The Avengers

Let's chat.

There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong with The Avengers, truth be told.  It was helped immeasurably by some solid prequels, great actor choices, and a seemingly great writer/director, but still: I had my suspicions that it was simply going to be too BIG to handle.  Comic film franchises tend to suffer in their later films by the attempt to cram too much shit into one film: Spider-Man 3 was a clusterfuck of bad guys, X-Men 3 was a mess of poorly written plot and badly explained detail.  I was afraid that The Avengers was pulling too many elements together.

1. Joss Whedon dialed back his "Joss-ness."  Yes, I appreciate what Whedon does, and I love the dialogue he writes, but going at this big, hulking Hollywood behemoth with his style turned on 100% was never going to work.  I deeply appreciated that he was able to dial the irony back, and that Tony got the majority of his snark (which is where it should have gone) but that he also wrote the characters who needed to be earnest and transparent in that manner (Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner, mostly).  He found a good balance between his preferred aesthetic and the Hollywood comic machine, and it works.


2. The direction and cinematography were perfection.  Let's talk about Whedon a little more as a director, because this may be his biggest project yet in terms of Hollywood grandeur and dude seriously stepped up to the plate.  Shakey-cam was conspicuously absent - I could see and process everything that was going on, which is exactly what the singular power sets of our heroes demands.  (This is how you know that someone in the visuals department plays Marvel Ultimate Alliance; who else saw the Iron Man/Captain America fusion power?).  In the big fight scenes, the camera moves seamlessly from one hero to the next, so that you can see how, even while they're all fighting their own piece, it's all an interconnected sequence.  I called Whedon a virtuoso on Twitter, and I stand by that.

3. Not a minute was wasted.  Whedon was not playing around: he dropped you into the story, trusting that you'd done your homework and seen the lead-in films, and kicked the movie into overdrive in a matter of minutes.  This made his huge cast of characters easier to juggle, since none of them were burdened with obligatory background; the only characters who hadn't really gotten an origin story already, Black Widow and Hawkeye, delivered exactly as much detail as was necessary to understand their place in The Avengers narrative.  I would totally watch a prequel movie about the two of them being superspies, but for the purposes of this film we got what we needed and not a speck more.

That sense that no time was being wasted meant that, even at 2 and a half hours, The Avengers never drags or feels slow.  It's a briskly paced action film with rapid-fire dialogue that trusts its audience to keep up.

4. Mark Ruffalo is the best-written, and best-acted, Hulk we've ever seen.  I've been told the Edward Norton version of The Hulk gets better on re-watching, but I've never tried to sit through it again so I wouldn't know.  I can say, definitively, that Ruffalo does very different things with the character than Norton does and it works COMPLETELY.  This is not a Bruce Banner who's just been through the gamma ray accident - this is a Bruce Banner who is totally beaten down and defeated.  The way Ruffalo stands, the way he holds his hands, the way he talks to other people are all so indicative of a man who is completely resigned to his life being horrible and isolated.  But, and this is important, this is not a man who's lost control - rather, he is SO in control of every aspect, every emotion, every bodily movement that it's tragic.  Ruffalo gets my three favorite moments in the film, and I like them so much because they say so much about how Bruce lives with the Hulk, and how extraordinarily sad his life has been.  This is also the first time that I've ever been afraid of the Hulk and what he can do on a destructive level.

No, really.  He's freaking terrifying.

THIS PART IS KIND OF SPOILERY, FYI, SO YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE YET.

I really loved the way that Ruffalo gives you the sense that, rather than the Hulk being the product of Bruce "getting angry," that he's ALWAYS angry; the Hulk is a product of him loosing the reigns on that anger.  So, you end up with two possible scenarios: Bruce loses control of the Hulk and that destructive energy, and lays waste indiscriminately to everything around him; OR, Bruce CHOOSES to let the Hulk loose, and can thus direct that energy to specific destruction.  Both go back to that idea that Bruce is a man tightly, tightly under his own thumb all the time, and it just makes him so endearing and empathetic as a character.

END SMALL SPOILER


5.  Everyone has a purpose.  This is not to be taken lightly.  You've got a team with three over-powered superhumans and one literal god, and then...two assassin-spies with a lot of gymnastics training and good eyesight.  And yet, I never felt like Hawkeye or Black Widow were shoe-horned in, or a waste of time.  They had clearly defined roles in the party and did some useful, kick-ass stuff.  I was also impressed with Scarlett Johanson's acting, which I haven't been in a really, really long time.  She gets some good scenes and some good lines, and actually delivers on them.

In summary: this movie does not disappoint.  I'm ready for the next round of Avengers, are you?

The Avengers

I wanted to write about my reaction to The Avengers trailer about a week ago, but I had trouble because there aren't all that many interesting ways for me to say I AM EXCITE, MAY SHOULD GET HERE FASTER.  So, there you go: it's a fabulous trailer, and I have high expectations for the films.

I think it's both interesting and worth mentioning that Marvel has basically taken a backwards approach to The Avengers franchise; usually, you get the ensemble film and THEN the spin-offs.  Do to necessity, perhaps, Marvel gave us the spin-offs first, and now has the herculean task of bringing together half a dozen disparate, egotistical, arrogant and powerful characters.  Some things we should note that Marvel did particularly well in preparing for this task, which are also all reasons why The Avengers has more potential to be wonderful than to fall on its face:

- Giving the characters worth caring about their own films.  Let's be honest: Black Widow, Hawkeye, Agent Coulson and Nick Fury are pretty awesome characters, but none of them are strong enough to carry their own films.  And Marvel wisely didn't try; instead, they built them up through other, more interesting movies.  The Thor movie is sort of the exception, and I think it suffered because Thor himself isn't a very interesting character, but the argument can be made that that film was more about Loki than Thor anyway. 

- Hiring fabulous writers that (most importantly) have experience with ensemble casts.  Joss Whedon writes really good dialogue, and he has shown in multiple venues that he writes distinctive voices for multiple characters really well.  Zak Penn, the other credited script writer, worked on one of the best comic book movies of the last ten years (X2), and fabricated two sequels that, compared to their originals, were veritable works of genius (Norton's Hulk and Elektra, the latter of which I will defend until I die because I actually thought it was fun).  He also wrote X-Men: The Last Stand, and regardless of what you thought of that particular film (I liked it), the dialogue was as solid as its predecessors.  These guys know what they're doing.

- The casting is perfection.  I've already written about how impressed I am with Chris Evans' Captain America (read my review here), and at this point it pretty much goes without saying that Robert Downey Jr. = Tony Stark (similarly to how Patrick Stewart = Professor X).  Chris Hemsworth as Thor was one of the only interesting things about that movie, and Mark Ruffalo certainly can't do worse at being Bruce Banner than anyone already has.  And if I need to mention Sam Jackson's Nick Fury here, you really haven't been paying attention.

- Not introducing a new villain.  I've just convinced myself that the purpose of Thor was actually to introduce Loki, rather than Thor himself, and all of his daddy issues, which means that The Avengers won't have to dedicate valuable time to introducing a brand new villain.  What I hope this means is that we'll get to spend more time seeing how all these egos learn to play nice together, which is honestly more interesting to me than villain backstory.  Which leads me to my last point:

- We're essentially done with backstory.  All of the establishing is done.  We know everything about these people that we need to, so we can get right into the meat of the story.  It really, really bugs me when filmmakers waste time, or spin out a movie longer than it should be; hopefully, with The Avengers we'll get no wasted space.

A Brief Meditation on Iron Man, also: Sucker Punch

As I'm sitting in a Holiday Inn somewhere in Wisconsin, stranded by the blizzard and unable to go anywhere until the snow lets up, I'm watching Iron Man and it occurs to me that a.) I'm due for a post here and b.) the sequel has a neat symmetry to it that hadn't been clear to me until just this moment.

When Obadiah has Tony paralyzed on his sofa, and detaches the arc reactor from his chest and delivers his mandatory "bad guy" speech about his plans to steal the arc reactor technology to take over the world for profit, he looks rapturously at the gently glowing reactor and says "A new generation of weapons...with this at its heart." This line gets a bit lost in the rest of the speech, which is really quite good, but take note of it: it's the entire center plot for the second film.

I have no idea if this was intentional on the part of Jon Favreau, but watching Mickey Rourke create weapons using the arc reactor technology after such an obvious lead-in makes me want to smack my forehead. OF COURSE that's what the sequel was about. With a line like that, how could it have been anything else?

In other news, I saw another trailer spot for Sucker Punch, which reminded me both that I haven't done a Trailer Talk on it yet and that I'm deeply excited about the movie. You may remember when I wrote about this film single-handedly saving Vanessa Hudgens' career, and you know, I still stand by that. But now I just want to watch cute girls in school uniforms downing zeppelins and battling dragons with samurai swords and tommy guns.

SUCKER PUNCH
Dark, gloomy beginning. I like that the eerie, trans-reality moments get introduced early; the eye in the key hole, Emily Browning raking her fingers over the face of her assailant. They're not WEIRD, but the composition is almost ethereal and fairy tale-like.

MAN, the cinematography has Zack Snyder all over it. Not that I mind, it's a good look - but the scene with Babydoll being driven to the sanitarium looks SO MUCH like the funeral scene in Watchmen.

Nice "Alice In Wonderland" look on Babydoll while she scrubs the hallway. Also, I love how waifish this actress is; it makes her stand out so starkly against the institution background and the harshness of her conditions there.

OK, here's where I get lost: Carla Gugino says "What you're imagining right now, you control this world" and then BAM, we're into school uniforms, samurai swords, and a dystopian backdrop. Does everything here on out happen only in the minds of Babydoll and Co.? Is the whole movie actually a LARP that's narrated by these girls?

It doesn't REALLY matter at this point, and frankly I don't want to know. The biggest problem I can foresee with this dilemma, though, is that it paves the way for Ultimate Tragedy in the end: if this all does, actually, only happen in their minds, then at the end they will all still be trapped in this horrible prison with no hope and no future. And that's the kind of ending that would ruin the film for me (I am an endless optimist and I like happy endings).

But! Spacescapes, dramatic jumping, grand temples in the snow. Steampunky military action, combined (awesomely) with medieval trebuchets and flaming catapult ammunition. The girls look like badasses, there are zeppelins, and a wise Zen old guy (everyone needs a wise Zen old guy in their lives).

Ooh, I had not noticed this before, but there's a quick snatch of a scene of the girls pouring over the map they find in the hallways of the institution. So there's at least SOME mix up of reality and sur-reality going on.

The visuals are amazing and will look fantastic on a big screen. I also heard that all the girls do as many of their own stunts as possible, which I think is AWESOME. (Jenna Malone can bench press 300lbs now! Hot damn.) Vanessa Hudgens executes a pretty great vertical downward kick, and I am 100% ready to be blown away by Snyder's first totally original project.