Broodman v Supergrimdark: Dawn of Misery (Rant)

I'm not even going to try to post this review on any other website. Nobody is going to want to publish one of my rants. But I'm mad and sad and depressed and I have a lot to talk about. So I'll dust off this blog and use it again. To talk about sad things. I'm sorry the first real post in a long time has to be about this. But hopefully it will be fun for you to read.

I think a lot of the reason I really stopped writing reviews was because I'm just... tired. After five years of watching any awful shit that came out of Hollywood I'm tired of doing this to myself. I looked at 2015's slate of bad comedies, bad superhero movies, and after things like "Age of Ultron", I just don't have the energy to say the same things over and over about the same kind of mistakes in the same kind of movies. Ironically I've seen a lot of really special, amazing, and original movies since I basically retired, "Room", "Anomalisa", "Hateful Eight", "Sicario", "Midnight Special", "The Boy and the Beast", "The VVitch", and I'm not writing about any of them. As a matter of fact, I think I'm just too old to watch shit anymore. I'm old enough to realize that life is too damn short to get hung up over the "Green Lanterns" of the world. One of these days I'll be dead and certainly nowhere on my list of regrets will be missing "Fantastic Four".

So here's my recommendation for "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice": don't see it. Don't do it yourself. There's nothing here. Trust me. I only saw this movie last night because a friend from high school wanted to hang out and why not see a superhero movie? I was on the fence about seeing it at all before that. I gave you a list of half a dozen great movies, watch those! Or see "The Revenant", "Trainwreck", "Turbo Kid", "Ex Machina", "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl", or "Krampus". Your life can be enriched, it can be improved, you can learn new perspectives, see new things, experience new emotions. Don't see "Batman v Superman". In the great cosmic scale of positives and negatives of entertainment, this is pure negative. It's a hateful, depressing, dreary movie that has a bold new vision for superheroes: mainly that superheroes are not fun anymore. And it's boring.

On Thursday I was tired of Marvel and didn't want to see "Civil War" and thought it was just all too much. On Saturday I am a Marvel fanboy. Bring it on, Disney. They make colorful and fun movies where people crack jokes. They're not perfect, but they're trying to entertain. They're not... this. It's so awful. It is corroded with misery. It's like a funeral. I've seen cancer movies with more joy than "Batman v Superman". I've seen Holocaust movies with more joy. You could make a Holocaust cancer movie that ends in a funeral and it would be more fun than "Batman v Superman". Just don't. Really. I can explain more after the pagebreak, but please, trust me even if you've never trusted me before. Don't.

(Also this is Batman Movie Batdown: Week 1,000 or something. It is also the very first time I have not enjoyed a Batman movie. Yay...)

Weird Watch: White God

Hey, an update!

If you haven't noticed, this blog has been deader than a terrible lab accident mixture of Disco and Adolf Hitler. I call him "Disco Hitler". And he was stillborn, it was very sad. Did not have the funk or the authoritative National Socialist militarism I had in mind.

Anyway, um... I'm sorry. I had a terrible thing happen to me called a new full time job.

The blog is not dead-dead, since at some point I'll have to review "Star Wars: Episode VII" here, just because I have to review it. It must be done. Anyway, I've been contributing to Wikia's new Fandom site for awhile, and here's the latest post, a review of "White God":

http://fandom.wikia.com/articles/weird-watch-white-god 

I'll have things to share coming up. The future is bright. Brighter than the rotting corpse of poor Disco Hitler, who god decided was not allowed to be born.

Pixels - Adam Sandler is a miserable human being who shuffles around with bitter contempt for his audience and humanity as he stares helplessly out with the eyes of one who is already dead. One day this guy is going be found rotting in the back of a Grand Rapids strip club half-eaten by mice after a cocaine overdose and nobody should be surprised. Nor should you mourn him.

So should you be surprised that a Happy Madison production ripped-off from a third of an episode of "Futurama" sucks?  Not really.

Usually the most half-assed and pointless part of any modern movie are the stale, generic CG effects.  "Pixels" flips that script and creates a visual style that is entirely unique with lovable and exciting digital creatures that will wow audiences of all ages.  Then the movie casts Adam Sandler and pals in the lead roles, meaning that every aspect about the story, the comedy, and the characters will be lifeless and depressing.  So "Pixels" is a unique experience where I spent half the movie in pure agony, with my hands clenched white knuckle onto my theater arm rests and my eyes shut begging the higher powers of the universe that I only vaguely believe in to end my suffering, but then felt something that was almost like joy when Adam Sandler shut up and let the animators do their jobs.  No, this is a not a good movie.

That Adam Sandler stopped caring about anything roughly around the second act of "You Don't Mess with the Zohan" is not a new revelation.  Sandler has made his character from "Funny People" literal.  Hell, I already reviewed "Jack and Jill" which proved beyond all doubt that he cares nothing about anything.  And yet even though anybody who cared about film saw through Adam Sandler's thin veneer long ago, he still makes roughly twenty movies a year and almost all of them turn a profit.  I don't review Adam Sandler movies very often not only because his films are unwatchable on any level but also because his existence turns me into the worst kind of misanthropic asshole.  If you ever needed proof that ultimately the average theater goer does not care about quality, Adam Sandler is it.  He is one of their own:  aging, lazy, and irrationally proud of ignorance and mediocrity.  From there it is only a few short steps to deciding that all of Western civilization has failed.  That's how bad Sandler's movies are:  don't examine them too closely or else you'll find yourself in Montana writing manifestos while stocking up on ammunition, fertilizer, and underage child brides.

"Pixels" is probably the best Adam Sandler vehicle in years if only because at this point he has become too lazy to even be a proper lead anymore.  He stopped trying to devise wacky characters for him to play ever since "Jack and Jill", instead defaulting to basically playing a wish-fulfillment version of himself.  Sandler gave up on any attempt at arcs or development in his characters.  Slowly he has been having less and less screentime in his own movies to allow his entourage of charity-case comic actors like Kevin James* to take up the slack.  "Pixels" is about 20% Adam Sandler, 10% Kevin James, 30% Josh Gad, 20% Peter Dinklage, and 20% Q*bert - I listed them in ascending order of funniness, by the way.  But every character in this movie is horrible, and "Pixels" would have been better served as a short film of nothing but CG characters destroying the world (as it was before Happy Madison got their hands on it).  If there is any enjoyment to be found here, it is months later once "Pixels" is out on video, where you have a fast forward button to skip past the zombie-eyed comedians dishonest attempts at entertainment to watch the parts with actual spark and imagination.

Revenge of the Reboots Part 1: Terminator Genisys

Remakes, retreads, and rip-offs have been common in Hollywood for decades.  2015's summer film season is in no way special in this.  I have been writing this blog for five years now and trust me, these kinds of franchise reboots are nothing new, they have given me thousands of words worth of material.  Most of which I wrote in a very angry mood. Throughout the May to July period, something special happened, no less than three major reboots to classic SciFi franchises hit theaters.  This I feel, makes for a teachable moment.  One reboot was a piece of crap, one barely passed, and one was fucking awesome.  Let's use these three films to see what lessons we can draw.

Welcome to a trilogy of reviews I call "Revenge of the Reboots".

I imagine that the genesis* of "Terminator Genisys" went something like this:  Two screenwriters drove into Hollywood on the same day, each with their own script for a planned reboot of the 1980s James Cameron time travel action franchise, Terminator.  One screenwriter had this cooky plan of rehashing the plot of "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" just with Arnold Schwarzenegger raising Sarah Connor.  Another screenwriter had a completely different script imagining a reborn Skynet reappearing in 2015 using our iPhones as a new terrifying way to start Judgement Day.  Then these two screenwriters, both rushing to make their meeting with the execs, smashed their cars right into each other.  Both were tragically killed, most of their scripts were destroyed in the fire.  But the execs were able to salvage the situation, they simply took what pages survived of each document and paperclipped them together.  Then it was time to make a movie - a disjointed, confusing, riddled with plot holes movie.

Guess what?  "Terminator Genysis" is the piece of crap.  The Terminator franchise has been long suffering, with "Terminator Gynisis" marking the third attempt in the past twenty years to turn these movies into a bankable annual phenomenon.  "Terminator 3:  Rise of the Machines" could only regurgitate "Terminator 2" only with less success.  And "Terminator Salvation" was the kind of movie so bad that if there was any justice in Hollywood, the word 'Terminator' should have been banned from film titles for a century.  Maybe our children's children would be able to undo our mistakes and atone for the sins of that travesty.  Yet here we are, just six years later, with yet another attempt.  And if the goal was simply to show that it is possible to make a Terminator movie better than "Salvation", they succeeded.  If they had any further goals, well... that's a shame.

Batman: Arkham Knight Harley Quinn DLC Review

This is a review of the Harley Quinn "story" DLC that I got along with my "Batman: Arkham Knight" pre-order.  The DLC actually seems interesting enough:  you play as Harley Quinn in a prequel to the main Arkham Knight storyline featuring her attack on Nightwing's city to rescue Poison Ivy.  That sounds fine. Harley is a great character even if her voice is mangled by an incompetent Tara Strong performance.  Her relationship with Poison Ivy is one of the most interesting and complicated ones in all of Gotham.  Plus Harley Quinn was apparently pregnant in "Arkham City" opening the door to all kinds of twists and emotional turns as she tries to get over the Joker.  Harley plays very differently from Batman:  she has no silent take-downs, but is more aggressive, faster, and can go berserker for one hit kills.  This should be great.

Instead this DLC is crap.  Allow me to give a summary of the entire thing:  Harley beats up some cops, then goes into a room to beat up more cops with guns, then goes into another room to beat up cops without guns, then goes into another room to beat up cops with guns, then goes go an elevator shaft, and finally beats up a few cops backed up by Nightwing, and rescues Ivy.  That's five fights total.  How long does that take?  Fifteen minutes.  Now I paid nothing for this DLC because it was a pre-order bonus, but somehow even after an investment of nothing, I still feel ripped-off.  This makes the worthless blue balls of "Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes" seem like a sixty hour JRPG like "Persona 3".  Just as soon you feel like you understand the difference between Harley Quinn and Batman's playstyles, the DLC is over.  This story mode is over so fast that I only ever got a chance to use one of Harley's gadgets, I do not even know what the other two do.

Okay, the game is lengthy in terms of Atari 2600 standards, but maybe the story makes it worth it?  Nope.  Harley Quinn's pregnancy storyline ends with no conclusion as Rocksteady decided to chicken out and retcon the pregnancy test you found in "Arkham City" as a false positive.  Harley as a character gets to do nothing but make some quips here and there, argue with the Penguin over her intercom, and talks with Poison Ivy for ten seconds before the DLC just ends abruptly.  Does any of this matter for the main story though?  Not even in the slightest!  Harley Quinn has barely anything to do in the main game.  Even after she beat Nightwing in a fair fight (which is pretty badass) Batman takes her her with a single punch, no boss fight.  I do not even think that the team behind this DLC even were in communication with the main Rocksteady team.  We're told Harley is trying to save Poison Ivy for the Scarecrow's plan.  Then in the main game, Poison Ivy wants nothing to do with Scarecrow's plan and does all she can to foil it!

So if this is the standard that Rocksteady is planning for the other DLC storylines to come, I'd say just save your money.  Sure Batgirl looks sexy in her upcoming story, but seriously think twice.  This is unacceptable for any price.