excited for when amazon and disney start engaging in open corporate warfare in 2027 and the mcu fan janjaweed start suicide bombing the amazon balls in downtown seattle on a daily basis to honor captain america and his corporate patrons
3 Likes
After Hours fuckin’ rules.
3 Likes
Pray as hard as you want it’s still not Shadowrun without trolls and shamans and shit
1 Like
Rather than continue to make the extremely banal point that there will never be a Marvel film as good as The Godfather 2, I think it’s more interesting to note that there will never be a marvel film as spectacularly bad as Jack. Ultimately I think this is actually a bigger problem for the future of cinema.
3 Likes
i think this is why venom was so attractive. sony allowed it to be/forced it to be bad in very specific ways which the disney algorithm will never allow.
8 Likes
the way people are ending all their derisive comments with his name like that makes me laugh so hard
6 Likes
you can see that new joker film as the kind of extension of this now
the world I’m imagining is going to be way lamer than Shadowrun
Venom was attractive because Venom is rad.
And Tom Hardy is P cool.
2 Likes
He needed to start with his last points.
The Marvel movies aren’t a problem. The problem is an industry which finds a few things which sell and then repackages them and sells them over and over again. “Nothing is at Risk” Should have been the opening critique of the industry. Not individual movies.
3 Likes
I gotta admit I felt a pang of nostalgia when I saw Eminem’s “Venom” video. Harkens back to the days when you had to have a single to go along with a major studio release. Do kids still like Eminem or was Gen-X actually the target demo for Venom?
No. It’s not just an industrial critique. It’s an artistic critique too. Part of his argument is the connection between these things. Marvel movies are not an anonymous and interchangeable container for what he’s talking about, they’re THE (most essential) vehicle that this change is being made through. Putting these movies on blast is critical to this conversation.
Drag em Marty
8 Likes
fucked up they didn’t let tom hardy do his own rap though
why do you think i gravitated to this place
1 Like
tired: marvel movies are meaningless, they lack depth and will never have truly impact our culture
wired:
6 Likes
Probably no one here thinks that the Marvel movies, as a whole, are artful or thoughtful.
The only reason they are being talked about, in particular, is because they have been VERY successful and they are connected under the same umbrella.
Every year, popcorn movies for consumption, are released. Some do quite well. Most do ok or even poorly. But scorcese didn’t point out one or more of those others.
Disney and Marvel figured out how to make a popcorn movie slam the box office almost every time. It could have been any of those other movies. We could be 12 deep on Independance Day, or Men In Black, or John Carter (which is as good or better than the best of the Marvels), or insert name here. But Marvel is the one being talked about, Because Marvel did it. and part of how they did it, is by doing a cinematic universe (with multiple characters with pre-existing, large fanbases). On a scale which probably actually is, if not then nearly, unprecedented.
But I’m getting away from the point that it would have been done with anything, if they could have figured out how to make a string of anything else explode almost every time. So, it should be an industry critique.
Scorcese’s article does a good job of thoughtfully explaining his comments about the Marvel movies. But I think he should have brushed aside the Marvel topic and aimed more for the industry. In a few words he could have said “You know, Its not really the Marvel movies in particular which I’m cranky about…” and effectively brushed off the storm. “…its the industry climate from which they were born and where their astonishing success has lead us”. And then go on to take down that industry with critiques.
Superheros as a fictional concept are cool and interesting, because they let you explore mythic spaces under the guise of science.
It’s kind of similar to how the Matrix is a Mage the Ascension fan fic, but if you made them actual wizards in 1999, it would be basically unsellable. This isn’t even remotely true any more, but I think Hollywood still thinks it is. I mean the matrix pretty much is a super hero movie, just without the continuity and stuff. Anyway.
The trouble is more about American commercial comics, and how comics are sold. For example, Archie is doing fantastically copying the marvel model because Archie comics are structured and sold like super hero comics…but aren’t about super heroes.
What marvel did was say ‘hey, these tactics that sold comics…constantly implying the plot will end up somewhere (it won’t), constantly saying this couple will get together (they won’t, and if they do one will die), constantly telling you it’ll all make more sense if you see all of it (it might but it probably won’t and they’ll have your money once you figure that out).
One big issue is that actual super hero comics occasionally got some interesting folks who could play around a bit. Comics are relatively cheap to produce, and at their height letting one weirdo play around with a character nobody cares about isn’t going to hurt anything, and might make that character more viable (see Swamp Thing, Daredevil, Animal Man, the original draft of Watchmen, And once upon a time the X-Men).
But movies aren’t cheap, so you can’t have any cool experimentation with the form in the same way. It’s all the downsides to this approach with none of the upsides.
6 Likes
uh excuse me the wachowskis hung out on Kult usenet groups so clearly the Matrix is a mashup of Mage, Kult, and anime.
4 Likes