Spider-Man Homecoming and Kairos Meme: Actors
We watched Spider-Man: Homecoming over the weekend, and it was ADORABLE. O had seen it already, in theaters with friends, but L and I had not; I really wanted to, and L, who is mostly indifferent to MCU and superhero movies, but kind of wanted to see this one, because she found "Spider-Twerp" funny in 'Civil War'. We all really enjoyed it. I was trying to decide whether I'd liked it more, the same, or less as Ant-Man, which is currently my third favorite MCU movie (after Iron Man and Avengers Assemble), and I'm still not totally sure -- I probably need more distance -- but L and O both said they liked it more.
I like this Spider-Man a lot -- I like that he is very much just a high school kid, his little adorkable asides "Oh god" and "Awesome!" and the rest. I'd liked Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man, too, but this one I just want to give a hug. His interaction with suit-lady "Karen" was really cute, and L and I awwed at the little spider drone, especially the noises it made, and Peter calling it "Dronie". From the trailers, I wasn't sure if I'd find his sidekick funny or annoying, but the answer turns out to be funny; same for the other high school kids. And MJ actually had some laugh-out-loud moments for me ("I'm not obsessed with him, I'm just super observant." and "I just come here to sketch people in crisis."). And speaking of conversation with past versions and subverting expectations, spoilers from here I loved the subversion of the upside-down kiss! Oh, and Peter getting ready for Homecoming with Aunt May, learning how to tie a tie from YouTube and the rest, was just super adorkable.
Of course, the Tony cameos were great, and I liked them both for the funny -- the not-a-hug in the car (although I don't buy that Tony's car has manual doors, come on), and especially "Don't do anything I would do. Definitely don't do anything I wouldn't do. There's a little gray area in there, and that's where you operate." and the way over-extended "screwed the pooch" analogy ("But then you did the right thing: you took the dog to the clinic, you raised the hybrid puppies... ") -- and the more profound. Like, Tony telling Peter that if he thought he was nothing without the suit, he shouldn't have it, hearkening back to IM3, Tony dealing with his daddy issues by trying to have Peter do better. And I'm not sure what the point is of having Tony and Pepper break up and get back together, beyond, I suppose, getting Tony to a further low point in 'Civil War' and isolating him from people who could've talked him out of more drastic actions, maybe -- but I've missed Pepper, and the scene with the ring (which Happy has been carrying for the last 10 years aparently) was cute. And the Cap PSAs were hilarious, and especially the gym teacher going, "I'm pretty sure he's a war criminal now, but I'm required to show these by the state." (L: "That's public school education for you. 'I'm pretty sure he's a war criminal, but eh, whatever.'" XP)
I remember most of my flist remarking that this liked this different type of villain/antagonist this movie had, and I concur. Marvel villains tend to be boring "take over the world" types with very little actual motivation, so it was a nice change of pace to have someone who was a 'regular guy', doing this for his family, ruthless without being capital-E Evil. I mean, he's obviously not a nice guy, but he was actually human, and you could kind of see how he ended up getting to the point we see him at, 8 years later. And he had a pretty good point when Peter said, "I know selling weapons to criminals is wrong" -- in that Tony had done that, too, before his Iron Man awakening/expiation, just at higher levels and a greater remove. Anyway, I was happy that Peter pulled him from the flames, and he's going to stand trial and everything.
Oh, and I think this was my favorite Stan Lee cameo yet!
*
This once more leads thematically into the next installment of the Kairos 30 Days Meme:
Seven favorite actors
7. Kevin Smith -- no, not the one you were thinking of before you clicked on the cut and saw the photo :P -- this one. He is, quite honestly, the main reason I kept watching Hercules and Xena as long as I did. And a big part of that was, admittedly, that Kevin Smith is my type, aesthetically speaking, to a ridiculous degree, especially with his Ares-goatee, but even cleanshaven. I also admit that I'm pushing my own rules a bit on this one (favorite people having to be those whose performances I loved or at least enjoyed in more than one role), because I've only seen him on Herc/Xena, and two roles on two related franchises (Iphicles on Hercules and Ares on both) is possibly cheating. But he was the first actor I went reseraching online, so the degree of obsession will have to make up for its narrowness. And he also furnished a totally unexpected but nice bonding moment for me: I went back to visit my old high school and the English teacher I had TA'd for, and one of her freshmen read a poem she'd written for Kevin Smith/Ares, and I totally got her refrence, and then we geeked out over it together. I bumped into her at uni a couple of times, and we always had this "secret handshake" moment, because of our shared adoration of him. She actually went to a con where he was present, and got a hug from him, and reported that he was incredibly nice. And he died so tragically young. I mean, I always felt that way, but looking at his dates just now, he was actually younger than I am :(
6. Veniamin Smekhov -- -- to be honest, I'm cheating even more with this one, because there really is just the one role of Smekhov's that I care about at all. But I couldn't leave him off the list, not when he's an actor/it's a role that I've loved and been obsessed with more and for longer than any other actor I could come up with. Because, quite honestly, Smekhov is synonymous with Athos for me -- the Athos I love, and grew up admiring and playing pretend at -- and all other actors in the role are, at best, pale shadows, and mostly just wrong, and even Dumas' Athos in the books is not fully right without Smekhov's face and voice behind him, being grave and slightly ironic and noble and stoic and generally wonderful (one instance in which I don't care about canonical veracity at all, because Smekhov's Athos is the best, end of story). Through trawling the Wiki, I actually learned or reminded myself that he also played Aramis when younger, which is something I'd like to see given the chance, though I think it would result in massive cognitive dissonance, tbh.
5. Robert Downey Jr -- yes, mostly for Tony Stark, OK, but not only. (Hilariously, I thought that Iron Man was the first time I saw RDJ onscreen, but turns out it wasn't -- he also has a role in Richard III, which I would've seen him in back in 1996, although I have no memory of this place. Anyway, it was Iron Man that made me consciously aware of RDJ, and after that he became one of those actors who makes me more likely to see any movie he's in. His charm (and OK, also Jude Law's) made me enjoy the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes outings, which I otherwise didn't think were all that great, and which definitely weren't what I look for in my Holmes adaptations. Totally randomly, I also associate young RDJ with Regulus Black, because for ages
copperbadge was using him as a PB on HP Dungeons
4. Morgan Freeman -- I don't really have anything original or profound to say about Morgan Freeman, but every role I've seen him in, no matter how small the role or how ridiculous the movie it's in, he fills it with dignity and warmth and gravitas, so I'm always thrilled to see him on-screen. I actually haven't seen him in most of this big, dramatic, critically acclaimed roles, because they're not in the kinds of movies I enjoy watching, but even the silly stuff is enough to make me love him a whol lot. Morgan Freeman was one of the best thing about Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (and I would've said the best if not for thhe fact that Alan Rickman is in there, too, in my favorite role of his). I liked him in Outbreak and in Deep Impact (usually, when you have someone playing the President, I look at the actor and role my eyes, but damn, I wish any of these real clowns were a quarter as presidential as Morgan Freeman) and in Bruce Almighty (yes, if you're going to have someone playing God, Morgan Freeman is definitely the best choice) and Lucky Number Slevin and Now You See Me. My favorite roles of his are recent ones, in the RED franchise and Going in Style. And, of course, I could listen to him narrate anything at any time :)
3. Chris Pine -- I may have to rethink whether he still belongs here as #3 after finding him not AS ridiculously charming in Wonder Woman, but I think he still does. So, I first saw him as Kirk in the Star Trek reboot, and it was that which made me realize that my till-then lifelong antipathy towards Star Trek was actually an inability to watch William Shatner. With Pine in the Captain Kirk role, I loved it! (well, and there were a lot of other charming and talented actors in that movie, too. But Chris Pine was the one who made the movie for me, and made me fannish about it, which very rarely hapens with movies for me). I knew it wasn't a fluke when I watched him in This Means War and Into the Woods, and found him utterly charming there as well. Somehow, Wonder Woman managed to suck like 80% of the charisma out of Chris Pine, but he was still my favorite thing about the half of the movie that I've made it through so far. And there's probably no role so ridiculous that I wouldn't watch him in it. And, yes, this is kind of a shallow appreciation, but here's the difference vs #7 and #5, whom I also appreciate partly or mostly for very shallow reasons -- I don't even LIKE guys of this type of appearance, normally! His charisma just transcends my normal taste. (On a random note, I have since learned that Pine has some Russian-Jewish ancestry in him -- on the right side to make him Jewish by Jewish traditions, even, and also that he and I overlaped at Cal, though he's two years younger than me. For all I know, we might've even been in some of the same classes, since he majored in English and I continued to take English classes.)
2. Ian McKellen -- You might think Ian McKellen is on this list for Gandalf or Magneto, given that both are favorite characters of mine, from favorite properties. And I do really love him in those roles, especially as Magneto in the original X-Men trilogy (Fassbender who?) But I first saw him and was terribly impressed by him in the Richard III movie with the ~1930s aesthetic, which we watched in my freshman English class on dystopias, after reading the play -- so by the time he was cast as Magneto and Gandalf, I was already a fan. One of my tests for whether an actor belongs on this favorites list is whether they can redeem an otherwise crappy movie for me. I know that Sir Ian can because he, in a secondary role, even, managed to make The Da Vinci Code worthwhile for me (one of the reasons Tom Hanks *isn't* on this list, even though I admire a lot of his roles, is that in an otherwise crapy movie, I have trouble watching him, this being one of the cases in point). And McKellen is another one of those actors who don't even have to be physically on-screen for me to enjoy their performance: I loved him as Iorek in The Golden Compass (shush, it was a pretty movie, if nothing else), and enjoyed his voice work in Flushed Away, Stardust (he's the narrator), and the live-action Beauty and the Beast most recently. I've not watched all of the McKellen movies I want to see. I actually need to make time at some point to watch Gods and Monsters, and maybe the TV movie of King Lear, as that's a role I really want to watch him in. But it's nice to leave myself some films to look forward to, since I know I'm going to enjoy them.
1. Harrison Ford -- Look, it's pretty simple. Besides everything else, Harrison Ford played two of the few movie characters I seriously care about -- Han Solo and Indiana Jones, both from series I was introduced to when I was young and impressionable, and I imprinted kind of hard. (Incidentally, both were series I was introduced to by my sixth grade ESL teacher at Hebrew Academy, who I think wanted us to get a primer in modern American cultural literacy -- or possibly just wanted an excuse to show his class his own favorite movies. Anyway, I'm very grateful to him for the introduction, whatever his motivation.) I think my fondness for space smuggler/pirate types can be traced back to Han, and my predilection for bantery relationships to Han and Leia, and the various scenes aroun Han being frozen in carbonite? Well, between that and the Indy/Marion scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a lot of my predilection for hurt/comfort was crystallized by those moments, OK? And, look, I do like the movies as a whole, both franchises, but they are both first and foremost about Harrison Ford's characters for me. I've seen Harrison Ford in other things, too, and always enjoyed his roles on some level -- in Blade Runner (which we watched in the same class as Richard III, btw), Working Girl, Sabrina, Six Days, Seven Nights, Cowboys and Aliens, Ender's Game, and I think I even watched parts of Patriot Games or whatever. But even if I'd only seen him in Indiana Jones and Star Wars, that would've been enough.
Honorable mention: Stanley Tucci -- I also feel like I should maybe include an honorary mention for Stanely Tucci, because whenever I see a character actor I really like but I don't know who is playing them, it turnes out to be Stanley Tucci. The asshole lawyer in Big Trouble? Tucci. The dad in Easy A? Yep, him. Dr Erskine? Tucci again. Caesar Flickerman? Tucci, under that ridiculous pompadour. Mr D in the Percy Jeckson moves? You've guessed it! Also the cadenza in the live-action Beauty and the Beast, apparently XD It's gotten to the point where, if I see a secondary character in a movie who I think is really well played, and I don't know who is playing the character, I just assume it's got to be Stanley Tucci. :D
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1059704.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
I like this Spider-Man a lot -- I like that he is very much just a high school kid, his little adorkable asides "Oh god" and "Awesome!" and the rest. I'd liked Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man, too, but this one I just want to give a hug. His interaction with suit-lady "Karen" was really cute, and L and I awwed at the little spider drone, especially the noises it made, and Peter calling it "Dronie". From the trailers, I wasn't sure if I'd find his sidekick funny or annoying, but the answer turns out to be funny; same for the other high school kids. And MJ actually had some laugh-out-loud moments for me ("I'm not obsessed with him, I'm just super observant." and "I just come here to sketch people in crisis."). And speaking of conversation with past versions and subverting expectations, spoilers from here I loved the subversion of the upside-down kiss! Oh, and Peter getting ready for Homecoming with Aunt May, learning how to tie a tie from YouTube and the rest, was just super adorkable.
Of course, the Tony cameos were great, and I liked them both for the funny -- the not-a-hug in the car (although I don't buy that Tony's car has manual doors, come on), and especially "Don't do anything I would do. Definitely don't do anything I wouldn't do. There's a little gray area in there, and that's where you operate." and the way over-extended "screwed the pooch" analogy ("But then you did the right thing: you took the dog to the clinic, you raised the hybrid puppies... ") -- and the more profound. Like, Tony telling Peter that if he thought he was nothing without the suit, he shouldn't have it, hearkening back to IM3, Tony dealing with his daddy issues by trying to have Peter do better. And I'm not sure what the point is of having Tony and Pepper break up and get back together, beyond, I suppose, getting Tony to a further low point in 'Civil War' and isolating him from people who could've talked him out of more drastic actions, maybe -- but I've missed Pepper, and the scene with the ring (which Happy has been carrying for the last 10 years aparently) was cute. And the Cap PSAs were hilarious, and especially the gym teacher going, "I'm pretty sure he's a war criminal now, but I'm required to show these by the state." (L: "That's public school education for you. 'I'm pretty sure he's a war criminal, but eh, whatever.'" XP)
I remember most of my flist remarking that this liked this different type of villain/antagonist this movie had, and I concur. Marvel villains tend to be boring "take over the world" types with very little actual motivation, so it was a nice change of pace to have someone who was a 'regular guy', doing this for his family, ruthless without being capital-E Evil. I mean, he's obviously not a nice guy, but he was actually human, and you could kind of see how he ended up getting to the point we see him at, 8 years later. And he had a pretty good point when Peter said, "I know selling weapons to criminals is wrong" -- in that Tony had done that, too, before his Iron Man awakening/expiation, just at higher levels and a greater remove. Anyway, I was happy that Peter pulled him from the flames, and he's going to stand trial and everything.
Oh, and I think this was my favorite Stan Lee cameo yet!
*
This once more leads thematically into the next installment of the Kairos 30 Days Meme:
Seven favorite actors
7. Kevin Smith -- no, not the one you were thinking of before you clicked on the cut and saw the photo :P -- this one. He is, quite honestly, the main reason I kept watching Hercules and Xena as long as I did. And a big part of that was, admittedly, that Kevin Smith is my type, aesthetically speaking, to a ridiculous degree, especially with his Ares-goatee, but even cleanshaven. I also admit that I'm pushing my own rules a bit on this one (favorite people having to be those whose performances I loved or at least enjoyed in more than one role), because I've only seen him on Herc/Xena, and two roles on two related franchises (Iphicles on Hercules and Ares on both) is possibly cheating. But he was the first actor I went reseraching online, so the degree of obsession will have to make up for its narrowness. And he also furnished a totally unexpected but nice bonding moment for me: I went back to visit my old high school and the English teacher I had TA'd for, and one of her freshmen read a poem she'd written for Kevin Smith/Ares, and I totally got her refrence, and then we geeked out over it together. I bumped into her at uni a couple of times, and we always had this "secret handshake" moment, because of our shared adoration of him. She actually went to a con where he was present, and got a hug from him, and reported that he was incredibly nice. And he died so tragically young. I mean, I always felt that way, but looking at his dates just now, he was actually younger than I am :(
6. Veniamin Smekhov -- -- to be honest, I'm cheating even more with this one, because there really is just the one role of Smekhov's that I care about at all. But I couldn't leave him off the list, not when he's an actor/it's a role that I've loved and been obsessed with more and for longer than any other actor I could come up with. Because, quite honestly, Smekhov is synonymous with Athos for me -- the Athos I love, and grew up admiring and playing pretend at -- and all other actors in the role are, at best, pale shadows, and mostly just wrong, and even Dumas' Athos in the books is not fully right without Smekhov's face and voice behind him, being grave and slightly ironic and noble and stoic and generally wonderful (one instance in which I don't care about canonical veracity at all, because Smekhov's Athos is the best, end of story). Through trawling the Wiki, I actually learned or reminded myself that he also played Aramis when younger, which is something I'd like to see given the chance, though I think it would result in massive cognitive dissonance, tbh.
5. Robert Downey Jr -- yes, mostly for Tony Stark, OK, but not only. (Hilariously, I thought that Iron Man was the first time I saw RDJ onscreen, but turns out it wasn't -- he also has a role in Richard III, which I would've seen him in back in 1996, although I have no memory of this place. Anyway, it was Iron Man that made me consciously aware of RDJ, and after that he became one of those actors who makes me more likely to see any movie he's in. His charm (and OK, also Jude Law's) made me enjoy the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes outings, which I otherwise didn't think were all that great, and which definitely weren't what I look for in my Holmes adaptations. Totally randomly, I also associate young RDJ with Regulus Black, because for ages
copperbadge was using him as a PB on HP Dungeons
4. Morgan Freeman -- I don't really have anything original or profound to say about Morgan Freeman, but every role I've seen him in, no matter how small the role or how ridiculous the movie it's in, he fills it with dignity and warmth and gravitas, so I'm always thrilled to see him on-screen. I actually haven't seen him in most of this big, dramatic, critically acclaimed roles, because they're not in the kinds of movies I enjoy watching, but even the silly stuff is enough to make me love him a whol lot. Morgan Freeman was one of the best thing about Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (and I would've said the best if not for thhe fact that Alan Rickman is in there, too, in my favorite role of his). I liked him in Outbreak and in Deep Impact (usually, when you have someone playing the President, I look at the actor and role my eyes, but damn, I wish any of these real clowns were a quarter as presidential as Morgan Freeman) and in Bruce Almighty (yes, if you're going to have someone playing God, Morgan Freeman is definitely the best choice) and Lucky Number Slevin and Now You See Me. My favorite roles of his are recent ones, in the RED franchise and Going in Style. And, of course, I could listen to him narrate anything at any time :)
3. Chris Pine -- I may have to rethink whether he still belongs here as #3 after finding him not AS ridiculously charming in Wonder Woman, but I think he still does. So, I first saw him as Kirk in the Star Trek reboot, and it was that which made me realize that my till-then lifelong antipathy towards Star Trek was actually an inability to watch William Shatner. With Pine in the Captain Kirk role, I loved it! (well, and there were a lot of other charming and talented actors in that movie, too. But Chris Pine was the one who made the movie for me, and made me fannish about it, which very rarely hapens with movies for me). I knew it wasn't a fluke when I watched him in This Means War and Into the Woods, and found him utterly charming there as well. Somehow, Wonder Woman managed to suck like 80% of the charisma out of Chris Pine, but he was still my favorite thing about the half of the movie that I've made it through so far. And there's probably no role so ridiculous that I wouldn't watch him in it. And, yes, this is kind of a shallow appreciation, but here's the difference vs #7 and #5, whom I also appreciate partly or mostly for very shallow reasons -- I don't even LIKE guys of this type of appearance, normally! His charisma just transcends my normal taste. (On a random note, I have since learned that Pine has some Russian-Jewish ancestry in him -- on the right side to make him Jewish by Jewish traditions, even, and also that he and I overlaped at Cal, though he's two years younger than me. For all I know, we might've even been in some of the same classes, since he majored in English and I continued to take English classes.)
2. Ian McKellen -- You might think Ian McKellen is on this list for Gandalf or Magneto, given that both are favorite characters of mine, from favorite properties. And I do really love him in those roles, especially as Magneto in the original X-Men trilogy (Fassbender who?) But I first saw him and was terribly impressed by him in the Richard III movie with the ~1930s aesthetic, which we watched in my freshman English class on dystopias, after reading the play -- so by the time he was cast as Magneto and Gandalf, I was already a fan. One of my tests for whether an actor belongs on this favorites list is whether they can redeem an otherwise crappy movie for me. I know that Sir Ian can because he, in a secondary role, even, managed to make The Da Vinci Code worthwhile for me (one of the reasons Tom Hanks *isn't* on this list, even though I admire a lot of his roles, is that in an otherwise crapy movie, I have trouble watching him, this being one of the cases in point). And McKellen is another one of those actors who don't even have to be physically on-screen for me to enjoy their performance: I loved him as Iorek in The Golden Compass (shush, it was a pretty movie, if nothing else), and enjoyed his voice work in Flushed Away, Stardust (he's the narrator), and the live-action Beauty and the Beast most recently. I've not watched all of the McKellen movies I want to see. I actually need to make time at some point to watch Gods and Monsters, and maybe the TV movie of King Lear, as that's a role I really want to watch him in. But it's nice to leave myself some films to look forward to, since I know I'm going to enjoy them.
1. Harrison Ford -- Look, it's pretty simple. Besides everything else, Harrison Ford played two of the few movie characters I seriously care about -- Han Solo and Indiana Jones, both from series I was introduced to when I was young and impressionable, and I imprinted kind of hard. (Incidentally, both were series I was introduced to by my sixth grade ESL teacher at Hebrew Academy, who I think wanted us to get a primer in modern American cultural literacy -- or possibly just wanted an excuse to show his class his own favorite movies. Anyway, I'm very grateful to him for the introduction, whatever his motivation.) I think my fondness for space smuggler/pirate types can be traced back to Han, and my predilection for bantery relationships to Han and Leia, and the various scenes aroun Han being frozen in carbonite? Well, between that and the Indy/Marion scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a lot of my predilection for hurt/comfort was crystallized by those moments, OK? And, look, I do like the movies as a whole, both franchises, but they are both first and foremost about Harrison Ford's characters for me. I've seen Harrison Ford in other things, too, and always enjoyed his roles on some level -- in Blade Runner (which we watched in the same class as Richard III, btw), Working Girl, Sabrina, Six Days, Seven Nights, Cowboys and Aliens, Ender's Game, and I think I even watched parts of Patriot Games or whatever. But even if I'd only seen him in Indiana Jones and Star Wars, that would've been enough.
Honorable mention: Stanley Tucci -- I also feel like I should maybe include an honorary mention for Stanely Tucci, because whenever I see a character actor I really like but I don't know who is playing them, it turnes out to be Stanley Tucci. The asshole lawyer in Big Trouble? Tucci. The dad in Easy A? Yep, him. Dr Erskine? Tucci again. Caesar Flickerman? Tucci, under that ridiculous pompadour. Mr D in the Percy Jeckson moves? You've guessed it! Also the cadenza in the live-action Beauty and the Beast, apparently XD It's gotten to the point where, if I see a secondary character in a movie who I think is really well played, and I don't know who is playing the character, I just assume it's got to be Stanley Tucci. :D
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1059704.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).