TV/Movies Megathread

[Admiral Yi]

What's with the frowny over Roanoke?

Not many NBA lottery picks coming out of Roanoke College.  These boys all have their Eyes on the Prize (tm).

[Neil]

Yeah, saw that one a few weeks ago.  It's almost parallel to the number of big lottery winners that go bust in a matter of years:  poor advice, poor money management, too many hanger-ons.   You'd think agents would make sure these guys, the moment they sign a contract, they'd be sitting down with somebody from JP Morgan or some other wealth management company.  But they don't.

Sorta sad what Bernie said;  you know when you're finally broke, because everybody stops calling anymore.  Family, friends, everybody.

To be fair, the JP Morgan assholes would ruin them too.  You ever see Casino?  The banker on that one is what JP Morgan does.

And their agents are usually the ones ripping them off.

[Admiral Yi]

None of the jocks interviewed talked about being ripped off by their agent.

[Ideologue]

Finally got around to seeing Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America.  Thor was the sandwich, the other two were just the bread.

Actually, Iron Man 2 and Captain America are pretty good.

Iron Man 2 really got a bad rap.  It's not nearly as overstuffed as was made out (or as many superhero sequels wind up).  I also didn't get the feel that it was a movie-length ad for The Avengers, as many have claimed, and I don't think that's because I watched it after the Avengers instead of the other way around.  It has a few bits that are like that, but that's, you know, sort of the Marvel superhero universe deal?  Get with the program.  Not much to say about this.  It's funny, it's fun, it's cool, really, it's fine. B

Captain America: The First Avenger is a really good movie for about thirty minutes, then Tommy Lee Jones shows up and it's a fucking great movie for about forty-five minutes after that, then Cap stops using a gun regularly which looks a lot sillier in live action than in the comics and the film suffers for it, and just before that Joe Johnston balls up the denouement of the Red Skull by showing his true face well before the end of the movie.  It staggers along as an okay movie afterwards, until going back to being a great movie for about a minute and a half.

Probably the most overt problem is the Red Skull.  Firstly, the makeup/digital effects magic isn't gross enough, it's too smooth and really more of a pink skull than a red one; but if that had to be the look they were going to go with it would have worked a lot better if you did not see it till the final confrontation.  We at least needed to see him lose his face in full gore.  C'mon.  Secondly, this all might have been overlooked if Hugo Weaving had not been rather underwhelming too; I hate it, but I was not overly fond of his performance, which really surprised me.  The gravitas he brought in similar roles, as Elrond and as Smith (even in the bad ones) and even as V in that awful, awful movie, was lacking.  Here, his role was rote and so was his acting.

Back to the positive side, whatever they did to make Chris Evans skinny in the beginning worked just fine.  The phrase "visual effects wizardry" gets thrown around a lot, but this deserves it; you couldn't have made this movie this way until very recently; and all the more credit for using visual effects in such a subtle way, to tell the story rather than for huge spectacle.  Evans' performance is really good too.  I didn't think about what a shitty movie Fantastic Four was once!  Bravo, dude.

I already said how cool Tommy Lee Jones was.

And Hayley Atwell was way hot.

Back on the negatives, the climax is mishandled.  It's not even 100% clear why he has to crash the flying wing, rather than simply turning it away.  Is it going to explode?  I could buy that, but they don't say that.

I liked it when the Red Skull tried to use the Cosmic Cube directly, but they could have done more with that scene than the opening of the stargate and the activation of the Cube's distintegration (teleportation?) app.  Oh my God, could they have done so much more.  Please refer to Tales of Suspense 79-81 (1966)*, upon which this part of the plot is loosely based, and tell me more faithfully extracting the climax from that would not have been way cooler.*  We needed to see the Red Skull fabricating a fleet of spaceships in a movie; I just don't think that's debatable.  But I guess it was still cool.  Kinda.

And some nitpicks: the German regular armed services won't mind while you search Europe for Hydra; likewise, Hitler won't mind if the Red Skull kills his emissaries and appropriates millions of marks' worth of Wehrmacht materiel; boy, it sure was nice of Captain America to convince FDR to desegregate the armed services, wasn't it?; the term "genetic code" probably was not widely used in a time period prior to the discovery of DNA, or at least before the widespread adoption of computers and thus systems that used programming code to function.

All that negativity aside, the first act, the first part of the second act, and the epilogue made up for much of the weaknesses inherent in the remainder, so it's a strong B.

P.S.: Okay, one more criticism: I would have liked to have seen Captain America punch one real fucking Nazi.  They went to the trouble of setting it in the 1940s, and could not be bothered to have one Nazi die.  I mean, the Red Skull should probably say something nasty about the Jews.  I'm just saying.  There's more genocide in Thor than there is in the movie set during the Holocaust.

Thor is amazingly wonderful in every possible way.  It's beautiful, it's well-acted, it's well-written, it's approaching the perfect way to do a movie like this, and I don't think it'll be equalled any time soon.  But I'll only talk about the two elements that surprised me the most:

1. Chris Hemsworth is possibly the only actor in Hollywood that could have played Thor this well.  Seriously, I think the demands of this performance are overlooked: he has to be, simultaneously, severely physically imposing, aw-shucks-charming, and princely and regal, all while delivering purposefully-stilted dialogue (to humorous effect) and undergoing a radical character shift that demands he recognize that he's kind of an asshole.  Yet he pulls it off and then some.  He's great.

2. Loki.  Probably the best supervillain we've seen on the screen and Tom Hiddleston gives us the second-best supervillain performance (after Ledger, but on the other hand I suspect playing the Joker might be like what Ed Norton said about playing the mentally handicapped--in case I am actually making that up, he said it was easy to portray a Hollywood retard).  He's written as complex and conflicted, and every time I thought they'd go too broad and too evil-for-its-own-sake, it didn't happen.  He had to kill Thor to keep the throne secure (and probably out of envy) but was really willing to spare others' lives.  Hell, he didn't even really try to kill Odin.  Interestingly, he did try to kill every Frost Giant, his own people.  And when the self-loathing Jotun chooses to fall into the void at the end, I teared up.  IT'S FUCKING SAD.

Too bad in the Avengers he's a cackling monster.  But at least we got to see how he got there.

Kenneth Branagh: one of the best filmmakers in the fucking world.  A+

BONUS SURPRISING THING ABOUT THOR:  "story by J. Michael Straczynski."  Consider my mind officially cracked wide open.  It was about time that guy did something worthwhile with his life.

***

*Best of luck finding it.  I looked for about twenty minutes and couldn't find any scans of the really cool parts of Tales of Suspense 81.  So here's Magneto talking to the Skull about the Holocaust instead.



LOL

[CountDeMoney]

Ide will write sprawling New Yorker shit-style reviews over comic book movies, but a review for Touch of Evil would get a "Meh, s'ok".

[Ideologue]

Hey, I did There Will Be Blood.  Not my fault PTA faltered and Branagh kicked ass from scene one.  I SHOULD KNOW IF A MOVIE IS GOOD BY THE TIME THE CREDITS ROLL, PAUL.

[Ideologue]

Just for Money, since he reminded me to watch an Orson Welles film I'd been meaning to get around to.  Spoiler-free, largely.

The Stranger (1946).  Franz Kindler (Orson Welles) is a Nazi fugitive and Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) is the man from the Allied War Crimes Tribunal obsessed with catching him, but as social climber Professor Charles Rankin, husband to Mary Longstreet, a Supreme Court Justice's daughter, the former architect of genocide has blended in almost seamlessly into the fabric of upper-crust New England that COMPLETELY BELIEVABLY mixes freely with small-town, checkers-playing America in Harper, Connecticut.  And Wilson does not know Kindler's face.

So to catch a Hitlerite he sets a Hitlerite, letting Kindler's former subordinate escape the Allied prison.  After shifting through South America or possibly Spain, the middling Nazi and born-again Christian makes his way to the U.S., and seeks refuge in Kindler's lair, but first encounters Mary.  Meanwhile, Wilson tracks him, and it looks like the movie is going to be about fifteen minutes long.  But Wilson's plan is upset when he gets beaned in the head with steady rings and Kindler's former subordinate's talk of Jesus (and, also, being followed) leads Kindler to almost immediately strangle him.  Thus begins a tense game of cat, mouse and 1940s-style female characterization, as Kindler's new bride becomes the sole witness who can link Kindler to the murder... and, torn between her loyalty to her Nazi husband and her conscience, in danger of losing her own life as well.

S'okay.

In seriousness, I do rather like it, it's an above-competent thriller, with a very good performance by Welles particularly (not Kane great, but very good), and a pretty darned good one from Robinson as well.  There are also some inspired bits of dialogue--most notably a dinner speech that almost clears Kindler of suspicion in Wilson's mind, by pretending to turn his genocidal tendencies against his own nation, claiming that the only rehabilitation that would serve Germany is annihilation.  He neglects, of course, the salutary effect that the Allied bombing campaign had upon the German psyche, but I digress.

The interesting bit is that this is not the tell that Wilson picks up on.  It's when Kindler says there's no expression of freedom in German history--except probably a whole bunch I could likely think of right off the top of my head, e.g. the 1848 declarations, those of the 1918 revolution, and so forth--but the exception the movie mentions is Marx: "But Marx wasn't a German, he was a Jew!"  There are several kinds of conversations Nazi fugitives should really avoid, if possible; one that involves labeling someone as DER JUDE is on the very short list of those conversations.

Anyway, while quality is overall high, one part really bugged me a lot.  It's like this: Wilson goes to Mary's dad (I assume he comes with a reference from Justice Jackson), tells him about Kindler, and they get Mary over there, showing her some (tame, because of 1946) Holocaust footage, and accuse her husband of being a mass-murderer.  In due course, she lets him know.  Later on, Wilson shows up at a party the Rankins (i.e., Kindlers) are having, and instead of acting as normal person might and telling Wilson to get out the fuck out of his house for calling him a Nazi, Kindler just says hello and acts weird and nervous.  This is sort of a tell.  I guess this is forgiven by the fact that everyone involved knows he has killed at least one guy, just that Wilson just does not have proof of it.  But that's the thing, they have no compelling evidence.  That's why no one's bothered charging him and putting him in a cell till they can establish that he's a war criminal yet.  It's just an odd choice, because they may think he killed the confirmed war criminal, but will always have that reasonable doubt that he did not; whereas when he does not react a whit to someone accusing him in front of his father-in-law the USSC justice of being Hitler's hitman, that gives away the whole farm.

In any event, Edward G. Robinson is a way better detective in this than he was in Soylent Green.  I appreciate that here he didn't crack the case by reading an atlas with his book club.

B+

The plus is for one of the raddest onscreen deaths I've seen from a movie of this era.  It's toward the end, and it is AWESOME.

P.S.: Hey, Joe Johnston?  You see The Stranger?  That's how you do a FUCKING NAZI, pal.

[Ed Anger]

Next up for Ide: My Dinner with Andre

[Drakken]

As youtube is now more and more used to put obscure BBC series totally illegally for public access, someone has put the those BBC 1974 series Fall of the Eagles online.

First part of episode 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PfXgOeaThQ

Barry Foster chews the scenery into Hell as Wilhelm II. It's mesmerizing how he gets the Kaiser just right, with his subtleties, even with his left arm posture and his antics.

[Syt]

Ohh, they also have Whoops! Apocalypse, one of my favorites. 

Ep. 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzIl5_N1zeY

[Josquius]

Skyfall- Surprisingly good given its troubled development. Quite a interesting Bond movie. Gone are the sexy, exotic settings and instead... most of the film takes place in London.
It...felt like a good film but not quite Bond...except they shoe-horned in a lot of Bond nods, some of which felt a bit weird and overly homagey.

Also giving Bond a background like that wow.
Sounded a bit like they were prequel fishing with Judi Dench's character too.
I miss old Bond one liners.

[Ideologue]

The Aston Martin indicates the existence of some kind of stable time loop.

Btw, You Only Live Twice?  Also much better than From Russia With Love.  I'll keep you updated as the series continues.

[CountDeMoney]

The Aston Martin indicates the existence of some kind of stable time loop.

The Aston Martin indicates branding for English-made automobiles in an English-based movie franchise.
Remember when they used BMW?  Didn't go over too well in a nation that still remembers the Blitz.

Stable time loop. 

[CountDeMoney]

There's no new Prep & Landing episode this year.     DISNEY IS KILLING CHRISTMAS

[Darth Wagtaros]

Prep and Landing was pretty cool.