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Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice

batman-v-superman-reviews Just when you thought the title of this movie was as pretentious as it could get, Zack Snyder delivers a pre-movie PSA on spoilers. I was offended. What else is the internet for aside from spoilers and porn? And since Snyder and crew spoiled some key parts about this movie in the title (namely the Batman VERSUS Superman part) and trailers (revealing the big bad guy), it was doubly ridiculous to waste time on a PSA that I could have spent watching a post-credits scene (SPOILER ALERT: THERE ISN’T ONE).

There’s really not much to spoil anyway. Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is exactly what you’d expect. The script is so cookie cutter and routine that the writers could skip exposition or backstory whenever convenient (and they take full advantage). But don’t worry, Batman fans! SPOILER ALERT: you will get to see Thomas and Martha Wayne get gunned down outside a movie theatre. Because we haven’t seen that often enough…

batman-v-superman At least we don’t rehash Superman’s origin (thank Krypton). But (SPOILER ALERT) we don’t get any hint of Lex Luthor’s origin or his motivations, other than (SPOILER ALERT) he’s evil and crazy and rich and smart and an orphan. It’s the same way with Wonder Woman – the no-origin part, not the evil crazy rich smart orphan part (as far as I know). That left me to guess as to why Lex hated everyone to the point he was willing to cause the destruction of Metropolis and Gotham (which, SPOILER ALERT, are right next to each other in a very lazy move by the writers), and why a literal greek goddess (I’m assuming) is conveniently hanging out in these twin cities waiting for an opportunity to (SPOILER ALERT) don her metal bathing suit.

One final SPOILER ALERT: despite all its issues, Batman v. Superman is actually fun in its brainless way. Batman’s costumes look great, the much-anticipated fight between the two titular characters is awesome, and the stakes are suitably high by the final battle that Wonder Woman’s participation feels like a necessary deus ex machina (and seeing all three on screen together was worth the price of admission).

batman-v-superman-trinity So if nothing else, Batman v. Superman accomplishes its objective. It made me want to see the Justice League movie. A lot. And despite my griping, Batman v. Superman is not nearly as bad a film as many critics would have you believe. I mean, it’s your typical trashy comic book movie but it delivers exactly what it promised. Judge it as art if you want, and on that scale it fails, but so does every Marvel movie! Genre fatigue is the only reason I can think of to explain the backlash, and to that I say: if you are tired of superhero movies, you will not enjoy this film. But you also won’t enjoy any “critically acclaimed” superhero movies past, present or future. And if you are still up for more, well, see this one, and then start saving your money for May’s double feature of Captain America: Civil War and X-Men: Apocalypse. Both of which will probably be much better reviewed EVEN THOUGH THEY WILL BE THE SAME EXACT MOVIE AS BATMAN V. SUPERMAN. Critical scores are so meaningless.

And on that note, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice gets a score of seven holy trinities out of ten.

Zootopia

30 Replies

videothumbnail_zootopia_officialtrailer_disney_a4d0f4ce In 2006, Disney purchased Pixar for the equivalent of $7.4 billion dollars. It’s becoming more and more clear how good a deal that was for Disney. Every Disney animated movie since has been amazing, from Wreck-It-Ralph to Frozen to Big Hero 6. maxresdefault Not only is Zootopia another success for Disney, it may be the best of the bunch since John Lasseter and Pixar came on board, and that’s probably the best endorsement I can give.

The best part of Disney Animation’s renaissance is that these movies aren’t just for kids. They’re as enjoyable for adults as for little ones. Zootopia, for example, includes a spot-on reference to Breaking Bad! Striking that balance must be incredibly hard but b17 Disney has picked up the torch from Pixar in that area and is doing it as well as Pixar ever did. Zootopia is literally a movie that all ages will enjoy. So it’s one up on LEGO!

Most importantly, Zootopia’s underlying message is timely and may be more important for adults than kids at this point, given the horror that is the U.S. Republican party’s nomination process. We as Canadians dealt with some of the same terribleness in our recent election so it’s not just an American tactic. Fortunately, enough of us were able to reject fear and demonization of minority groups to trump-chicago_wide-af9dd849d37a7079224f21dd42973b4aae2a4c88-s900-c85 choose someone who wants to bring us together instead of tearing us apart. We really, really, really want to believe American voters will do the same (just like they’ve done in the last two presidential elections). Please don’t let us down!

As for Zootopia, it is a movie that will definitely not let you down. It’s smart, funny and deep and you should totally see it. I give Zootopia a score of ten sly rabbits out of ten.

10 Cloverfield Lane

22 Replies

I have been trying to make sense of 10 Cloverfield Lane for months, from the moment I saw the title of this movie at the end of its trailer. And after seeing the movie I’m still searching for answers. 2834c660-9db5-0133-6e17-0efce411145f

Hinting at a connection between this movie and Cloverfield was probably not the best idea that J.J. Abrams has had. Cloverfield massively disappointed me. It seemed like a great concept, putting the camera in the middle of monster-created chaos, but Cloverfield ended up being your typical found footage crapfest from start to finish. So to suggest this is a sequel or prequel or some other form of spinoff was a weird choice, especially because the trailer for 10 Cloverfield Lane contained no hint of a connection between it and Cloverfield other than the similar name (and thankfully also contained NO FOUND FOOTAGE).

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

The common name is not a coincidence but it was a terrible idea. It ruined what might otherwise have been a nice twist two-thirds of the way through 10 Cloverfield Lane. To paraphrase Shakespeare, this same movie by a different name would have been just as mediocre, but at least the title wouldn’t have tipped off the audience that there was more outside the bunker to be afraid of than a lady with a melted face.

So if you’re making this movie, why tip your hand in the title? Does the Cloverfield brand really have that much value? Am I the only one who disliked that movie? I mean, I totally hated The Visit and others apparently thought it was good. So I’m open to the possibility that a similar thing happened with Cloverfield, but I would be surprised. Tell me whether or not you’re with me in the comments but know that I’m judging you based on your response.

[END SPOILERS]

It felt good to get that out of my system and now I think I can focus on 10 Cloverfield Lane as its own movie. In two words: don’t bother. The group of 13 year old girls sitting behind us couldn’t take it seriously and neither could I. There are way too many disparate elements at work and as a result the movie is disjointed from beginning to end. There’s nothing remotely redeeming or original here.

If end-of-the-world movies were drinks, 10 Cloverfield Lane would be a glass of three random types of bar-rail liquor, served to guests without a taste test. So it’s only fitting that 10 Cloverfield Lane gets a score of three bottles of cheap scotch out of ten.

Hey Everyone! I’m Sharing Some Spider-Man Memories

27 Replies

“Hey everyone.” With those two simple words, the latest trailer for Captain America: Civil War reminded me that Spider-Man is my all-time favourite superhero, hands down, and made it clear that I have to drag Jay to yet another superhero movie.

My love of Spidey started as a six year old who could not stop watching the 1960s cartoon, the one where Spider-Man would swing across the same three weirdly coloured sky backgrounds wit 60s spidey.jpg h no real need for anything to swing from (he swung across the Everglades at one point, above all the trees)! I am humming the theme song right now and hopefully so are you. I truly can’t imagine a better intro to a cartoon or a better gateway drug into the world of comic book consumerism.

Then came the comic books themselves. I still remember getting my first Spider-Man comic like it was yesterday. My parents bought it for me and it was, of course, a battle between Spidey and Doctor Octopus, where Spider-Man ends up saving Doc Ock at the end, because that’s what Spidey does.

From there, I was hooked. As I got older and realized that comics cost money, I supported my habit with paper route earnings. I wasted a bit of time buying Superman comics but quickly wised up and returned to Spider-Man. Though not quickly enough, as by the time I started buying Todd McFarlane-era Spider-Man comics, it was the height of the comic book speculation boom and some of them cost $20 each (which was a lot to a paperboy).

Of course, the market crashed soon afterwards but by that time I had moved on to playing sports, though occasionally I still drew my own comics until I got suspended from high school for it (seriously).

As a side note, my inker on that ill-fated high school comic strip ended up both rappelling down Toronto’s city hall in a Spider-Man costume and writing Spider-Man into Marvel’s recent reboot of Howard the Duck. As for me, the closest I ever came to wearing a superhero costume was owning a pair of Superman underoos. Underoos! “Hey everyone.” And with that, the circle is closed.

Race

11 Replies

Jesse Owens deserved better. Race is a movie that hits the points you’d expect but does it so mechanically that it has no momentum. Rather than having the power of its Olympic sprinter protagonist, Race is soft and lumbering, like a darts competition at the local dive bar.

The only time Race really shines is during the one-on-one exchanges between Owens (Stephan James) and his coach, Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis). Those conversations are funny, warm and real. Unfortunately, those moments are few and far between. It’s too bad that the film didn’t put those interactions into the foreground as that would have made for a much more
enjoyable movie.

Perhaps the problem is there was simply too much ground to cover. Race’s story follows Owens through the course of several years during the peak of his career. We flip back and forth between Ohio, New York, Berlin, Nebraska, Michigan, Los Angeles, and probably more places that I’ve forgotten. We hit the athletic highlights, like Owens setting three world records and tying a fourth in less than an hour in 1935, and Owens winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games. We touch on the hypocrisy of the United States’ threat to boycott those Berlin games at a time when racism and segregation were the status quo in the “land of the free”. We gloss over the rest of Owens’ life by way of end titles and some nice photographs of Owens and family at various stages of his life.

There is a good movie in here somewhere but the plodding delivery sinks it (and the important-sounding score doesn’t help matters). Race seems to want to be a message movie highlighting the aforementioned hyp jesse-owens ocrisy by showing us the second-class citizenship of Owens even when he’s America’s hero. If that was the aim, Race falls well short. Painting Hitler and the Nazis as the bad guys is easy, and Race goes that route. But the real story is more damning and I wish Race had told it as it happened. At a political rally in October 1936, relatively soon after his triumphant return to the U.S. with four gold medals in hand, Owens said, “Some people say Hitler snubbed me. But I tell you, Hitler did not snub me. I am not knocking the President….but remember that the President did not send me a message of congratulations because people said, he was too busy.” Hitler reportedly shook Owens’ hand after his victories, while Franklin Delano Roosevelt couldn’t find the time to send Owens a congratulatory telegram.

The President’s indifference to Owens presumably lines up with the attitudes of white America at the time. That may explain why Owens’ life after 1936 was a difficult one. His amateur status was revoked when he tried to make some endorsement money from his Olympic success, and after lo RACE sing his amateur status he was reduced to racing against horses for show. Later, Owens got by as a dry cleaner and gas station attendant (though “got by” may be generous as he declared bankruptcy and was prosecuted for tax evasion). All in all, it’s a very sad statement. Today, Owens is rightfully regarded as a legend but it seems that during his lifetime he was not treated like one, to say the least. Race hints at that fate but doesn’t focus on it, and that’s a shame.

That’s probably the biggest reason that Race seems like an opportunity missed. Coach Snyder would have called it a natural that lacks the work ethic required to be truly great. For its half-hearted effort, Race gets a score of five medals out of ten.

Deadpool

32 Replies

It’s always nice when a comic book movie doesn’t take itself too seriously. Deadpool makes clear from the opening credits that there is no danger of any seriousness here. Throughout the movie, Ryan Reynolds keeps that lighthearted vibe going by dropping references to every other comic book movie he’s been in, as well as a few that he hasn’t, and keeping the patter going even during what would be serious scenes in any other superhero movie.

Deadpool-Guns-Out Deadpool delivers, plan and simple. It is big, loud and stupid, just like it should be. After all, the main character(a) is insane; (b) is immortal; and (c) knows he is a comic book character. There’s really not any need for pretense – we came to see craziness and that’s what Deadpool gives us, from start to finish.

There’s even a bit of love to be found, but only to inject some tension. Since Deadpool can’t be hurt, someone else has to be in danger so the climactic fight means something. But for the most part, Deadpool gives us the merc with a mouth in all his glory, drawing with crayons, forgetting his guns, doling out terrible life advice, and generally being the worst hero imaginable.

And that’s okay! We don’t need all our superheroes to imitate 1960s Batman. Deadpool didn’t teach me anything and I respect it for not trying to. Though I could have done deadpool_clip_hd.0 without another superhero origin story. It’s not necessary, it’s lazy, AND I’m pretty sure they already did Deadpool’s origin in Wolverine: Origins (though I’m also pretty sure they screwed it up). So Deadpool makes a misstep there but it’s forgivable since it keeps us laughing while it spins its wheels. And really, the comedy is the whole point anyway so it’s not a major complaint, it’s just my critical two cents.

Overall, I enjoyed Deadpool a lot (and a lot more than I expected to). I give it a score of seven self-mutilating escapes out of ten.

Zoolander 2

26 Replies

Zoolander 2 is really, really, ridiculously dull. There was so little going on all I could really do was wonder why this movie got made and why so many recognizable faces pop up. The only answer I came up with was that no one involved had anything better to do. Well, I had better things to do – I could have been watching Deadpool!

There really isn’t a good reason to watch Zoolander 2. The “good” moments are rehashes of the original, and the rest seems like stuff they cut from the original (and rightly so). We get it, the fashion industry is vapid and empty, but you can’t satirize it with a movie that’s even more vapid and empty, because then the joke is on the movie. And the joke is definitely on the movie here. Even Justin Bieber should have known better than to be involved with this mess.

I honestly can’t think of one moment in the movie that I liked, and this is coming from a guy who laughed from start to finish during both Daddy’s Home and Dirty Grandpa. The original Zoolander was another movie that consistently made me laugh, but the sequel comes up woefully short. It’s old and tired, and made me feel the same way. Zoolander 2 gets a score of two glasses of prune juice out of ten.

The Abyss

25 Replies

Rewatching the original Star Wars trilogy seems to have made me nostalgic for the 80s. And when the latest Star Wars instalment recently sailed past Avatar and Titanic to become the highest grossing movie ever in North America, I couldn’t help but think of James Cameron’s other work, the stuff that he made before appointing himself the king of the world.

Aliens, Terminator and Terminator 2 are all wonderful and all high on my list of movies to make Jay watch (a list that has shrunk considerably in the last few weeks), but the first James Cameron movie that comes to my mind is The Abyss. To me, that’s the true precursor to Avatar and Titanic, the movie that hinted at what James Cameron was capable of (both good and bad).

The Abyss is near and dear to me, mainly because it provided one of the first signs that I was destined to become an Asshole Watching Movies. In the early 90s I became really obsessed with letterboxed movies even though we had a 30 inch (at best) tube television. This was before DVDs so my options

LaserDisc on the left, DVD on the right. I have enough trouble finding shelf space for my DVDs, thank you very much.

were either letterboxed
VHS (few-and-far-between) or LaserDisc (too-expensive-for-an-unemployed-teenager). But my parents, seeing my interest, indulged me by renting a LaserDisc player on a few occasions, and The Abyss was the first movie I ever watched on that strange format (on two 12″ discs!).

As for the movie itself, The Abyss is an underwater odyssey that is a bit of a mess, both on screen and behind the scenes. Again, it seems obvious in hindsight given James Cameron’s later works, but at the time it seems to have been a surprise that The Abyss’s production went way over time and way over budget. Filming consisted of 15-18 hour days and lasted 140 days total. Total cost: a reported $70 million, which if accurate would make it the most expensive movie ever at the time (surpassed by Terminator 2, which was surpassed by True Lies, which was surpassed by Waterworld, which was surpassed by Titanic). It is not a coincidence that all but one of those movies was made by James Cameron. He clearly has a talent for spending money. abyss13

When you watch the Abyss, though, you can see where the money went. All the diving scenes are practical effects and the movie looks amazing for it. The underwater scenes were shot 30 feet deep for up to five hours at a time in 40 pound helmets. There were
other costs than money that resulted from this underwater mayhem. Complaints from cast and crew were rampant. Ed Harris refuses to ever talk about the film to this day. James Cameron almost died when he lost track of time and ran out of air at the bottom of the 7,000,000 gallon water tank, and then on his way to the surface was given a broken emergency regulator, so when he thought he would finally get a much needed breath of air, he got a lungful of water instead. Knowing all that makes me wonder whether the end product, as beautiful as it is, was worth the trouble. Watch it and tell me what you think. In my view, the climactic visit to the “aliens” is a bit of a letdown and the ending seems rushed (which is particularly problematic for a movie that’s this long).

The original theatrical cut (which I have never seen) was released in 1989 and was 145 minutes long. The Abyss is one of the first forays into CG but the technology was not quite there yet so a climactic scene had to be cut because Industrial Light & Magic just couldn’t get the world- The-Abyss-Water-Face destroying waves to look right. Technology had advanced significantly by 1993, and so a special edition was released with 25 minutes more footage, including the ending as it was originally conceived. The CG effects hint at what is to come from Cameron and ILM (or, by the time the special edition was released, what had already come). The tentacle water effects in particular are very close relatives of the T-1000’s liquid metal goodness in T2 and they seem to hold up a lot better than most early CG (maybe because CG is used so sparsely in The Abyss).

Interestingly, we’ve kind of come full circle, moving away from CG in favour of practical effects (Mad Max: Fury Road being a prime example). Kwame Opum of The Verge calls practical effects, “vinyl for cinema”, and as someone with a large record collection, that comparison feels right. It makes me wonder where James Cameron, formerly a practical effects adherent, stands on the issue today since Avatar was so CG-heavy. Perhaps we’ll get a sense of that if Avatar 2 ever gets made, but that’s a long way off as it’s been delayed again and will not come out until 2018 at the earliest.

In the meantime, dust off your LaserDisc copy of The Abyss and enjoy!

Over the Top

21 Replies

Strange things are happening lately. Sylvester Stallone won a Golden Globe and is nominated for an Oscar. I’ve made Jay return to George Lucas’ glory days and watch the original Star Wars trilogy for the first time, which is something she swore would never happen. And since these sorts of things come in threes, I like my chances of convincing Jay to watch Over the Top, which I just found out is on Netflix. Especially because Jay is still on oxycontin recovering from her back surgery.

Over the Top is a hidden gem in the same way as a lump of coal. It was a very 80s attempt to reboot Rocky: take Stallone, put him in another salt-of-the-earth role where his muscles do the talking, give him a wholesome never-quit attitude, and add in Robert Loggia as the villain for good measure. The ingredients are all here but this movie is absolutely awful. So awful I can’t help but love it.

First, Robert Loggia. This is exactly how I feel when I see him in anything.

He was the best (RIP, Mr. Loggia) and he really chews the scenery here. Which is fortunate because in Over the Top, Stallone shows absolutely no charisma, the arm-wrestling bad guy is the most boring villain you could think of, and the kid Stallone is fighting for is so annoying, spoiled and entitled that you think all the way through that Stallone would gladly take $500,000 to never have to see him again.

over-the-top-poster

Second, trying to get us to cheer for Stallone’s down-on-his-luck arm wrestler is so misguided it hurts. Is there even such a thing as an up-on-his-luck arm wrestler? Are any of these guys in good financial standing? I don’t know how legitimate the World Armwrestling League is, but the champion only gets $20,000. So that was probably like $10,000 in 1987 dollars. If you’re driving a semi across the country like Stallone does in Over the Top, I guess you can save money by sleeping in the cab, but how much are you left with at the end of the day even if you are good/lucky enough to win? Just one more reason you wonder why Stallone wouldn’t take the $500,000 [SPOILER ALERT] rather than selling his truck (HIS ONLY SOURCE OF INCOME) so he can pull a Pete Rose and bet on himself to win the contest [END SPOILERS]. See how much you are going to love this movie?

Third, the music is the worst thing imaginable. Any song that was cheesy to make the cut for Rocky IV can probably be found on Over the Top’s soundtrack. No Easy Way Out is literally too good a song to be in this movie. I didn’t think that was even possible but it’s true. The featured ballad is a Kenny Loggins wuss rock gem, and the soundtrack also features songs from Sammy Hagar, Eddie Money and Asia. It is probably the perfect music to arm wrestle to, if you have the urge. And after watching Stallone [SPOILER ALERT] rock his way to victory [END SPOILERS], I predict that you are going to have that urge.

I give Over the Top a score of one man against the world out of the world. But since the one man is 2016 Golden Globe winner and 2016 Academy Award nominee Sylvester Stallone, that’s actually a very good score.

Dirty Grandpa

33 Replies

Robert De Niro clearly relishes his role in Dirty Grandpa as, you guessed it, the dirty grandpa. He cusses lots and spikes drinks with Zanex and flirts with Aubrey Plaza and takes his shirt off a lot and clearly is having a ton of fun all the way through. Zac Efron also takes his shirt off a lot but throughout this movie he looks as uncomfortable as the middle aged, flip-phone owning couple sitting directly in front of us at last night’s screening. Maybe, as Jay observed, Efron is coming to the sobering realization that being shirtless is his thing and the best he can hope for is to be brought back as the shirtless grandpa if this movie is the start of a Rocky-like franchise.

My money’s on there being no sequel. Dirty Grandpa has a lot of laughs and an abundance of dick jokes, but it also seemed unnecessarily long and unnecessarily concerned with plot. I didn’t need to see everyone learn a lesson. I certainly did not need three generations of lessons being taught to De Niro, Efron, and Dermot Mulroney. And we see stereotypes of hippies, lacrosse jocks, and gang members learn something too. The only ones exempt from this rule seem to be the very funny Jason Mantzoukas (a.k.a. Rafi from the League!) as a Daytona Beach drug dealer, and Adam Pally as Efron’s cousin. At least the writers had the good sense to allow those two to do their crazy guy routines the whole way through Dirty Grandpa. I wish they had given everyone such free reign. I was just there to laugh and didn’t need everything to be wrapped up perfectly, or at all.

I thought all the lessons really took away from Dirty Grandpa’s momentum, mainly by taking the focus off dirty De Niro. That hurt this movie a lot because De Niro as the dirty old guy is by far the best part. He’s really, really funny, but all too often he’s jolted out of that role when sad Efron calls him the worst grandpa ever (which happens every ten minutes or so). Take out all the grandpa-grandson make-up sessions and Dirty Grandpa would have been far more enjoyable.

Dirty Grandpa is a decent comedy, much better than I expected, but since the story seriously impedes these characters’ escapades, it seems like an opportunity missed. I give it a score of seven horny octogenarians out of ten.