There is a lot of pretty niche comic book mythology swirling around Madame Web, the inspiration for the newest of Sony’s Spider-Man spinoffs.
This is a character who goes back to 1980 and whose powers of clairvoyance helped Peter Parker at some point. She’s elderly and blind and sits atop a web throne that keeps her alive. But to be honest, reading about her didn’t help give any more meaning or urgency to the Dakota Johnson movie. You’ve been warned.
Madame Web is striving to be a classic superhero setup movie, about how the future Madame Web — now just single gal paramedic Cassie Webb — comes to terms with her newfound power that allows her to see the future. Well, sometimes at least, when it involves a death or something extremely violent.
Photo: AP
It’s also about the origins of a few other Spider-Women who are now just a couple of teenage girls, played by 20-somethings Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) and Celeste O’Connor (Mattie Franklin). Watching the flash-forwards to these three in their Spidey costumes makes you feel like there’s some Marvel TV show you forgot to watch that might make you care more.
A scene in which they try to sell the idea that all four women are connected in some cosmic way is so wildly strained (“you live in my building,” “you ran in front of my truck”) and inconsequential, you wonder if whichever screenwriter wrote their run-ins initially was even talking to the one who had to try to sell these coincidences. It’s impossible to know what exactly the four credited screenwriters (and three “story by” credits) are responsible for, but Madame Web feels like the stitched-together product of a bunch of people who weren’t actually collaborating.
There is also an alarming amount of repetition in just under two hours. Part of this is because Cassie is learning about her powers and sees various incidents play out over and over, which, by the fourth set piece, starts to get very tedious. You forgive it, a little, because Johnson is just always fun to watch and it at least serves a story purpose in theory. But then there’s all these scenes in which the bad guy, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), is either seeing his future death at the hands of the Spider-Girls (or whatever we’re calling them) or barking at his associate (Zosia Mamet) to find them with her Dark Knight-era surveillance setup in his blandly cold penthouse.
Photo: AP
We know Rahim to be a talented, charismatic actor, but Ezekiel is one of the dullest, most thinly sketched superhero villains in recent memory. The movie doesn’t even withhold his own cosmic connection to Cassie as a reveal — it literally opens with him killing her mother (Kerry Bishe) who is on a spider research trip in the Amazon while very pregnant with her. The venom, and some Amazonian spider-people, save the baby though.
Johnson’s singular performance style can make almost anything watchable. Her cool-girl deadpan is always interesting and funny and, thankfully, filmmaker S.J. Clarkson has the good sense to keep the camera on her as much as possible. She makes gems out of nothing and finds humor even while the script and story are crumbling around her. It’s too bad because there could have been a more fun movie in here — Clarkson imbues it with a distinctly feminine and teenage energy that makes good use of its soundtrack. But it spins itself into a knot trying to justify a silly story instead.
The studio, it seems, is playing a very long game with this one. Cassie’s paramedic colleague is Ben Parker (Adam Scott), whose sister-in-law Mary Parker (Emma Roberts) is about to give birth. But one has to imagine after seeing Madame Web, that, ironically, whatever payoff was planned may be a vision that will not come to pass.
Last week the State Department made several small changes to its Web information on Taiwan. First, it removed a statement saying that the US “does not support Taiwan independence.” The current statement now reads: “We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side. We expect cross-strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means, free from coercion, in a manner acceptable to the people on both sides of the Strait.” In 2022 the administration of Joe Biden also removed that verbiage, but after a month of pressure from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), reinstated it. The American
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative caucus convener Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) and some in the deep blue camp seem determined to ensure many of the recall campaigns against their lawmakers succeed. Widely known as the “King of Hualien,” Fu also appears to have become the king of the KMT. In theory, Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) outranks him, but Han is supposed to be even-handed in negotiations between party caucuses — the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) says he is not — and Fu has been outright ignoring Han. Party Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) isn’t taking the lead on anything while Fu
There is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot to put millions at the mercy of the CCP using just released AI technology. This isn’t being overly dramatic. The speed at which AI is improving is exponential as AI improves itself, and we are unprepared for this because we have never experienced anything like this before. For example, a few months ago music videos made on home computers began appearing with AI-generated people and scenes in them that were pretty impressive, but the people would sprout extra arms and fingers, food would inexplicably fly off plates into mouths and text on
Feb 24 to March 2 It’s said that the entire nation came to a standstill every time The Scholar Swordsman (雲州大儒俠) appeared on television. Children skipped school, farmers left the fields and workers went home to watch their hero Shih Yen-wen (史艷文) rid the world of evil in the 30-minute daily glove puppetry show. Even those who didn’t speak Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) were hooked. Running from March 2, 1970 until the government banned it in 1974, the show made Shih a household name and breathed new life into the faltering traditional puppetry industry. It wasn’t the first
RSS