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 Aging Remains Difficult For Some

Children Get Older

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Captain America: Civil War
dir. Anthony Russo & Joe Russo
147 minutes

Hello, My Name Is Doris
dir. Michael Showalter
95 minutes

Getting older seems so difficult: unless things actually improve with age. Tony Stark and Doris Miller have lived substantially more than half their lives and they find the prospect of going on daunting. One thing is absurdly clear: they intend to make serious changes in their personalities in order to accommodate this new reality.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is consciously uncoupled from Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) when Captain America: Civil War begins. She was very unhappy when he murdered a generation of Eastern Europeans battling a robot voiced by James Spader. She was willing to accept his drinking and flirting with other women, but all the death really soured the relationship.

The primary relationship of Doris Miller (Sally Field) was with her mother. The woman was something of a pack rat, and Doris inherited some of her mother's inclinations while keeping her data entry job at an advertising agency. When the agency's new art director John (Max Greenfield) tells her that he likes her glasses, she becomes obsessed with him.

Tony Stark's obsessions take a different form. After the tragedy of the last Avengers film (it claimed Joss Whedon's credibility as well, a serious loss), Stark has kept his eye on a Queens teenager. He shows up at the boy's house, sits on his bed, and relays instructions as to what to tell his family and friends. This actually happens in Captain America: Civil War, the most tone deaf movie since Taken 2. But really, discovering Spiderman is only a distraction in Captain America: Civil War. Stark is most focused on subduing the will of another, less susceptible person.

Steve Rogers (a magnificent Chris Evans) holds things together by dint of his colossal charisma. Captain America: Civil War subtly alludes at a love relationship between himself and the winter soldier Bucky Brooks (Sebastian Stan) who he tries to protect from the government and the other Avengers when a man attempts to frame Bucky for a terrorist attack. The two make a very handsome couple, and short shrift is given to Rogers' beard Sharon Carter (a bloated looking Emily VanCamp), a disloyal intelligence operative.

Steve actually is quite old, and previous films chronicling his return to the world focused primarily on how he would adapt after being frozen or something. These jokes never made much sense, since besides the advent of the computer, almost nothing has changed in American life that cannot be understood by watching three hours of cable television.

All the people Steve cared about are dead besides his winter lover. Tony Stark was abandoned by his close ones by dint of his own behavior — except for his parents, who he lost at a young age before he could make them proud. His new family was more recently ripped from him when Pepper started dating her own male assistant, who was much more savvy when it came to understanding her idiosyncratic romantic requirements.

Stark's new family is a bunch of mutants. Most of them are men. He is not really effective at forming relationships with women; in previous films he simply harassed them into a disturbed submission. In Captain America: Civil War, he confines the telekinetic Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen, more radiant than ever) to her chambers with instructions for an android (Paul Bettany) not to let her out. He has reached an eerie detente with Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) who doesn't seem to view him as a romantic prospect whatsoever, despite the fact this was a key feature of the comic.

This is sad for Natasha, who plays the role of therapist for the disturbed people involved in these mass murders. Johansson tries really hard, but Mark Ruffalo is nowhere to be found and she has little chemistry with the other possibles. Her outfits are unfortunately mediocre, as if no one involved with this production even thought very much about her.

Captain America: Civil War is mostly focused on the men, which is fine, since Hello My Name Is Doris has enough to say about women for both movies. Sally Field works overtime here, oscillating facial expressions so that we can see she is more full of emotions than anyone else in her story. Without her vamping there would not be much to admire about Doris Miller.

When the object of Doris' affection finds love near a blonde woman with a questionable singing talent (Beth Behrs), Doris immediately plans to sabotage and ruin the happiness John has found. She posts lies on his facebook page in order to break up the lovely couple. We are still supposed to sympathize with her — I guess taking into consideration the questionable idea that the elderly are not fully responsible for their behavior.

Doris' friend Roz (an amazing Tyne Daly) is deeply worried about her disturbed infatuation. By the time we reach Doris' age, individuals of all genders should understand the meaning of this childish concept. Just as different substances scale as uniquely appetizing, so too do people. Roz no longer feels such elementary pangs of humanity for others; the self-acceptance she radiates seems to be what eventually gets Doris to act as a mirror.

There is still a wisdom in youth before it is corrupted by later events. In Captain America: Civil War, Nigerian king T'Challa (the mercurial Chadwick Boseman) sees a man kill his father so he reacts by heading off to repay the favor. Roz's granddaughter Vivian (Isabella Acres) possesses a similarly straightforward perspective as she counsels Doris on her stalking. In her world, if a guy pays attention to you, he probably likes you. It is only further on in our lives that attention is traded so easily, for so little in return.

When Tony Stark was young, people constantly observed him because he looked and sounded good. They required no other reason — what need would there be for one? After the basic impetus of beauty fades, human beings have a tough time adapting to any kind of indifference from the universe. We must be essential: not simply caught in the flow of our lives. The only pleasant surprise is that in these humbling moments we are most ourselves.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Can't Go Wrong" - You Won't (mp3)

"Friends in Exile" - You Won't (mp3)

In Which We Struggle To Leave A Voicemail

Hand-Squeezed

by JULIA CLARKE

Chef
dir. Jon Favreau
114 minutes

The last film I saw alone was American Hustle, and I'm still recovering from that requisite tsunami of depression. I saw Chef because I doubted it would have the same effect, and also Swingers has forever given me a soft spot for Jon Favreau. A friend once described him as "the moldy inside of a ripe English muffin," but that friend doesn't understand how a lady feels when a man wearing a tank top struggles to leave a voicemail. I maintain he's adorbs. 

Contrary to what the trailers suggest, Chef is less a "the higher they rise, the harder they fall" story so much as a tale about someone who makes hand-squeezed, chili-infused artisan lemonade out of lemons, with the  coaxing of his ex-wife Inez (Sofia Vergara). That coaxing was relentless and weirdly good-hearted, considering their divorce.

Chef Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) is head chef at an upscale Los Angeles restaurant where randomly Scarlett Johanasson is the hostess. She plays a hipster named Molly who sort of has a thing for him, although after sharing a joint they say "we told each other we wouldn't do this," and just like that, their relationship is drier than the cornstarch Carl and his son pour on their male parts on a particularly humid evening.

Once an inventive, passionate craftsman, Carl is now a cook forced by restaurant owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman) to put out what the regular crowd expects: some sort of caviar thing in an eggshell, a blah Italian entree, and a chocolate lava cake. 

On the day of a big critique from renowned critic Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt), Carl struts into the kitchen with heirloom tomatoes, an enormous pig carcass, and purple carrots. But Riva demands that he "play the hits" and stick to the usual menu, which, of course, makes Ramsey Michel roll his eyes and write a heinous review. He pans Carl's boring cooking, but perhaps more cuttingly, he says that Carl's weight gain is decidedly due to obligatory eating of what guests send back to the kitchen. 

Carl is outraged and has an in-restaurant meltdown captured by another patron's iPhone and quickly posted to YouTube. Even though there is no such thing as bad press, Carl's services are no longer needed, and after a brief battle with pride, he does what his ex-wife suggests: opens a food truck in Miami.

With nothing else to lose (people don't want to hire him after his YouTube performance), he follows her advice, and brings along his cute son Percy (Emjay Anthony), who proves amazingly adept at social media outreach. A former coworker Martin (John Leguizamo) joins in at the last second, and the three of them drive from Florida to LA, stopping in cool cities like Austin and NOLA to serve up Cuban sandwiches and whatever other variations on that theme Carl feels like because now he's finally cooking what he loves.

The film has, given its food-centric nature, the expected shots of melty grilled cheese, pureed peppers, simmering green onions, tender pork. In one scene, Carl makes ScarJo some pasta instead of hooking up with her because they told each other they wouldn't. The camera closes in on some onions and spices sauteeing in a wok, and then Carl transfers the most glistening pasta in the world – did he use a gallon of oil? it's so shiny I think he can see his face reflected in it! – into the wok concoction. He twists it together artistically before plating it and handing it to her. When she takes her first bite, her eyes roll back in a way that reminded me of Paula Deen's expression when she bites into a stick of butter. 

In a scene in Texas, Carl, Martin and Percy stop at a hole-in-the wall BBQ place and cut into a piece of meat that has been slowly cooking overnight. It looks almost charred, but when the knife slices through it, the inside is visibly perfect, even to my vegetarian eyes. Someone in the theater audibly groaned in what can only be described as a sexual way. 

As a kale lover, most of the featured food did nothing for me. Most strange, though, was that the food Carl made wasn't nearly as innovative as the film implied he is. Carl's reputation before becoming head chef at the restaurant is that he's against the grain, menu-wise. As someone who has watched at least four episodes of Top Chef, a Cuban sandwich isn't wildly unique. Where you might expect some sort of foamy lecithin concoction atop seared scallops with a sprig of, I don't know, arugula, Carl presents basic Cuban sandwiches and fried plantains. That was actually what was to some heartfelt and others cheesy about it - he begins cooking not only what he wants to cook, but what reminds him of his romance with Inez, and in the process, he rebuilds his relationship with his son. "I get to touch people's lives with what I do," he says meaningfully to Percy. "And I love it. And I want to share this with you."

Performances were mediocre at best and racist at worst (isn't Sofia Vergara Colombian? Why was she parading as Cuban?), although Carl's son Percy was earnest in a believable and childlike way. Tweets appeared on the screen in the same way texts do in House of Cards, rendering social media a character in itself. It was also possibly too long, but maybe that's because there are only so many extreme close-ups of meat slabs I can stomach.

There were also some unanswered questions. I don't know why Inez needed a publicist, for instance, or why her house was so enormous, and she also had another ex-husband (Robert Downey Jr.!?) whose personality – erratic, enigmatic, eccentric – held little appeal. It seemed that her relationship with him was only a ploy for romcom friction between Carl and Inez, the two you're supposed to want to re-couple. I found myself wanting to hate watch a movie about how Robert Downey Jr. and Sofia Vergara's relationship got going and perhaps more interestingly, how it dissolved.

But all of that is neither here nor there in the grand scheme of it. What matters is that a man realizes simplicity and staying true to himself and his ideals will feed millions and bring broken families back together.

Julia Clarke is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She last wrote in these pages about a type.

"The White Tundra" - Black Prairie (mp3)

"Fortune" - Black Prairie (mp3)