Jingus

I have seen it. What. A. Pile. Of. SHIT. 72 Things Wrong With Batman vs Superman (complete with tons of SPOILERS): -We start with doing ANOTHER FUCKING RETELLING OF THE WAYNE MURDERS. What's that now, the fourth time we've seen this in a live-action movie in our lifetimes? We really needed to waste ten minutes of an already-too-damn-long movie on this redundant waste? -It's hard to defend Superman's lousy heroics in the previous film, when this one shows us even more of the city being destroyed than we saw in the first place. No, Niners, you cannot compare this to The Avengers. Number of buildings collapsed by the Chitauri in NYC: zero. Number of buildings collapsed by Kryptonians in Metropolis: ...shit, I honestly don't know, there were too many to easily count. "At least a dozen" is a safe bet. There's no way that this didn't cause a HUGE death toll, with thousands upon thousands of people getting crushed. -So Jimmy Olsen is now a CIA agent? Whoops, nope, Jimmy Olsen is shot in the head and dies. Thanks, movie! You're already blatantly ruining some of the most important core parts of the Superman mythos. -Why the hell did the lady cop shoot at Batman? Even if she's a rookie, nobody on GCPD ever told her "and by the way, don't shoot the goddamn Batman"? Especially since Bats is said to be friendly with the cops in this version. -Why is Batman branding criminals now? They brought that up and then completely glossed over it, never really explained it at all. Especially since it's openly said that anyone bearing the brand is automatically a dead man. -Why did the appearance of Bruce Wayne, Billionaire Philanthropist Goody-Two-Shoes at an illegal underground boxing match somehow not attract any attention? -I don't buy this version of Lex Luthor. AT ALL. This is horrible, from the writing to the casting to the acting. The comparisons to the wildly overacting Moriarty on Sherlock are very apt. Except for one thing: Moriarty is at least supposed to be a shadowy criminal guy, while Luthor is a public figure who somehow has everyone fooled. This despite everything about the guy absolutely SCREAMS "I'm a total fucking lunatic, a twitchy unreliable megalomaniac who cannot be trusted at any time for any reason, run away from me as fast as you can", even when he's trying to put on his facade to deal with the public. I don't buy that anyone would want to work with him. After that inexplicable weirdness where he shoves the candy into the senator's mouth, why doesn't that guy just go "fuck you, you're not getting ANYTHING from us", especially since he clearly didn't want to hand over Zod's body? -Since fucking when is Batman ever AN ALCOHOLIC? Alfred dryly mocks him for drinking way too much. I can't remember any point in the comics when Bruce was presented as a barely-functional drug addict (and no, that one thing with the Venom doesn't count). -The dialogue in this movie blows. Everyone sounds like they're reading from a WWE script. I'm not even joking, it has that same ponderous, artificial "these are all prepared remarks that we've memorized and are now reciting" quality to it that most of the promos on Raw do. None of it feels even remotely like anything said by an actual human being at any point in the entire history of the world. Everyone declaims their lines with such dreadful solemnity that they all sound like they're mumbling in a library. The only spark of life, the only passion in the entire movie, come from Jeremy Irons (being a professional of a "I can read the phone book and make that shit sound awesome" level) and, sadly, Eisenberg (being... I don't even know what the fuck he's supposed to be, like Jack Black playing Ledger-Joker). -Luthor doesn't have ANY security in the "roomful of supercomputers which contain incriminating evidence of his illegal activities" in his own mansion? Not even a lock on the door? Especially on a night when he's hosting dozens of strangers at a party in his house? -Since when is Wonder Woman a computer expert? How did she know that Bruce had left that gimmick there, and how did she know what it did? -It's the height of screenwriting laziness when any random scene is written to just so happen to take place during a holiday, so that the scene will be punched up with a little bit of extra-festive flavor which has nothing to do with the actual events which are happening in the midst of all the local color. Y Hello Thar, big deadly fire in Mexico right in the middle of the Day Of The Dead! "This scene seems boring... let's have everyone wearing skull makeup" is a fucking terrible band-aid to try and cover up a scene which is, indeed, still boring. -Okay, there is one blatant exception to the All This Dialogue Sucks rule: Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who clearly wrote all his own lines. His little monologue about the meaning of having a Superman on earth was a night-and-day difference from all the other speech in the movie, lively and jazzy and openly considering the ramifications without resorting to theatrical proclamations. And I think it actually hurts the movie by contrasting, especially since it does that thing where having a real-life celebrity suddenly show up playing themselves in a fictional cameo is so damn distracting. -These dream sequences are god-damned ridiculous. Not just in their overused quantity, but in their content as well. I can only imagine what must've been either bewildered silence or howls of laughter from the casual viewers when Batman suddenly goes John Woo with guns blazing, and then a bunch of flying monkeys suddenly show up. (Yeah, I know, parademons, but they looked like flying fucking monkeys.) And have any of you ever had a dream in which you get knocked out and wake back up, inside the dream? I sure haven't. -All of Batman's supercomputers and business connections couldn't discover the fact that "White Portuguese" was a ship, despite the fact that ship's names are legally recorded in countless documents and databases? -Gee, Bruce sure went from "I'm not sure I like that Superman fellow" to "I MUST ASSASSINATE HIM" in the blink of a fuckin' eye. -How did he teleport from standing on top of that tower to driving the Batmobile at ground level in even less than the blink of a fuckin' eye? -First confirmed Bat-kill: when he drags the car around behind him, recklessly crashing it into twenty different things. There's no way the guys inside managed to survive that. -Speaking of the Batmobile: I don't like this new design. It's ugly. Really, really ugly. It's largely a ripoff of the one from the Nolan trilogy, except smaller and less powerful-looking, nullifying the entire "Bats has a TANK" feel of that one. -Second confirmed Bat-kill: machine-gunning the shit out of that other car, blowing it up, certainly massacring everyone inside. No. Just fucking NO. That is NOT acceptable behavior for Batman, ever, period! We've spent almost thirty years complaining about Keaton doing it in '89, so having another one do it now is even less excusable than the last time. -Third confirmed Bat-kill: he lands the Batmobile on the back of the trailer, crushing it, obviously squashing at least one of the guys who was standing there. -Batman's brilliant plan when he sees Superman for the first time: "Ram him with my car!" Because obviously that will do so much damage to a guy he's personally witnessed crash through entire buildings. -Why does Superman want to stop Batman in the first place? They're doing the exact same job, in nearly identical manners. -Why does every covert tracking device in this universe have a big obvious blinking red light on it, just screaming "LOOK AT ME!"? -Why did the legless guy suddenly decide to start hating Bruce, the guy who saved his life and pulled him out of the rubble at great personal risk? -And just to make Snyder look even more like a Roland Emmerich-style hack, we blow up a national landmark. -Did Luthor really just execute Mercy Graves? I HATE THIS VERSION OF LEX. I FUCKING HATE HIM!!! -This movie's night scenes have an awfully heavy portion of Orange-&-Blue lighting, where you cast warm orange on one side of a person's face and cold blue on the other side, making them look all conflicted 'n shit in the most heavyhanded manner possible. It's a common sin of modern filmmaking, like overuse of handheld cameras, but that still doesn't excuse every individual movie that abuses it. -Why are Clark and Lois the only people who get along in this entire movie? Everybody else are all aggressively hostile towards each other, snapping and snarling and just generally being unlikable assholes. -The Kryptonian Archive apparently has even less security than Lex's computer room. "Hello, not-a-Kryptonian, allow me to immediately reveal all my people's deepest secrets!". -Even in today's ludicrously non-fact-based political atmosphere, I don't buy that the public would blame Superman personally for a terrorist bombing. -Wonder Woman, in full Amazonian regalia, apparently fought in World War One... and nobody noticed? History books don't mention that? The entire world didn't record anything besides a single picture (which she posed for, so it's not like she's allergic to publicity) of this amazing phenomenon? -Pa Kent turns up (in another fucking dream sequence) just long enough to tell Clark: "Son, never be a hero. There's no such thing. You'll only make everything worse. Heroes suck." And the movie seems to frame this defeatist little speech as if he has a really good point. -Why, exactly, is stately Wayne Manor now a hollowed-out ruin? -The only time I laughed in the first ninety minutes: when Nancy Grace shows up, self-righteously bitching about Superman not being good enough. But then I remembered "oh yeah, that's not a joke, she really is that stupid and awful in real life" and I just got grumpy again. -This soundtrack sucks. It sounds like a parody of regular Batman music. It's hard to believe that this crap was composed by the same genius who made the brilliant, unconventional, unnerving tunes for The Dark Knight. -Exactly how far apart are Metropolis and Gotham supposed to be, geographically speaking? This movie makes it feel like they're Dallas and Fort Worth, right next door to each other. Everybody seems to be able to travel from one to another within a few minutes. Even worse, half the time, I can't tell which city we're supposed to be in right now. There's not much effort spent in differentiating the two. -Y'know, it makes it a lot harder to believe that nobody realizes Clark is Superman when 1.it's become a running joke among the public that he's always saving Lois, and 2.Lois and Clark LIVE TOGETHER in this version. Also: why the hell doesn't he change his hairstyle when he's Clark? It's always combed the same way. -Speaking of which, I don't like this version of the character where, even in his rookie years, fucking everybody already knows Clark's secret identity. Lois met him as a Kryptonian before ever getting to know him as a man, and Luthor seemed to figure him out without even trying (or bothering to explain how he did it0. -You know something I'm deeply tired of seeing in superhero movies? Goddamned DADDY ISSUES being everybody's character motivation. In this movie, Clark AND Bruce AND especially Lex are ALL motivated by the failings of their fathers. -Why doesn't Superman just kill Luthor? We know he's willing to take lives. And even if he decides not to kill Lex, why doesn't he just use his heat vision to vaporize Lex's penis, to give Luthor a lil' reminder of what happens when you spit in God's face? And since when does he negotiate for hostages? This is a guy who can literally see and hear the whole world. His mother wouldn't stay hidden for long, he can find anyone anywhere. And we have direct proof of that, he can hear Lois screaming for her life even when she's on a different continent. -Bruce's opening trap against a man who can fly is... a glorified land mine that Superman has to STEP ON in order to activate? How the hell did he know that Kal-El would happen to land right there? And also, not see it with his omniscient vision? -And then, of course, machine guns. Because this version of Batman loves machine guns so damn much that he can't resist using them on a target he knows is completely bulletproof. -A smokescreen can fool Superman now? Superman can't see through fucking smoke? -Gee, it's convenient that Batman just-so-happened to have the precise amount of kryptonite necessary to nerf Supes's powers but do nothing else. It would've been terrible undramatic if 1.Supes wasn't hurt enough to NOT still squash Batman like a jobber, or 2.if it'd just fuckin' killed him outright. And how timely its effectiveness was, to have Superman impaired for just long enough to take a heel beatdown before Hulking Up to make his comeback (complete with the goddamn Batman begging off like Ric Flair). -In fact, the whole "Batman beats the shit out of a kryptonite-weakened Superman" part felt like I was watching a direct remake of the "Luthor beats the shit out of a kryptonite-weakened Superman" scene in Superman Returns. Even a few of the individual shots were identical. They also both featured Superman getting cut with a kryptonite blade. -Superman's punch shattered Batman's metallic armored faceplate... but didn't even SCRATCH the face underneath the plate? Come the fuck on. And since when does Batman have the superhuman-level strength it takes to throw a fully-grown man around as if he were a literal ragdoll? -I guess it's a good thing that this long, chaotic fight JUST SO HAPPENED to wind down in the exact spot where Batman had planted his kryptonite spear. Woulda been a real shame if they'd wandered away to a different location. -The movie's constant little flashbacks to itself are really annoying. "We don't think you're smart enough to remember who Martha was, so we're going to show you a replay of her death, plus her name inscribed on a tombstone, plus Thomas whispering her name as he died. GET IT???" -Everyone else has already pointed this out, but it's stupid enough to be worth mentioning again: "Wow, our moms have the same name!" is a terrible reason to suddenly rethink every single thing you're doing. -Aaaaand the Batplane makes the exact same "flying" sound effect as various spaceships in the PREQUEL trilogy of Star Wars. Because we needed even more reason to think of disappointing new franchises which don't even remotely live up to what we've seen before. -Really, of all random DC hired-henchmen to use for Luthor's goon, why KGBeast of all people? Especially since they never even called him by that name. Especially since they completely changed his appearance and his personality. -Yet another blatant murder by the bat man, machine-gunning another vehicle and exploding it, clearly killing everyone inside. -And now he grabs one goon and forces him to wildly spray bullets at his comrades. It's hard to tell because everything's all darkly lit and the handheld camera is shaky and everything is edited to half-second jump cuts, but it looked like at least one or two guys probably got shot dead. -And he basically says "oh, you got a grenade? EAT IT", detonating and murdering two more guys. -His armor can stop a point-blank gunshot to the head, but it can't stop a regular knife? In the words of the amazing Spider-man: "Oh no, it's my one weakness, SMALL KNIVES!" -And he murders two MORE guys in another explosion by deliberately blowing up the flamethrower. Niners, do NOT try to sweep all this bullshit under the rug, it's a whole bunch of intentional homicides in a row. -Superman just stands there and lets Lex finish his science experiment? -The very concept of including Doomsday this early in the game is ridiculous. It's terrible pandering to the fanboys. And the WAY he was included in this movie was even worse, flagrantly retconning the character's backstory. It's basically the same deal as how Venom was shoehorned into Spider-man 3 on both counts. -Also, they could've designed Doomsday's's CGI to not look exactly like a Hobbit cave-troll. And also exactly like the Abomination from The Incredible Hulk. They managed the impressive feat of making him an uncanny doppelganger for both. -And the FIRST thing Doomsday does is... throw a punch which is utterly no-sold by Superman, caught in mid-air, making him look like an utter bitch who poses no threat. Nice job building up your monster heel, guys! Yet mere moments later he's mercilessly beating Supes like a punching bag. There's no consistency here, everyone's powers get stronger or weaker as the script demands it. -Something they didn't bring up: let's say Doomsday did kill Superman. THEN WHAT? What was Lex's brilliant plan to deal with his own unstoppable monster made of pure rage, who is (maybe) even stronger than Superman and only wants to kill everything it sees? And hey, why does Doomsday suddenly have all of Electro's powers? -Why is Superman rassling with Doomsday in orbit? They've established that Doomsday can't fly. He can only jump; and in space, he's got no leverage to jump FROM anything. Why doesn't Superman just throw him into space? -The military makes the unwise decision to fire a nuclear missile at the villains, despite the fact that the heroes will be caught in the blast too. Yeah, because we didn't see THE EXACT SAME THING in The Avengers. Except this time the nuke actually explodes, and they just quietly ignore the fact that the fallout should rain deadly radiation all over the city. And both Superman and Doomsday should be radioactive for the next thousand years. -Earlier in the movie they established that this version of Superman needs to breathe, when Batman shot him twice with kryptonite gas. But now he can just hang around in the vacuum of space and be just fine? -Rather than "I'll go get the spear, then come back and kill this monster while it's still in an uninhabited wasteland", Batman's genius plan is "I'll get the laser-spitting monster to follow me back to my densely-populated city, and just hope I can grab the spear before it kills me and everyone else"? It's immediately proved to be a bad idea, when Doomsday promptly shoots down the batplane and then proceeds to flatten seemingly every single building within a one-mile radius, slaughtering God only knows how many innocent people. -"Hey guys, let's do something we've never done before, and have Lois nearly suffocate to death in an enclosed underground location at the end of a Superman movie! Also, I'm quite sure that Superman has never almost drowned in an underground pool while in close proximity to kryptonite. SURELY both things never happened in the same film before!" -Exactly how powerful is this version of Wonder Woman? At one point in the fight, she's hacking Doomsday's limbs off and no-selling his energy blasts like they're nothing. At others, he's smacking her around like a grizzly bear mauling a helpless child. -Since when do they do mandatory head-shavings in prison? That seems like such a fuckin' weak excuse for Bald Luthor. -Exactly how did they manage to have Superman AND Clark die separately? It seems like the body went back to Martha Kent, so isn't the rest of the world all like "hey, if Superman's really dead, where the hell is his corpse"? What the hell was in that coffin which the military was burying? -There's that many bagpipers in rural Kansas? Also: fuck you, movie, for shamelessly using what sounds like the exact same funeral music that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan used for Spock. -Did absolutely anyone buy, for one second, that Superman was really dead and honestly wouldn't come back? So yeah, in conclusion, fuck a bunch of that. And just for the record, all this is coming from a guy who actually LIKED Man of Steel, for the most part. But this lousy, lousy sequel has ignored everything I thought made that movie interesting, while doubling down on all of its regrettable flaws. All of its good parts (and those were a deeply-oppressed minority) had been done better in previous films, while it managed to invent several newly unique bad parts. This seriously felt like some Blade 3 type of mediocrity: not the worst comic book adaptation in the world, but nowhere near as good as the movies which preceded it in the same franchise. And seriously, I can't say "motherfuck Jesse Eisenberg" enough, that was the single worst portrayal of Lex Luthor that I've ever seen in any medium.

Admittedly, it's one thing to be grim and gritty in a Batman movie; it's quite another to be grim and gritty in a movie about a bunch of teenage superheroes who are all dressed as porno schoolgirls, who have epic CGI fight scenes against a bunch of giant robots (in dream sequences that are Incepted inside another dream sequence). He's taking the basic concept of Sailor Moon and directing it as if it were The Matrix, and doing a shitty job on both counts.

True dat, yo! The Elektra movie was one of the single worst superhero films I've ever seen in my life. Much worse than the lowest lows of any Batman or Superman or X-Men or Spider-man or Hulk movie ever. Right up there with Catwoman and Ghost Rider and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Supergirl and The Spirit and pick-your-least-favorite-version-of-Fantastic Four in terms of terrible modern superhero franchise adaptations which seemed like they were actively trying to piss off the existing fanbase for those characters. Come to think of it, did they even attempt to make ANY explanation of how Elektra didn't, y'know, DIE when Bullseye stabbed the fuck out of her in the previous movie?

Practically nobody heard of it. Despite being an animated kids' movie that was released in over 3,500 theaters. It barely scraped together a little over 50 mil domestically. Don't bother. It's almost like a parody of all of Snyder's worst tendencies. It's like a version of Tank Girl which is played completely serious without a hint of humor or levity. I've rarely seen a better cast of great actors give such top-to-bottom miserable performances. About half of the movie looks like a series of endless cutscenes from a video game. It's also the kind of movie that features a bunch of strippers as the main characters... who never actually get naked. It pretends to be all about female empowerment, while dressing all the characters as sexy cosplayers and having all the women be a bunch of rape victims who are nothing but pawns for their male oppressors.

That animated CGI movie about superheroic owls that nobody went to see.

That character was fucked from the start by the way the show writes her. They can never make up their minds whether she's a cold-blooded manipulator or a woman-child who can't control her temper; whether she's the most deadly fighter in the world, or if she's merely a wannabee compared to Matt/Stick/Chinese Scarface; whether she has some kind of intricate mastermind plan, or if she's just making this all up as she goes along; whether she really gives a damn about either Matt or Stick, or is just using them towards her own (vague and unexplained) goals. Hell, they can't even decide which CONTINENT she's from, picking a French actress of Cambodian ethnicity who has an English accent to play a Greek character who was raised by Americans. Poor Elodie Yung had no chance fighting against all that horseshit, regardless of whatever her level of talent is.

For the record, here's Zack Snyder's Rottentomato scores: Dawn of the Dead: 75 300: 60 Watchmen: 65 Legend of the Guardians: 50 Sucker Punch: 23 Man of Steel: 56 Batman vs Superman: 29 Foreign sales are actually the main profit driver. Age of Extinction made barely 20% of its overall more-than-a-$billion in American theaters.

Pile as many guys into the same car and the same motel room as humanly possible. Eat only the cheapest food. Try to get fans or rats to pay for anything they can/will pay for.

The majority of Batman's writers and the majority of Batman's fans agree that the character is best used when he's not killing people. If he IS willing to kill people, then what's special about him? We've already got a Punisher. We don't need another one. And seriously, why should "this superhero never kills people" be such an incredibly difficult rule to follow? And especially when the killing is done so callously, with Bats just slaughtering henchmen like their lives don't matter. That's unacceptable, it completely goes against everything in the character's motivations. Everything that drives Batman is "never let people die". When that's changed, when he becomes so much more blase about human life, he's much less interesting. If he MUST kill someone, the story should DEAL with that. Ya know the one time I'm completely fine with Bats whacking someone? Two-Face in The Dark Knight. Batman was exhausted, badly wounded, completely spent. He had nothing left, no bright ideas, and he was stuck facing his worst nightmare: the white-meat babyface Harvey Dent turned into a psychotic heel. All the work Batman did to keep Harvey safe (including sacrificing the woman he loved, even if it was unintentional) had gone to shit. So, to save the life of an innocent child, Batman makes a blind leap of pure instinct, having no plan and no idea how it's going to turn out. And it winds up doing the ONE thing he's spent the entire movie trying to prevent; killing Harvey Dent. And does he shrug it off? Does he just go "eh... shit happens" and continue the fight? Hell NO, it utterly DESTROYS him. Even though he wasn't actively trying to break his One Rule, even though he didn't have any better choices in that circumstance, he makes no excuses whatsoever: it was wrong. He takes full responsibility, lets the cops blame him for Harvey's murder, and stops being Batman for years afterwards. THAT'S how Batman should react to taking a life. Similarly, I never had that big a problem with Superman snapping Zod's neck, because they'd so thoroughly foreshadowed the entire thing. Superman spends the whole movie trying to deal with Zod in any way other than killing him. He had it drilled into his head by Pa Kent that he's not God, that he has no right to decide the fate of anyone else. And it's made all the more poignant by the fact that Zod is the only other Kryptonian left on Earth; Supes is forced to destroy the last remnant of his blood kin, in order to save his adopted community. Their final moments together are Clark begging Zod to stop, and Zod flatly saying "Never!". And then... well, they didn't follow through with it the enormity of such a choice afterwards, but at least Henry Cavill had the decency to act really bummed out. That's okay. It effects the character in an important way. It matters to the story. But Bruce just going "meh!" and dropping bullets and bombs on a bunch of mooks is the exact opposite. It's the exact kind of callous disregard for human life which goes directly against everything about Batman which is important to the consensus of people who care about the most about his portrayal.

Also, brutal honesty: I don't think Charlie Cox is that great. He's okay, he's competent, but he feels very much like "insert generic CW Network unshaven prettyboy hero Here" rather than a truly compelling lead. I think he gets blown right off the screen by Woll, Henson, and Berenthal; let alone the real heavy hitters like D'Onofrio and Glenn. And having known several blind guys in real life, I don't always buy his "blind" routine, he's doing too much acting with his eyes and is all too often looking other people directly in the eye when he's talking to them, real blind people never do that.

Two wrongs don't make a right. That's a shock? The "Harvey's locked in the back of an armored car" epic truck-fu battle in The Dark Knight is a better, more coherent, more tightly paced, more tense action scene than anything Snyder's ever done after Dawn of the Dead.

Today, people. TODAAAAAAAAY. Weirdest thing I noticed about my ballot: all of my top 5 somehow came from the same year.

Getting back to Daredevil: I'm on episode 12, and maaaaan, you guys weren't kidding about the repetitive, monotonous nature of those CONSTANT NINJA FIGHTS. It would be one thing if they were particularly well-choreographed action scenes, but they're not. Compare any of them to the gorgeously brutal "Frank versus ten convicts" prison massacre, and it really highlights how phony and trite all the Hand fights feel in comparison. Hell, even a relatively simple scene like Karen's apartment being riddled with bullets had so much more real-world weight and gritty plausibility than anything in the various spot-monkey martial arts setpieces. That even extends to the story; it's immeasurable just how much more I care about the stuff with Punisher, Kingpin, and Foggy/Karen than my utter apathy for the whole Elektra/Stick/Anonymous Ninjas With No Personality side of the story. An individual detail: when watching the raid on the boat and the subsequent police cleanup, was anyone else thinking "okay, Daredevil showrunners, we GET it, you really really REALLY love The Usual Suspects"? EDIT: they finally revealed the secret villain, and I almost felt like turning the whole thing right the fuck off. Such a terrible, arbitrary choice of a random character, like a Scooby-Doo unmasking. ALMOST as terrible as the whole "Hand ninjas are dead silent... but only sometimes" nonsense, which is the worst contrivance in the whole series. And that's saying something, considering the characters' abilities to magically track each other's locations via apparent psychic powers of precognition is still in full effect. (How the hell did Frank find Karen and He Who Done It? How the hell did Matt just happen to find the Hand's lair? How the hell did Elektra find Matt and Stick?)

A reminder, everyone: tomorrow (3/27) is the deadline, so get your ballots to Chaos pronto. I still need to finish mine... damn, it's annoying having to check back and forth between Flickchart (my rule-of-thumb guideline for the list) and Rottentomatoes, since we're using the latter's dates for what officially qualifies as "2010-2014" and all too often the two sites disagree.

It sounds like Goyer always wrote the original draft, and then the Nolans came in with a bunch of rewrites afterwards. But they must have loved his work, considering that they kept bringing him back each time.

What's the evidence of that? He's credited on all three movies, he wrote the story treatments at the very least. And it's not like there isn't plenty of documentation for him working on them, in both the DVD special features and the following articles: http://variety.com/2004/biz/news/the-bat-and-the-beautiful-1117899714/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060830132547/http://www.vh1.com/movies/news/articles/1494981/12172004/story.jhtml http://www.ign.com/articles/2004/09/24/the-influences-of-batman-begins https://web.archive.org/web/20070707174708/http://batman-dark-knight.moviechronicles.com/2007-06/a-round-up-so-far/ http://www.superherohype.com/features/88561-premiere-features-batman-begins http://deadline.com/2010/02/its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-chris-nolan-hell-mentor-superman-3-0-while-preparing-3rd-batman-24783/ http://herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/christopher-nolan-takes-flight-with-superman-we-have-a-fantastic-story-1/

There's a big difference between anything Daredevil ever does and shooting people with a machine gun, a grenade launcher, and a flamethrower. The guaranteed lethality rate of the latter is so much higher than punching/kicking/throwing someone that they're not a good comparison.

And he's flatly, factually wrong on claiming that Batman deliberately kills people all the time in The Dark Knight Returns. Even when he does indeed shoot that one guy with a gun, they still specifically say that he shot him in a non-lethal fashion. Which is bullshit, humans aren't reliably capable of that sort of precision (unlike, say, A ROBOT TERMINATOR WITH A TARGETING SYSTEM WHICH EXPLICITLY ALLOWS HIM TO WOUND WITH CONFIDENCE) but at least the effort was made. It sounds like, in the new movie, no such effort was made at all.

CaliV6Red knows how to party.

I'm trying to think of any others that are better, and not many come to mind. Kurosawa/Mifune and Scorsese/DeNiro are the only ones I think might top it. Bergman/Sydow, Ford/Wayne, Welles/himself, and maybe Woo/Yun-fat or Hitchcock/Stewart come close.

It stems from an ongoing segment from Kevin Smith's podcast Hollywood Babble-On, where each week they come up with improbable versions of Hollywood movies that all star Hitler.

Maybe it's the fact that Super Friends, Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, The New Batman Adventures, Batman Beyond, Justice League, The Batman, Static Shock, Justice League Unlimited, The Batman, Young Justice, Batman: the Brave and the Bold, and Beware the Batman were all children's cartoons starring Batman as a main character over the past thirty years? Not to mention a couple dozen animated features. Plus an entire franchise of Lego movies, games, and toys devoted to him. Honestly, an entire Lego franchise. How do you get MORE "this is for kids" than that?

The idea that Batman isn't supposed to be a kid-friendly property is just a bizarre claim to make, considering that the character appears in literally dozens of cartoons and video games and has continuously had his likeness sold in toy stores at all times always. From 1992-2014, there's always been some kids' show on first-run TV which featured Batman as a main character, sometimes multiple shows running simultaneously.

The Hand want the power of the "Dark Sky", which is Elektra but also when Zero Matter appeared in Carter, it split the sky , so there's that. And when Elektra was wounded and Stick was healing her, she had the black veiny shit appearing on her skin like victims of Whitney Frost had. And, on Carter , Roxxon was involved in the Zero matter experiments and on Daredevil they said that Roxxon was infiltrated by the Hand. To me that's all quite reaching. The veins were because she was infected with a neurotoxin from a poisoned sword. It's worth noting that the exact same "black veins" effect was seen on Tony in Iron Man 2, caused by something completely different.

Pretty much this. And on-the-nose "parodies" of Saw and Taken, really? I liked the episode, I never don't like this show, but last night's show felt campier than usual and with many more old tired jokes. "LOL, the security guard has a flashlight instead of a gun!" is not the level of wit that I've come to expect from this program.