Tag: Jake Gyllenhaal

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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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Throwback August: Brokeback Mountain

To talk about Brokeback Mountain today is to bring up two separate things: Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning epic about forbidden love in the American West, and “gay cowboy movie” memes. It is unfortunate but not surprising that Brokeback Mountain is more memorable for its sound clips (who hasn’t said “I wish I knew how to quit you” to a slice of pizza?) than for its cinematic achievement.

Brokeback Mountain is a movie about gay cowboys, but that’s sort of like saying Titanic is a movie about boating hazards. Brokeback is a love story, told with the simultaneous drama and reserve of Annie Proulx’s original short story. Proulx describes the mountain where Jack and Ennis meet as “boiled with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken-cloud light, the wind combed the grass and drew from the damaged krummholz and slit rock a bestial drone.” Lee’s cinematography likewise describes the men’s love through focus on the natural; their entanglement as uncontrollable and unpredictable as a summer hail storm.

Heath Leger as Ennis Del Mar

Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhall, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway all brought incredible performances. This is a big reason that Brokeback stands out from the crowd of mid-2000s movies with gay storylines: Transamerica (2005), My Summer of Love (2004), Far From Heaven (2002), and Wild Tigers I Have Known (2006.) All good films with good actors, but none that carried the emotional heat of Ledger’s “Jack, I swear” or Gyllenhall yelling, “This is a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation.”

Politically speaking, we can see that Brokeback unquestionably presaged the current visibility and successes of the gay rights movement. But with visibility and political actualization, there is a loss of some specialness, the “otherwise” character of gay life. It is possible to read Brokeback Mountain simultaneously as a break-out moment for gay rights and a movie that said gayness was most palatable from straight-passing, white cowboys.

Jack Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist

Regardless, Brokeback is an incredible film, work of art deserving of the accolades it received. It did something important to undermine Ennis tragic mantra: “If you can’t fix it; you’ve got to stand it.” 10 years on we can say with more honesty than ever before: you do have to stand it, unless you don’t. 

Throwback August: Brokeback Mountain

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Film Features Film/TV

Nightcrawler

At times, Nightcrawler is such an effective thriller that squirming in your seat is an involuntary reflex, like flinching at the bleeding leads on the nightly news. Writer-director Dan Gilroy’s new film lands several crude, short-armed jabs, and for a while it feels legitimately and bracingly crazy. But its buzz doesn’t last long, and once it wears off, all of the important questions it winks at — about photojournalism ethics, what it takes to make it in America, and what exactly is being satirized — are left unanswered.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Louis Bloom, a down-on-his-luck psychopath drawn into the nocturnal realm of big-city news gathering, where any amateur with a van, scanner, and video camera can shoot bloody, intimate footage of the evening’s major murders and executions and sell it to local news stations for a tidy sum a few hours later. The film coolly follows this networking young man — a face in the crowd to die for — as he drives his taxi up and down Sunset Boulevard in search of that sweet smell of success.

Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler

Bloom fascinates you even though he’s little more than a bug-eyed mannequin clad in self-help pull-quotes, motivational buzzwords, and polite platitudes, who says things like “working for myself is more in line with my skills and career goals” with a straight face. He’s a non-threatening shadow dweller pleasant enough to fade from memory but distinct enough to be suspicious. The cloistered, self-educated Bloom is a parody of someone who’s learned everything from spending day and night online, and occasionally Gyllenhaal hints at a cool, casual contempt for humanity as boundless as the internet itself.

The film takes place in Los Angeles, and Gilroy constructs a glowing, geographically savvy portrait of this great American city at night almost by accident. The bright digital photography here is nothing like the hazy, washed-out security-cam look of Collateral, Michael Mann’s L.A. crime flick from a decade ago. Cinematographer Robert Elswit’s primary colors are refreshing and sickly-sweet: the shots of video blue Chevron stations and neon signs blinking over the deserted early-morning streets are in some ways the film’s most significant cultural contributions.

Rene Russo plays Nina, Bloom’s weary television-producer boss, and she scribbles out a cocktail napkin-sized essay on fallen stardom in every scene. There’s a funny, tragic encounter when, out of nowhere, a casting couch virtually materializes in front of her while she nurses a watery margarita and listens to her new freelance darling’s Rupert Pupkin-like plans for world domination.

Bloom often holds his camera high above his head, as though he were about to bring it down on someone’s neck like an executioner’s axe: He constantly engages in shooting-as-stabbing, and his and Nina’s sexual thrill from a job well done is an important subtext. Gilroy’s suspenseful passages are similarly restrained. Yet they wring undreamt-of tension from watching Bloom watch other people, and something as simple and innocuous as a two-shot from an automobile’s rear-view mirror develops as much nervous energy as the scary, rollicking car chase that follows.