Today wasn't that great. Garry Shandling is dead. I had to do laundry. I bought a ticket to tonight's performance of Peter and the Starcatcher, then realized that it started during the time where I was slotted to be representing the Animation Workshop at the Workshop Showcase, and so had to give my ticket away. And Bats and Supes are taking themselves way too seriously, and I can't bring myself to forgive them for it, as irrational as I know it is to be so personally invested with my apathy toward the film when everyone else is hyped about it. So it's like a few months back, when The Force Awakens came out, only The Force Awakens is actually a good movie, and it wasn't competing with Zootopia.
Went to help out with the booth to shill for the Showcase, around noon. I made a challenge to myself to grab the whole stack of flyers and hand each one off to passers-by. Jimmy's a master at shoving flyers into people's hands-- he did all the heavy lifting, and all the feather lifting too, when we were distributing the flyers at the booth advertising Fandomonium[!], Alaire and I being more introverted than Jimmy when it came to that and Jimmy getting all the placements (though, as rad as I think Jung was, I think that the whole introversion/extroversion thing is a crock.) Workshop Showcase being tonight at 7:00, Jimmy meanwhile handing out flyers for an Apollo A Cappella gig tomorrow night, I had to carry the weight for advertising the Showcase, and I became proficient at handing out flyers by the end of it. Sure there are folks who refuse the flyers, but that's okay; like, seriously, their refusal of your flyer is already the worst thing that could happen, so it's like, well, that happened, oh well? One man said he wouldn't make it to the Workshop because he'd been going to see Batman v Superman tonight.
Batman v Superman. Sure, people are probably going to see it, but it's like people who read The Oatmeal, or people who are voting for Captain Sock Puppet: it's always some great mythological Other, not anybody you know. Not even in a corner are these things being done, they're just... being done by strangers. But this man was going to go see it. And I found myself, angry. At Batman. And I realized that, at least for now, I can't bring myself to forgive him.
I can't bring myself to forgive Batman because his movie's going to compete with Zootopia, and probably win. I can't bring myself to forgive Batman because his movie's (last I checked) at 33% on Rotten Tomatoes, but it will still make hundreds of millions of dollars, though with a $400,000,000 budget, it's probably still going to flop. Before that, though, even though it's going to be a disaster it will be number 1 at the box office, possibly breaking box office records for May openings, in further ways that they've been broken this month already. Though I can hardly believe in Zootopia as a noumenon, I still want it to beat out every other film this weekend, preserve the continuity from its opening, continue at number one in the box office domestically and internationally for at least one more week.
Continuity, that's it. It's about continuity. That's why I can't bring myself to forgive this movie. Adam never got to see Dark Knight Rises. He died in June 2012; DKR came out the next month. Batman once again on the big screen, in live action, breaks the continuity, like eating the chocolate muffin after having starved myself for a week when he died. The present had been tied to the past up till now. Even though the existence of Adam as a noumenon is by this point surreal, as surreal as the existence of Zootopia itself as a noumenon.
One of the last films that Adam went to go see, possibly the very last but I'm not sure, was Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol, and I can never watch it the same again, the scene in the garage at the end when Cobalt tries to throw himself off the ledge and take the nuclear football with him, his body twisted and broken on the ground, but having survived the fall. That part's tough. I'm sure there are those who can't watch DKR the same again after what happened, or watch it the same in the first place, seeing as how it happened at the premiere and so it wouldn't really be seeing the same way "again." I've never had a problem with watching it, but, would this new Batman disrupt that continuity as well, for those people, trample over those memories, four years old but still precious?
Dawn of Justice officially is released tomorrow; in practice it premiered tonight; last night I finally got around to Rogue Nation... It's so much like Spectre; Spectre's so much like it; Adam's brother Michael went to go see Spectre when it opened, on the very first day I think, the premiere...
I had a countdown on this blog for DKR when this blog first started; I had a countdown on this blog for Zootopia throughout last year up till the beginning of this month; Zootopia is compulsively rewatchable, in the vein of many recent films, mentioning specifically among others, the Lego Movie... which is getting its own big-screen Batman spinoff. And now they're coming head-to-head, Batman and Zootopia. But it's not Batman's fault.
Things fit together in such complex ways. I suppose that I'd have a lot more mixed feelings if Dawn of Justice actually looked any good.
Ask me about my Dark Knight/Zootopia crossover some time...
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