"Superhero Movies Are Dead on Arrival, Says Author ..." Topic
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Tango01 | 24 Oct 2016 11:29 a.m. PST |
…Jonathan Lethem "Jonathan Lethem, a bestselling author and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, is often seen as a major figure behind the growing acceptance of superhero motifs in literary fiction, thanks to novels like The Fortress of Solitude and stories like "Super Goat Man." But that doesn't mean he's a fan of the current crop of superhero movies…" Read more here link
Amicalement Armand "I think one of the least satisfying film genres I've ever encountered is the contemporary superhero movie, which just seems to me kind of dead on arrival," Lethem says in Episode 226 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I can't even get into the hair-splitting about, ‘Oh, but there are three or four good ones.' I just don't see any life there." Podcast |
Dynaman8789 | 24 Oct 2016 11:36 a.m. PST |
> "I can't even get into the hair-splitting about, ‘Oh, but there are three or four good ones.' I just don't see any life there." That exact same line applies to every genre of movie that has become the "big thing" since the dawn of movies. And I'm NOT a fan of Superhero movies, give me a good SciFi movie with spaceships any day. |
Vigilant | 24 Oct 2016 2:03 p.m. PST |
Each to their own. I don't discard any movie because of the genre, there are good and bad in all genres. |
StarCruiser | 24 Oct 2016 4:05 p.m. PST |
I don't know – I rather enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy! Oh yeah – and I really enjoyed Deadpool. Is it a coincidence that more are a bit…off…compared to the mainstream? |
15mm and 28mm Fanatik | 24 Oct 2016 6:32 p.m. PST |
He's in the "superhero business" as a writer so he has probably seen it all and superhero themed movies hold nothing new to him or have even been interesting to him in the first place. It's understandable. I'm sure there are horror fiction writers who feel the same way about horror movies. Their perspectives are different from ours. |
piper909 | 24 Oct 2016 10:04 p.m. PST |
I personally find that many parodies of genre films are more entertaining and more satisfying than the films they are lampooning -- e.g., Galaxy Quest, or Mystery Men. They send up the ridiculous aspects with a wink but maintain the heart and spirit of those types of stories at their best. Interesting viewpoint in this article. I empathize to a degree. I also sort of burned out on conventional superhero comic books after Watchmen appeared in 1987. That book just knocked everything that had come before on its head, and everything else published at the time seemed pale and wan next to the Moore-Gibbons magnum opus. But I still enjoyed the earlier stuff, the Silver Age especially in all its colorful glory and goofiness. I didn't buy new comics, but I kept my old ones. Eventually, decades later, I started to pick up a few titles here and there and discovered that some genuinely good stuff had been done or was still going on, some titles or creators who kept the balance between the new gritty realism (way too many bad Alan Moore imitators since Watchmen!) and the sense of fun and adventure that the older comics once maintained (I think of the DC animated series and books in particular, or anything Paul Dini writes). A problem with the movies as I see it is that hardly any of them have any input from actual comic book scripters, the great ones, for some reason or other. |
piper909 | 24 Oct 2016 10:06 p.m. PST |
PS: I found the X-Men movie series enjoyable, and I never even read any of those comic books, so my impression was solely from a movie goer's perspective. But the DC heroes, whose books I have read, have mainly had lousy movies. |
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