I’m not sure how I missed Isabel Coixet’s My Life Without Me as I’m usually all in on anything Sarah Polley, anything Mark Ruffalo, and I’m a fan of movies that explore complexities in relationships.* Though there were times that I felt like the slower-than-usual speech patterns of Ruffalo and Polley were distracting, there was a lot to like in this film. Plus, I feel like the ratio of upper-middle class/rich people stories to grinding poverty is about 7-to-1 in the movie world, so the living situation in this was an interesting change.
Sometimes the experience of watching a movie is an exercise in picking apart why the film isn’t working and so it was for James Wan’s Aquaman. I came up with a host of reasons: big gaps in the origin story; villains who had already turned evil, leaving me without reasons to “feel” for them;* flimsy story with not-great writing** that leads to too many action scenes; a very fit guy is only part of the reason to watch a movie, the character he creates has to also be compelling; lack of day-to-day stuff about his life.*** Overall, this was a great example of all style, no substance and I just didn’t care.
*Green Goblin from Spider-Man and Doc Ock also from Spider-Man come to mind as good examples of villains I felt for, even while rooting for their defeat. Even Ultron managed to by sympathetic. **For most of the movie Aquaman is all, “I’m totally not going to be your king!” and then at the end it’s suddenly, “This is gonna be fun!” Why the change Aquaman? ***The movie has placed him firmly as a laid-back surfer, and Aquaman himself says he’s dumb at one point. But he speaks, Russian, Italian, Maori and English? When did he learn all of that? Also, how does he eat? Or drink at the bar? Is he paid for his work? Who pays him?
Favorite IMDB trivia item:
Arthur and Orm are elder and younger brothers, but Patrick Wilson is five years older than Jason Momoa, while Nicole Kidman, who plays their mother, is seven years older than Wilson.
If I had a dollar for every movie with a woman playing a “mom” with this age span, it would add up quickly.
Since they don’t make movies like Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly’s On the Town anymore, this movie gets a pass on a lot of things.* But it does have great musical numbers*** and that great color saturation that comes with movies from the (almost) 1950s. There are musicals where the story, song and dance meld together into a cohesive wholes and then there is this type where the story is something to pass the time while waiting for the next musical number.
The verdict:
Good, though only because I gave it a pass on a lot of things
Cost: free from library Where watched: at home as part of Filmspotting’s Stanley Donen marathon.
Consider also watching:
Singing in the Rain
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers****
Chicago
The Sound of Music
Further sentences:
*Outmoded social norms,** a bit too long, a lack of even one very good song. **Although the character of Brunhilde Esterhazy reminded me a lot of Melissa McCarthy’s character in Bridesmaids. ***I cringed through “Primitive Man” but did enjoy Ann Miller’s awesome green dress with the plaid lining. ****Also a cringe-y plot, but with amazing dancing, great songs and a cohesive story.
Favorite IMDB Trivia Item:
There was a real-life version of the “Miss Turnstiles” contest in New York City. “Miss Subways” was a beauty contest run by the New York Subways Advertising Company from 1941 to 1976. Subway cars featured posters of pretty young women who lived and worked in New York. Link is here.
I did a re-watch of Blockers so Matt could see an appreciate it’s comic stylings. He did. Original review here.
Cost: $1.50 from Redbox (it went away from Redbox, and was in $14.99 streaming rental purgatory for a while, but then it reappeared.) Where watched: at home, with the aforementioned Matt.
Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell is uncomfortable, sprawling,* and at times puzzling, but it was an immensely enjoyable movie with a Cracker Jack performance by Elisabeth Moss.** This movie in four parts uses a framing device to set each section and sound design to amp up the swirling amounts of crazy as Moss’s Becky Something spirals out of control. It makes for good discussion about what we owe the people who create music we love when the combination of fame, money, drugs and their own psyche send them on a downward spiral.
Rock of Ages (Because Tom Cruise playing a very Axel Rose-like musician is a more fun version of this theme.)
Further sentences:
*I would have been fine if they had nipped and tucked away twenty or so minutes **Everyone was very good. Props to an unrecognizable Dan Stevens (Matthew in Downton Abbey). Cara Delevigne who captures the innocence of young punk rock, but I also really liked Agyness Deyn and Gayle Rankin as the poor band mates dealing with the increasing craziness.
Favorite IMDB Trivia Item:
During a Q&A at the 2018 New York Film Festival, Alex Ross Perry cited Axl Rose as the main inspiration for the character of Becky. Perry also cited the screenplay structure for Steve Jobs (2015), with its lengthy scenes that span over time, as an influence.
Avengers: Endgame’s release last weekend, got me thinking about how the seventeen years I’ve been in a relationship with Matt have coincided with the rise of the modern superhero movie.
We both like superhero films. He grew up reading comic books, I love an origin story. We both experienced Christopher Reeve’s Superman and the sequels that followed. There was the Batman in the 80s.
The start of “us” was around the release weekend of the 2002 Spider-Man movie. We watched the movie separately, but we talked about it in one of those long start-of-relationship phone call or email.
Quantity increasing:
At the beginning, we watched most of the superhero movies as they were released, usually on opening weekend, or close to it. And now? We mostly do the same thing, but there are so many more opening weekends for us. Look what happened:
Anniversary Celebrations
Because our anniversary is always celebrated the weekend before Mother’s Day, and that’s often the launch of the summer movie season, we’ve had more than one anniversary at the movie theater. Actually, there have been six, and had the last two Avengers films not moved their release dates one week earlier, we would be at eight.
(The self-portrait skills have not improved over the years. In fact, they may have degraded.)
Who we like:
Our films fall into four categories:
DC (Navy)
Spider-man (Red)
X-Men (Purple)
Marvel (Orange)
You can see which universe is the clear winner in our house. It’s Marvel by a long shot, probably because they have perfected the superhero film universe. Matt’s a big fan of X-Men, I have a soft spot for Spider-Man and neither of us prioritizes DC. Most of those DC films are Christopher Nolan’s Batman series.
DC
While I liked the Christopher Nolan Batman world overall, and we both liked Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises, Matt and I disagree about the Dark Knight. It’s his favorite, I thought it was much too dark.
I like Superman, but haven’t made time for him among the superhero glut and we’ve missed most of the DCEU. Exceptions: Wonder Woman, because no way was I missing that female icon’s big-screen debut, especially with a female director; Shazam! because the podcast Feminist Frequency gave it their seal of approval so Matt wanted to go. We both liked it, me more than him.
Here’s a nice 8-minute analysis of DC that compares that world unfavorably to Marvel.
Spider-Man
I’m not sure if the fact there have been four different actors portraying Spider-Man says more about our longevity, or the lack of originality in Hollywood.
As a big fan of Toby Maguire’s Spider-Man, I wasn’t a big fan of the reboot with Andrew Garfield coming so soon after Spider-Man III. We still watched the Amazing Spider-Man, though we both skipped the sequel.
For the next reboot, Matt went on opening day and I skipped it, but the argument “it’s a really great high school film” eventually won me over and Matt watched Spider-Man: Homecomingwith me on DVD. Tom Holland is a delight; he might just be the best of the bunch.
When Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was released, I was feeling rather full of superhero movies and almost didn’t go, but was so glad we did see the film. Miles Morales is the best animated Spider-Man I’ve ever seen and the movie is visually stunning. Plus, it has a great plot.
If they keep going at this rate, there will be another actor portraying Spider-Man by the time we celebrate our 25th anniversary.
X-Men
X2: X-Men United was the first superhero movie we watched together. We saw it at the Laurelhurst Theater as part of a double feature with the original Superman.
Hot tip: a double feature of those two films should start with Superman, as following early-2000s filmmaking with 1970s filmmaking makes the older film feel like it is playing at half speed. Plus there’s a rhyming poem-like series of thoughts in the middle that we both cringed through.
Since then we’ve seen an X-Man film that Matt still refers to as “the fan film” and refuses to acknowledge as part of the cannon. We’ve gone back in time to see James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender portray younger versions of Patrick Stewart (Magneto) and Ian McKellen (Professor X)
We’ve also seen the titles of films featuring everyone’s favorite mutant (Wolverine, of course) shed punctuation and articles as the years go by.
We’ve seen Logan’s origins (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) (terrible film), watched him go to Japan (The Wolverine)(okay film) to the end of his story (Logan)(a very violent, but higher quality film)
I’m guessing we will be at the theater for X-Men: Dark Pheonix. I’m looking forward to Evan Peter’s re-appearance as Quicksliver. His Jim Croche scene in X-Men: Days of Future Past was a highlight of the franchise for me.
Marvel
Marvel reigns supreme over our superhero moviegoing world. We’ve been to films with Marvel characters since the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a pipe dream.
That’s right, we’ve seen Hulk.
Not only that, but we watched The Incredible Hulk, and not just to catch up before the first Avengers movie came out.
What is it about the MCU that is so good? They take their movies seriously. They cast brilliant actors. They create a unified movie world, where one movie builds on another for an ultimate story, but where also each movie can stand on its own.
And they never lose sight that super heroes are fun, and the best ones are funny.
Though I have superhero fatigue right now, I still want to watch their films, because they do good storytelling. And that’s led them to a $20 billion worldwide box office take on movies that have cost around $4.5 billion to make.
(Numbers come from Wikipedia and are probably changing every second since Endgame’s release.)
In summary:
It’s been 17 years and an average of 2.35 new superhero movies per year. Will we keep up with the pace? I don’t know, but probably. But regardless, I’ve enjoyed our shared interest in the superhero world.
(L to R) Scott Pilgrim (MICHAEL CERA), Ramona Flowers (MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD), Young Neil (JOHNNY SIMMONS), Knives Chau (ELLEN WONG), Kim Pine (ALISON PILL) and Stephen Stills (MARK WEBBER) in the amazing story of one romantic slacker’s quest to power up with love: the action-comedy Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
Not having got enough of some of the Avengers, I re-watched Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World to see Brie Larson and Chris Evans before they were Captains Marvel and America and also because I fell asleep when I watched this in 2010.* While I still did drift off in a few places, I loved the visual styling of this movie and I think what Edgar Wright does well is cast leads whose quirks let them really lean in to their performances.** The quick cuts and fast pace are great, and it’s fun to see so many actors who have gone on to other great roles.
The verdict: Recommended
Cost: Netflix monthly fee ($8.99) Where watched: at home
*It was the movie that taught me that I can no longer watch movies that start at 10 p.m. **This movie capitalizes on all the Michael Cera things, and Wright later does the same with Ansel Elgort in Baby Driver.
There are 21 reasons I happily sat through a three-hour finale of Anthony and Joe Russo’s Avengers: Endgame; at this point, this endeavor is more of a new-generation serial* than a movie. As my movie-going companion pointed out, this is almost like three separate movies: a drama, a heist, and then an action movie. I loved so much about this movie: the callbacks to the previous films; the assembly of so many characters I know and love;** the amount of gravitas; the humor; and the way everything wrapped up.
The verdict:
Recommended, assuming you’ve seen the majority of the 21 previous movies. If not, might I recommend you begin with 2008’s Iron Man?
Cost: $10.50 Where watched: Baghdad Theater with a crowd who clapped multiple times.
Additional sentences:
*You know like those short films that used to be before the main picture way before my time? That’s what this is, a serial told over a decade and in much bigger chunks. **That said Marvel, in the future, I’d prefer more movies with female superheroes in starring roles,*** rather than just gathering them together at a(n admittedly tear-inducing) specific point in a big battle. ***I feel cheated out of Black Widow’s full story.
It’s probably best to watch Roger Mitchell’s My Cousin Rachel with a companion as there is much to discuss afterward and you might find yourself stuck with your own back and forth as to what you think the situation was. The indomitable Rachel Weisz plays the titular Rachel, and Sam Clafin* is the man who is not so sure about his cousin’s motives. Daphne Du Maurier knew how to write a shifting story, and there is much to puzzle out, plus usual historical drama perks of costumes, and furniture and life with servants.
The verdict: Recommended
Cost: free from Multnomah County Library Where watched: at home
