First, the good news… Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice isn’t a total disaster.
Even as a moderate fan of Man of Steel, every new bit of overshare for this movie cranked out by the Warner Bros. marketing team over the last year caused my expectations to drop lower and lower to the point that even a passable film would be considered a success.
It’s an ambitious movie and there are a number of good parts, but to be perfectly blunt, I’m not sure it even met that bar.
Some positives: Ben Affleck is an excellent Bruce Wayne and a pretty good Batman, and I think his character is (mostly) handled pretty well. He has the most fleshed-out motivation of any character in the film, though that isn’t saying much. The first scene in the film – which of course, you’ve already seen in the trailers – immerses us in Bruce Wayne’s perspective during Superman’s battle with Zod from the end of Man of Steel, and it is that point of view which shapes most of the film. It’s clear why he doesn’t like Superman, and when it comes down to their titular fight, Batman’s ability to hold his own and even defeat Superman is plausible, if largely cribbed from Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns, Pt II”. This film also contains one of the best Batman fight sequences ever made, so that’s a pretty big win.
Jeremy Irons is also excellent as Alfred Pennyworth, Gal Gadot is a strong choice as Wonder Woman, and Amy Adams continues to make a ballsy Lois Lane. Overall I think the performances and casting in this film are pretty solid. The problems with this film, much like with Man of Steel, really don’t come down to casting and I can genuinely say that I’m interested to see the upcoming solo films featuring Batman & Wonder Woman.
I’m probably in the minority here, but I even like Jesse Eisenberg’s largely unhinged take on Lex Luthor. Apart from the complete mystery that is his motivation for a lot of his specific actions, he is at the very least really good at being a villain.
Director, 
Though I normally would reserve my film reviews for SmashCut Culture, I recently got asked to do an in-depth review of Straight Outta Compton for 
American Sniper is one of perhaps three films* that I’ve seen all year which profoundly capture the pure essence of an individual.
Tim Burton’s latest film, “Big Eyes”, was released on Christmas day this year without much of a marketing push or fanfare, and while I had originally planned to write about the Sony hack this week, that’s all pretty well-traversed territory at this point, and since “Big Eyes” is a film that I suspect few people have even really heard about and aren’t already planning to see, I thought I would take this opportunity to encourage others to check it out.
fact and fiction; and it often centers around the contradiction of outsiders struggling to find their place in more conservative societies. Margaret Keane is a woman who bravely left a controlling husband and moved to San Francisco with her young daughter to become a painter in an era when women simply didn’t do that kind of thing, yet she ended up producing hundreds of pieces of art under another man’s name because “nobody would buy art painted by a woman”. Also a man of jarring contradictions, Walter seemed to have no talent as an artist, yet presented himself as a trained and successful painter to San Francisco’s rising fine art scene. Perhaps ironically, his lies and guile ended up selling countless originals and prints of his wife’s work when few galleries even wanted it by passing it off as his own. In a way, the pair was perfect for each other, and had it not been for the fraud it’s likely that no one would ever have heard of Margaret Keane.
I love science fiction and I love comic-book movies, and this movie is both. I love 
We meet 14-year old Hiro Hamada (
For me, though… The way that the evil businessman trope is so clumsily pushed the into the first act was really an early signal of a script filled with heavy-handed cliches, just like the dozens of bits of flatly expository dialogue.
ReasonTV put out a great short interview with Charles Brownstein, the head of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund that they shot at the San Diego Comic Con. The whole interview is worth a look, but the key takeaway is that comic books are, today, just as they were in the early years of their existence, among the most censored and challenged forms of expression. Two comic book series, the bizarre and often hilarious fantasy “Bone” by Jeff Smith, and of all things, “Captain Underpants” by Dav Pilkey, which actually won a Disney Adventures Kid’s Choice award in 2006, are among theg the top 10 most challenged books.
Facing a wave of attacks from the government, the comic book industry took a cue from the Motion Picture Association of America, and created its own preemptive censorship board known as the 
It’s important to understand here that while it was technically the industry “self-censoring”, it did so purely as a result of repeated threats from a government which had by that point a well-established history of censoring “undesireable” speech in numerous forms – a government, it should be remembered, that is legally constrained by the 1st Amendment, which expressly prohibits the creation of laws abridging the freedom of individual speech, or of the press.
The restrictions on comic books, films, and other entertainment media are one small piece of a very scary picture where the government of the country which is supposed to be the beacon of freedom for the rest of the world is continually grabbing more and more authority to control what people say. A world where ideas and art cannot be shared if a vocal minority of nannies deems those ideas “unsuitable” is a world headed for collapse.
I am biased towards one of these perspectives and could easily argue that we are already moving toward the future it depicts, and that the other worldview is critically flawed and built on a systemic rejection of reality, but I won’t go into which is which, as that would actually step on the broader point I want to make here.
In my experience, non-liberal cultural critics spend a lot of time complaining about how few works of art, particularly film & television productions, express ideas that align with their worldviews. And they’re right. Most producers and artists in Hollywood don’t really like many ideas that fall outside the narrow confines of cocktail party-progressivism. Movies with conservative or even libertarian themes don’t get made that often.
It is set in a society modeled right out of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”. Everything is peaceful and serene; there is no crime, violence, or poverty; and overtly ‘happy’ citizens go about their routines.
And it’s not just the script… This movie should have presented the film-makers with a ton of opportunities show the audience what it’s like to experience powerful new emotions after a lifetime of monotony, but none of the aesthetic choices do those moments any justice at all. Throughout the film we go from black & white to color, and the music & sound design go from virtually non-existent and grow increasingly prominent, but given that we’ve already seen this technique in films like The Wizard of Oz and Pleasantville, it’s not remotely innovative stuff.
When I first heard that Marvel was contemplating a 
Wit, humor, and directorial vision have always been Gunn’s strong-points as a writer and director, and it’s exactly what Marvel needed to launch a title like Guardians.
After seeing the film, however, I was tremendously disappointed. My suspension of disbelief was thoroughly destroyed early in the film and simply never returned. Consequently, I spent the baffling majority of the film wondering why things were happening on screen. It’s really hard to enjoy a cinematic experience when you are shaking your head with incredulity the entire movie.
Great stories can have the most fantastical spaceships, amazing technology, superhuman abilities and magical powers, impressive landscapes and strange alien beasts. They can – and perhaps should – completely abandon anything known to mankind.
By the end of the run, I’ll have racked up about 4,000 miles traveling through 9 different states. I’ll have completed production work on 2 major events; shot everything and begun the editing process for a biographical video; filmed 3 more interviews for an in-progress documentary; and screened my latest film, “Locked Out” at a Landmark theater in Atlanta and the Tribeca Film Center in New York City.
The film opens with Steve Rogers, aka Captain America (