Hacker Cinema
Mystery Men
1999 · Film · 121 min
Directed by Kinka Usher
AdventureFantasyActionComedyScience Fiction
When Champion City's hero Captain Amazing is kidnapped by the recently paroled supervillain Casanova Frankenstein, a trio of average, everyday superheroes -- Mr. Furious, the Shoveler and the Blue Raja -- assemble a new super team to save him.
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7 comments on Hacker News
Regarding the last paragraph, I'd recommend the feature film "Mystery Men" and the graphic novel series "Astro City." The Amazon TV series "The Boys" also covered this ground but did it a little too ham-handedly for my liking.
For the most part, modern movies have just been dreadful. Previous great screenwriters like Shane Black would make action significant (with people actually reacting in fear to guns), make comedy light and airy but non-constant etc. (he has some nice lists of advice and processes he would use going through scripts) but then these weird light Marvel movies started coming out, amounting to little more than Abbott and Costello vs. the Wolfman or whatever. And somehow that took over all of Hollywood, so Shane Black goes and directs an Iron Man...
Thankfully old movies exist, so I've started digging further and further back, really enjoying the quality writing and acting in things like 1942's To be or not to be or 1932's Grand Hotel. The 80s are also a great treasure trove - recently I saw Shane Black's Last Action Hero, which is way before its time. Or Mystery Men - satirizing these same superhero movies before they became ever present.
> But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.
Not to this degree. The last good year for movies was 1999. This is the list of major releases that year:
The Matrix
Fight Club
The Sixth Sense
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
American Beauty
Being John Malkovic
Office Space
The Iron Giant
Magnolia
Austin Powers
American Pie
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eyes Wide Shut
Dogma
Galaxy Quest
The Insider
Notting Hill
Man on the Moon
Analyze This
Detroit Rock City
Mystery Men
Bicentennial Man
This is not even the entire list, just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type.
You can't look at that list and honestly say nothing has changed, because it's just not true. The energy and creativity has clearly moved somewhere else, to TV and streaming services.
This year alone there's two FANTASTIC shows, Chernobyl and Stranger Things S3 that definitely deserve praise.
This whole thing reminds me of a shitty superhero spoof movie from the 90’s - Mystery Men - one of the characters’ superpower is that he can turn invisible when nobody else is looking and he is naked
Reminded me very much of the scene in Mystery Men[1] in particular the quotes of the Sphinx[2]
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132347/
[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132347/quotes?ref_=tt_ql_trv_4
Thsi reminds me of Mystery Men's Invisible Boy who has invisibility - but only when no one is looking!
I need to re-watch that movie.
All absolutely great quotes -- and I *still couldn't stop thinking about how much this ying/yang reminds me of the hilarious quotes from "The Sphinx" in the movie, "Mystery Men" (1999, IMDB here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132347/quotes)
For example, "He who questions training... only trains himself at asking questions."