Asking the Wrong Questions

This is going to be less a review as an I told you so. When I reviewed the first part of Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Frank Herbert's psychedelic space opera three years ago, I offered praise mingled with skepticism. I admired the film's stark, gargantuan visuals, but also observed how its monochromatic palette felt almost like a panicked reaction to the campy visual excess of David Lynch's 1984 film version. I praised some of the decisions Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts made to the novel's lumpy, problematic plot—and more importantly, their willingness to make those decisions and make the story their own—but also observed how they tended to file off anything that was too weird or creepy about the original story, streamlining it into a familiar, Game of Thrones -style tale of palace intrigue and squabbles between royal houses. There was something about the first Dune that seemed almost respectability-obsessed. It left me wondering how this would team han...

The Marvels is the first movie that makes me think the MCU might actually be over. Not because it's bad—it is, in fact, quite charming and enjoyable, solidly mid-tier Marvel, and near the top of the pack for a post- Endgame movie. And not even because it has been a box office disappointment—though in the conversation surrounding this underperformance, not enough has been said about how it represents less a reaction to the movie itself, and more the accumulated fatigue of an audience burned out by Eternals , Ant-Man 3 , and a slew of underwhelming Disney+ shows. No, the reason I think The Marvels might be the beginning of the end is that, beyond litigating its dismal box office performance, no one is talking about it. And there is, to be clear, a lot to talk about here. As little as five years ago I think this movie would have unleashed the kind of discourse tsunami that we saw in the wake of Winter Soldier , Age of Ultron , Civil War , or the first Captain Marvel . But now, cric...

So, friends, what is going on with the MCU? We're now at the end of phase four (I think? I've lost track of that sort of thing entirely) and there's a very palpable sense of the air coming out of the balloon. By which I mean not that the movies have gotten bad—some of them are ( Eternals ) but most are still falling squarely within the same C-minus-to-B-plus range that has characterized this franchise from day one. And yet, without very much having changed, it's clear that something has changed. The MCU used to be something that I—and a lot of other people—enjoyed talking about, and maybe even more than that, arguing with . When it was bad, that was something that felt worth calling out . Now it's just something to shrug at. [1] What I want to do with this post, then, is not so much review the new Ant-Man movie (which is definitely at the C-minus end of the aforementioned scale but still isn't that exciting to talk about) as to try to work out what it can tell ...

[This post first appeared, in slightly different form, at Lawyers, Guns & Money .] The conversation about the parlous state of the romantic comedy has been going on for so long that it has consumed not only buckets of virtual ink, but the real-world variety too. At this stage, it might be time to admit that the genre's heyday in the 80s and 90s was more of a blip than the long fallow period we've been in ever since. And yet, every few years someone comes up with a new killer app to save the romcom. Remember when (500) Days of Summer was going to revitalize the genre? Remember how, in the wake of the success of How I Met Your Mother , someone coined the term rom-sitcom and declared that from now on, all romcoms would be TV shows? Remember when Hulu crowed about screening the world's first Christmas romcom to focus on a lesbian couple, and then we watched with horrified fascination as Mackenzie Davis treated Kristen Stewart worse than any male romcom lead has ever treat...

There's a problem I've talked about before on this blog, of trying to review something really good and not knowing what to say about it beyond "it's really good, guys". When a work is bad, or even just flawed, you have an access point. When something works on all levels, though, it can be hard to tease out the threads that makes that success happen, to find the specific selling point that might attract an audience to it. That problem is compounded in the case of A24's sci-fi extravaganza Everything Everywhere All at Once —a film that, in my reckoning, is currently in the running for the best movie of 2022. True to its name, this is a film that is doing, and about, so much at any given moment that to focus on any specific aspect of it runs the risk of getting pulled down a rabbit hole, bogged down in specifics while losing sight of the whole. See, for example, how much there is to say just in summing up the film's plot. Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn, a harried...

There's a moment early in the new Doctor Strange movie that seems to promise something genuinely dark. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is attending the wedding of his ex-girlfriend Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams). He ends up seated next to Nic (Michael Stuhlbarg), a former colleague from his days as a surgeon, who informs Strange that during the five year interregnum when they were both reduced to dust by Thanos, his brother died. Was there, Nic asks, really no other way to defat Thanos than the one Strange chose? And for a moment, you feel it. The sheer existential terror, the crippling despair, of existing in a universe in which the very fabric of your reality is subject to the whims—or even the considered decisions—of not just cosmic beings like Thanos, but ordinary people like Strange. The sort of people you might end up chatting to at a wedding, while having to swallow the knowledge that they have determined the course of your life—often without even knowing that you...

My overall reaction to this movie is: "fine, I guess". And perhaps that's less a function of the film itself as of the state of the character, who has received five different cinematic takes in thirty years, the last two of which have converged on a sort of a Batman orthodoxy that mandates gloom, brooding, and violence. But even allowing for the tiredness of the material, Matt Reeves's version feels uninspired, stitched together from the pieces of previous attempts, lightly rehashing ideas that have already been thoroughly chewed over, and adding nothing new to the concept or the character. The guiding principle was clearly " The Dark Knight , but more so". The film is structured more as a crime story than a superhero story, with a strong presence for the Gotham police department, an emphasis on organized crime and institutional corruption, and a deranged villain—Paul Dano as the Riddler—who is obsessed with exposing the seedy underbelly of the supposedly re...

Black Widow is overdue. It's overdue since 2020, which is when the film was slated to be released before COVID shuffled movie schedules along with everything else. It's overdue since 2019, which is when its main character died a heroic death that turned her first solo foray into a prequel. It's overdue since 2016, which is when its story is set (specifically, between the next-to-last and last scenes of Captain America: Civil War ). It's overdue since 2012, which is when MCU fandom began clamoring for a movie starring Natasha Romanoff, after she became the breakout character of Avengers . And it is, arguably, overdue since 2008, which is when the architects of the MCU decided on a roadmap that did not include even a single movie headlined by a woman. This lateness contributes to the feeling one gets while watching Black Widow , that it is fundamentally inessential, more important for what it represents—the return of the MCU to movie theaters after a two-year absence; th...

At some point in the last decade, Christopher Nolan became known as a purveyor of experiences. Not movies, not stories, but immersive sensory extravaganzas that one must delve into completely unprepared, or risk losing some ineffable quality that can never be regained. It's hard to pinpoint when this transformation occurred—it doesn't seem to have been in place for Inception , which was marketed rather plainly as a movie about a team who conduct heists in people's dreams. But that film, and especially its reception as a philosophical text, seem to have been the tipping point. The increasing weaponization of FOMO, through which Hollywood has learned to market as unmissable, go-in-knowing-nothing experiences even those movies that could easily have been sold on the strength of their plot, also played a part. Which is how we arrived at 2020, a year in which nobody should even consider spending two hours in a closed, climate-controlled room with two hundred strangers, and fou...