'Black Widow' Can't Have Cake and Eat It Too
#136: "Black Widow," "Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar," "Three Days of the Condor," "The Pixar Story"
Edition 136:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: Black Widow is the biggest movie of the year so far! Is it any good? Plus a cult movie just dropped on Hulu, a classic spy thriller on HBO, and a must-see documentary on Netflix. This week’s “Trailer Watch” is a real treat, the kind of trailer that only comes around once every couple years. You have to see it to believe it.
Black Widow
(In theaters)
In the over three years since Avengers: Endgame dominated the culture and became the highest grossing movie of all time (briefly), the world’s most powerful entertainment conglomerate has been hesitant to advance the story for the most popular movie franchise in history even a single inch. Through side quests and prequels and TV shows, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has done little more than throat-clearing, table-setting and teasing what will come after the first epic saga completed.
The stakes are simply too high. Of the 22 movies that built the bridge to Endgame, all but two grossed over $500 million (eight made more than $1 billion). There’s nowhere to hide a flop, and if the well goes dry it would shift the tectonic plates of the entire industry. Unrealized potential allows for unlimited opportunities, while any definitive decision eliminates other potential decisions, which makes it really risky to end anything (just ask George R.R. Martin).
Kevin Feige and the rest of the Marvel brain trust are in the risk avoidance business, so they have switched from writing in pen to writing in pencil.
That’s why Black Widow, the universe’s second female-fronted standalone movie, was shoved somewhere in the chronology between movie like No. 17 and 18 (or something). Its main character, Natasha Romanoff, is (spoiler alert) dead at the end of Endgame, which is awkward for the purposes of wringing out every ounce of earning potential from her character, so we dip in here with no introduction and also no big send off (lest we eliminate the possibility future appearances).
Essentially, the movie wants its cake and to eat it too.
It wants non-stop action, relentlessly through the first hour, and it wants quiet emotional moments too, which in turn feel abrupt and out of place. It wants giant climactic fight sequences, including an entire cloud base thing blowing up and falling several thousand feet to the ground with our heroes punching and kicking mid-air, where nobody important gets a scratch on them. It wants Natasha to fight against her sister, then immediately become best friends with her. It wants her signature ground landing pose to look cool, and then her sister to make fun of it, and then her sister to do it and look cool. It wants one ending, then adds a second ending, then a third to set up future projects.
You get the point. Pure reward with no consequence. Basically this is an entire movie built around “The Chewbacca Problem.”
Conceptually, nothing bothers me about giant blockbuster movies needing to yadda yadda some realism for the sake of our heroes saving the world for the umpteenth time.
But, as opposed to frivolities like the Fast franchise or another recent CGI slugfest Godzilla vs. Kong, it drives me a little crazy how seriously people take the Marvel universe.
Characters like Natasha Romanoff have been put through the washer and drier so many times, spun time after time through different emotional arcs in each movie, that the character flattens into its broadest and most accessible yet least interesting form. She’s a symbol, an avatar, far more than a person.
That’s why the best part of Black Widow is the introduction of Natasha’s sister, Yelena. The character feels fresh, still new enough to infect the rest of the movie with that new-car-smell of humanity. The same can be said for the pair’s “parents.” Any sincerity, emotion, or humor can be credited to the newcomers.
It helps when those newbies are played by the incredibly talented Florence Pugh, David Harbour and Rachel Weisz. The MCU has time and time again relied on bringing in top tier talent to carry the pathos of what would otherwise be just punches and quips, yet theire batting average is almost 1000% on finding the right people.
Pugh, in particular, is easy to imagine as a leader in the next generation of heroes. She’s charismatic, likable, and capable of doing all the action scenes.
Really in almost every case, Marvel has developed a younger replacement for each Avenger as the original actors phase out (read: cash out). The stage is set for a new 20-movie saga.
And yet, the Marvel grand planners don’t seem to have that in mind. A post credits stinger appears to be sending Pugh’s Yelena straight into a TV series, and on another TV series, Loki, they’ve introduced a time travel concept where any character can have infinite “variants” in different timelines. So any character can be alive or dead or morphed into something entirely different? How convenient.
The Chewbacca Problem is now canon. They’re not even trying to hide it anymore.
And it’s working! Loki and the other limited series on Disney+ have been huge hits, drawing large audiences and scoring big with Emmy nominations that were released this week.
Black Widow opened at $80 million just in the U.S., the highest total of the Covid era, and Disney broke protocol to let us know the movie racked in another $60 million in pay-per-view purchases on Disney+ in its first weekend. That’s huge.
From the perspective of blockbuster filmmaking, the movie entirely deserves it. With respect to Vin Diesel and Mr. Kong, nobody does massive scale action set pieces better than Marvel, and every piece of the movie is coherent and perfect in an on-the-nose sort of way, even to someone who doesn’t follow the chronology like me. Larger questions — like why Cold War-style espionage matters when the universe has expanded to include intergalactic warfare and literal gods walking on earth — can be easily overlooked by the basic formulaic storytelling that each of these superhero movies employ. See mission, do mission.
I may not like what they’re doing, and I may use every week in this newsletter to remind you all how many better options are out there, but even I will admit it’s difficult to continuously criticize something as universally successful and beloved as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
But hey, just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying.
Something New
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (Hulu): In the “one for them, one for me” world of Hollywood, I’m not sure there’s ever in the history of movies been a more one-for-me movie than this, from Bridesmaids co-writers and stars Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumulo. It’s a B movie by design, so silly and ridiculous that it bears more resemblance to a SNL sketch, and I found myself on occasion just waiting for Wiig to break character with a laugh. With some very elaborate song-and-dance numbers, and jokes so niche they’re designed for maybe like 40 total middle aged and recently divorced women who go to Florida for vacation, this movie was headed for cult status from its inception. If you’re with a group and looking for a movie you can laugh at as much as with, this should be a first round draft pick.
Something Old
Three Days of the Condor (1975, HBO Max): Watching this movie felt a bit like peeking down a magician’s sleeve. The magic tricks of Jack Ryan, Jason Bourne and several generations of cinematic super spies were suddenly revealed to me through the flowing locks of Robert Redford, here a book worm for the CIA who gets caught up in a twisty plot to expose corruption with the help of an unsuspecting woman played by Faye Dunaway.
Admittedly the gender dynamics haven’t aged well, and frankly I’m not sure Dunaway and Redford’s chemistry passed the sniff test even back then, but all of Redford’s spycraft work here is fantastic. I’d seen literally a half dozen of his spy tactics copied in movies released later, but few did them with the style and charisma of Redford (who the very next year would deploy similar tactics in the name of journalism for All The President’s Men). The parallels between the post-Nixon paranoia and our current distrust of authority makes the plot surprisingly poignant, even if the spider at the center of the movie’s convoluted web of plot is a pure hero — something the modern counterpart couldn’t do both because culturally we now also distrust our heroes and because there are no longer heroic movie stars like Robert Redford.
Something to Stream
The Pixar Story (Netflix): This documentary was suggested to me from my friend Tyler (as always, everyone please send me your recs!), who loved it so much he watched it twice. The story of how Pixar went from laughing stock to entertainment superpower is as fascinating as it is star studded, including no less than Steve Jobs, Bob Iger, Michael Eisner, Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Billy Crystal, and the animators John Lasseter, Brad Bird, and Pete Doctor (the three men who literally created your childhood). I suppose the reason why they secured 100% participation is the worshipful tone with which they approach the subject material, which I usually hate but in this case feels almost entirely deserved.
Lassater and his team essentially created computer generated images (better known now as CGI), opening pandora’s box and beginning the technology sprint that has come to dominate modern blockbuster filmmaking. In that way, Toy Story is one of the most important movies in cinematic history. Without it, there would be no Marvel Cinematic Universe, no Jurassic Park, no Avatar. More importantly, Pixar went on a 25-year run of creating critical and commercial mega-hits back-to-back-to-back, a résumé that has never and will never again be matched: Toy Story->A Bug’s Life->Toy Story 2->Monsters Inc.->Finding Nemo->The Incredibles->Cars->Ratatouille->Wall-E->Up->Toy Story 3.
Trailer Watch: Pig
Sometimes, maybe once a year if you’re lucky, a trailer comes around that you just simply cannot believe is advertising a real movie. The last one burned into my memory was Mel Gibson’s angry Santa movie Fatman.
This time it’s Nicholas Cage as, apparently, some kind of Michelin star chef living out in the wilderness hunting for truffles. His only companion is…a truffle pig. Then someone steals the pig, and he’s about to go full John Wick mode on them? And the movie is called Pig. And like half of the trailer is him whistling for the pig, petting the pig, loving the pig.
And weirdly, somehow, this movie actually looks kinda good??