The Cutprice Guignol

Season 2, and this show just keeps getting better.

Phew, these new trailers are really coming thick and fast this week, right? I guess Marvel had to parry DC’s suspiciously decent-looking Suicide Squad trailer with someone equally as attention-grabbing- so they’ve chucked out a teaser for the upcoming Dr Strange. Now, this is a movie I’ve heard little about, but every screenshot I’ve seen seems to suggests it’s going to be a bunch of po-faced thesps saying very silly things in very silly make-up for a hundred minutes, which could either be incredible or mind-bogglingly dull. WITHOUT FURTHER ADO!

0:13: Okay, this doesn’t look too bad- Benedict Cumberbatch pulling a hilarious face upside down in a car, snow, dramatic voiceover. If they hadn’t just referred to him as Steven (sp?) Strange, which is one of the most quintessentially comic book names I’ve ever heard, this would look like some new edgy Cumberbatch Oscarbait.

0:31: Oh, THAT’S what Rachel McAdams is doing in this movie. That clears some stuff up. Either way, we’re on montage duty at the moment, while Tilda Swinton says things that sound horrifyingly like quotes from The Matrix (THE WORST FILM EVER MADE, for reference).

0:40: Look, we can all admit that this looks like it could be a promo for the new series of Sherlock, right?

0:48: “WHAT IF I TOLD YOU THAT REALITY WAS ONE OF MANY?” as the camera pans across two vaguely similar-looking cities. Um, they know more than one city can exist in the same reality, yes?

0:53: Whoever delivered that line about the power of the leaf has one of the prettiest voices I’ve heard in a while. I’d like him to come soothingly pet my head and read Stephen King books to me while I fall asleep.

1:03: Bald Tilda Swinton is cool, but then she can pull anything off. Once again, I’m getting Matrix vibes off of this, which is really not the tone I expected from this movie. She punches Benedict in the chest so hard his soul falls out, etc.

1:12: MADS! MADS! MAAAAADS! I’ve been reminded why I was ever remotely interested in this movie. I’d watch him in anything at all, despite the set pictures of his hangover make-up.

1:25: That’s…that whole city folding in on itself thing is from Inception, right? They know that? Right?

1:42: Benedict has a depression beard, and wants Tilda to teach him. Probably how to get such an incredibly clean-shaven look while sequestered away in some kind of interdimensional training ground, presumably.

1:50: Blah,  blah, a be-caped Benedict walks dramatically up some stairs, and this whole things looks passable. I’m reminded, however, that it’s out in my birthday month therefore someone’s going to take me to see it.

After the fiasco that was Batman vs Superman, DC have a lot of damage control to do. Rumours of hasty reshoots to turn the upcoming Suicide Squad movie into a lighter-toned romp abound and, to top them off, they released a new trailer last night at the MTV Movie Awards (which were hosted by Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson, who I now want compering every event in the industry). So, let’s take a look at what the newest trailer has to offer.

0:05: THE FIFTH WORD IN THIS TRAILER IS “SUPERMAN”. I thought they were trying to make us forget.

0:10: With every trailer that passes, Viola Davis looks more and more too-good for this movie, if that makes sense. Also, blah blah, Harley Quinn runs at some bars, Will Smith does some pull-ups in his freakishly ageless body etc.

0:28: The last two trailers had awesome music; this one does not. Already a step down. That said, Margot Robbie hasn’t licked a phallic object or slithered down a stripper pole yet so they might have pulled themselves back up on-

0:39: JOKER! WILL SMITH SAID JOKER! DO YOU GET IT DO YOU GET IT BECAUSE THE JOKER’S IN THIS MOVIE DO YOU-

0:45: Aaaaand there’s Harley Quinn squirming into a pair of tiny denim shorts. Isn’t it funny that Batman’s batsuit can change over and over again and no-one blinks an eye, but the concept of giving Harley Quinn a costume that covers more than 25% of her skin doesn’t seem to have crossed anyone’s mind in the last ten years?

1:00: KATANA! Well, it’s someone asking Katana if she has a boyfriend, but it’s the most acting she’s had to do in the trailers yet.

1:07: Haa, that vexing line was the first time Harley Quinn has done something I’ve liked. Thank God.

1:21: Why is Ballroom Blitz playing now? Oh, this’ll be the lighter tone they were talking about. It’s…..something, I guess?

1:34: MONTAGE! MONTAGE! MONTAGE! GET ALL YOUR MONTAGES HALF-PRICE WITH THE SUICIDE SQUAD’S KILLER DEALS!

1:40: Jared Leto’s Joker: still shit, even if we don’t want to admit it as a nation.

1:41: THAT’S BATMAN. THAT IS BATMAN. I HAVE GONE BACK AND PAUSED THIS VIDEO FOUR TIMES AND THAT’S BATMAN.

1:43: Aaaaand now that momentary flicker of excitement is gone as I remember Batfleck and just how thunderingly terrible he was.

1:50: Look, I’m going to be honest: I kind of dig this trailer. The first trailer was too dark, the second too goofy, but this has landed at a comfortable in-between- darkly funny, with cool action and characters I want to get to know.

1:52: Except the Joker. I can’t stress how little I care about him when Mark Hamill’s adapting The Killing Joke.

2:10: Will Smith is the epitome of a leading man and I’m delighted he’s in this. He looks like a lot of fun.

2:15: In a stunning twist, the final trailer tag is actually kind of funny. WHAT IS THIS MADNESS.

2:25: Dammit, I quite liked that.

Always look on the bright side: Henry Cavill could have been the leading man.

I don’t know what I fucking expected.

I’ve been dining out on my unadulterated hatred for Man of Steel for almost three years now. And I really thought a superhero movie couldn’t dip any lower than that- an uninspiring leading man, a fatally poor script, and generally joyless execution. After all, they were following it up with a Batman versus Superman movie- no matter how awful Henry Cavill was in Man of Steel, and no matter how much I detest Zack Snyder as a director, it would be next to impossible to suck all the fun and entertainment value from a battle that’s been pitched by every comic book lover at some time in their lives. Batman. Versus. Superman. You stick to this premise, and there is no room to fuck up. There is no room at all.

Out of the way Cavill, you’re standing in front of better actors.

But Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, which came out yesterday, failed to construct something even passably entertaining out of it’s iron-clad premise. Perhaps “fails” is too kind a word; that suggests that there was something to succeed at in the first place. Let me be clear: as soon as Snyder picked up that finished script, nothing good was possibly going to come out of it. From the opening moments, as a young Batman dreams himself floating amongst a bunch of bats (one of five-count ‘em, five- dream sequences the movie generously bestowed on us) while “DIRECTED BY ZACK SNYDER” appears on screen, I knew we were in trouble. This wasn’t any fun. This wasn’t any fun at all. This was pious, po-faced, pretentious pish, and I already hated it.

This was roughly my expression at the end of the movie.

And it continued in that vein for the rest of the movie. Batman vs Superman was cursed, in some respects, with the fact that it had to set up basically the entire DC cinematic universe in one movie, as well as trying to tell a coherent plot of it’s own. The movie would leap into some dark, fascistic terrorist element, and then have to jump straight back out again so Wonder Woman could be mysterious in a slinky dress. The action would finally pick up, and the film would grind to a painful halt as Wonder Woman watches three teaser trailers for upcoming DC superheroes on her computer. It leaves this two-and-a-half hour movie feeling, somehow, overstuffed. Every time the movie looked like it might be going somewhere, it suddenly remembered it had to work Doomsday into the script, somehow, and Lex Luthor had to get his head shaved, and Wonder Woman had to fight, and-

Lex Luthor: There, I guess

Let me be clear: I’m not saying that any of the rest of what we’re shown is much better. The scriptwriters, Chris Terrio and David S Goyer, seem to have mistaken “dark and edgy” for “turning both your leading men into complete fucking sociopaths”, as Batman kills people willy-nilly and Superman strops around like a whiny prick most of the time while the movie depicts him as an unsettling God figure the rest of it (one of the few aspects of the trailer the film really delivered on).

Henry Cavill is just as embarrassingly awful as he was in Man of Steel, maybe more so, as this film asks more of him while he delivers less. Ben Affleck- and I’m sure, by now, we’ve all seen the “Sadfleck” meme, which is both tragic and slightly funny in equal measure- is clearly trying very hard, but, between the ridiculous Batman suit that squishes all his jowls up till he looks like a frog, his poorly-articulated backstory, and the cartoonish rubbish fight scenes, there’s only so much he can do. He’s also quite catastrophically miscast as Bruce Wayne, dashingly sexy playboy, and every time hecomes near Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, I want to drape a napkin over her shoulder to stop him dribbing all over it. Jesse Eisenberg escapes relatively unscathed as Lex Luthor-despite the dire script, he brings an energy and sense of fun that the rest of the film is sorely lacking. Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman is perhaps the only actor who staggers free of this mess with some genuine accolades to her name, but with only a handful of minutes on-screen, she simply can’t do much to help by the time she turns up.

And it seems as if the writers and director assumed that the inclusion of Wonder Woman gave them free rein to treat the rest of their women with eye-rolling laziness- Amy Adams had to get saved by Superman no less than three times, while an early scene had her coyly playing the nipple dance in the bath for no apparent reason. Diane Lane didn’t fare much better. To be fair, though, this movie didn’t exactly do much to make it’s straight, white, male protagonists look any good, with both Supes and Batman making some staggeringly, mind-bogglingly stupid decisions that defied belief- both within the movie, and with the idea that someone thought this was a cogent plot point.

I found myself reaching for the controller during the fight scenes, as so many of them felt like video game cuts that would any second fade back into gameplay. The final hour of the movie is a poorly-defined collection of fights, all of which seem to take place against the backdrop of…. Is grey-screen a thing? If it is, then that’s what they shot most of the movie on. Every shot was dark and drab and visually uninteresting, despite Snyder’s usual flair for ripping off better director’s ideas.

And then, of course, there were the endless endings- I heard a handful of audience members laughing aloud at what was meant to be the film’s climactic emotional moment, and the rest of them sighing as we realized that this shit wasn’t over yet.

Honestly, I could write ten thousand words on everything wrong with this movie- every line that didn’t make sense, every poorly-defined motivation, every terrible piece of acting, every boring fight. But all you need to know is this: don’t see it. Don’t waste your fucking time. Take your money, and go see a better movie (Might I suggest the excellent 10 Cloverfield Place?). Because if we keep giving money to the superhero movie industry to see appalling tripe like this, this is what they will keep giving us. And by God, we deserve better. We surely don’t deserve this.

I am perhaps the hardest-core Will Arnett fangirl in the country. When I went to Google for images for this article, the first suggested result was “Will Arnett Smile” because I was drunk and had to show pictures of his lovely, lovely face to everyone in the room. Bojack Horseman, the brilliant animated comedy in which he stars, is pretty much the best thing I’ve seen in years. Gob Bluth is without a doubt my favourite thing about the near-flawless Arrested Development. I will fight you on this. I will fight you on this.

He’s…super tan in this series, I’m just now realizing.

So, when I heard that he was co-writing and starring in a new Netflix dramedy, Flaked, I was pretty pumped. And sure, maybe Love didn’t live up to my expectations, but this was Will Arnett, matched up with Mitch Hurwitz (of Arrested Develoment fame) as executive producer. This would be a terrible distraction from the last few weeks at uni and I was going to adore it.

The show revolves around Chip, played by Arnett, an apparently sober alcoholic who killed someone drunk-driving ten years previously. Surrounded by friends and lovers in the sun-soaked backdrop of Venice Beach, he’s become hooked on platitudes and mantras to try and prove to himself that he’s still a worthwhile person, able to help the people around him, particularly those in his Alcoholics Anonymous group. And yes, if you’ve seen Bojack Horseman, you’re all too aware that Arnett has already done a nigh-on perfect midlife crisis show that successfully subverts scores of tropes that genre suffers from. All the tropes, in fact, that Flaked wheezingly plods through over it’s excruciating eight-episode run.

Will Arnett’s face is the only thing I consistently enjoyed about the show.

When you’re treading territory as old as this- a middle-aged white guy has problems, let’s make a show/movie/book about it!- it’s inevitable that you’re going to hit some issues, but come on. Arnett bangs a series of hot young women, as do his equally middle-aged cohorts, even as almost every woman in the show proceed to reveal themselves as liars, emotionally abusive crazies, or vindictive bitches, several of whom are treated like utter crap by the male cast only to come sweetly, passively back. And then there’s Arnett’s on-screen ex-wife, played by Heather Graham- a blond, successful TV actress who apparently always “makes him feel small”. I’m not saying Arnett intended to take a swipe at his real-life blond, successful TV actress ex-wife Amy Poehler with this character, I’m just saying that one could pretty easily read it that way.

When you write a show which also stars you and features certain aspects that could be construed as reflecting your own life, you run the risk of falling into fantasy territory. Arnett is a folk hero for the local community, a stud with decades-younger women, beloved by all- and yes, I understand that a lot of it is meant to be a façade, but it all swings uncomfortably close to cheap wish-fulfilment, and that’s never interesting to watch. Again, I’m not saying it actually Flaked actually is the fantasy of the people behind it, but it certainly reads like that way too often for my liking.

Don’t get me wrong- I still think this is a pelter of a performance from Arnett (and, indeed, the rest of the oft-underserved cast), I’m just not sure the show has any clue what to do with it. Chip is so full of shit that it’s frequently impossible to figure out when he’s being sincere and when he’s just trying to snake his way into the pants of some inevitably-younger woman. Moral ambiguity- hell, having an outright bad guy as your leading character- has been done so well over the last few years (yo, Breaking Bad, haven’t thought about you in a while), Flaked really has no excuse for how ill-defined they make Chip’s motivations. He’s a tantalising, so-close-to-brilliant character that falls painfully short at every turn. As he spouts the story about his drunk-driving to his AA group in the opening seconds on the show, is he doing it to change lives or to garner sympathy? Hnadfuls of these moments are sprinkled throughout the show, scenes and conversations and lines that could have been so impactful is the show actually made a decision about his character. Is he an ultimately good guy using glossy lies and platitudes as a way to cover up his personal failings? Or is he a manipulative douchewad who doesn’t care about the people around him but still wants to feel needed?  It’s not ambiguity if it’s just straight-up confusion. If Flaked had made a decision one way or the other, it could have been brilliant.

And there’s the sad part about Flaked. Much like Love, it could have been something absoloutely great. Yeah, the genre’s been done to death, but Arnett and the rest of the cast put in solid performances and there’s flashes of something nuanced and insightful under the tropey bullshit and the refusal to flesh out characters and the central indecision about Chip’s character. With another season already commissioned, I can only hope that Flaked gets in bearings and leaves it’s weird, confusing first season behind it.