Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

I was worried that this would actually overplay itself in about a half-dozen different ways, but this is actually great - the excellent cast is only improved by more time for Michael Rooker.

Nice. Can't wait for next Thursday.

there's a lot of deft character work in here - everyone gets a little arc of their own and it's all pretty satisfying, even *sob gasp* touching at times

the way the central conflict sneaks up is clever - i spent a while not quite certain of when the villain would show up and from where

**rockets magically eject from ankles and propel me skyward as Looking Glass' "Brandy" plays**

― ╲╱\/╲/\╱╲╱\/\ (gr8080), Wednesday, 3 September 2014 21:26 (two years ago) Permalink

thought this was mostly bad tbh. Everything grating about the first film x10 (and I really liked the first film in general)

Nah, it was totally great start to stop (and beyond). Too many good moments to count, and it all looked beautiful to boot. Rooker and Bautista FTW but the whole ensemble was pretty sharp.

(Plus eight million perfectly timed easter eggs, cameos, etc.)

I'm seeing this on Sunday morning and I can't WAIT :D

i am so going to see this so hard.

probably tonight. my olde tyme theater has it in two rooms. which is nice.

i should probably call over there and ask which is the bigger screen...

Perhaps even more than the first, it is the ultimate VegGrrl movie.

:D :D

There are a couple of moments I'm thinking of where you will completely lose your shit. They're that perfectly done.

can I watch this movie from inside a bag of doritos

Haha, noticed this just now from IMDB -- clearly Gunn's parents:

Jim Gunn Sr. ...
Weird Old Man

Leota Gunn ...
Weird Old Man's Mistress

Also a number of Farscape nerds have been happy to note Ben Browder's in the film. (As is Rob Zombie.)

Nice interview with Gunn on music:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-guardians-of-the-galaxy-2-james-gunn-soundtrack-20170504-story.html

Clearing the use for such classic chart-toppers can sometimes prove an onerous process. Gunn feared that securing the rights to “The Chain” could be particularly difficult, with each member of the famously contentious Fleetwood Mac needing to sign off on its use.

I am imagining Gunn desperately trying to get a hold of each of them and dealing with each of their individual manias.

i find the music clearance stuff really interesting

If you didn't like this you're wrong

Gunn's brother becomes worthy of his SAG card with the pretty hat line

"One's BLUE."

All the Mantis / Drax stuff.
All the family stuff.

What struck me, especially hanging around for the several mid-credits scenes and the post-credits one, is how much collective creativity movies like this represent. Shit on the DisneyMarvel machine all you want, there are thousands of little touches in here that come from hundreds of people and you can tell. It doesn't feel like an auteur piece, but at the same time it's very close to Wes Anderson In Space, in a good way.

"it's very close to Wes Anderson In Space..."

you can't scare us out of seeing this movie.

It's very close to Wes Anderson in Space if Wes Anderson was any good.

If you don't like Fantastic Mr. Fox you're also wrong.

I knew when I wrote that sentence I was going to immediately catch shit from the ILX

We are cruel that way.

I do love that Gunn's big change this time around was essentially to up the Rooker content.

Good

In every way, literally.

I get the idea you liked this movie, tombot.

All the Mantis / Drax stuff.

These two were really funny. That was the best stuff in the movie.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--dK83bKv6--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/h4zt6xbwcyuzjag7swam.jpg

my "in every way" was to Ned's remark about "up the Rooker content"

but they also upped everyone else - the first movie was about Star Lord, this one is really about everybody else.

Very true. And it was nice how it wasn't just redoing plot beats from the first but expanding on a lot of specific points/arcs from it instead.

Nice hyperbreakdown of a lot of the Easter eggs. Spoilers, obv.

http://screenrant.com/guardians-galaxy-2-easter-eggs/

http://i.imgur.com/aSXzjWf.png

cyberhyberhyper

This was perfectly fun. A little smug and full of itself, but that's always preferable to overly serious. It did lean hard on one of the hoariest sci-fi tropes, though, the paradise planet with a dark secret, but that was fine, too. Loved the gold people.

Incidentally, pretty high violent body count for such a light film. That goes for all the Marvel movies, of course, but those are more generic bang, fall down deaths, or explosions. This one features huge numbers of dudes being sadistically slaughtered, for giggles.

I do like the high concept nature of all these comic book movies in that they parallel the creative diversity of the original medium. That is, the characters are the same, but the inkers, artists, writers, etc., are different. You could read, say, Thor at several different times and each issue or run could be totally different from the last, for better or for worse. Or Spider-man. Or any of the titles, really. My daughter said after this was over, "there could be a hundred Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and they'd all be the same and they'd all be good." She's right. And if (when?) that happens, these first two or three would be considered "the James Gunn run" or whatever.

If there's been a failing of this Marvel cinematic run it's that the movies have been a little *too* consistent, but so it goes.

I loved the end credits, not just the goofy breaking the fourth wall dancing around (anyone else notice Jeff Goldblum popping up dancing in the credits? Or was the Sly?) but playing find the "I Am Groot" tags, which my audience at least got a kick out of more than all the post credits scenes.

I wasn't thrilled with the scene of the mutineers being slaughtered. My reactions to movie violence are not consistent, but that one left me a bit depressed. I don't like the arrow weapon.

Agree that the high body count felt gratuitous. At least with the space battles they tried to avoid mass killings by having the bad guys use remote-controlled drone ships, but that one particular scene with the massive onscreen slaughter of living beings was too much. They tried to sorta justify it in that the slaughter was both necessary (so the good guys could escape) and a righteous revenge (because the bad guys had tortured the good guys and killed a bunch of their companions), but the scene went on too long and there was way too much loving detail put into showing all those deaths.

I think that scene exemplifies the biggest problem with this movie, which is that it tends to exaggarate and overdo the elements that made the first GotG movie so great. The previous movie had one character killing 10 others in a cool way? This time he kills 200! Vol. 1 had Rocket Raccoon improvise on technology to defeat some bad guys? This time he does the same to a whole army of them! Vol. 1 had some key scenes soundtracked by soft rock and soul hits from the '70/'80s that Star-Lord likes? This time the whole team likes them, they're played all the time, and the songs and their lyrics are even commented onscreen! Vol. 1 had some of the tense action and drama broken by inappropriately humourous comments, mostly by Rocket and Drax? This time that happens in pretty much every dramatic scene!

But the biggest problem IMO, is that this movie kinda overdid main it's emotional/psychological theme, which was pretty much the same one as in the first movie. In Vol. 1, you had these losers and broken people, who had all lost their families in one way or another (if they even had one to begin with), come together as a family of choice. And that was actually the way they defeated the bad guy: by holding each others' hands so they could handle the power of the Infinity Stone! It was the obvious theme of the movie, but they didn't need to spell it out so loudly, it came across with the characters' actions and choices.

But Vol. 2 deals with dysfunctional and/or broken family relations in way more overt way. The theme is even stated in dialogue by Drax, when Nebula asks him what sort of friends the Guardians are, and Drax says they're not friends but family. And that's okay, I don't think it's necessarily a flaw if a movie makes it obvious what its central theme is, it doesn't always have to be subtle. But it gets kinda tiring how every main character gets his own "family of choice" arc in the movie; this is most evident in the finale, where all of this subplots need to be tied up, so there are just too many tearjerking moments in a row (a la Return of the King).

But don't get me wrong, some of these emotional arcs actually work pretty nicely, because they feel organic and have their roots in the previous movie. IMO the ones that work include the love/hate sisterly relation between Nebula and Gamora, and the way Drax bonds with Mantis, whom he obviously sees as kind of a surrogate daughter (since he'd lost his own). Both of those actually brough tears to my eyes. But some of them feel kinda forced; for example, the bonding between Yondu and Rocket comes pretty much out of nowhere, and it seems they just added it there so Rocket could have his own arc too. So it's all a bit overdone, they would've gotten the message and the theme across without needing to apply it to every character. It's just too neat.

Btw, the way they handled Nebula's rage towards Thanos makes me suspect they're gonna use her in Avengers 3 the same way Starlin did in Infinity Gauntlet. Which I think would be cool, because in the movies they've added a Shakespearean edge to her by having her be Thanos's abused daughter bent on patricide. Whereas in the comics she was just Thanos's self-proclaimed granddaughter, who hadn't even met him before the IG plot started rolling.

It took a rather surprisingly long time for this thread to finally enter massive spoiler territory.

I empathize with the too-many-people-killed-deliberately-with-a-flying-shiv position, but it compels me to remind you that the first movie crushed thousands of xandarians with a spaceship. These are not set-to-stun movies. And quite seriously, those guys were pirates who mutinied and Yondu was going through them to get to his son. I would have punctured all of them too, probably.

also, they'd murdered all but one of yondu's crew, who are basically his family, by exposing them one-by-one to the hard vacuum of space right in front of him

the slaughter felt pretty in-character for yondu tbh

Speaking of Nebula, I thought the only bad sfx (bad as in "you can see the strings," not bad as in OTT or gross or silly) in this film was when she is delivering her monologue in close-up and you can tell her eye piece is painted on and not a prosthetic.

An argument could be made that baby groot is a little too much of a cartoon but to be clear he is totally a cartoon shut up.

(Noted that while enumerating all the "that was a hit last time so let's lay it on even thicker this time" examples, Tuomas does not mention baby Groot at all. This is because baby Groot is unassailable)

he's a cheeky, adorable baby tree who loves to dance and, occasionally, murder

i'm at peace with all of that

I think I'd rather get the arrow than be chased down and thrown off a catwalk by a screaming cartoon sapling who really hates me

that's gotta be a really embarrassing way for a battle-hardened space pirate to go

This was so dope. I welled up at Nebula reaching out her arm to embrace Gamora weakly.

Same w/ "I've never done a good thing my whole life. You gotta let me have this" from Yondu.

If this had been a DC movie it woulda been 120 minutes of pathos rather than like...15

Well yeah because they would have had to replace all of the jokes with something

There's a joek in the Wonder Woman trailer, i am sure they'll fix that in post.

Fiiiinally saw this yesterday. Surprisingly hilarious at points, v. good overall. It's always so pleasantly surprising that the movie side of the MCU maintains such a shockingly-high level of consistency (looking directly at you, Iron Fist).

I felt like such a bad Marvel Zombie, wondering first 'why did they hire Stallone to play some character I don't even know?' and later 'wait, now why the hell was Ving Rhames just in this thing for five seconds?' and then I remembered the crystal dude with Stallone and I was like, 'well, shit, of course.'

Also pleasantly surprised to see the Watchers. I would've thought for sure Fox held the rights as part of the FF package.

The impending arrival of Adam Warlock better damn well mean that Pip is also on the way. Just sayin'.

this wasnt even worth two posts noting how bad it was

c'mon deems, it has that surly wisecracking raccoon whatchamajig that sounds like it grew up in Yonkers, which fact fairly shouts FUN TIMES at you, while only slightly spraying you with spittle as it does so, unless you like to sit up front, and that would be your own fault don't you see.

the body count was a little too explicitly high for my taste

― Max-Headroom-drops-a-deuce-while-shredding (Sparkle Motion), Tuesday, May 16, 2017 5:54 PM (two weeks ago)

This, mostly for Yondu's slo-mo arrow slaughter scene.

While the barrage of million-dollar rainbow space puke certainly kept my eyeballs busy, there's precious little story holding it all together. The events of the plot, of which there are a great and colorful many, exist primarily to separate the beats of various relationship arcs. I can't really fault this approach, as "getting by on charm" is the established brand, and the conclusion delivers sufficient emotional payoff to make the preceding ramble feel worthwhile. But the midsection (by which I mean the hour leading up to the last 20 minutes) felt awfully long and aimless.

As with the last one, I enjoyed it but feel like I'm missing whatever it is that makes people go nuts for the franchise.

in the MCU I still maintain the first 2 Cap movies as their best output

Re: why people are nuts for the franchise, I can't speak for others, but I dig Marvel and these are the best movies that have been made of Marvel properties, and on top of that they're all interconnected. I'm not gonna pretend that it's high art, but in terms of what it is and what it does, it's pretty much everything I could've hoped for.

agreed

It's kind of miraculous that they keep hitting that sweet spot of the Venn diagram where Marvel fans and the general public intersect. Like, they could easily go the DC route and be like, 'here's another movie about that Super Man intellectual property we own, have fun people who kind of know who that is, fuck you people with any vested interest'. I'm thrilled that these movies are crack for my nerd brain and also that I get to overhear little kids excitedly leaving the theater and looking forward to more.

old lunch massively OTM in last 2 posts.
mk2 (13) enjoyed these films way more than any other superhero film.
marvel or dc based.

I am for this.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/david-hasselhoffs-guardians-of-the-galaxy-rap-is-gettin-1796789156

...audiences who lingered for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2's end credits were serenaded by an obscenely funky song called Guardians Inferno, complete with a David Hasselhoff rap that successfully managed to rhyme “procyon lotor” with “good with motors.”

But the good news is you’ll get to hear it and see it all over again when Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2 gets its home release, because James Gunn has announced that there’s an honest to god music video for the song that’ll be included on the disc. And if the poster’s anything to go by, it seems like it’s going to involve the main Guardians cast getting their funk on with Hasselhoff.

Yes, that really is Karen Gillan, Chris Pratt, Pom Klementieff, Sean Gunn, Dave Bautisa, Zoe Saldana, Michael Rooker, and presumably either Vin Diesel or Bradley Cooper dressed up as a silvery robot in the background.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--u67nwkKv--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/wcksvd3lettbcsdbphtb.png

lol

I somehow doubt this will improve darraghmac's opinion of the piece

that's a pretty depressing bar you've set

Hey I'm just feeling guilty let me wallow

deems otm tbf

Tombot otm

Sic otm

Hey sic. Dyou remember when we bid our fond goodbyes in Dublin, I ran into a fella from home and was half talking to him half talking to you? (I may be asking for a total recall here)

This is...scarily accurate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlUdkRBOv64

So...rumors about this all day now?

BREAKING: JAMES GUNN has reportedly been removed as director of the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY franchise following old tweets that have come to light. Developing...

— Jeff Sneider (@TheInSneider) July 20, 2018

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/james-gunn-exits-guardians-galaxy-vol-3-1128786

shitcanned by jack fuckin posobiec, ouch

sounds like bullshit

but deserved sacking after sequel anyway

was some load of old shit

ugh, revived the other thread without seeing this one

it is truly remarkable that people don't delete all their old tweets the moment they get any kind of success

surprising the film companies don't have policies on this stuff. acquaintance who is a political spin doctor got a promotion and was given a day off before commencing the job to delete/edit any questionable internet content that he may have posted on social media or forums

nobody knows whomst tf I am and I rarely tweet anything particularly inflammatory (and uh certainly nothing approaching what's in those Gunn tweets) and I *still* have them set to auto-delete after like three weeks

whats in the tweets

Examples are in the links above. Pretty bad “Transgressive” rape and pedophilila jokes from 10-12 when there was less of a pushback against that. He was criticizing Trump this week than people like Cernovich and his followers started looking through his past tweets.

He's an ex-Troma guy, right? That makes it *extra* wild to me that he wasn't digitally vetted.

how it got to this is inane. dude wrote Tromeo and Juliet, nobody thought of looking at any of his social media before investing hundreds of millions of dollars in him directing a family friendly franchise for Disney.

what he said

See, this is why I use my govt. name as little as possible online. Can you even imagine how my ILX posts might come back to bite me on the ass, given that I'm the current vice president of the United States? WHOOOOOOOMPS

obviously the bad faith of Jack Posobiecus is off the fucking charts but I can't really go along with everyone on left twitter who is already calling this a clear symptom of gamergate culture because one of those tweets uses the adjective "disgusting" to describe someone who is likened to a "tranny" and if a conservative cultural figure tweeted that these folks would be calling for their head.

I love the idea of mike pence writing that stephen king sex paragraph parody

I AM TOOTH pic.twitter.com/ohkYIrRGan

— Hector 🅰️ Parayuelos (@hecpara) August 22, 2018

OMG, there is a video... pic.twitter.com/oqqIv1tNaM

— Derek Slager (@derekslager) August 22, 2018

the sequel we all need

hmmmm

https://io9.gizmodo.com/james-gunn-is-going-to-dc-and-will-write-the-next-suici-1829631777

deeply mixed feelings