329. The Avengers

329. (25 Dec) The Avengers (2012, Joss Whedon) 32



So this is what happens when you team up superheroes from films with disparate aesthetics. Though Whedon goes out of his way to show these powers are evenly matched, he's juggling too many characters to make the action meaningful. Relying on our knowledge of other Marvel films (and nearly giving me PTSD with flashbacks from the heinous Captain America: The First Avenger) isn't objectionable since this is part of a franchise, but there's no continuation of any arc besides everybody kind of becoming friends. We get more characters piled on, including a poorly motivated villain, the always boring Jeremy Renner, and the third Hulk in as many films. The action sequences are boring considering everyone's invincible and there aren't any true dramatic stakes. Like they really have the effects budget to blow up lower Manhattan.

Black Sheep interviews Mark Ruffalo

RUFFALO SMASH HULK
An interview with THE AVENGERS star, Mark Ruffalo

When one thinks of veteran character actor, Mark Ruffalo, one might think of his 2000 breakout film, Kenneth Lonergan’s YOU CAN COUNT ON ME. Or perhaps of all the directors he’s worked with, from Michel Gondry (ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND) to David Fincher (ZODIAC) to Martin Scorsese (SHUTTER ISLAND). Most probably remember his Oscar-nominated supporting turn in Lisa Cholodenko’s THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT. I think it’s fair to say though that a giant franchise superhero movie would be the last place people would expect to see him. Well, that’s all about to change.

“My first reaction was to try to talk Joss out of casting me,” Ruffalo recalls of the moment director, Joss Whedon, told him he wanted him to replace Edward Norton as The Hulk in this summer’s mammoth comic book movie, THE AVENGERS. “Then I started to think, if I can get past all of the baggage of the part, I could maybe do something different and cool with it.”

Still, Ruffalo’s time on set was a challenge at first. “I was really nervous. My overall feeling on the set was probably not so dissimilar to Banner’s in the film. What am I doing here? Do I belong here? Look at how cool all these guys are!”

Ruffalo may now be one of the cool kids, which also includes Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Chris Evans as Captain America, but The Hulk has always been hit or miss, mostly miss, with film audiences. Ruffalo’s take though is resonating so much with fans that Marvel is now considering another standalone Hulk movie in the future.

The success of the character is something Ruffalo attributes to working with Whedon. “My first rehearsal with Joss was literally an hour in a room just wrestling,” Ruffalo explains of Whedon’s unorthodox approach to bringing out the beast in the man. “Joss and I definitely felt that this was a continuation of the last Hulk movie, with this idea that he might have some control over it. This next version of Banner, has been on the run for another 3 or 4 years, is getting into his 40’s, getting tired, longing for a life, maybe a family, and has a sense of humour about himself and a level of acceptance for this side of himself. Maybe he can finally face himself.”

That’s an awful lot of depth for a character who is most famous for smashing things.

Ruffalo has signed a 6-picture deal with Marvel to appear as The Hulk on screen. While thrilled at the possibilities, Ruffalo, who used to read Marvel comics as a boy, is also a realist. “I mean how much longer can I play The Hulk? If it takes three years to make the next Avengers and then another three years to make a Hulk, I’ll be in my 50’s,” Ruffalo, now 44, admits. “At some point, there is an obsolescence to a 6-picture deal. I’ll be happy if I end up just doing three.”

In the meantime, Ruffalo finally has a movie he can watch with his kids, three with his wife of 12 years, Sunrise Coigney. “I do realize that most of the movies I’ve made, my kids won’t be able to see until they’re in their teens,” Ruffalo quips. “This is something I felt like they could see. It interests me; it isn’t dumb; it doesn’t glorify violence just for the thrill of it. And at the same time, I don’t feel like I’ve compromised my artistic integrity. So it kinda just fit all the right boxes.”

Perhaps Ruffalo’s integrity is in tact because THE AVENGERS is not just mindless popcorn fluff but rather a genuine smash of a film. “Everything was grounded in character and in a reality that you really wouldn’t expect from this movie,” Ruffalo states with evident pride and satisfaction in the project. “If you can bring something real and naturalistic to this totally fantastical, unnatural world, then you stand out from the rest."

THE AVENGERS

THE AVENGERS
Written and Directed by Joss Whedon
Starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johannson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston and Samuel L. Jackson

Captain America: Stark, we need a plan of attack.
Iron Man: I have a plan. Attack.

Comic book movies or superhero movies or whatever you want to call them, all inherently have a very difficult task to accomplish. They all have to cater to a notoriously picky niche market, made up of detail oriented fanboys, while still remaining broad enough to appeal to the masses. They cost a fortune so they cannot afford not to attract the widest audience possible, but if they play it too broad, the fanatics will denounce the film and ruin any chance it has of making any money back. THE AVENGERS is the mecca of superhero movies. It reportedly cost $220 million to make. It features no less than seven iconic Marvel comic characters. And, given just how darn good it is, it actually stands the chance to become the biggest superhero movie of all time.

If you’re like me, the first ten minutes of THE AVENGERS might be a little bewildering. The script presupposes that you’ve seen all the Avenger related movies leading up to this one. As it turns out, I have, with the first IRON MAN (Robert Downey Jr.) and THOR (Chris Hemsworth) being my favourites.  Still, that doesn’t mean that they are always freshly at the forefront of my mind. So once I pieced together that Thor’s brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) was working with an alien race to take over Earth by harvesting the energy from what is known as the Tesseract, I was good to go. (I’m sure the history behind this premise is far more rich than I’ve just described but for casual Avenger fans like myself, this description is more than adequate to get your bearings.) What follows the initial and inevitable set up though is two hours of non-stop excitement with a surprisingly solid amount of depth and character study to make THE AVENGERS the perfect popcorn movie to kick off the summer.

It is Loki’s mission to force the people of Earth into submission by using great force. His belief is that freedom is the world’s greatest lie, that pursuing a life of slavery and worship unburdens the individual of feeling any sense of failure. Without any unique goals, there is only the common to pursue. You should know that Loki has a bevy of his own daddy issues to work out and vanquishing Earth is just his way of dealing with things. You should also know that Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the leader of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which stands for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division) is not going to just allow this to happen. So he enlists the help of six individuals, all of which possess a particular power or skill that makes them a definite asset to have in an intergalactic war of this magnitude, and dubs them The Avengers. Unfortunately for Fury, The Avengers are all also intense loners who do not play well with others.

Perhaps the greatest honorary Avenger out there is writer/director, Joss Whedon. Marvel entrusted a film they have been building up to for years now to a man who has built a reputation for creating deeply engaging yet still highly entertaining genre fare on television, like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, but whose only feature length film (SERENITY) tanked. Whedon is right at home here though and he has a seemingly easy time balancing the screen time between all these heavy hitters, from Chris Evans (Captain America) and Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye) to Scarlett Johannson (Black Widow) and Mark Ruffalo (taking over the role of The Hulk from predecessor, Edward Norton), while simultaneously juggling all of their individual arcs and development. The genius of Whedon’s work here is that he has them all subtly fighting against each other and against the idea of working together long enough to forget they were fighting so hard against themselves before any of this started. And when they start fighting together, that’s when THE AVENGERS goes from being a great comic book movie to being a great movie, period.

MARGARET

Written and Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

Starring Anna Paquin, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo and Alison Janney

Lisa Cohen: I just need to talk to somebody who doesn’t completely misunderstand who I am or what’s going on inside me.

It isn’t easy growing up, no matter who you are and no matter what you have to live through while you’re doing it. Take Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) for instance. She is a 17-year-old girl living on the Upper West Side in New York City. She goes to a private school and comes from a broken home. Her pre-occupations are not unlike any other girl’s her age - she bickers with her family, she wants to lose her virginity, she has opinions about worldly subjects she is only beginning to understand. And she is only just realizing that it is up to her to make sense of her own world when she inadvertently causes a fatal traffic accident. Suddenly, the world makes even less sense than it did just moments earlier.

MARGARET is writer/director, Kenneth Lonergan’s highly anticipated follow-up to his Oscar nominated 2001 feature, YOU CAN COUNT ON ME. The film went into production in 2005, when the now 29-year-old star, Paquin, who certainly gives a vibrant and youthful performance, was but 23. It then spent years in turnaround as Lonergan tinkered with the lengthy 3-hour+ runtime, trying to get distributer, Fox Searchlight, to sign off on it. It was scheduled to be released in 2007 but the cut was deemed unreleasable. In the midst of legal battles, Martin Scorsese and his faithful editor, Thelma Schoonmaker came on board to see what they could make of it. Their edit is the official theatrical release and both company and director are apparently happy with the end results.

Indeed all parties should be pleased as MARGARET is an engaging coming of age story. Lisa does not know how to process what she has witnessed and has no idea how to make right what she caused. She looks down every road for solace but constantly runs into walls and subsequently, she begins to act out as a means to make her life about something other than that accident. Perhaps in her own self-destruction, she can eradicate her guilt. If only life were that simple though. If it were, not only would Lisa find a simple path to peace but Lonergan would have found a simpler path to finishing this film. Life allows for things to pass in their own time though and with that, MARGARET needed to take this long to be released. Like Lisa, it too had some growing pains to go through first.

425. Margaret

425. (02 Oct) Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan)* 37



It's clear why Fox Searchlight considered Margaret to be unreleasable. The Dickensian abundance of plot and characters suggests a poorly condensed miniseries, not a movie. While it is hardly necessary for loose ends to be tied up, there are so many throwaway scenes here that at some point it hardly seems like Margaret required salvaging. Whatever movie Lonergan initially intended to make would have barely been topical or interesting six years ago. All this time later, it's dated, plodding, and fails to make much of an impact.

The few scenes that work play well only because Lonergan is letting the melodrama run amok. Jeannie Berlin, in particular, has no restraint. While her performance is silly at times, she brings a joy to Margaret that's otherwise lacking. Anna Paquin handles herself quite well, taking Lonergan's grossly unbelievable, misshapen dialogue and giving it a bit of a life. Her character is written to be rather unlikable, but Paquin has an incredible, natural charisma. During Allison Janney's early death scene, Paquin shows a first spark that suggests she'll steal the show and it's not particularly surprising when she continues on that hot streak. She screams and cries like a pro. If the script wasn't so godawful, Paquin might've been in Oscar consideration.

Subplots involving Matt Damon and several brief classroom scenes do not work whatsoever. They're Lonergan's attempts at heavy-handed political commentary. Family scenes with J. Smith-Cameron and Paquin have much more intensity and truth to them. There is a certain beauty in some of the tearful, angry arguments and in the final scenes where Smith-Cameron and Paquin finally find common ground. But these are fleeting moments in a film where almost all of it could've been on the cutting room floor. Even Mark Ruffalo's big scene which puts the entire second act into motion is somewhat underwhelming.

Enumerating failures in Margaret is difficult since the film fails on almost every basic level. With unfathomably clumsy writing and editing that forcefully, desperately tries to give shape to a shapeless story, it's immediately clear this is a disaster. But like the film's bus crash that sets the plot into motion, it's hard to turn away. Even when the film consistently enters laughable, over-the-top territory, it's a fascinating monstrosity.