This Week in Tickets: 12 February 2024 - 18 February 2024 (Getting Ready)

Quite the odd week for movie-watching; not so much a deliberate attempt to slow down after the previous week, although it worked out that way.

The week splits into two parts easily enough. During the week, I was getting ready for a couple of Part IIs. First up was streaming Pegasus, shockingly very available ahead of the sequel arriving in theaters for the Lunar New Year. This never happens with Chinese movies - as I mentioned when looking at If You Are the One 3 a month ago, I wasn't able to see the first before either one!

Not that it was necessarily easy; it was streaming on Amazon Prime, but the search made it hard enough to find at the time that I had to get there via JustWatch, and then opted to rent rather than use the stream included with Prime because the rental was $2 and adding ad-free streaming would be $3, and I didn't feel like giving them the satisfaction. The movie itself didn't quite put me off seeing the sequel - I'll probably be doing that in the next day or so - but it is a bit of a head-scratcher that it led to a sequel that seems to be doing pretty well.

On Thursday, I gave Dune a rewatch ahead of Part 2 coming out. Because I dawdled, the only place left showing it was the Majestic 7 out in Watertown, although I didn't much mind that - I was kind of surprised that I hadn't yet found an excuse to get out there in the roughly five years (minus a plague) that it's been open! I figured it would make the bus out to Best Buy or the big Target worth it, but that hasn't actually happened yet, and on top of that, I used to go by that place every day on the 70A bus when I lived in Cambridge and worked in Waltham, so there's a timeline where I'm not renovicted and my employers don't move where I'm seeing a movie there practically every night.

Nice little multiplex, though. I should do a thing where I visit every theater you can get to via the T, sort of look at the state of Boston moviegoing. Maybe when the Coolidge opens its expansion. I'm sure someone will announce they're reopening Fenway just as I finish.

Anyway, it was a quiet couple days after that, and then I opted to do a cruddy-movie twin bill on Sunday. The first part was a brunch screening of Argylle at the Seaport Alamo and, eh, I don't think I'll be doing that again. Certain parts of their menu are the sort of thing that makes me really anxious in restaurants - the burger, for instance, that has half a dozen toppings when I really just want cheese and bacon, and I don't want to be trying to pick out what I don't want in a darkened theater - and all three of the items on the special brunch menu are like that. On top of that, all the beverages were alcoholic, which meant there was a mimosa on the menu but not "glass of orange juice".

(Look, I know I'm a picky eater upon whom your carefully-constructed medley of flavors is wasted, but I don't like it when a menu makes me feel like that, y'know? Just offer the ability to build up from plain rather than deal with all the hassles of subtracting!)

Anyway, after that I killed a bit of time shopping and headed to the Common for Madame Webb on the Imax screen, and, eh, I've seen worse. I kind of feel like Sony will sort of quietly not greenlight any more of these Spider-adjacent movies after Venom 3 comes out this fall. It wasn't the worst idea given that Sony had rights to a roster of more characters than they could possibly use given how long movies take to make, but if Kraven flops, I think you've just got to look at Venom as an anomaly.

More coming on my Letterboxd account, then here.


Dune '21

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2024 in Majestic Arsenal Yards #2 (return engagement, laser DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere, and to purchase on DVD/Blu-ray/3D/4K at Amazon

I liked this a bit more on my third go-through, and sort of half-wonder if that's at all a function of this being the first time I saw it in "normal" fashion - my first viewing was in 3D, which isn't particularly missed even though there are stereo guys beyond conversion in the credits; my second was on the Omnimax dome at the Museum of Science from way too close; and this was on a regular 2D screen. Amusingly, I'll probably see the sequel on 70mm film, and wonder if there's any other way to do this. Are there D-Box screenings anywhere in New England?

Still, I'm not sure that this is a great movie or adaptation, although it's been long enough since I've read the books (I was way too young/ignorant to know half of what Frank Herbert was trying to get at) that I couldn't really say on the latter. It's very much half a movie, still, but a good half-movie, impeccably staged with a pretty terrific cast doing everything they can to turn Herbert's words into something that at least feels like human beings might say them. You still only sort of start to get the shape of what the filmmakers are getting at here, but it certainly seems to lay a strong foundation for what's coming next week.

Letterboxd post from October 2021


Argylle

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #8 (first-run, DCP)

Silly question: Do you think Samuel L. Jackson told director/producer Matthew Vaughn "look, MFer, I'm gonna take your money for three days of work in the south of France, but are you seriously giving her the same damn makeover?" when he saw the script or, given that he was probably only on set for a few days, after the premiere?

Even if you don't immediately recognize the movie I'm not being particularly coy about(*), I suspect that most folks will feel like Argylle was copied from something. It's got all the pieces of a twisty movie plot that has worked in the past, a terrific cast that should be able to make them work again, but none of the inspiration. Writer Jason Fuchs has come up with this story that could be a fun meta-commentary on James Bond-style espionage versus actual spy work, or what actually makes someone who they are, or whether attachments that have been manufactured in this way can be real, but there's no emotion behind it except in fairly rare instances - Bryce Dallas Howard does a few perfectly believable freak-outs, but Fuchs and Vaghn never seem to recognize that this could be interesting and dig in a bit; it's just time to pull the next reversal

All these folks should be able to get something out of the material, but the moments when they do are few and far between. Why do you even have Bryan Cranston playing his part if he's not going to do something interesting with it? It's funny/ironic, I suppose, that Bruce Dallas Howard's character is a spy-fi writer said to be beloved by actual spies for getting things right when the script is kind of precise but hollow; you might think that this sort of a script written by a guy who has spent a lot of time as an actor might have something to say about disappearing into a character, but it doesn't.

It's pretty, occasionally, but the sort of pretty where one can see the action being pushed to the image rather than the two fitting together. I also kind of wonder how much better the film would be if you switched Henry Cavill's role with John Cena's, because even if they aren't in the film much, there's something about Cavill that makes his scenes land with a thud in the gap between fun spy stuff and an enjoyably deadpan spoof of them. Make pro-wrestler Cena the cartoonish super-spy and Cavill the surprisingly-nerdy partner, and they probably click into place easily

SPOILERS!

(*) I refer, of course, the The Long Kiss Goodnight, and how when Howard's Elly is revealed to actually be "Rachel Gylle"(**), she is given the same short haircut/platinum-blonde dye job that Geena Davis got in that movie when she regained her memories, Unfortunately, it makes her look disturbingly like Amy Schumer as opposed to someone folks would think was a super-spy.

(**) Man, this feels like a place where filmmakers who were actually trying would come up with some sort of silly anagram, especially with spelling of "Argylle", but I'm not seeing one.

!SRELIOPS


Madame Web

* * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2024 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon)

Meh. Folks have been pumping this up as some sort of disaster all week when it's only below average, and even that in a way that highlights how much we expect more from these movies than we used to than any sort of fundamental misguidedness. The pieces of a decent mid-tier superhero movie are here, but it's like the filmmakers hit a wall when they have to put those pieces together in a way that makes it click for the audience, and wind up flailing. Just when the movie should be getting into a groove, gliding forward with a head of steam behind it, it keeps hitting bump where the audience wonders why you'd do that.

And it really should have that, because the circular nature of the story that involves folks seeing the future could be cool! Paramedic Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) can't do that when the audience first meets her in 2003, at least not until her partner Ben Parker (Adam Scott) restarts her heart after she falls in the Hudson River, but Ezekial Sims (Tahar Ramin), who shot Cassandra's mother when they were seeking a semi-mythical super-power-bestowing spider in Peru thirty years earlier can, and he's tormented by the fact that three young women with spider-like abilities (Isabela Merced, Celeste O'Connor, Sydney Sweeney) will kill him at some point in the future. So he figures out how to find them, but they all wind up on the same train as Cassandra, and she has a vision of him about to attack…

Add a bit in where the girls only get their powers because Ezekial is trying to kill them - that would be a logical way for them to get the magic spider-bites - and that would be kind of clever, or could be, if the five credited writers were taking more care to have all this stuff nailed down. Instead, there's a weird sort of tug of war between when they come up with something weird and screwy but in such a way that it feels like something an awkward person not used to superhero-related stuff would do and stuff that is just dumb. Sometimes the former seems to cause the latter, in that Cassandra and the girls have so little reason to make the leap to spider-powers that you've got to do something crazy to get them to the right exposition.

There's actually a little bit of weird relatable charm to Dakota Johnson's bafflement, at least, right up to the point where the need for explanation gets painful; there's something genuinely abnormal about how there's a bit of "what do you mean, natal trauma and a lifetime without roots has messed me up, I'm fine!" to pretty much everything she does. The cast is really not bad at all - I'd watch more movies with the Spider-Girls, while Adam Scott and Emma Roberts are quite likable as folks named Parker you can buy into. Tahar Rahim's Ezekial is more underwritten than anything. The action isn't massively-scaled, but works, and if the "hey, let's include something in a shot that's kind of like a spiderweb" stuff is trying too hard, it's in a way that usually feels like it would make a good comic panel. This would be pretty decent, if it came out 25 years ago, just before its 2003 setting.

Unfortunately, it comes out in 2024, with a studio throwing every lesser Spider-character they have at the wall in hoping something sticks as well as Venom, but in this case with nobody behind the scenes seeming to have the affinity for the genre that the MCU guys do or the Tom Hardy insanity that somehow worked. Perhaps most importantly, though, Ezekiel and the Spider-Girl characters are all close enough to Spider-Man in design and abilities that they remind the viewer that Sam Raimi and the Marvel Studios folks made a half-dozen Spider-Man movies better than this, and having them all exist before Spidey seems to make him incompatible with these movies, and who wants that?

This Week in Tickets: 13 February 2023 - 19 February 2023 (A Couple of Classics)

It was a pretty good week for seeing movies on the big screen, new and old.

I started off with the first of a couple Film Rolls things from South Korea - EXIT on Monday night and lucky Chan-Sil on Thursday, which are both relatively recent and at completely opposite ends of that country's film industry.

On Tuesday, I hit the night-before showing for Marlowe, which has a darn good pedigree - Sam Neill playing literature's second-greatest detective with Neil Jordan directing a script by William Monahan and a cast that includes Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, and Colm Meaney - but which is missing one important name in Raymond Chandler, alas.

It was back to the Common the next day for the new 3D rerelease of Titanic - I made a point to skip the Valentine's Day crowd for that one - and it's kind of mind-boggling that Cameron has only made a couple features (plus some documentary work) in a quarter-century since then, although all those movies are the sort of grand epic that few other people seem to have the ability to do.

Come the weekend, it was a couple days of noting how multiplexes seem to have grown even more hostile to folks catching two, especially if you're cutting across town. I happily caught Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on the big screen at the Coolidge - the schedule out from said "screening on digital and 35mm", although I didn't see where the 35mm times were, took the 66 back to Harvard Square to pick up the week's comics, and then wound up hanging around and grabbing a bite to eat at the Smoke Shop in Kendall Square so that I could make it to the 9:15pm show of Living, which was the most convenient time, since I'd dilly-dallied in seeing it.

And I don't just mean I'd waited until it was almost gone from local screens - I could have seen it in Dublin back in November, as that's when it was released there and in the UK, but apparently I had better things to do some evenings, though I can't imagine what.

Then, on Sunday, I'd kind of hoped to pair something else with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but the 4pm showtimes for the Imax 3D presentations really don't lend to that. But that's okay; Sunday is crossword & grocery shopping day, after all.

The ticket kiosk ate my ticket, by the way, which is why all that stuff is written in on the page. Not as bad as Assembly Row just not having them, but, c'mon, your loyalty program's name is Stubs, and I need my stubs!

One disappointment aside, a fun week! This coming one looks interesting as well, so catch the first draft of this blog on my Letterboxd or wait around for me to consider things a bit.


Eksiteu (Exit)

Seen 13 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

I will, of course, go longer on this one when I reach it in the Film Rolls queue, but it's a thoroughly fun action/adventure that I could probably recommend to the family members with kids even if it's not specifically made for them. Fun, friendly, always moving forward and fairly non-violent once the inciting incident is over; I think I really would have enjoyed seeing it on the big screen, but it had it's miniature North American release right at the end of Fantasia and skipped Boston anyway. I'd feel kind of dumb if I could have seen it in Montreal, so I won't be looking that up.


Titanic

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #14 (25th anniversary, 3D Dolby Cinema DCP)

I'm not sure I've seen this since the original release, and might not have gone to an anniversary re-release without the 3D conversion because, like with Avatar, it is very easy to forget how effective James Cameron's movies are in the moment one you've got a little distance, seen them shrunk to the size of a television, and started to break them down into pieces. The man is a precision crafter of motion pictures, though, and knows how to make a classic story work for a broad audience as well as anybody.

Which is kind of funny - the spectacle has been the hook for Cameron since The Abyss in 1989, with story often considered secondary because he doesn't necessarily surprise or break new ground. And yet, for as much as the grandeur and obsessive detail of this movie's production design isn't nearly so overwhelming as it was 25 years ago, it never feels like it's been passed by. There's a command of the form and knowledge of what rings true here, taking a simple enough story that almost anyone can relate and finding the little details that make it feel alive. One never feels like he's switched over to "blockbuster mode" when the catastrophe and visual effects begin to take center stage, and he uses great action work and some horrific imagery to communicate the scale without changing the type of movie.

And, boy, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are great here, both at a spot to make a big leap after a few impressive parts and both exactly what the film needs, full of youthful energy, their characters more polished and rough around the edges than one might expect, and almost effortlessly in love. Cameron's going for simplicity here means they can't really work at explaining or justifying that - the audience just has to believe it - and they hit that mark. That they'd go on to excel in more cynical material enhances how perfect they were at this time, in a way; you can see them as newcomers who still have some illusions here. A special supporting cast shout out to Victor Garber, whose modest engineer is achingly tragic.

The conversion to 3D is nice, if mostly understated; I'm not sure if they did it anew with the upscale or if it's the one from the last re-release a decade ago. It shines a bit of a light on the rare digital effects that haven't aged as well as the rest throughout the film but impresses in the last act - the extra depth and mechanical structure is nice throughout, but when the stem is vertical and the camera looks down, one sees why they'd do this. The 4K upgrade is mostly impressive a swell, aside from a couple shots where it doesn't quite take; Paramount is going to sell some good looking discs later this year.

As they should. It's easy to forget just how great this is, because it hasn't really been imitated enough to be better than its imitators and romance as a genre doesn't get much respect. But it works like crazy, even when that's harder than it looks.


Chansilineun bokdo manhji (Lucky Chan-sil)

Seen 16 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Blu-ray)

The idea of this movie that I had in my head - director Kim Cho-hee, who had spent much of her career as producer for Hong Sang-soo, making a feature about a producer who suddenly has the art-house figure she'd been working with drop dead - had more potential to be a satire that bites the hand that feeds it than Kim goes for. I'm not disappointed that she went the way she did, but no matter how warm and charming this film is, I kind of still want that other one.

As an aside, the Blu-ray edition is gorgeous from packaging to video, and the simple song over the end credits is weirdly catchy. I really wish there were more English-friendly releases like it.


Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2023 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (special engagement, DCP)

I just saw this a few years back (have we really been doing pandemic stuff for three years?), and I once again wonder if Ang Lee would have used flashbacks if the de-aging tech had been available when this came out, and what that would have been like. I think he can be trusted with it as much as anyone, but it's tough to imagine the movie being any better.

Indeed, this film is close enough to perfect that I really don't have that much to say about it: It's some of Michelle Yeoh's and Chow Yun-fat's best work, and what's kind of amazing about that is just how reserved the pair are and how much time they spend basically as sleuths working a case as opposed to would-be lovers totally focused on one another, just really beautiful jobs of revealing who they are through what they do.

And that's considering that what they do is often revealed through impossible action, with Lee and Yuen Woo-ping just making the fact that this group can run up walls and fly feel perfectly natural even though the way they stage it is telling: Chow's Li Mu Bai is a master, defying gravity casually; Zhang Ziyi's Jen is the prodigy, so even if it comes easy to her, she clearly likes to show off; Yeoh's Yu Shu Lien is not quite in the same refined air as Li, so you see her working at it, but always get the feeling that, among normal people, she's one of the best, and never actually looks bad next to the preternaturally gifted folks she meets.

Anyway, I love this movie, and am reminded why every time I see it. I don't know that the new restoration being touted is actually newer than the 4K disc I watched last time, but I have no problem with Sony coming up with a thin veneer of "look, we're going to cash in on Michelle's Oscar buzz". Hopefully they'll have a chance to do so with Chow and Zhang in the next few years.

What I wrote in April '20


Living

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2023 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

Living is just an exquisitely constructed and photographed film from start to finish. The opening made me wonder why we don't present the main credits like that any more, and I want to know how they managed the trick where it looked like the photograph at the funeral was about to come to life, as if imbued with its subject's new found vitality. At the start, there is also a seamless transition from nostalgic grain to painfully sharp digital capture with rich dark shades, and a formal rigidity to the shots throughout that threatens to crush the viewer but only if they allow it.

There are folks who don't necessarily like to see the filmmaker's hand so clearly, but in some ways, that seems the whole point of the film - the characters need to see the forces that are pushing them into unfulfilling situations, not necessarily out of malice, but inertia, propriety, and fear of blame if something goes wrong. Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro often seem to be tipping their hand so that the audience can recognize it applying to them as well. There are metaphors for this sort of control throughout; note, for instance, how Mr. Williams doesn't quite get the knack of the claw game, while the less set-in-her-ways Miss Harris is able to pull her rabbit out.

In the middle of all that, is Bill Nighy, his wiry figure and precise diction the perfect representation of a man who simply doesn't register, but it doesn't take much for him to become a version with a little joie de vivre, even if the flip side is palpable sorrow despite practicality about how much good it does. He's a perfect fit for the role, especially when he is seen as a template for almost every other male character in the movie, from Alex Sharp's newcomer who could choose not to go down the same road, to how the burlier figure and loud clothing Jamie Wilkes sports as Talbot marks him as Williams's opposite.

For a moment, it seems to go on a bit too long, but there's a certain self-awareness in that, as those left behind have to face how their memorable gesture may not last, and one must find new ways to keep oneself on a good path when the system is built to move one away from the daring. Yes, you may feel like it's time to coast out, but you don't really have that option.


Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon 3D)

People often fairly complain about how fake and weightless some of these movies are, but consider this: Maybe it's just because he's a good actor, but Michael Douglas looks like he's having the time of his life imagining what weird creatures will be digitally composited into his scenes and being a giant nerd about ants in this movie. Other guys with his resume would obviously be wondering how it came to this, but I'm not sure anybody is having quite as much fun as him, although Michelle Pfeiffer sure looks like she's going to enjoy getting to be a sci-fi badass as long as she can.

That aside, Quantumania is a pretty good Marvel movie, not breaking new ground but delivering the goods folks have ordered. By now, you've kind of got to meet these things where they are - yes, this will sacrifice some things that would make it a better individual film for the epic material; there's going to be a sky full of visual effects in the climax even if it maybe would have worked better with a tighter focus. But, the folks making it also know how to make a solid, entertaining adventure with enough danger to make you consider whether Paul Rudd is signed for more movies and enough wisecracking to grease the wheels without it quite becoming cringe material. It hits its marks and the guys doing creature work are clearly having as much of a blast as the folks at the top of this three-generation adventure.

Is it mostly solid, competent work built to look good on an Imax 3D screen? Yeah, and it probably only really transcends that when Jonathan Majors is putting in the work to establish Kang the Conqueror as a worthy foil for the next few years of Marvel material, tweaking what we've already seen on Loki for something more overtly villainous but the sort of confidence that feels human as well as formidable. I'm eager to see where he pops up next in these movies.

At a certain point, I imagine most folks get in a rut writing about Marvel movies, because they are unusually consistent and unambiguously commercial in their storytelling. I probably gave this an extra quarter-star because I like 3D goofiness, the way this particular Marvel crew seems to value kid-friendliness a bit more than the rest (really, this is probably a couple easily-replaced cusswords from being a straight PG), and, heck, I even still kind of like Bill Murray showing up and doing Bill Murray. These guys know what they're doing and don't screw it up.

New-ish releases: Eternals and Ghostbusters: Afterlife

WIth a bunch of festival reviews backed up and piles of discs in my living room, I was kind of tempted to just let the people whose sites are built around reviewing this sort of movie have them (or even just mainstream films in general), but for Eternals particularly, there seemed to be a lot of talk not of the film's relative merits but about what it means for Marvel, or whether it was good or bad by the standards of a Marvel movie (or good or bad at being a Marvel movie), etc. That's kind of horse-race stuff, though, as bad in movies as it's been in sports and politics.

That's especially true because I think Eternals is at its most interesting when you can most completely divorce it from the rest of Marvel and see it as its own epic fantasy. As much as Chloe Zhao does an impressive job of quietly embedding "why didn't these guys help fight Thanos" into the film and using it as a catalyst, it's housekeeping rather than something which bolsters its own story. To talk about Marvel in general when Eternals is rich on its own is a bit of a waste.

And Eternals is rich!

<SPOILERS!>

There's been a fair amount of talk about how Eternals probably won't play the lucrative Chinese market in large part because it's got a pair of gay characters that can't easily be cut around or dubbed into "roommates", or because Zhao is on the government's shit list because of some relatively innocuous comments she made in an interview years ago. True as that is, it kind of glosses over the basic fact that this Chinese woman used a bunch of a multinational corporation's money to make a movie which at its core is about people coming to grips with the idea that not only are their leaders lying to them, but that they've been formed and conditioned to be what those leaders find useful to the extent of not even exposing themselves to fight Thanos.

And as I get into in the review, it's not just about China. The last act is built around something that I feel like everybody struggles with, the idea of not knowing what to do when your religion or state and its leaders, the people and institutions one uses to define and guide morality, are in conflict with what one's own ethics say. In the movie, Sersi casts her lot in with doing right by humanity, Ikaris maintains faith in his gods, Sprite follows Ikaris more out of personal affinity than faith, and Kingo bugs out, refusing to involve himself in the fight. I've seen people complain that Kumail Nanjiani disappears from the movie at this point, but I feel like it's one of the most true if frustrating moments of the film - it's not long after Kingo has made a joke about the Eternals being capable of cowardice after Phastos is startled by a loud noise, but it's a cowardly act that is pervasive in human society, trying to think of oneself as above the fray or not taking sides. It's the cause of great turmoil in the world, and when Eternals gets down to wrestling with it, it achieves more of the mythic nature that superhero stories often try to claim despite mainly copying symbols. It's the really good Jack Kirby stuff.

(And while we're in spoiler space, let me just say that I hope that our heroes are able to use the equipment at the Forge of Worlds to print off another Gilgamesh loaded with the original's memories before it's destroyed and taken off the table as a plot device. Maybe another Ajak, too, but let's find a way to bring Don Lee back!)

<!SRELIOPS>

Ghostbusters: Afterlife, meanwhile, isn't nearly as deep in its themes, but I kind of feel like it's being dismissed as nostalgia and an overcorrection for how Paul Feig's Ghostbusters reboot activated some of the worst portions of modern fandom. It is that, but it's easy to leave it at that, and that doesn't tell the whole story. After all, it's bad nostalgia, deploying its familiar material as punchline rather than setup, seldom finding a way to twist it into something new that speaks to its Gen-Z heroes (and the audience of the same age). It undercuts the process of telling an exciting or funny story.

The thing is, there's something fascinating about how it engages with its audience(s). On the one hand, Jason Reitman and company often don't seem to realize that there's no need to bring back the mythology of the first movie, because as near as I can tell, nobody really gave a damn about Gozer and Zuul and Gatekeepers and Keymasters. That was weird Dan Aykroyd stuff before most people realized how weird Dan Aykroyd could be, goofy enough to keep the movie going and just a solid-enough pastiche of Weird Tales material to give the climax some stakes while still focusing on the comedy, not anything that really meant much to the audience.

Or did it? A few months ago, there was some back-and-forth about some film site or other claiming Ghostbusters wasn't primarily a comedy but a supernatural adventure with a lot of jokes, folks my age being aghast at that stupid take, and back and forth. My sympathies are solidly with the "of course Ghostbusters is a comedy" crew, but I wondered about the age of those saying otherwise and how they experienced it. You don't have to be much younger than me to mostly know Bill Murray as a sad-sack character actor whose characters are even sadder because he's dryly funny and there's the cultural residue of comedy on him rather than a comic actor who matured. And while the film and director Reitman were notable for the way they combined fantasy action and comedy at the time, the way they did it seeped into Hollywood. There isn't much distance between Ghostbusters and Guardians of the Galaxy, or between that and the rest of Marvel, and someone growing up on those films and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spawn on TV. are naturally going to see it through that lens.

I started thinking of that after encountering a group of Ghostbusters cosplayers at the Fluff Festival one year, because as much as I'd seen Ghostbusters comics and heard the theme played by marching bands on a regular basis when I lived right in Davis Square, that was the first time it really occurred to me that this franchise had that kind of fans, not just folks who laughed at the jokes and moved on. I still don't really get it as a fantasy franchise, but it is out there, and they're having fun, so whatever.

Heck, it feels like the post-credit scene is all about that:

<SPOILERS!>

It's kind of a weird scene, featuring Annie Potts and Ernie Hudson, not really related to what happened on screen or setting up the next film much at all, although it does touch on a few references to what the OG Ghostbusters have been up to. It's probably not expensive, but it must have taken some effort to film, because there's not another scene in this spacious Manhattan office. What's intriguing, though, is that as Winston Zeddmore is talking about how he has thrived since his time with the Ghostbusters, you start to wonder to what extent this is Ernie Hudson talking about how that movie was a watershed moment for him, a working actor who didn't have the sort of recognition Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis, Moranis, Weaver, etc. did but was trusted to be part of that ensemble, and how it gave him both the line on his resumé and confidence to become the trusted character actor he became.

And then, once that's done, it also feels like it's a little bit about fandom in general and Ghostbusters fandom in particular, a tight and supportive community where you meet friends and other folks on the same wavelength. Maybe you don't even produce bad fanfic that is nevertheless appreciated, but there's something to not being just a lonely weirdo.

<!SRELIOPS>

Does it make Afterlife a good movie? No, not really; it basically uses a lot of Sony's money and the fact that the cast and crew are all consummate pros to smooth out the fact that there's just not much to the whole thing. But I at least understand and kind of respect where the impulse to make this movie is coming from a little more.

Anyway - here's to trying to at least talk about what's interesting or what just doesn't work with even big movies versus what it might mean for other movies down the road and the massive companies that own the properties!

Eternals

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 November 2021 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon)
Seen 10 November 2021 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

Jack Kirby's comic book series The Eternals was published by Marvel Comics but only retrofitted into the shared universe later, and not always well (one gets the idea later writers would have more use for the grand mythology than the individual characters), and one often gets the sense that the movie adaptation would be better off outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well. Though not perfect, Chloe Zhao's film is grand fantasy with its own big ideas, and is at its best when one doesn't have to worry about it fitting into another framework as this month's apocalypse.

Seven thousand years ago, it tells us, the Celestial Arishem deposited ten heroes from the planet Olympia in Sumeria to protect the emerging human civilization from the Deviants, monsters from deep space driven to consume intelligent life. Through their guidance, the city of Babylon would grow into humanity's first great civilization and they would travel the world hunting down the Deviants, their names becoming part of mythology, until the creatures were defeated and leader Ajak (Salma Hayek) told them to explore the world they had saved. Or so they thought - the Deviants have re-emerged, seemingly targeting the Eternals themselves, starting in London where Sersi (Gemma Chan), with the power of transmutation, and eternal child Sprite (Lia McHugh) are only able to fight one off with the return of flying powerhouse Ikaris (Richard Madden). This calls for getting the band back together - warriors Thena (Angelina Jolie), Gilgamesh (Ma Dong-Seok aka Don Lee), and Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani); telepath Druig (Barry Keoghan); engineer Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry); and fleet-footed Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) - but the evolved Deviants are not the only surprise awaiting them.

Ten is a large number for either the major figures of a pantheon or a superhero team, especially when you're starting from scratch rather than pulling previously introduced characters together, and it takes Zhao and her co-writers time to introduce everyone and let the audience soak in the scale of their mission, to the point where it's fair to wonder if they've bitten off more than they can chew: The detours into the past are crowded and go on kind of long for what they tell the audience but seldom give those viewers a feel for how they and humanity are interacting and changing each other over that time. Zhao uses action well, in that there's seldom a fight that doesn't change the direction of the story, but it still sometimes feels like those scenes are there to break up a lot of talking.

Even if Chloe Zhao's jump from intimate, near-documentary films to millennia-spanning epic isn't always smooth, one can still spot the woman who made The Rider and Nomadland in this movie, especially when layers get peeled away and the characters start asking themselves who and what they are when they're not protecting humans from Deviants. As the film barrels toward its finale, one can see its demigods having crises of faith and she plays it out honestly and smartly there, with room for many permutations of some hope for the humans they represent as she drives it home. There's plenty going on, but the film's last act resolves into characters asking the question of what to do when one's religion and its leaders seemingly conflict with what one thinks is right, and if that's not exactly what Jack Kirby had in mind when he created these characters, it's the sort of grand idea kept larger than life but made into an easily-swallowed adventure story that made him the king of comics.

It's also gorgeous, even if its location-shot golden-hour vistas and unified costume design aren't exactly classic Kirby. In some ways, the world has caught up with him - the big square spaceship that has no business just hanging in midair has become its own sort of cliché now - but the filmmakers create nifty combinations of earthy or ancient mythology and the science-fictional spin that Kirby put on the ideas. The latter in particular pop in 3D and giant screens, and Ramin Djawadi's score does something similar in how it pulls together a number of influences to at least get close to being epic iiib a global manner.

The large cast is also used quite well, although its definitely a case where the simpler characters around the edges get more chance to make a splash than the folks in the middle. Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, and Lia McHugh are easy to like as the folks whose connections drive the plot, but they seldom make it feel big enough that a breakup 500 years ago is the sort of fantasy melodrama that could change the course of human history. Meanwhile, Salma Hayek's empathetic leader, Bryan Tyree Henry's frustrated builder, and Angelina Jolie's traumatized warrior have clear automatics, and personal favorite Don Lee is given the chance to both demonstrate great punching-monsters and being-generally-charming skills.

Eternals is stylish and self-contained enough that one can't help but wonder what it could have been if Zhao had the chance and inclination to go full-Kirby on it. On the other hand, the stuff in the end-credit buttons sure looks like it could be a whole lot of fun when these characters intersect with the greater Marvel Universe.

Also on eFilmCritic

Ghostbusters: Afterlife

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 November 2021 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, Dolby Cinema DCP)

There's a line, somewhere around 1978 or so, where folks on one side experienced the original Ghostbusters as a great, kind of crude big-budget comedy with a disappointing sequel in the same vein (maybe the first adult-skewing comedy their parents let them watch); on the other side, people who watched The Real Ghostbusters on Saturday mornings, had toys, games, comics, all sorts of stuff that goes with a light adventure franchise, even though most would circle back around to the original movie. Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a movie very much for the latter audience, and that's fine - they buy more movie tickets, after all - but once the filmmakers went that route, they could have made a much better movie.

This movie opens with a man encountering some sort of spirit in the American heartland, chased from a mine to his farmhouse, apparently passing from the encounter. From there the scene moves to New York, where single mother Callie (Carrie Coon) is telling her landlord that she'll be able to pay her back rent when she settles the estate, but it's apparently too late for that. So it's into the car and off to Oklahoma with son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and daughter Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), only to find it's a dirt farm. As they settle in, with Trevor crushing on Lucky (Celeste O'Connor), a waitress at the local diner, and probably-somewhere-on-the-spectrum Phoebe making friends with fellow nerd "Podcast" (Logan Kim) and science teacher Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) at summer school, the town is being shaken by earthquakes and both kids are finding odd junk around the farm. Gary recognizes Ghostbusters tech from when that was a thing back in the 1980s, but who ya gonna call given that the Ghostbusters haven't been a thing since before the kids were born?

It's not necessarily a bad hook for restarting Ghostbusters as a going concern after the recent remake wound up being a dead end for reasons that had relatively little to do with its actual quality, although in using it, filmmaker Jason Reitman (son of original writer/director Ivan) and co-writer Gil Kenan necessarily play things rather more straight than the original movies did. They're not looking to spoof the convention of how the initial film has been all but forgotten despite it being a juicy target that this film is uniquely positioned to skewer, possibly because doing so would undermine the franchise potential by calling attention to the wrong bits of absurdity in the premise. There are jokes, but it's the comedy of a Marvel movie, where the gags smooth the way to the next bit of plot, rather than vice versa. The bits with Phoebe thrown by the fact that Podcast is the weird one and Trevor being a tongue-tied goober around Lucky are cute, and there's some enjoyable CGI mayhem from a bunch of marshmallow-sized Stay-Puft Marshmallow Men, but the gags are secondary to the coming-of-age and coping-with-loss storylines Reitman and Kenan are going for.

The trouble with that is, real life has kind of boxed the filmmakers in - even if they avoid saying things like "the Spengler farm" for much of the runtime, Harold Ramis is the death they have to write around, and doing so means extrapolating a whole arc for his character that doesn't quite seem to fit the existing timeline (was he a divorced father before the first movie?) and requires a lot of backfill by way of not-entirely-convincing exposition because flashbacks are out of the question. One could hand-wave that away, but the movie leans harder and more precipitously on callbacks to the original movie as it goes on, crowding out the new ensemble - Kenan & Reitman really have no idea what to do with Lucky despite Celeste O'Connor having the charisma that makes it obvious why Trevor falls for her immediately - and completely missing the chance to build something new. The villains in Ghostbusters weren't entirely unimportant, but none of their details were nearly as important as them being the sort of weird fantasy Dan Aykroyd was into. There could have been something here - ancient gods attempting to return contrasted with kids chafing at a dying town frozen in time - but the filmmakers are just doing "let's see them again".

What's kind of surprising - but maybe not - is that despite making something that is more primarily an adventure story, Jason Reitman doesn't use those characters and images nearly as well as his father did. Ivan Reitman had to work around miniatures and stop-motion, but there was grandeur and horror mixed with absurdity in the way he staged his film's climax that having some of the same things in a medium shot just doesn't deliver, even with some new digital enhancements. Maybe it's a natural result of the son shooting with the knowledge that 99% of the audience will be seeing this on a small screen after a three-week theatrical run and building for that while the father was aiming at months in theaters with home viewing a compromised side hustle; maybe it's in how even "run-down" Summerville, OK is presented as an idealized setting compared to scrappy 1980s New York. Either way, Afterlife doesn't have the juice as a supernatural adventure, even if director of photography Eric Steelberg does get to shoot some beautiful Alberta scenery and Reitman's team does stage a few neat action bits, most notably the kids' first joyride in the Ecto-1.

Those kids are a likable enough group that it would be fun to see what they can do with filmmakers more interested in building around them. Mckenna Grace does pretty well with making Phoebe expressive and understood despite her being described as not being obviously so, and she's a fun pair with Logan Kim, though what either of these two is doing in summer school is left as an exercise for the viewer. Finn Wolfhard and Celeste O'Connor make their half-sketched characters more fun to watch than they might; hopefully they'll have more to do in a potential sequel. Carrie Coon and Paul Rudd are cute together and when playing off Grace.

Like I said at the top, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is going to hit differently depending on what someone associates the very idea of "Ghostbusters" with. Fair enough. Still, if you're going to make it more adventure than comedy, and introduce a group of young characters with potential exploits of their own, that would seem to call for a lot more creativity and forward-looking than this movie manages.

Also on eFilmCritic

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

A kind of weird thing about Marvel movies (mainline or not) is that they seem to turn around sequels much faster than studios had for the past twenty years or so. The pandemic sort of hides that in this case, but Venom 2 was meant to come out last year, just a couple years after the first, when three years had sort of become the traditional sequel turn-around time. I guess that when you're so locked into the idea of a franchise that you've cast the second movie's villain and shot a scene to introduce him at the end of the first, you're getting the wheels moving earlier.

Still, it's kind of weird that the result of Sony wanting a steady stream of Spider-Man-derived movies plus the pandemic has resulted in a spurt that has Regal offering a "see three in four months" deal for Venom 2 (October), Spider-Man: No Way Home (December), and Morbius (January), though I think the original plan would have still been pretty aggressive - 15 months instead of four - although maybe they've finally got some others close enough to ready to roll that it won't be a spurt and then nothing. I'm kind of intrigued by something in the Morbius trailer that ties it pretty definitively to the main Marvel Cinematic Universe, although I'll be kind of annoyed if they're basically putting something from the mid-credit tease into the trailer because, geez, who wants to see a Morbius movie starring Jared Leto otherwise? It's interesting to see the hints that various areas of the Marvel Universe are possibly existing simultaneously but mostly out of each others' way in the way that the mutants, Avengers, Spider-folk, etc., do in the comics. Although…

SPOILERS!

I've spent a few too many brain cycles trying to figure out what the timing on the Venom 2 post-credit scene is. It feels like it should be the snaps, but that doesn't quite line up unless whatever Venom was doing at the time kept them out of the main timeline for a little longer. It could tie into whatever the deal is with timelines jumping the tracks in Loki, or maybe whatever's going to happen multiverse-wise in Spider-Man: No Way Home, but it would seem to be too early for that.

!SRELIOPS

Anyway, I can't say I quite liked this as much as the first movie, but I'll probably be keeping an eye open to see if Sony is releasing a combined 3D/4K disc, because this is actually really nice in 3D - Shriek's cell in Ravenloft is clearly built to have layers, while all of the other gothic, creepy places (including the run-down church of the finale) are built to have a lot of depth and foreground/background contrast. Not bad for a conersion job, I say as the Last Person Who Likes 3D.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 October 2021 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

The first Venom movie was not, I suspect, what anybody involved wanted it to be; I'd love to know who thought they were making a sort of sci-fi horror movie, who was making a comedy, who wanted straight-ahead superhero action, and who saw a weird queer-ish romance underneath it all and decided to play that up. Somehow, don't ask me how, the movie worked better than it had any right to, even if it was not what one would call above-average. The sequel is clearly the result of Sony trying to reverse-engineer what happened and do it again, and deliberately replicating chaos doesn't come easy.

It's been some time since reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) fused with the intelligent alien symbiote "Venom", and in that time he's once again become respected as a reporter, although he naturally has to keep it hidden, which has meant a split with ex-girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams). Serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) will only give Brock his story, which leads to the pair finding where his missing victims are buried, but also to Cletus getting a symbiote of his own. With "Carnage" potentially more powerful than Venom, Cletus will stop at nothing to look for his long-lost and similarly psychopathic reform-school girlfriend Frances "Shriek" Barrison (Naomie Harris), whose mutant(*) sonic powers have had her locked up in a top-secret facility.

(*) I can only imagine what sort of legal wrangling was involved around this character given that Marvel had licenced "mutant" properties to Twentieth Century Fox and the "Spider-Man" characters to Sony, who I believe started work on this film which is not meant to be obviously connected to Spider-Man and which is very careful to use "mutation" rather than "Mutant" before Marvel parent company Disney acquired the former. Imagine being those lawyers.

As the most noteworthy villain in the Venom corner of Marvel's Spider-Man line, Carnage was teased at the end of the first movie, so returning writer Kelly Marcel (a frequent collaborator with star Tom Hardy, who shares story credit) was working from that on the one hand and the way audiences responded to Hardy blowing straight past Eddie and Venom bantering to play them as a strange romance with Venom clearly seeing Anne as potentially the third part of some sort of throuple. Squint, and you can see Cletus/Carnage/Shriek as a sort of twisted reflection of that, but it doesn't quite work; the Venom side is almost all weird breakup jokes and the Carnage side barreling through the plot at full speed. It takes a while for Cletus to get his symbiote with Eddie not having much to do while the audience waits, and despite all the eventual CGI slapstick, murder, and hints of something bigger with this mysterious mutant(*) prison, there's not all that much going on.

It doesn't really help that the cast seems out of sync, and not necessarily in a way where it's fun to watch people who think they're in different movies bump up against each other. Hardy's double act as Eddie and Venom is a little less its own thing and more familiar beats, but he's still entertaining in doing it. Naomie Harris has to work hard to outdo Woody Harrelson in chewing the scenery, but she manages, though Harrelson is doing a fine sort of bloodthirsty creep who thinks his disdain for human life makes him smarter than everybody else. There's a disconnect between Hardy and Harrelson, though; for all that Harrelson's trying to be repulsive as Kasady, Hardy's Brock seems a little too arch and able to interact with him as a normal human being, and it doesn't quite work with how he and Venom are fighting about the latter's desire to eat brains. He should be either a little more principled or uncomfortably hypocritical.

As a result, the movie really doesn't come together until the big climactic fight, when it doesn't have to try to figure out whether all the weird stuff of the first movie is going to be subtext or just right out there, and just has everybody yelling what's got them angry as they distort into grotesque shapes and pound each other. Unlike a lot of these movies, everybody has something to do (well, Williams is kind of stuck with hostage duty, but she at least seems annoyed by it) and can be cartoonishly thrown against a wall and knocked unconscious when they're not needed. Director Andy Serkis obviously knows something about making big motion-captured performances entertaining from the actor's side and is able to bring some of that to bear from the opposite end. The movie develops a little more personality when he and the crew can lean into pulpy creepy-building imagery, and those sequences are maybe half-a-star better when seen in 3D (it's a conversion job, but someone is having fun with depth and layers).

On top of that, the movie is 97 minutes long including credits and the inevitable mid-credit tease, which is something of a relief when so many of these superhero movies routinely stretch forty-five minutes longer out of sheer shagginess. Admittedly, that speed comes from the movie not having a lot to it because Marcel, Serkis, and the rest couldn't find more of whatever happenstance made the first sort of work, but there are many worse ways of being a mediocre movie than not wasting any more of the audience's time than necessary.

Also at eFilmCritic

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

It's almost ancient history now, but there was a point when the conventional wisdom was that superhero movies would rise and fall on their villains. The heroes, after all, wore masks and were simple do-gooders who had to be around for the next movie, while the bad guy was a meaty role with a rise and fall. The Burton/Schumacher Batmovies could swap new actors into the role of Bruce Wayne without a lot of complaint - and Jack Nicholson was billed above Michael Keaton in the first, with the bad guys being the things people pointed to later. Even the Sam Raimi Spider-Movies had a little bit of that going on; Alfred Molina's terrific Otto Octavius is a big part of why the second is a favorite versus the third with its forgettable Topher Grace.

The current run of Marvel movies has never really been about that; as they built to the Avengers, charismatic leads the audience would want to watch interact were important, and villains were either disposable or supporting characters like Loki (or Magneto, if you include the X-movies). In twenty-five movies, by and large fairly enjoyable, there have only been a handful of really memorable bad guys: Kurt Russell's Ego in Guardians 2, Michael B. Jordan in Black Panther, maybe Hugo Weaving's Red Skull, possibly Thanos (although he's more about scale than anything Josh Brolin does). Tony Leung Chiu-Wai is arguably the first Marvel Cinematic Universe villain to really overshadow the hero in the way that used to be the case.

It's an understandable choice - Leung is terrific, after all, - but it means I don't really know how much I'm anticipating future Shang-Chi movies as a result of so much of this one being tied up in Leung's Wenwu. Simi Liu is plenty likable, but he's not quite able to assert ownership of his movie in quite the same way as the other Marvel leads have. It's fine that he's part of a great ensemble, but I feel like I've got more concrete reasons for wanting more of Awkwafina and Meng'er Zhang in sequels than Liu himself. That's going to be the challenge for Cretton (if he returns) and Marvel, although the hints that they're pulling from Matt Fraction's Iron Man run and maybe his and Ed Brubaker's Iron Fist comics (it sure seems like they were referencing the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven at a couple points) suggest they'll have interesting material to work with.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to catching it again, probably on an Imax screen after watching it from maybe too close in 3D this time. It's a fun 3D watch - given the amount of stereoscopic techs listed up with the cinematography folks rather than down in the visual effects credits, I think Marvel is certainly working harder to build a good 3D experience than many other studios, which makes Disney's abandoning of 3D discs a bummer - but not an essential one. It certainly seems like it has re-watch potential, at least.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 September 2021 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

A funny thing about Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is how it is in large part made up of pieces that Marvel couldn't use elsewhere as much as his original 1970s comics: On the one side, an Iron Man villain who no longer works as his arch-nemesis when targeting a global market; on the other, what looks an awful lot like Iron Fist material that was too large in scale for that character's Netflix series. Those elements are almost literally this character's DNA comes from in the film, pulling him away from his pulpier origins toward something which fits more comfortably in the Marvel movie mold. It's a good mold and Shang-Chi is a pretty good movie, but it could maybe use a little less Marvel Universe and a little more Master of Kung Fu.

Shang-Chi is the son of Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), a warlord whose mysterious armbands have allowed him to live a thousand years and wield incredible power; he went looking for a hidden city 25 years ago and found Ying Li (Fala Chen). There was no happily ever after, though, and in the present, Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) has been living in San Francisco as "Shaun" for ten years since escaping his father's fortress, happily underachieving as a hotel valet with best friend Katy Chen (Nora "Awkwafina" Lum). The past he'd thought he left behind is about to catch up with him, as his father's men come to steal the jade amulet his mother gave him, as well as the one in the hands of Shang-Chi's sister Xialing (Meng'er Zhang), who has similarly fled their father and made her way to Macau.

Shang-Chi's name may be in the title and Simu Lieu may be billed first, but for all that there's good material to build around him here - or, from another perspective, important parts of his character like why he never went back for his sister that are just completely glossed over - that will probably have to wait for a sequel, because this is very much Wenwu's story. It's not so much that Tony Leung Chiu-Wai steals the film as much as how, when a production manages to land Leung, it's only natural to give as much of it to him as possible. He makes Wenwu one of Marvel's best villains yet, effortlessly carrying off the haughty belief that he is born to rule in a way that makes him seem dangerous rather than a simplified cartoon - watch how he quietly dominates a "family dinner" scene - but also shifts that charisma in a way that makes his love for Li genuine. It drives the back half of the movie in clever fashion, because it makes Wenwu both villain and victim, but the latter doesn't let him off the hook - Leung, director Destin Daniel Cretton, and his co-writers make the toxicity of his grief clear. They don't make Wenwu a sympathetic villain, but one can empathize.

The main cast is pleasant enough, though - Simu Liu and Awkwafina have a fun best-buddies-who-could-be-more chemistry that doesn't feel generic, fun to watch with Liu doing a nice job of revealing how his secret past has been a weight for Shang-Chi, while Awkwafina makes Katy one of the most entertaining normal people pulled into a superhero story Marvel's done; she's given a chance to be funny, gobsmacked, and useful. Meng'er Zhang has an auspicious movie debut as Xialing, giving weight to her issues with both father and brother, while Florian Muneanu makes a henchman much more fun than he could be when given a chance. It also never hurts to be able to pull out Hong Kong action legends Michelle Yeoh and Yuen Wah at the halfway point.

It also doesn't hurt to have Bradley Allan on hand for second-unit and action work; a veteran of Jackie Chan's stunt team, he and Cretton do excellent work together when it's time for martial arts, with an early fight scene on a crowded runaway bus a standout that has a lot of Hong Kong in its DNA. What's equally impressive is the way they are able to downshift at points, especially in Wenwu and Li's first encounter, as the combat becomes dance and a terrific example of how to get emotion out of action sequences. Even as the film begins to expand into something larger, Cretton and company do their best to keep things focused on how the action is an expression of what's going on for the Xus.

The story can't quite escape the pull of the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, of course, and not just in how the filmmakers spend a fair bit more time than necessary on how Xu Wenwu and the "Mandarin" from Iron Man 3 are and are not connected. Shang-Chi has never just been the Master of Kung Fu, of course, and the way Cretton and his team come up with nifty ways to use the Ten Rings is impressive (akin to how the Russos figured out ways for Captain America to do more with his shield than throwing it), but once it's revealed that Wenwu is not the final boss and the village of Ta Lo is guarding something bigger, it's almost inevitable that the film wil head to a big, effects-heavy finale, which means there's only so much room for punching and kicking, with Shang-Chi just too small compared to what he's fighting for the sort of straight-ahead action choreography that Allan's mentor is known for, which (fairly or unfairly) is often more impressive than the big digital rendering.

And then there's the inevitable mid-credits piece to connect everything even more directly to the franchise, because Marvel's got no reason to stop doing what has worked so well for them over the past decade or so. Heck, it works here, more or less; folks will come out of this movie wanting to see Shang-Chi and his supporting cast in more adventures on top of maybe wanting to see more from Tony Leung Chiu-Wai. Fans of the Hong Kong action that originally inspired Shang-Chi will probably wish there was a little bit more of that, but that doesn't make it any less a reliably pretty-darn-good Marvel adventure.

Full review at eFilmCritic

This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 6 July 2020 - 12 July 2020

Love not feeling great at this particular point in history!



I mean, I knew I wasn't sick in any sort of dangerous way - something on the pizza I made one night had probably been in the fridge too long after being opened (a thing that happens when you live alone and try not to hit the grocery store every other day), so it had me feeling lousy after eating it and watching Shanghai Triad, I slept lousy, thought I was doing okay the next day but had to lay down for a while, then had to make those hours back up at work later in the week. Totally knew that was what it was, but you can't help but get a little more tense about such things right now.

The movie? Good! After all, even lesser Zhang Yimou is pretty good, and this was him in his early Gong Li-starring run, with a sting you don't notice until you've had a bit of time to sit with it. I'm more than a bit curious how Zhang's films will get rolled out once China gets serious about re-opening theaters - some things have had whole year delays, others have gone to VOD, and who knows how getting released in China will translate to coming to North America, as Zhang's last, Shadow, skipped its National Day day-and-date and got a more mainstream release.

The only other movie-watching I did over the weekend was to drop Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse into the player for the first time. Surprise, it is still pretty great.

Sunday, I got the PUZ files of the last three years of the Boswords crossword tournament, and I have no idea how well I did on solving them. I got mostly scores in the 3000 range, according to Across Lite, but have no idea if that's "OK for someone who hasn't been solving much in the past few years", "respectable", or "contender". Guess I'll find out in a week and a half!

Got something a bit more ambitious planned for the next couple of weeks, so there will be stuff on my Letterboxd page, even if it's mostly just logging. Wish I could be in Montreal!

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

I think that this is the first time I've seen the movie flat, as both times I saw it in theaters were in 3D, and it's a thing that I couldn't help thinking about while watching it, because the animation style is very much designed so that you will notice where things are in terms of distance even without the glasses. On the 4K disc, the sharpness and bold color accentuates that, giving a feeling of depth. It also just highlights how gorgeous a movie it is: Detailed while still being cartoony, packed with creativity and detail despite never being too overwhelming, able to make deliberately different styles work together.

Some of the details show a little more wear on multiple viewings, although far less so than one may expect from this sort of fantasy - you can more often see the elegance of how Miles having a supervillain uncle is not just an ironic coincidence. I like the material with Peter B or Miles making fools of themselves with women less and less each time, but that's the sort of cringe-y stuff that I never really go for, and it's a part that gives the movie something for everyone.

It's telling, I think, that while ordering other stuff on Amazon that day, I stumbled on a decently-priced copy of the 3D disc from the UK and ordered that. As much as I know 3D has become a complete niche item in the USA (for no good reason! 4K sets have the high frame rate and Bluetooth needed to manage 3D!), it's still annoying that I have to double-dip across continents to get both the hi-res and 3D versions of a movie, although this is definitely one where it's worth the extra money and shelf space.

What I thought the first time and the second

This Those Weeks in Tickets: 15 April 2019 - 5 May 2019

Just posted the pages for BUFF, so obviously the ones which include IFFBoston 2019 are next.







This three-week period actually started off with heading out to another series, the Belmont World Film Festival, for Asako I & II on Monday, 25 April. It's a neat little movie in a neat little series (at a venue I kind of dig), although in some ways the thing I remember most is the guest talking about how it was weird, leading me to think that my idea of Japanese films being weird must be awful skewed, because this was barely odd. Or, alternately, she needed to see the anniversary screenings of Audition at the Brattle that weekend.

I didn't; instead, my next bit of Japanese film was finally making it through Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on Saturday, as the Harvard Film Archive had a subtitled 35mm print for one of their family matinees. Good, obviously, and I just hadn't seen it at the right time before. A much better choice than the thoroughly ill-considered new version of Hellboy than I saw later that evening.

The next evening, I would head to the Kendall for a split double feature of Little Woods and Wild Nights with Emily, liking them both, although the latter is the one that probably sticks in my head more, just because it is so unrelentingly odd and peculiar even as it is kind of ruthless in getting what it was going for across.

That was a good warm-up for IFFBoston, where did a (mostly) full schedule:

• 24 April 2019: Luce
• 25 April 2019: Them That Follow and The Death of Dick Long
• 26 April 2019: Pizza: A Love Story and Not for Resale
• 27 April 2019: We Are Not Princesses, Ms. Purple, When Lambs Become Lions, and In Fabric
• 28 April 2019: One Child Nation, The Pollinators, Cold Case Hammarskjöld, and For the Birds
• 29 April 2019: Shorts Exeter and The Rusalka
• 1 May 2019: The Farewell

Posts for those were all over the place as I tried to finish writing BUFF up first but bumped things to the front of the line as they got released. And, yes, I did kind of wind up taking a day off, mostly because I got held up on the MBTA and sometime around Charles, I knew that I would not make it to the Coolidge in time for The Sound of Silence and decided to get off, watch Avengers: Endgame in 3D, and figure that the stuff that plays the Tuesday night shows at the Coolidge usually wind up getting regular releases anyway. Sadly, this turned out not to be the case for either movie playing there that night, but I'd at least get to see The Art of Self-Defense at Fantasia.

It's enough to make you want to do something else for a few days, but there's new stuff every week, and I hit Always Miss You and Savage on the weekend, even if they weren't exactly the two Chinese films I'd been hoping would open in Boston that weekend. Neither were particularly great, but there's at least something interesting in Savage that could have been really good but for the inevitable censorship.

I wasn't going to see them on back-to-back days, but getting out to Danvers to see Bolden is a tricky four-legged process if you use public transportation, so I had to divert on Saturday before finally making it on Sunday. On the one hand, not exactly a good enough movie to be worth that sort of day-eating effort; on the other, I'd been waiting almost nine years to see the dang thing after having it teased at the Apollo Theater in 2010, so I wasn't going to miss it on the one chance I had to see it on the big screen.

As you can see, it's especially important to follow my Letterboxd page during festivals, because they will just take forever to write up.

Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2019 in the Harvard Film Archive (Weekend Matinee, subtitled 35mm)

Does it count as a rewatch if I've put the disc in the player two or three times and then nodded off before it was done? I swear, I've chosen the worst times to try and watch this movie before jumping all over the HFA's subtitled 35mm matinee.

Obviously, I should have seen this sooner; it's a downright terrific movie which establishes its science-fiction bona fides from the opening frames and is grounded in Miyazaki's particular environmental take on the genre throughout. Miyazaki draws no line between world-building and adventure, and sketches out a larger world casually, without ever losing his focus on the title character and her village.

It's obviously an early work - the animation is a little rough at points, the villains are sometimes a little too casually sketched, and there were more than a few comments from the audience about how much of Nausicaä's bottom we were seeing. It's almost never less than intriguing, though, and I likely would have been astounded if it had played Portland, ME/been a thing my parents would have brought me to when I was 11. It still seems like an insane practically out-of-nowhere achievement, and I'm mildly curious to know whether a shot early in the movie of Nausicaä walking to the forest from her glider inspired an iconic image from Akira, vice versa, or if they were pulling from the same source.

Avengers: Endgame

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2019 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

Funny how the better part of a year gives me an odd perspective on this particular movie - maybe no longer so keenly caught up in the hype to praise it as effusively as I did back in May, but also keenly aware of how Disney's Star Wars guys didn't quite stick the landing to their grand saga the way the Marvel team did. It is, as I figured after a second screening, one of the most satisfying movies of the year even if it's not the best.

I think it obviously being a piece of corporate IP hides a bit of what it does well: It's a smart story about wrestling with failure, on a super-hero-sized grand scale, and a fitting final evolution for what Robert Downey Jr. has been doing as Tony Stark for a decade. The plotting is shaggy when it can afford to be and clever when it needs to be, and for all that the grand finale is a bunch of CGI craziness, it's built and scaled to a sort of perfection, getting the audience caught up in the fight for it to actually feel desperate enough before reinforcements show up that you forget that's a possibility, even though it's been the point of much of the movie, and almost getting there again so that the audience can go "oh, right, Carol" when she shows up. The audience whooped and applauded for that, and it's tough to blame them.

I'm sure that Disney and the other studios are all trying to plan something as big and loyalty-generating as Marvel's Infinity Cycle (or whatever we wind up calling this stretch of Marvel movies when they're knee-deep into something else five years from now), but it may be a one-time thing. At least it ended as well as it could.

What I wrote back in May 2019

This Those Weeks in Tickets: 25 February 2019 - 10 March 2019

It's January 2020 and I just realized I left some big holes in this part of the blog, including this one. Not a lot of movies seen while I was on vacation, but a lot of tickets purchased!





As you may remember, I spent much of February doing marathons and catch-up for the Oscars, and by the time it was done, I had a couple of things I wanted to see on the big/3D screens ahead of vacation. Alita: Battle Angel was kind of what it was inevitably going to be with James Cameron trying to make the movie for years, never getting it to work, and finally hiring Robert Rodriguez to just get it done: A knockout visually, full of pretty capable action, but the story is just barely good enough. Crying shame more people didn't see it like this, because it's made for the giant screen. A couple days later, I hit How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World in 3D because DreamWorks movies are absolutely built for that, and this is a pretty good one regardless.

After that, it was onto a plane and to the other side of the world, seeing Hong Kong in person less than a week after taking in so many movies from the place. It's a long flight, but it was snowing when I left and beautiful when I arrived, and the street where my hotel was located was just Hong Kong as heck, looking lived-in with dried fish merchants and a tramway. I did get more frustrated by public transit than usual that first evening, and kind of dropped right away.



First order of business on Saturday was taking a tram up to the Peak, which is kind of surreal, in that it feels like the city has included roller coasters into its public transit (or at least, the creaky ascent part), and then you can actually look down on skyscrapers. After that, I spent the afternoon in Hong Kong Park - including their amazing aviary, which includes some birds I could swear were built by Jim Henson - before visiting the Man Mo Temple and the News Museum.



Sunday's activities started at the relatively nearby Sun Yat-Sen Museum and Museum of Medical Science, which were interesting if not quite so extensive an education on their very Chinese subjects as I might have benefitted from. After that, I went down to Central Pier, which included the very cool Maritime Museum and a nice little observation wheel, which I went on because that apparently is a thing I do when traveling now. The Museum included an exhibit on trade between China and the Northeastern United States, which was pretty cool to see as a New Englander.



Monday took me back to the pier so that I could get on a ferry and cross the harbor and see the exhibits and the Museum of History and Museum of Science, located right across the street from each other. The latter had a pretty terrific display of antique timepieces on loan. At the end of the day, I climbed aboard the Dukling above and watched the nightly laser-light show, which illuminates the skyscrapers in impressive fashion.



Tuesday, I took the cable car to Ngong Ping, and I've got to admit that I was a little surprised that the "cable car" that Google Maps included in my directions was a skyway rather than what they call a cable car in San Francisco. It was neat, but, boy, was the guy in line directly in front of me also surprised and not happy. Heck of a way to start a long day of walking around, being in awe at the Big Buddha and the ornate temples, with a detour out to the Tai O fishing village before coming back to see the Wisdom Path.



Wednesday wasn't exactly a bust - no day which allows me to walk around on restored vessels like the Alexander Grantham fire boat can really be called a bad day - but it was pretty rainy, the Hong Kong Film Archive didn't have a whole lot on offer that day/week, and another museum was closed for renovations. I bailed to see a movie, and practically the only thing playing was Captain Marvel, which I absolutely could have seen at home, although they're much more enthusiastic about 3D there than they are here. I did wind up going to the wrong place after buying a ticket online, but they were cool about refunding it.



Thursday started out nice, with a walk around Golden Bauhinia Square, although the Noonday Gun didn't fire when I showed up. After that, I went to the restaurant in the Blue House for lunch and made my way to the Police Museum, which is at the top of a hill (like several other stations converted to museums), and Hong Kong isn't kidding with its hills. If Google tells you that the walking directions and the bus directions take roughly the same amount of time, take the bus. I got off to look at the King Yin Lei mansion, although this was not one of the rare days when it was open to the public.



I spent a lot of the next day on the Ping Shan Heritage Trail, and I maybe should have joined an official tour; I got turned around and probably wound up a few places I shouldn't have been, as it winds through a residential neighborhood and the line between traditional halls (like Tak Tak Hall above) that tourists can look over and neighborhood shrines can be kind of hard to catch if you don't read Chinese. Nevertheless very interesting, and I had fun making my way to the Railway Museum and Tai Po Market later that day.



Saturday, I actually did spring for a tour, because that's kind of the only way you're seeing the GeoPark. We left from Sai Kung, a fishing town with a ton of massive seafood restaurants where you can either buy fish straight off boats and have the chefs work their magic or just point to the actual fish you want to eat. I must admit, I was kind of intimidated by these places, which really aren't set up for single tourists who don't speak Cantonese. The trip around the Geopark was pretty nifty, too - saw lots of great rock formations.



Sunday was my last full day and, man, I was all over the place in Kowloon, seeing the Avenue of Stars, the Yuen Po Street Bird Garden, the Tin Hau Temple, the Temple Street Night Market - where, yeah, I found a video store and loaded up with ten Blu-rays that I wouldn't have to pay shipping on to get home - and where I finally see an actual Hong Kong movie in Hong Kong, when I stumbled upon the Broadway Cinematheque and saw they were playing Three Husbands, the latest (at the time) from Fruit Chan, and probably more representative of his work than the action movie that opened later in the year. It was Hong Kong as heck, and a fine way for me to wrap my time there up.

As a result, write-ups for a couple of these movies have been confined to my Letterboxd page since March, which shouldn't happen again, but just in case...

Alita: Battle Angel

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2019 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, digital Imax 3D)

It only takes a few pages of the Battle Angel Alita manga to understand both why James Cameron was set on making it his next movie for some twenty years and why it took him forever to pound it into something close enough to filmable that he could give it to Robert Rodriguez, who can at least get a movie made without torturing himself over it not being perfect. This manga was probably unfilmable in technical terms when he started and building the tech exposed what a mess the story was.

And, boy, is this thing not perfect; it's half a story that keeps half of what's going on out of reach, but worries enough about backstory that it can't quite zero in on how Alita is a teenager with no experience but ironclad certainty of her indestructibility, and how she's got to learn her vulnerability. There's meat on that bone, but the film can't quite grab it. To be fair, there's a bunch in there about building your own identity and body that I didn't catch until I heard the film was popular in the trans community.

Still, it's a lot of fun. There's a spiffy cast, and between Cameron and Rodriguez, you've got two people who live this big 3D stuff and don't feel the need to compromise on the crazy cyberpunk visuals. The action is fast and fun and violent as heck, built in ways that defy normal human movement but still look real. For better or worse, it's Battle Angel Alita, or as close as American filmmakers can get.

Captain Marvel

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2019 in UA MegaBox BEA Imax (first-run, digital Imax 3D)

It's a bit of a shame that Carol Danvers didn't get her movie until superhero films in general and the Marvel house style in particular got common enough that we can look at this and just see another smart-aleck hero in an outfit made a little more practical for the movie than it was in the comics, fighting an enemy who threatens the entire world but who can be despatched in one big, 3D-friendly fight at the end followed by some Avengers business. It's an good example of that, but I begrudge nobody saying "another?"

But it's got Brie Larson, who puts just enough chip on Carol's shoulder and builds the sort of foundation where she can go from "pushy alien" to rediscovering her humanity without a hitch or a lot of talk. She's also got a nifty crew, from an authoritative but playful Annette Bening to Samuel L. Jackson revealing the sidekick hidden inside his Nick Fury, along with an especially delightful Been Mendelsohn and Lashana Lynch selling the reunion with her best friend perfectly.

It's really cool to see Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck get to play with the big budget, never letting the movie bloat (perhaps to a fault at times) and making some fun choices. And I suspect it will unpack well with future viewings, as viewers have a chance to note how everyone (except maybe the Rambeaus) is both adversary and ally as Carol rediscovers herself and how to trust, or how perfect her finally cutting loose is at the end.

Yes, it's Another Marvel Movie feeding into Endgame, but it does that thing really well and stands on its own for those just coming to the party.