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King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963)
Hard to like ... impossible to hate
Less than nine years after the original Godzilla, the film's progression as a franchise might have been expected to go from strength to strength. Since the success of the original 1954 Godzilla, Toho Studios had developed a talent for producing ingenious, high-concept, big-budget spectaculars: Rodan, The Mysterians, and Battle in Outer Space. What seemed to actually happen, however, that what, in terms of monster movies, would have been a dream project - King Kong Meets Frankenstein, pitting the original 7-or-8 metre-tall Kong against a laboratory creation that would be more or less the same size, stop-motion animation by the great Willis O'Brien - by the time it got to Toho, Godzilla replaced Frankenstein, and King Kong got blown up to roughly Godzilla's size, a hundred meters or so high, and was similarly played by an actor in an elaborate suit.
The collision of sensibilities made a film that can largely only be enjoyed on the so-bad-it's-good level. In adapting the concept - evidently pirated from O'Brien without credit or compensation - the producers also decided to satirize Japan's game show and wrestling reality-TV culture of the time, giving King Kong vs. Godzilla stretches of embarrassing comedy. What's worse, these skilled makers of ingenious sets, costumes and space-age technology settled for what must be the worst gorilla suit ever seen in films. Toho, where was your ingenuity when it was most needed? Pretty much any low-budget jungle thriller from the 1930s to the 1960s has a better gorilla suit than the clay mask glued to a wornout bear rug of King Kong vs. Godzilla.
The greatest of the film's slight compensations are the setting of Faro Island, depicted mainly on an elaborate indoor set with a huge cast of Japanese dancers and extras slathered in dark-skin makeup to portray South Seas "savages." Akemi Negishi does double duty not only as the lead dancer, but as the mother of a child saved from a giant octopus by Kong's intervention in an episode highlighted by the use of an actual octopus plus models and a touch of stop-motion. Here as elsewhere, however, we have startlingly bad process photography, with crowd scenes as dark foreground cutouts barely integrated with the giant-monster footage in the background. Throughout the film there are jarring changes of tone; we are asked to sympathize with Kong even though, once in Tokyo, he casually destroys a fleeing passenger train, and only heroic interventions stop him from doing whatever he had planned for sole survivor Mie Hama, who will go on to better things in King Kong Escapes and You Only Live Twice.
The American editing adds white guys pronouncing solemnly on the action (their newscasts, refreshingly depicted as being relayed through the space station from Battle in Outer Space), and the original score augmented with music cribbed from Universal films of the 1940s and '50s. Diehard kaiju buffs should seek out the original Japanese version - although nothing can remedy the awfulness of that Kong suit.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)
The Ship Goes On the Rocks
This is, I suppose, the second try at filming Dracula - or at least five pages of it - in a manner that claims to be faithful to the 1897 novel. The first try was Francis Coppola's 1991 Bram Stoker's Dracula - as far as I know: there have been so many adaptations and derivations of this iconic work that to narrow the field down to works that try to stay true to the original Dracula, you would have to ask someone like Kim Newman, whose johnnyalucard website acknowledges that these are serious matters.
In fact, almost all versions of Dracula have freely altered the novel's scenario in some way, but André Øvredal's retelling of the Demeter story, scripted by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz, lets us know from the get-go that it's taken straight from the novel.
The thing is, it isn't. There is a delightful cinematic phenomenon, particularly noticeable in horror or science fiction, wherein books or short stories get better when they're adapted into movies. One might include films such as Annihilation, Arrival, or Night of the Demon in this category, although you could also argue that they simply built on the perfectly good source material provided by the original stories to make something different. But Jaws, Starship Troopers, and Psycho are good examples of cases where a marginally-readable novel has been turned into an endlessly-rewatchable film.
Not so with Dracula - it's a tribute to the enduring power, you could even say greatness, of Bram Stoker's novel that when even the most talented adapters - and there is a lot of talent in Demeter - start changing the book's details, they only make an awful mess.
This is evident from the get-go in The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Since the entire film is a flashback that begins with the Demeter grounding on the beach at Whitby, the Dracula fan - already alarmed by the anachronism of rescuers approaching the shipwreck with flashlights - in 1897? - waits for the crucial plot point - the "immense dog" that is seen leaping off the ship and escaping down the beach. The huge canine is of course Dracula, taking on the shape of a wolf - but the creature never appears in the movie because despite claims to fidelity, the Dracula of The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a wholly different creature than the iconic monster of Stoker's novel.
The film is by and large beautifully filmed and excellently cast; a pall is cast over it from the start because we know everyone on the Demeter is doomed. Although in the book the vampire stowaway starts his depredations gradually, here once the ship sets sail from the richly-staged port of Varna, carrying in its cargo 20 boxes of soil, the bloodbath starts and the price for not stopping at any of the many ports between the Black Sea and London starts to get higher and higher. The atmosphere, shadowy and for a 19th-century working vessel, amazingly high-ceilinged, is clearly meant to evoke Ridley Scott's original Alien, but that film moved along quickly, while "Demeter" deliberately kills time and repeats itself while the cast try to figure out a mystery that is clear to the rest of us from the beginning. The death of a major sympathetic character is a climactic moment, but it takes place halfway through the film and does nothing to resolve the crisis onboard.
In the novel Dracula, even in his fleeting, terrifying appearances when he is out and about, is no less terrifying because he is a gaunt, well-dressed gentleman. In "Demeter," he is a winged, fanged, hairless demon with literally no weaknesses aside from his aversion to sunlight. In what kind of Dracula movie does the crucifix appear, but turn out to be useless? Garlic and mirrors are not even mentioned, the ship's rats disappear when Dracula first manifests himself - although we know he can summon rats as a mercenary army - and the creature crashes through barriers and breaks down doors in the ship, which the literary Dracula would never have to do, since he could turn himself into mist; eventually the menace the Demeter faces seems to be less Dracula than the Martian from It! The Terror from Beyond Space. Dracula exists, mysteriously, in only one form here, the winged demon that never appeared in the original novel, and that only seems to have entered the vampire canon when Fright Night and Life force introduced it simultaneously to films in 1985.
Like Coppola's version of the entire novel, when it follows the book The Last Voyage of the Demeter does marvelously well, but each variation is like a flat tire along the freshly-paved road of the film's straightforward plot, that eventually steers the whole vehicle off course.
The Rig (2023)
The Rig Would Have Been Better, Shorter
The Rig has a number of terrific elements, including an expert cast, some good dialogue, and its unusual setting of a North Sea oil derrick. Evidently filmed on location on an actual Scottish oil platform, as well as on studio sets with digitally reproduced backgrounds, The Rig is convincing and has an original premise. This particular rig has unearthed a prehistoric life form that, spreading through spores and linked through a vast planetary rhizome network, can not only invade human minds, but cause undersea geological disasters.
The hardworking cast is headed by Iain Glen and Emily Hampshire, but to be honest they are frequently upstaged by some of their colleagues: Calvin Demba as Baz, a restless worker who becomes the first, and worst casualty of contact with the lifeform, and becomes its advocate; Richard Pepple as Dunlin, who tries to keep discourse on the rig decent and supportive while others succumb to anger and violence; and Owen Teale as the unbearable Hutton, whose constant complaining and dangerous undermining of the rig's command structure covers a deep unhappiness and insecurity.
What is this menace and how to cope with it? Creator David Macpherson does a good job of keeping up the suspense, although what eventually undoes The Rig is its sheer length; although the five-hour miniseries does a good job, it's hard not to think that a pretty good series could have done its job better as a two-hour movie.
ROSIE (2022)
Rosie: One Hard-won Victory after Another
This low-budget Canadian film does a number of things exceptionally well, starting with the milieu: Hamilton 2021 just scrapes by as Montreal 1984 because much of the production is staged in back alleys and empty streets where the seams of contemporaneity are strained but do not quite burst. More effective is the blend of English, French, and Cree that the cast speak, even if they have to struggle to do so, because the issue of languages either clashing, mingling or mixing is inseparable from the clash of identities that is central to Rosie's dramatic problems.
When her estranged sister dies, a single working-class woman, Frédérique (Melanie Bray), already struggling to get by, is saddled with a six-year-old niece she has never met. As Fred gets evicted, lives on the street, and moves in with her trans best friends, she flirts with regaining her independence by returning Rosie to an overloaded social services system that is just as ambiguous as she is in its need to dump the little girl somewhere, anywhere. The date, after all, is 1984 and Fred and her sister are traumatized veterans of the "Sixties Scoop," in which the federal government separated First Nations children from their parents en masse. Although Rosie is the title character, Fred becomes the film's central figure as, despite her well-founded doubts about taking on the responsibility, she is gradually possessed by the need to save Rosie from suffering the same fate.
The casting is one of the things the film gets right, from Rosie herself, played by the remarkable Keris Hope Hill, to small roles such as Brandon Oakes as Jigger, a homeless Cree man who has hung on to an extent of hard-won dignity. Constant Bernard and Alex Trahan, as the trans couple Flo and Mo, also make distinctive spaces for themselves. With Bray a compelling central figure as a woman who will come into her own, if the world will just let her, this colourful ad hoc family hang together as Flo attends her mother's funeral as a trans woman - facing up to her disapproving father to do so - and Mo overcomes stage fright to flower as a performer (of course, with the help of the adorable Rosie) at the local karaoke bar.
There is some very effective writing - writer/director Gail Maurice knows how to write scenes, how to write for the actors so that their silences are just as effective as their speeches, and most importantly, how to move things along. It becomes evident, perhaps a little too soon in the film, that things are going to work out for everyone and that they will live together in a state of happy precariousness, every problem soothed by the effervescent Rosie. At the premier screening in Hamilton, each burst of cuteness by Hope Hill was absorbed by the audience with uncritical adoration and even applause - what else can you do? - but its reliance on the young actor's (admittedly irresistable) cuteness tends to undercut the tension that, if sustained, would have made Rosie a more effective drama. That said, any production that can achieve the victories that Rosie achieves on its slender resources has to be applauded.
The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
A Superior B with a Memorable Last Scene
I bought a used DVD boxed set of Universal horror movies and found a great example of B Movie Socialism: at the end of The Invisible Man Returns (1940) the Invisible Man, Vincent Price, is wounded and lies dying in the infirmary of the coal mine he owns with his cousin, Cedric Hardwicke. The coal miners love the kindly sir Vincent (and hate sir Cedric, who framed Vincent for murder) and gladly donate blood when the doctor asks. The transfusions, however, only prolong his life; the doctor still can't see to operate, because Vincent is still invisible. But in the last minute of the film, the doomed Vincent slowly turns visible: he's saved, and it's the blood of the coal miners that's done it!
Although a pretty ordinary film, the special effects are impressive, even 80 years later, and it repeats the invisible-man-running-through-a-crowd choreography that was also enjoyable in The Invisible Man. The scenes where subjects return to visibility, starting with their blood vessels, are not as technically accomplished as they were in Verhoeven's The Hollow Man (2000), but almost as eerie. But it's the remarkable ending that one remembers.
Trauma (2010)
Great writing, great acting in this Montreal medical series
Now that it's shown up on Netflix in 2022, we can check out the great Quebec francophone medical series TRAUMA, which was produced in Montreal from 2010 to 2014. Its main characters are a team of surgeons in the fictional Saint-Arsène hospital. They are trauma surgeons, so their territory is car crashes, motorcycle accidents, falls, stabbings, and horrible cuts and burns, often depicted in excruciating detail, although during those parts you can do what I do and just look someplace else. Although IMDB credits seem incomplete, the bulk of the series was written by its creator Fabienne Larouche, and directed by Francois Gingras.
To them we must attribute some virtuoso episodes, such as (unless I've miscounted), season 1 episode 9, with its expertly sequenced storylines, and the great bit where Antoine (Gilbert Sicotte) finds out why the angry trophy wife is so angry (part of Larouche's talent is that we can sympathize with the character's frustration, even as we laugh at the punch line).
Trauma (there are so many "Traumas" on IMDB that to find it I type in "Trauma 2010") is every bit as good as its U. S. counterparts ER and Gray's Anatomy - in fact, it is less sentimental than "Gray's" - so it is frustrating and a mystery that it ended so abtruptly with the fifth season. From the forms that Étienne (Yan England) is looking at, someone in the series is HIV positive, but who? Why is Julie (Isabel Richer) shafting her loving and supportive husband Mathieu (Jean-François Pichette), heading off on that extended trip with their young daughter? What will become of the flawed but likeable (although he is often the series' villain, we feel the pain of his self-awareness) Gilles Laprade (Luc Guérin), when a corrupt multimillionaire philantropist has hired a hitman to fly to Africa to take him out? We'll never know - all we can do is go back and watch the five existing seasons of Trauma again!
Werewolf by Night (2022)
Man-Thing Meets the Wolfman
The writers, Heather Quinn and Peter Cameron, working with a Marvel Comics character created by Gerry Conway, and director Michael Giacchino, have created something like a '40s Universal horror film written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. As a viewer knowing nothing of the Werewolf by Night or Man-Thing (an important character here) comics, the film seems completely divorced from the Marvel cinema and TV universe, with unexpected casting, and a film noir sensibility where everyone is out for themselves, except for a final scene of genuine bonding (granted, not hero-heroine but hero-monster). Plus, the whole production looks beautiful - thanks, cinematographer Zoë White! - though at no point does it offer extravagance. Finally, it is blessedly short, avoiding the bloat that has afflicted all the Marvel TV productions, and making it the first Marvel movie in some years (since Thor Ragnarok or depending on your tastes, Captain America: The Winter Soldier) that can be recommended unreservedly.
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
Dracula, but not Bram Stoker's
Director Coppola and screenwriter James V. Hart have worked hard to avoid the clichés of the vampire film (or of the Dracula film itself, since there have been so many adaptations of Stoker's 1897 novel that it's practically a genre unto itself). The result is visually arresting, occasionally spectacular, but too often unintentionally funny as Coppola experiments with light, shadows and color and Gary Oldman, as the cursed Count Dracula, morphs from nobleman to living corpse to bat creature to werewolf with dazzling frequency. Whereas in the original novel, every character was earnestly sympathetic except the titular monster, here it's the reverse; Ryder's Mina is definitely the star of the show, carrying the greatest emotional weight as she gradually finds Dracula more alluring than her dull fiance Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), the brutal, sexually threatening van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) and the obsessed Renfield (Tom Waits, unbearable as always). Although the title, Bram Stoker's Dracula, promises fidelity to the source material, in fact the source material is often betrayed by quirks in sets, costuming and characterization that work too hard to draw attention to themselves.
Body Cam (2020)
A dark and moody classic
All things considered, this is an intense and effective supernatural interlude. In a Los Angeles tense with incidents of police brutality towards its black citizens, officer Renee Lomito (Mary J. Blige) is caught up in the mystery of what seems to be a vengeful poltergeist that harms anyone who gets in its way. Suffering the loss of her own son, Lomito becomes obsessed by the ties between this supernatural phenomenon and a missing woman who has also lost a son. Lomito and her sceptical but seemingly well-meaning partner Danny (Nat Wolff) patrol nightly through a rainy, devastated Los Angeles where every pile of garbage has someone living in it. The characters' terse dialogues conceal wells of emotion, and the tragic death that unleashed the deadly ghost is explained just enough to underline that for Lomito, the line between being a good cop and a bad cop is the difference between redemption, and damnation. There does not seem to be a lot of love for Body Cam on imdb, but time and repeated viewings will reveal this moody exercise to be a well-focused and complex little classic.
The Bubble (2022)
A pandemic comedy that's actually very funny
During the Covid-19 pandemic, a group of fictional Hollywood movie stars - played by a group of actual Hollywood movie stars - are isolated in an English mansion/movie studio to make a forgettable monster-movie sequel that will ensure the studio's survival. The result is "The Bubble," a very funny comedy that is a bit more self-aware than a lot of Judd Apatow films, in its protagonists' awareness, in the midst of their luxurious quarantine, of how ridiculously privileged they are (an awareness, mind you, that has to be continuously reinforced during their numerous bouts of egotism and self-pity). They are being brought together to make "Cliff Beasts 6," in which squabbling but heroic adventurers, in a bleak postapocalyptic future, wield futuristic hand weapons to battle flying dinosaurs in a quest to build a luxury resort on top of Mount Everest. The actors tackle their roles with great relish (Karen Gillan guilted by the others because she turned down "Cliff Beasts 5"; David Duchovny's battered-but-professional former film idol; the very strange smile on Fred Armisen's face as he surprises Gillan in the mansion's huge swimming pool; Pedro Pascal as a desperately needy character actor) and there are funny cameos by John Cena as a remote stunt coordinator and James McAvoy as James McAvoy. It's a satire but being a Judd Apatow film, it's a benign satire that makes no pretensions towards greater importance (unlike fictional director Armisen's next film, Skittles, which he explains is, since the characters are vari-coloured Skittles, will be all about diversity and acceptance) and as a result becomes really quite important, in these times when we all could use a good laugh.
Vigil (2021)
Danger! - dramatic meltdown imminent
The cental conflict of Vigil's plot is not so much "a Glasgow police detective investigates a murder aboard a Royal Navy atomic submarine" as "a filmmaking team, tasked with devising a two-hour submarine drama, are forced to spin it into a six-hour miniseries." A sub-theme of the series - that the nuclear components of Cold-War technology, incredibly expensive to maintain, are bound to fray dangerously around the edges - is acted out in the absurd plot twists of its six episodes. At one point Suranne Jones' DCI Silva bursts into the submarine's control room to stop a missile launch - something a supposed expert, her professional life spent within a chain of command, is unlikely to do. Meanwhile a crewman who at one point holds Silva and the coxswain at gunpoint, then lets them talk him down from suicide, is allowed to wander the submarine's corridors unrestrained; he shifts inexplicably from intentionally spilling his urine sample on Silva to becoming one of her few allies among the intransigent crew. Meanwhile Rose Leslie's character, Silva's colleague and lover keeping up the investigation onshore, exasperatedly lets a suspicious vehicle drive away before she can snapshot its license plate - even though it's been following her all day and she's had countless chances to write its plate number down; a real professional, one would think, could even have memorized it. This is not to mention the endless flashbacks, layered awkwardly throughout in order to bring the plot to a halt every time it has a chance to get moving.
Still, Jones and Leslie have the watchability of real film stars, and one enjoys watching the series despite the groaning unreality of the plot (and in the early episodes, the constant grind of melodramatic music underscoring every moment and every move). Series creator Tom Edge is clearly no Sally Wainwright or Joe Barton, and "Vigil" can barely satisfy one's appetite for a crime series until a better one comes along.
Jallikattu (2019)
An escaped buffalo evokes Lord of the Flies in an Indian village.
I first read of JALLIKATTU around the time of its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and had the impression it was sort of a monster movie: JAWS with a water buffalo in the jungle instead of a shark in the ocean. This is far from the truth. The film takes place in a jungle village in the Indian state of Kerala. In this poor subsistence economy, beef is a luxury item and a butcher who can supply a bull every day is a pillar of the community. One morning, however, the day's bull evades its fate, escapes, and rampages through the village and the surrounding jungle and fields.
If in this case, the buffalo becomes a monster, it is that classic monster that longs to be human - or at least, longs to be left alone to roam and graze, without the harassment of hordes of vengeful men. What the buffalo unleashes in its escape, however, is a volcanic blast of economic and sexual frustration from the village's men. Women in JALLIKATTU are peripheral factors, their every appearance either as brides, wives, mother, or daughters, emphasizing how decency, sanity, and the mediation of desire become sidelined as soon as the community's men are given an excuse to sow violence.
The film's mis en scène is distinct: this jungle community is essentially a medieval village, except that there's a cellphone in every pocket and a TV in every shop. When a hunter is brought in, Kuttachan (Sabumon Abdusamad), he brandishes an antique muzzle-loading gun that he loads with powder and bits of metal. Yet the villagers chase through the jungle at night, blinding their prey, and each other, with bright LED flashlights.
The use of light - flashlights, fire, torches, the interiors of houses - is hypnotic (the cinematographer is Girish Gangadharan) as is the use of sound, ranging from a deep monstrous bellow that doesn't necessarily come from the bull, but from something deep and monstrous that has been unleashed into this precarious world. There is a lot of singing, as music seems as much a part of the hunt as the shouts of excitement, and there are also numerous percussion sounds, from meat cleavers and machetes, that blend seamlessly into Prashant Pillai's score in Renganaath Ravee's ingenious sound design. In the end, the effect is less Jaws than Lord of the Flies, as the mob turns on itself, and the monster "escapes" to (what is suggested in the brief vision of a dying man) an edenic vision of a peaceful afterlife.
Shadow in the Cloud (2020)
An Outburst of Nonstop Cinematic Exuberance
Especially amid the oppressive, tedious days of the pandemic, perhaps it is time to award more points to filmmakers in popular genres for sheer exuberance. Roseanne Liang's Shadow in the Cloud boasts the simplest of monster-movie plots - in WWII New Zealand, a woman talks herself onto a bomber just in time for its pre-dawn takeoff, faces harrowing adventures involving Japanese fighter planes and batlike gremlins, and survives the bomber's crash landing onto a beach.
This straightforward story, however, is enacted through a dizzying sequence that in other settings, would seem familiar but in Liang's hands takes on new life. First, the woman soldier, Maude Garrett (Chloe Grace Moretz), ostensibly just doing her job, is loudly desired, derided and insulted by the all-male crew. Then, when she is consigned to a machine gun turret in the plane's undercarriage, "Shadow" becomes a Locke-style one-person show where Maude only knows what's happening - and can only reveal herself - through what she says and hears through the intercom system. In fact, that's where we the viewers also get an idea of who each of the crew is as a person -their unseen bickering, jokes and instructions outline them more vividly than anything else in the film. When the bomber is attacked by Japanese fighter planes, Maude shows that she has the military experience the crew doubted, quickly changes accent and nationality, ups the stakes as the mysterious package she's guarding is revealed to be more important than any military secret, and becomes an action hero who makes Ellen Ripley in Aliens seem as if she's (to quote Maude herself) "being polite."
Plus, there are gremlins. To see Shadow in the Cloud is to recall the experience of its predecessor from a few years ago, What We do in the Shadows. They are both small-scale New Zealand productions that seemed to come out of nowhere, that take their respective genres in surprising new directions, and whose limited resources never seem threadbare, partly because the digital effects when needed, are used expertly. "Cloud"'s action sequences range from painfully detailed realism - Maude breaks a finger keeping an attacking gremlin out of her turret - to credulity straining (broken finger and all but immune to wind and cold, she climbs along the bomber's fuselage in flight) - to action extravagances (Maude falls from the plane, and returns) worthy of Stephen Chow or for that matter, Chuck Jones, Fritz Freleng or Bob Clampett (only Bugs Bunny in Falling Hare had a WWII gremlin problem on the scale that Maude has).
If Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper's score recalls earlier works in the genre, it is not the ominous Hans Salter Universal scores of the film's period, but 1980s Brad Fiedel and John Carpenter with their drones and squidgy synthesizer sounds. At 83 minutes long, Shadow in the Cloud is the perfect length to top a double bill, if whenever we return to cinema-going, there will be such things as double bills. It ends with a moment of essential motherhood and cuts immediately into a credits montage celebrating the roles of women in WWII, soundtracked by Kate Bush's Hounds of Love - the 1980s hit that begins with a voiceover from Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon. In the context of what has gone before, it is a crazily exhilarating sequence that keeps Shadow in the Cloud an outburst of sheer exuberance from start to finish.
The Looming Tower (2018)
The Road to 9/11 is Paved with Disaster and Desire
Impressed by Michael Stuhlbarg's performance in Shirley, I looked him up on IMDB and was drawn to this series by its strange title. Here Stuhlbarg plays late 1990s head of the National Security Council Richard Clarke, a much more sympathetic character (at least, as told here) than the slimy Stanley Edgar Hyman he portrayed in Shirley. The plot of The Looming Tower hinges on the dysfunctional relationship between the CIA and FBI in the years before 9/11. Its showpiece actors are Jeff Daniels as FBI special agent John O'Neill, Alec Baldwin as CIA head George Tenet, and Peter Sarsgaard as one of the series' composite characters, CIA administrator Martin Schmidt, who consistently blocks the sharing of any pertinent terrorist information with the FBI. Except for O'Neill, however, they spend much of their time offscreen. More central and in many ways, more interesting characters are Tahar Ahim as Ali Soufan, an Arabic-speaking FBI up-and-comer who is torn between his background, his increasing affinity with the Islamic faith, and his inability to commit to his girlfriend Heather, a 100% Anglo-blonde he is dating whenever his Middle East antiterrorism work allows him to come home to New York City.
In fact Heather, as played by Ella Rae Peck, is one of a number of intense and critical female characters in The Looming Tower who are all the more interesting in the depiction of how they get abused and sidelined as part of the War Against Terror. Heather loves and is willing to support Ali, but becomes increasingly frustrated by his near-constant absences and inability to discuss his dangerous, demanding work life. Annie Parisse is Liz, a vibrant artist and teacher who wants to marry John O'Neill, and doesn't realize (because he keeps it from her) his commitment to his estranged wife and two daughters, and to yet another woman, Amy (Katie Flahive), who O'Neill willfully allows to confuse their intense sex life with a deep long-lasting commitment.
O'Neill's professional predicament is interesting - on the trail of Al Qaeda operatives who seem to be planning an assault on continental US soil, he is constantly blocked by the CIA's noncooperation. Although he rants and blusters articulately (Daniels' O'Neill is a slightly more over-the-hill version of his Will McAvoy from The Newsroom), his superiors listen to him less and less. At the same time, he is the main figure of contrast between West and East. In the course of the series, O'Neill is drawn increasingly, partly through his relationship with Liz, into the Catholic Church; he even reads the Bible on long plane trips. Meanwhile, he is constantly drinking and eating out in expensive restaurants (he explains to the FBI's scolding bean-counter that this is an important part of his work), as well as having intense sex with both Amy and Liz whenever he can. His Middle East counterparts, on the other hand - both police and military liaisons and the terrorists themselves - are teetotallers, adamant about their religious beliefs, associating principally with other men for daily prayers, and operating on shoestring budgets: in a world short on everything but fertilizer and firearms, before leaving to blow up the USS Cole, a young suicide bomber's last meal consists of Cap'n Crunch eaten straight from the box. Dedicated as he may be, O'Neill inhabits a hedonistic world of incredible luxury and privilege compared with his opponents.
For all this, it is women who often stand out: pissed-off and constantly shunted aside, both by the heteropatriarchal worlds the live and work in, and occasionally by the plot itself. What about Jennifer Ehle as the US ambassador to Yemen, who has to be twice as aggressive as any man in order to get the same work done. Or even Leslie Silva as Deb Fletcher, a victim of the Nairobi US embassy bombing, who bursts onscreen for a minute or two, only to get more narrative coverage when she is trapped (offscreen) and eventually dies in the wreckage, mourned by the FBI's Robert Chesney. Although he is white, older, dishevelled, and dumpy, the two seem to have formed a strong overnight attachment which isn't explained by the time they spend onscreen.
Foremost is a riveting performance by Wrenn Schmidt as fictional CIA investigator Diane Marsh. Her fervor in carrying out her job is amplified by what seems to be a mixture of professional dedication and unrequited love for Sarsgaard's character, and she carries out his agenda with a fervor that matches that of the terrorists who in every episode, get closer to the 9/11 attacks. That agenda, unfortunately, blends gathering intelligence on the mounting plot, and keeping it from the FBI, who might actually be able to act on it. It is Marsh who explains the dilemma at the centre of The Looming Tower: although Al-Qaeda is the enemy, they have strong ties to Saudi Arabia, and the United States' relationship with the Middle East's wealthiest oil-producing nation must not be tarnished.
The series has a long list of writers, starting with creators Dan Futterman, Alex Gibney and Lawrence Wright (who wrote the book on which it's based), and including Shannon Houston, Ali Selim, Bathsheba Doran and Adam Rapp. Together with a great cast of actors and fellow creators, they have taken the events around 9/11 and interpreted them as a tragic and fascinating blend of personalities, politics, disasters and desires.
Mildred Pierce (2011)
Like touring an antique porcelain collection
Todd Haynes' MILDRED PIERCE is like someone showing you their beloved antique porcelain collection: they trot out one piece after another, you can't help but admire the work's delicacy, craftsmanship, and attention to detail, but you soon start making excuses to go and do something else.
This would be the case even if there wasn't already the 1945 MILDRED PIERCE, one of the great movie melodramas of all time, directed by Michael Curtiz with its score by Max Steiner, Ernest Haller cinematography, a virtuoso cast headed by Joan Crawford, and its Ranald MacDougall screenplay including the great line "one man's poison is another man's meat" (how did they get THAT past the censors in 1945?).
It's great to have a digital copy of the Curtiz version on hand whenever your everyday struggles and strife get too much for you and you want to see a tightly-resolved dramatic package about someone else's struggles and strife. It's 111 minutes long; the 2011 Todd Haynes version, in five episodes totalling 344 minutes, is three times as long; in fact it takes longer to watch the Haynes MILDRED PIERCE than it does to read the novel. Haynes' attention to detail includes a loving reconstruction of the book's penultimate plot device, the ascension of Mildred's monstrous daughter Veda to radio stardom as a classical soprano. Unfortunately, this is one of the novel's clumsier aspects; in 1945 they wisely condensed it into Veda's downmarket career singing in waterfront bars, and used a few gunshots to summarize Mildred's struggles, triumphs, and frustrated love within a compact murder mystery. The 2011 MILDRED PIERCE however, doesn't condense anything; it has great performances, exquisite costume and set design, superb cinematography and reconstructs every scene of the book, but like a tour of someone else's porcelain collection, it just seems to go on and on and on.
The Dead Don't Die (2019)
The Dead Don't Die, or Care
For all the film's wide distribution and publicity, its scattering of A-list stars, it's remarkable that the overall impression one gets from The Dead Don't Die is one of laziness. Yet its extended climax involves maybe a hundred zombie-actors arranged in a cemetery, and there are carefully-choreographed scenes of, for example, cars threading through zombies scattered along a street. Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny, Tilda Swinton and a host of others do their best to make the whole thing work: although all of them are known for more substantial productions, none of them give the impression that the work is beneath them. That position is left to writer/director Jim Jarmusch. Isn't the '80s hipster thing wearing a bit thin by now? Whatever one can say about zombie movies as a genre, there is generally some room for affect - that is, a hint of emotion. This is true even of zombie comedies: the characters in Edgar Wright's Shawn of the Dead, Andrew Currie's Fido, even the Zombieland films, have to undergo excruciating things in the course of their stories. The Dead Don't Die feels as if was made by one of those "hipsters from the city" that its characters dismiss: like hipsters, the only way they can show emotion is in their choice of music, so when Murray's character flips the CD of the title song out the window of his police cruiser, it's a telling moment (and one welcomed by the audience - by this time, we've heard this song quite enough), and one that indicates that there could be a lot more happening in The Dead Don't Die, if only Jarmusch had the courage to portray it.
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
It's the Endgame, Thank God
If a couple you know, having lived together for eleven years, decide to hold a huge wedding, spare no expense, and invite everyone they know, the net effect would be a lot like Avengers Endgame: several hours of your life you feel you'll never get back, and the one thing everyone agrees on is, thank god it's over.
I write this as someone who was a Marvel fan for a few years in the sixties, when these characters appeared only on the printed page. Then I forgot about the characters for thirty years, and came back to them when I had kids and we watched Marvel shows together: first the 1990s animated series, then the films beginning with the first X-Men in 2000.
From those first films, the Marvel franchise has been in the hands of skilled writers and directors who take the art seriously - very seriously. The current MCU, however, starting with 2008's Iron Man, peaked after a few years with the first two Captain America films, and 2012's The Avengers. After that, the seeming need to expand the universe led to increasingly messier films, making superstars out of all of its lead actors while squeezing them into less and less screen time; bit players in their own movies. Last year's Avengers: Infinity War, merging all existing Avengers with the intergalactic storylines of the Guardians of the Galaxy was bad enough, but Endgame outdoes it in terms of taking a modestly priced and scaled, mildly subversive art form (the comic book) and turning it into an extravagantly budgeted, exhausting mess (the Hollywood blockbuster).
The result is that although the climax of Endgame, bringing in almost every character who's appeared in the films since 2008, is pitched for thrills, the effect is the opposite. The return of all the heroes who disintegrated at the end of Infinity War is supposed to make us cheer, but it's as tiresome as the last drunken dinner speech at the aforementioned wedding. "Really? I was hoping I could go home. Can't anyone shut him up?"
The skills that go into these films are undeniable, but there seems to be a tipping point past which plotting this many characters becomes a matter of chance and luck. As the films grow from one super-hero against one-supervillain (Iron Man; Captain America the First Avenger) to two or three super-heroes against a larger force (Iron Man II; Captain America the Winter Soldier) to a veritable platoon of super-heroes against armies of robots/aliens/bad guys, the limits are passed. Even an expert like Joss Whedon couldn't stop Avengers: Age of Ultron from running out of steam like a badly timed fireworks display. Nevertheless, partly through their quality casts, the appeal of the films grows: like a dry spell in the episodes of a soap opera, the audiences keep watching because they've bonded with the characters and will stick with them, hoping that eventually the relationship will get better.
But a soap opera ain't the opera, and Endgame suffers from the blockbuster syndrome of giving the viewer too much of everything and not enough of anything. "Angry and wanting more" I think Pauline Kael called the Hollywood blockbuster, but in the case of Avengers: Endgame we can amend this to "angry and wanting less."
Life (2017)
Pointless and Cruel
We all have our own ideas about which might be the most disastrous trends in current Hollywood filmmaking. I vote for the trend that allows directors to essentially remake the science fiction action films that influenced them when they were young. This is the trend that in recent years has given us such dispensable works as Predators (Nimród Antal), The Thing (Matthijs van Heijningen), and Terminator Genisys (Alan Taylor). While directors such as Denis Villeneuve and Alex Garland have been laboring over sci-fi films such as Arrival and Annihilation - original works with layers of meaning that are revealed in subsequent viewings - these guys have been devoting precious time, hiring a huge range of impressive talents, and spending massive amounts of money, essentially to restage the cool scenes and remake the groovy films that so impressed them thirty or forty years ago.
Now we can add to this sad lot Life, director Daniel Espinosa's remake of Alien. Life deserves to be grouped with the films above - not Annihilation and Arrival, I mean the other, rotten ones - although to give credit where it's due, the film is the best of a bad lot. Its recreation of everyday life in the zero-G conditions of a space station is masterful and often beautiful, performed by an expert cast, and produced with obsession attention to realistic detail.
But what's the plot? An alien life form gets on board and is at first a source of wonder: as Jeff Goldblum says in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, "Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming." In a Jurassic Park movie, at least there are dinosaurs to look at, and the chance of escape. In Life, once the monster grows big enough, it first crushes a disabled astronaut's hand - his agony played out for us lovingly in real time - and then eviscerates a rescuer, and then proceeds one by one to kill everyone on board horribly until at the end - SPOILER ALERT - it makes its way to earth, where its arrival will certainly end life as we know it.
What the hell is going on here? The film was written by the same guys who write the Deadpool films, which make horrific violence funny by cloaking it in a kind of live-action Roadrunner-vs-Coyote ambience. Life reveals the weakness behind their sensibility: without the jokes, the fast cuts, and Ryan Reynolds (who departs too soon from Life), the violence is just pointless and cruel - not only for the film's characters, but for its viewers.
Manchester by the Sea (2016)
Fake realism
It is hard to imagine a less sympathetic protagonist than Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) in Manchester By the Sea. He is emotionally blocked and in almost all his interactions, passive-aggressive, with a few drinks teetering him over to the aggressive side. When he hears that his brother has died, he leaves his handyman job in Boston and drives to Manchester by the Sea to join his stereotypically swearing, beer-drinking, working-class family. We find eventually, through often-confusing flashbacks, that Lee was traumatized by what, in the script's terms, is a Great Tragedy – although real tragedy involves thwarted ambition, and this was a drunk, stoned goof-up that killed his children and alienated his wife. The Chandler family perpetually bicker and curse each other out – in Kenneth Lonergan's world, working- class people have no social skills whatsoever. These, however, are fake, Hollywood-imagined working- class people; when discussing (or rather arguing; these characters never discuss anything without arguing) how Lee's brother is to be buried, his nephew suggests a "mini-steam shovel." A real character who lived in a world where people ran heavy equipment would call the machine what it is, a mini-excavator. But there is nothing real in Manchester by the Sea. It is not even, as advertised, a Michelle Williams movie, as this great actress appears only in glimpses throughout this bullshit scenario. Fake all the way!
The Defenders (2017)
Indefensible
THE DEFENDERS proves that the Marvel film and television empire has peaked, and is in decline. The series brings together a strong cast of heroes and villains, but instead of putting them to work scheming, plotting, fighting and saving the world, just has them talking, talking, talking. Netflix started its Marvel world promisingly with DAREDEVIL in 2015. The style of the series took getting used to. Matt Murdock, blind but gifted with special sensory skills enhanced by rigorous gym and ninja training, takes on bad guys in his New York neighbourhood, unaided by a costume or special gear. The strength of this story, and its charismatic villain, played by Vincent d'Onofrio, carried the first season through an awful lot of drab talk among the relatively weak relationships of its central characters. The second season perked up considerably, with the addition of Jon Bernthal's scarily angry Punisher, and with Deborah Ann Woll's character becoming more proactive. Those familiar with Daredevil from the comics were waiting to see the emergence of his classic red suit and billy club, and although on one hand we can admire the filmmakers for keeping our interest – sometimes, just barely – through two seasons while waiting these elements to fully emerge, there were also long downtimes while Matt Murdock, Karen Page, Foggy Nelson, and Claire Temple figured out their relationships. Luke CAGE also managed to remain watchable. For the most part, Marvel's most interesting characters were those first conceived in the early 1960s: Daredevil, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, whose idiosyncrasies were built into their original conceptions. With exceptions such as Wolverine, the later characters are not nearly so distinctive, but Luke Cage presented, in its Harlem setting, a milieu even more distinctive than Daredevil's Hell's Kitchen, and it had the benefit of the genuine warmth projected by Simone Missick, Mike Colter, and Rosario Dawson, and some great actors (Alfre Woodard, Mahershala Ali) as villains. The other Marvel series did not fare so well. One quickly tires of Jessica Jones' perpetual state of pique. Evidently David Tennant is in the first season, if anyone has the patience to wait for him to appear! As for Iron Fist's Danny Rand, once he leaves the fish-out- of-water state of the first episodes, (as a billionaire who enjoys going barefoot and living on the street) the series seems to completely lose direction. In bringing these four together, THE DEFENDERS exacerbates all the Marvel Netflix problems instead of correcting them. Now we have four superheroes sitting around discussing their relationships. If you want a live-action superhero series, you would be better off going back to THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN in the 1950s. George Reeves dangling from wires or squishing prop revolvers might get repetitive, but at least those people knew how to move things along. With The Defenders, however, although the first episodes perked up after the resurrection of an intriguing character, not until the last episode did the series seem to approach its potential. Superheroes battling bad guys in an underground grotto built around a giant prehistoric snake skeleton while time runs out on a ticking bomb – now THAT'S good comic book TV! For all that, however, rather than creating strong stories and alternating tension with release, the Marvel/Netflix producers are clearly relying on the popularity of their branded characters to carry their series through a lot of narrative doldrums. One can say the same about THE DEFENDERS that one could say about the other Marvel Netflix series – if you edited out most of its several hours of running time, you could make a great 100-minute movie.
Before I Go to Sleep (2014)
Why So Serious?
If cinema was invented solely so that we could spend an hour or two watching beautiful actresses emote in closeup, then BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP is great cinema. Nicole Kidman plays Christine, a woman fully functioning in every way except that a head trauma from a mysterious assault has left her with only short-term memory: every night as she sleeps, she forgets everything about herself, and has to relearn her identity the next day.
There are worse ways of spending one's brief time on earth than watching Ms. Kidman register confusion, surprise, fear, curiosity, determination and (reflecting the audience's feelings) more confusion. It is hard, however, to imagine how any filmmaker could convey this protagonist's situation, pitiful as it is, without a trace of humour. Writer/director Rowan Joffe has made the film as claustrophobic as BURIED (which Ryan Reynolds spends in an underground coffin) but without a trace of irony, or its own essential absurdity (which Christopher Nolan was able to infuse into the same situation in MEMENTO). Christine is well-kept in her disability; the characteristically dour Colin Firth plays Ben, who greets her in the morning, explains her situation, then goes off to work as a chemistry teacher, leaving Christine alone in an enormous modernist suburban manse somewhere near London; the characteristically helpful-but-menacing Mark Strong plays Dr. Nasch (his first name is a plot point too complex to explain here), who phones Christine as soon as Ben has left for work, coaches her in keeping a video diary, and takes her on outings (through a perpetually damp, rainy south England – the film has a pervasive late-November feeling) supposedly to help her regain her memory.
Christine gradually starts to understand her plight, although the viewer simply becomes more and more confused. Christine spends most of her time alone in the house; outside it's always dim and rainy. There are breakdowns in dramatic logic: having uncovered a key fact about herself, Christine meets Ben at the door and while berating him, stands outside in a Niagara-volume downpour, ignoring Ben's requests that they move just a few meters to get inside. In another absurd scene, Christine is reunited with a beloved best friend, Clare. When Clare confesses a fleeting infidelity with Ben, Christine turns her back on her and leaves – although Clare offers her the only chance to have a social life beyond her present gloomy and mysterious life with the two gloomy and mysterious men who take turns mentoring/ manipulating her.
Still, it is very much Kidman's show and she makes the best of it; as well she must, since she is at the centre of almost every scene. If you want to watch a virtuoso actor in a state of perpetual tension and distress, there is no one better than Kidman, though a superior film to do so would be THE OTHERS.
Miles Ahead (2015)
Crazy, inaccurate, pretentious, and sometimes crystal-clear
Making a jazz film is hard: the most sincere efforts, such as Clint Eastwood's Bird and Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight, tend to recast the music as a synonym for tragedy and victimhood, the exact opposite truth of an art that was crafted to constantly countermand and undermine tragedy and victimhood. Miles Ahead has been criticized for its crazy sub-plot, that culminates in fistfights and gunplay at a boxing match, where Miles Davis reclaims a Macguffin-like master tape that Columbia Records will evidently do anything to get. Of course, this is completely fiction, but it is worth bearing in mind that co-star Ewan MacGregor has called the film "less a Miles biopic than an attempt to cast Miles in a caper flick that he might like to have been part of." In this light, one might regard such excesses a good way of expanding on the "badass" image, that Miles so liked to project. Historically flawed as it might be, the film makes clear that badassness was in fact a useful survival tactic for Davis, in a music industry full of unctuous guys in suits calling him "Mr. Davis," stressing how honoured they were to meet him, and then exploiting him at every turn. The film bounces around chronologically from the late 1950s to the 1980s. The constant flashbacks are somewhat off-putting, but sometimes they do a very good job. At their centre is Davis' relationship with dancer Frances Taylor; years after she has walked out on him – or rather, run out, fearing for her life – Miles is still obsessed with her. There is a scene where, over the phone, he convinces her to leave the London production of West Side Story to be with him. Just as we start to feel sorry for the lovelorn Miles, Cheadle cuts to the drug-fuelled orgy with two young fans that Davis has interrupted in order to take Taylor's call. Another scene takes us back to the 1959 Sketches of Spain sessions; for a jazz fan, it is a delicious pleasure to see and hear these being recreated, although Cheadle gives the impression that arranger Gil Evans was a sort of conductor for the session who was there to follow Davis' instructions. Early in the film, Davis stops an interviewer from calling his music "jazz." What he plays, Davis insists, is social music. In the midst of current recastings and redefinitions of what "jazz" might be, this is a more important message than one expects to hear in a Hollywood biopic. In reading the many criticisms of Cheadle's film, it might be useful to remember that Davis' music from the '70s and '80s was also fiercely criticized at the time it was made, but as the years go by, and we rethink what the artist was doing, it seems increasingly to be right on. The way this film is regarded might also very well change for the better in the years to come.
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Like all Wars, Civil War is a Tragic Waste
You might as well shoot your bow & arrow off at Godzilla than disparage a film that made a billion dollars in its first ten days, but here goes. Anyone, I guess, can make up an IMDb Trivia entry, but this one has the ring of truth:
"Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely's original idea for Captain America 3 was a vastly different and much smaller film without the other Avengers, but Kevin Feige suggested they adapt Civil War instead."
Shame on you, Kevin Feige. Markus and McFeeley, of course, are the writing duo who did such near-genius work on the first two Captain America films: "The First Avenger," with its rich period feeling, its great rationale for Steve Rogers donning his ridiculous name and suit, and its characterization of a superhero who ultimately, just wants to be a normal guy in a world where everyone gets a fair shake. "The Winter Soldier" took Captain America to a whole new level, in a modern day USA where the strongest, nicest, handsomest, most fair- minded guy in its dystopic Washington, DC, is fated to be a perennial outsider that the system will do its best to destroy. These are the two superhero movies to recommend to people who don't like superhero movies, and given the chance to make the kind of "vastly different and much smaller film" that Markus & McFeely could have done so well, it's a pity that Captain America: Civil War, instead of letting the writers do what they wanted, warps and inflates the narrative in order to repeat the worst mistakes of the latest Avenger movie.
Where the first Avengers film contrasted its characters with a world of normal humans, and put them head to head with an alien invasion – exactly the sorts of things superheroes do best – in Age of Ultron, everyone was a superhero. In the film, the Avengers' penultimate task was not to tackle some malign and hideous Other, but to evacuate a city, putting the Hulk and the God of Thunder to work making sure everyone fastened their seatbelts.
Civil War makes similar mistakes. With everyone a superhero, the differences between the characters become simply a matter of degree, and genuine conflict is submerged under an endless series of fanboy mixes-and-matches: golly, who's fighting who in the next scene? Certain episodes emphasize a legitimate central conflict – now that he knows that the Winter Soldier is his long-lost best friend, Steve Rogers will do anything to protect him, while both Iron Man and the Black Panther want to take him out. In these segments, a worthwhile sequel to the first two films peeks out of a script overstuffed with superpowered and technically augmented humans.
A welcome addition is the return of Brock Rumlow, the corrupt Shield agent from The Winter Soldier: near death at the end of that last movie, he returns as the hydraulically augmented Crossbones. Thirsting for revenge against the good guys, Crossbones is a scary and highly motivated villain who - Spoiler Alert – doesn't even make it through the first act, when – played as ferociously as before by Frank Grillo - he could have sustained an entire film (admittedly, the character is under-used less egregiously than Paul Giamatti's Rhino in Amazing Spider-Man 2).
Similarly, the plot reveals that a coven of unbeatable bio-engineered super- villains has been waiting for decades to wreak havoc on the world, but when our heroes track them to their arctic retreat, instead of the fight of their lives, they find
oh, that there's no menace after all, leaving the good guys only to battle each other. So, having engaged us with these characters in the first Iron Man, Captain America, and Avengers films, Marvel now buries them in a mass of superhero overproduction, with a dangling story line that we know won't be continued until the next Avengers movie. Markus and McFeely are writing that; if they're allowed to follow their instincts, maybe they'll be able to redeem themselves. But that's a good two years down the line. With the comic books, you only had to wait a month.
Fantastic Four (2015)
Let These Kids Have Some Fun
In all the bad reviews I've read of this film, none of the writers has mentioned its defining moment of badness: when the young explorers get drunk and journey to the mystery planet/dimension, they celebrate their arrival by PLANTING AN American FLAG on its alien soil. Even Captain America would balk at this act of wanton imperialism (he balks at a lot of things his government wants him to do, which is one reason that the Captain America films are the best superhero films ever), but the planting of the flag marks a blindness to the implications of power that is one of this film's weaknesses; along with its incessant darkness.
No one is having any fun, except in the expository chapters that bring young Reed and Ben together with the Storm family; these episodes are the best part of the film, except for their excessive length. Once the team gain their super-powers, Fantastic Four starts to pick up again, but then after a quickly staged battle on the mystery planet/dimension, it's all over.
Do film makers always think a superhero film is going to be easy and then find, to their surprise, that it is not? The Tim Story films got it right with the cast and the mise en scene—an attractive mix of characters in the brightly-lit streets of New York City—but the writers could never figure out the tone; were the Four a joke, or not?--and the narrative device of pitting the Fantastic Four against Doctor Doom (although Trank and Toby Kebbell do much better with the Doom persona than the shrieky guy in the Story films) got old very fast.
In the comics, the Four had a lot of gravitas: Reed Richards was dead serious about everything, constantly worried about putting his girlfriend/wife in danger, and burdened with guilt for making a monster out of his best friend; the Human Torch was always getting in over his head; the Thing was inclined to lose his temper, etc.
They also got to pit their powers against a wide range of villains. In the movies, the Story films as well as Trank's, the Fantastic Four quite happily live in their dark laboratory until Doctor Doom comes along to be vanquished. Where are the legions of alien invaders and mad scientists who made the comics so much fun? Where are the Inhumans, not to mention the mole people, the Skrulls, Namor the Submariner lusting after Sue Storm, the other superheroes dropping by for a quickly-resolved dustup? Why does everything have to be dark and grimy? Let these kids have some fun.
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
The End of an Age
It seems incredible to think that super-hero films might crash and burn the same way that historic/religious epics did half a century ago. After all, they have much more appeal for children than did those earlier movies, and every few years the market for a children's film is renewed. But seeing Avengers: Age of Ultron, one can see the end coming. Joss Whedon's writing is clever, but not as strong as what Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have done with the Captain America films, although to cut Whedon some slack, the nature of the Avengers forces the writer to work with a huge and unwieldy cast; there aren't many writers who could have made Age of Ultron as good as it is.
Still, the overall feeling is that there's simultaneously too much of everything, and not enough of anything. Watching Avengers: Age of Ultron in a cinema with multi-channel sound turned up just a bit too high is a special kind of sensory overload, like those sixties rock concerts where the audience got stoned because that was the only way they could stand the volume. The multiple digital effects are at once dazzling and numbing; they are like a rich man's funeral where the huge floral arrangements are meant to confirm that the deceased was beloved, but only confirm that he was rich.
The result is that it's the real things that make us stop and say "hey there": that the crowds fleeing the Hulk's rampage are predominantly black (it is, after all, Johannesburg, but seems like a brilliant innovation because we are so used to seeing crowds of white people, and Asians, in blockbusters and kaiju films); that after years of hearing Paul Bettany as Jarvis, we actually get to see him, looking and sounding great; and that when all the dust has settled and the crisis is over, Tony Stark summons that most mundane of sci-fi devices (soon to be science fact): a driverless car. Although spectacles come and go, at the core of great films are real things. In Age of Ultron, the real things remain at the periphery, when they should be at the core.
PS: the incredibly skewed gender and racial politics of superhero films are also dating them shamefully. At least in Age of Ultron, a few women occasionally get to do something. But the black characters played by Don Cheadle (a bit of a fifth wheel, even in the Iron Man films), Anthony Mackie (after Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we want to see more of the Falcon and the actor who plays him, not just a glimpse) and Samuel L. Jackson (who doesn't do much in any of these films except once again, the excellent Winter Soldier) are hastily shuffled through the plot, soon dispensed with to make way for the white heroes. Perhaps mass audiences want super-heroes; but how long are they going to put up with this comic book white-guys-only world?