Movies Scorsese on Marvel movies: "That's not cinema" "Theme park ride" EDIT: Coppola says Marvel movies "despicable" "same movie over and over again"

[Kal-El814]

16 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Martin Scorsese Says ‘Fight Back’ Against Comic Book Movie Culture by Supporting Directors Like Christopher Nolan: ‘We’ve Got to Save Cinema’

VARIETY.COM

---

Director Martin Scorsese once again discussed comic book and franchise culture, a topic which he has spoken out about at length in the past.

 

 

🤫

 

Nolan didn’t become a household name until he got his hands on Batman, fucking whatever.

[TheLeon]

Yes, ha ha, Nolan became a household name by making Batman movies, and the massive success of those movies is part of why comic book movies have been so omnipresent for the last 15 years. But also… he stopped making those, and has instead spent the last decade making unique, original blockbusters. Again, it can’t be overstated: a dense, talky, three hour drama about a scientist is the #5 highest grossing film of the year. That’s fucking insane. It’s easy to see why old Hollywood types are championing him now.
 

 

[Kal-El814]

9 minutes ago, TheLeon said:

Yes, ha ha, Nolan became a household name by making Batman movies, and the massive success of those movies is part of why comic book movies have been so omnipresent for the last 15 years. But also… he stopped making those, and has instead spent the last decade making unique, original blockbusters. Again, it can’t be overstated: a dense, talky, three hour drama about a scientist is the #5 highest grossing film of the year. That’s fucking insane. It’s easy to see why old Hollywood types are championing him now.

 

Of course. Again, Scorsese’s record, talent, and quality are unimpeachable. And despite the fact that I love comic books, the characters in them, and comic book movies (and shows and cartoons, etc.), I don’t want them to be the only movies that are dragging people to movie theaters. But all this shit comes off like auteurs bitching about what’s popular right now.

 

I wish that more movies like The Last of Sheila or The Conversation or Rope or whatever were getting made more regularly and did well in theaters. I do miss that kinda mid-tier, mid-budget movie. But so much of stuff like that comes to streaming services or prestige mini-series now. I dunno that something like Mare of Easttown would have been better as a movie? But that was excellent and fills some of that niche.

 

More than one thing can be true. I can agree with Marty generally and also acknowledge that he’s the old man bitching about how rock and roll is all noise and people used to listen to real singers and musicians.

[TwinIon]

That bit is even more jarring in the context of the whole profile. It goes through his career and details how he never really fit into the Hollywood system. How executives didn't like how little Casino made, how much trouble Weinstein gave him making Gangs of New York and Aviator, and how he needed to use his own money to finish the latter. It goes on to talk about how WB wanted The Departed to be a franchise and how he should have leveraged that film to make Silence, and how he's had to find independent funding for for all his films since Shutter Island. This is a man who, despite decades of commercial and critical successes, has constantly struggled to make the films he wants to make. He has one of the most incredible ouvres in the history of the medium, and has still had to push against the commercial film making machine for decade after decade.

 

Surely the story here is that it's always been hard to make these movies. That artistic success has never been a guarantee of financial support. That telling difficult stories is a difficult process.

 

No, instead the conclusion is that "the industry is over" and that there are generations that think cinema is only comic book movies. That directors need to fight.

 

Nevermind that those franchise films are often what gives filmmakers like Nolan the ability to make their own movies. Nevermind that the commercial successes of Barbie and Oppenheimer and Avatar shows audiences will pay to see cinema.

[TheLeon]

25 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

 

Of course. Again, Scorsese’s record, talent, and quality are unimpeachable. And despite the fact that I love comic books, the characters in them, and comic book movies (and shows and cartoons, etc.), I don’t want them to be the only movies that are dragging people to movie theaters. But all this shit comes off like auteurs bitching about what’s popular right now.

 

I wish that more movies like The Last of Sheila or The Conversation or Rope or whatever were getting made more regularly and did well in theaters. I do miss that kinda mid-tier, mid-budget movie. But so much of stuff like that comes to streaming services or prestige mini-series now. I dunno that something like Mare of Easttown would have been better as a movie? But that was excellent and fills some of that niche.

 

More than one thing can be true. I can agree with Marty generally and also acknowledge that he’s the old man bitching about how rock and roll is all noise and people used to listen to real singers and musicians.

I don’t think you had posted when I first clicked on this thread, so my post wasn’t directed at you, even though it looks like it was. Whoops. 
 

I was responding to the general “gotcha” nature of pulling the quote naming Nolan, like hey don’t tell the old man yelling at clouds how that guy made his big break. It’s really dumb.