Nine Thoughts on 2018 in Movies

1

I watched a few James Bond films recently: Roger Moore vehicles For Your Eyes Only (1981), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and Octopussy (1983) plus Pierce Brosnan starrers Goldeneye (1995) and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). I am sorry to confirm that Octopussy is still the most abysmally terrible of these. Sure, Bond films don't always strictly "make sense" -- see, for example, everything about Silva's confinement to and escape from MI6 in the generally excellent Skyfall (2012) -- but I have watched Octopussy many times and I am still baffled by the plot. I truly don't understand who is doing what to whom or what any of the villains are trying to achieve in this movie. The film has a few great set pieces -- the auto rickshaw chase through the streets of Udaipur and the climactic fight on the airplane exterior stand out -- yet as a whole, Octopussy is a confused, boring mess. I urge you to avoid it.

It pains me to say that after Octopussy, The Spy Who Loved Me, a perennial favorite, fared the least well for me on these recent viewings. It's the sexism. One particularly odious scene in which Bond is offered an unspeaking, scantily clad woman as a companion for the night just spoiled the movie for me. I seem to be reaching the point where these old cinematic friends grate against my strong feelings about misogyny.

Combining his sexism with his imperialism, Bond quips: 
"When one is in Egypt, one should delve deeply into its treasures."

Thankfully, For Your Eyes Only was much more bearable on the gender front -- Melina Havelock may be the most empowered, least sexually objectified woman co-star in the Bond corpus. Furthermore, Topol is superb as Columbo and Eyes' climactic rock-climbing sequence is a series high point. The Spy Who Loved Me still has the best villain (Stromberg), the best villain's henchman (Jaws) and the best theme song (Carly Simon's "Nobody Does It Better"), and I will need to re-watch The Man With The Golden Gun to be completely certain of this, but For Your Eyes Only might well be the best Roger Moore James Bond film.

Goldeneye was also excellent -- definitely the best Brosnan Bond film by far, featuring the franchise's second-best theme song. Tomorrow Never Dies is pretty good, Michelle Yeoh is terrific and Jonathan Pryce has a good time chewing scenery. Yet it has the very worst theme song of any Bond movie, no offense to Sheryl Crow.

2

The Favourite or BlackkKlansman or Sorry to Bother You is my favorite movie of 2018. Probably BlackkKlansman. I don't know. BK is a surprisingly upbeat and enjoyable film made by a very talented and focused director at the height of his powers. It may even be Spike Lee's best film, or is surely ranked among his best. Its ending, when it shifts into documentary footage, is one of the most potent and saddening and moving and gut-wrenching moments I had in cinema this year.

I love the audacity and genre-bending qualities of both The Favourite and Sorry to Bother You. Sorry To Bother You is scrappy, rough around the edges, more satirical and weird than pathos-driven, yet it packs a cumulative wallop with its zany absurdism and its willingness to address key social issues like labor strikes in a head-on way -- a rarity in Hollywood cinema. It is a satirical comedy with a touch of the surreal and science-fictional. Though it won't ultimately appeal to everybody, it is definitely a must-see.

The Favourite is a comedy of manners without the manners -- a dark comedy with touches of pathos, depth, and unexpected beauty. Visually audacious in its use of fisheye lenses, natural lighting, and long takes, The Favourite is riveting due to its tight script and its nuanced handing of interpersonal rivalries, lust, and love. All three leads are terrific but Olivia Colman as Queen Anne and Rachel Weisz as Lady Sarah are particularly revelatory. 

3

As far as big "popcorn" movies go, the only ones I clearly remember enjoying in 2018 are Black Panther and The Meg. I especially appreciated the women characters in Black Panther and also its villain Killmonger. He convinced me. And the rhino battle near the end ruled. I guess Black Panther is the best Marvel movie, though to me that is not necessarily the highest compliment, but whatever. This stuff is also true:

Killmonger is disenfranchisement turned into a person, someone for whom killing is a better fate than life and death is a better fate than bondage. He recalls slaves specifically, who would rather throw themselves from the ships than face a lifetime in chains.

The film’s idea of solving its dilemmas is always contained, to avoid conflict with other kinds of civics, to black-on-black violence . . .

Black Panther identifies and neutralizes its target audience by marketing empowerment but ultimately discarding it as the foolhardy goal of a Marvel villain. 

But whatever. I think I want to check out Into the Spider-Verse soon -- I have a feeling that might be the kind of superhero movie I will enjoy. I am also greatly looking forward to Captain Marvel. End of superhero movie talk.

Big-budget prehistoric giant shark movie The Meg actually surprised me  -- as predictable and rote as it is, I enjoyed it more than I expected to. Jason Statham and Li Bingbing make excellent co-leads. I need to re-watch that one soon I think.

4

I also really enjoyed Eighth Grade and Will You Be My Neighbor? this past year but those ones haven't stuck with me as much.

5

One of the highest points of my moviegoing year was attending the Eastman Museum / Dryden Theater's Fourth Nitrate Picture Show last May. The Nitrate Picture Show is a three-day film festival screening only nitrate film prints, by definition pre-1950s films since the industry switched to less flammable "safety film" after that. I am incredibly fortunate to live in a city -- Rochester, NY -- that can show such prints, as apparently there are only four or five theaters capable of screening nitrate films in North America, and the others are in California.

The entire program was wonderful, including a collection of shorts that kicked things off on Friday afternoon and Saturday night's headliner The Red Shoes (1948). Yet the real highlights of the festival for me were three films I hadn't seen before: the Robert Siodmak film noir Cry of the City (1948), George Cukor's delightful rom-com Holiday (1938) -- shown in a rare sepia-toned print -- and surprise "blind date with nitrate" festival finale Man of Aran (1934). The basking shark fishing footage in the latter film was the apotheosis of my Picture Show experience and a great way to cap off this very special event.

Just a few weeks ago I went to the Dryden's encore New Year's Eve screening of The Red Shoes -- a fun way to ring in the new year and a reminder of how much I am looking forward to attending the Nitrate Picture Show again this year. 

6  

Hereditary was 2018's best horror movie. (I enjoyed A Quiet Place while watching it but it didn't really stick with me afterwards and I was bothered by its big plot holes -- where does the farm's electric power come from? -- and its melodramatic valorization of John Krasinski's patriarchal father character.) Hereditary is suspenseful, emotionally harrowing, and visually striking. Its plot presents an interesting twist on the demonic possession plot, with some gendered elements I am still trying to work out. All the performances are excellent, though Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, and Alex Wolff are especially compelling. With its possession / parenthood themes and paranoia-inducing cinematography, Hereditary's closest cinematic cousin is Rosemary's Baby. A must-see for horror fans.

One of my favorite recurring images from Ari Aster's excellent Hereditary.

7

I teach film studies and my students are often kind enough to loan me DVDs and Blu-rays of movies I haven't yet seen. Two of the best movies I've seen in awhile came to me as loaners from students last fall: Escape From Tomorrow (2013) and Mandy (2018).

Escape From Tomorrow is a movie I knew about largely due to its audacious premise and unique, controversial production history. Shot surreptitiously and illegally and in the Disneyland and Walt Disney World theme parks, Escape tells the tale of Jim (Roy Abramsohn), a husband and father who seems bored with his family's trip to the Magic Kingdom. Shown entirely from Jim's somewhat disengaged and prurient perspective, Escape From Tomorrow, in one of its finest sequences, depicts the It's a Small World ride as a nightmarish, acid-trippy hellscape. Unable to use the song "It's a Small World" for licensing reasons, the film's soundtrack music actually makes the well-known ride both more familiar and more uncannily horrifying.  Brilliant.

Escape continues its deconstruction of the Disney experience with science-fictional behind-the-scenes machinations, an undercurrent of commentary about Disney princesses as sex objects, and its weird -- yet successful -- twist ending. Featuring great black and white cinematography and a haunting musical score, Escape From Tomorrow is much more than a guerilla filmmaking stunt -- it is a truly compelling satire. That said, it is surely aimed at Disney critics like myself or at least Disney fans with a sense of humor about their fandom and a tolerance for irony and dark comedy.

Mandy is one of the most visually striking movies of last year. It fuses a male-oriented revenge thriller / action movie with horror-movie trappings and art-film visual techniques. Laden with slow motion, wordless sequences, and red filters, Mandy is similar in general premise to Sam Raimi's wacky Army of Darkness (1992) but serious-minded and deliberately paced, more interested in mesmerizing visuals than speedy action. Mandy features one of Nicolas Cage's best performances in years -- he gets Cage-ishly unhinged by the end but earns it via a relatively restrained and measured performance in act one. Linus Roache also deserves kudos for being extraordinarily creepy and despicable as death cult leader Jeremiah Sand.

Nicolas Cage in Panos Cosmatos' artsy revenge thriller Mandy (2018).

Both of these films are strongly male-centered. Escape From Tomorrow, while clearly lampooning protagonist Jim's pretensions, also presents its women characters mainly as sexual objects (e.g., the two young women Jim keeps encountering in the park) or as two-dimensional, shrewish villains (e.g., his wife Emily [Elena Schuber]). Mandy does a little better, giving Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) some degree of agency in the first half, but ultimately she is a woman in a refrigerator, her death fueling Red's drive for revenge. In both cases, I guess the films' black humor and artsy visuals redeem them for me despite their palpable sexism.

8

Some comments on two 2018 films I saw in the past week:

First, the documentary RBG. This is a wonderful, well-constructed, inspiring feminist film that I highly recommend. Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a feminist trailblazer, having spent her long career doggedly fighting against gender inequality in the U.S. legal system. She is a true American hero, driven, hardworking, and unswervingly ethical. She is also, despite her serious exterior, great fun, as the later parts of the documentary, tracing her recent rise as a pop-cultural icon, make clear. This is a great movie about a great person.

Second, Mary Queen of Scots, which I just saw two nights ago at the Little Theater. This was a movie I really wanted to like, yet despite my somewhat middling expectations, I was disappointed. The two stars, Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, do everything they can with the material, and Ronan in particular manages some lovely moments, especially when interacting with Ismael Cruz Cordova's David Rizzio, the second most compelling character in the movie after Ronan's Queen Mary. Yet the film commits three major fuckups:

• It wants to be a movie about sisterhood and the oppression of women, yet it lacks the focus to deliver on its own heavily belabored thesis. I know we are supposed to care about how much Queens Mary and Elizabeth suffer at the hands of scheming patriarchal men, but the way the film sketches this oppression is too two-dimensional and facile to have any emotional resonance. This is especially the case in the film's egregiously stupid portrayal of Elizabeth (Robbie), who despite early promise is reduced to a maudlin, petulant, woe-is-me figure in the film's second act. Her final confrontation with Mary, a contrivance not based on historical incident yet featured in many fictional tellings of this tale, also feels contrived -- and when Elizabeth confesses that she is jealous of Mary's beauty and love life and motherhood, I almost barfed. The movie ultimately sells out both its female leads by making them obsessed with motherhood at the expense of all else. 
• The movie utterly squanders Margot Robbie and David Tennant. As she demonstrated in I, Tonya, Robbie is capable of fully committing to difficult, complex characters, but Mary Queen of Scots does not give her enough screen time to develop Elizabeth properly, and, as just mentioned, it has no idea what to do with her in the second half of the movie except to make her weirdly jealous of Mary yet uninterested in doing anything about it. Regarding Tennant, in Jessica Jones Season 1 he played Kilgrave, one of the greatest pop-cultural villains of the last several years, yet Mary Queen of Scots mostly makes his John Knox stand behind a pulpit and deliver dull, clunky sermons about how all women are duplicitous whores. Just watch Tennant's compelling performance in Jessica Jones Season 1 and see also Jonathan Goad's performance as Knox in The CW's Reign (2013-2017) for examples of how this could have been handled.  
• Bothwell is way too boring and de-romanticized, acting as a raping, scheming conspirator against Mary rather than her lover and co-plotter against Darnley. This choice robs Mary of her agency. She is a victim of patriarchal trickery rather than a lover caught up in genuine passion for Bothwell and a desire to be rid of her drunken, weak-willed first husband.  

Ultimately, the film is just too rote and boring, like the shitty Imitation Game. It takes very interesting people and situations and flattens them out via clunky storytelling and lack of focus on its purported theme. It cannot decide if it wants to tell a compelling tale about sisterhood or to check all the expected boxes in terms of what is known (or suspected, or speculated) about the historical Mary Stuart. Guy Pearce and the rest of the supporting cast do good jobs but it's not enough to save it. I cannot recommend Mary Queen of Scots except to hard-core period drama enthusiasts, Saoirse Ronan fans, or Mary Stuart completists.

9

Lastly, a short list of films I want to see in the near future: If Beale Street Could Talk, First Reformed, You Were Never Really Here, Leave No Trace, Escape at Dannemora.

Review: Doctor Strange (2016)

I saw Marvel's Doctor Strange last weekend. With its focus on magic, astral projection, and alternate dimensions, I figured it would be visually impressive and might deviate from the usual, standardized Marvel movie look and feel. On that front I was pleased; despite its obvious visual redundancies with Batman Begins and Inception, I basically enjoyed Doctor Strange, especially visually. However, I found its Euro-American imperialism and white-male-centeredness to be so bald-faced as to be, at times, unfavorably distracting.

This is not new news -- well in advance of Doctor Strange's release, many commentators expressed concern over the whitewashing of Doctor Strange's the Ancient One, that is, casting a white woman to play a role established in the comics as Tibetan. Sadly, the film's Orientalism runs even deeper than Tilda Swinton's casting. As Charles Pulliam-Moore writes in his essential and insightful article about Doctor Strange the character,

While no reference is made to Strange’s race or ethnicity in his early stories, he’s consistently drawn with slanted eyes and dramatic, convex eyebrows . . . to argue that Strange was always white is to willfully ignore the visual language that comics use to tell their stories.

Pulliam-Moore concludes that "There’s no reason that this character has to be white and if canon is really as important as hostile fanboys make it out to be, then Strange should have simply been portrayed by an Asian actor." That is hard to imagine in today's Hollywood, but it's a compelling idea and a missed opportunity to diversify (rather than further whitewash) the MCU.

The Hollywood Reporter's Graeme McMillan notes that "the Ancient One role really could've/probably should've gone to an Asian actor" and much as I love Swinton, I must agree. Making the Ancient One white is an act of racism, just like Christopher Nolan's revealing the "real" Ra's al Ghul to be white in Batman Begins. This shit really needs to stop, as do the disingenuous, economically motivated protests of innocence. 

The other weird racial thing going on that Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mordo is yet another magical negro of the Morpheus variety here to assist and mentor his white Neo-figure to world fame. Interesting to note -- my girlfriend spotted this -- that the only other time Ejiofor and Strange star Benedict Cumberbatch appear onscreen together is as slave and master in 12 Years a Slave (2013). Yikes!

Further orientalizing Doctor Strange is its climactic third act battle, which takes place in Hong Kong, depicted, like Beijing in the Transformers 4 finale, in a mode I call "developing nation poverty porn." I knew we were in trouble as soon as one of the sorcerers training Strange revealed that the three magic portals in their Tibetan base lead to London, New York, and Hong Kong. "In these three cities lie the strongest concentrations of magical energy on Earth or whatever," explains Wong (Benedict Wong). I instantly noticed that these cities are the seat of the British Empire, the seat of the American Empire, and one of the greatest Asian colonies England ever possessed. Hubs of global commerce that speak more to the politics of the real world this minute than they do any narratively explicable layout of magical lay lines. Why do globally significant events only ever happen in the same four or five highly developed world cities in movies?

Of course, I know the real-world answer: money. Global box office. China and East Asia are huge market these days, so influential they can prevent some domestic "flops" from losing money, so by featuring Hong Kong in the climactic sequence and giving sorcerer Wong some of the movie's goddamn funniest lines, Disney (who owns and runs Marvel Studios) hopes to draw in that audience. But these are token gestures -- delightful though it is, Wong's speaking part is quite small, and Doctor Strange is a story about an American white man who learns magic from a Tibetan white woman and uses his newfound powers to defeat another white man.*

Doctor Strange also hedges its financial bets by going mainly where other popular movies have gone before. Its Tibetan mise-en-scene (especially the Kamar-Taj training facility) is identical to that seen in the first act of Batman Begins (2005), and the movie's overall look and visual effects bear striking similarities to Inception -- the sorcery in Strange is basically the same as the dreaming sequences in Inception.** Buildings and landscapes bend and warp, gravity and orientation flips around constantly, character walk (and run, and chase, and fight) on walls and ceilings, and then they use special rings to "wake up" and transport back to their home dimension (or elsewhere). I am not the only critic to notice Doctor Strange's highly derivative visuals.

"Hi, I'm Ducard -- I mean, the Ancient One -- dang, I mean, Ra's al Ghul."

That said, I appreciate that Doctor Strange keeps the number of principal characters low so we are able to (at least minimally) care about each the participants. Mads Mikkelsen's Kaecilius is a bit boilerplate, and his followers just anonymous goons without personalities, but the main "good guys" are fairly distinct and generally likeable. And it is fun to see effects like these and characters like these in a Marvel film, making jokes and having a good time (not usually Nolan's strong suit).

Sadly, Rachel McAdams' Christine is hardly worth mentioning because she is given so little to do in the movie. As Stephen Strange's medical colleague and ambiguously not-quite-love interest, Christine's main job is to stand around gawking amazedly once the titular doctor starts manifesting his magical powers. She performs one crucial surgery, but even then she is being directed by Strange himself. Like Natalie Portman in Thor, she is essentially a "babe scientist" who cannot influence events in the movie since

The extermination of the threat depends not upon scientific knowledge, which the babe scientist has in spades, but rather on brute physical force -- quick reflexes, and combat skills, characteristics only male protagonists possess.†

McAdams' Christine represents a variation on this formula since her medical prowess is found wanting next to Stephen Strange's magical powers rather than his raw brawn -- though magic in this universe seems to be used mainly for manipulating physical reality and for sorcerers to blast and stab each other with. That is, it could aptly be called "brute magical force" and substituted into the above quotation. Thus, Christine is yet another example of a female sidekick character who starts out seeming narratively significant but who is shoved into the background by the film's last act.

Christine sez: "Don't mind me, I'm just here to make you look more awesome." 

There are no other significant female characters in Doctor Strange besides the gender-ambiguous Ancient One played by Tilda Swinton.

David Palmer's well-written Doctor Strange review convincingly exposes several plot and character-development problems that ruin the film for him. I didn't mind these problems so much because I wasn't that deeply invested in the film or its characters to begin with. My expectations for Marvel Studios films aren't high these days so this was a low-stakes game for me and I got my entertainment dollar's worth out of Doctor Strange.

Palmer writes near the end of the review that his distaste for Doctor Strange aligns with his preference for what he terms Marvel's more "ambitious" films, by which he means Captain America: Winter Soldier and Age of Ultron. Curious though I am about James Spader as the (voice of the) villain, I am not interested in the superhero movie-as-baroque clusterfuck that Ultron is rumored to be.   

So I guess I don't really like the "ambitious" Marvel movies, but then again I don't see Winter Soldier as being very ambitious, just well-scripted and well-made. It's like the first Bourne movie: it strikes a very good downbeat tone and introduces a lived-in, contemporary-feeling world in which "the Captain's very goodness has given him the edge of an antihero," as Owen Gleiberman puts it. I agree with Gleiberman's and Peter Debruge's comments on their Variety ranking of the first fourteen Marvel Cinematic Universe movies (including Doctor Strange), for while I haven't seen enough MCU films to weigh in on their whole list, I surely agree with their top five picks: Avengers, Iron Man, Captain America: Winter Soldier, Doctor Strange, and Guardians of the Galaxy.

As for Doctor Strange, I did enjoy it as entertainment. I would probably watch it again just to see the world-bendy visuals, enjoy the jokes, and see Mads Mikkelsen threaten Benedict Cumberbatch while wearing weird eye makeup. Strange's spectacular visuals and lively performances raise it a wee bit above the usual predictability of MCU films these days. However, despite its fine execution, Doctor Strange is not really all that innovative in any way, and certainly continues Marvel's / Hollywood's traditions of racism (see this and this), sexism (see this, this, this, and this), and, of course, pro-American imperialism. I didn't expect the film to surprise me on these fronts but I do feel, as other critics and advocacy groups do, that there was a missed opportunity here.

--
* Whiteys still get all the plum roles in Hollywood because the domestic U.S. market is still quite crucial, especially in creating an initial perception of (the economic viability of) the film. White stars and actors also benefit (relative to, say, Asian ones) from the global economic and cultural dominance of Hollywood since the early twentieth century -- due to Hollywood's economic leverage, and through sheer momentum, whiteness continues to sell well worldwide.
** Of course, Inception itself borrows most of its visual ideas from the superior anime film Paprika (2006), which I highly recommend.
† Holly Hassel, "The 'Babe Scientist' Phenomenon" in Chick Flicks (Ed. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, Routledge 2008) p. 196.

Film Reviews Are Subjective

FUCK THE TOMATOMETER!

Assigning numbers to creative works, even factory assembled ones like movies, is stupid. Reviews of cultural products like movies should be subjective and qualitative. They should tell you stuff ABOUT the movie, not try to force a meaningless number on it.

This is the main reason why I despise and refuse to use or endorse the Rotten Tomatoes website or its ridiculous Tomatometer.* The Tomatometer is a big-picture aggregator of reviews, which is not the same as an individual review assigning a numerical score. But it still attaches numbers (and its too-broad "Fresh" and "Rotten" labels) to something that (in my view) cannot be quantified -- not without losing its nuance and hence its utility.

Numerical ratings have no place in reviews of individual movies. As Gamasutra's video game reviewer Katherine Cross writes:

What may be an 8.5 to me is very different from what merits an 8.5 to another critic. And what’s worth marking down three tenths of a point? Is my site’s 6.75 different from another’s? What is the difference between a 9.0 soundtrack and a 9.5? Critics give scores on the basis of rubrics provided by their publications, often as not, but even there the score is still the product of a gut reaction; it is a melange of values, emphasis, and personal judgement. It can never be objective.

Yes, exactly that. We might as well embrace our fandoms and biases and just admit that film criticism is a subjective art. There is no point in pretend-quantifying the process.

I've been recently pondering an illustrative case. Reading fellow film blogger Sal Alonci's review of Captain America: Civil War, I noticed the superlatives he uses to describe what is, for him, a genre-pushing, evolutionary superhero movie:

"with Captain America: Civil War, Marvel Studios has once again redefined the superhero genre"

"Putting it simply, Captain America: Civil War is one of the smartest and best superhero films ever made"

I totally get where he is coming from -- this sounds like fandom and I definitely have my fandoms.** I love the excitement of Alonci's review. Furthermore, there are legitimate interpretive angles that a true fan with background knowledge of the comics can bring to bear on a genre film like this, as Alonci does in his sharp overview of the Marvel Universe films so far.

Darth Vader sez: "I am your father!" NOBODY fuckin' knew if THAT was true 
ahead of seeing Return of the Jedi in 1983.

Similarly, The Mary Sue's Christy Admiraal points out that foreknowledge often enhances a fan's viewing experience: "Knowing the identity of a previously unseen character can make it much more exciting when they finally make an entrance, and knowing what’s coming next before it happens can feel like keeping a secret; the informed viewer and the creators are in on it, while the general public will have to wait and see what happens." Alonci clearly possesses this kind of knowledge so his experience of the MCU movies is heightened relative to mine.

There is a lot of subjective fandom in Alonci's Civil War review, especially in passages like: "It's my favorite movie of the year so far, and will probably be my favorite movie of the whole summer." I mean, Alonci isn't hiding anything here. He is admirably up-front about his status as a fan: "I've already seen it three times and I'm going to see it again soon."

What this exemplifies is that ALL of us who write film criticism do so subjectively, at least in part because we are fans of the medium (and of specific genres, films, directors, stars, periods, etc.). This is as it should be. For while there are technical and numerical things we can learn about a movie -- its all-time grosses, for example, or its average shot length -- holistic film criticism is always colored by the history, tastes, predilections, hatreds, and fandoms of the individual reviewer.

For example, I have no interest in, and no intention of seeing, Captain America: Civil War. I never even really considered seeing it, but if I had, that consideration would've ended once I saw this review, in which Mike -- Mike! -- finally says (around the 26:28 mark) that "I got tired of all the punching. I think I'm done with superhero movies. It's no longer exciting to me. It's just punching."

Mike sez: "I think I'm done with superhero movies. It's no longer exciting to me. It's just punching." This is an example of a reviewer's film tastes changing over time. 

I felt like Mike does now a whole MCU Phase ago -- I quit after the first Avengers (2012). So for me, the whole MCU phenomenon is a thing happening to other people -- albeit LOTS of other people, if worldwide grosses are any indicator.

I keep my finger vaguely on the MCU's pulse, reading review articles and the like, and based on what I've read and heard, I may yet watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) one of these days. But as I have written before, I am not all that "on board" with the Marvel films in general. I am a superhero movie burnout case.

What, then, do we make of my recent defense of Escape from New York (1981)? Escape is a dystopian, science-fiction-y action film whose dark tone and "all-time icy badass" protagonist, Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), make it an obvious cinematic precursor to the post-2000 superhero film. So why do I defend Snake Plissken yet show such callous lack of interest in Steve Rodgers and Bucky Barnes as they enjoy their moment of massive worldwide fame?

Part of it is the passage of time and the transmogrification of my film tastes. In the 1980s, I was a big action-movie fan. Action films (including James Bond) and Star Wars-esque science-fantasy were my go-to genres in those early years. That and comedy.

Nowadays I can hardly be bothered to write seriously about a superhero film or a Transformers film because I just don't care all that much about them. My tastes have grown up and changed, and if I pen anything as gushy as Alonci's Civil War review, it's going to be about something a bit less mainstream like Belle or Snowpiercer or Mad Max: Fury Road.

It is now the superhero fans' moment in the sun, and I do not begrudge them it, even if I have reservations about the dangerous cultural messages geek-centered power-fantasy films typically convey to their target audience. I am not alone in this concern. But hey, there is a time and a place for fantasy, and I grew up on Snake Plissken and James Bond movies and I turned out okay.

In any case I better get used to it. Disney has Marvel movies planned out until 2020. Those super-profitable motherfuckers aren't going anywhere.

Meanwhile, in my own musty corner of the blogosphere, I pen defenses of science-fiction movies nobody else likes, low-budget 1970s horror films, and offbeat directors of whom most people have never heard. Long live fandom.

Werner Herzog sez: "Go for the ecstatic truth, man."

UPDATE 8/5/2016: Slate.com's Matthew Dessem agrees with my view, opening his smart piece saying that "If your opinion about a work of art can be expressed as a number, it’s not a very interesting opinion." He contends that "there’s little value in assigning a number to how much we liked [movies]. The interesting questions are 'Why?' and 'How?,' not 'How much?'"

There’s nothing wrong with the question “Should I see this movie?,” and criticism can definitely help answer it. But the right way to find an answer is to consult one or two critics whose taste you trust, not a thousand critics you don’t know.

My sentiments exactly -- well said Mr. Dessem.

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* As Kevin P. Sullivan reminds us, the Tomatometer "doesn’t measure film’s quality in the eyes of critics" but is rather "a record of critical agreement." Possibly so, though the value of even that aspect of the Rotten Tomatoes site has been called into question by Film School Rejects' Landon Palmer: "the numbers featured on Rotten Tomatoes provide some notion of a critical response ('critical consensus,' by comparison, is something that can only be argued, not tabulated) conveniently devoid of substance and content. Thus, Rotten Tomatoes can serve a purpose as an initial point of access, but never as a substitute for criticism itself." 

** Even beyond my love of Bond, rekindled embers of my ancient Star Wars fandom surely account for some of my warmth toward The Force Awakens.

The Fantastic Four (2015), Brand Loyalty, and "The Genius of the System"

I saw Josh Trank's Fantastic Four movie last week and what surprised me most was that, while it wasn't outright terrific, it actually wasn't all that bad. The critical and fan backlash against the film would have us believe that it was one of the worst movies of all time, which clearly is not the case.

Yes, the film is a bit slow-paced, which works fine in the opening 30-40 minutes as characters are being introduced, but dampens the fun in the back half. Yes, there is a devastating lack of witty banter of the sort one expects from the FF -- Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm do not flip each other any shit until the very last scene of the film, and that is a major problem. In general, Trank's take on the FF is a bit too serious in tone, which works well in the horrific segments depicting how the individual characters react to their newly acquired powers, but kills the buzz when it comes to the group's interpersonal dynamics. Omitting the traditional witty banter between the members of the FF is the biggest crime this film commits.

On the other hand, the movie's overall plot is well thought out; the idea that the military would try to control and exploit the FF really works for me. Furthermore, the film's portrayal of Victor Von Doom is absolutely spot-on, one of the best things about Trank's version. The darker tone really suits that particular character, and the parts where he starts wreaking havoc are terrific, although arguably they come along a bit late in the proceedings.

Toby Kebbell as Victor Von Doom -- the best part of Josh Trank's Fantastic Four movie. 

In other words, the FF film is flawed but not a disaster. As the Red Letter Media guys tell us, there are many good things about it, enough to keep it from being an outright failure. I personally enjoyed the film about as much as I enjoyed Marvel's Thor (2011), which had some good parts (its Asgard sequences) and, like the middle third of Trank's FF movie, just as many parts that dragged lifelessly and bored me (in Thor's case, pretty much everything that takes place on Earth).

Yet the Marvel movie fanbase seems to think that all Marvel Studios movies are somehow better than any other superhero action films these days and are rooting for Fox to hand the rights to the FF to Marvel Studios in the wake of Trank's reboot's under-performance. Bracketing aside that for economic reasons alone, that will never happen, I am not actually sure that is such a great idea. I think having different studios producing different "takes" on Marvel properties is probably a good thing, and I am not convinced that the Marvel Studios-produced films are really as consistently good as their brand-loyal fans think they are.

I am not saying that Marvel Studios isn't good at what they do. I enjoyed the first Iron Man and the first Avengers movies and thought the first Hulk and Thor movies were at least watchable. But the second Iron Man movie was a hot mess, and there is a kind of formulaic sameness that infects all Marvel's films that is getting really boring to me at this late stage in the game.*

Not that Trank didn't have his own problems with Fox Studios -- he did. As Mark Harris documented in 2014, we are in a completely franchise-dominated, bottom-line driven era of blockbuster film production, in which Disney-owned Marvel is just one particularly exemplary participant.** To be sure, Marvel Studios showed its true colors when it foolishly drove Edgar Wright off Ant-Man and pushed Joss Whedon to the point of exhaustion on Avengers 2, yet Fox and Universal are just as capable of crushing originality and creativity (or at least crushing the possibility of great mid-budget movies from directors like Trank) as is Marvel.

And my critique here reveals my own bias, doesn't it? I still tend to trust the individual director more so than I trust the larger Studio-as-auteur model now dominating Hollywood (just as it did in the Golden Age of the 1930s and '40s). To be fair, my preference for the individual director over the "house style" of a studio like Marvel (which is really Disney) is surely misguided. As Thomas Schatz writes in his brilliant book The Genius of the System,

the closer we look at Hollywood's relations of power and hierarchy of authority during the studio era, at its division of labor and assembly-line production process, the less sense it makes to assess filmmaking or film style in terms of the individual director -- or any individual, for that matter. [. . .] The quality and artistry of all these films were the product not simply of individual human expression, but of a melding of institutional forces. [. . .] The chief architects of a studio's style were its executives*** 

While it is not entirely accurate to compare today's Hollywood, dominated by unit-production and run by multinational conglomerates, to the vertically integrated major studios of the Golden Age, there are nevertheless some illuminating parallels to be drawn when discussing Marvel Studios in Schatz's terms.† Mark Harris has recently argued that studio executives like Marvel's Kevin Feige are the new power brokers in a Hollywood addicted to franchises and "live-action trailers" such as Feige's attention-getting 2014 reveal of the MCU's Phase 3. Indeed, Marvel Studios' Feige is surely the contemporary analogue to those executives to whom Schatz refers, and it is Feige, along with his corporate overlords at Disney, who chart the course of the MCU and make the final decisions about the tone, style, and content of each Marvel film.

No wonder idiosyncratic directors like Edgar Wright and Josh Trank, used to working in the somewhat more freewheeling indie sector, chafe at the dictates handed down by Disney/Marvel and Fox Studios.

Embattled director Josh Trank. 

All that said, perhaps the most noteworthy thing to me about Trank's Fantastic Four is its refusal to objectify or diminish Kate Mara's Sue Storm -- yes, amazingly, the film avoids the sexism that has so far pervaded the "official" Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel Studios' ongoing refusal to give Black Widow her own movie is only the best-known instance of this problem, dubbed "The Black Widow Conundrum" by Entertainment Weekly's Darren Franich.†† Franich writes:

isn’t it weird that, by the final action sequence [of Avengers 2], Black Widow’s main role is the same role as Pepper Potts in Iron Man, or Jane Foster in Thor: The lady who helps her man become a hero? “I adore you,” she tells Bruce Banner, right before she forces him to Hulk out and save the day. He also saves her life, and then makes the executive decision to disappear—To protect her, I guess? Even though the last time they talked, she made it pretty clear that she didn’t need to be protected?

Similarly, Natalie Portman's role in the Thor films is so transparently that of a two-dimensional damsel in distress that the actress attempted to escape the franchise after the first movie, to no avail.

Evangeline Lilly's Hope Van Dyne is relegated to training Ant-Man, her male replacement, because sexism.

To take an even more recent example, as Allyson Johnson argues in Marvel’s Ant-Man Went Out of Its Way to Shrink Hope Van Dyne’s Role and Suffered for It,

There is absolutely no reason why [Hope] shouldn’t have been the hero of the story. She’s relegated to being mad at her father and to training Scott, who in reality, has no real reason [for] being Ant-Man in this narrative aside from the fact that the larger narrative in the Marvel cinematic universe needs him to be. Hope is skilled in fighting, wildly intelligent and knows the lay of the company they will be infiltrating, and she continuously tells her father that she should be the one putting on the suit.

Indeed. Sadly, Ant-Man's Hope Van Dyne is just the latest female action hero to fall prey to what Tasha Robinson calls Trinity Syndrome, in which a female character initially presented as an ass-kicker is given very little to do in the film's narrative besides support the male protagonist. According to Robinson, this increasingly common character type ends the films she appears in as "the hugely capable woman who never once becomes as independent, significant, and exciting as she is in her introductory scene."

 Kate Mara as Sue Storm.

Fantastic Four's Sue Storm does not suffer this same fate. Hell, she does not even become Reed Richards's love interest in any palpable way during this film! She does become the target of Victor Von Doom's inappropriate affection/vengeance, but the film makes clear that she never encourages this. Furthermore, she never "uses" her feminine sexuality as a weapon or trap and the film never visually objectifies her. She simply plays her capable role on the team and that's that. What a refreshing breath of fresh air that was, believe me.

So in the end, I guess I am somewhat invested in keeping some of these Marvel characters in the hands of other studios and other directors. Trank's film may have been something of a noble failure, but for its casting, tone, refusal to objectify Sue Storm, and a few other nifty ideas, I respect it. While taking nothing away from Marvel Studios and what they do so well, I would rather see a few more of these offbeat attempts at something different than the same formulaic and predictable product Marvel/Disney seems intent on pumping out until the turn of the next millennium.


UPDATE 8/30/2015: Here is a list from Cracked.com that addresses the sexism of the MCU in an amusing yet accurate way.

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* In truth, I have not actually seen any Marvel Studios film since The Avengers in 2012.
** Harris updated his comments in this 2015 follow-up, written after Jurassic World's release.
*** Schatz, The Genius of the System (Pantheon Books, 1988), pp. 5-7.
† Unit production, which has been the dominant way of making Hollywood films since the 1950s, is when a unique constellation of creative and technical personnel (the "unit") are assembled to make each individual film. As Schatz documents, while some studios flirted with unit-production methods during the studio era (1920s-1940s), the dominant mode of production back then was to have one supervising producer in charge of several films at a time at a given studio. The authority of this creative studio executive, who usually reported only to the studio boss, was so great that key personnel on individual films, even directors, were considered interchangeable. These producers (Irving Thalberg at MGM, David Selznick at RKO, Darryl Zanuck at Warners) were indeed the auteurs of the films they supervised, and they frequently mixed and matched directors, writers, cinematographers, etc., as each project required, thereby diffusing the creative control of those adjuvant personnel.
†† As io9's Meredith Woerner and Katharine Trendacosta have noted, Marvel/Disney's disservice to Black Widow extends beyond the films: they cite Jeremy Renner's public slut-shaming of the character and the lack of Black Widow merchandise as evidence of the structural sexism surrounding her at Disney/Marvel. Of course, they also note the unfortunate sexism of her "forced sterilization" back story in Avengers 2: "Instead of wading into the 'red ledger' of a complicated person who did seriously heinous acts and is trying desperately to buy redemption with good deeds, we get the character who feels ruined by her barren womb." Much of my diminishing interest in Marvel movies is due to crap like this.