Spent the day at my wife's parents house in the suburbs, and it's always a massive culture shock because they have a television and several hours of each holiday are spent in front of the set.
I've mentioned before that I've seen very, very little tv after 1999 so it's always overwhelming and often stupefying what I see when I'm over there.
Please understand - this is a household whose ultimate favorite works of cinema are Waterworld and Independence Day. (I am being totally serious.)
So tonight's film was Batman vs Superman, and holy shnikies was it a trainwreck. From the 45 minutes I was able to endure, there were several mind-bending flaws with the picture.
First off, who the hell thought it was a good idea to cast Ben Affleck as Batman?! Or frankly, any of the rest of the cast? Was this a direct-to-video sequel in the franchise? The acting was appallingly overdramatic. The cinematography endlessly jerky handheld nonsense which nauseated the viewer more than it created any sort of suspense. And the storyline was painfully contrived to the point of being comical, (no pun intended).
Each of the scenes where Bruce was using his supposed "advanced" computer system was baffling in that his user interface is apparently trapped in 1996 a la
Hackers. And why the hell did Alfred slam down a newspaper headline in front of Bruce to communicate the public perception of Batman? How is a newspaper going to reveal anything of value beyond what his "incredibly advanced" computer has already told him? Is it just the trite old spoonfeeding of familiar memes to the viewer, like using the stock audio ringing of a land line phone in a contemporary film?
And who the smeg cares what the Daily Planet has to say in 2016? The largest news conglomerate in a metropolis like Metropolis would simply be parroting a feed from the AP / Pentagon - why do they have a staff of reporters?
And is Metropolis really a convenient 20-minute drive on the freeway from Gotham? And yet this is the first time any socio-cultural interaction has transpired between to the two internationally-lauded superheroes of their respective zip codes?
Jesse Eisenberg!? (That's really all I have to say there.)
And who said, "we've got two superheroes... why not throw in a
third?"
And why did the film score consist of an endless barrage of gothic choral vocals and drumming with no discernible cadence or variation? It's essentially keyboard mashing on a sampler with zero attention paid to plot or characterization.
I know I'm a bit of an outsider here, so I'm probably missing some fundamental social element which justifies this aberration of cinema. I just sincerely hope that this is a fluke of a picture and that the world actually demands something less... sh***y from their media.
