More Is Also More

I see I’m going to have to add a spoiler warning.

‘It’s like a pirate had a baby with an angel’.

It was a lot better than I expected.
Yes, given the ambition of the thing, and the juggling of so many characters, settings and tones, it came out about as well as could possibly be hoped. I feared it might be a massive car wreck, but somehow it just about holds together.

Spoiler alert!
Hopp Sing: Are such Brobdingnagian spoilers the automotive equivalent of the inflated scrotums I linked to the other day? 🙂

Still prefer a good frathouse movie.

pst314: Nothing is equivalent to that.
The old spoilers were overkill, and like old hairstyles can sometimes look dated or worse in retrospect, but compared to the inflated scrotums (did I really just type those two words together?), they’re positively sensible.

the pendulum has clearly swung back towards the center.
Given the scope and tonal span, and the surprising places it goes, and where it ends up, it’s remarkable that the thing doesn’t just fall apart or destroy any possibility of suspending disbelief. And whatever the merits or shortcomings of any individual film, it’s hard to fault the ambition of the Marvel Studios brand. They’re building an interconnected storytelling universe – from the street-level to the cosmic – in which disparate characters can exist simultaneously and interact, on film, without jarring wildly or seeming too stupid. And, at least for now, it’s a license to print money.
That’s no small achievement.

What is wrong with you people? Stop giving them money.

They’re building an interconnected storytelling universe […] That’s no small achievement.
The more so because the conventional wisdom for twenty years has been that this is a bad thing that hurts the financial viability of comics.
I think one could make the argument that things are different in movies, where there’s a release only every year or two rather than several a month, but personally I’m flabbergasted that the MCU is doing as well as it is amongst people who were never comic book fans.

What is wrong with you people? Stop giving them money.
Heh. Today’s words are escapism and fun.
Besides, they’re my only vice.
What?

the aggravating bathos of Thor: Ragnarok
I suspect 99% of the audience and 100% of the production crew of that movie don’t really know what ‘bathos’ is. Actually I reckon 60% don’t know what aggravating is either.
What is wrong with you people? Stop giving them money.
This.
x a million
+ whatever combination of explosions and wisecracks will drill the understanding that all superhero movies are worthless halfwitted nonsense into your heads

It was good to see a villain who’s not a CEO but a totalitarian environmentalist who’s into ‘fairness’.
Heh. Yes.

And slightly irritated at the 6,392 “digital artist” people who get credited at the end of every blockbuster film.
My solution is to walk out when the credits start rolling. (I’ve never understood people who insist on watching all the credits, including the 6,392 ‘digital artists’.)

I usually stay till the end to see if there are any goodies/easter eggs appended and for mention of filming locations, since there are a few studios where I am.
Director, Assistant Director, Assistant Assistant Director, Co-Assistant Director, Deputy Assistant Director, 2nd Assistant Director, 2nd 2nd Assistant Director, used to be bad enough already…
Everyone gets a trophy directorship or credit in the film!
Bah – in the old days it was “Effects by Ray Harryhausen” and we liked it that way.

Grumble, lawn, where’s my glasses, whippersnappers, etc.

I’m still waiting for “Tarbender,” the superhero/villain who works at a bar and gains his unique powers of insight by eating the picked eggs there.
It’s no secret, either. The bar patrons all know it but make a different cost/benefit calculation than he does.

He was an actual character, not just an effect.
A large part of my dissatisfaction with Age of Ultron wasn’t the CGI as much as the fact that Ultron wasn’t a character – he was Stock Joss Whedon Snark-Spitting Trope # 17. The personality didn’t fit the character design, the scope, or the motivation.
You don’t need a lot of CGI for a convincing character; H.A.L. was just a blinky light.

“Absurd, unattractive and unreal characters” you say.
Like, say, Homer? Or Hercules or Jason. Oedipus and Daedelus aren’t exactly Social Realism either.
Or Shakespeare. Unless you think MacBeth is full of realistic and likeable characters. And Lear: like anyone ever took that seriously.
Mythic literature is older than any other literature you can name. Super Hero movies are continuing an old and important tradition that speaks to people.

As opposed to our Hal, who is more of a linky blight, with his URLs to Google search results.
(Sorry Hal, couldn’t resist)

I did see one Marvel movie, or at least parts of it, about a guy who had knife blades shooting out of his knuckles. He fought the UBG on the rim of a nuclear plant’s cooling tower, as I recall.

As opposed to our Hal, who is more of a linky blight, with his URLs to Google search results.
(Sorry Hal, couldn’t resist)
Ehn, ‘s called citations, for further confirmation see Thus, etc . . .

I don’t think of HAL as malevolent. He’s an eerie presence, certainly, and wonderfully so, but for most of the film
Well. perhaps malevolent isn’t quite the right word. Eerie, as you said, and somewhat creepy is how I remember it from my first viewing, when it was new. I was a wee tyke then, and odd things scare children, I suppose… but the unsettling, creepy feeling has stuck with me all this time.

Sounds like Marvel ate DC’s lunch. Again.
In three days it’s already earned $630M. By the end of today, it’ll have made more than DC’s Justice League did in its entire run. So yes, lunch eaten. Though it occurs to me that millions of small children may be unfamiliar with the source material and not expecting a, shall we say, cliff-hanger. Especially one that’s almost wistfully bleak.

Today’s woke take: Lacking hair ties or pony tails, female superhero hair is a “sexist stereotype.”
It’s all about “gender fascism,” apparently.
You see, it’s not enough to feature lots of heroic women kicking ass and such, and being no less feisty and fearsome than their male counterparts, in a film that ends with a call for help to a cosmically powerful female superhero. No, these ass-kicking female characters must also have certain woke-approved hairstyles.
Which in fact at least four of them do. But that doesn’t count, somehow. Because feigned outrage is status now.

Among the reasons for spoiler warnings . . .

. . . . Doctor Strange doing his Hindu goddess thing. (Is it Durga? I forget which.)
Any of the above, actually, the multi arm thing is just a designator of stock variety extreme multitasking . . .

The solution to Kermode’s question is to avoid Hollywood’s extruded product altogether, or at least confine it to home viewing. The “pause” button is your friend.