Benedict Cumberbatch IS Doctor Strange.

A doctor...of strangeness!

http://io9.com/now-its-official-benedict-cumberbatch-is-playing-dr-s-1666968061

Etc etc

sigh

Ned, do you still read fantasy and SF? I enjoyed reading some of your old talk about James Branch Cabell and Avram Davidson. Your strong recommendation of the latter made me buy one of his books.

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I read things kinda at my lazy pace and whim lately. Thanks, though! I'll dip in as I feel the need.

oh god no

Fuck this

eh I mean I find him as annoying as one is meant to these days but it's not like his persona and or schtuck aren't a good fit

he's the worst everything

I don't get the negative reactions? He's seems to be a pretty good actor and decent human being, and even the one bad movie he was in (Star Trek 2) was no way bad because of him. Plus his physique and persona, if not quite similar to the comic book version, still feel like a good match for Stephen Strange. So why do people hate him?

I agree, seems like a p good choice to me.

Yeah he's fine and I find the venom of the ILX backlash against him a bit baffling.

I think Jack Huston could've been a more interesting choice though.

I've only heard of him. What's his best/worst work? Had sort of been hoping for Justin Theroux.

I probably haven't experienced enough Cumberbatching to make a call one way or the other, but the ire towards him certainly seems a bit bandwagonesque.

Will there be pengwengs?

I like Cumberbatch but I haven't seen him in much. He's lovely on chat shows and he was by far the best thing on Star Trek Into Darkness.

cumberbatch can certainly play odd / otherworldly, which dr strange really needs to be. struggling to think who else might have been better tbh

f uck tha poshos

This guy is definitely going to play Dr Who at some point

No he's not, way too famous.

(xp) He already has but, for reason, they decided to rename him Sherlock Holmes.

No he's not, he essentially turned it down right when Sherlock broke.

He might do it when he's Peter Capaldi's age.

I'd be massively surprised, would be an odd career path.

Yeah, he just hitched himself to a money train. Feel like starring roles in Marvel films are, at this point, a direct route to A-list status if one isn't there already.

just ask ed norton

I've only heard of him. What's his best/worst work?

Best: check out Sherlock (skip ep 2), Cabin Pressure (for contrast in his performance if not pure excellence)*, and him clowning U2 at the Oscars or w/e awards show

Worst: not being able to say "penguins" when narrating a documentary abt penguins I guess

*also a good example of him repeatedly returning to a low-paying role out of enjoyment of the material, writer/s & cast, despite his star rising

Ed Norton has no one but Ed Norton to blame for the vagaries of his career.

Watch Spielberg's "War Horse" for joint Cumberbatch/Hiddleston action just as they were both on the cusp of permanent nerd veneration.

i kind of want to see the imitation game, but it's got an actress named "tuppence" in it

Watch Spielberg's "War Horse"

I would advise against this.

i didn't really want to see the imitation game, but then i found out it's got an actress named "tuppence" in it

Just searched to see what Cabin Pressure is and there's a surprising amount of fan art by youngsters for it.

Small role as Doug Rocket's accountant in 'Nathan Barley' is the first time I remember seeing him.

We've already had a former Doctor Who appearing in a Marvel movie, can't see the reverse happening any time soon

i kind of want to see the imitation game

i thought that, then i saw it.

xp tom baker was a leftfield choice for black widow but he did a great job

I thought aside from the Turing potboiler I'd only seen BC in the ensembles of 12 Years a Slave (OK), Tinker Tailor (bleh) and August, Osage County (bad casting, weak adap) and then Letterboxd informed me I'd seen him in FIVE other films, incl War Horse, Atonement and the James McAvoy college-quiz comedy Starter for 10, in none of which did he stick to my memory. It reminds me of the months after Good Will Hunting when I was jostled into realizing that Matt Damon was the bland blond I'd forgotten instantly in Geronimo and Courgae Under Fire.

But I've never heard of Dr Strange, so it's all good.

He was in Atonement?

I don't really care one way or another about BC casting — the script and production design (better bring the fuckin' Ditko) are more important here.

pretty sure Dr Strange is supposed to be handsome tho

http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/uploads/MichaelTodd/2011-06-23_195053_Steve-Ditko-Doctor-Strange.jpg

Dr Sinestro

Sutherland in Animal House would've been a good Doctor Strange

Most of the core Marvel characters have benefitted from cosmetic upgrades over the years. Most of the OG silver age crew were malformed cretins during their early days.

also this movie should be set no later than 1973.

lol @ malformed cretins

can they resist the urge to blast Heart's "Magic Man" during the climactic showdown with Baron Mordo

Heavy Doors soundtrack with "Strange Days" and "People Are Strange".

In the spirit of the GOTG soundtrack, let's assume the planned list is:

"Magic Man," Heart
"Strange Magic," ELO
"Magic," Pilot
"Black Magic Woman," Santana
"Age of Aquarius," the Fifth Dimension

. . . what else?

Yeah the arc bothers me more, looking back on the film. He doesn't really have to grow or change at all, he just chooses a different career. The idea must be that, oh, see, he sacrifices himself over and over, the old Strange wouldn't do that. But he knows he's got it all figured out and he expects to come out okay in the end, so we're still in smug Iron Man territory. He'd be a much more interesting and distinctive character going forward if his thing was he is brought to do real introspection and soul-searching, he becomes humble in some real way. But actually everything pays off his assumption that he's the greatest at everything for no reason. Doctor Privilege.

I like how there's this template for british actors to just mimic Hugh Laurie's approximation of an american accent

I have to say, I think that's a pretty shallow reading of it. He's not the same man at the end as the start, and it's important to spot that the solution to the final confrontation is to threaten Dormammu with an eternity with Stephen Strange - he has belatedly reached the wisdom to realise that he's an absolute weapons-grade asshole.

Lashing him with that accent for eternity

forgot this thread existed, posted this to Rolling MCU

Doctor Strange is a very good looking nothing-burger of a movie

Rachel McAdams as Christine Palmer was the most memorable character, I think. Certainly the only one I actually sort of cared about, and they didn't even bother to put her in any peril other than having an astral punch-up sort of knock some things around. They somehow got Mads Mikkelsen to be a terrible, boring villain who strides so purposefully everywhere he goes it's like an inside joke we're not in on.

any credit for christine palmer has gotta go 100% to rachel mcadams cuz man that was one terribly underwritten and one-dimensional character. mcadams is the real magician in this movie imo *arches eyebrow mystically*

I really enjoyed this movie despite Strange effectively being played as "Tony Stark, genius surgeon"

tbh all smart, egotistical white men with facial hair are pretty interchangeable

Says himself huh

who you calling smart

Relatively for an American is the implicit

It was a good thing that they didn't put her in danger btw

White male wealthy superheros are more than their relationships with women

terribly underwritten and one-dimensional character

they all were though

I demand full realism from stories involving astral planes and time spells.

100% to rachel mcadams in scrubs basically the whole movie

Realism isn't the issue tho, is it?

The characters were drawn well enough to string the story along. I didn't really care about any of them except McAdams and Ejiofor but it didn't affect my enjoyment of the movie.

Strange himself was such a shitty person that i am glad they didn't plumb the depths of his character.

It's only a character

the movie worked for what it was, a big budget cartoon of mysticism. closer to Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 than Autobiography of a Yogi. if you tried to add much substance to it, it would have all collapsed.

Strange pre-mystical rebirth or whatever in the og comics *was* an arrogant, shitty person. I thought this did a good job of delivering the origin story along with some fun eyeball kicks. As far as Marvel movie villains I thought Mads was no better or worse than, say, Loki. My fave MVV so far has been Red Skull because ... a red Nazi skeleton guy is just gonna be cooler and more evil than, say, CGI Josh Brolin. Rachel McAdams is a pretty terrible actress so I was glad her role wasn't that substantial.

That's an awful lot of wrong packed in to a pretty short post u must practice

Nah you just disagree but that's par for the course

Par for the course takes practice tbf

It had a Ditko blacklight dimension and everyone did their best to not bust up when they said "Dormammu". Featured egregious collar popping, not sure if the Wand of Watoomb got a mention, but with the aforementioned already there I'm not sure what there was to complain about.

Definitely mentioned wand of watoomb, in the little sparring / relic exposition bit in the middle.

You guys are right, this did indeed contain numerous things that came from the comics and were referred to by name, and many parts of it were watchable or even entertaining! Obviously no big budget cartoon type movie has ever featured memorable villains, developed female characters, or a paid-off arc for the protagonist, so I really don't know what I was thinking to suggest that it could have been improved in any respect.

I guess I could nitpick more about things I'd have liked to see, but I thought it was pretty entertaining and well put together. I thought this one seemed to have more potential to go badly than some of the other Marvel productions, so I was pretty happy to see how it came out. If they can manage to do a second installment that improves on this I think it ought to be pretty good.

The MCU films have frequently allowed the talent to be talented instead of letting the sfx be the point of the movie, so when this one completely wastes Mads Mikkelsen As A Supernatural Psychopath and also pretty much wastes Benedict Cumberbatch as An Arrogant Brainiac while an actual red CGI cape steals multiple scenes is not actually a reversion to form here, it's a letdown.

Given how the Avengers movies, the Winter Soldier, Ant-Man and Guardians turned out, I fully support the way Feige is trying to use different directors with different genre backgrounds to try and keep these movies fresh. Handing Strange to the guy who remade The Day The Earth Stood Still starring Keanu Reeves looks almost like a guaranteed misfire in retrospect.

It was certainly watchable, nothing was so stupid that I actually groaned, but I thought the Doctor Strange movie was intended to add some extra heft to the COSMIC nature of the Infinity War stuff that's coming up, and instead it made it feel completely featherweight.

also this has been beaten to death everywhere but Tilda as the Ancient One was dumb as balls on eighty-two different balls-dumbness dimensions that I can see from here without even a sling ring

haha

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8gzkhHW0AEQLux.jpg:large

The training and discovering tripping balls parts early on were good, the action later on was pretty dull, but I think that about just about every superhero movie, barring Deadpool and GOTG (which was relatively light in the one-on-one combat IIRC). Maybe you just can't have the right kind of stakes to action in a PG-13 blockbuster to make it interesting to me.

(I'm also bored senseless by high-concept martial arts movies like Crouching Tiger, which feels closest to MCU fight choreography.)

Much as I did find a lot of enjoyment in this film, Crouching Tiger blows it away on pretty much every level.

It's amazing to me how many of the film's problems come down to the thing everybody knows is a problem with all these movies: hustling to cram in a first "villain" story keeps yielding blah, underwritten and non-memorable villains (incidentally wasting fun actors who could otherwise have left a real mark on the series), while crowding out payoff for all the interesting character work. Cut every scene with "Kaecilius" (had to look it up) and you gain soooooo much time for more genuinely awesome trippy freak-outs, and real development of the McAdams and Ejiofor character relationships. You still can have all the Inception kung fu (just quickly establish that Dormammu has some powerful magic henchmen), and the time-stop/time-loop ending (which is the villain confrontation people are ACTUALLY going to remember from this film, even though Dormammu requires only seconds to be the nonentity that Mikkelsen portrays over acres of footage).

damn now i wanna live in the universe where there's a bowie/jodorowsky doc strange movie

it def woulda been more interesting than this limp pile

the confrontation w Dormammu was very Dr. Who-like I thought

Yes!

Yes, that was it!

That was why I hated this more than I could put my finger on!

Thanks

lol

Hello.

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/doctor-strange-2-sam-raimi-1203475309/

Boy, that could really go one of several different ways. Here's hoping that, since it's already been referred to as an MCU horror film, it goes one of the good ways.

I have no stock in how this goes but his last movie fuckin sucked (can you remember what is was without checking?). I fear he's lost his touch completely. (but then this is the MCU so it might not matter)

Yeah, but the one before that, which was actually written by him, was Drag Me To Hell.

Dr. Agmetohell iirc

Oz truly sucked, SM 3 truly sucked, but the one about the Dr. was v good. I guess we'll see. I remain hopeful.

"MCU horror film" oh god what a nightmare

Why are you here, itt

ubiquitous, unavoidable cultural force = we all get to cruise in and take a potshot now and then

oy, that could really go one of several different ways...

― Dr. Teeth and the Women (Old Lunch)

yeah i uh hm

i am very much sold on a horror-leaning doctor strange (are they bringing in Nightmare for this one?) but was kinda thinking more creepy cosmic horror that gets under your skin vs uptempo slapstick horror... i guess it'll be worth it if at some point someone summons an animated chainsaw?

just listened to the score on Spotify and it far, far exceeded my expectations. Michael Giacchino bats about .500 for me (Let Me In and John Carter were great scores, his Star Trek stuff spotty) but this is one of the best things he's done and probably my favorite score album from any of these Marvel Universe things (though I have love for the first two -- silvestri/cap and doyle/thor).

― his eye is on despair-o (Jon not Jon), Wednesday, 26 October 2016 22:03 (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Watched this last night and the score fairly ruling was a pleasant surprise.

Yeah I listened to it a couple of weeks ago - it holds up real well