The Avengers

The main question I’ve been asking myself today is; can you love a movie and still have a huge list of problems with it?  Apparently, yes.  Yes, you can.

The Avengers is an amazing accomplishment in filmmaking, not because of what’s contained in the movie itself, but what came before it; five prequel films by four different directors over four years.  Each of the prequels was its own origins film, containing a beginning and ending, yet tied together by a few key cameos and some after credits extra scenes.  Each film built on the previous with the goal of coming together in the most ambitious superhero team film to date.

And come together they did.  Recurring their roles from the previous films were Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner and fan favorite, Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson.  Gwyneth Paltrow made an appearance as Pepper Potts, Stellan Skarsgård was back as Dr. Selvig and Cobi Smulders joined as Agent Hill.  The one replacement from the prequels was Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/The Hulk, picking up from Edward Norton’s turn in The Incredible Hulk.

Directing and co-writing fell to fan favorite Joss Whedon who brought his excellent sense of humor and incredible ability to write character driven dialog.  Anyone who has seen “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel” or “Firefly” already knew that Whedon had talent and after this film, so will the rest of the worldwide moviegoing public.

Because of the ambitious prequel films, The Avengers was able to show an origins story for the team without having to go into the backstory of each member.  After a brief setup to reintroduce Loki (Hiddleston) and bring us up to speed on his scheme to conquer Earth, Whedon and crew jumped right into the action and didn’t let go until the final post-credits scene.

One of the best things about The Avengers was the humor.  Whedon is an excellent writer and Downey and Evans have perfect comedic timing.  As Steve Rogers/Captain America’s ‘Man out of Time,’ Evans played it straight-faced and dry to Stark’s (Downey) zinger one-liners, but even Thor’s (Hemsworth) aloof, not-from-this-world ironic humor sent the audience into fits of laughter.  All good action films try to inject humor to break up the intensity of the action scenes but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it done so well.

Scattered throughout the movie were shout-outs to the previous movies which reminded us that Disney and Marvel were crafting a much larger universe for our heroes to play in.  Even Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster had a cameo via a computer screen photo.  The vision behind The Avengers is better than anything I’ve seen from a multi title comic book crossover and the future looks very bright for Marvel superhero films.

I could go on and praise the film for a lot of other accomplishments but then I might be getting into some spoiler territory that I’d rather skip; go see the movie, it’s overall excellent and enjoyable and I think you’ll all love it.

But having said that, we’re back to the question I asked at the top; can I love a movie and still have a huge list of problems with it?  The Avengers was able to overcome the problems I had because of the writing and the story and how all the actors stepped it up for the movie.  However, I feel the need to go over a few of the issues I had with the movie because I feel that they are things that can be improved on for the future movies and to point out that no matter how enjoyable the end product was, it was far from perfect.

I gripe about this all the time with movies but The Avengers has potentially taken it to a whole new level; I don’t think it’s possible for Whedon and his editors to have cut so many of the fight scenes into jitterier, more disorienting, blurry masses of unwatchable crap.  It’s a disservice to the actors, stunt doubles and CGI artists when you waste their hard work by doing this.  Stop it!  While some of the fight scenes were fine, there were two fights involving Black Widow in particular that were complete wrecks.  The final battle of the film had more of this but the scale was so huge that it was less bothersome.  Still, there was room for a lot of improvement in the fight scenes.

Goofy filming angles for no reason.  Joss, you’re not Michael Bay, you don’t need to film everyone from the ground up with crap flying overhead.  I was feeling a little queasy at the start of the film with the Bay-like camera swooping and up-angle shots as Fury walked around his base.  All that was missing was a huge ball of fire following him and a flock of Woo-doves to fly through the shot…

What was up with all the lingering shots of unimportant characters?  The girl in NY watching Cap fight off some Chitauri and then being interviewed at the end?  Panning over to Agent Hill (Smulders) and lingering on her when all she was doing was reacting to someone else speaking or doing something.  Granted, IMO, she’s hotter than Scarlett anyway so it’s not like seeing her was completely terrible, but either involve her in the scene or spend time on something more important or fun, like RDJ spitting clever one liners.

Jeremy Renner getting the short end of the stick for 3/4 of the film.  I can only hope that the rumored Hawkeye origins movie is in the works somewhere.

Phil getting Washed.

Too many heroes.  Yes, this is a superhero team movie and yes, there are a lot of heroes by necessity.  But I’ve said it before about villains, when a film has too many villains (Spider-Man 3 is a prime example) it becomes a problem involving everyone in the story without being overwhelmed or having someone underutilized.  The saving grace for The Avengers is the prequel films for the main heroes.  We know them, we understand them and we’re looking forward to seeing them together.  But with a lesser director or a less capable writer, it would be very easy to have a problem in future movies of this type.  In my opinion, Hawkeye suffered somewhat in this movie and while we did get more of the Black Widow’s story, there were other characters introduced (Agent Hill) without much fanfare.  Even Selvig (Skarsgård) got shortchanged on screen and he had a very important role in the movie.

Alien Snake Things

Character designs.  This point is really specific to one of the villains of The Avengers, the leviathan, for lack of a better term, that the Chitauri bring along with them to invade New York.  The giant Chitauri snake thing looks a lot like the giant snake thing from Transformers: Dark of the Moon and, apparently, also the giant snake thing from the upcoming Battleship movie.  In that picture on the right, do you know which film is which?  Probably, but I’m preaching to the choir here.  If you’re not a geek, from top to bottom it’s Battleship, Transformers and The Avengers.  The leviathan from The Avengers even shares a feature with the ship from Transformers; soldiers deploy from the armored sides.  We’ll have to see if the alien from Battleship has this feature also (my money is on yes).

Relying on the prequels.  Although the previous movies led into The Avengers, each can be watched as their own film without having seen the others and never seeing any sequels.  The Avengers, however, relies on you having seen those five films in order to understand some of what was going on.  I probably shouldn’t count this as a negative, as plenty of films have prequels, but for people that don’t pay attention to this type of thing, aren’t already Avengers (or general comic) fans or are deciding to jump in at this point due to the hype, there’s probably going to be some confusion.  I just re-watched all five of the prequel films over the last week and even I had to stop and think back on a few things to get the references or to understand some of what was going on.  And I still don’t really get how Thor got back to Earth.  One positive is that the Avengers sequels, and the individual movies still to come (Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 are already announced), will tighten things up and with this film’s success it’ll expose more people to the earlier movies.  This specific problem will pretty much go away after this movie.

I’m sure some would argue that my problems with the movie are unwarranted or nitpicky, and I might agree on a couple of them (but I’m sticking with the crappy editing on the fight scenes and the snake thing!), but as good as The Avengers is, I don’t think it was perfect.  Is it the best superhero movie of all time?  Maybe.  Top five?  Definitely.  It certainly stands alone as superhero team movies go and I think it would take an incredible X-Men or Justice League movie to ever rival the accomplishment.

Normally I’ll ding a movie up to a whole point for the bad action scenes but even I can’t be that cruel this time around.  The Avengers, even with a few shortcomings, is still a masterpiece and anything less than 5 Wheels of Cheddar would be lying.

John Carter

I went to a midnight showing to see John Carter on its opening weekend and while I didn’t write a full review, I may have given the impression, via a couple of tweets, that I didn’t like the movie.  But those tweets are not a true indication of my feelings, I actually liked the movie quite a bit.  So much so that over the last couple of weeks I’ve still been thinking about it and wishing that it had done better at the box office.  And that it wasn’t taking a beating in the press.

The latest news about the movie, posted by CNN on Wednesday, is that Disney will have to write-down nearly $200 million dollars in loss over the film.  The movie had an estimated production budget of $250 million and another $100 million was spent on marketing.  As of this writing, John Carter has only made about $60 million in domestic box office.

John Carter looks as good or better than any other film of this scale on the market today. Disney movies always have high production values and whether it needed to cost $250 million or not, I don’t think it can be argued that they didn’t get good results. The practical sets mixed with green screen helped ground the movie, the Tharks and other digital characters blended well with the live actors and the environment of Mars was brought to life with vast deserts, ancient ruins and modern cities. Visually, John Carter is an impressive work of art.

The story is pretty straight forward; John Carter, a former army Captain in the Civil War, is mysteriously transported to Mars where he finds himself in the middle of a power struggle between the alien Tharks and two factions of humanoid Martians.  The audience is asked to pay attention in order to understand the full scope of the movie, but that’s not something I feel is too much to ask.

So why didn’t more people go to see this movie?  I think a large part of it was in the marketing.

I’ve watched several of the trailers again and I see nowhere that it was mentioned that the movie was based on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs or that’s it a 100 year old tale of adventure set on Mars.  Actually, I don’t find Mars or Burroughs mentioned at all. The trailers, while showing a lot of action, did a disservice to the movie in scrubbing it of any context for its origin. And let’s be honest, naming the movie John Carter was about as weak as you can get. Why not “Under the Moons of Mars,” as the first serialized story was written? Why not “A Princess of Mars,” which the story is now known as due to the novelization? Why not just “John Carter of Mars?” Why not anything that would have give some frame of reference to the viewers of the trailer?

Talk about burying the lead.

I knew who John Carter was and had heard of the tales of Barsoom, I am a card carrying geek after all, but if you’d never heard of the Burroughs novels then all you really get from the trailer is that there are 15 foot tall aliens and Taylor Kitsch is fighting giant creatures in an arena that you’re kinda-pretty-sure you’ve seen before (Star Wars: Attack of the Clones among others).  Looking back now at the trailers, thinking as someone who didn’t know who John Carter was, I can easily see how the general public could look at those trailers and if they aren’t geeks, who are already inclined to go see this type of movie, decide to skip it.

Another failure in marketing were the comparisons to Star Wars and other popular science fiction films.  Marketing companies like to do that, I’ve heard other films compared to Star Wars in the past and so far nothing has ever lived up to it, to the point that some I can think of (The Fith Element, anyone?) failed just as miserably as John Carter has. However, while it’s probably not a good advertising move, this film is very similar to Star Wars; John Carter combines action, adventure, fantasy and even some old west gunslinging. Then again, Star Wars was nothing but an amalgam of the very kinds of stories that Burroughs was telling 60 years before George Lucas started on his films. The fact that John Carter’s arena battle was similar to that in Attack of the Clones is, in my opinion, more an unfortunate series of production choices than a shortcoming in storytelling.

At the heart of John Carter we also have a romance between Carter and Dejah Thoris.  A romance that spans two planets and has to overcome war, and, literally, time and space.  Nowhere did I see more than a hint of that part of the story in the trailers.  Why not sell John Carter as a love story?  Why not sell John Carter in any other way than what they did?

My hope now for John Carter is that it’ll find a much larger audience on Blu-ray when it comes out.  I’m sure there are a lot of people who didn’t want to spend $10+ per ticket to see this in the theater but will be happy to spend a couple dollars to download, Netflix or Redbox it.  If John Carter can live on as a cult hit I think it will vindicate Andrew Stanton’s vision.  I couldn’t care less that Disney loses some money on this film, but I don’t want it to flush Taylor Kitsch’s career with it and I definitely don’t want to see it kill the chances of other companies bringing to life big science fiction stories in the future.

I feel that anyone who is a fan of sci-fi, fantasy or action adventure should check out John Carter.  Even if you don’t see it in theaters before it leaves, put it on your short list for rent (or purchase) when it drops at retail later this year.

Génesis Rodríguez

Hot Broads You’ve Never Heard Of (HBYNHO) is a feature I used to do back in the day but not so much lately.  Well, I’m bringing it back today with Génesis Rodríguez.

Unless you’re a fan of Telemundo there’s a decent chance you’ve never heard of her since her biggest English speaking credit to date was a 3 episode tour on “Entourage.”  But there’s a chance you’ll be asking all about her after she shows up in this coming weekend’s film, Man on a Ledge, where she co-stars with Sam Worthington, Jamie Bell and Elizabeth Banks.

Till then, feel free to gawk.

Haywire

It’s odd to have a weekend where I’m interested in more than one opening movie, but this weekend there were three; George Lucas’ Red Tails, Kate Beckinsale’s Underworld: Awakening and Gina Carano’s Haywire.  No offense to George and Kate, but I’ve kinda been in love with Gina for a while now so I chose Haywire.

This is Carano’s first starring role and director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, the Ocean’s series) surrounded her with an excellent cast in Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum and Bill Paxton, who plays her father.

In this slow burning spy thriller, Carano plays Mallory Kane, a covert operative who works for McGregor’s Kenneth.  Much of the film is told in flashback, moving from Barcelona to Dublin to the US as Kane works to rescue a hostage, obtain information in Dublin and then figure out who burned her after she realizes she’s been framed for a murder.

Peppered throughout the film are some intense fight sequences and chase scenes, which are all perfectly executed by Carano who calls on her Mixed Martial Arts fighting background.  Credit is due for Soderbergh, who also acts as cinematographer, because unlike some of his contemporaries, he allows the well-choreographed fights to unfold without the hyper cuts so popular in today’s action films.  Carano is brilliant in all of her action scenes and you can tell that she was fully committed to doing much of her own stunt work.

Mixed in with the excellent action sequences there are several slowly paced parts where you can see Carano’s lack of acting experience, but that’s okay because she’s usually on screen with one of the leading men I mentioned.  They take over the heavy lifting there, and while some will ding this film for these parts, I believe that Soderbergh did it on purpose. While early on I started to worry that it was going to become boring, the further we went the more I realized that they were just building the suspense. The slower points actually increased my anxiety about what was coming next. How can this get worse for Mallory? Is she going to get out of this alive?

Well, will she? You’ll have to see the film to find that out.

Haywire is in the same vein as the Bourne films and I found that it combined the action well with the story which, while interesting, managed to keep you guessing without becoming overly convoluted.

Gina Carano

Something that I’ll be interested to hear about is what people think of the violence towards Mallory.  Unlike the Bourne films, where Matt Damon’s operative beat the snot out of other men, Haywire’s fights pit Mallory against men, and she’s not always the attacker.  Within 5 minutes of the film’s opening, Aaron (Tatum) attacks Mallory in a brutal fashion before she can recover and gain the upper hand.  Several of the fights go down that way, and with the way Soderbergh filmed them, it can be a little uncomfortable to watch.  In my opinion, that’s genius.  But you know how people are.

January is generally accepted as a dumping ground for films the distributors don’t feel can make it as a summer hit.  That’s a disservice to Haywire.  The story, plot, and action are all better in this film than others I’ve seen released in May or June.  My guess would be that even with the exceptional cast, nobody wanted to take a gamble on Carano.

Big mistake.  She has great presence in this film, you never want to take your eyes off of her.  She ranges from glamorous at a Dublin party to beat up and wounded to kicking the shit out of Aaron’s men at her father’s house in New Mexico.  Beautiful to wounded to fierce.  Believable in all three.

Her line delivery isn’t polished and sometimes you could tell she felt a little awkward with what she was doing on screen, but those things will come with practice.  Practice she’s sure to get after Hollywood sees her in this role.  I know I’d definitely like to see her in other films, or even a sequel to Haywire, if she chooses to continue acting.

Haywire had an interesting story and I felt it was paced correctly, the fight sequences were excellent and the acting talent in the film was top notch.  Soderbergh made some good choices in how to film this movie, especially the fight scenes.  Gina Carano handled her role well, it couldn’t have been easy being a first time actress and facing off with Michael Douglas or Ewan McGregor, but you’d never know it.  Four wheels of cheddar out of five for Haywire.

Merry Christmas

We want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and hope you enjoyed our 10th anniversary Advent Calendar!

December 24th - Randy Moore

December 23rd - Zahyra

December 22nd - Lisa Neils

December 21st - Conny