Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/15/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, November 15, 2024

Deadpool and Wolverine (Shawn Levy, 2024)

Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool & Wolverine

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen, Dafne Keen, Jon Favreau, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, Leslie Uggams, Jennifer Garner, Wesley Snipes, Channing Tatum, Chris Evans, Henry Cavill, Wunmi Mosaku, Aaron Stanford, Tyler Mane, Karan Sonni, Brianna Hildebrand. Screenplay: Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, Shawn Levy. Cinematography: George Richmond. Production design: Ray Chan. Film editing: Shane Reid, Dean Zimmerman. Music: Rob Simonsen.

Raucus, rude, and raunchy, Deadpool & Wolverine holds nothing sacred, even the production companies that made it, as the irrepressible Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) teams up with the grouchy Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) to take on the Time Variance Authority, represented by Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), and Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) in the Void and elsewhere. You might wonder how Deadpool could team with Wolverine since the latter died in James Mangold's 2017 film Logan. It involves traveling through the multiverse and encountering all the various Wolverines that exist in other timelines, including one known as The Cavillrine, a cameo by Henry Cavill. The Wolverine Deadpool chooses turns out to be the worst Wolverine, someone reviled in his own universe for bringing about the deaths of all the other X-Men. The arc of Wolverine's story in the movie turns out to be a quest for redemption. The multiverse trope itself gets lampooned by treating its actors as moving through their roles as if through other universes than the one they inhabit, the Marvel Universe. So there are allusions to Jackman's career as a performer in musicals and to Reynolds's older films like The Proposal (Anne Fletcher, 2009) and Van Wilder (Walt Becker, 2002). Chris Evans's appearance in the film is also a bit of role-switching. Deadpool at first thinks he's Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, until he reveals himself as Johnny Storm, aka Human Torch, the earlier Marvel role Evans played in Fantastic Four (Tim Story, 2005). Evans's brief performance in Deadpool & Wolverine includes one of the funniest speeches in the film, a foul-mouthed diatribe about Cassandra that's so good it gets repeated in the end credits. Thoroughly mindless and thoroughly entertaining, Deadpool & Wolverine is the superhero movie to end all superhero movies. Well, we can dream, can't we?