prokopetz:

Genre versus non-genre has nothing to do with how “formulaic” a work is. So-called high art absolutely adheres to formulas. Hell, you can tell which films are going to be this year’s Oscar darlings just from watching the trailers; that’s how predictable those formulas can be. The real distinction is how accessible the formula in question is to general audiences – and we all know which end of the accessibility equation is going to be held in higher esteem.

Basically, if the formula is approachable, it’s a genre; if the formula is fucking insufferable, it’s a “movement”. That’s as deep as it gets.

Eh. I think Scorsese’s emphasis on “risk” has something to it, that a work have enough personal vision-driven creative texture that there’s the possibility it could not work.

Like, look at the man’s corpus, he’s known to specialize in award-bait gangster period pieces, that’s a list of boxes to tick right there. Rise-to-power arc with complications of loyalty and romance, check. Bloody violence, check. Ambitious scenes, lush cinematography and period-accurate sets and costumes, check. Respected actors playing off each other in intense dynamics, major Themes.

But, say, Gangs of New York had all that, from the trailer you might expect it to take Oscars but no, it didn’t work. Like, I got all the American history bits, all the nifty bits he guided us through. Gallus Mag! Uptown poofs coming by for slum tours or to “rescue fallen women”! New York as Dixie-sympathetic city! Theatrical players freely editing plays to wildly alter the plot or introduce topical references!

I even “got” the Union Army-ex-machina ending – these tensions in America were never resolved, just smothered under the growth of national apparatuses that needed homogenized warm bodies and could suppress even the richest, feistiest local culture through inhuman scale and indifference

But it didn’t work, in large point not in spite of but because of this, that Scorsese is such an Ameriboo that he loaded it down with the things he found neat. The piece had enough of its creator’s particularity in its vision that it could fail.

In this sense it’s Ang Lee’s Hulk (2013) or Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013) or Nolan’s Dark Knight series that’s superheroes-as-cinema, and the fact that MCU stuff is too polished to fail OR triumph like that is precisely the distinction