|
Post by Martin Stett on Nov 17, 2020 1:28:29 GMT
Ant-Man and the Wasp - First time watch. Marvel, why do you do this to me? I was so bent on hating you, and then you pull out the most charming, funny movie on me and I have to admit that I grinned ear to ear throughout a whole film. From its very start, this felt like a Robin Williams movie from the 90s, like Jumanji or Mrs. Doubtfire or Flubber. Remember those? They rocked. The villains are a big part of this: Burch is a straight up "bad guy" trying to steal things from our noble scientist heroes, while Wu, Bill and Eva are "bad guys" that are only that way because they are placed in opposition to the protagonists This allows for dynamic action scenes in which the many different members of each faction are all chasing after each other, first of all (this movie boasts the best action sequences of the franchise). But it also allows for a gradation of villainy in which we can wholeheartedly cheer for the good guys, boo the bad guys, and sympathize with those in between. So this can be both a crowd pleasing good vs. bad battle while still allowing for some morally grey middle ground. Why don't more movies do this? On the comedic side, this has a different flavor from the other MCU gag heavy movies, because the gags always make sense for the characters. Scott and Bill "measuring" each other is a stupid joke, but it doesn't feel out of place for these characters to just run off talking about that. The few cutaway gags (THAT STAN LEE CAMEO!!! ) also fit in beautifully. I hate you, MCU. I hate that we are this far in and you actually managed to steal my heart. My credibility is shot. 8 or 9/10, ranked 2nd out of 20P.S. Robin Williams would have been amazing as either Scott or Hank, and you can't change my mind about this. I'd have him as Hank, because Michael Douglas seems like the one miscast piece here. He was fine in the first Ant-Man, but that was a film that lacked an identity... or a soul. Hank is still sort of the straight guy here, but Williams would have lent so much dramatic gravitas that Douglas just can't match, no offense to him.
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Nov 17, 2020 1:48:44 GMT
Oh, and screw those mid and post credit scenes. Stop leeching away the fun time to link this into Infinity War. I don't want to be reminded of Infinity War while I'm having a good time.
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Nov 20, 2020 1:28:07 GMT
Captain Marvel - This exists. It's kind of enjoyable, I guess, sometimes. Everything in this has been done in every other MCU movie and the complete lack of a spark hurts it, but... this is competent enough. I guess. *Shrug* Yes, I do have this little to say. 5/10, ranked 13th out of 21
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Nov 20, 2020 1:57:37 GMT
By the way, why is it that every Marvel hero has a helpful minority sidekick to help them in their white power fantasies?
Iron Man - Rhodes/War Machine Thor - Heimdahl and the ethnically diverse team of buddies, and he gets the Valkyrie in Ragnarok Captain America - Bucky in the first movie, but after that he gets Falcon Ant-Man - Luis Doctor Strange - Those guys played by Ejiofor and Wong Spider-Man - Ned. He'll probably get Zendaya later but I hope not because I hated that character Black Panther - Flipping the tables to a white sidekick in Ross Captain Marvel - Rambeau
Only Hulk and Black Panther avoid this. Hulk gets his girlfriend, and Panther has a team of black people and includes the token white guy instead of the token minority of everyone else. Just imagine all of these roles race flipped.
Iron Man - Played by Terence Howard Thor - Played by Idris Elba Ant-Man - Played by Michael Pena Doctor Strange - Played by Chiwetel Ejiofor Spider-Man - I don't know who played Ned, but he's awful so please no Captain Marvel - Ditto, really
I'm not saying that these roles should have been race flipped, but imagine if just one or two of them chose the better actor for the part and ignored the original race of the character? I could go with Tony played by Howard, or Stephen Strange played by Ejiofor.
|
|
|
Post by themoviesinner on Nov 20, 2020 7:29:14 GMT
Be sure to acquire some collyrium for Endgame. You'll definitely need it.
|
|
|
Post by Pittsnogle_Goggins on Nov 20, 2020 14:43:44 GMT
Wait, do you think Terrance Howard is a better actor than RDJ?
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Nov 20, 2020 14:57:13 GMT
Wait, do you think Terrance Howard is a better actor than RDJ? I think that RDJ is pretty awful as Iron Man. I think that Howard could at least match him in that role.
|
|
|
Post by Pittsnogle_Goggins on Nov 20, 2020 15:00:32 GMT
Wait, do you think Terrance Howard is a better actor than RDJ? I think that RDJ is pretty awful as Iron Man. I think that Howard could at least match him in that role. Fair enough,, specific to that role. Just don’t bring Zodiac into the convo...
|
|
|
Post by Lord_Buscemi on Nov 20, 2020 15:06:00 GMT
Don't care much for the MCU myself but these takes are just brutal He's being way too generous, anything higher than a 3/10 for any of these films is baffling.
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Nov 28, 2020 3:12:15 GMT
Avengers: Endgame - First time watch. I have to admit, I was not expecting what this movie did. After a lovely little opening with Tony and Nebula, it immediately addressed my fears about time travel and crushed them into dust. And then it killed Thanos for good measure. After that... epilogue. I was perplexed and rather excited: a curveball! Aaaaand then it went right back into time travel bullcrap, but I appreciated the post-apocalyptic destruction and hopelessness while it lasted.
Really, I super-appreciated just how miserable this was willing to be. The opening stage of seeing our heroes broken and cynical was excellent. Watching them all fight their personal demons, asking if they wanted to get off their asses and try again, it was good stuff. Seeing Nat try to recruit everyone to varying degrees of success - WAIT JUST A GODDAMN MINUTE!
This is Final Fantasy VI! You just straight up copied the second half of FF6, you plagiarizing bastards! Still, if you're gonna steal, you had better steal from the best. That game was brilliant and heartbreaking, and while Endgame never reaches the heights that FF6 did, it is still damn effective at using the same toolset.
Okay, so I loved that. Onto the... the Time Heist? First FF6, now Doctor Who? Well, outside of the title, there's no similarity... but if we're comparing, DW did it better. Not to say that this is bad at all. There are a lot of fun shenanigans, and I smiled the whole way through. It was fun and invigorating in a way that this series has rarely pulled off. The New York sequence had lots of goofiness. The Asgard bit was kinda touching and had a raccoon drawing blood from Natalie Portman. Nebula gets lots of screentime and that is never a bad thing. We get to see Quill dancing the opening credits GotG again, that's cool. The Clint/Natasha stuff was... well, whatever, it had to happen. A strong second act, all in all.
On to the big finale, which was cool and fun. Seeing everybody fight all out was cool, and I liked the "final battle" vibes it successfully produced. I don't like that everybody survives and that this pair of movies only had the balls to kill three and two halves (Gamora and Loki count as half each) characters, but that was expected. They made a successful big epic. It all worked. I saw LotR: RotK earlier this week, and this feels a lot like that: a successful, rousing ending to a story I never really cared for. 7/10, ranked 5th out of 21
P.S. A shame that Hulk's girlfriend has been erased from memory, because I would have liked to see her.
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Nov 28, 2020 3:18:09 GMT
A few stray thoughts:
1. Part 1 should have been called Endgame, and this should have been Infinity War. The war proper happens in the final fight of this movie, and Thanos wins the game in part 1 before the time travel bullshit.
2. Should I even bother continuing from here? Endgame was clearly the point this was all building towards. At the moment there's just one extended MCU film, but more are on the way. WandaVision looks totally awesome, but I'm not getting Disney+.
3. Although I crap on this series a lot, I do admire the cultural impact. This was the Lord of the Rings of its day... and I didn't care for that either.
4. GotG without Gamora is too sad to contemplate. Even if they use this alternate version of Gamora, it won't be the same.
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Nov 28, 2020 5:26:10 GMT
100% spot on.
|
|
|
Post by countjohn on Nov 28, 2020 5:32:38 GMT
I liked Endgame better than some of the other ones. I agree with you that the first two acts were pretty good with the character stuff at the beginning and the "time heist" middle act. Unlike in many of their other movies the characters have extended non-violent interaction with each other and there is some semblance of a story beyond just excuses to have fights and explosions. That kind of gets shot to hell at the end when it devolves into one of those big, dumb battle scenes. That stuff does nothing for me and I really just find it a bore when they go on and on. Thanos still sucks too and he's the main antagonist so there's no getting around that. It kind of evened out and I think I gave it like a 6/10.
|
|
|
Post by themoviesinner on Nov 28, 2020 8:07:16 GMT
Glad you came out of this Marvel marathon relatively unscathed. On a more serious note, I actually enjoyed some of these films. The first two Captain America films were interesting and entertaining. The Winter Soldier is definitely the best thing they've done for me, since it sheds most of the usual cringeworthy humour and works as a spy thriller quite effectively. I also like Civil War somewhat, since it's just too absurd story wise to not find entertaining. And the two Guardian Of The Galaxy films are pretty fun, since they don't seem as stuck-up as the rest of the films and actually embrace the silliness of the concept. The humour works well in these two films. Other than that, everything else is just bad. The Thor and Avenger films especially are completely unbearable.
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Nov 28, 2020 12:35:00 GMT
I liked Endgame better than some of the other ones. I agree with you that the first two acts were pretty good with the character stuff at the beginning and the "time heist" middle act. Unlike in many of their other movies the characters have extended non-violent interaction with each other and there is some semblance of a story beyond just excuses to have fights and explosions. That kind of gets shot to hell at the end when it devolves into one of those big, dumb battle scenes. That stuff does nothing for me and I really just find it a bore when they go on and on. Thanos still sucks too and he's the main antagonist so there's no getting around that. It kind of evened out and I think I gave it like a 6/10. The FF6 similarities become more pronounced the more I look at them. Infinity Saga and FF6 follow the same narrative almost all the way down the line, with two exceptions: FF6 doesn't do time travel stuff, and FF6 embraced a villain that was over the top, outrageously evil. Thanos is outrageously evil, but Infinity War expects us to "care" and "sympathize" with him. All of the complaints I hear about Joker are more accurately aimed at Infinity War, imo. Thanos is a dangerous mindset and the movie tries to make us see him as a poor soul whose heart is breaking having to murder everybody. Thanos is also hyped to be the scariest madman in the universe, whereas Kefka is introduced by whining that there is sand in his boots and throwing a tantrum that he is stuck as an emissary to the king of Tattooine. Kefka builds up into a horrifying villain as his envy drives him to kill everyone in his way, whereas Thanos is a horrifying villain that the narrative tries to force us into liking. They're almost opposites. I didn't mind the final fight of Endgame too much, simply because it came off as "the big battle" of the whole series. Sure, it was just a bunch of little scenes of individual characters doing their individual things, but the tone never came off as too goofy for the fate of the world being at stake.
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Dec 26, 2020 3:14:45 GMT
Spider-Man: Far from Home - *Deep breath* Once more into the breach. Got together with my sister for Christmas with one more MCU outing to catch up. After hating Homecoming (and Spiderverse, for that matter), I was reticent about diving into another Spidey movie. But Mysterio is one of the only Marvel characters that I actually know anything about, and he was always my favorite as a kid. Would the MCU screw him up? Well, before we get there, let's address the worst parts of both this and Homecoming. The kids. I hate them all so much. Especially MJ, who is the worst cancer ever inflicted on this whole universe. Nothing about her is funny or charming or anything other than horribly grating. Ned is just as bad. Betty is hot, so she gets more of a pass than the other crap kids. Okay, but now onto the good stuff: Mysterio is SOOO fun here, with Jake G going full ham and really making the character his own. He is Tony Stark taken to extremes in every way. Tony's whole father figure thing is so fun to see laid on extra thick here, but Beck is more than that: he's the natural result of Tony's overdeveloped ego. Tony Stark is the archvillain of the MCU, and FFH proves it by making Beck a stand-in for Tony. Stark had unlimited power, the biggest ego seen in the universe (screw Kurt Russell), and although he would feel bad about being terrible sometimes, it never stopped him from doing more terrible things whenever it struck his fancy. Beck is all of this... but even moreso. Beck is everything I hated about Tony Stark, reinterpreted into a villain, and thus allowing the story to show just how terrible he is. He's manipulative towards Peter (feeling bad about it, but that never stops him). He is conceited and fame-driven: his exposition party is ingenious, mirroring all of Tony's parties celebrating his great accomplishments, but unlike Tony Stark there is no mask of morality to his self-serving bullshit. Beck's master plan is to take Tony's KILLER DRONE/UNSTOPPABLE TRACKER SYSTEM and use it towards his own ends. Beck is a monster but he's a much more engaging one than Tony because the story has no illusions (heh) about him. He's evil, just like Iron Man. And he is soooo fun to watch because of it. But there are more negatives. The fight scenes are especially bad this time around, with terrible CGI popping up tp an extreme not seen since The Incredible Hulk. I don't think that the director is smart enough for this to be a postmodern comment on poor illusion-making ruining good mayhem in modern blockbusters, but perhaps Watts is smarter than I give him credit for. And as much as I liked the idea of Mysterio being the true form of Iron Man, I would have personally preferred that this went down the rabbit hole of Metal Gear Solid 2, addressing themes of fake news, social media "news sources," hacking, government tracking, and fears of government monitoring and control of everyone's personal lives. There's even a moment when MJ ( ) quotes George Orwell's "the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world" and twists it into her own "subjective" truth, which is a terrifying moment if you think of her as a hero or any sort of moral support for a hero. The post-credits twist is also shocking in a very, very scary way: our leaders and friends could all be lying to us. Does the Covid vaccine sterilize people? Is Bill Gates going to give us all quantum tattoos and keep anyone who doesn't get a vaccine from getting stimulus checks, or jobs? Who can we trust to be truthful, with no illusions or guile? I can't fault the movie for not going down this path, since the one they chose was fun. But there's a nagging sense of loss, where I wonder what could have been. There is so much room for terror in the premise of this film. As one final positive: Martin Starr is the surprise MVP here, consistently funny. He also had the only laugh of Homecoming, so it's good to see him in top form. 6/10, ranked 13th out of 22
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Mar 3, 2022 4:24:57 GMT
WandaVision - Wanda was always the best character in the MCU, and it is great to see a show that... actually dives into her. Dammit, this show understood the character! It didn't try to tame her or pretend that her actions are okay (outside of Monica's bullshit at the end). It presents her as a flawed, morally questionable human who is sympathetic but no less wrong for it.
Marvel has, for the first time EVER, properly written a protagonist's character arc and followed it through without cheating and rubbing off the rough edges of their actions. (Again, outside of Monica's bullshit, which I'm going to ignore because it is so out of place within the context of the show that I am fairly convinced that a producer threw it in there so that viewers don't write off Wanda as a villain - even though she totally is.) The sitcom stuff is pretty funny, the cosmic horror of the first few episodes is on point, and when it turns into a drama about grief, it actually trusts the audience to understand Wanda's position and that she can be a villain and a sympathetic character at the same time.
But fuck Monica and all she stands for. Goody two shoes stand-in for the producer. Gah. 7/10, ranked 4th out of 23
Edit: Although in retrospect, the early episodes (which are very good) don't mesh with the later ones, even if they're good arcs independently. It's a little whiplashy.
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Apr 14, 2022 1:49:49 GMT
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier - I have never been so enervated by this franchise. Even in the very worst movie, they gave us a terrific villain that deserved a better film around him. But this... I literally have no positives. It is inept in its action scenes, simultaneously confused and ham-handed in its messaging, cringeworthy in its attempts at social commentary, and utterly boring as a buddy flick. I kind of sort of like Zemo if I squint, simply because Daniel Bruhl is a great actor. That's it. I don't have any intelligent putdowns, because I was so wholeheartedly disgusted by the whole thing that I couldn't give enough shits to write up proper thoughts of hatred. 1/10, ranked 24th out of 24
|
|
|
Post by Joaquim on Apr 14, 2022 17:19:07 GMT
Been thinking about doing something like this. Re-watching all the mcu flicks since a good number of these I haven’t seen in years and evaluating just how bad it all really is. Would be like a sort of retrospective
But do I really want to put myself through this? Probably not
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Apr 14, 2022 17:27:16 GMT
Been thinking about doing something like this. Re-watching all the mcu flicks since a good number of these I haven’t seen in years and evaluating just how bad it all really is. Would be like a sort of retrospective But do I really want to put myself through this? Probably not Don't go down that path. Only frustration and loathing of the human race will follow.
|
|
|
Post by Ryan_MYeah on Apr 14, 2022 19:23:16 GMT
Been thinking about doing something like this. Re-watching all the mcu flicks since a good number of these I haven’t seen in years and evaluating just how bad it all really is. Would be like a sort of retrospective But do I really want to put myself through this? Probably not Don't go down that path. Only frustration and loathing of the human race will follow. I already loathe the human race. Movies didn’t need to make me
|
|
|
Post by Joaquim on Apr 14, 2022 21:28:29 GMT
Yea what Ryan said
|
|
|
Post by Ryan_MYeah on Apr 14, 2022 22:59:13 GMT
I think we do for completely different reasons though.
|
|
|
Post by countjohn on Apr 15, 2022 4:45:21 GMT
Been thinking about doing something like this. Re-watching all the mcu flicks since a good number of these I haven’t seen in years and evaluating just how bad it all really is. Would be like a sort of retrospective But do I really want to put myself through this? Probably not One of the big thing that hit home how bad these are is that I have zero desire to watch any of them again once I've seen them, even the comparably decent ones. They're just completely disposable like a fast good meal. There are mediocre movies I've seen two or three times because sometimes you're in the mood for a specific thing, but not these. So rewatching all these just seems like a complete waste of time to me (with all due respect to Stett, and in his case it sounded like he hadn't seen a fair amount of them at least) especially considering the run times some of them have. There are just so many better things to do with that time, whether you're watching movies or not.
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Apr 19, 2022 14:25:09 GMT
I'm having so much fun watching these guys rip into this Falcon show. Yes, a lot of it is nitpicky, and there are lots of bits I disagree with, but my god some of the points they bring up in this are hilarious. I'm nowhere near finished yet, but I'm watching bits at a time.
|
|