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Saw this again yesterday, and was blown away again. It'll be hard for any forthcoming Marvel films to top this. Brilliant balance of characters, and I really appreciated a lot of the subleties in Black Widow/Hawkeye this time around.

So far, the Blu-ray has been released internationally in some countries, but they are all missing a few extras from the upcoming US edition, and none of them include the Joss Whedon commentary.

manicsounds wrote:So far, the Blu-ray has been released internationally in some countries, but they are all missing a few extras from the upcoming US edition, and none of them include the Joss Whedon commentary.

Now the 10-discs Marvel Cinematic Set Phase One has been delayed until Spring 2013 as Marvel nor Disney didn't have the rights to produce the suitcase. Funny that Disney had a similar problem a couple of years ago when they were releasing one of their films with the Luxor lamp, yet they ended up being able to come to some agreement and released it on time. Someone dropped the ball with the Marvel set now and I wouldn't be surprised if somehow some of these sets leaked out since I'm 100% sure that they have already been distributed to some of the retailers.

By the way, I'm pretty sure this has been said before but I'll repeat it: I loathe studios that give a royal fuck you to customers and do sets like this one without taking into consideration people who have been loyal and bought the previous releases. Why can't these studios use those damn proof of purchase tabs for stuff like this? It would be perfect if I could send the proof of purchases of all the films I previously bought and be able to purchase separately the case and bonus material that I'm missing now.

stroszeck wrote:Just out of curiosity and not to be a jerk since I know this was almost universally acclaimed, but did anyone feel that it was sort of just all action and no real character development of any kind? It just seemed to me that it was so highly lauded in all the reviews as the perfect blend of action, story, acting etc but I thought it fell sort of flat and didn't find it very funny.

I don't get the acclaim either. I was expecting a Nolan style take on the action hero, and all I got was two hours of testosterone fuelled fight sequences, explosions and lame jokes. Terrible.

I personally found the fight scenes 'estrogen' fueled which made them more interesting. Not everything has to be Nolan styled (which frankly doesn't work well in comic sense with his films being closer to classic crime films with comic elements) and I thought all things considered the film was okay which is still better than most action blockbusters.

knives wrote:I personally found the fight scenes 'estrogen' fueled which made them more interesting.

Could you expand upon this? I haven't seen the film, but for some reason this statement makes me sort of want to.

Now I should state I don't usually like Whedon, but his story telling quirks mixed with Seamus McGarvey's faggy lens (I don't know if he actually is gay, but between this and We Need to Talk About Kevin I have to believe he is) transform a rather rudimentary spandex film into something very feminine (for example on Whedon's side of things the main character as it were (and the first of the Avengers we are introduced to assuming we don't count captain switcharoo) is The Black Widow who is the only one with anything like a character arc within the film. Actually, unrelated to my comment, Whedon seems more interested with the tertiary characters giving them more personality and more to do than the supposed main characters. Even the production design which looks like an expensive episode of the Power Rangers gives a feminine round feeling when it doesn't aim for that evil of realism (Loki's costume is chuckle worthy).

As to the action scenes themselves they are scripted rather traditionally though with more care for civilians than is usual. The difference comes from the lack of interest in the action portion of the action scenes (with the lamed exception of Thor's introduction which even gets a good setup from Capt) focusing instead on the bodies of the fighters and the words they're saying. The focus comes in on how the actions are done rather than the actions themselves which builds the body mechanically, but allows for the action to function sexually (that probably isn't the right word because aside of the focus on characters' asses the film remains sterile, but it is suggestive of what I mean).

knives wrote: Seamus McGarvey's faggy lens (I don't know if he actually is gay, but between this and We Need to Talk About Kevin I have to believe he is)

haha I literally have no idea of this means

Just that the way he shoots dudes even in the setting of a commercial film is sexualized. I probably made The Avengers sound way more interesting than it actually is though.

It certainly piqued my interest, although I'll still wait until one of those "might as well watch this" days.

I actually thought the relative absence of dubious 'character arcs' was one of the film's strengths. It's nice once in a while to have a big dumb action film without those sort of dramatic pretensions - which big dumb action films almost without fail execute abysmally.

I agree and that was what I was intending to say with that aside. It is a very basic film in a lot of ways, but that makes it far more effective than a lot of these films which give a rudimentary stab at theme or whatever just because when it ends up feeling like a distraction at best to the filmmakers.

It's certainly far superior to Iron Man 2, which let the character focus which never really works eclipse the fun parts for nearly the whole running length of the thing. Besides, the character of The Avengers as a group changes dramatically over the course of the film, and that works far better than trying to develop a dozen different characters at the same time (particularly since few of them have much depth of characterization to work with.) And everyone gets a fun character beat or two, as well.

knives wrote:Now I should state I don't usually like Whedon, but his story telling quirks mixed with Seamus McGarvey's faggy lens

I'm afraid I'm going to have to take exception to your phraseology there... [-X

Horrible. What is this incrediblie writing that everyone is talking about? Sub-sub Kevin Smith archness and having every character speak and behave exactly the same is not in any way good. And yes, even Captain America gets in on the miserable wisecracks. The joke being that the only reference he gets is The Wizard of Oz. The main strength of this thing is that the action sequences weren't quite as bad as what Michael Bay manages, and that the characters hold some nostalgia.

Really? They speak and behave the same? I thought Whedon was really smart with that. Captain America only got that one wise-crack, and I don't remember Hawkeye or Black Widow getting any wise-cracks (obviously, Tony Stark delivers most of them).

The Narrator Returns wrote:Really? They speak and behave the same? I thought Whedon was really smart with that. Captain America only got that one wise-crack, and I don't remember Hawkeye or Black Widow getting any wise-cracks (obviously, Tony Stark delivers most of them).

A super-soldier awakens from suspended animation, and his biggest adjustment to modern life is that his sense of humor is dated. Genius. I think Austin Powers had more of a character arc than this. Hawkeye might have been the only one without some forced dumb punch-line, but that's because he was hypnotized for more than half the movie. The childish falafel-shop gag pretty much summed this nonsense up for me. Otherwise I found this to be a huge tunnel of bland, and I wouldn't be so indignant if Avengers wasn't sold as the be-all end-all superhero movie. I'd certainly take a number of others before this one, though I have yet to enjoy any without reservation. At least I realize now that I hate Joss Whedon.

Well, no, his biggest issue with adjusting is that he's bewildered by absolutely everything around him for at least like half of the movie, in the context of which the line is actually both funny and also apropos- of course he's relieved by something he actually understands.

I'm not the biggest Whedon fan, and there's definitely a broad sense in which all his characters talk like Joss Whedon characters instead of each developing voices of their own, but that seems fair enough in a big team comic book movie- there's a sort of shared space in how conversations work in this world, but the characters' various backstories mean that they interact with that space differently. Obviously, if you don't find the jokes funny, that's going to be a big flaw, but I don't think insufficient differentiation works against this kind of movie.

The DVD is encrypted quite hard. None of the ripping programs seem to work. So much for MP3ing the commentary track. I guess I have to sit around at home to listen to it instead...

So, after teasing

Spoiler

Thanos

in the credit sequence, we now know that the next villain is going to be...Ultron. Huh?

Spoiler

Thanos

will probably be the villain in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Don't forget last year when they trotted out the...

Spoiler

Infinity Gauntlet

...for about 2 minutes for everyone to see.

As a former comic book collector in middle school, this kind of reflects why I have no interest in comic book films, at least where Marvel is concerned, given the way they operate. There's a sense that the filmmakers are expected to more or less re-stage very simple and straightforward storylines that are overly familiar to comic book fans. Doesn't matter which villain they put in, you know what story's going to be shoved into the film and how it's going to play out. There's nothing of real substance to be gained, nothing more to be revealed. A far cry from, say, reinterpreting a play, it really is the cinematic equivalent of fast food.

Matt wrote:

Spoiler

Thanos

will probably be the villain in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Ah, now that makes sense. I'm saddened to see thought that they're going with some contemporary lineup of the team. I too was a Marvel lover in Jr. High and used to read The Guardians of the Galaxy with the membership that remained constant from the late-60s until I quit the boo in the mid 90s. I recognize Drax the Destroyer, Nebula, and (sigh) Rocket Raccoon, but have no idea who the rest of the lineup are.

hearthesilence wrote:As a former comic book collector in middle school, this kind of reflects why I have no interest in comic book films, at least where Marvel is concerned, given the way they operate. There's a sense that the filmmakers are expected to more or less re-stage very simple and straightforward storylines that are overly familiar to comic book fans. Doesn't matter which villain they put in, you know what story's going to be shoved into the film and how it's going to play out. There's nothing of real substance to be gained, nothing more to be revealed. A far cry from, say, reinterpreting a play, it really is the cinematic equivalent of fast food.

Isn't that because it's also much more practical in a way that everything is already written in an easily adaptable way, or that, when they try to have something more original, they either ends up with something close to stuff already existing, or can't write it properly ?

I'm thinking of the Iron Man series, which I've found pretty awful in terms of screenwriting. When I saw the 3rd movie, the 1st thought was "they should have used the Extremis story arc straight-forward instead of trying to blend stuff from everywhere", especially from a pacing point of view.

I always take Slient Hill (not a comic book adaptation, I know) as an exemple : they wanted to do "something original", in the end, they just basically adapted the 1st game story, but in a way that blends elements from the 3 other games (at the time). In the end, you have a movie where, if you know the games, you will find incoherent stuff everywhere, because they're using elements which have nothing to do with the 1st game story, and if you're not, you're going not to understand half of what's happening.

Here, it's the same.

We watched The Avengers with my girlfriend last month. Watching it with her was a revelation of how you can't understand anything (or close to anything) if you don't know what happened in the rest of the "Phase One" movies. She was basically bored to death from missing all this.
By adapting a straightforward story arc, it might have been much better for people unfamiliar with this, because it could have been taken as a stand alone, like you would take the Dark Knight Returns 2-parts adaptation as a stand-alone.

In The Avengers, you're reminded every 5 minutes that there has been 5 movies before, and you get an ending sequence reminding you that Avengers is only a movie within a whole program of movies. I wish they would stop doing this type of movies, which are just part of a whole, and would go back doing stand alone movies, like we had in the past with Batman Returns, for instance. This is a movie which is not only very good, but that anybody can watch, because you don't have to watch 5 movies before, and 3 after, to get it all.