👋 “We’ve said goodbye before”
This week: WandaVision, Before Sunrise, Star Wars droids, and more.
Hello hello! The latest episode of my podcast, Follow Friday, is out now; it features New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, who has a new book out called Futureproof. We talked about the risk of "becoming a monster" on Twitter, why a Facebook page for Christian moms makes him jealous, and more. Check it out!
Also: I always buy a couple Criterion Blu-Rays when they go on sale (latest haul: Destry Rides Again, The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, and In the Heat of the Night, none of which I’ve seen before). But I guess I must have spent too much money because they just tossed me a free month of Criterion Channel access; may pump the brakes on my superhero movie-binging to watch a bunch of art movies there over the next few weeks.
… And now I’m wondering if my girlfriend asked Criterion to do this. 🤔
“Is it still the Ship of Theseus?”
As always, no spoilers here – just general thoughts.
I really liked the first (only?) season of the new MCU TV show, WandaVision, with some quibbles throughout.
First, the good stuff: As I mentioned after seeing the first two episodes, it’s delightfully weird, riffing over the course of the series on how suburban domestic life has been portrayed in sitcoms over the decades, from The Dick Van Dyke Show to Full House to Modern Family. And it feels so refreshing to be able to spend time with the characters outside of a high-stakes movie plot. Wanda and Vision’s relationship was never properly set up in the MCU films, which made the already-cramped events of Avengers: Infinity War feel unearned. WandaVision fills in the missing pieces, and then some.
Despite a killer premise and a promising start, however, the series is not without its flaws. I winced a little whenever the series slowed down to explain the subtext to viewers who weren’t paying attention — a decision that smelled like studio meddling — and the last two episodes felt more “familiar” in a slightly disappointing way. I’m pessimistic about this, but I really hope Disney decides to be as daring in future series as they were for most of this one.
Overall, the emotional core of the series is so strong — and Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany are such good actors — that WandaVision fundamentally works, and greatly deepens how I feel about these two characters.
WandaVision Season 1 ★★★★ - On Disney+.
Other stuff I’ve watched recently
Before Sunrise ★★★★★ - My new number-one favorite thing I’ve seen so far in 2021, and I can’t believe I’ve never seen it before. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have truly perfect chemistry, and the extremely limited time window in which the movie takes place just clicked with me in a way that Richard Linklater’s more sprawling Boyhood did not. And I already had enough cinematic reasons to visit Austria before watching this movie, but I guess I’ll just have to extend the hypothetical trip. On Max Go and DirecTV.
The Tragedy of Droids in Star Wars ★★★★½ - The YouTube channel this 35-minute video essay comes from, Pop Culture Detective Agency, is one of my favorites, but I missed this video when it first came out last year. Better late than never: It’s a clear, well-argued, nuanced interrogation of the way Star Wars has depicted its droid characters over the past 40-odd years, with frequent invocations of other robot media. And it proposes some seemingly obvious ways the series could have done better. On YouTube.
Top Secret! ★★★★ - A wacky spoof of war and adventure movies from Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, the filmmaking trio that made one of my favorite comedies of all time, Airplane! Top Secret is not as consistently funny as that movie (what is?), but if you like that style of humor, there’s a ton of great gags here, especially in the second half of the movie. Val Kilmer exudes gonna-be-a-star charisma, and I feel like this movie may be underrated because I had barely heard of it before. On Amazon Prime Video and Paramount Plus.
Hoosiers ★★★½ - This solidly entertaining sports movie relies a bit too much on montages, and under-invests in most of its supporting cast. Gene Hackman is excellent as coach Norman Dale, and Dennis Hopper gets a small but meaty role as an alcoholic assistant coach, but I was less invested in the rise of the Hickory Huskers than I was in the head coach’s troubled past and his outsider relationship with the town ... both of which basically evaporate as plot concerns in the movie’s second half. On Showtime, fuboTV, and DirecTV.
Deadpool ★★★½ - A necessary disruption to the superhero movie craze, released at the height of the genre’s fatiguing release schedule, the heralded a wave of (mostly) better and more thoughtful movies. Deadpool is smarter in concept than in execution, though, and the jokes are hit or miss. But the chemistry of the cast and the take-no-prisoners mentality of the script are undeniably refreshing.
X-Men: Apocalypse ★★★ - This movie had a lot of potential and a lot of earned goodwill from past movies with these characters, but the end result is a mixed bag. The effects and action scenes are almost all good, and some of the character moments are genuinely affecting, albeit predictable. However, the cast is way too big, and the movie is too ambitious. The extremely high stakes of the story, rather than reinforcing the characters as was the case in Days of Future Past, are a loud distraction in what should have been a quieter film.
P.S.
You can follow me on Twitter and Letterboxd. The latter is where you’ll also find my (ongoing) list of every movie I’ve seen in 2021, ranked.
My podcast Follow Friday is available for free wherever you listen to podcasts. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
Leave your reactions, questions, and recommendations — and debate the Ship of Theseus — in the comments below.