The Vocabulary of Bullets: The Punisher

Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle in The Punisher, on Netflix.

Country, I was a soldier to you.
I did what you asked me to.
It was wrong, and you knew.

Country, now I'm just a stranger to you.
A number, a name; it's true.
Throw me away when you're through.

– "I Wish It Was True" by The White Buffalo/Jake Smith

Now, that’s more like it. After two long years, we finally get a Marvel/Netflix series worthy of the promise demonstrated by the first season of Daredevil and the audacious Jessica Jones. (The last 18 months have given us an uneven sophomore season of Daredevil, the missteps at the end of the otherwise impressive Luke Cage, the terminally sluggish Iron Fist and the fun, action-packed, but ultimately forgettable Defenders team-up miniseries in August.) Frank Castle – a.k.a. The Punisher, played again by Jon Bernthal – was the best thing by far in Daredevil’s second season, and now he is back in The Punisher. If you (like me) lost faith in Netflix’s small urban corner of the MCU sometime during your viewing of Iron Fist (I abandoned the show in the middle of its 8th episode and have never looked back), this first season of The Punisher is likely to bring you back to the fold. Though bloodier by far than any other Netflix/Marvel outing, Punisher offers its most character-driven story since Jones, and its most relevant since Luke Cage.

Unsquare Dance: Baby Driver

Ansel Elgort, Jamie Foxx, Eiza González and Jon Hamm in Edgar Wright's Baby Driver.

Baby Driver sings. Its protagonist doesn’t (he’s tight-lipped, only speaking when it’s absolutely necessary), but the film hums and taps and grooves with such reckless energy that it spills out of the screen and washes over you. If Edgar Wright’s latest film – possibly his most pure and bombastic expression yet – doesn’t get your toes tapping and your heart racing, then I suspect that hot red human blood doesn’t run through your veins. Even the inhumanly criminal are still painfully, hilariously human in Baby Driver. It’s an absolute blast.

To Die For: 50/50 & The Walking Dead (Season Two)

Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 50/50.

The French existentialist philosopher and novelist Albert Camus once wrote that the real injustice of life is our recognition that everyone we know and love one day will die. It's what, he said, makes our life truly absurd. But you'd never know this from most of the movies made on the subject. The idea of death – its very final reality – might be the subject of many stories, yet rarely is its injustice (or absurdity) ever fully acknowledged. When Cary Grant and Irene Dunne lose their adopted child in George Stevens' popular 1941 melodrama Penny Serenade, for example, our sympathies don't concentrate on the dead infant but on the grieving parents instead. We're made to feel for their loss and pain, not the cruel and random taking of a child. It's as if the idea of death – a subject that gnawed hungrily at Camus in books like The Plague – was too terrifying to confront so movies concentrated instead on the moral struggles of the living.

Terms of Endearment

In pictures like Penny Serenade, the drama isn't worked out so that we come to terms with death, but instead with our trying to avoid it. Melodramas in particular always repress the notion of death, recognizing that our greatest fear of death, besides losing loved ones, is in our own terror of having not lived fully enough, of having perhaps pissed away valuable time that we can't get back. So this is why, especially when you add a recognizable disease like cancer to the mix, the stories resolve with the living having finally learned life's important lessons and then becoming better people. When you watch tear-jerkers like Love Story (1970), Brian's Song (1971), and especially, Terms of Endearment (1983), the survivors settle all rifts, resolve painful grievances, and improve their behaviour. These movies maybe even give us the impression that we can live forever, if we'd just improve our character. They make us feel edified, thanks to those who've died on our behalf, so that our own mortality gets comfortably buried with the bodies being grieved over. However in the recent dramatic comedy, 50/50, not only does death get stared directly in its face, but the picture also dares to laugh at it. Like Camus, 50/50 sees the absurdity in the subject. And it does so without cheapening or avoiding death's victories and temporary losses.

Glass Cannon: David Ayer’s Fury

Five men operate an M4 Sherman tank in the autumn of World War II, struggling to keep themselves and each other alive. Gordo (Michael Peña), Bible (Shia LaBoeuf), Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal) and their commander Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) lose their front gunner, and he is replaced by the squeaky-clean Norman (Logan Lerman), who must abandon his naïve sense of morality if he is to survive with the others. This is the setup for Fury, directed by David Ayer, which doesn’t do much of anything other than make a great deal of noise, but it does so with expertise and intensity.

The Best of CAL 2017

Critics at Large Summer Meeting, August 4/17 (l.to r. Kevin Courrier, Danny McMurray, Steve Vineberg, Devin McKinney, Justin Cummings, Bob Douglas and Mark Clamen)

Back in January 2010, David Churchill, Shlomo Schwartzberg and I came up with the idea of Critics At Large. We envisioned a daily online arts journal that would provide for us the freedom to write – a freedom we were beginning to lose working in magazines and newspapers. Growing rapidly tired of plying our trade in a field where desperate careerism was taking the place of collegiality and editors were beginning to reward expedience, we wanted to remain more true to the pleasures of critical writing. We also wanted to discover what kind of reader we could cultivate and who they might turn out to be. Over the last eight years, many things changed in both our writing and in our audience. For one thing, Critics At Large became less a haven for frustrated writers and more an accomodating home for a diverse and hopeful group who saw the magazine as a possibility. We began attracting a motley crew from various backgrounds who helped change Critics at Large for the better. A number of men and women, young and old, experienced and not, came to shape our identity rather than take on the one we already had. Along that path, we also attracted veteran arts critics who wanted to continue to address the work that inspired them, but we also drew inexperienced writers trying to find the true value of having a voice to speak with. When I read individual pieces each day, I marvel at the sheer range of material and the keen passion each writer brings to their subject. As for our readers, not only have they been rapidly growing, but the diversity of opinion in the magazine has helped us reach out to a much wider audience.What became most important for me, as one of its co-founders, was watching Critics At Large grow beyond my own expectations into a continually morphing organism that embraces the freedom our writers bring to it. For those who believe that arts criticism isn't about having the right opinion, but instead is a means by which the writer and reader mutually discover their own personal relationship to the arts, I think we are succeeding in getting there. As a way to celebrate that goal, and, I suppose, to amply demonstrate it, here is a look back at some of my own favourite pieces from 2017. They aren't presented in any order of preference. Rather than commenting on the writer and their work, I've selected specific quotes that I think best reflects their value to me as critics. As I continue on as editor, writer, and reader, I can truly say that I'm proud to call them colleagues.

Kevin Courrier
Editor-in-Chief
Critics At Large