Moon Knight (TV Program)

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares99 Views

    D.I.Y. Sci-Fi: A Talk With Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

    by

    The filmmaking and acting team discuss their latest low-budget science fiction movie, “Something in the Dirt,” and their work on the Marvel Disney+ series “Moon Knight.”The writing-directing-acting duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s latest film, the science fiction satire “Something in the Dirt,” follows John (Moorhead) and Levi (Benson), neighboring tenants in a ramshackle Los Angeles apartment complex. After observing inexplicable supernatural phenomena in Levi’s flat, they attempt to capture the event on camera for personal gain, but meet disaster instead.Since releasing their feature debut, “Resolution” (2013), Benson and Moorhead have made movies their way, exercising full creative control over their malleable, genre-fluid aesthetic. Referred to in reviews as their “most personal” movie after its Sundance premiere, “Something in the Dirt” (in theaters) is a distillation of their sensibilities, striking a lopsided contrast with their directing contributions to the Marvel Disney+ series “Moon Knight,” an atypically weird superhero show involving dissociative identity disorder, Egyptian gods and Oscar Isaac.In an interview via Zoom, the two discussed nuances in personal filmmaking, the line between virtue and villainy, and how directing for an entertainment giant crystallized their filmmaking identities. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“Something in the Dirt” is about two guys making a movie. Did the way that you make movies and collaborate wind up echoing in the story?Justin Benson: What’s strange is our dynamic and our filmmaking process and our relationship couldn’t be more different than John and Levi’s. Obviously we’ve seen it described as “their most personal film.” There is probably some truth to that, but you’ve got to get into this oddly precise definition of “personal,” because it’s the farthest thing from autobiographical. The characters were intentionally constructed to be wildly different from who we are.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and TV series continues to expand.‘She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’: Tatiana Maslany described the giant, green character making her television debut on Disney+ as “weirdly, the closest thing to my own experience I’ve done ever.”‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’: The trailer for the long-awaited sequel was unveiled at Comic-Con International in San Diego. The film will be released on Nov. 11.‘Thor: Love and Thunder’: The fourth “Thor” movie in 11 years, directed by Taika Waititi, embraces wholesale self-parody and is sillier than any of its predecessors.‘Ms. Marvel’: This Disney+ series introduces a new character: Kamala Khan, a Muslim high schooler in Jersey City who is mysteriously granted superpowers.Aaron Moorhead: For the most part we were interested in these characters because we were exploring stuff we don’t believe. That’s not just in our films. That’s our free time, our conversations. The stuff that’s interesting feels a little dangerous. It’s on a razor’s edge of being mockable, but still can hold resonance in our minds and hearts.Benson: The only similarity between Aaron and I and John and Levi is we spend a lot of time talking about science fiction. But that’s the point. The huge difference for us is that John and Levi are quick to believe, and we never believe in anything.Moorhead and Benson in “Something in the Dirt.”XYZ/Rustic FilmsJohn and Levi trade stories with each other that either are not true or are dubious. It feels like there’s a bit of you in that dynamic. Was it gratifying to play that in this fictional, very fractured environment?Benson: There’s a cut line from the movie — Levi accuses John of being a liar, and John says, “You lie more than anyone I’ve ever met!” They lie in different ways. Levi works at a bar and wants to put his best foot forward. He’s probably got half a dozen different stories, and once you run out of them, you end up with this sad, lonely soul. John lies for other reasons, but the way they lie was part of fleshing them out as real human beings.Moorhead: We were dedicated to this idea of: you sympathize with one character and suspect the other is a villain, and then it slowly swaps through the movie, and by the end, you realize they’re both flawed human beings, neither villain nor hero. Neither of us ever believed the characters we were playing were bad people, but while we were performing, we believed in the virtue of what they were doing. There’s a part of me deep down that says it isn’t villainous if you’re virtuous, but you don’t know if you’re virtuous or not. You just hope you are.Benson: The different ways John and Levi lie connects them to us as creators, hopefully as characters with humanity. You hope that in the way science fiction operates, people don’t think you’re lying, that they understand it’s science fiction storytelling — that people don’t think you’re expressing a viewpoint one would call a lie.Moorhead: It was part of the conception of this movie to examine your own relationship with pop culture and what you put out in the world. Sometimes lies enter the zeitgeist in a way you didn’t intend. What exactly is the responsibility of the person who’s creating these things whole cloth? It is terrifying as a filmmaker to think someone might actually believe that what you are showing them is real.“Something in the Dirt” premiered at Sundance. “Moon Knight” premiered in March. This isn’t a knock against “Moon Knight,” but it comparatively feels impersonal because it’s a Marvel production. There’s a big leap from your movies “Spring” and “The Endless” to Marvel. Did that personal quality remain intact in that framework?Moorhead: When we faced a decade of being completely unemployable, we walked into every single studio pitch room on every single project, pitched our hearts out and wouldn’t be able to make it happen. We now realize that was for the better, because our alternative was to make a personal independent film. That solidified in our own minds, but also in the minds of what you call the industry, what exactly we’re doing. Now, when people ask us if we want to do something, it’s in that niche — not broadly horror, broadly sci-fi. There’s mystery afoot, and something dark and cosmic about it.It isn’t that we have to erase our personality and work within the machine. What [Marvel] wanted from us was our voice. It comes out mostly in the visuals, because scripts are separate from direction, but we put a lot of ourselves into it. But your thesis is definitely correct. There’s by definition nothing more personal than an independent film.Benson: [“Moon Knight”] has given us opportunities to work with collaborators we wouldn’t otherwise, which has expanded our creative worlds. These opportunities have also given us time on set in a compressed period that’s been like a second film school in some ways — though being a filmmaker is continuously being in film school, because every day is never planned for, really.Moorhead: The greatest terror we both hold is losing our curiosity and ability to grow. It can happen, and it can sneak up on you. If you only ever make your own films, you might start to repeat yourself because you think you’ve got a bunch of great ideas, but they’re all the same idea. We only want to make stuff that expresses ourselves purely. Right now, doing something big and doing something indie, they feed each other very nicely. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Moon Knight’ Review: Marvel, Oscar Isaac and Identity Issues

      by

      Oscar Isaac multitasks in a Marvel series about a superhero who answers to an ancient Egyptian god and struggles with dissociative identity disorder.The hero of the new Marvel Comics series, “Moon Knight,” has a superior costume. It’s a cool, bullet-absorbing white suit with a billowing cape and eyeholes that shine like milky spotlights. It makes him look like a luminescent Batman. And he refuses to wear it.His wife, who has an abundance of common sense and very little patience, yells at him: “Summon the suit! Summon the suit!” But he just dithers or pouts or stares at her blankly while the bad guys close in.There could be a lot of things behind this costume avoidance, including a general move in Marvel’s television shows away from superhero business-as-usual and toward something with a little more, if you’ll excuse the phrase, psychological realism.With “Moon Knight,” which premieres Wednesday on Disney+, it also has to do with concept and casting. The show features a relatively minor Marvel hero, created in the 1970s, whose defining character trait is what is now known as dissociative identity disorder. In the four episodes (of six) available for review, he is most often Steven Grant, a mild-mannered clerk at the British Museum gift shop, and occasionally Marc Spector, a deadly former mercenary and earthly avatar of a justice-seeking Egyptian god.They are, of course, opposite halves of a symbolic whole: brains and brawn, peace and war. But the show generates most of its drama and humor, and a number of its visual effects, from their inability to coexist. Visible to one another as reflections, they bicker and trade insults, Steven abhorring Marc’s violence (even when violent action is called for) and Marc ruing what he sees as Steven’s weakness.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and television series continues to expand. ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: The web slinger is back with the latest installment of the “Spider-Man” series.‘Hawkeye’: Jeremy Renner returns to the role of Clint Barton, the wisecracking marksman of the Avengers, in the Disney+ mini-series.‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’: The superhero originated in comics filled with racist stereotypes. The movie knocked them down.‘Eternals’: The two-and-a-half-hour epic introduces nearly a dozen new characters, hopping back and forth through time.As they try to stop a sanctimonious bad guy from resurrecting a rival Egyptian deity, enduring chases, desert treks and crunchingly violent battles, they grudgingly trade off possession of their shared body. The show’s favored move is for Steven to give in just in time for Marc to save both them and their archaeologist wife, Layla El-Faouly. But it takes the direst circumstances for the suit to be summoned, turning the human protagonist into the magically powered Moon Knight.And that’s where the casting comes in: reflecting Marvel’s ability to attract top-flight talent, Steven and Marc are played by Oscar Isaac, and who wants to wrap Oscar Isaac in C.G.I. mummy bandages, no matter how nifty they look?There are a lot of issues swimming around in “Moon Knight,” including its treatment of ancient Egyptian culture, its presentation of its Middle Eastern milieu and its depiction of its hero’s mental health issues. But as a drama, it’s built entirely around the Isaac vs. Isaac cage match, which supplies fair to middling action and sentiment and consistently satisfying laughs.The hero’s highly symbolic identities are visible to one another as reflections.Marvel StudiosIt’s characteristic of the Marvel Disney+ shows that the ability of the performers exceeds the inventiveness of the crew — writers and directors seem to be hired for competence rather than distinctive vision. Jeremy Slater (“The Umbrella Academy”), the show’s creator, and its director, Mohamed Diab (the Egyptian features “Cairo 678” and “Clash”), are only fitfully successful at combining psychological drama, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” desert adventure and superhero origin story.A little more flair would help paper over the cracks; as it is, events and relationships aren’t easy to parse and characters’ actions (especially Steven’s) can be inconsistent. It probably didn’t help that nine writers are credited on the six episodes.You also could wonder how much focus was spent on navigating the hazards of orientalism and ableism present in the original material. The credits include consultants for Egyptology, Judaism and mental health as well as three general consultants from a company that promises on its website to “flag potential concerns and provide advice on how to avoid or mitigate risk.” (No Islam consultant is listed; the focus on ancient Egypt mitigates the risk of dealing with the country’s predominant contemporary religion.)We don’t know what the consultants’ input was. But onscreen, presenting Cairo in a new light (in interviews, Diab has said this was a priority) seems to consist of making it look like every other world capital. A scene featuring Gaspard Ulliel, who died in January, uses what appears to be an Arab form of jousting as background exoticism; when the characters venture into ancient monuments and archaeological sites, the dangers they face are of a familiar silver-screen variety.None of that increases the viewer’s pleasure, but it doesn’t necessarily diminish it, either, and you can always focus on Isaac’s nervous fidgeting, shy stubbornness and dodgy accent in his scenes as Steven. (Convinced of his Britishness, Steven refers to Marc as “the little American man living inside me.”)And Isaac has heavyweight support: Ethan Hawke plays Harrow, the villain, and F. Murray Abraham is the voice of the god, Khonshu, an arrogant and self-righteous loudmouth who appears to his avatar as a disjointed skeleton topped by a floating ibis skull.The show’s best moments belong to Abraham, who delivers helpful advice like “Kill him! Break his windpipe!” in hilariously stentorian tones. But the character we like best is the highly capable Layla, who gets to be the action star while Steven and Marc snipe at each other; May Calamawy, who plays the rebellious sister in “Ramy,” gives Layla an appealingly irritated insouciance.The makers of the show are not unaware of the “Raiders” comparison — Steven watches a movie called “Tomb Buster” whose title is rendered in the same sloping style. And while it’s unfair to wish that every desert or jungle adventure could be directed by Steven Spielberg (or Robert Zemeckis, or J.J. Abrams), “Moon Knight” won’t stop you from doing so. More