Seeing that movie was what I needed to notice the visual style of Sam Raimi, as the director of Evil Dead, at work in those Spider-Man movies. It’s like the gross out-action-film missing link between those two.
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sam raimis dutch angle is so neat. you never know when it happens if ghe next scene is gonna be stupid-funny or end in a character getting abused or sometbing actually scary
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the audience for jojo rabbit at the showing i went to were deadfucks. nobody laughed at the german shepherd scene until I had already been laughing at it for like 20 seconds.
several people were audibly displeased at the ending of the turning.
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lord that’s so depressing. i can’t imagine these people trying to watch Salo or something.
i’ve probably told this before but my favorite experience was some 3 hour long mostly worldless/quiet documentary about monks called “Into Great Silence” that we screened in one of my college film classes. about 30-40 minutes in everyone started gradually leaving the screening until by an hour in everyone was gone except for me. so i pushed all the desks in the room aside and and just sat on the floor and watched the last 2 hours by myself. i was very proud of myself for having the intended experience… but it probably tells you how little i had going on in my life at this point among other things, lol.
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i notoriously fell asleep in almost every film screening scheduled in my college film classes but i still really miss the experience of having that sort of like mandatory movie watching time set aside to see things that you wouldn’t necessarily enjoy as entertainment but would definitely like… have some kind of reaction to whatever was being shown. looking back on my undergrad days is so weird but i think perhaps the best example of what a ridiculously privileged experience it was is the fact that the profs could book an entire beautiful lecture hall / auditorium for a screening of, like, rashomon or maya deren movies or whatever that would be attended by about 2/3 of a intro film studies class. i think about students in the school i teach at now just sitting at home half watching whatever movie is assigned in a tiny minimized window on their laptop and it makes me very sad.
then again some of my favorite movie watching times from those days (i was a film major lol) involved wheeling some rickety betamax machine into a study carrel in the library so maybe the ‘theater experience’ isn’t everything.
on that note i think my most positive movie theater audience experience was watching STALKER in a packed auditorium at an art museum. it’s amazing how well a movie like that plays with a full audience, it felt like a comedy. not in a like awkward laughter way, there are a lot of lines and editing gags and stuff that would probably elicit a mild smirk or chuckle alone, but with a crowd full of people it was like kind of riotous. i don’t know if i could even get through it trying to watch it on my own.
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The last post reminded me that I only fell asleep at two class screenings: Vertigo (which I had seen before), which was great because I came to at the bit when Jimmy Stewart’s face is flying at you, and Triumph of the Will, which is just fuck that movie literally bored me to sleep
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A number of people mention spiderman homecoming and people being shocked by a michael keaton reveal. I’ve seen that film and don’t remember a single thing that would cause any kind of surprise like that.
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iirc it’s a well acted and edited sequence that feels really tense, but yeah i don’t think the reveal was as mind blowing to me as some people make it out to be?
i mean i am a big supporter of marvel movies compared to most people on here but i still feel like at best they are like… simulations of the experience of watching a movie rather than like actual movies? i don’t know how else to explain it. it’s like bowling with the gutter guards on
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the best marvel movie is blade. back before marvel movies had to be the third half of star wars extended to two and a half hours.
same, i have watched all of the marvel movies at least once, most twice, some many more, and like
they’re like a placebo of a movie? like, if you can convince yourself that it’s a movie then you’ll like it, but the illusion shatters pretty quickly when you’re exposed to really good filmmaking right before or after watching a marvel movie.
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it mimics the challenges of real filmmaking while still being utterly unchallenging to the viewer
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Homecoming was probably my favorite of the marvel movies when I watched it but I have soured so much on it the more I think about the actual politics of it’s plot.
The twist absolutely did get me, because I basically assume none of these movies have a real twist. I don’t think they could pull that off for me again, though.
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yeah, to expand on my last post, i think part of the thing i find fascinating with these movies is how the formula for them is very obviously ‘take some kind of genre movie framework from the past few decades and then graft a superhero plot into it somehow,’ and that is kind of why they feel like fake movies to me. but, at the same time, i some how feel like this is more sophisticated than just doing a sort of boilerplate superhero origin movie plot?
like the best examples of this to me are how iron man 3 is just a shane black movie that has iron man in it, winter soldier is a 70’s conspiracy thriller movie with captain america in it, guardians of the galaxy is like a self aware 80’s action comedy with a protagonist who is obsessed with 80’s movies, spider-man homecoming is a john hughes teen dramedy with spider-man in it, etc.
and it’s a hundred times more interesting than stuff like endgame, which is just the formula collapsing on itself into pure melodrama. but at least that had all of the self-referential time travel stuff, which to me was a way more fun to experience than the part at the end when all the action figures fight each other.
but anyway, esp wrt to homecoming and the winter soldier, i think the ‘twist’ in tws was more effective for me, but in retrospect it is way more obvious because of course the framework they are operating within insists that ‘it was your own people the whole time’ is the way the movie ends. i still think that is the height of the mcu personally, but mainly because they then go full camp with the nazi AI reactivating itself exclusively to deliver an evil monologue. it’s a moment that made me feel like deliriously giddy to experience and i treasure it much more than watching cap wield the mighty mjolnir or whatever.
but i think in homecoming it works better because its the moment where the genre fusion of the movie kind of comes into focus. like, of course the protagonist’s girlfriend’s dad is going to antagonize the protagonist, that also has to happen based on the kind of movie this is, and it is good precisely because of how obvious it feels in retrospect.
one of the things that the marvel movies have flattened out and made less interesting about comic books though is how heavily they have ended up leaning into this idea that the comics are all about how much we need heroes or w/e. this is something that i guess at least some of the dc movies do kind of ironically, but at this point the mcu seems to just be all in on this idea that the reason everyone reads comics and likes iron man or whatever is because he represents truth justice and the american way.
this to me is overlooking so much of what actually happens in comic books, and how much they are about stuff other than really bland power fantasies or morality plays or whatever, but instead have for the past several decades basically functioned as the illustrated version of pulp sci fi and horror stories. this seems especially true about marvel comics - so many of the characters are not really archetypal superman type avatars of justice, but ‘weird tales’ speculative fiction stuff tweaked slightly to result in the protagonist also like stopping a bank robbery or something.
I think there are a lot of missed opportunities here that seem like they would work really well with the MCU formula of just mashing superhero movies into preexisting genre conventions.
so like, what if instead of the Antman movie being what it was, it was like The Fly meets Honey I Shrunk the Kids? Like what if Antman was stuck in ant-size mode for 3/4 of the runtime, and the plot of the movie revolved around how weird it would be to have the ability to communicate with insects?
I dunno, i just feel like they should lean more into the aspects of marvel comics that aren’t really about the idea of the superhero more, because i’m… so tired of thinking about it.
I have hope that the 2nd doctor strange movie will go more in this direction, especially now that sam raimi is making it. but also movies maybe don’t exist anymore so we’ll see.
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Now just hold the fucking phone
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The single greatest scene in any Marvel movie is the straight up Evil Dead horror sequence in the operating room with Doc Ock in Spiderman 2
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This is a tangent but I feel like the heavy presence of phone booths, cape-like long coats, and especially Neo flying away at the end of the first Matrix definitely feel like the Wachowskis have some kind of comic book superhero based influences. They are just like… smarter and more interesting filmmakers than that though
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I think Blade was marketed in the last subsiding wake of '90s goth and post-Interview With A Vampire boomlet, not as a superhero.
The Avengers marks when superhero movies and specifically Marvel’s work became dominant. But I think reasonable CG and the turn towards fantasy in the early 2000s enabled superhero movies to become one of the prime genres of ‘teen blockbuster’. Spider-Man, X-Men, and then the Nolan Batman were all major films, and there were a bunch of major failures (Superman Returns, Green Lantern) and B-size superhero movies (Ghost Rider, Fantastic Four) before Marvel even started 2 years of medium-size releases, beginning with Iron Man, to prep for Avengers.
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Nobody considered it a superhero (or even comic book) movie at the time as far as I know, but I wasn’t reading Wizard anymore at that point.
I think the Superman movies are when they emerged as their own thing. Then Tim Horton’s Batman came around and reinforced it.
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Yeah I dunno about blade but X-Men, Spider Man, the batman movies (including the Nolan batman movies), Hellboy, to a lesser extent stuff like The Shadow and Darkman…there were definitely identifiable super hero movies, and a sort of template for them had been largely established by Burton’s batman film, with how you’d do an origin and and a villain origin and all that.
What Marvel changed was that they started crossing over different hero franchises together, and they became part of a larger whole, which meant they could start moving away from this template…and didn’t really replace it with anything other than advertisements for other movies.
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Batman & Robin created a temporary chill in the phase 1 of superhero movie rollouts that was ended by Spider-man, and then Batman Begins a few years later I think was the beginning of the era in which everyone was expected to take them very seriously.
edit: the first X-Men is really weird for this reason because it is full of these weird “jokes” that are like “Are we really doing this!/!!! OMG I’m like so totally random… LOL” like when they make very on the nose comments about how they have cool leather outfits and would never wear SPANDEX!!! EW!!!