Hate It Cool

Yes it has been a while but having a kid can change you priorities just a wee bit (not meant as a complaint, because I wouldn’t have it any other way – he’s beautiful).  Also it turns out some people actually read what I sent out into the ether and pointed out that it had been a while since I updated, so for all the 2 people still reading – this is for you :-)

I must say it’s fitting that I use ‘The Avengers’ as my return movie, since in my last run of reviews I covered the recent Marvel films that lead into this one.  Again I come to this as not a giant comic nerd who has any history with these characters outside of the movies.  If anything, the main bias that I have would be my Joss Whedon fetish and I was interested as to where his style would rear itself in the Marvel universe.  (My Joss cards on the table – I looooove ‘Buffy’ after initially dismissing it being based on a silly concept.  I preferred ‘Angel’’ over ‘Buffy’, due to less Sarah Michelle Gellar and more Lorne and Winifred.  ‘Firefly’ and ‘Serenity’ are still dear to sci-fi heart.  I haven’t yet seen more than the pilot of ‘Dollhouse’ because after being presented with the idea that Eliza Dushku could be anyone in the series, her take on a simple FBI agent was painful to the max and showed huge limitations in her acting.  Don’t get my wrong I love her as the character Faith and Eliza’s natural acting style, but asking her to disappear into roles just didn’t seem to be her bag.  However, I do own ‘Dollhouse’ and will correct this oversight soon).  That’s the long way round to say that I am familiar with Joss’s voice, his love of killing his own characters, denying people happiness for the sake of good drama, and not to mention his gratuitous well placed pop culture references.  So it’s interesting to me that upon reflection story of ‘The Avengers’ actually copies the pacing and arc ‘Serenity’ in quite a large way.  He opens with an action scene that introduces some of the team characters but is mainly focuses on setting up the evil threat that will push a team together.  He then spends the next hour reintroducing his characters to new audience members and setting up personality traits and gags that he intends to pay off.  Then the pace quickens a bit as he has an action sequence in which we also learn above the evil doers nefarious plans and then one of the team is wounded so that you know the threat is serious.  That pushes into the finale which is breathlessly paced and very emotional due to the higher stakes that he has been building over the course of the film.  I don’t consider it a slight to say that the structure is beat for beat the same as most of the “heroes journey” films (Star Wars, Matrix) follow similar narrative paths just out of structural necessity.  But there’s no denying Joss now has a cinematic formula that I hope he would break from for his third outing (surely which will be Avengers 2).  Did I mention I loved the film? Oh yes its outstanding and thrilling. I probably should have put that bit before the rest of the I-heart-Joss waffle.

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It’s about to get blasphemous up in here because I think this American remake is actually better than the Swedish original ‘Let The Right One In’ (ducks, expecting a barrage of rotten fruit in my general direction).  I’m not saying that I believe the original is diminished in anyway by this films existence, so I take nothing away from those who prefer the first film.  It was just that in this instance after putting aside the usual pretence about how much better original foreign films always are, this remake felt freer of extraneous subplots and more emotionally evocative.  As I wish to point out some of the differences between the adaptations, I might get into spoilers but I think it’s safe to say that the girl who looks like a vampire and kills people in the trailers IS a vampire and kills people.  However, as the fans of this tale already know, this story really isn’t about vampires and killings - it’s about the journey of a young teen boy and the loneliness, awkwardness and isolation that can come with not being popular at that age.  It’s also the story of a budding friendship between young teens or not actually young teens, but two lonely misunderstood souls who need each other in this moment.  (This type of story is universally relatable, as who wouldn’t want a protector/friend when you feel shunned and picked on by life … unless you’re the bully.)  The change of location from Sweden to the middle of nowhere in America doesn’t lessen the impact of the story and in a pinch if you haven’t seen either film then I would actually suggest to watch this first as it’s slightly more accessible.

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The tarnishing of a once great legacy continues with M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Last Airbender’.  In theory giving an already well liked storyline to a technically accomplished director should have been a slam-dunk, but instead we are left with a movie that for good reason was universally derided as a pile of junk.  My favourite way to sum up this film is to ask people to think about how kids re-tell action stories with breathless excitement, skipping over the bits that don’t interest them and adding in sound effects for effect.  Well imagine a kid saw ‘The Last Airbender’ TV show and was then given millions of dollars to retell it in that style.  You can still see the interesting original narrative seeping through the cracks of this re-telling, but it feels like all the good stuff has been lost in the sugar rush of zipping from one bland talking moment to the next blood free wire-fu scene.  Oh and if you want tangible character development then you can forget about that as well.  At the end of the day there’s still $200 million worth of stuff on the screen which means you do get handsome production design, but a good script writer and director would have made something memorable that might have made the public want to see the rest of the trilogy, rather than being left with only a mediocre first entry.

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Wow, Marvel is totally 2 for 2 this year in their adaptations and that’s great deal for nerds everywhere.  When I saw ‘Thor’ I thought it was one of the better comic book movies I’d ever seen, which makes it all the more surprising to then have ‘Captain America’ come along and top it for best superhero film of the year.  Actually, just defining this film as a superhero movie does it an injustice, because it doesn’t really evoke other spandex clad masked avenger tales and instead feels more at home with World War 2 adventure stories like ‘The Rocketeer’, and ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’.  I said to my friends that it was the funnest World War 2 adventure since the ‘Last Crusade’ and I know it’s would seem like poor taste to describe anything to do with the war as fun, but I stand by that statement because rip-roaring anti-Nazi tales have been around since the war itself.  If I grew up in the 40’s I’m sure I’d say it evokes the feel of those great serial adventure of old, but as a child of the 80’s I can really only speak to how it evokes early Amblin films that were themselves designed to evoke those serial adventures.  Whatever is evoking the feeling whatever, I like it a lot and hope there are more ‘Captain America’ stories set during the Second World War ahead of us (after his role in the upcoming ‘The Avengers’ set in modern day).

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