itt: consternation and wailing about Zach Snyder's upcoming SUPERMAN/BATMAN film/sequel to MAN OF STEEL -- official title: BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

Morrison and Moore both delivering diminishing returns at this point

basically i'm saying you've got to blame Morrison at least a LITTLE that this is the direction the film world went
― ulysses, Monday, April 4, 2016

Xposts - Yeah, Morrison's a big Silver Age stan - he likes comics as totally nutso generators of impossible concepts and bizarre feats. See his JLA, or especially All-Star Superman - very close to Reeve spinning the planet backwards to turn back time. Superman is bright and colorful and fundamentally good, and does ridiculous impossible shit every day. A good chunk of his Animal Man is basically him complaining about how Crisis took away all the fun stuff and loopy gimmick characters, and then parodying the grim and gritty trend (as a springboard for a Book of Job thing - why are authors so cruel to their characters, etc.). This doesn't get into his *Batman*, but his Supes I think is in the clear.

Yep. It starts around 60%, then gradually decreases. The overall take is around 50%.

i thought that for these huge tentpole movies the distributors share in the opening week/end is more like 90%. basically, it's extortion. "you want the biggest movie of the summer? OK, you get 10% of opening weekend gross."

for movies farther down the pole, the exhibitors get more, and of course as Batman V Superman heads into third, fourth weeks and eventually 2nd run, the exhibitors will take a bigger and bigger cut. though it's never /that/ big.

His Batman is basically "What if it ALL happened? TDKR and giant penny clown prince of crime and 1930s machine gun Batman".

Also the intended audience for this flick has 0 idea who Morrison is, gtfo with that shit.

xp Alan Moore hasn't really DONE anything in the better part of a decade, has he? I thought the America's Best Comics run was mostly excellent and memorably fun; if you consider that his last meaningful body of work, it holds up fine.

Morrison's Black Glove Batman run (i own all the floppies!) is the last thing of his I give any credence to, but i would say that in the end I prefer Dini's contemporaneous Detective Comics run.

Alan Moore hasn't really DONE anything in the better part of a decade, has he?

cranked out a bunch of LOEG stuff + that Lovecraft thing

xp, i could've worded that better: i'm not implying there's millions of Morrison stans setting the standard for the storyline. I'm suggesting that Snyder's "vision" is for people who _would_ consider Morrison to be taken at face value... or at least (as i imagine Snyder does) with the pop veneer of one degree of meta as a fig leaf to justify intellectual pretense

xp the league of extraordinary gentlemen has been righteously unreadable and i avoided the lovecraft, but that stuff all amounts to about eight issues of comics, no? I don't exactly consider that a denouement... but sure, i guess i can't really argue that i'm not self selecting what i consider to be "done" for moore.

full disclosure: i stopped buying floppies three issues into Batman Incorporated when the self parody moved to Frank Miller levels, so i likely hold Morrison to blame for loss of my late childhood innocence more than i really should

eight issues of comics

idk those Nemo and 20th Century books are longer than yr standard comic book but idk by how much. his productivity's been at about that level for a long time afaict

He's spent a lot of time on that zillion-word Northampton novel.

a goliath alan moore novel falls somewhere between green tea twix and custom gold fronts in the list of things i don't really need

xpost Uhhh...why, then, is the narrative that they make most of their money from concessions? I feel like you have to be running your business like some shit if you can't turn a profit on 50% of big Hollywood movie ticket sales.

― I am very inteligent and dicipline boy (Old Lunch), Monday, April 4, 2016 12:14 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. i'm always kind of amazed that movie theaters are still a thing cos every time i go to a see a movie in a theater and it isn't opening night or a huge film there is usually like 4-5 people sitting in the theater and it's probably like that for most showings. how do these theaters even pay rent on that?

or just the air conditioning bill!

I'm no superhero scholar but this was way better than all the reviews made out. Felt oddly operatic. I liked it better than any of the Nolan movies. Snyder has a lot of flaws but at least he's a blockbuster director with his own identity. His visual sensibility is also more interesting than The Nolan movies. The acting was great too. Only disappointing part was the ending, all too obviously setting up the next film. Feels like a lot of the poor reviews are just blockbuster bashing. But anyone who felt the plot didn't make sense, it wasn't exactly complicated.

bro April Fools day was last Friday mang

please explain the plan of the Senator and the fake (?) terrorists and all that. because it seemed like they were trying to frame Superman by shooting terrorists with bullets, which makes no sense on any level.

(also, those saying the plot 'didn't make sense' weren't saying "we didn't understand the main thrust of the plot" as much as "oh, we know what was happening, and it was really stupid and nonsensical")

The acting was great too.

wait waht

also please explain why the senator felt so confident in Luthor's scheme that she granted him unrestricted access to an alien ship and the body of Zod and then AFTER ALL OF THAT decided at the last minute to not go through with it?

honestly all the senator-Luthor scenes just left me wanting a movie about this crooked senator who is misappropriating homeland security top level materials and staging CIA operations in the name of....doing something about Superman? what exactly was the point of all of that? were they going to pass an anti-Superman bill? make it illegal for him to destroy the planet?

http://www.listen-tome.com/comics/2016-04-04-PLTM300.jpg

green tea twix would be fantastic. alan moore, please invent this.

apparently i made that up! i didn't know!

green tea kit kats are amazing. not a fan of caramel so i'll pass on the Twix.

I found this amusing: a stoned Kevin Smith offering his review. It's slightly incoherent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDsw86ATrQ0

Alan Moore hasn't really DONE anything in the better part of a decade, has he?

He also did the first arc of Crossed +100, which against all expectation is actually pretty good. Moore uses it more as an exploration of linguistics and culture than anything else (but caveat emptor beyond #6, Si Spurrier turns it back into more like a Crossed book). And a series of short films: http://shop.lexrecords.com/products/show-pieces-home-media-box-set

i found a positive review of this (surely there are more).

http://thequietus.com/articles/19936-batman-v-superman-review

And yet - and yet - it is never, ever boring. It's far, far too mad for that. Terrible? Yes. Reprehensible? Undoubtedly. Bizarrely made and shockingly over-funded, it is nonetheless the perfect encapsulation of one man's unique and dreadful vision of childhood as perpetual war. There is very little chance of a superhero film as utterly crazed as this being made again (the audience at the screening I attended – a proper audience, mind you, not just ivory-tower critics like myself – seemed actually angry after the credits had rolled). Dawn Of Justice really feels like something. The superhero movie reaching its incomprehensible Nietzschean peak, maybe? A glossolaliac tone poem of ruined brickwork and eye beams? The mind-frying spawn of Mad Max: Fury Road and Synecdoche, New York? One thing is certain, if Snyder's recent declaration of his regard for the works of Ayn Rand is to be taken at face value, then Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice is his The Fountainhead. It's rare that a commercial director gets an opportunity to grace us with something so true to himself. Rarer still that the results necessitate the creation of a whole new value system in order to assess them accurately.

if it's a tone poem then it's made entirely of one long brown note

amazing how "incomprehensible" has become the defining feature of "avant garde". remember when they said that about the one Transformers ("the fight scenes are blurry and incomprehensible -- it's abstract art!"), says more about these critics' own lack of knowledge of the avant garde than anything else.

And yet - and yet - it is boring as fuck.

i dunno if i'd call that a positive review but i found myself agreeing with a lot of it

he's dead wrong about one thing though: it is totally boring for long stretches. still struggling to parse wtf was going on in the superghazi subplot

It's rare that a commercial director gets an opportunity to grace us with something so true to himself

lol isn't the main draw of Snyder that he has a very distinct style developed through a number of hugely successful blockbusters what is rare about any of this?

i'm mostly offended he compared Mad Max: Fury Road to this. Snyder couldn't direct a film as elegant as Mad Max: Fury Road if his life depended on it.

If that glowing review is anything to go on, I have clearly been misusing the words 'terrible' and 'reprehensible'.

i still dont quite get what was so incomprehensible about this film. its not like the basic plot was that complicated. and i genuinely did not find any of it boring - people are acting like this was some slow-cinema arthouse patience tester. the only truly lame part was the quick resolution between superman and batman, the lack of any real middle ground being founded, and the unnecessary arrival of wonderwoman. even so, i found that barely any scenes were unnecessary, which was surprising for a film this long. this is what people might be referring to when they say that it doesnt make sense. it feels like a film that cut out various scenes, that might have contained more exposition, in order to ensure that it flowed and kept momentum. which im totally fine with. it gave the film a strange sort of obliqueness at times. even the dialogue, esp lex luthers, felt like it was almost theatrical, like it wasnt meant to sound like normal speech.

hyperventilating rhetorical overkill of the sort on display in that quietus piece aside, nobody is seriously accusing batman vs. superman of being hard to figure out. the word "incomprehensible" is being used to mean senseless (or just plain dumb), not "dauntingly complex".

Has anyone since the Roger Corman days graduated from making movie trailers to features? Because the people who make trailers for Hollywood blockbusters are clearly better at their jobs than the people making the movies. Either that or most of these movies should be no more than three minutes long.

im not sure it even WAS that dumb. ive seen films that were far dumber. and far - for those who complain snyder is over earnest/serious etc - more senseless. the main problem i could see someone was having is that the plot was perhaps lacking in more plot. snyder seems to like flattening any potentially troublesome bumps in a script if they might threaten his directorial power. but here, i think it worked. for a big dumb blockbuster, at least it had some timely political allusions (immigrants, hatred and fear of the other, etc). i thought it was interesting that bruce wayne was actually a more of a rich, trump-like bigot than ive seen him depicted in previous films.

Has anyone since the Roger Corman days graduated from making movie trailers to features? Because the people who make trailers for Hollywood blockbusters are clearly better at their jobs than the people making the movies. Either that or most of these movies should be no more than three minutes long.

im waiting for vine auteurs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le3y0QlLjJE

trailers seem more routinized these days than they used to be, although i haven't done a close analysis

by routinized i guess i mean they adhere to really strict conventions, such that you can almost time when the "sonic drop-out followed by sudden 'swoosh'" will occur

or instead of drop-out there's like a reduction of sounds to a bass throb.

honestly 'the dark knight' felt like one big trailer in that respect, in that nearly the entire thing seemed engineered to generate the same sort of cheap tension and startle response that i associated with trailers.

without making any great claims for it, i think you are overly harsh on TDK. the escalating tension of that movie was one of the better things about it. not sure i've seen another big blockbuster with such an air of menace present through the entire film. i suppose this is a kind of "trailer" aesthetic but it's perhaps more generous to say that trailers try to create the effect of something like TDK rather than the other way around.

nobody is seriously accusing batman vs. superman of being hard to figure out

well, i'm seriously saying that i don't get what superghazi, which apparently (?) causes the world to turn against superman, is all about. are people in the movie genuinely wondering whether superman picked up a machine gun and fatally shot a bunch of terrorists and undercover CIA operatives?

wouldn't it make more sense plotwise to have lex make doomsday earlier in the film, then have him use doomsday's kryptonian superpowers to commit murders that only superman would be capable of, thus putting superman in the frame for the murders?

not sure i've seen another big blockbuster with such an air of menace present through the entire film

yeah, watching tdk in the cinema and being swept along by its sinister momentum was a really memorable experience for me - it was only once the ride was over that i started thinking 'wait, what?'

haha yeah that was totally my reaction to TDK as well

it's not a movie that offers anything extra on repeat viewing, that's for sure

xposts bet you a dollar at some point there was a script treatment for a movie where lex does that with bizarro, here reinvented as lex's mad scientist clone of superman, and that was floating around and got grafted into this movie as this "frame superman" story even as they punted bizarro for doomsday and decided to hold him in reserve til the end. in the process of course causing it to not make sense and hence the machine gun thing. i have not seen this movie mind you but this makes sense to me.

I would watch a big budget Bizarro comedy, pref with Michael Shannon as Bizarro

shame ben gazzara is dead