Breaking the Line

Margaret: Life As an Unfinished Movie

The good folks at Slate let me go long on Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret, whose much-anticipated extended cut arrives today as a DVD bundled with the Amazon-exclusive Blu-ray of the theatrical cut. (As to why it's a standard-def edition available only through a single outlet, see the tortured history of the film's theatrical release.) The piece is long enough without me blathering on here as well, so suffice it to say that in spite of some technical rough spots, the three-hour Margaret turns an already great movie into a wounded masterpiece. When you're done, return here for an equally patchy recording of last night's post-screening Q&A, with Lonergan, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick, Jeannie Berlin and J. Smith-Cameron. (Not seen: Editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who from her seat in the house told moderator Tony Kusher to "move on.")

Video streaming by Ustream 

Mad Men's Styles of the Times: How the Show's Shifts Mirror the Characters' Uncertainties and a Turbulent Era

While I watch a lot of TV, I don't often get a chance to write about it; weekly recaps are a bit of a  thankless grind, and they've largely taken the place of more reflective, occasional essays. (Some people, like my colleagues Matt Zoller Seitz and Noel Murray, manage to do both at once, damn them.) Plus, Jesus are there a lot of people writing smart stuff about Mad Men on an almost minute-by-minute basis. Thanks, at any rate, to my Indiewire editor Alison Willmore for letting me chime in on the Mad Men finale and the season as a whole, focusing (I hope) on some of the broader issues that sometimes get lost in the weekly wash of plot developments, especially when it comes to keep tabs on the show's style. Enjoy.

"It's Laura Now": Against Me! and Its Transgender Singer Own the Stage

As a critic, sometimes you get paid to be in the right place at the right time. I'd somehow missed the fact that Against Me! was playing at Philadelphia's Electric Factory this past Sunday until my Inquirer editor asked me to cover the show — something about the phrase "opening for The Cult" evidently induced some form of temporary amnesia. But being present for the band's first tour with singer Laura Jane Grace — who, up until a few months ago, was known as singer Tommy Gabel — turned out to be a genuine privilege. I suppose the fact that the throng pressed up against the stage had paid headliner prices to watch the band play a 45-minute opening set meant they were a self-selecting group of diehard fans, but even so, it was amazing to watch heavily tattooed dudes jab their fingers in the air, biceps flexing, as they shouted along with the words to the unreleased new song "Transgender Dysphoria Blues," whose lyrics include the lines, "You want them to see you like they see every other girl / They just see a faggot." Even more extraordinary was the moment when an aggrieved looking fan, dressed for the occasion in an Against Me! t-shirt, yelled out, "Play some old shit, Tom!" and the man behind tapped him softly on the shoulder and gently chided him, "It's Laura now." More on the show, including a few words on the ostensible headliner, in my Inquirer review.

As a codicil, here's a review I did a few weeks back on Wish Me Away, a documentary about country star Chely Wright's decision to come out as a lesbian. The movie spends a lot of time worrying about whether the country music establishment can ever embrace an openly gay performer, but I wonder if the individual fans might be turn out to be more open-minded than the industry that services them gives them credit. If Carrie Underwood can embrace gay marriage, maybe we're not as polarized as some would have us believe.

Metric's Emily Haines: "It Was Always the Dream to Reclaim Radio"

I don't know many critics who rated Metric's 2009 album Fantasies quite as highly as I did, but if you like your pop music unabashed, heavy on sleazy synths and swing-for-the-rafters choruses, it's just about perfect. And while plenty of the popular music I love ends up being, in fact, not all that popular, Fantasies sold nearly half a million copies worldwide, especially impressive considering it was the band's first self-released album. Their new Synthetica doesn't have anything as punch-you-in-the-face awesome as "Help I'm Alive" or "Gold Guns Girls," but it turns out to be a surprisingly effective grower, not to mention a good pretext for me to chat up singer Emily Haines about the band's ongoing quest to make music people listen to without selling their soul in the process. More, including thoughts on sharing a vocal booth with Lou Reed, at eMusic.

Prometheus (Mostly) De-Livers: Alien Prequel Dazzles More Than It Disappoints

So I had this nice post pointing in the direction of my Prometheus review all set to go at an embargo-compliant 12:01 a.m. — a real beaut, involving the phrase "plays like a motherfucker" — and Typepad seems not only to have declined to post it but eaten it altogether. But here, in any case, is my Promtheus review, linked without embellishment or apology.

"Safety Not Guaranteed": Towards a Grand Unified Theory of Aubrey Plaza

I was in the midst of writing my review of Safety Not Guaranteed, in which Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza plays a magazine intern who tracks down the author of a classified ad seeking a time-travel companion, when I got an email from All Things Considered asking me to contribute to a profile on the actress. (The impetus, apparently, was this 2010 interview, in which, among other things, she talks about her sullen Parks & Rec intern, April Ludgate, as being a kind of generational stand-in.) NPR ended up whittling me down to one inconsequential soundbite — no complaints, it's nice to be asked, etc. — but I did end up give some serious thought to Plaza's screen persona in preparation. Among other things, it struck me as interesting that April's reflexive disdain is almost entirely without malice; she's not a disillusioned idealist so much as an idealist in waiting. (I also ventured that Plaza, who trained with the Upright Citizens Bridage, replaces the improv rule "Yes and..." with "So what?" This stuff is gold, people.) We've seen over the course of several seasons that April is capable of unironic appreciation — of her husband Andy, among other things — but there's a bar that must first be cleared, a defensive barrier breached. There's also a playful element to it, as when Rashida Jones' bubbly Ann, in an attempt to strike up small talk, asks April where she got her haircut, and Plaza deadpans, "Prison." The key, if perhaps slightly-on-the-nose, moment, is when April and Andy take a trip to the Grand Canyon — prompted by a small-town cult's doomsday prophecy — and she stares out at it and says, "I'm trying to find a way to be annoyed at it. But I can't." Frankly, I think Plaza does a good enough job portraying April's inner softie to make such a set piece redundant, but it comes in handy when you want to put a bow on things.

The Passion of Bjorn Pork: Down in the Muck With Mel Gibson and Joe Ezsterhas

Under the heading of "I read it so you don't have to," I slogged through all 30,000 words of Joe Ezsterhas' Heaven and Mel and wrote up the results for Slate. Long story short: Mel Gibson is, as expected, a raving, anti-Semitic loon, with a curious email alias (in the above title) to boot. (Remember when he was the fun, wacky kind of crazy, rather than the I'll-just-take-this-butcher-knife-to-bed-with-me kind? Good times.) Ezsterhas, as expected, turns out to be a self-serving sleaze whose converstion to devout Catholicism has only added self-righteousness into the mix. Also, Mel Gibson's father believes that Pope John Paul I was murdered when a cardinal sat on his face. Enjoy.

A Guide to Ghibli: From Castle in the Sky to The Secret World of Arrietty

Just a quick entry by way of pointing to my A.V. Club Primer on the films of Studio Ghibli. Argue over your favorties in the comments — and be sure to scold me for my insufficient love of Spirited Away. And really, watch Pom Poko next chance you get.

Previously: Reviews of The Secret World of Arrietty, Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and My Neighbor Totoro, plus a talk with Neil Gaiman about writing the English-language script for Mononoke. I reviewed Ponyo as well, but the internet seems to have et that one.

Feist's "Broken-Hearted Love Songs": Turbulent, Violent and Not Suitable for Easy Listening

I don't often (read, almost never) get around to posting my Inquirer concert reviews — sometimes because thanks to the paper's nightmarish website, I can't even find the damn things — but I'm pretty happy with how this account of Leslie Feist's show at the Academy of Music turned out. For me, at least, the show was a revelation, a dramatic and at times emotionally violent performance that sent me back to Feist's albums, wondering, "How did I miss that?" In all honesty, I still thought of her principally as the woman behind the ubiquitous, Muppet-friendly "1234," pointedly absent from Tuesday's two-hour show. But I also think that she's got an unfortunate tendency to sand the edges off her spiky and surprising songs on record; they literally get lost in the mix. The show transformed how I think of her, a rare experience for which I'm always grateful. Plus, any chance to drop a gratuitous Mary Margaret O'Hara in the pages of a major daily is a welcome thing.

Also in the Inky's pages recently: whistling virtuoso Andrew Bird, and the graceful aging of Nick Lowe.

The Avengers: Some Assembly Required

"I will send help as soon as I've accomplished a rescue in my own particular..."

"Idiom, sir?"

—Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I'm not moved to write a full-on review of The Avengers, mainly because I'm disinclined to wade into summarizing plot, recapitulating backstory and so forth, but there's one aspect of the project that struck me as particularly interesting. There's a burden built into the framework of The Avengers that Joss Whedon handles with exceptional grace, and yet still weighs down the movie considerably, which is that assembling a group of previously unaffiliated superheroes to fight a common enemy involves not only the textual burden of reconciling their personalities — finding common group between Chris Evans' square-jawed Captain America and Robert Downey, Jr.'s cynical Iron Man — but fusing the vastly different styles of the mythologies (and the movies) they spring from. It's hard enough to manufacture a threat that poses equal challenges to the quasi-divine Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, who's essentially a superlatively competent human assassin. Logically speaking, a force strong enough to threaten the one could easily reduce the other to goo. But on top of that, their stories are told in very different ways: Captain America's as a self-consciously retro evocation of patriotic duty, the Hulk's as a psychodramatic battle between id and superego, Iron Man's as the glossy, mildly tongue-in-cheek story of an amoral egotist accepting the responsibility that comes with his considerable gifts. (There I go with the backstory. It's hard to avoid.) It's not that Whedon has a lot of balls to keep in the air — he's juggling balls, bowling pins, possibly a chainsaw or two.

The Avengers takes its sweet, occasionally dragging, time introducing its characters before bringing them together, and a large part of the reason the setup takes so long is because Whedon has to find a common idiom that can accomodate the styles already established by Iron Man, Thor and Captain America. (The burden of assimilating the Hulk movies is lessened by the fact that the role played by Eric Bana and Edward Norton has been recast with Mark Ruffalo, giving Whedon something of a clean slate.) The back-and-forth between Downey's Tony Stark and his girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) has a snappy, screwball-comedy sheen that's worlds away from the desaturated, even-keeled introduction of Captain America, who's just come out of seven decades in deep freeze. (Whedon cut a scene in which Steve Rogers, Cap's civilian alter ego, meets up with his nonagenarian love interest from the Second World War, which would have made for an even more pointed contrast with the Stark-Potts banter.) There's a tremendous amount of busywork involved in simply getting the film to the point where Captain America can joke about a pop-culture reference and not have the line fall utterly flat.

Whedon knows where the red meat is, and he tosses plenty in the movie's climactic battle scene, which seems to run for the better part of an hour. There are references for newbies, casual fans, and more in-depth ones I'm sure I missed. (I read plenty of superhero comics in my youth, but the Avengers were never my thing. I'd have to guess they seemed too square, although it wasn't a decision I ever made outright. I had to hit the web to discern the meaning of the film's post-credits tag, which features an appearance by an unnamed character I barely recognized.) Even in in the thick of battle, he's still shifting gears. While the more superhuman of his heroes are fighting giant, snakelike beasts pouring from an interdimensional hole in the sky, the more down-to-earth slip into a bank and rescue a clutch of hostages from a handful of alien thugs. It's hardly on a par with saving the world, but from each according to his ability...

Apart from the climactic battle, which had a slightly goofy grin plastered across my face from beginning to end, the most joyous moment was a quiet confrontation between Tony Stark and Ruffalo's Bruce Banner, two scientific geniuses who approach their powers from very different angles. In large part, it's the thrill of watching two great actors finally allowed to punch their weight rather than tossing off quips in an ensemble setting. (Downey is The Avengers' Fran Kranz, dispensing self-aware snark at every available opportunity.)  In some ways, The Avengers is more a feat than a film, but it's still a hell of an act.