marvel universe

Just finished watching Incredible Hulk, or rather Beauty & the Beast...wait...King Kong...wait...the eternal battle between the physical & harnessing one's innermost, taming the beast within. So unpredictable & unoriginal, not complex at all -

No, you academic, you big thinker, it's not complex. It's a universal narrative. As a culture, this is something we need to get through our thick, instant-coffee meta barrier - that originality's an illusion, works-in-progress are never failures & innovations are linked to the infinite predecessor. So, if you didn't like Children of Men because it was predictable, good man, you missed its benefit & you need to broaden your holism. I got sidetracked...this blog is supposed to be about Marvel Studios.

Ahem, Marvel Studios, as you know have become its own independent studio & has already made under its banner two blockbuster superhero flicks, Iron Man & Incredible Hulk. Despite the critical & overwhelming commercial success of Iron Man, I preferred Incredible Hulk; Leterrier despite his hyper-machismo still pulled off that particular French flow, which is to say, the French have a certain narrative seamlessness, a gift for that grand, romantic storytelling. Iron Man, on the other hand, was the epitome of an American symptom infecting the world, empty flash, rock star mentality. Listen, Downey Jr. was spot-on wit & Paltrow was smokin', but that's all it was - it was choppy, it was aesthetic-driven, it was an array of setup scenes only there to cap off with a catchy punch-line or something instantly cool, it was hyper-postmodern.

But for Favreau, as a director, that's his weakness, fluidity. For all the solid comedy skits strung together & a decent aesthetic eye, Iron Man, Zathura, Elf & Made all lack that essential distinction between artist & technician: heart, soul. But, again, this blog is not a roast of Favreau because in this case it's not just Favreau, it's symbolic. We need to semantically take back Art, the word, give it meaning again. That's all on that, I'll move on. Marvel Studios, whom in the past licensed off their characters & plots only to sadly see horrible cinematic adaptations, many b-movie level, movies made as stand-alone productions, for reasons of financial safe-guarding & also due to contextual cultural perspective. Moving on to today, we're yearning for that sense of cohesiveness, for that unanimity, for that Great Work, for universality. What's simply brilliant, financially & metaphysically, about Marvel is that they're consciously building a community, a universe, intertwining their blockbusters the same way they did comic books, characters revolving & appearing in one another's stories, the ever-expansive web of life being reflected in commercial cinema the same way great authors like Salinger or auteurs like Almodovar have glimpsed at. I for one, will always have these degrees of transconnection in my works - it's reality.