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You're the Woman

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Avengers: Age of Ultron
dir. Joss Whedon
141 minutes

Chris Evans' upper body looks like the crest of some unearthly plateau. He has no love interest in The Avengers: Age of Ultron, but sometimes you catch other people admiring his body, especially in comparison to their own dilapidated form. He is the kind of person who has to keep shifting his own gaze, because he is never quite sure who might be addressing him.

Robert Downey Jr.'s facial hair is beginning to resemble the vaguely ancient locks of Father Time. He chooses his roles a lot more carefully than some, but playing assholes has a way of aging a person - Jamie Dornan is somewhere sobbing about this as we speak.

Since the producers did not want to deal with the particular headache that employing Gwyneth Paltrow entails, Downey Jr. seems extremely lonely, with his only friend being Mark Ruffalo. This being the case, he tries to create an android friend for himself.

Paul Bettany ends up being that android. His body is hidden in a velvety, Jack-Kirby ludicrous suit and the strange modulation of his voice into a sound that is unmistakably Wimbledon. In that film, he pursued Kirsten Dunst as a human woman, a far more unrealistic plot than occurs anywhere in The Avengers: Age of Ultron. "This makes no sense!" one of the Avengers exclaims at one point.

Mark Ruffalo is the most attractive of the group. Despite being fifteen years younger, Scarlett Johansson is attracted to his ansible-shaped penis. She turns him into a larger being when she is tired of looking at the gee-willikers mannerisms that make him the lesser evil when it comes to the men of her social circle. These guys are all becoming too old for her.

Jeremy Renner seems like he loathes all of these people. He is not permitted to banter with Chris Evans about their leader's considerable rigidity; he is very lonely spending time with the others because he misses his wife (Linda Cardellini) and two children. Renner is a member of this posse purely to provide income for his family, and it seems obvious that Downey Jr. gives him a large salary. The main perk is a certain amount of discretion should he want to cheat on his wife with Scarlett or the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen).

Whedon thought it was a good idea to give Olsen and her very fast brother Aaron Taylor-Johnson slight European accents. They are so distracted we barely notice the two are not extras on a set. Olsen's slightly upturned nose and whining cheekbones serve to put everyone else in a slightly better light.

In order to replace the aging older members, newer actors have been added to the group. Most are weirdly reminiscent of past individuals, making these people a sort of family which does not actually care for each other. By the end of the film they are all living together in a residence in upstate New York, where their nonprofit organization receives tremendous tax breaks from local and federal authorities.

There is a retreat from things here, a reluctance to group themselves with the rest that comes off, yes, a bit snobbish, but also somewhat stodgy, as if they simply cannot handle the vagaries of living in the world. Ruffalo and Johanssen plan to go off and hide somewhere, and he even suggests leaving the group as they are attempting to battle an army of androids in a small Eastern European city. None of them actually wants to be there.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Huller" - Adrian Northover & Daniel Thompson (mp3)

"Buhrstone" - Adrian Northover & Daniel Thompson (mp3)