Last night, I went to see Tom Hiddleston's other movie that came out this year, The Deep Blue Sea, which is about disintegration of a love affair based on a Terence Rattigan play, directed by Terence Davies. It's a mannered, deliberate film, and had a kind of formal severity despite its fluid chronology, punctuated by these moments of incredible emotional violence. Rachel Weisz is un-fucking-believable as an upper class married woman with a staid, dull husband, who falls recklessly in love with Hiddleston's callow younger man. There were parts near the end where I found it difficult to keep watching because the emotions on her face were so raw.
The pacing on this was interesting. I mean, it's a common story, but given a huge melodramatic weight because you are so tightly in focus with Weisz's character all the way (who is named Hester -- of course!), but the film doesn't let you wallow in OTT self-indulgent romantic grief, which I was actually kind of hoping for. So you have this almost operatic grief on screen, but without conventional catharsis, and you're left with this terrible knot in the chest.
I don't know. It's a fantastic film, but not easy to watch.
I keep reading so many amazing things about Avengers that now I'm afraid of being disappointed! What if it doesn't BLOW MY MIND WITH ITS AMAZINGNESS??
Dude, you have to lower your expectations.
Just tell yourself that it's going to suck, and all your friends and critics are giving it rave reviews because you're secretly the subject of some experiment and everyone else are actually scientists experimenting on you.
Or, you know, spend the next ten hours watching cat videos.
P-C, I was worried about the same thing, but seriously, this is Joss at his best. I went to see Cabin in the Woods last weekend, and while I found it entertaining and well-written, Avengers just blows it out of the water. I loved that even during all the battle scenes, it wasn't just violence for violence sake. Every fight exposed more and more of each character and who they were. Seriously, I'm going to go back and wallow in it. Also, expect to miss some of the better lines in the movie, because the entire theatre will be laughing at a quip and then a zinger comes back that the laughter just rolls right over and you miss it.
SailAweigh is an especially good scientist.
I AM DYING OF THE WAIT.
That is all.
(We're going to a 10:20 show, because of the way the times fell, that was the best choice to make sure we got there on time since Tim works late sometimes. But I am SO TEMPTED to just go to an afternoon show right the hell now.)
DYING.
I can't remember seeing an audience so INTO a movie as they were with Avengers. Even blew the midnight show of Dark Knight out of the water in terms of audience response. Granted, Avengers is a LOT more fun than Dark Knight (which I appreciate for its serious darkness), but it was also a smaller theater last night.
You're not helping, Sail!
P-C, I think your strategy is to focus on all the little things that were wrong with recent Marvel superhero movies: the loss of narrative focus in the second Iron Man movie, shoe-horning Black Widow in without fleshing out her character so she's just a fancy cameo, the lack of an emotional hook in Thor, or even how much better Captain America's costume looked set in the 40s.
Focus on the negatives going in and then when you watch the actual movie you won't be comparing it against The Platonic Ideal of the SuperHero Movie, but on how/if Joss can address those issues.
I will kill time by going to buy a Captain America shirt. (Why yes, I am a slacker.)
One of the things I really enjoyed was watching all these groups of women coming in together. Kind of explodes the myth that women don't like comics. For a while, the women in the audience outnumbered the men. We decided it was because women were less invested in seeing the movie in 3-D. (The 3-D line was almost exclusively male.)
One guy asked me if I was a "supportive mother" because, admittedly, I'm 20 years older than all my friends that I went with, and he was quite surprised when my friends immediately spoke up and said "oh no, not related to any of us, she's a nerd girl like us."
