Dakota Johnson defense squad, some rap music, and Vampire Weekend.
I feel like I'm Phineas.
My girlfriend and I had an extra nice Valentine’s Day this year. We very clumsily — mostly I, re: clumsily — made skewers with steak, scallops, green onions, and king oyster mushrooms on a camp grill and hand dipped the strawberries you see above ourselves. Being on a Wednesday this year, we didn’t want to run the energy meter down in the middle of the work week so we opted for staying home and staying cozy and instead, planned a staycation for the weekend as our celebration.
I’ve never been much of a travel guy — says the guy who has been to Japan — so the idea of staycation seemed incredibly novel to me. As they say, you learn some things with age and this week, I learned that taking a two hour drive to a hotel and hanging out in a walkable community is indeed very cool and very fire. I’m sorry to all the middle-aged couples out there, I was not familiar with your game.
I’m running solo this week for a rare back-to-back Friday drop. It’s a little off the rails. I had fun with it. Please direct all Dakota Johnson slander to the trash where it belongs. Let’s ride. — Emilio
The Madame Web defender has logged on.
You might be asking yourself: Emilio, are you for real right now? You’re gonna stand up for Madame Web, another bullshit superhero movie from Sony and another attempt to cash grab during the Marvel-fueled superhero craze? Well, yes, all of those descriptors are valid. It’s true, Madame Web isn’t very good. It is, indeed, another underdeveloped superhero movie in a long line of them that started well before Endgame wreaked havoc on the internet. I’m here to tell you though: it’s not that bad.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty bad. Both the directing and writing are incredibly novel, even by the standards of the post-Tobey Maguire superhero movie. (Should every superhero movie just star Tobey Maguire?) The casting is actually alright but no cast could do anything with this film, though Tahar Rahim and his so-dubbed-it’s-jarring dialogue are particularly bad. The editing is super grade school, especially in the climactic scene, yet the color grading was actually… nice? Costumes are unremarkable though it should be noted that the movie is set in 2003 but Dakota Johnson is dressed like a late indie sleaze-era New York white girl who was definitely into Crystal Castles. Where’s the continuity, Sony?
For starters, one reason I’m here is this feels like something more fun than normal to be contrarian on. (I’m only slightly kidding.) The primary reason I can’t say that this movie is as bad as people are making it out to be is that superhero movies are just this bad. I understand the, I would guess, 90% of Madame Web viewers who went in just to have a laugh and affirm their confirmation bias that it was going to be bad. I can’t, in good faith, have a laugh with those people if they also enjoyed Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, another superhero recently released that was also paced like shit and also sucked. It’s a lot easier to laugh with Paul Rudd rather than at him but make no mistake, those movies suck, man.
I get it too, Endgame was a perfect storm for both nerds and cinema. Nothing has dominated movie theaters this century like Marvel has and with the climax to the Infinity Saga, it was the payoff to several years of (incredibly dense) universe building and in the grand scheme, the end of an era, specifically with saying goodbye to longtime heavyweights like Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, and Scarlett Johansson.
Still, both things can be true when we say that the journey to and conclusion of Endgame was fun and also, Marvel did some wild damage to the entire film industry. Ignoring the Avengers films, by my count, they’ve been putting out mid since Black Panther. That was in 2018, man. (I’ll hear arguments for Multiverse of Madness and that’s about it. Shout out Sam Raimi.) Every year, they’ve put out lazy star-filled movies with elementary scripts, marketed to the masses on the basis of diversity and respectability politics or honoring the comics they’re adapting. I wish I was smart enough to be more elaborate but damn, crazy how evil and profitable it can be to market diversity.
2023 was strong enough to make me believe that culturally, Marvel has lost the juice. They’re a billion dollar military industrial complex — not a joke, by the way — and will be for some time but the strong performances of movies like Barbie, Oppenheimer, Fast X, John Wick 4, and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning seems like solid evidence that non-Marvel cultists are over it. I’m a strong believer in keeping your side of the sidewalk clean. The Funko Pop lovers can have their fun, just let me have mine too.
Unrelated: did you know that No Hard Feelings made $87m internationally? $36m of that was international; I wonder what non-English speaking audiences thought of Jennifer Lawrence hitting a sick backdrop suplex with her cooch out.
Back to Madame Web, based on what we know, it seems pretty clear that someone who helped produce this movie fucked up. The star of the movie has made it her personal mission to make everyone hate it; my personal favorite from her press run is claiming she hasn’t seen the final cut. Is she telling the truth? Honestly can’t tell! The most glaring thing I learned in my very minimal research for this was that Dakota Johnson dropped her agency only a week after the first Madame Web trailer dropped.
The harsh read is she made a bad decision and she’s trying to deflect from it. The kind read is Johnson’s agent took the paycheck and Johnson only realized what she was getting into when it was too late to back out. It’s been suggested that she was led to believe that this would be a Marvel production and not a Sony one. I’m not sure how much I believe this but given how Sony handled Morbius, it’s not unrealistic.
There’s a scene in Madame Web where Cassie goes to a barbecue with her coworkers. She’s given a Pepsi can that has the vintage logo on a brighter blue can — remember, kids, this is a period piece — but the can is so comically large, it’s disproportionately larger than anything else on the screen. It almost felt like a parody of the Kendall Jenner ad.
Madame Web is not very good. It’s a fever dream movie that constantly takes you out and frequently almost made me go “what?” in a packed theater. Personally, I also think it’s good, clean fun; a movie set in the 2000s that also feels like it was made literally in the 2000s. But that’s just it, I’m okay with that: it’s a movie. It’s not Ant-Man, it’s not Sarah Halley Finn taking people off of Forbes’ most influential people to star in the next obscure adaptation, and it’s not three hours of buff Natalie Portman — which I am into, to be clear. It’s a dumb movie, a fun, dumb movie. Also, it’s better than The Amazing Spider-Man. Those also suck.
A few songs, here and there.
ZAYALLCAPS & My Favorite Color, “Phineas”
I included this song in my 2023 EOTY stuff but I’ve been listening to it a lot again recently. One of my favorite beats in recent memory, the billowy drums feel like they could fit on “Teach Me How to Dougie” but the funky cadence and synth has its own character. "I feel like I’m Phineas, know what I’m finna do today” hard as hell. Shout out my brother Zay rocking the Manny Pacquiao jacket with the flag on it.
BADBADNOTGOOD & Charlotte Day Wilson, “Sleeper”
Haven’t listened to Charlotte Day Wilson in awhile, though I loved ALPHA when it came out in 2021. Music that came out during strict COVID regulations feels so long ago. Any way, she has a new album scheduled to drop in May so I’ve been running her stuff and really loved this single she did with my favorite white boys last year. They need to stop playing and do an album together!
Vampire Weekend, “Unbelievers”
Speaking of white boys and also people with new music coming out… We’re so back.
Tisakorean, “How I Walk in the Club”
Still baffles me to this day that Tisakorean hasn’t broken out in any major capacity. He managed to get booked for a Sprite ad but other than that, he and his music have remained within more tight-knit online circles, groups, communities, whatever. Younger me would bang my head against the wall wondering why, older me just thinks other people are missing out of the fun. mr.siLLyfLow is one of the best EPs of the decade so far and it feels like it only gets better over time. TikTok, come on, fucking do something about this!
Paramore, “Ignorance”
We all agree that Brand New Eyes is the best Paramore album. Right? Right.
Asian potato chips? Asian potato chips. (Next week.)
I was going to write about some imported chips that my girlfriend and I bought but I’m being suspenseful — more importantly, I’m gonna finish them first. If you’re local or close enough to Irvine, you can download this app called GoGoSonic and you can just pick up drinks and snacks directly from their warehouse. Don’t say I didn’t put you on!