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thoughtprovider · 2 years

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Is Spider-Man: No Way Home a Good Movie or Just Nostalgia-Bait?

It’s hard to tell, in the throes of its still-active record setting, how Spider-Man: No Way Home will be most remembered. After all, unqualified box-office records are essentially made to be broken, and their existence is most useful when shouted by a studio rep during the victory lap that is a theatrical run with strong legs, but less useful as a thing you can depend on to last. It won’t be the third-biggest worldwide opening of all time forever, but it is right now; it possibly won’t be the biggest worldwide opening of all time for Sony’s Columbia Pictures forever, but it is right now; true too with the record for second-biggest domestic debut of all time. Ask James Cameron’s heartstrings, the best a record-breaker can hope for is that they will themselves do the breaking.

With a name that can be easily confused in the IP-filled mind with its recent predecessors, No Way Home might not even be remembered by its own name in the mind of the general moviegoer. But in a spoiler-filled world, there is little doubt that it will at the very least be remembered as “the one with all the other Spider-Men in it”. That is, until we get a Clone Saga adaptation, or a big-budget Ben Reilly arc. That’s not a bad thing to settle for,

although, in a world of inevitable backlash, and people loving things then getting ashamed, cold feet and deciding they actually hate that thing, the only armor a piece of cinema art has is the strength of its quality over time. Will a person growing up outside of a hype cycle like it? A person who did not grow up with either a Toby Maguire Spidey or an Andrew Garfield one (or

even a Tom Holland?). Can the powerful rush of well-deployed nostalgia work on someone who doesn’t know the thing being referenced? Ultimately—is Spider-Man: No Way Home actually a great movie, or simply a well-liked okay movie, buoyed by its fan-friendly attitude?

It’s easy to have doubts. Avengers: Endgame was a narrative flex that broke the ankles of alleged imitators at the time (an IP-gathering that began in Avengers: Infinity War, it could be argued that the lamentable closing episodes of HBO’s temporary fan-favorite Game of Thrones wanted to execute a similar family reunion, as well as the divisive Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker). Often imitated, not-yet duplicated, if there’s a textbook case on how to bypass cognition and stab a rolled-up comic book right at the pleasure sensors, it is Avengers: Endgame. On paper it’s a no-brainer, and when sitting through it, the brain is beside the point. It is a film that feels great to watch, and to re-watch. It’s all over the place in all the best ways. It just works, and it might be luck, but it happened, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe has still not really recovered from that well-executed climax.

Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and Eternals can be viewed, in a way, as extended walks of shame, the world’s favorite superhero stable shuffling in its Uggs back to the drawing board after a ribald decade that is now just a blur. It’s characters still can’t help but talk about plot points that happened back when Joss Whedon was doing the writing, like it can’t believe it actually did that. The Hawkeye series on Disney+ opens with an Avengers musical (and Kate Bishop- featuring flashbacks) that mines moments from Marvel’s Avengers that were already mined in Endgame and elsewhere (like on Loki, also on the Disney streamer). The characters in these new offerings—many of them new to this universe—can’t help but wonder, where do we go from here, how do we get butts in seats? And there was a threat that nobody actually knew.

The answer, it seems, is to go back into the arms of a more familiar love, one who knows us. Right now, as we wait for an X-Man, those arms belong to a Spider-Man.

Jon Watts, the director of all our Tom Holland Spider-Man films, was given a tremendous golden goose by that very name—Tom Holland. An inarguably gifted actor who need do naught more than flatten his British accent to make us see not him but Peter Parker. But his two previous Spider-Man movies (Homecoming and Far From Home, 2017 and 2019 respectively), while great in all of their Spider-Man ways, were also saddled with existing in the run-up to, and immediate aftermath of, that pleasure-sensor dominating flex that was the MCU’s first-decade conclusion. They had to fit a lot of MCU stuff into his space, as a result. A ground-level, New York hero with global, intergalactic potential, the Peter Parker of previous comics and cartoons often had similar stakes to a character like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Protect your neighborhood, protect your family and friends, fight monsters that both represent your anxieties and prevent you from just being a kid.

Prior to his most recent film, the MCU Peter Parker has been able to engage at this ground-level in spurts with his movies being very much big, Tony Stark-level affairs. In Far From Home, he barely spends time in the city that informs him at all. They move quickly, and are fun, and Tom Holland prevents them from becoming disorienting, but one can feel the hand of Kevin Feige trying to get as much use out of Spider-Man while he still can, as Disney’s tentative alliance with Sony could be destroyed at any time, especially as Tom Hardy’s Venom started to become a genuine hit in its own right, proving Sony could do crowd-pleasing on their own, even if they still hadn’t quite cracked how to please a critic.

Going into No Way Home, one could be excused for expecting more of the same. With Holland speaking plainly about his ending contract in the weeks leading up to its release, the mindset during the production phase could easily be one of, Won’t it be sad you won’t see Tom Holland play with your friends anymore?

But that is not what happened. Maybe a craven acquiescence to Amy Pascal and Sony, maybe more low-key Kevin Feige masterminding, No Way Home is not here to do big narrative lifts for the MCU. It’s not even really here to change the game for Sony’s own Spidey- villain/Venom franchise (despite a Let There Be Carnage stinger teasing as much, and an impending, now-delayed, Mobius feature on the horizon). Don’t call it a love-letter, but the third Tom Holland Peter Parker movie manages to, finally, be very much about Peter Parker and his relationships. The very important inclusion of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange manages to not really pull attention away from Holland, but toward him. It hits the beat of another male figure to guide Peter, but the real emotional guidance is given, finally, to Marissa Tomei’s Aunt May. Holland gets to display his very-real chemistry with Zendaya’s MJ and Jacob Batalon’s Ned Leeds. In the film’s early goings, we can feel it wresting itself from the globe-trotting as it plops Holland right back into high-school via time jump, as if aware that something would be lost and hard to get back if the audience isn’t reminded that Peter Parker is just a boy, with a lot of stories that work best while that is still the case.

It’s not even completely sensical! Him just going back to school in this scenario. But it is necessary and so works for the forgiving because it could be no other way. Dr. Strange barely putting up a fight as this kid wants to alter a condition of human existence (memory) for personal gain is not totally reasonable either, but it too works because it too needs to.

These are the conditions that a future generation watching this movie might find quibble with. To its credit today, the film introduces no new characters, and proves how powerful a film can be by digging into the characters its established in previous entries. That alone will hurt a film’s chances of being loved a generation later, if that generation hasn’t spend the requisite time with those characters already. The classic original Star Wars films successively introduce new characters, but does that add to their aging well or is it beside the point? Does a piece of art have to age well in order to be of powerful value now?

At any rate—enter the Spider-Men. Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield, having played Peter Parker for directors Sam Raimi and Marc Webb, respectively, more than its villains help bring No Way Home up to the level of must-see viewing for a modern audience. Garfield especially. A charismatic actor with a twitchy take on Peter Parker, Garfield has thus far played the role in films that are honestly hard to watch. Not unlike Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four or *checks credits* Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story (and, to a lesser extent, Rise of Skywalker) there is something almost soul-crushing about watching a film visibly held together by studio notes and test-screening-negotiated reshoots. For an empathetic viewer, it’s written all over the actors’ faces. Announced as a reboot that would be penned by Zodiac writer James Vanderbilt, Garfield’s trilogy was mired by exec cold-feet almost from the very beginning. With Garfield coming from Fincher-land via the Social Network, it was genuinely exciting—to movie fans and the actor himself—to imagine what the writer of one of David Fincher’s best movies might bring to one of Marvel’s most iconic characters. Instead we got a trilogy Sony deemed not worth completing, in part because audiences had deemed it not quite worth shelling out money to see.

To witness Garfield finally getting to do his thing in a movie helmed with a sure hand is an aspect of this movie that packs a punch, even, it seems, for those who liked the Amazing Spider-Man films. Maguire, with at least one classic under his belt in Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, has less of this immediately-cathartic baggage, but still has a Spider-Man 3-shaped dint in his armor. With Venom already rehabbed-ish in public opinion after his shoe-horning into that latter film, this left only Maguire’s strutting Parker to be given the MCU quality-control treatment. It too works, on a different level. Their collective chemistry works, and will likely work upon looking back. Garfield plays wounded well, and to see the pain in the eyes of his Peter is to have a conversation, as an audience, with the actor about what he went through with his Webb films, both textually and meta-textually. That alone would have been brilliant enough, and, as such, has initiated a desire in the audience for more. Perhaps Tom Hardy’s character might exist in the same universe as Garfield-Spidey?

Anyway: Will these bits age well? There is a good chance not! The fact that actors deliver and that we believe them will never not age well, and so the movie may not actually need this extra-text nostalgia bump to be effective in the long run. But it might. Maguire’s Peter functions ultimately at face-value. He’s got a bad back, he’s the oldest, and he slips quickly into a mentor role and we buy it, and we don’t need a previous relationship with this character for that to work. Garfield-Spidey saving MJ? This need not be explained to a modern audience who gets the reference, but does it still work with just the set-up of the character mentioning Gwen once just a few scenes prior? I don’t know if it does. I hope it does, because I love it, but it might not.

Then there’s all the villains, which means only more talent, and more reasons for the movie to age well. Willem Dafoe’s scene-stealing, I’d argue, needs no study guide to get. He comes through and is playing a character explained well by the film. The fact that the other bad guys (with the theoretical exception of Alfred Molina’s Otto Octavius) do not get as painstaking a rendering as the Green Goblin is a gift to the film. They do cool superpowered stuff, and are bad, but Holland-Peter still has empathy for them. This is all the audience needs to know for their inclusion and elevation to work. Willem Dafoe chewing-scenery is the same in every language.

In the end, time will do what it always does and unmercifully bare truth. Maybe in fifty years, movies featuring an amnesiac Gwyneth Paltrow will go down as the best movies ever made actually, making Homecoming the crowning achievement of this Spider-era. And movies that tickle the nostalgia-bone will be looked down on as the navel-gazing of a population facing down various forms of apocalypse—like going through old photo albums while cleaning out a childhood home on the verge of demolition. Bearing this in mind, I think No Way Home will still be considered, full stop, the best of these first three Holland-starring films. It stays in his home town, it’s in conversation with its source material, and it’s stacked with an awards-caliber cast that makes its fantasies believable. In the end, if your script is being fundamentally honest with itself, a human face will be able to sell it, and its context’s import will diminish, as will the piece’s reliance on it.

Whether those fantasies are of a world where a multi-verse can be tampered with by a wizard who’s old enough to know better, or of a world where past artistic highs and lows matter as much as what’s happening in the moment, sprinkle a teary-eyed Tom Holland on top of your make-believe and human beings will recognize themselves in that work, helping it to age well, as the truth always does.

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thoughtprovider · 2 years

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TV Review: 1883

Tim McGraw as James Dutton, Sam Elliot as Shea Brennan, and Lamonica Garrett as Thomas in 1883

For the members of the viewing public who did not count themselves among the many watchers of Kurt Sutter’s biker melodrama Sons of Anarchy (2008-2014) or Rob Thomas’s young-adult detective dramedy Veronica Mars (2004-2019, technically), the name Taylor Sheridan likely did not come close to recognition, let alone ubiquity, until 2015. By that point Sheridan had already packed up his movie-star looks and dragged them in front of a laptop to become a full-time attempted writer. The opening salvo from his creative mind happened to land in the hands of one Denis Villeneuve, who was a couple of years away from becoming the science-fiction visionary to beat in the cinema space, but who was already making his bones as a helmer of art-serious thrillers in both French and English, one with great taste in cinematographers and composers and on-screen talent.

Together they would make Sicario, an instant crime-noir modern classic in a post- Breaking Bad media landscape that could not get enough of that stuff. It earned Sheridan a WGA nomination. The following year he’d release the piece that would prove his mix of masculine pondering and pulp camp was not something he tripped and fell into but that he had coming out of his pores with the release of Hell or High Water. A modern western with cool, sub-Coen one-liners and cooler actors saying them, directed by Scotsman David Mackenzie in what is perhaps an even better style fit than Villeneuve (though arguments can be made about who actually made a better picture). This earned him more nominations than is in good taste to list, though still no big award wins.

It would seem he, at this point, stopped looking for that kind of win and went for a gamble that should not have paid off as much as it did, with the Kevin Costner-starring Yellowstone. Yellowstone is the kind of show that, if one were to go only by its media discourse, one would be forgiven for thinking it Hillbilly Elegy on gear, or Ted Nugent presents the Sopranos.

In reality, Sheridan and his fine, game cast and collaborators has made a primetime action-soap that takes its placement in the Western genre seriously but little else. Politics play minimal part in the characters’ lives, not in the explicit way it does at people’s dinner tables. It is a paean to a way of life as rendered in turn-of-the-century paintings, and a loving depiction of the people who choose to live that way, or are forced to, not of a particular writer’s particular beliefs about a particular politic. It’s a Southern-accent party, and a hangout series, with much debt to a shows like Friday Night Lights or the short-lived MMA drama Kingdom, but obviously in the post-David Chase TV anti-hero lineage. Call it naturalistic camp, or pulp grit, but it’s mostly a good time with shortcomings in the serialized writing department (a show like Succession keeps its balls in the air a little more skillfully) that are easily overlooked because it’s, again, not taking itself too seriously, because, how could it? You’re there to root for the Duttons even when they’re wrong, to crush on the guys and gals, and so that’s what you do.

Enter 1883, a prequel-spinoff from the workaholic Sheridan about the early goings of that nascent Dutton empire. A product of the streaming wars and truly confusing rights deals; finally, something Yellowstone that Paramount can truly own. It’s less a crime-soap in Western clothes and more a classic Western in prestige limited-series clothes. It stars Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May (of Young Sheldon, pulling double duty as our contralto narrator) and a resurgent Sam Elliot, but, like its parent series, the real star is hanging out in beautiful country, with great photography, and hearing cool characters say cool shit in a Southern accent. It’s got a novel’s pace and characters worth liking and hating.

Unlike its parent series, it takes place in a fictional Old West (Texas at the outset), which means its characters are allowed to partake in reckless outlaw violence without too much screen time being spent covering it up or pretending they didn’t mean it; there’s a lot less cutting deals with law-enforcement agencies, at least so far. It’s free to be its own cowboy elegy with as much or as little post-modernism as it likes, as opposed to the level required in an actual modern thing depicting modern people with modern, moral responsibilities.

At just a few episodes in, that makes it a thing that’s easy to like, if you like Westerns. For an example of the genre there’s very few caveats, except maybe the requirement that one be willing to watch Tim McGraw act (it turns out this isn’t too hard a task for one to do, as he is enjoyable here). It’s artful enough for those who like Sheridan’s work in film, and unpretentious enough for viewers who don’t know what a showrunner is, and until Quentin Tarantino makes his fabled Bounty Law series into a real thing, it’s the cowboy party that’ll have to do.

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thoughtprovider · 2 years

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Film Review: The King’s Man (2021)

To Matthew Vaughn’s credit, one could get into a reasonable debate as to what the best film in his arsenal is, and not because it’s littered with absolute duds. It’s because he and chief collaborator Jane Goldman have struck gold more than once with their mixture of professionally-structured scripts with enjoyably by-the-book character development surrounded by, often, gonzo action bordering on slapstick. At its broadest, this style can play as juvenile and “not for” the serious movie-goer; at its most refined, it can come close to euphoric action-movie abandon.

His debut, Layer Cake, was nominated for a directing BAFTA, portending the next Guy Ritchie while the original Guy Ritchie was still very much still making “Guy Ritchie films” and not yet stylish, director-for-hire gigs. Vaughn’s debut starred the millenials’ future James Bond and made an instant fan out of most who were paying attention, which was not everyone. More were invited to his tent with Kick-Ass, the Aaron Taylor-Johnson fandom-making adaptation of the Mark Millar comic. But we’d argue Vaughn and Goldman struck gold most unilaterally with 2011’s X-Men: First Class, the crowd-pleasing origin story that gave a new generation its Charles Xavier and Magneto, giving the late-nineties-born franchise a very British makeover with well- cast actors committing fully to the superhero bit. By this point, Kevin Feige (a former X-Men producer himself) had already kicked off his masterclass in comic-book adaptations known as the MCU, and Vaughn/Goldman (doing a page-one rewrite of a script already in pre-production, and on an accelerated schedule) bring that refinement to Fox’s own superhero offering, for the

first time, some say, ever, others say since X2. Some of that is even present in the film’s sequel, which they effectively prepped for Bryan Singer, who did not let them down.

That home-run brought with it respect in the nerd space, some trust at 20th Century Studios, and it is with this reputation that the pair began work on what would be the only directorial playground we would see from Vaughn for years: the Kingsmen franchise. Part James Bond (popping up, as he does, as an influence in the work of many an English director) part Kick-Ass, Kingsman: the Secret Service and its first sequel made stars of many of its cast, and continued the trend of Goldman being too good to let Vaughn’s (and Millar’s, whose work was again being adapted) wildcard ambitions ever become too unmoored, its characters never too unrecognizably-motivated. To mixed results! But results enough to get a third outing greenlit, and released theatrically in the uncertain times that are life on Earth in the transition from 2021 to 2022, with Covid-19 still very much a thing. Released alongside a globe- conquering, Feige-produced, Sony superhero flick, the resurgence of a long-dormant, formerly- globe-conquering franchise, and singing cartoon characters. Which is to say, heaps of competition, both existential and filmic.

The King’s Man, that third film with all this competition sees Vaughn returning without his ace up his sleeve, as Goldman does not return with him. Maybe she was busy betting on the next wave of prestige fantasy at HBO. Whatever the case, much to this writer’s trepidation, the writing credits to this film features not her name, but that of Karl Gajdusek, who is best known for being the other guy whose name appears in the King’s Man writing credits.

The movie stars Ralph Fiennes as Duke Orlando of Oxford, a well-connected former man of war, who, after a tragedy, gets out of that business. Unfortunately for him, the world itself

has war up its sleeve, with this story taking place on the cusp of and during World War I, with our villains being a shadowy organization pulling strings and generally being up to no good. Our true hero, and apparent franchise torch-bearer, though, is Orlando’s son, Conrad, played by Harris Dickinson, perhaps best known for playing Prince Phillip in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil for Disney, and John Paul Getty III in the fantastic and underrated Simon Beaufoy/Danny Boyle FX series Trust. Dickinson does not get many notes to play here, but he plays them convincingly and is earnest. Fiennes as predictably great. Rhys Ifans (as Russia’s infamous Rasputin) more than earns his prime placement in the film’s posters and trailers. Somebody give that guy a raise.

The historical-fiction bits of this movie work remarkably well at adding a sense of urgency and peril…if you’re familiar with this history already, but may feel stock or inert to someone who doesn’t know their Franz Ferdinands from their Franz Josephs, or their Lenins from their Lennons. How much narrative heavy-lifting world history plays may have something to do with how split audiences seem to be in general regarding this entry in the franchise.

To this reviewers eyes, though, this is the best Kingsman movie since the first. The action is well- choreographed and coherent (more so, I’m loath to admit, than the recent Matrix film, Lana forgive me), with a trench warfare sequence being actually gripping and fun and interesting. The anti-war drum is beat by the film, while also showing respect to those who’ve served in conflict, and their families. Rhys Ifans's contributions cannot be under-mentioned, so here they are, mentioned again.

It’s unfortunate this film will likely get lost in the shuffle of our times and the absolutely stacked marketplace, because this is a genuinely fun movie with things to say about its own story (there is something inherently interesting about looking back to another generation’s global existential crisis, after all), with great costuming, and great locations. There’s maybe one too many one-note characters, and the shadowy villains have an air of Dr. Evil’s henchmen (only less memorable) but every actor brings it, as does their director. It’s a winner that need not exist, really, but a winner nonetheless, so I’ll take it.

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