Nick Bryan

Film Reviews

Avengers: Age Of Ultron and the serialisation value of superhero movies

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Avengers: Age of Ultron is out now all over the place, and I saw it on the opening Friday. The many solo film stars of the Marvel movies re-unite to take on an evil robot, ruptures form among the team and I’ll refrain from over-describing the film as some people might still be avoiding spoilers.

It was good, though – not as no-reservations excellent as the first Avengers movie, due to Ultron not being quite as memorable as Loki and the sheer volume of characters taking away from focus. Sill, among the upper echelons of Marvel movies and successfully kept me invested in the whole Marvel monolith.

Anyway, this isn’t going to be a straight review of the movie as there are plenty of those on the internet. The release of Avengers II served as a kinda peak point of a few months where I’ve been consuming a load of superhero media. Between DC’s FlArrow shows, Gotham, Agents of SHIELD, Daredevil and Agent Carter, that’s a whole lotta tights and tights-related material.

And that’s without even counting Walking Dead and Constantine.

Point being: I love serialised fiction across all mediums, but it kinda started with comics. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how this stuff translates because… much as I’ve liked many superhero movies, I feel like TV might be the ultimate medium for them.

“It matters that I matter,” said Batman, as he wept.

“I hate being a lizard! I must turn everyone else into one!”

Superhero comics, of course, are serialised within an inch of their lives. A lot of stories exist only to set up other stories, Some are massive huge important parts of the narrative, others just feature the characters going on a little fun outing or having development – point being, some issues do not feature top-level tension or mega-disasters. It’s fun seeing the characters just hanging out or taking on a slightly-less-A-list bad guy, but we rarely get that in the films.

Because movies, especially big expensive action movies, really fucking want to matter. Scale is their heroin and they demand every story seem like the most important thing in the world.

Sometimes this works – in Avengers: Age of Ultron for example. This is the climactic movie of the whole second Marvel phase and the threat is genuinely world-ending, so we are willing to grant the film the importance that it craves and needs.

This need for scale and importance, however, isn’t always so well-suited to the material – particularly pronounced in a lot of the earlier attempts at superhero movies, before sequels became inevitable. In a bid for drama and importance, a lot of those movies needed to have the villain assemble some kind of doomsday device and/or threaten mass destruction, often for little reason other than “Gosh darn it, this is a damned action movie picture and we gotta give the folk their destructo-spectacle!”

Which leads us to such odd denouements as Doctor Octopus and the Lizard building doomsday machines in Spider-Man movies despite just being a bit sad before that. Or the Scarecrow deciding to create a fear-bomb in Batman Begins, despite it feeling really at odds with the rest of the movie. Hell, even Magneto pulling a mutant-making machine out of his caped arse in X-Men seemed sudden to me.

Because in a TV show, you see, they could justify a finale where the hero just whacked the villain in the cock – ideally with complication or greater stakes, but still, a fight. But for many movies, that’s never quite enough and it has to be World In Danger.

This is particularly pronounced with characters like Batman and Spider-Man who generally work at smaller scales, so tone skews weirdly when the apocalypse is wanged in there.

“Steve, are people… invested in the Avengers?” said Iron Man, as he wept.

Plus, let’s be honest, too expensive for TV.

The other problem with forcing serialised narratives into movies, of course, is that it changes the nature of cinema to try and make it work, and not always in comfortable ways. TV shows are expected to leave a few loose ends hanging for the next episode/series/season, and even they eventually reach a grand finale where all threads are tied up.

A lot of this might be a psychological expectation – a TV show, as part of its make-up, is there to pull you through episodes. Films, because they’re sold as a singular experience, are expected to be more self-contained, and if all you get out of a cinema visit is that the studio would quite like you to see their other similar films, it’s understandable you’d be pissed off. This is one reason Guardians of the Galaxy was so good – it bent over backwards to be a standalone movie-style adventure romp, rather than an up-budget TV pilot.

If you flipped the psychology, I suppose, you could take this as incentive to be amazing – there’s no space for a filler episode here, guys – every installment has to brilliant in terms of quality as well as franchise maintenance, otherwise the whole house of cards might fall.

But, as hinted in the previous section, sometimes a quieter episode can build character and make the bigger ones work – honestly, one major problem with Age of Ultron for me? It felt like we were meant to invest in the Avengers as this big substantial organisation that had carved out a role and a dynamic. This would mean Ultron coming along to ruin it was a grand tragedy, striking at the heart of something precious.

Unfortunately, with only one previous Avengers film, it felt like the institution barely existed before it fell. The only chance the movieverse got to show us “a normal day” for the Avengers was the opening scene of the second film. It felt like a story where the main selling point was Smashing The Status Quo, except because we only get one film every three years, the Avengers don’t feel like the reassuring constant required for that to really kick us in the face.

Anyway, that’s just something I’ve been feeling about superheroes for a while, and with all this Ultronitude going down, seemed a good time to talk about this. I will, however, close out positive by saying this: Arrow, Flash, Daredevil, Agent Carter and, yes, even Agents of SHIELD lately, are doing good-to-great jobs of nailing all the stuff I’m talking about. If you like superheroes or serialised adventure in general but have been resisting the TV versions, I recommend giving one or two a chance. They won’t all be everyone’s cup of tea, but they’re all good serialised adventures in their own way.

BEST OF 2014 – Podcasts, Films, Music

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Right, 2014 is one week and a few Christmas crackers away from ending, so it’s time for bloggers to work out their Favourite [THING] Of [YEAR] lists. I am no exception, especially as I’ve hardly reviewed anything for ages and kinda miss it.

So, exactly as I did last year, I’ve broken my enjoyment down into a series of headings. In this first effort, we’ll tackle the podcasts, movies and music. One of those segments will be much, much longer than the other two.

Podcasts

Last year’s favourite podcasts, The Bugle and House To Astonish, both experienced erratic schedules in 2014, due to John Oliver’s new TV show and a presenter having a baby respectively. I think this proves conclusively the destructive nature of my love. (Although The Bugle produced some excellent episodes in the last few weeks, since afore-mentioned TV show went off air.)

Still – this clears the way for some newcomers on the scene. Firstly, yes everyone, I too listened to Serial, and quite enjoyed it. Sagged a bit in the middle for me, but I thought they provided a more convincing non-ending than I ever expected them to. I’ve watched true-crime-based films and documentaries before and judged Serial as another of that genre, albeit in a new medium. Seemed to stand up well.

Best newcomer for me personally, though, was Rachel And Miles X-Plain The X-Men. If a charming, funny, affectionately-poking-fun look back at the X-Men’s labyrinthine comic book history appeals to you, this podcast nails the pitch. So good, I signed up for their Patreon campaign. Their weekly YouTube reviews of current X-Men books are worth watching too.

Over in the weird-comedy section, the very, very funny ManBuyCow podcast put out the latter half of their second series at the start of 2014, hopefully 2015 will see series 3. The theme tune alone is worth listening for.Lastly, and most topically, both Tea and Jeopardy (the silly-but-fun scifi/fantasy books discussion show with Emma Newman) and Daniel Ruiz Tizon (South London’s master of melancholy) put out daily Advent Calendar shows during December, and both have been great in their own ways, exploring festivity and helping us all build towards Christmas

.I also attended the recording of the Daniel Ruiz Tizon Is Available Bumper Christmas Annual last night, wrapping up a good year for him as he took his show from podcast to Resonance FM, but kept on chronicling the small victories and defeats that band together to make up our lives. You might be able to hear me laughing in the background throughout the annual and saying something about Doctor Who towards the end. Looking forward to seeing what Daniel does in 2015.

Movies

Okay, this is going to be short, especially if we restrain it to viewed films released during 2014. It’s basically just the two Marvel movies (Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and The Lego Movie, all of which were very good, broad adventures with a unique flavour.

If I had to put them in an order, I’d say Guardians just edges out Lego for the top spot, but if you’ve any interest in those films and haven’t yet seen them, definitely rectify that. They all entertain and emote with balanced skill.

I also caught up on some late-2013 movies recently: Frozen and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, both of which were enjoyable, engrossing adventures. Catching Fire perhaps suffers a little from middle-of-trilogy-setting-up-for-last one syndrome, but they did inherit that issue from the book.

Frozen, meanwhile, aside from that very catchy song, is almost painfully likable and does interesting things with standard Disney tropes. Could’ve maybe used a few more memorable songs aside from Let It Go, but the story still held me regardless.

Music

I’ve mostly tuned out of current music, but I bought a few current releases this year – new Elbow album The Taking Off And Landing Of Everything was definitely much better than their last one, including a few songs that made me feel properly sad/uplifted as only they can.

I also listened to the new Taylor Swift album 1989, mostly to see what the fuss was about, and found it a fun hour of pop. After a few stern Twitter recommendations, I went back and tried Red, her previous one, and yes, that’s the country-catchy stuff. It stayed on rotation much longer.

New Weezer album Everything Will Be Alright In The End turned out to be an addictive collection of fun-but-not-stupid indie-rock, and no-one was more surprised than the band’s own fanbase. If you used to like Weezer and drifted away, the new one strikes a good balance between memorable choruses and genuine emotion. I especially like the songs Cleopatra and Da Vinci, but other people have different favourites, and it’s probably a good sign that there are enough high quality songs on the record for these arguments to exist.

Also played Weird Al Yankovic’s Mandatory Fun for a while to great enjoyment, although like many parody albums, it got old eventually.

Lastly, as with the movies, I also discovered some 2013 music belatedly – primarily CHVRCHES album The Bones Of What You Believe and Nocturnes by Little Boots. Both smooth, driving, haunting music and great for writing to, I’ve found. There’s a song on The Bones Of What You Believe that very much is the theme song of the fantasy novel I’ve just finished, to me. And I hardly ever have those kind of thoughts.

Right – probably two more posts to follow in this series, Books & Comics and Top Ten TV, same as last year. I’ll attempt to get both out before 2014 dies, although one of them may slip and I can only apologise if so. Gotta see the last episodes of Doctor Who, Agents of SHIELD and Homeland before I can do TV, for starters.

X-Men: Days Of Future Past – “Open Mouth. Insert Wolverine.”

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This week, I went to see X-Men: Days of Future Past, a movie attempting to properly fire the X-Engine back up for their cut of that sweet Avengers money. There are millions of characters in the X-Cupboard, after all, and they were among the first entrants in the current run of super-movies.

So, hell, do a comeback, why not. But, oddly, this isn’t a reboot or straight continuation of the excellent X-Men: First Class prequel. Instead, they’re bringing back cast and director from the first two films and mashing everything together into an epic time travel story.

Wow. That’s so comic book. I’m totally on-board. But will it be a good movie?

WARNING: Full spoilers throughout. And the ending is impressively weird, so if you’ve somehow avoided ruining it for this long, I’d keep going until you see it.

X-Men: Second Class?

Despite the returning of the Halle Berry/Patrick Stewart timeline dominating most of the promotion, this is far more a sequel to X-Men: First Class than older X-Movies in plot terms. However, thanks to the higher budget and return of Bryan Singer as director, the movie feels more like the old early-2000s efforts. It’s a strange mish-mash, and I occasionally missed the less actiony character focus of First Class, but the driving plot keeps things moving, and I was never bored. Manages a more serious tone than the Marvelvengers movies without seeming dour.

As you may gather, there are a lot of characters in this movie. So many, to be honest, a lot of them don’t get much to do. It’s particularly frustrating seeing Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart up there again, but without space to shine. Anna Paquin apparently had her entire subplot cut – I suspect the director’s cut DVD of this film will be a good one. But really the old cast are just there to jack up the stakes for the First Class section of the plot.

Still, we get Peter Dinklage as a villain – puts a lot into a small role – along with some impressive Sentinel effects. Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy have intense moments, as does Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique. Future-X-Men (the new characters, rather than the returning cast) get cool fight-power-demo opportunities too, even if they stop short of developing personalities. As everyone says, the Quicksilver bit is great.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Wolverine

And Wolverine, yes, he is there. Central to the film for cash-based reasons, yet so inessential that Magneto literally wraps him in metal and tosses him into a river with twenty minutes to go, where he stays for the whole final showdown. I can’t bring myself to get internet-furious about this, as Hugh Jackman is very charismatic and watchable in the role still, but nor can I pretend it doesn’t feel a bit perfunctory.

Still, manipulating events in service of the franchise is hardly new in these movies, and at least it doesn’t derail the story itself much.

Indeed, shoving Wolverine centre-stage just because he’s popular is precisely the sort of thing the comics have been doing for years, and you don’t see me ditching them. Between the multi-character-cramming, the plot that demands a decent understanding of past movies and the straight-faced delivery of ridiculous codenames, this is one of the most comic-booky superhero films I’ve seen in a while. It manages to feel like a single movie rather than a TV episode, but still does a lot of shifting bits around the X-Men game board. Ambitious considering we’re talking about a series which began over a decade ago.

(And again, I’m not complaining. Love me a good superhero comic.)

One More Days of Future Past?

The most superhero-comic thing in this film is the ending, though – and this is where I do real spoilers, so last chance to turn away.

Although it’s not the whole point of the movie (which is good), a major effect of this time-screwing is to somehow erase the events of X-Men: The Last Stand from history, restoring the school and several dead characters to life.

Now, that movie was awful and pointlessly destructive, I have no problem with this, but it’s always a risk making this your big ending as it skates close to being self-indulgent. Fortunately there’s enough meat to the story for this to just draw a laugh.

Also, it makes the meta-narrative of the movie great fun: director Bryan Singer reaching back in time to stop the X-Men movie he didn’t direct from happening. Bryan Singer is Wolverine. Excellent.

Best of 2013 – Movies, Music and Podcasts Edition

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As half-predicted in last week’s WriteBlog, my fiction-writing has slowed to a standstill thanks to festive distractions and an inconvenient cold. I’m just about keeping up with Hobson & Choi commitments, but aside from those, all quiet.

So, both to keep this blog ticking over and because I genuinely love reviewing stuff, I’m going to do a few posts about stories, shows and stuff I enjoyed during 2013. These are in no particular order and may involve items released pre-2013 that I’ve only just got round to dealing with, though I’ll try to keep those to a minimum.

This time out: movies, music and podcasts. Subsequent posts will cover books, comics and TV.

Movies

Django Unchained

My film viewing has been slack, so this shouldn’t be a long segment. My favourite film from 2013 was Django Unchained, released on January 10th in the UK, so it does count. The ending ran a bit long, but I enjoyed the characters and knowing meta-Western aesthetic a lot. Christoph Waltz was as amazing as everyone says, but no-one was bad in this movie. Well, except Tarantino during his cameo.

Elsewhere, I didn’t even keep up with superhero movies that well – not seen Man of Steel or The Wolverine – but Iron Man 3 was excellent, one of the best Marvel movies bar Avengers and maybe the first Iron Man. Heavy on character and light on costumed punch-ups, but I think we’re all getting a bit numb to shiny fights anyway.

Speaking of which, Thor: The Dark World was decent superhero fun-action, but we’re so saturated with these films at the moment, “decent” isn’t necessarily enough to make a huge impact. Still, it was enjoyable and didn’t let the side down.

The World’s End was a fun cap-off to the Cornetto trilogy that has been rumbling through my entire adulthood; Zero Dark Thirty has already been reviewed on this very blog, and was compelling and light on triumphalism; I finally saw The Hunger Games just as everyone else watched the sequel and it did a great job of capturing what I liked about the books and converting the unfilmable parts into film.

Also saw Looper and yes, that was a dynamic, entertaining sci-fi movie, although maybe I’ve watched too much Doctor Who to be totally blown away by time travel mindscrewery.

Music

Arcade Fire - Reflektor

This should be even shorter as I’ve dropped out of current music almost entirely – Frank Turner released Tape Deck Heart, which was listenable and stayed on rotation for a while, but the new Arcade Fire lasted even longer, especially once I cut out the draggy second and third tracks. Seriously, try it yourself if you’re struggling to get into Reflektor – cutting We Exist especially makes a difference.

The Duckworth Lewis Method debuted Sticky Wickets, their second cricket-pop album. Yes, I’m aware songs about cricket veer into novelty music territory, but since half the band is indie-pop maestro Neil Hannon (of The Divine Comedy), it was still excellent, catchy work. Recommended, especially if you’ve enjoyed Hannon’s stuff in the past.

Finally, we dive full-on into the novelty music vortex, as both of the former Amateur Transplants duo released new parody albums in the last few months. Adam Kay’s album Specimens features more inventive offensiveness, whereas Suman Biswas’s Still Alive After Amateur Transplants is catchier and longer. Both are good purchases if you enjoyed their previous work, or Weird Al-style word-swapping pun-parodies in general.

Podcasts

The Bugle

The podcast champion of this year is probably satirical-surreal mocknewscast The Bugle, even though it always is and they’re almost too obvious a choice. The schedule was patchy at times this year, probably due to John Oliver’s increasing stateside celebrity, but news stories like the US government shutdown and the UK’s huge pig semen exports meant they were always on form when they did release.

Elsewhere, I subscribed to Welcome to Nightvale like everyone else in the geekosphere, and yes, it is excellent. Creepy, funny, endearing, generally lovely. Perhaps less predictably, I also listened to the entire backlog of Me1 vs Me2 Snooker with Richard Herring. It’s an acquired taste, perhaps best kept for when you’re also doing something else, but I got strangely into it.

Daniel Ruiz Tizon, South London’s master of darkly comic melancholy, seems to have put his Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available podcast on hiatus for now. However, he did also write and star in The Letter for Resonance FM, a tragicomic series of monologues that distilled the best of his recent work into a single run. If you’ve never tried his stuff before, this is definitely the one to go for, and if the end of his regular show means more work like The Letter, I will have to grin and bear it.

House To Astonish

Finally, I listen to a few podcasts about comics, the best of which continues to be House to Astonish, dissecting recent comic book news and releases with exactly the right levels of fannish enthusiasm, cynicism and good humour. I also picked up Silence! this year, which also has good thoughts, analysis and chat. And yes, despite reading largely American comics, I only seem to like comics podcasts hosted by British folks.

Not entirely a podcast, but the makers of Alternate Cover also released a sci-fi sitcom called A Brief History of Time Travel this year, which is worth a look if you enjoy the Hitchhiker’s Guide/Red Dwarf Brit sci-fi comedy genre.

And that is it for now. Hopefully there’s stuff in there you haven’t already seen and might consider giving a shot. If I’ve missed anything of note, let me know in the comments below – especially in the podcast category, always looking for more good listening. I shall return in the near future to cover another category or two – probably Books & Comics unless plans change.

The Hunger Games Book To Movie – Adaptation Injuries

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The Hunger Games - Filmy Edition

I saw the film adaptation of The Hunger Games over the weekend, having read the book six months ago. A very topical choice, as the publicity is just revving up for the November release of the second movie.

So, how was the adaptation? What interesting choices did they make? Did I enjoy it? All that and more!

(Note on spoilers: there will be some.)

Tracker Jacker, Tracker Jacker, They Will Sting You In The Face…

The original Hunger Games novel was largely written in first person, and it works nicely for the main action: it’s a load of survival violence in a wooded area, and the desperation and ingenuity of Katniss is well-portrayed by her breathless internal monologue.

Obviously, that’s tricky with a film, but to their credit, they make a real effort to recapture it here. The wordless storytelling on display during the Games sequence is impressive, even if it does mean large chunks of this film you can’t easily watch whilst checking Twitter.

And the rest of the time, they cut to the news coverage or control room to give us exposition – about what the hell a Tracker Jacker is, for example. ( I assume not just me who started singing Tracker Jacker to the tune of Swagger Jagger there?) But they never stick with the outside characters long enough to take the focus off Katniss.

Fight Fight Fight Win Win Win

Yes, a few bits are cut: for example, not many of the Games players, beyond heroes Katniss and Peeta, get much development, but there’s only so much a filmmaker can do. Ultimately, like many reasonably faithful book adaptations, they’ve kept to the spirit of it, but if you want more detail, you can always read the book.

One omission that did slightly disappoint me: the violence. The Hunger Games in novel form was surprisingly visceral and unpleasant for a teen-targeted book, but the screen version sticks to very clean, off-screen or weirdly bloodless death. A few shots of flesh wounds and that’s about it.

This may make me sound like a monster hungry for blood, but I felt one thing the book did well was showing us horrific real life violence rather than a clean video game, and the film comes close to going back the other way. Still, the reactions of the actors (especially the excellent Jennifer Lawrence) do a lot to sell the horror.

Obviously, the filmmakers wanted their 12 certificate – although I gather a 15-cert “uncut” edition is available and the differences are tiny. Nonetheless, aside from that one issue of commercial reality, they realise the world nicely – I hate Gale, but I hated him in the books too. Good film, looking forward to the sequel.

Zero Dark Thirty – Some Dark Thoughtys

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Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty - GOOD AT ACTING

I don’t often review films –not really my medium, and my opinions are usually in line with the consensus anyway. For example, I saw Django Unchained, thought it was fun and surprisingly emotional for Tarantino, much like everyone else.

But I recently experienced Zero Dark Thirty, and honestly, the reviews I’ve read didn’t entirely capture my opinion of it. So here I am, throwing my slightly contrary hat into the ring. Disagreements welcome.

Torture & Jessica Chastain’s Acting – Are Both Good?

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t going to be a brutal flaying of the movie, I thought the first 50-60% were great. Despite the inevitability of the end, I enjoyed the search, the highs and lows, Jessica Chastain was as brilliant as everyone says in the lead role of Maya, and she’d totally deserve that Oscar.

I liked how we slowly warmed up to the character despite both her prickly nature and the few off-duty scenes. And as many have said before, there are some genuine ethical questions raised. We spend time with the CIA agents, seeing torture in action to gain crucial intel, and then Obama appears and starts declaring it shall never happen again. You can feel their dilemma, and feel guilty for sharing it at the same time – it’s intriguing work.

Oh, and the scenes on the ground in Pakistan, as Maya and her colleagues hunt down Bin Laden’s hideout, are stunning work considering they’re basically just some people driving around. It’s like a car chase, only realistic. As an investigation process movie, this part was brilliant.

Kneel Before The Almighty BUT

And now, the BUT.  The last hour or so of Zero Dark Thirty didn’t really work for me. The Maya character, who I was starting to really like, gets marginalised and most of the action shifts from espionage drama to bureaucracy, which means loads of men yelling at each other.

Yes, one of them was Captain Jack from Torchwood, but even that only made me giggle for a few seconds. The first chunk of the movie was exciting enough for me to forgive already knowing the ending, the second… less so. I basically sat there waiting for them to take that damn house.

When the raid finally happened, it was an exciting sequence, but by then I was already a little bored. I’ve heard anecdotal points about the film being on the verge of shooting when Bin Laden was killed, leading to extreme rewrites, and that could be one reason why the ending seemed odd.

Anyway. Lovely storytelling, good acting, still glad I saw it, but shame I emerged disillusioned with the climax. Have you seen Zero Dark Thirty? Do you agree with me, or am I talking gibber?