Review: "Justice League"

by Chris Feil

Has the DCEU gotten all that brooding out of its system now that the team is finally together? The answer delivered in Justice League is a "yes... but.” Here the combined powers of Batman, Wonder Woman, and (you likely guessed it) the reanimated corpse of Superman are joined by three new cohorts, though they are hardly to blame for the series’s new tonal obstacles that it has created for itself.

As teased in Batman v Superman, we get three new heroes and luckily more texture for the Gotham / Metropolis twin city scene. Ezra Miller as The Flash is the biggest breakout, all snappy wit and wide-eyed amazement at his and the team’s abilities. Cyborg surprisingly plays the film’s emotional core, even though Ray Fisher feels trapped in CGI hell. Aquaman gives Jason Momoa little to do past providing the eye candy. He's also stuck in an unclear characterization that's halfway between this franchise's macho instincts and its uneasy comic relief reaching...

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Review: "Wonder Woman"

by Chris Feil

The absurdly long wait for Wonder Woman to arrive on the big screen is officially over with the arrival of Patty Jenkins’s stellar adaptation. Gal Gadot may have been the all-too-brief bright spot of last year’s Batman v Superman, but in her own story she emerges as a hero for the ages.

While this is yet another superhero origin story, Wonder Woman’s conviction keeps its more common beats alive. Gadot’s Diana is raised to be a warrior among the Amazons, with a strong sense of true justice, under the watchful eye of her mother Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) and trainer Antiope (Robin Wright). On the otherwordly arrival of earthly spy pilot Steve Trainor (Chris Pine), Diana sets out for a righteous battle with destiny on the World War I front.

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"Wonder Woman" Gets More Promising

Chris here. Among the seemingly endless barrage of horrors, 2016 has also been the year that gave us two DC filmic trainwrecks. Next year however Warner Bros. will be able to turn that around in equal measure with Wonder Woman and Justice League (and, oh yeah, The LEGO Batman Movie). While we're less optimistic about Justice League, the goods on Wonder Woman keep getting better and better.

These new posters send clear strong messages to the fanboy hoardes ready to trash a female superhero picture. Maybe we'll even get more in this series with the captions YAAAS, QUEEN, and SLAY. For my money, we have enough "power" and "courage" at the movies, but Woman just might make good on that "wonder" promise. Check out the new trailer below...

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Strong Lex For Second Steel

JA from MNPP here with today's rumor going around that Man of Steel director Zack Snyder and the powers that be at Warner Brothers have narrowed the search for their sequel's Lex Luthor to one fella you probably recognize - Mr. Mark Strong. Although the source giving this info up says the sequel's going to shoot next year I still think it's way way early to be speculating on this... ahhhh but speculation's what the internet does. And I'd wager that Lex is, as a villain or at least as an important character that will be introduced, a given as far as the second film is concerned - he's arguably as important to the world of Clark Kent as Lois is.

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Mark Strong is probably a great pick, too - he's older than Cavill, but as we saw in Man of Steel Lex is already an established force in the world to be reckoned with; his company's name is all over the place. So making him older make sense. The thing that gives me pause is...

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... Mark Strong has already played a DC character. He was Sinestro in Green Lantern. Granted he looked a little different. And he was probably the best thing going on in that movie. (Not counting Ryan Reynolds' muscles.) Of course Green Lantern was a bit of a disaster for the studio, and sweeping all of that under the rug is probably where DC are going slash have already long gone, so I should get over this.

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It just makes the field for these roles seem small though, doesn't it? I'm not knocking Mark Strong by any means, I like him, but there are lots of actors out there in the world with access to a razor blade and a nice shaped head who might be interesting and unexpected and haven't already played the bad guy in a DC movie, you know? Any suggestions, folks?

Meryl Soaring! Michelle Slumming?

By now I am quite used to the twin 80s blondes trajectories of "Meryl: still preeminent; Everyone Else: struggling." Meryl Streep and Michelle Pfeiffer are a decade apart in age so they're only conjoined in my own mind as the formative blondes of my cinephilia though they aren't directly correlative. Meryl's true contemporaries are the Close / Lange / Weaver / Weist / Sarandon / Field / Keaton super-pack (all born between '46 and '49... a vintage crop.)

But let's check in with both of my blondes very briefly today. 

Dan Zak, who is a very fine writer that I am acquainted with, wrote kind of a frosty profile of Pfeiffer when Chéri came out (which made note of her still robust online Pfandom -- guilty! -- though we ringleaders went unnamed) but he's made amends with this profile of Streep to coincide with her Kennedy Center Honors. It's a beauty.

There is nothing to say about her handshake, her mood, her carriage. She has no smell. Her eyes, obscured by modish rectangular glasses, seem dark and colorless — until she begins to recite a verse by 8th-century poet Wang Wei to prove a point about an artist’s individual voice.

“I seem to be alone on the empty mountain,” Streep says in her silvery contralto, shifting her posture as if bracing for a blast of high-altitude air.

She pauses...

Really good big piece with nice payoffs throughout, so read it.

On to Michelle. We hope that she's great in 2012's supernatural Dark Shadows (though given that it's a contemporary Burton film our expectations be low) and familial drama Welcome to People (but given that it's a directorial debut from Alex Kurtzman who has mostly written TV procedurals and action films, our expectations are none because the worth of debut efforts are impossible to guess at) but we've never expected that New Year's Eve was going to be anything other than a cash grab.

Michelle Pfeiffer venturing out for New Year's Eve premiere without her Armani black (gasp). It's Dolce & Gabbana this time.

Ultra Culture has a hilariously damning quote piece on "How the cast of New Year's Eve pick their projects" in which none of the stars tell the truth. Would it kill one of them to say "for the money"? I bet they'd even get some fun extra media attention for saying so. I keep forgetting that New Year's Eve is arriving. But the photo above reminded me of this series of tweets 'tween two British based critics and myself. (Ultra Culture doesn't know who I am but MaryAnn is an old friend.)

@UltraCulture New Year's Eve, incredibly, as bad as you'd expect.
@MaryAnnJohanson No, it's even worse.
@NathanielR at least tell me La Pfeiffer emerges unscathed. Wait... don't. NERVOUS
@MaryAnnJohanson Ummm...

Ah well, at least La Pfeiffer is looking predictably great on the red carpet.