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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

If you consider liking/appreciating the MCU films as 'underdeveloped taste', then that's pretty close to being elitist. Not everyone goes to the cinema for the same type of content, so everyone's "taste" will be subjective. In that same respect, I don't think OP can ask for "evidence" that the MCU has lowered the quality of content across the board - the only thing we can see is that many other media companies want to mimic the money-printing machine that is the MCU, only to fail by outputting (unanimously) subpar films. The poster child is DC, but there are other examples, like how Universal tried to make a 'Dark Universe' and has effectively canned that[0]. That might mean more movie budget is used to poorly mimic a formula you dislike instead of movies you would like.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/movies/the-invisible-man-...

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If you think it’s elitist to ask adults to like adult things rather than things for children, have at it. I should note that the poster I responded to, in listing the merits of MCU films, discussed only technical details and the baseline of coherent storytelling; theme, meaning, film making craft, and artistic merit shockingly did not enter the discussion. I would call that underdeveloped taste and a limited understanding of how literary media work as art. If that makes me elitist, fair enough, but I’d much rather be an elitist than go through life thinking comic books are the height of human expression.

> I’d much rather be an elitist than go through life thinking comic books are the height of human expression.

Perhaps I'm too much of a child to understand your point, but this seems like a straw man.

I think the original contention was that MCU content is low quality (and no one has provided anything to support that claim beyond hand wavey "it's for children" nonsense). The other contention was that MCU films reduce the quality of the cinema industry overall, which is a similarly baseless claim.

Independent films still exist. Dramatic films still exist. Artistic production still exists. I haven't seen stats, but I would be shocked if the market for such content is smaller now than it was in 2008.

There's the possible claim that MCU sucks the oxygen out of the room for more artistic productions. I think the idea is that the world would be better if popular content didn't exist, so that we'd all have only "artistic" content available. I think that is a world in which fewer people watch movies at all, not a world in which everyone is driven to only appreciate high art. Thus the claims that MCU reduce the quality of cinema overall seems hard to defend.

I'm curious about the other perspective, so any perspective or analysis that better explains the thinking would be helpful. Otherwise I have to assume folks are just coming up with stories to justify their elitism.

BTW: "theme, meaning, film making craft, and artistic merit"

- craft was addressed in all of the sub-categories listed: performance, visual art, music, audio, effects

- theme/meaning: varies by film (because they aren't all the same). Sometimes it's loss and grief. Sometime's it's managing conflicts. Sometimes its reckoning with the inherent conflicts in heroism. Sometimes it's displacement after war. Sometimes it's about the forces that drive people to extremism. IDK humans aren't that complicated.

- artistic merit: a bullshit concept and I think you know it. Literal urinals have artistic merit. Canvases painted red have artistic merit. "Artistic merit" is elitism in distilled form.

Edit: I will concede that the performances in "Black Widow" were particularly weak.

How about this: MCU movies begin production with the VFX work for the major action scenes. This happens before they have a script or even a director. Have you ever noticed how MCU movies feel like a completely different movie once the CGI action sequences start? It’s because they are. These are not serious works of craft: they are marketing exercises meant to keep a money tree well watered.

I was never the target audience for this stuff but I was willing to be dragged along to Iron Man and Captain America because at that time “October Movies” still existed. That is mid budget Hollywood dramas and thrillers targeted towards adults, typically with an edgier tone, released in October after the summer tent pole season has run down but before Oscar candidate season has fully started. Basically everything David Fincher directed prior to being scooped up by Netflix fell into this category. Nightcrawler, All is Lost, and Captain Philips, are other “recent” examples, but of course they’re from the first half of the 2010s because Hollywood no longer green lights projects like these in the cinematic universe era. When MCU critics talk about crowding out better films, this is the sort of thing they’re referring to.

Look I apologize for not containing my scorn, but the fact is that the typical 9 year old can understand everything there is to understand in an MCU film modulo the punchline of a couple jokes. These are thematically simple films with no point of view and nothing to say for fear of shrinking the size of the big tent. The sad thing is that films targeted at children don’t have to be dumb; Bambi for example is a shockingly grownup film that sensitively deals with the passage of time and seasons, death and grief, coming of age, the hardness of life, and the cycle of generations, all within a runtime of under 70 minutes. There’s a lot going on there for the story of a fawn who does stuff in the woods. Yet that kind of depth does not exist in the children’s cinema of our times, ie the MCU, and the popular audience doesn’t even know to ask for it anymore.

We’re a stupid people and we get served correspondingly stupid culture. Sorry to rant and be rude, but in my view the MCU’s popularity is one of the leading indicators of our cultural decline, right up there with Trumpism and social media.

I think the stupidity lives in your point of view here. "Old x was better because it was sophisticated, new x is not because blah blah blah" is a story as old as time. The observable fact that you are either unaware of recent history or unwilling to learn from it is revealing. https://pessimists.co/novel-archive/

> Bambi for example is a shockingly grownup film that sensitively deals with the passage of time and seasons, death and grief, coming of age, the hardness of life, and the cycle of generations, all within a runtime of under 70 minutes.

I'm not going to defend MCU as being a pinnacle of meaning or depth, because honestly I tend to see _all_ of art as being fundamentally bullshit. However, all of what you wrote can describe one MCU entry or another. Literally every single one. I get media criticism, but ffs you should probably actually watch a recent entry before you pass judgment. Ideally with an open mind - if you go in assuming a work is trash, you will find it is trash. Even bubble gum pop has artistic value; I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find intellectually interesting themes in MCU.

I recommend you take a moment to watch Captain America and the Winter Soldier. It has (for a child's movie at a nine-year-old level) sophisticated treatment of the security-vs-liberty tradeoff, the politics of mass surveillance, adapting to societal change, dealing with loss, and more. https://ew.com/article/2014/04/06/captain-america-the-winter...

Unrelated to above points, but I think you should reflect on your arguments and whether things like the production schedule are actually part of a coherent framework to evaluate film, or just another fact pulled out of a hat to prop up your prejudice.

If you're willing to call everyone else stupid, I hope you won't mind me saying I expect better from someone on HN.

If you think all art is bullshit I pity the emptiness of your life. No wonder you defend the MCU. We have nothing further to discuss.

I pity your profound lack of self awareness.

Take every criticism of MCU here (which I am not defending) and it applies just as well to one bit of art or another.

The difference is the art house filmmaker either is lying to himself and the world or is simply deluded. That's fine, there's a lot of awards authorities who will award bullshit! It's kind of the point; the market rewards everything else.

It sort of reminds me of ice cream. Not particularly meaningful, but very meaningful to the person it brings joy to. Thousands of vendors make boring, trash ice cream that is formulaic: ice, cream, sugar, and a mix of flavorings and sometimes chunks of sweet and salty things.

But for Salt and Straw, the artsy/edgy types who are too self-obsessed to realize how basic they are, the formula isn't enough. They say, "ice cream isn't art unless it has anchovies". And unless it does something weird, it isn't _really_ anything but trash. It doesn't matter how premium the caramel, how many thousands of hours that went into perfecting the syrup recipes, how polished the flavor balance is, it isn't good unless you add something to make it unpopular.

Because if the hoi polloi can understand, then it isn't art. The sophisticated people who bitch about how formulaic cinema is these days say, "I want anchovies! I want garlic-gruyere-gumdrop ice cream! I hate vanilla and caramel because I resent the common people for liking that, I am better! Formulaic ice cream literally makes people stupid and degrades intellectual discourse! Too many people like vanilla so it is bad! If only no one made vanilla ice cream, the dumb people would be forced to love garlic-chocolate-pine needle ice cream!"

Art is a tool. People who want to use 'artistic merit' as a cudgel against art products they don't like should probably take a step back and reflect on art history. I won't argue any particular way, but if you zoom out far enough to see a whole, the only common pattern is it is all bullshit.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-duchamps-urina...

> Independent films still exist.

Barely. There's no money left in the industry. Everyone is trying to make the next universe, and failing.

5 years ago Birdman was very close to not being a thing because they couldn't find money. How many Birdmans of today can't?

> the only thing we can see is that many other media companies want to mimic the money-printing machine that is the MCU, only to fail by outputting (unanimously) subpar films. The poster child is DC, but there are other examples, like how Universal tried to make a 'Dark Universe' and has effectively canned that

They both tried to create universes from the outset, Universal IIRC even announced their Dark Universe before the first movie was released.

The Conjuring Universe on the other hand started the same as the MCU, and seems to have been a success: Make a good movie or two, then sequels and spinoffs, expanding organically until there's nothing else to call it but a "universe". It seems to be going well, with the 8th movie released this year, 2 more planned, 5 short films, and a comic book [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conjuring_Universe

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