Gideon58's Reviews

Hercules

Disney put their own animated stamp on the Hercules legend in this splashy and entertaining musical diversion that turns classic mythological characters on their ear and surrounds them with some terrific comic relief and some audio and visual trappings we don't see coming.

In the tradition of Clark Kent and Peter Parker, Hercules (voiced by Josh Keaton and Tate Donovan) is considered a freak and is distressed when he learns from his parents (voiced by Hal Holbrook and Barbara Barrie) that they found him with a medal around his neck that implies he is not human, but a God, which sets our hero on a journey to claim his destiny and purpose in life, finding friendship and romance in the process.

Ron Clements and John Musker, the creative forces behind Aladdin struck gold again by taking classic literary characters and painting them with a fresh and not so serious coat of Disney gloss...you're know you're in for something very special as the film opens with a pompous narration by Charlton Heston, which gets interrupted by a group of brassy muses (voiced by Lillias White, Vanessa Thomas, Cheryl Freeman, LaChanze, and Roz Ryan) who take over the narration and put it to music that puts Motown to shame.

The actual story is nothing new, but the execution here is fresh and a lot of fun. I love after Hercules finishes his training with Phil (voiced by Danny DeVito) and travels to Thebes where he not only becomes a hero but a merchandising dream and pop idol. They show his name being put on everything in the city, women trying to tear his clothes off, and most importantly, Hercules being confused by it all. We also are treated to an unconventional leading lady in Meg (brilliantly voiced by Susan Egan); this is no vestal virgin, this girl has been around the block a couple of times and when we meet her she is already the property of our villain, Hades (voiced by James Woods).

The voice cast is impressive...Loved James Woods as Hades, DeVito as Phil, Rip Torn as Zeus, and Matt Frewer and Bobcat Goldthwait as a pair of villainous stooges named Pain and Panic. Another fun musical fantasy from the geniuses at Disney.

DONNIE BRASCO

Director Mike Newell and his two stars deserve the lion's share of credit for 1997's Donnie Brasco, an atmospheric and moody docudrama that is an on-target look at small-time mob sensibility, bathed in rich period detail without making the lifestyle look as glamorous as it has been portrayed in other films and how so many innocent outsiders are affected by it.

This is the true story of a New York police officer named Joe Pistone (Johnny Depp) who was sent undercover to infiltrate the mob for three months as Donnie Brasco, but as our story begins, he has been in for over two years now and is in perhaps too deep to get out. The central story here concerns the relationship between Joe/Donnie and a veteran wiseguy named Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero (Al Pacino) and how Donnie allows this relationship to become the most important thing in his life without even realizing it's happening, keeping his superiors at arms' length and destroying his real life with wife, Maggie (Anne Heche) and his three daughters.

Newell has taken facts and molded them into riveting and believable screen entertainment that keeps the viewer on the edge of his seat, due to the complexity of Donnie's life and how much longer he can continue to do this. Donnie's feelings about the whole situation seem to be conflicted to him as they do to us...we observe him in his bare apartment marking the days off the calendar and yet when he does get the opportunity to sneak home to his family, he doesn't offer even a hint about when he might be coming home for good, though when he is home, he still tries to assert himself as man of the house and Maggie is unsure if he hasn't lost that privilege and it's hard not to agree with her...there is a wonderful sequence where he has come home for Christmas and we see him doing ordinary household chores that most people would find mundane, but he is totally relishing this time with his normal life.

On the other side of this story we have Lefty, a wiseguy whose best years are behind him trying to keep his head above water as part of this life because he really doesn't know any other kind of life. It's hard not to like Lefty because of his relationship with Donnie...we almost feel bad for him because in two years Donnie has built complete trust with this guy, which either makes Donnie the smartest cop on the planet or Lefty a complete idiot because in two years, Donnie has to have slipped up somewhere...I can't believe he tells Lefty that he was an orphan and that he has absolutely no family anywhere and Lefty just accepts that.

Newell manages to recreate 1970's New York with frightening accuracy and does a nice job of offering explanations for various forms of "mobspeak" that we've all heard for years but never really knew what they meant specifically. We learn what the difference between "connected" and "made" means and the difference between being a "friend of mine" and a "friend of ours" means. There is also one terrific scene where Donnie explains the multiple meanings of the most famous mob phrase ever..."forgeddaboutit."

But above everything we have two powerhosue performances from Pacino, giving us Michael Corleone 30 years later, trying to hold onto his legacy and Depp, a man trying to do his job and hold onto his sanity and always teetering on the edge but always thinking. Michael Madsen, Bruno Kirby, James Russo, Zeljko Ivanek, Gerry Becker, and Brian Tarantino offer solid support, but it is the work of Pacino, Depp, and Newell that make this one work...completely riveting entertainment that was the fastest two and a half hours I have had at the movies.

AT LONG LAST LOVE

Despite some superb production values, Peter Bogdanovich's 1975 musical At Long Last Love is an epic fail due primarily to the director's misunderstanding of the genre and his assumption that we would be as enamored of his leading lady as he was at the time.

This movie has been maligned as one of the worst musicals ever made and I haven't watched it in decades but felt a re-watch was in order before I wrote about it in order to be fair. I'm glad I did because, believe it or not, there are worse musicals out there, but unfortunately, this one is still pretty bad. This film is supposed to be the director's homage to the musicals of the 1930's, but at times, the screenplay and the director's staging of the story seems to vacillate between homage and lampoon and I'm not sure which Bogdanovich was trying to do here and I have a feeling that his cast was equally confused. The few entertaining moments that this film provides are unintentional.

The film's plot, such as it is, is centered on a romantic quadrangle: The players are Michael Pritchard III (Burt Reynolds) a rich playboy, Brooke Carter (Cybill Shepherd), a socialite trying to hide the fact that she's penniless, Johnny Spanish (Duilio Del Prete), an Italian gambler. and Kitty O'Kelly (Madeline Kahn), a Broadway musical comedy actress. The story finds this quartet of characters switching back and forth utilizing the iconic music of Cole Porter as a backdrop and herein lies one of the first problems with the film...Cole Porter wrote some amazing songs and they don' t need a lot of "help"...Bogdanovich seems to be working overtime to bring something new to these classic tunes and these are songs that don't really need to have anything new brought to them and even if they did, the cast he chose was not up for the job. Not to mention the endless reprises of each song. For some reason, the director decided it was necessary to give every major character a verse or two to sing of every single song, making some of these musical interludes interminable, made only worse by the lack of singing skill displayed.

We also have another problem that has plagued a lot of Hollywood musicals, especially ones of more recent years...we have a musical here that stars actors with little or no musical comedy experience. Only two cast members of this film (Madeline Kahn and Eileen Brennan) have any kind of musical comedy experience and since they are not the lead characters, some of the musical numbers are just painful to watch. Every time Reynolds and Shepherd open their mouths to sing is painful...Reynolds has never appeared so uncomfortable onscreen and Shepherd, who it is clear Bogdanovich was in love with at the time, was not worthy of all the screen time she gets here. And Duilio Del Prete is one of the most annoying actors I have ever seen in a movie, over acting and over singing all over the place...it is no coincidence that I never saw him in another movie. The two actors displayed a small semblance of chemistry, but their lack of musical skill put a kibosh on it. Kahn manages to rise above the mediocrity of the material provided as do Brennan and John Hillerman who play Brooke's maid and Michael's butler.

Bogdanovich has provided us with a musical that moves at a snail's pace...this movie was about two hours long, but it felt like six. The staging and choreography for the musical numbers was dull and unimaginative...the most complex dance step utilized in the film was a triple time step. On the positive side, the film is absolutely gorgeous to look at, with Oscar worthy sets and costumes, but it's just not enough to make this snore-inducing musical worth sitting through. Bogdanovich proved to be a director of some skill with The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, but this film is a strong indicator as to why his career went south. What a waste of talent, in front of and behind the camera.

THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS
Elizabeth Taylor at her most alluring is the main attraction of a 1954 melodrama called The Last Time I Saw Paris, a lushly mounted romantic tale that ranks with the best work of Douglas Sirk.

The film stars Van Johnson as Charlie Wills, a soldier who returns home from the war to Paris and begins a whirlwind romance with Helen Ellswirth (Taylor), a carefree party girl who kisses Johnson on the street during the coming home celebration. He gets a job writing for The Stars & Stripes and Helen continues to believe that life is one big party. Charlie and Helen marry and have a child, much to the consternation of Helen's sister, Marian (Donna Reed), who also has feelings for Charlie. But Charlie's inability to get his own novel published, which starts him drinking, coupled with Helen's boredom with their marriage leads to constant conflict and eventual tragedy.

Screenwriter Julies J. Epstein has constructed one of those old fashioned romances that appears to be sincere on the surface, but there are little hints along the way that this relationship is doomed. It is unclear from the beginning whether or not Helen is actually in love with Charlie or if she just pursues him to stick it to her sister, but a love does eventually blossom here, but it is aggravating watching Helen punish Charlie for the kind of behavior that was the norm for her. What we have here is a love affair that takes too long to find its footing for this couple to actually survive.

This film is slick and glossy and director Richard Brooks pulls a luminous performance from Elizabeth Taylor that lights up the screen. Brooks would later direct Taylor in her Oscar nominated performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Van Johnson is a solid leading man for Taylor, one of the few actors to do more than one film with Taylor. Clearly, the chemistry they demonstrated four years prior in The Big Hangover was no fluke. I loved these two together and was behind them as a couple from the start. Walter Pidgeon offers one of his most charming performances as Helen and Marian's father. Donna Reed works hard at keeping Marian likable but fights the screenplay. The film also features some exquisite on location photography in Paris and a memorable title song, but this is really Elizabeth Taylor's show...she knows it and owns this film.

GRINDHOUSE

B movie fans or anyone who ever got in a car and went to a double feature at the drive-in is going to have a ball with Grindhouse, an affectionate and scathingly accurate homage to B exploitation movies of the 60's and 70's that not only perfectly recreates the genre for modern audiences, but educates the genre newcomer to what they are watching and from which the inspiration came. Sadly, I don't think this film did too well at the box office because the all-important 18-34 demographic at which movies are aimed these days didn't have a clue regarding what Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino were trying to do here.

For the uninitiated, a grindhouse is a former movie palace that used to show classic films but has been closed for many years and has now reopened and is a place where B movies, usually double features, were shown. And for the really young members out there, a B movie is an independent feature made on the cheap that most major studios turned and most A list actors were not interested in appearing in, mainly because the people behind B movies couldn't afford to hire A list actors, so these movies were usually populated with bad actors sprouting a lot of a silly dialogue and working very hard at keeping a straight face while they're doing it.

Grindhouse is a dead on recreation of the B movie double feature experience...it starts off with a trailer for a movie that hasn't been released yet called Machete which features actor Danny Trejo and then we are treated to the first feature. a zombie thriller called Planet Terror which owes its origins to films like Night of the Living Dead and From Dusk Til Dawn. The director of From Dusk Til Dawn, Robert Rodriguez took the helm for this bloody action thriller which finds the hero (Freddy Rodriguez) and his girl (Rose McGowan) at the center of a zombie invasion and of course, the local sheriff (Michael Biehn) thinks they're crazy. This film is filled with hysterically funny dialogue, stomach-churning violence and features a cameo appearance by Tarantino.

After a commercial for a restaurant next to the theater and a couple of more trailers, including one for a movie where Nicolas Cage plays Fu Manchu, we are then treated to Tarantino's film, a raucous road picture called Death Proof which centers on a demented former stuntman (Kurt Russell) who decides to murder two different sets of women he encounters but finds a little more than he bargained for in the second group. Russell overacts all over the place and it is perfect for what Tarantino is trying to do here. What I love about these movies is that like the films they pay homage to, they don't employ a lot of A list stars, Tarantino and Rodriguez utilize a lot of actors who have been away from the screen for awhile and it adds a certain authenticity to what they trying to do, not to mention the look of the film...the film has that grainy look from the 70's with all the scratchy lines that we've all seen but pretend that it doesn't annoy us.

The films not only reference its inspirations like Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, but the directors' work as well...there is even a mention of Big Kahuna Burger from Pulp Fiction. I'm not going to lie, this is a film experience with limited appeal, but those out there who are old enough to understand what Rodriguez and Tarantino are doing here, this hits a bullseye.

SHREK 2

Disney knocked it out of the park with Shrek 2, the sparkling and imaginative 2004 sequel to their surprise hit from 2000 about the romance between an ogre and a princess that meets and surpasses all my requirements of a good sequel (see my review of The Dark Knight Rises) and provides a lavish animated adventure rich with modern pop culture references seamlessly blended into classic fairy tale sensibilities and the introduction of some new characters who almost steal the show and from the talent already assembled, that is quite the feat. And yes, I'll say it...this is that rarest of rare animals...a sequel that is better than the original.

As Shrek (voiced by Mike Meyers) and Fiona (voiced by Cameron Diaz) return from their honeymoon, we learn that the real Prince Charming (wonderfully voiced by Rupert Everett) who was the one who was really supposed to awaken Fiona with his kiss is too late and looks to his fairy godmother (voiced brilliantly by Jennifer Saunders) for help in getting him his true love back. Meanwhile, Mr. & Mrs. Shrek receive a dinner invitation from Fiona's parents, the King and Queen of Far Far Away, inviting them to dinner and a ball they are throwing to celebrate their wedding. Accompanied by Donkey (voiced by Eddie Murphy), who's "on a break" with his dragon girlfriend, Shrek and Fiona arrive and are met with instant hostility from the king (flawlessly voiced by John Cleese) who is revealed to have a secret agenda with the Fairy Grandmother that the Queen (voiced by Julie Andrews) knows nothing about and Shrek actually gets a shot at living as a human with the love of his life.

This sequel is nothing short of brilliant, thanks to a solid gold screenplay that seamlessly blends contemporary pop culture references into a fairy tale setting and making them seem perfectly natural. And while providing endless entertainment, the story also quietly provides some important messages regarding friendship, good vs evil, and most importantly, how what you are on the inside is a lot more important than what you look like on the outside. It's a bittersweet part of the story when Shrek gets his first taste of being human because you feel happy for him until it seems like he thinks this is the only way he can hold onto Fiona. The story also introduces two fabulous new characters...the Fairy Godmother, a villain in the tradition of Margaret Hamilton, is presented as a female Donald Trump with a wand who seems to secretly control Far, Far Away and Puss N Boots (beautifully voiced by Antonio Banderas) who the king hires to take Shrek out but he ends up bonding with Shrek instead. I love Puss' secret weapon of "kitten eyes" that he uses to distract his enemies.

Jennifer Saunders just about walks away with this film with her brilliant voicing of the Fairy Godmother...her rendition of "I Need a Hero" is a showstopper. Banderas also steals every scene Puss is in and Puss' duet with Donkey, following the "Ghostbusters"-inspired finale, is a whole lot of fun. This film is pure entertainment from opening to closing credits filled with warmth and laughter and not just for kids.

I wouldn't give it a perfect rating, but it did make my top 25 Animated list

The problem for me with the Shrek movies is that I enjoy them while I'm watching them, but I remember very little about them after the movies are over. I've seen the first two Shrek movies multiple times, but I only remember the characters. I don't remember anything about the stories. I don't even remember whether or not I've seen the third movie.

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If I answer a game thread correctly, just skip my turn and continue with the game.
OPEN FLOOR.

The Contender

Don't let the title of the film fool you...the 2000 film The Contender has nothing to do with boxing and is not a sequel to On the Waterfront...this is an intense, timely, and quietly powerful look at the Washington DC political machine and the often unscrupulous practices that keep it operating as well as an unapologetic look at the differences between serving the president and preserving the sanctity of the office, which often causes party lines to blur beyond recognition.

President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) has to replace his intended appointment to replace the deceased vice president when Governor Hathaway (William Petersen) becomes involved in a Ted Kennedy-type scandal that the President's handlers deem inappropriate for the office. The President then decides to go with Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen), who appears appropriate even though some believe she is only being nominated because she is a woman, but Laine's vice presidential dream starts to derail when an alleged sex scandal in her past surfaces right before the confirmation hearing for her nomination, headed by a republican senator named Shelley Runyon (Gary Oldman) who was a staunch supporter of Governor Hathaway and has personal issues with Senator Hanson that have him doing whatever he can to stop her nomination.

If you were around during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, then there are themes here that should ring familiar, but there are differences here. Instead of responding to the allegations against her, Senator Hanson chooses not to address the issues at all and that's where the crux of this drama lies...why would a woman, a hair's breath from the presidency, refuse to defend herself in order to ensure her becoming the vice president of the United States?

Director and writer Lurie really hits a bullseye here, especially in his creation of the story's central character, Laine Hanson...this woman is a class act, intelligent, sophisticated, the personification of cool. There is only one moment in the story where we come close to seeing the Senator loose her composure and it has nothing to do with the sex scandal, it is when she is being questioned regarding her views on abortion, but she even manages to catch herself before saying something she might regret. This character is grace under pressure and when she explains why she refuses to address issues of her sexual past, we realize she is absolutely right. I also love when Hanson reveals that she has more power as a US senator than she ever would as vice president.

What also makes this film fascinating is watching where the various players surrounding Hanson in this story fall...the President questions her once and lets it go, yet his aide (Sam Elliott), loyal to the president to a fault, is OK with Laine's nomination until this scandal leaks and does a complete 180. We even have a principaled junior congressman (Christian Slater) who, despite being a democrat, has never been a fan of Hanson's and bullies his way onto the nominating committee in order to stop her being nominated. But it is the ugly battle of wills between Hanson and Shelley Runyon that is the heartbeat of this emotionally charged political drama.

The performances that Lurie has gotten from his cast are nothing short of superb...both Joan Allen and Jeff Bridges received Oscar nominations for their work as Laine Hanson and President Evans. I love the folksy quality that Bridges brings to the President, who is obsessed with trying to order something from the White House kitchen and being told that they don't have it. Sam Elliott gives the performance of his career here as the presidential aide torn between his president and what is best for the office and I'm at a loss for words regarding the work of Gary Oldman here...Oldman is one of Hollywood's greatest chameleons, able to completely transform himself to something unrecognizable for every role and plays psycho better than just about anyone, but this character is no psycho, he is just evil, dripping with venom and Oldman nails it. This story takes a minute to get going but once it does, it rivets to a conclusion that holds a few unexpected twists that will prompt applause.

CHEF

Jon Favreau continues his quest to become the next Woody Allen as the writer, director, and star of 2014's Chef, an entertaining diversion that despite some questionable plotting and a contrived and convenient ending, is a pretty smooth cinematic ride.

Favreau plays Carl Casper, a gourmet chef and divorced dad who has a very public confrontation with with a food critic (Oliver Platt) that results in him losing his job. While traveling with his wealthy ex-wife (Sofia Vergara) and his son, Percy (Emjay Anthony) to Florida, he receives a beat up food truck from his ex's ex (Robert Downey Jr.) and begins a brand new business, with his son at his side.

Favreau is already a proven commodity behind the camera as director of the Iron Man films and has proven he knows what to do in the director's chair, but his writing is still a little suspect...there are several plot points that I had a hard time digesting...I had trouble getting behind Carl's co-worker in Manhattan (John Leguizamo) quitting his job and going to Florida to help Carl, with no promise of a job or salary. I thought it was a little strange that the ex-wife just let Carl take Percy for the entire summer to work on the food truck and I was really troubled by the EXTREMELY happy ending where everything that happened to our hero was cleared up. The writer and director made sure the star came out smelling like a rose.

I also am seeing another similarity between Favreau and the Woodmeister and that is his somewhat exaggerated sense of his attractiveness to the opposite sex. I had a hard time accepting Scarlett Johannsen playing his current girlfriend and Sofia Vergara as his ex-wife. This character was all about his work and I just didn't buy that this guy could land women who looked this.

The film features some attractive photography and the cast, for the most part is solid...Emjay Anthony was a revelation as Percy and the cameos by Robert Downey Jr. and Dustin Hoffman served the story properly. Leguizamo was fun but Johanssen's role was thankless. Overall, we had a very entertaining comedy that could have used a little shot of realism and a little less Favreau vanity floating over the proceedings.

I'm doing a review of this soon. Think I liked it a bit more than you did, but yeah, nice review.

Thank you.

Very true! That was my thought too! I reviewed this film too and I gave it the same rating. I liked watching it and it's a nice watch.

THE BOSS

Melissa McCarthy and writer/director Ben Falcone, who were behind the disastrous 2014 comedy Tammy had much better luck with the 2014 comedy The Boss that brought the laughs, despite a predictable screenplay and a rather bland supporting cast. Falcone puts the weight of the comedy on McCarthy this time and she is up for the job, providing her strongest outing since Spy.

McCarthy plays Michelle Darnell, a female Donald Trump who goes to jail for insider trading and upon release, shows up on the doorstep of her former personal assistant (Kristen Bell) and finds a way to scratch her way back to the top by going into business with her former employee selling her homemade brownies.

Falcone is aware of the comic gold that he is allowed to showcase and this time, he stays out of her way and lets the actress command the movie screen the way she has proven capable. He has fashioned a character for McCarthy that is perfect for her, a take-charge, kick-ass woman who eats business competitors for lunch, which was a welcome change of pace from the doormat he made her play in Tammy...McCarthy is no doormat and she proves it here in a comic tour-de-force that makes this rather ordinary comedy worth a look.

Unfortunately, Kristen Bell doesn't possess an iota of anything resembling comic timing which made for some rough going at time and Ella Anderson was nothing to write home about as her daughter nor was Tyler Labine as Bell's love interest. Only Peter Dinklage, playing McCarthy's scorned ex-lover manages to match McCarthy in the area of comic timing, making the most of an underwritten role, but it's McCarthy's movie and everyone seems to have been made aware of that and everyone just kind of stays out of her ways and lets her bring the funny, which she does in spades.

THINK LIKE A MAN TOO
Under the category of unnecessary sequels, feel free to file Think Like a Man Too, the 2014 sequel to the overblown 2012 comedy about how the relationship of four different couples is manipulated by a book written by Steve Harvey. Things were resolved satisfactorily at the conclusion of the first film (which took forever to get to) and couldn't imagine what a sequel could be about and, as suspected, an uninspired story borrowing liberally from a half a dozen other better movies was the result.

The film is centered on the wonderfully original idea of one of the couples, Michael (Terrence Jenkins) has decided to marry Candace (Regina Hall), despite the interference from his smothering mother (Jenifer Lewis) and it is decided that everyone's flying to Vegas for the event...a wedding party in Vegas...we've never seen this before.

Dominic (Michael Ealy) and Lauren (Taraji P. Hensen) are still being kept apart because of their careers; Kristen (Gabrielle Union) is pressuring Jeremy (Jerry Ferrera) into having a baby while still keeping his balls in a mason jar; Zeke (Romany Malco) can't escape his past rep as a player, even in Vegas, and Mya (Megan Good) can't take it much longer; Cedric (Kevin Hart) is trying to be best man for the big event and stay out of the line of fire of girlfriend Gail (Wendy Williams).

This big contemporary comic soap opera wasn't that interesting in the first film and moving the crew to Las Vegas really doesn't add to their appeal. Not to mention that everything that happens to these people while in Vegas has been seen in just about every movie that takes place in Vegas made during the last 20 years. In terms of story, it's all "been there done that", which is a real problem for a sequel. I barely cared about these people at the end of the first movie, a sequel was going to need a serious hook to sustain my interest and this one didn't have it.

The cast still looks good, but they all just seem to be phoning it in here...Jenifer Lewis, one of my least favorite actresses, made me want to reach through the screen and strangle her and even Kevin Hart, who can usually be relied on to bring the funny, comes off as forced and annoying. A whole lot of money and a whole lot of talent just gong to waste next to slot machines, swimming pools, and inside strip bars.

THE AVENGERS

Just put your brain in check, hold onto something and enjoy 2012's The Avengers, an expensive and eye-popping technical achievement that brings all of your favorite comic book movie heroes together and gives them a classic villain to contain while never letting us forget that most of them are human beings and flawed ones at that.

The story is so not the thing here, but if that sort of thing is important to you, it seems that Loki (Tom Hiddleston), brother of Thor (Chris Hemsworth), has some unresolved family issues that he has decided to take out on earth by completely enslaving it with the aid of a deadly steel-coated army. Loki is too much for his brother to handle on his own and we then see the genesis of an organization hinted at in Iron Man 2 where Thor gets an assist from Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), The Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner)in bringing his brother down.

Needless to say, this film is a technical triumph for director and co-screenwriter Joss Whedon, but what I loved most about this movie is the very human faces the screenplay puts on these superheroes....we are never allowed to forget that, except for Thor, these are all human beings who bleed and feel pain and most importantly, are not always comfortable with being a superhero. I love that when speaking to each other, they always use their real names. We see this immediately with David Banner, who seems to be in denial about the Hulk. I love when he learns he has to go to New York and he sheepishly admits that the last time he was there he "broke Harlem." Ironically, the moment when Banner does finally morph into the Hulk (and Whedon makes us wait for it) is when this film really kicks into high gear.

Also loved the immediate antagonism between Iron Man and Captain America. I expected them to pull out rulers and start measuring...the snappy exchanges between these two provided some of the film's funniest moments. At moments, it seemed like this antagonism was going to be instrumental in the Avengers' downfall, but of course, the exact opposite effect is accomplished.

This film is a lot of fun, but it definitely has its share of "Aw, come on" moments...all of these characters spend a lot of time defying gravity, falling for miles and miles and somehow conveniently escaping even a scratch or a dent in their uniforms, though I have to admit the scene where Tony Stark is saved by Jarvis and his suit was awesome. Not exactly steeped in realism, but this is a comic book movie where anything can happen. Nods to the film editing and sound departments, but this film is mostly a triumph for Joss Whedon, who has given us an out of this world adventure populated by ordinary people in extraordinary situations and the possibility for endless sequels.

The Avengers is one of my favorite superhero movies. I think they finally got The Hulk right with Mark Ruffalo. I hope he gets his own Hulk movie.

Mark Ruffalo was great...Mark Ruffalo is always great...he's getting to be one of those actors who I will see anything he does just because he's in it.

SCOOP

Even Woody Allen has a misfire once in awhile and he had a major misstep with 2006's Scoop, an interesting concept for a movie that gets lost amidst an overly padded screenplay and the director's thinking from below the waist that I'm pretty sure precipitated the casting of the leading female character.

Set in contemporary London, this is the story of a deceased British journalist (Ian McShane) who appears to a journalism student vacationing in London named Sondra (Scarlett Johansson) and strongly suggests that a wealthy English playboy named Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman) is the Tarot Card Killer because he met Peter's secretary upon arrival in Purgatory who suspects her boss murdered her. This tip motivates Sondra and a second rate American magician (Woody Allen) to investigate Lyman so that Sondra can get the scoop of the century, but as expected, Sondra begins to fall in love with Lyman, despite evidence piling up toward his guilt.

The basic idea of this movie is pretty good, but there are a lot of problems here and the primary one is the casting of Scarlett Johansson as Sondra. The Woodmeister clearly has a thing for the actress, having used her to excellent advantage the year before in Match Pont, but that was a drama. Johansson can be a strong actress in the right dramatic role but the woman is not funny and her performance here doesn't work at all and it's not entirely her fault. Woody's screenplay is confusing as to exactly who Sondra is and her degree of intelligence seems to change from one scene to the next. The film is pretty much centered around the character of Sondra, but Johansson just seems out of place here. Woody has even chosen to de-glam the actress for this role...minimal hair and makeup and glasses that do nothing to help her appeal. I guess this was supposed to show us that Johansson doesn't need to reply on her looks, but for this performance it might have helped.

I was also troubled by Woody Allen's performance. I haven't said this in awhile regarding Woody's work onscreen, but I have never found him as tedious and annoying as I did here...his constant stuttering over his lines like he didn't quite have them memorized was maddening. How can the writer not know his own lines? If the truth be known, I think this whole story could have worked without Woody's character at all...it would have been a lot more fun watching Sondra working with a ghost than with this guy, who for most of the running time, really wasn't a lot of help.

Woody gets an "A" for effort here, but he really needs to put a little more thought into his casting process than how it might get him laid. This was so unlike Woody, who normally serves his story first, but he was definitely trying to get something else serviced here.

I agree. I haven't seen a lot of Mark Ruffalo's movies, but I can't think of any of his movies that I haven't liked. I'll pretty much watch anything that he's in now, just because he's in it.