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In Scorsese and Coppola, Marvel Meets Formidable Foes

Associated Press

   NEW YORK - 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.

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