Frogs

Frogs (1972)

Dir. George McCowan

Written by Robert Hutchinson, Robert Blees

Starring Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, Judy Pace, Adam Roarke,

FROGS opens with minutes on end of a hunky gentleman in a canoe (Sam Elliott, who you will not recognize without his trademark mustache for a good half-hour or so) floating around a Southern waterway and doing some leisurely nature photography. This is an entirely appropriate beginning, because it’s also more or less the movie’s plan for the next 90 minutes of your life. FROGS, you see, is comprised of two things, in an approximately 50-50 split: footage of a bunch of annoying people sitting around a Florida panhandle manor house, and footage of frogs just kind of sitting there, looking pretty happy to finally graduate from extra to featured player. Why someone thought this would make for a good horror movie --or a horror movie at all-- is never even remotely clear. But if you like footage of frogs, this is the movie you’ve been waiting for your whole life.

Sam Elliott (THE LEGACY, THANK YOU FOR SMOKING) plays Detective John Frogs, a freelance photographer doing some hard-nosed digging into the seedy underbelly of amphibian life in sleepy Southern waterways. It must be pretty important work because the first thing he does when he gets back to civilization is run to call his editor, presumably to tell him to hold the presses. Unfortunately, this journalistic juggernaut is thwarted when a speedboat driven by Clint (Adam Roarke, DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY) swamps the canoe. Clint is a drunken rich-kid fuckup, but his sister Karen (Joan Van Ark, The Young and the Restless) --also on board-- is pretty nice and decides pretty quickly she’d like to bone the rugged young photojournalist, so she insists they fish him out of the water and bring him back to their family’s palatial manor house to dry off and then for some reason to stay for a few days.

Once there, Elliott quickly meets the family patriarch, wheelchair-bound Jason Crockett (Academy-Award-Winner Ray Milland, THE PYJAMA GIRL GASE, THE LOST WEEKEND), a grouchy old tyrant who is very fucking insistent that nothing ruin his birthday party tomorrow, not even a bunch of Frogs. For the next forty or so minutes Elliott just walks around the grounds of the house meeting every single relative and individually re-explaining why he’s there, while sometimes the camera cuts to footage of frogs. Pretty gripping stuff.

At about 45 minutes, we’ve had a lot of talking and a lot of footage of frogs, plus a good bit of footage of snakes, a sprinkling of geckos, a couple monitor lizards, and a little bit of alligator. But no actual scary parts. Elliott does find the deceased body of one of Crockett’s workers out in the woods, but he died off-screen before the events of the movie and nobody seems too surprised since, yeah, there’s snakes and stuff out there. Fair to say, then, that there’s not a lot of drama and absolutely no horror during the film’s first half, although in fairness the movie’s title promised FROGS, and frogs it delivers, dammit, and none too stingily. Finally, at 45 minutes, one of the hundreds of indistinguishable obnoxious people squatting at the house wanders out into the woods, where you know he’s gonna get what’s coming to him (and all humans). But even so, he as to accidentally shoot himself in the leg before nature can finish the job. Eventually, some other people die in some prolonged but fairly uneventful death sequences mixed with nature footage. But because FROGS doesn’t have a lot of animatronics or anything, the victims really have to do most of the legwork themselves. Another guy is standing in a greenhouse when lizards knock poisonous chemicals off the shelves and he asphyxiates instead of walking the four steps to the greenhouse door. Man, nature must really be kicking itself for not trying this sooner, who knew these guys went down so easy?  

One thing you’ll notice, though, is that even once people start dying, the cutaways to frogs continue. Which is odd, because while people are killed by monitor lizards, snakes, alligators, snapping turtles, and mostly their own stupidity, I note that the frogs never actually do anything. I don’t know if they’re the masterminds behind all of this, or if they’re just nature’s cowards and they’re not gonna take action til they can see which side is winning, or what. But it strikes me as strange that in a movie called FROGS, which features almost wall-to-wall footage of frogs, and boasts a poster with a human hand dangling from a frog’s mouth, the frogs just kind of sit there. Although Mr. Majestyk offers an interesting interpretation:

Anyway, regardless of whether anyone does or not get devoured by frogs (they don’t), FROGS may accidentally be the perfect movie for our times. For one thing, it’s terrible, just like our times. But for another, I think it may be  --maybe even intentionally!-- a metaphor for the inexorable changing cultural landscape and the bitter resistance some people put up against that change. The frogs never actually DO anything, but they’re the harbingers of what’s to come: they’re getting louder and louder, more numerous and brazen, harder to ignore, until the smart people finally acknowledge that a course correction is necessary. Those who refuse to take heed of their inability to control the world are gonna wind up in trouble. Seen in that light, there’s a lot of interesting subtext going on here with the various stock characters.

I mean, think about it -- you got Milland as the cranky, bullying family patriarch holed up in the gargantuan home he insists his family has lived in for generations. The only thing he cares about is ensuring things never change, that whatever happens, his birthday party does not deviate from the same routine he’s demanded his entire life. Oh, and when is that birthday? Why, on the Fourth of July! And lest you forget it, they have footage of frogs defiling his large American-Flag birthday cake, while he broods in his wheelchair, listening to patriotic music on a turntable. His single-minded insistence that they not budge a single inch from the routine that they’ve undertaken every year, without fail, is really the only conflict in the movie, which seems completely laughable unless you start to consider its potential for allegory.

I mean, is it too much to wonder if he represents the Old South (which was a little less old in 1972)? He’s a dithering, hectoring old bully, crippled and bitter, fixated on ensuring that everyone respects his unquestioned authority and dutifully goes through the same comfortingly familiar motions they’ve always gone through. But times are changing. One of his grandkids has a glamorous black girlfriend (Judy Pace, BRIAN’S SONG), and the awkwardness of her being a guest at this aristocratic Southern plantation hangs so heavy in the air that it doesn’t even have to be spoken. In fact, everyone fastidiously avoids speaking it; listing the reasons she’d be objectionable to grandpa, her fiance carefully avoids mentioning race at all, instead landing (lamely) on her being a “fashion model.” You can almost see him consider stating the obvious and then chickening out. She chickens out herself, albeit in a somewhat sweeter way, in a surprisingly nuanced scene between her and Crockett’s older, black maid (blues singer Mae Mercer, DIRTY HARRY, THE BEGUILED). Neither one of them needs to state the strangeness of their shared racial past and their radically different present, but the maid notices they have the same name -- Maybelle -- though her younger namesake goes by “Bella.” They share an odd moment of fractured, awkward kinship which feels unusually honest for a film (ostensibly) about killer frogs.

Are their different versions of the same name a sign that Bella is fooling herself in thinking she’ll ever be accepted in this world which almost certainly consigned Maybelle and her ancestors to humiliating servitude? Or is it a hopeful symbol that Bella could rebrand herself and sit as an equal with these backwards old crackers, who are surely deeply put off by her very presence, but are too scared to say something to a social equal (or better)? I don’t know, exactly, but it’s nice that the movie finds time for that ambiguity in-between shots of frogs. Towards the end, when Crockett’s black maid and butler (Lance Taylor, Sr, BLACULA) meekly ask if they can leave before they get killed by frogs or what have you, Bella finally makes the racial tension explicit: “Maybe you haven’t heard about it stuck out here in vacation land,” she snaps --and it’s hard to say if she’s addressing Crockett or his employees -- “but five score and seven years ago, they just started letting people make up their own minds.” When they do go, Crockett isn’t just angry, he seems genuinely hurt, even though they’re almost absurdly accommodating of the old bastard, and even seem touchingly concerned about his welfare. But concern isn’t what Crockett wants. Loyalty, he says, is -- but to him that just means unquestioned obedience.

He demands that obedience from both his hired staff and from his family. “He knows he’s not popular. With the public or his family. And he revels in it,” says one of his grandkids. But they play along, bored and annoyed, because they’re afraid that if they rock the boat they’ll lose their share of his wealth. If Crockett is indeed a metaphor for the Strom Thurmonds of the world, it’s an interesting perspective to cast his “kids” (the younger generation) as uninterested in his antics and priorities, but dutifully following them for their own selfish reasons. And of course, money is a big part of this; even though he’s just a single, crippled old man, Crockett can make everyone dance to his tune because he controls the money. It may not be earned, but that doesn’t mean his descendants fancy the idea of losing any of it. “You make us sound like the worst of the ugly rich,” one of his kids admonishes. “We ARE the ugly rich!” he replies, to which she explains, “We’re entitled to be ugly... God knows we pay enough in taxes.” Man, some things never change, huh? Which is particularly galling because FROGS is very much a movie which believes things have changed; which sees the grouchy old Crocketts of the world as the thing holding us back. Unfortunately it’s now 2017, and we just have new Crocketts to replace the old ones, and a lot of them are probably the same kids who just mechanically went through the motions to appease their bossy old grandpa, but who now cling to the same old bullshit as if they made it up. I guess with the benefit of hindsight it’s not so simple. But still, I appreciate the optimism of FROGS’s view that the Old Ways will get swept away whether they’re willing to acknowledge it or not, that the changing world is inevitable, overwhelming, a force of nature.

Of course, it’s also literally a force of nature here, which makes for a somewhat confused metaphor. On the surface, FROGS is very much a quintessential “Nature strikes back” movie, right down to the required scene where a character comes right out and speculates aloud about nature taking revenge. Hell, it opens with a potential motive for nature: Elliott photographs a bunch of garbage along with a bunch of frogs during the credits (in a perfect summation of what the filmmakers intend to do). But I think this is tied to the filmmakers' point, too; nature is one of those things -- like shifting racial, social and sexual mores-- which isn’t just going to politely sit there waiting for Ray Milland to come around. It’s gonna change, and you can either change with it or get trampled by it. You can try to ignore the growing chorus of frogs making a racket in the background, you can even try to kill them off. But in the end, who’s lying dead on the floor next to his overturned wheelchair, and who’s smugly hopping around on his corpse? I won’t say because I don’t want to spoil anything but after you watch the movie I think you will understand what I mean.

All this is kinda getting away from the fact that this is a ridiculous and terrible movie, which is pretty hard to deny. The acting isn’t a disaster, though; Elliott has a confident, reserved cool which makes his non-character seem compelling, and Milland is making at least a small amount of effort, or anyway more than one would expect from one of these late-career roles from former A-listers where they play a character in a wheelchair so they don’t have to stand up while shooting. But aside from some pretty nature photography (rendered in glorious blu-ray in the most recent Scream Factory! release) there’s not really much entertainment value to be had here. It’s not even really outrageous enough to be enjoyably campy, it’s just pretty dull (unless you suffer from a particular phobia of the fauna of Northern Florida wetlands, in which case this is probably far too horrifying for you to enjoy anyway).

Still, its little allegorical touches are interesting enough that it’s not a total wash, especially given the film’s ambiguous apocalyptic implication -- is this happening everywhere? “I still believe man is master of this world” Milland says. “Does that mean he can’t live in harmony with the rest of it?” Elliott returns. A pretty bold subtext for a schlocky killer frog lizard movie. Maybe someday, someone will make a good one. Until then, the best I can offer is the suggestion that you stick to the end of the credits to finally see an (inexplicably animated) frog actually eat someone. It’s not easy being green.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

ALIAS	Released mostly just as “FROGS” in various languages, though the West German title helpfully explains, “Frogs - Killer aus dem Sumpf” ie, “FROGS: KILLERS FROM THE SWAMP.” You know, in case you didn’t know where frogs come from.
TAGLINE	Today The Pond… Tomorrow The World! Which is inaccurate in two ways, first of all since the movie implies that they are probably taking over the world today, and also because it makes the movie seem much more funny and self-aware than it actually is.
TITLE ACCURACY	One of the most accurate titles in history.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	No
REMAKE?	None, alas
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	When Animals Attack!
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Ray Milland; Elliott was not yet famous (and only 28 at the time) but in retrospect he definitely counts. Incidentally, his shirtless scenes here earned him his subsequent role in LIFEGUARD, so at least you got that waiting for you.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Milland probably did enough horror films to count, although I’m sure he’d prefer to be remembered for his actual good films.
NUDITY?	Just the frogs, though Elliott does have a couple beefcake topless scenes
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Oh mercy yes
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	I think all that frog footage is definitely supposed to make us think the frogs are always watching us.
MORAL OF THE STORY	That swamp that Kermit was in at the beginning of THE MUPPET MOVIE was way more hardcore than "The Rainbow Connection" lets on.

Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Dir. Joe and Anthony Russo

Written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Redford

“We throw a lot of things against the wall to see if it sticks. We put a lot of interesting questions in the air, but that's simply a backdrop for the story. What we're really trying to do is show the cracks of society, show the conflicts that somebody would try to wedge open. We're going to get wildly different interpretations of what the film is supporting and not supporting, but it's not doing any of those things."

-- Christopher Nolan, explaining that his BATMAN films don’t have any particular subtext or message.

"It's hard to make a political film that's not topical. That's what makes a political thriller different from just a thriller. ...we love topicality, so we kept pushing to [have] scenes that, fortunately or unfortunately, played out [during the time that] Snowden outed the NSA. That stuff was already in the zeitgeist. We were all reading the articles that were coming out questioning drone strikes, pre-emptive strikes, civil liberties — Obama talking about who they would kill... We wanted to put all of that into the film because it would be a contrast to [Captain America]'s greatest-generation [way of thinking]."

--Anthony Russo, co-director of Captain America: The Winter Soldier

"The question is where do you stop? If there are 100 people we can kill to make us safer, do we do it? What if we find out there's 1,000? What if we find out there's 10,000? What if it's a million? At what point do you stop?"

--Joe Russo, co-director of Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Well friends, you know that I hate to say that I told you so, but as I am a gentleman, honor requires me to accept the credit when I’m proven correct. I’ve been on record supporting the Marvel films, which started off a little rocky but gradually seem to have managed to find the perfect tone for superhero movies, somewhere solidly in that sweet spot between the dour, self-consciously grown-up DC movies and the shiny, empty-headed nothing of THE FANTASTIC FOUR (a Marvel property, but not made through Marvel studios due to the movie rights being held by Fox, long story). Oh, there were doubts at first. There are those who called me mad, or unfair, or a variety of homophobic slurs, because I said that Nolan’s BATMAN films were ponderous and silly, and that at least Marvel remembered that superheroes were supposed to be fun. But I persevered. And now they’ve done it, they got where they were going.

There were hints of it happening early on; the first IRON MAN, for all its clunkiness, found the right tone and established a precedent for finding the absolute perfect actor to become the face of these larger-than-life characters. But then their HULK reboot with Ed Norton was just an utterly lifeless, dishwater-dull unmitigated failure, and IRON MAN 2 was a rambling bloated mess that totally squandered a great cast in a tangled junkyard of boring action and turgid plottiness. Those two were dire enough that I didn’t bother with the original THOR or CAPTAIN AMERICA PART ONE: THIS IS THE FIRST ONE while they were in theaters. But once I finally did get around to experiencing the one-two punch of those two movies and THE AVENGERS, I became a convert. This is how comic book movies were meant to be: colorful, imaginative, broad, and completely unashamed about their ridiculous premises while still treating them with respect.

With the new CAPTAIN AMERICA PART 2: THE SECOND ONE : WINTER SOLIDER RISING (presumably the third one will be subtitled YEAR OF THE PIG*) out, though, I may have to re-evaluate those other ones, because this is good enough to take it to the next level. It keeps everything we liked about the previous generation of Marvel films -- perfectly cast protagonist, a cheerful embrace of the cartoonish universe he inhabits, large-scale action balanced with charming character moments-- and adds something I never realized they were missing: a hint --but an unmistakable one-- of something to say about the world.

Hi kids. Captain America here, and I'd like to talk to you about an issue which is very close to my heart: Auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Now, I know, I know, that just makes you conjure images of all that postmodern deconstructionist mumbo jumbo from Zack Snyder’s Not Alan Moore’s flawed but enjoyable WATCHMEN or its subsequent hanger-ons (KICK-ASS, SUPER, etc), or, Nolan’s grimly ponderous BATMANS, or even worse, Snyder’s soul-deadening MAN OF STEEL. But fear not! It’s not like that at all; those movies are so dire because they fancy themselves important. This one doesn’t feel like that, it’s just that as it happens the comic book universe they’ve created lends itself rather gracefully to a few subtle but commendable allegories for the world we’re living in right now.

Which honestly is nothing revolutionary. Marvel has a long history of doing this sort of thing in comic form. They’ve been subtly commenting on all kinds of social issues for decades. Not in a “very special issue” kind of way, but rather just by incorporating little elements of reality into their fantasy world as a subtext. The fire-and-brimstone anti-mutant Preacher William Stryker from 1982’s God Loves, Man Kills comes to mind: he evokes the anger of right wing backlash embodied by guys like Jerry Falwell and asks us to imagine what it’s like to be the target of that anger, but without specifically being a one-to-one surrogate for any particular person or incident. It’s still a comic book, and it has heroes in costume fighting giant robots with superpowers. But there’s just something a little more resonant in the conflict, something a bit more relatable than fighting a guy made out of electricity who wants to destroy the world.

That’s what the movie is like; it reminds me of reading those old stories, how seriously the books take it all while still including a bunch of giant robots and stuff. That’s what great pulp is all about: superficially ridiculous trappings earnestly married with something which digs a little deeper. Comics are the opera of our time: the one medium which is completely unafraid to go over-the-top broad to capture the sometimes silly but also genuinely potent extremes of human experience. I mean, we remember how The Dark Phoenix Saga ends, right? On the moon, fighting in a gladiatorial battle against an army of Space superheroes (spoiler)? And yet, that final moment with Jean and Scott… these are characters with this long and fraught history together, broadly drawn but deeply felt. That ending, man, it’s the silliest thing in the world, but it cuts deep all the same. Maybe even deeper because of the utter earnestness in storytelling that is an absolute prerequisite to write a good moon-battle-with-space-gladiators tale with any conviction.

Second most emotionally moving moment in nerdom, after that time Optimus turned brown.

Anyway, this new Capn’ movie is spot-on in capturing that feel. It has all of comic books’ silliest conventions, but, like its protagonist, it's so earnest and committed to what it’s doing that you’ve almost got no choice but to just swallow your cynicism and go with it. And it’s a good thing too, because come on, Captain America? What could possibly be cornier than this half-century old icon of American militaristic nationalism? I mean, that’s a real tough sell after Vietnam, after Kent State, Gulf of Tonkin, Watergate, the Cold War, Iran-Contra, CIA drug trafficking, Partisanship, War on Terror, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, targeted killings, NSA spying, James Clapper just flat out lying to Congress with no consequences whatsoever, just recently finding out the CIA actively subverted a congressional investigation about it by deleting evidence from investigators’ computers, just to name a few things off the top of my head. Pretty hard to be the guy wearing the flag on his chest, taking orders from these clowns, knowing all that.

And to the movie’s credit, that’s the whole point here. Cap’s main conflict this time is not with some volcano-lair supervillain that can be defeated by a good punching. It’s with the system itself, the one giving him orders. The conflict is not with the guy he’s got to punch, it’s over who to punch, and under what circumstances, and how hard, and why. And what it says about him when he does it.

See, back in Cap’s heyday, right and wrong seemed a lot simpler. Hitler was so unambiguously evil that you could just be a good solider, follow orders. You could ignore the politics of it, listen to your general when he told you who to kill, and then go kill them. But 75 years later, things aren’t so black-and-white. Suddenly, S.H.I.E.L.D. is getting Cap involved in a bunch of shady, cloak-and-dagger intrigue, going after morally ambiguous targets for morally ambiguous reasons. He can’t afford to simply follow orders anymore, can’t afford to simply be a soldier, a defender of abstract concepts like freedom and justice. He’s got to decide if the people giving the orders are worth following, and if they’re not, what to do instead.

To it's credit, the movie tactfully avoids ironic flag imagery. But, just in case you worried that it was gonna be soft on terrorism, it does begin with Cap beating the tar out of an uppity Frenchman.

Although the movie doesn’t dwell on it, there’s something very tragic about all this. Steve “Cap’n Ammurrica” Rodgers has arrived in the present so recently that he’s still adjusting to living in this alien world (he has a list of things he still need to learn about, which includes Disco, Star Wars/Trek, Thai food) and he’s been a real good sport about everyone he ever knew being dead or senile. He’s got no life here whatsoever, no roots, no social circle, and he’s been trying to fill that space with work (recall, he recently was involved re: an alien invasion destroying the world). But even his work has changed: he’s still an ass-kicker, but he can’t take for granted that he’s being told to kick the right asses anymore, and it’s all he’s good at, hell, all he’s got. I mean, he’s a lonely guy; even when he’s got a chance to connect with other people, he’s got very little in common with them. He’s missed nearly a century of American culture, he doesn’t get the twitters or enjoy the music of Girl Talk or get your Austin Powers references. When he’s not on missions, he’s hanging out with his nearly 100 year-old ex-girlfriend, who thought he was dead for the last 70 years. I’m guessing they never got to consummate that relationship, although the movie isn’t explicit about it.

But despite these setbacks, Steve wants to do the right thing. He’s considering leaving the profession after he learns that S.H.I.E.L.D. is building a fleet of gigantic death stars drone battleships to conquer/protect the world (built, no doubt, by Facebook’s war division), but before he can, it turns out that he’s got more immediate problems: someone from inside the organization is trying to kill him and S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, COMING TO AMERICA) and he’s gotta go on the lam with adorable little Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson, HOME ALONE 3) to find out who and why.

What follows is a pretty effective 70’s-style paranoid thriller. Who can he trust? What dastardly secrets are being kept behind the veil of honest legitimacy put forward by this secretive lawless multinational paramilitary outfit?

So... I see you've redecorated in here?

The answers are enjoyably comic-booky (an evil supercomputer that runs on punch cards can and will become involved) as are their solutions (big action sequences, explosions, running down hallways to escape from explosions, etc) but the questions give the whole enterprise an unexpected potency. I think a lot of Americans right now feel depressingly alienated from the forces in power, and extremely uncomfortable with what we’re being told needs to be done “for our protection.” The nice thing here is that questioning the morality of our actions doesn’t make Captain America any less American -- it means the American thing to do is to do the right thing, not to just follow orders and pat ourselves on the back. It has some strong parallels to the recent Marvel Civil War, where Captain America has to turn into a rebel against the government to protect the rights of the people. It’s shocking, in a way, to see such a strident symbol of American nationalism turn against the system, but in a strange way it’s also kind of inspiring: America isn’t about the structures of power, it’s about the things we do, the people we are. What it means to be American, or Captain America, hasn’t changed; it’s just that the world has changed, and in response we have to evolve a bit.

Given that, I got a few quibbles with the way things turn out (SPOILERS AHOY THERE FOLKS!) since after making a logical and effective case against the abuses of power by the government, they retreat a little by the end and excuse everything with a lame cop-out. Oh, I guess we can trust the government after all, it’s just an evil cabal of ex-Nazi infiltrators who are causing the problems. I guess maybe that could be an analogy for the Tea Party, but really it kinda soft-pedals the main issue: we shouldn’t have a death star drone armada because nobody should have that kind of power, not because someone should, but not Nazis. Similarly, it would be a lot more interesting if [[DOUBLE SECRET SPOILERS, EVEN MORE SPOILERY THAN BEFORE]] Cap’s old buddy Shaw had genuinely been convinced that the US was irredeemably corrupt and that he had to fight it, instead of the lame brainwashing thing which makes him kind of a non-character. I mean, it’s interesting to give Cap his own doubts about the morality of what he’s doing, how much better would it be to have a villain who was more like Magneto, who legitimately has a point but maybe takes it just a little further than our hero is comfortable with. As it is, Cap isn’t really asked to seriously consider if Shaw is right, since Shaw himself doesn’t even really know what he’s doing. And of course, if I may say so the solution Cap’n A comes up with isn’t necessarily feasible for every American. (END O’ SPOILERS) But you know, baby steps. It’s nice to just have a movie which acknowledges how we feel, even if it doesn’t quite offer a solution for those of us who haven’t been dosed with Super Solider Serum.

One other thing I like? There’s an interesting little exchange between Nick Fury and our hero where Fury talks a little bit about his grandfather, a elevator operator. He doesn’t explicitly say it, but here he is today, ordering death star drone armadas to control the world, while his granddad was living in a society where the best work he could get was pushing up and down buttons for rich people. What society was that, by the way? Why, the one Steve Rodgers spent most of his life living in! Guess that kind of shoots a hole in the ol’ “back in the day, things were a lot simpler” theory, don’t it? Maybe 1940’s Captain America should have thought a little harder about who was allowed to benefit from the freedom he was fighting for. This kind of horseshit is nothing new, it’s just that in modern times we don’t have the luxury of not thinking about it like they had back in the day. Or that white men had, anyway.

Good guys wear black. Bad guys wear suits.

Anyway, WINTER SOLIDER mostly isn’t about that stuff, but just having it as part of the text makes the whole film much more satisfying. You get all the action and comic book hijinks you would usually get, but just a little more meat there so it’s not quite as disposable. You don’t have to really focus on these themes if you don’t want to, I’m sure you can just go in and watch the explosions without thinking too seriously about American geopolitical strategy. But commendably, they’re not just some lightly suggestive subtext, either; these are the central conflicts of the movie, and the movie takes them as seriously and expects you to do so as well, at least as much as you do with the guy with bird wings or the hovercars. 

And that’s the key to the film’s success right there: take everything seriously in the context of the story, just don’t take yourself too seriously. I complained that Nolan’s BATMAN movies bring up a bunch of interesting question which they have no real intention of exploring, while also somehow managing to be enormously ponderous and self-important. So a movie that can bring up real legitimate issues, and integrate them organically into a story which is thoroughly entertaining, and do it without betraying the inherent good-hearted silliness of its universe… well, I think that’s what I’ve been waiting all these years to be able to say about a Superhero film.** Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN movies probably came the closest, but he always seemed to be fighting the studio to make those work properly. Here, Marvel seems like it’s comfortable with its own universe in a way which Sony wasn’t, and as a result these movies seem to be finding their footing more and more easily. This one was from the directors of YOU, ME, AND DUPREE, so there you go.

CAPTAIN AMERICA PART 2 THIS TIME THE WINTER SOLDIER doesn’t think it’s gonna change your mind about the issues, or reinvent the genre, or teach you something about what it means to be human. But it does think that if you’re going to make a comic book film, you ought to try and make a good one. If Marvel sticks to that philosophy, we’ll probably still have a bunch of questionable political bullshit going on. But at least we’ll have some solid superhero flicks to keep us from getting too depressed about it.

*Get it? They’re both classic black and white period documentaries about the Vietnam war. No, nobody?

**Since they were trying so hard to please me, I gotta also appreciate that this is the rare film which takes place mostly around Washington DC which generally speaking actually looks like Washington DC, plus a gigantic megalithic S.H.E.I.L.D. headquarters which is sitting right on top of Teddy Roosevelt island. Fucking S.H.E.I.L.D. always with the cloak-and-dagger shit, and now they done fucked with Teddy? This shit will not stand.

Does this guy seem a little Aspen-casual for a WINTER soldier? Let's get a parka on this fucker, jesus, you're screwing up the whole gimmick, dude. How are you gonna say "freeze" and shoot someone with a cold ray if you're not even wearing a ski cap?