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‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: Why the Unsubtitled Tagalog Scene Matters

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‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: Why the Unsubtitled Tagalog Scene Matters

Editor’s Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home.The anticipation for Spider-Man: No Way Home rivaled that of any of the Avengers films, and the box office says as much. No Way Home is the first film to join the global billion-dollar club since the pandemic began, joining its bigger MCU counterparts. The buzz around the film began even before its own marketing campaign, as rumors surrounding No Way Home began as soon as the credits to Far From Home, the prior MCU Spider-Man film, ended. With Quentin Beck aka Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) using the multiverse as part of his fabricated backstory, eager fans were quick to speculate about the possibility of other Spider-Man heroes and villains entering the MCU. With Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as a primer for audiences to acclimate to the concept of the multiverse — which the Academy Award-winning film successfully explained and set up — it was only a matter of time before the MCU would commit to the concept in live-action.

Now, with No Way Home confirming so much fan speculation while simultaneously living up to the hype, the multiverse has fully arrived in the MCU with Spider-Man’s greatest foes arriving from their respective film universes — notably, Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock, Jaime Foxx’s Electro, and Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin. Some familiar heroes, too, make appearances, not only from Sam Raimi’s and Marc Webb’s films, but also from Marvel’s Netflix universe. With all these characters, No Way Home manages to juggle the impossible, yet fans were more than satisfied and rewarded. But one specific element of No Way Home resonated with Filipino fans in particular.

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RELATED: How Did Doctor Octopus Make It To ‘No Way Home’? Everything You Need to Remember About Doc Ock


In one of the film’s most significant scenes, which comes midway through the movie, Peter Parker’s (Tom Holland) best friends Ned (Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Zendaya) desperately want to get in touch with Peter, who has just suffered the loss of his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) at the hands of Dafoe’s Goblin. They are hiding out at Ned’s house, where his grandmother (Mary Rivera) looks after them. As Ned laments not having a way to contact Peter, he plays around with Doctor Strange’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) sling ring, conjuring a portal where a suited-up Peter appears. After Ned and MJ call out to him, the Spider-Man runs towards them, through the portal, and into the dining room. But as some eager fans can notice, his suit has a slightly different design.

When he takes off his mask, he reveals that he is, in fact, Peter Parker, but from an entirely different universe. He is played by Andrew Garfield from The Amazing Spider-Man films of 2012 and 2014. In order to prove his identity, Garfield’s Peter latches one hand onto the ceiling. Not satisfied, MJ tells him to crawl around. Ned’s Lola chimes in, requesting him to clean up a cobweb in the corner she never could reach. When Ned conjures up another portal, this time to a different Spider-Man, that of Tobey McGuire’s Peter Parker from 2002 through 2007, he is greeted by a welcoming smile from Ned’s Lola. After Garfield and McGuire figure out what has happened, and how they along with Ned and MJ must go find and help their own Peter, Lola complains about the mess they’ve made and brought into the living room from outside, then remarks that she’s going to bed, fed up with the Spidey hijinks.


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What is remarkable and unexpected about this scene is how Ned’s Lola speaks completely in Tagalog while Ned not only converses with her but also acts as a translator, such as when she asks Garfield’s Spider-Man to clean up the web. Furthermore, apart from Ned’s brief translations, the Tagalog isn’t accompanied by subtitles, so only those who understand Tagalog would catch some of Mary Rivera’s comedic delivery. In both of my screenings, I laughed alongside other Filipinos who were audibly amused by Ned’s Lola while everyone else in the theater was left to wonder what was going on.

Even the mere detail that Ned calls her “Lola,” the Tagalog word for grandmother, is a moment of representation that Filipinos rarely see on the big screen. Much like the use of Mandarin Chinese in introducing the origin story of Tony Leung’s Wenwu in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the use of Tagalog in No Way Home is rooted in character. Ned Leeds, as played by a Filipino American actor in Jacob Batalon, is Filipino. So, why wouldn’t he be in conversation with his grandmother in Tagalog? Especially in Queens, which has its own Filipino neighborhood in ‘Little Manila’. The use of Tagalog is a testament to Jon Watts’ and company’s understanding of Ned and New York.


No Way Home’s use of Tagalog is part of the recent trend in MCU films that utilize foreign and non-traditional languages. In addition to the use of Mandarin in Shang-Chi, an integral linguistic and cultural element to Marvel’s Master of Kung-Fu played by Simu Liu, Eternals also utilizes Spanish, ancient Babylonian, and American Sign Language. This is a significant step forward from Marvel’s previous inclusion of Tagalog — in the Disney+ series Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Shanti Dope’s Tagalog rap song “Amatz” is featured in the background when Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and Zemo (Daniel Bruhl) arrive in the fictional nation of Madripoor. Tagalog shouldn’t be some interchangeable language for an “Asian” fictional place.


Instead, it should come directly from the authenticity of the character and actor. In No Way Home, it makes sense that Batalon’s Ned and his grandmother would converse in Tagalog. This is akin to the authenticity presented in this year’s West Side Story in which Steven Spielberg pushed for a Latinx cast and also used unsubtitled Spanish. And while some audiences may complain about the lack of subtitles, their absence conveys an authenticity that parallels real life. No one walks around with subtitles displayed as they speak, even in English. Representation goes beyond appearances, as languages are just as diverse as appearances.

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

Hitting the three-quarter-century mark usually means a retirement home, a nursing facility, or if you’re lucky to be blessed with relatively good health and savings to match, living in a gated community in Arizona or Florida.

For Sylvester Stallone, however, it means something else entirely: starring in the first superhero-centered film of his decades-long career in the much-delayed Samaritan. Unfortunately for Stallone and the audience on the other side of the screen, the derivative, turgid, forgettable results won’t get mentioned in a career retrospective, let alone among the ever-expanding list of must-see entries in a genre already well past its peak.

For Stallone, however, it’s better late than never when it involves the superhero genre. Maybe in getting a taste of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) with his walk-on role in the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel several years ago, Stallone thought anything Marvel can do, I can do even better (or just as good in the nebulous definition of the word).

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The property Stallone and his team found for him, Samaritan, a little-known graphic novel released by a small, almost negligible, publisher, certainly takes advantage of Stallone’s brute-force physicality and his often underrated talent for near-monosyllabic brooding (e.g., the Rambo series), but too often gives him to little do or say as the lone super-powered survivor, the so-called “Samaritan” of the title, of a lifelong rivalry with his brother, “Nemesis.” Two brothers entered a fire-ravaged building and while both were presumed dead, one brother did survive (Stallone’s Joe Smith, a garbageman by day, an appliance repairman by night).

In the Granite City of screenwriter Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room, Season of the Witch), the United States, and presumably the rest of the world, teeters on economic and political collapse, with a recession spiraling into a depression, steady gigs difficult, if not impossible, to obtain, and the city’s neighborhoods rocked by crime and violence. No one’s safe, not even 13-year-old Sam (Javon Walker), Joe’s neighbor.

When he’s not dodging bullies connected to a gang, he’s falling under the undue influence of Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk), a low-rent gang leader with an outsized ego and the conviction that he and only he can take on Nemesis’s mantle and along with that mantle, a hammer “forged in hate,” to orchestrate a Bane-like plan to plunge the city into chaos and become a wealthy power-broker in the process.

Schut’s woefully underwritten script takes a clumsy, haphazard approach to world-building, relying on a two-minute animated sequence to open Samaritan while a naive, worshipful Sam narrates Samaritan and Nemesis’s supposedly tragic, Cain and Abel-inspired backstory. Schut and director Julius Avery (Overlord) clumsily attempt to contrast Sam’s childish belief in messiah-like, superheroic saviors stepping in to save humanity from itself and its own worst excesses, but following that path leads to authoritarianism and fascism (ideas better, more thoroughly explored in Watchmen and The Boys).

While Sam continues to think otherwise, Stallone’s superhero, 25 years past his last, fatal encounter with his presumably deceased brother, obviously believes superheroes are the problem and not the solution (a somewhat reasonable position), but as Samaritan tracks Joe and Sam’s friendship, Sam giving Joe the son he never had, Joe giving Sam the father he lost to street violence well before the film’s opening scene, it gets closer and closer to embracing, if not outright endorsing Sam’s power fantasies, right through a literally and figuratively explosive ending. Might, as always, wins regardless of how righteous or justified the underlying action.

It’s what superhero audiences want, apparently, and what Samaritan uncritically delivers via a woefully under-rendered finale involving not just unconvincing CGI fire effects, but a videogame cut-scene quality Stallone in a late-film flashback sequence that’s meant to be subversively revelatory, but will instead lead to unintentional laughter for anyone who’s managed to sit the entirety of Samaritan’s one-hour and 40-minute running time.

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Samaritan is now streaming worldwide on Prime Video.

Samaritan

Cast
  • Sylvester Stallone
  • Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton
  • Pilou Asbæk

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Matt Shakman Is In Talks To Direct ‘Fantastic Four’

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According to a new report, Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct the upcoming MCU project, Fantastic Four. Marvel Studios has been very hush-hush regarding Fantastic Four to the point where no official announcements have been made other than the film’s release date. No casting news or literally anything other than rumors has been released regarding the project. We know that Fantastic Four is slated for release on November 8th, 2024, and will be a part of Marvel’s Phase 6. There are also rumors that the cast of the new Fantastic Four will be announced at the D23 Expo on September 9th.

Fantastic Four is still over two years from release, and we assume we will hear more news about the project in the coming months. However, the idea of the Fantastic Four has already been introduced into the MCU. John Krasinski played Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The cameo was a huge deal for fans who have been waiting a long time for the Fantastic Four to enter the MCU. When Disney acquired Twenty Century Fox in 2019 we assumed that the Fox Marvel characters would eventually make their way into the MCU. It’s been 3 years and we already have had an X-Men and Fantastic Four cameo – even if they were from another universe.

Deadline is reporting that Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct Fantastic Four. Shakman served as the director for Wandavision and has had an extensive career. He directed two episodes of Game of Thrones and an episode of The Boys, and he had a long stint on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is nothing official yet, but Deadline’s sources say that Shakman is currently in talks for the job and things are headed in the right direction.

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To be honest, I was a bit more excited when Jon Watts was set to direct. I’m sure Shakman is a good director, but Watts proved he could handle a tentpole superhero film with Spider-Man: Homecoming. Wandavision was good, but Watts’ style would have been perfect for Fantastic Four. The film is probably one of the most anticipated films in Marvel’s upcoming slate films and they need to find the best person they can to direct. Is that Matt Shakman? It could be, but whoever takes the job must realize that Marvel has a lot riding on this movie. The other Fantastic Four films were awful and fans deserve better. Hopefully, Marvel knocks it out of the park as they usually do. You can see for yourself when Fantastic Four hits theaters on November 8th, 2024.

Film Synopsis: One of Marvel’s most iconic families makes it to the big screen: the Fantastic Four.

Source: Deadline

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Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase Star in ‘Zombie Town’ Mystery Teen Romancer (Exclusive)

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Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase have entered Zombie Town, a mystery teen romancer based on author R.L. Stine’s book of the same name.

The indie, now shooting in Ontario, also stars Henry Czerny and co-teen leads Marlon Kazadi and Madi Monroe. The ensemble cast includes Scott Thompson and Bruce McCulloch of the Canadian comedy show Kids in the Hall.

Canadian animator Peter Lepeniotis will direct Zombie Town. Stine’s kid’s book sees a quiet town upended when 12-year-old Mike and his friend, Karen, see a horror movie called Zombie Town and unexpectedly see the title characters leap off the screen and chase them through the theater.

Zombie Town will premiere in U.S. theaters before streaming on Hulu and then ABC Australia in 2023.

“We are delighted to bring the pages of R.L. Stine’s Zombie Town to the screen and equally thrilled to be working with such an exceptional cast and crew on this production. A three-time Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award winner with book sales of over $500 million, R.L. Stine has a phenomenal track record of crafting stories that engage and entertain audiences,” John Gillespie, Trimuse Entertainment founder and executive producer, said in a statement.

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Executive producers are Trimuse Entertainment, Toonz Media Group, Lookout Entertainment, Viva Pictures and Sons of Anarchy actor Kim Coates.  

Paco Alvarez and Mark Holdom of Trimuse negotiated the deal to acquire the rights to Stine’s Zombie Town book.

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