Eat any good books lately?

[benji]

Much like its subject, this gets worse as it goes on. Kevin Feige was a source for this so unfortunately he's treated as perfect, basically the smartest man to ever exist and someone with a career that's been flawless. Everyone else is treated more fairly and some get especially critiqued. But it basically stops at Endgame in terms of anything about the actors, directors, the films themselves, etc. But it still goes on. You just don't learn anything like what happened to Black Widow which was in development forever or any reasoning behind Eternals or the new Disney+ shows. They're sort of mentioned off hand as Feige continues to be perfect and it recounts how stuff like X-Men come back under Marvel's control. I think it should have probably been deliberately just the MCU up until Endgame but the same length for more content, rather than trying to keep up-to-date all the way to Kang getting fired. There's also a kind of amusing relation to the product itself because the book discusses how early on directors and actors had all this say and now Feige's team and "pre-visualizers" are increasingly deciding so much of the film before anyone else and the directors are handed these productions they can just allow Marvel to do the work for them on if they want to and make no real decisions about.



That was good enough that I'm interested in his sequel which will be the 1960's. The stuff about the actual industry is probably the most interesting. The chapters about the movies are often him just talking about the plot and actors and how much he likes them. There's paragraphs where he'll be like "monster movies were popular" and then lists like 30 monster movies or whatever. I have no idea why he does this, he's not saying they're good or bad, just listing them. One of the top Goodreads reviews that I see when I score the book was complaining that he's a left-winger who fills his comments with too much liberal crap about racism and women. But he literally argues multiple times that he disagrees with the current popular trend of evaluating everything by 21st century standards, mentioning things that are "problematic" with films for the purpose of arguing to look at them in the context of the time and see how progressive they actually were.

He also makes some negative comments about modern films but even if I probably wouldn't agree with his overstanning of the films he grew up with I do agree with his comments about pacing, editing and framing. Older films are slower, have fewer close-ups with nothing but the actors face, use the entire width of the frame for deliberate purposes, don't hyperactively cut as much, etc. I prefer this sometimes too!