[Movies] Avengers

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Adam

Adam

ThatNickGuy said:
Interesting! I hadn't heard that. Do you have a source for that info?

Also, I read somewhere that they intend on the next batch of solo movies to be more cosmic based to set up for Avengers 2. That would make sense, given the plans for Guardians of the Galaxy.

Speaking of which, is anyone else watching Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes? The Guardians of the Galaxy just showed up in the latest episode. Best parts? Rocket Racoon and....I AM GROOT!
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At one point it was on Wikipedia under Infinity Gauntlet, since removed. Superheroes Hype has it in their forums as well. Whether it's true or not, it would 'make sense'.
 
ScytheRexx

ScytheRexx

Speaking of which, is anyone else watching Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes? The Guardians of the Galaxy just showed up in the latest episode. Best parts? Rocket Racoon and....I AM GROOT!
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I heard it was cancelled! When did it come back on?
 
Charlie Don't Surf

Charlie Don't Surf

I have resisted posting in here since I'm sure a few of you will assume I'm trolling and I honestly don't want to break up everyone having fun with the new best movie ever made but well. To answer someone's post up there earlier- I'm not gonna wait a couple months to say I thought this movie sucked.

Also, here's a good review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/m...-directed-by-joss-whedon.html?_r=3&ref=movies

“I’m always angry,” he says at one point, and while “The Avengers” is hardly worth raging about, its failures are significant and dispiriting. The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre. Mr. Whedon’s playful, democratic pop sensibility is no match for the glowering authoritarianism that now defines Hollywood’s comic-book universe. Some of the rebel spirit of Mr. Whedon’s early projects “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Firefly” and “Serenity” creeps in around the edges but as detail and decoration rather than as the animating ethos.
“I aim to misbehave,” Malcolm Reynolds famously said in “Serenity.” But for all their maverick swagger, the Avengers are dutiful corporate citizens, serving a conveniently vague set of principles. Are they serving private interests, big government, their own vanity, or what? It hardly matters, because the true guiding spirit of their movie is Loki, who promises to set the human race free from freedom and who can be counted on for a big show wherever he goes. In Germany he compels a crowd to kneel before him in mute, terrified awe, and “The Avengers,” which recently opened there to huge box office returns, expects a similarly submissive audience here at home. The price of entertainment is obedience.
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These last two paragraphs are a highlight.

Another I liked: http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/3482756/

As daring as it might seem for the biggest superhero movie ever to turn the action knob way down for an hour so that its actors can do some acting, the actual material they're given is as programmatic as a bad culture-clash rom-com, transparently meant to tear our heroes apart just so they can come back together. One scene, in which Thor, Iron Man, and Cap each whip out their superpowers to show the others whose is biggest, amounts to a CGI-enabled round of roshambo.
Writer/director Whedon first showed his incredible talent for long-form storytelling in TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, infusing the fantastic with slowly built, genuinely relatable emotion. On The Avengers' comparatively minute canvas of two and a half hours, Whedon effectively creates a sketch of a working universe and tells us that his characters are emotionally damaged but doesn't explore that damage in any substantive way. The most Whedon-esque parts of the script are the flippant wisecracks—self-satisfied, self-deprecating, or somehow both—that the fucked-up superheroes toss off as knee-jerk self-defense in life-or-death situations. What worked as the cool diffusion of stakes in Buffy here underlines the lack of suspense to the mission: We never get the sense that any of the heroes might not survive to snark again.
...
The final act of The Avengers consists of an insanely complex action set piece, containing some truly cool visual shit, not least the alien army summoned by Loki, which arrives in some kind of undulating, indestructible, prehistoric flying fish. But really, who cares about another battle? We know how this is going to end. The long, technically bravura sequence is given dramatic tension only by occasional scraps of dialogue, such as a two-line exchange between Natasha and Barton over a job they worked in Budapest, alluding to the mysterious lives they'd all been leading before this movie. Then, a few minutes later, Iron Man breaks a moment of tension with a homophobic wisecrack. Every time the movie hints at something rich and evocative, Whedon undercuts it with a punchline—his instincts as a big-picture storyteller crippled by his short-term need to please the crowd.
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ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

Now see, I would have been fine if you didn't like it. Wouldn't really understand it, but fine. Your opinion and all that.

Except we're not getting your opinion. We're getting quotes from other reviewers. What did YOU think about it? Be specific or we'll assume you didn't see it and just read the above quoted reviews.
 
Adam

Adam

sixpackshaker said:
What a crap review.

What ever you do, don't please the crowd...
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Yeah, those reviews were...uh..interesting. The NY Times one was stuffing some kind of anti-authoritarianism bent up its own ass and the second, like you said, is upset that the director was interested in pleasing the crowd.
 
@Li3n

@Li3n

ThatNickGuy said:
Now see, I would have been fine if you didn't like it. Wouldn't really understand it, but fine. Your opinion and all that.

Except we're not getting your opinion. We're getting quotes from other reviewers. What did YOU think about it? Be specific or we'll assume you didn't see it and just read the above quoted reviews.
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What i got is that he doesn't like it because no one punched a cop while screaming RON PAUL 2012...
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

Yeah, I don't get that. When or why would ever not want to please the crowd? The one-liners in the movie is some of the best and funniest stuff. The Budapest line works not because they bring it up, but for Hawkeye's "you remember Budapest differently than me" response, which says a lot about both characters and how they view things. And sure, we know how it's going to end, but it's the how that's interesting.

Also, I'm really curious about the "homophobic wisecrack" he's referring to because I don't recall one.
 
Charlie Don't Surf

Charlie Don't Surf

They're better at articulating that sort of thing, but-

I never really got pulled into it. I am not some Joss Whedon hater or anything - despite my mocking of Browncoats (give me a second, holy lol at everyone thinking that this means he'll do Firefly again. He has 200 million reasons to never fuck with television again)- I really love Firefly. Those barbs and jokes landed and were enjoyable since there were actual characters underneath them. Everyone in this movie just kind of talks at each other. I never got a whiff of any sort of conversation/connection with ANYONE in this movie. The closest was Black Widow/Hawkeye, but again, that was maybe 7 out of 150 minutes.

I thought the action scenes were really uninspiring. For everyone's Transformers hatred, those aliens were just kind of grey random blurs that just kept getting exploded in different ways. There was more tension in a fight between the Power Rangers and the Putty Patrol. The whole Iron Man sacrifice thing was just stupid. The random scenes with Fury/the shadowy figures were so inane and made zero sense. The nuke just got shot there since who cares, it's the climax, there should be a nuke, something big should blow up for no reason. Loki's plan never really made sense to me. The hour or so spent on the aircraft carrier was just excrutiating. The 3D really sucked (and I don't buy that all 3D sucks after Transformers 3).

I'm not going to say it was the worst movie ever or anything. I did enjoy what they did with Hulk. But again, that was a small part of the movie compared to the boring rest of it. How did they so effectively kill off the interesting Tony Stark from Iron Man 1? Captain America and Thor are similarly one-note. That's all I got off the top of my head.
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

Charlie Don't Surf said:
Cut for length.
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1) The "random" scenes with Fury and the shadow men is that he still needed authorization for everything. They were higher up government people. Which also explains the nuke because they lost faith in Fury because he allowed the aliens to come, so they figured they'd go with burning everything down than rely on Fury's untested Avengers to do it.

2) Wouldn't you think the lack of connection among them is sort of the point? Widow/Hawkeye have one because they actually have a history with each other. None of the others did.

3) Do you mean one-note as in no character development? Because the story was more about the development of the team. The solo development stuff happened in their own movies.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
I liked the movie well enough, except it had the same problem that the spider man sequels had - too many stories to tell in one movie. Spiderman vs Sandman should have been an entire, separate movie from Spiderman vs Venom. I liked the individual movies as-much-if-n0t-better than the denouement "Avengers" because it's hard as hell to cram everybody's story in a 2 hour and change movie. There was so much I felt was touched on then dropped... glossed over... or just plain skipped for the sake of brevity.

But I still liked it. I think it was probably as good an Avengers movie as it is possible to make - and that's not a slight on Avengers, just an expression of the temporal limitations of the medium.
 
Adam

Adam

Charlie Don't Surf said:
They're better at articulating that sort of thing, but-

I never really got pulled into it. I am not some Joss Whedon hater or anything - despite my mocking of Browncoats (give me a second, holy lol at everyone thinking that this means he'll do Firefly again. He has 200 million reasons to never fuck with television again)- I really love Firefly. Those barbs and jokes landed and were enjoyable since there were actual characters underneath them. Everyone in this movie just kind of talks at each other. I never got a whiff of any sort of conversation/connection with ANYONE in this movie. The closest was Black Widow/Hawkeye, but again, that was maybe 7 out of 150 minutes.

I thought the action scenes were really uninspiring. For everyone's Transformers hatred, those aliens were just kind of grey random blurs that just kept getting exploded in different ways. There was more tension in a fight between the Power Rangers and the Putty Patrol. The whole Iron Man sacrifice thing was just stupid. The random scenes with Fury/the shadowy figures were so inane and made zero sense. The nuke just got shot there since who cares, it's the climax, there should be a nuke, something big should blow up for no reason. Loki's plan never really made sense to me. The hour or so spent on the aircraft carrier was just excrutiating. The 3D really sucked (and I don't buy that all 3D sucks after Transformers 3).

I'm not going to say it was the worst movie ever or anything. I did enjoy what they did with Hulk. But again, that was a small part of the movie compared to the boring rest of it. How did they so effectively kill off the interesting Tony Stark from Iron Man 1? Captain America and Thor are similarly one-note. That's all I got off the top of my head.
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Well, that's better!
 
ElJuski

ElJuski

Staff member
The major complaints seemingly coming from that second quoted one are really stupid. It's kind of like coming out of a Bond movie and saying, "There really wasn't any tension there...we knew he was going to survive and get the girl. Boring. He needs to say less cheeky things next time."

Just like when you played with your action figures at home, the thrill wasn't seeing whether any one of them would live to see the light outside of the sandbox again, but what happens when you take your favorite plastic heroes and make them bonks heads. I'm not a comic book fan by any stretch of the imagination, nor a big Joss Whedon fan (internet nerds get off on that guy way too much), but I thought he managed to pull off a deftly managed magic trick of entertainment and whimsy. It's pop-fluff done by a whizz, and I wish twice as many movies I saw could make me as much of an active participant in a water-cooler event as Avengers did.
 
Charlie Don't Surf

Charlie Don't Surf

ElJuski said:
in a water-cooler event as Avengers did.
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See - I think you're accidentally correct here. It's an event. It's a water cooler chat, that's all the depth here. The success of this movie has very little to do with its quality and a lot to do with it being a very calculated corporate product meticulously plotted out over...what 5 years? With five two-hour-long trailers preceding it, probably upwards of a billion of dollars spent. All of that - and this movie still can't resist setting up Avengers 2, Thor 2, Iron Man 3, Hulk 2, Captain America 2. It's just a fucking machine. I hate sounding like that stereotype "fuck the corporations, man" guy, but this whole enterprise is just so blatant.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Charlie Don't Surf said:
See - I think you're accidentally correct here. It's an event. It's a water cooler chat, that's all the depth here. The success of this movie has very little to do with its quality and a lot to do with it being a very calculated corporate product meticulously plotted out over...what 5 years? With five two-hour-long trailers preceding it, probably upwards of a billion of dollars spent. All of that - and this movie still can't resist setting up Avengers 2, Thor 2, Iron Man 3, Hulk 2, Captain America 2. It's just a fucking machine. I hate sounding like that stereotype "fuck the corporations, man" guy, but this whole enterprise is just so blatant.
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I don't see that as being any different from the comic medium from which the source material came.
 
Espy

Espy

You know, I thought the movie was a ton of fun. I did think the scenes that lagged tended to be anytime Cap or Thor got to say much of anything unless they had RD jr. to play off of. This isn't a... "great film" in my opinion but hell if it wasn't a fun popcorn flick. Far better than any of the TF movies, but it's not The Dark Knight. Then again it isn't mean tot be. I'm ok with that.
 
Adam

Adam

My brother and his boyfriend, my sister and her boyfriend and my wife all went together to see it with me. Damned if they didn't cheer at the end of it. Shit, people in the audience were clapping at parts. That just boggled my mind. If this is what a corporation wants to feed me instead of the latest indie hit about a smart-talking knocked up teenager from small-town USA, fill me up.
 
Charlie Don't Surf

Charlie Don't Surf

Adam said:
My brother and his boyfriend, my sister and her boyfriend and my wife all went together to see it with me. Damned if they didn't cheer at the end of it. Shit, people in the audience were clapping at parts. That just boggled my mind. If this is what a corporation wants to feed me instead of the latest indie hit about a smart-talking knocked up teenager from small-town USA, fill me up.
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A) lol @ anyone that claps or cheers at a movie screen
B) Juno is still the go-to-hated "obscure" "indy" movie?
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
In the theater in which I saw the movie, there was also such uproar at Hulk's thrashing of Loki that I, too, could not hear the "puny god" line muttered afterwards. Also, people seemed to think Thanos was Super Skrull. He was clearly Thanos to me, but whatever.
 
Adam

Adam

A) I KNOW RIGHT. Seriously, I've never seen it before and I hope it doesn't become habit, but still, very strange.
B) I enjoyed Juno. That doesn't mean I want to see more Junos. Fortunately or unfortunately, the best movies ever filmed were constructed in a corporate environment.
 
Adam

Adam

Find me an indie movie on this list.

1. 9.2 The Shawshank Redemption (1994) 753,116
2. 9.2 The Godfather (1972) 561,166
3. 9.0 The Godfather: Part II (1974) 354,298
4. 8.9 Pulp Fiction (1994) 592,823
5. 8.9 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) 234,701
6. 8.9 12 Angry Men (1957) 184,908
7. 8.9 Schindler's List (1993) 396,143
8. 8.8 The Dark Knight (2008) 689,348
9. 8.8 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) 530,571
10. 8.8 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) 319,061
11. 8.8 Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) 383,203
12. 8.8 Fight Club (1999) 572,520
13. 8.8 Seven Samurai (1954) 127,828
14. 8.8 Inception (2010) 544,573
15. 8.7 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) 552,493
16. 8.7 Goodfellas (1990) 335,356
17. 8.7 Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) 430,888
18. 8.7 City of God (2002) 249,217
19. 8.7 Casablanca (1942) 218,077
20. 8.7 The Matrix (1999) 549,690
21. 8.7 Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) 107,164
22. 8.7 Rear Window (1954) 162,291
23. 8.7 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 330,291
24. 8.6 The Silence of the Lambs (1991) 365,405
25. 8.6 The Usual Suspects (1995) 364,132
26. 8.6 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) 475,495
27. 8.6 Se7en (1995) 432,454
28. 8.6 Forrest Gump (1994) 478,653
29. 8.6 The Avengers (2012) 109,489
30. 8.6 Psycho (1960)
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
I have the movie poster for Raiders on my office wall.

"INDIANA JONES - THE NEW HERO FROM THE CREATORS OF JAWS AND STAR WARS."

"PARAMOUNT PICTURES PRESENTS A LUCASFILM LTD PRODUCTION - A STEVEN SPIELBERG FILM"

That's about as "corporate formulated" as any movie can get.
 
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