To Be Continued

Thor (Kenneth Branagh, 2011)

Captain America (Joe Johnston, 2011)

Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau, 2010)

Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013)

The Incredible Hulk (Louis Leterrier, 2008)

Most of these movies are not very good. But I watched them anyway. So that I could watch The Avengers. Good god, why? What is this completionist urge for pop culture?

I seem always to wonder why I do this to myself, but I know it’s the same with art movies. I did not necessarily enjoy All of Tarkovsky’s movies, but I’ve seen them all. Ticking boxes can be satisfying and the Marvel Extended Whatever’d Universe makes watching these movies feel like Candy Crush.

I also watched the series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which is a pain to type. Actually, the television series might be one of the better formats for the super hero genre. Daredevil and Jessica Jones had nice character arks with occasional excessive action sequences. These movies were essentially one long action sequence. They try to function as previews for the next instalment. It’s a very peculiar idea

I don’t include the first Iron Man movie because it worked well as a film in its own right. The next two were a bit more forgettable. They all contained a post-credits teaser clip. While it is certainly nice for people who worked on the film to know that people are sticking around while their names roll by, I kind of liked it when films just ended. If you liked it or wanted to know where it was shot or what that song was, you could stick around for hints, but otherwise that was it. Now there’s this enormous fear of missing something. And the credits for these CGI orgies are long.

Are any of these real movies in their own right? Or is this just a weirdly expensive television series drawn out over years? I can’t honestly remember the plots of most of the above. It seemed like they were just interested in setting everything up. I don’t read super hero comics, generally, but I imagine cliff hangers are a regular occurrence.

I’m not saying I hated watching these. I have watched more of them. I will probably watch even more of them. And I’m grateful to some extent that they aren’t all origin stories. But it’d be nice for them to have real structure, real endings and not just ellipses. At least they’ve managed to keep the same actors by and large (Hulk an exception) and haven’t fallen victim to the Batman problem. Then again, Batman movies are pretty good. More on that later.

My Mission

This is futile. I have rated in excess of 1,300 items on Netflix. This includes television shows, items I’ve checked as “not interested” to remove them from my feed and whatever my erstwhile flat mate has watched and rated, i.e. everything about vampires, werewolves and Victorians in any combination.

I want to write about them all. This will prove impossible. Even at a rate of 4 films per week, I’m staring at years of work, but even so, I will try.

It is not my intention to review all 1,300 films. I won’t be posting my star ratings from my Netflix profile. It’s uninteresting and it wouldn’t be fair. My hope is to write about these movies and how I watched them. The context. Or more pompously, my personal biography of these movies. I will try and group films that make sense, but the way they are grouped will not necessarily follow any logical critical path. It is possible to watch The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Me, Earl and the Dying Girl back to back. I know this. I did it on a plane at the end of 2015. Or at least I think I did.

I will probably cheat. I’m sure there will be huge dumps of movies I can only remember as small impressions, films that made no impression, other than the knowledge I spent two hours watching them.

I won’t be able to pinpoint when I watched a lot of things. I hope to remember if I saw something in theaters or on home video. I doubt that will be possible. I won’t be able to say if I’ve watched director’s cuts, extended editions, original theatrical releases. Perhaps this will be boring to anyone who doesn’t know me personally. Perhaps it will be dull to anyone but me. There’s a very good possibility I will bore even myself. Nonetheless, I think it’s a worthwhile exercise: we watch movies in so many places, in so many emotional states, for so many reasons. What is the total of all those hours of concentration?

Anyway. Let’s get moving.