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.