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

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

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

― a lad of balls (bizarro gazzara), Tuesday, April 5, 2016 10:43 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Permission to use this blurb in the advertising for all of Christopher Nolan's past and future films, plz.

it is kinda his trademark, innit?

xposts to doctor c - given that affleck and his pet screenwriter punched up the script before he agreed to be batman i wonder how much of the weird patchwork plot is affleck's doing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VrFV5r8cs0

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?

anyone who has seen some of snyders earlier films, like sucker punch for example, would not expect there to be much in the way of obvious narrative sense. also, i just dont expect that from modern blockbusters.

but this at least had style (which TDK did not). and theres some gravitas in its bigger ideas. also, for everyone saying its overstuffed, against something like TDK, which seemed to get out of hand as nolan got desperate to prove he was making More Than Just a Superhero Movie, etc, its virtually pared down, and snyder at least understands that the basic appeal of superhero movies is rooted in a child's sense of the world.

i uh don't wanna overstep the mark here but your childhood must have been significantly different to mine if there seemed anything childlike about bvs other than abject immaturity

xpost I kinda do expect narrative cohesion from modern blockbusters. Big action movies aren't just orgasms of stupidity anymore. It's nice that we're able these days to occasionally see a big, fun movie that doesn't require a complete override of one's critical faculties.

StillAdvance's childhood:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fcL_MS6LR_E/TlQ1i-5sChI/AAAAAAAAAJg/WS0ECsaFlQM/s1600/WareSuperman.jpg

xp

guilty lol

xpost - i must have missed the deep mine of adult maturity that was there in avengers assemble, thor, etc etc.

maybe childs sense of the world is the wrong phrasing, i suppose i just mean a child like, or simpler (?) idea of justice, good vs evil, right vs wrong, etc etc. a simpler, deeply felt idea of morality maybe is what i mean.

"xpost I kinda do expect narrative cohesion from modern blockbusters. Big action movies aren't just orgasms of stupidity anymore. It's nice that we're able these days to occasionally see a big, fun movie that doesn't require a complete override of one's critical faculties."

BVS isnt incoherent though. its basically earth loves superman, batman gets jealous, lex luger capitalises on this, batman and superman fight to the death.

"Big action movies aren't just orgasms of stupidity anymore."

erm mad max wasnt that long ago.

a child like, or simpler (?) idea of justice, good vs evil, right vs wrong, etc etc. a simpler, deeply felt idea of morality maybe is what i mean.

lol idk if you missed it but Snyder thinks this is the MATURE/GROWNUP version of morality that he's presenting

xpost Dude. a) "Big action movies aren't just orgasms of stupidity anymore." Indicating that, yes, orgasms of stupidity still exist. b) If you genuinely think Batman v Superman was grate and Fury Road was an orgasm of stupidity, well...

Defending this movie (or any movie, or whatever) is defensible, but when you're David fighting the Goliath of critical/public opinion, you really need to bring your A game, and this is like a C- at best.

Also ragging on Mad Max is some "point rock towards enemy"-level shit.

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?'

well, yeah, it worked for me the first time, too. but i later accompanied a friend to see it, and that second time, the effectiveness completely dissipated. which is why i called its approach "cheap."

what mainly still works for me is Ledger's performance. i think even if you stripped away his make up and scars, just the way he moves communicates *danger* in the sense of the kind of person you'd change subway cars to avoid.

eh, everything about that film--esp. ledger--is empty and overpraised.