Mal ,'Shindig'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Yeah but Push is great and totally underrated!
::high fives::
Maybe the comics were the problem? The Thor run by Walter Simonson was just so good, that the film had a really high bar to clear? Also, the Lord of the Rings also set such a high bar for fantasy films in general?
Maybe for sis and BiL, but for me, it really was pacing and dialogue.
I floved Thor when I saw it originally, but I knew it was at least 75% being in a movie theater on a movie theater on a 100 degree day plus The Hems. Plus being an enjoyable, sunny movie after The Dark Knight had already (in my memory) started things trending darker. So I watched it again recently, and thought it was fine, but not as great as my memory.
I loved the first Thor but I only saw it once in the theaters and I now realize that I remember absolutely nothing about the movie. I don't know what the storyline was. I don't remember one single thing that happened. It was very pretty, though. I remember that much.
I've found both Thor movies to be a lot of fun. They've managed to strike the right balance between serious and goofy for movies about an alien space viking with a magic hammer who fights crime.
2nd Thor has a cameo by Captain America! ish.
Which was absolutely fantastic.
I also don't 100% agree with that Sady Doyle piece, but it's got a lot of good points. You almost can't evaluate the movie as a standalone work, except for the part where it's a movie and it kind of has to stand on its own.
I enjoyed Thor. Also, Thor 2. I didn't hate AoU, although I don't think it's the best of the MCU.
My biggest issue is I don't see the point of Ultron in the wider sphere. Loki and the Chitauri played into the larger plan. Stryker and the Hydra experiments are holdovers from everything Captain America and would have been a nice base for Winter Soldier things. Yes, they needed something to justify Vision showing up, but it felt like someone was flipping through the Big Book of Avengers Villains to find something to plug into the movie.
Well, Ultron is one of the iconic Avengers villains like Loki or Kang, so his inclusion in the rotation felt right. But making him a result of the Scarlet Witch meddling with Tony's hubris rather than the world's leading Entomologist branching out into AIs with Oedipal complexes didn't feel organic. For one, I don't see why an AI more sophisticated than Jarvis would be necessary to protect the world from dangers like the Chitauri invasion—wouldn't multiple Jarvises and quicker production lines of Iron Legion 'bots in tandem with technology like Veronica have done the trick for that?