A Ranked Guide to Every Marvel Movie I've Seen

Ant-Man and the Wasp: I want my multiplex superhero movies to be breezy fun and this one mostly delivers. Sure it feels like the plot was awkwardly massaged into shape in an editing booth but the jokes are funny, there's a gleeful joy in the shrinking and embiggening, and detectable romantic chemistry between the leads (even if it never sets off a fire alarm).

 

Black Panther: Ryan Coogler made a film as thoughtful and bold in its ideas as a Marvel movie is allowed to be. There are distinctive, stunning sets and costumes! Killmonger’s museum heist is genuinely provocative! It's such a shame that it's ultimately muddled and declawed. Sure, Shuri spits "Coloniser!" at Martin Freeman's CIA agent but he's a complete teddy bear and the script contorts itself to present his participation in a coup against the fairly chosen head of state of a foreign government as morally righteous. And the final big step forward for Chadwick Boseman's hero is leaving all the racist structures in place but... teaching black kids to code? Come on!

(Also the need to hit an M rating and make the action look "cool" really undercuts the tragedy of the civil war. The two title fights are compelling though - they have strong narrative arcs.)

Thor Ragnarok: Everyone says this is the quirky one but honestly it's only a fraction weirder than the Guardians films. It's allowed to be coyly queer - but not too queer! And a little - but only a little - shaggier in its plotting. (And that's to make room for a director cameo. Frankly I have never found Taika Waititi to be funny in front of the camera. His actual face isn't even on screen this time and yet somehow you can still see him wink and mug relentlessly, like some overachieving theater kid desperate to please.)

I will award it some points for Cate Blanchett going harder than most Marvel villains but I'd seen too many of these by this point and the increasingly prefab nature of the whole affair was beginning to get to me, especially since I'd been promised that this one was different. 

 

The Avengers: It's fair to say that Joss Whedon has deservedly fallen off a pedestal that was always too high but... the man does write feuding family banter better than any other Marvel writer. And the plotting here is very slick while still leaving room for beats like The Hulk's heartfelt chat with Henry Dean Stanton. It's just a shame that the action is so static, so drearily televisual. (To be fair Marvel action is mostly a write-off until Winter Soldier.)

 

Guardians of the Galaxy: A bit like The Avengers insofar as the dialogue is actually somewhat witty but the climatic fight sucks. It tries to ape the multi-strand finale of The Return of the Jedi and the like. Unfortunately it turns out that watching a billion tiny ships piloted by nobodies form a shield is not even half as exciting as watching a single ship piloted by a named hero run the Death Star's defenses.

Also this time there's no villain as charismatic as Loki on hand. (I will allow that Karen Gillan has some spark and that her character's relationship to Gamora turns some of it to flame. But she's hardly in the movie and Lee Pace's glowering nonevent sucks up too much oxygen.)

 

Captain America: There's a definite charm to its period stylings and, oddly enough, how thoroughly conservative it is. It's like a nice boy in a Christmas sweater who wants to bring you home to his mum. Which is pretty much who Captain America is as played by Chris Evans so, um, that metaphor got weirdly literal.

The thing I can't get past is that it's a movie about fighting Nazis and it just kind of skips over the whole holocaust thing? You can see the racism in Red Skull's ubermenschen dreams but the movie is way more interested in drawing parallels between the Nazis and Steve's bullies and well, the Nazis are not just garden variety bullies! They are genocidal fascists! This is important!

Oh, of course it also earns points for the pec grab that isn't AKA the only time (afaik) that anything Marvel has ever been steamy.

 

Ant Man: I saw this after its sequel and was disappointed. The train fight is spectacular but the rest... I don't remember the rest. Also the romance was so gutted in the editing booth that they don't even kiss. What's the point?

 

Thor: I will cop to having only seen about 40 minutes of this but Branagh's sense of the dramatic here is so leaden and his desire to make every other shot a Dutch angle so bizarre that I found it all but unwatchable. It makes a perversely good argument for Marvel to keep all evidence of personality far, far away from its films.

John Wick: Parabellum

To grasp how John Wick's action sequences work it's instructive to watch how other films execute their own. Take Winter Soldier's opening ship set piece whose action is every bit as professionally staged. The difference is in the editing. Winter Soldier is cut to the beat of its blows; each edit lines up neatly with Captain America's fists meeting faces. Violence is its punctuation. However for John Wick violence is the subject. Though the goriest wounds may be hidden in shadows the impacts themselves are shown in full and soundtracked to elicit winces. Its punctuation is death.

You can build a movie out of the endless ways to meet one's maker - Parabellum shifts ably from South Korean inspired brutality to Keaton-esque slapstick to third person cover shooting - but how to build a franchise (now spanning three movies, a comic series, a video game and god knows what else) out of a movie whose bread and butter is endings? Up until now the answer has been to invest ever more heavily in its "mythology"; a bunch of rituals, phrases and tchotchkes given unearned weight by exaggeratedly dignified turns from Ian McShane and Lance Reddick.* Once again Parabellum piles on more layers to the increasingly creaky edifice - calling on Asia Kate Dillon to embody cold, impersonal power.

It also seeks to expand the building - travelling to Casablanca for a little incidental filling of gaps that would probably better serve as windows. I think what they’re going for here is a cosmopolitanism that extends the rituals and fine clothes to different contexts: here are the tattoos you're familiar with but this time they're in Arabic. Alas what they end up with looks more like the same old western exoticism. It’s an unintentional crassness that nonetheless fits right in with the intentionally garish subtitles and the way cuts from The Four Seasons and The Nutcracker are made vulgar by both ubiquity and modern remixing.

By its end Parabellum seems to be recognizing the futility of such endeavours - acknowledging that there's only so much interest that can be gained from an ever proliferating set of phrases and titles and suggesting that it’s time to bring the whole thing tumbling down. It is merely a suggestion at this stage though and the film’s Ouroboros-like plot, in which possibilities are done away with as soon as they are raised and kingdoms are reestablished as soon as they are razed, gives no hope for an escape.

Parabellum’s treatment of John Wick is similarly cyclical. He is a man without a future, only able to locate more facets of his identity by delving into the past. There are never any new friends, only old associates. It's almost admirable to refuse the standard device of giving him new things in order to take them away. Even more so given that the film is self-aware; letting Wick himself state that his reason for living is the remembrance of old things and not creation. But there’s no future in it.

If there is a way out it may lie in the embrace of actual mythology. There’s a fresh potency in the Bowery King surveying his new chthonic realm from a throne and a new kind of power in John Wick having acquired a kind of Hekate-like liminality as a result of coming completely unmoored from life and death as we know them.

PS: I greatly enjoyed they way Mark Dacascos' fanboy villain is used to poke at the hoary conventions Parabellum otherwise plays straight.

*I personally feel that the praise stems mostly from John Wick having had something where other films of its ilk have nothing.

New Year, New Ambivalence

If You Are the One begins and ends - as all romcoms must - with a broad satire of investor capitalism. OK honestly it's a little odd but not because of the content - any number of Chinese films express anxiety about a changing society in much this way - but because the scene is also about a bright future secured for tricksters like Qin Fen (Ge You) through the shortsightedness of others.

The rest of the film meanwhile is infatuated with honesty. At first because Qin and Xiaoxiao Liang (Shu Qi) are attracted to each other on account of being brutally frank about their shortcomings and later because honesty with themselves allows them to push past said flaws. Well, sort of. Qin's obviously eternally a huckster. And they use each other mercilessly along the way without always being upfront about it.

It is refreshing in a way that the film itself is honest. This isn't the sort of romcom that wraps up poor behaviour in sentimental trappings and expects you buy it as romance, although it alternates between showing the emotional impact of their acting out and playing it for laughs.

When it does the former it is achingly true to its characters' feelings. In one scene Xiaoxiao is having it out with her previous lover. They're sitting at a table, across from each other and their earlier conversation has been captured in close-ups. But in the moment when Xiaoxiao expresses her anger she gets up to pour a drink and the camera cuts to a wider shot of her arm and the drink before it cuts again to an even wider shot of her with her back to the camera and her lover looking back at her while she rages. It's like something out of a Mizoguchi film. Her anger and sadness is perfectly captured but her desire for distance is also conveyed and respected.

In some ways I can't help but feel like I've been conned by the film. Qin's dating classified is awful! He's awful! Xiaoxiao's almost equally awful! However while the film may buy into some of their dubious POVs it doesn't expect me to think of them as good people per se. If You Are the One just expects empathy.

I'm Too Miffty

I saw seventeen films at MIFF and I liked a lot of them but I'm lazy and so I only managed to write up four of them. On the Beach at Night Alone, A Man of Integrity, The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson and High Tide come highly recommended. The Idea of a Lake, A Skin So Soft, The Wound, Lover for a Day and Sami Blood are all worth a look.

Axolotl Overkill: Its detractors are right insofar as we probably didn't need another trawl through the Berlin drug/club scene but seeing as we got one anyway I'm happy to have Axolotl Overkill. It cuts from scene to scene with little regard for connecting tissue yet somehow this produces a hazy rhythm rather than an abrupt one. Also setting it apart from its peers is an eye for the absurd (where did that penguin come from?) and a willingness to pause all forward momentum for flights of fancy like an out of nowhere contemporary dance performance set to Me and the Devil.

Bright Sunshine In/Let the Sunshine In: Claire Denis is the greatest living director so calling this a major disappointment for me is something of an understatement. All the pieces are in place save for a script which approaches romance as an intellectual pursuit apart from the rest of life and a collection of characters (very deliberately) designed as caricatures of masculinity complete with unbearable tics. It is very much what it intends to be so if that description appeals to your sensibilities by all means have at it. I'll be over here exchanging sad high fives with the disappointed. (That is an actual thing that happened. Film festivals are strange.)

Floating Life: The sad truth of films is that for every widely hailed masterpiece that enters the canon and is forever available on a million different formats there are at least three other worthy films condemned to obscurity. The nice thing about film festivals is that such gems are occasionally dug up. Floating Life is definitely a gem. It starts out as a broad fish-out-of-water comedy set in the overexposed Australian sun but before it's done it cycles through a dozen different tones (lowkey realist drama, heartrending tragedy, sexy romance...) at least three different continents and all manner of compositions (flat with loads of negative space, deep focus, striking bird's eyes...) and yet all of it feels of a piece and contributes to its kaleidoscopic take on the immigrant experience.

Nocturama: Ostensibly this film is about terrorism and consumerism but it methodically, deliberately strips away almost all of the familiar context and rhetoric used to explain such things. Even physical space is violated in its finale as the action is viewed through banks of security screens which make it difficult - if not impossible - to know where people are in relation to one another. The cumulative effect of these choices is disconcerting, almost terrifying. There are no explanations to be found for its protagonists' deeds, no potential cures suggested for the sickness at its heart; just a headlong fall into a (richly aestheticized) void.

Band Baaja Baaraat

Band Baaja Baaraat contains all of the usual romcom cliches including a last minute run to win a lover's affection. That said all of them are played with ridiculous energy and fervor; as if they were being invented for the first time. Anushka Sharma's hilarious mugging in the first performance of Ainvayi Ainvayi is emblematic but performances aside there's also a riot of dutch angles, jump cuts and zooms. Some of its style is rigorously consistent (like the film's bright colour palate) but some of it comes and goes as needed: there's just one scene involving characters speaking directly into the camera. All of it feels every bit as delightfully kitschy as the heroes' wedding designs. Also whether serendipitous or not the film's through-line of first timers breaking through aligns nicely with its previously unknown male lead and debut director.

A Brief History of Gay Zombie Porn and Australian Film Criticism

In 2010 the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) attempted to screen L.A. Zombie, the latest work by avant garde filmmaker/art pornographer Bruce LaBruce.* It didn't work out. The Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC - now the Australian Classification Board) stepped in and refused it classification, effectively banning it from being screened in Australia.**

Predictably enough the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF - no really, that's its acronym) rode to the rescue of adventurous sickos everywhere and scheduled an illegal screening. Despite being widely advertised (with the location omitted, presumably the details were e-mailed to ticket buyers) the screening went ahead without interference.**** However the organiser's house was later raided by police and charges were laid.***

For me it's in the immediate aftermath of the screening that the real story lies. Luke Buckmaster - quite possibly Australia's most middlebrow film critic - attended and was unsurprisingly outraged. Somewhat disingenuously he supported the OLFC's decision to "...ban the film from screening in general cinemas."**** Strictly speaking that is indeed what the OFLC had done. Of course in practice the film was never going to screen outside of MIFF (with the possible exception of the Sydney Underground Film Festival) and was always going to be shown as an unrated film for 18+ attendees. However Buckmaster is not one to probe technicalities.

The Young Turks of Screen Machine, then Australia's premier journal of smarty pants film criticism, were incensed at what they saw as shameful wowserism and philistinism. The stage was set and on 13 September 2010 the curtain lifted on what I believe to be simultaneously the greatest and pettiest stoush in the history of Australian film criticism.

Ladies and gentlemen, courtesy of the Internet Wayback Machine I present to you Luke Buckmaster vs Emma Jane and Brad Nguyen. Be sure to read the comments: https://web.archive.org/web/20150423172850/http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2010/09/13/a-different-opinion-on-gay-zombie-porn-in-defence-of-bruce-labruces-la-zombie/

*http://miff.com.au/festival-archive/film/23584/l-a-zombie
**https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jul/21/gay-zombie-porn
***http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-11-12/filmmaker-questions-timing-of-zombie-porn-raid/2334866
****https://www.crikey.com.au/2010/08/30/cops-didnt-show-but-maybe-they-should-have-gay-zombie-p-rno-sickens/

Shin Godzilla

Shin Godzilla is pretty good albeit in an odd duck way. It's only peripherally a disaster movie. That's not to say it doesn't utilise Godzilla as a metaphor for nuclear destruction. There's a moment of grand tragedy that is utterly heartbreaking and its ending is quietly chilling. However such moments merely establish stakes; the meat of the film is, of all things, an unabashed celebration of bureaucracy.

Granted it celebrates a particular kind of bureaucracy. Before the heroes can work their magic we churn through a forest of deadwood; old men installed at the top of the hierarchy but too scared of their tentative grasp on power to venture opinions of real substance lest they be shamed. Once they're dealt with the effective bureaucracy can get to work: a mix of Young Turks (including a lone women who is disappointingly token in number but reassuringly not in narrative impact) and old men dismissed as crackpots working together in a comparatively flat organisational structure.

Their teamwork is celebrated in an unusual way. There are no Sorkin-esque walk and talks here and very little striding through hallways in general. Instead <i>Shin Godzilla</i> gets its energy from aggressively edited, oddly framed stills with something subtly off-kilter about the way their subjects are blocked. Adding to the effect are an overwhelming barrage of chyrons (mostly job titles) that are gone as fast as the audience can read them and a musical score that is a hodge podge of original composition and rearranged pieces from previous Godzilla films and, of all things, Neon Genesis Evangalion.

When individuals do emerge from the group it only serves to heighten the film's praise of self-sacrificing teams as they merge their egos with the desire to serve their nation. At one point an ambitious young man explains himself by way of reflecting that, "There needs to be a Japan in ten years if I am to be the Prime Minister of it."