It’s not exactly the stuff of “Stop the presses!” that
some of the greatest filmmakers in the world
have misgivings about the rise of the superhero
film and its outsized place in our film culture.
And yet recent critical comments by Martin
Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have been
greeted like entreaties to a prizefight, a battle
royale. “In this corner, the box-office champion
of the wooooorld, Marvel ‘The Incredible Hulk’
Studios! And in this corner, the 76-year-old maker
of anguished Catholic epics and crime-movie
classics, Martin ‘The-Raging-Bull’ Scorsese!”
Plenty of rumbling has followed since Scorsese,
in a magazine interview earlier this month,
suggested Marvel movies aren’t cinema
but “something else” — theme park rides
uninterested in “trying to convey emotional,
psychological experiences to another human
being.” Coppola doubled down over the
weekend, telling journalists in France, gathered
to see him accept the Prix Lumiere, that Scorsese
was not only right but that he didn’t go far
enough. Marvel films, he said, are “despicable.”
“He’s right because we expect to learn
something from cinema, we expect to gain
something, some enlightenment, some
knowledge, some inspiration,” said Coppola.
Image: Xxxxx
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