Reviews

But the best version of a Quentin Tarantino film is, even while its worst version is borderline schlock.

I saw The Avengers at the tail end of one of the Marvel Movie Marathons across the country, an exhaustilirating (a word I just made up) event which saw each post-credits tease followed by new opening credits, each film easter-egged on in an inexorable march towards midnight.

Regardless of what happened on the field, the ideas depicted in this film have won out so overwhelmingly that Beane and his ilk have had to move on to new methods of evaluating talent because the ones depicted here have already become the new conventional wisdom.

This is a character-centric story where the animals have more humanity than most other films' humans.

The public skits, however, are usually the cleverest segments in the film; a staged little person bar fight stands head and shoulders above the rest and brings "The Twilight Zone" to mind.

Here they have, for the second time, adapted their film from another film: 1969's John Wayne vehicle of the same name.

Without the aid of Dumbledore neither Harry nor his friends have any idea, and they meander about the wilderness for roughly half the film.

This conceit allows the film to fly from one event to another at breakneck speed without losing control, as each character can essentially narrate their own version of events.

The film's chief comic failing is Gru's "minions," thousands of tiny yellow things of varying shapes and sizes that speak only in high-pitched gibberish and are constantly hitting each other.

No self-respecting film about the nature of reality would be complete without a few red herrings, and no serious film about the nature of ideas would limit us to one definitive interpretation.