Honestly, most common audiences like Man of Steel fine. It did excellent in theaters, and the haters are an obnoxiously loud vocal minority made up of the usual suspects: Nostalgia Critic & most ex-Channel Awesome content creators, old snobby film critics, Movie Bob, Cinema Sins, Honest Trailers, YoVideoGames Crew (they're the least bad with it, but most of them either undermine some of DCEU accomplishments or try to pass off most of the films' as "average" [mainly Simmons]) and blind Chris Reeve fan boys/girls. The movie did great in theaters and home video. I know when Batman V. Superman had a worse reception, some of those MoS haters started looking at the latter in a better light or doubled down.
Oooh, I'll bite. For context I've never seen a Reeve Superman film, and have no reverence or attachment to the character.
Man of Steel is a bad film, and its badness has little to do with whether it understands the character or being a good Superman film. Man of Steel is a bad film because it's atrociously paced, superbly stupidly written, pretentious, hollow, subtle as a brick with its symbolism, takes itself way too seriously which leads to ton of unintentional comedy, scattershotly edited, brimming with missed potential in favor of Hollywood cliches, structurally completely incoherent, and it's obviously chasing trends that were well dated by its release date. And I say all of this as someone who was initially part of that common audience that liked the movie just fine. Only on a second watch many years later did I see it for the turd that it is. When discussing it with friends I said "I found it pretty badass when I first watched it, and I still think it's quite badass... meaning that it was ass, and bad by even the standards of ass", which felt incredibly satisfying.
In other movies:
Nope, 8/10
Jordan Peele's latest offering is certainly something, I dare say no one in Hollywood is currently making these kinds of tonal and genre mashup films as well as Peele. It's a drama, it's a sort of comedy, it's a horror film, it's social commentary, and the collision of all these definitely works. There's some superb tension and really disturbing imagery, yet it's always restrained and shows just enough to make the viewer's mind race and fill in the blanks without ruining the mystery. It actually reminded me of
Under the Skin in that regard, but this movie is much less abstract. The chemistry between Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer is great, and you really get the sense of siblinghood between them. There's some really clever reincorporation and implementation of initially seemingly irrelevant subplots into the central themes, and I feel this movie definitely warrants a second watch. The cinematography is also top notch with really clever uses of framing and focus which helps a ton with the mystery. The climax was genuinely fantastic.
It maybe takes a bit to get going, but I feel all of that setup may prove perfectly warranted on a second watch. Having listened to a podcast discussing it a bit, there's a ton of themes and commentary to dig into here, which is why I'm probably going to watch it again.
Titane, batshit crazy/10
I knew this only as the "movie about the woman having sex with her car" that just happened to win the Palm D'or, so my curiosity was piqued to say the least. I'm still kind of reeling from this movie, because it's such a relentless car crash (see what I did there?) of tones and genres that my immediate reaction upon the end credits was incredulous, involuntary laughter. It certainly holds your attention and it's never boring, but it can be a bit hard to parse what the movie's going for. To me it registered as a pitch-black, fucked up dark comedy, but I wouldn't fault anyone for thinking it's not funny at all. I was squirming in my seat on multiple occasions, so it's definitely not for the faint of heart. The acting's great, the gruesome stuff is properly gruesome, and it's also definitely a film you can interpret in a lot of ways. I'm having a bit of a hard time giving it a score because it's so out there and I found the ending a bit underwhelming, but what I was wanting from it was not what the film was about anyway, so that's down to personal taste.
