Following Joel Schumacher’s death earlier this week, there was the inevitable return of one of nerddom’s longest-living arguments, namely the quality of the two Batman films he directed. Granted, the man directed all sorts of other movies, including at least two undeniably great ones (The Lost Boys and Tigerland), and one fascinating and questionable one (Falling Down) and of course a whole lot of trash as well, but nerds be nerds and if we’re not talking about Batman somehow we’re just not happy.

The arguments boil down to two sides. The first, much more mainstream argument is that they are the bad sort of trash, because Batman’s costume has nipples and because of all the butt shots and because they’re campy and queer-coded. This argument, most of the time, boils down to not much more than thinly veiled homophobia. (And this was so mainstream that MadTV – hey, remember MadTV? Yeah, me neither – literally aired a sketch where “Joel Schumacher” explained that his first choice for Batman was Tommy Tune.) The second argument, the contrarian one, is that they are good precisely because of these things – the argument advanced first by Chris Sims and elaborated upon this past week by Anthony Oliveira. And, because the internet is the internet and polarization is the natural endpoint of any argument on the internet, there is no middle ground in this mostly-one-sided opinion war.

Well, call me Nuance Bob, because that is what I seek to introduce right now. I don’t think the Schumacher Batman films are good Batman films, and I don’t even think they’re particularly good films in and of themselves. That said, my dislike for them has nothing directly to do with their campiness, queerness or the butt shots, and when people complain about these things I think they’re mostly calling themselves out as narrow-minded dorks and/or prudes (and nerddom has both in great amounts, although the prudishness is of course mostly from a straight white male permissive perspective). Honestly, a lot of the time the queerness is the best part of these films for me. I have other reasons to dislike them.

That said, I do think the Schumacher Batman films achieve what Schumacher set out to do with them, and in that sense they are definitely successes. If you want what Schumacher is selling, then his Batman films – and especially Batman and Robin, which is simply better than Batman Forever on all counts – give you exactly what you desire. This is, of course, a concession to the idea that the audience’s subjective choice matters in determining the quality of a work of art, which is a minefield of debate all on its own (“is Thomas Kinkade good now?”) but I don’t think it’s something we can dismiss. Schumacher was a queer man who injected queerness into his films whenever he could, and if you look at his ouevre he mostly did a lot of buttoned-down stuff across his career. Getting to direct two Batman movies was a rare opportunity for him to go as wild as he could under Hollywood circumstances and justify it with “it’s superheroes!” Who can fault him for that? Who can fault people who find pleasure in that? I certainly can’t. But I do think the campiness of Schumacher’s films is the core of why they don’t work for me – and, by extension, a lot of other people.

By this, I don’t mean that they are too out there or too gloriously weird: I mean, my favorite Batman movie and the one I think is objectively the best of them all is Batman Returns, a movie that features rocket-equipped penguins, an evil circus troupe where the most dangerous member is a trained poodle, and Michelle Pfeiffer trying to eat an entire canary just to make a point, plus a pretty kinkily-sexualized relationship between Batman and Catwoman to boot. That said, Batman Returns is mostly not a camp film, for all its fantastical and weird elements. It is, like a lot of Tim Burton’s work, somewhere between goth and emo in terms of its aesthetic, and the reason it works (and Burton’s earlier Batman, although it is less successful than Returns) is because, whatever you might consider the flaws of these films, they are sincere.

The Burton films, and especially Returns, are achingly, almost embarrassingly sincere in their emotional cores, in a way that the “more realistic” Christopher Nolan Batman films often cannot manage with the same depth, because the Nolan films are desperate to make the ludicrous thing that is the entire idea of Batman “work” in an ostensibly real-world setting, and as such their emotional arcs are shortchanged because if you’ve got a guy dressing up like a bat, you either roll with it or find excuses. (I like the Nolan Bat-films, don’t get me wrong – but as time progresses, they’re aging with less and less grace simply because of this fact.) And, indeed, Adam West’s Batman – in both TV and movie form – is sincere as well, despite being also goofy and silly, because it’s sincere about being goofy and silly.

Sincerity is not something that is necessarily at odds with the camp aesthetic – John Waters, for example, has spent an entire career bridging that gap. But camp by definition is grounded in irony, and a sincere work that is also ironic has to find sincerity within its irony, and I don’t think the Schumacher films manage that. Batman Forever certainly doesn’t; it’s a messy hodgepodge of a flick, with no central emotional core whatsoever in a movie that is about Batman and Robin coming together as a partnership. I have to consider that a stunning failure. No amount of entertainment derived from Jim Carrey’s wonderful, queer-as-hell Riddler really changes how lifeless most of the rest of the movie is. (Tommy Lee Jones’ Two-Face is, for me, too frenetic to really be entertaining at all, but I know opinions vary sharply about this and I don’t want to get into that right now.) Really, when I think of Batman Forever as a whole, for me the entire film is encapsulated by the “holey rusted metal” gag from Forever – a wink and a nod to previous Bat-camp that isn’t as funny as the original and doesn’t serve as much more than a reference to it. It’s the queer Batman equivalent of “cake is a lie” T-shirts: hey, kids, remember this thing you liked on TV? We remember it too! But: they didn’t like it so much that they weren’t willing to wink at us and snicker about how dorky it was, and that’s how Forever truly fails.

Batman and Robin at least has a sincere emotional core, but it isn’t a narrative emotional core at all: it’s simply a film about the eroticism of Batman as a concept. It sincerely loves getting off about Batman. (I mean, Uma Thurman’s super-great Poison Ivy performance only really makes sense in that context, right?) Which: fine, it’s not a traditional superheroic arc or anything but at least the film is about something – except for when the movie is taking extended sequences to handle the story arcs of Alicia Silverstone’s Batgirl or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze, when the film is about nothing beyond bright, colourful visuals and actors who are terribly, terribly miscast in their very important roles. I don’t remember which queen on RuPaul’s Drag Race said it, but I do remember one of them saying it: camp that isn’t funny is bad camp. The problem with big chunks of Batman Returns is that Silverstone and Schwarzenegger are just not funny at all. (Chris O’Donnell, bless his heart, is at least trying to run with it in the most whitebread way possible, but really, only Uma Thurman in this movie is actually suited to what the movie wants to do.) When someone tells me to just shut my brain off and try to enjoy the seemingly endless series of grade-school-level ice-themed puns Schwarzenegger spouts off in the most perfunctory way, my response is always to think “but why couldn’t they have just written funny lines instead?” I mean, it’s not like Arnold doesn’t know how to toss off a decent one-liner. Or, and here is an idea, maybe don’t play the single most tragic Bat-villain for laughs – particularly when you’ve adopted the Nora Fries backstory from Batman: The Animated Series entirely for your movie, which makes all of the puns land that much more awkwardly – just because you’ve decided to embrace a camp aesthetic for the film in toto. Schumacher could have, instead, chosen to play Freeze straight and keep the camp visual aesthetic intact, which would have made for a more impactful movie. Or he could have made funny jokes instead of once again indulging in the holey rusted metal aesthetic of doing dumb jokes and asking us to celebrate their stupidity.

I get that Schumacher obviously didn’t want to make that sort of movie! That’s fine, that’s a choice – but at that point, why even use Mr. Freeze when he’s going to work against what you want to do? Granted, at this point we’re almost certainly running Schumacher’s desires up against studio demands to use visible, marketable characters in the movies so they can sell toys, but movies like this are always going to be about improvising your way towards what you want to do with what you’re given, and I don’t think Schumacher succeeded in that respect. This is why I have to consider Batman and Robin a failure – not because it’s queer, not because of its fetishization aspects. Those are the good parts, and they don’t outweigh all of the bad.

So Martin Scorsese said that the Marvel movies are “not cinema” and the internet kind of blew up because it is inherently polarizing, and the possibility that Scorsese is both one of our most talented living directors and also wrong about this particular subject is not particularly fun discourse for a lot of people on the internet, which often demands that only one take be right and correct. That said, I am now going to present to you the one take on this particular subject that is right and correct.

What Scorsese here is saying is the old standard of “that’s not art.” He says “cinema” instead of “art,” but that’s what he means. When he likens Marvel movies to theme parks, the point of such a comparison is invariably to dismiss the artistic merit of the works in question. I note that this is essentially the same comparison Roger Ebert made when he famously argued that video games weren’t art, which made Penny Arcade, among others, get all angry and stuff. Ebert was wildly wrong, but that didn’t make him one of the greatest critics in film history, because he was one. Sometimes people who are really good at things get something wrong. Especially this happens when the person who is really good at something is in the twilight of their career and their lived experience can sometimes blind them to possibilities outside of that experience. (Martin Scorsese is 76, incidentally.)

Are the Marvel films art? I go here by the Scott McCloud definition of “art,” wherein any creative expression that isn’t rooted in the survival or mating instincts is by definition “art,” because honestly it’s the only useful definition of “art” that I have ever found. It is possible for creative expression to be sublimated into the survival or mating instinct, of course (most marketing, for example, is creative but it’s also only extant because people need to keep a roof over their head). I don’t think the Marvel movies sink to that level at all, though, simply because of the amount of effort and love that goes into them. Granted, not everybody who works on a Marvel film is dedicated to the ideas in them. (Gwyneth Paltrow in particular has been open about her strictly mercenary reasons for working in the Marvel movies and that she doesn’t give two shits about them, which has led a lot of anti-populist film writers to celebrate somebody whose actual reason for making movies is to enrich herself and stay culturally relevant in order to give her hokum-peddling “wellness” empire more power. Basically my point here is that Gwyneth Paltrow is a bad person and if you find yourself celebrating her reasons for doing anything maybe give it a second think-over.)

But film has always been a commercially defined artistic endeavour. It’s too expensive not to be, outside of the true indie renegades who manage to shoot a 16mm gritty whatever on their spare time and never care about the money (which excludes most well-known “independent” directors who in fact live and die by whatever financial success their movies achieve, since it is only that which allows them to make more movies). There are always going to be people on any set who are just there to do the work and get paid. Martin Scorsese does passion projects; Martin Scorsese’s gaffer is paying down his mortgage by making sure people don’t get electrocuted. C’est la vie.

This is emphasized, I might add, by The Band Wagon, which I mention because it is one of the 85 films Martin Scorsese lists in his must-see films list/”films to see before you die” list/”instant film school” list/(it’s been named a lot of things). Now, I don’t take issue with Scorsese liking The Band Wagon, because it’s a fantastic film, one of the best musicals ever made, and definitely a film you should see if you haven’t. But it is also a celebration of populism. The entire film is about Fred Astaire starring in an artistic play that is unwatchable and saving it by turning it into a popular revue – and all of this in a genre which was explicitly predicated on being popular, unchallenging mass entertainment and frequently produced mediocre dreck as often as not. There’s a reason The Band Wagon and An American in Paris are on the list and, say, Navy Blues or It’s Always Fair Weather aren’t.

All of this is to say that Marvel films are art – but like musicals, there’s good ones and bad ones and a whole lot of mediocre ones. Logan is definitely great art. I’d put the first two Captain America films in the “great art” category as well, along with Black Panther. After that there’s a reasonable number of pretty good ones that do well by their larger themes (both Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Thor: Ragnarok, you can guess them easily enough), a couple of really great action blockbusters (and it is worth remembering that Scorsese has never particularly liked action films and has always tended to discount them as critically skillful fare) and a lot of passable entertainments and a few mediocre and bad ones. The best ones do tend to stand alone as individual films more than as chapters of a whole, but that’s a pretty banal observation to make about this genre anyway.

In short: either Scorsese was wrong to assert that the Marvel films aren’t art or he was wrong to imply that they’re uniformly bad art. But he’s still a master filmmaker and anybody claiming the Marvel movies are uniformly great is just being silly. But he’s still wrong.

(Since the last time I did this in 2014, there have been fifteen new Marvel movies from various studios released to theatres, so an update was warranted.)

THE ONES THAT ARE JUST TOTAL SHIT

47. Fantastic Four (2015) A godawful mess on every possible level, and no, even Michael B. Jordan doesn’t come away looking particularly good. Completely misses the point of the Fantastic Four on every level, but also misses the point of superhero movies in general. The script is dull both in terms of overall story arc and dialogue (there is not one joke in the entire goddamn movie that lands), plus its direction is hamfisted at best, with visual FX that mostly look cheap. An astonishing misfire that nearly ended Josh Trank’s career and got a lot of people fired, and all of it deservedly.

46. Man-Thing Brief theatrical run that was so brief it’s a direct-to-DVD in spirit. You have probably never seen it. You missed absolutely nothing. It is a mess in every possible way you can imagine, like Roger Corman came back from the dead (well, he’s not dead, but he hasn’t directed a movie in years so he might as well be, that’s what I say) and decided to make a SyFy Original Marvel Movie, which is basically what this is. It’s only not last because it’s so clumsy that it’s got that Asylum sort of charm, where you watch it and wonder what these bumblefucks thought they were doing, and because not so much money was wasted on it as on Fantastic Four.

45. Elektra A completely joyless slog that feels five times longer than it is, looking muddy and dull throughout – I mean, we all rightfully criticize today’s action blockbusters for adhering to that teal/orange color dichotomy like it is law, but at least teal and orange doesn’t look awful and bland all the time like Elektra does with its near-universal beige visuals. Tack on a nearly incoherent plot, action scenes which rely so heavily on bullet-time that the entire thing feels like it’s in slo-mo, and the pacing of a dead turtle and you have one of the worst “true” theatrical Marvel releases of the modern era. Heck, it’s probably worse than the 1990 Captain America and the Corman Fantastic Four. (It’s definitely worse than the Dolph Lundgren Punisher.)

44. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer An incoherent load of below-par SFX, a storyline that made little sense, next to no jokes (and how can you have a good F4 movie without at least some jokes?), but at least it’s over relatively soon because it’s 92 minutes long and that’s with a lot of very obvious script padding (as scenes just all go too long) because they didn’t have enough ideas to fill ninety lousy goddamn minutes. A complete waste of Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans, who don’t even get to shine like they did in the first film. Not even slightly ironically fun.

THE ONES THAT ARE BAD

43. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Critics were kinder to this than it deserved. “Spider-Man kills the baddie” is a trope that needs to simply not be a thing. The plot is stutter-stop because there are, of course, two villains (Jamie Foxx is an awful Electro and Dane DeHaan is an especially awful Harry Osborn/Green Goblin) with mostly-separate plotlines that make the film seem nearly schizophrenic. Gwen Stacy’s death feels editorially mandated in the worst possible way.

42. X-Men Origins: Wolverine Proof that you can spend an immense amount of money on a superhero movie, have competent filmmakers, have a solid cast (seriously: Hugh Jackman, Liev Schrieber, Ryan Reynolds, Danny Huston – that’s damn good) and it can still be a creative failure in every way that matters. The grimdarkness of the mid-period X-franchise permeates this on every level. Worth mentioning in discussion only for somehow, on a very belated scale, allowing the Deadpool movie to happen.

41. Punisher: War Zone It has a sort of craziness to it that I admire, Ray Stevenson is an inspired casting choice for the Punisher and Dominic West’s Jigsaw is enjoyably loony. But the problem is that simply taking Garth Ennis comic dialogue and putting it on screen does not work – there is printed page material and there is reading aloud material, and what is poetic on the page falls flat when you say it aloud. “There are times when I’d like to get my hands on God” is an amazing line in print, but spoken aloud it becomes bombastic and silly in a way that’s almost impossible to avoid. And the action is mostly bland, which is unforgivable for a Punisher film. A Punisher film, to work properly, should have the action of a John Woo classic combined with the moral dread of a Coen Brothers drama. This is not that.

40. Ghost Rider I think Nicolas Cage’s commitment to the wackiness of the idea of Ghost Rider is underrated even though he was slightly too old for the role when he first played Johnny Blaze – but when you’re saying “hey, 2007 Nicolas Cage is the best thing about this movie,” you know it’s probably not that good a movie because ironically liking Shitty Nicolas Cage is bad and this is bad. Ghost Rider overexplains itself like all get out, which is fatal in a movie that is about a guy who has a flaming skull for a head and rides a motorcycle that is also on fire. (ASIDE: Peter Fonda should have been a lock to be Mephisto and it just doesn’t sing.)

39. Blade: Trinity A mediocre third outing to the franchise which more or less killed it. (FUN FACT: they were hoping to spin a Nightstalkers franchise out of this film. Man, did that not work or what?) At this point the Blade flicks were running out of ideas – when you go to the Dracula well in a vampire-related franchise that’s rarely a good sign unless you invert it cleverly (a la Buffy in season four) and this movie did not do that. It’s not outright terrible by any means: there are some fun performances here (Patton Oswalt is particularly enjoyable), Wesley Snipes is quite reliable as Blade as he always is, and the action sequences are mostly competent. But it’s not anything other than a third movie in a dying series and it doesn’t elevate beyond that.

38. Fantastic Four (2005) It’s more coherent than its sequel, but remains mostly not very good. You see this for Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans’ performances, which are both excellent. Everything else about this movie is bland: Jessica Alba’s Sue is boring, Ioan Gruffud’s Reed doesn’t really work (it’s like he’s got an idea of who Reed is but can’t quite get there to make it work) and the less said about Julian McMahon’s Dr. Doom the better. Between this and the Trank I do wonder if it’s even possible to make a Fantastic Four movie that works for a mass audience, because the F4’s whole deal, really, is that they’re cool because they’re mostly so militantly uncoool, and that doesn’t play in Hollywood executive meetings.

37. Hulk There are a lot of contrarians who like to pretend that this is a good movie. It isn’t a good movie; it’s a misfire. A misfire by talented creators, to be sure, because Ang Lee was trying to do something to work outside the superhero box, and it shows: the film is a substantial whole, a work unto itself, trying to say something in a visual language entirely new to comics movies by outright adapting comics visual vocabulary to do it. Which is a really interesting idea, to say the least. The problem is that this language is visually unappealing and in service to a story that is simply dreadful: I defy anyone to explain the ending in a way that makes sense, and the bit with the gamma-irradiated poodle is just stupid.

36. The Amazing Spider-Man Excellent performances by Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone can’t redeem a clumsily plotted Spider-Man origin story and a major mangling of Spidey’s character (if your Spider-Man story has him consumed by revenge, you are doing it wrong). A massive mangling of the Lizard as the villain doesn’t help either.

35. X-Men: Apocalypse “A huge and talented cast is almost entirely wasted by a perfunctory and boring script” seems like it could describe more than a few superhero movies, but I am hard-pressed to think of a major-budget superhero picture that feels as obligatory as this one. It’s just boring as shit, with tons of FX to compensate for the fact that Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy are clearly completely bored to death with Magneto and Xavier, and when Fassbender and McAvoy are checked out there’s simply not a lot to carry the new-generation X-flicks because these films depend so heavily on their charisma.

34. Daredevil Another victim of the “what makes a superhero more relatable is making the superhero grittier and more morally compromised” school of superhero moviemaking, but at least ends with Daredevil rejecting that philosophy, so that’s something, I guess? Ben Affleck’s performance as Matt Murdock is acceptable, as is Michael Clarke Duncan’s Kingpin, but neither is amazing; only Colin Farrell’s Bullseye is greatly entertaining. Jennifer Garner’s Elektra is kinda bad, but not so bad to make the movie memorably bad; it is forgettable popcorn fare in the bare-minimum sort of way.

THE ONES THAT ARE PASSABLE I GUESS

33. X-Men: The Last Stand This one gets pounded a lot because it’s supposedly the weakest of the X-flicks (it’s not) and because it awkwardly merges multiple classic comics storylines into a weird melange (yeah, okay, but all the X-movies do that) and because Brett Ratner’s direction is, to say the least, uninspired (totally fair). But it has some nice bits. It has Ellen Page in it as Shadowcat! And Kelsey Grammer’s Beast is exactly who Beast needed to be. It could have been so much worse, and it is not. That’s something?

32. Spider-Man 3 Some nerds love to hate on the Dancin’ Evil Peter sequence, and I am not one of them – it’s fun. That having been said: like the other Spider-Man movies, this has a lot of craftsmanship in it. But it again goes to the “Spider-Man needs to have someone to seek revenge against for Uncle Ben’s death” well, which is awful and terrible and completely misses the point of the character. (It really drives home how ambitious Christopher Nolan was to remove revenge as a motive for Batman in his trilogy.) Combine that with the needless inclusion of Venom as demanded by the studio’s marketing department and you have a movie which is cluttered, confused and flawed.

31. The Incredible Hulk Probably the poster child for ensuring a lack of downside risk in a Marvel movie, which likely makes it the blueprint off which future Marvel films were based. There is nothing wrong with Incredible Hulk, other than that it is fairly predictable and fairly safe as entertainment goes, avoiding risk in vast chunks and doing its level best to avoid offending any viewer regardless of preference. But, again: this is a movie that knows what it wants to do and does it competently and professionally. Artistry is sort of an optional extra.

30. The Wolverine This is the “okay” Wolverine solo movie. It is defiantly average as superhero movies go. There are ninjas. And Wolverine. And that is basically it. I mean, it’s nice to see a superhero movie with a majority-person-of-color-cast, that’s certainly true, but you can’t shake the feeling that this entire $100 million movie was sort of improvised on a page-by-page basis based on when the ninjas were available. But at least they’re fun ninjas.

29. Iron Man 2 I know some people are going to complain about a Robert Downey Jr. As Iron Man movie being ranked this low, but here is my counterpoint: tell me what this movie was about off the top of your head. Because you can’t. I had to actively think for a while to remember who the villain was (it’s Mickey Rourke! Remember that? Mickey Rourke was the villain in the second Iron Man movie) or any detail of the plot other than “RDJ quips, and War Machine stuff, and um Black Widow makes her debut in the Marvel movies.” That was all I had. This is not to say that Iron Man 2 isn’t entertaining. It is. But it’s also mostly insubstantial.

28. Blade II Guillermo del Toro’s only Marvel movie is occasionally (but not always) visually striking, and has that gritty-B-movie fun factor that the original Blade had as well. And it’s got tons of great genre actors in it: Donnie Yen, Ron Perlman, a very young Norman Reedus, the guy who played Cat in Red Dwarf, that sort of thing. But it’s got a boring plot (basically: vampires versus zombie vampires) that’s just there to string together the fight sequences. Which are mostly great, admittedly, but Del Toro had already made better than this and would surpass this easily; it’s really kind of a low point in his catalogue.

27. Avengers: Age of Ultron There’s a good movie in here somewhere, but this is probably the apex of Marvel movies being studio-driven in their mandate to continue the overarcing metaplot tying everything together and it suffers for that. (Marvel course-corrected shortly afterward and it’s probably not a coincidence that when Guardians of the Galaxy, a project which has a lot of James Gunn’s personal sensibilities in it, made a fuckton more money than this did, that Marvel started allowing their directors to personalize their projects a little more.) I think James Spader’s turn as Ultron is really underrated, and the action sequences are good, but it’s just a movie that suffers from Too Much Movie bloat.

26. The Punisher This one is one of the more underrated Marvel flicks, mostly because people had enormously overinflated hopes for a Punisher movie “done right.” This is because the Punisher, outside of comics, is just your bog-standard vigilante/murder fantasy, and that doesn’t translate remarkably well to film because it just becomes, well, a vigilante movie. The Thomas Jane Punisher movie, however, is probably the best of them; if you forgot Marvel Comics existed, this would be a decent crime/revenge movie. It has good action, decent performances from Jane and John Travolta, and a solid plot. Certainly it can be described as unambitious, but then again this is a movie that aims for “solid” and hits it, and there are worse things.

25. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance This is basically the opposite of Punisher in that it is ridiculously ambitious and shoots for the moon and misses quite a bit, but it has great action sequences, and Ghost Rider turning a giant digger machine into a Hell-cycle, and Nic Cage and Ciaran Hinds and Idris Elba and Johnny Whitworth having a contest to see who can chew the most scenery. It is insane. And it’s fun. High peaks and extremely deep valleys, to be sure. But it’s never boring.

THE ONES THAT ARE FUN AND NOT A WASTE OF TIME BUT MAYBE NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO BE CALLED “GOOD” YET

24. Thor: The Dark World It is relentlessly entertaining. This is the one that was hardest for me to rank, probably because on the one hand it is the Marvel film I enjoyed terrifically while watching and then later, on sober second thought when the adrenalin of the experience was gone, thought “hmmm” – because enjoyment of the film helps one forget that the villain is bland and the magical McGuffin is meaningless and the plot just a series of excuses to have Loki do neato things and the film’s gender politics are just plain bad (especially after the first Thor was so good in this regard). And then I watched it again and it was still very entertaining. But it still bugs me.

23. X-Men: First Class There’s a lot of silly bits in here and a lot of things you can quibble over or complain about (how it instantly becomes Team Whitebread as the good guys, how the guy whose power is “don’t get killed” IS LITERALLY THE FIRST ONE WHO DIES, Jennifer Lawrence being underwhelming, January Jones being completely awful at everything she does, etc.) but the gorgeous sense of design, skilled direction by Matthew Vaughn, and the stupidly good performances of James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are what make this watchable.

22. Doctor Strange Personal biases would probably make me rank this higher, but honesty demands that this is where it lands because its major flaw is that it doesn’t really nail Strange’s character well until the end, and his journey to that point is unsatisfying in terms of character arc. Basically it serves its purpose as a way to integrate Doc into the MCU proper (as Strange’s appearance in Thor: Ragnarok is excellent), and it’s visually imaginative and every performance is basically good. But it’s not really anything more than that.

21. X-Men Deserves credit for inspiring the new wave of superhero movies in the first place, and beyond that it holds up surprisingly well. A nice balance between nerd callouts and easy access for newbs, well-directed by Bryan Singer with tight editing and gorgeous cinematography, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is still a revelation and the script balances pathos, action and moments of comedy quite well. It still has numerous weak spots (Halle Berry, and also Halle Berry), and the pacing is definitely askew much of the time, but it’s amazing how much this film got right on what was more or less the first try when so many others failed when they had examples of what worked and what didn’t.

THE ONES THAT ARE GOOD

20. Iron Man Let’s be honest: the third act of this film is at best a hot mess and at worst confused sludge, and we all forgive it that, because RDJ kickstarted the Modern Marvel Movie Movement ™ and because you get to see Jeff Bridges’ performance as The Dude Except Now He’s Evil (IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!) and because the first two-thirds of the film are just about perfect, so we let it limp to the finish and nobody really complains. But its strengths as a film have largely been eclipsed by second- and third-generation Marvel fare at this point. It’s still good, but there’s so much now that is better.

19. Ant-Man Gets by on a mostly paper-thin plot by relying on clever visual gags, much more storytelling flair than most Marvel movies have, and a set of really winning performances from Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas and Michael Pena, and Evangeline Lilly is allowed to stay within her range and is fine. Has a weak ending (Scott Lang can reverse being stuck in the unescapable quantum thingerdoo because of The Power of Love, I guess?), and the Bobby Cannavale character and his subplot just actively gets in the way of the movie (there is literally nothing he does that wouldn’t work better being done by Judy Greer’s ex-wife character instead, but she’s a lady person so of course we need a dude to be a minor antagonist) but this one is just gently funny all the way through.

18. Spider-Man The general lack of Spider-jokes (other than the inspired “go web!” sequence) is a shame, but other than that Spider-Man is an exceptionally well-crafted film in just about every respect. If, tonally, it is not quite accurate to its source material, that is forgivable given the impressiveness of its visual skill (Sam Raimi spent a decade making these films and it was time well spent), its strong story, fine performances from Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and Willem Dafoe, and excellent special effects (which he would improve upon in the sequel, but even so). But at this point, that level of craft is just the minimum standard to be expected.

17. X2 Everybody understands that this sequel is simply superior throughout to the original; bigger stakes, mostly superior performances (Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler and Brian Cox’ Stryker are standouts, but this is also Famke Janssen’s best work in the franchise and Ian McKellen is at the height of his powers as Magneto), and by this point Bryan Singer was developing his previous visual flair into a sense of craft that results in a film that is just endlessly watchable. Everything about this is good and nothing is bad.

16. Deadpool It’s extremely funny, but in between a quarter and a third of the jokes are of the not-funny-on-a-second-viewing variety, which is a little disappointing. And the action is mostly just sorta okay rather than the holy-crap-ninjas-on-acid-experience one would ideally want out of a Deadpool movie. Still, it’s intelligent, has faith in both its audience and courage in its core concept, and really just goes for that R rating in a way you have to admire on multiple levels.

15. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 Others have noted that there’s a really solid sentimental core to this film, about surviving abuse and coming to terms with one’s abusers, which is sort of remarkable for a superhero-aliens movie. That’s true. It has a lovely ending, too, and Kurt Russell’s Ego is a terrific villain, and all of the Guardians performers who were good in the first one are just as good in this one. That having been said, that stupid manifestation of Pac-Man at the movie’s action climax is so goddamned annoying it makes me knock it down a bunch of ranks. It’s just that bad.

THE ONES THAT ARE VERY GOOD

14. Thor: Ragnarok Super-entertaining joyfluff, with nary a bad performance to be seen and gorgeous visuals and score throughout. It’s efferevescent and lightless, and the reason it doesn’t make my top ten is precisely because of that. There’s not enough weight to it. Hela is a villain for the sake of needing a villain in the story: there’s no reason for her to be so evil, she just is because the story needs a baddie. There’s no definitive scene, either, no one scene that makes you say “oh, yes, this is the mission statement for this movie, distilled down into maybe ninety seconds that makes you understand why you made it.” And this all sounds like I hate it, and I don’t, I love this film, I love its craft, I love all of the jokes, I love everything about it. But there should have been more.

13. X-Men: Days of Future Past This one doesn’t really have an emotional core in the way that some of the other high-ranked films do, but it’s just about perfect as a distillation of a comic book movie. Superheroes, dystopic futures, time travel, alternate timelines, talking to variant versions of yourself: this one goes harder on comic-book concepts than just about any other superhero movie period, and it nails the dismount spectacularly. Great performances (the best of the Fassbender/McAvoy X-flicks by far for that cast, plus Jackman and P-Stew et al), rock-solid direction, and enough nerd shit that it was likely shat out by a veritable herd of nerd cows.

12. Spider-Man: Homecoming This is probably the best Spider-Man movie ever made. (Spider-Man 2 is a better movie overall, but you have to admit that it is also a superhero movie about a guy who looks a lot like Spider-Man rather than a Spider-Man movie proper, because the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man loses so much of what makes Spidey Spidey.) Earns points for not retelling the origin story again, for one of the best Marvel villains in Michael Keaton’s Vulture, for a lot of comedy that works extremely well. Loses points for a supposed Modern Teens Dance playing 80s songs, though.

11. Iron Man 3 Many have said that Iron Man 3 feels like a Shane Black movie that happens to be a Marvel movie, rather than a Marvel movie that happens to be directed by Shane Black – including myself, previously – but at this point after other directors have had the chance to really stretch the Marvel movie formula to fit their own personal styles that comment feels less accurate. That said, it is still smart and clever (recognizing that Movie Tony can’t really work as an alcoholic and substituting PTSD for it was particularly brilliant) and at times barely feels like a superhero movie at all. Of course, that is a bit of a problem because it is a superhero movie, or at least intended to be. But only a bit of a problem.

10. Captain America: Civil War It is overly long and does suffer somewhat from story creep because it is both, at once, the third Captain America movie but also the second-and-a-halfish Avengers movie. But, beyond that, there is very little to complain about with this movie, which manages to combine an effects-driven blockbuster with a character-driven conflict story and it all mostly works, far more elegantly than it realistically should be able to manage, juggling so many balls in the air and never really dropping any of them, with several set-pieces that are all-timers in the Marvel canon and one of the absolute best villains in any Marvel movie, regardless of MCU or not.

9. Guardians of the Galaxy This is a true story: a comics professional with deep connections throughout the industry told me, confidently, about eight months before Guardians came out that Marvel had mostly given up on it being a potential franchise, in large part because the original corporate motivation for it was to have a “space franchise” for Marvel to compete with Star Wars – and then Disney bought Star Wars, and Guardians was considered an ill-fated stepchild that the studio was prepared to give up on. And then the trailer (still one of the truly great trailers) hit and Rocket Raccoon was shooting people with his laser gun and the movie made a bajillion dollars, because audiences recognized a movie that knew itself and what it wanted to be: a rollicking space adventure comedy that understood not only that a raccoon with a laser gun was great, but that a movie where a raccoon had a laser gun had to both embrace its absurdity but also not let that absurdity define it.

8. Thor As time progresses I periodically return to this one and I think, more and more, it is one of the most underappreciated Marvel movies. Probably the most. Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearean direction works so fluidly with the characters and the story. The jokes almost wholly land perfectly: Chris Hemsworth demonstrated here for the first time his cheerful willingness to make Thor look like a lovable dope, and certainly in movies following they’ve been willing to take that further but he gets so much credit for getting the ball rolling. The “asshole learns to be a good person” story arc feels earned here in a way that it doesn’t in many other superhero flicks. And it’s colorful and bright, an outlier in that regard for Marvel films of the time when their preferred digital cameras tended to mute color palettes (thank god they’ve corrected course there).

7. Blade If X-Men is responsible for the modern superhero movie, we have to give Blade credit for making Hollywood think that Marvel Comics was something that could be exploited in the first place. But Blade is more than that; it is in its own right an amazing action/horror picture, just about flawless in every respect – the sort of B-movie that filmmakers imitate endlessly (and have done). There is simply nothing Blade does wrong.

6. The Avengers Now, if you want to point to things The Avengers does wrong – the lighting for many of the interior shots is insipid at best and cheap-looking at worst (Joss Whedon may not have been the cinematographer but it seems he wanted it to look like boring TV), the primary arc of the movie really is just a Cap/Iron Man buddy story, Thor doesn’t get enough dialogue, the Hulk reveal doesn’t make sense really, and the Thanos end-reveal is nerdwank of the highest order. But, on the other hand, they successfully made a superhero team movie of epic scale, the Battle of New York is probably the best long-form action sequence on film since the end of Hard Boiled, it doesn’t sag and it’s never boring. When we talk about movies being ambitious, it is worth remembering that Avengers was attempting to do something that had never been done, was by all accounts almost impossible to manage, and almost entirely pulled it off.

THE ONES THAT ARE GREAT

5. Spider-Man 2 Ebert’s favorite superhero movie and justifiably so: this is the height of Sam Raimi’s creative vision. Just watch any of the Spidey/Ock fights; they are simply perfect filmmaking. The balance between action and drama is expertly maintained. Alfred Molina’s performance is staggeringly good. I could say so many more things but they would all be superlatives.

4. Captain America: The First Avenger As Iron Man 3 is recognizably a Shane Black movie, so is Captain America recognizably a Joe Johnston movie; the lush colour palette Johnston utilized in The Rocketeer is present, as is Johnston’s well-documented love of homaging old Republic serials. But what makes Captain America so good is the emotional notes of regret and loss that are omnipresent throughout the film: despite being a superhero movie, this is a film whose core emotion is sadness, and that feeling hits at every beat of the movie, most notably in Chris Evans’ magnificent performance as Cap – he’s not as showy as RDJ’s Iron Man is, but I think it’s a more fully realized performance on the whole. The overall effect is to make the film slightly downbeat (which I think hurt it) but it also feels more mature and adult.

3. Captain America: The Winter Soldier Winter Soldier is even better than the other Cap movies, taking numerous visual cues from 1970s conspiracy thrillers in service of a taut, engaging story about government overreach which would fuel a lot of further Marvel flicks. This is a film that has the narrative confidence to simply skip a difficult and exciting heist because it needs to put the time elsewhere, a film that doesn’t bother explaining its tropes because it trusts the audience not to be stupid, a film that doesn’t feel the need to justify Arnim Zola as a living bank of computers or how Falcon’s jetpack works, but just shoves it out there immediately. This is the Marvel movie in maturity, and it feels so good to see it.

THE ONES THAT AREN’T JUST GREAT FOR MARVEL MOVIES BUT GREAT FOR ALL FILMS PERIOD

2. Black Panther Action filmmaking more realized than just about any other Marvel film so far, in service of a story that is, when you get down to it, about dueling philosophies of Black liberation (except that the dueling philosophies are embodied in people who are actually fighting each other), with stunning visuals, an intense score and soundtrack both, and performances that go beyond the usual rock-solidity that you get in Marvel movies and often hit near-profundity in their excellence. Plus all of the jokes work. It is amazing that this was made; it is beyond amazing how perfect an action film it manages to be.

1. Logan I keep coming back to that one scene where Logan, after burying Xavier, just starts attacking his truck with a tree branch until he collapses in rage and exhaustion, because it’s not cool Wolverine Berserker Rage ™ that he’s doing in that scene, it’s tired-old-man-who’s-furious-at-the-world-rage, in a movie where the moral is about how violence corrodes everybody and how it inevitably poisons your soul. They did that in a superhero movie. They also dealt, both matter-of-factly and fantastically, with the horror of coping with Alzheimer’s and senility – both as a patient and a caregiver. This movie is just so utterly unconcerned with being cool most of the time, in a way that makes it matter more than any Marvel movie so far.

10.) John Wick Chapter 2. Here is the interesting thing about John Wick 2: it is, fairly blatantly, a critique of capitalism. John Wick is imprisoned in an economic system with rules designed to benefit the powerful and all he really wants to do is not be a part of it any more, but when he negotiates his exit it turns out there’s a catch (there’s always a catch) and the catch is that he has to do the bidding of a power broker “one last time,” except that he knows that it’s never one last time because the last time was supposed to be the one last time, and when he takes action against that power broker, his supposed friend – another power broker in the system – “reluctantly” brings the entire system to bear against him. It’s honestly kind of brilliant, and on top of that it’s also a balls-to-the-wall action movie, even better than the first one was, and the first one was pretty damn good. (Now, if they’d only start using decent subtitles in these movies instead of the drama queen shit they instead use for some reason.) My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

9.) Logan. Comic nerds so often express the wish for a film version of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, which is not surprising because that story is basically about the denial of old age: Batman can solve everything, even getting older! Logan is subversive because it turns everything about superhero story on its ear: it straight-up tells you that aging sucks, and not everybody gets a happy ending, and that the world is getting steadily worse, but it doesn’t do this in some sort of boring gothy way where the movie takes pleasure in telling you “stuff is bad” but rather goes matter-of-fact about it in a way that superhero movies just don’t do. Logan having a tantrum and trying to beat up a car with a tree branch in a fit of rage – not cool Wolverine berserker rage, but shitty tired old-man rage – is one of the great scenes of the year. And, even with all of that, it finds its peace with these terrible truths. It’s a hell of a thing. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

8.) Get Out. Many, many people who are smarter about movies than me have written much, much more that is smart about Get Out already and I am not the one to explain how it brilliantly combines racial politics with body horror in a way that is completely compelling and immediately empathetic. I just wanna say how smart it is that at one point, the hero literally escapes from the clutches of his captors by picking cotton, because that’s a brilliant metaphorical inversion, and that the entire movie is filled with smart details like that in service of a story that’s both intelligent and affecting. And scary. Damn is it scary. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

7.) Okja. If Bong Joon-Ho’s previous film Snowpiercer is a critique of capitalism, then Okja is a critique of capitalists themselves, and this is a fine distinction; the movie practically admires one of the two sisters Tilda Swinton plays because she is amoral and can thus be dealt with expeditiously, whereas the other has distinct beliefs about how she both wants to be rich and wants to be morally in the right. This extends to the protestors who are ostensibly on the side of the good guys in this movie: Paul Dano speechifies at length about the need for nonviolence, but then fucks up Steven Yeun’s shit when he finds out that Yeun has (in some way) betrayed him. Nobody in this movie is perfect, except of course for Okja and her kin, because they are adorable. More than most movies on this list, Okja isn’t entirely sure what it is, but it’s that aimlessness that allows it to say so much about so many things. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

6.) I, Tonya. The single funniest movie I have seen this year and possibly the darkest as well, I, Tonya manages to find comedy (and a lot of comedy) in a series of viciously abusive relationships and not be tasteless about that, which is sort of amazing. It uses fourth wall-breaking and interview cutaway gags to maximum effect, creating a story that is intentionally meta all the way through to get you through the violence and discuss both a career and a scandal in detail. It only stops being funny when it takes a moment to be devastating, and those moments come quickly and with only enough warning so you aren’t still snickering when the freight train hits you. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

5.) The Florida Project. Most movies that are about childhood don’t remember that children are hilarious but also often just little shits. Most movies that are about poverty don’t remember that although poverty sucks, everybody has happy moments to which they cling. The Florida Project understands both of these truths completely and many more besides, making it the best film about being a poor child in living memory, with a cast mostly comprised of young, new and untrained actors to boot – the cops are real cops, the social workers are real social workers, and Willem Dafoe is… well, Willem Dafoe, he’s always great in everything, but it’s so nice to see Willem Dafoe get to just be a friendly, considerate person instead of a guy who screams at the camera for dramatic effect while gunfire happens at other points in the movie. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

4.) Columbus. Two-character movies (and although there are a couple of other characters in this, Columbus is about John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson, and they dominate 90 percent of all screen time together) are a tightrope of a thing: the two characters have to be likeable but not cloying, layered but not inscrutable, interesting but not so much that their inner lives become frenetic. These two characters pair together better than any pas-de-deux since the Before trilogy – the entire movie is in their hands and they do not fumble it, not once, and you expect John Cho to be good but he’s amazing, and Haley Lu Richardson is a revelation – and their conversations and the story are accentuated by Kogonada’s shot choices, which are some of the most beautiful and striking tableaux I’ve seen set to film in a long time. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

3.) The Big Sick. Here is the thing about serious medical crises that nobody will tell you: when you’re in one, you have to laugh or you’ll collapse. That sense is what permeates The Big Sick – the characters at all point have to laugh, because the stresses being placed on them are unimaginable, and I’m not just talking about the medical crisis that is the heart of the film’s plot but also the expectations of growing up as a member of an immigrant family or the realization that you’ve potentially fucked up the most important thing in your life. What The Big Sick does is invite the audience to laugh with the characters, because what else are you gonna do? And that’s pretty special, a warmhearted gesture from a film that feels like a real hug from family – comforting, but filled with complex associations as well. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

2.) Lady Bird. It’s probably a little banal at this point to agree with the chorus of people saying “this is what high school was like for me” – in part because it’s just under a decade off for me to really say “this is what high school was like.” I mean, we didn’t even have the Dave Matthews Band yet. Also, I was never a high school girl, and this is most definitely a movie about being a high school girl. That having been said, though, yes, the film feels like high school in a way that so many films don’t: it captures that synthesis of feeling awkward and cool at the same time, recognizes the desperation of wanting to find your own individual identity and the conflict of also wanting at the same time the comforts to which you’re accustomed, and understands that wanting to grow up isn’t the same thing as growing up while also understanding that ultimately, you do both of them at the same time. Also, Laurie Metcalf deserves ALL THE AWARDS. I AM NOT KIDDING ABOUT THIS. I WILL BURN SHIT DOWN, HOLLYWOOD. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

1.) A Taxi Driver. My favorite movie in 2014 was Pride (and it is still one of my favorites and always makes me cry a little), because Pride is a movie about ordinary people coming together in the face of oppression, and so is this, but this one is so much more of everything than Pride was – as much as I love that story and that movie, it’s still at its heart a Plucky Working-Class Brits Do A Thing! movie. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that genre, but.) A Taxi Driver is both a comedy and a drama, but it’s about the most vicious and violent form of government oppression rather than the slow-motion assault on the working class or the attacks on the dignity of minorities, and thus everything about it is more intense than Pride was – and also because whereas in Pride the conflict in the story is between natural allies who have to learn to accept one another, in A Taxi Driver the conflict is internal, about an everyman who has to overcome his own fears and selfish impulses to recognize his true responsibilities as a citizen, and that’s honestly even more universal than Pride was, and that makes all the difference between the two. (Plus, Song Kang-Ho is probably one of the ten best actors working on the planet today, so that helps.) My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

NEXT TEN: Dunkirk, Bad Genius, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Good Time, IT, Wind River, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Logal Lucky, Wonder Woman, Thor: Ragnarok.

STILL HAVE TO SEE: Call Me By Your Name, The Post, Coco, Brigsby Bear, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.

WARNING: this post has lots of spoilers in it for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. You cannot escape them if you continue reading.

continue reading "You fucking nerds"

In comments on the previous post, Disgrunted Manatee suggests:

As others have said, without a picture of the selection from previous ages, it is hard to digest this data. I still recall Blockbuster having an entire aisle to display 100 copies of each of the 3 most popular movies at the time, then 3 aisles holding a random smattering of other stuff. The selection was never all that grand. Anecdotally in my small experience, the selection now just with netflix is way better than in my childhood with blockbuster and two other brick and mortar video store memberships combined.

A few points in response:

1. Blockbusters were, for the most part, terrible video stores, focused as they – and Netflix, for that matter – were on feeding consumer demand for the newest hottest things, rather than being consumer-oriented pay libraries (which are generally profitable enterprises, if not as profitable as stoking consumer demand to hyperactive proportions).

2. Your typical Blockbuster – and I can speak to this as I had multiple siblings work there – worked on stocking principles that dictated that half of the store’s shelf space was devoted to new releases (with the newest and hottest releases taking more prominence, of course), and half to older stock. This contrasted with more traditional video stores, where (and I personally worked at several, so I can also speak to this) generally had a new release/long tail ratio of anywhere from 40-60 (your neighborhood mom and pop store) to 20/80 (the really good video stores that took movies seriously).

3. Compare to Netflix, where we actually have hard statistics to determine how much of their catalogue can be considered recent thanks to sites like New On Netflix. Thanks to that site, I can tell you that Netflix Canada has 5,190 titles right now, and of those 5,190 titles 3,007 are less than three years old. That’s 58 percent! And that’s before you remove TV programs from the equation, because TV series are considered (for search purposes) single titles with their year being the earliest season available on Netflix, so most TV series skew older rather than newer, which means that the percentage of movies on Netflix that could be considered reasonably recent is actually even higher than it looks at first glance.

4. Just as important, though, is the fact that although most video stores and Blockbusters would generally clear out their new releases stock as “previously viewed” sales to increase their revenue, they would keep one or two copies of each new release to be incorporated into their older stock, because although the long tail for rentals is a thing, for movies that are 5-10 years old you’re still in the medium of the long tail where there was an active audience of people who were only getting around to see any given movie which they had intended to see for a while (this happened regularly with prestige pictures/Oscar winners), and after the medium of the long tail passed there was still the long tail of revenue to be generated from movies which had already seen the vast majority of their lifetime rentals but which could earn additional revenue every so often simply by sitting there and being available.

5. The average Blockbuster had a movie library of approximately 7,000 titles at any given time (per Big-Box Swindle by Stacy Mitchell); independent video stores almost always exceeded this, with “good” video stores often exceeding 15,000 titles. Netflix – regardless of country – has at any point a library of in between 5-6,000 titles. That is usually about 20% TV shows (and many of the TV shows are marginal things); it usually also includes about 20% bottom-bin straight-to-DVD releases (and straight-to-video releases were certainly a part of any video store’s inventory, but the ratio was usually about 10% rather than 20%). There really isn’t any numerical question that Netflix’s service is inferior to practically all video stories in terms of variety of catalogue.

So, the basic response to Manatee’s comment is the least satisfying one to all concerned, which is “your memory isn’t really accurate.” Regular video stores were better for catalogue than Blockbuster was, and Blockbuster was better for catalogue than Netflix was.

People who know me know that I continue to be concerned that the transition to streaming services is actually providing less choice to film viewers rather than more. This is not a new hobby horse I’m riding, of course, but my opinion isn’t changing as time goes on, and the reason was recently illustrated to me all over again.

You may or may not be aware that Edgar Wright, he of Cornetto Trilogy fame and other movies that are mostly good also, last year did a list on Mubi of his thousand favorite films. (Here it is on Letterboxd if you want to clone it for your own Letterboxd. Also I’m on Letterboxd and that’s where my movie reviews and thoughts mostly are these days, mostly because I am finding now that sometimes I don’t remember if I’ve seen a movie from twenty to thirty years ago or not, which is a fun thing to recognize when you’re only 41.) It’s an interesting list. Some people are taking it as a list of One Thousand Great Films, which is stupid because Domino is on it and literally the only good thing about that movie is Keira Knightley saying “my name is Dahmino Hahvey and I am a bounty huntah.” Also it has The Artist on it, and the best thing about that movie is that it ended and then conclusively determined once and for all that the Oscars are a sham. But just because it isn’t necessarily full of movies that are actually good doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting list, curated by someone who really loves movies, and when you’re in the mood to take a deep dive into the movie pool, lists like this are extraordinarily helpful.

So yesterday I was in the mood for such a dive, and I went through the list and found Dark of the Sun, a 1968 action movie about mercenaries in the Congo. (The trailer is here.) The online word about the movie was that it was entertaining and that it had a scene where two guys fight each other with goddamn chainsaws, and I thought that sounded just fine to me, so I went hunting for it.

The problem, of course, is obvious: it isn’t on anything. It’s not on any streaming service in Canada. You can’t virtually rent it on iTunes or Google Play or Windows Media rental or Cineplex.com or even on the Playstation Network’s movie library. (I only occasionally do Google Play rentals and don’t use the other services, but if I wanted to sign up, they aren’t helpful.) There’s a couple of “free movie” streaming sites that advertise it, but I’m pretty sure I have enough malware on my computer already so I’m not doing that. Basically, if I want to see Dark of the Sun based on Edgar Wright’s recommendation and a liking of the idea of a chainsaw duel, I have to track down a copy of the DVD, and I’m not so sure I want to see it that I want to spend $20 on a used DVD (the going price on Amazon.ca’s resellers).

After considering this, I wondered at the rest of the list. It’s not your typical best-of movie list, because this is Edgar Wright’s favorite movies instead, which means there are, among other things, three Russ Meyer films on it. And a lot more horror than average, too, along with a fair dollop of Hong Kong action cinema. And because Wright is English the list skews English more than other lists might, and also has a little more European influence on it, and for films you often don’t see on “best of” lists to boot. And there’s some stuff on it which is simply just average, like the 1973 Burt Reynolds action film White Lightning, but every average action movie has people who love it beyond reason. (Mine is Posse.) All of this, combined with the impressive size of the list, means that Edgar Wright’s list is a reasonably random selection of movies. It biases a little towards certain genres and it’s perhaps a little heavier towards the modern day than it is towards the early years of cinema, proportionally speaking, but it’s a big slice of film that isn’t specific, which means it’s a pretty good sample.

So I took this sample, and asked a simple question: how much of it can I watch online? I set some rules for this. First off, I didn’t count movies illegally streaming on Youtube or on malware-bait movie sites as being online; I only want to count films that I can legally watch online with as clear a conscience as I can manage. “I could torrent it” doesn’t count for the same reason. I also didn’t count movies I could either stream or download by using a VPN to proxy myself into another country, both because it again seems like a violation of the rules and because most streaming and rental services are actively blocking a lot of VPN proxy servers anyways. I then distinguished between movies I could watch via a subscription streaming service in Canada, and movies I could only watch via use of an online rental service like Google Play or iTunes.

Here are the takeways:

Firstly: 223 of Wright’s thousand movies cannot be streamed in Canada in any way whatsoever. No streaming service has them and you can’t rent them at any pay-per-rental/buy-into-your-digital-library service. This includes Dark of the Sun, of course, but also a whole bunch of other titles. Some of the highlights (?) include:

And I could add another thirty films you’d recognize to that list whose inclusion would surprise you. The most recent film from Wright’s list which is not available to stream in any capacity in Canada is Michael, from 2011.

After those 223 films, there are another 475 films which can only be streamed via a pay-per-rental/library service such as iTunes or Google Play. None of the major streaming services have all of the titles, of course. Google Play has the most (382 of the 475 pay titles accessible), but every service has a few exclusives. Not all of the titles are rentable; some are purchase-only (iTunes in particular does this more often than the others do). It’s also important to note that the overwhelming majority of stuff available on the streaming services is also available via the pay-per-title services as well, but I didn’t keep a running tally of which providers duplicated which streaming services’ options (although Google and iTunes unsurprisingly had far more at a glance than the others did).

Finally, we come to the streaming services, which is probably what people most wanted to know about – and no, Netflix isn’t the one with the most. That honour – in Canada, at least, where we spell honour with a U – goes to TMN Go, our national equivalent of HBO Go, with 106 titles. TMN Go’s diversity of selection is easily the best among any of the streamers, with a good mix of classics and newer releases (many of which are shared in common with Netflix). Netflix comes in second with 80 titles, the vast majority of which are less than fifteen years old. (Netflix’s oldest entry on the list is The Grapes of Wrath from 1940.) Netflix’s recency bias is so strong that were Wright to repeat this exercise in twenty years with a “my 1500 favorite movies of all time” I think their overall share of titles would likely decrease.

After TMN Go and Netflix, the selection gets smaller fast. Third place with 48 titles goes to Tubi, AKA “that free service on your smart TV you never click on,” and because it’s a free service most of their selections are older movies but that’s a pleasant bonus rather than a chore in this case. Next is Fandor, a service for older films and foreign films which I had literally never heard of before doing this exercise, with 33, then Amazon Prime Video with 31 (the Canadian version of Amazon Prime is much less good than the American version, for those wondering). Rounding out the smallest streaming services we have the horror streaming service Shudder with 20, Sundance Now with 17, the CBC’s ici.tou.TV French-language streaming service with 13, and finally Crackle, Sony’s half-assed free network, with 10.

At this point in the blogpost you’re probably expecting me to walk around holding up the big WHAT IT ALL MEANS neon sign, except I’m not sure what it means. I can say a few things affirmatively, though.

One is that Google Play (in particular) has ramped up their library dramatically over the past three years and that their rights system (from what I know of it) tends to encourage stability, because anybody with film rights can just treat Google Play as an additional revenue generator rather than be concerned that they’re giving away streaming rights to a potential competitor like Netflix is. On the other hand, though, Google Play having ramped up their library still leaves them missing about 30-35% of Wright’s list, so they still have a lot of work to do. And, more importantly, renting movies from Google Play might just be re-opening the video store consumption model for the new age, but the thing about video stores is that they were cheaper than going to the movies but still pretty expensive overall, and purchased movies from Google Play (which are often as expensive or only a little cheaper than physical media!) are really just permanent rentals because they’re nearly impossible to download; by design, you watch them on YouTube.

iTunes is, for whatever reason, much less interested in increasing the size of their back catalogue than Google is, and also iTunes is still shit and I refuse to use it, along with all the other pay-per-use services which are worse. One is enough, and Google Play is the best one for multiple reasons, one of which is “it is the least bad and the others are all awful.” (Default, the two sweetest words in the English language!)

Netflix being more interested in becoming a movie studio than a streaming service is not really news, but you really feel the impact of it with this exercise, where less than one in ten of Wright’s movies are available via Netflix. Netflix’s general policy of appeasing the consumer base and not bothering with the long tail that most consumers rarely care about also means it’s utter shit for watching classics, and it’s only gotten worse and worse over the last few years. Still, Netflix has basic technical competency going for it, which is something. TMN Go’s internet interface is garbage. It uses Flash, for crissake. Flash. Their mobile app is similarly nearly unusable. Just like Shomi before it, TMN Go is a service with a great library which is mostly intended for on-demand viewing through a cable box so they half-ass the front-end everywhere else, and then they sit around wondering why nobody wants to sign up for their service. As for the smaller services which aren’t free, they’re really too expensive for anybody but a serious fanatic to drop the coin. Ten bucks a month for a streaming service is great – until you have more than two or three of them, at which point one starts wondering what the point of cord-cutting even is.

So basically everything is up in the air right now, and I don’t know where it’s gonna land – and I’m still skeptical about streaming services, for reasons I think should be obvious.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: I have seen nothing in this category, but: a lot of people are predicting that The Salesman will win, because director Asghar Farhadi is directly subject to Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, and because Hollywood is liberal and doesn’t like that sort of thing. I don’t think it’s going to win, for a few reasons. First off, A Separation was an amazing movie, but The Salesman is, judging by critical reaction, not as good as it was, and a lot of Oscar voters do care about the actual – or at least perceived – quality of the movie in question. Second, A Man Called Ove is really very popular with the Academy voters by all accounts, because it is about a grumpy old white man, which is what most of the Academy is (and that also hurts The Salesman, frankly). Third, Oscar voting started about a week before the travel ban was officially announced, and Oscar campaign season well before that, so at least some of the voters had already voted and maybe lost their chance to make a political statement with their vote. So I think A Man Called Ove wins.

BEST ANIMATED FILM: It’s going to be either Zootopia or Moana, because the only other one most people saw is Kubo and the Two Strings, and Laika animated films never win awards regardless of their quality. Zootopia is the better overall film, with a better, smarter and more politically relevant story, and it also made much more money. Moana is the visually prettier of the two films and it has songs in it. Therefore, Moana will win, because old white Academy voters.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM: It’s almost certainly going to be one of the three about race in America – 13th, I Am Not Your Negro or O.J. Made In America. O.J. is eight hours long. It is accordingly not going to win. 13th has Ava DuVernay; I Am Not Your Negro has Samuel L. Jackson as a narrator. I bet on Sam Jackson’s starpower over DuVernay’s taking this.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: The La La landslide starts here, because there are a lot of valid complaints you can make about La La Land, but “it isn’t shot beautifully” is not one of them. You can make a great case for Moonlight‘s striking visual palette (and it would get my vote if it had one), but it is quiet and moody where La La Land is showy and in-your-face about its visual skill, and, again, this is the Academy we’re talking about here. There is an outside chance that they give it to Arrival instead, because that was also visually striking in a showy, in-your-face way and the Oscars sometimes use the major technical categories to spread the love around, but my money is on La La Land.

BEST EDITING: See Best Cinematography above, but this time I think Arrival has an even better chance of winning, because that movie works because of the way it was edited. My gut says La La Land again (sigh) but I am predicting with my heart: Arrival deserves to take this. (Well, actually Moonlight does but “Moonlight is the movie that should actually win everything and will win nothing” is our theme for tonight.)

ORIGINAL SCORE: La La Land, dur. It is a musical for grownups! Hooray!

ORIGINAL SONG: This category basically boils down to “will the two La La Land nominees divide the vote enough for Lin-Manuel Miranda to EGOT” and I think the answer is yes. “City of Stars” is probably the song people identify most with La La Land (and it’s a good song, too), but “Audition” is the Oscar Song Which Was Filmed Like Anne Hathaway Singing Very Emotionally In Les Miserables and that will also get a lot of votes. On top of that, although “How Far I’ll Go” isn’t even the fourth-best song from Moana (“You’re Welcome,” “Where You Are,” “Shiny,” and “We Know The Way” are all better), it’s still a decent enough song from a Disney movie and it’ll get a lot of votes by itself. So it gets my prediction.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: La La Land will probably take this and it’s my guess, but I think there’s a solid case to be made for either Manchester By The Sea (Kenneth Lonergan finally getting his due for not winning his Oscar for You Can Count On Me) or 20th Century Women (one of the big Oscar snubs and a lot of people really loved it, and this is their chance to get it to win something). Still, I am cynical and expect the La La landslide.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: On the one hand Moonlight should win this (and was probably slotted into Best Adapted instead of Best Original so it would win something) but on the other hand Arrival should also win this. I want Moonlight to win SOME goddamn Oscars, so I will predict it, but an Arrival win wouldn’t surprise me.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Mahershala Ali has won pretty much every acting award you can win for his work in Moonlight, and there is no best supporting actor nominee for La La Land to come take it from him, and nobody else in the category is on Ali’s level. (I mean, fuck, Jeff Bridges got nominated for, what, his seventeenth turn as a cowboy type? How many awards does Jeff Bridges need for playing a cowboy type?) He should win this.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Viola Davis should win for Fences, not least because this is her third nomination already and how many times does she need before she wins her friggin’ Oscar? But, alas: #OscarsSoWhite is a thing. And Michelle Williams has a broad base of support for her role in Manchester By The Sea (which by all accounts is excellent). And the Oscars wouldn’t be the Oscars if they didn’t recognize white talent over slightly superior nonwhite talent egregiously at least once in the evening (not counting all those times La La Land is going to beat Moonlight). So I’m gonna guess Williams.

BEST ACTOR: Everybody’s saying Ryan Gosling is the weak link of La La Land but you know what? I think there’s two options for Oscar night: either La La Land destroys everything or the hype engine falls apart. And I don’t think it falls apart, not even in Best Actor, where Denzel Washington is widely considered to be a lock and Casey Affleck the runner-up (and Affleck would be the frontrunner if it weren’t for all his, you know, sexual harassment). I will hatewatch this awards show to death, I swear to god. Gosling wins.

BEST ACTRESS: fuck off it’s Emma Stone we all know it’s Emma Stone give me a fucking break

BEST DIRECTOR: AAAAARGH Damien Chazelle, you precious butterfly

BEST PICTURE: Christ do you even need me to tell you at this point of course it’s fucking La La Land, it’s probably going to sweep next year’s Oscars too at this rate

So let’s say that you (or more likely, your friend who sent you to this webpage and is dragging you to the Doctor Strange movie, or maybe the Google search algorithm that directed you here) want to get a quick handle on what the Marvel Cinematic Universe is before you go see the movie that’s coming out in a few weeks’ time. And because you only have so many hours in the day, you want to do it without watching thirteen movies in a row. You basically need a quick summary of everything that happened that you can read on your lunch break, something that will let you know what’s going on without having to watch everything at 1 1/2 speed just to fit it all in and winding up convinced that ‘The Avengers’ is a Benny Hill sketch.

No problem! Gotcha covered. Read on! (Oh, um, spoilers for the Marvel movies, but really at this point you should not be able to complain about spoilers for any of them except possibly Civil War and that’s way down at the bottom so you have no excuse.

Iron Man: Tony Stark is a rich douchebag who makes money selling bombs, but doesn’t feel guilty because he doesn’t drop them. Then he gets captured by terrorists and forced to confront the consequences of his actions, and also to build a cool suit of power armor to escape. (The suit also keeps him alive because he got shrapnel in his chest.) He comes back and decides to be nice to everyone while using his power armor to stop bad guys, which ticks off his business partner who hired the terrorists to kill him. Business partner builds his own power armor, they fight, Tony wins and announces to the world that he. Is. IRON MAN! (Stinger: Samuel L. Jackson shows up and says, “Hey, wanna join my superteam?”)

Incredible Hulk: Bruce Banner is on the run from military man “Thunderbolt” Ross because he tried to recreate the ultimate super-soldier (HINT HINT!) and it instead turned him into a big green guy whenever he gets angry. He’s hunting for a cure but that isn’t going so great. A British guy offers to help the government catch Banner in exchange for some of that sweet sweet super-soldiery goodness, but it goes bad and he becomes an even crazier big green guy. Banner turns into the Hulk to defeat him, then goes on the run again. (Stinger: Tony Stark tells “Thunderbolt” Ross, “You know I’m way better at this superhero stuff than you are, right? I’m part of a superteam!”)

Iron Man 2: Tony Stark is having a crazy bad week. His dad’s friend’s son is trying to kill him because he (the son) thinks Tony stole the Iron Man design, the government wants him to turn over the plans to the suit so they can make more, his business rival Justin Hammer is trying to steal his designs, and oh by the way he’s dying from heavy metal poisoning because the suit has to be plugged into his chest to keep his heart going. After Samuel L. Jackson and a cool superspy named the Black Widow (who’s been posing as his new secretary) give him a pep talk, he busts Justin Hammer for espionage, invents a new version of the suit that doesn’t kill him, blows up his dad’s friend’s son, and tells the government (in the form of Garry Shandling) to fuck off. (Stinger: Samuel L. Jackson’s right-hand man, Phil Coulson, finds out that a big weird hammer is in New Mexico. HINT HINT!)

Thor: All the Norse gods are real and they’re aliens from the planet Asgard and all the Frost Giants and stuff are more aliens. Thor, who’s nice (but hot-headed and kind of dumb) gets tricked by his brother Loki (who’s a manipulative little shit) into picking a fight with Frost Giants, so Odin takes his powers away until he learns how to control his temper and exiles him to Earth. Thor, having learned all the wrong lessons, picks a fight with the government to get his hammer back (which is where his powers are) but it doesn’t work because he’s not being good yet. Odin takes a nap and Loki decides to send an Asgardian killer robot called the Destroyer to kill Thor, but when Thor risks his life to protect ordinary people he gets his powers back and wrecks it. He and Loki fight and Loki winds up cast into the void, fate unknown. HINT HINT! (Stinger: Thor’s scientist buddy is invited by Samuel L. Jackson to study a weird super-science artifact called the Tesseract. He agrees…but he’s being mind-controlled by Loki!)

Captain America: The First Avenger: FLASHBACK TIME! Back in the 40s, ordinary guy Steve Rogers signed up to test the original super-soldier serum that Bruce Banner was trying to replicate. He becomes Captain America, and hangs out with his best friend Bucky and Agent Peggy Carter and Tony Stark’s dad to fight Nazis. Meanwhile, a Nazi super-science dude called the Red Skull, who took the same super-soldier serum but got his face melted off because he’s bad, and his sidekick Arnim Zola, decide the Nazis are probably going to lose and form a secret super-science cult called HYDRA. They use the Tesseract that Samuel L. Jackson will later ask Thor’s buddy to study to power their death cult, and Cap fights them. Bucky dies…apparently (HINT HINT!) and Cap defeats the Red Skull but is frozen in the Arctic for decades until Samuel L. Jackson finds him.

The Avengers: Loki shows back up and steals the Tesseract. He also brainwashes Hawkeye, who showed up in ‘Thor’ but didn’t do anything, into helping his evil plan to help a bunch of aliens called the Chitauri take over the world. Samuel L. Jackson knows this is bad shit, so he gets Black Widow, Hulk, Iron Man and Captain America to stop them. They capture Loki, just as Thor shows up to do the same (there’s a big fight because they don’t know Thor is a good guy but it’s all cool) but they don’t find the Tesseract or Hawkeye or Thor’s mind-controlled scientist buddy. Loki tricks the heroes into fighting each other and escapes in the confusion, and opens a big space portal above Manhattan for the aliens to use. The Avengers shut down the portal, recapture Loki, free Hawkeye and Thor’s buddy, and return the Tesseract with Thor and Loki to Asgard. (Stinger: The aliens were really working for an even worse alien named Thanos!) (Additional Stinger: Everyone eats shawarma!)

END PHASE ONE!

Iron Man 3: Tony pisses off a crazy terrorist called the Mandarin, but it turns out he’s not really a terrorist. He was hired to act all terroristy by a company called AIM, which is testing out another super-soldier serum called Extremis that can drive people crazy and make them explode as a side-effect. (The Mandarin’s bombings are really just people exploding.) Tony defeats them and oh by the way he gets surgery to fix his heart, but it doesn’t make him feel better because he was so freaked out by the killer aliens over Manhattan that he’s sure are going to come back and kill everyone and he doesn’t know what to DOOOOOOOO!

Thor: The Dark World: There are more aliens like the Frost Giants, but these are Dark Elves and they’ve been hiding for millions of years waiting for someone to find a super-science artifact called the Aether that they can use to unmake the universe because they believe it was really just a bad idea all around. Thor’s girlfriend Jane finds it. She gets superpowers but it’s killing her, and also elves are trying to kill her and she’s just basically having a bad week. Thor and Loki team up to stop the elves after they kill Thor and Loki’s mom, but Loki is killed…apparently (HINT HINT!) Thor defeats the elves, saves Jane and tells dad Odin he’s going to go live on Earth and be a superhero, and Odin’s like, “Sure, fine, whatever.” but it’s because he’s really LOKI IN DISGUISE! (Stinger: The Aether and the Tesseract turn out to be part of a family of super-science artifacts, and the Asgardians pawn it off on a weird alien dude called the Collector because It Would Be Bad to put them too close together. The Collector wants to do just that, though, because he’s a collector.)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Captain America is working with Samuel L. Jackson and his superspy group SHIELD, but SHIELD is acting all creepily authoritarian and Cap’s not down with that. They get worse after a mysterious assassin called the Winter Soldier kills Samuel L. Jackson… apparently (HINT HINT!) and Cap goes AWOL with the Black Widow to track down the Winter Soldier despite the orders of cool nice dude Robert Redford who takes over. Surprise surprise, Robert Redford is a bad guy, SHIELD has been thoroughly infiltrated by HYDRA thanks to decades of diligent work by Arnim Zola, the Winter Soldier is a brainwashed, cyborgized and cryonically preserved Bucky, and in just a few days SHIELD is going to bring the ultimate pre-emptive strike on line and kill everyone in the world who would even think about opposing their agenda. But Samuel L. Jackson isn’t dead so he and Cap and Black Widow and their new buddy the Falcon (an ex-soldier with a suit that lets him fly) defeat HYDRA, kill Robert Redford and Emile Zola, and free Bucky although he’s so spooked he goes on the run. So does Samuel L. Jackson, because SHIELD is kind of FUBARed by HYDRA and he needs to go undercover to make sure that he can root out all the bad guys. (Stinger: Some of the bad guys are using Loki’s magic staff to make new superpowered people!)

Guardians of the Galaxy: But fuck all that, let’s go to space for a caper flick! Star-Lord, a human who was abducted by aliens and raised in space, is stealing a MacGuffin that’s also wanted by crazy space terrorist Ronan. Ronan is working for Thanos and his two daughters, Gamora and Nebula, because Thanos has promised to help Ronan kill all his enemies (which is pretty much everyone) if he gets Thanos the MacGuffin. But Gamora is sick of her crazy dad and wants to double-cross everyone and sell the MacGuffin and use it to fund a new life somewhere way the hell away. So she goes to steal it from Star-Lord, then they both run into bounty hunters Rocket and Groot, and there’s a big fight and everyone gets locked up in jail. They break out with the help of a revenge-crazed alien named Drax who wants to kill Ronan, and go to sell the MacGuffin together to…the Collector! It’s part of the same family of super-science artifacts as the Aether and the Tesseract. But the deal goes bad and Ronan steals the MacGuffin. He realizes it’s a super-science artifact that he can use to get his killing done, and double-crosses Thanos. There’s a big fight, and the heroes stop Ronan and give the MacGuffin to a group of space police called the Nova Corps for safekeeping.

Avengers: Age of Ultron: Okay, back to the HYDRA guys using Loki’s staff to create supersoldiers. Turns out that the magic staff is actually just a cool staff, and all the real power is in the gem in the middle…which is, all together now, a super-science artifact with unimaginable power. After the Avengers stop HYDRA and get it, Tony Stark decides to use it to create Ultron, a robotic protector of humanity that will keep everyone safe from the aliens he just KNOWS are out there…but it goes very wrong and the robot decides to wipe out the human race. He steals the stuff he needs to do it with the help of the supersoldiers HYDRA created (Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch), but they betray him and join the Avengers, who stop Ultron with the help of Tony’s second attempt at a robotic protector of humanity known as the Vision, although Quicksilver dies. Oh and by the way it’s around here that Thor goes, “Gee, isn’t it kind of funny that all these super-science artifacts keep turning up? It’s almost like someone is looking for them!” Thor goes to find out what’s up with that, Iron Man goes off to figure out why he’s so messed up in the head about aliens and is doing so many stupid things, and the Hulk just goes off somewhere, leaving Cap in charge of the Avengers. (Stinger: The guy looking for them is Thanos!)

Ant-Man: Oh and by the way there’s this dude Hank who has a shrinking serum and he doesn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands so he hires an ex-con named Scott Lang to steal it back from an evil corporation. Which he does. And Scott becomes Ant-Man.

END PHASE TWO!

Captain America: Civil War: After sulking for about ten movies, “Thunderbolt” Ross comes back and says he’s sick of all these superheroes cowboying around and causing massive property destruction and being totally ineffective, because that’s his job. He forces the Avengers to submit to UN authority, and Tony Stark comes back to tell everyone they should do it because he can’t be trusted and so neither can they. This rightfully causes a big argument, which would probably not be enough to sustain a whole movie so we get a guy named Zemo who hates superheroes because Ultron killed his family, who frames the Winter Soldier for killing the king of Wakanda (a country that only exists in the Marvel Universe) to draw him out of hiding. Everyone thinks Zemo’s doing this because…well, no, everyone thinks the Winter Soldier really did it, except Cap because he’s loyal to his buddy, and Cap thinks Zemo did it because the Winter Soldier knows where a whole bunch more Winter Soldiers are kept and he’s not quite free of his brainwashing so Zemo can make him tell. And also make him kill people. Cap decides to help the Winter Soldier, and gets a team together to find Zemo. But Iron Man gets his own team together, and they have a big fight. Everyone gets captured except Cap and the Winter Soldier, and Iron Man chases them down by himself without telling anyone because he’s starting to suspect that Cap was right. BUT…it turns out that Zemo isn’t after more Winter Soldiers. He’s after proof that the Winter Soldier killed Iron Man’s parents so that he can get Iron Man and Cap to fight. They do, their friendship ends, and Cap and Winter Soldier break out the rest of the rogue Avengers and go on the run. (Stinger: The Winter Soldier goes back into cryonic sleep in Wakanda until he can get his shit together!)

Now, it’s debatable how much any of this will have to do with Doctor Strange, because supposedly he deals with all the weird shit that the Avengers don’t even know about. But just in case you need to know any of it, now you know it!

*looks around* Well, what do you know, they didn’t change the locks on me…!

Hello, citizens. My name is Justin. If you recall (and even if you don’t), I used to write about comics and stuff here, way back in 2009-2010. Do you remember when Conan O’Brien was hosting The Tonight Show and people were losing their damn minds about James Cameron’s Avatar? This was the cultural climate of the time during which I communicated important thoughts to you about Superman and the Dark Phoenix Saga, and also a small number of made-up facts about Beck.

Anyway, since we last spoke, I have had two children! There is a boy and a girl; the older one is six, and if you do the math, you will find a clue as to why I stopped blogging. There came a time when I had less disposable income to spend on comics and less time to spend reading them—and even less time to spend writing about them. I buy a few things here and there and keep in touch with the comics world by reading stuff on the usual comics news sources, much in the same way that you might follow a baseball team in your fine local newspaper without ever actually watching a game.

But I still think things about comics and feel things about comics, and every now and again I find I still want to talk about comics. However, my wife is pretty uninterested on the whole subject, and my son is not yet old enough to understand what I mean when I tell him that Jim Shooter was one of the best damn things ever to happen to Marvel, yet in the end he left them no choice but to ride him out on a rail in 1987. And so, I thought I would maybe start sharing these thoughts with you again.

Much has happened in the world in the past six years. For example, a terrifying madman is running for president! Have you heard about this? I will spare you the details because I want to talk about superhero comics, so you can perhaps draw your own parallels between the current unpleasantness and the Vote Lex 2000 storyline. (I still have my pin!)

Anyway, let’s talk about the big things.

DC rebooted its entire line, and then five years later wrote a kind of a narrative apology for doing so. I wish that DC Comics wasn’t so gosh-darn insecure about its superheroes. That’s what I think it comes down to, in the end. They have these characters that everyone knows and everyone loves, and yet they feel they constantly have to apologize for them. “You know, now that you mention it, maybe the kids who made fun of me for reading comics were right, and it is dumb that Superman wears trunks on the outside of his costume. Sorry it took us so long to get rid of them. By the way, do you think he should have been Superboy? I think he should have been Superboy and hung out with the Legion; sorry we got rid of that bit of history all those years ago. But on second thought, let’s do it over now and say he was never Superboy again. Sorry.”

They try so hard to convince you that Aquaman is cool. But don’t you already think Aquaman is cool? And if you don’t, is Geoff Johns going to change your mind by telling you, “No seriously, he really really really is, actually”? But anyway, All-Star Batman is neat and people seem to be cautiously enjoying Rebirth. But if sales go south again, I hope they’ll look at their characters and say, “Well, here are some things that are really neat about this character, let’s play around with them and bring them to the forefront,” rather than convincing themselves that Wonder Woman would sell like hotcakes if only they changed these three things about her origin.

Marvel made a bunch of movies that fans, critics, and non-fan audiences liked. Let me admit something to you: when Marvel announced their intention to make a series of individual movies that would feed into a combined Avengers movie, I was like 90% certain this was not going to happen. The deck, at the time, seemed pretty stacked against the idea. If any of the movies leading up to it had bombed, the whole thing would topple over, and then there’s the whole matter of figuring out how to make an Avengers movie itself. And then they got Joss Whedon to direct it, who at that time had a bit of a reputation for having projects fall apart on him.

But First Avenger was great (I’m kind of iffy about third act, though) and Thor was winning enough, and then Whedon came along and made it look like making an Avengers movie is the most obvious thing in the world. For real, you guys, Avengers was the real deal, the superhero movie you always wanted to see but which conventional wisdom told you could never be. Conventional wisdom, as it turns out, was wrong. I was wrong. And now the barriers are down and Spider-Man can show up in a Captain America movie that has Giant-Man and Iron Man and this all seems about right.

By contrast, DC made a movie that has Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman in it that I have no interest in seeing. Friends and family can scarcely believe this, but it’s true. Understand, it’s not so much that I am refusing to see this movie on some kind of principle, or because I took some sort of nonsense loyalist oath to Marvel movies. It’s just that every single thing I have read or heard or seen about it has told me, “You will not enjoy this on any level.” Even Suicide Squad I have a morbid curiosity about; I will possibly rent it. But Batman v. Superman…I’m not a professional critic and I don’t “owe” DC or Marvel anything. Why would I bother spending what little free time I have on something that looks so frustrating?

That said, DC has a bunch of TV shows on the air that have their problems but are so thoroughly charming that they overcome them. I don’t mean for this to be a backhanded compliment. Charm is important; possibly the most importing thing in adapting a superhero comic. Grant Gustin isn’t playing any Barry Allen I recognize, or even Wally West, but he’s really good at playing whoever this guy is who calls himself the Flash, and Jesse L. Martin’s Joe West has become one of my favorite TV dads of all time. Supergirl is very uneven and is totally hampered by having to hang around the DEO. (Did CBS think that their audience couldn’t handle a genre show that had no procedural element to it?) But Melissa Benoist is terrific and embodies everything you like in Supermythology. I’m curious to see if the move to the CW will allow a bit more of the “Can you believe they’re doing this on TV?” feeling you get from seeing King Shark or Gorilla Grodd on The Flash.

Marvel has made a push for diversity that people, by and large, seem to have accepted. When they announced Sam Wilson was going to take over as Captain America, the first thing I thought about was that eventually Steve Rogers would be back, and how was that going to look? “Well, thanks for holding down the fort, Temporary Black Replacement, but White Original is back!” But instead Marvel has decided…they are both Captain America? And Peter Parker and Miles Morales are both called “Spider-Man” and nobody much seems to mind? I wouldn’t have thought to go that route, but darn it, it’s working.

I have a sneaking suspicion these characters are being primed for the movies, which, if true, is clever forethought. Robert Downey Jr.’s not going to be able to be Tony Stark forever, and recasting the role risks a sort of George Lazenby Iron Man, but maybe you could transition the franchise to Ironheart if she turns out to be a hit? We’ve seen a proof-of-concept that audiences will accept a female Thor. Maybe this seems cynical, but sometimes the best way to get diversity advanced is to find a way for it to make it profitable, so I can’t complain.

There’s a lot more I didn’t cover (ComicBookResources redesigned their website in a way that made me sad!), but it was six whole years, and anyway, there will be time enough to talk about other things. I realize my little overview here looks a little harsh toward DC and pretty praising of Marvel. But would it surprise you to learn that I have trouble really connecting with Marvel books these days? And that this is not actually Marvel’s fault? Tune in next time, True Believer, for The Reason Why.

Everyone loves a good fan theory, right?

…um, right?

….can we just pretend they do, for the sake of my introductory spiel, here?

……..so some people on the Internet really love a good fan theory, while others are indifferent or unaware of them, and still others find them tedious and annoying. There are plenty of famous/infamous ones out there, like the Pixar Timeline, or Jar Jar Binks being Supreme Leader Snoke. But there are some fan theories out there that have gotten a little less traction. Let’s look at a few of them, shall we?

All of the extras in ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Independence Day’ are the same people, but the two stories don’t take place in the same fictional universe. They’re just crowds of gawkers who travel from one reality to another to watch crazy-ass shit happen.

Al Leong plays the exact same role in each of his movies, a wise and benevolent member of an alien species who has come to Earth to teach us universal peace and harmony. Unfortunately, they introduce themselves through their race’s traditional peaceful gesture of leaping into frame, brandishing weapons, and screaming loudly, and so are constantly gunned down by action heroes without a second thought.

‘Adventures in Babysitting’, ‘Home Alone’, ‘Mrs Doubtfire’, and the first two Harry Potter movies are all directed by Chris Columbus.

The peddler at the beginning of ‘Aladdin’ is really just making up the whole story to get you to buy his crappy merchandise, and Disney cut the scene at the end where ushers come into the audience pestering you to part with a little extra cash for some tchotchkes.

‘Highlander 2: The Quickening’ is a sequel to ‘Highlander’. (This is remarkably unpopular!)

John Cusack’s character in the disaster movie ‘2012’ is a time traveler, having come to 2012 from 1408 without having aged more than a few years.

All of the Marvel movies are linked in a variety of subtle ways, with characters such as Captain America, the Black Widow, Iron Man, Ant-Man, the Scarlet Witch, the Vision, Hawkeye, Thor, the Winter Soldier, and Nick Fury reprising their parts as “Easter Eggs” for the attentive viewer.

Soylent Green is actually made from people.

Will Smith pretty much plays the same part in every movie he ever did. (A similar fan theory exists regarding Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

Deckard is actually a telepath who can project his thoughts, but only in an unconvincing monotone.

’28 Days Later’ was originally written as a bleak, post-apocalyptic sequel to the film ’28 Days’, but after Sandra Bullock was recast as Cillian Murphy, they changed the character’s name.

Radagast the Brown was supposed to die in battle at the end of the third Hobbit movie and be reborn as Radagast the White, but Paul McGann was unavailable due to other filming commitments.

All of Pixar’s movies exist on my DVD shelf.

‘The Shining’ is really a movie about a hotel caretaker that goes insane and tries to kill his family.

‘The Abyss’, ‘Cyborg’, ‘Day of the Dead’, ‘Howard the Duck’, ‘Earth Girls Are Easy’, ‘Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome’, ‘Terminator’, ‘Real Genius’, ‘Night of the Comet’, ‘Short Circuit 2’, ‘Cocoon’, ‘Altered States’, ‘Back to the Future’, ‘Enemy Mine’, ‘Cherry 2000’, ‘Little Shop of Horrors’, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ and ‘The Garbage Pail Kids Movie’ are all works of fiction created in the same decade and filmed for public consumption to varying degrees of critical and commercial success. And you can’t prove otherwise.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, ‘Civil War’ was a great movie. It was an incalculably vast improvement on the comics, with characterization that felt more grounded in the previous movies and less crammed with Millar-esque swerves for the sake of swerves (part of this is that much of the genuinely despicable stuff that Tony did in the comics is off-loaded onto Thunderbolt Ross, who’s already a well-established asshole). The action sequences were great, the story worked in a whole bunch of characters and events without seeming overstuffed, and in general it made everyone look over at DC and say, “On your left.” And it made me want a very specific Marvel movie, which for the sake of avoiding spoilers for ‘Civil War’ I will put behind a cut.

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As I have previously mentioned, the one bright spot about the existence of the otherwise extremely uninspiring and uninteresting ‘Batman v Superman’ movie (really, I remember having huge misgivings as soon as the project was announced–Zack Snyder, talking about DKR as his inspiration, feels like it could be the dictionary definition of “toxic masculinity”) was that it held the potential for some truly wacky studio hijinks. After all, the movie looked like it was going to tank, at least by the standards of Hollywood blockbusters…

A word about that, for everyone saying, “Hey, it made $850 million, why is it being called a failure?” It’s being called a failure because different standards apply to Hollywood blockbusters. These things are designed, through merchandising, product placement, synergistic endorsement deals and aggressive promotion, to make back their money even if the film is basically just two solid hours of Arnie flipping the bird to the screen and shouting, “SUCKER!” in an Austrian accent every few minutes. (Spoilers for ‘Terminator: Genesys’!) It is very hard for them to actually lose money, because so much of the money is made before the film hits theaters–‘Phantom Menace’ would have been profitable without selling a single ticket–and so much more of the money is made before the reviews come out. These films are not judged on the absolute money they make, but on the money they make relative to each other, because their job is not to make money. Their job is to make the kind of obscene, world-shattering money that lets studio execs throw $50 million at some crazy vanity project sight unseen because they’re making ten times that per extremely reliable Avengers movie and have money to burn. On that scale, BvS has failed. ‘Ant-Man’ did better in its fourth week than ‘BvS’ in its fourth week. You do not want to be the guy who makes a Batman/Superman movie that makes less than ‘Ant-Man’.

OK. So the point is, all I was really hoping for is that WB execs would lose their shit and we would get some entertaining panic. Would they dump Snyder overboard like a hot potato? Would he give great snippy bitchy interviews where he blamed audiences for not getting his vision? (I’m still holding out hope for that. If there’s one thing I can say about Snyder besides the fact that he’s a shitty director, it’s that he’s incredibly thin-skinned and holds grudges with reviewers that he works out every time he does a press junket. He’s still holding court on ‘Sucker Punch’, ferfucksake.)

Instead, we get Seth Grahame-Green quitting the ‘Flash’ movie. Now, I can’t say this would have been a great movie–I loved the hell out of the book of ‘Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter’, but he hasn’t been able to translate his skills into movie-making quite yet and it’s distinctly possible that this would have been a big whiff. (Especially since this would have been his directorial debut, and giving someone a huge summer blockbuster as their first movie even though these things have damn near broken guys like Sam Raimi and Joss Whedon seems like its own category of fascinating train wreck.) But in terms of whose vision I’d rather see in the DC Murderverse, it’s an untested Seth Grahame-Green over Snyder any day.

And now James Wan is talking about ditching ‘Aquaman’. And while…look, I cannot stand ‘Saw’, okay? I absolutely think the final twist is the kind of irredeemable bullshit that makes me want to throw things at the screen, an infuriating and unearned “gotcha” that makes no sense and requires six billion coincidences that the killer can’t possibly arrange all to fall in a very particular way for the movie not to literally end on Page Two of the screenplay. (“Hey, I found these keys stuck in the drain! Let’s just go!”) I cannot stand this movie and I will gleefully spoil it for strangers on the grounds that it is better for you to not watch the movie than feel like you wasted two hours on it. (The killer is the guy on the floor. He’s not really dead. Yes, it’s bullshit.)

But that’s all the script. The direction in ‘Saw’ actually makes a movie about two guys stuck in a room all night compelling. It’s impressive work. James Wan has a solid and impressive body of directing behind him. If WB is backing Snyder, whose biggest hit is now over ten years behind him and wasn’t written by him in the first place, over Wan, this is going to be less “fun trainwreck” and more “oh. oh, that poor man. oh god, his wife is crying, and she’s covered in blood, and…is that her blood? is that her husband’s blood? oh god, they had a cargo flat full of adorable baby lambs, and they’re squealing, they won’t stop squealing, there’s just so much pain….”

I’m hoping that doesn’t happen. I’m really hoping that the backstabbing and panic leads to good movies in the end, rather than good movies being shitcanned in order to double down on the Snyder vision of a Bat-boot stamping on a human face forever. Because this, this thing of interesting and creative people fleeing the DC movies like rats leaving the sinking ship? Not actually what I was hoping for.

The problem with any retelling of the Doctor Strange origin story – and although I am more or less tired of origin stories as “first movies” in superhero cinema, I make an exception here, because Doctor Strange’s origin story is probably the last truly compelling one in comics that hasn’t been filmed yet – is that the original Doctor Strange origin is almost irreversibly Orientalist – apocryphally, Stan Lee is said to have described Doc as “what if Mandrake the Magician learned all of Fu Manchu’s secrets” at one point, and that is more or less the origin story right there and that’s kind of a problem. Doc, moreso than any other Big Two comics character, is the best example of the “white man learns ancient non-white secrets, surpasses the original practitioners” trope. Thus, I can see the argument for getting away from that by casting a non-Asian actor as the Ancient One, and Tilda Swinton is as gloriously weird an actor as exists on this planet so giving her the role makes sense in that context (and making the Ancient One female adds additional cultural weight to the student/master relationship between Ancient One and Doc that I feel is welcome).

However. In a cinematic universe where Marvel is doubling down on white male protagonists – to the point of casting the whitest possible character to play Iron Fist, a character who A) is only white because when he was created it was impossible to imagine a non-white character in his role and B) actually works much better in the “child of two worlds” aspect if you make him biracial Euro-Asian or simply Asian but raised in an American context – and has at this point a track record of reducing the impact of non-straightwhitemale characters seemingly to increase the impact of SWM protagonists (Ant-Man being the best example of this so far as it spends half the film trying to explain why Evangeline Lilly isn’t just the Wasp despite the fact that she obviously should be), any change of ethnicity in characters has to be very, very carefully done. Casting Chiwetel Ejiofor as Baron Mordo, for example, is diverse casting, but how great is it to make one of Strange’s definitive archenemies the diverse casting choice, exactly? And while Swinton is an inspired choice for the Ancient One, couldn’t Michelle Yeoh (for example) also have been as inspired?

So doing Doctor Strange’s origin story – which, I repeat, you should want to do, because it is about a bad and broken man healing and becoming a better one, unlike most superhero origin stories which are either lengthy revenge fantasies or “generally decent person gets superpowers” – is tricky, because you can either go with the traditional origin, in which case you risk criticism of being Orientalist, or you can revamp it and attempt to de-Orientalize it, in which case you risk criticism of whitewashing/yellowface. What Marvel have done here, apparently, is try to split the difference via the Swinton casting but still keeping the “trip to conspicuously un-named country that looks a lot like Tibet” aspect of the origin story, in an attempt to address both issues while still keeping the origin as traditional as possible. But the problem is that instead of avoiding both, they’ve opened themselves up to scrutiny on both counts, which is certainly sort of an own-goal in this context.

None of this, incidentally, should be taken as the implication that I won’t be going to see this on Day One because of course I’m going to go see this. Me noting that aspects of the film are potentially problematic (and I hold out hope that the script will address some of my concerns) is not the same as me refusing to go see a Doctor Strange film. It looks visually ambitious, which I both hoped for and expected, and Cumberbatch looks to be a decent Doc, which I also expected – just because he was the safe choice for the role didn’t make him a bad choice. (I do find it amusing that he’s basically doing Hugh-Laurie-as-House for the accent, if only because my personal Doctor Strange in one sentence is “if Dr. House became Dr. Who.”) I’m not sure how Mads Mikkelsen is gonna be Dormammu but, whatever, he’s a good actor, I’m happy to let them run with it and see what happens.

While it does, unfortunately, appear that Warner Brothers has not responded to the mediocre performance of ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’ with any kind of interesting panic (although Marvel is amusingly enough flaunting their confidence in ‘Civil War’ with a preview screening in twenty-five cities a full month in advance to build positive word-of-mouth), there’s certainly been a reaction among DC fans. It’s fair to say that this is probably the most divisive movie since ‘Phantom Menace’, and pretty much for the same reasons.

Basically, there seem to be four groups of fans. The first are fans that didn’t like the movie, and are arguing that it was an artistic failure so profound that they’re actually hoping it fails, so that WB will be forced to go back to the drawing board and re-envision their plans for the slate of DC movies. The second group are fans who didn’t like the movie, but see potential in the DC Expanded Universe and are hoping it succeeds even though it was bad because they want an Aquaman movie, a Wonder Woman movie, a Cyborg movie, et cetera. The third group are people who really liked the movie and want more. The fourth group just didn’t like the movie, and don’t really care about the box office one way or the other.

As with any fan schism, there’s a lot of category confusion going on. The second and third group claim that the first and fourth group don’t actually exist–anyone who says they didn’t like the movie is probably a Marvel fan who’s just shit-stirring DC fans because they’re afraid that DC will suck away money and goodwill from the viewing public, supplanting the Marvel Cinematic Universe and ending Marvel’s dominance at the box office. The first and fourth group assume that anyone in the third group is actually in the second group–to them, it’s unimaginable that anyone could like the movie, but they are willing to believe that people would lie about liking it because they’re terrified that if BvS fails, they’re looking at another eight years of the occasional, desultory Batman or Superman reboot before anyone even looks at the second or third tier characters in the DCU.

In actuality, all four groups have their points. It seems pretty clear by now that Zack Snyder is who he seems to be; if you haven’t liked ‘300’, ‘Watchmen’, ‘Sucker Punch’, ‘Man of Steel’ or ‘Batman v Superman’, you’re probably not going to be surprised by his next film. A DC movie universe guided by his vision is only going to appeal to his fans, and people who don’t like that can point to the slightly more heterogeneous style of Marvel and say that there’s another way to do this. And DC won’t do it as long as they’re making money. That doesn’t mean they’re “Marvel fanboys”, it means they’re DC fanboys who aren’t getting their needs met.

The second group is right in suggesting that a lot hinges on the success of BvS. Warner Brothers are not going to throw a ton of money at ‘Cyborg’, especially not a version of the character who isn’t recognizable to the existing fanbase of “Teen Titans Go!” fans, without some sort of assurance that the overall DC brand is going to be enough to draw audiences to the theater like the Marvel brand did for ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and ‘Ant-Man’. A failure of the big tentpole movie threatens to collapse the tent, and WB already has a pretty damn shaky record of giving a fuck about fans to begin with. (*cough* Jonah Hex *cough*)

The third group is right in saying that they like the things they like and shouldn’t have to be ashamed of it. If you enjoyed ‘Batman v Superman’, you get to be happy about that. Nobody should ever have to apologize for liking a movie. Full stop.

And the fourth group is right in saying that they have just as much of a right to dislike the movie–they should not have motives imputed to them, they are still DC fans even if they don’t like it, and it should be possible to discuss the film with fans without being the subject of angry, defensive rants about how they’re ruining the franchise. (This was also common with ‘Phantom Menace’–the people who liked it would get a bit intense in their discussions sometimes, simply because they wanted more ‘Star Wars’ and didn’t like hearing negativity around it. It also happened with the ’96 Doctor Who TV movie.)

But one thing all four groups need to keep in mind is this: WB doesn’t care what they think. I don’t mean this in a mean way, but the fact of the matter is that the dedicated fanbase of Batman and Superman just isn’t enough to sway the studio’s opinions no matter how many tickets they buy. The Batman comic sells about 100,000 copies a month. Superman sells about 38,000. Even if you assume no overlap, all those fans buying one hundred tickets apiece to the movie are only going to move the needle to the tune of about $138 million. Given that we’re talking a billion dollars as the metric for success, it’s unlikely that fan opinion matters nearly as much as the opinion of the general public in terms of box office success and future films.

So please remember, before getting violently angry over ‘Batman v Superman’: Your opinions are irrelevant. No, wait, that came out wrong. Remember that it’s not a life or death matter when you try to convince someone to see or not see the movie, and try to keep this particular schism, at least, to a polite discussion.