In Which We Meet Our Friends In New Orleans

Bye Girl

by ETHAN PETERSON

Girls Trip
dir. Malcolm D. Lee
122 minutes

Ryan (Regina Hall) gives out two lectures at the beginning of Girls Trip. The first is to her white assistant Liz (Kate Walsh) who uses a lot of African-American slang and buzzwords around her boss. Since they will be spending the weekend at the Essence Festival in Louisiana, she warns Liz to stop saying these racist things, since she will be around people who might be offended by them. Liz accepts her admonition, while saying farewell to Ryan by stating, "Girl, bye."

The second speech is to her friend Sasha (Queen Latifah) who runs a gossip blog. She criticizes Sasha for abandoning real journalism in her crusade for clicks, posting negative stories about celebrities that are sometimes nasty and unkind. Sasha does not really justify her occupation, but explains that she does this work in order to pay the rent on what looks to be a $4.5 million apartment.

In this lavish home, Sasha has no less than three desktop computers next to each other. Since she has nothing in the way of a staff, it is unclear what she uses these different terminals for. Ryan invites her to the Essence Festival, where she hopes to find a juicy story that will increase her pageviews. Fortunately, this bizarre character motivation is not really a huge part of Girls Trip, and Sasha later shuts down her blog, unhappy with her choice of work.

Anyway, Ryan is generally upset for most of Girls Trip. Surrounded by some of the finest black actresses of her generation, Hall (Scary Movie) struggles intensely as the centerpiece of her friend group, which calls itself the Flossy Posse. It is never mentioned why these four women adopted this name in the first place, but their FP necklaces and vests are very charming in the miasma of bright colors and alcohol that is New Orleans.

Director Malcolm D. Lee displays one image of the ladies in front of the Louisiana Superdome that is particularly heartwarming at the beginning of Girls Trip; this is later contrasted with the renovation of the building and the sale of the naming rights to Mercedes-Benz.

Everything went corporate, you see, even African-American culture. Ryan's husband Stewart (a tragically bad Mike Colter) is a former NFL tight end who is cheating on her with a model named Simone (Deborah Ayorinde). He impregnates the lovely young woman.

Ryan, unaware of this development, and incapable of having children herself, smashes the woman's head on a bar at the unexpectedly violent conclusion to a dance contest. Very little attention is paid to this aspect of Girls Trip, but her treatment of Simone is pretty horrid and possibly worthy of prosecution. Ryan tries to paper over the problems in her marriage by hooking up with a bass player, although he is not super into it.

It is pretty hard to watch Regina Hall's scenes in Girls Trip, because her character is completely unlikable and seems to be kind of a nasty jab at Beyonce. Fortunately, Girls Trip is saved by the rest of the Flossy Posse, composed of Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Dina (Tiffany Haddish).

Both women are far more complicated and entertaining than their showbiz friends, and the contrast between the two types of people begins to make the parade of celebrity cameos in Girls Trip feel quite hollow. So much of the film seems like a series of segments from E! News, about people whose entire purpose in life seems to be getting publicity for themselves.

Small moments, like when Lisa talks to her children or Dina is fired from her job are absolutely the best parts of Girls Trip, where the edges of an actual film seem to encroach on the milquetoast main conflict. Haddish's raunchy humor correctly takes all the attention, but she also listens and responds to her fellow performers with adeptness and grace. Besides when Jada Pinkett Smith gives a guy a blowjob with a grapefruit on his dick, it is the most exciting things ever get in New Orleans.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which Maybe Andrew Garfield Should Have Been The Last

Kids

by ETHAN PETERSON

Spider-Man: Homecoming
dir. Jon Watts
133 minutes

Peter Parker (Tom Holland) looks really old for high school, let alone to be a sophomore. Fortunately, his love interest in Spider-Man: Homecoming, the most "How do you do, fellow kids?" of perhaps any movie, is Liz (Laura Harrier) who is an absolutely mind-boggling 27 years old. At least director Jon Watts gives us the courtesy of never having Liz and Peter touch at all, possibly because on some level that would be child endangerment. When Peter finds out that Liz's father is arms dealer Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), he leaves a dance they were scheduled to attend and goes off to kill her daddy. This is a very confusing movie, even more confusing than Inception or Cars 3. Fortunately I am here to break down everything that happened for you, so you can sit back and marvel at how Robert Downey Jr. gets paid for acting.

Let me switch the discussion to a character called MJ (Zendaya Coleman), a classmate of Peter Parker's. MJ is one of Peter's two friends, because good-looking white guys whose physiques resemble professional wrestlers are regularly relegated to being bullied by Latinos. In one important scene, MJ is reading W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, which is not only utter shit, but is completely unrelated to what MJ is actually interested in. Probably the filmmakers chose the novel because it appears by its title to be about social concerns, but it is actually about no such thing.

In one key scene, MJ is hanging around the Washington Monument. She refuses to go up its elevator system, claiming that she is choosing to do so because the structure was built by slaves. This is not even true, but it makes for a funny line. The scene is really notable because it is the longest sentence she is allowed to utter in Spider-Man: Homecoming. She never addresses Peter Parker directly, speaking to him only as a unit with his Filipino friend, Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), with whom Parker shares his important secret.

Not content with one Mary Sue in this deeply misguided portrait of Queens, NY, which looks like a lot more like Beverly Hills, Liz appears one day in the hall. Although 27 and the tallest student in this high school, she is still the captain of the school's science team, and she clearly has a good head on her shoulders. Despite this, Peter never confides anything of what he discovers about her father to her, or asks for her advice. She is just a girl in a bathing suit, and Watts makes sure to squeeze in a scene where we see her sashay down a hallway to the pool in her one piece. Later, Peter observes her in the water from the hotel's roof.

Her father's crime is this: he discovers some alien technology left over from the unsuccesful Chitauri invasion of New York. He decides to repurpose what he finds as weapons, and he sells them to whoever wants them. Perhaps he does not vet his clients very closely, since one of them, played by Donald Glover, appears to be a ne'er do well of some kind. Others use the weapons to rob an ATM, where Parker discovers them.

Although the weapons are dangerous, they are most notable for being very effective in robberies. In their lethality they are no more special than munitions and firearms widely available today. To purchase such things for small crimes or acts of violence would be silly; they would only be useful to cut into a bank's vault and steal what was in there. Such money is insured, and anyway the organizations that hold it are not really in need of protection by a high-schooler.

Theft is a disturbing crime, and the deprivation of property is awful. However, Peter Parker is the one who deprives Toomes not only of his property, but his livelihood as well. It is not even wholly clear what Toomes did that is prosecutable, let alone worthy of being killed, which he thankfully is not in this movie. Combining this debatable criminality with the fact that Peter maintains a vague romantic interest in the man's daughter, and you have a deeply intriguing moral dilemma.

Instead, Spider-Man: Homecoming elides over this issue rather quickly. Parker causes hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to city and private property trying to prevent the sale of a few guns. (This is never mentioned because it is the central and only theme of Avengers: Age of Ultron.) The most amusing of these events is when he destroys the Staten Island Ferry for some reason, endangering over 100 lives before Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) shows up and saves the day.

Downey Jr. looks very old at this point, and is wisely no longer interested in portraying this character. Not coincidentally, no one is very interested in writing for it either, and the ostensible "comedy" in Spider-Man: Homecoming could not fall more flat. Downey Jr. even looks weirdly upset at points, and replacing him for the scenes they did not want to pay him for is his assistant, Happy (Jon Favreau), who is actually a good performer but never establishes any kind of deeper relationship with Peter.

Sam Raimi's Spiderman films struck a very weird tone and were the ultimate seed for the destruction of the character, since ultimately Parker became a parody of himself permanently ensconced in childhood. Despite the horror that was Spiderman 3, at least Parker had relationships with people and there were those in his life that he truly cared about, that he lived for. The death of his uncle motivated his desire to save innocents, and finding a woman with whom he could share everything was on some level his basic reason to continue living.

This Peter Parker is actually a sociopath in the making. He has one person he sort of cares about, his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), who he treats like complete shit. He can barely even listen to what she is saying during the one dinner they have in Spider-Man: Homecoming, which occurs at a Thai restaurant and is merely a pretext for an Asian waiter to admire May. The conflict between Aunt May and Tony Stark really worked in Captain America: Civil War, so of course there is none of that here. When she finds out that Peter skipped out on a school trip and was rewarded with detention for cutting class, May's response is to kiss him on the head and close the door to his room.

On some level, a movie has to be about something. It can't just be an origin story for Parker's participation in the next Avengers movies. Now that Joss Whedon has switched over to DC for Justice League and Batgirl, Kevin Feige has a group of directors that are passable technicians. Spider-Man: Homecoming's action is rather pedestrian compared to what the brothers Russo are planning to offer, and the writing is nowhere close to what Whedon was able to manage. It's fine to barrel through various plots that were offered in the comics decades ago, since they will be completely fresh to the fellow kids, but is the plan to strip them of artistic integrity completely as well? At least James Gunn's movies have a story: the disastrously dull Spider-Man Homecoming cannot even manage that.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

 

In Which Preacher Becomes A Cross For Ruth Negga To Bear

Prayer for the Dying

by ETHAN PETERSON

Preacher
creators Sam Catlin, Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
AMC

"Wouldn't it be great," said no one ever, "if we introduced the entire cast of a rural Texas town, and then savagely murdered them at the end of an anticlimactic first season of this adaptation of a graphic novel no one in their right mind has ever read to completion?" Garth Ennis' writing on his long-form comic Preacher always paled to his run on The Punisher. The difference between the two stories was crucial: one story, Preacher, believed that it was hilarious, and the other took itself seriously.

Preacher was not hilarious, and decades after its original publication the shock value has largely worn off as well. Sadly, the same is true of this second season of Preacher, airing on AMC. Through three episodes of this generic gods and monsters story, there has been exactly one moment worth savoring. Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper) is wandering aimlessly around New Orleans, which looks something like a sewer. He asks everyone he sees if they know where God is, and boy does he ask a lot of people this. Amazingly, no one wants to talk about the subject with Jesse, which runs counter to my experience of the American South.

Eventually he arrives at a bartender eager to help him find God. They take him to the basement, where a card-carrying member of the AARP hands him a blue dildo and shows him this:

You see God is Dog backwards. This would maybe be good for half a laugh, except Preacher refers to this knee-slapper like three more times. This humorous moment was preceded by the intro to the episode, wherein a teen girl shot herself in the head with a shotgun because she kissed a friend of hers.

Preacher had an intriguing slate of characters they decided to kill off; I still don't quite understand why they thought it was necessary to do this so soon. Lucy Griffiths played this really attractive churchgoer, for example. We are left with Jesse's two traveling companions: Tulip (Ruth Negga) who would be somewhat interesting if she were not hopelessly devoted to Jesse already, and the vampire Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) who transparently explains every single emotion and thought that comes into his head. These two dullards turn Preacher into the biggest snoozefest of a road trip you can imagine.

Included to spice things up are Jesse's various enemies, who virtually all resemble caricatures of Nazis. It's weird to see the malefactors that Ennis came up with, since the villains of The Punisher are all very subtle: a whoremaster with a nose for business, a Soviet general with a novel concept of patriotism, a fearful, homosexual spy. I can think of many plausible enemies of God, but the only ones who could really manifest themselves as a threat to Him are human, since they cannot conceive of the fullness of His existence.

Instead a litany of angels and demons are paraded before us. They cannot die, but they can be rendered inert, like a dangerous gas. They have no individual agency that could lead to a meaningful choice; instead their are destined to have problems identical to those they sought to overcome at the moment of their creation. This gives Preacher all the narrative momentum of a Saturday morning cartoon series.

Jesse's essential power, of course, is that he can make any human being do exactly as he wishes. This is a gimmick entertaining for a scene or maybe half a scene. Sometimes his instructions have slightly unintended consequences, but mostly they afford him a slight advantage in combat or a way to put an end to any pending negotiation. How they turned the idea of a reverend who could fight and have sex into such a boring production I will never fully understand.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.