I envy most of you right now, because you guys actually have the time to watch films. I’m in the home-run of college for this year so my time is being invested into completing essays and worrying about completing essays while I intermittently procrastinate on the internet. It’s, well, it’s rubbish, but such is life at times. I still have time to talk about films though, so let’s get on with it before I return to this blasted dissertation.
The Good: Captain America – The Winter Soldier
Director: Russo Brothers, Rating: 12A, Running Time: 136 minutes
So the Marvel train keeps rollin’, on and on. Following on from Thor 2 and Iron Man 3 last year, we have the next installment in the MASSIVE Avengers saga and greater Marvel movie-verse, Captain America 2. The first Captain America boasted Hugo Weaving and Tommy-Lee Jones in supporting players to Chris Evans’ Captain and a pretty tight superhero origin story all things considered. This time around we have Scarlet Johannson and Samuel L. Jackson in more prominent supporting roles, Sebastian Stan returning as The Winter Soldier and Anthony Mackie joining proceedings as Falcon. Look, let’s be honest, if you’re comic book fan, you already want to see this film, I don’t need to sell it to you… But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to.
Scarlet and Samuel having more prominent roles really has me excited because I think one of the greater weaknesses of Thor and Iron Man‘s latest installments is their lack of feeling cohesive to an overriding story concerning The Avengers bar the after-credits scene – S.H.I.E.L.D are playing a direct role in the action and the narrative here, so there’s more potential for progress in the overarching story. Chris Evans is sterling as the First Avenger, he just fits in both image and performance, and the more character development for him the better. The Russo brothers have good eyes for action, oddly, considering Captain America is their only notable film series, at all, and it makes choreographing action-packed scenes even easier when you have characters like Black Widow to add nuance and extra bodies to proceedings. This will be a fun evening in the cinema. Don’t leave until the credits are done, either.
The Bad: Divergent
Director: Neil Burger, Rating: 12A, Running Time: 143 minutes
I don’t hate Twilight. I don’t like it, but I don’t hate it. What I am starting to hate, is that in the wake of that tween love story with some sort-of-but-not-really vampires and werewolves there’s now a scramble to make the next big film series that can take it’s place on the big screen and make 14-21 year old females wet at the gills for unrealistically good looking barely-human young adult male characters who have a dark character and who wrestle with their demons in a poetic fashion. Several lines and I haven’t even mentioned the film yet, new record. Divergent is an adaptation in an effort to cash in a little bit on the in vogue teen romance based young adult fiction. The problem with Divergent doing that is that Hunger Games is still on the trot, which has the big budget dystopian science fiction adaptation market cornered, The Fault In Our Stars is due in June, and that has Ansel Elgort and Shailene Woodley in it too, so that’s the teen romance cornered to a HUGE degree, so where is Divergent going to go?
The story is quite cool, a teenage girl finds out she doesn’t fit into a pre-determined caste society in future-Chicago and goes on the run. The plot is basic, but it works for me. My problem with it lies in how it feels like an obvious shoe-horning of a film into a calendar that doesn’t have a lot of space for it, at least over here, and it seems to offer nothing new or distinctive. I can’t think of any reason to see this instead of reading the book (by Veronica Roth), and when you’re selling a film adaptation, that’s a problem.
The Anto: Dawn of the Dead
Director: George A. Romero, Rating: 18, Running Time: 139 minutes
This is going to appear in this column on more than one occasion, so get used to it. It’s my favorite film, and I regularly re-watch it when I’m stressed and need to relax, and that’s what I’ll be doing at some point this weekend. Dawn of the Dead defines zombie films, hell it defines horror films. Few pieces of movie history come close to how influential and far-reaching this and it’s sister films Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead are in their respective genre and in pop culture. Most people have heard the titles, and even more would recognize the logos and imagery. The story of people locked in a shopping mall while the rotting bodies of everyone they once knew await them outside is among the greatest modern horror tales and the themes of mindless conformity, social conscience and memories and the collapse and re-structuring of civilization are as thought-provoking now as they were then. I’m never sure where to start with my love for this piece of art, but in this instance I’ll talk a little about why it relaxes me the way it does. Frankly, I just find the idea of everything ending in an apocalypse of the living dead to be reassuring. It’s stress-relieving to think, even just for 2 and a half hours, that a scourge of zombies is on its way and that your not-yet-completed essays don’t matter because society as we know it is about to collapse. I mean, I’m not the only one who finds that kind of thing re-assuring, right? Right!? Whatever, man, we’ll see who’s best prepared when the zombies come.
Right, folks, I’ve got to get back to my essays and studying. This Health and Nutrition won’t learn itself. Apologies if this week is a little lacking, I promise next week will be back on top form altogether. See y’all then, same Arcade time, same Arcade channel!
