This is true, this is real, this is Straight Edge

I have a feeling that MCU Ant-Man will either surprise us all and turn out to be amazing, and everyone will flock to it and it'll be a mega-hit like GOTG, or it will be Marvel's first bomb.

1. A Black Widow movie GODDAMNIT

2. Chris Evans announces his engagement to theladyscribe

3. Spoilers for the upcoming DC movies, like that time WCW spoiled the outcome of the WWF championship match before it happened.

4. They ceremoniously light the Ant-Man footage on fire, promise to do better next time.

5. Movies starring Chris Pine, Chris Tucker, and Chris Jericho.

We now have a Bobbi Morse/Mockingbird for Agents of SHIELD: Adrianne Palicki, who also played Lady Jaye in one of the G.I. Joe movies, and Wonder Woman from the failed TV pilot from a few years ago.

Ant-Man is shaping up to have the oddest cast of a big Marvel blockbuster movie: aside from Douglas, Rudd, and Lilly, it's also got Michael Pena, Wood Harris from The Wire, the rapper T.I., Bobby Cannavale, and John Slattery returning as older Howard Stark. Evangeline Lilly's haircut looks super-cute, but why give her a Janet Van Dyne-do when she's not playing Janet?!

In other news, the lizard king Benedict Cumberbatch has been cast as Richard III in the mega production of The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, which I hope means he's now out of the running for Dr. Strange. Of the other rumored candidates, I'm hoping Edgar Ramirez gets it. I also think Jared Leto could give us a decent Strange.

Is Batista (Drax) the first Asian-American action hero in a major Hollywood blockbuster who is not also a martial artist? I can think of Asian martial arts heroes, and Asian protagonists who are not action heroes, but I can't think of another non-martial artist Asian action hero in a big Hollywood movie. (Batista is, in case you didn't know, half-Filipino, half-Greek.)

At the beginning of the movie, we see that Peter's mom Meredith is ( SPOILERS ) Later on we also learn that Peter himself is( SPOILERS ) Depressing thought: Is this what caused Mama Quill's fate? ( SPECULATION ) :(

Y'all, me and my girls redcandle17 and theladyscribe saw GOTG last night and it was soooooo good. Highly recommended, two thumbs (or tentacles) up, certainly the funniest MCU movie so far and full of the Power of Friendship, brightly colored action, and glee.

( SPOILERS )

Also, predictably fandom is already doing the concern-trolling handwringing over Gamora's portrayal in this film. I find it amazing that when we do get action heroines in Marvel films, the fandom rallies to downplay her accomplishments and compare her unfavorably to Natasha, proving once again that no matter what, female characters will be marginalized and be pitted against one another.

( In defense of Gamora )

Casting news from the Daredevil set! Deborah Ann Woll (Jessica from True Blood) has been cast as Karen Page on the Netflix Daredevil series. She's a New York native with an astounding set of blue eyes, so this is pretty cool news.

Y'all may have heard that Rosario Dawson is also on Daredevil; she's apparently got a pivotal role, but Marvel is being secretive about exactly who she is playing. I was thinking she was going to be Karen, but since Deborah's playing Karen that can't be it. She's probably going to be either Elektra or Maya Lopez (Echo). My money is on Maya. I suppose there's an outside chance that Rosario could be Typhoid Mary? She's another native New Yorker who grew up in a squat and everything, so you can hardly get more authentic than Rosario Dawson.

Butters and Fazekas, the producers of the upcoming Agent Carter series, also gave an interview. No real spoilers, as Marvel is keeping them tight-lipped as ever, but they did reveal that Dum Dum Dugan will appear; that Markus and McFeely wrote the pilot; and that Peggy is "strong, she's independent, but she's in a world where, after the war, strong and independent woman isn't what people want."

Very interesting find! The actual dogtags Chris Evans wore in the first Captain America movie turned up for auction. Source.

His dogtags read:

STEVEN G ROGERS
987654320 T42 O
P

The 'O' is his blood type, the 'P' stands for Protestant (so MCU Steve is not a Catholic!). 'T42' indicates he had a tetanus shot in 1942. There is no 'next of kin' or address on the dogtags, so Steve presumably had no permanent residence at the time he enlisted.

Also, this may be an unpopular opinion, but I am so glad CA:TWS jossed the idea of Steve and Bucky growing up in an orphanage together. They tend to be written as co-dependent as it is, it would only have been ten times worse if it was canon they were scrappy little orphans with no one in the world but each other.

Charlie Cox, a boyishly handsome British actor who's background is more Brideshead Revisted than Hell's Kitchen, is our new Matt Murdock in Marvel's upcoming Daredevil series for Netflix!

My next question is... who's going to be Elektra? Typhoid Mary?! Can we hope for a version of Typhoid Mary that is actually identifiable as the comics character? (the Typhoid Mary from the terrible Elektra movie is Typhoid Mary-in-name-only) Who's going to be the new Bullseye?

I'm curious as to whether they'll redo the Elektra saga, which was already adapted for the 2003 Daredevil movie. So far, superhero remakes have shied away from redoing storylines from earlier movies. But the Elektra saga is so iconic that I can hardly imagine Marvel skipping over it. Quesada said filming will start soon in Brooklyn and Long Island City, and as LIC is basically right now the road from me, I'm thinking of scouting out locations that look like they could pass for 1980s Hell's Kitchen and seeing if I can catch them filming.

I'm starting a prayer circle now that ScarJo puts in an appearance as Black Widow (Matt is her former boo-thang in the comics).

I'm so tired of seeing comments like "Marvel couldn't be bothered to get Russian names right! Black Widow's name makes no sense! LOOOOL".

1. Black Widow was created in 1964. This is before the internet, before Google; there was no Skyping some Russians to do some Russopicking. The Iron Curtain was in full effect. Very little was known about life in the Soviet Union, VERY few Americans could visit the USSR for any reason, and VERY VERY VERY few people from the USSR ever set foot on American soil. Are we so short-sighted and spoiled by the overwhelming access to information at our fingertips today that we can't comprehend that when Stan Lee wrote Tales of Suspense #52 (along with the 35 other comics he wrote that month) that the extent of his knowledge about Russian names, culture, or the KGB was limited to whatever could be found in an encyclopedia? Have any of y'all ever cracked open a fucking encyclopedia in your lives? Never mind, don't answer that.

2. Actual Russians keep pointing that that Natasha going by 'Romanoff' in the MCU is likely a personal choice she made, due to her spending the majority of her professional life in an Anglophone environment. Hell, Zola even calls her "Romanova, Natalia Alianovna" when he addresses her in CA2: TWS, suggesting that is indeed her official name and that Romanoff is just how she chooses to anglicize it. (In the comics she is variously called Romanoff, Romanov, Romanova, etc.)

3. DUH of course most of the Marvel Russian/Soviet characters are going to have surnames from famous individuals -- who else were Americans going to hear about in that time period? Artists, royalty, and cosmonauts, that's about it. Frankly, I'm grateful that Stan Lee didn't just slap some random syllables together into some godawful 'foreign-sounding' mishmash and call it a day (ie the Japanese manga-ka method).

4. 'Alianovna' isn't a Russian patronymic, true. Alian is probably Bashkir, Tatar, or even a Caucasian (ie Georgian, Circassian, etc.) name. Big surprise, Natasha may not be a full-blooded ethnic Russian! Another possibility is that Alian is actually an unusually transliterated version of the name Ulyan (Julian), which is a Russian male name.

So far, mothers have been almost as conspicuously absent from the Marvel Cinematic Universe as they were from most of Disney's princess movies. Tony Stark's mother, Maria, who in the comics he loved so much he named his charitable foundation after her, barely warrants a name, as her husband takes center-stage in Tony's daddy issues. Steve Rogers' mother, Sarah, who was a truly remarkable woman (she raised Captain America. You bet your ass she was remarkable) is only mentioned briefly after her death. So far the only MCU mom who we ever get to see on the big screen is Frigga.

I was surprised to see when I checked the Guardians of the Galaxy IMDB page that Meredith Quill -- mother of Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord -- appears in the movie and she's being played by British actresss Laura Haddock (DaVinci's Demons). Not only that, but Haddock even briefly speaks about the part to a magazine, saying: "My part is very personal, very important to the story, but quite a small part. But [still] very important certainly to [Star-Lord's] journey." Plus, Meredith comes along with a sister, a mother of her own, and a female best friend!

This tells me a few things:

1. There will be a flashback to Peter's conception/childhood
2. Meredith Quill and her fate are considered important enough to the story that she will be portrayed onscreen
3. Meredith will interact not only with her son, but also with female relatives and a female friend

That right there is three things I was not expecting from this movie. I hope that soon we will be seeing GoTG on the big screen, and getting to empathize with Meredith Quill's human frailties and quirks, her love for her child, and her fate.


Meredith and Peter from Guardians of the Galaxy #0.1.