Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice": Meet The Bizarro World Avengers

Directed by Zack Snyder
Written by Chris Terrio and David Goyer

(PG-13 - Warner Bros. - 2 hrs, 33 mins) 

MAJOR SPOILER WARNING

Alo Party Peoples.

If I were an executive at Warner Bros that had any hand in signing off on building the studio's next decade of summer tent poles around this movie, I would be on the roof demanding that heads start rolling by Monday.

Yeah, this movie sucks. The direction sucks, the cast mostly sucks, the screenplay really sucks, the art direction and cinematography... actually isn't half-bad for what it is, but it's so grim and morose and lacking in form or function that it's impossible to care about or even make sense of the action onscreen, which really sucks. It is increasingly evident not only that Zack Snyder simply does not understand the pop-iconography he's been assigned to work with, he may actively despise parts of it and Warner Bros simply doesn't give a shit so long as what he turns in is technically recognizable as a DC Comics adaptation. 

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is one of the worst blockbusters in recent memory, and I'm getting all of that out of the way now because going into exactly why requires massive spoilers, and I have no intention to write a piece that ceases to be relevant a week after the movie opens. Do I sound pissed off? Because I'm pissed off, I just had to watch two and a half hours of DC fan service world building that exists not to retell a beloved old story, not to tell an exciting new story, not even just for fun, but for the soulless task of franchise management. It's bad in a way that blockbusters generally haven't been since the late-90s when Batman and Robin nearly killed the entire genre for a while, and it only spares itself being that terrible because expectations were so low after Man of Steel. It's the kind of bad that can only be faithfully expressed by just describing the movie and letting the sheer stench of its stupidity permeate through the room.

To wit, "Lex Luthor hates the idea of Superman, so he's delighted when he finds out about Batman, who also hates Superman because some people that worked for Wayne Enterprises died during the ending of Man of Steel, so he tries to bait Batman into killing Superman by egging Superman into engaging in reckless escapades in North Africa and setting off a suicide bomb during his Congressional hearing with a jar of piss (seriously), but none of that was necessary at all because Batman was already trying to kill Superman because he's been having psychic dreams about a dark dystopian future and also because The Flash popped out of a time hole to warn him about Darkseid (I think?), so Lex lures him into building Kryptonite weapons and a suit of battle armor so he can maybe actually have a chance of killing Superman, but Lex didn't need to do that either because he used Kryptonian science magic to turn General Zod's body into Doomsday, essentially a giant orc that's more powerful than both of them put together, but fortunately this woman that Bruce Wayne has been seeing on and off thought the movie is actually Wonder Woman, who shows up at the last minute to help them punch Doomsday to death, which they succeed in but Superman dies in the process so Wonder Woman and Batman think about maybe trying to put together the Justice League just in case anything like Doomsday ever happens again."

It makes even less sense when I'm writing it out than it did when it had two and a half hours to happen. The script is built out of a ham-fisted attempt to smash The Dark Knight Returns and The Death of Superman together into one story, and I almost want to see that reported R-rated three hour Blu-Ray cut, because in order to fit all of that stuff into a feature-length running time, Dawn of Justice had to be hacked to pieces and so haphazardly reassembled that it feels less like a movie and more like one of those YouTube fan tribute videos with the whiny emo rock soundtrack stripped out. The plot is so overly complicated yet insultingly simplistic that it wouldn't pass muster for a fourth grader's creative writing assignment; you'd find better material scrawled in the margins of a bored fourteen year old's textbooks in between whiny amateur poetry and Fall Out Boy lyrics. Not even Zack Snyder's visual styling works; he remains a top tier technical talent, but it's clear that when left to his own devices he simply can't tell a story. He's trying for big epic grandeur, with the intense color saturation and hyper-stylized feel of a Romantic painting or an Alex Ross splash page but it comes across more like something you'd see airbrushed on the side of a van outside a tattoo parlor. All accompanied by the crushing sonic weight of an even more oppressive than usual Hans Zimmer score.

The cast doesn't get off much better, Henry Cavill is somehow even more of an unbelievable stiff than he was in Man of Steel, this Superman is supposed to be one that's conflicted about being a hero and a savior figure (in case the Jesus and/or Moses parallels weren't subtle enough), but we never get to see this theme elaborated upon outside of general brooding. Ben Affleck is actually a pretty convincing Bruce Wayne, he plays him as a charming old money scoundrel with hints of James Bond, but he's a terrible choice to play Batman, or he at least can't pull off the gruff, scowling Frank Miller Lite version he's been cast as; if that solo Batman movie can still happen, something good might come out of this mess, but that's a big if. Gal Gadot gets nothing to work with as Wonder Woman, it feels like she was only cast because Warner Bros told Zack Snyder that he had to include Wonder Woman, but she at least gets off better than Amy Adams as Lois Lane, who the screenplay tries and fails to find a place for. During the climax she nearly drowns retrieving a Kryptonite spear from a caved in pool, which sounds interesting and heroic until you remember that she threw the damn thing into the pool herself ten minutes ago for seemingly no other reason than because the script says for her to do that.

Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor... is one of the worst comic book movie villains ever. He's instantly obnoxious and not in an off-putting way, his face is made entirely out of awkward ticks, his cadence is too off and idiosyncratic to deliver the theatrical lines he's been given, and he's hamming it up like he thought the villains on the Adam West Batman show were too subtle. We never get a sense of who he is, what his motivations are, or even what LexCorp is supposed to be or do when he isn't being a supervillian. Even his reason for hating superheroes changes from scene to scene, one moment he just does, then it's because he has hangups about religion, then it's because of his abusive father, then he's screaming about some offscreen future horrors that must be prepared for at all costs.

Speaking of which, if you were wondering about tie-ins to Justice League, we get them. Oh dear god do we get them. There's a reason that Marvel tends to relegate their more fanservice-y bits of world-building to after the credits, that way they don't get in the way of the actual movie. But Zack Snyder looked at that and decided "I can top this!"; so halfway through the movie, Bruce Wayne sends Wonder Woman stolen files from Lex Luthor's servers that document not only her existence, but also The Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman, who he's not only documented but named and given individual logos to. Really, that's how they do it, they stop the movie halfway through so they can open up a press kit and show off teasers for the next four movies. But where Marvel's teasers feel like a promise, this feels like a threat; "How dare you think that superheroes dominating popular cinema for over a decade wouldn't have any downsides! Look upon me and despair!"

Dawn of Justice is like the Bizarro World inverse mirror of The Avengers, where that was a triumphant finale to years of buildup of an unprecedented experiment in faithfully translating the shared-universe shenanigans of comic book superheroes to the silver screen made by people that clearly understood and cared about the characters they were working with, Dawn of Justice is a cynical attempt to set up a shared universe that was slapped together on the fly and handed to a creative team that couldn't care less even if Disney had secretly paid them to cripple any potential Justice League project before it could even get off the ground. And if news breaks tomorrow that that's exactly what happened, I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 1/5

Let's Talk About Movies: "10 Cloverfield Lane" and Mystery Box Marketing

Alo Party Peoples.

I am not opposed to film makers naming their films after unrelated existing things inting  order to get their vision off the ground. So if you want to make a nasty little thriller like an extended Twilight Zone episode, and you have to name it after a found footage kaiju movie from eight years ago to get it made, I'm fine with it; you do what you have to in service of your art, but that is not the case with 10 Cloverfield Lane. 

10 Cloverfield Lane started production as an under the radar indie script called The Cellar, and it was picked up by Paramount and placed  under lock and key for months before getting a surprise trailer a couple months before release along with a viral marketing campaign hinting at possible connections to Cloverfield, so instead of thinking "Oh, this looks like a nasty little thriller, I might buy it on demand one day", you think "Oh, this reminds me of that found footage Godzilla movie that I sort of remember,  I might go see that." in service of the Mystery Box marketing shenanigans of producer J.J. Abrams.

If you don't have to know what the Mystery Box is - then I envy your superior life choices - but it's J.J. Abrams' twee little Ted Talk name for the way he makes/markets his movies, it boils down to "audiences like to be surprised", so he hides as much about his films as possible, in hopes of recapturing the pre-Internet experience of seeing films sight-unseen, remember the trailers for The Force Awakens? We saw almost every big moment of the film, but we had almost no narrative context for any of it, so we were free to speculate, which created terabyte after terabyte of free advertising.

This is Abrams' specialty, he's probably one of the best marketers ever, and it's a technique that was pioneered with Cloverfield itself, a campaign that was so low key that for months the film didn't even have a title, and it worked there because it was an original property that wasn't tied to anything else, so when people thought "A found footage Godzilla movie? I haven't seen that before, I'll check it out.", there was enough there to satisfy them. Now, however, Abrams appears to be trying to take that kind of marketing and turn it into branding for a loosely connected anthology

If that's the game, getting funding for rising indie filmmakers to make low-budget but high-polish genre pieces with relative artistic freedom so long as they have some mention of the word "cloverfield", I'm fine with that, that sounds awesome, but it would have been a better idea to use something a bit more general like "J.J. Abrams Presents...", because between the name and the marketing, anyone going to see 10 Cloverfield Lane that doesn't follow entertainment news isn't expecting an extended Twilight Zone episode with a larger than usual budget for the finale, they're expecting a kaiju at the end, so when they don't get one it's going to feel like a letdown.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a good movie, if allowed to stand on it's own merits it might even have been a sleeper hit that got director Dan Tractenberg a dedicated following, but now that it's been absorbed into Abrams' sphere, it can only be remembered as another example of the Mystery Box.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Zootopia" A Muddled Mess of Mixed Metaphors

Directed by Bryon Howard, Rich Moore,
and Jared Bush
Written by Jared Bush and Phil Johnsoton

(PG - Disney - 1 hr, 48 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Disney Animation's recent resurgence has been marked with stark shifts in approach and subject matter with each subsequent film. Frozen was a big flashy musical in the style of their 90s' Renaissance... that was also careful deconstruction of the Disney fairy tale and it's warped perception of romance and family dynamics. Big Hero 6 is a superhero adventure... but it's also a study of grief and how people deal with the loss of a loved one. Zootopia follows in this path in that it's a silly cartoon about talking animals, that's also a fable about diversity and acceptance.

Thousands of years ago animals (or at least mammals) became sentient and abandoned their predator-prey relationships in aims of creating a place where "anyone can become what they want to be", and through the Mayor's new "mammal inclusion initiative", Judi Hopps has achieved her dream to become the city's first rabbit police officer, but she soon discovers that the promise of opportunity is rather limited when she's assigned to be a meter maid, until she gets the chance to prove herself by investigating several disparate cases of animals "going savage", losing their intelligence, walking on all fours, and attacking anyone around them, for which she teams up with a sly streetwise fox, and they discover that only predators are going savage, which leads to increased targeting of predators by the police department and suspicion and fear by the general population.

All the pieces for another Frozen are there; a great voice cast, fantastic animation and character design, symbolic use of cartoon staples to make a point about the real world that created them, but they don't quite click in the same way that they did before, if anything it's because Zootopia is trying to do more. It's less focused on character dynamics and emotional payoffs than it is on allegory, and not particularly subtle metaphor, something that a cast of anthropomorphized animals is particularly well suited for. Problem is, Zootopia doesn't seem to have put that much thought into it's central metaphor, they're trying their hardest to make a serious statement about racial profiling, that it results from fear and ignorance at its core, that once it gets ingrained in a culture it's increasingly difficult to get out, and other things that would involve spoilers to go into, but their visual coding for "persecuted minority" is literal lions and tigers and bears, which more than undermines their point.

That's the thing about using animals as symbolic figures, the more complex an idea you're trying to convey, the less it works because we get the idea of a sly fox or a timid sheep or a powerful lion, almost on an intrinsic level. They go out of their way to include a little beat of a tiger sitting next to a rabbit family on the subway, and the mother quietly pulling her child away. We get the fear in the mother, the heightened alertness of the tiger, and the increasing tension on both sides, but it's a tiger, so of course the audience is going to want her to pull her child away. I'm not accusing Disney of doing anything nefarious, this is probably just the result of thinking "Okay, city full of animals! How does that actually work?" I'm accusing them of not thinking their visual language before they committed to it.

It's not all bad, the cast is a lot of fun, I'm sure the animation sets new records for rendering whiskers and fur, when they try for visual humor it mostly works; Zootopia is a good movie, but the Mouse House is definitely coasting off the success of Frozen at this point, it's a serviceable family film on its own terms, if the script had been put through the wringer a few more times it probably could have been great, but the muddled mess of mixed metaphors at its core keep distracting from the things that work.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Eddie The Eagle": Flies Above The Crowd

Directed by Dexter Fletcher
Written by Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton

(PG-13 - 20th Century Fox - 1 hr, 45 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

I did not plan to have two inspirational sports films in a row. I planned to review Triple 9 this week... but it's impossible to find anything interesting or noteworthy to say about Triple 9. I saw it less than a day ago as I write this, and it's already faded from memory. And since there's no way I'm wasting my time with Gods of Egypt, we're doing this instead, anyway...

Eddie the Eagle stars Kingsman's Taron Egerton as Eddie Edwards, a British would-be ski jumper that dreams of becoming an Olympian, but his father wants him to abandon his dreams and become a plasterer like him. But he doesn't listen to his father and he heads off to Germany to train under Hugh Jackman as a washed up former Olympian that lost the magic long ago, but all he needs is a starry eyed dreamer to remind him of his love of the sport. It's playing off the same template as Rudy, it has the look and scenes and big moments you'd expect, but Eddie the Eagle works for the same reason that Crimson Peak or Fury Road work, it's not about reinventing the wheel, it's about making the best wheel possible, and Eddie the Eagle triumphantly rolls off into the sunset all shiny and chrome.

Taron Egerton is great in this, he's funny, he's charming, he's consistently compelling and on point, he has great chemistry with Hugh Jackman, this kid is a movie star in the making, I can't wait to see where he goes next. Hugh Jackman is also on point, this is probably his first role other than Wolverine where he's made a real impression, I want to see these two work together again, in fact, someone try and convince Fox to do an X-Men /Kingsman crossover, that'd be a fun time. None of that would matter if they didn't have a good director to capture that chemistry, but Dexter Fletcher makes it all work, channeling producer Matthew Vaughn's talent for earnestly on-the-nose big money shots into big stand-up-and cheer moments.

Eddie the Eagle is a perfect embodiment of exactly what it wants to be; backed by a solid chemistry between its two leads and skillful direction, it sets modest goals for itself and achieves all of them, and it flies above the crowd.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Race"

Directed by Stephen Hopkins
Written by Joe Shrapnel
and Anna Waterhouse

(PG-13 - Focus Features - 2 hrs, 14 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Race feels like a movie that could have been plotted by a machine, that's not a criticism as much as it's an observation. If you've seen one other inspirational sports movie in your life and you have any familiarity with the story of Jesse Owens, then you know what to expect from Race; it has the tone you'd expect, the look you'd expect, all the beats and scenes and big moments you'd expect. It only really exists so that the population of perpetually overworked grade school teachers can have one more movie to pop in the DVD player during Black History Month, but as far as these things go it's near the top end of such fare.

Jesse Owens led a long and interesting life, but Race focuses on the thing he's most famous for, running for the US Olympic Track and Field Team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, winning four gold medals and shattering ideas of white supremacy in the process. Even if you've never heard of Jesse Owens before, just from that you should have an idea of what to expect; racial hardship, uneasy teammates becoming friends and allies, unsure crowds slowly coming over to his side, it doesn't do any of these things badly, it does them quite well, but aside from being the only high profile retelling of Jesse Owen's life story, it doesn't really do much to set itself apart from the glut of inspirational sports movies.

I can't think of any reason that someone needs to run out and see Race unless you're the kind of person that goes to see every inspirational sports movie, and if you are then you've already made up your mind and you don't care what I or anyone else has to say about it. But for everyone else, let's call it a competent achievement and a noble effort that succeeds on it's own terms without any major problems.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Deadpool" Your Father's Superhero Movie

Directed by Tim Miller
Written by Rhett Resse and Paul Wernick

(R - 20th Century Fox - 1 hr, 48 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Deadpool shouldn't work as the main character of anything. Pretty much his only distinguishing trait is that he's a snarky jackass that can't die no matter what you do to him; he's a Looney Tune, and there's a reason that those generally don't last more than a few minutes. He's a comic relief distraction with a very specific shtick, and that shtick gets old fast.

Fortunately, Deadpool realizes that it can only really be a comic distraction, and thus it embraces that and becomes one of the most comic-booky films in recent memory, the entire story is that the Merc' with a Mouth is chasing down a bad guy, and he teams up with a couple of X-Men guest stars to find him. Really, that's it. All that stuff in the trailers with a red suited human cartoon spouting off really corny one-liners while slaughtering people is confined to two big action scenes at the very beginning and the very end, and they've been expanded out to a two hour movie via flashbacks explaining how Wade Wilson became Deadpool, and why he's trying to kill these specific people. The result is that we can feel like Deadpool is our focus the whole time, while also making sure that he doesn't stick around long enough for the shtick to get old.

It's all so much really crude, really cheesy Gen-X sarcastic snark, which makes a lot of sense for a movie that's been in development hell since just after the first X-Men movie that was only recently revived by positive reception on the part of thirty-something comic fans to leaked test footage, but the comic energy is infectious, and I can't help but respect how completely it embraces it's weird little niche. It all comes down to Ryan Reyonld's performance, he is perfect for the title character both in personality and on the meta level that he's doing a dirty sendup of the now standard superhero film; a form he tried once before to disastrous results that Deadpool is more than happy to make fun of "Just don't make the supersuit green, or all -and vein-y." If you're wondering what Colossus is doing here, the idea is that he's a stand-in for the morally upright superhero who has become fond of Deadpool for some reason and keeps encouraging him to drop the profanity and bloodshed to become more conventionally heroic, but the real standout in the cast is Brianna Hildebrand as X-Men trainee Negasonic Teenage Warhead. It's just short of inspired to include someone that "gets" Deadpool's thing... but doesn't find it particularly amusing, and Reynolds plays off her spectacularly as Deadpool is both frustrated and invigorated by a "kid" that's already too old for his shtick.

Deadpool is a "mature" superhero movie, and it's funny enough for long enough that you almost don't realize that it isn't really that bloody or perverse when you get right down to it. Sure, if you're one of the teenage boys sneaking into the theater with tickets to The 5th Wave that Deadpool was clearly made for, it'll blow your mind, but anyone old enough to see this alone will have seen genre material that is way more intense. It's difficult to tell which parts are aping the aesthetics of a 90s action movie for a laugh, and which ones are genuine flaws because this essentially is a cheap 90s action movie. Is the bad guy one-dimensionally evil as a joke, or did they just not try very hard with the villain? Does most of the action happen in stock locations like a highway, a back alley or a shipyard to call attention to its own cheapness, or were they just trying to save money on sets? Is Deadpool's weirdly dated reference pool and sitcom dad sense of humor supposed to be a joke, or are we supposed to find it genuinely funny?

Deadpool is a good movie; but it's not the revelation that many online have already begun to declare it. It's a disposable lark that succeeds on its own terms, and if you're looking for a slightly grittier alternative to the Marvel Cinematic Universe that isn't overly self-serious like DC's recent output, then you're probably going to have a good time. There are moments when it approaches greatness, but it's intent on undermining anything that approaches sincerity because it doesn't want to be great, and for once that approach works because it fits with the spirit of the character.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Hail, Caesar!": Oh, Hell Yes!

Directed and Written by
Ethan and Joel Coen

(PG-13 - Universal - 1 hr, 40 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

The strange thing about Hail Caesar is how surprisingly unassuming and laid back it is. It has a wandering, improvised dialouge-heavy comic tone, most scenes feel less like scenes and more like a lavishly funded lampoon, and it's less interested in having overarching themes or character arcs than it is in providing an excuse for comic moments built around weird dialouge. But unlike certain other film makers that practice their craft solely to get a studio funded vacation for themselves and their friends, the Coen Brothers want the audience to have a good time as well, and for the most part they've succeeded, and even if Hail Caesar is an underwhelming film by their standard, for anyone else it would be a crowning achievement.

Hail Caesar is a day in the life of Josh Brolin as Eddie Mannix. It's 1950s Hollywood, and he's a fixer for Capitol Pictures. That day, implied to be no more bizarre than normal, involves arranging a publicity marriage for a pregnant starlet to preserve her family-friendly image, considering the prospect of a steady job with Lockheed over the chaotic world of show biz, fending off two competing gossip columnists (twins!) threatening to publish a scandal involving the studio's biggest star, and tracking down that star after he mysteriously goes missing just as their biggest production of the year "Hail Caesar: A Tale of the Christ" is set to finish shooting. That star, George Clooney as Baird Whitlock, has been kidnapped by a communist writers' union that demands a ransom of a hundred thousand dollars, and the clock is ticking because they're slowly indoctrinating him with a surface level understanding of their creed.

The entire film feels like everyone involved was doing it in between bigger projects, most of the top billed stars only have maybe one or two scenes total, and it feels like they spent less than a month on set, and most of their dialogue feels like it was made up on the spot; but they were months well spent, because every moment connects. Josh Brolin's "Wait, what? Are you serious?" reaction to virtually everything that happens is immediately relatable, Scarlet Johannson's sarcastic "I'm way too good to be here, everyone get out of my way." performance as the studio's sacred starlet is instantly compelling, Channing Tatum as a pretty face in a vaguely homoerotic big bombastic musical like a period version of Magic Mike is instantly hilarious, Jonah Hill's one scene as a mob accountant got big laughs out of the entire theater, newcomer Alden Ehrenreich as a Southern born cowboy heartthrob thrust into a classy period drama directed by Ralph Finnes is a hilarious moment and the two have great chemistry, and George Clooney as Baird is... essentially a caricature of George Clooney, but it's amazing.

Something this casual and seemingly effortless just shouldn't work, but the Coens' signature meticulous yet laid back direction ties it all together; it's less of a feature film and more of a collection of loosely inter-connected vignettes, like a collection of old shorts or a really good episode of Saturday Night Live, it takes its sweet time getting to its real gut busters, but once they land they land hard. Hail Caesar has some of the funniest moments I've seen in theaters in a long time...but the Coen Brothers are definitely an acquired taste. I can't imagine seeing the audiences that are genuinely excited for say, Zoolander 2 packing theaters to see a period comedy with a bunch of character actors riffing on the tail end of Golden Age Hollywood under the direction of the people that made Fargo, but this movie wasn't made with such audiences in mind.

Hail Caesar is a passion project in the purest sense of the term; a film made by people that really, really love movies for people that really, really love movies. It proudly displays it's starry eyed earnestness to the world and says "In spite of all the nonsense, I just really love the movies!" Perfectly encapsulated in the final words of the film, that the story has been "recorded in light everlasting", drawing a direct parallel between a spiritual experience and an incredible film. Hail, Casear! And All Hail Ethan and Joel!

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4/5