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Society & Culture Bill Maher hating on comic book culture
- Thread starter Dixie Normous
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Could say the same for Westerns in the 50's, mobster films in the 40's etc.
Acting like superheroes are the beginning of Hollywood pumping out generic juvenile material is asinine in my opinion. The only reason Westerns are serious cinema now and not generic films made for children with Roy Rogers singing is that all the people who were into them as kids are old now. The things that entertain the children of today entertaining the adults of tomorrow seems a fairly reasonable progression to me.
WITH THAT BEING SAID, I can understand Maher's viewpoint, the "comic book culture" is an embarrassment, although I think "fandoms" in general don't tend to emphasize the positive qualities of humanity.
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Probably not. I also got over video games when I was a child but I can sort of see how they fire something in the brain, you need to use your brain and reflexes in some way I guess.
Superhero movies for adults are just weird fantasy stuff.
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Unless you're watching stuff like Kramer vs Kramer or something the vast majority of movies qualify as weird fantasy stuff in my opinion (I wonder if Bill Maher was 62 in the 70's if he'd be saying the same stuff about Roger Moore's James Bond films).
Kind of like Bill's show. Every night: "Trump bad".
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Maher would love to live in an alternate reality where Trump wasn't elected and he doesn't have to talk about creeping authoritarianism every week.
Plugger35
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Those US talk show hosts would secretly love Trump being elected, he gives them so much great material to work with, more than Hillary would've given them.
He's a comedy goldmine.
I don’t know about “the vast majority of movies”. James Bond yeah, but it’s probably a little more realistic than these half human/half animal creatures.
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Bill got along well with Milo. Good sorts of fellas.
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Demosthenes
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I would say that it has more to do with time filtering out the schlock. There are an awful lot of forgettable westerns and samurai films and mobster films. We remember the stuff that Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa and Howard Hawks put out because their films transcended genre and did really interesting things. Their films gave the genre credibility, not the other way around.
Finding great films that are incidentally in the superhero genre is hard, in no small part because bigger budgets mean less creativity and adding superpowers to your plot immediately means a whack of SFX. But I would also suggest that producing effective human stories is inherently harder when you are dealing with characters who are (by definition) better than human. There are certainly films that do it, but they fight the tide to do so. Most just pick a different genre.
I could be wrong, but I suspect these sorts of restrictions will prevent superhero films from becoming a petrie dish for creative filmmaking the way other popular genres have been in the past.
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Guardians is the closest to a great 'superhero' film IMO but its really more of a sci-fi that just happened to be a Marvel comic.
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Also, Superman 2, Spiderman 2, The Dark Knight... None of which are MCU productions.
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Demosthenes
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Stuff like Guardians of the Galaxy and Spider-Man 2 are really well-made, but not particularly interesting art.
Personally my favourite superhero film is Logan. I also love James Gunn's first genre effort, Super, for all its flaws.
Personally my favourite superhero film is Logan. I also love James Gunn's first genre effort, Super, for all its flaws.
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The Incredibles is the best superhero
movie ever made
movie ever made
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Never heard anyone talk about this movie until the sequel came out this year.
CGI movies, they made a few good ones in the 90s and into the early 00s. But feels like they've just been repeating the same story ever since. "Little kid/animal/toy/robot learns to be confident and have self-esteem and here's a sprinkling of jokes adults can laugh at" x7376363636.
Finding Dory and Inside Out were two decent ones that came out relatively recently, but yeah there haven't been classics since the late noughties with Ratatouille and Wall-E. They're more interested in milking the Toy Story and Cars franchises with endless sequels.
Disney's projects without Pixar are particularly meh: Frozen, Moana, Zootopia, Wreck-It Ralph all very popular but bad films (inb4 stop watching kids movies you pathetic floghard)
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Agree.
Also not part of the MCU, which is the main crux of the situation here.
Super is awesome, love that movie. Be good to see James Gunn back to his own projects.
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Surprised at this take, Incredibles 2 was the standard uninspired audience pandering shlock Pixar has sunk too but the original is a very good film.
The entire basis of the films setting is that Superheros are made illegal after one is sued for interfering with a suicide attempt, and the middle act is centred around suspicions of an affair and a man struggling to deal with feeling emasculated by his domestication, so i don't think it can be really be described as a sprinkling of adult jokes. If anything I would describe it as an adult story with a sprinkling of kid friendly jokes.
Yeah I've never really understood it. I wasn't into Spiderman etc much as a kid either.
I do understand sometimes people just want to chill out and watch something that's not too serious and easy to follow. That's fine. But grown men and women obsessing over the latest superhero movie like it's going to be a masterpiece and different from the last just leaves me completely dumbfounded. A bunch of people are getting ridiculously rich over repetitive s**t.
It feels like they're partly to blame for what I see as a decline in movies in general. Filmmakers seem to suck at coming up with new ideas and can get away with it because droves flock to their boring repetitive stuff.
It's sort of like wrestling I guess. I was into it as a kid and still found it slightly entertaining. But I went to the WWE recently and after an hour thought to myself how absurd is this? Then there were all these grown men wearing ridiculous t-shirts, belts etc which just felt really weird.
Probably yeah. It's probably why I haven't watched a number of movie series like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings etc. Comic movies just seem different all together though. All seem to be fairly similar, just different settings and a new character or two.
When I watch a movie I generally want to be entertained but also want to see a new story. That's probably why I loved The Dark Knight so much. It had a comic book superhero as the protagonist yeah but the movie wasn't just filled with effects. The music was great, the story was tense and The Joker was an amazing character.
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Wait, what?
No! Its producers and financers who aren't willing to take the risk they once did and will go with backing the same s**t over and over because its more likely to make money. There is plenty of original content around, particularly on the TV medium.
This is partly to blame on those who buy the tickets of course. Once upon a time a sequel was seen to make less money than the original almost everytime but that may partly be due to sequels getting less backing so it was a self fulfilling prophecy.
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I think most genres in their infancy fall victim to the studio copy-pasting thing. The genre didn't even produce stuff general audiences would watch until X-Men in 2000 (Batman and Superman in 70's and 80's were really made because of the TV shows, not the comics).
The embarrassing part of the fanbase (which is where I think Maher does have a point) that is still oddly defensive of their properties, as though they are still an outsider form of media and not corporate juggernauts, and feel the need to defend them despite lack of quality, has allowed the genre to stagnate where other genres generally mature.
Yeah sorry that’s what I meant by filmmakers.
