Marvel have done a good job with Tom Holland. I guess given the age of most of the actors they work with (and the fact that many have been in the stable for approaching ten years) their characters tend to feel like uncles, even when they’re not sharing scenes with kids.
The moment that Captain Marvel starts working is when Brie Larson’s hero crashes in through the roof of a Blockbuster Video. If you thought that nerd culture’s recent spate of eighties nostalgia was overbearing, just you wait. The nineties are back baby. Her first reaction to it is to blow the head off a True Lies standee. The disappearance of the video store was a great blow to the growing democratisation of culture; our local one was family owned, lived in a tiny place between the One-Stop and a chippy. They had as complete a collection of the studio Ghibli films as I think it was possible to have, the proprietor was the guy who introduced us to them.
I’ll admit, the first shot of Glass didn’t fill me with much confidence. A masculine bodied person, wearing a dress, stalks into a room to intimidate a new batch of abducted young girls. It spoke to everything that I hated about Split: its stigmatisation of non-normative bodies, the casual nature of its depictions of abuse. Our first glimpse into the lives of our self-identifying heroes and villains disappointingly confirms that not much has changed.
I am in awe of Brad Bird. I mean he’s made mistakes: Tomorrowland, his support of Colin Trevorrow – but anybody who can make a film like this is on some sort of next level shit. The film picks up where the pervious one left off. The Parr family, under their guise as The Incredibles, defeated the robot terrorising the city. Pro superhero sentiment is on the rise again, but their vocation is still illegal and when they choose to go after the Underminer the law forces them back underground.
One of the best bits in The Hitman’s Bodyguard comes when the script tries to pull off one of the worst plot reveals of all time. Like, someone admits to being the reason behind someone else’s downfall and I’m not sure why I’m trying to keep it secret. It’s the most obvious twist of all time. I’m talking around it here; but when a film be about a bodyguard who loses his business in the opening minutes when a client is assassinated; and an assassin. It ain’t hard to put two and two together.
Most of the time I’ve spent ‘writing’ this review has actually been spent researching James Baldwin. Reading extracts from his essays, novels, plays; watching him appear on the talk shows that the film extracts from; that famous 1965 Cambridge debate with William F. Buckley Jr. to whom the film rightly does not give a voice.… Continue reading I Am Not Your Negro: A tonic for the blind
