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

He's right, you're wrong.

― Pauline Male (Eric H.), Monday, November 4, 2019

he's not even wrong. there have never been more opportunities for "risky" work to find an audience. just not at the multiplex. boo hoo, pour one out.

i mean of course it's ridiculous that Disney has now made more Maleficents than Snow Whites but it's pretty rich for a guy who puts "gimme shelter" in every other scene to bemoan the decline of symphonic audiences. now that was real music! these blues guys can't even read standard notation!

lol haha i am a cineaste pew pew upon your blockbuster framchise

xpost so he's...rockist?

Back in (decade) we made movies where actors said lines that (ham steak) audiences, on backdrops of pure (propane) with a truck and two (atelier)s

Another way of putting it would be that they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not.

I mean I’m no moviegoer, but everywhere I go these past few weeks, I hear ppl talking about this Korean horror film that’s all the rage. Meanwhile, Terminator just flopped.

None of us are in the multiplex heartland, let's be honest.

the fanboy reaction to this (on twitter, not on ilx) is so sad. the guy named a bunch of contemporary filmmakers he likes and ppl still act like he's william f buckley dissing the beatles in 1964.

Neanderthal I know you’re joking but... otm?

like what really does bum me out a little is the sudden discovery that martin scorsese is hella corny.

When the Hollywood studio system was still alive and well, the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made — in the words of Bob Dylan, the best of them were “heroic and visionary.”

Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination.

And I get that theatrical exhibition means a lot to him, I don’t begrudge him for that. I just don’t share the sense of “terrible sadness.”

appealing to bob dylan as an authority so on the nose it hurts

1) - this is great free publicity and that is almost certainly the prime reason why he's keeping this ball rolling
2) - this is the real crux of his argument and who could argue with it: "So, you might ask, what’s my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever."
3) - his other arguments as per marvel movies in general are admittedly hella flimsy, old man yells at cgi cloud and mostly appear to be predicated on the fact that he has no grounding in this universe and it holds no joy for him at all because of that
4) - in general scorcese has done more to turn more people on to more otherwise unremembered films and fucking awesome piece of art than almost anyone so i'm perfectly happy to let him have this, especially given that the argument against him on social media is predominantly NUH UH DR STRANGE = BRAKHAGE
5) - Parasite has made $100 million worldwide and is the feel-good cineaste story of the year; Joker has made ten times that in a month
6) - man who has devoted his entire life to film is allowed to be sad that the current successful business model for studios is "spend $250 million dollars, make $500 million"

And I get that theatrical exhibition means a lot to him, I don’t begrudge him for that. I just don’t share the sense of “terrible sadness.”

xps hey pal that's nobel prize winner™ bob dylan to you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0

damn autocorrect making me look like I don’t know the difference between its and it’s

forks otm tho

With any luck, the soundtrack to Guardians of the Galaxy 3 will overlap heavily with Casino and Goodfellas

no grounding in this universe

lol the spurious expertise to which cape and tights stans will appeal to justify their defensiveness

films are about THIS UNIVERSE, that's all the grounding you need to have insight into movies

j. with all respect I have no idea what you’re talking about

5) - Parasite has made $100 million worldwide and is the feel-good cineaste story of the year; Joker has made ten times that in a month

But it’s playing in theaters. The goalpost is not that small films should somehow be at BO parity with the big ones, even Scorsese’s not saying that.

this is the THIRD time i've xposted this but I saw Irishman in theaters on opening night and the first two hours were so preordained, so much gangster fan service scripting, so much special effects and explosions that i honestly did have the super-smug "well how is this different from a marvel movie" thought but, you know what the last 30 minutes so painfully and honestly rip off the cardboard thin veneer of cool to reveal the pure sad nihilism underneath and act as apologia for scorcese's big dick bad guy fantasy fuel that as far as i'm concerned he wins.

forks pretty much otm though. otoh, nobody’s going to remember who made Joker, and in a year, we’ll forget who starred in it too

parasite is NOT a small film btw! it won the palm d'or! it's got the best per theater opening weekend in the US for a foreign film in history! There's a big media campaign behind it!

also in 3 seconds nobody’s going to remember that I tried to be part of this conversation

goddam forks I’m pretty certain that’s quite possibly the finest capsule review of THE IRISHMAN anyone’s ever going to write and it’s wasted on the MCU thread

xxp So did Pulp Fiction!! Where are the goalposts — true cinema is now a microbudget indie out of nowhere that sweeps into the Zeitgeist purely on the strength of its artistic vision?

tombot your Guardians 3 post didn’t get the recognition it deserved. I am now legit going to be disappointed if Gunn doesn’t go there.

I mean I know nothing about Parasite other than it seems as far as you can get from a Marvel movie. But maybe Scorsese dismisses it too, I dunno.

Just looked it up, Parasite cost ~$11mm. That’s a small film!

Like the fact it’s being heavily promoted and doing well is actually the best possible counterargument to Scorcese’s point!

you can’t even license “gimme shelter” for 11 mil!

i think it's instructive to recognize the marvel (and star wars and harry potter and DC and every other film that relies on lore and fandom before story and character) box office hegemony as analogous to the worst perils of late era capitalism in that the particular style of art-and-business that they represent metastasizes to the point where it muscles out everything but the rare exceptions that, in some ways, succeed as much as anything because they ARE the exceptions... if you flip over to the Parasite thread, you'll find me complaining that though i liked parasite quite a bit, I'm sore that people who don't watch a lot of film won't stop telling me how good parasite is and i don't even think it's Bong's third best film! Or the third best class warfare film i've seen this year! but it's the underdog of the moment and that makes it the overdog! and people feel they've "done their part" for culture simply by dipping their toe in that water.

One of the best things about NYC is that, at any given moment, there are sixty different films I can watch. In downtown Manhattan alone , there are at least five theaters at any given moment playing the best available cinema available in America. But that is ABSOLUTELY a pure luxury and it pains me that some of the outrageously good film i've seen this year (Birds of Passage! Diane! Transit! Honeyland! For the Birds! Hail Satan! Penguin Highway! One Cut of the Dead! Shadow! Woman at War! Last Black Man in San Francisco! Fast Color! The Wild Pear Tree! and almost all of it at least as joyous and as fully accessible as Toy Story 4 or into the Spiderverse is) gets no big screen play outside of five major cities. it's a fucking shame.

xp to rogermexico thx i'm available for screenings and twitter arguments

ALSO!! BONG JOON HO BONUS COMIC XOVER INFO THAT MAY EXPLAIN WHY HIS WORK IS CONNECTING SO WELL WITH MARVEL FRIENDLY AUDIENCES:

In another life, he would have been a comic-book artist. Bong meticulously storyboards everything he shoots, and his movies look like individual frames come to life. He sketched out every scene for Parasite and Memories of Murder himself — complete with dialogue — and for films with bigger visual effects, like Okja and Snowpiercer, he worked with an artist. “He gave us storyboards that were fully bound books,” says Yeun of his experience acting in Okja. “They look like mangas, where you’re just like, Oh, this is the movie.”

Birds of Passage! Diane! Transit! Honeyland! For the Birds! Hail Satan! Penguin Highway! One Cut of the Dead! Shadow! Woman at War! Last Black Man in San Francisco! Fast Color! The Wild Pear Tree!

xps yeah i live in a relatively artsy city but its theaters are for shit, you need to go to the multiplexes in the suburbs to grab the occasional chance at a middle-aged person's hollywood movie tucked into the offerings, and where i actually live, you get your choice of 2-screen theaters showing the biggest blockbusters - the nearest to me has been showing joker and downton abbey for like ever

Also, Scorsese’s not just talking about “arty movies,” he’s also talking about how great the old studio system was. But plenty of mainstream, adult-oriented movies that aren’t Marvel or DC are still being made and distributed — look at each year’s Oscar contenders for example. Are many of today’s directors as good as Hitchcock? Probably not! But that’s a different point.

xp 20 years ago, many of those films would've been picked up and distributed broadly by big companies and distributors willing to settle for a smaller piece of the pie. Neon, Dogwoof, A24, Magnolia et al are scoring enough hits to stay afloat in a different ecosystem but they don't have the muscle to make in play in Peoria.

So if GotG 3 establishes its soundtrack with Quill discovering the Goodfellas OST on his Zune

ulysses relentlessly otm itt

you're arguing a lot of different points morrisp, i'm not sure which one you want to focus on here but i will say i don't think scorcese would for a minute want to go back to the "old studio system," maybe watch this for some historical perspective as to why and how scorcese might have a reasonable beef against hyperinflated hollywood horseshit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0jsxeXXtBk

Scorcese’s making a lot of different points! Some are

I’m simply asking how this: https://oscar.go.com/news/nominations/oscar-nominations-2018-full-list-and-highlights

...squares with this:

But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption.

Whoops, my first thing got cut off. I was saying some of his points are cut-and-dried, like: In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. That seems true & yes a loss

But lots of “major” films are still being made and screened (even in Peoria) that don’t fit his slippery “many films today” construction.

“Many films” have crappy/franchise whatever for as long as I’ve been alive. It’s one thing to lament the loss of screens for indie films, but that doesn’t seem to be what he’s arguing for most of the piece, he’s saying studios aren’t taking risks, which isn’t true.

no big screen play outside of five major cities. it's a fucking shame.

That’s also not the fault of any movie company. That’s the fact of living outside of major markets. People can stay at home now and watch all kinds of bullshit. Okja is on Netflix! We’re going to be OK.

(And candidly, ulysses, I feel a little condescended to for you to point me toward "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" of all things... but I'll survive ;)

Paramount just had two big flops w/Gemini Man & Terminator; but here are some films they were releasing deep in the MCU era, tell me they weren't taking risks:

November 11, 2016 Arrival
December 16, 2016 Fences
December 23, 2016 Silence (a Marty S. joint!)
September 15, 2017 Mother
October 27, 2017 Suburbicon
December 22, 2017 Downsizing

Granted, it's now two more years down the road, and Br4d Grey (who championed this stuff) is no longer there (or anywhere); but you get the idea.

And we're also never going back to the '70s, no matter how easy anyone rides, or how the bull rages... lamenting the loss of such a unique era feels like pissing in the wind

Okay, let's talk about that then.
the oscar nominations are meant to be the height of the intersection of art and commerce, films that are critically acclaimed and that tend to do notably well at the box office. Weinstein's svengali magic trick was that for a long time he was often very good at figuring out how to have one inform the other so that the whole country is going to see fucking Shakespeare in Love... but i digress. A quick bit of googling suggests that 870 films were released in North America last year. Those Oscar noms represent maybe 2% of those. The top 10 2018 hits (of which only Incredibles 2 and Black Panther cross over to the Oscars) equal nearly 25% of the total domestic box office for the year... about 3.5 billion of about 12. That means that 95% of the films released in america fit into neither category. that's over 800 films that don't take up a month in your local multiplex, that don't get marketing and press support from a major studio and that don't get screen time to impact the culture. before marvel proved that you could more or less lock up 25% of theaters with what is essentially the same movie playing for a full year, that space was filled with other stuff! Scorcese is bemoaning that loss, not that no other films play at all but that the margins are so slim and that most studios are opting out of the middle ground and ceding it to streaming.... which may not matter if you don't think that seeing a film on a big screen is any different than watching it at home but it is it is it is it IS different