Iron Man 2

[lydamorehouse]

Last night I got out to see IRON MAN 2 with my usual Marvel buddy, seanmmurphy. I know a lot of people are more lukewarm about this installment, but I enjoyed it tremendously. Of course, I'll say without spoiling that the cross-over-y bits were lovely, and I can only hope that this grand experiment Marvel seems to be up to actually works.

I have my doubts.

Thing is, I think they have a misunderstanding of movie-goers and Americans, in general. Like I told seanmmurphy last night, my agent speculated that one of the reasons Penguin was done with my Garnet Lacey series was because I'd committed the cardinal sin of marrying the two love interests. _Everyone knows_ you can no longer have fun, spark or excitment once you're in a committed relationship. I'd really hoped to prove them wrong. Because, for me, after twenty four years, I'm still head over heels, crazy in love. Every day is an adventure BECAUSE she's with me, BECAUSE of our history.

But the larger issue is that it has been established that romances are about "first blush," NEW love. American culture is very much about the new and improved. Throw out the old. Get the divorce and find the new, better, stronger, faster lover.

I think one of the reasons for that is because we don't have a lot of successful stories about romance between committed partners. The writers of the movie Titanic ignored one of the true life romances of that disaster (Mr. and Mrs. Strauss, an older couple, who stayed together and died together because they refused to be parted) and made up a more palatiable romance for American audiences (which was both forbidden -- by class -- and new and young.)

This relates to IRON MAN 2, how? Well, Marvel is expecting people to commit to characters. "Lost" and other serial TV shows have to give you the "previously, on 'Lost'..." bits because they know Americans audiences have etch-a-sketch brains. If it didn't just happen, they don't remember it. (By Americans, I mean, of course the general, average viewer. It is well established that fan brains are different. We have a legendary/notorious retention of storyline details and we are more comfortable with going with what's not familiar for a lot longer than the average reader/viewer.)

I don't know what that's going to be like, if, several years from now, they do success in making the Avengers movie. There's going to have to start being more than just a few hints and cameos.

And then there's going to be trouble.

Hollywood does NOT like ensemble casts. This to me is the reason for the relative failure of movies like THE FANTASTIC FOUR and SERENITY. It should be noted that I liked both movies, though I found them problematic. The problems centered around this issue. I think both tried too hard to fit the classic Hollywood mold and be about ONE character having ONE problem. The FF are a team AND a family. Their story needs to involve every character equally. Same was true of "Firefly" the TV show, which didn't translate well when they tried to make it mostly just about Captain tightpants/Mal.

So will Marvel be able to pull of an ensemble cast of big name actors all together on one screen? I don't know. I hope they can buck all the trends.

Comments

[kellymccullough.livejournal.com]

I think the problem of ensemble casts has more to do with length issues than it does Hollywood mindset, really. Two hours (60-120 pages depending on how much action you've got) is much more like long short story length than novel length or the series arcs you can do in comics. It's possible to do an ensemble short story, but it's very very hard.

[seawasp]

Lord of the Rings has an ensemble cast and did phenomenally well.

It's all a matter of how much time you're willing to (A) spend on each movie, and (B) spend on writing the script to BIND THE CHARACTERS TOGETHER.

The Fantastic Four movies were actually weak, in my opinion, for one reason only: for whatever ungodly reason that I cannot comprehend, they fumbled the ball on Doctor Doom. How the hell you can SCREW UP the characterization of Doc Doom I don't know, he's Darth Vader crossed with a Mad Scientist and that's it. Instead we get Evil Businessman and wierd powers, neither of which is Doctor Doom. Then after getting rid of him, we bring him back, and don't improve the characterization. Thus in both cases we have significant screen time devoted to a failed characterization.

My main concern right now is the Thor and Captain America films, which havea couple of very large caution flags raised by preliminary stuff including the cast list.

With respect to Thor I have no objection to selecting a racially diverse cast when it's not an issue for the story (i.e., Nick Fury was a hard-bitten white sergeant, but there was absolutely no reason he couldn't be black and Samuel L. Jackson is a perfect Nick Fury, regardless of the original vision), but they've chosen a black man to play Heimdall. Um, hello, HEIMDALL? NORSE GOD? NORSE? Like we're all EASILY SUNBURNED PASTY WHITE PEOPLE UP HERE?

And the guy they've picked for Thor... if he's supposed to be Thor he doesn't look either large enough or the sort of guy to have the presence necessary to carry it off, and if he's supposed to be Donald Blake, he's TOO big.

Captain America, I'm sorry, Cap doesn't look ANYTHING like Johnny Storm, yet they picked the actor who did Johnny Storm to play Cap. Looks are generally secondary, yes, but Cap's an image as well as a role. And to pull Cap off properly, they have to do this as a proper period piece, dead on, with the 1940s Patriotism Dial turned way up and NONE of the modern cynicism.

[mle292.livejournal.com]

Well said on the ensemble cast issue.

I think that a common, modern solution is the HBO/Showtime series. Enough time to handle an ensemble cast, but without the weird restrictions of regular television.