Back to the Future: The Musical is nothing short of miraculous. It’s not that it took more than a decade to put together or that it was the movie’s original writer, director and composer who developed it. It’s not even that having found its lead cast in 2018, the show managed to keep them all for three years while we all waited out Covid. Because with this cast, you would want to hang on to them.
No, the miracle is that it’s just so good.
I tell a lie. Bad Nat. There are two miracles. The second is that they appear to not only have cloned Michael J Fox from 1986, they’ve improved him at the same time.
La la la! Here’s another Marvel movie! Yay! I love Marvel movies. I’m so looking forward to this! Wait… Shang-Chi? Who? What? Maybe even… why? Trailer, please… Huh. A couple of cameos by people I’m not that interested in, some okay martial arts, Awkwafina being annoying. Aren’t trailers supposed to make me want to watch a movie, not put me off?
It really was an unpromising start and when I sat down to watch Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), I was confidently expecting to be as underwhelmed as I was when I watched most of the Disney+ Marvel shows. Bar Black Widow (2020) and certain parts of WandaVision (Disney+), it’s been feeling like Marvel has been struggling to kickstart its franchise back into action, following the closure that Avengers: Endgame (2019) brought to its decade-long story.
Surprisingly for me at least, Shang-Chi manages to both restart that storyline and make us care about – and let’s be clear about this – an absolute nobody of the Marvel comics whom nobody but nobody outside of a comics shop has ever heard of. And who goes into comics shops?
It’s one of those movies that transcends many of its sillier foundations to become something much more. Shang-Chi, while by no means a threat to Shakespeare or Mamet in its writing, is fun, engaging, character- rather than punch-driven, and generally a pleasure to watch from start to finish – and beyond, because of the obligatory credit scenes.
So what did I watch in August? Not a lot, to be honest. This actually wasn’t for want of trying but there haven’t been any appetising-looking new TV shows for me to bite my teeth into, TBH. I’m still considering Vigil on BBC One, mind, because it has submarines in it.
There’s one other exception: yet another remake of Fantasy Island, this time for Fox.
I thought about watching that. Then decided not to. It was August after all, and if normality is going to reassert itself post-Covid, we have to reassert the old rules, too: start a new show in August and TMINE will ignore you.
I also realised there’s a whole bunch of shows that are coming back for second seasons that I can’t be bothered with either. So Stargirl on Amazon isn’t getting much love from me, either.
That meant I’ve only been watching a couple of the regulars, both superhero shows, one concluding, one returning.
Superman & Lois
Superman & Lois remained perfect almost to the end, even if Lovely Wife did watch five minutes of it and declare it “terrible”. I thought it was great. Thrilling and exciting, with Adam Rayner proving a wonderful villain. The finale suffered maybe a little from being a slight retread of a previous episode, copying its conclusion and get-out mechanism, but I don’t think it suffered too much from that.
If I had one niggle, though, it’s the final scene: I just didn’t care. The funeral was oddly moving, given what it was. That’s not my niggle. That person showed up. I didn’t care. It was anti-climactic and actually put me off from watching the next season. But only a bit. I’ll definitely be back.
Titans
Meanwhile, Titans is back, now on HBO Max in the US. The main cast are a bit jauntier and a bit less angsty than before, although the absence of both Raven and Donna Troy is a real detraction from the show. Where it works still is on its depiction of superheroes growing up and ageing. This is still very much a show about sidekicks who are now too old to be sidekicks and need to move out of their friends’ shadows – and superheroes who are now old to be doing anything much at all, really.
The problem is that this season so far has focused on the ‘birth’ of Red Hood. Those who know their comics will not be surprised by who that is and the show only takes a couple of episodes to reveal all there. More surprising is just how bleak and miserable it all is. People are dying and getting tortured. Batman’s off murdering people. Not even Scarecrow – Pete from Mad Men – can add any fun to things. It’s just so unpleasant.
So I’ve given up after four episodes. Guys, we’ve been through so much misery over the past year and a half, I’d just like to watch something fun, please. Thanks!
I’m not quite of the generation raised on video games – movies were still the dominant medium for me growing up, with TV there in the background, too. But I imagine that the members of Generation Alpha are going to be more video game-literate than we Millennials are cine-literate, and be able to quote the best scenes from Grand Theft Auto as easily as I can quote Notorious or When Harry Met Sally.
As such, Free Guy is taking a big chance: it’s a take-down of modern video games that ends up concluding that “video games would be better if they were more like documentary movies, wouldn’t they?” I wonder how well that will go down with its target audience – or will it just go over their heads? Or am I misjudging those viewers, all raised on Fortnite, who might even agree?
Free Guy takes as its basis the likes of The Truman Show (1998), The Lego Movie (2014) and Tron to give us ordinary guy Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a bank worker who lives in Free City, a town divided between those with really, really exciting lives (the sunglasses wearers) who are always zooming around at high speed, shooting things, ignoring the law and generally having fun; and the regular people, who all seem to do the same things day after day after day, often getting killed in the process, only to be reborn again the next day. Little does he know, he’s only a character in a video game and those people in sunglasses are the players.
But one day, he spots sunglasses-wearer Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) and realises she’s The One. Inspired, he changes his narrative and follows her. Then, when he acquires a pair of sunglasses himself, he learns the true nature of the world and decides to advance up the levels of the game to win her over.
Nevertheless, he’s still only a character in a video game, a video game run by the evil Taika Waititi (Green Lantern, Jojo Rabbit). So can Guy ever truly be free?
Pfft. You know how you can really like someone and want them to do well, and usually they’re so reliable, you never have to doubt them – and then they do something really dumb? No? Okay, just me then… Awks.
Normally for me, though, the Rock – aka Dwayne Johnson – is one of those people. He can sing in Moana, he can star in a terrible Fast and Furious spin-off, he can act with a giant CGI gorilla and I’ll not flutter an eye lash. No matter what movie he’s in, no matter how dumb it looks, it usually turns out to be somewhere between “better than I thought it was going to be” and “totes awesome!”
And Emily Blunt is one of those people, too. True, she was almost Black Widow in the Marvel movies before a scheduling conflict meant Scarlett Johansson had to step into the breach at the last minute to take her place – I am just not ready to imagine a world where that never happened, but I can forgive Blunt for something she never actually did. Isn’t that nice of me?
But apart from that near-slip from her, I’ve been able to rely solidly on Blunt’s presence in a movie since more or less The Devil Wears Prada (2006) to know it’s going to be in the above-mentioned quality bracket.
And now we have Jungle Cruise, in which would-be explorer-cum-scientist-cum-sufragette Blunt decides to head to South America in 1916 with her closeted brother (Jack Whitehall) in order to find a slightly magical flower that could cure all known diseases, if you can believe all the old parchments, maps and wives’ tales that she’s collected. There they meet Johnson – and his rival (Paul Giamatti) – and charter him and his tourist-attraction vessel to take them down the Amazon to find the flower.
There’s a couple of obstacles for them. Naturally, there’s headhunters and cannibals. There’s also the zombie-like conquistadors who first found the flower, led by Edgar Ramírez (American Crime Story). There’s also a relative of the German Kaiser (Jess Plemons) who wants to get the flower for himself and is in hot pursuit of Blunt in a surprisingly modern submarine, aided in his quest by some helpful bees.
