Thursday, August 15, 2013

A whole new World, Same old Bad Guys.



Howdy, looks like its time for my six to eight month dust off of this bile filled sack of putrid acid that is my blog and take it for a whirl round the block.  So hold onto your butts cause here we go.


 Ive had numerous conversations over the last month or so about Warner Bros announcement that they are planning to follow up Man of Steel with a Batman VS Superman movie, which in turn will be helmed by adolescent that never grew up Zack Snyder. Now when this news first broke the only problem I had with it was Snyder's involvement, that was it. I know loads of folks took to the internet to voice their opinion on the idea of a Batman/Superman film being a terrible fucking idea, but that's not me, my original problem rested purely with Snyder that's it.

      Now I know Man of Steel made a gazillion dollars at the box office, I know that a lot of folks thought it was a great new reworking of the Superman story, but me personally I fucking hated the film. I went to see it twice and after the second viewing I decided yep this film is a piece of effects driven garbage directed by a man who not only doesn't understand the idea of Superman as a character but also took everything else about the Superman story filtered it through draft of a script he bought second hand off Michael Bay and then proceeded to shit it against my eyeballs giving me special effects conjunctivitis of the ooziest order.

      So the idea that this guy and the team he has working for him can take the two most iconic Comic book characters of all time and put them together in one film and do them justice is for me nothing short of a cluster fuck. The man may be able to make a shiny movie, but he cannot direct a character driven story, and as Christopher Nolan and Joss Whedon have shown we now want our Superhero movies to have strong central characters as well as the big explosions.

               We will be introduced to a new Batman in the new movie, I mean come on he has to be a new version, because Nolan's Bruce Wayne is somewhere in Italy (where no one knows what Multi-Billionaire Bruce Wayne Looks like) busy polishing his shit eating grin from the end of Dark Knight Rises, Fuck all these rumors regarding Bale returning for a silly paycheck this will be a different Batman. If it isn't then the credibility of this new movie has sunk even lower. The one rumor that I actually hope is true is that Josh Brolin might be tapped to play the Caped Crusader I do like the idea of Mr Brolin playing an older more grizzled Batman, this plays along with the idea that the studio may in fact be taking some story elements from Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns storyline, a story in which Batman is obviously the main character and in which Superman plays a small but significant role. 

 Henry Cavill while not bad as Kal-El in Man of Steel, we didn't so much as get a sniff of his take on the bungling Clark Kent that is for me an essential part of the Superman mythos. I have no problem otherwise with Cavill strapping the S on for another outing.

This brings me to what is essentially the meat of this blog post. The supposed villain of the new film, or at least one of the supposed villains who has been hinted at so far. Lex Luthor, a villain who has already been portrayed on the Big and Small screen by numerous actors over the years, Now here is a list of Superman's rogues gallery

Superman's Rogues Gallery


See all those Bad Guys...quite a lot right?

So I ask the following question and quite loudly too.

WHY THE FUCK ARE WE GETTING LEX LUTHOR AGAIN?

When Batman was rebooted with Batman begins we got Ra's al ghul, a character we had never seen on the big screen so why couldn't this approach be applied to Superman?. With Snyder's Man of Steel we got General Zod again, granted he was more in line with the comic character this time around but we had already seen him go up against Kal-El before and played sublimely by Terrance Stamp in Superman II in 1980 and in that outing Luthor had been reduced to nothing but a grovelling lackey. So why the fuck does Warner Bros feel the need to bring Luthor to the screen AGAIN. We actually don't even have to go back to Gene Hackman's portrayal of the character, we have already seen return to the screen in 2006 in the terrible Superman Returns this time played by Kevin Spacey and since this was supposed to be a sequel of sorts from Donner's/Lester's offerings Luthor's motives for his evil doings were still about the acquisition of land something that wouldn't really come across as that villainous in this cynical day and age. To really make cinema goers give a flying fuck nowadays you really need something more than a guy who wants to get a foot hold on real estate market

There is one Villain that would be able to go toe to toe with Superman and Batman as a team, pose a real threat to both and be relevant in this day and age, and it has yet to be utilized at all for a big screen outing and that villain is Brainiac. Just look at the state of America at the moment with all this NSA malarkey, Big brother watching everyone taking note of every phone call, every url we enter. Why not personify this into a villain? Brainiac has been around in the comics since 1958 so its not like the character might have slipped under the radar. he has gone through various different retcons and variations, and the character could easily be adapted to fit into something that would hit close to the bone of many a tech using cinema goer and prove to be a proper threat to both the big blue boyscout and the Dark knight. He can stand toe to toe with Superman when it comes to brawn and play tactical mind games with Batman and his cunning.

To me this is pretty much a no brainer (pun intended) . We live in an age where everyone is online, everyone is connected through their smartphones and tablets, so why aren't Warner Bros tapping the one villain that will drag their Comic book properties into the here and now? this would easily start to make them relevant and current and give them the ability to combat Marvel/Disney who are steaming ahead in terms of Comic book movies. Another thing that needs to be done is Warner Bros need to appoint their own version of Kevin Feige to steer the ship with regards to their overall plan for the DC movies that they hope to make off the back of this outing, but this is a whole other angry blog post.

Now I know that a lot of the news about the likes of Bryan Cranston or Mark Strong being tipped to play Luthor in the next film has yet to be confirmed by Warner's but I have yet to hear rumors of any other villain being put forward and with Cranston's current worth as an actor off the back of Breaking Bad lending gravitas to the idea of Luthor being the next Big bad of course a fair few folks are going to say "Fuck Yeah", but if there is any way of getting the word to Warner Bros that they need to try a new Villain on for size instead of giving us the same bad guys we have seen before on the big screen than please point me to it, cause right now my vote is for Brainiac, a role Cranston or Strong could easily play as well or any other talented actor who has the ability to shave their head.



UPDATE: 

So Ben Affleck has been announced as the new Batman, and the internet has literally exploded with reactions ranging from quiet and serene acceptance to people swearing vengeance on the studio, their families and their household pets.

Now I like Affleck as both an actor and a director. He has shown on numerous occasions that he can pull off roles with great skill, and also give us films filled with great story, emotional impact and Alan Arkin telling us to "Argo Fuck ourselves" . Still the great unwashed of the internet don't seem to be happy, and unfortunately no matter how hard I try on numerous social networking sites my words of sanity don't seem to be getting through the countless Fucktards and their postings  NOOOOO!s or "He was the Bomb in Phantoms Yo!" So Ive taken to this recent blog post to express my feelings.


  First and foremost, Affleck is an award winning writer and an multi-nominated and award winning Director. In my humble opinion he was robbed when it came to his turn as George Reeves in Hollywoodland. I'm trying to figure out what it is that people so vehemently  don't like about him and I guess because I am a fan of the majority of his work I'm either blind to this or there are more people out there who have a severely different measurement of quality compared to me than I originally thought. I mean come on remember the The Town? he was fucking amazing in that movie, a stoic broken character who was just tired with everything, perfect fucking analogy of The Bat in the DKR storyline even if I do say so myself, so why in the living flying fuck wouldn't he be able to portray a character like that again? Like I said at the beginning of this post the weakest link this franchise has is Snyder, the dude cannot see past the shiny effects. All of the actors involved can play each of their roles with gusto, but only if the Director lets them and this Fuck Knuckle cant.

So to finish up, Hey Warner Bros you used dialogue from a Batman comic to announce this sequel to a Superman film, and the first major casting announced is Batman. how about over the next month or so we get some fucking Superman news about this supposed sequel to a superman film and leave the Bat in the cave for a little while.