Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Black Widow" and What's Making Us Happy

Scarlet Johansson, David Harbor, and Florence Pugh take a walk in the woods. (Jay Maidment/Marvel Studios)

Pal-for-Life Glen Weldon and I have been on Pop Culture Happy Hour together on many occasions, but this is the first time since we started our own podcast. With host Linda Holmes and my fellow guest Vincent Schilling, we talked through our mixed responses to Black Widow, the Marvel movie that we all agree should’ve come out no later than in 2017, and which I wish had been more of a spy story than yet another Big Fight in the Sky. The casting of the the fabricated Russian spy “family” — Scarlet Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, and Rachel Weisz — made the film worthwhile for me, albeit frustrating.

Omitted from our conversation was my mention of this Guardian profile of Black Widow director Cate Shortland, wherein she describes removing a cheesecake shot of Johansson from the film after a test audience objected to it. I brought it up because the piece describes the film as pointedly not objectifying its star the way Iron Man 2 and other Marvel entries have, when some members of the audience I saw the film with felt strongly that the movie had done that.

My own incomplete thoughts on the subject are that it’s good that a woman directed this movie, that more films at every budget level but especially massive investments like Black Widow should be directed by woman, and that I’m not sure it’s possible to film a movie star without objectifying them. Our ability to regard them as objects as well as people may well be the mysterious quality that makes them stars. Johnasson has demonstrated herself on many occasions to be a good actor, too, but that’s a different skill.

NPR has begun to adapt the What’s Making Me Happy segment of these Friday episodes into a text blog post. Already I’m 11 chapters into The Devil’s Candy, the 1991 Julie Salamon book Linda has recommended about how Brian De Palma’s 1990 adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities went so wrong.

I’ve also made good on my promise to dive into The Criterion Channel’s July assortment of neo-noirs. I watched Arthur Penn’s Night Moves the other night and was shocked to realize near the end that the unrecognizable girl Gene Hackman’s 40-year-old football star-turned-private dick is enlisted to find was played by Melanie Griffith, who 15 years later would play a prominent role in The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Monsters, Ink: "Hellboy," reviewed.

David Harbour is the new Ron Perlman in Hellboy, also starring Sasha Lane. (Mark Rogers)

It's a shame about Hellboy (Neil Marshall, 2019). But we'll always have Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro, 2004). My NPR review of the former is here. None of these movies is as rewarding and reading Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics in bed, if you ask me.