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Aug. 13th, 2011 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bobcatmoranI went and saw Captain America. True to form, I saw it a couple weeks after it's come out because I am chronically incapable of getting my act together enough to see a movie the week of its release. Unless it's a Harry Potter movie, that is — I think there's only one of those that I didn't see right away, and that's because I lived more than fifteen miles from the nearest one-screen-one-movie-a-week-with-only-two-showings movie theater at the time.
Dang, that was a really, really good movie. Captain America is not normally one of those superheroes that I tend to get excited about. Spiderman, whoo-hoo! Batman, rock on! Captain America? Meh. I think I was more excited about Thor than this. Part of it's probably because my introduction to the character was through The Ultimates, the Ultimate Marvelverse take on the Avengers, and Cap's kind of an asshole in that. Actually, everyone's kind of an asshole in that. It was a pretty lousy series. But I digress.
A good part of the appeal of the movie comes from the fact that Captain America is not doing this out of some need for revenge or because he has some dark, hidden trauma that he needs to work out by punching bad guys in the face. No, he's doing it because, gosh dang it, it's the right thing to do. And that's kind of refreshing.
But there are three (non-spoilery) things that, for me, elevated this from a good comic book movie into a great comic book movie. First off, the musical number. Now, I know that if you haven't seen the movie, you're probably going, "What? Musical number?" But, yeah, there's a big, amazing, 40s-style musical number, and it makes sense in context, I promise. It's a great callback to a certain bygone style of choreography and musical theater, with a great song composed by Alan Menken — the guy who did the songs for the Disney animated movies of the '90s (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and also the recent Tangled, among others).
Second of all, the fact that the African-American guy on Cap's team is the linguist. Way to not have him be a token minority, but actually give him a role in an awesome and unexpected manner! He's not just "the black guy," but more "the guy who speaks three different languages and just happens to be black."
Third of all, (and I could just hug the filmmakers for doing this) one of the other members of Cap's team is a Nisei soldier. A Japanese-American. I can't even begin to say how happy and amazed I am that they did that (seriously, I almost cried in the movie theater), because I can count on no fingers the number of other films outside of documentaries that I've seen which even acknowledge there were Japanese-Americans fighting in Europe. I mean, you want patriotism? These guys volunteered from internment camps. That's some serious patriotism right there. I dunno how many people out there would voluntarily enlist in the military of a country that imprisoned them for no other reason than their ancestry, but I'm willing to bet it isn't many. And, yeah, it is pretty darn personal for me. My grandparents, both American citizens, with a newborn daughter, were forcibly relocated first to a California racetrack and then to a camp in Poston, Arizona. There are only two pictures of my aunt before she was three years old because you couldn't have cameras in the camps. I'm going to stop myself before I get on a total rant here, but check out Wikipedia's article on Japanese-American service in WWII and the one on the Japanese-American internment.
Anyway. Long story short, great movie. Go see it if you haven't, especially since it seems to be starting to move out of theaters.
Dang, that was a really, really good movie. Captain America is not normally one of those superheroes that I tend to get excited about. Spiderman, whoo-hoo! Batman, rock on! Captain America? Meh. I think I was more excited about Thor than this. Part of it's probably because my introduction to the character was through The Ultimates, the Ultimate Marvelverse take on the Avengers, and Cap's kind of an asshole in that. Actually, everyone's kind of an asshole in that. It was a pretty lousy series. But I digress.
A good part of the appeal of the movie comes from the fact that Captain America is not doing this out of some need for revenge or because he has some dark, hidden trauma that he needs to work out by punching bad guys in the face. No, he's doing it because, gosh dang it, it's the right thing to do. And that's kind of refreshing.
But there are three (non-spoilery) things that, for me, elevated this from a good comic book movie into a great comic book movie. First off, the musical number. Now, I know that if you haven't seen the movie, you're probably going, "What? Musical number?" But, yeah, there's a big, amazing, 40s-style musical number, and it makes sense in context, I promise. It's a great callback to a certain bygone style of choreography and musical theater, with a great song composed by Alan Menken — the guy who did the songs for the Disney animated movies of the '90s (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and also the recent Tangled, among others).
Second of all, the fact that the African-American guy on Cap's team is the linguist. Way to not have him be a token minority, but actually give him a role in an awesome and unexpected manner! He's not just "the black guy," but more "the guy who speaks three different languages and just happens to be black."
Third of all, (and I could just hug the filmmakers for doing this) one of the other members of Cap's team is a Nisei soldier. A Japanese-American. I can't even begin to say how happy and amazed I am that they did that (seriously, I almost cried in the movie theater), because I can count on no fingers the number of other films outside of documentaries that I've seen which even acknowledge there were Japanese-Americans fighting in Europe. I mean, you want patriotism? These guys volunteered from internment camps. That's some serious patriotism right there. I dunno how many people out there would voluntarily enlist in the military of a country that imprisoned them for no other reason than their ancestry, but I'm willing to bet it isn't many. And, yeah, it is pretty darn personal for me. My grandparents, both American citizens, with a newborn daughter, were forcibly relocated first to a California racetrack and then to a camp in Poston, Arizona. There are only two pictures of my aunt before she was three years old because you couldn't have cameras in the camps. I'm going to stop myself before I get on a total rant here, but check out Wikipedia's article on Japanese-American service in WWII and the one on the Japanese-American internment.
Anyway. Long story short, great movie. Go see it if you haven't, especially since it seems to be starting to move out of theaters.
