Rolling Marvel Cinematic Universe thread (+ a poll: Classic or Dud?)

... and apparently they're trying to do an Octavia Butler "Wild Seed" series too which would be rad

oh hey, fuel!
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/fernando-meirelles-marvel-superhero-films-1249498

I like the technique, sometimes I watch fragments and trailers and all the VFX and the production is really spectacular, really first class people are involved. But I can't engage with the story, I get sleepy. Sometimes I watch those at the cinema and after half an hour I am sleepy. It's very overwhelming. It doesn't interest me at all.

I mean, there’s nothing to talk about with that quote, it’s totally reasonable

Yeah, it's cool. Opining differs slightly from proclaiming.

... and apparently they're trying to do an Octavia Butler "Wild Seed" series too which would be rad

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Thursday, October 24, 2019 9:36 AM (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Whoa @ this

Agreed on Fast Color being a fun watch. Would be an excellent triple feature with Midnight Special and Kin. I'd like to see more from all three of those worlds.

I do find myself getting antsy for most Marvel movies to get over

no shame in that. the “big action piece” is usually pretty boring!

They would be better without any narrative at all, honestly.

i feel the opposite, the action scenes are really flat to me

but it's not the narrative that's good either, you're right. it's more the world building and little offhand moments

I don't know if I could sit down and tell you the plot of any of them, I mean the mcguffin or w/e that was being used

Well, yeah, they should ideally just be the raccoon yelling at Robert Downey Jr for half an hour, and then there's a Kendrick Lamar song.

this is the funniest thing i've seen pic.twitter.com/ywSFGMWFuD

— meeraan (@masturbatwing) October 23, 2019

I mean...anyone making that argument with any degree of seriousness probably has a full-time caretaker to keep them from sticking their tongue into wall sockets and what have you.

On that we do agree

they should ideally just be the raccoon yelling at Robert Downey Jr for half an hour

that's a really mean way to refer to gwyneth paltrow ffs

That's really dumb, but the first Ant-Man is essentially a heist film, so it's not entirely wrong on that count. I won't even try to make a case for the bottom two there.

I do find myself getting antsy for most Marvel movies to get over

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown),

you find yourself feeling like Paul Rudd

are you coming on to me?

If you refer to Doctor Strange as a 'surreal avant-garde experimental film' then you have seen maybe twelve movies in the course of your entire life.

someone's gearing up to release some pym particles, that's for sure xp

xpost Eleven of them superhero-related (with one of the Paul Blart joints filling out the roster).

best thing about that tweet is correctly categorising the last temptation of christ as a crime film

my main problem w/Marvel movies is they're not very kinetic or gripping in terms of the action scenes w/the arguable exception of Winter Soldier. and the visual style of the films is mostly very flat. the exceptions being Ragnarok and the GOTG films. and i've said elsewhere, so many of these films end with a large smoldering craft of some kind slowly crashing to the surface while people onboard fight to escape.

i think there's also the larger point remaining about how much talent behind and in front of the camera has spent a decent chunk of their peak years working on these films vs more interesting projects. i'm not gonna suggest they all needed a Cassavetes to give them a kick in the ass, or necessarily would be worth giving a talking-to (i'm not going to "what-if" myself thinking about missing all those Jon Favreau auteur projects) but it's certainly true that in today's Hollywood even moreso than the past that a lot of competent talent is lured with big paychecks so they can knock out tentpole product, and there's little room for anything else from a lot of them. So other filmmakers and actors giving a zing to that entire process is completely cool. i mean like i've also said i like the Marvel movies, for the most part, but more recently i've found their seeming omnipresence fairly wearying.

I fell asleep during one of the My First Mushroom Trip action scenes in Doctor Strange

these days when i see an action film done right i sit up and take immediate notice. honestly it's very rare and even the John Wick films (which i enjoy very much) kind of just feel like a pummeling after awhile, just this relentlessness which is impressive in its own right, taking place in this beautiful purple and blue and red world, but more exhausting in certain ways than they are completely thrilling. and they do remain impressive to me but i have to be honest about their shortcomings.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith is underrated as a modern action movie - like Bourne I (also Liman) and John Wick, the action is always visually coherent but it's dialed down even further than either of those.

discounting occasional outrage from sexist idiots online, there's nothing in any of the marvel films that really deviates from baseline mainstream american cultural mores

I feel compelled to watch and have some base level of enjoyment from watching these movies but there's no sense of risk in the scripts, shots, or acting. And after a while, without any risk there's no promise of a reward

I guess while I was typing this, omar said it better

i think there's also the larger point remaining about how much talent behind and in front of the camera has spent a decent chunk of their peak years working on these films vs more interesting projects.

I think about this a lot and am surprised its not brought up more often, the opportunity cost of whole careers getting sucked into the gravitational pull of these franchises

and whole audiences' hours of filmgoing life

so did you guys get this sorted yet

Just waiting on Soderbergh to weigh in.

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

(Soderbergh I'd be really interested in the views of, particularly since he helped the Russos get the gig)

All the lost Oscars for developmentally-challenged character roles. It's a tragedy! We'll always have Juliette Lewis, though.

i think there's also the larger point remaining about how much talent behind and in front of the camera has spent a decent chunk of their peak years working on these films vs more interesting projects.
I think about this a lot and am surprised its not brought up more often, the opportunity cost of whole careers getting sucked into the gravitational pull of these franchises

― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open), 24. oktober 2019 18:11 (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I really don't get who this would be? Most of the people making these films would otherwise be making a different kind of shitty blockbuster? If anything, making a marvel meant that Hitler bunny comedy got made.

this is all theoretical of course but certainly many of the actors have previously shown a lot of talent for picking interesting films, playing characters who aren't wearing capes. keeping in mind that i generally think most of these actors have done good work on the cape-character front.

which is also why separately it's a little disappointing to see Pattinson signing on to play Batman after a period in which he really went all-in playing a wide array of interesting parts. now if he's just doing it to allow himself to continue to play more of these parts, i'm all for it. As long as he doesn't Robert Downey Jr himself and start working exclusively for DC Entertainment Corp

xxp the person i can think of who this might be referring to is Chloe Zhao but she's got her first film with them on the way and I can only hope that this can fund her next six projects. and eternals might even be interesting (nb it likely will not)

RDJr's hit rate would be considerably higher if he was exclusive to Marvel, in fairness.

If anything, making a marvel meant that Hitler bunny comedy got made.

*faye dunaway floating math equations.gif*

painting all superhero films with a broad Worthless Trash brush

There have been three superhero adaptation films that aren’t worthless trash, but some of the others are fun worthless trash


I thought everyone in tha biz calls him “Marty”??

Christopher Moltisanti is not technically “in tha biz”

Mr. & Mrs. Smith is underrated as a modern action movie - like Bourne I (also Liman)

Live. Die. Repeat. is a better Liman in this comparison, as it’s punching CGI monsters in a green-screen environment but the action is clear, coherent, and with a concept of physics behind it. The last 45 minutes of the recent Avengers was an interminable array of sprites floating nilly, if not willy, against a sea of pixels.

One that bums me out is Ryan Coogler - I thought Fruitvale Station was a great debut, and he immediately got ensconced in the Franchise Industrial Complex. His upcoming projects are Black Panther 2 and Space Jam 2. I realize that nobody put a gun to his head but still, by the time he gets to his next non-franchise project a decade will have passed.

First of all, it's a bullshit standard. But even going by those standards, all of them pass! All of the superhero films have scenes of 'human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.' And consistently, those are the worst scenes!

― Frederik B, Thursday, October 24, 2019 10:25 AM bookmarkflaglink

FWIW I think you are misreading Scorsese here - he's talking about movies which are acts of human beings trying to convey etc. etc. to the human beings in the audience. we could argue over whether the marvel movies do this (or which ones try/succeed/fail), but obviously he is not just trying to argue that the movies contain no dialogue scenes about emotional or psychological experiences.

It's good at least that Taika Waititi is using his newfound clout to make passion proj---oh no

Fred is off on his own thing here with this hyper-literalist “technically correct is the best form of correct, and we have NAILED Scorsese by determining that these are in fact motion pictures that play in theatres (I have never talked to a human btw)” crusade

xp weirdly the day the clown cried IS cinema unlike the mtpu

you guys know that uh not old white dude directors prob feel the same way about disney but can't say it unless they wanna wake up in their beds to bloody mickey mouse ears hanging off the edge of their beds and "you'll never work in this town" written in disney font on the wall

— chai goth, a hit 2000s reality show Survivor fan (@Abid_ism) October 23, 2019

One that bums me out is Ryan Coogler - I thought Fruitvale Station was a great debut, and he immediately got ensconced in the Franchise Industrial Complex. His upcoming projects are Black Panther 2 and Space Jam 2. I realize that nobody put a gun to his head but still, by the time he gets to his next non-franchise project a decade will have passed.

Yeah, but the impact of Black Panther was amazing. Put out a small indie movie or a blockbuster that elates and inspires? A movie that from that Feige/Perlmutter article above, Perlmutter didn't want to greenlight? Coogler can have it both ways, and do the small projects if he wants, but I'd guess it's not entirely the paycheck that drives him to do the sequel.

the oceans movies were widely seen as soderbergh’s “one for them” (nb he has disputed that, saying he genuinely loved making them) but these days they’re practically arthouse

Even the ppl who like these movies make them sound like fucking death tbh. An action movie but it’s 3 hours long and everyone agrees that the action scenes are bad? “Whedony dialogue”? That showrunner guy does an excellent job at diagramming out IP convergences and flattening out any attempts at individual style. Wow great, sounds like cinema... not haha

Even the one impressive “achievement” of building an arc across a bunch of films is like congratulations, you spent a trillion and invented tv