The Avengers is less a movie than a novelization of itself, an oversized, self-aware picture designed mostly for effect: That of reliving the experience of a movie you’ve seen before and just can’t get enough of. The picture is broken down into narrative chunks that ultimately don’t tell much of a story – what you get instead is a series of mini-climaxes held together by banter between characters. The idea, maybe, is that people already love Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk and Thor so much — like, so, so much — that all a filmmaker really needs to do is put them all into a big stock pot filled with elaborate set pieces and some knowing dialogue and he’s golden. And maybe, given the heightened-lowered expectations of movie audiences, that really is all he has to do: It's possible to have looked forward to a movie all year, to enjoy watching it, and then to have completely forgotten about it the following week.
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There are so few filmmakers willing to tackle the romantic melodrama these days that Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea is welcome just for its sheer novelty. An adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play, the picture opens with an attempted suicide and ends with an uneasy kind of redemption. It’s a love story with a great deal of furious, elegant handwriting packed between the lines, an exploration of immutable class distinctions and emotional and sexual repression in postwar England. And Rachel Weisz, as a woman who risks everything for the love of the wrong man, carries the mood and subtext of the material safely tucked in her dressing-gown pocket – she’s vulnerable and self-motivated in all the right measures.
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With Thor poised to kick-off the next chapter in Marvel's superhero empire this week, the film's stars and creatives found themselves looking to the future at a press conference Sunday in Los Angeles. Though actors Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston were loath to drop details on the currently-filming Avengers, they gave a teaser of what to expect when their godly alter egos collide with human superheroes like Iron Man and Hulk in the Joss Whedon-helmed 2012 pic.
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