I think there's an outtake of Lee Pace accepting the dance-off and taking on Chris Pratt.
There is.
GUARDIANS of the GALAXY - Grading & Discussion
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There is.
I think there's an outtake of Lee Pace accepting the dance-off and taking on Chris Pratt.
But that's an outtake. FSM was talking about the content of the film as seen by theater audiences.
Oh I know and of course there was no actual dance-off in the movie but won't stop FSM from complaining about it. Still I would love to see that outtake.
I guess I feel kind of in between what you both are saying.
Yes, every film is a product.. absolutely, but sometimes it just screams out more.. and I think most people will find that this was apparent with "Amazing Spider-Man 2" and I felt the same way watching Guardians as I did watching that film. That being said, Guardians was much much better as a film then Amazing Spider-Man 2. If Guardians had featured a memorable villain (it didn't) an evil villain plot that I could relate to and didn't seem pretty dumb (it didn't) some nicer visuals... (space really looked garish and ugly to me, and that big scene near the end where the ships connect.. Enterprise TV beat them to the punch when the Tholians returned) then I might have been been able to disguise this overly manufactured feel that I get from it
I think I see part of what you are saying.
Let's see if this is the part I see.
Movies and tv shows are similar but really two distinct things, artforms if you like. A tv show is primarily episodic in nature and more is usually expected. A movie is, or was, a single distinct thing in itself and meant to be self contained. This was erroded many years ago with "sequels" and even more with "prequels" but still each individual movie was to be a story itself, ideally. MCU has shown up and pretty much shattered any differences between tv and movies because their movies are episodic in nature, their shows are cinematic, especially considering the Daredevil 13 hour movie/tv show on Netflix coming up.
Novels even have changed, too. A book used to stand on it's own, now we get trilogies all the time or series with no ending.
Being episodic and continuing indefinitely, there will be more, and the assembly line aspect of that can make it seem more like just another thing in a line of things instead of a distinct entity in itself. I enjoy the connectedness and when I see something mentioned in one place and it agrees with all of the other places it's refrenced it makes it seem like a whole rich tapestry with many parts woven into a whole work, but other people may see it as just another brick in the wall.
I'm really enjoying what I've been getting these last few years, but I can see how someone might be off put by the enormity of it. It also has the unfortunate side effect of not ever seeing "the whole story" unless you buy/watch every single movie/tv show, even ones you may not want to see otherwise.
For example, I'm really interested in the Daredevil and Power Man/Iron Fist shows coming up, but I never heard of Jessica Jones and wouldn't bother if it wasn't connected, maybe I'll like it but it's not on my list of things I'm looking forward to.
So, to sum it up, there is a loss of "uninqeness" that movies sometimes had because they are pieces rather that single movies. But, I've enjoyed every piece so far and that hasn't bothered me and too many movies have thrown their uniqueness under the bus just to squeeze more money out of the audience with multiple diminishing sequels/prequels/reboots/reimaginings and whatevers.
Let's see if this is the part I see.
Movies and tv shows are similar but really two distinct things, artforms if you like. A tv show is primarily episodic in nature and more is usually expected. A movie is, or was, a single distinct thing in itself and meant to be self contained. This was erroded many years ago with "sequels" and even more with "prequels" but still each individual movie was to be a story itself, ideally. MCU has shown up and pretty much shattered any differences between tv and movies because their movies are episodic in nature, their shows are cinematic, especially considering the Daredevil 13 hour movie/tv show on Netflix coming up.
Novels even have changed, too. A book used to stand on it's own, now we get trilogies all the time or series with no ending.
Being episodic and continuing indefinitely, there will be more, and the assembly line aspect of that can make it seem more like just another thing in a line of things instead of a distinct entity in itself. I enjoy the connectedness and when I see something mentioned in one place and it agrees with all of the other places it's refrenced it makes it seem like a whole rich tapestry with many parts woven into a whole work, but other people may see it as just another brick in the wall.
I'm really enjoying what I've been getting these last few years, but I can see how someone might be off put by the enormity of it. It also has the unfortunate side effect of not ever seeing "the whole story" unless you buy/watch every single movie/tv show, even ones you may not want to see otherwise.
For example, I'm really interested in the Daredevil and Power Man/Iron Fist shows coming up, but I never heard of Jessica Jones and wouldn't bother if it wasn't connected, maybe I'll like it but it's not on my list of things I'm looking forward to.
So, to sum it up, there is a loss of "uninqeness" that movies sometimes had because they are pieces rather that single movies. But, I've enjoyed every piece so far and that hasn't bothered me and too many movies have thrown their uniqueness under the bus just to squeeze more money out of the audience with multiple diminishing sequels/prequels/reboots/reimaginings and whatevers.
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Yes. Yes that's very close to what I'm getting at.
(small off topic tangent) Couple that with aspects that are more difficult to articulate (like the fact that Rocket might be my favorite character in the film, and his animation is very good, yet, still so kind of animated.. watching his movements reminded me of watching Dexter Jettster... good, but somehow, not quite as truly alive to me as, say Gollum, or even the puppet Yoda from Empire. I wish I could describe it, but while liking this character, he never quite feels real. I guess there are no moments in the film that work for him the way a simple gesture - Gollum grabbing Frodo's cloak and we not only see that interaction but feel the desperate emotion that comes from it as we see the cloak itself seeming to wrinkle in his grasp - that make him come alive. Or that simple moment that makes so much difference in the first Transformers to make those giant robots inhabit a real place by having Megatron turn his head to look at the approaching Blackhawks.. that small detail really helps put him in that world.. and I don't think that either Jettster or Rocket really have that despite being well-animated)
But I'm rambling. I think your point is touching on exactly how I feel. I was born just before the dawn of the movie blockbusters, which began as ideas from the minds of filmmakers whose delicate visions were hardly understood by the studios and somehow these guys like Spielberg, Lucas and Zemeckis and a few others, made them work, and then I've seen things change, fist with sequels, then with sequels and prequels and then with spin-offs (all the while TV was finally becoming something more substantial than it was in the 80's) and now the idea of shared universe, a stories that, as long as it's profitable, will never have an endpoint. Sure the same thing happened with Star Trek, but that, like Star Wars - at least to me- had so many aspects to it, and even that began to wear thin (it just took longer). While some could argue that superhero films could be as expansive as wh9ole galaxies filled with aliens and cultures, part of me feels that all the basic elements of whether a man should put on a suit and fight crime - all the variants of that - have bee done, and so while Marvel is trying to expand from that into some otehr things, I feel the sense that assembly line machine - run by producers and studio heads who know they have a cash cow of sorts and rightly want to exploit it while they can - have taken over the spotlight from the idea that the filmmakers themselves have established the vision.
Part of me doesn't mind, I mean I've seen the entire cycle. But it never happened before where I could look at summers and Christmas blockbusters seven or eight years in the future (maybe the closest we got was knowing a year or two out what was to come) and now that I am looking into the future, all I see is Marvel continuing with this treadmill-like machine for a lot of a third tier characters who will no doubt become much bigger, and DC starting to create it's own treadmill movie making machine for it's comic book universe, and Sony with plans at least to do that (assuming the company itself can survive), a host of Avatar sequels, Even Star Wars adapting this treadmill machine philosophy (I am hopeful it will work to its favor with Kathleen Kennedy at the helm and some new ideas) as well as the decline of the star-driven action picture or even the good intelligent science fiction action picture.
It feels like I am doing nothing but shaking my head. Creativity has become a relative term. Each of these franchises and shared universes can do something creative within their own respective worlds, but is there still creativity in blockbuster film-making? Will it be more rare for studios to top take chances on unknown properties when the safest thing to do is to follow what Marvel is doing? It doesn't help that CGI has made anything possible (I wonder if it slowly sucking away the true sense of innovation that filmmakers had to utilize to make the early blockbusters come to live both before the era of CGI and when CGI began but still had to be used sparingly)
I rambled a little bit. I do enjoy watching Marvel films. I have some real criticisms of the Winter Soldier, but the Nick Fury chase scene was just frickin' awesome (I even liked how his vehicle was pretty much like Jarvis, and we only learn that bit by bit) and I thought, that's how you build as scene that uses some comic book-y elements.. because it also had teeth! but I'm worried about long term "climate" of blockbusters films. Maybe it will all work out. I hope it does.
The MCU movies are run alittle like a TV series but then the said can said for the Star Trek, Star Wars, James Bond and Godzilla movies. That being said GOTG was by and and not connected to the other movies in MCU series and was generally thought that it might be the first MCU flop. But the movie was specular, funny and generally engaging and visually it's a great movie to look at. I think it says about the film that it's only really successful space opera outside of Star Wars and Star Trek.
Oh yeah, it's rather important in that regard the general audience had no idea who Thanos was after The Avengers.
I still have no idea who he is, other than he like jewels or something.
When puts the Infinity gems(stones) together to quote Doctor Emmett Brown "You're going to see some serious shit."
Oh yeah, it's rather important in that regard the general audience had no idea who Thanos was after The Avengers.
I'm that general audience. I don't read comics. Yet, I've already heard enough to know the stones are extremely powerful. GotG showed me a single stone, in the right hands, can destroy a planet. I also know when combined, the stone's power get magnified? Making the wielder the most powerful entity in the universe? So as far as I'm concerned, Marvel's done well in setting the backstory for the coming infinity war.
I'm so thrilled that film audiences have lowered their standards to this.
Anyone can say that a villain is the "ultimate" villain. Anyone can say that such and such a MacGuffin can destroy a planet, or destroy all life. These things alone are not what makes a compelling villain or a compelling MacGuffiin. You see like a cool guy, but you also are playing into the "lowest common denominator crap Marvel is hoping for.
Vader might have had a station that can destoy planets, but it was the character himself, the scenes that were written with him, that made him compelling. Simply giving Indiana Jones a bland rival to go after artifacts would give the hero nothing interesting to compete with, but Belloq was an interest character in his own right, played with panache by the actor that inhabited that role.
A ring that could destroy middle-earth is hardly compelling in an of itself. Imagine if it was girdle of destruction rather than a ring of power.It's the effect - like an addictive drug - that it it has on the wearer, that makes it compelling.
Thanos might be a developed character in the comics (he's older than Vader) but from what we've seen in the films alone he's just a smiling giant purple man we are told is evil, and these gems will make him powerful, and we are supposed to care. Marvel went from having grounded characters with actual enemies to having CGI blobs voiced by actual talent. Ugh.
The One Ring if held by Sauron would mean he would have held dominion over the peoples of Middle-Earth and he had no intentions of destroying it.
Thanos to date including his Avengers appearance has only had three scenes so far, but we know that Drax and Gamera are pretty much set to deal with him. But he was described in GOTG as the most powerful being in the universe and that's without any of the stones.
And we saw the effect the power gem had on Ronan, once he had it he no longer had the need of Thanos and indeed threatened him.
And we saw the effect the power gem had on Ronan, once he had it he no longer had the need of Thanos and indeed threatened him.
Thanos has had about two minutes of screen time. Of course he's paper-thin so far.
Anyone can say that such and such is the most powerful creature in the universe. That, by itself, won't make me care.
Weyoun was a wussy clone. A little girl like Ezri Dax, even before she was joined, could take him out while hardly breaking a sweat. But Weyoun was more compelling as a villain in his first scene than Thanos
Weyoun was a wussy clone. A little girl like Ezri Dax, even before she was joined, could take him out while hardly breaking a sweat. But Weyoun was more compelling as a villain in his first scene than Thanos