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

Also Tracer you may be confusing me with someone else as I never actually saw Solo (although I groused plenty about its existence, hypocrite that I am).

pretty sure this is a marvel film, really impressed by the mid-trailer TWIST
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSYjORgaRn4

omg OL i’m sorry! i guess it was a traumatic enough takedown that it fried my memory synapses

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

also wtf Solo is terrible

I enjoyed it!

Solo, or the 12 Parsecs of Kessel

I enjoyed it!

I thought the two main actors were great, especially the guy who played Han

Solo was not great or terrible. The kid was terrible, but Woody was great and it was more fun that I expected. About 20 minutes longer than it needed to be though.

Yeah, I would’ve cut down the “assault on the train” scene. I’m prejudiced against Woody Harrelson; I never know if he’s actually good or not!

agreed w/ OL about the five-year "blip" tho i guess they painted themselves into a corner by having the first post-Endgame movie be the one we expect to be a lighthearted comedy. don't need deep philosophizing, but man if there's one thing marvel "event" comics can do well, it's creating a new weird wonky status quo (like idk "norman osborne's in charge and all the official teams are full of villains!") that people have to actually deal with and write around and treat as important for at least a couple years of comics. half the universe dying and then coming back having missed five years is one of the craziest, wildest, far-outest concepts ('nuff said, true believers!) to ever land in a blockbuster film --- but beyond 20 minutes of people being sad in "endgame" it never feels like a thing that really happened, there's no imagination put into exploring that, or willingness to take the audience into a world they don't basically recognize (see also: how all the bizarre supertechnology never really changes anything about society, about which i think i've kvetched before).

even halfway through endgame, the hulk is taking selfies with fans in a diner. there are still *diners* with half the world dead? gee, guess thanos was right, we really didn't miss anything - and tony stark was able to get his dream cabin for a steal!

It's not dissimilar to the question of why denizens of the comics universe wouldn't have an entirely different relationship with mortality from those of us for whom death is an actual permanent thing with no takebacks. Why even open that crazy crazy door if you aren't going to explore the consequences of doing so.

I'm still unsure whether making the Hulk into the most pathetic, not good at being Hulk or Banner, version was incredibly lame or the best character sabotage

I do at least appreciate that the MCU has (thus far) treated death by anything other than Infinity Gems as a done deal.

There's an irony that for 40(?) years, the one exception to the revolving door was Bucky, the only one to come 'back from the dead' in the MCU (pre-Endgame)

I just personally value when the critic is able to signal that they've experienced the object of inquiry with their actual sense apparatus.

this is a privilege reserved for cinematic works, what's the need to get the ol sense apparatus in front of a screen and scribble in the notebook with the light pen when the world is thronging with people who have had their sense apparatuses in front of the screens and the thing the apparatus sensed was a chaos of cgi floating in space

which is the whole point of the criticism of the plotting and the franchising and the endless remythologization behind these movies! that stuff takes the pressure off the aesthetic emptiness of the movies by no longer needing it to be a route to make sense of actual writing, since the story material that is conveyed by the experience of the screen is already so pre-interpreted and packaged for the audience that they ~already know~ what they're seeing when they see it and when they leave the theater everybody already knows what everybody saw

Yes, that's a masterful summary of the approach that I'm reacting to. It's like a restaurant critic whose every review is all 'we've all eaten FOOD before, we've all been to RESTAURANTS, I will talk now about the ESSENCE of this particular cuisine as I meditate upon the GESTALT I've formed of other people's opinions'.

well i'm saying that the movies invite it because that's what they are

if you don't like people treating them that way then you are asking not for criticism and debate that denies that is true about them but one that acknowledges that it is the basis of all our possible apparatusey relations to them and builds on that

And I'm saying that that's no more valid a critical approach than mindlessly slapping 'CRIME FLICK' under a poster of every Coppola and Scorsese film.

tbf the MCU movies do feel like one of the "premium" fast casual burger chains. the food's prepped on site and you're going to get a baseline level of quality

if you want anything other than a burger, you're probably going to want to go somewhere else. you can probably get a comparable or better burger at a real sit-down restaurant that has them on the menu. probably better at a local place that actually has character and isn't a chain

hell, the Avengers are literally Five Guys (plus one woman) at the start

That's a fair extension of the metaphor except that I would ask: what are the better burgers in this case?

it's a metaphor, fill it out your damn self

it's completely irrelevant because the comment is "why are you people only into hamburgers?"

Scorsese shaking his head at people ranking the best hamburger chains when you can walk to any corner and buy a hamburger. Probably hasn't had a hamburger in years.

"I don't eat them. I tried, you know? That's not cuisine. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with cooks doing the best they can under the circumstances, is junk food. It isn’t the cuisine of human chefs trying to provide emotional, physiological experiences to another human being."

:)

shouldn't be eating that much beef anyway, it's bad for the environment and your health

http://i.pinimg.com/236x/dc/8a/33/dc8a3307858ad6052da3d6f496c262b4--anniversary-quotes-paper-anniversary.jpg

newman would've been a better iron man than rdj btw
ooh, we should do a retro dream casting

"the better burgers" probably depends what you're looking for in these movies. better action movies? better popcorn sci-fi? better techno-thrillers? etc... for each of those, ILX could probably collectively come up with tons of great lists of options from the last eleven years.

Rondo Hatton as the Hulk!

shouldn't be eating that much beef anyway, it's bad for the environment and your health

Impossible and/or Beyond is an option like everywhere now though (...I'm losing track of this metaphor!)

Jennifer Jones as Black Widow!

Toshiro Mifune as Doctor Strange!

Someone's gonna be sleeping on the couch tonight after Joanne gets whiff of that quote.

Paul Muni as Ant-Man!

Audrey Hepburn as Scarlet Witch!

"the better burgers" probably depends what you're looking for in these movies. better action movies? better popcorn sci-fi? better techno-thrillers? etc... for each of those, ILX could probably collectively come up with tons of great lists of options from the last eleven years.

― weird ilx but sb (Doctor Casino), Friday, October 25, 2019 9:55 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Movies That Were Probably Made By a Spasm of Six Year-Olds on Acid: The Top 75 Action Films Poll Results Thread

glenn danzig as wolverine!

I would give my left arm for a '70s Avengers film cast entirely with the regulars from Hollywood Squares.

It's not dissimilar to the question of why denizens of the comics universe wouldn't have an entirely different relationship with mortality from those of us for whom death is an actual permanent thing with no takebacks.

Did you ever read the X-Factor issues shortly after Banshee died and Siryn was incredibly blase about the whole thing because of how frequently Z-Men come back from the dead?

i'm unsure whether the impossible burger is thor ragnarok or dr. strange in this metaphor

probably the former: if you wanted a fun taika waititi movie, there are plenty that aren't in burger form

xpost Yeah! I don't get why that never took hold as the stock reaction to death in the 616.

lol that was supposed to read X-Men obviously

Ragnarok is a buffalo burger; Dr. Strange is a turkey burger

fwiw I'm envisioning the DC movies as that ridiculous burger place owned by Mark Wahlberg's family, Wahlburgers

DC films are surely

https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/black-burger-king-halloween-whopper.jpg

NONE MORE DARK

nabisco otm

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