Ant-Man and the Wasp (4/5 Stars)

Like an antidote to universe-sized seriousness, Ant-Man and the Wasp sneaks into theaters just a few months after Avengers: Infinity Wars. Importantly, it takes place before that movie. A good thing since the Ant-Man franchise is notable in its complete lack of bigness in both themes and superhero size. It stars the nice and cute Paul Rudd as a petty thief named Scott Lang who teams up with the reclusive scientist Hank Pym (played by Michael Douglas) who engineers for him a suit that shrinks his size but outsizes his strength, you know, like an ant. Hank’s daughter, Hope Pym (Lost’s Evangeline Lily), gets her own suit this time around and becomes The Wasp. Really, she was better at this thing than Paul Rudd was even in the first movie. She was the one who trained him after all.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is all fun and action. I mean really, it is a Paul Rudd movie (everybody is nice or at least means well) but with car chases and quantum mechanics. However, to explain anything that happens in this movie takes a stupid amount of exposition. In fact, this movie could serve as a screenwriting class on exposition. There are some really good examples and others not so good.

Exposition is something that all movies need to do. Since Ant-Man and the Wasp is like the twentieth movie in an intertwined Marvel Universe, much exposition is needed to explain what this particular movie is about. The best exposition in this movie happens in the first ten minutes as a soliloquy performed by the scene-stealing Randall Park. (I’ve been doing this for so long that I can say about Randall Park what I said about Paul Rudd after “Knocked Up”, I think this guy is a leading man who needs his own movies). Randall Park plays a FBI agent who is checking in on Scott Lang during his house arrest. Scott Lang’s seven-year-old daughter asks why the FBI doesn’t like her daddy. Randall gets down on his knee to better connect with the little girl. “It must be hard to understand for you,” he relates and then speaks at length in a direct and literal tone about the various legal codes in effect since Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War. Classic. This does three things: One it explains the most important events of past Marvel movies concerning Ant-Man’s situation. Two and Three: It is a character-defining joke, the FBI agent seemed like he knew how to relate to a girl by getting down on her level but comically revealed that he was too straitlaced to do so.

The worse exposition concerns all the explanations concerning Hank Pym’s wife being lost in the quantum realm, how the quantum realm works, and the nature of the movie’s bad but not so bad guy Ghost. These do not come along with jokes or character development. They are necessary scenes but pales in comparison with good exposition as above. In fact, it pales in comparison with a scene of unneeded exposition provided by Luis (played by the scene-stealing Michael Pena) who answers the simple question “Where is Scott Lang?” in a very funny not simple at all way.

But besides the exposition, what is this movie like? Well, it’s got a bunch of good people trying to figure out problems. There are a few bad guys but they are either kind of goofy (Sonny Burch played by Walter Goggins) or mean well (Ghost played by Hannah John-Kamen). They have car chases over and about the hills of San Francisco. You may have seen that before, but have you seen it with cars that shrink and unshrink and sometimes a huge Ant-Man? It is good times.

This movie has notable diversity. It is a casting laundry list of the better actors of various ethnicities in its supporting roles. Obviously Paul Rudd is the straight white male. But two main superheroes beside him are both female (The Wasp and Ghost). Paul Rudd’s friends who run a security agency are hispanic (Luis), some sort of Eastern European and black. The FBI agent is Korean. The lesser bad guy is a southern gentleman (Walter Goggins) who employs at least one Indian. Given the movie’s location, San Francisco, the cast seems possible and besides me, I don't think anybody has made a point of it.

The Ant-Man franchise adds another complexity to the nature of the Marvel Universe. Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy added the vastness of the universe. Dr. Strange added new dimensions. Ant-Man adds the minute quantum realm. The science behind these complexities is real if thinly realized. What is more interesting perhaps is how these various thin interpretations of real science will interact with one another. This is bound to happen in the next Avengers movie given how Ant-Man ends.

The Hateful Eight (3/5 Stars)

Given the huge deal Quentin Tarantino, the writer/director of The Hateful Eight, made about his once-in-a-lifetime roadshow, particular aspects are decidedly underwhelming. Take for instance the promise of the movie being shot in Panavision Super 70 mm filmstock. Tarantino gushed about how it was the largest widescreen format that ever existed and that it had not been in use since the 1950’s and 1960’s for such epics like “Ben Hur” and “Cleopatra.” Well, that is wonderful if the vast majority of The Hateful Eight’s three hour run time had not taken place within a single room. This movie is no epic. So I guess its cool that he used that obsolete film stock but he sure did not need to. Or take for instance the presence of additional footage in the movie. Given that the movie is almost entirely composed of people talking in rooms, I’m not sure this movie needed more of that. In fact it probably would have been better with less. It had a new Ennio Morricone score and that’s cool because Morricone made the best Western scores of the 1960s, but this score is not as good as those old scores. The program was pretty cool except that the movie was not a timeless masterpiece so I doubt it will be a piece of memorabilia in great demand.

“The Hateful Eight” for all its grandiose presentation is decidedly a small movie. A bounty hunter named John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is taking a prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to hang in the near town of Red Rock. His carriage picks up two more passengers, another bounty hunter named the Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and the supposed new sheriff of Red Rock, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). There is a blizzard that will intercept them on their journey so they decide to wait it out at Minnie’s Haberdashery. They do not find Minnie at the Haberdashery. Instead they find Senor Bob (Demian Bichir) looking after the place, Oswaldo Mobray the supposed hangman (Tim Roth), General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) an ex-Confederate officer searching for his son, and Joe Gage (Michael Madsen) who is in town to visit his mother. John Ruth makes the splendid observation that one of these men is not who they say they are. Minnie’s Haberdashery is composed of a bar, a kitchen, a general store, several beds and a place to sit by the fire, but it is all one room. The blizzard sets in and everybody waits for shit to start happening.

It takes awhile. By my count it takes about an hour and a half, which in my humble opinion is too long. Most of that time is exposition, that is to say it is people talking about what other people have done in the past. Something along the lines of one character saying to another, “Don’t you know who this so-and-so is, they did some crazy shit during the war.” I wrote about this sort of thing earlier in my “Steve Jobs” review. Movies are a show not tell medium. Lots of scenes where people talk about what happened in the past are more appropriate in the play medium where it is necessitated by the lack of ability to go all over the place but rendered harmless by the immediacy of the action. “The Hateful Eight” would probably make a great play. Very little would have to be changed. As a movie it can be, from time to time, <ahem> boring. There I said it. Boring, especially during the first half. It also does not help that Tarantino, though admittedly funny and cool, is not as funny and cool as he thinks he is. Some of the look at me funny and cool lines fell flat because the movie had not yet become cool or funny enough for them.

In the meantime and through to the end there is plenty of use of the word nigger and a lot of punching the woman in the face. We can take these one at a time because Tarantino does interesting things with the first one and not so interesting things with the second.

It is fair to say that the cinematic relationship between Samuel L. Jackson and Quentin Tarantino is a special one that does something more than simply transcend the race line. For other white writer/directors it is simply enough to make a sympathetic black character that has a rounded personality and isn’t merely an appendage to the white people. Jackson and Tarantino do more than that. They create black characters in the midst of terrible racism that are also complicated to the point of being bad men themselves. It is tough to be a despicable black character when everybody else in the movie is calling nigger. In this movie, we are drawn preternaturally to Major Marquis Warren’s side because he is the ultimate underdog, the one black guy in Wyoming. We judge the goodness and badness of the other characters by how they treat him. If they have respect for him, like John Ruth, he is a good guy. If they do not, like everybody else, they are not good guys. The most interesting thing about this movie is that by the mid way point, the audience may start wondering whether Major Marquis Warren is somebody to cheer for at all. Samuel L. Jackson has I believe only been nominated for one Oscar (Pulp Fiction). I believed he should have won for Django Unchained. If he is nominated for this movie, it can be said it was deserved. He is the reason why the movie should be watched at all.

Now for the gratuitous violence done towards the woman in the story, Daisy Domergue. She is a course rude bitch with a mouth on her. In the past she has murdered people and she deserves to be hanged. For as much insight Tarantino has had about the history of race relations, he shows a general lack of knowledge about the history of women. I have not yet heard of a 19^th century (or before) story about a woman like Daisy Domergue. Nor am I likely too because no such woman or very few of them have ever existed. Tarantino has this false notion that feminism in movies consists of giving a woman a weapon (gun or sword or kung fu) and having them kick ass. It does not work that way. You see women are physically weaker than men. At some point it does not matter how good at kung fu they are. They will generally lose battles to guys who have 50 or 100 pounds on them. The astute feminist screenwriter will then give their female characters what historical women have always had, shrewdness and wiles. They will not simply make them another man. When Tarantino made “Django Unchained” he paid attention to the psychology of a slave. Jamie Foxx did not just start out badass and plucky. He had to be rehabilitated from a society that would inflict physical and psychological harm on him if he did anything out of line. When making a historical period piece about a woman it should be required that their respective psychology is taken into account because women were subject to societal pressures as well. Tarantino ignores this and his reason for doing so is to make it okay for this particular woman to be punched in the face a bunch. That is to say he has made this particular woman more of a rotten bitch than she historically has any sense in being and he did it in order to make it okay for terrible things to be done to her.

I remember there was a time when Tarantino’s movies were violent but not as violent as people thought they were. When I watched the DVD extras of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, a big deal was made by how the violence merely felt gratuitously violent because of superior moviemaking. Like in Reservoir Dogs you don’t actually see the ear being cut off, or in Pulp Fiction the samurai cut is below the screen. Contrast that with Tarantino’s last several films where the blood being spilt is generally more extreme than what it would be in real life. One could reasonably question whether if say someone blew off someone else’s head three or four feet away from Jennifer Jason Leigh would she really be splattered with that much blood and brains? I doubt it and I’m pretty sure it is in there less for realism and more because Tarantino wanted to see a woman’s face splattered with blood and brains. It sure makes one question about early Tarantino’s professions of not being as violent as people said he was. As soon as he got a decent budget to splatter blood all over the screen he went whole hog.