Captain Marvel (2019): based on characters created by Stan Lee, Arnold Drake, Jack Kirby, Gene Colan, and many others; written by Nicole Perlman, Meg LeFauve, Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet; directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden; starring Brie Larson as Carol Danvers /Captain Marvel, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Ben Mendelsohn as Talos, Jude Law as Yon-Rogg, Annette Bening as Supreme Intelligence/Mar-Vell, Gemma Chan as Minn-Erva, Lee Pace as Ronan, Mckenna Grace as Young Carol Danvers, Djimon Hounsou as Korath, and Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson:
What's weird about Captain Marvel is that it's more like a Joss Whedon project than Whedon's two Avengers movies. Relentlessly light in tone, Captain Marvel is basically a buddy comedy featuring Carol 'Captain Marvel' Danvers and a young, mid-1990's Nick Fury, played by a CGI-youthanized Samuel L. Jackson.
Disney seems to have spent all the de-aging CGI money on Jackson, as a de-aged Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) often looks like a nightmare from the Uncanny Valley.
This is the first Captain Marvel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though the Carol Danvers Captain Marvel is the third or fourth so-named hero in Marvel history (and not the original Captain Marvel -- that is the 'Shazam'-uttering Fawcett Comics hero soon to appear in a movie called Shazam; after DC acquired the rights to that Captain from Fawcett, they forgot to trademark the name, thus leading to Marvel debuting their then-male Captain Marvel in the late 1960's).
It's a mostly fun, light snack. It's overly long in the climax department, as pretty much every blockbuster now is these days, relentlessly ticking off items on a Checklist of Closure. Brie Larson is fine as the good Captain, though she's not given much to work with beyond a surface jokiness. Jackson seems to be delighted to be doing comedy work, as do Jude Law as Marvel alien Kree mentor Yon-Rogg and Ben Mendelsohn as the alien Skrull leader Talos. Recommended.
Glass (2019): written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan; starring James McAvoy (Kevin Wendell Crumb), Bruce Willis (David Dunn), Samuel L. Jackson (Elijah Price), Anya Taylor-Joy (Casey Cooke), Sarah Paulson (Dr. Staple), Spencer Treat Clark (Joseph Dunn), and Charlayne Woodard (Mrs. Price):
In this sequel to 2000's Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan returns to his own private world of super-heroes, super-villains, and the ordinary people all around them. A very subdued Bruce Willis reprises his Unbreakable role as reluctant superhero David Dunn, 19 years older and now getting an assist from his now-adult son playing Oracle on the earpiece.
Samuel L. Jackson's Elijah Price -- aka Mr. Glass -- has been doped up in a psychiatric wing for the last two decades or so after Dunn handed him over to the police for his role in the deaths of hundreds. A third super-powered piece has been added, however -- James McAvoy's super-powered multiple personality/Alter The Beast from Split (2016). Dunn is on his trail for the kidnapping and murder of a couple of groups of teen-aged girls, racing the clock before The Beast kills his next kidnap victims, a group of cheerleaders.
M. Night Shyamalan manages some pretty interesting twists here, though many found them obnoxious or off-putting. His take on super-heroes seems to me to be a complaint against the homogenized corporate movie-super-heroes who took over the box office since the release of Unbreakable. Indeed, the first 'contemporary' superhero universe movie came out the same year -- Bryan Singer's X-Men (2000).
M. Night Shyamalan's heroes and villains mostly have to obey the laws of physics, More importantly, he posits them -- especially his superheroes -- as Folk Figures about whom the classic superhero comic books were myths and legends once-removed. Does this mean that there's a sinister global conglomerate that seeks to control those with superpowers as if they were just some sort of product?
Well, we'll see. Glass may have a controversial ending, and M. Night Shyamalan as always does some things that seem, well, a little goofy. Nonetheless, this is a fine film both featuring and about superheroes, supervillains, and the idea that in a world of crushing media conformity, magic may still exist -- real magic, dangerous magic, and maybe the real hero of a piece doesn't become apparent until the very end. Highly recommended.
Sphere: adapted from the Michael Crichton novel by Kurt Wimmer, Stephen Hauser, and Paul Attanasio; directed by Barry Levinson; starring Dustin Hoffman (Dr. Norman Goodman), Sharon Stone (Dr. Beth Halperin), Samuel L. Jackson (Dr. Harry Adams), Peter Coyote (Captain Baines), Liev Schreiber (Dr. Fielding), and Queen Latifah (Fletcher) (1998): A fairly famous mess in 1998 and still something of a mess now. But separated from tales of budget over-runs and what Dustin Hoffman correctly noted was a movie that needed a lot more re-writing and editing before release, Sphere just seems like a dud now and not an indictment of studio interference.
The U.S. military discovers a mysterious spacecraft 1000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean near Guam. Inside that spaceship is a giant glowy sphere that seems to be made out of liquid mercury but really isn't. A team is sent to investigate. Dustin Hoffman, at the conclusion of his brief flirtation with the big paychecks of Event Movies, plays a psychologist who has been chosen to lead the civilian portion of the team because he wrote a paper on First Contact procedures for the first Bush administration. The two other big names in the cast, Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson, play a biologist and a mathematician respectively. The lesser names in the cast play Cannon Fodder 1-4.
Barry Levinson's direction gets as much tension out of some of the exterior underwater scenes as it can, generating a real sense of panic in a couple of sequences as strange marine lifeforms menace our intrepid but whiny team. Sphere's fatal flaw is a scrambled, creaky script that results in scenes that are under-explained and long stretches of gratingly repetitive dialogue that even a solid cast can't make interesting. Even the threat, once revealed, doesn't make as much sense as the film-makers and the characters seem to think it does.
The movie is also rife with stupidities that exist solely to create plot tension (Hey, let's park the emergency escape sub a five-minute swim from the base, and while we're at it, let's not give the team any powered underwater craft to move between the base and the sub or the base and the spaceship!). There's also a truly incredible late howler involving the decoding of an alien message that I'm pretty sure a smart four-year old would catch. Not anyone involved with this movie, though!
There is one great twist early in the movie. Unfortunately, once we're past that twist, Sphere's fairly amazing similarity to a pair of Star Trek episodes* -- one from the original series and one from the Next Generation -- becomes more and more noticeable. Only much slower, stupider, and more boring and punctuated again and again with frustrating, repetitive scenes of people talking around and around in circles. Sphere could have been interesting, a fresh riff on movies like Alien and The Thing with a high-level cast and a major director. Instead it's a botch, though you may find yourself watching to the end just to see how big a botch it is. Not recommended.
* Spoiler alert: Sphere mashes together TOS's "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and TNG's "Where No One Has Gone Before." I kid you not.
The General: written by Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, Al Boasberg, Charles Smith, Paul Smith, and William Pittenger; directed by Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton; starring Buster Keaton (Johnnie Gray) and Marion Mack (Annabelle Lee) (1926): Buster Keaton's big-budget Civil War comedy astonishes in part because pretty much everything on-screen involving trains actually had to be filmed live. The timing of the various stunts and comic bits is impeccable, and the direction superb.
Keaton was the most gifted comic director of his time, a much more innovative figure than Chaplin in that regard. The sting of cheering for the Confederacy has been muted by Keaton in a number of ways, most notably by his complete omission of African-Americans from the screen. It's a comic triumph that will nonetheless infuriate some people for its glib view of the South. There are also some odd bits in which soldiers for both the Union and the Confederacy being shot to death get played for laughs. Highly recommended.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier: written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely; based on characters and concepts created by Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Ed Brubaker, and others; directed by Anthony and Joe Russo; starring Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow), Robert Redford (Alexander Pierce), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes), Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson/ Falcon), Georges St-Pierre (Batroc), Toby Jones (Arnim Zola), Emily VanCamp (Agent 13) and Cobie Smulders (Maria Hill) (2014):
Having Georges St-Pierre play long-time Captain America foe Batroc as a monosyllabic murderer pretty much encapsulates the Marvel movie approach to its comic-book properties. It's all business. Batroc is a Chatty Cathy in the comic books, a mercenary with a comical French accent who generally avoids killing people. Here, he's a surly plot device -- the first guy Captain America has to punch out on his way to the showdown with the Big Boss.
The Marvel Studios movie model has been, for the most part, breathtakingly efficient in its approach to making money from competent superhero movies. And it sorta has to be efficient: the two biggest draws on the Marvel Comics card, Spider-man and the X-Men, were optioned to other studios prior to the creation of Marvel Studios. It's as if Time Warner were stuck making DC Comics movies without recourse to either Superman or Batman.
Cinematic style is very much secondary in these movies. Perhaps tertiary. The Winter Soldier's directors are veterans of TV (including Community!). The plot chugs along from Point A to Point Z. There's a fight every 10 minutes or so, or an explosion, and a climax that goes on for the last half of the movie. You will be entertained if these are the things you seek in an entertainment. The 1940's-infused visuals that previous Captain America movie director Joe Johnson worked with are gone, replaced by an occasionally murky, thoroughly contemporary movie palette.
The biggest plus the Captain America movies have is Chris Evans as Cap, and if someone had told me this would be the case when he was cast four years ago, I'd have laughed. However, asked to assay a character as tricky as DC's Superman, Evans has delivered. It's not easy being a superhero whose primary attribute is Goodness. Evans sells it, partially with humour, partially by looking like a Jack Kirby Captain America as inked by Dick Ayers come to life. The rest of the acting is competent as well. Every time Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow talks, though, I marvel at how the character apparently erased all traces of a Russian accent from her delivery. That's committment to your adopted homeland!
So, you know, it's sorta fun. There's nothing epic or poetic here, just a solid franchise film meant to get you to the next franchise film. Given that Marvel Studios does such an efficient job of making blockbusters that are essentially big-budget TV episodes, its failure with its actual TV show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., seems doubly baffling. Lightly recommended.
