Results of Ruminations

In the first part , I set up a rewrite for Batman v. Superman  to try to salvage what happened in that film. Obviously, this is not a unique exercise, and there are a lot of others out there who have done similar things. I haven't read or watched those thought exercises, so if there are parallels between my ideas and others, it's happenstance. Part 2 Batman's unsatisfied, so he breaks into Luthor's office to see this "curiosity". He hacks (because it's this easy) the files, but doesn't have time to decrypt them as the alarm goes off (of course) and he has to do his disappearing bat-trick to keep from being caught. Now, however, he's on the trail.   Back at Lexcorp, Luthor figures out what Batman has done. "They know." He places a call, then says to the scientist fellow from earlier, "We have to move forward the Doomsday Protocol."  "To when?" asks the tinny voice on the other side of the call. "As...

Note: I'm assuming most people who care about Batman v. Superman  would have seen it by now, but I guess I should say I'm talking about that film in this essay. So...spoilers on it, Man of Steel, and  Wonder Woman , y'know? I tried " script doctoring " Jurassic World , so I thought I'd throw out some ideas about what I would have done differently with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.  Because multiple different films are contingent on the BvS  as the flagship, tent pole, or whatever metaphor you want to use for the entire DC Extended Universe, there are likely parts from Zack Snyder's film that had to be in there as setup for the other films. In fact, that setup is part of what makes BvS  such a hard film to follow. (In essence, DCEU went the opposite route of Marvel: What if The Avengers  had been the third film in the franchise, with only Captain America and  Iron Man  coming before it? It wouldn't have worked the way that it did. DCEU is...

A YouTuber named Nerdwriter--whose eclectic video essays span a gamut of fascinating topics, from how to read art to linguistic analyses of songs to deconstructions of film--has a great video about how Batman v. Superman  in particular, but Zack Snyder specifically suffers from eye-catching and memorable scenes, but fails to deliver on genuine moments. I rewatched Man of Steel  tonight, and I think Nerdwriter's points apply to the first foray into Snyder's take on Superman. I still like that movie. I'd never argue that it's well written (some of the dialogue is horrible, and their aversion of the word Superman  throughout almost the whole thing is weird) or not rife with problems, but I still enjoy the film. Part of it stems from my unapologetic joy at "building punching"--sequences where people throw other people through buildings. It can be monsters versus robots (like Pacific Rim , or, as I like to call it, Robot Monster Punch Punch ), or monsters vers...

Self-realization happens slowly. I have dim memories of being five-or-thereabouts and raising my arms in exultant joy that I was eating pancakes for dinner. I remember seeing myself in the dark reflection of the sliding glass door that led to the backyard of the Provo home that I had assumed we would live in until I died. Now that I see my second son's mannerisms, I believe that I tilted my head to one side the way he does, and I don't know if my memory is incorrect or not. One of the things that I dreamed of becoming some day was Spider-Man. I read novels about him, bought comics on occasion, and watched the '90s cartoon show fanatically. My own brown (ish) hair, white skin, and almost-kind-of-like-his body type only propelled me further into the fandom. If I married a redhead, I'd like to think it wasn't some vestigial sublimation of a too-obsessive childhood desire and that I was attracted to my future wife for other, more significant reasons. (Because I did, i...

I have loved superheroes since I was little. I have a memory of finding a length of yarn at my grandma's house and begging my mom to tie it around my wrist so that I could have a spider web shooting out of it. If I recall correctly, I was bothered that she put it in a cute little bow, and the length left over wasn't as long as I had hoped, but I do know that I ran around, pretending to attach the excess yarn to the walls and swinging through my grandmother's home. In the sixth grade, my world completely changed and Spider-Man , the cartoon show, debuted. And, just like that, I was hooked. (I would say "I was caught in the web from then on," but that would be cliched and too much of a dad pun, so I'll leave it at "hooked".) The vast majority of my childhood--including up through my early college days--found me reading Spider-Man novels* (I still have them, and they fill up an entire bookshelf on their own) or writing and drawing my own Spider-Man ...