Boy Movies #76

Amazing week jk

This, now more than ever, is Boy Movies — a newsletter.

What an absolutely piece of shit week, huh? I considered not sending out a new issue today because first of all who cares, and second of all I was simply not in the mood to write about something as frivolous as movies when I’m so angry and disappointed and tired and worried. I wish nothing but pain and suffering on Donald Trump and Elon Musk and especially that freaky Catholic convert ass (never ever ever trust one of these; either you’re born into it or you’re clinically insane and need to have your head looked at by a team of professionals) JD Vance, but as is always the case, it’s bigger than all of them. There were obviously a lot of people who were bowled over by the election results, but the most common sentiment I’ve heard from friends in the days since has been, “I’m not even surprised.” Like, yes, in many ways they got us, girls, whatever, but America is ultimately an evil, fascist country. Relatedly, the sky is blue.

Nothing I’m saying is new. Frankly, I have no business talking about any of it. If you’re a reader of Boy Movies, I imagine these are all things you’ve heard before, all spoken by people more intelligent than myself. But as we wait for Kamala Harris to announce that she’s writing 2 What 2 Happened, it’s hard to think about anything else. We have to go on existing with the knowledge that this is exactly what an enormous portion of the country wanted. The morning after the election my eyes snapped open at 6am after roughly four and a half hours of sleep to a text from Cassidy informing me that our home state of New Jersey went so red that Harris only won it by seven points. When I went out later that day in New York City, where I live, which went redder than I ever could have anticipated, the temperature was close to 80 degrees in November. It felt like a taunt, a reminder of how much worse conditions are about to get for our rapidly decaying planet.

It was maddening to hear Harris extend her congratulations to Trump, proof of what we already knew: that the Democrats have learned nothing from this, that they are an ineffectual party that stands for nothing. It feels so much worse than 2016 because it is. The abominably selfish American people had four years to think about it and said, Yes, give us more of that, please. To quote Nicholas, “I certainly don’t think the Democratic Party should ever be allowed to forget how their at-times avoidant, at-times stridently arrogant stance on an unfolding genocide lost them a key swing state and the goodwill of millions of Americans. But if there was ever a time to break our foxhole trust and reliance on voting as the ultimate political action, it’s now. If there was ever a time to expect more from each other ethically and morally, it’s now.”

All of this is to say that things are atrocious and I couldn’t think of anything to write about this week due to feeling absolutely atrocious, but an extremely well-timed text from my friend Geoff changed my outlook.

Thank you, Geoff. In the spirit of that, let’s talk about a movie I saw in the before times: Venom: The Last Dance.

Speaking as notorious Venomhead…

I am famously a fan of Sony’s Spider-Man-free Spider-Man film universe. For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure — and I really do enthusiastically recommend these movies to any of my fellow thought leaders who like to have fun — Sony’s Spider-Man-free Spider-Man film universe is made up of a series of movies that 1. include characters commonly associated with Spider-Man but not Spider-Man himself because of some messy rights issues with Disney, and 2. are bad. The series currently includes three Venom films, Morbius, and Madame Web. This motley crew will soon be joined by the upcoming Kraven the Hunter starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, an actor I’m very attracted to and very scared of/for.

There’s something incredible about these Sony movies. No one involved with them seems to be bothered by the fact that they’re widely reviled and that they do not make much money. Nevertheless, she persisted, etc. It’s as if they set out to invent a new kind of bad movie that entertains as much as it perplexes. I don’t know what to say to anyone who considers Madame Web or Venom: The Last Dance to be among the worst movies they saw all year, if not straight up the worst. Maybe go watch that wretched Mean Girls musical and get back to me. In that same vein, I would take a thousand Madame Webs before sitting through even one more Megalopolis.

In comparison to the Disney-produced Marvel movies, which have become increasingly unwatchable in the years since Iron Man first stormed the world stage, Sony’s Spider-Man-free Spider-Man film universe feels a bit quaint. From the Party City wigs plopped on Michelle Williams’s head in Venom to Madame Web’s inexplicably ADR’d villain to, I guess, everything??? about Morbius, these movies seem as though they were assembled with $5 and a dream. In order to understand a Disney-produced Marvel movie in 2024, you’re expected to have watched between three and five separate Disney+ series in their entirety. Meanwhile, Madame Web couldn’t even get approval to use Peter Parker’s name.

I’m not implying Sony has anything close to integrity — far from it — but they do have, dare I say, grit. They evoke a type of nostalgia satisfied only by the misguidedly campy superhero movies of the 2000s, which now exist as odd little time capsules. (I dare you to try watching Ben Affleck stumble around in that Daredevil movie today.) That’s part of what was so off-putting about this summer’s truly depressing Deadpool & Wolverine. The first two Deadpool movies weren’t vestiges of artistic freedom and creativity, but to see something that, for better or worse, did get to be a little different, be swept up in yet another corporate merger is exhausting. These movies and their corresponding TV shows are all the same. They look the same, they sound the same, many have overlapping actors in a goofy attempt to ensure everything ties together. As the ugly, forgotten stepchild of the modern superhero movie, Sony doesn’t really seem to have that problem.

That Venom has proved the most successful, both critically (okay, barely) and commercially, of Sony’s Spider-Man-free Spider-Man film universe should tell you everything you need to know. The Venom films star Tom Hardy as a journalist¹ named Eddie Brock who gets bonded with an alien symbiote that manifests as a big wet blob of black goo who, I have convinced myself, is written to be homosexual. The goo helps Eddie fight crime and also becomes his best friend. I like these movies so much because they’re primarily about Tom Hardy doing another incomprehensible accent as he plays out an odd couple dynamic with what is essentially his hand puppet. Other things happen in these movies, but far be it from me to care. I come to see Tom Hardy and the gay goo do Who’s on First.

Venom and its sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, are delightful nonsense. In the first film, Tom Hardy dunks himself in a tank of live lobsters; in the second, the gay goo goes to a rave. Venom is so much fun to laugh and scream and clap at. Do not let anyone convince you otherwise. You can imagine how excited I was for Venom: The Last Dance, the third and final (yeah, sure) film in the trilogy, as I’ve always operated under the assumption that these movies were relatively untouchable in their shameless weirdness. Many critics smugly dubbed The Last Dance too in on the joke, but as a Venomaniac I’m going to tell you all that that’s not the problem. The problem is, as always, that they involved the fucking government.

If superhero movies are gonna do anything it’s add in a government-related subplot. They cannot fucking help themselves. They are addicted to it. I want to know who the people behind these films think could possibly be sitting in the audience wondering, “What does the military think of the gay goo?” The Last Dance’s version of this is relatively mild, adding in an insipid symbiote-studying organization with a name I didn’t internalize during the movie and didn’t bother to look up before I sat down to write this issue. (Impervious? Emporium? I’m close. Don’t tell me.) It’s via this plot line, which eats up so much more of the movie’s runtime than I bargained for, that Juno Temple delivers what is by far the worst film performance of the year. That’s neither here nor there, but I must implore casting directors to stop forcing actors with incredibly British faces to do wack American accents. It’s not worth it and we’re all making fun of them. Anyway, she plays some kind of scientist with brother-related weather trauma (k!) who is obsessed with figuring out why the symbiotes have come to Earth.

Personally, I have never once found myself wondering why Venom and his friends came to Earth. That wasn’t a question I ever asked, let alone needed answered. I just accepted it because I am evolved. But fine, whatever, if Sony was out of ideas for this third movie, I can see a world where it could’ve worked: Is Eddie Brock not a journalist? Could he not have looked into it himself? Could he not have uncovered the secrets of the alien world using his own investigative skills? I’m genuinely asking: It seems as though everyone forgot that was, at one point, his job. Then again, Eddie’s been sharing a body with a symbiote for two full movies and didn’t once think to ask the symbiote directly, so maybe this was territory better left unexplored. Maybe Eddie, like me, didn’t give a shit.

Ultimately, what’s most annoying is that it of course comes down to the continued propagandizing of the U.S. government and the military. At the end of The Last Dance, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s soldier character selflessly blows himself up with a grenade in order to save the world from the vengeful Xenophage (don’t ask) creatures, turning him into another soldier who dies for his country. Look, the entire existence of Boy Movies was inspired by Top Gun: Maverick, so I’m one to talk. I certainly made plenty of “I’m enlisting!” jokes after seeing Miles Teller with that little mustache, but I forget that not everyone sees things the way I do.

Yes, the involvement of the government in V3nom is pretty ridiculous, but they still get to come out looking like the good guys. There’s an insidiousness to the way we spend our media-consuming lives getting bombarded with depictions of American imperialism, filtered through glossy movies and TV shows. (Liam just wrote a great issue on the subject in the new Dad Shows, where he watched Bad Boys II, directed by Michael Bay and released during the post-9/11 Bush era.) I’m not saying there’s a direct line from Venom to a second Trump presidency (imagine), but these things have felt a bit less tolerable with each passing year. It’s hard to enjoy the gay goo in such conditions, you know?

1. It’s very “Kat Dennings is an astrophysicist.”