EricJ

Yep, my first thought was "Oh, did someone get me kicked off again?...It was probably TikiSoo over the superhero arguments! " But nope, looks like it was just the main Forum index page that was down--If I hadn't tried typing directly to the GD forum, I'd have wandered away dejected. I've got the retiree/telecommuter's advantage of not having to go out if the driveway hasn't been shoveled, and during our annual January Northeast crises, I've learned to not to make long-range plans in January. Last year, it was almost ten days before I could get out the driveway--thank heavens for grocery delivery--and discovered that the first two medical symptoms of Cabin Fever are 1) Drowsiness, and 2) Increased Appetite. (Paranoia doesn't kick in until #3 or 4.) IOW, literally the mammal's instinct to stock up and hibernate until warmer weather. And when I started to feel like a nap eight hours after I got up, I figured, hey, if it's good enough for bears and squirrels... 🐻 Besides, they don't have electric blankets.

Back when every critic fell all over themselves to gush why "The Dark Knight" (I'm one of the few sensible people who couldn't stand that one, btw), quote, "Didn't look like a comic-book movie!" was that the current Marvel Studios style didn't exist when the movie came out--"Iron Man" had only opened a month before. Critics and fanboys praised the "deconstructive" style thinking it was "genius" because their image of "What a comic book movie looked like" was still stuck in 2004, and probably looked like Fox's inane Fantastic Four movie, or the horrendous "Catwoman". Now that more qualified people produced a more professionally qualified product from their own experience, and brought the innate appeal the whole storytelling style had had to begin with, there's no need to praise "deconstructions" anymore, and Warner's attempt to go Dark and Serious became the freakish box-office-poison exception rather than the rule. (IOW, Warner's "Justice League" tanked like a stone. "Watchmen", however, looked like that to begin with.) Well, we seem to have done that already, with the discussion sidetracked by 1978 Christopher Reeve Superman nostalgia--I wouldn't consider its tongue-in-cheek tone to be representative of current movies, but no question that it was a 70's icon when we needed one. Why not? (Hey, I never got to see it when it aired, either.) We've been recommending them right and left, whether they're "good" or not to suit your definition is out of our jurisdiction. If you've already seen Iron Man (and Spiderman), you could probably go to the first Avengers with little problem, as the other heroes are fairly self-explanatory. (A viewing of the first "Thor" would probably be helpful but not necessary, and probably get the same dissing.) I can't say as much for Avengers 2: Age of Ultron, which was pretty awful, but Wikipedia'ing a quick summary of what happened should be enough backstory for Captain America: Civil War, widely considered to be the best comic-book movie of the 21st century so far...That is what you were asking for, believe, but needs a bit of homework. The story may seem "generic", but then, comic readers don't read them for the stories. They read them for the characters. Guardians of the Galaxy doesn't quite intersect with the other heroes (...YET), so, yes, it's its own self-contained space opera, that doesn't require much backstory. Oh, and in keeping with the satirical tone of the original comic, a bit of a goofy laid-back one at that--Who says would-be galactic space-pirates can't love 70's tunes?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNlnQwHWSYw The Chris Nolan trilogy, again, I feel "fooled" a lot of people into thinking they were watching "art" because of their own prejudices about the genre--My impression was that Nolan didn't seem to like comic-books all that much either: Warner had hired him for Begins on his "Memento" reputation, since they wanted to reboot the self-destructed 90's franchise for their most "psychologically complex" hero--But Nolan's experience was in realistic psycho-thrillers, and in "Dark Knight", he literally seems to be more interested in the mechanics of how real-world Mafia money-laundering banks operate, or the issues of cellphone privacy, than in the idea of a hero in a black cape with gadgets. (And, yeesh, let's not even get into the attempted "Occupy Wall Street" metaphor of Rises--You could tell Nolan just wanted to get the heck out of there and back to his own movies, before Warner thought of making him reboot Green Lantern.)

That's what I meant about 1978--The theme just said Neato and Hopeful, which were new experiences to us back then That, and Richard Donner's odd, abstract beginning to the movie, as we see Action Comics #1 opened on a child's floor, the movie dissolves to live-action, and travels past the Daily Planet building into space headed for the planet Krypton, as we hear the opening kettle drums to John Williams' march....Forty years, and still gives you chills. 😮 (Well, we've already got chills this week, but that wasn't what I meant.)

Even if our generation no longer remembers what their parent's "VCR" was, or even that mystical "Tivo"... How about on any of the DOZEN or so streaming sites now showing Poltergeist as public-domain 80's-MGM fodder? (And the two crappy sequels, although Julian Beck was pretty creepy as the ghost-preacher in the second one, before they had to posthumously replace him in the cheap third movie.)

Ah, Bill Maher doing his Jack Webb/Joe Friday imitation...

Oh, come now--You've been watching TCM long enough to know that a movie that somebody says is "Good for you" ALWAYS turns out to be Just a Darn Good Movie. (The later ones get better once you actually know the previous-movie references to what's going on, but that's not to say that with the first ones, a good time still can't be had by one and all. They were especially made for people who don't know, anyway.) Yes, I get the idea: You're stubborn, and you like to joke about Overgrown Little Kids, because it's hipper and more socially cynical that way, and we get to agree with snarky handwringing "martyr" comics who believe that every current trend is a nutty one and that everyone they see on the TV news is an idiot. So, what, do we have to do this like I often do with my more stubborn friends who refuse to believe good audience word of mouth, and turn their seeing the movie into a wager? (I've rarely lost money yet.) Of course, if you really wanted to recommend Just a Good Movies to somebody for Just-Good's sake, one could always try more effective persuasion like, oh, LINKING YOUTUBE TRAILER CLIPS, so they'd get a better idea... That's okay, the '75 TV version is also still on YouTube, for those who couldn't stay up late nights as kids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNXbdLDZLKM (Yes, we've come a long way since the goofy "Americana" cute-camp of Adam West's Batman...)

Reportedly was made to cover Chico's gambling debts, and after the group had already separated--Which is why Groucho doesn't seem to be in the same movie as one that's 3/4 Harpo. (And yes, Groucho does claim he "discovered" Marilyn Monroe: They needed a model for a walk-on in Groucho's burlesque-sketch at the end, and he told the producers, "If you don't hire that girl, you're crazy.")

Dick Van Dyke's character even explains so, when the kids first meet him on the run from the bank--"Oh, a little dusty, maybe..."

Although it's not essential to knowing the Marvel Canon (everything you need to know from here on in is wrapped up in a five-minute flashback in the first "Avengers") Joe Johnston brought his colorful 40's "The Rocketeer" nostalgia to Captain America: the First Avenger (2011)--You go in expecting to snigger over 40's Golden-Age camp, and Chris Evans' 100% irony-free performance shows how Marvel's print stories could find the complex ethics in its heroes, and why he still had so many modern-day fans after the movie. As for Marvel Studios, the official first company-made "one that started it all" was Iron Man (2008), also not essential to the group Avengers movies except for knowing who the character is--But I've always said the first movie is somehow one of the most perfect social allegories of what we were thinking in our new high-tech Iraq-traumatized post-9/11 00's decade that any movie could capture. Avoid the recent Warner/DC movies, which wanted to kiss up to angry overcompensating hardcore teen fans who wanted their heroes bleak, "dark" and violent, especially after Chris Nolan was forced to direct "The Dark Knight", despite the fact he didn't really like comic-book movies either--If it says "Zack Snyder" on the directing credit, meet the darkest, angriest, most overcompensating DC fanboy of them all. That's probably why Patty Jenkins' direction on Wonder Woman (2017) got all the public mania for being the exception, made in the more traditional fan-sacred print-lore Marvel-movie style. As for "Early pre-Marvel/DC", Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man (2002) (the others were ehh, and Sony's "Amazing" reboots were train-wrecks until Marvel reclaimed "Homecoming") taught Hollywood how to do the love of fan-lore right, and...even if Richard Donner's original Christopher Reeve Superman: the Movie (1978) came out of a 70's post-60's-Batman urge to play it all for camp, Reeve's performance, John Williams' score and Alexander Salkind's big-soundstage budget came along right at the moment that 70's movies were burying Nixon/Ford pessimism for more wide-eyed populism.

Unfortunately, as Hollywood has now found out, neither do superheroes: Asian countries in particular, with their group social ethic, don't quite seem to parse the American comic-book idea of why one person would fight crime, and in tights, no less, rather than go to the police--And if Hollywood was counting on China to pick up their box-office with stories about rebel super-vigilantes breaking the rules, boy, were they in for a big fat surprise. Black Panther got a largely non-plussed reaction in China (where there are fewer black people), Spiderman: Homecoming fell quickly the second week, and Warner's big hopes for Batman v. Superman did "less than expected", as the industry term goes. European countries are less confused about the concept, although the idea of "Captain America" doesn't play the same in London or Paris. One of the only superhero movies so far that has gotten any positive draw from the Chinese audiences is Aquaman, and then mostly because his solo movie didn't seem to be connected to any other comic-book conventions--Warner could've just as easily retitled it "Prince of Atlantis" and sold it as a fantasy (the Chinese love no-specific-location fantasy), and it would likely have made the same box office. And don't take it out on the established comics, as Pixar's Incredibles have reportedly never exported well either. So, getting back to the idea of Superman, Batman and Spiderman as American folk-myth...

So...they're "all" looney because HE is, then. Mm-kay. No logical fallacies there. And while it's true that the Catholics get all the good "Song of Bernadette" stories and found-footage exorcism horror movies, us poor Lutherans only had two movies to our IMDb filmography--Both biographies of Martin, and both produced by the home office, but at least the 2003 version had Joseph Fiennes, fresh off of "Shakespeare in Love": (...He was the less loony anti-Catholic pamphleteer, don'tcha know.) Hulu? Last I heard, New Mutants was being streaming-dumped, but possibly to Disney's service...Now that Disney's Fox deal pretty well dumped Fox's X-Men franchise off a cliff, and "Phoenix" is Fox's own farewell movie. Guess they just couldn't wait. New Mutants was supposed to spin a new Fox franchise universe off of Deadpool 2, but things didn't go well with that either, and now we're just cleaning up the corpses. Avengers: Endgame, as the name suggests, effectively wrap-up ends Marvel's one central "universe" they've had for ten years, unless they can reboot it with side canons that Captain Marvel brings in (see, we learn that there've really been alien impostors in the Marvel Universe since the beginning!) And Spiderman is still Sony's last bit of Marvel, even though Marvel effectively bought it back from them, and it's all flashback by now as Peter Parker is already dead. Which is going to come as a bit of a downer to Sony, who literally wants to start their own studio "universe" out of all the Spiderman B-characters Disney/Marvel DIDN'T buy back...Hey, they still think it "worked" for Venom, and the animated Into the Spider-verse got a lucky break and turned out to be better than it looked.

Maher frequently jokes about his Catholic-school upbringing, and...yeah. Explains a LOT. Lapsed Catholics probably constitute the biggest share of Atheists (at least among the heterosexual ones), by a wide 2-1 margin over the "Childhood abuse victim" or "Red-state fundamentalist childhood" cases. As playwright Christopher Durang wrote, "I went to Catholic school as a kid, but I don't seem to know any adult Catholics." It's tempting for a Lutheran Protestant to delve into theological arguments about what Catholicism deliberately and willfully gets wrong about its image of God's relationship to man--Most of which was intentional, back when the Holy Roman Empire first needed to establish its world standing by politicizing Christianity into the same social feudal system as most monarchies, with the nobility on top and the peaceful, taxed peasants on the bottom. But for now, with the Moderators watching, let's just keep it on the pre-Reformation message that the Vatican church needed to tell its followers that there were NO OTHER religions to follow, that the elite knew best for them in interpreting the one they had, and that God would punish them with perdition if they even became curious as to whether there were. Naturally, if this happens to create a lot of frustrated adult Catholics who start to see the Protestant flaws in a theology that emphasizes a dogmatic message of guilt and "their fault", and their beaten self-image rebels, they don't so much think that they've seen the flaws in one belief, but because it's the, quote, "only" one, they believe they alone have found the secret flaw in All World Religion in Man's History. That's what happens when you don't get out much. Which also, as we see, produced the "Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo thought God had a beard...That's what EVERYONE thinks, isn't that silly?"

It's bad enough when we were getting American Roseanne-esque stories about cynical, frustrated housewives saying "I've had enough!--My world stinks, I'm going to speak up and standup-comic my way to self-realization!" (eg. Sally Field in "Punch Line"). The new wave of British ones (eg. Amazon's "The Marvelous Ms. Maisel") have been no improvement. It doesn't help the industry stereotype that "Male comics tell jokes, female comics complain with funny timing."

Why, of course they do--We see examples of their vulnerable sensitivity all the time: "Hallelujah!...Hey, Bubba, burn any science books today? Little baby so afraid of big bad death, he needs his pink unicorns and Flying Spaghetti Monster?--Don't worry, your big Invisible Buddy will take care of you, and you can go beat up some crazy Iraqi terrorists some more! Elvis's comin' to take you to heaven on his UFO!" "You're an a**hole." "...That's not NICE!! Why don't you forgive me, like you're supposed to, ya dirty hypocrite? " And the reason "Road to Perdition" was told as a one-shot graphic novel was that it was meant to be an intentional American Depression-gangster retelling of Japan's long-running "Lone Wolf & Cub" samurai manga. Hence comic readers would get the unique theme of the story much more effectively than simple novel readers would if it had been written for print-bestseller. So no, MST3K quoters, it's more than the simple post-Batman nerd-bashing joke of "It's not a 'comic book', it's a graphic novel!" Which, I'm guessing, Maher was aiming for, in the world where they believe that anyone who knew Marvel references before the movies came out was the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy.

She's also not Mary Marvel. She's not Mar-Vell of the alien Kree army, either.

I didn't, but I TRIED to forget Peter's Friends.

That's probably because they're trying to summarize forty or fifty years of folk history, written by a hundred or so writers over the decades, into two hours, and concentrating only on the barest Wikipedia explanations. We only have one John Henry story to tell, and maybe Disney found three Br'er Rabbit ones, but where do you start with Captain America being found in the ice or the pilot crashing on Wonder Woman's island? The recent "Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse" had to deal with Marvel's print magazine constantly re-inventing different spinoff alternate tellings of Peter Parker's bit-by-the-bug origin, and prefaces each alternate retelling with "Okay, you probably already know the story by now, BUT..." Every time we get modern atheist comics telling the same three jokes over and over about what they think organized religion is--"Hell must be a rockin' place, with all the bad boys who went there!" "Uh-oh, the Missouri Lutherans just declared war on the New England Lutherans again..." "Religion? Oh, you mean that thing six hundred years ago where they burned people on sticks!", etc.--wonder if they'd be embarrassed to know Mark Twain was telling the exact same jokes just after the Civil War. (Of course, he'd already lost a family member early, just like most atheists who throw adult tantrums because they lost their mother when they were six...Y'know, like Penn Jilette did.) Twain wrote all of "The Mysterious Stranger" and bits of "Tom Sawyer" and "Connecticut Yankee" out of the Same Three Jokes, and nobody's updated the material in the last hundred-and-fifty years. We don't have steamboats on the Missouri anymore, but we still have Twain's view that anyone who can quote a Bible verse is a thunder-preaching Sunday-dressed Southern Baptist who'll warn you you're going to double-toothpicks if you eat your peas with a knife...Which, around his neck of the woods back then, it probably was, but not sure if that was still true when he moved to Connecticut near the beginning of the twentieth century.

Actually, we do have non-religious cultural "folk" mythology--They're called "Comic books". Not everyone knows who John Quincy Adams is but you'll find most people who know who Superman is. (Written by a pair of Jewish NY immigrants, btw.) That's one reason--most likely THE reason, in our new age when the rest of Hollywood films stories they think we want to hear because we've heard them before--people have suddenly been flocking to movies about characters whose stories they didn't know, and found out that those stories had something in them to relate to, no matter how unrealistic. Well, okay, they're going to the good Marvel ones, not the goofy Sony ones or the painful and wrist-slitting DC ones, except for that one entertaining one with the armored babe. We don't come from a strange planet, but we've wished we could be the Nice Guy who singlehandedly makes the world a better place, and idealistically prove that they Finish First after all. We can't climb walls, but we've all had the teenage years of being the ambitious, overconfident kid who wanted to fix everything and get applause with his own secret plan, and found himself seriously in over his head with the scary grownup world. We think we're "techies" if we use a smartphone, why can't we invent the ultimate hi-tech device to save the world, and just happen to be a wiseguy showoff using it? We can't throw shields and haven't survived being frozen, but we relate to the idea that believing in old-fashioned ideals is worth it in our complex modern world, no matter how difficult and self-defeating that starts to get. Oops, sorry, Bill & Penn, was that "optimism"?--We know how much you hate it, because Optimism always means "Happy, delusional, and ignorantly gullible", and we know what terrible perils Happy Ignorant Gullibility ultimately leads to sooner or later, don't we? And like the folktales of the big lumberjack guy or the wiseass rabbit (the Southern one, not the cartoon one, although him too), we've often found more life lessons from someone who wasn't lecturing us, and just supposedly telling a neat story about what happened next, than from someone who was. So, in case Bill's confused about fat guys in Kevin Smith backwards-hats, that's why a lot of adults who Should Know Better And Be Cynical Because They're Important Grownups are going nutty over the independent black monarch with a young sociopolitical conscience who occasionally dresses up like a cat--And why the gravelly-voiced old guy who makes cameos (and had his obituary publicly crapped on by attention-hungry edgelords who said they didn't hate him personally, but were just trying to save the world from itself) has such loyalty among generations, despite "wasting his time" selling "kiddy" things to adults. Because adults curious about something they don't know--like characters they've never heard of but are willing to try--are more likely to learn something new than someone who Knows It All Already.

Showoff-atheists seemed to be more obsessed themselves with the idea of "The Bible is Everything!" than the people they complain about do. They can cite every example of "Public stoning" in Leviticus from memory, and can debate the scientific plausibility of Noah for hours, but couldn't give you a quote from Paul's letters to save their lives. I was recently going through the Old Testament on audiobook--just because I grew up Lutheran as a kid, and we never pay attention to the darn Old thing anyway--and for the sake of the Moderators, don't even get me started on What Loudmouth-Atheists Get Wrong about the Bible, since they're too busy working out their own childhood issues or complaints about the current Republican administrations. (Like the one about "First two naked people and a boat, and then six pages of 'Begat's?" Yes: Namely because Genesis was not written to tell people about naked people and a boat, but to try and get down on paper the ancient-Hebrew family-tree lineage of whose particular land was inherited by which descendants were "begat" of said characters...Which testate-court issue Joseph later sorts and hands out at the end of that chapter, and gets fought over all the way through Joshua. Yes, you're basically reading a one-sided book about Real Estate disputes, before we get to the more spiritual issues in the second half, where the nice long-haired guy comes in and says "It doesn't matter whose land you have.") This is the sort of stuff you learn when you pay attention to what you don't know, and stop complaining long enough about the things you think other people do. As Bill says in "Religulous", "I don't know, and neither do you", and Bill, you sure didn't have to tell us the first part twice.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) The when-not-if sequel to Francis Coppola's hit with Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and which sank quickly at the theaters for not following in its parent's footsteps--Coppola had other projects, tried to give it to another director, and ended up with one of Kenneth Branagh's first few attempts at non-Shakespeare movies, which Coppola later tried to distance himself from. It's also one of the most omnipresent of the Sony/Columbia Orphans, just about every-darn-where on streaming (if your service has "Gattaca", "Fifth Element", "Resident Evil", "Last Action Hero", "Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" and "Dracula", rest assured this one will be nearby), and I'd thought I should finally get around to streaming it just to be curious about why it hadn't lived up to its pedigree in the theaters. It's actually not bad, now that we know what to expect: Branagh's since moved away from Shakespeare (after "Hamlet", he could never get another one back in theaters), and now specializes in gloriously overproduced period epics with costume/production-design abandon. Back in 1994, we didn't think of Ken as "the director of Marvel's Thor and Disney's live-action Cinderella", but now that we do, it's a full-tilt exercise in period-production budget. Like Coppola's film, the idea was to (claim to) go back and explore the themes of the original novel, and Ken's performance and Frank Darabont's script does a good job with that, showing Victor Frankenstein as a privileged rich-kid medical student destroying everything for his one personal obsession, in a Regency-steampunk lab powered by electric eels instead of Universal-Horror lightning. Robert DeNiro is intended to play the monster, and does a good job with the book's idea of a verbose creature who questions his own existence, but he's playing it a little too DeNiro--With just a few stitch-scars and a big cloak, he comes off not so much as an unearthly creation, but more like the escaped criminal that Pip met at the beginning of "Great Expectations". It's good viewing if you take the movie at its own face value--There's one scene that deliberately tries to copy Coppola's abstract, dreamlike "Dracula" style, presumably to give in to Francis's complaints, and it sticks out from the rest of the movie like a sore thumb. The movie goes at Branagh's own wildly enthusiastic cosplay pace, and like his Hamlet movie, Ken's default style seems to be, when in doubt, shoot the scene Big. The story's attempt to top itself at every plot point does start going a little overwrought by the climax, but we realize that while he may not have made a Coppola followup, what he's done is create the world's most expensive Hammer film...Which is not always a bad thing.

Oh, so it wasn't about the Oscars then, he was just recycling another past example of being the angry political-shock-comic Tasteless Headline-Crapping Jerk--Like when he went on his show on 9/11, and said we had to hand it to the terrorists for being more dedicated to their cause than we lazy Americans were to ours. It's not that he was pro-Iraqi, he was just anti-Contented, and wanted to violently shock lazy common people for voting for GWBush.

Maher, like Carlin, believes he's the All-Purpose Atheist Gadfly-at-Large, upon whom the last hopes of intelligent civilization singlehandedly depend, or else fall into Thunderdome--Which means he's too smart to be "fooled" by the Common Sheeple to bother to ever research a little decent homework into the terrible cesspool of what the heck he's talking about. After all, that's not the point anyway, his job is to tell us how superior and annoyed he is at What He Thinks It Is. Like Carlin, by the time he got his angry Fox sitcom, it usually starts out as comedy, and then into self-indulgent rants at everything just for the sake of personal catharsism and the Thrill of Being Hated by people you yourself loathe and despise. (I remember a similar Maher rant against Prescription-Drug Ads that was so busy indulging I'm Annoyed With Pop Culture Invading My TV Set that it didn't even seem to understand the first basic concept about why the ads were made that way in the first place. Apparently, someone had just deliberately made them that way to annoy him, because they were made by Stupid Happy Gullible Modern-day People. And now, his I'm Annoyed with the Oscars trigger has finally (oh, just ten years or so) gotten around to superhero movies he was too "smart" to bother to go see, and thinks that everyone goes to see them because they're Content Overfed Gullible Sheeple Who Want to Remain Children and not grow up sophisticated and cynical like he had--And not, let's say, because a lot of people were headline-pushed into seeing a Marvel movie for the first time just like the existing core audience base, and found out that Marvel was the New Pixar, ie., that they couldn't depend on any other studio to bother to make competently entertaining commercial mainstream movies anymore. Actually, my first reaction was "...Is he still on?? Didn't he sort of drop out of sight after his big Lone Rational Atheist Tells You You're Wrong documentary blew up?"

Me, I just keep flashing back on an episode of the Flintstones, where the gang, having won a new houseboat, takes it out on the water--And when it starts to speed out of control, they don't realize at first, until they see ocean buoys zip by with signs: "If you're queasy/Sailing on the wave/Just open your mouth/And shout Terra Firma Shave". (Yeah, these lines are stuck in my head. They're useful at times.) And "madness" is a good word to describe how Busby Berkeley let loose all the wild ideas at Fox that MGM wouldn't let him all those years. The Gang's All Here gets a bit...creative for his Technicolor years. 😮

I was about to ask how anyone could forget Dirty Dozen, before realizing I had forgotten the Cabbie from Escape From New York. Not specifically a Borgnine role, but I remember seeing BTS footage of George Lucas working on designs for Obi-Wan's street-informer diner pal from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones ("Dexter Jettster", for the trivia-curious), trying to explain the minor unhistoried bit-character to his SFX crew: "He's sort of a guy who's got his own business, knows what's going on, and hears all the word on the street, he's...well, he's Ernest Borgnine, basically."

Although his Santa beard was so good, that the '94 Miracle on 34th St. remake deserved much better than a John Hughes script.