Marvel Watch: The Marvels (2023)

Watched:  11/09/2023

Format:  Alamo Drafthouse

Viewing:  First

Director:  Nia DaCosta

Marvel has been having some issues, of late, with quality and maintaining a fanbase.  I'm not sure why having a fanbase for sci-fi/ fantasy stuff means eventually that the absolute worst people on Earth feel like their opinions should dictate what the rest of the planet sees and what constitutes a "good" Marvel, Star Wars or whatever movie.  But I suppose it's the same reason that people think they get to tell other people they're the only *real* Americans.

I don't want to define the film Captain Marvel or TV show Ms. Marvel by the audience that manages to mix misogyny and racism into rocket fuel for social media, but I will say - in the event of this year's strike by SAG-AFTRA, it's been tough to get much in the way of promotion out there for The Marvels other than dropping trailers, and that's left a gap in the conversation those folks have filled.  It's more likely we'll see the occasional hit-piece by a major industry publication looking for clicks than Disney doing anything worthwhile to actually promote the film on their own.  We coulda really used the lead cast hitting Hot Ones and Good Morning America.

Look, I agree:  Marvel has put out too much content since Endgame, and that's had a deleterious effect on the overall quality of the material.  Even I have been asking "will this be necessary?" as I hear about each new Marvel thing still in the pipeline.  And sometimes you're watching, say, Loki Season 2, and you're thinking "I literally do not care what happens here" because something like "oh noes, the timelines will all collapse" is both meaningless, up it's own ass of the story being about itself, and insanely old hat to us aging comic nerds who've seen timelines and multiverses collapse and expand over and over for our *entire lives*.  And, yes, Superman will still get printed every month.

Movie superheroes still have to have an antagonist, and they still have to wind up in a big crescendo of a finale, but we've seen this dozens of times in the past fifteen years.  You can polish it, put a new coat of paint on it, but eventually it's someone in a slugfest with their evil opposite who has the advantage on paper (but not the heart of a hero).

So what you have left is what you can do with characters.

And that brings us to The Marvels (2023), Marvel Studios' latest offering.  

The movie has mediocre reviews and is tracking to open badly.  I haven't read the reviews, because (a) I already had tickets and was going, and (b) I kinda wanted to write this before I saw what Chris Spectacles of the Akron Observer thought of the film.*  And I didn't want this review to be me addressing the concerns of reviewers.  

I saw it in a 2/3rds full theater on opening night, and with not a child in sight.  I will say the following up top:  

First - there's no post-post-credits sequence to wait for.  Go home after the first couple of them.  This is not a trick.

D&D Watch: Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

I don't know who that @#$%ing dragon is, because he's not in the movie

Watched:  11/07/2023

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director(s):  John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein

Ok.  So.

Back when I was probably too young to be playing, my brother picked up the basic boxed set of Dungeons and Dragons rules in the fall of 1982.  From probably 1982 to around 1987 or so, we played the game regularly, making our way swiftly to Advanced D&D and the much more fun rule books and catalogs of monsters, spells, what-have-you that comprised D&D in the 1980's.  

We didn't so much quit playing Dungeons and Dragons as move on to other games.  Our interest in the fantasy world and complex rule systems of that game depleting as we found sci-fi games, games based on popular comic books, movies, etc...  

I could not tell you when I last played D&D itself, but I assume probably 7th grade.  And, I don't think I've touched a tabletop RPG since college.  I don't have a problem with them, but we all just sort of stopped making time for them.  Clearly I am into dork stuff that often shares retail space with RPG materials, so it's not that.  I just don't hang with people who game, I guess.

There's a lot of water under the bridge with Dungeons and Dragons itself, which has been sold and resold as a property, and now belongs to an offshoot of Hasbro.  I won't get into the history of D&D here, or why everything is stupidly complicated, but we'll just leave it at: people are complex and companies often make bad decisions.

But a curious thing happened.  

Marvel Watch: Captain Marvel (2019)

Watched:  11/05/2023

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  I dunno.  4th?  5th?

Director(s):  Anne Boden and Ryan Fleck

This is a kind of weird movie, and it's amazing it holds together.  It takes place in the late 90's, is very concerned with events of 6 years prior, hints at things that will impact Marvel in the future, and introduces two warring species, a 2-eyed Nick Fury and the origins of the Avengers Initiative.  It's got a *lot* of ground to cover.

But at the center of all that is a story about a former pilot who has been told over and over again to stay in line, that she's a mess if she doesn't have people telling her what to do, and that she lacks self-control/ is too emotional.  Ie: this is a movie working as a gigantic metaphor that is constantly saying "get it?  You see what we did there?"  And, of course, this created a cottage industry of very angry YouTubers who are still out there, four years later, getting clicks talking about how this critically and commercially successful movie is bad, actually.* 

Anyway, I like it.  It's a tight sci-fi actioner with a well-developed lead, well-considered supporting characters and a very interesting take on Young Fury.  I dig Larson's cocky test-pilot je ne sais quo, and the moments as she's realizing her own power (which comes in levels through the third act).  

Let's not forget this movie has Annette Benning, which should get it a high-five anyway, but she's having a lot of fun with the part and you'll kind of wish you got way more time with her Mar-Vell/ Lawson.  And, really, a gigantic, embarrassingly rich cast, including Lashana Lynch, Clark Gregg, Jude Law, Gemma Chan, Lee Pace, Djimon Hounsou, and the great Ben Mendelsohn.  And plenty more!  

A while back, we podcasted this one, and I'm sure it was a restrained and well-pondered podcast since I think we did it like an hour after getting back from the movie.  

By the way, I've never really gotten into Captain Marvel in the comics, but have tried to catch up here and there.  But she is, to me, a highlight of the MCU.  

Anyhoo, that's all the homework I'm doing before seeing the new movie, The Marvels, this coming week.  

*Like, people are still making these videos in 2023, which means not only are they still fired up over a single movie, there's people *watching* these videos.  Which.  Man.  You're allowed to not like a thing, but if you're still worried about it 4 years on, the problem isn't the movie.

G Watch: Godzilla (2014)

Watched:  11/04/2023

Format:  BluRay

Viewing:  Second, I think

Director:  Gareth Edwards

In a couple of weeks, Apple+ is dropping their decade-spanning, genre-mixing show about the Monarch organization, which is the group that.... something something.... in a world of giant beasties, based on Godzilla (2014) and the series of attached movies.  I've heard where/ when in the movie timeline the show takes place - just after this movie, and it had been a while, so I finally rewatched the first of the Monsterverse films to remind myself what the hell happens in the flick.

I remember going into Godzilla (2014) with some trepidation.  The last American-made Godzilla movie I'd seen was the 1998 trainwreck that just piled on all the worst habits of 1990's-era blockbuster entertainment, and then curb-stomped you with them.*

The trailers for the 2014 edition certainly looked cool, but the fact is that at the time of the film's release, Hollywood was doing this thing where they would come up with cool stuff for trailers and then maybe make a movie that tied those scenes and lines together.  

It was promising a movie for all-ages, including adults - casting thinking-person's stars like Bryan Cranston, Juliet Binoche, Ken Watanabe, David Strathairn and Sally Hawkins (a curious trend that has continued through Godzilla v. Kong with Rebecca Hall as our lead).  So it was literally *buying* gravitas with the casting choices.  Which was maybe needed after the 1998 debacle.  

Leaving the movie, I remember a vague sense of disappointment, but wasn't blogging at the time, so there's no record of what I was thinking.  In the 9 years since I've re-watched the movie, I'd kind of forgotten what the deal was.  Certainly I remembered them bumping off Binoche in the film's first five minutes, and that Cranston similarly exits the film in the first act, when I thought he was going to be our lead.