Marvel Comics on Film

Discussions of specific films and franchises.
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hearthesilence
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#276 Post by hearthesilence » Tue Nov 12, 2019 11:13 am

Toland's Mitchell wrote:
Mon Nov 11, 2019 7:03 pm
It's a bad argument by Feige.
SpoilerShow
At first glance, Civil War seemed like a risk. But everyone who's seen it can attest that it was about as namby-pamby as it could have been. The movie didn't kill off any major characters, despite the title is literally 'Civil War.' In those fight scenes near the end, the Avengers were apologizing to each other while half-heartedly trying to kick each other's asses. It was comically dull and stupid. The movie was deliberately avoiding risk and tension, I suppose because they didn't want to upset fans by having these characters actually hurting and killing each other. A friend and I were recently talking about Civil War being the deal-breaker in the MCU. This was the movie where the series could have turned dark and serious. We discussed the possibilities of "What if Rhodes had died from that fall?" (which he logically should have given it was from hundred of feet) That would have really made us sympathetic towards Iron Man. We also posed the question "What if Iron Man had gotten through Captain America and killed Bucky?" That would have made us feel for both characters. Tony would have avenged his parent's death, but Captain would have lost his close friend. And there would have been a much more bitter divide between them, leading to more interesting possibilities later in the series. But as we know, instead Marvel took no risks, and made everything fine by the end. And to make it even worse, Captain wrote a letter to Tony proclaiming friendship and that he would still fight alongside him if needed. Talk about a lame ending. The final 30-45 minutes of Civil War was when the series started going downhill in my opinion.
And come on Kevin Feige, half the characters died "temporarily". Temporarily...that's the key word. That is not taking a risk. We all knew at the time of Infinity War, Endgame and Spider-Man Far From Home had been announced. How could anyone take the ending of Infinity War seriously when we already knew some of the "killed off characters" were slated to return in later movies? Not one person I know believed for a second that the ending of Infinity War would stand. That's a terrible argument from Feige.

Anyway, Marty is correct in saying these movies lack depth and risk. They are just products made to be sold. Can they still be cinema? Well, that's in the eye of the beholder.
Spot on. The defense Feige brings up is so laughable, it's doubtful he'll ever get it. At best he should just admit it - yes, they essentially (and willfully) make amusement park rides for movie theaters. The fact that they bring in a lot of money means a lot of people have no problem seeing them. But it's asinine to pretend they're much more than that. It doesn't bother McDonald's when people say chicken nuggets aren't real food.

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swo17
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#277 Post by swo17 » Tue Nov 12, 2019 11:24 am

I think even more key than the word "temporarily" is the fact that Infinity War took the tremendous risk of "following the story laid out in the comics"

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Foam
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#278 Post by Foam » Tue Nov 12, 2019 6:40 pm

As someone watching through the MCU right now, I wish I could put my finger on what makes so many of them so boring in the same way. In some ways comparing them to amusement park rides gives them too much credit. I recently saw Alejandro Landes' film Monos; as far as plot and characterization go, it's a fairly formulaic and familiar Lord of the Flies style action-adventure movie, and doesn't give you any more deep psychology than you should expect in this type of movie. But, as the old canard goes, not only is every shot as good as a painting, but the way the editing and sound design all work together makes the film a tour de force and something really worthy of being compared to a roller coaster. In comparison, Thor: The Dark World or Avengers: Age of Ultron or even the action sequences in better films like Guardians 1 seem totally flat and stale.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#279 Post by hearthesilence » Tue Nov 12, 2019 9:38 pm

Foam wrote:
Tue Nov 12, 2019 6:40 pm
In comparison, Thor: The Dark World or Avengers: Age of Ultron or even the action sequences in better films like Guardians 1 seem totally flat and stale.
Absolutely. I posted this elsewhere, but I thought the one thing the Marvel films could do well were the fight scenes, but even when there's so much moving and speeding through the frame, the filmmaking - how it's composed, edited, etc. - is leaden and mechanical.

I think I've said this before, but if you take away the super powers and costumes, the basic storylines used in comic books flow like daytime soap operas. I think this is a big reason why I completely lost interest in Marvel comics. The over-the-top melodramatic developments were similar - particularly people dying, coming back from the dead or being never really dead, especially when a twin or double was involved - and everything was designed to go back to how they were. It became impossible to be invested in them because it was so cheap and ridiculous. The one thing that I still appreciate about them is that occasionally you had some striking art, courtesy of unique styles that typically weren't used for the entire run of an title, but visually you don't even get that in most Marvel films.

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knives
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#280 Post by knives » Wed Nov 13, 2019 12:22 am

I'm pretty sure every defense of them here has been based on them being soaps. That's a feature and not a bug.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#281 Post by hearthesilence » Wed Nov 13, 2019 11:29 am

knives wrote:
Wed Nov 13, 2019 12:22 am
I'm pretty sure every defense of them here has been based on them being soaps. That's a feature and not a bug.
Intention doesn't change anything, it's still boring.


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domino harvey
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#283 Post by domino harvey » Wed Nov 13, 2019 11:20 pm

Oof. Comedy’s hard, isn’t it folks

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bdsweeney
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#284 Post by bdsweeney » Thu Nov 14, 2019 12:49 am

Foam wrote:
Tue Nov 12, 2019 6:40 pm
As someone watching through the MCU right now, I wish I could put my finger on what makes so many of them so boring in the same way. In some ways comparing them to amusement park rides gives them too much credit. I recently saw Alejandro Landes' film Monos; as far as plot and characterization go, it's a fairly formulaic and familiar Lord of the Flies style action-adventure movie, and doesn't give you any more deep psychology than you should expect in this type of movie. But, as the old canard goes, not only is every shot as good as a painting, but the way the editing and sound design all work together makes the film a tour de force and something really worthy of being compared to a roller coaster. In comparison, Thor: The Dark World or Avengers: Age of Ultron or even the action sequences in better films like Guardians 1 seem totally flat and stale.
If this story is anything to go by Lucrecia Martel Turned Down ‘Black Widow’ After Marvel Told Her ‘Don’t Worry About’ Action Scenes, it appears that for many MCU film the fight scenes are out of a specific director's hands. If the fight scenes are usually under the guidance of second unit and/or VFX teams, it could mean a house style has evolved for them ... which may speak to their same-ness from film to film.


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DarkImbecile
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#286 Post by DarkImbecile » Thu Nov 14, 2019 5:24 pm

Because if there's one working director who hasn't already done enough for film preservation and promotion of new artists, it's Martin Scorsese.

ETA: I see the article itself makes this point, to its credit...

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BenoitRouilly
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#287 Post by BenoitRouilly » Thu Nov 14, 2019 5:30 pm

yes the article mentions that. But it doesn't have to be Scorsese to fund this by himself.
In France it works as a marginal tax on ALL admissions sold (so more money comes from the successful movies at the BO) and then they lend/give money to a selected number of "art et essay" films (artfilms) to help them fund their production and help find more backup financing.
[EDIT]That's how small films survive outside the laws of the market. Arthouses which show a minimum of these films are also subsidised, which helps them run without much of an audience.
Last edited by BenoitRouilly on Thu Nov 14, 2019 6:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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knives
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#288 Post by knives » Thu Nov 14, 2019 5:58 pm

That sounds like a great system, but I can only imagine the debates for it to pass in congress. "You want my tax dollars to go to this Su Freidrich pornographer?"

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FrauBlucher
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#289 Post by FrauBlucher » Thu Nov 14, 2019 6:03 pm

Of course Ruffalo is not unhappy about the current state of cinema. His personal wealth has grown leaps and bounds. Keep the superheroes coming, right Mark?


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hearthesilence
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#291 Post by hearthesilence » Thu Nov 14, 2019 8:01 pm

I guess Mark Ruffalo has become the Judas of arthouse cinema.

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mfunk9786
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#292 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Nov 14, 2019 8:15 pm

Well, if you're going to do something as clueless as suggesting that Scorsese dedicate more of his time and money to the creation and preservation of quality cinema, then you deserve the ire of someone like Schrader. Ruffalo always seems like a well meaning guy to me but a little bit dim at the same time.

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Brian C
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#293 Post by Brian C » Thu Nov 14, 2019 8:24 pm

LOL at that playlist article leading with Schrader’s “clout” in the industry.

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BenoitRouilly
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#294 Post by BenoitRouilly » Fri Nov 15, 2019 1:36 pm

knives wrote:
Thu Nov 14, 2019 5:58 pm
That sounds like a great system, but I can only imagine the debates for it to pass in congress. "You want my tax dollars to go to this Su Freidrich pornographer?"
That's the bet the French people are willing to take on Culture (regardless for who benefits from it). It just seems fair to protect art cinema that way. I don't hear anybody complaining about this tax (I wonder if people even know about it).

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tenia
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#295 Post by tenia » Fri Nov 15, 2019 2:36 pm

Taxes for the French cinema mostly comes from taxes collected on the ticket sales themselves. It works well because we're one of the last European countries to sell that many tickets. However, it's being heavily criticised in the way it's used because it doesnt change the fact that too many small movies get some funds but are not seen at all. The utmost majority of the titles releases make less than 10000 ticket sales.

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The Pachyderminator
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#296 Post by The Pachyderminator » Fri Nov 15, 2019 3:25 pm

In the US, it's a political struggle just to maintain the currently existing public funding for art. Adding new public subsidies for cinema would be... difficult.

Personally, I wish Scorsese had resisted the framing of "This is not cinema," because that's akin to arguing over whether Harry Potter is "literature" - it tends to push the conversation in an unproductive direction.

(Cf. the red herring of "elitism". Scorsese's not an elitist in any reasonable sense of the word. If he were telling everyone to go watch Fellini, that might be elitist. If his point was to compare Marvel unfavorably to the Sight & Sound Canon, that might be elitist. Instead, he's a champion of independent and unknown cinema from all over the world. He looks to me like the opposite of an elitist: he's a man who believes, down to his bones, that cinema is democratic and belongs to everyone, and acts accordingly.)

But ultimately cinema vs. whatever-a-movie-might-be-other-than-cinema is a semantic quibble. On all the substantive issues he raises, Scorsese is absolutely right.

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BenoitRouilly
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#297 Post by BenoitRouilly » Fri Nov 15, 2019 5:37 pm

Even with a defavorable opinion on them, I disagree with the "no-cinema" attack.
There has always been fluff from the studios. Help me out for examples (Sword & Sandals, Swashbucklers, Disaster movies, Alien Invasions, Spoofs, Z-movie...). But they never have been disowned or expelled from the home of Cinema. It's hard to call tentpole successes "B-movies" because of their budget and prominence, but maybe they are "Z-scenarios"...

When Truffaut called out "A Certain Tendency of French Cinema", he opposed quality pre-war French cinema with greater Auteurism from American Studios (The Golden Age of the "art" studios, not today's studio "money" mentality). It was a questionnable "quality", not an absence of quality.
More rencently American critics try to shoot down "festival films" as bad cinema for an excess of auteurism.
But these battles have not the purpose of excluding any movies from the word "Cinema".

One sure thing is these two entities opposed by Scorsese have different nature (under Cinema)... it's just not the same type of creation, invention, consumption, spectatorship... In fact, they shouldn't play at the same venues. The problem is blockbusters already have their space with multiplexes. And there is no circuit for the artfilms (anymore).

This is an elitist war between CGI tentpoles and art cinema. (I don't know why it is taboo in the USA to be elitist culturally). It's the cultural French elite who rediscovered the genius of the studio-system and its auteurs. So elitism does not put aside the mainstream and the non-artfilms (when deserving).
Isn't Criterion an elite of films among the masses of movies? (except for Armageddon maybe...)

I don't doubt that when the time comes a CGI tentpole spectacle could be considered Art, if artists are behind the project . But not with the current state of affairs in the studios. It's not the CGI, or the budget, or the superhero mythology that prevents them to be an art film, or just a good mainstream movie. And I respect the Comics genre (in paper form), even if I'm not a fan. They are archetypal or stereotypical, but there is a basis to exploit on its own terms, that I believe a good artist could turn into diamond (despite its juvenile mentality on the surface).

But who's interested to turn this material into art? Even Scorsese turned down Joker after pondering over it for 4 years...

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swo17
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#298 Post by swo17 » Fri Nov 15, 2019 6:00 pm

What Scorsese should've said is that Marvel movies are the white people of cinema

Nasir007
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#299 Post by Nasir007 » Fri Nov 15, 2019 6:11 pm

A thing to consider - is it perhaps possible for Scorsese to be mistaken in this affair (or in any choice he has made)? I don't think many people have considered this question as a viable possibility.

Secondly, I don't know how the numbers stack up - but you could also argue that eventually - these movies - are the only ones holding fort and protecting the theatrical experience from an absolute collapse and desolation. Endgame - a film I did not like - still got hundreds of millions of people to go to the cinemas and watch it. I would say - it was an affirmation of the cinema experience rather than a destruction of it.

Isn't it true that Scorsese gave up first? He made what for all practical purposes - and for 99% of the viewing public is a TV film that they will view on their phones in the subway or something?

That's beside the fact that I found The Irishman very diffuse and perhaps more suited to a TV series treatment anyways.

There are two sides to every argument. And there might be merit on both sides. Marvel movies are truly and unquestionably mediocre, but they serve some purpose.

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swo17
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Re: Marvel Comics on Film

#300 Post by swo17 » Fri Nov 15, 2019 6:14 pm

Nasir007 wrote:
Fri Nov 15, 2019 6:11 pm
is it perhaps possible for Scorsese to be mistaken in this affair (or in any choice he has made)?
No

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