KWIF = Kent's Week (or two) In Film. It would probably be easier on me if I just did as Toasty does and write-up each film as an individual post, but I seem to prefer just sitting down for three (or four or more) hours and plugging away at writing about movies when I'm awake way too early. We're encroaching on 2000 published posts here at T&K Sometimes Disagree, and had I separated each movie or TV show into their own entry we'd probably be closer to 2500. Whatevs. Still it's quite a milestone.
This Week:
Madame Web (2024, d. S.J. Clarkson - In Theatre)
All Of Us Strangers (2023, d. Andrew Haigh - Disney+)
Joy Ride (2023, d. Adele Lim - Crave)
No Hard Feelings (2023, d. Gene Stupnitsky - Crave)
Akilla's Escape (2020, d. Charles Officer - Crave)
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Of all the films I have to write about this week, Madame Web is certainly the least of them. It only gets the KWIF headline spotlight because it's the first 2024 film I've seen this year. I'm still catching up on 2023.
We all knew, from the first trailer, that Madame Web was going to be trash. The trailer hid nothing, and the complete disinterest of the cast was evident in a 2 minute montage.
Some of us even knew back when Sony announced they were producing a Madame Web movie that it was going to be trash. There's never even been a Madame Web solo comic book, how are you going to make a whole movie around that character? Especially when, in the comics, she's a blind, chair-bound eeeellllderly woman. As an actress Dakota Johnson is not a lot of things, and those are three of them.
The most interesting thing about Madame Web is all metatext, the stuff that happened around it. If the reports are true, it started out as a 90's-set prequel to the Andrew Garfield-led Amazing Spider-Man franchise. Then, apparently, producers got cold feet and wanted to push it up a decade and make it a prequel to the Tom Holland-led Spider-Man: Home* franchise. Then they got complete frostbite, lost their toes, and decided to make it its own thing.
It's certainly it's own thing.
We all knew it was going to be a bad movie. Upon its release critics were savage, comic book movie fans even more so, but even still, when I suggested Toasty and I spend an entire Saturday watching at least 4 screenings of Madame Web, I was only half joking.
Why?
Because Madame Web is truly a film that should not logically exist. There's no audience asking for it, there's no fanbase for the character, and there's no "world building" impetus for it. It was a studio-mandated dumpster fire the purple suits hoped would turn into a barbecue. And that's intriguing to me.
It's not like Morbius -- which I skipped and had zero interest in seeing until it cropped up on Netflix this week and now it's on the "wee hours of the morning, maybe" pile -- who is a character and concept, much like Blade which has the potential to be its own thing. He has had his own comic book series at least. But Morbius seemed too self-serious, as any Jared Leto-led project does. Madame Web looked like there was potential for a good time.
And you know what...?
I had a good time.
It is a terrible movie, just bloody ridiculous. A ludicrous farce of a superhero origin story that never fails to boggle the mind with inept story transitions and character choices and expository dialogue. But in that, it felt kind of light, breezy, mindless. It's sort of like getting that glaucoma test at the optometrist, where you sit there in dreaded anticipation of that puff of wind going in your eye, and then it happens and you can't help but be surprised and react and laugh, and then, really forget all about it seconds after its over. This is just a puff of wind in the eyes.
I don't have a lot of experience with Johnson's prior roles, and what I have seen has not left me clamouring for more. Her performance, if you can call it that, reeks of embarrassment. You can totally tell she doesn't really want to be in this movie. I have seen Adam Scott -- who plays (Uncle) Ben Parker here -- in plenty of things, dramatic and comedic, and I have never seen him not even phone in the performance, he's still dialing the numbers here. The whole cast is lifeless and drained of any energy. It probably speaks to all the many reshoots done, but it's a listless product, save for one aspect that actually does work: women talking.
The life of this film is when all the female characters are on screen together. There's a support there that seems to elevate the dodgiest script, and a true sense of bonding between the performers seemed to have happened... like soldiers in a regimen at war, experiencing the same traumas brings you close.
That good time I had watching this, though, I think it's a one shot deal. I can't imagine rewatching it and getting the same sense of enjoyment. It's a real dog of a Spider-person movie.
With a re-edit and more reshoots, I could see a much better, completely Marvel-free horror movie made out of this, of a woman whose precognitive powers isolate her from society and the three girls she must save from a slasher who is killing orphans or something.
Will Madame Web become a cult film, though? I could see people coming to screenings, holding pepsi cans and fake spiders in jars and doing fake chest compressions (the cure for everything) in the aisles.
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Andrew Scott plays Adam (no, he's not playing Adam Scott of Madame Web...we've moved on...) is a screenwriter in London. He lives in a new condo tower that is largely vacant. He seems lonely and a little depressed. He encounters a drunk Harry (Paul Mescal, completely endearing), who seems very much in the same state, but rebuffs Harry's offer for company to retreat into solitude.
Adam is trying to write about his parents, who died in a car crash when he was 12, but can't find the words, so he returns to his childhood home, where he encounters their ghosts. They catch up on their son's life. Adam is elated. He runs into Harry again and the two connect, first as two lonely and sad people, but then as two gay men whose lives just need more love and affection in them.
Adam and Harry become a fast couple, a very sweet, tender, romantic, caring couple, and together they venture out of their solitude and into the world. Adam, meanwhile, returns to his ghost parents on multiple occasions, some encounters not faring as well as others (like when he outs himself to his mother), but finding closure along the way.
Tone poems (like vibes movies) can be a challenge. I found myself a little bored during the first act, but when Adam and Harry finally connect, and get intimate, it's quite passionate. The second act, as Adam and Harry become more emotionally involved the colour palette gets really warm, and the bare skin of the men is just radiant. It reminds me just a touch of In the Mood for Love. The second act really endears you to these men and their gentle, supportive relationship. The vibestones leave no room for drama, there's not going to be any wild swings...except Adam's return visits to his parents' ghosts.
At times, I had to ask myself, is this a romance or a horror? A drama or a ghost story? The answer is "yes", and it's hard to reconcile at times. The third act is a tearjerker and, I'm sure for many (like Lady Kent), a head scratcher. At one point I was telling myself "if the movie goes there, I'm going to be so very mad at it." The movie went there. I wasn't mad, because it found itself, seconds later, right back in the vibestones, and it kept vibingtoning, and I kept vibingtoning with it.
It won't be for everyone, as vibe movies are pretty much exclusive to those who hit the same wavelength. I can see this emotionally connecting very hard with people who lost their parents young, or who have had strained relationships with them because of their gender or sexuality (or both) but, even if you can't personally relate, it offers a space on the couch, a little hit of something, and a set of headphones to feel the groove...if you accept it.
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Joy Ride is like half a Purple Suits-derived movie, and half spitting directly in their faces. The road-trip-gone-wild (RTGW) subgenre of comedy is such a Purple Suits formulae at this point that it's an instant eye-roll generator for me. The RTGW in recent years, though, has been co-opted from the Purple Suits by the FUBU crowd and we're seeing culturally-specific RTGW movies hitting the screens and turning tidy profits.
In this case, it finds two lifelong best friends, both Asian-American, but borne of different circumstances. Audrey was adopted from China as a baby to white parents, while Lolo was raised by her immigrant parents, and they met as children in the very white, Dave Matthews Band-soaked community of White Hills. Now adults, Audrey is the consummate overachiever, handling microagressions from her ignorant-not-intolerant white lawyer colleagues as she climbs to the top, while Lolo is a sex-positive artist with little income living in Audrey's basement. Audrey is set to take a trip to Shanghai to close a business deal and is taking Lolo with her as translator, since Audrey never really learned to speak Mandarin. In China they're to meet up with Audrey's college roommate, Kat, who has become a famous soap opera actress about to make the leap into major feature films. Lolo's awkward cousin, Deadeye, tags along as she's supposed to meet up with some online friends from a K-Pop superfan forum.
Audrey's experience in China at first is a mixed bag. Being surrounded by people who look like her lends her a quiet comfort that she never knew, but then finds that the language barrier, and the cultural barrier dampen that comfort. Lolo wants her to look up her birthmother while they are there, but Audrey seems to have no interest, until the business deal goes sour and proving her Chinese bona-fides to the Chinese investor involves recruiting her birth mom into action or losing everything she's worked for.
Of course nothing turns out right and the four women find themselves on a road trip gone very wrong that involves heavy amounts of drugs, aggressively sexy times with a basketball team, some distant relative connections, a breakdown in the friendships and an unexpected turn in Audrey's priorities.
I find the RTGW genre a fairly tired one, particularly the requisite "we're so high on drugs" scene and/or the absurd sex-stuff scene(s), because they're so often just relying upon the conceit for the laugh and not really working hard to elevate the jokes. The drug stuff here is so much the former, but the sex scenes with the basketball team leads to a pretty good group of gags, even if it's cartoonishly out of hand.
Our leads -- Ashley Park (Emily In Paris) as Audrey, Sherry Cola (Shortcomings) as Lolo, Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All At Once) as Kat and Sabrina Wu in a very breakout performance as Deadeye -- are all terrific, the chemistry is great, and they're all nimble comedic performers. Park nails the third-act drama so well, she had me tearing up along with her.
There is a place for comedy-for-the-masses, but to me, the best comedy gets deeply specific. What will always take a general 3-star RTGW story up a level is cultural specificity, it's the jokes that are generated from the culture by the culture to appeal to the culture. I'm not sure the jokes here are deeply specific, but they are definitely specific, and, even though it's not a comedy playing to me directly as an audience, it's still a rowdy fun time overall.
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Thus No Hard Feelings trailer premiered to a swath of reactionary, unfounded "film about grooming" allegations that I'm not sure it ever properly shook. From my perspective it looked like a stupid "raunchy comedy" that certainly couldn't have anything interesting to say about an older woman trying to bring a teenager out of his shell for a new car.
The teenager in question is 19-year-old Percy who is about to head out to Princeton in the fall, but never leaves his room and worries his parents with his isolationism. As a parent of modern teens, I can relate. But these rich second-home-having New York elite types are also aggressive helicopter parents and they aim to do something about it. They solicit an ad for a college-aged woman to date their son in exchange for a new car.
Answering the ad is Maddie, a 32-year-old Montauk lifer is struggling to keep her house. Her car has been repossessed, which means she can't supplement her low-wage bartending job with Uber driving for the summer when all the rich idiots descend upon town. It's these idiots, buying up and redeveloping all the real estate, that is driving her taxes up to unaffordable levels. She needs the car to drive the idiots to save her house, and she's willing to date a 19 year old to do it.
What results initially is highly awkward, very uncomfortable scenes of Maddie trying to get Percy's attention, trying to proposition him, trying to get him interested in having sex with her. Her plan is to get in and get out because time is money and time is a-wasting. But Percy is a thoughtful, sensitive and caring kid. He finds Maddie attractive but he wants to get to know her before he does anything with her.
What happens, naturally, is Maddie develops feelings. Percy's not like the quick meaningless lays she's left around town, she has a genuine interest in Percy's development as a person, seeing a reflection of her own life lost by the promise of this fledgling adult. Of course, her feelings are not romantic, like Percy's start to become towards her, and there's not really any easy way out of this, especially if he were to find out about the deal.
Jennifer Lawrence is a fearless performer. She doesn't carry with her any sense of ego or identity in her performance. It's only the first few minutes of the movie where I was thinking "yeah sure, world-famous movie star Jennifer Lawrence is pretending to be a victim of the housing crisis and class inequality" to "Maddie really needs that car, and while her tactics are riotously wrong-headed, she's not wrong for going for it". The brassiness that Lawrence shows as Maddie is a very well constructed veil that is evident from the beginning, hiding someone underneath who is sort of lost and afraid, and has been for a long time. (There's pretty much a direct parallel between Maddie and Adam from All Of Us Strangers, both who lost their parents young, and both who have severe difficulty opening up to others with knotted up hearts).
Matching her scene-for-scene is Andrew Barth Feldman, a newcomer to the screen but played the lead in Dear Evan Hanson on Broadway. The kid's got chops. The film is set in this age of financial disparity, and offers no resolution to it, save for the poor to take advantage of the inane ways the rich wish to be served. But it's also about the generation gap, between the time Percy's parents remember (eg. the John Hughes years) and the way kids engage with the world today, and also in the way Maddie views the world compared to Percy. It's not directly saying a lot about these things, but they're being put boldly up on the screen to examine and compare.
It's a far more thoughtful film than I had given it credit for, and it doesn't go for easy gags. Even it's most infamous (already) scene finds Lawrence engaging in fighting a trio of teenagers fully naked at night on the beach, at one point even suplexing a kid. In a comedy 20 years ago it would have been cheap titillation but, it's definitely not that. There's no leering. It's an action sequence. It's a brilliantly funny moment as she stomps out of the ocean in the background towards the teens like a Terminator fresh from the future, absolutely determined to destroy. And it's not funny just because she's naked, but because she's so unphased by her state when fighting with such wild gusto. It speaks to her as a character for sure, especially the conversation with Percy that immediately follows.
There's so much to enjoy here (see also Percy's stunning cover of "Maneater" or the "abduction" scene). This isn't a throwaway comedy. It's also not a laugh riot that demands immediate rewatch, but any other time in the past 50 years it would have been an instant cable TV classic. I don't know where it fares from here, but its charms are sure to prevail.
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Williams is a multi-multi-hyphenate. He does a bit of everything writing, poetry, music, directing, and yes, acting. It was his profile on my Rogers cable box that brought me to Akilla's Escape. I watch the trailer, it looked interesting enough, but the list of people associated with the production included Robert Del Naja, aka 3D of the band Massive Attack as part of the soundtrack. Williams was the lead, and also the composer, with 3D assisting.
The next day I listened to the soundtrack to Akilla's Escape a half dozen times, which led to a strong desire to watch the production. This is not unusual, as it happened a fair number of times back in the 90's when I'd gorge on a soundtrack long before I'd watched the film.
The story of Akilla's Escape is fairly simple, but the simplicity betrays its depth. Akilla is operating a grow-op in Toronto, where weed has become legal and is controlled by the province. The profits are still there, but competition has gone legit and he wants out. In the process of making his pitch to the criminals he's tangentially beholden to, a robbery goes down. One of the three thieves is captured, and he's just a boy, a mute kid in over his head. Akilla takes responsibility for the boy and gets him safely home to his aunt. But the danger isn't over. Akilla's associates want their goods returned and some intimidation for good measure, and the gang the boy was running with figure him for a snitch that needs to be silenced.
Flashbacks tell us about Akilla's life with his abusive father, drummed out of Jamaica after the political civil war ended and his enforcer status with the losing side marked him a wanted man. He took his family to New York where he started the Garrison Army, a particularly vicious gang, and when Akilla was old enough, brought him into the the fold. But Akilla had to run to Canada after retaliating against his father after repeatedly abusing his mother. It's been nearly 30 years.
But this boy he's saved, he was running with the Garrison, and that makes it personal for Akilla. And when the boy is abducted, Akilla will make sure he's returned safely to his aunty.
Overall this is a well crafted, tightly structured, and contemplative entry in the street gang subgenre. It's well coiled around a remarkably introspective performance by Williams who doesn't come off as an action hero badass, but instead a man capable of doing whatever it is needing done. He wears the weariness of Akilla well. He's tired of the life he's leading. Rather than thinking about something more, it's almost like he wants something less. An escape, you might say.
The film has a great trick in its sleeve, which is casting Thamela Mpumlwana as both the boy Akilla saves and as young Akilla in the flashbacks. Styled completely different, and yet, the resonance of Akilla seeing himself is absolutely the point.
At times this film bears the scars of its Canadian production budget. With better cameras, lenses, lighting and time, it would look a lot better than it does. It looks fine, but you can tell the late director Officer wanted it to look amazing. This should look like a Michael Mann picture, but it can only reach.
It's very much straddles the line between vibes movie and tone poem, owing a great debt to its soundtrack which weaves in and out of genres from reggae, dub, electronica, ambiant, industrial, gospel, hip-hop and even Spanish guitar. It is a great listen, both in context and out of.
