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Watch Watched Watching: The Rambunctious Cinema of Terrence Malick


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16 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I forgot about that. Still, they feel more like Batman than superheroes with actual powers.

By that token, Batman, Iron Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye, War Machine, and probably a few others are not superhero characters, and that's obviously wrong. 

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30 minutes ago, Kaligator said:

By that token, Batman, Iron Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye, War Machine, and probably a few others are not superhero characters, and that's obviously wrong. 

Let me set War Machine aside because I’m not super familiar with the character.

Iron Man doesn’t belong in this grouping. Tony Stark is a modified human, just with biotech instead of becoming a super soldier like Captain American. But the other three are just human beings. Batman is a bit unique in that when it’s required, his technology can make him a god of sorts, but otherwise in many of his stories he’s a ninja and a detective, just with all the money in the world. And do Hawkeye and Black Widow even have any real powers? Frankly they both probably should of died numerous times across the films.

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1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

Iron Man doesn’t belong in this grouping. Tony Stark is a modified human, just with biotech instead of becoming a super soldier like Captain American.

No, he's not. He has a pacemaker. That's it. He certainly doesn't have biotech in any event - his technology is entirely metallurgic and inorganic in origin. There's a hint in the name of the character too!

1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

But the other three are just human beings. Batman is a bit unique in that when it’s required, his technology can make him a god of sorts, but otherwise in many of his stories he’s a ninja and a detective, just with all the money in the world. And do Hawkeye and Black Widow even have any real powers? Frankly they both probably should of died numerous times across the films.

Superhero stories aren't stories just about people with powers. The super part doesn't mean powers; it means being more than just a normal hero. 

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20 minutes ago, Kaligator said:

No, he's not. He has a pacemaker. That's it. He certainly doesn't have biotech in any event - his technology is entirely metallurgic and inorganic in origin. There's a hint in the name of the character too!

I just looked up the character profile and it specifically says he injected himself with techno-organic materials (or biotech) to alter his biology, giving him extra powers on top of having the suits which make him a god like figure compared to normal human beings.

Plus, I thought he didn't have a heart by the end of his run in the Avengers.

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Superhero stories aren't stories just about people with powers. The super part doesn't mean powers; it means being more than just a normal hero. 

Do you view the characters from the F&F franchise to be superheroes at this point? It always makes me chuckle when people call them that.

 

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It depends on the version you look at - sometimes it's biotech, sometimes it's 'just' nanotech, which is what he seems to have in Infinity War and Endgame. Either way since Warren Ellis got his hands on him in the 2000s Iron Man has become basically like The Engineer (which is not really a shock considering the creator of that character) and is definitely superhuman by any reasonable standard, albeit a self-made techie one and maybe really more cyborg or post-human. 

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3 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I thought there were some misses between Iron Man and Avengers, but after that pretty much everything has been a giant hit except for Iron Man 3.

I think it's fair to say the MCU didn't become a true juggernaut (no pun intended) until Avengers.  And the mediocrity of the films in between Iron Man - Incredible Hulk, Thor, Iron Man 2 - granted credence to doubt that they were actually gonna pull this off.  OTOH, there's certainly been mediocre offerings since Avengers as well.

4 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Nolan deserves a lot of credit for that trilogy, even if I’ll always prefer The Prestige and Memento.  In fact, I think The Prestige (which I realize was released a year after Batman Begins) was the origin from which he extrapolated a lot that was in the Batman trilogy.

Not sure what you mean at the end there but Prestige is probably my favorite Nolan movie and too often overlooked.

I think TDK is rather obviously the greatest superhero movie ever, but it is kinda odd because it's not really a superhero movie as understood in contemporary times - certainly distinct from MCU offerings and even the DC films that tried to copy it.  As mentioned, it's a crime movie with the characters dressing up in silly costumes.  To sum up my response to how we got on this tangent - would TDK be on my top 100 list?  Yes, definitely.  Does that mean I'd ever call it one of the greatest movies ever?  No, definitely not.

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Man, all this talk of what "started" the modern day superhero craze with I didn't see a mention of the original x-men.  It was the first to bring that gritty realism to the superhero genre IMO

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15 minutes ago, aceluby said:

Man, all this talk of what "started" the modern day superhero craze with I didn't see a mention of the original x-men.  It was the first to bring that gritty realism to the superhero genre IMO

I think part of that is because it's overshadowed by X2, which the general consensus liked a lot better.  It's also overshadowed by Spiderman coming out two years later and proving superhero movies can not only make shitloads of money, but ridiculously large shitloads of money.

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20 minutes ago, aceluby said:

Man, all this talk of what "started" the modern day superhero craze with I didn't see a mention of the original x-men.  It was the first to bring that gritty realism to the superhero genre IMO

I think you could make the argument that the modern superhero movie craze started with Blade 1998. A case could be made for the Matrix films as well.  But X-Men 2000 is the real grandfather of the current trend. It was the first movie to demonstrate that VFX had caught up with the story telling and, importantly, that you could treat the mythology seriously. Spider-Man 2002 really brought that home.

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6 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Spider-Man 2002 really brought that home.

I'm still mad that this version never got made:

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The film rights were then acquired by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of The Cannon Group for $225,000.[29] The two were not familiar with the character's background and mistook Spider-Man for being similar to a werewolf-like character. Leslie Stevens, creator of The Outer Limits, was hired to write a screenplay based on this concept. Stevens' script featured Peter Parker as an ID-badge photographer who becomes subject to a mad scientist's experiment which transforms him into a human tarantula. Tobe Hooper, who was preparing to shoot The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Invaders from Mars for Cannon, signed on to direct.[30] Stan Lee hated the horror route the studio was taking with the character and demanded that a new script be written that was closer to the source material.

 

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Tim Burton's Batman really needs to be brought into this. It not only ushered in 3 sequels, it paved the way for big names, big stars, big budgets, summer style movies, continuity (of a sort), it started a renaissance of cartoon superheroes (one that is still being milked with DC doing tons of movies and series), and even had big, somewhat odd directors getting into it. 

Spider Man followed suit in this almost perfectly - somewhat weird, edgy director, big names for villains and most other parts, actual swearing and whatnot. One could argue XMen did that too, given that Bryan Singer was coming off of his success of Usual Suspects. 

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5 minutes ago, Kaligator said:

Tim Burton's Batman really needs to be brought into this. It not only ushered in 3 sequels, it paved the way for big names, big stars, big budgets, summer style movies, continuity (of a sort), it started a renaissance of cartoon superheroes (one that is still being milked with DC doing tons of movies and series), and even had big, somewhat odd directors getting into it. 

All good points, but at the same time the Schumacher films basically killed all that momentum dead.  Also, how dare you call Burton "somewhat odd."  He's at least mostly odd!

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38 minutes ago, Kaligator said:

One could argue XMen did that too, given that Bryan Singer was coming off of his success of Usual Suspects. 

Honestly, these days I just hesitate to bring up the films made by Bryan Singer because... well, it's Bryan fucking Singer. 

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21 minutes ago, Kaligator said:

Tim Burton's Batman really needs to be brought into this. It not only ushered in 3 sequels, it paved the way for big names, big stars, big budgets, summer style movies, continuity (of a sort), it started a renaissance of cartoon superheroes (one that is still being milked with DC doing tons of movies and series), and even had big, somewhat odd directors getting into it. 

Spider Man followed suit in this almost perfectly - somewhat weird, edgy director, big names for villains and most other parts, actual swearing and whatnot. One could argue XMen did that too, given that Bryan Singer was coming off of his success of Usual Suspects. 

That pattern was being established before Tim Burton's Batman, but getting Jack Nicholson and Kim Bassinger was certainly a bit of a coup. Keaton wan't really big at the time, but his casting certainly established the pattern of nerds losing their shit at a casting announcement. Not popular at all when it broke. 

Batman '89 and Superman '78 were important, but I think their relevance to the CBM phenomenon is overstated. Slightly more than the 1960's Batman and animated Spider-Man series. Maybe the '80's Hulk TV show.

Yes, they spawned their own sequels and only their own sequels. After Superman '78 it took 11 years for Batman to come along. It takes another decade post-Batman '89 before Blade and X-Men come along. I'm not sure that qualifies as "starting a renaissance". They also demonstrated DC's uncanny ability to screw up their franchises by chasing toy sales.

Batman '89 and its sequels also deviate from the post 2000 trend in that they clearly exist in a weird, off-kilter, pantomime, Tim Burton world. Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man (and the Nolan Trilogy) have a realism the early Batman films didn't have.  

Superman 1 &2: I loved these films as a kid. between them I've probably seen them 50+ times. They will always have a nostalgic quality for me, but compared to other films made around that time, those films really did not age well. Not that it's all bad, but I suspect that a few of the under-30 crowd that heap praise on those films haven't actually seen them. The less said about 3 & 4 the better. I saw 3 once. Never bothered with 4.

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I comfortably consider it my favorite super hero film  as well. I don't even like Spiderman nearly as much as most, but that was one exceptional movie. Looks stunning on my projection screen,  and one or the best to show off the dying-but-awesome-at-my-setup 3D googles.

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1 hour ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Yes, they spawned their own sequels and only their own sequels. After Superman '78 it took 11 years for Batman to come along. It takes another decade post-Batman '89 before Blade and X-Men come along. I'm not sure that qualifies as "starting a renaissance". They also demonstrated DC's uncanny ability to screw up their franchises by chasing toy sales.

I was talking about the cartoons that it spawned. Batman TAS was a massive thing that came about and used a lot of the aesthetic of Burton's Batman, and that in turn spawned movies, it spawned Superman TAS, JL, etc. The Xmen cartoon got greenlit partially because of the success of Burton's Batman too. The 90s had a ton of superhero-related stuff, and a whole lot of that was because of Burton's Batman and Batman Returns. 

 

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