The last post about my kids and Avengers: Infinity War

Looking back on my posts on this blog, I've actually only tagged Avengers: Infinity War three times, and only once within the past two years. Nevertheless, I feel like I've been going on and on about how I didn't want my kids to see it because I believe it contains one of the most mature incidents of violence in any MCU movie, and I wasn't ready to throw open the doors of the whole MCU to them. (That's the opening bit where ______ gets strangled to death.)

Well, doors officially thrown open.

Last night my older son (age 11) had a friend sleep over, and I didn't actually expect they'd be watching an MCU movie. My son has a bit of MCU fatigue, as we all do, though I took him to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness a few weeks ago and he really enjoyed that. Still, this was the friend who had previously recommended Monty Python and the Holy Grail to him, as written about here, so I imagined things wouldn't be so predictable. They've watched MCU before -- Thor: Ragnarok comes to mind -- but I figured we'd go off in some other unexpected direction this time, as we did last time.

But it's hard to get children to spontaneously conjure the titles of movies they want to see, and when we started to go through Disney+ to jog their memories, it turned out this friend also had not seen Infinity War -- even though he had seen Endgame. In my own mind I had come around to my son possibly seeing Infinity War, and it might have even been me who suggested it last night in order to get us out of a state of decision paralysis that could have theoretically lasted forever. (A luxury we especially could not afford with a movie that runs two hours and 34 minutes.)

Eleven still feels a bit young to me to be taking in some of these images, but he's taken in worse. In fact, a few weeks ago, he saw my favorite comic book movie since these final two Avengers movies, The Suicide Squad, with the other kids who were waiting for a gathering of my wife's friends to wrap up a leisurely dinner. That's a full-on R, with people getting ripped in half and their heads exploding, if I remember it correctly. If he could handle that with a shrug, he'd be fine on Infinity War.

And he was. In fact, when he emerged at about the halfway point to say that my laptop battery was about to die -- I'd forgotten to bring in my power cable when I set up the projector for them in the garage -- he said "This is a good movie." The emphasis was on the proper word, as in "This is a good movie" rather than "This is a good movie," which is a bit more circumspect. Hey, I agree.

In fact, if he even remembered that the strangulation of ________ was the thing that worried me -- though I don't remember if I'd ever hinted at why I didn't want him to watch the movie -- he probably blew right past it without thinking. Especially when he'd only recently seen a human-shark hybrid tear a man apart with his bear hands.

The other reason I dropped my opposition was that I realized it was futile. And now we're talking about my younger son.

We give both kids a lot of latitude when it comes to what they watch on YouTube, within reason. At least while my eight-year-old is watching things in the living room, we walk by regularly and can police anything he's watching that he shouldn't be watching. They're good kids and they don't usually push the boundaries of what they know we expect from them in terms of their behavior. 

Once we started showing them Marvel movies, Marvel-related content on YouTube seemed fair game. I mean, it's only logical, right? When we're casually monitoring the content of what they're watching, we're looking for the YouTubers to be dropping profanity -- which the ones they watch do not -- not concerning ourselves overly with the exact content of the discussion about superhero movies.

The other day, though, I realized that the eight-year-old was watching a YouTuber doing a deep dive into the climax of Avengers: Endgame. This didn't necessarily offend me on a content level, but on a spoilers level. Though to be fair, as they've watched Spider-Man: Far From Home, they've already had the biggest secrets of Endgame spoiled for them -- as discussed here. 

If my son was watching an analysis of exactly what happened at the end of the Avengers saga when I happened to be walking through the room, I can only imagine that he saw ________ being strangled to death sometime when I wasn't.

Whatever. If they want to ruin movies for themselves, they can. Not everyone has the same standards on that as I do, and as we all know, the events of these movies become playground lore pretty quickly.

And if they can handle images that I have determined to be too shocking for them, well, then that's great too.

I guess I'm out of reservations.

Swing open, door, to the cinematic content of the adult world. 

"Children, what do you know about Avengers: Endgame?"

My plan to watch the first two Marvel Spider-Man movies with my kids before taking them to No Way Home on Saturday -- thereby fitting in a crucial end-of-year screening while also getting credit for a family activity -- hit an unanticipated snag. 

All was going fine until mid-way through our first viewing, 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming, on Sunday afternoon. The kids were enjoying it, laughing in the right spots, providing the sort of commentary about the action that indicates full engagement.

Then I realized that our viewing of the Marvel movies out of sequence would finally have its first negative repercussions when we got to the next movie.

Spider-Man: Far From Home was the first movie released after Avengers: Endgame in 2019, the official beginning of the MCU's Phase Four. Where spoilers had never been a problem previously, they would immediately become so at this juncture. 

And though I'm sure you've seen Avengers: Endgame, now would be the correct time to issue a SPOILER ALERT.

Until now, the only things that could be "spoiled" from earlier Marvel movies were various plot-based twists and turns in the serpentine narrative, which is now 27 movies in length, and was already 21 at the time Endgame was released. Because these are superhero movies, the hero generally survives, leaving only weird references to Sokovia and the like as unexperienced events that could throw my kids for a loop, but only momentarily as they would just forget them and move on.

The death of Tony Stark, however, changed all that.

And while I heard my kids laughing and providing commentary, my mind raced ahead to how I was going to deal with the fact that they didn't know this had happened. It was like my worries of The Empire Strikes Back being prematurely spoiled all over again.

Watching the Avengers movies before Saturday was out of the question, even if I were inclined to do so. Even just watching Endgame was out of the question, as I would never dream of depriving someone of at least Infinity War as part one of the two-part story. I would also never dream of watching a three-hour movie with my kids, especially not this week. Then there's the fact that Infinity War contains what I consider the most shocking and potentially traumatizing moment in the entire MCU, the strangulation death of _____ by Thanos at the beginning. (I didn't give a spoiler warning for Infinity War, so I'll just leave out the name of that character.) It's that exact moment that caused me to wade into MCU viewings with my kids only very gingerly. It might be even more traumatizing considering that we only recently watched and quite enjoyed a show devoted entirely to this character. (Oops, so much for being vague.)

But I didn't want to abandon these viewings either. I need to get in Spider-Man: No Way Home on before I close off my 2021 rankings. With the hype it has received, not seeing it in time to rank it is just not an option. 

I thought of just skipping Spider-Man: Far From Home, which is like a non-stop Tony Stark memorial from start to finish. (Or from Stark to finish, you could say.) At least the kids would have one Tom Holland Spider-Man movie before seeing the newest one. But as I had already promised them both movies, I couldn't really renege now. Nor, as a proud film enthusiast and curator, did I consider it responsible to show them the third in a trilogy without showing them the second.

So I decided to put the issue to them and see what they wanted to do about it.

Tuesday afternoon I asked the older one, who is 11, the question you see in the title of this post. He was helping me put a shade cover on our new trampoline at the time.

"Something about Thanos gathering infinity stones to wipe out half the population."

"That's Avengers: Infinity War," I explained. "What do you know about Endgame?"

"Then nothing I guess," was the response.

The playground chatter that had given him the details of Thanos' master plan had not produced the end result from the second movie. I guess a bejeweled glove is more fascinating to the playground crowd than the death of Iron Man.

So I asked him what he thought of the fact that there would be spoilers from Endgame in the next Spider-Man movie. When he asked what kind of spoiler, I said it had to do with characters dying.

"No, I want to avoid that," he said.

Damn.

I punted for now and returned my focus to attaching the trampoline roof.

Because I had deemed Tuesday the best time to watch Far From Home before Saturday, and around 5:30 the best time to schedule the watch, I had to return to the topic later on, this time involving his brother.

I said we could either watch it and have the spoiler occur, or we could skip this movie and just go straight to third -- which a friend had told me did not include very much, if any, talk of Stark's death, if he remembered correctly.

The older one wanted to skip, the younger seemed horrified by that idea.

We settled on the compromise that I and my eight-year-old would watch Far From Home, and my 11-year-old would skip it. But almost immediately, he decided that if we were going to watch the movie he would just watch it as well.

As it turned out, I almost didn't need to worry.

One of the very first things that happens in the movie -- after the cold open featuring Michael Keaton's Vulture -- is a tribute on Peter Parker's high school news program to the fallen Avengers. Not just Stark, but also Captain America, Black Widow and Vision. I sat there their cringing at the enormity of the information being dumped on them. (After all, we'd watched Vision in Wandavision as well.)

You know what? Went right over their heads. 

Huh? 

Kids are funny sometimes.

I have to wonder if they didn't process it because they thought they knew how movies worked, and there was no way any of these characters could be dead. (Is Steve Rogers dead or is he just really, really old?) 

When I was able to exhale, I ventured a pause to make sure they understood what The Blip was and how it worked, how some characters were gone for five years and then came back.

"Don't spoil it!" the 11-year-old said. "Wait is that the spoiler?"

I hit play again without confirming or denying.

It went on this way, becoming more comical with each oblique reference to Tony's death. And by "oblique" I don't mean the references were indirect to any normal adult. My children apparently needed someone to say "Tony Stark is dead" for them to actually get that this happened.

Phrasing very close to that, which could not be mistaken for anything else, finally occurred during the "nightmare" that Mysterio creates for Spider-Man, one of several illusions Mysterio creates whose logistics are basically impossible to understand. At this point it took the eight-year-old to finally ask the question:

"Wait, did Tony Stark die?"

By way of confirmation, I put my hand on his back.

The revelation didn't derail anything. The laughter and the commentary continued. The kids loved the movie -- one or both of them called it their favorite of all time, which is something they say after basically every movie they see. (Most recently: Ghostbusters: Afterlife.) I myself liked the movie a lot better than I had the first time. I still find the Mysterio stuff kind of weak, but anything related to the high school students is gold, and I like Zendaya a lot more these days than I ever used to.

Some concern for Tony did finally arrive during the closing credits, at which point, the 11-year-old asked if Tony had come back to life yet in the ensuing Marvel movies. Maybe they get how these movies work after all.

"Not so far," I said, helpfully leaving the door open for his eventual resuscitation, if any emotional comfort was needed in that moment, if there had been any tainting of another recent first-time viewing -- the original Iron Man.

It doesn't seem that there was. They were screaming and bouncing on the trampoline a few minutes later.

"Not so far," my response to the prospect of Tony returning, was not a lie. I get how these movies work too. You telling me we're never going to see Iron Man in a movie again? Of course we are. He just won't be played by Robert Downey Jr. (Or maybe he even will be. Never rule anything out. The aforementioned Michael Keaton is playing Batman again, isn't he?)

So a tricky scenario tackled in the best way it could have been tackled: head on.

And at least now they'll have the context for all the ways I imagine their noodle is going to be fried in Spider-Man: No Way Home. I won't be able to pause this one to explain anything that's happening, including the Easter Eggs for the five live action Spider-Man movies that they haven't seen. 

My wife, who was expecting to be busy during that block of time, may actually join us for the viewing. She probably hasn't seen a Spider-Man movie since the Tobey Maguire original. Let's hope her adult brain can just go with it in the moment. 

Movies named like infinity stones, movies named like hurricanes

Unless something changes, Time will have been the last movie I watched in 2020. (I watched it last night, and thought the title itself was rather appropriate for the transition between years.)

Unless something changes, Soul will be the first movie I watch in 2021. (We're planning to watch it the night of January 1st for my son's birthday.)

Realizing this, I wondered, what other 2020 movies were named after the stones in Thanos' infinity gauntlet?

None as perfectly as that. However, there were films called Project Power and Color out of Space, so I think that's pretty good. Most years would probably not have films that had either of those bolded words in their titles. You probably almost never get a movie with the word "Reality" in its title, so that was never going to happen. "Mind" would have a chance, but there are only eight in the list of all the movies I've seen, so not a great one. (There's only one "Reality," that being Reality Bites of course.)

So I figure, the year after Thanos was finally dissolved from existence, his infinity stones were up for grabs?

While we're at it, I thought this was a good time to jam in another observation about 2020 films.

Have you noticed how many films released this year have had a woman's name as their title? Like, just the first name?

In other words, have you noticed how many films have been named like hurricanes?

I was planning to write this post when I finally see Shirley, which will be sometime before January 12th, but since my infinity stone observation was so brief, I decided just to piggyback on it with this one.

In addition to Shirley, we have the following this year, which either actually did come out, were scheduled to come out but were pushed back, or which (in one case) I saw at a (virtual) film festival.

In alphabetical order:

Annette
Becky
Clementine
Ema
Emma
Mulan
Rebecca
Wendy
Zola

And then there are two movies named after nicknames for female characters:

Babyteeth
Beanpole

And if you want to get into near misses -- or "missies," as the case may be -- you can consider also the following, which either consist of a woman's full name, or have a woman's name somewhere in the title:

Black Widow
Enola Holmes
The Glorias
Gretel & Hansel
Judy & Punch
Saint Frances
Selah and the Spades
Vitalina Varela
Wonder Woman 1984
The Wrong Missy

Incidentally, "Gloria" was the name of an actual powerful hurricane I experienced as a child. Hurricane Gloria whipped through New England in late September of 1985, according to Wikipedia, which also tells me it was the first significant tropical cyclone to hit the northeast of the United States since Hurricane Agnes in 1972. We all prepared for the worst and I can clearly remember the way it rained and the way the trees were blowing. We didn't evacuate and the only property damage we sustained was that a tree fell in our backyard, knocking down our "space trolley," which was kind of like the kiddie version of a zipline.

I guess I'd have to look at surrounding years to figure out if this is actually a significant number of movies named after female characters, but I can tell you that at one point, I looked down my Letterboxd Watchlist, and every other movie was one of these. 

Circumstantial evidence for the increased focus on women at the movies, maybe?

The year of endings

Given that 2019 is the last year of the 2010s, it seems only natural that we’d be thinking about endings.

What doesn’t necessarily follow, though, is that so many popular franchises would have been geared toward a natural 2019 endpoint in their own chronologies.

No popular cultural commodity can be packed away for good, so in many cases, what we’re talking about here is a pause in the action. But it’s a big pause with a big symbolic value, even if it ends up proving to be a short one.

That this should coincide with the end of a decade is, to be certain, a coincidence. It must be. No franchise starts with the idea of wrapping it up by a certain symbolic date, if only because most franchises can’t be sure they will endure long enough to get there. The point it starts is entirely a function of when its perceived viability has reached a critical threshold in order to make it into a film (or a TV show, as we shall see). The point it finishes, then, is usually a function of x number of consecutive production schedules until the entirety of the story has been told.

For whatever reason, that entirety really descended on us in 2019.

SOME SPOILERS, TREAD CAREFULLY

Let’s look at the examples:

Star Wars – This is the big one, as a story dating back 42 years, with many of the same actors, finally reached its conclusion in 2019. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is not, of course, the last Star Wars movie we will ever see. In fact, it’s almost certain that 20 years from now, we’ll already have as many more Star Wars movies as we’ve gotten in the last 42. But as the end of the Skywalker saga, or at least the end of the actual Skywalker bloodline, it’s a pretty big deal. Sure, Daisy Ridley may say now that she’s done with Star Wars, but I also read that she went and cried alone in her car after seeing the final cut. Emotionally, she’s susceptible to returning, and she adopted the name Skywalker after all. But there’s no doubt that for now, this is an ending, and it’s a big one.

Avengers – It’s hard to feel like a saga has come to an end when a new movie featuring some of the same characters comes out scarcely two months later. But there’s no arguing that Avengers: Endgame represented a real culmination of 11 years’ worth of movies that had preceded it, and that you definitively draw a line when you halve the total of six original Avengers in one fell swoop. Of course, in the perfect example of pop culture’s perennial self-rejuvenation, one of the deceased Avengers is actually getting her own movie just a couple short months from now, albeit a prequel (or so it would seem). Still, to measure just how much of an effect the MCU has had on us, many of us (myself included?) were sadder to see the end of this story than the end of Star Wars. And walking out of that theater back in April, it sure did feel like an ending.

Game of Thrones – Apologies if I switch to TV on a film blog, but GOT is one of the most cinematic TV shows we’ve ever gotten, and in the past decade, its cultural cachet came to rival the two mentioned above and the likes of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. That too came to an end in 2019, though I’m sure we’ll get The Further Adventures of Tyrion Lannister at some point in the next decade. The final season of Game of Thrones was heavily criticized in certain corners of the internet, as well as off it, as you didn’t have to be a geek to get involved in this epic of swords and dragons, breasts and beheadings. For me, the final season flashed moments of brilliance and moments of great disappointment, though more disappointment in the way our heroes can let us down than the way the writers botched the job of telling their story. And for me, it was another sentimental end to a saga I’d been living with for years.

Breaking Bad – While we're on TV ... Breaking Bad should have ended years ago, but since Vince Gilligan decided we needed a conclusion to the story of Jesse Pinkman, we got a movie that did that in 2019. Although the movie was received well in most circles (though not this circle), I suspect Gilligan won't decide he needs to wrap up any more characters, making this the final chapter in the story of these characters, in any case. Unless he gets the bad idea for Breaking Bad: Alaska, which, I hope not. 

Toy Story – So if Toy Story 3 wasn’t really the end, then Toy Story 4 surely is, isn’t it? Never say never, but for now, it does seem like Pixar is ready to move on from the story of Buzz, Woody, Bo Peep et al, delivering the final installment of their story in 2019. There’s nothing that states this has to be the end, except for the perceived catcalls of Pixar fans who thought a fourth movie was already a bridge too far. But at the very least, it’ll be hard to imagine how Woody will reunite with the legacy of Andy and his family friends, represented most distinctly by the gaggle of toys who do remain together at the end of this one.

X-Men – Not all conclusions had a sentimental quality to them. Given the general response of sheer exhaustion and disinterest by fans, they didn’t want to let the door hit X-Men on the ass on its way out. Dark Phoenix was always envisioned as the end point to this particular iteration of the X-Men franchise, but after the way the last two films were resoundingly rejected, it could be a stake to the heart of the franchise on the whole. If so, it’ll leave a bad taste.

It – Okay, so the first chapter of It was only two years ago. But this is definitely the last chapter, unless someone wants to pull some silly stunt like getting these actors together again in three decades, Before Sunrise style, to have them fight Pennywise as 70-year-olds. I include it here more for the way the poster added to the symbolic trend I’m exploring today. The tagline reads simply: “It ends.”

How to Train Your Dragon – Okay, I didn’t even see The Hidden World, which came out in early January in Australia (I was invited to a preview screening in 2018, as a matter of fact). I guess I tired of seeing these movies before they tired of making them. However, they have now tired of that, as producer Dean DeBlois confirmed they don’t intend to make any more. Right, and Sylvester Stallone didn’t intend to make any more Rocky movies after Rocky IV.

Rambo – Another one I didn’t see, but since the aforementioned Sylvester Stallone is now 73, it’s reasonable to believe the promise implicit in the title Last Blood. And since I didn’t see it, I have no idea if Last Blood puts a definitive ending to the story of John Rambo. But whether it does or not, this is actually a pretty big one, as the character has cinematic origins older than any other character on this list save Luke Skywalker.

And this is to say nothing of the franchises that may have practically ended due to poor box office, whether they intended to or not (Terminator, Charlie’s Angels), and the movies that felt like they were career summations based on the age of the director (The Irishman, Pain and Glory).

So yeah, it seems that 2019 was a year for us to look back on the past and kill it, to quote Rian Johnson’s version of Kylo Ren.

But 2020 is not only the start of a new year, it’s the start of a new decade. It seems likely that we’ll get more recycling of franchises that haven’t yet worn out their welcome. But don’t forget that when the last decade started, most of us hadn’t even heard of Game of Thrones or How to Train Your Dragon, and the MCU was in its comparative infancy at only two years old.

Ten years from now, we might be mourning the endings of things we haven’t yet imagined.

My strategy for tackling The Irishman

Martin Scorsese's latest isn't a film you watch. It's a film you tackle.

And it's not a quarterback or running back rushing over the line of scrimmage. Those guys can be lighter as they tend to be fleeter of foot. No, it's a defensive linesman rushing at your own quarterback, all 300 pounds of him, that you have to tackle.

If you haven't heard, The Irishman is three hours and 29 minutes long. That gets it over the Everest-like 200 minute mark, at 209 minutes.

I hadn't heard, at least not until this week when I actually looked into it. I mean, I figured it would be over two hours, as nearly every Scorsese movie is, even those that shouldn't be (like Hugo).

But three hours and 29 minutes? That's longer than damn Seven Samurai.

If I'd seen it in the theater, as I'd dabbled with doing, I surely would have discovered the running time before sitting down. It's rare that I don't check out the running time in that scenario, if only so I can be sure how many snacks or drinks I need to bring to stimulate me in an environment where I can't pause.

Well, I can pause at home, now that the movie is on Netflix, but pausing only makes the problem more difficult.

And that problem is: How to get through this movie in one night?

You can always split up the viewing of a movie, if you have to. When I finally watched Ben-Hur a number of years back, which bests The Irishman by only three minutes, I watched it over four nights -- a premeditated choice. I could certainly have done it in two, but I decided to make it like a miniseries, a week-long event.

But I don't think that's a good approach for The Irishman, mostly because a friend who saw it in the theater told me it isn't. When I asked him if I should "try very hard to watch it in one sitting," he responded, "Yep. It's a Scorsese flick."

Nuff said.

Now, the math is not impossible to watch it one night. You start at eight, you finish before midnight, or realistically, around midnight, as you're going to have to pause it a couple times for one reason or another. And there are certainly plenty of nights when the combination of things I watch totals more than three hours and 29 minutes.

But having natural break points, and continuing only because you've decided you have the stamina to do so, factors into being able to consume that much content in one evening. You can plan a double feature and then bail on the second movie if you're too tired. But if you've started a movie you've decided you must watch all in one sitting, you're pot committed, and the knowledge of the number of minutes you have remaining weighs on you like the rocks piled on the back of an accused witch. (Random reference. I will leave it in.) It also weighs on your eyelids.

So, afternoon?

That's the best strategy I can think of, though it's not something I can accomplish without outside help. I can only watch a movie in the afternoon on a weekend, and I can only watch a weekend afternoon movie if my kids are otherwise occupied. That scenario does arise when they go for a sleepover at my sister-in-law's house. That would also potentially allow my wife to watch it with me, as she's said she wants to.

But I've done the math there as well, and there are just not enough weekends, or not the right weekends, before my ranking deadline to accomplish this. The next two after this one have conflicts that would prevent that kind of thing, and then the following weekend leads right into Christmas, when we are seeing her as well as my kids' grandmother in Tasmania. It's possible some weekend after that could work out, but that's leaving it too late. And besides, all this hinges on my sister-in-law actually getting the idea to invite them over. That's not something we ever suggest on our own, because come on, they're a real handful.

There's one golden opportunity that sits out there, but I don't know about the practicalities of it, and I don't know again if I want to wait that long to watch The Irishman.

Although my wife and kids are flying to Tasmania for Christmas, I am not. I am doing something I've wanted to do for quite some time, though some people think it's a horrible experience. I am taking a ferry with our car. It's a trip that takes like ten hours. I guess if you're not good at sea, it could be miserable, but I'm pretty good at sea. I may be overly romanticizing it, but to me it's a bit like taking an overnight train somewhere -- a fun adventure that is increasingly old-fashioned and difficult to experience in our modern age.

The ferry ride there will be overnight, starting at 10:30. I'll surely watch something on that trip, but I'll want it to be no longer than 90 minutes and probably over by 1 a.m. so I can try to get some sleep.

The ferry ride back is when my opportunity could arise. I leave in the morning on that trip and ride for the better part of the day. An easy opportunity to see a 209-minute movie, right?

Yes and no. For one, it'll mean having to watch it on my laptop screen. If I missed this in the theater, the least I'll want to do is it see it on my smart TV.

Then there's the issue of whether the boat has WiFi, and if it doesn't, whether I can download it or not. On a device where I can get Netflix as an app, like my phone, the answer is yes. On my laptop, I believe the answer is still no. And if I don't want to watch it on my laptop, I certainly don't want to watch it on my phone.

So I guess the answer is, I still don't have a strategy for tackling The Irishman, one that I'm sure will serve the movie the best. I think I will have to take a wait and see approach. Who knows, maybe I will have to stay home sick from work at some point in the next couple weeks. Which, again, is not an ideal viewing scenario.

The good news is, I have already seen one three-hour movie in 2019 and it was a breeze.

When I watched Avengers: Endgame, it went by much more quickly than its 181 minutes. Which is a reminder that the content of a movie plays a role in how easy it is to sit through it. If it's action-packed and breezes along like an Avengers movie -- and I recognize the irony of comparing Martin Scorsese to the MCU given his comments on it -- then The Irishman may overcome my concerns and be easily digestible in a single night, even if I don't start it at 8 p.m. If it involves a lot of extended talking scenes like the other recent behemoth I thought of in this context -- Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 196-minute Winter Sleep -- then it's going to defeat me. (For the record, I stayed awake during my theatrical viewing of Winter Sleep, to the best of my knowledge, but I was in a kind of fugue state that made it difficult to distinguish sleeping from waking.) Even if it is like that, at least The Irishman will be in English.

Watch this space.

The finite lifespan of spoiler bans

No spoilers for Endgame in this post.

Joe and Anthony Russo have announced that the spoiler ban on Avengers: Endgame ends on Monday.

Um, what?

I still give spoiler alerts before I talk about the details of The Crying Game, to the extent that I ever do that. The point is, you should always avoid giving away spoilers to movies people haven't yet seen.

Their argument is that part of the reason to make a movie is to promote conversation, and apparently, they think that the extent people can discuss Avengers: Endgame has been inhibited by their own request not to spoil it.

But shouldn't a request not to spoil a movie be implicit? I understand why they felt they needed to plant that awareness in people's consciousness for this movie, and maybe, that gives them an implied responsibility to revoke that ban at a certain point.

But now that the Russos have given people "permission" to spoil what happens in this movie, it seems like people will double down on it and indulge their natural instinct to gossip. People love to be bearers of news -- good, bad, juicy, whatever. Now a bunch of idiots will surely go and spill all the beans on as many platforms as they are able.

Should you really have your enjoyment of Avengers: Endgame ruined by the fact that you haven't been able to see it in its first two weekends? What if you're off the grid for two weeks? What if you're recuperating at home from breaking both your legs and can't get out to the theater, leaving social media as one of your few comforts? A comfort that will be absolutely spoiled by Endgame talk come Monday?

The cynical view is that the Russos are trying to goose attendance in the second weekend so that Endgame is even more of a record-breaking juggernaut than it already is. But Endgame doesn't need that help.

I know plenty of people who like a good Marvel movie but hate crowds. It would be eminently reasonable for them to wait until the third weekend to see Endgame. Now they won't have the chance. And I think that's pretty tough.

I suppose the reverse argument is that there are, indeed, elements of certain movies that enter the zeitgeist, that become so widely known that you become disinclined to worry about spoiling them. For example, I no longer give spoiler warnings about Star Wars: The Force Awakens. If you don't know that [REDACTED] died in that movie, well, you aren't living in modern society.

But that was nearly four years ago, and this isn't even four weeks ago. Sure, pretty soon everyone will know that [SOMETHING SOMETHING SOMETHING], but I don't think Monday is a fair expectation for that to occur.

Human beings are dumb enough and inconsiderate enough to do plenty of spoiling without being specifically invited to do so. The Russos should have just let it occur naturally and kept their mouths shut.

The eternal life of the superhero

WARNING!

WARNING!

WARNING!

The following post contains the majorest possible spoilers about Avengers: Endgame!

(Though if you would like to read my spoiler-free review, click here.)

Two nights after my viewing of Avengers: Endgame, I was playing a game of Marvel Trouble with my five-year-old. You have to take those two words separately to understand what they mean in conjunction. "Trouble" is that old game that has the bubble in the middle of the board, which you press to roll a pair of dice (a handy way not to lose said dice). And "Marvel" means it's a version of Trouble -- a game that's a lot like Sorry, it turns out -- featuring the beloved characters of Marvel comics.

There are four different characters you can play, each of whom has four little identical game pieces. There's Iron Man, whose pieces are colored yellow. There's Thor, whose pieces are colored red. Those color assignments are not particularly obvious so I sometimes confuse those pieces for one another. The color assignments get more obvious from there as Hulk is green and Black Widow is black.

As we were setting up the board, I thought the following:

"Wow, half of these characters are now dead."

It was a sobering thought. It occurred to me how unusual it was that you could think of epic, timeless characters, who have graced the comics for many decades, as deceased. Most people have not yet seen Avengers: Endgame and my five-year-old probably won't see it for five years. But soon, most people -- probably including my five-year-old even before he sees the movie -- will know that Iron Man and Black Widow are no longer alive.

Of course, various comic threads over the years have killed off most if not all of these characters. I'm not sure how many times the world's two most famous superheroes, Batman and Superman, have been dead. There's even a whole series of comic books called The Death of Superman.

Yet not until it is done in a movie do we really think of these characters as actually dead. And even then we have to really believe it. Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice "killed" Superman, but we believed that one even less than we believed that Spider-Man and Black Panther might permanently be dust.

Even in last year's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where the actual Peter Parker is supposed to have actually died, we don't tend to think of that as canon. How can we, when another Spider-Man movie is coming out this year?

Yet the MCU has a definitive finality to it. It is the canon of all canons. And once something happens in an MCU movie, it has an authority that exceeds all of the multiplicity of possible rabbit holes comic books can go down. It is the final It.

And so when my son played Iron Man -- his favorite character -- in Trouble, he was playing with a ghost.

Me, I was feeling less morbid and played the Hulk. I love what they did with the Hulk in Endgame (and with Thor, for that matter).

I usually play Black Widow. It's in part to teach my children, by example, that female superheroes are just as cool as male ones. But this time, I just couldn't bring myself to grab those pieces. I figured at least one of us should be playing someone who isn't a ghost. (Plus, the board was more conveniently oriented for me to play Hulk without having to reach across the board.)

I expected the death of Tony Stark in this movie, because nothing has been better publicized than how Robert Downey Jr. wanted to be done making Marvel movies. Well, maybe that Chris Evans wanted to be done making Marvel movies. Captain America's not dead, but let's just say that the only adventures he'll still be going on are getting a second jello at the old folks home. (And lest you wonder where Captain America is in this version of Trouble, he's a special piece you can get on your team if you role the one side of the second die that has a shield on it. When he's on your team, none of your players can be sent back to the start.)

But I did not expect the death of Natasha Romanoff. That's in part because there is a Black Widow movie in the works, which I now understand must be a prequel. But at the time she gave her life for the soul stone, I figured it was not a permanent loss. And at the end, when Steve Rogers makes his improbable trip back to return all the stones (how does he know how to fly a space ship??), I predicted that instead of seeing him re-materialize five seconds later, we'd see her. Somehow when Steve went to return the soul stone, he'd have made an exchange of his life for hers. When I saw what they actually chose to do, that should have been a more obvious prediction. But my prediction revolved around Black Widow because I just couldn't reconcile that she was actually dead.

My feelings of loss over Black Widow probably have more to do with my feelings of affection for Scarlett Johansson than for the character. Black Widow has never been a greatly written character, in part because she has never truly been able to assert her individuality. She does, however, have a great scene in the first hour of Endgame, in which Johansson almost does some indie movie style acting in expressing her ragged, no-sleep-for-five-years frustration over her helplessness to undo what's been done. That was one of the film's most singular moments ... and now I understand why they made sure they got it in. It would be our last chance to really connect with Natasha Romanoff.

What has since occurred to me, though, is that Iron Man and Black Widow are not really dead.

Oh, they're dead within the MCU. Sure. They're not going to make surprise appearances in Black Panther 2.

But what I mean is, superheroes never really die. The Black Widow movie is confirmation of that. Not only will we see Black Widow again soon, we'll see Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow. She didn't even die because Johansson wanted to stop making movies. She just died because that's what the narrative dictated.

And not only will she live again in the Black Widow movie, she'll live again in an Avengers reboot 15 years from now. And 15 years after that. And 15 years after that.

What makes epic characters epic characters is that we will continue to tell their stories. Maybe we'll pick up earlier in their lives. Maybe we'll pick up in an alternate timeline. Or maybe we'll just scrap what has come before and tell it all again.

So just because a character has died in a movie doesn't mean we're likely to think of them as dead. Kids can still engage in Star Wars-related play acting without having it cross their mind that the characters they're playing -- Han Solo and Luke Skywalker -- are no longer among the living. Heck, Han Solo was most recently experienced by them as alive, in last year's Solo: A Star Wars Story.

If we're being honest, they were never among the living anyway. On some level kids know these are characters, characters who have been explored multiple times in multiple incarnations. That gives them a kind of eternal vigor we can never dampen.

Long live Black Widow and Iron Man.

First to the finish line

I’m going to a critics screening of Avengers: Endgame tonight. On the world’s third largest IMAX screen, or so it claims.

Jealous?

It’s a measure of how far the MCU has come with me in recent years that I am anticipating this with nearly the same fervor as I would a new Star Wars movie. I don’t think I would have gone to a midnight screening – especially not when the movie is three hours long – but it feels as momentous an occasion in many ways.

For one, the previous film left off with one of the great cliffhangers in modern movie history, even if the stakes were made to seem greater then we knew them to actually be. Even if you know that much of the loss from the previous film will be reversed, you don’t know how, and you don’t know what new loss may replace it.

And that’s really the key thing here. You could accuse Marvel of takesies-backsies when it inevitably revives Spider-Man, Black Panther et al from the dead, but it absolutely will replace some of those dead with heroes who can’t be revived. At least one of arguably the two most central figures in the MCU will croak in this film, and they ain’t coming back, so the film carries with it the same kind of foreboding as if you went into a Star Wars movie knowing for sure that either Luke Skywalker or Han Solo would die.

Now, Captain America is not Luke Skywalker and Iron Man is not Han Solo (though that would certainly be the correct way to align the characters according to their personalities and traits). Let’s not get carried away here. But I do find the most recent chapter in Steve and Tony’s very long saga to be more satisfying than the most recent chapter of Han and Luke’s very long saga, preferring Avengers: Infinity War to Star Wars: The Last Jedi. For which Han Solo wasn’t around anyway, which may be one of the reasons it was not as good as its predecessor.

So tonight is a pretty big night, and not just because the screen is big and the running time is big. It’s genuinely a big moment in the history of modern film mythology. You could argue whether superheroes should lay claim to such a moment, but the fact is, they do. Kevin Feige and company have spent well over a decade ensuring there would be full audience investment in this moment, and they’ve earned their moment in the sun.

Will it be a satisfying ending to this phase of the MCU?

I’ll be among the first to know … but I’ll heed #Don’tSpoilTheEndgame and keep my mouth shut until sometime next week.

The fear of three hours

I've heard a lot of hand wringing in the past few days about the fact that Avengers: Endgame is likely to clock in at three hours. ("Likely" because it's possible Joe and Anthony Russo are still tweaking it.)

Not just among snarky people on the internet, who use the announced length of this movie as further fuel for their arguments about the bloat of the MCU in general. But also among industry prognosticators who suspect the studio must be worried about audiences' capacity to sit through a movie of this length without an intermission.

Give us some credit.

The three-hour movie is nothing new, and I would argue that we are more conditioned than ever to watch it.

It's true that a mainstream movie of this length has not come out in a while. But they used to be par for the course. The Lord of the Rings movies are a prime example, and though their length was legendary, I don't remember the studio worrying too much about that. When I finally saw The Green Mile last year, which is pretty much three hours on the dot, I marveled at the fact that I don't even remember the film's length being a subject of discussion back in 1999.

There seemed to be more variability in the length of movies back then too. Ninety-minute movies were far more common then than now as well.

But that's what might make us better conditioned for a three-hour Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Fans aren't really expecting a 90-minute experience at the movies, as even comedies frequently approach or even breach the two-hour mark thanks to people like Judd Apatow. And no blockbuster movie of any kind is under two hours and 20 minutes. What's an extra 40 minutes on top of that?

Sure, it will be useful to go to the toilet before the movie starts. But you can say that about any movie.

As for the prospect of bloat, Avengers: Endgame seems like as good a candidate to be three hours as any movie in history. You can quibble with 11 years' worth of narrative choices that got us to this point, but now that we're here, I don't think it would be fair to say that this movie will be three hours because the Russos couldn't kill their darlings. It will be three hours because the movie has 47 main characters, half of whom, granted, are "dead."

If all the ticket sales for Marvel movies are any indication, no fan who sees Avengers: Endgame is going to be grousing about too much movie. They'd probably watch a four-hour Avengers: Endgame if you gave it to them.

And if you're one of those snarky internet types, or a critic who resents having had to watch these last 22 movies, then I guess you aren't really a "fan," are you?

Look, I can be that snarky guy too. And I certainly haven't been on board with the MCU for its entire history. There were some really fallow years in there.

But I'm on board now.

A three-hour Avengers: Endgame?

I'll lap up every minute of it.