@Imperious:
Pretty sure this is from Japanese television
Remove “television” insert “propaganda”
MOVIES 2016
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@Young:
To tell you the truth, I have avoided watching super hero movies for the past few years now… I liked Kick Ass, Deadpool, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Watchmen, and the Nolan Batman trilogy. After that, I don’t care to give away my money to the superhero comic book Hollywood gravy train. I haven’t seen any X-men movies after the first, haven’t seen Thor, Captain America, or the Avengers for that matter… I really associate this stuff with the mindless comedies big studios would manufacture back in the early 90s, because they were a big draw at the box office no matter how bad they were… and that’s what the super hero genre has come to. I’m glad to hear that Affleck’s performance was not to blame… but it’s still career suicide to take on the risk of these roles especially after the whole Dare Devil fiasco.
I guess I’m just bitter that my 2 favourite comic books growing up (Ghost Rider, and the Punisher) had epic fail movies.
Well, that is just what I have heard or read about Affleck anyway.
I am very much over the superhero craze. Been going on for over 10 years now and of all the movies made in the genre in that time, there are only a couple really great films and a few more than that which are good, IMO anyway. I am generally interested to see how the latest one fares, because there is always the chance that it is good… but I am definitely not going to the theater to see each one.
One of the real problems, I think, is the lack of creative liberty and continuity among the glut of comic book films of late. These cinematic universes have greater story arcs that need to be followed and multitudes of characters to introduce. Christopher Nolan’s Batman films were the notable exception. The world was his; he was free to approach the mythology in his way, tell the stories he wanted and include the characters he felt appropriate. It was all very self-contained and focused. I don’t know how much influence the studio had in making the films, but it seemed that Nolan had almost total creative control, especially as the films went on. Obviously this continuity was a benefit to the films, though that isn’t to say anyone could have made them so successfully. Nolan is a special director.
Sam Raimi had a similar run with the first three Spider-man films. You can argue that he was successful or not, but he was able to direct all three and make the world his own to some degree. I personally do not like his treatment of Spider-man and think his trilogy contrasts well with Nolan’s. They were certainly made in different styles, so there is a degree of subjectivity. However, Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is far more lauded than Raimi’s Spider-man.
The movie was so long, loud and dumb that the blame falls squarely on the writers and director. I’m scratching my head over Christopher Nolan’s involvement, maybe he wants his Batman movies to look better and better as time passes.
How much was he involved? I remember reading that he was, but I cannot imagine why or how much he actually did. Nothing in what I have seen or read from Batman v Superman in any way says “Chris Nolan” to me. Zack Snyder fingerprints are plastered over every slow-motion stylized frame.
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Definitely some Superhero fatigue around.
Seems like only yesterday Sam Raimi was making Spiderman films; it’s been rebooted twice since then.
Enough already!
They even cast Ben Affleck as Batman - he isn’t even British!
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When did Batman become British?
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When Christian Bale played him!
Ben Affleck tells a story of bumping into Christian Bale and being congratulated on gaining the part. Until that conversation BA had thought CB to be American, so I imagine many other Americans do too.
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@Private:
When Christian Bale played him!
So it takes only one british actor and Batman is Brittonized??
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Correct AetV. :-D
On that basis pretty much all the superheroes are British, which is fine by us. The Americans can play the baddies. Actually they are usually British too!
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Tom Holland = Spiderman
Henry Cavill = Superman
Christian Bale = Batman
Aeron Taylor-Johnson = Kick Ass -
Every Imperial officer of the Empire in the Star Wars franchise… British… we always knew you guys were evil.
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And who played Obi Wan? Or the two young heroes in the last one for that matter ……
Us Brits do have a proud history of playing Hollywood’s baddies. But increasingly we seem to get to be the good guys too.
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@Private:
Us Brits do have a proud history of playing Hollywood’s baddies.
There’s indeed a long cinematic tradition for this sort of thing. In American sword-and-sandal movies, ancient Romans – who typically serve as the bad guys – are almost invariably portrayed by British actors, whereas the oppressed and heavily taxed subject peoples of the imperial provinces are usually played by Americans. The 1950s version of Ben-Hur, with the American Charlton Heston in the title role and the Irish Stephen Boyd as the evil Messala, is a good example. You can see the same principle at work in the 1981 TV miniseries Masada, in which Peter Strauss (a New Yorker) plays the leader of the Rebel Alliance (oops – sorry, wrong movie) and the very British Peter O’Toole plays the commander of the Imperial forces, Lucius Flavius Silva. In that one, there’s even a touch of class structure: the Roman officers all speak in BBC English, while the enlisted men – one of them played by Warren Clarke – have Cockney accents.
I guess that this movie tradition evolved when American casting directors realized that, by casting British actors as Romans and Americans as non-Romans, a nice contrast of accents would be produced: the Romans would sound “foreign”, while nevertheless still speaking the same language (English) as the non-Romans.
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The biggest crisis facing American actors today is the influx of Australians who can effortlessly wriggle into leading, big time roles (that many stage-background English actors have struggled with) for the American movie-goer: Mel Gibson is the trailblazer*, followed by Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman, and now we have the Hemsworth brothers. And I haven’t even gotten into the actresses, including Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Naomi Watts.
*in the modern era, Errol Flynn is the true original.
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One thing for sure, doesn’t matter if you’re British or American… if you’re an albino, you’re playing the bad guy.
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@CWO:
I guess that this movie tradition evolved when American casting directors realized that, by casting British actors as Romans and Americans as non-Romans, a nice contrast of accents would be produced: the Romans would sound “foreign”, while nevertheless still speaking the same language (English) as the non-Romans.
Hi Marc. Possibly Britain’s Imperial past and the USA’s founding myth underpinned such casting for imperial Rome. Which lead to discovering that British actors were rather good at portraying unsympathetic characters. General Veers may be right: would Laurence Olivier, Charles Loughton or Peter Ustinov ever have conveyed the nobility of soul that Kirk Douglas gave Spartacus? It’s a bad film to use as an example, though, with some variations in casting from this supposed “rule”.
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@Private:
Possibly Britain’s Imperial past and the USA’s founding myth underpinned such casting for imperial Rome. Which lead to discovering that British actors were rather good at portraying unsympathetic characters. General Veers may be right: would Laurence Olivier, Charles Loughton or Peter Ustinov ever have conveyed the nobility of soul that Kirk Douglas gave Spartacus? It’s a bad film to use as an example, though, with some variations in casting from this supposed “rule”.
I haven’t seen Spartacus, but I did see Peter Ustinov play Nero in Quo Vadis, where he does a marvelous job of portraying the Emperor as a pathological narcissist. One of his best lines comes near the end of the movie, when an enraged mob is storming his palace. Faced with his impending doom, Nero blends terror and pettiness when he expresses his incomprehension at the idea that his own subjects are intending to kill him: “How can they bear the thought of living in a world without me?”
Watching that film was a weird experience for me because one of the main characters, Petronius, is played by Leo Genn, who I remembered very well from the WWII movie The Longest Day, in which he plays a British officer on Eisenhower’s staff.
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Ben Affleck did an ok enough job, I think, hard to be as good as Bale, anyway. He cant escape the script.
What was so lacking is some dry or dark or you name it humor in this movie. Granted, I might not have captured every nuance a native speaker would have, but they could have done so much more, and still stayed dark and world-ending.
I struggled the whole movie if I should find Lex credible, but all in all the movie is not as bad as critics say, imo, although clearly, to me, far inferior than Nolans. It cant escape from being called a bit shallow, thats true, a bit too schematic.
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@CWO:
I haven’t seen Spartacus
Well you must Marc. In my view it is far and away the best of the swords and sandals epics. I’ve probably seen it 20 times over the years and it still engages my emotions (to the detriment of my few masculine credentials!).
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@Private:
In my view it is far and away the best of the swords and sandals epics. I’ve probably seen it 20 times over the years and it still engages my emotions (to the detriment of my few masculine credentials!).
“It is only within the last two hundred years that Englishmen have become ashamed of tears. Our forefathers were not ashamed to weep openly, and the references to tears in the literature of England proves to us that, to the men of other days, a man incapable of tears was believed to be a man hard, inhuman, and inaccessible to mercy. Looking at Winston Churchill at that revealing moment, I thought that in some extraordinary way he belongs definitely to an older England, to the England of the Tudors, a violent swashbuckling England perhaps, but a warm and emotional England too, an England as yet untouched by the hardness of an age of steel.”
– H.V. Morton, Atlantic Meeting -
@Private:
@CWO:
I haven’t seen Spartacus
Well you must Marc. In my view it is far and away the best of the swords and sandals epics. I’ve probably seen it 20 times over the years and it still engages my emotions (to the detriment of my few masculine credentials!).
As long as you don’t notice that in the big battle half the Roman army is just a painted backdrop.
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As long as you don’t notice that in the big battle half the Roman army is just a painted backdrop.
In fairness, so were most of the Imperial Stormtroopers in that spectacular scene in Return of the Jedi when the Emperor arrives at the Death Star, where a very large guard of honour is waiting for him. Their absolute rigidity as they stand at attention wasn’t just the result of superb military discipline.
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@CWO:
In fairness, so were most of the Imperial Stormtroopers in that spectacular scene in Return of the Jedi when the Emperor arrives at the Death Star, where a very large guard of honour is waiting for him.
I’m sure the Emperor said “I’m only going to ask this once, are there any exhaust ports that lead directly to the main reactor on this new Death Star?”
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