Men Who Are Frozen: FOREVER YOUNG, CAPTAIN AMERICA, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

Top to Bottom: Forever Young; Captain America; Matter of Life and Death

Is FOREVER YOUNG (1992, top) in its blessed ignorance of the 9/11 to come, a sequel out-of-time to CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER (2011)? Taken together they form a Moebius strip: AMERICA begins with a psychedelic steampunk abstract version of WW2--replete with octopus swastikas--and ends with a de-thawing in 2011;  FOREVER YOUNG begins in 1939 and ends in the then-current moment, now our own past: 1992. Both film's stars death defy (Mel Gibson in YOUNG is a test pilot, Captain America is a commando) and both are deeply frozen in their (and our nation's) prime. One is motivated by grief, one by game self-sacrifice, but either way a part of what's best in the American mythic male is flash-frozen with them.

In this way there's also an echoes in both of Powell and Pressburger's A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946). Bombardier David Niven isn't deep-frozen in that one, but he does hang suspended between life and death in a frozen ice court/operating room after he has to jump from his burning plane without a parachute. Moments before he jumps he falls in love with June (Kim Hunter), a radio operator with Bomber Command, trying to guide him in through the fog. Their chemistry in their scene is terrific -- they aren't really in the same scene at all, or even the same altitude, but they convincingly fall in love just the same. She loves his poetry-even-in-the-face-of-certain-death gallant sweetness (he dictates a cable to his mother to her) and when he asks if she's in love she notes "I could love a man like you, David." tears in her eyes "I love you, June. Your life and I'm leaving you." - And just like 'that' - they're in love - They're both in love with a voice, and with the pregnant mythos of the moment, a flame they agree has struck in this vast opaque fog-enshrouded darkness. In wartime there is no room for waffling and being coy. When love strikes, the victims don't wait to give it their whole selves but grab on tight in great spasms of each-breath-may-be-your-last intensity.

After surviving he washes up right on the beach where June is cycling home - no coincidence, as anyone who's been in love and found fate thrusting themselves together over and over has experienced. They recognize each other without even needing to hear each other's voice. Is it a dream? We soon learn he was not supposed to survive. His psychopomp lost him in the fog. The thought of having to die a second time and not be with June is too much for Niven to bear, though his the heavenly soul-bearer consoles him he may get to meet her again... when she's 97 and comes up to the heaven at least. If he had managed to get a different operator at BC, he might not mind dying at all. But 97... she won't even be the same person.

So the age thing comes up again. Men are forever young, but the women age, and you come to heaven looking the same age as when you died, so growing old on Earth isn't always the smartest course if you're vain. So the man puts himself into a nice mylar bag with a non-acidic tape on the flap, to stay in a crisp NM condition. In keeping himself on ice he avoids the long-term wear and tear that erases the youthful bloom from the woman. And what happened to the lady Captain America (Chris Evans) left behind in the 1940s, Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell)? I appreciate her hot Brit sass but unless I missed something in the credits, by the time 2011 rolls around, she's presumably wicked old, or dead.

In1992, meanwhile, Mel Gibson lives the geriatric-romantic fantasia. He races against time to find his old bitty. What was romantic in the early 90s becomes in 2011 not even worth asking about --a mere regret. Captain A. notes to Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D (though Fury too, presumably was frozen since he fought WW2 as Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos), "I had a date." According to the Comicvine, Peggy Carter is "residing at the Larkmoore Clinic due to old age and possibly Alzheimer's disease."

You think Mel would have let that stop him?

Luckily for Mel's lovelorn pilot he starts to rapidly age soon after he's thawed from his (co-invented with George Wendt) cryogenic prototype. Thawing him, by accident, is a plucky young boy (Elijah Wood) who helps Mel reach his eighties right as he reunites with his lost love, who just happens to have a landing strip-sized front lawn. For Captain America, however, there can be no such strip and no such Wood. Seventy years is just too damned long to pick up the pieces. The next time a WW2 'greatest generation' member awakens from the ice, there will be so much distance between his waking date and WW2 that his lover will be long since turned to dust. And so it is on this past Thanksgiving I celebrated via CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER a country built on the urge to escape... from religious oppression, from time, from the ice (or into it) and, most importantly, from girls our own age.

But as Americans, we don't stop there. Even in our new safely-escaped-to haven we know that to be free and safe and cozy we must go deeper still, up the tinsel-and-celluloid palm trees, into the pulp novel of the cocoanuts and comics, into 3-D and Cinemascope, ever searching for a new excuse to get out of the house over the holidays, to escape from prying parents, screeching spouses, needy, nagging children, loud neighbors, lack of air conditioning. The theater is where we escape on those horrid summer days when our AC gives out. Is it not so? Freezing ourselves, as Americans, in film, becomes the new sky-diving, the new crack, the new Coke, good as a quart of bourbon and a W.C. Fields tape. You just drink and watch until Fields' double vision quadruples, and when you wake up technology and changing tastes and inflation have altered the landscape so drastically you may as well be on Mars.... hangover averted.

In all three of these 'frozen man' films it's hard to scrape together even one worthy bad guy to compet with the real enemy: time. Hugo Weaving's Red Skull works towards RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK meets WILD WILD WEST/JONAH HEX-style world archeological domination as best he can, but since he kills his own Nazi overseers how bad can he really be? He's more into world domination than genocide, so is he any worse than, say, Stalin?

Captain America of course can't understand that kind of high-end politics. His very name and uniform color was always a throw-back to the dawn of comic books, the 1940s, when nearly every superhero tangled regularly with the Axis, including: Captain Marvel, Captain Midnight, Captain Blackhawk, and so forth, and the colors of their uniforms needed to be bright and distinct from the backgrounds for the crude newsprint color printing process. In order to preserve his generic 'every man superhero' quality for modern times-so he can magically do battle alongside the Avengers--without making him seem hopelessly square (ala DC, rather than hipster Marvel), he needs a reason he didn't lose his integrity, the apple pie gleam. But it's a cop-out. He froze because he couldn't develop a sophisticated approach to relationships, political and personal. He was still working up the nerve to hit on Peggy before a chance to sacrifice himself bravely came along and let him off the hook. "Phew!"

 

And seriously, does anyone really love Captain America? No. He seems like he was created by some drab civics committee to deflect flak about juvenile delinquency. Comic book fans in the 1980s loved, as I did, the Fantastic Four when drawn by Kirby or John Byrne. We loved the X-Men as written by Chris Clarendon. We loved Frank Miller's stint with Daredevil, but Captain America (I presume since I never read him, even though I had a complete run of The Invaders) could never get too dark. He stood for something, and thus seemed wooden, like a support rod for a tomato plant.

And some might say that--in the modern light of things--the baroque steampunk version of WW2 is, in vaguely disrespectful, 'too soon'. In the 1940s comics it was okay to give Nazis gigantic death rays, but it seems now to diminish the true heroism of the men and women who fought and/or died in that war-zzzzzz. And when I see villains wasting time staring at glowing green or blue power sources I begin to think of Red Sonja (1985). Man, I knew that comic fairly well, too, and I really wanted that movie to be good. But it wasn't. Each bad scene and haircut (they gave her a mullet for god's sake) stretched time to tedium where freezing oneself to get to the end credits faster seemed to be already happening, but in a botched version where we're conscious the whole time. Red Skull fares only moderately better in that regard. Red does not mean hot in these cases.

Like Captain America, Red Sonja even as a comic character seemed exist solely to indulge some base instinct (patriotism as the last refuge of the sexually frustrated). Perhaps it is the mark of pure quality when the motivation for a character's creation isn't embarrassing in its committee-conscious contrivance.

On that note, a little background: In the summer, in the early 80s, as a sulky 13-16 year old, I used to put my feet up on both sides of the central air vent in the corner of my room, letting my crotch cool from the blasts of arctic frost while reading all the above comics in my bean bag chair, as well as all the DC war titles like The Unknown Soldier, Sgt. Rock, All-Out War, Weird War Tales, and Enemy Ace. What I mean is, I never had time to have a child thanks to permafrost sterility. And all my old real life crushes and lost loves now since aged into dreadful moms and withered forty year-olds. It's enough to make me wear a beard, and a mask of a younger man to cover my too-late completely blushless mummy skin. If I freeze myself until their grandchildren are over 38 is it skeevy to hit on them when I am woken? These are no longer just the concerns of 140 year-old hunk vampires, but of cryogenic America, a country built on the freedom to defy authority, natural aging processes, time, space, heat, humidity, and the lessons of history. 

Freeze me, then, Big Red Sonja Skull, so I can miss Christmas and airport anxiety and just magically get to the time when that AVENGERS movie is finally released... as an eye drop of digitally encoded biotechnology that lets me dream it in 4-D. Freeze me, December, and let me remember a time when I, too, felt human... and 22.

When I was 22, I had a very good year.

Prepare the blue ray and let's pull this spinning plastic disc planet to a stop. But.... wait...
Lois Lane crawls through the bushes,
looking for her Indiana Jones blue pill, but
there is no blue pill. That's what no one told Neo.
The blue pill was a sugar placebo.
There never was a choice of not burning in blushing bushes of idiot reject hell.
Every decade spent hiding in the cold, reading comics while we slowly froze our sperm just postponed our spasmodic initiation,
and now, alas,, the girl we finally worked up the nerve to ask to the prom is too old to dance,
and long since crumbled to dust, or worse, become your mom.

Xmas is coming, son, the least you could do is hit pause.

The Return of the Great 70s Dad: Nicolas Cage in KICK-ASS

I thought the age of great 70s dads was done, but that was before I saw KICK-ASS (2010), in which a truly cool father (Cage) manages to slide past the doting widower daddy ("mommy's in heaven!") morons of Hollywood to finally do what Batman should have been doing all along: using firearms, gutting mobsters with exotic weaponry, and teaching his 11 year-old daughter to be a pint-sized killing machine.

This is the kind of film where you see something genuinely subversive -- kids as instruments of lethal vengeance-- and know instantly that a dividing line will form between film critics that are cool (i.e. they get intentional subversion of the treacly overprotective cinema status quo) and the dull self-appointed moral guardians (i.e. status quo dogma-eating suckaz) as easy to demarcate as a scroll down the rotten tomato meter. My old editor at Popmatters, Cynthia Fuch's discusses for example the one-note presence of Marcus, Nic Cage's old cop buddy who raised Hit Girl while Nic was in the slammer, framed for his wife's murder :

Marcus serves one purpose here, to deliver the film’s not-so-earnest injunction against Big Daddy’s monomaniacal exploitation of his daughter: “You owe that kid a childhood!” With that done, the movie can proceed apace, exploiting her in every way it can think of. Serving as Kick-Ass’ mentor, savior, and inspiration, she’s abused and abusive, horrified and horrific, tearfully vulnerable and ingeniously cruel. (4/16/10)

Hahah! Well, frankly, if there wasn't some uptight backlash against all this "exploitation" the character wouldn't have nearly enough subversive zing, so I'm glad at least some critics felt the need to jump on this, like they have to make sure we know it's wrong WRONG WRONG to train our daughters to be assassins. "You owe that kid a childhood?" Really? What's a better childhood than not having to go to school and spending all your time hanging out with your cool superhero gun nut father? What is she missing? Facebook chats? Sexual subjugation and elementary school belittlement? Tedium in front of the TV? Wasted hours playing with dolls and engaging in clique-y slumber party backstabbing?



Even more inflammatory is a review by someone named Prarie Miller:

... let's just say that it's reached the point in movies where pedophiles could conceivably launch a movement protesting that double standard filmmakers get away with all sorts of exploitative behavior with children in movies that would land predators in the real world in handcuffs. It would seem that we're talking a line here between reality and fantasy, with the emphasis on a different kind of graphic at work, and a line that has been seriously crossed (Newsblaze)

 Yeah, Prarie, let's just say that... wait, what? Are you seriously using the phrase "in movies" redundantly in a sentence? Do you even know where the line between reality and fantasy is? It's not in a comic book movie, anywhere! Ever!  Don't you see that this girl assassin is a direct and intentional affront to your hypocritical projecting? More than anything, we love Hit Girl for the very reason that we know she will get you all up in arms; we know that some serious standing-up to nervous industry suits must have gone on to prevent their meddling with the script and turning her bullets into, say, tranq darts. Hit Girl is a triumph for the very reason that she kills her victims without qualms! She's an emblem for child empowerment rather than for child victimization mentality, which the Praries of the world prefer, and misread as saintliness.

Of course, as I say, without the whack-job moral guardian fringe ringing their alarm bells, you wouldn't wake up to realize that finally something genuinely ballsy is happening in a superhero movie -- a gleeful finger in the eye of the still-lingering remnants of the Hollywood moral production code and the whole "Won't someone think of the children" hysteria of films like Cage's "worst dad" film, KNOWING. Actually, Hit Girl's the first 'free' kid I've seen since 1979 and OVER THE EDGE, or the other cool kids I wrote about last week in my slam against Michael Cera (since amended), like Tanner from THE BAD NEWS BEARS!

I'm also reminded of one of the story threads in D.W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE (1919), wherein a moral crusader matron is out to rescue the exploited children of the slums, so she can drag them away from their loving mothers and throw them into a giant orphanage where they can be safely ignored in long rows of cribs by uncaring city employees. I think any girl who had the choice to be raised by Nicolas Cage and trained full time in the art of killing vs. being forced to go to some dumb public school and then come to a distracted babysitter while a single righteous mom works double shifts would choose the former. Watch fucking BLUE CAR and see how bad it could be.

Hit Girl is lucky she gets to spend all her time with a cool, loving father and when you consider (as I've written about in SALT) the usual back story of female assassins--their cruel schooling and tough surrogate parents--Nic's kindly Tod Browning-ish scheme of vengeance is a breath of fresh cool air.  He even takes his daughter to get ice cream after shooting slugs into her bullet proof vest and gives her cool butterfly knives in a big swanky box. This was the first film I've seen since about a single father-daughter pair bond that didn't make me want to wretch, and even makes me want to be a father if I could ensure I had a daughter into knives and not a dorky son into superhero comics.

For an example of the latter, let's examine another case of superhero childhood with (in this case surrogate) dad and no mom, HELLBOY.

Now, I liked the first HELLBOY which involved the origin of an adopted demon child by a squad of rough and tough American GIs in WW2. The child demon grew up a cigar-smoking badass, as if he'd been raised by Sam Fuller. But then in the insipid sequel we get this treacly homespun flashback of Hellboy as a goofy nerd, watching Howdy Doody with his glasses and buckteeth and wearing his jammies and getting tucked in by a loving and responsible... zzzz, I turned it off right at that moment. What the hell happened, "Hell" boy? Prarie got to you, didn't she?

Then there's the drably hypocritical "clean" conscience of heroes like Batman--on whom Cage's Hit Man is cheekily based--who would never, say, shoot a real gun at the Joker or something, because "killing is wrong," -- no guns, Alfred! So he has to invent all these bizarre non-lethal weapons so he can wipe out whole blocks with collateral damage (chasing the Joker around Gotham, he totals dozens of cars and I'm sure incurs a lot of fatalities), but as I've written before, he's as "innocent" as our precision bombers over Baghdad - though to their credit at least the military's not squeamish about shooting a bad guy up close.

Anyway... as Hit Girl, Chloe Grace Moretz is a revelation. Fresh air finally becomes breathable once you see an 11-year old girl eviscerate a room full of thugs and do so with a convincing air of detached cool and scary intellect we haven't seen since Anna Paquin in THE PIANO. QT had to do it in anime with the Lucy Liu backstory in KILL BILL, but that was all dark to be begin with. The juxtaposition of the day-glo highschool coming of age shenanigins in the dorky comic book guy side of things and the colorful costumes make the bloody merciless killing of KICK-ASS's pint-sized avenger all the more striking. We're just not used to it, it's original! Hollywood has this unofficial policy that good girls don't shoot guys - that's why Jamie Lee Curtis has to drop her Uzi before it's allowed to shoot everyone in TRUE LIES.

It's so liberating. One wants to go back in time and rescue Patty McCormack from her mom in THE BAD SEED and teach her to fight crime-- an army of bloodthirsty children stalking the streets! Pedophiles dying right and left. If Nic Cage's Hit Man could become a role model for all the dads of tomorrow, what a blood-stained, crime-free world we would have.

Moretz is next scheduled to appear as the vampire kid in the remake of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (above). I can't wait to read the uptight film critics' anxiety that seeing blood-sucking children onscreen sends the wrong message to parents everywhere: "Children are meant to be locked in their rooms with bibles and homework, not allowed to kill adults willy nilly!" Yeah, you wish, downpressa!

WATCHMEN Dig My Earth

There's something undeniably--yet deliciously--wrong about all the Dylan and classic rock used in Zach Snyder's WATCHMEN. The music of WOODSTOCK and Z-100 FM is corrupted, harnessed to images of superheroes doing Bad Things. Using Dylan's "Times they are a Changin'" over a montage of aging superheroes dying and drinking is akin to Alex's conditioners using his beloved Ludwig Van played over the atrocity footage in CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Kubrick's film--like WATCHMEN--doesn't give you too many people to root for in this decayed new world, just the weird feeling that everything worth saving about humanity has long been jettisoned, leaving just universal blandness and its underside: wild violent hooliganism. Nothing is clear cut, just bloody, brusied, and muddy, like the black/white morality of DIRTY HARRY was thrown into a blender and doused with CGI and motor-oil.

One of the trailers that played before WATCHMEN was for TERMINATOR: SALVATION and it looks great, the industrial wasteland-scape recalling the outback world of THE ROAD WARRIOR. But all the complicated sun-bleached CGI rubble doesn't add up to much after awhile. While CGI and mega-budgets let today's Hollywood minds create sci fi worlds our 1980 George Miller could never hope to duplicate, I'd still rather watch young pre-nuts Mel Gibson tangle with the dreaded Humongous (shown in WATCHMEN amidst a wall of TV screens) than all the gray day burnt-out cityscapes CGI can muster. No matter how intensely detailed it gets, CGI is always just a step and a jump short of anime' (when Sally Jupiter and the all-CGI Dr. Manhattan have their long dialogues together, it feels as phony as Jar Jar and Liam Neeson talking in PHANTOM MENACE). All MAD MAX 2 needed was a real car and a real gun and your heart was leaping in your throat. But everything is disposable today, so the heart leaps not - just  goes crumbling into pixels: the guns are melting in the rain like Dillinger soaps. Nothing survives at the cineplex for long except for the sexually frustrated howl of young male hormones; Humongous still lives, but reproduced in a post-modern ground zero simulacrum, on TV at the bad guy hideout at the end of the earth. Like all the Dylan and Hendrix, he's there as a cultural touchstone that's been licensed and co-opted, bottled...stacked and canned.

Did you know that if a sex offender comes into the hospital begging to be castrated, they would never do it? Why is this foul sex drive so highly regarded? It's the real culprit here, not greed or ambition or hatred; sexuality curdles everything with its corrupting touch. The whole comic book superhero world is born from this dishonorable discharge, this rape-ening of the world that turns innocent young men into Michael Landon (left) and women into something we never wanted to see them be: sexually voracious sadomasochists.

I'm always thrilled to see my misanthropy shared in a film's subtext; aren't we all full of secret ambivalence about mass destruction? Our world is a vile cesspool, like our friend Rorschach is always writing in his little TAXI DRIVER journal. Hey, we're reading it aren't we? Put the gun down, George, wait til it's time.

While WATCHMEN might be a cult classic in a decade or two, like STARSHIP TROOPERS, I wish they'd gotten a real artist like Alex Grey (left) to step in and bring some art director cohesion, the way HR Giger brought it to ALIEN (1979). As it is the big blue naked man is ridiculously uninteresting, like something between an out-of-focus anatomy book projection on the wall and a gay porn star (replete with effeminate, vaguely smarmy voice)

But I mean seriously, they play Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" in one scene, and I'm all like... again? Are they still reading the same old (2002?) market research report that suggested James Brown's "I Feel Good" be included in every single comedy trailer? And "All Along the Watchtower" for every 1960s montage?

It's a great song, but by now it's beyond cliche. I first noticed the Watchtower issue awhile ago when enduring the trailer for CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR: Phillip Seymour Hoffman pimped out as a congressman slow mo walking through a 1970s disco groove club. The Hendrix plus the glitter signifies the two-decade span, the hazy morass of Vietnam and acid that was 1965-1974, approximately (Sweet Jane). It's all they need. I squirmed in my theater seat in mute horror. Hendrix+Dylan now equaled Tom Hanks. All was lost. And now--relentlessly, murderously--the corporate plowmen continue to unironically, retournement-ally paste the song in everywhere over montages of slow motion Nixonism. Of course I'm sure it's encoded into the Watchman mythos that it's all self-aware Godard-style to its own comic book bloodlust. So why not go all Heavy Metal about it? Black Sabbath or Earth, Wind and Fire? It's a feelin', baby. Just because your budget allows for all these A-list rock classics doesn't mean you have to use them all.

The thing I admire about WATCHMEN is it does explode the mythos of America's Stockholm syndrome (reflected in Silk Spectre's falling for the Comedian after her attempted rape); pointing out we love watching our country get screwed over via slow motion handshakes behind flag country curtains, as "All Along the Watchtower" plays. We're letting them plow our earth and drink our wine, confident that none of them / along the line / know what any of it is worth-- and we cut back and forth to a television with that monk burning himself alive in protest for Vietnam. I've seen that footage being played on 1960s TVs since the 1960s (PERSONA, Bergman's 1966 film, used it first, to my knowledge, and before this I last saw it in I'M NOT THERE. It's become linked to the horrified female gaze via TV).

I'm not saying the footage isn't fascinating, just that it's embedded in WATCHMEN so deep the post-modern overuse angle is lost in the morass, just as all the other symbolic-historical tchotchkes in this film, from the overused smiley face button on up to the Egyptian artifacts, all trying to archly point in several directions at once and so end up like the Scarecrow on the Mount: "Of course you could go both ways!" America the violent, the beautiful, the beautifully violent; the Leni Riefenstahl by way of Roger Waters violent, italics and ironic quote symbols fall from the sky like rain on our ever-staining Rorschach blots. The feeling you get is that Zach Snyder has gone the reverse direction of the way Paul Verhoeven interpreted Robert Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS. Where Verhoeven exploded out in dry-docked self awareness, Snyder loses his arch via over-reliance on hokey touchstones, the way a Tom Hanks Movie would. With Snyder, self-reflexivity and political satire are absorbed as dogma, the way biblical metaphor becomes cold hard fact in the minds of the congregation.

Just how conscious was the fascism in TROOPERS we do not know, but it's a great look forward and a refracted glimmer of what could be a very real truth about our culture. Fascism is able to encompass its own fun house satirical reflection, i.e. it survives its own satirization, even thrives on it: hipster irony begets ironic fascism begets "the new sincerity" and onwards into neo-Puritanism, and that's why it works in dealing with grey aliens as well as hormonal suburban teen alienation-- the ticket and annual double-size issue buying kind. Irony learns to be as twisted as how a teen sees himself in the mirror. If we distort your reflection enough to get you to think you're ugly, maybe you will buy more skin products. It's worth the gamble that you won't go all Columbine on us. (though we secretly hope you do; a senseless killing sells papers!)

"It's because I'm ugly that I do ugly things," is how Boris Karloff put it in THE RAVEN (1933). But you just looked ugly, to yourself, like the pot calling the pot in the mirror black, and not even realizing its white the whole time. Celebrate the times, come on! Sincerity is the new insincerity but please please please! Leave Jimi out of this. The dead will soon return and when they eat my brains and drink my wine, I want Hendrix to be someplace far away and safe, drifting on a sea of forgotten teardrops / on a lifeboat / sailing ho-o-ome.

Even original WATCHMEN creator Alan Moore knows the Yanks aren't ALL violent sociopaths; too bad he forgot to tell Snyder. The maniacal rage of the Spartans in 300 had a definite heroic purpose; the rage of The Watchmen eats itself, like a clock swallowing its own tail. Snyder stands there getting all the details right, hoping--we presume--that the meaning will come.

Maybe it will; WATCHMEN is surely the APOCALYPSE NOW of its decade. It will take many viewings to truly "get" all the details and even more viewings than that to determine whether or not this warrior's journey to the heart of darkness actually goes anywhere, or just blows a lot of thing up, hoping you wont see how fat Brando got in all the smoke. I've sen APOCALYPSE over 30 times and I still can't tell.

P.S. I turn you also to Kim Morgan's uncompromising and refreshing take on the film here.