Darren Mooney
@darrenmooney.bsky.social
4K followers 300 following 3.1K posts
As seen/read/heard at: Second Wind | The 250 | Irish Independent | NewsTalk | Q102 | Polygon | The Escapist. He/Him.
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darrenmooney.bsky.social
With #Peacemaker wrapping this week, it's a good time to look at what makes James Gunn such a distinctive superhero filmmaker.

How Gunn puts himself in his work, how "Superman" & "Peacemaker" are about the internet, and what Gunn gets about superheroes as a genre.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DieY...
How Peacemaker (and Superman) Are About the Internet | The Backdrop
YouTube video by Second Wind
www.youtube.com
darrenmooney.bsky.social
DISNEY EXECUTIVE: “We cast that new TRON movie, just like you said, boss.”

BOB IGER: “*That’s* not what I meant when I said find me a cult actor!”
a tron ares poster with a red motorcycle in the background
ALT: a tron ares poster with a red motorcycle in the background
media.tenor.com
darrenmooney.bsky.social
On my way to #TronAres, and idly thinking about how the entire point of the ending of “TRON: Legacy” was that the older generation needs to let their children have the future, rather than allowing those kids to be haunted by their monstrous computer-generated digital ghosts.
Reposted by Darren Mooney
malcmanishere.bsky.social
Watched this yesterday. Great 34-minute video that analyzes a fav show of mine and shows why you should be watching it yesterday.

Someone I follow said earlier this year that no new mangaka is gonna be “the next Osamu Tezuka” because all these new mangaka are beefing with people on Twitter. 1/2
darrenmooney.bsky.social
With #Peacemaker wrapping this week, it's a good time to look at what makes James Gunn such a distinctive superhero filmmaker.

How Gunn puts himself in his work, how "Superman" & "Peacemaker" are about the internet, and what Gunn gets about superheroes as a genre.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DieY...
How Peacemaker (and Superman) Are About the Internet | The Backdrop
YouTube video by Second Wind
www.youtube.com
darrenmooney.bsky.social
One day, I hope to enjoy something half as much as Michael Sheen enjoys his five minutes of screentime in “TRON: Legacy.”

Where he does David Bowie by way of Charlie Chaplin, while ejaculating lasers to a DJ set from Daft Punk.
darrenmooney.bsky.social
It is worth noting that on top of the support of the team, it's the support of our Patrons that makes these sorts of deep-dives possible.

So thank you very much to everybody who does support us, we really appreciate you guys.

www.patreon.com/c/SecondWind...
darrenmooney.bsky.social
Then, after Kimmel, I talked about the new era of corporate media capitulation to the Trump administration.

How these giant media conglomerates are appeasing the political right, motivated by the larger structure of the market and the FCC.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJXE...
Kimmel and the New Era of Corporate Capitulation | The Backdrop
YouTube video by Second Wind
www.youtube.com
darrenmooney.bsky.social
Over the past three weeks, I've edited about 80 minutes of video essays. I'm very proud of the three that I've put out, with a huge shoutout to the support of the team at @secondwindgroup.com.

First of all, I talked about the "Conjuring" franchise.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xToL...
Is The Conjuring Secretly Hollywood's Second Most Successful Shared Universe? | The Backdrop
YouTube video by Second Wind
www.youtube.com
darrenmooney.bsky.social
There’s the opposite of the anxiety I feel in every frame of “Superman” - an anxiety which wasn’t present in his earlier work, but he wasn’t running a studio then.

The show knows if it keeps its production within a certain band, there is nothing it cannot choose to do.
darrenmooney.bsky.social
I was really surprised at how great “Peacemaker” was, even having loved “The Suicide Squad.” It’s so perfectly calibrated to be what it is.

It knows its budget constraints, its cast constraints, its status as a streaming show, and it knows if it can balance those practical constraints, it’s free.
darrenmooney.bsky.social
Rewatching “Superman”, there are ideas that I recognise as Gunn’s, but they’re always - to me - very carefully calibrated to come to a point where they might make an interesting statement, and then they veer into the safest, blandest, most generic versions of themselves.
darrenmooney.bsky.social
Not really, alas.

It cements the sense that “Superman” feels a “compromised” work to me, a work where anything like an edge has been filed off.

“The internet is full of screaming monkeys” is a much more comforting idea than “the internet is where disillusioned men get sucked into Nazi worlds.”
darrenmooney.bsky.social
How could you not want to watch a video that somehow discusses all of these people (and Ryan Coogler, who YouTube somehow missed)?
darrenmooney.bsky.social
I think a lot about what @mistercinecal.bsky.social once remarked of Gunn. He's the rare filmmaker who feels so perfectly suited to the genre, because I don't know that we're losing out on his version of "Oppenheimer" or "Sinners" because he's making these.

(And he makes them very well.)
darrenmooney.bsky.social
"Beware our power" indeed.
darrenmooney.bsky.social
With #Peacemaker wrapping this week, it's a good time to look at what makes James Gunn such a distinctive superhero filmmaker.

How Gunn puts himself in his work, how "Superman" & "Peacemaker" are about the internet, and what Gunn gets about superheroes as a genre.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DieY...
How Peacemaker (and Superman) Are About the Internet | The Backdrop
YouTube video by Second Wind
www.youtube.com
darrenmooney.bsky.social
"Subtext is when they put the captions at the bottom of the picture rather than the top."
darrenmooney.bsky.social
"There's no subtext here. What even is subtext?"
darrenmooney.bsky.social
“Can’t wait for the Green Lanterns show to be also somehow about Nazi Lanterns too”

Yeah, I mean it’s not like Green Lantern’s arch-nemesis is quite literally space!Hitler, down to the thirties mustache.
darrenmooney.bsky.social
Rewatching Gunn's "Peacemaker" this week, I appreciate that it understands that, even in a world of superheroes, the kind of people who would wear themed costumes and fight crime would all be fundamentally weird and dysfunctional in their own strange (and occasionally sad) ways.
darrenmooney.bsky.social
I thought “The Smashing Machine” was solid. Johnson is great, a reminder of how good he can be.

There’s some interesting stuff here about the idea of a combat sport movie’s central romance being with the sport itself, and combat being in the marriage.

But it’s extremely on the nose.
a woman is hugging a man in a kitchen with a bowl of tomatoes in the background
ALT: a woman is hugging a man in a kitchen with a bowl of tomatoes in the background
media.tenor.com
darrenmooney.bsky.social
There is a moment early in “The Smashing Machine” as Mark becomes addicted to opioids and the soundtrack blares “you take me - you take me more and more” over the sequence of him shooting up.

And I almost admire the bluntness.
a man in a suit and tie is talking about writers who use subtext and they 're all cowards
ALT: a man in a suit and tie is talking about writers who use subtext and they 're all cowards
media.tenor.com
darrenmooney.bsky.social
Really loved #GoodBoy. Virtuoso filmmaking, in terms of blocking and composition. Great central performance from its canine lead. It is very clever in how it plays with horror tropes.

More than that, a surprisingly thoughtful and moving exploration of being powerlessness as you lose someone.
darrenmooney.bsky.social
I hated "House of Guinness." I hated it. Hated it. Hated. Hate. Hate. Hated it. So much.

Less a television show than a concussion. All of the pain of "Guinness", none of the pleasure.

I talked about how much I hated it for @secondwindgroup.com.

READ: www.patreon.com/posts/column...
Around midway through the first season of House of Guinness, the new Netflix stream show from Steven Knight that offers a “fiction inspired by true stories” about the famous Irish brewing dynasty, young stout heir Edward Guinness (Louis Partridge) decides to impart a lesson on politics to his lover and young Fenian rebel Ellen Cochrane (Niamh McCormack). Naturally, he offers this lecture on political theory through a strained metaphor involving two bottles of the black stuff.

“There is a particular technique when it comes to pouring Guinness,” Edward explains, with the care that one expects from a modern “buy-o-pic.” The key, Edward says, is not to pour the bottle all at once. The glass should settle for a moment. “I call it the Guinness minute,” he offers. He elaborates, “These two half-poured glasses of Guinness represent the state of Ireland.” Edward sees his nation as a country “in need of time to reflect”, where progress is to be made “slowly, carefully, evenly.”

This moment reveals a lot about House of Guinness. On the surface, the show owes a lot to Knight’s other period series, Peaky Blinders. This is evident from its opening moments, which find the family’s resident ruffian, Sean Rafferty (James Norton), strolling through the brewery lit by flames as he amasses a mob to accompany the hearse carrying the deceased Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness. “Each of you grab a means of persuasion,” he orders. “Remove all obstacles with a firm hand.”

This influence makes sense. Peaky Blinders was a massive success on Netflix, to the point that the streaming service is co-producing the upcoming movie. House of Guinness has very clearly been brewed as Netflix’s own homegrown answer to Peaky Blinders, a sordid and sexy period soap opera with enough violence and sex to hold the attention of a younger audience alienated from more traditional period fare like Downton Abbey. It’s a crude calculation, but a pragmatic one.