Web Sight: SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the most straightforwardly entertaining Marvel movie in quite some time. It has no multiversal shenanigans or television tie-ins. It’s just a story about colorful characters colliding in the concrete canyons of New York City. Turns out Spidey’s at his best when he’s swinging between skyscrapers. That’s not to say the movie is without its Cinematic Universe trappings. It gets cluttered up with cameos and references and gives over most of its plotting in the back half to what is effectively a backdoor pilot for future comic book storylines with another character entirely. And yet it works pretty well, dovetailing with Peter Parker (Tom Holland) struggling with identity, while fueling some clever action sequences. We get lots of vignettes of crime-fighting, an attempt to stop a hijacked tank rumbling through the streets, a couple psychic chase scenes, and even some hopping among ninjas. Best is one that zips up, down, around, out, and through the top levels of a towering building while Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Punisher (Jon Bernthal) alternately help and hurt our main hero. It does a good job juggling variables, and heights. Finally we get one of these MCU Spider-Man movies getting the full vertiginous effect out of his hometown. Even the establishing shots of magic hour skylines or twinkling nighttime windows have some much-needed specificity that the increasingly hermetic green screens and volume video walls lacked in previous entries. (It doesn’t always feel like New York, but it generally feels like a real city streets. Progress!) Is it setting the bar too low to say this one always looks and plays out like a real movie?

It helps that the focus is on Spider-Man himself, even in the midst of all the walk-ons, foreshadowing, references, and loose threads. He’s center stage here; other heroes are clear supporting players in his story. He’s put through an emotional trial, grieving a death from the previous film, as well as recovering from the aftermath of the spell that caused everyone to forget Peter Parker. The citizens still love Spidey, but he’s never been more alone. He’s in constant action, and losing his sense of self. The balance between those ideas is held well in Holland’s body language. He’s a believably more mature and stressed superhero than his high school days. And it’s held in the tone and style, which director Destin Daniel Cretton is well-equipped to pull off from his experience with both outsized acrobatics (Shang-Chi) and small character studies (Short Term 12). He gets good milage out of the chemistry with Zendaya’s MJ, strained by her not knowing their history but sparkling all the same. And he digs into a mysterious quasi-villain played by Sadie Sink, who gets some terrific scenes, even if they often wink and nod in the direction other movies might take. (If they stick to their burgeoning metaphors in later entries, they might be onto something.) The movie is doing a lot, and suffers a bit for it, but it’s intending more of a sampler platter to go along with its core Spidey splash panels. It also manages to not devolve into CG nonsense for its climax, finding instead character-driven motivations and payoffs to root its effects. It’s all pretty entertaining. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to enjoy one of these. 

Coming Home: THE ODYSSEY

Christopher Nolan loves to play with time. Think about the dual timelines of Oppenheimer, the three speeds of Dunkirk, the backwards-and-forwards in Tenet, the dream levels in Inception, and relativity in Interstellar. So of course a part of Homer’s Odyssey that appeals to him is structural. Here’s a story that starts with an absence: Odysseus is gone. It’s been twenty years since he left for the Trojan War and, though his wife and son have long ago heard that the conflict has ended, he’s yet to return home. The son (Tom Holland) sneaks away from his mother (Anne Hathaway) and heads out to discover what happened to his father (Matt Damon). The story of his father’s leaving is told by a blind old man (John Leguizamo). An explanation of what happened during that absence is partially filled in by anecdotes from those who were at Troy and since made it home. It’s also filled in with Odysseus’ recollections of his travels, recounted on a remote island to a mysterious woman (Charlize Theron) as the words of a broken man slowly reawakening to his own memories. There’s also, in a nod to the original work’s oral tradition, a bard (Travis Scott) who gets the first words in the film: A face. A fleet. A war. A man. It’s his “sing to me of a man of twists and turns…” The movie feels suitably big and sprawling. The big budget’s on the screen. But because of its winding and familiar narrative, and the ways in which the telling holds back the emotions, Nolan’s typical momentum here draws slack as Odysseus’ crew gets lost and the chronology aligns. 

It ends up one of Nolan’s most straight-forward narratives, a recounting of several of the epic poem’s most famous sequences: the Trojan horse, encounters with giants, sirens, sea monsters, a witch, a cyclops, the dead. It’s given the full over-sized Nolan effect. The cast is jam-packed with recognizable faces doing solid work in every small role. The frames of IMAX film stock are towering and detailed with extras and effects. The landscapes and waterways are vast and real. (We’re never far from the roar and expanse of the wine-dark sea.) The soundtrack pounds away with repetitive deep bass and tense strings. And the film stretches to nearly three hours, winding its long way to the expected climactic homecoming confrontation. Along the way, the film smooths over some of the original text’s thornier elements, while introducing new notes of darkness and ambiguity (or muddling) all its own. Nolan makes the gods largely absent, but the monsters very real, and the effects of each moral failing fraught. It becomes a down-beat journey through a movie about loss and disappointment, about suffering the consequences of one’s actions and struggling to find honor and acceptance in troubled times. It finds uneasy answers, opting to give a bit of relational hope in its final moments even as the larger picture of civilization seems poised to topple. It evokes a certain amount of melancholy to have ancient Greeks talk about “living in ruins.” This Odysseus is full of regrets, feeling deeply the poems early lines that promise “he could not save [his people] from disaster…” In bringing this ancient story back to life, Nolan seems to be making a case for recognizing the damage in breaking old societal bonds for short-term gains, and how it leaves us all lost, fighting back to level from disaster. That may not be fully Homer, but it’s definitely now. How’s that for playing with time?

Moving Pictures: LUMIÈRE LE CINÉMA! andMINIONS & MONSTERS

We can always count on the French to do their part in keeping cinephilia alive. Thierry Frémaux takes us back to the dawn of the movies with his documentary Lumière, Le Cinéma! The form of the film couldn’t be more simple. The effect could not be more illuminating or entrancing. It’s a collection of late-19th century short films by the Lumière brothers, played one after the next without interruption. Frèmaux narrates, contextualizing and analyzing what we see. This is part of his ongoing project of researching and restoring the Lumières’ works. Those pioneers of cinema are perhaps best known today for two films: The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station and Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon. The apocryphal story of the audience leaping out of the way of the oncoming train has taken on a position as the mythic Birth of Cinema. You don’t need to think of the imaginary audience. Look at what’s really there on screen. The documentary realism of the camera’s witness of both machines and people locate these two shorts squarely in the time of the industrial revolution, and set a standard for the camera as observer that carries us through today. Together these shorts tell us a helpful story about the appeal of the movies. They provoke strong reactions. They take us places we may never go and show us people we’d never meet. 

The magic of these formative images is compounded by the truth of their making and their context within a body of work. Not content to repeat those greatest hits, Frèmaux’s patient pace and thorough explanations take us through more formative moments captured on shimmering celluloid—early comedic conceits, gymnastic stunts, home movies, anthropological travelogue. What an expansion of our understanding of their contributions! We see people behaving so naturally in front of the camera, our only opportunity to see people who have no context for what it means to be recorded in this way. We see machines in all their new might, whirring gears and moving parts. We see a window into an old world ending, and a new one arriving. Here’s cinema—the personal and the mechanical, the head and the heart, the documentary and the fantasy—as it’s born. Frèmaux, as artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival, already helps shape contemporary film culture. With this film he pays reverence to the early black and white frames that got us here. To let these shorts wash over you is to clean out your eyes and see moving images afresh.

But what if, when you saw the workers leaving the factory, there were a couple Minions there, too? If you, like me, are already laughing imagining a couple of those goggle-eyed, overalls-wearing, mostly-hairless squishes waddling out alongside turn-of-the-century factory workers, then you get the appeal of Minions & Monsters. The seventh entry of an animated series usually spells creative exhaustion. Instead this movie is the best one yet, and by quite a large margin. Pierre Coffin, director, co-writer, and voice of the eponymous little guys, has taken the opportunity to proudly place his creations as shimmering, glowing stars in the Hollywood firmament. The movie follows a heretofore untold tribe of the Minions who, lost on their centuries-long quest to find a Big Boss to serve, end up in 1920s Hollywood. After a raucous slapstick tumble through the streets, during which they interrupt the filming of a Charlie Chaplin, a Harold Lloyd, and a Buster Keaton film, they end up impressing the heads of a studio with their silliness and pluck. It makes perfect sense they’d be instant silent comedy stars themselves. 

They have an inexhaustible persistence of juvenile spirit, and a seemingly immortal capacity to take and enact cartoon pain and just keep going. There’s always destruction ahead of them and unintended chaos behind them. Popular comic conceits in any time! But, with their Minionese language, they’re left behind in the transition to talkies. Hoping to make a creature feature comeback, a trio of Minions filmmakers summon some cute, but dangerous, Lovecraftian monsters to play the antagonists. So they’re risking the end of the world, or at least Los Angeles. But they’re making cinema! There’s something so pure about these particular Minions’ drive to create movie magic it’s easy to root for them. So it’s a movie about The Movies, a mad jumble of references and influences done as bouncy cartoony joyousness for showbiz history, riffing on countless classics in a gleeful and affectionate way. (You’ll never forget Minion Charles Foster Kane’s dying word.) And it also appreciates the act of creativity’s dual purpose as personal satisfaction and community building. Isn’t nice when a movie loves being a movie? And this one wears it with genuine lightness. Here’s a celebration of moviemaking through being every kind of movie. It’s ultimately an animated slapstick comedy, a satirical period piece, a western, a monster movie, a let’s-put-on-a-show picture, a fantasy, a robot movie, a UFO movie, a behind-the-scenes movie-within-a-movie, and, of course, a Minions movie. Here they’ve risen to their highest potential, unleashed to be a pure mad gag-a-minute delight from first frame to last. To be a real cinephile is to recognize that, to paraphrase Ratatouille, great movies can come from anywhere. And isn’t that why we keep going?

Double Deutch: VOICEMAILS FOR ISABELLE and GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS

Here’s an interesting case study in modern movie distribution. Sony has two comedies starring Zoey Deutch this summer. You might recognize her from supporting roles in Zombieland: Double Tap or Juror #2 or Nouvelle Vague or from confusing her with Haley Lu Richardson. She can make for a sweet and believable center of a movie when given the chance. Of her two starring roles this year, one’s in a straightforward romantic comedy with a traditional blend of charm and sentiment. It’s sturdy crowd-pleasing, pushing all the right buttons. The other’s in an arch alt-comedy riff that transposes The Wizard of Oz into a goofy R-rated joke. It’s deliberately niche, a cult item at best. Which one has been sent straight to Netflix via Sony’s deal with the streamer, and which hit theaters through their boutique Sony Pictures Classics label? Both could’ve found an audience on the big screen. But it’s strange to find the broadly appealing picture is the one you can play from the couch right now. 

If you did you’d find Voicemails for Isabelle is a reasonably effective version of its kind. Deutch plays an aspiring chef trying to survive a tough kitchen run by Nick Offerman. She calls her sister all the time to share the details of her life. They’ve done that since childhood since the younger girl is housebound with an illness and lives vicariously through her big sister’s adventures. When the sister dies, Deutch keeps calling, but the number has been reassigned to the new phone of a yuppie (Nick Robinson) who falls in love with the mystery caller. So he doesn’t message her to let her know it’s now a wrong number just to continue eavesdropping on her life. Eventually he has to meet her. From the premise you can already see the broad strokes of where the plot will go—manipulated Meet Cute to dating montages to revelation to reconciliation. The leads are charming with some sweet chemistry. It gives just enough sparkle to the familiar beats. But where the movie really lifts above routine is the sister relationship, fleshed out in early flashbacks and then lingering throughout the movie as a glossy but honest expression of grief and mourning. Writer-director Leah McKendrick has a light and often routine movie here, with pop music and little quips throughout. It tilts toward glossy phoniness, but remains sensitive with attention to the sisters. It’s the most believable relationship in the movie, and hits hard when gone. That makes the lightness of the surrounding movie all the more of an uplift, and a fantasy. 

Far stranger, though, is Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Writer-director David Wain’s penchant for absurdity and vulgarity is an acquired taste. I quite like his loopy rom-com parody They Came Together, commune satire Wanderlust, and his raunchy man-child comedy Role Models. This one isn’t in that league.  Maybe it’s the ugly digital look, and awkward combination of high-concept winking, sitcom punchlines, and occasional violence and flatulence.(Maybe it’s the severe lack of Paul Rudd, the star of all those earlier pictures.) Regardless I found Gail Daughtry more theoretically funny than actually funny, with the kind of humor you watch silently registering the technical forms of the jokes while rarely rising to level of actual enjoyment. Deutch plays Gail, our Dorothy. The red shoes are a tip off. She’s a naive Kansan hairdresser about to marry a dopey guy next door. They jokingly discuss the hoary concept of the celebrity sex pass. He has a crush on Jennifer Aniston. She’s hot for Jon Hamm. Well, turns out the fiancé actually goes and hooks up with Aniston, which really gets Gail mad. When she’s off on a work trip to L.A. her buddy (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) convinces her to seek out Hamm and do the deed. True to Oz, she meets a collection of misfits on her trip: an absent-minded agent-in-training (Ben Wang), a paparazzo whose heart’s not in it (Ken Marino), and a cowardly John Slattery. There’s also a wicked mob boss (Sabrina Impacciatore) and her flunkies. The whole tone is pitched at a preposterous broad shtick, like a straight John Waters. The actors are committed to the straight-faced absurdity, and there are a few real laughs along the way. (I liked the assistant whose only threat is that he’ll “make you sick!”) But it’s so conceptual and airless that it never fully comes to life. 

Child's Play: TOY STORY 5

Toy Story 5 could’ve been a smartly updated retelling of the original’s replacement anxieties. You'd think being directed and co-written by WALL-E's Andrew Stanton, who has a writing credit on the whole series so far, would help. Pitched as toys versus tech, it starts with the dolls and figurines in Bonnie’s room freaking out about a new addition: a tablet. The Leapfrog knockoff Lilypad instantly captures the 8-year-old’s days, leaving the toys in the dust. Unfortunately, Lilypad (Greta Lee) never becomes much of a distinct character, with little personality and a character arc that’s foreshortened in two quick reversals late in the game. So, instead of the inciting incident kicking off jostling egos among the familiar faces of returning characters facing off against the interloper, cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack, a delight and given all the best moments) takes it upon herself to get Bonnie better friends than the mean girl cyberbullies the tablet attracts. This sends her off hither and yon in an attempt to save their kid’s feelings, and of course Buzz (Tim Allen) and Woody (Tom Hanks) give chase. But the whole thing feels much more cramped and less detailed than the series usually manages. It’s a bland working-over of over-worked tech fears that ends up being more of a pat on the head for harried millennial parents—saying it’s okay to give them tech as long as you check in on their social media messages once in great while. It never takes off into a clever kids’ adventure or engaging object lesson that it could be. 

There is a neat distinction drawn between gaming and playing and the greater social benefit of the latter—it’s nice to see Bonnie make a real friend—but the movie is so focused on the kids’ emotional well-being that it forgets to be much of a toy story. The classic ensemble doesn't even get much in the way of dialogue, punchlines, or story, and the new characters are one-note jokes. My struggling interest finally gave up sometime between Jessie using web-connected toys to manipulate two kids into a play date and a fleet of drones carrying the main cast of plastic beings off to the rescue. I guess I just don’t think toys should be doing all that. This entry in the venerable series—hitherto Pixar’s best!—takes it too far away from neurotic playthings and pushes well past the suspension of disbelief into making them meddling Defenders of Real Childhood. I missed the interest in the frictions and eccentricities of the toy’s personalities and the existential questions about one’s purpose. Here there’s just too little room for interest in their toy society when there’s more time spent on didactically weighing in on ours. Even attempts to connect to the series’ most moving moments—consciously echoing lines and scenes from earlier pictures’ highlights—plays as hollow repetition instead of enriching the emotional texture. Compared to the aesthetic and thematic complications of the previous sequels, which somehow manage to push the detail of the animation and psychology of the characters while maintaining a consistent look and tone in the childish whimsy, this one is all too thin and simple.

Out There: DISCLOSURE DAY

Disclosure Day barely functions as legible paperback thriller plotting, but it is a feast for Steven Spielberg auteurists. It’s a layered work of visual thinking and thematic exploration that’s a buffet of recurring ideas and preoccupations from throughout his oeuvre. And all that plays out as a backdrop for a pretty flimsy central narrative. It makes the movie a totally fascinating experience, and a sometimes distancing one, an open-hearted intellectual and intuitive exercise keeping a chintzy chase picture afloat. Put simply: it’s a MacGuffin chase for stolen government secrets. (There’s also a magic stick, the properties of which shift for the needs of the plot.) The hidden truths within are as follows: aliens exist and the government is covering it up. That’s a little underwhelming after his Close Encounters' transcendent finale of music and science, and E.T.’s fleeting intergalactic friendship, and War of the Worlds’ harrowing invasion and biological protection. Spielberg’s been here before. In Disclosure Day, the characters are ideas. We have Josh O’Connor as a man with a backpack full of USBs containing leaked footage. He’s Technology: research, math, the hard facts. We have Emily Blunt as a TV weatherperson, usually reading the forecasts but now fearful as she finds herself becoming a conduit for brain-scrambling languages and interpersonal connection. She’s The Media: communication, empathy, the messenger. Together they make both halves of the whole message from outer space. They have to avoid the shadowy suit (Colin Firth) who doesn’t want the secrets out. He’s the System. To short-circuit his private army, our heroes need help along the way from another whistleblower (Colman Domingo) who’s orchestrating the big reveal. He’s building a simulacrum from which to trigger their latent memories. He’s Art. The chase also involves a lapsed nun (Eve Hewson). She’s Philosophy, Theology. “You haven’t lost your faith in God,” she’s told by a wise elder nun (Elizabeth Marvel). “You’ve lost your faith in people.” 

So it is that the movie’s about alienation in all senses of the word. It’s set in our modern world where we suspect that there’s more to the official story about most everything, but many aren’t convinced the truth will make a difference. It’s Spielberg spinning a metaphorical web so quickly and masterfully, with such a vivid mess of intentions and references, that it can’t help but skate over some yawning plot holes in the process. His fluid camera teases and traverses spaces, separates and joins perspectives, locked into who sees or knows what and when, easily slipping between perceived realities. It’s a movie that’ll be far too open-hearted for the incorrigible pedantic quibblers in the audience. Spielberg is using the raw materials of his most crowd-pleasing popcorn pictures to make something deep and strange. But it’s an honest movie, and one that risks silliness at most every turn. And, sure enough, the characters are flatly representational and all the running around doesn’t add up to much for which it’s worth investing. But in the high-gloss B-movie mess of it all, Spielberg’s really making a movie about the power of movies to show us what’s really important—a fiction that takes us to deeper truths. This one opens in media res with a smeary digital image—an elbow to the ribs from our master filmmaker—that’s immediately contextualized as diagetic camerawork at a cheap phony wrestling match. It’s a parodical muscle man in red and another in blue playacting conflict for a cheering, jeering, invested crowd. The real conflict happens in the shadow behind them—a confrontation between the leaker and the forces who wish to stomp out his message. 

The movie’s wandering chase sequences and flat exposition then build up to a finale that’s all about listening. It has some of his crisp cross-cutting and Movie Star awestruck gazes and some screens-within-screens of CG effects. But the emotionality rests entirely on a TV reporter played by Courtney Grace, a relatively unknown actress who pulls it off with astonishing work as she narrates for her audience through an array of heightened confusion, wonder, bewilderment, and context collapse. It’s a moving moment of processing the unimaginable in real time. It’s not so much about what she, and we, see in those moments. (What’s actually there teeters on the edge of silly cliche.) It’s about the human connection in that moment, bound together by something real, for once. Spielberg wants us to really listen, to understand each other. To hear a truth is the start of enlightenment. He believes it to the point of transcendence—math and art, mind and heart, The Fabelmans of his own making. It’s that reconciliation that breaks down our all-too-human isolation, between nations, between individuals, and within our own heads. He thinks we need to believe—in a higher power, in the potential to move beyond our selfish fears, in the transformative possibilities of witnessing together. He believes in cinema. He believes in UFOs. He wants to believe. He’s our greatest living filmmaker. His movies are usually airtight and precisely calibrated to function at a high level, on multiple levels, while pleasing crowds. This one dares to fall apart in personal, idiosyncratic moments that resolve in ways only Spielberg’s instincts could pull off. The real disclosure here is his own. 

He's the Man: MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE

I agree with the filmmakers behind the new Masters of the Universe that there’s something a little embarrassing about adults wanting to seriously play with action figures, especially if we’re talking something as silly as 80’s cartoon hero He-Man. Put away childish things and all that. Here’s a story about a scantily clad muscle man with a big sword. He lives in the mythical kingdom of Eternia. He defends it alongside sidekicks with enormous fists or retractable necks. One’s a talking tiger. They’re constantly fighting an evil skeleton man named Skeletor who almost, but never quite, wins. I recognize it has a lot of nostalgia for people of the micro-generation for whom Saturday mornings imprinted its discount fantasy fiction, adventure serial charms. It’s all pretty silly. But if you’re going to do it, just do it. Be embarrassing and it’ll be fun. Director Travis Knight (mostly of stop-motion Laika movies) is almost there. It’s certainly better than the late-80’s live-action attempt, which spent its time in our world, hedging its bets. This one starts in a charmingly artificial CG Eternia and takes the backstory just seriously enough to get some emotive tropes going amid the phoniness. It makes some smart moves. It’s bright and fantastical. It has vibrant, colorful effects. It has an epic orchestral score including a screaming electric guitar part for Queen’s Brian May. (Flash Gordon much?) It has a stacked straight-faced supporting cast (Idris Elba, Camila Mendes, Alison Brie, and so on) in cartoony costumes. It has a naive beefcake leading role (Nicholas Galitzine’s been hitting the gym) and a plot that actually wants to engage in discourse about modern masculine ideals. Poor little Prince Adam is sent to Earth for his protection, but memories of his home realm cause him to search for a portal where he’ll become the He-Man he’s meant to be. 

It’s a pretty standard hero’s journey, and the plot moves are predictable, but have a Saturday matinee appeal. And yet the movie’s held back by its embarrassment. It keeps sheepishly joking about its lore, teasing its cartoon jargon and juvenile naming conventions and toyetic tech. It also has a nervous tick in the dialogue in the back half that undercuts the boys’ adventure spirit with smarmy double- or (worse still) single-entendres out of all that. That’s too bad. It’s Mattel’s second attempt at making a movie out of a product line. Their first was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. This one nearly achieves the masculine to that film’s feminine. It’s about a fantasy world with a porous literal and ideological boundary separating it from ours. It’s about messages kids receive from these plastic figures, albeit these of muscles and violence, and from our current culture’s competing poles of toxic masculinity and bland corporate culture. (The latter teeters on the edge of cynical confusion.) And then it substitutes a false maleness of might-makes-right for a more empathetic and understanding sense of justice and duty. (It even has the male equivalent of the America Ferrera monologue.) There’s a lot to like. It was clearly not made unthinkingly. There’s craft and passion here. And it has a ripped guy in a leather skirt that shows off his massive thighs and rippling abs. And he punches a skeleton man into dust. So why’s the movie embarrassed to be exactly that? I wanted to have fun, but the movie kept shrinking from its fullest expression.