Lance Mannion

Wanda and Vision Love Lucy

Posted Saturday evening, January 30, 2021.

Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff---the Avengers’ Scarlet Witch---looks perplexed at finding herself inhabiting a character who’s a mashup of situation comedy leading ladies: She’s in Laura Petrie’s kitchen, wearing one of Donna Reed’s dresses, and making dinner using the magic of Samantha Stephens in Marvel Studio's television series "WandaVision".

Mannion Family Movie Night is routinely The Mannions Catch Up on TV Shows Night. Last night we watched the second two episodes of “WandaVision”, and I think I have a better idea of what’s going on. I had no idea what to think after the first two episodes, which I’m pretty sure was the point.

“WandaVision” takes two characters from Marvel Studio’s Avengers series, Wanda Maximoff---a mutant with magical powers, played by Elizabeth Olsen, and the Vision, an android with Superman’s super powers and Mr Spock's affect, played by Paul Bettany--- and drops them without explanation or lead-up into a world that’s mimics television situation comedies and has them progress decade by decade from one era’s style of show to the next, moving from black and white to color, changing fashions, attitudes, and kitchen appliances without comment or notice. They start off in the 1950s, with Wanda dressed like Donna Reed and Vision like Ward Cleaver, to the early 60s, where they’re suddenly living in Rob and Laura’s house in New Rochelle, to the later 60s and Sam and Darren Stephens neighborhood, to the 1970s and the Brady Bunch’s place, which is where they’re left at the end of Episode Four.

Elizabeth Olsen is going to turn thirty-two in a couple of weeks. I mention this because of what I’m about to get into next.

It happened that the week we watched the first two episodes, I was catching up with the news that Aaron Sorkin is going ahead with a movie about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, reportedly starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, and fans---fans of “I Love Lucy” not of Sorkin, emphatically not fans of Sorkin---were in a collective social media platformed rage at the casting of Kidman as Lucy. Kidman is Sorkin’s second choice to play the part. Cate Blanchett had to drop out.

The fans had suggestions for “better” casting. Chief among the actresses they championed was Debra Messing. More for her smile, her liveliness, her quick wit, and obvious high humor, than her red hair, I think, although the red hair helps.

But another favorite was Kathryn Hahn, whom most people know from “Transparent” and “Bad Moms”, but I recognized as the voice of Doc Ock in ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’.

I never watched “Transparent” or saw “Bad Moms”. But I have seen Hahn work. Last night, in fact, and two weeks ago when we watched the first two episodes of “WandaVision”. She plays Wanda and Vision’s style-changing but not joke-changing wacky neighbor. She’s funny in the part, but looking at her and thinking about her playing Lucy, I wanted to say to the fans rooting for her, “Have any of you seen “I Love Lucy’?”

“Have you taken a good look at Lucille Ball?”

In the 1930s and 40s, Ball had achieved a second-tier movie stardom as a romantic leading lady, usually in comedies or light-hearted dramas, routinely playing the sensible girlfriend of the movie’s clownish, hapless, feckless, or misguided male lead. My two favorite movie starring her in a version of this role is “Sorrowful Jones” starring Bob Hope.

But in 1951, when “I Love Lucy” premiered, Ball was making a shift in her career. Not just from film to television. From leading lady to...clown.

I mean that as high praise. Chaplin was a clown. Keaton was a clown. Laurel and Hardy were clowns. Fanny Brice was a clown. Red Skelton called himself a clown with pride. Harpo Marx was the clown’s clown.

It turned out she had a gift for physical comedy. She could mug, mime, fall down, stammer, blubber, double take, spit take, and take hits (from things like inopportunely opened doors and objects falling off shelves)with the best of them. Some of the best of them guest-starred on the show. Harpo Marx, for one. Lucy did a more than passable Harpo impression, and together they did a take on the famous mirror scene from “Duck Soup”.

She could do all this while maintaining her movie star-beautiful looks. Which was a part of the show’s central joke.

Lucy could have been content to be Desi’s adoring wife, supportive, differential, domestic, ornamental. But she had ambitions.

She wanted to be a star. Of stage, screen, and television.

She wanted to be Lucille Ball.

In her own mind, she already was. She just needed a break, and was always scheming to get one.

Her trouble was she had no talent.

Which gave Lucille Ball plenty of opportunities to showcase her talent for clowning. She was at her funniest when she was acting out Lucy’s incompetence.

There are two ways of looking at this. One is to see Lucy as admirable in her determination to establish a life and career for herself apart from being Desi’s wife. The other is to see her as deserving to fail and being punished for getting ideas. Every week she was put back in her place. It was the 1950s, after all. Either way obscures the main point: Lucille Ball was brilliant at being Lucy Ricardo.

Lucille Ball was forty when she first played Lucy Ricardo. Nicole Kidman is fifty-three and a half. Cate Blanchett is fifty-one. Both are too old to play Lucille Ball at that time. Too old to play Lucy Ricardo who was supposed to be a young housewife. Debra Messing, the fan favorite for the part, going by the gossip on social media, is fifty-two. She’d have been a dream as Lucy during the first “Will & Grace” years. I don’t know about now. Depends on how well she still moves. Whoever plays Lucy has to be able to move.

By the way, Hahn is forty-seven.

For that matter, Javier Bardem, at fifty-one, is too old to play Desi Arnaz, who was only thirty-four when “I Love Lucy” premiered. I think I’d rather see Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, who is about to turn forty, or Gael Garcia Bernal, forty-two, as Desi. I’m assuming the casting rules are that Arnaz/Ricardo has to be played by an actor from a Spanish-speaking country, although not Cuba specifically. Garcia-Rulfo and Bernal are Mexican. Bardem was born in Spain. To me, as important is if he can play the conga drum and sing “Babalu”. Which reminds me: in the 1992 movie, “The Mambo Kings”, Desi Arnaz was played by Desi Arnaz, Jr. Not a bad movie. The novel it was based on, “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” is not a bad novel. Would have been a better novel if it had come with a soundtrack. Come to think of it, it would be easy enough now with the internet’s help to provide a soundtrack yourself. Hmmm...maybe...But never mind for now. Arnaz is a secondary character in the movie. The male lead was played by Armand Assante. The second male lead was played by Antonio Banderas, who would make a great Desi---Arnaz or Ricardo. He’s already proven he can sing and dance. He can do comedy and drama. He’s fifty-one, but he can still move.

All this depends on “Becoming the Ricardos” focusing on “I Love Lucy” as much as on the backstage drama of Lucy and Desi’s romantic and business lives. Sorkin’s 2006 TV series “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” almost never showed us any of the supposedly brilliant comedy whose weekly creation the series dramatized. And it was about characters who were never shown to be funny as a matter of course or even to have senses of humor. So we may get to see only glimpses and snippets of the Ricardos being their TV selves. If what we’re mainly going to see is a middle-aged couple who happen to be in business together growing apart while their marriage fails under the stresses and strains of work, with the comedy that is their work and their business kept offscreen, then Kidman’s and Bardem’s ages won’t matter. Let’s hope Sorkin has learned his lesson.

If he has, then Sorkin should have cast someone who could play Lucille Ball playing Lucy Ricardo. Someone able to be a clown at the same time she was beautiful, who could make her pretty face and hourglass figure part of her clown suit, and then switch to drama when the script called for it, without losing all traces of the Lucy we love. She would have to be able to move. That’s what Elizabeth Olsen is showing she can do on “WandaVision”. She’s expanding the range of Wanda Maximoff as a character by giving her a sense of humor and putting it to work. I’m looking forward to seeing how that plays out in the next Doctor Strange.

Meanwhile, back here at the Mannionville Ranch.

Last night, “WandaVision” made its first direct connection to the Avengers movies. Oliver got a kick out of how the show is treating as serious a situation “Spider-Man: Homecoming” made the basis of comedy. But then, the Spider-Man series is a comedy. So, in its weird, sinister way, is Doctor Strange. And Guardians of the Galaxy. And Ant-Man and the Wasp and, now, Thor. The tragic phase---or I should say epic phase---of the MCU films ended with, well, “Endgame”. The next phase is the picaresque. I wonder how Captain Marvel will fit in with that. Shouldn’t be hard to manage. After all, now that Captain America is out of the picture, Captain Marvel is the Marvel’s equivalent of Superman, and Superman is DC’s comic (Sorry. Can’t write around it.) hero.

Last note: fans on the web, and here in Mannionville, were thrilled when a character they love from the comics turned up in episode four and looks to become an important character. But I was more happy to see the return of a character from Thor, with a newly minted Ph.D. but without her intern.

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Yeah, I know. Ageist. So is my belief that forty-three-year-olds shouldn’t be starting at quarterback in the Super Bowl, but Tom Brady begs to differ.

“WandaVision” is available to stream on Disney+.

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Taking Chadwick Boseman to heart

Posted Sunday morning, August 30, 2020.

I’m sure you’ve all heard. Chadwick Boseman is gone.

I didn’t know he’d been so ill. The last movie I saw him in was the last movie there was to see him in, Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods”. I was a bit startled by the sight of him. He didn’t look well to me. He looked thin and haggard. I wondered if that was for effect. He was playing a soldier in the Vietnam War and I was thinking he was meant to look war-weary. But I also wondered if his age was beginning to tell. He was forty-three. That’s hard to accept, going by how young he looked in “Black Panther”, which he made when he was forty. He was ten years older than Jackie Robinson was his first season with the Dodgers when he played him in “42”. But now it’s clear it was that he was losing his four-year-battle with cancer.

“42” was the first movie I saw him in, and I took him to heart at first glance. I didn’t have a fantasized friendship with him. I didn’t see him as a surrogate me. Somehow I can’t explain, he struck a chord in me. It might have to do with the Dodgers connection. More likely, and more simply, I just liked watching him work.

He struck chords in a lot of people. A lot of people took him to heart. By all accounts, he was a genuinely good person.

I’ve only seen two of the movies in which he had the starring role, “Black Panther” and “42”. I have to fix that. Tonight the plan is to watch “Marshall” or “Get On Up”, but I hear “Message From The King” is good, so we may go with that. At any rate, I’ve only written about him once on the blog. For no good reason, I didn’t write a formal review of “Black Panther”. And it’s on the list of my top favorite movies of the 2010s. Go figure. I did write a review of “42”. It’s a long one, so I’m not going to repost the whole thing here. But here’s an excerpt from the heart of the review...

As Robinson, Chadwick Boseman is heart-breaking in conveying that sense of aloneness and the what must have often felt unbearable loneliness that would have gone with it.  I have some vague memories from my kidhood of the white-haired Civil Rights leader Jackie Robinson became, but I only know him as a player from film clips so I can't say with any certainty how close Boseman comes to capturing the real man. Rachel Robinson seems impressed enough. But Boseman isn't built like Robinson---Robinson looked and ran like what he was, a former star running back at UCLA---so he can't quite match that sense of dangerous abandon on the basepaths.  Imagine what it was like to be a shortstop of the time, who tended to be puny and anemic, and looking up to take the throw from the second baseman on what is now not going to be a routine 4-6-3 double play seeing Robinson coming at you as though you are all that stands between him and a touchdown.  Boseman doesn't fly, he sprints like an athletic actor who might have run track in high school.

Robinson's voice was high and piercing and he spoke fast with the volume turned up. Boseman speaks low and slow. No one would describe his Robinson as the real Robinson's teammate Don Newcombe once described him in an argument, as not just wrong but " loud wrong." And the thoughtful look in his eyes is that of someone who sees obstacles ahead as problems he's quietly worrying his way toward solving, while the brilliant glint in Robinson's eyes was that of a man who sees obstacles as challenges to be met head on, at top speed, and at full force.  And if, as the great sportswriter Roger Kahn said of him, Robinson burned with a dark fire, Boseman smolders.

But impersonation isn't required. Boseman plays Robinson as what he was in essence, a proud and talented man called upon to be two things he would rather not have had to be, a hero and a saint, and one thing he was but only more so, a great ballplayer. Boseman captures the pressure and the frustration and the strength, but he also conveys the natural human fragility. He's strong enough that we believe he'll stand up to it all, but we can see how he might break.

In case you’re interested in reading the whole review, follow the link to “A Man Alone” at the blog.

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ABC is showing “Black Panther” tonight, without commercials. It starts at 8 EDT. “42” is available to stream on YouTube. So is “Marshall”. You can watch the “Da 5 Bloods” and “Message From The King” at Netflix.

Humans to the rescue in "Thor: The Dark World"

Posted Sunday morning, May 12, 2019.

While Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) recover from another family squabble, astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) does that thing she does that makes her the heroine of "Thor: The Dark World" and the only true leading lady in the Marvel’s Avengers series of movies---think for herself.

[Note from your mighty blogger and critic: Continuing posting my reviews of previous movies in the Avengers series while I dither about writing a formal review of "Endgame". Oliver Mannion tells me that in his own online explorations regarding the Avengers and Disney's future plans for the Marvel franchise he's come across a lot of fans looking back on the series and coming to a new appreciation for "Thor: The Dark World". Both of us were glad to see this. It's one of our favorites, despite its featuring, as Oliver says, the worst villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When Malekith makes you miss Whiplash, Oliver contends, you know something's gone very wrong. Anyway, here's my review of "Dark World" from 2013. You'll notice I call Natalie Portman's Jane Foster the only true leading lady in the MCU. At that time, she was. Obviously Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow holds that role now, but that only began to develop a year later with the next installment in the saga, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier". It's funny, though, how, even though Portman decided not to continue in the series, Jane has remained important as the set up for the running gag of Thor vainly denying his heartbreak and his humiliation at being the one who got dumped. More evidence, as if its needed, that Chris Hemsworth is a great comedic leading man.]

The mortals save the day in Thor: The Dark World.

Thor helps out but he’s taking direction from the mortals, a team of scientists led by an astrophysicist named Jane Foster.

Thor’s girlfriend.

The love interest is the movie’s heroine.

This continues to give the Thor movies something the other entries in The Avengers series don’t have. A true leading lady.

In Captain America: The First Avenger, Peggy Carter’s role is to admire Cap and be admired back. She’s there to remind us that Captain America is everything he’s said to be and to represent the purity of Cap’s heart---when he gives his heart to something or someone, his country, an ideal, his best girl, his devotion is total, unswerving, innocent, and self-less. (But not blind or unquestioning.) Peggy is more of a symbol than anything else and the most important moment in her and Cap’s love story happens when she’s not on screen and the sexy blonde WAC plants a kiss on Cap that knocks him for more of a loop than anything Hydra has thrown at him. Peggy walks in on it, but we’ve already seen that Cap is more appalled than she’ll ever be. He can no more respond to another woman’s sexual advances than he could to a bribe from the Nazis.

In the Iron Man movies, Pepper Potts has a similar role. She has to admire Tony for us in order to remind us that although he can be a big jerk, there’s a man inside the armor (emotional armor, that is) worth caring about and she has to be admired back so that we can see that Tony isn’t entirely without a heart. Otherwise, she’s mainly there to be the damsel in distress.

I’m not sure if The Incredible Hulk is still considered part of the series. I think the only part of it definitely in the ongoing storyline is the part where he “broke Harlem.” But Betty Ross was an admirer and object of admiration and a damsel in distress and not either a heroine or a leading lady.

At any rate, Cap’s, Iron Man’s , and the Hulk’s love interests are defined by their relationships to their men.

Thor is defined by his relationship to Jane. Jane is defined by her relationship to her job and fits everything else in around that, including Thor.

And he likes it that way.

The Plot of Thor: The Dark World has Malekith, ruler of the Dark Elves of Schwartlfheim, leading his army of weirdly bug-eyed masked stormtroopers into a war to destroy Asgard and restore the universe to its original darkness. To succeed, Malekith needs to gain control of a simultaneously gaseous and liquid substance called the Aether, an energy source of, naturally, world-shattering power, and take advantage of a “Convergence,” when the nine realms of the Norse mythological cosmology will line up and all kinds of new laws of physics will come into play while old laws will no longer apply.

In short: SCIENCE!

Well, science-fiction.

Which is why we’re going to need a scientist to save the day.

Meanwhile, Thor and Jane have some issues to iron out and Thor’s mischievous and conniving brother Loki connives and makes mischief but to what purpose and who’s side is he on?

At the beginning of the first Thor movie---which now needs a subtitle---Thor and Loki have each fallen to the same temptation to think their special talents and abilities and their status as sons of the king exempt them from the rules all the other gods, mortals, and monsters have to live by. And die by.

Thor is punished for this sin and learns from it. But he learns his several lessons mainly through his dealings with Jane. And one of those lessons, the one that comes fully into play in The Dark World, is that god of Thunder or no god of Thunder, prince of Asgard or no prince of Asgard, superhero or no superhero, he doesn’t have to be the one in charge all the time. Not only that, but being in charge isn’t a matter of bossing others around and expecting them to follow your instructions. It’s a matter of listening to others’ ideas and letting them step up and take charge of seeing those ideas through.

This is the virtue that allows Jane to be a heroine. (It’s also a virtue Loki knows how to take advantage of.) Thor is willing to listen to anyone and will even let Jane’s goofball intern Darcy tell him what to do if the situation calls for it.

As The Dark World opens (I almost wrote As the Dark World Turns), Thor and Jane have been separated and kept apart and out of touch by various adventures and misadventures for two years. Both have been heartbroken, but Thor has had more to do to keep his mind occupied. Jane has been pining for Thor, though, and spending her time looking for a way to contact him up in Asgard. But as soon as she’s presented with a significant scientific mystery to solve, she puts the God of Thunder right out of her thoughts and focuses on solving it.

Of course this the moment Thor chooses to show up again. But Jane doesn’t go all swoony. Her attitude is, Oh good, you’re back. I’m glad. I’m mad at you for leaving me in the lurch like that but I still love you and we can work it all out later. Right now I need you to help me with this. Get to work.

Jane is one of the best written of all the characters, male and female, in the Avengers series and the best, after Loki, of the characters in the Thor movies. She’s allowed to think and speak for herself and as herself. She’s independent-minded as a matter of spunky heroine course and she’s intelligent by definition as a multiply-degreed astrophysicist, but it’s more than that.

She’s been given a mind that works independently of her role in the plot.

It doesn’t hurt that she’s played by Natalie Portman, one of the best and most intelligent actors in the whole Marvel franchise.

My favorite Jane moment is actually a moment when Jane’s intelligence fails her. When she learns that her goofy and less than competent intern Darcy has hired herself an intern of her own, we can see all the gears in Portman’s/Jane’s head spinning as she forgets everything going on around her and tries to comprehend the absurdity of that. Her brain just freezes up. It’s over in a moment but it’s a brilliantly delivered mental double-take.

Portman builds her performance on moments like this as Jane thinks her way through or around whatever problems and dangers the script throws her way. It’s not by any means a purely intellectual piece of work either. Portman’s Jane is full of warmth, spirit, humor, and just a hint of irritability. Having a superhero for a boyfriend and getting to be an action-adventure heroine yourself as a consequence has it charms, but it does get in the way of getting your real work done.

As good as Portman is as Jane, though, it’s still Tom Hiddleston’s Loki who gets off the best lines and steals the show, again, committing his thefts with a glance, a grin, a lifted eyebrow, a completely hypocritical but thoroughly convincing soulful look in the eye. This time out Hiddleston is allowed to play for some pathos. It turns out Loki has a heart capable of more than self-pity and mild, self-interested affection. He does love. And so he can have his heart broken too. In one scene, Loki lets one of his illusions drop and we get to see the effect of that heartbreak and it’s harrowing.

Of course, it’s still Loki and Hiddleston makes sure we’re left wondering what Loki’s scheming despite his bereavement.

Hiddleston’s performance, however, is dependent on his give and take with Chris Hemsworth’s Thor. So is Portman’s. And with both, it’s mostly Hemsworth doing the giving.

I don’t know if it’s all Hemsworth’s doing or if he’s just been very well-served by three directors now, but he’s made Thor’s willingness to step back and let others take over a defining quality of not just Thor’s character but his performance.

You’d think a guy that big and that handsome would have trouble blending in. But, while in my review of the first Thor I compared him to several actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, particularly Errol Flynn, in his ability to become part of ensemble without toning down his leading man star power, he reminds me of…Gary Cooper.

If it was appropriate for a Norse god to say Aw shucks, Hemsworth would pull it off.

There are times when his Thor is beaming with affection and respect for his friends (and Loki) that you can see in Hemsworth’s eyes the urge to applaud his co-stars. Nobody gets pushed off screen by his size, looks, muscles, or charm. If anything, he draws them more towards centerscreen.

It’s getting past the point where it’s worth rating the Avengers movies against each other. The producers, directors, and writers are doing a good job of making them feel all of a piece. Still, I’d put Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Avengers at One, Two, and Three, with Iron Man 3 at number Four. But I have a growing soft-spot for Thor and Thor: The Dark World and it seems underappreciative to say they come in at Six and Five.

The Dark World explicitly rejects any idea leftover from the original comics that the Asgardians are actual god or even demi-gods. They’ve been reinvented as a long-lived and muscularly robust species of anthropoids with a technologically super-advanced civilization who have kept the trappings and mores of their ancient Viking-esque culture.

This creates a problem visually, particularly during the perfunctorily directed and digitized battle scenes on Asgard where the design and special effects clash and things on screen begin to look like mashups of outtakes from the Star Wars prequels and Lord of the Rings.

But Thor: The Dark World, like Thor before it, isn’t all that interested in itself as an action-adventure movie.

This is true of all the Avengers movies. Action-adventure is the given, not the be-all and end-all. But if the Iron Man trilogy (so far) is a potential tragedy unfolding and Captain America is a classically romantic hero’s journey and (if it still counts) The Incredible Hulk is a horror story, Thor: The Dark World is a comedy.

Or a tragicomedy, at any rate.

Bad things can still happen. But comedy doesn’t exist without tragedy and vice-versa.

None of the Avengers movies are short on humor. They wouldn’t be Marvel if they were. They’d be DC. (A fact Warner Brothers and DC seem perversely determined to emphasize.) But the Thor movies are different from Captain America and the three Iron Mans in that, battles and catastrophes aside, it is more continuously humorous and the comedy isn’t mainly a matter of wisecracks and mishaps. The comedy and humor arise out of the interplay of the characters just being their all too human and human-like selves.

Even Odin.

Which brings me to this…

I would have liked to have seen more of the Warriors Three. They’re back, now reconfigured to include the lovelorn warrior-princess Lady Sif along with the roistering, boisterous bruiser Volstagg and the roguish Errol Flynn avatar Fandral. (For some reason Hogun the Grim gets pushed out of the story very early on.) Each gets a few funny and swashbuckling moments, but really they’re relegated to background to make room for the adventures and misadventures of the Scientists Three.

Kat Dennings and Stellan Skarsgard return as Jane’s intern with an intern Darcy Lewis and her mentor and surrogate father Erik Selvig. Since we saw her last in the first Thor, Darcy has grown in confidence and developed a sense of authority without acquiring any of the competence that ought to be the basis for both. Selvig, meanwhile, is struggling to regain control over his own thoughts after having spent most of The Avengers brainwashed by Loki and the struggle’s not going well. He has enough self-command to head on up to Stonehenge to make some crucial calculations, but not enough to remind himself he doesn’t have to be as naked as an ancient Pict to do it. He can deliver a coherent lecture on the physics of the coming Convergence but seems unaware that delivering it to a hospital ward full of psychiatric patients, while he is one of those patients, probably won’t result in anyone taking necessary action based on his findings. Darcy and Selvig are potentially clownish characters then, but they’re saved from clownishness by Dennings and Skarsgard’s playing them as straight as can be---Darcy and Selvig make perfect sense to themselves---and by director Alan Taylor’s taking them on their own terms and making sure we do too, especially in the final battle against Malekith when almost all Thor can do is hold the line un.

til the scientists get their equipment set up.

The fate of nine worlds depends on a small band of nerds being able to calibrate under pressure.

Which leaves us with this as the moral of our story:

Being a big, strong, handsome blond superhero with near godlike powers is fun and all, but when the universe needs saving, call out the human beings.

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"Thor: The Dark World", directed by Alan Taylor, screenplay by Christopher Yost and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely. Starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Stellan Skarsgard, Idris Elba, Christopher Eccleston, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Kat Dennings (Darcy Lewis), Ray Stevenson, Zachary Levi, Tadanobu Asano, Jaimie Alexander, Rene Russo, Chris O’Dowd, and Anthony Hopkins. 1 hour and 52 Minutes. Rated PG-13. Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.

"Avengers: Age of Ultron": Of gods and monsters

Posted Thursday night, May 9, 2019.

Frankenstein and his monster: Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark (Iron Man), begins to doubt he’s done the right thing in trying to bring about “Peace in our time” by creating the artificial intelligence software Ultron in Iron Man 4. Wait. I’m sorry. I meant Avengers: Age of Ultron.

[Apology from the critic: Still trying to decide how to go about writing a formal review of "Avengers: Endgame" and if i even want to. Meanwhile: G.K. Chesterton put together an essay collection popularly known as "Chesterton on Dickens". I think I've written enough posts on the Avengers series of movies to put together a collection called "Mannion on Marvel". (Agents and editors please take note.) I've been worried about over-thinking "Endgame". Based on a re-reading of my review of the second Avengers movie, "Age of Ultron", what I should be worrying more about is over-writing. But I over-thought it too. Tony Stark as Doctor Frankenstein? Anywho...the key item here is that I saw "Age of Ultron" not so much as an Avengers movie but as "Iron Man 4". Along with a lot of people, including the makers of "Infinity War" and "Endgame", I've come to see the whole series as Tony Stark's story, his Romance. He's a knight in shining, nano-tech armor.  From summer of 2015, here's my review, slightly revised, of "Age of Ultron". Oh, and the Frankenstein thing? Not really such a stretch.]

There’s a very simple story at the center of Avengers: Age of Ultron. A very simple, very old, and very true story. The story of an idealistic but vain scientist who, seeking to conquer death, creates a monster in his own likeness whose monstrosity lies in its---his---being at the same time more than human, less than human, and all too human. The monster escapes his creator’s control and runs wild, revealing himself to be not a conquering of death but a bringer of it. But the real horror is in his having a mind of his own and desires of his own that mirror his creator’s. The creator is forced to look in that mirror and see himself for what he is, a monster of vanity and ego, who has unleashed his own evil and set it loose upon the world. It’s a story, then, about how what we take pride in as being the best in ourselves can turn out to be the very worst.

This re-telling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Tony Stark as Doctor Frankenstein and Ultron as his monster---Did you think I meant Bruce Banner and the Hulk?---might be easy to lose track of in the noise and confusion of the overlong and repetitive battle scenes amid crumbling cities; the irrelevant inclusion of an underwritten subplot that amounts to little more than a set of teaser-trailers for the Not-Coming-To-A-Theater-Near-You-Until-November 2017 Thor: Ragnarok; the clumsy attempt to work in the Hulk and Black Widow movies that will never be made; and the overly-insisted upon group angst about whether or not the Avengers will ever be a true team---a question I thought got asked and satisfactorily answered in the first Avengers. 

But I think the problem---which is probably only a problem for me---is caused by Age of Ultron’s having been mistitled as an Avengers movie and not as what it is.

Iron Man 4.

But then I don’t think Marvel Studios really has an Avengers series unfolding. They have two parallel stories of individual heroes that are on their way to merging in a dual tragedy. Steve Rogers’ and Tony Stark’s---Captain America’s and Iron Man’s.

Before I get into that…

Marvel has been either lucky or brilliant in the casting of its leads and supporting players in most of its productions, which now include Agent Carter, Daredevil, and Ant-Man, all three of which feature excellent leads and supporting players. (The less said about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the better.) I’m particularly (and sentimentally) impressed by Chris Evans as Captain America. I think he’s done a wonderful job of putting the lessons of Christopher Reeve’s Superman to work in playing a hero too good to true and making his goodness believable, likable, sympathetic, attractive, and---the truly super feat---fun. But Robert Downey Jr is still the best of the lot. Evans is good in Age of Ultron and James Spader is better, stealing most of the show with his amazing voice work as Ultron, but Downey is never blown off the screen---except when Iron Man is literally blown off the screen, which happens a lot, maybe too much. Like I said, the battle scenes get repetitive, but never mind. Spader has great fun with his monologues, making well-written lines sound like brilliant ones and brilliant ones sound like Shakespeare. (I think I’d better explain that below.) But Downey matches him easily, filling his every sentence with an essential Tony Stark-ness. Which is to say, that just about whatever he says, no matter how witty, charming, and smart is tinged with competitiveness, ego, jealousy, selfishness, and…insecurity.

A good example is in an apparent throw-away moment, Cobie Smulders as former S.H.I.E.L.D agent Maria Hill---who, unfortunately, is turning out to be the Avengers’ Girl Friday instead of Agent Coulson’s replacement as Nick Fury’s Right Hand and heir apparent---addresses Stark as “boss” and he immediately corrects her.

“He’s the boss,” he says, meaning Captain America, “I just pay for everything, design everything, make everyone look cooler.”

It’s beautifully delivered but a great deal of its beauty is that Downey imbues it with all those qualities I mentioned: wit, charm, smarts, competitiveness, ego, jealousy, selfishness, and self-doubt.

Downey makes it plain that Stark accepts Cap as the team’s leader and knows that that’s how it ought be but also that he also can't help feeling that he could bethe leader and can’t help letting Hill know that too and know why and know why she should be impressed with him, as if she wouldn’t be already and would be more if she didn’t also know what an overgrown brat he can be, a fact he knowsand has come to dislike about himself but which he can’t seem to correct.

These qualities, with the emphasis on the wit, charm, and ego, have defined Downey's characterization of Tony Stark since the first Iron Man.  And that characterization is thematic. Running through all three Iron Man movies and now both Avengersmovies is the question Who is Tony Stark and what does he want? and all those qualities mixing up together make that a hard question to answer.

The first Iron Man ends with Tony announcing “I am Iron Man.” But that turns out to be a problematic statement because while it's true in the most obvious way, it's also a declaration that he’s a superhero and Iron Man 2 calls that into question. In fact, in Iron Man 2, Nick Fury decides Tony's not a superhero, or at least not up to being one of Earth's mightiest heroes, and although he doesn't kick him off the Avengers project, he demotes him, from hero to technical support. Tony earns a second chance, but in the first Avengers he has to prove he deserved it, that he is a hero and not, as Cap accuses him of being, just a big ego operating a suit of armor that does all the real work. Tony proves it---to the team, but apparently not to himself. That's what Iron Man 3 is about. Tony becoming a hero in his own eyes.

Now we find out that there's a problem with that.

Tony developed a real hero's heart. He did not lose any of his vanity. He did not learn, like Cap did long ago, humility.

It's not enough for him to be a hero. He has to be the hero.

Which brings me to the other part of the answer to who is Tony Stark and what does he want?

He's Howard Stark's son and he wants what he cannot have. His dead father's approval.

Specifically, he's the son of a brilliant and successful father who was, Tony feels, aloof, overly demanding, overly critical, and whom he has in significant ways surpassed. All his life he has been in a competition he can't win for a reward he can't have.  Howard Stark wouldn't acknowledge his son's genius while he was alive and now he's not around to applaud his success and achievements---and admit he’s been bested.  Add to this that Tony has given himself the mission of making up for his own and Howard's mistakes and sins, something that comes back to haunt him and the other Avengers in Age of Ultron, in the persons of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.

If all that sounds neurotic and even juvenile, it's mitigated by Tony's having nobler ambitions. He sincerely wants to fix everything and save everybody.

Like I said, he wants to be a hero.

Unfortunately, like I also said, vanity is still a problem.

Tony wants to be the one who saves everybody and fixes everything.

He wants to be the hero.

He says he built Ultron so that the Avengers won't be needed anymore. But he does it in the belief that he doesn't need the other Avengers to help him. (He enlists Bruce Banner but pretty much relegates him to the role of Igor.) Basically, he believes that the world already doesn't need the Avengers. It just needs him.

In an argument with Cap, Tony defends what he was attempting to do in creating Ultron, prevent war forever or, as he says, thinking he’s being cute and ironic, bringing about “peace in our time.”  Cap won’t buy it. “Every time someone tries to stop a war before it starts,” he snaps. “Innocent people die. Every time.” A line that might inspire anti-war liberals with Iraq in mind to cheer, but which is really kind of a strange thing for a veteran of World War II to say. Wouldn't it have  been a good thing if Hitler could have been stopped before? (Leaving aside the question of whether he actually could have been stopped.)  But there's an answer, which Stark doesn't give, because this is an action-adventure movie not a novel by Tolstoy and there isn't time or space for philosophic and historical debates. Innocent people die in wars, many innocent people, so isn't trying worth it anyway, if only on the chance that maybe only fewer innocent people will die?

Again, no time or space in the movie or in a movie review even on this blog. But quickly. Stark's mistake is that he has already had this debate with himself and made decisions by himself, leaving everybody else out of it. He has assumed knowledge, wisdom, responsibilities, and power that Cap, a conventionally religious man of his bygone time, would probably say belong to God.

Like I said. Frankenstein.

This is where the stories of Iron Man and Captain America begin to converge in a way that, for me, turns the Avengers saga into a side story.  The real story, now, is leading into the next Captain America movie, Civil War.

Of course I don't know what's coming. But this is what I see being set up. Tony Stark is going to bring about what he says he created Ultron to do, put an end to the Avengers.

To put it in mythological terms, he's going to bring about the breaking of the Round Table.

In my review of  the first Avengers, The Romance of Tony Stark, I said that if you see the Avengers as having parallels to the stories of King Arthur and his knights, Tony is Lancelot. Not in personality but in the potential role of tragic traitor. He and Lancelot share the same tragic flaw, a willingness to put their own desires above what they know to be right. In Lancelot's case, it's his love for Guinevere that undoes him. In Tony's, it's his need to be the hero.

In my review, I said that I didn't see Captain America as King Arthur. But Winter Soldier changed my mind about that.

S.H.I.E.L.D. turned out to have been based on the premise that “Might Makes Right.” Cap doesn’t just believe like King Arthur in “Might for Right.” He believes that Right Makes Might. His ambition isn’t just to make the world safe. It’s to make it right.

He dreams of Camelot.

With this in mind, you can guess which scene in Age of Ultron I got the most kick out of: the scene at the party celebrating the Avengers' defeat of the last remnants of Hydra. The guys---Clint (Hawkeye) Tony, Rhodie ( who, thankfully, has given up calling himself the Iron Patriot and gone back to being War Machine), and Steve Rogers---take turns trying to lift Thor's hammer.  Of course, they can't try as they might. As we know, only he---or she. I've been following what's going on in the comic books.---who is worthy can wield the hammer. The guys know this and they don't really expect to succeed. But they've had a few and they are guys, after all. They're showing off. But once they get going, Tony's competitive juices start flowing. He becomes determined to lift the hammer.

It's not to prove he's worthy. He doesn't take that part seriously. (Downey tosses off a couple of great one-liners on the subject of how he will treat his subjects when he takes Thor's place as ruler of Asgard, and, again, the lines are witty and charming but tinged with vanity. He's in effect telling Thor he's not impressed with his being a god and hero-king.) What he wants to show is that lifting the hammer doesn't prove anything except that you've mastered the trick of lifting it. And he's convinced there's a trick and equally convinced that if there is he's the one who can figure it out. That's his main job as an Avenger.

But when it's Cap's turn, we see Steve approach the task with a bit of reluctance. He's doing it mainly to be a good sport. But he gives it his all and...

The hammer moves.

To Thor's shock and consternation---Chris Hemsworth does a terrific double-take here.---and to Steve's own, well, fright. He gives it one more mighty tug but his heart isn't in it and, as we know from The First Avenger, it's his heart that gives him his strength. The super soldier serum only worked on him because he had a good heart.  Then he gives up and the implication is that he does because he doesn't want to know.

Not that he isn't worthy. He already knows he's worthy. That's what makes him Captain America. He doesn't want to know he's worthier. He doesn't like being as worthy as he is. He’s weighed down by the responsibilities and filled with self-doubt. He doesn't like what being worthy has made him. Sad and alone, out of time and out of place. A misfit. A freak. A monster, in fact. In yet anther Frankenstein story, one he explicitly tells about himself in this movie, the kindly Dr Erskine who invented the super-soldier serum is Frankenstein and he, Captain America, is the Creature.

Chris Evans, working with some beautifully understated dialog, makes Cap almost as witty and charming as Downey's Tony Stark, but he gives Cap a kind of reverse vanity. While just about everything Downey as Stark says is a form of boasting, just about everything Evans' Cap says is self-deprecation.

I don’t recall any specific moments when we see him reacting to Cap’s modesty, but it probably drives Tony nuts.

Here's where it gets messy.

Like it hasn't already, Lance?

If a big part of who Tony Stark is is Howard Stark’s son, then in his eyes Steve Rogers would naturally be something of a stand-in for his father.

That’s how Tony first came to know of him, as his father’s good friend and war buddy. He grew up listening to his father talk admiringly about Cap and from that he learned to resent him. Doesn't matter what Howard said or how often he said it, what Tony heard was an incessant criticism: Why can't you be more like him?

In other words, Tony would have grown up thinking of Captain America as the son his father wished he had instead of him.

It's no wonder that when he meets him in the flesh, Tony's filled with jealousy and an intense spirit of rivalry that would be hard to overcome even as the two became good friends.

Which they have. With not a whole lot of interaction, Downey and Evans make it clear Tony and Steve like each other, have fun together, and rely on each other. The spirit of rivalry never goes away, though, and it's felt on both sides, because more than they are friends, they are, spiritually, brothers.

We all know how things tend to go between brothers in literature. (And in movies. If you want to push it---and I'm always ready to push these things---there are parallels between Steve and Tony and Thor and Loki.) Steve, even though he's younger---discounting the seventy odd years he was frozen in the ice---is in temperament and in effect the older brother, as well as the favorite son.

All right, maybe all that's too mythological. But superheroes are often said to be our new myths---mostly it's said by fans of the comic books and the artists who make their livings creating them. If it's true, however, it's only when they've escaped the comics and other mass media where they have their origins and enter the collective unconscious to the point that they resonate with the very many people who don't read comic books, play video games, or watch the TV shows and go to the movies. That's happened with Superman and Batman. You can geek out for days debating which others have achieved Superman and Batman's mythological status.

Obviously, for me, Captain America is part of my personal mythologies.

But if these stories were truly myths, they would have endings. And the endings would all be the same. The heroes die. That actually happens to the mythological Thor.

It can't happen to the comic book heroes.

Well, it does all the time. But I mean they die and stay dead. They don't, as Cap advises in Age of Ultron, walk it off.

Their stories have an end which no stories told about them can go past. As far as I know that's only happened to Barry Allen's Flash.

Oh no.

Don’t tell me…

At any rate, there’s too much money riding on the popular heroes’ immunity to mortality.

Now, the heroes of the movies can die and stay dead. And that could happen in the Avengers saga. If the twinned stories of Iron Man and Captain America are truly myths, Civil War will be a tragedy that ends with the breaking of the Round Table, Lancelot's self-imposed banishment, and the death of Arthur.

It could happen. It doesn't appear to be in the offing. Avengers 3 and 4: Infinity War I and II are in the works. The intriguing thing is that as things stand Downey won't be in them. I haven't heard for sure about Evans. He may not be. That doesn't mean Iron Man and Captain America won't be.

There's precedent for recasting.

Look out! Here comes the pesky Spider-Man!

Again.

But to get down to it at last, this is why I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron as Iron Man 4 and why, as far as I was concerned, after the scene with Thor’s hammers all the Avengers except Iron Man and Cap could have disappeared from the movie until the inevitable climactic battle. Thor, for all intents and purposes, does.

Like I said, mostly what he does between the hammer scene and the final battle is show up in interpolated teasers for Thor: Ragnarok.

As for that final battle, and all the big battles, I could have done without them too. For one thing, the cgi work is too detailed. Watching all those buildings crumble into dust, all I was thinking was “Who’s going to clean up that mess?” (Note to stickler fans: I know who’s going to clean up that mess. The point is I was focused on the mess.) But mainly, what I wanted and what I think the story needed was a final confrontation between Iron Man and Ultron, and, even better than a good fight, a good scene between them like the one between Tony and Loki in the first Avengers.

As for watching a good fight, it’s interesting that the one good one between Ultron and an Avenger is between him and Captain America. I took that as symbolic.

The battles themselves are well staged. I’m sure Whedon had other things on his mind but they play like he was saying to Man of Steel’s director Zack Snyder, “Thisis how you do it.” Whedon keeps the focus on his characters as characters---that is, they are always being themselves as they run, jump, dodge, duck, fly, and fight. He doesn’t just use them as avatars in a video game. And he makes sure that we see that most of their efforts go into saving people. We see and feel that there are actual human lives in jeopardy and that it matters if even one person in the crowd dies.

And as for the characters…

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Quicksilver and Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch aren't given much to do. He's cocky and she's angsty. As the movie goes along, he gets cockier, she gets angstier. But pretty much they're here to save on time spent on exposition in the next Avengers movies.

I'm glad Whedon let Paul Bettany, who's been doing charming work as the voice of Jarvis, Stark's computer sidekick since the first Iron Man, appear as another new Avenger, the Vision. He's a little too much of a vision for my taste, but he's a needed calming, civilizing, and distancing presence. It's a relief to have a character who has some perspective and who can think clearly about what is happening and what the Avengers ought to be up to.  I don't expect that sanity to last. This is, after all, the Marvel cinematic universe.

Even though I didn't need to see them in this movie---as opposed to in those movies of their own that will never get made---it was good to see Jeremy Renner do more than take aim convincingly while cracking wise, Mark Ruffalo do something other than wrestle with his rage, although he still does a fair share of that, and Scarlett Johansson show yet another side of Black Widow, even if that side is that of the good-hearted bad girl who, to paraphrase Valerie Perrine as a variation of the type in Superman, doesn't get to get it on with the good guys.

Chris Hemsworth’s underused, again. Whedon gives a supporting female character a line that lets us know that he knows which of the Avengers most female fans---and gay male ones, I presume---want to see the most of and then doesn’t give it to them. Instead, proud and unabashed dork that he is, he lingers on Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, and makes him the focus of the longing female gaze. Ruffalo’s good, of course, but he’s nowhere near as pretty as Hemsworth and Banner is, after all, a dork. Hemsworth, though, makes do with what’s given and it’s important to notice that most of his best work is silent. He’s a natural comic actor and all he needs is his eyes.

Spader, as everyone acknowledges, is the stand-out star. When I said he turns his dialog into Shakespeare, I didn’t mean flowery or poetic. I meant that he makes the words alive to the character saying them. Ultron’s listening to himself. Choosing the words carefully. Writing his own script. Writing himself into being. Hamlet does this. Falstaff does this. Iago and Rosalind do it.  Ultron knows himself to be performing. He’s literally making himself up as he goes. And not only is he creating himself in his own eyes, he’s forcing others to think of him as he thinks of himself.

I probably need to come back and rewrite that.

That’s it. Time to wrap this up. But one more scene before the credits roll.

Whedon has been given a lot of credit for shaping the Avengers saga and giving the movies their tone and spirit. But I think what he deserves the real credit for is recognizing what was already going on, accepting it, liking it, and running with it. The first and most credit, I think, should go to Jon Favreau, and I was happy to his name show up in the credits of Avengers: Age of Ultron as an executive producer.

It was Favreau, as the director of the first Iron Man, who set the tone and gave the series its spirit and sensibility. And the best thing he did to do that was fight to get Robert Downey Jr cast as Tony Stark.

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Because the running time of this review isn’t long enough: My reviews of the first Avengers, The Romance of Tony Stark; Iron Man 3, Big Man in a Suit of Armor; and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Cap being Cap, the goodest of good guys.

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Avengers: Age of Ultron, written and directed by Joss Whedon. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Cobie Smulders, Don Cheadle, James Spader, and Samuel L. Jackson. Rated PG-13. Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.

Filed under Avengers Assemble.

"Iron Man 3": Big man in a suit of armor

Posted Wednesday morning, May 8, 2019.

Iron Man beside himself:  Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark feels less than invincible as he contemplates what else he is without his suit of armor besides a genius, billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist, and wonders if he’s up to that job in Iron Man 3.

[Editor's note: Still working my way toward a formal review of "Avengers: Endgame". Part of the work is re-reading my reviews of the previous movies in the series. It's making for curious reading. For instance, here's my review of "Iron Man 3" from June 2013. I remember liking it better than it sounds like I did, but that's typical of me---I overthink when I write and that distances me from my feelings about a movie, so I tend to make movies I enjoyed sound less enjoyable and movies I disliked sound less dislikable. But the thing about this review that surprised me is my thinking that Tony Stark's story was over. That puts me in disagreement with my own review of the first "Avengers" movie, and I wonder why I thought so. My guess is that I was reacting to news floating around at the time that Robert Downey Jr was done with the series. And I need to rewatch it, but I suspect director Shane Black and his fellow screenwriter Drew Pearce were reacting to it too and might have shaped "Iron Man 3" so that it could be seen as an ending if it did turn out to be Downey's last hurrah as Iron Man. By the way, the painkillers remark? Spring of 2013 is when my back problems started to become severe. It might not have been the medicine that was dampening my appreciation of the movie. It might have been the pain. Anyway, take that for what it's worth.]

Maybe it’s the painkillers talking, but I’m about to write a review of Iron Man 3 arguing it’s a two hour commentary on Pixar’s "The Incredibles."

This isn’t a joke. After all, "The Incredibles" is one of the best superhero movies ever made, right up there with "Spider-Man 2", "Batman Begins", and the original "Iron Man". Every superhero movie ought to be able to stand up to comparisons of one type or another with it.

No matter where I go with this, I will not be arguing that Pepper Potts is sexier than Mrs Incredible.

But think about it. Syndrome is a version of Iron Man. Both owe their powers to available technology which means both are walking, flying, fighting advertisements for the notion that anybody can be a superhero. Syndrome not only embraces the idea, he intends to peddle it. Tony Stark rejects it, but what is it Cap says to him in "The Avengers?"

“Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?”

And that’s the big question. What makes Iron Man a “super” and not merely a spoiled man-child playing with a lot of cool toys he’s invented?

What makes a “super” a superhero is one of the themes of "The Incredibles". It’s the theme of the Tony Stark/Iron Man arc in the Avengers series.

"Iron Man 3" is the story of Tony Stark trying to answer for himself the challenge Captain America put to him in The Avengers:

“Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?”

Stark’s comeback, “Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist,” is funny but empty, because it’s missing a word.

Superhero.

Or even just hero.

Stark tries to get back at Cap by calling him a lab rat and belittling his powers. “Everything special about you came out of a bottle.” Which shows that he must never have read his father’s notes on the Super-Soldier project.

We know, from "Captain America: The First Avenger," that everything special about Steve Rogers was already in him. That’s why Dr Erskine picked him. The serum just brought it to the surface. At heart and in his soul and to the physical degree he was capable of, Steve Rogers was already Captain America.

"Iron Man 3" is one of the better-made of all the movies in the Avengers series. But I left the theater feeling strangely let down and anxious and…lonely.

Alienated might be the better word.

This ennui surprised me because I thought I had been enjoying the movie while I was watching it. Mulling it over afterwards, I got half way to concluding I’d just been put off by the obligatory ad for the video game that’s become the standard climactic battle of every Marvel superhero movie. At least this one varies from the endings of "Spider-Man 3", both "Fantastic Four" movies, "Iron Man", "The Incredible Hulk", "Iron Man 2", "Thor," and "The Avengers". It doesn’t take place in the city streets full of crowds of screaming civilians running pointlessly to and fro while cars and trucks blow up around them and pieces of buildings rain down on their heads. But it’s confused, directionless, repetitive, purposeless in that it doesn’t build toward a satisfying confrontation between our hero and the villain, it just keeps throwing up more obstacles between them until the director and his stunt coordinator run out of gags and the whole thing just sort of times out, nihilistic, perfunctorily violent for violence’s sake, visually ugly, boring, and ultimately just another big noisy mess, and it’d have been no wonder if it was what had soured me on the film.

But then I realized that all the battle had done was dampen the sense of fun to the point that I was left feeling more strongly something I’d been feeling all along.

Sad.

And it dawned on me that "Iron Man 3" is in fact a sad story about the losses that come when you reach a certain age and you turn around and realize you are now the grown-up in the room and everybody around you is relying on you and you have no one to rely on yourself in the same way, because all the grown-ups you used to count on are gone from your life.

In "Iron Man" and I"ron Man 2", Tony Stark behaved as if he didn’t need anybody and nobody really needed him. Being a superhero was just something he did to amuse himself. In The Avengers he got a lesson in teamwork. He found out he couldn’t go it alone. The question was going to be whether the lesson would take.

Maybe we’ll get the answer to that in "The Avengers 2". In "Iron Man 3", Tony learns something else, that he was never as alone as he’d always thought and prided himself on being. But he learns it by finding himself suddenly very much alone. And he learns it while also learning that being a superhero isn’t something he can do for kicks. It’s something he’s obligated to do because other people need him to be one. And he learns that when as it happens he doesn’t have his superpowers.

Big man in a suit of armor. Take that away and what is he?

Jeez. No wonder Tony’s so sad. And since he’s still played by Robert Downey, his sadness is profound and convincing and, at least for me, infectious.

This is the first Iron Man---the first Avengers---movie without a certifiable grown-up, good or evil, to guide, advise, support, or challenge the hero, or, as Stark has always taken advantage of, mother, father, big brother or sister him. Agent Coulson is dead. Nick Fury is off doing whatever it is he’s doing with Cap in The Winter Soldier, along with Black Widow. Jim Rhodes is busy trying to chase down the super-terrorist known as the Mandarin. Happy Hogan’s in the hospital. Jarvis, Stark’s cyber-assistant and alter-ego, has been knocked out of commission. And, while Pepper Potts lives to take care of Tony, the trouble coming his way is way beyond her skill set and it isn’t long before she’s in no position to take care of him in any way.

Even Iron Man is out of the picture for much of the picture.

That is, if you accept that it’s the armor that makes Tony Stark Iron Man and not Stark who makes the armor something more than a machine.

Stark’s tried and true suits of armor have disappeared in the rubble of his house after the Mandarin’s minions leveled it in a helicopter attack and the one suit he has left is a prototype designed to assemble itself telekinetically but it has a few bugs in its program so that at the moment it’s much better at disassembling itself. It has a habit of short-circuiting and falling apart on him and eventually, instead of carrying Tony through the air, Stark is hauling it through the snow on a makeshift litter.

Tony is left to save himself, save his friends, save the President, save the country, and save the day all on his own, and it’s not a job he feels at all up to.

"Iron Man 3" isn’t about learning that with great power comes responsibility. It’s about learning that with responsibility you don’t have enough power to take care of everybody you’re responsible for and yet you still have to try to take care of them.

In "Iron Man 3", we get to see Tony doing things he hasn’t had to do before---think seriously about what he’s up to, doubt himself, ask for help---and not doing things and being things he’s used to doing and being. He has to not be so full of himself, not deflect criticisms, not shrug off or joke away feelings. In short, he has to act like an adult. Since he regards all this adult behavior as a drag (and an assault on who he thinks he is), he is add odds with himself in a way he hasn’t been before, consciously.

And he’s not sure whose side he’s on.

He jumps back and forth, but either way he jumps he treats himself as he’s been in the habit of treating everybody, dismissively, with impatience, with a general lack of sympathy, with offhand contempt, and as the deserving object of his meanest jokes.

And this means we get to see Robert Downey doing something he hasn’t had do to often in the series, play it straight. He gives us a Tony Stark who’s sober, somber, sorrowful, afraid, and…lonely.

It’s disconcerting. And of course Downey does it all very well. Maybe too well. Which it’s why it’s like I said earlier. Infectious.

Nothing that happens in "Iron Man 3" undid that for me.

Since Tony is on his own throughout much of the movie, Downey is on his own too. He has some fun moments in the early going with Jon Favreau as an unhappy Happy Hogan and a funny scene with a couple of the villains’ henchmen who let themselves get a little cocky after making the mistake of thinking that Tony Stark without his armor is just a billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist. But his scenes with Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts and Don Cheadle as Jim Rhodes are mostly a matter of their focusing together on the same spots on the green screens. All his best work with the Rebecca Hall as a sexy scientist with a secret and Guy Pearce as an unsexy scientist with a bigger secret is over and done with in the first fifteen minutes of the film.

And when Stark at last confronts the Mandarin, Downey’s main job is to hang back and feed Ben Kingsley pieces of scenery to devour.

The closest then Downey has to a co-star to really share a scene with is eleven year old Ty Simpkins, who plays Harley Keener, a fatherless middle-schooler with access to a workshop Tony commandeers to try to repair his recalcitrant suit of armor after it crashlands in the woods outside Harley’s small town in Tennessee.

Harley is a budding engineering genius in his own right and desperately in need of a father-figure, so naturally he takes to hero-worshipping Tony right away, something the old Tony would have enjoyed as his due but at the moment, beaten up from within by self-doubt and self-recrimination and not in the mood to hear what a swell guy he is, something he doesn’t feel he deserves. This has Tony brushing off Harley’s attempts at friendship which allows Downey to deliver some of the most acerbic anti-child acting since W.C. Fields last said, “Go away, son, you bother me.”

If you’re thinking that Tony and Harley sound a little like they're paralleling Mr Incredible and Buddy Pine at the beginning of The Incredibles, then you’re thinking along the same lines I’m thinking, but you’re ahead of me. I’ll catch up.

Downey and Keener make a good team, but given that Tony is divided against himself, Downey is really his own main co-star and mostly left alone to play against himself. Which means we finally get to see Tony Stark/Iron Man in the full Hamlet mode that’s the signature emotional state of Marvel’s superheroes.

This doesn’t mean he’s all gloom and doom. Like Hamlet, Downey’s Stark is still quick with a joke and, since the suit of armor’s been taken away, we get to see him (Downey and Stark) do something else we haven’t really seen him do yet, play the action hero. And Downey has a ball with it. As is the case with any great movie star, the man can move.

Stark is in good shape and he’s had training that’s made him a martial arts expert, but he’s no Captain America without his armor. What he is, though, is a genius. That’s his superpower: his ability to think and invent and build on the fly or, since the suit’s out of commission and he’s grounded, on the run.

He has to MacGyver his way through various challenges and around obstacles and past dangers and out of all kinds of trouble, and, as he showed in his last three outings as Tony, Downey is a genius at playing a genius. He doesn’t just look and sound smart, he moves smart. As a scientist, he’s poetry in motion. As an engineer, he’s a dancer and a painter, a musician and a performance artist. He makes the act of creating look creative.

Of course, what we’re really seeing is if without the suit of armor, Tony Stark is still Iron Man.

There’s always been a distant allusion to the Tin Man of Oz in the Iron Man myth, the working and survival and metaphorical existence of Tony’s heart being always and often literally an open question. Tony’s brain is what powers and empowers the armor, but what the suit needs is a heart. The Stark chapters of the Avengers series have been about the search for Iron Man’s heart.

But in "Iron Man 3", there’s one more missing element Tony has to find.

Courage.

Tony has never been a fraidy cat. But that’s not the same as saying he’s been courageous. What’s to be afraid of when you’re the Invincible Iron Man?

But it’s not physical courage he needs. He has plenty of that, although with him it’s a fine line between bravery and a recklessness born of pure vanity. Tony needs to find the moral courage to accept grown-up responsibility for other people even though he doubts he has the strength or the wisdom necessary for the job.

Ok. This has gone too far down the Yellow Brick Road. Let’s back up so I can get back to "The Incredibles".

In most superhero movies and most action-adventure movies in which the supposedly normal hero is in effect a superhero, the villain drives the plot in one of two ways.

Either he’s just going about his business as a supervillain and his scheme to control or destroy whatever he feels he needs to control or destroy is really just an excuse to show our hero acting heroically.

Or it’s personal. For one reason or another he has it in for our hero. His schemes to control or destroy are just ruses to draw our hero into a trap and, of course, force him to act heroically.

Sometimes the two get combined. Things get personal because our hero gets in the villain’s way and the villain’s feelings are hurt by that.

In The Incredibles it’s the second situation. It’s very personal for Syndrome. But with this variation. It’s the hero’s fault.

This is where things can start to border on the tragic or, at least, on the grown-up. Sometimes it’s personal because the hero has, to one degree or another, helped bring about the evil he has to confront and defeat.

And in effect, this puts our hero in conflict with himself.

Kind of goes without saying that The Incredibles isn’t a tragedy. Neither is Iron Man 3. And neither one is really intended for grown-ups. But it’s definitely an important theme of both movies. And The Incredibles does a better job of developing it and resolving it.

Both movies begin with our heroes making the same potentially tragic mistake. They reject offers of help from characters they make clear they regard as not worth their time or attention.

Stark does it with less reason and more cruelty and with a gratuitous demonstration of open contempt. But the effect is the same. The characters whose help they reject return to threaten everyone they love and they return having reinvented themselves as evil shadows of our heroes.

And their intention isn’t simply to destroy our heroes.

It’s to replace them.

Syndrome wants to be the superhero. "Iron Man 3’s" villain wants to be…Tony Stark.

They’re also in it for the money, of course. But that’s gravy. Mainly what they’re after is the sense of self-aggrandizement and self-satisfaction Mr Incredible expressed in rejecting Buddy’s application to be his sidekick. “I work alone” means I don’t need anybody else. But it also means “I get to take all the credit and reap all the rewards.”

Mr Incredible can only triumph by recognizing the mistake he made that brought Syndrome into existence and rectifying it. He has to face up to the fact that he can’t work alone and, not only is this well played-out in the dialog, it’s resolved in the climactic battle.

That’s what makes The Incredibles far more satisfying in the end.

That and that Syndrome is just a much better written villain with a far more interesting and sexy sexy henchwoman.

Also, "Iron Man 3" has no Edna Mode.

"The Incredibles" gives Mr Incredible time---and better dialog---in which to realize what’s he done and face up to the consequences.

Tony does realize his mistake but he and we have very little time to process it before the video game boots.

And the big noisy mess that’s the climactic battle sequence in Iron Man 3 doesn’t play out as a confrontation between Tony Stark and his own evil shadow.

That might have contributed to let down at the end. I think there was something else, though.

So, "Iron Man 3" isn’t as good as "The Incredibles". But how does it stack up against the other Avengers movies?

Pretty well. I’d rank them this way. "Iron Man", "The Avengers", "Captain America: The First Avenger", "Iron Man 3", "Thor," "The Incredible Hulk", and "Iron Man 2".

But it’s getting to where asking which movie you think is best is like asking which chapter of a novel you liked best. All the chapters share in a fan’s affection for being part of the same book, and that’s the point. Iron Man is now thoroughly part of the Avengers series and I missed the other Avengers, Cap most of all. Not just because I’ve always liked him the best, but because his story is still ongoing.

Tony’s almost certainly going to be back for "The Avengers 2" and possibly for an "Iron Man 4", and there’s already talk of recasting when Robert Downey decides to take off the armor for good. But really Stark’s and Iron Man’s story was completed in "The Avengers" and in a very real way "Iron Man 3" is about driving that home---the story is done and it’s time to say farewell.

So maybe that’s what I was feeling at the end. A sense of loss.

It’s over and I’m going to miss this Iron Man.

Filed under Avengers Assemble.

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Yes, Stan Lee’s back for another cameo, and, yes, you should sit all the way through the end credits.

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"The Incredibles", "The Wizard of Oz", Hamlet?  Really, Lance?  Of course. What else would you expect from the English professor who reviewed "The Avengers" as a commentary on the Knights of the Round Table?

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Like I said up top, as much as I like Gwyneth, Mrs Incredible is far sexier than Pepper Potts. But know what else? Much as I like Don Cheadle? No way the Iron Patriot is as cool as Frozone.

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Saturday Matinee update: I'm not the only one who saw references to The Incredibles.  Via Oliver Mannion: How Iron Man 3 Should Have Ended. Probably you shouldn't watch if you haven't seen the movie. Spoilers, of course, but also the jokes won't work if you don't know the film.

"Iron Man 3", directed by Shane Black, screenplay by Drew Pearce and Shane Black. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyenth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Rebecca Hall, Guy Pearce, Paul Bettany, Ty Simpkins, Jon Favreau, and Ben Kingsley. Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.

"The Incredibles" is available at Amazon as well, on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly.

Avengers Dis-Assemble: Trying not to overthink "Endgame"

Monday morning, May 6, 2018.

Last Avengers standing.

Saw it yesterday. “Avengers: Endgame”. Not sure how to write about it. Not sure I can write about it. Not sure I want to write about. I’m worried about ruining it. For you and for me.

I’m not talking about spoilers.

I’m talking about feelings.

I’m not a poet. I can’t write about the emotions stirred up by a work of art without pushing them to a safe distance. I had a history professor in college who told us at the beginning of a course that was going to spend a lot of discussion time on art that he didn’t trust artists. “They waffle.” He punctuated that line with the well-timed lighting of a cigarette. Yes, I’m that old. Professors could smoke in class. Well, don’t trust professors. We overthink. (No lighting of a cigarette.) I have enough professor left in me that I overthink my movie reviews. Overwrite them too. You may have noticed. I don’t want to overthink “Endgame”. I don’t want to think about it at all. I just want to remember it. I want to keep feeling what I felt while watching it. The scenes that made me laugh. The scenes that made me cheer. The scenes that made me cry---there were many of those scenes.

“Endgame” is a movie about love and loss.

Even the villain has his heart broken. It’s his own doing and fault, and it doesn’t make him less of a villain---if anything, it makes him more of one---but it’s still affecting. It’s still human, even if he’s not. All the main characters, even the ones who aren’t technically, are human, all too human.

To paraphrase another movie franchise from days gone boy: of all the Avengers movies, “Endgame” is the most...human.

Anywho…

Here are a few I hope not over-thought thoughts for now. They include what may be spoilers, although I’m going to try leave out as much detail and generalize as much as I can. Still…

Spoiler Alert!

Don’t read past here if you plan to see it.

Now…

I’ve read several online comments that made the point that “Endgame” is best appreciated if you don’t watch it as a single movie but as a string of episodes in a streaming TV series. I think that’s apt. “Endgame” is a serial adventure story. For that matter, the whole “Avengers” series has been a serial adventure story. “Endgame” breaks down pretty neatly into episodes that can almost stand on their own, most ending with cliffhangers, but some have actual endings. It’s not how I saw it as I watched but I did note the scenes that were self-contained episodes. My favorite episodes then are the rooftop between Bruce Banner and the Ancient One, which takes place during the Battle of New York in the first “Avengers” and the one in which Tony and Cap time travel to 1970 to sneak into the Army base that’s the ‘Birthplace of Captain America” and incidentally the headquarters and main lab for S.H.I.E.L.D where Tony meets his father, who among other things is worried about the impending birth of his first child, and Cap almost meets her. Tony ends up giving his father parenting advice and Cap resists the temptation to reveal himself to her, and each scene is affecting in different ways. Tony’s with Howard is heartwarming. Cap’s forgoing a meeting with her is heartbreaking.

The episode also includes a hilarious cameo by Michael Douglas. The hilarity is partly due to Douglas and partly due to the work of the make-up and costume designers.

Another of my favorite episodes is the one in which Thor and Rocket time-travel to Asgard on the crucial day when the Dark Elves are about to invade in “Thor: The Dark World” and Thor meets his mother, who we know and Thor knows, will die within the next hour. Frigga knows it too. She can see into the future. She knows that this Thor is from the future too and she consoles him in his grief for her.

The episodes are good in their own right but they’re better for the returns of Tilda Swinton, John Slattery, and Rene Russo.

It’s not a whole episode unto itself, but I got a real kick out of a scene in which Bruce Banner meets up with a group of young Hulk fans.

By the way, Mark Ruffalo is the only one of the stars who has had the chance to play three different characters in the series: Bruce Banner, the Hulk we know and love, and “Endgame’s” Bruce Banner-Hulk amalgamate, who is both Bruce and the Hulk and neither, he’s his own person”, at the same time.

Another scene I got a kick out of that’s not an episode---it’s an almost throwaway moment in one ---but a great inside gag has Cap stepping into an elevator with the same crew of bad guys who stepped into the elevator with him in “Winter Soldier”. It works out a bit differently this time.

By the way, “Infinity War’, which I saw for the first time Friday night---I was kind of busy when it came to the theaters last May and had other things on my mind---doesn’t break down as neatly into episodes but did include scenes that were episodes. The best of those, in my mind, is the one of the planet where Gamora takes Thanos to find the Soul Stone. “Infinity War” is fun and exciting but it’s pretty much all exposition setting up “Endgame”. This scene, however, is in effect part of “Endgame” and not just necessary to understanding and following the plot but to understanding and sympathizing with (while at the same time hating him) Thanos. And on the subject: An online review that didn’t read because, you know, spoilers, was headlined with the argument that Robert Downey Jr should be nominated for an Oscar. I think Josh Brolin should be nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

A few more thoughts before I wrap up. These include major spoilers.

I knew he was going to die. But I thought he would too. It turns out that while Tony is the tragic hero I always saw him as, Cap is a comic hero. And each gets the heroic ending appropriate to their roles.

In my review of the first Avengers movie I compared these heroes to the Knights of the Round Table. At the time, I didn’t see Cap as King Arthur. He struck me as more like Galahad. His strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure. But I was wrong. Cap is the King Arthur figure. It turns out that he did pull the sword from the stone. At the time only Thor noticed. He gets to wield Excalibur in the last battle. And he shares Arthur’s ending. Here comes the spoiler, if you’re up on your Mallory. He gets to go to Avalon.

Tony doesn’t match up with any of Arthur’s knights, although he has qualities in common with Gawaine and Lancelot--- “It’s the old wound, sire.” ---but he is a knight in his own right, not just by being a big and big-hearted man in a suit of armor, and he gets the noble death he’s earned. And he’s given as his last line the line that’s always been coming since the last line of the first “Iron Man”.

Nuff said, for now. I’m going to go over-think some more. If I think myself to the point where I think I can write a decent formal review, I’ll probably post it on Friday. Meanwhile, what I am going to do is post what I think are my best reviews of previous movies in the series, starting with my review of the first “Avengers” which I titled “The Romance of Tony Stark” .

It's posted below. You can click on the link or just scroll down.

Filed under Avengers Assemble.

"The Avengers": The Romance of Tony Stark

Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America square off in The Avengers in accordance with the rule that no superheroes can meet for the first time without getting into a fight so that fans have more fuel for their endless debates over who would win in a matchup.

This is what you get when you let a former English professor write movie reviews.

Within the cycle of movies of which The Avengers is the latest installment, Tony Stark---Iron Man---fills the role Lancelot fills in the King Arthur stories.

I warned you.

The Avengers isn’t a retelling of the Knights of the Round Table. For one thing, there’s no King Arthur. (If anyone wants to make the case that Nick Fury plays that role, feel free. I think it’s a reach. Try Merlin instead.)  And I'm not making a direct comparison of their personalities. In personality, Stark is no Lancelot. If he has a counterpart among any of the Knights of the Roundtable, it's Gawain. Gawain is vain, boastful, selfish, self-indulgent, a showoff and happy to think he can do it all on his own. He's also the second best of Arthur's knights. He was the best until Lancelot showed up. Fans can argue the actual ranking of the Avengers vis-a-vis each other. What matters is that Gawain wasn't inclined to admit to his demotion and Stark would disagree with you if you didn't rank Iron Man first among Earth's mightiest heroes. A lot of his best lines in the movie are cheap shots at the other heroes' expenses meant to let them know he's not impressed by them or their powers.

(The only other Avenger who even roughly has an Arthurian double is Captain America. He's like Galahad whose strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure. The super-soldier serum worked as it did on Steve Rogers because he had a good heart.)

Still, the comparison to Lancelot holds in that like Lancelot Iron Man is the hero around whose story the other heroes' stories are centered.

“I am Iron Man,” Stark declares at the end of his first movie. But as we learn in Iron Man 2, he’s not. Iron Man is just a robot Stark pilots from within. And for the robot to do its job it almost doesn’t matter who’s wearing the metal suit. What matters is if Stark can make the suit into a skin, that is, into an extension of himself.  And a lot has to change for that to happen. Every one of Lancelot’s adventures is crucial to the overall story of the Knights of the Round Table because the fate of Camelot depends on Lancelot remaining the exemplary knight he is while constantly confronted with the temptation to be just a man.  Every one of Iron Man’s adventures is crucial to the ongoing story of the Avengers because the fates of the Avengers and the world depend on Stark becoming a knight in shining armor, and he’s having a hard time with that.

Ok. Before taking this analogy any further…

I liked it. It’s fun. I had a good time. The Avengers is a good superhero movie.

It’s not a good movie the way Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins are good movies.  Rio Bravo is a good movie. Rio Lobo is a good Western. The Dirty Dozen is a good war movie. The Guns of Navarone is a good movie. The Avengers is a good superhero movie. The best so far in this particular series of superhero movies after the first Iron Man.

Part of what makes it good is that it is very much a piece of that series. Director Joss Whedon, who also wrote the screenplay, has clearly studied, liked, and taken to heart the previous movies in the series and he deftly weaves together narrative and thematic threads from Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger into one taut strand, pulls that strand smoothly through the movie, then quickly unravels it and spools the threads out towards the next movies in the series.  The Avengers sets up Captain America 2, Thor 2, and Iron Man 3.  (It doesn’t directly set up The Avengers 2.  That’s coming but it will have to pick up the threads from those sequels and do its part in continuing the series.) As Whedon has apparently learned from his long career in television and as a writer of comic books, everything doesn’t depend on single episode or issue.  The job of any particular episode or issue, in fact, is to get the audience excited about what’s coming next so they’ll tune in next week or buy next month’s issue.  For all the spectacle and mayhem that goes with bringing together Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and setting them up to fight off an invading alien army in the streets of New York City while landmarks like Grand Central Station are destroyed around them, The Avengers is a movie with an admirably modest ambition.

Moving the story along.

There’s a kick in watching the Avengers assemble for the first time and in listening to our favorites banter and argue. The dialog is sharp and snappy. The jokes are funny. The suspense level is high. Whedon makes us worry about every character. But the main reason for seeing The Avengers is the same reason why when you’re reading a book and you finish Chapter 10 you move on to Chapter 11 instead of skipping ahead to Chapter 12. It’s a fun and exciting chapter and, if you’re all caught up with your reading, a gratifying one that will have you nodding in appreciation and saying to yourself, “So that’s where they were going with that!” and “Of course! I should have seen that coming!” and even “Wow, I wasn’t expecting that at all!”  But that’s the thing.  All those reactions depend on your having done the homework.

You don’t need to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy The Avengers, but I don’t see how anyone who hasn’t seen the other movies in the series will be able to follow this one or find a reason to care about many of the characters or the story. Whedon is used to playing to an audience that includes lots of people who missed last week’s episode, so maybe I missed all the ways he slipped in to help viewers just tuning in catch up. But it seems to me that if you haven’t seen Iron Man 2, you won’t know why Tony Stark is a problem for the other heroes and himself. If you haven’t seen Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Thor you won’t know why Agent Coulson matters or appreciate Clark Gregg’s performance in the part. If you haven’t seen Thor, you may think Tom Hiddleston is a ham of an actor instead of a great one. If you haven’t seen Captain America: The First Avenger you won’t know why Cap is so forlorn or appreciate the subtext in his and Stark’s instant dislike of each other.  And if you haven’t seen The Incredible Hulk, you might not get Bruce Banner’s best joke.

Note: I’m not warning anybody away from The Avengers. I’m just saying if you’re thinking of going and really want to get the most of it, watch at least a couple of the other movies.  They’re good and good for you.

I’m also saying that The Avengers isn’t a good movie in and of itself because it depends so much on those other movies.  Which is not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind when you’re telling friends how AWESOME it is.

And it is AWESOME. With the above caveats.

Of course the star attractions are the stars, both the real life ones and the ones from the comic books they play. Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Mark Ruffalo, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk.

Evans does what he had to do going in, hold his own against Downey and Hemsworth while playing a much duller character and then make that dullness as compelling as Stark's naughty boy charm and Thor's swashbuckling sex appeal. Evans doesn't have Cap fight for his authority---if anything he has him doubting it. Cap's sense of himself is tied to what he sees as his place in the world, but his world is seventy years in the past. When the time is right, he assumes it, without fuss but with confidence. Events conspire to re-create a need and therefore a place for Captain America and Cap steps right in and suddenly Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and the entire New York City police force are gladly taking orders from him. Evans is a modest enough and secure enough actor to let the movie come to him.

If you haven't seen Thor, you might not feel as I did that Chris Hemsworth is underused. Whatever those of you who did see it might have thought of Thor the movie, I think you have to admit Hemsworth was terrific as Thor the god of thunder.  He established himself as a star and swashbuckling leading man in the tradition of not just Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn but Gene Kelly---how else would you describe Kelly's dancing style besides swashbuckling? What is his D'Artagnan doing while dueling if not dancing?---and Harrison Ford. In fact, if Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are truly intent on continuing with another Indiana Jones movie, they should consider doing a total reboot starring Hemsworth.

Thor's main job as part of the Avengers---and I mean the team as portrayed in the movie, not the whole movie itself---is to bring the mighty when the mighty's most needed. But the movie takes his mightiness as a given and his role in the story is to provide kindly approval of Cap, of Stark, and of human beings in general and show sympathetic disapproval of Loki.  Tom Hiddleston's Loki isn't dismissible as another cackling movie super villain because Hemsworth's Thor doesn't see him that way.

I would have liked to have seen a little more of this side of Thor in scenes with Evans and Downey. I'm also disappointed that Whedon didn't put him together with either Cobie Smulders or Scarlett Johansson. It would have been fun watching him charm them nearly out of their catsuits. And a scene between Hemsworth, Downey, and Paltrow in which Pepper Potts swoons for Thor while Stark drives himself nuts trying not to show how jealous he is would have been a real hoot.

Can't have everything, and one thing The Avengers has that I didn't expect was Mark Ruffalo's brilliantly understated take on Bruce Banner and the Hulk.

The Incredible Hulk is the weakest in the series, but it’s still a pretty good superhero movie. I thought its major flaw was the coldness and detachment of Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner.  Norton overemphasized Banner’s efforts to remain calm in order to keep himself from Hulking out. Ruffalo’s Banner isn’t calm. He’s ferociously, strenuously, and exhaustingly repressed.  He’s in the habit of referring to the Hulk as “the other guy,” but Ruffalo says the words with an ironic sneer in his voice and a look of fear in his eyes that let us know Banner is terrified and, even more wrenching, growing resigned to the fact that it’s Banner who’s the other guy and that the Hulk is the real him and the moment is closing in when the Hulk will assert himself for good.

When he reveals his “secret” to Cap in one of the movie’s most rousing lines, it’s one of those satisfying “I knew it!” moments.

The breakout character, however, is Black Widow. 

Can't say Scarlett Johansson brings anything special to the role besides an impressive deadpanning of her dominatrix persona and the ability to wear her catsuit with insouciance. But Natasha Romanoff---as far as I recall, she's only referred to as Black Widow once and then by an enemy spymaster who's using the code name that's the only name he has for her---turns out to have a superpower.

She thinks faster than a speeding bullet.

Literally.

I say Johansson doesn’t bring anything special to the part, but that’s not to say she brings nothing.  Intense and concentrated intelligence blazes out of her eyes as hot and almost as visibly as Superman’s heat vision.  She makes us realize that all Black Widow’s backflips, spin and scissor kicks, headbutts, karate chops, throat punches, and two-gun pistol shooting on the slide aren’t reflexive.  They’re plotted.  If The Avengers was a Guy Ritchie movie we’d see her in slow-motion set-ups, carefully assessing each opponent and planning her particular lines of attack.  The bad guys aren’t being out-fought as much as out-thought.  And this holds true when she’s not in a physical fight.

In mental duels, she out-thinks two of the smartest characters in the movie.

Still, I felt a little as though she was being forced into a leading role and forced at me.  Black Widow is a sidekick---my son thinks “sidekick” is a disparagement of her awesomeness. I should say she’s a first lieutenant to the hero-kings---and there is no other female character of note.  I'm not counting Gwyneth Paltrow's extended cameo.  As SHIELD agent Maria Hill, Smulders seems to be only on hand to wear the catsuit in case Johansson decides not to sign up for The Avengers 2.

At first glance it might seem that as Nick Fury Samuel L. Jackson hasn't been given much more to do but glower and growl and wear his black leather trench coat with a coolness that will make you desperate to own one yourself even though you know in your heart you will never be anywhere near that cool.  But as Stark warns, Fury is the spy's spy. He serves his country by lying and manipulation.  Jackson makes us see the sinister side of Fury's nature. He's not just Mace Windu with an eye patch. He has more than a touch of Darth Sidious and Darth Vader to make you want to rethink that black trench coat. You never worry about which side of the Force he's on. You just wonder if there's anyone he doesn't think of as a tool or a weapon to be used.

Like I said, you don't have to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy the movie, but if you're not I can't see how you won't be thoroughly baffled by the apparently wasted presence of Jeremy  Renner as Hawkeye (or even know he's called Hawkeye) for about two thirds the way through. Then he starts bringing the archery awesome and you'll be too busy thinking to yourself “I need to get a bow and arrow!” to care about his backstory.

But, getting down to it, I still see The Avengers as Robert Downey’s movie and the story being moved along as Iron Man’s story.

Of the big three, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor, Iron Man is the unfinished character. Captain America just needed to get his chance and in his movie he got it. Thor has learned his most important lesson. But when last we left Tony Stark at the end of Iron Man 2, he was still not a hero. Iron Man and Tony Stark were separate entities and Nick Fury had decided he could do without the former if the former could only be had with the latter.

He’s still an open question and I’m not giving anything away by telling you that The Avengers leaves that question open.

Downey and Ruffalo have a couple of wonderful and funny scenes together in which Stark and Banner play dueling geniuses on their virtual drawing boards. Hemsworth’s not the only one of the stars who can dance, so to speak.  In the exuberant physicality of what is essentially a comic song and dance act, Downey and Ruffalo reminded me of Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor or, maybe more aptly, Hugh Jackman and Neal Patrick Harris at last year’s Tony Awards.  What we’re watching is a partnership and a rivalry.

Stark has been drawn to Banner in an openly admiring and affectionate way we’ve never seen him drawn to any other character including Pepper Potts---mostly we’ve seen him deliberately annoying people in order to push them away.  In Banner he finds a potential soulmate capable of playing with him on his level, someone who shares his passion for science and can keep up.

But as they work together to solve a problem, Stark can’t resist turning it into a competition.

At first it seems as though he’s only trying to distract Banner by teasing him and peppering him with one-liners.  But then what he’s doing becomes more sinister and dangerous.  He’s trying to provoke him.  If Banner has to concentrate on keeping his cool, he won’t be able to focus on the problem.  But it gets worse.

He’s curious.

He wants to see Banner Hulk out.

It’s the pure scientist in him getting the better of him.  He can’t help seeing another human being as a potential science experiment.

Which is insane. Never mind for the moment that the fate of the earth is at stake. Trapping himself in a small room with the Hulk when he’s not wearing his armor is a really, really, really bad idea.

But that’s Stark. He’s rash. He’s impulsive. He’s reckless. He’s thoughtless. He’s immature. And he’s selfish.

And this is why I say that the whole series (so far) has been basically The Romance of Tony Stark and that’s likely going to be a main theme as the series moves forward.

Whatever the ostensible plots and whoever the villains, Thor 2 is going to be about Thor being awesome while searching for his lost love and Captain America 2 will be about Steve Rogers trying to find a place for himself in the 21st Century besides being Captain America.  But Iron Man 3 will be about whether or not Stark’s going to screw up again and how and how bad and how much of the result of that will carry over into The Avengers 2.

To get back to the Knights of the Round Table analogy, the one way Stark is most like Lancelot is that in both their romances everything depends on how the hero responds to his chief temptation which for Lancelot and Tony Stark is the temptation to put self before duty. For Lancelot that temptation comes in the form of his love for Guinevere. For Stark it's straightforwardly his ego.

Every tale of Lancelot foreshadows Lancelot’s ultimate failure and the breaking of the Round Table and the destruction of Camelot. Every one of Iron Man’s adventures (so far) foreshadows Stark’s potential failure to be the hero he and the world need him to be.

Again, I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you that in The Avengers we learn that if he has to Stark can overcome the temptation and be Iron Man and not just Iron Man's pilot, a billionaire, genius, playboy, philanthropist in a metal suit. It doesn't tell us that he is past temptation.

It’s a hilarious moment and a key one when Stark recognizes similarities between himself and Loki.  But we’re left to wonder what he’s going to do with this newfound self-awareness.

The romance is unfinished. The comedy or the tragedy is still to be played out.  The story continues.

Filed under Avengers Assemble.

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The Avengers, written and directed by Josh Whedon, starring Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Stellan Skarsgard, Cobie Smulders, and Samuel L. Jackson. On DVD and Blu-ray and available to watch instantly at Amazon.

First Marvelous Thought after seeing Captain Marvel: Who is Carol Danvers and why should I care she becomes a superhero?

Tuesday morning, March 12, 2019.

Looking for Captain Marvel: An amnesiac space special ops fighter who knows herself only by the name of Vers (Brie Larson) on earth to search for her true identity finds herself hunting a surprise enemy in the latest installment in Marvel’s Avengers series of movies “Captain Marvel”. Little does she know…

Saw it. In the words of one of the most discerning film buffs I know: “I liked it but I didn’t LOVE it.”

The discerning film buff added:

Too much origin story! It was Captain Marvel's origin story; it was Nick Fury's origin story; it was S.H.I.E.L.D.'s origin story; it was the Avenger's origin story... I have origin story exhaustion!

Yup.

Except…

For me, there was too much origin story in that the origin stories took too much screen time away from the main story, and too little origin story in that it didn’t answer the most important questions an origin story needs to answer, which don’t include how did the hero gain her powers. They are:

Who is this character and why should I care she became this particular superhero?

To put it specifically, Who is Carol Danvers and why should I care that she became Captain Marvel?

For that matter, who is Captain Marvel?

I’m sure I must have mentioned somewhere in all the stuff I’ve written about the Avengers movies that nostalgia plays a major role in my feelings about the movies and the characters. As a comic book reading kid I was a DC fan. Superman and Batman were my ultimate heroes. Doesn’t mean I didn’t read any Marvels or even make much distinction between DC and Marvel comics in my judgment. I just didn’t buy them. My friend Sandy bought them and I bought DCs and we traded back and forth. I liked ones of his I read and had my favorite Marvel heroes, chief among them, Spider-Man, Daredevil, and, of course, Cap. In my personal pantheon, Spider-Man and Daredevil ranked almost as high as Superman and Batman. Captain America as high. I also liked Ironman and Thor. All this is to say that my judgments about the movies all begin with how closely they come to recreating my memories of what I loved about the comics when I was twelve.

When I was twelve, Captain Marvel didn’t exist.

Not this incarnation.

Carol Danvers did. She appeared as an Air Force security officer---not a fighter pilot. The United States Air Force didn’t have female fighter pilots yet.---who became a sidekick of Mar-vel, the Kree spy sent to earth to keep an eye on us earthlings in case we developed the science and technology to become threats to the Kree empire. He develops a fondness for human beings and, in the guise of a superhero called Captain Marvel, uses his powers and abilities to protect them from themselves and various threats from outer space. I didn’t read his comic books. I don’t remember if it was one Sandy regularly bought. I do remember knowing that he was Marvel Comics' version of the superhero popularly known then and now as Shazam but as Captain Marvel in Pop Mannion’s comic book reading days in the 1940s, when he was one of Pop’s favorites, and I thought of him---Marvel’s Marvel---as a rip-off because I didn’t understand the copyright disputes that ended with both DC and Marvel somehow getting the rights to superheroes with the same name and similar powers and backstories. In my view, DC’s Captain Marvel was the real Captain Marvel, and, out of loyalty to Pop, I refused to be even mildly curious about what Marvel was doing with their Captain Marvel. So I missed it when an explosion gave Carol Danvers superpowers of her own and she took to fighting at Captain Marvel’s side as Ms. Marvel. Ms Marvel got a comic book of her own in the early 1970s, but by that time I’d stopped reading comic books altogether.

I didn’t know her from Adam Warlock.

But then I didn’t know any of the Guardians of the Galaxy from Adam Warlock either. If things go as is speculated, when "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" finally comes out, Adam Warlock will be a main character and I won’t know him from Adam Strange. But “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1” turned out to be a hoot. It’s my second favorite of all the movies in the Avengers series. (For the record, just to name the top three: “Winter Soldier”, “Guardians”, “Black Panther”) And I expect I’ll get a kick out of “Vol. 3”, especially now that James Gunn is back in charge.

Going into the theater, I carried no nostalgic feelings for Captain Marvel or Ms Marvel or Carol Danvers and knew next to nothing about her, her, or her.

Coming out, I carried a mild affection but knew only two things about her. She’s one of those type A personalities who expects everyone else to keep up with her whether she’s working or out partying and she thinks she’s funny.

Two things are about all we know about all the Marvel heroes and all we need to know. We’re not talking Shakespeare here. The interest lies in what there is to say about those two things. Longtime readers know how I can go geekily on and on about any one thing let alone two.

Like you’re doing here, Lance?

Fair enough. But my point is going to be that, as they’re presented in “Captain Marvel”, those two things about her aren’t dramatically or thematically interesting enough in themselves to inspire me to go geekily on and on. The writing and the storytelling aren’t compelling.

Superhero origin stories all answer the same basic questions: How did the heroes get their powers? Why did they get them? What are they going to do with them? And who are they now that they’re heroes?

How, Why, and What usually have similar and simple and final answers, dramatized within the same plot outline. Every origin story is some version the hero getting his or her powers by being blasted by gamma rays, bit by a spider, or gifted by an alien who recognizes the hero’s worthiness and who might as well be an angel, a magician, or a watery tart waving a sword. Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne are different in that they use their brains (and their money: “What’s your superpower?” “I’m rich.”) to give themselves superpowers, so there’s a little more complexity in the How. There are a few shades of difference in everybody’s Why, but their What is pretty much the same across the storyboard: fight for truth, justice, and the American way.

This goes back farther than Action Comics Number 1. It’s the origin stories of King Arthur, David, and Hercules. Which makes it so familiar that it's hardly necessary to include it anymore, let alone devote an entire movie to it. As Oliver Mannion  likes to remind me,Grant Morrison distilled things to five simple panels and nine words in "All-Star Superman":

Doomed Planet...Desperate scientists..Last Hope...Kindly Couple...Superman!

“Spider-Man: Homecoming” doesn’t bother with it. “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” makes it a running gag, without making a joke of Uncle Ben and his iconic maxim.

“Wonder Woman” and “Black Panther” deal with their respective heroes’ origin stories in the same way: by presenting them as bedtime stories told to their heroes by their royal parent and illustrated for the audience in cartoon-form, so the interest---dramatic and cinematic---lies in the telling---literarily and visually---more than simply in the story being told.

The intriguing question, then, is Who?

And Who is an ongoing question. It gets asked again and again in the chronicling of the hero’s career, phrased and re-phased as Who is the real me, the superhero or, well, me? Am I Clark or Kal-El? Am I Bruce Wayne or the Batman? Which is the ego and which the alter-ego?

Who is this person now that she’s decided to be a superhero? Or who is this person that makes her the superhero he is? This brings up the question of who were they before they became the superheroes they are and how did that figure in their becoming the superpersons they are?

In just about every movie in the Avengers series, the Who who Was was a jerk---a jerk who had to learn to stop being a jerk and put his powers and abilities to work helping people: Iron Man, Thor, Dr Strange, Ant-Man, every one of the Guardians of the Galaxy except Groot.

Tony Stark, Thor, Stephen Strange, Peter Quill, and Scott Lang each change when they accept the great responsibility that comes with their great powers and they become better people (although Tony not as much better as he thinks. “I am Ironman!” Not yet you are, pal.). Steve Rogers doesn’t change. He doesn’t need to. He becomes more himself, or, rather, more able to be himself---his body grows large enough to accommodate his already large heart and he’s able to put his powers to work doing on a grand scale what he’s been doing all along, fighting bullies and inspiring others to fight bullies at his side.

The enlargement of heart and the acceptance of responsibility is the key theme of just about every Marvel movie superhero’s origin story.

It’s even true of the two who beside Cap already have large hearts and deep senses of responsibility, Spider-Man and Black Panther.

Over in the DCCU, it’s true of Wonder Woman and Aquaman. Their already great hearts expand and they take on more responsibility as they move into a wider world.

Carol Danvers accepts responsibility, but I didn’t come away with the sense that her heart had been enlarged.

Basically we learn that it’s in the right place.

Like I said I’ve said, nostalgia plays an important part in my judgment of superhero movies and how well I like them depends on how closely their portrayals of the superheroes matches my idealized versions of how I remember them from comic book reading kidhood. Christopher Reeve’s Superman is still the best example. Of the Avengers, Chris Evans’ Cap is the best---the best of all the superhero movies since Reeve. But it’s not a requirement. Batman wasn’t a brooding, dour, grief-stricken, guilt-ridden, violent loner when I was a kid. And “Wonder Woman’s” director Patty Jenkins and its star Gal Gadot created a Wonder Woman very different than the Wonder Woman I knew: less boisterous, less bellicose, less pugnacious, less confident (arrogant) and self-certain, more cerebral, more thoughtful, and more self-questioning. As far as I’m concerned, they made her into a better and more attractive character. And a more dramatically interesting one.

Diana starts out knowing exactly who she is and already in possession of most of her superpowers. She decides that what she wants to do about it is leave home and see and take part of the wider world. Once she gets out there, though, she starts questioning who she is. Her sense of who she is divides into who she was and who she will become, with who she was not being of much interest to her or much of a factor in the movie’s plot. Answering the question of who she will become is the source of her and our excitement. The tragedy is that once she becomes Wonder Woman she is almost immediately disenchanted with her new identity and gives it up. When she next shows up, in “Justice League”, she’s gone back to being Wonder Woman but she’s not all that happy about it and not certain she’ll continue. This sets up as a theme for future “Wonder Woman” movies Diana’s always questioning who she is.

Who is she is an open question. It’s the existential question we all have to answer in real life every day. Who am I? The follow up questions are How did I get to be me? How did I get here? Why I am here? What am I to do about it? The second two are all forward-looking questions and therefore more potentially dramatic.

“Captain Marvel” and Captain Marvel are devoted to answering the question Who was I? With the attendant questions being: How did that get me here and What am I going to do about it? The first two are more expositional questions and stubbornly undramatic.

The movie’s answers are in reverse order: We’ll find that out in future episodes, starting with “Avengers: Endgame”. A timely explosion. And not a particularly interesting character. Carol Danvers turns out to be a stock character familiar from countless movies and TV shows of all genres: a talented and fiesty woman fighting for her place in a man’s world. That in the real world this is the story of too many women’s lives doesn’t automatically make it dramatically interesting in a movie.

When Carol finds out who she was, she’s done growing as a character.

That’s it! I was me! Now we can get back to the fighting!

Something more interesting---and exciting---is going on though. Trouble is it’s not well-brought out.

Who she was is a MacGuffin. While looking for who she was, Carol is also hunting for who she is. I don’t mean existentially or thematically or symbolically or psychologically. I mean literally and in the most narratively quotidian way. It’s really more of a question of what she is. And the answer to that is the movie’s Big Reveal.

Carol’s reaction to the revelation should have told us more about what kind of person she is or will be. But she’s not given much of a reaction. Instead, she just changes the colors of her uniform and flies off to fight a formulaic battle for truth, justice, and the…

You get the picture.

Original Sins: Notes on "Daredevil: Season 3" so far

Posted Saturday morning, November 17, 2018. Revised Saturday afternoon after editorial consultation with Oliver Mannion.

At the foot of the cross: Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil, contemplates his sins in a scene from the Netflix series “Daredevil”.

Too much Matt Murdock. Not enough Kingpin.

Not enough Daredevil. Too much Wilson Fisk.

Too much psychology. Not enough action-adventure.

Too much growling. Too much snarling. Too much talking too low and too slow.
Too much gazing sullenly inward.

It’s not that there’s too much Catholicism. It’s that there’s too much theology and not enough mythology. Which works out as too much exposition and not enough symbolism. Symbolic action, that is. Not calling for more iconography. So...too much telling, not enough showing.

Fisk is boring. Matt is boring. Sister Maggie is boring. Karen is boring and annoying. Give us more Foggy now!

Those are my quick notes on the first six episodes of Daredevil Season 3.

Fisk has been doing Kingpin-like plotting and scheming all along. Matt has been Daredeviling like, um, hell.  In fact, the story arc depends on Fisk being able to manipulate pretty much all of New York City and everybody in it from behind bars and then right under the noses of the FBI agents guarding him when he’s schemed his way out of prison and into “protective custody”---actually, literally, right in front of their eyes!. But the show hasn’t found much fun or humor in either plot thread. The same lack of fun and humor pervades Matt’s adventures as Daredevil.

The fights are necessarily brutal. Matt is still recovering from the near-fatal injuries he suffered at the end of "The Defenders" when a whole building blew up and collapsed on top of him. And he’s reinjured in each new fight, so he isn't capable of the gymnastics and swashbuckling derring-do that characterized the fights in seasons one and two and connected “Daredevil” with the comic books of my kidhood when Daredevil was my third-favorite Marvel superhero. Those fights also connected the show in my imagination with the great pirate movies of yesteryear and Charlie Cox with their stars Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks, Tyrone Power, and Burt Lancaster. That connection is somewhat tenuous and more by default than by intention. The thematic differences don’t allow Cox to play Matt with their devil-may-care---No, I’m not sorry---attitude or exhibit the joy they took in their own physicality.

BTW, now showing in one of the cineplexes in heaven is the Batman movie Warner Brothers and DC wished Zack Snyder had made starring Power or Flynn (You get to pick. It’s heaven, after all.) with Lancaster making a cameo as Superman and Fairbanks as Green Arrow. (Or Flynn. Again, it’s heaven.)

Also, by the way, although I’d rather see Flynn as Batman and Bruce Wayne, I think Power’s the more apt casting choice.

Give it a minute.

But there can’t be a lot of fun to be had while the emphasis is on Daredevil as a wounded ninja too exhausted and too distracted by pain to use his wits in place of his fists. Where the writers and directors have been missing out is in the scenes of Matt as a detective, which, grim and gritty as they’ve been, have provided some of my favorite moments so far.

The series so far has been about the main characters---Matt, Fisk, Karen, FBI Agent Nadeem, Bullseye, and, to a lesser extent, Foggy---wrestling with their guilty consciences. The showrunners have tried hard---too hard, I think---to make the tone of the scheming and the action scenes consistent with the angst-ridden scenes of the main characters coming to grips with their sins. I’m not calling that a mistake but it decreases the opportunities to relax and simply enjoy watching, if only for a few minutes here and there.

The most interesting character to me and the most compelling plot dynamic is Bullseye and the mirroring of his past with Matt Murdock’s.

Matt and Bullseye were orphaned at about the same time and age. But Matt landed in a Catholic orphanage where among the adults who helped each other raise him was a wise, tough-minded, soft-but not too-soft-hearted nun who knew when to give advice and when to step back and let Matt to figure it out for himself. Bullseye wound up in some sort of state run facility where the only adult who cared for him was a well-meaning but emotionally-wounded herself staff psychologist who, because she knew she didn’t have any help herself and he had no one else to turn to, took too much upon herself.

The critical compare and contrast isn’t between religion and psychology (or between Jesus and Freud) but between the nun, Sister Maggie (Joanne Whalley), and Dr Mercer, the psychologist (Heidi Armbruster). Dr Mercer tries to make Bullseye see himself as having worth in his own eyes. Sister Maggie helps Matt feel himself as being part of a community and finding self-worth in that.

Sister Maggie is guided by her experience, her faith, the lessons she learned from her own teachers and mentors and by being part of a community, and by her own conscience. Dr Mercer relies too much on her professional education and training. With understandable reason, she cuts herself---and Bullseye---off from the community she was part of, which was institutional and bureaucratic and while “caring” in its mission without a true beating heart and so not much to be missed. But she doesn’t join a new community. She effectively goes to live alone in the desert. When Bullseye comes to visit her, their relationship stays more professional than familial, despite their own wishes and efforts.,and they occupy their own little world where Bullseye has no comfort or support except what Dr Mercer can manage. He becomes dependent on her for everything including having a soul and he’s left at a complete loss when she develops cancer and dies.

And she has nothing to leave him but shadows of herself that he can only use to repeat what she’s already taught him. (Makes you think how it was a good thing Kal-El landed in Kansas in front of the Kents’ car and not in the arctic to raise himself with only Jor-El’s crystals for company and guidance.)

Sister Maggie helps raise Matt to be a hero to his community. Bullseye is raised to be nothing except the Dr Mercer’s moral puppet. She’s his Geppetto but there’s no Jiminey Cricket to help him grow up a real live boy.

Thanks to Sister Maggie and his other teachers, when Matt is ready to leave the orphanage he’s ready to leave the orphanage and take his place in the adult world. He knows what he wants to be---a help to others---and he becomes a lawyer to do that. He becomes Daredevil our of a sense of responsibility. But the fact is that his identity is defined by helping others and not by the job that lets him do that. He doesn’t have to be a lawyer or to be Daredevil to be Matt Murdoch.

Bullseye, on the other hand, needs a particular sort of job to give him meaning and purpose.

Guess what happens when he loses his job.

Or, rather, guess who happens to him.

Kingpin---played brilliantly once again by Vincent D’Onforio, although with a touch too much deliberation and repressed passion, rage, and madness this time out for my taste---is of course a great tempter. He is the devil in a white suit. Ken and Oliver Mannion see him as a version of Billy Bob Thornton’s devil in “Fargo” although without Malvo’s sense of malicious fun.  Bullseye resists, but he really doesn’t stand a chance.

Kingpin is still tempting Matt and the temptation is still for Matt to betray himself by killing Kingpin. But their connection this season is more in their doubling. Matt is more tempted by his own growing sense of despair.

Both Fisk and Matt Murdoch see the world as gone to hell. (It’s not just so he can call himself Daredevil and wear a red costume that he lives and works in Hell’s Kitchen.) Matt is tempted to give up trying to help and let the world burn. Fisk wants to be the one who sets and controls the fires.

Now I come to the least interesting and compelling character and her story arc---Matt and Foggy’s pain in their necks former secretary and now pain in her editor’s neck investigative reporter, Karen Page.

My main complaint isn’t with the character as written, although I’ve got a few complaints about that, which I’ll get to. It’s with Deborah Ann Woll who plays her.  I don’t think Woll is a particularly strong actress. Her voice is too high and without music or range. She has about three expressions---facially as well as vocally. She doesn’t move well. Every time she enters I expect her to just stand there and whine, and she rarely disappoints on that score. But she isn’t given much more to do. Karen is whiny, and in most of her dialog she either hectors and scolds or feels sorry for herself.

(It’s not Woll’s fault but it doesn’t help that I don’t see her when she’s on screen---her as her or as her character. I keep seeing someone who looks to me like, if she’d been alive and in Italy five hundred and fifty years ago or so, would have been one of Botticelli’s favorite models.)

As a character type, she’s a little girl lost and the writers seem to expect us to feel sorry for her and forgive her her annoyingness because of that. Little girls lost are more sympathetic and compelling when they’re actual little girls and they take an active part in their own rescues from the woods.

(See Dafne Keen in “Logan”. See “Logan", period.)

But something clicked while we were watching the seventh episode last night that made me appreciate Karen and her place in the story a bit more. It dawned on me that she’s an archetype as well as a type---a sinful mortal who’s been driven from the Garden and is trying to earn her way back by making up for her original sin.

The Garden that was Karen’s home lies somewhere the woods and farms of New Hampshire and her sin was against her family. At first I tried to think of her as Eve after the Fall, but that’s just my gender bias at work. She’s more like Cain after he kills Able, wandering the earth, trying to make things right again between himself and God but unintentionally causing himself and others he meets more trouble and harm. Traditionally, Cain inadvertently fills the world with demons, monsters, and mischief-making minor devils and fairies. Karen makes mischief and causes trouble on her own.  The demons, monsters, and devils are in her own head but they’re let loose whenever she tries to do what she thinks is right and good.

That makes her more interesting to me than the annoying screw-up I’ve taken her for since she first showed up for work at Nelson & Murdock in Season 1.

At any rate, to sum up:

Ok, ‘nuff said.

And RIP Stan Lee.

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Maybe I'm being too harsh. As is often the case, Ken and Oliver Mannion think I’m all-wet. Mrs M is on the fence and waiting for us to finish (No binging here in Mannionville.) before rendering her final judgment. But Ken and Oliver are enjoying this season and are much much more into it than I am. Oliver says the reason I’m not is that I’m spending too much time checking my cell phone so I’m missing key scenes and bits of dialog. I think he’s got cause and effect mixed up.

Saturday morning cartoon blogging: Gru vs Thor

Mined from the notebooks, Saturday morning, August 25, 2018. Posted Saturday morning, September 1.

Settling the question which is the better cartoon: ‘'”Despicable Me 3” or “Thor: Ragnarock”. What do mean, you didn't know that was a question? Of course it's question!

Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo as cartoon versions of Thor and the Incredible Hulk in the live-action cartoon “Thor: Ragnarock”. Yes, Hemsworth’s playing a cartoon. He’s just doing it without benefit of CGI. Ruffalo does the same when he plays the Hulk’s human alter-ego, Bruce Banner.

“Despicable Me 3” is a much better cartoon than “Thor: Ragnarock”.

I know. “Thor: Ragnarock” isn’t a cartoon.

Except that it is.

A pretty good cartoon, in fact.

It’s not just that it’s a CGI wonder from start to finish, to the point that it’s doubtful the actors ever worked in front of any actual set pieces or against any backdrops but green screens and you can count on your hands the scenes where they did, if they did. But the actors themselves play cartoon characters. I don’t mean that their characters are cartoon characters because they’re based on comic book characters. I mean the actors act like cartoon characters. They make cartoon characters of themselves. They play cartoon versions of themselves. Jeff Goldblum first, foremost, and funniest, although he has the advantage of being a living cartoon. But Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo (when he’s playing Bruce Banner. When he plays the Hulk, he is a cartoon), Tom Hiddleston, Tessa Thompson, Cate Blanchett, Karl Urban, Benedict Cumberbatch (who like Goldblum has the advantage of being a living cartoon) and even Anthony Hopkins and Idris Elba do excellent jobs playing it straight---the best way to play for laughs---and underplaying their parts so that they don’t come across as cartoonish. But, really, subtle about it as they usually manage to be, they might as well have worn motion-capture suits to create templates for the animators to draw on top of.

Jeff Goldblum, a living cartoon, as the Grandmaster. With Rachel House as his chief hench-living cartoon character. 

(And of course the best and most lovable supporting character, Korg, the affable and gentle-souled gladiator made of rocks---voiced by director Taika Waititi, who joins Brad Bird in the distinction of being one of the best voice actors in his own film---is another actual cartoon.)

Then, “Ragnarock”, more than any previous movie in the Avengers series except “Black Panther”, is shot, framed, paced, colored, and designed to look like a comic book come to life. It’s as if Waititi and his cinematographer and team of designers were working from storyboards drawn by Marvel’s best and most freewheeling artists and colorists if not from an actual comic book. In fact, I haven’t read that they were, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Other way round, actually. So it is a comic book brought to life. And comic books are made up of series of drawings that are by textbook definitions cartoons.

Like the New Yorker, comic book publishers call their cartoons drawings. The New Yorker doesn’t want its readers to associate its humor with the funny pages. Comic book publishers don’t want their readers to associate their books with Yogi Bear and Scooby Doo.

Like I said, “Ragnarock” is a comic book brought to life and that’s to say it’s a cartoon. I said it’s a pretty good one. Actually, I think it’s a very good one.

Just not as good a one as “Despicable Me 3”.

Which isn’t to say “Despicable Me 3” is a better movie. I’d have to watch it again and pay closer attention this time than I did this morning [Saturday, August 25, 2018] to make the case one way or the other.

Thanks to Oliver Mannion and his employee discount at his big box store place of employment, we now have Chromecast, and last night we inaugurated it, watching “Thor: Ragnarock” on Netflix for last night’s {Friday, August 24] Mannion Family Movie Night.  More on Thor in a bit. Chromecast worked like a charm. But we used Oliver’s computer to stream it. I haven’t explained how Chromecast works sufficiently to myself to completely understand it but as I do understand it, your computer or “device” is a supporting component of the system and as such it doesn’t need to be the most up to date piece of technology. This morning I decided to test it using my netbook. My old, failing, never that powerful to begin with netbook.

The netbook can handle some streaming on its own. YouTube clips and the like, for the most part. Whole movies are beyond its capacity though. I don’t even try to watch TV episodes. Attempting to binge watch would be an exercise in futility. And the banes of my online existence are autolaunched videos and commercials on news outlet websites. But I gave it a try and---wonder of wonders, miracles of miracles---”Despicable Me 3” streamed beautifully from start to finish. No buffering. No freezes. No crashing. I intended to watch just a few minutes just to see. But the longer I watched, the more caught up I got. I was impressed. Not just with Chromecast. With “Despicable Me 3”.

When you’re a Minion, you’re a Minion all the way…

I still only watched it with half an eye. There was a lot going on here this morning. But what I saw was funny and charming and well-written, well-paced, and very well-drawn. I got a big kick out of the parts I saw, especially the sequence in which the minions from their own gang and take over the prison.  I can’t say if it’s as good as the first two “Despicable Me’s” but it seemed that the filmmakers avoided the curse of the third movie in a series. What really impressed me though was how clean it was. (I mean cleanly drawn not how family friendly, although it is that.) It was impressive on its own merits as a cartoon but particularly in comparison to “Ragnarock”.

“Thor: Ragnarock” is much more than a live-action (well, partly live-action) cartoon. It’s a great superhero movie, and the only thing that prevents it from being a great movie is too much of its comic and narrative effect depend on the audience having seen at least a few of the Avengers movies. Its greatest strength lies in how different it is, visually and in spirit and tone, from the previous movies. Its flaws aren’t due to its being to much of a cartoon but to the moments when it is too much like too many of the previous Avengers movies.

It’s gotten way beyond the point where I can confidently rank the Avengers movies. I keep changing my mind and resolving to watch some or all of them again before I make my list. I still think “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is the best, but you have to take that with a grain of salt. Nostalgia is definitely compromising my judgment. A close second is the first “Guardians of the Galaxy” and then, an even closer third, “Black Panther”. After that, it’s all up for grabs, except for “Iron Man 2”, which I put at its well-earned place at the bottom of the list. But if “Winter Soldier”,“Guardians”, and “Black Panther” aren’t the top three (But are you really going to argue?), they are my own three favorites. And right now “Thor: Ragnarock” is number four. (Back last November when it came out, before “Black Panther” was released, it was number three.) But still it’s like too many of the other Avengers movies in that the action scenes are too action-packed and the thrills are only sustained by piling up even more---more action, more bodies, more debris---until they collapse into big noisy messes. The heroes and the plot and the point get lost in the noise and confusion. And Waititi even includes what has become a standard feature of the final battles, an anonymous crowd running this way and that trying to escape the carnage but somehow just finding their way into more of the same sort of trouble and confusion. And it’s too busy.

Apparently Waititi can’t look at a piece of empty screen without eyeing it as opportunistically as a graffiti artist eyeing a blank brick wall instead of using it for its own beauty and effect. He fills every available space with whatever the GGI wizards can come up with. It’s great that he uses so many more colors than other Avengers directors have (the less said about Zack Snyder over making his joyless movies set in the DC universe and his allergies to light and color the better), but in too many scenes there’s too much color (He seems aware of it and even lets Thor---or Chris Hemsworth. There’s a lot of improvised dialog---make a joke about it) and characters, the Hulk in particular, often blend into the background. And he hasn’t learned how to stage a fight scene. The fight scenes look as if he just let the stunt people loose to see what they’d come up and then liked everything they did.

Clear skies ahead: Villain turned hero Gru and his partner in crime-fighting and in life, Lucy Wilde, fly into battle against a bright blue sky left beautifully empty by the animators who understand the how to use blank spaces to artistic effect.

Meanwhile the makers of “Despicable Me 3” like to keep bits of screen empty both of detail and action. Their color palette is bright and varied but they don’t feel a need to use every crayon in the box in every scene, so to speak. The action scenes are action-packed but keep within strictly set bounds. And even though the minions essentially look and sound and act alike, they’re well differentiated. Even in their group scenes, you can pick out all the individuals. And this is done through the drawing and lighting and not by over-writing and comic business and busy-ness.  Finally, the animators and the writers have taken W.C. Fields’ lesson to heart. Whenever you feel like doing more, Fields said, do less!

Ultimately, though, what I admired most was “Despicable Me’s” economy of visual storytelling.

The film’s creators have learned a lot from Pixar and 1990s Disney. But I think they’ve learned more from...Chuck Jones, and he was a visual storyteller all filmmakers can learn from, even makers of live-action movies that aren’t live-action cartoons.

Of Gods and Monsters: The Avengers: Age of Ultron

Posted Saturday morning, May 5, 2018.

I’d planned to re-post my reviews of the first two Avengers movies along with my review of “Infinity Wars” but as things are looking it’s going to be a while before we get to see “Infinity Wars” or any movie, so…

Just for the fun of it, below is my review of “Age of Ultron”. Below that, in a separate post, is my review of “The Avengers”…

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Frankenstein and his monster: Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark (Iron Man), begins to doubt he’s done the right thing in trying to bring about “Peace in our time” by creating the artificial intelligence software Ultron in Iron Man 4. Wait. I’m sorry. I meant Avengers: Age of Ultron.

July 2015. There’s a very simple story at the center of Avengers: Age of Ultron. A very simple and very old and very true story. The story of an idealistic but vain scientist who, seeking to conquer death, creates a monster in his own likeness whose monstrosity lies in its---his---being at the same time more than human, less than human, and all too human. The monster escapes his creator’s control and runs wild, revealing himself to be not a conquering of death but a bringer of it. But the real horror is in his having a mind of his own and desires of his own that mirror his creator’s. The creator is forced to look in that mirror and see himself for what he is, a monster of vanity and ego, who has unleashed his own evil and set it loose upon the world. It’s a story, then, about how what we take pride in as being the best in ourselves can turn out to be the very worst.

This re-telling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Tony Stark as Doctor Frankenstein and Ultron as his monster---Did you think I meant Bruce Banner and the Hulk?---might be easy to lose track of in the noise and confusion of the overlong and repetitive battle scenes amid crumbling cities; the irrelevant inclusion of an underwritten subplot that amounts to little more than a set of teaser-trailers for the Not-Coming-To-A-Theater-Near-You-Until-November 2017 Thor: Ragnarok; the clumsy attempt to work in the Hulk and Black Widow movies that will never be made; and the overly-insisted upon group angst about whether or not the Avengers will ever be a true team---a question I thought got asked and satisfactorily answered in the first Avengers. When Age of Utron hit the theaters back in May, the whole movie and not just the Frankenstein story got a little lost for many fans in online arguments over whether or not director Joss Whedon had betrayed Black Widow as a character by making her sad about not being able to have babies and whether or not that’s actually what was making Black Widow sad and then by fan outrage when Whedon closed down his Twitter account in what they took as his response to their complaints and criticisms, followed by a further debate over whether or not that was in fact the reason he’d done it and, if it was, did he have the right to shut fans out that way. [Editor’s note: I revised this paragraph a bit after input from longtime reader and blogging comrade Gary Farber. See his comment.]

But I think the problem---which is probably only a problem for me---is caused by Age of Ultron’s having been mistitled as an Avengers movie and not as what it is.

Iron Man 4.

But then I don’t think Marvel Studios really has an Avengers series unfolding. They have two parallel stories of individual heroes that are on their way to merging in a dual tragedy. Steve Rogers’ and Tony Stark’s---Captain America’s and Iron Man’s.

Before I get into that…

Marvel has been either lucky or brilliant in the casting of its leads and supporting players in most of its productions, which now include Agent Carter, Daredevil, and Ant-Man, all three of which feature excellent leads and supporting players. (The less said about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the better.) I’m particularly (and sentimentally) impressed by Chris Evans as Captain America. I think he’s done a wonderful job of putting the lessons of Christopher Reeve’s Superman to work in playing a hero too good to true and making his goodness believable, likable, sympathetic, attractive, and---the truly super feat---fun. But Robert Downey Jr is still the best of the lot. Evans is good in Age of Ultron and James Spader is better, stealing most of the show with his amazing voice work as Ultron, but Downey is never blown off the screen---except when Iron Man is literally blown off the screen, which happens a lot, maybe too much. Like I said, the battle scenes get repetitive, but never mind. Spader has great fun with his monologues, making well-written lines sound like brilliant ones and brilliant ones sound like Shakespeare. (I think I’d better explain that below.) But Downey matches him easily, filling his every sentence with an essential Tony Stark-ness. Which is to say, that just about whatever he says, no matter how witty, charming, and smart is tinged with competitiveness, ego, jealousy, selfishness, and…insecurity.

A good example is in an apparent throw-away moment, Cobie Smulders as former S.H.I.E.L.D agent Maria Hill---who, unfortunately, is turning out to be the Avengers’ Girl Friday instead of Agent Coulson’s replacement as Nick Fury’s Right Hand and heir apparent---addresses Stark as “boss” and he immediately corrects her.

“He’s the boss,” he says, meaning Captain America, “I just pay for everything, design everything, make everyone look cooler.”

It’s beautifully delivered but a great deal of its beauty is that Downey imbues it with all those qualities I mentioned: wit, charm, smarts, competitiveness, ego, jealousy, selfishness, and self-doubt.

Downey makes it plain that Stark accepts Cap as the team’s leader and knows that that’s how it ought be but also that he also can't help feeling that he could bethe leader and can’t help letting Hill know that too and know why and know why she should be impressed with him, as if she wouldn’t be already and would be more if she didn’t also know what an overgrown brat he can be, a fact he knowsand has come to dislike about himself but which he can’t seem to correct.

These qualities, with the emphasis on the wit, charm, and ego, have defined Downey's characterization of Tony Stark since the first Iron Man.  And that characterization is thematic. Running through all three Iron Man movies and now both Avengers movies is the question Who is Tony Stark and what does he want?and all those qualities mixing up together make that a hard question to answer.

The first Iron Man ends with Tony announcing “I am Iron Man.” But that turns out to be a problematic statement because while it's true in the most obvious way, it's also a declaration that he’s a superhero and Iron Man 2 calls that into question. In fact, in Iron Man 2, Nick Fury decides Tony's not a superhero, or at least not up to being one of Earth's mightiest heroes, and although he doesn't kick him off the Avengers project, he demotes him, from hero to technical support. Tony earns a second chance, but in the first Avengers he has to prove he deserved it, that he is a hero and not, as Cap accuses him of being, just a big ego operating a suit of armor that does all the real work. Tony proves it---to the team, but apparently not to himself. That's what Iron Man 3 is about. Tony becoming a hero in his own eyes.

Now we find out that there's a problem with that.

Tony developed a real hero's heart. He did not lose any of his vanity. He did not learn, like Cap did long ago, humility.

It's not enough for him to be a hero. He has to be the hero.

Which brings me to the other part of the answer to who is Tony Stark and what does he want?

He's Howard Stark's son and he wants what he cannot have. His dead father's approval.

Specifically, he's the son of a brilliant and successful father who was, Tony feels, aloof, overly demanding, overly critical, and whom he has in significant ways surpassed. All his life he has been in a competition he can't win for a reward he can't have.  Howard Stark wouldn't acknowledge his son's genius while he was alive and now he's not around to applaud his success and achievements---and admit he’s been bested.  Add to this that Tony has given himself the mission of making up for his own and Howard's mistakes and sins, something that comes back to haunt him and the other Avengers in Age of Ultron, in the persons of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.

If all that sounds neurotic and even juvenile, it's mitigated by Tony's having nobler ambitions. He sincerely wants to fix everything and save everybody.

Like I said, he wants to be a hero.

Unfortunately, like I also said, vanity is still a problem.

Tony wants to be the one who saves everybody and fixes everything.

He wants to be the hero.

He says he built Ultron so that the Avengers won't be needed anymore. But he does it in the belief that he doesn't need the other Avengers to help him. (He enlists Bruce Banner but pretty much relegates him to the role of Igor.) Basically, he believes that the world already doesn't need the Avengers. It just needs him.

In an argument with Cap, Tony defends what he was attempting to do in creating Ultron, prevent war forever or, as he says, thinking he’s being cute and ironic, bringing about “peace in our time.”  Cap won’t buy it. “Every time someone tries to stop a war before it starts,” he snaps. “Innocent people die. Every time.” A line that might inspire anti-war liberals with Iraq in mind to cheer, but which is really kind of a strange thing for a veteran of World War II to say. Wouldn't it have  been a good thing if Hitler could have been stopped before? (Leaving aside the question of whether he actually could have been stopped.)  But there's an answer, which Stark doesn't give, because this is an action-adventure movie not a novel by Tolstoy and there isn't time or space for philosophic and historical debates. Innocent people die in wars, many innocent people, so isn't trying worth it anyway, if only on the chance that maybe only fewer innocent people will die?

Again, no time or space in the movie or in a movie review even on this blog. But quickly. Stark's mistake is that he has already had this debate with himself and made decisions by himself, leaving everybody else out of it. He has assumed knowledge, wisdom, responsibilities, and power that Cap, a conventionally religious man of his bygone time, would probably say belong to God.

Like I said. Frankenstein.

This is where the stories of Iron Man and Captain America begin to converge in a way that, for me, turns the Avengers saga into a side story.  The real story, now, is leading into the next Captain America movie, Civil War.

Of course I don't know what's coming. But this is what I see being set up. Tony Stark is going to bring about what he says he created Ultron to do, put an end to the Avengers.

To put it in mythological terms, he's going to bring about the breaking of the Round Table.

In my review of  the first Avengers, The Romance of Tony Stark, I said that if you see the Avengers as having parallels to the stories of King Arthur and his knights, Tony is Lancelot. Not in personality but in the potential role of tragic traitor. He and Lancelot share the same tragic flaw, a willingness to put their own desires above what they know to be right. In Lancelot's case, it's his love for Guinevere that undoes him. In Tony's, it's his need to be the hero.

In my review, I said that I didn't see Captain America as King Arthur. But Winter Soldier changed my mind about that.

S.H.I.E.L.D. turned out to have been based on the premise that “Might Makes Right.” Cap doesn’t just believe like King Arthur in “Might for Right.” He believes that Right Makes Might. His ambition isn’t just to make the world safe. It’s to make it right.

He dreams of Camelot.

With this in mind, you can guess which scene in Age of Ultron I got the most kick out of: the scene at the party celebrating the Avengers' defeat of the last remnants of Hydra. The guys---Clint (Hawkeye) Tony, Rhodie ( who, thankfully, has given up calling himself the Iron Patriot and gone back to being War Machine), and Steve Rogers---take turns trying to lift Thor's hammer.  Of course, they can't try as they might. As we know, only he---or she. I've been following what's going on in the comic books.---who is worthy can wield the hammer. The guys know this and they don't really expect to succeed. But they've had a few and they are guys, after all. They're showing off. But once they get going, Tony's competitive juices start flowing. He becomes determined to lift the hammer.

It's not to prove he's worthy. He doesn't take that part seriously. (Downey tosses off a couple of great one-liners on the subject of how he will treat his subjects when he takes Thor's place as ruler of Asgard, and, again, the lines are witty and charming but tinged with vanity. He's in effect telling Thor he's not impressed with his being a god and hero-king.) What he wants to show is that lifting the hammer doesn't prove anything except that you've mastered the trick of lifting it. And he's convinced there's a trick and equally convinced that if there is he's the one who can figure it out. That's his main job as an Avenger.

But when it's Cap's turn, we see Steve approach the task with a bit of reluctance. He's doing it mainly to be a good sport. But he gives it his all and...

The hammer moves.

To Thor's shock and consternation---Chris Hemsworth does a terrific double-take here.---and to Steve's own, well, fright.
He gives it one more mighty tug but his heart isn't in it and, as we know from The First Avenger, it's his heart that gives him his strength. The super soldier serum only worked on him because he had a good heart.  Then he gives up and the implication is that he does because he doesn't want to know.

Not that he isn't worthy. He already knows he's worthy. That's what makes him Captain America. He doesn't want to know he's worthier. He doesn't like being as worthy as he is. He’s weighed down by the responsibilities and filled with self-doubt. He doesn't like what being worthy has made him. Sad and alone, out of time and out of place. A misfit. A freak. A monster, in fact. In yet anther Frankenstein story, one he explicitly tells about himself in this movie, the kindly Dr Erskine who invented the super-soldier serum is Frankenstein and he, Captain America, is the Creature.

Chris Evans, working with some beautifully understated dialog, makes Cap almost as witty and charming as Downey's Tony Stark, but he gives Cap a kind of reverse vanity. While just about everything Downey as Stark says is a form of boasting, just about everything Evans' Cap says is self-deprecation.

I don’t recall any specific moments when we see him reacting to Cap’s modesty, but it probably drives Tony nuts.

Here's where it gets messy.

Like it hasn't already, Lance?

If a big part of who Tony Stark is is Howard Stark’s son, then in his eyes Steve Rogers would naturally be something of a stand-in for his father.

That’s how Tony first came to know of him, as his father’s good friend and war buddy. He grew up listening to his father talk admiringly about Cap and from that he learned to resent him. Doesn't matter what Howard said or how often he said it, what Tony heard was an incessant criticism: Why can't you be more like him?

In other words, Tony would have grown up thinking of Captain America as the son his father wished he had instead of him.

It's no wonder that when he meets him in the flesh, Tony's filled with jealousy and an intense spirit of rivalry that would be hard to overcome even as the two became good friends.

Which they have. With not a whole lot of interaction, Downey and Evans make it clear Tony and Steve like each other, have fun together, and rely on each other. The spirit of rivalry never goes away, though, and it's felt on both sides, because more than they are friends, they are, spiritually, brothers.

We all know how things tend to go between brothers in literature. (And in movies. If you want to push it---and I'm always ready to push these things---there are parallels between Steve and Tony and Thor and Loki.) Steve, even though he's younger---discounting the seventy odd years he was frozen in the ice---is in temperament and in effect the older brother, as well as the favorite son.

All right, maybe all that's too mythological. But superheroes are often said to be our new myths---mostly it's said by fans of the comic books and the artists who make their livings creating them. If it's true, however, it's only when they've escaped the comics and other mass media where they have their origins and enter the collective unconscious to the point that they resonate with the very many people who don't read comic books, play video games, or watch the TV shows and go to the movies. That's happened with Superman and Batman. You can geek out for days debating which others have achieved Superman and Batman's mythological status.

Obviously, for me, Captain America is part of my personal mythologies.

But if these stories were truly myths, they would have endings. And the endings would all be the same. The heroes die.
That actually happens to the mythological Thor.

It can't happen to the comic book heroes.

Well, it does all the time. But I mean they die and stay dead. They don't, as Cap advises in Age of Ultron, walk it off.

Their stories have an end which no stories told about them can go past. As far as I know that's only happened to Barry Allen's Flash.

Oh no.

Don’t tell me…

At any rate, there’s too much money riding on the popular heroes’ immunity to mortality.

Now, the heroes of the movies can die and stay dead. And that could happen in the Avengers saga. If the twinned stories of Iron Man and Captain America are truly myths, Civil War will be a tragedy that ends with the breaking of the Round Table, Lancelot's self-imposed banishment, and the death of Arthur.

It could happen. It doesn't appear to be in the offing. Avengers 3 and 4: Infinity War I and II are in the works. The intriguing thing is that as things stand Downey won't be in them. I haven't heard for sure about Evans. He may not be.
That doesn't mean Iron Man and Captain America won't be.

There's precedent for recasting.

Look out! Here comes the pesky Spider-Man!

Again.

But to get down to it at last, this is why I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron as Iron Man 4 and why, as far as I was concerned, after the scene with Thor’s hammers all the Avengers except Iron Man and Cap could have disappeared from the movie until the inevitable climactic battle. Thor, for all intents and purposes, does.

Like I said, mostly what he does between the hammer scene and the final battle is show up in interpolated teasers for Thor: Ragnarok.

As for that final battle, and all the big battles, I could have done without them too. For one thing, the cgi work is too detailed. Watching all those buildings crumble into dust, all I was thinking was “Who’s going to clean up that mess?” (Note to stickler fans: I know who’s going to clean up that mess. The point is I was focused on the mess.) But mainly, what I wanted and what I think the story needed was a final confrontation between Iron Man and Ultron, and, even better than a good fight, a good scene between them like the one between Tony and Loki in the first Avengers.

As for watching a good fight, it’s interesting that the one good one between Ultron and an Avenger is between him and Captain America. I took that as symbolic.

The battles themselves are well staged. I’m sure Whedon had other things on his mind but they play like he was saying to Man of Steel’s director Zack Snyder, “Thisis how you do it.” Whedon keeps the focus on his characters as characters---that is, they are always being themselves as they run, jump, dodge, duck, fly, and fight. He doesn’t just use them as avatars in a video game. And he makes sure that we see that most of their efforts go into saving people. We see and feel that there are actual human lives in jeopardy and that it matters if even one person in the crowd dies.

And as for the characters…

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Quicksilver and Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch aren't given much to do. He's cocky and she's angsty. As the movie goes along, he gets cockier, she gets angstier. But pretty much they're here to save on time spent on exposition in the next Avengers movies.

I'm glad Whedon let Paul Bettany, who's been doing charming work as the voice of Jarvis, Stark's computer sidekick since the first Iron Man, appear as another new Avenger, the Vision. He's a little too much of a vision for my taste, but he's a needed calming, civilizing, and distancing presence. It's a relief to have a character who has some perspective and who can think clearly about what is happening and what the Avengers ought to be up to.  I don't expect that sanity to last. This is, after all, the Marvel cinematic universe.

Even though I didn't need to see them in this movie---as opposed to in those movies of their own that will never get made---it was good to see Jeremy Renner do more than take aim convincingly while cracking wise, Mark Ruffalo do something other than wrestle with his rage, although he still does a fair share of that, and Scarlett Johansson show yet another side of Black Widow, even if that side is that of the good-hearted bad girl who, to paraphrase Valerie Perrine as a variation of the type in Superman, doesn't get to get it on with the good guys.

Chris Hemsworth’s underused, again. Whedon gives a supporting female character a line that lets us know that he knows which of the Avengers most female fans---and gay male ones, I presume---want to see the most of and then doesn’t give it to them. Instead, proud and unabashed dork that he is, he lingers on Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, and makes him the focus of the longing female gaze.  Ruffalo’s good, of course, but he’s nowhere near as pretty as Hemsworth and Banner is, after all, a dork. Hemsworth, though, makes do with what’s given and it’s important to notice that most of his best work is silent. He’s a natural comic actor and all he needs is his eyes.

Spader, as everyone acknowledges, is the stand-out star. When I said he turns his dialog into Shakespeare, I didn’t mean flowery or poetic. I meant that he makes the words alive to the character saying them. Ultron’s listening to himself. Choosing the words carefully. Writing his own script. Writing himself into being. Hamlet does this. Falstaff does this. Iago and Rosalind do it.  Ultron knows himself to be performing. He’s literally making himself up as he goes. And not only is he creating himself in his own eyes, he’s forcing others to think of him as he thinks of himself.

I probably need to come back and rewrite that.

That’s it. Time to wrap this up. But one more scene before the credits roll.

Whedon has been given a lot of credit for shaping the Avengers saga and giving the movies their tone and spirit. But I think what he deserves the real credit for is recognizing what was already going on, accepting it, liking it, and running with it. The first and most credit, I think, should go to Jon Favreau, and I was happy to his name show up in the credits of Avengers: Age of Ultron as an executive producer.

It was Favreau, as the director of the first Iron Man, who set the tone and gave the series its spirit and sensibility. And the best thing he did to do that was fight to get Robert Downey Jr cast as Tony Stark.

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Because the running time of this review isn’t long enough: My reviews of the first Avengers, The Romance of Tony Stark; Iron Man 3, Big Man in a Suit of Armor; and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Cap being Cap, the goodest of good guys.

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Avengers: Age of Ultron, written and directed by Joss Whedon. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Cobie Smulders, Don Cheadle, James Spader, and Samuel L. Jackson. Rated PG-13. Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.

The Romance of Tony Stark: a review of the first Avengers movie

Posted Saturday morning, May 5, 2018.

Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America square off in The Avengers in accordance with the rule that no superheroes can meet for the first time without getting into a fight so that fans have more fuel for their endless debates over who would win in a matchup.

This is what you get when you let a former English professor write movie reviews.

Within the cycle of movies of which The Avengers is the latest installment, Tony Stark---Iron Man---fills the role Lancelot fills in the King Arthur stories.

I warned you.

The Avengers isn’t a retelling of the Knights of the Round Table.  For one thing, there’s no King Arthur. (If anyone wants to make the case that Nick Fury plays that role, feel free. I think it’s a reach. Try Merlin instead.)  And I'm not making a direct comparison of their personalities. In personality, Stark is no Lancelot. If he has a counterpart among any of the Knights of the Roundtable, it's Gawain. Gawain is vain, boastful, selfish, self-indulgent, a showoff and happy to think he can do it all on his own. He's also the second best of Arthur's knights. He was the best until Lancelot showed up. Fans can argue the actual ranking of the Avengers vis-a-vis each other. What matters is that Gawain wasn't inclined to admit to his demotion and Stark would disagree with you if you didn't rank Iron Man first. A lot of his best lines in the movie are cheap shots at the other heroes' expenses meant to let them know he's not impressed by them or their powers.

(The only other Avenger who even roughly has an Arthurian double is Captain America. He's like Galahad whose strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure. The super-soldier serum worked as it did on Steve Rogers because he had a good heart.)

Still, the comparison to Lancelot holds in that like Lancelot Iron Man is the hero around whose story the other heroes' stories are centered.

“I am Iron Man,” Stark declares at the end of his first movie.  But as we learn in Iron Man 2, he’s not. Iron Man is just a robot Stark pilots from within.  And for the robot to do its job it almost doesn’t matter who’s wearing the metal suit.  What matters is if Stark can make the suit into a skin, that is, into an extension of himself.  And a lot has to change for that to happen.  Every one of Lancelot’s adventures is crucial to the overall story of the Knights of the Round Table because the fate of Camelot depends on Lancelot remaining the exemplary knight he is while constantly confronted with the temptation to be just a man.  Every one of Iron Man’s adventures is crucial to the ongoing story of the Avengers because the fates of the Avengers and the world depend on Stark becoming a knight in shining armor, and he’s having a hard time with that.

Ok. Before taking this analogy any further…

I liked it. It’s fun. I had a good time. The Avengers is a good superhero movie.

It’s not a good movie the way Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins are good movies.  Rio Bravo is a good movie. Rio Lobo is a good Western. The Dirty Dozen is a good war movie. The Guns of Navarone is a good movie. The Avengers is a good superhero movie. The best in this particular series of superhero movies after the first Iron Man.

Part of what makes it good is that it is very much a piece of that series. Director Joss Whedon, who also wrote the screenplay, has clearly studied and liked and taken to heart the previous movies in the series and he deftly weaves together narrative and thematic threads from Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger into one taut strand, pulls that strand smoothly through the movie, then quickly unravels it and spools the threads out towards the next movies in the series.  The Avengers sets up Captain America 2, Thor 2, and Iron Man 3.  (It doesn’t directly set up The Avengers 2.  That’s coming but it will have to pick up the threads from those sequels and do its part in continuing the series.) As Whedon has apparently learned from his long career in television and as a writer of comic books, everything doesn’t depend on single episode or issue.  The job of any particular episode or issue, in fact, is to get the audience excited about what’s coming next so they’ll tune in next week or buy next month’s issue.  For all the spectacle and mayhem that goes with bringing together Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and setting them up to fight off an invading alien army in the streets of New York City while landmarks like Grand Central Station are destroyed around them, The Avengers is a movie with an admirably modest ambition.

Moving the story along.

There’s a kick in watching the Avengers assemble for the first time and in listening to our favorites banter and argue. The dialog is sharp and snappy. The jokes are funny. The suspense level is high. Whedon makes us worry about every character.  But the main reason for seeing The Avengers is the same reason why when you’re reading a book and you finish Chapter 10 you move on to Chapter 11 instead of skipping ahead to Chapter 12. It’s a fun and exciting chapter and, if you’re all caught up with your reading, a gratifying one that will have you nodding in appreciation and saying to yourself, “So that’s where they were going with that!” and “Of course! I should have seen that coming!” and even “Wow, I wasn’t expecting that at all!”  But that’s the thing.  All those reactions depend on your having done the homework.

You don’t need to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy The Avengers, but I don’t see how anyone who hasn’t seen the other movies in the series will be able to follow this one or find a reason to care about many of the characters or the story. Whedon is used to playing to an audience that includes lots of people who missed last week’s episode, so maybe I missed all the ways he slipped in to help viewers just tuning in catch up. But it seems to me that if you haven’t seen Iron Man 2, you won’t know why Tony Stark is a problem for the other heroes and himself. If you haven’t seen Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Thor you won’t know why Agent Coulson matters or appreciate Clark Gregg’s performance in the part. If you haven’t seen Thor, you may think Tom Hiddleston is a ham of an actor instead of a great one. If you haven’t seen Captain America: The First Avenger you won’t know why Cap is so forlorn or appreciate the subtext in his and Stark’s instant dislike of each other.  And if you haven’t seen The Incredible Hulk, you might not get Bruce Banner’s best joke.

Note: I’m not warning anybody away from The Avengers. I’m just saying if you’re thinking of going and really want to get the most of it, watch at least a couple of the other movies.  They’re good and good for you.

I’m also saying that The Avengers isn’t a good movie in and of itself because it depends so much on those other movies.  Which is not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind when you’re telling friends how AWESOME it is.

And it is AWESOME.  With the above caveats.

Of course the star attractions are the stars, both the real life ones and the ones from the comic books they play. Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Mark Ruffalo, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk.

Evans does what he had to do going in, hold his own against Downey and Hemsworth while playing a much duller character and then make that dullness as compelling as Stark's naughty boy charm and Thor's swashbuckling sex appeal. Evans doesn't have Cap fight for his authority - if anything he has him doubting it. Cap's sense of himself is tied to what he sees as his place in the world, but his world is seventy years in the past. When the time is right, he assumes it, without fuss but with confidence. Events conspire to re-create a need and therefore a place for Captain America and Cap steps right in and suddenly Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and the entire New York City police force are gladly taking orders from him. Evans is a modest enough and secure enough actor to let the movie come to him.

If you haven't seen Thor, you might not feel as I did that Chris Hemsworth is underused.  Whatever those of you who did see it might have thought of Thor the movie, I think you have to admit Hemsworth was terrific as Thor the god of thunder.  He established himself as a star and swashbuckling leading man in the tradition of not just Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn but Gene Kelly---how else would you describe Kelly's dancing style besides swashbuckling? What is his D'Artagnan doing while dueling if not dancing?---and Harrison Ford.  In fact, if Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are truly intent on continuing with another Indiana Jones movie, they should consider doing a total reboot starring Hemsworth.

Thor's main job as part of the Avengers---and I mean the team as portrayed in the movie, not the whole movie itself---is to bring the mighty when the mighty's most needed. But the movie takes his mightiness as a given and his role in the story is to provide kindly approval of Cap, of Stark, and of human beings in general and show sympathetic disapproval of Loki.  Tom Hiddleston's Loki isn't dismissible as another cackling movie super villain because Hemsworth's Thor doesn't see him that way.

I would have liked to have seen a little more of this side of Thor in scenes with Evans and Downey. I'm also disappointed that Whedon didn't put him together with either Cobie Smulders or Scarlett Johansson. It would have been fun watching him charm them nearly out of their catsuits. And a scene between Hemsworth, Downey, and Paltrow in which Pepper Potts swoons for Thor while Stark drives himself nuts trying not to show how jealous he is would have been a real hoot.

Can't have everything, and one thing The Avengers has that I didn't expect was Mark Ruffalo's brilliantly understated take on Bruce Banner and the Hulk.

The Incredible Hulk is the weakest in the series, but it’s still a pretty good superhero movie. I thought its major flaw was the coldness and detachment of Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner.  Norton overemphasized Banner’s efforts to remain calm in order to keep himself from Hulking out.  Ruffalo’s Banner isn’t calm.  He’s ferociously, strenuously, and exhaustingly repressed.  He’s in the habit of referring to the Hulk as “the other guy,” but Ruffalo says the words with an ironic sneer in his voice and a look of fear in his eyes that let us know Banner is terrified and, even more wrenching, growing resigned to the fact that it’s Banner who’s the other guy and that the Hulk is the real him and the moment is closing in when the Hulk will assert himself for good.

When he reveals his “secret” to Cap in one of the movie’s most rousing lines, it’s one of those satisfying “I knew it!” moments.

The breakout character, however, is Black Widow.  Can't say Scarlett Johansson brings anything special to the role besides an impressive deadpanning of her dominatrix persona and the ability to wear her catsuit with insouciance. But Natasha Romanoff---as far as I recall, she's only referred to as Black Widow once and then by an enemy spymaster who's using the code name that's the only name he has for her---turns out to have a superpower.

She thinks faster than a speeding bullet.

Literally.

I say Johansson doesn’t bring anything special to the part, but that’s not to say she brings nothing.  Intense and concentrated intelligence blazes out of her eyes as hot and almost as visibly as Superman’s heat vision.  She makes us realize that all Black Widow’s backflips, spin and scissor kicks, headbutts, karate chops, throat punches, and two-gun pistol shooting on the slide aren’t reflexive.  They’re plotted.  If The Avengers was a Guy Ritchie movie we’d see her in slow-motion set-ups, carefully assessing each opponent and planning her particular lines of attack.  The bad guys aren’t being out-fought as much as out-thought.  And this holds true when she’s not in a physical fight.

In mental duels, she out-thinks two of the smartest characters in the movie.

Still, I felt a little as though she was being forced into a leading role and forced at me.  Black Widow is a sidekick---my son thinks “sidekick” is a disparagement of her awesomeness. I should say she’s a first lieutenant to the hero-kings---and there is no other female character of note.  I'm not counting Gwyneth Paltrow's extended cameo.  As SHIELD agent Maria Hill, Smulders seems to be only on hand to wear the catsuit in case Johansson decides not to sign up for The Avengers 2.

At first glance it might seem that as Nick Fury Samuel L. Jackson hasn't been given much more to do but glower and growl and wear his black leather trench coat with a coolness that will make you desperate to own one yourself even though you know in your heart you will never be anywhere near that cool.  But as Stark warns, Fury is the spy's spy. He serves his country by lying and manipulation.  Jackson makes us see the sinister side of Fury's nature. He's not just Mace Windu with an eye patch. He has more than a touch of Darth Sidious and Darth Vader to make you want to rethink that black trench coat. You never worry about which side of the Force he's on. You just wonder if there's anyone he doesn't think of as a tool or a weapon to be used.

Like I said, you don't have to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy the movie, but if you're not I can't see how you won't be thoroughly baffled by the apparently wasted presence of Jeremy  Renner as Hawkeye (or even know he's called Hawkeye) for about two thirds the way through. Then he starts bringing the archery awesome and you'll be too busy thinking to yourself “I need to get a bow and arrow!” to care about his backstory.

But, getting down to it, I still see The Avengers as Robert Downey’s movie and the story being moved along as Iron Man’s story.

Of the big three, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor, Iron Man is the unfinished character.  Captain America just needed to get his chance and in his movie he got it. Thor has learned his most important lesson. But when last we left Tony Stark at the end of Iron Man 2, he was still not a hero.  Iron Man and Tony Stark were separate entities and Nick Fury had decided he could do without the former if the former could only be had with the latter.

He’s still an open question and I’m not giving anything away by telling you that The Avengers leaves that question open.

Downey and Ruffalo have a couple of wonderful and funny scenes together in which Stark and Banner play dueling geniuses on their virtual drawing boards. Hemsworth’s not the only one of the stars who can dance, so to speak.  In the exuberant physicality of what is essentially a comic song and dance act, Downey and Ruffalo reminded me of Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor or, maybe more aptly, Hugh Jackman and Neal Patrick Harris at last year’s Tony Awards.  What we’re watching is a partnership and a rivalry.

Stark has been drawn to Banner in an openly admiring and affectionate way we’ve never seen him drawn to any other character including Pepper Potts---mostly we’ve seen him deliberately annoying people in order to push them away.  In Banner he finds a potential soulmate capable of playing with him on his level, someone who shares his passion for science and can keep up.

But as they work together to solve a problem, Stark can’t resist turning it into a competition.

At first it seems as though he’s only trying to distract Banner by teasing him and peppering him with one-liners.  But then what he’s doing becomes more sinister and dangerous.  He’s trying to provoke him.  If Banner has to concentrate on keeping his cool, he won’t be able to focus on the problem.  But it gets worse.

He’s curious.

He wants to see Banner Hulk out.

It’s the pure scientist in him getting the better of him.  He can’t help seeing another human being as a potential science experiment.

Which is insane.  Never mind for the moment that the fate of the earth is at stake.  Trapping himself in a small room with the Hulk when he’s not wearing his armor is a really, really, really bad idea.

But that’s Stark.  He’s rash. He’s impulsive. He’s reckless. He’s thoughtless.  He’s immature.  And he’s selfish.

And this is why I say that the whole series (so far) has been basically The Romance of Tony Stark and that’s likely going to be a main theme as the series moves forward.

Whatever the ostensible plots and whoever the villains, Thor 2 is going to be about Thor being awesome while searching for his lost love and Captain America 2 will be about Steve Rogers trying to find a place for himself in the 21st century besides being Captain America.  But Iron Man 3 will be about whether or not Stark’s going to screw up again and how and how bad and how much of the result of that will carry over into The Avengers 2.

To get back to the Knights of the Round Table analogy, the one way Stark is most like Lancelot is that in both their romances everything depends on how the hero responds to his chief temptation which for Lancelot and Tony Stark is the temptation to put self before duty. For Lancelot that temptation comes in the form of his love for Guinevere. For Stark it's straightforwardly his ego.

Every tale of Lancelot foreshadows Lancelot’s ultimate failure and the breaking of the Round Table and the destruction of Camelot.  Every one of Iron Man’s adventures (so far) foreshadows Stark’s potential failure to be the hero he and the world need him to be.

Again, I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you that in The Avengers we learn that if he has to Stark can overcome the temptation and be Iron Man and not just Iron Man's pilot, a billionaire, genius, playboy, philanthropist in a metal suit. It doesn't tell us that he is past temptation.

It’s a hilarious moment and a key one when Stark recognizes similarities between himself and Loki.  But we’re left to wonder what he’s going to do with this newfound self-awareness.

The romance is unfinished.  The comedy or the tragedy is still to be played out.  The story continues.

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The Avengers, written and directed by Josh Whedon, starring Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Stellan Skarsgard, Cobie Smulders, and Samuel L. Jackson. On DVD and Blu-ray and available to watch instantly at Amazon.

Fourth Wonderful Thought after seeing Wonder Woman and First Amazing Thought after seeing Spider-Man: Homecoming: Princess Diana and Peter Parker have identity issues

Posted Sunday night, July 9, 2017.

On the way out of the movie theater last night, we followed a pair of couples in their thirties on a double date who’d just seen Spider-Man: Homecoming too. Sounded like they all liked it, but the snatch of their conversation I overheard was about Wonder Woman. Seems that one of the two women didn't like it.

Actually, she hated it.

She thought it was stupid.

It wasn't "real."

I don't think she meant real as in realistic and she thinks Greek gods are mere fantasy while teenagers being bitten by radioactive spiders and gaining superpowers is the sort of thing that happens all the time in real life.

I think she meant that Wonder Woman the movie is grounded in comic books and myth while Spider-Man: Homecoming is grounded in the reality of being a teenager in contemporary New York City.

They tell pretty much the same story. An innocent and naive hero sets out on a quest to do the world a great good and n the process learns that the world is a darker place than they knew and people more complicated and not necessarily as good and deserving as he/she supposed. Diana learns this lesson more deeply and with greater pain and to her own self-disillusionment, but that's because she's part of a tragedy and Peter is still living in a comedy.

Spider-Man in the Avengers series appears to be one of the comic heroes, along with Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, and the Guardians of the Galaxy, and as things are trending it looks like it's the comic heroes who are going to save the day.

Tragic heroes fail even if they survive their ordeals. Comic heroes succeed even if they die.

Spider-Man succeeds and does not die. Wonder Woman fails at the end of her movie.

It's hard to tell what Zack Snyder intends for the Justice League franchise. His Superman and Batman are tragic figures. But I can't tell from the Justice League trailer how he sees Wonder Woman. It looks like she's the most fun character. That's probably mostly Gal Gadot's doing, but maybe Snyder sees her as  redemptive figure.

Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne are divided personalities, and both get lost in their other selves. Superman and Batman are identities separate from their "real" selves. That's tragic in different ways for both of them. Clark is pulled towards giving himself up to other people's idea of who he is, which is a form of self-erasure. Bruce is pulled toward giving into his own demonic impulses, to become nothing more than an agent of his desire to punish, which is a form of self-destruction. Diana is completely her own self. Wonder Woman is just a description of her in her armor. We'll see if her example and her affection can save then from themselves.

Batman has forgotten what it's like to be a hero. He needs reminding, and maybe Diana will do the reminding.

Superman inspires the other heroes and gives hope to the people of Earth. But who inspires him? Who gives him hope? I'm hoping it turns out to be Wonder Woman.

Meanwhile, over in that other universe, Peter is having identity issues too. But that's because he's fifteen years old. He's having normal trouble trying to figure out who he is and what kind of adult he wants to be and what career path to choose. It just happens that his choices include superhero. There's nothing neurotic or tragic about it, at least for now.

Both Diana and Peter are fundamentally simple characters and in a way the same character or rather, as I suggested, the same folk tale type. But Peter's life is more complex. More people in it whose interests, needs, storylines are at odds with his own. And that's why, as much as I enjoyed Wonder Woman and didn't think it was at all stupid, Spider-Man: Homecoming is more my kind of movie. It has more people in it.

I tend to like any type of movie that has a large cast of interesting and well-played supporting characters, and that's been one of the Avengers series strengths. The DC movies of the 21st Century, including Christopher Nolan's Batmans, are to my mind disappointingly underpopulated. Wonder Woman continues the trend.

Chris Pine is terrific a Steve Trevor, and he's more than the love interest. He's the second lead. But he and Gadot are pretty much all on their own. I know people were thrilled to see Princess Buttercup as an Amazon Warrior, but that's all Robin Wright’s Antiope is. She's defined by her role as Diana's trainer and the advocate for Diana's ambition. Other than that she has no character of her own. Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) is also defined by Diana's ambition. Like Antiope, she's an attitude, not a character. Steve’s team of commandos and his right-hand “man” Etta have more to do plot-wise and more to say for themselves character-wise, but Etta, delightfully played by Lucy Davis, is basically comic relief, and Sameer, Charlie, and the Chief (Saïd Taghmaoui, Ewan Bremner, and Eugene Brave Rock) are stock characters with the emphasis on character.

I found the guest appearances in Spider-Man: Homecoming by Robert Downey Jr, Marisa Tomei, Jon Favreau, and Gwyneth Paltrow distracting. (Chris Evans' cameos---Yep. Cameos plural---are a hoot.) It's the actors playing Peter's friends, classmates, and teachers who provide the fun and help create the real world Peter is part of and the world that doesn't need him to be real---that is, it's a world that exists apart from its being the background against which Peter's story is played. There's a pretty funny high school sitcom going on off screen that we get to see  occasional and tantalizing snippets from, which has an excellent cast, several of whose characters are also major players in the movie's storyline. I'll save my praises for them for my formal review, but for now...everything you've heard about Zendaya stealing the scenes she's in? It's true.

The point here is that the supporting characters aren't defined by their relationships to Peter's story. His character is defined by his interactions with them and Tom Holland's performance is enhanced by his castmates'.

As for the villains, Wonder Woman’s General Ludendorff and Dr Poison are fun as homages to Captain America: The First Avenger’s the Red Skull and his pet mad scientist Dr Zola but not compelling as characters on their own. And Ares is interesting as a villain in both his guises because of the way he's played. In Spider-Man: Homecoming, the Vulture is interesting because of the way Micheal Keaton plays him and because he's played by Michael Keaton, but the character isn't dependent on Michael Keaton to make him a character.

It's hard for me to say which is the better movie. Wonder Woman is the cleaner piece of storytelling, but there's more of dramatic an comedic interest at work in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Right now I'm favoring Spider-Man, but it's a good bet that that's a simple case of Recency bias.  I won't know, though,  until I've seen Wonder Woman again. Of course Recency bias might affect my judgment then too. I'll report back when the time comes.

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Follow the links to the previous Wonderful Thoughts:

Injustice in the Works?

A comic book movie for us guys.

and

Princess Diana, Captain America, and…Sam Spade?

Second Wonderful Thought After Seeing Wonder Woman: A movie for us guys

Posted Saturday morning, June 17, 2017.

Guys, guys. Can we stop pouting over how much fun the girls are having with Wonder Woman without us? We have our movie.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is still in theaters.

It’s just the movie for us.

After all, it’s all about a little boy who finds his lost daddy and gets to play catch with him at last.

Father-Son Chat: Peter Quill (Chris Pratt, left) and his lost and found father Ego (Kurt Russell) in a scene just for us guys in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Follow the link to the first Wonderful thought: Injustice in the works?

Doctor Strange: It doesn't make any sense, but as the Ancient One would say, not everything has to

Posted Saturday afternoon, November 19, 2016.

Among other things, he wears the cape well, although sometimes it seems to be the case that the cape is wearing him. Benedict Cumberbatch in the role he seems to have been born to play, Doctor Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, in the latest Marvel Studio’s Avengers franchise, Doctor Strange.

Doctor Strange opens with a dazzling fight scene that raises a question.

Why do they need Doctor Strange?

They being a brother and sisterhood of sorcerers who protect the earth from the depredations of evil invaders from other dimensions. At the moment though, their fight is with a band of renegade sorcerers known as the Zealots who have gone over to the dark side and are putting their considerable magic powers to work towards bringing about world destruction. They’re led by a Luciferian fallen angel called Kaecilius whose evil plan is to deliver earth to a world-devouring monster named Dormammu in exchange for eternal life.

This makes the Zealots sound like shades of the Sith and Kaecilius like Darth Vader...or Voldemort or Saurumon. But stories of magicians seduced by their own power or by the temptation to increase it and of heroes who through pride or some other tragic flaw turn into villains go back centuries, past Vader and Voldemort and Saurumon, past Faust, past Lucifer himself. Kaecilius, however, played with grim and sardonic charm by Mads Mikkelson, is in a way more formidable than the once and future Anakin Skywalker and the former Tom Riddle, in still showing more than vestiges of the hero he once was or at any rate could have been, and he and his followers put up quite a fight.

They don’t win but they get away with the a page they’ve stolen from a book in the good sorcerers’ library that---if they’re able to decipher it---will give Kaecelius the spell he needs to conjure up Dormammu.

Getting away is no easy matter because the good sorcerers are led by a millennia-old Celtic priestess known as the Ancient One and when she shows up the Zealots are immediately over-matched. At one point in the fight, the Ancient One finds herself confronting Kaecelius and his most dangerous henchpersons all by herself and that almost even things up for the Zealots.

The Ancient One is played by Tilda Swinton but we can’t see it’s her at first because she appears in a hooded green and gold robe that pretty much swaddles the stunt double handling most of the fighting, leaping, in the air spinning, and magical swordplay. But we know it’s her. We can imagine her inside the robes and cheer Swinton for her imagined awesomeness.That awesomeness informs the rest of her performance in which she mostly plays the Ancient One as mild-mannered, modest, restrained, cheerful, and at time even winsome, easily flustered, with an almost girlish bashfulness. The steel inside, however, is never in doubt, of course. But something else is and it gives her a sinisterness despite her simplicity.

That comes later. In the opening, she’s all steel. And that’s part of what raises the question, why do they---why does she---need Doctor Strange?

After the Zealots get away, it’s clear the Ancient One and her order can use a bit of help. So that seems to answer the question for now.

But when we meet Stephen Strange, the question is brought up with a new emphasis. Why do they need Stephen Strange to be that help? Because he’s nobody’s idea of a hero, let alone a savior. Nobody’s but his own, that is.

Strange is arrogant, self-centered, vain, self-indulgent---but everything he indulges in is an indulgence of his vanity. Whatever he does, including saving lives on the operating table, he does to show off to himself. “I’m so wonderful. No wonder I enjoy being me.” He’s not a bad person in the sense that he doesn’t go out of his way to hurt others. In fact, by some measures, he’s not just a good guy, he’s a great guy. Fun to be around, fun and satisfying to work for and with---provided you don’t get the idea you’re anywhere near his equal in the operating room---and a world champion neurosurgeon who routinely saves lives other doctors have despaired of.  People admire and celebrate him. Actually, they’re bedazzled by him, although not everyone falls under his spell, and it appears that only one person has managed to actually love him.

Strange is by most measures obnoxious, but in the person of Benedict Cumberbatch he’s more than charming enough to distract us from his obnoxiousness, he is bedazzling. He makes us like him for it, it being both being so charming in his obnoxiousness and bedazzling us into not caring he’s obnoxious. We know he has to change. We expect that he will change or there’ll probably be no movie---although this a Marvel movie and the hero’s spiritual growth isn’t a given. Tony Stark becomes a hero but, as Oliver Mannion has observed, he doesn’t change. That’s the point of the Iron Man chapters of The Avengers franchise and the root of the tragedy at its center. Tony decides he’s Iron Man but Iron Man is the heroic character. Tony Stark remains the same vain, flip, egotistical, self-centered showoff he always was. So it’s possible Stephen Strange can go right on being Stephen Strange only with actual magical powers instead of seemingly magical surgical skills. Doesn’t matter while we’re waiting for it to go either way, though. While we’re waiting, it’s just plain fun to watch Cumberbatch having fun being Strange having fun being Strange, obnoxious as he is.

But the difference between Tony Stark and Stephen Strange  is that Tony has a conscience. If Strange has one, he’s very, very good at ignoring it.

Of course change does come and it’s practically instantaneous. It’s not, however, immediately for the better.

Indulging himself on his way to another evening of self-indulgence, Strange has a car accident in which both his hands are crushed. The resulting nerve damage is so extensive that there’s no chance he’ll ever be able to wield a scalpel again.

His career as a world champion neurosurgeon is over and with it, he thinks, not just his professional life but his whole life. With the loss of his hands as instruments of his profession comes a loss of his sense of himself. He stops being Stephen Strange. He becomes...nobody.

Suddenly there’s no one there.

All that’s left of him is the vanity and the self-doubt and insecurity that were always behind it with the addition of a very unattractive dose of self-pity.

In effect, less than a third of the way in, the movie kills off its main character. The next step of the story is to show us who---what new character---is going to replace him. This takes a little while.

In his desperation after the accident, it doesn’t cross his mind that he’s still a doctor and there other specialties than neurosurgery where he could put his knowledge and other skills to work. Only one kind of doctor matters to him and there’s only one of that kind. Stephen Strange, the world’s most brilliant, successful, and famous practitioner of the world’s most difficult profession. His sense of self is tied up in being not doing. When he can’t be that Stephen Strange, he can’t do anything because he doesn’t think there’s anything else worth doing, and so he might as well not exist. He ceases to exist.

He becomes a lost soul wandering his own private Purgatory.

Of course, Purgatory is a mountain to ascend, and eventually Strange literally climbs a mountain or up into the mountains at any rate: The Himalayas where he arrives on the unimposing doorstep of the Ancient One.

What follows from this point in the origin story of Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts are some rather standard scenes of the education of an apprentice hero. Standard except for the humor. Most of the scenes of Strange learning to become a hero and to develop and master his new superpowers are played for laughs or, played with laughs, with plenty of jokes, verbal and visual, and delightfully comic touches by Cumberbatch---who if you’re a fan of Sherlock you’ll know is terrific at tossing off one-liners as if that’s the way geniuses naturally converse---Swinton, whose delivery is wry and droll and, like I said, somewhat bashful---she makes herself blush at her own wit---and the hilariously dead-pan Benedict Wong as the order’s head librarian whose name is, as it happens, Wong.

Head librarian, by the way, is akin to being chief enforcer.

Something else makes this origin story different from the standard. Origin stories generally don’t focus on the hero’s needing a personality transplant.

They're usually all business: Here’s how so and so got his or her powers. Now on with our story. 

Just sticking with the other origin stories within the Avengers series, the hero’s psychological and spiritual growth isn’t as much of an issue in the first Iron Man, the first Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, or Ant-Man. Scott Lang has had his change of heart before Ant-Man begins, that’s part of why Hank Pym recruits him to be Ant-Man, and his psychological and spiritual challenge is to prove he’s up to the task of being a superhero. Steve Rogers is already Captain America in his heart, head, and soul, which is why the super-soldier serum works on him. Thor simply needs a lesson in humility. Tony Stark, like I said Oliver Mannion says, doesn’t really change at all.

Doctor Strange’s origin story serves the plot not by simply introducing us to the superhero but by helping to answer that question I posited at the top of the post: why this particular hero is needed at this particular moment. He can only save the day by being who he is, which isn’t only a matter of acquiring his powers. That he’ll get his powers is a given. So much so that  the filmmakers feel free to treat that part of the origin mostly as comedy, like I said. He has to become who he is. And whether Strange will change psychologically is the serious matter.

Of course, he does.

But there’s no one special moment when he sees the light. There’s a moment when he realizes he has changed but it’s in the middle of other things that are claiming his attention and the moment passes quickly.  Doctor Strange and Doctor Strange go on as if the transformation is not worth remarking on, and to Strange, it wouldn’t be. He is not that Doctor Strange and doesn’t miss being him in the least. Except that part of him that was in love with a fellow doctor, played by Rachel McAdams, and I’ll get to her in a little bit.

As if you haven’t guessed, I think Cumberbatch is terrific as Doctor Strange. It’s a part he was born to play and he’s been rehearsing it for the past several years on Sherlock. He manages the complete personality change with aplomb, naturally, but it includes a physical change that comes without anything more than a slight change of expression---unless you count the touches of white hair at his temples. All the boyishness that’s the basis of his charm at the beginning simply vanishes and with it that Stephen Strange. The Doctor Strange who takes his place is imposingly adult, no longer self-involved and self-indulgent but self-contained and totally self-controlled, dashing rather than merely charming, much more handsome, and...slightly sinister, as you would expect a good master of the occult would be.

He’s also supremely self-confident, which is why when he meets another superhero late into the movie, one in whose company even other superheroes might feel daunted, he’s coolly unimpressed. That other hero is equally unimpressed by Strange which seems to be why they hit it off.

[Editor's note: I said that meeting occurs late in the movie. Technically, it comes after the movie proper. It's the now Marvel movies standard mid-credits scene, so as fans don't have to be told, stay for the credits. All of them. There's another one at the very end.]

Swinton, too, I think is terrific. She’s always come across on screen as a being from another planet if not another dimension, which of course helps in playing a sorcerer supreme. Benedict Wong, as I mentioned, is hilarious but not in any way that undercuts his formidability as the character who will go on to be Doctor Strange’s right hand man.

Mads Mikkelson is given limited scope as Kaecilius, showing up now and again mainly either to remind us that there’s an evil plot unfolding or to get into another fight with our heroes. In either case, he’s in a grim mood, as you’d expect of a villain who’s gone over to the dark side and is now bent on world destruction. But his grimness has shadings and nuances, and in addition to being grimly charming he gets to be grimly funny.

There’s a funny scene in which Kaecelius and Strange face off for the first time and Strange’s introducing himself leads into an Abbott and Costello-esque exchange with Mikkelson playing it so straight that it’s hard to tell if Kaecilius is deliberately being a wiseguy or is genuinely without a clue. Mikkelson give Kaecilus a slight and enigmatic smile that makes him hard to read throughout. He may be enjoying playing around with magic or being evil or he may simply be enjoying the thrill of being on an adventure and it doesn’t matter what side he’s on or what his goals are, at the moment he’s just having fun. Whatever the reason for it, the smile and the note of humor in his voice humanize him. That is, they let us see that he was once humane if not good. It’s the vestige of the hero he once was or might have been.

Now as for McAdams…

It’s interesting that even though Marvel Studios has yet to introduce a female superhero, their leading ladies are all heroines in their own rights, not to mention independent, highly competent, highly intelligent people who don’t need their superheroic love interests to do their jobs for them. Pepper Potts, Peggy Carter, Jane Foster, and Hope Van Dyne can get along fine without Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and Ant-Man, thank you. Most of the time, at any rate. Pepper Potts does fall into the role of Damsel in Distress in Iron Man 3. McAdams’ Christine Palmer is even less defined by her relationship with the male hero than the others.

To be fair to them, though, Christine’s relationship with Stephen Strange---the heroic Stephen Strange---is yet to be defined. Her romantic entanglement was with the first version of Strange and that ended before the movie begins. So she’s not the love interest so much as the former and maybe future love but right now very good but not uncritical friend interest.

Consequently, McAdams mostly has to play concerned, exasperated, and infuriated but she does get to be funny in an extended sequence in which she has to perform emergency surgery on Strange’s wounded and dying body while his astral form keeps popping in and out of sight as he alternates between giving her surgical advice she doesn’t need and fights off Kaecilius’ strongest and deadliest henchman who is also popping in and out of sight as he astral projects himself too.

McAdams is a delight as she has Christine, who has no idea what is going on, determinedly keeping her focus on the job of keeping her patient alive and trying not to lose her temper at Strange’s constant interruptions while barely holding herself together instead of freaking out at the weirdnesses flying and swooping in and out of view around her.

The only one of the movie’s leads who doesn’t have much of a chance to be funny is Chiwetel Ejiofor who plays Mordo, the Ancient One’s chief lieutenant and eventually Strange’s strong right arm. Ejiofr’s primary job here is to be questioning and over-earnest as the story sets things up for Mordo’s likely more prominent role in the expected sequels and other movies in the Avengers franchise. But he does get to toss off a witty line or two now and again.

Doctor Strange is a comedy. Not exactly in the same vein as Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy. Ant-Man is a comic heist movie and Guardians a comic pirate movie. Doctor Strange is a fairly straight-forward sword and sorcery adventure in the tradition of Lord of the Rings and, actually, Star Wars. There’s just more emphasis on the sorcery. But it’s like Ant-Man and Guardians in having a comic as opposed to a tragic hero. The comic hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Comic heroes are redemptive figures. They don’t just save the day. They put things back together. Cap and Tony are tragic heroes, not least because their fates are tied together in a way that pulls Cap down more than it lifts Tony up. His friendship with Cap makes Tony a better man. But not enough better. And Tony only exacerbates Cap’s central problem. He’s a hero out of his time. All that he stood for in 1943 has become corny, simplistic, more the target for irony than the source of inspiration. On top of his loneliness, this has crippled him with self-doubt that at times on crosses the spiritual boundary into self-loathing and led him to the brink of despair. That, in turn, limits his ability to put things back together on a personal, intimate scale.

He can’t bring about happy endings for others. And he’s never had the physical power to put things back together on a larger scale.

Tony has that power. We’ve seen him use it time and again. But he’s nearly as useless bringing about personal happy endings. In fact, he goes Cap one better---or one worse. He’s destructive on the personal level. Cap has at least helped Nat and Falcon heal their wounded psyches a little bit.

Merlin uses Arthur. Gandalf uses Bilbo and Frodo. Dumbledore uses Harry to an unconscionable degree. The Ancient One uses Strange. We have to wait to see if he uses someone in his turn and who that will be and how and to what end.

Like I said, there’s a long tradition of users of magic giving into the temptation to go over to the dark side.

All heroes fail in the end, even the comic ones.

Something to keep in mind maybe when thinking about the election.

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Doctor Strange, directed by Scott Derrickson, written by Joe Spaights, Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofer, Rachel McAdams, Mads Mikkelson, Benedict Wong, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Benjamin Bratt. Rated PG-13. Now in theaters.

Dispatches from Captain America: Civil War

Posted May 10, 2016. Updated Tuesday afternoon, May 11.

Which side are they on? Team Cap.

Ok. Now on to the important stuff. Captain America: Civil War.

Seems there are people who think Cap is on the wrong side on this one. They're not wrong exactly. Trouble is there isn't a right side.

It’s odd to me that anyone would think the right side is the side that has Thunderbolt Ross as its spokesman, but I think their point is that the Avengers should answer to a democratically elected civilian authority. This is more than just a matter of keeping a group of superpowered vigilantes in check. It’s a way of making them responsible to the people they’ve dedicated themselves to protecting, that is, the People. It lets the People decide when and how they should be protected and gives them the power to protect themselves from their “protectors.” A good democrat (and Democrat) like Cap shouldn’t have a problem with that.

And in principle, he doesn’t.

But Cap is a product of a different time. The civilian authority he answered to during World War II was Franklin Roosevelt’s. We don’t know who’s the President in the MCU. It may be Barack Obama or someone very like him. (Update: See note below.) You have to wonder, though, and worry about the kind of president who’d make Thunderbolt Ross Secretary of State. Doesn’t matter who the president is, however; he or she would always feel like a mere stand-in to Cap. In his heart and even still in his head, Franklin Roosevelt is his president and he’s loyal to FDR.  And he didn’t enlist to fight for the United States government anyway. He enlisted to fight on behalf of everyone everywhere being “bullied” by the Nazis.

“Do you want to kill Nazis?”

“I don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t like bullies.”

That answer’s what convinces Dr Erskine he’s found his super soldier.

But our Captain America-to-be adds something telling to his declaration about bullies.

“I don’t care where they’re from.”

In submitting to the authority of the United Nations, he’d have to care where the bullies are from. The UN would be telling him which bullies he officially disliked and, it follows, which bullies he was to ignore or even treat as fellow good guys.

Then there’s the promise he made to Erskine who asked him the night before he took the serum and became Captain America, which was also the night before Erskine dies:

“Whatever happens tomorrow you must promise me one thing. That you will stay who you are. Not a perfect soldier, but a good man.”

Cap recognizes at once that if he accepts the UN’s terms he becomes a member of a peacekeeping force---in other words, a soldier.

Worse. It’s clear from what Ross says about the missing Thor and Bruce Banner, the UN regards the Avengers as weapons.

On top of this, Cap has recently finished working for a government agency. S.H.I.E.L.D. And look how well that turned out.

Now, it’s likely he only signed up with S.H.I.E.L.D because he had no one but Nick Fury to turn when he woke up from his 70 year nap and he needed a job and somewhere to start in getting used to life in the 21st Century, but he was almost certainly drawn to SHIELD because it was founded by Howard Stark, General Philips, and, of course, Peggy Carter. So he wouldn’t have regarded himself as a typical government agent. In his view, he’d have been continuing to do the work for them he’d done during the war.

What this all amounts to is that in his heart Cap has always been answering to his own conscience and principles and subjecting himself to the guidance, counsel, and approval of FDR, Erskine, Stark, Phillips, and Peggy, and Nick Fury.

He’d see signing up with the UN as something of a betrayal of himself and all of  them.

Still, he knows he messed up in Nigeria. (I’d have written fucked up, but...language.) He feels guilty for the deaths he takes responsibility for causing and there’s a part of him that doesn’t think it should be his responsibility to take. I mean, he doesn’t think it should have been up to him to decide Wanda was ready to be in the field. This isn’t because he doesn’t want the responsibility of command. It’s because he doesn’t trust himself anymore.

This was one of the themes of Avengers: Age of Ultron. Cap’s growing self-doubt.

Self-doubt bordering on self-loathing.

So he’s torn between following his conscience, even though he’s filled with self-doubt, and answering to the will of the People through their elected representatives, even though he has good reason to suspect those representatives might not think they have to answer to the people who elected them.

Neither choice feels right.

That's Cap's dilemma. He doesn't know what to do. When it gets down to it he can only do the one thing he knows is right.

Try to save his friend.

The other Avengers who join him are doing the same, they're trying to save their friend Cap.

But that's what Nat is doing by siding with Tony, trying to save Cap from himself.

Meanwhile, Tony isn't on the right side either. There is no truly right side for him. If putting Iron Man at the disposal of the government is a matter of principle with him, it’s a new principle. This is the guy who boasted he’d privatized world peace and built Ultron because he decided on his own that it was up to him alone to save the planet. An unexplored irony in Civil War is that it’s Tony not the other Avengers who needs to be reined in, and it’s nice of Cap that he doesn’t bring this up. But even if Tony really has come to believe that about himself, when it gets down to it, he’s not really on the side of the government. He's on the side of assuaging his guilt. Which puts him, as usual, on the side of his own ego and vanity. To his credit, he seems to realize this, and it makes him almost as torn about what’s right as Cap.

His determination to get Cap to join him, though, is really a determination to get the better of Cap for once.

Again, and as always, vanity and ego. Tony’s fatal flaws.

That’s another theme. Tony’s and Cap’s fatal flaws mirror each other’s. Tony’s is his ego. Cap’s, his self-doubt.

Of the other members of Tony's team, only Rhodey is on the side he knows to be right...for him. Cap, Sam, and Rhoadie are the three soldiers. But Cap is a citizen-soldier. Sam is a disillusioned veteran of Iraq. Rhodey's the professional.  Subordinating his judgment to that of civilian authority and following orders is right for him. He's being what he is, a good soldier.

Spidey is on the side of his idol, Tony, whom he assumes must be in the right, but what does he know? He's just a kid.

Vision is along to save everybody from themselves, especially Scarlet Witch. And of course Black Panther just wants revenge.

So what you have is a situation in which nobody's truly in the right and nobody is completely in the wrong.

This is what caused the breaking of the Round Table. (With luck, we're going to get some of that in Star Wars Episode VII.)

In short, what we're presented with in Civil War is the stuff of tragedy.

The makings of the tragedy have been in the Avengers movies since the beginning of the series when Tony announced “I am Iron Man” and declared himself a superhero before he’d proven himself in fact a real hero.

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Presidential update: Ken and Oliver Mannion have pointed out that we do in fact know who the President is in the MCU and I should have remembered. He's an important character in Iron Man 3. I completely forgot one of the best scenes in that movie! His name's President Ellis and he's played by William Sadler, one of my favorite character actors. He's also a recurring character on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. but I don't watch the show which I know is supposed to take place in the same universe as the movies but so far that's been irrelevant to understanding and enjoying the movies.

Update to the update: Longtime blog pal and Mannionville's resident comic book librarian and archivist also reminded me about President Ellis. Gary also corrected me on the spelling of Rhodey.

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Previously on this blog:

Of gods and monsters. Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Cap being Cap, goodest of good guys.

The Avengers: The Romance of Tony Stark.

Ant-Man: “I know a guy”

For longtime very good friend of the blog Tom S.

Say hello to his little friend: Genius and thief Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) in his new role as a superhero discovers that among his superpowers is the ability to communicate with ants, a ridiculous comic book concept used to delightfully understated comic effect by director Peyton Reed in the heist movie that also happens to be a superhero movie Ant-Man.

Ant-Man is the third best movie comedy I've seen since Stranger Than Fiction.

That's not a hard distinction to achieve. Hollywood makes very few pure comedies anymore. The studios turn out movies they call comedies, but they're mostly one of two different things.

Romantic comedies, which are really sentimental dramas about slightly eccentric or lovably quirky people who say a lot of funny things and do some goofy stuff on their way to mawkish and unearned happy endings, and farces, which are to true movie comedy what insult humor, whoopie cushions, sneezing powder, and open manholes are to wit.

Farces are about how ridiculous everybody is. The better of them are about that, anyway. The routine ones are about how ridiculous everybody else is. Comedies are about how people struggle to find joy in a tragic world. Farces make us laugh at their characters' pain and suffering. Comedies make us laugh in sympathy and recognition as we watch the characters triumph, at least momentarily, despite their pain and suffering.

Pain and suffering are key, along with sorrow, heartbreak, and death. They must be real and they must be a probable consequence for a movie to be a comedy. Farces make those things unreal. They distance us from them. In effect, they help us wish them away. The best farces make us uncomfortable by making it very hard if not impossible to laugh it all off. Comedies don't ask us to laugh it off,  just to laugh to keep from crying.

By my definition, then, a movie doesn't have to be a jokefest be a comedy. It just needs to end with joy ascendant.

A comedy can be any sort of movie telling any sort of story.

The hero can even die at the end.

For the record, the best comedy I've seen since Stranger Than Fiction is The Grand Budapest Hotel.

One of Wes Anderson's career long themes has been how to find the humor in a life full of pain, disappointment, and death, which is why The Grand Budapest Hotel would be unbearably tragic if M. Gustave weren't such a witty hero.

Actually, why it almost is, even so. Gustave is defeated in the end, after all, or, at any rate, deprived of his own happy ending.

The second best comedy is Guardians of the Galaxy.

Rocket Raccoon isn't just being his hardboiled self when he tries to boo-hoo away Drax's grief with the line "Everybody's got dead people." The movie opens with a death that's never undone and the pain of which is never lessened. But just about every scene once the story gets us and Peter Quill into outer space contains at least one good laugh.

It's also thrilling, suspenseful, and exciting. Besides being a good comedy, Guardians of the Galaxy is also a good pirate movie.

Ant-Man is a good heist movie, and in outline a fairly typical one.

Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), a computing, engineering, and technical genius, not to mention a skilled cat burglar, gets out of prison, determined to go straight, after serving time for a spectacular crime against a corrupt corporation. All he wants now is to reconnect with his seven year old daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson)  and contribute his fair share to her support and raising. His ex-wife (Judy Greer) and her police detective fiancé (Bobby Cannavale) are all for that. They both like him and believe it's a good thing for father and daughter to be part of each other's lives. But their tolerance goes only so far.

Scott has to prove he can be a responsible adult.

That means getting and holding an honest job, which, as an ex-con he has trouble doing.

He gets fired from the one job he manages to land, working the counter at a Baskin-Robbins, when it's discovered he lied about his record on his application. "Baskin-Robbins always find out," says his sympathetic manager as he reluctantly lets him go, as if Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins are still alive and personally keeping watchful eyes on each of their individual employees.

This puts Scott in the desperate situation the heroes of all heist movies find themselves in---the need for one final, big score.

Fortunately, his former cellmate Luis (effervescently played by Michael Peña) an unshakable and somewhat manic optimist with excellent taste in wines and modern art, presumably cultivated while stealing the stuff, "knows a guy."

Who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows...

Knowing a guy is a running gag that runs right through into the end-credit scene, so sit still and wait for it and don't be fooled by the mid-credit scene into thinking it's ok to leave right there.

Luis tells Scott a story, the first of several sequences director Peyton Reed uses to break the fourth wall with a visual cleverness that are as much graphically as cinematically artistic. In fact, these sequences are the most like comic books brought to life that I can remember from any superhero movie.

You can see the scenes drawn and colored and laid out over several pages in interlocking and overlapping frames.

The job is to break into the home of a reclusive millionaire who the guy Luis knows who knows a guy etc. says has a basement safe full of loot. The heist is on, and the heist movie begins to unfold.

A team is recruited---Dave, an unflappable getaway driver (played by rap star T.I.), and Kurt (David Dastmalchian), an equally unflappable Russian tech wizard with strong opinions on movies that lead to little Pulp Fiction-like exchanges on contemporary pop culture between him and Dave. Luis is,  not improbably as it might first appear, the muscle.---the job is planned, although not as carefully as it could be, then the team goes to work. And thanks to Scott's resourcefulness and technological genius, they pull it off.

More or less.

They meet with a couple of problems.

First problem is there's no loot in the safe. Just a suitcase containing what looks like a spacesuit costume from an 1950s science fiction movie.

The second is Scott gets caught by the cops.

Did I mention they didn't plan as carefully as they could have?

Turns out, though, it wasn't just the lack of careful planning that caused the problem.

The job was a setup.

By the reclusive millionaire himself who turns out to be the genius billionaire scientist, engineer, and Stark rival---Howard Stark, that is, Tony Stark/Iron Man's father---Hank Pym.

And Pym (a stern and saturnine Michael Douglas) arranged the setup as a test for Scott.

He has a job for him. A real heist with a real payoff. A big one. But it's going to be very dangerous with life and death consequences, not just for Scott and the team but for the world, if they fail.

This is still a superhero movie along with being a comedy and a heist movie, after all.

So we go through the steps again. The plan is laid out, this time more carefully since Pym is in charge, the necessary equipment is assembled, the chief piece of which is that crazy spacesuit, which Scott has to be trained how to use by Pym with the help of his somewhat estranged daughter---because there has to be a love interest---who is a brilliant scientist in her own right but has good reason to resent and distrust her father---because there has to be a good guy with a dark past even if this wasn't a superhero movie---and which, as it happens, gives its wearer the power to shrink down to the size of an ant while obtaining super-strength and superspeed.

Thus, Ant-Man is born or reborn, as the case may be, and Ant-Man becomes mainly a superhero movie---without stopping to be either a comedy or a heist movie.

So, you might be asking at this point, as a superhero movie how does Ant-Man fit into the Avengers saga?

It doesn't.

Yet.

It's not made as if it does.  There are references to the Avengers as people who are out there doing superheroic things but only two short scenes directly connecting Ant-Man the movie and Ant-Man the superhero to any of the other movies---one sets up the other which comes at the end of the credits, so, like I said earlier, sit still and don't be fooled by the mid-credit scene into thinking it's over. An indirect connection is made through a direct connection to the TV series Agent Carter, but you don't have to get that to follow what's going on here.

Ant-Man does two things aesthetically for the Avengers movies that might seem mutually exclusive at first glance: scales things down and opens up space.

With the stakes so much lower, the fights, stunts, and special effects can all be ratcheted down in speed, intensity, and duration. We're left more at ease to pay attention to just the actors and what they're doing, allowing us to remember that, more than anything else, the actors and what they're doing have been the keys to the artistic success of the other movies as well.

Agent Carter and Netlfix's Daredevil, as character-focused as opposed to special effects-dependent stories, have contributed to this too.

Reed deserves credit for not trying to overcompensate. In fact, instead of doing more to try to make up for Ant-Man's comparative triviality---I mean breaking into a place and stealing stuff compared to saving cities from complete destruction---he does less. Whatever can be downplayed, Reed doesn't just have downplayed, he calls attention to what he's not doing that he could have done instead by milking the contrast for a laugh.

Another good one is when Scott puts on the Ant-Man suit for the first time and, as one does, strikes a heroic pose or what would be a heroic pose if he wasn't standing in a bathtub.

My favorite, though, is when members of the team need to make a getaway in their van without attracting the cops' attention. There are no screeching tires, there's no stunt driving. No high speed chase with multiple car crashes and bystanders diving out of the way ensues. They just put the van in reverse and back out of there, slowly, very slowly, in a long shot that Reed holds for what seems like a full minute.

Oliver Mannion reserves special praise for the way Reed handles what has unfortunately become the superhero movie requisite scene of mass urban destruction.

On the other hand,  the way opens up space is by making more of less. Most of Ant-Man takes place indoors and in small rooms. Much of the wide open spaces in the other Avengers movies is filled with explosions, crumbling building, flying machinery often flying into many pieces, and armies of enemies.  Reed leaves the little space he has around the characters he has to work with not empty exactly but neat and clean. He does fill in with lots of extra business, frenetic comings and goings, and other visual activity. In fact, often he has the action taking place off camera.

The result is the suggestion that the whole of the Marvel cinematic universe isn't completely crowded with superheroes in constant battle with alien invaders, demon robot armies, and battalions of supersoldiers equipped with weaponry so high tech they might as well be alien invaders or demon robots.  There's room for ordinary people to go about their business without worrying about things falling down on them from the sky.

It happens that in Ant-Man people's ordinary business involves breaking into places and stealing stuff and, incidentally, shrinking down to the size of an ant.

This opens up the niche wider for future entries in the MCU in which the emphasis will be---or ought to be---on the heroes' personal struggles and not as much on their super-exploits as they save the world, like Black Panther, Doctor Strange, the third and counting Spider-Man, and possibly even Captain Marvel, who has that woman doing a man's job theme to work through both as a character and as a brand.

But it should, I hope, serve as a reminder to focus on the saner, calmer, and more character-driven and -centered aspects of all the movies as what makes them good and fun movies.

You don't have to be a fan of the other movies or have seen any of them to follow and enjoy Ant-Man.  The movie works as what's known to readers of novel series as a stand-alone. And for fans, it might be even better if you don't think about the other movies and let it entertain you on its own separate merits.

Now, getting back to Ant-Man as a movie with its own separate merits, I'm going to bring back in Guardians of the Galaxy, with which it shares two virtues, besides being a comedy.

Both accept the ridiculousness of their premises without apology. In Guardians of the Galaxy we get a talking raccoon and a walking tree but so what? In Ant-Man we get a guy who can shrink down to the size of a bug and talk to ants and again, so what? Big deal. Or little deal. That is little deal is made of it. Reed knows it's ridiculous but he doesn't try to compensate with angst, drama, or attempting to overwhelm us by going overboard on the special effects and CGI.  In fact, even when he's wearing the Ant-Man suit, Scott spends little time ant-sized, so there are few scenes of him running around Land of the Giants-like sets among oversized props, and most of those scenes are played for laughs.

And both feature fine casts of supporting, secondary, and minor characters who are interesting as characters in their own rights and not simply for their functions in the plot, starting with the perpetually smiling Pena, the very warm and winsome Greer, and the always dependable Cannavale, who once again demonstrates that the Bobby Cannavale type is an Everyman and can be any sort or condition of human being, blue collar or white collar, slob, schnook, schmuck, or mensch, loser or hardworking average Joe, idiot, smart guy, or wiseguy, good guy, bad guy, thief, thug, crook, or, as he plays here, decent, honest, well-meaning, and intelligent cop.

Too bad, though, that Evangeline Lilly and Corey Stoll, as the little too reminiscent of Lex Luthor in more ways than just the absence of hair mad genius villain, have nothing much more to do than try to make their clichéd characters less obviously clichés.

Lilly, at least, has two clichés to work with and against: Rebellious because she's really desperate for parental approval daughter and love interest who starts off disliking the object of her desire but learns to see and appreciate his superior virtues (basically she plays the main character from a romantic comedy wandering in from another movie to where she's not really needed. But at least Reed doesn't use her as eye candy).

Stoll, however, just gets to play the jealous sorcerer's apprentice while barely repressing a maniacal laugh.

But then there’s T.I. and Dastmalchian giving matched hilariously deadpan performances as Dave the Driver and Kurt the tech wizard, and Stan Lee makes another fun and integral cameo while Garrett Morris---for you whippersnappers for whom Tina Fey and Will Farrell are grizzled veterans, Morris was one of the original members of the cast of Saturday Night Live---shows up to do that necessary work of reminding us that there's more to life in the Marvel Universe than superheroes battling to save the world.

And then there's Michael Douglas.

Another smart choice for Reed, which was actually made for him and which must have been so obvious to the producers at Marvel Studios that it wasn't really a choice, was to make Scott Lang, the current comic book Ant-Man, the hero and not Hank Pym, who was the original Ant-Man and, with his girlfriend and later emotionally and physically abused wife the Wasp, one of the founding members of the Avengers, along with Thor, Hulk, and Iron Man.

Cap came later.

If they'd gone with Pym, the movie would not be a comedy.

Pym is not a comic---as opposed to comic book---hero. He's practically not even a tragic hero.  He's almost a tragic villain.

Pym has a past so dark and so many tragic flaws and character failings that it's almost as if he was created with the express purpose of making Tony Stark look like a saint. He's even more vain, more arrogant, more selfish and self-centered, and more mad scientist ambitious than Stark without any of Tony's compensating wit, charm, compassion, or self-doubt.

In the comics, Pym is the one who creates Ultron.

Very little of this backstory makes it into Ant-Man the movie, but there's enough that as it plays out it becomes clear that one of the characters, if not the most important one, Scott, our comic hero, is there to save by giving a happy ending to is Pym.

Michael Douglas is entering old age with the dignified portliness and sardonic gruffness of a John Housman with hair that makes it hard to imagine he was ever young. But he was. And he more or less started his career as a lean and athletic action-adventure hero on Streets of San Francisco and came to movie stardom as an Indiana Jones avatar swashbuckling to the rescue of Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone. But rather than conjuring up images of his own younger self, he seems to be channeling his father, Kirk Douglas, in the ambitious, arrogant, reckless, self-destructive and anti-heroic angry young men roles in the career-making movies from his early prime, Out of the Past, Champion, Young Man With a Horn, Detective Story, and, particularly, Ace in the Hole---we can see the young Hank Pym as that ruthless and amoral in the pursuit of his goals although able to tell himself those goals are lofty and noble.

He paid a terrible price for what he's come to regard as a tragic mistake and Douglas lets us feel the pain and regret he's carried ever since.

He also makes sure we see that Pym is repentant but not entirely reformed. He has one more step to go.

Even though he's set it up, he has to learn, as tragic as his past was, this isn't his story anymore and he's now in a comedy.

Enter Paul Rudd.

Rudd is probably best known to movie audiences as a star of romantic comedies and farces and his casting as a superhero surprised many fans of the Avengers movies and the comic books.  But he's a classically trained actor with some Shakespeare on his resume and he knows how to play a character as well as how to play for a laugh.  More key here is that he knoes how to play for a laugh by playing the character. His Ant-Man is at his funniest not when he's delivering a one-liner but when he's quietly reacting to the absurdities of his situation.

And he brings an essential and winning modesty to the part. At no point does Scott seem impressed with himself, either as a genius, a superhero, or a super-thief, which is right given that none of those are what he truly wants to be and because as far as he sees it the qualities that allow him to be those things have brought him pretty much nothing but trouble.

More than any other Marvel movie hero except Captain America, Scott is in the superhero business just to do the right thing. But his ambitions are far more modest than Cap's. For him, doing the right thing simply means making the people who are counting on him most, his friends and family, happy.

Cap's job, as uneasy as it makes him, is the grandly noble one of saving the world.  Scott's job is saving the few people it's in his power to save from ending up in a tragedy.

That’s the main job of a comic hero. He or she can have other jobs. They can be agents of justice, they can be out to right wrongs and relieve suffering, they can save people, cities, and planets from a villain's dastardly deeds, they can even be on personal missions of vengeance or fight for truth, justice, and the American way. But ultimately what they must do is pull others away from the tragic abyss.

This, as true fans know, is the dynamic of the friendship between Batman and Superman. Clark Kent's job is to save Bruce Wayne from the Batman's tragedy. Judging by the gloomy and dreary trailer for Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, it looks like once again director Zack Snyder is missing the point, but maybe an apparently tragic Superman is just a set up. We’ll see.

As for Ant-Man and future Avengers movies: Based on what I could tell from Avengers: Age of Ultron, in the now-filming Captain America: Civil War, Cap's mission is going to be saving himself and Iron Man from Tony Stark's tragedy. This will present a big problem because although Cap was born to be a comic hero sice waking up from his seventy year nap in the ice as a man out of tome and out of place he's become a potentially tragic hero.

To remain in a comedy, he's going to need help.

Fortunately---minor spoiler---his pal the Falcon knows a guy.
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Again, more after-the-credits reading, because my movie reviews just aren’t long enough: My reviews of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Of gods and monsters, and Guardians of the Galaxy, “Everybody’s got dead people.”

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Ant-Man, directed by Peyton Reed, screenplay by Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, and Paul Rudd. Starring Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll , Michael Pena, Judy Greer, Bobby Cannavale, Hayley Atwell, John Slattery, T.I., David Dastmalchian, Martin Donovan, Garrett Morris, and Stan Lee

Of gods and monsters. Avengers: Age of Ultron

Frankenstein and his monster: Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark (Iron Man), begins to doubt he’s done the right thing in trying to bring about “Peace in our time” by creating the artificial intelligence software Ultron in Iron Man 4. Wait. I’m sorry. I meant Avengers: Age of Ultron.

There’s a very simple story at the center of Avengers: Age of Ultron. A very simple and very old and very true story. The story of an idealistic but vain scientist who, seeking to conquer death, creates a monster in his own likeness whose monstrosity lies in its---his---being at the same time more than human, less than human, and all too human. The monster escapes his creator’s control and runs wild, revealing himself to be not a conquering of death but a bringer of it. But the real horror is in his having a mind of his own and desires of his own that mirror his creator’s. The creator is forced to look in that mirror and see himself for what he is, a monster of vanity and ego, who has unleashed his own evil and set it loose upon the world. It’s a story, then, about how what we take pride in as being the best in ourselves can turn out to be the very worst.

This re-telling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Tony Stark as Doctor Frankenstein and Ultron as his monster---Did you think I meant Bruce Banner and the Hulk?---might be easy to lose track of in the noise and confusion of the overlong and repetitive battle scenes amid crumbling cities; the irrelevant inclusion of an underwritten subplot that amounts to little more than a set of teaser-trailers for the Not-Coming-To-A-Theater-Near-You-Until-November 2017 Thor: Ragnarok; the clumsy attempt to work in the Hulk and Black Widow movies that will never be made; and the overly-insisted upon group angst about whether or not the Avengers will ever be a true team---a question I thought got asked and satisfactorily answered in the first Avengers. When Age of Utron hit the theaters back in May, the whole movie and not just the Frankenstein story got a little lost for many fans in online arguments over whether or not director Joss Whedon had betrayed Black Widow as a character by making her sad about not being able to have babies and whether or not that’s actually what was making Black Widow sad and then by fan outrage when Whedon closed down his Twitter account in what they took as his response to their complaints and criticisms, followed by a further debate over whether or not that was in fact the reason he’d done it and, if it was, did he have the right to shut fans out that way. [Editor’s note: I revised this paragraph a bit after input from longtime reader and blogging comrade Gary Farber. See his comment.]

But I think the problem---which is probably only a problem for me---is caused by Age of Ultron’s having been mistitled as an Avengers movie and not as what it is.

Iron Man 4.

But then I don’t think Marvel Studios really has an Avengers series unfolding. They have two parallel stories of individual heroes that are on their way to merging in a dual tragedy. Steve Rogers’ and Tony Stark’s---Captain America’s and Iron Man’s.

Before I get into that…

Marvel has been either lucky or brilliant in the casting of its leads and supporting players in most of its productions, which now include Agent Carter, Daredevil, and Ant-Man, all three of which feature excellent leads and supporting players. (The less said about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the better.) I’m particularly (and sentimentally) impressed by Chris Evans as Captain America. I think he’s done a wonderful job of putting the lessons of Christopher Reeve’s Superman to work in playing a hero too good to true and making his goodness believable, likable, sympathetic, attractive, and---the truly super feat---fun. But Robert Downey Jr is still the best of the lot. Evans is good in Age of Ultron and James Spader is better, stealing most of the show with his amazing voice work as Ultron, but Downey is never blown off the screen---except when Iron Man is literally blown off the screen, which happens a lot, maybe too much. Like I said, the battle scenes get repetitive, but never mind. Spader has great fun with his monologues, making well-written lines sound like brilliant ones and brilliant ones sound like Shakespeare. (I think I’d better explain that below.) But Downey matches him easily, filling his every sentence with an essential Tony Stark-ness. Which is to say, that just about whatever he says, no matter how witty, charming, and smart is tinged with competitiveness, ego, jealousy, selfishness, and…insecurity.

A good example is in an apparent throw-away moment, Cobie Smulders as former S.H.I.E.L.D agent Maria Hill---who, unfortunately, is turning out to be the Avengers’ Girl Friday instead of Agent Coulson’s replacement as Nick Fury’s Right Hand and heir apparent---addresses Stark as “boss” and he immediately corrects her.

“He’s the boss,” he says, meaning Captain America, “I just pay for everything, design everything, make everyone look cooler.”

It’s beautifully delivered but a great deal of its beauty is that Downey imbues it with all those qualities I mentioned: wit, charm, smarts, competitiveness, ego, jealousy, selfishness, and self-doubt.

Downey makes it plain that Stark accepts Cap as the team’s leader and knows that that’s how it ought be but also that he also can't help feeling that he could be the leader and can’t help letting Hill know that too and know why and know why she should be impressed with him, as if she wouldn’t be already and would be more if she didn’t also know what an overgrown brat he can be, a fact he knows and has come to dislike about himself but which he can’t seem to correct.

These qualities, with the emphasis on the wit, charm, and ego, have defined Downey's characterization of Tony Stark since the first Iron Man.  And that characterization is thematic. Running through all three Iron Man movies and now both Avengers movies is the question Who is Tony Stark and what does he want? and all those qualities mixing up together make that a hard question to answer.

The first Iron Man ends with Tony announcing “I am Iron Man.” But that turns out to be a problematic statement because while it's true in the most obvious way, it's also a declaration that he’s a superhero and Iron Man 2 calls that into question. In fact, in Iron Man 2, Nick Fury decides Tony's not a superhero, or at least not up to being one of Earth's mightiest heroes, and although he doesn't kick him off the Avengers project, he demotes him, from hero to technical support. Tony earns a second chance, but in the first Avengers he has to prove he deserved it, that he is a hero and not, as Cap accuses him of being, just a big ego operating a suit of armor that does all the real work. Tony proves it---to the team, but apparently not to himself. That's what Iron Man 3 is about. Tony becoming a hero in his own eyes.

Now we find out that there's a problem with that.

Tony developed a real hero's heart. He did not lose any of his vanity. He did not learn, like Cap did long ago, humility.

It's not enough for him to be a hero. He has to be the hero.

Which brings me to the other part of the answer to who is Tony Stark and what does he want?

He's Howard Stark's son and he wants what he cannot have. His dead father's approval.

Specifically, he's the son of a brilliant and successful father who was, Tony feels, aloof, overly demanding, overly critical, and whom he has in significant ways surpassed. All his life he has been in a competition he can't win for a reward he can't have.  Howard Stark wouldn't acknowledge his son's genius while he was alive and now he's not around to applaud his success and achievements---and admit he’s been bested.  Add to this that Tony has given himself the mission of making up for his own and Howard's mistakes and sins, something that comes back to haunt him and the other Avengers in Age of Ultron, in the persons of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.

If all that sounds neurotic and even juvenile, it's mitigated by Tony's having nobler ambitions. He sincerely wants to fix everything and save everybody.

Like I said, he wants to be a hero.

Unfortunately, like I also said, vanity is still a problem.

Tony wants to be the one who saves everybody and fixes everything.

He wants to be the hero.

He says he built Ultron so that the Avengers won't be needed anymore. But he does it in the belief that he doesn't need the other Avengers to help him. (He enlists Bruce Banner but pretty much relegates him to the role of Igor.) Basically, he believes that the world already doesn't need the Avengers. It just needs him.

In an argument with Cap, Tony defends what he was attempting to do in creating Ultron, prevent war forever or, as he says, thinking he’s being cute and ironic, bringing about “peace in our time.”  Cap won’t buy it. “Every time someone tries to stop a war before it starts,” he snaps. “Innocent people die. Every time.” A line that might inspire anti-war liberals with Iraq in mind to cheer, but which is really kind of a strange thing for a veteran of World War II to say. Wouldn't it have  been a good thing if Hitler could have been stopped before? (Leaving aside the question of whether he actually could have been stopped.)  But there's an answer, which Stark doesn't give, because this is an action-adventure movie not a novel by Tolstoy and there isn't time or space for philosophic and historical debates. Innocent people die in wars, many innocent people, so isn't trying worth it anyway, if only on the chance that maybe only fewer innocent people will die?

Again, no time or space in the movie or in a movie review even on this blog. But quickly. Stark's mistake is that he has already had this debate with himself and made decisions by himself, leaving everybody else out of it. He has assumed knowledge, wisdom, responsibilities, and power that Cap, a conventionally religious man of his bygone time, would probably say belong to God.

Like I said. Frankenstein.

This is where the stories of Iron Man and Captain America begin to converge in a way that, for me, turns the Avengers saga into a side story.  The real story, now, is leading into the next Captain America movie, Civil War.

Of course I don't know what's coming. But this is what I see being set up. Tony Stark is going to bring about what he says he created Ultron to do, put an end to the Avengers.

To put it in mythological terms, he's going to bring about the breaking of the Round Table.

In my review of  the first Avengers, The Romance of Tony Stark, I said that if you see the Avengers as having parallels to the stories of King Arthur and his knights, Tony is Lancelot. Not in personality but in the potential role of tragic traitor. He and Lancelot share the same tragic flaw, a willingness to put their own desires above what they know to be right. In Lancelot's case, it's his love for Guinevere that undoes him. In Tony's, it's his need to be the hero.

In my review, I said that I didn't see Captain America as King Arthur. But Winter Soldier changed my mind about that.

S.H.I.E.L.D. turned out to have been based on the premise that “Might Makes Right.” Cap doesn’t just believe like King Arthur in “Might for Right.” He believes that Right Makes Might. His ambition isn’t just to make the world safe. It’s to make it right.

He dreams of Camelot.

With this in mind, you can guess which scene in Age of Ultron I got the most kick out of: the scene at the party celebrating the Avengers' defeat of the last remnants of Hydra. The guys---Clint (Hawkeye) Tony, Rhodie ( who, thankfully, has given up calling himself the Iron Patriot and gone back to being War Machine), and Steve Rogers---take turns trying to lift Thor's hammer.  Of course, they can't try as they might. As we know, only he---or she. I've been following what's going on in the comic books.---who is worthy can wield the hammer. The guys know this and they don't really expect to succeed. But they've had a few and they are guys, after all. They're showing off. But once they get going, Tony's competitive juices start flowing. He becomes determined to lift the hammer.

It's not to prove he's worthy. He doesn't take that part seriously. (Downey tosses off a couple of great one-liners on the subject of how he will treat his subjects when he takes Thor's place as ruler of Asgard, and, again, the lines are witty and charming but tinged with vanity. He's in effect telling Thor he's not impressed with his being a god and hero-king.) What he wants to show is that lifting the hammer doesn't prove anything except that you've mastered the trick of lifting it. And he's convinced there's a trick and equally convinced that if there is he's the one who can figure it out. That's his main job as an Avenger.

But when it's Cap's turn, we see Steve approach the task with a bit of reluctance. He's doing it mainly to be a good sport. But he gives it his all and...

The hammer moves.

To Thor's shock and consternation---Chris Hemsworth does a terrific double-take here.---and to Steve's own, well, fright.
He gives it one more mighty tug but his heart isn't in it and, as we know from The First Avenger, it's his heart that gives him his strength. The super soldier serum only worked on him because he had a good heart.  Then he gives up and the implication is that he does because he doesn't want to know.

Not that he isn't worthy. He already knows he's worthy. That's what makes him Captain America. He doesn't want to know he's worthier. He doesn't like being as worthy as he is. He’s weighed down by the responsibilities and filled with self-doubt. He doesn't like what being worthy has made him. Sad and alone, out of time and out of place. A misfit. A freak. A monster, in fact. In yet anther Frankenstein story, one he explicitly tells about himself in this movie, the kindly Dr Erskine who invented the super-soldier serum is Frankenstein and he, Captain America, is the Creature.

Chris Evans, working with some beautifully understated dialog, makes Cap almost as witty and charming as Downey's Tony Stark, but he gives Cap a kind of reverse vanity. While just about everything Downey as Stark says is a form of boasting, just about everything Evans' Cap says is self-deprecation.

I don’t recall any specific moments when we see him reacting to Cap’s modesty, but it probably drives Tony nuts.

Here's where it gets messy.

Like it hasn't already, Lance?

If a big part of who Tony Stark is is Howard Stark’s son, then in his eyes Steve Rogers would naturally be something of a stand-in for his father.

That’s how Tony first came to know of him, as his father’s good friend and war buddy. He grew up listening to his father talk admiringly about Cap and from that he learned to resent him. Doesn't matter what Howard said or how often he said it, what Tony heard was an incessant criticism: Why can't you be more like him?

In other words, Tony would have grown up thinking of Captain America as the son his father wished he had instead of him.

It's no wonder that when he meets him in the flesh, Tony's filled with jealousy and an intense spirit of rivalry that would be hard to overcome even as the two became good friends.

Which they have. With not a whole lot of interaction, Downey and Evans make it clear Tony and Steve like each other, have fun together, and rely on each other. The spirit of rivalry never goes away, though, and it's felt on both sides, because more than they are friends, they are, spiritually, brothers.

We all know how things tend to go between brothers in literature. (And in movies. If you want to push it---and I'm always ready to push these things---there are parallels between Steve and Tony and Thor and Loki.) Steve, even though he's younger---discounting the seventy odd years he was frozen in the ice---is in temperament and in effect the older brother, as well as the favorite son.

All right, maybe all that's too mythological. But superheroes are often said to be our new myths---mostly it's said by fans of the comic books and the artists who make their livings creating them. If it's true, however, it's only when they've escaped the comics and other mass media where they have their origins and enter the collective unconscious to the point that they resonate with the very many people who don't read comic books, play video games, or watch the TV shows and go to the movies. That's happened with Superman and Batman. You can geek out for days debating which others have achieved Superman and Batman's mythological status.

Obviously, for me, Captain America is part of my personal mythologies.

But if these stories were truly myths, they would have endings. And the endings would all be the same. The heroes die.
That actually happens to the mythological Thor.

It can't happen to the comic book heroes.

Well, it does all the time. But I mean they die and stay dead. They don't, as Cap advises in Age of Ultron, walk it off.

Their stories have an end which no stories told about them can go past. As far as I know that's only happened to Barry Allen's Flash.

Oh no.

Don’t tell me…

At any rate, there’s too much money riding on the popular heroes’ immunity to mortality.

Now, the heroes of the movies can die and stay dead. And that could happen in the Avengers saga. If the twinned stories of Iron Man and Captain America are truly myths, Civil War will be a tragedy that ends with the breaking of the Round Table, Lancelot's self-imposed banishment, and the death of Arthur.

It could happen. It doesn't appear to be in the offing. Avengers 3 and 4: Infinity War I and II are in the works. The intriguing thing is that as things stand Downey won't be in them. I haven't heard for sure about Evans. He may not be.
That doesn't mean Iron Man and Captain America won't be.

There's precedent for recasting.

Look out! Here comes the pesky Spider-Man!

Again.

But to get down to it at last, this is why I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron as Iron Man 4 and why, as far as I was concerned, after the scene with Thor’s hammers all the Avengers except Iron Man and Cap could have disappeared from the movie until the inevitable climactic battle. Thor, for all intents and purposes, does.

Like I said, mostly what he does between the hammer scene and the final battle is show up in interpolated teasers for Thor: Ragnarok.

As for that final battle, and all the big battles, I could have done without them too. For one thing, the cgi work is too detailed. Watching all those buildings crumble into dust, all I was thinking was “Who’s going to clean up that mess?” (Note to stickler fans: I know who’s going to clean up that mess. The point is I was focused on the mess.) But mainly, what I wanted and what I think the story needed was a final confrontation between Iron Man and Ultron, and, even better than a good fight, a good scene between them like the one between Tony and Loki in the first Avengers.

As for watching a good fight, it’s interesting that the one good one between Ultron and an Avenger is between him and Captain America. I took that as symbolic.

The battles themselves are well staged. I’m sure Whedon had other things on his mind but they play like he was saying to Man of Steel’s director Zack Snyder, “This is how you do it.” Whedon keeps the focus on his characters as characters---that is, they are always being themselves as they run, jump, dodge, duck, fly, and fight. He doesn’t just use them as avatars in a video game. And he makes sure that we see that most of their efforts go into saving people. We see and feel that there are actual human lives in jeopardy and that it matters if even one person in the crowd dies.

And as for the characters…

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Quicksilver and Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch aren't given much to do. He's cocky and she's angsty. As the movie goes along, he gets cockier, she gets angstier. But pretty much they're here to save on time spent on exposition in the next Avengers movies.

I'm glad Whedon let Paul Bettany, who's been doing charming work as the voice of Jarvis, Stark's computer sidekick since the first Iron Man, appear as another new Avenger, the Vision. He's a little too much of a vision for my taste, but he's a needed calming, civilizing, and distancing presence. It's a relief to have a character who has some perspective and who can think clearly about what is happening and what the Avengers ought to be up to.  I don't expect that sanity to last. This is, after all, the Marvel cinematic universe.

Even though I didn't need to see them in this movie---as opposed to in those movies of their own that will never get made---it was good to see Jeremy Renner do more than take aim convincingly while cracking wise, Mark Ruffalo do something other than wrestle with his rage, although he still does a fair share of that, and Scarlett Johansson show yet another side of Black Widow, even if that side is that of the good-hearted bad girl who, to paraphrase Valerie Perrine as a variation of the type in Superman, doesn't get to get it on with the good guys.

Chris Hemsworth’s underused, again. Whedon gives a supporting female character a line that lets us know that he knows which of the Avengers most female fans---and gay male ones, I presume---want to see the most of and then doesn’t give it to them. Instead, proud and unabashed dork that he is, he lingers on Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, and makes him the focus of the longing female gaze.  Ruffalo’s good, of course, but he’s nowhere near as pretty as Hemsworth and Banner is, after all, a dork. Hemsworth, though, makes do with what’s given and it’s important to notice that most of his best work is silent. He’s a natural comic actor and all he needs is his eyes.

Spader, as everyone acknowledges, is the stand-out star. When I said he turns his dialog into Shakespeare, I didn’t mean flowery or poetic. I meant that he makes the words alive to the character saying them. Ultron’s listening to himself. Choosing the words carefully. Writing his own script. Writing himself into being. Hamlet does this. Falstaff does this. Iago and Rosalind do it.  Ultron knows himself to be performing. He’s literally making himself up as he goes. And not only is he creating himself in his own eyes, he’s forcing others to think of him as he thinks of himself.

I probably need to come back and rewrite that.

That’s it. Time to wrap this up. But one more scene before the credits roll.

Whedon has been given a lot of credit for shaping the Avengers saga and giving the movies their tone and spirit. But I think what he deserves the real credit for is recognizing what was already going on, accepting it, liking it, and running with it. The first and most credit, I think, should go to Jon Favreau, and I was happy to his name show up in the credits of Avengers: Age of Ultron as an executive producer.

It was Favreau, as the director of the first Iron Man, who set the tone and gave the series its spirit and sensibility. And the best thing he did to do that was fight to get Robert Downey Jr cast as Tony Stark.

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Because the running time of this review isn’t long enough: My reviews of the first Avengers, The Romance of Tony Stark; Iron Man 3, Big Man in a Suit of Armor; and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Cap being Cap, the goodest of good guys.

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Avengers: Age of Ultron, written and directed by Joss Whedon. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Cobie Smulders, Don Cheadle, James Spader, and Samuel L. Jackson. Rated PG-13. Still in some theaters.

Guardians of the Galaxy: “Everybody’s got dead people.”

“I’m going to die surrounded by the biggest idiots in the galaxy!”: From left, legendary outlaw, a legend in his own mind, at least, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), vengeance-obsessed rage-aholic Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), bounty hunter and genetic experiment gone awray Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper), warrior and assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana), and sidekick, muscle, and walking houseplant Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), in their first act as a team of heroes-in-the-making, escape from a high-security space prison in a scene full of thrills, chills, spills, and laughter typical of the new Marvel comic book movie, Guardians of the Galaxy.

Guardians of the Galaxy is the most sentimental of the Marvel comic book movies going back to the days before Stan Lee’s first cameo.

Oh, sure, you could say it’s one of the most fun, one of the funniest, one of the most action and thrill packed, a rousing adventure tale, an old-fashioned pirate movie set in space that’s the pirate movie the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie almost was, a better Star Trek movie than either of J.J. Abrams’ reboots, the best Star Wars movie that isn’t a Star Wars movie (with the added virtue that ancient weapons and hokey religions don’t figure in the fun), a sci-fi Western that will make fans think this was what Buckaroo Banzai and Firefly were leading up to.

You could say all that. Plenty of people have said all that or much of it. Many of you already know all that.

I’m going with sentimental because it’s the critical path less traveled and because it’s true. Guardians of the Galaxy is the most sentimental of Marvel comic book movies because it’s the one with the most real sentiment.

Honesty of emotion isn’t a requirement for a good comic book movie. It’s usually enough just to suggest feelings so that we know our heroes are human and have hearts that are in the right places and the villains aren’t and don’t. The idea is to engage our emotions so that we feel we have a rooting interest in the characters and their fates and aren’t just along for a virtual thrill ride. So directors and screenwriters and actors use tricks to trigger emotional responses. We’re willingly fooled into sympathizing through the manipulation of conventions, tropes, and clichés we’ve been trained by television and movies to respond to with laughter, anger, and tears on cue. And that’s fine. There isn’t time for serious character development in these movies, anyway. We’re not in the theater to see that either.  As long as the tricks work, we don’t mind that it’s really us doing the feeling not the characters seeming to come alive on screen.

In a few comic book movies, in the best ones, something more happens. Because of good writing, good directing, and/or good acting, the prime and priming emotions are up on the screen. But it’s usually incidental. It’s not the point and, like I said, it’s not why we bought tickets.

The only exceptions I can think of are Spider-Man 2, which was great, and Iron Man 2, which was…not great.

Peter Parker’s emotional breakdown over his ambivalence about being Spider-Man is just more compelling and affecting than Tony Stark’s emotional breakdown over his ambivalence about being Iron Man, plus there’s the tragedy of Doctor Otto Octavius.

The only exceptions before Guardians of the Galaxy.

It’s not just that our heroes’ emotional development isn’t beside the point. It is the point. Guardians of the Galaxy is about our heroes’ developing feelings, towards and about each other and within themselves. Almost everybody with more than four lines, good guys, bad guys, and guys in between, is motivated by bonds of affection. Even the arch-villain Thanos who is indifferent to the wiping out of the populations of entire planets cares about his adopted daughters.

But it’s the developing bonds of affection between the five heroes---anti-heroes---who become known, at least to themselves, as the Guardians of the Galaxy that is at the center of the movie, gives it its heart, and drives the story.

Maybe I should put it this way to make it simple. Guardians of the Galaxy is as much a movie about friendship as Toy Story.

I think the climactic battle may even include a visual quote from Toy Story 3, but you can’t always go by me. I have a habit of reading into things, as you’ve probably noticed.

The reason the movie isn’t trite and hokey and overly-sentimental is the same reason Toy Story isn’t trite and hokey. It’s a well-written, well-directed, well-made, genuinely funny comedy.

All the Marvel comic book movies are funny. They’re full of wisecracks, one-liners, witty repartee, visual gags, and moments of pure slapstick. But most of the humor is an aside to the action. In Guardians of the Galaxy, the humor is often the source or the point of the action. The movie starts out on a somber and, frankly, sentimental note, with a scene guaranteed to make mothers cry, but in the very next scene director James Gunn announces his intentions. From here on out, we’re in it more for the laughs than the tears.

Guardians of the Galaxy is an origin story and origin stories are inherently comic because they are about the arrival of the hero and the hero’s job is to restore order. Things can take a tragic turn later. But for now, things are going to send or at least come to a rest happily. Gunn makes no bones about it. We’re headed for a happy ending. The fun and suspense is how we’re going to get there, what’s going to get in the way the Guardians have to do to overcome the obstacles and keep moving towards that happy ending.

This isn’t to say it’s all sweetness and light.

You can’t have a real comedy without the real possibility of real tragedy. Darkness threatens throughout, and all but one of the Guardians are suffering from heartbreak and loss. As Rocket Raccoon says, trying to brush away a claim on his sympathy along with his own pain and self-pity, “Boo hoo. Everybody’s got dead people!”

Let’s start where the movie starts, with Peter Quill’s dead people. Quill is the main character and eventual leader of the Guardians, the one among our team of heroes for whom the prefix anti- is the least apt. Not inapt. He’s a thief and a pirate, a scoundrel, rogue, and cad who makes Han Solo in the original Star Wars look like a gentleman of principle. But he’s the only one (at first) without murder in his heart and who feels any responsibility towards other living beings.  When the job of saving the galaxy falls into his lap, he takes it on with only a token show of reluctance. He comes up with a plan, or “twelve percent of a plan”, and sets to work convincing the others to join him.

Still, he is an outlaw, proud of it, and vain of his reputation as one, a reputation that doesn’t reach as far as he thinks it should. When he announces who he is using the outlaw name he believes his known by across the galaxy, Star-Lord, it usually turns out the people he expects to be cowed by it have never heard it or heard of him. Then they can’t get it right.

His saving grace is his dead people, his mother. (Who and what his missing father is is a mystery that probably won’t be solved until Guardians of the Galaxy 3!) Quill was raised by space pirates who kidnapped him from earth in 1988 when he was a little boy on the night his mother died. He’s been carrying around with him ever since his Walkman and the awesome mix tape---that’s what it says on the label, “awesome mix tape.”--- of her favorite songs from the 1970s and early 80s she made for him and he plays it constantly. It’s the soundtrack of his life and adventures and the voice of his mother imparting her wisdom and goodness, proving that rock and roll is a joyful and moral force, as well as helping to give Guardians of the Galaxy a terrific soundtrack of its own.

As played with great good humor and a dancer’s as well as an athlete’s physical grace---he’s got some moves---by Chris Pratt, in the role that will likely make him a star, Quill has a careless charm and a surfer dude’s way too easy-going, take life as it comes languidness that distracts from an intensity of feeling, energy, and intelligence that make him dangerous and immensely attractive. Pratt has a way of looking simultaneously vacant and thoughtful that lets us see why Quill is both good at what he does and easy to underestimate and even forget. It depends at what angle and at what moment you catch him whether you see the laid-back rogue or the focused hero.

The other Guardians are more emotionally twisted and tangled if not as complicated or puzzling.

Gamora (Zoe Saldana) is one of the adopted daughters of the arch-villain Thanos I mentioned earlier. Biologically re-engineered, she’s a trained assassin and soldier of fortune hired out by Thanos, along with her adopted sister Nebula, also an assassin but more formidable, being a cyborg, to the movie’s other arch-villain, Ronan the Accuser played by Lee Pace adding to the rogue’s gallery of hammy villains he began in Lincoln and continued in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, has his dead people, his father and, as he likes to say, his father before him, and he invokes them frequently to justify the grudge he’s holding against an entire planet. Ronan sends Gamora on a mission to retrieve a thing called an infinity stone that will give him the power to indulge his favorite past-time, mass murder, on a galaxy wide scale.

But Gamora, unlike Nebula, has a conscience and a sense of self-worth that’s driving her to rebel against Ronan and Thanos. She has a secret plan to keep the infinity stone for herself and either sell it for a bundle or use it to kill Ronan and Thanos, whichever works out. As it happens, the stone is in the hands of Peter Quill who, of course, doesn’t know what he has is hands on. As far as he knows, it’s just a lumpy metal ball he contracted to steal for someone else, which is to say, to him it’s just a payday, and he’s more than a little surprised when Gamora shows up, ready and eager to kill him if she has to, to take it from him.

Meanwhile, Rocket Raccoon---and by now you’ve probably heard that one of our heroes is a raccoon, a cgi creation with the voice of Bradley Cooper---a bounty hunter with an apparently thoroughly mercenary view of life and a fondness for high-caliber weaponry, has been hired to retrieve Peter Quill. Rocket shows up, along with his only friend who’s also his houseplant slash muscle, a seven foot tall animated tree named Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), at the same time as Gamora, intending to bag and pack Quill for delivery to his employers. This leads to one of the most exciting and funniest scenes in the movie, a round-robin of brawls, captures, and escapes ending with all four of the in the custody of the police who send them straight off to a maximum security prison in space where at this point we can’t help feeling they all, including Quill, belong.

In prison, they meet Drax the Destroyer, hulking elaborately tattooed tower of rage played with an endearing mix of sincerity and literal literal-mindedness by former WWE star Dave Bautista, who will become the fifth member of the team, when they finally get around to admitting they are a team. Drax’s wife and daughter were murdered by Ronan and since then Drax has been aimlessly touring the galaxy inflicting violence on all and sundry as he works out his guilt and grief, psyching himself up for a confrontation with Ronan, in which, alone, he’ll be hopelessly outmatched, which he knows and which explains why he’s taking a long and roundabout route to finding Ronan.

The five conspire to escape from prison together, their teaming up inspired by the fact that Quill’s lumpy metal ball, sold to the right person, will fetch them a fortune that split five ways will still make each of them rich beyond dreaming, and now the real action begins.

And I don’t mean the escape scene, another exciting mix of thrills, spills, chills, and laughs. And I don’t mean the plot that unfolds of trying to sell the ball and then having to stop Ronan and save the galaxy.

I mean the forming of their friendship.

The Avengers treated fans to the teaming up of some favorite superheroes, but in the end that’s all the Avengers are, a team. Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man learn to admire and respect and depend on one another, but they don’t become friends. (Bruce Banner and Tony Stark do, but we don’t find that out for certain until Iron Man 3.) They don’t need to. But the Guardians of the Galaxy can’t exist until they become friends. They can’t do anything good without each other and, as it turns out, they can’t do without each other. This is what I mean when I say Guardians of the Galaxy is a sentimental movie. It’s about the development of feeling, care, sympathy, and understanding between characters who aren’t heroes or aren’t heroes yet. They’re just people trying to cope.

Saldana is dynamic, thoroughly physical, intense, and surprisingly and beguilingly vulnerable as Gamora. Bautista is surprisingly lovable and funny without being at all clowning as Drax. Rocket is a scene-stealing dynamo both as a work of animation and in the work of Cooper who’s clearly having a ball not having to be Bradley Cooper and playing the sort of role it’s unlikely anyone would hire Bradley Cooper to play. Cooper gives Rocket a harsh, angry, old-fashioned movie tough guy with a cream puff of heart voice that I wouldn’t have expected out of him but which I suspect he’s been working on for his own amusement since he was a kid watching cartoons.

But the big surprise and delight is Groot. Diesel makes the most of the few words Groot has at his disposal---as Rocket explains to Quill “he don't know talkin' good like me and you, so his vocabulistics is limited to ‘I’ and ‘am’ and ‘Groot, exclusively in that order.” Quill predicts that that seemingly narrow combination of syllables will wear thin fast but in fact it doesn’t. Not for us, at any rate. Diesel uses those three little words in a variety of wonderfully expressive ways. We may not understand him when he speaks but whenever Rocket translates we know immediately that that’s exactly what Groot said.

The cgi work is just as expressive.

Another thing that makes Guardians of the Galaxy different from previous comic book movies is that it features more fully realized supporting and minor characters. These include John C. Reilly’s unflappably good-natured chief of security on the planet Ronan makes his main target, Glenn Close as the no-nonsense leader of the planet, Karen Gillan as Gamora’s implacable sister Nebula, Christopher Fairbank as a prissy fence known as the Broker, Benecio del Toro as a character I can’t begin to explain, you’ll just have to see him for yourself to get the idea, and the stand-out Michael Rooker as Yondu, the space pirate captain who abducted the young Peter Quill from Earth. Yondu loves Quill as the son he never had. He still has to kill him, understand. Business is business and a pirate captain has to do what a pirate captain has to do. But he loves the guy.

Obviously, I enjoyed the movie. I’ve been asked, though, by somewhat dubious others if they’d like it, considering they haven’t read any of the comics and don’t know the characters and their backstories. My answer is, I did and I didn’t.

Guardians of the Galaxy is the first comic book movie I went into cold without a previous rooting interest in the heroes. The comic didn’t exist when I was a comic book-reading kid and our sons weren’t fans before the movie was in the works.

I knew nothing and don’t feel like I need to know anything more than what the movie told me.

And I think that’s one of the best thing you can say about any movie.

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Guardians of the Galaxy, directed by James Gunn, written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman. Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Dave Bautista, John C. Reilly, Lee Pace, Michael Rooker, and Glenn Close. Rated PG-13. Now in theaters.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Cap being Cap, goodest of good guys

Everybody sing: “When Captain America throws his mighty shield/All those who chose to oppose his shield must yield!/If he’s led to a fight and a duel is due/Then the red and the white and the blue’ll come through…” Chris Evans as Cap being Cap in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

There’s a moment in Captain America: The Winter Soldier that when I saw it in the theater made my heart soar.

It comes as the inevitable last big, noisy CGI mess of a battle begins.  We see Cap, in extreme long shot, make a running leap off an aerial runway  and begin to plummet towards the deck of one of the giant flying death machines about to launch on a mission to wipe out a tenth of the population of the United States. For a second, as he falls, the screen around him fills with shades of battleship gray and Cap is reduced to a speck of bright red, white, and blue.

Lots can be read into that moment, but the main thing to take away is that in the midst of this massive swirl of ambiguity, confusion, and existential threat, there’s Cap being Cap, the goodest of good guys till the end.

And here’s something we know. In addition to trying to stop the agents of Hydra from carrying out their mission of mass murder, Cap intends to confront his new arch-nemesis, the Winter Soldier.  What we know is that when he catches up with him, Cap will not snap the bad guy’s neck.

I hope Zack Snyder took a break from filming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice to go see The Winter Soldier and maybe learn a few things about how to portray the goodest of good guys on screen.

Judging by Man of Steel and most of his other movies, I don’t think Snyder knows what it means to be a good guy.

I’m not sure he knows what it means to be good or that he even believes goodness exists.

The makers of Captain America: The Winter Soldier know and believe. The directors, brothers Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely fill the movie with instances of Cap’s many virtues and you could follow along checking them off on a list: Courage, fidelity, honesty, humility, generosity, self-denial, self-effacement, selflessness, faith, hope, charity, mercy, forbearance, all the cardinal virtues including purity or, if you will, chastity, which does not mean celibacy---We don’t know if Steve Rogers is a virgin. The movie’s humorously coy about that. We do know that he’s devoted to the woman he still calls his best girl, Agent Peggy Carter, even though she kept aging after he fell into the ice in 1945 and was quick-frozen for the next seventy years and is now ninety years old and, apparently, in hospice care.  But even though his faithfulness to Peggy is now purely chivalric and he’s about to lose her for good this time, he’s still impervious (although not oblivious) to the seductive charms of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow.

But the Russos never stop the narrative in its tracks for scenes of Cap demonstrating his virtuousness and Markus and McFeely haven’t clogged up their dialog with mini-sermons on what makes Cap Cap.  They trust us to pick up on that, or, actually, take it for a given, as the story moves along.  And in addition to trusting us, they trust someone else.

Their leading man.

Chris Evans carries it off with grace, wit, intelligence, modesty, charm, and----this is very important---conviction. Also, and also very important, a sense of humor.

As I’ve said in previous posts, Evans is an honors graduate of the Christopher Reeve School of How to Play a Superhero.

Before I take this further and risk turning this review into a sermon itself, let me stop here to praise Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a superheroic feat of moviemaking.

Of course, it’s a superhero movie. A very good superhero movie. One of the four best since the first X-Men made the genre as respectable as other genres like Westerns, War Movies, Romantic Comedies, and Spy thrillers. But very good genre movies tend to be very good movies never mind their genre and to have as much in common with other very good movies never mind their genres as with others of their own kind. The Winter Soldier is a terrific superhero movie, but it’s also a terrific spy thriller in the manner of the best Bonds, particularly Skyfall, which was a genre-bender in its own right. And while Skyfall referenced more realistic spy thrillers like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Winter Soldier pays homage to Three Days of the Condor, which I’ll bet Evans’ co-star Robert Redford noticed and appreciated.

And, as with X-Men: Days of Future Past, when The Winter Soldier is in traditional Spy Thriller-mode, it almost doesn’t matter that the heroes have superpowers.  Throughout the whole middle act, Cap might as well be Bond, considering what the plot has him doing, with Black Widow as his more heavily-armed and more gymnastic Pussy Galore.  The differences are that where Bond takes on five guys, Cap can take on twenty, and when Bond punches someone they fly ten feet and when Cap does they fly thirty.

Our story so far: Since the Battle of New York that was the center of The Avengers, Steve Rogers has been working as an agent for the no-longer ultra-secret super counterintelligence-counterterrorism organization S.H.I.E.L.D. but he’s not enjoying the work. As he says himself, he’s a soldier not a spy. But he’s a special breed of soldier, and I don’t mean a super-soldier. He’s a typical soldier of World War II which makes him a citizen soldier. He’s a volunteer who fights for principles. He’s missed the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, the beginnings of the War on Terror and so he sees things in terms of right and wrong, not us against them.  He wants to know---needs to know---that what he’s doing is right, but nothing his boss, S.H.I.E.L.D’s awesome but enigmatic and somewhat sinister director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is willing to tell him reassures him.  Just the opposite in fact.

There’s a reason Fury’s so evasive, though. It turns out that remnants of Hydra, the Nazi army within the Nazi army that was potentially even more dangerous than the regular Nazis and that Cap defeated when he made what he thought at the time was the ultimate sacrifice at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger.  While Cap was frozen, Hydra regrouped and, slowly, over the course of two generations, they infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D to the point where they are now in the position to take over and use S.H.I.E.L.D’s own weapons and resources to wage apocalyptic war on the entire United States. Once they’ve defeated the U.S, they intend to move on to dominating the whole world. Fury has discovered Hydra’s plan but before he can decide if he can truly trust the very few people he’s inclined to trust, Cap being one of them, and enlist them to help him thwart Hydra, Hydra sends their deadliest assassin, the Winter Soldier, to eliminate him.  Cap, to whom Fury was only able to divulge a part of the plan, becomes Hydra’s next target, and the chase is on.

Cap, with the help of the only two people he knows he can trust, Black Widow, whose loyalty is without question because it turns out to have been wholly to Fury and not S.H.I.E.L.D itself, and an outsider, a veteran of Afghanistan named Sam Wilson, soon and almost accidentally to be known as the flying superhero the Falcon, sets out on the run to figure out the whole of Hydra’s scheme and how to stop it while eluding, outwitting, and out-fighting Hydra’s army of hitmen, including the Winter Soldier.

Like I said, a Bond movie with those differences I mentioned, plus one more. Bond is essentially a loner. Cap likes company. He believes in having company as a virtue. Captain America is a teamplayer and a team leader. But, at heart, he’s a teammate. That is, he’s a friend.

You might remember which other goodest of good guys identifies himself as “a friend.”

I mentioned how the Russos and their screenwriters don’t take The Winter Soldier off-track for scenes only there to play up Cap’s virtues. But they do send it on a little side trip for a scene in which Cap---Steve Rogers, actually---makes a bedside visit to Peggy (Hayley Atwell in old-age make-up reprising her role from The First Avenger) in her hospital room.  Many of Steve’s softer virtues are on display. He’s kind, tender, solicitous, chivalrous, and tactful---he’s aware of what’s past and what can never be and of the differences that separate them and will soon separate them forever, but he’s careful not to say anything to call attention to those sad truths.

It’s a touching scene, but more so because of what she does.

Peggy brings up their ages---well, her aging---and he failing health as a prelude to letting him know she understands what he’s going through and that she’s worried about him. She assures him that, although it nearly killed her when she thought he’d died, she went on to have a good life.  She was happy.  What bothers her, she tells him, is that he wasn’t able to have his life. Which at first might seem like a strange thing to say to someone who is physically twenty-eight years old and thanks to his super-resiliency to injury and illness might live another one hundred and fifty. He has several lifetimes ahead of him. Plenty of time to have a life.

But not that life.

What she’s saying is that the life he was on the way to having was interrupted in a way that made it impossible to re-continue as he’d planned.  His hopes and dreams and expectations---including marrying his “best girl” and starting a family with her---will never be realized because everyone he needed to share that life and help bring it about is gone or is too old and about to be gone.  He’s alone, is what she means, and lonely.  And he’s about to become even lonelier, and her heart aches for him because she knows how sad that makes him.

It’s a question filmmakers, TV producers, and the creators of comic books have been asking themselves since they collectively realized the real money wasn’t in marketing superheroes to kids: How do you make superheroes into “realistic” characters adults can identify with?

The answer has been, generally, to burden them with emotionally crippling backstories to which they react tragically by acting-out their angst, self-pity, rage, or all three.

A better answer is to have them react to the plot and other characters with a wide-variety of ordinary and natural emotions and let good actors act them out.

Steve Rogers has a tragic backstory but it doesn’t fill him with angst, self-pity, or rage.  One of his virtues is an emotional resiliency that matches his physical resilience. He knows bad things happen to everyone, and worse and much worse to many, so he deals and he copes and he carries on.  In short, he’s a grown-up about it.  But he misses his family and friends and he is lonely and that does make him sad. Realistically sad.

And among Chris Evans’ virtues as an actor is an ability to make Steve Rogers’ sadness felt throughout without letting it drown his natural ebullience, optimism, and good-humor.  Peggy’s worries are well-founded. But Steve---Captain America---is still a man capable of joy.

Still, this is a problem for someone who makes virtues of having company and being a friend. Captain America believes no one should go it alone or can go it alone, not even a superhero, and here he is, alone.

And this is another way The Winter Soldier isn’t just a superhero movie or why it almost doesn’t matter that the main characters have superpowers.  An important part of the story is resolving Cap’s problem and so one of its themes is the nature of friendship.

The story presents Cap with two potential friends, Sam Wilson, soon to be known as the Falcon and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s top field agent and assassin Natasha Romanoff, known for good reason as the Black Widow.

Wilson is easy.  He and Cap share a common background as returning combat veterans having trouble fitting back into civilian life.  But as smoothly underplayed by Anthony Mackie, Wilson is no pushover. He admires Cap but he’s not awestruck. He knows is own strengths and he’s confident of his ability to work with Cap as the Falcon.  But he’s also confident that he can be a real help to him as a friend.  He knows what Cap needs from him and he gives it without a thought.

Things between Cap and Black Widow (Johansson) are more complicated.  Their shared background is as agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., work that doesn’t make Cap especially happy.  And Cap doesn’t think of her as real friend material and nothing she says or does through the first half of the movie inclines him to change his mind.  He’s not hostile. Just wary.  And this is her problem.

She’s not ideal friend material, for one thing, being a stone-cold killer by training and a loner by necessity, habit, and temperament. She doesn’t know how to go about being a real friend, generally, but she’s at a serious loss with Cap.  She can’t figure out how to get around his formidable good guy-ness---that’s part of her problem. She sees his essential nature as something to get around. Her approach to him is the same as her approach to any mark she has to deal with in the spy game. She tries to manipulate him. She messes with him. Every chance she gets. Every way she can think of. Which doesn’t work at all, and that confuses her no end. More baffling, though, is she’s learning from watching him that she didn’t know what it means and what it takes to be a good guy.  She’d thought all it took in her case was to switch sides from killing for the Russians to killing for Nick Fury (to whom she’s more loyal than she is to S.H.I.E.L.D. Actually, for her Fury is S.H.I.E.L.D.). Being around Cap is making her aware of something she didn’t know or care she had, a conscience. A guilty conscience.

To her surprise and consternation, she realizes she needs Cap not just to like her and want her as a friend but to absolve her.

Ok, I’m rambling my way back into a sermon.

Listen.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a terrific action-adventure movie with a witty and intelligent script full of snappy dialogue, a story that offers real suspense (if not all that much of a mystery) and puts matters of real and realistic importance at risk, and well-choreographed fight and chase scenes that don’t turn into extended ads for the video game but have tension, energy, excitement, and payoffs of their own while moving the plot along. The supporting cast is fine and the leading man is attractive, interesting, sympathetic, and real, not to mention one of the most frightening movie villains since Odd-Job.

I had to get Bond back in here somehow. But trust me. The Winter Soldier is scary. Not going to tell you who plays him because that might be a spoiler but even though he has virtually no lines and half his face is covered through more than half the movie, just with his glare and his body language commands the screen every second he’s on it.

I think I’ve made it clear I’m pretty high on Evans. Mackie and Johansson are fine too. Samuel L. Jackson is Samuel L. Jackson and it says something about the movie, the moviemakers, and Jackson himself that one of the most exciting action sequences features not Cap on his own but Fury on his own and the best and most exciting special effect in the sequence is Jackson himself.

Robert Redford as Fury’s boss, Alexander Pierce, does a good job of doing what he’s in the movie to do, make us forget why Robert Redford is playing this part. Frank Grillo makes a compelling and charismatically dangerous double-agent. Maximilliano Hernandez makes a compellingly cowardly one. Toby Jones returns for an amusing, creepy, and perhaps too clever cameo as the evil but cowardly mad scientist from Captain America: The First Avenger, Dr Arnim Zola, who has discovered his own way of outliving all his old friends, if he had any, and enemies.  Garry Shandling shows up too, crossing over from Iron Man 2 for a cameo as the smarmy Senator Stern whose dislike of Tony Stark turns out to have something more to it than his inability to tolerate a wiseass.  And Stan Lee rides again in what I think is his best cameo yet. Yep. Even better than the one in The Amazing Spider-Man. Nuff said.

To get back to what I said about one of the themes of The Winter Soldier being the nature of friendship, presumably that’s something that will feature in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, since it’s centered on the world’s finest friendship. In The Winter Soldier Cap begins to make new friends, but here’s the thing. They’re going to be friends of Captain America not of Steve Rogers, because, basically, Steve Rogers does not exist in 2014. There’s just no place for him and he has yet to make one for himself. Consequently, he has no life of his own apart from being Captain America.

That other goodest of good guys, however, has a life apart from being Superman. In fact, his life is apart from being Superman. Being Superman is just his job and whenever he wants he can put it aside to live his life as Clark Kent.

The Winter Soldier sets things up for The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America 3 to continue to deal with the sadness and loneliness that are at the center of Cap’s character.

Superman---Clark Kent---isn’t sad, isn’t lonely. He is that hardest of all characters to portray. The happy, well-adjusted hero.

Watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier won’t help Zack Snyder with that. He’ll have to figure out how to deal with it on his own.

Frankly, I’m not optimistic.

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Captain America: The Winter Soldier, directed by Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, screenplay by Chris Markus and Stephen McFeely. Starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Frank Grillo, Cobie Smulders, Toby Jones, Hayley Atwell, Robert Redford, and Samuel L. Jackson. Rated PG-13. Still in theaters.