American exceptionalism

I didn’t want to see Captain America. The trailer wasn’t great, Joe Johnston wasn’t exactly my idea of a dream director, and most of all, I was getting a little tired of superheroes. The fact that we’ve seen four major comic book adaptations this summer alone wasn’t the only reason. Ten years ago, a movie like Spider-Man felt like a cultural event, a movie that I’d been waiting decades to see. Today, they’ve become the norm, to the point where a movie that isn’t driven by digital effects and an existing comic book property seems strangely exotic. At worst, such movies come off as the cynical cash grabs that, frankly, most of them are, a trend epitomized by Green Lantern, a would-be marketing bonanza so calculated that an A.V. Club headline summed it up as “Superhero movies are popular right now. Here’s another one.”

Which is why it gives me no small pleasure to report that Captain America is a pretty good movie, and in ways that seem utterly reproducible. This isn’t a film like The Dark Knight, which seems like an increasingly isolated case of a genius director being given all the resources he needed to make a singular masterpiece. Captain America is more the work of talented journeymen, guys who like what they do and are reasonably skilled at it, and who care enough to give the audience a good time—presumably with the kind of movie that they’d enjoy seeing themselves. Joe Johnston is no Chris Nolan, but in his own way, he does an even more credible Spielberg imitation than the J.J. Abrams of Super 8, and to more of a purpose. If this is clearly a cash grab—as its closing minutes make excruciatingly clear—it’s also full-blooded and lovingly rendered.

As a result, it’s probably the comic book movie I enjoyed most this year. While it doesn’t have the icy elegance of X-Men: First Class, it has a better script (credited to Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely), and it’s far superior to the muddled, halfhearted, and overpraised Thor. Part of this is due to the fact that it’s the only recent superhero movie to manage a credible supervillain: in retrospect, Hugo Weaving’s Red Skull doesn’t do much more than strut around, but he’s still mostly glorious. And it’s also one of the rare modern comic book movies that remembers that the audience might still like to see some occasional action. As Thor failed to understand, special effects alone aren’t enough: I’ve had my mind blown too many times before. Yet it’s still fun to see an expertly staged action scene that arises organically from the story, and Captain America has a good handful of those, at a time when I’ve almost forgotten what it was like to see one.

What Captain America does, then, isn’t rocket science: it’s what you’d expect from any big studio movie, done with a modicum of care, aiming to appeal to the largest possible audience. So why aren’t there more movies like this? Perhaps because it’s harder to do than it looks: for one thing, it requires a decent script, which, more than anything else, is the limiting factor in a movie’s quality, and can’t be fixed by throwing money at it. The more movies I see, the more I respect mainstream entertainment that tries to be more than disposable, an effort that can seem quixotic in an industry where Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides earns a billion dollars worldwide. Like it or not, movies are going to look increasingly like this, which is why it’s a good idea to welcome quality wherever we find it. Because it isn’t enough for a superhero to be super anymore; he also needs to be special.

Potter’s wheel

During my sophomore and junior years in college, I worked as a film critic for a currently defunct pop culture website, attending preview screenings and cranking out movie reviews at fifty dollars apiece. This was, believe it or not, my first real job of any kind, and while not particularly lucrative, it was hugely educational. (I learned, for instance, that while it may sound like fun, being forced to see every movie that comes out between January and March is a special sort of hell.) I also suggested occasional ideas for feature stories, and one day, probably in the fall of 1999, I noticed that media interest was growing around a series of children’s fantasy books about a boy wizard. I made a note to bring up the idea with my editor, then promptly forgot about it. I never did write that story. And it looks like this may be my last chance.

Now that the second half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is finally in theaters, there have been a lot of think pieces about J.K. Rowling and the future of her creation, but one of the themes I find most interesting is the seamlessness of the franchise. This is the first global fantasy series, born from a novelist’s imagination, where books, movies, and other media were allowed to grow along with their audiences. There are those who love both the books and the movies; a significantly larger worldwide audience that has experienced the movies alone; and those, like me, who began with the books, then switched to the movies, once it became clear that the films were finally doing justice to the series. There’s also the theme park, the video games, and even, dare I say it, the fanfic. The result has shaped how we think about mainstream storytelling in ways we’re only beginning to appreciate.

As far as the films are concerned, Harry Potter was never my favorite movie franchise, but for the past ten years, it unstintingly received the full resources of one of our great movie studios, resulting in a polished Cadillac sheen that shouldn’t be underestimated. The installments by David Yates, in particular, while a bit impersonal, are among the handsomest, most lavishly mounted movies in recent memory, to the point where they’ve spoiled me for lesser franchises. These days, I get a little impatient watching a movie like Thor, which is clearly a big studio production but with obvious limits to its spectacle—meaning that it cost $150 million to make, not $250 million. And while the escalation of movie budgets is far from a good thing, there was still something reassuring about paying eleven dollars to see a Harry Potter film, knowing that you were bound to get your money’s worth.

But that doesn’t mean that bigger is always better. Of the movies, my favorite, somewhat to my surprise, is Goblet of Fire, which is also the only installment I never saw on the big screen. The first two movies are frankly embarrassing. Prisoner of Azkaban gets more respect, but while I have nothing but love for Alfonso Cuarón, I can’t get past that movie’s tonal issues and confusing final act, although much of it is smart and charming. And while the Yates installments, as I’ve said before, are big, sleek machines, Mike Newell’s Goblet of Fire comes closest to my idea of what this series should be about: not action, not special effects, but the idea of magic and of being a child. The lovingly detailed buildup to the Yule Ball, which otherwise puts the complicated plot on hold, strikes me as the most satisfying sequence in all the films. And that’s where I’ll remember Harry.