Reading Too Much Into Everything

It's a weird time to be a DC Comics fan. The movies based on those comics aren't all that great ; the constant albatross  that keeps hanging around the company's neck is bad for their PR image; the majority of the stories told in those New 52 comics aren't compelling ; and doing line-wide reboots  every few years keeps fans confused about which timeline to invest their money, time, and energy on (though DC is not calling this a reboot). But the big secret behind this Rebirth reboot-not-a-reboot is that Dr. Manhattan (from Watchman) was behind the creation of the New 52 DC Universe. This means that Watchman is now canon in the DC universe.  So the entirety of New 52 universe stories are a huge giant sequel to Watchman? Does this mean grim-gritty-grimdark New 52 DC universe? Will the Joker be the Comedian in disguise?  Will  Owlman in Earth-3 secretly be Nite Owl ? Will Silk Spectre kill Wonder Woman and take her place? Will Rorshach fight Batma...

I sit here, wondering why I'm so angry over Batman v Superman (hereafter called BvS). You see, I saw Captain America: Civil War (hereafter called CA:CW), and I thought it was a great film. I began to wonder, how could BvS be so bad, but CA:CW be so good? It's not like Warner Bros. set out to make a terrible film. I'm sure nobody there sat down and thought "I am going to greenlight this movie, spend money on this project, and produce a bad film that will insult not only the intelligence of the fanbase, but general audiences everywhere! This will produce a profit for us!" No sane person thinks this. But BvS comes out, then CA:CW comes out, and suddenly we have a basis for comparison that either amplifies the goodness of CA:CW, or amplifies the badness of BvS, or both.  How could this happen? A few theories come to mind. It may be any, all, or none of these theories. Pick whichever one that fits your worldview. Please note that I have no special knowledge or ...

It's amazing, in this current age of superhero movies, how many people who sucked in one superhero movie would be great in another. Just off the top of my head, here's some examples: Chris Evans Anybody remember him in the first 2 Fantastic Four movies made by 20th Century Fox, when he was the Human Torch? No, because everyone remembers him as being the awesome Captain America. Ryan Reynolds Wasn't he in that dumb Green Lantern movie? I don't know. I can't recognize him in his amazing Deadpool movie ( currently the 2nd top grossing R-rated movie ever ). Ben Affleck Say what you will about Batman v Superman ( I know I have ) but everyone now pictures Ben Affleck as cool-as-fuck Batman and not dumb-as-hell Daredevil. Amazing how good an actor can be when he has a good director bringing out a good performance from him. Or when the actor is reading from a script written by writers who know what a good story is. If all these actors did was their first superhe...

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (hereafter called BvS) is not a good movie. Most of us have either come to terms with this fact, or have begun to forget about the movie entirely. The underperformance of the movie has had several effects, from rumors that Warner Bros. will release the R-rated version of BvS, to the director Seth Grahame-Smith leaving the Flash movie over “creative differences”. Blame for the movie is being spread around, of course. But the ultimate responsibility, for my money, lays on Zack Snyder. Hundreds of people worked on the movie, but he was the one that made all the creative decisions that made the movie what it was. The thing of it is, it’s not like we didn’t have ample warning. Let’s look at a Zack Snyder interview with EntertainmentWeekly, from July, 2008. When asked about if he was always a comics fan, he said that he had a subscription to Heavy Metal magazine, but when a friend tried to get him into normal comic books, he said “No one is having...

Shamus Young, in his Twenty-Sided blog, talks about the different types of disbelief that forces a person out of the fictional work he or she is reading, watching, etc. For one person, it could be something technical. For another person, it could be some discontinuity in the sequence of events. For still another, it could be simple boredom. But they all have the same result; complete ejection from the fictional work into the real world. This happened to me while I was watching Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. One scene occurred that was so out of place, so unbelievable, that it violently ejected me from the movie and planted me squarely in the real world. And this scene is in a movie that has a guy that flies and shoots eye-lasers, a woman with a magic rope, and a murderous thug in a winged rodent cosplay. It was this scene: around half-an-hour into the movie, Senator Old Guy talks to Alexander Luthor (the young son of a far more interesting supervillain), saying “We can h...

So I had a discussion regarding superhero movies in the wake of a certain superhero movie, and the subject of fun came into my head. A lot, and I mean, A LOT of the criticisms (mostly by moviegoers) leveled against that certain superhero movie claim that one of the reason it failed was that it wasn't fun. I was about to claim the same thing, but thought about this wonderful article . To be sure, it was a thought-provoking piece. Should superhero movies be fun to watch? Certainly fun would be inherent in the genre, isn't it?  None of these comics were "fun" in the normal sense: Watchman, The Killing Joke, Supergod, The Walking Dead, the later Daredevil runs...I could go on. And yet all of these are good ideas for movies and TV shows (and some are there already). Fun should not be the only metric for a superhero movie (or indeed, any movie). Granted, a big reason for going to the movies is escapism (because real life is boring AND it sucks).  Superhero movies have...

This comment was made by Eight-Bit Hero, concerning the beginning of the Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice movie: Dear Literally Anyone Who Ever Makes A Batman Film In The Future, We DO NOT need you to re-tell Batman's "origin story" ever again. Seriously, even if, somehow, somebody is seeing your film without ever having heard of Batman before (right?), you do not need to show us Bruce's parents getting murdered in the street for a fourth (fifth? sixth? I lost count) time. Let them look it up. Convey Bruce's motivations in some other more meaningful way.  Sincerely,  Everyone (all bold text is the author's emphasis, not mine.) Marvel once again proves why they are better than Warner Bros. at this whole storytelling thing, by announcing last year that Spider-Man will NOT get an origin story in his next reboot.  How refreshing.