Lost in the Movies: movie review/film essay

Showing posts with label movie review/film essay. Show all posts

June 2025 Patreon round-up: EXCLUSIVE - Completing the Star Wars saga w/ The Rise of Skywalker & Solo (w/ Sparkwood & 21 podcast re-release)

During a period from 2010 to 2018, Star Wars was a frequent subject on this site; in over a dozen pieces including written reviews, podcasts, visual tributes, and video essays I covered every existing entry in the cinematic saga - all eight Skywalker saga "Episodes" as well as the first side-story film Rogue One - and even took a few steps into the extended Clone Wars spin-off universe. (All "Star Wars saga" labelled posts are listed here, with other more fleeting references included at the end of this Patreon entry.) The last of these commentaries was composed over seven years ago (although I did belatedly publish a backlogged The Clone Wars viewing diary in 2023), making the time since this steady stream of Star Wars coverage almost as long a span as the coverage itself. The great holes in this overview were the two films I never even saw (let alone discussed): the last - for now - chapter in the grand core narrative, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, and the plucky but underperforming spin-off film that killed the spin-off film concept for many years, the Han Solo origin story Solo: A Star Wars Story. Finally, for my $5/month patrons, I'm completing that journey in an effort inspired not by a film but a series: the superb two-season Disney Plus show Andor, run by Tony Gilroy. (Before writing these reviews, I conducted a conversation with return guest Riley MacDonald on all of Andor; it was so sprawling that I've only begun to transcribe it, so it probably won't have the chance become an exclusive reward until October.) Compared to the maturity, invention, and accomplishment of Andor, The Rise of Skywalker and Solo might seem quite slight but I found qualities to enjoy in both. In Solo's case, the appeal was straightforward: this is just a thoroughly entertaining adventure film overburdened by great expectations as well as presumptions of disappointment. In Skywalker's case, the appeal is much more complicated: the film is largely a disaster, but a deeply fascinating one, an experience I eagerly awaited digging into after watching for the first time. Meanwhile, in addition to this double review I offered an advance work-in-progress to all tiers and conducted a poll for next month's podcast with the top tier.

What are the exclusive June rewards?

In October and November, I embarked on a journey through every film in the Halloween series. Although initiated just for fun, this fruits of this slo-mo movie marathon are evident now: exclusive to the $5/month tier, a massive essay focused on two of the more fraught and compelling entries in the franchise, while touching on many of the other films as well. Rob Zombie's late zeroes reboots offered provocative and polarizing perspectives on the slasher classic: the first film is half prequel and half straight-up remake with some twists, the second film is a wild departure into new narrative territory. Moreover there are several versions of each, although I only get into the differences between the director's and theatrical cuts of the second. There are also many connections between that sequel and Twin Peaks (Fire Walk With Me in particular), a comparison many critics have drawn before and part of what led me to seek out Zombie's "unrated edition" of Halloween II in the first place. The emphasis of this essay is on what fascinates me most about these films: their reinforcement and reinvention of the cinematic traditions surrounding Michael Myers and Laurie Strode.

I'm sure this won't be the last work I do on Halloween (nor is it the first; see my podcast on the John Carpenter original). While thoughts on the eleven other Halloween movies are sprinkled throughout this piece, I'd love to do a more official rundown of the whole series in order, with capsules on each film; I'm also humoring the idea of a video essay series after checking out what already exists in that format. That project would be saved until at least next Halloween and/or maybe after Journey Through Twin Peaks (as noted with my remaining Mirrors of Kane chapters and the Watership Revisited mashup, the only ambiguous part of my path to new Journey is whether I'll use other video essays as runways or follow-ups to the big one). For now, this is my most ambitious and in-depth coverage of a horror touchstone. Like my public/patron essay on the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon from a few months ago, it represents a turn toward writing just for patrons - and is much longer than what will usually be offered month-to-month.

The Halloween essay can be read as one big post or divided into several parts: an intro about Michael and Laurie in the whole series, followed by a review of each Zombie film (you can see the initial round-up, with a note on presentation, here). Given its scope as well as other distractions, the work was not presented until early December. The monthly TWIN PEAKS Character Series preview made it up just in time for November; this is the first entry I needed to compose entirely from scratch - including screenshot selection - since 2018. And as a coda to the recently concluded public podcast feeds, which mostly consisted of re-presented Patreon audio, I've also offered teasers of all the films which remain behind a paywall for both Lost in the Movies and Twin Peaks Cinema. As noted in a recent adjustment to my welcome video, which I'll save for the December round-up, my nearly six-year archive is another big perk of becoming a patron.

What are the November rewards?

(I covered the rest of the Up series in 2016.)

The ninth entry of the Up documentary series finds itself - if not necessarily its subjects - hovering in a place of uncertainty. For fifty-five years, director Michael Apted at least attempted to interview fourteen British individuals (although a few declined to participate in certain entries) beginning when they were schoolchildren with the intended one-off 7 Up! - which Apted worked on under the direction of Paul Almond for a BBC program. Heading into 63 Up, I expected a more melancholy meditation on aging, loss, and disappointment although I'm not sure why. After all, these people are not quite elderly yet - many of them are still working even if they discuss imminent retirement, several have children still living at home, and more than a few mention parents who died only very recently or who are still alive in their eighties and nineties. There will, inevitably, be an end of the road for the entire ensemble but if they are closer now to that end than their beginning there is still a ways to go. Perhaps my anticipation stemmed from vague knowledge of the exceptions to that general case: two participants have passed away by now (one is mentioned in the film itself, the other shown in ill health). Above all, however, I think it was Apted's own passing which informed my initial impression. More than anything else going forward, the absence of the series' guiding hand casts doubt upon future films.

"The Unseen" is a series in which I watch popular films for the first time (spoilers are discussed, including for Twin Peaks and Forrest Gump). The list, which moves backwards in time, is based on the highest-ranked film I've never seen each year on Letterboxd (as of April 2018). The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was #5 for 2008.

The Story: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." The famous conclusion of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was literalized by the same author three years in the past (how appropriate) with his 1922 short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. And David Fincher's cinematic adaptation, based on a screenplay by Forrest Gump's Eric Roth (a connection hard to miss), literalizes this concept even further with actual floodwaters threatening the hospital deathbed of Daisy Fuller (Cate Blanchett) in 2005 New Orleans. As Hurricane Katrina bears down on the city where she spent much of her life, the eighty-two-year-old Daisy shares an anecdote, and then a diary/scrapbook, with her thirty-seven-year-old daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond). The anecdote relates the sad tale of Mr. Gateau (Elias Koteas), a clockmaker who was commissioned to create a grand timepiece for New Orleans' train station; grieving the recent loss of his son in World War I, Gateau's installation runs backwards, symbolically wishing for the return of those dead young men. The diary reveals that, around the same time - the night of Armistice Day to be exact - button manufacturer Thomas Button (Jason Flemyng) raced home through the jubilant end-of-war celebrations to find his wife (Joeanna Sayler) dying in childbirth. Horrified by the infant's appearance - the boy is a shriveled creature covered by wrinkles and wracked with arthritis, cataracts, and other ailments - Thomas flees his home with the baby in his arms, nearly tossing the child into the river before hiding him on the steps of a nursing home.

Adopted by caretaker Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) and dubbed Benjamin (eventually played by Brad Pitt whose features are fused with other actors' bodies early on), the child is not expected to live very long. Every day of existence seems a miracle, and all the more miraculous is his slow recovery from all those birth defects. Though small in stature, well into adolescence his face and body resemble the elderly residents surrounding him; he needs braces after finally standing from his wheelchair inside a revival tent (the preacher played by Lance P. Nichols collapses in death even as he summons Benjamin to rise). Drawn to the outside world but unable to travel far - physically because he's old and mentally because he's still a dependent child - Benjamin falls in love Daisy (Elle Fanning and Madisen Beaty before Blanchett steps in), a girl visiting her grandmother at the home. Just a few years younger than him in reality, they appear to be separated by an almost unbridgeable gap of generations. Eventually Benjamin becomes self-reliant enough to begin work on a tugboat, where the salty, tattooed Captain Mike Clark (Jared Harris) introduces the naive youngster to the pleasures of booze and women. Departing for a series of international engagement during the Great Depression, Benjamin - now looking like a seasoned but far more upright sixtysomething - meets the refined British expat Elizabeth Abbot (Tilda Swinton) while docked in the Soviet Union, already at war with Germany although the U.S. is not. The sailor and the diplomat's wife begin an affair with ends without explanation on the eve of Pearl Harbor; from there Benjamin joins his captain in a war effort where they serve mainly to assist bigger and sturdier cargo conveys and battleships.

After a relatively quiet period at sea, the tugboat battles a U-boat and Benjamin is one of few survivors. He returns to New Orleans looking middle-aged while his mother appears noticeably older. When he is reunited with Daisy, she is at the peak of youthful beauty and vivaciousness - a trained dancer, she lives in New York City and provides a stark contrast with Benjamin's reserved Southern gentleman demeanor. He declines her sexual overtures and then attempts to visit Manhattan and sweep her off his feet a few years later, by which time she has another lover. They remain emotionally too far apart to kindle their chemistry into something deeper and more fulfilling. Meanwhile, Benjamin's father reaches out to reconcile with him, explaining the young man's history for the first time and eventually passing the booming button business onto the younger Button when Thomas dies. Another decade, another phase of life for Benjamin, who is now spry enough to race his motorcycle from one romantic encounter to another while also encountering another missed connection with Daisy in the fifties. The handsome bachelor discovers that the talented performer's career has been cut short by a devastating car accident; when he shows up in Paris to visit, she rejects even his overtures of friendship. Only in the sixties, when they are both chronologically and physically around forty, do the couple finally come together. Traveling in style and living off the Button family earnings (they move in together only after Benjamin's non-Button mother passes away), they embrace the vitality of rock and roll and the sensuality of the era. A daughter - Caroline, it turns out - is born in the late sixties and Benjamin decides he must depart to wander the world and prepare for an old age in which he will transform into a child.

Benjamin and Daisy reunite one other time to make love, she now aged into her fifties (with a new husband to raise Caroline) and he a beautiful youth of twenty or so, before their final years together. A seeming adolescent whose confusion has more to do with senility than puberty, Benjamin returns to the nursing home and is looked after by his former lover now playing the role of mother; he dies in her arms as a fresh-faced infant just a couple years before her own end. Caroline is shocked to learn all of this history in her mother's final moments, just as it becomes clear that the hurricane is about to consume the city. Nearby, Gateau's ornate clock - recently replaced by an impersonal digital display - rests forgotten in a basement and drowns in the deluge.

The Context:

"The Unseen" is a series in which I watch popular films for the first time (spoilers are discussed). The list, which moves backwards in time, is based on the highest-ranked film I've never seen each year on Letterboxd (as of April 2018). Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was #8 for 2009 - the next entry will be published later today.

The Story: Far from the gothic fairy-tale setting of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Scottish Highlands, wicked creatures are attacking ultramodern twenty-first century London. The fanatical Death-Eater cult - who use black magic in a campaign against sorcerers born to Muggles (non-wizard humans) - destroy the Millennium Bridge; no wonder the salty old Hogwarts headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) yanks his star pupil, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), away from a date with a waitress (Elarica Johnson) whom he's just worked up the nerve to ask out. Harry is needed to help save the world; romantic rites of passage can wait. And yet despite these apocalyptic stakes, Harry will spend the next days and/or weeks far from the metropolis calling out for his protection, instead helping Dumbledore recruit (and then spy upon) a former professor (Jim Broadbent), studying an old spell book altered by the mysterious "half-blood prince" in his remote academy, and - after all - navigating romances between and around himself, his friends Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), and Ron's sister Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright). Distrustful of rival student Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) and the imperious teacher Severus Snape (Alan Rickman), Harry eventually discovers that their perniciousness runs even deeper than suspected; collaborating to bring down Harry's mentor, they end up killing Dumbledore (with Snape revealing that he himself was the half-blood prince who wrote the spells Harry has been using). Harry concludes that he must hunt down the evil Voldemort - once upon a time the brilliant but resentful Hogwarts student Tom Riddle (Frank Dillane and Hero Fiennes-Tiffin), whom Dumbledore rescued from an orphanage. And Harry's friends insist on accompanying him on this quest.

The Context:

Netflix's DVD mailing service ends today, and my last disc (Carmen Jones) was sent a few days ago. Although the closure received buzz in the past few months since it was announced, the vast majority of Netflix users - streaming subscribers, if it even needs to be said - likely have no idea that the postal service was still delivering those once-famous red envelopes at this late date (and technically, still will be as the last stray scarlet survivors reach their now-permanent homes early next week). As with so many of these mercurial changes, it's hard to say exactly when "Netflix" came to mean streaming from a number of quite limited titles rather than choosing a rental from a vast library of physical media and receiving that object from the company. Some time around the middle of the last decade, while I stubbornly persisted with this practice, most of my friends and family would appear surprised when they spotted the envelope, or heard me reference "getting a Netflix"...as if this could mean anything besides picking up a remote control and pressing a button. Much of my own work for the past fifteen years of this site - a period that parallels Netflix's own gradual shift away from its original model - would have been far more difficult and even impossible without access to a catalog far more vast than anything offered by a single streaming service (or even a collective sampling of many individual subscriptions).

This quiet termination, long expected among those of us aware it hadn't already happened, is indicative of much broader cultural trends. Sam Adams has already written a piece that articulates most of what I'd want to observe: "The Death of Netflix DVD Marks the Loss of Something Even Bigger". (The piece was either promoted or originally titled, before an all-too-revealing namechange to something catchier and more recognizable, "Remember the long tail?" Apparently not.) Adams references an article and book from the early zeroes (in the spirit of the general intransigence that led me to keep skirting streaming in favor of renting physical discs, I still won't call that era the aughts): "...on-demand manufacturing and digital distribution would disrupt the winner-take-all logic of monopoly capitalism and allow businesses to profit by making a nigh-infinite variety of products available to any audience, however small." The cultural trajectory of my own youth was in many ways the peaking and waning of this phenomenon - so in addition to the more generalized obituaries of Adams and others, I'd like to offer a few of my own personal reflections at the graveside.

My Netflix DVD history not only parallels but precedes my online work, stretching back between June 28 and 29 in 2005 when three discs were shipped to myself and my two roommates: Blazing Saddles (which I'm pretty sure was someone else's pick), Hotel Rwanda (which was definitely another roommate's, since I still haven't seen it), and Rebecca (that would be my own selection). I was living in Brooklyn, awaiting my senior year of college, and had moved into my first apartment just weeks earlier. Up to this point, my main source for rentals in New York was the legendary Kim's Video at St. Mark's Place, which would go out of business a few years later - part of a general trend of rental store closures initially spurred and eventually joined by Netflix's mail service - and experience a strange afterlife when its VHS/DVD library wound up in Sicily, enmeshed with the Mafia (a recent documentary relays this bizarre story). Truthfully, however, I hadn't been renting many films at all for the past year or so: music had completely captured my attention and eclipsed my cinephilia, and for a while Netflix was just another arm of that obsession. My rental history shows multiple chapters of the Beatles' Anthology documentary (alongside curios like the Pete Best doc Best of the Beatles) as well as Tommy, Live from the Isle of Wight, and so on.

A new phase of cinephilia was sparked a year later when I began renting more classic and contemporary art house films - as well as a little something called Twin Peaks. Prior to even the Gold Box collection, I rented "Season 1: Disc 1" of the David Lynch series on July 11, 2006, returning it a long fifteen days later with a resolution to wait until the pilot was available: this disc actually began with the first "regular" episode of the series rather than the one establishing the story. I'd finally come back to Peaks exactly two years later, by complete coincidence. On July 11, 2008 - after a six-month break from the service - I rented three discs simultaneously: Twin Peaks disc 1 (this time a version with the pilot), Be Kind Rewind, and Landmarks of Early Film. Five days later, the latter two would become the first films I'd ever review for this site. I'd always thought, for some reason, that I rented one of the titles - the more recent one, ironically - from a brick-and-mortar store, but no, apparently Netflix came in clutch from the beginning. From this point, my rental history (which parted ways with my roommates when they stopped the service and I took over their queues around 2006 or 2007, long before moving out) looks like an archive of my early blogging. Aside from some cinema attendance, and dips into my own collection, Netflix (which back then still just meant Netflix DVD) was my main dealer and perhaps occasionally my pusher, though I had enough endless requests that I didn't really need to ask for help finding more.

My queues - the list of discs Netflix would send me as soon as one was returned - grew to five and were organized thematically. In fact even that first trio had a rationale: Peaks topped the TV queue, Landmarks the chronological classic queue, and Rewind the new release queue. The first two topics remained until (literally) this very day, while new releases were phased out in favor of a random queue, a queue based on the Wonders in the Dark canonical countdowns, and a Criterion Collection queue which eventually became a home for acclaimed twenty-first century films instead. Each queue included hundreds of titles but I never got very far into most of these backlogs. My last disc is from my not-all-that-crowded chronological classics list which means in the fifteen years since Lumiere and Melies, with years passing between dips into this particular pool, I'd only reached the fifties. Now they all stand, Ozymandias-like, as relics of a time when the possibilities seemed endless.

As I plan to draw my own public film and (non-Twin Peaks) TV commentary to a close in just over a month, the closure of Netflix DVD feels like an intimate part of a long goodbye. Thanks for joining me in the neverending (until it ended) queue.

Barbie & Oppenheimer

I've separated those titles for a reason - this is not exactly a study of the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon which weaves these two radically different films together at every turn. Instead, for the most part I'll be reviewing each film separately and without concern for the combination of their divergent material (aside from this intro and eventually, in a follow-up Patreon piece, some closing thoughts about what does potentially link these movies). At the same time, clearly I'm taking the bait here by writing a single piece to deal with both films. How could I not?! For fifteen years, my online work has been marked by an obsession with duality (even my most singular obsession, Twin Peaks, focuses on that theme). My very first blog post paired two DVDs spanning the history of cinema, and since then I've taken every opportunity to compare and contrast in prose, podcast, and video essay (including a "Side by Side" series devoted to that very theme). These switch between works with blatant connections (like the Sterling Hayden 1950s heist films The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing) - in order to tease out what makes them differ - and works that seemed fundamentally opposed (the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion and the aforementioned surreal murder mystery Twin Peaks) - in order to tease out their rhyming sensibilities. A recently-concluded podcast covered dozens of different films with the hook of comparing them to Twin Peaks; as Kevin B. Lee once noted about my early video work, "interweaving" is a constant theme.

With all that in mind, I took immediate note of the bemusing, tongue-in-cheek "Barbenheimer" trend that overtook Twitter several months ago, following the announcement that Greta Gerwig's whimsical Mattel-sponsored toy movie Barbie would be released on the same day as Christopher Nolan's brooding period biopic Oppenheimer. The genesis of the meme is obvious at a glance - the movies form an almost too-perfect yin-yang in tone, aesthetic, creative development, and especially the gender of the protagonists and presumed audience. Cheeky vs. somber, bright vs. dark, commercial promotion vs. highminded literary adaptation, the ultimate chick flick vs. the distillation of filmbro chic. Alongside this fission, however, exists a sense of fundamental fusion. After all, if the films didn't have a certain consonance, the whole concept would fall flat. If Barbie dropped the same day as, say, Mission: Impossible 7, or Oppenheimer accompanied The Little Mermaid into theaters, there wouldn't be the same reaction. The most obvious parallel emerges in the titles themselves, one-word names of the central characters, lending themselves perfectly to a portmanteau. Both works are directed by distinctive auteur filmmakers working on a grand yet focused scale, making films that feel deeply personal even while addressing much bigger subjects. And those very subjects are both uniquely iconic. If the atomic bomb appears more consequential to human history than a plastic doll (despite what Gerwig's amusing 2001: A Space Odyssey opening tribute suggests), it's hard to argue against their equal ubiquity within pop culture. The Bomb and The Barbie have been wildly popular and deeply controversial, and the idea that they belong in the same conversation says much about the nature of postwar America, a legacy that lingers three quarters of a century later.

All of this was apparent at the outset, from posters and trailers, or even just knowing the basic concepts. Could this potentially long-winded joke ever have an adequate punchline, something which could convert it into a more profound meaning? I've avoided reading or listening to much else on the subject beyond those amusing memes (a follow-up exclusive to $5/month patrons will engage with critical commentary, among other matters). Nonetheless, I have peripherally picked up on some fatigue with the whole double feature conceit, implying a reversion to the idea that these two films are better viewed and discussed in isolation rather than forced concert. Even if that's the approach I'll mostly take here, it's worth noting that without the inspired pairing I wouldn't be reviewing these movies at all right now. I make it to few new releases, hardly ever on opening weekend, and have missed the more recent work of both directors (something I hope to rectify before that follow-up piece). I'm generally quite busy with online and offline work at the moment and it took some effort to catch this double feature last Saturday. The impetus of their complementary-yet-incompatible pairing made such an effort impossible to resist, so I'm thankful to the "Barbenheimer" booster rocket for that. For once I'm not catching up with a zeitgeist long after the fact - but are the movies themselves late to the party?

"The Unseen" is a series in which I watch popular films for the first time. The list, which moves backwards in time, is based on the highest-ranked film I've never seen each year on Letterboxd (as of April 2018). Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was #4 for 2010.

The Story: Scott Pilgrim lives across the street from the house he grew up in, although we never meet his parents. His world, the world the title tells us he'll be fighting (though he looks awfully passive when we meet him), consists of practice sessions for his garage rock band Sex Bob-Omb; pep talks - or helpful negging - from sister Stacey (Anna Kendrick) over the phone or roommate Wallace Wells (Kieran Culkin) in the basement flat where Wells brings a rotating cast of male hook-ups; gigs performed or attended in little Toronto clubs or, when a competition occasionally calls, swallowed up in a more massive venue; and walks through lonely, steep city parks on snowy nights, ideally with a girl he loves. At first, that girl is ostensibly Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), whose problematic age - seventeen (he's twenty-two) - provides the film's first line of dialogue. However, their companionship is chaste, more of a crush that Scott indulges while brooding over his ex, rising pop star Envy Adams (Brie Larson) and, before long, pining after his literal dream girl, pink-haired Amazon delivery woman Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who arrives in Canada from New York with baggage that Scott will spend the rest of the film unpacking.

Scott's dates with Ramona (even though he has yet to break up with Knives) end up devolving into fantastical battles with all of her exes. This is not a film which concerns itself with realism, creating an alternate universe with its own rules, or delineating between what is and isn't imagined by the protagonist. Rather, some already exaggerated semblance of everyday existence breaks open for a few minutes - sometimes just a second or two - and then returns to normal without comment or sideways glance. Think of the fight scenes as song-and-dance sequences in a musical; Wright himself quite explicitly did, and several battles double as both. First on the docket is Matthew Patel (Satya Bhaba) in a flamboyant Bollywood showdown. Next up the vain Hollywood action star Lucas Lee (Chris Evans in what appears to be prosthetic chin and...eyebrows?) unleashes not only his own muscled fury but that of his stuntmen on poor, spindly Scott. He's finally undone by his own vanity, attempting a deadly skating trick on a long, snaking stair rail down a hill. Likewise, supervegan Todd Ingram (Brandon Routh) is betrayed when he accidentally breaks his own dietary code. Roxy Richter (Mae Whitman), Ramona's "bi-furious" former girlfriend, must be defeated by Ramona herself - only she knows the lover's weak spot - while Scott's own unique skills equip him to take down both of the Katayanagi twins (Shoto and Keita Saito), electronic music whizzes facing off against Scott's crunchy punk guitar in a battle of the bands.

Finally, Scott's strongest opponent turns out to be the music industry impresario Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman), the ex-boyfriend with the strongest hold over Ramona - literally; he's implanted a mind-control chip inside of her - and the most power to wield over Scott as threat and enticement. All of these battles unfold with video game effects from bright flashes of light to cascading coins, leading to the climactic confrontation with Gideon in which Ramona and Knives clash alongside and against Scott, as well as with one another. But is Gideon the final boss Scott must face? Or is the final boss Scott himself?

The Context:

This concludes my episode guide to the Japanese anime television show Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995 - 96) and the spin-off films after ten years.

Does this little town nestled into the mountains have a name? Does it need one? The place where a gently perplexed Rei, embittered Asuka, and near-catatonic Shinji find themselves near the start of Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 provides a bracing break in the action and opportunity for reflection to these traumatized characters. A community founded after the devastation of the Near-Third Impact, this cross between a desperate refugee camp and a determined early settlement has simply been dubbed Village-3. While down-to-earth in its pragmatic daily activity, it carries a vaguely enchanted air, a fable-like flavor reinforced by the pink walls of chemical fairy dust protecting the villagers from roving monsters and the presence of a princess released from her dungeon - only to discover that the evil king has conditioned and limited her existence with a kind of techno-spell. Not to mention the uncanny "curse of the Evas" which traps our protagonists in perpetual adolescence while their former classmates grow up, raise families, and find their places in the world. This village is the sort of spot you drift upon by accident, settle into on a temporary basis with the intention of mere rest, and then never leave. You tell yourself the stay is only temporary, but the years go by, your roots sink into the ground, and suddenly you look up to realize how much time has passed, and that a lifetime of the same stretches before you. Regret may mix with a surprised sense of relief - after all, there are worse fates than this.

The Story: He's always an odd man out - initially as a scrawny Brooklyn kid who fails every Army physical and eventually as a fossil reawakened in a world he can't understand. But in between those two demoralizing positions, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) gets to be exceptional in the best way possible. Chosen for a top secret World War II experiment due to his fighting spirit and unpretentious sense of virtue, Rogers is injected with a high-tech serum which expands his muscle mass and increases his endurance. The goal is to create a fierce fighting force of fellow supersoldiers; unfortunately, he remains an army of one when the leading scientist Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) is killed, and the formula which transformed Rogers dies with him. Reduced to selling war bonds and touring the European theater in a tacky costume with the hokey name "Captain America," Rogers receives another opportunity for valor. He discovers that his childhood best friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) has been taken prisoner by the renegade German faction Hydra, led by the scientist Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving). Schmidt has received the same serum as Rogers and becomes his nemesis, especially after Rogers defies Colonel Phillips' (Tommy Lee Jones') orders to rescue Barnes.

With the encouragement of the smitten British officer Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and the technical support of Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), Rogers leads a band of misfit commandos on war raids, eventually climaxing with a battle against Schmidt over the Atlantic. Saving New York City from a devastating weapon (powered by the mysterious Tesseract that later shows up in The Avengers), Rogers is forced to crash land on an icy island where his body is discovered in 2011. He wakes up in a familiar forties hospital room...but it's a bit too familiar: he remembers the baseball game on the radio from several years before his disappearance. Breaking out of the false soundstage where he's being held, Rogers races into the modern Times Square and is confronted by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), head of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agency that has been cultivating superheroes across the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Informed that he's been frozen and comatose for seven decades, Rogers is most morose about the final conversation he had with Peggy shortly before his fate was sealed. "I had a date," he sighs, a Rip Van Winkle dismayed rather than relieved to discover the passage of time.

The Context:

The Story: Jumping right into the action and never letting go, the film begins when the godlike Asgardian extraterrestrial Loki (Tom Hiddleston) arrives at a secret scientific laboratory to steal the Tesseract energy source (and intergalactic gateway) from the spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. That's a mouthful, but The Avengers is largely unconcerned with the details of this intrigue which provide an excuse for its real purpose: assembling "the Avenger initiative," a team of misfit superheroes. Their task is enormous: stop Loki from opening a portal and marching an army of alien supersoldiers who will subjugate the Earth. Loki is determined to enslave the human race, converting them into mindless drones which - he proclaims - will be good for them as well as his own imperial ambitions; freedom is a curse and submission is the true nature of mankind. Only the plucky if unruly spirit of disparate individualists can prove him wrong, if they can coordinate that spirit without losing its drive. On a floating battleship where they've been brought together, these protagonists will quip and banter, fight amongst themselves, learn to work together, and develop a deep loyalty and commitment to one another, utilizing their disparate skills in order to save the world. While the narrative functions in a fairly self-contained way, it draws upon backstory and character development stretching into earlier entries from the Marvel Cinematic Universe like Iron Man (2008), Thor (2011), and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), as well as a half-century of comic book lore. A certain familiarity with the characters is assumed despite some slight exposition.

These characters, contacted and persuaded - or forced - to enlist by S.H.I.E.L.D. in a globetrotting first act, include the cocky New York tycoon Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.); the old-fashioned Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) who was recently thawed from ice after sixty-plus years and remains encased in a World War II era outlook; the weary, on-edge scientist Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo, controversially replacing Edward Norton after Marvel's 2008 The Incredibe Hulk) who transforms into a raging green monster when he gets too angry; lightning/hammer-wielding Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Loki's brother and the Mufasa to that villain's Scar who is determined to protect this planet from the power of his own alien race; and Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent herself with a dark past (what Loki sneeringly calls "a lot of red" in her ledger). They are overseen by the determined but perpetually frustrated S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) who must balance their unruly natures with the demands of his ruthless superiors, and they're eventually joined by the deadly archer Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), who is initially captured and converted into a brainwashed henchman by Loki. Together they battle Loki's hordes in Manhattan, until Iron Man travels through a portal that has opened up over the city, delivering a nuclear payload to the enemy before falling back through this closing wormhole just in time to declare victory - and lead his new friends to an exhausted shawarma dinner after the closing credits roll.

The Context: