While I’ve owned it for a couple of month since the steelbook came out, I didn’t get a chance to sit down and watch Captain Marvel – though I certainly wanted to. Part of what I do with the MCU films is that I have a playlist for them all in my own weird order and when new ones come in, they slide into place depending on that mental viewing of how I piece them together. And they get played in the background a lot because I kind of absorb them by osmosis. I only saw this once in the theater and enjoyed it for some of what it did to subvert comic book based expectations. But I also admit that I wasn’t ready to jump onto the Blu-ray release quickly because of all the negativity surrounding the film. Not the issues that are made critically in terms of filmmaking but the usual bullshit stuff that keeps coming up.
Before a film goes into background rotation for me, I make sure it gets one viewing without distractions. I really enjoyed taking this in again and how Brie Larson handled herself here. She fits in with the main leading cast of characters across the other films well while leaning more on the serious side. It works for the situation she’s in, the manipulations going on, and the mental headgames she’s coping with. This also ended up being a film that I went into all of the extras for and watched the making of. I wish they had done more on the de-aging aspects but I really enjoyed the Victoria Alonso featurette about her career path and how Marvel was the last place she thought she’d end up. We need more of these kinds of pieces across the spectrum.
I’m looking forward to my third viewing.
While I become less enamored of the Rebuild films for Evangelion as time goes on, I was eager to revisit End of Evangelion after watching the TV series. This was definitely a controversial alternate take right from the start when it was first released for the whole fully naked Asuka sequence and then Shinji masturbating to it. But as the film gets more into the psyche of creator Hideaki Anno while also trying to put just as much craziness on the screen as he could when it came to the action, it’s a strange mess that’s highly interpretative and can vary by one’s background in theology and psychology in particular. Without those, it’s an amazing mess of symbolism that will lead to all sorts of interpretations. But it’s the small moments that most will glom onto, and for me, that’s the Komm, Susser Tod song and the way it plays in contrast to the events playing out on the screen. I’ve found this to be a hauntingly beautiful song that I’ve listened to only a handful of times in my life because I discovered over the years I only hear it when I seek it out and I only seek it out when I’m feeling suicidal. So it’s a dark contrast and one that, strangely in its own way, aligns with the film.
During the week I went looking for something I hadn’t seen in an age and Sandra Bullock on my TV always pleases me. It’s a basic simple romance-drama film but what I liked was discovering that the little girl here was actually Mae Whitman, who went on to do a lot of stuff I’ve liked in the years since. Makes me glad I’m a credits junkie and have the depth of library to be amused by such things.
I can’t describe why I like this film. I don’t know why I did. I saw it in a shitty little art house theater in the 90s nearby as my mother was a huge fan of it and Catherine Deneuve. I revisit this terrible DVD version I have every few years and just take this odd, languid, journey through this French story.
With it opening on Tuesday as part of the 4th of July holiday, I was glad to get into a noon showing the first day before all the Anime Expo events got underway. I really enjoyed the first film for its take on a truly young Peter. I’ve talked before about how I didn’t like Tobey Maguire in the role while feeling that Andrew Garfield captured the kind of college Peter that I had always envisioned, especially in keeping with the class issues and how that impacted his life. And those films gave me Gwen Stacey instead of MJ, so there was much love.
Tom Holland’s Spider-Man is a far different beast and dealing with so many pulls from so many directions that it’s hard to really ground itself right. Homecoming did it better as it was mostly standalone but this one is epilogue to Endgame and the first storyline of the MCU overall. I like that it delved into Peter’s issues with wanting a father figure in his life, coping with the loss of one that meant the most. Jake Gyllenhaal was uncanny in how he looked like RDJ at one point with the glasses that it was unnerving. And I loved all the Happy/Aunt May bits and wish it was dealt with better. The film with its larger story works well and I think it handles the balance right, even as it’s drawn in whiplash directions thanks to SHIELD keeping Peter on the case even when he didn’t want to be.
The biggest issue I really had with the film was in that they were making a film about a high school junior and a lot of his classmates but the trappings were not theirs. This was evident more in the soundtrack in that even though music is easily accessible and a lot of kids listen to older popular songs, the soundtrack for this did not line up. It was a soundtrack for my age group and older, which it shouldn’t have been. The film has to stand on its own and that’s what left me frustrated. A lot of adults enjoyed the teachers subplot but disliked the Betty/Ned subplot and wanted the time spent reversed. if anything, they needed to cut the teachers even more and focus on more of the kids. There’s too much time with the adults here and it really hampers it because it is making it more about the adults. You expect that in Civil War and Avengers. In his own films, Spidey needs more of his age group.
