Cap’s teenage sidekick is two years younger than he is….

Updated on April 2, 2010 By Ken Begg 38 Comments

Like a properly young Robin, modern audiences were probably always going to have a problem with Bucky Barnes, Captain America’s WWII-era teenage sidekick. (Although Kick-Ass features a 13 year old homicidal maniac as one of the heroes, so maybe not.) They probably should have just punted the whole idea by getting rid of the character, but instead they seem to have abandoned the idea that he’s a kid. Bucky will be played by Sebastian Stan, who is 26, just two years younger than Chris Evans, the 28 year-old who will play Cap. Indeed, Stan apparently auditioned to actually play Cap at one point. So I assume they’ll more just have a buddy cop kind of relationship.

The age of Cap is in itself a problem. Comic book illustrator Alex Ross opined that Marvel was crazy not to cast the 40 year-old John Hamm as Cap, noting that when the character moved to modern day, for the upcoming Avengers movie, he’ll have to be a realistic “patriarch” for the Marvel Universe of superheroes. His basic point, which I slightly paraphrase, is that Marvel was “looking at where Cap starts rather than where he ends up.”

But that’s a big issue. Steve Rogers, the guy who because Captain America, was a 4F who tried and failed to join the military to fight in the war. As such, he really shouldn’t be more than in his very early twenties when he partakes in the super-soldier experiment that makes him Cap. Evans at 28 is probably a decent compromise, but the real issue wasn’t finding an actor old enough to realistically play a ‘patriarch,’ but finding a good enough actor that you’d believe, age aside, that someone like Tony Stark and even Thor would follow his lead. I don’t know if Evans is that guy, but I really, really hope he is.

Captain America has always been a property and character fraught with peril in terms of bringing it to the big screen. And certainly Hollywood is going to be a lot more uncomfortable with a straightforwardly America-first, John Wayne-type patriotic hero than the actual ticket-buying American audience would be.

Therefore, I think it likely they’ll have him go through a crisis of conscious on that part, or something, to explicitly let people know that he’s not, you know, like a *gasp* Republican or something. (Although this drive will be slightly mitigated by the fact that there’s a Democrat in the White House right now.) If they’re smart, they’ll use the WWII background to avoid as much political stuff as they can, but the urge to use Cap as a mouthpiece might be irresistible. I hope not, though. Our best hope is that there just won’t be time to do so, other than maybe an inevitable throwaway line here and there, between this movie and the character-filled Avengers movie.

In any case, the Cap film itself will feature him killing Nazis by the score, and really, in the end, that’s something we can all agree on.

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  • BeckoningChasm

    Yeah, nobody has a problem watching Nazis get killed, but I wonder how many of those Nazis will snicker about how they’re going to sabotage some health care legislation before Cap punches them right in the ideology.

    I don’t know who Chris Evans is, but I always thought Ben Browder would be a terrific Captain America.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Geez, just looked up Evans–the guy who played Johnny Storm as an obnoxious asswipe? Seriously, they’re going to use him for CAPTAIN AMERICA?

    I hate to say this film is doomed, but man…

  • To be fair, although I’m not really conversant with the “Ultimate” version of the FF, I think that’s how Storm is portrayed there (like an X-treme sports guy), and that the films just followed that lead. Whether he has the chops to play Cap, though, well, that’s a completely different issue. I can only hope Marvel knows what it’s doing.

    On the other hand, I’m sure the fact that Evans had worked in a big special effects film before, and thus knows the nuts and bolts of that sort of thing, didn’t hurt him any. They really need to start getting that movie in the can for next year’s summer release date.

  • Rock Baker

    Shouldn’t Rogers and Cap be played by two different actors? Rogers was a stick and Cap an anvil, and wouldn’t it be propper that Steve, after being givin the super-serum, look nothing like his former self once he becomes the star spangled avenger?

  • Foywonder

    This Cap newsbit from CHUD.com might help answer some questions (it seems like every single time they mention the movie there’s a cryptic comment about massive script problems):

    The Story

    The film will open and close with modern day bookends; the question becomes whether or not these bookends include Captain America waking up in the modern day or if it will be about others searching for his frozen body.

    An interesting twist that’s already causing controversy is the idea that Captain America, being the only supersoldier the US government can create, will be too valuable as a PR tool to risk in combat and so will be relegated to USO shows. Dissatisfied with being stuck entertaining the troops as opposed to fighting alongside them, Steve Rogers will go AWOL. (via the LA Times)

    The villain will be The Red Skull, as confirmed by Hit Fix, but nobody knows how that’s going to work. Will the Skull be wearing a mask or will he have a disfigured face? There are so many versions of the Captain America origin that it’s hard to be sure which version will show up here. That said, some things that I saw on the set of Iron Man 2 could give hints:

    Howard Stark, Tony’s father, is going to be smeared in Iron Man 2, and elements of Howard’s work, such as the 1964 Stark Expo, will play a big role in the movie. But there’s more about Howard; going through his dad’s old stuff Tony discovers schematics for Captain America’s shield, a map of Antarctica and what appeared to me to be a German passport. We already know that Howard Stark plays a role in Cap’s origin, but could it be as a defector from Germany? In some versions of the Captain America origin the Super Soldier program is a response to the creation of the Red Skull (and in other versions it’s the other way around). Might Howard Stark have been involved in the creation of the Red Skull? That’s absolute speculation, but don’t be the least bit surprised when John Slattery, who is playing younger Howard Stark, ends up in the cast list for The First Avenger: Captain America.

    Johnston revealed to me that the second half of the film will feature The Invaders, Marvel’s WWII superhero team. At Comic Con Kevin Feige had said that The Invaders would be a way of selling a film called Captain America to foreign audiences; while the real Invaders were mostly American, expect them to be more international in this film. Johnston said that there would be six Invaders, but there’s debate over whether that number includes Captain America himself. I suspect that it won’t – Captain America will work alongside The Invaders, but not as one of them. At least that’s my current guess.

  • BeckoningChasm

    It seems to me that one of Captain America’s biggest personality traits is that he’s a commanding presence. He gives orders to people like Thor, for example, and expects those orders to be carried out. He also has a certain amount of gravitas, seriousness. Not that he’s above a joke, but I seem to recall it being the exception.

    I don’t get that vibe from Evans. He seems more of a self-centered party-dude. It’d be like casting Seth Rogan as Otto Octavius.

    I know some people are thinking Keaton-Batman, but Batman always seemed rather one-note (unless Kevin Conroy was playing him). You’re dark, you’re brooding, you don’t like fun, and you punch clowns.

  • JJ Gauthier

    It’s worth noting that Chris Evans was excellent in Danny Boyle’s underrated (and largely unseen) “Sunshine”. And he honestly did about the best that could be done with the Fantastic Four scripts.

  • Grumpy

    “…the Cap film itself will feature him killing Nazis by the score…”

    They’re not killed. They’re just sleeping.

  • Nah, if Iron Man is killing folks, you can be sure Cap will. (Maybe not in modern times, so much, but during the War, definitely.)

  • PB210

    “I don’t get that vibe from Evans. He seems more of a self-centered party-dude. It’d be like casting Seth Rogan as Otto Octavius”.

    Did you hear about Rogan as the Green Hornet? That project seems doomed.

  • Re: Bucky’s age

    In the Ultimates version (which this Marvel Avengers series seems to be shaping up to be, what with Tony Stark going public as Iron Man and Sam Jackson as Nick Fury), wasn’t Bucky roughly the same age as the Captain as well? I think he served at Cap’s liason on the GI side of things.

    Also, I’m strangely OK with an international team of Invaders. They were always kinda bland in the comic to me, so making them each a different representative of the Allies isn’t a bad idea. (Again, the Ultimates sorta plays around with this concept by having a Captain Italy and a Captain Britain. Wait a minute… does this mean there’s a chance Captain Britain shows up on the big screen? Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease….)

  • BeckoningChasm

    That’d be awesome if they had a Captain France. I bet the tie-in action figure would come with a detachable white flag.

  • Blam Walker

    “Captain America has always been a property and character fraught with peril in terms of bringing it to the big screen. And certainly Hollywood is going to be a lot more uncomfortable with a straightforwardly America-first, John Wayne-type patriotic hero than the actual ticket-buying American audience would be.”

    You seem to be thinking small potatoes here Ken; of course this sort of thing might go over in the states but how will the international audience take to it? That’s a big honking slice of the revenue pie right there, and our brand of exceptionalism hasn’t really sat well with them for a number of years now. Hell, look at what they did to GI Joe to court the foreign markets.

  • Ericb

    There is a Captain Euro and you’d better watch out, he’s armed with stun gun:

    http://www.captaineuro.com/

  • I honestly don’t think foreign audiences are as resistant to “American exceptionalism” as is supposed. What massively jingoistic movies has Hollywood been turning out in the last 20 years to test this theory? Foreign audiences like big action movies, and if the Cap movie is good, I don’t don’t think that would hurt it, especially since pretty much everyone likes seeing Nazis get kacked.

    Besides, I wasn’t talking about having Cap constantly rah-rahhing America–although clearly the guy who’s the very symbol of his country shouldn’t be afraid of praising it–but rather concerned that Hollywood will reflexively go in the other direction, and have Cap actually running us down or something of the like. Or, on similar grounds, make him all metrosexual. Again, I think we need a John Wayne guy here.

  • Mr. Rational

    I’m a bit unsure about Evans too. But I suppose it’s always possible that he’s a good enough actor to effortlessly pull off the “party boy” ethos that is the heart and center of Johnny Storm, without actually being that way. Regardless, the casting choices have been great so far — Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man remains the most inspired casting job of the last fifteen years — so I’ll be very forthcoming with the benefit of the doubt. I will be less so as to how “American” Cap is gonna be, however. I’ve just lost all trust for Hollywood in that way.

  • alex

    I’d like to respond to a previous poster who referred to the French lost of 1940 (wich seems to be an obsession among some people here). The French army lost quickly because of the terrain on wich the war was fought and also because their army was badly equiped.

    The person mainly responsible for this is Marshal Phillipe Petain who was Inspector General of the army until 1931. Petain was a fascist and he wanted to overthrow the Third Republic. He made alliances with powerful financial backers, military officers and european fascists and everything was in place in the Summer of 1940 for a coup d’etat. Petain and his allies knew the French army was not ready (in large part because of him) waited for the situation to be desperate and offered himself as ‘the savior of France’.

    The french people were not only fighting the Nazis but also traitors from within who had the power to weaken the military and political spheres. So next time some of you want to indulge in some easy francophobia I suggest you instead educate yourself on what actually happened.

  • Ok, how about how France rounded up French citizens who were Jewish and boxed them up in train cars to send to German death camps? If you wish to argue that this didn’t really represent general French anti-Semitism, I’d suggest checking out The Sorrow and the Pity. And the ‘traitors’ you refer to where, you know, French. And they were hardly a teeny minority of the country.

    France’s decades of general lack of gratefulness to the Allied powers that freed them from the Nazi yoke isn’t exactly inspiring, either. It’s not like France had been a particularly steadfast ally in the years since. Indeed, France has spent much of that period kissing up to a long line of murderous dictators (and without even the excuse of fighting a cold war) and actively cutting deals with political terrorists. And there’s a lot more, including the petty yet galling pretense of the French in acting superior to, well, anyone, when they’ve about the least cause to of any nation I can think of.

    Indulging in ‘francophobia’ — is it really ‘phobic’ behavior to sneer at someone?–really isn’t all that hard. To be fair, though, the French are seldom actively evil–OK, there’s Algeria, but aside from that–so much as loathsome. I guess if you thought of Jimmy Carter as a nation, he’d be France.

  • alex

    Hi Ken,

    No need to get mad at me. I’ve been a long time reader of your website and I simply wanted to show a different point of view. The antisemitic laws of the Vichy regime were made by Philippe Petain. Those laws were so discusting that even some of Petain’s allies (like Pierre Laval, not a nice guy) were against them. But yes they did exist and plenty of people supported them. I don’t deny that.

    Also remember that many french citizens helped jews and fought against the nazis. They showed tremendous courage. I wonder how many of those who sit in judgment of the french would have had the courage to stand up if they had been in a similar situation. It’s the easiest thing in the world for people to criticise from behind their computer. Just ask yourself: what would you have done?

    All I’m asking is for people to use some judgment before condemming an entire country. The reality is much more complicated than a bunch of stereotypes and preconceived ideas.

  • I’m not mad at you, not even a little, and I apologize if I come off that way. I just really don’t like the French. And obviously I don’t mean in terms of individuals, because then I’d have to be a complete moron. Still, countries do have a certain gestalt identity, and France’s is not a particularly admirable one, I think. Frankly, there’s no intellectual problem with stereotypes (indeed, they’re a necessity when discussing or even at base defining any discrete group of people), unless they fail the usual two tests. First, they should broadly true. Second, they should not be applied to individuals. I feel pretty comfortable with my contempt for France as an entity under those caveats.

    Your points are taken, but again, it seems to me you’re talking trees and I’m talking the forest. For every French citizen who worked to save Jews, there were several who cheerfully helped the Nazis or at best shrugged off their efforts. There are also the hypocrites who shaved the heads off French girls–and I use that term advisedly–who entered into romantic relationships with young German soldiers, while they themselves collaborated with the German authorities in a much more repugnant fashion. Let’s just say the French Resistance saw huge membership growth as soon as the war was over.

    Then there’re their actions since the war. In particular, their deal with Libyan and other terrorist groups to travel freely in France as long as they didn’t launch attacks against France itself. And the connected way the French wouldn’t let us fly over their country when we bombed Libya. Or the way they sat in confidential briefings about U.S. upcoming military and political actions against Saddam’s Iraq, only to then pass on that information directly on to Hussein’s regime. I mean, you know, that’s kind of disgusting, especially from a purported ally.

    I realize you’re just saying, be fair. I’m just saying, I am. Ungenerous, perhaps, but fair.

  • alex

    Ken, why do you refer to french people as loathsome? Have you ever been in France? I visited Paris, Chartres and Saint-Malo in 1990 and I found the people I met to be very nice and welcoming. All the french stereotypes about rudeness and arrogance was not what I encoutered there at all.

  • alex

    Sorry I posted my last comment aqbout stereotypes just as you responded.

    Look all I’m saying is that the whole ‘the french are cowards because they lost in 1940’ bit is getting old. As I previously explain the French army was badly equiped and had a ‘fifth column’ of traitors within the army and the government waiting for disaster to stage a coup. So the deck was stacked against them. Many other european countries also got quite a beating from the nazis but it’s always the french defeat that seem to obsess some people for reasons I don’t quite understand.

    I don’t want to start a political thread, I just wanted people to hear the other side of the argument.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Alex, I apologize if my joke about “Captain France” offended you. I know that French history is rife with both heroes and villains and I wasn’t trying to slur an entire nation or the history of said nation. France has made many, many contributions to western culture all of which I respect.

    I’m sure you are equally aware of similar jokes about American Republicans, conservatives, former president Bush being an ignorant cowboy, Christians of any stripe, etc, etc, blah blah blah. Bonk bonk on the head!

    I’ve seen many such jokes (or other) myself and one just has to learn to brush them off.

    Sometimes you just have to go with the prevailing narrative and just say “They’re always going to say these things.”

  • alex

    To Beckoningchasm,

    I’m glad to read your last comment. Look we’ve all been guilty of stereotyping people or nations. It’s easy to do. When I visited France in 1990 I was a 17 year old with every preconceived notion about french people you can think of. The people I met there made me realise that I had some thinking to do. It was a valuable experience.

    I also made many trips to the United States and found the people there very nice and fun to be with. I heard every stereotype about the ‘dumb vulgar cowboys’ and I find those just as offensive.

    I’ve been reading this website since it was Ken’s World of Awful Films (was that the name?) and over the years I read snide comments about french pople here and there. I guess yours was the last straw for me and I decided to write back. Nothing personal. I’m glad to see you understand what I was trying to say.

  • Alex, I honestly appreciate your comments, and I hope you always feel welcome here. I would never want that not to be so.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Alex, and Ken, and everyone else–

    There are countless jokes that are easy, and easy to grasp. Sometimes they are way too easy, and sometimes these things come back and bite us.

    What happens is that we learn from these things, and we take hold of the concepts proven to be true, and those that are simply easy.

    Alex, the concept of the “French surrendering at a moment’s notice” is not new with me. It’s something I learned as a joke when I was learning 20th century history. Of course, what I learned then was the “course d’jour” of what history was, and meant.

    Maybe I didn’t learn it as well as I should. History, as Napoleon famously said, is the lies agreed upon by the winners.

    Anyway, I apologize again.

    I still think Chris Evans isn’t quite right for Captain America, though, which is where all this got started.

  • Ericb

    The French were pretty tough in WW1, in fact the French got along much better with the US than the British did at that time (in general US and UK relations were rather cool and formal during the First World War, the whole”special ralationship” thing didn’t start until World War 2). 80% of the AEF served with and were trained by the French army. And though it’s realatively ancient history and may not matter much at this point but roughly half the army that beseiged the British at Yorktown was French and it was the French Navy that blockaded the town giving the French Navy one of its few victories against the British Navy.

  • The stereotype of the easily-defeated French is one of the most erroneous I know, and is based exclusively on their defeat in WW2 (plus possibly the Franco-Prussian War). The French lost the Napoleonic Wars, but no one thought they were wusses after seeing them bitch-slap the rest of Europe for 20 years. They lost in Vietnam too, but they’re not the only ones (to say the least).
    They lost surprisingly quickly in 1940, but this is because of amazing new German tactics – no military historian doubts that if it were not for the Royal Navy, Britain would have fallen just a fast as France, Poland, and Benelux – probably faster, given the inferior British equipment and numbers. Throughout the war, the British got pwned by smaller numbers of Germans, yet Britain has not gotten a rep for being puny. Even at their great victory of the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe fighter pilots actually won a majority of their dogfights with the British. (The British won because they also shot down a lot of lumbering, ill-armored bombers.)
    It’s not correct to label Petain as the villain behind the French defeat – I don’t think anyone in the French military wanted France to lose in 1940 – their years of military neglect was primarily the fault of their weak civil government – they had no less than 18 changes of government from 1930 to 1940! They only had two governments which lasted more than a single year, and one of them had 5 different guys in charge of it at different times. It’s no surprise the Third Republic was completely ineffective in both foreign policy as well as militarily – how could they possibly carry out any long-term plans?
    I like France, the two times I’ve visited. French people can be total pricks, but for some reason, I don’t mind, any more than I mind hostile New Yorkers. It’s not like the French are nice to each other, either. They just don’t give a damn. I have met plenty of pleasant French people whom I consider my friends.
    Certainly Vichy France was an evil place. Early on, renegade Vichy police rounded up Jews and delivered to the surprised Gestapo, who hadn’t dared ask for the round-up, fearful they might offend the infant Vichy government (they still had hopes of getting the French to fight alongside). France has a dark history of anti-semitism too – just look at the Dreyfus case. The only defense I can think of is that they were convinced the war was lost and opportunists, scavengers, and villains crawled out from under their rocks.

  • alex

    Sandy, Marhall Petain did head a conspiracy to overthrow the Third Republic. He had powerful allies in finance, government and the military who wanted to overthrow the Third Republic. French historian Henri Guillemin not only wrote about it but witnessed it first hand since he worked for the government at the time. He heard politicians and military officers before May 40 saying they were happy the Germans were invading and that after they took over they (Petain and the new government) would ‘clean up’ the undesirables. I don’t know how much Americans history books tell about the coup but this is well known in Europe.

    If you speak French you can go to the TSR (Television Suisse Romande) website and hear Guillemin tell the story himself and the evidence he presents is irreprochable. What happened in June 1940 was a coup d’Etat carefully prepared. And the people behind that coup were the same gang (and their sucessors) that went after Dreyfuss in the 1890s. They were fascists who wanted France to be a dictatorship. Petain was their main guy at the time because of the clout he had with the French people. If the coup had happened in another circumstance it could have been General Darlan or the guys who ran Les Croix De Feu. Bottom line is this was a movement that wanted to overthrow the Third Republic and were waiting for the perfect opportunity. They got it in June 1940.

  • Plissken79

    It is a gross oversimplification to suggest France’s defeat by Germany in 1940 solely to the actions of Marshal Petain, as Alex tries to do. Although Petain did play a significant role, as sandy correctly notes, the endless political instability of the French Third Republic and outdated military thinking on the part of the French General Staff play the greatest role. The Germans were also aided by the fact that, unlike during the First World War, they were not fighting a two front war, thanks to the treaty between the little mustache and the big mustache. France certainly would have lost the First World War in the first few months had the Germans not had to transfer thousands of soldiers to East Prussia to confront the Russian offensive at the end of August 1914.

    Following Napoleon’s final defeat, France emerged victorious in the Crimean War, was defeated in the Franco-Prussian War, barely emerged victorious at the end of WWI (only due to American help, Germany surely would have forced a peace favorable to Berlin in 1917 without American assistance), lost in WWII, lost in French-Indochina War, and lost in the French-Algerian War. In addition, without the American military and economic commitment to Western Europe after 1945, the Soviet Union would have certainly absorbed Western Europe just as they had Eastern Europe. All in all, not a military record to be proud of. Without the American and the British efforts in the 20th century, the French would speak German or Russian as their primary language

    Back to Captain America, I am not at all convinced Chris Evans is right for the part, unless Iron Man is leading the Avengers as opposed to Captain America. Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stakr following Chris Evans around, not likely!

  • Ericb

    “[France] barely emerged victorious at the end of WWI (only due to American help, Germany surely would have forced a peace favorable to Berlin in 1917 without American assistance)”

    Uh, the British helped a little bit too. The British became the dominant force on the Western Front from 1917 until the end of the war. The Americans would have become the dominant force if the war lasted beyond 1918 but as it turned out it was American military potential rather than actual American victories that convinced Germany to seek an armistice. In 1918 the American Army was still pretty green and made many of the same tactical mistakes that the French made in 1914-1914 and the British made in 1916.

  • Plissken79

    I was not leaving out the British in 1917 Eric, but with Germany having knocked Russia and Italy out of the war, and with Britain nearly bankrupt and France simply running out of manpower by the spring of 1917 (and with massive mutinies throughout the French Army that ran throughout the first six months of the year), only the American entry into the war kept the French and British going. Otherwise, they would have been forced to agree to a peace that would have left Germany in control of Alsace-Lorraine and with a free hand in Eastern Europe. Germany could defeat four great powers, but not five.

    France would have lost the First World War in its first few months without the assistance of Britain and Russia, and in the last year without the United States. Its military record since 1815 has largely been one of defeat. Even its victories (the Crimean War/WWI) were more due to its allies than their own efforts.

    Jon Hamm would have been a better choice, at least I would have bought him as a leader of superheroes. There is no law that Cap has to be in his late 20s Chris Evans is too young and will remind everyone of the Human Torch.

  • To clarify, my problem with France is that they are horrible ‘allies’ (and I mostly mean in the modern era, which I think is much more damning, although I do think France was broken in some major way after WWI). I’m sure it’s a pleasant place to visit, although I wouldn’t want to live there, and their way of life, especially the international political fecklessness and the domestic dependence on government and the tendency for violent striking whenever financial reality is threatened does, I admit, pretty much sum up exactly my fears of where our country may be going.

  • Dr. Whiggs

    Hey, c’mon, let’s all share some crepe-wrapped cheeseburgers and hug it out.

  • Plissken79

    Good point Ken, but the addiction of the French people to their government (“domestic dependence” as you referred to it) is a by-product of French history. Bourbons, Bonapartes, Republicans, Vichyites, Socialists, Gaullists, and French Communists have always been in agreement that France needs an extremely centralized government with enormous powers and few restraints.

    Having been to all three, I prefer Berlin and Moscow to Paris (but Munich and St. Petersburg over those)

  • Aussiesmurf

    I’m coming comparatively late to the discussion, but I’ve also been reading since the first days of Jabootu, and its clear that Ken’s politics are of a right-wing bent. Since it is a given that any decent writing carries part of the person’s personality, that is clear. Examples that I can give off the top of my head (and i do not list these as reasons for criticism) would include :

    (1) Ken’s assertion as an incontrovertible fact at the start of his On Deadly Ground review that the United State is ‘the greatest nation in the history of the earth’.

    (2) Ken’s digression during the Superman IV review about how Superman’s quest to rid the world of nuclear weapons was misguided, partly because it was nuclear weapons that enabled Israel to properly defend itself.

    (3) Ken’s criticism of the 60s generation during the prologue to his Harrad Experiment review.

    (4) Ken’s references to being ill whenever he saw the words ‘President’ and ‘Clinton’ in the one sentence.

    (5) Ken’s fulsome praise for the Reagan government during his Rocky IV review.

    And you know what? That’s completely fine. Its his web-page, his reviews, and we all have the privilege of reading for free his thoughts on movies. Sure, politically, there’s a lot of disagreement (and as a comparatively left-wing Australian, I’d disagree more than many), but that has never taken away from my great enjoyment in reading Ken’s reviews (and those of Doug Milroy, Lyz Kingsley and Jason MacIsaac).

    I can also say that I have travelled to Canada, the United States, Hong Kong, Indonesia, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and Italy. In every country, generally, people have responded in kind to courtesy and respect. And you know what? That’s what people do.

    I would have a great time arguing the point with Ken about supposed American exceptionalism. And when Ken starts a political web-page, I will. While its a movie page, I’ll just talk about movies.

  • “Captain America has always been a property and character fraught with peril in terms of bringing it to the big screen. And certainly Hollywood is going to be a lot more uncomfortable with a straightforwardly America-first, John Wayne-type patriotic hero than the actual ticket-buying American audience would be.”

    You seem to be thinking small potatoes here Ken; of course this sort of thing might go over in the states but how will the international audience take to it?
    Blam Walker ”

    Well I can only speak for Britain here, but if it a classic John Wayne from his WW11 movies it will go down well.

  • Again, I agree. I think foreign audiences are a lot more open (or at worst, indifferent) to pro-Americanism in American films than the studios think. Or would like, actually. Taken didn’t seem hurt by this sort of thing.

    And again, it’s not like I’m talking actual speeches about how great America is or anything, although certainly Captain America should stand tall for the Red, White and Blue. I’m just hoping they’ll be smart enough / in control of themselves enough to skip the now seemingly de rigueur shots at America. Iron Man seemed happily devoid of that sort of thing, though, so I am hopeful.

    Really, I just want to see Cap forthrightly kack a batch of frickin’ Nazis. That sort of thing should be nearly impossible to mess up. Let’s hope it is.