With a slew of Marvel Studios productions coming to Disney+ over the next six months, The Escapist has launched a weekly show discussing these series
This week, in the gap between The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki, KC Nwosu and I take a look at a rather unconventional entry in the Marvel television canon: M.O.D.O.K., the half-hour sitcom from Patton Oswalt and Jordan Blum about the maniacal supervillain trying to strike a work/life balance.
Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney and with special guests Chris Lavery and Phil Bagnall, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.
This week, Masaki Kobayashi’s Seppuku.
It is a peaceful time in Japan. The samurai class have largely been rendered obsolete, with many veterans struggling to feed themselves or their families. A former samurai arrives at the estate of the powerful Iyi Clan, requesting to commit ritual suicide before them. He is the second such wanderer in so many days. However, nobody can expect what will follow.
At time of recording, it was ranked 32nd on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.
Cruella arrives as the culmination of two interconnected trends.
Most obviously, Cruella is the latest in the long line of live action (or pseudo-live action) adaptations of classic Disney properties hoping to turn the studio’s animated back catalogue into a source of rich intellectual property that can be steadily mined for quick returns. Movies like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King all grossed over a billion dollars, so there is surely an audience hungry to see beloved childhood classics transferred into live action.
Ready for some hot takes?
Ironically enough, 101 Dalmatians was one of the first films to make that leap from pencil and inks to live action, with an adaptation (and a sequel) in the mid-nineties. Indeed, it’s arguable that Glenn Close’s incarnation of Cruella DeVil looms just large enough in the culture that a simple reboot of the premise might feel a little gauche. Jon Favreau could direct a second pseudo-live-action version of The Jungle Book for the company, but only because the earlier effort had no cultural footprint.
So Cruella is not content to be a straight-up reimagining of the classic Disney cartoon. Instead, the film draws from another contemporary trend when it comes to managing these intellectual properties: the villain-centric reboot. Cruella is arguably of a piece with recent pop culture like Ratchet, Maleficent or Joker, all works that reimagined a familiar intellectual property through the lens of its antagonist. There is evidently money in this concept, with Joker earning over a billion dollars and Maleficent earning half a billion and inspiring a sequel.
A crime of fashion.
So Cruella offers an origin story for the classic Disney villain, inviting the audience to get to know the monstrous fashion designer whose defining character trait was her desire to skin a lot of adorable puppies to make the perfect coat. It’s certainly an ambitious assignment. While Cruella is one of the most striking villains in the Disney canon, with one of the catchiest theme songs, she is hardly the most complex or nuanced. There’s hardly a lot of tragedy to be mined in a character so horrifically monstrous that “if she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will.”
This sets up the central tension in Cruella, and the problem that the movie never quite manages to resolve. Cruella is a much stronger movie whenever it allows itself to drift away from the shadow of 101 Dalmations and become its own thing, but it suffers greatly when it finds itself drawn back into the gravity of the original Disney classic. Cruella works reasonably well as a seventies-set fashion heist movie, but struggles when it tries to be a compelling villain origin story for a character who really never needed one.
I’m thrilled to be launching 3-Minute Reviews on The Escapist. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be joining a set of contributors in adding these reviews to the channel. For the moment, I’m honoured to contribute a three-minute film review of Cruella, which released in cinemas and on Disney+ this weekend.
So, as I have mentioned before, I am launching a new video series as a companion piece to In the Frame at The Escapist. The video will typically launch with every second Monday article, and be released on the magazine’s YouTube channel the following week. This is kinda cool, because we’re helping relaunch the magazine’s film content – so if you can throw a subscription our way, it would mean a lot.
This week, given that TENET is now available to stream in the United States and around the world, it seemed like a good time to take a look at Christopher Nolan’s latest. In particular, a look how the themes of TENET resonate with other films in Nolan’s filmography, from Memento to The Prestige to Inception to Interstellar.
The Escapist have launched a movie podcast, and I was thrilled to join Jack Packard for the seventeenth episode of the year, with a very special guest – the wonderful Ty Franck, co-creator of The Expanse. Ty joined us to talk about seventies science-fiction, in particular Logan’s Run.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With TENET now on streaming, it seemed like a good time to dive into the film’s position within Christopher Nolan’s filmography.
Most discussions of Nolan’s filmography focus on the director’s obsession with time, and TENET makes sense in that context. However, the film also ties into more existential anxieties that simmer through Nolan’s body of work, in particular the question of reality actually is and how best to respond to a world that can fundamentally chaotic, hostile and unknowable. TENET deals this this theme, confronting its audience and its characters with a reality that appears to be unraveling.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the twentieth anniversary of Shrek, it seems like a reasonable opportunity to take a look back at the film and its sizable pop culture legacy.
Shrek emerged at the turn of the millennium as a response to the kind of animation that had dominated American cinema during the nineties. In contrast to the calculated earnestness and sincerity of the Disney Renaissance, and its many imitators, Shrek‘s irony and cynicism felt like a breathe of fresh air. It was a film that didn’t take itself too seriously, indulging in knowing jokes and winking references. It was a bold counter-cultural statement that nobody expected to succeed. However, it did succeed, and ironically became one of the defining films of the twenty-first century.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist yesterday evening. With the release of Superman: The Animated Series in high-definition on HBO Max in March, it seemed like an opportunity to take a look back at the underappreciated entry in the DC Animated Universe.
Superman: The Animated Series tends to get overshadowed in discussions of the DCAU by the two shows either side of it, by the earlier Batman: The Animated Series and by the two later Justice League series. However, Superman: The Animated Series is an interesting bridge between the two, eschewing the “villain of the week” structure of Batman: The Animated Series to instead focus on long-form storytelling that developed character and built the world in ways that would pay off in the later spin-offs. It remains one of the best takes on the Man of Steel.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I’m thrilled to be launching 3-Minute Reviews on Escapist Movies. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be joining a set of contributors in adding these reviews to the channel. For the moment, I’m honoured to contribute a three-minute film review of Those Who Wish Me Dead, which released in cinemas and on HBO Max this weekend.
the m0vie blog 