Sunday, April 27, 2014

EVERY SCENE WILL BE SHOT IN SLO-MO:  We're all in agreement that handing over your big budget world-spanning comic book franchise to the guy who wrote and directed Buffy and Firefly is a much smarter move (at least from an artistic standpoint) than handing it over to the guy who directed The Owls of Ga'Hoole, right?

12 comments:

  1. Joseph Finn11:26 PM

    OK, time for "Joe tries to be positive." If WB manages to realize one of the Man of Steel problems was that they were trying to impose a Nolan Batman aesthetic on a Superman story, I'm willing to give Snyder another shot.

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  2. Slowlylu8:35 AM

    I applaud your effort to be enthusiastic but I am officially done with DC Comics and Sony's Spiderman. It would have to take some seriously good reviews by critics on the Dissolve and NPR's Monkey See to get me to anymore of these movies. And yeah that goes for Peter Jackson and Middle Earth and JJ Abrams' Star Wars galaxy.

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  3. Who are you, and what have you done with Finn?

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  4. Adam C.10:01 AM

    I just don't know what DC/Warner hopes to achieve here, because I think the battle, such as it is, is pretty much over and I just don't see them reversing the tide amid these somewhat uninspired casting and directing decisions.
    As a kid, I was very firmly in the DC camp, and had only a tenuous association with Marvel, almost exclusively via Spidey. The Marvel films have succeeded in flipping me -- on both counts. I thought the Nolan Batman trilogy was well done and a far sight better than the Burton/Schumacher films, but I still have not seen Man of Steel, nor did I see Superman Returns. Yet I've seen all the Iron Man films, the first Cap and Thor films (and I'll at least catch up with Cap 2), and Avengers, and I've enjoyed all but IM2. I fell off the X-Men train early in the series, but that's more my own oversight than anything else, and I want to correct that before Days of Future Past comes out. I'm very interested in seeing where Guardians of the Galaxy takes us, and I'm extremely intrigued by the casting of the Fantastic Four reboot.
    Like Slowlylu, Sony has ruined Spidey for me, though to be fair, it was the bad buzz for the final chapter of the Maguire/Raimi trilogy that did it -- I have not ventured into the Garfield/Webb interpretation.

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  5. The first Garfield/Webb Spider-Man was decent (though largely unnecessary, as we all know Spider-Man's origin), and buoyed by the really good Garfield/Stone chemistry. The second one looks like a potentially epic trainwreck--no superhero movie needs 3 (arguably 4, depending on how you count Norman/Harry) supervillains (Electro, Rhino, Goblin), and I expect the ending is going to be polarizing based on what I've read.

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  6. Joseph Finn11:00 AM

    I generally like that first one, but sweet zombie jesus, 45 minutes to tell that origin story again?

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  7. Joseph Finn11:31 AM

    Hell, the first movie (the Raimi) could have cut down on it, but they did need a little time to note that this was a genetics story now, not a radioactive spider (and I still think that was an excellent idea).

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  8. Adam C.11:37 AM

    Yes - that's precisely what I was thinking of in the category of significant departure from canon.

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  9. Jordan11:37 AM

    I think Snyder is a visually impressive director who can give the franchise a unique aesthetic. Shit writer, though, and no ability to raise a mediocre script.

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  10. Eric J.11:55 AM

    As I'm fond of saying, once you've established that you're in a Superhero universe, you don't need to bother with an origin story at all. Prime example: How did Elastigirl get her powers? Does it impact your enjoyment of the film?

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  11. I saw Captain America 2 this weekend, and I thought it was one of the best of the Marvel movies.


    Interesting that you were a DC kid. I was the mirror imagine -- all Marvel except for some Batman (mostly just the "event" stuff). My sense is that Marvel was always bound to do better in a 21st-century big-screen format than DC: The Marvel books were aimed a bit older, and (as of the 80s or so) have more fully embraced the darker/more cynical slant that sells well in 2014.


    Which brings me to my other geek point: Kind of weird for Snyder to direct the ultimate deconstruction of the hero team approach (Watchmen) and then direct Justice League, which is arguably exactly what Watchmen was deconstructing.

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  12. Linda Holmes made a similar comment a few weeks ago on PCHH -- you don't need to spend an hour explaining why the MacGuffin is important. Just tell us that everyone wants it, and then get to it.

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