SHANG-CHI lands its punches thanks to best-ever Marvel action
Plus we talk about the single funniest "news" story of the week
It’s Saturday, September 4th, and here’s where we are…
I am so close to being able to share something with you guys, and yet… I can’t.
That’s what we’re going through on a national level right now, and it’s making us insane. I get it. I started working on this project in mid-2018, and now it’s almost the end of 2021 and I’m still not entirely sure when or how you’re going to see it. It makes me crazy because I am proud of it and because I think it will bring a new audience to this newsletter and I am looking forward to all of that. But I’m not in control, and because I’m not in control, it feels like an unscratchable itch. No one loves the feeling of not being in control of their lives, and that’s what we’re all feeling all the time right now. No wonder everyone’s stressed out and weird and prickly these days.
It doesn’t help that we’re living through another Groundhog Day loop as Paramount announces that it’s moving three major release dates again, pushing Jackass Forever to February 2022, Top Gun: Maverick to May, and Mission: Impossible 7 all the way to September of next year. Paramount is one of the studios that is completely dependent on these films working as theatrical hits, and based on what happened with A Quiet Place Part II, they feel confident that they’re making the right choices. It is frustrating, sure, but it doesn’t ultimately matter. They’ll release the films when they release them, and we don’t “need” anything to come out in any particular theatrical window. In the meantime, I can’t imagine anything’s going to get MGM to move No Time To Die again, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife seems hellbent on the now-available November 19th date now. I also suspect Last Night In Soho will stay on its date no matter what. I am not completely done with theaters, but I’m also finding myself a little more reluctant to just see every single thing again no matter what. I have to think about what I’m doing and try to get it right.
The message out of CinemaCon from the theater owners was loud and clear: we are open, and we really hope people show up. More importantly, they hope films show up. They’re freaking out, and with good reason. Theater owners may want to be in business right now, but consumers just aren’t comfortable. I am not an outlier here. Every poll they’ve done, whether on the studio side or the NATO side, makes it clear that as the summer has worn on and the Delta variant became a bigger and bigger issue, people just plain stopped trusting theaters again. Maybe if they’d maintained social distancing between groups or kept things at reduced capacity, but they didn’t. My own family felt fine with the first couple of films we saw, but when we saw The Suicide Squad, everyone was packed in tight again, and I noticed how uncomfortable we all were as a result. I ended up bailing out on a New Beverly double-feature I bought tickets for because the New Bev wasn’t doing any distancing at all anymore, either.
And look… this is largely an issue of perception right now. I don’t think movie theaters are more dangerous than any other indoor space, and the data is clear that theaters have not been hot spots for outbreaks. It is a safe space, quite literally. But if people don’t feel safe, they’re not going to go, and moving your movie is not the answer at this point. We’ve done that. We’ve done it so many times that it starts to feel like a cruel joke. You’re never going to have the perfect moment again, so stop chasing it. Right now, studios are killing the moviegoing habit aggressively, and I know it’s happening because it’s even happening to me. I never thought I’d find myself disconnected from the overall habit of going to the theater, but that’s what a year-long disruption will do. If I can be rewired, then I have to believe anyone can be rewired, and that should scare the living shit out of theater owners. Right now, they have got to convince the studios to keep putting out movies. Every single time they play Lucy and pull the football out of the way of the moviegoing Charlie Brown, they’re making it feel like theaters aren’t safe. They are enforcing the idea that you should not be going, and they’re training people to wait for a moment that, honestly, may never come at this point.
Over and over, it feels like we’re having the same conversation. We want things to be normal. Things are not normal. We act like things are normal anyway because we want things to be normal. Things get even more fucked up as a result, and move even further from normal. And more than anything, that makes us want things to be normal.
Which brings me to my next point…
IT’S FANTASTIC… FROM A DISTANCE!
I am going to be watching a big fat fistful of Fantastic Fest movies and reviewing them for you and I am excited about the programming, though frustrated about how and where I’ll be watching them. I was originally going to head back to Austin for the first time in several years so I could do the festival in person this year, but I’m just not comfortable yet. The festival just made a pretty major last-minute pivot to try to make attendees feel secure, but it also made it clear that this isn’t going to be the same kind of festival they usually stage.
The same thing is playing out right now with the Toronto Film Festival, while Telluride and Venice seem to be leaning into “we are back and everything is normal” much more forcefully. The one big difference to me between going to a regular theater and going to a festival is that I know from experience how often I got sick at film festivals. It’s because everyone’s coming from different places and we’re co-mingling our various personal spaces, and it’s so common that people used to joke about “the Fantastic Flu” after the festival. That was true of Sundance, of Cannes, of Toronto… pretty much any festival with an international audience.
I didn’t even apply to the Toronto festival this year. I knew I wasn’t going to go in person and I didn’t think they’d be offering quite as much of a digital option as they apparently are. But Fantastic Fest is different… it’s always been my favorite festival experience. There’s not even a close second place. It’s everything… it’s the venues, the audiences, the extra experiences programmed around the movies, and, yes, of course, the movies themselves. It feels to me like, along with theatrical exhibition as a whole, the film festivals we’ve known for the last few decades are all going through major overhauls. That’s good. They should. But right now, everything’s reactive. None of these decisions are being made from a place of strength. This is all about trying to keep up with public health concerns, and I applaud them for even trying. When all of this finally reaches a stable place, though, I think all of these festivals need to sit down and seriously contemplate what they’re for or who they’re for or why they exist. Are they just about launching films and building hype for the eventual general public, or are they about offering a specific curated experience for the audience that is actually there? Fantastic Fest has always felt closer to the platonic ideal for me, a festival that is largely unconcerned with whether things get picked up as a result of playing the fest and more concerned with the actual boots-on-the-ground experience.
Maybe it’s all the pent-up energy from sitting out the last year and a half, but I’m finding the reporting out of Venice and Telluride right now to be particularly sweaty. Everyone feels like they’re desperate to be first to declare the return of moviegoing, the first to pick this year’s eventual Best Picture winner, the first to return to a sort of detached cynicism about it all. I spent a fair amount of time traveling this festival circuit, and I have been guilty of all of this. Through it all, though, I was always genuinely more interested in the movies than in the hype, but I fell into all those same traps. I’ve always said that for the writer, the best version of the experience would be to have the whole festival happen, then write about the overall impression. Instead, everything’s a foot race. Everything’s about trying to justify the massive travel and lodging costs. Everything ends up focused on movie stars and acquisitions and trying to create biggest stories.
Doing Fantastic Fest at home this year is going to be a definite let down compared to what I was hoping to do, but it feels to me like they’re still one of the few major festivals entirely focused on the movies and not their place in the Oscar race. That is, indeed, fantastic, and I wish it were the model for the industry as a whole.
KUNG-FU DONE RIGHT
At this point, Marvel is the single biggest brand-name in movies on the planet, and nothing I say, good or bad, is going to impact the business the film does. There’s no critic who is going to convince an audience not to go see something they make, and no good reviews are going to sway an audience who has already tapped out on comic book movies. Shang-Chi absolutely demolished Labor Day box office records this weekend, even in the midst of a pandemic, and the message that sends is loud and clear: Marvel is the brand that audiences will show up for right now, no matter what.
At this point, the most you can hope to do as a critic is offer some kind of larger context for each particular film or discuss the craft itself, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings certainly offers more to discuss than the average Marvel offering. This feels like a film that would work incredibly well for people who are unfamiliar with the larger Marvel universe, an entry point with remarkably little attendant friction, even this far into the larger franchise. It feels like much of what Marvel is doing right now is designed to serve as a reintroduction, a new beginning point. I don’t know that we’ve ever seen anything quite like it in terms of a larger narrative, building to what felt like an undeniable ending with Avengers: Endgame, and then somehow picking up and continuing without any reboot. This is the 25th feature film from Marvel Studios proper, and it still feels like they’re trying to figure out the limits of what people will accept, how weird they can get without leaving the mainstream behind, how much they can really lean into the strangeness of comic books. We, as an audience, have been the frog in the pot for almost 15 years now, with Marvel turning the heat up incrementally over time. With Shang-Chi, it is safe to say the water is really boiling now.
This is, after all, a film where Ben Kingsley spends much of the film’s running time palling around with what can only be described as a sentient butt covered in fur.
The original Master of Kung-Fu comics were born at a time when Bruce Lee was just breaking through into mainstream American culture, but the specific incident that spurred them to create the series was the debut of Kung-Fu on American television. They actually tried to get the rights, but Kung-Fu was a Warner property, which meant DC owned the rights. That show’s production backstory has some deeply racist connotations, and while the enthusiasm that was felt by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin was real and genuine, they made choices that were deeply unfortunate. They licensed Sax Rohmer’s work to make Shang-Chi’s father Fu Manchu, and they made Shang-Chi half-white, the same unfortunate choice that Kung-Fu made to try to make the character “relatable.”
In many ways, this was the blankest slate offered up to any filmmaking team adapting a Marvel property so far. There was almost limitless room here to reinvent the character and his world, and they’ve taken that opportunity and run with it. It was smart of Marvel to enlist a largely Asian creative team, and the screenplay by Destin Daniel Cretton, Dave Callaham, and Andrew Lanham feels like it draws broadly on different cultural influences, mixing in Chinese mythology, superhero storytelling, and even the work of Hayao Miyazaki, resulting in something that feels both familiar and fresh.
Simu Liu stars as Shang-Chi, and the film manages to cover a lot of ground as an origin story without feeling like it’s just an origin story, something some of the early Marvel films struggled to do. There’s a whole bunch of story, but it’s handled in fairly nimble fashion, and it helps that Liu is such a naturally charming lead. He and his best friend Katy (Akwafina) live in San Francisco, where he’s struggling to figure out what to do with his life. She doesn’t know anything about his life growing up, and that’s the way he likes it. The past catches up with him, though, when they are attacked by a group of assassins from the Ten Rings, a vast secret criminal organization. There’s a reason they target Shang-Chi, and that reason forces him to confide in Katy and reveal the truth about his past to her.
Tony Leung is a goddamn legend. If he had made no other movies than the ones he made with Wong Kar-wai, he would still be one of the greats of Hong Kong cinema of all time, but he’s got a body of work that is truly daunting. Casting him as Xu Wenwu, Shang-Chi’s dad, was a brilliant move by Marvel, because he takes the character and gives him a depth and soul that really elevates the film. He’s not a simple bad guy, and it is one of the reasons the film really works. He is driven by a mad, desperate love, and he doesn’t see any of what he does in the film as evil. Those are my favorite antagonists in films, and when you get it right, I find it far more engrossing. Overall, the cast is terrific, and I particularly loved the way the film addressed Iron Man 3’s use of the Mandarin and entire history of Asian villain stereotypes without turning anything into a lecture.
There’s a general formula to Marvel films, a mix of humor and heart and action, that each director has to find their own way to accomplish. Different people lean into different parts of that formula, and Cretton, whose Short Term 12 is a truly great movie, proves to be fairly skilled in every department. The relationships in the film, etched quickly, are well-written and well-played, and the film is genuinely funny, with some big weird swings that really connect. What makes this feel different from a lot of the Marvel films, though, is the action, and I am equally sad and pleased to report that there is a non-stop concussive quality to the action here.
I’m pleased because of how inventive and ambitious the action is, and sad because it’s the work of Brad Allen, the brilliant fight choreographer who just passed away. Allen, the only Westerner to ever become a member of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, took this opportunity to apply everything he ever learned on a scale and budget he’s never had at his disposal before, and the results are dazzling. What I love most about the way Chan approaches action is the playfulness, the way he uses every environment and every physical object as part of the action, part of the scene, and Allen clearly absorbed those ideas from Chan. From the moment Shang-Chi first swings into action, the film has such a clear, delightful sense of how it approaches action that it feels almost giddy.
The box-office story being written this weekend concerns me. I’m glad to see any film do well, but I worry about how a data-driven industry interprets data collected under broken circumstances. When consumer confidence is down, it takes quite a bit to get them off the couch and into theaters, and in this case, it’s clear that audience curiosity and allegiance to the Marvel brand were enough to overcome those doubts. It’s easy to imagine a future where the only things that play theaters are giant brand-name movies that come pre-sold completely. I enjoyed this film, and I plan to take my own family to see it tomorrow at the Alamo. But this isn’t the only thing I want in theaters in the future, no matter how much I enjoy it, and I hope whatever Cretton does next is more personal, a cashing of the check this film is going to write for him. He deserves it. More importantly, so do we.
AND FINALLY…
I cannot fully express how funny I find the entire “Brett Goldstein is CGI” corner of the Crazy Internet, but please… allow me to try.
Brett Goldstein is, of course, an actual human being. He’s best known as Roy Kent on Ted Lasso, which is really getting to the meat of the season with these next two episodes. I think his work this year has been fantastic, adding new levels to what was already one of my favorite characters on TV. I also just recently started listening to his movie podcast, Films To Be Buried With, and I suddenly have a whole different level of respect for him. Whenever I start listening to a new movie podcast, I try to find episodes where the host has a conversation with a friend of mine. I do that because I know what I love about movie conversations, and listening to Brett talk to Edgar Wright or Patton Oswalt about movies, I can tell that Brett’s not faking it or phoning it in or just doing promotion for other people’s work. He’s a deep-down-in-his-bones movie nerd, and he’s designed this great format that pushes people to discuss a whole range of titles and genres. Listening to recent episodes with Nia DaCosta or Barry Jenkins as guests, you get a chance to really learn more about who they are as film viewers. I would not have called Jenkins as a big fan of The Last Action Hero or Howard the Duck, but here we are.
Living in this weird post-information age, where we have more information than ever available to us but people seem to have this increasingly loose connection to facts, it’s not surprising to see strange conspiracy theories gain some traction. There’s a person who used to be part of my life who went around-the-bend crazy after 9/11. As the 20th anniversary of that world-altering event approaches, it’s worth taking note of just how much the world itself seems to have shared my friend’s journey, and how it feels like there’s no way back to the normal that used to exist. There’s a baseline of absolute lunacy that has become completely normal, and people seem unashamed to just broadcast their deranged beliefs no matter how violently reality refutes them.
It does not surprise me that Reddit was the source of this lunacy. What definitely surprised me is just how far and how fast the lunacy spread. Thankfully, most people saw it as the insane joke it was, and I particularly liked how this guy responded:
By far, though, the best response is from Goldstein himself.
How can you look at that face and think he’s anything but real? Seriously, people. Use your brains.
The real answer here, most likely, comes from the startling amount of VFX work that they actually do use on the show. People don’t think of half-hour comedies as being FX heavy, but one of the things I learned watching the eight unfinished episodes that Apple posted to their screener site was that they use an amazing amount of green screen on Ted Lasso. I think part of it is that they’re not allowed to shoot on actual football pitches, so there’s a fair amount of trickery to make it look like they’re actually out there. They were also dealing with COVID restrictions, and lots of shows had to figure out how to keep shooting even when they couldn’t put actors together like normal. There are a few moments here or there where the compositing isn’t quite perfect, and viewers trying to figure out what it was that they were noticing made the most logical assumption: that one of the show’s primary actors is indeed a completely computer-generated character.
Of course.
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Let’s do the weekly media diary. This one covers the last couple of weeks, pretty much. As always, anything I particularly enjoyed is in bold.
THIS WEEK’S BOOKS: The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig; The Pusher by Ed McBain; The 22 Murders of Madison May by Max Barry; Rabbits by Terry Miles; Fletch, Too by Gregory McDonald; The Mysterious Affair at Miles by Agatha Christie; 007: Forever and a Day by Anthony Horowitz; Bloodless by Preston & Child; Shit, Actually by Lindy West; The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett; Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
THIS WEEK’S COMICS: Epic Collection: X-Men - The Gift; X-Men: Ghosts; X-Men: Old Soldiers; X-Men: Mutant Massacre; Epic Collection: Conan The Barbarian - Hawks From The Sea; X-Men: Asgardian Wars; Secret Wars; Secret Wars II; Star Wars: The High Republic #9; Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures #8; We Only Find Them When They’re Dead #8; Epic Collection: X-Factor - Genesis & Apocalypse; Something Is Killing The Children Vol. 1; The Nice House On The Lake #1 - #3; Darth Vader #15; Doctor Aphra #13; Defenders #1; Kang the Conqueror #1; Superman ’78 #1; Star Wars: War of the Bounty Hunters #3
THIS WEEK’S PODCASTS: How Did This Get Made? - “Surrogates,” “Minisode 272.5,” “The Island,” “Minisode 273.5”; Doughboys - “Mendecino Farms w/ Avital Ash,” “Shake Shack 2 w/Libby Watson,” “Einstein Bros Bagels w/Tony Rodriguez,” “MOD Pizza w/Cody Ziglar“; Blank Check with Griffin & David - “Assault on Precinct 13 w/April Wolfe,” “Halloween w/Alex Ross Perry,” “The Fog with Nia DaCosta,” “Escape from New York w/Karen Han”; One Heat Minute - “A Serious Disc Agreement: Criterion Collection - Deep Cover,” “Zodiac: Chronicle - Virgo Pt. 2”; With Gourley & Rust - “Jaws: The Revenge,” “Deep Blue Sea,” “Open Water,” “The Meg”; High & Mighty w/Jon Gabrus - “What We Learned from Action Movies w/Ben Rodgers and Ryan Stanger,” “Training w/Justin Lascek,” “Becoming an American w/Alana Johnston,” “Funny Athletes w/Billy Wayner Davis,” “Healthcare w/Libby Watson”; Films To Be Buried With w/Brett Goldstein - “Mark Kermode,” “Edgar Wright (Part 1),” “Edgar Wright (Part 2),” “Patton Oswalt,” “Nia DaCosta,” “Barry Jenkins”; Did You Get My Text? - “Tasty PJs,” “You’ve Been Chernobyled,” “Lets Hit The SAD Bar”; The Kingcast - “The Outsider w/Stephen Graham Jones,” “Misery w/Paul Tremblay,” “The Dead Zone w/ Patrick Fischler”; The Boogie Monster - “Stull, Kansas,” “Ghost Stuff”; Screen Drafts - “Planet Hollywood Mega Draft w/Marc Bernadin, Jordan Crucchiola, Wynter Mitchell & Drew McWeeny”
THIS WEEK’S TV: The Other Two S1 E9, E10, S1 E1 - E4; Archer S12 E1 - E3; History of the Sitcom S1 E6, E7; FBOY Island S1 E5 - E10; Big Brother S23 E17 - E24; The White Lotus S1 E6; Last Week Tonight with John Oliver S8 E21, E22; Reservation Dogs S1 E3 - E5; Dickinson S2 E8 - E10; The Pursuit of Love S1 E3; Superman & Lois S1 E14, E15; Nine Perfect Strangers S1 E1 - E5; Star Trek: Lower Decks S2 E2 - E4; Married at First Sight S13 E5 - E7; Brooklyn Nine Nine S8 E3 - E8; Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace S1 E4; U.F.O. (2021) S1 E1; Foundation S1 E1; Somebody Feed Phil - “Copenhagen”; Sex Education S1 E1 - E3; NYC Epicenters 9/11 - 2021 1/2 S1 E1; Only Murders in the Building S1 E1; The Chair S1 E1 - E3; What If… S1 E3, E3, E4; Moonlighting S2 E4, E5; A.P. Bio S4 E1 - E4; Evil S2 E7, E8; What We Do In The Shadows S3 E1, E2
THIS WEEK’S GAMING: Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla; F/X Pinball 3; Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey; Psychonauts 2
THIS WEEK’S MOVIES: Oscar; Last Man Standing; Conan The Barbarian; Tango & Cash; Demolition Man; True Lies; The Last Boy Scout; Assassins; Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings; Hide in Plain Sight; Nijinsky; Homeroom; Stillwater; Candyman; Reminiscence; Riders of Justice; The Fisher King; The Protege; Vacation Friends; Get Rollin’; Sitting Ducks; Ikiru; Shiva Baby; Rancho Deluxe; The Street Fighter; The Bodyguard; Apocalypse Now; Chinatown; Queenpins; Come From Away
Fess up Drew, did you actually relisten to the entire 6+ hour Planet Hollywood draft? That was an insane undertaking!! I love hearing your periodic appearances on that show...
I'd love to see Shang-Chi, but my showings are always filled, don't want to take that chance. I can wait.