One of the little fun things about our ol’ Year Of The Month feature is that you can often contextualize a work in its specific year in some way, and Venom is interesting mostly because it became a minor cult hit specifically because it managed to successfully straddle a line between two eras. It’s part of the terrible, short-lived attempt Sony Pictures made to cultivate a small superhero media franchise a la the Marvel Cinematic Universe out of the Spider-Man villains they had the rights to; out of all of them, the Venom films are the only ones to make any money, let alone to generate a notable fanbase.
Part of this, obviously, is that Venom is the only one of the characters anybody had ever heard of, although that’s never stopped a sufficiently talented and enterprising filmmaker before. It’s also that – and this was widely noted at the time – Venom is a bit of a throwback. Superhero films in the 00’s were generally noted to be gritty, ugly, and cynical; there’s a joke in the first X-Men (2000) where Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is complaining about the leather outfit he’s wearing and Cyclops (James Marsden) quips “What would you prefer, yellow spandex?” This was often pointed to as an example of superhero films being vaguely embarrassed to be superhero films at the time, but it also articulates the general aesthetic goals – leather, not spandex.
The film Venom most reminds me of is Daredevil (2003), although you can also see connections to Blade (2002), the most successful expression of this style, as well as Hellboy (2004), Catwoman (2004), and Elektra (2005). These are films with a self-conscious edginess and a lot of leather, rain, and angst that you could probably trace back to The Crow (1994). Venom definitely takes many of these visual ideas; every set looks dirty as hell, even the Apple-like shiny offices of the bad guy.
Except Venom also throws in an extremely modern and fashionable idea: a wise-cracking nihilist who takes none of this seriously. Obviously, quips are nothing new to superhero films; Joss Whedon and Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1997) introduced the idea of the wise-cracking genre-savvy character to genre works, and the world has largely run away with it and expected it in basically everything. Venom’s quips also strike me as a descendent of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988) – not a direct reference, but building off the same idea that one responds to a movie by cracking a joke about what’s happening on-screen.
Now, what makes MST3k work is the sheer density and variety of gags; there are references, puns, made-up characters, and satire on top of simple insults. MST3k’s weaker followers – which definitely includes Venom, as well as CinemaSins – usually resort only to the insults, which gets tedious after a while. However, the canny thing about Venom is that it puts these insults in the mouth of a character; audiences definitely respond to what is otherwise a generic flick with the novelty of some new element. I particularly think of a scene where Eddie (Tom Hardy) is having dinner with his Love Interest Who Can’t Understand (Michelle Williams), and the scene would be utterly risible and cliched if it weren’t for Venom making stupid jokes the entire time.
Even better, it’s in the mouth of a character to which another character responds. Eddie and Venom are distinct people with, importantly, distinct motivations; Eddie is genuinely trying to get the plot moving in a sensible direction and Venom just wants to eat people, a combination so simple it’s basically a road-map, and it made people sympathize with both Eddie and Venom. There is no easier way to characterize a character than to bounce them off someone else, and the Eddie/Venom relationship created a dynamic people could project homoerotic tendencies on.
So what you ended up with was a movie that seemed to fall out of 2004 with a 2018 character breaking in and mocking the whole thing without quite throwing it out of whack. There’s still a terrible CG-heavy climax, it still looks like dogshit, and the plot is both pointless and groundless (Eddie is a terrible reporter), but it at least is just original and competent enough to be compelling – it helps that Hardy is a good actor who wants to be a weird actor, and takes the opportunity to play with an otherwise goofy movie.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Red vs Blue, Season One, Episode Eight
Getting back on this. The characters have been scattered across space, which makes me think of Dave Shutton’s criticism of Babylon 5 doing the same thing; this gets away with it because it involves pairing up characters who have never been paired up before, mostly Caboose and Sarge, which is an incredible pairing. Both are obsessive about certain topics, and both end up riffing on each other in new ways – Sarge is exasperated with Caboose, which is naturally funny, and Caboose tends to try and be helpful but provides the most basic information – Caboose tends to be funny because he assumes everyone is as dumb as he is.
They also riff on the place they land, which is an obvious parody of multiplayer shooters; two teams who murder the shit out of each other dropping crude insults, with the added gag that they speak of the flags with religious reverence. Comedy is about the situation, and the situation can be switched out for another one, retaining the same characters. The filmmakers have enormous fun staging action scenes, including a moving camera tracking a guy running.
“I don’t have treads, but I do find them staring at things they really shouldn’t be.”
“Get Sarge. Get him to make me a new body.”
“We can’t! We’re out of body parts because we overused that joke!”
Sarge on O’Malley having lived in Caboose’s head: “Sounds like he took some of the furniture when he left. And the carpet. And the drapes. And I wouldn’t expect to get that deposit back. If you know what I mean.”
“My only choice is to blame Griff for coming up with such a flawed plan. Stupid, stupid Griff.”
There’s a gag where Caboose wrote his name in a wall with bullets.
The Trial – Orson Welles weaponizes uncanny liminal spaces decades before they’re discovered by niche subreddits. The combination of master visual composer and nightmarish sets means every single shot is an unholy feast. But at the risk of sounding ungrateful, it’s a feast that filled me up with a couple courses to go. Far be it from me to complain about a lack of tangible substance from Kafka, but there might be a reason the book tops out at around 200 pages.
Bizarrely, my current favorite Welles film even though I think once is enough of this feast. Perkins is especially great here.
He’s great. Everything is fantastic! It’s just being led in circles for two solid hours gets wearying, and not necessarily in an insightful way.
But that is almost the textbook definition of Kafkaesque, isn’t it? (That or turning into a roach.)
Yeah, or so I’m told.
Presence — zero Led Zeppelin in the movie, but some poor band of John Mayer-esque porridge gets tagged to a date rape scene, despite their terrible music I felt bad for the guys. An odd film, this is Soderbergh filming a ghost story from the POV of the ghost, which means every scene is shot in a single take although scenes themselves vary in length, this can create suspense but also be mostly a challenge for Soderbergh the cameraman and it’s clear why he’s interested in this. But as people noted at the time, this is also David Koepp’s movie and his strong sense of structure and economy (85 minutes, hell yeah brother) sort of bites him in the ass at the end when a perspective shift becomes the point of the movie and undermines things, it makes a subject more of an object. A very weird companion to Koepp’s Panic Room in terms of a camera gliding through a fixed location that has been invaded, a good watch but not much to chew on.
Live music — the Tarbox Ramblers playing their rootsy blues with a bit of gospel and quite a bit of drone, Tarbox’s guitar found some grooves that he just hung out in hypnotically. Violinist Daniel Kellar had a remarkable tone, not quite high and lonesome but clear and resigned while still hopeful. At times they made music that would have fit in Sinners if the Irish vampires had a bit of chill and could just jam with the house band, great stuff.
Woooooooooo live music!!
Live Music – spent the weekend away at an experimental music festival, the kind of event where they schedule a face-melting techno set immediately after a solo harpist. It was good fun, my highlight was Saturday night’s closing act Ensemble Nist-Nah, who are “gamelan-inspired”, i.e. they have all the cool tuned bells and gongs but combine it with a standard drum kit. So much fun to watch, the way they reconfigure the stage setup depending on the arrangement etc.
When I got back on Sunday night I went out to see a friend’s punk band since they’d travelled a long way to be here, only to find out they’d pulled out due to the singer losing her voice during soundcheck. Stuck around for the support act who soldiered on and played anyway but they weren’t really my thing, a solid post-hardcore kinda band but with an additional singer who seemed to do more harm than good, roaming around with his back to the audience in a waistcoat with a book clamped under his arm for some reason? Seemed like an annoying affectation and the guitarist was a better vocalist anyway.
Seinfeld, season 4 episodes – including “The Contest” which absolutely rules, one of the best episodes so far. But also “The Visa” which is one of the few episodes so far that really hasn’t aged well, the immigration jokes weren’t funny enough to excuse the dated politics. “The Pick” was another good one and a guest appearance from Calvin Klein was unexpected and funny.
Wooooooooo live music!!
Woooooo live music! Boooooo pretentious vocalist! I bet he thought he was the master of his domain.
Alice —The Woodman’s first film of the ‘90’s, this has to be noted as a minor effort. Mia Farrow plays a cloistered Upper East Side housewife who ventures into Chinatown to deal with a bad back, where she meets Dr. Yang (Keye Luke) a practitioner of natural medicine whose herbs start off with a euphoric effect and get wilder from there. (There are elements of magical realism in some of Allen’s early work, but this is where he really embraces it — at least at feature length, cf. Oedipus Wrecks.) Certainly this could smack of Orientalism, and it’s not an unreasonable charge, but Luke saves it. His Dr. Yang is wise, but hardly inscrutable, and he’s irreverent and humorous as well.
A mostly good cast here, with Farrow in a huge fur coat and distinctive hat that makes her look like a kid in her protective bubble. The movie depends on Farrow being able to sell Alice’s altered states, which, fortunately, she can. Joe Mantegna is (surprisingly) less reliable as Joe, the handsome stranger she meets. Mantegna, normally always great, has some excellent scenes reacting to Alice’s herb-induced aggressiveness. But he completely flails in reacting to certain magical elements. Which is a problem, because it pulls the audience away from the flow and forces to confront how silly some of it is.
His romantic scenes with Alice are better, dealing with the way she — a formerly faithful wife considering a first affair — runs hot and cold. He shows both how Joe is frustrated by this but also understanding that it’s a big step for her. These are the best parts of the movie, other than every scene with Alec Baldwin, who is predictably fantastic as always as the ghost of an old flame.
This has some laughs (delivered mostly by Luke and Farrow) and some emotional weight, but it’s neither as funny nor as gripping as what we’ve come to expect from this director. Next up is Shadows and Fog, which I’m dreading, but then there’s a hell of a run after that.
What did we play?
I forget if I brought this up, but I’ve gotten back into Team Fortress 2. I decided to treat it like it was my full-time job for a short while, deliberately playing every class – even the ones I avoid like the plague – for a few days each. I had fun and even found myself enjoying the Spy (who I always found intimidating), and, to my great surprise, preferring to main either Demoman or Engineer. I switched to a different project altogether but kept playing the game in smaller quantities, and to my great surprise have found I’ve improved enormously after cutting down on the game. Such is life.
The Curse of Strahd (which takes plays in Barovia and not the fictional nation of Boravia as seen in Superman) has finally let Yesterhill, just in time to fight and defeat a killer tree. Usually our battles last five or six rounds, and this was over in three. We lucked out in that two of us had spells very effective against plants. Or maybe the DM was just not lucky, or not trying to make things harder on us. Either way, we can actually start doing things again instead of getting (marginally useful?) lore dumps.
Still going in Blue Prince all these weeks later. Now the kids are in on it and, having been raised on Myst and things of that ilk, are very good at it. We’ve taken (as far as we can tell) all the low-hanging fruit and are grinding on the more obscure puzzles (or, very likely, missing some obvious clues that we’ve stared at several times). The game is still shockingly good at doling at rewards just when you think you’re at the end of the line. Don’t know that we’d 100% this thing, but I’m convinced there’s a secret ending just around the corner.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown – decided to give this a go now that I’ve given up on Silksong, as it came highly recommended by a friend. I have had a few issues with it early on – there are a few areas where it feels like the only thing to do is run left-to-right across an empty space which feels like pretty weak game design in 2025? But there have been some hints of cool things to come and the combat is satisfyingly tricky without being Hollow Knight-level brutal. Since I’ve given up Game Pass for now, I’m “buying” games again, although since it’s fairly easy to accumulate Microsoft points I haven’t had to actually spend “money” yet – still, it definitely offers a bit of motivation to stick with games even if they aren’t immediately clicking, hopefully this one will win me over a little more as I get deeper in.
I really enjoyed this one.
DOOM on Nintendo Switch
Just played for a few minutes. Not enough to crack open the level I was playing, Unholy Cathedral, but I suspect I’m getting there. This game has a knack of making the levels seem daunting at first, but peeling back gradually until you figure it out quite sensibly. Until you make the next level and the process starts over again.
I beat the Dragon Quest II HD-2D remake, but unlike DQ1, there’s a lot of new post-game content added here, so I’ve been spending the occasional time working through that. I am admittedly reaching the point where I’m feeling less like I’m into it and more like I’m doing it because it has to be done to finish the game, but on the other hand, I guess, my party is really strong now.
Superman (2025) – Twenty minutes after finishing this, I started making a list of the things that didn’t work for me. I didn’t mean to do that, it just happened. By this morning, I had decided that no sir, I do not like this movie. I can tell you what I do like: Lois and Jimmy (sign me up now for the Jimmy Olsen Show); some of the actors; the sheer earnestness of Superman and the determination to do good; James Gunn’s love of the character and knowledge of DC Comics; and Mister Terrific using his T-Spheres and martial arts to take down a battalion without killing them. The rest? Hoult was good but Luthor is so irredeemable and humorless that I found him a bore. Corenswet does earnest well enough but his no depth of feeling (his big speech at the end landed with a thud). Everything is surface level. Krypto was annoying. And dear lord the CGI was sometimes awful. I have to wonder now…did I not like this because I am not aligned with Gunn’s style, because how movies are made in 2025 doesn’t work for me, or because Gunn is just not a good filmmaker? (Remember, I hated GotG to bit. This is at least better than that.) No matter. I might come back for the sequels if only to see Brosnahan as Lois again, but this is not a promising start to the new DC cinematic world. (Lord help me, but I like the Whedon Justice League and WW84 more.)
The Practice, “Blowing Smoke”/”New Evidence” – Two cases in the former: a woman sued a cigar company for causing her divorce (because her husband decided he liked cigars more than her); a long ago ex of Rebecca’s, now a cop, is on trial for shooting a suspect while off duty. The former case is silly, the latter turns interesting and tragic when Rebecca realizes the cop was getting for another murder and one of those instances when the show’s usual defense of cops falters. The second episode is part one of an unusual case: Lindsey agrees to take over the defense of a friend on trial for murder. In Los Angeles. Most of the cast shifts to LA (not that the show ever films in Boston) and discovers their reputation as bottom feeders has spread to every corner of the California justice system. In addition to introducing a one time only judge and DA, this is actually a mystery. Clancy Brown is the DA, arch and charming as ever, and the judge – a right winger of the sort you don’t seen in Boston with a terrible temper and a tendency to say “Massachusetts” like it’s a slur – is played by Anthony Heald.
I liked two out of the three GotG movies, but I just have no interest in this after the previews that show him yelling in frustration at Lois. Superman is not allowed to yell at people!
It’s really a weird take on Superman from where I sit, but I am both a Reevian and a Byrneian.
I think they’re the first, second and third best MCU movies but I still can’t get all that excited about seeing his take on Superman. Maybe one day it’ll pop up on a streaming service I’m already paying for and I’ll give in.
Year of the Month update!
This December, we’ll be taking pitches on anything from 1948, like these movies, albums, and books.
Dec. 18th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Rope
Dec. 20th: Lauren James: The Lottery
And there’s still time write about any of these 2018 movies, albums, books, et al this month!
Nov. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Legend of the Three Caballeros
(Blade was 1998.)