Jingus

I still maintain that Teen Titans GO is the single greatest superhero cartoon in history.

Even I've listened to the new Wonder Woman themes a couple of times on Youtube. It's energetic and fun in a way that none of the rest of the soundtrack is.

Actually, Tim Burton was basically an associate producer on this and nothing else. He didn't write or direct it.

Total (declared) budget for the Hunger Games quadrilogy: $493 million. So, rephrase it as "BvS has the budget of about TWO Hunger Games movies put together" and it's accurate.

Even if this movie was a bigger critical/fanboy bomb than it was, there's no way it wasn't going to make a billion dollars. This is BATMAN MEETS SUPERMAN IN LIVE ACTION, PLUS JUSTICE LEAGUE CAMEOS we're talking about here. This isn't a B-list franchise like Fantastic Four, receiving yet another who-asked-for-it reboot after a string of flops. This movie was guaranteed to make money no matter what.

The most annoying part is, there's ways to do that intelligently. Look at High Noon or The Untouchables or even the first Dirty Harry or the first Death Wish, which all actually DEALT WITH the issues brought up by the idea of unlawful violence. Those movies all made it very clear that vigilantism is never 100% justified, that there's always a legitimate argument against it, that the act of engaging in such violence will tarnish the soul of even the most heroic do-gooder. Cobra does none of the above. It tells subtlety and nuance and complexity and ambiguity to all go fuck themselves, while setting up a conga-line of strawmen to knock down. Hell, even First Blood seemed to ultimately preach a message of tolerance, leniency, and pacifism which Cobra actively shits all over. The movie's entire moral argument can be summed up as "The answer to ALL crime is to get some big guy with a big gun to go execute whomever he feels like shooting."

Also, saying "Zack Snyder is simply a worse director than the Russo brothers in practically every category" is hardly some grand contentious statement. Even aside from the magnificence that was The Winter Soldier, the paintball episodes on Community are better than absolutely anything Snyder's ever done. If it were Kenneth Branagh or Peyton Reed or Alan Taylor they brought back to do Civil War then I might be worried, but Disney entrusted this project to very good hands.

Actually, it was a relative failure compared to his other films at that time. It made less than half of what Rambo 2 and Rocky 4 did right beforehand. Heck, adjusted for inflation, it made less than First Blood or Staying Alive. Except for Rhinestone, it was his lowest-drawing movie in five years. (It didn't keep that record for long, Over the Top and Lock Up made even less.) And it seemingly assassinated Sly's ability to have a movie cross the hundred-million mark in domestic sales; he'd done it four times before this, but Cobra started a losing streak in that area which wasn't broken until, of all things, Spy Kids 3.

I got the "giant baby" thought too, that was not a flattering outfit at all. In D'Onofrio's defense, he was used much better in the first season, pretty much everything involving him in S2 leans heavily on the viewer having seen all his stuff from the previous year.

Movies I'm Watching For The First Time, And Am Having Great Difficulty Forcing Myself To Finish: why hello there, Sylvester Stallone's Cobra! This could count as a parody of ultraviolent 80s action flicks, if it didn't take itself so goddamn seriously. I mean, the basic plot of "Sly is a rogue cop who plays by his own rules, and he's going up against an organized army of serial killers" pretty much begs for you to laugh at it. The villains have less motivation than Jason Voorhees, they kill people because... uh... because... well it's really never explained at all. Some kind of apocalyptic religious terrorism bullshit. Of course, this is flatly ignoring the fact that serial killers and terrorists aren't the same thing and have completely different methods and motivations; this dumbass movie blithely assumes that, hey, criminals are criminals, amirite? The mechanics of HOW they do any of this (recruitment, funding, planning, anything ever) are all totally ignored. Also not helping is a shitload of terrible acting: rarely has This Is The Director's Girlfriend been indicated more clearly than the laughably awful line readings from Bridgette Nielsen here (and god-damn but is her "electrocuted poodle" haircut a thing to behold with shock and awe). It might be tolerable if it either treated this material with a wink and a smirk (like Tango & Cash) or at least provided a lot of fun mindless carnage (like Rambo: First Blood Part 2, from the same director as Cobra). But it does neither. All the action scenes are so small and boring, involving only two or three guys going through the apathetic motions, that it feels more like action scenes from any given episode of a cheap cop show from the 70s. And worst of all is how it's clearly meant to be SERIOUS SOCIAL COMMENTARY. Stallone's script just keeps hammering the point of "stupid liberal laws protect criminals and prevent good people from doing anything... so FUCK THE LAW!!!" over and over again. The character of Cobra is a sociopathic creep, a violent fascist who routinely breaks the law whenever he feels like it, bullying and vandalizing and assaulting people for his own amusement. In any realistic movie, he'd be a villain. He only looks mildly "heroic" here because his opposition is so cartoonishly loathesome.

"One thing shouldn't have bothered you because it didn't bother me, and this other thing was half a mistake so clearly I can ignore the dozens of other specific problems you had with the movie!"

Except, while I did admittedly miss some stuff in that second episode, half of your "logical explanations" boiled down to "that just didn't bother me, so why should it bother you?". And I noticed you were remarkably quiet for my complaints about episode 8, most of which were gigantic plot holes for which there were no explicable excuses. That's a hell of a thing to say, coming from a guy who keeps missing things written in plain English in these posts, complaining "But you never ever mentioned X, and you totally believed Y!" when Y was never mentioned but X explicitly was.

Actually, almost, yeah. I was thinking "why is he so CLEAN? He was just in a fucking explosion. He should have suit and dirt and dust all over him." And another thing, for anyone claiming I'm being unfairly nitpicky against a bad movie because of whatever; I did the exact same nitpicking about the Daredevil show over in that thread. And I LIKED that show a lot better than I liked BvS.

I probably COULD list 72 things wrong with Burton's film, but why bother? I liked Batman '89 AS A WHOLE MOVIE much better than I liked Batman VVVVVV Superman, even taking that one issue entire out of the conversation. You keep saying "You only disliked this movie because of ______!" and then keep changing whatever ______ is supposed to be. And I guess you must've missed that three-paragraph-long analysis I did of a killing in The Dark Knight a few pages back when you keep whining that I never say a word about the killing in those movies.

Wait... what? Usually "you have a hard on for ______" means that you really really like whatever ______ is, but you seem to be using it in the opposite way. And even if what you meant to say is "you have a bias against Warner Brothers films", you're flatly wrong again, Niners. I fucking loved The Dark Knight, and still consider it to be one of the greatest comic adaptations of all times. Are we living in an alternate universe where TDK is NOT a Batman movie produced by Warner Bros? Are we living in an alternate universe where The Lego Movie is either 1.NOT a Warner Bros movie featuring Batman, or 2.NOT my favorite movie from that year? Boy, I sure must HATE Warner Bros, since they keep releasing all these other movies that I liked! Same deal with both the Richard Donner Superman movies, I adored those. Hell, I'd argue that Superman Returns and Man of Steel were both overall good flicks. And then there's the Tim Burton movies, produced by WB, which I do still enjoy quite a bit. Most importantly? ALL OF THE ABOVE were better individual films than Batman V Superman was. That's my "bias": I like good movies, and this new one fucking sucked. EDIT: and just for purposes of clarity and full disclosure: yes, there are Warner Bros superhero movies which are WORSE than this one. Batman V Superman is a better film than Superman IV, Batman & Robin, and Catwoman. I'm making very specific distinctions about exactly what I liked and exactly what I didn't. So don't pretend like I'm making "durrr, ALL those movies suck!" broad generalizations. So, are you gonna take back any of your bullshit statement, or are you just gonna keep no-selling all the times I keep proving you wrong?

I think it should've lasted longer. Slam him ten times, rather than five.

I didn't address it, because it made so little sense that I assume I must've missed something. Really, that's all it is? "A bunch of people were shot dead, to frame FUCKING SUPERMAN of having shot them?" That's... astoundingly moronic, even in a movie filled with bad ideas. Gee, if only I'd done that in the post you're criticizing... You are the worst type of "reader". Everyone allows their own personal biases to influence how they enjoy a movie, regardless of what that movie is and regardless of what their biases are. It happens every single time. Objectivity doesn't exist in art. And when the fuck did I say "I don't like this because it's not Marvel"? Or anything which even implied it? Yeah, by all means, feel free to throw around dumb accusations without a single shred of evidence. Come on, find a quote of me ever saying that, I dare you.

I'm about halfway through Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. It's got a kind of inspired gimmick: rework Lovecraft-style horror stories to a setting where the protagonists are mostly fans of HP's writing... and they're all black people in the 1950s, who have to deal with a very different style of horror every day. It's pretty interesting. Honestly, the horror parts are the weakest bits; the most compelling stuff is just dealing with the harsh realities of living under Jim Crow laws.

Is there any kind of "preview post" option at all? I'm having a lot of trouble with quote boxes. It seems like, once you click the "quote" button, the box is permanently there to stay, nothing I try can erase it. The prescribed "CTRL plus right click" does nothing whatsoever. Even worse, the board seems like it permanently keeps a saved draft of any post you start, not ever letting you restart from scratch with a blank reply box.

And just to further illustrate the point that we've seen the Waynes get killed lots and lots of times:

"But other movies made the same mistakes before" and "I'm sure they'll get around to explaining that... eventually..." aren't real answers.

If the Ruffalo movies aren't Hulk movies, then this Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman movie doesn't count as being an individual project for any of them either. Come on. And precisely when did I say I was above nitpicking? Of course some of those items are nitpicks. But not all seventy-two of them.

Okay, looking at it again, I forgot the opening credits featured a lil' montage of backstory. But that's like one minute of footage. That's not the same as restaging the entire "the Waynes go into Crime Alley and both get shot, with Martha's pearls scattering everywhere" scene again, beat by beat. Also: no origin reruns in the Ruffalo movies, so I'm 2.25 out of 3 on that one. He couldn't have figured out a way to fight Zod WITHOUT causing a whole bunch of 9/11s simultaneously? And fuck no, you're crazy for saying it IS similar to what happened in Manhattan with the Avengers. They specifically sent some of their team members on missions to get the civilians out of the area. No tall buildings were utterly demolished. The level of carnage in the two different incidents isn't even close.

Even funnier: NO ORIGIN FOOTAGE WHATSOEVER was shown in the Norton and Ruffalo movies. The Eric Bana one was literally the only time the Hulk's origin has been shown in a theatrical release. So that's a really terrible example to use as an argument of why it's okay to keep reenacting the Wayne murders over and over again.

All me, baby. (The two different times I directly mentioned your name, might be a hint.) All stuff taken directly from the movie. All making total sense. And AxB: point taken, but this version of Lex makes Trump look like Bill Gates or Oprah in comparison. He is SO aggressively antisocial at all times, mumbling and twitching and gibbering like a literal mental patient, that I couldn't believe anyone ever going along with a single word he says.