Movie Review: Captain America: Winter Soldier

Friday, April 4th, 2014 marked the return of America’s super-Boy Scout, Captain America. The Winter Soldier is part of Marvel’s round two of movies. This sequel manages to incorporate many characters and plot-lines from the comics while still remaining relevant to modern day.

There is a noticeable lack of a costumed super-villain in The Winter Soldier. Even the titular Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) does not fit the role of arch-nemesis because little is known about who he is, and less is known about for whom he is working. The ambiguity of the enemy speaks to the modern state of US warfare. Also, the main plot was a clear allegory for the controversy surrounding the NSA. Captain America, and Marvel comics, comes down clearly against the NSA. Despite its 95-year-old protagonist, the movie feels current.

That being said, the movie also keeps many of the comic book characters. Chief among them is the Falcon /Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie). For those who don’t know, the Falcon was so popular, that for a while the comic series was known as “Captain America and the Falcon.” Mackie is great, and his character is incorporated well into the plot. It does not feel as if the writers threw him in haphazardly to appease comic book fans.

Black Widow (Scarlett Johanson) also appears in The Winter Soldier. She works well with Captain America (Chris Evans). One of the strengths of these Marvel movies is this potential for crossover, which so far has worked well.

However, the new movie is not quite as good as The First Avenger. One of the most enjoyable things about the first Captain America movie was that it took place in the 1940s. It set Captain America apart from the other Avengers and gave him an identity of his own. Now that he is incorporated into modern society, his movie looks just like the Iron Man movies.

The fight scenes are amazing. The way they shot the fight scenes was confusing at first, but once I got used to it, it was great. It captures the speed of fights. The hand-to-hand, or hand-to-shield, scenes are good, but once the guns come out, it goes straight into comic-book hyperbole. The word to bullet ratio was low, at least 1:100, but probably closer to 1:1000. This was not because of a lack of dialogue, which was good, but because there were so many bullets.

Overall, this movie is well worth watching. Marvel once again strikes the perfect balance between action, comedy, and drama. It is heavy on the action side, but that is fine because it is a superhero movie.

By: Emma Morrison

Review: “The LEGO Movie”

          “The LEGO Movie’s” theme song sums up the movie perfectly: “Everything is awesome.” The movie opens with Emmet (Chris Pratt), a perfectly normal LEGO construction worker who only wants other people to like him. Emmet’s perfectly normal life soon becomes anything but. He finds the magical Piece of Resistance, a woman whisks him away to a different world, and brings him to a mysterious old man who informs him he is the “special” foretold by a prophecy. Sound familiar? (coughcoughTheMatrixcoughcough)

            Emmet must use the piece of resistance to stop evil Lord Business (Will Ferrell) from gluing all the LEGO pieces together. With help from Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) and Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), Emmet meets up with the other Master Builders, which include Batman, Superman, Abraham Lincoln, and Robin Hood, among others.

            The animation is amazing. Everything is made of LEGOs. When something catches on fire, there are pieces of LEGO fire everywhere. If something explodes, little LEGO bricks fly into the sky. “The LEGO Movie” makes the animation entertaining in and of itself.

            “The LEGO Movie” has everything a successful movie needs: humor, good plot, good voice acting, and good voice animation. It will entertain and delight viewers of all ages, and is well worth the price of a movie ticket.

By: Emma Morrison

Opinion Article

Headphones are a the simple, convenient invention that allow people to listen to their music without disturbing the people around them. There are many different varieties of headphones: over the ear, in ear, sport, even wireless. Of course, when choosing headphones many decisions go into picking just the perfect pair for your sensitive ears. First, you must consider the sound quality, then the comfort, then of course the price. You want to make sure that when you blast your music and close yourself into your own world that you have the opportunity to understand your music and enjoy it. Unfortunately, the thing most people don’t take the time to consider what it sounds like to the people around them.

Your music is very personal. The bands you listen to, the genre of music you particularly enjoy, and even the artists within the genres. Now in a given crowd, your music most likely differs from the people around you. For example, if you are rocking out and blasting Kanye’s new hit single, the person sitting next to you, who we will say in this situation enjoys classical, probably does not want to rock out with you. As I am sure, if the situation were flipped, you probably would not want to sit there trapped listening to Mozart blasting through their Beats headphones… ha.

Now, how is this relevant to me? Here in the wonderful environment that is Melrose High School, there are quite a few people who have taken their music choices and decided to push it upon everyone else. Now, I know what you are all saying: “Headphones aren’t even allowed!!!” Yes, the tragedy, but that rule doesn’t apply to hallways or certain teachers’ discretion. Walking through the hallways doesn’t bother me as much because I can avoid the full blown concerts that people decide to put on. But sitting in class, taking a test, minding my own business, and attempting to focus on a test, like the good students we all are… *cough cough*… I really do not need to suffer through Riff Raffs ‘sick’ new album. I would honestly much rather suffer through a pre-calculus test in silence.

Don’t get me wrong. I completely understand the "headphones in, world out" rule. When I walk home you can bet I have my headphones in; all I focus on is the sound of the music. I most likely have it on full blast, too. Now before you sit here and cuss at your computer screen or the newspaper open in your lap and decide to call me a hypocrite including some other names I am not allowed to write in this little rant, hear me out. I understand that not everyone likes the music I do, I do not expect that, and even if they did, I still would not want to sit and listen to it being paraded through your headphones in the middle of the test.

What I am trying to say in this article is that, in my opinion, there is a time to rock to sox off and there is time to not. “Well, how can I tell if it is an appropriate time to do that?” you may ask, and that, my friend, is precisely the question I was hoping you would inquire about:
The Golden Rule to Listening to Music with Headphones: OPEN YOUR EYES. LOOK AROUND. I cannot stress this enough, but all it has to do with is people. When you are walking home alone and you are in the middle of nowhere, completely alone then go ahead and bump those funky beats. But if you are in the middle of a test, then half volume is completely alright, heck, even 60-75% if you have good headphones. But please, PLEASE, be considerate to the people sitting around you. Now if you are not sure if it is too loud, then take the headphones off, listen real hard, and if you can hear your music with them 5 feet away from your face then guess what… it is TOO LOUD. If you cannot hear it, then you are fine *gives applause*.

Headphones are a glorious invention. Portable music that allows us to momentarily block everything out, but as you are doing that, make sure people don’t need to, in turn, block you out in the process. You were not hired as the DJ for the day, so please do not act like it.

By: Madison Forsberg

Taste Test: Bagels!!!

Bagels. Everyone loves bagels. Whether you are like me and eat 5-6 bagels a week or you live under a rock and only eat 1-2 a week, we all love them. Warm or room temperature, with cream cheese, butter or plain, bagels are a satisfying breakfast, lunch or dinner food. A lot of companies produce bagels, some specialize in it, and others merely make it on the side. I have had a lot of bagels in my time from a lot of different places. And I was curious as to which one was the best. I chose three popular bagel shops in or near Melrose and tested them out. To keep everything even and fair, I tested plain bagels with plain cream cheese from every shop.

First up: Brueggers. Located on Main Street, Melrose, this bagel shop offers many bagels as well as sandwiches and salads. I ordered a plain bagel as usual with plain cream cheese. The bagel was slightly warm because it was fresh that morning. The bagel itself was warm and soft on the inside but perfectly crunchy on the outside. The plain cream cheese compliments the bagel nicely and over all the combination is very nice.

Second, I tested Finagle-a-bagel. Their bagels are slightly larger than the ones at Brueggers, but not as thick. The products were complimentary as well. The overall package is good. Not absolutely amazing but good. The cafe offers other bagel like foods, like sandwiches and salads.

Third, I tested Bagel World. Their bagels are very good. Much like the others, they are well complimented by their cream cheese. The bagels are of average size and are filling for a meal.

By now you can probably tell which bagel I liked most. Out of convenience, being located right in Melrose, and because of the great taste, Brueggers, to me, is the best bagel!!

By: Elisa Lemack

State of the Computers

Here at Melrose High we have learned to adapt to things not working, breaking, or being from the stone age. The physical building is probably giving all of us exotic diseases that we will not fully feel the effects of until we are all too far gone. We put up with windowless triangular-shaped classrooms that change from stuffy, muggy, and intolerable in the warmer months to cold, harsh, and unbearable in the winter. We put up with eating lunch at times other people refer to as “brunch” or “early dinner.”  We have lived through gas leaks, bomb threats, and days that should have been snow days. We have learned a new schedule after following the same one for most of our high school careers.  We have embraced all that has been thrown at us; the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly. Melrose High has been a challenge to many, presenting obstacles and creating stress for those who try wholeheartedly to survive. 

Taking journalism has been one of the best decisions of my high school career. I have taken the class for two years. With each year I have learned new, interesting, and important things about reporting and news in general. For those who don't know what we do in journalism, we put out a paper every few months. We also update a blog. Becasue we live in the twenty first century, we use computers to type, edit, and put together our work for our blog and paper. But as many of you may notice, the journalism class is rarely in the resource center using the computers. That is because the English department has their own special computer lab. I know, it is pretty exciting and cool. But anyone who has actually entered that computer lab located in Room 328 would know that those computers rarely work. They are older than all of our grandparents combined, and probably enjoyed some time with the dinosaurs.

The computers, when and if they ever turn on, work, but very slowly. You can almost open the internet and Microsoft almost lets you type without a glitch every ten seconds. But when these computers are turned off, they take forever to turn on. And I'm not kidding when I say forever. We have about five computers in that lab that actually “work.” But “work” is an ambiguous word.

I was curious about the efficiency of our dear computers, so I tested them. First I turned all the computers off, then back on. I timed how long it took for them to start. A new computer takes less than two minutes to turn on. The computers in the blue or red lab take about four, or maybe five, minutes to turn on completely. After they are on, it doesn’t take very long to either open the internet or Microsoft. So I went through every computer in the English lab, turned them fully off and then timed how long it takes for them to fully load. You might be thinking that it couldn't possibly take that long, but the quickest computer takes about sixteen minutes to load. Now that means turning it on, going through the control-alt-delete page, and then eventually opening up Microsoft takes sixteen minutes. You might not think sixteen minutes is a long time to load a computer. But when classes are fifty-seven minutes, and realistically you take away seven minutes for the beginning or end of class to settle in or pack up you are left with fifty minutes. Now take away sixteen minutes to load your computer. Now you are at thirty-four minutes. Take at least another ten minutes to open the internet and Microsoft. That leaves twenty-four minutes. Now quick! Start an article or finish the one you have been working on. Don’t forget to save it or try to e-mail it before the bell rings and you need to run off to your next class. It is impossible to accomplish any noticeable amount of work in this time frame.

All this ranting does have a point, I promise. My anger is not necessarily the inefficiency of the computers, but rather the lack of recognition of this. At this point I would like to take a second and say I am not blaming the administration. But at the same time, I'm not sure they realize how awful some of the supplies we have are. There is not much we can do about the physical building, unless we literally tear it down, but students should be provided with computers that work. I don’t want to point fingers because maybe there are other reasons why we do not have better computers. I just do not believe this is the best the school can provide for us.

By: Elisa Lemack

A Conversation about The Hobbit

From the studio that brought you The Lord of the Rings comes the new trilogy of The Hobbit, the second installment of which, The Desolation of Smaug, was released on December 13^th to great fanfare. Imprint Staff members went to view the film as soon as it was released, and were impressed and surprised at how the film was created. We are now joined by staff members Duncan McLeod and Andy Griscom, who saw the film together and have very strong opinions about several of the design changes made by the studio.

[Editor’s note: This is not a review. It is a conversation. It contains spoilers.]

Andy: So, The Hobbit. It was an interesting movie. You had to suspend your disbelief for a good chunk of the movie, but it still managed to keep me amused. What did you think, Duncan?

Duncan: I found it to be a remarkable movie, though in contrast to your “suspension of disbelief,” pretty much all movies do that. This one just might have required it a bit more than some people prefer.  Yet overall, most anything straying from reality was done to make the movie more epic and grandiose.

Andy: Certainly it was, and I do agree with you there, it did make the movie better from an entertainment standpoint. But there is a limit to that. I have no problem with making things more epic for a great audience reaction, but after a certain point it just becomes annoying. Case in point; all of the Lord of the Rings characters, none of whom appear in the Hobbit book, who were just thrown into the movie to get a reaction out of Lord of the Rings fans. Enough! You guys got your own movies, go away and let these guys have theirs!

Duncan: The Hobbit was a prequel movie; therefor it needs material to tie it into the Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson essentially created more of a lead-in to the Lord of the Rings, like how he showed us what the Necromancer was doing for the duration of the movie, which in the book was just kind of left to the reader’s imagination.

Andy: I see where you’re coming from here, and it is kind of nice to not just have Gandalf disappear for half the time; we actually see what he’s up to, not just having it mentioned offhandedly after the fact. But a good chunk of the other stuff wasn’t needed. Legolas showing up in the forest? Makes a little sense; it was mentioned in the books that he was from Mirkwood. Having him save the gang from an orcish ambush (that also wasn’t in the book, but we’ll ignore that)? Okay Legolas, you got your screen time. Let us follow the people we actually came to see a movie about. Having him follow the gang all the way to Laketown and save them from more orcish hunters? Okay, enough already! Just go away! I came to see a movie about a gang of insane dwarves and a kleptomaniac midget, not to watch Orlando Bloom dancing around shooting orcs from the top of peoples heads!

Duncan: That does hit the upper limit of what I can take for changes on the book, however, it was done to add a level of characterization to Bolg, son of Azog, the most feared of orc hunters, beyond the level of just saying “Oh yeah, that guy is a scary person,” meanwhile, who better to test an orc heir than an elvish one? So I feel that the changes made not just improved tie-ins, but extended on J.R.R. Tolkien’s original introduction to Bolg.

Andy: That’s actually another thing that annoyed me. Who the heck is Azog? He never appeared in the book, that’s for sure. The character Bolg in the book appeared for like five minutes at the very end, leading the combined armies of every goblin kingdom in the North. He showed up, wrecked some stuff, and then died. End of story. There was no race against the orcs to get to the Lonely Mountain, or a revenge subplot going on in the background. It was the story of a group of dwarves traveling across the world, and the hazards they encountered along the way. The goblins were just another one of those hazards, nothing more.

Duncan: Once again, this is Peter Jackson’s unique approach to characterization.  He gets to turn one book into three movies, have twice as many epic scenes, and the people watching get to see a better demonstration of the bad guy’s character than something along the lines of a made-up history lecture, which many of Tolkien’s works can feel like.  However, I do feel that the matter of the black arrow is of great importance.  In the original book, the “black arrow” was a family heirloom, passed on to bard by his father, and it was essentially used as a fluke, the arrow had never missed, and bard used as his final arrow, hoping that he would be able to hit his mark.  However, the movie changes this idea.  Instead of the black arrow being some relic of an ancient line of archers, now it was some dwarven invention created only to be fired from a “dwarven windlass” (fancy giant crossbow with four limbs instead of two) that was created for dragon slaying.  Now this blatantly contradicts the idea of the black arrow as some sign that Gideon’s line (bards family) was blessed, and the fact that the dwarves never prepared for any dragon, and lost to Smaug because they had no such weapon.

Andy: Yeah, that annoyed me too. The Black Arrow was supposed to be some sort of magical, blessed, kill-whatever-you-shoot-this-thing-at arrow, not a mass-produced, glorified ballista bolt. And there just happened to be the weapon required to shoot it in Laketown, ready to go as needed, yet they didn’t bother to stock it with Black Arrows, which the thing was designed to fire. Not the smartest people, are they?

Duncan: So, the Black Arrow was a bit too much to take.  I feel that one of the strongest scenes, and the hardest to really believe, is the fight with Smaug near the end.  To see them taunt a dragon into lighting furnaces, use the Dragon’s natural obsession with gold as a weapon against him, to see them running like madmen and working in unison to take their revenge, is perhaps one of the most impressive parts of the movie.  Plus, there were explosives, and even more fun watching people fly around on pulley systems!

Andy: I do agree, it did look very impressive. Plus my favorite scene of the entire movie (Thorin surfing a river of molten gold on a wheelbarrow) came from that part. But it was also the part that strained belief to the greatest degree. The fact that the group had a live dragon, who happened to be fighting on his home turf and with a massive advantage in fighting power, chasing them all around for almost twenty minutes, trying his best to kill them, and not a single one was even injured, was a little much for me to take. I could understand that happening if they were sneaking around and trying not to get caught, but these dwarves were maintaining an average distance of some twenty feet away from the dragon. Words do not do justice to how horrendous an idea like that is, but it worked out just fine for them. Even Thorin, who, as earlier stated was surfing a river of molten gold at the time, had to run under Smaug’s legs in order to shred those waves. In fact, now that I think of it, the only time anyone gets hurt in the entire movie was when Fili got shot during the escape from the elves by one of the ten thousand orcs that snuck through the heart of elvish territory because, wait for it…, they needed to give that elf chick a reason to follow the dwarves to Laketown, in order to continue the romance subplot that they just threw into the movie because… well actually they had no reason. So yeah, that was stupid.

Duncan: True enough, the strange romance is totally unnecessary.  But if the argument is that adding extra material to a great movie that does entertain is a bad thing, then all of the Lord of the Rings movies, and the previous Hobbit movie, are in fact all bad.  The point is: how much material can be crammed into a three part movie totaling about 9 or 10 hours, in the Lord of the Rings that meant taking material out, in The Hobbit that meant adding more material.  The easiest way to do this is add more prequel material for The Lord of the Rings.  Essentially the romance between Fili and Tauriel (the elf chick) acts both as entertaining material and more reason for Legolas (Orlando Bloom) to have an unusual hatred for Dwarves.  However, I do believe that we can agree that extending the scenes with Smaug is worthwhile because of the sheer quality of Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice acting and the animation detail.

Well, let’s wrap this up before we turn this into a 9 hour trilogy. Despite all of the massive plot holes, it was still a very entertaining movie, which, when you come down to it, is what movies are supposed to do. Suspension of disbelief is something that just comes with the territory. Nonetheless, it was a good movie and we strongly recommend going and seeing it.