James Gunn: From Troma to the Toilet


In the past 24 hours, Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2 director James Gunn has deleted more than 10 thousand (!!!!) tweets dating as far back as 2008.

The acclaimed director came under fire after directing his ire at conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro. Afterward, The Daily Caller did a deep-dive into Gunn’s tweets to discover what many of us long-time Tromites already knew: Gunn is a degenerate edgelord who has posted probably the most outrageous and offensive tweets of any A-list hollywood director ever. By a long shot.

Gunn’s provocative and offensive tweets range from jokes about the holocaust to many, many jokes about child-rape.

Gunn is now on the defensive, issuing a new series of tweets wherein he acknowledges his edgelord past but claims to be a changed and “grown” man. This supposed growth just so happens to coincide with the moment he started cashing checks from Marvel/Disney.

It’s unclear what the repercussions from this offensive tweet unearthing will be for the rising Hollywood star, but the situation could be addressed as early as today when Gunn is scheduled to appear at San Diego Comic-Con.

Update: He’s fired

Why do I care about Gunn’s social media drama other than as an amused onlooker watching another hard-leftist suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome fall to the very same outrage machine they helped to create?

Because I would have never made a film if it wasn’t for James Gunn.

I can’t state that more clearly. There would absolutely be no Hack Movies, no Cockhammer, no Nixon and Hogan without the influence of James Gunn.

His film Tromeo and Juliet helped inspire me to pick up a pen and start writing offensive horror/comedy movies and the book he co-wrote with Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman, All I Need To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From The Toxic Avenger was the bible by which I lived in my earliest years making movies.

But my connection to James Gunn goes even deeper than that. He’s a fellow St. Louisan. And while we didn’t grow up in the same town or know each other, he is personal friends with people I lived down the street from and graduated high school with.

So you can say James Gunn was a hero to me in my early years. I cheered from afar after he moved on from Troma and landed a gig writing the live action Scooby-Doo movie and later the Dawn of the Dead remake.

I consider his indie film SUPER to be one of the best deconstructions of the super hero genre and, ironically, a cautionary tale about the same sort of vigilante justice that the far-left advocates in ANTIFA.

His early foray into the social media world with the bizarre and amazing short films with his brother Sean, Humanzee! and the PG porn series are hilarious. I also consider the Guardians of the Galaxy movies to be among the absolute best in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But James Gunn unequivocally deserves every ounce of scrutiny and criticism coming his way this week. As he got more famous and a bigger and bigger following on Twitter, he became everything the Troma Team up in New York satirized about the film industry.

Later, when Donald Trump was elected president, Gunn turned up the liberal hypocrisy to the Nth degree, absolutely catching an awful case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Gunn and everyone like him in Hollywood haplessly make the same mistakes the Christian Right made in the 1990s. Ironic because the Left still tries to hang that albatross around conservative necks some 25 years later.

The Christian Right got huge and rich and used that wealth and power to influence politics making them a political and social force that could not be moved from the outside. It took corruption, lies and awful conduct from the inside to shatter their grip on the nation.

And that’s exactly what’s happening to the Left today. Influencers like James Gunn believe they are the moral arbiters of our culture. They believe that they KNOW BETTER than middle-America about what our values are and how we should live our lives.

They chide us for wanting a border wall, strong borders and an un-molested second amendment while living behind gated communities with armed guards. They lecture us on morality while all of Hollywood is infested with moral degeneracy and, apparently, a pack of frothing rapists according to the #MeToo movement.

James Gunn, and many, many liberals like him, used to be cool motherfuckers. They used to represent anti-establishment values and weren’t afraid to be edgy and tell shocking, provocative jokes for no other reason than to offend the morally pious church ladies of the rural US.

But as the great Jim Goad says, the liberal SJWs like James Gunn are the new church ladies and they’re getting exactly what’s coming to them.

James, you should have stayed in your lane.

 

TQP 29: Infinity Summit w/ Jim Starlin


This episode is devoted exclusively to the man who made Thanos of Titan a household name: Jim Starlin. He talked about the time he killed off Robin (A Death in the Family), the success of the Thanos character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and his recent novel: Lazgood’s Boys. At the end, he explains why he left Marvel Comics once again, and after hearing his story, we’re not sure we would react any different.

Links:
https://www.amazon.com/Jim-Starlin/e/B004MNOC1Y

Music provided by: Love Under Will, ZZ Pot (ZZZiggurat)

Kevin Strange’s Netflix Punisher Season 1 Review


How do you take the most hyped-up and exciting new character in the Marvel Netflix super hero universe who has comic book fans and military/gun aficionados going bonkers waiting for a spin-off solo show putting his brand of take-no-prisoners, hyper-violent vigilante justice and totally and completely shit the fucking bed with it?

Start by reducing what was Daredevil season 2’s best, most action packed and talked about character, The Punisher, back down to just a guy named Frank who wears a hoodie and has a hard time making eye contact.

DDS2 so perfectly told Frank Castle’s back-story, all the way up to giving him his iconic white-skull chest costume, that a spin-off show was a no brainer. Everything was right there. All you had to do was write him some compelling villains, some pot-boiler plots, and let Jon Bernthal act his ass off while shooting every last motherfucker in the room.

The episode of DDS2 where Frank goes to jail, meets Kingpin and pounds his way through a couple of dozen inmates is one of the coolest episodes of comic book TV ever.

In fact, Daredevil remains the only consistently GOOD Marvel Netflix show. Jessica Jones and Luke Cage wear their liberal progressive agendas on their sleeve while presenting snoozefest stories of, you guessed it, super heroes wearing hoodies talking really seriously to each other sprinkled, almost begrudgingly with several short minutes of action scenes.

The SJW Marvel crowd so thoroughly took a shit on the WHITE MALE LEAD in Iron Fist, laughably calling for the show to change the character’s ethnicity because reasons, that it’s clear who Marvel Netflix is aiming these shows at.

These three shows are so awful, I didn’t even bother watching their cross-over event season THE DEFENDERS and it doesn’t seem like anybody else did either because there is not one single reference to them in the entire first season of The Punisher.

Which gets us back to where we started. Frank Castle. The Punisher. Double-crossed by the CIAFBIDHS, basically the entire big bad US government, run by WHITE MEN with the sole purpose of lying, cheating, stealing and killing their way into becoming corrupt millionaires.

They killed his family. We saw all this in DDS2 and thankfully, they do not rehash those events. Frank is the Punisher in the first episode. We get an AWESOME montage of him murking every last person involved in the death of his family. Then he burns his Punisher vest and retires to a quiet life of beating the shit out of concrete walls with a sledge hammer day and night for presumably a cash-under-the-table construction gig.

This episode is bizarre because it seems like they shot it as a pilot pitch to a network, even though the character was firmly established as a huge hit with its audience. The entire episode is a stand-alone. There are characters who are never seen or referenced again, as though there was a chance that the network would pass on the show, so they didn’t want to get too deep into the plot right away.

And that shows one of the Netflix binge-show formula’s biggest weaknesses. The pilot of the Punisher is fucking amazing. It’s a slow burn, shot and edited to build the suspense right up until the moment Tom Waits’ “Hell Broke Luce” pounds out of the speakers and Frank starts beating the shit out of dudes with a sledge hammer. Ruthless. Violent. Unforgiving. The Punisher.

And that’s it. The end. A one hour, fully realized story. A one-shot comic book, if you will. In its glory days, network television would produce a couple of dozen stories like these for its TV shows every season. Some a half hour, some an hour. Then episodic TV fell out of fashion sometime shortly before LOST became all the rage and now 99% of shows use the serial format.

Which can be great. But in the case of Netflix shows, since the service is able to analyze its viewers’ habits down to the millisecond, they’ve decided to write specialized serials built around the concept of “binge watching.”

Some clowns sit at home and manage to smash out a 12 hour TV show in 10 hours. I’ll barely be a quarter of the way through a new Netflix show when assholes will start posting spoilers online for the season ender. It’s absurd how quickly people burn through these shows.

And as such, Netflix paces its shows for this obnoxious habit. In essence, what that means is, Frank Castle and “Micro” (maybe the worst name for a sidekick since Robin) can sit in the same set-piece and talk hour after hour after hour in what is ostensibly marketed as an action thriller show.

Don’t get me wrong, there is action, but the pacing between endless dialogue scenes and the little bit of violence and gun fighting sprinkled throughout is so wonky for people like me who tend to watch one episode every few days. If you cram 12 hours of TV into 10 hours, it doesn’t seem like that three to four hours in the middle drags too badly.

You were zoned out scrolling Facebook laughing at memes for those 4 hours anyway. For people like me, that’s almost an entire week of viewing. And it fucking sucks.

Look, I’m already way further into this review than I have any right to be without ever even touching on a single plot point in The Punisher season 1. Suffice to say, this show takes an enormous leap backward with the character, makes every aspect of the US government out to be evil and tyrannical just by virtue of existing, (except for the one non-white Mary Sue FBI agent girl who can out-smart, out-drive, out-fight and out-shoot every male character on the show) and gives every ex-military character either PTSD or a villainy motivation.

But without a doubt the WORST part of Netflix’s The Punisher? The main baddy ends up being a 25 year old war vet with PTSD who becomes a bomb-making domestic terrorist the likes of which the United States hasn’t seen since Timothy Mcveigh.

That’s right, Netflix takes a page right out of the batshit crazy alt-left’s handbook and digs up a 1990s boogieman with which to scare its viewers. THE EVIL WHITE “PATRIOT” IS COMING TO GET YOU!

America is bad OK? And The Punisher TV show is worse.

I DGAF if that storyline was lifted right off the page of a 90s run of Punisher comics and is panel for panel faithful to the source material. It’s insulting in the current year while the Western world is being bombed and terrorized weekly by Muslim psychos. Now ain’t the time nor the place to write a “US soldiers are terrorists” story line.

In the end, as much as I absolutely love this character and the Jon Bernthal casting, I have to give this piece of SJW lefty crap 2 out of 5 Strangeheads for pushing their tired binge-formula and unpopular liberal agenda instead of delivering an apologetically violent, merciless and exciting Punisher TV show.