| Title | Qt3 Movie Podcast: Spider-Man: Far from Home |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Movie podcasts |
| When | July 8, 2019 |
Hey Peter Parker, do you have something for us?
You misspelled Pet Sematary.
This movie is a high school comedy first and a superhero movie second, so it felt kinda weird how packed it was with post-Endgame MCU housekeeping. That split focus and the lip service it pays to the character’s grief over Tony Stark seemed very much at odds with the colorful, funny, and lighthearted tone of the film. But then my favorite part was the psychedelic funhouse illusion trip sequence with zombie Iron Man, so what the hell do I know?
One thing I can be certain of is that the Edith gag in the opsis was so goddamned funny that I had to pull into a gas station to keep from crashing my car.
Glad someone got it. Felt like Roseanne on the pitcher’s mound at the time. Same voice even.
I don’t give movies a pass for suffering a compressed schedule unless it’s one of those legendary scripts written in two days or a fantastic single take with a flaw or whatever. The story about the making of the movie needs to be pretty cool to make me enjoy the movie more. Sony trying to fit a blockbuster into the MCU wall chart isn’t quite there.
Also, thanks for inserting Amy Pascal into the opsis. In my head canon, her office is like VP Meyer’s from Veep, and I need more fuel for that.
“Archie and Betty and Veronica?”
“Classic high school love triangle!” - Mr. Glass. What’s the point of him being in high school if there aren’t even any teenage romantic complications? Brenda or Kelly? Barbarino or Horshack? Zack or Screech? Carrie or Chloe Grace Moretz? Prom on Ecstasy or prom on Adderall? So many choices, so many stories to tell.
Do high schools even still have cliques? I’m genuinely curious. These Spider-Man movies make it unclear. The only thing anyone ever fights over is who gets to do MJ.
When you did the Edith voice, did you know that Marisa Tomei played Edith in the recent All in the Family live episode??
By the way, you do know that Creepy Five-Years-Older Asian Guy and Flash Thompson are not the same person, right? You said that in the 'opsis, but then I think to repeated it in the movie discussion.
Also, Flash was criminally underused in this movie. I think he insulted Peter maybe once or twice.
Haven’t seen it, but that cast sounded conceived on bad acid.
I try not to pay too much attention, so that the final product’s dumber. It’s confusion as branding.
Since Tom asked about it on the podcast: The Eternals is one of the movies currently in production at Marvel, with no announced release date yet. In fact, there are no MCU movies with announced release dates, which seems weird to me. But in case you want to block off your calendar:
5/1/2020: Untitled Marvel Movie 1
11/6/2020: Untitled Marvel Movie 2
2/12/2021: Untitled Marvel Movie 3
5/7/2021: Untitled Marvel Movie 4
11/5/2021: Untitled Marvel Movie 5
2/18/2022: Untitled Marvel Movie 6
5/6/2022: Untitled Marvel Movie 7
7/29/2022: Untitled Marvel Movie 8
And Kelly, you were thinking of the Inhumans, not the Eternals. The Inhumans have a guy whose voice kills people; the Eternals are totally different.
I’m not sure anyone cares, but here’s the concept behind The Eternals: Back in the dawn of mankind, a godlike race called the Celestials came to Earth and tampered with primitive DNA, creating three races: the Eternals, who are basically superhuman immortals (think Zeus, Ares, Athena, etc.); the Humans, who are just normal people; and the Deviants, who are basically every image people have of devils or demons.
Cut to: present day! The Celestials have returned to Earth, and they are going to judge mankind…after about 500 years to monitor everything happening on Earth. So basically you have these 1000-foot giants, standing in various points around the world, observing everything that happens. They don’t move, they don’t talk, and after 500 years, Arishem (the leader of the Celestials) will judge humanity: If he gives a “thumbs up”, humanity survives. If he gives a “thumbs down”, humanity is destroyed.
I wish I were joking about any of this.
I have no idea how this is going to make a movie. It sounds horrible.
I think one of the reasons for the Skrull reveal was that the plot of the movie requires Fury to be a chump. But he’s played by Samuel Jackson, so there’s no way the real Fury buys Mysterio’s story about being from another dimension and doesn’t do some checking and find out that he’s really a disgruntled ex-Stark guy.
The other reason is probably to set up Fury and maybe some of the other Avengers in space to put things in place for Guardians 3, Eternals, Captain Marvel 2, or some other plot in the works.
(Also, I totally cracked up at the Edith voice, too. A+)
What I was getting at in my e-mail is that Mysterio was originally a stuntman using practical effects like springs in his boots and smoke and magnets to fake superpowers (and that weird smoky effect in his helmet is just a one-way thing he can see out of just fine “using the same principle as Spider-Man’s eyepieces”). So I thought it was great that they updated him to be basically a whole movie studio faking superpowers with CG and loved the bits with him directing the animator and getting dialogue from his writers.
And that made me think it was very funny that Hollywood is fine with a lone genius building fusion reactors, supersuits, and an army of robots alone in his basement. But blockbuster movie FX? Obviously Mysterio has a whole team working on it. It would be ridiculous to imagine one guy could make a movie all by himself.
And going along with the “Mysterio is a team” idea, I think the movie was showing us that Gyllenhaal’s character is dead but the FX guy grabbed a Portentous Thumb Drive from the computer when the group was bugging out after Mysterio’s defeat. So the movie clip JJJ shows in Times Square is a fake put together by Team Mysterio using doctored versions of the video from the fight to blame it all on Spider-Man. (Also when Gyllenhaal told the team to turn off the illusions, he says he has a plan for how to sell it, so that’s probably when he recorded the “Spider-Man did it” speech, although probably intending to use it after killing Spider-Man.)
This was a really fun podcast episode to listen to. It was kind of a laid back movie, and fittingly it was a laid back podcast, with no one really pushing strong opinions about the movie.