Last movie you watched......

My 10-year-old nephew understood the movie just fine.

 

So turning your brain off is non-negotiable?

 

Prometheus.
I already saw this movie, when it was called Aliens.
Yeah I know it was kinda, sorta a prequel, but the format was so much similar to the first Aliens movie.
I liked Aliens much better.
This one didn't hold my interest.

 

Skyfall
Say what you will about story, characters, ripping off "The Dark Knight" but no one can argue it's a beautifully photographed movie. I really enjoyed this one, but maybe not as much as "Casino Royale." But I do like how a sustained theme of M as mother resulted in a resolution. I also wonder, as this film rebooted the reboot of "Casino Royale" where does the franchise go next?

 

Jarhead

Didn't like it.

 

"Celeste and Jess Forever."

Interesting little relationship study of a divorced couple trying to remain friends that hit pretty close to home as my brother and his ex-wife (no children together) have remained uncomfortably close at times. I watched "Hope Springs" a couple of weeks ago, and this was an interesting companion movie to it, I felt. One about older people struggling with relationship issues. One about younger people doing the same.

I'll be interested to see if Andy Samberg continues to take on more serious roles. I thought he did a good job here.

 

So did my nine-year-old daughter.

As I mentioned on the Avengers thread, if you're not going to bother to see all the movies leading into it, worrying about all the little details is going to drive you crazy. You will be missing information related to the characters and the story.

 

OK, but it wasn't exactly marketed this way. I assumed - and I think it was justified - that it would stand up as a stand-alone film. It didn't. It was a series of set-piece interactions between Marvel movie characters for fan bois to jack off to. Which is fine. But I don't think that I am somehow at fault for not realizing this ahead of time.

 

I understand your point about all the crap with Tesseracts and Asgardians and that stuff, too. I never saw Thor and I don't really plan to. But I saw The Avengers. I liked it, thought it was fine but didn't come out blown away or anything. Whenever they start talking about Tesseracts, etc, I pretty much just ignore it. Movies like that, for me, tell me who the bad guy is, tell me who the good guy(s) is and let's get to the big, impressive fights. I suppose some would argue that you need to know what they are fighting about because it raises the "stakes" but in a fantasy movie like that, the stakes pretty much always are "world dominance."

 

It stands up just fine on its own. I know because plenty of people who didn't see all of the films still enjoyed it.

My wife is not a Marvel fan, or a comic book fan of any kind, but she enjoyed it. She had seen Iron Man and perhaps Iron Man II, but that's it.

My 9-year-old daughter hadn't seen any of the other movies and she enjoyed it.

My point is you can either try to think about it and understand every little thing that happens or you can just watch it as a "dumb" action movie. I think it holds up either way, but if you are going to do the former, which I think you tried to do, you need to have seen the other movies.

 

Which I think might be as much my problem with it as the Asgardians and Tesseracts and Jibber-Jabbers and Blargobots and Bip-she-bips.

There are no stakes in comic-book movies. No real stakes. This was a huge issue I expressed here about "Dark Knight Rises." In every single one of these movies - or at least it feels that way - there is a good vs. evil battle for world domination. In theory, the stakes are huge. Much huger than a couple small relationship movies I just mentioned - "Hope Springs" and "Celeste and Jesse Forever." But the stakes don't feel huge, and the stakes in those relationship movies feel much more compelling and larger and real. They feel contrived. And besides that, I feel unconnected from them as a viewer, because they are rarely tied to a well-developed smaller story. There were two recent movies about the end of the world that I enjoyed: "Melancholia" and "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World." Huge stakes. Hard to think of bigger ones. But the stakes were intimately tied to the specific relationships between characters in the movies.

"The Avengers" - and "X-Men: First Class," as well - has the stakes problem compounded by having far too many characters to keep track of and follow. The result is that both are a hot mess, existing just as an excuse to stage a bunch of action sequences. But all these action sequences have a been-there, done-that feel by this point. A sameness. So, for me at least, they don't justify the movie's existence.