Tag: Marvel

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Rocket’s backstory forms the emotional core for one last adventure with James Gunn’s Guardians.

The first installment of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy foreshadowed the wacky space antics to come by opening with Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), grooving to Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” on a deserted planet. Volume 2 followed Baby Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) as he boogies to Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” blissfully unaware that his fellow Guardians are locked in combat with a giant octopus monster.

But Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 offers no such playful dance number intro from a joyful audience surrogate. Director James Gunn’s Marvel swan song (he’s now creative director for rival DC Studios) opens in darkness. A group of baby raccoons in a dirty cage hears footsteps echo from a hallway, and a silhouette emerges. All the raccoons flee from the cage door except one, his eyes wide in terror as a hand extends slowly into the cage.

That frightened face morphs into the present-day Rocket (Bradley Cooper), the anthropomorphic gunslinging raccoon (but don’t call him that) and Gunn’s preferred “secret hero” of the franchise. When the bristles on Rocket’s face come into sharp focus — the most accomplished CGI that we’ve seen in a Marvel film for quite a while — it’s clear Gunn is not interested in repeating himself.

The rage and frustration of Radiohead’s “Creep” follow Rocket in an early scene as he walks through Knowhere, the Guardians’ new HQ. His found family of oddballs are in a bad place following the events of Avengers: Endgame. A permanently drunk Quill is despondent that former teammate and love interest Gamora (Zoë Saldaña) doesn’t remember her time as a Guardian, while Nebula (Karen Gillan), Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) do their best to pick up the pieces. Meanwhile, comic relief Kraglin (Sean Gunn) is joined by newcomer Cosmo the Space Dog (voiced by Maria Bakalova), cracking wise, playing cards, and trying to keep the mood up.

The early sidelining of Quill establishes that this is Rocket’s story, with frequent flashbacks to his time as a genetic experiment under the eye of the maniacal High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a man that harbors a twisted obsession to create the perfect being. Rocket is critically injured during an early skirmish with newcomer Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), but the crew needs the High Evolutionary’s tech to save him. From there, the story gets dark and even depressing, at one point delivering the franchise’s first “Fuck.”

Previous Guardians films have explored the core crew’s backstories, but Rocket’s tragic past has only been hinted at. Guardians has always been about fatherly trauma, whether it’s Gamora and Nebula’s years of torture under Thanos, Drax’s failure to protect his late daughter, or the revelation that Quill’s father was Ego the Living Planet. Rocket’s grueling backstory gives the movie something that’s been missing from recent Marvel films: an emotional core.

Young Rocket dreams big with his fellow experimental subjects; they’re excited to be a part of the High Evolutionary’s new world, even as they undergo grotesque, body-horror alterations. Pet lovers beware: There are some pretty brutal depictions of violence enacted upon animals in this movie.

Star-Lord’s attempts to win back Gamora provide the series’ usual semi-comic tone, and we get the requisite space shoot-outs, and even a Nathan Fillion cameo. But pathos is never far from the surface; Rocket’s journey through his trauma is always front and center. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the sanitized corporate slop that has given moviegoers superhero fatigue during the MCU’s latest phase. Gunn even manages to introduce Warlock, who is set to be a big player in future MCU films, as an organic part of this story, rather than a distraction.

Guardians Vol. 3 is the most creative Marvel film in years, a fitting end to Gunn’s time with Disney. It should serve as the template going forward, but will it? It seems unlikely super-producer Kevin Feige will afford this much creative leeway to directors with lesser reputations, and with Gunn off to DC, the MCU will probably return to the assembly line approach that’s left Phases 4 and 5 feeling stale. At least Gunn, Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Nebula, Mantis, Groot, and especially Rocket can all go out with a bang.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Now playing
Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania

Like stepping on an anthill, Marvel’s antics in this romp will have you itching to leave your seat.

When, exactly, did the MCU jump the shark? For me, it was with Avengers: Age of Ultron. Things were fun and getting funner on Earth-616 until 2015, when Joss Whedon assembled Earth’s mightiest heroes to fight another army of faceless, disposable enemies.

There has been a lot of ups and downs in the approximately dozen lifetimes that have transpired since then, but the one thing we could take solace in was the comforting mediocrity of Marvel movies. The MCU had a low ceiling, but a high floor. They were never great — the demands of branding always weighed the stories down with extraneous fluff — but they were never as awful as the DC super-turds they were extruding over at Warner Brothers.

I’m sad to report that with Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, the floor has finally dropped out.

Let’s begin with the title. When presented with director Peyton Reed’s idea to call the third Ant-Man film “Quantumania,” who was the coward at Disney who failed to tag an exclamation point on it?

“Quantumania!” See how much better that is?

Second, let’s talk about The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly). She is not so much a character as she is an afterthought. Occasionally, you can catch writer Jeff Loveness remembering Hope van Dyne is in the movie. Lilly plays her with a resigned detachment I find relatable.

Third, is there something I’m missing about Paul Rudd? He brings to Ant-Man a weird kind of anti-charisma, in that everything he does seems repulsive and wrong. Did he get this job because he is so bland and flavorless no one finds him offensive? Is “tolerability” really all we ask of our movie stars?

Fourth, M.O.D.O.K. (Corey Stoll) Where to even begin? Sorry, Jack Kirby heads, but M.O.D.O.K. is just a goofy character design that’s impossible to take seriously outside his Silver Age comics context. Every moment he’s on screen is excruciating.

The only characters I really liked in this meandering multiverse were Hank Pym’s (Michael Douglas) uplifted ants. When they’re sucked into the quantum realm alongside the aging super-scientist and his screwup family, they spend their time dilation doing something useful, like developing a Kardashev Type II civilization, so they can ride to the rescue like diminutive Rohirrim.

Speaking of the Pym family, all this Quantumania(!) could have been avoided if Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) had told her granddaughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) what happened while she was trapped in the quantum realm for 30 years. Janet claims she didn’t tell her family about the exiled supervillain Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) because she wanted to protect them. Not to second guess a super-scientist, but wouldn’t it have been logical to just tell them, “Hey, there’s this dangerous supervillain who is trapped in the quantum realm, so maybe don’t go poking around down there?” She wouldn’t have even had to broach the subject of her affair with Lord Krylar (Bill Murray, going big) or of her role in fomenting a minuscule rebellion against the forces of Kang’s tiny tyranny.

But the worst part of Quantumania is not the stupid characters or the Baskin-Robbins product placement. This movie looks bad. I saw it in 4K, and most of the time it was a dark, swirling CGI soup. The haphazard lighting and aggressive color grading conspire to make poor Majors look constantly sweaty. I thought the Marvel shark had been well and truly jumped, but it turns out the Fonz was just getting warmed up.

Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania
Now playing
Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing in Memphis: Let’s Get Small

Paul Rudd, Kathryn Newton, and Evangeline Lilly get small in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania

The big release in movie theaters this week is the latest Marvel contraption, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. Reluctant Avenger Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), who usually gets just kinda small, gets super-tiny. We’re talking seething quantum foam of semi-imaginary particles small. His variably sized partner Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and their daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), who also sports a super-small suit, also get tiny, along with legendary super-scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer). There they meet Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), who will apparently be important in the next hundred or so Marvel movies.

If you’re not into getting quantum-realm small, how about a small indie romance from Australia? Of An Age is writer/director Goran Stolevski’s second feature film. Ebony (Hattie Hook) is a late-teen party girl whose bestie Kol (Elias Anton) is also her ballroom dance partner. When Kol has to pull Ebony out of a bad situation, he enlists her brother Adam (Thom Green) as a driver, and sparks fly.

But maybe you’re looking for a different kind of small. Short films are often the highlight of film festivals, but rarely get screen time in commercial theaters. There’s a great opportunity to watch the Oscar-nominated short films in the animation, documentary, and narrative categories at the Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill this week. These films won awards at qualifying festivals, and now the up-and-coming filmmakers have a chance at Oscar glory. And who knows, maybe one of them will get slapped by Will Smith!

Speaking of Oscar contenders, on Wednesday, Feb. 22, Indie Memphis brings the nominated documentary All the Beauty And the Bloodshed to Studio on the Square. Directed by CitizenFour helmer Laura Poitras, it tells the story of legendary photographer Nan Goldin and her crusade against the Sackler family, pharmaceutical oligarchs who also happen to be big patrons of the arts. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed became only the second documentary in history to win the Golden Lion at Cannes, and it’s probably the frontrunner for the Oscar, too.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Letitia Wright is the new Black Panther in Wakanda Forever.

In December, 2016, Carrie Fisher died of a heart attack shortly after finishing her final scenes for The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson’s film turned out to be the best Star Wars title in thirty years, but the franchise had a big problem. The final film, Duel of the Fates, was to have focused on Leia as the last surviving member of the original trilogy’s band of heroes. With Fisher deceased, the script was scrapped, and the director fired. J.J. Abrams was brought in to guide the saga to a safe landing. Instead, he crashed the ship. The Last Jedi remains controversial, but The Rise of Skywalker is universally acknowledged as an epic fiasco. 

In August, 2020, another Disney department faced tragedy. Chadwick Boseman, the beloved star of Black Panther, died of colon cancer at age 43. Director Ryan Coogler, having made the best film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was faced with nothing but bad choices. Do you recast T’Challa, and assume the hero of millions of Black kids worldwide is, like James Bond, just a brand name fillable by semi-disposable himbos? Or do you try to write around the disappearance of one of twenty-first-century cinema’s brightest lights? 

Coogler chose option B. He immediately announced that Boseman would not be replaced. That meant Wakanda Forever was written with the difficulty settings on “high.” Normally in the second film of a superhero franchise, we have dispensed with the origin story, and the hero really comes into their own. Instead, Coogler and writer Joe Robert Cole had to account for their hero’s offscreen death, deal with all of the resulting character and plot fallout, and shift the focus to a new protagonist, all while introducing a new antagonist and delivering all the super powered thrills and chills the audience expects. 

It’s an impossible assignment. Coogler and Cole come very close to pulling it off by leaning heavily on the excellent ensemble they assembled for Black Panther. We open with the skeptic Shuri (Letitia Wright) praying to the cat god Bast as she races to find a cure for the mystery illness afflicting her brother T’Challa. She suspects the solution is related to the heart herb which gives the Panthers their power, but pretender to the Wakandan throne Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) destroyed the garden where the herb grew, so now she must try to create a synthetic version. She’s still struggling with the problem when her mother, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), tells her it’s too late. 

Tenoch Huerta Mejía as Namor in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

All this drama, and the moving, slow-mo funeral sequence, takes place before the opening credits. Flash forward a year, and the Queen is trying to help Shuri to come to terms with T’Challa’s death. Wakanda is still struggling with the same question that has always hung over the secret Afrofuturist society—should they engage with the world that has always been so hostile to Black people, or hide behind their vast technological advantage and huge supply of the alien wonder material vibranium? Stung by the trauma of her husband’s and son’s deaths, and the West’s quest to steal Wakandan resources, Ramonda is leaning back towards isolationism. Her political calculations are upended when a new variable presents itself in the person of Namor the Sub Mariner (Tenoch Huerta Mejía). He’s the king of the underwater realm of Talokan, which has their own independent supply of vibranium. Since Namor is a 400-year-old super powered mutant son of the Mayan civilization, he’s also suspicious of representatives of “Western civilization” looking for resources in his territory. It would seem the two civilizations’ interests would align, but instead they spiral into war as Wakanda searches for a new protector. 

Coogler is the best director working in the comic book space. His deep knowledge of classic genre films makes him uniquely suited to this novelistic storytelling. He flawlessly executes a tension-building Zulu sequence leading to the film’s first set piece, a three-way, air, ground, and water chase through Boston. Basset carries the early acts on her sculpted shoulders, before passing the baton to Lupita Nyong’o’s super spy Nakia and Winston Duke’s grumpy warlord M’Baku for their own bravado scenes. 

T’Challa was the moral center of the Marvel heroes, the one who best represented Stan Lee’s dictum “With great power comes great responsibility.” When Shuri takes up the mantle of the Black Panther, she faces the Wakandan conundrum of conquest or peace? T’Challa made the Solomonic choice to split the difference. Shuri’s choices, like the film itself, turn out much messier. Wakanda Forever tries very hard, but Chadwick Boseman is just too tough an act to follow. 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Thor: Love and Thunder

Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth are both Thor in Thor: Love and Thunder.

There are two schools of thought on how to make a movie about comic book superheroes. The first is to try and make it realistic and grounded in the real world. That’s what Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy did for Batman and The Joker. Those films are grim and violent, long on visceral thrills, short on humor.  

The second school of thought is to make comic book superhero movies more comic book-y. Outlandish plots, self-aware asides, and jaunty humor are the order of the day. The best example of this school of thought is the wacky Batman TV series from 1966. Richard Donner’s earnest 1978 Superman is a less extreme version. 

Students of the gritty school accuse the other side of not taking the source material seriously, while the comic book-y school believes that the grittys fundamentally misunderstand the source material. Since films about superpowered people wearing tights punching each other in space are ubiquitous to the point of being mandatory, the question “Is Batman a good-natured altruist like Adam West or a glowering neo-fascist like Robert Pattison?“ has outsized impact on the culture. 

The two philosophies collide violently in Thor: Love and Thunder. Chris Hemsworth has now appeared in nine films as Thor, but he didn’t find his footing until 2017’s Thor: Raganork, when director Taika Waititi empowered him to go for laughs. Since then, the himbo from Asgard has been a breath of fresh air when things get a little too self-serious  in the MCU. 

The gritty side is represented by Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher. As Nolan’s gravelly voiced Batman, he wrenched the gravitas out of a rich boy who dresses like a bat to play cops and robbers. Making the DC hero into a Marvel antagonist is a admittedly stunt casting, but Bale is a phenomenally talented actor who played one of the greatest villains in cinematic history in American Psycho. 

Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder.

Gorr is the first person we see in Love and Thunder, wandering through the desert of his home planet on a pilgrimage to the shrine of his god Rapu (Jonny Brugh) in an effort to save his daughter, Love (India Rose Hemsworth, who is actually Chris Hemsworth’s daughter) from the blight that has consumed their world. But Love dies anyway, and when Gorr meets the real Rapu, he makes it clear that he doesn’t care about the sufferings of the little people who worship him. So Gorr grabs the nearest weapon, which happens to be the god-killing Necrosword, and vows to wage a campaign of deicide, beginning with Rapu.  

Meanwhile, Thor is hanging out with the Guardians of the Galaxy, saving planets and — having sculpted his Avengers: Endgame dad bod into a chiseled god bod — looking good doing it. Thor’s intro sequence epitomizes why I prefer the comic-booky approach to comic-book movies. I can get detectives chasing serial killers and corrupt cops anywhere, but only Waititi can give me a space Viking fighting an army of owl bears on hover bikes. 

Thor gets wind of Gorr’s anti-god crusade, and returns to Earth to check on New Asgard, where the refugees from his destroyed home planet are now running a tourist trap. Sure enough, Gorr and his shadow monsters have come calling. But the Asgardians are putting up a fight, led by Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and The Mighty Thor (Natalie Portman). 

Hold up — there’s another Thor? And he’s a she? And she’s Thor’s ex-girlfriend, Dr. Jane Foster, who, for budgetary reasons was unceremoniously written out of the story after Thor: The Dark World? Yes, yes, and yes. Since the breakup, Jane’s had her ups and downs, first becoming a famous physicist and then contracting terminal cancer. She heeded a psychic call to New Asgard, where the reassembled pieces of Thor’s broken hammer Mjolnir prolonged her life and granted her the powers of the thunder god. As we’ll see, facing an ex who also has his old job is just the beginning of Thor’s problems. 

Love and Thunder is a deeply divided movie. On the one hand, you’ve got a hero dying of cancer and a villain whose motivation is literally the Greek philosopher Epicurius’ Problem of Evil. On the other hand, you’ve got Hemsworth mugging for the camera and the director himself (as Thor’s sidekick Korg) narrating as a “once upon a time” story.  Bale tries valiantly to fit in, but he’s got one gear: “intense.” Portman is professional who understands the assignment, and is able to at least fake having fun. Ultimately, the film collapses under the weight of its contradictions. Love and Thunder can’t decide if it wants to laugh at itself or soar into Valhalla, and ends up doing neither well. 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Simu Liu as Shang-Chi

Hi! It’s me again, with a Radical New Theory (TM). 

For the last 13 years, the Marvel movie machine Borg (to mix pop culture metaphors) has been assimilating all other genres. Do you want a spy movie? A space opera? Well, Disney has sucked up all the available resources and slapped a thin layer of Marvel branding on it. Spy movie? Captain America: Winter Soldier. Space opera? Guardians of the Galaxy. 

Now, it’s kung fu movies’ — or, more accurately wuxia, the Chinese blanket term for stories that blend martial arts, fantasy, and East Asian history — turn. With all of the first-gen Avengers like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans out of contract (and Scarlett Johansson suing the studio), Marvel needs a new breed of stars. To tap into a fresh supply of those sweet, sweet yuans, the first order of New Avengers business must be introducing Shang-Chi, a character modeled after Bruce Lee, to the masses. Since Iron Man was on the superhero B-list as late as 2007, Marvel considers this a solved problem. Thus, we get Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. 

Simu Liu creating corporate synergy.

Shaun (Simu Liu) is a carefree young guy in San Francisco, spending his days working as a valet at a fancy hotel and nights carousing at karaoke bars with his bestie, Katy (Awkwafina). But one day, on the bus to work, Shaun is attacked by a bunch of karate-chopping thugs, led by a guy named Razor Fist (Florian Munteanu, aka Big Nasty) who has, you guessed it, a giant razor where his hand should be. 

The big fight on the bus that ensues, in which Shaun reveals he has mad kung fu skills, is one of the best fight scenes the MCU has produced. The attackers were after a jade pendant Shaun’s dead mother Ying Li (played in flashback by Fala Chen) gave him. His estranged sister Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) has a matching pendant. So Shaun tells Katy his real name is Shang-Chi; his father Wenwu (Tony Leung), The Deadliest Man Alive, is a semi-immortal leader of an international crime syndicate called the Ten Rings, last seen in the MCU battling Iron Man. They’ve got to go to Macau to preemptively rescue Xialing from whatever the Ten Rings wants the pendants for. 

Once in Macau, they discover Xialing has been much more industrious than her older brother. She has built a small empire out of a quasi-legal street fighting league that rakes in the cash by streaming death matches on the dark web. After Shang-Chi survives a main-event dust-up with sis (Katy makes bank by betting against him), they are attacked by the Ten Rings, which precipitates another instant classic set piece on a bamboo scaffolding. 

One thing that distinguishes this film from most MCU fare is its frequent flashbacks. The Ten Rings group was named after a set of magic bracelets that grant Wenwu both practical immortality and extreme kick-assery. But the old warlord decided to settle down after getting his butt whooped by Ying Li, who was the guardian of the magic village Ta Lo. Now, Wenwu has been receiving psychic messages from Ying Li’s spirit, begging him to rescue her from captivity in Ta Lo, and he has retrieved his wayward children to help. Once Shang-Chi and Xialing reach Ta Lo, they discover the truth is quite different from what their father told them. 

Awkwafina steals the show as Katy.

Shang-Chi is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose debut, Short Term 12, is one of the best independent films of the 2010s. The screenplay, which he co-wrote, is both more complex and clearer than most MCU fare, even considering the time devoted to retconning the Yellow Peril aspects of the Ten Rings so as not to offend cash-bearing Asian audiences. Simu Liu is fine as a bland everyman hero, but it’s Awkwafina as the normie sidekick comic relief who repeatedly steals the show. 

Turns out, wuxia is the perfect fit for the superhero formula. Which brings me to my Radical New Theory: What if the MCU films have always secretly been wuxia at heart? Think about it: an elite class of super-warriors defend civilization and the innocent with martial arts. No matter how out-there superhero storylines are, problems are always solved by people in tights punching each other. So Shang-Chi does not represent Marvel co-opting East-West crossovers like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as much as it is reconnecting with its roots. Regardless, Shang-Chi definitely ranks among the more entertaining installments as the MCU grinds endlessly on, devouring everything in its path.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Black Widow: Super-Sisters Doing It for Themselves

Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanov in Black Widow.

First of all, Black Widow should have happened five years ago. It took eleven years — from Iron Man in 2008 to Captain Marvel in 2019 — for Disney super-producer Kevin Feige’s Marvel Cinematic Universe to make a solo super-movie starring a female superhero. In the interim, Warner Brothers filled the void with 2017’s Wonder Woman, the only good movie made from a DC property in a decade. 

Considering how aggressively mediocre Captain Marvel was, it’s especially galling that it took so long for Scarlett Johansson to get her own starring vehicle as Natasha Romanoff From a character standpoint, Natasha is the most interesting of the Marvel A-team. Trauma has always inflected the best superhero origin stories. (Did you know Batman’s parents were murdered in front of him? Someone should put that in a movie.) She was trained from childhood to be an elite assassin and intelligence operative by the Red Room, a secret Soviet super-soldier program notorious for its brutal methods. Somehow, the stone cold killer’s conscience survived the ordeal, and she defected to S.H.I.E.L.D., where she became Nick Fury’s most trusted confidant. Alone among the Avengers as a non-super-powered (albeit surgically enhanced and relentlessly conditioned) human, she feels pain when she gets hit. Thor the space god is cool, but he’s one-note. Natasha’s adamantium-tough exterior hides a broken person, deprived of human connection, riven with guilt for all the “red on my ledger,” trying to balance the books with world-saving good deeds. But she’s always gotten short shrift. During The Avengers iconic Battle of New York, the prototype for all the Marvel Third Acts to come, Black Widow was fighting flying, laser-firing aliens while armed only with a pair of pistols. Couldn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. at least get her an assault rifle? 

Natasha’s emotional potential is realized in Black Widow’s unexpectedly moving cold open. It’s 1995, and she’s living in suburban Ohio with her mother Melina (Rachel Weisz) and sister Yelena (played as a 6-year-old by Violet McGraw). Just as they’re about to sit down for an ordinary, wholesome family dinner, father Alexei (David Harbour) comes home with bad news. Turns out, the family are deep-cover spies, and their cover’s been blown. As the fake family rushes to get to the escape plane to take them to Cuba, Natasha stares longingly out the window, saying a silent goodbye to the closest thing to a normal life and human connection she will ever have. Her family may be fake, but it felt real to her.

Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh as super-sisters Natasha and Yelena in Black Widow.

Fast forward to 2016. (The film itself recognizes that it’s late. Natasha died in Avengers: Endgame, so Black Widow’s story takes place while she was on the lam after the events of Captain America: Civil War.) Yelena (played as an adult by Florence Pugh) is hunting a target who turns out to be another member of the Black Widow program. After Yelena strikes a mortal blow, the dying Widow exposes her to a red gas that undoes the chemical mind control regime the Red Room has imposed on her. Yelena goes rogue, stealing the remaining doses of Widow antidote, and sending them to her estranged, faux-sister Natasha for safekeeping. Instead of spending her downtime watching Moonraker — naturally, Natasha’s an obsessive James Bond fan — she decides to track down Yelena, and the pair team up to kill the Red Room mastermind Dreykov (Ray Winstone) and dismantle the Widow program once and for all. 

With director Cate Shortland at the helm, Black Widow is the best superhero picture since Black Panther. It’s not just an acceptably entertaining Marvel product, but an actual good film in its own right. The second-act action set piece, when Natasha and Yelena break their pretend-father Alexei out of a Siberian prison, stands with the airport brawl from Civil War as an all-time, kinetic highlight of comic book cinema. 

David Harbour as Red Guardian

It’s Johansson’s movie (she’s executive producer), but she leads an ensemble cast. Natasha’s been making life-or-death decisions since she was a teenager, so Johansson plays her with a deep world-weariness. She has zero time for petty bullshit; in 2021, I find Natasha’s emotional exhaustion extremely relatable. Pugh is her kid-sister foil, knowing exactly where to needle to get a rise out of the ice queen. The comic relief is left up to Harbour as the Red Guardian, Captain America’s Soviet counterpart gone to seed, still bitter about losing the ideological struggle with the West. 

Black Widow’s ideology is overtly feminist. It’s a quintessential female gaze movie. The women are sexy, but not subject to a leering camera; the men are either buffoons or sniveling abusers. The stakes and scale are remarkably restrained by Marvel standards. Natasha, a subject of unthinkable patriarchal abuse, is fighting to give other victims the kind of agency she was denied. Left to her own devices, Black Widow doesn’t choose to save the world from xenocidal aliens. Her heroism serves a more practical, down-to-earth purpose. 

Categories
Film/TV Television TV Features Uncategorized

Loki Enters The Marvel Multiverse

Tom Hiddleston as Loki

Every culture needs a god of mischief. For many Native Americans, it was Coyote. In West Africa, it was Anansi. For the Norse, it was Loki. 

Most trickster gods have no motivation beyond spreading chaos. They are, as they say on the internet, in it for the lulz. Loki was a little different. He had an agenda. To prevent him from seizing power, the gods of Valhalla imprisoned him — order symbolically controlling chaos. But one day, he will escape his bounds, and bring about ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, and the destruction of creation. Chaos, in other words, will ultimately win. 

When Stan Lee introduced a superhero based on the Norse god Thor, making a version of Loki to be his arch-enemy was a no-brainer. Played by Tom Hiddleston in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this is the version most people know. And now, to feed the gaping maw of streaming content of Disney+, Loki the villain has his own series. 

Loki begins, as all things must, with Avengers: Endgame. During the hopelessly convoluted time travel plot/MCU clip show the Avengers concocted to reverse Thanos’ snap heard ‘round the universe, they traveled back to the events of the first Avengers film, where a chaotic mix-up briefly left Loki in possession of the MacGuffin de jour, the cosmically powerful Tesseract. But when he tries to teleport away from the fracas to use his new magical artifact to take over Asgard, he finds himself instead in the clutches of a mysteriously powerful organization called the Time Variance Authority (TVA). Instead of producing plentiful, cheap, low-carbon power from nuclear, hydroelectric, and solar, like the TVA we all know and tolerate should be doing, this TVA is tasked with keeping the multiverse simple and understandable by stamping out variations from the One Sacred Timeline. Putting a powerful magic item in the hands of a trickster god certainly qualifies as a disruptive event. 

Loki is used to throwing his magical weight around, but the TVA’s privileged place in the multiverse means it makes its own rules. Magic doesn’t work, but time travel sure does, and they weaponize it to neutralize Loki. Existing outside of time, they’ve seen it all before, and will see it all again. 

In the pilot, much is made of the TVA’s ’70s retro aesthetic. Instead of charismatic gods and heroes, they’re a bunch of bureaucrats doing a job. When Loki appears before Judge Ravona Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), she is on the road to sentencing him to whatever the multiverse equivalent of the death penalty is until Special Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) intervenes. He’s hunting a powerful variant force threatening to tear the multiverse a new charged vacuum emboitment, and it takes a trickster to catch a trickster. 

Hiddleston’s Loki has always been one of the best actors in the MCU, providing a little lightness to Thor’s ponderous proceedings, until Taika Waititi let Chris Hemsworth’s comic hair down in Raganarok. Under the direction of Kate Heron, he is predictably charismatic. Wilson unexpectedly turns out to be a great deadpan foil to Hiddleston, and the pair’s chemistry promises to propel Loki to series length. 

Written by Rick and Morty alum Michael Waldron, Loki looks to take the MCU squarely into Doctor Who territory of multidimensional madness. If the team can sustain the energy of the pilot, it might be a time trip worth taking. 

Categories
Film/TV TV Features

The MCU Assumes its Final Form with WandaVision

Correct me if I’m wrong — and I’m sure someone will — but I think WandaVision holds the Marvel record for most elapsed screen time until someone gets punched. In the course of 23 films and eight TV series, the problems of superheroes and their discontents are always ultimately solved by scrapping. (I haven’t seen everything, but I’m guessing there’s a lot of punching in Iron Fist.) That’s to be expected from stories about characters who, as Vision (Paul Bettany) points out, dress like Mexican wrestlers. But for years, the “blam!” and “pow!” that are allegedly the genre’s biggest selling point have been the least interesting part of Marvel movies. How many action sequences do you remember from The Avengers? But you remember when the triumphant heroes went for shawarma.

WandaVision, the Disney+ miniseries that reaches its climax on Friday, March 5th, is the most creative thing to happen to superheroes since Into the Spider-Verse. Its real genius is leaving out the punchy parts that I’ve been tuning out since Vision was born in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Elizabeth Olsen (left) and Paul Bettany use TV Land tropes to unpack trauma in WandaVision

The love story of magically powered former Hydra operative Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision, the $3 billion vibranium synthoid of Tony Stark’s AI butler J.A.R.V.I.S. and rogue superbot Ultron, was mostly there to provide some pathos when Vision sacrificed himself to save half the universe. But despite the fact that Vision died (twice, thanks to the magic of time travel), when WandaVision kicks off, he and Wanda are living in a quaint house in a quiet New Jersey suburb. Their living room looks just like The Dick Van Dyke Show, right down to the black and white. The superpower couple tries to keep up appearances as normal, 1950s-style humans, even as their words are interrupted by a laugh track of mysterious origin.

The “real people trapped in a TV show” setup is nothing new — remember Raul Julia’s breakthrough performance in 1984’s Overdrawn at the Memory Bank? (No? Just me?) WandaVision‘s first three episodes see our heroic domestics trying to figure out what, exactly, is going on as they cycle through a survey of sitcom history, from I Love Lucy to The Honeymooners to the thematically appropriate I Dream of Jeannie. Then, as the world fills with color and the clothes become a lot less buttoned down, Wanda is pregnant with twins and their house looks like The Brady Bunch. As the twins grow up supernaturally quickly, we transition to the 1980s. In the show’s most delicious meta moment, episode 5 takes on Full House, the show that made Elizabeth Olsen’s sisters, Mary Kate and Ashley, into child stars.

Meanwhile, there’s a parallel story developing in a more recognizable version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) is one of billions of people who return from Thanos-induced oblivion to find a world transformed. She reports for duty at secret super-agency S.W.O.R.D. and is immediately thrust into the twin mysteries of the violent disappearances of Wanda and what was left of Vision, and a small town in New Jersey that has been cut off from the outside world by a dome of energy. By the time the narrative threads meet and the first punch is thrown in episode 6 “All-New Halloween Spooktacular!” the real world and the meta world have become hopelessly intertwined — and we haven’t even gotten to the musical number yet.

Olsen and Bettany, an “unusual couple”

WandaVision is at its best when it plays like the legendary Adult Swim short “Too Many Cooks” with an unlimited budget. Showrunner Jac Schaeffer delights in subverting basic tropes of both classic TV and Marvel superhero movies. The most important scene in the entire show, when Vision confronts Wanda with the knowledge that she created the sitcom world with her magic, plays out with credits rolling over it.

But none of the narrative fireworks would matter without emotional grounding from the leads. Olsen and Bettany have perfect chemistry. You have no trouble believing a witch could love a robot so much that she would bend the fabric of reality itself to bring him back from death (or at least deactivation). There are plenty of good performances among the sprawling supporting cast, especially Kathryn Hahn as Agnes, the nosy neighbor with a secret.

After 2020, the year without superheroes, WandaVision‘s popularity points to the staying power of the MCU, and Disney’s continued market domination, as the film world tries to get back on its feet. In some ways, the show is Marvel in its final form. The MCU has looked more like serial TV than discrete films for a long time, and the show’s cheeky writing makes a running joke out of Marvel’s tendency to hijack unrelated genres and slap a superhero in them. Marvel the infinitely pliable is the perfect vessel for Disney the insatiable devourer.

WandaVision streams on Disney+.

Categories
Book Features Books

Wakanda Forever: Bluff City Writers Contribute to Black Panther Anthology

Memphis looms large in the just-announced Marvel Black Panther prose anthology, Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, due next February. Not that T’Challa is hanging out on Beale Street, taking in a view of the Mississippi, or attending art shows at the CMPLX. No, it’s that so many Memphis authors have contributed to the collection.

Memphians all, poet/editor/author Sheree Renée Thomas, teacher/author Danian Darrell Jerry, and FIYAH magazine publisher and Memphis Flyer contributor Troy L. Wiggins are all featured in the anthology, which is edited by Memphis/Holly Springs native Jesse J. Holland.

“I was like, ‘This is a dream that I wouldn’t have said aloud.’ I was thrilled. Can this year get any crazier?” says Thomas, who is having something of a banner year. Her short story collection, Nine Bar Blues, was published in spring (and many stories are eligible for awards), she contributed to the Slay vampire anthology, and was named the new editor of long-running The Magazine of Fantasy & Science-Fiction. “It’s a 20-plus year overnight success. I spent years quietly just working, publishing, of course, but not getting huge fanfare beyond the anthologies,” Thomas says. “That’s how it is for everyone, but we focus on the exceptions.

“Writing is a long game. You’ve got to be a long distance runner. It’s one thing my mentor Arthur Flowers has always said,” she continues. “It may be a while before you’re published in something your family recognizes.”

But if there’s a list of high-profile recognizable characters, Black Panther is indisputably on it. Though Thomas is a longtime reader of sci-fi and fantasy, she says she’s newer to the world of comics. “I wasn’t able to read comics regularly as a child. [It was], ‘Here’s your library card, go to the library.’” But, the author says, she is a fan of the character. In fact, she dressed up to attend the 2018 screening of Black Panther and even made it onto some news clips about the night. “They show me in my Wakanda outfit with a huge afro. I was ready for Wakanda,” Thomas says with a laugh. And anyone who’s read her work can attest that Thomas will be right at home in the Afrofuturism of Wakanda.

“When Chadwick Boseman passed, that was a big blow to everyone,” she continues, remembering the charismatic Black Panther star who passed away in August of this year. “I had to take a moment to kind of regroup from that. I think it had an effect on us. We were so hoping that he would be able to enjoy the book. So it put new passion into the writing to honor his amazing performance. He embodied the Black Panther.”

Of course, writing for Marvel means digging into decades of history. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby debuted the character of T’Challa in 1966. “When I was writing my story I had to do a lot of research,” Thomas says. “You’re not using the Marvel Universe; you’re using the canon. And of course, the new story threads that are being written out by Ta-Nehisi Coates and others.” (Note: Coates’ The Water Dancer was my favorite novel of 2019, and his ongoing run on Black Panther makes for some of the most exciting and challenging comics I’ve ever read.)

“I’ve always been a big Marvel fan,” says Danian Darrell Jerry. “Not just Black Panther, but anything they’ve put out — X-Men, Spider-Man, Avengers, Doctor Strange. So this is a great opportunity for me to get in there and tap into some of the things I imagined as a child. It’s a little surreal, but it’s fun.”

Jerry is a native Memphian with deep roots in the city’s creative scenes. He’s a hip-hop artist who works with the Iron Mic Coalition. “I’ve always been interested in reading and books and comics, but I’ve always been interested in the arts in general,” he says. What’s more, Jerry works here to help promote literacy and an appreciation for literature — from childhood on to adulthood.

He has his MFA from the University of Memphis, where he now works as an adjunct English instructor teaching composition and literature classes. “This last semester I got a chance to teach Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me in my lit classes. [It was great] taking my literature class and adding a BIPOC focus and lens to it, examining hard questions on race relations in class, which was very productive.”


As founder of Neighborhood Heroes, a community outreach program, Jerry has used comic books as a tool to foster an appreciation of reading. Now he’s writing some of those same characters. “We use comics and fantasy to promote literacy to kids, teaching kids how to read through comics,” he says. “Last year, we threw an event on Mud Island, and it’s funny because we had ‘Black Panther’ come out and greet the kids and take pictures. We had cosplayers, and they loved it. Last year I was doing that, and this year I got the chance to actually write in the Black Panther book.”