Hell, Nick Fury, and a Woman Scorned

I have to admit, I went through kind of a bizarre existential crisis leading up to my viewing of this movie.

YouTube has a way of recommending videos that don't really relate to the ones you normally watch, and then bombarding you with videos that DO relate to those recommendations after you watch them. In my case, this meant crossing paths with one video about Captain Marvel star Brie Larson's snarky comments on the excess of "white dude" film critics and how she wants to use Captain Marvel as her form of activism...and then watching dozens of other videos about that, the audience censorship on Rotten Tomatoes for Captain Marvel, Disney's alleged string-pulling to boost the film's box office numbers and review ratings, and how they're trying to hold this "glass-ceiling-shattering" film so high that feminist activists can't see Aliens, The Terminator, Underworld, Resident Evil, The Hunger Games, Wonder Woman, or Alita: Battle Angel in its shadow. And this went on for about a month.

So yeah, I was kind of conflicted about supporting Captain Marvel. I was curious to see the film because of its tie-in to Avengers: Endgame, and I get that Brie Larson just wants equal representation in every aspect of the film industry and only said it in the worst way possible, but all the drama surrounding this movie rubbed me the wrong way. Besides, I've only seen nine of the twenty Marvel Cinematic Universe films that existed before this, and the Avengers crossovers do a pretty good job of recapping things so you don't have to see the other films to understand them. And let's be honest, in today's age of YouTube spoiler reviews and Wikipedia plot summaries, no one has to see any movie anymore to know what happens in it. So really, what need was there to give Captain Marvel a ticket sale -- especially since Disney may or may not be buying enough tickets themselves?
 
Well, in the end, I got invited to a ten-year-old's birthday party to go see the movie, so I caved.

So what do I think of Captain Marvel now that I have seen it?

I don't know if it was intended, but I do think that setting this movie in the 1990's helps to make the whole don't-let-white-dudes-hold-you-down angle feel less ham-fisted. It's a lot more believable, though still debatable, that male air force pilots would be that discriminant against a female pilot back then, as opposed to today. The film doesn't show as many moments of that discrimination as you might think, but there are a few, plus some pretty blatant song choices like No Doubt's "I'm Just A Girl" and one cringeworthy line about how a responsible mother character needs to go along on a potential suicide mission in order to set a better example for her daughter. Although, I don't seem to recall the "I'm kinda done with you telling me what I can't do," line from the teaser trailer being said in the final film.

So yeah, the winks and nods at social justice gender politics throughout the movie can be a bit grating, but I don't think they're so prevalent that they overpower the story.

The story itself is pretty standard. It's an action mystery where Captain Marvel (a.k.a. Carol Danvers) gets stranded on Earth in the 90's and tries to stop aliens from invading it while also trying to remember her past. In Marvel terms, it's like a cross between the first Thor film and Howard the Duck if it starred Wolverine. There's a decent theme of paranoia and not being able to trust people at face value throughout the film, illustrated best by the shape-shifting aliens, and also one big twist that fans of the comics might not expect. Also, I did laugh at the end of the final showdown for basically giving the finger to one really cliched action movie trope. Overall, the story is passable, but it feels more like something you'd see in Phase One of the MCU rather than something you'd see near the end of Phase Three. It just doesn't have the same sharp edge to it that the franchise has evolved since 2008.

And speaking of 2008, it's worth mentioning that Captain Marvel contradicts a few things that were previously established in the MCU. One example is how Fury and Coulson refer to their organization as S.H.I.E.L.D. despite not coming up with that acronym until the end of the first Iron Man a decade later. It's a minor nitpick, but given how good the MCU seemed to be about avoiding those errors until now, I find it telling of how differently the studio approached this film's production.

I also agree with the criticisms that Carol just rising above something that was holding her down without really coming to terms with any of her personal flaws or mistakes is a pretty big narrative misfire. I'm actually curious to see her in Endgame just to see if the Russos course-correct this by making her more reflective.

But much like with Iron Man, the real driving force for Captain Marvel is the cast performances. This has got to be the most likable that Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury has ever been in any MCU film. It's almost his origin story, showing how he started out as a lighthearted but levelheaded agent who was quickly forced to become more suspicious and deceptive. It's also pretty funny to see Jackson embrace his dorkier side by baby-talking to a cat and then awkwardly chasing aliens around with it.

Lashana Lynch as Carol's friend Maria Rambeau and Ben Mendelsohn as the villain Talos also do surprisingly good jobs in their roles. Jude Law gives his usual decent performance, and it's nice to see Clark Gregg make his big-screen comeback as Agent Coulson. The only weak link, surprisingly, was Annette Bening as Dr. Mar-Vell. I don't know how, but this movie managed to make a four-time Oscar nominee like her sound like she didn't read the script until an hour before the cameras started rolling.

As for Brie Larson...well...putting aside the way she comes across in real life, I didn't hate her performance, but I didn't like it enough either. She has a lot of good moments, especially in her scenes with Samuel L. Jackson, but I don't think she has enough sincere ones. You can tell Marvel Studios is trying to give her a combination of Tony Stark's humor and Steve Rogers's stoicism, and that makes sense since she's supposed to take their place as the face of the MCU after Endgame. However, Stark and Rogers used those traits largely as fronts, as defense mechanisms to help them cope with their situations. In private moments, we saw that they were more vulnerable, genuine, flawed people. They were fully realized characters, relatable characters, and so were heroines like Black Widow, Gamora, and Scarlet Witch.

What character flaws does Carol Danvers have? The only one I can recall the movie giving is that she's overemotional, but she hardly ever comes across that way. We get a flashback where she discovers that aliens exist when they shoot down her fighter jet, her passenger also turns out to be an alien and then dies from the crash, and she discovers from someone holding her at gunpoint that the fate of an entire race is suddenly in her hands; I don't think her facial expression or tone of voice changes once.

Even in those private moments where the protagonist is supposed to drop their facade, she's still either emotionally distant, snarky, or angry. We never get a satisfactory sense of humanity from her performance because the film seems afraid to make her vulnerable. I don't know if the fault lies with the actor, the director, or just the script again, but it doesn't make me connect with the character enough to really want to see her succeed.

I'm not sure why Marvel Studios is trying so hard to sell us on Captain Marvel. Maybe they're scrambling to outdo Wonder Woman since the DC Extended Universe made a female-led superhero film before they did and that gave DC some competitive traction. Maybe they're also trying to make up for the way they've handled their female characters in the past, such as not bothering to release any Black Widow action figures when Avengers: Age of Ultron came out. That's all just speculation on my part, though. One thing I can say for sure is that Captain Marvel is only groundbreaking in the scope of the MCU itself.

The irony is that looking back on all the drama surrounding this film's marketing, I actually think less may have been more. It's the end of the MCU's Phase Three; the studio doesn't have to work that hard to get viewers into the theaters anymore. There's barely been any advertisement for Endgame, but everyone's rearing to go see that. Heck, the setup for Captain Marvel in Avengers: Infinity War was such a morale booster after that cliffhanger ending that ticket pre-sales for this film were once through the roof. Had Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige and even Brie Larson just taken a step back and let their movie sell itself, I think it would have fared much better. Some people probably still would have complained about the gender politics in the movie afterwards, but most of us would have gone into it more positively.

At the end of the day, I think that Captain Marvel on its own merits is just an average Marvel movie  -- and that's all she wrote.

Is "Seinfeld" Offensive Now?

I've mentioned once how my huge love of the Andy Serkis Planet of the Apes movies has managed to never come up in my blog entries before. Something else that I've never mentioned being a huge fan of is the 1990's sitcom Seinfeld. I don't know why, given my taste in movies, but somehow Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David's magnum opus about the silly, meaningless details of everyday life is my absolute favorite TV show.

Well, a friend of mine recently sent me a link to a YouTube show called "Does It Hold Up?", in which modern-day young viewers are shown episodes of older TV shows and asked if they think the shows are still relevant today. The episode my friend sent me had these viewers watching episodes of Seinfeld, and the majority of them found it too offensive to hold up today.

Here's a link to the video if you want to watch it yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5BxjUmzPPA


And for the record, here's a list of the Seinfeld episodes it discusses:

"The Merv Griffin Show": Jerry, George, and Elaine repeatedly give Jerry's girlfriend medication that makes her drowsy so they can play with her antique toy collection while she's sleeping.

"The Contest": Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer have a bet to see who can go the longest without masturbating. The three men make Elaine bet more money than them because "it's easier for a woman not to do it."

"The Soup Nazi": Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer frequent a dining establishment run by a short-tempered, ethnically questionable foreign chef.

"The Cigar Store Indian": Jerry keeps accidentally offending his Native American girlfriend and other people of different ethnicities.

"The Hamptons": Jerry's girlfriend accidentally sees George naked after he went swimming and he and Jerry ask Elaine if women know about "shrinkage."

"The Outing": A muckraking reporter believes that Jerry and George are a gay couple and they vehemently deny it while always disclaiming, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

~

As you can imagine, my knee-jerk reaction while watching the above video was to yell "Serenity Now!" every time someone complained about Seinfeld. My friend even questioned if the group of viewers chosen were a fair representation of modern audiences or if they were just picked because they had the most dramatic reactions. Now that I've had some time to think it over, I want to discuss this more in depth.

For starters, I don't really think you can gauge how well something "holds up" by how offensive it is. Watch any episode of Seinfeld back-to-back with any episode of the currently running sitcom Family Guy. I don't think anyone's going to find Seinfeld more offensive just because it's the older of the two shows. You can argue of course that Family Guy has more leeway because it's a cartoon and that the offensive jokes on that show are more exaggerated and deliberate, whereas Seinfeld's offensive jokes are more grounded and reflective of then-current cultural views. That's not to say that one show is funnier than the other, since humor is subjective and always offensive to some degree. It's just that not every show is made for the same audience.

What does make Seinfeld feel dated at times is the technology depicted onscreen, since things like cell phones, online streaming services, and self-adhesive postage stamps weren't commonplace when the series was made. Jerry not being able to find his friends in a movie theater because they can't text each other isn't offensive, though. What's more, I don't think that featuring outdated technology really lessens a movie or show's entertainment value. Heck, Marvel Studios just released a superhero movie that's a period piece set in the 1990's, and while I have heard complaints about the film, none of them have been about that aspect of it.

Second, I think a lot of people who do find Seinfeld offensive are just missing the point of the show. That point is that you're supposed to laugh at the main characters, not with them. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are selfish, ignorant, immature people, and the humor comes from how much those flaws hinder them when solving trivial, everyday problems. The show usually calls them out for their bad behavior one way or another, even when they don't get a proper comeuppance; other characters tell them how ridiculous they're being, their significant others dump them when the bad behavior comes to light, and sometimes their bad deeds from older episodes come back to haunt them.

It's like that scene from the movie Borat where the title character spends the night at a B&B run by a Jewish couple, and his antisemitism causes him to frantically throw dollar bills at two insects in his room because he thinks they're the couple who've shape-shifted to sneak in and kill him. It's making fun of ignorant racists like Borat, not the people they're prejudiced against. By the same logic, Seinfeld is making fun of people like Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer who are too morally inept to function in society, not the people they wrong in each episode. That's why the series ends with all four of them in prison.

The only episode I can think of that is unapologetically offensive is The Bubble Boy from Season 4. Jerry, Elaine, and George are asked to visit a young man with immune deficiency who has to live in a germ-free plastic enclosure, and because of George's childish stupidity, problems ensue. Not only does the show never address that the three are wrong to be uncomfortable about the "Bubble Boy's" condition (it even mocks the characters who do show him support and sympathy) it also depicts the "Bubble Boy" himself as a nasty, entitled brat who deserves what happens to him. I know that his condition is extremely rare, so not many people would take offense to this episode personally. I also know that Seinfeld wasn't trying to promote ableism with this episode, but the fact that it never really works a disclaimer into the script like most other episodes do is a bit irresponsible for them. Still, one mishandled message doesn't ruin an entire series -- and really, that episode is still funny.

And at the end of the day, I think that's the most important thing to take away from this: the tone of the series overall. You can't get an accurate view of a nine-season sitcom by just watching a handful of cherry-picked episodes. I'll admit that the producers of "Does It Hold Up?" could have shown their subjects far more triggering episodes than the ones they did, but there are plenty of less triggering episodes that they could have shown too. We need to view things in as full of a scope as possible before properly judging them, and TV sitcoms, while mainly a source of entertainment, are no exception. Fortunately, it's easy to view as much of Seinfeld as possible because it still aires daily on practically every TV channel known to man.

And if a show is still doing that more than two decades after it ended, it probably isn't offending too many people.