Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

Welcome to Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a phrase that might not mean much of anything to the mainstream critics, who are starting to sniff at Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Truth be told, this is the 31st film in the MCU, and fatigue may be setting in, especially considering that three of the last seven Marvel flicks were duds. In actuality, Quantumania is proof positive that we’ve been spoiled over the last fifteen years – Marvel spent so much time upping its own game that it can’t keep competing at that level. Quantumania is fine, but that used to be a much lower bar.
 
Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is riding high after helping to save the universe in Avengers: Endgame. While Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) is saving the world with her humanitarian foundation, Scott’s daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) has begun her own explorations of the Quantum Realm, which will drag Scott, Hope, and her parents (Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer) into a conflict with one of the Quantum Realm’s most feared inhabitants – Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors).
 
As we’re entering Phase Five, firmly entrenched in what the marketing boys are calling “The Multiverse Saga,” Quantumania feels a bit like a cross between table setting and the first course. It’s got to introduce Kang, our new big bad, while following up on at least the appearance of He Who Remains in the first season of Loki. For those who didn’t see it, He Who Remains was also played by Jonathan Majors, who teed up the notion that we’d be seeing lots of versions of him, traversing the multiverse and causing all sorts of Avengers-level havoc. Meanwhile, No Way Home and Multiverse of Madness have been hinting at all the bad things that might happen when parallel universes collide (in short, multiversal incursions, the deaths of whole universes, and plots glued together by fan service).
 
It’s heady stuff, and if you’re not already bought into the MCU project, you’ll probably have checked out long ago. If you’re a tried-and-true Marvel Zombie, you might be bored by all this in light of recent middling fare. And if you’re only in it for Ant-Man (I have to believe there are some of you out there), this movie might not be as zany as its subtitle promises. All of which is to say that Quantumania is a weird movie, and it may not be transcendent or titanically significant, but it is good clean fun, a worthy diversion for two hours. And I liked it well enough to say that if you’ve come this far with Marvel, Quantumania isn’t worth bidding the franchise farewell.
 
For starters, Quantumania is a very good time. Paul Rudd is effortlessly charming as Ant-Man, having lost none of his aw-shucks charm or good-natured wonderment. When something amazing happens, he breathlessly fires off one-liners like, “Boy, a lot’s happened today,” which is more my speed compared to the scatological or postmodern humor that’s pervaded much of the superhero genre lately (looking at you, Gunn and Waititi). The key is that the joke is never on the material or on the audience, but rather on the situation or on the characters – and it helps that Rudd is a genuinely funny individual (and just a genuine mensch all around).
 
Ant-Man’s usual gang (including Michael Peña, David Dastmalchian, and T.I.) are nowhere to be seen, but Douglas and Pfeiffer are stellar as Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne; Douglas is bemusingly charming, while Pfeiffer never buckles under the weight of the expositional retcons her character is used to deploy. It’s only too bad that they don’t have much to do in the film’s climax, because we’ve never gotten to see the original Ant-Man and Wasp in full action. We’re also introduced to Kathryn Newton, plucky and precocious; she’s going to make a fine addition to the Young Avengers, once we get around to them, but for now she plays very well against Rudd as his “peanut.”
 
And then there’s Kang. In much of the critical reviews I’ve read for Quantumania, I’ve seen critics praising Jonathan Majors as the one piece of Quantumania that actually works. I’m not quite sure I’d fall over myself just yet – I thought his performance as He Who Remains did more to convince me of Kang’s fearsomeness than actually seeing The Conqueror himself, which is maybe a greater testament to Majors then it sounds. I do wish the film had shown us a little more of Kang rather than simply tell us how evil he is, but then we have a ways to go before The Kang Dynasty in May 2025. Suffice it to say, though, that Majors is right in the pocket with what the film needs him to be, and he’s in a unique and promising position as far as the future of the MCU is concerned. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot more of him.
 
The key to Quantumania is, I think, that it’s not a terrific Marvel movie. It’s a fairly middle-of-the-road outing in a franchise with some exceptional highs and some dismal lows. It might not even be the best Ant-Man movie, which is as an incredible sentence to type as it is to read, but that fact is still better than things like Morbius or 80 For Brady, God save us. Quantumania is, however, a pretty good Star Wars film that just happens to have Ant-Man in it; it’s chock full of bizarre creatures and garish special effects, and if you surrender yourself to the bonkers frivolity and go along for the ride, Quantumania is not going to disappoint. 
 

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is rated PG-13 for “violence/action and language.” Directed by Peyton Reed. Written by Jeff Loveness. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Kathryn Newton, Bill Murray, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Michael Douglas.

Bat-May: Batman Returns (1992)

I was four years old at the time, but I remember Batman Returns feeling like the most important movie ever made. I had an oversized “making of” book that I read practically to shreds. I studied the biography of Tim Burton, pored over the photographs and teasers for the plot. I could even name for you the producer of the film (Denise Di Novi, a wonderfully Gotham-esque name). I had the toys, the fast food cups. And yet, I have no memory of when I first saw the movie itself. In a way, that’s the best metaphor for a review of Batman Returns – chock-full of unforgettable bits and bobs and yet so unwaveringly strange that the whole gets lost amid the mad sum of its ludic parts.

Batman Returns is the story of three freaks – The Bat (Michael Keaton), The Cat (Michelle Pfeiffer), and The Penguin (Danny DeVito). After the events of the first film, Batman spends his nights waiting for action, silently anticipating the call to fight crime. Amid an invasion of circus clowns, The Penguin arrives from the sewers, pleading with Gotham for an opportunity to learn the truth about why his parents abandoned him. Meanwhile, exhausted secretary Selina Kyle is defenestrated and murdered by her boss (Christopher Walken), only to be reincarnated with nine lives, a feline fixation, and a Shakespearean desire for revenge.

 

Just like I can’t say when I first saw Batman Returns, I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen it, but on this latest viewing I was largely unprepared for just how weird this movie gets. I have always maintained that the difference between Burton’s two Batman movies is that Batman is a Batman movie directed by Tim Burton, while Batman Returns is a Tim Burton movie (co‑)starring Batman. The difference is so apparent in this one; the Gotham sets are freakishly Burton, all odd angles and grim shadows, and Returns doubles-down on its predecessor’s premise that freaks beget freaks, with a brooding meditation on how these freaks find their place in a hostile society (they retreat, or they rebel).

 

In short, Batman Returns is so idiosyncratically Burton that it is impossible to imagine a major franchise film – a sequel, no less – surrendering so entirely to its auteur’s vision that the titular hero ends up being subsumed by the villains. (Today, the claim is usually the reverse, that the villains are largely indistinguishable when the movies are governed by the large personalities of franchise heroes. Can you name, for example, the three villains of the Iron Man franchise?) Indeed, Burton is much more fascinated by the monstrous Penguin and the sideways-feminist Catwoman (“I am Catwoman – hear me roar”), with Batman relegated to a largely supporting role in a film that is nominally his. Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is heroic mainly in that he has sublimated his freakish impulses and wears a mask of normalcy, which Penguin is unable to do while Catwoman is entirely unwilling. In a standout sequence, Bruce and Selina attend a masked ball sans disguise, underscoring that their civilian identities are the costumes. (It’s an image that has been appropriated forever since, with a notable reprise in The Dark Knight Rises.) Penguin, meanwhile, crashes the party, as DeVito crashes the film itself, all shouts and gurgles, bile and bodysuits. 

 

It's clear, however, that Burton’s sympathies lie with the villains. The film begins with the birth of Oswald Cobblepot, ultimately cast into a river for his monstrous appearance; despite the fact that the infant Oswald is clearly dangerous, murdering and devouring the family cat, Burton manages to find pathos in this act of attempted filicide. Likewise, at film’s end, Burton stages Penguin’s final scene as high tragedy, with oversized penguins waddling in what appears to be an impromptu funeral procession. In much the same vein that Batman (1989) belonged to Jack Nicholson’s Joker, Batman Returns is paced as if it’s Selina Kyle’s film. Selina gets a full origin story and ends up in a sort of inverted will-they-won’t-they, akin to Bruce’s arc with Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) from Batman. Again, Burton feels more sympathy for Selina than he does for the curiously submissive Batman, evidenced by an elegiac sequence where Selina relives the trauma of her murder and proceeds to dismantle her entire apartment in a fugue of rage.

 

Putting it into plain English makes the film sound entirely normal, but I can’t undersell how bonkers this movie gets by adding a number of elements together. And these are all things that happen in the same movie: There’s an extended subplot about Penguin’s borderline-Trumpean bid for mayor, buoyed by Christopher Walken’s industrialist Max Shreck, who wants mayoral regime change to greenlight his construction of a power plant that will instead drain power from Gotham. (Shreck’s son, meanwhile, is played by Andrew Bryniarski, doing a transparently meatheaded Walken impression.) Circus clowns invade the edges of the frame, with Danny Elfman’s score veering carnivalesque at each turn. The whole thing is set at Christmas, casting a Burtonesque pall of sarcastic cheer over the affair. There are actual marching penguins, wearing rocket launchers, plotting to murder the children of Gotham. As delightfully strange as the movie is, one has the acutely nagging question during the whole film, “Warner Brothers was okay with this?!” (Spoilers for next week – they weren’t.)

 

I mentioned Danny Elfman, and he’s one of the main reasons this film succeeds. A good score can buoy any film, and while his Batman Returns score isn’t as bombastic or iconic as his work on Batman, it works really well by being dialed into exactly the movie Tim Burton wants to make. It’s traditionally superheroic when it needs to be (in those rare moments that Batman is doing hero work), but more often than not it’s playing in a strange realm of uncomfortable tragedy. His descending Penguin theme grows more and more militaristic, balanced as it is by the aforementioned carnival music. His Catwoman theme, on the other hand, plays like a tragic music box, swirling like his Edward Scissorhands work while highlighting the tragedy of Selina’s fall from innocence and her attempts to claw her way back toward peace.

 

Batman Returns is a film of beauty and of pain, in distinctly Burton ratios, but it is also a film almost as broadly painted as Batman ’66. Walken plays Max Shreck like a boogeyman, right down to the electrified hairdo, while DeVito’s Penguin is a thing of perverse revolting fascination, gruesome and grotesque in equal measure. Burbling black-green bile and groping every woman he finds, it is nearly impossible to find the tragic sympathy Burton feels for this grunting, snarling antagonist, who is handily the most revolting Batman foe ever committed to film. And yet, there is something expertly calibrated about Burton’s Gotham; as exquisitely eccentric as Burton’s vision may be, his Gotham seems very much of a piece with the comic book depiction. Gotham is a city of unending crime and corruption, of perpetual peril. Despite the mayor’s objections, a marauding gang of killer clowns seems to go hand-in-hand with Gotham City as a whole, particularly given the intimation that the clowns constitute a kind of haunting courtesy of Nicholson’s Joker. It’s almost a chicken-and-egg situation, where it’s unclear whether the comics birthed Burton or if Burton’s shadow warped the comics in his wake. (I’ll go out on a limb and venture the latter, though it’s equally Frank Miller’s fault.)

 

When I drew up the Personal Canon in 2016, there was no question that Batman belonged on it. That movie was nigh elemental in my love of superhero narratives. But Batman Returns was always the weird younger brother, the one who went away to art school and came back a changed man. I was never all the way comfortable with it, but neither could I relinquish it entirely. It’s always had a weird pull, especially as distinct from the twin day-glo Schumacher films; it was, before Christopher Nolan, what Batman movies ought to be.

 

Batman Returns is rated PG-13 for “brooding, dark violence.” Directed by Tim Burton. Written by Daniel Waters and Sam Hamm. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Christopher Walken.

For more Bat-May action, the good folks at Collected Editions posted my review of Batman: The Movies, the comic book adaptation of the Batman Quadrilogy. Give them a click - no one reviews comics like Collected Editions!

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

Perhaps there will come a day when I have to write a bad review of a Marvel movie, when I have to find a way to tell you to stay away, stay far away. It has nothing (okay, maybe a little) to do with my being something of a shill – a Marvel Zombie, if you will; instead, Marvel Studios is rapidly proving that there is little they cannot do. Where Justice League buckled under the weight of changing directors mid-stream, Marvel not only rebounded when Edgar Wright left the first Ant-Man, they established a brand identity for the little guy in the midst of creative differences and have now managed to build onto what ought to have been an unstable foundation.

Waylaid under house arrest after the events of Captain America: Civil War, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) has a few days left on his sentence when his old friends Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) reach out to him for help on a case. Scott risks his freedom to don the Ant-Man suit once more – alongside Hope in her new life as The Wasp – in order to collect some tech, reenter the subatomic quantum realm, and protect his friends from the phase-shifting Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen).

Following Infinity War in the way that Ant-Man followed on the heels of Avengers: Age of Ultron, the Ant-Man franchise is garnering a reputation as a palate cleanser for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a breather away from all the high-stakes sturm und drang of saving the cosmos from extinction-level events. In Ant-Man and the Wasp, as in its predecessor, the focus is not on the fate of the universe but on more personal stakes – smaller plots, if the pun can be forgiven. Rather than put Scott Lang at the heart of ensuring the survival of the galaxy, the Ant-Man films have wisely bent toward the heist genre; “break into a place and steal some stuff,” Hank Pym advised in the first film, and while this film ventures into the quantum realm between molecules, it has nothing to do with tearing apart the foundations of reality.

It’s a task for which Scott Lang would be ill-suited, though one suspects that perhaps Hope Van Dyne might be up to it. There’s a sly joke about her absence from the Leipzig airport battle in Civil War, but her deft hand at superheroics will likely lead audiences to wonder why we’ve had to wait ten years to see The Wasp on the big screen. (Diehard devotees know well, for one, that it was The Wasp who gave The Avengers their name back in their 1963 debut comic.) Lilly is more than fantastic as Hope, a proper scene-stealer who’s exceedingly capable as a hero without the need for so much as a training montage. Paul Rudd’s doing his Paul Rudd thing as Scott, dopey and self-deprecating with a spot-on sense of comedic timing, but the film feels more properly a two-hander with Lilly bearing more than her fair share of the weight – both in terms of action sequences and emotional gravity.

Between this and Incredibles 2, I’m seeing a promising pattern of restraint in our big-budget sequels. Like Edna Mode before him, Michael Peña turns up to revisit Luis, a fan favorite from the first film for his relentless cheeriness and proclivity for shaggy-dog anecdotes. In a lesser version of Ant-Man and the Wasp, we’d get five or six Luis stories (up from two in Ant-Man), but instead Peña and the script recognize that Luis is more interesting if he’s not one-note, if his puppy-dog honesty is matched with new challenges, rife with their own unique opportunities for him to insert a foot into a perpetually open mouth. 

The filmmakers have not, however, exercised restraint in all the size-shifting shenanigans made possible by Pym Particles. Tiny things enlarge, large things shrink, and characters change scale to accommodate any number of sudden developments. Moreover, the characters never lose sight of how cool and hilarious these shifts can be, so we too get to enjoy them all the more. There is something equally engaging about the unpredictability of shape-changing and phase-shifting in this film; at any given moment, one or more of the laws of physics can bend in unexpected but visually stunning ways, making Ant-Man and the Wasp a particularly unique spectacle.

Twenty films into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and mere months after Thanos cut a bloody swath through Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Ant-Man and the Wasp is perhaps not the most obvious choice for an immediate follow-up, but it’s a welcome breather with a tight focus and a fine knack for summer blockbuster fun. It fits into the larger Marvel tapestry, of course, gesturing forwards and back, but it’s telling that I’m equally enthused about the prospect of a third Ant-Man film, or perhaps just a standalone feature for The Wasp. (Flashbacks in the first film introduced Hope’s mother Janet as the original Wasp; might a third introduce Hank’s other daughter Nadia, for Ant-Man and the Wasps?) Regardless, Marvel has proven itself capable like no other studio at harnessing an audience and leading them to queue up for another helping. More like this, please.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is rated PG-13 for “some sci-fi action violence.” Directed by Peyton Reed. Written by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Paul Rudd, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby. Starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Hannah John-Kamen, Michael Peña, Walton Goggins, Michelle Pfeiffer, Laurence Fishburne, and Michael Douglas. 

mother! (2017)

I can honestly say that after Black Swan (which I listed on my Personal Canon as a film that influenced the way I approach movies), I was ready to follow Darren Aronofsky anywhere, even through the strange exhibit that was Noah, diverting if peculiar in its biblical revisionism. With mother!, however, a film that sacrifices signification for surreal spectacle, writer/director Aronofsky has transparently lost the plot.

In many ways, mother! most resembles Eraserhead by way of Rosemary’s Baby, a nightmarish portrait of a young woman (Jennifer Lawrence) and her older writer’s-blocked husband (Javier Bardem), whose pastoral life restoring a home is interrupted by the arrival of two strangers (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer) who bring with them a litany of family strife, consumption, and destruction.

mother! is perhaps the most infuriating film I can recall seeing in a very long time, and I say that as a person who very much appreciates a film that asks its audience to perform leaps of analytical reading. I like a film that makes me think, and there are few passions in my life more ardent than the work of interpretation, of thoughtful analysis, and of cinematic cryptography, but I have never wanted to throw something at a screen more than I did during mother!. There were more than a few moments when I wanted to walk away from the film – something I almost never do because of my abiding devotion to the sacredness of narrative – though it would seem that Aronofsky does not share that same investment in storytelling. mother! is catastrophically ghastly, maddening for its steadfast refusal to give the audience anything to which we can cling when the film verges, as it is wont to do, between poles of frustrating uncertainty and chaotic turmoil.

In a film where the characters are not named, even in the end credits, we have to grasp onto the performers to give the characters some kind of identity. Javier Bardem is captivating, though perhaps the word should be used in the sense of “abducting,” as the film more closely resembles a hostage situation than a moviegoing experience. One hires Bardem for his ability to turn a smile into menace without adjusting a muscle on his face, and on this count he excels as the husband (“Him,” in the credits). He’s scary, and he’s emotionally abusive, but I need more from a film than watching Jennifer Lawrence in perpetual terror for two hours. Her acting in mother! is first-rate, and she’s a perfect audience surrogate as she too faces bewilderment over the myriad of home invasions she suffers. She’s clearly terrified, but at no point did I feel that same fear. I felt angry – furious, even – at the way the film left me at the door without bothering to address the nonsense “logic” governing the whole thing.

Perhaps this is Aronofsky’s whole point, that we are, like Lawrence, thrown into a world that refuses to make sense, that tortures us to the point of despair. I did not, however, have the opportunity to despair because the sensory overload in the film transgresses far beyond human registers into the point of feeling naught but numb. Furthermore, there are things in this movie that are just vile, that would cross the rubicon of the palatable if for one second we had any emotional involvement beyond its appearance as the latest in an inventory of tasteless violence. Aronofsky peppers the film with halfhearted biblical allusions, as if applying Burroughs’s cut-up technique to the book of Genesis. (A riff on Cain & Abel approaches some interesting ground, especially as Aronofsky tips his hand that he’s going for the story of the first murder, but it flies off the rails once the film and its characters appear to have forgotten that it had happened.) If the film is an Old Testament allegory, though, what are Mother Mary and talk of forgiveness doing in the midst of all this? Noah had a similarly loosey-goosey take on textual fidelity, but at least that film had the good sense to throw in rock monsters to keep us engaged. In their place, mother! walks instead through a first-person videogame of destruction, wanton lasciviousness, religious zealotry, and the devastation of a war zone without bothering to clue us into the point of it all.

And if pointlessness is the point, if the object of the game is to obfuscate the message with colliding allegories, isn’t there a way to do that without nauseating your audience to the point of disconnection? I cannot oversell how frustratingly vile this film is, how fiercely irritating it becomes when it, like its houseguests, overstays its welcome and refuses even to gesture at what it’s trying to accomplish. It abuses us and taunts us with our unwillingness to leave. mother! undercooks its plot, overloads its allegory, and assaults the senses until anyone who cared has long since checked out. Aronofsky then slams on the gas in the film’s final minutes, recognizing he’s almost out of time and accelerating past the event horizon of the point I presume he’s trying to make – that people are terrible and God is an abusive, aloof narcissist. mother! leaves its audience with more sound and fury than its narrative could signify, but mostly I’m just left with fury – empathic fury at first, but ultimately just fury at being suckered into a two-hour vanity project that tells us only that Aronofsky is infatuated with Lawrence and with seeing her suffer while wearing translucent blousy nightwear. And if sadism is your thing, mother! is a rip-roaring good time. I, on the other hand, find it grotesque and infuriating.

mother! is rated R for “strong disturbing violent content, some sexuality, nudity, and language.” Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Top 10 Christmas Season Movies - #6-5

This week, in anticipation of the Christmas season, we at The Cinema King would like to bring you more than just your usual share of recommendations.  So we present to you:  this week’s Top 10 list.  More specifically “The Top 10 Christmas Season Movies.”  Rather than fill the list with “obvious” choices of Christmas-y movies, there are a few “alternative” choices on the list – the overarching determining criterion is whether or not this is a movie that I will watch beginning to end, especially during (but not limited to) the Christmas season.

#6 – Batman Returns (1992)
Come on, you’re reading The Cinema King – you had to expect Batman at some point on this list.  I’ve commented elsewhere that Batman stories and Christmas go together like gingerbread cookies and eggnog, and Tim Burton’s second outing as the Bat-director plays that card to the hilt.  Burton’s Gotham remains gothic under a blanket of snow and all the tinsel of a major metropolis decked-out for the holidays.  Michael Keaton is back as Bruce Wayne; Batman’s enemies here are The Penguin and Catwoman, with Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer turning in iconic performances.  It’s never a bad time to watch a Batman film, and Batman Returns is one of the better Bat-movies – even if it’s more a Tim Burton movie where Batman plays a supporting role to a literal traveling carnival of freaks.  But watching Batman defend the lighting of Gotham’s Christmas tree ought to give anyone a dose of holiday cheer.

#5 – Die Hard (1988)
In many ways, Die Hard is a de facto choice for any tongue-in-cheek list of Christmas movies.  It’s so far from most films classically considered to be Christmas movies; it’s clearly a late-80s action movie starring Bruce Willis as the yippee-ki-yaying cop John McClane.  But there’s an element overlooked by most, what those in the know remember about this movie once December rolls around:  that office party that Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) and his gang raid?  It’s a Christmas Eve soiree, which accounts for how every cop in New York can surround the skyscraper when the heist goes down.  Add in John McClane’s classic “Ho Ho Ho” message he scrawls on the body of a thug wearing a Santa hat – you can bet that wasn’t on Gruber’s Christmas list.  At its core, though, Die Hard is just a great bit of fun, filled with classic action, clever dialogue, and enough Yuletide cheer to make even the grouchiest Grinch a little peppier.

Come back tomorrow for #4-3!