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The Average Spider-Man

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 05:43:34 GMT

For some reason, Sony's not releasing the new Spider-Man film until January seventh in Japan. I guess that's better than Ghostbusters: Afterlife, another Sony film, which isn't being released until February. What gives? Sony's a Japanese company and Covid's not nearly as bad in Japan. I guess I'm not bent out of shape about it--I hated Spider-Man: Far From Home and the new one has the same director and writers. I guess it goes to show how much I like the character that I'm willing to shell out money to see it. Or maybe I'm just happy that it managed to beat out China's propaganda film, The Battle at Lake Changjin, to be the top grossing film of the year. But, really, the entertainment media look like a bunch of saps for having faith in the numbers China reported for Chiangjin and Hi, Mom. You're really trying to tell me there are more people in China who wanted to see a cheap period war film than who wanted to see No Time to Die or even Venom 2?

Anyway, whatever my love for the character, I realised I'd never gotten around to watching 2011's The Amazing Spider-Man. This is despite the fact that I like Emma Stone and I thought Andrew Garfield was amazing in Never Let Me Go. I guess I was sore about them booting Sam Raimi. Well, now Raimi's making one for the real MCU, though I heard Disney's demanded a lot of reshoots of him. Yeah, though he can make a Spider-Man or Evil Dead 2, Raimi does now and then make a Spider-Man 3, but I'd still say the price for allowing an auteur his freedom is well worth it in the long run. Eighty years from now, a lot of the MCU movies will have about the same status The Egyptian or The Robe has now, those massive sand and sandal epics of the 1950s most people don't remember who were born after 1960.

And The Amazing Spider-Man stands as testimony of just how boring a film can be when it's produced by people whose concerns are limited to marketability.

Garfield and Stone do give good performances, particularly Garfield, who manages to make all of the many moments his Peter Parker is at a loss for words completely distinct and reflective of internal motives. It's great, too, seeing a Spider-Man movie again where the love interests seem like they're sexually attracted to each other instead of just accepting couplehood by default. Altogether, though, The Amazing Spider-Man feels very small.

A big part of it is the cinematography, which is much darker than the Raimi films or the Jon Watts films. It seems more appropriate for a Batman movie but Batman movies are more stylish than this. This movie's whole style concept just seems to be "darker". And that extends to Spider-Man's costume which includes big sunglass lenses for the eyes.

But, just like the Raimi and Watts films, he spends way too much time with the mask off. It's especially egregious in the Jon Watts movies when the mask's eyes are more expressive. The filmmakers never let the audience get used to the idea that this is his normal face, that Peter Parker's face is the disguise. After it worked so well with Deadpool, there's no excuse for it now.

Anyway, the performances are all good in The Amazing Spider-Man except they never overcome the lifelessness of Webb's direction. Garfield has a lot of time to spend with Sally Field and Martin Sheen who create a distinct dynamic for the Parker household. But the scenes are shot like those general purpose, stock videos sold to advertisers.

So, if Sony knows what's good for it, they'll never waste time revisiting this iteration of the character . . .

The Amazing Spider-Man is available on Netflix in Japan.

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To Wakanda, a Dream Country

Sun, 18 Feb 2018 20:51:51 GMT

I didn't honestly think I was going to like 2018's Black Panther. The trailers didn't look good, filled with lousy cgi, and I thought Chadwick Boseman's portrayal of Black Panther was the dullest part of Captain America: Civil War. But the film I saw on Friday was pretty enjoyable, largely due to an excellent supporting cast, particularly Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, and Letitia Wright. The story's central political conflict, though it owes a lot to the first Thor movie, was also engaging and provided an interesting commentary on contemporary American politics.

This is the shot I especially hated in the trailer. It's so clear every grouping of people on all the little outcrops aren't really there. The movie's shots of Wakanda, the fabulous secret high tech city, generally made me long for the gritty realism of Coruscant in the Star Wars prequels. The film would've benefited a lot from some actual African shooting locations.

I really don't understand why this film was shot entirely in Atlanta and South Korea. It wasn't long ago that Mad Max: Fury Road, a film shot largely in Namibia, was a smash success. My guess is Disney's insurance wouldn't cover African locations. The 1950s and 60s were filled with Hollywood films with real African locations, from 1950's amazing King Solomon's Mines to John Huston's classic The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. Ironically, the period so associated with soundstage exteriors has a more authentic location feel than this 2018 film.

But Black Panther is really a fantasy about the United States. Michael B. Jordan is another excellent member of the supporting cast, playing the villain Killmonger. His rise in the Wakandan government, overthrowing the anointed ruler T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman), will remind more than a few people of Donald Trump for Killmonger's ruthlessness and for the way the mechanisms of government and tradition compels people to automatically follow him. In fact, Boseman himself has pointed out similarities to Trump's election. To be fair, though, Killmonger seems like he's more capable of empathy than Trump. I suppose it's a bad sign when a guy named "Killmonger" comes off as more sensitive and altruistic than the U.S. president.

But the resemblance adds an interesting dimension to a plot otherwise strongly reminiscent of Kenneth Branagh's Thor. Arguably, both films are drawing on the Edgar/Edmund subplot from King Lear. One could very naturally give Edmund's "Why bastard?" speech to Killmonger, who is made T'Challa's illegitimate brother for the film:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me?
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? With baseness? bastardy? Base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth within a dull stale tired bed
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops
Got ’tween asleep and wake?

Oddly, Boseman's uninteresting performance actually makes him seem a bit more like royalty. Listening to his flat line deliveries reminded me of listening to Prince Harry and thinking, "This guy's supposed to be important?" It's also not unlike how Thor was meant to be sort of a good natured but simple minded fellow in the first movie before filmmakers decided to emphasise Chris Hemsworth's comedic talents. When the much better trained and charismatic Killmonger challenges T'Challa, a lot of the tension comes from how difficult it is to see why T'Challa deserves to be king instead of Killmonger. I would have really liked if the film included montages contrasting the upbringing of Killmonger and T'Challa, showing how Jordan struggled on the streets of Oakland before beginning the hard military training that led to him becoming a Navy Seal while T'Challa was doing . . . whatever a Wakandan prince is brought up doing. One suspects it's nowhere near as rough.

Since Wakanda doesn't exist, its isolationism and hoarding of its superior technology and resources as a country that was never colonised makes it more reminiscent of the United States than any African country and Killmonger's plight, coming from an impoverished lower class, gives his conflict with the Wakandan elite a resonance more like the poor working class who voted for Trump as, Michael Moore observed, a "fuck you" gesture to the paralysed Washington political machine.

The first part of Black Panther is a bit tedious, though, concentrating on ceremony and airless banter, like that moment in the trailer where T'Challa insists he doesn't "freeze". This stuff is finally replaced by a fun film when Letitia Wright is introduced as Shuri, T'Challa's sister, a tech genius who provides her brother with gadgets in a role very much like Q in the James Bond films.

Her teasing him drew the first genuine laughter from me. This is followed by the other highlight when Okoye (Danai Gurira), head of Wakanda's female militia, and Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o), a spy for Wakanda and T'Challa's love interest, join the Black Panther for his mission to South Korea, their personalities easily eclipsing his. I would so love to see a buddy cop movie starring Gurira and Nyong'o. Throughout the rest of the film, any time none of these three women are onscreen, I found myself impatiently waiting for their return. More than anything else, they're the ones that truly make this movie work.

Twitter Sonnet #1085

A line in straw presents the only shield.
The sensors broke upon beholding stars.
The rabbits green dispersed in barley field.
The wind contorts the wheat to drying cars.
A waiting ghost returns the mind to dawn.
A sprinkling starred the darkened forest edge.
Collected hues combine chromatic brawn.
The boulder 'neath the house is called a ledge.
A massive cursor moves the mouse anew.
In shapely time the pear's too like a watch.
Ordained for fast repast the snows accrue.
A dip between the wire hills was notched.
A paper rights itself on inky tracks.
The shelling front prepares for turtle backs.

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Old Jobs versus New Tech

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 21:55:02 GMT

The connexion between making money and survival, for you and your loved ones, as always been fertile ground for drama in stories set in the U.S. 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming dramatises the political struggle between a working class whose sense of morality has been warped by the money-making imperative and a new generation who is so accustomed to economic privilege that abdication of higher moral responsibility seems monstrous. Not all of the implications may have been intended but the film certainly has economic class in mind while presenting, in some ways, the best and most true to his comic roots Spider-Man brought to film: Tom Holland as an unmistakeably adolescent Peter Parker. In some ways, though, the character deviates quite a bit from his original comic book incarnation in order to make its argument on the economic landscape.

Michael Keaton as Adrian Toomes, a.k.a. The Vulture, is the best villain to feature in an MCU film, largely because he's barely a villain. He's a salvage contractor who's muscled out of the job of picking up alien scrap from the first Avengers movie by the Department of Damage Control, a government department set up by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.). This after he'd already spent money on the resources necessary to clean up the stuff so now he and his team have to get creative if they have any hope of bringing a paycheck home. This is the kind of problem Peter Parker would've been familiar with in his original Stan Lee and Steve Ditko incarnation--Peter was constantly worrying about bringing enough money home to support his aunt May and himself. And he certainly wasn't above using his new-found powers to make a buck--something we see in Sam Raimi's adaptation, though I don't remember seeing one of my favourite scenes from the comic, where our hero tries to cash a check made out to "Spider-Man".

No mention is made of May having serious financial woes in Homecoming and Peter seems to feel no pressure to make money. When Tony Stark mentions he can get Peter into a good school, the kid barely seems to notice. It's no wonder he seems to have no sympathy for the lengths Toomes goes to to support his family.

The fact that Peter isn't thoroughly irritating is one of the film's greatest achievements and it's accomplished with the same goal that makes the new Wonder Woman movie work so well--Peter really cares about helping people and he has what seems like a very honest humility.

He isn't a guy looking for a fight, he's a guy looking to help out, and if that involves fighting he's ready to do it. He's not above giving an old lady directions and he's deeply apologetic when he accidentally webs a guy trying to break into his own car. Like Wonder Woman, he's a welcome return to the original idea of Superman, the idea of a really powerful person who really is more interested in making life better for everyone than in stroking his own ego or getting revenge. Like Raimi's incarnation of the character, he's also really excited to be Spider-Man and do Spider-Man things, but he naturally sees this as something he doesn't keep to himself--when some guys on the street ask him to do a flip, he automatically does it. Later, when his friend tries to talk him into showing up as Spider-Man at a party to improve Peter Parker's reputation, he realises how stupid this is and seems like he would have avoided doing it if a crisis hadn't called him away anyway.

The character is also helped a lot by some lessons taken from Deadpool. In addition to giving the mask expressive eyes, the filmmakers also seem to have recognised that the character's awkwardness is a strength and here it makes even more sense when kid Spidey is a but a wisp of a lad.

I hope to whatever gods might be listening that no remake of Back to the Future goes forward but if someone were casting a new Marty McFly I could see Tom Holland being a very good fit. He has a real Michael J. Fox quality, handsome but with a sort of ungainly kittenishness. All this helps make the movie's underlying drama more interesting.

It's hard to believe this movie was wrapped before the election last year. Vulture almost seems like he's meant to be the working class Donald Trump voters while Peter is the Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama who failed to campaign for that working class demographic. On that note, the movie has an optimism in its conclusion I wish I could share in.

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