A non-profit newsroom, powered by WNYC.

Weekend Movie Forecast: Captain America Vs. Justin Timberlake

11 photos

Wrapping up a hefty payload of summer superhero movies (X-Men: First Class, Thor, Green Lantern) is Marvel's Captain America: The First Avenger. The film follows all-American good boy Steve Rogers, who volunteers to participate in an experimental program that turns him into the Super Soldier known as Captain America. Judging from the trailer and commercials it looks like they really delve into '40s American mythology (bombshell girls, evil Nazi scientists, big bands) which was one of the fun things about the Indiana Jones franchise, but we're not holding our breaths. A lot of people will be lining up for this, so if you're not a fanboy who bought a ticket months ago, you might need to get to the theater early if you want any chance of getting in. Reviews have been pretty good for a superhero movie, with Tasha Robinson from <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/captain-america-the-first-avenger,59302/">The A.V. Club</a> saying: "More than any Marvel Studios film since Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger feels like it’s working from a conceptual checklist titled How To Make A Superhero Movie Fun For Everyone. For mainstream viewers, there are big action sequences, a heady battle montage, a ’40s setting featuring Ã¼ber-Nazis with glowing laser-guns, and plenty of well-timed one-liners. For the hardcore comic-book fans, there’s the Wilhelm scream, the Stan Lee cameo, the Marvel-history inside jokes, and a self-aware humor that even includes a wry dig at Raiders Of The Lost Ark. "At times, Captain America feels like four films in one, packed with incident and distinct acts, a few of which work better than others. (The tone-deaf ending, which turns a tragic situation into a stupid punchline, is a massive miscalculation.) But for the most part, it manages to balance laughs, genuinely rousing moments, and a fully packed agenda into something fleet enough to keep running under the weight of its rich ambitions."

Gothamist

Judging by films like Knocked Up, Life as We Know It, No Strings Attached,, and today's very similar Friends with Benefits many of us in our late 20s/early 30s are sex-crazed, immature, urban professionals who refuse to get married or settle down until some zany chain of events leads us to the conservative ideal of "growing up." The plot is basically No Strings Attached, meaning two people attempt to be friends with benefits and the apparent absurdity and hilarity of the idea of it (according to Hollywood). In any case, we like Timberlake and Kunis, and since they're basically the vehicles for this movie, it could turn out to be a nice little, light picture. The film has been getting some pretty decent reviews, with Manohla Dargis from <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/movies/justin-timberlake-in-friends-with-benefits-review.html?ref=movies">The New York Times</a> saying: "Friends With Benefits, a breezy, speedy and (no kidding) funny comedy with a nicely matched Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis that is about love and sex in the age of social networking, gets some of its juice and tang partly by trash-talking its own genre. The setup is familiar, as are the essential elements: a single man and a single woman, two battered hearts yet a pair of resilient, eager, pretty bodies. But Ms. Kunis’s character is dark and savvy, not blond and dippy, and when she comically rails against an unseen Katherine Heigl you may sigh with relief (fingers crossed) that you’re watching the Scream of romantic comedies. "Much like the recent similarly themed if less satisfying and cruder No Strings Attached, Friends With Benefits uses sex and bared skin to get at questions about the possibility of romantic love between true male and female equals. After all, without Mommy and Daddy, religion, community or a ticking clock forcing the issue, what’s the point of settling down (or just settling)?"

Gothamist

Going Down in LA-LA Land It's been quite a time for the LGBT community these past couple weeks, with the Gay pride celebrations, the landmark decision for Gay marriage in NY, and now <a href="http://newfest.org/wordpress/2011/07/22/four-dont-miss-friday-films/">NewFest</a>, the Premier LGBT Film Festival, it's nice to see the community get their much deserved fiesta and we should all be celebrating with them, and what better way than a week long Film Festival at <a href="http://www.cinemavillage.com/chc/cv/">Cinema Village</a>! They'll be showing a series of films all week so check out the website for more information or head to the <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-07-20/film/newfest-2011-good-timing-great-lineup/">Village Voice</a> (of course) for a summary of the entire festival.

Gothamist

Also coming out today is Another Earth, which sounds like one of those "two strangers whose lives become irrevocably intertwined following a strange, life-shattering event" type of movie. It involves something about a duplicate earth, a woman whose in the MIT astrophysics department and a male composer. We guess these sort of movies aren't worth summarizing: as long as they can pull off the execution, the story be as convoluted as the writer wants. Reviews have actually been very positive, with Joshua Rothkopf from <a href="http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/film/1721759/another-earth">Time Out New York</a> saying: "We science-fiction fans have put up with shiny robots and slobbering aliens for a hyperage now—how about a movie about serious ideas, to keep company with Solaris and The Man Who Fell to Earth? As if hearing our plea, the Sundance Film Festival has long bestowed a special award, the Alfred P. Sloan Prize, to the entry that most speaks to ethical issues of science and technology. (Be still, our geeking hearts.) This January’s winner, Mike Cahill’s suggestive and extraordinarily sad feature debut, can proudly stand beside 2004’s brainy Primer—another Sloan recipient—as an exemplar of thoughtful indie genrework. "Another Earth is a movie you take home and write your own ending to."

Gothamist

For the next four weeks at <a href="http://www.filmforum.org/films/essentialprecode.html#722">Film Forum</a> they're showing Essential Pre-Code films, which, if you haven't seen them, are a really interesting cross-section of pictures made during the Great Depression before the restraints of the Film Code came into effect. The focus of the retrospective is Minnesota's Warren William, who is known as "the Heel of Heels" in '30s cinema. They're showing one of his films every Thursday, so although you probably missed yesterday's film, you can catch him in tonight's film Gold Diggers. Go to Film Forum and see films from one of the most interesting times in our country's cinema history, when the studio system was in full effect but was unrestrained by government censorship.

Gothamist

Starting today at the <a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/">IFC Center</a> is the new 35 mm restoration of enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder's obscure 3 hour plus, sci-fi noir, World on a Wire. The film opened to much fanfare at MoMA a couple months back and is being hurled onto the masses once again. For most people, seeing a movie at MoMA is a pain in the ass (with members getting first dibs, fewer showings, and dealing with midtown), so this should be more convenient for most of us. The film is a sci-fi dystopian film in the vein of Orwell, Dick, and Vonnegut, but with a spin that only Fassbinder could pull off.

Gothamist

Based on the extremely successful novel of the same name, Sarah's Key tells the story of an American journalist and her French husband who move into a flat owned by the husband's family, and then discovers that previous occupants were a family of Jews who were abducted during World War II. She begins to investigate about this family, especially the daughter Sarah, and is led into revelations about France, her husband's family and, of course, herself. Reviews have been mixed, with criticism coming from Melissa Anderson at <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-07-20/film/sarah-s-key-milking-the-shoah-for-easy-emotion/">The Voice</a> who says: "Exposing a little-known piece of Holocaust history—the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, in which French police arrested thousands of Jews in Paris in July 1942—Sarah’s Key dutifully follows the template of scores of movies about the Shoah: wringing from atrocity the most unseemly sentimentality. "Based on Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel and co-written by director Gilles Paquet-Brenner and Serge Joncour, Sarah’s Key is filled with the usual meaningless bromides, concluding with Scott Thomas’s voiceover declaration: “When a story is told, it is not forgotten.” This film vanishes from memory immediately."

Gothamist

For a long time Constance Garnett was the standard translator for almost every Russian writer, but she fell out of favor in the '50s when Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky criticized her for destroying authorial voice. Than Nabokov's bestie Edmund "Bunny" Wilson went off on Nabokov's translation of Pushkin in a literary journal and pissed him off and ended the friendship. Nowadays, with help from the NYT Book Review, the husband-wife power duo Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are in favor and are devouring and regurgitating almost every Russian book ever written. It's not very interesting for anyone but us nerds, but if most of this paragraph wasn't news to you, then you should go see The Woman with the 5 Elephants which is a documentary about the mystery surrounding the life and work of Svetlana Geier, one of the world's greatest translators of Russian literature. Reviews have been very good, with Noel Murray from <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-woman-with-the-5-elephants,59258/">The A.V. Club</a> saying: "Svetlana Geier is one of those people who seems to have lived her entire life for the purpose of becoming a great documentary subject. Raised in Kiev by a progressive farmer who was later imprisoned by Stalin’s regime, Geier lived in a community that was “liberated” by the Nazis, and while many of her Jewish neighbors were subsequently killed, Geier made herself useful as a translator, eventually settling in Germany before the end of the war. There, she gained renown as a scholar, professor, and translator of Russian literature, dedicating herself especially to the novels of Dostoyevsky. (She refers to his major books as “the five elephants.”) "It’s all connected: the way Geier finds something new in a book every time she attempts a new translation, and the way her own life story has been re-contextualized with time. (It’s significant that a woman who owes her life to some Nazis is responsible for the German title of one of Dostoyevsky’s most famous novels being changed from Guilt And Atonement to Crime And Punishment.)"

Gothamist

Also being released today is the film The Myth of the American Sleepover, which despite its intriguing name, sounds like your run of the mill indy ensemble bildungsroman, which really hasn't been done properly since Dazed and Confused. The film follows four teenagers on the last week of summer in the suburbs of Detroit. Sounds dangerous. Reviews have been pretty mixed, with Joshua Rothkopf from <a href="http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/film/1721777/the-myth-of-the-american-sleepover">Time Out New York</a> saying: "Swaddled with a lacquer of nostalgia that passes for cultural insight, this one-night-in-sweatpants drama will make you yearn for a moratorium on teen movies—at least ones so aggressively dewy-eyed. "To the movie’s credit, the way-back machine never sours into cynical comeuppance. No one suffers that much; the best tale, about an adrift collegian, Brett (Jacobsen), pining for the good old days, takes on the creepiness of backward fixations most directly. He recalls a pair of younger twins who he thinks crushed on him and goes on the hunt. It’s actually more innocent than it sounds. In Brett’s floppy bangs and forlorn demeanor, you might be reminded of Judge Reinhold’s king turned loser in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a film far worthier of your wistfulness."

Gothamist

And here is the animation/documentary Psychohydrography, which follows the trail of water from mountain to aqueduct, from city to sea. Filmed all over the world and animated entirely with single frame photography, it's probably a beautiful film to watch and one that deserves to be seen on the big screen. This sounds like a great movie if you're not feeling like actively involving yourself in action or drama films, but rather just relax and pretend it's not a hundred degrees outside. Reviews have been good, with Nick Pinkerton from < a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-07-20/film/psychohydrography-floating-along-the-l-a-river/">The Village Voice saying: "A fitting companion to Joan Didion’s very great essay on the Westerner’s water obsession, 'Holy Water,' Psychohydrography is an hour-long travelogue structured around the progress of the L.A. River, from the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains, to a concrete trough (best known as the scene of a Terminator 2 chase) running under countless viaducts through the city of Los Angeles until it empties into the Long Beach harbor. "In one indelible, contemplative frame, rutted mud is shot to resemble a mountain range above a sea-like puddle, which gradually shades with the pink of dawn, as a bothersome fly’s buzz and a turbine rev fill the soundtrack. A Pacific shore whose rolling tide is rendered as a field of static is the final, remarkable image—though the water cycle film might work best on loop."

Gothamist

Hey! Get some beer and some cleaning products! Tonight at the <a href="http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Market/NewYork/NewYork_frameset.htm">Landmark Theater></a>, Sunshine at Midnight presents Tarantino's (and Tony Scott's) True Romance. Love it or hate it, think of it as the poor man's Wild at Heart, Badlands rip-off, or a great reimagining of Romeo and Juliet, you have to admit it's a shit ton of fun. If you haven't seen it, fasten your seatbelt for one of Tarantino's "training wheel" scripts and the small blips of personality he would perfect later in his career.

Gothamist