Tag: Superman

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Film Features Film/TV

A Few Points on Zack Snyder’s Justice League

[ed note: In 2017, I structured my review of Justice League as “a series of bullet points presented without any overall organizing principle.” Keeping with the spirit of form following function, this review of the Snyder Cut of Justice League will be presented as a much longer series of slightly more organized bullet points.] 

  • Close your eyes. Envision Superman. What color is his costume? Is it blue, with a red cape and yellow trim? Wrong. It’s black, with black highlights, like Batman.
  • The S? Gray. 
Henry Cavill as Superman in Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
  • In 2017, when the original Justice League was in post-production, director Zack Snyder had just turned in a cut of the film he called “90% done” when his daughter Autumn died. Snyder took a leave of absence, and Avengers director Joss Whedon stepped in to finish the film. Following the orders of Warner Bros. execs who called the Snyder Cut “unwatchable,” Whedon rewrote the script and did some reshoots to bring it in under two hours. The resulting film grossed $657 million, and yet is considered a box office bomb. 
  • Last week, a Baltimore businessman offered to buy Tribune Publishing, the nation’s third largest newspaper chain, for $650 million. 
  • Disappointed that the film starring Batman (Ben Affleck), Superman (Henry Cavill), The Flash (Ezra Miller) , Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) grossed only enough money to run the entire United States government from 1790-1836, DC comics fans on Reddit started a campaign to “release the Snyder Cut!”
  • Historical budget numbers are readily available online, proving that the internet is a glorious wonder for which we should all be thankful. 
Ciaran Hinds as Steppenwolf
  • The villain of the original Justice League is Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds), an utterly forgettable soldier in the army of the planet Apokolips. His master Darkseid (Ray Porter) is a new addition in the Snyder Cut. His inclusion helps the plot make slightly more sense. 
  • Darkseid, the biggest big bad in the DC universe, bears a striking resemblance to Thanos, the biggest big bad in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 
  • Maybe it’s the other way around. 
  • The character design tends to be both super busy and dull at the same time. It’s actually kind of impressive. 
Ben Affleck experiencing angst as Batman.
  • After a pressure campaign lasting years, the online Snyder Cut agitators got their way. Warner Bros. greenlit a restoration project, which eventually consumed an estimated $70 million, proving once and for all that the internet was a mistake. 
  • The running time for Zack Snyder’s Justice League is four hours and two minutes. Other films that break the four hour mark include Shoah, the 1985 Holocaust documentary that runs 9 hours, 26 minutes; OJ: Made in America, the seven-hour ESPN documentary series which had a limited theatrical run in 2016; Carlos, the 2010 biopic of terrorist Carlos the Jackal, which clocked in at 5 hours, 39 minutes; the 1927 silent epic Napoleon which takes 5 hours, 32 minutes to meet its Waterloo; and Sleep, which is just footage of Andy Warhol’s boyfriend sleeping for 5 hours, 21 minutes. 
  • You think I won’t keep wasting your time with random facts I found on the internet? Well, I sat through the damn Snyder Cut, so buckle up, motherfuckers! 
  • The record for the longest film ever made is held by Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson. The sole pubic screening of their film Logistics at the House of Culture in Stockholm lasted from December 1, 2012 to January 6, 2013. 
  • What sets Justice League apart from those other extremely long films is that, as we enter hour four, we learn that Bruce Wayne was traumatized by witnessing the death of his parents, which later caused him to dress like a bat and fight crime. These stunning facts have never before been revealed in a film, with the exception of Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), Batman Forever (1995), Batman & Robin (1997), Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Batman v. Superman: The Dawn Of Justice (2016). 
  • The revelation about Batman’s parents comes via a conversation with The Joker (Jared Leto) during a dream sequence epilogue which has nothing to do Steppenwolf, Darkseid, or anything, really. I have no idea why it’s there, except to give Jared Leto cocaine money.
Ezra Miller as The Flash
  • Here is a partial list of scenes shot in slow motion during this four-hour, two-minute movie:
    • A close up of Bruce Wayne’s razor while he’s shaving 
    • Aquaman drinking whiskey on a pier
    • A man digging a hole. 
    • A woman looking at The Flash.
    • The Flash moving super-fast.
    • The Flash staring at a girl.
    • The Flash staring at a hot dog.
    • Cyborg playing football. (There’s quite a bit of this.) 
    • Cyborg looking sad because his father isn’t there to watch him play football. 
    • Steppenwolf picking up a handful of dirt. 
    • Superman going super-fast
    • A Humvee flying through the air
    • Cyborg’s father (Joe Morton) disintegrating. (This one worked.) 
    • A shell being ejected from the Batmobile’s guns. 
    • The heroes riding into the final battle with Steppenwolf. (This one kinda worked, too, even if we’ve seen it many times before, such as in Joss Whedon’s Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron.) 
    • The Batmobile exploding. 
    • The Superfriends just kind of standing there, not looking particularly happy, or sad, or anything, really, despite the fact that they’ve just won the final battle and saved the world. (The film still has more than 30 minutes to go at this point.) 
Jason Momoa as Aquaman, aka Moist Batman
  • Snyder’s direction of actors is indifferent, at best. Everyone seems to be instructed to glower grimly as if every trip to the Gotham DMV is the Battle of Gettysburg. In other words, he tells everyone to be more like Batman. This is another example of Creeping Batmanization. Wonder Woman? Girl Batman. Cyborg? Black robot Batman. Aquaman? Moist Batman. Superman? Super-Batman. The only character who doesn’t act like Batman is The Flash, and he is constantly shamed for it.
  • I don’t know if Jared Leto does cocaine. 
  • The big revelation in Superman v Batman: The Dawn of Justice is that both Superman and Batman’s mothers were named Martha. In the Snyder Cut, we find that Martha Kent was actually J’onn J’onzz, aka the Martian Manhunter, who was my favorite character in the 2001 animated TV series Justice League, which is superior to both cuts of this film in every conceivable way. 
  • GOAT Batman movie? Mask of the Phantasm. 
  • The excessive length of the film is a plus for HBO Max, the streaming service which debuted the Snyder Cut. Streamers value continued engagement above all other metrics, so the longer the better, as far as they’re concerned. 
  • In the time it takes to watch the Snyder Cut once, you could watch Mask of the Phantasm, which is also on HBO Max, 3.16 times. 
  • Instead of a standard HD 16:9 aspect ratio, or a widescreen 2.76:1 aspect ratio, the Snyder Cut is presented in an old-fashioned, square 4:3 aspect ratio. This is just pointless and pretentious enough that I like it. So, kudos to you, Zack Snyder.
  • $370 million, the total amount of money spent on the original Justice League and the Snyder Cut, is greater than the 2020 budget of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, combined.  
Don’t make Superman angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
  • In my original review of Justice League, I wrote: “The high-functioning sociopaths running the Hollywood studios are uniquely unsuited to making good superhero movies, because they fundamentally cannot grasp what is appealing about a character motivated by pure altruism.” This remains true. 
  • Snyder and writer Chris Terrio simply do not understand Superman. He is an avatar of the benevolent protector, and a fundamentally nice guy. It’s not edgy or insightful to point out that an invulnerable, super-strong alien who can fly and shoot freakin’ heat rays from his eyes would eventually come to view the humans it was supposed to protect as puny, flawed, contemptible things. That’s the purpose of Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, which Snyder adapted for the big screen in 2009. There is a moral dimension to Superman. He is so powerful, he will always win any fight. So the key to writing a good Superman story is to put him in the horns of a moral dilemma. He must choose the lesser of two evils, or sacrifice Lois Lane to save Metropolis, or something like that. Superman’s purpose is not to be a badass, it’s to explore the nature of “goodness.” 
  • Henry Cavill remains the worst actor to ever play Superman. Give me drunk, chubby George Reeves any day. 
  • Don’t get me started on Lois Lane (Amy Adams). What have they done to you? 
  • Watchmen was the last Zack Snyder film I enjoyed. I even bought the Blu-Ray. 
  • Ben Affleck, who got all swole to play Batman, portrayed George Reeves in the 2006 film Hollywoodland. He was good in that film. He sucks as Batman. 
Ray Porter as Darkseid.
  • Remember that commercial for the video game Gears of War where the soldier dressed all in black is running through a dark, ruined city and fighting monsters, which are also black, set to a slow, romantic cover of Tears for Fears “Mad World”? Imagine watching that at half speed on a loop for half a work day. 
  • The Snyder Cut might make a good screensaver, except the blank stripes on either side of the screen due to the 4:3 aspect ratio would eventually lead to visible burn-in lines on your monitor. So it fails at that, too. 
  • When the Superfriends gather in Superman’s spaceship to use Kryptonian technology and a little Flash razzmatazz to bring Clark Kent back from the dead, the spaceship’s A.I. begs them to stop. In that moment, I felt kinship with the Kryptonian A.I.
  • The Wonder Twins, shapeshifting aliens from the 1970s Superfriends cartoon, are, sadly, nowhere to be seen. Come on, Zack! I want to see an eight-armed Arcturian space platypus solve a problem with a jackhammer made of ice, which is actually her brother!
  • RELEASE THE WONDER TWINS CUT!
Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman
  • Writer Chris Terrio, who penned Batman v Superman, Justice League, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, is the greatest living example of the mediocre white guy who keeps failing up. 
  • Here’s a short list of scenes Justice League rips off from other films: 
    • Joker’s bank heist from The Dark Knight. 
    • The lighting of the warning beacons of Gondor from Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    • The cavalry charge from the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers. Twice. 
    • The climax of the 1978 Superman, where Supes flies faster than the speed of light to travel backwards in time and change history to save the world. (The Flash does it.) 
  • Let’s say you’re a film director, and you want to portray The Flash traveling at superhuman speed. You would show The Flash operating at normal speed, while the world around him is moving in slow motion, because that’s how things would look to The Flash, right? WRONG. The correct answer is that The Fastest Man Alive is depicted in slow motion, while the rest of the world is at, like, super slow motion. That’s why Zack Snyder is worshipped as a genius on the internet, and you are not. 
  • The boneheaded choice of casting Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor in Man of Steel still haunts us a decade later.
Ray Fisher as Cyborg
  • I’m not sure how he does it, but Snyder manages to ruin the sole good scene in the original Justice League, where Cyborg and The Flash dig up Clark Kent’s dead body in the middle of the night. 
  • At one point, Cyborg’s father is hassled by agents of the Office of Secret Intelligence from The Venture Bros. 
  • I’d watch a Cyborg movie starring Ray Fisher—provided it was less than two hours long.
Does that look like a trident to you?
  • After four years and $370 million, Aquaman’s trident STILL. HAS. FIVE. POINTS. Not three points, which is what differentiates a trident from a pitchfork. Five (5). All hail Aquaman, who rules as rightful King of Atlantis with the symbol of the seas, his mighty PITCHFORK! 
  • Credit where credit is due: the executives at Warner Bros. who called the Snyder Cut “unwatchable” were absolutely right.
Categories
Music Record Reviews

In Dolemite Is My Name Score, Scott Bomar Puts His Weight On It

“You’ve been blessed by Moses.” Those were the words uttered by none other than Isaac Hayes when he visited tracking sessions for the soundtrack to Hustle and Flow.  While that Craig Brewer film led to Three 6 Mafia winning an Oscar in 2006, much of the picture’s music marked the breakout of local producer, composer, and bassist Scott Bomar, and it was during his sessions that Moses descended.

Now, with Bomar’s soundtrack to Brewer’s latest, Dolemite Is My Name, that blessing has come to fruition. As Bomar recently told Variety, “I would say any Memphis influence that’s in the music is through the influence of the film scores that Isaac Hayes did. Isaac…was a very big influence and mentor to Craig and I both. I feel like that blessing has continued into this project, because he would have really loved this. We use three of the musicians on the score who were in his group who played on the scores to Shaft, Tough Guys and Truck Turner: Willie Hall (on drums), Lester Snell (on keys) and Michael Toles (on guitar).”
Courtesy Memphis Music Hall of Fame

Scott Bomar & Don Bryant

Bomar has always had impeccable instincts in choosing his players, as with the globe-trotting Bo-Keys, who purvey classic soul with front men like Percy Wiggins and Don Bryant. Some of those players overlap in this project, though there are some other cameos as well: actor Craig Robinson, regional blues lifer Bobby Rush, Beale Street royalty Blind Mississippi Morris, and trombonist Fred Wesley, who played with James Brown for many years, also make appearances.

Needless to say, this is one funky, soulful soundtrack, a veritable encyclopedia of 70s motifs and riffs. Wah-wah guitar, clavinet, organ, and punchy horns abound, all grounded by the rock-solid rhythms of Bomar and drummer Willie Hall. Having said that, many imaginative flourishes abound. “Pur Your Weight On It,” for example, employs some period-authentic synthesizer and unorthodox, high register bass notes to disarming effect. The campy “Ballad of a Boy and Girl,” sung by Eddie Murphy and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, makes for perhaps the most powerful use of kazoo in any major motion picture soundtrack.  And, as with so many classic Isaac Hayes tracks, the heavy funk is decorated with some gorgeous orchestral embellishments.

Beyond Isaac Hayes, amidst all the pitch-perfect funkisms, there are some unexpected influences on this music. As Brewer told Variety, “I told Scott Bomar that I wanted him to treat the score for Dolemite Is My Name as if it were a little bit of like a superhero movie. I wanted there to be a “Rudy theme,” just like there would be a Luke Skywalker or Captain America theme.”

Scott Bomar

Bomar adds, “The theme to Superman was definitely a reference for this film. With the melody that we call the Rudy theme, the first time we hear it is in the beginning of the film where he’s creating the character and experimenting with the comedy routine; by the end of it, with the music building, he’s pulling a wig out of a box in the closet, and when the wig is revealed, that’s where we first hear this theme. It’s used a few times throughout the film, and then the last time we hear it is at the end when they’re going to the premiere; when Rudy steps out of the limo, that’s where the Rudy theme is fully developed. And, definitely, the reference there was the theme from Superman.”

Aside from the two tracks sung by Robinson, the track by Bobby Rush perfectly captures the gritty roadhouse blues vibe, fired by his uncanny delivery, and Blind Mississippi Morris, accompanied by Jason Freeman, brings things down to earth as the album’s closer. All in all, it’s a grand survey of the sounds that make this place burn with musical passions, expertly curated and assembled by one of the city’s greatest contemporary producers.

Hear Scott Bomar speak with author Robert Gordon about this and other music he’s created, tonight at the Memphis Music Listening Party, Thursday, January 30, 7 pm, at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library. Free.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot

Tonight at Malco Ridgeway, Indie Memphis presents Filmworker, the story of Leon Vitali. An actor who landed the part of Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, Vitali gave up a promising acting career to become Stanley Kubrick’s right hand man through the 1970s, 80s, and 1990s. The documentary is a story of creativity’s highs and lows, and a warts-and-all account of the making of some of the greatest films ever. Tickets are going fast for this one. They are available over on the Indie Memphis website.

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot

Meanwhile, over at the Paradiso, there’s a 25th anniversary screening of The Sandlot, a cult coming-of-age film about a young boy who moves to Los Angeles and wants to learn to play baseball.

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (2)

On Thursday at the Paradiso, there’s a filmed version of a Broadway musical version of a film: Newsies.

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (3)

This week, the Orpheum Theatre’s Summer Movie Series hits a trio of high notes. First on Friday is the all-time classic The Wizard of Oz. If your kids have never seen it, they need to. If you haven’t seen it in a while, it richly rewards repeated viewings. If you don’t know anything about it, educate yourself with this trailer:

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (4)

Once you’ve gotten your fix of Judy Garland fighting witches, head on over to the Midnight at the Studio, where Mike McCarthy is presenting one of the most unlikely onscreen love stories ever made, Harold and Maude. The film about a May-December romance between a young pessimist and an old optimist plays at the witching hour on both Friday and Saturday.

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (5)

Saturday night, The Orpheum returns with a sorely needed double feature for our superhero-obsessed times. At 5 PM, it’s Superman. Richard Donner’s 1978 film is a tour de force of pre-CGI special effects. Even 40 years and literally hundred of superhero movies later, no actors have come close to either Christopher Reeve’s performance as Superman or the recently departed Margo Kidder’s turn as Lois Lane.

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (6)

Then, after you freshen your soda and popcorn, The Orpheum presents Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. Often considered the first modern superhero movie, its success in 1989 was by no means a sure thing. That’s why Warner Brothers attached their biggest musical star to do the soundtrack. It doesn’t get much attention now, but “Batdance” was Prince’s fourth song to hit #1 on the Billboard pop charts, the R&B charts, and the dance charts all at the same time. Check out this batshit crazy video, directed by Purple Rain helmer Albert Magnoli.

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (7)

See you at the cinema! 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

The problem with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is right there in the title.

Granted, there are a lot of problems with Zack Snyder’s $250 million epic of super conflict, but the biggest one is that DC and Warner Bros. have tried to mash two films into one. The first film is Batman v Superman: Batman (Ben Affleck) and Superman (Henry Cavill) are set on a collision course by the machinations of Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg). The second film is Dawn of Justice — Batman discovers the existence of hidden “metahumans,” and gets the idea of uniting them into a super team — a “Justice League,” if you will — to protect the world from extraterrestrial threats. Both plots have the potential of forming the spine of a good movie, but, in a cowardly move that is all too typical of contemporary corporate filmmaking, the producers have tried to make a movie that is all things to all people and delivered a soggy mess.

Henry Cavill

Batman and Superman are supposed to be two very different characters. Batman is a brooding, tortured soul haunted by the loss of his parents. Superman’s disposition is sunny, optimistic, and virtuous, the result of some exceptional child rearing by Ma and Pa Kent in Smallville. Ben Affleck does a pretty good job as Batman/Bruce Wayne — at least he’s no George Clooney. Henry Cavill, on the other hand, plays Superman as a brooding, tortured soul, haunted in his dreams by the loss of his father (Kevin Costner) and the deaths of innocents in the climatic battle of Man of Steel. This isn’t Batman v Superman. It’s Batman v Batman. But the biggest miscalculation is Jesse Eisenberg playing Lex Luthor as a cross between Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and a twitchy, 12 Monkeys Brad Pitt, when he should have been portrayed as a megalomaniacal Elon Musk by someone other than Eisenberg. There’s more than a whiff of Heath Ledger’s Joker in this Luthor, another symptom of Batman Poisoning.

Ben Affleck

The women fare a little better. Amy Adams is inoffensive as Lois Lane, but she’s wearing the same grim countenance as everyone in this dark nightmare. When she and Cavill share the screen, there’s no hint of the explosive chemistry between Margot Kidder and Christopher Reeve that propelled the Richard Donner Superman. Gal Gadot makes a big impression as Wonder Woman, but there’s simply no reason for her to be introduced in this super mixture rather than in her own headlining picture. In the post-Katniss Everdeen era, there’s no excuse for Wonder Woman to play third fiddle.

Snyder’s direction is a cavalcade of bad decisions, beginning in the opening sequence with the baffling notion that we needed to see Bruce Wayne’s parents die again, when the second sequence, where we see the battle between Superman and General Zod (Michael Shannon) from Bruce Wayne’s point of view, is so much stronger. Multiple dream sequences and momentum-killing digressions, including one trip into a parallel universe, pad out the running time to a grueling 151 minutes. Snyder’s good at composing an interesting image, and the top-billed Bats/Supes throwdown delivers the goods before its emotion is dispelled by the completely unnecessary team up with Wonder Woman to fight Kryptonian mutant Doomsday.

To be fair to Snyder, who has produced one of the greatest comic book movies in 2009’s Watchmen adaptation, Batman films have been overstuffed messes since Tim Burton left the franchise. There hasn’t been a decent Superman movie since the Carter administration, and the decision to glom the Justice League origin story onto the Batman v Superman story probably came from the corporate level. But none of that excuses the fact that this film is just no fun. DC vs. Marvel is the closest thing to a sports rivalry in the geek world, and while DC fans are still showing up in droves, they now know what it feels like when their team is in a rebuilding year.

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

When Dave Brown Met Batman.

It’s WMC weatherman  and wrestling host Dave Brown’s last day on the job. He’ll be missed for many reasons. In addition to weather reporting he was a disc jockey, and hosted local TV shows like Dialing for Dollars. But this is how your Pesky Fly chooses to remember him— moderating a squabble between Jerry Lawler and Adam West.   

When Dave Brown Met Batman.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly On The Wall: Awkward Superheroes and Candy

Super Awkward

I really can’t show you the entire photo that a WREG reporter tweeted last week from a charity 5K. As they say on the internet, it’s just NSFW. I can, however, show you the top half of the photo and tell you just enough about what you’re not seeing to make squeamish readers really wish I hadn’t.

As you can see, Melissa Moon had her photo taken with Superman, Spider-Man, and Batman impersonators. Who wouldn’t, right? Well, judging by the uncropped R-rated version of the photo, which is floating around the internet, if you really need to see it, Spidey and Bats both seem to have forgotten their underoos and are going “commando.” Insert your own Peter Parker joke here.

Sweet Adventures

A recent Commercial Appeal feature spotlighting Mayor A C Wharton’s “Blueprint for Prosperity” yielded this charming anecdote from the Whitehaven Christmas parade. Once upon a time Wharton was riding in a convertible through the streets of Whitehaven tossing individually wrapped pieces of candy.

“I don’t want no damn candy. I want a job,” one woman called out, causing the mayor to think. “We’ve been throwing them candy,” he was quoted as saying. “What they want to do is to be able to buy their own candy.”