MovieMonday: Avengers: Endgame

If you went to a movie last weekend, odds are good that you saw this one.  And enjoyed it.

It caps a 22-film narrative that stretches back to 2008's "Iron Man," the first Marvel movie, which showed us how Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) turned himself into a superhero devoted to protecting humanity and, over time, life generally.

Endgame opens ominously, with Iron Man in exile, other Avengers in sorrowful states and a palpable sense of worldwide loss over the consequences of last year's "Infinity War."  The dark tone enhances the theme that much is at stake.

The Avengers meet and disagree about whether to accept what has happened or to try again to defeat archenemy Thanos.  Their decision is the expected one.

From there come experiments in "quantum mechanics" and the space-time continuum -- a necessary bit of mumbo-jumbo -- that launches Antman, Hulk, the Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, et al. on various quests to retrieve the lost Infinity Stones that are essential for galactic harmony. 

The film climaxes in an epic battle with Thanos, for which Marvel pulls all the stops, and I do mean all of them. 

Afterward, a coda mourns team losses and suggests possible new Avengers members and/or a series of stories involving another Marvel team, the Guardians of the Galaxy.

The film includes some notable elements:

-- Much more attention to the superheroes' (and even the bad guy's) personal backstories than is typical in the genre.  The Avengers care about their families and each other, and the emotional drama plays well with audiences who have grown to care about the characters after seeing the previous movies. 

-- Plenty of humor, including an unanticipated Thor development, time-heist boo-boos, references to other space-time movies, and good-natured needling among the Avenger crew.

-- Cameo appearances, apparently from old movies, by a number of famous actors and even Stan Lee, who created dozens of Marvel characters and who died late last year.  (Lee cameos featured in all the previous Marvel films.)

-- Various setup-payoff lines and themes to keep the story knitted together. The most prominent is Thanos' oft-repeated declaration -- "I am inevitable!" -- that pays off nicely late in the movie.

The movie is long at three hours but accounts for itself well enough to sustain viewers' interest.  A nice piece of work.


Notes

Some enthusiasts have been watching or re-watching all the previous Marvel films in preparation for this one, but this YouTube video is a useful prep for those who do not have time.

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The question before this movie was released Thursday evening was whether it could set a record $300 million in domestic ticket sales over its opening weekend.

By late Sunday the answer was in:  Yes, yes it could.  North American ticket sales were estimated at $350 million, with another $860 million in sales worldwide.

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Later -- the Marvel story.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Commentary from our columnist on news from Windsor Castle to Gotham to Los Angeles' own USC. 

Oy, feh, those Royals are at it again. All iberkern they are because Prince Harry and his pregnant soap-opera wife, Meghan Markle, have announced that the new baby's godfather will be Mark Dyer,  Harry’s real father. Of course, everybody already knew that Prince Charles was not Harry’s real foter, because he doesn’t have the family schnozz like William and the seide (Prince Philip).

Meanwhile, the Queen, who knows from nothing, waddles around the daffodils with her corgi dogs and spends the rest of the day in the castle sipping tea and counting her ducats. She should live to a hundred and twenty.

And then there’s Regis Philbin. He’s another nudnick up in years who’s older than Methuselah. For the kids who don’t know the Methuselah, think of Morey Amsterdam. Is he still alive? (Ed. note:  Mr. Amsterdam died at 88 in 1996.) Anyway, Regis has the bad heart and could drop dead any minute, and he wants to make amends for quitting his talk show without telling his cohost Kelly Ripa.  But eight years later, his calls she’s still not taking.

Two actresses were arrested in that big scam about the parents who were bribing colleges to take their narisch kids. One is Felicity Huffman. She was in the “Desperate Housewives,” the TV show about the scheming yentas who hated each other – on and off the camera. The other one was Lori Loughlin, who played the nice girl on “Full House” and the Tess Trueheart types on those Lifetime Movies. Meanwhile, she’s married to this character Mossimo Giannulli, who’s made billions of dollars selling schlock T-shirts, and nobody has the beitzim to utter the word “mafioso”?

They ought to lock up all three of them and dump them in a turme like “Orange is the New Black.”

Enough I’ve said already.


Vocabulary

Beitzim is the Hebrew word for "eggs."  In Israel, as in this column, it seems to be the  vernacular equivalent of cojones in Spanish and balls in English.

Iberkern means "upset."  Grandma is polite enough not to overgeneralize, and so we can only guess whether the Windsors' worry is bissel (a little) or zeyer (rather a lot.)

Narisch is a German word that translates roughly as "crazy."  In Yiddish, narischkeit means nonsense.  (Ed: I'd use stronger language to describe the parental behavior in the Varsity Blues matter and also the narisch daughters' explanations, which amounted to, "Gee, I'd never have done that if I thought I'd get caught.")

Nudnick is a handy word for describing a boring pest.

Turme, of course, means prison.


Note

Grandma regularly drops unusual tidbits into her posts.  In this one, she raises the possibility, perhaps known to all but me, that Prince Harry may not be Prince Charles' son.    Curious, but who knows?

MovieMonday: Missing Link

This good-natured kids' film mashes together several disparate themes to generally good effect.

Its star is Sir Lionel Frost (voiced by Hugh Jackman), an apparently well-funded British explorer, perhaps in the mold of Charles Darwin.  Frost receives an unusual letter from a sasquatch who lives in the woods of the Pacific Northwest and who has taught himself to speak, read and post mail to London.

Frost takes his letter to the Optimates Club, an all-male gasbag group that Frost wants to join.  He suggests that his correspondent may be the missing link between hairy primates and humans, an idea that enrages the science-denying bigshots.

"I say we are descended from great men, not great apes," thunders the head Optie (Stephen Fry,) who also opposes electricity and, of course, women's suffrage.  He orders a feisty hit man named Willard Stenk (Timothy Olyphant) to follow and kill Frost and his sasquatch.

Upon arriving in the forest and meeting Mr. Link (Zach Galifianakis,) Frost learns the sasquatch is the only survivor of his group and yearns to meet his presumed cousins, the yetis of the Himalayas or, here, Shangri-La.

Sir Lionel sets out to help his new friend achieve his goal  Such a project is fraught with problems, of course, including woodsmen horrified by an enormous hairy monster.  After Mr. Link is outfitted in a loud plaid suit, the Optimates' hit man takes aim.  Then Link and Frost are joined by a really smart and brave woman, Adelina Fortnight (Zoe Saldana,) who's a dead shot with a pistol and who has the precious map that will lead them to Yeti Central.

The threesome set out in various conveyances (rail, ship, howdah) and against many, many obstacles to reach their goal, which is not resolved as planned but in a way that gratifies 21st century sensibilities about buddyhood and female agency.

The film was made with stop-action animation -- frame-by-frame rearrangements of characters' bodies and expressions (see below) -- and augmented by computer-generated imagery and, I believe, at least some photography.  The effect is exaggerated characters who are fun to watch against very detailed and often beautiful backgrounds.

Note:

One term the film uses as a synonym for "sasquatch" is "skookum." To this day, there arise periodic reports of skookum evidence found in the Pacific Northwest, rather as there are reports of the Loch Ness Monster, which also makes an appearance early in the movie.

In our 49th state, however, there is a more common use of the word "skookum," which derives from the largely extinct Chinook language.  If an Alaskan tells you a person is "skookum," that's high praise -- implying strength, bravery and smarts.

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Later:  A fun book on a semi-related topic.

MovieMonday: The Mustang

Here we go again.  For the third time in two years, a non-US filmmaker gives us a moving story from the western interior, about the west itself and about what it takes to be a man.

This one comes from French director Laure de Clermont-Tonerre and stars Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts as Roman Coleman, a man serving a long sentence in an isolated Nevada prison.

Coleman is fueled by rage and for this has spent long stints in isolation.  Occasional sessions with a psychologist underscore his fury but do not change him.  When his young adult daughter comes to visit him, he says, "I never want to see your goddamned face again."  Their backstory is spooled out over the course of the film.

Coleman is chosen to participate in a program -- apparently active in a few actual Western prisons -- in which inmates are paired with wild stallions.  The goals are to train the horses, auction them for horse-appropriate work and spare them from euthanasia.  Along the way, benefits may redound to the inmate trainers.

Coleman's horse has a personality not unlike his own.  The mustang kicks repeatedly inside the wagon that has delivered him to the prison and is not amenable to human society.  As other inmates make progress with their horses, Coleman struggles against the horse and his own temper. 

Little by little, cracks appear in Coleman's armor.  The process is nicely supervised by Myles (Bruce Dern) a cranky old guy himself but one who understands both two-legged and four-legged males.

The prison, the scenery, the horses, the inmates and Coleman cohere into a satisfying narrative, worth a trip to the multiplex, assuming your local cinema screens non-tentpole films.

I enjoyed this movie and recommend it.


Note

Recent western US film stories about horses, men and manliness include last year's The Rider about a Native American rodeo star (made by a CHINESE filmmaker); and  Lean on Pete,  about a teenager from a broken family who befriends a horse and heads out into the frontier (from BRITISH filmmaker Andrew Haigh. ) Both movies are very good.
       
A third film, Hostiles, is an American-made story about the painful 1890s reconciliation between the US Army and native tribes in the west; sadly, it misses its target.  The most consistent praise it won was for cinematography by Masanobu Takayanagi, a Japanese artist who presumably came to the scenery and the story with an open mind.

The American film media (plural) emanate now almost entirely from large coastal cities, big college film programs, mega-studios and streaming companies.  It's ironic that filmmakers from other continents take up compelling narratives that their Americans colleagues cannot see.

Movie Monday: Dumbo

This is the remake of an old Disney animated feature, a live-action version that looks great but serves up a three-course meal of stereotypes old and new.  The best parts are the winsome title elephant and Danny DeVito's energetic portrayal of Max Medici, the owner of a small-time circus.  The rest is not so good.  

The story opens in 1919, when Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) arrives home from the war, having lost everything but his children.  His left arm has been amputated, his wife has died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, and his circus job as a horse-riding performer is gone because the circus is broke and the horses have been sold.

The children are 2019 kids in period clothes.  Much is made of the older child, a daughter (Nico Parker), who wants to be a scientist and acts the part, and less of her younger brother (Finley Hobbins,) who hasn't indicated a career preference yet.

Holt is given a new assignment tending the elephants.  One, pregnant Mrs. Jumbo, delivers a baby boy who turns out to have very large ears, which make him the object of jokes and ridicule.  When Mrs. Jumbo reacts to protect her son, the two are separated and she is chained in a wagon, apart from her beloved baby, who also misses his mother. 

The two children discover Dumbo's superpower -- yes, flying -- and this redounds to the benefit of the Medici circus, which attracts the attention of a more prosperous (read: greedy) circus operator named Vandevere (Michael Keaton).  He absorbs the Medici troupe and then teams with a financier, who is also greedy (duh) and is played by Alan Arkin.  They plan to fire all the Medici performers and exile Mrs. Jumbo to certain death while capitalizing on the prized asset, Dumbo, by making him the star attraction. 

If we were talking in 17th century terms, this would be the moment known as the Slough of Despond in the "The Pilgrim's Progress" -- which I'm guessing filmmaker Tim Burton did not have in mind.  But the film continues on that old story's track to the expected redemptive conclusion, one that will gratify all the animal rights protesters who have been picketing traditional circuses for the last 25 years or so.

There's nothing wrong with this exactly, but I didn't understand how all the pieces came together.  Children attending the movie will get the gist of the thing, but if they're older than 12 or so, they may suspect their emotions are being manipulated in the service of a formulaic plot. 


Notes

The first "Dumbo" was Disney's fourth full-length cartoon (after "Snow White," "Pinocchio" and "Fantasia.")  In recent years, the mouse house has been releasing various new versions of old favorites.  Another Tim Burton-led one, "Alice in Wonderland," was popular in 2010, but last year's "Mary Poppins" disappointed fans of the original.   Next up, apparently, is Will Smith as "Aladdin."

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I haven't seen the original "Dumbo" from 1941, but the general story is clear below.  It differs from the current release in that it is shorter -- 64 minutes versus 112 -- which may be why the current film has more characters and plot elements.  Also, the older version has no real human characters; Dumbo's best friend and biggest fan is a mouse.  Other animals scorn Dumbo, including a group of crows who speak in African American dialect and then become great friends with the little guy, a touch that probably was intended as a nod to racial harmony.  Unfortunately, the leader of the crows is named Jim; a bit awkward, that.