Thirty years later, Cassandra Webb (Johnson) is an EMT in New York, super-dedicated, but lacking in any kind of social skills, for which she leans on her partner, Ben ‘Yes, That Ben Parker’ Parker (Scott). A near-death experience leaves her with visions of impending death, at the same time that Simms is becoming obsessed with his own vision of three Spiders-Women who will one day kill him. He tracks down the three, currently still teenagers, and goes after them, but Cassandra’s visions allow her to intervene, saving Julia Cornwall (Sweeny), Anya Corazon (Merced), and Mattie Franklin (O’Connor) but being blamed for kidnapping them and attacking police because no-one else seems even able to see Simms in his emo Spider-Suit.
“So, the MCU is going to continue to lose its way in 2023… and it’s still going to be the most coherent superhero universe at the cinema?”
In 2023, the film industry looked forward to a year without pandemics and mass theatre closures for the first time since 2019. Then, in May, the Writers’ Guild of America went on strike over, among other predatory industry practices, the use of outdated theatrically-led models for streaming residuals and the threat of generative AI replacing human writers (because if generative AI can’t yet match human creativity at its best, it can certainly aspire to the level of a Hollywood writer on a shoestring salary and unrealistic deadlines.) The writers were joined in July by SAG-AFTRA, with the result that most of the summer tentpoles were not publicised by their stars, leading to a disappointing summer box office (with two significant exceptions, thanks to the phenomenon known as Barbieheimer.)
The juggernaut of the MCU continued to deny all logic and ploughed through on the strength of one really strong showing (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3; another of the year’s movies, The Marvels, was also pretty good, but got hammered by the strikes and the usual review bombing of any female led superhero movie.) Moving into Phase 5, the franchise still feels lost in the wake of the Infinity Saga, with the Multiverse Saga lacking focus and, indeed, a lead villain, with Jonathan Majors’ domestic violence conviction moving his status from quietly sidelined to persona non grata mere weeks after his run in Loki Season 2 wrapped up. Honestly, the MCU would have been in more trouble if DC had put up a credible opposition, but The Flash ended the DCEU on a whimper, leaving Blue Beetle (also under-publicised due to the strikes) in a sort of weird limbo.
Got to go fast (and yes, that’s a Sonic thing, but there wasn’t a Sonic movie this year.)
So, for various reeasons, I’m a mite behind on my reviews. In order to get caught up for Christmas, then, I’m going to crank out some shorter-than-usual offerings for, well, the latter half of 2023, since the latest review was of a film that dropped in July.
It’s almost a quarter of a century since I started this little project of mine with my review of The Phantom Menace, and coming on for a decade since I relaunched it here on WordPress. In that time, I’ve reviewed around six hundred movies, always using the same format and… well, it’s becoming rather restrictive.
The other day, I observed to skerryflower that I didn’t mind if she wanted to do reviews without the template, and she posted her first review in years. That was when I realised that I’ve also been finding the format restrictive in some cases. Consequently, I think I’m going to, if not abandon the format, certainly apply it less strictly in future.
Former RAF commercial pilot Brodie Torrance (Butler) is flying a half-empty plane from Singapore to Honolulu via Tokyo. When the airline orders a flight path through a storm to save money, the plane is disabled. Torrance and his co-pilot Sam Dele (An) land the plane safely, but they realise they are on an island run by local warlords, with minimal chance of a quick rescue and an indicted murderer – former French Foreign Legionnaire Louis Gaspare (Colter) – among them.
2023… 23… 2 plus 3 is 5… MCU Phase 5 – What does it mean?
And so, from looking back to looking ahead. I’m just going to focus on cinema for this one, since other media I tend to consume in a more catch as catch can fashion.
2022 saw the world emerging, perhaps precipitously, from the shadow of Covid. Cinema schedules were more normalised, but a lot of tentpole pictures were delayed due to the ongoing impact of the pandemic. (A badly mismanaged global pandemic has lasting consequences? Say it ain’t so!) On the other hand, the MCU went into overdrive as it wrapped up the transitional and divisive Phase 4. Perhaps as a result, it achieved a level of quantity over quality that saw its effects mocked, but more seriously the studio’s treatment of its overworked effects teams criticised. In the second half of the year particularly, the ongoing impact of Brexit (I can’t even joke) coupled with Russia’s invasion of and attempted annexation of Ukraine, resulted in a massive cost of living crisis in this country, so that’s been fun.
The global dialogue around cinema continued to be dominated by three major themes:
Superhero movies are, or are not, real art, the true soul of cinema and/or films at all in the strictest sense, say a bunch of old auteurs who resent the cheapening of their art and/or Marvel’s continuing box office domination.
Nothing in the world will be right until Warner install Zack Snyder as creative director for DC movies, reinstate Henry Cavill and Ben Affleck as Superman and Batman, and commit to a three movie ‘Knightmare’ arc for the Justice League. In related news, James Gunn is the Great Betrayer, called Beast, Who Shall Ruin All With Wokeness (as is Taika Waititi.) Since I started writing this review, the narrative has now changed to ‘sell the Snyderverse to Netflix,’ as if a) DC would let a streaming distributor loose on its IP when it famously won’t let its own animation studio use the Joker unless it’s in a purely Batman-led cartoon, and b) the streaming distributor famous for dropping things after their second successful series because new adopters are worth more than retention are the peeps to secure the future of a multi-film epic.
Johnny Depp is a saint brung low by the infernal wiles of Amber Heard and anyone who says otherwise is clearly sexist and only believes her because she’s hot, rather than the more obvious conclusion that the Depp-Heard marriage was a total shitshow from which no-one emerges with much honour.
On a personal note, after years of writing, I finally managed to bring together a selection of my short fiction and published them on Kindle. If you enjoy my writing here, please do check out Borderlands, if you haven’t already.
It’s also been a 2016 of a year for celebrity deaths, and we bid farewell to, among others, Kirstie Alley (Drop Dead Gorgeous), Kevin Conroy (Batman: Mask of the Phantasm), Robbie Coltrane (Krull), Angela Lansbury (Beauty and the Beast), Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, director), Anne Heche (Wag the Dog), Olivia Newton-John (Grease), Nichelle Nichols (Star Trek the Motion Picture), Paul Sorvino (The Rocketeer), Tony Sirico (Goodfellas), James Caan (Elf), Ray Liotta (In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale), William Hurt (The Big Chill), Emilio Delgado (Sesame Street), Sally Kellerman (M.A.S.H.), Bernard Cribbins (Doctor Who and the Daleks), Jason David Frank (Power Rangers), Leslie Phillips (Doctor in Clover), David Warner (Time Bandits) and Sidney Poitier (Blackboard Jungle).
It’s a little outside the usual wheelhouse of this blog, but your humble correspondent has published a collection of short stories on Kindle.
Borderlands contains fifteen short stories set in the inbetween places: from the lost history of the moon to the place where worlds collide; from the guardians of time’s proper course to the gap between a mirror and reality; from the desperate distance between a group of mercenaries and a place of safety, to the forlorn places where faith hides from the light of reason.
You can pick up a Kindle copy of Borderlands from your Amazon region of choice today.
So, this is daring of me, to assume I’ll be able to make a respectable number of films in 2022; enough to have to plan ahead even. This list is just based on what is currently scheduled to be on at the local cinema and has caught my eye, and honestly the main thing to take away from it is how normal it is. Clearly the industry has decided that this year they can take a solid chance on not losing weeks and weeks to Covid flare ups and lockdowns, which means this is going to be a serious test of that model.
21 pick up
Screw it, I’m done with the jokes about how movie scenes all ignore social distancing guidelines.
So, there are a few I want to try to catch up on after Omicron (that’s the Omicron variant, a particularly virulent strain of Covid-19) shut the office again and I didn’t manage to see anything in the last week or so before Christmas:
West Side Story – Spielberg’s take on Bernstein and Sondheim’s take on Shakespeare’s take on da Porto’s take on Salernitano’s tragedy of Romeo and Juliet took a real beating at the box office, probably in part because of Omicron. I almost certainly won’t manage to see this one at the cinema, so it could be a while.
The Matrix Resurrections – Similarly, I wasn’t able to get to see Lana Wachowski’s return to the world of The Matrix. I might be able to catch the tail end of its cinema time, depending on how it does overall and what shows up to replace it.
After 2020, the future of cinema was basically in serious question. Certainly in the UK the government policy of pretending that everything was fine as long as no-one who went to Eton was sick meant that everything closed again immediately after Christmas. Release dates were in flux, so I don’t even have my usual ‘what I planned to see’ post to compare to this here annual round up. I saw basically nothing new in January or February, as the studios held onto their releases in anticipation of theatres reopening.
Once things got going, cinemas began to open in a socially distanced way, and the crowds were fairly sparse, which suits me much better than it does the cinemas. There were also a lot of simultaneous or rapid releases to streaming services, especially Disney+, including premium releases with additional fees and the controversy of Black Widow‘s split release. Then the government policy of basically feeding anyone who can’t afford a chauffeur into the meat grinder saw public transport fill up and cinemas cramming more and more people in. Finally, the Omicron variant came along in the latter part of the year to mess with us again and I imagine (hope) we’ll have another pretty meagre January.
The Bad Movie Marathon 