With my nuanced take on why capes bad, I rise above both sides :grill:
I don't like it because it's drivel aimed at infantalising an entire generation so they buy expensive swag that is made through slave labor and just ends up in a landfill.
After Endgame, it's like a switch was flipped and I just couldn't be arsed anymore. I got the payoff from Nick Fury's first cameo in Iron Man, although the payoff wasn't worth it with all the missteps Endgame (and the MCU as a whole) took along the way. It still fucks with me how Marvel was bankrupt in the 2000s and threw the ultimate hail mary with a goddamn Iron Man movie starring Robert Downy Jr. No one saw it coming and now it's dominated the film industry for a decade. Absolutely bonkers.
Endgame was a really great place to just stop watching. They really didn't give much incentive to keep watching their shows.
The MCU is a great timeline of anti-imperialist sentiment getting recuperated and redirected to benefit imperialism. Early stuff like Iron Man 1 and early Captain America was skeptical of US hegemony because we were coming off of Bush’s presidency but now you have the white CIA agent in Africa being the hero
The first Iron Man movie had no real criticism of US hegemony. One day I'll do an effort post on this, but in the first Iron Man they never ever ever criticize the U.S. military's goals or motivations. The U.S. military is in the right when they bomb countries, Iron Man just thinks he can do it better. When he weeps to the press he doesn't mention the collateral damage of local victims to US hegemony, he literally is just sad that Stark weapons got used on US troops and himself. Iron Man (the film and the character's) only criticism of the US military is that it's not neoliberal enough.
Yeah we're talking about a film where he personally returns to not-iraq and slaughters a villagefull of 'insurgents'
Honestly I never started disliking it, I just got bored with it. If I see a trailer for something that seems like a fresh take on the genre I might get interested for it, but until then I'll stick to watching
classics that came out before I was bornthe same TV shows from my teenage/young adult years over and over again.I like capeshit, but honestly I'm not interested in anything other than the next Spidey movie. The rest of the line-up looks like absolute doodoo
Wandavision was kinda cool. Falcon and Winter Soldier was all around bad, on top of having shit-tier politics. Loki was somewhat entertaining and I think
spoiler
Kang will be a cool villain.
Not wasting any money on any more movies though, that's for damn sure.
Huh I thought the opposite, Falcon and Winter Soldier had shit politics but not as bad as I expected, Wandavision was terrible, but I really liked Loki.
The Falcon show was painfully lib and the villains were written terribly, but I like the eponymous characters and Zemo. Their relationships really saved the show imo.
edit: also Loki was really good. Breath of fresh air
You can't write good villains who are even remotely anarchist without making them painfully stupid, or making them superficially anarchist fascists. It was so obvious they tried.
I love comic books (not just superheroes comics) as I think they are just a wonderful medium for storytelling. That said, I have almost always hated comic book culture and the subsequent movies culture it has spawn. I'm sure this is the same for almost any other hobby, but I have particularly hated the consumer culture around of many superhero movie fans. I hate when consumption is a personality trait, and funny enough most comic nerds will try to dunk on Disney fans or weebs when all three are pretty much the same thing.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of great writers and great stories that have something interesting to say in the books (especially books outside the big two, though you'll find a real banger here and there inside them too), but the movies tend to be creatively watered down a lot. I'm not THAT GUY, but I do feel that most of all the big films are just created for mass appeal, and it shows.
They disregard their decades long creative legacy and find the more mainstream/accessible components and use that. Many of the characters have a lot of unique stories that only fit well into their comic, but the films make them all seem utterly interchangeable. I would love to see more "cape shit" if they weren't all trying to be a giant interlinked franchise that all played by the same rules and very rigid creative boundaries. They need to make more "one-shots" (to use a comic book term), that's part of the reason I liked the "Birds of Prey" film, it was at least tried to do something different from every other modern superhero film, and in a way that highlighted the unique aspects of the characters in the film (I thought Ewen McGregor was great as Black Mask).
To use an analogy I heard a friend say on one of our video calls, It'd be like going to an amusement park that only has roller coasters. There lots of other super fun things to do at an amusement park other than go on the big "epic" roller coaster. Bumper cars, go-karts, mini-golf, laser tag, the Ferris Wheel, The hall of mirrors, the one where you shoot water into the ducks, etc. But because all of these films are all roller coasters, they all feel like they hit the same beats, but perhaps this roller coaster is wooden rather than steel, or this one has neon lights on it. You don't have any fundamentally different experience, so people argue which one is the fastest, or the most build-up, or how many loops it has. Which then becomes a weird arms race to build progressively same-y-ier roller coasters and worse yet limits the type of fun you can have at the amusement park. It's not the perfect analogy, but I think it gets the point across.
This is my take too. I loved Ragnarok for being basically the first MCU film to actually go full Walt Simonson and do some off-the-wall crazy bullshit for a change. Comics are inherently weird, lean into it and do some cool shit instead of "punch CGI bad guy really hard to stop the apocalypse from ravaging London/New York/Chicago/etc."
Also Winter Soldier is unironically a good film on its own, and easily the best Cap they've ever done.
I think the presentation is okay the animation can get a little clunky, the voice cast is superb, and I find the gore to a bit overdone. In that the shock value is diminished, the comic used that extreme violence to an almost cartoon/loony toon level but it was effective in that it was spaced put properly. BattleCat versus Thrang is my favorite example as the gore were more of visual expression of how extreme the two were willing to go rsther than just gore for gores sake. Overall i am happy to see more indie comics get some love (not that Kirkman comics aren't already pretty mainsteam). It gives me hope for comics like Chew, Outer Darkness, and or Paper Girls
I am not at all excited for the live action film, but Kirkman says he's been working on it since before the animated show. Personally I think Invincible's strengths were when it used ridiculous shit that could only be done in a comic book (or animated) which won't translate to the big screen well.
Agreed on all counts. The strength of comics and animation is that you can do just about anything, movies are limited by the tech.
Oh my fuck I hate the shared universe bullshit. Like, sometimes the isolation is part of what makes a thing work. The best characters are inextricable from the limits of their setting god dammit! Characters should be more than aesthetics!
Broke: Iron Man is bad because it deifies arms dealers as heroes
Woke: Iron Man is bad because it vastly overstates what you can do with an ad hoc maker space
There were a couple Marvel films I liked. They're good entertainment to watch with other people for the most part. I just don't like how much this franchise film trend is overtaking film and pushing everything out. It's hard to just watch something else when your local theater only plays about ten films and they're all franchise films.
It wasn't really til the captain marvel movie where I processed that, but that's because it was marketed as a two hour air force ad.
Since then I've been more critical of films with that kinda thing.
I'm fine with it being popular because it means we'll get good Batman universe films, the only acceptable cape shit because it's the most naked argument against it and the twizted society we live in. Beyond the ideological indoctrination I just don't like excessive CGI. The behind the scenes footage is mostly people interacting with a circle on a blank set. That's negatively impacting acting as an art, robbing production crew of jobs that can be easily outsourced to animation studios elsewhere, and investing a huge chunk of studio funds in films that look bad a few years later. When cape shit is mostly done with practical effects we get films like Joker where it stacks up against Martin Scorsese films.
To be honest, we need a Poison Ivy film where she does ecoterrorism, and this is portrayed as a good thing. And a trend in cape media to recognize that anyone doing anything good is defined as a villain.
Agreed. I hold Joker up because it's all four aspects of Marx's theory of alienation expressed through a vulnerable person in a neoliberal society that thrives on the spectacle of punishing the alienated. What happens is the obvious result of that contradiction. Even if it wasn't written by or for Marxists, there's a tremendous amount of agitation value there in asking how societal failures produce the monsters that attack us. The superhero side of it is forgettable enough that there wasn't one in that film and it didn't feel missing.
Yes pls, and bring in Harley Quinn and let Cathy Yan direct it again
Harley shooting up a police precinct with beanbag rounds was dope.
Yesssss, especially with the "run, piggies!"
Also how Cass's apartment building number was 1312 lmao I love being dogwhistled to
Set it in the 1980s, make it feel like the very worst of LA smog with the worst of Pittsburg water pollution. Have the climax be evocative of the Cuyahoga River Fire where a river literally burst into flames from water pollution as a backdrop, to really drive home that Ivy isn't wrong.
Her origin story is born entirely of empathetic pain and anger. It's a pity most writers suck at drawing that out.
