“America-Where Are You Now We Can’t Fight Alone Against The Monster”- “Captain America: Winter Soldier” (2014)-A Film Review

“America-Where Are You Now We Can’t Fight Alone Against The Monster”- “Captain America: Winter Soldier” (2014)-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Vance Villon

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

Captain America: The Winter Soldier, starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel Jackson, Robert Redford, from the Marvel Comic series, 2014   

As I mentioned recently in my very first piece in this space The Dragon Man Goes Awry (check the December 2017 archives) I came into this work post-Allan Jackson the deposed site administrator now situated according to his close friend Sam Lowell, another writer here, out in Utah in what some have called retirement and others have called a “purge,” a controversy I don’t want to delve into because frankly I know very little and the rumor around the blogosphere is that same Sam Lowell is going to gather up all the various strands of the dispute, what did or did not happen, and who was harmed or not and write about it all soon.

The only point at which I intersected with the previous regime other than knowledge of my father-in-law Phil Larkin’s long-time friendship with Jackson, indirectly, was when I approached the new site administrator, Greg Green, and asked him if it would be possible to do a Captain America film review. The first one, The First Avenger subsequently assigned to a younger writer than me Kenny Jacobs is the one I had in mind with the idea of the Captain being the foundation stone as a resistance leader against the troubles laid on humankind by the bad guys who always seem to be with us. Given the nature of the times, the dreaded 2017 real time of this impeding cold civil war in America which might very well turn hot, very hot given the tensions and what one writer using a forest fire as his metaphor called the social timber ready to burn. This civil war business something that as young as I am I could never have imaged would turn up in my lifetime.

I had heard that Allan Jackson (who used the moniker Peter Paul Markin during his tenure the genesis of which has been explained in previous posts by other writers, young and old, so I need not go into it since it really involves stuff that Phil Larkin would know more about than me) had refused to countenance any writer reviewing anything related to comics. That despite his own well-verified youthful love of comics, and of films related to comic book entries like Superman and Batman. Greg said sure, go ahead but don’t get too heavy on the history of such comics and center on the plot and why such films are made. That is what I had intended to do since I frankly don’t have enough information about those old days and the effect of comics on the youth of America to go into that thicket much.

All of this was before the “controversy” between Phil and young up and coming writer Kenny Jacobs over who was to do the first review in the trilogy although last in the series so far-Captain America: Civil War blew up. In the end neither wanted to do the review but Greg to placate the younger writer and test his range with an old black and white film review had Phil wound up doing the piece. As part of his introduction Phil went out of his way to grouse about why the hell was he doing a kid’s thing review when a kid was getting the plum Bogie movie review which he would have been all over (Kenny did a good job on it). When Kenny wound up doing the review for the first film in the series The First Avenger he, in his turn, groused about having to do a review of something that interested him less than Phil despite his youth. You will not find me either grousing or saying like they both respectively did WFT about this assignment. I wanted it and here it is. Vinny Villon]         

              

****

Like most action packed movies, movies which depend on their very reason for existence on X number (some huge X number) of fast paced action per minute stunts and scenes the film under review Captain America: The Winter Soldier has plenty of that and very little on heavy dialogue or plotline. Except go forward, blindly or not, and crush the bad guys whatever guise they appear under. Of course since this film is the second in the series (which now stands at three) we already know how the character of Captain America came about during World War II. I think Phil Larkin hit the nail on the head (and even disgruntled Kenny used the idea) when he said that they had taken a 4-F runt, a scrawny weakling right off of what would have been then a matchbook cover Charles Atlas kick sand in your face advertisement and made him a he-man. A he-man who could jump high, jump down better, run like the wind even through New York City traffic no mean accomplishment, bump kill bad guys and have time for a nap before lunch. Just the kind of guy who all by his lonesome could eat a Panzer division alive during the big one . Get this though to get through the action of the first film the Captain, after dealing a death blow to a failed mutant experiment named Red Skull, had a moral obligation, at least by his lights to ditch a plane headed to that very New York City carrying horrible energies in as always a small box into the Artic snows to resurface seventy years later after being in a deep freeze for that long. Looking young and a bit bewildered by the sights and sound of New York City.  

But that was mostly old hat by now. Obviously, mutant or not, a guy with the Captain’s powers is something worth having on your side. Here Captain America played by Chris Evans is working for the big time espionage agency S.H.I,E.L.D which is trying  to on the face of it bring world peace or something like that via getting rid of bad guys and settling for less than paradise in the process. That operation is opposed by the remnants of that nasty Hydra criminal enterprise that Red Skull had played a central role in who are up to their old tricks of trying to grab the latest technologies to control the world assuming humankind preferred stability and peace through a strong security apparatus than fudge along not knowing what will happen at any given moment. The key leaders Fury, played by Samuel E. Jackson and Pierce, played by now hard to view ex-beauty mummified Robert Redford who in his day would have probably had the Captain America role handed to him on a platter.            

Of course the Captain is not working solo these days for a high-flying intelligence operation as he has a wingman and a jumping jack played by ubiquitous Scarlett Johannsson. Fellow mutants to work the means streets.  The task is to prevent Hydra from grabbing some very high-end helicopters which can direct massive fire wherever whoever is guiding the thing wants. And guess what Hydra’s enforcer in chief is- the winter soldier, a bad ass dude no question who just happens to be an old Brooklyn growing up buddy of Barnes, played by Sebastian Stan, who wound up working, for or against his will it is never quite clear, for Hydra. And doing a very good job of it.

That turning to evil purposes by old Barnes, by the transformed winter soldier makes perfect sense. Especially as if as claimed he was subject to Soviet-era brainwashing. What I had, have, a hard time getting around is the fate of Pierce, of Robert Redford, who as it turns out was a Hydra “mole,” working the espionage racket. A guy who went to the mat with Butch Cassidy to waste the bad guys in the old West, a guy who put a greedy New York stockbroker into cheap street working the old con in The Sting turns out to be nothing but a cheapjack secret agent for the nefarious forces loose in the world. How the mighty have fallen. Therein lies one cautionary tale. The other don’t trust anybody from Brooklyn-or Queens if you know what I mean.   

Present At The Creation- Marvel Comics “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011)-A Film Review

Present At The Creation- Marvel Comics “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

Captain America: The First Avenger, starring Chris Evans, Sebastian Stan, Tommy Lee Jones, 2011, Marvel Productions

[Now it is my turn to say WFT, although I could have probably gotten what the initials stood for long before my fellow reviewer on this site long time contributor Phil Larkin decoded the latest shorten terms in modern text-twitter-Internet world. His WTF reason, Phil’s, was that he went here on this site publicly to grouse about having to do another film in this so-far Captain America trilogy rather than what he considered should have been his plum assignment doing a review of his hero actor Humphrey Bogart’s  in one of his lesser later films from the 1950s Deadline-USA. A film about the even then declining (against television) newspaper racket’s struggle for the big story and how to beat off the stiff competition of the other news sources in the big cities.     

Under the new regime, manager Greg Green and the newly instilled Editorial Board, which Phil showed great disrespect for by calling that panel toadies of Greg’s, each writer has the option of airing his or her grievances in the introduction to their articles. With no particular role for either Greg or the board except as something like “gatekeepers” to avoid letting any personal obscure animosities spill into cyberspace. New as I am to this site I have no quarrel with that policy which seems right after what other writers have told me the previous manager Allan Jackson’s never-ending attempts to sweep any writerly controversies under a very deep rug. I have no quarrel either with Phil grousing in public about how he was short-shifted on what he expected to be his assignment. What I do object to and feel a need to mention if only in passing is my “cred” to do the Bogart review.        

Phil seems to believe that if you were not at least alive, as neither I nor my parents were, to have seen the film you are reviewing then that mere fact disqualifies you from reviewing the damn thing. He probably got that idea, an old idea in any case, from his buddy-buddy relationship with Allan Jackson and the coterie of older writers he surrounded himself with until a few years ago. Jackson  seeing the writing on the wall that the older writers were either running out of creative steam or were so hung up on the 1960s when most of them came of age, including Jackson, that they needed younger writers to stop the drainage of younger reader away from the site. While, in general, we younger writers will write material reflecting our coming of age experiences I reject the idea in this specific case that Phil was the only one who could do justice to the Bogart piece.

As I mentioned in my review, and either Phil missed or consciously ignored, I was spoon-fed on Bogie movies as a kid because my parents who met in the 1980s in Ann Arbor were crazy for Bogie (and for the four films with his honey Laruen Bacall especially) after having gone to the campus film department’s periodic retrospectives on the age of black and white films. Later too when they had their version of nostalgic for Bogie they would traipse me along with them to some commercial retro-theater like the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts when they were graduate students. So I will special plead my “cred” on that film. In any case Greg, to placate Phil I guess although that era was supposed to be over with the departure and what some writers have called the exile of Allan Jackson, has assigned me what was supposed to be Phil’s second review in the Captain America trilogy. Truth is I know and care less about that whole Marvel comic book operation than Phil could ever know but being a good sport and also able to feast off of his first review to avoid any heavy lifting I consented. I am, unlike the apparently more paranoid Phil, confident that this introduction will see the light of day. Kenny Jacobs]          

********

Phil Larkin in his review of 2016’s Captain America: Civil War made the appropriate point that these basically mutant creations of humankind’s off-beat fantasies who squared off in that film pale in comparison with a guy like hard-boiled no nonsense private eye Phillip Marlowe, sea-worthy Captain Harry Morgan, closet anti-fascist resistance fighter Rick of Rick’s Café Americian out in the Kasbah, or for that matter unjustly convicted for murder escapee Vincent Parry Bogie. See I am stealing Phil’s stuff already. I won’t deal with the other mutants here since they, except for bad guy Winter Soldier, played by Sebastian Stan and a cameo by youthful inventor Stark aka Ironman, play no role here in The First Avenger saga but this Captain America specimen aka Steve Rogers out of Brooklyn, played by hulky Chris Evans, is a good example of why I shunned such matter when I was a kid. Phil was beautiful in noting that the idea of taking a ninety-eight pound weakling right out of a matchbook cover Charles Atlas “kick sand in your face” advertisement and turning him in 1945, or anytime, in a humanoid monster and then conveniently deep freezing him is kind of a hoot. Filling him up with a ton of what were, are, probably toxics did wonders for his ability to leap, do the 400 meters fast, and collide into people with his trusty shield but left his short on the brains side. Strictly a bronzed beauty-male version in a tight outfit for all the girls, young women, regular women in the theater audience to ogle over.      

Well enough of bursting the bubble and let’s take what we are given for a plotline which Greg Green, the managing editor, now rather irritatingly,  has again insisted that I make sure to outline to give the reader a leg up on what the thing is about. So using the “present at the creation” 1945 motif from the headline let’s get to how this whole mess started when the kid who used to have sand kicked in his face by girls or get his ass whipped by guys got to be on humanity’s short-list of saviors. First off blame it on some screwy doctor who convinces the scrawny weakling to be a trial balloon in one of his experiments to make super-human fighters by the bushel load to fight the bad guys, real bad guys the Nazis and their friends and hangers-on. Bingo he is in although not knowing he was not the first to go into the program. A Frankenstein, who will go by the name Red Skull once he arrives on the scene, is running amok trying to seize some advanced technology which will make him the numero uno bad guy pulling guys like Hitler and Mussolini off their pedestals.

So the quest for the golden fleece, for the fountain of youth, or whatever they are searching for is on. In this case a super-powerful energy source to do the do with Red Skull’s mad scientist colleague’s mad world-controlling inventions. Red Skull has it but not for long as the newly minted Captain America chaffing under the bit doing war bond drives instead of off-handedly saving the world (and creating as Phil noted many more innocent casualties than lowering the count on bad guys). So he moves off dead center and goes mano a mano with Red Skull finally grabbing the valuable energy elixir in a big air fight in which Red Skull comes up with the short end of the stick. Problem is our good Captain is left to guide the plane to safe harbors but can’t avoid crashing into big cities if he does so he “falls on his sword” taking the plane down in the Artic to wake up some seventy years later a stranger in a strange land-New York City. To continue saving a world even wackier than when he wound up in that deep freeze. End of story.

No, not quite, because comic he-man adventures or not there has to be a love interest here his Peggy, a British intelligence agent and all around whizz which naturally fizzles out when duty calls. As well we have a preview of what will come up in future episodes when his high school buddy, Barnes, who is presumed dead, will give his old buddy the masked man more trouble than he could shake a stick at. Yeah, I am with Phil, WTF, yawn.     

When Super-Heroes Go Mano a Mano-“Captain America: Civil War” (2016)-A Film Review

When Super-Heroes Go Mano a Mano-“Captain America: Civil War” (2016)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Captain America: Civil War, starring Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, Sebastian Stan, Scarlett Johannsson, 2016

[WTF and anybody who is ready this freaking review will know exactly what I am saying and not worry about the kids, since kids don’t come anywhere near this site because they are way too busy texting each other or doing some unearthly social media vamping. Yes, WTF am I, a guy who has shaded three score and ten doing reviewing a Marvel Comic film production about some silly guy who had been frozen since about 1945 and ever since being defrosted has been running his ass off (remember it is okay-no kids will see this) trying to save every American city that he can from various evil parties, parties from a place which bear a striking affinity to the late USSR, the Soviet Union today’s just plan Russia-and Crimea. And now in a brawl with other super-heroes over turf and policy Yeah, what the hell. 

Here is my take and it burns me up because a film that I should have naturally reviewed, Deadline-USA, a late effort by legendary actor Humphrey Bogart which while not his best or most classic work (Casablanca, To Have And Have Not, The Big Sleep, Key Largo are in my book) should have been mine by right. I, who spent many a Saturday afternoon double film matinee with one stretched out bag of popcorn in the second-run Strand Theater in North Adamsville about forty miles south of Boston watching and many times more than once to get out of the chaotic household I grew in at least am old enough to have seen the films before the dust settle on them. Unlike the kid, the young man, this Jacobs kid, who new site manager Greg Green had assigned to do the review, his first, and who came right out and said that he went to the re-run theaters in Michigan with his parents, his parents for God’s sake, when he was nothing but a kid, Didn’t even understand half of what was going on. 

   

No. This coup has all the earmarks of new site manager Greg Green’s work although I am sure he will deny this simple truth as will this new toady Editorial Board who has bowed to his every wish getting even with me for supporting one hundred per cent, and still supporting, the recently deposed long-time site manager and a childhood friend Allan Jackson. I don’t expect this comment to see the light of day. Probably I will be pieced off with one of those not enough space excuses and told I can have it to introduce my next article when again space limitations will be cited and I will be pieced off until infinity or the end days come around. Bullshit (don’t worry even a stray curious kid has long ago stopped reading this screed as some meanderings of an old three score and ten guy if they know how much that is and that is not a given). But onto the review. Phil Larkin] 

Frank Jackman who writes here now on anything as per the new so-called Editorial Board rule but who used to be the senior political commentator under Jackson and a good one has spent most of the last year proclaiming to everybody who will listen or read that we are in the age of Trump in a cold civil war situation for real. And there is plenty if not definitive proof of that escalating this year rather than as Trump publicity hounds would have it become a dead issue. Compare that real not “fake” storyline with the stuff that this film is throwing your way as Captain America yet again bounces of buildings and people with maybe a scratch or two since they took him out to defrost a few years back comes firing at you (having been in deep freeze since 1945 if you can believe that therefore unlike three score and ten me looking like about twenty-five or whatever graphic the studios are shooting for).   

That said and I hope you can hold your ability to suspend your disbelief long enough for me to give you what my old friend Sam Lowell calls the “skinny” here  (a guy who nevertheless stabbed his old friend Alan in the back by voting with the kids to send him packing).  I will grant no question the super-hero grift is a tough racket. Even with a motley of those with some specialized skills like speed, iron, being good with a bow and arrow, spidery, flame-throwers, robotic, double- flip artists who have the ability to fend off the bad guys they are too few in number to keep the world save from the creeps for long. Moreover for every action they, these so-called avengers, take against the creeps, usually not many at least in the leading cadre  there is “collateral damage” as they say, innocents by the scores, hundred, thousands,  get wasted through no fault of their own.

The question becomes, ever for those running kinds who make up the avenger herd, a moral one. Against cutting off a few bad guys who will just be replaced by another crop how many innocents must die. That is the premise behind the duel to the death here not only against the bad guys but with a falling out among the good guys when push comes to shove between the immoral rogues and the guilty accommodators. And it will be push come to shove when the various super-heroes pick up sides. Those who are willing to come under some international control commission to become essentially a super elite special forces operation working under instructions and those who want to roam free and kill whatever they can and let the devil take the hinter-post.       

Leading the rogue element, the don’t give a fuck about casualties, is this former ninety-eight pound weakling out of an old matchbook Charles Atlas kick sand in your face advertisement who gets boosted up like crazy so he can run, fight and bounce off walls is the aforementioned Captain America played by bean-head Chris Evans. This is the third film in the series so we already know his bio-and his trail of destruction. He can do everything but think beyond the killing fields he has created. Leading the civilized avengers, a brainy guy who can actually think before he acts Stark aka Ironman, played by Robert Downey, Jr. who is, catching on about that collateral damage outweighs whatever bad guys get wasted argument, willing to take himself and some others into that elite unit under international control. That is how the good guys divide up and since they all have checkered pasts the line-up splits down the middle. Of course the joker is the bad guys led by the totally berserk Winter Solider, played by Sebastian Stan, who is really an old buddy of the Captain’s who has been brain-washed by the Russians to do their dirty work. A little Cold War I scenario familiar from Le Carre novels and James Bond films.      

So the so-called tensions between the two factions mount especially when Winter Soldier allegedly blows an international conference building to smithereens with heavy causalitie. Wrong fall guy as it turned out and when he is captured miraculously he goes over the Captain’s side just like the old days once he is out of range of his handlers and their nefarious skills. But there are still those government toady avengers to deal with and so the two sides go mano a mano until, well, until it is discovered that some over-the top nefarious fourth party, a Doctor Zemo has been manipulating the whole controversy for his own sense of revenge. So all the old gang get back together after waylaying each other in such a manner that mere mortals would have gone beyond the pale long ago-or held some serious long-standing grudges. Yeah, now you know why I said WTF. Give me a hard-boiled rough-edged private detective, a salty sea captain ready to do his bit for the cause, ditto a nightclub/café owner in the Kasbah, or another private detective who sends a gun-simple femme fatale over for the big step-off Bogie just regular anti-hero any day.