fantastic_four

Not that I am taking sides. I enjoyed Homecoming. But it is the second highest RT score, behind Spider-Man 2 (now 92% vs. SP2's 94%). And more importantly it's much further behind on average rating with 7.6 for Homecoming and 8.3 for SM2. And that's significant because you almost NEVER see average ratings above 8 for a superhero movie. Always remember, when talking about comparative quality of movies, don't use the dumb Rotten Tomatoes score, use average rating, which is equivalent to Metacritic or MRQE ratings, i.e. they're the average of the actual scores reviewers give. The RT rating is a dumbed-down "did they like it or did they not" score. It's VERY useful for deciding whether or not you're likely to enjoy a film, but it's poor for doing relative comparisons of the quality of two films.

If they had made them morph like Mystique, I wouldn't be confused. But having her pull a mask off just made me wonder "is she about to pull stilts out of her legs, too?"

I wasn't expressing an inability to suspend disbelief, I was asking how it worked. If it's magic, it's magic.

What exactly allows Arya to sound like an old man and gain a foot in height? Magic?

Slow start.

I figured that scene was an homage to Spidey 33 as well, but clearly the scene from Homecoming was a far closer homage. So much closer I'm not even sure you can even describe him catching a falling roof a Spidey 33 homage anymore.

Is the suit any different than the one from Batman v. Superman? Looks similar, and the fat chest logo is definitely the same.

And the height of that was what he did on Fantastic Four with the Thing. The interaction between Thing and Johnny was probably the highlight of Silver Age dialogue, and lines like "IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME!" long outlived Stan's actual time at Marvel.

Dialogue was Stan's greatest strength behind his extreme innovation with character concept. I suppose I can't even criticize his plots since he didn't write them and left them up to the artists, but the real problem there is that Stan's "Marvel Method" sucks. Writers need to write everything, not just come up with a story and leave it up to the artists to work out like Stan did.

Or more specifically, they were a product of the state comic books were in at that time, i.e. geared towards children. Stan's big contribution was that he wanted to gear them towards children AND adults. It was the youth of the medium, because certainly the elements of writing he wasn't good at had been well-developed centuries prior to the 1960s, it's just that comic books were looked at as the slums of the overall writing world. They still are to a great extent, but it draws far better writers today than it did before Stan changed everything.

There is no universe in which this is true. I'm going to guess you mentally stripped all context out of that comment in the exact same way you stripped it out of what you chose to quote from my original post. Or if you think Stan was an amazing plotter, I'm eager to hear why.

Tall, thin, great figure, pretty face. Average for an actress, well above-average for the general public.

Same. Bendis is a MUCH better writer than Stan Lee was. Lee was an incredible creator of characters and innovated the entire superhero genre with that strength in a way we're still vividly feeling today, and his dialogue was superb, but his plots were awful, and his story ideas were often super-campy. To be fair, that's probably more of a result of the much-vaunted "Marvel Method" where Stan let the artist do most of the plots with him editing them after the fact. Writing is better if it's all centralized with one person. Impossible to say what Stan was capable of if he spread himself less thin and wrote less titles but did all the writing for the ones he worked on.

McGuire was a more introspective Stan Lee Peter Parker whereas Holland was a more modernized, it's-cool-to-be-a-nerd Peter Parker with a Brian Bendis quick wit. The old Peter was more relatable because he was quiet in his normal life, but became jokey in the suit because he felt anonymous and freer. Bendis made Peter far more personable out of the suit, and that made him more interesting to listen to but less relatable. I listened to a Holland interview on "The Nerdist" podcast this week, and he says he had never read the comic before landing the role, and when he did, he mostly drew his performance from Peter as depicted in Ultimate Spider-Man because in his words it was "more modernized."

Off topic.... You wouldnt add Blade in there? Not even in the top ten. MAYBE in the top 20, but it has been so long since I saw "Blade" I'd probably have to watch it again to place it.

I'm unclear on this--does it mean that they're re-shooting the film with Patty Jenkins directing it? If not, the success of Wonder Woman should have little or no impact on the quality of Justice League. Or put more directly--what a dumb idea.

OK, I haven't thought about this for a while, but "First Class" isn't one of the best five superhero films. Iron Man is fifth on that list, and Avengers is ahead of First Class.

yep, I still love to watch Spidey take on Bone saw in the ring. You can see Toby smile through the "Human Spider" mask when Bruce Campbell declares him the winner! Just an awesome scene. The end of my repeat viewings of that film comes right where they show a quick sequence of various New Yorkers expressing their opinions of Spider-Man, including one guy who goes "He stinks, and I don't like him!" and a punk rock girl (surprisingly played by Lucy Lawless and shown below) who says "Guy with eight hands--sounds hot." That marks the end of the origin sequence and the end of my favorite part of the film.

Homecoming also isn't ahead of the original Iron Man film, which I place above Avengers.

Yea, as soon as that movie flips over to Spidey versus Goblin around the point you're referring to it significantly slides in quality. Such a horrible suit. The first half origin was told as well as I can imagine it ever being told; they really did NOT need to re-tell that in the first Garfield movie.

When you sort superhero films out by average critic reviews on MetaCritic, MRQE, or the Rotten Tomatoes "Average Rating" score, it also sorts high towards the top of all superhero films. You will rarely see ANY superhero film get over 80% on any of those scales, but Spider-Man 2 is one that did. It's just all-around exceptional top to bottom.

spidey 2, dk and the avengers sit tied atop the medal stand for me--because of my life-long love for the character, spidey 2 is probably first among equals. I think I agree that Avengers is better than Homecoming. I've got full Spidey runs of multiple titles--Spectacular Spider-Man as a kid because it was affordable, Amazing Spider-Man as an adult because I could afford it by then--and have always liked him better than any DC character, Batman included, so I was fairly surprised I ended up liking the Nolan films so much. But they're just SO freaking good that the quality overcame ALL of my character or Marvel VS DC biases.

What the Avengers do is the equivalent to what national armies do, but what Spider-Man does is more what cops do. I'm generally intrigued with the idea of meta-humans as cops; wouldn't it be easier for Peter to find crime to fight if he had a central dispatcher deploying him to do it? The Sekovia Accords seem to be an international framework for global threats, so when you've got a local crime-fighter, do they even bother with such matters? The United Nations has no idea what's happening locally in Queens, so I'm not sure why the international body enforcing the Sekovia Accords would. The UN concerns itself with crime or injustice on a broad scale, not an individual one. Locally, the cops go after Spider-Man when they see him. Even Stan depicted law enforcement doing that back in the 60s. Is there reason to think the Sekovia Accords guys would care about local events in the Marvel Universe any more than the United Nations does about local crime?

To me, anyway. I suspect it isn't to most people, which is why those constraints weren't an active part of the Homecoming story and why we likely won't see them at the forefront of many Marvel movies. I know most people found the political aspects of the Star Wars prequels boring with the way Darth Sidious was playing both sides, but I enjoyed it. Which is why I'm generally interested in the Sekovia Accords as well. I expect we won't see much about them, but I can't rule out that whoever is keeping this stuff straight is making an effort to do so. Previously I would have said the Marvel Creative Committee is probably doing it, but these days, the only entity I can point at is Kevin Feige.

I don't watch Agents of SHIELD, so you know far more about the Accords than I do; all I know is what I recall from the Civil War comic, which isn't much and is clearly different since those required revealing secret identities, and what I recall from the Civil War movie, which is spotty now. And we're both engaging in our own fictional ponderings anyway, but it's all good and the notion of realistic politics for superhero action is definitely interesting. So with that...given the way the Accords are structured, could it be that Stark is just being trusted to create that controlled environment? We know he's averse to such authority or control, so it's no surprise that he's actually not watching Peter all that closely. The main question there is whether or not Stark has the authority to deploy Spider-Man to fight crime. Does he? I don't know. If he does, he might just be claiming he sent him to that deli, or to the Monument, if asked. And he realized he was tired of having to cover up for him, so he pulled him into the Avengers. And when he got turned down, he wasn't sure what he'd do next to reign him in.