In Scorsese and Coppola, Marvel meets formidable foes

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 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. Even Christopher Nolan, whose Batman film “The Dark Knight” is widely considered the genre’s greatest triumph, has said he’s no longer interested in franchise movies given the way they’ve come to be manufactured. “When we were doing the ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy, I think it was easier for a filmmaker in the position I was in to express a more personal vision of what they wanted to do in a franchise property.” Marvel’s biggest supporters, I think, would grant part of the films’ appeal is that they all feel of one spandex-wrapped piece.