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Movie Curiosities: The Boy and the Heron
December 11, 2023 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
At this rate, I won’t believe that Grandmaster Hayao Miyazaki will ever truly retire until he’s dead. And even then, he might have a few projects in the pipeline to be completed and released posthumously. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Eileen
December 10, 2023 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Y’all need to stop sleeping on Thomasin McKenzie. I realize that pretty faces are a dime a dozen in Hollywood and there are too many brilliant young ingenues for anyone to keep track of, but just look at McKenzie’s CV. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Dream Scenario
December 6, 2023 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Earlier this year, Ari Aster brought us Beau is Afraid. It was built from the ground up to be a disturbingly nightmarish acid trip of a movie about a middle-aged white man driven to catatonic anxiety and paranoia by an aggressively illogical world in which everything and everyone was out to destroy him for no discernible reason. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Silent Night
December 4, 2023 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Good news: Grandmaster John Woo has returned to make his first Hollywood picture in twenty years.
Bad news: The script comes to us by way of Robert Archer Lynn, who hasn’t written anything since 2007 and wrote fuck-all of note before that. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Godzilla Minus One
December 3, 2023 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
“To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.”— William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1
Movie Curiosities: Next Goal Wins
November 30, 2023 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
It should go without saying that Next Goal Wins is a Taika Waititi film. Any movie with this premise and this absurdly overqualified cast could only have been made directly by Waititi or with his involvement in some capacity. Oh, and Andy Serkis is on board as an exec producer, just to make it even more Pacific Islander. So let’s get to it, shall we? Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Napoleon
November 29, 2023 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
There can be no doubt that Grandmaster Ridley Scott is one of our greatest living filmmakers. Even so far into his eighties, he remains a prolific director/producer who’s left an indelible influence across multiple genres. But with Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Duel, Exodus: Gods and Kings, and of course Gladiator on his CV, Scott has spent the past twenty years carving out an especially productive niche in the area of historical epics. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Saltburn
November 26, 2023 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Emerald Fennell broke out in a big way with Promising Young Woman, a film that racked up significant critical praise and Oscar recognition even despite how controversial it was. Though I certainly had my issues with the film, there could be no doubt that Fennell got her point across. From start to finish, Promising Young Woman was uncompromising and blunt as a bulldozer in its agenda as a feminist rape revenge picture. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: May December
November 24, 2023 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Here’s one I really had to mull over for a while.
May December comes to us from Todd Haynes (PDX represent!), who doesn’t tend to make films very often. When he does, they vary wildly in quality from Carol (now regarded as a holiday classic among the LGBTQ+ crowd) to Wonderstruck (a sappy misshapen trifle) to Dark Waters (overwrought and horribly paced). And now we’re here with a movie about pedophilia. Buckle up, folks.
The premise begins with Gracie Atherton and Joe Yoo, respectively played by Julianne Moore and Charles Melton. Back in the ’90s, Gracie was caught in an extramarital affair with Joe when she was 36 and he was 13. Gracie got arrested and later gave birth to Joe’s child (Honor, played by Piper Curda) in prison. For obvious reasons, this was a massive tabloid scandal back in the day.
Cut to 2015. Gracie and Joe have been happily married for the past two decades, they’ve had another pair of twin children (Mary and Charlie, respectively played by Elizabeth Yu and Gabriel Chung) now set to graduate high school, and they’ve more or less settled into a pleasant status quo. Then comes the news that some indie movie about them is in the works.
Enter Elizabeth Berry (producer Natalie Portman), a TV actor who landed the starring role of Gracie Atherton. Thus she’s flown out to spend a few days with the Atherton-Yoo family, interview anyone connected with that incident in the ’90s, and get herself inside the head of a married woman who fell in love with a teenager. Hilarity ensues.
What’s at once frustrating and brilliant about this movie is in how slippery it is. Like our protagonist (Elizabeth, in case that wasn’t clear), the film isn’t really interested in condemning or condoning what happened so much as understanding it. To repeat, we’ve got a married woman with teenage kids of her own, she has sex with a teenage boy knowing full well it’ll destroy her life, then the woman and the boy go on to live happily ever after. How does that happen?
Well, there may be certain inaccuracies with the premise of that question.
There’s a particularly illuminating interview with Gracie’s old lawyer (Morris Sperber, played by Lawrence Arancio). He recalls that Gracie and Joe were under the delusion that love would conquer all and everyone would simply leave them be with no consequences. Morris goes a step further and speculates that Gracie and Joe may still be in that same state of denial.
In another scene, Joe states firmly that he was never a victim. He knew what he was doing, he benefited greatly from it, and he never regretted anything. That’s before the scene when he starts to question whether he was really old enough to be making those decisions. Turns out Gracie and Joe have gotten by all these years by doing their best to ignore the past and keep moving forward. Up until Elizabeth’s arrival and her inquiries pick at so many scabs and now all these unresolved traumas are resurfacing — gee, who saw that coming?
For better and for worse, this is very much a movie about unanswered questions. It’s implied that Elizabeth is having problems with her offscreen fiance, and this is never resolved. There are text messages (not to mention that climax) implying that Joe may be seeing someone else or is secretly unhappy with his marriage, but nothing is ever confirmed. There are plenty of rumors about Gracie with regards to childhood traumas and how stable her sanity really is, but there’s precious little that’s reliable or definitive either way.
Yes, this unfortunately means a lot of time wasted on loose ends and dead ends in the plot. But on the upside, it makes a statement about the complexity of a person. Elizabeth sets out to try and understand every layer of Gracie’s psyche, effectively portraying her hangups and desires and flaws within two hours’ screentime, and must resolve herself to the impossibility of the task. This is a story worth telling, and it’s worth trying to understand how and why this sort of thing happens, but any film, any book, any one person can only do so much toward comprehending and explaining something as mercurial and multifaceted as a human being.
Unfortunately, everyone else must also resolve themselves to this same impossibility, whether they know it or not. With Gracie, Joe, and everyone who knew them back in the ’90s about to be impersonated on mass media, they all have different expectations of what they want the movie to be. Granted, most of them are smart enough to realize that Elizabeth is just an actor with no say in the creative process. But that doesn’t stop them from trying to get their intentions and justifications on record, with the implicit hope of making their voices heard in the final picture. And then we get assholes like Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), Gracie’s first son from her previous marriage, looking for ways to enrich himself as a direct result of the film.
That said, at least Cory Michael Smith is having so much fun playing the heel that he serves well as a kind of comic relief. The cast is uniformly solid all-around, really. Special kudos are due to Charles Melton, who got stuck with the tough job of playing someone who appears to be an empty-headed pretty little nothing, but may or may not have a lot more going on under the surface. Melton certainly does a good job playing someone who went directly from childhood to adulthood and skipped a lot of crucial formative steps in between, I’ll give him that.
Then we have Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore. “Passionate to the point of insanity” is nothing new for either of these actors, they’re both running on all cylinders, and they work pure magic with this material. There’s one particular scene in which Gracie demonstrates her makeup routine by putting her makeup on Elizabeth — that one scene is so intimate, so personal, so dramatically intense and thematically charged that it’s worth the cost of admission on its own.
To say nothing of the big climactic monologue delivered by Elizabeth, in makeup and character, in extreme close-up, directly into the camera. Holy shit.
May December is a film that asks a lot of its audience. Simply buying into the premise of following a movie about a pedophile is a big ask to begin with. What’s more, this is a deeply complex movie about a lot of deeply complex topics. It could be a statement about the inherent complexity of people in a world and culture that demands everything to be simple. It could be a statement about the gaps between who we really are, who we pretend to be, and who we perceive ourselves to be. It could be a statement about how our entertainment gets made and who potentially gets exploited in the process. It could be all of these things, none of them, and probably a few other facets that haven’t occurred to me.
This is not for anyone who’s looking for a quick and easy movie to pass a couple hours. It’s a challenging movie, but not as long or intensive as, say, Killers of the Flower Moon. So if you’re an arthouse enthusiast looking for a heady and insightful film to hit the sweet spot in between, check this out.
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Movie Curiosities: The Holdovers
November 23, 2023 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
The Holdovers comes to us from director Alexander Payne, an arthouse darling with multiple Oscar nominees under his belt. The screenplay comes to us from David Hemingway, a journeyman TV writer responsible for not much of note. A peculiar combination, but the last time Payne directed Paul Giamatti in a starring role, we got Sideways. So let’s see what we’ve got here.
The year is 1970, and we lay our scene at Barton Academy, a boys’ boarding school in New England where the rich and entitled can keep their spoiled kids out of sight until they’re sent off to some Ivy League college. Because God forbid any of them (with one notable exception, whom we’ll get to later) should be sent off to fight with the hoi polloi in Vietnam.
Giamatti plays Paul “Wall-eye” Hunham, a Barton alumnus who now teaches ancient history there. In fact, he’s been teaching for so long that the current headmaster (played by Andrew Garman) is a former student of his. Hunham is a classic “Ivory Tower” intellectual, to the point where if it isn’t in a textbook, a museum, a historical landmark, or a place of higher learning, it doesn’t exist. He’s old, fat, and physically incapable of exerting himself in much of any way. He has a visual impairment (hence the nickname) and a congenital metabolism defect leaves him with unbearable body odor.
Put simply, Hunham is obsessively devoted to history, and he hates other people. To wit: When Hunham is first introduced, we learn that he flunked a congressman’s entitled idiot son, to the great frustration of the school administration. Of course, Hunham argues that integrity means nothing if it’s for sale and ignoramuses shouldn’t be handed everything simply because they’re rich.
But then we see Hunham handing out the final exams, and it turns out that he failed almost all of his students. Could it be that all of his students are rich spoiled pinheads? Or maybe he’s a bitter and miserable old man taking it out on everyone around him? Maybe a bit of both?
Anyway, due to another teacher’s last-minute maneuvering and white lies, Hunham is tasked with looking after the students who are stuck at Barton with nowhere else to go for the two weeks until New Year’s. Eventually, the students and faculty file out until it’s only three (or four, depending on how you count) people left on campus. In addition to Hunham, there’s Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), manager of the school cafeteria. Mary took the job to get her son into Barton, only for poor Curtis to get killed in Vietnam shortly after graduation. Mary is still deep in grief over that.
Oh, and did I mention that Curtis was black? By all available evidence (to the best of my recollection), Curtis was the only black kid to ever attend Barton, the only alumnus who couldn’t afford to go to college after graduation, the only student who got drafted, and the only one who got KIA in Vietnam. The film doesn’t put too blunt a point on it, but this seems like a relevant detail, no?
Then we have Angus Tully, a student played by newcomer Dominic Sessa. Angus’ father is… ahem out of the picture, his mother recently remarried, and she’s taken her new husband on a last-minute honeymoon that made them completely unavailable. Yes, this rich woman and her new wealthy husband left her son in a lurch and cut off all communication with him because they needed a break. Makes you wonder about the spoiled entitled parents behind these spoiled entitled kids.
The bulk of the action and drama is centered around these three, but I’d be remiss not to mention Danny (Naheem Garcia), a janitor who pokes his head in every now and then, positioning himself as a possible love interest for Mary. Nothing is ever done with this potential arc.
The upshot is that we have these three misfits stuck together alone on an abandoned campus in the middle of nowhere for two snow-covered weeks. And they all have to bunk in the infirmary because maintenance has shut off the heating pretty much everywhere else. Making things worse, Hunham is a backwards-thinking disciplinarian who insists that the holidays are no time to slack off studies, and pain builds character.
Until Angus gets his shoulder dislocated in an accident. After that gruesome lesson in what pain really looks like, relations between Hunham and Angus start to smooth over and they open up with each other like they never have with anyone else.
Here we have two bitter and stubborn assholes, intelligent to fault, who want isolation even as they need validation. But at least Angus is a brooding hormonal teenager — what excuse does Hunham have?
Hunham is a man who cannot make any sense of the present, and the future looks increasingly bleak, so he keeps himself buried in the past. But as the film unfolds, we come to find out that Hunham never left his old high school because he couldn’t fit in anywhere else and nobody else will come anywhere near him. Even more fascinating, while Hunham will talk for ages about the Greeks and Romans of antiquity, he’s frightfully sensitive about his own personal history.
The same could be said of Angus, who got dealt a seriously shitty hand with his parents and his childhood. That said, even if Angus got dropped at boarding school so he could be someone else’s problem, the fact remains that his parents still paid and provided for his first-class education at Barton. If Angus can get his head out of his ass long enough to apply himself and get that damned chip off his shoulder, he’s got a great future ahead of him.
Compare that to Hunham. How much of a future does that old bastard have left, and how much of it is he wasting at Barton? What legacy is he leaving behind, except for a few thousand brow-beaten students who hate his guts? And as long as it’s those last couple weeks of December — traditionally a time for hope, compassion, optimism, new beginnings, being with friends and loved ones, and so on — how can Hunham and Angus help turn each other around?
So it’s perfectly clear, there is a lot going on in this film thematically. To sum it all up as succinctly as I can, this is a story about three motley misfits who don’t want to be in this situation, forced to live and learn together as they try and make the best of what they can. It’s a microcosm of the entire world, in a way. After all, none of us asked to be here, we didn’t choose our family or where and when we were born, yet here we are with all our baggage and and obligations and all the gifts we take for granted. All we have is each other, and we only have this brief time together, so why spend that time making everyone else miserable? Hell, why be miserable at all?
Paul Giamatti is indispensable here, as nobody else can play an endearing sad-sack quite like he can. He’s playing perfectly within his wheelhouse here, with a director who’s proven that he knows how to work with Giamatti at his finest, so it speaks volumes that Dominic Sessa is holding his own as a scene partner on his first try. As for Da’Vine Joy Randolph, she does admirably well playing the beating heart of the picture, a third party to call the boys out on their bullshit as necessary.
So, are there any nitpicks? Well, for every supporting character who helps to make a crucial point (Carrie Preston comes to mind, playing a potential love interest for Hunham), there’s a supporting character who doesn’t amount to much more than a dangling loose end (Angus’ love interest, played by Darby Lee-Stack). This is a 133-minute movie that could have and probably should have been trimmed down to two hours.
For an awards-season dramedy, The Holdovers is nicely charming. The pacing drags in spots, but the lead characters are so compelling and the plot is crammed with so many thematic layers that I couldn’t help having fun unpacking the film as I watched it. The film has brains and heart in abundance, and it’s worth seeing the film just to watch Paul Giamatti in peak form. I have no doubt that this will be mandatory viewing for awards completionists, and anyone in the mood for a bit of intelligent feel-good cinema would do well to check this out.
For more Movie Curiosities, check out my blog. I’m also on Facebook and BlueSky.
Movie Curiosities: Wish
November 22, 2023 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
You’d better believe I’ve been anxious to tear into this one.
I’ve already written at great length about how Disney’s grand centennial year has been terribly botched by one box-office flop and corporate blunder after another. To say nothing of the historic strikes that exposed corruption and greed throughout the whole industry. And through it all, we’ve had the trailers for Wish, a film made and marketed as Disney’s 100th-anniversary victory lap.
I might add that while most of the directors and writers on this project (namely Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee, and Fawn Veerasunthorn) were key Frozen alumni, the music was not handled by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, the Oscar-winning husband/wife team who are at least half the reason why Frozen got to be so massive. Instead, the songs were written by Julia Michaels, a moderately successful pop music artist who came up through reality television, working alongside ex-boyfriend JP Saxe. This is not an upgrade.
That said, the score was handled by David Metzger (Representing Corvallis, Go Beavers!), who’s been working on music for Disney in some capacity ever since freaking The Lion King. If Metzger was good enough to help compose and arrange the rendition of “When You Wish Upon a Star” that opened every Disney movie from 2006 up until 2022, he’s more than qualified for this gig.
(Side note: The one writer/director who wasn’t involved with Frozen in any capacity was co-screenwriter Allison Moore. She’s a television writer who started with “Beauty and the Beast” on CW and “Da Vinci’s Demons” before going on to a whole bunch of mature TV shows I haven’t heard of. How she went from “Manhunt” to Wish, I honestly couldn’t tell you.)
Anyway, the premise begins with King Magnifico, voiced by Chris Pine. He’s an exceptionally powerful sorcerer who developed the ability to store and grant wishes. With this power, he and his wife (Queen Amaya, voiced by Angelique Cabral) went to build their own kingdom on a remote island, building it up as a haven for those who’ve given up on their dreams or found them too hard to accomplish in the outside world.
The deal is that upon arrival — or upon turning 18 — the citizens of Rosas are free to live out their lives in peace and comfort for the low, low price of giving their heart’s most fervent desire to Magnifico. So long as the wishes are safe in his care, the citizens are spared the unfathomable heartbreak of their lifelong dreams getting shattered. The only drawback is that the citizens have no memory of what their wish was. On the one hand, the citizens are giving up a crucial aspect of who and what they are. On the other hand, if there was no chance that a lifelong dream could ever come true and thinking about it only brought shame and regret, would you really want to know what it was?
But then again, the fact remains that these citizens are entrusting a central part of their identity to a powerful monarch whose judgment is placed beyond question. And therein lies the problem.
Enter Asha (Ariana DeBose), a clumsy and well-meaning young woman who seeks to be the sorcerer’s apprentice (GET IT?!) to learn Magnifico’s secrets and maybe grant her aging grandfather’s wish in the bargain. But then Asha asks a few too many questions, prompting Magnifico to reject her from the job with the oath that he will never grant any wish from her family. In turn, Asha goes looking for help to make sure everyone has a chance at getting their wish granted, and help arrives in the form of an actual fallen wishing star. Hilarity ensues.
Where do I even begin with this?
From start to finish, this was clearly intended to be a love letter to Disney. There are a great many jokes and images and callbacks to all throughout the Disney canon — my personal favorite example concerns the seven supporting characters who were explicitly modeled after the Seven Dwarves. Unfortunately, because this is Disney’s big onanistic centennial celebration, anything the least bit subversive or novel is off the table. We’re here for the greatest hits, the nostalgic hallmarks, everything that defines the Disney brand as defined by Disney itself, and nothing but.
Perhaps the most prominent example is baked into the premise itself: The notion that dreams come true. “When You Wish Upon a Star” has been the Walt Disney Company’s anthem since it was first introduced over 80 years ago. Never mind that the song and the sentiment completely overlook all the luck and hard work and everything else that goes into making a dream happen, it’s all about faith, trust, and a little bit of cold hard cash to buy a set of mouse ears and a day pass at Disneyland. There’s a lot of nuance in the sentiment that dreams come true, and the film raises a fascinating philosophical conundrum about whether it’s better to forget about dreams that never came true. But this is a film slavishly devoted to the Disney ideal, so forget all of that and just keep on wishing really hard.
Which brings us to our antagonist. Here we have a tyrant who brutally enforces a monopoly on wishes, choosing which ones to grant or deny. Magnifico doesn’t want anyone to put any work into fulfilling their own wishes without his magic, he doesn’t want anyone questioning his methods or logic, he doesn’t want anyone publishing their own independent works of art or music that could potentially lead to rebellion (That’s not a hypothetical, that’s a huge plot point in the film.), and he slaps his face on everything from massive statues to cookies handed out to everyone in the kingdom.
It takes a special kind of disconnect not to realize that thematically speaking, Magnifico is the analogous stand-in for Disney itself. So it is that when Disney tries to portray downtrodden citizens rising up to take down Magnifico’s cruel tyranny, the film and filmmakers are pathetically and laughably incapable of selling it.
It certainly doesn’t help that Magnifico has no development arc to speak of. He starts the movie as a pompous dickhead and he ends the movie as a two-dimensional supervillain. The movie tries to introduce some leeway on the grounds that he’s corrupted by dark magic, but that’s bullshit. Any child could tell that Magnifico didn’t turn evil because he went to dark magic, he went to dark magic because he turned fucking evil. There is no attempt at redemption, no nuance or doubt in his philosophy, Magnifico simply does what he does because he’s flat fucking evil. This in turn ruins the themes, because there comes a point when Asha and her friends aren’t trying to stop Magnifico because he’s got everyone’s wishes trapped — they’re trying to stop him because he’s gone so far out of control that he needs to be put down for the sake of it.
Speaking of which, what about Asha? Sadly, our protagonist highlights so much of why this movie doesn’t work. She doesn’t have much in the way of personality, or even much in the way of motivation. This is a character so focused on her grandfather’s wish that we never learn what her wish is. I kept waiting for someone to ask or answer the question of what Asha would’ve given Magnifico when she turned 18. By virtue of the premise, and by virtue of how extremely important it is to know about our protagonist’s motivation, overlooking that question was a huge mistake.
Another huge problem is that Asha depends so much on physical comedy. She speaks loudly, her movements are exaggerated, she’s clumsy, she’s neurotic… this is a character who takes up a huge amount of space and she needs to move quickly. This style of animation doesn’t allow for that. I can understand the logic of trying to split the difference between traditional 2D cel-shaded animation and more modern CG animation, but the middle ground they came up with doesn’t fit the tone of the film.
It’s not just Asha, either. We’ve also got the aforementioned wishing star and a talking goat voiced by DAS mainstay Alan Tudyk. These characters never shut the fuck up. Star doesn’t even talk and the character is still noisy as hell. Even and especially when they need to lay low on pain of blowing all their plans, these characters keep on jabbering and making trouble long past the point of wearing out their welcome. I could say the same for the aforementioned not-Dwarves, who only have the color schemes and personality tropes of the original Dwarves without any of the rubbery animation or cartoonish proportions that made them work. Conversely, we have Queen Amaya and Asha’s family, all of whom are one-dimensional characters with cellophane development arcs.
Then we have the songs. Gods above, which examples do I go with? We’ve got “Welcome to Rosas”, with its forced rhymes and too many syllables emphasized incorrectly. We’ve got the de facto single “This Wish”, which sadly has too many lyrics that fall flat on the floor. (“Throw caution to every warning sign,” what the hell is that supposed to mean?) We’ve got “This is the Thanks I Get?!” which doesn’t sound remotely like the villain song it’s supposed to be. I’ll grant that Ariana DeBose is trying her damnedest to sell every lyric and her talent goes a long way, but it’s not enough.
Oh, and on one final note: I was supremely disappointed when “Once Upon A Studio” wasn’t screened before the movie. What the hell?
The bottom line is that Wish is a movie made exclusively of, by, and for the so-called Disney Adults. This is a movie intensely devoted to the ideals and iconography of the Disney brand, to the exclusion of anything new or thoughtful. I can see glimpses of sincerity with regard to the themes of holding on to wishes and how our dreams define us, but those thoughts are drowned out by enough noise and color and empty spectacle and annoying comic relief to fill a goddamn Illumination film. Moreover, it’s hard to take the themes of revolutions and nonconformity seriously when we’re so constantly reminded that this message is coming from the world’s most dominant multimedia force since the Medici Family.
Look, Disney, I know you had to do something like this for your big 100th anniversary. It’s a huge milestone, congratulations. Now that you’ve gotten this out of your system, try harder next time.
Oh, and by the way: This one gets a huge marketing push while The Marvels is left to rot? What the fuck?!
For more Movie Curiosities, check out my blog. I’m also on Facebook and BlueSky.
Movie Curiosities: The Marvels
November 21, 2023 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
If nothing else, I’ve gotta say it’s nice reviewing a Marvel movie that isn’t critic-proof. As I’ve said before, The Marvels comes at a time when the MCU and its position in the mainstream zeitgeist are in flux. Now that the Infinity Saga, the Blip, and its immediate aftermath are all played out, we’re slowly but surely reckoning with the fact that the Marvel films have become normalized. It’s no longer feasible to continue treating each Marvel film as a huge cultural event, much less an Endgame-level smash, even though everyone from the C-suite at Disney to the last fuckwit talking head on YouTube has come to depend on that status quo.
Furthermore, The Marvels comes fresh off a SAG-AFTRA strike that made promotion borderline impossible in the weeks and months when press appearances would’ve done the most good. This is likely why October box office grosses across the board would’ve been historically bad if it wasn’t for Taylor Swift. I need hardly add that Disney’s big centennial year has been catastrophic, with a string of costly box-office flops. One of my correspondents went so far as to suggest that Disney deliberately tanked The Marvels, so they could declare the losses as a tax write-off.
It’s the best explanation I have for why The Marvels is underperforming, because it’s not a bad movie at all.
Don’t worry if you’re not up to speed with the MCU. Enough time in-universe has passed in between entries that even those up to speed are no longer up to speed. Luckily, the first act makes efficient use of snappy dialogue and flashback montages to fill us in.
- Carol “Captain Marvel” Danvers (Brie Larson) has been so busy zipping around the cosmos that she hasn’t found the time to immediately end every other movie in the canon. As it turns out, the bulk of her work has focused on mitigating the Kree-Skrull War and the collateral damage thereof. Moreover, it turns out that her actions in Captain Marvel indirectly caused the Kree-Skrull War to escalate in a catastrophic way, and she’s too proud to go back home to Earth for any length of time until she’s cleaned up her mess.
- Cpt. Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) knew Carol as a kid, and she’s still upset with Carol for leaving Earth without a trace 30 years ago. Ever since getting her own light-based powers (see: “Wandavision”), Monica’s been hard at work on S.A.B.E.R., a new international peacekeeping agency headed up by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson). Together, Monica and Fury have maintained an impressive new space station to keep an eye on threats both terrestrial and interplanetary.
- Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) recently obtained her own light-based powers, with some assistance from a mysterious bangle passed down as a family heirloom (see: “Ms. Marvel”). She’s a teenage Captain Marvel fangirl still coming into her own as a superheroine, juggling her powers, her Muslim heritage, and her uptight family.
Into all of this comes Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), the latest supreme leader of the Kree, who uncovers a bangle identical to that of Kamala’s. Without going into too much detail about her big evil plan (more on that later), the upshot is that it indirectly and accidentally results in Carol, Monica, and Kamala getting entangled. So now the three of them swap places with each other when they use their powers at the same time. Does the explanation make any sense? Put it this way.
Monica: “I walked through a witch hex, so now I can become intangible and absorb massive amounts of energy.”
Carol: “Huh. That’s cool. Anyway, there’s a teenager I’ve never met who can turn light into solid matter, and I’m standing in her house right now because we instantly traded places across half the galaxy, what are we doing about that?”
This is the MCU, stranger things happen every day of the week. The important thing is that we’ve got a novel conceit for a superhero crossover like nothing we’ve never seen in any superpowered team-up to date. The teleportation element adds a whole new dimension to multiple fight scenes happening at once, and I raise a glass to editors Catrin Hedstrom and Evan Schiff for cutting everything together in a way that stays coherent without compromising energy. Perhaps more importantly, the conceit gives our main characters a compelling and innovative reason to train together, coordinate, communicate, and grow closer as a team.
Perhaps most importantly, a crucial element of this premise is that our leads have to be judicious in their choice of when to use or not use their powers. It adds some neat variety to the fight scenes, as our heroes have to find other ways of beating bad guys and solving problems aside from throwing pixels around. This even makes for phenomenal character development, most especially in the case of Kamala: Tell a bright young budding teenage superheroine that she can’t use her powers — not even to save peoples’ lives — and see what happens. Especially when that message is coming from someone Kamala idolizes as much as Captain Marvel.
Carol has spent so much time brooding in the vacuum of space, zipping from one war zone to the next, she’s lost sight of the individuals who look up to her and depend on her. Carol herself may object to anyone holding her up as an omnipotent role model, and she’s spent much more time with her reputation as the reason why the Kree homeworld has gone to shit. But both sides are equally true and valid sides of her brand image and she has to deal with them both.
Carol Danvers is the experienced paragon who comes to rediscover her human side. Monica Rambeau is the comedic “straight man” who comes to embrace her status as a superhero. And Kamala is the excitable wannabe who eventually gets lifted up to join the pantheon of her idols. The three of them inform each other superbly well, and it’s astonishing how well these actors play off each other.
And what of our villain? Well, I’m sorry to say that Ashton is such a vacuum of charisma that she comes off looking and sounding like a lower-tier MCU villain. But what Dar-Benn lacks in screen presence or personality, she more than makes up for with her big evil scheme and motivation thereof.
The Kree homeworld of Hala has become such an uninhabitable dump that Dar-Benn is opening up wormholes to drain entire planets of their most vital resources and pour them into Hala. (Not like gold or oil or anything like that, I’m talking about stuff like breathable air and potable water.) Predictably, it turns out that tearing open wormholes and keeping them open indefinitely is really fucking bad for the entire space/time continuum.
Basically put, Dar-Benn is so tightly focused on her mission, so blinded by her own arrogance and spite, she’s made herself willfully blind to the consequences of what she’s doing with her power. In this way, she works well enough as a thematic dark mirror against Carol Danvers, taking Captain Marvel’s mindset and methodology to the furthest possible extreme.
To wit: At the climax, we learn that Captain Marvel could’ve fixed literally everything all along with only five minutes and barely any inconvenience. Why didn’t she come up with such a blindingly obvious solution in the first place? Well, a less charitable viewer might chalk it up as a failing of the plot, and I will grant that the runtime could’ve afforded another two minutes to smooth out the plot in some places. Even so, I prefer to consider this another example to show just how badly Carol Danvers has lost herself.
That’s not even getting started on all the other fun stuff packed into this movie. We’ve got a new species of alien that communicates entirely in song, opening it up to some delightful musical numbers. We’ve got Kamala’s family (played by Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur, and Saagar Shaikh) to provide just enough comic relief without wearing out their welcome. Don’t even get me started on that diabolically brilliant Flerken sequence, I was rolling on the floor laughing all through it.
There’s character development, there’s pathos to go with the empowering themes, and there’s comic relief that’s genuinely entertaining. We’ve got a central premise that deepens the interplay between leads and powers the action set pieces in an exciting and innovative way. The MCU callbacks are rewarding and the setups for future installments are mind-blowing (seriously, stick around for the mid-credits stinger), but none of that is delivered in a way that distracts or detracts from the story being told. It’s uplifting, it’s energetic, and it’s all-around fun.
Gentle readers, The Marvels is everything we ever asked or expected a Marvel Studios production to be. I seriously can’t think of any good reason why this movie is bombing so hard when it’s not even close to the worst thing we’ve seen from the MCU. I couldn’t even finish “Secret Invasion” and I had a great time with this one.
Seriously, don’t wait to catch up on “Wandavision”, “Ms. Marvel”, the Infinity Saga, or anything else in the canon to date. See the damn movie and catch up with the rest later on, if you feel so inclined. This is absolutely recommended.
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