The Marvels and How It Took Me Forever to Watch It
I'm not mad, but come on Alamo Drafthouse!
I miss those old days back at the start of college when studios would have their movie street teams out giving people free showings of movies like Fight Club, American Beauty, and Gladiator. You'd get a ticket and tumble into a theater with 300 of your classmates and check out a sneak preview of a movie non-college people wouldn't see for weeks until after you did. I miss those days. I still love movies, but watching them becomes increasingly harder as everything moves to our home theaters and streaming becomes glorified cable.
So I continue to be a major fan of whatever it is that Marvel puts out. Long before Disney bought it, the first Iron Man film, and back when he and the Fantastic Four and Incredible Hulk were anything other than Sunday morning cartoon shows in the 90s, I was already into Marvel Comics for a decade. Looking back from here, I and the comics giant have a history that’s been pieced together for as long as I’ve been alive. So despite any problems others may have seen I enjoyed Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. I liked Ant-Man: Quantumania. Despite their problems in comics and film, I'm still a die-hard fan of Marvel and check out their new books every week. I'm not the one to personally worry a lot about something like "Marvel fatigue" outside of all the explaining I had to do for people leading up to Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers Endgame. I can’t help but love Marvel til the death of me.
Similar to the comics, even if the movies are trash (which they are not), I'll always come back to see what characters I've been reading about since I was 5 years old are doing 35 years later. It's the kind of fun I now have to thank Disney for despite buying The Spider-Man Saga when Disney was making The Little Mermaid for the first time. Of all the other terrible things they do as we saw during the strike period we know that executives are terrible thanks to their elimination of competitors, destruction of unions, and how they generally should all dive into a volcano. They also oversee all the damn movies I want to see.
The Marvels: The First Marvel Movie Title Without A Colon In Years
The Marvels takes three different Marvel Characters with "energy-based" powers and sets up a story where any time two of the three of them use their ability at the same time, they switch places with the other members. Directed by Nia DaCosta, The Marvels takes Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel), Monica Rambeau (The Pre-Carol Captain Marvel), and Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) and sends them through this wacky little story where they keep switching locations and fights for 2 hours. Personally, I think it’s Barbie Movie awesome. It’s got a whole planet where the language is singing. I want to go there.
If The Marvels is still in your theatres, go see it as quickly as you can.
I don't want to talk about that movie so much as about all the trouble I went through to see it. I got a ride one night to the Alamo Draft House to go watch this movie. I went alone with no worries or cares about who would even be there at 5:30 pm on the Thursday before the movie technically opened. Originally I was going to go to the AMC near our house, but decided it'd be better to go out to the theatre that will serve you fish and chips and spicy popcorn while shutting people up during your feature.
I walk up to the theatre and see a bunch of people standing outside. I assumed they'd be waiting to see the same film I was and went in to try and buy a ticket to the movie. These tickets are... more expensive than I remember. But, I was already out and didn't have a ride home. I snuck past the group of people and bought one from a machine they had inside the place.
Nobody seemed to stop me.
That's important because what my brain failed to put together was that people weren't waiting outside the Draft House weren’t huge Marvel fans trying to meet each other, they were standing outside because the theater was shut down. It could have been a mistake or a flood in one of the theatres, but the staff wasn’t saying much. Either way, the alarm was going off since before I’d walked it and it didn't hit me what was happening until I bought that ticket for a movie I wasn't going to get to see that night.
Obviously... this is not fun. I'm not driving now and didn't have a ride back home at all. I was going to be stuck at the Alamo Draft House. It’s nice, but practically closed. The manager gave me a "rain check" to see the movie later. That's great, but I wasn't ready to call a Lyft yet and came up with a plan. The area the Draft House is in is surrounded by other bars and places to hang out. I would just hang out at the place next door bar for a while and wait for these firemen to show up and turn off the alarm. After that, I'd be able to watch The Marvels before opening night the way I intended.
So I go into the bar next door to wait around for these lights to stop.
Hour one was kind of fun.
I had a drink and stopped to think.
Hour two made me blue.
These firemen weren't about to save me.
Eventually, I got tired of waiting and a whole other line of people going into the next showing to get their rain checks. I realized I should have gotten a ride with the woman in the wheelchair in the hope they went somewhere else to check out the movie. I waited in the new line for a while, underneath these blaring fire lights, but eventually, I thought better of it. I just took my leave and made my way back home in the back of a Lyft.
I made my way from Houston back to Austin. I got a bicycle from the homie Rob and brought it back in my friend James' Volvo. I took a trip to Houston and worked on music with Andrew. I have TV show notes written into my whiteboard... but you know what I hadn't done? Seen The Marvels. It killed me deep down. To have not seen all three of my favorite all-time characters in the movie that I never thought would even get made a few years ago.
It took me almost a month to get back to that Drafthouse. This time I had James with me and we watched... "Another Marvel Movie." To me, it was an 8 of 10. Fun times with The Marvels, Nick Fury, and Kamala Khan's entire family. An interesting little teaser scene at the end of the film. Ultimately, I liked what I saw.
The internet is going to tell you that you have Marvel fatigue. They’re going to crap on a movie with four female leads because they’re all women in it. They’re going to say it’s the lowest opening Marvel movie when the strike ended a day or two before it opened. People aren’t going to be fair to it.
What I think is the biggest problem is that we have “bad movie” fatigue instead. Maybe Disney really shouldn't have bought EVERYTHING, but they did. Marvel properties should have been given more time to cook, but they weren’t. Maybe DC shouldn’t have made significantly worse movies the whole time, but they did. Either way, while I ultimately loved The Marvels, I understand that my appreciation is part of what's wrong with movies. I get that. What I think we want is the feeling we got during this scene:
This scene is what we want. Take another eight years to make something that excites us that much. I don’t care if we have to use the government to break up Disney to get it, but hopefully, someone will give it to us soon.
Anyway, go watch the The Marvels. It’s awesome.
That Avengers clip is amazing; I teared up just listening to the audience.