My son and I went to see the new Marvel movie Black Widow tonight, and I know we don't normally do movie reviews on CathInfo, but I noted several things that made this film a refreshing break from the usual Hollywood presentations in recent years.
I had a hard time following the plot, something about some glowing red sticks being used as a kind of "McGuffin", which was totally lost on me, but there is a lot to like about Black Widow, some things that "jumped out at me" (I will try to avoid spoilers):
* Very little profanity, the F-bσɱb got dropped once or twice, fleetingly, but that's about it.
* No sɛҳuąƖ situations.
* Violence in great abundance, but the typical normal person doesn't have an atavistic urge to make mayhem on people left and right, so IMHO no harm done. It's all fantasy violence and suspension of disbelief anyway.
* No discussion of gender issues, no obviously ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ characters, no sympathetic references made to LGBTQXYZ alphabet soup.
* No demonization of the white race, nor of white males in particular.
* No sympathetic "black saviors" swooping in to save degenerate white people from themselves and their baser impulses and passions.
* The closest that the movie came to "political correctness" was that the "widows" were of all races and ethnicities. Pretty harmless.
* The international scenes, particularly those of Budapest, were actually pretty educational. Hungary looked kind of grim and colorless, a bit shabby, which surprised me. On several occasions I deciphered the Cyrillic alphabet to tell my son what various signs and logos said. (And they pronounced it correctly, "Bood-ah-pesht". Nice touch.)
* There were at least three homages to the Tarantino Kill Bill movies, including a fairly obvious one of two women fighting in a kitchen. The other two were a bit more oblique, so I won't spoil that part. If you've seen the Kill Bill movies, you'll spot them instantly.
* Making allowance for the fact that the women were wearing action-heroine costumes, which entailed wearing form-fitting bifurcated lower garments, there was no patent immodesty in the film.
* While the film as a whole was utterly secular, there was some Catholic iconography towards the end (to describe it further, would indeed be a spoiler).
* This may defy conventional wisdom, but when you look at Scarlett Johansson long enough --- there's no nice way to put this --- she is actually a bit homely, or jolie-laide might be a better way to put it. Nose too long, lips too full, eyes too poppy, relative newcomer Florence Pugh is far more naturally attractive. (I know this invites commentary on Miss Johansson's ethnicity, and I can predict what that commentary will be, so I'll just leave it at that.)
* The camera lingered just a bit too long on the young ladies' rear ends. My son commented on this, not that I hadn't noticed it myself.
All in all, I was pleasantly surprised. A couple of years ago, my son insisted upon being taken to see Black Avenger, and we had a long talk afterwards about that movie. Such a blatant propaganda piece, that if I had been black, I would actually have been embarrassed by it. "Wakanda forever", indeed.