Come anticipate CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR with me

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.

Just like Civil War itself, this was mainly Captain America: The Talkening. It never really got going, plus Zero's plan was utterly ludicrous and way more complex than it needed to be. It really only works if he always knew that PLOT SPOILERS REDACTED and if then all he needed was the film then what was all the "mission debrief" in aid of?

Airport scene was cool but felt incongruous, if Cap movies are conspiracy thrillers (see also "hey, Manchurian Candidate").

I also wasn't keen on the overly kinematic way the fights were filmed, especially early on.

what on earth does 'kinematic' mean in that sentence

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

at the scene in the end where he smashes the thing, i was like, hm, let me just google to see if that thing has the significance it has in the first movie it was introduced, oh, guess it does, well, that was some bathos for me

Friggin' loved this, unsurprisingly. I don't go into these movies expecting groundbreaking cinematic works or novel takes on the narrative form but I'm always thoroughly satisfied. Marvel makes a certain type of movie and they do what they set out to do so well.

Boring reiteration of the points everyone in the world has already made: Spider-Man was spectacular, and it was such a great choice picking an actor whose voice hasn't even properly broken. The moment with Ant-Man (you know the one) was genuinely thrilling and, while I should've totally expected it, I was totally surprised. Action scenes were great and startlingly coherent throughout (cinematic fight scenes have come a loooooong way in my time). I'm pretty sure I was grinning like an idiot throughout.

The only real criticism I have is on the behalf of the casual fan inasmuch as this definitely felt like the thirteenth film in a series. As a Marvel Zombie, I love that it feels like you picked up a random issue in the middle of a years-long comic run, but I can see where the multitude of references to previous films and lack of clear resolution could be off-putting to people who just want to dip in and enjoy a Captain America movie.

xpost Google failed you, then, because the thing Cap smashed lost its significance at the end of the third movie of the guy in possession of said thing. But I definitely saw that scene in the context of audience members who maybe hadn't seen or didn't remember said third movie and were probably like, "holy shit, did Cap actually just (REDACTED)?!?"

You guys, GIANT-MAN

I guess we're officially doing spoilers, then.

@thomp xpost

I'm using kinematic to means the in-close, constantly moving camera that imo distracts from the action. All the early fights leading up to that thing that happens w Scarlet Witch are particularly bad for it.

I'm sure it's a word I've seen used before, I'd guess a portmanteau of kinetic and cinematic, if not then I've invented it.

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You mean the Greengrass/Spielberg you're right there in the action shake-cam? Yeah, it could have been a little smoother, I guess.

I just saw this yesterday and I have no idea what any of you are talking about re: Captain America smashing something. I mean, there is a lot of smashing.

Also a lot of power-splainin' going on - "Falcon, go get your little Falcon out and use it to run recon and set a trap." "Spider-man, use your adhesive webbing and great powers of agility to stop that thing." "Scarlet Witch, is it true that your ill-defined powers allow you to move things with your mind?" That kind of thing. No real problem with it, because it's largely used in service of fun. I liked Tony Stark's self-conscious "does anyone else have any surprise new powers that can help us out of this mess?" I like that the Vision's powers are as-yet totally ill-defined here. Keeps him mysterious. That's a great example of comics people being at an advantage, because even if a newbie saw him first in Avengers and now here, I think they would still have trouble telling exactly what he is - human? robot? Spock?- and what he can do. Clearly he will become more important in the next Avengers films.

Josh, we're talking about the very final instance of Cap smashing.

box office records amirite

xpost I still don't know what you mean! You mean the iconic part of that other character's costume that he crushes with his shield? What's the significance of that? Oh, I see, you're saying it's *not* significant anymore, because it serves a different purpose than it initially did. I think I get it. Though clearly said character with a shield does not kill the other character, so I'm not sure why anyone would think it significant, other than how long they linger on the twisting the knife, as it were.

Josh, yes, that's the cam I mean. I'm not a fan I guess.

The reactor. He smashes the reactor in Iron Man's chest.

box office records amirite

― i do not sense the entity ted (bizarro gazzara), Sunday, May 8, 2016 10:49 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In its US opening weekend after being open for a week overseas (so based on like eight days' receipts total), Civil War's global box office is currently just $200 million shy of Superman v Batman's lifetime gross, which I'd guess it's almost guaranteed to surpass by the time it's been open in the US for a full seven days. Such beautiful schadenfreude.

It's already the 87th highest grossing movie of all time. Globally. After it's been open for like two days in the US.

I don't usually give that much of a shit about this stuff but they deserve the success.

i just remembered the brief shot from the final fight of Bucky yelling 'you killed cap!' at iron man which was in one of the trailers but isn't in the movie - i guess they shot that just to fuck with freeze-framing nerds huh

I guess it was 'steve's dead'

https://49.media.tumblr.com/bec0c7371e5509ad8d5734f74cade9c1/tumblr_nye5eqOaS31ue1oh7o2_500.gif

It's already the 87th highest grossing movie of all time. Globally. After it's been open for like two days in the US.

You, ah, you do know what globally means, right?

Xpost got it. Reactor used to be needed to keep Stark alive, but in this movie it's ... Just a chest reactor.

xpost I, ah, I do know what globally means, yes. If you scroll up just a scooch you'll see the part where I acknowledge that it's been open for a week elsewhere.

Heading in to see this now

he's breakin his heart guys don't you get it *THE SYMBOLISM*

Reactor is just a power source for a suit of armor that also is a rocket, smartphone, life support system, etc.

I was actually slightly curious to see if the suit would still allow Stark move after it had been disabled, tbph

I am in the theater now, so you guys can start posting spoilers in ten minutes when I turn off my phone

The villain is the guy from Mungo Jerry

This movie would have been 10% better if they didn't bother with a bad guy at all and just had our heroes getting mad at each other and beating one another up. Because this bad guy was barely even there. I wasn't even sure if he was a villain from the books? Because he's not the villain of the same name from the comics, right, just some Euro shlub with a grudge?

Daniel Brühl is one hell of a soporific screen presence.

i saw some idiot alleged-adult on the subway w/ a CaptAm shield/backpack and wanted to hulksmash

Airport scene was cool but felt incongruous, if Cap movies are conspiracy thrillers (see also "hey, Manchurian Candidate").

Only Winter Soldier had aspects of conspiracy thriller. The first CA flick was Joe Johnston finally getting to do a proper WWII-action-with-some-dieselpunk flick that he attemped to do with the Rocketeer.

I enjoyed this a lot. Not sure if it tops CA:WS overall, but I read something a coupla days that I agree with: that the airport sequence was when they really did finally pull off everything that a grand superhero comic book film should be.

Interesting that you deliberately have this film coming out so close after BvS and the contrast between two different views of collateral damage.

Zemo in the comics looks like this:

http://images-cdn.moviepilot.com/images/c_fill,h_540,w_960/t_mp_quality/igodeuuz5oapfau1imjf/could-baron-helmut-zemo-become-marvel-s-smartest-movie-villain-655834.jpg

and we seriously didn't need him in this flick.

Also, we live in a time where the majority of trailers in front of a tentpole superhero films are other superhero films(and Rogue One, in my screening, which was fun to see projected that big. Those klaxons sound GREAT on a theater's sound system).

Most surprising aspect of this film was that there were still great moments not spoilered by trailers or advance hype.

I love that the 'punch you in your perfect teeth' line that was so RMDE-worthy in the trailers is totally recontextualized as a friendly jab in the movie and works just fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJvUTFVqwJQ

I love that the 'punch you in your perfect teeth' line that was so RMDE-worthy in the trailers is totally recontextualized as a friendly jab in the movie and works just fine.

totally. I didn't love this as much as I thought I might - the setup felt a bit forced and the preposterous appearance of some ~incriminating footage~ kinda dulled the edge of what should have been a big moment, but scene by scene it was great. spidey was both hilarious and unexpectedly profound. "can you move your seat up" and attendant schtick a total delight.