Marvel Studios has been trying to sell audiences the idea of a movie starring comic book heroes the Avengers since 2008, when after the end credits of the first Iron Man film, in which Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury approached Robert Downney Jr.'s Tony Stark to tell him about "the Avenger initiative." This is a movie that has basically been five years in the making, and is the culmination of a painstaking effort, consisting of two Iron Man films, as well as films starring the Hulk, Thor and Captain America, to lay the groundwork for arguably the most ambitious superhero movie ever to be made. Each of those films, some more than others, contained narrative cues leading up to the introduction of Marvel Comics' most popular superhero team.
Now that it's finally here, one inevitably asks the question: does it live up to the hype? As far as I'm concerned, it certainly does and more, which is quite an achievement considering that expectations for this film are no doubt sky-high.
Story-wise, it's a continuation of threads that were started in last year's Marvel Films Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger. Thor, starring Chris Hemsworth as the titular God of Thunder, introduced the villainy and angst of his adoptive brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), and Captain America: The First Avenger, starring Chris Evans as Marvel's iconic super soldier, introduced the power of the Cosmic Cube, known in Marvel's cinematic universe as the Tesseract. The Avengers brings these two story elements together as Loki, having lived in exile since the events of Thor, makes a deal with mysterious alien beings and steals the Tesseract from the custody of S.H.I.E.L.D., the super-spy agency that has been in possession of the artifact since the organization's founder, Howard Stark, fished it out of the ocean at the end of the Captain America movie. Nick Fury (Jackson) concerned, decides to dust off an old plan of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s that has been in mothballs for some time: The Avenger Initiative. For this he needs superheroes, and one by one Captain America (Evans), Bruce Banner/a.k.a the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo in a surprisingly well-textured, nuanced performance), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), and Thor (Hemsworth) come on board at one point or another of the journey. Another member, Hawkeye/Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), comes on later for reasons I will not spoil here. The question then arises: is even the combined might of the Avengers enough to take on the forces that Loki, using the Tesseract, is about to bring to bear on the hapless population of Earth (particularly Manhattan)?
The Avengers is not a film that's heavy on subtext or social commentary. It doesn't try to make profound statements about the human condition, but it does offer viewers a lurid, somewhat entertaining glimpse at a dysfunctional group of people thrown together in the hope that they can accomplish something great together, and as incredible and eye-popping as the action may be, this is actually the film's single biggest asset. Ever since he paired an insecure cowboy doll with a deluded astronaut doll in 1995's Toy Story, of which he was a co-writer, Joss Whedon has most definitely been the man for the job. As many heavyweights as this film sports, Whedon is hands down its biggest star. Handling both directing and co-writing duties (having rewritten the original script turned in by Zak Penn), Whedon infuses a distinct intelligence, humanity and humor into a film that could easily have been, in the hands of lesser filmmakers, one of the biggest clusterf**ks of all time.
As many fans and critics alike have pointed out, the action is sublime. It's frenetic but still judiciously paced, the viewer can actually tell what's going on at any given time, and there's actual suspense to see how things will turn out in the end. Critical to the action, though, is that it features characters whom people can actually care about, and it is in this aspect that Whedon succeeds considerably. In one crucial respect, Whedon's The Avengers stands head, shoulders and every other bodily appendage over any of Bryan Singer's X-Men films in that this is a true ensemble piece. Sure, the X-Men films had the whole metaphor for prejudice going for them, especially the last one, but the thing is, each and every one of those films, with the exception of the Wolverine-centric prequel, was supposed to play out as an ensemble piece but instead ended up revolving around one character, whether it was Wolverine in the first three films or Magneto in the latest one. The Avengers, which could have easily degenerated into Iron Man 3 considering Downey Jr.'s megawatt charisma, or Thor 2 considering that it picks up where the first film left off, actually feels like an ensemble piece in the way it devotes screen time and hefty character development to so many members of its cast. One reviewer says that Downey Jr. steals the show, another one says that Hiddleston steals the show, while Whedon himself feels that the Hulk is the most important character of the movie. This is an extraordinary achievement in that there are so many outstanding performances in this movie, and yet none of them got lost in the shuffle of so many characters.
Whedon, I feel, is Marvel Studios' first true visionary, and that includes the directors of the studio-made Marvel movies. I say this as someone who thoroughly enjoyed the Bryan Singer X-Men movies and the first two Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and Jon Favreau's Iron Man films (yes, even the second one). All of those directors turned in solid, admirable work and even flirted a bit with greatness at times, but I don't think any of them could be mentioned in the same breath as Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson in terms of the ability to construct epics involving massive destruction and conflict. What Whedon has done here, though is something unprecedented, a balance of egos and monstrous logistics and some of the most amazing digital effects I've seen since James Cameron raised the bar for effects with Avatar a few years back. His script brims with pathos, nuanced interpersonal interaction, some tense, some tender, and dollops of impeccably-timed humor. I'm loath to use a cliche that many writers have no doubt used and will no doubt use to describe Whedon's feat but he's really knocked this one clean out of the park.
The ensemble cast of actors, three of whom already veterans of their own individual films, do an amazing job with Whedon's script, and even though they've already each had a film each (two in Iron Man's case) for some healthy character development, they still manage to take their characters to new places this time around and considering they had to share the somewhat crowded film with each other it's really quite a marvel (pun intended) that they were able to make their performances work the way they did. For my part I think special mention should go to Tom Hiddleston in his second go-'round as Loki. To be the arch-villain in a film starring six superheroes is no mean feat and it would not have worked, no matter how spectacular Loki's powers, if they hadn't gotten an actor capable of conveying a genuine sense of menace, something Hiddleston achieves quite admirably with some pretty interesting dialogue. Mark Ruffalo also surprised as Bruce Banner; I was a fan of Norton's performance and was not expecting him to live up to it, but he definitely made the character his own and I hope, for once, Marvel sticks with this particular actor for the inevitable sequels to this film. It helps that in rendering the Hulk, the visual effects crew(s) behind this movie have finally gotten him right. Alan Silvestri's bustling music score deserves a shout out, too, though for some reason it seems infused with a slightly anachronistic 80s flavor at some points.
I'd be lying, though if I said I didn't have any problems with the film at all. Having watched the film in 3-D I have to say the conversion job on this movie was a huge improvement from the half-assed post-production changeover Marvel did with Thor, and a number of effects shots look amazing as a result, but it resulted in a movie that was, overall, conspicuously dark, especially the parts that took place at night, of which there were many. Considering this was Marvel's format of choice I can't help but roll my eyes at their blatant cash-grab. Another quibble I have with the film was that the alien army Loki uses the Tesseract to assemble are, in the comics, a prominent group of bad guys in their own right, (whose identity I will not spoil) and certainly deserved better than the cannon fodder treatment they got here. Still, those are mostly "nerd" concerns, and overall the viewing experience is not significantly diminished by them. This movie is one of those rare examples of the whole being so much greater than the sum of all its parts. As much as I enjoyed most of the individual movies of the characters featured here, some more than others, Joss Whedon has truly set a new standard for the Marvel Studios film.
Score: 5/5
Friday, April 27, 2012
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Overkill
Tomorrow, or sometime within this week, I will buy tickets for myself and my family to Joss Whedon's The Avengers, which opens here in the Philippines next week, on April 25, a full nine days before its release in the United States. It is my movie of the year; I am more anxious to see it than I am to see Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man, Ridley Scott's Prometheus, and just about any other movie, big or small, due out this year. I am fairly certain there are a lot of other people who feel the same way.
That said, I find myself slightly annoyed by the proliferation of footage of the film on the internet, done by Marvel itself.
Now, Disney, Marvel's parent company, has been in the business of making and selling movies for a long time and has done a pretty good job of it, so arguably it's not my place to question the wisdom of their marketing strategy, but for some reason I can't help but wonder why, having given audiences three full-length movie trailers, a tantalizing superbowl spot, and a number of TV spots with incremental increases in footage, Disney still feels it has to go the extra mile and show footage from the film. Even granting the film is 140 minutes or so long (nearly two and a half hours!) and that the sum total of the footage being shown on the internet is less than a tenth of that running time, the saturation of footage seems to suggest that Disney isn't confident enough in their product to just let what they've already shown simmer a bit in the collective consciousness. It strikes me that they aren't content to let the film sell itself at this point. Well, if nothing else, if for some macabre reason this film fails to live up to its massive expectations, no one will be able to accuse Disney of not being aggressive enough in pushing it.
James Cameron's Avatar got a great deal of pre-release mileage out of the mystery surrounding its plot, which in the end turned out to be rather hackneyed and buoyed only by the film's fantastic visuals. Christopher Nolan's Inception benefited from similar ambiguity. Both of these films were released in the internet age, and both are sterling examples of fantastic return on investment.
With their ad blitzkrieg, Disney seem to be saying that if people aren't thinking about The Avengers every waking second, they aren't thinking about it enough. I'm really not sure I agree with that, but I'm not in the business of selling movies.
Well, if nothing else I at least have the choice not to watch all of this footage, even though I couldn't help but check out some of it.
The good news is, from the little I've seen this movie looks at least as good as the trailers promise it to be. Still, if they continue to market it this way, it strikes me that no movie will ever be as good as they are hyping this one up to be.
That said, I find myself slightly annoyed by the proliferation of footage of the film on the internet, done by Marvel itself.
Now, Disney, Marvel's parent company, has been in the business of making and selling movies for a long time and has done a pretty good job of it, so arguably it's not my place to question the wisdom of their marketing strategy, but for some reason I can't help but wonder why, having given audiences three full-length movie trailers, a tantalizing superbowl spot, and a number of TV spots with incremental increases in footage, Disney still feels it has to go the extra mile and show footage from the film. Even granting the film is 140 minutes or so long (nearly two and a half hours!) and that the sum total of the footage being shown on the internet is less than a tenth of that running time, the saturation of footage seems to suggest that Disney isn't confident enough in their product to just let what they've already shown simmer a bit in the collective consciousness. It strikes me that they aren't content to let the film sell itself at this point. Well, if nothing else, if for some macabre reason this film fails to live up to its massive expectations, no one will be able to accuse Disney of not being aggressive enough in pushing it.
James Cameron's Avatar got a great deal of pre-release mileage out of the mystery surrounding its plot, which in the end turned out to be rather hackneyed and buoyed only by the film's fantastic visuals. Christopher Nolan's Inception benefited from similar ambiguity. Both of these films were released in the internet age, and both are sterling examples of fantastic return on investment.
With their ad blitzkrieg, Disney seem to be saying that if people aren't thinking about The Avengers every waking second, they aren't thinking about it enough. I'm really not sure I agree with that, but I'm not in the business of selling movies.
Well, if nothing else I at least have the choice not to watch all of this footage, even though I couldn't help but check out some of it.
The good news is, from the little I've seen this movie looks at least as good as the trailers promise it to be. Still, if they continue to market it this way, it strikes me that no movie will ever be as good as they are hyping this one up to be.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Revisiting Mork: Thoughts on Robin Williams
Yesterday morning, while getting ready to go to work, I caught a replay of Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting on TV. It was the film that launched Matt Damon and Ben Affleck into the Hollywood stratosphere, and which featured a performance by Robin Williams that earned him his first and so far only Academy Award. It was a nuanced, troubled and ultimately inspired portrayal of a world-weary psychiatrist who sees in Matt Damon's prodigy Will Hunting a new challenge and someone who badly needs his help. To be honest, as impressive as Damon's career-making performance was, it was Williams who really stole the show for me.
Inevitably, I asked myself "what's he done lately?" and to my dismay, the almost universally panned 2009 film Old Dogs came to mind, as did a number of other films that were either critically panned, largely ignored at the box-office, or both. His most high-profile role in the last ten years has been as the magically animated wax statue of Theodore Roosevelt in 2006's Night at the Museum, which was pretty much a supporting role. Williams hasn't anchored a major financial success since 1998's Patch Adams.
There are a number of iconic actors who made a huge impact on pop culture in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s who have started to flounder in the new millennium, a topic which could cover an entire post (or something much longer) all on its own, but Williams' fall from grace is particularly disturbing to me because I grew up on his work. I was a fan of the TV show Mork and Mindy in the late 70s and early 80s, and when Williams moved on to motion pictures I was fond of those too, from Moscow on the Hudson to the highly-acclaimed Good Morning Vietnam. Dead Poets Society , which was one of the defining films of my youth and which still moves me when I see it today, is still hailed as one of the most inspiring films of all time by the American Film Institute. In films like this and in the also highly moving Awakenings, in which he co-starred with Robert De Niro, Williams showed he could do serious roles every bit as effectively as he could comedic ones. The man was really incredible; between 1988 and 1992 he scored three Academy Award Nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role, for his performances in Vietnam, Poets and the very stylish Terry Gilliam dramedy The Fisher King, another film starring Williams that I loved. I was even a fan of his work on Steven Spielberg's Hook, for all the lambasting it received from critics.
Williams good form continued throughout the 1990s, with the commercial hit Mrs. Doubtfire, and the Mike Nichols comedy The Birdcage. Williams showed remarkable versatility even in his comedy; he went for zany in Doubtfire, but in Birdcage played the "straight man" in the gay relationship between his character and that of Nathan Lane.
When Williams finally won his Oscar in 1998 for Good Will Hunting, for me it was a bright spot in a year dominated by the thoroughly depressing Titanic and it was easy to root for his success. Apart from giving a brilliant performance for GWH, Williams had, with his performances, his stand-up routines, and his generally pleasant demeanor in interviews, established himself as kind of an everyman, someone one would want to succeed. The guy was obviously a top-tier moviestar by then but he didn't come across as one, at least not to me.
After that, Williams seemed to go through a strange phase where he was attracted to bad guy roles. He played two in succession back in 2002, first in Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, then in Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo. I figured it was a phase, that after it didn't work out we'd be back to more of the high-quality laughs we were accustomed to getting. I was confident that at some point we would once again be seeing Williams in films that were both smart and funny.
It didn't happen. Apart from the odd art house film that didn't even show up in theaters over here, Williams came up with stinkers like RV, License to Wed and the aforementioned Old Dogs, which was apparently so bad that Disney, who released it, nixed plans for a sequel to the successful 2007 film Wild Hogs (which didn't star Williams), for no other reason than that they shared the same director and had similar sounding titles.
So what I'd really like to know is: what happened? Did people just get tired of Williams? Did his ability to tell good scripts from bad ones diminish with old age? Did he fall under some horrible curse after he divorced his Filipina wife? Is this some kind of Oscar winner's curse?
One could ask similar questions about fellow Oscar-winner Al Pacino, who went from Scarface and Michael Corleone to playing a sex-crazed version of himself in Adam Sandler's last stinkfest Jack and Jill, but Robin Williams, first as Mork then later as a bona fide movie star, wasn't just an icon for film buffs, he was at one point a seemingly permanent fixture on the pop-culture landscape with a string of commercial and critical successes throughout the late 80s and early to mid 1990s. He was the voice of the Genie in Aladdin for gosh sakes!
His career didn't exactly implode in the same way that Mel Gibson's did though I have read some reports of alcoholism, but in some ways I'm not sure if what's happened to Williams isn't somehow worse than what's happened to Gibson, who even in his ruination is still the object of much public fascination. Williams' star simply appears to have faded. I hear he's doing well with stand-up routines, but his is a talent that, to my mind, should be shared with audiences everywhere, not just comedy club patrons.
Of course, there's nothing I can do about the state of the man's movie career, but I certainly wish him well. Like I said, I grew up with his work; I've been inspired by him. Judging by the careers of actors like Paul Newman, Burt Lancaster, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon and many others, Williams still has some good years left, and I hope he spends them entertaining a whole new generation of filmgoers, who deserve better from him than garbage like Old Dogs.
Inevitably, I asked myself "what's he done lately?" and to my dismay, the almost universally panned 2009 film Old Dogs came to mind, as did a number of other films that were either critically panned, largely ignored at the box-office, or both. His most high-profile role in the last ten years has been as the magically animated wax statue of Theodore Roosevelt in 2006's Night at the Museum, which was pretty much a supporting role. Williams hasn't anchored a major financial success since 1998's Patch Adams.
There are a number of iconic actors who made a huge impact on pop culture in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s who have started to flounder in the new millennium, a topic which could cover an entire post (or something much longer) all on its own, but Williams' fall from grace is particularly disturbing to me because I grew up on his work. I was a fan of the TV show Mork and Mindy in the late 70s and early 80s, and when Williams moved on to motion pictures I was fond of those too, from Moscow on the Hudson to the highly-acclaimed Good Morning Vietnam. Dead Poets Society , which was one of the defining films of my youth and which still moves me when I see it today, is still hailed as one of the most inspiring films of all time by the American Film Institute. In films like this and in the also highly moving Awakenings, in which he co-starred with Robert De Niro, Williams showed he could do serious roles every bit as effectively as he could comedic ones. The man was really incredible; between 1988 and 1992 he scored three Academy Award Nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role, for his performances in Vietnam, Poets and the very stylish Terry Gilliam dramedy The Fisher King, another film starring Williams that I loved. I was even a fan of his work on Steven Spielberg's Hook, for all the lambasting it received from critics.
Williams good form continued throughout the 1990s, with the commercial hit Mrs. Doubtfire, and the Mike Nichols comedy The Birdcage. Williams showed remarkable versatility even in his comedy; he went for zany in Doubtfire, but in Birdcage played the "straight man" in the gay relationship between his character and that of Nathan Lane.
When Williams finally won his Oscar in 1998 for Good Will Hunting, for me it was a bright spot in a year dominated by the thoroughly depressing Titanic and it was easy to root for his success. Apart from giving a brilliant performance for GWH, Williams had, with his performances, his stand-up routines, and his generally pleasant demeanor in interviews, established himself as kind of an everyman, someone one would want to succeed. The guy was obviously a top-tier moviestar by then but he didn't come across as one, at least not to me.
After that, Williams seemed to go through a strange phase where he was attracted to bad guy roles. He played two in succession back in 2002, first in Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, then in Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo. I figured it was a phase, that after it didn't work out we'd be back to more of the high-quality laughs we were accustomed to getting. I was confident that at some point we would once again be seeing Williams in films that were both smart and funny.
It didn't happen. Apart from the odd art house film that didn't even show up in theaters over here, Williams came up with stinkers like RV, License to Wed and the aforementioned Old Dogs, which was apparently so bad that Disney, who released it, nixed plans for a sequel to the successful 2007 film Wild Hogs (which didn't star Williams), for no other reason than that they shared the same director and had similar sounding titles.
So what I'd really like to know is: what happened? Did people just get tired of Williams? Did his ability to tell good scripts from bad ones diminish with old age? Did he fall under some horrible curse after he divorced his Filipina wife? Is this some kind of Oscar winner's curse?
One could ask similar questions about fellow Oscar-winner Al Pacino, who went from Scarface and Michael Corleone to playing a sex-crazed version of himself in Adam Sandler's last stinkfest Jack and Jill, but Robin Williams, first as Mork then later as a bona fide movie star, wasn't just an icon for film buffs, he was at one point a seemingly permanent fixture on the pop-culture landscape with a string of commercial and critical successes throughout the late 80s and early to mid 1990s. He was the voice of the Genie in Aladdin for gosh sakes!
His career didn't exactly implode in the same way that Mel Gibson's did though I have read some reports of alcoholism, but in some ways I'm not sure if what's happened to Williams isn't somehow worse than what's happened to Gibson, who even in his ruination is still the object of much public fascination. Williams' star simply appears to have faded. I hear he's doing well with stand-up routines, but his is a talent that, to my mind, should be shared with audiences everywhere, not just comedy club patrons.
Of course, there's nothing I can do about the state of the man's movie career, but I certainly wish him well. Like I said, I grew up with his work; I've been inspired by him. Judging by the careers of actors like Paul Newman, Burt Lancaster, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon and many others, Williams still has some good years left, and I hope he spends them entertaining a whole new generation of filmgoers, who deserve better from him than garbage like Old Dogs.
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