Do we benefit from drawing lines between "cinema" and... whatever you might call a Marvel film? What do we call a Marvel film, if not "cinema"?
Further, why isn't anything at risk? Infinity War got about as close to real risk as any MCU film has so far, and I think if Mr. Scorsese watched that film he'd realize it's actually possible to create emotional drama within the context of a "Marvel Movie".
Also, are we really drawing the line arbitrarily at Marvel specifically? Where does "Joker" fit? Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Wonderwoman, 300, Scott Pilgrim, V for Vendetta? What about undeniably "Marvel" films like Logan, and Into the Spiderverse? Do we dismiss all media sourced from the pages of comics, or just the MCU specifically?
I ask both to make a rhetorical point, and because I genuinely don't understand. Mr. Scorsese writes this opinion piece like there's a shared understanding of what a "Marvel movie" is, but I don't know that there is such an understanding.
I’ve seen all of those movies except “Joker” and they’re largely drivel, certainly of lower aesthetic and intellectual value than the films Scorsese cites. And I’m a huge comic book fan and illustrator. These movies are primarily IP cash-ins on work stolen from writers and artists through shady work-for-hire deals and other predatory arrangements.
This reads like it was written by someone who has never had something they've created criticized at any real level...
Edit: Since I'm rate limited, my point is that his is an unexamined dismissal of someone else's creative effort that only comes from never having your own work glibly dismissed out of hand.
Is your point that he shouldn't criticize anything unless he can do better, or that he shouldn't criticize something because it might hurt the feelings of the creator?
“Bombastic effects and painfully long fight sequences coupled with jokes anyone of any age can understand; this is the formula studios have spent decades refining. Any modicum of intelligence possessed by the best of the comics, (and there is very, very little) is completely drained in favor of material designed to appeal to literally everyone. These movies take no risks. They are thoroughly vetted, focus-grouped, market-tested. That one could walk away from three hours of such blatant pandering feeling anything other than insulted is indictment enough of our cultural moment.”
The gist isn't the line that you are focusing on. Scorsese loves movies that expand the mind and enrich the spirit. Irrespective of where the line is drawn (losing sight of the forest by focusing on a tree), he thinks that the Marvel movies aren't trying and are playing it safe. He says that that is fine but that their massive success is crowding out movies that could potentially expand the mind and enrich the spirit from getting made or being seen. He didn't bring up that they were based on comics (that's a straw man argument).
I do not think you understood his point. It's not about comics. It could as well be monster flicks or romcoms or what have you. The genre, in fact, the entire content, is irrelevant to his point. It's about the creative process that underlies the making of the movie. Let's make a technical analogy.
There's a profound difference in products made by the vision of a single person or maybe two co-founders, and the kind of products that are design-by-committee in big enterprises. The first kind takes risks, explores new ideas, disrupts the industry. The second kind is usually made to fit a predetermined market niche. It exploits market analysis, and usually leverages some existing tech in order to quickly deliver RoI.
And that's what Marvel movies are. They're soulless, because no soul has written or directed them. Every detail has been polished and considered by several other people. But it's just Marvel, it's all franchise movies. It didn't even start with Marvel. It's just the most successful and most prominent example.
It's bullshit to say that only individuals can makes things "with soul." Why is having multiple people polishing and examining details a weakness?
Marvel did disrupt the industry when the MCU came out. Look at how many cinematic universes have been attempted now. The MCU is the largest and most successful.
Marvel is also a worldwide copyright, sensitive to Taiwan, China, Russia, Pakistan, India, Israel, and all other "hard geopolitical issues".
Pandering to comic book characters, with larger than life evildoers is a slam bet to make money. And the max viewing is what, 8 billion?
Making films for the US is limiting your market to 300m max. The numbers for how much films cost doesn't make sense to not make worldwide distributions.
Sounds like he doesn't like adaptations, then, which doesn't make any sense at all.
The Russo Bros, Favreau, Joss Whedon, James Gunn, Chris Nolan, Stan Lee, Bruce Timm. These aren't committee members, these are the visionaries that make the movies Mr. Scorsese seems to think have no soul, taken no risk.
Besides, he didn't call out franchise movies, he called out Marvel films. Your interpretation doesn't hold water. Adaptations have existed for decades, he doesn't seem to mind them, he even makes them! Do you think he invented "Bill the Butcher"?
It's interesting to wonder if the marvel comics themselves are created as you say, by motivated individuals or by committee. Definitely the origin stories (at least the ones we've been fed) are of one, sometimes two, writers, hatching basically every super hero character we know.
But those origin stories are all in the past (the most recent that's culturally noticed is MacFarlane with Spawn?) I wonder if the current vanguard of marvel comics (or others) are driven by individuals or by committee. I would guess that it's closer to the former, because comic _books_ are still not the enormous business that the movies are, and hence have much fewer people to please.
Hopefully Marvel et al are wise enough to hand the reigns of new, current books over to new, motivated, and individual, writers.
It's individuals today! Scott Snyder had a run with Batman, so did Grant Morrison (both wonderful in their own way), then you've got Tom King, and who could forget Frank Miller or Alan More. You've got Alex Ross with Superman, Gail Simone, Hickman, Bendis, Brian K. Vaughn (The Walking Dead, Saga, Y: The Last Man, anyone?), the ever present Geoff Johns, Neil Gaiman...
To say comics are written by committee is to not know any of the names above, and to not know any of the names above is to not know anything about comics.
? Not sure what you mean. Of course they are, that's why I listed them! They're good films that seem to defy the "Marvel movies play it safe" stance Mr. Scorsese is claiming.
"We're sorry, but this URL is not supported by Outline"
Does anyone know how this service works? Do they leverage robot accounts that fetch non-paywalled copies of the articles and then rehost them?
As an aside, I'm really torn.
Yes, I could pay for this content. But it appeared in my social media stream at the opportunity cost of some other interesting but free content that could (should?) have taken its place.
Paid content slipped into the stream. In a way, it's a kind of noise.
I'm not going to pay for 10 different news websites, and thus I will pay for no news websites. It's the same situation I'm about to find myself in for movie and tv streaming.
I can scarcely believe the level of elitism I'm seeing here.
Guess what: Most art is garbage. Scorsese here is complaining that the movies we're seeing are the "bad" ones, but if we just went to see his preferred kind of movies (ie totally new and unexpected), most of it would be infuriatingly bad.
So yeah, we watch predictable, samey movies because we know they will at least be watchable. Because we're not artists and it's not on us to move the medium forward.
I disagree, but I think I mainly put the agency on film producers / investors, and not on viewers. Super hero movies tend to be either sequels or in a series, and producers have recognized that these are low-risk, pretty decent guarantees of a good movie. So they've been highly motivated in cashing out that trend.
In the 00's and 90s we had a lot more variety, but the movies also had more variance in their investment return.
For the last few years I've only been watching superhero movies when they hit netflix or when I'm on a plane, and I think there's a growing trend of people being tired of superhero movies.
And I'd say that there are times when a predictable superhero movie is great. But the best movies probably won't be marvel ones.
[Hypocrisy disclaimer, one of my top 3 favorite movies is The Dark Knight, and IDK if that qualifies as a superhero movie.]
I would say no — Nolan reinvented the super hero film with his Batman movies. And it wasn’t to turn them into theme-ride paydays. He may be partly responsible for the current mono movie that’s been running for years but only because he breathed new life into comic book cinema.
I'd sooner credit Sam Raimi's Spider-Man with starting the modern big-budget superhero movie trend. That movie beat Harry Potter's box office record. It was a big hit and I think it proved the concept.
See, I feel exactly opposite here (funnily enough - TDK is also an all-time favorite of mine).
Opening night super hero movies, and Star Wars movies - are the only things I've bothered to go see at the theater for in the last 5 years now.
I like that they are events to experience with friends. We buy our tickets together and chat beforehand about predictions. People dress up and take pics in line. The crowd knows when to cheer and laugh. The visuals and sound effects take advantage of the medium.
I don't know any millennials who actually enjoy the watching the type of movies that Scorsese is talking about. The price per head at most theaters is too high for the entertainment you get. If I want to watch something with depth, then I can find television or streaming series which are far more enjoyable and actually have enough time for character development. I think the resurgence of shorter-run series and anthology shows (Fargo, True Detective) has addressed the primary issue TV shows had of not resolving storylines completely to keep you hooked another season. Movies just seem too short in comparison.
If that was his only point it wouldn't be contraversial. The contraversial part is saying those movies be doesn't prefer aren't examples of cinema.
This isn't part of the historical use of this word. The Lumiere brothers coined the French version of the term, from Greek roots meaning "moving drawings" or "moving pictures". Motion pictures, movies, it all means the same thing. The nature of the content and whether you considered it artistic was not relevant.
Consider whether the marvel movies have cinematographers.. consider the craft that goes into making movies look so good. Consider the makeup artists, Foley artists, set designers, etc. These movies are triumphs, and only small minds can find nothing in them but drivel.
But the elites need words to separate themselves from others. And they've chosen to co-opt "cinema" for that purpose. Their goal in doing this is very clearly that draw a line between what they consider good and what they consider bad.
It's by definition elitist.
I'll get voted down for saying it, though, because a good chunk of HN is elitist too, and there's no one elites protect more than their fellow elites.
Remember when Roger Ebert said that games aren't art?
I think most of the Marvel movies are kind of lame or even actively bad (Guardians of the Galaxy and it's sequel especially), but this is some real Old Man Yells At Cloud stuff and it's sad to see someone so prolific in film (oh wait, CINEMA, excuse me) say something so needlessly elitist. It didn't even need to be said.
Ebert was right, if talking specifically about AAA games, which is what Marvel flicks are an equivalent of. "Shoot a bunch of guys with more realistic graphics than ever!" Hard to argue this is art.
These, and most movies, are business products of the movie industry. He's talking about something different, works of art, and the movie industry isn't funding those much at all...because it's a business sector for making money.
And Marvel movies are money printing machines. Aside from the forgettable Ed Norton Hulk movie, way back at the dawn of the era, they have all more than doubled up their budgets. It's reached the point where anything associated with the MCU will make a half billion at the box office, no sweat.
This kind of thing is all you see at the movie theater these days though. When there's a Marvel movie, a Star Wars movie, and two or three Disney movies out at the same time, that pretty much monopolizes all the screens at my local AMC. Except for the Oscar bait season that we are rolling into now, you have to go to Netflix or Amazon to find more adventurous mid-budget movies.
> When there's a Marvel movie, a Star Wars movie, and two or three Disney movies
Rephrased: "four or five Disney movies." Both the Star Wars and Marvel franchises are owned by Disney. 20 years ago I would have told you that Disney was on it's way to being a has-been. Don't bet against the mouse...
There's nothing wrong with Disney or the entertainment industries as a whole (movies, music, games, books) that can't be fixed with a sustained campaign of old-school antitrust enforcement in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt.
Scorsese probably has a point. Marvel films aren’t “art”, in the way he (or most auteurs) would define the term. The question left unasked here is whether that’s bad.
I had the good fortune to visit the Prado last year. It’s an amazing place. Visiting it made me a better person. But when it came time to redecorate my office this summer, it didn’t make me want to hang Old Masters paintings on my walls. I hung some pretty pictures of Athens that my daughter took on our vacation there instead.
Why? Because Old Masters paintings are terrific, they took tremendous talent and decades of training, and you can see something new in them every time you look — and that’s not what I want in a space where I have to crank out code. What I want is something that I can glance at and be removed from where I am — cranking out said code — and immediately go to my happy place, which is walking around Greece with my wife and kids. This should not take a lot of brain power. The fact that it doesn’t does not make me a philistine. It just makes me a human.
Movies are the same way. Sometimes you want to see a Scorsese film. And sometimes you want to see Iron Man kick some ass. Why? Maybe you just want to spend two hours being entertained without having to pull out the genius-level IQ, because you’ve been using that IQ all day cranking out code and you just want to give it a rest already. Or maybe you found refuge in comics as a kid, and watching the films takes you back there. None of those is the “wrong” reason to watch a film. What would be wrong would be insisting that there can be only one “real” kind of film, and that anyone who likes the other kinds is insufficiently discriminating. Just as it would be wrong to insist that everyone everywhere should take down the pictures of their kids and replace them with Goya’s black paintings.
Marvel movies are very low brow, and there is nothing wrong with that. Some of my favorite movies are low brow, like Jackass 3D, Idiocracy, and Return of the Living Dead.
But there are different sorts of low-brow, obviously. With some sorts of low-brow entertainment, no fans will be upset when somebody like Scorsese says "That's not cinema." Because they know it, and they're okay with it. Everybody knows Jackass 3D is low brow, and as the sort of person who enjoys it, hearing that said would just make me wonder why somebody was bothering to state the obvious.
I'm not sure if the problem originates with the MCU itself or the MCU fans, but one way or the other the fans seem to take it very seriously and get very cross when somebody voices their dislike of it. Before Scorsese started catching flak for it, Pewdiepie similarly voiced his dislike of MCU and got a lot of very similar angry backlash. (I think the contrast between Scorsese and Pewdiepie is amusing.)
I think maybe part of the problem is the MCU is power fantasy media, where the audience frequently insert themselves into the role of one of the super heroes. Perhaps this involves their ego whenever somebody criticizes that character by way of criticizing the franchise. So perhaps in a way, when somebody insults the MCU they're effectively insulting MCU fans. That's just me spitballing though.
The MCU films are based on comic book properties that many people have been fans of for decades, they have a long-term emotional investment in these characters and their storylines. It's got nothing to do with the MCU being "power fantasy" media - you see the exact same phenomenon in fans of Star Wars Star Trek or sports teams.
Also, there is the fact that most people who vocally dislike the MCU, superhero films or comic book media in general, tend to do so in a way that derides the intellect or tastes of the fans. When a lot of the criticisms of a genre amount to backhanded insults of the people who like that genre, people can get sensitive about it. I think a lot of people find them particularly childish because of the funny costumes and superpowers and their origin in comic books which a lot of people still don't take seriously.
> Marvel films aren’t “art”, in the way he (or most auteurs) would define the term.
Here's the thing, though. He doesn't get to define art. Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup sold for $11.7 Million. I certainly wouldn't call that art, but someone does. What is or isn't art is very much subjective, the eye of the beholder and all that.
So how do you define art? And can you tell it apart from Pornography?
As someone who usually doesn't get art, especially the more traditional forms, looking in to that box a lot of what I see makes no sense to me and some of it I couldn't tell apart from an acclaimed artist and a child.
As far as I can tell Art is whatever a large enough group of people decides is art based on consensus.
Money is a conflated metric in the arts; it's largely an investment, and you're really investing in the "cool" factor (the cooler the artist gets, the better the resale value of his work). By following the money, you're mainly watching a popularity contest (and Warhol was nothing if not cool).
Art itself is of course nebulous, and has multiple branches of thought, but at it's most basic is just something that's "thought-provoking and interesting", which is best defined by contrast to those things we can all generally agree is mindless (eg marvel, porn).. somehow we'd also like to include technical skill, but it's neither sufficient nor necessary.
And then you just have to navigate the history, niches and social groups that exist around it; some work isn't interesting, but an army of pretentious fucknuggets will swing by and tell you it is (but without explaining shit). Some work is interesting, but your own pretentions will stop you from seeing it (often humorous work go right over people's heads, because they're too busy looking for a "deeper" meaning, or assuming it exists and don't bother processing any further). And some work is only interesting given a certain context/history (eg duchamp's famous urinal, which broke down art circles for decades).
I agree with your overall point, but your analogy doesn’t work that well for me. The Marvel movies (particularly the biggest of them) are insanely intricate and detailed and could only be created by both a huge team of talented performers, craftspeople, and technical experts, and a (probably smaller) executive team executing on a vision.
I still agree that there’s a difference in genre between, say, Avengers: Infinity War and Goodfellas, and I don’t know how to articulate precisely the difference, but I’m certain that the difference is not that the latter requires more talent or contains more details that reward multiple viewings.
Fair, but that wasn’t the distinction I was trying to make. The point is, films can have legitimately different purposes, just as things you hang on the wall can. I hesitate to say that one of those purposes is higher than all the others, but that does seem to be the judgment the auteurs are making.
The effort that went into them can be (not always — but sometimes) orthogonal to that.
That’s the point I was trying to make: that the difference between Scorsese’s classics and Marvel blockbusters doesn’t seem to be anything remotely objective (or even subjectively quantifiable) like “level of talent required” or “amount of detail.”
This comment seems to miss the point. It's fine if you like the superhero genre and other highly produced films. The issue he's bringing up is that this has taken over and reduced the incentive for other types of films, director-driven "cinema" instead of studio-driven cash cows, to be shown in theaters.
He's kinda late to the party decrying these sort of flicks now. You could make the same criticism movies that came out a decade ago, like Armageddon, Independence Day, Transformers, etc.
Independence Day was during the “golden era” of modern film. They’re was a huge range of indie to blockbusters you could see. Transformers (2007) was with the beginnings of the MCU and started this issue. The other side is also Disney leveraging their power over theaters with releases, but sure...
I think a better way for him to make the argument is that we should all try and push ourselves a little bit. I share your sentiment. I use enough mental energy during the day that often it's hard to choose something that isn't passive.
There have been a couple times where I've pushed myself to read a great work of literature. Something within the canon. My preference is to read cheap, dime store crime novels from authors like Kendra Elliot. I decided to tackle War and Peace (had I been less ambitious, I could have chosen an easier and shorter Tolstoy novel, or something from mid-20th century). I hacked away at it for months on end, and I will forever be grateful for that. There are things I learned about myself, descriptions of people and places, and ideas about the world that will stay with me till I die. There is an order-of-magnitude difference between the novels I read to relax and ones like War and Peace.
People should absolutely fill their time with the things they find dear and refreshing. This is compatible with the idea that we should try and push ourselves a bit too, if only for our own sake.
Superhero movies are mostly throwaway pop culture. No one is going to mention Iron Man 2 and Spiderman Reboot 4 in the same sentence as Goodfellas or Cape Fear in 30 years, to name a couple excellent Scorsese films. Honestly they won't even be mentioned at all, in any context.
That being said, I saw my first superhero movie in several years recently when I saw The Joker. That was a truly excellent film! I believe it was excellent because it was not throwaway pop culture but a disturbing character study based on dark source material that happened to be in the comic book universe. If more superhero movies were like that I would pay to see them.
The Joker is, by definition, a superhero movie because it takes place within the universe of a DC property. It (re)tells the origin story of one of the most famous comic book villains of all time.
It may be stretching the boundaries of the genre, but it's still in the genre.
We might disagree forever, however this is my argument. What connects the Joker movie to the Batman universe are essentially three names: the Joker's himself, Bruce Wayne, and Gotham City. And names are labels: you can stick the label of a bottle of wine on a bottle of coke, but it remains a bottle of coke: it's sweet, fizzy, and won't make you drunk.
If you take a Harry Potter novel and rename him as Batman, his enemy Voldemort as Joker and Hogwarts as Gotham School, it doesn't make it into a DC superhero story. If you take a fantasy novel and replace kingdoms with planets and castles and horses with starships, it doesn't make it into a science fiction story- despite Star Wars being labeled as one.
Art is subjective. I get Scorsese's point and in many ways agree. In regards to risk -- superhero movies have few. The plot is very structured and a substantial part of the plot is adapted.
I've shared the same opinion about Marvel movies for long time. My girlfriend absolutely loves them, so we do watch them together, but I honestly find them really boring. They have stories that constantly turn, huge production value, etc., but none of that really moves me. It's going to sound cliche, but I prefer movies that make one think.
Personally I think all the time at work (AI) and literally the last thing I want to do in sport / cinema / personal life / any after work activities is think. No one go to marvel for the storyline, people just like action (and for me, seeing the adaptation of comics I read).
But this doesn't have to be a fight, you do you and I "do me". To me scorcese was indeed elitist. It's like saying classical music is better than rap or metal.. it's not true per se and honestly it doesn't reflect well on him to say something like that. Indeed more like "old man yelling at crowd"
Mm yeah. Personally I go also for the storyline since I read the comics too.
What I meant was more "people don't go to see a masterpiece of storyling but a masterpiece of entertainement / action / CGI". Marvel movies are like cartoons to me and it's totally respectable.
Similar critique to what some people say about modern first person shooters being "on rails" [1].
"Like most Call of Duty games, Black Ops 3’s story campaign is a highly scripted, tightly controlled experience. Go here, stand next to that, shoot those guys. Sometimes, in fact, you don’t even have to pull the trigger." [2]
superhero movies are generally liked by capitalist types as it tick boxes the right things. good wins over bad, you work hard you succeed, and when you succeed you get all the good things. + very poor treatment of death, failure and loss. revelation and surprise are indeed missing. there are many movies that i cherish for just one scene eg., the survival scene in dersu uzala, senate hearing scene in scorsese's aviator when hughes says 'thats what i do'. these moments make me pause the movie and contemplate and play it back again etc which is easier to do on the smaller screen at home though ;)
i disagree that all movies are for the big screen. star wars yes, a jane austen drama? come on. superhero movies work well on the big screen or as he puts it audio-visual entertainment especially without audience interaction. a game would work on super small screens but not a movie. although people are putting up with anything on long commutes.
Difference lies in taking risk.
Lot of money and lot of people are depended on a movie business. No one wants to lose this for a individual soulful movie.
All kinds of movie can co-exist only if rules are not same for all kinds of movie.
If studios figure out , what they are, everyone can live happily ever after. Great opinion.
Framing an argument as "X is not Y" is a great way to ensure that everyone ignores all your points in favor of arguing over the definition of Y. I think that there's fairly obviously a fundamental difference in nature between a typical Marvel movie and a typical Hitchcock movie, but framing it as "Marvel Movies Aren't Cinema" just leads to an argument over definitions rather than any meaningful discussion.
This isn't limited to movies. Economic stimulus is ever-present, eliminating the business cycle and creative destruction. Our modern conception of politics (at least before Trump was elected) was to be boring and risk-free, moving along the same paths even if a course correction might make more sense.
And as for personal safety, we are amazingly safe, but terribly frightened (I assume becasue we lost all calibration for danger).
As for life in general, everyone seems compelled to go to college because it's the safe life plan.
I'm not suggesting that we give up the gains we've made. But I can't help but wonder what we've lost in terms of true creativity and freedom.
Do they need to be? No. His concern is that they have creeped into the territory of expression using dollars and suffocated that market, which, to be fair is a legit concern.
After reading the comments here, I've started to wonder...
Does elitist mean "Doesn't like the same things I do?"
---
While I wouldn't phrase it the way Scorcese did, I sort of share his opinion. Super hero movies bore me to death in most cases. As do most things created and A/B tested by a committee, i.e. most Disney movies. Despite having all the time in the world, I do not go to the movies any more. There's very little I want to see...
When will there be new movies in the same vein as Pulp Fiction, Tombstone, Donnie Brasco, True Romance, The Godfather, Goodfellas or hell, even the Rocky movies.
Exactly. Bad commercial movies designed by a committee aren’t a new thing, I remember the likes of Independence Day and Speed from the 1990s. What is new is the rarefaction of the sort of movies you mention.
I recommend Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast. What he says is that it is the combination of two things.
First people don’t go to the theatre anymore, they stream, so the economics have become really hard for smaller independent movies.
He also argues that Marvel movies are so plain that they don’t really produce new movie stars with a strong personality, it’s all CGI, most of the audience probably doesn’t even know the names of the lead actors. And the model for smaller movies was for the a producer to secure a movie star (popularised by big blockbusters), then get the financing on the back of that star, then the movie could be made. And that model is now dead.
We already get them: Whiplash, Baby Driver, Inception, Arrival, The Martian... Those are just a few of my favourites from the last decade or so but the list goes on!
They all had an established director, producers, and/or actors. It’s a safe risk because studios (from this list fox (rip)) can either bank on the casting list/director history (baby driver, the Martian, arrival) or have it as their one “cinema” film for awards season. Theres a lot missing for 10 years of film that just didn’t take off.
Also Memento was a $9 million dollar movie, even in 2000 that wasn't a lot of money.
What we're missing these days are what myself and my buddy, who's a film buff and writer, are the 10-30 million dollar films. Well written, competent director and director of photography, a reasonable cast of most likely newbies but they can act, and a decent plot/story....Memento, Donnie Darko, The Hurt Locker. Jeez the Hurt Locker was just a 15 million dollar movie, but it's pretty decent (I've watched it five times).
To me the elitist part is that he's taking his personal dislike of Marvel movies and drawing a box around the things he does like as 'true cinema/movies.' That's the part that reeks of elitism saying 'this isn't good enough because I personally don't like it and think cinema should mean something.'
It's very similar to the art/high art/not art conversation that happened in the wider art world starting in the mid-20th and continuing somewhat today. The decision there has been very expansive.
I think that an elitist viewpoint is one that aligns with and supports curation. Marvel movies are the opposite of curated content. They're produced specifically to capitalize on the success of their predecessors by appealing to the widest audience possible.
I feel similarly about the explosion of computer animated kids movies as I do about Marvel. They're mostly "not bad", but I think that we can do better than premium mediocre by doing a little less.
What is really bad about MCU is that it displaced other movies from the big budget sci-fi niche. For every Ad Astra or Gravity we have 5 comic book films.
My own resentment with superhero movies started with "The Avengers" (2012). Joss Whedon made the excellent space adventure Firefly and the even better "Dollhouse". Both series were intriguing, leaving you something to think about.
"Joker" was good however, and "Black Panther" was fun (there may be a few others I haven't seen).
Scorsese said "[f]or me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves."
The paradoxical nature has been there between Thor and Loki, for example. Or Thanos and Gamorra.
The most revelatory Marvel movie was Captain America the Winter Soldier.
"Steve Rogers: The Future? How could it know?
[Sitwell laughs]
Jasper Sitwell: How could it not? The 21st century is a digital book. Zola taught HYDRA how to read it.
[Steve and Natasha look at him in confusion]
Jasper Sitwell: Your bank records, medical histories, voting patterns, e-mails, phone calls, your damn SAT scores. Zola’s algorithm evaluates peoples’ past to predict their future.
Steve Rogers: And what then?
Jasper Sitwell: Oh, my God. Pierce is going to kill me.
Steve Rogers: What then?!
Jasper Sitwell: Then the Insight Helicarriers scratch people off the list. A few millions at a time."
Coincidence or intentional, the fact that they kept that plot line after Snowden, that took balls. IIRC a lot of films around 2001 re-shot in respect of 9/11, and they could have re-shoot if they wanted to avoid it.
I can agree that these aren't the forefront of most Marvel plots. But I can think of far more movies that I'd accuse as not-cinema before I'd go after Marvel.
so tell me exactly what revelation that scene made you have about yourself or the human condition? or what complex emotion that you have no words to describe did it evoke? these are a few things that film-as-art strives for.
it's ok to like these movies, taste is entirely subjective. but just because you really like something doesn't mean you can declare it to be something that many, many people have been spent decades determining the criteria by which it is judged
> but just because you really like something doesn't mean you can declare it to be something that many, many people have been spent decades determining the criteria by which it is judged
Please provide us with the entire canonical list of objective criteria by which film is determined to be art. I can only assume from this statement and its confidence that there is such a list, and that it is universally agreed upon. After all, it's not as if "art" is a broad and deeply subjective category, even when applied to the medium of film.
Because, of the two criteria you've provided, I could name plenty of films commonly considered "art" which didn't evoke either a revelation or a complex emotion which I couldn't describe.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadFurther, why isn't anything at risk? Infinity War got about as close to real risk as any MCU film has so far, and I think if Mr. Scorsese watched that film he'd realize it's actually possible to create emotional drama within the context of a "Marvel Movie".
Also, are we really drawing the line arbitrarily at Marvel specifically? Where does "Joker" fit? Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Wonderwoman, 300, Scott Pilgrim, V for Vendetta? What about undeniably "Marvel" films like Logan, and Into the Spiderverse? Do we dismiss all media sourced from the pages of comics, or just the MCU specifically?
I ask both to make a rhetorical point, and because I genuinely don't understand. Mr. Scorsese writes this opinion piece like there's a shared understanding of what a "Marvel movie" is, but I don't know that there is such an understanding.
Is that the kind of deal where you work for an employer and they pay you?
Kind of like the deal most software engineers take.
Edit: Since I'm rate limited, my point is that his is an unexamined dismissal of someone else's creative effort that only comes from never having your own work glibly dismissed out of hand.
Here is a very well written critique:
https://jacobitemag.com/2019/05/14/capeshits-endgame/
“Bombastic effects and painfully long fight sequences coupled with jokes anyone of any age can understand; this is the formula studios have spent decades refining. Any modicum of intelligence possessed by the best of the comics, (and there is very, very little) is completely drained in favor of material designed to appeal to literally everyone. These movies take no risks. They are thoroughly vetted, focus-grouped, market-tested. That one could walk away from three hours of such blatant pandering feeling anything other than insulted is indictment enough of our cultural moment.”
> No one should be “allowed” to enjoy something that thinks so little of its audience.
Bugger off Maggie Siebert.
There's a profound difference in products made by the vision of a single person or maybe two co-founders, and the kind of products that are design-by-committee in big enterprises. The first kind takes risks, explores new ideas, disrupts the industry. The second kind is usually made to fit a predetermined market niche. It exploits market analysis, and usually leverages some existing tech in order to quickly deliver RoI.
And that's what Marvel movies are. They're soulless, because no soul has written or directed them. Every detail has been polished and considered by several other people. But it's just Marvel, it's all franchise movies. It didn't even start with Marvel. It's just the most successful and most prominent example.
Marvel did disrupt the industry when the MCU came out. Look at how many cinematic universes have been attempted now. The MCU is the largest and most successful.
This is just pretension, not insight.
Pandering to comic book characters, with larger than life evildoers is a slam bet to make money. And the max viewing is what, 8 billion?
Making films for the US is limiting your market to 300m max. The numbers for how much films cost doesn't make sense to not make worldwide distributions.
The Russo Bros, Favreau, Joss Whedon, James Gunn, Chris Nolan, Stan Lee, Bruce Timm. These aren't committee members, these are the visionaries that make the movies Mr. Scorsese seems to think have no soul, taken no risk.
Besides, he didn't call out franchise movies, he called out Marvel films. Your interpretation doesn't hold water. Adaptations have existed for decades, he doesn't seem to mind them, he even makes them! Do you think he invented "Bill the Butcher"?
But those origin stories are all in the past (the most recent that's culturally noticed is MacFarlane with Spawn?) I wonder if the current vanguard of marvel comics (or others) are driven by individuals or by committee. I would guess that it's closer to the former, because comic _books_ are still not the enormous business that the movies are, and hence have much fewer people to please.
Hopefully Marvel et al are wise enough to hand the reigns of new, current books over to new, motivated, and individual, writers.
To say comics are written by committee is to not know any of the names above, and to not know any of the names above is to not know anything about comics.
Well, Scorsese considered directing "Joker" (but ultimately didn't) and calls the movie "a remarkable work":
https://variety.com/2019/film/news/martin-scorsese-joker-dir...
Does anyone know how this service works? Do they leverage robot accounts that fetch non-paywalled copies of the articles and then rehost them?
As an aside, I'm really torn.
Yes, I could pay for this content. But it appeared in my social media stream at the opportunity cost of some other interesting but free content that could (should?) have taken its place.
Paid content slipped into the stream. In a way, it's a kind of noise.
I'm not going to pay for 10 different news websites, and thus I will pay for no news websites. It's the same situation I'm about to find myself in for movie and tv streaming.
I also "discovered" that "trick" after some websites had the balls to put some kind of block IN FRONT of the content AFTER loading it.
We live in a world were pages are larger (stop the down early! hit stop!) to purposefully remove features.
I feel sad some people think adding such "features" is a good use of their limited time on this earth.
I don't see how second statement follows from the first.
Why not: I'm not going to pay for 10 different news websites, instead I will pay for one. ???
When the choice is hard enough i'll usually opt for no choice at all.
Guess what: Most art is garbage. Scorsese here is complaining that the movies we're seeing are the "bad" ones, but if we just went to see his preferred kind of movies (ie totally new and unexpected), most of it would be infuriatingly bad.
So yeah, we watch predictable, samey movies because we know they will at least be watchable. Because we're not artists and it's not on us to move the medium forward.
In the 00's and 90s we had a lot more variety, but the movies also had more variance in their investment return.
For the last few years I've only been watching superhero movies when they hit netflix or when I'm on a plane, and I think there's a growing trend of people being tired of superhero movies.
And I'd say that there are times when a predictable superhero movie is great. But the best movies probably won't be marvel ones.
[Hypocrisy disclaimer, one of my top 3 favorite movies is The Dark Knight, and IDK if that qualifies as a superhero movie.]
Opening night super hero movies, and Star Wars movies - are the only things I've bothered to go see at the theater for in the last 5 years now.
I like that they are events to experience with friends. We buy our tickets together and chat beforehand about predictions. People dress up and take pics in line. The crowd knows when to cheer and laugh. The visuals and sound effects take advantage of the medium.
I don't know any millennials who actually enjoy the watching the type of movies that Scorsese is talking about. The price per head at most theaters is too high for the entertainment you get. If I want to watch something with depth, then I can find television or streaming series which are far more enjoyable and actually have enough time for character development. I think the resurgence of shorter-run series and anthology shows (Fargo, True Detective) has addressed the primary issue TV shows had of not resolving storylines completely to keep you hooked another season. Movies just seem too short in comparison.
This isn't part of the historical use of this word. The Lumiere brothers coined the French version of the term, from Greek roots meaning "moving drawings" or "moving pictures". Motion pictures, movies, it all means the same thing. The nature of the content and whether you considered it artistic was not relevant.
Consider whether the marvel movies have cinematographers.. consider the craft that goes into making movies look so good. Consider the makeup artists, Foley artists, set designers, etc. These movies are triumphs, and only small minds can find nothing in them but drivel.
But the elites need words to separate themselves from others. And they've chosen to co-opt "cinema" for that purpose. Their goal in doing this is very clearly that draw a line between what they consider good and what they consider bad.
It's by definition elitist.
I'll get voted down for saying it, though, because a good chunk of HN is elitist too, and there's no one elites protect more than their fellow elites.
I think most of the Marvel movies are kind of lame or even actively bad (Guardians of the Galaxy and it's sequel especially), but this is some real Old Man Yells At Cloud stuff and it's sad to see someone so prolific in film (oh wait, CINEMA, excuse me) say something so needlessly elitist. It didn't even need to be said.
edit: Sorry it was even more obstinate
"VIDEO GAMES CAN NEVER BE ART"
https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-ne...
This kind of thing is all you see at the movie theater these days though. When there's a Marvel movie, a Star Wars movie, and two or three Disney movies out at the same time, that pretty much monopolizes all the screens at my local AMC. Except for the Oscar bait season that we are rolling into now, you have to go to Netflix or Amazon to find more adventurous mid-budget movies.
Rephrased: "four or five Disney movies." Both the Star Wars and Marvel franchises are owned by Disney. 20 years ago I would have told you that Disney was on it's way to being a has-been. Don't bet against the mouse...
I had the good fortune to visit the Prado last year. It’s an amazing place. Visiting it made me a better person. But when it came time to redecorate my office this summer, it didn’t make me want to hang Old Masters paintings on my walls. I hung some pretty pictures of Athens that my daughter took on our vacation there instead.
Why? Because Old Masters paintings are terrific, they took tremendous talent and decades of training, and you can see something new in them every time you look — and that’s not what I want in a space where I have to crank out code. What I want is something that I can glance at and be removed from where I am — cranking out said code — and immediately go to my happy place, which is walking around Greece with my wife and kids. This should not take a lot of brain power. The fact that it doesn’t does not make me a philistine. It just makes me a human.
Movies are the same way. Sometimes you want to see a Scorsese film. And sometimes you want to see Iron Man kick some ass. Why? Maybe you just want to spend two hours being entertained without having to pull out the genius-level IQ, because you’ve been using that IQ all day cranking out code and you just want to give it a rest already. Or maybe you found refuge in comics as a kid, and watching the films takes you back there. None of those is the “wrong” reason to watch a film. What would be wrong would be insisting that there can be only one “real” kind of film, and that anyone who likes the other kinds is insufficiently discriminating. Just as it would be wrong to insist that everyone everywhere should take down the pictures of their kids and replace them with Goya’s black paintings.
But there are different sorts of low-brow, obviously. With some sorts of low-brow entertainment, no fans will be upset when somebody like Scorsese says "That's not cinema." Because they know it, and they're okay with it. Everybody knows Jackass 3D is low brow, and as the sort of person who enjoys it, hearing that said would just make me wonder why somebody was bothering to state the obvious.
I'm not sure if the problem originates with the MCU itself or the MCU fans, but one way or the other the fans seem to take it very seriously and get very cross when somebody voices their dislike of it. Before Scorsese started catching flak for it, Pewdiepie similarly voiced his dislike of MCU and got a lot of very similar angry backlash. (I think the contrast between Scorsese and Pewdiepie is amusing.)
I think maybe part of the problem is the MCU is power fantasy media, where the audience frequently insert themselves into the role of one of the super heroes. Perhaps this involves their ego whenever somebody criticizes that character by way of criticizing the franchise. So perhaps in a way, when somebody insults the MCU they're effectively insulting MCU fans. That's just me spitballing though.
Also, there is the fact that most people who vocally dislike the MCU, superhero films or comic book media in general, tend to do so in a way that derides the intellect or tastes of the fans. When a lot of the criticisms of a genre amount to backhanded insults of the people who like that genre, people can get sensitive about it. I think a lot of people find them particularly childish because of the funny costumes and superpowers and their origin in comic books which a lot of people still don't take seriously.
Here's the thing, though. He doesn't get to define art. Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup sold for $11.7 Million. I certainly wouldn't call that art, but someone does. What is or isn't art is very much subjective, the eye of the beholder and all that.
Does money define art?
As someone who usually doesn't get art, especially the more traditional forms, looking in to that box a lot of what I see makes no sense to me and some of it I couldn't tell apart from an acclaimed artist and a child.
As far as I can tell Art is whatever a large enough group of people decides is art based on consensus.
Art itself is of course nebulous, and has multiple branches of thought, but at it's most basic is just something that's "thought-provoking and interesting", which is best defined by contrast to those things we can all generally agree is mindless (eg marvel, porn).. somehow we'd also like to include technical skill, but it's neither sufficient nor necessary.
And then you just have to navigate the history, niches and social groups that exist around it; some work isn't interesting, but an army of pretentious fucknuggets will swing by and tell you it is (but without explaining shit). Some work is interesting, but your own pretentions will stop you from seeing it (often humorous work go right over people's heads, because they're too busy looking for a "deeper" meaning, or assuming it exists and don't bother processing any further). And some work is only interesting given a certain context/history (eg duchamp's famous urinal, which broke down art circles for decades).
I still agree that there’s a difference in genre between, say, Avengers: Infinity War and Goodfellas, and I don’t know how to articulate precisely the difference, but I’m certain that the difference is not that the latter requires more talent or contains more details that reward multiple viewings.
The effort that went into them can be (not always — but sometimes) orthogonal to that.
There have been a couple times where I've pushed myself to read a great work of literature. Something within the canon. My preference is to read cheap, dime store crime novels from authors like Kendra Elliot. I decided to tackle War and Peace (had I been less ambitious, I could have chosen an easier and shorter Tolstoy novel, or something from mid-20th century). I hacked away at it for months on end, and I will forever be grateful for that. There are things I learned about myself, descriptions of people and places, and ideas about the world that will stay with me till I die. There is an order-of-magnitude difference between the novels I read to relax and ones like War and Peace.
People should absolutely fill their time with the things they find dear and refreshing. This is compatible with the idea that we should try and push ourselves a bit too, if only for our own sake.
That being said, I saw my first superhero movie in several years recently when I saw The Joker. That was a truly excellent film! I believe it was excellent because it was not throwaway pop culture but a disturbing character study based on dark source material that happened to be in the comic book universe. If more superhero movies were like that I would pay to see them.
The Joker (whatever its qualities) is definitely not a superhero movie.
It may be stretching the boundaries of the genre, but it's still in the genre.
If you take a Harry Potter novel and rename him as Batman, his enemy Voldemort as Joker and Hogwarts as Gotham School, it doesn't make it into a DC superhero story. If you take a fantasy novel and replace kingdoms with planets and castles and horses with starships, it doesn't make it into a science fiction story- despite Star Wars being labeled as one.
But this doesn't have to be a fight, you do you and I "do me". To me scorcese was indeed elitist. It's like saying classical music is better than rap or metal.. it's not true per se and honestly it doesn't reflect well on him to say something like that. Indeed more like "old man yelling at crowd"
That's why you have small riots when some detail of a comic was not incorporated or changed.
The storylines are tangled and boring most of times. But I find them fun when watch from time to time. I really enjoyed the first Iron Man.
What I meant was more "people don't go to see a masterpiece of storyling but a masterpiece of entertainement / action / CGI". Marvel movies are like cartoons to me and it's totally respectable.
"Like most Call of Duty games, Black Ops 3’s story campaign is a highly scripted, tightly controlled experience. Go here, stand next to that, shoot those guys. Sometimes, in fact, you don’t even have to pull the trigger." [2]
1: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RailShooter
2: https://kotaku.com/it-s-always-fun-to-stop-shooting-and-let-...
i disagree that all movies are for the big screen. star wars yes, a jane austen drama? come on. superhero movies work well on the big screen or as he puts it audio-visual entertainment especially without audience interaction. a game would work on super small screens but not a movie. although people are putting up with anything on long commutes.
All kinds of movie can co-exist only if rules are not same for all kinds of movie.
If studios figure out , what they are, everyone can live happily ever after. Great opinion.
This isn't limited to movies. Economic stimulus is ever-present, eliminating the business cycle and creative destruction. Our modern conception of politics (at least before Trump was elected) was to be boring and risk-free, moving along the same paths even if a course correction might make more sense.
And as for personal safety, we are amazingly safe, but terribly frightened (I assume becasue we lost all calibration for danger).
As for life in general, everyone seems compelled to go to college because it's the safe life plan.
I'm not suggesting that we give up the gains we've made. But I can't help but wonder what we've lost in terms of true creativity and freedom.
Do they need to be? No. His concern is that they have creeped into the territory of expression using dollars and suffocated that market, which, to be fair is a legit concern.
Does elitist mean "Doesn't like the same things I do?"
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While I wouldn't phrase it the way Scorcese did, I sort of share his opinion. Super hero movies bore me to death in most cases. As do most things created and A/B tested by a committee, i.e. most Disney movies. Despite having all the time in the world, I do not go to the movies any more. There's very little I want to see...
When will there be new movies in the same vein as Pulp Fiction, Tombstone, Donnie Brasco, True Romance, The Godfather, Goodfellas or hell, even the Rocky movies.
/Old man yells at clouds
I recommend Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast. What he says is that it is the combination of two things.
First people don’t go to the theatre anymore, they stream, so the economics have become really hard for smaller independent movies.
He also argues that Marvel movies are so plain that they don’t really produce new movie stars with a strong personality, it’s all CGI, most of the audience probably doesn’t even know the names of the lead actors. And the model for smaller movies was for the a producer to secure a movie star (popularised by big blockbusters), then get the financing on the back of that star, then the movie could be made. And that model is now dead.
What we're missing these days are what myself and my buddy, who's a film buff and writer, are the 10-30 million dollar films. Well written, competent director and director of photography, a reasonable cast of most likely newbies but they can act, and a decent plot/story....Memento, Donnie Darko, The Hurt Locker. Jeez the Hurt Locker was just a 15 million dollar movie, but it's pretty decent (I've watched it five times).
It's very similar to the art/high art/not art conversation that happened in the wider art world starting in the mid-20th and continuing somewhat today. The decision there has been very expansive.
I feel similarly about the explosion of computer animated kids movies as I do about Marvel. They're mostly "not bad", but I think that we can do better than premium mediocre by doing a little less.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...
"Joker" was good however, and "Black Panther" was fun (there may be a few others I haven't seen).
That said, the last I saw was Transformers (first one).
Scorsese said "[f]or me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves."
The paradoxical nature has been there between Thor and Loki, for example. Or Thanos and Gamorra.
The most revelatory Marvel movie was Captain America the Winter Soldier.
"Steve Rogers: The Future? How could it know? [Sitwell laughs] Jasper Sitwell: How could it not? The 21st century is a digital book. Zola taught HYDRA how to read it. [Steve and Natasha look at him in confusion] Jasper Sitwell: Your bank records, medical histories, voting patterns, e-mails, phone calls, your damn SAT scores. Zola’s algorithm evaluates peoples’ past to predict their future. Steve Rogers: And what then? Jasper Sitwell: Oh, my God. Pierce is going to kill me. Steve Rogers: What then?! Jasper Sitwell: Then the Insight Helicarriers scratch people off the list. A few millions at a time."
Coincidence or intentional, the fact that they kept that plot line after Snowden, that took balls. IIRC a lot of films around 2001 re-shot in respect of 9/11, and they could have re-shoot if they wanted to avoid it.
I can agree that these aren't the forefront of most Marvel plots. But I can think of far more movies that I'd accuse as not-cinema before I'd go after Marvel.
it's ok to like these movies, taste is entirely subjective. but just because you really like something doesn't mean you can declare it to be something that many, many people have been spent decades determining the criteria by which it is judged
Please provide us with the entire canonical list of objective criteria by which film is determined to be art. I can only assume from this statement and its confidence that there is such a list, and that it is universally agreed upon. After all, it's not as if "art" is a broad and deeply subjective category, even when applied to the medium of film.
Because, of the two criteria you've provided, I could name plenty of films commonly considered "art" which didn't evoke either a revelation or a complex emotion which I couldn't describe.