Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Love Hurts (2025), Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Weird anyway. Attention all Shield agents, this is Steve Rogers. You've heard a lot about me over the last few days. Some of you were even ordered to hut me down. But I think it's time you know the truth.

Shield is not what we thought it was. It's been taken over by Hydra. Alexander Pierce is their leader. The Strike and Insight Crew are Hydra as well. I don't know how many more.

I know they're in the building. They could be standing right next to you. They almost have what they want, absolutely control. They shot Nick Fury and it won't end there. If you launch those Hello carriers to day, Hydrid will be able to kill anyone that stands in their way unless we stop them.

And I know I'm asking a lot. The price of freedom is high, always has been, and it's a price I'm willing to pay. And if I'm the only one, then so be it. But I'm willing to. Bet I'm not.

Welcome back, midnight viewers to Father Alone's weekly round up. I'm Father Alone in this pretty little Valentine. Beside me is miss Ripley Jean? Are you excited for the latest Hallmark holiday and you're wearing pink pink collar with hearts brand new. It's lovely.

Have I told you how adorable you are lately? Well you are, and all of you out there you're pretty fucking adorable too. Don't think I haven't noticed. Trying to be positive y'all while the whole world burns. And get your marshmallows and your chocolate.

Hold the gram Cracker. I'm gluten free. I can't digest it, ripley. That's why you get all of my fast food. Bread baby, speaking of indigestible, that delectable looking more so, that just won't fucking settle in your stomach.

That's love hurts. Marvin Gable? Who are you? Your brother brought us in to find you after you? Let Rose go?

Tell my brother to. Back off. This little spot of monkey Lynden dot haf I, Rose. Why did you come back? If we're gonna stop, your brother, I'm gonna need the old youth.

I'm so sorry. Fine my brother and Rose. Now now let's finish this together. You want the old me you got? It's about damn time.

Sorry, love hot, Okay, before we go any further, there are a couple of things to recommend the movie, although not really. There is a scene where Keih Kwan and Sean asked and share a spontaneous hug, and when they did, I cried like a baby. It wouldn't be the last time the movie would push me to tears. Though. The other recommendation is it features a performance by Mustafa Shakir.

He was big mic on the deuce. Someone give this giant man a giant role in something. Can you imagine him as a wandering ronin Jedi in the years following Order sixty six? Just saying now onto the film itself. Later today, I'm going to put john Wick four on the television and I'm gonna watch that scene where Keanu goes tumbling down all those stairs, and I'm gonna enjoy it.

I might even rewind it and watch it a second time, because john Wick has a lot to answer for. I now feel like those movies where we get to watch the shit kicked out of him for two or more hours at a clip is penance for what he ended up unleashing. We're in a post john Wick era where every filmmaker seems to have a pedigree in stuntwork first, in screenwriting a distant third or fourth. Plenty of filmmakers can't write a word. You might say no, but they can tell a fucking story, one that has more nuance than these two guys need to fight using every item in a room as a weapon.

Stuntmen as action filmmakers are nothing new. You know whose first gig was as a stuntman, John Ford. That should silence any naysayers. And if he had a full career as a stuntman before stepping behind the lens, it would make a little more sense. But we're talking about like nineteen seventeen.

I think the situation there in that brand new fucking industry was more of Hey, what can I do to help? Sure, I'll crank the camera, Oh, you need the lights strung up on the ceiling. Sure, I can fall off a horse. And it had less to do with Keanna Reeve's stunt double on the Matrix, which was just one of a long line of stunt gigs in a chosen career of falling down for actors. It probably sounds like I'm bagging on the very idea of stuntmen as directors, but that is not the case.

I love those John Wick movies, and I've been a fan of the work of Hal Needham and the Baxley Family. Hell. John land has started out in stunts. You can see him in An American Werewolf in London. During the Piccadilly Circus sequence, a car slams into him and knocks him through a plate glass window, which is totally insane.

What if something actually went wrong and he got killed? Who would have finished that movie? That's right. I'm more upset about the idea of not having an American Werewolf in London than Landis's continued existence. Oh no, the show is devolving.

I gotta stay positive. I can't. I had to watch Love Hurts. I don't know if it's love, but it's certainly fucking hurt. I've often said that there's nothing at all wrong with an author putting out variations on a theme.

My go to is the Ramones. They wrote the same song for thirty years, but every one of them was distinctive, and every one of them has something to offer. Jim Thompson's novel Pop twelve eighty is a virtual remake of his own The Killer Inside Me, and I love both those books equally. Red Harvest and The Glass Key are very close to Dashall Hammett. You get the idea as long as something is quality, the origins are less and less relevant.

But those are creators, not studio or production companies. We're talking about eighty seven North here. Surprise, it's David Letch's company. He's half of the directing duo of that first John Wick. He'd go off to make Atomic Blonde, which was bad, Deadpool two which was bad, Hobbs and Shaw not good, Bullet Train continuing the trend, and The Fall Guy.

Yeah, chand Steleski, the other half of that duo stuck with john Wick directing only those, although he's currently in pre production on The Highlander remake with Henry Cavill. Please let that script be good. Please let that script be good. We're not talking about Steleski here, though. It's David Letch, who a couple of years ago produced Nobody.

That's the Bob Udenkirk john Wick clone. At least in that case, it was Derek Coldstad writing. He created John Wick variations on a theme, and what are those themes? Former hitman enforcer has settled into a comfortable suburban existence and is suddenly dragged back into the life by unforeseen forces that require him to re engage with his past and kill it once then for all. Okay, so there's the variation on the theme.

Now we just need quality, which of that movie nobody was completely unable to deliver on. It got close. Some of the early action scenes are pretty fucking great, and Odenkirk performs exactly as he should have the same instinct to stick the comedian into a drama carried over to action. Someone should have put him in peril twenty years ago. But it was ultimately to diminishing returns creatively.

I mean, it did well enough at the box office to cement its formula over here with David Letch, because now that copy of John Wick gets its own copy here. Lest any of the creative snaff from any of those successful early films. In the wake of Bruce Lee's death, you had every production company in Asia grabbing any up and coming martial artist and trying to cram him into the Bruce Lee mold to deleterious effect. It's like trying to manufacture another Christopher Walking. Good luck, go back and watch it.

Jankie Chan's first films like Snake Fist Fighter, it was years till they figured out Jackie Chan's badassery wasn't the Clint Eastwood model. It was more the Charlie Chaplin with Spinkicks model. Clearly that's been a winning formula and they try that here a for effort. Key hey Kwan, our short round, our data, Fuck you, Brent Spiner. Johnny Coum.

Lately he's had a pretty great resurgence of late, what with the Academy Award and all. That's a fucking comeback, and he's as charming as ever. But this feels like that Norm MacDonald's Burton Reynolds impression. After his rejuvenation thanks to Boogie Knights, asked what he was going to do next a car picture with Don Delawiz. Though, to be fair, those Cannonball Run movies, which featured Jackie Chan and was directed by a stuntman, had actual laughs in it.

In fact, all of Jackie Chan's movies are solid comedies. Love Hurts wants to be a lighthearted version of John Wick, a romantic comedy version of John Wick. It can't get the action right, and that's what a bunch of stunt guys operating the What chance do you think this comedy is going to be funny? It's not at all, But that's part for the course. Here, the action isn't very exciting, the comedy isn't funny, and the romance is tempid and unearned.

Romantic action films are a rarity. Good action romantic films aren't even rarer Romancing the Stone, Princess Bride, Scott Pilgrim gross point blank true romance. Mister and Missus Smith. Now, I have yet to dive into the TV show with Donald Clover, but but Mister and Missus Smith is the perfect example for Love Hurts. That's about married assassins who are unaware of their spouse's occupations.

As a metaphor for relationships, I don't think it has a peer. You come together having no idea who the other is. You battle one another for identity and voice in the relationship, and then you figure out all the brawling can best be served by forming a true fucking partnership in taking on the world. What works in that film, other than having two of the most beautiful people on the planet performing in it, is that even though our leads are unaware of the other's capabilities, the audience isn't. Love Hurts.

Starts with a perfunctory scene of Marvin in full dexter mode. Just bright and chipper and bacon cookies, and then handing out those cookies at the real estate office, and a montage of what a great realtory is, and then right into the fucking action, which means, unless we're gonna get a protracted flashback, we're gonna end up with entire fucking paragraphs of exposition from these characters. Why do you have Tippy my brother knuckles accountant tied up in your trunk? Well, he's the only person who knows the secret of the robbery and the frame up. Ah yah YAYI.

Expositional dialogue in skilled hands is mainly clumsy. Imagine what these stunt men came up with. Do an extended flashback next time? You know, I was just about to get into the full plot and what would make sense what didn't, But that would be completely pointless. It's just moments of exposition.

Fight scene, sub Tarantino banter fight scene, more laughable dialogue here. This will sum up the movie better than any synopsis. It has a scene where Marvin on the run, has hold up at one of his unsold properties. He and Ariana debos another oscar winner, are bloodied and batter and shouldn't be there when the couple who are prospective buyers show up, So it's this whole comedy of manners showing them the house while trying to conceal all the blood and the bandages and shit. And then the couple goes off on their own and after a moment, the wife screams.

It's a scream that says, I've just walked into a bloodbath and now my husband is being eviscerated in front of me. Marvin burst into the room to find the husband and wife marveling at the new washer dryer combo. She was screaming with excitement. Doesn't Marvin feel like a fool? Now?

No? I do. I paid to see this. I hope this is the last of the Accidental Assassin movies. They keep pulling me back in subset of actioners, because no matter how many times they remake it, they're never going to recapture the alchemy of the first John Wick.

You know what it was. It was the gift his ailing wife had delivered to him after her death. It was the dog. Yeah, of course, you think so, that beagle in the first film. That actor's name is Wick.

Yes, the actual don No, they didn't name the film for him, it was the other way around. Would you pick a movie HP hit it. K because. Thank you, HP, You'll always be the world's most dangerous band to me, your pick could not be more timely, Young Patriot. This Friday, this Valentine's Day, are you listening, lovers, we'll see the release of Captain America Brave New World original title New World Order that somehow seems more appropriate.

To commemorate that release, we're taking a look back at what I consider the best of the Captain America films. That's the one where a World War Two soldier finds himself decades later, a new century, even battling the same goddamned villain. Only it went underground since the nineteen forties, worming its way into every fabric of government, and now it intends to finish what it started. Just keep telling yourself, it's only a movie. It's only a movie.

It's only a movie. Most of the intelligence community doesn't believe he exists. The ones that do call him the Winter Soldier. He's a ghost. You'll never find him.

The joint shield to protect people, you have to build a better world sometimes means turn the old one down, and that makes enemies fast. I'm strong, out of my alarm. Are you ready? All it takes is one step. People are gonna die.

I can't let that happen. Captain American needs my health. When do we start? You just said price of freedom's high, and it's a price I'm willing to pay. He told me not to trust anyone.

This is how it ends. Everything goes. Like you giving the orders now, Captain, I am right. How do we know a good guys from the bad guys? If they're shooting at you, they're bad.

If I have a yin yang duo of superheroes I consider formative, then the dark would be represented by my main man, Batman, who forged his grief and loneliness into a weapon to shield the innocent, and in the light, Captain America, whose amplified decency became a literal shield against the darkness. I'm a gen X kid, let me tell you. During the nineteen eighties, reading comics was not cool. It was for babies, according to every asshole of every generation, including my own. Bye.

If God forbid, someone were to actually overhear you having a spirited conversation about a comic book, Batman might get you slightly less of a taunting than cap I mentioned gen X Right. We were fed the same steady diet of raw, raw American our parents had been fed, including all of the same entertainment, the same movies and TV shows and propaganda that their parents had made for them, on top of which we had edutainment like Schoolhouse Rock, There's going to be fire your Works, file Works, you remember. But tempering that was the fact that the era we were steeped in included jubilation over the deposing of a president and the ending of what many considered an illegal war. Those are interesting scales to be asked to balance.

And while I've never been ashamed to be an American, I'm also not running down the street waving the flag and chanting USA. We've done some fucked up shit over the years, including to our own citizens. So everybody calmed down. When does an invalidate celebrating the nation? We do it in institutionally on July fourth, and it deserves celebrating.

The idea of America is fucking powerful and it's one we should all be striving for. That goes for you English listeners as well, not America, but the American dream is what I think of when I think of Cap, that everyone should have the freedom and opportunity to succeed and attain a better life. Pretty fucking simple, but just like Christianity would be spectacular if any of the Christians treated their neighbors as themselves. Most people have focused on the succeeding and not the freedom to do so part of the American dream. Not Cap, not Steve Rogers, that kid from Brooklyn.

He gets it. And as you know, what turned that frail kid into Cap was the serum. Yeah, but it was what it amplified, his unbridled decency. It's a willingness to do the right thing in the face of any ideology. That makes him special.

And before I go any further, I just want to point out a couple of runs of the character that I really loved in the comics. During the seventies. For a brief time, Cap and Sam Wilson were private detectives and Home That was pretty great. There was the nomad period where he was wandering the US like a one man super soldier Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance. I loved Cap Wolf.

I might be the only one there, but I don't care. But if you want some Prime. What the fuck Captain America? Check out the end of his original run. This was long after the war.

It's now the nineteen fifties, and they're just telling the same stories with Cap, albeit some of the guys telling them are giants like Bill Finger and Manly Wade Wellman. The fifties were fairly owned by horror comics, and since they didn't know what the fuck to do with this war relic, let's give him a run as a horror title. Thus two issues of Captain America's Weird Tales. I did mention this was the end of his original run. I meant it.

Captain America's Weird Tales shut CAP down till the nineteen sixties. They were just anthology books with little or no CAP interaction, except for the first issue, which had Red Skull in Hell summoning Cap there and then they have to go before Satan to decide who gets to return to Earth. Is pretty fucking great. The cover of the second and final issue has what looks like a dead ringer for the Crate from Creep Show. The story is in fact called The Thing in the Chest, but it has zero to do with King's story.

Check Out the cover though, and tell me you're not intrigued, but the stories is bad, do not read it. It wasn't until the nineteen sixties rebirth of Captain America that we got the frozen in ice backstory and gave him another interesting shade, which is he was now a man out of time, an aspect of him that actually got better in the films because the length of time between then and now is so vast. In the sixties, Cap could have just hung out with everyone he knew from the war. They'd be weirded out by this younger, virile version of him, But it's not like he couldn't go back to Brooklyn and see most of the people he remembered. Not Cinema, Captain America officially resurrected at the end of Captain America, the First Avenger, a film I love but I wish had more of a protracted second act.

A montage of the howling Commandos is fine, but I wanted to see them blazing all over Europe and stomping Nazis under their boots I mean Hydra. So although he gets a bit of a readjustment period in the first Avengers film, it wasn't until Captain America The Winter Soldier that we really felt how a drift Steve Rogers is in our world, not just culturally, which they address with the list he's been tabulating. One of the great lost ploth threads in the MCU is whether or not Steve Rogers appreciated Disco or the Beatles in the UK, or Old Boy if you were in South Korea, or Chupa Chups if you were in Spain, or Shakira in Latin America, or Roberto Benini in Italy. Yeah, the wonders of digital film prints.

You can just drop any list in anywhere, no matter the region, which is actually really cool and kind of in keeping with Steve Rogers' character. So not just culturally, but politically and personally a drift as well. We get Captain America facing not only the more unsavory elements of the world stage, but the personal regret and grief from his own time that he can shake enter The Winter Soldier. Thanks to misters Ed Brubaker and Steve Empting, here's reht conning and reimagining done right. Bucky Barnes in the original comics is a bit of a joke.

He's like Robin to CAP's batman, a kid out there frolicking in the trenches of World War Two. I guess it made sense in the comics at the time, because that's what all comics were doing. But when Cap came back in the sixties, Bucky stayed frozen. Mercifully. What came out of the ice in Brewbaker's hands was not only a mirror image of Cap, in this case, his best friend that he's been agonizing over losing for decades, but a nifty metaphor for all the PTSD, all those greatest generation vets were carrying around with them.

Unlike the book, the movie is sent now, which means it's abandoned the length of grief that Steve has felt and gained something better. Cap and Bucky are now both out of time. It puts their conflict at even higher stakes, and it's got the elevator seeing y'all. There are plenty of action films marvels include We're all row on a scene from a particular film and having seen it, don't really feel the need to re experience some of the more interesting bits hung around it. Here.

I can watch that fight scene endlessly, and the rest of the movie supports it. In fact, any one sequence in Winter Soldier could easily be the most spectacular finale for any lesser action flick. Remember when Sitwell got vaporized? Oh Baby? On top of which, Winter Soldier functions perfectly within the MCU.

It's its own story, but it comes in freighted with past events and characters and then has ramifications for the future of all of the films we'd just gotten used to shield and now they've smashed it apart. True, they never really did anything with that, owing perhaps to professional asshole Joss Whedon and his need to get Ultron into the world, treating the genuine menace engendered in Winter Soldier as a fucking joke at the beginning of the next Avengers film, which I should note was the next film in the MCU, just completely ignoring Hydra and what it's done to shield. Winter Soldier was at least to plant the seed for the final film the Steve Rogers trilogy, when Hydra finally reveals itself in the form of a computerized Arnim Zola.

I love Toby Jones. He was Steve Rogers in the mist think about It. Zola reveals that Howard and Maria Stark were assassinated by Hydra. That'll pay off in Civil War on a completely nerded out level. We got the Triskellion for the first time in this film.

We got Sam fucking Wilson the Falcon. Okay, maybe he can't communicate with birds telepathically anymore, but that's okay. I was just overjoyed to see him show up. We got Batrock the Leaper in that Bravura opening sequence. We got Agent thirteen.

Sharon Carter used to be Peggy's sister in the comics Super Weird. She's her grand niece now, which doesn't make anything about their relationship any less. Weird, We meet Strike, and we meet Alexander Pearce. Speaking of Weird, Pierce in the comics was just a high level Shield agent. Here they've promoted him to the head of the World Security Council.

In Avengers, that spot was taken by Powers Booths Gideon Mallick. Mister Booth's death necessitated a recast, and they fucking nailed it. Joe and Anthony Russo, the film's directors, went on and on about their influence of seventies Cold War thrillers. If you're gonna ape that, you might as well, pull in Robert Redford. He's just walking gravtas through what might some dismiss as a typical superhero flick, and the movie has a deepening of every single character portrayed as propulsive as the film is, and it never stops it.

Somehow manages to find moments between characters. Pairing Cap and Black Widow is just beautiful, her being another shade of him, as well as the characters on their own. Nick Fury finally gets a fucking action scene, and it's amazing. Steve Rodgers also gets to do a lot of soul searching in this film, as much, maybe as he'll do in the entire series, well until Civil War or Infinity War or Endgame. He never stops evolving while never abandoning his own core values.

He's the best perfect example of that evolution. Watch the way Cap fights from movie to movie. He just gets more and more modern and better. Overall, if you sent Endgame Cap back to any point in history, he would have won. I don't care what timeline, I don't care if there is magic involved.

He was gonna win. But at the center of this film is the relationship between Bucky and Cap. It's one of two real relationships threading through the entire series. Though their involvement pretty much ends after Civil War, it's wildly important to the series. After all, Bucky is still out there fucking up shit.

In the MCU, he ends up being not just a symbol of everything Steve Rogers has lost, or the guilt and grief of his past made flesh. It's also his pal, the one he looked up to and could depend on in the face of anything till the end of the line. Though I said that's one of two relationships in the series, Clearly the one that begins and ends Steve Rogers' story is Peggy Carter. Now that's a love story for Valentine's Day. Watch first Avenger and then Endgame.

Do not watch Civil War here in Winter Soldier. The visual effect on Haley Atwell is stunning, though no more stunning than her performance. I understand that they're scene together may have been intended for Avengers, but I'm glad it wasn't. Fuck those guys. Peggy and Steve are just the fucking ideal, and the whole scene here is heartbreaking.

Yes, I cry every time every time. There is a line in fact from this movie that is one of the last things my wife ever said to me before she passed. So maybe we'll talk about Peggy and Steve at another time. It deserves a bit more than my Quippi nonsense. There's a conversation early in Winter Soldier between Rogers and Fury that struck a chord with me when the film came out.

I think it cuts straight to the heart of who Steve Rogers is, who Captain America is, and what he actually stands for one during which all the themes of guilt and despair of the past are met head on. After New York I convinced the World Security Council we needed a quantum surge and threat analysis for once. We're way ahead of the curve. By holding a gun to everyone on Earth and calling it protection. You know, I read those SSR files Greatest Generation.

Yes there's some nasty stuff. Yeah, we compromised sometimes in ways that made us not sleep so well, But we did it so that people could be free. This isn't freedom, This is fear. Shield takes the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be. This is getting damn near past time for you to get with that program.

Cap Donald, your breath a stuntman of love hurts. That's how you do exposition as dialogue. Captain America, the Winter Soldier, you know where you can find it. I'm burning through the entire Cap series of flicks and TV series boy Man Agent Carter is great. I'm doing it all in preparation for Friday's new Captain America flick.

I think Sam is the obvious and perfect successor. I know Bucky held the shield for a while in the comics, but Sam is a natural for the MCU. Although anyone taking up the mantle of Captain America does remind me of the Jerry Seinfeld routine about rooting for your hometown based. Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city. You're actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it.

Do you know what I mean? You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Nevertheless, I am excited to watch Captain America kick the shit out of Thunderbolt Ross President Ross for as long as that scene goes. Huh, what do you think? Kid?

Is? Winter Soldier? The Best Captain America flick with the nineteen ninety one Oh Good, I thought you'd lost your K nine mind, the TV movie with Christopher Lee You're mental. Don't be mental like her? Watch Winter Soldier and if you haven't yet started watching Yellow Jackets, you better fucking start.

Next season comes out on Valentine's Day. Gotta love that. I'll have thoughts I always do. Join us this Friday for a very special episode of Midnight Viewing. It's a crossover episode with the Noise Junkies podcast.

That's Music Man Extraordinaries, a HPS podcast. He also has a new album out on bandcamp. You got to check that out as well. He and I sat down to talk about the misbegotten nineteen seventy eight jukebox musical Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Where else can you watch Barry Gibb hit a joint handed to him by Donald Pleasants That's out on Friday, or if you want to hear it right now, head over to patreon dot com slash fatherm Alone.

Subscribers get all episodes early and commercial free, and sometimes they get early drafts of things that I didn't mean to post. But as a subscriber, you'll also get access to shows you can only get there, like cable box theater. But if money is tight, well I am broke. I guess we all are, and we will be. You can still be a decent person.

You can be a Steve Rogers. Come on, be Steve Rodgers. Give this show a like or five stars, or write some nice words about it, or share it, or make some nerd listen to it and watch his head explode as I'm certain there were some mistakes made in my reporting. Anyway, help out any way you can, and I'll continue to do so as well. Gonna leave you with a bit from Captain America.

It is from a Captain America movie, Civil War. They gave the line to Sharon Carter there, but it came from Cap originally. In Civil War Amazing Spider Man Volume one, Captain America says this to Spider Man. And I should note that this speech that is going off like a gong in my head lately was written by J. Michael Strazinski, whom we've given a kicking to here on Midnight Viewing for his work on Twilight Zone eighty five.

Rereading this speech, I take it all back, every fucking word against him. Here is Steve Rogers, a character conceived to smash fascism. Doesn't matter what the press says, doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say, doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else, the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or consequence. When the mob, and the press and the whole world tells you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth and tell the whole world, no, you move.