Hacker Cinema
Guardians of the Galaxy
2014 · Film · 121 min
Part of Guardians of the Galaxy Collection
Directed by James Gunn
ActionScience FictionAdventure
Light years from Earth, 26 years after being abducted, Peter Quill finds himself the prime target of a manhunt after discovering an orb wanted by Ronan the Accuser.
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66 comments on Hacker News
If you enjoyed the Fifth Element absolutely watch Jodorowsky's Dune
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/
On the cover it's a story about the failed production of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune script but the deeper story was the aggregation of an unbelievably talented pool of visual artists including Jean "Moebius" Giraud (mentioned as central artist in 5th element), H.R. Giger, Chris Foss, Salvador Dali, & Dan O'Bannon.
That group would go on to centrally influence the visual style of a huge body of science fiction work including Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Star Wars, The Matrix, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc etc.
The art and creativity on display in the film is absolutely sonic.
Kind of like the original PayPal mafia!
I greatly enjoyed the first Iron Man movie which got me to look at the really affordable black and white editions of the Kirby/Ditko/Lee age. I watched a lot of them, bookended by Guardians of the Galaxy which I also greatly enjoyed. Somehow I fell out of the Marvel habit and didn't see any more after that though there wasn't any moment where I felt that I feel out of love.
My TV is from around 2017 and some of those settings definitely suck on it. I'm curious if they have improved any of them on newer TVs.
Here's how bad it was in 2017. One of the earliest things I watched on that TV was "Guardians of the Galaxy" on some expanded basic cable channel. The fight between Peter and Gamora over the orb looked very jerky, like it was only at about 6 fps. I found some reviews of the movie on YouTube that included clips of that fight and it looked great on them, so I know that this wasn't some artistic choice of the director that I just didn't like. Some Googling told me about the motion enhancement settings of the TV, and how they often suck. I had DVRed the movie, and with those settings off the scene looked great when I watched it again.
>Productions have been much cheaper and quicker in the past, and there's no technical impediment to making them that way again already (nothing has been lost)
Productions also looked a lot worse in the past. Some productions are more expensive today because that's the budget the kind of production requires. You act like a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy looking as good as it does was even remotely possible decades ago and studios just want to spend more money for vain spectacle. Star Wars 77 was great for its time but that's exactly it, 'for its time'.
77's budget adjusts to 60M today and while you certainly can't recreate a modern 'will hold up' star wars with that budget, 60M today gets you a lot farther than it did decades ago with much better looking movies.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
Original Star Wars trilogy. Lord of the Rings American Psycho Total Recall (1990) Blade Runner Love Actually The Fifth Element Unbreakable Pulp Fiction Four Weddings and a Funeral Guardians of the Galaxy X-Men X-Men the Last Stand Showing my age here, but I started to lose interest in movies after the 2000s. No I do not want to watch a remake of [Blade Runner, X-Men, etc...]. Also X-Men was great, but my interest didn't stretch to Captain America and Iron Man, so the MCU was a loss for me.
Probably because it's the opposite of dystopic but Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciences [0], Valencia, ESP is one of the most sci-fi locations I've ever set foot in. You'll recognize it from Marvel films it's the setting for Guardians of the Galaxy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Arts_and_Sciences
does anybody here know a lot about recommendation algorithms? The one I'm interested in seems obvious to me, but it's never implemented so maybe it doesn't work, or it serves outliers and not the mainstream so why bother. The data is there, but I don't get to mine it. (heheh "mine" it)
I don't want to know what's popular, I want to know what other people who share my past tastes are watching currently. Doesn't matter the size of my niche, why can't i find my niche, and be shown my cohort?
I just don't feel it's an impossible task to find, for example, a set of people who enjoyed Deadpool 1, Guardians of the Galaxy 1, but think the entire rest of the superhero cavalcade is utter garbage. ok, I'll allow Kickass also, and a grudging nod to Iron Man 1. (as an illustration, I just searched to look up the name of Iron Man, I could only remember Tony Stark. Top search results were "a fictional character", "played by R Downey Jr", "Marvel cinematic universe"... You see, none of those is Iron Man 1. I don't care about the horde of people who care about a supposed cinematic universe. We (in my cohort) liked the first one, and what we liked about it wasn't continued in the 2nd.
How about preferences that show I like a few early films with say George Clooney, but after that, no. Julia Roberts, same. I remember when Meryl Streep was a new actress, but now she's a red flag. I'm sure my tastes aren't shared by everybody, but I'm also sure, since I can articulate reasons, there must be others who in general share them, people who are willing to watch what's new and trendy in some way, but then not beat the dead horse. Oh, Spielberg, a few winners, but overall "nope nope nope", the way he aims at sentiment is a zero for me.
I originally had this idea back in the 80's when Consumer Reports had their monthly mail-in bingo card for what current movies you liked, then they would tabulate what was popular among their readers. That type of "best of" list is entirely missing co-variance, which I think is where I live.
I think they’ve also hit the limits of escalation. That’s the ultimate problem with a large shared cinematic universe. They’ve had to keep escalating the big baddies and now there’s really nowhere to go but down. They haven’t built out the “infrastructure” to focus on the storytelling quality, just what they need to pump out splashy hollywood blockbusters. It’s not like Star Wars where they can tell an infinite number of interesting stories with the endless back and forth between the Empire and Rebel factions in the background.
Where do you go after Thanos wiping out half the universe with the flick of a finger? Thanos 2.0 wiping out 2/3rds of the universe? Who gives a shit. Deadpool is invincible. Scarlet Witch is basically a god. So is Vision. Loki is literally capable of time jumping at will while the universe disintegrates around him. There’s only so much you can lean on zany characters like the Guardians of the Galaxy before they jump the shark too.
All the good TV shows either ran their course (Agents of SHIELD), or were prematurely canceled like Punisher and Luke Cage during the Disney handover. Seriously, what now?
They just keep escalating with Loki. He Who Remains is another one of those deus ex villains that they’ll have to one up even further. Based on the season 2 finale I can’t even tell if they want a season 3 or if thats over too.
/rant
The problem with a UCLA-sponsored survey of teens is always going to be response bias.
For example:
>Very few adolescents prefer aspirational content. The majority favor original content over IP-based content. Also, the majority prefer binge releases over weekly releases.
A quick search of the top Youtubers shows that Gen Z in fact loves aspirational content, they just don't like the image that comes into their head when they hear the term.
A quick scan of the box office shows that they also love IP-based content, unless all the viewers of Spiderman, Barbie, Mario, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fast X, and The Little Mermaid were over 25 (Hell, even Oppenheimer was technically IP-based).
I believe the binge watching thing though.
I think it's the profit motive that has ruined this medium. Most movies are just investment vehicles for the studios -- it's telling that when they're mentioned in the news, it's rarely the plot / storyline, but almost always the budget and ticket sales that are talked about.
Seems like most of the big blockbusters are extremely formulaic -- the studios take what made money before, and rehash it over and over again until it stops making money. A really good example of that was one of the silly superhero movies - the first Guardians of the Galaxy. Somehow, a fresh take on the tired genre made it to production, and audiences reacted enthusiastically, because it was somewhat new -- and what followed? Two carbon-copy sequels that didn't work nearly as well as the first one.
Of course that's within the constraints of big-budget studios that make movies as a high-return investment vehicles. Where else could you throw a hundred million dollars and get a 200% return?
I'm sure art films still exist, independent films still exist. People still make movies because they have something to say, and that's the medium they want to speak through. Maybe the way to encourage that is to fund more art schools and subsidize independent filmmakers.
> i do not believe this is true. otherwise smart contracts would not work.
Smart contracts work because they keep everything on the chain. You're proposing a weird hybrid model, like "let's tie the legitimate possession of a real-life movie to the state of an item in World of Warcraft".
Things work if you're within WoW fully, or dealing with a physical DVD fully. Trying to combine both into a single system is where things get weird.
> if i store something on the chain, and accessing it triggers a smart contract, then you should not be able to bypass the contract.
This works so long everything you care about is on the chain. But your movie isn't.
> i don't know how that works, but if it didn't work then smart contracts would not be enforceable. if that is the case i'd really like to see evidence of that.
Try to think of a mechanism that would force me to have a WoW account, and to register my interactions within WoW every time I wanted to watch say, Guardians of the Galaxy.
> a watermark only tracks ownership, but it doesn't call home to count how many times the movie has been watched.
I think you're not getting that the blockchain and the movie exist separately. For the blockchain to refer to my particular copy of the movie, my copy has to be unique in some way. It has to have an unique SHA256. I'm saying that if my copy is already unique, it's already identifiable as mine, so the blockchain doesn't really add much to solving anything here.
Your legal issues are solvable by just "Look, here's a record that I sold this movie to Bob Smith and his copy has SHA256 ABCDEF0123...., and look, here it is on Pirate Bay"
> the question here is, can it be addressed or is the whole concept so flawed that this can't be fixed?
IMO, it's unfixable. The whole point of blockchains is the lack of a central authority. Your identity on one starts and ends in the possession of a public/private key pair. The second somebody gets their hands on that, as far as the chain is concerned, they're you. At that point they transfer your stuff to their account and you're screwed. There's nobody to appeal to, because the very point of the system is that nobody can override that mechanism.
I suspect it has something to do with Feige pushing out the Russo brothers who seemed to make most of the better MCU films (Captain America 2, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers Infinity War and End Game). After that Feige started putting out movies like the Eternals that were terrible. Nearly all of the tv shows are bad... they lost any quality control. Only Loki and Guardians of the Galaxy have been as good as the films that came out prior to End Game.
Chris Pratt's "short" career has more or less been Parks and Rec -> Guardians of the Galaxy -> Jurassic Park. I thought he was pretty great for the first two but the scale of jurassic world being generic trash has managed to completely undermine any interest I had in him. I'm not clear where he stands on public opinion.
I also think Office Jim being Jack Ryan is strange. But I don't think people care about the amazon shows. His news thing and production of a Quiet Place was interesting. People fucking love Office Jim if they could put him in something that was not action man.
I find it kind of hilarious to highlight keanu reeves as an actor with range, as someone who loves reeves movies good or bad. Or tom cruise for that matter. The titles that made most of the "big actors" big were not things showing range. It's shit like top gun. Actors showing range are not doing big movies because big movies mostly don't ask for range.
Young actors don't tend to have that much star power either. That comes after a career. I feel like I can't agree on your entire framework here. But I guess if we had to target actors under... 35 that people want to see I would say it's probably shifted a fair bit to women. Perhaps Margot Robbie. Anya Taylor Joy. Jenna Ortega. Emma Stone.
off picks for men: Michael B. Jordan largely for the Black community. Harry Styles perhaps.
Was Logan Marvel Studios, though, or Fox? (I know I could easily look this up, I'm just making conversation).
In the 00s I really liked the Marvel movies. Then came Marvel Studios to ruin everything. But even in the beginning, the first couple of films were really good: Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. But once they started to expand the "MCU" I quickly lost interest in the films. I like character driven stories that focus on the person behind the power. Batman is interesting because of Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is interesting because of Peter Parker etc. When you start doing these big mash-ups and team stories, like Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers, you lose focus on the individuals and it becomes lots of long, drawn-out & boring action sequences.
But if I remember correctly, Fox held the film rights to the X-Men property. So when Marvel Studios got off the ground, they did everything but X-Men. I don't know if that ever changed.
In any case, I agree. Logan was really good. And it was really good, in my opinion, because it was character-driven and not just 13 hours of drawn out, boring as hell, CGI "porn" action sequences. And I figure it was like that because it wasn't made by Marvel Studio.
I think they're overlooking the change on the content production side there. If a Guardians of the Galaxy movie is going to cost a 250 million to make, you can't exclude some big audience. They need people of all ages buying tickets.
It shouldn't be surprising that something designed to appeal to young and old alike, is consumed by both groups.
We need more movies like Interstellar & Dune and less Guardians of The Galaxy 36, people might be more willing to go to the cinema then. I can get free tickets and still don't go more than once or twice a year.
> But also at home I got the feeling there were less interesting movies.
I manage maybe 30-35 new movies per year (and usually pick up a few more from that year by about two years out from its end) and I'd say a solid 80% don't suck, and about half are pretty damn good. Usually there are another ten or so that I know about and wanted to watch but never get to, and there are surely a bunch more good ones that I miss entirely. 2021 was a bit of an exception because Covid fucked with productions quite a bit and made the movie scene that year kinda weird (though there were several really good small-cast-small-crew films released that year!) but otherwise, consistently, there are roughly mid-tens of good movies released every year, not even counting local indie scene stuff.
Now, assessing it this way does require 1) looking at more than just what's heavily advertised, and 2) having pretty broad taste in genres and being willing to meet a movie where it is, and at least having the capacity to enjoy what it's trying to do assuming it pulls it off reasonably well—me, I'd say Beyond the Black Rainbow and Guardians of the Galaxy and One Cut of the Dead and Logan Lucky are all good movies, so... I'm capable of enjoying most genres and both "high" and "low" art, so the set of films that I might like is pretty large, which helps a lot.
Maybe you're just totally misguided on what a producer does, which may be the joke you're trying to make that nobody knows what a producer does. The producer would be closer to the president of the board while the director would be the CEO.
This is false. It seems you don't know what you're talking about. OTOH, I have worked with multiple studios including Fox (now 20th Century), Searchlight, Vendome, Canal+, and Lightstorm.
The executive producer is similar to the CEO or other executive; hence the "executive" in their title. They are in charge of the overall production, but not the creative aspects of the film or episode, and usually are not involved in the day-to-day operations. A regular "producer" can be anyone involved with the day-to-day operations of this production, and this title was once given out like candy. (Look at the credits for Top Gun: Maverick, for example: David Ellison is credited with a "producer" title despite having no actual involvement with the movie beyond being the CEO of one of the studios funding the production.)
The director is not involved with hiring crew, unless they also act as a producer (aka, the "auteur" school). These days, many directors also executive produce their own films (e.g., Nolan, Cameron, etc.), but many don't (e.g., almost all Disney movies). The director gets to provide input as to who gets hired, but quite frequently the main crew and cast will already be attached to the film. Notably, directors can and do leave films all the time (e.g., Rogue One, Justice League).
Who the creator/founder equivalent is really differs between projects. Sometimes, the producer has the idea and staffs around it. Sometimes, the director has the idea and also acts as a producer or just staffs the producer out to someone. Sometimes, it's the studio's idea and staffs everything out.
This is true for a few films, but the vast majority of films start with a screenplay that has come across the producer's desk. Auteur directors might produce their own ideas (e.g., Lucas, Shamalayan, Nolan, Cameron), but even they will usually start with an idea they acquired from someone else (Shamalayan: Old and Cabin at the End of the World, Gunn: Guardians of the Galaxy, Nolan: Insomnia, The Prestige, Batman Begins, Spielberg: almost all of his films, etc. Look at IMDB to see the production credits they have far exceed the films they actually direct).
Also
> If it looks like something from a Marvel movie, there’s a reason. The army of consultants commissioned to work on Neom, the $500bn urban region of which the Line is part, comprises not only urban planners but numerous digital artists from the special effects industry. According to a Bloomberg report, they include Olivier Pron, a designer who helped create the look of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy films; Nathan Crowley, known for his work on the brooding Dark Knight trilogy of Batman movies; and futurist Jeff Julian, who worked on the apocalyptic extravaganzas World War Z and I Am Legend.
I guess if there's a fat paycheck in it, I'd design a megalomaniac choppy-choppy prince's fantasy city too...
I was talking about that w/ my son, how it's just been years (Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014?) since we cared about a Marvel movie.
This is exactly the reason why I like superhero movies. I go to the cinema to relax, switch off the rationale part of my brain and have fun.
I liked very much the Marvel movies that were fun (Guardians of the Galaxy for instance) and did not rewatch the sad and heavy ones.
It is of course a matter of personal taste. My wife terrorized me a few times into going with her to movies where I either had to take notes to follow the narrative, wonder about the mental sanity of the script writer and the director, wonder whether the movie froze when people were looking at each other for 5 minutes without saying anything, or simply trying to find a comfortable position to sleep.
Some of these movies left a trace, though, but maybe not a very good one (usually Almodóvar movies)
For myself the amount of TV and movies I can watch is pretty limited compared to what I could obtain.
Lately I've been into the silents (Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino) but also Howard Hawkes movies not to mention things like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_de_Jour_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Jackson_(1988_film)
feel free to laugh but my son got the family (including my wife who teaches people to ride horses) to watch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_Friendship_Is_Magic
... and then there are all the Gundam anime since Gundam 79, all the rest of Sliders, at least 200+ hours of video "in the queue".
I think how a few years back I would go see a movie like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardians_of_the_Galaxy_(film)
in the theater. I was talking to my son the other day how we lost interest in Marvel and Star Wars movies... We never had a moment when we said "Marvel Sucks", but they rarely make it into the queue to watch on video. And going to the theater post-COVID seems implausible to me because I don't want to deal with disgusting popcorn mess.
I'm sure there are good movies made today, even more sure there are good TV shows, but they have to fight for every minute of view time they get.
No, think about Star Wars. Luke doesn't believe in the Force, doesn't believe Obi Wan is anything but a crazy old man. He has to come to his realization himself and then find the Force in himself. He isn't gifted with it. That truly is a big difference between the classic hero's journey and the newer 2010s films where people just have a magic power.
And people are sort of sick of it. It's why Watchmen or Guardians of the Galaxy stand out against so many boring superhero movies. Because a hero needs to be unwilling, unable, and unbelieving... and possibly not even a very good candidate for heroism. Hollywood shortened the journey with the classic stupid "karate montage to music" thing in the 80s. But now it's just like, oh jeez wow I have a superpower! Cool! So ultimately, who cares? Who can relate to that?
Look at Greek mythology. No one could understand why Zeus got all pissed off, but he was Zeus. He was kind of inscrutable. Man related to demigods who carried our emotions and message as envoys. Or, take Star Trek. Spock is half-human. He serves as a bridge between the alien logic and the emotional, rational part of our nature. We know we should eventually evolve to be like Vulcans, but we value our dirty humanity. So Spock, by occasionally regressing to his human side, is our proof that our humanity itself has value.
There's no humanity in a superhero who's just born with superpowers. That's Zeus. A great hero is like Spock, or Luke Skywalker, someone fighting their inner nature. Otherwise all conflicts are just eye candy, external, and ultimately CGI bullshit.
I think marvel has actually gotten fairly good at fights and making them interesting to watch as a function of why the hero is unique tbh.
Throwing huge punches is bad. Firing arbitrary laser blasts is even worse. Especially when the consequences of being hit seem so trivial. But it can be done well. I think Thor Ragnarok is a good example of this.
This is the first movie in which both Thor and Hulk were actually shown as extremely strong with little more than just physical blows. What’s noteworthy is that most of the fights they’re in are very easy for them, and frankly it’s much more fun to watch them stylishly stomp 100 goons and look strong rather than incomprehensibly struggle to fend off 10 nobodies. Filmmakers tend to be afraid of having a fight scene without tension.
Avengers infinity war fight v. Thanos also comes to mind as a quick little highlight reel of each of a dozen characters special contributions. It comes across as competent and unique.
Off the top of my head, black panther, iron man 1,2,3, guardians of the galaxy 1,2, Shang chi, wandavision, earlier avengers, all felt particularly bad at this.
I would comment as follows.
Iron Man - sort novel for setting marvel tone but mostly banal action movie
Iron Man 2 - banal action movie
Thor - banal action movie
Captain America: The First Avenger - particularly banal action movie
Marvel's The Avengers - banal action movie
Iron Man 3 - banal action movie, sort of interesting to see protagonist suffering PTSD anxiety from being a superhero
Thor: The Dark World - banal action movie
Captain America: The Winter Soldier - first interesting take. Patriotism is not the same as government obedience. Real fight choreography approaching a soft john wick.
Guardians of the Galaxy - Early rock and roll aesthetic pretty interesting
Avengers: Age of Ultron - banal action movie, perhaps mcu lowpoint
Ant-Man - superhero heist movie, literally deconstructs larger than life superhero tropes. I think thumbs up
Captain America: Civil War - by this point doing the mcu's own thing, which is novel, but probably not interesting outside
Doctor Strange - banal action movie
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - aesthetic still feels mostly fresh.
Spider-Man: Homecoming - super down to earth high school drama, frustrated working class villains suffering the fallout of superheroes, seems interesting to me
Thor: Ragnarok - great film, very genre savvy. Rare achievement to make godly strength brutes feel really engaging to watch. Taika Waititi is a genius.
Black Panther - pretty good. interesting aesthetic. directly addressing racial tensions.
Avengers: Infinity War & Endgame - Mostly fan service and not too surprising but honestly still novel.
Ant-Man and the Wasp - Ehhh I really don't remember
Captain Marvel - Beginning had some great hard sci fi imo. Thought the ending message of newly apotheosizied female not needing to prove herself to her evil male mentor was a solid take, whereas a classic "mano a mano" kind of showdown would be so typical of the genre
Spider-Man: Far From Home - Villain emphasizing themes of the power of deceptive media? heck yeah.
Wandavision - Really bizarre and interesting start. Unfortunately non-self-aware conclusion
Falcon and Winter Soldier - Active discussions of race and the problematic nature of superheroes being supremacists? Very good.
Loki - kind of a super cliche topic (time cops) that is also somehow really rare? eh.
honorable mentions for Logan and Deadpool for being just great; and the Amazing Spiderman for its excellent aesthetics despite terrible writing.
I have seen Iron Man 2, both Guardians of the Galaxy, the fist Captain America and the second Avengers movie. So it's actually five movies (one more than I thought).I might have seen part of the first Hulk on TV but I'm not entirely sure, could have been any of the other ones. I stand by my opinion.
When you consider that Hollywood produced movies like The Deer Hunter, Chinatown or even the first Jurassic Park if you want to talk about blockbusters (not the new ones they could be Marvel movies), it makes me a bit sad.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I enjoy going from McDonald's from time to time. Nothing like a bunch nuggets when you had too much to drink. I just don't go around pretending it's good food.
Thor Ragnarok is one of the few capeshit movies I have seen and it was pretty bad. The entire dialogue is written around forced oneliners from a minute into the opening scene. Guardians of the Galaxy was OK but nothing to write home about or even make me remember to watch the sequel(s?).
All of them are a steep drop in quality from The Dark Knight and there certainly isn't enough material there for twenty something 3hr films and half a dozen TV shows. Just like The Empire Strikes Back is a legitimately great movie while everything else Star Wars themed asymptotically approaches zero.
The whole idea of world building with dozens of movies is a scourge on story telling and a complete dead end imho.
> Toy Story is probably the most interesting because it doesn't really fit in any major format.
What? It’s clearly Hero’s Journey. I haven't broken the beats down by time, but I’d bet its a reasonable approximation of the Save the Cat ideal times for each part of the plot, as well. The main unusual thing is that it has basically two intertwined Hero’s Journey's, but even that (and the twin protagonists each being antagonist-mentor shapeshifters to each other with, at least initially, diametrically opposed world views) is a not-uncommon paired-lead setup.
> There's a lot of little highs and lows
That's a fairly typical 2nd act pattern, which makes the arrival of the intense crisis more jarring.
> as opposed to the usual where it's all ascends to one really big high (e.g. Guardians of the Galaxy).
That's also a common, especially action-movie, pattern, where the idea is for the central crisis to be an expected payoff. But its not so overwhelming as to be “the usual”.
> Buzz and Woody are both protagonists, antagonists, and mentors to each other, except the story is told through Woody's perspective
Mentor-antagonist (or antagonist-mentor) shapeshifters are a common hero’s journey variation, though.
I'm enjoying story analysis a lot now. I've gone beyond watching movies and reading books to know the plot. My hobby now is finding all the possible plots based on the introduced characters and situations.
What makes it fun is that multiple people have invented a lot of rules around what a good story should be. Aristotle has written what's closest to the Newton Laws. It's badass that Newton's Laws still hold up with astrophysics and it's badass that something someone wrote in ancient Greece still holds up in the modern era of cinema. It's flawed, but it says things straight, instead of lots of maybes, so it's easy to prove true or false.
Megamind is an interesting beginner's analysis. It's very formulaic but doesn't look anything like that. It's subtle too, his cloak changes color according to his progress as a character.
Toy Story is probably the most interesting because it doesn't really fit in any major format. It's a Comedy, there's a misunderstanding, and things go from high to low to high again where enemies are friends. But that's about it. There's a lot of little highs and lows, as opposed to the usual where it's all ascends to one really big high (e.g. Guardians of the Galaxy). In Toy Story, he's about to get home, then things get worse. He makes another plan, it fails. It just gets progressively worse. There's no fixed mentor character too. Buzz and Woody are both protagonists, antagonists, and mentors to each other, except the story is told through Woody's perspective. The most interesting part is that they hatched a formula from it that works, which is used in all other Toy Story movies and a little in other movies. It seems they didn't follow the classical literature analysis and made up their own formulas and it works.
IMHO this what Thor: Ragnarok got right.
It was one of the few Marvel movies that seemed to remember its comic book origins. Quick pace--individual comic issues are short, snappy (not necessarily quippy) dialog--because there isn't space on a comic panel for walls of text, colorful and interesting character designs, and a good dose of humor sprinkled in.
It would probably get old if every Marvel movie were like that, but all in all I think the formula works. Guardians of the Galaxy also did pretty well in this regard, but making most of the characters assholes in one way or another undercut the theme somewhat.
> They're also assuming the movie is set in our version of reality, even though they know it's not, because there's 2 space stations that are closer together than in our reality.
I really love it when movies set out to explore an alt universe. They're fun. But Gravity didn't do that.
> Also they're missing the point of the film, and of science fiction, it's not about predicting the future, it's about exploring humanity via putting humans into extreme/unusual circumstances.
No, I think you miss the point of sci-fi there. Sci-fi is literally just fiction where science is the major plot directive. It could use that platform to discuss ethics (as Star Trek often set out to do), it could use it do explore loneliness and survival (as The Martian did), it could be a platform to scare people (like Alien) or it could just be using it as a canvas for something totally made up and fun (like Guardians of the Galaxy). But there's absolutely no reason what-so-ever why sci-fi can't be about predicting the future. And in fact a great deal of sci-fi does set out to do just that.
The real problem with many of the comments in this thread is they assume "sci-fi" is this single entity in which all content assumes the same goals. But it's not. Different writers will have different stories to tell and different emotions they want to leave with the audience.
Furthermore, movies are not the only platform from which sci-fi exists. If you take a look at novels you'll see that sci-fi is actually a massive genre to which cinema only scratches the surface of. I'd wager that's probably true of most genres when comparing books to movies though.
What you're talking about is the difference between hard sci-fi and pop sci-fi. The pop stuff is intended to have fun Hollywood physics and not taken too literally. But hard sci-fi is intended to be more theoretically plausible.
The issue with Interstellar was it set itself up as a hard sci-fi with some Hollywood sugar with the way it depicted a future Earth, black hole physics (for the most part) and time dilation. But then it took a dramatic left turn into ridiculousness at the end. This really broke immersion of the film for me. Whereas films like Guardians of the Galaxy (and it's ilk) make it clear from the outset that it's a fun distraction from reality. So it's easier to suspend disbelief while watching.
Modern actors aren't as willing to sacrifice their health for muscle as their historical counterparts, especially because the lean look is preferred over the muscle-bound appearance of yesteryear. Thus, (with rare exceptions, like Christian Bale between The Machinist and Batman Begins), what you see on screen today is hard-earned through hours a day in the gym, a very regimented diet, and hydration timing.
Generally, to get to the level of single-digits body fat you see on screen, you're looking at 3-6 months of clean eating (or more, depending on the actor's physique when they land the role), meaning among other things, no alcohol, no sweets, and lots of eggs or chicken meals. Someone being paid a few million dollars can afford to pay a nutritionist to custom-design a diet to meet specific appearance goals, a and they have a huge incentive to stick with that diet. For example, Chris Pratt had to give up beer, pizza, and all dietary pleasures for six months to go from being the fat guy on Parks and Rec to the main hero of Guardians of the Galaxy.
On top of the diet, the actor is spending hours on near-daily exercise for several months. Chris Hemsworth eschews cardio for pure muscle-building, but Paul Rudd and Kumail Nujani each spent a year preparing for their Marvel roles, using a blend of cardio and full-body workouts (as, in contrast to Thor, Ant Man and Kingo have lean physiques but neither actor was particularly athletic when cast), while Pratt spent nearly 6 hours a day, 6 days a week, for over 6 months on cardio activities to cut weight for the first Guardians movie (as he already had the muscle for the character underneath his excess bulk and just needed to reveal them).
But the real trick to the "cut" look on screen is dehydration; actors don't drink for several hours before shirtless scenes, which makes them appear thinner and more defined. (In several interviews, Kumail Nujani talks about nearly passing out after several filming several shirtless scenes for The Eternals, which required him to limit water consumption for nearly 12 hours before shooting.) This is something you can actually try yourself at home: take a before pic, spend a few hours on a long cardio activity like running or biking, and then take an after pic before you rehydrate. You will appear thinner and your muscles (if they were visible beforehand) will appear more well-defined, even though they aren't any bigger.
I downloaded guardians of the galaxy recently because someone was praising the cgi and I just wanted a quick look at it, but there is no way I would go to the cinema to watch it and no way I would ever buy it on dvd even if it was being sold really cheap. basically they would not make any money from me either way, so what exactly is being stolen from them?
This misses the point of Marvel movies, though. There is an entire universe of characters and stories. Iron Man's success paved the way for putting those stories on the big screen. Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, Dr. Strange, the Infinity Saga, and so on. That's what Keven Feige, and many of the Marvel people have been trying to do. Setup a universe to tell these stories instead of just having one-off superhero movies.
So instead of Spider-Man or Iron Man just being in their own movies, they can fight alongside (or even against) Captain America, Thanos, etc.
Adding on to Moore's point about superheros and clinging to childhood, the director Pedro Almodovar makes an interesting observation^[1] that the Marvel movies are neutered and almost sexless. All of the relationships shown in the films are practically chaste. The characters who display sexuality are considered immature (Tony Stark in Iron Man, Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy), until they "graduate" to a relationship that immediately removes any trace of sexuality from their being.
[1]: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/pedro-almodovar-wants-sexier-marvel-movies-and-superhero-films-they-are-neutered-1202129903/
Remember when Roger Ebert said that games aren't art?
I think most of the Marvel movies are kind of lame or even actively bad (Guardians of the Galaxy and it's sequel especially), but this is some real Old Man Yells At Cloud stuff and it's sad to see someone so prolific in film (oh wait, CINEMA, excuse me) say something so needlessly elitist. It didn't even need to be said.
edit: Sorry it was even more obstinate
"VIDEO GAMES CAN NEVER BE ART"
https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art
I don't see the MCU movies as a problem. They're doing some ridiculously bold stuff with the way they're bringing comic book attitudes to the big screen. From the weirdness in Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor Ragnarok, to wrapping up a dozen movies with dozens of main characters in Infinity War, and then ending the movie in defeat!
That stuff takes balls, and I'm enjoying it a lot.
It's true that superheroes do dominate the current movie landscape maybe a bit too much. Nerds won and now everything has to be SciFi, Fantasy, Horror or Superheroes. I wouldn't object to dialing that back a bit, but only a bit.
Annihilation, Dark City, Riddick Chronicles, Babylon A.D., Guardians of The Galaxy, Fast and Furious, Hummingbird, Transporter, Crank, Hardcore Henry, Revolver, Lucy, Ghost in The Shell, Now you see me, Passengers, Transcendence, Maze Runner, Limitless...
I think we've had a good run; I also think it's easy to be biased and not see it because of some nostalgia-effect of sorts. If you are f.e. 30+ you might more easily dismiss a movie as Limitless or Lucy as uncredible; both are based on a common myth that we only utilize a low percentage of our brains capacity, as an example, so they are that: unrealistic. But I think that's an unfair comparison because of an inherent bias that when you think about a movie like The Matrix you don't see it with the same critical lens because you perhaps had less knowledge of the world in your earlier years. #JustAFewThoughts
I'd probably recommend the initial Guardians of the Galaxy although I almost feel that's a cheat because it's not really a superhero film in the usual vein. Same with Deadpool.
Iron Man is probably as good a choice as any for a standalone Marvel film.
One problem is that the template for a modern big budget action film, which includes all the superhero films, weighs things down with so many explosions and special effects and just non-stop action sequences that they're all a bit exhausting and tend to overwhelm any humor or character interactions on the screen.
"Soundtracks."
That isn't a genre, but each soundtrack offers has its own themes and style. Depending on mood you can have techno (Hackers/Matrix), fantasy (LOTRs/Interstellar), Pop (Greatest Showman/Guardians of the Galaxy), Regional Styles (Last Samurai/Moana), or even just calming/relaxing (Sims 3: Pets).
PS - Try not to dismiss soundtracks just because you never liked the movie/game. I never played the Sims 3, let alone the "Pets" expansion, but the soundtrack remains me of SimCity's sound.
Given the “old world” nature of it, I have to think that it’s one of those things that was really amazing at the time, but just can’t compare to modern sweets, so you can’t really get a good perspective on it. Like if you had watched a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy before ever seeing Star Wars, you’d wonder what the big deal was about Star Wars.
They did do a Guardians of the Galaxy one, but in general, not a lot of movies.
They did do a ton of work (exclusively?) with other people's IPs, which may have been what they were trying to say.
Most comments here just seem to generally crap on all video game movies to date (correct) and surmise that it's a losing concept (wrong).
Movies afraid to deviate away from source material I don't think applies to the problem. I've probably seen most video game movies (even the cringe-worthy Uwe Boll ones) and I'd say the overwhelming problem is no one on set even bothering to look at the source material, or understanding what they're trying to do.
Someone mentioned Edge of Tomorrow, which never was a game. It was based on a very light-sci-fi japanese novel, in turn inspired by a player's forum account of restarting a game over and over in order to incrementally learn enough to finish it.
But it doesn't really matter whether Edge of Tomorrow was or was not based on a video game. The fact that it works as a movie and you can think about it in terms of a video game proves that there's no issue with making a video game movie.
The problem with Hollywood sometimes or often putting out crap is a Hollywood problem, not a medium or genre problem.
Think of a movie you thought had all potential to be good, but turned out bad, and then google the backstory on its production. I'll put $10 on saying that it most likely suffered from "too many chefs"/creation by committee, and focus-grouping it to death, instead of trusting the vision of the creator(s), whether that be screenwriter, director or other.
This is obviously subjective, but why is the best Marvel movies Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, Deadpool and Logan?
For example, James Mangold did both The Wolverine and Logan, what changed between them?
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Logan, guardians of the galaxy and Deadpool fairly soundly proved that unsafe movies can be popular. But at Disney it's about maximizing profits. If you can get all of the family to go see a movie rather than just anyone over 16, you're making more money.
I think some of it is just a change in the terms we use.
Take Guardians of the Galaxy for example. A fun superhero movie! Except it’s really just a science fiction movie that avoids the “SF” term. It’s pretty similar to something like Star Wars in terms of the characters and technologies shown... but for some reason, Luke Skywalker isn’t a “superhero.”
Or consider the Greek myths. Instead of superheroes, they had “gods” and “demigods” and such. What’s the difference? None, really.
Humans have always enjoyed morally unambiguous tales of heroes beyond the ordinary. There’s a place for complex entertainment too, but it’s unreasonable to expect it to dominate.
That movie illustrates my point, though. Domestic box office for Get Out was $175m with foreign receipts coming in at just $77m.
Compare that to Guardians of the Galaxy, with domestic box office of $333m and foreign box office of $440m. They made more money outside the US than in, with China topping the totals.
Sure, you can still make money with a movie aimed at the domestic audience, but you can make a lot more money with one that isn't.
It's easy. The true play is an augmented reality game... wait a minute... hear me out.
So, you sign up for 10USD a month, for unlimited cinema visits. Any more than one visit means that Moviepass loses money.
So while they are selling you this service... they also need to do everything in their power to ensure you don't use it. Buried in the terms and conditions and innocuous sounding statement which gives them the unrestricted right to warp your understanding of reality.
For example, you're walking down the street on your way to see Guardians of the Galaxy 15: 2Guardians2Galaxy when you receive a text message indicating incoming North Korean ICBMs... this is it... you quickly check some news sites (which they access to through an information sharing agreement, or by sub-contracting to a money starved NSA) and they all say the same thing: to have any hope of survival you need to get out of the city now... and find shelter.
Obviously by the time you figure it was all a fake you've missed your showing and need to wait another 24 hours, when they'll have another more extreme and equally convincing scenario to distract you.
I can even envisage that they'll start sub-contracting this out mech-turk style. "$1 to convince 1000 people not to go to the cinema today using information warfare" that kind of thing.
In case this isn't the true play, any VCs out their let me know, I'm seeking 10MUSD for 15%. My MVP is this post.
I probably go the cinema once a year, and don't really watch much at home either, but I have some movie buff friends so I get tangential exposure to which movies are good: I just Googled what's out and the ones I've heard were very good include Dunkirk, the new Planet of the Apes, Baby Driver and The Big Sick, and Beach Rats. On top of that are the movies that I probably wouldn't enjoy seeing but that someone who likes movies would likely enjoy: Guardians of the Galaxy, Logan lucky, maybe even Wonder Woman (I just know that one's popular, but not much about how good it is).
This is just stuff that I (who doesn't even enjoy going to the movies) happen to Know about, and wouldn't mind being dragged to if a friend wanted to socialize at the cinema. I find it kind of hard to believe that "Hollywood is putting out garbage" could be true to the degree that that's the reason there's nothing you want to see.
Note that I've left out indie movies since those tend to be less accessible and more polarizing and also left out popular things like the Transformers movie.
I see perhaps 1.5 movies per year, mostly because the value proposition is not good.
To see a single movie in the non-shitty cinema, with a drink and popcorn will run me up about $35AU. I still have to watch 20 minutes worth of ads at the beginning too, so we'll boost that up to $40AU for wasting my time and brainpower. That gets me about 2hrs entertainment.
Why would I do that when I can pirate your movie in a few months and watch it at home, infinitely cheaper? Only the rare exceptional movie is actually worth the "cinematic experience" (ie. Dunkirk). Something like Guardians of the Galaxy or Deadpool is perfectly fine watching on my TV and Soundbar.
You can skip the ads and tell people off for talking during the movie in your own home too.
Gravity was a good movie. And for a movie set in space, it's pretty realistic...ish. But it's orbital physics are terrible. Just terrible. I mean, most movies don't even try. Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars don't deal with orbital physics at all. Gravity tries, and gets it all wrong.
In the original Jurassic Park, dinosaurs moving in the open are full CG.[1] Close-ups where the actors were directly interacting with the dinosaurs were model work. That was the first major film with photorealistic CG creatures.
It's still difficult to do close interaction between humans and CG-animated characters, although, with enough money and a huge team, it can be done. See "Guardians of the Galaxy" to see that done very well.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-cgi-works-in-jurassic-park-2014-7
I see two things they can change to improve.
- Make going to the movies more of an event. Alamo Drafthouse understands this. Don't tolerate disturbances. Sell food and alcohol. Don't run ads for the local mattress store before the film.
- Price B movies lower than tentpole releases. Guardians of the Galaxy I'll gladly pay $10-12 for. Some romantic comedy that will quickly be forgotten and the studio only spent $30 million on ought to be priced less.
The Marvel movies are already formulaic.
The reasonable success of Ant Man and The Guardians of the Galaxy sort of points to them having a good formula.
Interesting; I've always had a bit of an issue with the lines between Science Fiction and Fantasy, in that the former is far more interesting to me than the latter. For instance, I enjoyed the movie Lucy as entertainment using a science fiction anchor, and was utterly bored with Guardians of the Galaxy which is a fine and dandy space/fantasy type of thing. I love Hackers as entertainment in spite of its drastic flaws that were obvious then and still are in the 'scientific' context.
Asking for a buddy: Would a computer/technology driven crime and character driven story be applicable in the 'science fiction' wide definition?
Hope you get what you're after and help break some new folks into the scene. Nice that you're up front about the rights too. I know my buddy would love to get paid and then take that money and register his story with WGA West in case of screenplay potential.
I'm more interested in what those 20 movies are. I found:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1981
1 Raiders of the Lost Ark 2 On Golden Pond 3 Superman II 4 Arthur 5 Stripes 6 The Cannonball Run 7 Chariots of Fire 8 For Your Eyes Only 9 The Four Seasons 10 Time Bandits
Of which I guess 2, 3, 8 isn't original.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2:w014
1 American Sniper 2 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 3 Guardians of the Galaxy 4 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 5 The LEGO Movie 6 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 7 Transformers: Age of Extinction 8 Maleficent 9 X-Men: Days of Future Past 10 Big Hero 6
Of which only 10 is original.
Well, for one, they could stop doing origin stories on well established characters. For example, the next Spider-Man movie will supposedly be a non-origin story as it is rebooted to be part of Marvel's cinematic universe. If they wish to start a new actor as a character it doesn't necessarily mean a reboot of the character. But issuing new actors over-and-over with reboots and origin stories for these characters would be the boring part.
I, for one, like seeing the new heroes being introduced into the mix such as Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man. Marvel has a large number of characters to rely on that haven't been introduced into the cinematic universe. Just because they are relatively unknown doesn't mean it won't work. Guardians was considered a risk because most people had no idea what they were, yet it did big numbers at the box office.
These stories can be told endlessly if they are done correctly. Not all of Marvel's characters are super-powered beings and some of the normal characters have interesting stories to tell. Daredevil on Netflix is a good example of this. It didn't even feel like a typical Marvel enterprise until the suit came into play. Up to that point it was an interesting drama with occasional action pieces. Agents of Shield is another; stories about mostly ordinary people dealing with living in this new world of super-beings and gods.
Where comic book movies/shows go wrong is when they are created to be commercials for selling toys and the story comes second. So far, Marvel has avoided this. Hopefully DC can do the same. If telling the story is always the most important aspect, then these things can last a long time before they get boring.
The core issue for me is that of the dozen or so shows and movies I would be interested in watching, on average 0.5 are available via netflix. So I spend a lot of time searching in futility for that show or movie I half remember wanting to see. During that search netflix is trying to recommend a bunch of other things to me and I find it annoying and distracting.
Also, could somebody somehow post a schedule of show/movie availability? Shows get added or removed on a regular basis and I always find out by accident.
(e.g. "Oxryly1! We do NOT have 'Guardians of the Galaxy' at the moment. We expect to add it in 4 months time. Thank you.")
</rant> indeed.
Does that matter? The joker.org server is doing the p2p download bit and streaming the content to the browser.
It's likely that it's caching material for torrents. I tried Guardians of the Galaxy and could skip almost all the way to the end of the film when it had only just begun.
Tried an mkv from NYAA: no go, format not supported (loads to 100% but then gives the error)
Different mkv from Kickass: format not supported (without loading, apparently, though I wonder if it's cached given that it was Guardians of the Galaxy)
TV episode of Gotham: same as for previous
Something is happening because it says e.g. 'Gotham' in the top and retrieves a nice faded background of the cast but I keep getting 'format not supported'
EDIT: seems to be my browser or connection; trying a different machine on a different IP and it works very nicely and quickly indeed.
I think it's because it's easy. Dystopia bring automatic conflict which is easy/lazy to dramatize.
Still all isn't bad, it isn't Star Trek, but there are non-dystopic popular fictions:
- Her
- Stargate SG-1 and spinouts
- Fringe
- Warehouse 13
- Eureka
- Sanctuary
- The new crop of super hero shows and movies, Arrow, SHIELD, The Flash
- Heroes
- The short lived new V series
- Dr. Who
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- Inception
- Gravity
and more....
in Literature there's a huge bounty of great non-dystopic stuff too.
- The Golden Oecumene
- The Culture series
- The Night's Dawn Trilogy
- The Gap series
You just have to know where to look.
Try to actually think about it. What movies fit that formula?
Iron man - no, an arrogant man built his own powers Thor - no, an entitled boy temporarily had to cope with the absence of his powers to earn them back The Hulk - no, he is not a great wizard, he is trying to cure himself Captain America - you could make an argument for it, but no, he auditioned for his powers Batman - no Guardians of the Galaxy - no Spider-man - OK, especially in "The Amazing Spider-man" they played the destiny card Superman - sort-of, but he grew up with his powers Green Lantern - yes Daredevil - sort-of, but his wizards power is "not actually blind" X-men - sort of, but their powers are a civil rights race analogy
Most comic book movies do not fit the boy-who-thinks-he-has-nothing-is-actually-a-great-wizard formula and those that do tend to be less successful.
It's worth considering that he's with ESPN, and sports is an unusual case.
Television shows and movies don't have nearly the timeliness factor sports broadcasting has. If I see guardians of the galaxy a week after it comes out it doesn't really matter, but there's very little point in watching 'the game' even a day after the fact (unless there's some exceptional reason to).
So in some regards, they do have kind of a stranglehold and are holding out hope that they can capitalize on that. It's funny talking to cable subscribers < 40, because (obviously anecdotal) the majority of the reasons given are 'how else am I going to watch sports?'
Disclaimer: I'm a comic reader.
Agent's of S.H.I.E.L.D. starts out pretty bad. Very flat characters, often cheap plots. About half way through it became good though. It's low-power, so no worries about super heroes.
Capatain America 2 you need to watch for the last third of the show to make sense ;)
Guardians of the Galaxy will be the first comic movie I'm really looking forward to. It's not a superhero comic at all and the main characters have a personality closer to the firefly crew than anything else (That's assuming they are staying close to the comic).