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

(I acknowledge that his may just be instance 815 of 'Old Lunch does not understand hate-watching'.)

There were four Twilight movies. Is all.

I have to have something to talk about around the water cooler

And when the heck to I have to have an affinity for source material to watch a movie that captures some zeitgeist? I think I read part of one Harry Potter book but had no real interest, but the movies are relatively harmless family-friendly stuff I can watch with kids. Kind of enjoyed the Hunger Games movies but I've never cracked any of those books.

(my friends' kids, I'm not abducting children to watch Harry Potter)

Because it's impossible not to? I haven't watched any of the Marvel movies after Doctor Strange but I would have to live in a hermitage in the mountains to not interact with them in some way.

If Émile goddamn Zola had just refrained from writing so many novels I might've been able to refrain from commenting on his corpus.

No one is saying you HAVE to have affinity for the source material, sheez. There just seems to be a lot of 'superheroes more like superstupid' sentiment underlying much of the criticism and I'm just like...yes, these superhero movies do indeed feature the exploits of superheroes. If you know that's not for you, why bother?

I guess if you avoid television commercials, trailers played before other movies, commercials using the characters to sell other products, places that play music from Black Panther, sketch comedy like SNL that references the movies, advertisements on the street, board game stores that double as comic book stores that are playing the movies in-store as you're shopping, costumed children and adults at halloween...

I guess it's all avoidable

wins otm, i've enjoyed a fair number of marvel films but as a set, they're decent big-screen TV serialization but not half so special as they're supposed to be. so i derive no enjoyment from the "love Marvel or hate 'em, you gotta admit... they pulled it off!" cheerleading. they pulled off... putting out a bunch of movies? that are mostly kinda the same except for some windowdressing sufficient only to convince fanboys who have never seen a paranoid espionage thriller or a romantic comedy that these genres are actually fully embodied herein? and they needed like twenty of them in order to get me to tear up at the end of the last one? most movies can manage that in one movie if they're trying to.

like even the much-ballyhooed storyline/tone/phase coordination isn't much to write home about. to name just one example, the Vision is massively built up Age of Ultron as an important new character, then never does anything besides hang around (and crippling Rhodes, which has no impact on anything), before dying in Infinity War... surely if these were the popcorn masterpieces they're supposed to be, with expertly staged "fuck yeah!" and "oh no!" moments, he would have at least the rudiments of an arc, a setup, a payoff....? i've bitched before about the characters' inability to remember anything that happened in previous movies, let alone have it inform their choices.... etc etc.

to be clear I adored marvel comics throughout my teens and at some other junctures later on - my beef is not with the existence of movies about superheroes!

There are plenty of culturally omnipresent things that I somehow manage to avoid (see: professional sports as a whole). I don't feel like blaming the siren song of the zeitgeist quite explains away my confusion.

Superhero action, comic: three pages, two minutes of reading time tops
Superhero action, MCU: thirty minutes, possibly seizure inducing

Halloween's become kinda fun tho.

"Who are you?"
(silence)
"He's Einherjar #4."
(silence)
"Get the fuck off my porch, kid."

xxp I was gonna say -- avoiding most the things listed by mh (with minimal effort) is actually pretty easy

Actively avoiding something is an even more annoying interaction.

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yep, esp when you don't have cable and have lost interest in the popgeist. xxp

I remember Christopher Reeve getting good reviews for the first Superman in '78 (Kael said he was the best reason to see it) and him pooh-poohing awards talk in an interview: "You don't get an Oscar for playing Superman."

If I didn't read the trades (and I guess Twitter), I would probably just see the billboards and that's it

lol Eric

reeve actually should have won awards for that performance though, it's outstanding (and a reminder of many things unfortunately lacking in a lot of these recent movies)

Winner
Richard Dreyfuss, The Goodbye Girl

Nominees
Woody Allen, Annie Hall
Richard Burton, Equus
Marcello Mastroianni, A Special Day
John Travolta, Saturday Night Fever

only seen Annie and Fever but I'd give it to Travolta over Reeve. Those assholes almost broke his pussy finger!

Wrong year.

Winner
Jon Voight, Coming Home

Nominees
Warren Beatty, Heaven Can Wait
Gary Busey, The Buddy Holly Story
Robert De Niro, The Deer Hunter
Laurence Olivier, The Boys from Brazil

Ah, give it to Travolta anyway. He worked a long time on his hair!

re: ease of avoiding Disney/Marvel content

If this doesn’t make your blood boil... https://t.co/A4WERjtuX1 pic.twitter.com/yRMWq5whHG

— Vikram Murthi (@fauxbeatpoet) October 24, 2019

I mean they're just going to wind up burning themselves with that shit ultimately, particularly as they continue to lean heavier on regurgitation of their own supply. Cut to five years from now as tumbleweeds drift through a multiplex showing the live-action remake of Chicken Little on fifteen screens.

eh, take it to the Star Wars thread

I mean they're just going to wind up burning themselves with that shit ultimately, particularly as they continue to lean heavier on regurgitation of their own supply. Cut to five years from now as tumbleweeds drift through a multiplex

Independent theaters will have been killed by then.

re: engaging w/the material, i myself enjoy the films despite my issues with them but the manner in which they've taken over the movie culture (and to a lesser extent, Star Wars films have done the same thing and i guess maybe on second thought we should count our blessings that Solo was a failure and the second of the new trilogy didn't "do well" i.e. didn't make five billion dollars) is a bummer. would i have a problem w/them if i didn't feel like they were a negative on what films are getting made? or at least part of a larger problem in terms of moviemaking? not really. my aesthetic concerns would remain the same but as movies they're not any more offensive than your average blockbusters of yore.

I also don't think Scorsese is wrong (he says much the same thing Meirelles says, just a bit more pointedly and again i think it's just because he likes to talk and will keep going if you give him an opening, and i think he did it out of love). i guess i don't find them particularly moving or thought-provoking. what they succeed at is they are exceptionally made products and sleek and nice to look at and they're occasionally very, very well cast, especially Hemsworth. (again, Ragnarok is a really excellent film, Marvel or no. It manages to stand alone too, which is to its credit. It helps to see the earlier films but it's one where you can maybe get away with just seeing this one).

he says much the same thing Meirelles says, just a bit more pointedly

This just isn't true!

oh i think it is i think FM was being just a bit diplomatic, but it's fine really, the MCU has weathered a lot of storms and while i feel bad that noted Scorsese collaborator Jon Favreau feels not-great about the comments, i also think w/the current climate in the film industry ol Marty can sigh a bit over the films' influence.

anyway i do actually have ENDGAME on hold at the library, looking forward to how events wrap up!

He didn't sigh a bit over their influence, he said "that's not cinema"!

endgame’s the only one i’ve seen

there were two good jokes iirc and hulk’s mouth was weird

Sighing a bit is a good way to describe it. He didn't declare war or call the creators or consumers immoral for doing their thing. He was just "jeez...ugh...yknow?"

i mean by his definition they're not cinema and i'm not going to strictly disagree but again that's okay, the MCU will survive and some people including myself find enjoyment in them.

Meanwhile (as they say in comics) — looks like Hailee Steinfeld’s role in an Apple series may be holding up her acceptance of the Kate Bishop part: https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/hailee-steinfeld-interview-hawkeye-disney-plus-dickinson-apple-1203378527/

what if — hear me out — this take is exactly backwards, and it's actually the triumphal simplicity of this stuff that's helped convert a subset of admirers into blinkered anti-social wannabe crusaders who have in fact made the world demonstrably more unsettling pic.twitter.com/TZW0ZjmehZ

— Nitsuh Abebe (@ntabebe) October 24, 2019

damn idk who nabisco’s quoting there but that is a colossally stupid take

https://media.giphy.com/media/iGMTtx1VmHmZFhwDxX/giphy.gif

based on this argument, there should have been lines around the block for Dark Phoenix. Explain.

Again, when you adopt a broad brush approach to any subject, you can generalize to the point where nothing you say is entirely untrue but neither is it especially meaningful. Like, in what way has popular entertainment (children's or otherwise) become ever more infantilizing, exactly? Is there a strain of hyper-erudite pop culture from the past several decades that I somehow failed to notice? What specific works are under discussion here? Because just referring to eg 'cartoons and comics' is like...you might as well issue sweeping proclamations about 'music'.

They both have a point but either take is great, tbh (the rare not-quite-OTM!). The simplicity of the stuff nabisco speaks of (again, the simplicity of what, precisely) isn't at issue as much as the erosion of critical distance among segments of the audience. This is just the pearl-clutching discussion of The Joker all over again, though. If people are transformed in some measurable way by, say, a superhero movie, that shit doesn't happen in a vacuum and it's not because the movie has some special transmogrifying power which thwarts all attempts at resistance.

If anything, these types of entertainment seem to have the most deleterious effect upon those who attempt to criticize them.

Big props to Doc C upthread, though, who actually made the effort to hone in on specific aspects of the MCU and reckon with it on its own terms with some legit + valid criticism. I don't get why it's so hard for so many other people to do likewise.

Oh cool, the argument has reached batshit right wing cartoons phase:

pic.twitter.com/jQSP8TFaZ9

— John Campea (@johncampea) October 24, 2019

That’s no way to talk about the mcu

So batshit reactions from the fringes of an internet discussion are still reliably batshit. Good to know that there are still some things you can count on in this crazy world!

"on its own terms" is a loaded phrase though, OL. it seems like you're responding to dr C's knowledge of comics - which for you lends weight to his criticism of the cinematic MCU - i.e. he's criticizing these movies on their "own terms". but i don't know anything about the comics. neither do my kids. they, and i, experience them primarily as movies (despite all the other happy meal tie-ins or whatever). "the movies" seems like a pretty valid frame of reference for somebody like me, or even a movie director, to use. anyway I'm kind of surprised your defending them so hard - i feel like you're usually pretty hard to please when it comes to this stuff!

i'm probably just still sore from when you comprehensively dismantled every reason i thought i had for loving Solo

to be clear my beefs with the Marvel movies are mostly to do with them sometimes being lame and forgettable movies, followed by them often being cryptofascist. tho maybe my knowledge of the comics reminds me of how truly fantastic they could potentially be. i also loathed solo, but equally as a movie and as a work of star wars product.

xp misread that as "Salo" and was about to jump in

I'm responding more to Dr. C's willingness to criticize elements of the films themselves in terms of what they're actually trying to achieve. The basis of his critique about the role of Vision, for instance, is all there on the screen and doesn't require any knowledge of the comics themselves.

I don't feel like I'm defending the movies themselves as hard as I'm challenging nebulous criticisms of 'the MCU' or 'superhero movies' built around abstract notions of what these movies are or what they supposedly represent. I think they're great fun but I don't in any way think they're above criticism! I just personally value when the critic is able to signal that they've experienced the object of inquiry with their actual sense apparatus.