BATMAN V SUPERMAN: the film of the decade?

http://www.movingpictureblog.com/2015/11/batman-v-superman-teaser-trailer.html

The 1989 Tim Burton BATMAN was tagged with the blurb THE FILM OF THE DECADE.

And certainly, there was a must-see factor due to its trailer showcasing the stunt casting of Jack Nicholson (in his only superhero outing to date) as The Joker.

But there wasn't the enormous burden of artistic/financial expectations as there are for Zack Snyder's BATMAN V SUPERMAN.

Warner Brothers and DC have managed to devalue the DC Comics brand on-screen for more than twenty years--starting with the decision to dropkick Burton after the blend of genuine subversiveness (the Penguin and Catwoman scenes) and going-through-motions that was BATMAN RETURNS; the studio chose to hand off to the more pliant Joel Schumacher (it should be noted that parents weren't complaining about disturbing content the way they did during the original release of BATMAN RETURNS) for two films that tried to fuse 90s camp (nipples on the Batsuit) with the more obvious burlesque humor of the 60s Adam West/Burt Ward ABC series.

There's no need to discuss at length Bryan Singer's heartfelt but too leisurely attempt to provide a coda to the Richard Donner/Christopher Reeve era of SUPERMAN. 

But it's still a mystery to me why WB/DC decided to double down on Zack "punch through three layers of concrete" Snyder (who admittedly made a mostly effective film of WATCHMEN) after he too gave the world an uneven SUPERMAN reboot with a way-overdone climax.  And Snyder/WB/DC tripled down on retaining Henry Cavill as Superman (during the making of B V S, the Guy Ritchie MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. co-starring Cavill underperformed due in part to young audience unfamiliarity with the old TV series that birthed it).

Some people I follow on Twitter are beginning to salivate over BATMAN V SUPERMAN--perhaps in hopes the "adult comic book" ethos and fresh-for-the-time feel of the Burton BATMAN duo will again be realized (within the limits of the PG-13 rating as it's now enforced).

Maybe the miracle will happen.  But I'm not so sure we'll see a franchise rejuvenation like, say, the good-but-not-great CREED or the so-far-wonderful trailers/clips for JJ Abrams' STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS.

Sean Young, star behavior/misbehavior and Hollywood sexism.

From a GUARDIAN profile (inspired by a British theatrical reissue of BLADE RUNNER) by Danny Leigh
(http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/26/blade-runner-sean-young-interview) :

It's strange, how the Blade Runner legend now leaves out both [Sean] Young and her co-star Daryl Hannah, presenting it as the collective triumph of Ford, Rutger Hauer with his “tears in rain” speech, and Ridley Scott orchestrating it all. Then again, that kind of thing often blights actors. Like a lot of what befell Young, it could only have happened to a woman.

The past is unknowable. But the idea that a young female actor new to Hollywood would be directed to the casting couch is hardly outlandish, or that the same actor would face the same demands even as a star. On-set, male actors can scream abuse at underlings and have it passed off as being “driven”; making Wall Street, an unwitting Young had a sign reading “cunt” stuck to her back by Sheen. And when the media reported her trials, they did so with the particular pursed delight that greets a woman’s fall from grace.

As for Hollywood, it often finds it easier to give second acts to men. Young could be excused a smile on noting that the highest paid actor in Hollywood for the past two years has been Robert Downey Jr, whose struggle with drug addiction in the 90s saw him spend time in state prison, as well as mistaking a neighbour’s house for his own and falling asleep in a child’s bedroom.

There are probably too many stories about Young’s “theatricality” for them all to be untrue. In the course of our email exchange, I am not always struck by the urge to get stuck in a lift with her. She admits to a “knack for pissing people off.” It is also rude to heckle someone while he’s collecting an award. But it’s unlikely any of this was helped by how the industry treated her. And she can be funny, and self-aware, and if even half those stories were embellished, and just some of that treatment was down to sheer misogyny – well, that’s quite a bum rap. You’d be angry too.

Regarding Johnny Depp.

As expected, there are several what's-going-wrong entertainment media articles on Johnny Depp's affinity for payday jobs in would-be franchise starters like THE LONE RANGER (which would have been immeasurably better if Depp and Gore Verbinski created a lower-budget, non-Disney/Bruckheimer product feeling obligated to hit familiar PIRATES marks) and MORTDECAI (haven't seen it, but marveling at how Depp passed on Wes Anderson's GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL to work for David Koepp yet again).

The only upcoming Depp projects that hold interest for me are the Whitey Bulger biopic (though it's being directed by the I-love-Formula Scott Cooper) and Depp's own still-in-the-works Keith Richards documentary.

Then it's back to the safety of being acceptably eccentric in two more PIRATES sequels and a sequel to ALICE IN WONDERLAND (the low point of the Depp/Tim Burton collabotations).

Now vs. then: film critics/reviewers/watchdogs on the far edge of PG-13 violence.

"Even allowing that TLR's weirdness is "interesting" -- and I think it's just an overstuffed train wreck of multiple agendas, myself -- there is such a thing as a movie's implied compact with its audience, particularly when it's a supposed kiddie flick. I've read about droves of parents exiting with their tykes as soon as [SPOILER ALERT] one character cuts out and eats another one's heart. I'm with them, and remember: that's one hefty chunk of change for parents to burn off at the multiplex all of 1/2 hour in."--Tom Carson, veteran of publications such as L.A. WEEKLY and ESQUIRE, commenting on Glenn Kenny's MSN.com review of THE LONE RANGER.

"The film betrays no human impulse higher than that of a ten-year-old boy trying to gross out his baby sister by dangling a dead worm in her face."--Dave Kehr on INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, which had a heart-removal scene and caused the creation of the PG-13 rating midway through the summer of 1984.

And here's Ed Grant of Common Sense Media doing a years-after-the-fact assessment of Tim Burton's 1992 BATMAN RETURNS:
http://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/batman-returns

Critical tut-tuts, audience squeamishness in certain cases--and more broad-audience-friendly sequels with the latter two films.  Given the response to THE LONE RANGER (though the film has its critical defenders), it's not likely to get that far.

Post to Blu-ray.com Forum section with irreverent take on Tim Burton.

Although I'm never inclined to entirely trust reviews of films I haven't seen myself, that review honestly doesn't surprise me. I've been seeing trailers for this in front of movies at the theatre for a heck of a long time now, but for whatever reason I haven't been able to get excited about it. Until recently, when a few additional (and mostly frenetic) scenes were added in, the trailer seemed to be geared to entice the audience mostly via amusement with the Frankenstein (or Bride of Frankenstein) references, rather than anything very unique. The "old" Tim Burton--the one who directed "Vincent"--was all about ripping off Edward Gorey, and paying tribute to the twisted and ghastly. Edward Scissorhands seemed to be the transitional film, where he first started turning into the "new" Tim Burton, who was all about pointing out how mean perfect people pick on poor misunderstood souls with pale complexions--And then he even pushed THAT aside to direct everything his fanboys and nostalgically clueless studios thought he "should" direct, which usually means campy, snickering love letters to easy pop-culture references everyone thinks they're clever for throwing about. He hasn't done one of his "own" movies since Mars Attacks, and that was fiffteen years ago. By getting the chance to look back at his roots, now that post-Alice Disney throws money at him for belching, think he wanted to see whether he could still direct Beetlejuice, and from the reviews, think the answer we get is......."No." You can't go home again after Dark Shadows and Corpse Bride.  (If I want late-80's/early-90's Tim, I'll just have to content myself with the "Aladdin" episode of Shelley Duvall's Fairytales.)

The burden of being Tim Burton.

Remembering an interview Daryl Hall once gave where the subject of music superstars who wanted to hire Hall and Oates to produce their records came up. Hall referred to these unnamed singers as "....vampires who want to vampirize your sound.". And there's Tim Burton, enough of a brand name to be hired to Burtonize projects such as the 2001 PLANET OF THE APES, SWEENEY TODD (which was genuinely good, along with the under regarded CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY)) and ALICE IN WONDERLAND. During the past decade, there was also BIG FISH, which I'd like to think of as producer Richard Zanuck encouraging Burton to make an uplifting, non macabre, Oscar-friendly project. And there's the unevenness of DARK SHADOWS, where Burton was apparently expected to treat Dan Curtis' gothic TV/film franchise as THE ADDAMS FAMILY--given Burtonesque treatment by Barry Sonnenfeld two decades ago. What now exists in my short-term memory: Johnny Depp's heroic gravitas, the waste of Helena Bonham Carter (in a role changed from strong female on the TV series to comic lustful drunk) Chloe Grace Moretz and Michelle Pfeiffer, Bella Heathcote looking like a character from Burton's stop-motion and CGI-animated films come to life and Eva Green gamely maneuvering all the film's shifts in tone. Somewhere, the ghost of Dan Curtis weeps as Tim Burton continues a two-film artistic slide which will hopefully end (UPDATE 10/18/12: The slide did end, with FRANKENWEENIE turning out as Burton's best post-SWEENEY TODD film, but suffering at the box office due to being the last in a threesome of animated horror comedies out this summer and fall--and perhaps paying for the sins of DARK SHADOWS too.) with this fall's animated remake of a short film called FRANKENWEENIE (the original was made when Tim Burton was considered subversive and relatively avant-garde by the standards of 1980s Hollywood).

Tim Burton explains for you why DARK SHADOWS is being served with a twist of parody.

For those who don't keep up too often with THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, Geoff Boucher is the designated chronicler of all things Fanboy-friendly.

So, here's an excerpt from his talk with filmmaker Tim Burton on what looks to be Burton's Barnabas-meets-BEETLEJUICE take on Dan Curtis' gothic DARK SHADOWS (a durable property which became a daytime soap from 1966-71, two theatrical films in 71-72 and a short-lived prime-time series in 1991).

Boucher and Burton discuss the appeal of the daytime version.  Let's join Burton here--highlighting and bracket comments by me:

"It's a different animal," Burton said. "If I go back and watch something like STAR TREK, it's not that hard
to analyze what the appeal was, and even if the show is dated you identify what it was that made it work.  The DARK SHADOWS appeal was a little more abstract.  What I loved about it was the fact that it was a melodramatic soap opera, and, well, that flies in the face of any modern studio's interests as far as moviemaking [unless it's a recently-generated source of material such as the TWILIGHT books/films].  But what we've gone for is a mixture, and that's always what I've been interested in.  I think most of my movies are mixtures of light and dark and serious things and things that have humor in them. [what Burton is really saying is that old, unfamiliar TV series now get greenlighted as movies if they're played for laughs a la 21 JUMP STREET--but not in their original form]."

Shedding tears for Denise DiNovi's current producing career.

http://rainn.posterous.com/thank-you-hollywood

Once upon a time, Denise DiNovi (met her once and thought she was a nice person--she's married to a man who was a cinematography fellow at American Film Institute during 1988-1989) was involved in the production of films such as HEATHERS and EDWARD SCISSORHANDS.

Now, she has another film coming out from her home studio Warner Brothers--it's a little Katherine Heigl/Josh Duhamel dramedy called LIFE AS WE KNOW IT.  From the TV ads, it promises to be a sitcom filled with lots of baby poops/pees/barfs jokes.

Previously at WB, Denise was involved with producing an Amanda Bynes vehicle called WHAT A GIRL WANTS--where the original poster art of Bynes giving the peace sign was apparently thought too subversive (remembering that the film was released in the George Butch Jr. era) and airbrushed out in later versions.

It's just sad to see someone with talent having to make the best of what I'm guessing must be a less-than-ideal environment to get female-centered and/or intelligent mass-audience films greenlighted, made and released with full studio support.