Friday, May 14, 2021

WandaVersion


I give it's "Lost but Suburbs" vibe in the early episodes credit for fully committing to the bit, if nothing else. The imitation of sitcoms over the decades was pretty thorough, including everything from the laugh track to story lines and dialog and humor styles. That said, it was a bit like the no-cut cinematography in 1917, a gimmick whose gimmickiness overshadowed the point of the gimmick. Actually, in the end there wasn't much of a point to the gimmick, except to entertain the viewer with the gimmick. Like the sitcom situations don't actually serve the plot in any way, it's just established that Wanda is living in this woo-woo land of make-believe. The show just drops the whole shtick in the last few episodes and no more is ever heard of it.

I also think the danger of a show within a show, a layer of fiction within your fiction, is that your IRL fiction has to be very, very grounded otherwise the lines between your real fiction and fiction fiction start to blur and the viewer gets confused about what's real fiction and what's fiction fiction. You get me? The "reality" of your fictional universe kind of gets worn away and it gets harder to empathize with your characters since they're all fiction. 

So, and this is just an example, just spitballing here, just a f'rinstance, just say, making your main villain a literal witch would be a bad idea. Hypothetically speaking.

Good god that was dumb.

Attention writers: Wanda is the villain. She is also the victim. This is interesting, do not run away from that and insert some boring ass white dude and a literal fucking witch.

Also thought there were a whole bunch of extraneous characters in this, a show which could have been a pretty tight focus on dealing with grief. Like the writers or showrunners or Marvel or Disney got a little scared of how dark they were getting and threw in a slightly irritating Millennial youtuber type personality and the relative of some character I've never heard of from a movie I haven't seen.

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