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Looks like more of the same, which isn’t altogether a bad thing, but the Josh Brolin moment is inspired.

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Few things in real life are more heinous than Nazis. And yet in the realm of fantasy adventure, few things are more useful. As shorthand for unbounded evil, a Nazi is hard to beat. Tack on a frothing obsession with supernatural whatnot, and you have the makings of a great pulp yarn, as was memorably demonstrated by the Indiana Jones movies.

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Captain America: The First Avenger is in some ways the best of the Marvel Comics preludes leading up to next year’s superhero jamboree, The Avengers. Like the Indy films, it’s set in the dark years of Hitler’s rise toward world conquest (the mid-1930s in the Jones pictures, the war years of the early ’40s here). In this rich period setting, so unlike our own morally nuanced age, the story’s uncomplicated good-versus-evil structure is unusually stirring.

The movie’s protagonist, unpromising at first, is a classic 98-pound weakling named Steve Rogers (Chris Evans, digitally diminished—an eerie effect). Steve longs to join the army and battle the Huns, but he’s repeatedly rebuffed—this is a kid who was born to be 4F. Then he comes to the attention of a government scientist named Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci), who selects him for an experiment involving a top-secret new serum that—in the words of Colonel Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones), head of the “Strategic Scientific Service”—will create “a new breed of cyber soldiers” who will “personally escort Adolf Hitler to the gates of Hell.” Yes!

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A year ago Big Hollywood’s John Nolte expressed his “predictable heartbreak,” and I did likewise, over disappointing interview comments by Captain America: The First Avenger director Joe Johnston. They seemed desperately designed to reassure his patriotism-hating peers in Hollywood that his superhero “wants to serve his country, but he’s not this sort of jingoistic American flag-waver. He’s just a good person.”

As recently as last week, the film’s star Chris Evans chimed in with more apologies about his intrinsically patriotic character. “He might wear the red, white and blue, but I don’t think this is all about America. It is what America stands for. It could be called ‘Captain Good.’” You read that right. Captain Good.

The Los Angeles Times echoed the hand-wringing that a film with “America” in the title and a protagonist swathed in red, white, and blue might not be groveling enough to suit their leftist self-loathing:

Of course, setting ‘Captain America’ in the storied past [WWII] helps avoid some of the more charged political questions that accompany releasing a patriotically themed production around the world at a time when the U.S. is perceived in certain places as somewhat less than heroic.

As I settled in my seat for a screening of Captain America (next to my esteemed Big Hollywood colleague Alex Marlow, who posted his own review yesterday), my expectations – based on all the preemptive apologies from the filmmakers and critics – was that I was about to witness Hollywood’s ruination of the most iconic of American comic book heroes. (more…)

Something happened in 1991 that my daddy never believed possible: Tommy Lee Jones played a gay man.

And the shrill and very vocal faction of the homosexual community cried foul at not only his portrayal, but of the portrayal of homosexuals in “The Silence of the Lambs.” GLAAD led a protest of “Basic Instinct” before the movie had even wrapped principal photography, and the controversy continued when Tri-Star released the picture during so-called Awards Season in 1992.

The nominees:

“J.F.K.” – Great filmmaking and mythmaking.

“The Silence of the Lambs” – The winner, released all the way back in February of 1991, and a genuine crowd pleaser.

“Beauty and the Beast” – I’m not saying it’s a bad movie, but it’s inclusion smacks of tokenism, as in, “There. We nominated an animated movie. Now leaves us alone.”

“Bugsy” – Another good movie, but I remember thinking, “If this gangster movie wins after ‘Goodfellas’ lost, I’ll threaten a boycott like my gay friends did.”

“The Prince of Tides” – The stink here was that Babs wasn’t nominated for best director. It had to have stung that Ridley Scott was nominated instead for directing “Thelma & Louise,” a wrongly politicized road movie about two women on the run from the law. Babs also missed out on scoring one for women when John Singleton was nominated for “Boyz N The Hood.” The irony, I guess, is that all these years later, both “The Prince of Tides” and “Boyz N The Hood” feel like TV movies.

What should have been nominated:

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“The Company Men” tells the story of three businessmen who lose their jobs during an economic recession. As the story begins, the three men begin their day tying their neckties and planning another normal day in the office. However, all of their lives change dramatically when the company that employs them starts laying people off.

The three company men are Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones), and Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), who all work for a corporation called GTX. Bobby is the first one to lose his job at the company. He walks into his office confident and enthusiastic and walks out embarrassed and unemployed. He leaves his office with a severance package, a box of belongings, and hope that he will find another job soon.

Gene is eventually laid off as well, despite the fact that he helped found GTX and used to be close friends with the company executive who is making all of the cuts. That executive is James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson), a man who is focused on the company’s bottom line. Gene had previously noted his displeasure with James’s earlier cutbacks, so it’s no surprise that he’s let go. Like Gene, Phil loses his position in the second round of cuts. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the youth or the energy that Bobby has or the financial safety net that Gene has built up. Phil is overwhelmed by the bills that keep stacking up and knows that few companies want to hire a man of his age.    (more…)

A great performance sticks with you long after you’ve scraped the theater floor-gum off your Keds.  But too often, professional drama geeks and mainstream media critics will bestow their blessing on freaky, idiosyncratic performances that hew to the party line *(cough) Heath Ledger (cough) Brokeback Mountain (cough)*, leaving the rest of us to scratch our collective heads.  If that was good, we wonder, how bad do you have to be to be bad?

What follows is a list of the Top 10 performances of the last quarter century.  It focuses on lead roles, or at least substantial ones – no cameos, thank you.  Interestingly, there are no straight comic performances here, and many of the roles are villains.  And it is also focused on movies people have actually heard of. 

So, this is not an exhaustive list – it overlooks plenty of great performances.  But it is my list and based on my criteria alone – and I’m sure I’ll hear about my myriad defects of insight, taste, breeding and general mental competence in the comments.  For example, Daniel Day Lewis is missing because I decided not to invest three hours into There Will Be Blood (2007) since after seeing the “I drink your milkshake!” clip I just can’t take it seriously.  (more…)

“The best football movie ever!” declared one reviewer.  “It’s the ‘Hoop Dreams’ of football!”, chirped another.  Which is why, as a lifelong devotee of independent films, documentaries, and college football, I decided to see Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, a film by Kevin Rafferty about the “epic” 1968 game between the Ivy League rivals.  Like most epic football games, the 1968 Harvard-Yale game was between two teams nobody cared about, and it ended in a tie.  As if the fact that Harvard and Yale played to a tie in 1968 wasn’t enough to drag me into the theater, this film also features Tommy Lee Jones, a guard on that 1968 Harvard squad, and Yale quarterback Brian Dowling, the inspiration for “B.D.” in the comic strip Doonesbury that was so popular back when Jimmy Carter was president.  So what’s not to like?

Cut to me in one of the comfy chairs at the Screening Lounge of the Landmark Theaters at the Westside Pavilion in West L.A last night. (Which is awesome, by the way– it really is just like a screening room.)  Things got off to a slow start when some guy, seemingly not noticing the half-empty room, informed me that I was sitting in his seat.  Like most of the other patrons, this guy gave every appearance of being either a Yale or a Harvard man. Speaking of which, does Harvard only admit pompous jackasses, or is becoming a pompous jackass a requirement for graduating from Harvard?  Ah, the eternal questions.  (Actually, that’s probably not fair.  I’m sure that plenty of normal, decent, men and women of average-sized egos have graduated from Harvard University.  I’ve just never met one.)  In any case, the seating issue was resolved, the film was soon underway and I settled in for what promised to be the cinematic experience of a lifetime. (more…)

Please go to this link first – click here – to understand what I’m about to rant about and why I’m so pissed.

Almost 90% of Americans believe the war in Iraq is and was a waste. The Hollywood media feeds the public wasteful, depressing, and horribly fabricated stories. When did the U.S. military become the bad-guys? We are stereotyped “Generation Kill.” I guess that is all we do. All we do is go to Iraq, hunt innocents and slaughter them. I guess that is what I did for eight months while I was there.

I guess I really didn’t save Iraqi families from being tortured by foreign jihadis. I didn’t set up the first ever Iraqi elections. Or see my brothers blown up, shot, maimed, and killed. Getting attacked from Mosques and hospitals–and you know what?  We just took it, day after day we took it and we kept going. An IED blowing up underneath me each day.  We couldn’t fight back; we were ordered not to. No matter how much vengeful, pent up aggression I felt, or how much I wanted to kill, I didn’t act on it. We have a code, Rules of Engagement. “RULES,” rules that are followed.

But according to then Senator and now President Obama, all I did was air-raid villages and kill innocent civilians.  This is a video I will never forget:

People like Pat Dollard and Micheal Yon tell the true stories.

Please watch these clips and tell me if you buy into what is portrayed. Honestly, tell me what you believe. (more…)