“Captain America” and Cinematic Misunderstanding
I hate the word cinephile. To me, it has connotations of the “I think I’m better than you because I’ve seen this 3-hour Moldovan production shot from the POV of a cockroach” crowd. People who have an overinflated sense of themselves and their “artistic opinion.” That being said, I think I can reasonably call myself a cinephile. Per my Letterboxd, I’ve seen over 340 movies — and I only started using Letterboxd in 2022. The real number is a lot higher. All this to say, I’ve been at this movie watching thing for a really long time. I know generally when a movie is good and when it’s not. I can tell when I like a movie even if it’s not great, and when a great movie just isn’t my taste. But recent happenings have begun to make me question that. Let’s talk about it.
Now, you may be wondering, “what the hell does any of this have to do with the new Captain America?” Well, I’m glad you asked. I went and saw Brave New World. It’s a Marvel movie; I see it in theaters. It just is what it is. In this particular instance, my viewing was expedited by inadvertently seeing snippets of reviews. They were not good. As at the time of writing it’s sitting at 51% on RT and 43 on Metacritic, the lowest of any MCU movie ever. Yes, even lower than Thor: The Dark World. So, in a way, I wanted to see it before my opinion got colored by reviews and spoilers. So, I went. And it was… good. Like really good. Not “not as bad as this or that movie” good, I mean genuinely a good movie. While I wouldn’t call it the MCU at its finest, it is still a very respectable addition to the studio’s library. And it most certainly is not “the worst ever MCU movie.” And now I’m faced with a dilemma. It’s not MCU blindness because even I could see when certain projects didn’t hit (*cough cough* Quantumania). Here was a movie that I considered very good, and I was being told that it wasn’t. And that just refuses to compute with me. Then it got me thinking about other movies.
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First was Anora, the movie that is currently taking the awards season by storm and has emerged as a late frontrunner for the Oscar for Best Picture. This more than baffled me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s a bad movie — it has a nude Mikey Madison, how bad can it be? But the movie never really becomes anything. It’s been described in places as a reimagining of the Cinderella story but is it really? None of the characters really go through any meaningful level of change or development — they’re all more or less the same as they were when the movie started, plus or minus a couple thousand dollars, some furniture, and a car. Hell, Ivan isn’t even around for most of the second half of the movie. And yet it currently sits at a 4.0 rating on Letterboxd, got nominated for the Best Picture Oscar and is looking likely to win it, beating out what I consider to be the real best movie of 2024: Dune Part Two. It just doesn’t make sense to me. And I don’t like when things don’t make sense. Sean Baker is officially an Oscar nominated writer, director, and producer — a trifecta only the all-time greats have managed and very few on the same movie, all for a movie that could best be described as a stripper’s vlog with a soundtrack.
The second movie that made me feel this way was Challengers. Now, I’m gonna come out in front of this and say that I was already hooked in to watch Challengers for two reasons: the threesome tease in the trailer and the fact that it was Zendaya. I have seen many a movie because of her. But again, a move is a movie — we judge it on its merits. And so, I came into this, a movie about tennis players but not about tennis players. A movie about the most convoluted love triangle spread over 10+ years that is never really resolved with any degree of satisfaction. A movie where infidelity is tossed about, and nothing really ever comes of it. And then there’s the ending. Spoilers for Challengers but at the end, Patrick basically admits to sleeping with Tashi, using some clever callbacks. They then have this intense rally where the camera does all kinds of strange (and in my opinion, unnecessary) things. Tashi, sitting front row center, doesn’t even turn her head as the ball crosses the net. Then on the very last shot, Patrick comes over the net and falls into Art’s arms. Roll credits. What the hell was that? See, I have a rule. If i have to Google “X movie ending explained”, everyone involved has done a terrible job. Movie endings are literally where the entire story coalesces into a final beat, and yet here I was, more confused than someone who was shown Memento with all the explanation scenes cut out. There are dozens of articles with the general theme of “Challengers ending explained” or “That Challengers ending scene explained” and to me that just seems like you didn’t manage to tell me whatever it is you were trying to over the last 130+ minutes — if I have to read supplementary material to understand your movie, I think that counts heavy against you. Luca Guadagnino gets his praise for his evocative use of sexual imagery and other such platitudes that have become standard for Luca movies. And yet, once again, I am left with a strong sense of “what the hell did I just spend 132 minutes watching?”
Like I said at the start of this piece, I’ve been watching movies for a very long time. I’ve seen good films and I’ve seen bad films. I’ve seen great films and I’ve seen films that I couldn’t even call trash as that would be an affront to trash. But when I find myself in situations like this, I start to think, am I somehow missing something? Do I acquiesce to those with self-professed “better tastes”? Or do I do like the Good Captain once said and plant myself like a tree in the face of opposition from the world and say, “No. You move”? In the end, I do what any of us can do: I watch movies.
