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THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 2014
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
MOVIE REVIEW
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MARVEL STUDIOS
Latest 'Captain America' is one of Marvel's best
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
"Captain America: The Winter Soldier," the latest Marvel movie/merchandising monolith, has all the makings of another generic comicbook blockbuster. It's a toollong sequel with a few snappy one-liners, a third act that concludes with a predictable cacophony of explosions, and the usual end-credit previews for the next installment. Nothing new to see here.
Except, for the most part, it works.
Maybe it's the charm and chemistry between Chris Evans as our square-jawed hero, Steve Rogers, and Scarlett Johansson as his partner in global crime-fighting, Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow. Maybe it's the rock-em-sock'em, mano-a-mano action scenes that directors/brothers Anthony and Joe Russo stage. Maybe it's the top relevancy as the government Captain America defends seems to be turning on its own people, launching a worldwide satellite spying program that theoretically will have the ability to kill those presumed dangerous to the state. Whatever the case, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" is one of the better entries in the franchise.
At the start of the movie, Rogers is undergoing some
emotional turmoil. A chance meeting with veteran Sam Wilson (an engaging Anthony Mackie), who works with soldiers struggling with PTSD, brings to the surface mixed feelings Rogers has about his role as Captain America, the genetically engineered defender of all things red, white and blue. Remember, he's originally a man from the 1940s and he's not sure his old-fashioned sense of what's fair has a place in this modern world.
His faith in the institutions around him is further shaken by the latest threat: The agency he works for, S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division), has evildoers within its ranks. They are pushing for the new surveillance program, under the guise of protecting our freedoms.
It's up to Captain America to wage a one-man war against the people he used to trust. And who can he trust? Natasha? His no-nonsense boss, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson)? Government bureaucrat Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford)? His flirty next-door neighbor, Kate (Emily VanCamp, from TV's "Revenge")?
And there is the Winter Soldier of the title: another soldier, like Rogers, modified
to be indestructible, but one who takes orders from the bad guys. With all the world against him, how can Captain America hope to survive?
At 136 minutes, it takes the Russos, working from a script by Christopher Marcus, Stephen McFeely and Ed Brubaker, awhile to get to that answer. And you don't have to see one minute of the film to know what the answer is.
But there's enough fun and actual suspense along the way to make the whole affair entertaining. While the Russos made their mark in television —working on sitcoms like "Community" and "Happy Endings"-they've made the transition to big-budget action seamlessly. In fact, there's a car chase between Fury and the baddies that's especially convincing.
Be sure to stay through the credits as there are two previews wedged in there. After all, no matter how good "Captain America" is, it's really just a long commercial for promoting the whole Marvel enterprise.
Yet, if "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" is indeed an augur of things to come during this special-effects laden summer, maybe it won't be such a painful season after all.
Colbert responds to Twitter controversy, deletes account
TELEVISION
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
NEW YORK — In his first night on the air since a campaign to #CancelColbert erupted on Twitter Thursday night, Stephen Colbert spent nearly his entire show Monday night responding to charges of racial insensitivity.
For anyone who missed out on the brouhaha, it all began Thursday evening when "The Colbert Report's" Twitter account quoted a joke from a segment on Wednesday's episode of the show that mocked Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder for setting up a charity to aid Native Americans in lieu of changing his team's name. In the original bit, Colbert said he was inspired by Snyder to start his own charity called "The Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever." (Ching-Ching Ding-Dong is the name of a cartoonishly stereotypical Asian character occasionally played by Colbert on the show.)
Out of context, however, some Twitter users thought the joke was offensive to Asian Americans, and within hours the hashtag #CancelColbert was a top trending subject on the social website.
Colbert humorously referred to the controversy on his personal Twitter account, @StephenAtHome but waited until Monday night to issue a full response
—and that he did, taking to task Comedy Central executives, the anonymous web editor responsible for the problematic tweet, conservative pundit Michelle Malkin and, oh yeah, the entire news media.
After an intro in which Colbert, clad in Redskins gear, had a nightmare featuring a cameo by actor B.D. Wong, the host dove right into the debacle. He explained that the joke originated in a segment about Snyder's charity that was rebroadcast multiple times on Thursday without incident. It was only when his show's promotional Twitter
account repeated the joke, without a link to the segment or a mention of Snyder's charity, on Thursday night, that a backlash ensued.
"Who would have thought a means of communication limited to 140 characters would ever create misunderstandings?" Colbert quipped.
Although he acknowledged why the tweet was misunderstood, Colbert expressed little sympathy with his critics. "When I saw the tweet without context, I understood how people were offended the same way I as an Irish American was offended after reading only one line of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal; 'Eat Irish babies', he said, referring to the essay
"Who would have thought a means of communication limited to 140 characters would ever create misunderstandings?"
STEPHEN COLBERT TV personality
in which the famed satirist urged impoverished Irish parents to sell their children to the wealthy as food.
And as Colbert pointed out, the #CancelColbert advocates think he's racist even in context, to which he responded, "I just want to say that I'm not a racist. I don't even see race, not even my own. People tell me I'm white and I believe them because I just spent six minutes devoted to explaining how I'm not a racist, and that is about the whitest thing you can do." However, Colbert did urge his followers to stop harassing the hashtag activist Suey Park, who initiated the Twitter campaign against him and has been subjected to a barrage of criticism online.
And he reserved some of his most obvious displeasure for "the brain trust" at Comedy Central that decided to delete the original tweet once "the twit hit the fan" ("That's how the Internet works, you
can just take stuff down and no one will know it ever happened. Just ask Mayor Weiner.") and especially for the news media.
The #CancelColbert controversy spawned a flurry of news stories in outlets including Time, the New Yorker and Salon, the last of which ran seven separate items on the controversy. Even CNN took a break from covering the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 "to report spotting what they thought was the wreckage of my show off the coast of Australia." Worst of all for Colbert, he was attacked by "fellow conservative" Michelle Malkin, who taught him about sensitivity to the Asian-American experience with her book, "In Defense of Internment," which defended the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
"To recap, a Web editor I've never met posts a tweet in my name on an account I don't control, outrages a hashtag activist and the news media gets 72 hours of content," Colbert said. "The system worked."
As a result, Colbert decided to shut down operations of his foundation and broke the news to the group's supposed chief operating officer, "JaMes" (whose name is actually James). "That ends that controversy," he concluded. "I just pray that no one tweets about the time I said Rosa Parks was overrated, Hitler had some good ideas, or ran a cartoon during black history month showing President Obama teaming up with the Ku Klux Klan, because, man, that sounds pretty bad out of context."
Though he stopped well short of apologizing for the tweet, Colbert also seems committed to avoiding such Twitter misunderstandings in the future. Case in point: Later in the show, he welcomed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who helped him deactivate the @ColbertReport account, which, as of Tuesday morning, remained nonexistent.
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