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StumblyWumbly posted:Having Hulk, Wolverine, and whoever be extensions of the Super Soldier program is a neat addition because it adds an arms aspect and gives Capt America a legacy of unintended consequences that is very American. I thought Grant made a great addition with the Weapon Plus Program. Captain America was the first weapon/super soldier and it included Wolverine. I could see how Truth could tie into all this.
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Jan 7, 2014 18:21
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Arrow is above and beyong SHIELD. I don't think that is controversial.
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Jan 7, 2014 18:24
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Waterhaul posted:Yeah but comparing like with like from Begins onwards, superhero wise, I think DC have had better films quality wise. I didn't even like Rises and I think Marvel have yet to come close to The Dark Knight quality. I think the first Iron Man film is up there. Both Marvel and DC have more bad movies than good ones though. But it's been longer since DC's last good one. Uncle Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Jan 7, 2014 |
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Jan 7, 2014 18:57
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:I think the first Iron Man film is up there. The Lego Movie has Batman though so DC is the winner when that comes out.
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Jan 7, 2014 19:28
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StumblyWumbly posted:
Hell it almost killed the entire genre of superhero movies.
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Jan 7, 2014 19:37
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Madkal posted:Arrow is above and beyong SHIELD. I don't think that is controversial.
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Jan 7, 2014 19:42
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I unironically love Batman and Robin, to a degree where if I tried to describe what's so great about the movie you would think I was SuperMechaGodzilla. I don't mean that as a rip. I would be honored. Edit: The super obvious reversed footage drowning scene is the only thing I won't defend. greatn fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Jan 7, 2014 |
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Jan 7, 2014 19:47
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greatn posted:I unironically love Batman and Robin, to a degree where if I tried to describe what's so great about the movie you would think I was SuperMechaGodzilla. I don't mean that as a rip. I would be honored. You and me both. In fact some one called me SMG-like in this very thread last time B and R came up. A great piece of pro-queer cinema in any case.
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Jan 7, 2014 19:53
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With a kick rear end score and the best set design of any Batman film.
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Jan 7, 2014 19:55
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I enjoyed the hell out of Batman and Robin as a kid, and never learned to dislike it.
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Jan 7, 2014 19:55
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Batman and Robin/Batman Forever are certainly bad movies, but they're extremely entertaining and endlessly rewatchable bad movies, which at least gives them one up on The Dark Knight Rises.
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Jan 7, 2014 20:17
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Batman and Robin/Batman Forever are certainly bad movies, but they're extremely entertaining and endlessly rewatchable bad movies, which at least gives them one up on The Dark Knight Rises.
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Jan 7, 2014 20:29
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redbackground posted:Forever is quite good, with the major exception of lunatic Two-Face. You've already got a kuh-RAY-zee bad guy in Riddler, he needed a more solemn counterpart for contrast. When they're both hepped up, it's just a mess. I gotta disagree with you there. Watching TLJ and Jim Carrey bounce off of each other was the best part of that movie. You got all the solemn counterpart you'd ever need from Kilmer there. Also Forever had the best batmobile. 
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Jan 7, 2014 20:32
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Error 404 posted:Watching TLJ and Jim Carrey bounce off of each other was the best part of that movie. The question mark/bat symbol was a great image, I'll add.
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Jan 7, 2014 20:33
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Batman & Robin wasn't a failure. It just didn't do as well as expected. It earned $238m worldwide on a budget of $125m. Iron Man 2 did much better on a larger budget, but B&R still did good enough for 12th domestically in a year dominated by Titanic and had the third best opening weekend of the year, bested only by Lost World and Men in Black. It's not the dismal failure people think of it as, it just wasn't as successful as Warner had hoped so they killed the franchise. It *certainly* didn't cause the wide-ranging death of comic book movies, since Blade came out the following year, X-Men two years after that, then Spider-Man another two years after that, and that's just mentioning superhero stuff. They just weren't anywhere near as common as they are now, so it seems like they "died" in retrospect.
Endless Mike fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Jan 7, 2014 |
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Jan 7, 2014 20:40
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Endless Mike posted:Batman & Robin wasn't a failure. It just didn't do as well as expected. It earned $238m worldwide on a budget of $125m. Iron Man 2 did much better on a larger budget, but B&R still did good enough for 12th domestically in a year dominated by Titanic and had the third best opening weekend of the year, bested only by Lost World and Men in Black. It's not the dismal failure people think of it as, it just wasn't as successful as Warner had hoped so they killed the franchise. The fact that it was the biggest critical whipping boy since Showgirls also probably had something to do with it.
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Jan 7, 2014 20:43
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Error 404 posted:I gotta disagree with you there. Watching TLJ and Jim Carrey bounce off of each other was the best part of that movie. You got all the solemn counterpart you'd ever need from Kilmer there. TLJ tried to do his best Jack Nicholson as the Joker impersonation without the subtelty, which when dealing with a character like Two-Face seemed very strange. The fact that you had Riddler already playing the over-the-top crazy guy along with TLJ just made it worst. It was like TLJ felt he was in a compeition with Carrey to see who could out-ham the other. Also it is fun to think that the acid thrown at Two-Face not only scarred his face but turned the non-burnt side white (seeing as Harvey Dent was played by Billy Dee Williams in the first Batman movie).
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Jan 7, 2014 20:57
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TLJ's performance came across like the only Batman he was familiar with was the West Batman movie and he decided to mimic Romero because the other option would have been Meredith as Gorshin was already taken.
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Jan 7, 2014 21:08
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My 9-year-old cousins think the Nolan bat movies are boring, Iron Man 2 is the best thing ever because of the racing sequence, and Batman and Robin and Batman Forever are Top Batman. The boy also liked Man of Steel but the girl hated it. I think the bright colors of Marvel and 90s Batman keep them more interested than the more somber recent DC films. MoS and Thor 2 were borderline grim-looking enough that my aunt wasn't sure whether they should go or not, which I did wonder about for MoS (i.e. what kind of young attendance to theaters it would see). Neither of them knew who Wonder Woman is though (they don't read comics or watch whatever the big Saturday morning cartoon comic properties are out there, I think) Just wanted to throw that out there, as these movies reach all kinds of demographics, not just 20-to-30 year old comic nerds represented here. There's a report with a sample of two.
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Jan 7, 2014 21:13
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Lobok posted:You're making it out to be some kind of "aha, gotcha!" post when it's not. I'm just asking. Forget we were ever talking about Wonder Woman if it helps. So okay, sorry to bring this up a page later but I missed it the first time. So thematically, Wonder Woman would be hurt in this theoretical origin change in a way the Hulk wouldn't. That's because the Ultimate Hulk is still, talking themes here, checking the same or at least similar boxes that Wonderwoman wouldn't. Hulk in both forms is about Hubris. Not Hubris in the personal, but the hubris of nations and the constant march towards greater and greater destruction. The fact that Banner inflicts himself with the Hulk in the Ultimate version gives a greater Jekyll/Hyde vibe than 616, but the underlying avatar of national sin is still there. But unlike the 60's, where the fear was brute impersonal dispassionate destruction by button press, by the time Ultimates 1 was being written it was death by intimately personal ideology and belief that was on the collective mind. Therefore changing Hulk brought him in line with the wave of the time without diluting the original idea. Wonder Woman, and since you're not a fan you probably haven't ever needed to consider this, is intimately linked to the Mythic Greece. Not just the Gods and Minotaurs and women with snake hairdos, but also that Mythic Greece that exists as the basis of Western Civilization. The Greece that invented Theatre, developed Democracy, created the poetry and art and architecture that twenty centuries of western culture built up on. The idea of Greece as a perfectly developed bastion culture is an absurd fiction, but so is the idea that there's a big bearded sky daddy that controls lightning. That's what Wonder Woman represents when she leaves Themyscira to the World Of Man, stepping away from a better society to aid ours. A mythic ideal of a past that never existed come to bring us up to that mythic level. She is to society what Superman is at his best to the single person. Of course, considering how Goyer wrote Superman, making Wonderwoman a distant descendant from a bunch of space bastards might be right in line.
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Jan 7, 2014 21:24
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:The fact that it was the biggest critical whipping boy since Showgirls also probably had something to do with it. To add to this, I think critical and public appreciation of the Adam West Batman was at a relative low in the '90s. With the release of the 1989 film (and arguably the marketing campaign leading up to it), DC and Warner Bros had publicly reframed Batman away from the overt camp of the '60s show/movie. Even the kids' cartoon version of Batman was, at the time, straight-faced and serious-minded. So in 1997, there was something critically fashionable about rejecting a film that styled itself in the same arch tone as the '60s show. You can probably read some kind of reflexive anti-queer sentiment into all of this as well. The '66 show aired only a couple years after Susan Sontag first wrote about camp as a recognizable style, making Batman '66 probably one of the first works of camp in mass-culture to know itself as camp. And when Warner Brothers and DC disavowed the campiness of the Batman character, they also explicitly disavowed any queerness that was conflated with it. For Batman to be serious, he has to be straight—and vice-versa. Not that everyone who hates the movie is a homophobe, of course, but the continued discomfort at the re-queering of Batman shows us how creatively radical this was. The irony of it may be, I think the Nolan movies actually went a long way towards opening up the public consciousness to the more overtly stylized portrayals of Batman & Robin and Batman '66. I liked The Dark Knight fine enough, but I would forgive anyone who watches that movie and wishes for a Robin or Batgirl to lighten things up. The veneer of realism in Nolan's movies only foregrounds the fundamental silliness of a guy who dresses up like a bat—no matter how nearly the rest of the movie resembles a modern crime thriller. The movies show the "serious Batman" for what it is: an inherent contradiction, and, ultimately, an arbitrary limitation on our cinematic Batmen. Batman can smile, goddammit. And have nipples.
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Jan 8, 2014 00:00
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Yes, I agree completely about America and camp in the 90s being a problem with the reception of both B&R and Forever. America just wasn't in the right place for a film with two villains literally being walking talking/Tim Allen Grunting  mockeries.
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Jan 8, 2014 00:05
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I agree pretty unreservedly with pretty much everything in the first two paragraphs, although I don't see Nolan's ultraserious take as any more limiting than Shumacher's ultracampy take (and I'm still not prepared to go so far as to say Batman & Robin is good).
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Jan 8, 2014 00:18
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Mr. Maltose posted:Yes, I agree completely about America and camp in the 90s being a problem with the reception of both B&R and Forever. America just wasn't in the right place for a film with two villains literally being walking talking/Tim Allen Grunting Which villains are you referring to?
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Jan 8, 2014 00:20
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Poison Ivy and Bane, I'm phone posting so I'm loath to go into great detail but Woodrue is the reductive force of society creating Man as Id and Woman as Succubus. Ironically it's Mister Freeze that's more like Tim Allen, trying to fulfill the role of the husband being sole provider and protector, the rejection of this at the end of the film being the salvation for both Alfred and his wife.
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Jan 8, 2014 00:28
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The problem is that none of this recognizes the extremely strong possibility that Schumacher was simply very loving bad at doing what he set out to do and that Batman and Robin is still a very bad movie no matter what's going on under the surface. "Camp" and "queer subtext" aren't get out of jail free cards for simply dropping the ball on execution and if you think that didn't happen, ask Alicia Silverstone how her career's doing lately. There's a turd in this toilet and all the Febreze you spray on it after the fact can't change that.
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Jan 8, 2014 05:37
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McSpanky posted:The problem is that none of this recognizes the extremely strong possibility that Schumacher was simply very loving bad at doing what he set out to do and that Batman and Robin is still a very bad movie no matter what's going on under the surface. "Camp" and "queer subtext" aren't get out of jail free cards for simply dropping the ball on execution and if you think that didn't happen, ask Alicia Silverstone how her career's doing lately. This strikes me as a really strange response, I'm not really sure where to begin. I don't really think Mr. Maltose is suggesting that Batman and Robin is a bad movie that is saved by some hidden meaning. More that Batman and Robin is this movie, and why that is.
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Jan 8, 2014 07:36
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Dan Didio posted:This strikes me as a really strange response, I'm not really sure where to begin. I don't really think Mr. Maltose is suggesting that Batman and Robin is a bad movie that is saved by some hidden meaning. More that Batman and Robin is this movie, and why that is. While I'm not saying anyone here is proposing that, you'd be surprised how many film geeks will say this. Because it has (unintentional) subtext, its a genius piece of filmmaking, rather than something designed to sell toys that just accidentally has said subtext. Like the people who were saying iron man 3 was terrible because they altered the Mandarin, but the Purge was a genius critique of American paranoia of minorities. I think one of the big reasons I cannot stand to watch Batman & Robin is because I saw it when I was like 20, and the others came out when I was a kid. Though I remember hating Batman Returns, but now it's fantastic. twistedmentat fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Jan 8, 2014 |
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Jan 8, 2014 08:26
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McSpanky posted:The problem is that none of this recognizes the extremely strong possibility that Schumacher was simply very loving bad at doing what he set out to do and that Batman and Robin is still a very bad movie no matter what's going on under the surface. "Camp" and "queer subtext" aren't get out of jail free cards for simply dropping the ball on execution and if you think that didn't happen, ask Alicia Silverstone how her career's doing lately. It doesn't matter what Schumacher set out to do. It's Death of the Author but instead of being dead he's just really really gay.
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Jan 8, 2014 11:08
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Whizbang posted:It doesn't matter what Schumacher set out to do. It's Death of the Author but instead of being dead he's just really really gay. Death of the Author really doesn't mean what everyone thinks it does. But since everyone thinks it means they can make up whatever the gently caress they want about everything and always be right, then nobody cares what it really means anyway. GOD drat YOU, POSTMODERNISM.
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Jan 8, 2014 12:28
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Whether intentional or not, and it doesn't matter if it is or not, I find Batman and Robin hilarious from start to finish. I love little touches like Batman flying toward Mr. Freeze - jump cut to Mr. Freeze on ground unconsious, Batman standing over his body, does the silliest "bat" pose you have ever seen for the benefit of no one in particular(he's the only one there). A lot of people groan at that Batman credit card, but it sends me into fits of laughter thinking about the logistics of how such a thing works in universe. I love the Mr. Freeze is so crazy he's wearing polar bear pajamas while watching winter cartoons 24/7 when he's at his lair. There's a ton of stuff like that which are just complete oddball choices that I love. And the music is awesome as I've already said, and the sets are fantastic. Robin motorcycling across skyscrapers and the skyscrapers are also giant gothic statues that are rad as hell.
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Jan 8, 2014 12:48
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greatn posted:Whether intentional or not, and it doesn't matter if it is or not, I find Batman and Robin hilarious from start to finish. I love little touches like Batman flying toward Mr. Freeze - jump cut to Mr. Freeze on ground unconsious, Batman standing over his body, does the silliest "bat" pose you have ever seen for the benefit of no one in particular(he's the only one there). A lot of people groan at that Batman credit card, but it sends me into fits of laughter thinking about the logistics of how such a thing works in universe. I love the Mr. Freeze is so crazy he's wearing polar bear pajamas while watching winter cartoons 24/7 when he's at his lair. There's a ton of stuff like that which are just complete oddball choices that I love. I understand that, more power to you, I've got plenty of my own movies I feel the same way about. It's just that, I apologize if I read your and some of the other pro-B&R posts the wrong way, but when people take it a step further than "I really like this movie that wasn't very popular" to the point of "I'm better than everyone else because I totally got this movie the way they didn't", that implied attitude of smug self-satisfaction for finding the true greatness of this overlooked masterpiece, it really rubs me the wrong way. Invoking the name of SMG really didn't help, man you gotta trigger warning that poo poo next time.
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Jan 8, 2014 13:14
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If someone invokes death of the author about something I wrote, am I allowed to kill them in self-defense?
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Jan 8, 2014 13:29
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Boogaleeboo posted:If someone invokes death of the author about something I wrote, am I allowed to kill them in self-defense? If you live in Florida
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Jan 8, 2014 14:00
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Like I've said before in the thread, the existence of this queer subtext doesn't "fix" Batman and Robin. What it does do is make the film interesting, at least to me. People just don't arbitrarily do things in films, and a film like Batman and Robin is far afield of subtle. I'm not saying it's Criterion worthy. (But Chasing Amy is, so maybe it should be.) Getting upset that I'm apparently trying to hide the fact this is a bad movie, like some innocent is going to read my posts and step on a cinematic landmine, is kinda weird. The idea that Schumacher just sort of unintentionally created all this subtext, possibly by forgetting to deactivate the "camp" setting on the cameras, is kind of hilarious. He's doing edits, scratching his head at the film. "Where'd all this neon come from? What are these Bat Nipples doing here? Did I really film six different angles of spandex caressing George Clooney's firm buttocks?"
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Jan 8, 2014 15:09
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Boogaleeboo posted:If someone invokes death of the author about something I wrote, am I allowed to kill them in self-defense? man I don't know what BSS and somethingawful in general has against post-Lacanian poststructuralism this is like the eighth time in the past month I've seen someone derisively refer or allude to Death of the Author as if it's the worst thing to ever happen to media or media criticism and it's getting kind of weird Anyway, Batman and Robin is a really entertaining trainwreck of a movie and it's nice to see it gaining a bit of a cult following among the "so bad it's good!" B-movie-watching set. If Schumacher had thrown in a few musical numbers, it might be more admired today, given the higher camp threshold that is accepted in musicals. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Jan 8, 2014 |
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Jan 8, 2014 16:13
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PupsOfWar posted:man I don't know what BSS in general has against post-Lacanian poststructuralism Death of the Author has kind of been a crutch of sorts for film discussion for they last while on SA so people get worked up whenever it's brought up.
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Jan 8, 2014 16:20
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I don't think anyone is even arguing that Batman & Robin is some neglected work of artistic genius, myself and others are just saying it's a campy bad movie that's entertaining as hell. The queer cinema readings don't make it a great movie, but they're not off base and they are fun to talk about.
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Jan 8, 2014 16:29
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Waterhaul posted:Death of the Author has kind of been a crutch of sorts for film discussion for they last while on SA so people get worked up whenever it's brought up. It's only a crutch if you have an unconventional reading of the film and when someone asks you to justify/prove it you shout "death of the author!" and run away. It's not a license to make any kind of half-baked argument, it's a license to say that anyone's interpretation is valid as long as it's backed up.
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Jan 8, 2014 16:56
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greatn posted:Whether intentional or not, and it doesn't matter if it is or not, I find Batman and Robin hilarious from start to finish. I love little touches like Batman flying toward Mr. Freeze - jump cut to Mr. Freeze on ground unconsious, Batman standing over his body, does the silliest "bat" pose you have ever seen for the benefit of no one in particular(he's the only one there). A lot of people groan at that Batman credit card, but it sends me into fits of laughter thinking about the logistics of how such a thing works in universe. I love the Mr. Freeze is so crazy he's wearing polar bear pajamas while watching winter cartoons 24/7 when he's at his lair. There's a ton of stuff like that which are just complete oddball choices that I love. My favorite part is when Robin falls in some water at Poison Ivy's place and the film literally plays in reverse because someone was in the editing room and thought "poo poo we can't do reshoots now, no one will notice this, right?" Also cold puns. Always cold puns. I stand by B&R being a bad movie but the cold puns are a wonderful fantastic thing.
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