My Movie Diary: October Odds & Ends

So, October! In like a lamb and out like a lizard! Or in like a lion and out like an old pot of stew! Alright, so I don’t know many month-related cliches, but I can regale you with my definitively correct takes on a bunch of flicks I saw (semi-) recently. There’s a couple pretty good ones in here!

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) – After the relentless sturm-und-drang of Infinity War (see below), this tasty little dose of superhero silliness was just the palate cleanser I needed. This flick is maybe one-tenth as ambitious as Infinity War, and about five times as enjoyable. I should probably work through the math on that to come up with a Superhero Seriousness Ratio, with which I could show that the more seriously a flick like this takes itself, the less fun it is to watch. The latest Ant-Man adventure is a textbook example of this. The film retains the tongue-in-cheek good humor of the original, with Paul Rudd once again proving to be the perfect choice for the title role. He maintains a kind of jovial, wide-eyed amazement at what’s going on around him, even as he becomes better and better at his superhero-ing. This time, co-star Evengeline Lilly gets to join in on the fun, donning her (flying!) Wasp outfit as she helps Ant-Man try to rescue her mother from the quantum realm. As noted in the first flick, mom disappeared into the realm when she had to shrink herself tinier than a molecule in order to down a rogue missle. Okay, it’s all just made-up scientific hokum, but it tracks well enough while you’re watching it to suspend your disbelief. Besides, there’s always a creative action scene to keep things moving too fast for you to think about it all too much. And it’s in the action scenes that Ant-Man and the Wasp really shines, with some really great, inventive fights and chases that make the most of the characters’ abilities to shrink or expand themselves and the environment around them. It’s just a big, silly spectacle that doesn’t take itself at all seriously, which is the best kind of superhero flick, as far as I’m concerned. All that said, the most impressive thing about this movie by far is its use of CGI to make Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfieffer young again. It’s one thing to show a giant Pez dispenser flying around. It’s quite another to depict whole scenes, complete with close-ups, that flawlessly show Douglas and Pfieffer as they appeared years ago. It makes that Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One seem especially plastic and lame, and provides hope that maybe one day soon we can enjoy CGI Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the full-color spectacular Casablanca 2: Weekend at Rick’s.

Children of Men (2006) – I tend to go for gritty dystopian visions, so it’s kind of surprising that I hadn’t caught this gem until now. I’ve always heard good things about it, but something in the back of my mind wondered how good a movie starring Clive Owen could really be. Well, pretty damn good, it turns out. Now I get why Owen keeps getting roles: casting directors keep thinking back to this movie and convincing themselves that he’ll somehow be that engaged again. He turns in a rock-solid performance here as a grief-damaged, cynical former activist who gets pulled back into his former world. The film takes place in a grim future world in which humans have become sterile – no babies have been born for eighteen years. As you might expect, once humanity finds out it has no future, it leans into the nihilism and mutually destructive chaos. In the midst of this maelstrom of despair, Owen finds himself enlisted as the de facto bodyguard of a young, mysteriously pregnant woman. He is charged with helping guide her to a rebel group that’s based on a constantly moving ship at sea. This is unlike any road trip movie you’ve seen, I guarantee it. Director Anfonso Cuaron creates an utterly believable world in the midst of a complete societal breakdown, anchored by some truly fantastic cinematography. Emmanuel Lubezki was rightfully nominated for an Oscar for his work behind the camera here, full of memorable images and some jaw-dropping one-shot action sequences. An early attempted hijacking in the woods ranks with some of the most incredible action filmmaking I’ve seen, as the camera stays inside a car as it’s attacked by a cadre of guerrilas. The innovative use of long takes for scenes like this has had quite an influence – watch any gunfight from a John Wick movie and you’ll see echoes of Lubezki’s impressive achievements here. Children of Men is a really great flick, filled with unforgettable images and packed with ideas about humanity, redemption, and how to maintain hope in the face of fate’s often relentlessly cruel twists.

Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) – “Found poetry” is a kind of literary collage, taking words and phrases from other (often non-literary) sources and reframing them as poetry due to their new setting. Dawson City: Frozen Time is the cinematic equivalent of found poetry – with the emphasis on “found.” Writer/director Bill Morrison has constructed a poetic gem of a film that tells the story of Dawson City, Canada, a gold rush boomtown deep in the Yukon. Well, he’s actually telling two stories at once, because the film is constructed from bits and pieces of old silent films that were dug out of Dawson City’s frozen tundra. It seems that while preparing the ground for a new Dawson City civic center, workers discovered a treasure trove of previously lost silent movies buried underground. During Dawson City’s days as a gold-fueled boomtown, movie theaters had done thriving business. The town was the last stop on the distribution trail, though, so when the film reels finally made their way up there, it cost too much to ship them back to Hollywood. Film studios told the theater owners to simply dispose of the films. And while most were burned or tossed in the river (!), hundreds of them were buried in the tundra to serve as backfill for a construction project. Preserved in the frozen ground for over 50 years, many of the reels were still watchable when they emerged in 1978. Just about every one of the films had been written off as completely lost to history. Morrison has taken the footage from these rediscovered silent films and edited them together to tell the story of the town in which they were found. With just the help of some brief interviews and helpful captions, Morrison brings the era strangely to life. He weaves together newsreel and fictional footage, creating a gripping narrative against the backdrop of a moody, minimalist soundtrack. The city’s history is plenty interesting on its own: Donald Trump’s grandfather started his fortune by running the brothel that catered to Dawson City’s gold rush miners, it might (not) surprise you to find out! But it’s Morrison’s inventive use of the found footage that really makes this film special. He uses plenty of bits of film that have sustained environmental damage from being in the ground so long, but the weather damage gives the clips a weird beauty unto themselves, a kind of accidental psychedelia that’s really hypnotic. The film probably runs a bit long, although I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what should be cut. This is an outstanding documentary and an even greater technical achievement. Plus, it really made me wish that more than one reel of Tod Browning’s evidently ahead of its time, proto-noir “The Exquisite Thief” had survived…

Ant-Man (2015) – Yes, my son and I watched Ant-Man after we had already seen Ant-Man and the Wasp. No, it didn’t make any difference. Which points out one of the main reasons that the Ant-Man flicks are among the best current series in the Marvel stable: they’re not all that tied into the endlessly continuing saga of the Avengers and their Infinity Stones. You can watch an Ant-Man flick as a self-contained event, without having to know five films’ worth of backstory to understand what’s going on. Almost every Marvel movie these days ultimately amounts to an extended trailer for the next one. Their stories never really end, they just bleed into the next flick, and the next. Because Ant-Man is such a minor character in the Marvel Universe, though, his stories have been pretty much allowed to exist as fun little one-offs. This first outing for the character is a decent, if unspectacular, dose of superhero action that goes down easy, largely due to the spot-on casting of Paul Rudd as the title character. At first, the thought of goofy everyman-type Rudd as a superhero seems odd, but it’s perfect for this role. Rudd brings just the right amount of gee-whiz wonder to his part, and let’s be honest, a traditional tough guy like Jason Statham or someone would never work as a superhero whose main power is that he can shrink to the size of an ant. This flick is okay, certainly not as good as its sequel, probably because so much time has to be devoted to explaining the whole needlessly convoluted Ant-Man origin story. And I really do wonder how much better it would have been if original writer/director Edgar Wright had been allowed to bring his vision to the screen. Still, this is an enjoyable enough entry in the genre, anchored by a fun central character and some inventive CGI effects.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018) – So this might be the Marvel flick that finally killed the whole idea of an “entended universe.” For the past few years, every Marvel film has tied into every other one, slowly building to the Giant-Size Marvel Team-Up of Avengers: Infinity War. The story of intergalactic baddie Thanos and his quest for the six Infinity Stones has been laced through each recent Marvel film, whether right up front or hidden in the end-of-credits codas. This has tended to add a certain amount of bloat to each movie, but nothing compares to the overstuffed opus that is Infinity War. The filmmakers have brought together pretty much every character from every recent Marvel film and tossed them into an epic tale of intergalactic destruction. The result is a flick that’s way too long – superhero movies have no business clocking in at over two hours, but Infinity War sails way, way past that mark. It’s also all over the place tonally, careening from deadly serious drama to slapstick silliness and back – which is also probably a result of having to stuff so many characters, from so many different movies, with so many different tones, into one wearying story.

My main problem with the film, though, is with the ending, so I’m gonna toss out a spoiler alert right now. If you somehow haven’t seen Infinity War yet and care what the ending is and don’t want to know what happens, please stop reading now. Alright. So. Infinity War ends with the on-screen deaths of scores of major Marvel heroes. This downbeat, completely shattering finale pretty much ruined it for me. What had been a decently fun (if overwrought) superhero opus takes a crazily dour turn once Thanos gets his hands on all six stones. He quickly accomplishes his goal of wiping out half of all life in the universe, so we are treated to scene after scene of favorite Marvel characters turning to dust and dying right before our eyes. Peter Parker has the saddest exit of all, pleading that he doesn’t want to die even as he disintegrates in Tony Stark’s arms. We watch everyone from Black Panther to Doctor Strange dematerialize as tear-jerking music swells and everyone left behind looks devastated. And then the flick ends.

Look, I know that this is only the first part of two, and I know that there’s already a Black Panther 2 and another Spider-Man flick in the works. So there’s literally no chance that these characters stay dead. They’ll undoubtedly be resurrected through some ridiculous means — I’m guessing by turning back time somehow, since they show Thanos doing this to bring Vision back from the dead here. There’s too much money on the table for Marvel to kill off their most popular characters. Which begs the question of why they felt the need to end this flick on such a down note. Every adult who sees this will instantly realize no one’s really dead and find the whole thing silly, while every kid will get to enjoy watching their favorite heroes die. My son wasn’t the only kid who walked out of the theater bummed and confused — and plenty were even sadder than him. Nothing says “fun summer movie” like seeing a bunch of young kids with tears welling up in their eyes! At some point along the way, Marvel seems to have forgotten the whole point of superhero movies. They’re supposed to be fun! The wild success of the Marvel franchises convinced the makers that they were doing something ‘important,’ and the need to ratchet up the threat level with each new film kind of painted them into this corner. Infinity War takes itself and its essentially daft storyline way too seriously, resulting in a finale that is a crushing bummer.

That’s a real shame, since so much of the film is actually pretty fun. The best moments come (once again) from Chris Hemworth’s wry take on Thor, who gets most of the best lines and establishes a fun rivalry with Chris Pratt’s Star Lord. As in Civil War, Spider-Man lends some nice goofiness to the proceedings, as well. It’s these moments of lightness and fun that keep Infinity War watchable through all the Thanos-related angst. Once everyone comes magically back to life in the next episode, I hope that Marvel decides to reign in their universe-building and focus on making some stand-alone features again. Black Panther was ten times the movie Infinity War is, largely because it was able to limit its focus to the conflict between T’Challa and Killmonger. Once you have forty characters in five different places at once, it all gets to be too much. The filmmakers raised the stakes so high and made their villain so powerful that they had nowhere left to go but killing off major characters; but because we all know they’re really not dead, the story actually ends up having no stakes at all. The thing that Infinity War does best is send viewers home depressed, which I’m not actually sure should be the goal of a summertime superhero flick. Meh.