Grumpiness & It's Not All Politics Induced (Part 2) Film, Escaping Reality and Humanity

 The echocardiogram did a number on me. I have to admit that. This morning, I woke grumpy from stiffness and achiness. 

I made a trip to the convenience store for cigarettes and caffeine. Then I started on the email. 

First stop, the Los Angeles Review of Books. Two things I like about LARB. It is not as stodgy as the New York Review of Books without sacrificing a quality of writing, and it is free.

Now, for Part 2.

No, Time to Die: The Biden Years On-Screen, Part Two - LARB does film really well, and being incarcerated for the start of the Biden Presidency, I thought I could learn what I missed. And I did.

If the movies were speaking not directly to their audiences but to each other, what were they saying? Mostly, they were acknowledging a desire for escape—and a liberation from illusory, unsatisfactory choices. Trinity and Neo had defeated the Matrix only to find themselves exploited by new masters. In preparation for a new era of IP management, the MCU had embraced multiversal storytelling with December’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, uniting Tom Holland’s Peter Parker with the heroes and villains of the earlier Sam Raimi and Marc Webb Spider-Man films. In May 2022, Raimi himself would join the MCU for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which reintroduced Disney’s recently acquired Fox IP in the form of X-Men and Fantastic Four characters. Recalling both the alternate lives and multiversal storytelling of The Matrix Resurrections and of the struggling MCU, March 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once celebrated the legacy of Marvel’s dominance by connecting it to a longer lineage of pop storytelling, including the honorable Hong Kong action cinema of its star Michelle Yeoh and the handmade surrealism of breakout indie underdogs Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, except more aggressively ingratiating: the film’s signature image is Yeoh in a kung fu stance that makes it look like she’s going in for a hug. Co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert had created a genuine phenomenon, yet the troubling question remained whether their model of comic-inflected indie storytelling could rejuvenate the ailing industry, or if its decidedly profitable run—then the highest-grossing A24 release, making back its small budget several times over—represented a new, diminished ceiling for consensus cinema: quirked-up, goated with the sauce, and produced by the goddamned Russo brothers.

Having not seen Everything Everywhere All at Once until this year, I missed the zeitgeist and was left thinking it was brilliant for being so much about it characters' humanity. I have seen none of the MCU movies except Spider-Man: No Way Home - which I did like as one likes a hot fudge sundae while under the influence of the sugar high. Having put myself in a struggle against my depression and its nihilism, I am attracted to what accentuates our humanity. That is why I like James Gunn's Superman; there is substance under its messiness. And what is more human than messiness?

The post is still too long, so I decided to cut it into parts at this point. Part 3 will appear tomorrow.

sch 8/2