Asking the Wrong Questions

My overall reaction to this movie is: "fine, I guess". And perhaps that's less a function of the film itself as of the state of the character, who has received five different cinematic takes in thirty years, the last two of which have converged on a sort of a Batman orthodoxy that mandates gloom, brooding, and violence. But even allowing for the tiredness of the material, Matt Reeves's version feels uninspired, stitched together from the pieces of previous attempts, lightly rehashing ideas that have already been thoroughly chewed over, and adding nothing new to the concept or the character. The guiding principle was clearly " The Dark Knight , but more so". The film is structured more as a crime story than a superhero story, with a strong presence for the Gotham police department, an emphasis on organized crime and institutional corruption, and a deranged villain—Paul Dano as the Riddler—who is obsessed with exposing the seedy underbelly of the supposedly re...

To get the obvious stuff out of the way, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a terrible movie.  I mean, you didn't need me to tell you that, right?  It's been out for three weeks, and the reviews have been so uniformly terrible that its 28% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes actually seems a bit high.  And before that consensus formed, there were the pre-release reviews, which were if anything even more brutal.  And before that, there were the trailers.  And before that, there was Man of Steel .  And before that, there was the overwhelming majority of Zack Snyder's career.  No one should be shocked by the fact that Batman v Superman turned out to be a bad movie, and though I have to admit that I was surprised by how bad it turned out to be--bad enough that even with my expectations lowered by all the factors listed above, I was still surprised by its badness; bad enough that my brother and I spent an hour after the movie enumerating its many flaw...

Well, here we are again.  As has become traditional, the US networks scheduled a boatload of new shows for the week of Rosh HaShana (happy 5775 to those of you celebrating!), which is very convenient as it gave me some time to wade through the deluge.  As usual, there are some shows I just don't have much to say about--I don't need several hundred words to say that Scorpion is awful and dumb, and as compelling and propulsive as the pilot of How to Get Away With Murder was, there isn't much to say about that show yet, and probably won't be until it starts developing its characters and themes as well as its plot--and a few that have already got me thinking.  Here are my thoughts on the fall's first batch of new shows. Forever - ABC's new procedural wants so desperately to be this year's Elementary that it's almost funny.  Like the surprisingly successful Holmes adaptation, it centers around an Englishman in New York, who has remarkable deductive abil...

I've been thinking for some time about how fandom reacts when its beloved auteurs fail.  When someone like Aaron Sorkin produces something as preachy, self-satisfied, and misogynistic as The Newsroom , fandom reacts with dismay, but is that surprise justified?  In Sorkin's case, all of these flaws were baked into his work going back as far as Sports Night , and they were ignored, excused, and forgiven because what he was producing was of such high quality.  Is it really surprising that a writer who has been showered with unconditional praise and adulation should feel free to indulge their worst impulses, and revel in bad habits they might previously have worked to curtail?  I mention this because going into The Dark Knight Rises , I was determined not to make this sort of mistake.  The previous volume in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight , was an excellent film--thrilling, sharply plotted, one of the best superhero films of the last decade....

When Batman Begins was released and the entire internet was falling over itself, going on about the best superhero film ever and My God, the Realism, I found myself left out of the celebrations. I liked the film well enough, but I thought it was held back from greatness, or for that matter even very goodness, by the same flaws which, earlier this year, marred my enjoyment of Iron Man . The dialogue was atrocious, the villains forgettable, and the plot trapped in the well-worn grooves of the superhero origin story, and thus completely predictable. It was only at its very end that Batman Begins --again setting an example that Iron Man would later follow--made me sit up and take notice, in a scene in which Gordon uses the Bat Signal for the first time and makes a tentative alliance with Batman. Even as he chooses to tolerate Batman's presence in the city, Gordon notes that that presence is an escalation in the terms of the battle between law and lawlessness, and that its consequ...