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Baby Steps

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The Fantastic Four: First Steps

by Hope Madden

Wholesome is the new look in superheroes. Just a couple weeks back, James Gunn and Superman made kindness punk rock. And now, director Matt Shakman hopes to draw on a retro-futuristic vibe to conjure a less skeptical, cynical time.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps owes much of its entertainment value to production design. The 1960s of the future is as quaint as can be, but the vibe is never played for laughs at the expense of its innocence.

And sure, villainy is forever afoot, but for Mr. Fantastic (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), nothing is as scary as new parenting. For the first time, Mr. Fantastic/Reed Richards is facing the fact that he knows nothing about anything (as all new parents must).

But he’d better get over it because world eater Galactus (Ralph Ineson, in great voice) is headed to earth, as heralded by one silver surfer (Julia Garner). Does Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) have a crush? Sure, but so does The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), thanks to that kindly teacher over at the neighborhood Hebrew school (Natasha Lyonne, donning her own inimitable retro-future style).

Shakman helms his first feature in over a decade, after slugging it out on a slate of successful TV series, including helming 9 episodes of WandaVision. Though he nails the visual vibe, set pieces and action sequences entertain more than wow.

The wholesome family speechifying gets a little tiresome eventually, as well. But the earnest, heartfelt messaging—no cynicism, no snark, no ironic detachment—feels not only welcome but fearless. Performances are no less sincere, each actor carving out camaraderie and backstory the film refuses to telegraph.

Pascal, as a genius almost enslaved by his calculating brain, effortlessly mines the character for conflicted tenderness, so believably submissive to this new love. Both Moss-Bachrach and Quinn, in supporting roles, craft memorable, vulnerable characters.

Kirby impresses. Saddled heavily by the cinematic tropes of protective motherhood and indefatigable maternal instinct, she edges Sue’s conflict with flashes of rage and ferocity that not only support the plot but give life to the character.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is no Superman. But it’s fun. It’s wholesome. It’s swell.

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Not-So-Way-Back Machine

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Eddington

by Hope Madden

There are very few contemporary filmmakers better able to pick scabs, to generate discomfort for an entire running time, than Ari Aster.

Eddington, his latest, is an inverted Western set in late May of 2020—you remember spring of 2020, don’t you? The lunacy. The terror. The relentless need to move from one day to the next as if we were not actively sniffing the apocalypse. Well, Aster sure remembers it.

In a lot of ways, Eddington, New Mexico resembles just about any place in the spring of 2020. An awful lot of people wanted to ignore the pandemic because it hadn’t touched their town (yet, that they knew of). Others wanted to follow the rules as closely as was convenient, hoping that business as usual would find a way. Others spiraled, whether from terror or boredom or lack of structure, often turning to the internet, many to finally realize that police brutality was a real thing.

Aster captures it all, depicting the way the façade of normalcy had protected us from ourselves and each other, and reminds us that nothing healthy grows on stolen land.

Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) just wants things to go back to the way they were. He sees the disdain, fear, maybe even hate people like him—white, unmasked men—are facing. It is disconcerting—Aster’s hint that the underlying cause of all the harm, hatred, violence, and mayhem that came from the pandemic might have less to do with Covid 19 and more with white men feeling their true vulnerability.

Phoenix is characteristically flawless—flummoxed and human in a way that engenders more empathy than Joe likely deserves. Joe’s counterpoint, the smooth, opportunistic mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), doesn’t get off any easier, and Pascal’s slightly brittle performance is enlightening.

Aster populates Eddington with a collection of the exact types of people forged by the pandemic, though many are boiled down to defining lines of dialogue (“I am a privileged white male, and I’m here to listen! And I’ll do that as soon as I’m done with this speech.”) Still, with supporting performers as strong as Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Michael Ward, and Dierdre O’Connell, even the most faintly drawn character is fascinating.

Aster’s film blames humanity, not right or left, for the cultural rot we’re left with. That may be the most honest and aggravating choice he makes, but Eddington offers very little in the way of fabrication. The town may be fictional, but I think we all remember the place.

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Proper Credit

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Materialists

by Hope Madden

Just two years ago, filmmaker Celine Song produced a breathtakingly original romance movies in Past Lives. With that film, she delivered a love triangle of sorts where no character felt cliched, no choice felt obvious, and every moment felt achingly true.

Now she sets her sights on something decidedly more mainstream, but that only makes her instinct for inverting cinematic cliché in search of authenticity that much more impressive.

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a skilled matchmaker at a high-end Manhattan boutique. When she attends the wedding of clients she introduced, she runs into her ex, John (Chris Evans). He’s handsome, thoughtful, clearly into her, and he’s catering. Actually, he’s a waiter working for the caterer.

Lucy also meets the groom’s brother, Harry (Pedro Pascal). In the parlance of Lucy’s profession, Harry is a unicorn: handsome, wealthy, smart, and single.

Immediately, we know this movie. Lucy’s job is to broker relationships. Check boxes. Create partnerships. And the film is going to teach her that a good match can’t hold a candle to the unruly nature of love.

It has been done to death. But the path Song takes to get there, and the insights and realities she explores along the route, never cease to fascinate.

Characters use the words value and risk a lot, terms that have a specific meaning in business but actually mean something quite different in the human setting. It’s interesting, in a society where women have agency and financial means, how different the vocabulary of love can be. Listening to women turn men into commodities, ordering as if from a buffet or build-a-bear, is simultaneously funny and horrifying.

Of course, Lucy has men for clients, too, and Song is quick to remind us of the entrenched language of objectification and conquest. And the different definitions of risk.

She also never asks us to root against anyone. Harry’s a gem. John’s a good dude. The one person whose flaws are explored is Lucy, and Johnson’s reflective, quiet delivery is characteristically on point, allowing those flaws to draw us closer to the character.

Materialists isn’t perfect, and to a degree, Song submits too much to formula. But the way she works within those confines is often magical.

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Freaks Off the Leash

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Freaky Tales

by George Wolf

Look, I’m not saying I didn’t expect someone to make a Sleepy-Floyd-as-a-ninja-assassin horror comedy. I am saying I didn’t expect it to be Boden and Fleck.

Eric “Sleepy” Floyd played thirteen years in the NBA, making the All Star team in 1987 as a member of the Golden State Warriors. Freaky Tales makes him the heroic centerpiece of a wild anthology that loves the late 80s, Oakland, and Nazis dying some horrible deaths.

Let’s party!

Ryan Fleck may be an Oakland native, but his films with partner Anna Boden haven’t primed us for this campy, Grindhouse detour. Breaking in with the standout indie dramas Half Nelson and Sugar, they moved closer to the mainstream with the road tripping gamblers of Mississippi Grind before giving Captain Marvel a satisfying MCU debut in 2019.

Freaky Tales feels like a return to a low budget indie mindset, where ambitious and energetic newcomers want to showcase their favorite movies, music, and neighborhoods while they splatter blood and blow shit up.

The tone is set in the first of four chapters, when local skinheads make a habit of busting up a punk club. Pushed too far, the young, pierced pacifists decide to take bloody revenge with the help of a Scott Pilgrim aesthetic and a glowing green substance seemingly from another world.

Episodes two and three back off on the bloodletting, but begin interconnecting the tales with shared characters. A racist cop (Ben Mendelsohn) harasses two ice cream shop clerks (Normani, Dominique Thorne) before they get the chance to battle rap star Too $hort (DeMario Symba Driver, although the real rapper is also in the cast) onstage at a local hip hop club.

Meanwhile, an organized crime enforcer on the way to losing all he cares about (Pedro Pascal) disappoints a snobbish video rental guy (Tom Hanks in a fun cameo) while references to Sleepy Floyd (Insecure‘s Jay Ellis) get more and more frequent.

Part four brings everything together in an explosion of Metallica metal and Tarrantino-esque alternative history, with Floyd slicing up enough bad guys to impress Uma Thurman before breaking out the break dancing that runs beside the closing credits.

If you haven’t guessed, this is a crazy ride that has plenty to offer fans of bloody fun and WTF plot turns. And while the middle chapters sometimes tread water compared with the action splatter of parts one and four, give Boden and Fleck credit for throwing us one we didn’t see coming.

Buried under all this blood and camp, the film displays a genuine love of time, place and genre that you cannot ignore. These Freaky Tales are truly off the leash, usually in the best possible way.

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Return of the King

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Gladiator II

by Hope Madden

Ridley Scott knows how to stage an epic. At 87, he’s lost none of his flair with massive battles on land or sea, nor with the brutal intimacy of hand-to-hand combat. And he still knows how to cast a movie.

His narrative skills have taken a step back, but his eye has rarely been sharper.

It’s been 24 years since Scott’s Oscar-bedecked Gladiator cemented its position as the best sword-and-sandal film, but in the age of Caesars, only 14 years have passed. Scott opens Gladiator II with a lovely animated sequence honoring the fallen Maximus, as well as many of the filmmaker’s most iconic images.

And then we land on the film’s present-day African coast, a battle with a Roman navy led by Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a nation subdued, and a grieving widower (Paul Mescal) claimed as prisoner of war.

But we know he’s no ordinary prisoner.

For the next 2+ hours, Scott toys with “echoes through eternity” as he undermines much of the rebellious political nature of his original in favor of a returning king parable. That, a few wobbly accents, a couple of narrative dead spots, and a really poor decision involving sharks weaken the sequel.

But a good gladiator can’t be stopped, and Mescal is a really good gladiator. Russell Crow layered righteous rage with tenderness. Mescal replaces that tenderness with a vulnerability that only makes the rage more unruly. A touch of mischievous good humor humanizes the character and compels attention.

As does Denzel Washington. I dare you to take your eyes off him. Vain but wise, calculating and saucy, Washington’s Macrinus proves a much more complicated foe than the original’s wholly dishonorable, incestuous crybaby Commodus. But the simplicity of good v evil clarified Gladiator’s appeal. Macrinus is harder to hate.

Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger supply the syphilitic excess this go-round as twin Emperors Geta and Caracalla. Connie Nielsen returns, regal as ever, though no more skilled at staging coups. The balance of the cast is uniformly solid if not entirely memorable.

Gladiator II delivers an often exhilarating, mainly gorgeous spectacle populated by enigmatic characters performed admirably. It does not live up to Gladiator. But what could?

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Metal Mama

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The Wild Robot

by Hope Madden

With wry, almost gallows humor, visual panache and an impressive voice cast, co-writer/director Chris (How to Train Your Dragon, Lilo & Stitch) Sanders’s The Wild Robot nails the aching beauty of parenthood like few other films have.

Adapted from Peter Brown’s gorgeously illustrated middle grades novel, the film drops us and ROZZUM unit 7134 on an island uninhabited by humans. This makes it tough for “Roz” (Lupita Nyong’o) to fulfill her mission of completing a task, any task. But then an undersized gosling (Kit Connor) imprints on her, allowing Sanders to have some fun with the unending complications associated with Roz’s new task: parenting.

The writing and the delicately lovely animation work together to hypnotic effect, each unveiling something more human with every scene, regardless of the fact that there’s nary a human in the movie. Sanders’s script reflects the human experience, both the timeless (the thankless heartbreak of investing your whole heart and soul into the process of successfully losing your child to their own future) and the immediate (AI, corporate greed, tech overlords).

A talented cast deepens the film’s effect. Nyong’o effortlessly treads the line between logic and longing with so graceful a character arc that you can feel Roz blossoming. Pedro Pascal joins her as Fink, the fox who hates to admit that he wants to be part of this little family unit more than anything.

Catherine O’Hara—always a treasure—delivers dry wisdom in hilarious doses. Meanwhile, Ving Rhames, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry and Bill Nighy bring endearing personalities to their furry and feathered characters, while Stephanie Hsu injects Act 3 with a little wicked humor.

The film’s delight is only deepened by its sadness, and you may find yourself bawling repeatedly during this film. I know I did.

Sanders’s career is marked with the vulnerable optimism that defines an outsider’s longing for connection. In his worlds, a parent and their sort-of child—Lilo and Stitch, Hiccup and Toothless, Roz and Brightbill—flail and flounder until they find the strength of an extended family.

It’s a story he’s apparently not done telling. But he tells it so very well.

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Pleased to Meet Me

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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

by George Wolf

It’s not just that it’s the role he was born to play. It’s also that it feels like precisely the right moment for him to be playing it, as if the cosmos themselves are aligning to deliver us some rockin’ good news.

How good? Well, for starters, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent gives him about a minute and a half just to name check himself as “Nic f’innnnnnnnnnggggggggow!WoahCage!”

It’s a film that nails a joyously off the rails tone early and often, as Nic goes after the role of a lifetime with a public rage reading for David Gordon Green, but comes up short. The letdown has Nic considering walking away from the business altogether, until his agent (Neil Patrick Harris) calls with an attention-getting offer.

Attend one birthday party for a superfan, collect one million dollars.

So it’s off to Spain and the lavish compound of Javi (Pedro Pascal), where Nic is blindsided by two federal agents (Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz) staking out the place. Seems Javi is actually a drug kingpin who’s holding a young girl hostage in an effort to influence an upcoming election.

Sounds funny, right?

Not really. Which makes it even more of a kick when there’s no defense against giving in to the gleefully meta madness.

Director and co-writer Tom Gormican (That Awkward Moment) taps into the cult of Cage by both exploiting the myth and honoring how it took root. There are multiple, non-judgemental callbacks to the Cage filmography, while the young Nic (via hit or miss de-aging) drops in to remind his older self just who the F they are!

And while we’re loving all manner of Cage, here comes Pedro! More natural and endearing than he’s ever been, Pascal starts by channeling the fan in all of us, and then deftly becomes the film’s surprising heart. Yes, there are nods to Hollywood pretension, but they’re never self-serving, and the film is more than content to lean all the way in to a madcap adventure buddy comedy spoof.

Would it shock anyone if we eventually get a tell-all book revealing that Cage actually was a CIA operative? Or that he won Employee of Every Month? Nope, and Massive Talent is a fun, funny salute to a guy who’s improved a host of movies by never forgetting who he is.

WoahCage!

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Eighties Lady

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Wonder Woman 1984

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

During a moment in time when a TV personality megalomaniac attains unprecedented and appalling power and threatens global civilization, it’s good to find a little hope in humanity.

Or at least a diversion, so let’s watch Wonder Woman 1984, eh?

Gal Gadot returns, lasso in hand, to defend the world from Eighties-style greed and fashion in a film that homages Reeve-era Superman while it straps some social commentary in shoulder pads, and lets loose with some thrilling fun.

Unburdened by the origin story of her 2017 original, co-writer/director Patty Jenkins is free to expand the hero’s narrative. 1984 finds Diana Prince as a Smithsonian anthropologist working with the socially awkward gemologist Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig, a blast) when self-help ponzi scam artist Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal, slimy perfection) brings Big Comic Book Villainy to the DC mall.

Lord is looking for a 4,000 year old artifact that grants wishes. But when the dream stone gives, it also takes, and Diana’s sleuthing finds that over the many centuries, entire civilizations have paid the cost.

While the last film weakened in the final third with an overly cumbersome finale, WW84 only gets better as it progresses, making that two and a half-hour running time seem much more palatable.

The story turns manage to find real hope in the face of overwhelming global selfishness and the destruction that comes with it. The Reagan-era spin is luminous—Whamtastic, even—and Jenkins displays a delightful knack for the Eighties-style action sequences.

Bigger! Bolder! With leg warmers attached to legs that ain’t afraid to kick a sexist pig where it counts.

Gadot’s easy grace creates a more wizened hero than the naieve goddess of the last go. Jenkins and her co-writers even find a perfectly reasonable and wildly welcome way to bring Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) back from the dead. The chemistry between the two actors again sparkles with endless charm while Pine’s “man out of time” deadpans fuel the funniest lines in the film.

And this film is funny, playful even. But more than anything, this episode is a bow to truth, and to the belief that the truth still means something. If it doesn’t, not even a superhero will be able to save us. And the truth is, WW84 finds a thoroughly entertaining, surprisingly touching way to point that out.

And stay during the credits for a welcome stinger.