‘Captain America: Civil War’ is an allegory for American politics

You’d think that an ultimate showdown between superheroes would be funny and absurd as Lemon Demon’s “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny,” but Anthony and Joe Russo’s superhero showdown “Captain America: Civil War” isn’t funny.

The only part that’s remotely funny is the banter in an almost 12-minute battle sequence at an airport.

Other than that, the painstakingly long two-and-a-half hour film is mostly about what keeps bubbling up in conversations: politics.

Written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, “Captain America: Civil War” centers on a political debate America’s all too familiar with: the battle between whether governmental bodies should have more or less oversight. In it, the Avengers become an allegory for America and representatives within the organization aren’t willing to compromise on how the Avengers should be governed.

Armed in his red Iron Man costume, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) stands with democratic values, believing that the United Nations should oversee the Avenger team. Donning a red, white and blue shield, Captain America (Chris Evans) sides with traditional republicans beliefs, advocating for less governmental control and more freedom of choice.

The resulting arguments aren’t pretty. They’re nasty, vindictive and very, very physical (These are the Avengers after all). Plenty of people get hurt. And even after the battles are over, the fissure remains.

“Captain America: Civil War” was directed by brothers Joe and Anthony Russo. The screenplay was written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. 

‘Marlena’: a coming-of-age retrospective wrapped in mystery and nostalgia

You know that scene in “Footloose” where the pastor’s daughter, Ariel, climbs through a window and straddles a moving sedan and pickup truck as they’re driving head-on toward a tractor trailer?

With age and perspective, you watch this scene with paralyzing fear — fearing that you’re about to watch a tragic car crash you can’t prevent. But when you’re young and living these moment, your friends cloak you with a coat of invincibility. As long as you’re with them, you feel like you can fly.

“Marlena”
By Julie Buntin.
274 pp. Henry Holt and Company. $26.
2017.

Julie Buntin’s debut novel “Marlena” oscillates between youth and adulthood, wrapping mystery with nostalgia.

Ariel is how I imagine Marlena Joyner — the beautiful, wild and effervescent center of this novel.

Unlike Ariel though, Marlena doesn’t miraculously avoid collision. She dies tragically young before the novel even begins. Years later, Marlena’s ghost still haunts the thoughts of her best childhood friend, Cat.

Cat is twice the age that Marlena ever got to be. But even as she nears 36, Cat vividly remembers how it felt like to be 15 and to befriend her next-door neighbor Marlena — “to the first time I heard Stevie Nicks, to watching the snow fall outside the window with a paperback folded open in my lap, to the moment before I tasted alcohol, to virginity and not really knowing that things die, back to believing that something great is still up ahead, back to before I made the choices that would hem me to the life I live now.”

Each chapter pivots between Cat’s current life in New York City and her former life in Silver Lake, Michigan, a small dead-end town mostly populated by tourists in the summer. Her memories takes her back to the year when Marlena was still alive, the year when her mom had just divorced her dad and moved Jimmy and her to a town in the middle of nowhere northern Michigan — the kind of place where “there aren’t words for the catastrophic dreariness.”

The only light was Marlena, who was both danger and exhilaration — dangling the keys of friendship and peer pressure in the form of booze, pills and cigarettes. Cat was addicted to how friendship made her feel while “pretending to be girls with minor secrets, listening to Joni Mitchell with the volume turned up.”

Written in first person, “Marlena” seems like a cautionary tale, but it’s not a book about not living. It’s a book about remembering — remembering how the people in your life shaped how you are today.

‘Pachinko’: When life pushes you around, you have to keep playing

My family doesn’t often tell me stories, but I’ve seen their wishes and dreams in their actions. How they moved over continents for their children. How they scrimped and saved to send us through school. How they worked 18-hour days with no vacations, seven days a week. How they always made sure that even if we didn’t have much, we always had full stomachs.

For this, they traded the ease of communication, learning a foreign language in a foreign country when they were well into their early thirties. It wasn’t easy, but as my mother tries to explain to me, a parent lives for their children.

Sometimes I wonder if my parents gave up more than they gained by immigrating to America. For years, they’ve lost touch with their family and friends, isolated in an area where they didn’t know the language or culture.

My mom vividly remembers the helplessness she felt when I was feverish and sick as a baby. She tried to take me to a pharmacist, but she didn’t know enough English to explain what was wrong with her child.

“Pachinko”
By Min Jin Lee
490 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $27
2017.

Years later, we still have trouble communicating. Google Translate can be a bridge to understanding, but it’s never enough — which is why a book like Min Jin Lee’s “Pachinko” is such a treasure.

Lee, who is a first generation Korean American, writes about the immigrant’s journey with such incredible empathy that it almost feels like she held a magnifying glass on my family’s soul and started transcribing. Lee’s words express sentiments of love and loss — using the Japanese game of pachinko as a metaphor for life. (“Man, life’s going to keep pushing you around, but you have to keep playing.”)

This game almost spans an entire century — from 1910 when Japan occupied Korea to 1989 after Korea was split into North and South Korea following World War Two. The book follows four generations of a humble Korean family that immigrated from Korea to Japan.

The protagonist for much of the book is Sunja, the daughter of Yangjin and Hoonie, humble boarding house keepers on a small and coastal Korean village.

When she was 16, Sunja became pregnant with a married man’s child. Knowing that her son would become a bastard without a surname, Sunja takes a kind and sickly Korean pastor’s offer to marry.

The 26-year-old Korean pastor, Baek Isak, was a Christian missionary on his way to Osaka, where he had accepted a teaching position at a local church. He and his newly married wife, Sunja, were to meet his brother, Yoseb, and sister-in-law, Kyunghee, in Osaka.

While Yoseb and Kyunghee were thrilled to have more family close by, Japan didn’t welcome them. Koreans were seen as dirty, lazy and violent troublemakers who were quick to anger.

“Pachinko” beautifully and tragically chronicles how a woman raised her kids by peddling kimchi; how a man attracted to men was still expected to marry a woman; how Japanese kids cruelly sent death threats to their Korean peers; how a father couldn’t protect his son from racial prejudice and discrimination; how a Korean born in Japan could still be deported even if he spent his entire life there; how it feels like to pinball between two cultures and not belonging to either; and how try as you might, you can never escape your blood.