Marvel Comics on Film

[jazzo]

In regards to my concerns about any special appearances in the new Spider-Man simply being cameos

SpoilerShow

I was pleasantly surprised to see that was not the case at all! Not only do Dafoe and Molina get big parts,, Foxx. Ifans and Church also get a lot of screen time, though the latter two mostly supplying their voices to CGI creatures onscreen. Even the other big appearances get a lot of screen time, a surprise for me because I figured one of them would have been only game for a walk-on, if appearing at all.

This all probably leads to the film being a bit too long, though, and there's some exposition there only for people who haven't seen the other films, some of which is awkwardly inserted.

To the film's credit, it really could have just phoned it in but it's not just fan servicing (though the parts that are there specifically for that reason stand out, one sequence going on for far too long with too many winks). It takes its premise down an interesting, even thoughtful, path. Still, having said that, I did feel some glee in seeing everyone again, even from the films I didn't care that much for.

Let's try this again. Apologies for any unclear or unformed thoughts. I'm doing this between work stuff.

cdnchris, I, too, was surprised by my delight with this film.

If I was asked to rank the Spider-Man films, I'd probably have a hard time deciding between Raimi's Spider-Man 2 and Into The Spider-Verse as the best, and since both approach the story/myth so differently, yet so perfectly, it seems a disservice to choose either as being better than the other, so I won't.

I will, however, say that while the other films are varying degrees of successes and frustrating failures, the Tom Holland MCU versions work a bit better for me as whole films, at least compared to Raimi's front half-successful first film, his disastrous third, or Marc Webb's two attempts at super-emo. I suppose it could be argued that, by their very nature, the MCU films need to have a bit less personality in them to fit within their corporate IP, but Jon Watts's voice shines abundantly through with the same humour and heart that creators like Lee/Ditko and Roger Stern brought to the comics, and quite honestly, the positive energy that often bursts from these three films found only in youth. The actors always seem game for what's needed, and I do think his trilogy starts on an appropriately low "neighborhood" level, organically builds to a "get out and see the world" middle, and then grows, again, to the much grander word of young adulthood and the "multiverse" of the finale.

Things I love, all appropriately hidden:

SpoilerShow

It wisely addresses the fact that there never was, nor did there need to be, an origin story for the MCU version, since not only do we already know Spider-Man's origin from decades of comics and and film incarnations that have seeped into our collective unconscious, but No Way Home also acknowledges that we're now firmly within the MCU version of this multiverse. There are other heroes here. This version of Spider-Man is for the people who are already well...versed (pun intended) with Peter Parker and his world of superpowers and alien invasions.

And while Tobey Maguire was a terrific Peter, Tom Holland may be the perfect Spider-Man. He embodies everything the character is supposed to be; funny, sweet, respectful, without a whole lot of confidence, and he also doesn't look like a man shaving twice a day and dressing down to play a teenager.

I, like most viewers at the time, was annoyed by Andrew Garfield's two overly emotional performances in his Amazing Spidey films, which wavered between too weepy or too hip, due either to his or Webb's choice for him to deliver Peter's dialogue with sarcastic "street" edge, probably the one thing in the world that Peter Parker would never claim to be.

But here, it was a delight to see the other two actors reprise the roles that made (and perhaps broke) their careers; aged, tired, and beaten up by life. And oddly enough, it was extra exhilarating to see Garfield's Peter again. No Way Home wisely addresses the criticisms levelled at his version of the character, then even sort-of redresses the audience for having those criticisms, valid though they may have been, by giving him the most emotionally resonant moment in the entire picture, when he saves Michelle Jones from her fall, and brings a beautiful sense of closure to something left dangling from another film, another time and another universe, almost a decade earlier. It actually made me love his version of the character, and it made every film in the series feel part of a whole, even if they were retrofitted in.

And, as you mention, there were actual arcs for all the characters, heroes and villains alike, that are more than just button-pushing nostalgia. They had things to do. They do them. They end. And we feel those endings. I suppose it does seem that there's a bit of a template vibe to the films of the MCU, but what this story is, and how it builds to what it does in its three films really is quite an achievement. It's just more subtle and effective than I expected from a corporate property named Spider-Man.

[hearthesilence]

I didn't realize Ethan Hawke is co-starring with Oscar Isaac in the upcoming Moon Knight show. Amusing since both were cast in the lead roles of Paul Schrader's last two films, also the last films I've seen from both so I still have a strong mental image of them writing in their journals in Schrader's world. (When I saw the latter film at MoMA, Schrader and Isaac gave the absent Hawke a hard time for not being able to write in cursive.)

[domino harvey]

Ha, we just posted about this at the same time in different threads. Here's the trailer

[hearthesilence]

Ha, we just posted about this at the same time in different threads. Here's the trailer

LMAO, I hope they shoot an in-joke in the series. Maybe a scene with them writing in journals accompanied by voiceover.

[hearthesilence]

Ten years ago, Simu Liu was an accountant who got fired from his firm. It was an absolute low point and now look what's happened to him...I still haven't seen the Marvel film, but regardless that's a pretty amazing turnaround!

[Finch]

3 1/2 stars out of four from Slant Magazine and David Ehrlich (I know) calling it a "real Sam Raimi movie" is making me reconsider not going to see the new Doctor Strange.

EDIT: On the other hand, Variety and THR were lukewarm on the film, and Brian Tallerico of Roger Ebert.com did not like it at all.

[knives]

Ehrlich doesn’t like Marvel movies usually.

[Finch]

The only Marvels I've liked were the first films of Avengers, Guardians and Doctor Strange. I'll see what I feel like next week when I have got time to go to a theater. If Everything Everywhere All At Once is still playing, I might go to that instead for a second time before it hits UHD in a month.

[colinr0380]

Without having seen any of the Spider-Man films as yet, does anyone know which multiverse this one comes from?

[DarkImbecile]

I hadn't seen a Marvel movie, series, or other content module in more than three years when some friends invited us to see Thor: Love and Thunder with them last night, so I kind of assumed I would be a little lost when it came to the latest developments in the ever-complicating cross-film storylines. Instead — in much the same way my mother-in-law can miss a couple of weeks of her preferred soap operas and figure out what she's missed within minutes of jumping back in — my return to the world's most popular soap opera was remarkably easy, so instead of being confused by my ignorance of the six feature films and 48 miniseries episodes I missed in my absence, I could focus on being confused solely by this movie's lousy screenwriting and bad production values.

I remember kind of enjoying Taika Waititi's last entry in this franchise, 2017's Thor: Ragnarok, so it was a genuine surprise to me how visually poor, shabbily plotted, and remarkably unfunny this film was, reheating jokes and cameos from the previous film, adding extremely uncompelling new characters like Zeus and Hercules, and half-assing nearly every big effects sequence. There's a shot of an attack on a small town by an army of shadow monsters that is so dark you can barely see the monsters, but you can see the extras barely bothering to pretend to fight them, lethargically swinging swords like background performers in a middle-school play. There are multiple other shots involving subpar visual effects that have been thoroughly mocked on social media, and for good reason.

Even ignoring how bad the movie often looks or how flat most of the humor falls, it's remarkable how the old Simpson's joke for plot inconsistencies or logical gaps is basically the entirety of the movie's narrative content — characters die but you want to bring them back later, a battle needs to be won or lost depending on the needs of the plot, new abilities or weapons need to be introduced randomly: space wizards did it!

I briefly thought at the beginning of the film that Christian Bale's villain might allow for some amusingly subversive anti-religion commentary, but I guess Waititi devoted too much runtime to Chris Pratt cameos and rock alien sex rituals to do anything even mildly provocative. Best of luck to anyone here still keeping up with these, but if this film is reflective of the effort being put into Marvel movies these days, I think I'd rather just give up on having friends than be peer pressured into seeing another one.

[Computer Raheem]

The second Black Panther is going to be 2 hours and 41 minutes.

As someone who is relatively ambivalent (or outright hostile, depending on the work) towards the recent MCU material, this runtime is signaling two diametrically-opposed scenarios:

• 1. This is Ryan Coogler's big swing-for-the-fences auteur moment

• 2. Marvel is going to lose the plot on this one, and it's going to be an absolute trainwreck

Hoping for the former, but expecting the latter given the MCU's recent output (and this is coming from someone who like the first Black Panther, third act notwithstanding)

[tenia]

I don't think it's anything else than another big budget hollywood movie ending up being 140-150+ minutes because "it's an epic movie" and because it seems it's a way of giving moviegoers something for their money : Jurassic World 3 is 146 min long (160 min extended), The Batman is 176 min, F9: The Fast Saga 143 min, No Time to Die 163 min, The Rise of Skywalker 142 min, WW84 151 min, and of course within the MCU, Eternals is 156 min long, No Way Home 148 min, Age of Ultron 141 min, Civil War 147 min, Infinity War 149 min and Endgame 181 min (and absolutely none of these movies felt to me like such runtimes were justified by the on-screen results).

The fact that studios, especially within franchises like the DCEU and the MCU, have now kind of weaponized runtimes as a spec akin to the width of a roster in a fighting game ("it has 150 different characters !") or the size of a free roaming game ("the map is 50 km² !") tends to support this quite simple "longer is better" selling spec.

[Mr Sausage]

I think knives had it right, the best comparison is really to Bollywood. Bollywood movies were (still are?) three to four hours—not just to give a sense of sheer spectacle, but also because attendance was a more communal experience, with families spending an afternoon together at the cinema, bringing whole meals, and not necessarily spending every moment watching the film. It was (is?) a social event.

Personally, I think The Batman would be excruciating at a shorter length. Not only would the quicker pace betray the sludgy atmosphere of the thing, but the movie would become a headache-inducing rush of plot information with no time to digest it ala Tenent. And, turning to the MCU, the serial nature of the MCU makes the ever-extending length of the films kind of unavoidable, and its recourse to Netflix to develop its universe unsurprising.

I never tire in pointing out: Renaissance plays, eg. Shakespeare and others, were typically 2.5 hours. Classical opera, too.

[tenia]

I still do believe most of these long movies (including Batman) are that long for no reason as perceivable on-screen. I understand the theoretical need for Infinity War and then Endgame to be that long, but both actual results still felt like they could each lose half an hour. That's a trend I had an issue with for quite some time (and I already mentioned it somewhere on this board), and while duration certainly isn't a correlated metric of movies' quality overall, there definitely is a kind of hollywood movies whose every minute past the 120 minutes bar is correlated to how much bored it'll leave me. That's my grip with it : I've seen Bollywood movies like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and they never felt like slogs despite their runtimes. These hollywood movies ? They do, and how their runtimes are now part of their marketings really makes it feel as described above, like they're long for the point of being long because it's perceived as Important and a Quality Marker, to the point extremely flawed movies like Venom 2 are perceived as flawed because they're too short (no : it's just very bad).

[Mr Sausage]

I get your own personal preferences in the matter; there’s no argument there.

But…well, there’s rarely ever an onscreen reason for any movie to be any length. There is sometimes, eg. the amount of story just cannot be told in a shorter amount of time without becoming incoherent. But by and large movies (or other narrative forms) are the length that they are for reasons that have nothing to do with necessity. Audience expectation and narrative philosophy are more the dictator. A cultural context that favours efficiency will produce movies that are lean and to the point (ie. old Hollywood). A more baroque context, like the Renaissance, would favour more expansive and ornamented storytelling, so you get long Elizabethan plays like Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s and expansive epics like those of Ariosto and Tasso.

Some of the greatest films of all time, like Stalker, Rocco and His Brothers, Ran, and Once Upon a Time in the West, have no internal necessity to be as long as they are. The Batman frankly has more claim here since it has twice the plot of any of them. They are the length they are not out of utility, but for reasons more artistic. Duration is itself an experience. A specific duration and the rhythms it allows for will produce unique effects unavailable to other durations. Leone could easily have shot Once Upon a Time in the West in the more efficient manner of A Fistful of Dollars without losing an inch of plot or character. But he would’ve lost that intense and tangible quality of its style that makes the film so unique and powerful, and which Leone achieved entirely through his chosen pace. It’s a signal instance of a movie choosing a longer length not for reasons of plot, but purely out of consideration for artistic effect.

Whatever your or my personal preferences: utility is not a good marker for judging art; length is dictated more by cultural context; movies using length as self-advertisement is old and not confined to Hollywood; people don’t judge length on principle—ultimately, if they enjoy the experience, the length is justified.

[domino harvey]

Ebert had a great line about this: “No good movie is too long, and no bad movie too short”

[Monterey Jack]

Gimme some -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UKbwz6s6VY

[tenia]

Utility can also be a matter of pace. The Batman might have "twice the plot" of the Leone, it still felt like a predictable slog to me that could be 30 min shorter and still manage its plot while improving its sluggish pace. The Leone movies however manage not to feel sluggish despite their indeed slow pace. That's part of my issue with this, it's not just a matter of plot content, but also of pace. One might argue Age of Ultron is packed for instance, it still felt like one of the most sluggish movies I've seen, one I felt I would never see the end of even when fast forwarding through it.

But of course indeed, the Ebert quote sums it up perfectly.

people don’t judge length on principle.

That's the thing : I don't recall runtimes being that much of a sale spec, say, in the early 2000s, and I do think more people are currently judging length on principle that they used to some years ago.

When The Batman's runtime was announced (but also for other movies, including Black Panther 2), some people rejoiced : it was that long because it's good, it's epic, it's a big budget, and the characters have the time to be fully developped. Meaning the opposite can't be true and a 110 minutes blockbuster can't be good and characters can't be properly developped.

[therewillbeblus]

And sometimes a sluggish pace is part of deliberately entrancing us into a routine that only gains power with length. Something like Jeanne Dielman is an obvious example, but also Out 1, which only begins to work because a joke develops based on the banality and frustrations of the pacing in rhythm with the ‘plot’ being engaged with, both by characters within the film and us outside looking in. I’d even say that Refn’s recent epic Too Old to Die Young starts off as an ‘okay’ film reminiscent of his stylish but empty work, only to eventually reveal itself as something brilliant and deep. But it requires an approach of deliberate “sluggish pacing” in longevity to peel back those onion layers.

[tenia]

That might be precisely what I have trouble with : how some movies master sluggish paces and others simply don't. And I just don't think most of these long Hollywood big budget movies nowadays are doing well in this department, so it's not just a question of utility but also simply of skills (whether it's writing or editing, for instance).

To come back to Black Panther 2 : the first movie was 30 minutes shorter and already felt like not much was happening during its first half.

[Mr Sausage]

Utility can also be a matter of pace. The Batman might have "twice the plot" of the Leone, it still felt like a predictable slog to me that could be 30 min shorter and still manage its plot while improving its sluggish pace. The Leone movies however manage not to feel sluggish despite their indeed slow pace. That's part of my issue with this, it's not just a matter of plot content, but also of pace. One might argue Age of Ultron is packed for instance, it still felt like one of the most sluggish movies I've seen, one I felt I would never see the end of even when fast forwarding through it.

Well, yeah, but your argument still boils down to whether you like it or not. I love Leone too; his movies never drag for me; but there isn't a single argument you've made that cannot and has not been used against his movies. The pace of Once Upon a Time in the West is preposterously slow. I love it; it has a unique effect; but it's extravagant and unjustified in any traditional sense. Also, yeah, Ultron has a fast pace, but I'm in full agreement that thing is a slog. But then I liked The Batman's sludgy atmosphere and willingness to take its time. I also felt it was justified; its plot benefited from the extra breathing room, plus I liked the broody, angsty atmosphere enough to appreciate they indulged it on top of making a plot-heavy mystery. Nominally we're talking about stuff like pace, craft, artistic justification, whatever--but mainly we're arguing accidents of sensibility.

This has little to do with utility. A movie can be done many different ways--done well many different ways. I don't like to argue that a movie is good the way it is because it cannot and should not be any other way. There's a way to create a 120 minute The Batman that would be good...but I don't care, because I liked the current one just fine as it is. You disagree. Awesome. Where we really part ways is in thinking that length needs a utilitarian argument, eg. must make itself undeniable. Too many great movies don't pass that test and any number of mediocre ones do.

That's the thing : I don't recall runtimes being that much of a sale spec, say, in the early 2000s, and I do think more people are currently judging length on principle that they used to some years ago.

You're right that there's been a social shift here. Previously the wisdom was anything much over 2 hours would limit showings and therefore money. That seems to've been replaced by the idea that more people will come to longer films, something the viewership seems to bear out (I wonder if the rise in binge watching has helped up people's tolerance for/enjoyment of longer viewing experiences). But while I can't speak for other people, I don't think they are judging length on principle so much as expressing their current preference. Overall, people vote with their feet, not with twitter manifestos. (There might be a bit of illogical thinking, too, like "all the good movies I'm seeing are long, therefore long movies must be good" kinda thing).

But what I suspect you're doing is claiming that, because there is no evident internal reason for the movies to be this long, therefore it must be marketing alone, making everything big and epic because that's what the trend is. Ok. But you run into a chicken/egg problem. Marketing usually plays catch up--so movies would've had to've been trending longer already for the new viewing preference to be noticeable. So unless those earlier long movies have obvious internal justifications for their length that the new ones simply don't...I don't see the point of the claim. These things are always feedback loops anyways. Audience preference drives more movies that fit audience preference which drives audience preference. Personally, I don't think movies are longer mainly as marketing. I think filmmakers are making longer movies because storytelling values have shifted away from economy towards abundance and maximalism for reasons of their own, and this has occurred at a time of greater tolerance for longer movies in both audiences and executives.

When The Batman's runtime was announced (but also for other movies, including Black Panther 2), some people rejoiced : it was that long because it's good, it's epic, it's a big budget, and the characters have the time to be fully developped. Meaning the opposite can't be true and a 110 minutes blockbuster can't be good and characters can't be properly developped.

I can't speak to these essentially hypothetical people. But I don't think the logic of your last sentence holds true. Positive assertions are not also de facto negative assertions.

As well, I think you're overfocussed on what are essentially rationalizations. People attempting to explain to themselves why their preference is the way it is. So while people might make claims that sound like aesthetic principles, it's mostly an attempt to give coherent shape to something that isn't coherent, ie. taste. If you proved to one of these hypothetical people that added length does not make these movies objectively better, more epic, give the characters more time to be developed, etc., they wouldn't suddenly stop liking longer movies. They'd just come up with other reasons for their preference.

[Finch]

Some of the greatest films of all time, like Stalker, Rocco and His Brothers, Ran, and Once Upon a Time in the West, have no internal necessity to be as long as they are. The Batman frankly has more claim here since it has twice the plot of any of them. They are the length they are not out of utility, but for reasons more artistic. Duration is itself an experience. A specific duration and the rhythms it allows for will produce unique effects unavailable to other durations. Leone could easily have shot Once Upon a Time in the West in the more efficient manner of A Fistful of Dollars without losing an inch of plot or character. But he would’ve lost that intense and tangible quality of its style that makes the film so unique and powerful, and which Leone achieved entirely through his chosen pace. It’s a signal instance of a movie choosing a longer length not for reasons of plot, but purely out of consideration for artistic effect.

I find The Irishman fascinating to ponder in that context because Steven Zaillian's screenplay is a fast read whereas the film is the opposite though the pacing felt more correct than too slow to me personally.

[tenia]

Yes, it indeed obviously boils down to whether I like it or not : a sluggish movie I like is a slow movie, one I don't like a slog. But it seems to me that the current trend of opening runtimes past the previous 2hrs threshold is simultaneous to me disliking most of the hollywood movies doing so (as I wrote above, I can almost predict how low my score will be just by looking at these runtimes), hence why I might make such a subjective correlation.

However, for my last sentence, this isn't hypothetic : I've heard people saying Venom 2 and Thor 4 aren't good because they're too short to do things properly, unlike these longer movies that, for these people, are better because they have the runtimes to do so (I don't think they actually do, but still).
That's where I'm coming from on these impression that runtimes really ARE becoming some kind of quality metrics.
And of course, I've also heard people saying they won't go out to theaters and pay for a shorter movie, it's not worth the money, as if they're having a linear $/min metric.
These aren't hypothetic people, and this was in France, ie a country with a lesser positive aura towards these movies and chepear ticket prices.

[Mr Sausage]

Sorry, I didn't bother to explain myself. I know you meant real people had said these things, but for the purposes of this discussion you had no specific person in mind, more the rhetorical device of a hypothetical person who would share these genuinely held opinions. Does that make sense? I dunno, probably a pointless distinction I should've cut out of my post completely.

It's interesting that people have started to feel like shorter movies are too rushed in what their doing (at least in France, among the people you're listening to). I mean, I thought Venom 2 and Thor 4 definitely didn't need to be any longer, but apparently these people feel stories in general need more time in order to feel more substantial. If it zips by too much, there's less impact for them. Hmm.

[tenia]

I agree with you regarding Venom 2 and Thor 4, and I don't think a longer version of Venom 2 would have changed how bad this simply is for many other reasons, but it indeed seems like people tend to think so (and US people on Twitter too, for what it's worth). This explains part of my reasoning as why I feel this has become kind of a default setting for this type of movies.