SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME - With Great Power Comes Great Franchisability

Director: Jon Watts
Writers: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers

Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Jon Favreau, Jamie Foxx, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Benedict Wong, Tony Revolori, Angourie Rice, J.K. Simmons

Runtime: 148 mins.

2021

The NEW

J. J. Abrams, who has perhaps done more to influence the last decade of blockbuster cinema than anyone this side of Kevin Feige, did a particularly bad job with Star Trek: Into Darkness. That film, like this one, was the sequel of a reboot. That film, like this one, rehashes the preboot series. That film, like this one, treats the rehash like a reveal even though nobody in their right mind expected otherwise.*

*Star Trek: Into Darkness and Spider-Man: No Way Home also both feature a smug yet perturbed Benedict Cumberbatch.

There is a scene in Star Trek: Into Darkness in which the evil villain kills the father of a main character. She is grief-stricken, she weeps. Thirty seconds later, she is speedwalking down a space hallway spitting exposition. There is no evidence that she has just undergone a traumatic event, nor does her father's death impact anything in the remaining runtime. Drama is the technique of showing growth and change and choice through adversity. If something just happens in a movie and everyone forgets, we don't feel any sort of way about it. Actions hunger for consequence.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 10 - Quilting Point

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Silence Lay Steadily

The finale begins with a revelation: the room behind the red door was not unattainable, after all. It is the promise of attainment. Each child spent time in the red room, each within their own personal safe space. The knockings and scrapings and hauntings were not malicious ghosts, but each other experienced through a shroud of perspectival trickery. The red room channels the power of wish fulfillment, and a space to be alone is certainly a common wish in a family of seven!

"A ghost is a wish." Trapped within their former safe space, each living Crain sibling experiences the sordid side of fantasy. The house spoonfeeds them visions of their deepest desires as it feeds. The past creeps in, and it takes a herculean effort to stay present.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 9 - Regression

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Screaming Meemies

Olivia Crain (Carla Gugino) is the only character in The Haunting of Hill House who isn't double-cast. Finally, in the penultimate episode of the series, the weight of that sinks in. Olivia does not have a Then and a Now. In a show rife with literalized metaphors, this storytelling choice is a quiet blow to our psyche.

Current day Olivia is a phantom limb. She is impossible. This is foreshadowed in the opening scene, when she holds her sleeping children close to her even after her arms grow numb. She asks her husband to leave them be, so it comes as something of a shock when he removes Luke undetected from her dead grasp.

Olivia is no dearly departed saint, nor is she entirely responsible for her own collapse. She is caught in an anxiety spiral, and anxiety breeds neurosis. Is there a word for something that you make true by worrying about it? Negative actualization? Prophecy? A psychotic break? More than anything else in the world, Olivia is afraid of, well, the world, and what the world will do when it gets hooks into her children. "I'm scared. That's all there is. I'm nothing else." This is the story of a woman who would squeeze her children to death to stop them from growing. It's not because she means them harm-- her own childhood trauma has instilled in her a powerful need to prevent them from experiencing the pain she has experienced. Pain that has been dulled by her beloved children, who are small enough to fall asleep in the crook of her elbow.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 8 - Death Drive

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Witness Marks

Hugh tells Steve about witness marks-- the evidence that repairs have been done to the inner machinations of a clock. They are "the story of the piece." If you can read the scars, you can understand the entire history of that clock. If you can't, it just looks like damage.

Steve of all people needs to hear this the most, since his defense mechanism is to take everything at face value. His avoidance impulses are titanic. He even got a secret vasectomy! Of course this torpedoed his relationship, how could it have gone any other way? But he prefers a torpedo to vulnerability. He clenches up to avoid passing on his family's sickness. "There's something wrong with our goddamn brains." He wants his blood line to die but he isn't strong enough to admit it.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 7 - Phallocentrism

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Eulogy

The episode after "Two Storms" was inevitably going to scale back. You can't blame a show for peaking at the peak. We return to our 'monster of the week' format with a Dad-centric episode. In a way, we are relieved to fall back into the familiar narrative shape, and the prominence of his perspective last episode makes it feel as if we ought to get to know him better.

Can't they just talk to their Dad? Now Hugh (Timothy Hutton) approaches each of them in such a kind, open way. Stubborn, but gentle. The siblings' disgusted rebuffs of him may read as cruel from the outside, but the show is eager to contextualize. They cannot just talk to their Dad. Because he couldn't just talk to them.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 6 - Scopophilia

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Two Storms

We don't want what we see-- we see what we want. Freud used the term scopophilia to describe the resolution of arbitrary data inputs into the sense of sight. We immediately pick out our crush in a crowded room, we gloss over mess despite looking straight at it, we find Waldo. You could consider it the act of deriving pleasure from what you're looking at, but really it's the opposite. Desire dictates the shape of the world.

Cinematography is gaze incarnate. An unmotivated image will feel empty no matter how nominally beautiful. When "Hill House" was first released, the mediasphere was abuzz with discussion about episode 6. No surprise there-- what Flanagan has achieved here is a technical marvel. Yet the truly impressive thing isn't that he pulled off an episode comprised of jaw-dropping continuous shots, it's that he pulled it off without sacrificing dramatic clarity. To go one step further, this particular story feels like it couldn't have been told any other way.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 5 - Memento Mori

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The Bent Neck Lady

We've seen Luke's side of the story: him and Nelly against the world. Nobody listens, nobody understands, nobody can see what they see. But at least they have each other.

Episode 5 treads similar ground to Episode 4: a spirit-sensitive twin bereft of their support system struggles to keep their head afloat in the onslaught of pain that is life. This could have felt redundant, but Flanagan and co. are wise to orient this episode around a key difference... these twins are not equally yoked. They may have been once, but the house and their history have come between them. Luke's coping mechanism leaves no room for his sister, as we see in a heartbreaking scene of Luke pathetically bullying Nelly into buying him heroin on the way to rehab. This is a betrayal of the highest order. It is also a harder and better scene than Luke's struggles with substance abuse in his own episode. Maybe it hurts more seeing addiction through the eyes of a loved one.

Best of the 2010s: Top Ten

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Art is Revolutionary. It can entertain, explain, obtain, and remain, but the most lasting experiences come with some pain. Stories are breakages. Why break if not to build something better from the wreckage?

Electric arcs follow characters who strive. Often they strive against the flow, as when a preacher does his small part to fight climate catastrophe, or when a boy comes of age in a world that wants to erase him, or when a worker refuses to perpetuate the oppressive cycles they are born into. Art has a Revolutionary quality; this may be its most crucial quality of all.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 4 - Compulsion

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The Twin Thing

At the end of the last piece I mentioned the motif of a tertiary character telling a ghost story every episode. Oral storytelling is the preferred medium of ghost stories, after all. Specters can be inherited, and words are their DNA.

This time the story comes from a military veteran. He recalls gouging his own eyes out on an acid trip because of a charred Iranian girl whose corpse he encountered while overseas. She was all he could see. The eyelessness of the corpse he couldn't forget demanded the eyelessness of the body he cannot escape. Luke is the audience for this story, and the setting is an AA meeting. Why this particular tale from this particular person? The symbolism doubles up when child Luke explains the way he protects his family with little green army men. You have to count them out, a lot, and you have to keep doing it, and you have to believe it will work. Adult Luke is like a disabled veteran, cast off by society, whose PTSD and abandonment issues result in debilitating drug use.

Much like the teller of the ghost story, Luke's problem is that he sees too much. His follow-up problem is that nobody believes him about what he sees. When he was young he was dismissed as an innocent kid. Now that he's older he's dismissed as a cynical junkie. He just can't win.

DON'T LOOK UP: Dope Impact

Director: Adam McKay
Writers: Adam McKay, David Sirota
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande
Runtime: 138 mins.
2021

Dr. Strangelove, Sorry to Bother You, Melancholia: the much better apocalyptic satires that I was reminded of during this film. Do the Right Thing, Catch-22, First Reformed. I found solace in dwelling on the sharpness of these stories, their visual splendor, their human insights, and their gall. Don't Look Up has none of that. This is a Netflix film, which means it is algorithmically gestated to remind us of other, better movies. A thin veneer of style stretched over a boomer facebook screed about how kids are too much in their phones to Get Out the Vote. This is not satire, it is a lecture.

For this is a movie about the Bang at the end of the world, a massive meteor that nobody seems to want to take seriously. Our guides on this journey of misanthropy are PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). Their quest takes us from the observatory, to the White House, to yammering daytime talk shows, to oblivion. As they try to spread the word that the Earth has six months to live, the airwaves crowd them out with news of celebrity gossip and political scandal.

This is the kind of movie that thinks the height of comedy is revealing that the president of the United States (Meryl Streep) has sexted her vagina to somebody. This is the kind of movie that still thinks jokes about diet culture are cutting edge. This is the kind of movie that interrupts televised celebrity drama with a placeholder character who intones that their phone just automatically bought that celebrity's new single, and oh would you look at that, it did it again.