Review: Ant-Man

Tim here. Ant-Man is maybe the most typical film yet made in the now 12-picture Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is up to the individual viewer to decide if that's a compliment or a vicious & lacerating criticism. But it's really hard to think of it as anything other than a factory-pressed rebuild of the same basic story beats, character arc, gags, and conflicts that have become locked-in through Marvel's seven-year multifranchise experiment.

The film's distinguishing elements are all at the margins: in the hands of director Peyton Reed (who is much more in Yes Man-style "mercenary hack" mode than Down with Love-style "crafty stylist" mode), this is the most generously comic of all Marvel films to date, with the zippiest, silliest performances; the stakes are refreshingly low, and there's no aerial battle with the fate of nations and worlds at stakes in the final act. The cinematography by Russell Carpenter - an Oscar winner for Titanic - is distinctly more interesting than anything in any Marvel movie so far, with something resembling a thought-out purpose for the muted colors and rough lighting. It strips back some of the polish and gleaming surfaces in the Marvel movies of yore, to make a film that feels like it takes place in an actual world.

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73 Questions w/ Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman does Vogue's "73 Questions" as she gives us very brief peeks at her farm. I didn't know that Vivien Leigh was her favorite actress! Or that she'd just throw out the title "Bewitched" without worrying about bringing up painful memories.

Also she is terrible at doing impressions. 

We can discuss sexism in comic book movies when you get back from the theater.

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Secret in Their Eyes Character Posters

Manuel here sharing these new character posters for the English-language adaptation of the Oscar-winning film, The Secret in their Eyes. 

We talked at length about the film's trailer a few weeks back and the marketing for the film will surely continue revving up as we near its October release date.

The poster series is bold (if a tad on-the-nose) to deny us three sets of expressive eyes but it does force us to focus on these gorgeous movie stars' lips and eyebrows, while denying us another opportunity to gripe about the film's look (those wigs!!)

And yet, I'm surely not alone in flashing back to a handful of other eye-less character posters:

If you're going to ape a marketing campaign, you could do worse than reminding us all of that perfect Michel Gondry/Charlie Kaufman film. But perhaps that wasn't the intention, especially as it ends up being an unfair comparison on every single count; look at all the detail and suggestive plot elements we get in those 2004 posters and then turn to these new photoshopped images of Nicole, Chiwetel and Julia. They're much emptier and only tell us

Julia: Don't look back
Chiwetel: Don't look closer
Nicole: Don't look away 

Here's hoping the final Secret poster is a bit more inventive, though floating head composites are always a very real threat for all star movies. I'm personally hopeful about Julia's performance; are you? 

Titus Andromedon and the "GBF"

Please welcome new contributor Kyle Turner to the team, who has previously Smackdown'ed right here. In the wake of the Emmy nominations, he's here to talk about one very particular film & tv trope - Editor
 

In Tina Fey’s book of autobiographical essays Bossypants, she describes with delight and nostalgia her time growing up working at the Delaware County Summer Showtime program for the arts. And while her experiences about her background in theater are the surface, it’s her relationship to the queer community that serves as, perhaps, the thesis and thematic core of the essay. She writes carefully, balancing emotional reaction of the present juxtaposed against examining the events in hindsight. She talks about the lesbian best friends she had for several years, the way her hometown was like “Gay Wales” (“What Wales is to crooners, my hometown may be to homosexuals – meaning, there seems to be a disproportionate number of them and they are the best in the world!”), and, most important, the role of LGBT people in her personal narrative(s). She writes

I thought I knew everything after that first summer. ‘Being gay is not a choice. Gay people were made that way by God,’ I’d lectured Mr. Garth proudly. But it took me another whole year to figure out the second part: ’Gay people were made that way by God, but not solely for my entertainment.’ ”

In one quote, Fey pinpoints a problem that mainstream media often has when depicting queer (usually male) characters: they’re often asexual, thinly written, or designed with tropes built in as opposed to given the benefit of complexity that their straight counterparts more reflexively are given. They are, in a word, tokenized. [More...]

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