Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion. - Democritus (c. 460 - c. 370 BCE)
"The ones who love us best are the ones we lay to rest. We visit their graves at holidays at best. The ones love us least are the ones we try to please. If it's any consolation, I don't begin to understand." The Replacements 'Bastards Of Youth'
"when the rich wage war its the poor who die" - Jean-Paul Sartre "I want to win, like everyone else, why else do we race?" (Rough Translation) Peter Sagan "Delete, delete, delete" Mikami, Death Note "Man Suffers only because he takes seriously what Gods made for fun" Alan Watts, or pretty much anything the man said, haha
"When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds; your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be."—Patanjoli, 2nd century BCE
“Folks, I'm telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean- so get yourself a little loving in between.” ― Langston Hughes
" Every man's memory is his private literature." -Aldous Huxley "Fame is temporary, make it longterm by putting smiles on people's hearts and helping others by expecting nothing in return. Be famous and unforgettable for your Unconditional Love." -Arsi Nami "Learn how to be happy with what you have while you pursue all that you want."- Jim Rohn "Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company." - Mark Twain
"The last thing I want to do is to spoil a book with plot. I think plot is the last resort of bad writers" --- Stephen King "Now I have a reason to look ugly. Most people don't." --- Nikki Lauda, F1 Champion, after his horrific crash at the Nürburgring, after falling into a coma and being given the last rites, before he came back having missed just two races to finish the 1976 season second in the Drivers Championship and first in the Constructors Championship... Bone dry sense of humour, that boy. Spoiler
“Cinema was about revelation—aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters—the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves. … What’s not there [in Marvel movies] is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk."—Martin Scorsese
"You often feel tired, not because you’ve done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you."- Alexander Den Heijer "If we understood the power of our thoughts, we would guard them more closely. If we understood the awesome power of our words, we would prefer silence to almost anything negative. In our thoughts and words we create our own weaknesses and our own strengths. Our limitations and joys begin in our hearts. We can always replace negative with positive."- Betty Eadie "Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought."-Yip Harburg
Sour grapes. Martin Scorsese bitched constantly about this crap for a while and obviously hasn't actually seen the movies. I doubt he even knows the difference between Marvel and DC, one of which is good. He also seems unaware of all of the horrible movies that were made over the decades along side these masterpieces he's talking about. Rob Schneider sold a lot of ticket, too, after all. A lot of the Marvel movies (not all) are filled with the exact things he says used to be in "cinema." No emotional risk? We lose major, beloved characters plenty of times in moments of extreme pathos. Marvel has taken a serious dip in quality over the last several years, and their ticket sales reflect this. People won't just blindly follow Marvel off a cliff. Scorsese made these comments when The Irishman was coming out, and he was obviously bitter over the fact that it was coming out on Netflix instead of in the theater, and he blamed super hero movies. The plain truth is, though, The Irishman was just about the most boring thing Scorsese has ever made. And believe me, I'm normally a fan. I love a lot of his movies. Goodfellas is probably my favorite gangster movie ever. Unfortunately, he just doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to Marvel.
I think he knows exactly what he's talking about, and in his followup piece he directly addressed many of the points you raised here. He addressed exactly the things that bothered me about not just Marvel movies but franchise movies in general, which unfortunately were spawned by the New Hollywood directors, including Spielberg and Lucas, who were doing some really exciting and new things (based largely on what they saw being done by international directors like Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman, etc). As much as I love early Spielberg, I really miss the movies of the earlier periods that touched more deeply on transcendence, the mystery of humanity, and some deep issues of what it is to be human that franchise movies gloss over in the rush to mass appeal. Nothing designed to appeal to the masses and to offend as few as possible can have any of those powerful characteristics. He didn't bash Marvel or franchise movies, though it's clear he had some personal animosity about them (understandably), but he did say many of them are good movies, they're just made for a very different purpose by a very different process. Of course not all of the deeper movies or stories are successful at what they attempt. I think when you're going for the transcendent it's a lot harder to do it justice. It's a lot easier to hit market demographics and please a mass audience with shallow spectacle. But having grown up on a lot of the much more daring and deeper fare, I really miss it now that it's almost extinct. I certainly don't want only deep movies (or stories)—that's too rich, it only needs to be a small part of the diet (a little of it goes a long way), and it's a lot harder to do with any success, but not many even try anymore, aside from a handful like Paul Thomas Anderson and Darren Aronofsky. Since the 80's things have shifted such that shallow franchise entertainment has become more the norm, and the industry makes it hard to aim at anything else, it has to be done on the periphery now. Now it's something like 98% junk food whereas it used to be more like 75%. Don't get me wrong, I love me some junk food, but it needs to be balanced with some good nutritious fare.
Terrible films are what we deserve as an aesthetically bankrupt society. Things used to be made cheap and ugly now; these days we’ve made an extravagant production of it. I don’t know how Disney stays solvent with all the nonsense they’ve been putting out for the last five years. I guess they can coast for a while on lucrative IP. That aside, Scorsese’s mistake is viewing Marvel as the problem instead of a symptom. Hollywood has been pretty good to Scorsese so he’s loyal to it, but the whole issue is that franchise filmmaking is done by risk-averse committee, and apparently they hire really shitty writers. Independent studios are doing good work. Hollywood does good stuff every now and again, but it’s too much to expect a commercial apparatus like that to focus on quality over profit, especially one that has so much cud to chew. Hollywood doesn’t need to come up with new stuff to make money; they can use the old stuff. That wasn’t the case so much in the 20th century. Franchises are even better for studios now because we’ve accustomed ourselves to viewing the world through the lens of commercial brands. I guess it’s a necessary heuristic in an environment as commercialized and consumerist as ours is. Sometimes quality and profit coincide, or there’s a personality with enough power to make a film according to a personal vision (like Scorsese I guess). That’s always very nice
He actually was talking about franchise movies in general, but of course Marvel was the kingpin at the time, and he was adressing the irony of the name Marvel Cinematic Universe when they actually don't make what he calls cinema. I almost removed the little parenthetical phrase mentioning Marvel so that wouldn't become the focus, but without it the whole statement doesn't quite make sense.
I doubt I have the critical chops of you two when it comes to film in general as I've never thought about them as analytically as I have books. But nonetheless, speaking as someone whose friends are really into those damned Marvel films and have made me watch about half of them... ...Even if Scorsese is unbecomingly bitter, his basic critique seems true. Yes Marvel films have pathos and some of them are moving and a lot of them hang together very well. But somehow you can tell that the studio starts each time with the notion of "the calendar its time for the next Marvel film", then "its Captain X's time up on the character rotation roster so we're doing one of those", then "who's next on the roster after him, therefore where do we need to leave the 'cinematic universe' at the end of this script and the various characters?". Only then, "lets find the best writers and directors we can buy to work out what the actual story is this time and cram some damn pathos and chin-stroking into this payday, I mean this meaningful work of art". Yes, Hollywood has a strict formula for almost all films. But even strictly formulaic and massively successful stand-alone films that are tweaked to within an inch of their lives to appeal to mass audiences --- like say Titanic --- are usually conceived of from scratch because of some core truth about the human experience that a writer, director or executive producer wants to convey. They aren't just super sized vessels (ah ha) off the production line, one every six months or so, never late, into which the studio tries to pour as much acting talent, heart-tugging scenes as possible, plus a dash of safe social commentary, after its been commissioned. I guess whether you stomach the Marvel cinematic universe comes down to whether you mind knowing that they were going to make a film with the same name and the same characters in the same world released at the time time, regardless of whatever they subsequently added in for artistic and emotional depth. I can see its perfectly reasonably to say, "who cares, so long as it does have artistic and emotional depth in the end, how it got there?" But its more than just sour grapes to not take that point of view. Most people grumble about flu symptoms, not about viral load. I don't think it is a mistake or misunderstanding; its just a lot less abstract. Oh bugger, this is the 'favourite quotes' thread. Quickly: ____ * Original quote: "The music business".
Part of the problem is the serial nature of comic book movies in general. You've got these ongoing characters, and generally you can't have any of them radically change during the course of a single movie, because they need to remain recognizably the same character throughout. With some exceptions—Tony Stark for instance (Iron Man) did grow gradually worse in his PTSD into full-blown panic attacks in his third movie, which is a surprising amount of depth for a comic book character in an ongoing series of movies, but partly it was so they could phase him out and bring in his replacement Ri-ri Williams, who is going to be a shallow Mary-Sue character guaranteed (as so many of the newer ones are now). The reason I think Logan is more powerful and poignant than any of the other films is because it largely stands outside of the franchise as a standalone movie, exploring the death of a hero, and since there wasn't any followup planned it works outside of that lineage—they could really explore his character in more depth and with more pathos than would be allowed in the regular continuity. But even still, you can't achieve the character (or movie) depth you can in something like Apocalypse Now or Taxi Driver. Those were labors of love by the director and writer working together with no need to submit their ideas to a committee for approval, they were allowed to proceed as artists working from their own ideas and intuition. And there was a lot of intuition involved at every level, from conception to writing to cinematography to improvisation while shooting. The themes are far richer and more evocative than you'll find in any superhero movie or franchise installment designed to bring in box office returns. The productions that allow more artistic freedom can result in incredible films, whereas to me movies means they're products aimed at entertainment and profit above all else. I guess what Scorsese calls cinema I call film. Hollywood has changed drastically, well I suppose it's been changing all along, but there was a lot more artistic freedom allowed before the end of the 80's. There were still some excellent artistic movies being made then for sure, but a lot less, and it's only gotten worse since then. Part of it is that computers allowed companies to easily look at numbers and make spread sheets and they started doing focus groups and test screenings etc to try to boost those numbers in the ways the producers (the money men) wanted. This change is detailed in the movie Moneyball. It's the true story of the losing-est baseball team in the 80's, where the owner, faced with the prospect of just dissolving the team, decided to take a chance by hiring this pimple-face kid fresh out of computer school who had already saved several struggling businesses by writing algorithms for them. The team became the winningest, by allowing decisions to be made by a computer that had formerly been made by human beings. This business model swept across all businesses in the 80's, and changed the way everything was done. You can see the results in the way movies look and feel before and after. Much of the soul is gone from moviemaking as a result. It's a lot like what's being discussed now concerning the rise of AI. Of course I'm talking about Hollywood and their big box-office movies here, it isn't true for every movie, especially outside of the big studios. Though now even the indie studios are mostly if not all owned and controlled by the big studios, and need massive backing, and the movies all need to make big box office money for the most part. The focus has shifted (for the most part) from allowing writers and directors to be artists to a large degree, to the producers being in charge and looking entirely at the bottom line. And using computers for most decisions.
...and all comedy is equal, and all dramas are the same, etc., etc. Lumping things together and judging all of them by the few you've seen is ludicrous. Again. This is insultingly reductive. "Franchise" movies aren't all the same thing. You cannot compare The Empire Strikes Back to Transformers or Endgame to Superman IV or The Godfather Part II to The Godfather Part III (Just because it didn't use computer effects doesn't mean it wasn't a franchise.) They're incredibly different films, some intense and artistic, some terrible in every way. This is a little dramatic. The film industry goes through phases. Did all the spaghetti westerns and blacksploitation and kung fu movies of the 70's take over and stick around forever? People had similar complaints at the time, even though there were gems in the exploitation genres. The truth is -- and this has nothing to do with whether or not you like the films -- the MCU is the most ambitious undertaking in cinematic history. Never has a studio attempted to create a fifty-hour epic like the Infinity Saga. Comic book super hero movies were hardly a safe bet when they started the project either. For every The Dark Night with brilliant writing and cinematography plus one of the greatest villain performances of all time, there was a Green Lantern, which no one can stand for very good reasons. There was no guaranty of a homerun. If you just can't stand super hero movies, then don't watch them. It really is that easy, but those willing to watch the saga in order have been rewarded with far more than spectacle. Some entries are better than others, yes, but that's to be expected to some degree. Many entries are visually stunning, which, by the way, is not a bad thing. They feature complex and often conflicted characters, plus story arcs and character evolution that span several films. If you've watched a couple of random movies from the saga, you've basically judged a greater whole by one of its components. It's like watching episodes 5 and 12 of a TV show and judging the entire show. You may be able to tell it's not your kind of show, but you can't really speak to character arc and the like.
The film industry does go through phases, and those phases are often a reflection of society in general. I have heard it said that super hero movies tend to be the most popular when times are hard for people. How true that is I don't know. But movies tend to have an escapist feeling to them. How that escape reflects the mood of society in the box office is as question for those who know the industry from the inside. Keep in mind this is a business that is often a gamble for the studios. Where they are placing Multi-million dollar bets on a film. So Sequels to a successful film is a natural off shoot of that.
Yeah cinema has always been exploitative and disposable to an extent, with overall highs and lows. Good stuff floats up and sticks around through time. I don't miss breastacle comedies at all, or those even older cop thrillers where a lanky dude runs around with a snub .38 and shoots like one guy then the score goes nuts about it. I think what hurts modern blockbusters (so naturally that includes super hero movies) is not only are they careful about the local LCD, but the foreign one too and all the limitations that implies. Well, that's a long way of saying Chinese sensibilities, but a nicer way at least. Look at this nonsense: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/actor-john-cena-apologizes-after-taiwan-comment-n1268526 He didn't apologise because he feels bad about offending China State, he apologised so he wouldn't get blacklisted as an actor. At the same time, you would think advances in craft would reflect in current peak movies regardless. Starwars 7-9, or Jurrassic Park: Whateverthaheck is a good recent example of that. It contained so many basic cinematic flubs, amateur execution—has nothing been learned in the past half century? Should note, especially with Star Wars and certain Netflix (think Snyder) flops, that they were created by auteur directors with lots of say over the final execution. The directors just aren't that skilled in writing, pacing, tension... all of it. I think part of the shame of super hero movies in particular is they take the box office role of action/adventure, which people might feel cheated on if they are tired of the super hero fare.
I don't think anything I said was insulting. You seem to think I'm saying I hate superhero movies or franchise movies or something, which I definitely don't. I actually got quite involved in here some time ago defending Marvel movies against all kinds of attacks (Anyone else not a fan of the superhero?). I really like many of them, and I have a big shelf stocked with them in the living room: Movies shelf by Darkmatters, on Flickr I had to desaturate it all the way to black and white because I used a bright blue flashlight to light it up, and it blew out the colors radically—everything was fluorescent green and purple The third shelf down is superhero movies, the one above it is horror—almost all franchise flicks. The top shelf has a lot of films on it (Top-Shelfers), some of which are also undoubtedly blockbusters/franchise flicks, like Jaws and Close Encounters. Obviously there's a lot of overlap like this, I just assume everybody understands this and I don't have to load down my posts with caveat after caveat to explain it. But I mean, if you won't allow speaking in broad generalities, then every post is going to take a reeeaaaally long time. Of course, I totally agree. But you can draw a distinction between tentpole, blockbuster franchise movies and movies made because the director or a producer or writer, or maybe an actor, really loved the material and decided to lovingly craft a movie with little to no studio interference, that doesn't rely on focus groups or demographic studies or computer algorithms, and that isn't aimed to put as many asses in seats as possible. And as I said above, for every film I watch, I need to see several movies (franchise blockbusters or just silly fun popcorn flicks). Just because I point out the obvious distinction between films made to a higher standard of artistic integrity and those made to entertain the masses doesn't mean I 'love' one and 'hate' the other. They're just very different.
Yeah you’re right. I don’t really mind any of the Scorsese films or most of the Marvel films; it’s just interesting to me that he is complaining about something that is so clearly a result of the system that has benefited him. I like Scorsese and I liked a lot of the Marvel films pre-third or fourth wave, or whatever it was that followed Endgame. They were pretty cool. GOTG3 was good. The same guy who made Wolf of Wall Street complaining about this sort of thing is goofy.
