RICHARD’S REVIEWS FOR APR. 4, 2014 W “CANADA AM” HOST BEVERLY THOMSON.
Richard Crouse sounds off on his reviews for this week’s releases: ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ and ‘Island of Lemurs: Madagascar.’
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Posts Tagged ‘Captain America’
Metro In Focus: Captain America almost had another superhero name
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Captain America, played by Chris Evans in this weekend’s superhero flick Captain America: The Winter Soldier, was almost tagged with a different patriotic name by creator Joe Simon.
In 1940, when he first imagined the character, he dubbed his creation Super American. Then he had a change of heart.
“There were too many ‘Supers’ around,” he said. “Captain America had a good sound to it. There weren’t a lot of captains in comics.”
The first issue of the new Captain America comic was an instant hit. Released on December 20, 1940, and featuring Cap giving Adolph Hitler a knuckle sandwich, it sold almost one million copies.
Numbers like that should have attracted Hollywood’s attention, but Captain America’s screen debut was inauspicious. In 1943, Republic Films decided to launch a superhero serial based either on the mysterious masked character The Copperhead or the caped do-gooder Mr. Scarlet. Scripts were prepared, but before cameras rolled, the decision was made to insert Captain America into the story without radically altering the screenplays.
As a result, the character bares only a passing resemblance to the comics. In the serials he has a different secret identity and fights evildoer The Scarab instead of Nazis. His famous invincible shield is missing, as is his sidekick Bucky and there is no mention of the Super-Soldier Serum that transformed him from zero to hero.
Nonetheless, the 15-part serial — which featured exciting titles like Blade of Wrath and Vault of Vengeance — was very popular, but unfortunately did little to further the career of its star Dick Purcell. Legend has it that the strain of playing the active character was too much for him and he passed away just three weeks after filming was complete.
Despite the success of the serial, it would be half a century until Captain America was featured in another story shot for the big screen. In 1990’s Captain America, Cappy is played by Matt Salinger, son of author J. D. Salinger, who beat out Dolph Lundgren and Arnold Schwarzenegger for the part.
The movie returned the character to his comic book roots, and was originally set for a 1990 release to coincide with 50th anniversary of the character but was shelved until 1992 — perhaps because of what Entertainment Weekly called a “shapeless blob of a plot” — when it was released on home video.
Captain America is possibly the most patriotic of all superheroes, but the name also pops up in one of the most famous counterculture movies of the 1960s. In Easy Rider, Peter Fonda’s character Wyatt is nick-named Captain America after his Harley Davidson Captain America chopper.
Chris Evans: From Captain American to psychopath ice cream truck murderer By Richard Crouse Metro Canada May 14, 2013
“He had an ice cream truck and kept bodies in the truck. There are plenty of little kids out there who bought ice cream and that ice cream was freezing next to a corpse.”
That gruesome image is courtesy of Chris Evans, the handsome actor best known for playing Captain America, the superhero dedicated to defending American ideals.
His new film The Iceman co-stars Michael Shannon as real-life Mafia hitman Richard Kuklinski. Evans plays his mentor Robert ‘Mr. Softee’ Pronge, a vicious killer who out-psychos the psychotic main character.
“No villain thinks he’s the villain,” he says. “They don’t think, ‘I’m the bad guy,’ so you can’t approach it thinking you’re bad. You have to (examine) what part of our brains stops us from doing these things.”
To play Pronge, who ran his business out of an ice cream truck, the actor had to explore his own dark side.
“I may be revealing too much,” he says, “but on a daily basis I can’t tell you how many times I think, ‘What if I just did this right now?’ — jerked the wheel into traffic or walked off this building. On a daily basis your brain tells you what not to do, so you have to imagine that for a real sociopath that voice holds no water in their brain.
“(As an actor) you kind of just start liberating yourself of all restraint and it starts getting really fun. You come to set and think, ‘I’m going to do whatever I want. Say whatever I want to say. Act however I want to act and what kind of person will come out of that? How would that person interact?”
Evans, who stepped into the role when James Franco dropped out, had to get under Pronge’s skin to figure out what made him tick.
“I’m sure even Pronge didn’t start out killing somebody,” he says. “He probably started doing something else that was liberating in terms of his social restraint, and then found a liking and became addicted to that sensation and it ultimately became this complete disregard for human life because it was just completely freeing.”
The result is a creepy performance that may shave some of the smooth edges off of Evans’ all-American image.
“I still have strange thoughts,” he says. “I still think the things I think throughout the day but I’d never act on them. At least not now.”
THE AVENGERS: 4 ½ STARS
“The Avengers,” the new all-superhero-all-the-time Marvel movie, was going to go one of two ways. Either it would be a Frankenstein of the movie; a stitched together monstrosity that cannibalized the remains of the successful movies that came before.
Or it could have been a state-of-the-art geek fest that wove together the separate backstories of its lead characters—Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner)—into one seamless super-cool spectacle.
Luckily it’s the former. Director and co-writer Joss Whedon was up to the unenviable task of mixing and matching mythologies, combining them into one epic film that sets a new benchmark for superhero movies (at least until “The Dark knight Rises” comes out).
At stake is nothing less than the freedom of every man, woman and child on earth. The trouble starts when Thor’s brother, exiled god Loki (Tom Hiddleston), steps through a portal into the super secret S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters. Confronted by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) Loki explains his intention steal S.H.I.E.L.D.’s most coveted possession, the Tesseract, a glowing cube that holds the key to unlimited sustainable energy. Of course Loki isn’t interested in creating green energy, he wants to rule the world. Fury knows that he is “hopelessly and hilariously out-gunned,” but if there is a chance to save the planet it lies in the skills of a disparate group of superheroes– Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Thor–and their helpers–Black Widow and Hawkeye.
“The Avengers” has everything you expect from a superhero—or should that be superheri?—movie and more. All the usual clichés are in place—the earth is in peril, there’s giant action set pieces, a super villain with super powers and special effects galore, including the now-standard-for-every-superhero-movie lightening beam from earth to sky—but the best special effect is Joss Whedon’s expert juggling of the major characters.
Each if the lead heroes are stars in their own right, and each has already had their own movie. Whedon’s job was to bring them together, allow each time to shine, but also work together as an ensemble. He succeeds. As the nominal lead Downey Jr. smarms his way through his now trademarked “Iron Man” one liners, Evans emerges as a thoughtful symbol of patriotism, and Hemsworth flexes his muscles in a most impressive way. This olio of heroism gives us what we want from the characters but also freshens the formula.
It’s Ruffalo, however, who really impresses.
The Hulk has had a tough time on the big screen. Ang Lee’s version flopped. The Ed Norton adaptation didn’t really work, but Ruffalo and Whedon have finally figured out how to balance the Hulk’s humanity with his fury. You’ll like him when he gets angry.
“The Avengers” embraces the high-octane tradition of superhero movie—although this movie is by no means wall-to-wall action—but tempers it with sparkling dialogue, geek wit and the silly pleasure of seeing grown men in costumes spouting one-liners as they try and save the planet.
