Annette (2021, Leos Carax)

Right up until the end, it seems like Annette will maintain some level of success solely due to the audacity of the project. It’s a musical set in Hollywood, where an edge lord white male comedian (Adam Driver) marries a beloved singer (Marion Cotillard). Only he’s got a shelf life because he’s always trying to offend, and she doesn’t really want to play Hollywood mom. The movie’s terrible about delineating the present action, but basically, they get married right away because he’s knocked her up.

Their child, titular Annette is mostly a puppet, so you don’t see Driver and Cotillard being shitty rich and famous people to a real toddler. The puppetry is fine but never great. Kind of like the film at its best; it’s sometimes fine, never great. Well, except the opening musical number, which has the entire cast walking down the street singing, and it’s actually good. People don’t just seem to be enjoying themselves, they seem to enjoy being part of an ensemble.

Annette’s got a lot of problems. It’s a long and tedious melodrama, Simon Helberg is terrible as the second act foil, the songs are entirely naturalistic, Driver’s middling, Cotillard’s underwhelming and deceptively presented, the script’s craven, but the worst problem is how little anyone interacts. It’s a musical where–outside people singing at each other every fifteen minutes–everyone’s doing solos. Cotillard’s got the voice for it, but the songs are wanting. Driver could probably get away with it if the writing were better, but it’s not, so he’s just a bore.

Not to mention he’s a bore of a comedian too. Annette can present Cotillard as a good singer because she’s, you know, singing well. Driver’s comedy bits? He abuses the audience, they cheer, he moons them, they cheer, he does a ten-minute set and bounces, they cheer. When he has his eventual fall, he can’t figure out why they didn’t like his shitty new material, and it’s a valid question; it’s no worse than his other material. In fact, even if it’s misogynistic, it’s at least ambitious. But writers Ron Mael and Russell Mael have no idea how to write funny stand-up or even potentially funny stand-up. Director Carax tries to stylize the sequences to cover for the conceit requiring such a leap, but there’s no way to cover for it.

Then when it turns out part of the plot involves Driver actually being an abusive white male edge lord comic? It just seems mercenary and exploitative. Given the second act is all about Driver and Cotillard discovering their kid has a fantastic ability—other than being an animate puppet—and Driver wants to exploit her too… I mean, join the club. There’s nothing not exploitative in Annette.

The finale tries hard for a big, revelatory moment, but Carax completely whiffs it. Sort of understandably, it’s a terrible scene, but it drags Annette down the rest of the way. It’d been teetering for over an hour, and it’s the final drop. Maybe if Helberg were even mildly okay, but part of the script involves no one acting with any sense while singing about why they should be acting with sense; Cotillard only does it once; Helberg does it for every single one of his scenes. So it goes from disappointing to annoying to appalling.

Though the film does make its ickiest swing with Helberg. At first, it seems so icky it couldn’t possibly be intentional, then everyone starts singing about the icky, and it’s hard not to sympathize with Driver. And Driver’s profoundly unsympathetic. Like, the movie’s unsympathetic because it’s so craven and cheap in the narrative, but Driver’s always an apparent bastard. But even a bastard can be sympathetic, apparently.

Mostly good photography from Caroline Champetier. Sometimes she and Carax run afoul of digital video constraints, but they’ve also got some good-looking sequences. Otherwise, it’s not technically notable. Carax’s direction is fine, but he’s got a wide berth.

Annette’s interesting but not for any good reasons.

Annihilation (2018, Alex Garland)

The two most bewildering things about Annihilation are director Garland’s inability to frame for Panavision aspect ratio—did cinematographer Rob Hardy just not want to tell him he was reusing the same three close-up shots, with his subject on one side of the frame, looking off, the other three-quarters empty, or did Hardy not see a problem with it (given the amount of post-production filtering and CG enhancing, it’s hard to guess what they actually shot)—and Jennifer Jason Leigh being a supporting player and not the lead.

Natalie Portman is the lead of Annihilation. She’s a Johns Hopkins professor, married to a special forces guy (Oscar Isaac), who has been dead for a year. We know he’s been dead for a year because Garland (as screenwriter, adapting a novel) has a whole bunch of exposition dumps in the film. We’ve already seen a meteor (or something) crash into the planet Earth, targeting a lighthouse because… V’Ger had a series of romance novel covers on it too and then Portman in an isolation room, with a fantastic Benedict Wong interrogating her, then we flashback to before the isolation room, after the meteor. Isaac’s been dead a year, Portman’s friend at work, David Gyasi, invites her to a barbecue but she can’t because it’s finally time to paint she and Isaac’s bedroom.

Cue flashbacks of Portman and Isaac’s idyllic, playful sex life.

We’ll soon find out—because Isaac interrupts her painting the bedroom—he hasn’t been dead, he’s just been missing. In fact, the Army hasn’t even officially classified him M.I.A.—though Annihilation plays real loose with what one might consider military protocol, there are Chuck Norris movies with a heck of a lot more reasonable verisimilitude as far as military operations go. But something’s obviously wrong with Isaac, even before he starts bleeding uncontrollably. When Portman tries to take him to the hospital, a bunch of stormtroopers intercept the ambulance and kidnap them.

She wakes up in what seems like a hospital room, talking to a psychiatrist (Leigh), and quickly learns Isaac had been missing because he went inside the strange, growing zone of something or other around the lighthouse where the meteor (or whatever) hit in the opening. It’s been three years, this zone, called the Shimmer, has increased exponentially in size and overtaken the towns, military bases, shacks, and who knows what else. No one has ever come back from the Shimmer, except Isaac (and Portman, as the frequent flash forwards to the interrogation remind—it’s not a bookend device, but a narration one)—and, well, Leigh’s putting the next team together.

Leigh, secretly dying of cancer, is sick of sending men to their apparent deaths and is going to go in now. It’s going to be an all-female team; her, paramedic Gina Rodriguez, scientist Tuva Novotny, other scientist Tessa Thompson. And wouldn’t Portman make a great fifth, being a not just a Johns Hopkins biologist, but also a former soldier. There’s a (bewildering) scene where Novotny asks Portman about her CV and Portman says she was in the military so Novotny can ask which branch so Garland can kill another fifteen or thirty seconds of the runtime, which is supposedly okay because the mise en scène of life in the Shimmer—a Florida swamp with lots of colorful plant mutations–not to mention Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s emotive score, is so compelling.

Is the Shimmer visually compelling? Sure? Garland’s not great at establishing shots. Annihilation feels very much like someone aping Terrence Malick aping 2001 but without the commitment to either. Mark Digby’s production design is good enough it’s too bad Garland’s not patient enough to explore it. Whether Digby is a Vertigo Swamp Thing fan or it just happens to always looks like panels (or covers) from that series aside… it’s a great proof of concept for an adaptation of the comic because a bunch of it is straight from those comics. But Garland avoids visualizing too much, instead sticking close to Portman’s perception of things unless he’s got to manipulate the audience to make the next narrative twist work.

At a certain point, Annihilation peaks and then plateaus. The thirty minutes (it runs just under two hours) before they get into the Shimmer isn’t great, especially since Portman’s protagonist is flat. We keep learning more and more about her and Isaac throughout and all of it’s boring. Same goes for the rest of the team (save Leigh, who gets so little onscreen character development it does gin up curiosity). But Novotny, Rodriguez, and Thompson? They’re shadows of caricatures, Rodriguez and Thompson the most. Maybe Garland couldn’t figure out how to write them in a reality where no one in the world noticed a whole section of Florida disappear, which would be visible from space. Maybe he really thought Portman was somehow the most compelling.

Doesn’t matter. Like his framing, like his downgrading of Leigh’s character, like his choice of composers… he was just wrong and it doesn’t work.

Kind of like Oscar Issac doing a Southern accent. No matter how much CGI you throw at it, no matter how much scary gross you make it, somethings just aren’t going to work.

Annihilation desperately wants to be heady, lush, hard sci-fi and is willing to sacrifice everything else to get there.

Angola Janga: Kingdom of Runaway Slaves (2019)

Angola Janga is historical fiction. It falls victim to a few of the genre’s main pitfalls. Cartoonist Marcelo D'Salete has done his research, he knows all the facts. And he moves within them. With the single exception of flashing forward to modern-day, urban Brazil (which turns out to be a bad move), D’Salete does it all straight. He stays within those fact lines. And Janga suffers for it.

Also, it suffers from the translation’s subtle Kingdom of Runaway Slaves. The actual translation of the original subtitle would be something like A History of Palmares. Now, maybe Fantagraphics is thinking American audiences won’t know Palmares—it’s a quilombo or a settlement of escaped slaves in 17th century Brazil. Palmares lasted eighty-nine years before the Portuguese destroyed it.

D’Salete doesn’t do a great job, in the comic, of laying out Palmares or the kingdom. The supporting cast isn’t interchangeable because there’s not really a supporting cast. Not of the escaped slaves. There’s a bunch of Portuguese supporting players, but it’s a core group of African survivors.

The comic starts in 1673. Palmares started in 1605. So D'Salete is skipping a lot of the formative stuff, because it’s not about the formative stuff. It’s not really a “History” of Palmares. Not like you’d know anything more about the historical facts. D’Salete, as an artist, also isn’t big on aging his cast, so they never feel like living people. And D’Salete’s got a great essay about the history. Mixing text and comics might be the better way of conveying the story. Though Angola Janga’s story also falls victim to that other big historical fiction pitfall… the wrong protagonist. D’Salete picks the wrong guy to follow, even though the whole thing is structured to follow this guy. He lacks personality, even as D’Salete keeps throwing him curveballs, the protagonist never reacts in an interesting way. Meanwhile all the Portuguese get great characterizations—with a single exception, they’re all exceptionally bad people—D’Salete gives them a lot of personality. But the actual good guys, D’Salete tries to humanize them through their faults. It’s very weird.

Again, D’Salete’s sticking to the facts and his cast are historical figures but… he’s got no insight into them. Hence why a more mixed media approach might sit better. Especially given there are leaps ahead in time between every chapter and no time spent connecting to the previous one’s cliffhanger or finish.

Art-wise, D’Salete’s fine. He’s best, both in art and writing, when doing the battle sequences. They’re incredible and make you wish he just did a war comic out of it instead of the story of the settlement’s downfall. The history is full of doubt, cowardice, and betrayal. D’Salete never makes it feel melodramatic but he also never makes it compelling.

It ought to at least be compelling. The battle stuff is phenomenal; compelling. The rest is obviously interesting, but not interesting in its execution.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018, Peyton Reed)

Despite being in the first scene in the movie and sharing most of Paul Rudd’s scenes with him, Evangeline Lilly is definitely second in Ant-Man and the Wasp. The film gives her her own action scenes–some truly phenomenal ones–but very little agency. She’s entirely in support of dad Michael Douglas; even after it’s clear Douglas–in the past–was an egomaniac who hurt lots of people, it’s not like Lilly has any reaction to it. Or the film for that matter. During the scene maybe, with Rudd laughing about what a dick Douglas has always been, someone getting very upset remembering how Douglas treated them, Douglas looking bemused, and Lilly looking vacant. There are a few of those scenes and they really define the film’s dramatic qualities.

It doesn’t have many.

It’s got a lot of humorous qualities and a lot of charming ones, but not dramatic. Nothing ever gets as emotionally intense as the first act, in flashback (either straight flashback or dream sequence). Even when there’s all the danger in the world, as Rudd, Lilly, and Douglas race against time to save Lilly’s mother (and Douglas’s wife), Michelle Pfeiffer, from being trapped in the Quantum Zone. Realm. Sorry, Quantum Realm. There’s a lot of quantum things in Ant-Man and the Wasp, it’s hard to keep track.

But the film isn’t about dramatic possibilities so much as good-natured, comedic special effects action ones. There’s this omnipresent theme about parents disappointing children–Douglas and Lilly, Rudd and his daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson), not to mention the villain (Hannah John-Kamen), who’s got her own father issues. But if the film never acknowledges it’s a theme, is it really a theme? The screenplay (by five screenwriters) never worries about it and director Reed really doesn’t narrative echoes. It’s not his thing. His thing is humor and pacing and the film excels at both of them.

Because, even with those five writers–including Rudd–it’s not like there’s much depth to characterizations. Walton Goggins is one of the villains and he’s basically doing a really broad caricature of Walton Goggins being in a Marvel movie as a Southern tech-gangster. Randall Park plays a goofy FBI agent who Rudd keeps on one-upping and it’s even broader. Michael Peña excels with similar treatment; he’s always played for obvious laughs and Peña plays through, fully, successfully embracing it. Goggins and Park act obviously to the joke. Not Peña.

None of the leads have much heavy lifting either. Rudd and Lilly are so adorable–and find each other so utterly adorable–it’s hard not to enjoy every minute they spend together. Douglas is one note, but the script doesn’t really ask for much more. Pfeiffer does more in her two scenes than Douglas does in the entire film. And she doesn’t even do a lot.

Meanwhile, Larry Fishburne–as one of the many people Douglas screwed over in the past–is able to bring some gravitas to his part. He takes it seriously, even when no one asks him to do so.

But none of it really matters because everyone’s really likable, including villain John-Kamen (far less Goggins, who’s nowhere near as funny as he needs to be to warrant so much plot import), and Ant-Man and the Wasp is full of delightful special effects action sequences. Whether it’s when Lilly is shrinking down and growing big to kick ass in fight scenes, flying all over the place, throwing people all over, or when it’s Rudd growing big instead of shrinking down and using a flatbed truck as a scooter. Reed and the screenwriters know where to find every laugh, every smile–it doesn’t hurt Rudd and daughter Fortson have such cute scenes. Opening on Lilly, making the movie about her missing mother, her lost childhood, it almost seems like it’s a movie about daughters. Oh, right, John-Kamen too. But it’s not. It’s about being cute and funny. It’s never even heartwarming when it’s not cute. There’s not much depth to it.

And, for a movie without much depth, it’s an awesome time. The special effects sequences alone–it isn’t just the fight scenes with awesome shrinking and growing effects, it’s sight gags and car chases and everything else (not to mention adorable giant ants). The film’s inventive as all hell. Except with John-Kamen’s villain, who’s not just occasionally invisible, but also immaterial. Her powers make narrative sense, Reed doesn’t visualize them as well as the rest.

By the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp, you want another one. It’s a delightful, thoroughly competent amusement. Even if Christophe Beck’s score is never as good as it seems to be.

Angelic (2017) #3

It’s not a great issue of Angelic. It’s an all right issue, but it’s kind of an action-packed bridging issue. Spurrier’s just setting things up for next time. There’s trouble brewing with the flying monkeys. The flying manatees are lying to Qora, the good flying monkey girl. There are weaponized cats, who aren’t friendly.

The action is paced quite well. Even though the issue isn’t a substantial read and Wijngaard mostly impresses just because he can keep up with the story, it’s got a good pace. You keep turning pages, expecting something significant to happen.

And it doesn’t. There are all sorts of hints at significant things, but they aren’t the same as substantial moments in the comic.

I was hoping Angelic would be smooth sailing after its bumpy start and solid second issue. It appears it’s going to be bumpy throughout though.

Angelic 3 (November 2017)

And it doesn’t. There are all sorts of hints at significant things, but they aren’t the same as substantial moments in the comic.

I was hoping Angelic would be smooth sailing after its bumpy start and solid second issue. It appears it’s going to be bumpy throughout though.

CREDITS

Heirs and Graces, Part Three; writer, Simon Spurrier; artist, Caspar Wijngaard; letterer, Jim Campbell; publisher, Image Comics.

Angelic (2017) #2

Turns out all Angelic needed was some teched-out manatees to turn the book around. Young hero Qora is alone on the beach, waiting to be married off to an icky priest monkey. She just wants to keep her wings (she loses them at marriage). The manatees show up and offer her a deal–help them save their god.

Their god is a malfunctioning drone scanner robot thing; doesn’t matter.

Spurrier paces out the issue beautifully. The back and forth between the Mans (manatees) and Qora is great, with the young Monk (monkey–Spurrier doesn’t go too far off with the dialect and its eclectic nouns). And then the second half, with a Mans and Qora questing, is even better. Spurrier’s able to draw their characters out right away, all nature introduction stuff. Deft.

Lovely art from Wijngaard. He’s got a lot of concise detail, but with thick, emotive lines. Gives the book a lot of its feel for the talking heads. Manatees. Whatever.

Angelic just got a whole lot better.

Angelic 2 (October 2017)

Their god is a malfunctioning drone scanner robot thing; doesn’t matter.

Lovely art from Wijngaard. He’s got a lot of concise detail, but with thick, emotive lines. Gives the book a lot of its feel for the talking heads. Manatees. Whatever.

Angelic just got a whole lot better.

CREDITS

Heirs and Graces, Part Two; writer, Simon Spurrier; artist, Caspar Wijngaard; letterer, Jim Campbell; publisher, Image Comics.

Angelic (2017) #1

Angelic is simultaneously new and familiar. It’s post-apocalyptic, no people, just genetically altered animals. The villains are flying dolphins who hunt the winged monkeys. The winged monkeys live in a patriarchal society with a cult-like religion controlling everything. They look like Wizard of Oz winged monkeys, talk like Planet of the Apes. Well, writer Simon Spurrier gives them their own vocabulary with modified words, which they presumably learned themselves (because in being genetically modified, they learned to speak?).

The lead is a female monkey who doesn’t want to get her wings cut off, which is what happens to female monkeys when they have to become broodmares for some dude. The lead, Qora, is going to be broodmare for one of the high holies. She’s not thrilled. So she goes down to the sea shore to sulk and is attacked by a cyborg cat.

The cat’s real messed up. It appears to want pets.

And then she discovers the world is not what it seems.

Lovely art from Caspar Wijngaard. Spurrier’s writing is compelling enough; he pushes it with all the vocabulary, as the story doesn’t have enough weight to support it (yet). But Wijngaard makes up the difference.

Angelic’s all right.

Angelic 1 (September 2017)

The cat’s real messed up. It appears to want pets.

And then she discovers the world is not what it seems.

Angelic’s all right.

CREDITS

Heirs and Graces, Part One; writer, Simon Spurrier; artist, Caspar Wijngaard; letterer, Jim Campbell; publisher, Image Comics.