Dale Cooper Black

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what even is the canon anymore

It's probably worth noting that this was largely by necessity. Thanks to the truly epic shortsightedness of Marvel publisher Martin Goodman in the 1960s, the company still didn't have the film rights to its most notable characters when Marvel started their great cinematic experiment decades later. With the exception of Captain America (who was indeed a household name prior to the MCU), the company mostly had second- and third-tier characters to work with. (Most of their best characters were completely off-limits, and even the Hulk couldn't star in his own film without making a complicated deal with Universal.) But, yeah, it's true that the Marvel movies (unlike the comics) aren't 100% dependent on nostalgic 50-year-old boys. The MCU has managed to tap into the youth market in the same way that the Marvel Comics Group did during its heyday.

The Marvel cinematic universe has cranked out some very entertaining movies, and the studio deserves a lot of credit for figuring out how to scale Marvel's special brand of familial, secret-clubhouse vibe for a mass audience, but... The Avengers? Canon-worthy? Seriously? I hear the word "epic" (a quintessential Marvel word if ever there was one) being thrown around a lot regarding these movies, and it makes me chuckle to realize that an entire generation of adults has so completely bought into Stan Lee's hyperbolic horseshit. The infantilization of the general moviegoing audience (which started, arguably, with Star Wars) seems to be more or less complete. The Marvel movies, at best, comprise a loosely-connected soap opera, not an epic. It will be difficult to take seriously a Canon that includes an "epic" like the Avengers, but not a single film by Kurosawa, Fassbinder, David Lean, Sergio Leone, or DW Griffith. And anyway, if we do need the MCU to be represented in the Canon, Iron Man is as good a place to start as any.

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what is the past tense of "bing"??

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Post re-watch, this is a definite "yes" for me. Another Canonizer (is that a thing?) used the term "tone poem," and that pretty much sums it up. The clunky parts are still there, exactly as I remembered, but the beautiful parts are so absurdly, mysteriously beautiful that the clunky parts don't even matter. After the re-watch, I'm inclined to disagree that this movie would have been better with a different lead actor. It is precisely because of Sandler that this film A) exists and B ) works. For whatever reason, PTA decided to mine Happy Gilmore in search of emotional truths. I wouldn't say he hit paydirt, exactly, but the nuggets he found are certainly enough to sustain this movie. I mentioned Robert Altman elsewhere in this thread entirely at random, but there are some parallels between Altman and PTA that I only noticed after re-watching Punch Drunk Love (and hearing that song from Popeye again). Both directors specialize in making films that are wildly divergent from each other, and yet each of their films bears the unmistakable signature of its director. To push the comparison a little further, I would say that Punch Drunk Love is a cousin to Altman's The Long Goodbye. I don't think Elliott Gould was cast "against type" in The Long Goodbye so much as his "type" was transplanted into an entirely new context, thus adding depth to both the character and his new surroundings. I think the same is true of Sandler in Punch Drunk Love. Anyway, thanks to Amy & Emily & everyone on this board for a fascinating conversation.

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Maybe it's time to start putting a director's entire oeuvre up to a "yea or nay" vote. (Some of the homework assignments would be pretty intense, though--imagine watching every Robert Altman movie in a single week.)