actually, for someone coming from a spy-film background, the first two Captain America films may satisfy, and personally they were two of my favourites. They're completely different from each other, too, which is a bonus.
The first (subtitled The First Avenger) is gung-go World War Two propaganda pastiche, similar to the old Wonder Woman tv series.
...then he gets frozen in a block of ice and wakes up seventy years later
the second (subtitled Winter Soldier) is modern day paranoid political thriller, done in the style of Watergate era spy-films, in particular referencing Three Days of the Condor. Robert Redford even appears in this one.
The third one (subtitled Civil War) I do not recommend if you don't like these types of movies, it's the epitome of the "everybody come on out" team-up big-budget toy commercial.
Being lazy I guess, but which superhero film should I watch next?
Notorious
This fine Hitchcock film stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, and has an important role for Claude Rains as a German hiding out with his less suave Nazi gang in South America. The film is set in the year it's released - 1946.
Grant is Bond really, in particular with his introduction but for all that it's really Bergman's film because she gets to open up while he is an enigma. Some of it resembles Bond and Tanya with regards to getting the Lector in FRWL. But later we are put in mind of OHMSS, in particular getting on to the villain's turf to get info, and the Irma Bunt character, played out far better here I must say.
It makes one wonder what Hitch might have made of OHMSS though he was not in his prime by the late 60s at all.
Grant looks like Bond - but this is 46 and of course would have been nearly 20s older when the real Bond films came around. Of course, had he starred in what was slated for the first Bond film at one point, Thunderball, it might well have resembled Never Say Never Again, as Grant looked like an greyer Connery by then.
Rains is great though as ever you don't really notice or care that he doesn't have a German accent, just as you didn't notice or care he wasn't quite French in Casablanca. Was his accent American in that James Stewart film Mr Smith Goes to Washington, where he played a senator? Probably not.
This film is similar in tone to Rebecca, a few years earlier and Hitch's breakthrough hit in America. It is rather racey for its time, in terms of what Bergman's character is meant to do.
Not quite sure why it's called Notorious. It's not obvious.
It would be great if Hitchcock filmed Casino Royale in the style of Notorious in the 1950's. Ingrid Bergman would have been a great Vespertoo.
Another superhero film that should appeal to a spy-film fan would be this year's Black Panther. The middle section is a sequence of consecutive James Bond tributes, and it's very well done aside from that!
Thanks, of course I saw Superman: The Movie when it came out in the 70s! And very good it was/is too!
I meant of the recent crop, which should I go for to catch up? I've seen Iron Man, Superman, Wonder Woman. Captain America is on telly next week, so I'll watch that, it looks good.
Not bothered about old time stuff like Batman and Catwoman and all that...
That's a good explanation for the title of Notorious, Mr Potts. I suppose she is a tramp in that she is prepared to go thru with marrying and shagging of course a German spy (you don't really believe they had sex in those days... in fact, do we ever see Bergman and Rains even smooch in the film?) The film could, in fairness, have made more of the idea she is of easy virtue from the get go, but Grant is the man who might 'redeem' her or sees something different in her.
Marlene Dietrich might have been a better fit for the role, being German, and a bit slutty in her persona, but she might have been too old by that point. And never really seeming that vulnerable, she'd give the old bag a run for her money.
MarvelDisney better hurry up and buy the rights to those Fox properties if they wanna get out of this latest mess, that's all I can say!
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re Notorious
there was something called the Hayes Code that was still all powerful in those days ... I think it was the studios themselves self-censoring a long list of unfilmable content, to forestall the threat of the government shutting down the film industry. It lasted from the early 30s through til the late 60s.
So sex could not be acknowledged. But a clever filmmaker like Hitchcock could certainly imply, in such a way that no adult watching would miss what is really going on.
Speaking of kissing, there was a specific rule a man and a woman could never be shown kissing any longer than some very small number of seconds, or else that would be sex. The scene where Grant gives instructions to Bergman goes on for several minutes in a very sexy embrace. They kiss until that time limit is up, he speaks a line of dialog, they get back to it as long as the Code allows, she speaks a line, and so on. Hitchcock could be very creative in how he tested the limits of that Hayes Code.
in Psycho, Janet Leigh flushes a toilet! that alone was scandalous, no toilet had ever been shown onscreen since at least the implementation of that code! humans did not procreate by having sexual intercourse, and they certainly did not need to expel bodily wastes! But Psycho was deliberately made as a lowbudget shocker, quite a few taboos got broken in that one.
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Just saw Infinity War. Definitely not an entry level Marvel film. At the very least you'd have to be familiar with the two Guardians.... films, the first two Avengers, Civil War (and arguably the first two Captain America films), Doctor Strange, and Thor: Ragnarok, to know what everybody is talking about. Might as well just watch every single one of them in order in preparation for this one.
there was a trailer for an Incredibles sequel.
Glimpses of another Ken Adam style villains HQ, teases of John Barry style music...
we oughta have a thread called "what completely unrelated films deliver the Bond experience better than any of the recent official Bond films seem to manage"
Gymkata you left out Thor: Ragnarok (2017).
If nothing else, it explains why the Hulk is in Asgard in the very first scene of the new one, and Thor keeps referring back to events that happened in that film in his dialog.
Also, Ragnarok is very funny, directed by one of the writers from Flight of the Concordes. Maybe the most likable of the three Thor films. Good Cate Blanchett content.
I would actually recommend it as a standalone, even though its the third in that series.
It's tricky, all the background knowledge needed for this new one. I could say, "don't worry about such-and-such a supporting character in Wakanda, she was introduced in the last movie but does not significantly effect the plot in this one" ... but then if a viewer is expected to cherrypick which characters and dialog they pay attention to, somehow guessing what is significant to the plot, then they will end up ignoring all dialog and just being swept away by the visuals.
Imagine forcing a customer to watch umpteen previous movies to know what's going on in their latest product. Good marketing strategy.
I think the Gamora/Nebula subplot is pretty important, more so than a lot of other elements. It's a big chunk of the middle of this film, directly related to Thanos. Should not spoil anymore than we have, but I suspect there is more to come with Nebula, so it will be good to know her backstory. (and that's Karen Gillan for all you redblooded Doctor Who fans out there, but a bodymapped CGI version, so no red hair and long legs).
I may sound cynical in some of my comments, but I'm just warning folks this is not an entry level Marvel movie.
What I really think is this is an incredible feat, unprecedented. To tie this many films together in so short a time (I think this is approximately the twentieth?), approx. $200million budget apiece? whatever the actual average budget, times twenty that total is more than some national GDPs. Commit that many big name actors (and there are several dozen big names in this one film alone). And to carefully, and consistently, lay out the plot threads throughout those twenty films over the period of a decade. You mentioned Nick Fury makes his first cameo in the first Iron Man, who makes the Avengers inevitable five films later. And the first Infinity Stone appears in Captain America, which makes this film inevitable fifteen films later. With no continuity errors or contradictions that I can spot.
Whether this is the way we want filmmaking to go or not is a subjective value question. But the scale of the achievement is undeniable.
Was it ever done before in film? all I can think of is the Universal monster films of the 30s and 40s, and those contradicted each other from one installment to the next.
It is exactly what Stan Lee achieved in the comics in the 1960s, translated to bigbudget film form. But he had it easy, he was writer, co-plotter and editor for the whole line of comics, and Jack Kirby was artist and co-plotter for fully half of them. Making these films has involved a much larger number of people (tens of thousands, if not hundreds) who all have to keep it coordinated and internally consistent.
...
And apologies to Number24 who doesn't want to hear about these types of films, and yet one page later all we've talked about is Infinity War. I did try to bump the comic book movie thread, but it's already dropped halfway down the General Discussion page. This may be the new normal for film discussion. I think we may instead have to start an indie/auteur/artfilm thread for the minority of films that are not comic book related.
Dawn Of The Dead (1978). It's hard to believe this is 40 years old - I saw this in the cinema on a first date and she hid her eyes through most of it ) . It's been many years since I've seen this before yesterday and the film is still the zombie film by which all others should be judged...and found wanting. This is George A Romero's all time classic and one of the best horror's of all time.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
The Black Panther, Great superhero movie. With a few nods to Bond with basically
a Q branch sequence. Brilliant fun, and the female General is amazing, she kicks
ass all over the place ...... in an evening gown and high heels. -{
"I've been informed that there ARE a couple of QAnon supporters who are fairly regular posters in AJB."
. . .the female General is amazing, she kicks ass all over the place ...... in an evening gown and high heels. -{
That's Danai Gurira, who plays Michonne on The Walking Dead--she does similar ass-kicking there, with a samurai sword and in long dreadlocks.
Since I'm here, I'll add that I saw Infinity War last Friday, on a rare day off. I expected it to be a mess, with so many characters, but it's actually well-balanced and always entertaining. And Thanos may be the best villain in any superhero flick--a monster you can actually understand and even empathize with. Good show!
I saw a bit of Big Trouble in Little China on telly; it's an odd one isn't it? I thought John Barry did the score but I didn't get his trademark touches on it, maybe he didn't. Sometimes it's nice not to use Google isn't it? Just preserves a sense of mystery. That Sex And City gal Kim Cattrell gets hogtied at one point. Very odd.
Summer of 42
Typical of the sort of wistful nostalgic film that dominated the early 70s, all soft focus cinematography and slightly racier approach to the subject matter, albeit in a slightly depressing sort of way. The Last Picture Show etc
I got this for my Dad who had a nostalgic memory of it and was a young teenager during the war. It's about three teen lads on I dunno Maine is it, American East coast it seems, mostly deserted. They are obsessed with sex and not getting it, one of them has the hots for a war widow who lives in a nice beach hut that is to say she's getting letters from her army bloke but isn't getting anything else. For some reason, the other two lads don't seem taken by this unquestionable hottie...
Michel NSNA Legrand does the tinkly, evocative score.
It's okay, but you expect the trio to break into You've Got To Fight For Your Right (To Party) at some point. Lots of talk about rubbers and so on, not so great to watch with your Dad. Anyway, in the film, where are the parents in all this? You never see them at all but that makes the film work better in a way.
I suppose the whole movie can almost be distilled into the song Summer (The First Time) by Bobby Goldsborough. It even has the crashing of the waves and that high tingly sound over it (what is that? Buoys? We don't get that in the uK).
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets :
I know this was a huge flop at the box office, but I really enjoyed this film. The
visual spectacle and imagination on display is amazing.
"I've been informed that there ARE a couple of QAnon supporters who are fairly regular posters in AJB."
I saw a bit of Big Trouble in Little China on telly; it's an odd one isn't it? I thought John Barry did the score but I didn't get his trademark touches on it, maybe he didn't. Sometimes it's nice not to use Google isn't it? Just preserves a sense of mystery.
You might be thinking of The Golden Child, a similar movie that Barry did work on. (No Google involved)
Ah, okay, he did some stinkers didn't he? Howard the Duck. I mean, you never see that on telly ever, I know it was rubbish but other rubbish gets shown.
Captain America: The First Avenger
On telly last night, and next week too (Film). Now this is a proper superhero film, very good, budget works in all the right ways and good supporting cast. Great retro feel with nods to Indiana Jones, the direction is Spielbergian though maybe better than he'd do these days; he might regards this kind of film as slumming it now.
Dunno why I didn't see it in cinemas at the time, maybe the whole 3D is offputting because I don't always like 3D but then again going for 2D means an inferior cinema and the feeling you are missing out. Give a man a choice, you give him a dilemma...
The film seems less impressive the following day, maybe because the star is not really a charismatic lead, you don't want to be him quite. Plus there's the feeling that it is all building up to a money shot movie where all the Avengers get together, it's the like the tune that's part of an opera or classical movement. The villain was both overdrawn and underdrawn, he was there a lot but didn't quite get who he was or why it seemed right to take his mask off - surely word might get around that he wasn't an ordinary Nazi?
I'm not sure how historically accurate it was. I mean, there's no mention of Captain America in Martin Gilbert's History of the Second World War. Then again, the Dam busters raid isn't mentioned in that either.
Anyway, I see what some critics mean when they say that Wonder Woman was v similar to this. But hang on, why call Captain America the First Avenger when WW took part in The Great War? CA is in the Second World War... Or was it that they hadn't thought of doing a film about Wonder Woman at that point? Surely she preceded him?
Anyway, I see what some critics mean when they say that Wonder Woman was v similar to this. But hang on, why call Captain America the First Avenger when WW took part in The Great War? CA is in the Second World War... Or was it that they hadn't thought of doing a film about Wonder Woman at that point? Surely she preceded him?
Wonder Woman isn’t one of the Avengers because she’s not a Marvel character. Those two movies are made by different studios. Wonder Woman is part of the DC universe whereas Captain America is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
why call Captain America the First Avenger when WW took part in The Great War? CA is in the Second World War... Or was it that they hadn't thought of doing a film about Wonder Woman at that point? Surely she preceded him?
Ha, you're getting hung up on the Marvel vs DC thing again, normal enough for a civilian who has never worried about the comic book source material.
I quote myself from the previous page:
The difference between DC and Marvel isn't really that confusing. They have been competing publishing companies since the birth of the comic book in the late 30s. They have sued each other a few times over the decades, and are very possessive about the legal status of their character trademarks.
both publishing companies go back to the late 1930s, soon after the invention of the comic book format (originally 16 sheets of tabloid newsprint folded once more and trimmed, and stapled with slick paper covers)
in June 1938 DC published Action Comics #1, which introduced Superman, the first superhero. This was a massive success, selling exponentially more copies than any previous comic and spawned hundreds of imitations from dozens of competing companies. DC sued a few of these early imitators for copyright infringement. DC quickly created a lineup of similar but distinct superheros, including Batman and Wonder Woman.
Marvel was one of the many competitors. At that point it was no better than most of the rest, but it did have one big success with Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941, almost a year before the USA entered the war). There were three Captain America adventures in that first comic, the origin as seen in the movie is almost exactly the first of those three adventures. His first encounter with the Red Skull is the third adventure, but it is rather different in the film, based more on appearances decades later.
that cover image of Cap slugging Hitler was a big deal at the time, as the USA was officially a neutral country and Hitler a democratically elected leader. The cartoonists and publishers (all New York Jews with family in Europe) received death threats. Brave stuff, that may have helped inspire America to enter the war! I believe we actually see that cover in the film.
(Wonder Woman first appeared in a comic Dec 1941, so Cap was in fact created first.)
In the early 1960s Marvel went through a creative renaissance, and in a very short period of time were created the Fantastic Four, AntMan, the Hulk, Thor, Spider-Man, Dr Strange, the X-Men, Iron Man, Daredevil, Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD, and the Avengers. And the old Captain America comic was revived. Just like in the film, the character was found floating frozen in a block of ice, but only twenty years after WWII in this version.
By the end of the decade Marvel, once a minor competitor, had eclipsed DC's sales to be the biggest publisher of superhero comics.
In the early 1970s DC was bought out by Warner Brothers (their original owners were actually Lower East Side gangsters who wound up making more money from the publishing front). This allowed them to make big budget film adaptations like the Christopher Reeve Superman film, or the Tim Burton Batman movies.
Marvel had bad luck with film adaptations all this time, they had to license their properties out to other companies who generally did not respect the source material. Howard the Duck, which you mention, was actually one of theirs. Finally circa 2000, the X-Men and Spider-Man adaptations were very successful and perhaps allowed Marvel to establish their own studio, and the publishing company and film studio were quickly bought out by Disney. Bringing us to the all-superhero all-the-time universe in which we live today.
But DC(Warner Brothers) and Marvel(Disney) are still corporate rivals, perhaps even more so because of their parent companies.
...and this is why Wonder Woman cannot be a member of the Avengers, as much we'd all like to see the two star spangled characters interact!
_____________________________________________________
(EDIT: found a better source for those covers)
Okay, how does this fit into the comic book world? It seemed to be part of a series - have there been any other Star Wars films?
Anyhow, that was an interesting post, caractacus potts, esp all that stuff about Captain Avenger slugging Hitler! Marvel were late bloomers, it seems, with their movies. Maybe they had to wait for kids to grow up and be an adult market for all this to take off.
Last Jedi, now I understand this caused a stir. I liked it, but the first half I found a bit ho hum, it's the usual let's raid the enemy type thing, seen it all before. Anyone seeing Carrie Fisher in this wouldn't be surprised she died soon after filming, she seems older than her years, almost 80 ish, mainly in her diction.
The film is very busy as usual, forget the quiet eerie moments you had in the very first filmed Star Wars films, where I have to say looking back it was like the cool kids taking on the teacher. Now the villains seems just as juvenile, or just CGI.
Also, the blokes do seem to screw up a bit, on both sides. It's a busy film, but it seems our hero Oscar Isaac wipes out his own Rebel base through his heroic shenanigans - or am I being unfair? And Ben Solo needs a slap. 'Just get on with it!' you want to say, but they have to eke it out. Still, as with Wonder Woman, this is a different take on male heroics, and it does sort of give the vibe of how you can't win in some situations so you have to make the best of it. It does make the rebel forces kind of like living in a Soviet satellite state for decades, or North Korea, as opposed to the World War narrative of a slugfest where eventually the good guys win and own the situation.
...that was an interesting post, caractacus potts, esp all that stuff about Captain America slugging Hitler! Marvel were late bloomers, it seems, with their movies. Maybe they had to wait for kids to grow up and be an adult market for all this to take off.
glad you enjoyed it Napoleon! I could dissertate on this stuff for hours, but I suspect normal folks would not be interested.
I just wanted to show the difference between DC and Marvel goes back a lot deeper than which film studios have the rights to which characters. And since WB and Disney are two of the media megacorps dividing up reality as we know it between them, I'm sure that fundamental difference is now vaster than ever before.
Comments
The first (subtitled The First Avenger) is gung-go World War Two propaganda pastiche, similar to the old Wonder Woman tv series.
The third one (subtitled Civil War) I do not recommend if you don't like these types of movies, it's the epitome of the "everybody come on out" team-up big-budget toy commercial.
standard superhero flick.
It would be great if Hitchcock filmed Casino Royale in the style of Notorious in the 1950's. Ingrid Bergman would have been a great Vespertoo.
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Another superhero film that should appeal to a spy-film fan would be this year's Black Panther. The middle section is a sequence of consecutive James Bond tributes, and it's very well done aside from that!
I meant of the recent crop, which should I go for to catch up? I've seen Iron Man, Superman, Wonder Woman. Captain America is on telly next week, so I'll watch that, it looks good.
Not bothered about old time stuff like Batman and Catwoman and all that...
That's a good explanation for the title of Notorious, Mr Potts. I suppose she is a tramp in that she is prepared to go thru with marrying and shagging of course a German spy (you don't really believe they had sex in those days... in fact, do we ever see Bergman and Rains even smooch in the film?) The film could, in fairness, have made more of the idea she is of easy virtue from the get go, but Grant is the man who might 'redeem' her or sees something different in her.
Marlene Dietrich might have been a better fit for the role, being German, and a bit slutty in her persona, but she might have been too old by that point. And never really seeming that vulnerable, she'd give the old bag a run for her money.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
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re Notorious
there was something called the Hayes Code that was still all powerful in those days ... I think it was the studios themselves self-censoring a long list of unfilmable content, to forestall the threat of the government shutting down the film industry. It lasted from the early 30s through til the late 60s.
So sex could not be acknowledged. But a clever filmmaker like Hitchcock could certainly imply, in such a way that no adult watching would miss what is really going on.
Speaking of kissing, there was a specific rule a man and a woman could never be shown kissing any longer than some very small number of seconds, or else that would be sex. The scene where Grant gives instructions to Bergman goes on for several minutes in a very sexy embrace. They kiss until that time limit is up, he speaks a line of dialog, they get back to it as long as the Code allows, she speaks a line, and so on. Hitchcock could be very creative in how he tested the limits of that Hayes Code.
in Psycho, Janet Leigh flushes a toilet! that alone was scandalous, no toilet had ever been shown onscreen since at least the implementation of that code! humans did not procreate by having sexual intercourse, and they certainly did not need to expel bodily wastes! But Psycho was deliberately made as a lowbudget shocker, quite a few taboos got broken in that one.
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Just saw Infinity War. Definitely not an entry level Marvel film. At the very least you'd have to be familiar with the two Guardians.... films, the first two Avengers, Civil War (and arguably the first two Captain America films), Doctor Strange, and Thor: Ragnarok, to know what everybody is talking about. Might as well just watch every single one of them in order in preparation for this one.
Glimpses of another Ken Adam style villains HQ, teases of John Barry style music...
we oughta have a thread called "what completely unrelated films deliver the Bond experience better than any of the recent official Bond films seem to manage"
Problem is, the Bond films do get caught up in trying to do something different to avoid being 'just another Bond film'.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
If nothing else, it explains why the Hulk is in Asgard in the very first scene of the new one, and Thor keeps referring back to events that happened in that film in his dialog.
Also, Ragnarok is very funny, directed by one of the writers from Flight of the Concordes. Maybe the most likable of the three Thor films. Good Cate Blanchett content.
I would actually recommend it as a standalone, even though its the third in that series.
It's tricky, all the background knowledge needed for this new one. I could say, "don't worry about such-and-such a supporting character in Wakanda, she was introduced in the last movie but does not significantly effect the plot in this one" ... but then if a viewer is expected to cherrypick which characters and dialog they pay attention to, somehow guessing what is significant to the plot, then they will end up ignoring all dialog and just being swept away by the visuals.
Imagine forcing a customer to watch umpteen previous movies to know what's going on in their latest product. Good marketing strategy.
I may sound cynical in some of my comments, but I'm just warning folks this is not an entry level Marvel movie.
What I really think is this is an incredible feat, unprecedented. To tie this many films together in so short a time (I think this is approximately the twentieth?), approx. $200million budget apiece? whatever the actual average budget, times twenty that total is more than some national GDPs. Commit that many big name actors (and there are several dozen big names in this one film alone). And to carefully, and consistently, lay out the plot threads throughout those twenty films over the period of a decade. You mentioned Nick Fury makes his first cameo in the first Iron Man, who makes the Avengers inevitable five films later. And the first Infinity Stone appears in Captain America, which makes this film inevitable fifteen films later. With no continuity errors or contradictions that I can spot.
Whether this is the way we want filmmaking to go or not is a subjective value question. But the scale of the achievement is undeniable.
Was it ever done before in film? all I can think of is the Universal monster films of the 30s and 40s, and those contradicted each other from one installment to the next.
It is exactly what Stan Lee achieved in the comics in the 1960s, translated to bigbudget film form. But he had it easy, he was writer, co-plotter and editor for the whole line of comics, and Jack Kirby was artist and co-plotter for fully half of them. Making these films has involved a much larger number of people (tens of thousands, if not hundreds) who all have to keep it coordinated and internally consistent.
...
And apologies to Number24 who doesn't want to hear about these types of films, and yet one page later all we've talked about is Infinity War. I did try to bump the comic book movie thread, but it's already dropped halfway down the General Discussion page. This may be the new normal for film discussion. I think we may instead have to start an indie/auteur/artfilm thread for the minority of films that are not comic book related.
While I enjoy a superhero movie once in a while, I do prefer indie/auteur/artfilms like Dunkirk, Bladerunner 2049 and James Bond :007) :v
Big Trouble in little China. -{ in HD for .... £1.99
Roger Moore 1927-2017
The Black Panther, Great superhero movie. With a few nods to Bond with basically
a Q branch sequence. Brilliant fun, and the female General is amazing, she kicks
ass all over the place ...... in an evening gown and high heels. -{
That's Danai Gurira, who plays Michonne on The Walking Dead--she does similar ass-kicking there, with a samurai sword and in long dreadlocks.
Since I'm here, I'll add that I saw Infinity War last Friday, on a rare day off. I expected it to be a mess, with so many characters, but it's actually well-balanced and always entertaining. And Thanos may be the best villain in any superhero flick--a monster you can actually understand and even empathize with. Good show!
Summer of 42
Typical of the sort of wistful nostalgic film that dominated the early 70s, all soft focus cinematography and slightly racier approach to the subject matter, albeit in a slightly depressing sort of way. The Last Picture Show etc
I got this for my Dad who had a nostalgic memory of it and was a young teenager during the war. It's about three teen lads on I dunno Maine is it, American East coast it seems, mostly deserted. They are obsessed with sex and not getting it, one of them has the hots for a war widow who lives in a nice beach hut that is to say she's getting letters from her army bloke but isn't getting anything else. For some reason, the other two lads don't seem taken by this unquestionable hottie...
Michel NSNA Legrand does the tinkly, evocative score.
It's okay, but you expect the trio to break into You've Got To Fight For Your Right (To Party) at some point. Lots of talk about rubbers and so on, not so great to watch with your Dad.
I suppose the whole movie can almost be distilled into the song Summer (The First Time) by Bobby Goldsborough. It even has the crashing of the waves and that high tingly sound over it (what is that? Buoys? We don't get that in the uK).
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I know this was a huge flop at the box office, but I really enjoyed this film. The
visual spectacle and imagination on display is amazing.
You might be thinking of The Golden Child, a similar movie that Barry did work on. (No Google involved)
Captain America: The First Avenger
On telly last night, and next week too (Film). Now this is a proper superhero film, very good, budget works in all the right ways and good supporting cast. Great retro feel with nods to Indiana Jones, the direction is Spielbergian though maybe better than he'd do these days; he might regards this kind of film as slumming it now.
Dunno why I didn't see it in cinemas at the time, maybe the whole 3D is offputting because I don't always like 3D but then again going for 2D means an inferior cinema and the feeling you are missing out. Give a man a choice, you give him a dilemma...
The film seems less impressive the following day, maybe because the star is not really a charismatic lead, you don't want to be him quite. Plus there's the feeling that it is all building up to a money shot movie where all the Avengers get together, it's the like the tune that's part of an opera or classical movement. The villain was both overdrawn and underdrawn, he was there a lot but didn't quite get who he was or why it seemed right to take his mask off - surely word might get around that he wasn't an ordinary Nazi?
I'm not sure how historically accurate it was. I mean, there's no mention of Captain America in Martin Gilbert's History of the Second World War. Then again, the Dam busters raid isn't mentioned in that either.
Anyway, I see what some critics mean when they say that Wonder Woman was v similar to this. But hang on, why call Captain America the First Avenger when WW took part in The Great War? CA is in the Second World War... Or was it that they hadn't thought of doing a film about Wonder Woman at that point? Surely she preceded him?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Wonder Woman isn’t one of the Avengers because she’s not a Marvel character. Those two movies are made by different studios. Wonder Woman is part of the DC universe whereas Captain America is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Ha, you're getting hung up on the Marvel vs DC thing again, normal enough for a civilian who has never worried about the comic book source material.
I quote myself from the previous page: both publishing companies go back to the late 1930s, soon after the invention of the comic book format (originally 16 sheets of tabloid newsprint folded once more and trimmed, and stapled with slick paper covers)
in June 1938 DC published Action Comics #1, which introduced Superman, the first superhero. This was a massive success, selling exponentially more copies than any previous comic and spawned hundreds of imitations from dozens of competing companies. DC sued a few of these early imitators for copyright infringement. DC quickly created a lineup of similar but distinct superheros, including Batman and Wonder Woman.
Marvel was one of the many competitors. At that point it was no better than most of the rest, but it did have one big success with Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941, almost a year before the USA entered the war). There were three Captain America adventures in that first comic, the origin as seen in the movie is almost exactly the first of those three adventures. His first encounter with the Red Skull is the third adventure, but it is rather different in the film, based more on appearances decades later.
that cover image of Cap slugging Hitler was a big deal at the time, as the USA was officially a neutral country and Hitler a democratically elected leader. The cartoonists and publishers (all New York Jews with family in Europe) received death threats. Brave stuff, that may have helped inspire America to enter the war! I believe we actually see that cover in the film.
(Wonder Woman first appeared in a comic Dec 1941, so Cap was in fact created first.)
In the early 1960s Marvel went through a creative renaissance, and in a very short period of time were created the Fantastic Four, AntMan, the Hulk, Thor, Spider-Man, Dr Strange, the X-Men, Iron Man, Daredevil, Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD, and the Avengers. And the old Captain America comic was revived. Just like in the film, the character was found floating frozen in a block of ice, but only twenty years after WWII in this version.
By the end of the decade Marvel, once a minor competitor, had eclipsed DC's sales to be the biggest publisher of superhero comics.
In the early 1970s DC was bought out by Warner Brothers (their original owners were actually Lower East Side gangsters who wound up making more money from the publishing front). This allowed them to make big budget film adaptations like the Christopher Reeve Superman film, or the Tim Burton Batman movies.
Marvel had bad luck with film adaptations all this time, they had to license their properties out to other companies who generally did not respect the source material. Howard the Duck, which you mention, was actually one of theirs. Finally circa 2000, the X-Men and Spider-Man adaptations were very successful and perhaps allowed Marvel to establish their own studio, and the publishing company and film studio were quickly bought out by Disney. Bringing us to the all-superhero all-the-time universe in which we live today.
But DC(Warner Brothers) and Marvel(Disney) are still corporate rivals, perhaps even more so because of their parent companies.
...and this is why Wonder Woman cannot be a member of the Avengers, as much we'd all like to see the two star spangled characters interact!
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(EDIT: found a better source for those covers)
Okay, how does this fit into the comic book world? It seemed to be part of a series - have there been any other Star Wars films?
Anyhow, that was an interesting post, caractacus potts, esp all that stuff about Captain Avenger slugging Hitler! Marvel were late bloomers, it seems, with their movies. Maybe they had to wait for kids to grow up and be an adult market for all this to take off.
Last Jedi, now I understand this caused a stir. I liked it, but the first half I found a bit ho hum, it's the usual let's raid the enemy type thing, seen it all before. Anyone seeing Carrie Fisher in this wouldn't be surprised she died soon after filming, she seems older than her years, almost 80 ish, mainly in her diction.
The film is very busy as usual, forget the quiet eerie moments you had in the very first filmed Star Wars films, where I have to say looking back it was like the cool kids taking on the teacher. Now the villains seems just as juvenile, or just CGI.
Also, the blokes do seem to screw up a bit, on both sides. It's a busy film, but it seems our hero Oscar Isaac wipes out his own Rebel base through his heroic shenanigans - or am I being unfair? And Ben Solo needs a slap. 'Just get on with it!' you want to say, but they have to eke it out. Still, as with Wonder Woman, this is a different take on male heroics, and it does sort of give the vibe of how you can't win in some situations so you have to make the best of it.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I just wanted to show the difference between DC and Marvel goes back a lot deeper than which film studios have the rights to which characters. And since WB and Disney are two of the media megacorps dividing up reality as we know it between them, I'm sure that fundamental difference is now vaster than ever before.