What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Dave Boy

Boy did this film take ages to get going anywhere. Once it did I thought it was pretty good. Batman looks and sounds awesome and once Wonder Woman appears she is straight in the fight and when she uses her lasso I was in my element. Shame we never got another solo Superman film as I think we needed one before this. Lex luthor is more like the Joker than anything else and far too young. Overall, a decent effort, pretty grim and not really a superhero movie for the kiddies.

Yours is the first review on here that makes me want to see this film, Dave.

[keirarts]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Yours is the first review on here that makes me want to see this film, Dave.

Go in with lowered expectations and you might get some fun out of it. Its just really, really, really poorly written. I was discussing it the other day and I could not explain Lex Luthors motivations for anything he did, at least without thinking about comics I'd read.

[fuzzymctiger]

Originally Posted by keirarts

Go in with lowered expectations and you might get some fun out of it. Its just really, really, really poorly written. I was discussing it the other day and I could not explain Lex Luthors motivations for anything he did, at least without thinking about comics I'd read.

That's the big problem with it IMO and has actually been admitted by Snyder, is that it is catered entirely to fans of the comics and well no one else really. My friends and I all loved it, and afterwards we came out picking apart all the story lines used and references and where we thought it would go afterwards.

But the problem is, well that as well. Around the middle it does get quite confusing as things seem to go everywhere and nothing Lex does makes any sense. If it weren't for all of us having read the comics, we'd have struggled with it all a lot

But the Batman side of things is by far the best portrayal of the batman universe we've ever seen, and besides the terrible harddrive scene, the Justice League/future elements such as the nightmare hold promise of what is to come.

[keirarts]

Originally Posted by fuzzymctiger

That's the big problem with it IMO and has actually been admitted by Snyder, is that it is catered entirely to fans of the comics and well no one else really. My friends and I all loved it, and afterwards we came out picking apart all the story lines used and references and where we thought it would go afterwards.

But the problem is, well that as well. Around the middle it does get quite confusing as things seem to go everywhere and nothing Lex does makes any sense. If it weren't for all of us having read the comics, we'd have struggled with it all a lot

But the Batman side of things is by far the best portrayal of the batman universe we've ever seen, and besides the terrible harddrive scene, the Justice League/future elements such as the nightmare hold promise of what is to come.

Thing is, a decent script could have improved things a lot. Its so muddled and confusing because its really bad at telling a coherent story, something most of the Marvel titles managed without too much need to reference the comics, the bits that were generally were the end credit scenes.

The best way to understand it is to assume that Lex Luthor knows everyone's secret identities from the get go and he is basically able to understand their deepest hidden scars and motivations and exploits this, he even allows all his sensitive data to be nicked by Bats to this end.

Why?

F*** knows, he seems to just want superman dead and instead of developing a super science trap to make that happen... you know... like LEX does in ALL THE COMICS, instead he decides to con a bloke dressed as a bat to steal all the kryptonite and basically waste it in a gamble.

[keirarts]

LLMOS.jpg

To me this is the definitive Lex vs Supes tale and shows exactly what he can do to the man of steel.

[J Harker]

Originally Posted by keirarts

Go in with lowered expectations and you might get some fun out of it. Its just really, really, really poorly written. I was discussing it the other day and I could not explain Lex Luthors motivations for anything he did, at least without thinking about comics I'd read.

I keep saying, character motivation was the biggest problem. And not just Lex, its not that his plans didn't make sense, there just wasn't a reason for him to do the things he did. I struggled more with Batmans inexplicable desire to destroy Superman. I completely get his concerns about Supes powers and the risk to the world but not to the extreme it was taken. If he'd have wanted to develop a weapon as a back up in case that would have made perfect sense. But he just had a death wish for him which didn't make sense to me. Another thing that was a bit of a shambles i thought was the geography of the film. Metropolis and Gotham seem to just be splodged together. There was nothing to really define one from the other which meant the climax of the film felt a bit all over the shop. I really hope the extra thirty minutes flesh things out a bit and Snyder doesn't just add a load more bigbaddaboom!
Oh and the Aquaman cameo...erm its a bit shit? Was i meant to laugh out loud?

[keirarts]

Originally Posted by J Harker

I keep saying, character motivation was the biggest problem. And not just Lex, its not that his plans didn't make sense, there just wasn't a reason for him to do the things he did. I struggled more with Batmans inexplicable desire to destroy Superman. I completely get his concerns about Supes powers and the risk to the world but not to the extreme it was taken. If he'd have wanted to develop a weapon as a back up in case that would have made perfect sense. But he just had a death wish for him which didn't make sense to me. Another thing that was a bit of a shambles i thought was the geography of the film. Metropolis and Gotham seem to just be splodged together. There was nothing to really define one from the other which meant the climax of the film felt a bit all over the shop. I really hope the extra thirty minutes flesh things out a bit and Snyder doesn't just add a load more bigbaddaboom!
Oh and the Aquaman cameo...erm its a bit shit? Was i meant to laugh out loud?

Half the stuff in its baffling when you consider all Lex really had to do was kidnap Martha Kent and supes, rather than zoom in and save her with speed and x-ray vision would simply do exactly what Lex said. All the other stuff he did to make supes look bad seemed pointless in retrospect unless it was simply to make batman more concerned about him, enough to want to kill him. The you just need to point out that Batman is one of the smartest guys on the planet and should be able to figure out when he's being played.

[fuzzymctiger]

Originally Posted by J Harker

I keep saying, character motivation was the biggest problem. And not just Lex, its not that his plans didn't make sense, there just wasn't a reason for him to do the things he did. I struggled more with Batmans inexplicable desire to destroy Superman. I completely get his concerns about Supes powers and the risk to the world but not to the extreme it was taken. If he'd have wanted to develop a weapon as a back up in case that would have made perfect sense. But he just had a death wish for him which didn't make sense to me. Another thing that was a bit of a shambles i thought was the geography of the film. Metropolis and Gotham seem to just be splodged together. There was nothing to really define one from the other which meant the climax of the film felt a bit all over the shop. I really hope the extra thirty minutes flesh things out a bit and Snyder doesn't just add a load more bigbaddaboom!
Oh and the Aquaman cameo...erm its a bit shit? Was i meant to laugh out loud?

It was my understanding that Metropolis and Gotham have always been across from each other? Like Metropolis is in Delaware and modeled off New York and Gotham is in New Jersey and modeled after Chicago. This is why apppearances may fool but they're both on Delaware Bay

[J Harker]

Must admit I'm totally ignorant as far as the comics go. But then i am with Marvel too but their films have never required any foreknowledge.

[Frankie Teardrop]

NIGHTMARE WEEKEND – It looks choppy. What's going on? A robbery, maybe? Somebody tells someone else to “rotate the disc”. What's 'the disc'? What does it all mean? Aeroplane. Suddenly, a glove puppet attached to a computer pops up and yells “Danger! Danger!” Then a really unimpressive silver ball trashes the f*ck out of someone's face. Roll credits. Welcome to 'Nightmare Weekend.” It has its own theme tune, with lyrics about a nightmare weekend. It sounds like it was sung by Barbara Dixon.
Anyone who makes it through 'Nightmare Weekend' will find that it does make a bit more sense than the pre-credit scramble suggests. A bit more sense, but not all that much more. There is a plot, sure. It becomes as labyrinthine and as pointless as Robert Altman's softcore version of 'Knots Landing'. I'll try to simplify, but I won't do a very good job. Basically, there's a computer scientist with a massive house, maybe two massive houses (I couldn't tell which was which most of the time) who invites some chicks over to his pad one weekend for some “psychological experiments”. They seem pretty pleased about it when they discuss it during their aerobics class. Maybe I'm wrong, though. Maybe it's the scientist's sinister assistant who gets everyone over. She's involved in some kind of complex subterfuge involving the outcome of all these 'psychological experiments', and seems like the sort of person who wouldn't mind “going above fifty on the Biometer” (which you're strictly not allowed to do in 'Nightmare Weekend'). She certainly doesn't seem to have any qualms about using silver balls to trash people's faces. Those silver balls, by the way, have a lot to answer for. They're obviously ripped off from 'Phantasm', but only to the extent that anyone with a small, unimpressive silver ball with admittedly sinister properties can be said to be ripping off 'Phantasm'. They're at the centre of these 'psychological experiments', and they get in people's mouths, change their victim's personalities, turn them into zombies, that kind of thing. They waver in and out of the film, and tend to be called upon in moments when the filmmakers were obviously thinking “Jeez, how can this scene get any better? I know, we've got these really rad looking silver balls...”. Silver balls aside, we get to focus on the scientist's daughter, who falls for a biker who's in cahoots with the sinister assistant. She turns to the glove-puppet slash computer combo entity for advice on the matter. He tells her she's in love. While she sets about wooing the man of her dreams, we're subjected to various scenes of people shagging in cars with on-lookers bugging out to their walkmen in the background, people shagging on pinball machines in an attempt to intimidate others, and a rape interrupted by one of those silver balls. The list of nonsensical interludes is endless. This is, after all, 'Nightmare Weekend', a derailed cinematic landscape where one man's idea of an insult is to approach another guy in a bar with the words “You're quantity. I'm quality”. 'Nightmare Weekend' is staunchly incoherent. If it has to tell a story, it'll give you fifty of them instead, none of them very good. This is all obviously bad filmmaking rather than an attempt to do anything experimental or 'dream-like', although there are moments which make you question that. Take the scene where one of the girls who've been invited to the house gets it on with a Tom Selleck look alike. She ends up with a silver ball in her mouth and becomes a deranged sex harpy. She straddles Tom and is about to 'strike' in a horror kind of way when the scene cuts away to spider crawling over some croissants and the maid character going “eeek!” No mention ever again of what just happened up there in the bedroom. But, the scene with the spider had obviously been very deliberately set up because it clearly foreshadows something else later on that happens to the maid. It's this weird, weird combination of intricacy and idiocy that makes 'Nightmare Weekend' so special. It's such a head scratch that I can forgive the fact that it's not even very nightmarish until the last ten minutes, when those sliver balls turn everybody into deformed zombies on a death rampage. 'Nightmare Weekend'. What can I say? See it if you like bad, f*cked up weird shit. Don't expect transgression. Don't expect gore, thrills, suspense. Accept that you will be baffled, and perhaps want your money back. For me it's a keeper.