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

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

sorry i see that was posted abt 12 hours/100 posts ago

like... depending what itch needs scratching.... i'm just scrolling backwards through my letterboxd, and here are a bunch of great high-energy genre films since 2008 that i think do at least some things better than the bulk of the MCU, and in several cases many things way better. different levels of colorfulness, kid-friendliness, high adventure vs. heaviness, etc., but again depends what you want out of marvel. i'm really behind on a lot of the contemporary action canon (john wick, mission impossible, etc.) so that's missing here...

Alita: Battle Angel, Detective Pikachu, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Aquaman, the Wreck-it Ralph movies, Incredibles 2, Ocean's 8, Blade Runner 2049, The Shape of Water, Logan, Kubo and the Two Strings, Star Trek Beyond, Crimson Peak, Mad Max:Fury Road, Furious 5-7, Big Hero 6, The Pirates (the Korean epic adventure, not the Aardman claymation thing), Pacific Rim, Furious 5-7, Brave, Tintin, Hugo, Real Steel, Attack the Block, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the Harry Potter films, Coraline, Ip Man, Speed Racer....

even kinda lousy/flawed/overreaching pop scifi movies (Valerian, Jupiter Ascending, Gravity) still have more personality and wowza crazy fantastic shit to think about afterwards. if you need more bombast or just spectacular production design, Inception and Interstellar are close by. and if you just wanna see stuff blow up, Roland Emmerich's 2012 has the advantage of being committed to its disaster porn spectacle. etc. etc. i'm not asking every marvel movie to be a timeless scifi classic - just wish the conversation were more adept at comparing them to other, non-marvel movies within their various wheelhouses.

... Blade Runner 2049 ... Mad Max:Fury Road ...

how are we defining "kid-friendly" here

i mean, i said there were different levels

I suppose "zero" is a level, sure

I definitely agree with your final point, Doc C, but glancing through that list the MCU still seems to be at least right in the middle of the pack. They aren't goddamn Nolan films, at the very least.

also Gravity ruled, wtf

Maybe he watched it on his iPhone?

just personally, i would put the best marvel films somewhere in the middle to bottom end of that pack. the lesser entries, even when competent, just have too little personality, too little voice, and so few memorable or striking images.

but sure --- they do go down easy, they're fun, the wisecracks are mostly good, the set pieces have sprinkles of creativity and even joy (albeit rarely). i enjoy watching characters i know being realized with some degree of integrity and creativity. waititi's ragnarok is colorful and alive (if jokey to a degree that harms the material), and coogler's black panther does a whole lot that i think is important and interesting in terms of the cultural imaginary. most of the rest, i feel like if someone snapped them out of existence with a magic gauntlet, cinema wouldn't really be *missing* anything unique or that my imagination comes back to, or that I see and go "I can't wait to show this to Friend X," etc.

for every "being a teen is really hard.. when you're a super hero!" moment in the Spider-Man movies, you could just watch Lady Bird

or on a related-by-actor note, Hanna

i possibly should give gravity another chance someday. i saw it with my then-partner on a big-ish screen (it was near the end of its run) and we were underwhelmed, but she REALLY didn't go for it and maybe that pulled my rating down a bit. liked it as zany thrill-ride and felt it was basically worth the price versus going on a ride and a half at coney island, but i remember the script being just insultingly dumb.

one million xposts-

X2 is still the best comic book movie

Blade > X2

... Blade Runner 2049

How are we defining "high-energy" here? Amour had as much.

(both terrible films)

DJP otm

i watched Winter Soldier w/my wife at home and she said she just didn't feel like she had any reason to care about anyone in the movie, which is a fair point though i think it's one of the more accomplished movies out of the 21 thus far.

if i was re-doing the action films poll i would probably give Ragnarok a down-ballot vote. i think the films w/the most humor have wound up being the best (that one, plus the Ant-Man flicks and GOTG also benefit from it). they're also the ones that are the most memorable along w/Black Panther (which is a tier below them just due to much more pedestrian direction and action despite the actually interesting storyline).