Hey, I’m an old guy so take this with a grain of salt, but last night, god save me, I went to the movie Captain America. I hadn’t seen an action film, no less a super hero film in a while and I was unprepared for – if this is a typical example – where they’ve migrated to. (And let me say here, that I’m not someone who doesn’t like good old-fashioned trash for entertainment from time to time.) Someone had told me, incorrectly as it happens, that it was an anti–drone film and I was curious. In fact, it wasn’t coherent enough to be an anti-anything film, though if I understood it correctly, it was a warning that the world is secretly being taken over by a Nazi scientist preserved in an old computer system and our only hope is a superhero brought back to life from the 1940s with a boomerang shield that rejects bullets. It was hard to tell where the film started at my local multiplex and the 25 minutes of ads followed by the 25 minutes of previews (all at ear-splitting decibels) of future superhero films meant to fill this summer, followed by warnings to turn off your cell phones or be fried by little drone-like balls of animated something or other ended. The film had clearly been written by a team of 700 drug–dazed writers, all of whom had dropped out of film school before that class about “plot” was offered. So the banging and clanging and rote action scenes were followed by… well, what was that? The same weekend I went to an Indian film, The Lunchbox, about an unhappy young woman whose carefully prepared lunches sent to her husband at work are delivered by mistake to an older man about to retire and how via those lunches they begin sending messages to each other from the misery of their lives. There not only wasn’t an action scene, but not even an action in sight most of the time. It played against everything a film is supposed to do, was based on words written on paper, unfolded by each character and read aloud, and it had more suspense in any 30-second bit than Captain America had in its … well, it seemed like 4 hours of “action.” It swept me, as films can sometimes do, into a different world and, of course, it’s a film that almost none of you will ever be able to see. It’s bound to open in, like, two cities in this country. But if you can, skip the Captain (and undoubtedly Spiderman 932 as well) and head for The Lunchbox. Tom sonyclassics/thelunchbox/
Posted on: Sun, 04 May 2014 11:53:38 +0000
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