The Vibes are Off

Multiplex Offerings of the First Half of 2023

(Some spoilers ahead for The Flash, if you care)

Last year, the movie that “brought back movies” was a bittersweet tribute to three institutions — the American empire, Tom Cruise, and movies themselves — widely thought to be in a state of decline. This year, the biggest hit is a video game adaptation in which the big draw is seeing stuff from the games on a movie screen. Quality notwithstanding, if these movies represent the zeitgeist, then I’m feeling a little anxious about the state of the art.

The vibes are off in film culture. The box office has rebounded somewhat from the immediate post-lockdown period, and studio executives have been vocally re-affirming their commitment to theatrical exhibition now that streaming profits are looking like a mirage. But the business model that has reigned since at least The Avengers in 2012 — of $300 million movies that connect with a dozen other $300 million movies, designed to make $1 billion each — is showing signs of rot. For every Super Mario Bros. Movie that wins the lottery, there are a few once-reliable brands (Fast & Furious, Transformers, Ant-Man, the DCEU, possibly Indiana Jones in a few weeks) wearing out. As someone who doesn’t want to have to watch a season of WandaVision to understand a new Sam Raimi movie, I welcome any tectonic shifts that could get us out of this rut, although I’m not hugely optimistic that what comes next will be better.

Again, the vibes are off. For example, I’m not typically in the business of knowing the names of studio executives, so I think it’s bad news that I’m so aware of the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO, former reality TV mogul David Zaslav. Someone could tell me that he’s actually no worse than any other studio executive, and possibly they would be right, but I think it’s bad that we have to hear so much about a guy who’s so happy being a bean-counter. This week brought news that Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Paul Thomas Anderson had to organize an emergency phone call with Zaslav to beg him not to gut Turner Classic Movies — one of many assets in his control for which he knows the cost but not the value. Zaslav has also happily worn the black hat during the Writers Guild of America strike, which has underlined the spectral threat of AI in the creative arts. Marvel Studios has already used AI to animate the title sequence of one of its wretched streaming shows, and a thousand bluecheck Twitter accounts are happy to show you how Van Gogh’s paintings can be improved by zooming out. I realize that there are socioeconomic factors behind all this that are more powerful than just Marvel Studios, and also that complaining about Marvel is getting a little tired and hacky, but I will suggest that living a decade-plus dominated by their vision of entertainment — in which superstructure is more important than the building blocks, and in which individual creators are subservient to the brand — has helped foster a landscape in which the human factor is devalued.

There have been other disquieting rumblings, like the collapse of the streaming bubble, and the sweatshop conditions at the handful of visual-effects companies producing ever-uglier CGI. And, it’s a minor thing, but I’ve been unable to shake the sight of a smirking Johnny Depp on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. Regardless where you stand on Depp following his recent trials, I think we can agree that this bloated, heavy-spirited man is not who he was 30 years ago, nor is he even still Captain Jack. Whatever is being advertised on the tin, he’s not doing it. I feel like a functioning film culture would have no further use for him. We should be generating more new stars.

Cinema comes in all shapes and sizes, and there is plenty of good, vital stuff being made (so far this year I’ve especially liked One Fine Morning, Showing Up, and Boston Johnny). But in this space, I’d like to focus on the mainstream fare I’ve been seeing at the good ol’ multiplex — from blockbusters to the sorts of medium-budget programmers that were once a movie theatre’s bread and butter. Some of them are good. Most of them are bad. I don’t have any particular thesis I’m trying to advance beyond the one in the title. So come join me, movie lovers, on a tour through the first half of 2023. To quote a line from my favourite movie of the year so far: “You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts.”

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I’ve been haunted by a scene from Fast X in which Vin Diesel, Jason Momoa, Brie Larson, and Scott Eastwood are together on the Teodoro Moscosco Bridge in Rio de Janeiro, because I would bet my life that they all filmed separately and were grafted together later. When Larson stands atop a car and holds a gun in the background, she just radiates the energy of a background character from an N64 game. It’s a quietly emblematic moment for the franchise, which in its old age has become increasingly ungrounded from physical reality. Movie #5 ended with a spectacular climax in which the boys hauled an enormous bank vault through the streets of Rio, and this one opens with them chasing an enormous bomb through the streets of Rome, and somewhere along the way the fun has dissipated. In retrospect, I think the shark-jump moment was that scene in movie #7 where the car drove from one skyscraper to another. Cars can do anything in this world, so it’s no surprise when they do anything.

The popularity of John Wick: Chapter 4, with its physically grounded and brutally violent action scenes, must be partly a backlash to the bloodless, weightless CGI action of the Marvel and Fast franchises. Back circa the first Rush Hour, Jackie Chan would grumble in interviews about how American directors, studio executives, and audiences wouldn’t accept an action scene that was more than a few minutes, and that so much more time was spent filming his dialogue scenes with Chris Tucker. What a difference 25 years makes. Now western culture has absorbed The Raid and Police Story, and the Ip Man movies are on Netflix and Michelle Yeoh’s action movies are on the Criterion Channel, and even people who aren’t nerds have seen the Drunken Master II factory fight on YouTube. The people who grew up playing violent video games and watching “Dragon Dynasty” DVDs are making movies, and now when a Hollywood movie hires a beloved Hong Kong action star (in this case, Donnie Yen), there’s an assumption that the audience already knows and loves him, and he’ll be given more to do than just be straight-man to Seann William Scott. Also, it seems at some point that the Hollywood studios got together and gave the MPAA the Ned Beatty speech from Network because it’s clearly impossible for anything to get an NC-17 for violence anymore. The people who made this movie are allowed to run wild in a way that John Woo wasn’t back when he came to America.

John Wick: Chapter IV is 169 minutes long, and there’s so much good stuff in it, just in terms of sheer mass, that I really have to give it a pass, despite some misgivings. I feel churlish complaining, but the many long, long scenes of John Wick merking one henchman after another can get a bit deadening. For all the obvious skill and imagination of these scenes, they don’t hit anything like, for example, the hospital finale of Hard-Boiled. That said, the movie looks great, and is full of good actors in little scenes where they get to really pop, like Bill Skarsgard as the hammy villain and Scott Adkins as The Penguin. I finally got fully on its side in the last act, where all the Paris stuff — particularly the Arc de Triomphe fight and the staircase scene that owes a bit to Laurel & Hardy — is pretty nifty.

The biggest hit of the year has been The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and no wonder. Who doesn’t like Mario? I’ve counted him as a friend since I was four years old. When I saw a big billboard for this movie above Yonge-Dundas Square, with Mario jumping like he does in the games, I said to myself: “I love that little guy. I kinda wanna see his movie.” The Super Mario Bros. Movie is for children, who seem to love it. If I were a child, I would probably love it too. As an adult, I periodically found it sorta neat to see the colors and hear the sounds from the video games, but there are limits to this sort of pleasure. The movie figures out how to incorporate side-scrolling and mini-games and Mario Kart races, which is all sort of clever, I guess, although not really that clever, since I could be having more fun playing a game. Chris Pratt brings almost nothing to the role of Mario, which must have been intentional (Mario is a neutral figure who must be loved by everyone). A movie that is interested in being clever would wring some comedy out of asking why plumber would want to save a princess, but this isn’t that kind of movie. Who cares? Children seem to love it.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is about 10 times more entertaining and imaginative. I don’t want to advocate for more Spider-Man movies in the year 2023, but I’ve got to call ‘em like I see ‘em. This is another in the recent spate of multiverse movies, envisioning a reality where infinite universes exist in parallel, each with its own Spider-Man. Tying all these realities together is a sort-of central universe where all the different Spider-Men can hang out (we see characters from many of the Spider-Man entertainments that have accumulated over the decades), as well as a sort-of official Council of Spider-Men who keep everything in harmony. These elite Spider-Men enforce the “canon” — a certain series of events that must happen across all universes, lest everything collapse. But a complication arises: our hero Miles Morales was bitten by the radioactive spider accidentally. He was never destined to become a Spider-Man, and his very existence threatens the natural order. The movie ends on a cliffhanger, but I believe we will learn that “canon” is a fraud, and that Miles has as much right to be a Spider-Man as anyone. Among recent movies that make the concept of “intellectual property” their subject, it seems to me that there are two types: one that positions a corporation’s I.P. as a big sandbox in which the viewer can self-actualize (The Lego Movie), and another in which intellectual property as just that: property. Space Jam: A New Legacy was the definitive example of the latter tendency — a movie about how Warner Bros. can kill Bugs Bunny and then resurrect him whenever it wants. Across the Spider-Verse is in the former category, teaching the lesson that you — yes, you! — can be Spider-Man, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Never is there any suggestion that one of these universes might not need or want a Spider-Man, because, to tweak a sentiment from Fredric Jameson and/or Mark Fisher, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Spider-Man.”

The box office charts these days sometimes feel evenly divided between $200 million mega-productions and niche oddities from upstart distributors — half The Flash, half The Jesus Revolution, with everything in between happening on HBO or Netflix. I’m always panning for gold in the swamp where Termite Art grows, so I was sure to make time for Plane. This Gerard Butler B-movie was sold as nothing more or less than an efficient January time-killer. The main thing I remember about it is that is was reactionary in a way that I didn’t think normal, wide-release movies were allowed to be anymore. Usually in a movie with exoticized foreign bad guys there’s at least one scene where the chief villain gives a “We’re not so different, you and I…” speech and lectures about American imperialism. Not this time. Here, the Filipino rebel warlords are just really bad guys.

Cocaine Bear is one of several medium-budget, high-concept movies that Universal has released this year, but if it represents the sort of “original” studio movie we’re supposed to be grateful for, then cinema might as well just pack it in. If you’ve seen the title, you’ve seen the movie. We follow the bear as it intersects with several uneventful story threads, and comic ultraviolence follows, though it’s hard to locate the joke. Just as awful, Renfield is the latest in a long line of attempts to do something, anything, with Universal’s stable of classic monsters. It feels like it sprang from call for pitches, and was made by people whose only goal was to get a pitch sold. The one-joke premise is that Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) is in a support group to escape his codependent relationship with Dracula. The movie is a mix of insufferable “Uh, so that just happened” humor and purloined John Wick aesthetics, and features Nicolas Cage as Dracula because studios are slow-moving behemoths that have only just realized that there might be money to be made from Cage’s Epic Bacon following. In debased circumstances, Cage heroically maintains his integrity, delivering a charismatic performance that will eventually be condensed into a 15-minute YouTube supercut.

Ben Affleck’s Air dramatizes the story of Nike’s pursuit of Michael Jordan and the eventual creation of the Air Jordan shoe line. The stakes are that if the deal doesn’t happen, Nike might exit the basketball-shoe market and remain dominant only in the running-shoe market. The script is shameless Sorkinsploitation, and suffers from comparison to its most obvious inspiration, The Social Network. In that film, the qualities that made Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire were the same ones that doomed him as a human. Sorkin and David Fincher didn’t ask you to like Zuckerberg or even care about Facebook. Air wants you to think its characters are good and that their cause is righteous. Michael Jordan’s unprecedented deal for a gross percentage of all Air Jordan revenue is positioned as a historic win for workers and an inspiration for the millions of underprivileged children who look up to him. Exactly one line of dialogue is devoted to Nike’s use of sweatshop labour, which is more insulting than zero. The movie ends with some on-screen text noting the billions and billions in passive income its characters still make on the shoes, but also adds, “Phil Knight has donated $2 billion to charity.” I looked into this and it turns out that $100 million of that money has gone to the Harvard Business School.

Like all of its franchise predecessors, Creed III hinges on a highly implausible premise that you’re just going to have to go with – in this case, that two guys pushing 40 are vying for the heavyweight title. The contenders are the retired Adonis Creed and his old friend Damian (Jonathan Majors), a once-promising amateur fighter who took a rap for Adonis and went to prison. Newly freed, he shows up to Adonis’s gym to prick his conscience, and soon gets the kind of Cinderella title shot that Apollo once gave Rocky. But when Damian pulls a Rocky-like upset, we’re meant to feel something very different. We see Damian’s opponent bloodied on the canvas, and the film takes the perspective of Creed, who is now a mogul. His face says, “This is bad for business,” and the movie agrees.

Damian spent his childhood in a group home and his prime years in jail, a victim of institutional racism. He has maintained his skills, but has also become a dirty fighter who uses anger as fuel. Worst of all, he holds his victory party in a bad neighborhood. Written and performed with texture and charisma, Damian is on another level from all the previous Rocky/Creed antagonists, to the point where the character is simply too compelling – certainly moreso than the movie’s ostensible hero. When Adonis comes out of retirement, his goals are to teach Damian a lesson in humility, and to prove to himself that he actually is great – even greater than this guy who rotted away in prison for years. Rocky Balboa’s career trajectory paralleled Sylvester Stallone’s, so now that Michael B. Jordon has taken the reins of the Rocky/Creed franchise, Creed III invites similar autobiographical interpretation. If this movie reflects what’s stirring in the heart of its director, my message to him is: It’s okay. You deserve your success. You deserve to be rich. You are valid.

With Black Adam and the third Ant Man underperforming, and the Shazam sequel outright flopping, the Superhero Industrial Complex is finally showing signs of vulnerability (or at least, is no longer guaranteed a $120 million opening weekend every time). I keep trying to swear off Marvel movies, but because they remain the dominant culture for the time being, I occasionally I find myself in situations where I’m obliged to see them. For what it’s worth, I can feel James Gunn’s presence in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 more than I felt Sam Raimi’s in whichever one of these it was that had his name on it. I liked the weird sets, costumes, and character designs, and in contrast to all those other superhero movies that put their action set-pieces in airport hangars, deserts, and parking lots, there’s usually something interesting to look. In the demerit column is the script, which is bloated and exhausting in the typical Marvel style. So many characters. So many subplots. So many references to Disney+ shows. Apparently I needed to have seen some kind of Guardians of the Galaxy holiday special to understand half of this? The Tim Burton Batman movies that people used to call incoherent are models of narrative precision next to this.

The year’s most conspicuous flop, The Flash has faced some unique marketing challenges. In an apparent strategy to distract from the fact that the lead performer was recently involved in a crime spree, the trailers and TV ads for this movie have placed a confusing emphasis on its supporting characters. “Come see The Flash – don’t worry, it’s about Supergirl and Michael Keaton’s Batman” is a funny way to pitch a Flash movie, especially one that already carries a certain stench of failure and impotence given that Warner honchos David Zaslav and James Gunn have announced plans to wipe the DC slate clean anyway and cancelled the proposed BatKeaton and Supergirl projects in development. It becomes even funnier when you see the movie and discover how the trailers have strip-mined nearly every scrap of these characters’ usable footage. I simply cannot emphasize enough how much more time is spent on the comic stylings of Ezra Miller. In fact, for most of the movie there are two Ezra Millers! There’s a long stretch of this $250 million movie that’s just the Ezras sitting in rooms bickering with each other, and it’s been a while since I’ve felt boredom so acutely.

The idiotic plot sees Barry Allen (Miller) breaking the space-time continuum on a whim, and zapping himself in and out of being a superhero like the sex addicts in A Dirty Shame. The story ineptly tries to give Keaton’s Batman the Luke Skywalker Last Jedi arc crammed into about five minutes before moving on to an hour of numbing CGI spectacle. Say what you will about Man of Steel — I didn’t particularly like it when I saw it on opening weekend ten years ago — but its action set-pieces had a sense of weight, both moral and material. I was one of those people who thought it was too grim and violent, but fuck, I’ll take what Zack Snyder was selling over the meaningless digital gloop of this one. The idea of an older Batman is potentially interesting, but here we get fakey little CGI avatars of Ben Affleck and Keaton – ages 50 and 71 respectively – bouncing around like ping-pong balls.

It climaxes with the Barrys lost in what appears to be the Warner Bros. Serververse from Space Jam: A New Legacy, with ghoulish CGI renderings of Christopher Reeve, George Reeves, and Adam West, who cannot escape this even in death. By the end, Barry has erased nearly every supporting character out of history. The final scene was reportedly shot multiple times under different Warner Bros. regimes, with various configurations of Michael Keaton, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, and Sasha Calle, depending on which direction they decided to take the franchise. In the final version, Supergirl and BatKeaton remain dead, while Barry is condemned to live in the corner of the Serververse where they banished BatClooney. End of movie. End of cinema.