@therealsilvermane

I wouldn't say that because the critical and media response to Shang Chi has been almost 100% glowing.

I did enjoy peeing on your leg for a few posts...

Ah, I see. Your previous comments about MCU cult fanatics was pointed at me. Such positivity in the face of rare negative comments. Anyway... First of all, I just like balance. Second, yes, I have tired of these countless "cinema" directors taking pot shots at the MCU. I happen to be a Marvel Comics fan (it's why I'm here) and it's a lot like my parents and teachers and peers from my youth calling my comic book collection and comic book interest as nothing better than garbage. Screw them. But I did see Dune and I actually liked it and posted my positive thought on the movie over in the Dune thread. Third, Oddball posted a not so positive Eternals review with a really really negative headline that turns out to be a misleading headline, which I've now pointed out happens to be a common practice at Slate.com. Pointing out that shady practice by that website now makes me a cult fanatic? Okay, maybe I didn't point it out with DC movies or other flicks here but that's because I'm here mostly for the MCU thread discussions. I get it, because I support the MCU Captain Marvel and defend it from haters here that makes me some kind of fanatical Don Quixote. Ever consider that that itself might be a reach? I do believe I've been critical of MCU films in these forums, whether it's IH, Thor 2, or even Dr Strange. I've pointed out here how I thought the Russo Bros MCU films are riddled with plot holes IMO. I didn't think Black Widow was that great and I posted my thoughts. If I don't think Eternals is that great or if I love it I'll post my honest thoughts about it. So I'm a MCU cult fanatic because I love the Captain Marvel movie? I might be a fanatic for Carol Danvers, probably because she has so many troll haters in the world (again, I like balance), but I don't believe I'm a MCU fanatic. Die hard fan? Yes. But I don't picket at the gates of the homes of studio heads or post death threats to their social media.

And when @Slate shared a tweet about clickbait headlines on Facebook, they were instantly called out for their own use of clickbait headlines by other Twitter users.

Oh look, someone even wrote an internet piece a few years ago about how Slate.com posts clickbait headlines. https://www.somethingawful.com/news/slate-clickbait-headlines/

I say the Black Widow article is also another misleading headline. While the subtitle "It reminded me why big screens and superheroes go so well together" is lifted from Stevens' article, the main title "Black Widow is a thrilling remedy for sexism" is not. But that headline will have you believe that Dana Stevens is "reminded" that superheroes and big screens go well together directly because the movie is a "thrilling remedy for sexism." That's misleading. Stevens didn't exactly say that. And that's two in a row for that website. It seems to me that Slate has a practice of titling its articles with misleading headlines in order to get more views. Nothing will get you more hits than throwing "sexism" or "disaster" in your headline.

The review article you posted points to my previous posts how public opinion on movies can be unjustly manipulated by critics swarming a movie and the flawed RT aggregator. The Dana Stevens Slate article points to another cultural manipulator that's even out of the journalist's hands, that the final editor of the article might title the review with a sensationalist yet misleading headline in order to get more views on the article, and thus more ad revenue from that article.

If somebody tells me something I want to taste tastes like poop, I prefer to taste it myself before I conclude that it is either poop or a delightful pu pu platter.

Nothing goes over my head. Except like birds and airplanes.

Journalists rarely write their own headlines. The headline creation is done in the editing and finishing process before it goes to print or the internet. Nothing in Dana Stevens' Slate review above speaks to the really negative tone of her review's headline. She doesn't call the movie a disaster. She says it's "one of the weakest MCU movies" and is "meandering" and "sluggish." Well, Chloe Zhao kinda makes meandering movies. The Rider and Nomadland aren't particularly notable for their super tight narrative. Here are the review portions of her Eternals review article: "However you may feel about the place superhero blockbusters have occupied in the cultural landscape for the past dozen-plus years, there is something ineluctably sad about the way directing one has become the primary marker of success for a gifted emerging filmmaker. Distinguish yourself in your field, as Chloé Zhao did when she won the Best Director and Best Picture Oscars last year for her contemplative indie road movie Nomadland, and you are ceremoniously handed the keys to the Marvel car—a gigantic CGI-enhanced vehicle that can navigate black holes and shoot rays of plasma out of its headlights, but that always moves in the same direction to arrive at the same predetermined spot. That’s not to say that Zhao’s Eternals doesn’t feel different from the average Marvel offering. This is a movie with a prominently featured gay male relationship, a (PG-13–rated) sex scene between two other major characters, the first deaf superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Lauren Ridloff’s Makkari), and the most diverse cast of superbeings the franchise has yet offered. Eternals is as sociologically inclusive and as pictorially beautiful as any movie in the franchise, with scene after scene bathed in the warm light of Zhao’s favorite time of day, the pre-dusk “golden hour.” But it’s also one of the weakest Marvel movies I’ve seen, meandering and wan. It takes place over a vast timespan in locations all over the globe (and the galaxy), yet it has the curiously claustrophobic feel of a Saturday afternoon serial filmed entirely in a windowless studio. ..... The film, scripted by Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, and Ryan and Kaz Firpo, weaves plenty of jokes in with long stretches of intergalactic hocus pocus and equally long action set pieces. But the parts only sporadically cohere into anything like a whole. Zhao, a director whose previous three films have all centered on the everyday lives of working-class rural outsiders, seems ill-suited to a movie of this scale and frankly uninterested in the fight scenes. Perhaps this movie’s sluggish pace, what I can only describe as a lack of narrative muscle tone, can be attributed to the lack of a single identifiable villain. Instead of the Avengers saga’s mauve meanie Thanos, whose staunch belief in the rightness of his must-destroy-half-the-universe mission made him an actual character with a comprehensible if horrifying motivation, all we get here are sad ropy CGI dogs with no apparent goals beyond the desire to destroy the Eternals. A scene where Phastos, standing in the ruins of Hiroshima, berates himself for allowing his technological advances to make way for the Atomic Age feels in questionable taste when the movie’s ultimate conflict takes place not in the crucible of the human soul but in a landscape overrun by animated superbeasts. Eternals’ cinematography incorporates a little more natural light and open landscape than your average Marvel joint, but the demands of a $200 million corporate enterprise ultimately prevail over any aspirations to auteurship. That’s OK—a filmmaker of Zhao’s gifts has earned the right to try her hand at what, like it or not, is one of the dominant genres of the 21st century. She has also earned the right to make a bad movie, shrug it off and move on. Whatever world she decides to build next, I hope its heroes are significantly less super."

This is how much more image you're seeing in IMAX versus standard movie theater screens, much less a TV screen at home. Apparently an hour of the movie's two and a half hours was shot with IMAX cameras.

But...but...this other critic below gave Eternals a glowing review! See what happens when you cherry pick articles?

For one thing, you're getting 40% more image on an IMAX screen. Seeing it in IMAX is actually even a different experience than seeing it on a standard movie screen. I've felt this way about pretty much every movie I've seen on IMAX especially most recently Avengers Endgame and Shang Chi. I'll probably give Dune another look at the IMAX. I'm definitely going to go see Eternals in IMAX.

Actually I think it's argued, outside of the classic Lee-Kirby-Ditko years, that 1981 was Marvel Comics' peak year. 1981 gave us Chris Claremont and John Byrne's Days of Future Past storyline in X-Men, arguably the greatest Marvel Comics story of all time, again, outside the Stan Lee years. 1981 also gave us Frank Miller's Elektra Saga in Daredevil, David Michelinie and Bob Layton's Iron Man run (arguably the best Iron Man stories), the Bill Mantlo-Sal Buscema Incredible Hulk, the beginning of John Byrne's classic Fantastic Four run, the classic Michelinie and Romita Jr. Amazing Spider-Man run, the introduction of Rogue, Doug Moench and Bill Sienkewicz's early Moon Knight run, and others. It's stories from this year that we've probably seen the most turned into movies. Similarly, 1986 is probably DC's peak year.

What are you talking about? Are you referring to the movie? Annette Bening played the role of Mar-Vell, a Marvel Comics character who has been dead and irrelevant since 1982.

Even though a lot of folks here seem to think Disney is the root of all evil, I wouldn't exactly blame Marvel Studios for turning the poor innocent critics into trained monkeys. First of all, it's the nature of Western civilization to want to put everything in its little compartment and keep it there. We've been taught that since grade school. And critics have been shoehorning films since the dawn of film criticism. Look at Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film Vertigo. It was a bit of a more psychological departure for Hitchcock and critics didn't know what to make of it so rather than try to understand it, they just blasted it with poor reviews which helped kill it at the box office. Now it's considered the greatest film of all time. Nowadays, any "blockbuster" movie try to get out of its action smaction lane and try and be weird or different and the cultural gatekeeping critics will be there to put it in its place. And then you gotta get through the Rotten Tomatoes filter, the final cultural arbiter of what's worth seeing and what's not.

And I'm saying RT itself can be an active manipulator of the final RT score as its criteria for giving a review a rotten or fresh designation seems to be all over the place. For instance, the LA Times Justin Chang Eternals review is actually generally positive despite the headline, but RT designated the review rotten. I bring this up now because after reading some Eternals reviews on RT, some "negative" reviews of the film seem to be based more on what critics expect from either a Chloe Zhao movie or a MCU movie rather than some weird out-of-the-box hybrid, as if critics seem to not know what to make of comic book movies that look and act like an indie movie. Case in point, Joker's own 68% RT score.

I stopped trusting Rotten Tomatoes when I realized the flaws in their aggregation model going back to Lone Ranger, I believe. While not a great movie by any means, was it deserving of a 30% RT score? Shouldn't it get points for its all-out weirdness instead of being skewered for it? I realized two things while studying the reviews for this particular movie. First, national media critics seem to unionize and pile on in some cases, as if they all got the same briefing that morning. If a hyped movie starts getting some bad reputation during production or something, it's as if the critics smell blood in the water and attack like a swarm. This gets reflected in an overall poor review if you group all these seemingly biased reviews into one score, as opposed to actually reading a few reviews by critics you know and trust. This seemed to happen in the case of Lone Ranger. The mass of reviews just seemed like a relentless attack on a movie that didn't fit inside a particular box. Second, Rotten Tomatoes itself can be biased in the way it gives a certain review a fresh or rotten designation. I remember reading a Lone Ranger review that was generally positive yet Rotten Tomatoes gave the review a "rotten" designation, negatively impacting the final score which is what people generally look at as opposed to actually reading the reviews. I've never trusted Rotten Tomatoes since Lone Ranger. I have a few critics I pay attention to but mostly I make up my own mind whether a film is good or bad, and I let other factors decide whether I'm going to see the movie in the first place. Rotten Tomatoes is a flawed review aggregator that unfortunately the world has given too much power over the movie industry. A rotten or fresh designation from RT can sometimes decide the fate of a movie, and there's something wrong with that.

Brie Larson was and is great casting for Carol Danvers. When RDJ was cast as Tony Stark, there was a kind of kismet to it. Here was a guy who not only kinda resembled Stark, but also had his own battle with personal demons that the comic book character dealt with. Brie Larson could similarly relate to her comic book counterpart. Carol Danvers was created by Roy Thomas in 1969 as a kind of pre-feminist supporting character, a woman in a man's world. As Ms. Marvel, she became not only Marvel's answer to TV's Wonder Woman, but also to the feminist movement of the late 70's. Ms. Larson herself is an outspoken feminist and an early leader of the #MeToo movement. In an Avengers comics storyline, Danvers was infamously kidnapped, raped, and impregnated by a distant interdimensional variant of Kang. Larson won a Best Actress Oscar for playing a woman who is kidnapped, raped, and impregnated by her abductor. Brie Larson brought charm, funny, spunk, and a kind of improvisational naturalism to the role of Carol Danvers. I'm not sure another actor like the glum yet fan-favorite Emily Blunt would have brought that same spirit and charm. While Ms. Blunt nails intensity and grit in Edge of Tomorrow, she was bland boring and stiff in Mary Poppins 2. You can say Larson was bland and boring in CM all day, but she wasn't. The filmmakers for sure had a low-key subtle approach to the way they told their story (as opposed to over the top storytelling), and Larson played her role to fit that approach perfectly.

The plots of MCU movies might be formulaic, cookie cutter, cut and paste, or whatever term is getting used in the latest tweet from said filmmaker or actor, but the plots aren't why the MCU is king of the mountain. While story quality varies from movie to movie, the secret of the MCU's success is great casting and memorable CHARACTERS. The MCU is character driven, not plot driven. Marvel has done a great job of picking the right actors for its movies, then picking the right creative team to create memorable characters for its universe. The plot of the first Iron Man movie is kind of forgettable, but RDJ as Tony Stark is unforgettable. That's what makes the ensemble Avengers movies so fun, seeing all these memorable fun characters interact in one movie together.

Joker got a 59 Metacritic score. Jus' sayin'.

These dudes make up a handful of people who saw particular MCU films in order to get attention or get in Guiness. The "fanatical MCU cult" doesn't go see these movies 100+ times. If the movie is good, yeah, it'll get multiple views by fans. It it's not that great, like Black Widow, then it won't. Where was this "fanatical cult" for Ant-Man and the Wasp when the two Avengers films that sandwiched it made billions? Maybe they're not that "fanatical." Yes, the MCU has a fan base that shows up at marathon viewings etc., but how is this any different from diehard Star Wars fans? Like Star Wars, the MCU has a diehard fan base because Marvel Studios has created a movie universe that's kind of awesome. This doesn't make the MCU fans "fanatical." At least they don't protest at the houses of Studio heads and send them death threats.

Watched Dune Part One on HBO Max. I liked it. I certainly wasn't bored with it like I was with Blade Runner 2049, though I can dig slower more thoughtful muted filmmaking that Villeneuve employs in his movies. Villeneuve has mastered the art of Ridley Scott. I do have concerns when it comes to folks watching this movie who have no patience for slow quiet filmmaking in this age of louder faster action flicks. And also concerning folks who don't realize this movie is a Part One. I've already heard more than one complaint about that. I'm a kinda fan of David Lynch's Dune, though I'm not sure which cut I like best. Denis Villeneuve's Dune is definitely a different movie, though some scenes are verbatim (obviously they're from the same book source). Lynch's Dune seemed to focus more on the Zen martial arts aspect of the story, with its focus on Paul's sound powers and constant practice. It also felt more like a sci-fi movie with its elaborate cramped ornate art direction. This modern Dune seemed to focus more on the environmental and colonialism aspect of the source material. The historical concept of Western powers invading the Middle East for their oil very much felt like a metaphor in this movie. It also felt more Earth-bound with lots of "terran" art direction elements like palm trees and bullfighting images. Villeneuve's Dune was more spare in its decoration which I suppose played into the visual theme of Arakis's wide open spaces. There were small touches in Villeneuve's Dune that I appreciated, like Paul and Lady Jessica actually doing the Fremen shuffle as they walked across the Arrakis sands, and continuing it throughout their desert trek. I felt the prescience ability of Paul was overdone visually and narratively to the point that it seemed to take away a bit from the character's journey of discovery. Even with the film's muted colors and dim lighting, Dune would be a sight to see in IMAX.

The upcoming Willy Wonka movie trumps this whole debate IMO. But whatever. Fine, Timothay's a good actor. When he becomes an A-list actor whose non-blockbuster movies draw millions at the box office just because of his name, when he's a usual suspect in the Best Actor Oscars list every other year, and when he's so big he gets millions of people to pay attention to social causes they might otherwise ignore, then maybe we can start drawing comparisons. Until then, he's just another actor.

So far, MCU storylines post-Endgame like WandaVision Loki and even Shang-Chi seem to be driven by the Multiverse and Multiversal energy ie chaos magic. I bet if the MCU is indeed developing some kind of World War Hulk story, that the multi-dimensional elements of Immortal Hulk will find its way into the -script. With the Immortal Hulk idea that gamma beings enter and exit our universe through a "green door", this could be a driving story element for an out of control unstoppable Hulk.