Legacyquels Are Getting Old

Spoilers ahead for "The Matrix Revolutions," "Ghostbusters: Afterlife," "The Mandalorian," and "Spider-man: No Way Home."

I watched "Ghostbusters: Afterlife" recently, and I was struck by how it fits so perfectly into a pattern that other films from older franchises have fallen into lately.  I like the term "legacyquel" that Matt Singer used to describe "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," which reboots a franchise while soaking in the nostalgia for that franchise, via numerous callbacks, cameos, and references.  2021 was full of these, including "The Matrix Revolutions," "Ghostbusters: Afterlife," "Space Jam 2," "Halloween Kills," "Coming 2 America," "Candyman," and "Spider-man: No Way Home."  2022 already gave us another "Scream," and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and coming up is "Top Gun: Maverick."

I'm still sorting out my feelings about "Ghostbusters: Afterlife" - it's not a bad movie, but it's also not a good one.  The first hour with McKenna Grace and Finn Wolfhard digging up their deceased grandpa Egon's old ghostbusting equipment and having themselves a new adventure is fun.  It's an Amblin film more than anything else, up until it decides to replay the third act of the original "Ghostbusters," capped off with an awkward reunion of the original cast.  The fact that Harold Ramis was dead couldn't save him from having to participate, via CGI doppelganger.  Watching a very tired-looking Bill Murray snark at Gozer the Gozerian, all I could think was that this was at least twenty years too late for the "Ghostbusters 3" that the fans wanted.  Audiences seemed receptive to the film anyway, but I couldn't get past that shameless tearjerker finale that overshadowed everything else.

The list of films and series that have elicited similar responses from me keeps getting longer.  I thought that Luke Skywalker's appearance at the end of the last season of "The Mandalorian" bothered me so much because the effects technology wasn't good enough to get across Uncanny Valley, but the truth is really that his presence was a huge distraction and deus ex machina that disrupted the rest of that show.  The "Star Wars" franchise has been a terrible repeat offender here, especially J.J. Abrams' contributions, which just stacked callbacks upon callbacks while neglecting its major characters and storylines.  "Bill & Ted Face the Music" had some good ideas, but watching Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter trade surfer bro shtick in their fifties often felt more depressing than funny.  Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton finally reunited for "Terminator: Dark Fate," and got to be properly badass for about two scenes apiece before it sunk in that neither of them were in the physical shape to be in this kind of movie anymore.  

Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but watching these older actors return to the genre franchises of my childhood has rarely paid off as well as the filmmakers think it will, because so many of the projects are just so badly conceived.  They claim to want to give the fans what they want, but usually give the fans what they wanted when they were kids - and often far, far too late.  At this point I don't feel any excitement for another "Indiana Jones" film because the last time Harrison Ford put on the fedora, he was already pretty creaky, and Spielberg was clearly out of ideas.  The few I have liked, including "Blade Runner 2049" and "Creed," have taken pains to keep their older actors in more age-appropriate roles and lean on thematic connections instead of recreating elements of the original films.  An interesting recent case has been "The Matrix Resurrections," which was self-aware about its status as a legacyquel to the extent that this became a part of the plot.  I think it did better than most, doubling down on the romantic relationship between the leads, and deemphasizing the bullet ballet that the original "Matrix" was known for.  Neo never even fires a gun in any of the action scenes.                 

A new variation, as embodied by "Spider-man: No Way Home" is the legacyquel crossover.  Those franchises that have seen multiple reboots can now pull their cameos and callbacks from multiple versions of any given set of characters, resulting in three different Spider-men teaming up to face foes from all of their respective universes and timelines.  It's still technically a legacyquel, because Tom Holland's Peter Parker finally experiences the level of tragedy that has largely driven the other versions of the character.  However, the emphasis is definitely on the crossover, and the fun of having Holland, Tobey Maguire, and Andrew Garfield getting to interact and play off of each other for an hour of screentime.  Maguire, fortunately, isn't too old to get back in the suit, and it helps that Disney and Sony were able to corral so many supporting players to take part.  A lot of its success was also due to good timing and unusual circumstances that will be hard to duplicate.

Legacyquels tend to make money, so we'll be seeing plenty of them for the foreseeable future. Filmmakers' attentions have been shifting to newer material, and "The Matrix Resurrections" and "No Way Home" seem to be signaling that we'll be seeing more variations on the concept.  I've remarked before that legacyquels aren't new - I've found a few from as early as the '80s - but I hope to see fewer of them going forward.  We're currently being deluged with so much nostalgia that I'm starting to become averse to any familiar property making a reappearance.  Some are a good time, but mostly they've just been reminding me, over and over, of the merciless passage of time and how none of us are getting any younger.    

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"Spider-Man No Way Home" (With Spoilers)

All the spoilers ahead.  I mean it.

I suspect that the making of this movie is more interesting than the actual film.  The most impressive part of "Spider-Man: No Way Home" is the deal-making that must have taken place to get  Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Jamie Foxx, Thomas Hayden Church, Rhys Ifans, and J.K. Simmons to reprise their roles, not to mention Andrew Garfield and the elusive Tobey Maguire, who gave up acting and hasn't been seen onscreen since 2014.    

Thanks to the inescapable rumor mill - which is only getting more aggressive - I was pretty confident that Garfield and Maguire would be making some kind of appearance in the film, but it was a great treat to see them spend the whole last act of the film together with Tom Holland's Peter Parker, interacting, quipping, and finally bonding with each other.  I finally watched the Andrew Garfield "Spider-man" films last year, and I'm so glad I did, because "No Way Home" really only works the way that it should if you have the past history with all of these films.  Without the nostalgia, the sudden introduction of two previously unknown versions of Peter Parker, along with all of those villains, probably comes off as much more abrupt and clunky.  

The MCU is really milking the multiverse concept, and I'm sure they're far from done.  However, "No Way Home" feels like the best possible execution of this kind of crossover event, because the Sony reboots came in such a short amount of time, and the franchise was so huge in the popular consciousness that they're still mostly remembered fondly.  This also gave director Jon Watts, and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers a chance to tie up some of the loose ends left over from the Maguire and Garfield-led "Spider-man" films.  It's oddly reassuring to know that both of the previous Spideys are alive and well in their own universes.  Garfield really is a very good Spider-man, and Maguire may be less enthusiastic, but he delivers when it counts.  

And it feels miraculous that in a movie with so much comic book madness going on, the emotional journey of Tom Holland's Peter Parker remains so clearly defined throughout.  The other Spider-men coming to support him in his hour of greatest need wouldn't work so well if the stakes weren't as high as they are here.  Peter Parker thinks his life is ruined until he does something immature and stupid, and has to face much bigger, much worse consequences.  It's the kind of morality play, featuring tragic ironies and hard choices, that Watts and company have mostly sidestepped so far, and I'm glad that they finally decided to commit to it here - even if redeeming all the villains is so very, very Disney.  Peter Parker is uncoupling a bit from the MCU and going back to square one, and it feels right.  

And while I like that Peter has been de-powered, forced to grow up, and given a suitably sad Spidey ending this time out, what I really appreciate about featuring the whole multiverse concept is that now we can treat the MCU "Spider-man" canon as fully its own thing.  There doesn't have to be a Gwen in this universe, and "With great power comes great responsibility" works fine coming from Aunt May.  And after six film appearances from the Tom Holland Spider-man, he's finally crossed off all the boxes of the usual Spider-man origin story, and feels properly like a full-fledged Spider-man instead of a younger version.  Frequently, "No Way Home" feels like "Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse," but not quite as good because the storytelling relies so much on the previous films.  

Where Spider-man goes from here depends mostly on what Tom Holland wants to do, but it's clear that there's plenty of material left for future adventures.  More Venom seems to be an inevitability, which I am not looking forward to.  I also worry that the success of "No Way Home" is going to spark imitators, but few studios have the IP or the deep pockets to pull something like this off - can you imagine a multi-Batman crossover with the current state of Warner Brothers? - so this will likely stay a high water mark for superhero crossovers for a while.  

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"Spider-Man No Way Home" (Without Spoilers)

"Without spoilers" here means that I'm not going to reveal anything that we haven't seen in the trailer footage.  There have been so many leaks and theories and conjecture around this movie, I really don't know how anyone with any interest in seeing this movie has managed to come through the spoiler storm unscathed.  Still, I'll do my best.  Also it's difficult to talk about "Spider-Man: No Way Home" without talking about the events of the previous movie, "Far From Home," so there will be some spoilers for that one.  In fact, you should probably watch "Far From Home" before seeing "No Way Home."  Annnnnd, maybe, all the other "Spider-man" films since 2002. 

Here we go.  

"No Way Home" is probably the most indulgent piece of superhero media made yet, designed to appeal to those devoted fans of Spider-man who have stuck with him through thick and thin over the past two decades.  The big gimmick of this film is not that the Tom Holland Spider-man's secret identity, Peter Parker, has been revealed to the whole world, but that he and Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) attempt to cast a spell to fix this, inadvertently bringing Spider-man villains from other universes to their own.  Those other universes, of course, are the previous Sony Spider-man films that predate the MCU Spider-man.  This means the return of Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), the Green Goblin (William Dafoe), and Electro (Jamie Foxx) to our screens, and they've never looked better.

So this movie is packed to the gills with Spider-man references and Easter eggs, and will work best for Spider-man's biggest fans - the ones who have been waiting to see Spider-man fight his most famous franchise foes again.  By the end of the film, it also becomes clear that "No Way Home" functions as a soft reboot of sorts, bringing Peter Parker back to his roots, and re-emphasizing some of the major themes from the older parts of the Spider-man mythos.  This entire trilogy that began with "Homecoming" feels like it's been one, extended origin story.  On the one hand, this means Tom Holland will be gainfully employed for a long time to come (if he wants), and on the other hand the degree to which the MCU is dragging out simple narratives is getting wildly out of hand.        

To be fair, a lot happens in "No Way Home."  Unlike "Far From Home," or the Spider-man appearances in the "Avengers" films, we finally see some meaningful progression in Peter Parker's character arc and changes to the status quo that are not going to be handwaved away easily.  The fact that this is coupled with so much spectacle and so much fanservice is the film's biggest accomplishment.  As spectacle, "No Way Home" is not as impressive as some of the MCU films that we've seen lately.  However, like the "Avengers" films, it benefits from drawing from the material of the previous installments, paying off the storylines for many different characters, and hopefully leaving fans with a sense of closure before we move on to the next phase of Spider-media.  This is a MCU movie, after all, and raises as many questions as it answers.

Holland is as solid a performer as ever, but he's got a lot of competition for the spotlight this time out.  Dafoe and Molina are clearly having a ball being villains again, and chew scenery with everything they've got.  I think this is also the best we've seen of Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, and Marisa Tomei in this series, who get plenty to do.  Doctor Strange is exactly the right amount of annoyed authority figure, and doesn't overstay his welcome.  The only character who feels underused is J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), who got a big reveal at the end of "Far From Home."  His role turns out to be very minor, and functions more like an in-joke than anything else.  

I'm curious as to how viewers with less experience with the older "Spider-man" films are going to react to this one.  I suspect it'll land well, because "No Way Home" does have more to offer than spectacle and nostalgia, which I found a more pleasant surprise than anything else.  And we'll talk about the anything else (and there's a lot) next time.  

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I'm Slightly Addicted to "Lip Sync Battle"

I fell into a Youtube rabbit hole recently, watching clips of the performances from Spike/The Paramount Network's "Lip Sync Battle." On the surface level it looks like all the other celebrity-led reality competitions of recent years. LL Cool J and Chrissy Teigan host, and two celebrities face off in every episode, performing lip syncs of two different songs apiece before a winner is declared. Regular episodes are only half an hour, so nobody wears out their welcome, and the show has become known for its high production values. Elaborate costumes, sets, props, and a troupe of background dancers really help the performances pop.

However, what originally caught my attention was that the participants are more high profile actors and musicians than the usual participants on something like "Dancing with the Stars" or "The Masked Singer." "Lip Sync Battle" started out as a segment of "The Tonight Show," and was spun off as its own show, with John Krasinski and Stephen Merchant credited as creators. The performances are a mix of earnest homages and exaggerated parodies. However, everyone clearly has a blast playing at being larger-than-life music stars for a day, or in the case of the professional musicians who participate, playing very different musicians. There's a tremendously appealing vibe of wish-fulfillment in many of the appearances. Race and gender lines are crossed constantly, with so many drag performances that the show is often compared to "RuPaul's Drag Race."

So, I can see the appeal of the show for a performer. "Lip Sync Battle" is an opportunity for them to let loose and play with other personas. It's so much fun to see John Legend doing "Can't Touch This" in M.C. Hammer pants, or Neil Patrick Harris as "Moonwalker" era Michael Jackson performing "Smooth Criminal." I appreciate the really unexpected subversions, like Kathy Bates absolutely killing Bruno Mars's "That's What I Like," or Jenna Dewan doing her husband's "Magic Mike" routine right in his delighted face. Many of the performances go for laughs or irony, like Josh Gad dressing up like Donald Trump for "I Touch Myself," but there are a handful that are truly touching. Zoe Saldana stepping into Lisa "Left Eye" Lopez's shoes, alongside the other members of TLC, is magical. So is Laverne Cox borrowing some of Beyonce's glamour for "Lose My Breath."

In many ways, "Lip Sync Battle" embodies all the usual reality schtick. The hosts are pretty bland, with Chrissy Teigan often being used as a prop. Later seasons have gotten too spectacle heavy, and I miss the early days when it was mostly a bare stage, chintzy costumes, and the lip-syncers had to rely more heavily on their own impersonation skills. However, when you get a group of talented people together to do something they really enjoy, even if it's something very silly, it's terribly entertaining. And once in a while, you get lucky and something transcendent happens, like Tom Holland as Rihanna, or Anne Hathaway on Miley Cyrus's giant wrecking ball. And I can't help being a little envious of being able to do something that daring, and wild, and fearless. I can't help enjoying the vicarious thrill.

Now, if I were on "Lip Sync Battle," what would I want to perform? Well, I always did wonder what it would be like to wear David Byrne's giant suit...

 

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The First Five of "Daredevil"

Minor spoilers for "Hawkeye" and "Spider Man: No Way Home" ahead.

The latest MCU series, "Daredevil," has popped up on Netflix, probably because this series is much more violent and adult than the projects that have premiered on Disney+.  This is clearly an experiment for Marvel, as the show has none of the big budget resources of the other MCU shows, and even uses different branding and logos.  Created by Drew Goddard, it takes a much more gritty, grounded approach to a superhero property, built around the character of Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), the blind lawyer who was introduced in "Spider Man: No Way Home."

Murdock, who was blinded as a child and gained superpowers, is devoted to making a difference in crime-riddled Hell's Kitchen.  By day, he and his partner Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), are do-gooder lawyers trying to keep their tiny practice afloat, with the help of new Girl Friday receptionist Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll).  By night, Matt is a masked vigilante, just starting out, who uses his super hearing and fighting skills to stop local gangsters and other criminals. Crime boss Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio), originally a Spider-man villain, and recently seen in "Hawkeye," is being set up as the main villain.  The "Daredevil" version is much more brutal, but also a more well-rounded character with many shades of gray.  The two episodes he's appeared in so far show him romancing a lovely woman named Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer).  Matt is also helped out by a nurse named Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson), who fishes him out of a dumpster in the second episode, and patches him up regularly. 

Everything about "Daredevil" feels much more grown-up than any of the other MCU projects so far, because it exists in a much grimmer universe where everything seems to be stacked against the good guys.  I like how it's so stripped down, feeling very much like a typical network crime procedural rather than a superhero show in a more heightened reality.  There are no fancy costumes, few special effects, and even the showy fight scenes are impressive for their realism rather than any fancy choreography.  This version of Matt Murdock doesn't have super strength and gets beat up a lot.   Initially, I was worried about the higher episode count - this is a thirteen episode season - but "Daredevil" is making good use of its length, setting up its characters and multiple interesting subplots.  This isn't a show where there's any assumption that you already know the characters, and it's good to just spend time with Foggy and Karen, who are revealed to be real people instead of just comic relief.  The usual MCU habit of dropping references and easter eggs everywhere has been mercifully curbed. 

    

"Daredevil" highlights how formulaic the MCU has gotten, and it makes me wonder what some of its other  recent entries would have looked like if various creators had let themselves take their own concepts more seriously.  Would "Falcon and the Winter Soldier" have been better with a higher episode count, fewer guest stars, and fewer ridiculous action scenes?  Would I have liked "Loki" more if it had cut down the amount of snarky quips and crazy characters, and just committed to being a character study of a morally complicated villain?  Clearly the "Daredevil" approach wouldn't work for every corner of the MCU, but it's almost shocking how well developed characters like Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk are, after relatively little screen time, compared to someone like Doctor Strange, who doesn't even seem to have completed his initial origin story arc yet.   

If you remember the 2003 "Daredevil" movie with Ben Affleck, the show is so different as to be almost unrecognizable.  Instead, Goddard and company are clearly drawing more from the Frank Miller "Daredevil" comics and various recent "Batman" adaptations showing Bruce Wayne in the early days, before the Rogues' Gallery and the wonderful toys.  The impulse to go back to basics has yielded great results here, and I hope we'll see it reflected in more Marvel media to come.

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The First Five of "The Wheel of Time"

I had a friend in high school who loved Robert Jordan's "The Wheel of Time" books, so while I haven't read them, I'm well aware of their popularity and longevity.  I was looking forward to the new adaptation, which Amazon was touting as one of their more ambitious productions.  Unfortunately, I think they oversold this.  They oversold this a lot. 

"The Wheel of Time" is a fantasy series, where dark forces are massing as the primary magic users in this universe, the Aes Sedai, are searching for the reincarnation of a powerful figure known as The Dragon.  This search brings the Aes Sedai Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) and her bodyguard "Warder" Lan (Daniel Henney) to a small village and five young people, one of whom they believe is the Dragon - Mat (Barney Harris), Rand (Josha Stradowski), Egwene (Madeleine Madden), Perrin (Marcus Rutherford), and Nynaeve (Zoë Robins).  An attack on the village by Trollocs forces the group to flee toward the Aes Sedai stronghold, the White Tower, but they get split up and encounter further dangers.

I've tried not to look at too many comparisons of the book series to the screen adaptation, but it seems like one of the primary problems here is that the creators have taken a series that was originally geared more toward young adults, with a younger set of characters, and aged everybody up so that we could get something that feels closer to "Lord of the Rings" and "Game of Thrones."  The trouble is that nobody does the work of making sure that the five youngsters are properly written to reflect this change, so they come across like an especially dim set of early twenty-somethings who act like very young teenagers.  In other words, they're CW protagonists tramping through what's supposed to be a prestige television show, and come off as pretty ridiculous.  

Now, this isn't always a fatal blow to a series.  I'm a great lover of terrible '80s fantasy films and cheesy '90s syndicated adventure shows.  The simple pleasure of watching a bunch of familiar character types going off to have an adventure together can be enough.  The trouble is that "The Wheel of Time" doesn't understand how to do this.  And it's not smart enough to subvert the old tropes, or ambitious enough to do anything new with them. And it doesn't have the deep pockets to hide the deficiencies with fancy effects.  The better actors do what they can, but too many of the cast look like they don't want to be there.  And while the opening sequence is beautiful, all too soon we're stuck with a bunch of remarkably tedious characters who just feel like they're going through the motions.  

Frankly, it's incredibly disappointing that a series with a pretty decent level of production quality and with source material so beloved should be this badly written.  The pacing is pushing way too fast, skimping on the character moments to get to the action.  Rosamund Pike and Daniel Henney, who are easily the best actors on the roster, are barely keeping my interest.  I'm honestly not sure whether any of the younger cast members have any actual acting ability because they're given such awful dialogue and barely any character traits, let alone actual characterization.  Rand has a thing for Egwene, but she's standoffish.  Nynaeve doesn't trust the Aes Sedai.  All five of the kids start manifesting various powers, which some react to better than others.  

The worst part is that the show just isn't very entertaining.  There are an awful lot of characters to keep straight, and the show is more worried about the plot than making any of them likable or interesting to follow.  There's an absolutely deadly dearth of humor, aside from a few minor characters who show up way too late in the proceedings to make much of a difference.  I don't mind that the show is silly, with its dodgy effects and trite hero's journey narrative, or even that it's so self-serious and treats everything in deadly earnest.  I just don't think it's very much fun.  And if it's not fun, what's the point?  

I criticized "The Witcher" for a lot of these same issues, but at least "The Witcher" gave me two good characters and let Henry Cavill beat things up regularly.  With "The Wheel of Time," there's no such luck.

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Oscars Aftermath 2022

Well, this was a rough one for me, folks.  Aside from Ariana DeBose and Jane Campion, I wasn't too  happy with who got the statuettes this year.  I made my peace with "CODA" getting Best Picture a few days ago, after it swept the guild awards, but personally I ranked it dead last out of all the contenders.  Jessica Chastain and Will Smith were boring choices for Actor and Actress, the screenplay winners were awful, and I'm relatively meh on "Drive My Car" and "Dune."  Oh, and Lin Manuel Miranda really lost to the Billie Eilish song?  Really?

So, instead I'm going to focus on the telecast itself, which was at the center of a maelstrom of drama for months because of the Academy's attempts to reverse the ratings nosedive that the ceremony saw last year.  They decided not to announce eight of the categories live in order to save time, but still ended up going forty minutes over the allotted three hours.  They settled on having three hosts - Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, and Regina Hall - after going without one for the three years prior.  Performances of the nominated songs were kept in the telecast, plus "We Don't Talk About Bruno" for good measure, after they were moved to a pre-show last year.  

Having the telecast open with a thunderous Beyonce production number was probably the smartest move - it helped the ceremony open with a bang, and confirmed we would be getting big stars all night.   There was a lot of ruckus over the inclusion of the Fan Favorite contests, which most commentators saw as a variation on the Popular Film category that the Academy leadership tried to implement a few years ago.   However, no actual Oscar was handed out for winning - they didn't even merit a presenter.  The rules for the Twitter-based voting were designed to allow for crazy vote manipulation by fans, so this was clearly a stunt from the beginning.  I was fine with the quick montage countdowns as a compromise.  Of all the audience attracting hijinks, this was honestly one of the most benign. 

Wanda Sykes bumming around the Academy Museum was fun, and Amy Schumer's monologue wasn't bad, but most of the host segments were pretty mediocre.  The Regina Hall bit in particular is one of those things that you could not get away with if the genders of the everyone involved were switched.  I appreciate the livelier "In Memoriam" segment we got this year with the show choir and additional speakers.  Anniversaries were a big theme of the ceremony, trying to get the audience to link the Oscars to their favorite films.  I liked the 60th anniversary tribute to the Bond films, though it's a reminder that these films have famously been unrecognized by the Academy.  The 50th anniversary tribute to "The Godfather" was less successful - a half-hearted montage followed by Francis Ford Coppola and his leading men thanking Mario Puzo and Bob Evans.  

This telecast was marked by a lot of little awkward moments - Ryusuke Hamaguchi's stop-and-go speech, Chris Evans trying to segue into a "Lightyear" preview, teleprompter stumbles, a too-brief glimpse of Governors Award winner Liv Ullman, the nip slip, and the noticeably edited down pre-recorded categories being dropped into the telecast at random.  Makeup and Hairstyling came after Best Actor!  Was that BTS?!  On the other hand, the sign language accommodations for the deaf "CODA" cast and crew were excellent.  Troy Kotsur easily had the best speech of the night.  Best presenters were the casts of "Pulp Fiction" and "White Men Can't Jump" - a reunion I didn't realize I wanted.  

And, of course, the most talked-about moment of the night was Will Smith slapping Chris Rock onstage over a seemingly innocuous joke, while Rock was presenting for the Best Documentary Feature category.  And then Smith won Best Actor a few minutes later and delivered a lengthy, rambling apology to everyone except Chris Rock.  A day later, nobody quite seems to know what to make of this.  I have no idea what to make of this, except to acknowledge that ABC and the Academy got what they wanted.  Everyone's talking about the Oscars again, though for all the wrong reasons as usual.

There really is nothing like Oscar night, and against my better judgment, I'll see you all again next year.

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