by Le Anne Lindsay, Editor

Tinsel & Tine Guests on the Popular Podcast

THE LAMBcast – ANT-MAN and the WASP

After writing a blog for almost a decade, I came to the conclusion that talking about movies is more fun than writing about movies. But also having maintained a blog for all these years makes me know for sure that I would never want to host my own podcast, not unless I had a lot of behind the scenes help, both technically and marketing wise. Thankfully, I get to provide a radio movie segment each week on That’s Show Biz with Chuck Darrow (currently on a 4 week summer hiatus, new episodes to begin August 7th) and as a member of the Large Ass Movie Blogging Association, I get to guest on a couple podcasts a year too!

Listen to me and 4 other members of the LAMB community as we buzz and dissect in detail Marvel’s 20th installment to the MCU – Ant-Man & the Wasp:

00:00 Intros
03:55 Ant-Man and the Wasp discussion, mostly spoiler-free
28:40 Ant-Man and the Wasp discussion, full spoilers
45:42 Rants and Raves
74:36 Who Am I? Game
98:00 Plugs
104:55 Out-takes

If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing now, below are the crib notes I wrote to keep me on track during the taping:

Paul Rudd (Scott Lang) and Evangeline Lilly (Hope Van Dyne) Michael Peña (Luis), Hannah John-Kamen (Ava Starr/Ghost), Michael Douglas (Hank Pym) Michelle Pfiffer (Janet van Dyne) Laurence Fishburne (Bill Foster), Abby Ryder Fortson (Cassie), Randall Park (Jimmy Woo), Walton Goggins (Sonny Burch), Bobby Cannavale (Jim Paxton), Judy Greer (Maggie), Tip “T.I.” Harris (Dave), David Dastmalchian (Kurt)

First off Evangeline Lilly as the Wasp is great as a super confident superhero, not over-confident there’s no hubris, but she definitely earned her name in the title. (Side note: Marvel’s first film in 10 years and 20 movies, to put a female superhero in the title).

Peyton Reed and the Marvel team really got the whole what and when to get big & small thing down to a science. It’ seamless, you’d think it would get old during the movie but it’s cool every time. Especially the Wasp taking on Sonny Burch’s gang in the kitchen, it’s great when one moment she’s running on an airborne knife and the next she’s full-size again and packing a punch, then back to flying, it’s perfectly timed. You have to love that the laboratory is not only portable, but looks like a carry-on bag. The whole movie is light, fast and much tighter than the original, not that I had a problem with the first one, but it felt outside the MCU. With this movie making a good deal of this story having to do with the fallout of what happened in Captain America: Civil War (which by the way, I love when Hope busts Scott’s chops about calling Captain America “Cap”) they’ve established continuity between the MCU and Ant-man. Although, I read a review that said they felt the movie was a fun summer popcorn movie, but a throw away in the Marvel Universe. I don’t agree with that at all, without getting into spoilers it clearly is juxtaposed with Infinity War in a “Meanwhile this is happening over here, kinda way”; But yes, at the same time it is a comedy, that seems shorter than 2hrs, when we reach the climatic car chase scene, I wasn’t really ready for it to wrap up, was having too much fun!

The original Iron Man comicbook Ghost backstory was that he was a prize engineer at a corporation called Omnisapient. Which was so dependent on Ghost’s inventions they hired a woman to “fall in love” with him to keep him happy and productive. Only they had to kill her when she tried to blackmail the company. During his grief he for some reason designed a new computer network that allowed him to merge his own consciousness with a computer network. I guess kinda like that terrible Johnny Depp SyFi movie Transcendence. Through this ability Ghost found out that his lover was an actor who had been murdered which lead him to become an anti-capitalist supervillain.

In Ant-man and the Wasp, Ghost is completely different in more ways than now being a woman – the motives are still emotional and personal, but on a self-preservation level, not a revenge or rage against the corporate giants’ agenda; and this Ghost doesn’t have any tech skills, more of a soldier. But we’re seeing more and more of this actress Hannah John-Kamens who was also a villain in Ready Player One and she and Walter Goggins were both in the new Alicia Vikander Lara Croft Tomb Raider. I’ve only seen one episode of Black Mirror, but I hear she’s been in 2 of those. It’s like she and Sophia Boutilla have become these multi-ethnic, International hot properties, which is awesome.

I’m so glad they found a way to still utilize Luis (Michael Pena) and the other two cohorts, that scene with the truth serum, not being truth serum, just kept getting funnier and funnier. And I was waiting to see if we’d get one of his off-tangent voice-over stories and this was the perfect way to do a little what’s been happening in the last 2 years exposition.
It really struck me & my sister funny when Luis admitted he didn’t like the way Scott loads the dishwasher, because she and I share an apartment and that’s something we argue about, as I want the dishes off the counter and out of the sink so I just put them in any ol way, where she likes to let the dishes pile up until she’s ready to load the dishwasher but then she has a system.

Michelle Pfiffer’s hair color is great not quite gray, blonde, silver or white but somewhere in between. The CGI they can do now to make an actress look 30 years younger is amazing! I can’t wait until that technology is available in real-life.

More to come in the trippy micro-universe The Quantum Realm? Looks like it, not just because of the ending of Ant-Man and the Wasp, but it’s been heavily rumored when we get introduced to Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) that although the character is known to operate in the far reaches of space, perhaps the reason the character hasn’t shown up in Guardians of the Galaxy or Avengers is because she too is stuck in the Quantum Realm? READ MORE

T & T’s LAMB (movie bloggers association) Score: 5 outta 5S

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