Thursday, May 24, 2012

The Avengers by Joss Whedon

It's been a while since my last blog post on a movie (posted on Inception in July 2010 and sort of posted on The Social Network in October of that year), but saw The Avengers last night and enjoyed it quite a bit.

The film was written and directed by Joss Whedon and while I haven't seen much of his prior work, he's got quite the following and I was interested to see The Avengers after reading recent pieces on him like "The Hero Whisperer" by Lev Grossman for Time Magazine.

The movie was entertaining and whipped through it's 2:20 run time and while the effects were good and all, the story was what struck me. I don't know modern movie-making well enough to know the directing process of a CGI-heavy movie like The Avengers, but the way Whedon's script had such rich mythology and character development as well as brought together the characters was impressive.

I'd be interested to read the movie script sometime and while watching the film, remembered a short July 2010 Esquire piece on Jon Favreau (who executive produced The Avengers). Quote that stood out from him was "I had a writing teacher who said, 'if you want to learn to write a screenplay, read "The African Queen" twice'."