Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – a review

Okay – so another of the movies I got given for Christmas was this one!

Kiss and make-up?

So now I’m going to review it.

Fair warning – there are GOING to be some spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, hold off on reading this review.

Mind you, I am somewhat biased. I can’t be too rough on this flick. I mean, I asked freaking Santa Claus for it, after all.

My taste in movies can’t be THAT bad, can it?

Peter Jackson flick – long before the horror that was The Hobbit!

Let’s start with the beginning. We open with that scene of the alley-shooting which I have seen about a billion times before – in comic book and movie format. Come on now. Can’t we safely assume that MOST of the world’s population have a pretty good idea how Batman got into the crime fighting profession?

Then we get that whole scene of how Superman’s battle messed up the city and how Batman couldn’t get to the scene of the crime fast enough to rescue some dude who got a building dropped on his legs. I mean, this guy is Batman, isn’t he? He OUGHT to have something a little sportier than an SVU to ride around in.

Let me pause for a minute and divulge something that’s pretty important. First off, I hated those three Batman movies (Batman Begins and those other two). First off, Batman’s voice became harder to understand with every movie. By the time the third movie came around we had Batman fighting Bane – the only super villain in the world to decide that wearing a Predator’s jock strap over his mouth was a really smart idea!

Read my lips…

Well – Ben Affleck really does a great job portraying Batman.

Superman (Henry Cavill) is a little stiff playing Superman.

Wonder Woman – who is really only in this movie to help advertise her own movie – looks great but as soon as she speaks her dialogue really seems to fall flat. I’m sure she is a competent actress but I felt like she was reading off of cue cards the whole way through. But I bought her in the fight scenes.

Mind you, my wife made me take her back for a refund.

🙂

Let me talk about Luthor.

Why hasn’t anyone been able to come up with a real kickass Lex Luthor yet?

The dude who played Luthor in this movie had all of the dramatic depth of a Borat – with the Joker thrown into the mix. I just didn’t buy him as a criminal genius, not one little bit. I kept feeling he’d had too much sugar and had been watching YTV commercials most of his life. He kind of reminded me of Foamy the Squirrel on helium.

So we got an hour of all sorts of build-up. Everybody is hating on Superman and hating on Batman and we got a whole lot of angsty shots of brooding superheroes with a couple of cheap-assed cameos from the Flash and Aquaman who might as well have been wearing sandwich boards advertising the upcoming Justice League movie which is probably also going to be heavy and shadowy and angst-ridden and boring.

Then we got an eight minute fight scene between Batman and Superman.

They pretty kill each other until the Batman – great detective that he is supposed to be – finds out that Superman’s adoptive mother had the same first name as Batman’s mother.

Martha.

One minute before that happens the two superheroes have each other on the brink of destruction and then all of a sudden it’s kiss and make-up time.

“Damn dude, your mom has got the same name as my mom. What are we fighting for, anyway?”

Really?

Is that what really passes for scripting?

About that time somebody in production looks at their wristwatch and says something like “Damn it, we are going to need an whole hour of movie length before we hit the credits.”

(and yes, I have heard about the so-called ULTIMATE version that adds another half an hour to the whole bloated two and one-half hours of mind kill)

So then all at once somebody gets the idea of throwing Doomsday into the mix.

I mean – stop and think about it.

We’ve got the whole Frank Miller Dark Night Returns story arc kind of cannibalized and vivisected and mosaicked back together in a rather piss-poor fashion.

That’s a story arc that could have been a whole entire movie.

Then we’ve got the whole Superman versus Doomsday story arc kind of cannibalized and vivisected as well, jamming it into this two and a half hour crapfest.

I just have to say that I was left really feeling disappointed in this flick. I was really hoping that this would revitalize my love for superhero movies but between Batman v. Superman and Marvel’s Civil War movie I really feel like I had my pocket picked at the movie store.

Damn Santa Claus.

One last comment.

I am way past tired of hearing bloggers and newscasters alike talking about this movie and calling it BATMAN VEE SUPERMAN, rather than BATMAN VERSUS SUPERMAN!

Damn it.

V means versus – although if I had to give this movie a grading like in public school I guess “V” wouldn’t be that far off of the mark.

I gave Captain America: Civil War a “W” – and it was only Giant Man that saved them from a “Z”.

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

 

 

Captain America: Civil WTF???

Okay, so this Christmas I got a whole heap of dvd’s. I love movies. I especially love superhero movies – but they keep messing them up. They just can’t seem to make a decent follow-up to most of the superhero movies I loved.

Let’s talk about THE AVENGERS. That’s a great movie. I’m having a bad day or sick with a cold and I want to watch a movie – odds are I might pick up the Avengers and watch it. Again. But AVENGERS: THE AGE OF ULTRON left me wanting a couple of hours of my existence back.

Same thing with IRON MAN. The first flick was brilliant. The second and third flicks were about as entertaining as projectile vomit.

CAPTAIN AMERICA? Well, while I know a whole lot of folks have sung the praises of THE WINTER SOLDIER (Captain America 2) – it left me feeling like I had eaten an entire bucket of unsalted, unbuttered three day old popcorn.

Turns out that CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR is no exception to the rule.

I know.

I should have posted a spoiler alert. You can skip the rest of my movie review if you want to. Just by reading that sentence “Turns out that CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR is no exception to the rule.” you can already guess what I thought of the flick.

It sucked.

Except it didn’t – for just a tiny little while.

Let me tell it to you. Humor the old fart, would you?

Let’s start with the title, shall we?

First off, the Civil War (at least in America) took about four years to resolve itself. I mean, there was Fort Sumter and then throw in the Monitor and the Merrimac, Antieatam, the Emancipation Proclamation, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg – and a whole bunch of other battles I can’t remember – and we’re still arguing over the flag on the top of the Dukes of Hazzard’s Dodge Charger.

Wait.

You mean that the movie wasn’t about THAT Civil War?

Oh yeah.

I forgot.

Well, secondly, the actual Marvel Universe Civil War saga went on for about a couple of dozen graphic novels worth of material involving damn near every single superhero in the whole entire Marvel Universe.

I haven’t read any of it, you understand. When a storyline runs that long it tends to be garbled and DEFINITELY out of my wallet-range.

Yup, I’m a cheapskate. And I’m broke. That’s a bad combination, but there it is just the same.

So the filmmaker who decides to try and cram all of that into one single two and a half hour movie has REALLY got their work cut out for them.

Well, the folks who made this movie didn’t let that stop them. They crammed about two hours worth of hissy-fits, pointless dialogue, long meaningful glances and stunned looks into a long and pointless movie.

First off, they forgot the villain.

I mean, I read some of the earlier Captain America comic books and I remember Baron Zemo looking something like this.

If I recollect correctly, he was a Nazi mad genius who accidentally got his favorite red toque super-glued over his face in a kind of a sudden-death-reverse-wedgie maneuver. I figure he was the sad victim of a ruthless high school hazing incident.

Actually, he was the dude responsible for the death of Bucky Barnes, back when Bucky looked like this.

Well, probably because it’s become politically incorrect to use mad genius Nazi dudes in movies these days they decided to use some dude who looked like a high school nerd-gone-bad.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH MAD GENIUS NAZIS, ANYWAY???

So then we have the start up – about an hour of folks talking back and forth and a whole lot of intense arguing and then there’s General Thunderbolt Ross chewing up the scenery and wondering where in the heck the Hulk is and then all of a sudden Iron Man and Captain America throw a simultaneous hissy fit and send each other nasty tweets and blocking each other’s Facebook accounts.

Then there is about fifteen solid minutes of superhero entertainment when Captain America pulls together his version of the Avengers (Hawkeye, Sharon Carter, Falcon, the Ant Man and Scarlet Witch) and Iron Man pulls together HIS version (War Machine, Black Widow, Black Panther, Vision and Spider Man) into an absolutely kickass superhero versus superhero experience.

And I’m on the couch going “YEAH! DUDE! THIS IS WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT! SPIDERMAN! ANT MAN! GIANT MAN!”

And then there’s an hour long stretch of more boring back story and a blurry and poorly shot scrap and then Captain America and Iron Man kiss and make up.

That’s right. A two and one half hour episode of Big Brother – with about fifteen minutes of kickass WWF (back before the World Wildlife Federation sued the “F” out of the WWF) action.

I know.

If you do the math you’ll come up with one hour in the beginning, one fifteen minute kickass airport fight scene, and one more hour of muddied-up carnage.

The other fifteen minutes is the credits.

And yes, there is an Easter Egg credit surprise scene – two of them actually, that don’t give you much more than a hint that the next two Marvel movies are Black Panther and Spiderman.

(And who the hell thought that Marissa Tomei would make a good Aunt May? What, did she fall into a time vortex or something?)

That’s it.

That’s all that I’ve got for you.

Okay, so I will watch this movie again – but I’ll most likely skip to the scene list and just pull up the Airport fight scene and skip the other two hours and fifteen minutes.

Seriously.

I’m not kidding.

Sometime today I think I’ll watch Deadpool and see what all the excitement was about!

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

Finding the Strength to Keep On Writing – OR – Silencing Your Inner Prune!

Folks who follow this blog know that I frequently hang out at kboards – and if you have ANY sort of interest in indie-publishing you REALLY ought to start to hanging out there as well. There are folks on there that sell a HECK of a lot more e-books than I do – and they are more than happy to pass some of that knowledge onto other writers.

Early back in September a writer started a thread on the kboards Writer’s Cafe saying that she had begun to lose hope and did not know if she had the strength to keep on writing.

Some of you folks might have had a similar experience. Writing – ESPECIALLY independently-published writing – is a constant test of your faith in yourself and your own creative abilities.

So let me tell you what I told her.

I am 56 years old and have been writing for about forty years and I am still trying to figure things out.

Writing isn’t an instantaneous process. You don’t snap your fingers and become a “great” writer. You become a writer by writing a lot of stuff.

There are ALWAYS going to be crap-tacular reviews. There are ALWAYS going to be people who don’t like your stuff.

Look at how many people bought FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY.

I tried hard to read FIFTY SHADES. I tried three times and I could not get past the first couple of pages. It hurt my eyes. They are leaking puss right now just thinking about those first few crap-tacular paragraphs.

But THOUSANDS of people loved that book!

Don’t start figuring that every review is going to be positive – because they are not.

I just released a short novella and had a three day freebie giveaway to try to boost it’s profile. Among other things that promotion netted me eight reviews. Seven of those reviews were glowing. They loved me words. Wanted me to run for President – even though I’m a Canadian.

However one of those eight reviewers didn’t like my book. She peed all over the pages – great big splashing drops of sulphur-reeking e-urine – and she was giggling while she did it. She told me my words stunk so badly that her pet skunk died after sleeping next to her Kindle.

It was bad.

It was very, very bad.

Did I let it get me down?

NO!

Remember, you can’t please everyone.

Sit down, write – and please yourself.

Besides – I wish to the high holy Moose Mountains that I had a book with as many reviews as you’ve got. Obviously you must be touching some of those readers.

We’ve all got that inner prune – that sits there and farts at our creations and tells us we are no stinking good. Remember – that’s just the inner prune that is squeaking at you. Don’t pay it no heed. It won’t ever go away. Life doesn’t work that way. But you just remind yourself that the inner prune is NOT worth listening too.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Tell that inner prune to shut on up and then get back to your writing.

(stepping down from the pulpit)

Now that I am done thumping my chest let me assure you that even writers with as many years experience as I have encounter this gnawing nasty inner prune feeling. I’ll come up short and say to myself – “Vernon, who are you kidding? Your words are crap. You had to tie your keyboard to your ankle and jump off of into the deep end of the Arctic Ocean.”

What it boils down to is feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

Some old wisdom in a brand new blog entry.

If you want to read the entire kboard thread swing on over here.

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

PS: Don’t forget that today is your last chance to pick up a copy of my BIGFOOT TRACKS: A CREEP SQUAD COLLECTION for FREE over at Amazon.

Amazon.com

Or pick up a copy at Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.co.uk

If you’ve already picked up a copy I thank you. If you have read it and enjoyed it I could ALWAYS use a good review. And – lastly – please spread the word about this freebie anyway that you can. Tweet it, Facebook it, talk to your cat about it or just scribble the link on your nearest mensroom wall.