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.

HER: Artificial Emotional Intelligence

In which I am uncharacteristically honest and sensitive.

Director: Spike Jonze
Writer: Spike Jonze
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Chris Pratt, Olivia Wilde
Runtime: 126 mins.
2013

I try to sound smart on my movie blog. I try to identify and engage with what I deem to be the key aspects of any given movie. I talk about things I know a little bit about, like performance or story. I talk about things I really know nothing about, like sound design or editing or cinematography. I try to be honest. But perhaps more than that I try not to sound stupid or inane.

I do this because I'm afraid of being wrong. That has always been my fear. So I try to make ironclad arguments instead of tossing out a bunch of unsystematic sensory impressions. Sometimes, during the act of watching a movie, I am already formulating what sort of points or narrative I want to craft in a potential future post.

That's probably the right tactic for a movie blog, but it's not the conversation I want to have about Her. The golden rule of criticism should be to approach a piece of art or entertainment on its own terms, and evaluate how successful it is within those parameters. As I was watching Her, it became apparent that the right way to talk about the movie would be to share how it impacted me on a personal level.

AMERICAN HUSTLE: Neither Profundity Nor Moribundity

Director: David O. Russell
Writers: Eric Singer, David O. Russell
Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner, Louis C.K.
Runtime: 138 mins.
2013

American Hustle lives in the endlessly entertaining realm of smart cinema, breezing past clever and falling short of intelligent.  It never even brushes its gaudy sleeves against profound, but the good thing is it never tries.

Our heroes are Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), lovers and small-time con artists who get nabbed by F.B.I. agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper).  They make a deal to participate in a sting that, thanks to DiMaso's wild and dangerous impulses for glory, spirals into a situation too big for our savvy con artists to handle.  Irving's ditzy, manipulative wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) is a wild card who only complicates matters.  Through all of this, the characters struggle to find something real and genuine in love and friendship despite the constant subterfuge.  But the plot isn't really what's important here.