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BURBANK, Calif., (August 2, 2022) – With just over a month until Disney’s highly anticipated D23 Expo presented by Visa in Anaheim, California, kicking off September 9, Marvel is unveiling a can’t-miss lineup of panels, stage events, guest appearances, exclusive merchandise, giveaways, and more!
Fans will be able to explore the Marvel Studios Pavilion on the show floor to experience an awesome costume display, exclusive giveaways, a photo activation, and other surprises. Elsewhere on the show floor, the shopDisney booth will spotlight exciting Marvel merchandise featuring the Avengers, Spider-Man, and the Guardians of the Galaxy, along with a variety of other products at retailer booths during the show.
Throughout the weekend at D23 Expo, fans won’t want to miss Marvel’s panels and stage events diving into what’s next for Marvel Studios, a celebration of 60 “Beyond Amazing” years of Spider-Man, an exciting current look at Marvel Games, and more! These include:
Marvel DRAW Live!
Friday, September 9, 2–2:30 p.m. PT and Saturday, September 10, 1:30–2 p.m. PT | D23 Expo Live! Stage
Join Brian Crosby, Marvel’s Director of Themed Entertainment, for a real-time, step-by-step tutorial session on how to draw some of Marvel’s most iconic heroes and villains!
Hall D23 Presentation
Saturday, September 10, 10 a.m. PT | Hall D23
As previously announced, filmmakers, celebrity talent, and surprise guests from Marvel Studios will join Lucasfilm and othersonstage in Hall D23 to showcase theatrical and Disney+ titles. Going behind the scenes of these studios’ highly anticipated films, specials, and series, attendees will see exclusive footage and be among the first to learn what’s in the works.
Marvel Comics: Celebrating 60 Years of the Amazing Spider-Man
Saturday, September 10, 2–3 p.m. PT | Backlot stage
Celebrate sixty spectacular, sensational, web-slinging years of Spider-Man! From his humble debut in 1962’s Amazing Fantasy #15, he wall-crawled his way to international super-stardom. Now, join Marvel’s Executive Spider-Editor Nick Lowe and Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski as they team up to trace the comics history of the web-head across six decades—and BEYOND! Tantalizing trivia about the webbed wonder will be shared in this can’t-miss panel, so be sure to swing by! Fans attending will also receive a special exclusive giveaway (while supplies last), to be revealed in the coming weeks!
Signings with Marvel Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski and Executive Editor Nick Lowe
Saturday, September 10, 5:30–6:30 p.m. PT | Talent Central
Swing by Talent Central to meet Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski and Executive Spider-Editor Nick Lowe for a signing opportunity!
D23 Expo is sold out. Select presentations will be streamed for guests at D23 Expo Live! For more information, visit D23Expo.com.
Additional event details, including D23 Expo plans for Marvel Games, will be released in the coming weeks and made available on the D23 Expo app. Stay tuned to Marvel.com and D23Expo.com for more information!
Schedules and talent are subject to change.
AboutMarvel Entertainment
Marvel Entertainment, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is one of the world’s most prominent character-based entertainment companies, built on a proven library of more than 8,000 characters featured in a variety of media for over eighty years. Marvel utilizes its character franchises in entertainment, licensing, publishing, games, and digital media.
For more information visit marvel.com. © 2022 MARVEL
The post Marvel Returns to Disney’s D23 Expo 2022 With Thrilling Lineup of Panels, Events, First Looks, and More appeared first on The Nerd Element.
Exhausted by the self-help craze twenty-two years ago, the Secret Society of Happy People decided to step back and recognize that even as life challenges us, happiness happens. The group decided pursuing happiness can be an intentional practice.
Now August is celebrated as Happiness Happens month. Expressing happiness as a personal practice can be daunting, so here are five activities to help encourage authentic happiness to happen in our lives this August and beyond.
Quality Time in Solitude
Alone time provides the space to recharge our batteries and reflect on our lives. Practicing intentional solitude can encourage empathy, creativity, and productivity.
When was the last time you were able to spend some time alone with your thoughts, a book, listening to music or people-watching? Observing people can be a source of endless entertainment accessible to all of us at any time. Sitting down with ourselves and reading a book for pleasure for an afternoon can change your mood and lighten perspective. Gardening or allowing yourself time to binge-watch a show you love is equally nourishing activities that can make you connect to your special happy place.
Alone is not lonely; learning to embrace the difference is a key element to building a lifetime practice of unconditional self-love.
Conscious Dance
Image-RhythmTherapy Creative Arts Salon
Episode 3 of Lizzo’s reality show Watch Out for the Big Grrrls is titled “Curves and Confidence.” Lizzo’s dancers encounter their first conscious dance class led by sensual body movement expert Rashida KhanBey Miller. The class was a sensual embodiment experience that allowed the Big Grrrls to connect to moving their bodies without judgment outside the constrictions of choreography or the gaze of an audience.
With joy-filled tears in my eyes, I witnessed the ladies’ relationship to movement in their bodies transform after the experience. I’ve been a conscious dance facilitator leading my RhythmTherapy Creative Arts Salons for over 14 years. I’m grateful to Lizzo for sharing conscious dance with the world on her Emmy-nominated series to normalize this movement style to Black women.
As a Black woman, to dance outside the limitations of someone else’s choreography is an expression of freedom that I don’t get to experience in this body in most situations. Leading conscious dance classes, particularly the past two years during the pandemic, I’ve witnessed thousands of people experiencing full body autonomy for the first time.
But you don’t have to go to anybody’s class to experience consciously loving your body unconditionally and expressing yourself without judgment. Connecting to joy through dance is as easy as popping in your favorite song and dancing like nobody’s watching. Guess what, nine times out of ten, nobody cares if you dance in your happy place; in fact, your ability to connect to your happy place just might be contagious.
Home Cooking
Good food is glorious, especially when made with loved ones. When non-essential workers were working from home, lots of folks felt the need to hone their culinary talents by preparing meals made from scratch. From complicated processes like baking the perfect loaf of sourdough bread from homemade starters to putting together prepared meal kits, home cooking became cool again.
As soon as pandemic restrictions lifted, the majority of us hung up our aprons and ran back to restaurants without looking back. But there’s something special about food made at home with love.
One of the most valuable gifts we can share with young people is the ability to cook. Chefs like the author of Black Panther: The Official Wakanda Cookbook, Nyanyika Banda, are using their culinary talents to craft cookbooks based on films and TV shows. Kids of all ages enjoy cooking together and sitting down as a family to enjoy the fruit of their labor.
Cooking is universal, and if you’re single and fabulous, you’re not left behind. There’s nothing like taking the time to cook something you love for yourself and then enjoying a meal cooked with your own hands. Bring a smile to your face by cooking something yummy to make your tummy smile.
Spending Time in Nature
I recently interviewed writer Baratunde Thurston about his PBS series America Outdoors. One of the most valuable gifts his mother passed on to him was a love of nature. Even though Thurston grew up in Washington DC, his mother would round up Baratunde and his friends from the neighborhood, pack their station wagon, and take the boys out to a national park to camp, hike, and spend time exploring creation. Thurston recounted how other parents in the neighborhood were grateful to his mom for making the outdoors an adventure for his friends in the neighborhood.
We also talked about the stigma the outdoors holds for so many Black Americans. Thurston noted, ”I’ve gotten more sensitive to the complex Black history associated with the outdoors. Because of my mom, I didn’t grow up with a fear of the outdoors. I didn’t grow up with a traumatized relative, who was like, ‘We were forced to work in the outdoors, forget the outdoors. I’m staying up in this air conditioning.’”
It’s easy to feel FOMO about going out in nature if you’re not used to being an outdoors person. Doing the work to find ways to embrace easing into nature in ways that feel right to you is worth it. GirlTrek is a Black women’s health movement that makes the outdoors accessible, affordable, and less intimidating. You don’t need any special equipment, and if you don’t have the resources to get yourselves out on the trail, you can strap on your sneakers, go outside, and take a walk for thirty minutes near your house while listening to one of GirlTrek’s Black empowerment themed podcasts. Or, you can find a crew you vibe with and walk together in community or on the trail.
Whether you’re happy going in the wilderness for a hike or your vibe feels alive taking walks in your neighborhood after dinner with friends or family, spending time in nature is sure to raise your happiness vibration.
Celebrating Victories
If you read the Black Girl Nerds article “Set Goals Not Resolutions for 2022,” and you achieved or are on your way to achieving your goals, take time to celebrate. Whether your goal was personal, professional, or financial, recognizing the work it takes to complete a task successfully is vital to your personal practice of happiness. Knowing you “did good” is particularly sweet when a challenge is difficult to achieve. Celebrating victories is one of the sweetest parts of life. How can you not be happy after completing a task challenging you to grow?
I love this quote by Father Alfred D. Souza, “Happiness is a journey, not a destination.” When we think of happiness as a practice rather than a goal, we allow ourselves to witness life in real time. Difficult times are sure to arise, but recognizing August as Happiness Happens month is a reminder to take time to recognize, nurture, create, and appreciate when happiness happens all year long.
The saying goes that the first murder is the hardest. For Olivia Foxworth (Jemima Rooper) in Lifetime’s new miniseries Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, the hardest is her first turn of the outside lock on a door in the east wing of Foxworth hall that leads to an infamous attic. No, this moment is not the one where she locks her four grandchildren away.
This first turn of the key is years before when Olivia and her perverted husband Malcolm (Max Irons) lock up his 19-year-old stepmother Alicia (Alana Boden), pregnant with Malcolm’s rape baby. A baby who would one day become the Corinne Dollanganger we know from VC Andrews’ still-scandalous Flowers in the Attic. She marries her half-brother and eventually schemes to kill off their four children to access her significant inheritance. Depravity runs in the Foxworth family.
VC Andrews fans are a peculiar bunch. So many of us read the books way too young in the 80s and were forever marked by the twisted story. Even those coming to the Flowers in the Attic series more recently go through the same shock as we younguns did back then.
This disturbing five-book tale of incest, child abuse, generational trauma, and arsenic-laced donuts has aged like gothic wine in a blood-soaked barrel thanks to VC Andrews’s lyrical and compelling prose. Yet the film adaptations have left much to be desired — filmmakers shied away from taking the source material as seriously as it has deserved. That is, until Lifetime’s new miniseries, Flowers in the Attic: The Origin.
The show is based on the posthumously published, Garden of Shadows: a prequel started by Andrews before her death and finished (rather perfunctorily) by her ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman. The Origin takes its time developing the back story. The Origin also adds important important new characters and fleshes out existing ones to make a three-dimensional portrait of Olivia and the Foxworths unlike any that has existed on the screen to date — or even comprehensively in the source material.
In Garden of Shadows, Olivia Winfield begins as an unattractive, cold, hardened, and bitter woman whose resentments, in particular, towards other women only grow. It’s easy to imagine book Olivia would eventually reap such cruelty on children and even delight in it. But the Olivia Winfield of The Origin created by writers Connor Good, Amy Rardin, and Paul Sciarrotta, is brought to painful life by the extraordinary Jemima Rooper. She has a much more dramatic character arc that is so compelling we end up at times rooting for her, even though we all know where her horrible story ends.
In The Origin, Olivia begins as a genuine, intelligent, and independent woman who gets sucked into Malcolm Foxworth’s world of abuse and is broken down by it over the decades. Her process of disillusionment is heartbreaking to witness. Unlike the book where Olivia has her own money and could leave at any time, always choosing the violence of remaining, The Origin’s Olivia is trapped by a lack of economic opportunity. This makes her descent all the worse.
“I met a man who turned out to be a monster,” Olivia says and The Origin becomes a cautionary tale about how spending extended time with a monster will inevitably turn you into one, too. It also shows how religion can be used to manipulate a traumatized person to lead them to things they never imagined doing, but can now do under the eye of a vengeful god-figure.
Yet through Jemima Rooper’s exquisite and controlled performance, she never fails to portray Olivia’s innate humanity. This is one of the most challenging characters, arguably of all time, and Rooper has managed to embody her with empathy and compassion. Thanks to Rooper’s artful character development, Grandmother Olivia has gone from a stock villain to a complicated woman whose life went off the rails — and she could never get it back on track. I never, in my VC Andrews-loving life, imagined I’d ever feel anything but disgust for Olivia. Now I do. Give Jemima Rooper an Emmy for each part of this series already.
But Jemima Rooper isn’t the only marvel in The Origins. The writers have added key new characters in housemaid Nella (T’Shan Williams) and her daughter Celia (Evelyn Miller), two of Malcolm Foxworth’s original victims. The fact that they are Black adds an entirely new level of nuance that this story needed as Nella’s family becomes the conscience and heart of this gruesome tale.
Their presence also acknowledges Virginia’s Confederate history and the Foxworth family’s history of slave-owning — an important detail left out of Andrews’ books entirely. That Malcolm Foxworth essentially developed his future MO as a rapist and serial predator of Black servants. This reflects a history of the south that many conservatives are trying to erase from the history books.
Nella also gives us fresh contexts in which we witness Olivia’s own privilege through her whiteness. She denies to herself that she and Nella are friends, even though she knows nothing of Nella, her family, or even the fact that Olivia’s own husband had abused her. When Nella finally calls Olivia out on the power dynamic of servant and mistress, Olivia flips into Karen mode.
She reminds Nella that Olivia has promoted her “beyond her station” and could take her livelihood at any moment. This was such a white woman interaction that Black and other women of color experience regularly, with a varying spectrum of awfulness, even now, 100 years after the events of The Origin. Olivia Foxworth in this iteration is all too real, on so many levels.
The Origins has also made Olivia’s second son Joel (Luke Fetherston) explicitly gay. This is something only suggested in the book — and incredibly eschews the “bury your gays” trope. The writers reimagined Joel’s story from the book of a freak, accidental death in an avalanche and instead turned it into a stint in a sanitarium to cure his homosexuality resulting in his escape from the toxic Foxworth family with the man he loves, Nella’s step-grandson Harry (Jordan Peters). Finally, someone gets a happy ending in Flowers in the Attic. Maybe we will get a Joel and Harry spin-off series one day.
The fantastic new characters aren’t the only thing that sets this miniseries apart from every other VC Andrews adaptation. The female gaze is ever present in The Origins. It serves to handle so much difficult content sensitively, including scenes of sexual assault that contribute to the plot and character development. The production value is stupendous. Every actor is on point. There are no hokey performances here to be found, even if Malcolm’s southern drawl might come and go.
One of my favorite things is how, once again, there is a new version of Foxworth Hall itself. We could read this as a continuity error, but I interpret it as the inconsistency of memory. Nobody remembers things the same. We often don’t even remember our own memories as they happened, especially after trauma. It serves an internal logic that every on-screen version of the Foxworth mansion looks different, and The Origin’s version is it’s most imposing.
Flowers in the Attic: The Origin is the adaptation of our weirdly beloved VC Andrews stories fans have been waiting decades for. Finally, someone took the books seriously and put together a production that matches the tone and content, bringing the story to life in its most realistic version yet.
I sincerely encourage Lifetime to follow in The Origin’s footsteps and create a miniseries of each book in the Dollanganger series. All of those so-bad-it’s-good adaptations could use a proper retelling that embraces the gothic power and horror of these twisted tales, rather than the camp. The Origin sets a new bar not just for Flowers in the Attic and VC Andrews adaptations, but book-to-screen adaptation in general: a rare example of the miniseries far surpassing the book.
Flowers in the Attic: The Origin is streaming on Lifetime TV and Lifetime Movie Club.
At this point, we’ve got nearly 70 years of kaiju and giant monster movies baked into the fiber of our cinematic brains to know the basic order of events. A giant beast attacks, a group of humans from different government organizations come together to fight it, they succeed, end of movie. Sometimes you can throw in a good kaiju to battle it; also a space giant named Ultraman if ya nasty. But ultimately, you know what you get. But what about what happens after? This monster just destroyed half of a city, what is the cleanup effort? What about the corpse? That question lies at the center of Satoshi Miki’s new film What to Do with the Dead Kaiju?, which played Fantasia Film Fest 2022.
If you liked the disaster movie vibe and bureaucratic red tape of Shin Godzilla, then you’ll love the same bit with a satirical edge of What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? When the movie begins, the giant reptilian monster lies dead. Who knows why it died. All the Japanese government knows is it’s dead and lying there. Every department thinks it’s a different department’s job. The military doesn’t really know what to do. It’s up to a small group of young, smart underlings at various positions throughout the cabinet.
What makes Miki’s film so engaging is the way it deftly straddles the line between satire/parody and legitimate disaster film. A million people are in the cast but they each manage to stand out, and even if you forget character names, you get their characters completely. The Prime Minister seems like a genuinely noble dude who wants to do right by his people. The problem is, all the other ministers look at the kaiju’s rotting corpse as something to garner tourism dollars. Or, once that seems less likely, as a way to make other department heads look bad.
The closest we have to main characters in the movie constitute a love triangle. Yukino (Tao Tsuchiya) works for the health minister. She’s married to Ame (Gaku Hamada), a former military guy who moved into the government. Their marriage isn’t all that strong, however; especially not when Arata (Ryôsuke Yamada), a former colleague of theirs and suitor for Yukino, reappears. The movie very much leaves it to the younger generation to do anything useful, but even they feel the weight of government inefficacy and spin.
Essentially, What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? escalates its problems in the environmental and governmental. After they decide to strip the meat from the rotting corpse because it’s starting to smell, a blister begins to grow on the body. The blister, they learn, has a noxious gas within it. (The government needs to decide the official smell of the gas, either puke or poop, or perhaps a mixture.) So do you pop the blister? What will happen to the surrounding area if the gas proves to be toxic? Or, as happens, the gas is actually spores for enormous fungi? The issues are both granular and ridiculous.
I will say, for as entertaining as I found the movie, I think it maybe overstays its welcome ever so slightly. By the middle of the second act, it seems like the escalation had reached its natural end, and yet we still had a ways to go. As fun as new characters popping in are—like Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim) as a badass government operative and Joe Odagiri (Kamen Rider Kuuga) as a rockstar munitions expert—they eventually run the risk of dragging rather than heightening.
Still, I enjoyed What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? a lot. It has a lot to enjoy for people for whom Godzilla movies are second nature. The jokes on the genre land super hard, but they land just as well if you mistrust government red tape. Would you trust the US to effectively clean up a natural disaster, kaiju or otherwise?
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
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