"Accomplishments"
In theaters: After a bunch of misfires, the MCU actually gives us what could be a top-tier entry in Thunderbolts*, in large part because it is so heartfelt. Let's just say you could do worse than hang your narrative on the always very touching Florence Pugh (she was the best thing about Black Widow AND Hawkeye). Yelena is, at this point, clinically depressed (perhaps a stand-in for Disney looking at MCU numbers), and depression is very much the theme, one shared with the threat of the piece. They hammer it home almost too much, but between Yelena and David Harbour's Red Guardian, equally affecting even if he's essentially the comic relief, I really don't mind. It kind of speaks to the moment, doesn't it? Despite grounding the action more than in most MCU films, it's high-level and inventive. There are civilians to be saved, which is something many superhero movies fail to provide, which I think is a failure. There are a lot of funny lines, but also good pieces of drama. Bonus: Drive-Away Dolls' Geraldine Viswanatha gets an MCU role and I, for one, am happy about it.
At home: The extensively-reshot Captain America: Brave New World fails to lift and beyond the mid action scenes, sometimes cringy dialog, and general shrug of the thing, I think it's main problem is that it's really a Hulk movie. Disney keeps wanting to make them, but can't put the word in the title, so other heroes inherit the Hulk's storylines. So where Falcon just went through this whole transformation into Cap in the TV series, and kind of has to prove himself AGAIN as a movie property, he has to do it while trapped in a sequel to 2008's The Incredible Hulk (who was even asking for this at this point?), fight the Leader and the Red Hulk, with Thunderbolt Ross having more of an arc than Sam does. Sure, the Hulk effects have only gotten better (but maybe spend money on CG environments and props too, as these tended to video game level), but I don't know that you can make your hero "prove himself" if he's basically second on the call sheet. Another sign of de-Cap-ization is how the reshoots got rid of the Serpent Society and replaced them with "SERPENT" (G.I. Joe should sue), just normal mercs led by a Sidewinder that has nothing to do with the comics' version (he's basically Zatan the Weapons Master, at best). Giancarlo Esposito is a bad mo-fo, sure, but it feels like we're back to the time where we were ashamed of superhero fashions. I though Sabra's connection to Israel was the thing they reworked so as to avoid controversy, but it seems she was always going to be a President Ross advisor(?). They nerfed her powers though, which again speaks to a deescalation of "comic book" elements. Please accept our new Captain America, we really lowered the bar for him to succeed... but please also still believe he can fight a Hulk at the end. Anthony Mackie is generally good, and I appreciate the film is less jokey (and multiversal) than the MCU's usual, but it's not enough to give this compromised project a pass.
Unlike most people, I didn't have a viscerally negative reaction to Madame Web, but the biggest distraction from its enjoyment has to be the very fact of its existence. All of these Sony Spider-Man films that can't have Spider-Man (and Madame Web is very coy about naming anyone who actually appears in the MCU, so I guess this is all for legal reasons) seem to be made just to keep hold of an IP, and are therefore made rather carelessly. And despite all acting like prequels to some Spider-Man version we haven't seen yet (this one more than the others), nothing really connects them to each other. Madame Web had surprising potential though. It's essentially The Terminator, but with precognitive visions instead of time travel. The villain has visions of three women killing him in the future and tries to kill them in the present, with Dakota Johnson trying to protect them using her own foresight. The use of prescience as a power is cool (there's just one power that's too nuts to accept), and Johnson is engaging in the scenes she doesn't phone in. Her scenes with Adam Scott (the future Uncle Ben) are the best, so he's perhaps not in it enough. Famously, it was Sydney Sweeney who insisted all the Spider-Women get to wear their comic book costumes at least once, which means they look a little ropy (especially Johnson's), at best TV-strength. This planned omission is especially egregious given that baddie Tahar Rahim got to wear was is ostensibly a black Spider-Man costume 15-20 years before there's a Spider-Man (playing a character that's wrapped up in that Spider-Totem stuff fans hated back in the day). And ultimately, Sony doesn't really care enough about these projects to put proper quality controls on them, so the movie squanders its potential with frenetic camera moves, cliched dialog, uneven acting, plot holes (usually people doing illogical things because it would force the plot to continue), and early 2000s CG effects.
I've liked J.C. Chandor's procedurals, but he's a weird pick for Kraven the Hunter, a film that's as far away from Margin Call or All Is Lost as it gets. Once you get over your hang-ups about the relevance of Spider-Manless Spider-Man movies (don't worry, they ALL apparently have to include a wall-crawling character and Kraven has all the animal powers), he does produce a surprisingly viable franchise about a global-scale vigilante who kills mobsters and poachers with extreme prejudice. Viability does not equate to success, of course, so even if there's sequel bait, I doubt Sony will take it. Obviously, it's not without its missteps. There's a lot of unconvincing CG animal action (and poaching, which is ugly even in CG form). Alessandro Nivola is actually pretty fun as the jaded Rhino... until he turns into a physical threat for Kraven and then it's just silly. The sorest point, however, is the unrequired female lead who has all the skills required of any given scene (mostly redundant, as they're all Kraven's) except acting. She's from the comics, but that's no excuse. Speaking of which, the spider-eating iconography from Kraven's Last Hunt is ONLY there to give J.M. DeMatteis a paycheck (right? RIGHT?! Yeah, I didn't think so) because it's really shoehorned in, and there are other comics characters here, but I would consider them spoilers. What, you say? I can spoil them because you don't intent to see this movie? Suit yourself, but it's a fine mid-range superhero flick.
If you liked the symbiote shenanigans in the previous Venom films, you're likely to enjoy Venom: The Last Dance. With numerous callbacks to the first film, a lot more symbiotes (including animal versions of Venom), and the creature's goofy charm, there's enough there to entertain. Where it fails is mostly with the human characters. Eddie Brock is, at this point, so frazzled that he's almost a non-issue. Chiwetel Ejiofor (tired of waiting for Mordo to do something in the MCU) is th Thunderbolt Ross to Venom's Hulk, but like the rest of the guest cast, largely underwritten. Maybe I'm supposed to recognize something of their comic book counterparts, except I'm not a regular Venom reader, so all this Knull stuff is really just exposition in search of characterization. On a plot-level, it's a bit disjointed, with the MCU scene from a previous end-credit scene resolved pointlessly, and various set pieces to show off the comedy or effects thrown in as padding. The potential poignancy of its ending is hurt by the film hedging its bets that there could be another one. The other two were dumb fun, and so is this one, but I can't quite give it as solid a recommendation in that category.
When everyone was trying to do pulp comic book movies at the end of the 80s, comic strip icon Brenda Starr got a whimsical matinee serial-style feature that no one seems to remember. Brooke Shields is at her cutest as the fashionable reporter, armed only with her moxie, wardrobe and cosmetic products, here in a completely ridiculous trek through the Amazon in search of The Big Story(TM). Timothy Dalton, fresh off his first Bond film, plays a similar secret agent type, and Brenda is caught between his handsome allure and her own cartoonist's attentions. Normally, I think it's a hard sell when someone from the real world goes into the fantasy world as a way to motivate the story, but it works here by making it a subplot rather than the plot. It's just part of the silliness and humor, and in way, is also a metaphor for an artist falling in love with his subject. Shields plays the character as absolutely real (within the rules of her strip) and is extremely charming, making me think she might have had a better Hollywood career had she been born 50 years earlier. I can understand this being ignored at the time, but today, divorced of all context, I really loved it. At the very least, makes a great double feature with Dick Tracy.
With one of the biggest visual drop-offs between poster art and look of the actual film, Todd Tarantula adopts that ugly "posterization" effect from Photoshop, which has two functions. One is hiding the greenscreen and other cheap effects; the other is creating a trippy, psychedelic look that made me check if this were somehow adapted from a Thomas Pynchon story (it isn't). Todd's motorbike has been stolen and to recover it, he'll have to discover his precognitive and time travelling abilities to defeat his devilish villain's plans, and perhaps reconnect with his estranged father, too. Mixed in are talking skulls, lizard people, cyberpunk ideas, and more, but it only starts to make some sense towards the end. But I do swear it does. Mostly. I at least respect the effort, even if it's hard to feel connected to the noir-punk protagonist and his world. Kind of like Inherent Vice on a strict budget, but with a bigger canvas, if that means anything.
It's hard to believe Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes came out in 1970 because it looks at least 10 years older, but what would have been jarringly dated at the time is just part of a more elastic past today, and I gotta say, it's a great Sherlock Holmes movie. "Based on" the secret papers of John Watson, this "scandalous" tale looks like My Fair Lady, but feels like Stephen Moffat's Sherlock series, with great banter, a Sherlock who continually humiliates a comedy Watson, discussions of Holmes' love life (or lack thereof), and a woman played in a very similar way to that series' Irene Adler. Wilder doesn't just give us a Holmes that's more grounded and falls short of the literary "exaggeration", he also creates a mystery worthy of Arthur Conan Doyle. We're not surprised that his comedy works so well, but pastiching a specific writer is another kind of skill. The way he reveals things is witty and, at times, makes YOU feel like the detective, just a second or two ahead of the game. I enjoyed Robert Stephens' take on the character, and Colin Blakely is great at doing funny bits of physical comedy, but this review can't end without mentioning Christopher Lee's Mycroft, who steals every scene he's in.
Just how difficult is it to expatriate a body from Italy?! Based on the stage play of the same name, Billy Wilder expands on Avanti! with his trademark comedy - lots of physical bits of business, sight gags, etc. - which therefore makes the film a little long for a comedy. I'm not sure we mind all that much, though. Jack Lemmon is a borderline Ugly American who flies to an Italian resort to get his father's corpse, only to find he died in a car crash with his mistress, and further, that the mistress' daughter (TV's Nanny - I'm dating myself - Juliet Mills) is there for a parallel reason. Could they be genetically disposed to be in a romcom together? A romcom that is intelligently about discovering one's parents through a kind of mimesis. Well, it's an Italian vacation movie (it's really a whole subgenre), so it can stand to take the scenic route, and the witty banter and general look makes it feel like it's older than 1972 (dated political jokes not withstanding). Which is why the sudden, late-game nudity is such a shocker! Although it's perhaps that #consent is cooked into the premise of the film that's most surprising. The one bit that doesn't really work is the whole thread about the female lead being overweight when Mills is a tiny, if curvaceous, woman. Is this the best Hollywood could do with its pool of talent? (Not that I begrudge Mills this role, she's perfectly charming in it.)
How far would you go to get insurance money not really owed you? (And on the other side, to withhold money from a claimant?) Billy Wilder really doesn't hit the right notes, for me, with The Fortune Cookie (I even think I tried watching it some years ago and had bailed on it) The problem with this insurance fraud comedy is that, no matter how sweet Jack Lemmon's false victim acts, it can't forgive the wringer the accidentally-assaulting football player is put through. The moral scales just don't balance in the end. It's not without its moments, of course (it's Wilder!), which is what breeds disappointment. Walter Matthau is charismatic as the almost-caricature of an ambulance chaser. Lemmon is particularly good when he finally realizes his ex-wife is back in the picture for the wrong reasons. And there are certainly some amusing gags here and there. Just a little too rancid for me.
From the World Cinema Project![Georgia] You're kind of always aware of the camera in What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? - its rare movements, what it chooses to focus on, often avoiding faces or even human beings entirely... It's very much a film where absence provokes inference, which ties into the title nicely. This is a world where we look at the ground more than we do the sky, where dogs have no visible owners, objects are thrown by arms out of shot, Georgia's violent history is invisible and out of reach except for the narrator's thoughts. The main story is that of two strangers who dare to make a date and are cursed by the natural order for being so bold. They wake up the morning of the date looking like completely different people and therefore can't recognize each other. We spend the whole film waiting for these "other people" to perhaps meet and equally fall in love, as if the curse predicts the compulsion to "not be oneself" on first dates. The relationship still exists, but in a potential space, again an inference. Director Alexandre Koberidze is making a movie like he'll never get to make another one, and so there's perhaps too much happening over too long a time, especially in his love letter to this football-crazy town. I didn't mind it though. The inference is that there's a whole world out there, and it's in the film even if we don't see it.
[Azerbaijan] Saying that The Bra is Cinderella, but with a frilly brassiere instead of a glass slipper, is doing it a disservice, but the back half of the movie actually is, yes, about various women trying on underwear to see if it will fit. Azerbaijan is the backdrop for this surreal fairy tale, told entirely without dialog (allowing easily for an international cast), about a train conductor whose train drives through a neighborhood where the locals use the track as a backyard. He often snags clothes lines and near his retirement, he snags a particular bra that captures his imagination and proposes to marry the owner... if he can find her. I think it would be uncharitable to say the film equates women with their physical attributes, because there seems to be more going on. Each time someone tries it on, it's like a whole relationship represented in a blip, each encounter metaphorically a relationship that didn't work out - a disappointment, an incompatibility, an affair, a mocking rejection - and ultimately, it's about finding companionship rather than love or sex. Director Veit Helmer, as usual, throws a lot of ingredients into the pot, not all of which pay off. Denis Lavant's very Denis Lavant steampunk musical bit, for example, or the faux-analog artifacts added to the film to make it look older than it is. But I loved the whimsical universe he created in a landscape that we're not used to seeing on screen.
Books: The first in a series of animal-related books signed by Frédéric Brrémaud (plot) and Federico Bertolucci (art), Love vol.1: The Tiger is a wordless graphic novel set in the jungles of India. The theme, according to the brief foreword, is that, in the animal kingdom, there reigns a universal, divine, elemental love that humanity cannot understand. So it's useless picking sides, whether the title predator (who you might empathise with because he's having trouble finding food) or its potential prey (the underdogs, unless they are overdogging some other creature). But it does play that game with you on through to the final punchline. The art is beautiful, and the "story" puts me in mind of Age of Dinosaurs (indeed, one of the volumes of Love seems to be set in the Cretaceous), moving from animal to animal, using the Tiger as a thruline. You'd think there would be a lot more gore in a comic like this, but, while not entirely bloodless, it's very close to being so. Love isn't going for sensationalism, but for beauty.
I completely understand that Fury from the Deep's reputation is that it's the very best lost Doctor Who story, so giving it an expanded treatment in the adaptations makes sense. In practice, however, original writer Victor Pemberton is essentially including the whole script and avoiding the usual contractions, which makes for repetitive reading. On television, in episodes spread across six weeks, repetition is unavoidable and even necessary. In a short novel, it seems like Robson is being the Mayor from Jaws again and again, Victoria is making it clear she's no longer enjoying herself over and over, the Doctor keeps walking into the room with the next line in the exact same way, and we even get scenes where someone goes "repeat what you just said", and they do! The Target range's best adapter, Terrence Dicks, would have slashed a third of this thing and not lost anything of value. The main addition, Jamie's sneezing fits whenever he smells gas, is a bit silly, but biographical data on the guest cast are welcome. Once we're past the technobabble portion of the story, things get moving at a faster pace, and Victoria's farewell is as touching as it needs to be.
While I recognize The Wheel in Space as derivative of past Cyberman stories (especially The Moonbase), Terrence Dicks' adaptation makes it feel rather fresh and pacey, in large part, I think, thanks to the air of mystery that consistently hangs over the proceedings. The Cybermen are playing the long game, but to what purpose? We're always asking, and even before they're even introduced, the Doctor and Jamie are in situations they strive to explain. This is also the introduction of Zoe, who has a good showing here, but then, the rest of the Base Under Siege cast is well-rendered too. This story is still mostly lost and has yet to get an animated treatment, so even if I've listened to the audio and seen a reconstruction at SOME point, it still felt full of surprises. And in prose, the outer space action is left up to one's imagination, which I'm sure helps it loads.
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