Wknd Box Office: Captain America, Friends w/ Benefits, Tabloid

Here is an interesting article from http://www.debbieschlussel.com/  reviewing some of the movies that came out over the past weekend. This follows this post some of the movies from last week and  THIS POST about some movies that have been released over the past few years that you might have missed!  This all  follows this post about guidelines to chosing good movies to watch yourself!

Wknd Box Office: Captain America, Friends w/ Benefits, Tabloid


By Debbie Schlussel



Per usual, there isn’t anything spectacular at the box office, but the best pick–very relatively-speaking is “Captain America: The First Avenger.”











* “Captain America: The First Avenger“: Steve Rogers is proud to be American and wants more than anything to kill Nazis. Problem is that the filmmakers ain’t so proud to be American and don’t really want people to hate Nazis, so they eliminated American military insignia and Nazi swastikas from the equation.

Why did “Captain America” filmmakers erase all swastikas from the Nazis and mute U.S. Insignia on American Soldiers?




I’m not gushing over “Captain America: The First Avenger,” unlike most other movie critics. The movie was okay. It’s fine. But it isn’t great. And I question just how “American” it actually is. While I loved the first third or so of the movie, the rest is a long, boring, amorphous fight between American soldiers with no American insignia on their uniforms and Nazis who don’t bear swastikas. The barely visible eagle on helmets isn’t the American eagle, but the symbol of the SSR–Strategic Scientific Reserve–division of the Army in which Captain America is placed. The references to the U.S. become more and more muted as the movie goes on.



This Has Almost None of This



I guess this was done to please the Nazi-lovers and America-haters around the world (including most Muslims who continue to make Mein Kampf a best-seller), who might be offended if bad guys actually wore swastikas and the guys wearing “U.S.” pins on their lapels were actually the good guys. I mean, it is called, “Captain America,” after all. Not Captain Mohammed or Captain Switzerland. That’s the reason for the second title. The studio planned to just call the movie, “The First Avenger.” And all future movies with Captain America are set to use the name “Avenger” in them.



Yes, unlike in the Captain America comic books, the Nazis are barely in the picture in this flick. They are mentioned at the beginning as is Hitler (who is mocked in a musical number on a stage), but that quickly ends. And swastikas are completely whitewashed out of it. The only swastika you’ll see in the entire film is during newsreel footage before a movie that the characters go to see. Instead of swastikas, we are shown an octopus with a skull’s head, apparently the symbol of the Hydra division, that becomes a rogue offshoot of the Nazis studying supernatural science. We never hear “Heil Hitler,” just “Hail Hydra.” It’s absurd. Oh, and hey, the Nazis aren’t that bad. They’re “moderates” because they try to get rid of the mad scientist bad guy in their midst. Yeah, like that ever happened. Mengele, anyone?



Why not just call this “Captain Avoid America?” Would be more appropriate.



And then there’s the English woman (Agent Peggy Carter, played by Hayley Atwell) who gives orders to Army recruits at boot camp and thereafter. Yeah, right, a woman–much less a female “agent” from England–gave orders to American soldiers in World War II. PUH-LEEZE. Oh, and she saves Captain America from being burned alive by being the she-man who shoots the evil Hydra guy with a machine gun. Yeah, ‘cuz we had soooo many women shootin’ machine guns at Nazi, er . . . “Hydrazis,” during World War II. Absurd.



The story: Steve Rogers is a scrawny, short guy who longs to be in the U.S. Army during World War II, so he can fight for America against the Nazis and Hitler. He is repeatedly rejected and sees his best friend, a more robust guy, get shipped off to Europe. But a German doctor working for the Americans overhears Rogers complaining about it to his friend and soon recruits Rogers to his special supernatural science division, planning to inject him with a super serum he developed in Germany. The serum makes a man extremely muscular and powerful, and he’s already done the same with a Nazi, Schmidt, who becomes the Red Skull and heads the Hydra division.



But after the injection, while Rogers becomes super strong, the doctor is murdered by a German spy and there isn’t any more serum to replicate an Army of American supermen like Captain America. Rogers finds himself in the Army but not fighting Nazis as he’d dreamed. Instead he performs in patriotic musical numbers to raise money for bonds and entertain troops, and he’s a laughing stock. He seeks to prove himself, and ultimately he is fighting for and leading some amorphous Army of American soldiers without U.S. insignia against the Hydra fighters.



Like I said, it’s not a great movie. It’s just okay and waaaay toooo looong. They could have cut 30-40 minutes off this thing, and you’d miss nothing. The special effects aren’t that spectacular, either. And the whitewashing of swastikas and American identity out of it is disturbing and stupid. And it’s hypocritical, since the movie poster has the American flag on it and the closing credits are filled with patriotic music and pics of Uncle Sam, etc. Why are we so afraid to show swastikas in their place in history? Again, it’s “Hey, we might offend someone.” Political correctness ad absurdum.



BTW, if you do go see this, you can see a “stinger,” including a preview of “The Avengers,” if you sit through ALL of the credits at the end. And I mean all of ‘em. It’s insufferable and not worth the “reward” at the end.






ONE-AND-A-HALF REAGANS





* “Friends With Benefits“: I liked this better than the first time I saw it back in January, when it was called, “No Strings Attached” (read my review). But not that much better. It was still vile, pointless, and predictable from the first five minutes forward. And, yes, it’s nearly the identical plot as the awful “No Strings”: guy and girl who are attracted to each other but not dating agree to just have sex with no romance or emotions. And predictably, as in the first incarnation, one or both start to have romantic feelings, they have a big melodramatic shouting and crying match, and then make up and live happily ever after, after all that empty sex. Awww . . . touching. Yes, it’s a chick flick that tries to cross dress as a vile Judd Apatow movie but just can’t go both ways. And I hate both genres, so it’s even worse when they mix. And I could do without the usual measure of melodrama, crying, and yelling. Yuck.



I despise Justin Timberlake and I used to like Mila Kunis, until I saw her in this movie. He cannot act, and she got on my nerves. And it’s the usual story of how the girl didn’t have a dad because her loser mother slept around. Who cares? I didn’t. There are some funny lines in this, but mostly it’s just groanworthy, cheesy, and vulgar. No charm here. If you want to see the over-rated Timberlake’s naked butt and the same for Kunis, this is your movie. For everyone with taste, this ain’t your movie. It’s all about promoting promiscuity, which we’ve already had decades of . . . and the results: diseases, kids born out of wedlock and having no fathers in their lives, millions of single mothers, the breakdown of the American family, etc.



In watching this movie, I was like the stereotype of a guy having sex (as promoted in a joke in this movie). After a minute, I was done.



TWO MARXES





* “Tabloid“: During this whole movie, I kept thinking, “Why the heck am I still sitting through this f–king movie?” Answer: because if I walk out in the middle of a screening, I’m not allowed to review the movie. The movie wasn’t just anti-Mormon, it was nuts. And it made me waste two hours of my life on a trivial, insignificant trollop. Is there really such a dearth of valid documentary topics and material that the crazy Joyce McKinney is now worthy of wasting my time and the big screen near you?



This “documentary” is about a bleeping crazy woman, McKinney, who was once Miss Wyoming in the Miss USA Pageant. A nutjob bimbo, in the mid-1970s, she fell in love with a Mormon missionary (Kirk Anderson) because she drove a Corvette and he drove a Corvette. But she wasn’t a Mormon and after they allegedly slept together, she thought they would get married. He disappeared to England to go on his Mormon mission.



Joyce worked three jobs (or so she says), one of them being a prostitute, another being a nude model, so she could save enough money to charter a jet to fly to England, kidnap the Mormon, chain him to a bed on the English countryside, and rape him back to liking her. She carried out her plans, then got arrested for kidnapping and was about to stand trial, which she escapes by using disguises and fleeing Great Britain.



I absolutely hated this woman and couldn’t stand to hear her talk after about the first ten minutes. Oh, and did I mention that later in life she spends $150,000 to clone her favorite dog, Booger, in South Korea. Yup, she’s “barking mad,” as one of the English commentators in the movie noted. And why was it necessary to constantly bash and mock Mormons throughout this movie, when it was clear they are the relatively normal and moral ones, not this crazy lady skank and the gay activist dude?



Not that I cared about this crazy chick, the story, or anything in this movie, but the documentarians didn’t really do much of a documentary. They mostly just interviewed this nutjob, along with an anti-Mormon gay activist, the charter pilot, and a couple of English reporters. And they failed to answer the only questions I had: what the heck does this lunatic loser do for a living that she can afford to sit around and do nothing and has $150,000 to spend on cloning a dog? Where did she get the money? They don’t think to tell you. But, again, like the rest of this crazy movie, I really didn’t care much.



THREE MARXES