RIP Zack Snyder

not really

we can dream though

it's sad he killed Superman

it's sad he never got to make that authoritative adaptation of the Fountainhead where Howard Roark beats Toohey to death with his bare hands

rip big man, heaven needed a visionary director

i think ILX really needs to look at itself in the mirror. is this the first person the board has collectively gotten together and killed?

will never forget his last words...

"avenge me" - to no one in particular

*sigh*

is this the first person the board has collectively gotten together and killed?

*looks off meaningfully into the middle distance*

Joe Lieberman RIP
RIP David Brooks

Enraged Zack Snyder Lashes Out at People Who Don’t Think Superheroes Kill

“Someone says to me, ‘Batman killed a guy.’ I’m like, ‘f**k, really? Wake the fuck up,'” Snyder says in the video. “I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

Snyder goes on to explain: “Once you’ve lost your virginity to this f**king movie and then you come and say to me something about like ‘my superhero wouldn’t do that.’ I’m like, ‘Are you serious?’ I’m like down the fucking road on that. It’s a cool point of view to be like ‘my heroes are still innocent. My heroes didn’t f**king lie to America. My heroes didn’t embezzle money from their corporations. My heroes didn’t commit any atrocities.’ That’s cool. But you’re living in a f**king dream world.”

...You've charmed me.

Can we just close the book on this collective delusion that superhero culture has moral or artistic merits?

Granted, I haven't seen any since Batman Returns (1992) convinced me it was a genre for children, but I really do think that the whole genre is poisoning a generation, who would otherwise understand that the survival of human civilization will only be possible through collective action of ordinary people.

Zack Snyder, should you read this, have Superman close coal mines or sink (empty) oil tankers. You might win a fan.

Resisting...urge...to c+p...trenchant post...

Dr. Wertham would agree

I'm not quite there with Wertham. I do think future generations, living amidst the conseqences of our lives, will regard all of it as empty escapism.

Is there a single superhero that really responds to our collective guilt for destroying a planet?

This is that hot new 'engagement with one concept necessarily entails a lack of engagement with another concept because the human mind isn't capable of juggling two or more concepts simultaneously' thing rearing its head again, isn't it. Such a hot take, and so very fresh.

Is there a single superhero that really responds to our collective guilt for destroying a planet?

Can we just close the book on this collective delusion that superhero culture has moral or artistic merits?

Granted, I haven't seen any since Batman Returns (1992) convinced me it was a genre for children

Is there a single superhero that really responds to our collective guilt for destroying a planet?

I do think future generations, living amidst the conseqences of our lives, will regard all of it as empty escapism.

you could say this about literally every form of entertainment

Is there a single superhero that really responds to our collective guilt for destroying a planet?

― with Chew Guard™ technology (Sanpaku), 26. marts 2019 03:59 (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Isn't Aquaman mad that we're polluting the ocean?

xpost Well, then, perhaps it's time for every form of entertainment to tighten it up. I don't recall Ethan Hunt ever trying to put an end to carbon emissions in the Mission Impossible series of films, for example. Why not?

WHY NOT?

superman 4 ended the cold war and inspired the nations of the world to destroy their nuclear arsenals, i dunno what more you could expect tbh

Wake the fuck up. If you don't think Darkwing Duck doesn't kill people, you're living in a dream world.

— Lindsay Ellis (@thelindsayellis) March 26, 2019

Yes but people are an invasive exotic in Duckberg so killing them is both legal and encouraged.

(Sanpaku, if you're still reading, much love 2 u + yrs, didn't mean to have a go but I'm hard-pressed to think of an opinion expressed on this board I have felt so compelled to clown that I could almost write a book-length retort, and I accept that this is perhaps redolent of a number of unresolved issues on my own part, I accept this, I do.)

Is there a single superhero that really responds to our collective guilt for destroying a planet?

https://mondrian.mashable.com/uploads%252Fcard%252Fimage%252F250653%252F20a552d3-1a76-4f67-83da-bc1fb8f24fca.jpg%252F950x534__filters%253Aquality%252890%2529.jpg?signature=rR9uIyiXR1_9PEzHGldFpIiSGLY=&source=https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com

Captain Planet embezzled so much money

I've always thought his extensive oil holdings posed a serious conflict of interests.

army of child soldiers also problematic imo

Dr. Wertham would agree

― pippin drives a lambo through the gates of isengard (Sparkle Motion)

dr. wertham did good work and had some reasonable points, and has had his reputation smeared by enraged comic book fans backlashing against a moral panic that basically none of them were even alive for

Um.

Please, and only if it's not too much trouble, unpack the everloving christ out of that one when you get a chance. Thanks much.

(Color me shocked that reviving a Zack Snyder thread would elicit some of the more piping-hot takes I've seen in some time.)

"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call... the Challops Zone."

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi.huffpost.com%2Fgen%2F1182665%2Fthumbs%2Fo-ROD-SERLING-facebook.jpg&f=1

Ooh, ooh, let me try! Ummmmm...okay: 'the work of Frank Miller only really got good around the time when he kicked off his drug-induced progeria'. Hope that got me in the Zone!

I'm assuming the formula here is something like: (wrong + conservative) * baffling²

you guys know wertham did work unrelated to comics and did try to make some sense of peace with comics later in life, right

dr. wertham did good work and had some reasonable points, and has had his reputation smeared by enraged comic book fans backlashing against a moral panic that basically none of them were even alive for

^Both parts of this sentence are complete and utter bollocks. Just for example, this study from 2010 found that Wertham “manipulated, overstated, compromised and fabricated evidence”:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/books/flaws-found-in-fredric-werthams-comic-book-studies.html

oh for sure his original foray into comics commentary is nearly 100% indefensible

I would've assumed that he had a career beyond his crusade against comics but I'll concede that I never felt particularly compelled to explore the subtler shades of his life. Maybe Joe McCarthy regularly organized community book drives for disadvantaged children after those congressional hearings, who can say.

I'm biting my tongue because I really only read more info on him in order to half-heartedly bait the thread by going to bat for rushomancy's take out of boredom

but today I learned

Wertham had an early reputation as a progressive psychiatrist who treated poor black patients at his Lafargue Clinic when mental health services for blacks were uncommon due to racialist psychiatry. Wertham also authored a definitive textbook on the brain, and his institutional stressor findings were cited when courts overturned multiple segregation statutes, most notably in Brown v. Board of Education.

it's kind of wild that 90% of the things I've ever heard are "that guy fucked up the funnybooks!" and he was out there treating under-served communities and helped break down racist institutions

I mean, he did fuck up funnybooks though

All the more tragic that that's the hill he chose to die upon.

he got what he wanted I guess in that nobody actually buys or reads comic books

Coming from the "Sucker Punch" auteur, his bropinions are no surprise. Wish he'd just optioned "Irredeemable" instead of taking on the Big Blue Boy Scout.

Re: comics and bettering the world, J. Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars had a nice plot along those lines. Was noted in 2016 as optioned for a movie, but haven't heard anything new there for a while.

can we get a definitive take from Zack on whether Batman fucks

We know Nite Owl fucks.

If Zack Synder is to be believed, then comics... aren't just for kids anymore... o_0

bam! pow!

I wonder how The Fountainhead is coming along.

i'm not necessarily defending wertham's role in instigating the anti-comics witch hunt. sure, he had some crazy-ass ideas like that the batman/robin relationship had elements of man-boy lust or that wonder woman comics had bondage undertones. i just feel like overall, he did some good work, and dismissing him as "like mccarthy, but for comics" is an overly reductive sketch.

i wonder how wertham would have felt about the comics code he instigated in promoting censorship of anti-racist stories, like the ec comics one about the black astronaut. probably conflicted. maybe he felt it was a fair price to pay for six year olds not seeing graphic depictions of baseball games played with human entrails.

i'd say in the long run the comics code was bad for comics, but not because it hurt superhero comics. if anything they might have benefited from the hysteria - when wertham began his crusade comic superheroes were dying out, being replaced by funny animal, horror, and romance comics, comics that were also genre exercises but often with more storytelling possibilities than you could get with superman or captain america. the code in practice, unlike the hays code, served to reinforce comic books as a medium for children, and when "mainstream comics" got around to telling adult stories decades later, they did it with garish and childlike power fantasies marketed towards young boys. now we have a medium fit for a generation of man-children like snyder.

Wonder Woman comics did have bondage undertones!

I've yet to see any evidence that Wertham did any 'good work' within or about comics - as I noted upthread, Seduction of the Innocent is actually 'bad work' in terms of methodology, transparency, accuracy and fairness, in that it routinely distorts facts in order to bolster a highly dubious thesis (and gain Wertham publicity in the process - the good doctor was a notorious gloryhound).

I don't think funny animal comics have any more or less storytelling possibilities than superhero comics; and what 'adult stories' in mainstream comic, 'decades later', are you talking about?

It's good practice, as a general thing, to not talk about a thing like you know what you're talking about if you don't actually know about the thing you're talking about. As a general thing.

Wonder Woman comics did have bondage undertones!

― Ward Fowler

i confess to a slight bit of sarcasm in that statement

again, any "good work" wertham did would not have been related to comics - if these issues should have been considered at some point, they would benefit from being considered in a different environment than the hothouse atmosphere wertham fostered.

funny animal comics might or might not have had more storytelling possibilities than superhero comics, but i don't feel like they had fewer storytelling possibilities at least. i feel like walt kelly did a pretty good job with pogo. at the very least comics in that era had a sort of genre diversity they haven't, outside of art comics, had since.

my statement about "garish and childlike power fantasies" was badly phrased - i meant it to apply to the original conception of the characters, not necessarily to the "adult" stories themselves

there's an inherent dissonance in telling "adult" stories with superheroes, one that i'm honestly not necessarily averse to; it's just that the limitation of "comics = superheroes" is arbitrary, dumb, and apparently immutable at this point.

full disclosure, i'm super ill right now so please take anything i say in the context that i might possibly be delirious right now.

Look, when you stray into Golan and Globus territory, you just have to throw your qualitative compass out the window and let the winds of coke-fueled madness take you where they will.

i had no idea 'sucker punch' even existed

i'll probably watch it tbh

I did not know that existed

(It’s an original novel, not a movie. 100% imprinted my tiny headcanon version of Krypton / Smallville / teen Lex vs Superboy hatred etc etc, and taught me what a philtrum was)

what a philtrum was

That's almost the only thing I remember about also reading that novel as a youth! And I may still have never seen the film. What was the context, do you remember?

Probably something about Superman's philtrum looking real weird because they CGI-ed over his mustache?

very nearly: Superman goes undercover on another planet where everyone looks like humans except they don't have philtra, so he fills it in with some putty

man of steel, philtrum of putty

http://images.sequart.org/images/Superman-Maggin-Moore-001.jpg

this looks exactly as worn as my memory of my copy

(from the extremely prolix Colin Smith wondering if Alan Moore nicked some of his own prolixness off Maggin)

The extremely scientific infodump:

Average humanoid height in the Galaxy was somewhere between two and two-and-a-half meters. The nine Guardians were all an identical height of 124 centimeters. They also had filtrums.

Filtrums are rectangular clefts in the skin leading from the bridge between the two nostrils to the middle of the upper lip. Most of the humanoids in the area of the Central Cluster had them. The only known incidences of filtrums in humanoids outside that region of the Galaxy were on the planets Earth and Krypton. There were several theories on the reasons for this incidence of the apparently functionless birthmark, but one thing was known about them. Only humanoids with filtrums were capable of smiling.

The youngest of the Guardians was born within twenty years of the oldest, roughly eight billion years ago. Their blue skin was completely unwrinkled, they no longer had visible pores or prints in their skin, they each had a fringe of thick white fur around the sides and backs of their heads, they were virtually identical in appearance. What active communication they had with each other was instant, on a subliminal level. They no longer had any need for telepathy. Their functions were identical, their aspirations and jealousies were lost to the ages. Only one Guardian had actually left Oa in eight billion years, and he returned only briefly to be stripped of his immortality as punishment for some subtle breach of the group's ethical code.

LATE SPOILER:

"Not a bad escape plan for an amateur," Luthor told his companion as solar energy took over from inertia to fuel the Black Widow.

"Well, it was you who got all that computer information, like the pyramid's layout and the way to scramble the computer record of the escape," Superman complimented Luthor as he tore off the fake uniform and the wad of flattened building material he had scooped out of a wall and used to cover the cleft of his upper lip.

Hmm, excessively complimenting one another, hastily removed uniforms, scooped-out philtrums...sounds like a recipe for sexytimes if ever I heard one.

Superheros aside, I think anyone who has even seen any review of Sucker Punch, the film Zack Snyder had the most creative control on, would find him a bit skeevy.

In a moral and sane universe, that would have been the end of ZS's directorial career.

His Watchmen film was impressive as an effort in slavish emulation that also entirely fails to understand what it is copying.

it’d be cool if the movie had managed to be a meta commentary on the history and form of superhero movies

You're more likely to get that sort of treatment with the HBO adaptation/sequel.

well, now they'll have to make it a commentary on Snyder's work

fp'ing you all for not referring to him as elliot s! maggin

the book cover is right there

yeah i'm fp'ing dc comics as well

what about Hutchinson

hutchinson can fp themselves, i'm moving on with my life

tbf they stopped existing in 1985

Zack Snyder said "I don't think anything is going to happen right away, but Jim and I talked about it quite a bit. And talked a lot about maybe doing a book, or a comic book down the road to kind of finish this. We haven't locked anything yet."

"I would love to do a comic book, in the post-apocalyptic Knightmare world, the world has fallen, the ragtag team that's left alive trying to put it back."

"Inside of that story, we would also do that story of Joker killing Robin. The Joker is somehow involved in the stealing of the Mother Box and using it to create the treadmill; Cyborg is going to do the math, this is what we're going to have to do to jump back in time and warn Bruce correctly. A lot of the conflict would be Bruce reliving the death of Robin and what went into that."

"That would be a fun comic, Even just the death of Robin in that world would make a nice little one-off."

Recreating comic books in comic book form

a comic book with... violence? and shocking twists from a ragtag team? is there nothing his visionary mind can't rethink?

There were many avenues of interest but the bulk of my focus fell upon 'that would be a fun comic'.

I always thought that the element missing from Death in the Family was the visual of Jason Todd's brains spraying all over Joker's pant leg. The scene as depicted just never felt as...fun as it could've been.

I guess I should just be thankful that people like him and Geoff Johns are able to reroute their dark impulses into creative pursuits rather than, say, building furniture out of their neighbors' remains.

i mean sure for the next door neighbor but the damage to the culture...

"We're gonna kill the shit out of Robin" is either super brave or super dumb in this era when people get apoplectic over spoilers.

idk if you can spoil a comic book explicitly positioned as being based on a prior comic book, at least as far as broad strokes go

Remembering now that the trailer for Batman v Superman had that shot of Batman looking up at the defaced Robin suit image that implied he was long dead and the movie proper includes that same shot and literally nothing else about it or why it matters iirc

not explaining shit that’s implied backstory that’s not essential to the movie’s plot is fine, imo

tired of everything being explained, when it doesn’t come to the main plot. just.. let stuff have happened with implications

Yeah that’s true and I agree generally with that approach. Just in that case it seemed like a fan service type of thing to me when I saw it.

imo fan service relatively invisible to those who don’t get distracted by it is also good, until someone yammers at them about it

News that Snyder's completed "Army of the Dead" and a prequel has me interested. Didn't know this was in the works, with all the JL attention.

his previous dead movie was a better remake than a lot of others and when the message is simpler he gets the direction better?

his own ideas are less straightforward and there’s
just... no vision, and not in a fun “open to interpretation” way imo

basically he has a variation of the Michael Bay visual
sense, however still has an ability to focus on the screen. but he just throws ideas he found interesting at the screen haphazardly. or is just boringly adapting things without nuance (Watchmen)

His Dead movie is the only thing he's done that's not worthless.

He has now done a Dead movie that IS worthless. "Impressed" that a man who recently lost his daughter can film a scene where a woman tries to save her daughter and they both get crushed to death by a shipping container and it's played for laughs. And then 5 minutes later you're expected to be moved by a man who loses his wife because Snyder is a useless shitbag when it comes to making films.

I quit at the 30-minute mark. Still 2 hours to go.

Flicked through it, looks like the usual inarticulate bombast

The RLM guys make the movie look dumber than Kong vs. Godzilla.

decrying KvG and the Snyder army pic and boosting… Red Letter Media?

The plot of the movie involves a rich guy hiring a safe cracker to break into the rich guy's own safe.

It turns out that rich guy didn't actually want the stuff in the safe, but the head of an alpha zombie. The time it takes to unlock and unload the safe lets the alpha zombies attack them, destroying both the money and the head. Spoiled u lol.

Rich guy works with the US government and would have had easier access to zombie's heads at any earlier point.

Also the entire movie is shot with extremely short depth of field. Not such a good idea for a movie featuring hordes of zombies.

the one dude’s mission was to get an alpha zombie
head, iirc

everyone else’s mission was to run into weird things that made them question the futility of being in a heist film, including the corpses of a failed prior expedition that looked like their own. accompanied by a time loop joke that… may set us up for the sequel:

Army of the Army of the Dead

I'm guessing the time loop thing was included because Snyder thought the Ring Cycle involved a literal time cycle.

really looking forward to watching this if the RLM dudes hated it or complained about it being dumb

the negative effects of red letter media on film discourse are profound imo

I don't like or watch RLM stuff but I tend to think of Cinemasins as the nadir of online film criticism, RLM is just boring and vaguely offputting

true by ultimate beef is with cinemasins now and forever but rlm is responsible for plinkett

Huh, I guess I just don't find the RLM people that much more off-putting or whatever than most things on the internet, and they occasionally make good observations. No idea what their negative effects on anything are, let alone on film discourse, whatever or wherever that is.