Much has been made of my comments regarding Marvel movies and what I believe should be their place in cinematic history, so I’d like to clarify for the record: I have not stopped vomiting since the fateful day five years ago when I watched twenty minutes of Iron Man 2.
I don’t fully remember what happened in the “film” during those twenty minutes. Something about Blythe Danner’s daughter and Robert Downey’s son doing… something. Something robot-related, perhaps. I didn’t feel the need to see the first Iron Man so I do not know who these people were or what they were doing, nor do I care to. All I know is I threw up while watching it and a day hasn’t gone by since during which I haven’t thrown up just thinking about it. I had to fast for four days and take an anti-nausea medication usually prescribed to chemo patients to be able to write this without destroying my keyboard.
Is this what cinema has become? Where are the timeless stories, the tales of cops trying to arrest gangsters and gangsters trying to evade cops and birds trying to kill Tippi Hedren? To be fair, it is possible Iron Man 2 was eventually about some or all of these things, I wouldn’t know, because of all the vomiting.
Movies need stakes that audiences actually care about, that is what makes them art. The fate of something important must be at risk, and I’m not talking about the fate of a city or a planet or half the population of the universe, I’m talking about the fate of Leonardo DiCaprio and/or Robert DeNiro. Were either of them in Iron Man 2? I don’t actually know but I doubt it. And I can’t ask them without ruining my suit and our working relationship.
In closing, I’d like to question who benefits when the predominant entertainment form of a society is a homogenized mythology controlled by a single corporation with a vested interest in keeping people quietly spending, when the new opium of the masses presents simplified tales of good vs evil in which might quickly makes right without questioning how or why that should be or what it all means in the end. I am of course assuming that is what these movies are, I’ve only got those twenty minutes to go on.
Also, Marvel owes me like fifty new couches.
