Monker wrote:verslibre wrote:The "big picture" here entails rolling things out at a "fast food" clip. There's no slow roasting, the sauce doesn't get to reduce over hours, everything goes right into the deep fat fryer and comes out and gets served. That's the only way for them to make the third Thor film about Ragnarok (which should be 4-1/2 hours, if done properly, but it won't be). For guys like you who need Star Wars-level instant gratification, it's just right, I guess.
I simply completely disagree with this.
I have posted here often about Joseph Campbell and the "Hero's Journey" All of these "superhero" origin stories are ALL repeating the telling of the Hero's Journey. When they follow the formula, you have a good movie. When they don't, it's a not so good movie.
Nothing I said has been to the contrary. The story for
Thor: The Dark World, originally conceived by Walter Simonson, is awesome. They did not handle it properly. They also shortchanged us when it came to Sif. It's sad that she'll end up having more facetime on
AoS. My point about "fast food" is you're getting something that fills you up, but it's also "less filling," just like Miller Lite. When you're done with it, you're not satisfied, and you want and need more to compensate for the less-than-satisfactory overall experience you just paid for, when it should have been an exemplary one.
Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor, Thor 2, Hulk, Daredevil (those last two are not MCU films, but still serve as examples) all have third acts that don't quite measure up to the first two-thirds, with
Iron Man being the best of them and
Daredevil being nothing short of abysmal. I am a longtime FM-Daredevil fan and am very much looking forward to the Netflix reboot because I want everything that is DD-centric to be done justice.
Monker wrote: There is another piece of famous writing written by Edgar Allen Poe called "The Philosophy of Composition". In it, he makes a few very key points: Write the ending first. Know your audience. Write to fit your format so the audience you are writing to can enjoy it in one sitting.
And that's exactly what Goyer and Nolan did. They knew how they were going to resolve the
TDK trilogy, it was getting there, i.e. the journey that was the hard part. These movies build up to crescendos, but some of their conductors (directors) aren't as good as waving their wands as others. (Yeah, you can interpret that as a dick joke.
)
Monker wrote: For Marvel, the ending is Infinity War. Everything that has occurred since the first Iron Man movie has been directed towards that story.
No,
Infinity War is one of many huge-scale events they could have brought to the screen. It is indeed one of the best, and they chose that one. It was not in place "since the first
Iron Man movie." That's revisionist bullshit. DC and Marvel both construct "event" storylines like
Crisis on Infinite Earths (it has had various iterations),
Blackest Night (the coming of the Black Lanterns),
Secret Wars (which is being rebooted) and the Infinity War, which is what they're doing now. Another one involved Galactus, which would be, to pardon the pun, a visual "marvel" if they were translate him correctly to the screen and not like a big fart vapor as he was conveyed in
FF: RotSS. There is a wealth of material to draw from for these movies, and any of these stories is always in danger of being mishandled and pared down to a joke.
Monker wrote: In comic books, they can enjoy the freedom of being able to be a bit picky and choosy about when to got to something like Infinity War. That is not so true in movies. There are contracts, actors age, people could even die..and it can take several years to crate a single movie. Therefore, they have to plan this out with a movie audience in mind and the limitations that go along with creating a movie.
See, you're also wrong there. Storylines in comics can take a very long time, too.
Secret Wars, which came out in the 80s, was planned years in advance. It is a long process from writers' table to the approved script to the finished art to the printing stage to availability for public consumption. When a printed comic appears on the shelf, it wasn't just written the previous month, or even written two months earlier and drawn the previous month. Six months to a year, depending on the scale of the story and integration with multi-title crossing over to minimize the frequency of frayed threads. Scott Snyder isn't just the writer of
Batman, he's the
head writer, which means he's one notch below the editor and gets to plot out multiple books and make key decisions, not to mention keep the other guys' scripts on spec. During this process, they can't drop everything, scrap it and go "Fuck it...reboot again." That is a liberty you can take with a movie, which is exactly what happened in the interim between the two Hulk flicks. Reload and shoot again.
Monker wrote: So, within those limitations, they have had to plan out huge story arcs for these characters and apply the Hero's Journey to the telling of how these characters get to the end which is the Infinity war. So, dramatic events such as Captain America or Thor dying need to be placed accordingly on that timeline. It's time for a huge shift like that to happen. if you know anything about the Hero's Journey, you KNOW that is true.
When they "planned out" the Marvel movie story arc, it came on the heels of the DC roster leak, and it seemed like a response. They probably had a large marker board set up in the conference room, and a bunch of guys each got to erase and draw lines and scrawl words on the board, and by the time they were done, they had the order they wanted. They were going to build up to the Infinity War, but they hadn't decided [the female] Captain Marvel (formerly Ms. Marvel) and Black Panther were going to get their own movies. The decision to give CM her own film was obviously a response to the Wonder Woman film announcement. Marvel has no iconic female equivalent of WW, and they're going to try to turn CM into that.
Monker wrote: How is there "too much" when they intro'd a slew of new faces into Agents of SHIELD (by your remarks, I assume you watch it)? We got Triplett (gone), Morse/Mockingbird, Mack, and Ward will be back, and so on. The Yellowjacket/Wasp storyline, along with Stark's alcoholism, is one of those things that helped elevate the genre above the norm.
Because Joss Wheedon has said he doesn't want to direct another Avengers movie because he doesn't want to handle even more characters. So, Marvel has their premier director saying it's getting to be too much to handle and therefore I have to say that unless their is an obvious NEED to introduce somebody then they should hold off.
I guess you missed the memo that Joss isn't going to direct any more Avengers movies. The Russo brothers, who directed
Cap 2 and did a bang-up job, are helming the next Avengers movies, and that's great.
Cap 2 has the best direction of any MCU movie since the first
Iron Man, and Joe Johnston did a fine job with the first Cap movie. I've no problem with Joss jumping off. His style smacks a little too much of "TV" at times for me. Some of the angles he uses, the photography, etc., should have been different. I also hated the now-famous tracking shot that everyone shot their load over.
Monker wrote:Yes, it is perfect story telling. Again, Hero's Journey. The Hero must suffer. He must be taken to the edge of defeat, If he can die and be resurrected, that's even better. In this case, it is the TEAM of Avengers that is the hero that has suffered and been taken to the edge of defeat.
Done, and done better, by Nolan. Only
Cap 2 can compete with Nolan. So far, anyway. The Russos' fight choreography was extremely well done.
Monker wrote:Phew. You sound just like a friend of mine who pretends to be a comics fan but is really only a Marvelite and won't give DC the time of day. His remark when he saw the first teaser for The Dark Knight Rises: "a shit sandwich." And we know how well that movie performed, even with its flaws.
No, that's not it at all. The point I am making is there is not this type of epic story telling coming from DC. Ok, you have BvS, and new Aquaman and Wonder Woman movie. But, do they know how all this is going to come together in 10yrs? I don't think so. Marvel did know. in fact, I will say that I have never heard of this type of huge story arc spanning accrross so many movies, ever.
Of course not, it hasn't been done before. It doesn't mean nobody else can do it. It doesn't mean DC/WB won't do it. Why did Marvel-centric movies not take off until the first Spider-Man film? Before that, we had four Superman films and four Batman films. What took so long? Nobody felt like gambling, that's what.
Monker wrote: Was it Disney or Marvel who made the decision about those story lines? I would guess Marvel because those storylines are just so necessary to get to the Infinity War.
Kevin Feige is the MCU spokesman and he's the one who said so and I get the feeling he's not the guy who made that decision. That's some cute sarcasm in your second line, but again, you reinforce what I said about fast food-styled gratification. Because they're heading towards a cosmic event doesn't mean there is not the room, time or interest to explore interpersonal dilemmas. Intensity is not exclusive to Death Star-sized explosions in space.
Monker wrote: I disagree...you should be hoping.
I'm not worried about it.
