Skip to main content

How I learned to stop worrying and enjoy the Marvel Cinematic Universe | James Greig

I devoured 20 of the films in a month-long frenzy. But I can’t quite shake off the guilt that comes with this guilty pleasure

I started England’s second lockdown last year with good intentions: I was broke and underemployed, and since it didn’t look like my economic circumstances would be improving anytime soon, I was determined to emerge from the pandemic rich in cultural capital. I decided to work my way through the British Film Institute’s directors’ poll of the 100 best films ever made and soon I was watching arthouse films like there was going to be an exam at the end of the pandemic. This wasn’t purely about self-improvement: many of these films I found straightforwardly entertaining or moving, while some were more challenging (ie boring) but rewarding in different ways. It felt like a good use of time. But then, one Friday evening, it all came crashing down: my younger brother suggested that we watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier, on the tantalising promise that it was “not as bad as you might expect”.

Prior to this, it wasn’t so much that I disliked Marvel films but that I’d staked a claim in being the kind of person who didn’t watch them. I opposed them as a symbol of cultural decline, a phenomenon that had destroyed cinema (I was at least partly correct on both counts – Hollywood’s seeming inability to think of anything new can be traced back in part to the franchise’s success). That night, I was sceptical but curious. In the end, the film wasn’t exactly a revelatory experience, but I enjoyed it well enough. Before I knew it, I had watched more than 20 of them in a month-long frenzy.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/31n7cMC
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more