BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE - Badman v Pooperman

Director: Zack Snyder
Writers: Chris Terrio, David S. Goyer
Cast: Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck, Jessie Eisenberg, Amy Adams, Gal Gadot, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Holly Hunter, Scoot McNairy
Runtime: 151 mins.
2016

It's bad. Wow, it's bad. It's bad, boring, and bloated.

The real kicker is that we've been hearing about this movie ceaselessly for three years. All that time, all that buildup, just for a roasted turd of a final product. Not that it ever at any point in the development process looked at all promising. First it was the terrible idea to crib from the infamous graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns for a movie that is supposed to kick off your extended superhero universe. Returns is a mythology-killing work, not a mythology-building work. That's the point. It is the Batman and Superman stories taken to their darkest and most brutally honest conclusions. It is an evisceration of the superhero genre. How could you possibly think it would be a good idea to use that story as a scaffolding to introduce a world of superheroes who we are supposed to support as superheroes? It's almost as if Snyder and co. read The Dark Knight Returns once or twice and totally ignored every single theme, both textual and subtextual. They just thought it was cool that Batman took on Superman.

Then we got the godawful title. That alone was a harbinger of doom. The cluttered grotesquerie of it screams of corporate committee decisionmaking. The title cannot function as anything but a parody of itself. It's so bad that I find it embarrassing to say out loud. Every time I've talked to people about the film this week, the title has caught in my throat. I've just said "Batman versus Superman" or "the Batman and Superman movie." I cannot bring myself to say "Batman vee Superman" let alone the hideous appendage at the end.

GONE GIRL: Gone in 149 Minutes

In which Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry are both cast in a thriller for the first and last time ever.

Director: David Fincher
Writer: Gillian Flynn
Cast: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry
Runtime: 149 mins.
2014

David Fincher feeds on twisty structures and mind games. It's his lifeforce. His body of work is one sinister game after another: Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, House of Cards, and the most cheekily named The Game. He thrives on these house-of-mirror thriller structures, generally at the expense of real, convincing, or meaningful characters. Go ahead and try to name one truly memorable character from Fincher's filmography--and before you say Tyler Durden, Frank Underwood, or Mark Zuckerberg, let me add one more caveat: a memorable character who isn't a sociopath. The list runs thin, doesn't it?

Fincher has made a career of taking trashy source materials/ideas and elevating them to the level of Serious Cinema. To be clear, I love trashy stories. They don't have to be mere entertainment, although they can be. They can also be fodder for all sorts of interesting intellectual interpretations. Fincher clearly believes this, and he has always walked the fine line between giving genre fiction the attention of craft that he feels it deserves, and taking it all rather too seriously to the point of losing perspective. His best work tends to be the former, and if it can be said that any of his films have "failed," they belong to the latter category.

Lucky for us, Gone Girl features both a twisty-turny thriller structure, and characters who are designed more to be avatars than believable people--a Fincher special! Double lucky for us, Gone Girl may be a serious affair, but it never mistakes itself for what it's not. This movie is a thriller all the way down.