|
Post by Mako Crab on Jan 27, 2018 8:53:40 GMT -5
I love me some meaty film analysis & Bob Chipman aka moviebob just finished up his 4 1/2 hour long deep dive into why Batman v Superman failed on every level. Thankfully he broke it up into 4 parts: intro and then the 3-part actual analysis. I just finished watching part 3, which I thought raised some interesting points for discussion. But if I’m honest, I can’t remember much of what he said during the other parts. Maybe it’s been too long since I watched them or maybe it’s his rapid fire, barely takes a moment to breath between sentences style, but I’m drawing a blank. Might require a refresher. Anyway, here’s the whole thing minus his original review for the movie, because 4 1/2 hours is already a mountain of time to devote to this.
|
|
|
Post by Mako Crab on Jan 27, 2018 9:49:26 GMT -5
INTRODUCTION: WHY BATMAN V SUPERMAN?
- Before I even get into the why of why he chose BvS, I just gotta give him props for creating a series like Really That Good. I have only watched the episode he did about the 1986 Transformers movie & it kinda blew my mind, & gave me new things to think about after a lifetime of having heard everything there was to say about it. But it’s cool that he’s offering a positive counterpoint for the mountain of negative reviews that flood the net. His critique of the whole Angry Reviewer trend is on the mark (though I do love me some AVGN), & he makes it a big point to say that this one time he’s making an exception & doing a Really That Bad.
Now the interesting part! So if this is it, if this is the only time that he’ll ever do a Really That Bad, and then never again (we’ll see), what movie would be worthy of that? What movie is so fundamentally broken at every level, that it deserves this level of analysis? At the outset, he says that it’s not hard to make a bad film. No one tries to make a bad film, but we get them all the time due to all kinds of factors. But there’s a whole range from the schlock that SyFy airs on their channel like Sharknado to the comedy trash of Pixels. Most of the bad movies he cites are harmless, trashy fun. If you’re not laughing at their badness, you’re likely to forget about them entirely in the following weeks. So his premise is that the kind of bad movie he’s looking for is a movie that for all intents and purposes should’ve been good. A movie that brought in top tier talent & had a huge budget. A movie that had everything going for it, where everyone was working very hard to make it good. But a movie also where every decision was the wrong one & stacked on top of each other until nothing good was left. Where even the one or two good things in the movie only reminded the audience how much worse the rest of it was. He brings up the lightsaber duel in Phantom Menace, saying that even in a movie widely regarded as bad, everyone loved that fight & it kinda redeems part of the movie. For me, the big title fight of Freddy vs Jason is an awesome final act in an otherwise garbage movie. What he’s talking about though, is a movie where even a cool fight scene like that can’t even bring the movie up a bit. Where the rest of the movie is so bad, that it drags down the one cool moment. And finally, it’s badness has to be bigger than the movie itself- it’s the epitome of everything currently wrong in Hollywood at the time it was made.
And so we have Batman v Superman.
I’ll be rewatching the rest of these in the near future if anyone cares to jump into the discussion. Because there’s a lot of ground he covers & while my memory of parts 1 & 2 is foggy, part 3 was definitely interesting & something I can’t wait to discuss!
|
|
|
Post by Deinonychus on Jan 27, 2018 11:45:21 GMT -5
because 4 1/2 hours is already a mountain of time to devote to this. Yeah...this is where I am with this. I usually watch his stuff, and while I don't agree with his observations a lot of the time, he still makes some cogent points. If I can't muster up the fortitude to watch the actual movie, there's no way I can watch someone go on about what a giant stinking pile it is for almost twice it's actual running time. I may eventually get around to watching BvS since I have a Rifftrax for it sitting in my account...
|
|
|
Post by Optimal Megatron on Jan 27, 2018 15:24:58 GMT -5
That's kind of where I was. Movie Bob and I've had disagreements on what he thinks is amazing (Sucker Punch) and what he thinks sucks (The Expendables), and since he left the Escapist, he's been.... in need of an editor, I suppose? Some of his reviews have been...unprofessional, let's say. Also, his entire video defending Metroid Other M and stating Metroid Prime was a FPS and thus everything wrong with the game industry made my eyeballs roll so hard they fell out of their sockets.
|
|
|
Post by Gojitron on Jan 27, 2018 16:03:26 GMT -5
I watched each part as it was released over the past few months and I quite enjoyed it and agreed with just about all his points. It's a fascinating, in depth deconstruction of a terribly misguided film. Bob does get a little too emotional at times but that's par for the course with him.
|
|
|
Post by SporkBot on Jan 27, 2018 16:36:45 GMT -5
Woof. Just finished all the videos. And I was concerned about my upcoming review of an old crossover comic being 37 minutes (but maybe I should still be concerned).
But I agree with many of his points, like intention and execution, and think that they can apply to any number of problematic ventures. Like, if one of the many TV show revivals doesn't pan out.
Also noticed that his voice changes from normal-speaking to that...New York(?) accent, largely during voice over, but also a little when he's in front of the camera. Not sure if that's a character he does or what...
|
|
|
Post by Gojitron on Jan 27, 2018 17:00:57 GMT -5
Also noticed that his voice changes from normal-speaking to that...New York(?) accent, largely during voice over, but also a little when he's in front of the camera. Not sure if that's a character he does or what... Boston. He tries to mask it but it comes through when he starts going off script.
|
|
|
Post by Mako Crab on Jan 27, 2018 23:31:59 GMT -5
That's kind of where I was. Movie Bob and I've had disagreements on what he thinks is amazing (Sucker Punch) and what he thinks sucks (The Expendables), and since he left the Escapist, he's been.... in need of an editor, I suppose? Some of his reviews have been...unprofessional, let's say. Also, his entire video defending Metroid Other M and stating Metroid Prime was a FPS and thus everything wrong with the game industry made my eyeballs roll so hard they fell out of their sockets. Hm. Most of his stuff I’ve seen is from his Escapist days. Haven’t heard about his need for an editor since going solo, although I can certainly support that idea after rewatching part 1. Also, he’s crazy if he’s defending anything about Other M aside from the gameplay. I endured the entire Other M “movie” that unlocks after you beat the game. It should be used as the penultimate example of how not to write in film studies classes. Now I’m curious to look it up & see what he said. So I got about an hour into rewatching part 1 of his analysis, paused it for a moment to grab some food. And while I was fixing myself something, I had the sudden realization that I couldn’t remember much of what he had said. This was literally 5 minutes after pausing the video. I thought about it a bit: is it his auctioneer way of speaking a mile a minute? No, I don’t think so, because I’ve retained plenty of what he’s said in his other videos. The length maybe? Maybe it’s just too long & too much for the human brain to process all of it? No, because his Transformers episode (and part 3 of this analysis) was similarly long as well and that stuck with me. No, I think that perhaps it’s because part 1 seems like a grab bag of random things he wanted to mention before getting into the analysis proper. There doesn’t seem to be much of a coherent structure to part 1: more just a list of things he wanted to get out of the way, like his section on things that bother him about the movie but are minor nitpicky things that don’t actually contribute to it being a bad film. Things like Superman’s red briefs being MIA (I’ll have something to say about that in a minute). So I can’t believe it, but I think I’m going to rewatch part 1 one more time and mark each section with bullet points to see if I can parse out what’s actually criticism & what’s just him rambling about stuff in a stream of seeming consciousness. I say seeming, because I think he spent a lot of time revising his material. It just seems all over the place. So weird, because part 3 felt really focused.
|
|
|
Post by Mako Crab on Jan 29, 2018 11:34:03 GMT -5
That's kind of where I was. Movie Bob and I've had disagreements on what he thinks is amazing (Sucker Punch) and what he thinks sucks (The Expendables), and since he left the Escapist, he's been.... in need of an editor, I suppose? Some of his reviews have been...unprofessional, let's say. Also, his entire video defending Metroid Other M and stating Metroid Prime was a FPS and thus everything wrong with the game industry made my eyeballs roll so hard they fell out of their sockets. Just watched it out of curiosity, & holy crap, yeah- he’s so far off the mark in that one, it’s not even funny. You don’t just ask your audience to “hear me out” and then spend the next 10 minutes straight in a 15 minute video belittling their concerns & mocking them & then close by asking for them to be calm & stop being mad about something that he thinks is trivial. And you especially don’t do that & then turn right around and eviscerate Batman v Superman for 4+ hours & expect that same audience to take your complaints seriously. And IF YOU’RE GONNA DO THAT, you had better well understand what the actual complaints are. I’ve enjoyed many of Bob’s videos, I’ve also enjoyed many of his vids while still disagreeing with him, but wow- he was a tool in that Other M vid.
|
|
|
Post by triumshockwave on Jan 29, 2018 18:37:02 GMT -5
I defend Other M's gameplay, I found it to be a fun game. Is it really that much more linear than locking you out of areas until you get a certain item, and telling you where to go with a pulsing dot on the map? The story though is atrocious, and everybody involved should feel ashamed for that. I always thought of Samus as this like Ellen Ripley character. Tromping around in her power suit fighting aliens, and underneath she's sweaty, dirty, and built like a brick shit house. But then you have Zero Suit Samus which makes her look like a Disney princess, and Other M turns her personality into that of a mewling kitten before this random asshole who was barely a footnote before.
On topic... would love to watch someone dissect BvS, but for over 4 hours... meh. I can watch the movie and pick it apart myself in less time.
|
|