Captain Marvel

There is a scene in “Captain Marvel” when the eponymous superhero (Brie Larson) finds herself, and assorted others, in 1990s Louisiana and needing, for convoluted reasons, to upload a CD rom to a bulky home computer. A member of Starforce from the planet Hala, as advanced as a 2019 8 year old with an iPhone XR would appear to a jaded teen from the grunge era, she looks at Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), her right-hand man, confused about what’s taking so long to acquire the needed information. “It’s uploading,” Fury says. If it’s a cheap back in the day joke, it’s also emblematic of “Captain Marvel’s” editing and pacing, a refreshing departure from the favored frenetic, eye-wearying comic book movie aesthetic. Shots, bless editor Elliot Graham’s soul, are held for two, three, four, even five, seconds, like a tense moment where two characters board an elevator and the shot is held as is rather than cutting to a close-up of Fury’s“wait a second” face. Indeed, most every cut, like every zoom and tilt, counts, maintaining a linear progression of events so you see how each moment leads to the next. Best of all, however, is the editing’s emphasis on its Marvelous Captain, always ensuring she is the show’s star.

That should come as no surprise since writer/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are dramatists whose oeuvre includes character-centric films like “Sugar” and “Mississippi Grind” in which their protagonists undergo odysseys toward fledgling states of self-discovery. That essentially describes “Captain Marvel.” Larson begins the movie as Vers, green-suited Starforce member in a galactic battle against the villainous shape-shifting Skrulls, eventually unlocking her true Carol Danvers self by coolly unleashing her superpowers rather than tempering them at the behest of her mentor Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) and modifying her uniform to the iconic red, blue and yellow. Her journey starts when a rescue mission yields imprisonment and a memory probe at the hands of the Skrulls’ Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), whose green reptilian face re-proves no actor is more committed to letting himself look like shit than Mendelsohn. But Carol escapes to the planet below, C-353, mid-90s Earth, as it turns out, meaning “Captain Marvel” hurtles into the past, mirroring its character’s emotional journey.

The 90s place her squarely in era of the Riot Grrrl. Among the tenets of the Riot Grrrl ethos, as explained in Kathleen Hanna’s manifesto, is how Riot Grrls “know that life is much more than physical survival and are patently aware that the punk rock ‘you can do anything’ idea is crucial to the coming angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere, according to their own terms, not ours.” Carol Danvers, in other words, which is why her desert highway sequence aboard a motorcycle being scored to Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains” is not mid-90s nostalgia but an embrace of her inner riot grrrl. Alas, this remains Marvel, which demands action scenes, meaning that frequently physical survival, as flashbacks evince, tie into Carol’s psychic life and mostly, sadly trumps her cultural life. A photograph of young-er Carol in a Guns ‘n’ Roses t-shirt singing karaoke provides a glimpse of cultural life, but that’s all, just a glimpse, limiting the character’s backstory to a militaristic context, less a well-rounded person than a fighting machine figuring out who needs to be fought.

“Captain Marvel”, however, is not simply Carol’s spiritual reclamation but The Avengers’ genesis too. In her earthly battle with the Skrulls, she partners with pre-eyepatch S.H.I.E.L.D agent Nick Fury (a digitally de-aged Jackson) whose collaboration with Carol triggers the idea of enlisting superheroes to his Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. Jackson hints at this idea by echoing Carol’s give-no-ground attitude, not awed, just impressed. At the same time, Jackson understands whose movie this is and willingly cedes the spotlight to his co-star (and the cat) when necessary. His being there also naturally allows for the intermingling of black and white, and then eventually green, which is as much allegory as “Captain Marvel” yearns to stress. Though there might be overtones of incendiary Middle East politics, Boden and Fleck limit the film’s air to a broader bleeding-heart liberalism, evoked in a dinner table scene near the end, heavy-handed though undoubtedly also destined to enrage bothsidesists because it, like, you know, presents all sides.

No, “Captain Marvel” works less as an allegory and more as Carol coming into her own and, by extension, Larson’s finely calibrated performance, one truly conveying the idea of maintaining an even keel in the possession of immense power. Larson grasps a star’s symbiosis with the camera is frequently dictated on less being more and even in a movie of grand set pieces, she generally remains still in frames, able to generate a laugh simply by rolling her eyes to the right. And she renders her entrance into a train car long after its left the station with such self-possessed charisma that it’s kind of the comicbook version of Lauren Bacall moving through the Martinique hotel bar in “To Have and Have Not.” Larson is so low-key, high voltage in this moment she even turns the obligatory Stan Lee cameo into a decent comic beat. The movie’s biggest moment, teasing a showdown seemingly set up since the first scene, becomes a comic beat too, where Carol does not finally recognize how to master her power but recognize she has had it mastered all along, reducing the conspicuous male across from her to a variation of Ron Burgundy priggishly screaming at Veronica Corningstone. The moment’s inherent simplicity might simultaneously epitomize the overall lack of more traditional thrilling blockbuster CGI sensation, but sometimes a single star is brightness enough.

A Non-Review Of Don Jon

When I entered the theater Sunday afternoon for a showing of "Don Jon" there were only two other people - a couple and, thus, sitting together - in the whole auditorium. I took a seat in the middle of the fourth row from the screen because, I confess, I'm someone who enjoys being much closer to the screen than back from it. Naturally, right before the previews commenced, another couple entered, sat directly behind me despite there being an entire swath of seats from which to choose, and talked throughout the movie.

Our world is full of talk. Talk radio is an epidemic. I enter the kitchen at work and the TV is always on, loud and proud, someone talking at amplified volumes. There is small talk and serious talk and shop talk. People, as established, can't even not talk for ninety minutes during a movie. When 2013 is all said and done there will be two talks remembered forever and neither of them will be President Obama and President Rouhani talking - it will be Wendy Davis and Ted Cruz filibustering. Orations have given way to Obstructions, words for the sake of words, talking all night and saying nothing.

"Don Jon", the directorial debut of Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who also wrote and stars), is full of talkers - loud talkers, shit talkers, people talking to get what they want, people talking to tell lies to get what they need. There is a recurring Catholic Priest in the confessional (who we never see) who by film's end must have ordered our boy Don Jon to say at least six hundred Hail Mary's and four hundred and fifty Our Fathers. And Don Jon says them, sure, all of them, but he doesn't, you know, SAY them. And I'm reasonably certain the Priest we never see is not really HEARING what Don Jon is confessing before absolving - he's just waiting for his turn to talk.

Don Jon and his friends talk, mainly about whether this girl is a "seven" or that girl is an "eight" and what makes a girl the hallowed "dime". Don Jon's gum-smacking gal Barbara (Scarlett Johannson) talks, issuing orders masquerading as sexual banter. Don Jon's Dad (Tony Danza) and Mom (Glenne Headly) talk - well, argue - ceaselessly, just like any good old fashioned Italian stereotype. Don Jon even talks to himself when he's alone - in voiceover - in a vain effort to convince himself he doesn't have a problem (he's a porn addict, as if "Shame" had been directed by Norman Jewison). But do you know who doesn't talk?

Monica (Brie Larson). All the way to the right.

Don Jon's sister. Monica. She doesn't talk. Like, at all.

Monica is played by Brie Larson and stars as just another spot of satire in a satirical sorta film. Monica is attached at the hand to her smartphone. Literally. In every single scene we see Monica - at the family dinner table, at church, at the family dinner table, at church, at the family dinner table, etc. - she is holding her smartphone and looking at her smartphone and scrolling through her smartphone. No one seems surprised or bothered by it. Not even the church parishioners. We gather this must be standard behavior for Monica. Also, did I mention she doesn't talk?

This is Levitt the writer poking fun at our teenage culture - hell our entire culture - and our obsession with our smartphones and how in the moments when we are not actually talking we are looking at these teeny screens in front of our faces, so engrossed that I have actually seen pregnant women on the train have to clear their throats to get people hovering over their phones to look up to give up their seat to get right back to hovering over their phones. It's a brilliant gag to have Monica in all these scenes but never acknowledging anyone or anything aside from her phone. But hey, did I mention that she DOESN'T TALK?

It's a modern-day silent-era performance. Her facial expressions are entirely non-existent. She lives in a bubble of smartphone apps, I suppose, and those probably lost their amusement a long time ago. So many people in such a role would be trying to, as they say, make his/her reel, but not Larson. No one engrossed with their smartphone betrays much emotion, they just......look. So Larson just......looks. She hears, and you can tell she hears what goes on around her because she occasionally reacts but whenever she reacts it comes across as an annoyance that she was disturbed from her Facebook or her Twitter or her Instagram or her Candy Crush and a non-verbal desire that clearly indicates "Christ, can't you people just shut up for five seconds?"

But...there's a moment. It's a moment when Don Jon and Barbara have just split up and so he's talking to his parents, explaining himself, and his Dad is talking, because how could his son let such a foxy lady go, and his Mom is talking, because how can he continue to deny her the grandchildren she so desperately wants, and all that talking gets out of the way and then....

Monica looks at her brother. Just looks at him. There's hardly a change in her demeanor from any other time but there is a change. The pointed eyes, yes, but more than that she's looking at him. It's the only time in the whole film she has actually looked at someone. Levitt knows. She knows. We know.

Well, eventually Monica talks. She has to. That's how these things work. But when she does inevitably open her mouth, the content of her utterance is not necessarily stunning – it’s what I’d been thinking, and perhaps what you’d been thinking too. Rather its profundity is a direct correlation of its simplicity.

The phrase Talk Is Cheap is typically deployed to denote that words must be accompanied by action. Perhaps an even more literal reading of the phrase, however, might be that this modern world of incessant and banal blathering is what has rendered it cheap. Air needs to be filled, after all, and so the words come at us in such sustained waves that we have fewer and fewer moments without noise and less and less time to formulate and get lost in our own thoughts.

Monica is merely pointing out the obvious, it's just that no one else could hear it until then over all the braying.