Tag: Alfred Molina

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Spider-Man: No Way Home

From "Spider-Man: No Way Home."

“The Simpsons Already Did It” is a 2002 episode of South Park. Trey Parker wrote the now-classic installment out of frustration, because he was always scrapping good ideas for episodes after someone remembered that The Simpsons had gotten there first. In sci-fi circles, there’s a lesser-known equivalent: “Doctor Who did it,” a recognition that, over the almost 60 years Doctor Who has been on the air, staff writers at the end of their wits have already tried everything. In the 1970s, for example, the Doctor Who serial “The Ark In Space” donated many plot points to Alien, including parasitic, wasp-like creatures who feed on human hosts, and an ending that is uncannily similar to Ridley Scott’s. In “The Deadly Assassin,” the Doctor must enter a computer simulated world called The Matrix to battle a malevolent intelligence that controls the fabric of reality. In 1973, Doctor Who celebrated its tenth anniversary with a very special episode, “The Three Doctors,” in which all three of the actors who had at that time played the regenerating Time Lord teamed up to defeat an ultimate evil. 

Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange separates Spider-Man’s soul from his body.

Which brings us to Spider-Man: No Way Home. Since the new Marvel film just scored the second-biggest opening weekend in history, taking home a dizzying $637 million worldwide as of this writing, I’m going to assume you already know where I’m going with this Doctor Who digression. 

The film, directed by Jon Watts, helming his third Spider-Man solo outing, begins immediately after the events of Spider-Man: Far From Home. Longtime spider-antagonist J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) uses his paranoid tabloid website TheDailyBugle.net to broadcast a video from the dying Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaall) outing Peter Parker (Tom Holland) as Spider-Man. Peter, having just returned from saving London’s bacon, is intent on exploring his new relationship with MJ (Zendaya) and getting into M.I.T. Instead, he finds himself at the center of a media maelstrom, and the lives of the people around him, like Aunt May (Marisa Tormei), his bestie Ned (Jacob Batalon), and handler Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), are thrown into chaos. 

Since Peter knows that the post-Thanos world was set right by the reality bending power of Doctor Strange’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) magic, he seeks out help from his super-colleague. But when they try to cast the spell to erase the world’s knowledge of Spider-Man’s identity, Peter’s indecisiveness distracts Strange at the wrong moment, and the universe shudders. Suddenly, Spider-Man is called to fight some villains that are unfamiliar to him — but familiar to us in the real world who have watched nine Spider-movies in the last 20 years. 

Wilem Dafoe as The Green Goblin

For, you see, Spider-Man: Far From Home is the result of a long-running dispute that has made many a corporate lawyer’s boat payment. Spider-Man has been the jewel in Marvel’s crown of classic characters since his introduction in 1962. When the company fell on hard times, back in the 1980s, it sold Spidey’s movie rights to stay afloat. This resulted in a series of collapsed projects and lawsuits that stretched over 16 years. Ultimately, Columbia Pictures traded its claim on the James Bond franchise to MGM in exchange for the spider-rights, and parent company Sony footed the bill for the excellent 2002 Spider-Man, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire as the friendly neighborhood webslinger. After three movies, Raimi and Maguire handed the baton to Marc Webb and Andrew Garfield for The Amazing Spider-Man, which was decidedly less than excellent. 

Meanwhile, Disney CEO Bob Iger (who is retiring at the end of 2022 to go count his money) had the bright idea to just buy Marvel outright — albeit without Spidey. Disney took the Marvel B-team, the Avengers, and made them the core of a cash machine. Meanwhile, Sony was thrown into crisis when the North Korean government hacked its computers as retaliation for the Seth Rogen comedy The Interview, and it was forced to the bargaining table with Disney. After unfathomable amounts of money changed hands, Spider-Man could once again share the screen with other Marvel characters. 

Zendaya as MJ flees the paparazzi with Spider-Man.

Far From Home is essentially a reunion show, bringing back familiar faces from the franchise’s multi-corporation evolution. First, there’s Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), who confronts Spidey on the now-mandatory bridge fight scene. Also from the Sam Raimi Spider-years is Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church), and The Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). From the Amazing Spider-Man years come Lizard (Rhys Ifans) and Electro (Jamie Foxx), and they’re all confused when they see that the MCU Peter Parker doesn’t look the same as he did when the intellectual property was controlled by Sony. 

Surprise! Doctor Strange’s magic also brought Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, both sporting their respective spider-jammies, to Earth C-53, and the aforementioned classic Doctor Who episode breaks out. If it ain’t spider-broke, don’t spider-fix it! 

Seeing the three Spideys together, it’s safe to say the hero has had good luck with casting. Maguire, nowadays mostly a producer, exudes emo gravitas. Garfield, saddled with bad scripts and indifferent direction during his tenure, blossomed as an actor in his post-superhero career. He looks like he’s having the most fun. Holland, meanwhile, tries valiantly to hold the whole mess together, one reaction shot at a time. On the other side, the always brilliant Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe deliver better than the material deserves. Meanwhile, current it-girl Zendaya outshines everyone whenever she and Holland scheme together to, as Doctor Strange says, “Scooby Doo this shit.” 

As a stand-alone work, No Way Home can’t match either the Raimi-Maguire era or even Holland’s first outing, Homecoming. But the film, which just had the second biggest opening box office weekend of all time and is being hailed as the savior of the theatrical experience, is better understood as the successful culmination of a decades-long branding exercise by the two largest intellectual property conglomerates on the planet. Hooray for Hollywood! 

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Film Features Film/TV

Little Men

Little Men proves Ira Sachs directs actors better than almost anyone else working in film today. Sachs doesn’t rehearse his actors before they come onto the set, but that doesn’t imply a lack of preparation on his part. The first step in getting career-best performances from people like John Lithgow and Alfred Molina is a spot-on instinct for casting. For example, when preparing for 2014’s Love Is Strange, he discovered that Lithgow and Molina were old friends, and he knew that even though both actors are straight, they would be perfect to play the long-committed gay couple whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they are finally able to marry. Little Men, which finishes a trilogy of Sachs films about male relationships that began with 2012’s Keep the Lights On, starts off with a strong foundation of perfect casting from top to bottom. The lead duo are Theo Taplitz as Jake Jardine, the shy, 13-year-old whose parents’ move from Manhattan begins the story; and Michael Barbieri as Tony Calvelli, the outgoing, first-generation Brooklynite who immediately recognizes a kindred spirit.

Jake’s dad Brian is played by Greg Kinnear, from whom Sachs wrings an unexpected depth of emotion. Brian is an actor whose father Max dies, leaving him and his sister Audrey (Talia Balsam) the building in Brooklyn where he lived. The building comes with a spacious apartment and a single tenant, a dress store owned by Leonor Calvelli (Paulina García). When Max bought the house, his Brooklyn neighborhood was quiet, working class, and not very desirable. By the time the Jardine family moves in, it’s in the midst of a real estate boom, pushing the average rents on the street five times higher than what Max was charging Leonor.

Sachs has been recognized as perhaps the greatest queer filmmaker of his generation, but there has always been an underlying class consciousness in his work. Little Men brings those concerns to the forefront. Jake and Michael quickly become best friends, but there’s no suggestion of romantic attraction between the two teens. Tony clearly likes girls, and one of his best scenes involves his getting his first taste of rejection when the girl he’s crushing on informs him she’s into older guys. After giving a look like he’s been hit in the stomach with a sledgehammer, Tony gathers himself up and says, “Thank you for your honesty”—which, not coincidentally, was the title of the retrospective series New York’s Museum of Modern Art ran in Sachs’ honor this summer.

Greg Kinnear (left) and Talia Balsam deliver acting gold in Ira Sachs’ Little Men.

Jake and Tony bring out the best in each other. Jake begins the film avoiding eye contact with his public school classmates and ends with a developed set of social skills. Tony takes Jake’s commitment to his drawings and discipline in schoolwork, and the aspiring actor flourishes, as seen in a blistering scene in an acting class run by Mauricio Bustamante. But as the two only children grow closer, raw economics conspire to pull them apart. Brian’s acting career is going nowhere fast, and his sister Audrey insists on raising Leonor’s rent to levels the store can’t sustain. Jake and Tony’s doomed friendship becomes a metaphor for the vanishing multiethnic, economically varied community in Brooklyn that inspired Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Sachs’ and co-writer Mauricio Zacharias’ ability to imbue a simple story about a couple of tween boys bonding over video games with such depth of subtext is breathtaking. Even the way they get into and out of scenes brings unexpected joy. Sachs and cinematographer Óscar Durán’s camera is always in exactly the right place, never sacrificing clarity even as the framing and staging veers wildly unconventional.

Sachs says Little Men was inspired in part by his experiences as a longtime member of the Memphis Children’s Theatre, and it’s clear that his actors are at the center of everything he does. García is absolutely brilliant as Leonor, a tough but kind woman fighting for her livelihood while trying to do what’s best for her son. Molina makes a cameo as Leonor’s lawyer, and even his minor turn is brilliant. Kinnear delivers the sneakiest performance of the film, surrounded by loving family, but also alone, uncertain about his action, and ultimately denied any sort of lasting satisfaction. It may not rise to the emotional highs of Love Is Strange, but Little Men is a beautiful, complex work that will stay with you long after the credits roll.

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Film Features Film/TV

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Tina Fey in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Four years after the fall of Saigon, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now attempted to come to terms with the Vietnam War. Notice I did not say “make sense of,” because Coppola’s goal was to show that very little about Vietnam “made sense.”

As the era of post-9/11 war (hopefully) winds down, we find ourselves again needing to come to terms with insanity. There have been some excellent documentaries about the Bush wars, such as 2007’s No End in Sight, but the treatment of the Iraq war is limited to Clint Eastwood’s militaristic hagiography American Sniper. Afghanistan was the forgotten war, as far as Hollywood is concerned.

Tina Fey is the first to tackle the absurdity of yet another empire trying and failing to impose its will on Afghanistan. In Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, she portrays Kim Baker, a war correspondent based on the real-life Kim Barker, whose book The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan served as the jumping-off point for the script, penned by 30 Rock showrunner Robert Carlock. Fey’s Baker is chosen to cover the Afghanistan war, and she leaves her cushy desk job in New York for Kabul.

It’s undeniably fun to ride along with Fey as she dives into what the international press and military types call “The Kabubble.” Whiskey Tango Foxtrot taught me that the Afghanistan war was covered primarily by people with constant, grinding hangovers. The capital is a whirlwind of Champagne-sipping consulate parties, internet porn, and hookahs full of hashish in the media room. The Westerner’s desperate decadence is in sharp contrast to the lives of the locals.

Kim’s confidence is constantly being tested as she gets a ground-level tour of different international flavors of sexism, from the Westerners’ military bravado, to the lecherous Afghan government official played by Alfred Molina, to the conservative Muslim women who are the most fierce defenders of the religious patriarchy. Fey’s assured strength at the center of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a double-edged sword, and the episodes where she bears witness to the war’s surreal futility — including a take where a mostly silent Marine general (Billy Bob Thornton) digests the awkward answer to the mystery of why an American-dug village well keeps getting blown up — give way to a focus on her romanic misadventures with Iain and her struggle to advance her journalistic career while the war descends into a stalemate. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot feels like a missed opportunity to use humor to dig deeper into America’s twisted relationship with militarism; the great statement about the legacy of Bush’s bungled wars will have to wait for another day.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
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Love Is Strange at the Brooks

“Sometimes, when you live with people, you know them better than you care to, that’s all.” So says John Lithgow’s Ben to Alfred Molina’s George in Love Is Strange, co-written and directed by Memphis filmmaker Ira Sachs. Ben and George have been a couple for 39 years. They are now, finally, newlyweds, but their happiness is cut short when old bigotries emerge, and a lost job results in the couple also losing the Manhattan apartment they’ve shared for 20 years. Forced to live apart, depending on the kindness of old friends and family, the line is whispered regretfully over the telephone, in the dark, and functions as a kind of one-sentence summary for this and every other film Sachs has ever made. The irony, of course, and one of the many things that makes the love Sachs examines in his 2014 film so very strange, is how much we can miss those same people when they aren’t around anymore.

Alfred Molina and John Lithgow

Those who missed their opportunity to see Love Is Strange on the big screen in September can catch it in a one-night screening at the Brooks on Thursday, January 8th, at 7 p.m.

Love Is Strange runs just under two hours but covers a lot of ground. It’s a film about aging, coming of age, friends, family, the melancholy side of Chopin, and the cold, hard facts of New York real estate. It’s a study in awkwardness and a real showcase for veteran actors Lithgow and Molina.