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Author
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Topic: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
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Sam Graham
AKA: "The Evil Sam Graham". Wackiness ensues.
Posts: 1431
From: Waukee, IA
Registered: Dec 2004
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posted 04-05-2014 05:22 PM
CINEMA: AMC Council Bluffs 17, Council Bluffs, IA
AUDITORIUM: 1
PRESENTATION: AMC Recline-o-Vision/Mystery Meat Digital
PRESENTATION PROBLEMS: FirstLook ran audio only, mismatched audio with video at start of previews
RATING: Two and one half stars (out of four)
Smiling Ticket Taker took my ticket and said "First auditorium to your left." And that would have been correct in any other multiplex in the country, where auditoriums are numbered clockwise from the center concession area. But this weird building numbers counter-clockwise, so 1 is actually to the right. And I knew this, but forgot about it and followed her instruction before seeing Auditorium 16 and remembering how this plex is laid out. As I walked past her again, she exclaimed "I'm so sorry! I sent you the wrong way!"
Me: "It's an honest mistake in this building."
Some Guy during FirstLook kept shouting "TURN ON THE PROJECTOR!" as if he thought somebody in the booth would hear him, let alone anybody would be in an all digital booth in the first place.
The projector kicked on at the start of the trailer package, but kept showing "FirstLook" while the audio played from the trailers. Some Other Guy in Audience: "FIRST DAY ON THE JOB?" Then the audio went off, then came back on (still wrong), then off, then on, then off...then both audio and video were shut down for about five minutes. Various members of the audience got in on the staff mocking and the atmosphere got to be like an MST3K riffing session, with most the audience laughing along. Finally, everything was restarted and correct.
THE PLOT: Surveillance is bad. Wackiness ensues.
I was pleasantly surprised with the first movie. This one's pretty decent overall with some great stuff in it, but ran a little long and started to bore me.
This will be the movie that goes down as the one I realized that credit sequences are long enough that I can go to the bathroom and come back in plenty of time to see the obligatory scene after the credits. How did I not think of this before.
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Stu Jamieson
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 524
From: Buccan, Qld, Australia
Registered: Jan 2008
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posted 04-05-2014 08:36 PM
^ Haha, jeez you go to some crap cinemas, dude. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
Captain America: The First Avenger was one of the lesser well received Marvel films, I seemed to be one of the few kids on my block who liked it. Three years later, and with an Avengers movie in the intervening years, comes Cap's second film, The Winter Soldier.
Captain America is an old world hero transplanted into a modern age and this made for some fun exchanges in the context of The Avengers but can this be sustained in a film all his own? The result, The Winter Soldier is mixed bag of successes and , well not quite failures, but certainly non-successes.
The film is a well-written, intricate story with broad elements of Minority Report and Robocop and it's nice to see how these components weave together through the course of the film. It's unevenly paced, however, running at 2 speeds. There's the balls-to-the-wall thrilling action sequences and then there's our hero's relatively quiet interludes of introspection as he wrangles with his fractured past. This duality existed of a kind in the first film, of course, but they seemed to co-exist harmoniously in that film. Here the two elements tend to collide. Perhaps it's because we have a classic era personal story running alongside a modern era actioner. In the previous film the personal story was matched with classic era "action adventure".
Scarlett Johansson is as good as ever as Agent Romanoff but something has happened to her accent in this. It's less refined, more nasal, more "Jewish mother-in-law". It's quite irritating actually. That aside, her other assets are in fine form.
It's nice to see veteran actress, Jenny Agutter, in a more substantial role this time around (you can actually see it's her!) and it's always a pleasure to see prior Neighbours star (will he ever jettison that label?), Alan Dale, who is strangely uncredited.
Chris Evans is a solid hero, Samuel Jackson is Samuel Jackson (no bad thing) and Robert Redford is a pleasing inclusion also.
7.5 out of 10
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 04-06-2014 02:49 PM
I ended up watching this movie in Digital IMAX and, without the intention to start that whole rant again, I still want to add my two cents: I'm now sure that Digital IMAX in it's current incarnation is definitely NOT the way to the future, no, it's actually a step backward.
I was sitting close to this thing called "the screen" (this wonky smiley face shaped thing) and the biggest distraction was this huge blob of HUGE, fast moving pixels in front of me. Yuck. Another distraction are those prehistoric 3D glasses, tilt your head ever so slightly and everything is getting fuzzy. So, this movie in IMAX 3D is an exercise in holding your head at the right angle for 2h+.
And not really the failure of IMAX, but put that airco to some use please, actual condensation was forming on our glasses...
To be honest, this whole Marvel superheroes stuff starts to get a bit repetitive and especially at the length of all those movies. Do they really plan to keep it up until The Avengers 3? After that they can surely reboot the whole franchise another time, as it would neatly coincide with yet another reboot of the Spider Man franchise...
Throughout the movie I kept wondering why this thing was actually titled Captain America: The Winter Soldier... First of all, the semicolon would imply that Captain America is THE Winter Soldier and secondly, this Winter Soldier guy is just a byline in this whole story, he isn't even the main enemy, he is just somebody the actual enemy hired to do part of the job...
PS: Did this movie have a second end-credit scene? Because, you know, one end-credits scene couldn't possibly suffice.
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