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

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).

I tried watching Ant-Man with my son last weekend — he was begging to see it, and I had watched it already / thought it would be ok — but we ultimately had to bail even on that "lighthearted" entry in the series, due to more extensive gun violence than I recalled from my viewing.

I had *zero* exposure to ANY Marvel characters except Spider-Man as a kid... so it's easy for me to bypass all these.

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....

Dear lord! I mean, I agree with your main point, that if Marvel didn't exist it would just be replaced by something similar, but looking at that list it really makes me appreciate Kevin Feige much more. Tintin? Speed Racer? Also, talk about insufferable fan bases...

Kubo and the Two Strings was beautiful

the inescapable cultural omnipresence of Speed Racer fans

Luckily they are few and far between, and let's keep it that way. It's NOT okay.

speed racer is fucking amazing, gtfo

nothing the MCU machine is cranking out is going to be truly divisive or polarize mainstream audiences. if you buy into their superhero premise, the most you're going to get is ambivalence or "ehh, it was ok" from most people if they weren't wholly invested

I think the formula is such that eventually everyone is going to be ambivalent, because all of the rough edges are polished off of these things

and my point was not abt marvel being replaced with something similar...? i'm saying that we can get away from only comparing marvel movies to other superhero movies, while still comparing them meaningfully to other movies that try to do some of the things that the marvel movies are going for.

Kubo and the Two Strings was beautiful

I don't get the comparison with half that list then, I mean, Blade Runner 2049? To me Avengers Infinity War really went for that rollercoaster feel, but it didn't hit that feel half as much as Manakamana or The Iron Ministry. I'm not sure what that kind of comparison would achieve, though. It's true, if there weren't any Marvel movies tomorrow, I wouldn't miss them at all, I also lived quite well without any Star Wars movies for years. I'd be perfectly happy is the cinema was only slow Hungarian arthouse. But it's not! There's going to be popcorn movies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

..... which is why i tried to offer up a list of popcorn movies that i personally enjoyed more