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Tag: movies

  • Captain America: Brave New World (2025)

    Captain America: Brave New World (2025)

    I actually think this might be the worst one of these?

    I say this as someone who has sat through Eternals, to which this movie, bafflingly, decides to be a direct sequel. If the MCU is going to start binning off things like Kang, they’ve really got to suck it up and start retconning entire movies and TV shows that haven’t worked out. They happened in a different universe or whatever. It’s unfair to force me to remember things that suck.

    I suppose the joke is on me though because I still watched this. It feels like the kind of granularity required here is unnecessary, but watching this you understand there’s a difference between “soulless content” where people might have had “ideas”, “concepts”, perhaps even a “mindset” and “goals”–in films as bad as the aforementioned Eternals, or The Marvels–and something that seems to have been cobbled together for no other reason than to exist.

    It’s entirely possible this was intended to continue the kind of “vaguely spy thriller” feel of the earlier Captain America movies, which was pounded into mush by five different writers, countless more rewrites and reshoots, ending with what’s barely a conspiracy with a shifting reason from a hidden mastermind whose reveal leads to the kind of reaction the word “nonplussed” was invented for (unless you just laugh at how stupid he looks. How can you treat Tim Blake Nelson like this?)

    Like: this is a movie where a bunch of characters get Manchurian candidated, attacking when they hear a particular song, and no one says “did no one notice that song playing suddenly before all hell broke loose” in any of the sequences where they’re trying to defend the people who went loco.

    But I’m getting hung up on details in a movie that even visually has no connection to reality. It’s insane a movie looks this bad. The first fight scene doesn’t have the impact a regional filmmaker working in his own backyard could manage, and every dialogue sequence makes it look like they didn’t get access to the Volume so they asked Neil Breen if they could use his setup. They compensate by making the lighting so flat and bright that for all I fucking know they might actually have been some of those places.

    Ah man. I can’t resist pointing out that the climax of the opening scene is that Sam has to fight… a large man. Like just a big guy. I guess he has a beard? It’s so hilariously underwhelming. Later action sequences are no better, completely weightless and because of the complete failure of narrative, absolutely stakes free. Like… we all know you can’t beat up a hulk, so why are we watching a character attempt it for about twenty minutes?

    I suppose the main thing that’s interesting about this film is its politics, which manage to split the difference between “milquetoast” and “completely toxic” somehow. I’d be very interested to know how everything here got shaped into a movie where the first Black Captain America says things like “sure he threw me in prison and let you be experimented on for 30 years against your will, but he’s the president and we should trust him now!” which manages to make Falcon And Winter Soldier (which really copped out by the end) almost look revolutionary.

    It doesn’t help that one of the major character here is based on an explicity Israeli nationalist superhero, played by what appears to be an Israeli child with progeria whose make-a-wish was to be in a Marvel movie (I assume after having their top choices, “I’d like to blow up a hospital full of children sicker than me” and “make the IDM mixes I post online popular” turned down.) I like the way they pointedly say “none of us have to be defined by our past” without saying anything like “it’s doing the right thing now that matters” because, well…

    Really the moment of this movie that stands out the most to me, though, is when Sam stands meekly by while an old black man is roughly thrown to the ground by cops, mustering up the strength to shout something like “wow, be gentle!” which the cops completely ignore. I’m not sure a Marvel hero has ever seemed more pathetic. You feel a deep sense of embarrassment watching it, and, to be honest, throughout the film. You ask yourself, what were these people thinking? And you realise: nothing. these people were thinking… nothing.

    Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.

  • Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)

    Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)

    The first American Masala.

    …

    Alright, to explain that a bit: I find something extremely moving about Indian epic cinema. At least partially it hits because of my own cultural connection to it, but it’s also that Indian cinema doesn’t treat their culture and traditions as rarefied specimen nor their history as sacred. They can gleefully mix melodrama, music, action and more to retell their stories in a way that suits them. The white man loves to hear about how bad he was and how noble the savages were in the face of everything they had done to them–and the kind of white man who sees that kind of film is very sorry now (but “look, it’s in the past now, and it’s not like we can fix what was done…”) but Indian cinema isn’t about that. It doesn’t revise or remix for pity. It says: we get to be the heroes of our stories. This isn’t about you. We’re cool as fuck. We’ve always been cool as fuck. So get reckt. 

    I have to admit that since seeing RRR I wondered if someone might take the baton of empowering historical revisionism and run with it for the Black American experience, and I’m thrilled that Ryan Coogler was able to escape the Marvel mines to create something like this–genre as cultural expression. Coogler explained himself that Sinners came from suffering the loss of his uncle:

    “Coogler admitted that, for most of his life, he thought of the blues as ‘old man music,’ but that changed after his uncle’s death. ‘A mourning ritual for me, in a way [to] ease that feeling of guilt and loss, I would play these blues records,’ said Coogler. ‘But,  I would play them with a newfound perspective, and I would kind of conjure my uncle.’”

    And that’s it! Through our art, our experience of that art, we can conjure our ancestors and pay them tribute. Honour them. Show them love.

    This is–obviously–barely subtext in Sinners. I suspect if you’ve been used to seeing yourself on screen the centrepiece musical sequence of this movie probably seems silly. And to be honest, Sinners is often ridiculous! But I felt nothing but a deep sense of solidarity watching this: a movie that doesn’t say “look at what we suffered” but “look at how we endured. Look at what you can never take away from us…

    …and look at what we’ll do to you if you ever try again.”

    Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.