Shall We Vote?

 

The Marvels

starring Brie Larson, Iman Vellani, Teyonah Parris, Zawe Ashton, Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur, Saagar Shaikh and Samuel L. Jackson

directed by Nia DaCosta (the 2021 Candyman sequel)

Napoleon

starring Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, like a zillion other people in small roles for maybe five minutes of screen time, maximum

directed by Ridley Scott (loads of stuff, like Blade Runner, Alien, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, The Martian, The Last Duel, etc.)

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NOT EVEN A LITTLE WORRIED ABOUT SPOILERS FOR SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED TWO AND A QUARTER CENTURIES AGO. THE OTHER ONE, WELL, IF YOU'RE WAITING FOR IT TO COME TO STREAMING, POSSIBLY WAIT TO READ ALL THIS

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I don't have to like everything. Being open to being disappointed is a sign of good psychological and emotional hygiene, that's what I always tell myself about the thing I have decided I perceive myself capable of doing (I'm a very modern American, after all). I'm even OK being less than bowled over by things I pay for. Sure, I don't want a box full of shards and a metal stump if I ordered lightbulbs, even less so if I've ordered a tuna melt. But if I get roughly what I asked for and it ends up just not being life-changing-ly wondrous, eh. There are less survivable things than consumer disappointment. Like, for example, ptomaine poisoning from bad tuna, or whatever happens to your insides if you eat busted-up lightbulb. There's probably a name for it besides "perforated."

For some reason, nobody really seems to want to go to the movies anymore. It's hard to make comparisons year over year because of the way COVID made everyone stay home and stare at foaming jars of bread goo for 24 months, but it looks like box office is going to be down a good 25% vs. the last pre-COVID "normal" year, unless something drastic happens. The only major tentpole left to come out in calendar 2023 is the new Aquaman, which, um, yeah, not the place to rest our hopes maybe. Which is surprising because a damp, shirtless Momoa is typically cash money.

We could futz and gnash and ponder the "why" of it, but these days I'm way more about outcomes than analysis. Maybe we all have spectacle fatigue after 20 years of Marvel movies, maybe we can't be bothered to keep up with a bunch of interconnected storylines on multiple platforms so movies feel like homework now, maybe Martin Scorsese was right and it's all just ephemeral garbage that can't be sustained and people crave grown-up movies with grown-up themes... I mean, maybe, but the top four this year so far are Barbie, Mario Bros., Spider-Man and a Marvel one. Whatever box office there is, it's still being carried by essentially the same type of IP-generated franchise-making. Sure, Indiana Jones and Mission:Impossible and a Hunger Game all kind of ate shit, but maybe that's all Boomer crap now anyway?

I went to see The Marvels by myself for a couple of reasons. First, my kids (three GenZ boys) didn't really seem that interested. It's not because it's about girls. They definitely seem interested in those, so much so that now I have to compete for family movie-going-to time with real live actual women. It turns out men in their early 20s sometimes prefer the company of a similarly aged young lady to 120 minutes of more people shooting more hand lasers in order to yet again save the same dumb universe that somehow can't keep itself from getting imperiled over and over. Maybe my boys are indicative of the movie-going public in general. They're not going to the movies with their girlfriends either, I suspect because it's way easier to do the "and chill" part if you first opt for Netflix.

Second, it's starring women and directed by a woman, so there is that underlying bit of dipshit heavy-forehead red-ass reddit dork hate out there by reflex, shitting on anything woman-centered as somehow a harbinger of... something, I don't know what yet/still. Kelly Marie Tran couldn't even tell you, and she's arguably seen the most of it. So I kind of had to go just out of spite for people I'd never actually talk to and would actively refuse to meet. I feel like I really showed them.

Going to see Napoleon, I will tell you, was not my idea. I'd seen a few adverts and was underwhelmed by the campaign. I also have a mild but very real aversion to Joaquin Phoenix in general and his showy, look-at-me-acting! style of acting. I found Joker tedious and obvious, not his fault surely but certainly not helped by what read to me as a willfully idiosyncratic performance; like someone trying to seem crazy instead of actually being crazy. I'll say he wasn't much better here, still the same sort of mush-mouthed, mumbly, aloof, charisma-free dingus he seems to play in every role, except now he was supposed to be one of the pillars of the Great Man Theory of History. Mostly he just came across as kind of a snivelly knobhead to whom things just sort of happened. Like Forrest Gump, but French and with more artillery. I went because one of my sons wanted to go. So I jumped on that (see above re: girlfriends).

Was The Marvels actually good? Eh, it wasn't bad. The main problem is that Marvel has reached the point where you really can't just go see a movie. There's no way this makes sense if you haven't seen the Ms. Marvel or WandaVision TV series. They were smart to take the best parts of those shows (a real star in Vellani, plus the actors who play her family, and Parris from WandaVision) and put them next to Brie Larson, even though her character is one that the Marvel producers/writers seem the most afraid of. Captain Marvel has the Superman Problem in that in order for her to work, she has to be in some way hobbled, otherwise the answer is: hand-lasers. She's indestructible, faster than thought, an infinitely reusable H-bomb in the form of a tiny flying woman... the conceit used here to fuck her up a bit is cute and well used just for general good-time shenanigans and to make the action sequences really jump. At the end, though, she literally just flies into a dying star and turns it back on. Back to square one.

Both films, I'd say, really shine when they can find something funny in them. The Marvels gets so broad it borders on slapstick sometimes, but to satisfyingly silly effect. Napoleon is full of did-they-mean-that-to-be-funny? moments, but has all of one sequence where your boy Nap is flapping around, exhibiting some emotion that isn't just a vague curiosity at what the humans are doing. For the rest of the time, he's like a dog watching his owner-people have sex, just sort of patiently bewildered. That's not inappropriate though as the film tries to cover so much historical ground, we don't spend enough time with any people to get to see them as people, even Napoleon and a mostly wasted Vanessa Kirby as Josephine. It's about sixty two-minute snippets of time and then bang, on St. Helena, jauntily getting poisoned. They didn't even bother to spend any time on the guy who stole his dick.

I didn't hate either of these, but I didn't love either, either. I went for different reasons (contrarianism, curiosity) and it only cost me some money. I will say: though it's hard to get your adult children to make time to do stuff with you, it does have the upside of sometimes they will pay for the stuff that is their idea. Napoleon cost me zero dollars to see. That didn't make me like it any more, however. It just made me a little more willing to spend $8 on a movie soda.