A while ago, while grumbling about Thor: Ragnarok, I wrote, 

With Marvel films, there’s usually a tricky balance of bombastic drama and quipping, and it’s easy to lose that balance and end up with the humour kicking the legs out from under any dramatic tension… [In Ragnarok,] the humour is for the most part formulaic and repetitive. A character says something cocky or pompous and a deflating pounding or misfire or pratfall ensues. This is repeated later, and then repeated again, and again. This is the joke template of the whole film. And if everything is essentially a set-up for some more rote goofiness, another gag like the one you saw five minutes ago, the stakes and drama ebb away, along with any goodwill, resulting in a film that feels much longer than it actually is.

With that in mind, and via Ace, here’s a related and more detailed rumination by Just Write. On cinematic bathos, or dramatic knee-capping.

Flat, grating and unfunny. Don’t trust the Rotten Tomatoes score. 

A telling exchange, one of many:

“It essentially sounded like you were being held hostage. If you wanted to go to the bathroom, you had to go with two escorts – is that true?”

“Erm, that’s what the students felt was true. I was going to go to the bathroom regardless and they wanted to escort me.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did they want to escort you to the bathroom?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ask them?”

“No, of course not.”

From Michael Moynihan’s short film on events at Evergreen State College, where ‘progressive’ utopia is under construction.

Update:

In the thread below, several commenters note that the dramas at Evergreen – this Theatre of the Bedlamites™ – is merely an extension and enactment of the values being inculcated by the staff. After years of wearing away the customary moral and behavioural restraints, and after years of rewarding pathological vanities and delusions of persecution, the leftist bureaucrats and educators were caught off-guard by the speed and vehemence with which their own protégés turned on them, using mob force and well-practised spite, and merrily wielding baseball bats. Which reveals just how blinded by ideology, and how ludicrous, and unfit, those educators are.

These are moves of power, not moves of reason.

Filmmaker Rob Montz visits Yale, where the Clown Quarter’s trademark psychodrama has alarming influence: 

Mr Montz previously visited Brown University, his alma mater. And for those who may have missed it, Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary Indoctrinate U was released almost a decade ago. Evidently, things have not improved.

Or Doctor Strange in forty words.

There are the usual origin story tropes to get through and the inevitable exposition, but once things start cooking, the lysergic imagery and unhinged action more than compensate. IMAX 3D viewing strongly recommended. And do stay for the mid-credits sting.