International Women's Day: The Marvels

To recap, my position on The Marvels at the end of 2023:

1) I'm definitely not seeing it in the theater, but

2) I'll definitely see it if it streams on Disney+ before my ranking deadline, which it did not, which is okay because

3) I'm feeling kind of backlashy toward Brie Larson, for reasons that may be valid but might align me with people I don't want to be aligned with, and besides

4) Not seeing it would allow me to finish watching Ms. Marvel on Disney+ before I see it.

But really, what I worried people thought when I didn't rank it was "He just doesn't want to see it cuz there's girls in it."

People who know me know that's not the case, but I'm thinking about all those people who don't know me.

So to atone, I watched it last night on International Women's Day. 

It's only been a tradition for me to watch a movie to celebrate International Women's Day for one year. Last year I finished off my best picture nominees by watching Women Talking, which hadn't yet been accessible to me on my ranking deadline, and that experience had a good ending. I say "ending" because I thought the start of that movie was stilted, but I came around on it pretty strongly by the time it reached the finish line.

No such finish for The Marvels, but I will say that it also went up for me a half-star by the end. Unfortunately, instead of that getting it up to the four stars Women Talking received, it got it up to only 2.5.

The Marvels has been streaming on Disney+ for about a month now, and considering that I've watched two 2023 best picture nominees as well as one other 2023 film that wasn't nominated for anything, the lid was officially off the prohibition against watching movies from the previous year in the wake of closing my list. In fact, I'd already been eyeing it for a viewing for several weeks now. Once a Marvel die-hard, always a Marvel die-hard, I guess -- even after consciously acknowledging that Marvel movies don't carry the likelihood of success with me that they once did.

The thing is, there was one thing holding me back: Finishing Ms. Marvel, as I said n point 4 above that I intended to do.

To recap that one, we started watching it as a family not long after it debuted in the middle of 2022. But after about two episodes, the kids admitted they weren't drawn in by it. My wife and I were disappointed, but not enough to continue watching it on our own after they went to sleep for the night. 

I did try to pick it up again last month, to prepare for the Marvels viewing that I didn't care enough about to prioritize a viewing in the theater. I guess that was too much preparation for too many things I didn't care enough about. A pause of 18 months fatally sapped my interest in finishing Ms. Marvel. I'd watch halves of episodes before either falling asleep or moving on to something else, and in the halves I did watch, even though I watched them consecutively in terms of the narrative, I felt myself confused about what was happening.

And then I realized a simple thing: I'm not in a place right now to be a Marvel completist both in terms of Marvel television and Marvel movies. It's enough to be a Marvel movie completist, which I am again now. Stuff may have happened in Hawkeye and Secret Invasion and She-Hulk that has some bearing on these movies, but I've gotten by without watching those shows. Ms. Marvel would just be the same.

And in truth, the only thing I probably needed to know that I didn't get from three-and-a-half episodes of the show was that Kamala Khan did indeed come into her powers and that the members of her family survived the experience. Which is what I would have guessed before I watched one minute of the first episode.

Okay let's get back to this movie.

It's fine. I have no interest in getting all hatery and saying how it's a disaster. It's competently made and I didn't find the characters grating in any way. I have actively positive thoughts toward Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau and especially the delightful Iman Kellani as Ms. Marvel, essentially our viewer surrogate in this film. They did their level best to try to make both the actress and the character a bit more accessible in terms of Larson as Carol Danvers, surely absorbing some of the backlash that involved Larson being difficult to work with and feeling too arrogant about her character's powers. But I still caught her posing with a superior look on her face one too many times for my liking.

There's a problem that remains with Captain Marvel, which is that she is, by some descriptions, the most powerful character in the entire MCU, and yet you can't have a protagonist who doesn't have vulnerability. I must admit that I didn't work very hard to piece together the plot of this movie and whether it made sense or was satisfying, but I had a hard time feeling like Carol was in danger at any given moment. At the same time, they have to specifically not have her use some percentage of her powers to solve problems so she doesn't just fly into everything and zap a supernova at it, which it seems she is capable of doing. By being too strong, the character has possibly unsolvable problems in terms of building stakes and creating tension in the narrative.

I did like the bit about how the three main women switch places, though again, I didn't really understand how or why it was happening and what the rules were. Therefore, I couldn't tell if the gimmick was being used cleverly or fairly. The enjoyment I got there was purely surface level.

Then I will also admit liking the scene with all the newborn cats, which I won't spoil if you haven't seen it, even if that whole joke is the sort of thing we've already seen in four Men in Black movies.

So let's drop the qualitative analysis of the movie for a moment and see how it does as a viewing on International Women's Day.

I feel like there is something smart in the construction of this movie as being divided between three main female characters. Even though more women may be more triggering for the wrong segment of the public, Marvel has not been catering to that segment of the public for years, if ever. What it does for people who are less extreme in their anathema to heroines is it divides it equally between three characters, rather than providing a monolithic single character against whom to expend your negative thoughts. To some this is just woker and woker, but again I say, those people can go suck an egg.

I also do think there is something useful about the movie in terms of being post the most obvious subtext of any movie involving female superheroes: namely, the chip on its shoulder about being able to do anything a man can do. We've had enough female superhero movies now that those original gestures are now too simplistic of a goal in this type of movie. As with any representation hurdle we must overcome, the first step is to overcome it, and to tell your audience that you are doing so in no uncertain terms, so they're not too thick to get it. Then, you get to a point where the representation alone is enough and you don't have to draw extra attention to why you were fighting for that representation in the first place.

I think The Marvels is in that spot, which is good. The fact that it doesn't totally succeed -- in fact, that it doesn't even succeed enough to earn the minimum three stars for a recommendation -- isn't on the women, or on director Nia DaCosta, who does a good job with the material in terms of her specific responsibilities. (Though she does share the writing credit with two other women, and that particular trio may not do their job as well as the trio they are writing about.)

No, The Marvels is a disappointment because 33 MCU movies have raised the bar to impossible heights in terms of what qualifies as something new or interesting. Even the trio of female superheroes is not particularly new, in the wake of that famous scene in Avengers: Endgame where all the female Avengers assembled on the battlefield to walk together in slow motion. And space? I feel like fully half of the ongoing MCU properties are now set in space, even if it is outer space-resembling inner space, like in the last Ant-Man movie.

I'm glad I watched it on International Women's Day, though, if only for the benefit of that hypothetical bean counter I often reference, who may be taking note of spikes in streams and may correlate that to a day dedicated to women. I still want to appreciate women, even if I didn't appreciate this movie as much as I'd hoped.

Captain Marvel passes the test

Captain Marvel may not be my favorite Marvel movie -- it's somewhere around the middle, probably -- but there was a lot riding on it last night.

As you know from yesterday's post, it was my son's tenth birthday yesterday, and also our first full day of having Apple TV and Disney+. Captain Marvel had been lined up for his surprise birthday evening viewing, something my wife officially agreed to it at some point after I wrote yesterday's post.

The questions I had before watching were many:

1) Will I have miscalculated terribly? Will this be too intense for my kids, if not the ten-year-old then certainly the six-year-old?

2) Will my wife shoot daggers at me throughout the movie for twisting her arm into something she never really wanted to do?

3) Will they like it?

Since I don't love Captain Marvel, the last one of those shouldn't matter as much. But when you show someone a Marvel movie, you're not just getting them to buy in to that particular movie. You're trying to sell them on more than 20 movies, and the viability of watching the rest of those movies hangs in the balance.

For the children, I didn't think that would be a problem. I mean, superheros punching each other, flying, and shooting laser rays out of their fists? What kid wouldn't like that?

But my wife has only seen maybe five of the Marvel movies, and kind of turns her nose up at them. In fact, the only ones I can say for certain she's seen are Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor: Ragnarok. I'm sure she's seen one or two others, but they would have all been under my direction and without very much excitement.

I don't care if she likes these movies, really -- I've already seen them all so I don't need a viewing partner. But her liking them might also be instrumental in giving her blessing for the kids to keep watching them, which I do want them to have the chance to do. Especially now that we have D+.

Probably the more worrisome issue, though, wss whether anything in this movie would scar my kids, especially the younger one. I did a cursory check on the internet -- more than cursory, I guess, as I read the entire parental recommendation section on IMDB, as well as sought out counsel from my Flickcharters Facebook group. It didn't really seem like there would be anything too scary.

And in fact, there were only two moments when I thought the kids were actually disturbed, the first of which was previewed on IMDB.

That first was the autopsy of the dead Skrull, when you can see the flaps of his chest and abdomen held open with medical instruments. You don't see any actual alien guts, but apparently, the whole idea of looking inside the body of what had once been a living thing was a bit too much for my ten-year-old. I think he might have just thought it was gross rather than the kind of thing that chills him or makes him consider his own mortality. He looked away from the screen and asked us to tell him when it was finished.

Then the second thing was with my younger son -- who didn't care about the autopsy, it should be noted -- and was something that would never come up in a parental guidance report for Captain Marvel. When Carol Danvers is under a trance near the end and is "visiting" an incarnation of her mentor, Annette Bening's Mar-Vell, she tries to punch the vision in the face. The face, a projection as it is, subsumes the fist, so that the fist sinks into it up to the wrist, and the mouth disappears entirely. "That is the weirdest thing I have ever seen," said the six-year-old, who may have indeed dwelled on that for a few minutes after it left the screen.

Well did they like it?

"It's the best movie I've ever seen," said the birthday boy. He's prone to exaggeration -- what kid isn't? -- but I do think I've only heard him say it about five times before. So that means that Marvel beats DC, I guess, as he had previously favored Shazam.

"Yeah," said the younger one, who is not given to talking about and ranking favorites. I guess he takes after his mother in that regard.

"Oh yeah," said my wife, in a way that hits the word "yeah" and suggests "could there be any other reaction?" Captain Marvel was a strategic choice on my part, you see. First and foremost, it was something my son had mentioned. But as it's Marvel's first female-fronted movie, that had been a potential draw for my wife from back when it came out, to the extent that she may even have intended to see it in the theater. That doesn't mean she's going to automatically green light the other Marvel movies, but having sat with her kids and seen how they reacted -- both their attraction to the material, and perhaps more importantly, their lack of aversion to it -- can only help.

Me? I liked it a lot more.

I had been a bit cold on Captain Marvel from my first viewing -- not because I didn't think it was a good movie, but because, as with Black Panther, I just didn't think it was anything special. Well, I do find there to be special aspects to this movie on second viewing, and I don't just think I'm being influenced by my family's obvious affection.

Although I think the female empowerment messages are great, and I do like the performance of Brie Larson in the title role, I hate to say it, but it's the performance of the two lead men that really raises this up a notch. Samuel L. Jackon is in rare form here, even more charismatic than usual, and looking great with the aging down technology (which is more a compliment to the special effects than the performance, I realize). But I think it's Ben Mendelsohn who really clinches the tone that Jackson gets started. My wife pointed out that it's lovely that he got to keep his native Australian accent, and I think that helps sell his persona here. I'm having trouble putting it into words -- neither "flippant" nor "aloof" capture it perfectly. But his personality is key to selling the mid-movie transformation of our understanding of who this character is.

Now that I think about it, I'm wondering if this transformation played a role in why the kids like it so much. It made for a number of mid-movie questions about who was really the good guy, as they were surprised to have their expectations overturned like they may never have had them overturned before. But I think it also helped them understand a couple core lessons that we would like them to take away from any piece of art: Don't judge a book by its cover, and don't trust everything told to you by authority figures.

It reminded me a bit of my own blow-your-mind moment around this age, maybe a year or two older, when I saw the Dennis Quaid-Lou Gossett Jr. space movie Enemy Mine. If you don't recall the particulars of that one, it's the one where Quaid's human and Gossett's alien -- a Drac by species name -- get stranded together on a planet they are unable to escape. They are enemies in a raging war between their species. The film cleverly puts you in Quaid's shoes to start, so you assume he is fighting a just fight against a truly reprehensible enemy, and the fact that the Drac is "ugly" (by human standards) helps cement your core perspective. Of course, as the movie goes, you realize just how kind and worthy of our sympathy this Drac -- this enemy -- really is.

I'm not sure if the other Marvel movies have such useful messages to impart as female empowerment, racial tolerance and skepticism of authority, but hopefully, we'll get a chance to find out.

The truest sign of my indifference to Captain Marvel

The further I’ve gotten away from Captain Marvel, the less I like it/think about it. Actually, I can’t say I don’t think about it, because I’ve been listening to it discussed at regular intervals on my podcasts as each of them gets to it, or as I get to listening to them. And in fact, one particular podcast finally gave me the balls to admit what I should have admitted straight away: I don’t really think it’s all that great. Genevieve Koski of The Next Picture Show, who I tend to think of as a champion of responsible depiction of women at the movies, gave a number of reasons she didn’t love it, all of which I agreed with. If it’s okay for Genevieve to say she didn’t love Captain Marvel, it’s okay for me to say it too.

One of the things Genevieve and I agree on is the piss poor usage of 90s music in the movie. It’s not that the songs they choose aren’t good, because they are. It’s that they are applied so indifferently, so haphazardly, that they exist only as broad signposts of 90s nostalgia, nothing that feels organic to the movie or the scenes in which they are deployed.

There’s a weird extension of this problem that I never thought would have been a problem for me, because it involves my favorite band of all time.

For a good portion of the movie, maybe 15 or 20 minutes, Carol Danvers wears a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt. It immediately put me in mind of the Public Enemy t-shirt the young John Connor wears throughout Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Whenever I thought of him wearing that t-shirt, I thought of it as a case of the two things mutually boosting each other up. The fact that he likes Public Enemy speaks well of John Connor, and the fact that the future leader of the human resistance against the machines wears a Public Enemy t-shirt speaks well of Public Enemy.

I should feel this – in fact, I should get a surge of pride – with Carol Danvers and Nine Inch Nails, as they are indeed my favorite band. But like many of the other signifiers in this movie, this one is pretty empty. Carol is, or at least thinks she is, an alien from another planet. Her choice of a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt is not based on an acquaintance with their music. It’s random and inspired by nothing other than its proximity to her at the time she was looking for clothing (they mentioned she grabbed it off a mannequin in the discussion on The Next Picture Show, though I don't remember that happening).

Whether Carol consciously adopted Nine Inch Nails as some kind of symbol or not should be irrelevant. If it’s not her endorsing the band, then it’s the movie endorsing it, and that should be good enough. But I treated Carol wearing a shirt emblazoned with the iconic NIN logo -- something that should have been aimed directly at me, appealed directly to me, and in all ways been an easy win for the movie to score with me -- with little more than a shrug. It doesn’t only represent her not making a conscious choice, but the choice feels just as arbitrary for the filmmakers as their choice of which music to drop in which scene that doesn’t go with that music.

I did like the fact that the movie endorsing it, and by extension Brie Larson endorsing it, was proof positive of what I’ve thought for ages: that Trent Reznor is a feminist. Larson has spent a good portion of the press leading up to Captain Marvel talking about gender equality and #MeToo-related subject matter, after all. Reznor, the lead singer and in fact entirety of the band, has written some really angry lyrics and music over the years, the type that could make a fan defensive. But the people who know have never confused that anger with misogyny, even though some of the lyrics could broadly be interpreted through that type of filter.

The thing is, Reznor received a pretty high endorsement of his feminist credentials a full quarter century ago. None other than Tori Amos asked him to join her for a duet on the chorus of “Past the Mission” on her album Under the Pink, this after including the words “nine inch nails” in her song “Precious Things” from her solo debut album Little Earthquakes. Her follow-up to Under the Pink contains the song “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” which name-checks Reznor’s own debut album, Pretty Hate Machine.

In other words, I don’t need Captain Marvel or Captain Marvel to tell me I have good reason to like Nine Inch Nails.

If I felt the character of Carol Danvers and the music of Nine Inch Nails were in some way in conversation with each other -- as I do with John Connor and Public Enemy -- then it might mean something. But alas, the character herself is as poorly defined, as poorly delineated, as the character's connection to whatever symbolism Nine Inch Nails is supposed to have for her, or for the movie.

And I'm not going to include a bunch of language here reassuring you of my own feminist credentials. I hope you know I support the idea of Carol Danvers, just not so much her execution in this particular film.

Hey, Genevieve Koski said it was okay. 

Looking for the Boden-ness and the Fleck-ness

Marvel Studios has hired directors with vision (Taika Waititi), hacks (Peyton Reed), and directors with vision that they tried to turn into hacks (Edgar Wright).

The decision to hire Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck to direct Captain Marvel seems like a case of the former, but it may have ended up being a case of the latter.

In any case, after watching the movie, I’m not seeing the Boden-ness or the Fleck-ness in it.

That’s not to say I disliked Captain Marvel. In the end I had a fair bit of affection for it. I feel about toward it as I feel toward Black Panther, which is 3.5 stars out of 5.

But Black Panther was at least directed by a director with vision, who was allowed to keep that vision intact when he made the movie. Captain Marvel feels … well, just about like every other Marvel movie.

Which is kind of what they’re going for. It’s been much discussed, occasionally by me, that the real auteur behind the Marvel movies is not their individual directors, but Kevin Feige, the producer on … well, every single Marvel movie I think. He’s had credits on Marvel-related properties all the way back to 2000’s X-Men, where he served as associate producer. The guy is as steeped in the Marvel vision as Stan Lee was – more, probably.

But even within that, there is the leeway, even the desire, to step a bit afield from what’s considered to be the “standard” Marvel movie. That’s why Feige hired Edgar Wright for Ant-Man, though he wasn’t willing to go as far afield as Wright wanted. Maybe he wasn’t ready yet. Thor: Ragnarok’s Waititi and Panther’s Ryan Coogler got to inject some of themselves into the movies they made, which became massive hits.

So he was certainly ready for Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck to do their thing … but they didn’t.

Or maybe they just don’t have an identifiable “thing.”

Since the average MCU fan will likely not have seen any of their filmography – and I’m not going to blame you if you’re that person (sorry to refer to you as “average”) – I’ll give you some idea who they are and what they’ve been up to. Boden and Fleck have always worked together as far as I can see. They are not related and have never been in a relationship, which makes them a bit of an anomaly in terms of directing teams. [NOTE: I was wrong, they are/were in a relationship, but they are very private about the nature of it, though it looks like they have a child together. I'll leave this as is and just add this note.] In fact, they met on a student film and decided to collaborate. They do have a bit of a Coen brothers thing going on in the sense that both were always credited as writers but one was initially credited as the director, that being Fleck. (The man always gets the best title, right?) After about their second film they both started being listed as directors, which seems only fair.

They burst onto the scene, in a manner of speaking, with their 2006 film Half Nelson. You the “average MCU fan” still didn’t likely see it, but in indie film terms, it was definitely a bursting. It was one of the movies that helped break Ryan Gosling, who received an Oscar nomination for his role as a crack-addicted teacher. Neither crack addiction nor teaching makes an appearance in Captain Marvel.

They then moved on to something decidedly smaller scale, if only because it had no name actors in the cast. That was 2008’s Sugar, a realistic look at the attempts of a young Latin American pitcher to make it in American professional baseball, which makes it an anomaly in terms of baseball movies. The star of that movie is a young man name Algenis Perez Soto, who didn’t pick up another role for ten more years (though does have a small part in Captain Marvel, I now see). I’d say that Latin Americans and baseball do not make an appearance in Captain Marvel, but baseball does make a small appearance.

Next was another shifting of gears for the duo, who made the mental illness comedy It’s Kind of a Funny Story in 2010. This was a bit more mainstream as it featured Emma Roberts, Zach Galifianakis and Viola Davis, not to mention another guy who seemed on the track to stardom but hasn’t been heard from much lately: Keir Gilchrist. (Oh yeah, he was in It Follows.) Mental illness doesn’t make an appearance in Captain Marvel, although I suppose comedy does.

Their fourth feature, and last before Captain Marvel, was the 2015 buddy dramedy Mississippi Grind, which features Ryan Reynolds and a man they would work with again in Captain Marvel, Ben Mendelsohn, who was actually my favorite part of the movie. It’s about two guys going on a gambling spree along the Mississippi, and also trying to discover themselves. There’s no gambling in Captain Marvel, but there's self-discovery out the wazoo.

I’ve liked all of Boden and Fleck’s movies, but trying to find a throughline is pretty difficult. The question is, should we try to find that? Do good filmmakers have to revisit similar themes to stake out an identity for themselves? And does appearing to be obsessed with the same themes over the course of a career actually make you a better artist, or just someone easier to discuss because it allows film school students to construct grand unifying theories of you?

And there’s no doubt they are good filmmakers. I’ve liked all of their films, particularly Half Nelson, which was my #10 of the year it came out.

What I don’t really see, and what it may not ever be possible to see, is a logical, identifiable reason why Feige would have considered them a good match for Captain Marvel. They’re not a bad match, certainly. Good filmmakers can, presumably, take any material and make it good, as long as they’re starting with a good script and a good cast. But what was the Boden-ness and Fleck-ness he was looking for?

If forced to give an answer, I’d surmise that he saw a streak of humanism in their films, a sense of how to bring three dimensions to a character. A “gooey women’s movie” needs someone like that. (That’s not me talking, of course, but what I imagine the thinking might have been.)

In fact, their hiring represents a kind of funny half measure toward accepting female directors, and primarily female-driven content, into the MCU. It’s only half-directed by a woman, though harder to believe even than that is that Marvel has yet to make a movie in which a woman was the protagonist. They do have a Black Widow movie lined up (directed by a woman, Cate Shortland – see my thoughts on her here), and presumably will have a Captain Marvel 2 if/when this is a success. But they’re a bit late in getting here, and when they do, it’s hard to know/see what this woman has brought to this project.

Again, nothing against Anna Boden, or against Ryan Fleck. But I just don’t see what they’ve done here other than shepherd the project through and make a pretty good movie.

In a way, this makes them like the biggest recent Marvel success stories, who are also a directing pair – the Russo brothers. If you are grading MCU directors on the admittedly flawed scale I introduced earlier, from hack on one side to directors with vision on the other, the Russos are probably closer to the “hack” end of the scale. I should probably describe what I mean by that. A “hack” is thought of as someone who just does the studio’s bidding and does not display any trademark techniques or styles. You know, maybe a Joel Schumacher. On the extreme opposite end you’ve got someone like Wes Anderson, who is so much like himself every time out that literally no one else could have made his movies.

The Russo brothers came to the MCU with two random features – Welcome to Collingwood and You, Me and Dupree – as well as a handful of episodes of Community (which appear to have won them the gig) under their belt. Not much. But they ended up being the perfect choices to execute Feige’s vision, first in two Captain America movies and now in two Avengers movies, assuming they continue their run of success with next month’s Avengers: Endgame.

Boden and Fleck would certainly be happy with accomplishing something like that, but I guess I feel more is expected of them, given that they made four genuinely interesting films, one of which garnered an Oscar nomination. Their role in relation to those films was decidedly not the role of a hack, as these are smaller movies that they wrote. But neither did they develop a signature style. So when they’re tapped to direct a Marvel movie, I do expect more from them than just turning in a good Marvel movie … even if I can’t quantify what that is.

If you’ve seen the movie and can identify either its Boden-ness or its Fleck-ness, I’d love you to let me know in the comments below.