Spider-Man: Homecoming — A tangled web

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for sci-fi action and violence, and mild profanity
By Derrick Bang

It’s both ironic and yet appropriate that this newest incarnation of Spider-Man — let’s call it Spider-Man 3.0 — works best when young Peter Parker is out of costume.

Try as he might, Peter (Tom Holland) can't seem to make things work properly ... either
in his personal life, or as the web-slinging would-be hero, Spider-Man.

As originally conceived by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, way back in 1962, Peter was an angst-ridden high school outcast: a nerd long before that word became a fashionable descriptor. Eternally abused by campus tormentor Flash Thompson, ignored by all the cool kids, Peter took solace from his scientific curiosity and the protective embrace of home life with his beloved Uncle Ben and Aunt May.

British actor Tom Holland — so powerful as the eldest son forced to help his family cope with a tsunami’s aftermath, in 2012’s The Impossible — persuasively nails this all-essential aspect of Peter’s personality. He has a ready smile that falters at the faintest slight, real or imagined; he’s all gangly limbs and unchecked, hyperactive eagerness. Peter frequently doesn’t know how to handle himself, because he doesn’t yet possess a strong sense of what his “self” actually is.

That said, director/co-scripter Jon Watts’ update of Peter gives the lad a firmer social grounding that he possessed in all those early Marvel comic books. He’s a valued member of his school’s academic decathlon squad, where he’s routinely thrust alongside teammates Flash (Tony Revolori), crush-from-a-distance Liz (Laura Harrier) and the aloof, slightly mysterious Michelle (Zendaya, the effervescent star of TV’s engaging K.C. Undercover).

And — oh, yes — Peter is a-bubble with enthusiasm over the secret he cannot share with anyone: his recent trip to Berlin, supposedly as a science intern for Stark Enterprises, but where he actually joined Iron Man and other super-powered associates and went mano a mano against Captain America (recent back-story details supplied via a clever flashback).

Impetuously assuming that he’ll therefore be made a member of the Avengers, Peter is chagrined when days and weeks pass without a word from Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) or his right-hand man, Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau). I mean, Spidey deflected Captain America’s shield, right? What the heck is Tony waiting for?

Retrieving stolen bicycles and helping little old ladies may establish cred as “your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man,” but it hardly stacks up against saving the world from super-powered bad guys. Peter chafes at being abandoned on the sidelines, and thus makes the mistake that Stark anticipated.

Wholly contrary to the essential divide between civilian and costumed life, Peter begins to employ his alter-ego as a crutch: a means to enhance his social status.

“But I’m nothing without the costume,” he eventually wails, in genuine torment, to Tony.

“If that’s true,” Tony replies, “then you don’t deserve it.”

Table 19: Book elsewhere

Table 19 (2017) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for occasional profanity, drug use, sexual candor and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang

Wedding guests often receive inconsequential little favors: tchotchkes that may draw a smile or two in the moment, but are quickly forgotten.

This movie is just such an item.

The misfits at Table 19 wonder what they've done, to be abandoned in the wedding
reception's far corner: clockwise from left, Bina and Jerry Kemp (Lisa Kudrow and Craig
Robinson), "Nanny Jo" (June Squibb), Walter Thimple (Stephen Merchant), Rezno
Eckberg (Tony Revolori) and Eloise McGarry (Anna Kendrick).

Filmmaking brothers Jay and Mark Duplass are known for modest, character-driven comedies — such as Baghead and Jeff, Who Lives at Home — that feature eccentric folks who don’t quite inhabit the real world. They’re somewhat familiar, in a that-quiet-guy-next-door manner, but you’d probably avoid them in a social situation.

Table 19, alas, is so insubstantial that it would blow away during a soft breeze. The premise is droll but cramped, barely able to drag its way through a mercifully short 85 minutes. Indeed, the film pretty much runs out of gas after the first act, leaving its cast adrift in uncharted waters.

Maybe that’s why the Duplass boys, who generally helm their own material, farmed this one off to director Jeffrey Blitz. Who, to be fair, does the best with what he’s got. Individual moments of Table 19 are quite funny — co-star Stephen Merchant is hilarious throughout — and the core plotline builds to a an unexpectedly poignant conclusion.

But the film too frequently struggles and flounders through awkward silences, much like the half-dozen strangers thrust together at the “misfit table” during a wedding reception that pretty much ignores them.

Until the last moment, Eloise (Anna Kendrick) was the maid of honor for best friend Francie (Rya Meyers), eagerly helping with all wedding and reception details. Eloise also was in a steady relationship with Francie’s brother, Teddy (Wyatt Russell), serving as best man. But that was then; after being dumped by Teddy — via text, no less — Eloise was relieved of her duties and transformed into an instant persona non grata.

(Which, just in passing, seems shallow on Francie’s part ... just as it seems weird that the best man would be her brother. But I digress.)

Defiantly determined to attend the blessed event anyway, Eloise duly arrives to find herself consigned to the Siberia of reception regions: the dread, distant corner Table 19.

The Grand Budapest Hotel: Grandly chaotic

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: Rated R, for profanity, sexual candor and brief violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.21.14

This one’s hard to categorize.

On the one hand, and perhaps most visibly, Wes Anderson’s newest opus is a madcap farce populated by eccentric and oddly polite characters who hearken back to those found within West London’s famed Ealing Studios comedies, during the late 1940s and early ’50s.

With the police hot on their heels, M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes, left) and his faithful
junior lobby boy, Zero (Tony Revolori), frantically try to figure out where to hide a
priceless Renaissance painting that they have, ah, liberated.

On the other hand, it’s a droll send-up of Agatha Christie mysteries, with suspicious butlers, nosy maids and assorted other shady and avaricious characters, all of them anxious about the contents of a will that keeps throwing up codicils, riders, supplements, postscripts and assorted other appendices, possibly even superseded by the second copy of a second will.

On the third hand, it’s an affectionate ode to an era of more civilized behavior, when traveling strangers regaled each other with fascinating tall tales while enjoying a sumptuous meal; and when courting lovers exchanged passionate letters.

Then, too, there’s an affectionate nod to Inception, with its nested narratives.

And, last but certainly not least, however we choose to define this unapologetically zany melodrama, it most certainly could have come only from the eccentric imagination of director Wes Anderson ... and perhaps that’s the only explanation that matters.

Anderson’s films take place within a fanciful universe of his creation: one slightly off-center from our own, with occasionally familiar cultural landmarks that merely add to the gently bizarre atmosphere, laced with characters who deliver crucial soliloquies and peculiar non-sequitors with equal aplomb, and always with resolutely straight faces.

No character ever laughs at something said by another; at best, the speaker might get a raised eyebrow that Signifies A Great Deal.

In short, Anderson’s films are strange. Very strange, and definitely an acquired taste. I generally swing toward admiration, but not always; his previous outing, Moonrise Kingdom, is a thorough delight ... but I almost couldn’t make it through The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

This one falls somewhere in between, leaning more heavily toward the wacky delights of Moonrise Kingdom. Anderson has concocted the script with co-conspirator Hugo Guinness, claiming inspiration from pre-code 1930s Hollywood comedies and the stories and memoirs of Viennese author Stefan Zweig (!).

Avid film fans with a fondness for old-style filmmaking technique likely will have a ball. Mainstream viewers who casually wander into the theater will be convinced, after only 15 minutes, that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

And, to be fair, they won’t be wrong.