Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer

Have I Seen it Before: Yep.

Did I Like It: It’s the Marvel movies that are the least burdened by setting up Bigger And Better Things™ and instead content to be a movie. This could have been weighed down by the task of providing the missing link between the hopelessness of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and what—at the time of this writing—is the hopeful rebound of Avengers: Endgame (2019. Instead whatever place-setting obligations the film has is largely relegated to the post-credits scenes where they belong.

Thus the film operates as a diverting extended comic chase sequence with plenty of sci-fi weirdness gobbledegook. It is about as perfect an example of counter-programing to the aforementioned Infinity War as one is likely to see.

And still, I wonder how the film and the series would be different if Edgar Wright had gotten to direct the movie he wanted to way back when.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. CGI de-aging is getting good. Scary good. Whereas Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan tried to take the 80s by storm in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), the technology seemed so pointedly stupid that I couldn’t fathom why filmmakers kept coming back to it. Now, I’ve traded in my request for a Batman Beyond film for a hope that Warner Bros. can just get their act together and give as the third Michael Keaton Batman film we all deserved. This film practically has a proof-of-concept for such a dream film in the performance of the hypnotic-at-any-age Michelle Pfeiffer. Hell, Pfeiffer could play 90s era Pfeiffer without CGI de-aging. But that statement may have more to do with my chronic 90s nostalgia madness. 

Oddly enough, it’s some of the scenes where Lang has to interact with a slightly larger world that—while funny—don’t work as brilliantly on the special effects side of things. Not all special effects are perfect, and even fewer advance along the quantum leaps (see what I did there?) of the CGI de-aging process.

Stardust (2007)

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Cast: Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer

Have I Seen it Before: I really was pretty sure that I had, but as I watched the movie on this screening, it became pretty clear that I’ve only ever seen bits of it. My wife loves it, and so I must have, over the course of ten years, seen about half an hour of it.

Did I Like It: The fact that just half an hour feels like a more than complete experience of the movie, should tell you something. Ultimately, its unfair to expect me to like it, but here we go.

Something about the fantasy genre usually bugs me. J.R.R. Tolkien may be a master wordsmith, but the legacy of having to excruciatingly detail your world building in fantasy is often mind-numbingly boring and stops any forward momentum in the story when in the hands of lesser writers.

Now, Neil Gaiman is not a lesser writer. In fact, he is one of the greats. That only makes me expect more from him, and maybe the book from which the film springs is different, but this is entirely too much run-of-the-mill fantasy material for me to recommend it in any way. The first ten minutes are weighed down by a lead balloon of VO narration by the admittedly pleasant Ian McKellen and wandering plot lines that never quite pay off.

The rest of the film is pleasant enough, I suppose, but never quite outgrows the turgid first half an hour. Maybe the big performances of Pfeiffer and De Niro are meant to be fun, but in the context of this film she feels too kitschy for her own good, and it’s been years since De Niro has approached a film role with more focus than I make a left-hand turn. 

Batman Returns (1992)

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Michael “Greatest of All Time” Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Christopher “Yeah, But Imagine If I Had Been Playing The Scarecrow” Walken 

Have I Seen it Before: So, so many times.

Did I Like It: I’ll do you one further. Not only is it a great movie—even if it intentionally plays fast and loose with the core of Batman—it may be damn psychic.

But before I get to the film’s prescience, let’s talk a little bit about the movie in the context of the time it was released. One supposes that Warner Bros. wanted to reassemble as much of the team responsible for Batman (1989) as possible, and were willing to just about anything to get Michael Keaton and Tim Burton to acquiesce where they might have otherwise been disinterested in the prospect of returning to the batcave. 

So Warner Bros. decided to let them do whatever the hell they wanted as long as it featured the Penguin, an action set piece with the Batmobile, and was ready for summer 1992.

They delivered on all of those promises, and went completely nuts with everything else. In a movie essentially meant to entertain children, there sure is a lot of filicide, borderline S&M, and biting of Republican noses*. I can almost see why McDonalds got all bet out of shape in the summer of ’92. Maybe that means I’m getting older, but we’re treated to an unashamedly idiosyncratic movie in place of what could have been a throughly bland summer blockbuster. The Schumacher of it all that was to follow proves pretty conclusively that this movie was a special treat that is unlikely to come 

But in the twenty-five years since the film’s release, it has taken on a new life.

Now, I don’t want to say that there is some modern parable in the story of a woman beset by a crushing degree of sexual violence and harassment, while the rest of society is slowly burning under the caprice of a malevolent homunculi trying to grab all the political power he can before laying siege to everything in sight…

But I could.   

*Watch that movie again and tell me that each and every person supporting The Penguin (DeVito) in his bid for Mayor of Gotham isn’t a Republican, and I’ll be able to tell you haven’t been paying attention. Oswald Means Order, indeed.