Tough Crowd

It’s now soared to 36%.

And 2h 33m to boot. The ’35 Mutiny on the Bounty was a pretty long movie for the day (even then the Oscar contenders tended to run longer than the average A movie, I think), but still it only runs about 2:20.
Don’t get me started on the color scheme, either. I’m trying to imagine how the color schemes of today (either orange/teal, or denatured with as little color as possible) would handle something like Diana Ross in Mahogany.

Or as Alfred Hitchcock supposedly said, “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”

Or as Alfred Hitchcock supposedly said, “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”
Thing is, I tend to go to early morning screenings, which often necessitates a visit to the multiplex café and the gulping down of several cups of coffee. You can see how my cunning plan may have a flaw.

Variety seemed to think it was decent but flawed http://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/batman-v-superman-review-dawn-of-justice-1201735801/
a reviewer I trust here in Oz seemed to think the same.
http://www.mediaweek.com.au/review-batman-vs-superman-dawn-of-justice/
I like Affleck and I reckon he will work well as Batman
I’m in – don’t care what Rotten Tomatoes 4 review collation says.

The plot sounds a bit contrived.

Never trust a leftie review of a film.
Some of the left-leaning reviewers of Man of Steel had interesting political objections, and by interesting I mean peculiar. One disliked the film because Superman is “white, male and American.”

Now every film needs to be dragged out near the 3 hour mark.
FWIU, that was the target for Castro’s speeches. Coincidence?

41%
Heh. What’s odd is that the Rotten Tomatoes score usually corrects downwards. Spectre, for instance, opened at ninety-odd and then quickly sagged to its current, fairly accurate, 64%. Or meh as they say in the trade.

I preferred Spectre to Skyfall.
Brain fever, obviously.

I think I’ll wait for Captain America: Civil War.

Batman, on the other hand, was clearly a psycho.
Batman, like most super heroes, was misunderstood and got bad press. He wasn’t really psycho, he was just brooding. The media bias was compounded by his being an evil, corporate industrialist (presumably) capitalist. Plus, let’s remember he was only human.
Robin never figured in to MY (rather limited) comic book universe either. Was never a fan of circus people. They always looked down their noses at us carny-types.

Going back down again. 38%.
Will keep you posted.

Wait a minute. Prometheus has a score of 73%.
That can’t be right.

Superman is “white, male and American.”
Superman is American?!?!?

Wait a minute. Prometheus has a score of 73%.
That can’t be right.
Of course it can: Ridley Bloody Scott.
Now, as far as entirely everything else in Prometheus aside from the cinematography, absolutely everything makes perfect sense when you watch Prometheus with the missing ending.

I preferred Spectre to Skyfall.
Brain fever, obviously.
Skyfall was definitely well done and definitely something more than Casino Royale, Part III.
Spectre, in turn, has already gone down in history as merely being the JB fraternal twin to Abrams’ attempt at a Star Wars movie—Take a known franchise and deliberately and openly do absolutely only Wave The Big Character references, where, you silly people, plot and storyline and logic are merely what real movies have. We are here to Present An Icon . . pause . . . Present The Next Icon . . . pause . . . Repeat . . . roll credits when you run out of icons.
—After Abrams’ attempts at Star Trek, how’d y’think he got handed Star Wars?!?!?
Why Batman v. Superman, anyway? Did Batman sleep with Lois Lane or something?
Consider the level of scripting that resulted in Prometheus, the last several versions of a Batman movie, Spectre, Abrams’ SW movie . . . .

Batman v Superman has an 8.3 on IMDb. The fanboi effect shouldn’t be discounted, but I’ve generally found a high score on IMDb to be more indicative of a film I will like than a low score on Rotten Tomatoes indicating one I will not. And since I don’t watch movies on behalf of anyone else, that’s good enough for me.

I’ve generally found a high score on IMDb to be more indicative of a film I will like than a low score on Rotten Tomatoes indicating one I will not.
How a Rotten Tomatoes score is arrived at is probably a thread in itself.
What makes me reluctant to give Snyder the benefit of the doubt, though, is past experience. He’s a strong visual stylist – his films usually look great – but he doesn’t have a sense of structure or an ear for tone, which results in quite a bit of dissonance and, at times, an unpleasantly nihilistic aftertaste. (“He saved us!” says Perry White, amid the miles of scorched rubble and countless unseen corpses.) And Snyder doesn’t seem able to deliver the emotional notes he aims for – he fumbles almost all of them. (See Jonathan Kent, death of.) An overbearing soundtrack telling you, very loudly, to EMOTE NOW isn’t enough. It just makes you aware of where the emotion should be, but isn’t.
It’s telling, I think, that in Man of Steel, despite all the booming and visual spectacle, Snyder couldn’t deliver a set piece anywhere near as elating as the ‘Lois and helicopter’ scene in Richard Donner’s 1978 film or the rescued airliner in Bryan Singer’s otherwise misconceived mess. I’m not sure elation, or a sense of heroism, is something that Snyder knows how to do. Which is a bit of a setback if you’re making a mainstream film about well-loved superheroes. He doesn’t seem interested in, or is unable to create, likeable characters.
There’s also the problem of the premise. In the comics, the two lead characters have generally been depicted as contrasting in both their skillsets and personalities, and hence some room for conflict, for drama. But in Snyder’s hands, Superman doesn’t have much of a personality or worldview and is by default almost as gloomy as Batman. Instead of day and night, hope and cynicism, it’s grim and grimmer.

We must chase the heathen from the village.
Don’t forget to give the address.

Spectre, Skyfall…
I didn’t even see Spectre. I saw Skyfall only because of some commercial tie-in with Aston Martin. Not that I have an Aston Martin myself (I’m more of an Italian car guy), but it was free, so… I just can’t get used to Daniel Craig as James Bond. He looks more like a Russian villain to me than a man in the employ of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Plus those suits he wears make him look like a sausage in a too-tight casing. Like if you were to prick him his innards would explode all over the screen. And who wants to see that?

Hedgehog: “The fact that for the past ten years or more these comic book superheroes are back in vogue ought to tell us something about the state of the country.”
Isn’t it just that the nerds who grew up on Superman are now the ones in charge?

Isn’t it just that the nerds who grew up on Superman are now the ones in charge?
I should imagine it’s a convergence of things. Partly the generational aspect you mention, and the fact that comic book adventures are now much easier to depict on screen in fairly convincing ways. Spectacle sells. Comic book characters also provide an in-built audience, a familiarity, a ready-made mythology to exploit. A lot of the marketing has in effect already been done. There are decades of stories to draw from and no end of gadgets and vehicles to sell in toy form. They also lend themselves to the franchise model, which is currently in favour.
And of course some of them are great fun.

Any thoughts re: films now that “they” have invented that algo that can take any actor’s performance and put anybody’s face they like on it, in real time?
Think the stars of Hollyweird have much chance of pulling down those multi-mil salaries for phoning it in?

Superhero movies tick off all the boxes for “safe bet”.
It’s presumably easier to market a film based on an iconic property already known to millions of people who also go to the cinema. And again, the serial nature of comic storytelling lends itself to franchise movie-making. And then there’s all the merchandising. That said, I approve. I spent many, many hours reading Marvel comics as a kid and it’s quite entertaining to see them being realised one by one in IMAX and surround sound, albeit with varying degrees of success. I’m afraid I’m one of those people who chuckle knowingly at the cryptic post-credits teasers.

I’m a little different. As a raving comic book geek (Yes, I also got the “…would be to court death” reference at the end of Avengers I) but also a fan of wider-ranging tastes, I’m not about to give a movie a pass just because it’s catering to my tastes. I’m a sysadmin, but I’ll freely admit that Harrison Ford’s Firewall was not a good movie.
There are already signs that the superhero genre is getting played out; Age of Ultron was a muddled mess of visual chaotica with too many subplots flying around, and Mardisvelney has used up all the A-list heroes and is digging into the B- and C-list characters that have no mythic resonance and that nobody knows.
The best observation I’ve heard came from a film review I’ve lost the link to: superhero movies are this generation’s 80’s action movies. The Arnie movies, the Rambos, the Die Hards, the JCVDs. Over-the-top, corny, splashy, fun but ultimately disposable.

The Netflix Marvel series are well worth a watch. I’m not much of a superhero nerd, but they are startlingly moreish. They might even rise to the level of good drama in their own right.

And it’s well into David’s Friday morning, and I need to get to bed.
31%

Saw. Regretted. It’s a fucking omnishambles.

There are very few films I go out of my way to watch twice. I can think of maybe a dozen.
I would enjoy seeing the list.

Sad Affleck.
Perfect.

And further . . .

…making something that entertains millions of people for a couple of hours[…] isn’t that awful.
Oh, don’t misunderstand me; look at how many of those 80’s action movies are cultural touchstones now. It just saddens me that given the stories that superhero movies could be making – they are, ultimately, the 20th-century expression of the Campbell Hero Myth – they’re choosing to default to slam-bang grimdarkery.
Look at Ant-Man: in amongst the coloured power suits, there’s a pretty good movie about blended families and what it’s like to be a father ejected from his own daughter’s life and the struggle to deal with that conflict. Using a superhero movie to do that is the ideal way to anchor that in a man’s POV instead of the usual female one.

It just saddens me that given the stories that superhero movies could be making – they are, ultimately, the 20th-century expression of the Campbell Hero Myth – they’re choosing to default to slam-bang grimdarkery.
Yes, I think this is where Synder fails, quite badly, and to a lesser extent the Christopher Nolan films too, which, a few scenes aside, I didn’t much like. A lot of 90s comics were terrible for this reason too. Again, there’s a nihilism that jars and is quite at odds with notions of heroism and that aforementioned, rather important, sense of elation. Villains can be nihilistic, heroes not so much.
There’s a scene in the first Avengers film in which Tony Stark is hurled through the window of his penthouse and is falling to his apparent doom, pursued by an autonomous, somewhat tardy, suit of armour, which wraps itself around him as he falls. On one level it’s silly, but it’s a visually wonderful idea and seen for the first time in a cinema it’s quite thrilling, in fact elating. It works dramatically – which is to say, emotionally – because Tony Stark is a likeable character and we want him to survive.
Ditto the ‘barrel of monkeys’ scene in Iron Man 3, in which an explosion on Air Force One results in 13 passengers – more than our hero can carry – falling without parachutes from 30,000 feet. Naturally, an ingenious solution presents itself, albeit one that necessitates a bit of teamwork in difficult circumstances. That the solution is somewhat improbable in no way diminishes the spectacle and tension – and the elation when it (just barely) succeeds. Again, we, the audience, want the hero to prevail and so there’s an emotional pay-off. That’s what makes it exciting, suspenseful and fun.
This is the kind of basic stuff that Synder doesn’t do well, or even seem to understand.
[ Edited. ]

Um.
I really enjoyed it…

What are we missing?
http://io9.gizmodo.com/batman-v-superman-spoiler-faq-of-justice-1767720335

[ Reads spoiler FAQ ]
Wow.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/batman-v-superman-spoiler-faq-of-justice-1767720335
Hmmmm . . . . Skimmed through bits and pieces . . . for a train wreck viewing variety of attendance, I do note that I have a matinee showing available nearby . . .
—Went to see Gods Of Egypt for just the same reason . . . Now as far as demonstrating utterly energetic cluelessness, that one managed to make the Marvel comics grasp of Norse mythology almost plausible . . .

. . . for a train wreck viewing variety of attendance, I do note that I have a matinee showing available nearby . . .
Oh, dear.
—Yes I bloody well did make the point of catching a matinee . . .
Sooo, as noted above, Prometheus gets 73% on Tomatoes because of cinematography by Ridley Scott.
In bvs, not only does the script make even less sense than even Prometheus, the cinematography sucks.
Therefore, what’s the point of making bvs, aside from blowing $250,000,000? Actually, that’s easy to answer: The only point of bvs is to be a standard production staff employment project, so that anyone named in the credits got to have a paycheck, where if any profit turns up, that’s a bonus.
Literally everything the FAQ says “wasn’t explained in the film!” was damn well explained in the film if you were paying any attention.
Ahhhh . . . Scuzzi? I was paying very close attention, just like the writer of the FAQ, and quite actually the FAQ is utterly accurate, now that I’ve read through it all.
. . . damn well explained?!?!?!!
‘k, to pick just one bit of total cinematic gibberish, where was there any explanation of that bit with what was supposed to be The Flash?—Particularly noting that one can only do such an I.D. by A) being a viewer of the movie, who B) has read a number of the comics . . . .