Spy games

Two films based on classic sixties TV spy shows are in cinemas at the moment. I loved both of them but for very different reasons.

The latest instalment of the Mission Impossible franchise has been out for a while now. Both its box office takings and reviews have been impressive. I’m certainly not going to dissent from this chorus of approval: I had a riot watching it. All of these points have featured in pretty much every review and I agree with all of them:

• It’s fun;
• The action sequences look cool;
• Rebecca Ferguson steals the show; and
• The stunts are impressive. All the more so because Cruise does them himself.

In addition to that there were a fair number of smaller detail that made me smile:

• It understands that villains and people who are potentially villainous have English accents;
• Simon McBurney and Tom Hollander reprise their partnership from Rev only this time Hollander is PM, so it’s McBurney who has to grovel and scrape;
• The trailers largely avoided showing anything from the film’s final act. That’s a nice change from promotional campaigns like the ones for Terminator: Genysis and Age of Ultron that revealed way too much; and
• That the opening credits cleverly pastiched the iconic title sequence of the TV series.

Indeed, such is the dependability of the franchise that it shows that a frequently criticised aspect of blockbuster films can in the right hands become one of their strengths. The Mission: Impossible films are undoubtedly filmmaking as a business but done by businessmen whose approach to making money is to find something people want, advertise that that’s what they are offering and then deliver it in great quantity and at high quantity. In this case that’s watching Tom Cruise doing steadily more ridiculous things in order to save the world whilst Simon Pegg, Ving Rhaimes and Jeremy Renner provide comedic commentary. If those businessmen could go on delivering it for a while longer I would appreciate it.

Similarly, one can without great difficult understand the commercial reasoning that lead to the Man from UNCLE. Warner Bros presumably looked at the $2Bn and counting Paramount have taken from the Mission: Impossible films and thought ‘are there any other 60s TV shows about spies we can remake’. Indeed, it even appears that at one point Tom Cruise had been cast as Napoleon Solo.*

The “we want something <insert name of currently profitable property>” school of commissioning generally does not produce great results. It’s generally cynical and allows films that have no business being made to get greenlit because they feature vampires, teens in a dystopian future or whatever is considered to be ‘in’ at that moment. It also results in a fair amount of herding.

Fortunately, the Man from Uncle isn’t like this. Far from being a clone of Mission: Impossible it strikes out in a quite distinctive direction. Techno mumbo jumbo is replaced by masses of retro charm. It positively luxuriates in its sixties setting making full use of the style, music and historical context that allows. And while the M:I films are now essentially big action set pieces held together a thin cartilage of plot, the Man from Uncle is all about the characters. Indeed at one point rather than watching one of the leads engage in a death defying speed boat chase, we watch the other lead watch the action. The scene that follows lasts only about a minute and has no dialogue yet we get to see a central character (amusingly) realise that he doesn’t see the world the way he thought he did. It’s a fitting microcosm for the film as a whole. It has a genuine sweetness and elicits real warmth for its characters. It does action well but uses it for a purpose rather as an end in itself. And it generally avoids doing what you expect. Nothing in the way Guy Ritchie directs the film is revolutionary but he nonetheless avoids it ever feeling derivative; he always appears to be doing his own thing rather than copying anyone else.

Summary: both films are solid 8/10s. Despite their similar conceits they take very different approaches to delivering popcorn entertainment yet both succeed admirably.

*That was probably a bullet dodged.

Less is more

I find some films almost impossible to review. Some like Mad Max: Fury Road are so overwhelming that they’re hard to process. Others don’t seem worth bothering with; I managed to write a paragraph on Jurrasic World as part of a post about velocirapotors.

By contrast, the review of Ant Man basically writes itself. I complained that its predecessor in Marvel canon, Avengers: Age of Ultron, was overblown and unable to contain all the characters, subplots and mythology jammed into it. Ant Man, a film about someone whose superpower, is shrinking himself avoids this problem.

Writing that seems trite but coming a few months after the overstuffed Age of Ultron it’s very welcome. Rather than a globe spanning adventure containing every character Marvel can get the IP for, its cast of characters is basically composed of two (broadly defined) families. That allows it to savour its most appealing elements while staying reasonably compact. Its run time is less than two hours rather than closer to three – a difference my bum and bladder both appreciated – yet of the two films it feels by far the less rushed. And in such a compact story the conflagration of the different elements feels natural rather than contrived for the sake of epicness. Ant Man thus delivers more entertainment with less endurance than Age of Ultron.

That this film has been a modest success is a substantial triumph. Not only was there a real risk the core concept would appear ridiculous but the path from that concept to the screen was rather fraught. It was initially supposed to be directed by Edgar Wright, who’d previously made cult classics like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs the World. However, he walked out in protest at the changes Marvel demanded to the script he had written with long time collaborator Joe Cornish.

Fortunately for people who like Wright’s work – and there really should be no other kind of person – Ant Man still feels a lot like one of his films. His trademarks, like action synced to music, are all there. Strikingly the most Wrightesque scene, in which someone delivers a ridiculous piece of exposition accompanied by fast cuts that might as well end ‘and go to the Winchester and wait for it all to blow over’, was apparently added after Wright’s departure from the project. That suggests he style remained an influence on the new creative team. And if, as I suspect, the climactic battle aboard a toy train set was Wright’s invention then it will rival the killing zombies with records sequence in Shaun of the Dead as his most entertaining set piece.

This is not to say it’s perfect. The plot moves along grooves which are sufficiently well worn that one can tell what will happen at least ten minutes before it does. And while the gang of goofy ethnically stereotyped petty criminals undeniably provide some of the funniest moments of the film, it’s still not great that there’s a gang of goofy ethnically stereotyped criminals.

Despite this Ant Man is massive fun and an unmistakable victory for Marvel. Nonetheless, it is potentially a bad indicator for the studio’s future films. If smaller is better, then colossal projects like Civil War and the Infinity War are likely to underwhelm.

Summary: 8/10 – just the right amount of a good thing.

The art of silliness

The Minions demonstrates the intelligence and hard work required to make an apparently stupid film.

I spend rather more time thinking about the Minions than a grown man really ought to. Despite this I’m not really sure about the exact alchemy that makes them so appealing. They somehow manage the peculiar feat of combining the normally contradictory traits of cuteness and weirdness. Their burbling is somehow endearing rather than grating.

That they have a very humanoid form but are very clearly not human probably helps as it keeps them well clear of uncanny valley. Certainly those big expressive faces, especially the eyes, help. And their strange patois has a musicality to it.

However, I suspect that what ultimately make them so likable is that they are very childlike. Indeed, I’ve found that now I work with children the Minions have become (even) funnier. They perfectly reflect a seven year old’s combination of excitability, innocence, eagerness to please and the attention span of an ant. Oh and one of them is always yelling something incomprehensible for some unfathomable reason. They thus tap into our primal affection for our young.

The appeal of the Minions may come from an instinctive place but that doesn’t mean they were created that way. As Pierre Coffin, the director and voice of the Minions, records they had to be crafted not only for their own sake but as an element of a bigger film:

In the first film, they were depicted as this big army of muscular thugs doing the dirty work of the arch villain Gru and we quickly realised that they were very unappealing and made Gru a totally unsympathetic anti-hero.

“To make him charming, we had this idea that he’d know all of his little helpers by their forenames, even though there were hundreds, and suddenly Gru was sympathetic. We then put goggles on them, added workers’ overalls, making them look like these subterranean mole men-type creatures, gave them an increasingly saturated yellow skin tone and then they became the Minions. And from that first scene we knew they gave the other characters counter-balance, had great comedic potential and were super cute.

And to move from supporting characters to the centre of the film they have to be recrafted. They’re no longer simply an extension of Gru: they now have their own history and journey. And they’re made more distinctive from each other with their differing personalities emphasised.

Indeed the Minions is a good reminder that what is dumb fun for the audience requires, if done well, hard work and intelligence from the filmakers. Millions of manhours must have been spent at computers shaping the onscreen images down to the last blade of grass. The jokes are not hugely original, the climactic gag is very similar to something the Shrek films did, but from the Minions doing the Universal theme ownwards they land with a speed and regularity that belies any idea they happened by accident. And while it lacks any performance quite as stellar as Steve Carrell as Gru, the voice work is nonetheless still huge fun. Jennifer Saunders as the Queen is a particular blast.

The end product may be dumb fun but to make this kind of film requires very smart people working very hard.

Summary: 8/10 – it doesn’t quite match Despicable Me 1 and 2 but the Minions is still a ludicrous amount of fun.

 

Velociraptors were actually pretty lame

They were the size of turkeys, had the brains of ostriches and probably could have been fought off with a good kick.

I’m pretty clearly in a minority on Jurassic World. Audiences seem to be lapping it up; it’s box office taking currently exceeds the GDP of Gambia by several hundred million dollars. Nonethless, I felt it’s human characters were lazy stereotypes there solely to deliver ‘well duh’ worthy exposition. Where the original generated genuine awe, this one keeps telling you that you are being awed before presenting you with something that looks like a so-so episode of Walking with Dinosaurs. And its gender politics are as bad as Our Lord Joss predicted they would be.

But one thing even I think it got right is maintaining the menacing appeal of the velociraptors, all the more heightened because this time they may be lulling the human characters into a false sense of security. They might lack the raw power of the T-Rex but they more than make up for it with cunning and the ability to work together to bring about our downfall.

Unfortunately (or if humanity ever does start bringing dinosaurs back, fortunately) the real things were rather less impressive. The New York Times spoke to a number of paleontologists who explained that raptors were about the size of a turkey with the feathers to match, lacked the facial muscles to snarl and had to contend with with overflexible wrists and tails. Indeed, the article quotes one paleontologist saying:

“If you had a good pair of work boots you could kick it in the head and it wouldn’t be frightening”.

Credit: Peter Minster

Our best guess at what an actual velociraptor would have looked like

As for their intelligence I’m not sure that’s quite up to what the Jurassic film suggests. An article on the Smithsonian website, says that based on their brain-body weight ratio they were probably among the smartest dinosaurs. Disappointingly, that’s not saying much and they’d only be about as smart as an ostrich.

I also found a post on a blog hosted by the University of Berkley commenting on the claim in Jurassic Park III that raptors were “smarter than dolphins, smarter than primates”. In fact:

They had modestly large brains but those brains were nowhere near as elaborate as the brains of mammals or even most modern birds. If relative brain size is any measure of intelligence, dromaeosaurs were just a little smarter than typical dinosaurs. Not geniuses by mammalian standards.

So the particularly chilling moment in the original film where human characters realise that the raptors pursuing them can open doors probably wouldn’t have happened. Indeed, it stands to reason that if your cat would struggle to figure something out, it would almost certainly have defeated a raptor.

[Spoiler] Hence it seems exceedingly far fetched to claim as Jurassic World does that because it has raptor DNA, the fictional Indominus Rex would be smart enough to: leave claw marks on its enclosure to make it captors think it has climbed out, then exploit its tree frog DNA to make its thermal signature disappear, then lie in wait for humans to open its enclosure, before finally clawing out its tracking implant and going on a rampage.

So in conclusion, velociraptors have been significantly overhyped and are much less impressive than generally thought. Rather like a certain summer blockbuster currently showing at a cinema near you.

Two cheers for franchises

The insane majesty of Mad Max: Fury Road is an unanswerable riposte to those who assume franchise cinema lacks originality.

A lot of commentary around films takes as its premise that the assent of franchise cinema represents a clear case of Hollywood sacrificing creativity for commerce.  That film would be so much better if only Hollywood would be more original.

I’m sceptical about both parts of this equation. I blogged yesterday about the how the financial case is not as formidable as is often supposed. Today, I want to suggest the artistic indictment is also weaker than generally assumed.

The impetus for doing so comes from Mad Max: Fury Road. It looked to have emerged from Studios ongoing process of fracking their intellectual property: they blast, shake and pump apparently arid territory to yield up new, though generally not fresh, material. For example, you make a fourth instalment in a series that’s third instalment was released thirty years before but do so without its star. Could there really be any plausible reasons besides money to do so?

Surprisingly, there turned out to be plenty. I saw it a week ago but have not yet been able to write a review of it. Sitting down and writing what I think of it would require me to have digested it. Yet it’s so vast, visceral and strange I’ve not been able to. But I can say, applying the labels often slapped on franchise cinema – safe, predictable and interchangeable – to Fury Road would be unthinkable. We’ve seen plenty of visions of dystopian futures lately but nothing this disturbing and regularly putridly revolting. The action scenes go not only big but aptly crazy without losing coherence or humanity. And it looks, astonishing, the Namibian desert is a sumptuous background to shots that will soon feel familiar as filmmakers rush to copy them but which at the moment are bracingly different. It’s raw, undiluted cinema and even if I’m not sure I liked it, I know it I was awed by it.

It is not just an exception to the rules; it is a stark demonstration of how wrong it is to suppose there is a rule that says franchise films must be lazy or unoriginal.

For starters, term ‘franchise films’ has come to encompass a vast array of movies. If a film is a sequel, spin-off, remake, adaptation of a popular novels or some combination of those it seems to count. By that definition The Godfather, Exorcist, Jaws and Gone with the End were franchise films rather than original ones. Even the most apparently cynical pieces of franchise stretching of recent years, resemble things that have produced classic films in the past. Silence of the Lambs was not only both an adaptation and reboot, it was a reboot that came just five years after the previous attempt to bring Hannibal Lector to the silver screen. That’s the same length as the gap between Spider Man 3 and a reboot in the form of the Amazing Spider Man.

Even if we talk confine ourselves to the films more often spoken of as franchises there still a pretty diverse bunch. One may be able to observe similarities between Fury Road and the Nolan Batman Films or the Hunger Game but probably not with Twilight or the Hangover. One can point to franchise films across the whole range from light to gritty and from innumerable genres. Just about the only common denominator is that they tend to be made for sizeable budgets with a large audience in mind. But even there are exceptions to that rule, for example, Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. So it is wrong to imply that working within franchises forces filmmakers to make films that are interchangeable. It still leaves open a huge number of different avenues for them to take. If you want an illustration of this compare (or rather contrast) Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher and Christopher Nolan’s massively different takes on the Batman mythology.

It is also worth considering the fact that the existence of a franchise is largely determined by the character and story. So working within the ‘confines’ of one should not constrain filmmakers from experimenting with the other aspects of their film. If the ending of X-Men: Days of Future and Captain America: the Winter Soldier look more or less the same to you, and they do to me, that says something about directors clustering around certain visual styles not about franchises breeding conformity.

There also seems to be a mistake made as to what kind of films would be getting greenlit in a world with fewer franchises. In a speech accepting his Independent Spirit award for Nightcrawler, director Dan Gilroy proclaimed that “Independent film, the foundation and everybody here today, I think are holdouts against a tsunami of superhero movies that have swept over this industry”. The implication was that independent films like his were threatened by big franchises of which superheroes are talismanic; that they have to struggle against them in order to survive. Whilst it may be true that independent cinema is struggling to survive, it is not by and large struggling with franchises. They are threatened by their block busting rivals to about the same extent that a Michelin starred restaurant is by a KFC. Stripped down to its essentials they may deliver the same product but they are doing so for such different markets that they don’t really compete. If not Fast & Furious 8 never makes it to the screen, the fourteen year old boy in a city in inland China that it’s targeted at is not going to go out and see a documentary shot with hand held cameras instead. The tsunami’s path has not taken it towards the most obviously worthy films.

What is has destroyed are the kind of blockbusters that predominated in the eighties and nineties. These were very often original only in the sense of creating a new fictional continuity. They had exactly the same pressures to maintain a broad audience as modern blockbusters do and did it in the same way: by cleaving to familiar styles and tropes. Where they differed was in the familiar faces they used to draw in audiences: they leaned more on stars than on classic characters. I’m not convinced that was such a great loss. Certainly I’m not sure that more films of the ilk of Beverly Hills Cop and Top Gun would be worth sacrificing Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the Dark Knight or, yes, Fury Road for.

The Shared Universe bubble

Are you excited about the Sinister Six film as I am? Yes! Then Sony is in trouble.

It’s doubtful that audiences love shared universes as much as studio execs do. Just look at poor Spider Man.

The not so amazing spider man

Blockbusters often divide audiences and critics. Yet the Amazing Spider Man 2 managed to unite them in modestly hostile indifference. A Rotten Tomatoes score of 53% was enough for the website to withhold a ‘fresh’ rating from the film. Meanwhile, it went on to become the lowest grossing Spider Man film of all time. Despite a boost from inflation, larger global audiences, the greater popularity of superhero films and a budget twice the size, it earned more than a $100 million dollars less than the original Spider-Man released twelve years before. For a film featuring an icon of popular culture recognisable around the world this was a disaster. Such a disaster in fact that Sony, the studio behind it, subsequently made the painful decision to share their prized property with their rivals Marvel.

The failure of the Amazing Spider Man series should serve as a warning to studios that are going increasingly franchise mad. But the potential financial rewards involved appear so large it has been ignored.

Not a license to print money

Franchises are undoubtedly big business. Survey the top grossing films of 2014 and you’ll see that all bar one of them are sequels, spin-offs, remakes, adaptations of popular novels or some combination of those. The exception Interstellar comes in right at the bottom of the list and even that had the advantage of sharing a director with a massive franchise. So studios are clearly right to think there is money to be made here.

But they are probably wrong about why they are making it. The prevailing view amongst movie execs seems to conflate familiarity with popularity. The theory seems to go that lots of us recognise, for example, Robocop and therefore presenting us with a new Robocop film will elicit a Pavlovian reaction that will compel us to go out and watch it.

However, as I’ve blogged before, a more plausible model is that franchises function as brands. Scott Mendelson of Forbes made this point well when he suggested that we should see Marvel as a new Pixar: audiences are drawn to its output not just because they recognise the characters (otherwise Guardians would have flopped) but because they treat its name as a marker of quality. It still follows that being part of a franchise can give a film a boost but it’s by making it more visible not more appealing.

The problem for studios is that this process can go into reverse. Fox had to struggle for years with the bad taste left by X-Men: the Last Stand.  They had to make a couple of good films before the franchise produced another big hit with Days of Future Past.

How a franchise can eat itself

Much the same problem afflicted Sony and its Spider Man reboot. By the time the Amazing Spider Man 2 came along audiences had seen the studio serve up duds for a decade. Why suppose this film would be any different?

Had it actually been different then, like Fox, Sony might have found themselves on a trajectory towards future hits. In fact, it compounded the problem. It staggered between an excessive number of subplots and characters only a few of which actually held much interest. That was in large part, a product of the fact the film served its own logic less than that of its franchise. Most of that superfluity of characters and subplots added little the film: some made the necessary gestures towards the source material but a larger number were part of Sony’s efforts to launch spin-off films about a group of villains from the comics. It thus wound up being – to borrow a joke from its Honest Trailer: “as much a set up for a Sinister Six movie you didn’t ask for, as it is a sequel to the spider man reboot you also didn’t ask for.”

Irrational exuberance

The damage wrought by Sony’s efforts to turn the Spider Man films into a Shared Universe make it strange that so many other studios are embarking on similar projects. The indications are that within a few years we will have Shared Universes for Marvel, DC, the X-men (possibly encompassing the Fantastic Four), Star Wars, Lego, Harry Potter and Transformers. Even the Sinister Six may still happen. Were I a shareholder in a studio, I would look at the number of eggs being put into this basket with great concern.

It would be one thing, if there a demonstrable demand from audiences for Shared Universes. But it’s not altogether clear there is. Besides the success of Marvel and the failure of the Amazing Spider Man, we don’t have much to base a judgement on: Batman vs Superman, Deadpool, Rogue One, Fantastic Creatures and Where to Find Them etc have not yet been tested with actual audiences. We can consider the two Wolverine films Fox has spun off from the X-Men films but their success has been moderate and even that relied on sharing a lead with the main series of films. The evidence that we have does not appear to bear out the notion that Shared Universes are an easy path to big hits.

If one wants to be bullish about the prospects of these forthcoming films, one could observe that Shared Universes have a proven track record in TV and books. But those are very different mediums from film. Almost every fictional TV series is already a shared universe of sorts requiring continuity to be maintained by multiple authors working on multiple instalments. Hence tying together multiple TV series is a less fundamental change than doing the same with films. Books work for pretty much the opposite reason; a literary shared universe likely has a single author which makes it easier to maintain continuity. Plus they are not constrained by things like actor’s contracts.

I suppose one could make a more abstract case for Shared Universe: we’ve not seen it yet but they have all these properties that mean they’ll make loads of money. One film can advertise the others and a desire for completism will compel  moviegoers to see films they would otherwise skip. The problem is that like the case for franchises in general, these can equally flip round. If audiences feel they need to see all the films in a Shared Universe to truly appreciate any of them, they might skip the lot. And if audiences dislike some of the films in a Shared Universe then that’s precisely the wrong kind of advertisement for future instalments.

The weakest link?

Were I looking for a Shared Universe to short, it would probably be DC’s. I liked Man of Steel but an awful lot of people didn’t. And it actually made less money than the Amazing Spider Man 2. Despite this Warner Bros is planning a dozen films in four years that will maintain continuity with it. I am sure that the afterglow of the Nolan and Burton Batman films mean that the next instalment, Batman v Superman, will do well. Beyond that things look rather dicey. One really has to wonder how they’ll mesh the bleak tone of Snyder’s films with more jovial characters like the Flash. One also wonders whether what is supposed to be a safety net for studios is actually encouraging Warner Bros to take risks they otherwise wouldn’t. In particular, I suspect that if brought the idea for a standalone film about a character as apparently corny as Aquaman, they’d have said no. I also suspect that even as part of a larger DCU they’ll have a hard time encouraging audiences to embrace him and that if the films that precede it are a disappointment then it may be a forlorn effort.

Waiting for the crash

Which is not to say that some of these Shared Universes won’t be big hits. Age of Ultron maybe hints that Marvel is becoming overambitious but it would take a huge reversal before it’s anything other than a substantial success. Star Wars is a rich universe that lends itself to spin offs and some interesting talent is being pulled in to work on those films. X-Men seems to have found its groove again though how we will have to see how it will cope without Hugh Jackman as an anchor.

But the existence of successes would not preclude their being a bubble. Amongst the companies whose shares rocketed during the dot com bubble were Amazon and Google. But there was also a company that sold only pet food and accessories that nonetheless attracted $300 million in venture capital before going bankrupt in less than a year without ever having made a profit. A proposition that seems only slightly less unreasonable than the notion that Dracula Untold is going to kick off a successful franchise.

I suspect that a lot of Studio Execs have similarly sceptical views. But a degree of herd behaviour may be kicking in: if you make a mistake it’s better for you to make the same one as everybody else because that way you can’t be singled out for blame. This is a key part of how bubbles emerge in financial markets: everyone buys the same stock and its value rises until it becomes apparent that it’s overpriced at which point its value plummets and a lot of people lose a lot of money. I’m afraid that the stock of Shared Universes may be similarly overvalued and that a crash may be on the way.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (review)

Of late the axiom that ‘less is more’ has not seemed to apply to superhero films. Indeed, they have appeared to defy gravity, adding far more characters than seems feasible yet somehow not coming crashing to earth.

Age of Ultron perhaps represents basic cinematic physics reasserting itself: it stays airborne but at times you can hear the engine sputtering.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not only big but also clever. The core story is engaging. The cast and writing has charisma to spare. There are precisely the kind of one-liners and comic moments. The action while hardly get out groundbreaking is nonetheless effective. And Ultron (voiced by James Spader) is an entertaining villain. And the first appearance of Andy Serkis’ Ulysses Klaw bodes well for Black Panther.

However, it all winds up feeling rather undercooked. I think the reason why is that in a superhero team movie, screentime had to be spread thinly between individual characters. While the first Avengers largely avoided this pitfall, its  sequel falls straight into it. The difference is that the first film had a very definite narrative about the team as a whole, recounting how a disparate collection of superheroes become the Avengers. The subplots didn’t feel like they were competing for time because they were pulling in the same direction. Age of Ultron is much less cohesive. Battling Ultron takes each of the Avengers on a journey but they are distinct from each other. The individual arcs intersect rather than merging. So none of them has enough space to satisfactorily play itself out.

It also worked in the Avengers favour that we’d already met all the important characters in stand alone films. By contrast, Age of Ultron is the first time we get to know Ultron, the Vision and the Maximoff twins all of whom part key roles in its plot.

That’s symptomatic of a broader difference. While the Avengers was the climax of the first round of Marvel films, Age of Ultron mainly appears to be preparing and foreshadowing the third batch of movies. Indeed on reflection what it reminds me of most is a two and a half hour trailer. It showcases cool stuff and hints at more of it but never quite delivers in full.

Summary: 7/10 – Age of Ultron was always going to be good. Sadly it’s nowhere near as good as it could have been.

I ranked every film and TV series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe because I’m that cool

As my way of celebrating the impending release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, here’s my personal ranking of the ten films and three TV series that form the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) so far.

13. Iron Man 2 (2010)

Pros: The first film to move beyond hinting at a broader universe and start fleshing it out. Also it introduced us to Black Widow, and Don Cheadle is a better James Rhodes than Terrance Howard.

Cons: It’s all set up and no pay off. The filmmakers seem to have purposefully avoided anything too interesting lest that prevent them being able to use it later on. Perhaps because of this the story and script are a mess. Also, it wastes Sam Rockwell (a serious crime) but gives us plenty of Gwyneth Paltrow (an even worse crime).

Summary: The film that sacrificed itself for the good of the rest of the MCU.

12. The Incredible Hulk (2008)

Pros: Nothing in particular.

Cons: Nothing in particular.

Summary: It’s really forgettable.

11. Thor (2011)

Pros: The scenes set on Earth are mostly fun.

Cons: Despite having superthesp Ken Brangh directing, the faux Shakespeare stuff doesn’t really work. That’s unfortunate because that’s most the scenes and in particular the most dramatic ones.

Summary: A film where some physicists taking readings in a backwater town in New Mexico is more interesting than the action sequences. That’s mostly not a good thing.

10. Thor: the Dark World (2013)

Pros: Loki only really came into his own when Whedon’s writing injected him with some menace and panache. The improvement carries over into this film, with by far the best scenes being the Whedon penned sparring between Thor and Loki. They are a joy to watch.

Cons: I really could not care less whether Thor manages to prevent the Dark Elves unleashing the Aether at the centre of the convergance.

Summary: Ideally Thor: Ragnarok will just be Tom Hiddleston delivering Whedon one-liners.

9. Captain America: the First Avenger (2011)

Pros: The by no means straightforward evolution of Steve Rodgers into Captain America is well played with nice twists like how the military’s first instinct is to use him for propaganda. The best part, however, is Hayley Atwell managing to elevate Peggy Carter from a generic supporting role to the core of the film.

Cons: The actions scenes are bland beyond words. As a result, the film actually tails off as it reaches its climax. Also Tommy Lee Jones gives the most “where’s my cheque?” performance of all time.

Summary: The first film to hint that Marvel was capable of doing smarter things. However, it gets the basics wrong and largely falls flat as a result.

8. Agents of Shield (2014-15)

Pros: It took a while getting there but this is now genuinely good telly. It’s pacey, delivers plenty of cliffhangers and has found interesting character dynamics to explore. It has also begun serving as a harbinger of the future development of the MCU.

Cons: Very little good can be said about the first sixteen episodes. It was corny with terrible CGI and a meandering story arc. It’s got a LOT better but it still has weaknesses. The most grating of which is overuse of on the nose exposition.

Summary: If I’d judged the two series separately then the second would have been higher placed. The first might well have been bringing up the rear.

7. Iron Man (2008)

Pros: Started the whole MCU, revived Robert Downey Jnr’s career and made post-credit stings a thing.

Cons: It’s a bit hammy in places.

Summary: If you ignore what it lead to, it’s a pretty generic blockbuster. Naught wrong with that mind.

6. Iron Man 3 (2013)

Pros: Impressive stripped down action sequences, a plot that makes sense and a good ensemble cast. And as much as it annoys comic purists, the twist is hilarious.

Cons: Gwyneth Paltrow is still in it.

Summary: Proved that Marvel could live up to the standards it set itself with the Avengers.

5. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Pros:  Rivals Scott Pilgrim as the funniest comic book film ever. Plus the sheer boldness of making a film with a racoon and a tree at its heart.

Cons: Marvel loves its McGuffins almost as much as its underwhelming villains. This film has two of the latter chasing after one of the former. It’s an indication of how good this film is that this only mildly undermines the fun of the movie.

Summary: If you didn’t enjoy this, I despair of the possibility you will ever be entertained.

4. The Avengers (2012)

Pros: Successfully married sci-fi epic and office comedy with phenomenal results.  Created a new sub-genre: the superhero ensemble. In Mark Ruffallo, we finally get the movie Hulk we deserved, who let us not forget at one point destroys a massive alien spaceship with a single punch.

Cons: The plot is occasionally a bit thin (*cough* failsafe *cough*) and it introduced Thanos which on the evidence of Guardians was a mistake.

Summary: Whoop, whoop!

3. Daredevil (2015)

Pros: All that juicy weighty morally ambiguous darkness. In particular, Vincent D’Onofrio as a villain we can believe in and therefore get really scared by. Also the simultaneously beautiful and horrifying fight choreography.

Cons: Marvel’s young fan base should definitely not be watching this. If you know any of them who are, report their parents to social services.

Summary: Daredevil is to Marvel, what Daniel Craig’s 007 is to the Bond franchise.

2. Captain America: the Winter Soldier (2014)

Pros: Another great ensemble. Fight scenes inspired by the Raid and a car chase based on the French Connection.  I love how it adopts of a Seventies political thriller and the fact that it uses the space afforded by having a lead character called ‘Captain America’ to highlight the fact that not everything the American government does is desirable.

Cons: You can knit pick the plot and the massive battle scene at the end rather undermines the more grounded feel of the rest of the film.

Summary: In my initial review, I described the Winter Soldier as Marvel “coming of age”. I stand by that.

1. Agent Carter (2015)

Pros: A smart plot, a great lead performance, supporting actors who are almost as good, its wonderful evocation of the 1940s, a deliciously twisted villain, real pathos, a feminist message and its style.

Cons: Sometimes it feels a little like its rushing to get everything into the eight episodes it has. Other than that I really can’t think of anything.

Summary: Even in a golden age of television, there’s little else on at the moment that’s this entertaining.

Boyhood took Two Days, One Night’s nomination

Dear readers may I crave . Up till now I’ve not written about Boyhood for the simple reason that I only got round to watching it last night. Now I have, I’m thinking not only that Birdman was a more worthy winner but that its nomination should have gone to another film.

Now obviously saying, as the awards process requires, that one film is better than another is kind of stupid. Not only is such a judgement subjective, it also generally involves comparing things that are not really comparable. For example, imagine deciding, as Academy voters just did, whether Boyhood or Birdman is better? You might make judgements like Birdman is funnier or Boyhood is more realistic. But noticing this kind of thing is largely beside the point: Boyhood is not trying to be comic nor is Birdman trying to be naturalistic. The banal conclusion one generally ought to reach is that they are different.

However, there are occasions when one can compare like with like. For example, there were two films last year that told the story of explorers alone and adrift in a hostile environment: Gravity and All is Lost. The broad similarities in their plot and structure make it easier to pick out contrasts between the two films. Gravity was corny and predictable, whilst All is Lost generated far more pathos and tension. So I felt comfortable saying the Academy blew it by giving multiple nominations to Gravity but only a Sound Editing nomination for All is Lost.

This year, the part of Gravity was played by Boyhood. It received great plaudits for its central gimmick: shooting a single film over 12 years. And to be fair to Linklater, he pulls it off. Having placed himself under this constraint, he delivers a perfectly reasonable film.

That does not, however, mean that it:

…is not just good but revolutionary—a film that reconsiders, in surprising and rewarding ways, the medium’s relationship with time, with storytelling, and with its audience.

Boyhood does unfortunately illustrate why generally speaking one does not make a film in scattered bursts across a decade. The film’s energy is rather dissipated, it lacks energy is rather dissipated, it lacks direction or a plot and at times feels loose assemblage of short films rather than a feature film in its own right.

Even its great strength has been done better by another film this year: Two Days, One Night. Both films depict the very ordinary in a way that is nonetheless seems cinematic. Belgian directorial pairing the Dardenne brothers share with Linklater a talent for making their camera disappear and thereby convincing you that you are watching say a meal in a stranger’s house.

However, in Two Days the Dardenne’s take pretty much the opposite approach to Linklater in dealing with time. The film takes place not over a dozen years but (as the name implies) a single weekend. During that time we follow the efforts of Sandra (played by the Oscar nominated Marion Cotillard) to persuade her co-workers to forgo their annual bonuses so she can keep her job. This framing gives it precisely the kind of form and purpose Boyhood lacks.

While I think the above point is the most important point in Two Days favour, it also benefits enormously from its central performance. While the acting in Boyhood has rightly been praised none of it matches Cotillard’s achievement. Her face is on screen in close up for the majority of the film’s running time. Yet Sandra’s personality and depression as filtered through the Dardenne’s ultra-realistic style demand that she is generally rather subdued. So Cotillard has to carry the audience through more or less the whole film while conveying a massive inner struggle in only the subtlest of ways.

It is also worth mentioning that Two Days offers a deep and affecting look at mental illness and deindustrialisation. By contrasts, Boyhoods’ attempts at tackling ‘issues’ wind up seeming more like hit and runs than a proper exploration of them.

Yet, like All is Lost the year before, Two Days only received a single nomination. It deserved better. Though I’m delighted that having been snubbed by every other major award Cotillard was nominated for an Oscar. If you’ve not seen Two Days then I’d really recommend seeking it out.

No Bollywood film has ever been nominated for a music Oscar

^Bolo Na from Chittagong. Winner of the 2013 Silver Lotus Award for best lyrics. In the same year the Academy decided only to nominate two of a possible six films for the Best Song Oscar^

I have pretty big reservations about the Oscars. When this year’s nominations were announced I blogged that:

The pale, male and stale voters of the Academy retain a strong preference for a particular kind of film. The nominations have as always gone disproportionately to English language dramas at the more worthy end of the mainstream with actors and directors the academy is familiar with which go on general release in the United States.

A particularly stark illustration of this comes from the Academy’s music categories.

They are generally much criticised. In a recent article for AV Club Jesse Hassenger works through the most striking songs in the films of 2014 and shows how technicalities kept virtually all of them were kept off the Academy’s Long List. For example, he observes that none of the songs from Belle and Sebastian film God Help the Girl were eligible because they’d appeared on a 2009 album by the band and were therefore not originally from a film. This rule applied even though it appears that the songs were written with the specific intent they be used in a musical and the album was an attempt to garner interest in a project that eventually became God Help the Girl. Hassenger writes that the result is that:

the music division’s old-fashioned tastes combined with various rulings makes them seem vaguely hostile to any musical artists operating outside of a standard movie-score (or in the case of songs, Broadway-style) framework.

Possibly the worse year for the best song category was 2012 when the Academy found the year’s offerings so limited that it only nominated two rather the usual six. ‘Am a man or a muppet’ from the Muppets went on to win. Which is a charming but otherwise not particularly interesting song.

Now had the Academy wished to look for a wider selection of songs from films where would it have had to look? I would suggest the obvious answer is India. It has the largest film industry in the world as measured by the number of feature films produced each year. And of course music plays a massively larger part in those films than it does in Hollywood’s output. This point is illustrated by the fact that India’s National Film Awards have (by my count) six categories devoted to music compared with the two at the Oscars.

Yet the Academy appears never to nominate songs or scores from Bollywood films. Wikipedia’s (extraordinarily short) list of Indians nominated for Academy Awards can be to divided pretty easily into categories: 1) nominees for Best Foreign Language Film and 2) Indians working on British or American produced films. This later group do get nominated and indeed win. A.R.Rahman picked up golden statuettes for both score and song for his work on Slumdog Millionaire. Yet it seems that no one working on an Indian film for a South Asian audience has even got a nomination.

I’ve looked in vein for an explanation of why this is. It might be that they also fall victim to technicalities, that the people drawing up the long list simply don’t think to include choices from Bollywood or that Indian distributors don’t put their films forward. Whatever the reason it is a stark illustration of the parochialism of the Oscars.

The Academy may theoretically be an international organisation but its based in the US and that’s where the vast bulk of its membership comes from. The National Film Awards are sometimes called ‘India’s Oscars’ and perhaps it would be better if we thought about the Academy Awards not as ‘the Oscars’ but as ‘America’s Oscars’. They represent primarily American tastes and a small slice of American tastes at that. They are the output of a process by which a series of heavily lobbied old, white, American men make subjective choices about which films they personally preferred. There’s nothing wrong with that but it means they are not the definitive marker of cinematic quality they are often taken to be.