Avengers Anthology

[dj aakmael]

they all suck, this one will too, if it weren't for robert downey this whole thing would be a disaster, as the technology for making movies has improved the writing has gotten terrible

The Avengers movie was actually GREAT! I saw it over the weekend, much better than what I had thought. It had a few comedic parts, but nothing like in the other films. The action was top notch, well worth it!

[Marshall Jefferson]

I'm still waiting for them to explain why the Hulk bursts out of every stitch of clothing EXCEPT his crotch and behind.

[Myron]

I'm waiting for Time Warner to put out the Justice League v. the Legion of Doom!

Available at your DVD retailers:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0MSuTJNDdc

[mhd]

fond memories, my marvel experience started with comic books - at 12cents a pop, trading cards and then this animated series,for kids then, to finally see your hero in action with a voice as well was mind blowing. to support my point, they had theme songs for the group as well as for each individual hero, it was amazing, each song was written and produced with the particular hero in mind, you would never see that level of care today. in todays films, if they want to improve it they find something else to blow up. they have the worst writers for these things, i would love to see terence malick portray the angst of silver surfer or daredevil or vision

[neon]

I'm still waiting for them to explain why the Hulk bursts out of every stitch of clothing EXCEPT his crotch and behind.

Maybe Mother Nature didn't bless him with very much, if you get my drift. ;)

[silverbull]

I'm still waiting for them to explain why the Hulk bursts out of every stitch of clothing EXCEPT his crotch and behind.

For the same reason Donald Duck wears a towel when he comes out the bathroom but never really wears pants any other time. Somethings just make you go hmmmmmm.

[TAB.]

For the same reason Donald Duck wears a towel when he comes out the bathroom but never really wears pants any other time. Somethings just make you go hmmmmmm.

We were equally curious as to why Banner always wore purple pants. Ain't never in my life found or worn purple jeans. LOL

[dj aakmael]

We were equally curious as to why Banner always wore purple pants. Ain't never in my life found or worn purple jeans. LOL

Explanations on Hulk's purple pants

[vic]

I know Hulk was part of the Defenders, but, when was he part of the Avengers?

What I miss here?

[silverbull]

I know Hulk was part of the Defenders, but, when was he part of the Avengers?

What I miss here?

Since 1963 first issue

[chldfknungrnd764]

Since 1963 first issue

[Myron]

Since 1963 first issue

And he left the team in issue 2.

[vic]

And he left the team in issue 2.

Ah. Gotcha.

Cant really explain why, but always digged Kirby's work.

[dag]

not for gen. powell...


WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 2012 12:00 AM UTC
“The Avengers”: Will superhero movies never end?
Joss Whedon's overcrowded "Avengers" shows just how thoroughly played-out the genre has become
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR

more


Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans in "The Avengers"
If you’re new around here, this is how the script goes: I damn “The Avengers” with faint praise, observing that the (supposed) culmination of the long, laborious Marvel Comics movie franchise is a competent but pointless popcorn entertainment that’s being wildly overpraised simply for existing without being incoherent and terrible. Some readers sniff from behind their digital copies of the Atlantic: Why did you even bother? Others lament that, once again, a non-fan of comic-book movies was sent to review something whose true significance, as with a sacred scroll written in Tocharian B, is yielded only to a coterie of gnostics and believers. (An enormous coterie, in this case.) Someone will invoke the ghost of Pauline Kael to instruct us that movies are meant to entertain, and someone else will suggest that the editors send me back to covering films about lesbian sheepherders made in Azerbaijan.

Well, there just isn’t enough output from Azeri lesbian cinema to keep me busy, so here we all are again. Cutting to the chase: “The Avengers” does what it needs to do, absolutely. In my conversation with writer and director Joss Whedon a couple of weeks ago, he promised Marvel fans that this movie would “deliver unto them,” and that it does, with two and a half hours of increasingly frenetic action and a swarm of characters who crack wise in Whedon fashion but feel strongly connected to the mish-mash Marvel mythology. If you’re not much of a Marvel Comics person but just want to get an early start on your mindless summer moviegoing, well, I guess this picture is no stupider than anything else. (As you can see, I possess a certain knack for writing irresistible blurb copy.)

If you belong to the significant quadrant of the population that feels a powerful, tidal impulse to belong to this pop-culture moment, and hence yearn to believe that “The Avengers” is terrific, explosive, awesome fun (or other language of your choosing), please don’t let me harsh your vibe. I mean that seriously; what kind of person would I be if I begrudged others a good time at the movies? But it’s my job — and, I guess, my inclination — to stand outside those tidal currents and view these big spectacles dispassionately, as far as I can. What I see in “The Avengers,” unfortunately, is a diminished film despite its huge scale, and kind of a bore. It’s a diminishment of Whedon’s talents, as he squeezes himself into an ill-fitting narrative straitjacket, and it’s a diminished form that has become formula, that depends entirely on minor technical innovations and leaves virtually no room for drama or tragedy or anything else that might make the story actually interesting. To praise the movie lavishly, as so many people have done and will continue to do, basically requires making endless allowances. It’s really good (for being a comic-book movie). It’s really good (for being almost exactly like dozens of other things). It’s really good (for being utterly inconsequential).

I saw “The Avengers” less than a week ago, and already much of it’s a blur; if it weren’t so easy to find plot synopses widely available, I’d probably forget key details. In another month, all that will stick with me is a few striking scenes and images: Tom Hiddleston, as the sneering Norse god Loki, compelling a crowd of Stuttgart civilians to kneel before him, until one older man, no doubt remembering the last time the Germans did that, rises to confront him. Or Robert Downey Jr., as playboy zillionaire Tony Stark cum Iron Man, delivering oh-snap comebacks one after another to Chris Evans’ ultra-square Captain America. (Have Downey and John Malkovich ever been in a movie together, doing their dueling “I’m so gay but I’m actually straight” routines? I think not.) Or Scarlett Johansson in a catsuit, as superspy Natasha Romanoff, cocking her head just so as if to acknowledge that she’s the idealized fetish object of the 11-year-old boy within every so-called adult male.

Is there any point in discussing the plot of “The Avengers,” anyway? If you’ve read this far, the odds are strong that you either A) already know the whole story, B) don’t want me to issue clueless spoilers or C) simply don’t care. For those who may choose “none of the above,” I can explain that one-eyed, super-secret government honcho Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has to reassemble the superhero team known as the Avengers after Loki — last seen in Kenneth Branagh’s “Thor,” getting evicted from Asgard, home of the Norse gods — comes to Earth in search of a mystical energy source called the Tesseract, with a force of insect-like space aliens following him. So Iron Man, Captain America, Natasha, Thor the Thunder God (Chris Hemsworth) and Dr. Bruce Banner aka the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo, in a nicely understated, embittered performance) all gather on a flying aircraft-carrier/command-center thingy, along with the imprisoned Loki, who plans to sow discord and dissension before his super-disappointing aliens — rejected by Michael Bay for insufficient gnarlitude, I think — show up to wreck the place.

Got all that? You don’t, believe me. There’s also quite a bit of eye candy in “The Avengers,” not all of it Johansson-related, and a few glimmers of genuine narrative weight, as in that moment with Loki and the Germans. But in trying to cram in enough plot and back story and increasingly incoherent action sequences for at least three summer movies, Whedon never finds a confident or relaxed narrative pace, and the results are exhausting, a picture that pushes three hours and feels like five. Obviously Whedon is one of the most experienced storytellers of our time, and I have to assume this is a deliberate attempt to satisfy the core young-dude demographic with an experience that will be physically draining, like an extended amusement-park ride. I felt tired at the end of “Avengers,” for sure, but even more bored and irritated, probably because the pretense of mythic grandeur can’t stand up to the fundamental teenage-boy, men-in-tights silliness of the whole enterprise.

I know, I know. I’m profaning sacred ground here. Once upon a time, and a very long time ago it was, the teenage boys (and occasional girls) who grew into adults and kept on reading superhero comics were viewed as oddballs or outcasts. When Hollywood began to rediscover the pioneering DC and Marvel superheroes of the 20th century, it was refreshing and delightful at first, and for a while: the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, Tim Burton’s “Batman,” Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, the X-Men series. All were lots of fun, all descended into fatal decadence — as exemplified by Joel Schumacher’s “Batman & Robin,” quite possibly the worst film ever made in any language or tradition — all have since been zombified and ripped from the grave for another go-round, with emphatically mixed results. There’s nothing new about any of that, arguably. One of the defining characteristics of Batman and Superman and all their kind is their malleability, their immortality, their apparently endless recyclability.

But for the love of Christ, at what point is the triumph of comic-book culture sufficient? Those one-time comic-book pariahs are now the dominant force in pop-culture entertainment, and their works are deemed to be not just big but also relevant and important, much the way that Cecil B. DeMille’s crap-history spectacles were in another day. This latest series of Marvel adaptations, mounted on a scale that would make Richard Wagner blush, has attained baroque heights of meaninglessness that make the James Bond movies seem like Strindberg by comparison. I would agree, by the way, that Stan Lee and his many acolytes and followers have created a kind of modern syncretic mythology, and that over the long, long haul both the Marvel and DC universes have incorporated some narrative complexity and some sense of mortality. That’s not possible in two or three hours of mass-market entertainment, so we get these movies with zero dramatic arc, where the protagonists’ fates are never in doubt and the central issues are all technical: Iron Man’s ass-kicking fight scene with Thor; soulful Bruce Banner’s transformation into The Hulk; the precise nature of the alien-invasion force; Scarlett Johansson, hubba-hubba, catsuit.

There’s no point getting exercised about public taste: Millions of people out there are eager for the visceral vacation from everyday life that “The Avengers” will provide, and given the difficult task of packing all these superheroes into one story, Whedon succeeds pretty well. (I’d rank “Avengers” above “Iron Man 2″ but below the first “Iron Man,” roughly on the same level as “Thor.”) My problem is less with the movie or its audience or Joss Whedon — although I honestly don’t think being an A-list Hollywood director serves his talents appropriately — than with the penumbra of bratty, entitled coolness that surrounds the whole project. It’s a neat little postmodern trick, actually, to simultaneously position this movie as the most central pop-culture event of 2012 and insist on some kind of edgy, outsider status that renders any and all detractors as pipe-smoking William F. Buckley squares, defending a nonexistent Establishment.

Right up to the end of “The Avengers,” I carried with me the faint hope that this really would mark the conclusion of this particular epoch-spanning series of hyperinflated comic-book spectacles. For good or ill, it is not to be: As Marvel fans surely know already, the usual “stinger” follows the closing credits, revealing that behind Loki and the insectoid aliens lurks … well, somebody or something who will propel us into “Thor 2″ or “Iron Man 3″ or whatever else is coming. This mimics the way comic books have long worked, of course, and there’s something wistful about it: As the transitory ersatz awesomeness of this particular spectacle fades away, like the cinematic equivalent of SweeTarts on the tongue, true Platonic awesomeness is waiting out there somewhere, in the next chapter.

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/02/the_...ies_never_end/

[the crackhouse]

I didn't grow up with superheroes (If you ask me, "Strange" was some weird shit when you were a teen in France) so I ask you: Why did I prefer the X-men movies to Thor, Iron Man or Hulk?

I thought that Thor was absolutly bad visually and the storyline got me "Huh?", Iron man was just some guy floating around with no psychological relief whatsoever, and Hulk was lame.

Overall I did prefer the Batman series, and Spiderman was ok as an action movie. Is this the kind of movies where you're waiting for some events from the comics to happen in motion?

That's 2 real questions, to me Batman series seemed to roll quite far from Holywood, but Iron Man or Hulk have been a pain in my cliché ass.

Idance

[Myron]

I'm seeing The Pirates! Band of Misfits this weekend.

[Fletch]

I'm waiting for Time Warner to put out the Justice League v. the Legion of Doom!

I forgot.....DC/Time Warner hasn't solved the Wonder Woman issue!

[TAC]

Movie was bananas. Hulk brought dah pain!!!!

[TAB.]

I'm Hearing mostly good reviews. A lot of the the folks that gave it thumbs down tend to mention they don't care for the Genre. Anyways, got my Imax 3D for tuesday night. Tomorrow, its regular 3D with the kids.

[The Good Reverend Rollo Goodlove]

Movie was bananas. Hulk brough dah pain!!!!

Yup. I also loved the reveal at the end. 85% of the viewing audience had no idea who he was and I screamed his name like a 12 year old girl at a Justin Beiber concert. That was awesome.

[Myron]

I forgot.....DC/Time Warner hasn't solved the Wonder Woman issue!

Actually they have, since Geoff Johns became one of the co-publishers of DC Comics he made it much easier for Warner Brothers to use Wonder Woman in film and television projects. In the last two years Wonder Woman had a television pilot filmed and appeared on Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Young Justice cartoons. Plus two versions of Wonder Girl recently debuted on Young Justice and the Super Best Friends Forever shorts.

Now if Warner could have a movie hit with a character other than Batman.

[Marshall Jefferson]

Yup. I also loved the reveal at the end. 85% of the viewing audience had no idea who he was and I screamed his name like a 12 year old girl at a Justin Beiber concert. That was awesome.

The possibilities are endless but it's too soon for him; I'd like to see a Warlock or Mar-Vell movie to set him up. Probably too much to ask so I guess I'd just settle for Henry Pym and the Wasp in the next movie.

[The Good Reverend Rollo Goodlove]

The possibilities are endless but it's too soon for him; I'd like to see a Warlock or Mar-Vell movie to set him up. Probably too much to ask so I guess I'd just settle for Henry Pym and the Wasp in the next movie.

One of the main reasons I dug it so much is that when details about this movie came out I commented to my boy "How they gonna have a movie about the cosmic cube and not have him in it?". Seeing him at the end made this movies plot make even more sense. I agree about Henry Pym. That has always been my major issue with this Avengers team. I also wanted Ultron as their villian. How awesome would that be? BTW now you're spoiling it. Lol.

[Tee Dubb]

anyone see the regular version? fug it I'll go 3D

[The Good Reverend Rollo Goodlove]

anyone see the regular version? fug it I'll go 3D

I saw regular. I hate 3D and avoid it when I can.