The vast majority of people seem to prefer Avengers 17 over any cinematic masterpiece, the latest drake song would be better rated than a Tchaikovsky... We should let them play and worship chat gpt if that's what they want to waste their time on
I don't understand the logic of calling superhero movies lesser/unserious like this, it's very snobby. Movies and music are made to be entertaining, the avengers is more entertaining than your "arthouse cinematic masterpiece that nobody likes but it's just because they aren't smart enough to understand it". It's also lazy and ignorant to ignore the sheer manpower that goes into making a movie like that.
I don’t fully agree with putting down “fun” movies like the Avengers, but at the same time “serious” art is not primarily for plain entertainment.
People might find “serious” art meaningful and it might spark feelings in them, but that’s not the same as getting an adrenaline rush from exploding cars in an action scene.
Of course there are also cases where the boundary between “fun” and “serious art” is not so clear, there are always exceptions to any attempt to define what makes something “serious art”. Art can also be subversive and run counter to traditional expectations of what art “should” be. But I don’t think the Avengers is an example of that.
Movies, music, wiriting, all human arts, are made to make their audience feel something. "Entertaining" is only a small and honestly ill-defined subset of this, no more valid than any other approach.
I don't think analyzing the black square or Ulysses, or Arnold Schönberg's works (just random examples, I could go on and on) in terms of if and what they make you feel is an ill fated course of action. It's also not what people actually do.
On the other hand a lot of other stuff can be broadly analyzed in terms of making people feel something. Painkillers, excuses, hugs, titles.
So it seems your generalization is neither necessary nor sufficient for "human arts".
> your "arthouse cinematic masterpiece that nobody likes
You're reading way too much into my comment. Any block buster from the 80/90s absolutely shits on 90% of block busters released today. I'm not talking about obscure 1950s czechoslovak cinema here...
> ignore the sheet manpower that goes into making a movie like that.
A lot of work doesn't make something good, especially when cgi quality actually gets worse year after year. FYI the entire LOTR trilogy had 30% less budget and 4x the runtime of the last avenger movie... And they actually filmed things outside of a Hollywood studio
The only lazy thing here are the scenarists and the directors shitting out the blandest movies ever.
But then again if all we care about is raw entertainment then sure, it's perfect, very easy to digest, lots of colors and not too much to think about, the cinematic equivalent of fast food. You can even buy avengers branded toilet paper and bottle water, that really shows how much they care about movies!
Well said. There's tons of blockbusters and other popular movies from the 80s/90s that were absolutely made for the "masses", but were genuinely great films, and far better than almost any blockbuster from the last 5-10 years, especially all the comic-book stuff. Alien(s), Back to the Future trilogy, Terminator 1/2, Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, I could go on and on. And of course the LotR trilogy if you look at the early 2000s. Movies just aren't as innovative or risky these days; something as quirky as Ghostbusters wouldn't be made now (but Hollywood is happy to make remakes and sequels of that franchise now, 40 years later).
Film is such a nascent art form. The 90s as “peak blockbuster action” is a valid stance on taste but hard to defend as superior to all that came after. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight is leagues aways from the 90s Batman, as an auteur friendly and obvious comparison. Pixar another on the animation front.
There have been great films made in every era, but the trend towards tighter writing, more legible and compelling action, and emotionally impactful story telling is strongly trending upwards overall.
And nothing will ever top the merchandising mania of the 80s!
I hope you're referring to Joel Schumacher's kitschy drivel, and not to Tim Burton's masterpieces (both of which are IMO vastly superior to Nolan's take on the subject).
It would be nice if people actually stated why is x better than y rather than expecting everyone to hold the same opinion as them. Makes for better conversations.
I don't get why people having this narrowminded view of literature/movies, you don't see it that much in culinary conversations
In a culinary conversation nobody is trying to make the case that the chicken mcnugget is objectively superior to fresh pasta in a handmade pesto sauce. So you don't need to tell people "please just go away with this mcnugget nonsense". You wouldn't be expected to explain why one is better than the other. Most people that taste food understand immediately what you mean.
This reminded me so much of Spaceballs! And the yogurt merchandise towards the end! Such a great movie that has so many obvious "flaws" like the mirror under the speeder on the desert planet when they comb the desert. And yet I've actually watched that movie more often than even the actual real Star Wars movies (meaning the first three made - all of which are timeless awesomeness)
> Any block buster from the 80/90s absolutely shits on 90% of block busters released today
You sure it's not survival bias, as in, you only are thinking and remembering the good ones over a two-decade period and comparing them against what movies came out this year. When in reality, there might be tons of blockbusters in those era that were just as bad as your average one today?
what a ridiculous comparison. Of course a superhero movie is more entertaining than a film that is explicitly designed to avoid mass appeal.
The nuance is that movies today is not where the most creative talent is directed anymore. The shift started with prestige TV taking off in the 2000s, and episodic content on streaming services surpassing film as a mass-market artform in the 2010s, with the pandemic driving the nail in the coffin.
I loved the late 2000s / early 2010s superhero movies. Spiderman, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, etc. These were great films. Today, the MCU is just eating its own tail with the most bland, repetitive crap. It's all designed to incentivize the same die hard fans to keep forking over their hard-earned cash with all the cross-film teasers and the need to watch every film to understand all the references and moving parts. I understand the business model—it's actually the same as comic books now—because people don't casually go in to see random movies anymore, they do that at home on Netflix, so they have to target the repeat viewers. It's visually impressive, and the acting is good enough to keep a relatively large subset of the population coming back, but for someone like me who wants at least a little bit of novelty or creativity in the plot or characters, it's just so become so mind-bogglingly boring.
Sheer manpower doesn't make it good. You should have just made a point about entertainment, which it definitely does provide. A case can be made that this was the only thing they were going for. You would have had a good point. Implying that just because a lot of people did a thing together that means it has merit is kind of a strange thing to say. It's definitely not self-evident and you make no attempt to elaborate on it.
In your opinion, perhaps. Other films are made to be provocative-- to make you think or reflect. Certainly, a lot of the "arthouse cinematic masterpieces" aim for that as a goal rather than purely entertainment.
You're arguing against a strawman here... nobody is saying making an avengers movie is low effort. Certain aspects of an avengers movie though require less effort.
There is more to art than entertainment. For example Oedipus Rex [1] - distinctly not entertaining; but art, and powerful in an incomparable way, anyway.
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[1] Don't look it up if you don't know what that is.
Oedipus Rex, also known by its Greek title, Oedipus Tyrannus (Ancient Greek: Οἰδίπους Τύραννος, pronounced [oidípuːs týrannos]), or Oedipus the King, is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles.
And I'm perfectly aware that you're trying, hard, to make some sarcastic point, but that's what everybody in the English-speaking world calls it. Or did you want to talk about it in Greek? I'm fine with that. After all, it was in Greek that I've watched it, as a child, here:
Did you think that I'm just name-dropping a Greek tragedy to appear erudite and culturrred? Again: I'm Greek. I grew up with that stuff. They even teach us some of it in school (Antigone, for one).
That's clearly your opinion; I can't speak to the motivations of whom you refer to as "the other guy" but I have zero interest in either attempting to troll you or in looking cool.
Uhm. Sorry to bother you with something totally off-topic.
I have an almost lifelong itch, which I couldn't successfully scratch so far.
It's about the meaning of this surename: Κούβελας
Usually it is transcribed in English as Kouvelas, in German as Kouwelas, and in French it can be Couvelas, and AFAIK it is pronounced something like Koo-well-as(s) in Greek.
Does it have any 'speaking'/describing meaning, like Miller, Carpenter, Fisher, Baker and so on, or is it something like 'from a place called this', maybe distorted over generations?
I only get nothing from sites like this https://forebears.io/surnames/kouvelas , and the few people with Greek heritage I knew couldn't tell me either, so far.
Movies and music are usually made to be entertaining, but sometimes they're made as an artistic outlet for the creator.
I was listening to Schoenberg's "Suite for Piano" the other day. Did he make it to be entertaining? I don't know, interesting maybe. I wouldn't put it on at a party.
It's true that snobbery is off-putting, but if you're looking for artistic merit, then some works last longer than others. If you're looking for something to enjoy with your popcorn, then there's that too.
