Recently Watched: Holiday Edition

Twas the season of comfort movies, old favorites, catching up on a few missing pieces. I had a John McTiernan double-feature, first rewatching his dum-de-dum delightful Christmas movie, Die Hard, followed by the jungle bloodbath of Predator. I got the Predator 4K collection as a gift; when I finish the series, I’ll say more about that.

Christmas with the kids, once the Lord of the Rings fest is over, would’t be complete without Miyazaki (Howl’s Moving Castle this time) and the MCU—my younger son has been wanting to watch Avengers: Endgame again, so we took a long afternoon to do so. I have many issues with the MCU (and most superhero movies, really), but given how beloved this movie is I wanted to give it a solid rewatch. Endgame is fine, for what it is, which is an intermittently charming, interminable effects reel, with lots of feels, which I guess were earned over the twenty or whatever previous movies. It’s impressively excessive, but I will never love this movie.

For my money, Venom is more fun. If I can’t really believe much of what happens in a super hero movie, not enough to have strong feelings about the outcome, I can definitely enjoy one that leans way into the ridiculousness. Tom Hardy’s performance in Venom is delightfully funny—it’s like if Brando did a superhero movie, this mumbly tenor vocalization he does—and none of the movie takes anything too seriously. It’s interesting how “taking it seriously” is so often not what one wants in a movie. At least not a movie about sentient space goo making a washed-up reporter’s midlife crisis a lot zanier.

I also watched (sigh) Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s latest impenetrable think-piece action movie. The harder the movie worked to make me care, the less I gave a fuck. That’s not to say that the visuals were not impressive, or some of the set pieces incredible, but his movies pretend to a sophistication they lack and claim to be heady and full of ideas, and…well, they’re full of something all right. Mostly bad acting, as it turns out.