Martin Scorsese is urging filmmakers to save cinema, by doubling down on his call to fight comic book movie culture.
The storied filmmaker is revisiting the topic of comic book movies in a new profile for GQ. Despite facing intense blowback from filmmakers, actors and the public for the 2019 comments he made slamming the Marvel Cinematic Universe films — he called them theme parks rather than actual cinema — Scorsese isn’t shying away from the topic.
“The danger there is what it’s doing to our culture,” he told GQ. “Because there are going to be generations now that think … that’s what movies are.”
GQ’s Zach Baron posited that what Scorsese was saying might already be true, and the “Killers of the Flower Moon” filmmaker agreed.
“They already think that. Which means that we have to then fight back stronger. And it’s got to come from the grassroots level. It’s gotta come from the filmmakers themselves,” Scorsese continued to the outlet. “And you’ll have, you know, the Safdie brothers, and you’ll have Chris Nolan, you know what I mean? And hit ’em from all sides. Hit ’em from all sides, and don’t give up. … Go reinvent. Don’t complain about it. But it’s true, because we’ve got to save cinema.”
Scorsese referred to movies inspired by comic books as “manufactured content” rather than cinema.
“It’s almost like AI making a film,” he said. “And that doesn’t mean that you don’t have incredible directors and special effects people doing beautiful artwork. But what does it mean? What do these films, what will it give you?”
His forthcoming film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” had been on Scorsese’s wish list for several years; it’s based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name. He called the story “a sober look at who we are as a culture.”
The film tells the true story of the murders of Osage Nation members by white settlers in the 1920s. DiCaprio originally was attached to play FBI investigator Tom White, who was sent to the Osage Nation within Oklahoma to probe the killings. The script, however, underwent a significant rewrite.
“After a certain point,” the filmmaker told Time, “I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys.”
The dramatic focus shifted from White’s investigation to the Osage and the circumstances that led to them being systematically killed with no consequences.
The character of White now is played by Jesse Plemons in a supporting role. DiCaprio stars as the husband of a Native American woman, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an oil-rich Osage woman, and member of a conspiracy to kill her loved ones in an effort to steal her family fortune.
Scorsese worked closely with Osage Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear and his office from the beginning of production, consulting producer Chad Renfro told Time. On the first day of shooting, the Oscar-winning filmmaker had an elder of the nation come to set to say a prayer for the cast and crew.
I mean, he’s not wrong. But there has always been a ton of shitty action movies with the same cut and paste plot. Marvel just tweaked the formula.
And it’s not like good movies aren’t still being made. The Marvel movies are historically bad at winning awards. There have been a handful of nominations, but not a lot of wins. The wins always go to good movies that deserve them.
Sure, the Marvel movies pull in more money than other movies, but the money makers are usually trash. Marvel is like the McDonald’s of movies. It’s going to pull in way more money than a fine dining establishment, but not because it’s good, because it’s the garbage that the public will take out their wallet for. There is space in the market for both of these things.
There is space in the market for both of these things.
Not so sure about that, and that might be the problem. Marvel/Disney is both rather monocultural and a ridiculously huge draw and brand that can suck the oxygen out of the marketing ecosystem. It could be true that the comic cinema industry is genuinely taking eyes off of other things and creating a less diverse cinema experience per capita. Even if for most people it’s only marginal, a slightly alternative take on an action or hero film with a slightly different angle or message or style is still diversity that might be important and valuable.
It would be interesting to compare this to the action and block buster movies of the past. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that there was a noticeable diversity and I’m going to say thoughtfulness amongst big films of the past compared to today. I’m open to being wrong of course, but it’s worth thinking about, just because big-corp monopolisation can easily have these effects.
I’m partly influenced by a recent rewatch of Jurassic Park and noticing how subtly thoughtful it was while also being basically a straight action film (after the set up at least). There’s even a moment (when they first see the raptors being fed) that’s basically kinda vegan message or at least a critique or contrast between humans and “the monsters” of the film, done entirely but very clearly through editing and directing … it was really nice actually.
You’re wrong.
But to be clear, when you say “the past” you are talking about maybe twenty years. Thirty, tops.
Because people WERE in fact saying this about Star Wars. The notion that the new Hollywood brats were turning it into a commercial dystopia was very much a thing. So the old school action films you’re talking about are the blockbusters ranging from 1978 to maybe 2000 when the Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man films start building momentum for comic book movies.
Before then you’re in Old Hollywood territory, where the “action” stuff is pulp and exploitation in the margins. The status quo you remember is late 20th century kids bringing the crappy b-list stuff they grew up with into big money blockbuster fare.
Ummm … wrong about what exactly … I don’t that’s clear from your post?
Otherwise, we can both be right. The action blockbuster movie thing, as far as I understand, and as you state, was definitely a creature of the 70s up to now. And it’s also probably important and valuable to criticise that too. Danny Boyle, for instance, is on record saying that the great sin of Star Wars is that it transformed the idea of an “Adult film” into a pornographic film when it used to just be a normal drama film about adult and interesting things which have been pushed out of the industry by relatively childish blockbusters. Comic films can easily be seen as just an extension of that. My point was that we might find that it’s been a continuous collapse of “Adult films” under the weight of blockbusters to the point that the blockbusters aren’t even trying anymore to imitate, at least at times, the more nuanced “adult” films of the past.
All due respect to Boyle’s hot take, but I’d argue that US censorship had a whole lot more to do than Star Wars there.
I mean, sure, it created an understanding that family films that don’t get a restricted audience due to censorship make more money, but I’m gonna guess people would have figured that out at some point either way. It’s also interesting that the other target he gave in that quote was Pixar, but people tend to not mention that part.
I think there’s a sense that pre-blockbuster Hollywood wasn’t about spectacle or commercialism, which I find a bit confusing in the context of Cleopatra, Gone with the Wind or The Ten Commandments. I think the movies people miss are the pulpy trash they saw as kids, probably. “Serious dramas” or “adult films” were only at the forefront of filmmaking when they were at the forefront of profitability. That’s to say, when the so-called “star system” made it so that seeing Cary Grant or Humpfrey Bogart mostly just… hanging out and acting out stage plays could move audiences.
Which is, incidentally, why people are so desperate to praise Nolan or Villeneuve, who are both very competent visual filmmakers that are way less smart than they and the industry seem to think.
Okay, let me put it this way: I like most Rian Johnson movies. I think is worst movie is The Last Jedi. I think that movie was made worse by being a Star Wars film. I don’t think that would have been any different in 1982.
In the late-70s/80s it was slasher movies. In the 80s/90s it was Rambo-style action movies, or Lethal Weapon and Fatal Attraction-style thrillers.
There have always been Hollywood bandwagons.The difference is that back then the major studios made a bunch of films of all scopes and budgets, while today those same studios make fewer, more expensive movies.
If Scorsese was a young man today - or Robert Altman or William Friedkin, whoever - he probably wouldn’t get a chance to make a Raging Bull, he’d be steered towards a superhero film with - of course - NO final cut. The one exception is Christopher Nolan. And even he did an entire superhero TRILOGY.Taking what Marty is saying and putting it another way - major studio content is not driven by a director’s creative vision in the current environment, but by producers… the suits and their market research.
Look, I didn’t love Guardians 3, it’s a conservative, Christian movie and I don’t agree with most of its premises.
But there wasn’t a dry eye in the house by the end of that, and I’m pretty sure most of them know what “it meant”, and it certainly wasn’t “almost like AI making a film”. Ditto for Across the Spider-Verse, whcih is a progressive movie I do agree with.
There’s always been this argument that successfull movies are bad, and I’ve never liked it. It’s never been true. There are tons of bad films that make their money back, but for every Air Force One there is a Die Hard or Back to the Future (more conservative movies I don’t agree with but are very well made, go figure).
So yeah, I do agree that Oscar bait keeps Oscar baiting, and that superheroes aren’t killing cinema, which is a hard take to roll with this year in particular. But no, I actively don’t think superhero movies or genre movies are worthless or trash, any more than I think westerns are trash or action movies are trash.
How is Guardians 3 a conservative Christian movie? You know the director, James Gunn, is very outspokenly progressive, right?
I responded to this above, but just to clarify on this point, I mean small c conservative here. Which is absolutely not inconsistent with Gunn being a normal person who is not an actual fascist.
I mean that it’s a conservative movie in that it explicitly religious and does take the stance that science and technocratic “let’s change the world” science is inherently equal to hubris and negative, while the positive flipside is enduring suffering, embracing spirituality and being rewarded with a happy afterlife. There is absolutely a progressive read of those beliefs, there has been for hundreds of years. Gunn seems to be explicitly aligning with it here, and that’s fine, but that’s still a (small c) conservative viewpoint.
Hell, I’ll go one further: a lot of people on the opposite side of that argument are today, in fact, actual fascists. It’s not hard to go find examples of atheist dicks online, or of technocratic tyrants. Turns out your religious beliefs are not connected to whether you’re a good person. That doesn’t mean the Catholic worldview isn’t inherently conservative. I was using the word philosophically, not politically.
That’s a lot of mental gymnastics to make GOTG3 political.
It’s a movie about friendship, family, and a megalomaniac.
How is it mental gymnastics? I’m starting to feel bad for Gunn, because he put all that stuff on the movie super on purpose and apparently people will not just miss it they will actively try to ignore it.
Eh… I may be late to this, but… yeah, these are extreme SPOILERS. This thing really needs a content warning system, a spoiler alert system or both.
Anyway, dude, Rocket goes to actual heaven. They flag it as actual heaven. We see it on screen. Lyla straight up says there is a God and a heaven and Rocket gets to go to it.
Normally you expect this argument to be about some subtextual reinterpretation or an allegory or whatever but… no, man, it’s right there. Explicitly.
Hey, don’t look now, but besides being pretty explicit about there being a God and an afterlife it’s also super not on board with for-profit health care and animal testing. You may have missed how it’s like 75% of the running time of the movie. You could argue about it being a religious film, but political? It’s the story of a group of people whose friend’s organs are hadlocked by a corporation, they go fight the corporation and end up freeing all their animal test subjects.
Every time this “it’s not political” stuff comes up in online conversation I swear it’s like an optical effect of some sort. It makes you question how subjective perception is and wonder how other people’s minds are parsing the world in different ways.
God and Heaven exist in the Marvel universe in the same way that Thor and Zeus exist. You’re reading way too much in to it.
They do, but no, I’m not.
There’s a difference between using Christian mythos as mythos and making a spiritual point. You pick what to pull and why, and things have meaning.
Ironically, in this context if they had made this more of an explicit heaven it’d have been less of a conscious choice (see also, Thor: Love & Thunder). The framing of the afterlife, who states the existence of a divine plan, paired with the role that scene plays in the movie are all important context cues.
Again, people worked really hard to not trivialize that scene as a fantasy setup and instead charge it with meaning and a point. It’d be a shame to purposefully ignore it, whether you agree with the implied philosophical take or not.
Right on, those are some very fair points. I guess calling them trash is a bit far.
But out of genuine curiosity, could you expand on how the movies you mentioned are conservative Christian movies? I know Die Hard takes place on Christmas, but that’s all I’m picking up.
I have absolutely no idea what they mean by conservative/progressive movie. I too would like to know, because I’m utterly baffled.
Oh, boy. Should have guessed that’s the bit that would get picked up.
I mean, I didn’t think Guardians was very subtle about this at all. James Gunn doesn’t seem to be an asshole, but you can be religious and not be a completely reactionary idiot. The movie features actual heaven, where a character tells another “there’s the hands that made us and then there’s the hands that guide the hands”, and says that heaven “is beatutiful and it is forever”. And then the villain yells “there is no God, that’s why I stepped in”, which is the tipping point for his allies turning on him. The entire diagnosis the movie has on the guy ends up being that “he didn’t want to make things better, he just hated things the way they are”, which is, for the record, a much, much better take on the equally conformist version of that in The Flash. It’s a very well made, very emotional, very beautiful movie, but… you know, it’s not very shy about spiritualism. If I had to sum it up I’d say it’s… eh… Stephen Colbert Catholic? In that wavelength?
As for Back to the Future… well, I’m not the first to notice that the “good future” is a Reaganomics fever dream. Somebody points out the Trumpy bad guy in the sequel, which I guess from the modern day makes it read different, but… yeah, it’s a very 80s franchise with very 80s sensibilities. Zemeckis has pushed back against this slightly, I think, and yeah, it’s being a bit jokey about the weirdness of the americana he’s clearly nostalgic for, but that doesn’t change the text. I mean, he’s also the guy that used “a black family lives here now” as shorthand for the town going to crap in the sequel. He also made the entirety of Forrest Gump, so… yeah, you don’t have to present a worldview on purpose to have it color your stuff. Once again, the movie isn’t mean about it, and it’s certainly not dumb, but it’s coming from a certain worldview and you can absolutely tell.
Die Hard is straight up MRA propaganda, though. Great film, love it to bits, but it’s entirely about how the down-to-Earth cop feels emasculated by his wife having a career and rubbing elbows with all the California yuppies only to get himself vindicated when things turn violent and he’s the only one with enough common sense and old school skills to fix the situation. Also, the government is fundamentally incompetent unless it’s specifically the cops. And Reginald VelJohnson’s entire arc is about how he should not stop shooting people just because he once killed a kid when he saw his toy gun, which is up there for “plot point that has aged the absolute worst in movie history” award. Still love it, though. Super conservative movie. The most political of this bunch, probably. Still good filmmaking.
Look, you don’t have to dislike things just because they’re built on implicit viewpoints that you don’t agree with. Art is art, and it carries meaning and implications. You can notice them and still enjoy the result regardless of whether you agree with those viewpoints. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to enjoy anything made outside this century or… you know, your own culture. It’s fine.
I wasn’t on board with you at first, but this write-up was thought provoking and I appreciated the read.
Cool, thanks!
People sometimes think analysis or interpretation of stuff they like is an attack, especially when it identifies elements they disagree with in things they enjoy.
But that’s not the point, it’s about understanding what you’re hearing and seeing and you can absolutely enjoy things even if they’re saying things you don’t agree with. If I made that point to one person this entire thread was worth it (and already more interesting than Martin Scorsese not liking superhero movies, honestly).
TIL that somehow it makes sense to consider the classic back to the future somehow a fucking conservative movie. LMAO might wanna lay off whatever heavy drug you’d been ingesting
Less conservative and more a product of its time, so let’s say centre with a whiff of Reagan.
But yeah, hey, that’s a thing. If you learned it today and you’re curious about it there are decades of criticism and analysis about it. I am very far from being the first to point that out, among other things because I was a toddler when it came out.
Despite other people pointing it out I’m not really buying it.
There is a line “Ronald Reagan, the actor? President?” Which seems to indicate it’s a ridiculous idea.
Then as others have pointed out, Biff in BTTF 2 is basically exactly trump and they couldn’t paint that character in a worse light. He’s an evil villain.
The reality is probably that the movies have nothing political in them other than the joke about Reagan which likely actually wasn’t meant to be a real critique
That’s not how meaning works, though.
Look, I get it, not everybody cares or knows how semiotics work, but it’s always baffling how much people get invested in the notion of “no politics in art” no matter how often this comes up.
Yes, there are politics in Back to the Future, as in any other film where the worldview of the creators becomes the perspective from which the entire film is put together. Things in movies don’t happen by accident, they get carefully written, acted and shot. Everything in a movie is something somebody is saying, and like any other thing you say it has both superficial and subtextual meaning.
So yes, BTTF does spend the entire movie boiling down maturity and success to being financially successful and self-confident. Because it’s an American movie from the 80s and that’s how young Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale saw being self-fulfilled looking like in 1985.
And yes, they poke good intentioned, light fun at Reagan being president. And they acknowledge some form of past racism in the form of Goldie being president, but also holy crap, the way Goldie is characterized also tells you a lot of how the Bobs saw race working and let’s just say that nothing in BTTF2 and Forrest Gump was accidental.
Is it an active piece of propaganda? No, that’s not where the bar is for containing a political or even politicized worldview. But it does present a worldview, and that is… a pretty centrist, eminently materialistic take on what was a fairly conservative world.
I promise that’s not an insult.
I love his movies, but this feels like an “Old Man Yells at Cloud” story.
C’mon bro-- comic book movies have even ruined comic book movies at this point 😅
The thing is though, Low effort, high special effect action, action over plot moviesis nothing new, before marvel it was transformers and so on all the way back to shoot em up westerns at the dawn of cinema.
Its not like before the MCU, you’re average movie goer was watching super artistic cerebral movies, and comic book movies took that all away, like this guy is acting
It absolutely is yelling at clouds.
They’re just fun scifi westerns, not the end of cinema.It’s just a catchy headline to mask the real point of this article: to advertise his new movie.
Good point
Man who makes only gangster movies angry at people who make only superhero movies.
My take on it is eventually viewers will tire of the genre, and it will fade out into the background like most other genres. Dramas were all the rage in the 40s, Westerns were very popular in the 50s, in the 70s and 80s you have disaster films and pure action type stuff that was incredibly popular, the 90s had the start of some very popular independent films, and the late 90s and early aughts had a lot of popular fantasy/epics and animation films.
None of those genres completely went away, and some have had resurgence from time to time. Comic based movies won’t be dominating forever. There was and still are a lot of complaints about the movies made in the previous couple decades, and I think it says something that people are finding these comic stories so compelling. I think “Hollywood” needs to look in a mirror to remind themselves why these types of movies have became so popular… is it just everyone attached to beautiful art and special effects? Or is it perhaps that maybe their storytelling wasn’t as great, or original as they thought, and they are losing out to stories written decades ago because they are just simply more interesting?
I’m already tired… Spiderman gets recycled ever so often because of the license they have, then the multi verse was fine the few first movies but gets annoying after, then you get super heroes that only hard fans know and no one else.
I actually think the multiverse concept is a super annoying and obvious cash grab. At no point did I think “oh cool these movies connect”. From the first moment to me it read as “oh they’re planning to make 100 movies and tying them together is just a tactic to con people into seeing all 100 the same way people have watched plenty of sequels they know will suck, but they just want to finish the trilogy”. Then the first time I heard it referred to as the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” I threw up in my mouth. I’ll never understand how people didn’t get bored and jaded after… 10 years max. We’re now sailing past 20 years from where I see this as all starting and it’s still some of the most popular shit of all time.
I feel like technology has changed things a lot. In the past when there was tube TVs with crappy resolution and poor quality sound you had to go to a theater for good quality picture and sound. Now TVs are good enough that if you’re going to watch a 3 1/2 hour long movie about some gangsters in their 70s reminiscing about a hit they did many decades before, you’re better off watching it at home. Why would someone want to go to the theater for that?
Now people go to the theater for the spectacle. Big event movies that people get dressed in costumes for. Movies with big effects that their home TV and sound system just won’t give as good an experience.
Serious dramas? I’m not getting anything more from watching it at the theater than I’m going to get at home on my TV.
And why is that a bad thing? A modern 4K TV with even just a speaker bar probably gives a better viewing experience than people had when they watched Taxi Driver in the theaters in 1976.
It’s definitely an issue, but it’s not an unworkable one. Villeneuve films for exemple, while a bit hit-or-miss on the characters, definitely use the format in a way where you loose something if you watch it on TV instead of in a theater.
I saw BR 2049 in the cinema, and even now, several years later, I wish I could see it again that way. The sound over that enormous system was absolutely incredible, in a way that I could never recreate in my terraced house with neighbours. That’s the draw of cinema for me these days.
Those are big special effects movies. You’re certainly not going to Villeneuve movies because they’re well written. Well the writing in Dune is good, but only because he’s sticking close to the novel. But even with Dune, I’m obviously not going to the theater for the story (because I already know the story) I’m going for the visuals and sound.
Yeah, people remember a handful of classic war movies or westerns and think that era was magical but for every great film there was a hundred terrible cookie cutter cash grabs.
I would love to see some more directors focus on making great art but the reality is that’s incredibly hard.
heres the thing, comic book movies as a concept arent bad but theyre executed terribly. disney and dc both fucking suck horrendously, thwyre unbearable
Those comic book movies are keeping theaters open, so there are screens even in existence to show Scorsese movies. He ought to be grateful.
That’s not really true though, we’re forgetting this now because covid really shuffled things, but it was getting impossible for anything lower budget than a blockbuster to get screentime because of how many screens were contractually obligated to Disney and Marvel. They had really insane power for a few years, after all if you don’t show their movie almost exclusively for an extended period they might not let you show it at all.
Something like the Irishman probably had a better shot dealing with indie theaters that normally oscillate between playing cult classics and the festival scene movies than with multiplexes.
My dude reads the Barbie comics. Respect.
It’s been that way for a loooong time.
Movies became so expensive to produce that studios can’t finance them themselves.
So they turned to the banks.
Banks are by nature risk averse.
So a production company has to submit an application to their bank’s movie financing department like you would when applying for a home loan.
The bank decides whether to finance the movie based on the information submitted: Script, subject matter, director, which stars have committed to the project, etc.
Now if you imagine, people from the banking industry are not artists and creatives and visionaries. They just look at raw investment potential, i.e. Is this proposed production going to pay off the loan with interest?
If there’s any risk, e.g. this has never been done before, or there’s no recognizable franchise branding, or if something could be controversial in a meaningful way, the bank won’t approve the production loan.
So sequels, brand name franchises, with writing committees, are easier to get approvals from the banks, therefore are more likely to make it into production.
That’s why Hollywood doesn’t make daring, experimental, and controversial movies much anymore.
And it’s not just movies.
Hit song analysis systems like Platinum Blue, aka Music XRay, use algorithms to compare new songs to hit songs of the past to rate the chances that they will become hits themselves.
This is why all new songs sound the same and there are so many cover versions.
New songs are scored by hit song analysis system(s) and have to achieve a high score showing how much they resemble previous hit songs before money is allocated for promotion.
That’s… really sad
So in a way it’s going right back to the way things were during the Golden Age of Hollywood. I hope this means more musicals are on the way.
Not every film can be a cinematic masterpiece. I wouldn’t want to watch nothing but masterpieces, it would be exhausting. On the flip side, there can absolutely be comic book movies that are masterpieces. Logan comes to mind.
Logan was certainly a great movie, but a lot of what made it great were the years we had spent with the characters. Without that the movie wouldn’t have been nearly as impactful. The fact that we knew what wolverine and professor x were once capable of, and then seeing them in their present state, really helped set the backdrop for the movie.
Guardians of the galaxy 3 was absolutely amazing on every level!
Comic book movies can be good. What Martin Scorsese means to say is woke culture is ruing good story telling.
Just write good story’s and don’t be an asshole.
People removed about it, and its because Martin is 100% right. Comic book things are collapsing now at Disney.
No lies detected.
Honestly tuned out of the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe stuff after the Avengers Age Of Ultron movie. It all felt so manufactured and artificial by then already.
Remember before Marvel movies, when we had such hits as Encino Man, Problem Child, Speed 2: Cruise Control, and and Cocktail? I’ve got news for you, Marty, cinema has been killing cinema since the dawn of cinema, and yet cinema survives. There will always be movies that someone doesn’t like that make a FUCK ton of money. Then there will be the passion projects that gain a cult following decades after the fact. If you are lucky, you get a little of both sides of the coin, but most aren’t. Get off your high-art horse and enjoy some escapism, not everyone has a 9 figure net worth, some of us need to forget how much life sucks and watch a guy with a hammer beat alien skulls into paste.
Hey now, let’s leave Encino Man out of this.
No wheezing the juice!
That just sounds like immature drivel from someone angry they’re being called out for not thinking about anything.
The existence of low-quality garbage does not justify its existence and the fact is that post-endgame Marvel movies SUCK. And they suck because they do not follow basic rules of plot, building up suspense, meaningful stakes and other important shit the rabble either forgot about or never knew.
And the fact remains that Americans are suffering because they’re not being exposed to high-level ideas in movies, one of the kinds of entertainment they consume the most, and being actively discouraged from thinking by and large through arguments of your own intended to justify their ignorance to avoid emotional hurt. It’s hurting us as a people. Art isn’t there solely to entertain, it’s there to teach you things and make you think, and one of the things Americans badly need to learn is that life isn’t all about being entertained and having fun. You have to be willing to put on your big boy pants and actually think.
The fact that there is even a dichotomy between enjoyable movies and movies that make audiences think is what should be upsetting people right now, not Martin Scorsese pointing out truths that make you feel bad.
Grow up.
People who disparage Marty forget or don’t know that he has been a fierce proponent and heavy financial supporter of film restoration through companies like Milestone Films for more than three decades now. If you ever enjoyed world cinema, the films of Kalatozov, Pasolini, Buñuel, Murnau and many more, there is a decent chance you were able to enjoy them in good quality through the direct efforts of Martin Scorsese and others.
“Because there are going to be generations now that think … that’s what movies are.”
should be understood in this context as well. We owe him so much gratitude for keeping the language of film alive.
BUT HE INSULTED MARVEL 😠 😡 😡 FUCK HIM AND HIS PRETENTIOUS BULLSHIT! HE’S JUST MAD THAT MARVEL MAKES BILLIONS
I mean, can’t we just have both? On some days I want to see a silly lighthearted action movie and on some days I want to see a heart wrenching story about the deepest darkest recesses of the human mind. It’s not a zero sum game.
Something can be lighthearted or action based and still be interesting film making in contrast to the paint by numbers MCU films and some others.
It’s pure action, but Fury Road is an example of a simple action movie that had thought put into the editing, cinematography, etc. Barbie is light hearted but similarly had some ideas to play with.
We’ve just had the highest grossin opening weekend with Barbenhiemer.
Yes, we can have both. They need to have both otherwise they are only accomodating part of their audience.
The Barbie movie is a perfect example of the balance of pinache and meaning, and mainstream movies ought to learn from that.
And that lead actress, whoever she is, should totally get an Oscar for her performance this year.
well, THAT just happened
Awkward
…he’s right behind me, isn’t he?
Once X-Men hit at the box office, all the movie studios snatched up every single comic property they could get their greedy little hands on.
It’s kind of amusing that he mentioned Christopher Nolan as a possible ally in his grassroots campaign of filmmakers extolling the virtues of cinema. Christopher Nolan who made a massive comic book movie trilogy. That Christopher Nolan?
I don’t believe that The Dark Knight trilogy can be compared to anything from Marvel. They are miles ahead in cinematography, directon, use of practical special effects, writing, etc. And there wasn’t 20+ TDK movies.
Christopher Nolan’s Batman is cut from a different cloth though.
It’s far better than anything Marvel’s ever put out, and isn’t confined to being good “comic superhero movies”, they’re just good movies to the point that even my mother loves the dark knight.
The fact that you find those movies to be comparable to marvel ones kind of disqualifies all future opinions of yours lol
They are literally comparable as they are both in the same genre this article is about. You realise Batman is a comic book character, and that the article is about comic book movies, yeah? I said nothing about the quality between the two.
“quality is obviously not included when comparisons are made” -Mr Giggity
Hah. From your perspective sure, I’ll give you that. I don’t think subjective or objective “quality” is the sole criteria when comparing cinema, especially in this context where the article is talking about comic book movies versus the rest of cinema, but I am running on 4 hours of sleep so I wasn’t as clear I could have been, sorry. In this context, from my perspective, they are inherently comparable since they are in the same genre. I think we may also have slightly different applications of “comparable” here — maybe a regional language thing?
For the record I think the couple of Marvel movies I’ve seen have been vapid wastes of time that could have possibly been
writtenengineered by LLMs for maximum returns on investment. So I think we’re of a similar opinion and probably on the same side here. I still think mentioning Nolan in this context is hilariously hypocritical given he made some of the biggest comic book movies ever. I get the intent behind evoking Nolan’s quality filmmaking, still funny to me regardless.That said… Your messages come across as quite antagonistic. Why is that? I mean this quite sincerely: are you doing okay? It takes so much energy to be sour all of the time — I know from experience. Feel free to message me on here if you want to shoot the shit.
-Mr Giggity
