Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Hi there, Steve Barnes here with yet another in the endless series of life writing live broadcasts. As always, if you enjoy this, please share it. It's the only way we know which subjects and approaches are making people happy. And today, hopefully, people are going to be happy because I'm going to be talking about. I'm going to do a spoiler free review of In Game, Avengers In Game. And then we're going to talk about some other things. So, you know, hang on. We're going to have some fun. Many years ago, I met Stan Lee just for an hour. We were on the same panel at a Comic Con, I think it was. I was awestruck by him, but I didn't really grasp how deep that awestruckness went. He was funny and personable and warm and open. We sat next to each other and we were trading quips and barbs back and forth and we made each other laugh. And I told him how much I loved his work, how grateful to him I was for all that he had done. And I had the sense that he'd heard that a million times, but he still loved hearing it as much as he did the very first. He was willing to be that guy. He was willing to take that responsibility. He invited me to Marvel for lunch. I took his card, shook his hand, thanked him very much for the experience and the invitation. And I never called him. I froze. I just couldn't do it. For one of the very few times in my life, I had been utterly intimidated. It's really one of the few regrets I have in my life. I just couldn't do it. It's difficult, supremely difficult to to review Endgame because there hasn't really been anything quite like it before. The Marvel cinematic universe is 22 films over 11 years, billions of dollars of tickets sold worldwide, instant identification for formerly unknown or minor characters, and a pretty clear winner in the DC over Marvel schoolyard debates. This spoiler free review is that they bring the saga to a satisfying close and open the door to future films that tap into more than a half century of hero storytelling. There's really no telling what will happen now that Marvel has basically every splinter of the Marvel canon under one roof, with the possible exception of Submariner, which I think is over Universal. But briefly, I cannot imagine anybody who would go see this movie, or I cannot imagine that the average score for people who go see this movie would be anything less than an A. I really, I really don't. It's spectacular when it needs to be heartfelt, when it should be hilarious. When it can be. And surprisingly somber, as is appropriate considering the thematics and the events of the previous film. It's quite the package really. And it zips through its three hour length like lightning. Shortest three hour movie I've ever seen in my life. So if you're tempted to go see it, see it. There are so many things to talk about as an era comes to an end, and I'll almost certainly revisit them because I like talking about human development and storytelling and, you know, riding this wave of energy in this movie right now as it will be a cultural phenomenon for the next month, I think there are worse things that I could do. My thought today is that it's hard to see the Marvel Cinematic Universe getting better or more successful. I mean, it's not impossible. There already been so many records broken and precedent set that, you know, I can only shake my head. It's like, wow, who saw this coming? What hits me is that there is one reason I suspect that we might have seen the peak, that it will start to not go downhill, but be less consistently successful. And it's connected to the reason I think the whole thing worked in the first place. And that is that for a while we had Stan Lee and now we've lost. So if you ask yourself the question, because everybody in Hollywood's asking this question, why did the Marvel Cinematic Universe work as well as it does the entire cinematic thing? I mean, everybody's trying to do it now. It's just remarkable. But it couldn't have worked without a diversity of voices and tones on the creative side. And coordinating that was another major miracle. I mean, seriously consider the James Bond films. They all have a very similar tone. And it's hard for a director to put their stamps on something where the tone is imposed so clearly by the production forces from above. But a dozen different directors have established a dozen different styles within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So I have to credit Kevin Foege for being something of a ringmaster, guiding all of those visions in a way that wove together ultimately to create a sustained emotional experience. What I know is that while transferring the images, characters and concepts to filming, the costumes were less comic y and you know, names like Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch are either discarded completely or minimalized. Usually used like Barton and Wanda, they still captured the feel of a Marvel, of reading a Marvel comic book. When I was a kid, you know, it felt that way. And that feel existed across, you know, in the original comic books, across two dozen four color monthly titles. I bought about half of those books. Every month and read in many of them. And no matter whether the art was done by Jack King Kirby, who's probably the best comic artist in history, let's just give him his props, or Steve Ditko or Gene Colon or any of the other guys. There was a consistent tone to Marvel. And the only commonality that I can see is that Stan was at the center of sort of an interconnected web godfather, if not father of basically, you know, 98% of everything that we consider core Marvel. The Marvel method of comics production seemed to be that Stan would meet with a different artist every day, five days a week. They discuss a story possibility, flesh out some basic directions. Then the artist would go off and pencil the whole thing out. Stan would then approve and consider adjustment and suggest adjustments and write dialogue and captions. Then it would be inked and colored. In that way, one man wrote more comics than were actually humanly possible, because if he actually written them, he basically would have been writing one entire comic book a day every month. Nobody could do that. He had to rely on artists who were also storytellers. But his heart, his approval, his voice was that consistent feel to everything that came out every month. There will and have been endless debates about exactly who did what. And it's quite probable that beyond a 15 year stretch in the 60s and 70s, Stan's writing influence shrank quite a bit as other writers and editors, and even artist writers like the amazing Jim Steranko, for God's sake, swept through. But they had to have been attracted by what was probably one of the greatest creative environments in history, what was called the bullpen. However much influence and contribution the others had made, Stan was the voice, the face, the tireless cheerleader, the man on the soapbox. Unlike dc, where virtually every character was created by a different set of creative minds, were any of the original creators still alive and influential when their movies were being made? You know, one of the original creators of Superman, Joe Shuster, had sold the rights many years before, and he was broke. He was reduced to being a messenger, you know, taking packages around offices in New York. When the first, when Christopher Reeve played Superman and the movie made over $80 million, he embarrassed the studio when this got out, so they gave him a pension. Thank goodness. That was the right thing to do. But it suggests a major problem. Dc, I mean, Marvel was a family. DC was a publishing company where many different creators came together, but no single person really influenced the entire enterprise. Before going into any further into questions of why this all happened, I have to state clearly and for the record, that I think a major factor was some miraculous creative synergy between Kevin Feige and Stan Lee. Stan, no longer the creative force and hadn't been since the 70s, was still the cheerleader. He could sit in a room and tell everyone stories about what the artists and writers are thinking and feeling. And when they created those wonderful characters, the inside of all of those different characters, that sprawling canvas, that world of spandex and neuroses and magnificent wounded heroes. Only 15 years of creative output at its peak. But then the Beatles were only on the world stage, really, for six years, from Ed Sullivan in 1964 to the let it to Let it be released in 1970. Six years that changed the music industry and left an unmatched legacy. It isn't duration, it's impact feeling. And Marvel had a new and different feeling. Something I think flowed from that special chemistry between extraordinary artists, something most sensually present in the Lennon McCartney team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, with Stan ultimately having the greater impact. Kirby never achieved that same level of success outside of that collaboration, but Stan created magic with at least a half dozen different artists. And Stan was still alive, still involved, still carry the torch, even if he couldn't chop the wood anymore. And somehow, I think he inspired a new generation of writers, directors, artists, dreamers. He lived long enough to do that. Is a single creative vision that important? I submit that it can be. I'll argue that it is that just as William Gaines was the sane, moral, compassionate, cynical satirist at the core of Mad magazine, and it was never the same after his death, he had laid a core which, for instance, the National Lampoon never had. Mad magazine seemed to have a sense that the world could be a wonderful place if we just laughed and loved each other a little bit more and were afraid to point out the absurdities. I remember meeting the big three science fiction writers, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, and was struck by something I considered to be a fascinating difference. Asimov's attitude seemed to me, look how amazing my mind is. Clark's attitude was, look how amazing the universe is. And Heinlein seemed to be, look how amazing you are. Come with me, young man, young woman, and I will show you what you might become. That, I maintain was Stan. Stan believed in heroes and how they are created and their role in the world. The answer of their core, the living hearts, their creation, might be found in the single most famous sentence from the entire Marvel mythos. With great power comes great responsibility. A secret to its magic can be Seen, if you invert those words, with great responsibility comes great power. See, because it's true that you have to know why you want to do something before you get the power to do it. Don't worry about the how you know, the to do list. That's the least of it. Getting clear on what it is that needs to be done and why you need to do it gives you the power. Power to move mountains. You know, why must something be done? To what are you committed? Every parent can and should be a hero to their children just by doing the things that must be done every day, day after day, rain or sign, sick or Well. I remember my first favorite sequence in the entire run of Spider man comics is Peter Parker lifting an impossible weight off of his body for no reason other than he has to, because otherwise his last living relative will die. Something in the DNA of the Marvel universe is this sense of power and responsibility. These things are mirroring and feeding each other. Runs consistently through thousands of comics, touching on them in hundreds of different ways, circling but always returning to that basic notion. Whatever was happening in the Marvel offices in those golden years, it seems that they understood. They tapped into something valuable, something precious and important. They somehow saw the dweebs like me who desperately needed some deeper sense of self. Kids who were asking, how do I grow up? How do I become a hero in my own life? And hearing no answers, we went looking in fiction, film and comic books. There was something in those comics. Yeah, a lot of leaping and grunting and shouting and biff and pound thwip. But on a deeper level, there was love and faith and hope and responsibility. Stan accepted the responsibility for conducting a ray of light into the heart of a kid without a father to guide him. He burned in that flame. He never lost it. And he was the last man standing. He survived long enough to pass along that torch. And now he's gone. What will happen? I don't know. I really don't. Maybe it's onward and upward to undreamed of heights, or maybe there'll be sparks and flames and fun, but a little of the magic will be lost and the air will slowly leave the balloon until you have only ordinary blockbuster success and the occasional bad misfire that would be expected. But hey, you never know. Feige and his team have a huge responsibility now. And you know what responsibility can do if you're a true believer. Namaste, Steve. Once again, if you've enjoyed this talk, please share it with your friends. And if you want to know more about how these concepts have applied in my own life. You could check me out over at www.afrofuturismwebinar.com. take care, guys. See you.