The part of Marvel that rubbed off on Ryan Coogler

Ryan Coogler doesn't seem especially likely to direct another Marvel movie. I don't believe there are any more stand-alone Black Panther movies in the works, and even if there were, Coogler himself probably figures that two is enough, and he doesn't want his career to be defined by becoming a Marvel company man.

But there sure seems to be a part of the Marvel experience that has stayed with him.

I won't say much about Sinners. Before I write my review, I'm trying to figure out how much of the plot is known from the trailers or from the press coverage in general. I can tell you that from the one trailer I saw a couple months ago, I did not remember key elements of the movie, just a general vibe -- which is what a good trailer should do. I can also tell you that I loved it.

I'll tell you one more thing that is important to know, though, and it's not a spoiler. In fact, it is a public service of sorts.

Sinners has not one, but two extra scenes -- a mid-credits sequence and a sequence after the credits.

Sound familiar?

Although there are surely other movies that do a thing like this, it was popularized by Marvel and most of the other movies that do it are trying to ride the MCU coattails in some way. In other words, it is very clearly a superhero or at least superhero adjacent move.

Sinners is only superhero adjacent in the sense that its director directed two superhero movies.

But he's pulled the Marvel move, and you need to know, because I was the only one in my screening who didn't walk out of the movie before the second sequence. 

Now, I'll also tell you that the first mid-credits sequence is a lot more important, to the story, than the second. The second is effectively not important at all.

But it does qualify as more movie that Coogler saw fit to make, and with a movie like Sinners, you want to see all the movie there is to see.

It's hard to determine if Coogler would have made this choice without having made Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In fact, as a sort of sign of respect of the passed Chadwick Boseman, I think the second one might be one of the few MCU movies that does not interrupt its closing credits with more movie. Because these sequences are often cheeky in some way, it's maybe not the tone for it if you are also, I don't know, honoring the passing of the star of the franchise.

Wait, I can check. Yes, confirmed. Only the words "Black Panther will return" after the credits end. (Though, presumably, not in a stand-alone movie.)

Maybe Coogler thought this decision shorted him two mid-credits sequences, and he had to fit them into his next movie.

Can I blow off The Marvels?

Oh sure, Vance. The first Marvel movie with a cast that is basically all women and a Black man, and you want to blow it off?

Now hold on a minute, I have my reasons.

1) I have to admit, the Brie Larson backlash has gotten to me. I take backlash against famous women with a grain of salt, but enough of what I've read about how difficult Larson is to be around has seeped through the first few layers. It sounds like she takes playful bantering with co-stars in interviews and makes it overly competitive and a little distasteful. It sounds like she let playing such a powerful character go to her head, and she felt like she was the character. It sounds like maybe winning an Oscar also went to her head. Is this fair? I doubt it. Has it created a real wariness in me? It has.

2) I didn't get to finish the Ms. Marvel series on Disney+ because my kids didn't like it. I think we watched two episodes, both of which my wife and I liked. My kids couldn't care less. And it's not that they are anti-Marvel, though I haven't seen them clamoring to watch any of the recent movies. We're watching Loki and they like it, probably more than I do this season. They just didn't go for it. I feel like it would be ideal to have the connective tissue from that series when coming into this movie.

3) Marvel fatigue. It's real, even for (especially for?) a guy who has seen all the movies. The third Ant-Man stinks and I was ultimately mildly disappointed by the final Guardians of the Galaxy. There's nothing that states I have to be a Marvel completist, especially when it's getting to the point where their first 40 movies are already planned out.

However, I should mention the pros:

1) The movie is only 105 minutes long. If I'm correctly remembering what I read somewhere, that makes it either the second or third shortest Marvel movie. And it's about half the length of Avengers: Endgame. (Then again, that was one of my favorite Marvel movies.)

2) My favorite use of Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury was in the first Captain Marvel movie, Captain Marvel. He's seemed like a bit of an add-on in the other movies, but he felt fully integrated in that movie and was funny as hell.

I think the real issue is that I feel compelled to watch it because of a perceived interest by my readership. Not this readership, but the ReelGood readership. I have of course missed reviewing my fair share of tentpole movies in the nearly four years I have been running this site, but each time I do, I feel like it erodes the site's credibility just a little bit. Is that fair? I doubt it. Has it created a real wariness in me? It has.

More than anything it creates a tangentially related crisis, which is that I don't know what my readership really wants. Theoretically this is an Australian review site, meaning that at least some heed should be paid to films of Australian origin. Also, the site was started with a real indie sensibility, pitched to readers with the same aesthetic values.

Do those readers care about -- checking the actual number now -- the 33rd Marvel movie?

Maybe I just won't see it and find out. 

Not the type of Marvel fan I thought I was

Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger were released consecutively in the summer of 2011, exactly ten years ago today in the case of the second movie, which came out July 22nd of that year. When I started writing this a couple days ago, I noticed the fortuitous timing related to the anniversary and ended up being able to hold it until today. (Numbers guys like me get off on stuff like this.)

The release of First Avenger -- when I saw the movie six months later, anyway -- was kind of a watershed moment for me in terms of my MCU fandom. I had greeted Thor with a kind of perplexed bemusement, considering the whole idea of superheroes from space to be anathema to what I expected from the genre. I recognized some strengths to the film, but overall, I didn't like it, and this was already a pattern in the movies that Marvel had released to this point. I rated Iron Man significantly lower than most people, thought The Incredible Hulk was okay but forgettable, and didn't even see Iron Man 2 until more than a year after its release (11/27/11), and about six weeks after I saw Thor (10/15/11).

Despite the way the MCU was regularly disappointing me, I dutifully saw Captain America: The First Avenger on January 3rd of the new year, or another six weeks after that. Something about this film finally unlocked these movies for me. I loved the World War II setting -- a similar setting worked for me in Wonder Woman -- and I really appreciated the set design and artistic direction. The action scenes had a kind of kinetic quality that I hadn't seen before in the MCU.

After that, it was rare that I disliked any other MCU films. There were a few -- I wasn't hot on Doctor Strange when I first saw it, and the second Avengers seemed like a turd at the time, though I bet I'd think differently if I watched it today -- but overall I've been mostly on board with what they do. (He says, with the selective memory of just having not liked Black Widow.)

One thing that was consistent was that I always liked anything with Captain America in it. It didn't have anything to do with Chris Evans, though I've grown to love his political activism and the fact that he's from the same hometown as I am (Boston). No, there was just something about these stories, about how Joe Johnston and then the Russo brothers were telling them, that clicked with me, as the sequels to those movies (The Winter Soldier and Civil War) remain personal favorites. Captain America was my gateway into the larger MCU.

Of course, in time, I grew fond of Thor. Ragnarok is top five MCU for me, which is no small statement given that they now have 24 films, and will be over 30 before you know it. (Sometime next year, to be exact.) The whole "superheroes from space" thing still seemed sort of weird to me, but given how many other times Marvel has gone to that well -- Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain Marvel being prime examples -- my objection to dosing the superhero movie with science fiction started to seem arbitrary. I had to accept it or not even bother watching these films, so accept it I did.

Ten years after my Thor/Captain America watershed moment, there happen to be two TV shows on Disney+ that have grown out of those particular storylines, one of which I've just finished (Loki) and one of which I am now just over halfway through (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier).

And you know what? I've done a complete reversal.

If Marvel movies are generally split between things that might happen (Captain America) and things that could not happen (Thor), I now find myself in the other camp.

I suspect I'd still love those Captain America movies -- The First Avenger is the only one I've seen more than once -- but this show that uses characters first introduced to us in that storyline? I'm finding it to be a slog. The second episode was better than the first, but then the third and fourth took a step backward again.

Meanwhile, Loki was a constant delight, an example of the imaginations of creative people turned up to 11. It built on what WandaVision had done, the latter also being an example of the outlandish multiverse-type thinking that originally bothered me about a planet populated by Viking gods.

The comparative realism of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier just feels gray and drab and stunted by comparison. In fact, the only thing that really draws me to the show is Wyatt Russell's new Captain America, and only because something about it reminds me of The Boys. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier themselves? Yawn.

Then you've got Loki, fronted by an actor (Tom Hiddleston) whose status as a treasure is just revealed to me more and more all the time. It's colorful, it's shot in a grand style relying on great digital landscapes, it's got a noodle-twisting narrative, and it's even got the best use of Owen Wilson in at least five years. 

And if you told me five years ago, when I was fully in the grip of my Captain America infatuation, that I'd be this enchanted by a show about people trying to fight a purple smoke monster that guards a gate that takes you to the man who watches over the end of time, I'd have thought you were crazy.

Yet here we are. Not only am I fully on board with all things Thor -- Love & Thunder might be my most anticipated movie of 2022 -- but I can't get to the end of this brief six-episode Captain America spinoff fast enough.

Could it be that the thing that initially made me skeptical of Captain America -- its probable self-seriousness and jingoism -- has finally caught up to it? After all, the anointing of a new Cap in this series feels pretty quaint, reflective of a set of values from the past. (As I've watched it I can't help but think that this show is a bone thrown by Marvel to its more conservative audience, who just can't understand Loki and WandaVision.)

But I don't really think that's it. I think that I finally accept that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is not just a series of stories about small twists on reality, featuring characters who are super in scenarios that are ordinary. Rather, the MCU is a place for people to dream up crazy ideas, based in whole or in part on existing material, and to get those crazy ideas filmed. 

Its only limits are the limits of our imaginations, and after ten years as a fan, I've decided that's how I like it. 

Last days as an MCU denier

It seems funny now that I ever would have disliked Doctor Strange. Yet it was only four years ago.

Back then, it's fair to say I had not yet bought in to the MCU. It was still possible to greet new movies with a shake of the head and an upturn of the nose. It was still possible to say "Yet another movie made from a comic book? When is this going to end?"

Now that I know where it was destined to end, I am on board retroactively. 

It's kind of similar to my feelings about Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which I didn't like when I first saw it. The next two movies won me over big time and now I have a strong sense of affection for the original.

The occasion for this reckoning with Doctor Strange was watching it again on Friday night with my ten-year-old son. His younger brother was spending the night over at their aunt's house, so my wife got the idea to order burgers to be delivered (since the younger one doesn't eat them) and watch a movie that might be a tad too old for the six-year-old. We're still basking in the newness of our Disney+ so were obviously drawn there. I suggested the original X-Men from 2000, as my older son is obsessed with Wolverine due to his recent insertion in Fortnite, but my wife preferred something she hadn't already seen. So we landed on Doctor Strange, which would make my son's second MCU movie after Captain Marvel on his birthday a month ago. (Exactly a month ago, as it happens.)

They both really liked it. In fact, it is now my son's favorite movie -- supplanting Captain Marvel. Ah, to be at an age when all your favorite movies are still ahead of you.

I liked it a lot better, too. More than that, though, I find it hard to really remember why I disliked it to the extent that I did. I gave it only two stars on Letterboxd. I spoke quite negatively about it on a podcast devoted to it. I could go back and listen to that podcast to hear the opinions of a version of me that is not yet four years old, but to be honest, I don't want to spend the time.

Doctor Strange -- the character, not the movie -- has been to a lot of really good places since then, which could explain why I suddenly feel so much better about him. And that brings me to the second occasion for my reckoning with this right now.

As you may or may not know, I've been playing catch-up for some time in adding all the movies I've seen to Flickchart, the movie-ranking site where you duel movies against each other and steadily build a list of favorites over time. A few years back I decided it would be better to wait a month after seeing a movie before I ranked it, to let the recency bias wear off before I decided where it belonged on the list. Well, that created the conditions for me to neglect adding my movies entirely, and suddenly, I was two years -- which is about 500 movies -- behind. It's now been three or four years since I've actually been caught up.

But the pandemic has helped me get closer, and now I am "only" about 14 months behind. If I keep at it, I should catch up soon. 

The key to that 14-month time period is that I have now added the most recent movie released in the MCU, Spider-Man: Far From Home. (We'd have Black Widow by now, and I wouldn't have added it to Flickchart yet, but the release has been pushed back to next May.) That means that Flickchart can tell me my rankings of all 23 MCU films, from first to 23rd. And that I can now tell you them. Such a momentous thing might warrant its own post, yet I now have my qualms about some of the films I so easily dismissed when I was still an MCU denier.

So I will just quickly list them ... as "quickly" as you can list 23 films I guess:

1. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) - 457/5319 (91%)
2. Thor: Ragnarok (2017) - 586/5319 (89%)
3. Avengers: Endgame (2019) - 665/5319 (87%)
4. Captin America: The Winter Soldier (2014) - 759/5319 (86%)
5. Captain America: Civil War (2016) - 1018/5319 (81%)
6. Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) - 1323/5319 (75%)
7. Iron Man (2008) - 1498/5319 (72%)
8. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) - 1611/5319 (70%) 
9. The Avengers (2012) - 1712/5319 (68%)
10. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) - 2024/5319 (62%)
11. Black Panther (2018) - 2037/5319 (62%)
12. Captain Marvel (2019) - 2251/5319 (58%)
13. Iron Man 3 (2013) - 2764/5319 (48%)
14. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) - 2919/5319 (45%)
15. Thor: The Dark World (2013) - 3018/5319 (43%)
16. Ant-Man (2015) - 3375/5319 (37%)
17. The Incredible Hulk (2008) - 3403/5319 (36%)
18. Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) - 3498/5319 (34%)
19. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) - 3661/5319 (31%)
20. Iron Man 2 (2010) - 4075/5319 (23%)
21. Thor (2011) - 4222/5319 (21%)
22. Doctor Strange (2016) - 4374/5319 (18%)
23. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) - 4409/5319 (17%)

Digesting this list for the first time, I can see plenty of placement errors -- small ones (I definitely don't like Iron Man better than Captain America: The First Avenger) and what are probably major ones (the original Thor surely will no longer feel like my third worst MCU movie now that I've loved Ragnarok so much). That's the nature of something like Flickchart, where a movie can only jump up on the list if it gets the right duels, unless you purposely re-rank it. And I may indeed have some purposeful re-ranking in my future.

But I suspect a lot of these movies need to be seen again and appreciated for where they stand in the thrust toward Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Age of Ultron may require that in the extreme. 

For the purposes of our discussion of Doctor Strange, though, I noticed something interesting which I will phrase in the form of a question:

"What do the top three movies on this list -- Avengers: Infinity War, Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame -- all have in common?"

There are actually a number of correct answers to this question: Thor, the Hulk, Valkyrie, Loki, Korg ... the list probably goes on. But the relevant answer today is that they all feature Doctor Strange.

So my guess is, as Doctor Strange became increasingly central to the fates of the Avengers, he came to seem less like the star of a side project that arrived at a time when I didn't want to meet any new Marvel characters. Watching Doctor Strange today, I can see it as the origin story of the guy who figured out how to see all possible futures and find the one way of beating Thanos.

Now, shedding my status as an MCU denier does not mean that I automatically embrace anything new that comes out of the MCU. I was lower on both Black Panther and Captain Marvel than some people, and the latest Spider-Man is correctly ranked as at only 34% on my total chart. In fact, it probably should be lower on the Marvel list, as some of those movies -- Doctor Strange in particular -- should be higher. But as my most recently seen and my most recently ranked film, Spider-Man: Far From Home clearly shows that it takes more than just the Marvel Studios logo at the beginning of the movie to win praise from me. 

What has clearly changed, and what has been changing since the second Captain America movie, is my ability to dismiss these movies as "just some comic book movie." In fact, the directon the MCU has gone has so thoroughly convinced me of its validity that it seems hard to believe I was ever snobbishly waving them off. It's hard to remember there was a time when we couldn't see the grand design, and thought that each new movie was made just to make money. Of course, they were made just to make money ... but you can't have such narrative cohesiveness and intricacy without a genuine love for the material as well.

I wouldn't say that I love Doctor Strange now myself, but I do think it deserves one of those purpose-driven re-ranks, which I will now give it post-haste.

Okay, back from that. It is now 2394/5319 (55%), which would jump it from 22nd all the way up to 13th on my MCU list. 

You could indict recency bias for this new placement and call it an over-correction, if you want to use my own logic against me. But an incorrectly placed movie on Flickchart really does need to be dealt with sooner rather than later. When placing a film for the first time, you need to rely on the placement of every movie it comes up against if you want to be sure this new movie will land in the right spot. A film should not be dueling against the likes of Christmas With the Kranks and Live Free or Die Hard -- Strange's former neighbors on my chart -- only to then get stomped by the superior sorcerer who can conjure circular portals that can take him anywhere in the multiverse.

Thirteenth may be too high for it among the MCU movies ... but that just tells me I've probably got more re-ranking to do.

And with Disney+, and a couple of children eager to dive further into the MCU, something tells me I'll have the opportunity, too.

In fact, we've already got our next candidate. That's Ant-Man, which has been deemed suitable for the younger one, and which might have been watched as soon as this weekend if we hadn't just watched Doctor Strange. Given how much I love Ant-Man and the Wasp, I suspect this will be a riser, too. 

My younger one has already said he wants to see a movie with Groot in it, so it looks like a long path is being laid out before us. Which is fine by me, because my days as an MCU denier are ancient history.

MCU completism

I wasn't always that into the MCU. I used to greet new releases with forehead slaps, sometimes. How many of these movies did we need?

As the Captain America movies kept getting better and better, though, I kept getting more and more interested, and now I'm fully on board. Although I think plenty of the earlier movies are duds, there's only been one movie released in the past four years that I haven't liked, which was 2016's Doctor Strange. Heck, even that one I'd probably like a lot better now that I've drunk the Marvel-flavored Kool Aid, and now that I enjoyed the character in both Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Infinity War.

In fact, I'm turning into such an MCU nerd that I watched Infinity War again on Friday night. It's my advanced preparation for the release of Avengers: Endgame at the end of this month. I'm not one of those people who is re-watching all the previous movies, but re-watching this one seemed appropriate.

Besides, you can't "re-watch" all the movies in a series if you haven't watched them all once.

That's right, lo these six years since its release, Iron Man 3 had remained unwatched by me. In looking back at a post I wrote on the day of its release, I noticed I finished with the following comment about it: "I'm not saying I might wait until DVD, but ... I might wait until DVD."

Boy did I ever. Actually, I waited for an Australian streaming service called Stan, which I hadn't even heard of back in 2013. In fact, I was still about three months away from even moving to Australia.

It wasn't unusual for me to "wait for DVD" on an MCU movie back then. I didn't see either of the Marvel 2013 releases in the theater, though I did catch up with Thor: The Dark World in 2017 in preparation for the release of Ragnarok. I was 2-for-2 in 2014 (Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy), but again I skipped Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015 until the end of my ranking season, in January the following year.

Since then I've been loyal to Marvel, though I can't really say I've been loyal with my wallet, as all of those movies have been available to me for free through my critics card. Still, a viewer is a viewer, and though I only actually reviewed one of those films (Ant-Man and the Wasp), I reviewed it very favorably, helping spread the Marvel love.

So the night after I watched Infinity War the second time, I decided I'd erase my last MCU blind spot. I'm 21-for-21 at long last, just in time for #22 to come out.

I sort of liked Iron Man 3. Again, this could be a bias based on my newfound appreciation for this cinematic behemoth on the whole, but I thought it was enjoyable. It's definitely an eccentric movie, spending a significant amount of its time in winter in Tennessee, of all places. Add Shane Black to the list of Marvel directors who were, indeed, able to put their own stamp on one of the MCU movies. There's a lot of Black banter in there, and though not all of it works, it does give the movie a bit of distinctiveness.

I also loved the twist with this film's villain, Ben Kingsley's The Mandarin. I won't spoil the twist in case you haven't seen it. I mean, there must be someone out there other than me who hadn't seen it.

And now to go watch Tony Stark's farewell at the end of this month. I'm not the kind of MCU nerd who reads up on rumors, but I think pretty much everyone knows that Robert Downey Jr. is leaving the MCU, along with Chris Evans (and Chris Hemsworth?). Anyway, some of these guys are going to die, and that's going to be a bit sad.

And now I can officially say I was with them every step of the way.

Looking for the Boden-ness and the Fleck-ness

Marvel Studios has hired directors with vision (Taika Waititi), hacks (Peyton Reed), and directors with vision that they tried to turn into hacks (Edgar Wright).

The decision to hire Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck to direct Captain Marvel seems like a case of the former, but it may have ended up being a case of the latter.

In any case, after watching the movie, I’m not seeing the Boden-ness or the Fleck-ness in it.

That’s not to say I disliked Captain Marvel. In the end I had a fair bit of affection for it. I feel about toward it as I feel toward Black Panther, which is 3.5 stars out of 5.

But Black Panther was at least directed by a director with vision, who was allowed to keep that vision intact when he made the movie. Captain Marvel feels … well, just about like every other Marvel movie.

Which is kind of what they’re going for. It’s been much discussed, occasionally by me, that the real auteur behind the Marvel movies is not their individual directors, but Kevin Feige, the producer on … well, every single Marvel movie I think. He’s had credits on Marvel-related properties all the way back to 2000’s X-Men, where he served as associate producer. The guy is as steeped in the Marvel vision as Stan Lee was – more, probably.

But even within that, there is the leeway, even the desire, to step a bit afield from what’s considered to be the “standard” Marvel movie. That’s why Feige hired Edgar Wright for Ant-Man, though he wasn’t willing to go as far afield as Wright wanted. Maybe he wasn’t ready yet. Thor: Ragnarok’s Waititi and Panther’s Ryan Coogler got to inject some of themselves into the movies they made, which became massive hits.

So he was certainly ready for Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck to do their thing … but they didn’t.

Or maybe they just don’t have an identifiable “thing.”

Since the average MCU fan will likely not have seen any of their filmography – and I’m not going to blame you if you’re that person (sorry to refer to you as “average”) – I’ll give you some idea who they are and what they’ve been up to. Boden and Fleck have always worked together as far as I can see. They are not related and have never been in a relationship, which makes them a bit of an anomaly in terms of directing teams. [NOTE: I was wrong, they are/were in a relationship, but they are very private about the nature of it, though it looks like they have a child together. I'll leave this as is and just add this note.] In fact, they met on a student film and decided to collaborate. They do have a bit of a Coen brothers thing going on in the sense that both were always credited as writers but one was initially credited as the director, that being Fleck. (The man always gets the best title, right?) After about their second film they both started being listed as directors, which seems only fair.

They burst onto the scene, in a manner of speaking, with their 2006 film Half Nelson. You the “average MCU fan” still didn’t likely see it, but in indie film terms, it was definitely a bursting. It was one of the movies that helped break Ryan Gosling, who received an Oscar nomination for his role as a crack-addicted teacher. Neither crack addiction nor teaching makes an appearance in Captain Marvel.

They then moved on to something decidedly smaller scale, if only because it had no name actors in the cast. That was 2008’s Sugar, a realistic look at the attempts of a young Latin American pitcher to make it in American professional baseball, which makes it an anomaly in terms of baseball movies. The star of that movie is a young man name Algenis Perez Soto, who didn’t pick up another role for ten more years (though does have a small part in Captain Marvel, I now see). I’d say that Latin Americans and baseball do not make an appearance in Captain Marvel, but baseball does make a small appearance.

Next was another shifting of gears for the duo, who made the mental illness comedy It’s Kind of a Funny Story in 2010. This was a bit more mainstream as it featured Emma Roberts, Zach Galifianakis and Viola Davis, not to mention another guy who seemed on the track to stardom but hasn’t been heard from much lately: Keir Gilchrist. (Oh yeah, he was in It Follows.) Mental illness doesn’t make an appearance in Captain Marvel, although I suppose comedy does.

Their fourth feature, and last before Captain Marvel, was the 2015 buddy dramedy Mississippi Grind, which features Ryan Reynolds and a man they would work with again in Captain Marvel, Ben Mendelsohn, who was actually my favorite part of the movie. It’s about two guys going on a gambling spree along the Mississippi, and also trying to discover themselves. There’s no gambling in Captain Marvel, but there's self-discovery out the wazoo.

I’ve liked all of Boden and Fleck’s movies, but trying to find a throughline is pretty difficult. The question is, should we try to find that? Do good filmmakers have to revisit similar themes to stake out an identity for themselves? And does appearing to be obsessed with the same themes over the course of a career actually make you a better artist, or just someone easier to discuss because it allows film school students to construct grand unifying theories of you?

And there’s no doubt they are good filmmakers. I’ve liked all of their films, particularly Half Nelson, which was my #10 of the year it came out.

What I don’t really see, and what it may not ever be possible to see, is a logical, identifiable reason why Feige would have considered them a good match for Captain Marvel. They’re not a bad match, certainly. Good filmmakers can, presumably, take any material and make it good, as long as they’re starting with a good script and a good cast. But what was the Boden-ness and Fleck-ness he was looking for?

If forced to give an answer, I’d surmise that he saw a streak of humanism in their films, a sense of how to bring three dimensions to a character. A “gooey women’s movie” needs someone like that. (That’s not me talking, of course, but what I imagine the thinking might have been.)

In fact, their hiring represents a kind of funny half measure toward accepting female directors, and primarily female-driven content, into the MCU. It’s only half-directed by a woman, though harder to believe even than that is that Marvel has yet to make a movie in which a woman was the protagonist. They do have a Black Widow movie lined up (directed by a woman, Cate Shortland – see my thoughts on her here), and presumably will have a Captain Marvel 2 if/when this is a success. But they’re a bit late in getting here, and when they do, it’s hard to know/see what this woman has brought to this project.

Again, nothing against Anna Boden, or against Ryan Fleck. But I just don’t see what they’ve done here other than shepherd the project through and make a pretty good movie.

In a way, this makes them like the biggest recent Marvel success stories, who are also a directing pair – the Russo brothers. If you are grading MCU directors on the admittedly flawed scale I introduced earlier, from hack on one side to directors with vision on the other, the Russos are probably closer to the “hack” end of the scale. I should probably describe what I mean by that. A “hack” is thought of as someone who just does the studio’s bidding and does not display any trademark techniques or styles. You know, maybe a Joel Schumacher. On the extreme opposite end you’ve got someone like Wes Anderson, who is so much like himself every time out that literally no one else could have made his movies.

The Russo brothers came to the MCU with two random features – Welcome to Collingwood and You, Me and Dupree – as well as a handful of episodes of Community (which appear to have won them the gig) under their belt. Not much. But they ended up being the perfect choices to execute Feige’s vision, first in two Captain America movies and now in two Avengers movies, assuming they continue their run of success with next month’s Avengers: Endgame.

Boden and Fleck would certainly be happy with accomplishing something like that, but I guess I feel more is expected of them, given that they made four genuinely interesting films, one of which garnered an Oscar nomination. Their role in relation to those films was decidedly not the role of a hack, as these are smaller movies that they wrote. But neither did they develop a signature style. So when they’re tapped to direct a Marvel movie, I do expect more from them than just turning in a good Marvel movie … even if I can’t quantify what that is.

If you’ve seen the movie and can identify either its Boden-ness or its Fleck-ness, I’d love you to let me know in the comments below.

An odd pitch to girls

Hollywood is slowly (quickly) becoming aware of the need to cater more to their female viewers, as data has shown that women are more likely to dictate the financial expenditures of families, and therefore have a greater say in what movies get watched.

I saw one of the oddest examples of that at the toy store the other day.

We were picking up a present for a birthday party my younger son is attending next weekend. I asked him to select a Hot Wheels car to go along with the main present, which I didn't deem quite expensive enough. He did a pretty poor job of that, preferring to run the aisles instead, which left me lingering around the Hot Wheels section for longer than I expected to.

Long enough to notice a very odd way to get girls into Hot Wheels, though not inconsistent with the trend we're seeing in the movies.

The first I noticed was the one pictured above: a van with She-Hulk on the side. Now I'm not familiar with every corner of the Marvel comic book universe, but at least in the movies, She-Hulk has yet to make her appearance. Yet Marvel and Hot Wheels think that a She-Hulk van might sell like hot cakes. Well, there were a lot of them still there, I can tell you that.

Then next I saw:

Again now. They've only just introduced Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Spider-Woman has yet to be heard from, though I'm sure she's been in the comics for years. But as with She-Hulk, I doubt they are trying to sell a Spider-Woman van off the backs of any comic books. It's just a pandering "here's a Hot Wheels girls will like" move. (Though I guess I should be happy they aren't just trying to pedal Hot Wheels that are colored pink. This is definitely a step up from that.)

The third one is at least someone I recognize:

Elizabeth Olson plays Scarlet Witch in the MCU, though I don't remember her skin being pink, and I don't remember an outfit anything like that either. And what is that, a bakery truck? The flames are cool. The pink skin, not so much.

Now we're getting somewhere more along the lines of what I would expect:

Black Widow is probably Marvel's best and most famous offering among a relatively limited number of female characters. Though damn, they might have tried to make her look more like Scarlett Johansson. And what's with that giant stack of red hair? And is that one of those trucks that takes large quantities of money to and from the bank?

Lastly we have:

At least they're on brand with this one, with a picture that is clearly Zoe Saldana and the familiar font that has appeared on movie posters for Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Plus, it's a car, which wins. Why do girls have to play with boxy trucks?

I mightn't have found the whole thing so odd if there were equivalents for Marvel's male superheroes. But there wasn't a one. The options among Hot Wheels were either female Marvel superheroes, or all other cars, dressed normally as cars.

If it is pandering, as I am kind of suggesting it is, at least it's better pandering than if they put forth a bunch of pink cars with petunias on them. At least let these girls aspire to be badass.

But more than anything I think it calls attention to the dearth of female comic book heroes, rather than celebrating the ones that exist, as it surely intends to. You can go about 40 deep with male Marvel stars. The fact that you can't even go five deep here, without hauling out two "girl version of" heroes that no one has heard of outside of imagining that they must exist because obviously they do, is just sort of sad.

In a year or two you'll be able to add Captain Marvel to this list, I suppose.

But do you bump out She-Hulk or Spider-Woman?

I prefer Ant-Man in his own universe

I was really digging Ant-Man. In fact, I was toying early on with giving it a four-star rating. As just one example, I loved that scene where Michael Pena recounts how he learned about the potentially unguarded safe, and all the characters in his story mouth the words of his story as he's saying them. That was probably Peyton Reed's best Edgar Wright impersonation of the film. Not because that's something Wright would actually do, but because it's in the spirit of something Wright would actually do.

But then, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had to come along and screw it all up.

"I think the first thing we should do is contact the Avengers," says Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), with a completely straight face, at what I would guess was the film's 40-minute mark.

The first thing I thought was, Wow, that line was delivered really awkwardly.

The second thing I thought was, Wait, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is not laughing.

The third thing I thought was, Wait, how does this civilian know about the Avengers?

The fourth thing I thought was, Oh yeah, because all the events of all the previous Marvel movies are things that actually happened in this world, and were covered by all the major media outlets. This guy knows about the Avengers because the Avengers are the most famous people in the world.

Yeah, that universe.

This was exactly the moment when Ant-Man lost a full star rating and never recovered it. A few moments later, Pym makes reference to something that happened at the end of the second Avengers movie, which I haven't seen but which I know about anyway. It's such a bad joke that you can almost hear the rim shot that accompanies it. He also makes mention of Tony Stark.

Here we go, I thought.

And here we went. A few scenes later, Lang is unwittingly trying to break into some kind of Avenger headquarters, and must face off against Falcon (Anthony Mackie). So too much attention is not drawn from our central figure, I guess, this is the only Avenger Lang actually meets, and he's one of the second-tier Avengers. (It's not the only Avenger who appears in the movie, however -- you are of course obliged to wait all the way until the end of the credits to see who else shows his face.)

I had been just fine with Ant-Man in his own cinematic universe and not a part of somebody else's. I didn't know until the closing credits (every last one of which I was compelled to sit through, even though I was in danger of missing the last tram home) that John Slattery was playing Howard Stark, Tony's father, in the opening scene. (If he played him in other movies, I either haven't seen those movies or have just plain forgotten.) But once we were reminded that Ant-Man is just a tiny cog in what is, by now, an impossibly unwieldy infrastructure of superheroes and supervillains, the movie lost its authority for me. Now everything that was going on would be subsumed into this larger narrative, a narrative so big that even its biggest players are inevitably now reduced to someone else's second fiddle.

This is why superhero movies worked for so long under this basic premise: the superhero in this movie is not only the only superhero in the world, he's also the first time the characters are even acquainted with the idea of a superhero. Most old-fashioned superhero movies -- and by "old-fashioned" I mean "more than ten years old" -- were not only origin stories for a particular superhero, but they were stories of the origin of the concept of the superhero. That's why the characters who witnessed this superhero at work were so amazed/astounded/ what have you.

But when a suit that can shrink a man to the size of an ant is only the 10th or 11th most impressive superhero trick out there, something is lost. This is a world where a man turns into a giant green monster when he gets angry. This is a world where a super-powered soldier from World War II was revived 70 years later. Shit, this is a world where an alien god can travel back and forth between Earth and his planet through some kind of interstellar bridge and has an all-powerful hammer. A man the size of a bug is small potatoes compared to all that, pun absolutely intended.

Can't I just be happy with a world where Ant-Man is the world's only superhero, and the things he does astonish us as though we'd never before seen something supernatural? Can't I live in a world where this power is not only described as the world's most powerful weapon, in order to hype up the stakes of this particular film, but actually is the most powerful weapon, because everything else that exists in this world exists within a framework of realism?

I can't, because that world is dead. I'm not sure if another superhero will ever step on to your IMAX screen without the baggage of all the other superheroes who may be slightly cooler than he (or she) is. D.C. will soon be part of Marvel's game -- already is, really, since both Suicide Squad and Superman vs. Batman feel as though they've already been released -- and anyone else who has any kind of superhero will never be able to compete with the two giants.

I for one would like to marvel -- pun again intended -- over the wonders of an unfamiliar superhero as though I'm just discovering what a superhero is myself. For about 40 minutes, I did just that.

But then, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had to come along and screw it all up.

Something not Marvel-related for a change

There have been so many movie announcements and casting announcements from Marvel in the past couple months --

["How many have there been, Derek?"]

-- that basically nothing but these announcements has been filling up our movie-related news feeds.

So it's kind of a relief to see a movie called Nightcrawler hit theaters that has nothing to do with comic books.

One of the X-Men characters -- whose rights are split in some complicated way between Marvel and Fox -- is named Nightcrawler, and with the way these characters have been spun off into their own stand-alone movies or even franchises, it's remarkable that the rights owners would even allow a movie unrelated to this character to bear his name.

Yet Nightcrawler IS completely unrelated. It's a Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle about an ambitious journalist armed with a video camera, which is drawing more comparisons to Taxi Driver than to X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

And unfortunately, I'll have to wait a month more to see it, as it actually doesn't come out until November 27th in Australia. (Funny -- Halloween release date in the U.S., Thanksgiving release date in Australia.) So yes, what you are currently reading is that good old-fashioned American release date preview post, an endangered species on this blog since I've moved to Australia and never seem to know when anything is coming out anymore.

Actually, I could see it before then, as I'll actually be in the United States from November 13th to November 28th. So that's when you can prepare yourself for a little Audient sabbatical, or at least, only a few very brief updates.

But I'll have bigger movie fish to fry when I'm stateside. My biggest priority will be Foxcatcher, which I understand will open sometime while I'm there, but won't open here until after the cutoff for my 2014 rankings in mid-January. Then there's Birdman, which gets a release date on the final day of my 2014 list eligibility, just like Her and Inside Llewyn Davis did last year. I'll have to go see it on opening day if I want to include it.

So while I'm in the U.S., I'll be catching either a fox or a bird, or possibly both.

Who are these people directing these movies?

Have you ever heard of a person named Alan Taylor?

Neither had I. Except I was noodling around on the interwebs and learned that this person is directing the Terminator reboot (or whatever it is).

Trying to figure out how they would just hand this movie to this guy I had never heard of, I discovered that Mr. Taylor also directed Thor: Dark World. (Shows you how much attention I paid to the sequel to one of my least favorite Marvel movies.)

Trying to figure out how they would just hand the sequel to one of my least favorite Marvel movies to a guy I had never heard of, I discovered that Mr. Taylor also directed movies called Palookaville, The Emperor's New Clothes and Kill the Poor, the most recent of which came out in ... 2003.

Huh?

What crack is Marvel smoking these days?

If it were just this, that would be one thing. But do you know who's directing April's Captain America: The Winter Soldier?

Joe and Anthony Russo, known for their cinematic classics Welcome to Collinwood and You, Me and Dupree.

Wha?

The answer, of course, lies in what these directors have been doing when they have not been directing features. And that means the answer lies in TV.

Taylor is a veteran of a half-dozen episodes of Game of Thrones, making him a pretty darn logical candidate to direct a Thor movie in that sense. And the Russo brothers directed some of those episodes of Community that featured paintball wars (there were at least two of them, and possibly as many as 17), which I guess makes them a slightly more logical choice to direct an action movie.

Then again, they still kind of don't make sense. Game of Thrones has surprisingly few scenes of actual fighting, and I don't know how slow-mo action-comedy sequences on Community qualify someone for big-budget, serious action.

What's clear is that Marvel has a downright kooky idea of who should direct its movies. After all, Jon Favreau had to seem like an unusual choice for the original Iron Man, having made only Made, Elf and Zathura. Now we think of him as a hot director of big-budget films, Cowboys & Aliens notwithstanding.

Ditto Kenneth Branagh for the original Thor (he's the "Shakespeare guy") and Joss Whedon for The Avengers (he's "the Buffy the Vampire Slayer" guy).

There's something delightfully risk embracing about their stance. (What's a good opposite of "risk averse," anyway? Risk comfortable? Risk welcoming?) Any of these decisions could easily blow up in their faces, but so far, none really have.

They appear to have made another smart unconventional choice with the director of next year's Ant-Man: Edgar Wright. Though this would be one of their least unconventional choices, given that each of Wright's movies has had a somewhat serious dose of action.

When they tap Woody Allen to direct Iron Man 4, that's when I will really start scratching my head. But it's much more likely that they will get someone like Ramin Bahrani, director of the indie darlings Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and Goodbye Solo. After making At Any Price, which featured Zac Efron as a race car driver, he's all set to helm a superhero movie, isn't he?

I'm pretty sure Marvel thinks so ... and heck, given their track record, I'm pretty sure they're right.