Are you insinuating that (for lack of a better term) "un-artistic" film or lit doesn't take work? Well, it does; a lot of work. Just as much, if not more. The Avengers, a movie has about as much cultural impact as a builder's fart, took hundreds of people, and millions of dollars. If you think you're annoyed by anti-culture, it's incomparable to my bitter loathing of anyone who flags 'enterainment' as easy because it doesn't hold some indulgent introspective. As a side note: Creating something for yourself is much easier than creating something that designed for peoples enjoyment. I can draw you a picture I love in an hour, if I was entering a contest I'd spend 10. I've spent the part of the last five years banging around my local art-scene and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that there are plenty of wankers staring down a metaphorical cigarillo, and at least one literal (the basis of the image). You look at the top of the food chain and completely ignore the inherent jealousy in young literary writers. I haven't heard of Pynchon, and I'm sure he's above it, but plenty are not.
^Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing he's talking about the audience having to do more work to understand the film, not the film-maker. On a side note: Anyone seen "Killer Of Sheep"? That's what I would define as an "artsy" movie, incorrectly lauded for being long, convoluted, uninspired and boring.
To me it isn't. Then again, if there's some official definition of "artsy" that I've missed, I may be wrong. I'd call NBK an artsy film just like I'd call Dead Man artsy, but I still love both of them. It's when the artsiness feels gratuitious that I shy away from a piece. Just like I don't really enjoy gratuitious violence as the main substance of a film.
Yes, because the idea of building up to a film across four separate film franchises and then pulling all these characters together to form an iconic team from comic book lore in a massive special effects-laden undertaking with a fun story, a ton of action and more fleshed out characters than has ever existed in a previous comic book adaptation, like The Avengers did, is pretty dumb and does not reflect imagination at all. Totally the same thing as gratuitous boobage, unnecessary Megan Fox, and stupid talking robots. Uh.
Well, regardless, The Avengers still sucked... bad. Those characters were about as fleshed out as a brick.
Tony Stark had two separate movies where his character was fleshed out before coming to the Avengers, Cap and Thor each had one, and even Banner, who was limited by two previous shitty movies and an actor change, still managed to be excellent. (Finally, they get the Hulk right.) Romanov was the catalyst to get the team together, and I would only complain about Barton's lack of screentime. Otherwise, The Avengers sucked? Hardly. I seem to have walked in on a bit of a wankfest here, however, and that's probably due to the nature of this thread. The entire idea of 'blockbuster vs artsy' film is a very elitist and even ableist idea - it operates on a certain school of thought that says 'this is highbrow for the educated, and this is lowbrow for the common man.' There's an idea from the more artsy set that they are more intelligent (in the traditional, 'book-smart' sense) than the people who prefer blockbuster explosions, which is where the elitism comes in. (There's also the ableism for you: the assumption that intelligence is only measured in one quantifiable way, and that the only true form of intelligence can come from "high taste" and book-smarts.) Likewise, there's an attitude from those that prefer the blockbusters that says those who prefer artsy films are dry, humorless killjoys. Neither are correct. If you prefer the artistic films, more power to you, and I can see where you're coming from. Likewise, if you love blockbusters, hell, I'm there with you as well. Not all films that feature CGI and battle scenes are good (Transformers being the most obvious that springs to mind), but hell, explosions and world-ending scenarios are fun, and those that turn up their noses at them disgust me; it's such an elitist superiority-complex move. Those that turn up their noses at the art movies, though, are much the same - it's another form of superiority. Neither are better, it's all down to preference.
Thinking of film as 'art house' can get very very restrictive to be honest, same with thinking of some films as 'indie films'. They are films, just of different genres, that's all. If you don't like a few art films does not mean you are not going to like any of them. You might, JJ, have just came across nothing but pretentious crap in search of an 'art house' film instead of just looking for a good film.
I love many blockbusters. Hell, I write big explosive violent scripts. Dredd was awesome (not really a blockbuster, but still). Rambo was awesome (Rambo 4). The Avengers sucked. Plain and simple. Thor was pathetic, I didn't mind Captain America, I didn't see any of the Iron Man films, and all the Hulk films were garbage.
If you haven't seen or even disliked the movies that went into the buildup that was The Avengers, obviously you're not going to like it. Like I said, a matter of opinion. There's no 'plain and simple' about it.
It sounds dreadful already xD There will always be films you like and dislike - artsy films are no different. I never even finished watching Requiem For a Dream and everyone says it's so excellent - I thought it was boring. But I do like artsy films - Black Swan I disliked because I dislike horror, but I can tell it was done well and certainly beautiful and thoughtful. I rather enjoyed The Artist and this Japanese film, which I consider a bit of an artsy type, Departures, as well as the French film The Intouchables. I like chick flicks like The Proposal, Notting Hill, Definitely Maybe - but I hated Mamma Mia (don't get me wrong, I love Abba and I love musicals - I loved Moulin Rouge), and I couldn't even get past the first 10min of PS I Love You. I rather enjoyed The Dark Knight, 300, Inception - but really didn't like Batman Begins, and thought the remake of Total Recall was mediocre. I don't even watch horrors but I adore The Mummy lol. Just like any other genre, you're gonna find some you like, and some that you don't. Mind you, then you get some that are so inherently awful that you won't ever like any of them - for me, that's gotta be the grotesque trend of torture porn.
It comes down to personal taste - some prefer arthouse, some prefer blockbuster. Neither style is better than the other and neither person is right or wrong for preferring one over the other.
I enjoy some art films and dislike others. I enjoy some pure entertainment movies and dislike others. Pretty simple and straightforward, no? Watch a wide variety of both and find what you like. The problem comes when people watch a single movie and then make vast, overarching claims about thousands of other movies from different countries, decades, directors, and styles.
Hear! Hear! to both sentiments. I have enjoyed both sides of the movie house in equal measure and been disappointed by both sides in the same equal measure. The anti-snob snobbery giving rise to this train of distemper is only just that, snobbery.
Many people seem to have a strong need that their subjective opinion be objective fact. Human nature, I suppose, at least among the more insecure
The plots are almost identical, as illustrated below. http://9gag.com/gag/5879959 Personally I thought that both Transformers 3 and The Avengers blew. It was boring as hell. Ohhhh aliens, oooh hulk, oooh robots, ooooh whatever. I don't care about the characters, and couldn't have given two shits if they lived or died. Which was convenient because from the moment they were introduced you knew exactly who was going to pull through. ... Yep because a playboy billionaire/superhero is incredibly in depth and original... oh wait.... That had been done twenty five years earlier. I haven't seen captain america but it looked OK; which was interesting because it got thumped in the reviews. Thor's movie was the biggest load of crap I've had to swallow since Australia's last federal election, and the hulk movie I saw (the first) had eric banner in it, was steaming pile of crap, then the sequel had edward norton? transformers may have boobage but the avengers wasn't shy about slamming in some sexy ladies... And bow and arrow guy? Who the hell is he? aside from semi-useless in the battle, he didn't seem to drive the plot at all either. I almost, almost, find it funny that you're taking the moral high ground over transformers, painting it as low-brow crap (which it is), only to state that the Avengers was well developed and in-depth. You're just plain wrong, the stories built up around these characters are bland and boring, everyone knows this. They're made for people to drool of special effects and get a bit of light entertainment.
As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Entertainment is meant to entertain, nothing more nor less. But hey, I've enjoyed plenty of films others haven't, while enjoying films others have, disliking films others like, and disliking films other disliked. Same true with video games & music in general. Originality makes for no more an entertaining value than lack thereof, and eventually there will be no originality as every possibility gets found out. Naturally. What gets me is with horror fans always talking about nothing being scary any more. Really? Even when I watched Freddy Kreugar and Friday the 13th for the first time, and that was when I was maybe 4-6 years old, they sure as hell didn't scare me. If anything, I thought they were action-comedy films. Then there are all the RE fanbois, thinking the old RE games were scary and that the RE films should stick to the original storyline. The first side is that the RE games never were scary, they just had convoluted controls; the second is that the original storyline played out already and everyone knew by then what happened in the RE's original universe.
Tony's not just a billionaire and a superhero, though - in the comics, he's a much deeper character, someone who struggles to live up to the legacy of his neglectful father, balance the difficulties of both of his jobs, and he has a shitload of alcoholism and depressive issues, among other things. The movies do a pretty good job of illustrating that; the second one especially focuses on his lack of emotional health and his preference for struggling through a life-threatening situation alone over actually asking for help. The scene with Pepper in the jet, where he makes her breakfast and offers to take her on vacation, only to have her decline ("We can't just jet off anywhere, Tony") is a great example of that - he's trying, in his anti-communicative, Tonyesque way, to tell her that something's wrong and that he only has a certain amount of time left, and when she shuts him down (because of course she doesn't realize what he's trying to tell her, he's giving her nothing to go on), he doesn't push, doesn't try to actually get help from her. She only learns about the palladium poisoning because Natasha lets it slip; if that hadn't happened, would she ever have known? Thor's movie wasn't the greatest, but it wasn't useless, either - the two Hulk films, however, are utterly terrible. I wish they had gotten it right with Ruffalo in the first place. But I ignore those movies entirely. As for the "sexy ladies," I try to judge any movie's female characters by two tests: the Bechdel test and the "sexy mannequin" test. The first is a test that asks, basically, if some time during the movie, two women have a conversation with each other that doesn't relate to a man or a man's storyline at all; it's a test to make sure female characters have motivations and lives of their own that don't revolve around the male characters' lives. The second is a test that asks: if you could take out this female character and replace her with a sexy mannequin, would it negatively impact the plot in any way? It's a test that asks if women are there to move the plot forward, or if they're just there for eye candy. Transformers fails at both, because not only is it a sausagefest of a movie, but Megan Fox doesn't really do all that much. The Avengers doesn't pass the Bechdel, but it passes the sexy mannequin test - Maria Hill is a trusted, high-ranking agent of SHIELD, and Natasha is the one who brings the team together. She gets the Hulk to come out of hiding and agree to show up, she takes the initiative to go after Clint when he's taken by Loki, she tricks Loki into revealing his plan to them by pretending to be weak, and she works with the Hulk even after he tries to kill her, among other things. As for Hawkeye, he's so much more than bow and arrow guy - he's one of the smartest and craftiest members of the team, and he can hold his own on a team of superpowered people despite being only human, among other things. Transformers was nonstop explosion and exposition - I didn't care about the characters or their motivations. With the Avengers, I had backstory from comics and movies alike, and I cared about them and their stories. And "everyone knows this"? So you presume to speak for everyone that's ever seen the movie, and anyone who enjoyed it? Because judging by the highly positive reviews across the board it got when it came out, only a few people appear to "know this." (Compared with the universal panning of Transformers.) I don't have a problem with you disliking the Avengers, but when you start saying "well, your subjective opinion is objective fact and it's wrong, and everyone thinks one way, no exceptions, because I also think that way," then you have a problem, sir.
Actually the idea of a playboy superhero is a concept most recognized with Iron Man and Batman. But they are hardly the only ones and what do you mean done 25 years ago? Iron Man has been around since the early 60s and Batman even longer then that. Plus the concept being done already is only one thing you should focus on. Tony Stark/Iron Man is a unique and interesting character. Who has had to deal with everything from alcoholism to depression. As I'm not a big Iron Man reader (I'm Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Spider Man guy) that's all I can name at the moment. But I do know Stark is character with a great deal of depth to him and the moves did a good job of showing it such as in IM3 (which is the most recent in my mind) when Tony is talking about why he can't sleep I found it very emotional and good performance Also the guy with the arrow is Hawkeye. How was he useless? Its been awhile since I've seen the movie. But I recall him taking out quite a few of the enemies. On top of that he's a very interesting character. In the books Hawkeye is probably one of the wittiest and coolest members of the Avengers. He's able to take on super villains with his improbable aiming skills. He also has one of the most interesting marriages in Marvel. He and Mockingbird had such a natural progression I find it endearing. How was Avengers slamming ladies? When I saw the film Black Widow was one of the most competent members of the team just as her comic counterpart is and Gigi already went over it so I'll spare the details. And finally Sam Jackson. The stories these that these characters are built around are hardly trash. They are some of the most enduring works of fiction around. They have staying power due to all well developed and interesting their stories are in the comics. Which is why they have movies, games etc.
