Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Posted on April 3, 2014 at 6:00 pm

This is how you make a superhero movie. Director brothers Joe and Anthony Russo are best known for sitcoms with few but passionate fans (“Community,” “Happy Endings,” “Arrested Development”) and the underrated crime comedy “Welcome to Collinwood.” That is not the kind of credential that usually leads to a big budget comic book movie. But they prove to be just what the doctor ordered, funny where it should be, exciting where it should be, smarter than it needs to be, and just plain fun. Plus, I may be late to the party, but now I totally get the shield thing now as offensive and defensive weapons and it is very cool.

This is the sequel to the WWII-era origin story, where Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) a 98-pound weakling, volunteered for a government experiment that turned him into a super-strong super-soldier. But he got frozen in a block of ice and was thawed out more than sixty years later in time to join “The Avengers.” the storyline continues Captain America’s adjustment to the 21st century. We first see him running around Washington D.C.’s monuments neighborhood, repeatedly lapping vet Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie). Pretty soon, they’re talking some mild smack and Wilson is telling Rogers what he has to add to his catch-up list of cultural touchstones: Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man. Also on the list “Star Trek/Wars” and Steve Jobs. Evans and Mackie have a natural chemistry that makes that scene very funny but also shows us how much both of them need a friend who understands what it’s like to be a soldier home from the war.

But then Captain is called into action again. Alongside the Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson, tough, smart, funny, and just a touch flirtatious, as she chats with Rogers about girls he might want to ask out while they trade blows with the bad guys. There’s a mission, a hijacked cargo ship (I kept looking for a captain-esque crossover from Captain Phillips). Straight-ahead Captain America, used to fighting Nazis and other incontrovertibly bad guys who dress the part, expects that the people on his side will treat him with the same trust and respect and integrity he gives them in return. But this is the 21st century, and it’s complicated.

Rogers knows how to follow orders and he knows how to fight. Now he must learn to understand who he is fighting and what he is fighting for. It’s one thing when the bad guy has a Red Skull and wants total world domination because he is a fascist. It is another when both the good guys and the bad guys wear suits and speak in tempered, diplomatic tones, and want total world domination because it is best for everyone. “Don’t trust anyone,” Nick Fury tells Rogers. And Rogers, used to trusting everyone (how many people today would allow the government to inject them with an experimental serum?), has to learn what that means.

And it is one thing to take on a dozen bad guys at a time, knowing none of them have superpowers. But here Rogers must face an assassin called The Winter Soldier, someone as strong as he is, someone without any of the second-guessing that comes from understanding the complexities of the situation, someone who cannot be reasoned with or argued with or appealed to. And someone Rogers knew and trusted in the past.

The easy chemistry between Cap, Sam, and Natasha/Black Widow adds depth and heart to the story. Natasha needs to learn to trust as Cap needs to learn when not to trust. “How do we know who the bad guys are?” Sam asks as they race into battle. “The ones who are shooting at us,” Cap tells him.

There is just enough depth and gloss and humor and heart to set off the action, gorgeously staged in and around Washington, D.C. The elevated Whitehurst Freeway along the Potomac River gets the super-fight it was built for and it is a beaut. Wait until you see what’s been going on under the Potomac. It was a whole other level of pleasure to see a movie that gets Washington’s geography right. Most important, this is a film that respects the genre and the audience. Captain America and his fans get the movie they deserve.

Parents should know that this film includes constant comic book, action-style, superhero violence with many characters injured and killed, guns, bombs, chases, crashes, explosions, weapons of mass destruction, discussion of genocide, torture, fights, and brief strong language.

Family discussion: If you were advising Captain America on cultural developments while he was gone, what would you suggest? What is the biggest problem he faces in trying to adjust to modern times? How do the plans under consideration here relate to current discussions on world affairs?

If you like this, try: “The Avengers” and the other Marvel superhero movies

One-Line Movies With the Year’s Best Actors

Posted on December 2, 2013 at 3:59 pm

The actors who created some of this year’s most intriguing performances each appear in a eleven original (very) short films directed by Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. The one-line scripts are from the year’s best screenwriters, from Lake Bell of “In a World” to Sarah Polley of “Stories We Tell” and Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg of “This is the End.” Watch Oprah Winfrey, Michael B. Jordan, Bradley Cooper, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Robert Redford, Forest Whitaker, and more create a world in a moment.

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Actors Shorts

“Casting By” — HBO Documentary About Casting Directors

Posted on August 17, 2013 at 8:00 am

Anyone who cares about movies should see “Casting By,” a new documentary on HBO about casting directors. It is a rare opportunity to see early glimpses of some of the greatest actors live in their first roles and even never-seen before audition tapes. But more important, it is a chance to understand the influence of casting directors like the pioneering Marion Dougherty, who championed actors like Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and John Travolta and literally changed the face of movies.

In the early studio days, actors were primarily chosen for their looks, including the indefinable “screen presence.” They were under contract, and when it came time to make a movie they would often pick whoever was available from their list of in-house talent. They would train them in-house as well. “They used what people looked like physically to define the character…Can we fix the nose, can we fix the teeth? Last on the list was ‘can they act?'”

The end of the studio era coincided with a change in story-telling on film that opened the door for New York stage-trained actors who looked less like leading men and more like real people, actors who understood a new kind of acting based on “inner being, emotional truth.” The movies were ready for “great actors as opposed to the Hollywood star-making system.” That was where Dougherty came in. She began casting for live television, a trial by fire that was the perfect foundation for getting to know the actors and the business. It is touching to hear the gratitude of the actors she helped. “She can see what other people can’t see,” we learn. “Even before you see it in yourself,” adds Danny Glover.

Gatsby on Film

Posted on May 6, 2013 at 3:53 pm

In honor of this week’s release of the lastest movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age novel, The Great Gatsby, revisit the book and take a look at four earlier versions:

The Great Gatsby (1949) Alan Ladd and Betty Field star in the earliest surviving version of the story, heavy-handed and missing the lyricism of the book. (A 1926 film with Warner Baxter has been lost.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2jh6XkjrHU

The Great Gatsby (1974) Robert Redford and Mia Farrow star in this sumptuous version that is rather static but better than its reputation.

The Great Gatsby (2000) A TV version starred Mira Sorvino, Paul Rudd, and Toby Stephens and preserves more of the narration from the novel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgDQ_aN19NU

G. Audacious, ambitious, and provocative but uneven and ultimately unsatisfying, this film adapts and updates the story. Instead of Jay Gatsby, the Prohibition-era gangster who can’t forget the girl he lost, we have Summer G, the gangsta, the head of a successful hip-hop recording label.

You might also want to take a look at the only movie credited to Fitzgerald during his brief, unhappy stint in Hollywood:

Three Comrades A tragic love set story in post-WWI Germany starring Robert Young and Margaret Sullavan.

Or watch one of the movie portrayals of Fitzgerald:

Beloved Infidel Gregory Peck plays Fitzgerald in this movie based on the memoir of gossip columnist Sheilah Graham about their years together.

Midnight in Paris Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill play Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Woody Allen’s romantic comedy about a contemporary writer who goes back in time to meet his literary heroes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzoOA473wq0

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle Malcolm Gets plays Fitzgerald in this movie about the New York writers who gathered at the Algonquin hotel for cocktails and repartee.

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Books Original Version

The Company You Keep

Posted on April 11, 2013 at 6:13 pm

I can’t help thinking that even though this movie is based on a novel by Neil Gordon, it is primarily a trip down memory lane for director/star Robert Redford. Shia LeBeouf plays Ben, an idealistic investigative reporter a la Redford in “All the President’s Men.” Redford himself plays a “Three Days of the Condor”-style guy on the run from the government and the aging radical living under another name from “Sneakers.” There are the buried family tensions of his first filmas a director, “Ordinary People.” And let’s not forget — no matter how much we try — the long debates about philosophy and policy in his last directing/starring movie, Lions for Lambs, For a moment, I thought he was going to jump off a cliff a la “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

There’s nothing wrong in wrestling with the same themes, especially themes as meaty as the conflicts between our larger responsibilities as citizens and our responsibilities as family members and friends and when the ends justify the means — or when the means just make you into the same kind of bad guy as the people you are fighting.

Redford plays a single dad and small town lawyer who, it turns out, has been living under an assumed name for longer than he lived under his own. When a suburban mother of two teenagers (Susan Sarandon) turns out to be a long-missing fugitive sought by the FBI for her role in a bank robbery that led to the felony murder of a guard (himself a father of two children). The robbery was the last act of a splinter group from the anti-war Weather Underground. (Apparently, this fictional theft was inspired by the 1981 Brinks robbery by members of the Weather Underground and Black Panthers.)

Ben, a reporter at a failing newspaper called the Albany Sun-Times, does some research and discovers that the man known as Jim Kent (Redford) is really Nick Sloan, also a fugitive accused of participating in the robbery. Jim/Nick leaves his 11-year-old daughter (singing sensation Jackie Evancho, sweetly natural) with his brother (Chris Cooper), and goes on the run, contacting the old gang (including Nick Nolte, Richard Jenkins, and Julie Christie), none of whom are very happy to see him.

Meanwhile, both the FBI (Terrance Howard and Anna Kendrick) and the reporter are chasing after Jim/Nick with all kinds of high-tech surveillance (FBI) and looking at old microfilms for the kinds of esoteric newspaper archives and property records that are not even online (reporter).

There is some talk about protest here, with a pause for a professor’s lecture to his class about determination to make absolutely sure we do not miss the point. And there is more talk about parents and children and how they change the calculus of responsibility and a great big metaphor of a character who is supposed to represent all of that.

Like “Lions for Lambs,” this is a talky film, but the balance this time is more on the side of story, and the non-stop parade of top-tier actors hold our interest. The title is as much about our relationship as long-term fans of these masterful performers as it is about the characters who have been hiding out as they come to grips with their failures and betrayals.

Parents should know that there are glimpses of wartime and protest violence and characters use strong language. The movie includes drinking and drug dealing.

Family discussion: How did having children make people evaluate their options differently? Do you agree with Ben’s decision at the end? How did the characters show their different ideas of loyalty?

If you like this, try: “Running on Empty” and “Steal This Movie”

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