Friday, March 29, 2024

WashPost’s Ann Hornaday: What Defines a ‘Must-see’ Movie and Why ‘Infinity War’ Isn’t One

ann hornaday
Ann Hornaday

*What defines a must-see movie? The Washington Post’s Film Critic Ann Hornaday explores this question after she found herself having no desire to see “Avengers: Infinity War,” despite the influx of critical and public praise.

Hornaday writes: “This has nothing to do with quality, or with prejudging: I fully expect to enjoy ‘Infinity War’ when I finally see it. So why am I resisting its irresistible vortex? What are those ineffable x-factors that go into creating a desire so overwhelming that not seeing a movie is tantamount to not living one’s best life?’”

Read the full article: https://wapo.st/2IuhJ0Y.

Excerpts:

  • Sheer volume is one issue: As with most superhero series, the overstuffed, gangs-all-here mash-ups are far longer, baggier and busier than the more fleet and streamlined stand-alones. I still have more vivid memories of 2008’s “Iron Man,” the revelatory adaptation starring Robert Downey, Jr. that got the whole ball rolling, than the two “Avengers” team-ups that appeared in 2012 and 2015, respectively. The dangers of a never-ending story is that a fair number of its chapters will be filler.
  • But even the most dutiful exercise in the management of sprawling serials can be substantive enough — both narratively and aesthetically — to transcend their roles in the larger whole to become imperative viewing as both pop-culture events and paradigm shifts: Witness “Wonder Woman” and “Black Panther,” which imbued their respective origin stories with enough new ideas to qualify as genuinely groundbreaking, whether it was proving that a female superhero could carry a movie with as much assurance and charisma as a man, or that world-building norms based on African traditions, textures and perspectives are unquestionably universal in their reach and resonance.
  • “Wonder Woman” and “Black Panther” are undoubtedly must-see movies: To ignore them would have been to opt out of the conversational zeitgeist, declare sociocultural illiteracy, surrender one’s own claim to relevance. The same could be said for “Get Out,” Jordan Peele’s sleeper hit from 2017, which tiptoed into theaters with minimal hype and became a self-made phenomenon, its themes of assimilation, racism and liberal hypocrisy aligning perfectly with its era of “woke” smugness and black lives that are over-policed, both literally and figuratively.
  • But mere topicality isn’t enough for a movie to qualify as must-see: Last year such fine films as “Detroit,” “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House” and “LBJ” sought “must-see” status on the basis of being unusually attuned to our current era, with mostly disappointing results. However timely, even the best-crafted piece of cinema isn’t guaranteed to be artful or illuminating — or just plain entertaining — enough for average filmgoers to choose it as one of five or six movies they’ll see in a calendar year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

source:
Naseem Amini
Publicist | The Washington Post
[email protected]
@WashPostPr

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