Thoughtful Heckler Archives - Page 3 of 10

Lois Lane’s secret in Man of Steel

June 17, 2013 Tory 3 Comments

I was all mad at this movie, with its on-the-nose dialogue, repetitive exposition and female characters with zero agency. Roll-up-the-sleeves mad. Children of Men mad. Mad.

Then I realized Lois Lane’s secret, and now I’m OK with it.

Spoilers ahead. You know how I be.

Lois is an alien dispatched by the Guardians of the Universe to supervise Superman.

Hear me out.

A) She has hyper senses and seems impervious to harm. Like Superman, she navigates in the pitch dark like it’s no problem. Like Supes, she shows no discomfort in -40F weather and a padded jacket. Like Supes, she strolls around an ice cliff like it’s no trouble. She demonstrates Prometheus-level lack of self-preservation when confronted by a snakebot. Sure, it hurts her, but it has hurt Supes, too. If anything, the fact she survived an attack potent enough to hurt Supes proves she’s superhuman. I submit that she tolerates Supes “I’m gonna cauterize the wound with my laser eyes without even taking off your sweater” line of logic because she knows he can’t do her harm. Her Saw-movie screaming is but an act.
B) She has super speed. Twice Supes dashes off to have a high-flying punch-battle, landing at some random spot in Metropolis (once downtown, and once in a mass transit station), and each time Lois manages to jog up to him within minutes. It would be funny if it weren’t revealing: she has used her hyper senses and super speed to join him.
C)She provides only information, never action. Not only does she permit her rescue to be engineered entirely by Supes and Jor-El’s Consciousness DongleTM (no risk to her as she is invulnerable), but also in a baffling climactic moment she attempts to use the Consciousness DongleTM again, fails, says “this is supposed to work” and immediately gives up and wanders off. There is no reason for her to do this except to permit the agency of an earthling. That earthling turns out to be Richard Schiff, who sorts out the dongle issue on his first try, with no foreshadowing whatsoever, proving how simple the task would have been for Lois had her Prime Directive not compelled her to step aside.
It is so hard to stand by and do nothing like this
D) Supes knows it. This is why he and Lois kiss without any previous chemistry. It just feels natural.
As further proof, after the kiss she offers him some Lou Reed: “They say it’s all downhill after the first kiss.”

Why does Lois say such a strange thing? Possibly because Reed’s “Modern Dance” would resonate with any superhuman: “I need a guru, I need some law/Explain to me the things we saw.” She has found in this song a connection to the human world — its romance and bewilderment — and positions herself as the bridge Supes can use to connect as well.

Supes, lacking her subtlety, answers, “I think that’s only true when kissing humans.” As pointed out by long-distance co-heckler Donna, this comment would be quite insulting to Lois if she were human! But by saying it to a fellow alien, he reveals in his dunderheaded way that he understands she’s not human at all.

Put your space lips on mine
E) Lois has the ideal job for a super-powered alien, as Supes eventually discovers. Naturally, the thought process that leads Supes to become a reporter is the one Lois has already had. It’s a natural choice for Lois the watcher, which brings us to…
F) ~~Watchers~~ Guardians are well-established in the DC universe. Certainly the Guardians of the Universe would not limit themselves to the Lantern Corps. Certainly Oa would indulge the odd on-location observer, and certainly not every female they enlist gets stuffed in the Star Sapphires. Lois’s GotU training is why she i) Follows Jor-El’s orders without question, ii) refuses to obstruct earth’s collective will and iii) takes no action, as Supes seems to have all the life-threatening stuff in hand, however recklessly he goes about it.
I’m just so damn good at punching

With all that understood, I am no longer provoked to purple rage by Lois’s passivity and incompetence. She serves a greater mission than this pale blue dot can grasp.

So I will set aside the many other inept, helpless female characters in this movie and pursue the many other questions at hand.

1. Why do the characters speak dialogue par with “to my point of view, the Jedi are evil”?
A sample exchange:

Lois: I’m a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist!
Perry: Then act like one.
Lois: Print it or I walk.
Perry: You can’t. You’re under contract.

Why would Lois make a threat she can’t possibly back up? Lois would look really dumb and/or forgetful if we hadn’t already established she acts this way on purpose.
2. How many Valium did Lara-El take before putting baby Kal in the shuttle? Because I’ve shown more emotion gate-checking a guitar.
3. Could Jor-El not have passed on a Lara-El Consciousness DongleTM, too? What kind of monster is Jor to listen with a straight face as Lara grieves about never seeing their baby again? I guess the same one that dons a suit of armor while his wife wears a bathrobe.
Prologue is set entirely on the planet Ego

Also — a civilization capable of Consciousness DongleTMs should take better care of their data. Off-site backups, people.
4. Why does Supes seek advice from a priest? Is he Catholic? Because that would be super interesting. And why does the priest’s advice have NOTHING to do with God? I guess it’s harder to breeze into a therapist’s office for free “what does your gut tell you” guidance.
5. Could we have spent a little more time with the “Supes is painfully overstimulated by the world” angle? It’s incredibly interesting and important to the story later, but it’s introduced and resolved in one scene that could be called “Ma Kent cures autism.”
To be fair, my voice is really, really soothing
6. How can there be an element that’s not on the periodic table? More likely the Smallville jeweler Pa Kent visited blew smoke up his butt. You gotta make your fun in a small town.
7. Could Pa Kent have given Supes some advice — ANY advice — on how to deal with bullying? Kevin Costner is this movie’s empathy-generating device, but even he has nary to say about “use your words” or “express your anger” or “win friends and influence people.” This is a recipe for a Hulk, not a Supes. No wonder Oa sent Lois!

Suffer in silence, son. That’s what I always say.
8. Why do the baddies need to rough up Ma Kent? You don’t need to get someone to do the John-Steinbeck’s-The-Pearl sidelong glance to guess the giant space shuttle is stored in the FRIGGIN’ BARN.
Son, I think I’m bleeding internally
9. Is it really Pulitzer-Prize-level investigation to follow a trail of twisted steel and surfacing school buses? Maybe this film is an indictment of American journalism.
I can’t believe I’m the only one on the planet with this skill set
10.How do you muscle a bus out of open water from below? That would take some Super kicking.
11. How do the Clarks manage to forget their dog during a tornado in the first place? This scene actually worked pretty well so I don’t want to poop on it too much. Maybe the dog was Ma Kent’s responsibility. Stupid Ma Kent and her inability to get to overpasses.
Why doesn’t General Zod try diplomacy? Zod’s black-and-white broken gif kidnapper video is a pretty poor ice-breaker. Baddies should think they’re goodies. Sophisticated baddies should not make speeches that “morality” makes goodies inferior. But that happens, too.
We got it bad and that is good
12. Why do the Kryptonians need Superman whole to remake the Krypton space-babies? They took a blood sample when Supes was on their ship. Is that not enough cells? But I don’t really know how DNA of billions of creatures integrated into one’s cells is supposed to work.
13. What is the point of the “Jenny” character except to give Lawrence Fishburne someone to save? TWICE. If you need a character this freakin’ helpless, please use a child or a dog, though Air Bud would have demonstrated more agency than Jenny does.
14. What the heck was supposed to be happening with the gravitron/black-hole-generator/mass increaser weapon? Seriously, I have no idea.
And there’s no way this didn’t kill thousands of people

I also didn’t follow how the Phantom Zone was supposed to work, when it was a death sentence and then nullified and then a death sentence and then nullified again. But I enjoyed the flight of the frozen space peens.

I WILL FIND HIM and immediately state my intentions
15. After all the flying face-punching, shouldn’t killing Zod require a little more effort? Seriously. I thought it was going to take decaptitation-by-laser-eyes for sure. But no.
16. On a scale of 1 to 10, how problematic is it when Supes tells someone he’s above suspicion there’s nothing more American than being “from Kansas”? Is it more or less problematic that the person he tells this to is black? Would Supes be less “American” if he were Hussein-El? WHERE MY MELTING POT AT?
The real message of this movie is there’s nothing more American than laundry

A-a-a-a-a-a-and SPENT.

If you like thoughtful heckling, you might also enjoy:

12 Lingering Questions about Star Trek Into Darkness

May 20, 2013 Tory 3 Comments

Star Trek Into Darkness is optimal for heckling. It just wants to make you happy and feel a few feels. The actors are game and totally committed. It’s fun, fast and smart enough that its occasional nonsense isn’t offensive. I would gladly see it again. I would gladly buy it or put it in my Netflix queue.

Benedict Cumberbatch's sweet duster into darkness — Duster in Cryptkeeper Black by Hugo Boss

It makes finding haughty questions a worthwhile sport.

So let us find them.

Spoilers abound.

In no particular order.

1) Why is the full-body Alice Eve underpants shot in the trailer from a fleeting, gratuitous moment in the movie? Yes, this question is mostly rhetorical. I also stand by my assertion that all lady underpants shots played for laughs should have mismatched bra and undies. Ain’t nobody wearing matching undies that isn’t planning to have somebody see them. (See Fantastic Four for prior offense.)
2) Why does Karl Urban’s scenery-chomping Bones need Khan’s blood specifically? Doesn’t he have 72 handy frozen bodies with similarly super-powered blood?
3) How does Captain Kirk in another solar system make a cell-phone call to Scotty in San Francisco? Not even a satellite delay. That’s a very smart phone.
But the roaming charges are MURDER
4) Why does Captain Kirk wait until the last minute to deploy his murderous-native-distracting scroll? And why was it they were on that planet in the first place, if not to neutralize the volcano? And why did they have a volcano-neutralizing kit handy?
5) Speaking of, why do all these volcano-neutralizing devices and warp cores need to be managed by hand? Can’t we get some remote control/robots up in this piece? Not to sound meatist, but I think that’s an android on the bridge with the pale complexion and skull vent. Can we use one of his ilk for some of the more life-threatening stuff?
6) Also — I saw some people/beings with the wisdom to wear hazmat suits in proximity to Kirk’s heavily-irradiated body. However Bones is not one of them. Also the hazmat masks had only one aperture — for the right eye. I really have no idea what was going on there.
Would this face irradiate you, baby?
7) Did Captain Kirk ever figure out that his deceit-by-omission of Starfleet was way worse than Spock’s honest “backstabbing”?
8) Can Benedict Cumberbatch move his face above the mouth? Does the sound of his own Smauglike voice give him a boner? Can be he blamed?
Please forgive my self-induced voice boner
9) How and when did Spock develop insane superpowers of leaping and punching in the face? Also — Uhura is the world champion of “No, Spock, it’s too dangerous!” up until bloody revenge is on the line. Then she’s all like, “GO GET ‘EM.”
10) Why did ~~Robocop~~ Admiral Such-And-Such send all 72 bodies/torpedoes with Kirk? (Both Khan and the admiral explain that the admiral knew the torpedoes had bodies in them.) Did he really expect Kirk to use all 72? Or something?
Captain Kirk, renowned torpedo enthusiast
11) Why not send a secret agent captain with the torpedoes/plan instead of patsy Kirk?
12) Is anybody flipping out about all the Enterprise crew members and civilians who got killed during this movie?

A-a-a-and SPENT.

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Jack Reacher is Hilarious

January 7, 2013 Tory 1 Comment

Louis CK told me to be judicious with “hilarious,” but Jack Reacher was hilaaaaaarious.

It was also ugly, with a prison rape joke in the first stanza of dialogue, but mostly it was hilarious.

Just look how big they ‘Shopped his noggin!

Yes, it was a functional action movie on the level of an above-average James Bond. Well put-together. Capably shot and acted. Densely plotted in a way that makes everything feel clever and agreeable until you start walking home.

But I got beefs. I got beefs like Burger King.

The plot problems are funnier, so let’s get the character stuff out of the way.

I haven’t read any Jack Reacher novels, but the character in this movie is split-personality to the point of actual mental illness. This is no crime. As written, he should spend some scenes as a charming jerk (rebuffing the advances of a woman 30 years his junior) and others as a dead-eyed sociopath (telling a baddie he’s going to “drink [his] blood from a boot.”) No problem. He also gives a few sincere, heartwarming pep talks. Er, all right. Workable. The Lethal Weapon franchise is proof of this.

The Back to the Future school of poster cast accumulation

Alas Tom Cruise plays every scene as “badass.” He’s like the first D&D character a middle school kid rolls up that takes a bonus in Intimidate and never touches Diplomacy or Bluff.

(Rampant spoilers ahead, which shouldn’t interfere with your enjoyment of the movie with the inevitable RiffTrax.)

This choice is boring, and it forbids engagement with the character. The scene with the very young flirting woman, Sandy, has a lot of unmotivated nastiness that would at least land softer if he were smiling through it. Later he shows up at Sandy’s work to find her (she’s conveniently at Reacher’s first guess, just as she conveniently shared her workplace info with a stranger she has been led to believe is a creep). Some Bluff or Diplomacy would go a long way here, but instead he threatens her boss, barges his way in, corners Sandy in an office and menaces her there. For a guy who prizes anonymity, this is pretty stupid.

He also menaces attorney and District Attorney’s offspring Helen (Rosamund Pike). He yanks her around by the arm. So does Helen’s dad(!), the aforementioned DA. Also topless Jack Reacher makes Helen all shuddery with lust (ha ha ha ha). Also super-young Sandy can’t stop hitting on him, even while crying, even after Jack has told her “the [women] you don’t pay for are the ones [he] can’t afford,” because in that scene he talks like Elmore Leonard fanfic. Also Jack asks Sandy why she runs with such a bad crowd, and she says, “That’s just what girls like me do,” which is a thing no one has said ever and is also a brainless answer, like the writer dropped in some temp dialogue and never went back to fix it.

Exposed to bad writing at a tender age

Oh, and later Sandy gets felt up by the camera a little more before getting creeped on by a baddie and then slowly murdered.

So it’s safe to say this movie is a rough watch for the ladies.

Anyhoo.

You know that rad scene from the trailer? Where Jack slips out of a police chase and into a crowd? And a cool older dude gives him his ballcap? Yeah, there’s no reason for the crowd to do that. His face isn’t famous. They haven’t seen him do anything heroic. There’s no undercurrent of cop corruption that would cause citizens to automatically abet a chased stranger. It poops on the trailer like nine pigeons on a balcony.

HE KILLED FIVE GRANNIES FOR ALL YOU KNOW

So that’s why this movie didn’t connect as an action film.

Here’s why it totally connected as a comedy:

The inciting incident is that one elite sniper frames another slightly less elite sniper at the behest of a Huge Evil Corporation who wants to disguise one woman’s murder as part of a random mass killing. No, wait! The woman interfered with Huge Evil Corporation’s plan by refusing to sell her business. This resistance is somehow a dealbreaker for HEC’s master plan. So instead of Diplomacy, Bluff or even Intimidate, HEC goes straight to Murder. I hope the woman’s company isn’t inherited by a hardheaded son or daughter, or this family’s next reunion is going to have a skimpy turnout.
In order to kill this woman, who seems to have made the troubling decision recently, the HEC arranges for an evil elite sniper to befriend a troubled but redeemable elite sniper. This befriending has been going on so long that they’ve taken multiple trips to a remote shooting range together. How does such a friendship begin? “Hello, I see you are also an elite sniper. Do you like Thai food?”

I like shooting dudes in the eye. Do you like shooting dudes in the eye?
The HEC is evil because it builds pointless things, like “bridges to nowhere” and “highways nobody uses.” They have done this in multiple countries. I don’t understand how this is a working or profitable scheme. Would it not be sufficiently evil if they used muscle to win, like, legitimate contracts? Isn’t a pointless bridge as expensive to build as a useful one? EVIL CORPORATIONS ARE A SILLY THING IN GENERAL.
I understand it’s hard to marry white-collar crime to wetwork. What you need is some character that occupies both worlds. A Patrick Bateman. A Stringer Bell. Not Werner Herzog as a hyperbolic one-eyed, one-fingered Siberian gulag survivor who doesn’t actually do anything, isn’t connected to the plot in a way I could follow, and turns up for the final shoot-out even though HE DOESN’T DO ANYTHING and he HAS NO FINGERS so he can’t even HOLD A GUN. Why is he here? I think it’s just “look spooky” and “be German,” which he does very well, but oh my God it’s so silly.

I really should not have come to this shootout
Rosamund Pike pretending to be overwhelmed by Tom Cruise’s topless physique is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a month. It’s just such a young adult novel thing to happen. Tom Cruise is plenty physically fit, but he is 50. Rosamund Pike is 33. There are only three reasons a woman that age would be overwhelmed by carnal feeling for a man his age:
- She is drunk.
- They have formed a deep romantic bond over many weeks and many incremental personal revelations.
- He smells like Cinnabon.
Someone dressed Rosamund Pike in multiple low-cut shirts. Cleavage is not a crime, but it is a funny fashion choice for a character who should have been dressed like Rose Byrne in Damages. Perhaps Helen prefers stretch fabrics because she gets yanked around by the arm all the time.

This bosom had more screen time than Werner Herzog
As mentioned previously, Jack Reacher tells a baddie, “I will drink your blood from a boot.” Alas he doesn’t then literally do it, which I believed was the only reason anyone would ever say this. I AM DISAPPOINT.
Jack Reacher asserts “there’s a bus station three miles away and I can walk there in twenty-four minutes.” I can run an eight-minute mile if I am pushing it and slightly afraid. For funsies, the Olympic racewalk 5K record, set in 1995, is 18 minutes and change. I invite you to imagine Tom Cruise elite racewalking right… now.

This, but in jeans and a leather jacket

(No disrespect to racewalking, where competitors walk faster than I can run on my best day with two cups of coffee and everything, but there is NO WAY this is what Jack Reacher means, which makes it comedy gold to debate what he is asserting.)
Jack turns a blind corner to outshoot a dude peering through a lock of Helen’s hair. If you were expecting Bluff, Diplomacy or even a shoe mirror to solve that standoff, YOU ARE DISAPPOINT.
Robert Duvall plays an eighty-year old elite sniper because this movie has elite snipers like my house has loose dog hair. In the final shootout he kills like nine dudes with his own registered rifle. How he is going to deal with the legal fallout of all this remains unclear. If you were hoping for a one-liner about how he is eighty and just needs to drag the trial out a few years, HAVE SOME DISAPPOINT.

Just for fun, I went to Wikipedia and got this description of the books’ Reacher:

Reacher’s demeanor is stoic, and he does not talk much. He has a propensity for saying “that’s for damn sure”. Reacher frequently does not answer when people make statements or ask questions, nodding or shrugging, preferring the other party to fill the silence… Reacher is 6′ 5″ tall (1.96 m) with a 50-inch chest, and weighing between 210 and 250 pounds (100–115 kg). He has ice-blue eyes and dirty blond hair. He has very little body fat, and his muscular physique is completely natural (he reveals in Persuader, he has never been an exercise enthusiast).

Ha ha ha ha ha. I will say if this movie starred John Cena as a dude with half the dialogue who pretended not to work out, everything else in the movie would have made total sense.

I will drink your blood from a boot… ladieeees.

A-a-a-a-a-and SPENT.

If you like thoughtful heckling, you might also enjoy:

23 Silly Things about The Dark Knight Rises

July 23, 2012 Tory 4 Comments

Alfred, that is a lot of silly things

(Thanks is due to many co-hecklers in the production of this heckle.)

Nolan’s Batman saga is like a coin.

The first side features breathless cause-and-effect (Batman Skyhook-extradites a businessman because that businessman eloped with crime boss money because Batman/Bruce Wayne bookends are too good at what they do because Batman.)

The second side features wild coincidence (in a besieged city of 12 million, Bruce Wayne encounters Selina Kyle on a bridge) and wild oversight (Batman never investigates how to mess up the thing that lets Bane, you know, breathe.)

The first side offers great lines (“And you want to blackmail this person?”) and moments of humanity (“Bats are nocturnal!”)

The second side offers extended lectures about what characters want (“I’m Gotham’s reckoning.”) without actually explaining what they want (Reckoning for what?).

The first side has Michael Caine.

The second side has one-armed bicep curling a Liam Neeson.

Bring him a ruby the soize… of a tangewine.

This installment leans heavily toward the second side.

I didn’t have a problem with Bane’s Sean-Connery-doing-a-Bill-Cosby-impression voice (try it!) I thought Anne Hathaway did a fine job even if her character was confusing. But I think close-up fistfights are silly and on-the-nose dialogue is silly and vague pan-Asian torture spirituality is silly so I thought a lot of this movie was silly.

Here are the top twenty-three silly things in The Dark Knight Rises (SPOILERS AHEAD).

– Batman AND Bruce Wayne go on hiatus for eight years. Does anyone make the connection? No, until…

I put the Bat-suit on ice… LI-TE-RA-LEEEEE!

– John Blake (Joseph Gordon Levitt) intuits that Bruce Wayne is Batman because they had similar orphan upbringings and John Blake relates to Batman a whole bunch. Bruce Wayne makes no effort to deny this. The ease with which Blake figures it out and Wayne concedes it makes Commissioner Gordon look really, really dumb.

– Miranda (Marion Cotillard) and Bruce show up to abandoned Wayne Manor at the same time. I missed why. Because it is raining, they make out. Maybe this is because Miranda just picked up Bruce’s framed publicity still of Rachel Dawes, which reminds him what a great idea it is to get romantic.

– Speaking of figuring out who is who, Bane drops a bombshell on Gotham by revealing Harvey Dent killed two people eight years ago. However it’s hard to understand who in Gotham gives a rat butt about this since they are UNDER THREAT OF NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION and locked in their homes like I Am Legend and probably dead because I don’t know how they’re getting food into the city with all the bridges blown up.

This is a thing you still care about, right?

– Also, Bane thinks the Harvey Dent news is big, but when he finds out he doesn’t announce WHO BATMAN IS.

– I don’t know what Bane wants or why his death-willing followers are so loyal. It is probably some vague pan-Asian torture spirituality thing, but it is unclear.

– Gotham PD responds to a bomb threat by sending three thousand cops into stadium tunnels. WORST PD EVER.

– When these cops get trapped, a radio dispatcher tells new Detective Blake “every cop in the city is trapped in there!” Then Blake says, “Not every one!” And then there is a cliche singularity and Brett Ratner becomes self-aware.

What am I doing? My job!

– There’s a nuclear bomb that, according to Designated Science Guy, will go unstable and detonate in 5 months. That five months turns out to be about 90 days (according to TV-screen countdowns).

– Batman needs to recuperate because Bane beat him in a fistfight. Batman got into the fistfight because he was tricked, which is like Spiderman getting sneaked up on. He has the fistfight because he must have left his Bat-everything in his other Bat-pants. He uses no strategy or implements whatsoever against topless, breathing-impaired Bane, but maybe there was a reason and I missed it because I zoned out during this part so hard.

– Batman recuperates in a super death prison… somewhere… deserty. Somebody is running it for some purpose and feeding this prisoners a lot of protein. Also it gets electricity and satellite TV. Also a heueueueuuge amount of backstory gets delivered at this place, about two hours into the movie, plus a Liam Neeson cameo and Christian Bale re-enacting every platformer video game.

– Bruce Wayne climbs out of super death prison and there’s no guard or nanny-cam at the top. If there was ever a time for a nanny-cam, it is when you have Batman in super death prison.

– Bane’s regime forces the condemned to walk across a frozen bay. Nobody gets on their bellies and does the walrus. I woulda got on my belly and done the walrus.

– I’m not going to get into how crazy cold it would have to be for Gotham’s body of water to freeze and how in the non-bay scenes it looks like September, but that is a thing.

– Wayne Enterprises has a code repository for its Bat-Heli-Harrier, and Bruce Wayne commits code to that respository, and his username is “Bruce Wayne.” Also, that is not a terribly active project, because nobody noticed for six months. Also, depending on whether you believe Bane has been in charge for 5 months or 90 days, Bruce Wayne may have committed that code before he knew the Bat-Heli-Harrier existed. WHOA.

– Did the mayor die? Did Bane? I assume so.

I’m the Bat Manuel

– Miranda has the most snerkable death scene since Queen Amidala died of ennui.

– The ensuing here-I-go-to-die chit-chat with Selina Kyle and Commissioner Gordon are the most snerkable here-I-go-to-die chit-chat since ever. There is a nuke about to detonate. If ever there were a time for meaningful glances and a removed mask, THAT TIME IS NOW.

– Former-Detective John Blake throws his badge in the bay. That seems… frowned upon. Also, that bay is frozen, so that seems… ineffective.

– Three minutes later, Commissioner Gordon asks Blake, “I can’t change your mind? About leaving the force?” Which is a pretty great example of the IS THIS CLEAR ENOUGH? dialogue in this movie.

– Speaking of, someone outs John Blake’s real name as “Robin.” First, OW MY NOSE. Second, NONE OF THE ROBINS IS ACTUALLY NAMED ROBIN. Third, IF THAT WERE YOUR REAL NAME WHY WOULD YOU PICK IT AS YOUR ALTER EGO NAME?

– There is one more OW MY NOSE and it is Alfred’s cathartic cafe scene. You have been set up to know exactly what this scene means, so it would have worked better like Monsters Inc to have Alfred look up, smile, and cut to black. BUT NO.

It got all sneefy in here all of a sudden

A-a-a-and spent.

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Splitting Hairs with Brave

June 25, 2012 Tory

I’d have to be a total jerk to criticize Brave.

It’s fleet, entertaining, funny and charming. It’s eye-shatteringly beautiful, exquisitely animated and perfectly performed.

Its heart is in the right place. The slapstick is good-natured. It reestablishes bosoms and buns as comedy gold.

Even the pickiest of hair-splitters would merely be praising it with faint damns.

Yup.

Well.

That hair-splitter’s going to be me.

No hair puns please

Spoilers ahead.

From the advertising for Brave, I figured the movie was about a plucky heroine who runs away from home and inadvertently tangles with dark forces. Or maybe is called upon to defend her kingdom. Definitely something where she’s swording and arrowing it up in the black forest.

So I was a skosh surprised that Brave is a buddy movie about Merida and her mom.

I’m not even in the posters!

Also, weirdly, it’s her mom that has a literally transformative experience. It’s her mom that’s forced to see things from a new perspective. It’s her mom that has a change of heart as a result. Merida has a shallower arc, where she becomes sort of willing to make a sacrifice (but doesn’t have to) and remembers she really loves her mom. This latter part works and is the reason the story succeeds overall, but I still have beefs.

(Brother Bear (2003) is the other Disney animated feature where someone learns compassion after being turned into a bear. After a day at Disneyland, of [former] Bear Country and Country Bear Jamboree and Grizzly Peak, I am forced to conclude Walt Disney just really liked bears, and now it’s in the studio’s DNA.)

So. Beefs.

– Stakes unclear. Merida’s external conflict is she doesn’t want to get married, and her mother wants her to for the good of the land. There are plenty of reasons for a fifteen-year-old not to be real jazzed about an arranged marriage, but while Merida complains it’s “not fair,” she doesn’t quite express what her problem is with it. Is it that she doesn’t want to be told what to do — especially not something as significant as marriage? Fair enough, but not quite expressed. Is it that she’s afraid of losing her small portion of freedom? It’s never stated that marriage would end this. Is it that she wants to fall in love on her own time? That’s the conclusion Merida’s mom, Queen Elinor, reaches, but since Merida never stated this as her beef, it’s not clear that they really came to understand each other — rather than Elinor just giving Merida what she wants.

And what happens if Merida refuses to marry any of her suitors? Ostensibly there will be war, but the clans as presented just sort of squabble in amusing and harmless ways. It’s difficult to imagine Merida’s actions provoking them either way: to get along or to wage bloody war. Merida’s mother tells her a story — one time, a brother went his own way out of pride, and it caused war — but it’s not clear how that relates directly to Merida’s situation.

It’s possible at least one of the clans in Brave should have been menacing instead of funny. It would have paralleled the four clans in Merida’s mum’s story and helped establish the stakes.

– Too many helpers. Several times, Merida gets helped out of a dead end by Will-o’-the-wisps, a witch AND her three mischievous brothers. They’re all rad, but story-wise the wisps are plenty. The witch isn’t foreshadowed and disappears after playing her part. The brothers are highly entertaining but don’t contribute to main story (plus Merida doesn’t seem terribly alarmed that they’ve been turned into bears.) What these three do is solve Merida’s problems on the regular. Trying to escape castle with bear-form mom? Brothers. Can’t find witch’s cottage? Wisps. Can’t figure how to undo spell? Witch. Locked in a tower? Brothers. Even though Merida’s rock-climbing has been established! Oh well.

Thanks, brothers!

– Another bear subplot. There’s a baddie bear named Mordu. He’s an artifact of Queen Eleanor’s story-within-a-story, but I’m not sure he’s necessary, except to motivate Merida’s dad to really, really, really hate bears. It’s not clear why this bear has been laying low for ten years, or why he decides to start roaming the countryside again just because Merida falls in his den. Mordu’s existence does culminate in a fight with bear-form Queen Elinor, which is violent and scary and should fill up /r/AskReddit “What childhood movie traumatized you the most?” threads fifteen years hence.

This one. This one did.

– Red herrings. Queen Elinor gives Merida a necklace, which turns out to be valuable enough to buy the witch’s service. It never shows up again. There’s an enchanted Stonehenge-like-circle that frightens Merida’s horse, but aside from that and being a wisp hangout it demonstrates no magical properties. And! Merida’s horse Angus is established and compelling and then disappears after the first 30 minutes. Angus!

– Thematic messiness. The last act oddly involves Merida wielding a sword to protect her bear-form mother from her father. Her father refuses to believe the bear is Queen Eleanor transformed, and that’s typical movie hard-headedness that I don’t really have a problem with (though I would have liked to have seen Merida try a little harder to convince him.) Having Merida physically fight her dad, however, who has always been loving and understanding before, just has an odd flavor to it. She could have just thrown herself in the path of dad’s sword, a la Pocahontas or Fox and the Hound. This would have supported the theme of personal sacrifice, not called upon Merida to suddenly be apt with a sword, and not weirded me out.

One awkward conversation later, things were fine again

My West Coast Heckling Partner and I bounced story ideas back and forth with the idea of, well, what would a Pixar fairy tale be? It should take tropes and put them on their ear! Some ideas:

– Let the princess start off as a TOTAL COWARD. (It’s called Brave, after all!) As a little girl, she was foolishly fearless, until she endangered her family by breaking the rules. Now she’s overcompensating by being waaaaay too cautious, even carrying around a little abacus to calculate risk before even eating breakfast. When a Big Bad attacks her kingdom, she hides! She emerges to find her kingdom turned to stone/ice/bears/sleep. Now she’s the only one left! Can she use her math skills to undo the Big Bad’s spell before her kingdom shatters/melts/hibernates/is eaten by wolves? Will she learn to be BRAVE?

– Show a wish-granting antagonist (who in normal fairy tales is forever demonstrating to be careful what you wish for) as having good intentions — but just being overly helpful. This troll/fairy/witch might feel hurt and unloved when no one seems to want her spells. You said you wanted it never to rain again! WHY ARE YOU SO MAD AT ME?

I JUST WANT TO BE LOVED.

I had the idea to write up the story in this heckle, but then I think we got onto something and I think I’m just going to what we came up with as a standalone.

So.

You got that to look forward to.

A-a-a-a-and spent.

If you like thoughtful heckling, you might also enjoy:

Prometheus

June 11, 2012 Tory

Might solve a mystery… or rewrite history!

What what.

What what what.

Prometheus is exquisitely made and beautifully acted. The art direction will melt your face. The cinematography will scorch your scalp. But the story is a fractal of mess, where you approach the general shape of the mess and find jutting mini-messes all the way to infinity.

NONE OF THIS MOVIE MAKES ANY SENSE.

It is a Rorschach test of confusion, where you can reflect on it for hours with a heckling partner, comparing notes on which morsels jarred your brain the worst. It is a Master’s Thesis of confusing, contradictory and silly. This is a movie with more red herrings than regular herrings.

Here there be spoiling pretty much everything that happens, and it is graphic, so be warned.

The primary mess is that, in Prometheus, a race of massively muscled translucent white “Engineers” started life on earth, which evolved into humans. Some tens of thousands of years ago, these beefy dudes visited various groups of people and persuaded them to kindly depict a space map on cave walls and whatnot so as to direct humans to a certain planet once they become space-faring. Then about 2000 BC the beefy dudes (and they are all dudes) get SO MAD at us they want to wipe us out. WHY they get SO MAD goes deliberately, infuriatingly unanswered, but if you buy this critique (link from Oddernod) it was because we killed Space Jesus.

Also they have Greek statue faces. Allegory direct enough for ya?

Alas we humans don’t know we made the beefy dudes SO MAD, because we kill pacifist prophets basically as a hobby. So we go on our merry way until about 2089, when a very nice married couple of archeologists (some guy and Noomi Rapace) discover the shocking pattern of space maps, because by 2089 humans have developed shocking advances in CAVE EXPLORING and LOOKING AT STUFF.

Anyway, a megawealthy corporation takes interest in their assessment that an alien species created humankind and left these maps so we could find them. The revealed goal is that the head of this corporation wants to meet the creators of humankind so he can live forever.

It turns out the beefy white dudes got SO MAD they created a new kind of biological weapon — hostile seeds of life itself — to send to earth and wipe us out. They created this weapon on a planet other than their home world. This also happens to be the planet they directed us to before they got SO MAD. But they also put ships on it to ferry these horrible weapons to earth.

Uhhh… so ten thousand years ago they left us maps to a barren planet. Maybe this was intentional, in case they decided later they didn’t like us? But then as soon as we killed Space Jesus, they were like, “Forget it — let’s waste ’em.”

Ah, frick, I don’t know what’s going on.

Or why they sculpted a giant head in their spaceship/military base/welcome station

Anyway, the seeds of life itself kill all the beefy white dudes on this installation (pretty much). And the other beefy white dudes ostensibly on their home planet or wherever don’t make any attempts in the intervening two thousand years to rescue their fellows or nuke the doomed planet or keep trying to kill humankind or anything.

So all the nastiness and spaceships are still on this doomed planet when archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and her posse come to town.

I heart caves!

For a funny critique of this narrative, go here (link also from Oddernod).

Now.

Stuff that was cool:

– Replicant David (Michael Fassbender) dyes his roots blond. Not only does this imply that his hair grows, which is SUPER interesting, it characterizes a robot who wants to look other than his predetermined look. That is SUPER INTERESTING. Don’t worry — not explored further.

Also he eats food! No, David! You will break!

– Idris Elba smokes, plays a musical instrument, flirts and generally acts like a human being, which is nice.

– The spaceships look cool.

– The landscapes look cool.

– Biologist guy wears a future hoodie. It looks kind of cool.

Mess:

– Characters plainly stating their intentions. A geologist proclaims, “I’m not here to make friends.” Don’t worry — this proclamation is not confirmed or disproven at any time. He is quirky Giger fodder and disappears quickly.

– Science-types on a strange planet ALL TAKE THEIR HELMETS OFF. Quickly, with limited discussion. There are no holdouts.

Loo lee loo loo… helmets are for suckers

– The science-types do not act like scientists. They aren’t cautious. They don’t take notes. They don’t measure or document. The geologist doesn’t look at any rocks. The biologist tries to pet an alien snake — like REALLY tries to pet it and doesn’t take no for an answer — like the dumbest dummy that ever dumbed. Even at Yosemite you keep wildlife wild, yo.

– Science-types dissect an alien noggin with no protective gear but gloves. No goggles. They have masks around their necks, which is not a useful place for masks.

– Also the alien noggin is “incredibly well-preserved.” By that, science lady means that, despite having been sitting in an earthlike environment in the presence of mealworms for two thousand years, it is fresh as a daisy. Why? NOBODY ASKS.

– Oh, and there are flying probes that detect life, but they don’t detect all the mealworms. They COULD have detected these mealworms, and everybody looks around and says, “Oh, it’s just mealworms,” so the crew starts to ignore the probes, BUT NO.

– Deliberately flimsy reasons for stuff. Why are nice married archaeologists along on this multi-year adventure? Because Daddy Weyland is “superstitious” and wanted a “true believer.” Really? And “true believer” means what exactly? No one asks, and it doesn’t pay off. The archaeologists are surprised by this. Is this not something you might ask BEFORE embarking on a four-year mission? THEN why is cool blonde Vickers along on this ride? According to her, she didn’t want to stick around the board at Weyland-Yutani trying to figure out who should be in charge, which is apparently a complex issue because Daddy Weyland (Guy Pearce) is still alive. THIS MAKES NO SENSE. If you want to be in charge of a company, you don’t leave it for four years! While the real CEO is gone! In space! Where you decided to join him! AAAAARRRRGH.

– Husband archaeologist is all moody and depressed because they traveled two years and only found evidence of multiple kinds of advanced alien life and biotech, including terraforming. But since there are no living aliens, he can’t ask his important questions! Because archaeologists rely on talking to living beings to get their questions answered. BLARGH.

– For some reason David infects archaeologist husband with alien black slime, because… I dunno? Possibly so he will impregnate Shaw, the archaeologist wife, with an alien entity? This is what happens, but why? This has NOTHING to do with David’s prime directive, which is to put wannabe-immortal Daddy Weyland in front of one of the beefy dude Engineers. I watched this movie like three hours ago, and I seriously have no idea why David infects one, or whether he even intended to impregnate the other. SO BLARGH.

– Also Shaw reminds her husband at one point that she’s infertile. So it’s weird that she gets pregnant (is it truly conception, or implantation?) Don’t worry — this isn’t explored at all.

– When Shaw realizes she’s pregnant and immediately wants to get it out of her — which is at least a thing that makes sense — David drugs her. Two other scientists show up in hazmat suits (protective gear FINALLY) to put her in cryosleep. Why? What did David tell them to persuade them to cryosleep her? Is this just a thing they do? “Hey, you’ve got a bad headache; we’re gonna throw you back in cryosleep.”

– Rather than TALK to the scientists, or TELL ANYONE AT ALL EVER that she’s got an alienfetus inside her, Shaw fights them. Apparently she knocks them both out, because they don’t pursue her. Also apparently she KILLS THEM, because they never appear again.

– Then Shaw sprints off to the Chekov’s gun of Vickers’s surgery pod. We learned in Act 1 that only twelve of these were made, and one is sitting in Wickers’s quarters because she’s safety-minded (FLIMSY REASON.) Shaw requests a C-Section (what), but she has to summarize the procedure because the machine is on a “male” default setting. WHY is this machine set to “male”? WHY is it set to either gender? IT’S A FREAKIN’ POD THAT DOES SURGERY. And WHY is it set to male when it lives in a woman’s quarters? Did Wickers not go through the user’s manual? If anything, it should be set to Charlize Theron’s exact biological description, and short Noomi should have to stretch to seem 5’9″. AAAARRRRGH. (Ohhh. Heckling partner has read that the surgery pod was possibly pre-set for Daddy Weyland, not Vickers, which also explains why its along for the trip at all. OK, but still — gimme a main menu!)

– So now we come to the C-section. Why, why, why does Elizabeth request a C-section and not, you know, AN ABORTION. I think no matter your opinion on abortion you will pretty much agree to a woman’s right to get things out of her uterus that AREN’T HUMAN. But no! She asks for a C-Section, and she gets what, like, George Lucas imagines a C-section is: one long lateral incision, and then a claw machine lifts out the amniotic sac. Handy! Then another device staples her skin shut, and then she’s up and sprinting with the best of them. ALL OF THE BLARGHS. There is a scene from The Fly that should have been here.

– In great pain, Shaw flees down a corridor and happens up on the room where Daddy Weyland is being secretly kept. Was this an accident? Coincidence? Was she looking for someone? No idea. David’s there, and she doesn’t seem too steamed at him about him for drugging her and condemning her to cryosleep while she begged to be unpregnant, so that’s mighty forgiving of her.

– Shaw takes a moment to ask Idris Elba’s captain what he believes in, but does not mention the whole horrific alien pregnancy thing, or that the alienfetus is still flailing around Vickers’s surgery pod. Man, some people just won’t open up.

– Vickers turns out to be Daddy Weyland’s kid. So she has a different last name from him, and that’s progressive, and I’m down, but how did that happen? Wouldn’t she want to keep that powerful last name if she wanted to run the company? But that’s a small potato here.

– The great question of how we made the beefy dudes SO MAD is not answered. It’s left as a cliffhanger, because after two hours and fifteen minutes we did not earn the answer. COME ON.

Stuff that happens but does not pay off in any way:

– Vickers and Captain Elba get it on. This is never mentioned again.

Look out! A story point with no consequences!

– At the beginning, Shaw gets a super-short backstory showing her religious Africa-exploring dad. An hour later David casually mentions that dad died of ebola. This does not come up again AT ALL.

A whole world of random things to mention

– One of the sacrificial scientists (I seriously don’t even know which one) comes back to the ship as a charred heap folded backward on himself. He reanimates, kills some dudes, and they set him on fire some more. I guess they just needed to kill off some crew members, because nothing comes of this later.

– Shaw risks her life to get the giant, “incredibly well-preserved” head back to the ship. She and ~~Lysa Arryn~~ Ford (Kate Dickie) dissect it, and it explodes. A lot of screen time and suspense is applied to the head, but after exploding it never comes up again.

I’m sure there’s more but my brain feels squishy and bad. So.

Spent.

In Defense of Battleship

May 21, 2012 Tory 4 Comments

Battleship pleasantly surprised me.

Successfully selling shlocky dialogue, SIR.

It’s not that I have a soft spot for “E for effort” action movies. Of the Transformers movies (with Rifftrax), I found the first one decent and the latter two punishingly bad. I slept through half of Battle Los Angeles, and War of the Worlds and I Am Legend bored me numb. Even John Carter, with its game actors and healthy sense of humor, annoyed me overall.

What separates a bad-bad action movie from a good-bad action movie? What flaws are forgivable? Why would I be more likely to watch Battleship again than any other of the above? Why would I categorize this movie with Independence Day and the other movies with a dull headache?

(Your mileage may vary.)

Pretty sure this is a still from Battleship

Let us start with the TERRIBLE:

– Anything military Despite my occasional pretending, I really don’t know much about military dress or procedure — all I can do is complain about haircuts and hats. But there are so many lolwuts that the complete lack of trying is entertaining in its own right, such as when Sam and Max visit a Philippines “drawn without reference material.” For example: on the way to RIMPAC exercises, our hero Lieutenant Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) engages in some fisticuffs and gets dressed down by his admiral. The. Admiral. This is like screwing up at work so bad that President Obama comes to chew you out.

Starboard the aft mainsail deck!

Later Lt. Hopper’s commander brother warns him, “They’re going to kick you out of the Navy. The day you get back.” Not now, but later. No court martial or anything. And not a fancy term like “dishonorable discharge.” Just “kick you out,” like the Navy is a big floating Key Club. Silly.

Also there is a tendency in this script for sailors to argue with their superiors. Again, not Key Club. At most, a crazy order warrants a well-timed, incredulous “sir?” But then generally captains in movies are cool heads with clever unfolding schemes, instead of meatheads.

– Anything logical The alien baddies attack only what they perceive as threats, as informed by their color-coded HUDs: green means go, red means destroy. This means they will knock a dude to the floor but then turn their back on him. Not only is this very silly (you are punching me! I punch you back! You stopped punching me! OK, we’re done here!), and raises odd questions (are the aliens a hive mind? Is “threatening-ness” determined programmatically, so that on-the-ground aliens don’t have to face the day-to-day question of what dudes to punch?), but it’s also self-contradictory. Red: industrial equipment, freeways, cars sitting in traffic, battleships not doing anything. Green: dude as soon as he stops punching you.

I can see your Ha-lo… Ha-lo… Ha-lo… Ha-lo-o-o…

– Character design Predator they ain’t. The alien baddies are beige, doughy and have big square teeth (SQUARE!), so they look sort of like Shrek with a beard. They have angry eyes, you know, like the snake in Anaconda, but if you’re going to drop in aliens with no clear objective (colonize the planet? sack it for resources?) it helps if they look dangerous. Like, at all. These space-bros look like they’re just down for beer pong and courting Princess Fiona.

Shaved alien

Can we stop doing the angry eyes thing? It is not scary. Like at the end of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, where the alien is melting Cate Blanchett’s brain, and he leans in one last time and makes an EXTRA mean face, and it’s so silly you want to die of carpet burn?

Now THAT’S a bad movie

– Love interest Brooklyn Decker plays Lt. Hopper’s girlfriend, Sam. I hesitate to blame Decker for the performance lodged in this movie, irritating and unpalatable, like gristle in one’s teeth after a steak sandwich. I don’t think she picked the tank-top, short-shorts, dangly gold hoop earrings she’s forced to wear for most of the movie, which is the outfit she wears to work… as a physical therapist… for disabled vets. Because when helping 250 lb former soldiers with missing limbs, you want as many self-inflicted wedgies as possible.

These are my physical therapist earrings

In Sam’s few scenes, we learn much about her. We learn she is rude to pushy drunks until they commit crimes for her, and then she likes them a lot. We learn she enjoys compliments and making out. We learn that even if a big strong hard-headed veteran of the war in Afghanistan says he won’t do a thing, she’ll be all like, “You’re gonna do it,” and then he’ll do it.

Gregory D. Gadson as Lt. Col. Mick Canales, here to destroy cutesy acting

It would have been neat-O if, in this scene, she had shown her powers of persuasion, or knowledge of medical science, or understanding of his condition, or wisdom of experience, but no. The script does not rise to the occasion, and this scene is a terrible galling waste. A more experienced actress might have been able to make it work, but, as Decker was sent to set that day in dangly hoop earrings and short-shorts, she may not have received much helpful direction on her character’s motivation.

Peter Berg just said to make this face a lot

(Spoilers imminent… If you have any plan to watch this movie, I advise you not to read. The warm glow of Battleship‘s pleasures is not so bright as to survive a spoiling.)

– Random dead people Cities are destroyed. 9/11 imagery is evoked. A skyscraper gets chopped in half, and a whole freeway gets flung to bits by some chainsaw Langoliers. Weirdly I am able to forgive civilians getting killed for my amusement more than I am military personnel getting killed for my amusement. It bothered me less when all of Hong Kong was demolished than when Lt. Hopper’s brother’s ship got blown up. This reminds me that, in response to the death of his brother and countless others, Lt. Hopper gets this reaction shot of “aw, dang!” I understand it is hard for a cartoony action movie to take the time to depict grief, but then maybe it would be better if it didn’t blow up ships full of people ‘n’ stuff.

Now the lollable:

– When an alien encounters Hawaiian horses, its HUD helpfully identifies them with a horseshoe. What. What. What. *head asplode*

– Admiral’s daughter is successfully hit on by law-breaking drunk meathead who looks like he doesn’t smell great. If this were written into the character — that she is secretly super into drunks, meatheads and not smelling good, and has been looking all her life for the right man to give her dad nightmares — well, that would have given her a characteristic, and that would have been nice.

– At the last moment, the cowardly nerd arrives to save the Army vet and the love interest. This is dumb and makes no sense, which in this movie is forgivable, but it’s also unsatisfying, which is less forgivable.

Now the kind of great:

– Rihanna. Totally game. Totally effective. Exactly what she needed to be in this movie. I sort of wish she had played both her rifle-loving role and the love-interest — like, they happened to be identical twins. No, it wouldn’t have made sense. No, that wouldn’t have mattered.

Standing by to blow up Shreks, sir.

– Acknowledging, casting and characterizing disabled vets. Hell yes. It is cruel that Gregory D. Gadson’s naturalistic performance as Lt. Col. Mick Canales is so often paired with Brookyln Decker’s prohibition from doing anything unpretty. However it leads to him bodily beating the daylights out of a space-Shrek, and I found this tremendously satisfying.

– A multiculti cast! With women! And old folks! This is the kind of movie where a Japanese captain reminds American meathead Lt. Hopper that “The Art of War” is Chinese — and Hopper doesn’t have a snotty comeback. Where a white petty officer’s Colonel-Sanders-resembling whiteness is worth remarking about — and there is someone of color around to do it. Where an alien smacks around Rihanna, so she blows him up with a missile (very satisfying.)

Right between the angry eyes

– The entire movie as excuse to take the USS Missouri for one last spin? To honor the vets thereon? To show quintessential young buck rock star Rihanna eagerly taking instruction from them? To the strains of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck”? On some level I hoped this sequence would take us all the way to the credits, a la Death Proof: nothing but old timers blowing the living crap out of an evil spaceship while AC/DC songs played. Well, the movie slows down and has a normal ending, but I still enjoyed it.

– Speaking of inclusion, this movie has an American meathead and a Japanese slightly-less-meathead teaming up IN HAWAI’I and ON THE MISSOURI in order to defeat a greater evil. Come on. COME ON. Admit you were not expecting subtext from Battleship.

SATISFYING

This is why I think Battleship works where others fail. Transformers‘s stupidity serves a racist, sexist, mean-spirited and childish product. Battleship‘s stupidity serves an inclusive, multi-national, good-natured and childish product. Transformers is a thirteen-year-old boy who talks back to his mom and flames strangers on CoD. Battleship is a thirteen-year-old boy who visits his grandparents and offers to help with the dishes.

Come on rude boy boy, I will blow you up

A-a-a-and spent.

11 Things to Love About The Avengers

May 7, 2012 Tory

ASSEMBLED

Boy, howdy, did I enjoy this movie. No surprise. It’s at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s earned the biggest box office weekend EVAR.

But it has stuck with me in curious ways.

Spoilers abound, and if you haven’t seen The Avengers yet I advise you to GO SEE IT and NOT to read this. The little twists and gifts and traps and pointy bits add up to the great pleasure of the movie, and the reason I’d put this Blu-Ray in on any rainy Sunday, whereas Dark Knight might molder in cellophane forever.

WHAT I LOVED:

1. The one-liners
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2. The many-liners
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3. Bruce Banner conspicuously going sans belt, shoelaces or top shirt button. (It’s not wise to constrain the doctor.)
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4. The many conflicts and power-checks. I was like, dang, Joss Whedon really understands how to balance a superpowered ensemble. Where’d he pick that up? Oh, yeah. It’s all he does.
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5. The strategic pairings. Did you want to see Tony Stark and Bruce Banner discuss the gifts and responsibilities of scientific discovery? Yes, yes, you did.
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6. Black Widow and Loki settling in for a good Silence-of-the-Lambs you-tell-me-yours, I’ll-tell-you-mine head-game session — and B.W., unlike Clarice, winning.
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So much better
7. No fan service. Yes, Black Widow’s caboose is carefully lit, but so is Cap’s, and neither of them pose for the camera.
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Okay, maybe a little posing
8. A Pepper Potts that doesn’t make me want to stab myself in the face!
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9. Black Widow being a character. The moment when she tries to calm a hulking-out Banner while shooing away arriving help is worth the cost of admission.
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10. Hulk hulking. Can’t get enough of that Hulky stuff. There is no wrong Hulk here.
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Also he looks like a brute instead of green Superman, which is nice.
11. Tom Hiddleton as Loki. It’s not easy to be the baddie against ~~five-six-seven-eight?~~ a basketball team’s worth of goodies. But he does it all, the preening and the brooding and the funny bits, juuuust right.
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Like Tom Felton and Brent Spiner had a spooky baby

WHAT I DUG:

Joss’s tropes on tropes. The parting scene between Nick Fury and Agent Coulson parallels the same between Mal and Shepherd Book; you could even swap the dialogue. The gruesome death Loki imagines for Black Widow echoes the time Buffy killed Angelus, who turned back into Angel just in time for some last-minute awareness. Then there’s the magic device that makes people tetchy, and I’m pretty sure this was used in a Buffy, not to mention a Harry Potter and a Lord of the Rings.
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There’s a moment where one lone civilian stands up against Loki. You can tell from his age, accent, and music cue that this character is a Holocaust survivor. I could have used a little more time with this moment: this man is the lone voice of courage without superpowers, and the lone demonstration of standing up (literally) for your principles even when you don’t have muscle or firepower to protect yourself from harm. It’s appropriate that Cap is the hero who arrives to defend this man, but I could have used just one minute more with the idea he represents.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE:

– The Brave trailer. Didn’t really do it for me.

WHAT I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND

Okay, so I have a few nitpicks. That’s the fun part. If I weren’t still thinking about this movie, I wouldn’t have nitpicks. And these are like complaining that people on Tatooine cast only one shadow: THEY DON’T MATTER.

What baddie is in charge? Is Loki working for the ~~Master Shredder~~ The Other (played by Alexis Denisof, hell yeah)? Sort of looks like it. If so, what does Loki get in the end — bragging rights? A way harsh prank on Thor? And why does The Other need Loki to pull this caper?
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The outcome of the Black Widow/Loki Lecter-versation is the reveal that Loki wants The Hulk. But for what? He never tries to capture or harness Hulk’s powers. It never comes up again at all, as far as I can remember. Sure, The Hulk is useful for helping destroy the ~~invisible jet~~ flying aircraft carrier, but that doesn’t motivate why Loki sort of gave himself up in the first place.
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Speaking of, The Hulk is set up as an indiscriminate murder force — unable to control his rage or, in the case of his first manifestation, distinguish between friend and foe as he attacks Black Widow. Yet thereafter he has no trouble strategizing, targeting the baddies and eventually rescuing goodies. What changed?
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Even if faked, Agent Coulson’s blood-stained trading cards are biohazardous at best. There’s no assurance Captain America has a superpowered immune system.
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When the portal is opened, everyone agrees the tesseract-employing portal opener can’t be shut off. Loki tells Thor this, and Thor doesn’t even try to bash it with a hammer. Thor tells Cap and the rest this, and all of them are like, “Welp, that sucks,” for the next 10 minutes. No attempt to out-science it or Gamma-muscle it or vibranium-thwack it. Then after a few waves of space orks come through, somebody suggests they really ought to look into shutting that portal down, for reals, and lo there is a way to do it.
Maybe a little earlier SOMEBODY could have had a go at riding up Stark Tower to punch Stellan Skarsgard in the head. At least explained a little more WHY such a thing should not be attempted. Everything else had good rhythm and sense, so the delay in addressing the portal coupled with it being the eventual solution felt a little out of sorts.
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As noted by Random_Tangent, it was peculiar for Cap to go motorcycling with a bare noggin. Maybe he’s not up to date on helmet laws?

Eight people who will never be left alone at a con

So can Joss Whedon make more movies now, or what? Wonder Woman, yes? Two Whedon films a year in perpetuity would be just dandy, thanks.

The Tory Party

Posts categoriezed as Thoughtful Heckler

Lois Lane’s secret in Man of Steel

12 Lingering Questions about Star Trek Into Darkness

Jack Reacher is Hilarious

23 Silly Things about The Dark Knight Rises

Splitting Hairs with Brave

Prometheus

In Defense of Battleship

11 Things to Love About The Avengers

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