Fanboy Wars Thread: Personal Attacks not allowed | With Digital Fur Technology

[That One Girl]

4 minutes ago, Napoleon said:

Another film blogger who too loved to bully DC fans also got fired this week:

 

 

hooo boy

[Harpospoke]

7 hours ago, AndyK said:

50% of not very much is not very much.

Very true...but not really the point.    He had his level of popularity at the time.    It was claimed loudly and often that he would make the overwhelming majority of his money in the US because that character would never fly OS.    That was not the case.   He made a higher percentage OS than Domestic....which even WW didn't do.

[Mojoguy]

Very true...but not really the point. He had his level of popularity at the time. It was claimed loudly and often that he would make the overwhelming majority of his money in the US because that character would never fly OS. That was not the case. He made a higher percentage OS than Domestic....which even WW didn't do.

You talking about Captain America?

[AndyK]

3 hours ago, Harpospoke said:

Very true...but not really the point.    He had his level of popularity at the time.    It was claimed loudly and often that he would make the overwhelming majority of his money in the US because that character would never fly OS.    That was not the case.   He made a higher percentage OS than Domestic....which even WW didn't do.

WW's 49.7% OS is down to an overperformance in the US market, rather than anything else.

 

TFA did 52.3% OS, its not too dissimilar except WW did 3 times more business.

 

The winter soldier did over 60% and its gross was $455m OS.

 

Its weird trying to interpret why those numbers are why they are, TWS is the MCU's highest quality (IMO) movie to date but it seems people outside the US appreciated it more than those at home did.

[Zakiyyah6]

7 hours ago, Squadron Leader Tele said:

^^ Working DC into this feels kinda tasteless. 

More than kinda. That clusterf**k has nothing to do with DC and yet some DC fans and haters alike try to act like it is.

[ZattMurdock]

I want to preface this by saying that I truly dislike Devin Faraci as a person and while I think that at some point he will eventually comeback - we liking it or not - and that even him deserves to work on what he is good at, but now it's not the right time for him to comeback. The way he operated in the movie critic sphere is an 101 on how not do it, and that goes beyond his personal problems with sexual assault. He is disgusting and a threat to women that work in this industry AND a black eye in the world of movie criticism in general, but GODDAMN he is a good writer when it comes to writing reviews of films. I've found the reviews of his for most of the big releases this year and I'm quoting them below, without giving him a link. I'm doing it because goddamn he does some great points and puts a different perspective to some of these films that I feel that deserve to be read by the fans of these films. So here it goes:

 

 

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2

Rating: 4/5

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Spoiler

 

Someone on Twitter asked James Gunn if the third GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY movie could just be the team hanging out on vacation, but it turns out GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL 2 is actually pretty close to that dream. It’s a hang out movie with space battles, a film whose entire plot turns largely on emotion, not on ‘go there, do this’ action beats. Someone asked me about the plot of the movie and I couldn’t really answer it without getting spoilery.

 

This isn’t to say that GUARDIANS VOL 2 is boring, but rather that it’s quite unlike any other Marvel movie yet, and maybe unlike any superhero movie yet. Yes, there are galaxy-impacting stakes (that get shoehorned in during the third act, and that feel like an afterthought to an afterthought), but the real stakes of the movie are all relationship based. Father/son dynamics dominate the film, but writer/director Gunn slips in some sibling rivalry and even muted romance along the way. At the end of the film the biggest question wasn’t whether the Guardians would save the day, but rather whether the Guardians would have the cathartic emotional moments they need to continue growing as people.

Like I said, it’s unlike any other superhero movie.

 

The story begins shortly after the events of the last film, and the now-established team are heroes for hire. They battle a space beast at the behest of the gold-skinned people of the Sovereign, an advanced and haughty race of genetically engineered perfect beings. That legit job goes sour when Rocket can’t help but pocket some of the Sovereign’s crazy expensive Space Batteries. The Sovereign, piloting remote control drones that make arcade game sounds, call in Yondu’s Ravagers to help destroy the Guardians in retaliation. It turns out that Yondu’s Ravagers have been shunned by the larger Ravager community (led by Sly Stallone himself) because of the fact that Yondu ‘kidnapped’ young Peter Quill rather than return him to his father, as he had been contracted to do. This mission perhaps offers Yondu a chance to redeem himself.

 

Just as things seem to be too much for the Guardians, a mysterious figure appears, riding a spaceship like it’s a chariot. It’s Ego, and he tells Peter that he’s his long-lost dad, and that Peter has a destiny. And that’s where the ‘plot’ kicks in AND where things get spoilery.

 

Gunn has given himself a huge cast of characters this time; not only is he servicing the original Guardians but Yondu has an emotional arc, Nebula returns and has an arc, he introduces the character of Mantis who needs to be serviced and then there’s Ego himself. On top of that the Ravager side plot is pretty major, and there’s a lot of emotional back and forth happening over there as well. All of this makes GUARDIANS VOL 2 slightly overstuffed, but in a welcome way - it feels like going to a party and all your friends are there and you know you’re just never going to have to the time to hang out with any of them quite enough.

 

Faced with that dilemma, Gunn doubles down on Yondu and Rocket while making Quill something of a straight man this time out. Star-Lord, the beloved rogue from the first movie, has his edges slightly sanded off here as he becomes a shockingly passive protagonist, sort of going with the flow and making what feels like way fewer jokes. Quill sort of stands in the center of the movie, unchanging, as other characters relate to and bounce off of him. Which isn’t to say that Chris Pratt is lame here - he’s charming and funny and has plenty of scenes, it’s just that when you really look at it the story is not moved by his character, it’s moved by everybody else relating to his character.

 

All of this might make GUARDIANS VOL 2 sound kind of like a chamber drama, but it very much is not. It’s a huge film, and it’s got way more jokes per capita than the first. Gunn does not hold back his comedy here, and more than once he gets right up to the edge of undercutting his own drama with a gag. Every emotional beat in the first 80% of the movie is followed up almost immediately with a joke, and at some point you suspect that Gunn is purposefully deflating all of these moments. But if he is it’s just in service of an emotional wallop at the end; the barrage of humor gives way to some terrifically emotional and potentially tear-jerking climaxes at the end. It’s a testament to Gunn’s mastery of tone that he can make this movie so relentlessly funny while still getting us in the tear ducts at the end.

 

Visually GUARDIAN OF THE GALAXY VOL 2 is absolutely stunning. Most scenes are saturated in eye-popping color, and Gunn’s corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has long since left behind any grounded qualities. The film’s designs are hyper-science fiction, with many shots looking like 1970s scifi novel covers (or prog rock album covers) come alive. The shot of Ego riding his spaceship, waving at the occupants of the MIlano, is exactly the sort of over the top visual the MCU has been missing, and it brought me enormous joy.

 

Ego himself is a huge concept. I don’t know if this is a spoiler or not, but Ego is a character in the comics, and his full name there is Ego, The Living Planet. Yes, Kurt Russell is playing a planet that has taken the shape of a man (with a working penis, as Drax goes out of his way to establish). This brings another set of father/son dynamics - that of God/Christ, and while Gunn underplays it, the film’s third act feels like a criticism of evangelism (I’m assuming nobody pointed this out to Pratt, who is a serious Christian). It’s a big, big, big scifi concept, way bigger than ‘blowing up the world’ or ‘getting the stones,’ and it is pretty cool. I kind of would have liked to see it explored further, but that the film has Kurt Russell playing God to Chris Pratt’s Christ is pretty cool in and of itself.

 

Russell is great, and Gunn uses him to critique many of the masculine tropes that underlie the Star-Lord character himself. Ego gives a big speech about the 70s AM radio staple “Brandy,” talking about how the protagonist of that song - who loves Brandy but is wed to the sea - is very much Ego. It’s a puncturing of the ‘great man’ story, the Captain Kirk type who comes into port and romances the ladies but has to take off to see to the bigger issues of the day. It’s a fitting theme for a movie that is so obsessed with family (seriously, family talk is at Dom Toretto levels here), and I like how it subverts everything we expect from a character like Star-Lord. The way that Gunn is playing Star-Lord’s franchise arc is less about his domestication and more about his assumption of responsibility; GUARDIANS VOL 2 is, across all the character arcs, a movie that rejects the romanticization of irresponsibility. Every character in this movie, at one point or another, has to step up and take responsibility not just for themselves but for each other. Man, I really respect how Gunn works a theme.

 

If Quill has to be the straight man at the center of the maelstrom, Rocket and Drax get to have all the good bits. With Dave Bautista proving his comic chops in the first film, this movie sees Drax getting the lion’s share of jokes. He’s endlessly hilarious, and almost every sentence out of his mouth is a laugh line. But Gunn also weaves in a sweet relationship with Mantis, Ego’s personal assistant. Played by Pom Klementieff, Mantis is almost Drax’s exact opposite. Where Drax’s inability to read other people made him a surprise icon to the autistic community, Mantis has powers of super-empathy - if she touches you she feels what you feel. But that doesn’t make her any less socially awkward, and she and Drax make a terrific pair - a man who doesn’t feel enough and a woman who feels too much, each set socially adrift in their own way. I never would have guessed at that match up in advance, but Gunn nails the dynamics.

Rocket, meanwhile, gets the most action in the film, and he’s the most active protagonist. He’s playing dad to the still-growing Baby Groot (a constant scene stealer who, in another testament to Gunn’s mastery of tone, is often ALMOST too cute but always avoids becoming cloying) even as they get captured by the Ravagers. Rocket is dealing with his own asshole nature - his ceaseless need to push people away - and so Gunn teams him with Yondu, who has similar tendencies. Yondu, meanwhile, is caught between being a father figure to Quill and also dealing with the disapproval of his own father figure, Sylvester Stallone’s Stakar (and yes, that is the name of one of the original, futuristic Guardians of the Galaxy). Yondu’s arc is pretty great, and he and Rocket both grow immensely in the course of this film. Michael Rooker, long of James Gunn’s company of actors, really sinks his teeth into the character this time, finding layers of regret and sadness under the surface of this blue-skinned space biker.

 

If Quill is the straight man, Gamora is the straight woman. She seems like the character Gunn has had the loosest handle on in both of these films. This time her story is divided between relating to Quill - who believes they have an unspoken, Sam-and-Diane-from-CHEERS things happening - and her sister Nebula, who is looking for revenge. What I really like is how Gamora is forced to confront her own role in Nebula’s past trauma, which she does without self-hatred. The relationship between these two is so complicated and nuanced that you almost wish Gunn would give them more screen time to work it all out.

 

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL 2 shares some beats and concepts with the first film - what is with Gunn and swarms of single-pilot ships? - but it is so much its own unique beast. It’s funnier than the first movie but it doesn’t have the element of surprise and discovery that made the original sing so clearly. VOL 2 is slightly overstuffed, but in a way that you like - these are great characters and you love them. There’s a feeling of indulgence onscreen, but it’s not in the service of empty spectacle or computer FX (although there’s plenty of spectacle and FX) but rather in the service of characters, relationships and jokes. Could you cut time out of this movie, especially in act two? Sure, but why would you? You’re getting a chance to hang out with so many great characters, played by such wonderful actors, cavorting in such beautiful environments, while having interesting and complex emotional arcs… while also being funny as hell.

 

If GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY was a great pop song, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL 2 is much closer to a prog rock concept album. The hooks are there, but the songs go on for six to eleven minutes and it’s a double album and the gatefold image is fucking insane and you like to lay it open while you listen and dump your weed on it to pick out the stems and seeds. It’s a truly different experience from the first movie, and I think it’s an experience that will be heightened by revisiting it again and again, giving yourself the luxury of sinking into the groove after you’ve given this concept album an initial listen.

 

 

 

 

Wonder Woman

Rating: 4/5

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Spoiler

 

Movies are alchemy. I’ve said this before, and I’m sure I’ll say it many more times before I’m gone, but it’s the truth of the cinema: a magical, hard to harness process can turn a strip of film into something far more precious and meaningful.

 

Watch WONDER WOMAN with distant, unengaged eyes and you might see the seams, the places where reshoots came in or where the story is papered over in order to keep moving along to the next scene, where actors are standing in front of green screen or their faces have been plastered on a stunt double. But that’s the lead, and in the hands of Patty Jenkins it’s all turned into gold. What’s her secret? I believe it’s a combination of sincerity, conviction and, most of all, love.

 

Unlike Zack Snyder, who birthed the DCEU into which WONDER WOMAN explodes as the best (and maybe only truly GOOD) entry, Patty Jenkins isn’t looking to deconstruct her heroine, nor is she looking at Wonder Woman’s heroism as something weird that needs to be explained. Jenkins embraces the goodness of Wonder Woman - and tests it, as a good drama should - without irony or a need to ‘modernize’ it. She just simply loves it. And we end up loving it as well.

 

I was one of the doubters when Gal Gadot was first cast as Wonder Woman for BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE. She didn’t have enough experience, I thought, and she came across to my chauvinist eyes as kind of scrawny for a superhero. Where, I kvetched at the time, was the gravitas of a princess of Themyscira? I have to say, BvS didn’t do much to convince me I was wrong; Gadot is one of the highlights of that film, but at the time I thought she was a relative highlight, only as compared to the jar of peach tea in which she found herself.

 

I spent most of the running time of WONDER WOMAN eating my words. Gadot isn’t just a movie star, she’s a fine actress, bringing a level of complexity to a character who, in the wrong hands, would have been boring, bland and one note. Gadot is able to navigate complicated waters between being naive and sweet and being tough and deadly, and she does it with ease - sometimes in the exact same goddamned shot. She’s magnetic in a way that makes you lean in and bask in her presence, and it’s good that you’re leaning in because there’s a lot of subtlety that she’s bringing to the role of a demigod.

 

What Gadot does with Diana of Themyscira is miraculous; I worried that the tone of the DCEU would demand a hardened warrior Wonder Woman (which exists in the comics - at one point she murdered Maxwell Lord, for instance) but Gadot plays her as a wide-eyed idealist, a woman who will not allow practical considerations to get in the way of her innate drive to heroism. If MAN OF STEEL sketched out a Superman who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into heroism, WONDER WOMAN presents a hero who is born to it, who burns with it.

 

Gadot plays her arc gently, going from a hero who can’t help but be a hero to a hero who truly understands what it means to lead and inspire, and how to be inspired in turn. And that’s not just coming from her - it’s baked into the script, the first script in the DCEU that fundamentally understands how heroism works. The scene where Diana charges across No Man’s Land, having made up her mind to save a French village on the other side, is one of the finest examples of cinematic superheroism ever, and like the great train scene in SPIDER-MAN 2, it highlights the way the superhero inspires the regular heroes among us. It was one of many scenes of hope, light and decency in WONDER WOMAN that brought tears to my eyes.

 

Opposite Gadot is Chris Pine, a supporting actor cursed with leading man looks. WONDER WOMAN, like INTO THE WOODS, goes a long way to proving that theory - he’s incredible as Steve Trevor, a spy who accidentally brings WWI to the shores of Amazonian paradise Themyscira, and it’s because he has the space to NOT lead the whole film. He gets to be a charming rogue, and to play a few other interesting shades, without the burden of leadership, and he’s better for it.

 

One of the things I quite liked about Steve Trevor is that he enters the film a hero. A very easy, and very schlocky, arc for Steve would have been to begin the movie as craven and selfish and, through the inspiration of Diana, become a good man. Instead screenwriter Allan Heinberg (who had much uncredited help including, according to my sources, Geoff Johns himself) opts to have all of that story happen before the movie takes place, and Trevor is a good man who has already tried being a bad one. Pine plays it well - hints of regret and weariness dance at the edges of his performance - and in the end his Trevor is a guy who inspires Diana as much as she inspires him. It’s a truly egalitarian relationship in that way, and it’s thrilling.

Patty Jenkins works beautifully with her cast, getting great and fun (if occasionally irritatingly anachronistic) performances from them. Her action scenes are remarkable as well; heavily Snyderian in influence, Jenkins’ action scenes use speed ramping not as a way of underlining brutality or kewlness but rather of highlighting grace and beauty in action. Zack Snyder speed ramps for the fist pump; Jenkins does it to elicit ‘aaahs’ from the audience.

 

One of the best examples of this is in the early beach battle, as Germans storm Themyscira (here, by the way, is a good example of how the quality of everything else helps move us past problems - the Germans have a steam ship that shells the beach at one point, but nobody ever deals with it! What happened to that ship?). Jenkins allows the film to drop to slomo to highlight the balletic grace of the Amazons as they take on the clumsy and bewildered men; in one of 2017’s highlights Robin Wright’s Antiope leaps off a shield proferred by one of her Amazonian sisters, soars through the air and unleashes a triad of arrows into the chests of some of the Kaiser’s best men. It’s a rousing moment, and the slomo heightens it, never cheapening it.

 

The action in WONDER WOMAN is consistently excellent, and it all parallels Diana’s journey. Watch closely as she battles earlier in the film, and see that she is beating on guys and cutting their guns in half and knocking them out; she leaves the killing for her ragtag Howling Commandos. But as the story goes on, and as rage and doubt builds within her we see Diana start simply slicing soldiers to ribbons; Jenkins never calls attention to it (as a warrior Diana doesn’t have a big crisis of conscience about killing when it is needed, and that’s correct for THIS character) but she uses it as a way of telling a story about this character. It’s subtle and smart and I love it.

 

If WONDER WOMAN falls into bog standard superheroics at the end, I can forgive it. There are a couple of problems with the end of the movie - including the casting of Ares, which is a) bad and obvious from a hundred miles away - but a clumsy third act in no way derails what came before. And what came before was an accumulation of beautiful moments - the scenes on Themyscira, Diana trying ice cream, No Man’s Land, the first snowfall, Ewan Bremer’s tiny little arc (“Who will sing?”) - that built the film into something truly special.

And, if we’re being honest, something Marvel-esque. From the humor and the emphasis on hope to the weak villainy, WONDER WOMAN feels more like a Marvel movie than what we have so far seen from the DCEU. More than that, it feels like a mash-up of THOR and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGERS (WONDER WOMAN even has another Steve hijacking a plane full of weapons of mass destruction at the end - a little on the nose, guys), but that’s not a complaint. I think that the Marvel style is the RIGHT style for most of the iconic superheroes, not just the Marvel characters. We want to watch heroes who want to be heroes, we want to enjoy them more than the villains (the main weakness of all the Batman iterations, imo, is that the villains are consistently more interesting than the hero), and we want to feel hope and happiness along the way. We want to see our heroes tested, but we want to see them succeed, and to succeed rousingly. We don’t want their heroism questioned and deconstructed, we want it celebrated. No, we’re not going to a superhero movie for a treatise on the miseries of the real world and how it beats you down, we’re going for a bright shining moment of inspiration on how to live in that world.

 

That lays at the heart of one of the more brilliant choices in WONDER WOMAN: the time period. There is no war worse than WWI, an unbelievable slog where millions died for very little reason and where humanity’s murderous ingenuity far outstripped its decency. WWI represents a major turning point in human history, and not just because of the scale of the conflict. For the first time, as we see in WONDER WOMAN, the forces of science were truly aligned with the forces of destruction, setting the scene for the next hundred years, where the military-industrial complex has been the main motivator and funder of scientific advancement. Fuck, man, Velcro got invented for war. So did Silly Putty.

 

It was the most human of the human historical moments - our incredible intelligence and problem-solving skills, all brought to bear for the purpose of mass killing in a war whose exact stakes were unclear (WWI is so much murkier than WWII, which makes WWII a not very good setting for this kind of story. After all, Diana’s villain is war itself, and it’s hard to argue that both sides were equally bad in WWII. It takes very serious ethical gymnastics to get there). That allows the setting itself to fundamentally speak to the movie’s themes, about the journey that Diana goes on where she comes to understand the duality of man. Staring into the face of the mechanization of killing, looking at the true horrors of indiscriminate slaughter, Diana comes to one conclusion: she can only love humans, as weak and fucked up and wrong as they often are. It’s a rousing and moving end to her arc; she goes from naive hope to a clear eyed hope, never hardening, and in fact becoming softer in ways that make her stronger.

 

Over the years I’ve been accused of hating the DCEU, of coming at these movies from a place of bias. Those accusations are partially right: my bias is that I love these characters and want to seem them translated to the screen with the proper respect not only for their aesthetic and their most famous storylines but for their thematic meanings. WONDER WOMAN is the first DCEU film to do this, to present a cinematic version of these DC characters that feels like it understands why these characters have persisted for 75 to 80 years so far. The film is sincere in its appreciation for Diana and her ethics and her ideals, and it never wants to undercut them. In MAN OF STEEL Zack Snyder spent the whole movie trying to - and finally succeeding in - breaking Superman’s ethics and, in effect, proving why Superman doesn’t work today. That, to me, was the easy route. Patty Jenkins has taken the harder route, placing Wonder Woman in a time of true pointless horror and still finding a way to be hopeful and idealistic through it all. That takes strength, that takes courage, and that, it seems, takes a woman.

 

 

 

 

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Rating: 4/5

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Spoiler

 

The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Three is, to my eyes, an unprecedented success. Still the only expanded universe in town that works, with Phase Three (ANT-MAN, CIVIL WAR, DOCTOR STRANGE, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL 2 and now SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING) Marvel has truly hit its stride. These films have transcended most of the usual complaints about Marvel movies (at which I always scoffed anyway) and have become fantastica joys, each with a unique point of view behind them. What’s more, they’ve left behind the ‘realistic’ quality of Phase One and fully embraced the wacky, sci-fi riddled world of Marvel. Gone are the days when every last thing had to be grounded in some way, replaced with a world where anything can happen at any time; Spider-Man is not shocked to discover ATM robbers with laser weapons, he’s just shocked that they’ve shown up deep in his home boro of Queens.

 

If each film in Phase Three has had its own sub-genre within the larger superhero world (heists, psychological thrillers, the occult, space opera), SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING blazes a brand new sub-genre for Marvel, as director Jon Watts has made a straight up comedy. Most of the other Marvel films are funny in some way or another, but HOMECOMING is the first Marvel film that is a comedy at heart. Previously you’ve seen characters like Tony Stark be funny, but the usual modus operandi for comedy in a Marvel movie is the characters being witty - ie, within the world of the movie other characters would recognize each other making jokes. HOMECOMING transcends that; while characters are funny themselves there are also jokes that arise out of the situations and scenarios that would not read as ‘funny’ to people in-universe. These moments are presented as funny to us, the audience, but Peter Parker wouldn’t recognize it as a joke.

 

I know that’s sort of dissecting the butterfly of comedy, but it feels important to explain why HOMECOMING is so fresh in a Marvel Cinematic Universe well known for its one liners. It also explains why HOMECOMING is, at its heart, a high-wire act of tone, one that Watts maneuvers so adeptly you don’t even realize he was two hundred feet off the ground without a net the whole time. See, HOMECOMING is a comedy but it also has deeply dramatic elements and it also has serious action scenes (as well as comedic action scenes), and none of these tonal changes undercut one another. In fact the tonal changes - especially as the third act gets more serious at the same time that a wonderful running gag pays off - only complement one another. I don’t mean to get too effusive here, but I think Watts’ handling of this movie is some of the most extraordinary filmmaking you’ll see this year. While it isn’t always represented visually (although I think Watts does try to make even scenes where characters sit in a room and talk feel interesting, and not like TV), HOMECOMING is the direct result of having a director who is in absolute control.

 

With all of that gushing out of the way let’s address the elephant in the room: did we really need another Spider-Man? I’d argue that not only did we desperately need to move past Marc Webb’s ponderous iteration, HOMECOMING makes a strong case for itself and this reboot of Peter Parker. This film exists squarely in what was basically the first 20 minutes of Sam Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN, and rather than rush through the high school escapades HOMECOMING finds its meaning in them. This is a take on Spider-Man that could only be accomplished by starting over; revisiting his earliest days as a hero offers up dividends for a character whose history is so familiar at this point that Marvel opted to just skip his origin altogether; there isn’t even a mention of Uncle Ben in the whole film, a first for this franchise. This is also a take that could only be accomplished in a shared universe.

 

In the comics Peter Parker was in high school for only 28 issues - two years in both comics and real time - but those earliest stories set the tone for all that would follow. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko understood what made their wall-crawler different from their other heroes, and it was the fact that Peter’s life was a soap opera. He had his Aunt May at home and he had his revolving cast of recurring villains, but most importantly he had his continuing cast of supporting characters. Watching Peter navigate these three worlds - home, school and Spider-Man - were why we loved him. True Spidey fans have always gravitated to this early run on the comic not only for its purity of vision but also because it’s one of the periods where Pete’s supporting cast is best delineated and where that soap operatic quality most flourishes (just about every decade of Spidey comics has a period like this, where the writers realize that it isn’t the foes who make Spider-Man but rather his supporting cast. Current AMAZING SPIDER-MAN writer Dan Slott truly understands this, and it’s why his run is one of the best in Spidey history).

 

By setting all of HOMECOMING in high school (and by keeping almost all of the story centered on high school, as opposed to using high school as a starting point from which to free Peter), the writers (credited as Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jon Watts, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (three Jo(h)ns, two Chrises and one Erik)) make the most of that soap operatic element. But they don’t play it like a soap - heavy, sad, angsty - as the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN films did. They play it like a teen movie, which is the exact right tone.

 

It’s the right tone because, like so many teen movies, SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING is about our hero figuring out who he truly is. When the movie opens Peter Parker has just returned from his first ever trip overseas, where he fought Captain America and Giant-Man. He’s had a taste of the big life, but now he’s back in Queens, waiting for another call from Tony Stark that will lift him out of his humdrum life as a low-level loser. Watts and his writing army understand why Peter Parker lives in Queens, something that I think escaped all previous directors - Queens is close to the action of Manhattan yet always, fundamentally distant and secondary to it. Only Staten Island is less part of “New York City.” This distance mirrors Spidey’s place in the Marvel universe - on the periphery, not quite central, always discounted and looking in from outside.

 

That’s where Peter is. He’s got some serious Dorothy Gale business going on - he just wants to get away from home and find his destiny out there among the colorful brawlers of the MCU. For most of the film he’s got his head in the future and he’s itching to get past the final bell at school, and he’s quit all his extracurriculars and he’s got no time to consider something as mundane as college. He has a vision of himself, but it’s unclear how realistic that vision is, and how much of it is supported by the hi-tech suit Tony Stark gave him in CIVIL WAR. Peter is ignoring who he really is and pretending to be some kind of hero he simply isn’t.

 

That’s where the expanded universe comes into play. Previous Spider-Man movies couldn’t do this - Spidey was the only hero in town in those movies. But in the comics Spidey’s second or third tier status was always key. In AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1 he attempts - and fails - to join the Fantastic Four. This Queens boy has always had dreams of fitting in with the big kids in the city, and he’s always fallen short or been rebuffed. Raimi and Webb couldn’t do that, but Watts is given the ability to let us understand that Spider-Man, despite his real world popularity, is a minor figure in his own superhero universe. And so we end up with the great tragedy of Peter Parker - a maligned nerd by day who becomes a maligned and undervalued superhero by night.

 

SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING is set smack dab in the middle of the MCU - an Ultron head appears at one point - but it also feels like it is at the periphery. You don’t need to actually know much about what has come before, but the expanded universe adds a richness to everything and to the sense that the world itself has changed drastically in the last eight or nine years. That expanded universe allows Peter Parker to calmly futz around with alien tech. Remember when the Venom symbiote falling to Earth felt kind of plausibility-shattering in SPIDER-MAN 3? It would fit right in to this world.

 

If HOMECOMING is set deeply in the MCU that means Peter’s Dorothy isn’t living in Kansas but rather just over the river from Oz. After years of Netflix promising it to us, HOMECOMING actually gives us the street-level view of the MCU, a view that gives us a sense of what the regular people in that world are up to. It’s not quite MARVELS, but it has a different perspective on that whole world, one where the Avengers Tower is in the background and references to Black Widow and the Hulk are peppered through your daily banter. In this context Spider-Man offers us something not unlike Scott Lang’s Ant-Man - that outsider point of view - but unlike Ant-Man, Spider-Man desperately wants in.

 

Tom Holland plays that masterfully. Peter Parker has always been a complex and difficult character; in his earliest appearances he has the sort of bullied anger that fuels many school shooters. Andrew Garfield’s Parker went too far in that direction, while Tobey Maguire’s had almost none of it (which is why, I think, so many people find his evil persona in SPIDER-MAN 3 so jarring, even though it’s perfect), Holland has just a dash of it. Instead Holland relies on the almost desperate sense of excitement and misplaced self-confidence that led Spidey to try and join the Fantastic Four back in 1963. Previous cinematic Parkers have struggled with their motivation, but Holland’s does not - he wants to be a hero, very very badly.

 

Holland is a delight; to say he’s the best Peter Parker ever is actually underselling him. He has a bright joy to him that keeps Parker’s bummer moments - that Old Parker Luck plays a major role in HOMECOMING - from feeling like real bummers. After the dirge of the AMAZING films, Watts needed to make his movie positive and fun, and Holland is the exact correct guy to do that. But he’s not relentlessly upbeat; when Peter gets chewed out by Tony Stark for putting lives in danger Holland brings the simmering anger and resentment that fuels Peter, and in other scenes he quietly plays the guilt that motivates Spider-Man. Uncle Ben is never mentioned but when Peter watches his friends frolic in a pool as he prepares to swing off as Spider-Man Holland makes you feel the deceased patriarch’s presence.

 

As in CIVIL WAR Holland has an almost perfect outer-boro accent, and I loved listening to him trade quips and banter with his supporting cast. Marisa Tomei may not have much to do as Aunt May (I suspect she’ll have a bigger role in the sequel), but hiring a great actress like her means those small moments - May taking Peter to a high school party, May teaching him how to dance - carries a lot. Also carrying a lot: May’s hotness, which gets remarked upon a number of times. This version of Spider-Man is leaning into their all-new, all-different Aunt May.

 

In the past Peter Parker has been alone, keeping his secret to himself and struggling quietly with his dual life. In this film, inspired by the Miles Morales ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN run, Peter has a best friend named Ned (played by Jacob Batalan, and for the nerds: it is not revealed whether or not his last name is Leeds), and Ned’s presence allows Peter to be a little less angsty than he might otherwise have been. Batalan is wonderful as Ned, a guy whose own enthusiasm is ratcheted up to 11. He’s one of those nerds who knows he’s a nerd but either doesn’t understand why or doesn’t care, and so he just does his own thing, regardless of the reactions he gets.

 

Ned is the best pal, but Peter is surrounded by high school characters. The Raimi films gave Peter a reasonable supporting cast, but HOMECOMING is the first Spidey film to feel like it has a REAL supporting cast. These aren’t characters who show up in a scene, they’re characters who are woven throughout and many have their own arcs and storylines. Tony Revolori reinvents classic jock Flash Thompson as a rich kid dweeb who DJs (poorly) at parties and drives his daddy’s expensive car. BEASTS OF NO NATION’s Abraham Atta is Abe, a wise-ass on the Academic Decathalon team. Angourie Rice (THE NICE GUYS) is young Betty Brant, hosting Midtown Science High’s in-class new telecast. Zendaya is Michelle, the snarky, politically-minded loner and weirdo who clearly will have a huge role to play in the sequel (some people will complain that the pop star gets very little to do here, but this is the clearest and most obvious example of someone being set up that I’ve seen in a long time. Be patient). As you can see even these small roles are filled with good actors, which means that Watts is looking to give all of these supporting parts weight and meaning. By the end of the movie you will wish there was a TV show set at Midtown Science High with this wonderful group.

 

Then there’s Liz Allan. Laura Harrier plays her, and I can already see the complaints coming. I don’t want to spoil anything or give anything away, but I think this version of Liz Allan is truly interesting for a few reasons - one of which is that in this iteration she’s being set up as a very classic damsel-in-distress (check out the iconic moment when Spidey is saving her in an elevator in the Washington Monument) with the specific intention of subverting that later. And not necessarily in an empowering way, to be fair, but I don’t think that’s a transgression - it’s interesting storytelling, and it allows the third act of this film to become truly meaningful on a personal level.

 

Spider-Man has one of the great rogue’s galleries in comics, maybe second only to Batman. You can see this in the movies; six films in and Watts still has all-timers to choose from. Sure, if you didn’t grow up reading Spidey comics you might not recognize the Shocker and Vulture (and the Tinkerer, to a lesser extent) as great villains, but they’re among my favorites, and HOMECOMING treats them right.

 

The meme is that the MCU has a villain problem (this meme, it turns out, is correct), and HOMECOMING goes a long way towards correcting that. The answer is simple - give your villain a good story and then also have a good actor playing him. There’s no need to take away screen time or attention from the hero to do this, as HOMECOMING proves. This time the villain is something of a Bernie Bro, the oppressed white working class guy who has a big house who complains about the richer and more successful people keeping him down. It’s great, and I’m not sure that the filmmakers knew they would be tapping into the zeitgeist so hard with this one - setting up Spidey and the Vulture as semi-working class heroes (with Spidey as the true working class guy, Vulture as the guy who holds on to his working class resentments) only adds to the thematic texture of Peter living in Queens and Spidey being outside the world of gods, spies and billionaires who make up the Avengers.

 

Keaton is extraordinary in the role. He doesn’t overplay it, he doesn’t go broad or arch. There are some scenes in the third act - he and Peter talking in a car - that I think are all-time great villain/hero moments. The key to a good villain is having that villain believe he’s right, and Keaton sells us that. He sells us the idea that he will go to extraordinary - and fatal - lengths to protect his business and his family. A grounded Spider-Man needs a grounded villain, and while the Vulture flies, he’s just that villain.

 

One of the smart things the movie does is establish the Vulture’s origin quickly and early. We get it out of the way so that Spidey and the Vulture can have an escalating series of conflicts that finally climax at the climax - as it should be. Too many films keep hero and villain apart, or have the villain doing things away from the hero, so there’s no sense of rivalry between them The idea of an oncoming collision between hero and villain can be cool, but I like the old fashioned plot of having the hero and villain tangle in a series of battles that keep raising the stakes.

Those battles are great, and all are smartly designed to test - and reveal - the limits of Spider-Man’s powers. As Peter dreams of being a globe-trotting Avenger he has to deal with the fact that web-slinging doesn’t work in the suburbs. As Peter dreams of soaring high with the Avengers he has to climb the Washington Monument, going further up than he ever has before and discovering he’s a little afraid of heights. And in the end Peter has to figure out what he’s fighting for, and why, and what kind of a hero he is. There are a lot of action scenes in HOMECOMING but they don’t overwhelm or dominate the film. You never feel like you’re waiting to get to the next action scene… but conversely the action isn’t disturbing the fun stuff you’ve been enjoying. They’re melded together seamlessly, with the action and the comedy and the character beats all working together.

 

You want the old ranking, don’t you? You want to know how this film stacks up against what came before. Here’s what I’ll say: this is the best Peter Parker. This is also the best Spider-Man (he’s doing corny jokes the whole time, I loved it). I think it’s also the best Spider-Man movie… but SPIDER-MAN 2 is still better than this one. And that’s just because SPIDER-MAN 2 is more than a Spider-Man movie; it’s the ultimate superhero movie, and it’ll be tough for any film to top its elegant exploration of heroism and sacrifice. But when it comes to pure Spidey-ness, HOMECOMING wins.

 

It’s worth noting that HOMECOMING is very Spidey in that it’s very small. The Vulture is the first Marvel villain who is just stealing shit. He isn’t looking to take over the world or destroy it, he just wants to make some money and keep up his house payments. Spider-Man, thanks to the Old Parker Luck, actually causes more trouble than he stops, but it’s mostly localized. There are a couple of events that would be the top of the local news, but nothing in HOMECOMING is earth-shattering; nothing would lead the nightly news (unless it was a slow day, in which case the Staten Island Ferry bit might be the top story). I wonder if some people will walk out disappointed in the slighter stakes, or if they will subconsciously discount this film because the stakes aren’t quite high enough (everything that happens in this movie is, as Tony Stark says, under the Avengers’ pay grade). To me it’s refreshing, and the stakes are huge - it’s just that they’re incredibly personal. Marvel Earth will keep spinning no matter what happens in HOMECOMING, but there are so many places in this movie where the life of 15 year old Peter Parker can be ruined - and that’s not even counting the moments when it could be lost.

 

The stakes are emotional, and they’re all about Peter figuring out who he is, and who Spider-Man is. They’re all about Peter wrestling with the combination of guilt and lust for glory that motivates him. They’re all about Peter just trying to find something that makes him feel like he matters, and then compensating when he realizes that nothing on the outside - no trip to Berlin, no hi-tech suit, no date to the Homecoming dance - can do that for him. It’s all about Peter figuring out that his strength isn’t about stopping buses with his bare hands but about being strong enough to do the right thing, and to keep trying when he fucks up (which he does a lot). In the end the stakes of HOMECOMING couldn’t be higher - they’re all about the future of a boy named Peter Parker.

 

 

 

 

War for The Planet of the Apes

Rating: 4.5/5

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This review may contain minor spoilers.

 

No film series stands apart quite like the PLANET OF THE APES movies. They always have, from the earliest days. The 1968 original was a smart, meaningful movie dressed up in G-rated kiddie scifi drag. The following films went even farther in that direction, creating some of the sharpest social commentary ever put to film, regardless of genre. There have been times when the general public got hip to what the PLANET OF THE APES films were doing, but those times have been rare - mostly the films have been seen by people as a bunch of silly ape make-up adventures. For decades nobody took them seriously, despite the fact that they were - at their heart - more serious and better than most of the films we canonize year in and year out.

 

Then came the reboot, RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (it’s the first reboot of the series ever. There were no other APES films between BATTLE and RISE). It was created in one of the worst landscapes for modern blockbusters, put together by one of the worst studios for modern blockbusters (look at how Fox has ruthlessly squandered the X-Men, one of the most popular and imaginative superhero comic books of the last 50 years). By all rights RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES should have been garbage, should have been another entry in our annual succession of explodo-thon forgettable releases. There was no way to hope that the intelligence, the gravitas and most of all the battle between cynicism and hope in the original APES films would make it into the 21st century.

 

And yet RISE was low-key brilliant. It was a character movie created with cutting edge FX and released into a summer marketplace. And its sequel, DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, upped the ante. More action was included this time, but it was organic, and it served larger themes. The script was deep, and it wrestled with big questions about leadership and ethics that summer blockbusters avoid at all costs (I would say only Marvel ever gets close to the kind of thematic stuff that the rebooted APES films have made their bread and butter). With DAWN it was clear - these new APES films are great, and they are honorable reboots of the originals.

 

Now comes WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES; DAWN director Matt Reeves returns for what is essentially the conclusion of a trilogy. That this film has an ending - you could stop watching APES movies after WAR and feel satisfied that you have enjoyed a full story - is amazing enough. That this film is a hybrid of BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES and the Book of Exodus is… well, this is a pretty fucking cool movie series, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when it gets all smart on us.

 

Picking up a few years after the climax of DAWN, WAR finds Caesar and his ape colony hiding in the woods, desperately trying to avoid further conflict with the surviving humans. Caesar has sent scouts across a great desert (the future Forbidden Zone?) to see if there is another homeland for his people; they return with word that a paradise - a promised land, if you will - awaits them just past the burning sands.

 

But there is no time for an organized journey. Human forces, personally led by The Colonel, attack the colony, killing Caesar’s wife and son. The invaders are repelled, but it’s clear that there’s no time to waste. The apes must head to the promised land, but they will do so without Caesar; the ape leader has succumbed to vengeance, and heads off on his own to get even with The Colonel.

 

But WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES, like the rest of the APES movies, is not a simple summer blockbuster. This is not a movie where a man (or a chimp) on a personal mission is presented as something heroic. And it’s not presented as something wrong, either. It’s presented as something complicated, as an understandable action, and one with unforeseen consequences. It’s those consequences that take the film from its initial stages as a Western (the sight of a group of apes riding across the snowy mountains on horseback brings to mind DJANGO UNCHAINED and THE SEARCHERS) to its ultimate form as a Biblical epic, which Caesar recast into the role of Moses.

 

Caesar has been Moses-like from the start. RISE has echoes of the Exodus story in its tale of a chimp raised with human parents who must reconnect with his birth heritage and lead his enslaved people to freedom. Those echoes resurface here, but they’re louder and more insistent. If RISE had the parting of the Red Sea replaced by the crossing of the (red) Golden Gate Bridge, WAR brings itself to a much more epic version of those Biblical events.

 

Standing in the center of all this is Caesar, one of the great modern movie characters. Played for three films by the brilliant and eternally underappreciated Andy Serkis, Caesar is not the kind of soft and cuddly monarch we like to imagine when we consider the comforting notion of living under a fatherly ruling hand. He’s a pragmatic leader, one who is merciful when it is strategically necessary. But Caesar recognizes the part of him that makes him a strong leader is also the part of him that makes him a bad ape - he is haunted by visions of Koba, the usurper from DAWN, who Caesar personally killed in single combat. The ape law “Ape shall never kill ape” rings in Caesar’s head as he sees these demonic visions, and he is tormented by the fact that he had to break the law in order to keep it.

 

This is often the tragedy of great warrior leaders - the viciousness with which they will fight for their ideals makes them unfit to live in the society those ideals have created. In many ways Caesar’s attempt to go seek solo vengeance (he tries to go solo but his steadfast companions, including Maurice the Orangutan, insist on accompanying him) is the result of him understanding he cannot follow his people to the promised land. The blood he has spilled to secure them peace stains his soul too much.

 

But there is hope for him. His quest for vengeance slowly gets eroded - first his band orphan a young mute human, and they take her on as a ward (her name, in a nod to the first film, is Nova). Then Caesar sees the consequences of his decision to leave his people, and he finds himself a prisoner in a labor camp, forced to build a great wall for the Colonel, who clearly expects an attack from outside invaders.

 

It’s hard to watch a movie where a wall is being built today without thinking of Donald Trump, but it’s pretty clear that the Colonel is Pharaoh, and this wall is his Great Pyramid. Still, the Colonel’s camp - decked out with American flags and the symbols for “Alpha” and “Omega” (more nods to the original films) - pulsates with the energy of the modern racist moment. Just as the original APES films captured the political heat of their respective years, so WAR ends up being a movie that reflects back to us the fire in which we currently burn. I don’t think it’s possible that director Matt Reeves saw 2017 coming when he was shooting this film a year ago, but he read the tea leaves. The humans see the apes as invaders taking their spot in the world, exactly the sort of ‘economic anxiety’ that drives Trump voters.

 

What gives WAR a bit of frisson is the idea that the military is RIGHT. The apes are ascendant. The Simian Flu, released into the wild in the first film, has mutated and is starting to strike humans as dumb, and is beginning to devolve them into brutes. The future of PLANET OF THE APES has arrived, and the Colonel’s fears of his race losing are actually well-founded.

We see that all around us today. The white power structure is clearly in decline in this country (even if it’s having a resurgent moment, a last gasp), and it’s going to be replaced by something else. The problem the Colonel has is that he can’t figure out how to have a future where ape and man lives side by side. He jumps directly to a military solution - wipe out the apes in the hope of wiping out the Simian Flu (it’s a patently absurd solution, since every human on Earth already has the Flu in their system). It’s the same problem that the White Genocide types have - they can’t envision a future where they live side-by-side - and mixed - with people who are of different races. So while there’s no overt racism in the picture, the whole movie is a searing racial story. Notably, it’s the first of the new trilogy that really hits these race notes, which the original five hit as hard as they possibly could.

 

To make a character like The Colonel work you need someone you kind of like. It’s easy to cast a villain in this role, but the story has no kick if, on some level, you can’t identify with The Colonel. You need someone who is a reflection of Caesar, someone who can make The Colonel a man whose laugh we know, and not just make him a hardass with an uncompromising genocidal vision. That makes Woody Harrelson perfect casting.

 

The Colonel feels, in some ways, like the dark other side of his HUNGER GAMES character - an idealist turned dissolute. Where Haymitch dissolved into an alcoholic stupor, The Colonel has solidified into an alcoholic rage. “Why do you have to be so EMOTIONAL?” The Colonel snaps at Caesar, and he’s clearly talking to himself.

 

Around these two titans is assembled an almost all-CGI supporting cast. The new APES series has seen a steady decline in the human presence, and most of WAR is human-free. That’s remarkable on a lot of levels, but perhaps most remarkable is that this means huge swaths of this expensive blockbuster is spent with CGI apes talking IN SIGN LANGUAGE. Yes, ape language remains limited, and so most of the characters interact through their hands, with subtitles letting us in on the conversations.

 

If that’s the most remarkable thing, the second most remarkable is how fully these apes have just become characters. We’re so far beyond even being impressed, which is the best possible outcome for the FX artists who labored on this movie. They are successful when we stop seeing the effects, when we stop looking for pixels, when we just look at Caesar and Maurice and Rocket and see living, thinking, feeling beings. They are successful in WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES; sometimes in big scenes you might become aware of the phoniness of an ape, but it’s the way you become aware of the phoniness of Captain America in a big AVENGERS action scene. When the characters are in small moments, talking, arguing, supporting one another, they are so real it is jarring to bring your mind back to the vision of them simply being people in pajamas. I almost wish they didn’t have behind the scenes photos on this one so a whole generation could grow up thinking that somehow apes really got on to the set and acted and lived and were real.

 

Caesar is surrounded by his old friends, and in WAR he gains a new one: Bad Ape. Played by Steve Zahn, Bad Ape is a big step for the series, as he’s a chimp who can talk but who was not part of Caesar’s original pod. He was in a zoo, and the Simian Flu made him more intelligent; now we see that this has impacted apes everywhere, and for the first time Caesar and company consider that this could truly be a planet of apes.

 

Bad Ape is comic relief, but he’s also heartbreaking. His name comes from the thing humans called him the most; he has made his abuse his identity. This is a powerful message when put alongside the film’s larger racial themes - you see how entire populations internalize the toxic atmosphere around them, allowing themselves to be defined by other cultural norms. Every black girl who grew up hating her nose because of white beauty standards, every Asian boy who hated his eyes, every short person, every fat person, every person who believes the othering placed on them by the culture - their trauma is represented in Bad Ape.

 

Zahn is terrific in the role. He never allows Bad Ape’s comedic aspects take over; he’s silly but sweet, and he’s never annoying. He’s no Jar Jar, that’s for sure. By the end of the movie I truly loved Bad Ape in a way that, frankly, I haven’t loved another one of the new apes besides Caesar. What makes Bad Ape all the more amazing is that he’s so clearly Steve Zahn, even though he looks nothing like Zahn.

 

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES is the most compelling film in the reboot trilogy, and I think it’s probably the third or fourth best in the whole eight film saga (which is incredibly high praise from me, considering my deep love of the original five movies). It works on every level - it is beautiful, it is meaningful, it is suspenseful, it is exciting, it is consuming. Matt Reeves has ascended to another level here, and he’s taken the very form of the summer blockbuster with him. WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES feels like the place where the modern blockbuster - CGI heavy, big action scenes - meets the classic blockbuster - sweeping epics, tragic and flawed characters - and it makes me incredibly happy. This is a great film, a stunning work that knows the best way to get to a happy ending is to wade through hell. In fact, this is the one way I think WAR turns its back on the original APES franchise - this is the single most hopeful movie in the series. But you have to earn that hope, and Reeves isn’t afraid to break his characters in order to find happiness within them.

 

 

 

 

Dunkirk

Rating: 3.5/5

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DUNKIRK is one dead wife away from being the Nolaniest movie that Nolan ever Nolaned. It’s very much what his filmography has been leading up to, in both theme and form, and he’s pretty much perfected it. It is the pinnacle of all he has done - good and bad - and it is technically stunning. As craft, it’s unimpeachable. And yet I spent a lot of the movie not really caring about what I was watching. I was involved - the editing and sound design and camerawork bring you into the moment, and there was tension and there was excitement and there was dread - but I didn’t CARE. If one soldier died it would be a shock, but I wouldn’t feel anything for the man. Over the course of DUNKIRK’s short but intense running time there was only one character with whom I found myself emotionally engaged, and that was Mark Rylance’s character of Boating Mark Rylance.

 

To be fair I have almost never felt emotionally engaged with a Christopher Nolan film. I don’t think that’s what he does; INCEPTION, my favorite Nolan, is the movie that touches me the most, but even there I’m bringing in more baggage than the brothers in THE DARJEELING LIMITED. I don’t know that there’s ever been a director this popular who was also this cold, and while sometimes I hate that about him - THE PRESTIGE is a bummer for me because it has so little to care about beyond the mechanics - in DUNKIRK it adds to the experiential nature of the film. Nolan’s icy passionlessness allows him to show it as it was, or at least to convince us that he’s showing it as it was. He doesn’t have the strengths that other war tale tellers have - Vonnegut and Heller’s ironic understanding of the absurdity of war, Spielberg’s melodramatic love for the hearts of the young men fighting the war, Kubrick’s cynicism about the whole enterprise of war - and so he simply shows war to us. It’s like if Uatu the Watcher made himself a WWII movie; it would simply be events as they occurred.

 

Of course that doesn’t mean Nolan is going for straight realism. You never see a German in DUNKIRK, perhaps one of the most interesting choices you can make in a war film. It eliminates the sense of the enemy being a thing that can be conquered or understood and instead turns war into a vast warping of the nature of reality. Existence itself is out to get you in DUNKIRK, and the characters die as often (if not moreso) from drowning as they do from being shot. This serves to remove all ideology from the story and allows Nolan to get to one of his main thematic concerns: survival. This is a survival horror movie, for sure, and by telling the story of this massive defeat and retreat Nolan is making the statement that sometimes surviving is enough.

He’s also interested in perspective, which has always been one of his driving cinematic concerns. I’m actually surprised that Nolan hasn’t made extensive use of split screen thus far in his career, as it seems like a very immediate way to explore this aspect of reality. He’s always touching on perspective - from MEMENTO to THE PRESTIGE, from THE DARK KNIGHT’s hero we need but don’t deserve to INCEPTION’s layers of dream time - Nolan is obsessed with how the world looks different from our individual experiences.

 

In DUNKIRK he gets very expressive about that, telling three stories - air, land and sea (although the “land” section takes place like 70% of the time on sea) - in three different time frames. The land section, called “The Mole,” begins a week before the evacuation. The sea section begins one day before, and the air section one hour. He intercuts them, and as the movie goes on you realize that a boat Tom Hardy’s character Spitfire Tom Hardy flies past was actually the one on which Boating Mark Rylance was boating. Some asshole is eventually going to cut together a chronological version of this movie, but that won’t work; by weaving through time Nolan allows himself to create a tempo that rarely flags. It’s DUNKIRK’s intensity that is wowing audiences, and to tell this story chronologically would be to rob it of its greatest asset.

 

Nobody talks in DUNKIRK, and when they do talk you can’t understand what they’re saying. I’ve noticed this as an issue in Nolan’s work (watching INTERSTELLAR in theaters made me want to get my hearing checked), and either he’s the world’s worst audio mixer or he’s actively trying to downplay the importance of dialogue. DUNKIRK argues the latter; he’s striving to tell this story as visually as possible, and he’s succeeding. You are caught up in the images, themselves rarely flashy. There are moments of flair - a stationary camera captures what it is like to be on a capsizing boat as the ocean suddenly become perpendicular to your standing plane - but they’re always in service of immersion and thematics. Those cool sinking ship shots only underscore how DUNKIRK is a movie about how reality itself is conspiring against these men. It’s very similar to INCEPTION in that way, and it all plays into how Nolan looks at perspective. I think it kind of freaks him out a little bit, the idea that reality is malleable depending upon the observer.

 

Where DUNKIRK sort of loses me is in those observers. If I cannot care about the people whose stories are being told it’s hard for me to care about their stories on any level beyond the technical. That’s especially true in a story like this, based on history, where the outcome is known. It’s not that I need to be surprised by the ending of a movie - the hero wins in a movie about 98% of the time - but rather that I want to feel the trials and tribulations of the characters as they move towards that inevitable victory (or, in the case of DUNKIRK, survival).

DUNKIRK is a very sense-oriented movie, in that it operates on a rather assaultive level. For me that’s the level it operated on the most, and that’s a level that I find entertaining but not particularly moving. The best example I can give is one I’ve run into the ground in the past - the difference between THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. PASSION is more like DUNKIRK - physically assaultive and immediate. You feel the whips and the nails. But I don’t find that to be meaningful. LAST TEMPTATION, on the other hand, presents a compelling vision of the psychological pain that Christ experienced. I prefer that.

 

Which isn’t to say DUNKIRK is devoid of that. It’s why I like the Rylance section of the film - it’s the most human and the most relatable and the most emotional. I won’t get into spoilers here, but it’s also the only section where I felt anything at a character’s death, and that was only because I understood that character’s psychology. Again, it isn’t that I misunderstand the survival instinct on display in “The Mole” segments, it’s just that I don’t find them as emotionally compelling. There are other issues in those segments, including the profound interchangeability of the brunette soldier boys (by the end they’re covered in oil and I literally had no idea who was living and who was dying. Perhaps that is purposeful; if so it only distanced me from their plight), but emotional frigidity is what truly kept me outside of the scenes, enjoying them on visceral and technical levels.

 

If experience has taught me anything it’s that Nolan does those levels well enough that most people are okay with it. I admire what he does, I just usually can’t bring myself to love it. I always hope to be more cerebral in my cinematic appreciation - and sometimes I am, sometimes complex thematic elements really get me off - but it turns out that I need some warmth in there as well. I responded very well to the warm moments in DUNKIRK, but even at his warmest - at the very end of the movie, a moment intended to be upbeat and inspiring - I got so much rainy British staidness from Nolan that I, as easy a movie crier has ever lived, couldn’t get tears out. It was nice! I got the message, and it was heartening! But it didn’t hit me as hard as any of the shells or the bullets or torrents of water did.

 

So for me DUNKIRK is real middle of the road. It’s not as unbearable as INTERSTELLAR or THE PRESTIGE, but it doesn’t have the beating heart I managed to find in THE DARK KNIGHT and INCEPTION. It is excellent work, unparalleled in skill and craftsmanship, but for me it’s almost all technical. I am impressed, but cannot be in love.

 

 

 

 

It

Rating: 4/5

 

Not quoting the last one since the review does get spoilerific. But I really like his reviews for the superhero films this year. 

Edited September 14, 2017 by iJackSparrow

[ZattMurdock]

Now, this man, this man just knows how to say the right things to put a smile on my face:

 

Quote

"Sooner or later, they're going to get the rights back to all our characters," Lee said. "They're working on it, and they're still making X-Men movies and stuff. Don't worry about it. You'll get more Marvel superheroes than you'll have time to look at in the next few years."

Source: http://comicbook.com/marvel/2017/09/13/stan-lee-marvel-getting-x-men-fantastic-four-back/

[WeneedtotalkaboutKevin]

 

He is the man WE DESERVE AND NEED. I miss his opinion on comic book movies...

[Harpospoke]

10 hours ago, Mojoguy said:

You talking about Captain America?

Yes.

8 hours ago, AndyK said:

WW's 49.7% OS is down to an overperformance in the US market, rather than anything else.

 

TFA did 52.3% OS, its not too dissimilar except WW did 3 times more business.

 

The winter soldier did over 60% and its gross was $455m OS.

 

Its weird trying to interpret why those numbers are why they are, TWS is the MCU's highest quality (IMO) movie to date but it seems people outside the US appreciated it more than those at home did.

All true, but WW overperformed in the US instead of OS.   That's was supposed to be the kind of thing Capt America did.   He was supposed to have a bigger fan base in the US than anywhere else and that's not what happened.

 

It's just one of those predictions that was way off base.

Edited September 14, 2017 by Harpospoke

[Captain Craig]

I'm excited for the reboot of this comic property franchise! Wish we'd have had a 3rd Perlman HB entry but I'm pleased the property is being revived!

Hellboy Reboot first look!

 

[Walt Disney]

2 hours ago, iJackSparrow said:

Now, this man, this man just knows how to say the right things to put a smile on my face:

 

Source: http://comicbook.com/marvel/2017/09/13/stan-lee-marvel-getting-x-men-fantastic-four-back/

Strange seeing you happy about that. You were one of the biggest supporters of Disney not getting the rights back to the Marvel superheroes that were licensed to other studios.

[Captain Craig]

Stan Lee said nothing new or revealing that hasn't been stated by countless others. He made a general comment that we all know will one day likely be a reality. Either the contracts will lapse and the rights to X-Men & FF are back at Marvel OR Fox/Disney come to terms on a financial payout for their return. 

[ZattMurdock]

43 minutes ago, Walt Disney said:

Strange seeing you happy about that. You were one of the biggest supporters of Disney not getting the rights back to the Marvel superheroes that were licensed to other studios.

I think you are mistaking me for someone else. I always was one of the biggest advocates of that happening. To the point people that don't seem to understand how amazing that would be to complain about it. Are you sure you didn't mistake me for someone else? 

[AndyK]

1 hour ago, Captain Craig said:

Stan Lee said nothing new or revealing that hasn't been stated by countless others. He made a general comment that we all know will one day likely be a reality. Either the contracts will lapse and the rights to X-Men & FF are back at Marvel OR Fox/Disney come to terms on a financial payout for their return. 

Stan Lee's "Lucky Man" was a pretty decent TV series in the UK very recently.

 

Have you guys seen that in the US?

[Walt Disney]

23 hours ago, iJackSparrow said:

I think you are mistaking me for someone else. I always was one of the biggest advocates of that happening. To the point people that don't seem to understand how amazing that would be to complain about it. Are you sure you didn't mistake me for someone else? 

Maybe you just didn't want them to get the film rights back to Spider-Man. You were adamant that you wanted Sony to keep those film rights.  I thought you were part of the camp that wanted Fox to keep the X-Men film rights too, but maybe it just seemed that way.

 

You definitely weren't one of the biggest advocates for Disney getting the film rights back to all the Marvel characters though. It was me, Captain Craig, Harpospoke, Talkie, Druv10, BKB and a few others who I am forgetting (sorry to those of you that I forgot). But you never advocated for that here.

Edited September 15, 2017 by Walt Disney

[mredman]

i have no clue where to put these awesome news. So here it goes. Matthew Vaughn confirms MoS sequel talks. This confirms the news about Vaughn was true and this pretty much confirms a MoS sequel was always on the table and its only kept quiet because of Supes is dead to the world right now and after JL when SUPES is back to the PUBLIC we will get the announcement

 

 

https://heroichollywood.com/vaughn-man-steel-sequel-director-talks/

 

Quote

“I am planning another Kingman, I’ve written the treatment and some of the scenes…I don’t know what I’m going to do next but I have had chats about Superman, I love Superman.”

 

Edited September 15, 2017 by mredman

[ZattMurdock]

5 hours ago, Walt Disney said:

Maybe you just didn't want them to get the film rights back to Spider-Man. You were adamant that you wanted Sony to keep those film rights.  I thought you were part of the camp that wanted Fox to keep the X-Men film rights too, but maybe it just seemed that way.

 

You definitely weren't one of the biggest advocates for Disney getting the film rights back to all the Marvel characters though. It was me, Captain Craig, Harpospoke, Talkie, Druv10, BKB and a few others who I am forgetting (sorry to those of you that I forgot). But you never advocated for that here.

I honestly think you got something wrong. That's a position that I've always defended it, with that said, I wouldn't be opposed to Fox keeping making X-Men films without Marvel Studios if only they were as good as Deadpool and set in that same universe. That'st not what we are getting at the moment though. 

 

Can some of the old timers that talk with me chime in about this? @Cochofles, @Captain Craig, @Harpospoke, @druv10?

 

Edit: And I just wanted good Spider-Man films, and I remember saying time and time again how great it'd be if TASM could somehow make its way into the MCU. Obviously, I was wrong about that after TASM2, but I think my position regarding Marvel Studios having all the Marvel characters at their disposal was always crystal clear, I would believe. Not sure how you got that idea, but that's not what I meant at all. 

Edited September 15, 2017 by iJackSparrow

[YM!]

I kind of like X-Men separated from the MCU. I don't think we would get movies like Logan or Deadpool.

[ZattMurdock]

Just now, YourMother said:

I kind of like X-Men separated from the MCU. I don't think we would get movies like Logan or Deadpool.

If we could get Deadpool, Logan and have the world of Deadpool being set in the MCU would be the ideal, in my opinion. 

[YM!]

Just now, iJackSparrow said:

If we could get Deadpool, Logan and have the world of Deadpool being set in the MCU would be the ideal, in my opinion. 

I don't see MCU at least in the foreseeable future to make R-rated movies.