1
Arts & Entertainment / Re: Now Playing
« on: May 23, 2025, 09:20:18 PM »I don't know why, but it's a Neil Young kind of evening.
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I don't know why, but it's a Neil Young kind of evening.
2
Arts & Entertainment / Dee Dee Ramone Like You've Never Heard Him Before
« on: April 23, 2025, 02:54:03 PM »If you're anything like me, you've been waiting for this for a long time.
3
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Flat Earth Popularity stronger than ever!
« on: April 03, 2025, 11:05:38 AM »
And yet the most recent post on the FE section is weeks old, and most threads there don't even get to the double digits in replies. The most popular thread on the forum is easily the Trump thread, which is approaching 13000 replies over the course of a decade, and that mostly consists of the same half dozen people trading inane barbs over and over again. Whether or not flat earth theory is popular, this place remains niche at best.
4
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Sexual Scandals
« on: January 20, 2025, 07:07:53 PM »Louis CK had plenty of edgelord fans to back him up when his career took a hit; Gaiman does not.Louis CK also wasn't accused of anything nearly as extreme as Gaiman, plus he admitted it and apologised. Gaiman is going all in on self-pitying apologia, which is only going to blow up in his face if/when it turns out even half of what he's accused of is true.
5
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Sexual Scandals
« on: January 18, 2025, 10:53:58 PM »wtf NeilIt's okay, he's a feminist.
This one honestly hurts a lot.
6
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: US Presidential Election 2024
« on: November 06, 2024, 09:31:44 AM »I expect support for Ukraine will be cut significantly, possibly completely, and I doubt Europe can really pick up the slack there. Putin's forces unimpeded in eastern Europe would most definitely be 'wild shit'.Oh, yeah, wild shit is about to go down one way or another. I dunno if it'll be martial law, but we mostly agreeWill it, though?
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Technology & Information / Re: ⚡Is my browser faster than your browser?
« on: September 23, 2024, 03:24:05 PM »
22.3 what
8
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?
« on: September 12, 2024, 05:29:44 PM »
These days if you say you're English you get arrested and thrown in jail.
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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?
« on: August 12, 2024, 03:03:39 PM »https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/12/elon-musk-should-face-arrest-if-he-incited-uk-rioters-says-ex-twitter-chiefWhat does some random guy who worked for Twitter have to do with UK policy re: Elon shitposts?Quote“In the short term, Musk and fellow executives should be reminded of their criminal liability for their actions under existing laws. Britain’s Online Safety Act 2023 should be beefed up with immediate effect.”
Is the UK okay?
10
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?
« on: August 11, 2024, 09:04:18 AM »
I had to look up the Sky News video of Rowley since the article linked does not show it. From the way Rowley said it, I can only conclude that he did mean people outside the UK, although to extrapolate 'US citizens' from that is a bit of a stretch. He's more than likely referring to UK citizens who are currently outside the UK, like Tommy Robinson, who is alleged* to have played a major role in instigating the riots.
Rowley is asked about Elon Musk but he doesn't say anything about Musk specifically, nor does he say anything specifically about foreign nationals, US based or otherwise, only that 'keyboard warriors' are not protected from incitement laws.
NY Post is full of shit as usual, but Saddam's interpretation is also lacking imo.
*if you want a better example of how fucked UK speech laws are, I can't even say something obvious without qualifying it as an allegation that I heard somewhere else because libel suits are so easy to file and win
Rowley is asked about Elon Musk but he doesn't say anything about Musk specifically, nor does he say anything specifically about foreign nationals, US based or otherwise, only that 'keyboard warriors' are not protected from incitement laws.
NY Post is full of shit as usual, but Saddam's interpretation is also lacking imo.
*if you want a better example of how fucked UK speech laws are, I can't even say something obvious without qualifying it as an allegation that I heard somewhere else because libel suits are so easy to file and win
11
Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched
« on: August 04, 2024, 12:38:09 AM »
Finally, the last time I will ever watch, think, or write about anything involving Zack Snyder! I've seen his name so many times recently that it ceases to look like an actual name that someone would have.
It’s tempting, whenever a director gets to do it their way, to celebrate the triumph of art over commerce. We might think of Terry Gilliam’s successful campaign to have control over the theatrical cut of Brazil after Universal created its own secret cut which removed the so-called ‘dark’ ending. More recently perhaps we think of David Lynch being brought back on board the third season of Twin Peaks after initially dropping out over budgetary concerns, delivering on that basis a work of clearly unfiltered personal expression. We prize such stories so highly because they are rare, for the pitfalls of giving an artist creative control in a commercial industry are many. Famously Michael Cimino’s 1980 behemoth western Heaven’s Gate not only lost United Artists tens (today hundreds) of millions of dollars, but apparently caused them to drop out of movie production altogether because the damage to their reputation was felt to be an even greater loss. Heaven’s Gate is by no means a bad film, but it suffered the worst vagaries of the invisible hand nonetheless. Seeming to have learned nothing from this and similar examples of the artist crushed by the capriciousness of commerce, Warner Bros. gave Zack Snyder the helm of their DC Comics film franchise, hoping to build a competitor to the Marvel Cinematic Universe by appealing to a darker, more auteurish take on such beloved heroes as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash. Maybe they got a little too much of what they wanted, with Snyder’s vision highlighting the rift between different groups of comics fans. His conception of the superhero, which he refers to as ‘hardcore deconstructionist’, is one of those things which you either go along with or simply refuse to accept; I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to be both interested in the superhero as a concept and ambivalent towards the idea that Superman killing his enemies makes him more mature or philosophically compelling as a character than he otherwise would be. Nonetheless, Snyder’s three directed DCEU features made money on their insane budgets, including Justice League, which Snyder himself did not finish owing to a family tragedy. Joss Whedon, who had notably helmed the first two Avengers films to great commercial success, was brought on board by Warner with the hope that he would give the DCEU its first mega-hit, or at least salvage the garbled mess that the film presumably existed as at that point. It made back its budget, meanwhile Snyder’s fans who had been awaiting the all too hasty culmination of the hardcore deconstructionist vision were left out in the cold. A massive fan campaign ensued with the result that in 2021 Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a four-hour epic, was released by HBO.
Since the film is more or less the same as its theatrical counterpart but twice as long, to talk about the plot seems a waste of time, though to talk about excess that adds nothing is perhaps a fruitful use of our time. This will mainly be the purpose of this review, which I hesitate to call a review in my usual style since it is not really all that concerned with content but with form, though it is very much polemical nonetheless. My main concern is to attempt to understand Zack Snyder himself, what is it that makes him do what he does as a filmmaker, because I am rapidly approaching the point past which I will never have to commit to thinking about Zack Snyder ever again. I want from my last effort in this fraught space to feel like I have gained something, that there was more than just the pointless suffering of nonsense as if I were a character in a story by Samuel Beckett. If I find myself depositing a stone in one pocket, then removing that stone and putting it in another pocket, and so on until it has traversed all of my pockets, the discovery made through this work may be one of insanity. But we must do the work first. First, then, an answer to the question: should we celebrate this victory of the artist, this preservation of the original vision? It’s easy and perhaps even sufficient to say that if you like the DCEU then you like Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and that that formula holds true in the negative as well. However, for me, someone who has been fairly baffled by the idea that anyone could find this sloppy, incoherent, childish drivel even remotely compelling in any sense whatsoever, the answer is yes. While I will take the piss out of them and their fave relentlessly, I still want Snyder’s fans to have their cake. The real question, the snobby question, is whether Snyder should be thought of as an artist at all. In many ways he can be seen as a commercial filmmaker with pretensions towards a garbled aesthetics which may ultimately come from his favourite author Ayn Rand. Rand’s philosophy, while commonly associated with the mantra ‘greed is good’, in reality spans many different fields in its scope. I want in particular to focus on aesthetics and creativity, and Rand has much to tell us that will prove illuminating as we delve further on into the mire of Snyder’s action figure nightmare world.
In her fiction many of Rand’s protagonists are notable for some prodigious skill or ambition that makes them better than the people around them, a common thread running through these is a seeming obsession with invention, particularly in the fields of architecture and industry. In We the Living, Kira Argounova is an aspiring engineer who dreams of skyscrapers from within the suffocating confines of the Soviet Union, even while she is swallowed up by the grinding inhuman machinery of the communist system. In The Fountainhead Howard Roark is a genius architect who is shunned by the establishment because he is steadfast in his desire to build structures in new and daring styles. In Atlas Shrugged John Galt leads a revolution of ‘productive’ and ‘creative’ people in order to force the US government to do away with laws that restrict industry. In all three cases the message is clear, these people are the real people, individuals for whom the whole world should kneel in acceptance of its inferiority as a matter of existential necessity, for if these individuals are bound by those chains whose links were forged only to bind the common folk, the leeches, the ‘looters’, humanity itself will wither and die by a plague of mediocrity. In many ways we can see these characters as superheroes of one kind or another, Promethean figures heralding change, progress, evolution, bringing mankind towards a reckoning with its own limits. As with the titular department store in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames you can be intellectually for or against them but to act to resist them is to invite your own doom, for in the real world per Rand theirs are inexorable forces that will sweep you away as though you were the merest mote of dust. However, I would like to think of this phenomenon of the all-powerful individual not entirely in reference to superheroes but also to artists, and in particular to Zack Snyder, the director who would build skyscrapers.
Like Argounova, Snyder dreams of skyscrapers, great spectacular man-made things that reach up to blot out the sun, looming over the world. Like Roark, Snyder is unorthodox, audacious in his methods, his stories move at their own pace, his characters to their own rhythms. Like Galt, Snyder’s creative vision is one that abhors all restriction, whether material or intellectual, and makes no compromise that is not to its own advantage. Snyder’s Superman kills because it is audacious, because it looms above the audience, because it negates compromise. This is the essence of his creation, a Randian action figure sandbox where big things happen not because of any logic of causation, any motive of character, but because they are big; not because they have substance to dig into or meaning to impart, but because their proportions and the awe they are presumably intended to inspire invite the assumption that they possess those qualities. Snyder’s interest is solely in the bigness of the event, and while he wrings some symbolic value from these gargantuan superhuman happenings, or at least tells us that he does, this can only ever amount to so much decoration on the periphery of the actual thing.
Snyder in many ways puts the lie to Rand’s idealisation of the individual, he embodies pretty much every Randian virtue but he is also of meagre talent. He is the real Howard Roark, an aspirant to greatness who was not shunned but who failed artistically, not because he was too brilliant but because he was an idiot, and not because he boldly transgressed the stuffy traditions of the establishment but because his alternative was founded upon nonsense. Crucial to Rand’s characterisation of ideal man Roark (and basically all her protagonists) is inherent victimisation, it is not enough for such a man to try and fail on his own merits, he must be the victim of a cruel system, a conspiracy to make mediocrity sacrosanct. It’s easy enough to see how this arises from her youth in the Soviet Union, where the good and the great were commonly ground down to nothing to serve the glory of the Motherland, of the Party. Kira Argounova is Rand’s most grounded heroine in that sense, yet in America, the setting of all Rand’s other fictions, the hero is beset by what exactly? Poor people who want help! A lesser woman would have clutched her pearls and fainted. For all her talk of individual merit, it is Rand’s preference that those who have talent but no money to begin with should loiter below their supposed true station for want of access, because what she holds sacred is not talent, not work ethic, not genius, but raw material wealth. In fact wealth is the virtue that retroactively guarantees talent, work ethic, and genius—if you have it, it must be because you earned it: the theory is not tested against the data, the data are tested against the theory and found wanting. When Bruce Wayne quips to Barry Allen that his superpower is being rich, the cuteness of the exchange only somewhat veils the Randian truth that Batman’s vigilante crusade and concomitant violence are validated by his virtue, the virtue of having lots of money. In this world, though he is presented in Dawn of Justice as a vanguard against the superhuman, Batman has purchased his own godhood, he has become a skyscraper to dwarf all those which he owns, towering far above the little hovels of other men.
The film itself is a skyscraper. At four hours in duration it is totally needless, a Burj Khalifa, testament to self-justifying excess. Compared to the theatrical cut, which was bad but unremarkably so, Snyder’s authorised version is an exercise in empty grandeur, like a gold toilet with gold toilet paper and a flush handle made of diamond. Amusingly this was expected to be the ‘mature’ version, yet a good many of the quips one might have expected to drip from the pen of Joss Whedon were Snyder’s own, laying bare the empty-headedness of the idea that Snyder is a mature, thinking person’s filmmaker. Rather he is a Randian filmmaker, someone for whom stamping one’s name upon something is more important than the quality of the thing being stamped upon. Snyder frequently makes ‘choices’ in this version of the film simply for the sake of having them be his own. Not better, perhaps not even worse, but his. There is something worthwhile in this in principle, but in practice it just serves to make you more and more aware of his own lack of artistic sensibility. Take the non-score music choices (please!) for example, during Bruce Wayne’s confrontation with Aquaman Arthur Curry we get to learn that Snyder likes Nick Cave, or rather that what he likes is people singing sad songs over a piano or whatever. I lost count of the number of drawn out sad piano scenes telling us nothing we didn’t already know, like for example were you aware that Lois Lane is sad because Superman is dead? Well don’t worry, there’s a drawn out scene with sad piano people just to make sure you got the point. But in fact it would appear that for Snyder ‘getting the point’ doesn’t really matter at all, it is enough for such scenes to be there because they add to the film’s duration, make it larger and therefore not just better but greater, a great work, a skyscraper.
Generally speaking I think that self-indulgence in art is a good thing, the greatest works throughout history in any given medium have not been made by following all the rules, indeed often they have made their own rules for other artists to navigate. As Walter Benjamin put it, I feel somewhat hyperbolically, a great work either creates a genre or ends one. If Snyder has rules of his own they are incoherent, like a child making up new rules for a game as it unfolds. Any genre he could create would begin and end in the same work, perhaps not even by the end but halfway through, for whatever ideal it pretended to in the first place would be gone, superseded by whatever needed right there and then to be the case. This entire review has of course been an extremely roundabout way of saying that Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a confused mess founded upon half-realised, half-grasped conceptions of art, of drama, and of the superhero. Maybe even less than that, it is an attempt to figure out Snyder himself. My conclusion is that he wants desperately to be seen as a philosophical filmmaker, a thinking person’s director of blockbuster epics like the similarly ponderous Christopher Nolan. But he isn’t even as good as Nolan, because at least Nolan has in his head some actual design that guides his projects, despite being a design I hate. I fear nonetheless that I have been too extreme in calling Snyder an idiot. Since I am not a Randian I hold charity, which may loosely be defined as kindness at the root of the act of helping others, to be a virtue, but since I am also a garrulous and combative egomaniac I must build in prose my own skyscrapers with my own name hung haphazardly therefrom in blinding neon. As the clichéd movie villain speech goes: we’re not so different, you and I. But in that case I would be saying nothing more than that everyone is Zack Snyder, for everyone wants their name on something somewhere and hopes that it won’t be erased too soon. Even if I am just a writer of flowery pseudo-entertainments, I would like to think that my name has ended up on a few things that are at least not incompetently designed and constructed.
Ultimately, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is an exercise in pointlessness. It adds nothing to the theatrical cut other than the weight of its own self-importance. It revels in its imagined audaciousness, the daring required to unzip and let loose a weak but long lasting stream of piss on the audience. Four hours later the front row, thoroughly soaked with piss, claps furiously at the brilliance of having been pissed upon to no real end but itself. The rest of us, who have only watched the front row become perfumed with the sickly scent of piss, should understandably feel a little bit disappointed that we missed out. Perhaps we assume that there was in fact something to gain from being drenched in piss. Like the touch of a saint the piss of Zack Snyder may have imparted the gift of healing to us lepers who just don’t get it, healing through understanding that to be pissed upon and be thankful for it is a joy beyond joy. If I didn’t already know that this is the last time I will ever wittingly visit Snyder’s mass pissoir, I would resolve next time to bring a cup.
It’s tempting, whenever a director gets to do it their way, to celebrate the triumph of art over commerce. We might think of Terry Gilliam’s successful campaign to have control over the theatrical cut of Brazil after Universal created its own secret cut which removed the so-called ‘dark’ ending. More recently perhaps we think of David Lynch being brought back on board the third season of Twin Peaks after initially dropping out over budgetary concerns, delivering on that basis a work of clearly unfiltered personal expression. We prize such stories so highly because they are rare, for the pitfalls of giving an artist creative control in a commercial industry are many. Famously Michael Cimino’s 1980 behemoth western Heaven’s Gate not only lost United Artists tens (today hundreds) of millions of dollars, but apparently caused them to drop out of movie production altogether because the damage to their reputation was felt to be an even greater loss. Heaven’s Gate is by no means a bad film, but it suffered the worst vagaries of the invisible hand nonetheless. Seeming to have learned nothing from this and similar examples of the artist crushed by the capriciousness of commerce, Warner Bros. gave Zack Snyder the helm of their DC Comics film franchise, hoping to build a competitor to the Marvel Cinematic Universe by appealing to a darker, more auteurish take on such beloved heroes as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash. Maybe they got a little too much of what they wanted, with Snyder’s vision highlighting the rift between different groups of comics fans. His conception of the superhero, which he refers to as ‘hardcore deconstructionist’, is one of those things which you either go along with or simply refuse to accept; I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to be both interested in the superhero as a concept and ambivalent towards the idea that Superman killing his enemies makes him more mature or philosophically compelling as a character than he otherwise would be. Nonetheless, Snyder’s three directed DCEU features made money on their insane budgets, including Justice League, which Snyder himself did not finish owing to a family tragedy. Joss Whedon, who had notably helmed the first two Avengers films to great commercial success, was brought on board by Warner with the hope that he would give the DCEU its first mega-hit, or at least salvage the garbled mess that the film presumably existed as at that point. It made back its budget, meanwhile Snyder’s fans who had been awaiting the all too hasty culmination of the hardcore deconstructionist vision were left out in the cold. A massive fan campaign ensued with the result that in 2021 Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a four-hour epic, was released by HBO.
Since the film is more or less the same as its theatrical counterpart but twice as long, to talk about the plot seems a waste of time, though to talk about excess that adds nothing is perhaps a fruitful use of our time. This will mainly be the purpose of this review, which I hesitate to call a review in my usual style since it is not really all that concerned with content but with form, though it is very much polemical nonetheless. My main concern is to attempt to understand Zack Snyder himself, what is it that makes him do what he does as a filmmaker, because I am rapidly approaching the point past which I will never have to commit to thinking about Zack Snyder ever again. I want from my last effort in this fraught space to feel like I have gained something, that there was more than just the pointless suffering of nonsense as if I were a character in a story by Samuel Beckett. If I find myself depositing a stone in one pocket, then removing that stone and putting it in another pocket, and so on until it has traversed all of my pockets, the discovery made through this work may be one of insanity. But we must do the work first. First, then, an answer to the question: should we celebrate this victory of the artist, this preservation of the original vision? It’s easy and perhaps even sufficient to say that if you like the DCEU then you like Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and that that formula holds true in the negative as well. However, for me, someone who has been fairly baffled by the idea that anyone could find this sloppy, incoherent, childish drivel even remotely compelling in any sense whatsoever, the answer is yes. While I will take the piss out of them and their fave relentlessly, I still want Snyder’s fans to have their cake. The real question, the snobby question, is whether Snyder should be thought of as an artist at all. In many ways he can be seen as a commercial filmmaker with pretensions towards a garbled aesthetics which may ultimately come from his favourite author Ayn Rand. Rand’s philosophy, while commonly associated with the mantra ‘greed is good’, in reality spans many different fields in its scope. I want in particular to focus on aesthetics and creativity, and Rand has much to tell us that will prove illuminating as we delve further on into the mire of Snyder’s action figure nightmare world.
In her fiction many of Rand’s protagonists are notable for some prodigious skill or ambition that makes them better than the people around them, a common thread running through these is a seeming obsession with invention, particularly in the fields of architecture and industry. In We the Living, Kira Argounova is an aspiring engineer who dreams of skyscrapers from within the suffocating confines of the Soviet Union, even while she is swallowed up by the grinding inhuman machinery of the communist system. In The Fountainhead Howard Roark is a genius architect who is shunned by the establishment because he is steadfast in his desire to build structures in new and daring styles. In Atlas Shrugged John Galt leads a revolution of ‘productive’ and ‘creative’ people in order to force the US government to do away with laws that restrict industry. In all three cases the message is clear, these people are the real people, individuals for whom the whole world should kneel in acceptance of its inferiority as a matter of existential necessity, for if these individuals are bound by those chains whose links were forged only to bind the common folk, the leeches, the ‘looters’, humanity itself will wither and die by a plague of mediocrity. In many ways we can see these characters as superheroes of one kind or another, Promethean figures heralding change, progress, evolution, bringing mankind towards a reckoning with its own limits. As with the titular department store in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames you can be intellectually for or against them but to act to resist them is to invite your own doom, for in the real world per Rand theirs are inexorable forces that will sweep you away as though you were the merest mote of dust. However, I would like to think of this phenomenon of the all-powerful individual not entirely in reference to superheroes but also to artists, and in particular to Zack Snyder, the director who would build skyscrapers.
Like Argounova, Snyder dreams of skyscrapers, great spectacular man-made things that reach up to blot out the sun, looming over the world. Like Roark, Snyder is unorthodox, audacious in his methods, his stories move at their own pace, his characters to their own rhythms. Like Galt, Snyder’s creative vision is one that abhors all restriction, whether material or intellectual, and makes no compromise that is not to its own advantage. Snyder’s Superman kills because it is audacious, because it looms above the audience, because it negates compromise. This is the essence of his creation, a Randian action figure sandbox where big things happen not because of any logic of causation, any motive of character, but because they are big; not because they have substance to dig into or meaning to impart, but because their proportions and the awe they are presumably intended to inspire invite the assumption that they possess those qualities. Snyder’s interest is solely in the bigness of the event, and while he wrings some symbolic value from these gargantuan superhuman happenings, or at least tells us that he does, this can only ever amount to so much decoration on the periphery of the actual thing.
Snyder in many ways puts the lie to Rand’s idealisation of the individual, he embodies pretty much every Randian virtue but he is also of meagre talent. He is the real Howard Roark, an aspirant to greatness who was not shunned but who failed artistically, not because he was too brilliant but because he was an idiot, and not because he boldly transgressed the stuffy traditions of the establishment but because his alternative was founded upon nonsense. Crucial to Rand’s characterisation of ideal man Roark (and basically all her protagonists) is inherent victimisation, it is not enough for such a man to try and fail on his own merits, he must be the victim of a cruel system, a conspiracy to make mediocrity sacrosanct. It’s easy enough to see how this arises from her youth in the Soviet Union, where the good and the great were commonly ground down to nothing to serve the glory of the Motherland, of the Party. Kira Argounova is Rand’s most grounded heroine in that sense, yet in America, the setting of all Rand’s other fictions, the hero is beset by what exactly? Poor people who want help! A lesser woman would have clutched her pearls and fainted. For all her talk of individual merit, it is Rand’s preference that those who have talent but no money to begin with should loiter below their supposed true station for want of access, because what she holds sacred is not talent, not work ethic, not genius, but raw material wealth. In fact wealth is the virtue that retroactively guarantees talent, work ethic, and genius—if you have it, it must be because you earned it: the theory is not tested against the data, the data are tested against the theory and found wanting. When Bruce Wayne quips to Barry Allen that his superpower is being rich, the cuteness of the exchange only somewhat veils the Randian truth that Batman’s vigilante crusade and concomitant violence are validated by his virtue, the virtue of having lots of money. In this world, though he is presented in Dawn of Justice as a vanguard against the superhuman, Batman has purchased his own godhood, he has become a skyscraper to dwarf all those which he owns, towering far above the little hovels of other men.
The film itself is a skyscraper. At four hours in duration it is totally needless, a Burj Khalifa, testament to self-justifying excess. Compared to the theatrical cut, which was bad but unremarkably so, Snyder’s authorised version is an exercise in empty grandeur, like a gold toilet with gold toilet paper and a flush handle made of diamond. Amusingly this was expected to be the ‘mature’ version, yet a good many of the quips one might have expected to drip from the pen of Joss Whedon were Snyder’s own, laying bare the empty-headedness of the idea that Snyder is a mature, thinking person’s filmmaker. Rather he is a Randian filmmaker, someone for whom stamping one’s name upon something is more important than the quality of the thing being stamped upon. Snyder frequently makes ‘choices’ in this version of the film simply for the sake of having them be his own. Not better, perhaps not even worse, but his. There is something worthwhile in this in principle, but in practice it just serves to make you more and more aware of his own lack of artistic sensibility. Take the non-score music choices (please!) for example, during Bruce Wayne’s confrontation with Aquaman Arthur Curry we get to learn that Snyder likes Nick Cave, or rather that what he likes is people singing sad songs over a piano or whatever. I lost count of the number of drawn out sad piano scenes telling us nothing we didn’t already know, like for example were you aware that Lois Lane is sad because Superman is dead? Well don’t worry, there’s a drawn out scene with sad piano people just to make sure you got the point. But in fact it would appear that for Snyder ‘getting the point’ doesn’t really matter at all, it is enough for such scenes to be there because they add to the film’s duration, make it larger and therefore not just better but greater, a great work, a skyscraper.
Generally speaking I think that self-indulgence in art is a good thing, the greatest works throughout history in any given medium have not been made by following all the rules, indeed often they have made their own rules for other artists to navigate. As Walter Benjamin put it, I feel somewhat hyperbolically, a great work either creates a genre or ends one. If Snyder has rules of his own they are incoherent, like a child making up new rules for a game as it unfolds. Any genre he could create would begin and end in the same work, perhaps not even by the end but halfway through, for whatever ideal it pretended to in the first place would be gone, superseded by whatever needed right there and then to be the case. This entire review has of course been an extremely roundabout way of saying that Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a confused mess founded upon half-realised, half-grasped conceptions of art, of drama, and of the superhero. Maybe even less than that, it is an attempt to figure out Snyder himself. My conclusion is that he wants desperately to be seen as a philosophical filmmaker, a thinking person’s director of blockbuster epics like the similarly ponderous Christopher Nolan. But he isn’t even as good as Nolan, because at least Nolan has in his head some actual design that guides his projects, despite being a design I hate. I fear nonetheless that I have been too extreme in calling Snyder an idiot. Since I am not a Randian I hold charity, which may loosely be defined as kindness at the root of the act of helping others, to be a virtue, but since I am also a garrulous and combative egomaniac I must build in prose my own skyscrapers with my own name hung haphazardly therefrom in blinding neon. As the clichéd movie villain speech goes: we’re not so different, you and I. But in that case I would be saying nothing more than that everyone is Zack Snyder, for everyone wants their name on something somewhere and hopes that it won’t be erased too soon. Even if I am just a writer of flowery pseudo-entertainments, I would like to think that my name has ended up on a few things that are at least not incompetently designed and constructed.
Ultimately, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is an exercise in pointlessness. It adds nothing to the theatrical cut other than the weight of its own self-importance. It revels in its imagined audaciousness, the daring required to unzip and let loose a weak but long lasting stream of piss on the audience. Four hours later the front row, thoroughly soaked with piss, claps furiously at the brilliance of having been pissed upon to no real end but itself. The rest of us, who have only watched the front row become perfumed with the sickly scent of piss, should understandably feel a little bit disappointed that we missed out. Perhaps we assume that there was in fact something to gain from being drenched in piss. Like the touch of a saint the piss of Zack Snyder may have imparted the gift of healing to us lepers who just don’t get it, healing through understanding that to be pissed upon and be thankful for it is a joy beyond joy. If I didn’t already know that this is the last time I will ever wittingly visit Snyder’s mass pissoir, I would resolve next time to bring a cup.
12
Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched
« on: July 28, 2024, 12:59:40 PM »
I'm working on my Snydercut review and then that's it. I'm only on these because I foolishly decided that I should finish the Batshit Odyssey™. The most disturbing thing here is Saddam hasn't responded to my incredible takes in autistic detail.
13
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: US Election poll
« on: July 24, 2024, 05:59:14 PM »
My vote doesn't matter but clearly RFK is the most sane and normal person of all time.
14
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: July 23, 2024, 03:24:14 PM »I didWell, now that there's definitively only one senile old pedophile in the race, who are YOU voting for?
Pretty tough for a lot of people to answer when one of the parties hasn't chosen a candidate to be voted for yet.
You really should pay attention to the news.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/22/kamala-harris-democratic-delegates
You should really pay attention to who you're quoting.
15
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden
« on: July 21, 2024, 10:09:02 PM »
Allan Lichtman must be furious right now. The keys, the keys!
16
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: July 14, 2024, 03:11:32 PM »The last thing you should be hoping for if you want to see the end of MAGA is Trump as a martyr.Damn it, just a little better aim and we'd have had great news.
I dunno, I mean... What would his raving supporters do if their leader was murdered by the only one with motive(they think): Biden and liberals?
Lots and lots of violence.
It'd be worth it.
idk if you're trolling or you legitimately think accelerationism is a good idea but you need to stop lmao
17
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: UK General Election, 4 July 2024
« on: July 07, 2024, 08:17:28 PM »:')It's a Catch-22, the only way to get rid of the big parties is through PR, the only way to get PR is to get rid of the big parties.I mean, we could have a referen—
wait
wait no
let's not do that
In five years' time it could even be feasible to do it that way, although not preferable to a government with a mandate and an actual plan.
18
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: UK General Election, 4 July 2024
« on: July 07, 2024, 11:04:31 AM »
The case for PR becomes stronger with each election. But will either of these dementia patient dinosaur parties let go of power? I doubt it. It's a Catch-22, the only way to get rid of the big parties is through PR, the only way to get PR is to get rid of the big parties.
19
Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched
« on: July 06, 2024, 02:07:32 PM »
Justice League (dir. Zack Snyder / Joss Whedon)
As promised by Dawn of Justice, the Justice League get their own feature length outing in the appropriately titled Justice League. This film is perhaps better known for its production difficulties, and its being a precursor to a fan campaign for the release of Zack Snyder’s four hour cut, which was put out by HBO in 2021, than it is for anything that actually happens in it. Zack Snyder was forced to step down from the director’s chair by a family tragedy, and perennial hack Joss Whedon was brought in to attempt to smooth things over with rewrites and reshoots. It didn’t work. While Whedon’s helming of the first big MCU team-up movie The Avengers—released in the UK as Avengers Assemble, in order to avoid confusion with the very relevant and current British TV show The Avengers, which is about a man named Steed who wears a bowler hat and has a cane sword—which now that I think about it is definitely cooler than the actual movie——was undoubtedly a major success, his quippy levity here sits ungainly alongside Snyder’s empty portent.
The story is as complicated or as basic as you want it to be by virtue of a lot of stuff happening to no real significance. There is an alien called Steppenwolf, and he was born to be wild! No, in fact he was born to be a space terrorist or something. He hops through dimensional portals looking for theinfinity stones mother boxes which when combined will make everything go a bit Color Out of Space in order to resemble his homeworld for some reason. At one point Steppy mentions Darkseid, with the implication that Step-To-the-Beat is working for him, but Darkseid never shows up or does anything, so it’s unknown what the master plan is there. A long time ago Steppenwolf was banished from Earth by a coalition of Amazonian and Atlantean forces, and the mother boxes were scattered and hidden away. However, Step-On-Up has no difficulty finding these in the present day and is also basically impervious to everyone. That is until the Justice League uses one of the boxes to resurrect Superman, who is so amazing and perfect that Steppenwolf actively begins to lose power as a result, to the point that even Aquaman, who spends most of the movie being completely useless, even in situations where his powers should be at their most potent, can beat him. Steppenwolf gets scared, and his army of fear feeding fly fiends descends upon him, forcing him to retreat. And that’s it.
To call this film bad is to invite some comparison to previous DCEU outings. Is it as bad as Man of Steel or Dawn of Justice? In some ways it is, while in others it manages to be just bland and forgettable enough not to be. The most obvious problem that develops as the film goes on is its cast of heroes, there are simply too many to do justice (ha ha) to, and while three of them are semi-known entities from previous films, the rest are just sort of there to the point that their existences, powers, and purposes are mostly known through exposition. My favourite part might be when Wonder Woman tells Cyborg that she had a common life experience and that she had to deal with it. It’s not just that the dialogue and delivery are stunningly ham-fisted, but that this exchange somehow convinces Cyborg that being alive is good actually. As much as I make fun of the pretence towards depth in Snyder’s previous films, this film is particularly brazen in not even attempting to veil the fact that its drama is a literal flat 2D plane. I don’t actually know how much of what we see in this film is Snyder’s or Whedon’s ‘vision’, but my conclusion from this and from previous experiences is that both of them need to stop, and possibly see a therapist.
The film’s visuals are no delight either. From its chained sequences of establishing shots to its often shockingly poor special effects, the film is neither artistically nor technically compelling. It is marred by uncontrolled and purposeless excess in all elements, from the number of shots it takes to do something extremely basic, to the near constant movement of the camera. Its shots, which are almost entirely mock epic in scope and minuscule in impact, do nothing to help the storytelling. It is a film made by someone who, per the credits, wrote the script but did not read it. I suppose this is a roundabout way of saying that the film is boring, like stupefyingly boring. Where previous DCEU films were often hilariously bad, there is barely anything to make fun of here, or rather it makes fun of itself simply by existing in the form that it does. Whoever signed off on this at Warner Bros. was a fucking idiot. Forget Snyder, forget Whedon, forget whoever edited it, the fault here ultimately lies with execs who were too stupid to say ‘no’. You put up a budget of $300 million and not only is this what you get back, not only that, but you’re happy with it? Are you kidding? Are you pranking me bro? Fucking what. It didn’t even do that well, just barely making back double its budget. Who thought it was a good idea to put it out this way? I’m not saying you could have gotten a much better movie with more time, but it could have been a little bit less… whatever you want to call this. It’s so bland that my vocabulary fails me.
A quick note on the music, which kept pissing me right off, and while for the most part is as nondescript as that which it accompanies, does actually speak somewhat to the inability of DC to really let go of its cinematic past. Quotes from Danny Elfman’s Batman and John Williams’s Superman scores litter the soundscape here, and every time they pop up I feel a certain ire well up within me like stomach acid into my oesophagus. You failed to do justice (ha ha ×2) to them in the first place, laying waste to and burying Tim Burton’s expressionist fairy-tale Batman outings under Joel Schumacher’s insulting cack, and making worse and worse sequels to Richard Donner’s lovably silly Superman. Don’t extend them now as olive branches to people who expect a bare minimum of competence from writers and directors, please. The return of Michael Keaton’s Batman in the final Snyder-verse movie The Flash was a welcome enough piece of fanservice, but he undoubtedly didn’t really fit into that world. Similarly, trying to inject the swashbuckling triumph of those Elfman and Williams themes into this dour, miserable, barely-registering-as-a-movie movie is not merely an insulting reminder of better times and better movies for DC heroes, it’s also just plain incongruous.
Justice League is a bad movie that seems less bad than it is when taken in the context of its predecessors. Its characters, plot, action, pacing, cinematography and special effects are all dismal, and its one saving grace may be—with its first set of credits (the funniest thing about Justice League may be its confident teasing of sequels that will never happen) appearing under the one hour and fifty minute mark—that it farts along and runs out of gas quickly compared to Snyder’s previous efforts. Some time after its release, Snyder was content to start talking up his alleged original allegedly a vision for the film, which engendered a massive fan campaign that was actually successful. I’m always amazed when something that seems primarily to exist on Twitter and Reddit manifests in the form of something actually happening. Cue the four hour long Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a torturous task as daunting and dreadful as any I can think of in the cinematic world. The best thing I can say about this theatrical cut is that it didn’t make me want to scream, if only because it didn’t really make much of an impression at all. And with that I say justice has been done!
As promised by Dawn of Justice, the Justice League get their own feature length outing in the appropriately titled Justice League. This film is perhaps better known for its production difficulties, and its being a precursor to a fan campaign for the release of Zack Snyder’s four hour cut, which was put out by HBO in 2021, than it is for anything that actually happens in it. Zack Snyder was forced to step down from the director’s chair by a family tragedy, and perennial hack Joss Whedon was brought in to attempt to smooth things over with rewrites and reshoots. It didn’t work. While Whedon’s helming of the first big MCU team-up movie The Avengers—released in the UK as Avengers Assemble, in order to avoid confusion with the very relevant and current British TV show The Avengers, which is about a man named Steed who wears a bowler hat and has a cane sword—which now that I think about it is definitely cooler than the actual movie——was undoubtedly a major success, his quippy levity here sits ungainly alongside Snyder’s empty portent.
The story is as complicated or as basic as you want it to be by virtue of a lot of stuff happening to no real significance. There is an alien called Steppenwolf, and he was born to be wild! No, in fact he was born to be a space terrorist or something. He hops through dimensional portals looking for the
To call this film bad is to invite some comparison to previous DCEU outings. Is it as bad as Man of Steel or Dawn of Justice? In some ways it is, while in others it manages to be just bland and forgettable enough not to be. The most obvious problem that develops as the film goes on is its cast of heroes, there are simply too many to do justice (ha ha) to, and while three of them are semi-known entities from previous films, the rest are just sort of there to the point that their existences, powers, and purposes are mostly known through exposition. My favourite part might be when Wonder Woman tells Cyborg that she had a common life experience and that she had to deal with it. It’s not just that the dialogue and delivery are stunningly ham-fisted, but that this exchange somehow convinces Cyborg that being alive is good actually. As much as I make fun of the pretence towards depth in Snyder’s previous films, this film is particularly brazen in not even attempting to veil the fact that its drama is a literal flat 2D plane. I don’t actually know how much of what we see in this film is Snyder’s or Whedon’s ‘vision’, but my conclusion from this and from previous experiences is that both of them need to stop, and possibly see a therapist.
The film’s visuals are no delight either. From its chained sequences of establishing shots to its often shockingly poor special effects, the film is neither artistically nor technically compelling. It is marred by uncontrolled and purposeless excess in all elements, from the number of shots it takes to do something extremely basic, to the near constant movement of the camera. Its shots, which are almost entirely mock epic in scope and minuscule in impact, do nothing to help the storytelling. It is a film made by someone who, per the credits, wrote the script but did not read it. I suppose this is a roundabout way of saying that the film is boring, like stupefyingly boring. Where previous DCEU films were often hilariously bad, there is barely anything to make fun of here, or rather it makes fun of itself simply by existing in the form that it does. Whoever signed off on this at Warner Bros. was a fucking idiot. Forget Snyder, forget Whedon, forget whoever edited it, the fault here ultimately lies with execs who were too stupid to say ‘no’. You put up a budget of $300 million and not only is this what you get back, not only that, but you’re happy with it? Are you kidding? Are you pranking me bro? Fucking what. It didn’t even do that well, just barely making back double its budget. Who thought it was a good idea to put it out this way? I’m not saying you could have gotten a much better movie with more time, but it could have been a little bit less… whatever you want to call this. It’s so bland that my vocabulary fails me.
A quick note on the music, which kept pissing me right off, and while for the most part is as nondescript as that which it accompanies, does actually speak somewhat to the inability of DC to really let go of its cinematic past. Quotes from Danny Elfman’s Batman and John Williams’s Superman scores litter the soundscape here, and every time they pop up I feel a certain ire well up within me like stomach acid into my oesophagus. You failed to do justice (ha ha ×2) to them in the first place, laying waste to and burying Tim Burton’s expressionist fairy-tale Batman outings under Joel Schumacher’s insulting cack, and making worse and worse sequels to Richard Donner’s lovably silly Superman. Don’t extend them now as olive branches to people who expect a bare minimum of competence from writers and directors, please. The return of Michael Keaton’s Batman in the final Snyder-verse movie The Flash was a welcome enough piece of fanservice, but he undoubtedly didn’t really fit into that world. Similarly, trying to inject the swashbuckling triumph of those Elfman and Williams themes into this dour, miserable, barely-registering-as-a-movie movie is not merely an insulting reminder of better times and better movies for DC heroes, it’s also just plain incongruous.
Justice League is a bad movie that seems less bad than it is when taken in the context of its predecessors. Its characters, plot, action, pacing, cinematography and special effects are all dismal, and its one saving grace may be—with its first set of credits (the funniest thing about Justice League may be its confident teasing of sequels that will never happen) appearing under the one hour and fifty minute mark—that it farts along and runs out of gas quickly compared to Snyder’s previous efforts. Some time after its release, Snyder was content to start talking up his alleged original allegedly a vision for the film, which engendered a massive fan campaign that was actually successful. I’m always amazed when something that seems primarily to exist on Twitter and Reddit manifests in the form of something actually happening. Cue the four hour long Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a torturous task as daunting and dreadful as any I can think of in the cinematic world. The best thing I can say about this theatrical cut is that it didn’t make me want to scream, if only because it didn’t really make much of an impression at all. And with that I say justice has been done!
20
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: UK General Election, 4 July 2024
« on: July 04, 2024, 11:15:43 PM »
Sad news, Hamas apologist troll and grifter George Galloway is projected to lose his seat. The entertainment we'll be missing out on is immeasurable.