Marvel Cinematic Universe: Bringing Spidey in from the Cold

If you haven’t heard, Marvel has struck a deal with Sony Pictures to use Spider-Man/Peter Parker for their in-house movies.  From what I can tell, the long and short of it boils down to the following.  1) Spider-Man (rebooted once again) will appear in a Marvel Avengers-verse film; smart money seems to be on Captain America:  Civil War.  2) Sony will continue to put out Spider-Man movies, co-produced by Marvel.  3) Other property-sharing could potentially occur – Spidey in other Marvel movies, of course, and maybe Marvel characters (ie, Cap, Iron Man, and the like) showing up in Sony’s Spider-Man films.

As it stands, I’m of at least two minds about this.  I love Marvel’s cinematic universe to bits, and I’ve been a Spider-Man fan since I was a wee lass.  Undoubtedly, two great tastes that taste great together!  The stuff I’ve heard about the Cap-Spidey interactions in the original Civil War story is what has me most interested in that film, and anyway, that storyline will be better if there’s a superhero around who actually has a secret idea.  More generally, I think it’d be awesome to see Spidey working with other heroes in a live-action franchise.  The Avengers have such an interesting mix of personalities anyway, and bringing in a smart-alecky teenage science nerd could lead to so much fun.  I’m beyond excited about the prospect of having Spider-Man in these movies; he’s one of Marvel’s biggest comic-book characters for a reason.

However, this scenario could also result in some serious Wolverine Syndrome, whereby one popular character starts monopolizing all the screentime in an ensemble franchise.  I mean, I like Wolverine, and Hugh Jackman does a great job with the role, but there are oodles of X-Men, and it’s frustrating to see interesting characters relegated to glorified cameos in order to get yet more Wolverine.  The Avengers franchise is already a bit crowded and becoming more so all the time, and it’d be easy for Spider-Man to edge out his fellow heroes.  I love Spidey, but I also love Thor and Cap and Iron Man.  Plus, when characters like Black Widow and Bruce/Hulk don’t have their own solo movies, they’d be even more susceptible to getting their screentime eaten, and I don’t want to resent Spider-Man for denying me anyone else.  (Already, making room for the co-produced Marvel/Sony Spider-Man solo film has pushed back the releases for the third Thor movie and the debut pictures for Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and The Inhumans.  Black Panther and Captain Marvel in particular are long overdue as it is.  You’ve got a lot of plates spinning, Marvel – be careful.)

And finally, I’m kind of crushed that we’ll be getting yet another Spider-Man reboot.  The Amazing Spider-Man films are enjoyable but middling, and they make a number of missteps, but they absolutely succeed in Andrew Garfield’s Spidey/Peter.  Skeptical as I was that we’d needed a new Spider-Man so soon after the Tobey Maguire trilogy, Garfield just fell effortlessly into the role for me, in a way that Maguire never quite managed.  He, Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy (though she’s already been fridged – stupid canon,) and Dane DeHaan’s Harry Osborn consistently deliver and make those movies worth any implausibilities or blunders, and I hate that this excellent casting is being thrown out with the bathwater of the underperforming Amazing Spider-Man franchise.  How much would I have loved to see Garfield’s Spidey talking genetics with Bruce or being snarky with Tony?  It’s Marvel, so I’ll put faith in whoever they pick to take up the web-slinger mantle, but in my opinion, they’re missing out on a great opportunity.  So long, Amazing Spider-Man – we hardly knew ye.

Favorite Characters: Nikita Mears (Nikita)

Aaaand we might as well round off the set.  There’s a definite possibility of other Nikita-related posts in the future, but this is, I think, the last immediate entry in my must-write-about list.  Oh, Nikita, how much do you rock?  Let me count the ways.  (Usual Nikita spoilers warning applies.)

Like other characters I’ve loved and reviewed from this show, Nikita is a superb mix of fine assets and honest flaws.  She’s an action heroine, a smart cookie, a BAMF surrogate mother, a hard-decision maker, and a lost soul who’s scraped together some restitution for her past sins.  She’s one of those lucky people who need people, although she doesn’t always realize that and sometimes actively fights against it.  Where redemption is concerned, she puts her money where her mouth is, but at the same time, she often dances on the knife edge between light and darkness.  Most of all, she’s a woman who gets things done; she drives the story forward, and any time the plot tries to dictate her movements, she makes it clear she knows how to push back.

Nikita and Alex are both unique in that they’re female protagonists with pretty morally-murky origins.  Nikita came to Division as a drug addict and a cop-killer (committed under the influence, but still,) and before leaving it, she rose to become one of its top assets.  She killed for them spectacularly and without complaint.  When she does break from Division, her chief aim vacillates between justice and revenge.  She no longer turns a blind eye to Division’s crimes, and she seeks to put a stop to it, while simultaneously trying to atone for the unconscionable acts she did at its biddings, but she’s more than just a crusader.  She’s also a devastatingly wronged party looking to twist the knife – Division killed her fiancé, largely to display their power over her, and this lends a disquieting aspect to her mission.  She wants them to feel every particle of her rage and pain over Daniel’s death, and she wants them to pay for it, pound for pound, in flesh.

This dichotomy informs much of Nikita’s story.  She wants to thwart Division’s nefarious plans and save innocents, whether they’re directly in Division’s crosshairs or mere collateral damage.  However, her desire to see Division break and suffer as it falls sometimes gets in the way of her nobler intentions, and these two drives within her wrestle for pride of place among her motivations.  As such, she is never all good or all bad.  In her efforts to disrupt Division’s villainy, she kills agents who were abducted, blackmailed, and conditioned by Division just as she was.  When she has the means to end the life of one of her enemies, her hand is sometimes stayed by mercy, hope for the better angels of their nature, or a simple desire to end the violence.  It’s strong, thoughtful, character-driven storytelling that women get too rarely on television.

One of my favorite things about Nikita is her slow, gradual admission that she needs a family.  At first, she rebuffs anyone who wants to help her in her mission; Alex only makes the cut due to her sheer determination.  And even after Nikita lets in Alex, then Michael, then Birkhoff, and so forth, she’s prone to go off on her own, to insist she doesn’t need back-up in the field, or to spare others from doing what she thinks she has to do alone.  Her loved ones hate it when she does this, and rightly so, because they’re all highly capable adults who can make their own decisions, but really, when she pulls away on this end of the equation, it only expresses how much she needs them.  Whether she’s misguidedly keeping them at arm’s length to protect them from danger or drawing a curtain over her own darkness so they won’t see, it’s her way of saying how much she loves them. 

Buster Keaton: Post-MGM Film Work

I’ve already looked at short films Buster Keaton made after leaving MGM, as well as some of the TV work he did during his resurgence in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  His post-MGM film career – not counting Le roi des Champs-Élysées, which is fantastic – is a much more unfortunately-mixed bag than either of these.  While there’s some good to be found, much of it is nothing-to-write-home-about cameos, projects beneath his talents, and a few outright perplexing film choices.

Of the films I’ve seen, I’ll start with my favorites.  The Villain Still Pursued Her rises to the top because it’s a) funny, b) well-written, and c) relatively good to Buster.  A satire of Victorian morality plays, it’s nowhere near his usual wheelhouse, but he adapts well to the broad, winking silliness.  The film is about an honorable young man whose life and family are nearly ruined when a nefarious schemer tricks him into tasting a drop of alcohol and he’s addicted instantly.  Buster plays the fallen hero’s best friend, contributing to both the plot and the laughs.  I’m not sure what to make of Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight – with its potent mix of humor and sentiment, it’s a bit like a Dickens novel – but Buster’s short appearance as the comedy partner of Chaplin’s down-on-his-luck former entertainer, is easily the funniest part of the film.  Chaplin does most of the obvious clowning around in their onstage routine, but Buster is effortlessly funny in the background.  His job is to haplessly accompany Chaplin on the piano, and he does it hysterically; I could die laughing at the bit where he spins himself off his stool but desperately tries to keep playing.  I also enjoy Buster’s work in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  It’s another brief role, but he’s a lot of fun as a nearly-blind old Roman looking for his children, kidnapped in infancy by pirates.  (Plus, I get a kick out of the toga-and-slap-shoes combination.)

Bizarrely, the ‘60s saw Buster as something of a staple in teen beach movies (with Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, and the like.)  He appeared in four such movies – Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, and Sergeant Dead Head – doing light gag work and hamming it up as much as you can with a stone face.  These movies are just crazy-weird, much more than I would’ve expected.  There’s teenage love, girls in swimsuits, and cheesy musical numbers, of course, but there are also Martians, girls made by witch doctors, and Freaky Friday-style body swaps.  Buster must have enjoyed them to be in so many, but watching them (and him in them) is a surreal experience.  Another odd appearance of his is In the Good Old Summertime, a musical romantic comedy starring Judy Garland and, from what I can tell, an early version of You’ve Got Mail.  Buster is sweet but wasted in the role of a sycophantic salesman in the music shop where the main characters work; however, his hand is evident in a few comic gags, especially the doomed meet-cute in which Van Johnson destroys Garland’s hat.

Not much to say about Buster’s cameos in Sunset Blvd., Around the World in Eighty Days, or It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, because there’s hardly any “there” there.”  It would’ve been fun to see him playing himself in Hollywood Cavalcade, a story about the early film industry, but it doesn’t get Buster’s silent career at all.  The fake movies it shows him acting in are cheap, silly, and unfunny, it paints him as a simple pie-thrower with no comic finesse, and worst of all, it suggests the clever, coordinated Buster is a bungler with two left feet who only stumbles into comic routines accidentally.  Lastly, I don’t know what Li’l Abner is meant to be.  I think it’s based on a comic strip, but that’s no excuse.  While Buster does what he can in the problematic role of an American Indian hired hand, there’s not much to salvage in that one.

Top Five Audio Serials: The Second Doctor

Netflix finally sent me Patrick Troughton’s Lost in Time collection of “orphan episodes” so I could incorporate them into my listening of the Second Doctor lost episode audios.  All in all, I did a lot of “Stupid BBC!” fist-shaking, because there’s a ton a creative storytelling on display here and Patrick Troughton was so fantastically wonderful as Two.  Still, I’m glad I have a means of enjoying these stories at all.  My favorites are as follows.

“The Power of the Daleks” (Series 4, Episodes 8-14) – Sigh… When will people learn that the Daleks are always running the game, even when they’re pretending to be helpful and submissive?  Silly humans.  The real draw here is that it’s Two’s first serial, and we get him in all his Two-ish glory.  I imagine ‘60s viewers experiencing their first regeneration probably felt a lot like Ben and Polly – confused and suspicious at first, but soon won over.  I love Two testing the capabilities of his new body, the recorder (obviously!), and the DIY precursor to the sonic screwdriver.

“The Macra Terror” (Series 4, Episodes 27-30) – Oh my gosh, this story is so insane and creepy and awesome – I love it.  It has overly-cheerful dystopian citizens singing unsettlingly-cheerful jingles, team TARDIS (the Doctor, Ben, Polly, and Jamie) visiting an alien spa that of course turns out to be evil, and hyper-intelligent giant crabs playing the men behind the curtain.  I love it so much!

“The Faceless Ones” (Series 4, Episodes 31-36) – I’m glad to have finally listened to the lost Ben, Polly, and Jamie stories, ‘cause there’s some really good stuff here.  Ben and Polly’s farewell tale finds our heroes investigating a shady touring company – that, naturally, happens to be run by aliens – at Gatwick Airport.  We get the TARDIS materializing on an airstrip, frozen people in packing crates, and Jamie’s famous description of an airplane as a “flying beastie.”

“Fury from the Deep” (Series 5, Episodes 29-34) – Another goodbye story, Victoria’s this time.  Okay, so the resolution to the alien plot is pretty silly, and malevolent alien seaweed as a general rule isn’t going to crack anyone’s Top Baddies list, but there’s a nice base-under-siege vibe and some super-creepy possessed people going around being creepy.  Victoria’s exit feels earned, and her goodbyes to the Doctor and Jamie are lovely.

“The Wheel in Space” (Series 5, Episode 35-40) – I love Two-era Cybermen, and this is a fine story for them, as they manipulate the inhabitants of a space station into bringing them aboard for shifty Cybermen purposes.  Our introduction to Zoe is great – I like that we get some background on her genius status and her position as a glorified human computer.  She and Jamie exchange some delightful snark right off the bat, and the Doctor’s connection with Gemma, the station’s physician, is fantastic.  And I’m really happy that the last episode is one of the two that survive, so we can have the hilarious sight of Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury flailing around on wires for Jamie and Zoe’s “spacewalk.”

Favorite Characters: Alex Udinov (Nikita)

My Nikita love-fest continues with Alex.  Like Birkhoff, she’s a wonderful character even apart from her excellent relationship with Nikita.  While Nikita is a top-notch leading woman and Birkhoff is an entertaining personal favorite, Alex is probably the most intriguing character on the show.  Her intense backstory (chockfull of spoilers, by the way – consider yourself warned) gives us a rich, complicated character just begging to be explored.  This is Alex.

Right away in the pilot, we get tons of revelations about Alex and it only scratches the surface.  We see that, despite Division’s interest in her as a capable murder, she couldn’t actually pull the trigger in the crime she’s been imprisoned for.  Amanda’s sharp, probing assessment of her offers hints of her past.  There’s the drug use, of course, but also her roots; her flawless American accent only indicates how young she was when she left Russia, and Amanda points out that a 13-year-old eastern European girl with no family probably didn’t come to the States of her own free will.  And finally, the pilot ends with the reveal that, as a new recruit, Alex isn’t just our eyes into Division – she’s Nikita’s as well, serving as Nikita’s mole on the inside.

And that’s just the beginning.  More than a trafficked orphan, more than an escaped sex slave, more than a recovering addict, more than a spy infiltrating spies, the show is only getting started with Alex.  In the episodes to follow, it slowly rolls out her history as the daughter of a ruthless Russian industrialist, the presumed-dead heir to an empire built with unclean hands.  We learn of the death of her family, including Division’s involvement in it, and how Nikita, in sparing Alex’s life, inadvertently puts her on the path that leads to her exploitation, abuse, and addiction.  When Nikita reconnects with Alex years later, it’s only to help her and atone for her (Nikita’s) own mistakes in trying to help Alex the first time.  She doesn’t count on Alex’s resolution to avenge her family, her insistence on helping Nikita take down Division.

With such complex ground in which to cultivate a character, it’s no surprise that Alex is as messed-up as she is incredible.  She’s a survivor with an enormous well of courage who takes on her enemies and her demons with the same fierce determination.  More than any member of team Nikita, she’s a champion of the victimized – her past experiences make her especially attuned to the suffering of others, and her guilt at getting out when others haven’t fuels her need to rescue those who’ve been lost through the dark cracks of society.  When it comes to relationships, she’s a mixed bag.  Guarded doesn’t begin to cover her default setting; she’s been hurt, used, and lied to, and she doesn’t easily let people in.  However, once she does connect with someone, it means the world to her, and even though she can’t necessarily articulate that, she needs her few friends and confidantes so badly.  Put these two facets together, and you get someone who desperately needs the strong attachments she tentatively forms, but who has so little trust in the idea of herself as worthy of love or friendship that she’s vulnerable to emotional manipulation.  She’s quick to pull away because it’s so easy to convince her that she’ll be let down or betrayed, or that her loved ones will discard her as soon as they’re no longer in need of her.

Forged in fire, Alex is hands-down the most rewarding character to watch on Nikita.  It’s amazing to see her grow into a young woman wrestling to figure out who she is.  After one life was taken from her and another tried its best to ruin her, she creates a new life for a new Alex, one who doesn’t deny the tragedies in her past but doesn’t let them determine her future.

Relationship Spotlight: Brian Slade & Curt Wild (Velvet Goldmine)

I recently watched this film again for the first time in ages, and I enjoyed it immensely.  It’s definitely one of the more original movies I’ve seen, I love the immersion into a world I know little about, and Citizen Kane-esque narrative device is well-used.  Plus, how can you dislike a film that posits that Oscar Wilde was both an extraterrestrial and the first glam rocker?  Made of win!  Brian and Curt’s relationship certainly isn’t one of the best I’ve seen, but it’s plenty interesting, and I’m so intrigued by the way the film uses it.  Between the colorful characters it involves, the good drama it facilitates, and the sly commentary it makes, it seems ripe for review, so here we are.  (Spoilers for Brian/Curt.)

Since this is both a working partnership and a romance between two flamboyant rock stars, it’s only fitting that Brian first sees Curt onstage.  The two men’s styles (musically and aesthetically speaking) couldn’t be more different.  At the time, Brian is all soft edges, long hair falling in his eyes as he accompanies his Bowie vocals with an acoustic guitar and wears hippie-ish dresses onstage (this is before he adopts his glitter-alien persona.)  Curt, meanwhile, is the epitome of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” – there’s no softness or care in his indifferent fashion sense, the ragged vocals of his heavily distorted music, or his wrecking-ball stage presence.  The performance Brian sees isn’t a concert as much as an experience.  He’s transfixed by Curt’s audacious sensuality, blatant anarchy, and seeming contempt for the adoring audience losing its collective mind.  Brian’s second reaction is professional jealousy, to wish he’d come up with that salacious stage show, but his immediate response is too overwhelmed for coherent thought.  Over the course of a single song, Curt Wild has managed to win everything Brian has to give.

It’s why, when Brian finally meets Curt some time later, with Brian on the rise and Curt on the descent, he’s still gaga.  Curt is literally slumped in a corner and drugged up to his eyeballs when he’s introduced to Brian, but Brian doesn’t have eyes for any of it.  Curt’s unceremonious parting with his record label and unemployable reputation only gives Brian the chance to offer Curt the prospect of a co-written album.  Others who’ve known Brian throughout his life describe his inescapable magnetism, but in Curt, Brian meets his match.  Regardless of the drama, the creative differences, and the recording equipment destroyed in studio tantrums, both men exert a power over one another that’s nearly impossible to break even when they’re apart.

I really like the way the film juxtaposes Brian and Curt’s actual relationship – intense, messy, dysfunctional, electric, and utterly heartfelt – with the publicity-seeking façade put forth by Brian’s agent.  Depending on the day, Jerry has the media treating them like an old Tinseltown power couple or as titillating proof of Brian’s edgy outrageousness.  He arranges to have them “unexpectedly” photographed, with shots blown-up to linger on their socially-taboo kisses.  One of my favorite scenes in the film is the fantasy sequence in which Brian is made up as a ringmaster in the center ring, delivering bon mots a la Wilde to a gallery of slathering reporters.  Curt makes his way clumsily down the aisle, serving drinks and cast in the role of the pop star’s devoted housewife (but, of course, much naughtier – he’s a man, don’t you know,) and Brian snaps off a few cheeky wink-wink suggestions about their liaisons.  When they kiss, though, there’s no pretense or performance.  In that moment, it’s only them, and it’s not until the flashbulbs start going off that the rest of the room comes back into existence.  It’s that imperfect but entirely real connection that none of the media frenzy can touch.