Another belly flop. Another director. It’s time for another conversation about Marvel’s piss-poor, ham-handed, uninspired “movies”…you know, if that’s what they want to call them. Whatevs.
First, Martin Scorsese kicked down the door to Kevin Feige’s office and told him all those acclaimed movies suck, largely because anything in ‘The Infinity Saga’ “isn’t cinema.” Backing up his paisono, Francis Ford Coppola turned up the heat by calling those meh billion-dollar mishaps “despicable.”
Well, you know what they say: plane crashes, famous deaths, and elitist directors with a big stick up their cinematic stinkwhistles happen in threes.
Enter into the fray: Mr. Roger Corman.
I’ve read what [Scorsese and Coppola] said, and I think I agree with them to a certain extent. As pure cinema, as a pure art form, these films don’t qualify. But, if you say it is a combination of an art form and a business, then they do qualify. Even if the stories may be simplistic, the productions may be standard, they’re standard on a high professional level and particularly the special effects are wonderful. So I think you have to recognize there are various aspects to this.
To summarize, the man behind films that Tom Servo and Crow called “favorites” has a problem with CBMs. Mmmmkay, Sure, he has been making movies since the late 1950s. Yes, he has focused on a genre — B-Movies — and owns it. And, in case you didn’t know, he is the brain behind the cult classic Little Shop of Horrors and his film Death Race 2000 inspired Mad Max, so there’s that.
Equally, Roger Corman, 93, has fully earned the right to say what he wants about whatever he wants in Hollywood. However, let’s have some salt with that subjection he’s serving up.
Both Sides of an About Face
The strange thing about all this Marvel ballyhoo is these acclaimed, award-winning directors think Hollywood has short-term memory loss. Consider the great Scorsese. Did you know he wanted to direct Joker?
Scorsese is all about the purest art in making movies, so he wouldn’t dare touch any source material that came from a comic. Right? That is, unless he decided he had time in his busy day to do it.
The legendary filmmaker said he thought about directing the controversial hit flick “Joker,” but decided he didn’t want to — because the protagonist turns “into a comic-book character.”
“I decided that I didn’t have the time for it,” Scorsese said in a BBC interview promoting his new film “The Irishman.” (via New York Post)
Now, let’s look at the nonagenarian guy babbling in the corner.
Marvel movies don’t count as art…unless they make a ton of cash?! Sure, “various aspects” of 23 movies over 11 years are wonderful, but a storyline that lasts more than a decade is definitely “simplistic.”
Let’s see how simplistic a Corman-helmed version of The Fantastic Four circa 1994 would look like…
Annnnd that just happened. (Well, not really. It was 26 years ago, but you get it.) Talk about simple.
The moral of the story: Your girlfriend or boyfriend is always the best looking…until she or he dumps your tail, then it’s amazing how your cataracts clears up and how overwhelmingly duck-billed-platypus-faced they appear.
This is cinema. They are not simple. They’re not going anywhere. And they’ll make bank just about every time they show up. Don’t like it? Don’t watch.
(Speaking of “Don’t watch,” anyone else find it slightly morose that these talking heads don’t back talk DC and WB products? Yeah, hurts to miss that one.)
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