Are Marvel Movies Cinema?

So what exactly is art to you? Is my avatar art or is it invalid because it's how I see myself?

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Ami-Scythe

Not invalid in any way. It all goes on the honesty you put on seeing yourself and how you manage to express that, will either make me see myself in your honest image, something I realize I also have and never thought about, or actually thought about and never knew how to express it, or didn't even wanted to express it for various reasons, didn't want to conceive that image of myself, it takes courage, or it can make me see something different that I never saw before. I talk about honesty, because if it's not honest, people will tell, and that honesty, I believe, comes on realizing you already lost, we all did, so there's nothing else to really lose, and you can fell liberated and see beauty, or the opposite. Honesty is difficult, is really difficult, true honesty. By honesty, for me, I mean, see beyond the mask, the persona.

So is it invalid because it's an opinion or because it's not honest? I don't know if you've seen my channel but I'm pretty sure Shinizou is all the parts of me I usually keep hidden away. While others typically make up a personality for the internet, the internet gives me the voice I don't have in real life. But that's not necessarily the thing that baffles me. It's the amazing works that people have done in cinema that's being disregarded because apparently art and entertainment can't be the same thing? And if it has any opinions in it it's invalid? That's a really insane claim so I just really want to understand what it is you're trying to say. Every artist's work is unique because their art is a direct passage to who they are. You can learn just about everything based on what people decide to create. So in other words, every other work of art has a shard of opinion or perspective in it. We are all alone in in our minds and art is a reflection of that. You're saying that almost all art isn't art because it entails a unique perspective of some kind and that is honestly insulting.

Yes, I've seen your channel, not really very deep, but I've seen some of the videos. I agree with a philosopher, well, he didn't call himself that, that's what a artist normally does, the same thing with a master, he never calls himself master, other's call him that; anyway, he said, a great poet is not someone that writes great poems, is someone that managed to make his life a great poem. If I understand what you wrote, and I believe I did some parts, we are overall in the same tune. If you read some things of what I've being unpopularity saying in the off topic discussions, I believe everything is an opinion, so, I guess that answers it, the part about being honest is really an introspection, a self-judgement.

Er, if you care to look at what I replied to; 'it comes from an insecurity' & 'Scorsese and Spielberg and angered by the success of Marvel' that's a conjecture.

I don't know if that's true.

Hardly audio, I should have thought.

Course it isn't. Even during the golden age people had ideas about what cinema is (Andre Bazin wrote two volumes about that).

Marty's clearly wrong in a literal sense. I don't think there's much argument there. But we also know what he means, and it's obvious he's sort of exaggerating for effect, so I'm happy to say he's simply overstating things and then immediately move on to what he's clearly saying: that they're not art, that they're disposable, blah blah blah.

I don't really agree on that front, either. They're not works of high art as that term is commonly understood, but then, I think the ways we define high art are silly. I think people dramatically undervalue the difficulty and artistic potency of speaking to large numbers of disparate people, which can be a beautiful thing, even if doing so necessitates making something with less potential depth.

Re: opinions. "Everything's just an opinion" is one of those things that's mostly true, but also often just a cover for not being informed or not thinking a position through properly. As an abstract point about the nature of truth, sure, it matters, but it shouldn't be deployed to handwave away inconsistencies or opinions that don't seem to make sense.

It reminds me of the word diet. Everyone's on a diet - it's simply the consumption of food (or the restriction of such) and eating patterns of each individual whether it's a regular pattern or completely at random. There are controlled diets and uncontrolled diets, diets that focus on health or weight loss, or which only focus on sating an appetite or eating what tastes good even when one is not hungry. Some diets consist of binge eating and gluttony!

We know what you mean when you say you're on a diet, but everyone's on a diet even if they pay no attention to what they consume.

Is Marvel really operating at a lower level than the blockbuster medium as a whole though? Marty's comments seem to imply some significant shift which I don't think has happened.

I tend to think that actually their better work is towards the upper end of what blockbuster cinema has produced. Not sure they've created something as finely crafted as say Raiders of the Lost Ark but I would say in terms of characterisation and drama they above the typical standard we get.

Part of why I don't think the tone of his comment is very helpful is that it seems to have played into a lot of peoples views that cinemas worth is judged by its "edginess". That the problem with Marvel is down to these films being brightly coloured family blockbusters when honestly the Russo's films have more dramatic substance to them for me than Nolan's Batman ever did.

As far as Endgame goes I actually felt the first hour of that film was some of the best work Marvel has ever done and a good demonstration of why the main attraction of the films isn't CGI action but rather character interaction. Seeing these character actually dealing with there failure was I felt very effective indeed and the sense that Thanos's actions hadn't given rise to some bright new world, they'd infected society with a sense of loss that was corrosive.

Again I think the real issue would be more Disney's dominance of the market and lack of investment in cinema outside of blockbusters and of other studios trying desperately to copy Marvel with very limited success producing a lot of bad cinema.

Yeah, I think it's better than blockbuster stuff has been in a long time. There's this weird, backwards thing where the closer mainstream stuff comes to being thoughtful, the more it gets criticized for being thoughtful. The Nolan Batman films are a perfect example: they're clearly a lot smarter than a lot of blockbusters of the past, but I think they get more eye rolling on that front than those others. I think it's an aspirational thing: oh, they think they're more thoughtful (or are recognized as such), so however they're failing to life up to your art house fare is magnified and amplified.

I mean I can see the reason for some of it with Nolan films as you do get some rather caustic fans holding them up as the ultimate example of quality cinema. That said though I think there is a certain condescension that often sets in when pop culture attempts dramatic or thematic depth.

I do have to say with Marty as well you look at his work after the early 80's and really much of it is very much on the entertainment side. Something like Goodfellas is a very well made him but really is there much depth to it? not for me, its mostly about an entertaining expose of gangsters lives.

I would totally agree with you not that long ago. I would be mad when people made a point about things that didn't had anything to do with another, one was, what I believed, a fact, and the other, one opinion, so I diminished the value of opinions in a way. I believed the fact was completely irrefutable, so I had the truth in my pocket, the few couldn't argue against something the many agreed to be a fact, many things became a convention, like we all know the earth is flat, and a man with the truth in his pocket is the most dangerous man on Earth. I would be mad when I was discussing movies with friends and they would say they didn't saw, let's assume, Taxi Driver and then talk about Hunger Games calling it one of the best movies made in the 21st century, and any argument I tried to make would end up with: this is my opinion and it's all about opinions. That would make me mad. Everything changed when I got into philosophy, eastern religions and science in general. In a way, I shaped them to fit the image I wanted, but at least I know that, I don't think they are any truth. I make my picture, and I share it, and that picture is not done, but it would need much more than facts to change it, because, the creator is more important, the who and why, that's why I don't give any importance to television information, because I don't trust the who and I know the why, at least I think I know. This is not something you haven't already heard before, not sure why I'm saying it again, not to make any arguing.

Yeah, I mentioned this a couple months back, but this, I think, is what's really going on: people stop talking about the films and start talking about the people talking about the films. So people try to "balance" other people's over-effusiveness by saying something is bad. I first recall seeing it with The Matrix, which is a great, moderately smart film, which got a lot of flack not because it was bad or mindless, but because a lot of teenagers used it as an intro to philosophy and others saw it, consciously or otherwise, as their job to average that out by dumping on it, I guess.

Yeah, definitely, the mere attempt opens them up to more criticism than much less thoughtful films, which seems like a bad thing to encourage. I think there's as much stupid stuff as ever out there, but I also think moderately intelligent things are making tons of money now, at least sometimes.

To the degree the subjectivity of opinions is used to humble us, it is a good notion. To the degree we use it to be intellectually lazy, or absolve of us having to be informed or thoughtful, it is not. It's all in how you use it.

I would try and limit any negative comment more to situations were such people were actually present rather than disliking someone like Nolan as a whole. I mean I wouldn't personally say he's made a truly great piece of cinema but pretty much everything he's done has been of good quality.

Again there are definitely issues with cinema that you could argue Marvel's success plays into less directly but in terms of the films themselves? I think their(and Pixar's) success in recent years especially has been a welcome return to people actually valuing quality blockbusters over the cynical dross that's been put out by a lot of other studios. That is definitely one benefit of the net age, its become much harder to polish a turd in the fashion Hollywood had become incredible successful at in the 90's and early 00's.

Yeah, Pixar is a really good example to throw into this mix. Even though that's not what comes to mind when we think of blockbusters, perhaps, I think it shows the way quality has mostly gone up in a lot of highly successful films.

Okay. I think everything is around how we see the world. Doing it intellectually, that's the same as saying scientifically, science being a method of description, an art of definition, of getting things to be black and white, getting the unknown, the wiggly into patterns, regularity, known and controlled things. The term fact, intellectual and science are very interlinked. I'm not bond to follow it as an absolute truth, I would be very hard, not flexible, not open, because, even science contradicts itself everyday, something they considered a fact, something that is common sense, is later proven wrong, some of the biggest scientific discoveries were made that way. There is nothing infallible and when there is something deeply rooted, a convention, you should start wondering about it. I don't know anything, I don't have certainty about anything, don't even about death, because I only know death as an anticipation of something I saw in other people. What I'm trying to say, is, there are various forms of understanding things. About being informed, you already know my opinion on information.

True uncertainty/skepticism is self-refuting, since it must be applied even to itself, which is functionally impossible. But as for the inherent subjectivity of things, you ought to be able to see that my replies are already accepting that premise, but then move past that into an observation about how we incorporate that into what we think and say.

So, my previous response seems like the best response to this, again: if what you're saying is used in the service of humility, it's great. If it's used to avoid being thoughtful or informed, it's bad.

This is literally the most interesting, intellectual and philosophical conversation ever to have risen from anything connected with Marvel movies.

of course its cinema what else it would be i wonder..

Mind control, that's what Marvel movies are about. There an insidious plot to rewire millennial brains so that they become mass consumers of big business products. Thus taking away their finer sense of taste, which then removes their desire for choice. This is the first step in a conglomerate Big Brother type government....where the evil empire aka: the magical monopoly of Disney terrorizes everyone with though-control police donning Mickey Mouse mask and whirling blackjacks made out of bubble gum.