High Life. Claire Denis. 2018.

Hey! Claire Denis! Science Fiction! Space! New!

OK, I’m slightly drunk and hoping this movie won’t be too gruesome. I mean, I love Denis, but ever since Trouble Every Day (which is a vampire/cannibal movie with way too much cannibalism) I’m a bit wary.

Those French directors, you know.

Unusually for Denis, the cinematography isn’t by Agnès Godard. As much as I love her, Yorick Le Saux manages to do very, very Denis-like shots,

This movie has the sort of structure that I usually love: We’re dropped into the middle of it all, and things don’t make sense really, but we trust that it’s going to make sense.

But.

This shot, a few minutes into the movie, just made me go… “wha”…

I mean, it’s established immediately that we’re on a space ship that has a constant acceleration of about 1G. But then there’s this shot of a floating glove. What? How. When? What?

And losing faith in the narrative at this point isn’t a good thing. And while every scene is fab, my mind is just buzzing with “er… sending criminals into space… that’s not a good idea; there’s a gazillion of people who would volunteer”… “er… why can’t they just fuck…” “er… why don’t they just rebel…”

I mean, if trust was established at the start, then I’d just go along and see what happens, expecting things to resolve. And some of the things did, because Denis, but.

But that floating glove. That fucking glove.

Shazam!. David F. Sandberg. 2019.

Well, I just saw the Captain Marvel movie, so I might as well watch the movie about Captain Marvel.

Wow! New Line Cinema!? That’s a logo I haven’t seen in a while.

Oh, they’re really leaning into the origin story thing in this movie. I. Do. Not. Understand. The obsession with origin stories when doing super-hero movies. I realise that many people want to “start at the beginning”, but it inevitably means that half the movie is over before we get to the actual super-hero stuff… which is ostensibly the subject matter of these movies.

And… all the articles about this being a different sort of DC movie; lighthearted and well not teal: I’m half an hour in, and this is just as turgid as any Zack Snyder turd.

[time passes]

OK, it gets a bit better: They poach a bunch of scenes from Big and those are always fun. But there are so many wasted opportunities: The main bad guy has a bunch of demons at his beck and call, and their designs are so generic that you have to wonder whether they were designed by humans at all, or whether they were just designs the CGI company had on file already.

This is one of those movies where the origin part makes total sense, and I wish the delete key on this keyboard worked so I could delete that paragraph up there, but darn!

The humour is 97% “a kid in a grown-up body talking like a kid”. But all the lines are cribbed from sit-com kids lines and it gets old. It’s from the “kids sure are stupid” school of screenwriting. It’s like they are going for “hey, this is lighthearted comedy, right?” but it’s all schmaltzy nihilism. (That’s totally a thing.)

There are scenes in here that work. But it’s mostly tedious.

Captain Marvel. Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck. 2019.

Wait! This isn’t 4K!? The guy in the video store gave me the wrong disc!

Dude.

Oh, well, I guess I’ll just have to suffer through the 2K version…

This is a pretty fun movie. It all hinges on the main characters being somebody you want to watch, because it’s you know a super-hero movie so the plot is the usual running around after a MacGuffin. But Brie Larson is super-charming and plays it pitch perfectly: She’s serious about her heroing, but everything else is done with a cheeky grin.

Perhaps the best super-hero performance ever.

Nick Fury’s face sure looks weird. Is that even Samuel Jackson? Is he CGI? His face looks like silly putty. It’s offputting, but… you kinda get used to it? Until you see a screenshot and it’s like EEEEEEK.

Dude. It looks like they modelled his face down to his skeleton and then rendered a flensed CGI based on that.

I mean, like they do with dinosaurs.

Anyway!

For all it’s got going for it, it’s got pacing problems and … like … basic problems with the logic of some of these conversations: What Earth words the aliens understand depend of whether it makes a good joke or not. It’s fine, it’s fine, but it could have used some polish.

It’s definitely among the better Mar-Vell movies.