Captain Marvel Review - A White Male's Opinion (Spoilers)

Well if the incessant Comic Book Resources and Screen Rant articles hadn't alerted you already, "Captain Marvel" has been released finally to an audience already so polarized their immediate vicinity has become an officially protected penguin habitat. Why you may ask? Well we can thank Brie Larson, the WOMAN lead, for that. And I put the word WOMAN in all-caps because good lord, I don't know about you but I've never ever seen a woman in the lead role for an action film so it pays to emphasize this fact. Which, in all fairness to Brie Larson, is what the ad campaign for this film did. 

Still Larson's own remarks haven't exactly helped things. I mean who would've thought alienating a good portion of your potential fanbase with race and gender politics would garner you some kind of backlash? Not to worry though, corporate entertainment media and Rotten Tomatoes are here to help by reflexively defending you and your product by denouncing dissenters as misogynists and trolls and redesigning their website in an attempt to silence said misogynists and trolls respectively. 

Because it's not about whether the product itself is any good, it's about how many people you can convince you don't hate women. 

Speaking of the product (Full Disclosure: I have not read any of the comics), I'm going to borrow an expression from a friend of mine who attended the screening with me, as I feel it describes it pretty well; "Aggressively Average".

At least one can say that about most of the movie. In fact generally speaking it's so average that one could even wonder what all the fuss was about; not necessarily from those who hyped the movie but from those who were all but ready to piss on it from a great height. I honestly had trouble feeling anything for it throughout my viewing other than a few moments where my hands gripped the armrests of my cinema seat in spasms of pure uncut cringe. In fact those moments are probably what kept me awake. 

In spoiler free summary; it's formulaic, the story has very little weight or lasting effect in terms of the MCU, those who telegraphed Brie Larson's performance being akin to a corpse on marionette strings just by watching the trailer were directly on the money and the aforementioned cringeworthy moments of horrendous propaganda were nowhere near funny enough for me to even recommend it as a "so bad it's good" affair. In fact I'd hazard to say that you probably wouldn't even need to see it in order to understand the upcoming "Avengers: Endgame" film.

As for the moments of horrendous propaganda, well....

Look, there's nothing wrong with having a message in your film as long as you have the skill and nuance of mind to put it across without making your product ultimately come off didactic or unsubtle. The people who made Captain Marvel do not have this ability. Very early on we are privy to a set of scenes which honestly would not be out of place in a feminist ad campaign. Carol Danvers taking on some military obstacle course as a group of chortling men heckle her from below, a scene where her father chastises her as a young girl after she careens off of a go cart track (right after ignoring the advice of a boy on the track to "slow down" as she comes up to a turn - insert woman driver joke here); seriously there were times where I thought the film hadn't even started yet and Cineworld were showing Gillette's latest marketing travesty. There's even a part later on where a biker dude randomly tells her to smile and we all know THAT'S a hate crime akin to a man asking for your phone number. 

Fake news, you never smile.

It can also be seen in the way that the film treats characters like Nick Fury, turning him into an outright joke of a character. I get it, he's younger in this film, not yet the director of S.H.I.E.L.D and as such less experienced, but he honestly comes off as a totally different character and ends up doing very little. This, I'm afraid is a hallmark of this kind of Mary-Sue-centric storytelling. Don't believe me? There's one particularly hilarious moment when Danvers sends Fury out of the room so she can sit and have a chat with her friend, Marie Rambeau (mother of Monica Rambeau who was actually the SECOND Captain Marvel way before Carol Danvers, a black woman too - naughty, naughty Brie Larson, deplatforming a WOC like that), just so that the film could pass the fucking Bechdel Test.

I was probably the only one who noticed that but my mind is trained to home in on feminist bullshit like a heat seeking missile. It is my gift and my curse. 

Going back to Fury himself and how they turn him into a joke.... the scar over his eye was from a cat scratch. 

I'm not kidding. 

To be fair, it's an alien cat that proves to be deadly. But it's a cat scratch nonetheless. But I'll give it this, the jokes surrounding the cat are some of the only ones that landed for me. The MCU is often praised for its sense of humor and for the most part this film manages to fuck that up also, and a large part of it comes down to Larson being an extremely humorless actress (and let's face it, probably person). She has two settings; neutral and smug. Either way it inspires anger and/or boredom more than it does mirth. Despite the film's other failings I feel it would have been drastically improved with a different actress. Both performance wise and PR wise.  

Ultimately her character has the same problem that Rey from the latest Star Wars movies also has. She starts off awesome and ends godly. She has very little flaws and whatever flaws she does have are negligible, making her unrelatable and a chore to watch. Compare her to, say, Miles Morales in the recent "Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse" film, which I had my problems with, but is a vastly superior film with a vastly superior main character. 

As for villains... I can't really say much. The film has one of those "omg they were the bad guys all along" twists that anyone with a functioning frontal lobe can see coming from a hundred miles away. One villain is basically a space SAS commander and the other is the "Supreme Intelligence", the central AI controlling the Kree world, which, I have been informed by my friend, in the comics looks like a giant green gorgon face.

"... AND I'M GOING TO MAKE MEXICO PAY FOR IT."

"Yes Supreme Intelligence."

   
Which is awesome. They don't do this in the film of course but I understand, adaptations need to be made. 

So, is this the film that's going to "set the stage" for women leads in superhero movies? Well, aside from the action films with female leads that already exist, we had Wonder Woman before this. Ideally the stage was already set. Women CAN be action heroes. We know this. It's been done. But you see... those movies were not orthodoxy approved. As was proven by Wonder Woman being generally well received by the public and critics but chastised by ideologues for not being feminist enough. 

And for the record, I thought Wonder Woman was okay. It's certainly the best of the DC movies. But no one ever talks about it as though it's this groundbreaking event that sets the stage for female fronted action/superhero movies. And yet Captain Marvel - THIS - with it's boring story, unmemorable villain, unrelatable hero and generally fucking insufferable lead actress is the one that's being reflexively defended from hordes of "manbabies" and "fragile males"? The one that Rotten Tomatoes is actively changing aspects of their website and deleting reviews for? THIS?

My prediction is that Captain Marvel will forever be remembered as the Amy Schumer of comic book flicks. Not merely because it similarly got a website to change due to its horrible ratings. But because it wouldn't stop shoving its cunt in our faces. 

Pic unrelated

Halloween (2018) Review - MODERATE SPOILERS

Halloween.

It may not be, as some claim it is, the first slasher film (that distinction may belong to either Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or Bob Clark's "Black Christmas") and it isn't even the best film John Carpenter would ever make; but it most certainly is the definitive template for the slasher genre going forward. It created the concept of the indestructible masked slasher killer, it created the concept of the virginal Final Girl and it also created the concept of the endless slasher movie franchise. 

Speaking of which, they finally made another one. Yay?

Yes, after multiple sequels of varying continuity (one not even featuring the Michael Myers character) a remake and a sequel to the remake set in some bizarre universe where retarded hillbilly rapists outnumber the general population to the point where they are hired as orderlies in mental institutions, we finally get a direct sequel to the original that has absolutely nothing to do with ridiculous cults, long lost relatives or old Irish tycoons distributing evil masks to children to fulfill an ancient occult ritual. 

Seriously though, Halloween 3 is actually pretty great, go watch it.

Forty years after Michael Myers originally escaped from Smith's Grove Sanitarium and wrought havoc on Haddonfield, Illinois - in particular the life of Laurie Strode who witnessed the butchery of her friends - Michael once again escapes to Haddonfield to terrorize the area with a new spate of killings. But this time Laurie, a traumatized survivalist living essentially as a hermit in a fortress-like house, is ready for him.  

Firstly I have to say; what is it with the modern film industry that they can't come up with names for their sequels? The fact that they've called this film "Halloween", only differentiating it from the original with (2018) next to it, gives me serious flashbacks to the "The Thing" prequel. And this is something you do not want to do. I mean it's not even a remake, it's a sequel. They couldn't put a "Rebirth" or a "The Vengeance" in there? Cliché yes but I'd rather that than having to constantly clarify which movie I'm talking about by specifying the date it was released in. It's already annoying enough that I have to specify "the original" whenever I'm talking about a movie that some coke-addled Hollywood sex offender decided to remake because to these people "taking a risk" means paying a child star's parents to keep quiet, not actually trying anything new.  

(Ed Note: Okay Glenn, Hollywood is filled with sexual deviants. We get it. Back to the review)

As for the film itself.... not bad. 

I mean we're talking about slasher movies, the fast food of the horror genre. The bar was already incredibly low so when I see one that's actually tolerable to watch I tend to take note. Is it as good as the original? Well... no, but just look at it. The original was all about a murderer breaking free from a mental institution and killing a bunch of teenagers. This film... is about a murderer breaking free from a mental institution and killing a bunch of teenagers. Cut, print, they nailed it. Congratulations, you managed to keep me awake with a modern slasher movie.

Okay to be fair there's a little more to it than that and it actually sports one or two fairly clever, if not fan-servicey as hell, moments. If we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of the thing then realistically the only characters who really matter in this film are Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. The other characters, like in almost any slasher film, are expendable. But slasher films don't need characters, they need lemmings. They need hollowed out automatons whose only settings are "fuck", "do drugs", "fuck whilst doing drugs" and "walk into that dark room with the creaky door and flickering light that you just heard someone's scream followed by a death rattle and meaty stabbing sounds come from mere moments ago." 

Slasher films are not horror, they're schadenfreude.

So what do we have in terms of characters? Well at the beginning we're introduced to a couple of true crime podcasters who visit Michael in the sanitarium and then engage in a short interview with Laurie, only to then be killed almost immediately. They're generally set up to be prominent characters so one could argue that it's a tribute to Janet Leigh's shock death in "Psycho". But at the same time Psycho was going against narrative norms of the time, here it just seems like the writers (yes, this slasher film required multiple writers) just couldn't think of anything to do with them and so just dropped them. 

In terms of teenage characters, our main one is Allyson, Laurie Strode's granddaughter. Her and her friends are simply what you'd expect, hormonal, dumb and prone to drama. They're not annoying and they don't actively court death with their very presence so I have little to complain about. Again, they benefit from the fact that the slasher film bar is already pretty low, but still nothing as memorable as PJ Soles punctuating her sentences with the word "totally" or the famous "See Anything You Like?" scene, in which I most certainly did. 

Totally.

But as was said, the only character other than Michael who really matters in the long run is Laurie Strode, and she is by far the most interesting thing about this movie. Why? Because in the intervening decades she has gone completely batshit insane.

This is where this film's strength lies. As stated previously Laurie is, for all intents and purposes, a hermit who lives in a woodland fortress that is both surrounded by and filled with bullet hole ridden mannequins. She has a basement hidden by a moving kitchen worktop that's filled with an arsenal that would make Burt Gummer from "Tremors" feel inadequate, she has the reflexes of a Vietnam veteran when someone sneaks up on her and just about any time she's on screen she's doing something insane; like showing up at her granddaughter's graduation dinner babbling about wanting to kill a man, or appearing inside her daughter's house with a revolver just to scare the shit out of her. 

"BOOM! You're dead.... You're fucking dead."

To top it off, she is 100% the manliest character in this entire film. Allyson's boyfriend Cameron certainly can't compete (his name alone has a low T count), you have Oscar who strikes out so hard with Allyson it's amazing her womb didn't shriek like a banshee the moment she met the guy and her dad, in conjunction with being generally useless, has the shittiest, least memorable death in the entire film; proving once more that the institution of the Western Male has become a shadow of its former self and women have had to pick up the mantle. 

"It's time to go Ray."

"Was I useful?"

"No. I'm told you were basically furniture."

Laurie basically lives for the moment that Michael finally escapes, just so that she can kill him. And it's here that the film has some of its cleverer moments in scenes like the one where Laurie's granddaughter is looking out across the road from her classroom window and seeing Laurie standing there waiting, mirroring the same moment in the original Halloween when Laurie spies Michael standing across the street. Something similar happens later when Michael tosses Laurie off a balcony, turning away and then looking back to find that she has disappeared, again perfectly mirroring the same moment at the end of the original. 

Yeah it's obvious and fan-servicey but I dug it. It's clear that they are trying to do a sort of "they aren't so different" thing, which is a bit of a cliché in its own right but again, slasher movie. The fact that this had any kind of symbolism in it, let alone decently done symbolism, is a miracle to rival Britain actually leaving the E.U in March 2019. I'll take it for what it is. 

That doesn't count.

I mean even as fan service it sure as shit beats the "leave the axe" scene in "The Thing" prequel. It actually makes sense for one thing. 

"Don't, leave it."

(Awkward silence)

But I'd say some of this film's flaws other than it's largely uninteresting characters lies also with it's camera work at times. John Carpenter is quite well known for his sparing use of his camera, and here for the most part they pay homage to that style. However it gets somewhat annoying when they make use of shaky cam technique during more violent moments. On top of that you have the unfocused plot since, I think we can all agree, this entire film should have been called "Laurie Strode" and should have been about her generally being a paranoid nutcase waiting for the moment when Michael inevitably breaks out. 

Overall, not bad. I might even watch it again. I know I forgave it a lot for the mere fact that it's a slasher film that didn't bore me shitless but if you've seen as many as I have, you'll understand. Plus getting John Carpenter back to co-write the soundtrack is a stroke that I very much appreciate since Carpenter's soundtracks are part of the reason you watch Carpenter.

So I'd like to say Happy Halloween but I took forever to review this so it isn't Halloween. 

Oh well.

…...

Bye.

BOO! Hahaha... I'll go now.