Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XIV

As the title suggests here are some short thoughts about the movies which aren’t quite substantial enough for each to merit an individual blog posting.

Edge of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

I blundered into the middle of Edge of Tomorrow aka All You Need is Kill aka Live. Die. Repeat. recently, at a time when I couldn’t commit to watching something, but was a bit annoyed that I couldn’t catch the first 20 minutes before turning off. Then realised that I could do something better, because it was showing on a channel with a +1 option. So I started switching between the two channels, one of them about 15 minutes in, the other 1 hour 15 minutes in. Back and forth, back and forth, even as Tom Cruise tried to explain to Emily Blunt how all this had happened to him before and how he’d got better at navigating this world, death by farcical death. An exposition lecture I was illustrating by channel-hopping. There is a peculiar joy to be derived from rewatching temporally trippy films in such a temporally scrambled way. I have fond memories of watching Interstellar with my Dad two years ago when RTE premiered it at a time of critically low DVR capacity. As a result of something running over we were forced to tape and watch, tape and watch, until eventually we found ourselves fatally behind, and forced to watch live until an ad-break because we couldn’t tape. And once the ads came we were able to finish the few minutes of taped material we needed in order to delete that chunk, setting us back nearly an hour in the story, and then we could start taping again while beginning the remaining 30 minute chunk of taped material. Dad complained at the end, not unreasonably, that he couldn’t make heard nor tail of the last three hours of gibberish.

The MARVELlous Mr Renner?

It’s slightly depressing to think that Jeremy Renner, despite having been pretty vocal about the shoddy writing of his character Hawkeye after The Avengers, is going to spend part of a second decade chained to him. As has been noted hereabouts the cinematic Hawkeye is a pale shadow of his immediate comic-book antecedent in Mark Millar’s The Ultimates. As indeed are all the cinematic Avengers, which is what makes the Marvel Studios juggernaut so very depressing when it exists at the same time in history as Fast & Furious 5-thru 8. Looking back at this decade, as is becoming depressingly unavoidable, it’s clear that what Renner did when he jumped off the Marvel juggernaut was when he really shone: The Town, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, The Bourne Legacy, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, The Immigrant, American Hustle, Kill the Messenger, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Arrival, Wind River, The House, Tag. Renner lights up the two M:I movies, with Christopher McQuarrie dubbing him a fantastically funny ad-libber. His supporting turn in The Town is a masterpiece turning what is often a one-note character in heist movies into a wonderful imp, and in Arrival and Wind River he is superb at grounding sci-fi and Western noir in humanity.

And he built a crooked house

Stephen Errity, who has occasioned a few pieces like this, prodded me to mark 10 years since the first spark of this blog in 2008.

Talking Movies proper began on Sep 1^st 2009, but April 22^nd 2008 saw the staking of this claim in the digital terrain; and there is an obvious topic to hang an anniversary post on. Just over a week later the first review went up – Iron Man… 10 years later, that bloated business plan known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is about to finally pay-off (HA!! Yeah, right…) in the shape of (The) Avengers (3): Infinity of Characters War. I will not be going to it. It’s not just that I don’t care about Thanos, of many of the other characters, or the Infinity Stones that have become a deadly serious ‘Fetch’. Marvel Studios’ omnipresence have made the last 10 years seem very long indeed, and have successfully killed off my interest in their characters, comic-book movies, and comic-books themselves. “Oopsies!”

I’ve charted my obvious decline of interest in the Marvel movies below. I saw the bold in the cinema, the italics on DVD, and the others remain unwatched.

Iron Man

The Incredible Hulk

Iron Man 2

Thor

Captain America

The Avengers

 

Iron Man 3

Thor 2

Captain America 2

Guardians of the Galaxy

The Avengers 2

Ant-Man

 

Captain America 3

Doctor Strange

Guardians of the Galaxy 2

Spider-Man

Thor 3

Black Panther

The Avengers 3

Working my way through the archives in the last week I find myself complaining over time that the Marvel movies lack the outrageous fun of Mark Millar’s comic extravaganza of these same characters, The Ultimates. I vividly remember being pedantically lectured by a bore on how audiences wouldn’t accept a scene as outré as the ultimate Millar action movie fantasy beat where Black Widow jumps from building to building and calls for a gun to be dropped from a chopper above her so she can grab it in mid-air and crash into the next building spraying bullets to save Hawkeye. Clearly, audiences wouldn’t accept this. I mean 3 movies into the MCU audiences had already accepted a bank vault being towed and used as a prehensile wrecking ball in Fast & Furious 5, and would later accept an endless runway in Fast 6, a man running up a falling truck at the same speed and so remaining in situ in Fast 7, and, oh yeah, cars driving out of one skyscraper, into another skyscraper, out of that skyscraper, and into another one. But yeah, Marvel actually adapting a panel from one of their own comics, clearly, audiences would rebel. Just as they howled in outrage and ripped up the seats when X-Men: First Class put the characters in their original yellow and blue outfits rather than the fetish leather that we were told was the only choice in 2000 because audiences wouldn’t accept those silly costumes. Oh wait, they didn’t.

On Doubting The Avengers

I can’t get excited about The Avengers, allegedly the biggest or second biggest film of 2012 depending on who you talk to, even though it should be catnip to me.

The Avengers consists of one successful film franchise, Iron Man, two newly launched franchises (that with their Norse Gods magic as opposed to super-science technology don’t really synch with the interior logic of the successful franchise), Thor and Captain America, and one franchise that has failed to launch, twice, Hulk. That mixture just does not cry out for a super-team-up super-franchise. If in 1991 John McClane and Riggs & Murtagh had joined forces for a super-team-up action-movie buddy-cops super-franchise, Die Hard with a Lethal Weapon, it would have made far more commercial sense than Marvel foisting The Avengers on us.

Commercial sense (and interior logic) aside I have grave screenwriting concerns about the movie. Does anyone really think that one film can successfully contain so many characters? Think about it. Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Thor, Nick Fury, Black Widow, Pepper Potts, Agent Coulson, Loki and The Krulls. What exactly can be done in 2 hours in terms of actual story once you’ve finished establishing ground rules for all those characters (in case some people, as is highly likely, missed some of their cinematic instalments), introduced Hawkeye and somehow not made him ridiculous, and given the stars ego-balanced arcs?

If by some miracle you manage to synch all the fictive micro-universes together into one coherent macro-universe, and massage all the egos involved in juggling several franchise characters, what villains are you left with after the customary slaughter of bad guys in the denouements of the existing franchises? The Krulls. Oh, great. What works well in comics doesn’t necessarily work well in cinema. The Krulls immediately invoke the Mission: Impossible 2 peril. If everyone in every scene could really be someone else wearing a mask then you cease to emotionally invest in anything that happens because it mightn’t be real.

Given these problems does anyone really think that co-writer/director Joss Whedon has it in him to pull this off? Whedon has after all directed only one two film, which had a fraction of the budget and star power of The Avengers, while his most recent filmed screenplay has been sitting on a shelf for over a year, allegedly while the studio debates whether to convert it into 3-D because all horror films have to be in 3-D now. Paranormal Activitys rake in the money without being in 3-D which leads to the suspicion the studio thinks The Cabin in the Woods sucks just as much as Buffy Season 8. Whedon apologised for that arc (so awful that Wolves at the Gate, the largely stand-alone volume written by his Cabin co-writer Drew Goddard, is the only remnant worth salvaging) citing unlimited VFX giddiness…

Thus giving Whedon an unlimited special-effects budget, without Goddard’s counter-weight, may be as counterproductive as giving Richard Kelly the money he always needed to ramble on about aliens, time-travel, philosophy, and water.