sycasey 2.0

My thought is if they'd done a movie focusing on Black Widow and Hawkeye, then Whedon wouldn't have felt the need to add extra scenes in Age of Ultron to flesh them out. It might have also helped that movie become more streamlined.

I think that first Cap movie keeps improving the more you go back to it. I didn't love it right away, but every time I go back I gain appreciation (plus IMO that one has the most heartfelt and believable love story in the MCU, which I put down to Hayley Atwell being terrific all the time). I also have a very anecdotal sense that most people remember that one more fondly than Thor these days, even if the latter made more money at the time (I think Cap wasn't advertised too well for overseas markets). But yeah, in both movies they give you a sense of how the lead character was "originally" and then change up their circumstances (Steve goes from scrawny to strong, Thor goes from Asgard to Earth) to show how they learn to be a hero. Captain Marvel seems to be trying something different, but the structure of the story seems disjointed to me. Memento has that structure because it's building to a thematic point about how the biggest lies we tell are to ourselves. A complicated and twisty structure seems to fit that kind of theme. A Marvel movie like this is usually just trying to deliver a more straightforward message about "be a hero!" or "appreciate your friends!" . . . which can be great, but I don't know that being mysterious about it actually helps deliver that kind of message. For me, I think the overt "Girl Power!" message of the movie would have landed more strongly if I'd just seen a linear progression of Carol being overprotected as a young girl, then doubted as an Air Force recruit because of her sex, then gaining super powers but held back by an alien who claims to be helping her, to breaking out of all of that and becoming the powerful being she always could have been. But doing it that way maybe doesn't give them the chance to put Young Nick Fury in long stretches of the movie or have more appearances from the alien bad guys in Guardians and so forth. I suspect some of the needs of the larger Marvel machine got in the way here.

I think there were contractual issues that had to be ironed out re: Scarlett Johansson actually headlining a movie as Black Widow (you'd have to pay her more if she's the lead in one movie versus being a key supporting character across several movies). On some level that makes sense and on another level it seems like a lame cop-out when the MCU is raking in gobs of cash anyway, even for movies with talking raccoons and stuff. Just pay her; you'll make that money back and then some.

I also think Get Out set some high expectations here, because he walked that tightrope so well in that movie, giving the scientific explanation but in a way that didn't submarine the larger implications of the core theme (playing the cheesy old-school video with Chris strapped to the chair was a kind of ingenious way of delivering it). Us is a bit wonkier about this piece, IMO. Anyway, the movie doesn't suck or anything -- it's well worth seeing. I think Peele did show a lot of growth as a visual director, so that still has me excited for his future as a filmmaker.

To add to the above, I think that's how the movie comes across to me, like it's just getting at the idea of having a strong woman hero (with montages and iconography and stuff) and not actually giving us the full character. I really wanted more of those smaller character moments to help flesh her out.

That's why I tried to add the qualifier of "many cases." Of course I can't speak for everyone. But reading that back it does sound a bit presumptuous, so I apologize for that. I'm just trying to work out why this movie isn't doing it for me.

Though the issue with that is that the explanation for the Tethered's existence is that they were CREATED by humans, so it's not a case where humans were the invading force like Europeans coming to America. This is why I think the class critique is muddy. Peele might have been better off not explaining their origins at all, just leaving it as some kind of vague supernatural thing. Or if he is going to do that, I would have liked to see a bit more of how the Tethered lived, what kind of society they had below the surface, etc. For me, the reading that works best is on a personal level: it's about our personal demons, the "shadow person" you don't want to let anyone else see but that sometimes shows up anyway. I also think the sci-fi origins make that reading difficult, but if I had to pinpoint a core idea then I think that's it.

That montage was nice, but unfortunately I had lost connection with the character long before that, so it didn't land like they probably wanted it to. My feeling is that the traditional brand of storytelling becomes traditional for a reason (it works), and if you're going to break it there needs to be a really good reason and a really good understanding of why you're breaking it. I didn't think it was clear in this movie. To me it seemed like they were doing it just to maintain a mystery about the character and her powers, even though everyone who has been watching the Avengers movies knows that she's going to have to be revealed as super-powerful eventually. Anyway, I think in many cases people are emotionally connecting with the very idea of a woman superhero becoming powerful, so I don't want to rain on people's parades there. I do like that idea. I just wish it had been done better this time.

I have trouble with this, because of how the Tethered are presented. It seems to me that they are essentially the monsters in the story, the remorseless killing machines. If the movie is about class struggle, is that how Peele views the American underclass? I kind of doubt that's the point he was trying to make. The only one of the Tethered who can actively speak and communicate is one who was actually from the surface. Now, it is interesting that both versions of Adelaide are clearly capable of speech, so that does suggest the movie is making some distinction of nature vs. nurture, showing that it's possible for one of the Tethered to learn to act like a surface person. I'm still not comfortable with how the rest of the Tethered are characterized, though, which is why I don't think the movie's class critique holds up all that well.

So thematically, what do people think this movie is actually ABOUT? Do you buy the idea that it's a class critique? That it's about America's underclass (be it racial, socioeconomic, whatever) giving the privileged a little what-for? I ask, because that seems to be the most common critical interpretation, but I think the reveals at the end kind of hurt that reading (when you learn that the only reason anything went wrong was because Shadow Adelaide got out in the first place).

For me, I see flashes of that in the movie, but it doesn't gel into a fully-coherent arc. Like, I'm not sure why they can't just tell Carol's backstory as a linear plot. I was interested in the brief scenes of her as a child at the racetrack, her in boot camp, etc., but they were just too brief. For most of the movie she's in that "held back" mode (but already basically established as a super-powered being), which IMO hurts the emotional connection. I would compare this to the first Captain America: in that movie we first get Steve Rogers as a scrawny weakling, but the core of the character is there. We see him standing up to a bully, taking a beating because he's physically weak, but continuing to stand up just the same. Trying over and over to enlist so he can stop the Nazis. That human core carries through after he becomes super-strong, but you connected to him as a regular guy before he became the powered guy. I'd say that Wonder Woman pulls the same trick, only in a different way: she is always superhuman, but the movie begins with her among the other Amazons, so by comparison she's just like the rest . . . you can connect with her as a real character before she has to fight the big bad guy. I was missing that in Captain Marvel. It feels to me like this movie is trying to do a whole lot more (showing us what SHIELD was like in the 90s, connecting to the other Marvel cosmic characters, setting up the next Avengers movie, etc.) and loses track of the core character arc. I'm glad it did well (I mean, all the Marvel movies do well so I wasn't that worried), but I hope for the next one they course-correct like they did with Thor: Ragnarok and give us a better showcase for Carol.

Captain America is much better as a pure character introduction, IMO. They nail the character's ethos and give him a real human backstory that you can feel. I think this one gets the "ethos" okay, but the human character remains muddy. I would say this is similar to Thor in that respect, but also IMO they didn't really nail that character until Ragnarok. I also think Guardians of the Galaxy is an amazing introduction to a whole host of characters. I think this has actually been Marvel's strength throughout their current run (doing good introductions to the primary characters), which is why I found this one disappointing. I'm not disappointed that it did well at the box office, but I am disappointed that I didn't "feel" it like the other ones . . . and believe me, I wanted to.

To me it's about trying to look outside myself. Does this movie carry currency outside of my personal tastes and aesthetic preferences? If I can identify a lot of influence on other artists, then clearly it does. To me this kind of thing is important when judging an "All Time" list.

Waking Life is on of my faves, but it's way too much of an esoteric cult item to make the AFI list. I think it's as I mentioned above: most animation is expensive and requires a very large crew. There's a high barrier to entry, more than for live action. That's why you see so much of the interesting experimental work happening in short films (which are also very unlikely to make the AFI list).

Soon we will be one shared collective mind. Resistance is futile.

One more possibility would be The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's not one of my personal favorites, but boy do I know a lot of people who love it.

I do put this down to The Dark Knight more than WALL-E, but it's true that both were in the conversation.

Right, most of those studios have made some good movies and all, but hard to claim anything as an all-time great (and of course Don Bluth was a Disney guy who left and made his own Disney-style films). I might make an argument for The Iron Giant or maybe the South Park movie, but it's not a super-strong argument. Brad Bird later became part of Pixar, and South Park is mostly known as a TV show. Animation is expensive and requires a large team, so it makes sense that a couple of major studios would siphon up all the talent for feature films.

I think part of the issue is that as far as feature-length animation goes, I'm not sure what other American studio besides Disney or Pixar I would consider historically important enough to honor. The Warner Bros characters are culturally important, but they are known for shorts and not features (sorry 90s kids, but I don't think Space Jam has much chance). The other great animation studios tend to be overseas (Ghibli, Aardman), or are more TV-centric. I mean, personally I do consider WALL-E the best Pixar movie, but it is also one of Pixar's lowest grossing and didn't win any more awards than the usual Pixar entry. It will take a while for the reputation of that one to rise enough to be "listworthy" to the average AFI voter (if it ever gets there).

It does seem like most of the filmmakers' energy went into making the animation as great as possible. And indeed, even today it's a pretty dazzling piece of animation. Beautiful colors, creative designs, etc. They definitely succeeded on that level, which probably set the table for the future of Disney as the dominant animation studio in America. Given that, the story sometimes feels a little wonky and jerry-rigged. Not to a completely baffling degree (it's not, say, Van Helsing), but I think the storytelling did get more polished after this. Sometimes Snow White feels like almost as much an anthology movie as Fantasia, in that all the characters except for Snow White herself seem to live in their own separate movies and rarely intersect or even alter the main character's arc.

Oh, I'm just nitpicking this thing like it's an HDTGM movie. It's not a big deal.

I mean, yes, the witch is crafty. But still . . . Grumpy JUST told her. She's only in this house because she found out someone was trying to kill her. You'd expect a little more caution in that scenario.

And later he tells Snow White not to let anyone in the house and then she . . . lets a strange woman in the house.

The other thing is that there isn't really a "debate." I mean, maybe there is for the list of nominees (which is very extensive), but for the final list it's just individual people voting. Those votes are then combined to form a Top 100 list, which represents a kind of consensus. No one is going to be happy with every part of the consensus To that end, Snow White is not my favorite of Disney animation, but I'm comfortable with it being here. It was a true cinematic landmark and massively influential on everything in its wake. Even to this day, the animation is stunning, even more impressive given that no one knew how to make a movie like this at the time. I can support its inclusion, even if (IMO) the story is a little bit disjointed as compared to subsequent Disney efforts and the moral lessons are a little bit wonky by modern standards (that part you can apply to just about all of Classic Disney).

I can't believe I forgot about Surly!