Zack Snyder doesn’t make movies for people; he makes them for bros. Or dudes. Or dudebros. And video game players. Which is why I found the experience of watching Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice(PG13, 152 minutes, now showing, ) a lot like walking into the winning team’s locker room after a rugby match. It’s sweaty, grunty, loud, self-congratulatory and, if movies had smells, pungent.

Director Snyder hates story. They get in the way of the important stuff, like having two sets of fists punch their way to emotional closure.

That is why you never understand why Batman (Ben Affleck) hates Superman so much that he wants the Man Of Steel (Henry Cavill) dead. Bruce Wayne does mutter something to Alfred (Jeremy Irons) about saving the world from unchecked power, but nowhere in the script does it have Wayne pause to question his own right to vigilantism.

That would be thoughtful and having self-awareness is not what this movie is about. For example, there is a long Rocky-style montage in which Wayne works out, in the most manly way possible – not with actual gym equipment (that would be for wussies) but with lorry tyres.

He is developing abs so he can be fitter, to beat up a guy who can crush a small planet between his arms. How many push-ups would it take? What timing on the 2.4 km run would be enough?

Displays of beefiness, in all its forms, are the point, sense be damned.

The plot is dead simple, but in between there is a lot of stuff that Snyder thinks is deep, such as arguments about how as Foreign Talent, the Kryptonian ubermensch cannot be trusted, even with his superhero Employment Pass. He is Donald Trump’s worst nightmare, stealing jobs from local costumed vigilantes.

Another dead-end sub-thread is his liability for the battle damage to Metropolis, caused by the events of Man Of Steel (2013).

Real journalists are enlisted to spell out the arguments on televisions in the background, announcing – no, hammering you over the head with how important these moral and political issues are, so that you will go home believing you got smarter watching this, instead of dumber. If you saw Snyder’s Watchmen (2009), this first-year philosophy course stuff is old hat.

In any case, both threads vanish in a puff of smoke midway, to make way for another incomprehensible thread, when Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) kicks off his plan for… what, it’s never clear. But never mind, there’s a mini-ad in there for upcoming franchises Aquaman and The Flash, so book your tickets early.

The climax of the film is an ear-splitting fight, in which one set of computer pixels fights another set of computer pixels, but what happens is never clear because Snyder likes flicker edits, dark shadows, smoke and camera lenses with a coating of grime.

But you walk away with a sense-impression that something big hit something bigger and then everything blew up.

The battles are like the ending of this movie – Snyder can’t decide what he wants so he puts everything in, creating three false endings before the credits roll.

For a film that is aware of its own silliness, and revels in it, try Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday (PG, 90 minutes, now showing on Netflix, ) – if you can put aside the strangeness of watching Paul Reubens, a 63-year-old man, play a child in everything but appearance.

The first movie featuring the Pee-Wee character in almost three decades sees Reubens meet movie star Joe Manganiello (playing himself), who convinces the eternal boy to break his vow of never leaving his hometown, Fairville. Pee-Wee heads out to New York City and immediately runs into trouble on the road.

A lot of the jokes are physical, and not just from Pee-Wee’s Rube Goldberg contraptions.

There’s plenty of surreal fun in Fairville, a town that stayed in the 1950s while the rest of American moved on.

Pee-Wee’s mix of Pollyanna optimism and ignorance about the modern world drives the comedy – fans of the sister Netflix show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt will see a resemblance between Kimmy and Pee-Wee.

Kimmy’s world is more grounded in reality than Pee-Wee’s, but both feature plenty of sweetness and an anarchic sense of fun, providing some respite in a comedy landscape littered with too much snark.

johnlui@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on March 25, 2016.
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Los Angeles – Hollywood’s traditional media players are facing an unprecedented challenge to their business model as “cord-cutters” opt to cancel their expensive cable subscriptions in favour of on-demand streaming services.

While pay-TV providers continue to charge well in excess of $50 (S$69) a month for the top packages, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon are serving up an ever-growing menu of acclaimed original content for the price of a cheap bottle of wine.

Cable may still be king when it comes to the breadth of choice, but streaming on-demand video (SVOD) hits like “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black,” with 49 Emmy nominations between them, are competing on quality.

Earlier this month California-based payment service provider Vindicia published the results of a survey of 1,000 American adults who had at least one paid subscription service.

Some 45 per cent of respondents cited “over-the-top” (OTT) video services such as HBO Now, Netflix and Hulu as most important to them.

Crucially, more than half of the key “millennial” generation – those in their 20s and 30s ardently courted by the advertisers – said they used SVOD.

Research by global media consultancy LEK published in January showed a similar pattern in Britain, where the majority of millennials expecting to get OTT in the next year were planning to cancel or reduce their pay-TV spending.

“In this increasingly on-demand world, the quality of content will be more important than ever before,” said Martin Pilkington, head of LEK’s European Media, Entertainment and Technology division.

“The race is already on, a good illustration of the new dynamic being the very high level of investment in original content by Netflix and Amazon.”

While Netflix remains the largest SVOD service, Amazon is staking its own claim, with “Transparent” and “Mozart in the Jungle” picking up multiple Emmys and Golden Globes.

Hulu has been slower to roll out original content, but recently premiered “11.22.63,” a time-travel series produced by J.J. Abrams, with religious cult drama “The Path” due out on March 30 and already creating buzz.

“I could tell on the page there was no way we could do this on one of the networks,” said Jessica Goldberg, creator of “The Path,” which stars Aaron Paul of “Breaking Bad” fame.

“Hulu came to the table in such a passionate way. They saw what we wanted to make, they let us push the envelope, they let us take time and breathe with stories. So it has been an amazing marriage.”

Goldberg, who co-produced the Emmy-nominated “Parenthood” drama series, told AFP she had noticed a big shift to SVOD among friends, and not just with original content like “The Path.”

“It seems like that’s what people are doing now – even watching shows (from) other cable stations but waiting until they are on Netflix or Hulu because they’d rather watch them like that,” she said.

The revolution isn’t confined to television, with the shift towards an on-demand world redefining the way we access services in many other aspects of our lives.

In the 2015 edition of its influential “Internet Trends” report, venture capitalist firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers noted the increasing popularity among millennials of apps like Uber, Airbnb and Instacart.

Streaming has emerged as a threat to cinemas, too, in the guise of the controversial start-up “Screening Room,” which is planning to offer movies in people’s homes on the date of their theatrical release.

At $50 per rental plus $150 for a set-top box, it remains to be seen whether the idea, led by social media impresario Sean Parker, will be of interest to anyone who isn’t a film buff, or rich.

But it already lists among its shareholders such Tinseltown royalty as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, who said in a statement to Variety magazine he was satisfied the service was “very carefully designed to capture an audience that does not currently go to the cinema.”

According to the proposal, theatre owners and studios would collect as much as $20 each of the $50 fee for a new movie.

Every innovation in home entertainment – from the introduction of video and then DVDs to high speed 4G broadband – has been accompanied by shrill predictions of the death of cinema.

Yet US audiences have been roughly stable over 50 years, while North American box office takings have remained between $10 billion and $11 billion since 2009.

The cinemas have closed ranks, however.

The National Association of Theater Owners said innovations should come from within the industry and the smaller Art House Convergence group of specialty theatres warned of a possible “wildfire spread of pirated content.”