Avengers - Infinity War

No Turn Unstoned

Avengers - Infinity War
2018 USA Directed by  Anthony and Joe Russo 
UK cinema release print.

Well this was surprisingly good.

I honestly thought that Avengers - Infinity War, the first of two movies which is a culmination of the various plot threads left deliberately dangling in the wake of the first ten years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), was going to be only half watchable at best. Since the film teams up most (but, contrary to what was advertised, not all) of the specific Marvel superheroes in those films, I was assuming that this would be patchy at best. After all, with over 60 major characters making appearances... well... my thinking was that you could only give them a few lines of dialogue each and then there would be no time left for action. I’m happy to say I was wrong about this... plus a few other things I’d predicted for this film so... yeah, happy to be proved incorrect in this instance. There are some minor problems but not really enough to do overall damage.

Now I’ve not read the comics these are based on but I’m well used to the Marvel movies not being anything like the original source materials and this one certainly isn’t... although I’m guessing the basic plot elements are the same. For instance, in the comics it’s the Silver Surfer who crashes through the roof of Doctor Strange’s mansion and warns him what is coming his way. Well, we still get the roof crash and warning here but it’s courtesy of one of the other characters... specifically one who isn’t locked into sticky negotiations as Disney’s lawyers retrieve the Silver Surfer and many other characters from 20th Century Fox.

The film follows the antics of super villain Thanos, played by Josh Brolin, as he gathers the five Infinity Stones seen in a fair few of the previous movies so he can wield them with his Infinity Gauntlet. Standing in his way are Iron Man, Spider-Man, Thor, Doctor Strange, Hulk, Black Widow, Captain America, War Machine, The Falcon, White Wolf (formerly The Winter Soldier), Black Panther, Scarlet Witch, The Vision, The Guardians Of The Galaxy... and a fair few others.

Now the script is actually quite well written and, breaking the burden of the story to what is effectively three mini teams working together in different parts of the universe, the directors manage to pull together an entertaining movie which doesn’t get distracting and which doesn’t feel like the story is in service to the characters instead of, how it should be, the other way around. In fact, even when they're cross cutting on mini cliffhangers built into the action sequences from one group to the next, it never becomes too overpowering that you don't know exactly where you are with the various characters.

It’s actually very dark in places... in fact the threat and tone of the movie is dark all the time but that doesn’t stop the film-makers from having a lot of humour with it and it’s great to see new combinations of the characters reacting and arguing with each other. There are some truly funny scenes in this and it’s a really nice juggling act because you do find yourself laughing even though the lives of half of the population of the universe can be wiped out at any second.

The movie starts off with a fairly bleak opening sequence, the sound of which can be heard even as the opening logos are rolling up on the screen, which carries on from one of the post-credit sequences in last year’s Thor - Ragnarok (reviewed here). The film takes a little time here to show us just how lethal going up against Thanos can be, in no uncertain terms. It also shows up just how ineffectual against Thanos the biggest ‘character weapon’ in The Avengers' arsenal is. And, yeah, the story didn’t go the way I thought it would. The IMDB cast listings for the film are, at best, wildly inaccurate and I suspect that this, along with other strong hints along the way, were deliberate instances of misinformation by Marvel/Disney so the fans of these movies wouldn’t be able to figure out what is going on here until they were in a cinema watching this thing. Everything is handled quite deftly and, with the excellent performances we get from regular cast members such as Rob Downey Jr, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris Hemsworth and Elisabeth Olsen, it makes for an entertaining movie, to say the least. A cast ably supported by Alan Silvestri’s music for this one...

Now, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Silvestri’s score for the first movie but he does some good work here which, obviously, utilises his main Avengers theme to good effect. The best use of this, for my money, is when two of the characters are about to get ‘taken out’ by allies of Thanos in a train station in Scotland. Just as things are about to go dark for two of the characters, three of the other regular characters show up for the first time in the film and the music suddenly swells on Silvestri’s main Avengers melody. It’s a great movie moment and gets the hairs on the arm standing to attention, that’s for sure.

Okay so, there’s some bad stuff here too. One of which is the recasting of a character from one of the previous movies. If the character is not that important and could be replaced by another if the original actor didn’t want to come back then... why use that character at all? It seemed a bit odd, to be honest.

Another thing is... well I’m not going to reveal the ending here but how dumb do Marvel think their audience is? Some stuff happens in the last 5 to 10 minutes of the movie and... it just feels like Marvel are insulting everybody’s intelligence here. I can understand how they might have been able to tease out this specific ending around thirty years ago, before the internet but... well all I’m saying is that we all know what movie sequels will be coming out in the next couple of years. Sure, the next two MCU movies... Ant Man and The Wasp and Captain Marvel (in reality, Ms. Marvel) are both set before the events of Infinity War but, you know, people already know what other stuff is in the works down the line. The end of this movie makes the prospect of next year’s follow up seem like it’s going to be a big ‘control z’, ‘undo’ moment of a film, to be honest. So the, actually quite nicely done, dramatic punch of the final act is somewhat softened by the fact that, I would guess, most of the audience don’t believe a moment of it.

One final thing I question somewhat is from the film’s post credit sequence. If you have a distress beacon you can send to a specific person that you think can make a difference to the clear and present danger the various characters find themselves in here... wouldn’t you have activated that during the events of the first Avengers movie? I find it a bit of an odd deus ex machina, to be honest.

Apart from these few things, however, the movie is not the mess I was expecting it to be and the Russo Brothers have knocked out one of the better of the MCU movies with this one. Especially in terms of the main villain. Thanos is not the one dimensional bad guy you might at first think. His motivations for the wholesale slaughter of half of the universe are, it has to be said, not that different to what should be happening in real life on this planet now anyway. We are a vastly overpopulated world and we should be looking for ways to cut back on the growing population... which I think could be done without killing anyone. It’s exactly the same kind of motivation that the ‘evil’ mastermind in Ron Howard’s Inferno (reviewed here) has and, although Thanos’ pursuit of his goal is inherently evil (what with all the wholesale slaughter and such), it doesn’t change the fact that these are exactly the conversations people should be having here now and his arguments do make a lot of sense. When Thanos returns in the next movie, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Thanos himself who sets everything back the way it was before some of the events of this movie take place because, if nothing else, he certainly has an unshakeable moral centre.

And that’s about all I’ve got for you on this one. I suspect that the follow up part of this story could easily be a bit of an anticlimax... although I am still expecting the character I thought would die in this one to meet his maker in the next one, that’s for sure. Avengers Infinity Wars is a truly entertaining, funny but also bleak movie experience and, you never know, I might go back to this one and have another look while it’s still at cinemas. Not Marvel’s best movie but certainly one of their best. If you claim to ‘Make mine Marvel!’, as the phrase used to go, then you don’t want to be missing out on this one.

Ingrid Goes West

Stalk On The Wild Side

Ingrid Goes West
2017 USA Directed by Matt Spicer
UK cinema release print.

Well this is a pretty amazing movie.

Ingrid Goes West is a film which I went to see purely because I’d seen Aubrey Plaza in one other movie and I was quite taken with her performance. That previous movie was Ned Rifle (reviewed here), the last part of Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool trilogy where she played a character who had only been alluded to in the previous parts of that series. I found her quite quirky and appealing as an on screen personality and so when I saw the trailer for this, although I had my reservations, I thought I’d give it a go.

As it turned out, that was a really good idea.

Here, Plaza plays the titular Ingrid who is, for want of a better term, a social media junkie who spends her waking hours trying to catch the eye of her latest Instagram obsession. The movie is toned, for the most part, as a comedy but it has a really dark heart and, as lazy as it is to say it, that dark heart is ultimately Ingrid herself. That being said, she’s not a villainous character and doubles as both protagonist and antagonist in that her actions, when viewed by the audience, are almost understandable at times and, although she is pretty much a full fledged stalker, insinuating her way into the private lives of others, she is also the character who the writers and director presumably want you to identify with.

The film poses no easy way into that mindset, however, as it starts off with the end game shenanigans of her latest obsession. A woman who she is so obsessed with and feeling excluded by that she crashes her wedding and maces her in the face for not inviting her there. The credits montage, then, is of Ingrid in her local mental hospital as we see her partaking of all the usual movie clichéd pastimes pictured at said establishments such as pill taking (with the sticking out of the tongue as proof of a swallow), group therapy and such like while her voice narrates her ‘apology’ emails to her victim, laced with the feint tinge of hope that she will get a forgiving (and possibly inviting) response.

What the start of that sequence also does, of course, is establish to the audience that Ingrid is crazy enough to flip into hostile and aggressive behaviour towards her ‘instagram crushes’ when things don’t go the way she wants... which helps to populate the character with an edge of unease as the story progresses because... well... the audience knows just what she’s capable of.

As the opening sequence finishes, Ingrid’s mother dies and leaves her a large sum of money. We don’t find out until later, in an almost throwaway line, that Ingrid’s mum was her best friend and the void in her life left by her departure may be one of the factors to have influenced the bizarre way in which she engages with the rest of the world. As the movie wears on, she gets more sympathetic, even though, as the story starts properly, she finds a new Instagram person she starts to obsessively follow, to the point where she takes her entire inheritance out from the bank, loads it up in her backpack and moves to California to stalk and penetrate her next ‘victims’ life.

That next victim is Taylor Sloane, played by Elisabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch from the Marvel Cinematic Universe) and Ingrid very quickly kidnaps her dog and waits for the appearance of a reward flyer, by way of an introduction into the lives of Taylor and her husband Ezra (played here by Wyatt Russell). The film then plays out as Ingrid becomes one of the family’s closest friends as she uses and manipulates everything around her to try to stay popular with her new ‘Insta pal’... including hooking up into a relationship with her young, Batman obsessed landlord Dan Pinto (played by O'Shea Jackson Jr.) in order to be able to turn up with her ‘imaginary boyfriend’. Then, when Taylor’s hero, her dominant and thoroughly nasty brother turns up, things start to go a bit pear shaped for Ingrid in some pretty nasty and uncomfortable ways.

Well,  that’s the basic set up and, I have to say, the actors and actresses in this movie really turn in some amazing performances... especially Plaza and Olsen. A lot of the humour in here is based on that very American style of ‘the comedy of embarrassment’, it seemed to me and, while I’m not a big fan of that kind of ‘little fish trying to fit in’ style of humour, it was just balanced and subtle enough in the performances here that it never once alienated me and I had a really good time with it. Also, as I said before, it’s not just a comedy and as the movie progresses, it kind of creeps up on you that it’s also an observation of the way loneliness can effect people and the lengths to which they will go to pursue a cure for that particular state of being.

There’s also some nice things happening with the way the film has been put together, too. The constant, almost staccato beat of Ingrid’s voice as she reads the Instagram captions out loud on the soundtrack in her head, including the vocalisation of the emojis (princess emoji, prayer emoji etc) is also echoed within the sharp cuts of certain montage sections exploring the famous social media site but it also has some nice visual echoes when the film is not specifically doing that too.

For starters, there are a fair few more static shots than you might expect in a film about the people of this particular age group. And I loved the way that, for some of the establishing shots of new locations, instead of smoothly panning the camera around to create the setting, the director will instead drop three differently angled static shots making up a quick ‘establishing edit’ rather than do the obvious... which is how you would perceive somewhere shown as static photos on a social media site, I guess (don’t get me started on gifs please).

There’s even a set of windows which he occasionally comes back to which take up the whole frame as a three across by two high grid... and of course when a character is standing outside those windows, they tend to be perfectly framed within one of the rectangles, just like you might be trying to do with an instagram picture or grid layout, I guess (I’m not actually on the site, I think).

Another great moment is in the score provided by Jonathan Sadoff and Nick Thorburn (sadly, there’s no proper CD release of this as yet... just a wretched download). Ingrid is dressed up in a Catwoman mask and seducing her new boyfriend with her best Catwoman shenanigans and this includes a moment where she licks his face in the exact same way that Michelle Pfiefer did something similar in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns... and why it works so well here is because the score is an obvious parody of Danny Elfman’s Catwoman orchestrations. It’s just a perfect moment of pastiche in a movie which is full of good ideas and, despite its bleak trajectory, I found myself thoroughly entertained by it.

It also ends in a way which is not entirely unexpected in terms of the aims and objectives of the title character but which also has a tragic poignancy. The way in which it’s pitched here works so wonderfully that, by the end of the sequence following what I was at first worried was the end sequence, I was genuinely torn between whether or not I should be feeling happy or sad for Ingrid. Is this redemption or... ? Oh no, this isn’t quite that at all it’s something else and it may seem deliberately ambivalent in its execution but I just thought the last shot was just the perfect ending for the movie.

Indeed, I didn’t realise how powerful that ending was until I started sobbing as I walked home from the cinema after it had finished. I have to confess, I felt really suicidal on the journey back and the next day and, although I can’t completely blame the movie for that right now (I have some stupid rubbish going on in real life at the moment) I felt compelled by the film to contemplate the darker parts of my biological make up for a day or two. Which is great, right? The film haunted me and made me think about things for a bit so... if that’s not a recommendation for a good time at the cinema then I don’t know what is. It wouldn’t surprise me if, when I come to tot up my top ten movies for 2017 at the end of the year, this one is in the mix somewhere on that list. Ingrid Goes West is a truly amazing little movie and I’m so glad I was lucky enough to see it.  

#IAmIngrid. 👰

Wind River

Huckleberry Fiend

Wind River
2017 UK Directed by Taylor Sheridan
UK/Canada/USA
UK cinema release print.

Warning: A very minor, structural spoiler on this one.

Well this is a terrific little film.

I wasn’t really that sure what Wind River was going to be like from the trailer but it looked like a high quality production and, yeah, that’s something it certainly is. I was personally more interested in the casting, more than anything. Ever since The Avengers: Age Of Ultron (reviewed here) I’d been kinda wondering how long it would be before somebody spotted just how good the chemistry was between Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye character and Elisabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch character in that sequence in the middle of the final battle, where he lays everything out for her before she makes that decision and grows into the heroine she is supposed to be. Well somebody else other than me must have noticed it after all because here they are playing the two lead protagonists in a taut thriller which pitches them against both 'murder most foul' and the adverse, icy conditions of the Wind River Indian reservation, where this film is set.

After a brief prologue of a scene which is better explained in an autopsy room later in the picture, we get around about 15 - 20 minutes of the film just setting up Jeremy Renner’s character. He has an Indian ex-wife and a son and there’s something else which connects him spiritually (at least) to the events which follow and which I am not going to spoil for you here. He is a hunter/tracker for the reservation named Cory Lambert, working hand in hand with the police as he kills wolves and whatever else is killing livestock in the area. I have to admit I was torn with being asked to empathise with someone who goes around killing animals but I am not going to get into that debate now and Renner plays the character very well. The writer, who is also the director, is sensitive enough to not let it be too much of a problem for the audience, I think. As Renner is tracking a family of lions who have been killing off buffalo in the area, he comes across the dead body of the girl from the opening sequence and, after calling the local (and very small) police force in, the FBI are informed.

Enter Elisabeth Olsen’s character, FBI agent Jane Banner, the fish out of water who needs the help of Renner’s tracking skills to investigate various elements of the case as they come to light and who is quite unprepared for the weather conditions. She does, however, prove herself to be a dab hand with a pistol and, although she is the ‘green’ out of town character with the usual dynamic which that brings for the first 20 or so minutes of her screen time, she soon proves to be an edgy and resourceful person. And she’s all the local police have got to help them because, due to the way in which the first victim dies, the coroner cannot ‘officially’ reach a decision of homicide so she needs to wrap things up in a hurry before she is pulled out of there and back to her normal ‘hunting ground’ of Las Vegas.

That’s the basic set up and it’s a real humdinger of a movie, for sure. It actually utilises a lot of hand held camera throughout but it’s used to good effect without spoiling the sharp focused, languid style of the cinematography. Hectic during such scenes as running through a snowy forest and... just a little jittery and inquisitive to heighten tension when, for instance, Olsen is trying to secure a house without knowing who is inside and whether or not someone is going to try and shoot her to pieces around the next corner. This style of shooting can either kill a film stone dead if overused or really add to the weight of the story and this one, I’m glad to say, is definitely in the latter camp.

It’s not all moving camera though. There are some really nice static shot compositions here too and one of them was so well done, not what I’m used to seeing from a big budget movie made in the last ten years or so, that I was quite staggered. It’s a scene from the earlier part of the movie where Jeremy Renner is standing out on the porch of the father of the first murder victim, talking to him. He’s kind of half blocked off by a vertical wooden slat so he is in sharp profile in the left hand side of the screen. In the middle of the screen are some more verticals and diagonals and in the foreground, completely out of focus, is the guy he is talking to, also in profile to the right of the screen. So you have three vertical splits with the right of shot like a blurry after echo of the left. Which is all pretty cool but then the director further surprised me by showing just how much he knew about designing within this kind of widescreen format for the big screen, where a jolting cut could pop an audience right out of the action. The reverse shot is taken with the camera at such and angle that Renner’s head and shoulders takes up the same left hand third of the screen with the other actor still on the right... which is exactly how you make a seamless transition without unsettling an audience in a cinema where the contents of a huge, wide canvass is leading their collective eye at any stray movement or cut. It’s text book movie making and I was glad to see it so well executed here.

Although I had no idea who the killer was in this one before the reveal (it’s not that kind of film... the reveal here is the first time you meet the character) there was a point where, quite bizarrely as it happens, where I kinda second guessed the reveal of a certain shot... well I did and I didn’t. To explain, after a certain very intense scene involving a bunch of law officers and Elisabeth Olsen, she is knocking on the door of a trailer and you are almost expecting something to happen. Then you see the person inside the trailer getting up from bed and going to answer the knocking. For some reason, I just knew that when he opened the door I was not going to see Elisabeth Olsen on the other side of the door. I kinda guessed the director was going to pull a switch in the edit and that’s exactly what he did. Where I got it wrong, though, is that I was expecting it to be Renner on the other side of somebody else’s door when, instead, the director doesn’t displace the narrative spatially at all. He instead displaces the narrative in time and it’s here that we are privy to the scene which went on before the opening sequence of the film. That being said, it’s quite a good way to do it and it kinda beats Quentin Tarantino’s way of showing the exact same thing... that is, revealing the back story to an up and coming scene by flagging it up just before it becomes really important, as he did in The Hateful Eight (reviewed here) and as this director does here. It’s a nice little moment and the pay off when we finally do get back to Elisabeth Olsen knocking on that same door is... well, it’s a good one.

At the end of the film we have a scene where the inevitable happens... Renner’s character is a hunter/tracker and he finally catches up with his prey. The nature of the punishment that he metes out is not totally unexpected and, in its ‘poetic justice’ kind of way, it kind of reminded me a little of the way Mel Gibson conducted business at the end of the very first Mad Max movie (reviewed by me here). It’s not a million miles away from that and, after the final denouement, we have two epilogues which pick up some other pieces in the story and... it all goes down very well, to be honest.

The music for the film by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (both of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds fame) is quite supportive in places but did get a little too distracting in some moments. This is mainly in some passages where some lyrics are sang over the scoring and... well, I didn’t think too much of it when Hans Zimmer tried that in his score for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here... although that makes an awesome concert piece on it own) and I wasn’t too sure of it here. I might pick up the soundtrack CD at some point and see how it holds up as a stand alone listen but, when the vocals aren’t kicking in, it seems an appropriate and supportive score, on the whole.

All in all, Wind River is a pretty fun and quite suspenseful, tension filled thriller which shows just how good Renner and Olsen are together (and they are ably supported by a whole bunch of great actors) with a more leisurely pace than most modern movies today. Which, as far as I’m concerned, just shows how the director appreciates what a slower approach can bring to a movie when the action scenes are given that kind of setting, so they will really jolt the audience in contrast when... ‘stuff goes down’. It’s edgy, has some beautiful, snowy backdrops and it doesn’t once get boring or outstay its welcome. Definitely one to get to see this year if you are serious about seeing good movies when they come out at the cinema. A well made joy from start to finish.