KWIF: Blue Beetle (+2)

 KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, but more like Kent's A Few Weeks Ago in Film...KAFWAF?

This Week:
Blue Beetle (2023, d. Angel Manuel Soto - Crave)
Parker (2013, d. Taylor Hackford - AmazonPrime)
Repeat Performance (1947, d. Alfred L. Werker - Criterion Channel)

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Blue Beetle is a back-to-basics superhero origin story with an injection of Texan Mexican-American culture and family values. So, maybe not so basic.

There may not be a massive collective of Blue Beetle ultra-heads out there, but it seems writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer is one of them. The amount of comics-derived Beetle lore he injects into this script, and thus forcing the production to visualize all this madness, is utterly remarkable. As a guy who is one rung down from being a Blue Beetle ultra-fan myself (both Ted Kord and Jaime Reyes are on my top 5 all-time favourite superhero characters list), I delighted in every ounce of it, even when the script makes a few blatant left turns, like introducing Ted Kord's daughter(!?), and shifting the relationship Jaime has with his scarab.

I don't mind what they did with either, but I really wish, in the exploration of what makes Jaime's relationship with his family so special, they also explored what makes his relationship with the scarab so special. In the comics and Young Justice cartoon, the scarab is a super weapon intent on being a super weapon, but Jaime has the ability to keep it under control. Here, the scarab takes a marginally passive role, bending to Jaime's wishes rather quickly, but also acting as advisor to him. It's a less dramatic relationship but the film probably wouldn't work the same way with it being more contentious.  Even still, it doesn't spend enough time with Jaime and the scarab coming to terms with each other (I think about the scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming where Spidey's engaging with his onboard AI and we don't really get a scene like that here).  The alien-ness of the scarab is used a little too sparingly.

I found the humour of the film largely fell pretty flat and was very dependent on screaming (as Toasty pointed out). Given how the film leans in very heavily on these humourous moments for basically the first two acts, it's kind of a shame we're actively yelled at for much of the film's run time. But you know who likes yelling-as-comedy? The kids, if half the animate programming on TV is any indication.

The third act, where many a superhero film falls apart or descends into cgi goop, here is where Blue Beetle triumphs the most, letting all the players in on the action, giving most of them meaningful things to do, and delivering a thematically apt finale. Go Nana! 

I like that this film made little attempt to world build outside of its own neon-drenched El Paso-analog pocket of the DC Universe. A brief mention of Superman and the Flash (and calling Batman a fascist) is more than enough to tell us what world were in. Jaime's not vying for a spot on the Justice League roster, he's just a college grad, deeply in dept, looking for a job, who happens to get an alien bug weapon integrated into his spine. That old saw.

I wish I could downright love that a Blue Beetle movie exists, although I do genuinely appreciate that this one does. I've wanted for years for there to be a Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle movie, hoping it would be a smash success and see little kids wearing the scarab backpack, running and jumping around screaming "I'm Blue Beetle".  This wasn't a big enough hit for that, unfortunately. 

I think the translation of the suit from comics to screen is incredible, and I like the cast, if not all the yelling in their performances. I'm not fully enamoured with the final product but that's at least in part because, as Toasty said, superhero fatigue is real. I think 20 years ago I would have embraced this much more fully...but then Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle didn't exist until 2006 (RIP Keith Giffen). 

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There have been a number of cinematic interpretations of Richard Stark's Parker (Stark being Donald Westlake's pseudonym for his two dozen hardboiled crime novels starring the character of Parker), played by many tough guy actors. Lee Marvin in Point Blank, Jim Brown in The Split, Robert Duvall in The Outfit, and Mel Gibson in Payback, among others. The interesting thing about these previous adaptations of Stark's Parker is that none of them featured the character "Parker". Westlake, it's siad, wouldn't permit use of the character's name unless the studio licensing his work committed to at least three films.

That Jason Statham plays a character named Parker in a film titled Parker, something Westlake's widow agreed to with the producers, somehow seems like a slap in the face to Westlake's wishes.  Maybe it only is in hindsight, given how frustratingly awful the end result is.

I'm no superfan. As I am with most things, I'm an avid tourist, just popping in, absorbing and appreciating some of the experience, without dedicating myself to it.  In this case, just prior to watching Parker I had just finished reading the omnibus of Darwyn Cooke's loving adaptations of a few of Richard Stark's Parker stories. This certainly isn't that.

It's not even that Statham's Parker doesn't at all seem to be the same character I just read, or that Statham's Parker is indistinguishable from almost any other Statham character, or even the unambitious Hollywoodizing of a Parker story (it absolutely stalls out whenever it jumps to Jennifer Lopez's character...not JLos fault, it's the script), it's that Taylor Hackford shoots the goddamn thing like its an episode of NCIS. It's one of the ugliest, sloppiest 30-million dollar production I've seen in a long while. It's got an incredibly stacked support cast (Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce, Clifton Collins Jr., Nick Nolte, Patty Lupone, Bobby Cannavale) that all deserve much better than to be treated like tertiary local hires. It's also got a godawful soundtrack that made me feel slightly ill, and horrendous editing that seemed to do nothing to help the story progress with any finesse.

It was very difficult transition going from Cooke's incredible passion project of delicately translating Westlake's stories and characters so precisely and creatively, with a gorgeously illustrated, stylized 50's setting, to this atrocity in which nobody at all seems to care about the quality of the final product.  

Rumour has it Shane Black's attempting a series of Parker stories with Mark Whalberg as the lead. From Black's repertoire, it's clear he can do justice to this material, but I cannot stand Whalberg, and he's an immediate deterrent for me watching a film (even more than Statham, Whalberg's a guy who can't really play anything but the same character over an over). 

Skip it all, go read Cooke's comics (or the original novels).

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From pseudo-noir to actual noir, I recently watched Repeat Performance, a part of Criterion Channel's "Holiday Noir" selections this December. My desire was to get away from Hallmarkies for this year's XMas Advent Calendar, and thought this Noir category would be the perfect distraction. Alas, the "Holiday" of this "Holiday Noir" is New Years Eve, not Christmas.

There are still others to watch, even ones that clearly identify themselves as Christmastime movies, but I chose this one first since it features some timey-wimey shenanigans that are obviously totally in my wheelhouse.

Here Sheila (Joan Lesley) is an actress subjugated by her husband, Barney (Louis Hayward). She winds up shooting him on New Year's Eve in self-defence. She's distraught, and in the process of heading to her play's producer looking for help, she wishes she could do the year over again, and by the time she reaches the top of the stairs, the clock has rewound by a year.  It takes her a while to realize that she is not going mad, and upon returning home, seeing Barney alive, she starts trying to manipulate the timeline, to prevent Barney (a struggling playwright) from meeting Paula (a successful playwright played by Virginia Field ) and having an affair that both kills their marriage and, quite literally, kills one of them. But every effort to change the tides of fortune result in either further cementing the inevitable or maybe even making things worse.

True to Criterion Channel's assessment, Repeat Performance does feel like a prototype for The Twilight Zone complete with an opening voice over narration that sounds similar to (but isn't) Rod Serling. It's a fairly compelling film despite some pretty hammy acting (Hayward leading the charge on that one) and being absolutely drenched in sexism, both outwardly in the story and intrinsically in the script. The whole movie is really not about Sheila trying to stop the events that wind up with her killing Barney, but, instead trying to save her marriage to a drunken, depressed, jealous, washed-up, pathetic man that she inexplicably loves to the point of reversing time to try and save. It's a noir, so it sustains its fatalistic tone pretty well, but it's hard to root for a character who spends an entire year making one big mistake.

I was really hoping at the very end to find that Sheila kills Barney again, heads to the same stairs only to find herself, once again, a year earlier...stuck in a horrific time loop she can't emotionally escape. Alas, it twists the ending into a tale fooling fate, just enough to be quite satisfying.

A fascinatingly terrible story, but a good production overall.

Enemy

Twenty-for-Seven #8 (Day 4)
2013, d. Denis Villeneuve - AmazonPrime

(I was hoping to do a trilogy of doppleganger movie reviews, but 2013's The Double, directed by Richard Ayoade, is unavailable on the streaming services I have, so for now it's just a duo, which is more thematic anyway)

Jakey G has Toronto and spiders on his mind

In the Letterboxd app's decade in review, Denis Villeneuve topped the list of top 100 directors.  Now, I admit, I'm very late to the game on appreciating Villeneuve.  There are many of his films I've wanted to see over the years, and very few I have actually seen.  I was years behind on Arrival and certainly many months behind on Blade Runner 2049.  Both of these films impressed me greatly yet I spent no effort to review his back catalog, so I became quite surprised to recently find that Incendies, Prisoners, Sicario and Enemy (all films on my "to watch" list) were all Villeneuve films.  I see the connective tissue between Arrival, Blade Runner and (forthcoming) Dune, but none of these seem to fit together as a "type".  But then I haven't watched all of them yet.

Enemy I was curious about years ago, mainly because I like the idea of discovering a doppleganger and then tracking them down.  I had forgotten that the film is set in Toronto... and not "Toronto posing as X" as it so often does.  It's exciting to see Jake Gyllenhaal jump on the 504 King Streetcar or to look up an address in Mississauga and actually go out to Mississauga (and see those salt and pepper shaker apartment complexes in the background).  Toronto never plays Toronto, so this is an added thrill.

Beyond that, the film is very curious in the way the lead character Adam gets so worked up over discovering his visual double, Anthony, after seeing him as a background performer while watching a video.  It becomes obsessive for him, and once they finally meet, Anthony is absurdly angry about the whole situation.

What we learn is Anthony is quite an asshole.  He's a member of some weird sex club, he cheats on his pregnant wife and seems completely self-involved.  Adam meanwhile is demure and reticent.  He has a fuck buddy but they don't seem very intimate or close.  Gyllenhaal does remarkable work differentiating these two in both demeanor and physicality.

The accompanying soundtrack by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans infers something very sinister, while the heavy shadows and yellowish hue Villeneuve applies provides and overbearing gloominess and weight to the world Adam lives in.  There's a repeating motif of arachnids, which seem to be weighing on both Adam and Anthony's minds, a web of deceit spun that they both get caught in.

The end of the film is a puzzle, one that I had to look up other reviews to make sense of.  This is a film about duplicity and deception, the lies we create and then fall victim to ourselves.  Adam and Anthony, you see, are the same person, and with this understanding the film becomes much less literal and far more metaphorical.  There isn't a twist ending, that reveals this, it's all still undercover and inferred.  I'm not sure if it helps going into the film knowing this, or if it's better to discover it after, but I think the film works in either situation.   In effect, Anthony has created a whole other life in order to conduct his extramarital affairs, so segregated that he's effectively bifurcated his personality into two distinct characters.

It's quite brilliant in its execution, but I needed that extra outside nudge to get the message.  I've been thinking and parsing out the film a lot since watching it, and I'll defintely need to watch it again. I see how Villeneuve went from Enemy to Arrival from here, if only in style.

(Toast's take circa 2014)

5 Seasons of Mad Men

The first episode of Mad Men I saw was the Season 4 Christmas episode my sister was watching on Netflix.   It wasn't terrible but it didn't captivate me either.  I just felt rather lost.  

Mad Men has a reputation as one of those "great shows", addictive television like the Wire or Breaking Bad, that has achieved both commercial and critical success, yet seems to retain a tight artistic focus that was once rare on television, (though, in the wake of Mad Men's surprising popularity, seems to be as prevalent as network-driven programming).  I didn't have a tremendous interest in watching it initially, yet with the critical acclaim continuing through its fourth season, I thought I should at least give it a shot.

The first season, to be honest, was a bit of a slog, not nearly as immediately captivating or addictive as I was led to believe.  The wife and I watched a half dozen episodes over a month's time and then left it for a while... at least half a year before resuming.  It was around episode 9 of the first season that the switch was flipped, however, and the addictive nature of the show kicked into full gear.

There are many facets to Mad Men that contribute to its appeal.  It's very soap operatic, meaning there's a lot of romantic entanglements to deal with, a tremendous amount of infidelity and relationship drama.  It's a nighttime soap, like Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, amongst others, that long ago went out of favour (replaced by teen-geared soaps), yet more mature, less tawdry.  With its early-1960's setting, it's impeccable set dressing, wardrobe and styling, it's visually striking, refined and very stylish.   There's an investment in production value, and a palpably high level of research into the advertising game, the culture and the zeitgeist of the '60's. 

What really makes Mad Men tick, however, is its characters.  It's evident from its slow-burn beginnings that creator Matthew Weiner wasn't interested in shorthanding his characters by archetyping, instead they come fully formed and it does take over half the first season for the audience to get to know them and begin to understand their motivations.

Weiner also created a storytelling language for Mad Men that makes it distinct from almost every other program on television.  Besides Don Draper, no other character's story carries on from episode to episode.  They're generally all present in the community of Sterling-Cooper, but the focus shifts around the large cast, and it can be 3 or 4 episodes (or more) before focus falls back on one of the supporting players, picking up their story in a "real time" sense.  This means, typically, that much has developed off screen since last their non-professional life was followed.

Then there's Don Draper, the show's centerpiece, it's ace in the hole, an instant classic character that has transcended the show, to the point that I'm sure as many people know of him that don't watch the show as those that do.  Don Draper begins as a bit of a mystery, but a man of ultimate cool:  composed, suave, dapper, talented, respected, even a little feared.  He's part James Bond, part Wolverine for the dramatic set. It's evident early on that nobody on the show really knows him, and the show parses out bits and pieces of Don's surprising past across the first three seasons in flashbacks and fever dreams.

Don's character constantly pulls at the seams, in surprising ways.  When Don has a breakdown, or is stymied, or becomes Dick Whitman, you see the facade drop, chipping away at his mystique, if not his appeal.  Yet, Weiner always has a restorative bullet in the chamber, something that, once fired, immediately brings Don back to his god-amongst-men status.  Jon Hamm is fantastic in the role (and so goddamn handsome, you want to hit something), and it's his ability to show those fractures in the mask that the show is hinged upon.  Without it, Don Draper would be too perfect, perhaps unlikeable, callous even.

The show is typically exceptionally well written, and it constantly defies expectations.  Unlike most nighttime dramas, Mad Men rarely takes you where you think its going to go.  We've trained ourselves as a viewing audience to look for foreshadowing and to get wrapped up in the build up of drama, and as such Mad Men is constantly setting up paths in that regard.  Yet it rarely follows them, as it seems doing so would be far too easy, too "TV dramatic" and less interesting than the road it actually does wind up taking, those which are rarely foreshadowed.

The show's involvement of the events and politics of the '60's is one of its weaker traits, though valiant in its efforts.  As often as it handles these well, it doesn't.  It's use of the Kennedy assassination was brilliant, especially in how it interrupted the drama in everyone's life, an even that united people in shock and sorrow.  Conversely, its handling of era's race issues is quite often clunky, as is it's pointed use of smoking, big tobacco in advertising, and things like shock therapy or even littering, which are displayed in a manner like "look how ignorant we were".  It's a little too flagrant and could've been incorporated more organically or not at all.  It handles feminism and gender issues far, far better.  The diversity in its female characters, how they view themselves and their roles within their professional and personal lives as the sixties barrel on is one of its strongest facets.

That said, weakest element of the show is, hands down, January Jones.  Devoid almost completely of any charisma, she's unappealing in the role of Betty Draper, Don's somewhat depressed suburban housewife.  Prudish, sour-faced, and neglectful, she's a thoroughly unlikeable, and with Jones in the role, mercilessly unsympathetic.  I have a feeling that the audience is supposed to feel something towards her other than pure detestation, alas, Jones is unable to elicit anything resembling compassion or affection. 

Mad Men's first four seasons are exceptional, with the fifth season only slightly less so.  The latest season suffers from, primarily, the distance to its beginnings.  It's pretty much exhausted the drama of Don Draper's origins, which means as the central figure to the show, he's marginally less engaging, and largely demystified.  As well, the transition from the buttoned down, conservative style of the 50's into the mod-influenced mid-60's (including a set change between the 3rd and 4th season for the advertising agency) greatly impacts the overall feel of the show.  The fifth season is a little too bright, a little too showy, losing some of its subtlety.  While still good, with some of the show's most shocking and depressing moments (and, finally, a scene the focuses solely on Jon Hamm and Christina Hendricks, which is so much concentrated attractiveness that your TV set might overheat) it also features so much infidelity (a show staple) that the affairs have become tiresome and uninteresting. 

Next to Don Draper, infidelity is the show's center point.  The characters seem to constantly revolve around it, but there's little exploration of what it actually means to these people, why they all do it (and they all do) and I find it even harder to believe that the 60's are accurately represented by its prevalence within the show.  The closing scene of season five had me throwing my hands up.  We will see where we are when season six hits, and apparently there's another season to follow before the show runs down, but by then I'm wondering if it won't have overstayed its welcome.