A camp movie walks a thin line.

If you’re going to go for camp deliberately, you have to make sure of a lot of things. For instance, every actor in your film has to have gotten the same memo. Your script has to make sure to avoid sudden pockets of maudlin sentimentality, while still having enough serious lines for your actors to over-deliver. You have to have enough going on that there’s always something in the frame to enjoy. You have to be able to manufacture the sense that it’s all happening spontaneously, while trying to convey your tongue-in-cheek intentions and/or extremely serious camp-situation intentions. And ideally, you’d do all this while sneaking some homoerotic subtext in at intervals. Basically, there’s a reason most great camp is accidental.

And if you tried really hard to manufacture some camp, and someone told you, “We also need steampunk because that’s getting popular,” and you said yes, and someone else told you, “Also we need a lot of Mission Impossible action to make sure everything is exciting,” and you said yes, and someone was like, “Is Mads Mikkelsen available to humiliate himself for two months?” and you said yes, and someone else was like, “Orlando Bloom would probably be strangely perfect for this, right?”, and you said yes, and you decided you were going to make this movie as No Homo as you possibly fucking could, you would be Andrew Davies, and you would have written The Three Musketeers.

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In the growing Avengers franchise, Captain America is arguably the hardest sell.*

Fundamentally a product of his era no matter what the comics do to modernize him, Army man Steve Rogers is always one misstep away from turning into a walking USA-propaganda poster. Any movie dealing with him had its work cut out for it to not only make him a compelling character – a straight-up hero in an era of antiheroes – but to ground him in both his own era and the modern day. (Also, his own era had some sketchy stuff going on, so it’s not like that’s a picnic, either.)

Bonus: this year is completely glutted with superhero origin stories, most of which have blown chunks, which means that audiences were walking in either pre-grimacing from Green Lantern or fake-smashing coffee cups from the one scene in Thor people are always fake-smashing cups from. So, in addition to all the other work this movie is doing, it has to be an origin story that doesn’t embarrass anyone.

Shockingly, Captain America nailed it (spoiler?). It has its missteps, its plot soup, and its Ham-Off contestant, but I forgave them all, because what the movie did best is the sort of thing one always wants in a superhero movie and rarely gets: it beautifully answers the question, “Why them?”

Under the cut, we’ll go into some spoiler action about this remarkably adorableface period-piece character-study origin-story Ham-Off action flick.

“I’m just a kid from Brooklyn…an impossibly chiseled and endearing kid from Brooklyn.”
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This weekend, we reach the end of Harry Potter (for this month). Now, let’s talk about how the last car of this train rolled into the station, shall we?

More vague spoilers than you can possibly imagine…
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There’s something very telling about seeing a movie in the theatre. For all the annoyances that come with it (and I am so, so easily annoyed), a movie audience provides instant feedback and flavors the viewing experience.

Here are three viewing experiences in the theatre where I saw Priest. At a key moment, when a character is thrown from a train during the movie’s third act:

People behind me, at volume: “Oh DAMN!”

Me, under my breath: “Someone’s callsheet in the Mojave comes to an end.”

Dude to my left, at volume: *snoring*

Throughout this (spoiler-heavy!) review, know that the people behind me were utterly invested throughout, I was consumed with laughter throughout, and the dude to my left slept throughout. We all enjoyed ourselves. It’s that kind of movie.

It’s also the kind of movie that features a minute-by-minute travelogue of Paul Bettany’s overnight motorcycle trip across the desert, including a closeup of the NITRO setting, which is later used to explain how someone on a motorcycle can outrun a 200-mph train, atop which people are casually standing and having normal-volume conversations as an occasional breeze gently ruffles the hems of their coats.

In other words: shitmazing.
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Reader, I saw it.

This was the eighth adaptation of Jane Eyre I’ve seen (not counting the George C. Scott version, which I bailed on like a day player in a skydiving movie). There have been at least twenty adaptations made. There have been abysmal versions and serviceable ones, hysterically off-the-mark ones, ones that are overpraised, and ones that are close to my heart even though they’re deeply flawed and sometimes really terrible (lookin’ at you, Samantha Morton and Ciaran Hinds).

But the thing is that even though it’s been filmed so often, there’s never been a version so good it can be claimed as the definitive version. (Pre-emptive: the 2006 version is often described this way, and it certainly looks good and hits some of the right notes, but there are so many characterization problems and Handsome Rochester issues that from a textual standpoint it’s not the case). Thus, Jane Eyre becomes a one-woman course in the difficulty of adaptation; it seems like a straightforward-enough book, but when you try to bring it to the screen it’s easy to let something crucial slip through the cracks.

This Jane Eyre is also not the definitive adaptation, though Cary Fukunaga managed a movie that does more than just stage scenes from the book, which is where many adaptations stop; this Jane Eyre focuses on Jane herself, in a way not many of the others have. As a character study, it’s a new enough take to have something to say, and though there are some missteps, what it does well it really does well.

Below the cut, more specifics, for those who don’t want to be spoiled about what’s in the attic (it’s a puppy mill).

“The shadows are as important as the light.”

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