Venom One, No, Not "There Will Be Carnage"

This was a bit of a dog’s breakfast, wasn’t it? I’m trying to figure out where this went wrong and it’s weird because none of the individual parts, taken in isolation, sound all that bad, it’s just they never quite combine into a coherent whole. Basically, I think the movie tries to do too many things, and as a result does nothing particularly well.

I didn’t write it so I’m kind of trying to read minds and guess what happened here, but it does feel like a good idea butchered through rewrites or edits in an attempt to check certain boxes that didn’t need to be checked.

What is this movie even about? The minimalist, bare-bones outline of the plot is: “Down-on his luck reporter Tom Hardy gets infected with an alien being that gives him superpowers. The two must prevent a tech-bro tycoon/mad scientist who wants to bring more of the aliens to Earth for Reasons.”

You look at that, and you realize that the first sentence has almost nothing to do with the second.

How does Hardy being down on his luck move the plot forward?

Well, gives him a reason to dislike the tycoon. Check that box. What, you mean a reason other than the whole “infect the entire human race with alien spores” thing? Uh, yeah, well, that doesn’t come up until the final act, in a scene where a space shuttle is readied for launch in five minutes.

Why does the alien symbiote agree to help Hardy prevent this from happening?

Well, it likes him for, um, reasons. I don’t know, there’s a throwaway line about them both being losers, whatever that means. Check that box.

Just, so many scenes and beats don’t seem to have a reason for existing in this movie.

After he’s infected, there’s an extended sequence where Hardy/Venom break into a news corp office tower so he can plant evidence that the tycoon is up to no good. After his escape from a SWAT team whose rules of engagement are apparently shoot to kill for offences like breaking & entering (hey, this is America, so… maybe?) this never comes up again. Cool action scene (even though we already had one), check.

Immediately after, we discover that the alien goo thing is slowly killing Hardy. Second Act hurdle, check. At the end of the movie, Hardy is reunited with his alien goo. The health problems are never mentioned again and Hardy looks quite chipper.

Well into the third Act, the tycoon is ALSO infected with an alien spore thing. Before he is infected, the tycoon plans to find more alien spore things because he thinks human-alien hybrids are the next stage in evolution (idk man I don’t write this stuff). After he is infected, the tycoon plans to… find more alien spore things. Huh. Okay. Third Act twist, check.

In all this mess I think what should have been the heart of the movie, a kind of odd couple slash buddy cop action-comedy with Hardy and the alien sharing his body kind of gets lost. You can kind of see glimpses of it in the first chase scene where the tycoon’s goons try to capture the pair (starting by attempting to ram them with explosive kamikaze drones, look I really didn’t write this thing) with Hardy playing the oceanically out of his depth reporter unwittingly and unwillingly turned superpowered killing machine.

Hardy is good in these scenes though eccentric and uneven in others. Eddie Brock is a tough character to make likeable, a charming but self-centered asshole who lacks the brains of a Tony Stark or Stephen Strange to balance it out, and the part feels like it was written for a much younger actor. With Hardy, he seems more arrogant man-child than headstrong kid. What does Brock want? I don’t really know. What does Venom want? I… don’t know. What are Brock and Venom trying to achieve? Mainly to stay out of the bad guy’s clutches—it’s only at the very end that their motivation switches to stopping the bad guy’s plan, but then again the bad guy only came up with the plan 10 minutes before the ending so you can’t really blame them there. 

Still, being unable to answer those questions makes these guys to relate to.

Same goes for the rest of the cast. Riz Ahmed as the big bad spews a couple of lines about how awful the Earth is and how humanity needs to migrate to the stars, so I guess he’s a kind of Elon Musk not-quite-parody, but quite why he thinks bonding with aliens is the way to go is all a bit say-wat-ish. And then he gets infected with the alien which changes his goals and motivations… in no way whatsoever. Huh.

There’s also an ex-fiancée and her new boyfriend in there. Yup. They exist in this universe. There’s a kind of funny moment between Hardy and the no-longer-ladyfriend about her pet cat mainly notable because the joke actually lands. Otherwise, they’re just plot devices.

All of these issues could, I think, maybe have been resolved if there was greater focus on what this movie was going to be about. Odd couple learn to appreciate each other? Okay, gotta give each of them something worth appreciating. Then show how their adventures drive the realization. Dramatic climax where they finally learn to work together to stop the bad guy. Boom. Roll credits.

I did write that, so you can blame me for that one.

 

 

 

Jupiter's Legacy

This one is very rough about its pasted-on beard edges. The eight episodes are pretty slow paced for what actually happens: Ageing superhero dad confronts rebellious kids who feel big daddy J's values are old-fashioned and out of date, while in flashback scenes set in the late 1920’s we see how Pops and others originally got their superpowers. Season 1 is all setup and no payoff, introducing a whole mess of conflicts, old vs young, good vs evil, brother vs brother, without really developing them much.

There was one brief flicker of original thought, when the protagonists “The Utopian” (another Superman knockoff a la Omni-Man and Homelander) goes to visit a former supervillain turned shrink for a chat, and the shrink essentially calls bullshit on the premise that our times are now somehow more complicated than they were 90 years ago. Life has always been complicated and filled with compromise, he explains.

(What has changed, from a meta perspective, is we expect greater psychological realism from superhero stories than we did in the past.)

The CG is “Doom being played on a pregnancy test” poor and the fight scenes consequently more silly than satisfying and the hair & beard prosthetics are, hm, distractingly unconvincing. The actress who plays Chloe, the protag’s daughter, is just awful, never looking not miserable in all situations. The flashback scenes by contrast were stylishly done, though as mentioned above the plot development creeps along like one of them newfangled automatic horseless carriage things.

Still, I thought the bones of the story weren’t bad—superhero families behaving, like, you know, families—though maybe a touch overdone in recent years, or hell in recent months, with Invincible and The Boys and whatnot. Given the sluggish and slightly dreary delivery of season one though, I’m not sure we’re ever going to find out what they planned to do with it.

Love Death and Reboots 2

Season two of the Netflix's animated SF short story anthology. Comes in much shorter than season 1, with eight episodes as opposed to 18 in the first batch, and many of the ideas feel similarly truncated, all setup and no payoff. Noticeably less bloodthirsty and boobthirsty than the initial outing, perhaps as a result of viewers asking them to tone it down a bit? 

1. Automated Customer Service: Robots + Death. Cleaning robot goes bad and attempts to murder its exceptionally ugly owner and her irritating dog. The customer service line she attempts to call is mildly amusing.

2. Ice: Brotherly love + Death. Oddly-proportioned people go ice-whale watching. Not a lot happens, but I liked the understatedness of the ending, the way they just tell it with a look and a smile rather than spelling it out.

3. Pop Squad: Death. A middle-aged Anakin Skywalker does a 50's art deco Blade Runner. Easily the darkest of the stories here, and one of maybe two that are even remotely thought-provoking.

4. Snow in the Desert: Love + Robots + Death. Old Man Logan, er, Kenobi. Immortal desert hermit gets attacked by bounty hunters. Impressive cg but not a lot else going on here. Twist ending was entirely predictable, despite coming at the end of an almost comical series of reverses.

5. The Tall Grass: Death. Polar Express, but evil.

6. All Through the House: Death (Potentially). Santa Claus, but alien.

7. Life Hutch: Robots + Death. Michael B Jordan defeats a robot evidently implanted with the brain of a cat by using a laser pointer. 

8. The Drowned Giant: Death. A dead whale washes ashore but our David Attenborough narrator reimagines it as a gigantic human corpse in order to underline our blasé attitude to death in nature and the indignities to which we subject dead animal bodies.

So you have have love and death without the robots, or robots and death without the love, or all three together, but there's always death. Death is mandatory. 

WandaVersion

I give it's "Lost but Suburbs" vibe in the early episodes credit for fully committing to the bit, if nothing else. The imitation of sitcoms over the decades was pretty thorough, including everything from the laugh track to story lines and dialog and humor styles. That said, it was a bit like the no-cut cinematography in 1917, a gimmick whose gimmickiness overshadowed the point of the gimmick. Actually, in the end there wasn't much of a point to the gimmick, except to entertain the viewer with the gimmick. Like the sitcom situations don't actually serve the plot in any way, it's just established that Wanda is living in this woo-woo land of make-believe. The show just drops the whole shtick in the last few episodes and no more is ever heard of it.

I also think the danger of a show within a show, a layer of fiction within your fiction, is that your IRL fiction has to be very, very grounded otherwise the lines between your real fiction and fiction fiction start to blur and the viewer gets confused about what's real fiction and what's fiction fiction. You get me? The "reality" of your fictional universe kind of gets worn away and it gets harder to empathize with your characters since they're all fiction. 

So, and this is just an example, just spitballing here, just a f'rinstance, just say, making your main villain a literal witch would be a bad idea. Hypothetically speaking.

Good god that was dumb.

Attention writers: Wanda is the villain. She is also the victim. This is interesting, do not run away from that and insert some boring ass white dude and a literal fucking witch.

Also thought there were a whole bunch of extraneous characters in this, a show which could have been a pretty tight focus on dealing with grief. Like the writers or showrunners or Marvel or Disney got a little scared of how dark they were getting and threw in a slightly irritating Millennial youtuber type personality and the relative of some character I've never heard of from a movie I haven't seen.

Falcon Appearing in Conjunction With The Winter Soldier

I finally caved and got a Disney+ subscription and the first thing I watched was the Mandalorian but I have nothing to say about it so moving right along to other things I have nothing to say about, but will anyway: Not Only Falcon But Also Winter Soldier.

Confession time, the few MCU movies that I watched have almost all been blasted into my brain from the back of airplane seats at 30,000 feet above the Pacific, so nothing has really stuck. Needless to say, everything I know about this world has come second or third hand from social media but luckily we all know what a reliable source of information that is.

That said, I kind of liked this.

The opening and set up in particular were solid, especially the Bucky stuff with his psychologist and Sam's stuff with Isaiah. The whole question of whether a Black man could or should become the symbol of America was well-handled I thought, acknowledging both history and present issues, but also making the case for people to define for themselves what their national identity is.

That said, this was Subway sandwich overstuffed. I really wish Bucky had more airtime, because that's another fascinating subject they could have tackled--guilt, forgiveness and redemption. How do you make amends when "Sorry" does not even begin to cover it? 

But nope, no time for that because in addition to race in America, we've also got immigration and the refugee crisis to deal with, and the dark side of being treated like a hero, and the radicalization of youth, and political accountability, and and and and it's all too much. The bad guy aims are vague and unconvincing and Bucky's redemption arc gets wrapped up off-screen.

Random thoughts:

1. More Bucky and Yori and the cute waitress from the sushi place. 

2. It was just bizarre to me that they had Nubian women in full tribal regalia wandering around Latvia or Lithuania oh come on like you can tell the difference, you'd think that would have drawn more attention

3. Didn't know who Sharon was so the whole "Power Broker" subplot was a bit ?

4. Karli was in the Han Solo movie that nobody watched, too

5. Mackie going from practicing with the shield with Bucky in one scene, to not being able to catch it the next was just an odd bit of editing

6. More Zemo. Yes I know everybody loved his dance. More villains with comprehensible backstories and identifiable goals, please.

7. Is "USAgent" supposed to be significant? And who is Seinfeld lady? Don't make me google essential plot details please, shows. 

Sisters Brothers

Title: The Sisters Brothers

Directed by: A Frenchman

Starring: John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed

Cuts about 90% of the Picaresque adventures of the brotherly bounty hunters and thus misses the sense of absurdity about the whole thing. It is a dadaish work, standing in opposition to both John Wayne and Unforgiven, declaring that there was no moral order in the West, inverted or otherwise, merely luck and chance, and the only real victims were idealists.

It is significant, I think, that the only character to get a "happy" ending is Eli, the one who had the simplest motives and ambitions.

Spiderman Infinity

Title: Spider-Man Into the Spider-alaxy

Directors: Yes, 3 of them

Starring: Spider-Man, other Spider-Man, older Spider-Man, SpiderMan, Spiderman, Spider-Man But It's a Girl, Anime Spider-Man and Looney Tunes Spider-Man

"Anyone can be Spider-Man" assures this movie in which a group of heroes who have all been granted superhuman powers up to and including invisibility and the force lightning thing from Return of the Jedi after being bitten by radioactive spiders team up to do things which would instantly pulverize, squash, mash, rend, tear, destroy and kill any normal human who attempted them. 

Deliriously fun for the most part, though the "reality" level is all over the place so I was never quite sure if I should be worried for anyone's safety or not, the serious scenes are corny as all hell, and like I say, the actual story itself completely and utterly contradicts the moral it tries to tell.

But man this was good, goofy fun.

I AM NOW A PUBLISHED AUTHOR

A Life On Our Planet

I’ve just watched David Attenborough’s “A Life On Our Planet” and it’s beautiful as always, frank, open, heartfelt, a powerful plea to protect, preserve and even expand the wild places that he so loves and has made it his life’s work to document and explain. To do so, he says, is not mere environmentalism, but a necessity if humanity is to survive on this planet. It’s all delivered in his trademark BBC tones of gentle wisdom and quiet authority—not the gravelly voice of God a la Freeman but something warmer, more familiar and human—it is assured, it is educated, intellectual, knowledgeable and kind without being saccharine. It is a chronicle of nature in the 21^st century, which means of course it is a chronicle of how fast that nature is disappearing and—OH MY GOD WE MADE DAVID ATTENBOROUGH CRY. Well done, us. I hope we’re fucking happy with ourselves. We’ve saddened this beautiful, beautiful man, whose hiking boots we are not worthy to—oh, it makes me mad. MAD. I’ve been listening to Sir Dave since Life on Earth, back in the early 80s, and it is just heartbreaking to hear him talk about how much has been lost, much of it irrevocably. His prescriptions are not novel, and repetition from the mouths of other environmentalists has stolen some of their thunder, but he does stress how attainable they are—greater use of renewable energy, cooperative and planned utilization of ocean resources, less dependence on meat-heavy diets, an end to human expansion. Fine goals of course, but the challenge is (as it always has been) that many refuse to admit there is even a problem. I’m sure this documentary gets a rougher reception down America way, where belligerent climate change denial has become a cornerstone belief for half the population (the message probably also faces an uphill battle in, say, China or India, sorry Americans for picking on you again, but you are the Florida Man of the English-speaking world at the moment). Which is also sad, if not quite as sad as seeing Sir David upset. It is so frustrating to hear people at times bemoan our modern lack of moral compass, the cliched “What would Jesus do if he was alive today” when we are surrounded on all sides by Attenborough and Mister Rogers and Bob Ross and Steve Irwin and Keanu Reeves and, idk, Dave Grohl, we are surrounded by figures pointing the way to kindness and humility and respect and we keep throwing up our hands in the air and saying “Welp, too bad everything sucks, that’s life.” The answers are all around us, people. Worried what to do about climate change? Just listen, listen for once in your goddam lives instead of yammering away on Facebook and Reddit and Twitter and Instagram and just listen. What would Jesus do? I DON’T KNOW WHY DON’T YOU TRY FUCKEN LISTENING TO ONE OF THE THREE DOZEN SHINING, POSITIVE FIGURES IN OUR CULTURE. Maybe we wouldn’t be in such a goddamn mess then. But no, it’s Donnie Trump, football players and the sodding Kardashians. Mad. But back to Sir David. The poor dear is 93 but still going, if not strong, then gently and calmly as ever, and I would say “we shall not see his like again” but I don’t want to jinx it, I sincerely hope we do see his like again, whole battalion of Davids, great regiments of Attenboroughs sweeping across the continents, documentary teams in tow. Endless Davids, a never-ending stream Attenboroughs. Then maybe life on this planet will actually be worth living.

Enola Holmes

Title: Enola Holmes
Directed by: Harry Bradbeer
Screenplay by: Jack Thorne (based on a novel by Nancy Springer)
Network: Netflix

My favorite scene in Netflix’s YA breezy, light, fluffy and fun Nancy Drew-slash-Ferris Bueller knockoff “Enola Holmes” is when the black woman jiujitsu instructor in Victorian London turns and says directly into the camera: “Sherlock Holmes failed to dismantle the patriarchy.”

Which is to say, it’s a fun little adventure movie several cuts above your usual made-for-Netflix fare but my god is it horribly unsubtle with its out-of-place political posturing.

You could, you know, make a movie that inspires the audience to reevaluate the place and role of female characters in period dramas by doing what this movie does the other 90% of the time when it’s not having anachronistic hyper-modern women totally destroy those fuddy-duddy Victorian men with FACTS and LOGIC—i.e. by creating an enjoyable, engaging movie in which women happen to play all the central roles. That would do it, guys. That would get your point across. You don’t have to bring the action to a screaming to a halt just so someone can break the fourth wall and just say the premise straight to the audience.

It’s weird, it’s distracting, it detracts from what would otherwise be a ringing endorsement of more female-centric movies. Bah humbug get off my lawn.

Anyway. So. The actual movie. Enola Holmes is a fictional sub-creation of the blessedly copyright-free Sherlock (here played with marble stiffness and facial inarticulation by Henry Cavill), a supposed younger, precociously and spunky and plucky teenage sister of the big cocaine-addicted S, played with instantly adorable and delightful charm by Stranger Things’s Millie Vanilli Bobbie Brown Bel Biv DeVoe. With Sherlock and brother Mycroft (Sam Claflin) grown up and moved away, Enola is raised by her independent, eccentric domestic white terrorist mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter) who speaks in inspirational poster homilies (“If you want to be heard, you’ve got to make some noise,” says the fey dearie as she builds pipe bombs to slaughter innocents).

All seems well until Mother disappears one day—ooh, a mystery, involving a Holmes, who would have guessed. Enola’s search takes her to London, and along the way stumbles across a plot to bump off the young, pale, slightly foppish but actually not really his personality is a bit of a mess honestly Marquess or Possibly Viscount of Somewhereorother (Louis Partridge and His Hair), in order to prevent said Lad Who Is Quite a Modern and Liberal Thinker from voting the wrong way on a historically inaccurate bill to give women the vote. Enola promptly stops looking for Mumsie (probably just as well, as this is not a terribly compelling arc) and resolves instead to save the Marquess (or Viscount) and His Hair. Aided by numerous and repeated flashbacks to Enola and Eudoria beating the hell out of each other at juijitsu, Enola solves the case, er, mainly by using jiujitsu to beat up and kill the assassin sent after the young Laird. Not much sleuthing going on, really.

Enola’s two talents appear to be decrypting messages that have been purposely fed to her in order for her to read, and dressing up as a boy. Because either the scriptwriters aren’t that good at coming up with clues and mysteries, or because (as I’ve whined about elsewhere) our society is currently incapable of thinking of any way to show strength other than beating people up.

Sherlock does show up once or twice, but is here mainly used for the “Worf effect”, that is having a supposedly intelligent character get out-thought by the protagonist in order to showcase just how gosh darned smart she is.

In between, Enola talks to the camera in the style and tone of Ferris Bueller, which doesn’t add much to either the plot or our understanding of the character, but hot damn, that Millie Bobbie Brown can charm the back legs of an Arcturan Megadonkey.

All this leads to the rousing climax in which Enola saves the Lord, gets women the vote several decades too early, and manifests her manifesto, declares her independence and sets up the sequel. Huzzah. 

And I’m being incredibly cynical about the whole thing, maybe because Generation X as a whole has been raised to view the world through the filters of irony and cynicism, maybe because I’m an incorrigible misanthrope, and yet this movie has moved me to wonder—is the English-speaking world finally moving past detachment and irony as its default and primary if not only means of interpreting the world? The bromides in this movie about equality and gender ring tinny and false in these tired, failing old ears, surely nobody could say this with a straight face, yet the movie’s single notable characteristic is how committed and sincere it is about everything. Could, my crusty old heart wonders, audiences actually mean it, sincerely mean it, sincerely enjoy having characters stand up and declaim their beliefs with outthrust jaws and beaten breasts? Are we (and as a terminally-repressed Englishman in Canadian disguise, I shudder at the prospect), are we on the cusp of a new era of genuine emotion?

People online have long bemoaned the death of satire, but few have considered what is taking its place, and I think I see now: Sincerity. Meaning what you say. No more “ironically” enjoying things that are objectively awful. No more sarcastically quipping lines you don’t believe in. No more sneering at genre tropes or cliches in shows or movies that consciously ape those tropes and hold them up to ridicule or else seek to subvert them.

A movie about a plucky, spunky teenage girl who is (A) plucky and (B) spunky and that’s it, that’s the whole thing, it revels in her terminal pluckiness overload and in her anaphylactic-shock-inducing abundance of spunk. It wears its applique-thin iron-on primary school philosophy on its sleeve and is proud of it, genuinely proud, is not afraid to bellow it into your face. So to me, the effort feels hopelessly misguided, because who my age takes philosophical moralizing in a movie aimed at teenage girls seriously, but I’m the one out of touch now, there’s a coming wave of genuine-ness and it wears the winsomely smiling face of Millie Bobbie Brown.