Emily Armstrong (MidnightMadwoman)

Know what? I bet that Spike Lee would make a really brilliant zombie movie. He really excels at crafting stories about groups of characters caught in circumstances that bring out the worst in everyone. This movie reminds me a lot of Do The Right Thing, but it's made twelve years after and set ten years before. I was surprised (though perhaps I shouldn't have been) that this movie spent so little time with David Berkowitz himself and so much more with all the characters made paranoid and hostile to each other in the wake of his insane and random murders. The Son of Sam murders have fostered an atmosphere of suspicion that leads former friends and people who've grown up together to mistrust each other, form vicious little in-groups and turn on other people to make themselves feel more secure. Not unlike in The Walking Dead. These characters seem really three-dimensional and real to me, and everyone's motivations, while sometimes despicable, are at the very least understandable. I really like the way Ruby and Ritchie get into the burgeoning CBGB's punk scene and come together, and I really liked Vinny and Dionna as the profoundly unhappily married couple trying to repair their strained relationship. Are they even compatible? I love this movie. It's so human and so big, and Spike Lee tells the story with a real sense of flair and zeitgeist.

I didn't have very high hopes for this film, but I found it very enjoyable. There is nothing, specifically wrong with it. I can't say that I was a big fan of Red Skull as the villain, but Hugo Weaving did a pretty good job with what he had. I probably wouldn't have liked this as much if anyone other than Chris Evans had been cast as the hero; he crafts a sincere and wide-eyed, almost naive Captain America that I'm now quite looking forward to seeing play off the other, more cynical and hardened Marvel heroes in the upcoming Avengers film. It's quite novel to see a modern superhero movie, complete with contemporary film and editing techniques and slick digital animation, be set in the forties. As for the story, it was fine, I guess. It hit all the narrative points and as an action movie, it was as good as any other. Not my favorite Marvel movie, but again, there's nothing wrong with it. It's funny and action-packed and has a hero you can root for. Could you ask anything more from a popcorn blockbuster?