Category: Movies

There’s a moment in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 3 where Adam Warlock is commenting on the pet of a person he just murdered, and he observes, “He looks sad. I don’t enjoy how it’s making me feel, actually.” That’s not the one thing I like about this movie, but it’s a very succinct summation of how I felt watching it.

I’ve been avoiding watching it for a long time, because I’d been warned that there are many scenes of cruelty to animals (and death, and genocide of an entire civilization). And the warning isn’t being over-sensitive, either. I had to stop watching about 20 minutes in, just so I could stop sobbing and go hug my cat.¹In case anyone’s curious: the eye tracking on the Apple Vision Pro still seems to work even if you’re crying profusely. Even reminding myself repeatedly that I was watching entirely CGI-created talking animals in a sci-fi superhero movie, it was too much to tolerate in one sitting. I had to come back the next afternoon to finish it, and I cried a whole lot more.

I’d been tempted to abandon it, writing it off as a case of James Gunn letting off some (well-deserved, IMO) anger before leaving the series, crossing the line from “effective” to purely manipulative. But I’m glad I was able to finish it, because it’s actually an almost-shockingly sincere farewell to the series, and a rejection of cruelty in favor of selflessness and acceptance. It took what had been the most flippant-for-the-sake of fun entry in the MCU²At least until Taika Waititi got hold of Thor and closed the trilogy with heartfelt love for its characters and for the spirit behind them. I felt as if I’d been torn down emotionally so that the moments of sincerity ended up being so much stronger, ultimately feeling like a catharsis.

By the time the movie started wrapping things up, there was a barrage of wonderful moments one after the other, each of them landing with me, hard. The one that really got me was Mantis (with her power to plant ideas in people’s minds) hugging Cosmo and telling her, “You are so strong,” but I was even finding myself getting misty-eyed during a gun battle. The last act feels like a victory lap after all of the trauma the characters (and audience) had been subjected to up until now.

I think my feelings about the movie are all summed up in Karen Gillan’s performance as Nebula. The character is an emotionless antagonist-turned support member of the Guardians, who in this movie had been pushed into the center, holding everything together while everyone and everything else spins out of control. The actor has built a career out of seemingly selfless dedication to interesting projects and forming lasting connections with her collaborators along the way.

• 1
  In case anyone’s curious: the eye tracking on the Apple Vision Pro still seems to work even if you’re crying profusely.
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  At least until Taika Waititi got hold of Thor

I’m still not exactly sure whether it was intentional that you know the premise of Palm Springs — a romantic comedy about two people stuck in an infinite time loop — going in, or if that’s just a side effect of my watching it five years after its release. But the thing I like is that it works best if you’ve done all the required reading before going in.

After a clumsy and skippable intro showing Andy Samberg’s character Nyles having a difficult time having sex with his current girlfriend, we see him going through the events of a wedding day where it quickly becomes apparent that he’s seen all of this happen before, many, many times. He does a favor for the bride’s sister Sarah, getting her out of an awkward situation, and then impresses her with a dance in which he weirdly seems to be able to anticipate what all of the other guests are going to do.

The effect is kind of like starting the story from the climactic scene of Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray’s character has demonstrated to Andie MacDowell’s that he’s grown to be cultured, considerate, and thoughtful. But then, Palm Springs goes on to suggest that that’s not enough.

And for the audience, it has the added effect of feeling like the repeated scenes in time loop movies, right from the start: we’ve seen this before, so what’s different with this iteration? The entirety of Palm Springs seems to be about what’s different between a fairy tale-inspired romantic comedy in 1993 and a more modern take on relationships between flawed people in 2020.

The most obvious appeal of Palm Springs is that it’s got two of the most charismatic and inherently appealing comedic actors in a romantic comedy that respects the audience’s intelligence, and it’s thoughtful and often clever. The longer-lasting appeal is that, like Groundhog Day, it still uses the time loops as a metaphor, but as metaphors for deeper and, frankly, healthier ideas.

For one thing: it gives the female lead complete agency. Sarah’s a full participant in the loops now, instead of just a prize for Nyles to win once he’s improved himself enough. It is simply more fun and less bleak to see what happens when two likable but self-destructive people are dropped into a situation where they can do anything they want without consequences.

(If I’m being super nitpicky: Sarah’s character does feel sometimes like the Amy Schumer bit of “a chick who can hang,” i.e. she sometimes feels very much like a woman written by a man with an idea of what his perfect woman would be like. But this is mostly just in the scenes that are deliberately meant to be silly, and she’s a better character when it really matters).

But all of its metaphors are about relationships between two equal partners. What we bring to them, what we get out of them, the things we need to get over before we can commit to them, how to make them last, and why we need them in the first place.

And the best is that it quickly dispels the idea that these characters are going to be freed from their situation as soon as they find and accomplish the one thing that will redeem them, or make them better people, or make them fall in love. The movie never explicitly references Groundhog Day, but it does suggest that the core idea of that movie is a little solipsistic at best, or outright toxic at worst.

In Palm Springs, we see Sarah and Nyles go through lots of time loops together, and we get an idea of what the implications of a life without consequences means to each of them. But by the end of Groundhog Day, we’ve seen that Phil has had what must be years of dates with Rita, but she’s only known him for less than one day. We’re left wondering how that’s a foundation for a stable relationship, as opposed to basically being the story of a woman who’s been charmed by her supernatural stalker.

And more significantly, Groundhog Day is all about Phil improving himself as a person to the point that he deserves the love of someone like Rita. Palm Springs says that we all inherently deserve love from the start, and what makes the relationship strong is the way we spend a lifetime improving each other.

Not to mention the assertion that falling in love, even if it’s genuine, isn’t enough. Relationships take work and putting in the effort to get out of a problem and move forward.

Groundhog Day is solidly in the realm of pop culture at this point, and most people are probably familiar with the premise even if they’ve never seen the movie. I’ve seen quite a movies by this point where being familiar with the most well-known time-loop movie is helpful for understanding the plot. Palm Springs is the first I’ve seen where being familiar with Groundhog Day is helpful for understanding what they both mean.

There’s a scene in Superman where Clark and Lois are having a serious discussion about their relationship and how they really feel about each other, while a battle against a huge inter-dimensional creature is silently playing out over the city in the background out the window. In the reverse shots where Lois is talking, we can see the blurry image of the battle reflected in the furniture behind her. That’s a fantastic detail, and the scene is one of many that illustrates exactly why I loved this movie so much.

Comparisons between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and this first entry in the James Gunn-led new version of the DC universe are tiresome but inevitable. I still like both a lot, but the comparison doesn’t really make sense because they’re trying to do almost completely different things. The MCU is all about translating the weird, decades-long continuity of the Marvel comics into a streamlined format that makes sense for cinema and television. Superman defiantly insists that trying to make it make sense is missing the point. It’s all batshit crazy nonsense in the service of simple, old-fashioned, moralistic storytelling, and that’s the joy of it.

Before I saw the movie, I’d seen and read a lot of reviews that mentioned the comic series All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely as one of the primary inspirations. To be honest, I doubt I would’ve picked up on that otherwise, but if you go into the movie with that in mind, it’s obvious. It’s definitely not a direct adaptation, but it borrows a lot of the character designs, in particular inside the Fortress of Solitude.

But more than that, it has the same mindset: it’s a self-contained story that doesn’t try to carefully usher a mainstream audience into decades of niche media continuity; and it doesn’t try to adapt all of the wacky and corny ideas into a more grounded or realistic version. Instead, it embraces not just the idea that anything can happen in comics, but also that so much stuff already has happened. These books have been telling stories about aliens and super-heroes and pocket dimensions and gigantic monsters for decades. It’d be ridiculous to try and sweep that under the rug for the sake of an audience that’s perfectly capable of running with it.

All of the marketing for M3GAN 2.0 has abandoned any notion of the franchise being horror or satire, and just gone all-in on the idea that M3GAN is a sassy bitch who loves drama. Which had me expecting the worst, because what I liked so much about the first one was how it nailed (no offense to dog neighbor lady, RIP) its tone.

I don’t want to overstate the appeal of M3GAN, because it’d be revisionist history to claim that it was a brilliantly insightful classic. But I thought it was a ton of fun, and downright masterful in how it made the movie itself reflect the creepiness of its main character: it never settled fully into camp or fully into horror, always remaining in the uncanny valley where everything just felt off.

A perfect example of that was how M3GAN would spontaneously launch into song at odd moments, to help Katie come to terms with her emotions. It was corny but sincere, awkward and unexpected and just plain weird.

After I realized that M3GAN 2.0 is more broadly comedic than its predecessor, and doesn’t even pretend to be a horror franchise anymore, but more cheesy 1980s hyper-violent action thriller, I settled into just enjoying it for what it was. It still had flashes of very clever people making something deliberately silly — a bad guy gets his entire head punched off in the first five minutes! — and a casting decision that I hadn’t been spoiled for and was a terrific surprise. (In retrospect, the trailers were actually fantastic for not giving away some of the movie’s best surprises).

But then, in the middle of a scene I was already liking anyway, M3GAN starts singing at an unexpected moment. And it was sublime. Without exaggeration, the most I’ve laughed in a movie in years.

On Monday I went to another of AMC’s “Screen Unseen” mystery movies, 100% convinced that it was going to be the sequel to M3GAN. Same rating, very similar run-time, a week before release: it couldn’t be more obvious what this one was going to be.

I got to the theater after the trailers had already started, to find a camera crew both outside and inside the auditorium, plus posted warnings that we were going to be filmed. The room was packed full, and everybody cheered when Scarlett Johansson and the guy from Wicked appeared on screen to thank everyone for coming. I was holding out hope that it was going to be a comedy fake-out, and they’d reveal they were there to promote an unrelated movie, but no, it was in fact Jurassic World: Rebirth. And with so many studio types around, I thought it’d be rude — not just to them, but to the people in the audience hyped to be there — if I’d just stood up, gave a thumbs down and blown a raspberry, and walked out.

I skipped the last Jurassic World movie, but I wasn’t boycotting the new one or anything. I’d already made a reservation for next month, in fact. I’d just expected to be watching it in IMAX for the full summer blockbuster effect. But I honestly wasn’t expecting much from it, and I had been hoping to see a different movie, so take that into my account when considering my early-ish review.

Because it’s fine. Actually, I’d even call it the third best Jurassic Park movie, after The Lost World. That movie was disappointing at the time and remains baffling: yes, it has the young girl using conveniently-placed parallel bars to defeat a velociraptor with the power of her gymnastics, but it also has what is undeniably one of the best sequences that Spielberg has ever made, with an RV getting pushed over the side of a cliff. Rebirth doesn’t have any sequences that reach that level (very few movies do), but there are some very cleverly-choreographed kill scenes, and an extended sequence with a T-Rex that is outstanding.

Which was a relief, because I was sitting through the first 30 minutes or so completely stone-faced, worried that I was messing up the night-vision crowd reaction footage or something. I avoided the camera crews on the way out, even though I like the idea of being part of an ad campaign that just has an old man in a goofy T-Shirt saying, “I dunno, I thought it was fine. The guy playing the dad was crazy hot.”

The best image during the entire introduction was a traffic jam caused by a dinosaur lying in a park near the Brooklyn Bridge, slowly dying while the New Yorkers seemed more concerned about traffic than about the fate of the creature. Rebirth established repeatedly that the dinosaurs that went global after the events of the last movie are now concentrated only around the equator, not just because of the climate, but because of a lack of interest from the general public. Like the space program in the early 1970s, what had once been a source of breathtaking wonder was now so commonplace that people didn’t care anymore. That felt to me like a pointed bit of self-awareness about this franchise in general.

So in short: this really is one of the better entries in the franchise. There are a lot of charismatic actors doing their best with what they’ve got, which sounds like damning with faint praise, but the reality is simply that they’re fun to watch. There are a couple of really good action sequences, and an awareness that the dinosaurs themselves are no longer the main draw, so you’ve got to make everything else compelling. It’s a by-the-numbers summer blockbuster that holds its own, and it really shines in a few key moments.

One moment that stood out to me as hilarious: the group has all assembled at the site of a dead and abandoned InGen facility, near a convenience store. The generator rumbles to life, and all the lights start to flicker on, accompanied by “Stand By Me” playing over a speaker system. Our little-girl-in-peril character looks frightened, and her dad holds her close and says something like, “It’s okay, baby.” It was funny simply because it was so weird: is this girl who’s survived multiple dinosaur attacks frightened of corny needle drops in general, or just Ben E King?

But the most interesting thing to me about Jurassic World: Rebirth is how it works within its action/monster movie template, and saying so would require spoilers for a movie that’s still a couple of weekends away from release. So spoiler warning in bold not to read the rest unless you want to be spoiled.