We’ve tuned out of Marvel on the podcast for a little while, but one of the eternally entertaining superheroes, Spider-Man, reignites our interest with Brand New Day. With Doctor Strange having cast a spell at the end of 2021’s No Way Home to make the entire world forget Peter Parker, for reasons that Doctor Strange presumably cast another spell to make us forget, Peter, newly isolated, returns to fighting street-level crime in New York City while pining for his old relationships and suffering severe headaches. Can he revive his former life? Surely it wouldn’t be a Marvel film if an enormously significant, cliff-hanging event had permanent consequences.
Still, even for those as cynical as it’s possible to be about the MCU, Brand New Day has plenty to recommend it. It aims for thematic depth – though how fully that’s achieved is up for discussion – and is genuinely moving. Indeed, certain moments move the audience to cheer and applaud, which in turn moves Mike to harrumph bitterly. Destin Daniel Cretton, directing his second MCU entry following Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, demonstrates a gift for working with actors and a strong instinct for staging action, although Cineworld does its best to undermine those virtues with its poor projection.
We also return to our discussion of IMAX and The Odyssey, asking whether the frame’s envelopment of the visual field impedes filmmakers’ ability to express through composition and framing, and considering whether there’s something fundamentally anti-democratic about making films whose fullest form can only be experienced at a handful of cinemas around the world.
Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
Jessica Jones is smart. and sexual; she’s not afraid to ask for what she wants. She can take it, she says. Jessica’s drinking way more than what’s good for her, trying to forget something terrible that’s happened which is clearly indicated as some kind of rape though what we’re shown is a mental violation — to the point of physical possession and erasure of will — and with jarring but indistinct sexual overtones. So here we have a woman, just like men in the best noir’s, trying to survive in a dangerous world, drinking to forget someone who’s bruised her beyond repair, doing her best to earn a living, and screwing with whatever looks tasty and doesn’t cause too much trouble: It saves on the drink. The opening line in the series, spoken in voice-over, is a great one: ‘New York may be a city that never sleeps but it sure does sleep around. Not that I’m complaining. Cheaters are good for business. A big part of the job is looking for the worst in people.’
Jessica seems less mentally strong than Warchowski. In fact she’s been the victim of a man’s mindfuck — he took over her mind and made her do ‘things’– and then the episode reveals, discretely, some superpowers which we don’t yet know the extent of. It has a great noir look too, at least as imaginative at that of Daredevil and is more interstingly polysexual and multiracial than the series on ‘The Man Without Fear’. The object of desire here is who will be revealed to be Luke Cage, a hunky black bartender, made to seem lusciously desirable, who we are shown to have slept with a black woman before Jessica. The series is treading carefully on the politics of representation.
Krysten Ritter has an intriguing look of crumpled intelligence. Her face seems poised in a state of smirky disappointment and can look very beautiful and also quite down-at-heel. Carrie Anne Moss appears as a two-timing lesbian corporate lawyer who sometimes throws crumbs of work Jessica’s way. The first episode moved really well, with the editing evoking a sense of a dangerous past impinging on the present, something that could be a memory but could also be a presence and in either way dangerous. It’s very sexy too, with the sex being a context for an exchange of tough-talking dares that reveal as much as they hide. I look forward to the following episodes.