Most everything I had to say about Marvel’s The Avengers, in a review I wrote in May of 2012 but forgot to actually post, was summed up by film critic Jim Emerson:
A movie like “Marvel’s The Avengers” doesn’t need critics and critics don’t need it. Of course, it’s perfectly reviewable in mainstream journalistic / consumer guide terms (story, character, action, effects, acting, etc.). My own hunch is that it’s not going to be subjected to much in-depth critical analysis. Not of its aesthetics, anyway. Somebody might write about how it changed the movie business (if it does), or study the mythology of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe,” or examine the technologies used in making it, but they’re not going to study the filmmaking, which is serviceable but little more. There just isn’t all that much going on from shot to shot (I’m a fan of Whedon’s “Buffy,” but he isn’t that kind of director). As M. Leary says in a piece at Filmwell on the movie’s fleeting references to theism, “The primary purpose of the film is to be awesome, and it certainly accomplishes that.” No need for criticism if that’s all there is to it. Somebody says “It’s awesome!” and somebody else says “No it’s not!” and that’s the extent of the discussion (which has nothing to do with movie criticism). We’re simply back in Monty Python’s Argument Clinic, where there’s no argument, just contradiction in the most simplistic terms.
—Jim Emerson, Scanners With Jim Emerson
You never ‘sound’ bored to me. With this much fodder from the Life Experience you could write for the rest of your days. I notice that you still have right clicking on links disabled in most of this page. Why is that?
Simple: I don’t own the images. Disabling the right-clock is a pretty big waste of time, it’s mainly a nuisance lock as most anyone really determined to grab your content will just grab it. I suspect I will write for the rest of my days; singers sing, painters paint. I may not write *comics,* but I write each and every day. Kind of a habit, now. 🙂
Yeah, there’s not much to say about Avengers. I loved it, but I don’t think about it much. I like watching it, and it’s tight, and it’s glorious and Joss Whedon’s a great story teller, I think, for pulling it off. And he has a lot of discipline to have pulled it off like that. But there’s just not much to say about it.
And that’s a funny thing about when you do something really well like that, sometimes. Cuz I’ve watched Iron Man 3 five times as much as Avengers. And Iron Man 3 was a mess. I could easily write 3 pages right now talking about all the weirdness in that movie, exactly all the ways that it derailed and ended up a huge trainwreck. But that’s what makes me watch it again and again. And it’s open to so many possible other ways it could’ve been done, and that’s what i sort of obsess over about movies like Iron Man 3. That’s why I can recognize them as not being as good as other movies, but end up loving them more.
It’s almost like how we end up more attracted to either beautiful faces with singular ugly features or ugly faces with singular beautiful features. Personalities too. But those are the kind of things that drive people mad, that make us lose it over them. Far more than entirely beautiful or entirely ugly faces and personalities.
Gimme the glorious train wrecks, any day. I love the perfect movies like Avengers too, not saying it’s boring, but they just don’t do it the way I like it.