w@llcrawler said:
If I understand you correctly, I'm just wondering what more YOU expect from a moviegoing experience.
I understand that FF didn't deliver for you (as it didn't for me) because we are long-time fans of the comic and the movie failed (IMO) to capture much of the magic of the comic. But in general, if you go to a movie that you know little about, pay your money, get some popcorn and a drink, watch the movie and are entertained, what more is missing that would have otherwise made it a 'rich' experience?
You understand me quite correctly, yes. And I’ll tell you what’s missing.
Let’s get two different examples.
The first, if you go see a movie with or without some previous knowledge of the director’s work, like, watching Jan Svankmajer’s
Faust, knowing or not that he studied medieval theatre and puppet manipulation at Praga. That he is interested in the surrealist modern movement, etc.
The movie expands your sensibility, if you’re looking for more than passing fun. It presents that old conflict between two human aspirations (heavenly & earthly), but gives images never seen before, with analogy in the place of common logic. Not CGI commonplace, but very industriously handcrafted.
You leave the cinema wondering about how things in life are bound together, you consider your own experience. You start seeing the world differently by adding new forms of thought through images.
That example is valid for filmmakers like David Lynch, Jean Cocteau, Ingmar Bergman, etc.
The second, a comicbook-based movie: the ability of a director to adapt the specific qualities of the comicbook is at hand.
In great comicbook adaptations, like
Sin City (directed by Rodriguez & Miller), some things of the first example apply. Everybody could see that
Sin City proposed a new way to tell a story through images in the cinema. Of course, it was the first movie that did justice to the visions of Frank Miller, that made a revolution in comicbook way of telling a story two decades ago.
Bryan Singer’s
X-Men (1 & 2) makes an effort to bring to great audiences some very important issues that X comicbooks always dealt with.
What is prejudice? Where to draw the line between bad and good? (read the very intelligent interviews of Ian Mackellen) and, in cases like that of movie Rogue, how teens can feel like aliens when they’re growing up. It is a metaphor, but I suppose it is very effective, like most Stan Lee’s ideas usually are, and Singer developed his vision upon these qualities.
That’s what is missing if you just pay ten bucks, sit for an hour and a half, only get your fun with some jokes and one or two cliché bruhahas, and go back home to your daily life. And that’s why audiences give huge BO to unmentionable crap.
They couldn't care less.
"Pompous Ass" still fits in that situation....
