Matthew Fox:
Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome back to the Marvel Movie Minute, a weekly podcast which we assemble to explore the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe five minutes at a time, and there is no AI to help us. In this, our ninth season, we are looking at Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I’m Matthew Fox.
Pete Wright:
And I’m Pete Wright.
Rob Kubasko:
Hello, I am Rob Kubasko.
Matthew Fox:
Pete is gonna find a way for me and Rob to watch the Terminator movies sometime soon, because I think we might need a refresher course. But today we’re talking about Winter Soldier.
Rob Kubasko:
I’m fine, everything is fine, everything is fine.
Pete Wright:
Oh, yeah.
Matthew Fox:
I wasn’t gonna say anything, but then we had the AI voice. Anyway, we’re talking today about minutes 71 through 75, which begins with Black Widow breaking a million hearts when she says she thought she was going straight, which doesn’t mean what we hoped for. And it ends with Cap acknowledging that Black Widow has better style, but still doesn’t mean what we hoped for. Folks, there’s a lot we can jump into. I just want to start with this Rogers and Natasha heart to heart. Was there anything you guys want to jump in with first?
Pete Wright:
Oh, let’s heart to heart. I mean, I don’t have anything beyond heart to heart that I want to talk about.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I’m in prime heart to heart mode.
Matthew Fox:
Right. So what do we think of this wonderful little moment that we get with Natasha and Steve?
Pete Wright:
I like so much about it. I like the way it’s blocked. I like the way he’s sitting lower than her eye line, and it allows her to be so deeply vulnerable and not shed a tear and not cut. It’s really lovely. It’s Scarlett Johansson getting to act.
Rob Kubasko:
And I also think, for the both of them, it continues that theme of, it’s not sexual tension, but it’s what-could-have-been tension. Like, there is that little bit of dynamic of, I’m not good enough for you, but I wish you were, but actually I am, and here we are.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.
Rob Kubasko:
So.
Pete Wright:
If only you’d been around, you know, 80 years ago, kind of a thing.
Matthew Fox:
For me, what I really love about this is that it’s easy to tell a story like this where one of them is the good character and has to kind of morally redeem the other one, or morally corrupt the other one, you know, get them to not be so naive or whatever it is. And I think they’re doing a really good job of having it go both ways, because we’ve already had some moments of Steve being naive and being kind of dumb and Natasha having to show him, hey, this is where you’re off. And now it’s flipped over. And I think the fact that they use that line where she says, I thought I knew whose lies I was telling, but I guess I can’t tell anymore, and he says, maybe you’re in the wrong business, which is the exact same line that she used when he was being very naive. It’s the kind of thing that feels like it should be trite, because it’s like twenty minutes since we used the last line, but it works so well.
Pete Wright:
It works so well, and then, within this same minute, we have the reciprocal corrupting force of him, you know, it’s not really my style. And then letting Natasha be the evildoer on the rooftop. I think what we’ve seen over the last fifteen minutes of the show is a really lovely little tapestry of the dance of their emotional relationship and their professional relationship. And I mean, I appreciated it before, but watching it while slowing down, I don’t think I recognized just how well Scarlett and Chris approach this as performers, because these beats really play.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
They really, really work. And we’re about to end this kind of sweet fifteen-minute run with them and get into something completely different. This is a nice little island right in the middle of the movie.
Rob Kubasko:
And I would say, another 90s movie reference, in regards to Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer: Russia House.
Pete Wright:
Russia House. Great, great call.
Matthew Fox:
Oh yeah, good call. Good call. Although I would push back a bit on the idea that there’s a romantic kind of, you know, tension here, because to me the kind of relationship this is echoing, and I think this is really intentional, is the kind that Steve had with Bucky, and the kind that…
Pete Wright:
Oh, that was romantic though, right? Like, the headcanon is that was a romantic relationship, right?
Matthew Fox:
I mean, we want it to be, but yeah, you know.
Pete Wright:
Okay, good.
Matthew Fox:
But also the kind that Falcon clearly had with this guy Riley.
Pete Wright:
I just want to make sure that’s locked.
Matthew Fox:
Like, it’s the…
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
The show has really touched on the thing of, I made the gay joke at the start, you know, we don’t have to keep going back to it, but I’m with you on all of them. Still, my point being that the show has done a lot to talk about the…
Rob Kubasko:
It’s okay, it’s okay.
Matthew Fox:
…special bond about people who fight together, people who face danger together and who do these missions together. And to me, more than anything else, that’s what Steve and Natasha are having here.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s true. And I think that in fact is what builds the trio, because they step into Sam’s kitchen, ’cause Sam cooks, and we end up with a threeway relationship of people who exist together.
Matthew Fox:
I get that now, but yeah, okay.
Pete Wright:
…because of their mutual appreciation of the complexities of their jobs. And that, I think, was set up really perfectly in this movie, because everyone gets that arc. Even Sam gets that arc, even though he’s not in the movie very much, although, to a point, he’s been in the movie more than the Winter Soldier has. We do get that arc of him experiencing the recovering-soldier gestalt, and it plays very, very well. So now that we get their meeting in the kitchen, I think we end up with a perfectly resonant 70s-thriller union that allows us to put away the sentimentality and move straight into the why-are-we-all-scared-again, let’s-get-moving.
Matthew Fox:
Well, and I just have one question about that, because before we even jump into the Sam part, Natasha asks Steve, does he think that she would have saved him? You know, he did kind of a selfless act. He didn’t just save himself, he saved her as well. And so she’s kind of wondering, do you think that I would have done the same thing for you? And he says, I do now.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I do now, and I’m always honest.
Matthew Fox:
I have some questions about that part, but first just on that first thing. Do you think that he means, because I think I can read it two ways. One is, I didn’t know you well enough, but now I know that you would have saved me. Or does he mean, I don’t think you would have before, but now we’ve gone through this together, now I think you’re the kind of person who would save me. Is it Steve’s opinion that’s changed, or is it Steve recognizing that Natasha has changed?
Pete Wright:
I don’t know the answer to that, and I think maybe both of them. Maybe that’s why the question is bigger than it sounds, because in fact they have both changed, and that’s a really tidy observation in just two lines of dialogue to demonstrate that.
Rob Kubasko:
Well, also made apparent, I was just gonna add, also made apparent that she doesn’t like those feelings, because then she kills it with the next line.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
That’s right. That’s right.
Rob Kubasko:
She does not like that.
Matthew Fox:
I think her next line there is the one about, how do you feel knowing that you live for nothing?
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah, you seem pretty chipper for someone who found out they died for nothing.
Rob Kubasko:
What the heck?
Pete Wright:
Yeah, that’s nice.
Matthew Fox:
I would say saving the earth from the Chitauri counts as something.
Rob Kubasko:
Yes.
Matthew Fox:
There’ve been a few little things that have happened since the capsule melted until now, Natasha.
Pete Wright:
Truth.
Matthew Fox:
You were there. But I think, Rob, you’re totally right. The whole point there is, she doesn’t mean it. She’s emotionally deflecting because she’s being vulnerable in a way that she never, ever wants to.
Rob Kubasko:
Right. Yes.
Pete Wright:
Now, can we move on to breakfast?
Matthew Fox:
Yes, yes. If you people eat that kind of thing.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, so Sam brings people in, and I think this may be my favorite bit in this movie, just from a filmmaking perspective, because it’s one of the most beautiful and, I think, trusting sets of minutes from a screenwriting perspective. We have them all in the kitchen and we need to learn some things. We need to learn that Sam is who he is, and we’re gonna force the audience to just keep up. We’re gonna drop the Riley bit. We’re gonna drop these little nods, the Bakhmala and the Khalid Khandil mission, and all of those things are things we don’t know about. We haven’t seen them.
Matthew Fox:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And we’re gonna say, this is Riley. And Riley was the guy that may have been mentioned, that we as an audience may not remember from an hour ago, but we’re just gonna trust you to pick up what we put down here. And then, what’d you use, a stealth chute? No, these. They don’t even show us these. And then he says, where do we get one of these?
Matthew Fox:
Well, you’re also forgetting the, I thought you were a pilot. I never said I was a pilot.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right. Right. And then, well, first of all, dude, Captain America needs my help, there’s no better reason to get back in, is the mission statement at the top of the brief of this movie. That, really, is Sam’s entire motivating life goal for the rest of his time so far in Marvel: dude, Captain America needs my help, there’s no better reason to get back in. That is outstanding. And then he says, well, there’s one at Fort Meade behind three guarded gates and a twelve-inch steel wall. Shouldn’t be a problem, says Steve Rogers. And then they don’t show us the scene.
Matthew Fox:
I want to talk about that, but I need to pull you back just ten seconds, because to me there’s an additional relevance to that line of Sam being so excited that Captain America needs his help. Because it’s the thing that goes against and helps to buttress all of the cynicism. Because, as we were talking about before, these three are bonding about the fact that they all want to do good, and all have had failures about that, and all have had problems with that. They have PTSD that they’re coming back with, they lost partners, they did things that they thought were for the right people, and now they’re questioning. And to me, that line being part of this same scene of, yes, I don’t know if I believe in the agency that I thought I was working for, I don’t know if I believe in, I thought I was going straight, but I’m not, what am I doing? But Captain America needs me. It’s saying, we’re gonna tear down a lot of other stuff, but don’t worry, we’re still gonna give you something to hang on to.
Pete Wright:
To stand for, right?
Matthew Fox:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
And they do it all without a single line of “as you know” explaining to the audience what is going on, because I guess at this point we weren’t looking at our phones when this movie came out, so they could just give us a movie. And I think it’s really artfully, artfully crafted. And you wanted to talk about the fact that they don’t show us the heist of the wings.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah, what’d you guys think of that?
Pete Wright:
For me it’s an absolute win.
Rob Kubasko:
Oh, well, first of all, it saves money. Let’s put that aside.
Pete Wright:
Okay, no Doylist interpretation.
Rob Kubasko:
Because the reveal is so great. Well, I mean, it saves money, come on.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.
Rob Kubasko:
I mean, right? But also, the payoff is that much better then.
Matthew Fox:
You know, some of the best movie moments have come from a completely out-of-the-movie attempt by the actors to save trouble. I think perhaps one of the greatest action movie moments of all time, the guy swirling his sword right before Indiana Jones just shoots him, that only happens because Harrison Ford is hungover and doesn’t want to do the scene. And so if it’s because of the budget that they did this, I think you’re right, I think it’s absolutely brilliant, and it sets up the reveal so much better. The only reason it bothers me, and I want to get into this a bit, and you all can shout me down if you think, is I feel like the next two minutes are totally wasted and are for the exact opposite of what you’re talking about. It’s because the writers don’t trust the audience. Up until this point, Jasper Sitwell is kind of a figure. Well, we don’t know much about him. We know that he’s been showing up for SHIELD a couple of times. Until now we’ve never seen him directly connected to Hydra. We have no reason to think that he is Hydra, or that he’s really scum. We think he’s kind of shady, but we don’t know much about him. And you guys can say in a minute if from the comics we should have known something. But we’re about to see him being, by every legal definition, tortured. He’s going to be kicked off a building to simulate the fact that he thinks he’s gonna die, in order for him to be saved in a great way by Sam. And all action movies do this, that’s fine. I will point out that all evidence is that it doesn’t work, but putting that aside, imagine if we have that really awesome moment of Steve saying, you’re right, it’s not my style, it’s hers, and she kicks him off the building. At that moment, we don’t know that he’s Hydra. If we don’t know that he’s gonna listen to Garry Shandling, I’m sure he has a real name as a senator, but it’ll always be Garry Shandling to me, talk about this incredibly inappropriate sexual relationship he’s having with a twenty-three-year-old he has no respect for, and him being like, aha, I think you’re gonna be just fine, Senator. He does those things, and he listens, he basically says Hail Hydra. Shandling says it, but he goes along with it. Now we’re all on board to watch him get tortured. I think that’s the only reason why those two minutes exist, and that feels to me like really cheap screenwriting.
Pete Wright:
That’s interesting. I think it’s actually functioning in a different area. And part of it is because it needs to. I mean, functionally, let’s just take the characters off the table for a second and just say functionally, what the filmmakers want to do is demonstrate that it’s not just SHIELD that has been compromised. And who better to do that than to go back to a character from a prior Iron Man movie and connect him through time to the lore? And for that, we’re going to go with Senator Stern. And Stern is a dirtbag. We know he’s a dirtbag, and we have a connection now that we understand that Sitwell exists somewhere between Senator Stern and Pierce. And the cat’s sort of out of the bag, because we already know that Pierce is Hydra.
Matthew Fox:
But my point is that the characters don’t know that. And so we’re using it so that we, the audience, can feel justified about something that is actually much more morally gray, because they don’t know what we know.
Pete Wright:
You’re talking about the fact that Natasha and Steve presumably don’t know that Sitwell is Hydra.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah, they just know that he was on the Lemurian Star and they’re not sure why, and so he could be a good source of information. And I think there’s reason to suspect he could be part of all the shenanigans, but they have absolutely no evidence to know that he definitely is.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I get that. But I think, you said it, and I think you’re absolutely right, movies do this all the time. This is shorthand, and we as the audience, what we’re doing kind of unconsciously, subconsciously, is connecting characters and what they know by what they see, and making it okay, rationalizing what they’re doing without them needing to actually demonstrate it to us. Because shorthand, right? They’re just trying to move forward. Now, the degree to which that’s okay at the culmination of a set of fifteen minutes where we’ve really been trying to understand the level of moral gray area in which Natasha lives and is indoctrinating Steve, that’s an interesting choice. It’s as if the last fifteen minutes they’ve learned nothing. But it’s present, yeah.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah. And I think that’s kind of my point. I feel like the audience would have a much different reaction if we didn’t have those two minutes, if we were in the place that the characters are, and I think that would have been a much more honest way to approach it. I think we might say, yeah, in this situation you gotta get him to talk. But I just think that’s why that feels like bad screenwriting to me, because it feels like you’re making it easier for the characters. You’ve set up this whole thing of all this moral grayness, but now you’re adding moral clarity where there shouldn’t be, because there isn’t for the characters.
Rob Kubasko:
I just want to add, on Garry Shandling, and it is Senator Stern, we never know what his first name is.
Pete Wright:
His first name is Senator. It’s Senator Senator Senator Senator Stern.
Rob Kubasko:
It’s Senator, yes, exactly.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Rob Kubasko:
Just for those, we love Garry Shandling. This was his fourth-to-final movie appearance before his untimely death. The name Senator Stern comes from Howard Stern, who the character is named after, and he patterns the character after former U.S. Senator Arlen Specter, very famous in politics.
Matthew Fox:
I like it. I like it.
Rob Kubasko:
From the Kennedy assassination to his death as well.
Matthew Fox:
Pennsylvania.
Rob Kubasko:
And you can Google that. I just want to say this, a lot of interesting stuff there. So the cool thing, one of the additional things this plays in for people who are layering their experience at the time this movie comes out: this movie is only four years apart from Iron Man 2. It helps to realize, oh, Hydra’s been in this from way before we knew.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah.
Rob Kubasko:
And that’s simply what Stern is there to show. You could say that it’s there to show that Sitwell’s bad, but also it’s, oh, this has been rotten for a lot longer, probably since we’ve been watching everything.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Rob Kubasko:
So I think that’s just the main reason why they’re doing this.
Matthew Fox:
I think it’s a good scene. I just, first of all, the whole thing about the intern he’s gonna go sleep with, just…
Rob Kubasko:
Oh, it’s gross.
Matthew Fox:
But I think you could have either had that earlier in the movie, or you could have had Sam listening in some way so that they hear that he’s Hydra and you see a reaction.
Rob Kubasko:
But I mean, nothing’s changed. Sure.
Matthew Fox:
It’s the way of doing it of…
Rob Kubasko:
Gotcha.
Matthew Fox:
The characters don’t really know that Sitwell is that bad, but the audience gets to find out, so they don’t think badly of the characters. That’s the part that I just feel is a little, and do I hold all Marvel movies to this bar? Of course not. But this whole movie is trying to say, we want to wrestle with these things. And so 90% of the time I think they’re doing it really well, but this one scene just stands out for me because it’s like, come on guys, you could have done that better.
Pete Wright:
Well, yeah, I mean, I totally get that point. And, speaking of cognitive dissonance, I don’t have a problem with it. There’s part of it that I just like, that Sam and Steve and Natasha decide to just go hard. Like, this guy’s gonna talk. We already know he’s an agent of SHIELD, and we’re just gonna have to do what we need to do. And I think, if we go back, Steve knows that Sitwell is part of the team that is already chasing him when he falls down the elevator, right? It’s Sitwell’s voice on comms. It’s Sitwell who’s a part of this whole thing. I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility that Steve’s already pretty hacked off at the fact that he was chased out of SHIELD, when he was drummed out of SHIELD. And Sitwell is an avatar for SHIELD right now, whether he knows he’s Hydra or not.
Matthew Fox:
Right.
Pete Wright:
I think his assumption’s probably pretty strong.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah. I mean, I think, as we talked about a couple episodes ago, there is still that question of who is in good faith in SHIELD and is having the wool pulled over their eyes first.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
So, but yeah, either way.
Pete Wright:
Right, right, right.
Matthew Fox:
But yeah, so I think all that scene coming there, when we’re in this in-depth analysis, makes me think we could have used those two minutes better. But I definitely think you’re right that using them for the Fort Meade scene, no, because it is just so perfect. Whatever issues I have with it, the beautiful callousness of, she kicks him off the building, and he’s not like, oh God, how can you do it? They just get into this discussion about yet another potential romantic possibility. And we have Steve betray the one great moral flaw that he has, which is that he has bought into the idea that you can judge someone by their facial jewelry. The lip piercing, I don’t think I’m ready for that.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I’m not ready for that.
Rob Kubasko:
Oh my God.
Matthew Fox:
And you know…
Pete Wright:
He didn’t say he wouldn’t ever be ready for it, though. I think he’s warming up to it.
Matthew Fox:
That’s possible.
Pete Wright:
Where do you guys fall on the Hail Hydra meme? Did you ever serve, or get served, the Hail Hydra meme? This is a big thing.
Rob Kubasko:
Oh, I think so. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
In less than twenty-four hours after Hail Hydra was released, the hashtag Hail Hydra was tweeted over twenty-two hundred times on April 6th. Actor Clark Gregg, who plays Phil Coulson, a big fan of Captain America in several Marvel films, retweeted an example of the meme featuring My Little Pony. On April 7th, MTV published an article titled “Hail Hydra” as the best meme from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and it went crazy. Anytime you have people whispering, whether it’s kids, whether it’s President Obama, whether it’s the Pope, a couple of adorable polar bears, they’re all hailing Hydra, and I love it. I don’t know if this is true, but it may be it’s still one of the most popular memes from the MCU since they started releasing films. It’s a big, big deal. And I love, thank you to Know Your Meme for this image gallery. They are quite, quite good.
Rob Kubasko:
Can I add a funny story about this?
Pete Wright:
Mm-hmm.
Rob Kubasko:
At the time this movie came out, I think it might have been six months after, I had a Pebble smartwatch.
Pete Wright:
Of course you did.
Rob Kubasko:
And of course I did. And it allowed you to put simple images on it. And I’ll never forget, one of the images that was readily available for it was the Hydra logo, that you could then put on the watch. And I will never forget going out to, I think it was lunch or something, with my little nephews, who are huge into this. And I went to one of my nephews, I think it was Nathan, and I showed him the watch, I pressed the button and the logo comes up and I went, Hail Hydra. And he crapped himself. Like, that’s how big a deal it was. Literally, yes.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. It was a big deal. Yeah, it was a big deal. Okay, now I’m a little bit upset that Kyle’s not here, so some of this we’ll have to table for next time. But this is the reveal of Falcon, the Falcon, in this five minutes. We only get about a second of it, but it is the reveal, and I feel like we can’t wrap up without at least acknowledging what Falcon is and looks like. Were either of you, I think I know Matthew’s answer, but were either of you into, did you know what to expect with Falcon?
Rob Kubasko:
Nothing.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Matthew Fox:
That’s odd, because I will say this was one of the movies that taught me to try and start avoiding trailers.
Pete Wright:
I did not.
Matthew Fox:
Because the scene of him kind of coming back down and landing with his wings out had been in the trailers so many times.
Pete Wright:
Oh, sure. Well, I just mean more, I did not know enough about Sam Wilson and Sam’s background and the original Sam in the comics. I just want to say out loud, so it’s on the record, that Sam was originally, in the comic, a Harlem social worker, and his ability was he had an empathic telepathy over birds. And as Kyle instructed us last week, his Red Wing, which in the movies is an autonomous drone, was actually a falcon in the comics. But I say “but” because that’s all weird. The Stan Lee, Gene Colan version, Captain America #117, September 1969, made him the first African American superhero in mainstream comic books. And, again, for the record, a cultural touchstone: he was the first black superhero not to have the word “black” as part of his superhero name. We’ve come a long way, team.
Rob Kubasko:
Wow.
Pete Wright:
A long, long way.
Matthew Fox:
And I have to say, the thing about birds is weird. Especially if you say he’s got empathic control of all of them.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
This means that, taking the Joker theory, he’s one bad day away from a Hitchcock movie.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
But also, Stan Lee, to me, is a great example, and Jack Kirby somewhat, but I think Jack Kirby was somewhat better about this, but Stan Lee, of someone who genuinely wanted things to be better about sexism and racism and homophobia and all of it, and did his best.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Matthew Fox:
And often that was pretty bad. And sometimes it was pretty good. And to me, I just have this wonderful image of him trying to be like, okay, how do we not give him a power that is connected to stereotypical images of black people in America in the late nineteen sixties? Let’s give him control of birds.
Pete Wright:
Right, right.
Matthew Fox:
He’s just so out of left field that, sure, I love it. It’s great. This is not a…
Rob Kubasko:
Was he just trying to make Aquaman and Avian Man have, like, a little partnership?
Pete Wright:
I think so.
Rob Kubasko:
Like, yeah.
Pete Wright:
I think so. I mean, it’s better than Plumbing Man, the guy who can unclog drains. It’s just weird. I do like the MCU version updates him in a really interesting way. And when you read up on what Markus and McFeely were doing to ground him as a U.S. Air Force pararescueman, the PJs, the elite combat search-and-rescue unit, their motto was “that others may live.” That’s harrowing, that motto. That others may live. That’s the unit that this version, the MCU version of Sam Wilson, is retired from. And the fact that he’s pararescue, not a pilot, I feel like that comic-to-screen translation lands really hard. I don’t think it takes very long to feel like this is the canonical Sam Wilson, that they managed to do this in the film and pull that stuff back into the comic. When you look at the cycle of comic to film to comic, you look at Sam Wilson, you look at Nick Fury, it was highly influential, and it is a great character. And we’ll let Kyle talk about even more weirdness next week when we get a little bit more of Sam.
Rob Kubasko:
Are we not going to talk about Jasper Sitwell’s HTC One X+ cellular phone?
Pete Wright:
Oh, Rob, I’m ashamed.
Rob Kubasko:
That phone was released in November of 2012, and you know it’s the X+ model because the X+ model has the red navigation buttons, as opposed to the white buttons of the regular One X model.
Pete Wright:
Wow.
Rob Kubasko:
Matthew, I know Matthew was missing this.
Matthew Fox:
I’m breathing deeper now.
Pete Wright:
That was…
Matthew Fox:
I was so bothered by that, by the lack of it, but now that Rob has said that, I feel like I can take a deep breath, move along, find balance in the world again, and return to this topic of Sam Wilson.
Pete Wright:
I don’t know that I’m ready for that yet.
Matthew Fox:
Because I do think…
Pete Wright:
Was this, what was running on this, this was Android, right?
Rob Kubasko:
Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Rob Kubasko:
I think it was.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I think it was.
Rob Kubasko:
I don’t know.
Pete Wright:
HTC was all Android at that point.
Rob Kubasko:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I was thinking back, because there was a period in there where I actually had a Windows mobile phone, and it was enormous trash. But this was not it. I was conflating phones.
Rob Kubasko:
As a promotion, because HTC was heavily compensated, or compensating, for their presence in this movie. They did launch a SHIELD Limited Edition of the HTC One M8 version. I don’t know if we’ve talked about that yet, but there’s that.
Pete Wright:
Oh, we have, oh, of course we haven’t, Rob. You weren’t here.
Rob Kubasko:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
Well, and I appreciate this also, Rob, because a lot of times a podcast, when they mention things like this, is gonna get accused of product placement, and that we’re getting paid.
Rob Kubasko:
Oh, no.
Matthew Fox:
So I appreciate you shilling for a company that no longer exists.
Rob Kubasko:
Yeah, I mean, I have no skin in this game. I just report the facts.
Matthew Fox:
Pete, meanwhile, who’s constantly bugging me to make my podcast more monetized, just burned any hope of us getting an IBM or Windows contract anytime soon.
Rob Kubasko:
That’s it.
Matthew Fox:
But anyway, back to Sam Wilson. I love the appearance of the wings. It was not a surprise to me. My memories, having been beaten so into the ground, when he says, I never said I was a pilot, I kind of rolled my eyes a bit. But to me it works for the character. It makes him, you know, we’re starting to play now with this idea of what does it mean to have people who are basically superheroes but do not have superpowers. And we’ve kind of already established, through someone like Tony Stark, that Tony Stark doesn’t have superpowers, he just has tech. And so this is, to me, another person who’s using tech to become a superpowered person. And the fact that it’s in the military, and that that’s just a normal thing now, because you think, well, wait, this is supposed to be our own world, and our own world doesn’t have that technology. To me, it’s actually brilliant world-building, because the idea is that since Iron Man goes public and Tony Stark starts doing the Tony Stark things he’s doing, the technology of the MCU is going to advance at a much faster rate than our own world. And the idea that the military, who Stark has had a sometimes-partnership with…
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
…as well as the fact that these movies are all now getting sponsored by the U.S. military and thus being asked to do nice things for the military, and that’s a whole other ethics question, but the fact that in this world the military has more advanced tech that is about individuals having kind of superpower-type things, that’s an incredibly Tony Stark idea. Of course he was involved in creating this in some way. And to me it feels like brilliant world-building of saying, we’re just gonna assume that, yeah, the U.S. Army has these kind of things, because of course they do in an Iron Man world.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah, the technology bleeds, and it feels so of the universe. But because we’ve watched Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff in their civvies for the last twenty minutes, you forget what world we’re in, when Sitwell is holding up his HTC One X+ running Android Jelly Bean…
Matthew Fox:
With red buttons.
Pete Wright:
…we lose track of the fact that this is still a Stark-influenced universe until he shows up on that rooftop. And I think that’s really classy.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah, very much so.
Pete Wright:
Were you guys on board with the Anthony Mackie train before this movie?
Matthew Fox:
I think this was the first time I saw him. But if you remind me when he was in something, I might have been like, oh yeah, he was…
Pete Wright:
Okay. Well, let’s see. He was in a lot of stuff before Winter Soldier. Let’s see: The Fifth Estate, Pain & Gain, Gangster Squad, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, probably high on your list, Real Steel, he was in Real Steel, The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon. He’s been actively working since 2002. So to see him in this movie, it was not a surprise. And yet he wanted to be in this movie badly, and apparently wrote Kevin Feige, or wrote Marvel, emails saying, I just want to be in this movie, I’ll play anyone black in the movie, any superhero that is black. And apparently wanted to play Black Panther. I think he got the right call. He got the right part.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah, I’d agree with that.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
Agree with that. I will say, I don’t think I remembered him. The only one of those things you mentioned was Vampire Hunter, which I don’t remember him in, but mostly I remember the wonderful discussions I had about that movie afterwards, where we discussed: did it do more damage to American history or to vampire lore? Because the movie attacked both with utter disregard for both. But, you know, that’s a whole other podcast.
Pete Wright:
Fair. Yeah, right.
Matthew Fox:
Vampires do not sparkle.
Pete Wright:
And that’s it. That’s the end, right? That’s the end of our minute, and it ends hard.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
It ends hard. We don’t even see him land, I don’t think. He just flies up and drops Sitwell, and it is grand. And now we’re off to our next minutes. And I think we’re off to the races at this point. I think it’s action all the way down.
Rob Kubasko:
Oh yeah.
Pete Wright:
No more of this namby-pamby talking stuff.
Matthew Fox:
Well, we’re gonna get some talking among the action, but I will just jump in, because you made an offhand comment to this.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Matthew Fox:
I know people are discussing it in our Discord, which, by the way, join our Discord, trustory.fm, you’ll find all the information there. There’s this discussion of, is it a problem that the movie is named, the Winter Soldier is the tagline, and the character’s basically barely been in it? And I think one of the great things about the movie Alien is that the alien is barely in it. One of the great things that makes Jaws a great movie is that they spend an awful lot more time talking about the shark than they do seeing it. And I think The Winter Soldier gets that. He is so rarely on screen, but he’s so often just off the edge. They’re talking about him constantly and he’s looming over it. And I think it would have been a much worse movie if we were seeing a lot of him.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, if there’s a Bechdel test for the Winter Soldier, this movie fails. Everybody in this movie fails.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah. I’m Matthew Fox. I’ve been joined by these two wonderful people, and we’ve gotten to talk about Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Rob, where can people find more of your stuff?
Rob Kubasko:
Hey, they can find, there’s actually a museum exhibit of my life at robkubasko.com. That’s where they can find me.
Pete Wright:
And you can find me at itmepete.com. That’s my personal site, but you can find my writings there, especially my books. My first novella dropped last month, and my next book’s coming out, looks like, July fourth. I’m very excited for that. So I appreciate everybody, if you read, if you remember how to read, I would love it if you’d read some of me. It’s itmepete.com.
Matthew Fox:
Definitely check those out. Check out Rob’s website. Check out all the awesome things that are happening at TruStory FM. I, of course, am the Ethical Panda. You can find all that stuff at theethicalpanda.com. And so, on behalf of myself, Rob, and Pete, thank you all so much for listening. Kiss someone with a lip piercing. It’s really not that different.
