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“So Earth has wizards now.”

by Diane Duane December 2, 2016

Yes, well, so it does. But all the same, when the line came up in a mid-credits scene, I snorted.

After the madness of the weekend and Tuesday and my naughty eye and everything, I did (yesterday evening) something I don’t do all that often: I said to Peter, “I need a day out.”  So we prepared to have one.

And looking at the local cinema schedules, I discovered that yesterday was the last day that I was going to be able to see DOCTOR STRANGE – as the Christmas releases here have pushed it out of all but the very biggest multiplexes up near Dublin: and even there, who knows how much longer it might last? And I declined to miss out on a chance at a big-screen viewing for an old friend whose adventures I’ve been following, on and off, since the early 1960s. (And a very odd and mixed history Stephen Strange’s has been. He started out as a filler and went in all kinds of, well, strange directions after that, many of which I loved.) So: to the movies!

And off we went to our neighbor town, Newbridge, Co Kildare, and had lunch: and then we headed for the multiplex in the Whitewater shopping center. It was, as it happens, the very last showing of the film.

Except for us, the cinema was empty. This was hilarious and delightful, as we got to treat the whole place like our living room. P. even said, “Here, let’s spread out like we do on the plane, with a seat between us so we have somewhere to put the popcorn and the drinks.” And I said, “But what if I want to grab you if I get scared?” and he sort of rolled his eyes and said “You haven’t done that since ALIENS in Philly – ” Which is true enough. We clutched each other all through the guts of that movie and then staggered into the bar at The Commissary across the road, and the barman took one look at us and said, “You’ve been to see that movie, haven’t you?” No arguing with that: we were wrecked after that flick.

I didn’t expect anything of the kind, obviously. Anybody who’s been online and breathing between now and October (and cared to know) has easily known the guts of what happens in this movie. But spoilers fortunately don’t bother me. If learning about some one surprise in advance could completely ruin my appreciation of a piece of art, I’d have revealed myself to be a bit of a delicate flower and I don’t know that I’d have much time for myself.

So anyway. Visually: it’s a delightful piece of work. Ditko’s original vision of fragments of what would eventually become part of the Multiverse was honored again and again, to my intense pleasure. (Disclosure: I have been a Doctor Strange fan since the 1960s.) Just the look and feel of the thing makes this by far the trippiest movie in the MCU so far. The Inceptionesque folding-city bits that made the trailers are some of the least impressive stuff. It’s a pity there won’t be an opportunity for me to see this again in 3D, as parts of it would really benefit.

In terms of the script: Of course I’d have written it differently, but to the best of my recollection they didn’t hire me. 🙂 What I saw wasn’t at all bad. In terms of structure it worked for me, by and large; and in terms of slotting the POV and issues of the Strange-verse into the larger MCU, it did very well. It was also repeatedly funny, and not in simple ways like “the wi-fi password. We’re not savages.” It was also really satisfying in the sense of having an ending that involved not merely Blowing Shit Up (though inevitably we got some of that), but of Outsmarting The Big Bad. Always a pleasure for me, and one I’ve used on occasion. (You Young Wizards fans who’ve noticed this as being thematically similar to something that Darryl McAllister does to a fragment of the Lone Power in A Wizard Alone – well, yes, it is. But this is a moderately familiar trope in both fantasy and SF, and way better writers than I have used it over the years.)

Also, as a connoisseur of such things: I really liked the way they handled the various worldgating effects. Very sharp.

A couple of issues that jumped out for me while watching:

(a) Mads Mikkelsen did a better-than-competent job as Kaecilius, but what really got my attention was how much the makeup they’d put on him was bothering his eyes. I felt for him. He’s obviously a trouper and a consummate professional, but GOD he often looked like he was in pain that had nothing to do with characterization.

(b) Rachel McAdams had such a thankless row to hoe in playing Strange’s past-sometimes-lover, sort of a living continuity bridge between past-arrogant-surgeon and present-Sorceror-Supreme-in-training. She gave the part more and better than it deserved.

And as for Cumberbatch: he’s a good match for the canonical look of the character, right out of the box. That he should be able to get to grips with Strange’s character in his normal manner (and of course he has a manner: no news for those who’ve seen him work more than a few times) is a good thing. God knows enough actors would have taken this job, if offered it, whether they thought they could pull it off or not. He did, though, and he did, to this Strange fan’s tastes anyway.

(The one thing I would tease about, slightly, is his New York accent, which – almost certainly due to the vicissitudes of scenes being shot out of cutting order – kind of gets better and worse and BETTER and HILARIOUSLY worse. In one scene he sounds so over-the-top New York Nasal that I was itching to get him some antihistamines. In other scenes he had at least one Manhattan native completely convinced, and oblivious that he might ever have had any other accent.)

…So we’ll see where it all goes from here. The mid-credits sequence apparently suggests some appearance for Strange in THOR: RAGNAROK (and Thor is seen holding a scrap of paper with the Sanctum Sanctorum’s immemorial Bleecker Street address on it in recent shooting). There’s some resonance to this in that Dr. Strange and Thor have often enough run into one another and worked together in the comics continuity. It’ll be interesting to see how the themes introduced here get developed further in other parts of the MCU, and where (and how) Stephen Strange turns up next.

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December 2, 2016
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“This day is call’d the Feast of Crispian…”

by Diane Duane October 25, 2016

October 25th rolls around and inevitably brings this with it. Of all the filmed versions, this is my favorite: half because of Branagh, half because of the wonderful film score by Patrick Doyle. (You can hear occasional echoes of this in his score for Thor if you listen hard.)

 

…And with this comes the unavoidable memory of a fun thing that happened some years ago. (Before smartphones, alas, or there’d sure as hell be video of it.)

Peter and I were guests at a little media con in the south of England. Another of the guests (among numerous others) was John Rhys-Davies. As often happens at conventions, the committee kindly took all us guestly types out for a lovely dinner at the end of the convention.

Somehow or other Shakespeare came up. Now, Peter’s degree in Eng.Lit. was angled more toward the Chaucerian end of things, but he did his share of Shakespeare while studying, and he and Rhys-Davies spent about half the dinner discussing the Bard.

I can’t now remember which of them started it, but I realized suddenly that the two of them were engaged in a tag-team recitation of the St. Crispin’s Day speech. Now, Peter’s voice isn’t exactly soft or retiring when he gets going in this mode, but even so there’s no competing with John Rhys-Davies when he gets his wheels under him. The restaurant went (unsurprisingly) quiet around us as the two of them headed for the finish line, both reciting in unison now, and finally hitting “Upon St. Crispin’s Day!” at the (joint) top of their lungs.

Our table and most of the rest of the restaurant exploded into applause. And one nice lady not far away, looking at Rhys-Davies for the first time and realizing only part of what had been going on, then said loudly enough for everyone to hear:

“Oh, isn’t that lovely? It’s Luciano Pavarotti!”

(snort)

…Good times, good times.  🙂

Anyway: here for those who prefer it is the 1944 Laurence Olivier version.

 

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October 25, 2016
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AnimationArtCommercialsFilmGermany

The Underberg Ad: “Through the Night to the Light”

by Diane Duane October 12, 2016

Its name in German is “Durch Nacht zum Licht”, and though I’ve loved it for years I had no idea it was so famous.

Some years ago, back when the Sky satellite system had not yet gone digital, numerous analog European stations shared various transponders with the English-speaking services on that generation of Astra satellites. A number of these were German — Bayrischer Rundfunk, the two German national stations ARD1 and ARD 2, Hessische Rundfunk, and various others, including the commercial broadcaster RTL.

One night RTL 2 showed a compendium edition of 50s and 60s German commercials. (The compendium as a whole is available on YouTube, here: about thirteen minutes of assorted stuff. I strongly recommend watching it if only for the below Lady in the Terrifyingly Pointy Bra.)

pointy-bra

 

Anyway, I love programs like this, and so I taped it; and some while ago while we were dubbing some old tapes to CD (this was before DVDs), I made sure to dub that program as well, because I really wanted to share this commercial (and a couple of others). The sponsor is the  herbal digestive bitter called Underberg (which is still sold and quite effective. The main active ingredient, if I remember correctly, is valerian, but I strongly suspect the alcohol content is important in offsetting hangover symptoms.)

This commercial is the freakiest evocation of a hangover nightmare (or frankly any other nightmare) that I’ve ever seen on TV. It turns out that the animator, Hans Fischerkoesen, was famous in Germany: he was often called “Germany’s Walt Disney” and you can read more about him here. Anyway, the thing is impressionistic and there are rats and skeletons and clutching spectral fingers and it’s just terrific. 

So here’s that ad. As it’s clipped out of the compendium setting, it ends a little abruptly. Sorry about that.

Enjoy (if possible!).

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October 12, 2016
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FilmMedia

Setting Out on the Journey

by Diane Duane December 14, 2012

Bilbo Baggins at Rivendell

The second I saw it, the image above turned into a kind of mental “money shot” for me. I’d been awaiting this particular movie with interest for a long time, but not until I saw this image from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey did the hair stand up on the back of my neck and the little voice whisper in my ear, “Start marking off days on the calendar.” Yesterday The Big Day finally came, and I went up to Dublin to see the film in the best possible company. What follows are some very broad and non-spoiler-y notes on the experience.

Just so you know what previous affiliations may color this review: I first read Tolkien’s work in my mid-teens, loved it instantly, and have returned to it repeatedly, for pleasure and sometimes comfort, all my adult life. So am I a fan? Yes. (So was my seatmate at the film, my collaborator / spouse Peter Morwood, though he came at Middle-Earth from the opposite direction: The Hobbit first, then the Lord of the Rings trilogy.) That said, I think I can set aside fondness and fandom for long enough to review what I’ve seen with a relatively clear eye.

Having seen the original LotR film trilogy and loved it—with only the most minor niggles about creative choices—I was still a bit concerned; for in terms of adaptation, it seemed to me that The Hobbit was always going to be a hard road to walk in terms of getting the tone right. The Hobbit is extremely different from the Lord of the Rings books, plainly intended (as we too-coyly put it these days) “for younger readers”. It was always going to be a challenging work to bring to the screen when a lot of the prospective audience would be adults who’d seen the LotR film trilogy, and were used to something in a more starkly grown-up mode. I was a bit nervous that, with creative imperatives simultaneously dragging it in such different directions, the movie might not work.

Well, I needn’t have worried. That leads to my initial answer to the question: should you go see this film? Yes. Will you be satisfied with this film if you’re a Tolkien fan of the I-read-the-books-now-convince-me-you-haven’t-ruined-them school? I think so.

Let me set aside a couple of meta- or marginal issues first: first of all, the fact that Jackson chose to shoot the film in the higher-definition 48 frames-per-second format, untried until now in a major release. I didn’t find myself bothered by it in the least. Peter and I saw the film in its 3D version, and found the 48fps format not at all distracting or strange—in fact, I’m not sure I would have noticed it if I hadn’t been prewarned. Everything just seemed very clear. And the 3D seemed well-handled and not overdone. Obviously your mileage may vary: but I mention this because it’s been a big issue for some people.

Also: in regard to those reviewers who’re wandering around muttering “I don’t know how you can get three movies out of this one small book…” Sorry, but I don’t have much patience with this attitude. It seems to come chiefly from those who haven’t done their homework, ignoring the interviews with Jackson that clearly detail how the film’s writers went back to the Appendices attached to the LotR books for extensive backstory / background material. These reviewers’ position strikes me as similar to one that might be taken by someone who—having seen, for example, a series of Le Carre-based “cold war”-period films—then tries to claim that you couldn’t possibly get three big films out of the whole of World War II. The Appendices at the end of The Return of the King sketch out, in the briefest detail, centuries of uneasy history between the time when Sauron was first dispatched and the time when he becomes a serious problem in LotR: centuries in which the dark power that once rose in Mordor begins its slow and stealthy reconsolidation further afield. I looked over Tolkien’s bare-bones timeline last night, to make sure my memory of it was correct, and with my screenwriter hat on I could easily see three movies implicit in one page of that material. (I’m half tempted to do a Nothing-But-Spoilers review leading into a tentative breakdown, with an eye to what we’ve seen in the first film, of what the structures of the next two films could be like. Another time maybe.) It’s a pity that some reviewers can’t take the time to inform their opinions before trotting them out the door, but such is life. From where I sit, the advice is: Ignore them and go enjoy the show.


“Incineration…?!” …Martin Freeman and Refusing The Call as
an art form

…So back to the film at hand. About the acting there’s not much to say except that it’s always at the very least workmanlike, and sometimes terrific. When you have a big ensemble cast, with so much going on, getting all the introductions made is always going to be problematic: a lot of us can’t even name all the Seven Dwarves, after all these years, and suddenly here we are with twelve… Suffice it to say, this crowd of characters gets handled as well as it might be. Richard Armitage stands out in the crowd, but he in particular has a hard row to hoe; he has to carry the weight of the character work that will turn Thorin Oakenshield into a hero worth following, without leaving you thinking of him as nothing more but a sort of height-challenged bargain-basement Aragorn. The problem is increased by Thorin’s (canonical) distrust of Bilbo, which has to be established strongly enough to register as a problem, yet not so much so as to make him unsympathetic. (And for me this was a close one: I do remember myself thinking, “If this doesn’t get sorted out pretty soon, he’s going to come off as a real dick.” But it gets sorted, as it must.)

Martin Freeman, standing at the core of the story, does as Bilbo Baggins what he usually does, seemingly effortlessly: he makes the part his own until you find it hard to imagine anyone else in it. He starts out (apparently) a little hesitantly, but it’s my opinion that this was both an acting choice and a directorial one. To make Bilbo too proactive too soon would be a misstep, as he’s standing in for all of us in regard to how we’d behave if the house suddenly filled up with dwarves, and how most people would handle the ensuing physical and emotional turmoil that Thorin’s business proposition will provoke.

You’ll hear complaints from some quarters about these early sequences being painted in too-broad strokes, or overplayed for comic effect. But where it counts, the real business is if anything underplayed. In particular, in the crucial moments when the adventurous and much-suppressed Took side of Bilbo’s emotional heredity starts slipping out of the shadows and asserting itself, the temptation to go for any Meaningful Close-up has been wisely resisted. We get nothing but a medium angle, and kind of a remote one at that, of Bilbo sitting leaned up against a wall and listening, just listening with all of him to what’s going on in his sitting room. The way his body’s held, and the still hunger in the character’s face, between them say everything that needs to be said about Bilbo’s secret longing for adventure… and remind us that Martin Freeman can do more with his face while holding it still than many actors can while twisting theirs around every which way. (One word here, also, to my fellow Sherlock fans: toward the end of the film there’s a spot—no, two—where I think you will see, on Freeman’s face, a kind of shadow or presentment of an expression we’ll sooner or later see Dr. John Watson turn on his long-missing partner in the Work. In its present context, though, the expressions and the acting go straight to the core of the character’s interior business, in a flash completely changing the way you see him.)

At any rate, in short order Bilbo gets himself together and things get going. I for one didn’t begrudge the leisurely induction: it’s like the slow climb of the roller coaster up to the first big drop. And like a rollercoaster ride, everything after that starts to happen very fast indeed. Sometimes almost too fast: I could have occasionally wished for a touch more breathing space between sequences… but that’s personal preference. Soon enough we get to the point where Bilbo is walking into Rivendell, and what had originally seemed simply hectically real starts (for me at least) to acquire additional depth.

“Now it is a strange thing,” Tolkien says in The Hobbit, “but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to: while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.” Tolkien gives Thorin’s company a couple of weeks in Rivendell, and it would have made me happier (from the fix-this-problem-in-the-typewriter side of the brain) if even just a few more days there had been implied in the theatrical release. This would have put right a whiff of the (canonically) too-coincidental that occurs here, and also would have allowed time to set up a signpost to Bilbo’s personal sense of wonder, longing, and the depth of his regret at leaving. A few shots of montage would be all it would have taken to deepen and fully establish this sense, so that later when (at a bad moment) Bilbo says that he wants to go back to Rivendell, it doesn’t sound quite so much as if he’s simply chickening out. (Out of context, I’ve seen some images that suggest this material may well appear in the Extended Edition that’s almost certain to come out on DVD in the fullness of time.)

In terms of other character business that might possibly have been augmented a bit—there is muttering from some quarters also about Gandalf being a little too wizard-ex-machina in this film. I can only shrug and say that the beats are canonical, and too much foreshadowing of Gandalf’s assets and abilities here strikes me as counterproductive: the dwarves are plainly as much in the dark about exactly what he can do as Bilbo is. One thing I do like in this: we get to see Gandalf be a bit of the swashbuckling swordsman with Glamdring (and that too is canonical).

In any case, as the film moves toward its climax, Bilbo’s character spends his time doing what served the book perfectly, and serves the film so too: endlessly Refusing The Call (as Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” structure would have it) and then hastily accepting it and Refusing The Next One… the refusals becoming briefer and briefer as Bilbo starts the process of growing into his greater place as the hero of this story as well as its heart. This is an arc that in my opinion needs three films for maximum believability: no one would have bought it in one film, and even two (to my way of thinking) would seem rushed. The main story arc, also — the return to the Lonely Mountain and the issue of dealing, both with the very intractable problem lying within it, and the other difficulties that will follow on that problem’s solution — also need time and space to stretch.  So I think the three-film decision is the right one, and that things are proceeding as they should; and I’m intensely happy for the opportunity to sit back and watch Jackson & Co. get on with it.

Here are some scattered highlights that stood out for me:

Really big things happening. One of the great delights of film for me has always been its ability to show you something bigger than you could have imagined until you saw it unfolding in front of you right that moment. Probably what initially whetted my appetite for this kind of thing would have been the look down into the heart of the ancient Krell machine in Forbidden Planet. I’m always alert now for scenes in film that do this well, and there are a couple of scenes like this in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. One in particular involves a part of The Hobbit that I had completely forgotten about. Peter Jackson imbues this sequence with such a sense of sheer size and elemental threat that I got completely lost in it for some moments, torn between “Where the hell did this come from, I don’t remember this?!” and “Wow!”

Ian McKellen, doing what Ian McKellen does. In particular his scenes with Galadriel have something about them that’s unusually sweet without being cloying. There are other moments when some expressions of McKellen’s are given particularly close attention by the camera, with very good reason. It’s impossible to tire of watching such effortless mastery.

Smaug…what we see of him. Not very much, which doesn’t surprise me: I no more expected any significant view of him in the How-Erebor-Fell sequence up top than I would have expected seeing much of the shark, early on, in Jaws. But I have been waiting a long time for a dragon attack that properly shows the dreadful power and violence that such an onslaught should entail, and boyoboy do we get a taste of that here.

…Finally: surely I must have a few niggles? Yeah, a few, but they come very much from the fannish end of things. Chief among these: I’m not entirely sure about the characterization of Radagast. He smacks to me more of a T. H. White-ish Merlin than anything else, and knowing what we know about the Istari, I’m not sure that the affect of dotty absent-mindedness (with its overtones of “what-in-Middle-Earth-have-you-been-smoking-old-boy”) really works. Not to mention his, uh, mode of transport, which struck me as a bit on the Pythonesque side. …Well, maybe—if we see more of him—he’ll grow on me. (After all, enough things seem to be growing on him…)

But by and large, I had very, very few other problems with this film, and I’m looking forward to seeing it again sometime over the next couple/few weeks. This is, to sum up, as good an adaptation of The Hobbit as we could have hoped for: or rather, the beginning of as good a one. And we’re not done yet.

Because now, of course, the wait begins for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. For some people (myself included) it won’t come soon enough: next Christmas already seems far away. But I think the wait—and the wait for Christmas 2014—will prove to have been worth it. Looking forward, a time will come, I think, when these three films and the three LotR films that preceded it will be seen as a double trilogy, inextricably interwoven. We’ll see.

 

…One last note. Before seeing the film I almost entirely avoided looking at the early reviews from the trades and so forth: not for fear of spoilers, but because reviewers too focused on the bottom line can often affect one’s impressions in ways that don’t count—specifically, assessment of how the visual and verbal storytelling holds up. I allowed myself only one exception. I went and had a look at the review written by our old friend and colleague, Munich-based screenwriter and media maven Torsten Dewi (aka Wortvogel). I trust Torsten’s judgment, and was curious to see what he had to say. Now, having seen the film, I’m not surprised to see that he and I are on the same page as regards a lot of issues; and I commend his review to your attention (in rough Google translation if you’re not German-speaking).

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December 14, 2012
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Perfectly Assembled

by Diane Duane April 28, 2012

So we saw Marvel’s Avengers Assemble last night. (Aka The Avengers in the US.)

Don’t ask me why we get to see this first, instead of North American audience  getting it now: but I am so emphatically not complaining. (I should add this: I can think of several marketing/rollout strategies that would explain why this move makes sense for this franchise, but I have no data to suggest that what I’m thinking has any connection to reality in this case, so I’ll just shut up about that now.)

Let me say right here that I come from a position of bias. I have been actively reading comics since I was eight, and have been reading the Avengers characters (separately and together) since my teens. But I can normally put bias aside sufficiently to tell other people whether the film I’ve just seen is any good or not.

Anyway: we saw it at an eight PM screening in center-city Dublin last night. The audience was thoughtful (not a single damn mobile phone went off during the performance) and well-behaved, which always helps. There was a line of people twenty deep at the concession stand when I ducked out for popcorn before things started, so I went back in, resolved to find a screenplay “quiet moment” to go out and get some later.

It never happened, because there are no quiet (read “boring”)  moments in this screenplay. Not to say that there aren’t lulls in the action (sensible: incessant action is fatiguing and tends to do the storytelling harm) and pauses to handle character business: but regardless of these, the script clicks along at an amazing rate. The dialogue is crisp and the “smart lines” feel natural: characters sniping at each other because that’s what they would do, rather than because that’s what they should do now. The pacing is just faultless. And most importantly, the characters are perfectly introduced, so that whether you know them or not when you sit down, you know them quite well enough when you leave.

This is always a problem with ensemble films: getting everyone introduced and getting the character interactions sufficiently well laid down that the action which should flow from them does so naturally when it starts moving. In this case, the characters start feeling out each others’ weaknesses and picking at each other in absolutely natural and understandable ways, to the point where you do start wondering whether this team is going to come together correctly. (And the acting is almost certainly helped by the fact that all these actors seem to genuinely like each other.) There was — to my mind — a sort of thematic breathing space almost exactly in the middle of the film where the viewer is allowed a few moments to mull over the possibility that things are not going to go according to plan. And then plans start going wrong, very wrong indeed, and things come together, very believably, more in spite of what’s happening than because of it.

This is storytelling of a very high level indeed. But then, this is Joss Whedon we’re talking about: so, ’nuff said. (And though this is not a place where the majority of viewers will be coming from, let me say now that there’s a tremendous pleasure as a writer in sitting back and watching a fellow professional, who has finally been given enough money and enough time, just do his thing and knock the story and the visuals right out of the park. It is — if you’re a baseball fan like me — the visual equivalent of hearing the batter hit the ball just that way and produce that particular CRACK that gives you warning enough to sit back in sheer pleasure and watch the ball start describing that long lazy arc up and out.)

I don’t dare go into too much detail here about the film: it’s so tough to tell what people consider spoilery any more that it seems better to say too little than too much. But I don’t mind sharing a few general personal opinions.

  • Mark Ruffalo picks up this film, stuffs it into his pocket and runs off with it in some of the most charming ways possible. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Hulk, and the portrayal of his Bruce Banner side is just winning: dry and witty and so enjoyable. I could have watched Bruce sparring with Tony Stark for hours. (I leave aside the wonderful snarkfest with Loki. I was privileged to see some of this material at an advanced trailer showing in Munich in November of last year, courtesy of our old friend and fellow film fan Torsten Dewi at Wortvogel.de… and it’s been preying on my mind and making me grin mindlessly at things for no particular reason ever since. You have no idea what a pain in the butt it is to see something so marvelous and then have to keep quiet about it for five months. God, how I suffer for my art.)  (Heh.)
  • I also couldn’t get enough of Chris Evans’ innocent — let’s just say the word — beauty, and the way he carries himself and his character: to my mind he’s even better as Captain America here than he was in his own movie, which is saying something. For me at least he’s always been at the core of the Avengers concept, a character with his own special something, akin to what Superman has — that quality of just being good — and it’s marvelous to see Cap so well played.
  • I want to have Agent Coulson’s babies. (Perhaps fortunately it’s way too late for this. But still.) I have always loved the character, and I now love him, if possible, even more. You’ll find out why.
  • And a side issue: I don’t think I’ve ever seen New York so beautifully destroyed. (Disclaimer: I am a native Manhattanite, born on East 86th Street.) If you’ve read much of my novel work, you know that in fiction I occasionally destroy cities, or bits of cities, that seem to need it. I once dropped an alien spacecraft on top of the main train station in Zürich because I didn’t like the floor tile they’d installed during a renovation. (…Well, I mean, who installs tile that’s going to be slippery when it’s wet, in a space where people are going to be tracking in snow for a third of the year? I ask you. It made me cranky.) But the outdoor CGI during the whole climactic sequence was utterly believable. I know that lighting: I’ve been there when the weather’s like that: it felt real. The whole thing was magnificently done — the cinematographer deserves an Oscar. And as for details… I won’t go into too much here. Let”s just say that I’ve trashed Grand Central in my time, but boy, not like this. I was awed. (And can’t wait to see it again.)
  • Pepper and Tony have a moment while they’re working on something. Watch what Pepper does to what they’re working with.  😉 This throwaway, wide-angle moment perfectly sums up why this will go down as a classic “four-quadrant” film.

…I may add some notes  to this posting later as things occur to me that I haven’t mentioned here.  However: one of the blurb sources presently being mentioned in the European trailers says of the film, “Possibly the best superhero film of all time.” Now, that’s a pretty high bar to jump. (I hold the original Superman in high regard.) But it’s possible, just possible, that this opinion is correct. In any case, there are relatively few films that I buy on DVD, not just to watch repeatedly for pleasure, but to study so that I can better understand the reasons why a movie works so well. This is going to be one of those films. And it’s going to take me weeks to get to the studying part, because this film is going to keep sucking me into Insane Enjoyment mode time… after time… after time.

Whether it’s “the best superhero film ever made” or not: you have a truly superior viewing experience ahead of you. The characters work together, they care about each other, and the Spectacle kicks right in on schedule in the proper ancient Greek sense….so as a result, this whole damn thing is unmissable.

Enjoy!

I intend to, again, as soon as possible.

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April 28, 2012
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The blogger


40 years in print, 50+ novels, assorted TV/movies, NYT Bestseller List a few times, blah blah blah. Young Wizards series, 1983-2020 and beyond; Middle Kingdoms series, 1979-2019. And now, also: Proud past Guest of Honour at Dublin2019, the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland.

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