Shoutout to the one person I’ve seen online that thinks Man of Steel is maybe the best DC film or at least admits it’s okay. I can’t follow you with BvS though.
Shoutout to the one person I’ve seen online that thinks Man of Steel is maybe the best DC film or at least admits it’s okay. I can’t follow you with BvS though.
That's a problem with all the live action Batman movies. I don't think any of the live action versions of the character have been true to the character's level of intelligence or detective skills...
That's a problem with all the live action Batman movies. I don't think any of the live action versions of the character have been true to the character's level of intelligence or detective skills (among other things) across the comics, animated versions, or even video games.
You can always tell as a Batman fan when someone is only familiar with the character from the live-action movies based on what they think he's like and what his limitations are.
Four hours. Just when I thought I couldn't think anything less of Snyder, he does a four hour film. Dude, you're a fractionally smarter version of Michael Bay, you're not Andrei Tarkovsky. General...
Four hours. Just when I thought I couldn't think anything less of Snyder, he does a four hour film. Dude, you're a fractionally smarter version of Michael Bay, you're not Andrei Tarkovsky. General rule of thumb for people who aren't Tarkovsky or Kubrick: if your film really needs to run more than 2 hours, just don't. Make a TV series instead. Like Ingmar Bergman did with Fanny and Alexander or Lynch with Twin Peaks.
Obviously this will be a mess because it's Zack Snyder and he's never made a good film, what's interesting to me is how much better it will be than the mess Joss Whedon made of things. Probably writing a bit of python which arranges clips in Premiere in a random order right off the camera would have made a better film than Whedon (I'm really starting to think Buffy was good in spite of that dude, not because of him).
Argh comic book films make me so cross. I like a lot of comics but they're almost always so poorly translated to screen. Especially by Snyder. I'll never forgive him for what he did to Watchmen. Or Dawn of the Dead. Maggie May Fish has a good series on why he's so bad
Can I ask what you don’t like about Dawn of the Dead and Watchmen? I’m curious because those are the two films of his I actually like. I also really love the source material for both and I think...
Can I ask what you don’t like about Dawn of the Dead and Watchmen?
I’m curious because those are the two films of his I actually like. I also really love the source material for both and I think they are both good adaptations of the source material.
With Dawn of the Dead, it lacks the subtext of the George A. Romero original, but it’s still a good movie.
And I think most of the changes to Watchmen work to make it work better as a movie. I don’t know how well the graphic novel’s original ending would have played.
Except it's not. It's just some pointless zombie nonsense. Take away the subtext - which is the real point of the original movie - and really, what's the point of it existing at all? Why does that...
With Dawn of the Dead, it lacks the subtext of the George A. Romero original, but it’s still a good movie.
Except it's not. It's just some pointless zombie nonsense. Take away the subtext - which is the real point of the original movie - and really, what's the point of it existing at all? Why does that film exist? Nothing. It's empty, hollow, meaningless. Like everything Snyder does.
He appears to have absolutely, completely, totally misunderstood Watchmen. Then, while avoiding the whole point of the book and still slavishly copying it, he made the movie boring. It's an astonishing piece of work in how utterly wrong it is. From Hell did a better job translating Moore to screen and that's one of the worst movies ever made.. This essay covers my thoughts on Watchmen pretty well. Synder now claims it's satire but as Maggie Fish's videos also point out, you can't make something which*is essentially indistinguishable from the thing you're claiming to satirise, because that's not satire that's just the bad thing again.
If you don't like the ending of Watchmen, maybe don't make a film of Watchmen because the ending matters. Alan Moore didn't end it like that by accident.
It's interesting about Watchmen because I don't agree, at all. I find his ending better than the graphic novel. Also if you found the movie meandering and boring, I dunno how you made it through...
It's interesting about Watchmen because I don't agree, at all. I find his ending better than the graphic novel.
Also if you found the movie meandering and boring, I dunno how you made it through the comic. It's not exactly an action-packed thriller.
I love how polarizing the movie is though, makes me like it even more to be honest.
If we want to talk film adaptations of comics that sorely missed the mark, let's talk about The Surrogates.
A comic naturally has a much different sort of pacing by virtue of being static images on a page, though. There's plenty of visual detail to look at in each panel, and you can speed up or slow...
A comic naturally has a much different sort of pacing by virtue of being static images on a page, though. There's plenty of visual detail to look at in each panel, and you can speed up or slow down at your own leisure. The art of pacing in a comic is extremely unique to the medium and there have been some excellent explorations of it throughout the decades because it has to subtly influence the speed a reader applies and the tone they arrive, whereas something that is delivered uninterrupted to a reader like a movie or song has a pacing and tone that isn't dynamically interpreted.
For example, a comic doesn't trap you in an extended graphic sex scene while Leonard Cohen's hauntingly dirge-like Hallelujah plays over top what's supposed to be an emotionally climactic and genrally happy moment.
But the ending is an interesting subject because it's so polarizing, even when Watchmen was only ever a comic. Moore's editor at the time famously tried to convince him to change it but it's the one thing Moore stuck to his guns on. On the surface, the movie's ending does seem better because it's not quite so left-field batshit, but it's in the second and third order consequences where it's actually worse. The movie's ending leaves the US in a very broken and precarious position whereas the comic's ending was supposed to join humanity together and give the world a common enemy to rally around. This is in following with how the story was thematically always about the differences between people being escalated and overimportant, leading to strife when it wasn't supposed to. The comic's ending, controversial and batshit at it is, does reinfoce this idea whereas the movie's doesn't seem to realize what it means for the world. It's also worth noting that it was, canonically, supposed to be left-field and batshit of an event. The whole point was to cause an event that was so completely inexplicable that humanity had no other choice but to come together. The movie's ending goes the other way entirely and, in my mind, accidentally suggests that its going to lead to the fall of the US as Russia becomes the new world superpower by virtue of being right all along.
I understand the sentiment of wanting to change the ending for an adaptation, I get it totally, but the ending we got in the movie is probably my biggest sign that Zack Snyder didn't understand anything of the story beyond "wow, this is cool!" I don't think he's capable of understanding implication at all. Like, I think Snyder may be the kind of person to read A Modest Proposal and think Swift was literally suggesting we eat Irish children.
Some time ago I watched a YouTube video which explained how Snyder completely misunderstood the source material for Watchmen, and my biggest takeaway was that I too had completely misunderstood...
Some time ago I watched a YouTube video which explained how Snyder completely misunderstood the source material for Watchmen, and my biggest takeaway was that I too had completely misunderstood the source material. Subtlety and metaphors are generally completely lost on me, and that's probably why I enjoyed the film more than the comic.
Yeah because he's such a fucking auteur or something. Honestly. It's porn. Don't get me wrong, I like porn. Gun porn (other people do it far better than Snyder) and sexy lady porn (again, there is...
It's not in widescreen either, apparently - square only.
Yeah because he's such a fucking auteur or something. Honestly.
What did you think of Sucker-Punch, if you saw it? :)
It's porn. Don't get me wrong, I like porn. Gun porn (other people do it far better than Snyder) and sexy lady porn (again, there is better out there). But it's empty. It's stupid and a bit fun but there are plenty of better ways I could spend the 90 minutes I wasted on that film. Hell, Birds of Prey ticks all the same boxes and is a better movie. OT but I quite liked Birds of Prey. Nobody else did, apparently.
Don't have much to add here other than Birds of Prey is my favorite DC movie. I found it funny and enjoyable and really liked a lot of the characters in it especially Black Mask (note: when I say...
Don't have much to add here other than Birds of Prey is my favorite DC movie. I found it funny and enjoyable and really liked a lot of the characters in it especially Black Mask (note: when I say I really liked Black Mask, I mean I think he was a good villain, dude was a monster)
And I'm sure it was shot with IMAX in mind.... except loads of stuff is shot/edited for IMAX and for standard cinema and for TV/bluray as well. All different aspect ratios. Nobody in their right...
And I'm sure it was shot with IMAX in mind.... except loads of stuff is shot/edited for IMAX and for standard cinema and for TV/bluray as well. All different aspect ratios. Nobody in their right mind shoots in 4:3 alone. Especially when all the cinemas have been closed for a year and they know their movie is being released via streaming, so everyone will be watching it in 16:9.
The quote is the studio let him do this in order to “preserve the integrity of Zack Snyder’s creative vision.”
Well, it's been in editing for that long. This being a streaming release wasn't a surprise for anyone involved. Also that wasn't my main point. My main point was plenty of other people manage to...
Well, it's been in editing for that long. This being a streaming release wasn't a surprise for anyone involved.
Also that wasn't my main point. My main point was plenty of other people manage to shoot for multiple aspect ratios just fine. Snyder himself has done it plenty of times.
He thinks he's an artist but he's not making art films, he's making shitty superhero movies which are low-grade even by the astonishingly low standards of modern superhero movies. Most of his job - as far as the studio which is employing him will see it - is to sell merchandise. Merch beats ticket sales for making money any day of the week. He did this because he's a dick and he was allowed to for goodness knows why.
Honestly, I’ve been so turned off by the fans that I have zero interest in watching this (or any DC universe movie that isn’t a Birds of Prey sequel) for a long time.
Honestly, I’ve been so turned off by the fans that I have zero interest in watching this (or any DC universe movie that isn’t a Birds of Prey sequel) for a long time.
Color me surprised. Justice League never looked like something that could be saved in the cutting room. I was always confused by the support this got, mustering passion for the various DC films...
Color me surprised. Justice League never looked like something that could be saved in the cutting room.
I was always confused by the support this got, mustering passion for the various DC films seems like a royal pain.
Shoutout to the one person I’ve seen online that thinks Man of Steel is maybe the best DC film or at least admits it’s okay. I can’t follow you with BvS though.
What I hated the most about Batman v Superman was how they turned the best detective in the world into a complete imbecile for the sake of the plot.
That's a problem with all the live action Batman movies. I don't think any of the live action versions of the character have been true to the character's level of intelligence or detective skills (among other things) across the comics, animated versions, or even video games.
You can always tell as a Batman fan when someone is only familiar with the character from the live-action movies based on what they think he's like and what his limitations are.
Since the riddler is the next villain, it's pretty much guaranteed that we will see a lot more detective Batman in the next movie.
Four hours. Just when I thought I couldn't think anything less of Snyder, he does a four hour film. Dude, you're a fractionally smarter version of Michael Bay, you're not Andrei Tarkovsky. General rule of thumb for people who aren't Tarkovsky or Kubrick: if your film really needs to run more than 2 hours, just don't. Make a TV series instead. Like Ingmar Bergman did with Fanny and Alexander or Lynch with Twin Peaks.
Obviously this will be a mess because it's Zack Snyder and he's never made a good film, what's interesting to me is how much better it will be than the mess Joss Whedon made of things. Probably writing a bit of python which arranges clips in Premiere in a random order right off the camera would have made a better film than Whedon (I'm really starting to think Buffy was good in spite of that dude, not because of him).
Argh comic book films make me so cross. I like a lot of comics but they're almost always so poorly translated to screen. Especially by Snyder. I'll never forgive him for what he did to Watchmen. Or Dawn of the Dead. Maggie May Fish has a good series on why he's so bad
Can I ask what you don’t like about Dawn of the Dead and Watchmen?
I’m curious because those are the two films of his I actually like. I also really love the source material for both and I think they are both good adaptations of the source material.
With Dawn of the Dead, it lacks the subtext of the George A. Romero original, but it’s still a good movie.
And I think most of the changes to Watchmen work to make it work better as a movie. I don’t know how well the graphic novel’s original ending would have played.
Except it's not. It's just some pointless zombie nonsense. Take away the subtext - which is the real point of the original movie - and really, what's the point of it existing at all? Why does that film exist? Nothing. It's empty, hollow, meaningless. Like everything Snyder does.
He appears to have absolutely, completely, totally misunderstood Watchmen. Then, while avoiding the whole point of the book and still slavishly copying it, he made the movie boring. It's an astonishing piece of work in how utterly wrong it is. From Hell did a better job translating Moore to screen and that's one of the worst movies ever made.. This essay covers my thoughts on Watchmen pretty well. Synder now claims it's satire but as Maggie Fish's videos also point out, you can't make something which*is essentially indistinguishable from the thing you're claiming to satirise, because that's not satire that's just the bad thing again.
If you don't like the ending of Watchmen, maybe don't make a film of Watchmen because the ending matters. Alan Moore didn't end it like that by accident.
It's interesting about Watchmen because I don't agree, at all. I find his ending better than the graphic novel.
Also if you found the movie meandering and boring, I dunno how you made it through the comic. It's not exactly an action-packed thriller.
I love how polarizing the movie is though, makes me like it even more to be honest.
If we want to talk film adaptations of comics that sorely missed the mark, let's talk about The Surrogates.
A comic naturally has a much different sort of pacing by virtue of being static images on a page, though. There's plenty of visual detail to look at in each panel, and you can speed up or slow down at your own leisure. The art of pacing in a comic is extremely unique to the medium and there have been some excellent explorations of it throughout the decades because it has to subtly influence the speed a reader applies and the tone they arrive, whereas something that is delivered uninterrupted to a reader like a movie or song has a pacing and tone that isn't dynamically interpreted.
For example, a comic doesn't trap you in an extended graphic sex scene while Leonard Cohen's hauntingly dirge-like Hallelujah plays over top what's supposed to be an emotionally climactic and genrally happy moment.
But the ending is an interesting subject because it's so polarizing, even when Watchmen was only ever a comic. Moore's editor at the time famously tried to convince him to change it but it's the one thing Moore stuck to his guns on. On the surface, the movie's ending does seem better because it's not quite so left-field batshit, but it's in the second and third order consequences where it's actually worse. The movie's ending leaves the US in a very broken and precarious position whereas the comic's ending was supposed to join humanity together and give the world a common enemy to rally around. This is in following with how the story was thematically always about the differences between people being escalated and overimportant, leading to strife when it wasn't supposed to. The comic's ending, controversial and batshit at it is, does reinfoce this idea whereas the movie's doesn't seem to realize what it means for the world. It's also worth noting that it was, canonically, supposed to be left-field and batshit of an event. The whole point was to cause an event that was so completely inexplicable that humanity had no other choice but to come together. The movie's ending goes the other way entirely and, in my mind, accidentally suggests that its going to lead to the fall of the US as Russia becomes the new world superpower by virtue of being right all along.
I understand the sentiment of wanting to change the ending for an adaptation, I get it totally, but the ending we got in the movie is probably my biggest sign that Zack Snyder didn't understand anything of the story beyond "wow, this is cool!" I don't think he's capable of understanding implication at all. Like, I think Snyder may be the kind of person to read A Modest Proposal and think Swift was literally suggesting we eat Irish children.
Some time ago I watched a YouTube video which explained how Snyder completely misunderstood the source material for Watchmen, and my biggest takeaway was that I too had completely misunderstood the source material. Subtlety and metaphors are generally completely lost on me, and that's probably why I enjoyed the film more than the comic.
It's not in widescreen either, apparently - square only.
What did you think of Sucker-Punch, if you saw it? :)
Yeah because he's such a fucking auteur or something. Honestly.
It's porn. Don't get me wrong, I like porn. Gun porn (other people do it far better than Snyder) and sexy lady porn (again, there is better out there). But it's empty. It's stupid and a bit fun but there are plenty of better ways I could spend the 90 minutes I wasted on that film. Hell, Birds of Prey ticks all the same boxes and is a better movie. OT but I quite liked Birds of Prey. Nobody else did, apparently.
Don't have much to add here other than Birds of Prey is my favorite DC movie. I found it funny and enjoyable and really liked a lot of the characters in it especially Black Mask (note: when I say I really liked Black Mask, I mean I think he was a good villain, dude was a monster)
In a review I read they claimed the weird aspect ratio is because the film was originally shot for Imax theatres.
And I'm sure it was shot with IMAX in mind.... except loads of stuff is shot/edited for IMAX and for standard cinema and for TV/bluray as well. All different aspect ratios. Nobody in their right mind shoots in 4:3 alone. Especially when all the cinemas have been closed for a year and they know their movie is being released via streaming, so everyone will be watching it in 16:9.
The quote is the studio let him do this in order to “preserve the integrity of Zack Snyder’s creative vision.”
Zack Snyder is a fucking idiot.
Most of the footage was filmed long before the pandemic, so your point is moot.
Well, it's been in editing for that long. This being a streaming release wasn't a surprise for anyone involved.
Also that wasn't my main point. My main point was plenty of other people manage to shoot for multiple aspect ratios just fine. Snyder himself has done it plenty of times.
He thinks he's an artist but he's not making art films, he's making shitty superhero movies which are low-grade even by the astonishingly low standards of modern superhero movies. Most of his job - as far as the studio which is employing him will see it - is to sell merchandise. Merch beats ticket sales for making money any day of the week. He did this because he's a dick and he was allowed to for goodness knows why.
Honestly, I’ve been so turned off by the fans that I have zero interest in watching this (or any DC universe movie that isn’t a Birds of Prey sequel) for a long time.
Color me surprised. Justice League never looked like something that could be saved in the cutting room.
I was always confused by the support this got, mustering passion for the various DC films seems like a royal pain.
I wish other films would get director's cuts like this. Unfortunately the demand usually isn't there.