Tag: Elizabeth Olsen

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Avengers: Infinity War

Doctor Who premiered November 22, 1963. It was an immediate hit, and over the years the hokey show about a time-traveling weirdo became a cultural touchstone. By 1983, the production team was at the height of its powers. The lead role was in the hands of the young and charismatic Peter Davidson, and the budgets were bigger than ever. In the post-Star Wars afterglow, the show finally made the jump to America. The BBC decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary with the greatest crossover event in television history: They would bring together all the actors who had ever played the Doctor for one universe-shattering adventure. After months of hype, “The Five Doctors” premiered on November 23, 1983. It was a disaster.

Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), newly minted beardo Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and supersoldier in perpetual distress Bucky Barns (Sebastian Sam) defend Wakanda in Avengers: Infinity Wars.

Getting the giant cast together was a nightmare of bruised egos and diva behavior. The most important actor, Tom Baker, pulled out late in the process, so writer Terrance Dicks had to rewrite around some clips of Baker salvaged from a scrapped episode. The ratings were good, but not significantly better than a normal week’s viewership.

Worst of all, “The Five Doctors” exposed the weaknesses that the show’s fanbase had learned to overlook. There were still great moments to come—in 1984, the series produced “The Caves of Androzani”, now regarded as an all time high—but viewership faltered, and before the decade was out, Doctor Who was cancelled. In the internet comment board fever swamps, this is what’s known as “jumping the shark.”

I think you can see where I’m going with this.

Spider-Man (Tom Holland) and Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) get lost in space.

Picking up where Thor: Ragnarok left off, Avengers: Infinity Wars gets off to a strong start. Spaceships full of refugees from destroyed Asgard are intercepted by Thanos (Josh Brolin), who slaughters them and extracts the Infinity Stone from the Tesseract held by Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) narrowly escapes the destruction and rides the Rainbow Bridge, opened by Heimdal (Idris Elba) to Earth, where he warns Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Tony Stark (Robert Downy, Jr.) of Thanos’ plan to collect all six Infinity Stones, artifacts of immense power that control Mind, Soul, Space, Time, Power, and Reality, and use them to destroy half of all life in the universe.

One thing Infinity War has going for it that other superhero movies have struggled with is a compelling villain. Brolin’s Thanos, until now a barely glimpsed, purple skinned mound of muscle, turns out to be surprisingly complex. He gets some fine scenes with his two adoptive daughters, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gilian, who has emerged as one of the best Marvel actors). Directors Anthony and Joe Russo are at their strongest when they take time to concentrate on pairs of characters, such as the doomed romance between Vision (Paul Bettany) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), or the science/magic rivalry between Stark and Strange. Chris Hemsworth’s Thor gets paired off with Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and teenaged Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), which makes for some pleasantly goofy comedy beats. But everything else seems rushed, thin, and worst of all, calculated for maximum fan service, such as when the Guardians of the Galaxy are introduced singing along to The Spinners’ “Rubberband Man”. Our heroes make a stand in Wakanda, but the snap Ryan Coogler brought to Black Panther is missing. The potentially touching reunion of Banner and Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) is completely botched.

Thanos (James Brolin) seeks radical glove improvement. Also, genocide.

What ultimately sinks Infinity War is the unsolvable problem that sank “The Five Doctors”—the need to fit in references to 19 other Marvel movies. This is a film designed for superfans, and it could please many. But there inevitably comes a moment in long, episodic serials when the audience realizes that the catharsis they seek will never come. The demands of capitalism means there can never be a satisfying ending, and each installment of the story is reduced to a commercial for the next one. One way to read the ending of Infinity War is as a bold departure from formula. Another, more accurate way to read the ending is the plot equivalent of the moment in A Christmas Story when Ralphie uses his new Little Orphan Annie decoder ring to discover that the secret message is “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”. It’s the moment when all of the superheroes team up to collectively jump the biggest, most expensive shark of all time.

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Film Features Film/TV

Ingrid Goes West

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in January 2007, no one really understood the enormous cultural change about to happen. The foundation of the new world was already in place — the internet was 15 years old, and cell phones, many of them with built-in cameras, had been ubiquitous since the turn of the century. But the iPhone — and the smartphones it inspired — brought everything together in a powerful, versatile, easy-to-use package that fit in your pocket.

As the saying goes, a good science-fiction writer could have predicted the automobile, but it takes a great one to predict the traffic jam. Instant, fully portable, audio, video, and data communication had been predicted since the 1930s. The iPhone’s front-facing camera, meant to be used for video conferencing, had comics fans giddy at the thought of finally having their own, working Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio. What almost no one saw coming was the selfie.

Smartphones not only changed our culture, but also the kinds of stories we tell. Plot points that rely on missed communication, for example, are no longer believable. Romeo and Juliet would have ended very differently if the two lovers could have just exchanged text messages before they decided to kill themselves. Horror movies now have a mandatory scene where they establish that the soon-to-be-murdered person is out of cell range.

Elizabeth Olsen (left) and Aubrey Plaza star in director Matt Spicer and writer David Branson Smith’s social media satire.

There have been attempts to grapple with the side effects of this new cultural paradigm, but few have hit the mark harder than Ingrid Goes West. It’s a carefully observed dark comedy, equal parts Sunset Boulevard, Heathers, and The Social Network, about how our emotional needs and self image are shaped by people we’ve never even met.

At the heart of the picture is a penetrating, sharp performance by Aubrey Plaza. The actress gained fame with her flat deadpan in Parks and Recreation, and she’s made a career of being a dependable comedic player, but nothing I’ve seen her in has hinted at the depth she achieves here. When we first meet Ingrid, she is crying bitter tears while flipping through the Instagram feed of a bride-to-be. It’s only when she jumps out of her car and maces the bride that we realize the wedding is in progress.

Once Ingrid gets out of the mental hospital, the roots of her dysfunction are revealed. Her mother has just died after a long, painful illness. She is alone in the world, except for people she follows on Instagram. Tired of watching glamorous Californians eat avocado toast while she munches on hot pockets in front of the TV, she takes her modest inheritance, moves to Los Angeles, and starts a new Instagram account under the name Ingridgoeswest. Her goal is to befriend Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen), a professional social media influencer who, judging from her photo feed, seems to drift through upscale boutiques, vegan restaurants, and party houses in the high desert.

Ingrid’s inheritance-funded transformation from provincial loser into the image of the perfect California girl is a quintessential American story, from The Great Gatsby to Chicago. Plaza, director Matt Spicer, and writer David Branson Smith turn Ingrid’s desires and methods just a notch above socially acceptable levels and put in her hands the greatest tool for stalking ever invented. Is it even really stalking if the subject does all the surveillance work for you?

O’Shea Jackson Jr. does stellar work as Ingrid’s Batman-loving landlord who gets slowly pulled into her web of lies. Wyatt Russell takes what could have been a throwaway part as Taylor’s ineffectual artist husband and makes it memorable. The only actual villain in this conflicted cast is Billy Magnussen as Nicky, Taylor’s cokehead brother who is, like everyone else in this world, a ruthless social media grifter.

The dynamic between Plaza and Olsen is an intricate deconstruction of the way we build our identities in the social media age. As Ingrid learns once she worms her way into Taylor’s life, social media stars put a lot of work into creating a seamless illusion of happiness and connection with an audience who lives vicariously through them. Ingrid’s biggest fault is that she believes the lie too deeply.

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Film Features Film/TV

I Saw The Light

The Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light looks and feels like a movie that was scrapped halfway through shooting but cobbled together anyway, awkwardly, with many key and climactic moments left out. To patch all the disparate bits together, director Marc Abraham inserts aged, black-and-white footage of Bradley Whitford as the enormous and all-knowing head of music publisher Fred Rose, who appears on screen anytime somebody needs to explain what the hell’s going on or why anybody might care.

Instead of creating a sense of authenticity, indiscriminate use of documentary-style interviews makes the whole enterprise seem that much more insincere. One wonders if Whitford will eventually lead the cast in a rousing chorus of the “Time Warp.”

Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams in I Saw the Light

The Hank Williams story is one part Amadeus and two parts Sid and Nancy. Here was a young, uncontrollable brat with a touch of genius whose genre-defying songs threatened a carefully maintained hierarchy in country and pop that ruffled more feathers from Nashville to New York than all the troubled hillbilly’s missed tour dates combined. There’s the obsessive, endlessly destructive marriage to his wife Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen), who was determined to become a celebrity in her own right. All of that potential drama is left on the table in favor of softer, more sympathetic characterizations, and a complete rejection of the idea that, in order for the light to matter, things need to get pretty damn dark.

I Saw the Light chooses to turn Hank Williams’ life story into an old fashioned disease-of-the-week movie, with loving shots of Cherry Jones as Hank’s ma giving Scarlet Witch some stinky side-eye.

The saddest part of all this is that Tom Hiddleston’s acting chops are considerable. Loki may be a little stiff when he’s singing and swinging, but he’s an impressive shape-shifter and a fair vocal mimic.

For all of its landscape shots, I Saw the Light has no sense of place, and even less sense of purpose. Alabama could be Shreveport, could be Nashville, it’s all the same. But what’s most fascinating about the way I Saw the Light fails, is the way it decisively treats Williams’ music — from process to performance — as a tertiary concern. Musicians like Ray Price (Von Lewis) and Faron Young (Fred Parker Jr.) are introduced to the story line but never explained, and, aside from a handful of Hiddleston performances, no attention is paid to the changing sounds of postwar country music, the people who listened to it, or the people who profited from it. The guy had some hits, but what about all of the terrible back pain he suffered? And the drinking problem! Those ill-defined mommy/wifey issues? Without the music, no amount of talking head inserts can explain why we should care.

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Film Features Film/TV

Avengers: Age Of Ultron

In “The Freshman,” the first episode of the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, our heroine, having killed the villainous Mayor by exploding her high school, discovers that the vampires have followed her to college. Buffy’s trusty sidekick Xander knows what to do: Get the gang back together.

“Avengers assemble!” he exclaims.

Now, 16 years later, Buffy mastermind Joss Whedon has released his second, and if the director is to be believed, final, Avengers movie to a different world. In 1999, “Avengers assemble” was a reference to Marvel Comics’ B team — it was funny because it wasn’t the X-Men. Now, Captain America (Chris Evans) helms the flagship of the biggest film franchise in the world. Disney’s success with Marvel has set the standard for the 21st-century blockbuster, and all other Hollywood studios are trying to emulate it. Even Star Wars, the original modern film franchise, is adapting the model. It’s no accident that Furious 7 has the same number of main characters as The Avengers. Whedon’s 2012 film, the first to unite all of the different strains of the Disney-owned end of the Marvel Universe, was used as a blueprint, with Vin Diesel playing the Captain America role and Dwayne Johnson playing Nick Fury. The results of that cargo cult appropriation was laughably bad but extraordinarily profitable for Universal. Even car chase movies have to be superhero movies now. Comic books are rewriting film in their own image.

Is this a bad thing? If it means more quality movies like Avengers: Age of Ultron, maybe not. It’s a sprawling epic that represents the best work the corporate Hollywood studio system can produce. With Whedon’s work, that’s not damning with faint praise, it’s just a statement of fact.

Contemplate, for a moment, the extraordinary difficulty Age of Ultron‘s screenplay alone represents. Whedon had to juggle Captain America, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), from the first film, while introducing new villain Ultron (James Spader), as well as three new members of the team, Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), and Vision (Paul Bettany), and integrating Don Cheadle’s War Machine from the Iron Man sub-franchise and Anthony Mackie’s Falcon from Captain America: The Winter Soldier into the outfit. That’s 11 superheroes and a supervillain. The Batman franchise has repeatedly choked on one superhero and two supervillains. Only a few of the X-Men movies were able to pull off something so complex, and Whedon moonlighted as a script doctor on the first one of those back during the Buffy days.

Creativity often flourishes while pushing against restraints, and in this case, Whedon is in one of the tightest straitjackets any writer/director has ever had to don. With so many subplots and characters to deal with, every beat in the screenplay has to be accounted for. Whedon pulls it off, even accounting for the fact that the first cut he turned in to the studio was reportedly more than 40 minutes longer than the final 2-hour-20-minute running time.

Whedon is the best in the business at teasing out real human emotions from fantastical characters in unbelievable situations. One of the ways he does this is by being honest with the audience. As Hawkeye, who seems to serve as Whedon’s voice in Age of Ultron, points out late in the picture, here’s a guy with a bow and arrow fighting an army of robots in a city that is currently being levitated into space. “None of this makes any sense!” He’s telling Scarlet Witch, the new member of the team who just a few minutes ago was an enemy, to cowboy up, and it works, both in plot as a motivational speech and as a Shakespearian aside to the audience.

Shakespeare looms large in Whedon’s world. When he worked himself into exhaustion on the first Avengers movie, he directed an all-star cast in a low-budget adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing to unwind. He has also absorbed the greatest lesson from the English language’s greatest humanist: “The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth

Early in the film, while our heroes are busting up yet another Hydra base in Eastern Europe, Scarlet Witch uses her mind-bending powers to trap each of the heroes in a hallucinatory world where they are confronted by their fears and desires. At that point, Whedon has been in action mode from the word go, but things suddenly slow down and get weird. Captain America sees what his life would have been like had he not been frozen in ice before World War II ended. Black Widow relives her childhood dream of being a ballerina perverted into a life of killing in a brutal Soviet training camp. Thor sees Asgard ruled by evil. And Iron Man sees himself unable to prevent the destruction of the Avengers and the world. The sequence, which cuts back and forth between frantic action and reverie, is the single greatest moment in any Marvel movie to date.

Ultron is a creation of Tony Stark’s hubris. Tony’s worst fear is the destruction of humanity by superpowered cosmic forces, but his solution is to create an artificial intelligence that wants to accomplish just that. Ultron is the best kind of villain: One who honestly believes he is the hero of the story. He thinks if he can just explain the plan in clear enough terms, everyone will be on board with human extinction. Think of the benefits! The cyborg race he will create to replace us will be a great improvement over this mortal coil. Spader’s performance is mostly a voice performance laid on top of motion capture and CGI work, but that doesn’t make it any less brilliant.

Age of Ultron has one of the things The Avengers lacked: romance. It pairs the most emotionally vulnerable of the team, Bruce Banner, with the most emotionally cut off, Natasha Romanoff. But, this being a Whedon joint, the gender roles are switched. Johansson’s Natasha pursues Ruffalo’s Bruce, who flees like Cinderella from the ball at the stroke of midnight. The two actors have great chemistry together, even when one of them is a green CGI creature the size of a front-end loader. When Natasha, faced with a choice between love and duty, inevitably chooses duty, her solution will look very familiar to Buffy fans.

Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.

That Banner, for the first time, has a possible future outside of super science and “Avenging” gives the big, mandatory fan service moment emotional heft. When the Hulk, driven insane by Scarlet Witch, goes on a rampage in a populated area, Iron Man has to super-size his armor to subdue him. Iron Man fighting the Hulk has been a fanboy favorite ever since it played out on the comic pages 30 years ago, and Whedon’s interpretation proves just how good at this stuff he is. He out-Transformers Michael Bay in the giant robot fighting department while simultaneously echoing and outdoing the city-destroying brawl between Superman and General Zod in Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel.

Most importantly, Age of Ultron does what big studio movies have been trying to do since before Errol Flynn took up his bow and rapier in 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood: It’s a fun flick to watch in a big theater full of people. Is it a perfect movie? No, but its failings are set by the limitations of the genre. Is it the kind of movie Whedon would be doing in this critic’s ideal world? Not really. His skills and vision are bigger than men in tights. Historically, we’ve had Westerns, adventure movies, spy movies, science fiction, war movies, and all the other action movie variants to deliver swashbuckling good times. Now, with Marvel banking $187 million in three and a half days, and Warner Brothers planning at least 10 more movies set in the DC Comics universe, the superhero template is all we’re going to get for the foreseeable future.

Whedon’s contract with Disney/Marvel is up next month, and he’s been telling everyone who will listen that he’s not coming back. Marvel’s still got a crackerjack team, but Whedon is the secret sauce. Age of Ultron seems like the end of an era.

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Film Features Film/TV

Godzilla Versus Meta-Godzilla

Near the end of Godzilla, a CNN-like cable broadcaster describes the eponymous creature as “King of The Monsters — Savior of the City?” That question mark both highlights mankind’s ambivalence toward Godzilla’s status as its defender and champion and indirectly touches on Godzilla’s eternally evolving status in popular culture. Sixty years after his debut, what has changed? What kind of inhuman hero do we deserve now?

Answering this question is tricky. Filmmakers who downplay or ignore the implicit campiness of a gigantic, fire-breathing lizard that scowls like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven do so at their own peril. But some form of distancing and detachment seems unavoidable, because Godzilla is one of the few pop-culture icons whose dozens of sequels and reboots strive to be less dark than the source material.

Like George A. Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, IshirŌ Honda’s 1954 Gojira is both a high-concept genre exercise and a kind of national primal-scream therapy session. Released less than a decade after the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and less than a year after the infamous Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, Gojira is a Japanese film about the horrors of nuclear war and the dangers of unregulated scientific research. While it is true that Godzilla’s first-ever onscreen appearance isn’t very scary — he peers over a hilltop in broad daylight like a nosy neighbor — Gojira‘s powerful undercurrents eventually surface. When Godzilla returns later in the film to attack Tokyo, which is fortified with military firepower and surrounded by an enormous, multi-storied electric fence, he reduces everything in his path to rubble and sets it ablaze with a shocking, indiscriminate fury that’s effective in part because it’s so impersonal. As flies to wanton boys are we to the Godzilla; he kills us for sport.

Bryan Cranston

Honda’s film unforgettably asserts that “humans are weak animals” whose grim fate is unavoidable. This is never more true than during the chilling scene where a widow crouches amid the flaming Tokyo rubble with her young children and comforts them by saying, “We’ll be with Daddy soon.” Gojira climaxes with an interspecies murder-suicide followed by a stern warning about environmental devastation from an aging, Lorax-like scientist. It’s clever enough to leave room for a sequel, but it’s downbeat enough to make people wonder whether they really want another sobering ecological nightmare.

Releasing a contemporary American blockbuster that condemns the impieties of progress as vigorously as Honda’s film is all but unthinkable. Yet the subtext is part of the Godzilla myth; ignoring it altogether causes just as many problems. If the filmmakers want to stage a simplified conflict between good monsters and bad ones, then Godzilla’s frightening independence and agency lose all meaning. This all-powerful creature shrinks and becomes a scaly, prehistoric Rin Tin Tin that answers the bell for mankind whenever Mothra or King Ghidorah start poking around.

Elizabeth Olsen

With the 2014 Godzilla, director Gareth Edwards and his team of technicians seem aware of the traps and contradictions of the Godzilla mythology, and they split the difference between scary and silly better than you might expect. Their monster is a big, pear-shaped, angry old cuss whose status as an apex predator in a world of enormous, ornery super-beasts unintentionally works in mankind’s favor. But since Godzilla is not human, he feels no remorse for the buildings he topples and the hordes of screaming, terrified people he steps on. The destruction he leaves behind is the price we pay for security — a message relayed through an overhead shot of Godzilla swimming from Hawaii to the mainland while flanked by a pair of Naval battleships.

Edwards keeps his ill-tempered star hidden from view for as long as he can — a visual strategy as old as the classic horror and sci-fi movies he draws from. This secrecy is apparent during Godzilla‘s opening credits, which wed historical photographs of atomic bomb explosions to blocks of text that are quickly redacted as though they conveyed sensitive classified information. (However, the only full credit I got before it was blacked out was “Produced by the fire-breathing Thomas Tull,” which probably means that this is one of the movie’s only jokes.)

Off-screen sounds and blurry photos are parceled out sparingly, and the first appearance of something inhuman is actually a sly fake out: the huge, glowing curlicue emitting radioactive pulses in an abandoned Japanese city is actually a “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Object” or MUTO, an enormous pointy-headed insectile thing that snacks on warheads and glides around like a leathery stealth bomber.

My favorite example of Edwards’ tendency to withhold what people most want to see occurs just before Godzilla’s big reveal, when the Army fires off a round of flares to see what’s causing all the commotion. The flares soar up into the sky, but they only reveal part of Godzilla’s hindquarters; the full sight of him is still too much to absorb at once.

Those twin senses of moderation and awe fuel the best stretches of the movie. Forget about its all-star cast of puny humans (Juliette Binoche, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen, and others), who exist largely to fill in plot holes. Godzilla is about imagery, and its shadowy visual poetry excels whenever Edwards and company try to convey the world-flipping emotional impact of an average person coming face to face with something out of a prehistoric creation myth. There’s a great shot from the point of view of an indefatigable military man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who parachutes into San Francisco and passes by the expanse of Godzilla’s spiny backside before touching down. First, you hear his heavy breathing. Then, almost involuntarily, you start to share his breathlessness.

That moment of fearful excitement sustains you all the way through the final battle, which takes place under the kind of malevolent grey skies that portend the end of history. The monsters have some tricks up their sleeves, and the fight and its aftermath manage to evoke some real pathos. But when it’s all over, it will be hard to suppress a cheer, or a roar, of victory.