Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James Gandolfini who originated the Tony Soprano character in legendary fashion, doesn’t show up until the 52 minute mark and isn’t given much of anything to do. I can believe him as an uncomfortable teenager who becomes the Tony of the show eventually, but he never seems comfortable in the role. Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
5/10The Many Saints of Newark opens with Michael Imperioli, who played Christopher Moltisanti in “The Sopranos,” narrating about what will happen in the future and spoiling one of the show’s best plot points for seemingly no reason. Many Saints is a competent enough film, but I would strongly advise against watching it for that reason alone unless you’ve already seen the entire show. It was made exclusively for “Sopranos” experts, anyhow, and never makes any attempt to exist as its own piece of media.
Newark, July 12, 1967- A black cab driver named John William Smith is arrested and beaten by Newark police, kicking off the 1967 Newark riots. Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.), an associate of Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), joins the riots, and eventually flees the state to avoid a murder warrant. Moltisanti and the rest of the DiMeo crime family, including older characters who appear in “The Sopranos,” take advantage of the police’s increased focus on black Newarkers. Four years later, McBrayer returns and attempts to organize the remaining black community into a crime organization to rival the DiMeos, triggering a race war.
The director and the art director just had an argument about how many arms Carnage should have. Images courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.
1/10Venom was fun enough to be enjoyable though its flaws. That kind of good will doesn’t last.
San Francisco- Freelance reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy, who also has a story credit) works with the FBI to find the lost victims of serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson), because Kasady has decided that he and Brock are “kindred spirits” and he’ll speak to no one else. Kasady is found guilty of murder in a litany of unsolved disappearances thanks to Brock’s work, and the governor reinstates the death penalty in California specifically for his case. Visiting him as he’s about to be executed, Cummyeyes McGoo Venom (also voiced by Hardy), the alien symbiote that lives in Brock’s body, spawns into Kasady, creating Cummyeyes McGoo, Jr. Carnage (also voiced by Harrelson). The newly empowered Kasady breaks out and starts wreaking havoc in search of his long-lost love, Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris).
The amount of work I’d have to do to get all these reviews fully fleshed out before I have to leave for Venom: Let there be Carnage is gargantuan – love that word, so rarely get to use it in a sentence – and nobody went to see any of these movies anyway, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is still the no. 1 movie in the world somehow, so I’m going to cut myself some slack and just spit these out-
Image courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
Malignant 4/10Malignant is a wet, sloppy mess of a movie, and I would never call it good, but it brings me joy.
The core ennui of being a ‘90s child is watching things disappear.
This is most easily tracked through technology. Within our childhoods, we watched playing outside with neighborhood kids, maybe one of whom had an N64, turn into a kaleidoscope of different gaming systems, most of them played in private, all major investments that needed to be upgraded every five years or so. These miraculous toys of the future, things we loved and grew up with that partially defined our social circles, became “obsolete” within the span of half of our lives, roadside attractions whooshing past backseat car windows as a technological race we knew nothing of sped onward. Mobile phones, monstrous things that could barely be held onto but still had to be considered luxury items because of how few could afford them, became sleek handheld flip phones we were given “for emergencies,” a major threshold for the American teenager comparable to what cars used to be that represented our first measure of privacy and critical dating tools, and they have since become glass sandwiches of varying size that are considered critical teaching tools which we raise our own children with from birth. Computers and the internet went from science fiction to ubiquity seemingly overnight.
I was born in 1992, and having grown up through all this, I’ve always gravitated toward things that I can be comfortable will outlast me. These can be movies or classic literature and what they say about their time and place, news events that will go into history, or more often recently trying to directly seek out the spirit of a given place, that amalgamation of psychic energy that grows like a cancer anywhere people gather over time, but what underlies all of that is architecture. Architecture is the oldest form of mass media, of artistic expression that can affect an audience at scale. It defines the skyline, look and memory of a place, feeding and feeding from a city’s character, monoliths that inspire the art made in their shadows and can summon all the history of a place to mind with only their images.
9/11 was not just an attack on American soil, American people or the American psyche, but on American architecture. It was an attack of the American identity, on American engineering and artistry, on American permanence. What can anyone build now when titans such as these can be destroyed? What can I be sure will outlast me, what can a ‘90s child forever lost in time draw toward in a world where the twin towers are fallen?
3/10Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has a lot of good components, but they never really come together, and the put-together product is instead so forgettable you can sometimes forget you’re in the process of watching it. But the point wasn’t ever to make a good movie.
In Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung) finds a set of power Hung Ga rings that turn him into an invincible immortal and becomes China’s greatest warlord, building an organization of bandits that somehow has no formal governmental power despite hundreds of years of military rule over Southwest China. In 1996, after centuries of this, Xu finally notices a woman and settles down to raise a family with her.
In the present day, Xu Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) lives in San Francisco, estranged from his father and sister, Xu Xialing (Meng’er Zhang), when he’s suddenly attacked by Xu Wenwu’s assassins. Along with his life partner Katy (Awkwafina), Xu Shang-Chi returns to Macau to protect his sister and confront his father.
