Movie Box Review

There's something infectious about watching the people behind a brand-new TV hit enjoy their success, and at tonight's PaleyFest salute to this year's break-out comedy hit NEW GIRL, the pleasure of the cast and producers bubbled over.  

To an unusual extent that the panelists acknowledged themselves, the dynamics among the cast members and writers seemed not unrelated to the relationships in the show.  By the time creator/showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether had finished kicking off the session and introducing the episode being screened, it came as no surprise later on when star Zooey Deschanel summarized her character Jess by saying she was equal parts the 13-year old versions of herself and Meriwether.  Similarly, the good-natured snarky bickering between Jake M. Johnson (Nick), Max Greenfield (Schmidt) and Lamorne Morris (Winston) could have been outtakes from any given episode, and there seemed to be a gray area between where the actress Hannah Simone left off and her character Cece picked up.

Everyone concerned spoke several times of the show's efforts to deepen and develop the characters as the show goes on, and it turned out that the screened episode "Injured" (which airs tomorrow night) was a standout example of this principle in action.  "Injured" may be the first episode of New Girl that takes place entirely outside of the apartment all the characters except Cece share, and it centers on Nick rather than Jess.  In the course of the episode, Nick has a health scare, and the tone of the episode resembles the bittersweet 50/50 more than New Girl's usual carefree celebration of character eccentricities.  More interestingly, the episode has a very loose, casual feel akin to an F/X comedy.  Not incidentally, "Injured" was directed by Lynn Shelton, whose reputation is in semi-improvised indie relationship comedy-dramas like Humpday and the excellent upcoming Your Sister's Sister--whether "Injured" was actually partly improvised or just very well scripted (by J.J. Philbin), it shows New Girl starting to put some distance between itself and its cutely charming roots.  

There were little in the way of spoiler revelations in the course of the evening--as producer Jake Kasdan noted, the series has few enough continuing storylines, they didn't want to ruin any of them--except that Dermot Mulroney and Jeanne Tripplehorn will appear in an arc (Mulroney as a Jess love interest), and that shippers hoping for the seemingly inevitable Jess/Nick coupling will have to wait for a while.  

With Glee fading, New Girl is now at the center of FOX's Tuesday night, with an audience slightly smaller than CBS' 2 Broke Girls but with far more pop cultural and critical cachet.  The show has plenty of time--years, undoubtedly--to work out how and where they want the series to go.

There's a certain irony in the fact that, in this summer of Super 8 and its Spielberg rapture, the most successfully Spielbergian movie of the season is Marvel's CAPTAIN AMERICA:  THE FIRST AVENGER.  Its connection to Steven Spielberg is faint but important:  director Joe Johnston served as Art Director on both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and later directed an episode of TV's Young Indiana Jones; not concidentally, this is something like the Indiana Jones 4 that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never was, and although it has its limitations, Captain America is a surprisingly entertaining old-fashioned adventure.

One of the most engaging things about Captain America as a movie is that it's as unpretentious as a $150M+ giant superhero extravaganza can be.  The first section of the movie tells the story of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans, CG'd in the way of Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button) a 90-pound weakling but endlessly stout of heart, who longs to join the Army in World War II and fight against Nazis, but is rejected because of his physical frailty.  Steve finally runs into Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci, putting on a great show), a German refugee scientist who has a magic serum--not to mention his gorgeous aide Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell).  Johnston and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley take their time with this part of the story, and it pays off; although we know that Steve will turn into, well, Captain America, we get to know him first as a plucky underdog.  Even after the transformation, there's a witty sequence where the new Steve is turned into a pitchman for War Bonds (it's like the comedy version of Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers), complete with a musical production number by Alan Menken--by the time Steve gets to Europe, we're as longing for him to see battle as he is.

The huge action sequences, when they finally arrive, deliver in size and design, but they're kept for the most part on a human scale--like the Indiana Jones movies, they stay just this side of what an actual human being might be able to do.  Evans is less interesting as the full-fledged Captain than he was as the puny version, but he has a few moments where he gets to reveal the scrawny kid within, and the rest of the time he hits the stalwart buttons effectively.  And there are welcome supporting actors to perk things up between battles:  Tommy Lee Jones does his Tommy Lee Jones thing--it's like he invented macho snark--and Toby Jones is a junior evil Nazi.  Atwell, who's been doing very good work under the radar in projects like Woody Allen's little-seen Cassandra's Dream and the TV miniseries Pillars Of the Earth, has a snappy way with dialogue to go with her looks, and the gadget man on Captain America's team is Howard Stark, who would one day father Iron Man (ah, Marvel); he's played by Dominic Cooper, who'll soon be seen to much splashier advantage in The Devil's Double.   

The very clever production design by Rick Heinrichs creates a larger-than-life version of 1940s archetypes without calling too much attention to itself (as opposed, say, to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow's attempt to do the same thing):  tanks, motorcycles and planes that make sense in the World War II context but are convincingly a bit beyond reality.  The photography by Shelly Johnson, unfortunately, is obscured by a terrible 3D conversion that has little effect beyond badly smudging the original image--this is definitely a picture where audiences should try to save the money and find a 2D auditorium.

Where Captain America really falters is in its villain.  Hugo Weaver, who may be out of fantasy role inspiration now that he's done The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Transformers and The Wolfman, seemingly does a deliberate Christoph Waltz imitation as Red Skull; he's your basic raving super-Nazi (he even listens to Wagner), with a little of Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Voldemort's noselessness.  Red Skull never says or does anything interesting in the picture, and that lowers the stakes of the drama quite a bit; at this point in movie history, if you're going to scare us with a Nazi villain, it takes more than a red digital make-up job to do it.

Despite that central flaw, Captain America is a fun ride.  It's actually disappointing that in their zeal to get the character into next year's all-important Avengers conglomerate (consumer note:  sit through all 10 minutes of credits and you'll be rewarded with the teaser for next year's everyone-but-the-kitchen-sink epic), Marvel was in such a hurry to pull him out of the 1940s.  This retro fantasy could have made a nice variation from their usual formula, but it's seemingly a one-time effort; although we must all believe in the powers of Joss Whedon, he'll have his hands full juggling half a dozen heroes in Avengers, and the Captain's charm may not age well.  That, however, is next year's movie problem.