Weekend Watch - She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Episode 1
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’s first episode sets the tone for a solid superhero origin story featuring a mix of likable original characters and familiar MCU favorites with some quality topical comedic writing thrown in to top it all off.
Welcome back to the Weekend Watch, where each week we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a review and recommendation. This week’s Watch, chosen by votes on the Instagram account, is about the new MCU Disney+ show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law whose first episode dropped this week and will run for another eight weeks on the streaming service. It stars Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk as well as featuring Mark Ruffalo, Ginger Gonzaga, Jameela Jamil, and Steve Coulter. Future episodes are also supposed to feature Tim Roth, Charlie Cox, Benedict Wong, Josh Segarra, and Griffin Matthews. The show follows the origins of She-Hulk and Jennifer’s efforts to maintain a normal professional and social life as she gains these new powers; let’s get into the review.
Letter Grade: A-; for what is essentially a pilot episode, this might be one of the MCU’s best so far.
Should you Watch This Show? I’m gonna say yes. This show feels like it has a lot of potential to take its characters in fun directions and it feels worth checking out.
Why?
This first episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law serves as the hero’s origin story. It starts as Jennifer is prepping her closing arguments for a case against some powerful individual. She then breaks the fourth wall (as the character often does in the comics) to cut and acknowledge that she is in fact a “Hulk” and then goes into the back-story. The origin involves a trip with her cousin Bruce Banner where she becomes a Hulk and then a long training journey where he teaches her how to be a Hulk. Along the way, we get a lot of development of both characters, delving deeper into Bruce’s connections to Tony Stark and Steve Rogers in some fun and even briefly emotional ways. At the same time, we see a little bit of what makes Jennifer tick, learning about her love for her job and her hesitancy to become a superhero in spite of her new powers. The threads that are set up in the flashback provide some nuggets for strong character development as the show goes forward. The CGI, which was a problem for many when the show’s trailers first dropped, has been touched up surprisingly well, especially for a T.V. show on a streaming service. It’s by no means perfect or “movie-quality” but it’s better than most of the other MCU shows for sure. I have seen people complaining about Maslany’s characterization of Jennifer and She-Hulk as too abrasive or “feminista” or whatever, comparing her to Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers, and I cannot disagree more. Yes, she has some talking points that should be expected in a show featuring a female superhero (only the fourth Marvel project to do so in a solo endeavor, I might add), but the character is legitimately funny and doesn’t feel overconfident or disingenuous at all to me. She is a New York attorney whose job is prosecuting powerful people (maybe even superpowered people), confidence and an ability to adapt on the fly are incredibly necessary in that world. I will also say, the show’s comedy harkens back to some of the more classic MCU days in a way that is highly reminiscent of the Iron Man franchise and even the first Avengers, and I didn’t hate it. In fact, this episode’s post-credits scene might be the best that Marvel has ever done, in terms of comedy; I was dying laughing when it went to black. Overall, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’s first episode sets the tone for a solid superhero origin story featuring a mix of likable original characters and familiar MCU favorites with some quality topical comedic writing thrown in to top it all off. I’m excited to see where the rest of the show goes. Follow it as it releases each week on Thursdays on Disney+.
Weekend Watch - Where the Crawdads Sing
Where the Crawdads Sing is a faithful, if lacking, adaptation of Delia Owens’s novel, featuring all the story points of the beloved book without the strong character and relationship development that tied it all together.
Welcome back to the new and improved Weekend Watch, where each week, you vote on the blog’s Instagram for what we should watch next weekend, and then I watch it and give a little review and recommendation about it. This week’s winner was the new theatrical release, Where the Crawdads Sing, based on the best-selling novel by Delia Owens. It features Daisy Edgar-Jones as the protagonist Kya Clark, Taylor John Smith and Harris Dickinson as her two love interests (Tate and Chase), and David Strathairn as her elderly lawyer, Tom Milton.
Letter Grade: C-, it definitely doesn’t wow, but it tells an interesting enough story
Should you Watch This Film? Fans of the book should enjoy this one well enough, but visually, it doesn’t bring enough to the table to necessitate a theatrical viewing.
Why?
Where the Crawdads Sing suffers from similar issues to many adaptations of detailed books into films. It tells the story well, but the story was only part of what made the book so well-liked. The character development is cast to the wayside in favor of hitting story points, but because of runtime requirements, the story points often feel disjointed from one another, making it a difficult film to categorize. This film has notes of a romantic drama, a woman-empowerment film, and a courtroom drama, but not quite enough of any individually to get it into those categories. It has a love triangle (of sorts) between three attractive actors, in which one guy is clearly better for the girl than the other is, but she has to discover that for herself. The only problem is that for extended stretches of the film, the romance plot simply disappears, taking you out of that genre’s mindset. The film features a strong female protagonist doing great things all on her own like fending for herself after being abandoned by her family, writing a plethora of books about local wildlife that end up published by academic publishers, and fighting off an attempted rapist all on her own. At the same time, she only learns of the publishers from one of the men in her life and her court case rests on the skill of her male lawyer, as she refuses to take the stand in her own defense. These are two clear moments of potential female empowerment that lose some of their impact because of the men involved, which is true to the book, but the book has plenty of other aspects that enforce the female empowerment piece, and maybe the story’s ending redeems those points to a lesser extent as well. Finally, as a courtroom drama, we get very little, which was also the case in the book, as the trial featured only at the story’s conclusion. In the film adaptation, the court case is sprinkled in throughout the film between flashbacks to other parts of the story. For the most part, the courtroom and related scenes serve mainly as a vehicle for David Strathairn to do some acting and very little else. Not much is revealed through those scenes, and they feel more like an afterthought to everything else going on in the film because of Kya’s reluctance to speak. Despite these tonal disparities, the story is compelling, and the acting is relatively solid (minus some occasional accent inconsistencies). I’d say this is certainly a film worth watching at some point, especially if you’ve read the book or you are at all curious about the book but haven’t had time to sit down and read it yet. Where the Crawdads Sing is a faithful, if lacking, adaptation of Delia Owens’s novel, featuring all the story points of the beloved book without the strong character and relationship development that tied it all together. It feels like something that could have been even better, had it gone the route of miniseries like so many other stories have in recent years.