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‘the avengers’, and hollywood’s new rightful overlord.

By • On • In invasion/visitation movies, movies, nerd candy, scott • 2 min read

This blog is entirely spoiler free. No story points are ruined, not even the ones already ruined by the trailers. Grrr! Also, for those who don’t feel like staying for this whole blog post, make sure you do stay through the entire credits if you see the movie. There are not one, but two stingers during the credits. So, don’t get cocky after the first one ends and leave, stay all the way through. Worth it! Anyway, on with the post.

Oh, Avengers. My sweet, sweet, Avengers.

I expected this movie to be really good, but it far exceeded even my lofty expectations. It just further confirms that Joss Whedon is some sort of awesome geek god. This movie is a fanboy/girl’s dream come true. Well, I guess I can’t speak for all fanboys and girls, but I can speak for this one, and he loved it. Unadulterated joy. I laughed, I smiled like an idiot. At one point, I even said, “Yes!” out loud… involuntarily. I shit you not. I didn’t realize I had said it until it was already out of my mouth.

The audience we saw the movie with really loved it, too. There were points when they cheered and clapped and yelled, a common occurrence on opening night. The difference is that this time, it wasn’t even annoying (I usually find that extremely annoying), because the scene they were cheering was so fucking awesome it deserved to be cheered by a bunch of idiots like us.

Oh, and did I forget to mention the salvation of the Hulk? Whedon and Ruffalo brought him from being underwhelming and boring to somehow being the best Avenger. Even Whedon’s favorite scene features the Hulk, but I won’t tell you what it is… no spoilers.

This is the reason they invented summer blockbusters. It’s the culmination of all popcorn fare that has come before. Hilarious, action packed from start to finish, and never bogged down by the overwhelming number of characters on screen. To quote Peter Travers of Rolling Stone: “All hail Joss Whedon, the warrior king of this dizzying, dazzling 3D action epic. The Avengers is Transformers with a brain, a heart and a working sense of humor.” I thought it was funny when I got home from the movie and saw that Travers compared the movie to Transformers, because after this insanely huge film was over, I thought, “Joss Whedon has become the anti-Bay. He is the embodiment of good, where Bay is evil.”

That is very good, because between his writing and directing of The Avengers and his writing on Cabin in the Woods, Joss Whedon is on fire. I don’t know if Joss Whedon wants to take over genre entertainment the way Loki wants to take over Earth, but if he does, I will gladly bow down before the rightful king.

I assure you, I’ll be seeing the film again, pronto. Probably several times. And by ‘probably’ I mean ‘definitely,’ and by ‘several,’ I mean ‘thirty.’

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the history of whistling.

By • On • In Uncategorized • 1 min read

This has been sitting on my browser all week waiting for me to finally watch it. Thus, you’ve probably already seen it.

Still, holy shit. This is awesome. Minus the fact that they left out Andrew Bird, the greatest whistler of them all.

Also, this one.

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the amazing spider-man. [trailer park.]

By • On • In movies, scott, trailer park, Uncategorized • 1 min read

I read an article with Kevin Feige recently, where he said that people in the film industry said he should come work for another studio. He’d had a good run with comic movies, they said. Yet, they were at the tail end, he was told, it couldn’t last forever. He knew they had no idea what they were saying, as is usually the case with people in the film industry. With this year’s Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Amazing Spider-Man, it’s only getting bigger, and better.

Here’s today’s brand new trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man. 

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beasts of the southern wild. [trailer park.]

By • On • In movies, nerd candy, scott, trailer park • 1 min read

Finally, finally, finally! This trailer has been a long time coming. Lots of buzz about this film since Sundance in January.

Keith Simanton actually wrote that he thinks some will “cite it as an influential, if not THE influential film for them, the one that flipped the switch.” I desperately want to see this movie. I hope it comes out in Seattle as part of its limited release.

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the sportswriter. [fictionista.]

By • On • In books, fictionista, scott • 2 min read

Frank Bascombe is a sportswriter who doesn’t much care about sports one way or another. Yet, as a man in the midst of the complexity of shattering tragedy, he embraces sportswriting for its simplicity and predictability. It’s part of his retreat from reality, into ‘dreaminess’, as he himself puts it. As the book begins, his career as a novelist has aborted before it truly got started, his oldest son has died, and his marriage to a woman he still loves has recently ended.

Thus, with nothing in his life to truly ground him, Bascombe romanticizes the fact that athletes can embrace a single-mindedness; that during their careers they can step on the field where there are rules, where things make sense, where they can pour themselves wholly into their art. Then, when off the field, they can answer reporters questions in clichés, perhaps even non sequiturs, in their special language of the game, never having to touch down into the muck of life as it truly is. This is, in the character’s opinion, why athletes often live lives of such abject failure after their playing careers have come to a close.

With 1986’s The Sportswriter, my first experience with Richard Ford, he has created a remarkable engagement with life as it is. His narrating protagonist is fully realized, complicated and contradictory. This is a beautiful rumination on the beauty of mystery, and also its ability to shield us from the bone and marrow of true life if we choose to use mystery as a crutch. It is about our ability to hide from the truths we know, but pretend not to. It is a mirror for how we cope with failure, loss, tragedy, pain, joy, intimacy, and community.

We can live our entire lives hiding from anything genuine or true. Like the athletes whom Frank Bascombe profiles and interviews on a regular basis, we can live in artificially created worlds, the sole design of which is to blind us from what actually is. Reading The Sportswriter, I was nudged to ask myself if I am willing to pay the price for belonging. Am I willing to pay the costly price of vulnerability, honesty, and the risk of pain in order to experience true intimacy, connection, and relationship.

This is true 20th century literature at its best. The prose is eloquent, simple and grounded, like the work of Walker Percy and Graham Greene. Thus, it’s not for everyone. Some folks will probably be bored out of their minds reading this book, so if you prefer popular fiction in the commercial sense, you’d be wise to steer clear. That may sound pretentious, but it is also simply a fact.

For my money, I highly recommend it.

My booklist is probably longer than I can ever read in my lifetime, and it is ever growing. This is because every book I read opens up several I need to read as well. Now, in addition to Ford’s work in general, I also need to get around to reading the next two novels in the Bascombe trilogy. The second book in the trilogy, Independence Day, actually won the Pulitzer.

 

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