In which I have options

Luther M. Siler

I can actually write a piece about what happened in Washington DC this week. It’s definitely coming, but it’s going to be lengthy as hell if I write it, and it’ll likely be obsolete in some way by the time I hit the Publish button.

Or I can recognize that it’s Friday night, and I’m tired as fuck, and this week has been insanely stressful on a level I haven’t encountered since, well, this exact week last year, where not only did my mother die but, if you recall, we were all concerned about going to war with Iran, and I can watch a couple of episodes of Attack on Titan, be a shark for a while on my PS5, read a book, and go to bed.

Tough choice.

#REVIEW: Wonder Woman 1984

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

I LiveTweeted my way through this last night– I’m going to say a lot of the same things in the review so I’m not going to include them, but feel free to go look— and it takes a certain type of movie for me to do that for: the movie must be either entertaining and kind of dumb, or I have to hate it. And Wonder Woman 1984 has been receiving some seriously mixed reviews, so I had a little bit of worry going into this– the original Wonder Woman is still easily my favorite DC movie since Christopher Reeve was playing Superman, and I was worried they’d fucked it all up.

Spoiler alert: they did not, in fact, fuck it all up.

I mean, there’s some fuckery afoot, don’t get me wrong. But they did not fuck it all up.

Now, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here: while Wonder Woman 1984 never gets close to the heights of gloriously dumb that Aquaman reached, there is nonetheless quite a bit of glorious dumb in this movie, and really it has a lot more tonally in common with Aquaman than it does with the first Wonder Woman movie. That said, heart goes a long way with me, and this movie has heart to spare, and I am officially elevating Patty Jenkins to the best superhero-movie director working today, because once again she has demonstrated that she remembers her main character is a superhero and there are a number of places in this movie where crazy shit like saving people and– wait for it, this will startle you– stopping crime is Wonder Woman’s priority.

This is, in a lot of ways, a yeah, but type of movie, where everything that is wrong with it also leads to at least one thing that is good about it, and so ultimately your takeaway from it will depend on whether the bad things annoy you more than the good things made you happy. Some examples? Sure!

Steve Trevor did not belong in this movie! Yeah, but that scene with the flying, and the other scene with the flying, and the way he leaves the movie?

Pedro Pascal is about twelve times as much actor as this role needed, and spent most of the film blissfully gobbling up scenery! Yeah, but he sells the hell out of the last fifteen minutes of the movie, and when was the last time you saw a movie where the villain was defeated by reminding him that he loves his son?

Hey, did you hear that this movie was set in 1984? Because it’s totally set in 1984! Yeah, but … okay, they leaned into that one a little harder than they really needed to.

I don’t understand why movie people can write a film set in the 1930s or for that matter the freaking 840s without pounding you over the head that their movie is a period piece, but every movie set in a decade I remember has to constantly beat you over the head with time period references.

There’s a couple of exceptions, of course: Kristen Wiig didn’t really have a lot to do, and should have had her own movie. There are bits and pieces of her performance that I really liked, but her character bounces off of Steve Trevor in a really weird way (it is obvious, to the point where it could not have been an accident, that Barbara Minerva and Diana Prince have a hell of a lot of chemistry together, in a way that Diana and Trevor really don’t) and I felt like she deserved a stronger arc than she got, particularly at the end of the movie. And a lot of people really seem to have enjoyed the bit at the beginning of the film set on Themiscyra; I am not among them. They should have used that time to give us more of an indication of what Diana has actually been doing with herself other than spending 70 years pining over the first dude she’d ever met, who she knew for a week.

(I knew intellectually that there was no way they’d do this, but there was a bit in the film where I felt like Steve Trevor was about to remind Diana that they’d only known each other for a week, and whoa, lady, let’s pump the brakes here on the eternal love thing just a lil’ bit.)

(Trevor’s entire thing in this movie, from start to finish, is kind of a problem, but it’s a problem that’s mostly outside the movie, if that makes any sense.)

So, yeah: I have some gripes. I loved Wonder Woman, and I wanted to love this movie, and I didn’t. But it’s not a bad movie; it’s a solid B or B+ type of film, for me, mostly on the strength of Gadot’s performance and Jenkins’ story decisions. The DC Murderverse films’ biggest flaw is that they forget who their characters are, and they have a thing called the Justice League that has no concern with “justice” as a concept whatsoever and that the characters they’ve written would never have named their organization in the first place. Wonder Woman 1984 remains defiantly outside the Murderverse, out there with Shazam! and Aquaman and making fun of the Supr Srs murples and throwing popcorn at them. Go ahead and pay the $14.95 to join HBO Max for a month; you’d have paid more than that to see this in theaters anyway and it’s well worth that amount of money and an evening of your time.

#REVIEW: Birds of Prey

Luther M. Siler

…and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. Because I’m not putting that entire damn title into the headline.

It’s possible that you remember my review of Suicide Squad, way back in 2016 before the world went mad, which was basically “this is exactly the movie you think it is, only maybe 20% better.” Birds of Prey isn’t exactly a sequel to Suicide Squad, but it isn’t not a sequel to Suicide Squad, and in a whole lot of ways it’s exactly the same movie, right down to me being able to basically review it the same way: even if you haven’t seen this movie, you already know what you think about it, because this movie is exactly what it appears to be, and you probably already know what you think of those types of movies. It’s big and kinda dumb and kinda pretty and the acting is a weird combination of interesting and entirely inexplicable and, like most things, it could have been much shorter if Batman had been in it.

Seriously, there’s a bit toward the end where “You’re Harley Quinn, I bet you can find a way to attract Batman’s attention” is easily the best way to solve the problem the characters have, but then they’d have to find a way to stuff his name into that title and it’s already too unwieldy. This was an interesting comic book movie for me to watch, honestly, because despite being a Batman fan in general I actually own very few Batman-related comic books and I really don’t know much about most of these characters beyond the very broadest strokes, and even then I had to look a few people up here and there. The big draw is the action sequences, of course, which are better than a bunch of other comic-book movies I’ve seen, and I found myself a big fan of Jurnee Smollett-Bell’s performance as Black Canary, especially a reveal she gets toward the end.

Ewan McGregor is in it. His performance is … memorable. Yes. I will remember his performance. That is true and accurate. His final scene is also Quite a Thing. Like, “my wife and I both yelled out loud at 11:30 at night when The Thing happened” level Quite a Thing.

If you want to see it, it’s available as a digital rental right now; I would recommend you follow your gut on it. If you think you’ll enjoy it, you probably will and I suggest you check it out. If Harley doesn’t interest you, I don’t think this will help much with that, though. I hear Snowpiercer is going to be a TV show soon; maybe check that out. 🙂

5:20 PM, Sunday, May 10: 1,326,328 confirmed cases and 79,384 deaths, thankfully not much of a change from yesterday’s numbers, although that’s typical for a Sunday.

SHAZAM! Non-spoiler #Review

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

This is going to be a non-spoiler review (I’m only directly discussing stuff revealed in the trailers) because I did manage to see this early, even if it was only the night before general release. Honestly, the movie did catch me by surprise a couple of times and I feel like I want everyone going in to have the same chance at that that I had.

Also, continuing with the Facebook blustering: do not expect me to call the superhero “Shazam” at any point in this review. The movie is named Shazam! The wizard is named Shazam. The superhero is named Captain Marvel, and I don’t give a damn what DC or Warner Brothers’ legal departments have to say about that. If having two superheroes named Captain Marvel confuses you in a world where three superheroes are played by blond white men named Chris, I can’t help you.

I also have bad news for you about who the real “Captain Marvel” actually is.

Onward!

So. Yeah. Go see it. Go see it go see it GO SEE IT GO SEE IT GO SEE IT RIGHT NOW. This is exactly– exactly— the movie that I wanted to see, and you should go see it right now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, standard disclaimers; I get enthusiastic. But I’m having a really hard time right now imagining how a movie about this Captain Marvel could have been any better than this one was, and I’m starting to have some hope that at least some corners of the people involved in making movies for DC have a clue about what they’re doing. They’ve now produced two great movies (Wonder Woman and Shazam!) and one (Aquaman) that … well, wasn’t actually good really but was awfully enthusiastic and fun. Okay, the rest of them have all been some flavor of hot garbage, but … progress, right?

Here’s the thing: You can’t do grimdark Captain Marvel. You just can’t. It doesn’t work unless, like in Kingdom Come, the point is that absolutely everything has been corrupted and fucked up. Captain Marvel’s childlike innocence and faith are at the core of the character, and while they’ve wisely made Billy Batson a bit older than usual for this movie they still get what he’s supposed to be. Much like Wonder Woman, this movie actually understands the character they’re making a movie about(*), and it remembers the very fucking important fact that Captain Marvel is supposed to be a Goddamned superhero and superheroes are supposed to save people.

And they kept Zach Snyder and his cancerous-ass direction as far away from this movie as they could, and they did it a hundred percent right, and they very much should be rewarded for it. I want this movie to make a lot of money, and I want the people responsible for DC’s movies to learn from it, dammit. There is no trace of the Murderverse in this movie. It’s wonderful.

The acting in the film is across-the-board phenomenal, particularly the two leads and the kid who plays Freddy Freeman, and if the movie has a flaw it’s that Freddy almost seems like he’d make a better Captain Marvel than Billy Batson does. He’s the heart of the film, though, and while Captain Marvel is an inherently cheesy superhero (one of his nicknames is literally The Big Red Cheese, y’all) the movie dips into the cheesiness without ever being overwhelmed by it. The action is well-shot, the effects are phenomenal, and– rather unexpectedly– the bad guy and his minions are scary as hell, to the point where I’d caution against taking anyone under 10 to see this without previewing it first. It’s PG-13 for a reason. Is it weird that a movie about a kid superhero can’t be seen by kids? Maybe a little, but again: they aged Billy up a little bit and the movie is a bit more mature than one with an 11- or 12-year old Billy Batson might be. This movie isn’t PG-13 because they say “shit” a few times, even though they do. The movie is PG-13 because Dr. Sivana is too scary for a PG villain.

If you are the type to be irritated by Superhero Physics, where a bus can fall off a bridge and be caught by a man standing underneath the bridge and no one in the bus is harmed because the superhero caught the bus … well, remember that Captain Marvel’s powers are literally magical and maybe be prepared to have to roll with that. Because there is a lot of Superhero Physics in this movie. He’s magic. You’ll be OK.

So, yeah: we’re seeing a great trend recently, with Into the Spider-Verse and now Shazam!, where studios that aren’t Marvel are finally starting to figure out how to make superhero movies that aren’t crap. This is what we’ve been telling them we want, guys. Reward good behavior, and go see this one.

(*) Jason Momoa’s Arthur Curry is not remotely the Arthur Curry from the comic books, but frankly Aquaman himself has always been treated as such a flat character that it barely even registers. I’ve been reading comics since I was nine and I couldn’t tell you how Aquaman might react to a situation differently from any random human selected from the side of the road other than a vague commitment to environmentalism. I can’t tell you how a movie that “gets” Aquaman might look different from one that doesn’t. I can for damn sure do that for most of the rest of DC’s heroes, and they’ve fallen down repeatedly on this front.

In which I get lucky

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

My wife and I get to see Shazam a little bit early tonight, which is super cool. I kinda lucked out getting the tickets; the folks at the comic shop had an extra pair that a customer had given them to “give to a good home,” and I guess we’re a good home.

I’m spending the day fiddling around the house trying to accomplish minor things– the impending end of my Spring Break is starting to weigh on me a bit– so in lieu of an actual post today, have this Superman/Captain Marvel short comic, which I found on imgur yesterday and am frantically trying to find the source material for because I must own it. “Who did this to you?” is the most Superman reaction ever:

(EDIT: This is from Superman/Shazam: First Thunder, by Judd Winick and Joshua Middleton. It came out in 2006.)

(Oh, what the hell– while I’m at it, these pages from Mark Waid and Alex Ross’ Kingdom Come, one of the best Superman/Captain Marvel stories ever published. Context: it’s in the future, Superman has returned from retirement, and Captain Marvel has been brainwashed into villainy by Lex Luthor, which is why they’re fighting.)