foofighters7

my title would be
Superman: Not Nietzsche's Superman but still darn good!

Supermallet

I changed the thread title so that there's no confusion as to whether or not it's meant to be the title of the new movie.

The Bus

Ugh, Zack Snyder.

Charlie Goose

More like Epic Fail Superman.

Hokeyboy

People actually thought the title was New Superman? Really??

fumanstan

Solid Snake

That son of a bitch!

Blu Man

Nolan? Ruined?

DieselsDen

Snyder's film will be the precursor to a reboot in 2018.

Paul_SD

I am curious to see what this 'direction of taking the character that Warner never thought' of is. Nolan's an ambitious storyteller, but also quite sloppy.
Hopefully Synder will make whatever it is as tight as it can be.

Supermallet

Yeah, Memento and The Prestige are so sloppy.

I think you're letting your dislike of the The Dark Knight color your perceptions.

fumanstan

For someone that doesn't care much for the movie, Paul_SD certainly has had a lot to say about it for 2 years now.

RichC2

Nolan is a pretty solid storyteller, though he focuses a little too much on plot and lets other things, like character, slip through the cracks. And I'm still not convinced on Snyder. Watchmen was a visually well rendered "recreation" of the comic book but failed spectacularly as a movie. 300 and Dawn of the Dead had similar issues, Legend of the Guardians was simply all over the damn place. It also doesn't help that his movies are, frankly, pretty boring.

We'll see though.

Guru Askew

I wouldn't even concede that Nolan is an ambitious storytellers. Every single one of his movies with the possible exception of "Following" is a rehash of something else. "Memento" is a Pintner ripoff, followed by a remake and three adaptations. "Inception" is then totally derivative and unoriginal. I'm sure you could dig something up that did "Following" earlier if you wanted and as far as I'm concerned it would probably be better. For what it's worth when I watched it on Netflix streaming with my dad he asked me if it was a remake of something else or had been remade. That sums up Nolan's entire body of work far as I'm concerned, movies that are bland and derivative and leave you with a sense of having seen it all before. I guess you can get away with having no visual style (unless you consider "shiny skyscrapers and blurry action scenes" as a visual style) when you're pretentious Eurotrash with a competent cinematographer.

Snyder, on the other hand, isn't afraid of entertaining his audience, unlike Nolan. He's no Spielberg but he's a perfectly capable director of flashy action and while "Superman" is obviously more "popcorn" than any of his other movies I definitely think he is a good fit.

RichC2

He is a pretty ambitious storyteller. He isn't the most original, but he does try to tell 2 movies worth of plot in every movie he does. Just another definition for the same word.

Just hope Nolan forces Snyder to keep the slow mo to a minimum, it has become unintentionally hilarious.

Guru Askew

I don't think the whole "2 movies worth of plot" really applies when you have something like "The Dark Knight" when the storylines for the 2 villians are as half-baked as they are. In reality there are like 3 or 4 storylines going on in that mess of a movie and Nolan (and his brother and Goyer) should probably learn that you need to have at least one solid A plot, you can't just throw in a bunch of B-plots and hope that they add up to make a good one.

As for the slo-mo, maybe if Nolan employed it every now and then you'd be able to follow at least one of the action sequences in his over-long 5-and-a-half-hour Batman "epic".

RichC2

Must have seen a different movie. I'm not the biggest TDK fan, and while I think it's agreeable that the secondary villian got the shaft, the rest of it was fine. The action scenes are pretty easy to follow and thankfully kept to a minimum, let him stick with the more interesting stuff which varied in its own right. Still, a really entertaining movie in its own right that easily trumps most big budget entertainment (something I'm finding less and less appealing.)

Snyder's big problem is he has nothing to do but be flashy - and it quite frankly doesn't look that good - which is why his 30 second fight scenes that should be over and done with last a full 3 minutes post-slowmo. Shit gets old, fast, not to mention corny. Hopefully he'll leave it out of this project altogether.

Neither one of these directors is particularly great at getting emotion out across the screen, but Nolan is better at what he does.

kefrank

This argument doesn't make sense. The source material is independent of how one tells the story. By your argument, Snyder (not to mention countless other directors) is no more ambitious of a storyteller than Nolan, since every one of his feature films has been a remake or adaptation. That does not compute.

While Nolan may not entertain you, the available evidence shows that even in spite of his flaws he's been pretty successful at entertaining his audience.

I haven't gotten to Watchmen yet, but I find Snyder to be a pretty mediocre director. Dawn of the Dead was ok, but 300 had too many flaws for me to take it very seriously. His attachment to this Superman movie doesn't get me excited.

I also always find it a little odd when people hold Spielberg up to be the pinnacle of directing. Spielberg has had his moments, but he's had just as many missteps and his sentimentality is way too heavy-handed for my taste.

Hokeyboy

May I ask, what mainstream filmmakers who specify in genre-related entertainment do you think have done superior work over the past, say, 5-10 years?

Guru Askew

David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, Steven Spielberg, Sam Raimi, Bryan Singer, the Wachowski Bros (well, not in the last 10 years but close), Peter Jackson, off the top of my head. Then you have people like Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese who have flirted with genre movies in their later years (as opposed to Spielberg who has done full-on genre films in the last decade) and Nolan doesn't even come close. Ultimately I'd put Nolan in the same league as middle-of-the-pack genre directors like Alex Proyas. If you gave Proyas the same crappy co-writer (who did "Dark City" with him) and told him to take it far too seriously to the point of ridiculous it would have been just as good as Nolan's Batman movies, if not better.

I'm not irrational, I'm not going to sit here and say he's a hack on the level of Paul WS Anderson, Michael Bay or Uwe Boll but he's certainly overrated.

Supermallet

Fincher I'll give you. Aronofsky doesn't do mainstream genre work. Spielberg's been up and down (Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can are among his best, then there's The Terminal), Singer did Superman Returns, Raimi did Spider-Man 3, I liked Speed Racer. Lord of the Rings was great, King Kong and Lovely Bones were not.

I'd actually put Proyas above some of those, as he's at least always done what he wanted and I've never failed to be entertained by his movies.

But the best answer is Quentin Tarantino.

Hokeyboy

Neck and neck, IMO. Nolan's more consistent, whereas Fincher has higher highs and lower lows.
Low-budget indie auteur, different league from Nolan.
Wake me up when Nolan directs a total shitburger like "Crystal Skull". Spielberg's "Munich" is probably his best film ever, and "Catch Me If You Can" is fine entertainment, but I'd put anything Nolan's done over "War of the Worlds", "Minority Report", "The Terminal", "Crystal Skull", and 80% of "AI".
Spider-Man 2 is the only film he's done in the last 10 years that ranks up there. Spidey 1 is good but heavily flawed and Spidey 3 is a total fucking joke.


The fucker has made 1 decent film since "Usual Suspects" (X2) and Nolan's movies are entirely superior.
I actually liked the Matrix sequels, more or less, and dug "Speed Racer" too, but there's not a one of them I'd see before watching Nolan's "Insomnia" remake again.

FOTR, I'd rank up there, because that's before the studio gave him the keys to the kingdom and he was forced to rein in his indulgent practicies. Parts 2 and 3 are the living definition of diminishing returns (much of "Return of the King" is near unwatchable in its awfulness). Then you have the abortion that is "King Kong" and the "Lovely Bones" disaster... talk about your sloppy storytelling.

To be fair, these are giants late in their careers, whereas Nolan is only in his second decade. And what genre films has Scorsese done? "Shutter Island", really, and while it's a better movie than "Inception", it's no "Memento" or "The Prestige".

And Ridley Scott? Not for nothing, but "Gladiator" is a shittier "Best Picture" winner than "Crash". Pretty picture moviemaking for the feebleminded. And as thrillers are concerned, let's put "Memento" and "Hannibal" in the ring. Scott's done two quality films in the past decade ("American Gangster" and "Black Hawk Down") and a whole lot o' swill.
"Dark City" was a fantastic film. David Goyer needs a strong collaborator to make his ideas really shine on screen.

Agree to disagree, but if we were all the same we'd all be dull as dirt (unless we were all Groucho).

kefrank

+1 to every single one of Hokeyboy's points above.

Anubis2005X

-notrolls-

Nolan is ridiculously awesome and I love every one of his films, nuff said...

Solid Snake

ditto....