I've read a number of scathing reviews. Shame really, I thought the first Deadpool film was quite refreshing. Doesn't make much difference to the great world audience, seeing as it's already made half a billion dollars.
It's not awful mind, I was laughing hard for the first 15 minutes or so. After that it got a bit ploddy, despite some great little moments. Emphasis on little.
I think this is the problem for me with the Marvel films in general (and all the stuff they've influenced) in that they're not actually *about* anything. They can be entertaining moment to moment. But it doesn't add up to anything at all.
I don't mean they have to be explicitly about something outside themselves, they don't have to be commentary or allegory or whatever. I just mean that they're not even really *stories*, just a series of kinda arbitrary unconnected events and outcomes, they don't really emerge from anything.
They're kinda just character studies. But of deeply uninteresting characters.
For the MCU as a whole, actor deaths and accusations have played a part in changing the overall story arc.
Sometimes, it's just highly enjoyable to see characters you love on the big screen. I'm a big fan of 80s and 90s Spider-Man cartoons and the 90s X-Men cartoon. Tobey's Spider-Man, X-Men and X2 were all a wonderful experience for me. I don't really care if they go anywhere.
We're now at the point of saturation, there's so many superhero and special powers type films and TV shows, that it's hard to find something unique to enjoy about each one. Deadpool should be an easy hit, swearing, self-mockery and 4th wall breaks. It still needs a good story and good writers though.
Box office receipts passed $1,000,000,000 over the last weekend. As it's still out in theatres, it will probably overtake many box office faves such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Toy Story 4 etc. Mind you, in a list which includes Aquaman and the Super Mario Bros Movie, that's a sad way to succeed.
OK. I largely agree. There's an emptiness to many of the stories, and I think you're description of the problem is pretty well correct. There's too much production and too little direction. In other words, all the great ideas are show-boated because the producers think that's where the money is, And, of course, the directors follow that lead because they get hired again and applauded by a cast of millions. But the stories are left behind and if they're even completed, it's an afterthought. And the stories are empty because they're just constructed to bind all the events (great ideas) together rather than being in any sense living, breathing things.
Which, oddly, is where television series will win. It's because TV writers absolutely have to focus on stories. It's why the Loki TV series was superior to any of the movies featuring Loki, and ( I think) Marvel Agents of SHIELD was more engaging than the parallel movies.
I used to think of the 80s as when cinema went wrong. When dumb action movies became the money-makers. But, looking back, something like Predator is fucking Shakespeare compared to what we get now.
I've been listening to Chapo's Time for My Stories where they talk about a bunch of prominent TV shows from recent decades (also Gunsmoke). They have a bunch of theses as they go through. One is that entertainment became political in a weird way. We want media to reflect our politics and we see our choice of media as a political choice. And, because there's *so much* media now, it's all microtargeted so we're just kinda watching reflections of ourselves. Lady Ghostbusters was feminist because it... had women in it, and if you don't like it you're a misogynist and watching it is a political statement, whether it's good or not is beside the point and if you focus on that you hate women.
In their Game of Thrones episode (which is very good and you might enjoy) they identify GoT as being on the cusp of that change and as the last consensus reality. The last thing that everyone watched and agreed as to what it was.
I don't think that's the whole problem but I think it's in there for sure.
Yeah, the point isn't that nothing was differently-understood before (though honestly in that case I'd say the jingoists were reading Tolkien *right*). It's that we've reached a point where *nothing* can be commonly understood.
All media is now overtly part of this shitty culture war that stands in for politics.
I think what's changed is that a lot of people have become highly misinformed, and highly opinionated about topics they neither knew or cared about previously. Influenced. That's by design.
“A man with nicotine, protein, caffeine, and creatine coursing through his veins is an unstoppable force.”
I think, over here at least, deregulation of the media (and, later, the internet of course) played a huge part.
We've always been misinformed, but until the 90s or so we were misinformed according to the wishes of the state. Which is not *good* but does at least lead to coherence.
Now we're misinformed by the market and we can choose our misinformation. And as scientists and other experts bent to the whims of the market they discredited themselves, so we lost any sense of there being any reliable universal authority.
And in an environment where huge numbers of people have, for the past 40 years, been economically immiserated, socially atomised, politically disenfranchised and culturally demonised, that's a real problem when there's no left speaking to them.
It's socialism or barbarism and there's not a whiff of socialism.
Of course, there are parts of the state that are actively engaged in promoting a contradictory, atomised set of views and beliefs. In the USA (how long will the "U" remain vaguely applicable) we can see the growth of political cults towards the end of the C20th and the start of the C21st which were unusualy wacky, even in a nation where cults were and had been commonplace since the inception of the nation. So in the first decade of this century we see the rise of the Tea Party which was a powerful political force in spite of having no obviously coherent policies, not even libertarianism or alt-right conservatism. Much of this fervour has been adopted by the GOP under Trump, so we see incoherent and often contradictory pronouncements. And yet what Trump actually did in power was entirely in line with what Nixon was aiming at 50 years earlier. Pack the Supreme Court with rightwing morons, institute a kind of C17th conservative moral code by law, free the ultra-wealthy to do what they want, crush socialist dissent. Well, he managed the first of those and started on the others.
Over here the same has been the aim of countless MPs within the Tory party and elsewhere. We had the insanity of Johnson, who lied every bit as wildly and enthusiastically as Trump and lent support to every rag-tag bunch of thugs that sounded roughly in line with Tory strategy. I think that there's an important sense in which the UK hasn't been governed for the last decade and a half. It's been shaped into a disparate mass of groups and individuals.
Thank goodness we've got that sensible, honest socialist Mr Starmer to lead us out of this mess.
> there's an important sense in which the UK hasn't been governed for the last decade and a half. It's been shaped into a disparate mass of groups and individuals.
The Tea Party's sole coherent policy was rich guys not paying taxes, hiding inside a nebulous cloud of grievances the rich guys couldn't care less about, but got the great unwashed onboard with sufficient coaching. It was, and remains a resounding success, and is the meal ticket of ensuing extreme right movements.
“A man with nicotine, protein, caffeine, and creatine coursing through his veins is an unstoppable force.”
I think the original impetus for the Tea Party was opposing the bank bailouts. Which is a good position. They held it for the wrong reasons, of course, and quickly became a vaguely racist anti-Obama, fiscal conservatism thing but ... yeah.