TV/Movies Megathread

[Ideologue]

Watched The Dark Knight again.  Every time I watch the first two hours or so, I love it more and more; and then Dent gets his face burned off and the movie turns into the dumbest possible version of itself at express speed.  It amazes me that people are able to take the shit that goes down in the last half hour as extremely seriously as they did, and I imagine still do.  Sure, it's good at manipulating the emotions and has all that morality play shit that people were really into in 2008, but just look at it objectively.

First, it features the well-rendered but hilariously inappropriate zombification of Aaron Eckhart--alongside his incredibly bizarre failure to act as if he's in any kind of pain.  Then there's the Joker's turn to straight-up omnipotence, with the controlled demolition of a hospital that no doubt took weeks and hundreds of person-hours in real life to set up, yet is accomplished in the film by a gang of street crazies under the nose of increased security.  Finally, there's the questionable idea that anyone is going to buy the notion that Batman decided, a year in, to start murdering apparently random people with guns (because it totally wasn't Harvey Dent!).  Stuff like this would never amount to problem in the Burton and Schumacher pictures, but that's because those were self-evident cartoons, rather than conscious pomposities.

Still a pretty great movie though.  It just flies right off the rails because Chris Nolan continually loses his sense of proportion.

[Syt]

Germany and Austria are quite disappointing since they used to spearhead the movement with Zweikanalton.

Austrian TV does it for some series, and then only on the public channels. Commercial TV never does it. And for movies - Swiss TV seems to offer original audio. Austrian state TV will rather use the second audio channel for Dolby sound (as opposed to the stereo sound standard). As I was reminded again yesterday when I noticed "X-Men - First Class", which I hadn't seen yet, was on. Which prompted me to opt for Road House instead.

[Eddie Teach]

Stuff like this would never amount to problem in the Burton and Schumacher pictures, but that's because those were self-evident cartoons, rather than conscious pomposities.

The fact that it lets you forget it's a comic book movie at times doesn't mean you should overthink it.

[celedhring]

I agree that the last 30 minutes or so of The Dark Knight aren't the strongest of the pic - the whole business with the boats is a bit forced and the hostage scene isn't the greatest either - but it's still clearly the best comic-book picture ever made, imho.

[Ideologue]

I don't think it's that clear at all.  Watchmen, Thor, Batman '89, Dredd, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Batman Returns, Kick-Ass, Spider-Man... all significantly better to my mind (and I've seen all of them recently enough to make a direct comparison).  If not for the mishandling of Bane and the consequent reduction of class warfare to background scenery, DKR would've been better too.

Iron Man, Mystery Men, and (maybe) Man of Steel are probably better too (though I've noticed something really weird about Robert Downey performances--I find them incredibly enjoyable in the moment, yet simply stop caring about them the minute the movie's over).  I'd bet an Internet dollar X-Men: Days of Future Past is better, but I guess I'll see in a few hours.

And does The LEGO Movie count?

(If it's not superhero films but films adapted from comics, I'd add Road to Perdition to the "better than" list too.  There's probably some others I'm forgetting, too--and unfortunately, I still haven't seen A History of Violence, which I know is just unforgiveable. )

[Ideologue]

Apropos of little, I really need to see Green Lantern and Ang Lee's Hulk too.  I doubt the former is better--I doubt it's even remotely good, really--but the latter could be.  Then I would have seen all the major ones.

Actually, I guess I would also need to see Daredevil, Elektra, and the Ghost Rider and Punisher flicks to get to a full 100% for major DC/Marvel superhero films.

[celedhring]

Man, I could give you the benefit of the doubt in some of the films you cite but... Man of Steel? Really? It was the bad boring version of a Nolan morality play superhero film, you can't prefer it to the good version of a Nolan superhero morality play film.

Ang Lee's The Hulk is fantastically dull. Again it suffers from the need to "elevate" the material with faux-freudianism and forgetting about the actual entertainment.

[Syt]

I've watched Watchmen again recently. It's still the best possible adaptation, I guess, without turning it into a mini series.

My two favorite bits: the opening credits sequence, and the really good soundtrack (except for the selection of "Hallelujah" for the love scene).

Something that strikes me as unlikely, though - and that's a problem I had with the comic, too - is the Comedian cracking up after he discovers Veidt's plan. Considering what we see him do during his "career", and his acceptance that the world will blow itself up anyways, this seems rather weird.

[celedhring]

My problem with Watchmen is that I don't think it can be adapted successfully to the screen without massively changing it. It's too long, too self referential and very dated (in the sense that it came out in the 80s and you lose a lot without the late Cold War hysteria, not that it hasn't aged well).

One of those things that are a too good expression of the artistic possibilities of its original medium in order to adapt it faithfully to another.

[Syt]

Oh agreed - I'm not against making changes when transferring material from one medium to another, if it's beneficial to the final result. Which is why I said "the best possible adaptation".

It's a very far cry from other Alan Moore adaptations (esp. From Hell or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which were almost unrecognizable in movie form).

[frunk]

I agree that the last 30 minutes or so of The Dark Knight aren't the strongest of the pic - the whole business with the boats is a bit forced and the hostage scene isn't the greatest either - but it's still clearly the best comic-book picture ever made, imho.

I'd give that crown to The Incredibles, Spiderman 2, Iron Man, Spiderman, then maybe Dark Knight.  It really is far too dreary a pic

[celedhring]

I don't like dreary for dreariness' sake, but that's the thing, TDK ultimately has a good ending - Joker fails when ultimately the good people of Gotham save each other.

All those films you mention are great though. Maybe barring Iron Man - the origin story is excellent but the actual superhero vs villain plot is pretty weak, something common in superhero origin films.

[Ideologue]

Man, I could give you the benefit of the doubt in some of the films you cite but... Man of Steel? Really? It was the bad boring version of a Nolan morality play superhero film, you can't prefer it to the good version of a Nolan superhero morality play film.

Ang Lee's The Hulk is fantastically dull. Again it suffers from the need to "elevate" the material with faux-freudianism and forgetting about the actual entertainment.

Actually, I probably wouldn't include Man of Steel.  At least TDK manages a consistent tone.  That one scene where Superman and Lois joke with like 50,000 corpses in the background really kills that movie.  That said, the horrifying nature of the violence, when it's not being undercut by badly-timed cutesiness, is really one of the most effective things I've ever seen in a superhero movie.

Re: Watchmen--I think that's the issue a lot of people had with it, and it's tremendously unfair.  Watchmen is essentially the Citizen Kane of comics, a codification of the form.  Hell, that's not even doing it justice.  There probably isn't another single work of art in the history of time that has been so profoundly influential on its particular medium in terms of either functional innovation or in pure formalism.  (Maybe there are some examples in architecture, like the John Hancock Center.)

Even if its liberal use of juxtapositions (i.e., match cuts), center-oriented closeups, and "long takes" could be easily replicated--though their results may vary--Watchmen's formal engineering as four-dimensional object simply could never be easily translated into a moving picture.  So, sure, a Watchmen adaptation was never going to live up to that no matter what.  And there already is a Citizen Kane of movies.  (It's called Flash Gordon.)

So, really, I'm pleased with it just getting the story largely right and having good-to-great actors inhabit the parts (even poor Malin Akerman's not doing too badly, considering her character is, after all, Laurie Juspeczyk).  That it does have some style of its own is a bonus (or a mild disability, if you don't like Snyder's patented speed ramping).

Syt, I can see your point, but I could buy Eddie Blake balking at the prospect of a genuine holocaust.  (I thought the Hallelujah bit was okay.  Overwrought, maybe, but I think it works, whether you want to view it as a deliberate joke at Dreiberg's expense or just as a somewhat overheated sex scene.  I'm biased anyway, though, since it got Korea wet. )

P.S. I'm also firmly on the side of the film's writers regarding the squid issue.  That was already tantamount to a plot hole in the book--DNA analysis might've been crude in 1985, but it could tell "human" from "extra-terrestrial" and the list of possible sources of a genetically engineered telepathic squid in the Watchmen universe seemed pretty short.  Likewise, the threat of Dr. Manhattan going Old Testament on us, judging humanity for its sins now and presumably forever, is also far more likely to keep peace permanently than what amounts to a particularly tragic one-time interdimensional teleportation accident.  (Sure, part of the text of Moore's plot is that Veidt can never account for all variables because "nothing ever ends," but I don't think an ultimate implausibility to his awesome plan was supposed to underline that in subtext.)

[Ideologue]

Oh, and cel reminds me: Watchmen gets mega-super-bonus-points for being a period piece, too.  Iirc, early attempts to film Watchmen wanted to update it to the 90s/00s.

[celedhring]

Oh, and cel reminds me: Watchmen gets mega-super-bonus-points for being a period piece, too.  Iirc, early attempts to film Watchmen wanted to update it to the 90s/00s.

The thing is, Watchmen wasn't a period piece. It was released in the 80s and set in the 80s (even if an alternative universe version of them).