The Avengers

Despite being a ready-made blockbuster success, The Avengers had a pretty significant hurdle to clear if it wanted to be any good – a notion that is hardly necessary when the quality of a film like this is rarely important when it comes to being a “success”.  Ensemble films are tricky enough, but when four of the central characters have each had movies of their own, attempting to corral them all into something sensible without giving short-shrift to anyone is doubly (or, quadruply?) so.  This is all to say that anyone who says that writer/director Joss Whedon, who was given the task of putting this all together, merely has to “not screw it up,” they’re doing an extreme disservice to the sheer difficulty of the task at hand.  A surfeit of good, existing elements is probably harder to make into something even basically functional as a movie than starting from the ground up.  It’s a small wonder, then, that The Avengers is not only good, it is better than it probably needs to be and is certainly the best of this slate of Marvel films.

Captain America: The First Avenger

The question that continued to weigh on my mind as I viewed Joe Johnstone’s Captain America: The First Avenger, the latest in the series of extraordinarily expensive supplemental materials for 2012’s Avengers spectacular, was this:  are comic book movies boring or am I bored of comic book movies?  I’m not entirely sure, and although I realize the premise isn’t entirely true (I am excited to see Nolan’s next entry in his Dark Knight series), I couldn’t even feign enthusiasm for any of the superhero tentpoles that have graced the screens this summer.  As a matter of fact, I only saw this one and X-Men: First Class, so maybe I’m just being harsh.  I’m sure I’ll rent Thor just to get myself up to speed, but at this point the Marvel Universe (or really, the Avengers Universe) entries are all too mediocre to get excited about.  They feel more like filling in the prerequisites for a course I don’t particularly want to take.  I recognize that Captain America isn’t all that bad, but it’s not all that good either.

Scott Pilgrim vs The World

As much as I have fond memories of my childhood and the frivolities of life as a youngster, I can’t help but find certain hipster trends in recent years both shallow and regressive.  Yes, I loved playing SNES games and arcade fighters and I loved the Smashing Pumpkins, but referencing the obsessions of a bygone era does not endear me to the nostalgia-laden world that people selling Megaman t-shirts and and their chillwave bands are basking in.  Not to denigrate the cultural touchstones of a generation, obviously including my own, but the mere mention of a tanooki suit does not fill me warm, fuzzy feelings and it certainly does not elicit a chuckle.  Such are the dangers of geekdom, for making some ‘shit that is awesome’ is not enough to generally enough to make that same ‘shit’ interesting, and certainly not if the only thing ‘awesome’ about it is that it stirs up memories of my life as an 11 year old.  After all, ‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.

Kids with Guns: Kick-Ass

I’m sure I’ve talked about the importance of tone in films before, and before I go back to that old standby when talking about Matthew Vaughn’s comic book fantasy Kick-Ass, I think it worth stressing how crucial it is (for the thousandth time). In most films, suspension of disbelief is paramount for engaging with the characters and story. This is not to say that everything need be believable or even logical, but if you want to be swept up in whatever experience the film can offer, the wrong moment can jar you right out of the picture. A consistent tone does well to maintain the suspension of disbelief in genre films such as Kick-Ass because, after all, nobody wants to find themselves aware of the real world when they’re meant to be escaping from it. As a digression, a good director making a certain film knows when to use a moment totally at odds with everything else around it to emphasize a point and, hopefully, get an emotional reaction (Richie’s attempted suicide in The Royal Tenenabaum, for instance). I’m not saying Matthew Vaughn is forever incapable of accomplishing this, but Kick-Ass is most certainly not that film.