Black Widow
SPOILER ALERT: There is actually nothing in this piece that I would consider a spoiler, but since I know a lot of you are so sensitive, I’m putting this warning here anyway. To me, this would be a good thing to read BEFORE seeing the film. My comments here are of a very general nature and do not reveal any plot points other than in the most vague general sense. But for a lot of Avengers’ fans, just knowing which characters are going to show up in the movie is a spoiler. If you’re a person like me who doesn’t think spoilers matter unless specific plot points are revealed, you’re okay reading this. But if you are more militant than that, best to be on the safe side and see the movie first. But I’ll just say this to you: YOU SHOULD SEE IT!
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I am so embarrassed and I know I have to explain myself. I did not know until the early dawn hours on Mother’s Day, May 9, two months ago, that Scarlett Johansson had actually gotten married LAST YEAR! Readers of this blog must have been so confused as to how I could not know that. I imagine you all must have thought it was some kind of gag. But I really didn’t know and the story of my ridiculous ostrich act will appear in a later posting.
So I was promising the companion to my porn piece, “Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: How Liberals Lost the Culture War”, and then this blog just went dead silent for two months because, honestly, I was not in an emotional space where I could write, and I certainly didn’t feel like working on that.
I don’t want to give the impression that I was heartbroken over a girl I don’t know in the same way one would be over a breakup. But Scarlett was my dream of the moment, of the last nine years (in the form of “the girl I saw in Vegas” for the first six of those years). I really meant (still mean) everything I said about her, and I actually did real-world care because I became infatuated with her in the real world, not on a screen. So, of course, I was sad and disappointed for a little while.
But I finally moved past that enough to get back to work. But my state of mind has shifted. Right now, my writing is all about dealing with the emotions I feel. So that means I have to be in the right emotional space to work on certain things. My present emotional state is not there to work on a largely political piece because of Scarlett, so I’ll have to do what another redhead says, appropriately one in politics, and circle back to that. Right now, we need to talk about Scarlett Johansson and Black Widow...
In my life, I have probably seen around 1,000 movies at the theater. In the late 90s, I was watching 75-100 movies per year at the theater. Including television and video, I guesstimate that I’ve watched over 10,000 movies in my life. But until Friday, I had not been to the theater in over ten years.
Half of that time is accounted for by my five years incarcerated, but I had actually stopped going to the movies long before that. There were several primary reasons.
The first big dropoff in my theater-going happened around the turn of the millennium when I felt that Hollywood started to shift away from making a lot of the kinds of movies I like most (epic dramas and serious mysteries and thrillers) and toward the genres I like least (action franchises, war movies, pro-cop propaganda with law enforcement officers as heroes which is fine but ignoring the reality of all the Derek Chauvins in America). For me, 1999 was the best movie year ever.
But the biggest change came when I moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to San Diego. In Northern California, there were two great theaters that I loved—the AMC Mercado in Santa Clara near where the 49ers stadium is today, and the AMC Saratoga, Saratoga being a fairly ritzy suburb of San Jose. Both were brand new, state-of-the-art theaters in the late 90s.
The Mercado was a huge multiplex located in a strip mall across the street from Six Flags Great America. So the theater became kind of a hangout spot for high school and college-age kids. It was really happening on weekends. The only downsides to the Mercado were a bad parking lot, with too few and too small spaces, and a lot of sold-out showtimes.
The Saratoga was an awesome small theater with only a few screens. It was almost never crowded, parking was easy, and the crowd was mostly affluent, middle aged people and wealthy teenagers from the surrounding nice suburbs. As a result they showed a lot of off-beat and lower budget movies while Mercado only played the hits.
They had this one house I loved for a certain kind of movie. It was VERY small, maybe only like 100 seats and the screen was the smallest theater screen I’ve ever seen. They showed only indie films in that I one. I saw Kasi Lemmons’ strange, interesting overlooked film The Caveman’s Valentine in that theater.
I love Kasi Lemmons work. Eve’s Bayou is one of the best movies EVER. I know a lot of non-Black moviegoers avoid films with all-Black casts and that is not necessarily an injudicious decision. Most Black movies aren’t very good (I will double down and defend that statement if challenged), and even most good ones deal with stuff you won’t relate to or be interested in if you’re the average non-Black person. But Eve’s Bayou is a movie anyone who likes fine drama will appreciate.
In any event, I loved those theaters, but when I moved to San Diego, there were none like those. I personally like the way AMC does things. There are a few decent AMCs in San Diego, but none like Mercado or Saratoga.
The final nail in the coffin for my theater-going was the arrival of HDTV and Blu-ray. When I got a big flat screen and a Blu-Ray player in 2007, I realized that I could create what was, for me, a BETTER movie experience at home than at the theater. I turn out the lights and pull my couch up so that I’m maybe four feet from the screen and the visual experience of that for me is more immersive than a big theater screen in all but a couple of choice sweet spot seats in a theater that people are always running to grab.
At home, I can pause and go to the bathroom or make something to eat. If I get tired, I can go to sleep and finish it later. If I don’t understand a sequence clearly, I can rewind and watch it again. I don’t have to turn my cellphone off and risk missing important calls. I can watch in my old comfy sweats or in the nude if I want. I can watch any time of day—certain types of movies I love watching early in the morning (Labyrinth). Other types, I like watching in the middle of the night (Phantom of the Paradise).
It is usually too cold for me at the movie theater (and inside most public places), so I can watch at a comfortable temperature. I don’t have to worry about people talking in the movie or needing to pass in front of me. I don’t have to worry about parking or sellouts or movies so crowded there are no good seats, and it’s cheaper. It’s just a superior experience for me all the way around.
Before HDTV and Blu-ray, the difference in image quality between home video on a tube TV and the movies was dramatic enough to keep me at the theater all the time. There’s really just NO reason for me to go to the movies anymore.
Now, this is true for me because of two things a lot of movie goers care about that I don’t. I’m not a sound guy. I’m not knowledgable about it, and it doesn’t really make a difference to my viewing experience as a rule. Most of the time at the theater, the movie is way too loud for my taste. I hate it when the movie is so loud you can feel the sound in your body, but for a lot of moviegoers, this is a key part of the experience, and a key part of what makes the theater better than home viewing.
Also, I don’t need the social interaction aspect. Entertainment is personal for me. I don’t care what anyone else thinks about the movie in the sense of wanting to see it with a bunch of people. I get annoyed when I’m walking out of a movie I loved and the other people are trashing it (Kevin Costner’s The Postman was probably my most extreme experience of that).
The only thing that is left (and this is now over, perhaps for good because of Covid), is in the past you had to wait a little while for home video to be available. But outside of being in too much of a hurry to become a professional success, I’m a very patient person. There have only been a handful of movies that I felt I HAD to see right away—Great Expectations, Fight Club, Pearl Harbor, Beyond Borders, For Love of the Game, and a few others. By the way, though I really liked most, I was disappointed to varying degree in all those movies. I had hyped myself up for them too much.
I have connections, so I’ve had tickets to a lot of advanced screenings dropped in my lap, but Great Expectations is the only movie I’ve wanted to see as soon as possible so bad that I WORKED to get tickets to an early showing. I was a broke college student in 1998. If my financial status then had been what it was in say 2002, I’d have probably paid as much as $5,000 for a ticket to the premiere. For a lot of people, they save up for a Super Bowl or a World Series game or a U2 concert. Seeing Great Expectations the first time was probably for me the biggest event of that type in my life. I was actually a VERY SLIGHT bit disappointed, my “great expectation” being that it would be my favorite movie of all time. But I still love it and I saw it like ten times at the theater.
But since I moved to San Diego in 2003, I’ve probably only been to the theater 10 or 12 times. I believe the last movie I saw at the theater was Inception in 2010.
Before my incarceration in 2013, it wasn’t that I had a policy against going to the movies. It was just that the combination of the factors above made it so I rarely wanted to. I didn’t know that In Time was an Andrew Niccol movie until I was holding the Blu-ray in my hand. If I’d known that was one of his movies, starring Justin Timberlake who is one of my favorite all-around entertainers, and Amanda Seyfried who I’d just seen and fell in love with in Jennifer’s Body, I’d have been calling the people I know in Hollywood asking, “Who do I have to blow to get into the premiere of THAT movie?”. And I believe Amanda was still single back then? Yeah, I’d have found a way to be there even if it was in New Zealand!
After I got out of prison in 2018, I realized how long it had been even before my arrest since I’d been to the movies and that now, what movie I chose to see on my return was meaningful to me. I was going to go see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are two of my favorite actors, and I’ve been waiting for technically-brilliant Quentin Tarantino to grow up in his storytelling and that movie looked like he has. I haven’t watched yet, but it’s running on TV a lot now and literally four times I’ve stopped flipping channels and thought, “This looks interesting. I wonder what it is?”.
I was about to go see it in the theater and then I stopped myself. I’ve just decided to join the movement for girls. I’m dreaming about starting a girl-led production company with Scarlett, Natalie and Amanda. So I’m going to make my return to the movies a film headlined by two men, directed by a guy whose movies to me suggest problematic attitudes about women to go along with his expessed problematic attitudes about race? Can’t do it.
I was going to go see Avengers: Endgame, but then I heard about Marriage Story, and I thought, well, that’s perfect. It’s Scarlett doing the kind of thing I want to see her do, and I’ve heard all these glowing things about Noah Baumbach’s work, but I’ve never seen one of his movies.
But then I saw a still picture from the movie, and I looked at the expression on Scarlett’s face, and I thought, “I can’t watch this movie right now”. Scarlett is so good, and I really can’t take watching her acting out a painful breakup on screen. It’ll feel like I’m really watching her go through that and it will tear me apart. Don Jon was hard enough and that movie is kind of light.
Plus, I’m always a little skeptical when I hear a filmmaker getting the particular type of hype that Noah Baumbach gets. People who get that particular kind of hype (Sofia Coppola is another) usually make movies that only film-school types like, and I USUALLY do not like the types of movies film school types do. I mean, we agree on a few. Of course, Citizen Kane and The Rules of the Game are great. Owned both and a whole lot more of that Criterion Collection shit. But these are the people that will tell you Bad Lieutenant is a great movie, but Steven Spielberg sucks. These film school dudes really believe that—that Steven Spielberg sucks!
Martin Scorcese is one of my favorite directors and Robert De Niro is one of my favorite actors, but I think Taxi Driver is shit, and I can defend that statement. Godard, Truffaut, Bunuel and all that shit, you can keep it.
It’s the naked emperor thing. There are only few people who like these movies (and I’m glad they exist for them), and everyone else is just afraid to criticize them because someone with a masters degree from USC Film School or NYU will come along and call them an idiot who wasn’t smart enough to understand it. Well, I’m a National Merit Scholarship winner who went to Stanford. So now what?
For someone who loves movies as much as I do, I have real problems with what I call the pretentious film school wing of Hollywood, and that very well may keep me from ever getting work there. But most people I know who have actually worked in Hollywood don’t think like this. It’s the people who spent years getting film school degrees and couldn’t break in, so they are bitter and jealous and act like French New Wave is the only proper way to make a movie. I like some of the stuff that they like, but their pathological hatred of anything that’s popular is offensive and childish.
You find this attitude across the board in all the arts and it is the biggest reason why most Americans never get into fine art. This pretentious hipster superiority is off-putting. Let people get into an art by way of what interests them, and then if the art grabs them, they’ll branch out. But if you’re telling them that what they like sucks, just out of stubbornness and your offensive attitude, they’ll refuse to explore what you like.
Some people might accuse me of hypocrisy here, and say, “Well, isn’t that what you’re doing with superhero movies?”, and I would respond that this is a FAIR CRITICISM. That’s why, if you notice from the beginning of this blog up to now, I’ve slowly tempered my criticism of these movies. Being TOO outspoken at times is one of my flaws I’m constantly working on. I realized that some of what I was saying was a little too much. But to be fair to me, a lot of it was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a kind of joke on the fact that I love Scarlett Johansson but don’t love The Avengers.
But I don’t know Scarlett. She might have been offended by that, because at the end of the day, she’s put a lot of hard work into making these movies for some reason, and I don’t think it’s just because she’s greedy. But if Scarlett is the type of person that couldn’t take that kind of ribbing from someone who has heaped such glowing praise on her, her other work, and her talent, then she wouldn’t be the girl OR the boss for me.
If Scarlett wasn’t in them, I wouldn’t be talking about the Avengers movies at all except to say I don’t like superhero movies and wish Hollywood would offer a bigger variety of different types of movies like they used to. That’s actually part of the reason why I went a little over the top in poking fun at the Avengers, to let Scarlett know that was how I can be so she would have a better idea if I was her type of guy or not. But now that Scarlett’s married, joke’s over and I can say the literal truth...
At this point, I’ve actually watched several of the Avengers movies, and they aren’t bad. I actually kind of liked Captain America: The Winter Soldier. They’re all well-done technically, all the actors are highly capable. The costume designer, whoever that is, is a rock star. Both the character costumes and the regular clothes look really good. All the movies are very...polished.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the only time I’ve been able to tolerate that much obvious CGI as those endless Avengers battle scenes. I feel like I’m just watching someone else playing a video game. I just personally don’t enjoy that style of movie or superhero themes, so they are not entertaining TO ME, but I can see why people like them.
I never thought about it until just now, but there is something else other than the superhero factor. I can’t think of a single movie of any genre with a “cast of thousands” and no real main character that I like. That always makes a movie feel disjointed to me with a bunch of short scenes rotating through all the characters. About as far as you can go with that for me is P. T. Anderson and Wes Anderson (two of my favorites), with six or eight main characters. But more than that, you’ve lost me. That’s probably why I liked Winter Soldier as it has a very scaled-down cast of characters and lots of Scarlett!
But the biggest factor that stopped me from making my triumphant return to the theater with Marriage Story was that I didn’t feel I could handle seeing Scarlett doing a role like that right now. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I’m not the guy for her. Ten years ago, I’d have been first in line. I knew Black Widow was coming, and I thought, “I’ll go see that if nothing comes out earlier that feels right.”.
On the Thursday before Black Widow opened, I went to the beach. I came back to my room in the mid-afternoon and turned on the TV. The first image that came up was Scarlett’s face. This will sound unbelievable, but I swear its the truth. I flipped through the channels ONE time (and I’ve only got like 25 channels here), and THREE TIMES the first thing I saw on a channel was Scarlett. Not just something with Scarlett in it mind you. But Scarlett’s face on the screen.
That night, I watched two episodes of The Simpsons on Freeform. I saw the trailer for Black Widow SIX times...in one hour. I wanted to get up and check the back of my TV like, “Am I on Punk’d? Am I getting the Scarlett-Johansson-only television feed?!?”. I mean, Tom Cruise is a big star who has been in a lot of blockbuster movies. I haven’t seen his face on my TV in over a month I don’t think, or maybe a little less since I watched Born on the Fourth of July. For the last six months, it’s been hard for me to get through a DAY without seeing Scarlett’s face on my TV when I’m not looking for her. I don’t know if you heard, but she’s so cute. Every time she pops up on my screen like that, in my head I say the same thing: “Goddamnit, Scarlett, leave me alone! NO, WAIT! Don’t ever leave me alone!”.
Friday, I was TIRED. I’m still trying to get my cardiovascular conditioning back after almost dying at the beginning of the year and spending January-March almost bed-ridden. I was out and about walking miles Sunday-Thursday, so by Friday, I was exhausted and planned to rest all day and see Black Widow on Saturday. But then I heard Scarlett’s voice in my head...
SCARLETT JOHANSSON
Hmmm, so you say you want to MARRY me, but you can’t get up to go support my movie on opening day?
(beat)
And this is after you didn’t support my Oscar-nominated movie at all.
So at around noon on July 9, 2021, I went online and bought a ticket to a 4:15pm IMAX 2D showing of Black Widow at the AMC Mission Valley in San Diego. After getting stuck up for three dollars by a certain online ticket seller I’ve never liked and won’t name, this set me back just shy of $20. Exhausted though I was, I got up, put on a Scarlett blue t-shirt, and went back to the movies for the first time in over a decade...
I arrived early, and I was surprised there was no crowd. I sat nearly alone in the darkened theater for a long time, thinking about my college days when that was the place you were most likely to find me, and all the things that had happened in the 25 years since then. After a seemingly endless procession of the same insurance commercials and movie trailers I’ve been seeing on television, it began.
So what did I think of the movie? I was shocked: I loved it. It’s a really good, maybe even great movie. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a groupie for Scarlett Johansson, even though I AM a groupie for Scarlett Johansson, and unashamedly and unrepentantly so. But you know I have no problem criticizing Scarlett’s movies when they deserve criticism. You could sub in Jennifer Lawrence or any other competent actress of that type and the movie still works, and fantastically so. I don’t know that ANY movie has ever exceeded my expectations to the degree that this one did. Contact and Gattaca, maybe.
First of all, Black Widow is not really a superhero film just as Natasha Romanoff is not really a superhero. All the characters are humans. In fact, I don’t think they even mention any of the non-human characters in the Avengers universe. This is a human story. Black Widow is more similar to one of the better Bond or Mission Impossible movies, but its more dramatic than those movies. There was actually something about it that felt very similar to Inception, although it isn’t THAT good. But I’d say its really like a Bond film except to me it’s better than any of those—deeper, more emotional, and without the Bond films’ toxic misogyny (I actually haven’t watched any of the Daniel Craig Bonds as I feel there has long since been nothing left to do with that franchise, so I assume Bond’s misogyny is turned down in those in keeping with the times. Sean Connery’s Bond was a flat-out rapist).
In tone and style, Black Widow differs dramatically from the other Avengers movies to an extent that would have worried me as a studio executive as to how audiences would respond. It would seem this won’t be a concern as the oddly very different audiences before me and with me both loved it. The earlier audience was “comic guy”-heavy, probably 75% male with a lot of the audience wearing some kind of Avengers apparel (not actual costumes, but Captain America shield t-shirts and the like).
When I saw this group coming out and they had loved the movie, I thought, “This is significant. “. Why? You have a movie starring a girl, with a nearly all-female cast directed by a girl, and a bunch of comic book guy types loved it. That’s progress.
My audience was a lot of teenage and young adult girls, and few middle-aged couples. A few middle aged girls alone or in pairs but probably two-thirds girls anyway. I don’t think I saw one person wearing Avengers gear. After both shows, I heard nothing but positive comments and saw nothing but satisfied faces.
But each show was less than half-full on mid-afternoon of Friday opening day on IMAX in a big multiplex theater in a busy mall in a busy shopping district. Maybe the crowds were thinned by the fact that there is another huge AMC in another mall basically right across the street.
I don’t know how much the movie economics have changed because of release-date home streaming and the pandemic and so forth, but that may be a red flag for the first-weekend returns. But in the long run it’ll be fine because it’s actually really good and the only way a really good movie can flop is if people don’t see it, and a bunch of Avengers fans are guaranteed to see it no matter what. When you have a standing guarantee that a certain (large) number of Avengers fans will see it, the word of mouth will be good, and I can’t see any reasonable person DISLIKING, regard of your genre wheelhouse. I just told a girl she should go see it.
I think this movie COULD rake in the most of any Avengers movie because it is good enough to impress a dedicated comic hater like me, and still satisfy the kind of 40 year old male who still reads comics and wears superhero pajamas, and appeal to an adolescent girl at the same time.
I have long had the theory that Scarlett Johansson’s name actually doesn’t put butts in seats even though she’s the highest box-office grossing actress of all time (that’s so hot!) and the ninth highest overall. She will probably move up to seven if Black Widow does well. She might catch Robert Downey for six if it does really well (but she may not, because I saw Robert Downey is listed in the cast, but he’s not in the movie that I recall). Which would leave only Sam Jackson and animated movie voice actors ahead of her. Nobody’s catching Sam. He’s $12,000,000,000 ahead of the next live-action actor!
But I don’t think Scarlett has ever moved the needle at the box office. She’s great at her job and she and her team know how to get attached to the right projects. The Black Widow marketing doesn’t even have her name in it. Scarlett’s name can’t get people to run out in mass to see mediocre and bad movies like Angelina Jolie’s could in her prime. It’s just that Scarlett is usually in movies people like. I have a sense that a lot of the movies where she is the solo headliner didn’t do that well, but I can’t be bothered to go research that right now.
I believe my own personal level of interest in Scarlett from the first scene of The Horse Whisperer until now has always exceeded the level of general public interest in her. Even back in the mid-2000s when she was on the cover the celebrity rags and on ET and Access Hollywood all the time, I didn’t hear people in the street talking about her like I did Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, or even Jennifer Lawrence in recent years. It could be regional? Maybe all the Scarlett Johansson fans are on the East Coast where she’s from? But even so, I’ve participated in online movie forums with people from all over. Scarlett is an extremely SUCCESSFUL actress, but I’ve never really been sure how POPULAR she is. That may change now.
The opening sequence of this movie is one of the best movie scenes I’ve ever seen. David Harbour is great throughout the movie but he is so fantastic in that first scene. If I hadn’t already known where where the movie was going, I would have been excited like I was after the first scene of...I’m actually going to have to sit down and think about better opening sequences than that. There may not be any, and that’s not hype.
Now, not being a comic guy or an Avengers guy, I had no idea who the characters in that scene where or what was about to transpire. If you know the story, and you know who those characters are, and you have even a vague idea what’s going to happen, it may not impact you the way it did me, but that was all-time great filmmaking. In the past, the audience would have applauded after a scene like that even right in the middle of the movie.
Speaking of, since I haven’t been in so long, is applauding at the end of a good movie no longer a thing? I’ve never done it because it never made sense to me. The filmmakers aren’t there. If there is a even a projectionist up there, they don’t care. So what are you applauding for? To let the other people in the audience know you liked it? But not one single person clapped at the end of the movie, but both the audience before me and the audience with me, everyone was saying they loved it. And usually, in the past, at least a couple of people would clap at the end of even mediocre movies. There’s somebody who likes everything. I like Gigli. But since not one single person applauded but everyone appeared to leave happy, I assume that silly social convention must have thankfully faded into history.
In any case, this is a thoroughly well-made film—well-written, well-acted, well-directed, and notably well-edited. The episodic, discontinuous editing style of superhero movies really irks me. This one, and Christopher Nolan’s Batmans are the only ones I’ve seen that flow seamlessly. Black Widow director Cate Shortland uses a new (to me) technique that makes it feel uncommonly cohesive. Well, Francis Ford Coppola did something vaguely similar in Dracula. But Black Widow did with sound what he did with images.
I mentioned earlier that sound is not a big thing to me. In years past, I would look at the Oscar nominees in the sound category, and they were movies I had seen, but I had no idea what those awards were based on. This is maybe the first movie where I’ve noticed that the sound was really good. There is the particular sound-based theme they repeat throughout the movie that I’ve never seen (or I guess never HEARD) done before. It’ll be interesting to me to see if they get Oscar nominations for sound.
As a lover of the arts, one of the most exciting things is discovering an artist you hadn’t known before. This is great even if it is someone from the past you had somehow missed, but the best is when it is a young contemporary artist that you will hopefully be able to enjoy more in the future. I was not aware of Florence Pugh before this movie, and I really like her. Not LIKE her like her. But she’s GOOD.
First of all, she’s pretty smoking hot. Not like Scarlett-smoking-hot, but really really cute. Scarlett and Florence? That’s an awful lot of smoking hot for one movie! But don’t worry, Florence, I’m not going down the road of having crushes on any more actresses that I haven’t met. Plus, apparently she’s dating Zach Braff, so she fits the pattern of entertainers I like dating and marrying other entertainers I like.
But just like with Scarlett, Amanda Seyfried and all the girls I talk about here, Florence being smoking hot cute isn’t the main reason why I like her. She is REALLY good at her job. I know a lot of Russians and Eastern Europeans. Slavic people who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the years after have this particular distinct style of humor, a kind of pessimistic sarcasm. Florence nails this better than I’ve ever seen anyone who is not actually from over there do it. She hits the TONE of Russian people so well that because I did not know who she was, I was sitting there gambling with myself as to whether she was really Russian or not. Because she had somewhat Slavic facial features, my bet was that she actually was Russian or Ukrainian or something along those lines. Maybe her family has roots over there. But since I know that culture somewhat well, it was noticeable.
In fact, David Harbour is excellent in this respect also, as is the script. Florence and David are helped by the fact that script captures the tone of Russian people perfectly in how it’s written. The speech David Harbour gives his daughters about how proud of them he is because they are such great killers is SO what a Russian soldier would say. They must have had a great Russian consultant or some key person involved must have Russian roots. Actually, wait...does Scarlett?
I didn’t know Scarlett was a Jewish girl from New York until sometime after The Island. With the Swedish name and the way she looks, I thought she was a White girl from middle America, probably Minnesota (there are a lot of Swedes up there).
There is something I do that kept me from knowing her background. As a general rule, I don’t read the full bios of entertainers I like. Why? First of all, I respect their privacy. But more than that, if I ever meet them and we become friends or even more, I want them to be able to tell me their story in their own words. It is probably a rare privilege for a celebrity to meet someone who really doesn’t know anything about them. So while I’ve known for a while now that Scarlett’s father is Swedish and her mother is Jewish, I don’t know anything more than that. I don’t know if her parents are living or dead. I don’t know what kind of work they did or do. I don’t know if she grew up rich or poor (I’m guessing rich, but people usually think that about me and it isn’t true). I don’t know if her father is American-born or actually Swedish-born. But also, almost all American Jews also have national roots in Europe. I could be wrong, but the way Scarlett looks, I’m guessing her mom’s not Mizrahi or Sephardic. Is Scarlett Johansson the big Russian behind this movie’s cultural accuracy?
If I were still doing my film awards, in the average year, Florence Pugh’s performance would have been good enough for a Best Supporting Actress nomination from me. Florence was actually more impressive than Scarlett to me, who was doing her usual thing of bringing her uncommon brilliance to a role that doesn’t really NEED it. Florence’s role needed a talented actress and she nailed it. Man, Florence, do I have work for you! I have a lot of things I was hoping to get Scarlett or Amanda Seyfried to do, but they are now too...umm...experienced.
Your work in Black Widow was really like an audition for my movie Groupie and you’re HIRED! It has one fairly graphic sex scene that the movie has to have. I don’t know your position on that. I know a lot of you younger actresses won’t do that stuff anymore, which I understand. I hate movie sex scenes and usually don’t put them in my scripts (I like the way Alfonso Cuaron did it in Great Expectations where they don’t really show anything). But in this case, the movie can’t work without it.
Shout out to screenwriter Eric Pearson—that was GOOD work, man. Really really good work. I can be a harsh critic of other screenwriters, not because I’m a jealous hater but because I feel we all should have high standards in our work. I don’t hate on any screenwriter as much as MYSELF. But that was like Steve Zaillian/David Mamet caliber work.
Man, you did a way better job than I could have even thought about doing for this movie. There was ONE line that should have been taken out in my opinion that took what would have been a great sequence down to just being a good one, but that wasn’t your fault. I’d have probably done the same thing on the page. The director or editor should have realized cutting it would make that moment have more impact and continuity. It sucks because it is one of the key moments in the film. The sequence is still good and most in the audience won’t notice how much better it would have been if they don’t see things like a filmmaker. But I’d love to talk to you, Cate and Scarlett to see if you agree that it would have been better my way. But in any event, I’ll be on the lookout for your past and future work!
I want to add this. If you’re not an Avengers person, you might be tempted to watch some of the earlier movies before you watch this one. I recommend you DON’T! This is a stand-alone movie. You don’t need to have seen any of the other Avengers films to follow it, and I think you’ll enjoy it more the less you know going in.
Okay, there’s one more thing. I need to talk to Stephen Dorff for a minute. I don’t have his number, so I’m going to have to do it here. Dude, I don’t know what type of shit you’re on. I mean, I don’t have to defend Scarlett Johansson—she can defend herself. But that was some real tone-deaf shit you were saying. I wish I was in the position to stick a microphone in your face and ask you, “On what conceptual or practical level is Blade better than Black Widow?” (Spoiler alert: NONE). And I like Blade. It’s a good movie. I owned a copy of it. As a matter a fact, I like Stephen Dorff. He was one of my favorite supporting actors back when he was hot. But he’s on Mars here. I saw that people are already getting at him about this, so I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but I have to say a few things...
Look, like a LOT of “serious movie people”, I too am frustrated by the “Marvelization” of Hollywood. I don’t like superhero movies either, apart from this one and The Dark Knight which I still have serious issues with even though I like it a lot.
I support Scarlett and obviously, her life choices are her own and I support that, but as a fan, I’m miffed that Scarlett has dedicated so much of her career to standing blank-faced next to Tony Stark instead of continuing along the lines of how she started, working with filmmakers I like making the style of movies that I like. However, on the other side of that coin, if all her Avengers work was JUST to create the opportunity to do Black Widow and do it this way? It was way well worth it, because while this isn’t one of the greatest movies of all time in an overall sense, its potential to appeal to every type of moviegoer as a female-driven production is monumentally significant. Maybe Scarlett was thinking that far ahead.
A bunch of talented actors have been headlining superhero movies for a long time now. But Scarlett headlines one and you’re going to say you’re EMBARRASSED for her?!! Are you embarrassed for yourself over Blade? I notice others have already called out this particular hypocrisy. I guess you’ll say “Blade is a vampire movie not a superhero movie”, to which I would reply “Ok, then Black Widow is a spy movie not a superhero movie”. At least I see you were smart enough not to get at Natalie Portman like this over Thor and Star Wars. Her favorite Star Wars movie isn’t any of the ones she’s in. It’s The Empire STRIKES BACk!
This is another reason why this is a weak move, coming at someone who doesn’t mind saying controversial things, but doesn’t as far as I know enjoy one-on-one media flame war. Stephen would never get at Taylor Swift like that. His career would be over Taylor SWIFT. Maybe saying stuff like this is why his career has kinda been over. Maybe saying things that could be argued to be similar is why I’ve never had one. I’m going to be better, Stephen. You can, too.
That girl I saw in Vegas actually looked more dangerous in this regard than Natalie Portman or Taylor Swift, the Bruce Li and Floyd Mayweather of media combat. Rose McGowan is like Conor McGregor—she’s not as skilled or as calculating but she’s coming for you with frantic energy and relentless determination.
But Stephen man, I don’t know what you and Scarlett’s relationship is. Maybe you were in the “I wanna marry her” line with me and now you’re mad. Maybe you been sitting somewhere eating the lime green Jell-O with James Deen because Scarlett is so much more successful than you. Maybe you got more history than that, Scarlett being all non-monogamous and what not. Maybe you guys were friends and had some kind of a falling out. But as far as I’ve heard, you haven’t said shit about Christian Bale doing Batman (or Christopher Nolan doing it), or or Robert Downey doing Iron Man, or Idris Elba doing Suicide Squad. So what’s really going on? I think I know.
So look, while I observe and experience what is true about our SOCIETY, I’m not into levying allegations at specific individuals like calling people racist, or misogynist or homophobic. Not only is there the “you never know a person’s heart” factor (unless they tell you outright that they support hate), but I also believe it is counterproductive from a practical standpoint. So, I’m not calling Stephen Dorff a misogynist. But I will take the position that, perhaps unconsciously to him even, his viewpoint here is motivated by our society’s misogyny.
The Avengers films have been going on for over a decade now. Black Widow cones out with a female lead, a nearly all-female cast, and a female director, and Stephen Dorff, veteran of a superhero franchise himself, suddenly has this to say, apparently before he’s even seen the movie? Curious.
Stephen was kind of “tricked” into saying this as the Black Widow trailers really are actually bad, I think deliberately so—underpromise, overdeliver. If he is a reasonable person at all, he will walk this back after seeing the movie, if he hasn’t walked it back already after the backlash.
In life, you always have to account for what you may not know. First of all, Stephen may have been misquoted or quoted out of context. Or they may have printed something that was supposed to be off-the-record. Reporters do that kind of thing ALL THE TIME.
Then there is another possibility, something I believe happens though I don’t know it for a fact. Stephen and Scarlett might be REALLY good friends. Stephen’s career opportunities haven’t been so spectacular recently, so maybe he said what he said with Scarlett’s blessing just to get some media buzz for his upcoming movie. It’s no skin off her...nose. Black Widow’s gonna make half a billion dollars regardless of anybody’s opinion except the Avengers’ fans. I notice Stephen was quoted in another recent article saying that Titanic was “pretty vanilla” (an opinion I agree with), but saying something like that in 2021 supports the theory that he’s just trying to get his name in the news. I’ve known that Stephen has reportedly been an irreverent, outspoken guy always, but timing indicates intent.
Or look, we all sometimes get angry or emotional and say or do things we shouldn’t. I’ve done it a million times. I saw that Stephen’s brother died fairly recently. Even though it was a few years ago, if they were close, an event like that can keep you in an irregular mental space for years, sometimes forever.
So, I’m not judging him. Stephen Dorff may be a bigger fan of Scarlett and a bigger advocate for girls than I am, and there are factors at play here unknown to me. He may be able to explain himself. But he should have to.
This irked me to the point of feeling a need to respond because I feel it is part of a larger pattern, not just because I feel any need to defend Scarlett. That girl can take care of herself. That’s obvious. But the fact is, in our society, misogyny is such a fundamental assumption that even people who oppose it sometimes express views that are misogynistic in character without even realizing it. Antisemitism is very similar in this respect.
Isaiah Washington is out there hustling backward, too. It makes me sad he (not Katherine Heigl) threw his promising career away. That dude has phenomenal talent, but while I never met him, don’t know him, I’ve had some questions and doubts about his mindset toward women ever since I felt he played those disturbing scenes in Out of Sight with Jennifer Lopez and Nancy Allen TOO well. To me, those girls seemed real-world uncomfortable with him in those scenes. They aren’t great actresses LIKE THAT. And so when the Grey’s Anatomy thing happened, I was not surprised. I was only surprised he wasn’t smart enough to back down and give a real apology.
It’s funny that this came to my attention right now because I was just earlier today writing in an upcoming piece equating my Scarlett Johansson encounter with a scene in one of my favorite movies “Soul of the Game” where Isaiah does a few moments of great work as baseball great Willie Mays. It would be a great time to reboot that (instead of Candyman—shoutout to Jordan Peele, whose work I dislike, which is weird since I love Keegan-Michael Key).
Soul of the Game is, in my opinion, the best and most accurate of the handful of movies about Jackie Robinson breaking the color line. It succeeds where some others fail in that it doesn’t descend into blind hero-worship like we usually do with anyone who breaks down a barrier. The first almost always becomes overrated in almost every arena of life.
But Soul of the Game is a limited budget made-for-HBO film. The acting is really good, featuring Blair Underwood, Delroy Lindo, Mykelti Williamson and some other good people. The script is pretty much fine as is. But the film’s big flaw is, it is hard to make a good period-piece on a limited budget as rolling back the clock to make it FEEL like fifty years ago is really expensive. The details are off/missing such that you’re always aware you’re watching the 90s not the 40s, and its too short, I’m sure for budget reasons also. But still I had it near the bottom of my top 50 favorite movies list I made back in the early 2000s.
But all these dudes out here, man. Attacking girls is like a sport in this society, and I’m sick of it. That’s why this blog exists, and at this point, that’s the only reason why **I** exist. While I do not know Stephen’s motivations or ideological leanings, I believe his comments fall under the same umbrella as the relentless media and personal attacks you see against most ALL powerful, successful women, especially if they are young and smoking hot. Taylor Swift, Natalie Portman, Rose McGowan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Meghan McCain. But it extends to older women like Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey, too. Now, I have issues with some of these girls, but most of the criticism you hear of them is UNFAIR criticism.
Even my girl Beyonce gets it a little bit, like when people were trying to blame her for fake Latino and fake JFK “Beto” O’Rourke losing his Senate race because she didn’t tweet out a message of support soon enough. A liberal Democrat with authenticity issues loses a Senate race in blood-red TEXAS, and it’s BEYONCE’S fault?
But the fact that Beyonce gets less of this actually supports my argument. Why do I think Beyonce gets less misogynist hate? Because she is prominently known as Jay-Z’s wife and displays a relatively traditionalist female attitude. Those other women I named are all single or their partners are in the background, and they are much more outspoken than Beyonce.
Of course, Bill Clinton is a huge figure but he has stayed in the background during the last fifteen years while Hillary has been making her presidential runs. I think that was a mistake if Hillary really wanted to win. Maybe she didn’t want by to win at ANY cost, and campaigning hand-in-hand with Bill was counter to what she wanted to achieve. But the fact is, most Americans who are not on the ideological extremes still agree Bill Clinton was a great president.
But especially knowing better than anyone else Bill’s “girl problem”, Hillary may have felt that winning was not worth the cost of having it said the first female president was really her husband’s puppet, so she made the decision to distance herself from him, a decision I would respect if that was her thinking. I find it fascinating that most of the revisionist history critics of Bill Clinton are now on the far-left rather than the far-right, but that’s another essay.
All things considered, Black Widow is one of the most excellently-made films I have ever seen. And that’s not weighted for my expectations being low. That doesn’t mean it is one of the best movies ever. I’m just saying it is exceptionally well CRAFTED. I could never like it as much as my top favorite movies because of its subject matter, but it is made just as well, even better than most of those.
Black Widow is exceptional in every area of film craft. It’s attention to detail is impeccable. It’s dramatic, it’s funny, it’s creative and unpredictable in its execution if not its subject matter. It is the best superhero movie I have ever seen, by a small margin over The Dark Knight. I will probably go see it at least one more time, and I will certainly buy it. This is a movie that, if I’m around, I’ll end up watching many many times.
There is a story that circulates around that on A Few Good Men, before the production began, Jack Nicholson sat everybody down and told them, paraphrasing, “You won’t have many chances in your career to work on a project this good, and so that requires the absolute best effort out of all of us.”. I was surprised when I heard that, because it didn’t seem like Jack’s personality type. I feel like someone must have given a similar speech before production on this movie started.
My quibbles with this film are limited to what I feel are the inherent limitations of the genre, and inside baseball filmmaker stuff, a line here or there that I felt should be rearranged or left out, a scene here or there that I wish was a little bit longer, and the fact that its PG-13. And, also, I think this is an Avengers convention so the fans know, but if you’re not an Avengers person, stay through the credits—there is a little scene at the end. I’ve always disliked that, but this is another product of franchise filmmaking. To me, the scene doesn’t add anything to the story you’ve just seen. It is for franchising purposes.
If you know Black Widow’s story, then you know what the Red Room is. It bothers me when a movie has something like that as a major plot element but has to talk around it. If they’d made a R-rated movie where they could confront that issue directly, it is so timely and it actually could have been one of the greatest movies of all time.
But I understand Hollywood’s business decision to make almost every movie PG-13 or less. Making Black Widow R-rated so that they could really talk about the Red Room, the lost ticket sales would have cost them $100 million! But if you’re an artist first, you’ll pay it. The issue is too important to handle with kid gloves, which is literally what this is. This movie is too good to not be profitable regardless.
It just makes me sad that it seems to me that most of the people in Hollywood, my beloved Scarlett included, are now businesspeople first and artists second. There are people like Amanda Seyfried and Andrew Niccol still out there fighting the good fight for me. Stephen Dorff probably thinks he is because we agree some of the Avengers movies look like video games, but he’s hustling backward.
I was going to levy a criticism that I decided to retract, but I’ll mention it. Black Widow contains a lot of off-the-shelf action movie stunts that we’ve seen a thousand times, including one I’m so sick of because it is in just about every action movie now that has the one element that it requires. But the reason I retract that criticism? Who is “we”? I’ve seen 10,000 movies, so of course I’ve seen almost everything. But the 12 year old girl sitting in front of me hasn’t. The first time I saw that stunt, it was thrilling and awesome, as it probably was for that little girl. So should she not be able to see that stunt for the first time in what will probably be one of her favorite movies just because I’VE seen it before?!?
At this point, the action movie stunt doesn’t do anything for me anyway. When I see the trailer for F9, that stuff just looks ridiculous, but I’m not “embarrassed for Vin Diesel”, who I actually think is very talented. I haven’t watched the movie. Maybe its good.
But at my age, elaborate action movie stunts hold zero interest to me. They are like the video games at Chuck E. Cheese—there to amuse the kids while the adults are eating. Hollywood’s long-standing casual relationship with the laws of physics and what is and is not scientifically plausible is something I’ve had to learn to ignore.
It’s the same as why I changed my tune on The Island. I’ve seen too many movies to criticize anything for lack of originality, and I know too much about science to criticize a movie for not getting its science exactly right.
You’re going to have to repeat some things that have been done. But they’ll be new to young viewers and that’s fine. As the great Frank Darabont said, “Some things are conventional because they work”. And its harmless to slightly mislead viewers about complex scientific things they never will and do not need to understand. If they develop an interest in science, they’ll find out the right answers.
Oh, I do have one other ironic problem with the movie, and it is part of why I don’t like the genre. Nearly all comics other than the X-Men arose out of America’s pathological anti-Communism and anti-Russianism. Don’t get me wrong, I feel Communism is a terrible IDEOLOGY, but Western nations are not MORALLY superior to Eastern ones. We are always doing Freudian projection with China, Russia and other Eastern powers. We act like they are the only ones who do sinister things when our government leads the world in doing shit like that. There are no doubt Red Rooms all over the world, but the closest thing to that I know of that was confirmed to exist was run by a Black Republican Party operative named Larry King...from Nebraska. Look it up. Jeffrey Epstein was an AMERICAN. So, we all need to chill with that “Russia is evil” shit. JFK told us so back on June 10, 1963 and these pathological anti-Communists got so mad they shot him in the head over it.
Yes, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-il, Josef Stalin, Lenin, Hitler—these guys were/are vicious thugs. But guess what? Richard Nixon was a vicious thug. Donald Trump is a vicious thug. Andrew Jackson was a vicious thug and if he’d had the technology would have tried to do to Native Americans what Hitler tried to do to Jews.
Fact is, Russia and China both in their history have BEEN attacked more than they’ve attacked others. In fact, excluding the Tibet thing, which is very debatable, China hasn’t attacked another country in last few CENTURIES! They’ve certainly NEVER attacked anyone in the Western hemisphere. All their wars have been in their local area, and mostly they been just trying to defend themselves against relentless Japanese aggression (until the bombs pacified Japanese culture by nuclear force). Germany, the US, France, Spain and England lead the world by far in military aggression and sinister plotting over the last 200 years, and they and their allies are the only ones that have been crossing oceans to go fuck with people half a world away with less than half their military capability. I prefer the Western way of life, but we are NOT morally superior.
I say this is an ironic criticism because of how true to Russian culture the movie feels. I don’t think the filmmakers are on the rabid anti-Communist page, but the source material is what it is, so you can’t take those overtones out of the story. And that’s another criticism. There is one big change I would have made that you can’t even begin thinking about making because this is a comic book franchise movie.
Oh, you guys are doing the t-shirts wrong. It should be JUST the black widow spider marking and NOTHING more, like the Captain America shield shirts. No words. No little Scarlett inside the symbol. Just the symbol, red on black. I’d buy one.
But in the three days since I walked out after seeing Black Widow, I find myself thinking more and more highly of it as I reflect upon it. To give some scale to this, I’d rate it a 9/10. It is probably the best movie I’ve seen since In Time, with the caveat that obviously I have a lot of movies to catch up on from my time incarcerated. I like it a little more than Lucy, even though Lucy will always be special to me because that was when I realized Scarlett was the girl I saw in Las Vegas. Black Widow is truly, thoroughly, and in my opinion, indisputably, good.
I want to point out that this is in my opinion the best-acted action film I’ve ever seen by a mile. There are a few moments of such emotional intensity in this movie, you’d swear you were watching an Oscar-bait drama about a broken family. It’s actually only a few scenes, but they are so well-done that they give the characters life and depth that is usually missing from this type of movie, and that’s what makes it FEEL fundamentally different. You are usually not really emotionally invested in action movie characters, but here, you are. And Scarlett actually plays Natasha in a different way in this movie. Even outside of the family scenes, she is more emotional, more expressive than Avengers Natasha who is very muted.
That may be the influence of having a female director. There are a lot of male directors I love, but if I ever make it (back) to Hollywood, I would love it if I could arrange things so that every movie I write is directed by a GIRL. Cate Shortland, Karyn Kusama, Kasi Lemmons, if I get into Hollywood, you girls get ready to be BUSY! Sofia Coppola, too. The movies you’ve been making are largely not for me, but your technical talents are obvious.
Ah, Scarlett. I don’t know what to do with you! Just when I think I have you figured out, you surprise me. I thought you were content to just stand there in that latex suit collecting money with your friends, and making a Marriage Story every once in a while to remind people you can. And I figured Black Widow would just be more of the blank-stare Natasha tagging along behind Tony Stark, just without Tony Stark. But then you go and make a movie like this which is kind of exactly what I wanted you to do, but it isn’t, but it kinda is, but it still isn’t, but maybe it is...and that’s how it is with you. But the bottom line, regardless of what genre of movie it actually is, is that I really really ENJOYED it. The rest is just smoke-filled coffeehouse bullshit—Shoutout to Aaron Sorkin! I have an idea for a sequel to A Few Good Men that I know you’d like. I don’t know where Wolfgang Bodison is these days, but he’s the star of the story I have in mind, set 25 years after the events of the first film.
Well, Scarlett, I guess now I can stop saying I don’t like your movies. With Lucy, and this, and Marriage Story, which I’m sure I’ll like when I can bear to watch it, the tide has turned. It’s not possible that...there’s no chance that...you were listening? One never knows. Stephen Dorff may be embarrassed for you. I’m PROUD of you. You did a great job with this movie. Everyone did.
So where do I go from here? Black Widow’s great but Scarlett’s married. Everybody’s married. I have to recalculate my life partner search, starting with deciding if I have the emotional energy to continue it.
Hollywood hasn’t called, so I have to reevaluate my professional options. I have to start all over, and it’s been such a long road already. I’ll try to figure it out. What else can I do? Stay tuned for what will now be my next piece, “Why I Want To Marry A (Jewish) Lesbian”...
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