Beware of 9/11 anxiety in the latter half of Marvel's The Avengers, the ultimate Marvel/Disney Motion Pictures Studios franchise built on franchises that Joss Whedon ( Buffy The Vampire Slayer ) helms.
The gross destruction and families posting missing-person fliers edge uncomfortably close to events in our recent national memory, but the fight choreography and special effects set some pretty high standards for the summer movie season. The beautiful and historic Grand Central Station in Manhattan takes a heavy beating for the good of humanity as the place where the non-flying Avengers stake out against Kree-Skrull-like aliens who look like The Federation from Star Wars Episode I crossed with the dementors from the Harry Potter series. The aliens aren't the most original bunch but supervillain Loki—the brother of Norse god/superhero Thor played by the gorgeous and talented Tom Hiddleston ( star of gay director Terrence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea ) —makes up for the unimaginative alien army.
The defunct Avengers initiative, brainchild of S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury ( Samuel L. Jackson ) , is reinvigorated by tragedy when Loki kills agent Phil Coulson. Mark Ruffalo ( The Kids Are All Right ) channels Marlon Brando as Dr. Bruce Banner, the laboratory scientist-turned-green reckless monster The Hulk, whose knowledge of gamma radiation is supposed to help stop Loki from making a portal for invading aliens using the explosive source of infinite energy, Tesseract, a metaphorical Pandora's box.
Cleverly and without the help of gadgets, Russian spy Natasha Romanoff ( Scarlett Johansson ) , AKA Black Widow, tricks Loki into divulging his plans, yet as the loosely reunited team wastes time bickering among one another, their hovering aircraft carrier is getting ransacked. Assisted by the deductive powers of Tony Stark ( Robert Downey Jr. of the Iron Man series ) , the team tracks down the lost Tesseract cube to a shiny new phallus in Manhattan known as Stark Tower—a testament to the self-titled billionaire, playboy, philanthropist's charming ego.
At the last minute, these seemingly anarchistic misfits somehow pull together their oversized egos and set aside their righteous superhero attitudes. Stark is as slick as ever, jetting circles around the alien chariots that are hammered down by Thor ( sexy Aussie Chris Hemsworth, of Star Trek and Cabin in the Woods ) or trampled by The Hulk, who generously assists, albeit haphazardly.
At one moment, The Hulk stands and shakes off the rubble he created crash-landing through the windows of Grand Central Station. Just for laughs, he nonchalantly punches Thor clear across the hall. The script, by Zak Penn and Whedon, aims for comedy in the many one-liners sprinkled throughout, but I'd be hard-pressed to figure out what these characters would say to each other if not for their common enemy. "Too bad I lost my good eye," says patch-eyed Fury ( Jackson ) , one of his many signature lines of sarcasm. If the hull of the S.H.I.E.L.D. aircraft carrier is a riff on the Death Star, then Fury is like a reformed Darth Vader.
The host of characters with their own comic legacies have never before been together on screen in one film according to a studio interview with Whedon. Of the six avengers, three are derived from the original 1963 volume by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Present time in these comic franchises feels oddly like a science-fiction world that has finally caught up with a much more technologically advanced civilization envisioned in past movies of the genre. The Avengers opens nationwide May 4.
Preview: Retiring at half the cost of living in the Third World is many a westerner's dream, hence the premise of John Madden's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, based on Deborah Moggach's novel These Foolish Things, about retirees forced to outsource their retirement. Marigold Hotel stars Dame Judi Dench ( J. Edgar, My Week with Marilyn, Notes on a Scandal ) , Maggie Smith ( Harry Potter ) , Tom Wilkinson ( The Debt, Shakespeare in Love ) as solo-flying retirees and Billy Nighy and Penelope Wilton as a quarrelsome couple. AARP will likely relish in this dramedy about a group of retired Brits' failed expectations of a resort advertised as newly restored accommodations in India. Madden continues his long-time collaboration with both Dench and Wilkinson in this retirement farce.
I'm reminded of Hyacinth and Richard, the perfectly mismatched couple in BBC's Keeping Up Appearances series. Among the seven cash-strapped strangers lost in translation at the mercy of the Westernized Sonny Kapoor ( Dev Patel, Slumdog Millionaire ) is the widowed Evelyn ( Dench ) who inherits her husband's debt, High Court Judge Graham ( Tom Wilkonson ) , and Muriel ( Smith ) who plans to have her hip replaced before leaving India permanently. Also co-starring are Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie as love-seeking Brits. Participant Media executives Graham Broadbent and Peter Czernin produce Marigold Hotel. Music is composed by Thomas Newman ( The Help, The Iron Lady, Fried Green Tomatoes ) , who is also responsible for the music in HBO's acclaimed six-hour miniseries Angels in America.
Film notes:
—Albert Nobbs, the Oscar-nominated queer film directed and starring Glenn Close as an Irish lesbian who disguises herself as a man to survive in 19th-century Ireland, comes to DVD and VOD May 15.
—White Light Cinema presents Naughty and Nice Boys: The Pioneering Physique Films of Bob Mizer ( 1922-1992 ) , a two-night "illustrated lecture/screening series" Saturday-Sunday, May 5-6, at 8 p.m. at Nightingale Theatre, 1084 N. Milwaukee Ave. Mizer was a radical photographer and filmmaker who served a nine-month prison sentence for distributing illegal images of nude men by mail as early as 1942.
He went on to found an influential studio Athletic Model Guild ( AMG ) in 1945 and photographed thousands of men with the help of his mother and brother, which were then published in Physique Pictorial. Lecture/screenings are curated by Billy Miller, New York City Editor and Publisher of Straight To Hell ( a.k.a. "The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts" ) . Miller will be in person to present photographs and film clips courtesy of The Bob Mizer Foundation. See www.WhiteLightCinema.com .
—Chicago lesbian producer, editor and owner of Black Cat Productions announced the Chicago premiere of A Mind in Quicksand: Life with Huntington's. In time for Huntington's Disease Awareness Month, this is an award-winning documentary that traces director Kim Lile through her experience as a newly diagnosed patient. Prominent experts in the field are featured, including Deborah Boyd and Charlotte Rybarczyk, representatives of the Huntington's Disease Society of America; and Huntington's experts Kathleen Shannon, M.D., and Stephen Clingerman, Ph.D. The film will have a limited run of three showings at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St., May 5-7. Director Kim Lile, Producer Sharon Zurek and executive producer Jesse Ewing will be on hand for the Q&A. Tickets are $11; see www.siskelfilmcenter.org .
—Look for two screenings of gay interest at Gene Siskel Film Center this weekend. First, Patty Schemel, lesbian drummer for Courtney Love's recently reunited grunge band Hole, is the subject of Hit So Hard, a documentary by David Ebersole, which has its Chicago premiere May 4. Second, Rogue director Guy Maddin ( My Winnepeg, The Saddest Music in the World ) continues his tradition of outsider art films with Keyhole, starring muse Isabella Rossellini, daughter of Ingrid Bergman ( Casablanca ) and neo-realist master Roberto Rossellini ( Rome, Open City ) ; Udo Kier, the memorable cult actor who played a gay john in My Own Private Idaho; and Jason Patric ( The Lost Boys ) . Both films run for one week, May 4-10. Showtimes vary; see www.siskelfilmcenter.org .
