Shazam!. David F. Sandberg. 2019.

Well, I just saw the Captain Marvel movie, so I might as well watch the movie about Captain Marvel.

Wow! New Line Cinema!? That’s a logo I haven’t seen in a while.

Oh, they’re really leaning into the origin story thing in this movie. I. Do. Not. Understand. The obsession with origin stories when doing super-hero movies. I realise that many people want to “start at the beginning”, but it inevitably means that half the movie is over before we get to the actual super-hero stuff… which is ostensibly the subject matter of these movies.

And… all the articles about this being a different sort of DC movie; lighthearted and well not teal: I’m half an hour in, and this is just as turgid as any Zack Snyder turd.

[time passes]

OK, it gets a bit better: They poach a bunch of scenes from Big and those are always fun. But there are so many wasted opportunities: The main bad guy has a bunch of demons at his beck and call, and their designs are so generic that you have to wonder whether they were designed by humans at all, or whether they were just designs the CGI company had on file already.

This is one of those movies where the origin part makes total sense, and I wish the delete key on this keyboard worked so I could delete that paragraph up there, but darn!

The humour is 97% “a kid in a grown-up body talking like a kid”. But all the lines are cribbed from sit-com kids lines and it gets old. It’s from the “kids sure are stupid” school of screenwriting. It’s like they are going for “hey, this is lighthearted comedy, right?” but it’s all schmaltzy nihilism. (That’s totally a thing.)

There are scenes in here that work. But it’s mostly tedious.

Captain Marvel. Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck. 2019.

Wait! This isn’t 4K!? The guy in the video store gave me the wrong disc!

Dude.

Oh, well, I guess I’ll just have to suffer through the 2K version…

This is a pretty fun movie. It all hinges on the main characters being somebody you want to watch, because it’s you know a super-hero movie so the plot is the usual running around after a MacGuffin. But Brie Larson is super-charming and plays it pitch perfectly: She’s serious about her heroing, but everything else is done with a cheeky grin.

Perhaps the best super-hero performance ever.

Nick Fury’s face sure looks weird. Is that even Samuel Jackson? Is he CGI? His face looks like silly putty. It’s offputting, but… you kinda get used to it? Until you see a screenshot and it’s like EEEEEEK.

Dude. It looks like they modelled his face down to his skeleton and then rendered a flensed CGI based on that.

I mean, like they do with dinosaurs.

Anyway!

For all it’s got going for it, it’s got pacing problems and … like … basic problems with the logic of some of these conversations: What Earth words the aliens understand depend of whether it makes a good joke or not. It’s fine, it’s fine, but it could have used some polish.

It’s definitely among the better Mar-Vell movies.

Mike’s Murder. James Bridges. 1984.

I’ve had the soundtrack album (by Joe Jackson (not one of the Jackson siblings)) since I was a teenager:

It’s pretty odd as soundtrack albums go: It’s got three vocal songs on the first side, and then instrumentals on the reverse. I kinda sorta assumed that perhaps only the instrumentals were in the actual movie, but then Jackson had embellished them into vocal versions for the album?

I guess I’ll find out tonight!

Hm… Jackson is credited with “additional music” in the opening credits… not a good sign…

This movie is by a director I know nothing about, but he’s done stuff like Urban Cowboy and The China Syndrome… which are, I guess, well-received big-budget movies? This seems distinctly low-budget.

Hm, not, $6.3M in 1984 isn’t that bad. But it totally, utterly bombed at the box office.

Still, he went on to direct Perfect, the vehicle for Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta (which also failed commercially and critically), and then did Bright Lights, Big City with Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland and the rest of that crowd, which, again, wasn’t a success.

This isn’t a good movie. All the tension depends on us caring about these characters a lot, but we’re given no reason to do so. If the actors had been charming, that might have helped, but they’re pretty useless; Debra Winger is by far the best of them. The cinematography is relentlessly blah, so there’s not even that.

The structure is also way … strange. It’s basically about a guy running from the mob, but we mainly follow the guy’s girlfriend. And everything takes so long. She goes to visit his former boss/boyf and they’re in that garden, talking, for what seems like eons.

They do use some of the vocal Jackson songs, though: As background music playing on the stereo in some scenes. Makes sense.