Venom: Let There Be Carnage (a movie review post)

 

I suppose I forgot how much I enjoyed the first Venom movie. I know I have because I went back an read my review and it expresses a degree of appreciation greater than what I remember, which means I should probably re-watch it. Part of the problem is that I have no great liking for Tom Hardy, except, I guess, as Venom, because I clearly enjoyed him in the first movie, and I did again in this one. He is quite good as Eddie Brock.

Still, I was going to skip this one until it "came out on DVD" (LOL), because I had no one to go see it with, BUT my son (the younger one) found out that the post-movie clip ties into the MCU and, so, he wanted to go see it (even though he has not seen the first one). I'm glad I didn't skip it. The relationship between Eddie and Venom is, for lack of a better way to express it, fun. My son laughed all through the first half of the movie.

My impression, without going back and re-watching the first one, is that this one is better. Don't take my word for it.

I do have one complaint... Look, it's me; what do you expect?

This is not exactly about the movie...
I mean, it is, but...

It's Woody Harrelson, okay? I like Harrelson. A lot. And he is really good in the role. Seriously, he is. BUT! But...Look, Harrelson is at least a decade older than me, and they have him playing a guy who is supposed to be in his 20s. And, hey, they do a great job with the makeup. Most of the time, it works but, every once in a while, during a closeup, you can just see his age. And, then, it doesn't work. It feels kind of weird, actually. I feel like Sony could have found someone of an appropriate age to play the part. It's not like Harrelson is any extra draw for this movie. They're not fooling some Boomer into going to see a Venom movie just because Harrelson is in it.

I guess it's a small complaint. It's just... weird.

Michelle Williams may be better in this one? I don't know. She's so generic to me, I feel like she could be anyone. Don't get me wrong, she's fine in the movie. There's not a lot for her to do to allow her to show any real acting talent. Reid what's-his-name, who I think of as Dan-from-Veep who also plays Dan in this movie, has more room to show off. And I like him pretty well.

Look, the movie is really about Venom and the relationship between Venom and Brock, and it completely succeeds at that. The conflict with Carnage is mostly secondary. Oh, which brings me to the only other issue I have with the movie: it's presented as a given that Carnage would want to kill his "father." Why? There's no reason given. Carnage is born and immediately wants to do away with "daddy." No one bothers to wonder why, not even, or especially, Venom. So maybe this is how it is on the symbiote planet? That seems like it would make it difficult to have any kind of society. But it's never addressed, and that one thing is kind of nagging at me.

That said, it's a fun movie. If you don't mind the plethora of dead bodies because, yeah, Carnage lives up to his name. It's not gory, though, or anything like that, but it's clear that Carnage is leaving a trail... um... that's not a big enough word... a freeway of bodies behind him as he goes. He kills everyone. So... fun? Look, they don't show the bodies, okay. That would be horrific. As it is, it's fun.

And, yes, the post-movie clip does promise, in a sense, a Venom/Spider-Man meeting. Evidently not in the next Spider-Man movie, though. It will be interesting to see what Marvel does with Venom as an import rather than re-creating him.

Oh, I suppose I failed to mention Shriek. She feels mostly like a MacGuffin. Which is kind of weird, I suppose, to say about a character, but she's really insignificant to the actual plot. I guess she needed to be there because she's in the "Maximum Carnage" storyline in the comics and to give Cletus some direction. -shrug- She's fine; she just feels superfluous.

Look, ignore all the negative stuff I said. It makes it sound worse than it is, because it's not worse at all. I actually wish I could sit down and watch both of them back-to-back, right now, but I guess I will have to wait to do that.

Venom (a movie review post)

Where do I even start with this? I mean, a Venom movie without Spider-Man? How do you even? Just the idea sounds insane. And with Tom Hardy... I'm sure I've mentioned how not a fan of Tom Hardy I am.

But it's Venom, so I went to see it. Which is not to say that I'm some huge Venom fan, at least not of what he grew into, but, back when he was first introduced, he was a pretty cool and innovative character.

So let's start there, at the beginning. Which is to say that Venom has a very... problematic... origin.

An origin that I'm not going to get into, right now, because it has nothing to do with the movie. I only bring it up because when Venom was first introduced as a character outside of the comics (back in one of the animated Spider-Man shows from the 90s), they needed a non-Secret Wars origin for the symbiote, so they chose to have it be from outer space. Which you can't really argue, anyway, because when the "suit" was first introduced, no one knew it where it came from other than that it was on the Beyonder's war planet.

All of that to say that the origin in the movie is derived less from the comic books and more from a previously established pop culture origin story that more people are probably familiar with than the number of people who know that actual origin of the alien symbiote. That part of it, I can give a pass.

I'm less comfortable with the part of it where Venom is part of an alien invasion force. That coupled with the human names for the symbiotes (oh, yes, there are more than one!) gave that aspect of the movie a bit of a Transformers feel.

And I miss the spider on Venom. That feels to me as if it is part of the character and leaving it off (because in this origin without the involvement of Spider-Man, why would there be a spider?) takes away somewhat from the character.

Overall, though, they did a fine and decent job with coming up with an origin for the character, and I do hope Venom and Spider-Man end up in a movie together... Well, this Venom and the current Spider-Man under Marvel's control, because I think that would turn out to be... great? Yeah, probably great.

Which brings me to Tom Hardy. He was surprisingly good. They made the Eddie Brock character a bit more... I don't know. In the comics, Brock was a loser. Just a loser. A wannabe. He had a beef with Parker because Parker wouldn't work with him, which was because Brock was a no-talent loser. This iteration of Brock starts him out at the top, not just competent but exceptional, then they bring him down and make him a loser. Washed up. Hardy played both ends of that spectrum believably, so I have to give him kudos for that. And he pulled off playing against a disembodied voice, so I have to give him credit for that, too. Maybe Hardy just needs to quit working with Nolan, because Nolan seems intent on making Hardy into nothing more than a mumbling pair of lips.

Then there's Michelle Williams who is a bowl of boiled noodles. Just the noodles with nothing on them. Not even butter. I suppose there are some people out there who like plain noodles, but they don't taste like much and have no flavor or character. Neither does Williams. She's good at delivering her lines, but there's nothing much to her. She's always the same, and she felt more like a placeholder here than anything else.

It was, however, nice to see Jenny Slate, who was so... normal in this role that I kept questioning whether it was really her.

My final analysis is that this movie is better than every single DC movie that has come out. Hands down. In fact, the DC movies don't even get close. No, it's not as good as the Marvel Studios movies, though I'd say it holds its own against Fox's X-Men films, but the only DC movie that's even on the same playing field is Wonder Woman. So, yeah, I'd go see another Venom movie -- and they teased one in the clip in the credits -- though it's unclear whether it will get a second one since it seems to be under performing a bit. Well, you know, you leave out Spider-Man and it loses a lot of its draw. Tom Hardy isn't a big enough name to get people into the theaters on his own, and most people's only experience with Venom is Spider-Man 3.

All of which is to say that you're not going to be missing out if you don't watch this. Unfortunately. It's a pretty standard superhero kind of movie even if this particular "hero" does have a taste for eating brains. But it doesn't tie into anything else, not at the moment, anyway. I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens with Sony's non-Spider-Man Spiderverse to know if this is a critical movie or not.

The Revenant (a movie review post)

A beautiful and terrible movie.

I could almost leave it at that, but I suppose it does need more explanation.

First, though:
You know, I'm not going to complain about DiCaprio getting best actor for this. I think a role like this is probably pretty tough. And I don't just mean the rigorous conditions. I mean the not being able to use your voice. There's not a lot of talking in this one. DiCaprio did a more than adequate job of carrying the movie with his facial expressions and stumbling around, much better than Redmayne did last year, at any rate. However, I think Bale would have been the better choice for The Big Short. If he'd been nominated for best actor, that is. What's up with that?

And I don't particularly like Christian Bale.

The movie is beautiful. Even in its terror, it's beautiful. The cinematography is, in a word, amazing.

But, beyond that, the movie doesn't offer much. In that way, you can take "terrible" to mean whatever you want it to. What I can say is that, at the end of the movie, I wasn't left feeling anything. Maybe that's the way Inarritu intended it, but I don't want to watch a movie and then feel nothing. My actual thought when the screen went from DiCaprio's face to the credits was, "Oh... That's it?" There was no joy, no sadness, no nothing. No catharsis. There wasn't even anything to think about as there was at the end of Birdman. It was just over.

Now, this next thing is my own bias:
People talk about this movie as if it is just a revenge tale, but that's not true. It's not even mostly true. Mostly, it's a survival tale. I tend to not like fictional survival tales. They're just... too outrageous. Once you've decided your hero is going to survive, you can do anything you want to the character and, guess what, he survives! I have a hard time with Hugh Glass surviving the trials he went through. A real Hugh Glass, that is. Still, I was willing to go along with it for a while, even the trips in the freezing water, but [SPOILER ALERT!] going over the cliff on the horse was just too much for me. Okay, so was putting gun powder in his wound and igniting it. Clever but too much.

See, if you give me something like 127 Hours, I'm good. That really happened. The things Aron Ralston did to survive were amazing, but it's amazing because it's real. Nothing Hugh Glass did to survive or that he survived was amazing, because it was all a fiction. There's nothing triumphant and nothing to cheer. Then, there's the ending...

Also, there's Tom Hardy. I have nothing good to say about Hardy. Maybe if he takes a role that's more than guttural mumbling.

Mad Max: Fury Road (a movie review post)

I think I've decided I don't like Tom Hardy. He seems to like wearing things on his face, which is fine, but it's not acting. Plus, he doesn't seem to ever speak clearly. Or coherently. Basically, he speaks with this guttural mumble which is, more than anything else, completely indecipherable. Fortunately, Max is not the protagonist of this movie, because, if he had been, it would have made even less sense than it did.

But that thing about Max not being the protagonist is an issue. I mean, as a Mad Max movie, we ought to care about the character and his goals, but he doesn't seem to have any goals other than, eventually, the co-opted goal of helping the actual protagonist, Imperator Furiosa.

A lot of people have been going on about Charlize Theron in the role of Furiosa, and, I have to say, I just don't get it. I mean, she was fine, but she wasn't any kind of amazing nor did she do with the part anything that a dozen other actresses couldn't have done.

However, Nicholas Hoult, in a part that, although important, seems a bit of a throwaway was amazing. Of the characters in the movie, Nux was the only one I came to care about enough that I felt compelled to root for. Nicholas Hoult is an actor I am with whom I am increasingly impressed, so he was a nice discovery in this movie (because I had not paid attention enough to know that he was in it before I saw it).

The other surprise was Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as The Splendid Angharad. She's all the more impressive in her role for the simple fact of being impressive in the first place. It's obvious that she, along with the rest of the breeder wives, were thrown in as eye candy, and the other four do nothing more than fulfill that expectation, but Huntington-Whiteley brought a certain amount of attitude to the role that made her stand out. I didn't think much of her after her stint in Transformers, but maybe she's someone to keep an eye on. Considering she's only done two movies so far, I'll guess we'll have to wait and see.

Now, it seems almost wrong to talk about the story, because there's almost no story. There might even be too much story. The story amounts to, "Oh, we need to escape. Oh, we need to go back and take over." It is only there to give a semi-plausible reason to have the various cars chase each other through the desert and have mayhem. That's fine, as far as it goes. Likewise, it seems wrong to point out any stupidity within said think fabric of story, but there was one thing that really bugged me, bugged me through the whole movie: the whole blood transfusion thing. The thing in and of itself was fine, if it had been done correctly. The idea is that blood is being drained from Max into Nux, so the needle in Max should be in an artery going into a vein in Nux. [Also, since there was no way to get blood back to Max, he should have been dead within, oh, minutes, but, not only does he not get weak from blood loss, he seems to be perfectly fine throughout the whole procedure.] At the point when the line is finally cut, blood should have gone spraying everywhere but, not only does that not happen, it doesn't seem that there is any blood leakage at all.

Oh, yeah, the whole thing with the breeder wives down the whole "car wash" scene (without a car) where they're spraying water all over themselves also bothered me. Um, water is the most precious thing in their world, and they're spraying it all over the desert so they can look all sexy in their white bride rags. So, yeah, I get the director was going for the visual stimulus, but it was dumb.

The movie, really, is about the visuals. I think, if he could, he would just have the cars chasing each other and doing their thing without any story at all, and, honestly, that might be better. That's what people who want to see it want to see. It's like... car porn. The story is only there to give an excuse for the rest of it to happen.

And I wish I had liked it. It's not that I didn't like it, but I didn't like it. On the one hand, there was the the vehicle that I'm going to call the "band mobile." The rear was a huge set up of drums, and there was a blind(?) guitar player hanging from the front. Visually, it was cool. The dude playing the guitar in the midst of all of that was really cool. As long as I didn't think about it; if/when I did, my brain would say, "That's dumb," and I'd have to tell it to shut up.

All of that to say:
Visually, it's an amazing movie. If you want to go and just watch the action, this is a great movie to do that with. You have to really go in without any expectations other than car chases and explosions, though. Don't listen to anyone who says anything about the amazing story or how feminist this movie is. Just because it has a powerful female lead does not mean the movie is "feminist," and it certainly doesn't have any kind of story that is empowering to women. Because, well, that would imply that it had a story. Beyond, you know, the very basic one I already explained: "Run away!" Except, in this case, "Drive away!"

Mostly, the movie left wondering if I missed something in the other Mad Max movies or if it's just been too long since I've seen them, because it's been more than 20 years since I've seen them. My new plan is to re-watch the other ones and see if they give me some kind of deeper appreciation for this one, but... well, yeah, I don't think that's going to happen.