THE AVENGERS

THE AVENGERS
Written and Directed by Joss Whedon
Starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johannson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston and Samuel L. Jackson


Captain America: Stark, we need a plan of attack.
Iron Man: I have a plan. Attack.

Comic book movies or superhero movies or whatever you want to call them, all inherently have a very difficult task to accomplish. They all have to cater to a notoriously picky niche market, made up of detail oriented fanboys, while still remaining broad enough to appeal to the masses. They cost a fortune so they cannot afford not to attract the widest audience possible, but if they play it too broad, the fanatics will denounce the film and ruin any chance it has of making any money back. THE AVENGERS is the mecca of superhero movies. It reportedly cost $220 million to make. It features no less than seven iconic Marvel comic characters. And, given just how darn good it is, it actually stands the chance to become the biggest superhero movie of all time.

If you’re like me, the first ten minutes of THE AVENGERS might be a little bewildering. The script presupposes that you’ve seen all the Avenger related movies leading up to this one. As it turns out, I have, with the first IRON MAN (Robert Downey Jr.) and THOR (Chris Hemsworth) being my favourites.  Still, that doesn’t mean that they are always freshly at the forefront of my mind. So once I pieced together that Thor’s brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) was working with an alien race to take over Earth by harvesting the energy from what is known as the Tesseract, I was good to go. (I’m sure the history behind this premise is far more rich than I’ve just described but for casual Avenger fans like myself, this description is more than adequate to get your bearings.) What follows the initial and inevitable set up though is two hours of non-stop excitement with a surprisingly solid amount of depth and character study to make THE AVENGERS the perfect popcorn movie to kick off the summer.

It is Loki’s mission to force the people of Earth into submission by using great force. His belief is that freedom is the world’s greatest lie, that pursuing a life of slavery and worship unburdens the individual of feeling any sense of failure. Without any unique goals, there is only the common to pursue. You should know that Loki has a bevy of his own daddy issues to work out and vanquishing Earth is just his way of dealing with things. You should also know that Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the leader of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which stands for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division) is not going to just allow this to happen. So he enlists the help of six individuals, all of which possess a particular power or skill that makes them a definite asset to have in an intergalactic war of this magnitude, and dubs them The Avengers. Unfortunately for Fury, The Avengers are all also intense loners who do not play well with others.

Perhaps the greatest honorary Avenger out there is writer/director, Joss Whedon. Marvel entrusted a film they have been building up to for years now to a man who has built a reputation for creating deeply engaging yet still highly entertaining genre fare on television, like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, but whose only feature length film (SERENITY) tanked. Whedon is right at home here though and he has a seemingly easy time balancing the screen time between all these heavy hitters, from Chris Evans (Captain America) and Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye) to Scarlett Johannson (Black Widow) and Mark Ruffalo (taking over the role of The Hulk from predecessor, Edward Norton), while simultaneously juggling all of their individual arcs and development. The genius of Whedon’s work here is that he has them all subtly fighting against each other and against the idea of working together long enough to forget they were fighting so hard against themselves before any of this started. And when they start fighting together, that’s when THE AVENGERS goes from being a great comic book movie to being a great movie, period.

AFRICAN CATS

Directed by Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey

Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson

Do you know what is amazing about nature? For me, it is that, despite being so complex, it unfolds without any evident intervention and more often than not, without the notice it deserves. You might even say nature just happens “naturally”. You might not though if you a) had no desire to make anyone’s eyes roll back into their head and b) if you were the creative team behind Disney Nature’s third offering, AFRICAN CATS. Directors Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey are both gentlemen with backgrounds in nature photography – Fothergill even worked on Disney Nature’s EARTH and the wildly successful BBC series that film was based on, Planet Earth. There is no question that they do an incredible job capturing breathtaking shots of a lush savanna in southwestern Kenya and its awesome inhabitants but what they do with them is nothing short of manipulation.

Samuel L. Jackson tells us from the very beginning that AFRICAN CATS is the story of two mothers, a lioness named Layla and a cheetah named Sita, and their struggles to raise their cubs in the wild. My first thought was how does Jackson know their names? Had they been formally introduced? I was then told that animals on preserves, like the Maasai Mara National Reserve where AFRICAN CATS was shot, are given names. Fine, he had me there. And surely the experts on the preserve have been observing these majestic animals for years, therefore able to make educated assumptions about their behaviour patterns and motivations. When Jackson laments about one lioness’s sadness as she limps off into the sunset to die alone though, complete with heart-tugging string score accompaniment of course, it becomes a bit of a stretch to think anyone can get that deep into a lion’s head. That said, when the action on screen gets violent – and it does, Mom’s and Dad’s – Jackson sounds as if he might at any moment break into his famous PULP FICTION speech. Those lesser animals will know the lion is the lord when he lays his vengeance upon them alright.

Like any documentary, you cannot know how your subject matter will play out ahead of time. You have to pick what you think is going to be most compelling and follow it in hopes that it lives up to its potential. Plenty happens in AFRICAN CATS and it is engaging action. Empires are challenged and fought for; hunts happen regularly; there are even plenty of “Awwww …” moments between the cubs and their prides. The melodramatic elements of the script that are assigned to the action feel forced and thin though, binding nature too tightly to the story just often enough to throw the film’s authenticity into question. Did this really happen when it did or did they move the action around so that the narrative still made sense? We can’t know for sure so we have to take their word for it. When you dress something up as much as AFRICAN CATS does nature though, it makes me wonder how much of that word I can really take.