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I have an interest in writing about movies that can inform masculinity. This gives me an excuse to pay 12 dollars to watch stuff blow up. Last week I took that opportunity to go to the movie, Guardians of The Galaxy Volume 2. I can’t remember if I saw Guardians Of The Galaxy, Vol. 1 or not. This could be a function of my memory at 65 not being as good as it once was, or maybe Vol. 1 was no more memorable than Vol. 2.
I went to the cineplex at my favorite increasingly empty local shopping mall. The Macy’s anchor department store has been closed for good. So to the JC Penney store. I am old enough to remember when JC Penney was JC Penny, before the Mandela Effect took hold of it. Or may be this is just me forgetting in the same way everybody else remembers shopping at JC Penny. From the look of the shelves in the Sears store, it will be anchors away for time honored brand as well. The Mall is beginning to look like a good location for one of those rumored FEMA camps.
I remember the Shopping Mall as being a concept of putting the village square under a roof and air conditioning it. Where young love once blossomed under street lamps, Mall era youth could do so without the mosquitoes. It didn’t work out too well because the idea of shops under a protective bubble was mainly being about getting people to buy more stuff than they could do in a town in a few hours. This worked until amazon.com made it be known that you could really go to town with consumption with just a click click here and a click there for free shipping if you were willing to wait a few days or cheap shipping if you needed it overnight.
The last inhabitants of the increasingly ghost town facility includes purveyors of perverse clothing, sex toys, video games and shoes. There is still something left of the food court. There is always plenty of room for people who clearly like to eat too much to sit. Those who have some difficulty getting around due to amputations from poorly controlled diabetes have no stairs to worry about and there are more medications then ever to help keep diabetics alive to continue to eat too much sugar.
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I am retired so I go for the matinee. Its a little cheaper. Usually there are about as many movies playing as there are movie watchers that time of day. A gentleman who appeared to be my senior sought advice as to what movie he should check out next from a young woman who was selling the popcorn and the young man who was selling the tickets. The older man said he had decided that he would try the movie, “Everything Everything” and asked the two employees if they knew anything about “Everything Everything.” The young women replied that it seemed popular with 15 year old girls. The man said that he now wasn’t so sure he wanted to see it. He said that he knew that he did not want to see a movie where it “looked like things were flying out of the movie screen towards you.” He said that he had already seen much of what was playing, so would take his chances with “Everything Everything.” After he was out of hearing range, I said I wanted a ticket to a movie where I could see stuff that looked like it was flying at me. Guardians was the only 3 D film playing that day.
It used to be that there was a separate person in the middle of the cineplex that took your ticket after you bought it from someone else near the entrance, ripped a part of it off and handed it back to you and announced what theatre the film was in. That apparently is a job that Donald Trump hasn’t brought back to America yet. As I headed to the show, the pop corn woman passed quickly by. She was responding to a patron of the film arts who was complaining about humidity. Before she was out of my sight the older gentleman reappeared in the hallway and let her know that he had changed his mind and was going to see the Amy Schumer, Goldie Hawn movie “Snatched.” I had an urge to warn this seemingly unsuspecting soul where that movie title came from. I thought for a few seconds about how Amy has made it easier for woman to refer to their nether regions as coarsely as do most men. I thought about how Amy stood on Goldies’ shoulders in portraying how funny women acting stupidly can be. I resisted my urge to warn.
Being in the service of guarding the galaxy seems like it would be noble work. Turns out it isn’t. In the movie the Guardians are mercenaries that go after a monster who stole some batteries. They do their job well, but one of the Guardians who looks like a raccoon (formerly racoon, see Mandella Effect), can’t help but steal some of the batteries he was paid to get back to their rightful owner. This pisses these battery owners, known as the Sovereign, off. They go after the Guardians. The Guardians get away, but not without crashing on a planet where they meet a Celestial god, named Ego. (Making fun of the ridiculous character names is a running joke that crawls along through out the plot).
Turns out Ego is Peter Quills’ father. (No apology for not giving a “spoiler alert.” There is no way that this movie can be spoiled anymore than it already is). Peter Quill – Star Lord, is the most heroic of the Guardians. This character could have been named Peter Pen, but something more light weight does seem an appropriate reflection of the quality of the dialogue written for this movie.
Ego, like most powerful father villains, wanted to control everything. He used to think that all that he needed was the love of Peter Quill’s mother, Meredith. Ego thought that he had reached the zenith of his powers when he could get it on with Meredith, behind a Dairy Queen on a planet, that I think was supposed to be Earth and show her the exotic plant he had put there as part of his hobby of introducing his favorite invasive creation through out the galaxy that made Ego happy.
Ego gives an impassioned speech as to how he came to find true love to be boring and why Peter should join him in being a god, as their combined power would truly kick ass. Luckily Peter doesn’t honor his birth father, Ego, but rather the man who raised him after his mother died, Yondu Udonta. Mr. Udonta had a falling from grace when he got greedy and dealt in child trafficking. This went against the code of the organized crime family, known as the Ravagers, that Yondu was a part of. Yondu goes on to see the light that child slave trafficking is a bit over the top for respectable gangsters. He makes the ultimate sacrifice for Peter, when Ego wants Peter dead for not agreeing to become like him. This earns him the respect of the Ravagers who give Yondu a most beautiful funeral. Yondu is the hero of this story by earning the approval of gangsters.
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The tragedy of Guardians Of The Galaxy, Vol 2 is not that I wasted 12 dollars. I got more than enough of things blowing up with debris that looked like it was coming right at me, for my money. The tragedy is that these days, these types of movies are the most popular throughout the world. Good, dirty, irreverent entertainment. An escape from the serious focus on the bad, dirty, irreverence of our everyday lives.
I almost cry thinking about what it would be like to watch a movie where a tenth of what it cost to produce Guardians was spent on paying gifted writers to write great dialogue for a movie focused on a loving connection between a father and his son or between romanic lovers.
I seriously wonder what some of the crew at Marvel Comics, could come up with if they tried to reflect an aspect of the Jesus Christ, Son of Man story. I wonder what kind of movie could be made out of that.
We are alive at a time where it seems that Satan has become real. That stories in the Christian Bible about God sending Satan to deliver us a message that our debasement of romanic love and love of the Earth, has gone on long enough. Long enough that there is not much left worthy of guarding. God sent His Son Jesus Christ to warn mankind that Jesus is literal not fictional. To warn that things are coming our way that will make any scary movie look lacking in imagination.
Jesus Christ reassurance that God’s love can move in what appears to be the most frightful of ways, as the wicked are loved into check, is lost on most. Jesus is the realest of things to believe in, but whose name is frequently something to make fun of and mock.
There is probably nothing you have to do the prepare for the end of humanity show, but if you want a good seat to watch the stars fall out of the sky and be one of the first of the meek to inherit the Planet, be prepared to recognize what may be thrown at you will not look like anything you have seen before and it will all be just a show, a process for selecting a cast for the New Earth.
The Satanic way is to enjoy an endless variety of demons fighting each other with ever more creative weaponized technologies. In most movies that men prefer the superior weapons usually lose and those who win do so by being brave and cool under pressure. Fathers and sons typically don’t get along over some difficulty sharing power. Romantic objects inspire lust and little else.
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The relationship between God The Father, His Son, Jesus and the Holy Spirit can be more confusing than Hollywood. One way of looking at it is the Holy Spirit knew that It is too much love for people to comprehend in the raw. People are more comfortable with the idea of an all loving father. That is conceivable. Just take all of the loving things you got that was good from your father, then add all of the things you didn’t. We need a Son here, because it is impossible to feel what it is like to have that kind of love going both ways.
At some level we know that we and God are the same thing. It is Jesus Christ that tries to guard us from forgetting that. He reminds us that when we do forget, to not feel like we’ve done something very wrong and therefore must suffer. Jesus already took care of that.
Many people would more easily believe in a talking racoon, that flies around in a space suit, than they would believe that a Being that looked like a person nailed to a cross did anything for them.
If you already accepted Jesus’ offer to be saved by believing it can be so, I hope this piece helped you celebrate that. If you doubt it, use you head. What other light illuminates a way out of this increasingly wicked world? What other way to know that love is all there is by feeling that love.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
Did you, uh, intentionally not pay attention to this film? Or are you just bad at critiquing narrative?