also just going to go ahead and have a Captain America: The Winter Soldier thread

Been thinking of making this thread for a while, finally pulled the trigger: Rolling Marvel Cinematic Universe thread (+ a poll: Classic or Dud?)

bizarro gazzara long post OTM

BTW, I saw some weird backpedalling - or obfuscation - on the part of Marvel that the Stephen Strange mention means there's a movie/character introduction coming...

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, April 6, 2014

what backpedaling? they name-checked him. that's it!

Kevin Feige:

"Well, 'we' know what it means and where we want to head with it, but we were comfortable with keeping it in there and leaving it in there because there are a few different ways to interpret it. The whole thing, what Sitwell's saying is, this algorithm is going to predict if you're going to become a problem for Hydra or not. So you don't have to just be Tony Stark, actively plotting to save the world. You could be a kid whose SAT scores and whose essays have indicated that you're going to be a problem one day. So is Stephen Strange the Sorcerer Supreme? Probably not at that point. Is he an unbelievably talented neurosurgeon who's opinionated and kind of arrogant? Probably. That might put him on the list."

Kevin Feige:

right. we name-checked him. that's it

I enjoyed this but it seemed, I don't know, too wedded to the whole idea of the box ticking mythology. I mean, did anyone actually spot ghat Toby Jones played Arnim Zola in the first film? And he felt kind of superfluous in this, the whole HYDRA infiltration could have happened without needing him in it at all. Ditto the Falcon, who seemed to be there primarily for the 'throw the bad guy off the roof' joke but mainly because the comics say he's Cap's mate when he's hiding/undercover.

Obviously I knew from the title about Bucky, so watching from that POV they really trowelled on the hints before the reveal.

It felt to me like the Falcon was there because Captain America can be a pretty dull character who benefits from a strong supporting cast in order to round him out a bit. Cap's an old soldier, who mentions that all his WWII buddies are dead, so it makes a certain amount of sense to have a modern soldier for him to relate to, bond with and cast a different light on his experiences.

From a purely plot-related perspective, the film calls for Cap to be out in the cold with no-one to trust, so having a new friend for him to rely on who isn't involved in SHIELD makes sense too, and the Falcon is a logical choice - especially since Marvel movies have been rightly criticised for featuring a lot of white guys in leading roles.

And yeah, I remembered Toby Jones as Zola from the first film. He spent a lot of time with the Red Skull. Between you and Josh in Chicago, I'm starting to feel like I was the only one paying attention during the first movie. They didn't strictly need him in there, I guess, but they did need someone to explain the HYDRA infiltration and using Zola provided another link to the first movie (which I guess could be a challenge considering they're set 70 years apart and share few characters) and also allowed them to provide a wink and a nod to comics fans by making him stuck inside a TV screen like the Zola of the comics. Plus, it gave us the '200,000 feet of magnetic tape!' joke which I lolled at.

Cap's little notebook of things to learn about, which includes the entry "Star Trek/Wars," creates one of those celebrity paradox things: Sam Jackson has been in the Star Wars films, and Chris Hemsworth has been in a Trek film. Does Cap notice that characters in those movies look just like Thor and Nick Fury?

Cap's cultural catch-up list also included the 1966 World Cup, so I wondered if it was a different list for different territories

Nick Fury just looks uncannily like Sam Jackson.

http://cdn.themis-media.com/media/global/images/library/deriv/705/705450.jpg
http://wpc.556e.edgecastcdn.net/80556E/img.site/PHvTwzsGPwpHzB_1_m.jpg

xp yes, yes it was: http://io9.com/captain-americas-catch-up-list-is-different-in-differe-1555534018

Instead of I Love Lucy, he's learning about the British show Sherlock. And instead of the Berlin Wall, it's the Beatles.

And Cap's list is different in other countries, too. According to Slashfilm:

Aussies have AC/DC, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, and Steve Irwin added to the list, while Koreans get Ji Sung Park, Dance Dance Revolution, and Oldboy. French fans see the 1998 World Cup and The Fifth Element, among other things.

That's pretty awesome actually.

Heh, in the comments:

Monty Python's Flying Circus
Moon Landing
The British Invasion (not an act of war)
Punk Rock (genre)
Benny Hill
Thai Food
Star Wars/Trek
Ramones (band)
Rocky (Rocky II?)
Troubleman (Soundtrack)

That's the suggested "improved" UK list, btw.

I believe they took suggestions from test screening audiences as to what should be on the UK list. Hence Sherlock

I like that Star Wars is crossed off the US list. Wonder what he thought?

Star Wars/Marvel crossover will def. happen now.

I enjoyed this.

Got a kick out of the Marathon Man set-up scene in the beginning, and Redford's All the Presidents Men costume ref. Apparently the Shield HQ bldg is located where the Watergate actually is.

The heavy contrast of ending titles was a great summary of the two different genres they went for: the 1st is a rah-rah WWII film and so they used propaganda art, vs the 2nd is a 70s paranoid spy thriller and has something between Maurice Binder and Saul Bass designed titles.

I dug that they explicitly namechecked "the Howling Commandos".

Nick Fury torching his storage locker is a nice bit of imagery but doesnt really work when the establishing shot of it shows nothing but fire-proof metal cases.

The upgraded helicarriers were death star in function, but Battlestar/SDF1 in design.

I don't think they could do much about the Bucky reveal, seeing as how the comics had decades of emotional impact with the running joke that everyone comes back from the dead, except Bucky.

I think a lot of the deeper refs I missed, since I grew up obsessed over the xmen, not the avengers.

And the product placement was annoying.

Watched the first film last night, so a lot of stuff was fresh in my mind, like the fact that the first shot of Toby Jones' Zola is thru a lens/screen:

http://cdn.screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/Arnim-Zola-East-Egg-in-Captain-America-The-First-Avenger.png

Falcon has his own Lego minifig now:

http://marveltoynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/LEGO-Marvel-Falcon-Minifigure-with-Serious-Face-Expression-640x480.jpg

gary shandling reveal was so great, glad they didn't cut it for dvd extra.

I have no idea how I didn't guess the Zola angle in the second one after I'd noticed the foreshadowing in the first one!

Cool to see Redford play a fascist in his own conspiracy movie. Also, “wtf is with garry shandling's face” has “About 2,200,000 results”

I like that they foregrounded Jenny Agutter from the shadowy Council

I was disappointed it wasn't actually her doing all that asskicking

I thought, "wow this lady is a badass too eh?" then it turned out to be some Tom Cruise Mission Impossible shit.

still it was a pretty fun movie. I liked how many doors were blown off in this move.

http://x1.fjcdn.com/thumbnails/comments/4071127+_358b6267776b0c7c70f562774b630280.gif

Watched this on the plane. I mean watched half of it because it was phenomenally boring. Avengers had its problems but Whedon, at least, knows how to write a line of text. "We needed a quantum surge in threat analysis." Who writes this shit? Really? They are going to READ PEOPLE'S DNA FROM A SATELLITE? Why do they put the longitude and latitude of locations in the establishing shot? Just to emphasize how much watching this is like watching a mid-season episode of a third-tier action show on USA Network or FX? The action setpieces, at least the ones I saw, were just dull. Anonymous figures bouncing off walls and punching each other to little effect.

Thor 2 at least was funny in places. This, at least in the first half, was not. Johanssen seems to wince at some of the "snappy" lines she has to read. They should have put Madcap in this movie and gone all-out wacky/bleak.

Johanssen actually wrote some of those snappy lines

I guess she figured she couldn't do any worse than the actual screenwriters.

this was appallingly stupid and inept.

Thank you.

darraghmac hates America

one of his best qualities

jaysus the glare of the three magi all at once

http://wp.streetwise.co/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/hocus-pocus.jpeg

"ello, we're maggie"

I had heard going in that this was arguably the best Marvel film to date, and it's hard for me to disagree. It's very good as an action film, above average as a paranoid thriller type homage, though still probably a bit overstated on that point in terms of what actually is happening in the story. Again the casting is really key; Chris Evans is good in the role but more crucially he's extremely likable in a part that could be a lot more boring and not very interesting, this extremely good and righteous moral hero who doesn't have much if anything in the way of dark shading. It could fall completely flat, cf any post-Christopher Reeve Superman, for example. But it's been executed really well in both of the CapAm films I've seen.

It does remind me to a certain extent of The Dark Knight, in a lot of it seems to be taking from genre thrillers rather than superhero films, but it's not nearly as morose and the Hydra plot is more interestingly diabolical.

this is however another Marvel film in which the climax involves large craft blasting away high in the sky and eventually falling slowly to the ground in a smoking ruin while people battle onboard and try to escape before it crashes....

apart from the brief appearance of Toby Jones, I snored through this

Well but what did you think of the 3.5 minutes you saw of the film?

pretty good!

it was just one of those things where the stakes seemed nonexistent and the "conspiracy" pretty obvious

If anyone, three or four more Marvel movies down the line, remembers a single solitary detail from this movie with any affection, I'll ... no, that will not even remotely happen. This is placeholder serialized franchise filmmaking at its most useless.

― Eric H., Sunday, April 6, 2014 12:11 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Posts that didn't age well

" this is however another Marvel film in which the climax involves large craft blasting away high in the sky and eventually falling slowly to the ground in a smoking ruin while people battle onboard and try to escape before it crashes...."

I think this has happened now in every Marvel movie since.

I haven't seen Endgame yet, but out of the 12 movies between Winter Soldier and it, it happens in 3: Guardians of the Galaxy, Age of Ultron, and Homecoming.