Come anticipate CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR with me

Stan Lee is about a million times luckier than Ringo Starr

The whole audience cheered and applauded at the end of this. Don't think that would have happened at many B vs S screenings... especially in peckham.

The one character that Stan Lee indisputably created by himself is Stan Lee.

Frankly Mr Stank Lee

relax everyone stan lee will be dead soon

Now that Marvel is part of Disney, Stan gets a cryogenic suspension unit next to Walt

he's like the winter soldier now - they only break him out of cryogenic to make cameos in movies

I'll see this this weekend. In the meantime, I volunteer a couple of times a week at the elementary school library, and noticed today that the boys in the kindergarten class (most of whom are still more or less picture book level) were super excited to check out any book with "Civil War" in the title. I think this is a great opportunity for Marvel to get in on cross-promotional education opportunities: they should start affixing important historical events to every movie from here on out. "Spider-Man: Magna Carta." "Iron Man: Japanese Internment Camps." "Ant-Man: Dawn of Genetic Mapping." "Black Panther: Ada Lovelace, First Computer Programmer."

lol Tony Stank was great.

and "can you move your seat up?" "No."

also ws Aunt May

Aunt Tomei

Tomei-aged Aunt May makes way more sense than the traditional Aunt May who is somehow as old as Peter's great great grandmother.

is marisa tomei immortal? srs q

I thought Tony Stark was one of the few characters Stan Lee actually had a significant hand in creating. Well, the idea of a rich arms dealer who was also a superhero, anyway.

Eh, people have kids at odd ages, families have odd gaps between siblings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/movies/captain-america-civil-war-review-chris-evans.html

This very crowded, reasonably enjoyable installment in the Avengers cycle reveals, even more than its predecessors, an essential truth about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s not so much a grand science-fiction saga, or even a series of action-adventure movies, as a very expensive, perpetually renewed workplace sitcom.

This left me cold. Peaked about halfway thru with the big airport battle. The rest = zzzzz

Also really tired of these movies all looking the same. Dudes in colorful spandex fighting in anonymous parking structures and shit

Yeah workplace sitcom is about right

that's a feature not a bug etc etc

nouveau work sitcom

If anyone can convince me these movies are actually like JLI or Hitman I promise I will watch them

NB Hero Hotline is not high quality enough, Damage Control is too mired in impenetrably irrelevant Marvel continuity IME

No, these movies aren't actually like JLI or Hitman. For which we can all be thankful.

They're doing a comedic Damage Control TV series at some point.

Good old them.

I've tried my damnedest to figure out who owns the rights to Damage Control but all I've turned up is a web of anonymous holding companies so I'm gonna have to go with 'them' for the time being until more clues come to light about this enduring mystery.

Awww I loved JLI

this was enjoyable. black panther was badass, spidey was great, marisa tomei is still hot af. definitely not as good as winter soldier but it was fine. if you're getting sick of marvel movies though i don't think there's gonna be a lot here for you.

it's hard for to imagine how they shoehorn so many characters into two 1/2 hours gracefully. do they pull that off?

also i had a friend in college (cough almost 20 years ago cough) who had the biggest crush on marisa tomei, his dorm room was plastered with pictures of her

(another wall was plastered with images of bruce springsteen FWIW)

it's hard for to imagine how they shoehorn so many characters into two 1/2 hours gracefully. do they pull that off?

p much. the OG characters are fairly easy, and the new ones are pretty deftly inserted (Spidy transition a little forced, but it's still cool as fuck)

I've tried my damnedest to figure out who owns the rights to Damage Control but all I've turned up is a web of anonymous holding companies so I'm gonna have to go with 'them' for the time being until more clues come to light about this enduring mystery.

It's not a mystery that the best of JLI was done by either Maguire or Hughes with Giffen, DeMatteis and Helfer. It's also not a mystery that the best of Hitman was done by Ennis & McCrea. The covers might not say it, but the OK-to-goodish bits of Damage Control I've read were by McDuffie & Colón, or especially McDuffie & Baker. It was the pleasant, sitcommy nature of 'Mazing Man by The Answer Man and deStefano that made me get Hero Hotline out of 50c bins.

Based on their excellent work as directors and senior, hands-on producers on television sitcoms Community and Arrested Development, I'd be very intrigued by a superhero workplace sitcom by the Russos, if it was on the level of the other superhero workplace sitcoms I cited.

From his work writing and directing on sitcoms and comedy films and being funny on comedy gameshow podcasts, I was looking forward for years to Edgar Wright's comedy superhero film, and disappointed when he got boned off it weeks before production. Rudd's comedy instincts, combined with an enormous appreciation for Reed's directing and commentary track work on comedy films, got me to give their replacement work a go when I had to wait a few hours for somebody and nothing else was on.

Being mildly diverted by that movie where the little guy from Ghostbusters shrank his kids 22 years before didn't make me think the first Captain America would be a good or funny movie. Thinking The Transporter 2 was one of the best visually-directed action films I'd seen in years and years has not yet made me interested in seeing the second Hulk film. Liking the comedy film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang means I'll give Iron Man 3 a chance if it's ever five minutes from starting on TV when I'm home and not about to do anything else.

Comedy action films The Specials, Slither and Super, combined with Mantlo's brother's statement, made me go and see Gunn's next film on purpose in the cinema.

I've watched every episode of Buffy seasons 1-7 and Angel seasons 1-5 at least twice, but I went to see Much Ado About Nothing in the theatre in 2013, and have not been botherd to watch The Avengers even when it's been five minutes from starting on TV when I'm home.

Speaking of, the comedy relief bits with Keaton and Elton in the previous Much Ado I saw in the theatre don't instill much confidence that Thor is an effective workplace sitcom. What's it closer to: JLI #51, a Michael Schur show, or Keaton's Dogberry?

Alias is the easily second-least-awful Bendis comic I've read, but it didn't convince me to sample anything else he's done since in the hopes of similar bearability. The "idiot plot"ting, endless wheelspinning and utterly flat structure of Jessica Jones has not done anything to make me give The OC or the Twilight film adaptations the benefit of my previous profound doubts.

Successful executive producer of television Dwayne McDuffie is still dead IIRC?

I thought this was OK. It's got some issues--it might not be quite as good as Age of Ultron tbph--but the stuff it does well, it does really well.

Sorry, I meant to note "Rudd's comedy instincts" in workplace sitcoms like Wet Hot American Summer and Parks & Recreation. Not so sold on McKay's own workplace comedies The Other Guys or Anchorman 2, but the resulting film didn't appear to be trying to be a workplace sitcom to me - though it would likely have been much stronger if it had. Have Peña work within a variety of ensemble scenes, rather than stealing the screen, let Douglas' gravitas be undercut through interaction, and probably do more with that guy who plays Agent Kington in workplace sitcom / action film hybrid Decker.

man u shd pitch marvel or smth

this was, i thought, much better than age of ultron. possibly it helped that i saw it in 4d, half-drunk--every action sequence seemed more interesting than every equivalent sequence in that movie; there was a lot more to work with in light relief; none of the 'serious' bits as out-of-left-field forced as scarlett johansson's weird monologue whedon apparently had left over from dollhouse. that said, i'd probably have felt better about myself if i'd gone to see a movie for grown-ups.

the big airport fight sequence is probably the first time i've seen, on film, the wacky fun over-the-top superhero fight done well--ant-man being launched on hawkeye's arrows, and so forth. the action-as-in-punching-people pretty much a freitag's triangle deal, building from the ground-level stuff to the increasingly ridiculous, and declining to a finish with three guys punching each other repeatedly in front of a fixed camera. the action-as-in-the-narrative kind of all over the place. which is okay, i guess, for an action film--and kind of free-ing--as long as the whizzbang moments follow the correct rules of scale, you can put whatever you want in between them, it's a free lunch. winter soldier had much better free lunches.

this ruled

xp really? Because I did think everything Black Widow did in this movie felt a little forced and weird. I feel like they need to get her the fuck out of the Avengers tbh, have her hang out w Daredevil or something for a while...

Anyways, I'm p much undecided at this point. Spidey was great, Black Panther was great, the airport scene was exhilarating, and RDJ, Evans, and Stan delivered great performances throughout. There were definitely stretches of this movie where I kept thinking 'This isn't actually that good ," but I left the the theater p satisfied, so it's possible a lot of my problems w the movie boils down to minor quibbles with some of the decisions the Russo bros. made that prob couldn't be improved upon goven what all had to happen here, and the fact that I thought the movie's take on Zemo was pretty terrible...

i saw this, it didn't seem particularly better or worse than several of the recent marvel movies. thought the demands of franchising -- shoehorning all the characters into the plot -- meant that, as usual with these things, the narrative was fairly lumpy. and a lot of the action lacked kinetic force for just being hard to tell what was happening. i know, i know, that's the familiar complaint, but it was true a lot of the time. (e.g. the staircase fight with cap and bucky; the airport stuff was a little bit better.) in general thought the utter lack of visual filigree was a little bit depressing. there were some downright ugly shots, which you don't really expect in something this pricey. but i wasn't bored, much.

nearly every narrative beat of this movie felt overfamiliar to me. i know that genre is all about taking familiar materials and varying them up, but somehow i felt like this embodied that truism in an especially literal way-- like the whole film was just a light reshuffling of narrative beats, character motivations, etc. from other superhero movies, probably other marvel movies.

i mean, i guess it was just about what i expected, maybe a little less given the surprisingly outstanding reviews...

i miss mazing man. still have all the floppies.

I thought this was OK. Had some real "Empire Strikes Back" vibes (and not just for the obvious reasons). A lot of dark turns, a lot of "I am your father" stuff, a lot of walking into rooms and having the automatic doors slam shut and then there's a fight. Ant-man was a great addition to the vibe. Spider-man was good, but super weird how he was just squeezed in to the story. Vs. Black Panther, who was awesome and whose introduction had some weight to it.

Was pretty put off by the pervasive CG work, tbh. I know these things are virtually (no pun intended) all CG, but the character animation of Iron Man and Spider-man in particular was a little distracting.

Was thinking how this Spider-man was essentially the equivalent of bizarro Marvel's Quicksilver. Young, funny, quippy, etc.

bizarro Marvel's Quicksilver.

What's the difference between Marvel's Quicksilver and bizarro Marvel's Quicksilver?

(Also young, funny, quippy = normal Spider-Man, no?)

that's one of the great things about this - we finally got an actual teenager Spider-Man

He's not being continually ground down by Great Responsibility, for a start.

they just allude to it for a second and then it's quickly forgotten among all the banter about his hot Aunt May

are we doing full spoilers now?

ok if not now then when is cap gonna die already? i thought his contract was up like 4 movies ago

tbh marvel should always leak false info about contracts ending, actually build some stakes

Xpost I meant the scene stealing Quicksilver in the X-Men movies, who is young and funny and irrelevant, vs the one in the real Marvel movies, who is not. And is dead.