Why I didn't like the Avengers movie

A couple reasons off the top of my head why I didn't like the Avengers movie:

The Loki guy looked a little too much like an angry Pee Wee Herman.  Plus I never quite followed the logic of what he was doing, why he allowed himself to get captured, what the deal was with the eyeball-scan thing he did on the guy, or how he even got to earth in the first place.

The Black Widow and Hawkeye characters served no purpose for the film.  The film would have been completely workable had their characters not even been there in the first place.  Compared to Hulk and Thor, they were pathetic in terms of what they brought to the team.  Ooooh, arrows!

What exactly does Nick Fury do?  And where did he vanish to during huge segments of time in the film?  Why didn't he show up at the NYC fight to help out or something, perhaps with other agents of SHIELD?

The Avengers had it's moments, but otherwise didn't really work for me.

Snippet of James Horner

James Horner wrote some remarkable film music back in the 1980's, which was the prime of most all cinematic music. Film music today just stinks. It's computer-rendered garbage written by music majors with no understanding of how to utilize the components of a full orchestra (let alone the fundamentals of music theory.) Horner scores a couple of the Star Trek films in the 80's (thankfully not the "whale" one) and strangely, I've not enjoyed much by Horner over the last several decades. I thought his Avatar music was boring, and his Titanic stuff was just too overshadowed by that awful "near-far...wherever-you-are" stuff. Beyond that, I'm not sure what else he's even written since the 1980's. I think of him as one of those composers trying, and coming a little close, to following the John Williams mold and then, falling short, branched into doing more of those maudlin, simple-piano tripe. Still, it beats most of the generic, amelodic garbage padding most films these days.

Here's a theory: the more cinema branches into the digital, the greater the decline in musical quality in the soundtracks. Or maybe I'm just not keeping up with films and I'm missing the good stuff, but with what I've seen/heard lately in cinema, it just isn't happening anymore.

Skip the first :25 seconds of this short track and enjoy Horner's succinct cover of the principle Alexander Courage theme:



Another very energetic piece of work, with a touch or two of Prokofiev: