10 Years of Life: How Channing Tatum Meets Mike Lane in a Stripper Drama in London and the Way of Water (aka Flashdance)
Blockbusters are back, baby! Everything old is new again in Hollywood, after the success of Top Gun: Maverick and the early returns on the film Avatar: The Way of Water. That could be a very good thing for studios in the coming year, which promises some very-long-awaited sequels, hot Willy Wonka, superheroes galore, and several minutes of Tom Cruise running. The slate of movies in 2023 is jam-packed and we are excited to see 15 of them.
Ten years, one stage musical, a reality show, and soon-to-be-three movies later, the idea of Steven Soderbergh directing Channing Tatum in a semiautobiographical stripper drama still seems preposterous. But it works! And Tatum’s ready to slip into—and out of—his tearaway pants one more time. Mike Lane, played byTatum, is in Florida when he meets a woman with ulterior motives, who convinces him to go to London and become a stripper. The trailer has the same amount of water splashed upon it as flashdance.
Creed III: The Story of Adonis, Apollo, and the Lost Counting Agents of the Quantum Realm Revisited
Paul Rudd and Michael Douglas play the role of Scott Lang and his daughter, respectively, in the film, as they are drawn into the Quantum Realm along with the other members of their family.
Just when you think the Rocky franchise has played itself out, it gives you a compelling reason to keep rooting for it. Creed III, which is the directorial debut of Michael B. Jordan, is the story of Adonis Creed, son of the original series’ Apollo Creed. The movie revisits the same themes ofRocky’s fraught relationship with Apollo, as Adonis and Dame Anderson go to work together, and as the movie ends with Dame Anderson finally getting what she wanted.
This movie feels like it was made for the movie theater, with a huge variety of weird and strange characters and a very strange production design.
With much of the action unfolding on that plane, the movie bears scant resemblance to the original “Ant-Man,” or even its sequel, which overcame its potentially mockable premise with plenty of comedy and a modestly scaled story.
Director Peyton Reed is back for the third time, and the movie begins with a similar sense of whimsy, but similarities to the franchise’s 2015 introduction pretty much end there.
The trip consists of an especially strange trip with little to nothing in terms of recognizable reality. The hidden universe that Jonathan Majors plays is so powerful that it allows its inhabitants to keep their identities a secret and even refuse to say their names.
One structural problem, in fact, is that Kang’s power and the scope of his evil plans make the hero-villain pairing feel like a decided mismatch – to couch it in terms suited to Majors’ upcoming role in “Creed III,” asking a lightweight to go toe-to-toe with a heavyweight, one that got his start in the comics sparring with the Fantastic Four. It’s a point overtly made by Kang himself, who sneers at Ant-Man, “You’re out of your league.”
The studio hasn’t felt like a big-league player since the movie hit theaters, even though it has achieved smashing success after a global epidemic changed the playing field.
Thanks to its emphasis on Kang, the third “Ant-Man” has taken a necessary step toward something bigger, with the aforementioned “Guardians” and “The Marvels” sequels still to come this year. But it is, at best, a small step, and like much of Marvel’s recent output, only makes “Endgame” loom that much larger in the rearview mirror.