The Avengers ::: 4 May 2012

I've been enjoying the trailers...will definitely be there. I wasn't an avid reader of the original Avengers series from Marvel Comics but have gotten more recent runs....

Mrs Aural Sects wrote:

I've been enjoying the trailers...will definitely be there. I wasn't an avid reader of the original Avengers series from Marvel Comics but have gotten more recent runs....

Lets put it like this: the trailers do the movie no justice at all it is far better: complete and in the cinema.

CGI-heavy comic book based stuff is not usually a genre I go for, but it was entertaining enough.

Also, I want to have some crazy sex with Scarlett Johansson. Just thought it was important you all know.

If the plane goes down, ScarJo is my floatation device.

I plan on seeing this tomorrow if I don't get called in.

saint mark wrote:

This is the best superheromovie made so far. Easily.

That's because it's written and directed by a guy who actually understands the characters. Tying together four separate franchises - IRON MAN, THOR, CAPTAIN AMERICA and HULK - while introducing characters like Nick Fury and Hawkeye who have never had a standalone franchise and somehow making a superhero ensemble film (which has really never been attempted before) was always going to be a pretty tall order. There was a serious chance that the film could be a horrid mess, so getting the right person for the job was the first port of call.

Prisoner Monkeys wrote:

I plan on seeing this tomorrow if I don't get called in.

saint mark wrote:

This is the best superheromovie made so far. Easily.

That's because it's written and directed by a guy who actually understands the characters. Tying together four separate franchises - IRON MAN, THOR, CAPTAIN AMERICA and HULK - while introducing characters like Nick Fury and Hawkeye who have never had a standalone franchise and somehow making a superhero ensemble film (which has really never been attempted before) was always going to be a pretty tall order. There was a serious chance that the film could be a horrid mess, so getting the right person for the job was the first port of call.

I agree and Whedon was the right choice for direction and scripting.

Well, I saw it today and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think it addressed many of the issues with modern superhero films - they take themselves way too seriously. Films like GREEN LANTERN and GREEN HORNET try way too hard to be gritty and reaslitic and they lose all of their escapism. But THE AVENGERS knows just how preposterous it is - it does, after all, have an invisible lying aircraft carrier - and isn't ashamed or self-conscious of it. It was a lot of fun, even if the post-production 3D effects hurt my eyes at times. I don't think I've ever heard an audience laugh as much as they did during this film.

Also, the scene that really clinched it for me was the interrogation at the beginning. When most films have evil chracters speaking their own language (and it's usually the Russians), it's limited to simple dialogue. You'll ntoice it in THE BOURNE SUPREMACY when Kirill collects his payment; the script is limited to "Half now. Half later." and lines like that. But the characters in THE AVENGERS actually had a conversation, rather than the usual "we're bad because we're talking about money and jobs in another language". I knew then that the film was going to be really good.

Will hopefully catch this over the weekend, reviews are extremely positive.

Caught this tonight. Not sure where I place it among my superhero pantheon, but it was certainly one of the most enjoyable. Nice mix of really great humor and really great action. A couple moments with Hulk really stole the show.

Armond drops a bomb on it.

Quote :

The Delusion of Marvel’s The Avengers

Previous Marvel Comics superhero movies such as Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America and Thor were like roughly cut puzzle pieces that looked odd and unfinished by themselves—pretend movies derived from already established brands. Most of them, particularly Jon Favreau’s dung-colored Iron Man, were poorly directed.


Marvel’s The Avengers.

Now, fitted together in Marvel’s The Avengers, the superhero tales still don’t quite cohere; instead, each superhero’s traits and powers have been simultaneously inflated and streamlined (Scarlett Johannson’s Black Widow, barely a cameo in last year’s Iron Man 2, is almost a character here) with the sole intent to overwhelm, not merely entertain. That’s why a corporate brand is part of the title.

A live-action version of the comic book series about “The Earth’s Mightiest Heroes,” Marvel’s The Avengers is promoted as the ultimate Comic-Con—the franchise of franchises, the movie contemporary audiences have been trained to anticipate and genuflect to.

This whopping sales campaign manipulates immature, undeveloped adolescent taste into the mistaken notion of cultural fulfillment. The Avengers is neither good nor important, yet the more it consummates Marvel Comics’ current strategy to secure the adolescent comic book/graphic novel/video game market, the more it illustrates Hollywood’s shameless insufficiencies.

To discuss The Avengers as a story—or even a thrill ride—is delusional. Best to tally some of the actors’ deceits—which parallel the media’s complicit self-deception—as they trivialize the emotional satisfaction that is supposed to come from modernizing myth and legend.

The Captain America role traps Chris Evans, who was a great tease as the Human Torch, in an uninteresting anachronism, now a truly faded idea of American Exceptionalism. The same holds for the Halloween freakazoids Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Bruce Banner/The Hulk (a CGIed Mark Ruffalo).

As villainous Loki, Tom Hiddleston, who was so moving in Spielberg’s War Horse and Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, comes closest to giving a performance. He suggests the intense young aspirant Peter O’Toole, though without the glorious voice and no story details to frame his petulance, just a pretext for the superheroes to fight his plan for world domination.

The film’s only probable hero is zillionaire gadgeteer Tony Stark, who Robert Downey has finally learned to make his own using hipster witticisms that lend this basically unhip movie erratic self-satire.

Only a capitalist icon with Stark’s endless resources makes sense to an audience of semi-illiterate consumers catered to by the leisure industries and discouraged from an interest in characterization, theme or ideas. That’s why Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury can simply watch action from the sidelines (occasionally firing off a gunshot or an epithet), pretending to be a leader in his ghetto eye patch. (Insert convenient Obama comment here.)

Director Joss Whedon brings TV squalor (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to this, his second big screen superhero outing. Whedon doesn’t have Zack Snyder’s personal style, the élan that at least made Watchmen and Sucker Punch thoroughly idiosyncratic and fitfully compelling. Whedon directs impersonally, which is to say he manages the proceedings as one runs a fast-food joint.

This analogy ought to appall the very fast-food patrons who flock to The Avengers, yet cannot accept that an artistic enterprise should be more than ground patties of optional substance. Like Whedon, they can’t tell the difference between art and conviction-less product.

This proves the brainwashing that has happened to pop audiences in the generations since comic books and TV stole their imaginations from cinema and literature. Much of this tragedy has to do with the impact of TV (Whedon’s background), which has destroyed popular understanding of narrative complexity.

Each superhero should represent overcoming some social difficulty; now they’re just gimmicks. Whedon simply makes the action go on and on. He has no sense of dramatic build or rising to a climax. He overloads the spectator with one climax after another (imitating Michael Bay angles, particularly the same skyscraper-devouring turbine f/x from the last Transformers flick).

Unlike the lyrical teen fantasy Chronicle or Neveldine/Taylor’s daring Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which addressed life, death and morality, Marvel’s The Avengers has little to say other than “Buy me!” Millions of mentally hijacked moviegoers will respond like Pavlov’s dog, barking “Wow!”

http://cityarts.info/2012/05/02/pavlov%E2%80%99s-franchise-2/

Shocking.

Anyway...I'm seeing this tonight. I'm not really into superheroes, but this one looks fun. Plus...well, you know, Scarlett Johansson.

Sharky wrote:

Armond drops a bomb on it.....

No surprise there. Armond White was primed to hate the movie before one scene had ever been filmed. He hated Thor, Green Lantern, and Captain America last year, with only Green Hornet getting his approval because it turned the stereotypical realtionship of a white superior and a minority servant upside down, with Cato the Asian sidekick being the more mature, heroic, responsible character in the movie instead of Seth Rogen.

Only Michel Gondry’s Green Hornet escaped this problem and did so primarily through Gondry’s sophisticated approach to the nature of comic-book heroism. Gondry, Seth Rogen and Jay Chou explored the stereotypes by which white male characters (and their audiences) presume heroism via social convention that gets mistaken for natural right. (http://nypress.com/mean-green/)

In his review of Captain America:
Evans runs with a dancer’s grace like he did in Cellular, but his WASP heroism here is not just anachronistic; it’s a white elephant.
(http://nypress.com/unfelt-americana/)


In other words, we can't have images of a white male being heroic because it might, like, you know, hurt other people's feelings and stuff.

Armond White's reviews should have no credibility with any person looking for good, old-fashioned entertainment. He's a politically correct, radical, leftist, bomb-throwing racist. I would have been shocked if he'd actually liked any of these superhero movies, because asking him to review a movie about a group of heroic white people (and let's face it, Nick Fury was remade as a black man strictly to be politically correct, diverse, "inclusive", and "sensitive") is like asking Kirk Cameron to review BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN.

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

Armond White's reviews should have no credibility with any person looking for good, old-fashioned entertainment. He's a politically correct, radical, leftist, bomb-throwing racist.

Now that's wildly off the mark. Armond White's conservative, Christian, extremely anti-Obama, and despises political correctness and the (racist) liberal elite. He's film criticism's contemporary equivalent of Dr. James David Manning.

To defend the guy (which I've bravely done for the last 2 or years or so), all he's asking for is for some thought in these movies, instead the same old earnest, outdated, reactionary, mid-century, clean-cut blandness of Captain America and his ilk. The last thing he would want is Affirmative Action Man™ (he's got a strong BS-detector for that kind of thing), but any ethnicity will do, even WASP, as long as it was explored and not taken for granted. A social context, in other words, or maybe satire.

I just care if it's a decently well-written and directed.

I saw it twice today, starting with a 3am show that was about 85% full....free tix....Mr. Dog's perks at the cine complex :face:

Awesome shit and I took my daughter the second time. She is now interested in reading Iron Man comics, just her luck I've got about 200 of them

Must've been nice for the makers of the Ghost Rider sequel to get one positive review, anyway.

You're a MILF, too, Mrs. Sects?

Jeez. This just keeps getting better and better.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

I just care if it's a decently well-written and directed.

It's lightweight fun, in keeping with the same commercial products the Marvel films have given us so far. Armond White isn't wrong--THE AVENGERS is definitely "product"--but it is a good time at the movies. Anyone looking for a film will be genuinely disappointed. Anyone looking for an enormous Saturday-morning cartoon will be pleased.

Does it address class and social issues?

Does ScarJo take her top off?

Was it worth ruining (IMHO) the Captain America movie and it's possible sequels?

Tom Hiddleston doesn't look like a very good villain.

But, I'm curious about one thing: does half of the movie contain Downey, Jr., Ruffalo, etc. acting like tough, hardass heroes who 'play by their own rules', but then suddenly learn the value of teamwork by the time the finale rolls around?

Mr. Brown wrote:

But, I'm curious about one thing: does half of the movie contain Downey, Jr., Ruffalo, etc. acting like tough, hardass heroes who 'play by their own rules', but then suddenly learn the value of teamwork by the time the finale rolls around?

Sort of, but their disagreements are born more out of the way they all have very different ideas about the best way to proceed.

Spoiler:

Mr. Brown wrote:

Tom Hiddleston doesn't look like a very good villain.

He's pretty good, actually, though it's more or less a not-as-compelling rehash of what we got in THOR. He's actually my favorite cast member.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

Was it worth ruining (IMHO) the Captain America movie and it's possible sequels?

Frankly I'm more excited about Captain America 2 now because it's clear that it's going to get to address all the fun man out of time issues that AVENGERS merely hinted at.

I'm going to re-think my answer to this:

Mr. Brown wrote:

But, I'm curious about one thing: does half of the movie contain Downey, Jr., Ruffalo, etc. acting like tough, hardass heroes who 'play by their own rules', but then suddenly learn the value of teamwork by the time the finale rolls around?

I think the best thing about THE AVENGERS script is that Joss Whedon recognised very early on that the general ending is a foregone conclusion. Just as in any other superhero film, the Avengers have to prevail, no matter what happens. Whedon picked up on this, and so the focus of the film shifted. It's not about how the Avengers band together to overcome the threat - it's about how they get to the point where they can band together. The last half hour or so is just the pay-off for that rather than the point of the film itself.

Mr. Brown wrote:

Tom Hiddleston doesn't look like a very good villain.

He was surprisingly effective, IMHO. I think he was better in The Avengers than Thor.