Knee-jerk review: "Wonder Woman 1984"

1. To us, it's not a step down from 2017's original Wonder Woman... but it's not exactly a clear improvement, either. 

2. We have never been fans of the curious insistence of superhero movies to cram multiple villains into a single movie.  That splits the focus of the conflict, limits screen time for the characters, and adds unneeded narrative confusion.  It's a terrible idea.

3. That said, the two villains here get pretty sympathetic, fleshed-out backstories.  Even if it's still one too many.

4. The whole "monkey's paw," careful-what-you-wish-for premise felt fresh.  It's the execution of that idea that didn't always pack a punch.  The basic mechanics of the wish fulfillment, for example, weren't always clear, which seems like a pretty important thing to make clear.

5. While the shopping mall action bit that kicks things off was surprisingly dull, we did love the big truck chase sequence that called to mind Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Honorable mention: the White House fight.  The movie could have used a few more moments like those.

6. We don't see very much of the Wonder Woman costume.  Diana Prince spends most of her screen time in civilian attire.

7. We suppose that's as good a way as any to bring back a character who clearly died in the previous movie.

8. There's some interesting things happening here with female objectification and how pretty women have completely different experiences than "regular" women.  Unwanted male attention is a hassle for supermodel Gal Gadot but something Kristen Wiig's character ("homely" by Hollywood standards) craves.

9. If that was an attempt to put President Ronald Reagan into the movie as a minor character, they could have done a better job.

10. Gal Gadot may have limited range as an actress, but this does seem to be a role she was born to play.

11. Seems like the filmmakers could have done more with the 1980s timeframe.  What was the point exactly?

12. With every comic book movie ending with huge CGI bombast, deafening sound design, laser light shows, and multiple climaxes, we appreciated how different this ending felt.

13. Our biggest complaint involves the villain.  Max Lord gets what he wants pretty early on, but then inexplicably continues to take needless steps that plunge the world deeper and deeper into chaos.  It's not enough to just shrug it off with "I want more power."  His choices are what's creating the conflict, so the motivation needs to be airtight.

14. The prologue set at some kind of Olympics event in Themyscira was fun.

15. Much online has been made about implausibility issues with a plane flight from the U.S. to Africa.  We don't want to spoil anything, but those online complaints are completely valid.

16. Seems like the golden lasso is a bigger deal this time around.  Has Wonder Woman been practicing with it between movies? 

17. As with most big-budget movies like this, it's about 20 minutes too long.

18. A fun movie for sure, but we wish it had been better.

A word about distribution.  As you may know, Warner Bros. chose to release Wonder Woman 1984 simultaneously in theaters and also on the streaming platform HBOMax, which has apparently lagged far behind Disney+ in subscriber numbers.  Warner Bros. has further decided to follow this same pattern for all of its 2021 releases.  Those titles will get a theater release on the same day they also go onto HBOMax for 30 days.  If streaming is indeed the future of Hollywood content, Warner Bros.' choices make business sense as a way to boost HBOMax's profile and get more subscriptions.  The pandemic has inexorably changed society in every possible way: how we work, how we buy groceries, how we eat out, and - the point here - how we consume entertainment.  The theatrical moviegoing experience as we knew it "before times" in 2019 will likely never return.  We understand this fact, but we certainly don't have to like it.

 

Streaming has been growing for years. Way before anyone heard of COVID, Amazon Prime and Netflix (and Disney+ which debuted last fall) were changing the paradigm.  But 2020 accelerated those trends.  Exhibitors like Cinemark have had next to zero business since March.  Many theaters may close for good.  And as people grow more and more comfortable watching movies at home, and with studios like Warner Bros. understandably leaning into that trend (and admittedly, some Hollywood mavericks have long pushed the idea of releasing new movies in theaters and homes on the same day), they may resist going back to the theater once the pandemic ends.  (For the record, Disney's Mulan and Universal's Trolls World Tour led the charge in moving from an intended theatrical release to a streaming launch.)  Habits can be hard to break.  People may buy tickets and popcorn for big movie spectacles, but what about comedies and smaller dramas and thrillers that were already getting squeezed in a world of sequels and remakes and superheroes?  Is Hollywood unwisely cannibalizing itself?  Can a streaming subscriber base paying a reliable $15 a month take the place of a few $500 million-grossing movies each year?  Time will tell, of course, but we lament the possible end of an in-person, theatrical moviegoing culture that has been such an important part of our lives.

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A Few Words About CBS All Access' "Star Trek: Picard"

As a matter of habit, we don’t binge television shows.  This frequently creates conflict in the Cheese Fry screening room (a.k.a. the sectional couch in front of a Vizio flatscreen).  Ms. Fry always wants to watch “just one more” episode, but the more appropriate viewing process, obviously, is to soak afterglow of each episode to carefully mull everything over.  Then, and only then, can one watch the next episode.  What is the root of our peculiar 20th-century preference?  It could be just a lingering preference from days of yore when folks only got a new episode once a week or it could be that we perhaps expend so much mental energy undertaking painstaking, useless analysis of story structure, acting performances, cinematography, plot holes and the like that we’re simply too exhausted after 48 minutes.

And yet... over the recent Fourth of July weekend, we binged all ten episodes of “Picard” in less than three days.  That's a big media bite for us.  We don’t subscribe to CBS All Access, but our father-in-law does.  So we had to avail ourselves of the show while we could.  It was an intense experience, but not altogether unpleasant.

Here are our disjointed musings and comments.

* “Engage.” Be honest.  How often have you said that in your car when you’re about to begin a trip?  Or maybe when the light turns green?  Just us then?

* There’s a pretty complicated backstory here about a failed species-wide Romulan evacuation linked somehow to a massive android sabotage of the Starfleet shipyards on Mars.  It all feels unique and appropriately big, but the scope grows so vast that the story sometimes felt overwhelming.  This may be an unpopular take, but not every science fiction story has to grapple with fate-of-the-universe stakes.

* “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (1987-1994) played a big part of our high school and college years (1986-1994), both the first-run episodes that ran on weekend evenings on KTXA 21 and the reruns that played every weekday evening in the 90s.  We came of age right alongside the show, which – like us – started with some rather clumsy and awkward moments before soaring with some classic masterpieces later in its run.

* Honestly, we’d probably prefer to watch a domestic drama on CBS All Access about the Riker family living on a farm on Nepenthe raising their precocious daughter.

* Name-dropping sidebar – we once sat behind Jonathan Frakes at a Beverly Hills Sunday morning church service.

* We read somewhere a suggestion that the entire Borg subplot of “Picard” could have been completely removed without ever being missed.  As crazy as that sounds given the huge amount of screen-time spent on the machinations inside the reclaimed Borg cube, that person is absolutely correct.  It’s a cool idea that really doesn’t go anywhere.

* We never liked the “Next Generaton” Klingon or Romulan “culture episodes” where the Enterprise crew had to navigate ridiculously intricate customs and complicated alien political intrigue and subtitles and dark lighting and dozens of extras in latex face makeup.  Worse, those episodes always seemed to be two-parters.

* As expected, the best part of this show was watching Picard assemble his ragtag crew of mercenary malcontents. (Echoes of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock in which Kirk asked Starfleet for help with a mission, was turned down, but Kirk went anyway.)

* The two Romulan heroes who work on Picard’s vineyard are charming and complicated, while the two Romulan villains are complete one-dimensional duds.  Further demerits for the show by insisting that the scruffy-looking Romulan spy was somehow alluring.  Having female characters call him “hot” as a way to somehow convince the audience this was so was particularly hilarious.

* The best episode of the season was the stand-alone Freecloud (how well will that name age?) episode in which our heroes had to pull off an underworld Mission: Impossible sort of con on what seemed to be a Las Vegas planet.

* That we enjoyed that episode so much perhaps points to our overall fatigue with serialized television, where a single story is dragged out, er, told over multiple episodes.  That sort of thing certainly has its place for deep dives into complex characters and byzinatine plots.  But sometimes don't you just want a self-contained story without a contrived cliffhanger?  There's a reason "Law & Order: SVU" has been running 20 years.  We hope season 2 is more episodic.

* Although Data is an ageless android, the 71-year-old actor Brent Spiner most decidedly is not.

* Name-dropping sidebar – Ms. Fry by chance ran into Brent Spiner one evening on the Paramount lot and engaged in a lengthy verbal joust with him regarding both what she was doing there and what he was doing there.

* Honestly, this thing probably should have been six episodes.

* The four-letter cursing feels completely out of place on a “Star Trek” show.  It’s so glaring and strange, in fact, it totally took us out of the story and reminded us that this is a new, edgy, streaming-service version of “Star Trek.”

* Patrick Stewart is one of those actors that can probably find a way to make anything cool and interesting.

* Interesting stuff layered in here about the myth of Jean-Luc Picard, Starfleet hero, and how he must cope with all that baggage, whether it’s trying to not believe his own hype, subtly using it for leverage to get what he wants, or swallowing his disappointment when someone doesn’t show him the expected respect based on reputation.  We wished the show had dug a little more into that mythbusting angle.  

* We haven’t watched many episodes of “Deep Space Nine,” “Voyager,” or “Enterprise.”  We’ve missed all of the “Discovery” series.  Yet we call ourselves rabid “Star Trek” fans.  Is that right or wrong? Discuss.

* Surprising parallels to the overrated The DaVinci Code, what with the secret society protecting a crazy conspiracy theory for thousands(!) of years.  Dan Brown should get a "story by" credit.

* If you’re going to kill someone off and wring big emotion and catharsis out of that moment, then you really need to let that person stay dead.  Otherwise, the moment is cheapened and the drama totally undermined.  Better idea: just don’t kill them off.

* You can grumble about the plotting, but you certainly cannot criticize the strong work of the cast (especially Allison Pill).  

* We did sometimes have hard time getting a handle on Picard.  He didn’t always ring true.  For example, no matter how pained and lost he may have felt after leaving Starfleet, it’s hard to believe in fourteen years Picard never once checked on the last executive officer he served with.

* This is the kind of show that inspires interweb commenters to point out after Seven of Nine and Picard share a warm reunion that the two characters never had a single previous onscreen scene together.

* The show ended pretty strong, but the middle was more mushy than we would have preferred.

Top ten “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episodes: 

1. "Yesterday's Enterprise" - the one where a time rift allows Tasha Yar to die a noble death

2. "Best of Both Worlds, Part 1" - the one with the gut-punch OMG cliffhanger where Picard is a Borg and Riker opens fire on him

3. "Lower Decks" - the one told from the point-of-view of the low-level Enterprise officers

4. "Starship Mine" - the one that's Die Hard on the Enterprise

5. "Tapestry" - the one were Q gives Picard a chance to make different choices as a young officer

6. "The Inner Light" - the one where Picard lives a whole other life via an alien probe

7. "Timescape" - the one where time is frozen just as the Enterprise is about to be destroyed

8. "Q Who?" - the one where we first meet the Borg

9. "All Good Things" - the series finale with Picard bouncing between three timelines

10. "The Measure of a Man" - the one with the trial to determine if Data is sentient

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What We've Been Watching (in 50 Words or Less)

In the grip of COVID-19 lockdown, days run together, bored children drive you to drink evening cocktails, weeks are measured solely by the Wednesday mornings when the lawnmower man visits, you find the elementary school online learning platform more confusing to operate than the recording timer on a 1985 VCR, and the kitchen table becomes the place where you eat and also the place where you work.  

The Cheese Fry has recently ramped up television consumption and we've been musing about how long the list might be if we looked back at the shows we've been regularly watching (or fully binged) since the fall season started back in 2019, all of them full of people touching and hugging and standing very close to each other.

Here's a rundown.  Each title gets only fifty words.

American Housewife (ABC) is a funny family comedy about classism in spite of the grating lead character - the titular "American housewife" - played by Katy Mixon.  We can't tell if she's insufferable because of the way she's written or the way Mixon plays her.  She's the worst part of the show.

Black-ish (ABC) is very much a descendant of the great Norman Lear sitcoms of the 1970s. So determined to use humor to explore complex issues of race, the show can be preachy, but there's a fun absurdist bent that leavens any heavy hand. Essential viewing.

The Conners (ABC) finds black humor amid financial hardship. It's shocking to see this kind of gritty realism on network television when most shows feature ruggedly perfect hero cops, paramedics, and doctors.  But more people in America are like the Conners than the folks on the endless Chicago shows. 

Ellen's Game of Games (NBC) is a good one for the kids, a series of elaborate games that treat the contestants - most hysterically, inexplicably in love with host Ellen DeGeneres - pretty badly, dunking them in goo or yanking them up into the rafters or dropping them through trap doors.

Emergence (ABC) is one we almost gave up on. We worried it was making it up as it went along and we're still recovering from the trauma of mistakenly believing Lost knew what it was doing. This show ended strong. Bonus points for quirky lead Allison Tolman.

Evil (CBS) is a 21st century spin on The X-Files, pitting a believer (theology student Mike Holter) and a skeptic (psychologist Katja Herbers) together to investigate mysteries for the Catholic Church. Like the producers' previous show, The Good Wife, this ingenious series is too good for CBS.

Jack Ryan (Amazon) is like an eight-hour Jason Bourne movie, all exotic locations,  sweaty foot chases, and shocking shoot-outs. We can't stop thinking about the production budget.  It may seem impossible to think of The Office's schlub Jim Halpert as a spy, but John Krasinski pulls it off.

Lego Masters (Fox) is awesome, a reality show contest that pits Lego builder teams against each other in increasingly complex "builds." The show is nudged along by the strangest TV co-hosts we've ever seen: two geeky Lego masters who are hilariously self-serious and often seem impossible to please.

Lost in Space (Netflix) may share flavors of the dystopian Battlestar: Galactica reboot, but it's most definitely a family show: it regularly showcases the power of teamwork and resourcefulness to solve any problem. Is it just us or is Parker Posey's villainess Dr. Smith just a little too much?

The Mandalorian (Disney+) has the zip and zing that The Rise of Skywalker could never truly muster.  Characters you care about, high stakes, smart plotting, and a phenomenal score.  Best of all, it leans way into the Western outlaw vibe that partially inspired George Lucas in the first place.

Modern Family (ABC) stopped being genuinely funny years ago; now it's just coasting on reputation. Expect a couple of smiles each episode, but they've exaggerated the characters now to the degree that they're no longer real people. This was their last season.  It was time.

The Outsider (HBO) is adapted from a recent Stephen King novel.  We stopped reading King 20 years ago, but this is all very familiar to us: small town besieged by a supernatural evil that commits unspeakable violence. The great cast and the stylish cinematography elevate everything.

Stumptown (ABC) is fun mostly because of rough charms of stars Cobie Smulders, Jake Johnson, and Michael Ealy. The seedy world of private eyes, ex cons, dive bars, and blue-collar cops recalls the work of our favorite novelist Elmore Leonard, which is sometimes all you need.

Superstore (NBC) has been accurately described as The Office at Walmart what with the oddball characters and the workplace setting. But there's more meat to this show in the way it explores the struggling working class.  It's not as funny as it used to be, but it feels kind of important.

Survivor (CBS) maintains a special place in our heart.  Since debuting in 2000, we have only missed a single cycle. This season features past winners and the show has changed so drastically over the years that there is a noticeable difference in game play between "old school" and "new school."

The Unicorn (CBS) feels genuine, filled with real people who happen to be funny rather than zany "characters." It's strange to see the usually villainous Walton Goggins - playing a widower dad - as a comedic family man, but his dramatic chops add edge. We hereby confess our crush on Michaela Watkins.

Watchmen (HBO) is a masterpiece of television. We were skeptical of the producers' intent to extend the mythology of the landmark 1986 graphic novel, but they delivered. A layered, rich tapestry of characters grappling with race and power, boosted by genius plotting and slick style. Not a single misstep.

Will and Grace (NBC) is a throwback sitcom driven more by sharp one-liners than characters that resemble real people, especially when it comes to the absurdity of Jack and Karen. They almost seem to belong in another, totally nuts show.  Even so, we find it hilarious.

Young Sheldon (CBS) is far more nuanced than The Big Bang Theory, the overrated set-up/joke, set-up/joke show that spawned it.  It would work if it didn't feature the Sheldon character, though it probably wouldn't be as popular. Bonus points: Annie Potts and Wallace Shawn.

We sampled 911: Lone Star, All Rise, Carol's Second Act, The Masked Singer, and Single Parents. One episode was enough.

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