CAPTAIN MARVEL

CAPTAIN MARVEL is a game of two halves. I found the first half of the film utterly tedious, failing to fire with its buddy comedy and alien politics, but the second half to be really moving and powerful and wonderful.

The film starts with Brie Larson (ROOM) playing a human with superpowers and amnesia, being trained by a beefed-up Jude Law to fight as part of a Kree special forces unit against their hated Skrull enemy.  She crashes to earth sometime in the mid 1990s - well before the events of the current Marvel series - and tries to uncover the mystery of how she got her powers with the help of a friendly government agent called Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) and her old best friend Marie Rambeau (Lashana Lynch).  Turns out she was a kick-ass fighter pilot called Carol Danvers working for an inspirational woman called Mar-Vell (Annette Bening) who - turns out - was an alien who invented the original tesseract - a kind of super-energy source McGuffin that has wound its way through these films. And so Danvers and her sidekicks have to protect the tesseract from - they think  - the evil terrorist Skrull - especially their leader Talos played by Ben Mendelsohn in full evil villain guise.

Like I said - the first hour of this film seemed pretty tedious to me. I don't really engage with CGI filled alien planet fight scenes, especially when I don't care about either side. I also didn't really care about the early scenes on 1990s Earth other than some pop tune nostalgia.  I could see that the directors wanted to create a kind of buddy movie road-trip odd-couple comedy between Carol and Fury but I just didn't respond to it. I could see Samuel L Jackson trying to be funny but didn't laugh - and it didn't feel like anyone else in the cinema was laughing either. 

Where the film began to ignite for me was in its second half, broadly where we get a major plot twist regarding one of the characters. This allows that character to actually become the one driving the witty deadpan humour and the heart of the second half of the film.  I also really loved the relationship between Carol and Marie - which also takes place in the second half of the film. In fact, you could easily have played it as a gay relationship co-parenting a child, and I wonder if this film will achieve cult status on that level.  

Finally, its in the second half of the film that a lot of the feminist groundwork done in the first half pays off - it's where we see Captain Marvel as a hero who's main skill is obstinacy in the face of bigotry. She doesn't need a wise male mentor to give her advice or permission. She doesn't have a crisis of confidence. And she doesn't have a love interest (male or female apparently).  She just gets the job done, no mess, no fuss. This is refreshing in its straightforward empowerment but does make Captain Marvel a fairly unengaging superhero. She's the strong smart ethically grounded woman who basically never does anything wrong, never has any doubts, and doesn't really need her friends. Accordingly, it's no surprise that the MVP of this film is a cat. 

CAPTAIN MARVEL has a running time of 124 minutes and is rated PG-13. It is on global release. 

London Film Festival Day 9 - SUGAR

SUGAR is the latest film from the directors of the quietly brilliant drama HALF NELSON. HALF NELSON starred Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps as a schoolteacher and student forming an unlikely friendship. The twist was that the white teacher wasn't helping out the African-American kid from the deprived inner-city school. Rather, the young girl was helping out the fucked-up junkie teacher. I loved HALF NELSON because it told an unusual story with sensitivity and without judgement. Ryan Boden and Anna Fleck gave the film room to breathe but built slowly to a devestating denouement.

SUGAR shares some qualities with HALF NELSON. Once again, the movie tells an unuaul story that crosses class and race lines and adopts a quiet, patient tone. New-comer Algenis Perez Soto plays a Dominican called Migel "Sugar" Santos. Like so many of his friends, he's desperate to make it out of poverty by playing baseball. Apparently a lot of US teams have training camps in Latin America, where they can train and recruit players at a fraction of the cost of their US college-educated counterparts. Each year a few of these players will make it to wealth, fortune and Major League success. But many will get a season or two in the minors and get injured, or not quite make the grade. What happens to them?

In SUGAR, we see players come to America, struggle with language, get injured, under-perform, and get released. One of Sugar's friends skips out to New York rather than go home. Better to drive a taxi and send home dollars than to return to poverty. Sugar experiences the same trajectory. He moves to the US and plays so well he's catapulted to a "Single-A" local team. He lodges with a baseball-crazy family called the Higgins. But soon he gets injured and when he returns, he's off his game. Life is thin. Everyone's kind but he's basically isolated and frustrated. Rather then wait to be axed, he leaves for New York where he carves a harsher and yet more familial existence with the local ex-pat community. It's a bitter-sweet ending. He won't make it as a baseball player, and he has regrets, but he does have friends and purpose, and he can still send money back to his family.

Once again, the strength of SUGAR lies in the fact that Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden coax a good performance from an unknown actor. Moreover, they continue to avoid melodrama and to show rather than tell. Take the way they treat the issue of race. Sugar is treated well by everyone he comes across - from the baseball manager, to a kindly waitress, to the random people he meets in New York. But we do get little hints of subtle discrimination. When Sugar and his friends go to a nightclub, Sugar borrows a friend's ID. They are convinced that the white bouncer won't care to tell them apart. And then, when Sugar starts dancing with a white girl, the white guys at the bar are clearly unhappy.

The problem with SUGAR is that it lacks the emotional pay-off of HALF NELSON. The slow pace and subtle tone go nowhere. The movie ends on the same even-handed, almost narcoleptic tone as it begins with. All this is fine - I don't need whistles and bangs - but it just felt a little bit, well, thin.

SUGAR played Sundance, Toronto and London 2008. It opens in NY and LA on April 3rd 2009.

HALF NELSON - quiet brilliance

HALF NELSON is a movie that has the courage to turn those Hollywood conventions of an uplifting high-school-teacher-as-mentor story. In these movies an idealistic teacher - usually white - turns up in a violent inner city school usually populated by ethnic minorities. The teacher uses quirky teaching methods to get the kids' attention. One kid usually does really well; another does well but is held back by getting knocked up or an abusive parent; and the rest slide into a morass of happy, thankful sprites. Movies like that - all rose-tinted depictions of the under-privileged - make me sick.

Like I said, HALF NELSON is nothing like these movies. Writers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden do have an idealistic white teacher - played by Ryan Gosling. But he is as much in need of help and mentoring as the kids: he has a raging drug habit. He forms a friendship of sorts with a thirteen year-old student called Drey when she catches him after basketball practice smoking crack in the girls locker room. She nurses him and gets him home. So the friendship is not about him helping her out but about both of them helping each other. Despite or perhaps because of his habit, the teacher is able to caution Drey against becoming a dealer for a family friend. I also love that despite the vogue in recent films, the writers never let the relationship between the two of them become "inappropriate".

The movie is well-directed by Ryan Fleck. He gives it room to breathe - the pace is gentle (some might find it too slow) and slowly builds to a quite dazzling closing segment. HALF NELSON is also brilliantly acted by Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps - indeed, the movie is arguably an expansive two-hander between the two of them. They deserve all the plaudits they are receiving.

HALF NELSON was released in the US in August 2006 and played the Sundance and London Film Festivals.