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Post by Jeremy on Feb 1, 2018 11:32:10 GMT -8
Tangential Update: Those of you who are waiting eagerly for Spider-Man: Homecoming to show up on Netflix are in for a disappointment.
Although Homecoming is part of the MCU, and the last few Marvel films are all currently on the streaming service as part of the Disney deal, Sony still owns a significant stake in Spider-Man. While they didn't get to influence the film creatively, they do retain distribution rights. That means Homecoming will have its TV/streaming premiere on Starz (where most Sony films debut), and will probably not be available on Netflix.
Bummer, innit?
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Post by ThirdMan on Feb 1, 2018 21:22:59 GMT -8
I'm sure folks can find....other ways to watch Homecoming.
Re: the actor playing Thanos, I guess it's Josh Brolin, and he's also Cable in Deadpool 2. It should be interesting to see what happens with THAT franchise now that Disney bought Fox. Mind you, Disney owned Miramax when they produced Pulp Fiction, so I'm sure Deadpool will continue unabated assuming, of course, the sequel is another big commercial hit.
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Post by Jeremy on Feb 1, 2018 21:41:21 GMT -8
Yeah, Disney's made it clear that the MCU is steering clear of R-rated territory. Deadpool will be fine in his own series, so long as he continues to rake in the money.
The X-Men are more of a wild card, though. As are the Fantastic Four.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 1, 2018 20:55:50 GMT -8
So, Black Panther may not be the very best film in the MCU, but I'd definitely rank it in the Top 5, and possibly the Top 3. Great cast, great sets/costumes, and some terrific action scenes. And hey, a villain with both a clear character and a compelling backstory! Didn't think those existed in Marvel films.
If I have one real complaint, it's that - for all time the film spends in Wakanda - the city never really gains a sense of presence. Part of this may be intentional (since the city is designated as closed-off from the rest of the world), but apart from a few cool-looking backgrounds, I never really felt immersed in the city itself. I mean, say what you will about the first two Thor films, but they did make Asgard feel like a living, breathing place. (Well, the first one did, anyway. The Dark World couldn't even get that right. Sigh...)
Other than that, I agree with all the buzz surrounding the film. After three straight comedic films in 2017, it's refreshing to see the MCU begin the new year with a bold and evocative drama.
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Post by ThirdMan on Mar 2, 2018 19:43:41 GMT -8
Heh. See, one of my many complaints about the first Thor was that Asgard, from the outside, seemed like a totally uninhabited, artificial CGI creation. It felt completed unfinished from a visual standpoint.
I think the one-on-one human fights in BP are good, but the final battle in their costumes is rather weightless on account of so-so CGI. The strength of the film, to me, is primarily in its characters and script.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Mar 3, 2018 8:58:47 GMT -8
Heh. See, one of my many complaints about the first Thor was that Asgard, from the outside, seemed like a totally uninhabited, artificial CGI creation. It felt completed unfinished from a visual standpoint. I think the one-on-one human fights in BP are good, but the final battle in their costumes is rather weightless on account of so-so CGI. The strength of the film, to me, is primarily in its characters and script. The villain in particular. Michael B Jordan was fantastic, and his characterization was unusually strong for a Marvel film.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 3, 2018 17:17:45 GMT -8
I think Kenneth Branagh was able to make Asgard look pretty good, keeping it in line with the film's epic tone. (Although it clashed somewhat with the film's more toned-down Earth scenes.) His films aren't always great, but he knows how to make them visually pop. The villain in particular. Michael B Jordan was fantastic, and his characterization was unusually strong for a Marvel film. Killmonger is easily my favorite MCU villain yet. (Sorry, Loki... you overstayed your welcome.) Great character, great performance, with a motivation that makes sense within the story. The strength of Black Panther really is in the characters, be they heroes or villains.
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Post by ThirdMan on Mar 3, 2018 19:59:50 GMT -8
The interiors of Asgard in the first Thor looked fine, but the unpopulated exterior shots looked liked they'd only gone through the first or second rendering phase in the computer.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Mar 7, 2018 17:41:26 GMT -8
So apparently the new season of Jessica Jones retains the strengths of the first season, but starts off slower. I think this could mean one of two things. 1-They read our delightful forum, took Jeremy's advice, and opened the season slowly so they could end the season on a bang. 2-They have absolutely no story at all. Hopefully it's the former.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 7, 2018 19:40:25 GMT -8
I'm hoping it's the former, especially since it would imply that Melissa Rosenberg is a lurker at our forum (awesome if true).
But, given the track record of the Netflix/Marvel shows, I'm kind of assuming it's the latter.
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Post by Jay on Mar 27, 2018 9:49:14 GMT -8
I committed the great mistake of reading some of the hype around Black Panther first and only getting around to seeing it well, yesterday. But I still have thoughts, belatedly. May as well split into positive and negatives... + Admittedly, I don't make it a habit of seeing MCU fare, but the idea of bringing us in, not with T'Challa, but with T'Chaka and the previous Black Panther in Oakland had the ability to set up a solid, "sins of the father" motif, which helped ease over the pains of "we're doing an origin story, sort of." The scene felt complementary to the crisis ofthe movie generally. + I totally get Jeremy's criticism about how Wakanda not really feeling like a real place (we had the marketplace and the palace and the lab and ), but the design itself, while I found myself pining for practical effects, was compelling and interesting: Technologically advanced, but with clear African design inflections and seemingly more ecologically conscious than other similar cities outside Wakanda. It helped make the location feel distinctive. + Even the conclusion was foregone, I enjoyed the coronation ceremony. A lot of the experience felt uniquely joyful in ways I wasn't accustomed to seeing, and they made the fight with M'Baku sufficiently dramatic even if you knew Gorilla Tribe wasn't gong to win and that it was just a set piece so that they could have the second challenge later onf Killmonger showed up. + Spears? I feel like a lot of combat in these movies is forgone, so it helps to have something interesting to look at. I liked Okoye (but then, I see her and I think "MICHONNE!") and her combat prowess and her fight scenes, particularly in the Korean segment felt refreshing. You're going to have a car chase in any movie of this genre now, it's mandatory, but the spear added some fun elements to it so it wasn't "oh gosh here's T'Challa jumping from car to car oh no he ripped them open a moonroof with his sharp claws." + I also felt like the use of the Gorilla Tribe, which deviated from the comics I hear, was productive and I liked that weird little trip to the mountains to see what they were up to. I think the chemistry between T'Challa and M'Baku was arguably more interesting, politics aside, than that with Killmonger. + The acting didn't seem to be too demanding, outside of the physical stuff, but it felt consistently good and the characters had solid chemistry. + Unsurprising since I live in Chicago, but there were a few African-American families who were there with their kids seeing it for the n+1st time, it being spring break and all, and it was a nice feeling to be a part of that viewing experience and to see how much it meant to them. - Killmonger? I kind of go back and forth on him. I read a bit much hype about the idea of him as a compelling villain, but in action, it felt pretty topical and I mean that for both "relevant to contemporary events" and "surface level." You go from Oakland to to military and it's not entirely clear what happens in between nor how much his father shaped his worldview or whether or not we're defaulting to pop culture depictions of the East Bay. Moreover, it seemed like you still needed Everett Ross there to explain various motivations. Dude loves killing and is basically a Wakandan Victor Szasz. Why exactly? Why does he like bloodshed that much? The political goals are clear, but the fixation on bloodshed, less so. The ancestral vision even gestures to a sort of nihilistic, fatalistic worldview, but that can't be perfectly squared with the tallying of kills, the visible glee he has when doing harm (though I enjoyed that as a quirk), and the fact that he was willingly used as a tool of the military to engage in bloodshed and oppression against brown folk the world over. Instead of really hitting Killmonger's characterization and knocking it out of the park, I felt like they just came really close and gave him more political nuance than "we're going to blow up the world!", which is an accomplishment unto itself, but not in line with the hype I felt. - Another reason that experience of Killmonger felt heightened is that while he's present in the beginning and during the establishing heist, which again he has good "motives" to be at for lack of a better term (although his very peripheral romance is also weird in retrospect), the movie basically forgets about him for a good hour in favor of giving the run around with Ulysses Klaue who by comparison feels like the type who would tie damsels to railroad tracks and twist his mustache were he born into another era. Serkis is fun to watch, but Klaue couldn't really support the type of project the movie was after. I get why he's there as a sort of caricature of the Scramble for Africa, perhaps with South African apartheid inflections, but the whole thing feels like little more than a fakeout. - I'm kind of at a loss for being able to explain why Killmonger knew the exact point of entry he could take into Wakanda that would put him with Klaue's corpse as a gift to the W'Kabi, who wanted it the most. - Speaking of W'Kabi.... The final act of the movie (T'Challa's return) felt very off to me all throughout. I suppose a lot of this is built up into my conception of Wakanda as a tight knit, isolationist nation, but given that there were five main tribes living in common harmony (or detente in the case of Gorilla), the real interpersonal drama of brother against brother, which is effectively what the climax was, didn't feel like it was actually present and was instead subordinated to an idea of personal loyalty versus loyalty to the state. In the battle that ensued, it just felt like a melee, where the actual parties or affiliations didn't matter and for story purposes, it may as well have been an invasion by an outside group. The fact that Rhino tribe sides with Killmonger (for some reason) and fights the Panther tribe it was formerly aligned with and then has ass handed to them by the Gorilla tribe, those complex dynamics didn't feel as if they contributed to the drama in any way, and there were limited misgivings about a nation that had been self-sufficient for millennia suddenly killing it's own for the first time since who knows when. There were no misgivings about the bloodshed that was taking place beyond Okoye on the side talking about her loyalty to state above person, again. It was probably the thing that bothered me the most in the film because, like Killmonger, it was something that was close to being really right and they just didn't go far enough in the execution.
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Post by ThirdMan on Mar 27, 2018 10:01:53 GMT -8
I agree that the big action climax felt somewhat rushed, but that's such a common feature of these types of films that it didn't come as much of a surprise.
I think you make some good points re: Killmonger's past not being explored as much as it could've, but I'll say that I believe the reaction to the character is based more on Jordan being a charismatic and nuanced performer (and also a beautiful, beautiful man...heh). And also him having a reasonably credible and charged perspective for a "supervillain": it's tough to argue that his final line doesn't have some real potency.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 27, 2018 10:32:37 GMT -8
More importantly, Killmonger is a popular villain because he's got more personality and motivation than all the villains in the Iron Man films combined. (And unlike Loki, it looks like the MCU heads aren't going to overexpose and overuse him.)
Klaue is much more in tune with the generic villains who've populated much of the Marvel lineup, but he's thankfully relegated only to the film's first half; I expect the writers were mainly tempted to include him because he was the first villain the comic-book Black Panther ever faced.
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Post by Jay on Mar 27, 2018 10:41:12 GMT -8
Right, and that's a part where I should acknowledge my own position here in that I don't watch many superhero movies and can't place him in a proper hierarchy relative to the inferior and forgettable villains, his performance in particular had just been singled out and blown up to such a degree that my response became more to that than what he was doing.
In praise of it, I found it compelling because Jordan typically plays the hero in his films and while there were things that he was doing that were plainly underhanded or callous, you could still feel like there was that sense that in the character's own mind, he was also playing the hero. He's not cartoonish (Klaue, on the other hand...), nor is he totally reprehensible from where he's coming from and even when he's doing awful things, you don't exactly hate him, which is far more complex than most supervillains would get, I imagine. It just felt like both with him and the strife in Wakanda that they'd had more resources to work with than they actually made use of.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 27, 2018 12:49:14 GMT -8
Funnily enough, I've been reading Black Panther's first ongoing series (from the 1970s), and Killmonger is portrayed as a total cartoon. That was kind of the norm for comic villains back then, but it's pretty jarring after seeing the film version.
Jordan definitely adds a lot to the role. It helps that he's worked with Coogler in previous films. (And will probably do so in the future as well.)
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