Another week, another set of movies in Chateau Steelypips.
The Avengers: SteelyKid really got into Loki, triggering a big MCU kick, so when I asked for Movie Night suggestions the top two were The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World, both of which I had seen before. The Pip hadn’t seen The Avengers which is the better of the two, so we went with that.
This was more or less as I remembered it from seeing it in the theater back in 2012: quippy dialogue, relatively brisk for a two-and-a-half-hour movie. They clearly haven’t quite figured some of the characters out yet, in particular Thor and Loki. It does what it’s doing reasonably effectively, though.
I was much less enthusiastic about it this time around because it was full of reminders of the giant exhausting mess the whole MCU has become. And it has the standard problems inherent in the genre, namely that nothing in the set-up holds together if you think about it for more than a few minutes, and that it manipulates the audience into cheering for some ethically questionable behavior. Like, is it really cool to have the head of the S.H.I.E.L.D. military just casually refusing direct orders when he feels the civilian leadership are misguided?
Anyway, I think I’m out on these going forward. If the kids insist on more MCU movies, Kate can take those.
Lethal Weapon 2: Since SteelyKid got to pick on Friday night, I gave The Pip the final decision for Saturday, with the stipulation that we weren’t doing another Marvel movie. He wanted both “funny” and “action,” and after a bit of time suggesting other things said “Fine, I’ll watch Lethal Weapon 2,” which I had pitched on a couple of past occasions after being reminded of it by a recent-ish episode of The Rewatchables podcast.
There were a few bits of context that needed explaining— the villainous South Africans were mildly confusing— and some that remain imponderable mysteries— “Why is [Mel Gibson]’s hair like that?” “It was… it was the 80’s. Just… Yeah.” For the most part, though, this was a big hit— the setpieces are great, the banter between Gibson and Glover is top-notch, Joe Pesci’s broad comedy really clicked for them.
The one exception was the sex scene— both kids are vehemently anti-romance, in anything, so they didn’t even like Mel Gibson flirting with Patsy Kensit. Once there was actual sex stuff, they started ostentatiously looking at other things and announcing it in a weird Valley Girl sort of accent: "Oh mah Gawd, look at these curtains! I wish I could have these!" This then carried on through the rest of the movie: "Oh mah Gawd, how could she drown in that jacket! That was a perfectly good jacket!" and "Oh mah Gawd, I would be mad at you but you're kinda dead!" This continues to be hilarious— The Pip made a comment about the curtains this morning when we came downstairs.
Anyway, I think we can chalk that one up as a success…
One additional item for this week:
Q: Into the Storm: This isn’t technically a movie (it’s a six-part miniseries on HBO Max), and it certainly wasn’t a Movie Night, but it is a thing that I watched this week (while staying home with a cold that had my head full of goo). This is a documentary about the QAnon conspiracy and the people associated with it, starting in 2018 and running into February or so of this year.
I thought this was interesting, but a bit too long and self-indulgent: lots of swooping drone shots of various locations around the globe, and extended sequences of the principal figures just being weird. It also seems surprisingly credulous for a lot of the run time, including a lot of scenes where somebody is just blatantly lying to the filmmaker without it being called out. This is I think meant to set up the final sequence where he goes through a large swathe of those blatant lies and ties them all together, but that’s so late in the process that the effectiveness is blunted.
This would’ve worked better if it were either two hours shorter and more focused, or the same length but with a wider range of subjects, looking a bit more at the ordinary people taken in by the Q conspiracy and less at the kooks and grifters behind it. As it is, I’m not sure it added much beyond what I got from a podcast a year or so ago (I think it was a Reply-All episode?) that made the same core accusation. Other than, you know, putting faces to names.
It passed the time while I was groggy and congested, but I wouldn’t call it a brilliant piece of work or anything.
And that’s this week in media consumption. Here are the obligatory buttons:
And if you want to suggest other funny action movies that The Pip might enjoy, the comments are open.