Throwing It Down

I know this isn't primarily (or even regularly) a review blog and I just did a review last week. Two, even. So this week should be back to regular shenanigans where I talk about... uh... hm, it just now hit me that I'm like a decade in to this thing and I still haven't settled on a theme.

When the structure of how movies are released changed over the last 10-15 years or so, my nice, safe Thursday night blog routine started being occasionally threatened by some goddamned blockbuster something or other that demanded my attention. At some point somebody gave up on the radical cachet of the midnight Thursday-into-Friday earliest-possible screenings for movie obsessives and try-hards and just decided--out of nowhere!--that just showing the movie in the evening at a regular post-dinner hour on Thursday was now OK. I mean, it's an extra screening or two to add to the weekend box office numbers, so it's not like I don't get how math works,* the motivations are clear. But nobody asked me if it was OK to draw me out on a Thursday night, away from you, my beloved blog-reading public. And for that I shall never stop being sorry. Or resentful. I am a middle-aged white person after all. Every apology comes with a little side order of entitlement bruising.

As you can probably guess, I went with the teenaged boys to see Avengers 3: Age of Ultron II: The Infinite Warz (Part One) or whatever the fuck it's actually called.

See, I sound slightly disinterested and resentful, but was I actually? Was I fuck. I'm a big fan of hype and few films have come with quite so much of it. It wasn't quite a Star War, but it was nearly as hard to ignore.

A combination of a) the immense and immeasurable standard set by last week's intense and very professional review and b) the fact that this dang movie kept me up late, I won't do a blow-by-blow thoughtful or nuanced review. And this being the internet, that means the answer is: listicle!

Or actually nowadays it usually means some shitty embedded video clip surrounded and interrupted by shittier ads. And I guess listicle implies some kind of numbering schema, which I frankly can't be arsed to conjur. So instead, you get bullet points.

Some impressions or things that generally happened in this movie, described in such a way as to avoid spoilers (really):

-Dang, this Marvel thing really has been going on for like a quarter of my life now.

-It's lazy and dumb to compare these movies to the DC properties' movies. But these are way better.

-Ten years of buildup means the action beats have a ton of opportunity to be earned, evocative, deep, weighty, character-relevant and resonant. They do that.

-The Russo Brothers' primary talent seems to be understanding the potential of a thing and then not fucking squandering it. Go back and watch Captain America: Winter Soldier again if you want an idea of what I mean. They do it here too.

-Motion capture has come so, so far. A good third of the characters are mocap in some way (either in action sequences or entirely), including big bad Thanos and all his henchmen. The novelty factor has worn off by a) time and b) quality.

-This movie is loaded. There are a zillion characters to service and it endeavors to service them all, in some small way or another. That means the pace is a bit breathless, but it never feels frenetic or panicked. Huge credit to the screenwriters and the editors.

-Chris Hemsworth? I fucking would. Even with one eye.

I feel like that's all I can safely say. Overall, a solid thumbs up. I'm not saying up where exactly though. Use your own discretion.

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*I don't.