Captain Marvel (Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, 2019)

Captain Marvel (Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, 2019)

Cast: Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law, Annette Bening, Djimon Hounsou, Lee Pace, Lashana Lynch, Gemma Chan, Clark Gregg, Akira Akbar. Screenplay: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Nicole Perlman, Meg LeFauve. Cinematography: Ben Davis. Production design: Andy Nicholson. Film editing: Debbie Berman, Elliot Graham. Music: Pinar Toprak.

When I was a kid, Captain Marvel was a big guy in red long-johns and a cape who looked like a swole Fred MacMurray. But now, many years and many lawsuits later, the captain is a woman and my erstwhile superhero has taken on the name Shazam! which was the magic word that Billy Batson used to transform himself. And that's another movie -- not to mention another comics universe -- entirely, one that I hope I hope to see before too long. Captain Marvel the movie is about Carol Danvers and the origin story of her superhero alter ego. Or perhaps I should say one of the origin stories, because if you start rambling around the internet you'll find that the mighty captain has had many personae along the way. Even this origin story is a little head-spinning, involving rival alien races, abduction, amnesia, accidentally acquired superpowers, and much more. Even now, I'm not sure I can tell you for certain whether the Kree and the Skrull are the bad guys or the good guys and where Annette Bening's Dr. Lawson fits into the whole thing. Only my familiarity with Nick Fury and Phil Coulson (Samuel F. Jackson and Clark Gregg, respectively) from other Marvel movies and TV shows makes me think that Carol Danvers is doing the right thing by trusting them. Even my favorite character in the movie, Goose, is a somewhat ambiguous figure, apt to turn into a voracious many-headed monster when provoked. Good kitty. I have long since grown impatient with movies in which the credits run almost as long as the story, so the narrative complexity of Captain Marvel bored me less than the usual CGI foofaraw it sets up. Brie Larson does what she can with a character who, if she's really as invulnerable as the film implies, doesn't hold much chance for challenge and growth. I assume the sequels will show us what her Kryptonite is -- she can't just potter around the universe tidying things up forever.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010)

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Scott Pilgrim: Michael Cera
Ramona Flowers: Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Knives Chau: Ellen Wong
Kim Pine: Alison Pill
Stephen Stills: Mark Webber
Young Neil: Johnny Simmons
Wallace Wells: Kieran Culkin
Stacey Pilgrim: Anna Kendrick
Julie Powers: Aubrey Plaza
Matthew Patel: Satya Bhabha
Lucas Lee: Chris Evans
Envy Adams: Brie Larson
Roxy Richter: Mae Whitman
Todd Ingram: Brandon Routh
Gideon Graves: Jason Schwartzman

Director: Edgar Wright
Screenplay: Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright
Cinematography: Bill Pope
Production design: Marcus Rowland
Film editing: Jonathan Amos, Paul Macliss

Edgar Wright's hyperactive but witty Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was a box-office failure, despite being an entertaining farrago of everything in 21st century pop culture: comic books, video games, anime, rock, superhero movies, and so on. Critics generally praised it, but that may have been something of a kiss of death, making it too mainstream for the hip. It has since, as such commercial misfires tend to do, become something of a cult movie, finding its audience as it ages and turns into a nostalgia piece. It gets much of its strength from Michael Cera's performance as the sweet slacker Scott, who plays bass in a garage band and has to balance an inappropriate infatuation with the underage Knives Chau and a more appropriate attraction to the très hip Ramona Flowers. Unfortunately, Ramona has a slate of evil ex-boyfriends, each of whom Scott is obliged to vanquish. Chris Evans and Brandon Routh send up their own superhero roles as two of the evil exes, the former a skateboarding movie star with an entourage of stunt doubles, the latter a bassist for a rival band who gets his superpowers from veganism -- about which he is willing to go on at hilarious length. Presiding over the evil exes is record producer Gideon Graves, sneeringly played by Jason Schwartzman. It's all very silly, but it's also bright and colorful fun if you want a break from reality.

Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015)

Jacob Tremblay and Brie Larson in Room

As emotionally affecting as Room is, and as brilliant as the performances of Oscar-winner Brie Larson and the equally worthy Jacob Tremblay are, the film left me dissatisfied. The premise is an intriguing one: Joy (Larson) was abducted at the age of 17 by a man (Sean Bridgers) who locked her in a shed, where she gave birth to Jack (Tremblay), who has just turned 5 when the film begins. Left alone together for all this time, with only periodic visits by the captor for sex and to bring supplies, mother and son have bonded uniquely. She has allowed Jack to believe that the shed, which they call "Room," is the only reality -- even the people they see on the television set the captor has supplied are just colorful shapes; they are "TV." The sky they can see through Room's one window, a skylight, is "outer space." The only other entity Jack knows about is "Old Nick," the captor, and Joy keeps the two of them separated as much as possible, shutting Jack in the closet when the man visits. We are in Plato's Cave here, and to follow up on that fable, which is beautifully established in the first part of the film, we need an awakening to reality that is both dramatically and thematically powerful. We get a good start on that when Joy, thinking that Jack is old enough for the truth, begins to break down the myth of Room and suggest to him that there is in fact a world outside. Jack responds with something like the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: He denies what she is telling him, grows angry and depressed, but finally accepts it as truth, which then allows Joy to enlist Jack in an attempt to escape. Unfortunately, after the excitingly suspenseful escape succeeds, the film begins to disintegrate into an often sketchy and unconvincing tale of recovery, and concludes with a tenuous "happy ending." Jack, a doctor tells Joy, is still "plastic," a word that Jack overhears and indignantly rejects: He's real, not plastic. But Joy sinks into a deep depression, partly aided by the fact that the world is going to test the bonds she has formed with Jack, and by the fact that things are not what they were before her abduction. Her parents, for example, have divorced and her mother (Joan Allen) has remarried. Her father (William H. Macy) has moved far away and can't bring himself to accept Jack as his grandson. She and Jack move in with her mother, Nancy, and stepfather, Leo (Tom McCamus), but the tensions of the household grow as they are besieged by reporters, and when an interviewer awakens feelings of guilt and responsibility she has repressed, Joy attempts suicide and is hospitalized. The problem with this part of the film is that there are no easy solutions to the crisis it has created. Moreover, we don't know enough about the characters it introduces to understand their behavior: Why, for example, is it so hard for Joy's father to accept Jack as his grandson? As brilliant an actress as Joan Allen is, she doesn't quite make the loving, gentle grandmother much more than a stereotype. How much hope can we hold out for Joy's full recovery and Jack's successful integration into a world he had previously never envisioned? I haven't read Emma Donoghue's novel, so it's possible that this part of the story is better developed and the characters are more plausible on the page than they are on the screen, although Donoghue also wrote the screenplay. There is, however, a scene at the end, in which Joy and Jack return to Room, now about to be demolished, that provides a kind of closure to the film that's satisfying artistically -- if not psychologically.