Author: S. Brady Calhoun

James Cameron went away for more than a decade to turn his U.S. Military versus eco-warrior aliens movie into a five-picture franchise.

If I thought about this at all, it was only on a family vacation to Disney World and a visit to Avatar land inside Animal Kingdom. I did sometimes wonder why the guy who proved himself to be one of the most successful filmmakers of all time chose to dedicate decades to this particular story.

As the film grew closer my Movie Friend (MF) kept telling me this was going to be one of the best movies of the year.

I remained unconvinced and unmoved.

“He’s cooking,” MF said.

MF says a lot of things. He falls in and out of love with a lot of movies. He saw about 120 new releases this year and he calls it a slow year.

But, one thing MF has is decent instincts and good taste. So even though I wasn’t planning on seeing Avatar 2 in the theater I broke down and went to an IMAX 3D showing with MF by my side.

About 15 minutes into it, after the first battle and when Jake Sulley is trying to find a way to discipline his kids but sounds too much like a battle commander and not enough like a father I leaned over to MF and conceded.

“Dang it, you were right,” I said.

If we had bet on it I would have owed him money.

Avatar is not Star Wars because few things in life can be among the very best that cinema and sci-fi have to offer. But Avatar: The Way of Water is close to Empire Strikes Back. It’s a movie that is so good that it retroactively improves on its predecessor and shows that Cameron’s bet on the Na’vi makes a lot of sense.

Having done the hard work of setting up the science fiction world, the stakes and most of the major players in the first one, Cameron is free to spend three hours telling a story without a ton of exposition. The movie no longer needs to explain the Na’vi just as a new Star Wars thing no longer needs to explain a Jedi.

As the movie opens the aliens of Pandora have lived in harmony for about 20 years without those pesky humans and Jake Sulley and his wife Neytiri have two sons, a daughter, an adopted daughter, and a human child that was left behind that they have also adopted.

But the humans (sky-people among Pandora) return and the forest Na’vi are once again immediately outgunned and outmanned.

Cameron and his team give everyone in this large cast reasonable issues, personalities, and motivations. He also brings back his Marine villain from the first movie in a unique way and gives the characters an excuse to discover a new portion of Pandora with a tribe that has a connection to the ocean in the same way the first movie was set in a forest.

The running time was a very serious discussion before the flick was released but any experienced moviegoer knows that a bad movie is always too long and the running time on a great movie will be of no consequence. Avatar: The Way of Water finds the right balance between family drama and action, it never drags and it wraps up all of its storylines in mostly satisfying ways.

It’s very much the second part of a multipart story though. In the same way that Empire ended on a cliffhanger, The Way of Water doesn’t so much end as come to a comfortable stopping point in the story.

Once again, Avatar’s evil marine commander gets all the best lines.

A marine can’t be defeated. You can kill us, but we‘ll just regroup in hell.

Miles Quaritch

But dialogue has never been Cameron’s strong suit and just like in the first movie what’s important to Cameron and his team is the visuals, the unique aliens, and the broad nature lovers vs. machines story.

This is one of the best movies of the year and it justifies the time, hassle, and expense of seeing a movie in a theater. If you haven’t caught it yet and you enjoy sci-fi spectacle on a big screen then I can’t recommend it enough.

At one point in the flick, one of the characters hangs out with the Na’vi version of a sentient whale. They have become friends and under a glorious sun, they float in the water together in what most cinema lovers would call a perfect shot.

At that point, MF leaned over to me and smiled.

“Movies man,” he said.

With James Cameron’s Avatar 2: The Way of Water waiting in the wings I decided to watch the first Avatar again. 

I saw it for the first time in 2009, in IMAX 3D (did we have IMAX 3D back then? I saw it in 3D for sure.) on opening weekend. I enjoyed it then, for what it was, and then I never watched it again. 

But for 13 years, we have all lived in a world where Cameron was working in secret, if not silence, to make four sequels to Avatar. Avatar land opened at Animal Kingdon in Disney World in less time than it has taken to make the first sequel. 

And the question — for me at least — is what did Cameron see in this story he was telling, that enraptured him so much, that he’s going to spend a good part of his working life putting together a franchise? 

Avatar is a broad and familiar story set in a science fiction universe. Jake Sully, a space marine, is in a wheelchair after being injured in an unseen conflict. He travels to Pandora and is given the ability to get into a virtual reality pod and mind-meld with a cloned suit that will make him one of the Na’vi. The Na’Vi are tall, blue, catlike creatures who can connect with animals on their homeworld via a genetic mutation in their tails. 

Sully is supposed to work with a group of scientists to connect with the Na’vi and convince them to move away from their sacred tree so that the Space Marines and an evil corporation can mine for (I kid you not) unobtanium. 

All of this plays out and looks like the opening of a video game. If you’ve played say Halo, and gone through the opening encounters where the game teaches you how the controllers work, then you have watched the opening of Avatar. 

The rest of the movie hits every story beat exactly as you expect. Will Jake Sully fall in love with a Na’vi woman? Will this woman be the daughter of the chief? Will he betray the evil corporation and lead the Na’vi into battle against the bad humans? Will everything mostly work out in the end?

I’m beating up on it more than I should. 

It’s visually stunning. Everything Stephen Lang — as the evil head of the evil space marines — does proves he’s an incredible badass villain. He also gets all the best lines in both movies. 

“If there is a Hell, you might wanna go there for some R & R after a tour on Pandora. Out there beyond that fence every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes.”

Col. Quaritch

And a story like this demands that it be broad and simple and be understood in multiple languages for those sweet foreign markets. 

I never doubted how the first Avatar was going to end. Just as I never doubted that Thanos would ultimately be defeated in Endgame. 

What I did doubt was that Cameron could take what he gave us in Avatar and then make a compelling sequel. And, having seen that sequel, wooo boy was I wrong.    

A master can take anything and make a masterpiece. 

Picasso and his canvas, Willie Nelson in a studio or on a stage, Mamet preparing a play or Stephen King with a new story in mind. 

Or Steven Spielberg making a movie. 

After The Fabelman’s came out I looked through the Spielberg catalogue and wondered what I had missed. Most of what he’s done, good, bad or indifferent, I saw when it came out or shortly after.

And some of it I wasn’t alive for but I’m mostly caught up.

But War Horse looked hoky and so I let it pass by. I caught it this weekend as I moved through the list. 

The first thing that struck me as it the end credits rolled was how much of this movie felt like classic Hollywood. That’s usually Speilberg’s thing but this was especially old school.

I’m not sure any other filmmaker has the taste or the options that are available to Spielberg. At this stage of his career he can do pretty much whatever he wants. And it seems like what he wants to is to shoot for classics. 

If you had told me War Horse was a lost movie from the 1950s the only thing that might have give me pause would be the digital color palette. 

Spielberg, or at least the Spielberg of the last 20 years or so, tends to make movies that live in the legacy of the classic, classy filmmakers of his youth. 

After War Horse he made Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, The BFG, The Post, Ready Player One, and a remake of West Side Story.

I think Lincoln is one of the great movies in American Cinema and I think the rest are all good to great. (I’ve not seen the BFG or Ready Player One). 

But I also think that Spielberg has clearly made a choice to make movies for everyone. 

This is maybe the only war movie made in the last 40 years in which there is absolutely no blood. 

That doesn’t mean it’s not good. They made classics for decades under the Hays Code. 

But even as the director and the camera found another unique way to hide the violence I couldn’t help but be struck by just how good Spielberg is at this. 

There is a shot where he uses a windmill to shield us from a shooting. And another where the audience learns the fate of a group of rides just by seeing the horses ride past a group a machine guns. The horse run free, their riders dead in the field behind them. 

War Horse is, essentially, a series of vignettes about the war. We see life in the shire (kidding — it’s a farming community in England) before the war. 

Then the movie moves through the lives of England’s mounted cavalry, German soldiers, a French farm and finally into the the horrors of trench warfare. 

At several points I was amused by what can be done when you have, essentially, unlimited funds and massive manpower. 

You can, essentially, send an army into No Man’s Land and have everything look absolutely realistic. 

I don’t want you to think that I was wrong when I assumed this was a hoky movie 11 years ago and ignored it. 

It is a hoky movie. And a hoky horse movie at that. 

But Spielberg is still a master and watching this — seeing the warm heart and directors expertise at work — I couldn’t help but be swept along. 

With fifty years of filmmaking behind him War Horse may not even make it into Spielberg’s top 10. 

But it’s a fine work done by a master. It’s got his signature on it from the opening shot till the curtains come down.

You ever listen to AC/DC or say ZZ Top? In both cases you have rock bands that play these simple big riffs and never try to over complicate the boogie.

And it seems so easy. Except that any musician would tell you that it is incredibly hard. It takes an amazing amount of work and practice to make something that looks so simple. 

Prey is an AC/DC song hitting one or two riffs and playing them beautifully in a lean running time. 

Here is action movie with a smart dog and a plucky heroine. 

It lives and dies by it’s premise that a predator is stalking in the same area where a Comanche tribe is hunting for food. 

A young woman is a smart hunter who wants to prove herself to her older brother and the men in her tribe. 

These two hunters are on a direct course with one another. 

Anddddd that’s it.

No seriously, save for a small second act complication (that I don’t want to spoil) that is absolutely it. 

Love it. Give it all the flowers.

An action movie that knows what it is, doesn’t do more than it needs to and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. 

Do you know how hard that is? 

It has a few small connections to the other movies but nothing that you need to know. In fact, this could be someone’s first predator movie and that would be absolutely fine. 

The actual first one is a classic along with Conan and The Terminator is among the very best that Arnold ever did.

And I have a soft spot for the second one cause Danny Glover is awesome and it has an Alien skull at the end of it.

One of the characters in Prey says one of the classic lines from the original. And when it was said it was one of those, for me, ohhh yeahhh moments that great action movies can nail and bad action movies can ruin.

Anyway, this movie gives you a ton of Predator fun and never slows down. 

This is a good hunt indeed.

You know how old people talk about how tough it was being a child when they were young? 

Not the thing about walking to school but about how tough and violent and poor everybody was. To be a child back then (whenever back then was) meant dealing with parents who would beat you for nothing and bullies who were out for blood. 

The Black Phone transports us to idyllic 1978 (the year I was born) and examines, for a moment, life among a group of schoolchildren. 

The movie looks great or maybe not great but it’s a look that yells “this is the 1970s
at you. It’s the same type of lens trickery that happens when Americans in the movies travel to Mexico and suddenly everything is orange. Which is to say that the director made a choice to make the entire movie have a color and texture that is different from almost everything else. 

So I can’t say it looks great because it’s not supposed to look great. But at least it isn’t filmed that flat Netflix/Marvel movie house style. 

Finney and Gwen are siblings but are close and protective of one another. Finney won’t stand up for himself against the school bullies (plot point) or stop his father from physically abusing his sister (plot point). 

Later he is captured by a deranged serial killer and starts getting calls on a phone in a basement that should not work. 

Ethan Hawke is a fine serial killer and another character, played by The Wire alum James Ransone, does an awful lot with very little.

Pity the plot calls for Hawke to wear a mask in nearly all of his scenes. There’s a reason why superhero movies demand that they keep taking off or losing their masks. We want to see these guys and gals emote. 

The movie features two horrific scenes where kids fight with one another. On one hand, I want to suggest that they are so violent that someone should have died. Because in real life if you get punched in the face that much you are gonna have serious problems. But on the other hand, I once watched a girl bash another girl’s head into a brick wall when I was in high school and I’m pretty sure everybody was mostly fine when it was over. 

There is a moment where two fighters are both injured and both slump down, out of the fray and next to one another on a chain link fence. I thought that moment, of two kids who should hate each other but are done fighting and just take a breather next to each other, was both interesting and poignant. 

But, this one never completely soared for me. Its story is very slight and the movie avoids the most gruesome aspects of a serial killer story. 

Of course, if it had shown those things there is a good chance I would have turned it off. Sometimes you can’t win no matter what road you take. 

Two other things stood out. Finney’s sister, Gwen, talks to Jesus several times during the movie. And man, I felt those discussions. 

Finally, the movie has a structure to it that leads to a satisfying conclusion. You will probably guess what’s going on before the end. It helps if you have already seen Signs. 

The plot work made me smile though and I was satisfied that everyone had thought the whole story through.

This movie made me spend a lot of time thinking about Wes Anderson’s childhood. 

Can you picture him? Sitting in his room surrounded by copies of The New Yorker and independent comics and smoking clove cigarettes. 

His only friend, a weird kid like him that he kind of hates. His first love – an older gal pal of his mom who didn’t quite break his heart. 

Can you imagine the dioramas? Do you wonder how many shows – both puppet and shadow – that his parents must have sat through? I bet their critiques were brutal. 

I think that boy, who was the definition of too smart for his own good, must have been terribly lonely. 

By the way, I have no idea what Anderson’s childhood was like. He could have been a star athlete who was voted class president. But his movies suggest something else. 

Anderson’s adulthood begins with the movies Bottle Rocket and then Rushmore. Then we get The Royal Tenenbaums which becomes a roaring success. It’s such a success that Wes Anderson continues to make what can only be described as Wes Anderson movies. 

Like the Coen Brothers, his movies are so distinctive they are essentially their own genre. 

What’s a Wes Anderson movie? Sharp characters full of dry wit. Emotional people and emotionally damaged people almost never show any emotion. Beautiful and perfect sets and costumes.

Twee. 

I think he’s gotten better as he’s gone along and I think The French Dispatch may be his best work. 

It’s set in France in a city called Ennui. That was a bit too twee for me but I’ll allow it.

It’s about journalists who discover life itself and then report it out to the world. 

It’s about Bill Murray who plays the editor of the New Yorker style magazine and the father figure to a group of brilliant writers. 

He gets to say things like, “Don’t cry in my office!”

And 

“Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”

It may be Anderson’s funniest movie. It’s certainly his most star-packed movie.

Everywhere you look another famous actor shows up to do something amazing and then gets off stage. I’m pretty sure there is one Oscar winner in it who has no lines. 

Benicio Del Toro is in a lot of it but he mostly just growls. Tilda Swinton and Frances McDormand both get fun, meaty roles. And roles that you could only imagine being played by these two actresses. 

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Wright plays a fictional version of James Baldwin and steals every scene he gets. 

One warning. The movie spends a decent amount of time in a painter’s studio with a nude model. Those of you with kids or parents should be aware. 

IMDB tells me this is Anderson’s ninth film with Murray, his eighth with Owen Wilson, and his seventh with Jason Schwartzman.

Which seems to make it clear to me that while the boy may have been lonely the adult found his family.

The internet is a funny place. 

People took this movie and pretended it was the height of cinema as a joke on pretentious film lovers. And then the joke went so far that Sony actually thought they had something and rereleased it only for it to bomb twice. 

“It’s Morbin Time!” indeed. 

The short version is that Dr. Michael Morbius has a rare blood disease and finds a cure for it. And because this is a superhero movie his cure mixes his DNA with a vampire bat and turns him into a kind of vampire. 

He becomes Morbius The Living Vampire! 

And in Spider-man comic books he’s a fun, tragic, villian. His origin is essentially the same as The Lizard and a host of other Spider-Man villains who are mostly a collection of smart guys who turn into monsters because their science failed them. 

Spidey is usually friendly with these guys when they aren’t corrupted which adds to the trademark Stan Lee drama when he has to fight them.

“How can I stop this man, my mentor/friend/boss’s son?”

“But I must, I will, for if I fail hundreds/thousands/millions will die!”

Anyway, that’s what it looks like on the page. And then there’s usually a great splash page from Smiling Steve Ditko or Jazzy John Romita. 

Sony’s decision to create a Spidey cinematic universe means we get movies like this and Venom for villain characters who should not be getting movies on their own. 

That said, this isn’t a terrible movie. It’s for sure not a great movie. But it mostly goes through the motions and does a decent job in the action scenes.

I enjoyed Morbius figuring out how to fly by jumping in front of a subway train. And the fight scenes were mostly fine. 

Matt Smith and Jared Leto are having fun as the hero and villain of the piece. Jared Harris is wasted in a role that gives him almost nothing to do and he looks like he wants to be somewhere else.

It’s all perfectly average superhero nonsense. 

The two end credit scenes at the end are hot garbage and obvious corporate mandates that make no sense and hurt everything that came before. I love superhero movies, I love the connecting end credit scenes that the MCU started. But I was honestly offended by these scenes. 

If Sony wants to bank on its intellectual property this bad why don’t they just do Miles Morales or Spider-Gwen? Or all the other Spider heroes? Who thought a series of villian movies was a good idea? 

On second thought, if spider heroes are all gonna be done with this level of quality maybe I should shut up. I don’t want Sony getting any ideas.

It’s 1996 and I’m 17 and I was flirting with the girl who sells tickets at the movie theater. I was working concessions and hoping that I was going to be promoted someday to that sweet usher job. It’s dead as disco and so we did not have much to do but chat.

Finally, a customer stepped up to the window. He was large, wore a skull cap and I’m fairly certain I had seen him around.

“What’s this duck movie about?” he asked.

She tried to explain it but it was not easy. It’s a family film she says, and there are ducks.

Suddenly the light clicked on.

“Oh, she has to raise the ducks and then get them south?” he said.

We both nodded our heads and, knowing what he was in for, the patron happily bought a ticket for Fly Away Home.

Even though I could go see movies for free I somehow missed Fly Away Home. I’m sure it’s out there somewhere amongst the Dark Highways of cinema and the internet. And maybe you, like that movie patron from decades in my past, will be comforted in knowing exactly what kind of movie you will get if you choose to spend time with it.

I’m fairly certain that no one has ever used this analogy before but have you ever noticed that Marvel movies are like amusement park rides?

You get on the ride, it takes you for a fun, safe thrill, and then you get off. Most of them are the comfort food of cinema. I don’t know about you, but I think that is wonderful. After all, I know exactly what I want out of a certain type of cinema.

In a western, I want easy-to-define good guys shooting at despicable villains. In a rom-com, I want exactly what the name implies, romance and comedy. Those should give me a few laughs, a few tears, and usually a happy couple at the end. Horror films should scare. Pixar movies, and most Disney cartoons, begin with tragedy and then show us how to live well and find our place in the face of the heartrending change that is growing to adulthood. Gangster pictures had better deliver urban violence and a critique of capitalism.

With a Marvel movie, I know what I am going to get.

Superhero cinema usually delivers quippy action scenes, CGI spectacle, and earnest questions about what powerful people owe to their friends, their families, and the world at large.

Some of us love this stuff. Some people loudly hate it. I once knew a girl who absolutely would not watch anything with a phaser, a spaceship, or an alien in it. I think she’s missing out, but everyone can decide for themselves which entertainments they want.

Some people like Space Mountain and some people like The Hall of Presidents. I haven’t watched a reality show since the first season of Survivor but I have seen every version of Star Trek. I am happy with my life choices.

Marvel’s Phase 4 gave us a lyrical portrait of humanity in The Eternals, a lawyer comedy show in She-Hulk, a glimpse into the life of a Muslim teenager in Ms. Marvel, and an examination of fictional grief in WandaVision and real-world grief through a fictional lens in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Before we get even deeper into the weeds let’s briefly talk about what has come before and why it became the most financially successful cinema in the history of cinema.

After selling the rights to its most successful properties to others, Marvel, then an independent comic book company, decided to start its own movie studio. They began in 2008 with Iron Man, a character that had not been translated into film or television before, and leaned on producer Kevin Feige who has a deep love of the source material. The movie ended with an end-credit tease for The Avengers.

Iron Man was a hit and audiences mostly enjoyed four other Marvel films, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger.

Just as Iron Man ended with a tease for The Avengers, The Avengers ended with a first look at Thanos and a bigger story, The Infinity Saga.

This story would more or less be part of every movie going forward until the end of Phase 3 and Endgame. And while the movies did have their own adventures and concerns there was, for the most part, a tight, easy-to-follow, straight line in every film from point A to Endgame. ¹

We’d never seen that before. I would add the movies were generally well-regarded. Two concerns I remember from the early days:

1. People were going to have superhero fatigue. To which the answer must be, nope.
2. The music in Marvel movies sucked. This was specifically about the scores themselves. But that proved to be nonsense and James Gunn showed that a superhero movie could have the same connection to the music world as a Tarantino jam.

So Phases 1-3 are mostly considered massive successes. So much so that following Endgame the expectations at every level are tremendously high.

Meanwhile, as we got to Phase 4 Marvel found itself dealing with several real-world issues that had massive impacts on its creative ambitions. First, the world shut down for the coronavirus pandemic and as everyone eventually went back to work there were strict controls over how we interacted with each other in public.

Second, Marvel was acquired by Disney and found itself with all of the benefits and problems that come with being part of a massive entertainment conglomerate.

Think of Disney as the murderous gangster Paulie in Goodfellas.

“Now the guy’s got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with the bill? He can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy, he can call Paulie. But now the guy’s gotta come up with Paulie’s money every week, no matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.”

— Goodfellas

Hey Marvel you want to start a new storyline? Great, we will spend billions on marketing and distribution. Also, we have Disney+ now and we’re gonna need a new show, movie, or special every few months to keep subscribers happy. Covid causing problems? That’s too bad. Now, where’s Moon Knight? Not enough CGI workers in the world available to make all of this seem believable? Well, sorry about your bad luck but She-Hulk needs to release in Q4.

Disney’s other creative factions, Pixar and Star Wars, pretty much cracked under the pressure. Star Wars films are dead and were mostly rejected by their audience. Pixar is a shadow of itself.

Marvel rolls on.

Marvel’s finances remained at the top of the game in Phase 4. They, along with Batman and most small-budget horror flicks, are the only guaranteed winners at the box office. And, Disney+ is essentially the house that Marvel built. Notable exceptions: The Mandalorian, and pretty much nothing else. I love Andor too but I am not convinced that anyone, other than internet critics, actually watched it.

Critically, Phase 4 is a mixed bag.

There is no easier mark for Marvel film and television products than me. I’m a guy in my 40s who grew up reading and loving a world of comic book stories including Marvel. I still have a pull list at my local comic book store. I have never thought of a comic as an investment and have instead read every book I ever bought.

And movies are an escape for me. In my day job, I write about some of the most horrid things humanity has to offer. I don’t watch crime fiction all that often because I live with it five days a week. Instead, please give me a happy story where the heroes are likely going to be noble and then win in the end.

No one, no matter how good they are at the game, can produce this much and have a near-perfect record. We don’t talk about Michael Jordan’s losses or his time with the Washington Wizards. Tyson and Ali had bad nights before the end. It’s all in the game.

So here’s some of what I loved and some of what didn’t work for me.

This stuff was great

Spider-Man: No Way Home

This was as good as anything Marvel has ever done. And Endgame level film for 20 years of Spider-man movies that managed to give any fan exactly what they wanted and to bring a satisfying conclusion to three different Spider-men. I watched every Best Picture nominee last year. No Way Home was better than at least three of them.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: Introduced a great new section of the Marvel Universe (Ta Lo) and two new fun heroes. It’s a fun romp and it’s up there with solid movies I can watch again any time.

Ms. Marvel: Expectations can often lead to disappointments but they can also lead to great surprises. I expected Ms. Marvel would not be for me. It’s a story about a teenage girl who becomes a superhero and deals with her family and her religion. But in the hands of its creative team, it’s a wonderful glimpse at a unique culture (a culture that is seriously underrepresented in American media) a nice adventure story, a history lesson, and a chance for star Iman Vellani to wow audiences with her infectious, happy charm. Marvel TV had a bunch of winners but this was the champ.

WandaVision, Loki, and Hawkeye. These shows had wildly different goals but I think all of them succeeded. The Matt Fraction David Aja Hawkeye comic book run, on which this series is based, is maybe my absolute favorite run of comics over the past 20 years. The show didn’t quite manage to hit those heights but it was awful close.

WandaVision: eventually wore me down with one too many sitcom spoof episodes but it pulled everything together nicely in the end.

Loki: Someone get Mobius a jet ski. What are we even doing here? Also, bonus points for having the final episode just be Jonathan Majors being awesome. I know several people didn’t like it but I was all in.

Werewolf By Night: My only critique of this is that I didn’t care for the use of black and white. It seems likely that it is there to make sure a story as clearly bloody as this does not get Disney in trouble. But it’s a fun horror romp that manages to be faithful both to the Marvel comics of the 1970s and the Universal horror movies that influenced them. I thought it was really good. But I also hope that we are going to get more of this soon. I’d like a Giant Sized Man-Thing show please.

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. I thought it was near perfect.

This stuff was fine

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law; Moon Knight, What If…? and Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness.

She-Hulk could have easily made it into the great category. But yes, the CGI was not great and there were some definite clunkers among the episodes. Still, it made me laugh a lot, especially because it was designed to punch a certain group of non-fans in the face every week. That ending was spectacular and ripped from the comics. If we got nothing else than the Daredevil stuff and the Wong (and Madisynn) episodes then everything here was worth it.

Moon Knight: I told a friend who was super-hyped for Moon Knight exactly how they would use his multiple personality disorder to hide expensive action sequences when the trailers dropped.

And then, they did exactly what I suggested in the first episode. My friend grew very disappointed in the show. I thought it was good though it never quite made it to greatness. As Marvel digs deeper to find new characters to spotlight we are reaching a point where third and fourth-string characters are given a chance to make a go of it.

But there is a reason why a lot of these characters are often given limited series runs or show up in team books. They are hard to sustain. Not every character can be Batman.

Mistakes were made

Black Widow, Eternals, Thor: Love and Thunder

If this blog has a point at all it’s that I don’t want to spend a bunch of time criticizing things I didn’t care for. The internet is full of people telling you what is wrong with the things they supposedly otherwise love.

But briefly, Black Widow would have been a lot more fun if it had come out in Phase 3 before Natasha Romanoff died in Endgame. It’s hard to enjoy a superhero romp when you know it ends in a graveyard.

Eternals: It did its best to mix the Jack Kirby original vision with the Neil Gaiman reimagining. I know people who swear by it. I am not one of those people.

Thor: Love and Thunder: I laughed a bunch. But in the end, I was disappointed. They took 10 years in the comics to tell the Gorr the Godbutcher story while also telling a story about Jane Foster getting cancer and becoming Thor. This needed more time and people who were willing to treat the material as something more than a way to get from one joke to another as quickly as possible. It was the biggest creative miss of Phase 4.

Endgame

If I had to peg the honest criticism of Phase 4 its that the audience really wants another straight line to follow. They want the Infinity Stones and Thanos to be replaced by Mephisto and a multiverse of problems who can be tracked over every movie and show for the next 10 years.

Marvel may end up doing some of that as we get Kang off the ground but it seems very likely that we will not be doing the same thing, in the same way, moving forward.

Nor should they. Marvel has actually been at its most successful when it breaks the mold and allows filmmakers like James Gunn and Taiki Waititi (well once) to take the reigns.

And despite what critics might say Marvel has made some bold television and movies during Phase Four and they seemed willing to experiment even while knowing that some of those experiments might blow up in their faces.

No one else has ever gone so far before without a reset. James Bond was recast every decade or so and the franchise went in a new direction. The same with Doctor Who and Star Trek. DC defenestrates itself every few years and while I have high hopes for the new regime it will be a decade before I trust that they really will stick with a plan and keep plowing forward.

The MCU continues on. Some of you out there in cinema land take that as a threat. But there is obviously one answer.

“I Am Inevitable.”

— Thanos

Footnotes

1. As long as you ignore the Marvel TV properties in Phases 1-3. Which I am.

It’s central to this movie’s appeal that it could have been titled: Young Steven Spielberg.

The Fabelmans tells the story of a young boy who is taken to a John Ford movie — The Greatest Show on Earth — and becomes obsessed with it and then transfers that obsession into a love of making movies.

As the movie continues, the boy’s father, played by Paul Dano, and mother (Michelle Williams), grow apart and eventually divorce. The father is an engineer and the mother should have been a concert pianist.

Their differences are on display in nearly every conversation they have with the boy. The father explains in painstaking detail how a projector works, and the mother talks of art and love.

The boy’s childhood is spent making movies with his sisters, then his boy scout friends, and eventually his entire high school class. The boy is his mother’s son and pursues art at every turn. But his father is in him too. At one point he figures out how to make the fake guns in his western look like they are really firing.

The father’s engineering and computing career takes off and he moves the family twice. In response, his mother buys a monkey.

That these people stayed married long enough for the boy to be in high school is a damn miracle.

Meanwhile, he faces a series of personal issues that threaten his commitment to what should be his career. At one point the boy, (Gabriel LaBelle) has something intensely personal to tell his mother. He’s found it in the movies he was shooting.

But he can’t say it out loud. And that leads to a long bit of tension between the two until it eventually erupts. Finally, he still can’t say it, so he pulls out the reel of film and plays it for her.

And I thought, “yeah kid, you’re either going to be a director one day or dead at an early age.”

You needn’t worry, Young Steven Spielberg did quite well for himself.

One by one, our old friends are gone. Death, natural or not, prison, deported.

The Godfather: Part II

When I left the theater I found myself thinking of the men of Spielberg’s generation and where they are now. I was born in 1978 and so the raging bulls — Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorcese — loomed over most of my film-going life. There are more names that deserve to be on that list but when I think of one of them I almost always think of these four guys together.

George of course is the easiest to peg. He sold Star Wars and Indiana to the Mouse and retired. As the years have gone by the prequels have grown in stature and his achievements have been reassessed but it seems clear that he never really recovered after the fans reacted so negatively to the new trilogy.

The thing I remember the most about him is that he kept saying that he wanted to make more small movies, more things like THX 1138, but Star Wars consumed his life. The franchise that is Star Wars has had ups and downs but it seems in good hands now.

Much of the movies we watched, or the books we read, even the things that consumed the entire world for a season will fade away. Quick, what was the biggest box office hit of 2019? Of 2003? Of 1983? Of 1963?

These things leave us. But Star Wars will most likely stand forever. He never made those small movies, he’ll have to settle for changing the world.

Francis is off chasing one more crazy dream. It took him 40 years to be willing to pursue another one after the hell he went through on Apocalypse Now.

“My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”

Francis Ford Coppola at a 1979 news conference.

His new movie, apparently filming now, is called Megalopolis. In an interview, he’s comparing it favorably to Apocalypse Now. I think he’s also financed or nearly financed it with $100 million of his own money.

“Now with “Megalopolis” I would like to make a Roman epic with the story of an architect who wants to rebuild a utopian New York City after a devastating disaster,” Coppola told GQ.

This is either going to be a world conquerer or a flop. God Bless him, but Francis has decided he will not go quietly into the night.

And Marty, who was once going to be a priest, and is now the Pope of cinema. To hear some tell it Marty presides over the Council of Bishops and they cast their favors over what is and what is not real cinema.

He really got under their skin by telling people what he thought and why. It reminded me of the time Roger Ebert said, “Video games can never be art.”

Ebert said it, he believed it, and he caught a lot of online scorn and hatred about it. And now, I suspect, most of the world has completely forgotten about it. Tomorrow we shall be angry at someone else we disagree with.

Marty should say whatever he wants about anything he likes or dislikes. He’s earned it. He’s one of the world’s great directors. I think the real issue though, is not what is being made, it’s that Marty remembers what it used to be like when he and George, and Francis, and Steven were young.

Back then, the people with the money might take a chance on a weird science fiction romp that blends World War II fighter pilots with Arthurian legend. They might do a divorce movie with aliens with the boy from the back lot who gave them Jaws. They’d let a sickly kid from the city explore the Mean Streets and come back with a story about a psychopath who is obsessed with street crime and women.

How was he to know that the end of Casino would be an elegy for the Hollywood he loved too?

The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over. Today it looks like Disneyland. And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior’s college money on the poker slots. In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it’s like checkin’ into an airport. And if you order room service, you’re lucky if you get it by Thursday. Today, it’s all gone.

Casino

But Marty’s still out there making movies and tilting at the windmills. He and Spielberg will probably die on the same day. Like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, each of them, I suspect, hunched over in an editing bay.

And this year, Steven has retreated into his boyhood. They say he cried every day on set because he was, truly, bringing these painful times back to life. Sitting Shiva not just for his mother and his father but his own youth, and the dreams you have when you’re young and you don’t yet know the cost.

There comes a point in your life when you realize how temporary all of this really is. That everyone you love, and nearly everything you love will just one day be gone. And you’ll be gone too. Even the memories of you will fade as the world moves on.

But if anything has a chance at it, if anything is immortal at all, it’s the great movies.