Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

I’m a week late to the Multiverse of Madness party, partly because the first time that I saw the new Doctor Strange film, the power went out twenty minutes before the end of the film. After a lights-out impromptu intermission, I got to see the end of the film, and the theater made good with a complementary ticket to return. More to the point, though, I waited to review it because Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was the first time in at least five movies and umpteen television series where I couldn’t wait to watch it again.
 
Put another way, I haven’t loved a Marvel movie like this in a great long while, and after having seen it twice, I’m pretty sure it’s hands-down my favorite Marvel movie since Avengers: Endgame.
 
Haunted by his surrender of the Time Stone and the consequences of returning to life after “the Blip,” Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) finds his world flipped sideways when the literal girl of his dreams arrives. But America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) tells the good doctor that those weren’t dreams – they were visions of his parallel selves. With an army of demons at their heels, Doctor Strange calls in help from the strongest magic-user he knows, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), setting off on a journey across the multiverse.
 
I’ll concede that much of my post-pandemic relationship to Marvel has something to do with not seeing these films in packed, exuberant audiences, but my Doctor Strange crowd brought their moviegoing A-game. They laughed at all the right jokes, gasped in the appropriate places (including a particularly brilliant first-act twist), and hooted and hollered for the cameos. Even my No Way Home crowd was comparatively quieter compared to the raucous atmosphere in which we collectively entered the Multiverse of Madness. This is how one ought to see a Marvel movie; as Tony Stark once said (in Iron Man 2), “Oh, it’s good to be back!”
 
More to the point, though, Multiverse of Madness is such a strong entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe because of its unique flavor and its (relatively) self-contained narrative. It’s part of a much larger canvas, true, and if you haven’t seen WandaVision yet, your mileage may vary on Wanda’s part of the story, but director Sam Raimi and screenwriter Michael Waldron keep the film relatively insular. There aren’t dangling plot threads or universe-serving big pictures at play; at its core, it’s largely a horror movie in which Doctor Strange is chased by shadowy distortions of his own controlling personality, while Wanda is dogged by her grief at the multitudes of losses she’s endured.
 
Everyone remembers Sam Raimi as the man who brought us Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man trilogy, but let’s not forget his horror bona fides. And boy howdy, is this Doctor Strange a horror movie. Dutch angles and rapid zooms, jump scares and chase sequences straight out of a slasher film – it’s impossible not to appreciate the Raimi of it all, taking lessons he taught himself in things like Evil Dead and Darkman. Even the most mundane of establishing shots has something distinctively and idiosyncratically Raimi about it; indeed, there are some sequences that look like they were filmed on a GoPro attached to a vampire bat, a shot that practically screams, “Raimi!” What’s more, the film looks and thinks like a comic book. With crossfades and unconventional compositions, Multiverse of Madness feels like it was storyboarded directly from the comics. (Having Danny Elfman, arguably the most influential composer of the comic book movie genre, doesn’t hurt, especially in a symphonic chef’s-kiss of a battle amid the ruins of a parallel Sanctum Sanctorum. If you’ve seen it, you know exactly what I’m referencing.)
 
Benedict Cumberbatch joined the MCU at a time when the shared universe was poised to punch above its weight class. Frankly, he’s almost too good for the role, playing no fewer than five different Stranges, a scant forty days after his second Best Actor nomination at the Oscars. He’s clearly being groomed (if he’s not there already) for the Tony Stark center around which the rest of the Marvel Universe orbits, and he’s deftly up to the task, emotional and scary and all-powerful, without losing the ability to drop a good wisecrack or two. Elizabeth Olsen, though, very nearly steals the show as Wanda, now fully inheriting the mantle of the Scarlet Witch after the events of WandaVision. Olsen has always had fun as Wanda, and it really shows here as Raimi lets her lean into the character’s long history and peculiar physicality, all head cocks and intricate fingerwork (with just a pinch of a Sokovian accent). 
 
Meanwhile, it’s a great pleasure to see Benedict Wong back as Wong, now Sorcerer Supreme and stalwart arched eyebrow of the MCU. (To push the analogy, after appearances in Shang-Chi and Spider-Man: No Way Home, is Wong the new Nick Fury?) Amid all the other returning faces, including Rachel McAdams and Chiwetel Ejiofor – though not always in the way you’d be expecting – and a whole host of cameos that I wouldn’t spoil in a million years, there’s Xochitl Gomez as America Chavez. Comics enthusiasts can probably bet that we’ll see some kind of Young Avengers before too long, with Kate Bishop (Hawkeye) and Yelena Belova (Black Widow), and we can only hope that America Chavez is among them. She’s fun and spunky, not unlike Brec Bassinger’s recent turn as TV’s Stargirl, and her multiversal powers open up a whole new portal (pun intended) for future MCU shenanigans. 
 
Within the Multiverse of Madness, America lets us see scores of new worlds, familiar in a sideways kind of way, and much of the film’s second act involves a few surprise appearances facilitated by our journey into the multiverse. And unlike some films I could mention (more on that tomorrow), Sam Raimi holds the cameos at bay, preventing them from overwhelming the movie, even though he must surely hear the audience champing at the bit for more parallel worlds, more cameos, more interconnective tissue. Nay, says Raimi, the focus must be on the story at hand, a tight two-hour superhero horror flick that gives each of its main players a compelling arc. And it’s all done with a magician’s flourish, including one firing of Chekhov’s Gun that is so viscerally surprising and yet perfectly inevitable that I quite literally stamped my feet with glee when I realized how Raimi and Waldron had set the table for a delightfully creepy third act. (All the better that it’s using prosthetics more than CGI, an effect that seems straight out of Darkman.)
 
While I don’t know that I’ll ever love a Marvel movie as much as I love Captain America: The Winter Soldier (a perfect confluence of so many things), Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness really is the antidote to the Marvel malaise I’ve been feeling of late. Sure, I gave most of them good reviews, or at least fair to middling, but I haven’t rushed to rewatch any of them. (And indeed my opinion of one in particular has soured – but again, more on that tomorrow.) With this Doctor Strange, I fairly ran to the theater a week later. I should have known; leave it to the doctor to give you the medicine you need.
 

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, frightening images and some language.” Directed by Sam Raimi. Written by Michael Waldron. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Xochitl Gomez, and Rachel McAdams.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

For whatever reason (perhaps deservedly so), 1939’s The Wizard of Oz has attained a kind of untouchable status, casting a large shadow over any project attempting to approach any adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s work.  But after Disney made a pretty penny revisiting Alice in Wonderland with Tim Burton, now they’ve let Sam Raimi take a crack with Oz the Great and Powerful.

And it’s better than I was expecting.

James Franco stars as the eponymous Oscar Diggs, a selfish traveling magician who is transported from Kansas to the magical land of Oz by way of – what else? – a tornado.  Once his hot-air balloon lands, Oscar (known as “Oz”) meets a trio of witches – Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz), and Glinda (Michelle Williams) – who contend that he is the subject of a prophecy concerning the fate of Oz.  Trouble is, Oscar’s no wizard, even if his flying monkey and china doll companions believe he is...

It may be that I just had low expectations for a prequel to the aforementioned Wizard, but I found myself rather enchanted by Oz the Great and Powerful.  Raimi goes a long way to redeeming himself for Spider-Man 3 (redemption he had begun with 2009’s Drag Me to Hell), and the movie is clearly the creation of someone enamored with the art of filmmaking itself.  Of course, I’m a bit of a sucker for this kind of meta-film, but it’s particularly clever when, for example, we learn that behind the curtain lies a movie camera.

After learning that Robert Downey Jr. was under consideration for the role of Oscar, I was disappointed that it came down to James Franco, but Franco actually does a pretty good job with Oscar, capturing the bogus charisma and accompanying self-doubt that the character inhabits.  I can’t tell if Franco’s clueless perma-smile is the result of good casting or good acting, but it works in the context of the film.  He’s also an effective gateway character, his obliviousness helping us get acclimated to Oz and any dramatic ironies therein.

The witches are perhaps better cast, more interesting because of how recognizable they are from the 1939 movie.  I can’t tell if we’re meant to recognize Theodora and Evanora on sight (so it might be spoiling to say what each one does), but Kunis and Weisz are quite good as two very different kinds of witches.  But I say it’s Williams who steals the show as Glinda, adhering closely to Billie Burke’s iconic performance while adding some of the good-girl-snark that’s become popular these days (see also Peppy in The Artist). 

Younger fans will likely adore Finley the flying monkey (Zach Braff) and the China Doll (Joey King), but for me the standout feature of the film is the way that it pays tribute to some of the 1939 film’s formal attributes without retreading them.  For instance, in a shot that I wish wasn’t spoiled by the trailers, Oscar’s arrival in Oz is marked by a transition from 4:3 fullscreen to 2.35:1 widescreen.  It’s a great way to recapture the magic of 1939’s shift from sepia-tone to color for an audience already ultra-accustomed to that kind of twist (but don’t worry, you still bet a color change, too).  The film also plays up the dual-casting from the 1939 film, with Williams, Braff, and King making appearances in Kansas and Oz; it perpetuates the surreal quality of Oz while also inviting interpretation as to the reality of what’s going on.

It’s to Raimi’s credit that these formal nods never feel like obligatory deferential references.  Instead, they pay homage to the long legacy of Baum’s work while reinventing and/or reintroducing the Land of Oz to a new audience.  All told, Oz the Great and Powerful is quite good.

Oz the Great and Powerful is rated PG “for sequences of action and scary images, and brief mild language.”  This movie is quite tame, appropriate for most audiences; the flying baboons are a bit ooky, and maybe the Wicked Witch might creep some out when she appears, but all in all this is a pretty wholesome flick.

Tuesday at the Movies - July 10, 2012

A day late but not a dollar short (since we’re still free of charge), welcome to Week Twenty-Five of “Monday at the Movies,” in which I pregame for The Amazing Spider-Man with Emma Stone and the latter two Sam Raimi Spider-Man films.  (I reviewed Spider-Man [2002] back in May 2008.)

Easy A (2010) – There are some movie stars who can carry a film solely on charisma.  Perhaps the newest face in this crowd (which includes such personalities as Denzel Washington, Judi Dench, and Samuel L. Jackson) is Emma Stone who, while making her big debut in Superbad, garnered international attention for Easy A, a take-off on Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter in which Olive Penderghast (Stone) becomes the talk of her high school after a rumor about her romantic escapades takes on a life of its own.  I’m a sucker for literary updates (most of the time, at least, but I make no apologies for digging Twelfth Night by way of She’s the Man), and here the story works because it doesn’t use Hawthorne as a crutch but rather winks at the relationship and self- references itself in a clever way; a similar relationship with the John Hughes canon is fostered, as well, and the comparison is a successful one.  But as for charisma, Stone is insanely charming, extraordinarily gorgeous, and unceasingly hilarious as Olive; if the script is campy, it’s on her shoulders that the film succeeds.  Credit, too, should go to the supporting cast, which includes Stanley Tucci as Olive’s scene-stealing father, Thomas Haden Church as her favorite and most sympathetic teacher, and Amanda Bynes as the school’s antagonistic “Jesus freak,” an inverse Penny Pingleton.  Though the film relies on Olive’s webcam as a narrative guide, it’s a bad gimmick that works because of Stone’s aforementioned charm.  While Easy A may not yet be a classic like 10 Things I Hate About You, it deserves to stand in those ranks.

Spider-Man 2 (2004) – Under the capable direction of Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire’s second outing as Peter Parker stood for a long time as arguably the best comic book film (up until, y’know, The Dark Knight), and it’s still exceptionally strong almost a decade later.  Here we see the classic “second film” plotline of the hero questioning his place in society, finding trouble navigating the disjunct between secret identity and public persona, even – channeling the famous comic plotline – quitting the hero game for a time.  This thread is especially strong, ably guided by a strong screenplay which makes the webslinger’s struggle seem plausible but never forced.  Alfred Molina’s role as Doctor Octopus in particular contributes to the film’s success, layering the villain with a complicated mixture of pathos and psychosis.  Spider-Man 2 makes the smartest choice of all, which is to play itself almost completely straight, save for J.K. Simmons’s spot-on performance as J. Jonah Jameson (note to the rebooters – bring him back at all costs).  And if Spider-Man 2 is indeed a perfect superhero film, it’s because it avoids the temptation of the sequel to replicate and overfill, instead moving the series in a new direction and allowing its plotlines to breathe.  Reflecting on this film makes me think about the very nature of good reviews; it’s difficult to reach my standard 250 words because the film is exceptional.  In the words of Stan Lee, ’nuff said?

Spider-Man 3 (2007) – Take a breather.  Spider-Man 3 is not as bad as we remember.  The film is flawed, to be sure, but it’s not irredeemable; had it not been preceded by Spider-Man 2, things may have seemed different, but the film certainly suffers by comparison to its antecedent.  For the first hour, the film is strong, among the best of Raimi’s trilogy; consumed by revenge, Spider-Man hunts The Sandman while under the influence of a malicious alien symbiote which feeds on his vengeance and budding narcissism.  But the film escapes Raimi’s control near the beginning of the second act; the film is overfull, with Bryce Dallas Howard miscast as Gwen Stacy, who literally has nothing to do in this movie and whose absence would have no effect on the finished product.  What’s more, we have three villains (Sandman, Venom and New Goblin) who never get fully developed beyond shallow and poorly scripted motivations.  Worse, the film badly fumbles the symbiote plotline, opting for slapstick and easy laughs instead of focusing on the internal perversion and darkening of Spider-Man.  How much better might the film have been if we got a truly frightening Symbiote Spider-Man rather than the Emo Peter Parker we found tousling his hair and thrusting his pelvis?  What’s good about the previous films still holds – J.K. Simmons still aces his part, Thomas Haden Church as Sandman is another great villain – but Spider-Man 3 has a strong first act but spirals out of control like the Goblin’s glider.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (1987)

I've already given Evil Dead a great review for being fun and frightening, with all the shine of a great Hollywood camp classic. Unfortunately, by the time Evil Dead II came around, the zombie-fied adventures of Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell - a man with so much camp cred, they put it in his name) are wearing a bit of tarnish.

After a mildly disorienting recap of the first film (director Sam Raimi, unable to reuse footage from the first film due to a rights conflict, had to film new footage recapping the first film), we pick up right where we left off - with a mysterious force attacking Ash (Campbell) just as new faces are coming to the haunted cabin in the woods. Along the way, Ash encounters a(nother) demon in the fruit cellar and has to cope with the infection of his own hand, which goes rogue in top slapstick form.

Evil Dead II delves more into the mythology of the franchise, exploring in greater detail what the creepy creatures are and where the Necromicon (Book of the Dead) came from. This attention to detail - and the increased appearance of stop-motion and body-suit monsters - ends up hurting the film, distracting us from the emotional heart of the movie: namely, Ash and the four new forest-going folks. Where the first movie kept the invading forces a mystery - and rightly so (see The Strangers for the utmost in anonymous villainy) - Evil Dead II's interest in world-building seems forced and self-conscious.

Perhaps the creatures would have worked if they looked more realistic. The first film's creatures were predominantly just the actors wearing ooky makeup once their characters became infected. Here we have a full-figured rubber suit living in the fruit cellar and a headless stop-motion skeleton in the woods, as well as a Harryhausen-esque hydralike creature attacking Ash at the climax. And don't get me started on the incarnation of evil that appaears at the end of the film, which looks something like a ridiculous cross between The Blob, Starro the Conqueror, and Spidertron from Power Rangers. Keeping it real rather than resorting to fantastic creatures might have helped the film.

But Campbell still keeps it light as Ash, inciting a decent amount of guffaws - particularly at his antics once his right hand becomes infected. And it takes a special kind of camp to strap a chainsaw to your arm (is this where Cherry Darling's gun leg was born?) and deliver the line "Groovy!" without destroying the audience's experience. So kudos to Campbell.

As sequels go, this isn't the worst I've seen. Evil Dead II is probably on the level of Attack of the Clones as far as sequels go; it takes a while to get going, but the same charm from the first movie is still present and the ending is wow-inducing, setting up perfectly for the third installment in the series, Army of Darkness. Groovy, indeed.


Evil Dead II was initially released unrated, but the creature violence (graphic blood of all kinds of colors) and gruesome shadowplay (mostly involving chainsaws) would land it a hard R rating today, with the help of some strong language.

The Evil Dead (1981)

Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead is without a doubt one of the most disgusting movies I've seen in my life. Yet, for all the blood, gore, and effluvium copiously flowing through the film, I couldn't tear myself away.

I couldn't stop laughing!

It's kind of funny that I'd resume my reviewing duties with a look at a cult classic almost thirty years old, but then I have a habit of seeing these "golden oldies" too late (I'm reminded of the Jim Gaffigan bit where he sees Heat and wants to talk about it, only to find all his friends saw the film six years ago - a plight I'm now in with that exact movie). But after watching The Evil Dead, I'm not surprised that Bruce Campbell and the character "Ash" are cult favorites. After a lackluster experience with Mulberry Street, I was looking for a startling and severely nauseating horror flick, and Raimi delivered.

It's difficult for me, without a thorough knowledge of the genre, to separate what's innovative from what's cliche, so I won't suggest such distinctions. Ash (Campbell) and four of his buddies are spending some time in an abandoned cabin in the middle of some undeniably haunted woods when the spirits are awakened by a tape recording and begin to attack the five youths. It's a simple premise, one that Raimi executes more than adequately.

This is, after all, a horror film, so the acting isn't Oscar caliber; Campbell approaches credibility, but the star acting comes from the "Fake Shemps" screaming and writhing as the epnoymous zombies. As a horror film, though, there's blood -and plenty of it. Deft cinematography and edgy camera angles bring more terror to the film than the admittedly dated special effects could. The first thirty minutes of the movie are not the best; the exposition sputters and dies a few times, delivering a few attempts at jump moments that flop and leading me to question whether I should give up the film before too long. Once the audio tape is found and one of the girls returns from a disorienting encounter in the woods, however, I was on solid ground.

I asked at the beginning why it was this particular film that brought me back to the reviewing fold. Here's the short answer - this is the Pirates of the Caribbean of zombie films. By this I mean that it doesn't take itself too seriously, but you'll take it seriously enough to have a good time with it - that is, don't be surprised if you're cringing one second and laughing the next. I sure did; those in the house with me when I watched it were flabbergasted by my uncharacteristic loudness during the film, groaning in disgust, reeling with nausea, doubled over with laughter. I had a blast with this film. I suppose, by reviewing it, I hope you will too.

The Evil Dead bore an NC-17 rating on its original release, though the DVD is unrated. Brutally gory scenes of zombie violence, as well as some partial nudity early in the film, would probably garner it an R rating today.

Spider-Man (2002)

A great many people will credit Bryan Singer's 2000 film X-Men with saving the superhero genre from the ignominy of Schumacher. To be certain, the X-Men franchise proved that comic book movies could be taken seriously. Yet I was always slightly more partial to Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. Maybe that's unfair, because I own both movies and rewatch them every so often.

Perhaps what makes Spider-Man the stronger of the two is its direct handling of "the origin story." Raimi walks us through the ins and outs of Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire, who seems like he was birthed by Stan Lee's original comic book), so that by the time he's bitten by the radioactive spider we feel intimately acquainted with the human side of the character.

And while Ian McKellan is a brilliant Magneto, nothing beats the almost inhuman split personality that Willem Dafoe delivers as Norman Osborne, alias The Green Goblin. Alternating between a desperate businessman and a maniacal fiend, Dafoe is at his peak here. His ability to deliver on multiple emotions in the same scene - as in the mirror scene here - should come as no surprise; Dafoe played Detective Kimball in the 2000 cult classic American Psycho, where he acted his part in three different ways (1 - positive of a character's guilt, 2 - positive of his innocence, and 3 - uncertain either way), edited together to allow the viewer not to get a grasp on his character.

The dialogue here is a little hammy, but one has to remember that it's based on a Stan Lee comic book. As Lee's famous creation The Thing might say, 'nuff said. What the dialogue does exceptionally well, though, is capture the first-person narration that comic books provide more readily than movies. Maguire's narration isn't awkward (as Kevin Costner's is in Dances with Wolves) or stilted (Sin City, though narrated poetically, left something to be desired with the inflection of its narrators).

And as a piece of art, the movie just looks good. The red and blue costume of our Friendly Neighborhood Web-Slinger stands out in stark contrast to the Green Goblin's... well, green suit. Sunlight on New York never looked so beautiful. And Kirsten Dunst, who's otherwise dull, glows in this movie. Maybe it's the red hair.

One can't critically review Spider-Man without at least touching on J.K. Simmons's spot-on performance as grizzly newspaperman J. Jonah Jameson. If Maguire was born of the pages of Marvel Comics, Simmons was the inspiration, because he couldn't be more flawless. Scene-stealing has never seen the likes of a performance like this and indeed probably never will. (Though I should give "props" to Cillian Murphy's scintillating turn as Dr. Crane / The Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan's 2005 Batman Begins, which may be the best comic book movie ever... until its sequel dethrones it)

Speaking of great comic book movies, Spider-Man 2 is generally considered to be among the best, if not THE best. Then came Spider-Man 3, the universally deplored threequel that gave us the travesty that is a disco-dancing Emo Parker. Try to forget that. The first film was a powerhouse. But "With great power comes great responsibility."