Friday, April 25, 2014

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

We don't often go out to see movies in the theater -after all, if we're willing to wait just a few weeks we can buy the DVD for the price of our 3 tickets!- but this time I've decided will be my last time. Unless I can find seats made more like the old-style theater seats. The "new" over-sized stadium seating has me in severe pain in my hip and back. I'm short enough so that if I sit up straight in the chair my knees don't reach the edge of the seat and my feet dangle nowhere near the floor and my head comes up to the point that most people's necks reach giving me a horrible position to try to work around. If I slide down far enough for my feet to touch the floor, my back screams for some support of any kind. If I try to sit sideways with one or both feet up in the seat, my head hits the head rest in a bad place. Very uncomfortable no matter what I do. We have a decent-sized tv here at the house, so I think I'll stay home from now on. Unless, as I say, I can find a theater old enough to have the smaller seating.

We did like this Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie. The characters themselves were fun and well-played. Paranoia about Nazis is just getting tiresome for me if I don't also get zombies, but I forgive them in exchange for not turning Captain America into a boring cardboard cut-out.

trailer:


Huffington Post opens with this:
Riveting. Stunning. Surprising. Curves are thrown at you at unsuspected moments. A great plot is filled with hair pin turns and witty one liners. Laughter erupts at unpredictable moments. In the very beginning when the logo Marvel is flashed on the screen, the audience goes wild. Everything about this film is about precision
Rolling Stone gives it 3 out of 4 stars and says it's "every rousing, whup-ass thing you want in an escapist adventure. And did I detect a hint of depth under the dazzle?" Empire Online gives it 4 out of 5 stars and concludes, "It may climax with an overly formulaic splurge, but The Winter Soldier benefits from an old-school-thriller tone that, for its first half at least, distinguishes it from its more obviously superheroic Marvel cousins." SF Signal gives it 3 out of 5 stars and closes with this:
Evans finds the right balance of stranger in a strange land and present-day hero, with just enough uncertainty and angst to give him extra dimension, adding weight to what otherwise could have been a forgettable entry. Captain America: The Winter Soldier breaks no new ground, but it renders its service admirably.
RogerEbert.com gives it 3 1/2 out of 4 stars and says it "is a very good movie, the rare film in this genre that serves as both entry point and continuation. For a change, you can walk in cold and you won't be too lost." Rotten Tomatoes has a critics score of 89%, and the audience score is even higher.

8 comments:

  1. The Winter Soldier was filmed mostly in Cleveland, people around here are saying good things about the movie but hate what it did to traffic.

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    1. wow! yes, i imagine traffic was a nightmare, but i'd think that the filming would be good for a city's economy. we don't get many movies filmed here. even the tv series "memphis beat" was filmed elsewhere because of better deals offered by other states.

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    2. They film three or four pictures in the Cleveland area every year for the past 5 or 6 years. Usually you don't really notice the filming going on but you can't mess with rush hour traffic. I don't know how beneficial to the economy movies actually are after all the tax abatements and incentives.

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    3. i would think the local businesses would benefit enough to offset it (hotels/restaurants/local work opportunities), but i guess the incentives are pricey. we have what seems to me to be a growing independent film scene, but we don't get attention from the major studios. they've filmed a couple of things here which shut down streets downtown, but what i heard about was people trying to get hired as extras lol. it's just such a novelty here.

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  2. Anonymous5:21 AM

    I liked it a lot. It is up there wioth Iron Man I as the best of the recent Marvel movies.
    --A Pal

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    1. i'm loving how much fun these shows are! since i never was "into" comic books, it could've been hard for me. these are good, though :)

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  3. "Paranoia about Nazis is just getting tiresome for me if I don't also get zombies" - LOL! That´s the funniest thing all week!

    I couldn´t get the husband near this, I´m afraid. Anything super-power, anything sword&sandal I have to go alone or wait for it to get to television. He was a good sport about the first Tolkien-adaptations, but the third one seemed to never end, even for me, and that was it for him. Forever.

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    1. there's a lot to be said for watching at home. there were only about 4 little clutches of people in the theater when we saw this. my husband is a big comic book fan since his childhood, so he's always hopeful they'll treat the characters with some respect. the captain america character is being treated respectfully here.

      tolkien, on the other hand, is getting the longer-is-better treatment. sad.

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