Nice analysis by Zach Baron over at Grantland on how The Avengers easily eclipsed the quality of almost everything released in the summer of 2011:
On the likely chance you’ve blocked the months of May, June, July, and August of last year out of your mind forever, let’s try to make this as brief and non-traumatic as possible. There was the colossally ill-advised attempt to make a star out of Ryan Reynolds and a successful movie franchise out of Green Lantern, a beloved comic book with a wholly impenetrable native mythology (something about “the emerald energy of willpower” and the color yellow, I think). In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Michael Bay forced real-life American hero Buzz Aldrin to salute one CGI robot and nearly raped Rosie Huntington-Whiteley with the creepy animated tendrils of another. And on it went — the sound-stage costume buffoonery of Avengers precursor Thor; X-Men: First Class, a good, kitschy insta-reboot that disappeared into the swamp of a hundred other comic book movies…
Don’t quite agree with his negative take on Thor and especially X-Men: First Class (both are underrated), but Zach makes many excellent points here, both on The Avengers and summer movies in general.
The Atlantic‘s Daniel Snyder makes an excellent point about one key Black Widow scene in The Avengers (warning, spoilers ahead):
During an attack on the heli-carrier in the second act, Romanoff becomes trapped in the lower engine decks with Bruce Banner, who loses control and becomes his unstoppable raging alter-ego, the Hulk. Her attempts to reason with him fail, and soon she is running for her life through the bowels of the ship, chased by the unthinking green mass of rage. The Hulk swats her against the wall like a mere insect before the Norse God of Thunder, Thor, intervenes. When next we see her, the Black Widow is cowering in the corner. The look on her face is that of a woman utterly broken.
When I watched the film last weekend I didn’t consider this scene at all; it felt lost in the midst of all the bombast. If Hawkeye and or Black Widow eventually get their own movie – being the weaker “mortal side” of The Avengers squad – this human vulnerability could be a really interesting angle to explore.
A three part documentary testing the latest crop of high end digital video cameras. 12 cameras are tested head to head, from the expensive Red One M-X (getting increasingly popular on the indie film circuit) to the well known Canon 5D Mark II and Nikon D7000 DSLRs.
It’s rather technical, but if you want to see where the film and camera industry is moving, this is a good start.
Excellent discussion over at Slashfilm this week regarding the death of film as a physical media. Hosts Dave, Devindra and Adam break down the implications for a half hour, covering technology, economics and the emotional attachment to celluloid.
Because the Slashfilmcast moved to a shorter, more streamlined format a few weeks ago to accommodate host Dave’s new day job, I didn’t expect we’d see in depth discussions like this. Kudos to the team for keeping production levels high.
Two hundred plus comments on what you should watch from Netflix’s streaming library. It’s territory covered heavily elsewhere online, but especially if you’re new to Netflix and bewildered where to start, there’s some good options here.
The A.V. Club’s Mike D’Angelo on that car chase from The French Connection:
Early in the scene, it’s mostly Hackman (who later became a mildly successful amateur race-car driver) behind the wheel, clearly visible either in profile or in the rear-view mirror. But the second half features footage shot from the front bumper, and that’s Hickman (“Hickman, Hackman. Hackman, Hickman”) barreling down actual, non-staged Brooklyn traffic at what Friedkin, who was operating from the back seat, claims was upward of 90 miles per hour. Some sources—notably cinematographer Owen Roizman—claim this is exaggerated slightly…you can still tell that what you’re seeing was in no way safe, and the idea that most of those other cars are just ordinary folks going about their day is mind-boggling. Do they even know they’re in the movie, or do they just think they narrowly avoided being hit by some random asshole?
If you love films and got a few hours to spare, the latest podcast episode of Battleship Pretension is a must listen. It’s a chronological review of the 90s independent film movement, from Sex, Lies and Videotape to Bottle Rocket and The Virgin Suicides. Hosts Tyler and David discuss each film’s influence, lasting quality, and how many of the movement’s “it” directors (Tarantino, Smith, Rodriguez, Anderson) evolved in later years.
To me, Rouge! Is a traditional musical, except with twice as many shots run at the speed of a trance remix. The Transporter is a Euro-trash version of a John Woo cartoon. And Friday Night Lights with graceful camera? Nope. Boring. We’d never be able to slink into those sizzling Texas mini-worlds on network time. And I’ve not yet mentioned Paul W.S. Anderson’s jaw-dropper of a surprise, Resident Evil: Afterlife, one of the greatest uses of multi-level geometry and spatiality in cinema I can recall seeing, where oneattack scene features twenty or so color-coded Milla Jovoviches attacking hundreds of color-coded bad guys, and it’s not even a high point.
Chaos, I think, has been evolving.
He’s got a point. Much maligned “chaos cinema” would technically embrace the Bourne films. And 28 Weeks Later. True, the ratio of bad to good films in the chaos canon is staggeringly high, but let’s not completely overlook what’s great.
As she sprints through the forest, Katniss is carrying the burden of multiple symbolic identities. She’s an athlete, a media celebrity and a warrior as well as a sister, a daughter, a loyal friend and (potential) girlfriend. In genre terms she is a western hero, an action hero, a romantic heroine and a tween idol. She is Natty Bumppo, Diana the chaste huntress of classical myth, and also the synthesis of Harry Potter and Bella Swan — the Boy Who Lived and the Girl Who Must Choose.
As is clear from the above, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis go through some pretty deep analysis of why Katniss is such a hot character in this lengthy Times piece. To its credit, it touches on a lot of social and psychological issues from The Hunger Games I've generally dismissed up till now.