[film] Captain America: The First Avenger

[inulro]

Lovefilm seems to be intent on sending me all the Marvel films at the moment.

Compared to Iron Man 2, this is a little more like it. It's a straight-up superhero film that definitely suffers from "only one strong woman in the film" syndrome, but it's good straightforward fun that hangs together well.

Of Captain America's squad, the Oriental-looking guy from Fresno jars a bit (even if not interned, I don't think Japanese-Americans were welcome in the army, but I'm happy to be proved wrong). I do, however, like that the black dude is a multi-lingual student of Howard University.

Comments

[nwhyte]

Did you spot the new Doctor Who companion playing Second Girlfriend in an early scene?

[inulro.livejournal.com]

No, - I don't watch Doctor Who, but probably would have missed it anyway.

[ivory-goddess.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed the film, more than I expected to, but my personal bug-bears were:

1) 'Skinny Steve' was a different height in every scene. The effects were very convincing in isolation, but the transition between scenes/angles was sometimes quite jarring - there was one scene in a car where he switched between looking like a small, slight adult and a 12 year old boy depending on the camera angle!

2) Less importantly, the squad member with the brown hat and silly sideburns was like something out of a Victorian adventure, not WW2 era. I can only assume he was a direct copy of a character from the comics, but he seemed very out of place.

[kekhmet.livejournal.com]

Japanese-Americans were allowed in a segregated batallion. I remember my Kendo sensei at University of Wisconsin talking about it. Kiyota-sensei was interned himself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese-American_service_in_World_War_II

[kekhmet.livejournal.com]

University of Wisconsin offers Kendo as a one semester course, cross listed between East Asian Studies and PE

http://www.anthropology.wisc.edu/kendo/Class/join.html

At the time I was taking it Professor Minoru Kiyota was still the chief instructor, with a grad student as assistant instructor. I see he's retired now and is a an Emeritus Professor at UW, so is now a guest instructor on the course. It makes me happy to see that at least as recently as last year he was still instructing. He was a teenager during WW2. He refused to sign the loyalty oath in the camps, saying he'd sign it when he was released.

Thing on YouTube with interview with Minoru Kiyota
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI5lJ2myos0