Colette Arrand

Tag: Chris Evans

  • Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

    Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

    Avengers

    I remember spending a lot of time in my local library as a kid. It was close, within safe walking distance from my house, and beyond a few people who hung out and read magazines they didn’t want to subscribe to, it was just me, the librarians, and a whole lot of books. Browsing the stacks one day, I found these gigantic treasury editions of 60s and 70s Marvel Comics, which I checked out and read every week for three years. My favorite of them was Marvel’s Greatest Superhero Battles, its cover promising an epic clash between The Hulk and The Thing, my two favorite characters in the yet cinematically undiscovered country that was the Marvel Universe. This was the 1990s, and, say what you will about Stan Lee, but the way he wrote his superheroes (and the way Jack Kirby, Herb Trimpe, Sal Buschema, and John Romita (among others) drew them) still had a way of speaking that appealed directly to this very particular sense of selfhood I was developing. Bruce Banner was a quiet man, Benjamin Grimm a soft-hearted lunk. One wanted to be left alone. The other was doomed to be forever unhappy with his body. I got that. I identified with it. And, sealed away in these treasury books, they belonged to a world that only I had access to.

    Had you told nine-year-old me that The Hulk would be a cornerstone of one of the world’s most successful film franches—man, I don’t even know. 27-year-old me can hardly believe it, and I have lived experience of summers spent in multiplexes that weren’t showing a superhero of some kind. Sitting in the dark waiting for Avengers: Age of Ultron to start, there were three trailers for upcoming superhero films, and I was late. The next in Disney’s Avengers sequence, Ant-Man, is coming out in July. We barely get a month to rest up between episodes now, such is the cultural demand for city-destroying bacchanalia. I was tired. I was restless. I wanted to shove nine-year-old me into a locker for liking this stuff. And when the film started, I was largely still exhausted. Joss Whedon’s latest venture into the Marvel Cinematic Universe is overstuffed and overlong, struggling to contain itself, even at two-hours and 20-minutes. A lot of the bloat, at this point, must be attributed to the fact that an Avengers movie isn’t just a movie—it’s part of a cycle, and, as such, is part of a feedback loop that looks back as far as 2008 and looks forward as far as the heat death of the universe. Around that, Whedon, admirably, is going for something more here than in Avengers. Meglomaniacs get smashed-up real good and the physical and psychic trauma of 9/11 is exported to a countries real and imaginary, but it’s clear at this point that Whedon is most in his element when the world is quiet and his team has divested itself of their spandex.

    Then, he can get down to the real meat of Marvel Comics, which is that beneath the spectacle and muscle, superheroes are really just damaged human beings who are very uncomfortable with their bodies. This has been a sub-plot of most MCU films for awhile now, the whole “He’s just a man, but I’ve got an army!” deal, but Whedon’s script ventures beyond that, ruminating on the fallibility of flesh. His villain, Ultron (James Spader), a malevolent, sassy robot whose AI bears a striking resemblance to Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), sees the body as a necessary step forward in his evolution. Stark knows he will die, leaving his project of world peace unfinished. Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) is just a regular dude with a bow and arrow. Captain America (Chris Evans) is still acclimating to a world where most of his friends have died. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is doomed to be ashamed of his monstrous, green alter-ego, and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) has a past that involves bodily disfiguration. Where a villain like Ultron (or Loki, or the assembled horde of Hydra bad guys, or men in knock-off Iron Man gear) see this as the team’s weakness, it’s the axis upon which the whole thing spins—there aren’t many people who could understand their individual circumstances, but they’re all here in a room together, drunkenly trying to lift the hammer that lets Thor (Chris Hemsworth) lay claim to the throne of Asgard.

    But at this point, it’s not enough to truly satisfy. MCU films are, like a hang-out sitcom, an excuse to sit around and chuckle with a group of favorite characters, mind turned off. Battle sequences are well-executed, if perfunctory and consequence free. If you don’t check in on Marvel’s televised output, it’d be easy to assume that the fallout from any given fight is a paycheck from the Stark Relief Fund (which, man, that name) and a new life in a city that maybe won’t host a rampaging Hulk. I feel like complaining about the lack of stakes after eleven Marvel films, far from being a fruitless endeavor, reveals something about the limits of popcorn filmmaking, or at least the men responsible for making them. The Avengers: Age of Ultron can be nitpicked to death or praised for things that happen or are imagined to have happened at its fringes, but at heart this is a big, dumb action movie trying a little too hard to sound smart. This, in general, works for me. I am, if anything, overly enthusiastic about The Fast and the Furious‘ focus on makeshift chosen families, and am still fascinated with The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises‘ attempt and failure to engage with philosophical theory and political science. Whedon does the same here, toying with ideas of fatherhood, Catholicism, and ruined women, but all too frequently it feels like he’s wrestling a Wikipedia page and not the idea itself. The drama will continue in the next wave of Avengers movies, we’re promised, but just once I’d like to see a Marvel movie that is a movie first, rather than an advertisement for an upcoming slate. I’d like something real to chew on. I’d like to go home not dreading the prospect that, someday soon, it will not be enough for a comic book movie to merely entertain me for three hours. Like the villains of these pieces so frequently say, it’s time to evolve. If only the folks behind the camera were listening.

     

    The Avengers: Age of Ultron. With Robert Downey, Jr. (Tony Stark/Iron Man), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner/Hulk), Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow), Jeremy Renner (Clint Barton/Hawkeye), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Quicksilver), Elizabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch), James Spader (Ultron), and Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury). Directed by Joss Whedon from a screenplay by Whedon, based on the Marvel Comics characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

  • Movie Review: The Avengers (2012)

    Movie Review: The Avengers (2012)

    A time-displaced soldier. A Norse god. A playboy billionaire genius. A brilliant scientist who turns into a raging monster when angry. A former Russian spy. An expert marksman. On paper, a team comprised of six individuals this vastly different shouldn’t work. There are egos to deal with, competitive urges, the occasional extinction-level event. Since 1963, the Avengers have walked the very fine line between being Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and Earth’s Largest Screw-Ups. All it took back then was an assortment of popular comic book characters and the retrospectively brilliant idea of bringing a World War II era hero back from the publishing grave. In 2012, to get The Avengers together under the auspices of one movie took a more herculean effort: Five good-to-great movies serving as pretense, an assemblage of the right actors playing the right characters, and the right director at the helm of so much potential chaos. (more…)

  • Movie Review: What’s Your Number? (2011)

    Movie Review: What’s Your Number? (2011)

    It’s really hard to even begin a review of a movie like What’s Your Number? without selfishly floating a few things out there, so bear this in mind as I try to figure out what, exactly, I saw:

    1. As a man in a household consisting of myself, a sister, and a mother, I’ve seen a ton of romantic comedies. I was practically raised on a diet of Audrey Hepburn and John Hughes, so I’d like to think that I know what works, what’s funny, and what’s romantic. I consider myself not dude-at-a-chickflick, but an unbiased judge of these things.
    2. As a frequent grocery shopper, I often catch glimpse of magazines like Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire, the former being the magazine with the article that is the crux of this film. Other than learning a few overly-complicated methods to the male orgasm (hasn’t friction worked for centuries?), I’ve learned that a good amount of the magazine publishing industry relies on making women feel insecure about their looks, their weight, and how many men they have or haven’t slept with.
    3. As a human being, I can’t help but be sad (and a little angry) about how much money our society pumps into these industries. It seems like every other romantic comedy is an artless slice-of-“life” debating the merits of one relationship crisis article or another. He’s just not that into you? You’ve worn twenty-seven bridesmaids dresses but have yet to be the bride? You’ve slept with twenty dudes? Whatever. There are well over six billion people out there. Twenty isn’t a fraction; it’s a crumb.

    But our biological clocks are ticking from the moment of conception, so I suppose it’s not all that unreasonable to feel pressure/begin panicking when, on the eve of thirty, no significant headway has been made towards our mutual goal of not dying alone. This, I suppose, is why I’m supposed to feel sympathy for the plight of Ally Darling (Anna Feris), the woman who has slept with twenty dudes and who is freaked out about the Marie Claire article (researched by a Harvard doctor, no less!) that says she’ll never find happiness.

    This, of course, is absolute crap, but go along with it for a bit. In an effort to find her one true love, Ally decides to put off everything, including her sister’s (Ari Graynor) wedding, to track down her twenty ex-loves. Because a woman can’t be expected to do these things on her own, she turns to her neighbor Colin (Chris Evans) who, as the movie has it, knows how to find people. Of course, some people are right out. Colin, for one, since he’s a womanizer and would put her over her number. Julie, a girl she slept with in college, because she’s a dude now. Gerry, a puppeteer, because puppeteers are probably more interesting than divorced guys and Miami gynecologists. She’s really hoping to settle for two options, though: A Senate hopeful (Anthony Mackie) and the son of an incredibly rich guy (Dave Annable), neither of whom question her motives for looking them up again some 5 or 15 years after their last contact. Naturally, the one who’s right for her is right under her nose, having sex with every woman in Boston. Naturally, he comes to realize that she’s the only woman he’ll ever need to have sex with again.

    I’d feel bad about spoiling the end of the movie were it not a bastardization of the same ol’, same ol’. The film’s every element is predictable. For example, if I told you that the black senatorial candidate was a Republican, would you be able to guess his sexual orientation? If I said that Ally had a “weird” hobby, would you guess which smokin’ hot bro suggests she make it her career? If I told you that the events of the film surround the wedding of her sister, would you be able to guess which character would grab a fretting Ally by the shoulders on that day to say “Go to him?”

    If you can (heck, even if you can’t), it’s probably obvious that Ally’s not a person worth your interest. To the point, she seems like a terrible person, oddly infatuated with the idea of snatching money and power without earning either, to the point that she makes her sister’s wedding about her. None of this would be a problem were the situations comic in nature, but the movie can’t, at any point, decide if Ally is somebody we should be rooting for or somebody we should hate for being a slut, and Anna Ferris, once tabbed as one of the funniest women in Hollywood, can’t make anything about her stick. In a way, the movie’s funniest moment is when Ally’s father tells her to be herself. If she really followed through on that advice, she’d be a gibbering collection of lies she’s told men so she’d get laid.

    But getting laid, as every romantic comedy would have you know, is terrible unless it’s with one partner, for the rest of your life. Last night at a Waffle House, I wound up having a conversation with the waitress about this movie. She was pretty drunk during it and couldn’t remember much, but she said “There was nothing wrong with her [Ferris]. A number’s a number. You should own it.” Her number was one. At this, the restaurant Awwwwed. Maybe someday romantic comedies will go back to being about nice women like the waitress at Waffle House, who fall in love with nice people and whose lives are complicated by more than magazine-issue stereotype. Until then, we’ll always have the rom-com slut. We’ll always have our insatiable appetite for slutshaming.

    Rating:

    What’s Your Number? Directed by Mark Mylod. With Anna Faris (Ally Darling), Chris Evans (Colin Shea), Ari Graynor (Daisy Darling), Joel McHale (Roger), Blythe Danner (Ms. Darling), Andy Samberg (Gerry Perry), Anthony Mackie (Tom Piper), Dave Annable (Jack Adams), and Aziz Ansari (Jay). Released on September 30, 2011, by 20th Century Fox.