Something to watch tonight: Thursday 1 May

Avengers: Endgame (Russo Brothers, 2019)

I’ve spent far too long today look­ing for an “on this day” title that is actu­ally read­ily avail­able online and have had to settle for this rel­at­ive obscur­ity that I reviewed on At the Movies on 1 May 2019.

This is the time of year when Marvel tends to release their big tent­pole film of the year and, sure enough, six years on from a film called “Endgame”, Thunderbolts* is arriv­ing in cinemas this weekend.

I did pro­duce a hast­ily writ­ten but enthu­si­ast­ic for the RNZ web­site (after a mid­night screen­ing!) but the more con­sidered audio from ATM is my pre­ferred version:

Endgame attempts to cash in all the chips the Avengers series has been accu­mu­lat­ing over the 22 films since the first Iron Man and mostly suc­ceeds. Some char­ac­ters – and I’m sorry to say the vic­tims of this are mostly the women – don’t get a fair shake and if his­tory has any­thing crit­ic­al to say about these block­busters it will be that Marvel got way too much cred­it for way too few attempts at decent representation.

But the main male char­ac­ters – Downey Jr as Stark, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Chris Evans as Captain America and Mark Ruffalo as Hulk – all get a chance to show off their con­sid­er­able chops and deliv­er sat­is­fy­ing con­clu­sions to their arcs. (Interestingly, the word arc used to be reserved for film nerds and screen­writers but now, thanks to con­tent like Avengers and Game of Thrones, every­one can bandy it around with abandon.)

This is a film I’ve actu­ally gone back to a couple of times – once while it was still in cinemas and once at home. It’s a great crowd-pleaser and also an excel­lent test of your home enter­tain­ment system.

Also in that epis­ode of At the Movies: a doc­u­ment­ary about nuns grow­ing marijuana called Breaking Habits and Unicorn Store, a Netflix film star­ring (and dir­ec­ted by) Brie Larsen. No one wanted to open a film up against the Marvel juggernaut.

This film also showed up in the search today and clearly does­n’t deserve to be the main fea­ture but I enjoyed the reread­ing the review des­pite hav­ing no memory of it whatsoever:

Our own Karl Urban gets his name above the title for the first time as a Viking Red Indian in the styl­ishly pho­to­graphed non­sense Pathfinder. Looking like he’s spent more time in the gym than the act­ors’ stu­dio recently, Urban plays Ghost, a Viking boy left behind to starve when their first attempt to con­quer North America fails (inex­plic­ably). When the Vikings return, Ghost has grown and is the only brave who knows how to wield the iron blade and save the tribe until the bul­lets come hun­dreds of years later to do the job prop­erly. The viol­ence isn’t par­tic­u­larly well dir­ec­ted and there isn’t much apart from viol­ence in it, so it’s ulti­mately very hard to recommend.

If you’re inter­ested, Pathfinder is stream­ing on Disney+.

We get requests

Local film­maker Peter Webster reached out to me over Facebook a few weeks ago to ask me if I could review his inde­pend­ent fea­ture, Green Angels. I told him what I tell every­one who asks – I’ll take a look but I’ll only review it if I think there’s some­thing there for an audi­ence. I don’t see the point in bag­ging a movie that someone has com­mit­ted so much time and effort into.

So, it says some­thing that I’m men­tion­ing it here.

Auckland entre­pren­eur Ange (Siobhan Marshall) is wid­owed sud­denly and attempts vari­ous schemes to keep their son Jack (Johnny Morell) in the upper middle-class con­di­tions she believes that he expects, not real­ising that she’s actu­ally put­ting dis­tance between them at the very time that he needs her atten­tion the most.

Jack and his school­friend Ella (Hannah Koumakis) have an idea for one of those fancy online disrupter-type busi­nesses – selling fresh herbs to res­taur­ants and deliv­er­ing by drone – but are strug­gling with their own fin­ances, not to men­tion the atten­tions of the law.

Green Angels is a film of two halves and I think I liked the first – the more groun­ded for want of a bet­ter word – half than the more fant­ast­ic­al second, but the char­ac­ter­isa­tions are strong and the rela­tion­ship between Ange and Jack is recog­nis­able to any­one who knows teen­agers and their parents.

The film opens today at The Vic (Devonport), Monterey (Howick) and tomor­row at Hawkins Theatre (Papakura). Audience response will decide how much fur­ther it goes but if you are in any of those neigh­bour­hoods your curi­os­ity will be rewarded.

Where to watch Avengers: Endgame

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland, USA, UK: Streaming on Disney+

India: Streaming on Hotstar