Captain America: Brave New World

As many of you know, I'm a bit of an MCU apologist around these parts. I grew up reading these comics and have always had a soft spot in my heart for their screen adaptations. I've missed a few of the MCU movies of the past couple years, but I think I've seen like 32/35 of the movies. Brave New World is the worst of them, but it's not because it's bad, it's just as bland as can be. Sure, part of that blandness is from the direction from Julius Onah, where shots are seemingly chosen at random, the fight scenes don't always look to have had a visual continuity or line of thinking behind their framing, and the CGI green screen work is pretty bad in some places (and good in others). Most of all, for me, and maybe it's that I fancy myself a writer and this is something that bothers me, is that we don't know Sam Wilson as a character. I like Anthony Mackie as an actor, but we don't know who Sam Wilson is, really. We don't know what makes him tick, what he's afraid of, what he's striving for. There's no narrative throughline within the character, so it makes the machinations of the plot feel like Sam is just going on the random ride of the plot gods while not effecting it himself. We knew who Steve Rogers' Captain America was as a character. He was a thoroughly good and decent man who was gifted a superheroes body and abilities and doubted whether he was a hero outside of that. Tony Stark even tells him in The Avengers that everything special about him came out of a needle (which is Steve's fear, even though we know it shouldn't be). So, in Avengers Endgame when Steve catches Mjolnir, who can only be held by someone who is "worthy", it's the culmination of Steve character arc while also being a badass moment of action. Similarly, we know Tony Stark, we knew T'Challa, Peter Quill, Thor, Rocket, Bruce Banner, and Peter Parker. We know who they are and what drives them. We don't know that about Sam Wilson, and the movie suffers for it. Harrison Ford is good in his role as President Ross, but it's also not exactly asking a ton of him as an actor. Still, Ford is one of the great movie stars in cinema history and carries his role with ease. Tim Blake Nelson returns after 17 years to the role of Samuel Sterns, who's our "main" antagonist here, but since there are secondary antagonists of Red Hulk and Giancarlo Esposito's Sidewinder (a nothing role wholly beneath the great actor), Sterns doesn't get enough screentime to really let Nelson loose and become a great villain. His look is kind of ridiculous, but it also kind of worked for me. Overall, I would rank this at the bottom of the MCU. Eternals had a similar issue with characters, but it looks amazing. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 has some of the lowest lows of the MCU, but also some of its highest highs. The lows knock it down near the bottom of the MCU as a whole, but its highs keep it well above Brave New World, which is just so bland and forgettable that it has to be at the bottom. 5/10

The Substance

I'm kind of at a loss about this movie. Obviously it has important things on its mind about aging and perception and self-love and many other things, but it's also cartoonish, grotesque in a way that I didn't like, full of caricatures trying to exist within the same world as real characters, and overly gory to the point of absurdity. Why did it need to be that gory? I don't think it did and found it detracting from the movie's point rather than supporting it. I'm not sure I can give this any more than a 5/10 because I admire its ambition, but I don't really think it's successful at being anything more than a cartoonish gore fest, and I liked it better when it was making intelligent observations about its subject. I admire any movie that takes a big swing, which this movie definitely does, but I don’t always give them grace when they fail with that swing. To me, I didn’t need any of the viscera in the finale, the point was already made because the point was to become monstrous in pursuit of perfection and beauty and youth. What does the gore actually say? Nothing, to me. The gore becomes “I’m doing this because I don’t actually believe in my ideas enough to feel the point was made so I’m hammering home everything while also making something that will thrill the horror crowd with gore” and since I’m not thrilled by it, the movie ends on its lowest note for me.

Sinners

 Ryan Coogler's Sinners is his most ambitious movie yet, a Southern Gothic horror movie seeped in themes of racism, the grief of loss, hoodoo, the insidious hold of religion on society, and the power of music. Also vampires and oral sex, not necessarily at the same time. It's a powerful movie, acted to perfection, and told through Coogler's singular lens as a filmmaker. Sometimes you watch a movie unfold and just through the shots, the layering of sound, the choice of music, you can tell that you're in the hands of a master filmmaker. I've felt that while watching Coogler's movies dating all the way back to the opening of Fruitvale Station, and I felt it more than ever while watching Sinners. It's Coogler's most ambitious movie, but also his best.

Set in Mississippi, October 1932, star Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack, WWI veterans who've moved back home from Chicago. They buy an old saw mill they intend to open up into a juke joint that very night, bringing along their guitar playing young cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), and recruiting others along the way like Delroy Lindo's Delta Slim, a piano/harmonica player who wants to be paid in little more than corn liquor, shopkeepers Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao, respectively) who provide the catfish and signage, and Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) a hoodoo practitioner they want to be their cook, and who just happens to be Smoke's ex-partner. Into the mix also comes Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), an old flame of Stack's who shows up at the juke joint whether Stack wants her there or not. Another one that shows up to the juke joint whether they want him there or not is Remmick (Jack O'Connell) an Irishman whom we've already seen smoke when the sunlight hit him before he murdered a couple in their home, a couple who follow closely behind him as he asks to be invited into the juke joint.

There's a certain indebtedness here to the 1996 Quentin Tarantino written, Robert Rodriguez directed movie From Dusk till Dawn, which similarly seems to be a crime movie in its first half before turning into a vampire survival flick in the second half. But Coogler greases the horror wheels right off the bat, opening the movie with talk of music that can pierce the veil between the land of the living and land of the dead, in a beautiful way, but how it's also music also that attracts evil. We see Sammie burst into church a bloody mess before he's told by his preacher father that the devil has been looking for him and we cut to "one day earlier." So Coogler makes sure that the threat of evil is always on the horizon and we're not left with the tonal shift that From Dusk till Dawn has that loses many people who watch the movie (me partially included, since I think it's pretty uninteresting in the second half of the movie, it never quite recovers from the transition of crime to horror). It's a brilliant bit of direction from Coogler to have that horror feeling just in the background of each scene, so that we're not surprised by the appearance of the smoking-from-sunlight Remmick, we're thrilled at the plot kicking into gear full throttle. Rodriguez's film is about survival, about outlasting the monsters, but Coogler is after something deeper and more interesting than just surviving until sunlight.

The movie would've been amazing even if it had been a straight drama about two African-American brothers opening a juke joint in 1930's Mississippi, without the horror element. In fact, I'm sure there are many people who would prefer it that way. But for me there's just some indefinable something that finds the movie elevated by the fantastical elements. Maybe especially because of Coogler's ability to seamlessly weave them throughout the story, whether it's the standard vampire stuff we're familiar with, or in a beautiful sequence showing the way that music can connect us to both the past and future at the same time. The fantastical is always there, always present.

And that helps in securing the tone for the finale which unfolds in a bloody mess, but again it's to Coogler's credit that he grounds everything that happens in emotion and reality as well as the fantastic. When Grace screams out to the vampires surrounding the building near the end, we get it, we understand her motivation and again welcome the churning of the plot that follows. When Smoke is experiencing a transcendent moment late in the movie, it hits us emotionally because of everything that has led him to that moment, everything that grounds the character and his experience.

It's a movie that's perfectly acted, beautifully shot (although the changing of aspect ratios throughout the movie did bother me a bit), and is overall one of the best movies I've seen in recent years.