We dig into LOKI and BLACK WIDOW in a Marvel double-decker

Plus a reprint of something we had locked behind the paywall

It’s Wednesday, June 30, and here’s where we are…

I’m settling into a lovely rhythm of working on the ‘80s newsletter for a certain amount of every day, freeing myself up to focus on other things the rest of the day, and I’m excited for subscribers to get a look at the February 1980 entry. If you’re not already subscribed, you should jump on board now.

If you’re not interested in the ‘80s, I get it. It’s definitely a much more narrow focus in some ways, but the sheer breadth of what I get to write about it makes it feel freeing.

I’m having a lot of fun preparing for Toshi’s 16th birthday next week. I can still feel the weight of the newly-delivered baby I held in my hands in the early-morning hours of July 6, 2005, but now there’s this man-sized person walking around my house with facial hair, standing the same height as me, and I am struck constantly by just how close to grown-up he is now.

I’m also gearing up for another appearance on the Movie Trivia Schmoedown this week. If you’ve never seen the show, it’s a movie trivia battle, wrapped in the drama of professional wrestling. It’s absurd, and that’s the fun of it. The dramatic side is all for fun, with rivalries and shit-talking and online beef that we all lean into and enjoy. The actual game itself, though, is deadly serious, and it’s not easy. I may know a lot about movies, but being able to pull stuff up in the actual moment? That is not a simple task for a 51-year-old pot smoker, and there are times I feel positively beat-up by the people I play against.

I’ve been playing on and off for a while now, since 2016, and I’ve had a mixed record. In teams competition, I’ve been fairly unstoppable, with a 14-4 record. In singles, I’m hot and cold, though, with an overall record of 6-9. I’ve had six straight losses in the singles league, which is dreadful, although two of those were part of the annual Free-4-All, a massive event where 30 to 40 competitors are part of the same round-robin.

I find that the competition is only getting tougher as more and more people join the league, too, so I’m not sure this week will be the one where I break my streak. They’ve been adding recognizable names to the league like Kevin Smith and Paul Walter Hauser and Doug Benson and Griffin Newman, and it’s fun to see them go head to head with the league’s regulars. The truth is, though, that there are players who have been doing this for a while who have gotten very hungry and very good at preparing for the matches, and there are newbies who are just frighteningly smart. I’ve seen several people play perfect games, and not just one, but a number of them in a row. One question can be the difference between winning and losing in this league, and sometimes it comes down to dumb luck.

Whatever happens this week, I’m just glad to still be participating. It’s definitely strange playing these matches online, though, and I’m hoping we get back to in-studio matches soon because that’s a big part of the game.

Anyway… let’s make today a Marvel double-header. Whattaya say?

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A LITTLE BIT BAD, A WHOLE LOT WEIRD

Maybe I’m a Loki variant, too.

When I visited the set of Thor, I was part of a group of journalists. There were probably six or eight of us total, and part of the day was spent introducing us to Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston, explaining who they were, and trying to convince us that Marvel knew what they were doing hiring these relative unknowns.

I always walked onto set armed with more knowledge than the publicists would give us. In the case of Thor, I not only knew quite a bit about that film’s script, but I already knew most of the details of The Avengers. At one point, the producers found themselves called away for a few moments, and they left us standing with Hiddleston, who seemed happy to be giving an interview. These were still early days and Marvel hadn’t totally figured out how to impress upon people the importance of total secrecy, and I couldn’t help but push my luck a little.

“So, Tom, how does it feel knowing that you get to be the first Big Bad of the joined universe as the primary villain in The Avengers?”

“It’s very exciting!” he replied and as he started to tell us more about it, I saw the heads of all of the producers and publicists snap towards us, eyes wide. I think he managed about three more sentences before they moved in, steered him away from us, and had a quick huddled conference. He strolled back over, chastened, and started, “It appears the penalty for spilling secrets is that I’m not the bad guy in The Avengers anymore. Oh, well.”

So, yeah. I understand Loki. I understand that urge that lies at the heart of all of his decisions. Sometimes, mischief is just too much goddamn fun, no matter the consequences, and that’s certainly true of the new Disney+ series that features Hiddleston’s reprise of the character in the closest thing the Marvel universe has attempted to Doctor Who so far.

We’re four episodes deep now, and while I’m not going to indulge in the hyperbole that drives so many of these conversations, I’m definitely enjoying this in a different way than I enjoyed either WandaVision or The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Each of these shows has felt about as different as they can feel while still fitting under the larger Marvel umbrella, and that’s smart. I like the big ideas that writer Michael Waldron is playing with here. The TVA is a fascinating addition to the larger Marvel universe, and the sheer scale of their power is humbling when you look at all of the superhero antics we’ve seen so far. Owen Wilson has the perfect charisma to balance Tom Hiddleston, and the two of them dropped right into a great easy comic rhythm together.

I think Sylvie aka Lady Loki is a great addition to the mythology, and I thought it was interesting how they casually dropped the information that the Lokis are bisexual. While the American version of Disney+ is far more sanitized than the international version, I’m surprised by how far the Marvel shows have gone in terms of content. At some point, Disney’s going to have to decide what their American brand is because Star Wars and Marvel are increasingly forcing the issue. I don’t have any problem with more adult ideas and themes existing on the service, but American audiences, in particular, are so damn weird about their Disney, treating it more as a religion or a lifestyle choice than just a corporate brand.

image courtesy of Marvel Studios/Disney+

I thought I knew where they were going before the last ten minutes of episode four, but I’m less sure now. The idea I find most provocative in the series is the notion that we always have a choice about who we are going to be, and that we are not strictly defined by our past. At first, I thought we were going to see Richard E. Grant playing a variant of Loki who would be revealed as the Big Bad in a sort of Wizard of Oz rift. Now that the Time Keepers have been revealed to not be what they claimed, part of that seems right, but the mid-credits sequence introduced Grant’s Loki, and he’s not what I expected at all. It still feels like this show is so cheeky and so absurd that it would be thematically fitting and dramatically delightful in equal measure for Loki to realize that he is his own Big Bad, and I’d love to see an encounter with the worst version of himself push him to become better. Hiddleston may have started his time in the Marvel Universe as a bad guy, but he has become a huge asset for the studio overall, due in no small part to his charisma off-screen when he makes appearances at Comic-Con, and I suspect that his death will be far less permanent than some of the others we’ve seen in Marvel.

Clearly, the producers know that hardcore Marvel fans are going to pore over every detail of the show, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw playing Ravonna Renslayer is a giant red flag regarding some of the things that we might see in these last few episodes. I have no idea if we’re going to see Kang the Conqueror show up or not, but her character is deeply connected to his in the comics, and we already know that Kang is coming soon. Jonathan Majors sound like great casting for Kang, and I’d love to see the relationship between him and Mbatha-Raw play out. Are they going there? Well, that’s part of the fun of the way Marvel adapts these things. They draw in all these familiar elements and then find new ways to play them out, so just because we know something from the comics, it doesn’t mean that’s true in the movies.

The entire show so far feels like one big fake-out, and I’m curious to see if this ends stronger than WandaVision or The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The Marvel shows so far have all featured strong interesting moments and ideas, but I think the six-hour form is still new to them as storytellers, and they’ve really landed the punch with any of them yet. Loki’s busier than both of those shows put together, throwing lots of mythology at us, and the relationship between Loki and Sylvie is such a strange and potentially rich one that I’m up for whatever the ride turns out to be.

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FIGHTING WITH THE FAMILY

Before we watched Black Widow last night, I showed my girlfriend Natasha’s introduction from The Avengers. She’s largely unfamiliar with the Marvel movies, and when we watched the first two Disney+ series, she was profoundly confused by the dense continuity. I watched the first Loki and told her that she would probably end up more frustrated than anything by the series. It’s so reliant on you having knowledge of all of Loki’s previous appearances, and it doesn’t seem particularly concerned about catching you up on things. That’s fine… Marvel’s in the business of serialized storytelling, and it’s all readily available if you’d like to catch up. No one has to jump in at this point if they don’t want to.

As it worked out, that one scene was all the introduction she needed. I told her Natasha was “basically James Bond in a superhero world. She’s got no powers, but she’s the most highly trained person possible. She used to be Russian and evil. She defected and became American and an Avenger. And now, because of a sacrifice she made in Endgame, she’s dead.” That introduction, where Nat’s tied to a chair and seems to be in danger, only to be interrupted by a phone call, is a terrific bit of character writing, and much of Black Widow seems to draw on exactly who she is defined to be in that one scene.

For what it’s worth, my girlfriend proclaimed the movie “awesome,” and she understood everything except the post-credits scene, which I presume is a direct set-up for something we’re going to see later this year, using a character who is rapidly becoming the evil antithesis of Nick Fury. It works very well as a stand-alone film, and I thought it did a great job of finally giving us a fully-rounded Natasha in a way that makes her death less painful. Scarlett Johansson’s been playing the part for most of the time the MCU has been a thing, and she’s got the same kind of ownership of the role at this point that Robert Downey Jr. has of Tony Stark or that Chris Evans has over Steve Rogers. These movies changed the arc of her career, making her a credible action lead, and Black Widow will only reinforce that she’s able to carry a film like this.

image courtesy of Marvel Studios

The real news here is that Florence Pugh is equally at home in the action world, and she makes a strong impression as Yelena, the closest thing to a sister that Natasha has. We learn in the opening scenes that Natasha spent part of her childhood in America, growing up as a normal American kid in a normal American family until the day her “parents” completed their espionage mission and they fled back to Russia. Those memories haunt both Natasha and Yelena as they grow up, conditioned and abused until they emerge as weapons. We know that Natasha made the choice to defect to America. We know that she feels damaged because of her past. But now, we get to see not only how she broke but what she had to do in order to feel whole again.

David Harbor and Rachel Weisz play her ersatz parents, both in the flashback opening scenes, and in the main body of the film, which takes place between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War. I think Harbor is terrific here, having a preposterous amount of fun as the Red Guardian, Russia’s only super soldier, and his running thread about his preoccupation with Captain America is hilarious. Weisz brings a very different energy to things, grounding it even as she plays out her ambiguous allegiances. The entire film hinges on Natasha learning that the Red Room program that created her did not die when she thought it did. She gets an opportunity to shut it down, and in the process, her fake family is reunited and she is forced to deal with the very real weight of those “fake” memories. There’s a stretch in the middle of the film that is basically just these four characters dealing with one another, and it’s very effective in making them feel like people with a real shared past and with genuine shared trauma. Cate Shortland’s previous features are all human-scale dramas, and she’s interested in the way trauma continues to ripple through someone’s life even after a traumatic event. That, as well as her work with the actors, makes this feel like it fits with the other work she’s done. I was surprised by how much I invested in the relationship between Natasha and Yelena, and their final scene moved me as much as anything I’ve seen in a Marvel film.

I was worried that Black Widow would feel like a narrative dead end, an afterthought, but it doesn’t feel like one at all. Instead, it works not only as a vital piece of character-building (even if it is after the fact) for one of the cornerstone characters in the MCU, but also as a solid stand-alone film about the way someone living a life of violence builds up scar tissue, both physical and emotional, and what it takes to hold onto your human heart when the world only wants you to be a weapon.

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AND FINALLY…

I’m going to re-run this piece about Quentin Tarantino’s newly-published novelization of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood because the book was finally published this week.

I recommend you pick it up if you loved the movie, for sure. I’d also point out that my paid subscribers got to read this review months ago. Today’s a freebie, but for only $7 a month or even less if you sign up for a whole year at once, you could be in the loop, and you’ll also get access to my entire archive.

Anyway… here’s what you missed the first time around:

I love novelizations. I do not think they are high art, and in many cases, they were cobbled together quickly with cynical intent. No matter. I still find them fascinating, especially when they accidentally give you a glimpse of an early draft or a rough cut of something.

I assumed, like most people, that Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming book Once Upon A Time In Hollywood: A Novel was just going to be a simple novelization, a one-to-one translation of the film he released. I figured he’d maybe include some scenes that were cut from the film, but otherwise, it would be very familiar. This week, I got hold of an early copy of the book and it turns out I was completely wrong. That’s not what he did at all.

Instead, this reads like it’s a book that Quentin read and loved and decided to adapt. The basic story that the book tells is the basic story that the film tells, but they are profoundly different experiences. The book de-emphasizes Sharon and the Manson storyline in favor of a great deal of backstory for Cliff and Rick, and there are some startling choices when it comes to the larger structure. Without getting into details, I’ll say that the last 50 pages of the book were not anything I expected them to be, and it seems like a different thing altogether because of how he frames the opening and the closing of this particular version of things.

Anyone who expects a literal translation will be baffled by the changes, and I suspect some people will have a strong negative reaction to the book’s version of Cliff Booth. He’s the one given the most richly imagined inner life, and it’s a fairly wild ride. I don’t think anyone who was upset about the Bruce Lee stuff is going to feel any better about it here, but I love the new context for that sequence. We learn a lot about Cliff’s troubled domestic history as well as his taste in movies, and we learn the details of several murders which Cliff has successfully committed over the years. He’s a war veteran, deployed largely in Italy and then the Pacific theater, so that means Tarantino’s got two different Brad Pitts out there running around in WWII now. It’s funny that the thing that will mess with people’s sympathies the most isn’t the truth about whether or not Cliff intentionally killed his wife (he totally did) but rather his complicated history with Brandy, the dog everyone fell in love with in the film.

More than anything, the book feels like a big playful game in which he’s remixing Hollywood history, inserting his characters into it. I’m surprised how much the Manson stuff feels like it’s in the background now, especially since that’s all anyone talked about before the film came out, how this was “his Manson movie.” There is more Manson material here, but some of what was in the film is gone, too. It all definitely feels backgrounded in favor of more time spent with Rick and Cliff, and that is perfectly fine with me. I love that we learn about what the characters love to watch, because I do think that’s a great way of learning who someone is and what’s important to them. Cliff Booth’s list of his ten favorite Kurosawa films may be ephemera, but it is revealing ephemera, and it just adds to your understanding of who this person is.

I don’t want to itemize things you can expect because that would rob you of the pleasure of stumbling across them for yourself. I do love that Quentin Tarantino clearly exists in the world of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, but not as the exact same Quentin Tarantino. He’s got a slightly different filmography, just like a number of other real-life filmmakers who Tarantino uses as characters here. It’s an interesting game he plays overall, and one of the things that I have always enjoyed about Quentin is the way he collects great Hollywood stories. When he would introduce films at the film festivals he threw in Austin, he would have stories about the production of every single film he introduced, no matter how obscure. He is a sponge, soaking this stuff up and willing to deploy it at a moment’s notice, and he weaves a ton of truth in around his fiction here, having fun with it all.

If I had to pick one over the other, I would pick the film, no question about it. This is a strong alternative version, though, and one of the strangest overall reads I’ve ever had. Expectation can be a burden sometimes, and as with his films, it feels like Tarantino is well aware of just how much power there is in totally subverting expectations in an effort to give the audience something they can’t shake. I’m not sure I think this version’s ending totally works, but by making the choice he does, he forces you to consider this in a totally different light than the story he told in the film. I’d say that alone qualifies this as a success, and I hope it’s not the last time we see his work in print like this.

I’ll just add that the version I read didn’t have any of the ephemeral bits and pieces included with the actual paperback, including the ad on the last page for a “deluxe hardcover edition” that promises even more new material. I’m not sure if that’s a joke or not since the pages around it are all a big wink at the audience, but if he publishes it? I’ll read it.

I’ll see you back here on Friday for another newsletter, and I’ll have a few Library entries for you before the holiday as well.