I think it's fair to say that with the exception of the Lord of the Rings film, all of which tell one story in three parts, and, arguably, Richard Linklater's Before Sunset, the little-seen, 2004 sequel to the little-seen 1995 film Before Sunrise, every single sequel to every film ever made was greenlit based mainly on the producers' projection of how much money they could make. No matter what directors or scriptwriters may say about having more stories to tell, at the end of the day there's invariably a suit or bunch of suits more concerned about return on investment that make the final decision. There's a reason, after all, it's called show business.
To be fair, the obvious financial motivation behind most sequels has not always resulted in badly-made films. Some of the most widely-acclaimed films in the history of the medium have been sequels, such as The Godfather Part II, Aliens, Terminator 2, Toy Story 2, Spider-man 2 and The Dark Knight, to name but a few.
Pixar films is no stranger to fantastic sequels; Toy Story 2 was one of the rare films that equaled if not eclipsed the charm of the original, and even though last year's Toy Story 3 was not quite as good as Toy Story 2, it still contained genuine emotional resonance.
I confess, however, that I was disappointed with the latest choice of their films to "sequelize," namely Cars, the sequel to which, Cars 2, will be coming out in a few weeks' time. Cars is viewed by many as easily the weakest of all Pixar films storywise, its plot having been widely recognized as having been taken almost straight out of Michael J. Fox's 1991 film Doc Hollywood. It has the lowest score of any Pixar film among aggregated critics' reviews, whether on rottentomatoes.com or metacritic, and it is the one Pixar film that broke their streak at the Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature Film, having lost to Happy Feet, a cartoon so boring that even my four-year-old son wanted to walk out of it.
If I were given the choice of Pixar films for which a sequel should be made, I would, without hesitation, choose 2004's The Incredibles, directed by Brad Bird and winner of two Oscars, among them the best Animated Feature Film award. As a nearly-universally acclaimed, bona fide box-office superhero smash with a story that not only left plenty of room for sequels the way most superhero stories do but actually ended on a cliffhanger (with "the Underminer" showing up at the end for the heroes to battle), this would quite arguably be the best-suited film for a sequel in Pixar's entire library.
In fact, speaking purely in terms of box-office returns, The Incredibles, with a worldwide gross of about $630 million, still manages to trump Cars, which grossed about $462 million worldwide. Bird is a visionary and deserves to weave his magic with the Parr family one more time, preferably before Tom Cruise locks him up to direct a series of Mission: Impossible sequels. Of course, the fact that apparently Bird himself hasn't declared that he's come up with the perfect script for a follow-up adventure could serve as a hindrance to the sequel getting made. Still, I'd argue for the aggressive development for a sequel to this film before any other in the Pixar stable.
From a purely financial perspective, though, there are numbers on the side of Cars that simply cannot be argued with: from 2006 to early this year, the merchandise derived from Cars has earned EIGHT BILLION DOLLARS, a figure rivaled by probably only one other franchise in film history: the Star Wars series, which is over 30 years old. To put things in perspective: Avatar, the biggest box-office hit in the entire world, grossed THREE billion dollars, or less than HALF of what the merchandise for Cars earned.
It would appear, therefore, even where Pixar is concerned, that awards and accolades and even box-office, to an extent, can go out the window when compared to the lure of billions of dollars in merchandise sales. This marks the second year in a row that Pixar is coming up with a sequel instead of one of their unique and original films like Finding Nemo or Up.
From what I've seen based on the trailers, which feature a lot of big explosions and several unfunny jokes involving Mater, the film looks largely uninspired and a lot like the cash-grab I firmly believe it is. Sure, some sequels are fantastic, but this doesn't really look like one of them.
As if to add insult to injury, the animated short film that will precede Cars 2 will be a Toy Story spinoff starring Barbie and Ken, neither of whom are characters created by anyone at Pixar, but who are, in fact, dolls from Mattel, the manufacturer of the Cars diecast toys that have made the company 8 billion dollars richer. Considering how much they stand to make from this film, I wouldn't be surprised if Mattel picked up the entire bill for this movie. After all, what's a couple of hundred million when one can make it back more than ten times over? However, I said it once when I slated Pixar for giving Barbie and Ken starring roles in Toy Story 3 and I'll say it again: Pixar DOESN'T need the money...but they're taking it anyway.
Movies made purely for the purpose of selling toys are generally mindless crap (as evidenced by both Transformers movies and most likely the third one as well and the forgettable G.I. Joe), and while Pixar is not in the business of making mindless crap, I am not optimistic regarding Cars 2.
Now, I will recognize that I could be completely off-base about this; considering the development time that went into this movie, and considering Pixar's generally rock-solid track record, Cars 2 still has an even chance of being a very good movie, even if it should fall below Pixar's usual standard of excellence the way the first one did. I would be happy to be proven wrong, even though part of me doubts that'll happen.
Furthermore, if Pixar greenlights Cars 3 before it does The Incredibles 2, they will definitely not get my money.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Treading Water: A Review Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Many unkind things have been said about Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the latest installment in the popular Disney franchise, and while I don't necessarily disagree with all of them, having just seen the film, I feel that a lot of the hostility against this film is unwarranted.
Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is back, this time on a quest to find the fabled Fountain of Youth. Unfortunately, so are the Spanish, so is the King of England (Richard Griffiths) who has sent one of his finest privateers, Sparrow's old nemesis Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), and so is Blackbeard (Ian McShane). As the last film left Jack without a ship, and this one finds him without a map after he runs into King George, Jack finds himself throwing in with his ex-girlfriend Angelica (Penelope Cruz), who may or may not be Blackbeard's daughter and ends up joining Blackbeard's expedition in particular.
Now, apparently the use of the Fountain of Youth of this particular story is far from something as straightforward as drinking from its water to obtain eternal youth. Here, there is a "profane ritual" which involves two chalices, a mermaid's tear, of all things, and a victim from whom life must be drained for the drinker to obtain youth or vitality or whatever it is the fountain is supposed to bestow. What this does is ensure that, apart from reaching the fountain, the adventurers also have to find the chalices, and capture a mermaid and "harvest" a tear, something which could prove extremely difficult considering that the mermaids here have more in common with the murderous sirens of old than the Disney vixens spouting show tunes; these (literal) maneaters are some pretty nasty bitches. Unfortunately for fans of the first three films' CGI showcases (the walking skeletons for part 1, Davey Jones and his giant squid for part 2, and the massive whirlpool for part 3) the nasty mermaids and their showcase of supernatural talents (which in one scene are apparently enough to take down a whole ship) are about all you're going to get.
The movie gets from point A to point B well enough, and Johnny Depp delivers his signature gay (by his own admission), drunken pirate performance without missing a beat. Everyone else, including Geoffrey Rush, whose performances in the previous films were at least as lively as Depp's, is rather listless, unfortunately. If nothing else, this film is definitely a step up from the bloated, painfully awful third installment, At World's End, which, I had once thought, would have been enough to kill this franchise. I guess it's fair to say that this movie was never going to be worse than that one, though that does not really say that much.
Still, it manages to entertain on its own merits, although I cannot help but feel that what happened to me was more a case of managing my expectations than anything else.
What kind of sullied the experience for me was how, even though this purported to be a "back-to-basics" approach to the franchise, the producers still packed nonsensical devices into the plot in an attempt to liven up the proceedings. The "mermaid's tear" story device was probably the biggest such excess; it enabled them to inject the ultimately forgettable killer mermaids and to shoehorn a half-baked romantic subplot involving star-crossed young lovers in the person of a young missionary (Sam Claflin) and a captive mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey). Apparently Bruckheimer and company weren't confident enough in Depp and his onscreen chemistry with Cruz to make their story the only romance in the film. It was funny how the producers seemed glad to be rid of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley and their love story, only to substitute it with an even blander, less developed one.
There are also some pretty silly plot holes, some of them pretty big, but few movies these days really stand up to scrutiny when it comes to that sort of thing.
The funny thing about this movie is that if I sit here long enough, I can pick it apart and go from being vaguely disappointed by it to downright hating it, but I won't. All I will say is that if one has the money to burn and the time to kill, there are still worse ways to spend it than by watching this movie, but there are a number of better ones, too.
Score: 3/5
Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is back, this time on a quest to find the fabled Fountain of Youth. Unfortunately, so are the Spanish, so is the King of England (Richard Griffiths) who has sent one of his finest privateers, Sparrow's old nemesis Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), and so is Blackbeard (Ian McShane). As the last film left Jack without a ship, and this one finds him without a map after he runs into King George, Jack finds himself throwing in with his ex-girlfriend Angelica (Penelope Cruz), who may or may not be Blackbeard's daughter and ends up joining Blackbeard's expedition in particular.
Now, apparently the use of the Fountain of Youth of this particular story is far from something as straightforward as drinking from its water to obtain eternal youth. Here, there is a "profane ritual" which involves two chalices, a mermaid's tear, of all things, and a victim from whom life must be drained for the drinker to obtain youth or vitality or whatever it is the fountain is supposed to bestow. What this does is ensure that, apart from reaching the fountain, the adventurers also have to find the chalices, and capture a mermaid and "harvest" a tear, something which could prove extremely difficult considering that the mermaids here have more in common with the murderous sirens of old than the Disney vixens spouting show tunes; these (literal) maneaters are some pretty nasty bitches. Unfortunately for fans of the first three films' CGI showcases (the walking skeletons for part 1, Davey Jones and his giant squid for part 2, and the massive whirlpool for part 3) the nasty mermaids and their showcase of supernatural talents (which in one scene are apparently enough to take down a whole ship) are about all you're going to get.
The movie gets from point A to point B well enough, and Johnny Depp delivers his signature gay (by his own admission), drunken pirate performance without missing a beat. Everyone else, including Geoffrey Rush, whose performances in the previous films were at least as lively as Depp's, is rather listless, unfortunately. If nothing else, this film is definitely a step up from the bloated, painfully awful third installment, At World's End, which, I had once thought, would have been enough to kill this franchise. I guess it's fair to say that this movie was never going to be worse than that one, though that does not really say that much.
Still, it manages to entertain on its own merits, although I cannot help but feel that what happened to me was more a case of managing my expectations than anything else.
What kind of sullied the experience for me was how, even though this purported to be a "back-to-basics" approach to the franchise, the producers still packed nonsensical devices into the plot in an attempt to liven up the proceedings. The "mermaid's tear" story device was probably the biggest such excess; it enabled them to inject the ultimately forgettable killer mermaids and to shoehorn a half-baked romantic subplot involving star-crossed young lovers in the person of a young missionary (Sam Claflin) and a captive mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey). Apparently Bruckheimer and company weren't confident enough in Depp and his onscreen chemistry with Cruz to make their story the only romance in the film. It was funny how the producers seemed glad to be rid of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley and their love story, only to substitute it with an even blander, less developed one.
There are also some pretty silly plot holes, some of them pretty big, but few movies these days really stand up to scrutiny when it comes to that sort of thing.
The funny thing about this movie is that if I sit here long enough, I can pick it apart and go from being vaguely disappointed by it to downright hating it, but I won't. All I will say is that if one has the money to burn and the time to kill, there are still worse ways to spend it than by watching this movie, but there are a number of better ones, too.
Score: 3/5
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Michael Mann + 1960s Racing Cars = Very, VERY Promising
For motor racing fans over the age of fifty and racing history buffs, few stories will compare to the tale of how Ford, a maker of mass-market cars, took on Ferrari, arguably the most renowned racing marque in the world, back in the 1960s, particularly in the field of endurance racing, and beat them four years in a row at the legendary 24 Hours of Le Mans race. Like the saying goes, "you can't make stuff like this up," and even though Ford has never ever duplicated its success in international racing since those four years in the late 1960s, its story will almost certainly endure.
Well, thanks to a book by A.J. Baime which is currently being developed for the big screen with Michael "Miami Vice" Mann apparently slated to direct, the odds of that story being burned into the public subconscious have just improved considerably.
Traditionally, movies about motor racing don't really sell all that well. The most recent motor-racing themed movie, Speed Racer, was an also-ran at the global box-office in 2008, as was the latest "Herbie" sequel in 2005 and the Renny Harlin/Sylvester Stallone collaboration Driven ten years ago.
Not even Tom Cruise could sell the NASCAR-themed Days of Thunder; though that film was a modest hit in 1990, it came out at a time when the actor was white hot thanks to the success of films like Top Gun, Cocktail and Rain Man, as well as his first of three Academy award nominations for Born on the Fourth of July the year before. So by Cruise's standards at the time, Days of Thunder was a letdown and proof positive of just how hard it is to sell a racing-car-themed movie.
Pixar's Cars and Sony Pictures' Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby the latter of which starred Will Ferrell are the rare exceptions (both of which, coincidentally enough, were released in 2006), but in those films racing took a backseat to other things. In the case of Cars it merely served as a backdrop for Lightning McQueen's journey of self-discovery in Radiator Springs, while in Ricky Bobby it was a distant second to Will Ferrell's man-child antics, this time with co-star John C. Reilly.
(The Fast and Furious movies, by the way, being about street racing, don't count.)
In fact, apparently most Hollywood producers are so sure that motor racing movies don't and won't sell that they hardly make them.
The very notion, therefore, that Mann would take on a project as risky as this is something for which I genuinely admire him. One thing he has going for him, though is that more than just a run-of-the-mill motor racing yarn, the story of the Ferrari-killing Ford GT40 is a classic underdog, David-and-Goliath tale in the vein of the horse-racing movie Seabiscuit and the football-themed Remember the Titans, both of which were also based on true stories, and both of which were quite successful at the box-office. The story has a lot of potential to draw in audiences that wouldn't normally watch movies about car-racing, but I suppose that would depend largely on what kind of movie Mann eventually decides to make, and how it's marketed. As a moviegoer who enjoyed The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, Ali and Collateral, I'm reasonably confident in Mann's ability to pull off a nice, gripping movie. While scouring youtube one day, I even managed to catch a Ferrari ad he directed. He definitely has what it takes.
For my part, I dearly hope that this movie gets made, gets made well and that it really takes off at the box-office. I've been jonesing for a real, balls-to-the-wall racing movie since I first saw John Frankenheimer's 1966 cult classic Grand Prix on DVD a couple of years ago. With the right cast and script, the tale of the GT40 could be the screen classic racing fans know it deserves to be.
The best of luck, Michael Mann!
Well, thanks to a book by A.J. Baime which is currently being developed for the big screen with Michael "Miami Vice" Mann apparently slated to direct, the odds of that story being burned into the public subconscious have just improved considerably.
Traditionally, movies about motor racing don't really sell all that well. The most recent motor-racing themed movie, Speed Racer, was an also-ran at the global box-office in 2008, as was the latest "Herbie" sequel in 2005 and the Renny Harlin/Sylvester Stallone collaboration Driven ten years ago.
Not even Tom Cruise could sell the NASCAR-themed Days of Thunder; though that film was a modest hit in 1990, it came out at a time when the actor was white hot thanks to the success of films like Top Gun, Cocktail and Rain Man, as well as his first of three Academy award nominations for Born on the Fourth of July the year before. So by Cruise's standards at the time, Days of Thunder was a letdown and proof positive of just how hard it is to sell a racing-car-themed movie.
Pixar's Cars and Sony Pictures' Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby the latter of which starred Will Ferrell are the rare exceptions (both of which, coincidentally enough, were released in 2006), but in those films racing took a backseat to other things. In the case of Cars it merely served as a backdrop for Lightning McQueen's journey of self-discovery in Radiator Springs, while in Ricky Bobby it was a distant second to Will Ferrell's man-child antics, this time with co-star John C. Reilly.
(The Fast and Furious movies, by the way, being about street racing, don't count.)
In fact, apparently most Hollywood producers are so sure that motor racing movies don't and won't sell that they hardly make them.
The very notion, therefore, that Mann would take on a project as risky as this is something for which I genuinely admire him. One thing he has going for him, though is that more than just a run-of-the-mill motor racing yarn, the story of the Ferrari-killing Ford GT40 is a classic underdog, David-and-Goliath tale in the vein of the horse-racing movie Seabiscuit and the football-themed Remember the Titans, both of which were also based on true stories, and both of which were quite successful at the box-office. The story has a lot of potential to draw in audiences that wouldn't normally watch movies about car-racing, but I suppose that would depend largely on what kind of movie Mann eventually decides to make, and how it's marketed. As a moviegoer who enjoyed The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, Ali and Collateral, I'm reasonably confident in Mann's ability to pull off a nice, gripping movie. While scouring youtube one day, I even managed to catch a Ferrari ad he directed. He definitely has what it takes.
For my part, I dearly hope that this movie gets made, gets made well and that it really takes off at the box-office. I've been jonesing for a real, balls-to-the-wall racing movie since I first saw John Frankenheimer's 1966 cult classic Grand Prix on DVD a couple of years ago. With the right cast and script, the tale of the GT40 could be the screen classic racing fans know it deserves to be.
The best of luck, Michael Mann!
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Remember These Guys?
What do Francis Ford Coppola, Barry Levinson, John Landis, Ivan Reitman, and Brian De Palma all have in common? These men directed some truly memorable films of the 1980s and in some cases the 1970s and early 1990s, and who appear to have either completely dropped off the radar since the turn of the millennium, or to have been reduced to shadows of their former selves in terms of churning out Hollywood blockbusters.
Coppola, in particular, is, for his work on the first two Godfather films alone, one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of all time, but apart from those cultural touchstones he has a whole host of very well-regarded films on his resume including Apocalypse Now, Peggy Sue Got Married, and a highly-stylized retelling of Dracula. For all of that, however, the only films to his credit these days are independent films that apparently nobody sees, and which don't even garner particularly good reviews.
Levinson rose to prominence in the 1980s with films like Diner, The Natural, and the certified blockbusters Good Morning Vietnam and Rain Man, with his work on the last film grabbing him an Academy Award for Best Director in 1989. He had one more hit, the sexual-harassment-themed Disclosure in 1994, and a few more films that received so-so reception in the late 1990s and the first couple of years of this millennium, then proceeded quietly into obscurity.
Landis, on the other hand, was a regular fixture of the 1980s, with his first big hit National Lampoon's Animal House being regarded as one of the pioneering films in the "screwball comedy" genre, and which is also regarded as one of the highlights of the late John Belushi's career. His hits and career highlights included the Eddie Murphy films Trading Places and Coming to America, collaborations with Dan Aykroyd like The Blues Brothers, and Spies Like Us, the cult-classic horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London, and his rather celebrated work on the late Michael Jackson's music videos for the songs Thriller and Black or White. Unlike Belushi and Jackson, Landis is very much alive, but for some reason he seems to have pretty much dropped out of circulation.
Earlier this year, Ivan Reitman managed to nab, for the first time in well over a decade, the number one spot at the U.S. box-office with the Ashton Kutcher/Natalie Portman romantic comedy No Strings Attached, but anyone with even a passing familiarity with his box-office track record would almost certainly wonder what on earth happened to this guy. This is the man behind the massively successful first Ghostbusters film, who gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his biggest box-office hits that weren't directed by James Cameron, and who is probably principally responsible for Bill Murray's ego being as big as it supposedly is, for the simple reason that thanks to films like the two Ghostbusters films (the box-office disappointment of the second one notwithstanding), Stripes and Meatballs, Murray became a household name. His career may have stumbled a bit when he took on the Herculean task of creating chemistry between Harrison Ford and Anne Heche in Six Days and Seven Nights and unsuccessfully tried to do with aliens what he did with ghosts in Evolution, but I'm fairly certain that Reitman deserves better projects than an anemic attempt at a romantic comedy. Though My Super Ex-Girlfriend was pretty awful, I like to think this guy still has a couple of pretty good comedies left in him.
De Palma is responsible for one of my hands-down, all-time favorite movies: the crime drama The Untouchables, which conquered at the box-office and won both critical acclaim and an Academy Award for Sean Connery. Not only that, but he was responsible for Scarface, which remains, to the best of my knowledge, one of the most oft-quoted movies today, with the line "say hello to my little friend!" showing up just about everywhere on the pop-culture landscape. Despite the cultural impact of these films, De Palma's presence barely registered in Mission Impossible, which he directed but which will forever be remembered as Tom Cruise's movie, and just about every film he has made since then has gotten a lukewarm reception at best.
I'm not necessarily championing these directors; many of them had their shot and arguably just lost their touch as time went on, particularly de Palma, but I guess what dismays and to an extent depresses me is how they, and other fairly popular 80s directors like Walter Hill, Joe Dante, Larry Kasdan, and Richard Donner seem to have lost their ability to captivate audiences with a compelling story. Sure, a lot of their contemporaries like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, and Peter Weir, to name a few, endure, and continue to pack in theaters, but I guess I'm disappointed that the current generation of film goers has to put up with hacks like Michael Bay, Zack Snyder, McG, Shawn Levy, Roland Emmerich, Stephen Sommers and most of the idiots who rotate on the Adam Sandler movies. Sure, today's generation has Christopher Nolan, J.J. Abrams, and Peter Jackson but I honestly can't help but feel like they're missing out on some directors who really knew how to tell fun, engaging stories back in their day, which was not too long ago. Heck, though he may be a mega-bazillionaire, the James Cameron who directed Avatar and even Titanic is to my mind the merest shadow of the James Cameron who directed Aliens, and the same can be said of the Spielberg who directed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when comparing that schlock to just about anything he did in the 1980s and even most of the 1990s.
With movie prices continuing to skyrocket, especially thanks to gimmicks like IMAX and 3-D, moviegoers deserve more than mindless drivel like the Transformers movies, 300 and the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. They deserve better than the contrived spectacle of having movie characters look like they're reaching out of the screen to grab them; they deserve adventures and stories that really DO grab them, the way the movies of by likes of Reitman, De Palma and Landis used to grab me and lots of other moviegoers when I was younger, especially considering that unlike many notable directors of years past like David Lean, John Huston, Billy Wilder, and the like, most of those guys from the 80s are still around.
Coppola, in particular, is, for his work on the first two Godfather films alone, one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of all time, but apart from those cultural touchstones he has a whole host of very well-regarded films on his resume including Apocalypse Now, Peggy Sue Got Married, and a highly-stylized retelling of Dracula. For all of that, however, the only films to his credit these days are independent films that apparently nobody sees, and which don't even garner particularly good reviews.
Levinson rose to prominence in the 1980s with films like Diner, The Natural, and the certified blockbusters Good Morning Vietnam and Rain Man, with his work on the last film grabbing him an Academy Award for Best Director in 1989. He had one more hit, the sexual-harassment-themed Disclosure in 1994, and a few more films that received so-so reception in the late 1990s and the first couple of years of this millennium, then proceeded quietly into obscurity.
Landis, on the other hand, was a regular fixture of the 1980s, with his first big hit National Lampoon's Animal House being regarded as one of the pioneering films in the "screwball comedy" genre, and which is also regarded as one of the highlights of the late John Belushi's career. His hits and career highlights included the Eddie Murphy films Trading Places and Coming to America, collaborations with Dan Aykroyd like The Blues Brothers, and Spies Like Us, the cult-classic horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London, and his rather celebrated work on the late Michael Jackson's music videos for the songs Thriller and Black or White. Unlike Belushi and Jackson, Landis is very much alive, but for some reason he seems to have pretty much dropped out of circulation.
Earlier this year, Ivan Reitman managed to nab, for the first time in well over a decade, the number one spot at the U.S. box-office with the Ashton Kutcher/Natalie Portman romantic comedy No Strings Attached, but anyone with even a passing familiarity with his box-office track record would almost certainly wonder what on earth happened to this guy. This is the man behind the massively successful first Ghostbusters film, who gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his biggest box-office hits that weren't directed by James Cameron, and who is probably principally responsible for Bill Murray's ego being as big as it supposedly is, for the simple reason that thanks to films like the two Ghostbusters films (the box-office disappointment of the second one notwithstanding), Stripes and Meatballs, Murray became a household name. His career may have stumbled a bit when he took on the Herculean task of creating chemistry between Harrison Ford and Anne Heche in Six Days and Seven Nights and unsuccessfully tried to do with aliens what he did with ghosts in Evolution, but I'm fairly certain that Reitman deserves better projects than an anemic attempt at a romantic comedy. Though My Super Ex-Girlfriend was pretty awful, I like to think this guy still has a couple of pretty good comedies left in him.
De Palma is responsible for one of my hands-down, all-time favorite movies: the crime drama The Untouchables, which conquered at the box-office and won both critical acclaim and an Academy Award for Sean Connery. Not only that, but he was responsible for Scarface, which remains, to the best of my knowledge, one of the most oft-quoted movies today, with the line "say hello to my little friend!" showing up just about everywhere on the pop-culture landscape. Despite the cultural impact of these films, De Palma's presence barely registered in Mission Impossible, which he directed but which will forever be remembered as Tom Cruise's movie, and just about every film he has made since then has gotten a lukewarm reception at best.
I'm not necessarily championing these directors; many of them had their shot and arguably just lost their touch as time went on, particularly de Palma, but I guess what dismays and to an extent depresses me is how they, and other fairly popular 80s directors like Walter Hill, Joe Dante, Larry Kasdan, and Richard Donner seem to have lost their ability to captivate audiences with a compelling story. Sure, a lot of their contemporaries like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, and Peter Weir, to name a few, endure, and continue to pack in theaters, but I guess I'm disappointed that the current generation of film goers has to put up with hacks like Michael Bay, Zack Snyder, McG, Shawn Levy, Roland Emmerich, Stephen Sommers and most of the idiots who rotate on the Adam Sandler movies. Sure, today's generation has Christopher Nolan, J.J. Abrams, and Peter Jackson but I honestly can't help but feel like they're missing out on some directors who really knew how to tell fun, engaging stories back in their day, which was not too long ago. Heck, though he may be a mega-bazillionaire, the James Cameron who directed Avatar and even Titanic is to my mind the merest shadow of the James Cameron who directed Aliens, and the same can be said of the Spielberg who directed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when comparing that schlock to just about anything he did in the 1980s and even most of the 1990s.
With movie prices continuing to skyrocket, especially thanks to gimmicks like IMAX and 3-D, moviegoers deserve more than mindless drivel like the Transformers movies, 300 and the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. They deserve better than the contrived spectacle of having movie characters look like they're reaching out of the screen to grab them; they deserve adventures and stories that really DO grab them, the way the movies of by likes of Reitman, De Palma and Landis used to grab me and lots of other moviegoers when I was younger, especially considering that unlike many notable directors of years past like David Lean, John Huston, Billy Wilder, and the like, most of those guys from the 80s are still around.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Action Classics
I'm as much a fan of today's action movies, even the ones filled with either computer-generated imagery, ADHD-esque, lightning-quick editing, shaky camera movements, or all of the above, as the next guy, and generally think that action movies have improved over the years, but I can think of at least two movies out on DVD that make a solid argument for the old adage: "They don't make 'em like they used to." The first one, which has only been out for about five years in the format, is John Frankenheimer's 1966 Formula One film Grand Prix, while the second, which has been available in the format for so long that I was able to get it at a bargain-bin price, is James Cameron's sci-fi classic Aliens. These films are twenty years apart and literally worlds apart in their setting, but for me they truly set the bar for what a truly fantastic action film should be like.
I won't go into a detailed review of either film; I already reviewed Grand Prix elsewhere (specifically at http://apeltala.multiply.com/reviews/item/51) and Aliens is, I think, so well-known that even among many of the younger sci-fi geeks that it needs no introduction from me. What I WILL discuss is why I think these films continue to serve as the standard for action movies even today, and will present my "theses," point by point.
1. Keeping It Real - Aliens was made when CGI was in its nascent stage, and therefore not only clunky but prohibitively expensive, which meant that it wasn't an option for Cameron. Grand Prix was made when CGI was nonexistent. As a result, both filmmakers relied on a combination of stunts and practical effects for the action sequences, and while Aliens had some iffy green-screen sequences and Grand Prix had an awkward scene in which a racing car's wheel broke off but didn't quite look realistic, I was really struck by how in-your-face most of the action was in both films, although this was more evident in Frankenheimer's film than in Cameron's as Cameron seemed to have budgetary constraints.
2. Building Tension is Essential - Aliens being a horror film set in space, Cameron obviously had to build more tension than Frankenheimer did, but clearly both of them knew how to do it. The Aliens script is easily Cameron's best, and it is through this that he sets the stakes and maps out the perils that lie ahead for Ripley and the marines. Also, even though this was a sequel and therefore part of a franchise, Cameron was able to create an atmosphere of fear that people from the cast of characters would die, as many of them did. Frankenheimer didn't write the rather so-so script of Grand Prix, but in filming the races and even the quieter moments, he managed the all-important task of establishing why the races mattered, why the drivers would risk their lives driving around and around.
3. Letting the audience see the actors in the thick of things - the cast of Grand Prix, in many sequences, actually drove their cars at ridiculous speeds. Of course, safety and insurance clauses dictate that actors should not do anything quite so dangerous these days, but there is still something important about creating the genuine illusion that the lead character was in some kind of peril. Audiences could see Ripley in the robotic loader fighting the alien queen at the end of Aliens, and could see Sigourney Weaver's adrenaline charged-performance. These days, it's all CGI and jump cuts, with a lot of the original magic gone. Sam Worthington's duel with Stephen Lang at the end of Avatar, as slick as it may have been, did not, to my mind, have anywhere near the visceral impact or emotional resonance of the Ripley/Alien Queen throwdown, and never will.
This is not to say that there aren't a number of action films these days that get it right. For all the criticism leveled at the "shaky cam" device they leaned so heavily upon, I remain a fan of all three Bourne films, which as improbable as they are when one really thinks about them really riveted me for two hours at a time and sold me on the idea of Matt Damon as an amnesiac hyper-assassin. I'm also a fan of Frankenheimer's 1998 cult classic Ronin, the spy film starring Robert de Niro and Jean Reno that featured more high-speed car chases, this time through city streets. There are films where CGI is used as a supplement to the atmosphere, including Cameron's own Terminator 2 rather than as a substitute for real, balls-to-the-wall action. There are plenty of good action films out there, even the ones that used CGI, shaky cams and quick-cuts.
The reason I picked these two films as my standard was, to be honest, my astonishment at how well they've aged, which goes to show that at the very least, adherence to the three rules I cited are a pretty good indicator of how well a movie can endure the inevitable onslaught of time.
I won't go into a detailed review of either film; I already reviewed Grand Prix elsewhere (specifically at http://apeltala.multiply.com/reviews/item/51) and Aliens is, I think, so well-known that even among many of the younger sci-fi geeks that it needs no introduction from me. What I WILL discuss is why I think these films continue to serve as the standard for action movies even today, and will present my "theses," point by point.
1. Keeping It Real - Aliens was made when CGI was in its nascent stage, and therefore not only clunky but prohibitively expensive, which meant that it wasn't an option for Cameron. Grand Prix was made when CGI was nonexistent. As a result, both filmmakers relied on a combination of stunts and practical effects for the action sequences, and while Aliens had some iffy green-screen sequences and Grand Prix had an awkward scene in which a racing car's wheel broke off but didn't quite look realistic, I was really struck by how in-your-face most of the action was in both films, although this was more evident in Frankenheimer's film than in Cameron's as Cameron seemed to have budgetary constraints.
2. Building Tension is Essential - Aliens being a horror film set in space, Cameron obviously had to build more tension than Frankenheimer did, but clearly both of them knew how to do it. The Aliens script is easily Cameron's best, and it is through this that he sets the stakes and maps out the perils that lie ahead for Ripley and the marines. Also, even though this was a sequel and therefore part of a franchise, Cameron was able to create an atmosphere of fear that people from the cast of characters would die, as many of them did. Frankenheimer didn't write the rather so-so script of Grand Prix, but in filming the races and even the quieter moments, he managed the all-important task of establishing why the races mattered, why the drivers would risk their lives driving around and around.
3. Letting the audience see the actors in the thick of things - the cast of Grand Prix, in many sequences, actually drove their cars at ridiculous speeds. Of course, safety and insurance clauses dictate that actors should not do anything quite so dangerous these days, but there is still something important about creating the genuine illusion that the lead character was in some kind of peril. Audiences could see Ripley in the robotic loader fighting the alien queen at the end of Aliens, and could see Sigourney Weaver's adrenaline charged-performance. These days, it's all CGI and jump cuts, with a lot of the original magic gone. Sam Worthington's duel with Stephen Lang at the end of Avatar, as slick as it may have been, did not, to my mind, have anywhere near the visceral impact or emotional resonance of the Ripley/Alien Queen throwdown, and never will.
This is not to say that there aren't a number of action films these days that get it right. For all the criticism leveled at the "shaky cam" device they leaned so heavily upon, I remain a fan of all three Bourne films, which as improbable as they are when one really thinks about them really riveted me for two hours at a time and sold me on the idea of Matt Damon as an amnesiac hyper-assassin. I'm also a fan of Frankenheimer's 1998 cult classic Ronin, the spy film starring Robert de Niro and Jean Reno that featured more high-speed car chases, this time through city streets. There are films where CGI is used as a supplement to the atmosphere, including Cameron's own Terminator 2 rather than as a substitute for real, balls-to-the-wall action. There are plenty of good action films out there, even the ones that used CGI, shaky cams and quick-cuts.
The reason I picked these two films as my standard was, to be honest, my astonishment at how well they've aged, which goes to show that at the very least, adherence to the three rules I cited are a pretty good indicator of how well a movie can endure the inevitable onslaught of time.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
The First "Real" X-men Movie?
Marvel Studios is allowing itself to breathe again given that its latest self-financed outing, Thor, has conquered at the box-office. It only has a two-week window to reap in most of its earnings before the inevitable onslaught of summer sequels kicks off this weekend with the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but it's gotten off to an admirable start. Marvel's execs will soon be holding their breath again this July, though, when the final piece of the cinematic puzzle that is the Marvel Avengers film slated for 2012 (which bears no relation to the 1998 disaster starring Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman and Sean Connery) falls into place: the Captain America movie.
Possibly of slightly less concern to them is the fate of X-men: First Class, a film that is arguably of more concern to 20th Century Fox, who continue to hold rights to make X-men films for as long as they keep churning them out, and who, if the trailers and teaser clips are any indication, are actually taking that responsibility very seriously for the first time in years. This film looks at least as good as the most celebrated film in the series X2: X-men United, and easily better than anything the studio has come up with since the original series director Bryan Singer left the franchise to try (and fail) to revive the Superman franchise. Though I actually enjoyed the box-office bomb Stardust and found Kick-Ass to be last year's one true guilty pleasure, I honestly didn't think new series director Matthew Vaughn had it in him to make a film that looks as impressive as it does in the trailers.
More than the ultra-slick presentation of this film, however, I think what I really admire Fox for is the risks they appear to have taken with this film. The first risk they've taken is the decision to make film a prequel rather than a reboot, even if it means accepting all of the baggage of everything that came before it, in particular the damage to the general X-men storyline wrought by the third film. Mercifully, though, it appears to have dumped the X-men Origins: Wolverine prequel as canon, judging by the fact that one character who appears in the Wolvie pic as a teenager in the 70s appears in a 1960s-set First Class as an adult. But Fox has done what not even Sony, the studio behind the box-office juggernauts that the Spider-Man films were, would dare do; which was stay the course set by the previous films. The decision to stick to the original films' timelines has led to other interesting decisions, like setting it in the 60s, a quirk which could potentially alienate younger viewers who may or may not know anything about JFK or the Cold War, and excluding just about everyone from the original films' cast, including Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. This movie has the potential to be the first actual X-MEN movie, and not just a movie about Wolverine told against the backdrop of the X-men's world.
The sad part is that as far as sequels/prequels/reboots go, I don't see XM:FC as one of the summer's more highly-anticipated offerings. While it could theoretically pop, with POTC 4, Kung Fu Panda 2 and The Hangover II all wreaking box-office havoc before it, it could just as easily get lost in the shuffle. This is actually something that could benefit Marvel Studios as a failed X-men film could discourage Fox from making any more and therefore encourage them to allow the rights to revert back to Marvel and therefore their corporate parent, Disney, but if the film is as good as it looks it would be a genuine shame for audiences to ignore it. If the film is as good as it looks, Fox definitely deserves a shot at making more of them.
It's amazing what the threat of having the film rights revert back to Marvel can do...
Possibly of slightly less concern to them is the fate of X-men: First Class, a film that is arguably of more concern to 20th Century Fox, who continue to hold rights to make X-men films for as long as they keep churning them out, and who, if the trailers and teaser clips are any indication, are actually taking that responsibility very seriously for the first time in years. This film looks at least as good as the most celebrated film in the series X2: X-men United, and easily better than anything the studio has come up with since the original series director Bryan Singer left the franchise to try (and fail) to revive the Superman franchise. Though I actually enjoyed the box-office bomb Stardust and found Kick-Ass to be last year's one true guilty pleasure, I honestly didn't think new series director Matthew Vaughn had it in him to make a film that looks as impressive as it does in the trailers.
More than the ultra-slick presentation of this film, however, I think what I really admire Fox for is the risks they appear to have taken with this film. The first risk they've taken is the decision to make film a prequel rather than a reboot, even if it means accepting all of the baggage of everything that came before it, in particular the damage to the general X-men storyline wrought by the third film. Mercifully, though, it appears to have dumped the X-men Origins: Wolverine prequel as canon, judging by the fact that one character who appears in the Wolvie pic as a teenager in the 70s appears in a 1960s-set First Class as an adult. But Fox has done what not even Sony, the studio behind the box-office juggernauts that the Spider-Man films were, would dare do; which was stay the course set by the previous films. The decision to stick to the original films' timelines has led to other interesting decisions, like setting it in the 60s, a quirk which could potentially alienate younger viewers who may or may not know anything about JFK or the Cold War, and excluding just about everyone from the original films' cast, including Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. This movie has the potential to be the first actual X-MEN movie, and not just a movie about Wolverine told against the backdrop of the X-men's world.
The sad part is that as far as sequels/prequels/reboots go, I don't see XM:FC as one of the summer's more highly-anticipated offerings. While it could theoretically pop, with POTC 4, Kung Fu Panda 2 and The Hangover II all wreaking box-office havoc before it, it could just as easily get lost in the shuffle. This is actually something that could benefit Marvel Studios as a failed X-men film could discourage Fox from making any more and therefore encourage them to allow the rights to revert back to Marvel and therefore their corporate parent, Disney, but if the film is as good as it looks it would be a genuine shame for audiences to ignore it. If the film is as good as it looks, Fox definitely deserves a shot at making more of them.
It's amazing what the threat of having the film rights revert back to Marvel can do...
Monday, May 16, 2011
A DVD You Might Have Missed: Millions
I'm fairly certain that anyone who loves film knows that a little over two years ago Irish director Danny Boyle won a slew of Oscars for the film Slumdog Millionaire, a film which was a hit with critics and audiences alike for its tale of an underdog...excuse me, slumdog...hitting the big time. What not as many people may know about is a film that Boyle also did that came out three years earlier, also with the word "Million" in its title: a sweet little comedy titled "Millions."
The title is a little misleading; the poster and marketing of the film suggest that a little boy (Alexander Etel)happens upon millions of pounds, when in fact the total is just under a quarter of a million. All the same, though, when a huge bag of money seems to fall from the sky onto little Damian Cunningham (Etel) while he's playing in his fort made from cardboard boxes, it might as well be millions of pounds sterling. This mysterious delivery is actually courtesy of the Bank of England, which in the film is switching over from pounds to Euros by the end of the year, and is about to burn all of its pounds. A syndicate of thieves all over England are scrambling to seize as many of these soon-to-be-destroyed pounds with the intent of exchanging them for a kingly sum as soon as possible, and one of their schemes involves a single thief flinging bags of money from the train carrying them as it makes its way across the English countryside. One such bag lands right on Damian's fort, destroying it and astonishing him.
Damian, a devout Catholic whose mother recently died and who seems to be a virtual encyclopedia of facts about Catholic saints, many of whom actually visit him throughout the film, believes that the money is a gift from God and believes it should be given to the poor. His brother Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) has other ideas, though. At Anthony's urging, the boys hide the money from everyone, including their father (James Nesbitt) with each of them spending it as he sees fit, with Anthony building up an entourage and Damian doing God's work. It is ironically Damian who catches more attention as he drops a thousand pounds into a donation bin during a drive for charity, and catches the attention of the woman conducting the drive (Daisy Donovan), and his school principal. Anthony lies to the principal, claiming that he stole the money from the Mormons who live in their community (to whom Damian has also given a considerable amount of money) in order to keep the boys' secret.
However, things get a little dangerous when the thief for whom the bag of money was intended shows up looking for it, with Damian innocently asking if he's a "poor person" and intending to give him money (and telling him that he has lots to give), and with Anthony, being a little bit wiser, throwing the thief off the trail by giving him a huge jar of coins and telling him that this was the "lots" to which Damian referred.
Time is not on the boys' side as the deadline for the switchover draws near, with the thief seemingly getting hotter on their trail and the money simply becoming too difficult to conceal.
All told, this was a sweet little story that has more in common with Pay It Forward, than it does with Slumdog Millionaire, although mercifully it doesn't have the ridiculously contrived ending of the former. While Boyle is about the only truly well-known film maker involved in making this film, all of the actors, especially young Etel and McGibbon, turn in fine performances that do the film proud. The characters were difficult to understand at time due to their thick "Mancunian" accents ("Mancunian" referring to the speech of those hailing from Manchester in Northern England) but considering that this DVD is subtitled it wasn't as big a problem as it would have been for one watching this in movie theaters. The film gets a little preachy at times but it never loses its sweetness. There's also a nice dynamic to the relationship between the two brothers, and while their relationship is not put through the wringer that the brothers in Slumdog undergo it is definitely put to the test in some ways and is all the better for it.
The DVD has decent enough extras like deleted scenes and interviews with the director, cast and crew, but there's nothing that particularly stands out, as DVD extras go. Fortunately, the film is an attraction in and of itself, and definitely something worth checking out for anyone suffering from sequel/remake/reboot/franchise fatigue.
The title is a little misleading; the poster and marketing of the film suggest that a little boy (Alexander Etel)happens upon millions of pounds, when in fact the total is just under a quarter of a million. All the same, though, when a huge bag of money seems to fall from the sky onto little Damian Cunningham (Etel) while he's playing in his fort made from cardboard boxes, it might as well be millions of pounds sterling. This mysterious delivery is actually courtesy of the Bank of England, which in the film is switching over from pounds to Euros by the end of the year, and is about to burn all of its pounds. A syndicate of thieves all over England are scrambling to seize as many of these soon-to-be-destroyed pounds with the intent of exchanging them for a kingly sum as soon as possible, and one of their schemes involves a single thief flinging bags of money from the train carrying them as it makes its way across the English countryside. One such bag lands right on Damian's fort, destroying it and astonishing him.
Damian, a devout Catholic whose mother recently died and who seems to be a virtual encyclopedia of facts about Catholic saints, many of whom actually visit him throughout the film, believes that the money is a gift from God and believes it should be given to the poor. His brother Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) has other ideas, though. At Anthony's urging, the boys hide the money from everyone, including their father (James Nesbitt) with each of them spending it as he sees fit, with Anthony building up an entourage and Damian doing God's work. It is ironically Damian who catches more attention as he drops a thousand pounds into a donation bin during a drive for charity, and catches the attention of the woman conducting the drive (Daisy Donovan), and his school principal. Anthony lies to the principal, claiming that he stole the money from the Mormons who live in their community (to whom Damian has also given a considerable amount of money) in order to keep the boys' secret.
However, things get a little dangerous when the thief for whom the bag of money was intended shows up looking for it, with Damian innocently asking if he's a "poor person" and intending to give him money (and telling him that he has lots to give), and with Anthony, being a little bit wiser, throwing the thief off the trail by giving him a huge jar of coins and telling him that this was the "lots" to which Damian referred.
Time is not on the boys' side as the deadline for the switchover draws near, with the thief seemingly getting hotter on their trail and the money simply becoming too difficult to conceal.
All told, this was a sweet little story that has more in common with Pay It Forward, than it does with Slumdog Millionaire, although mercifully it doesn't have the ridiculously contrived ending of the former. While Boyle is about the only truly well-known film maker involved in making this film, all of the actors, especially young Etel and McGibbon, turn in fine performances that do the film proud. The characters were difficult to understand at time due to their thick "Mancunian" accents ("Mancunian" referring to the speech of those hailing from Manchester in Northern England) but considering that this DVD is subtitled it wasn't as big a problem as it would have been for one watching this in movie theaters. The film gets a little preachy at times but it never loses its sweetness. There's also a nice dynamic to the relationship between the two brothers, and while their relationship is not put through the wringer that the brothers in Slumdog undergo it is definitely put to the test in some ways and is all the better for it.
The DVD has decent enough extras like deleted scenes and interviews with the director, cast and crew, but there's nothing that particularly stands out, as DVD extras go. Fortunately, the film is an attraction in and of itself, and definitely something worth checking out for anyone suffering from sequel/remake/reboot/franchise fatigue.
New Product
A few years ago I posted something on my old blog about the dearth of original or new product in Hollywood, essentially lamenting the infestation of sequels, remakes and the then-relatively new phenomenon, the "re-boot" flooding the market. That situation has not substantially changed, as borne out by the fact that in the first decade of the new millennium, six out of the ten years, the top-grossing films at the American box-office were sequels.
There is a built-in cynicism, as a result, among many casual moviegoers, that the market can only truly accommodate sequels. About a month or so ago I read an article in the newspaper in which several people who attended a film expo were asked (on condition of anonymity) what films they thought were going to pop and which they thought were going to flop. The answers were almost uniform; Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two (essentially Harry Potter Part 8 or Harry Potter Part 7.5, depending on how you look at it), Transformers 3. Their predictions for flops were a little disheartening. A number predicted Thor would tank, a number more predicted Captain America: the First Avenger, Cowboys & Aliens, Super 8, and Green Lantern would bomb. Two weeks into the U.S. summer season, those would-be soothsayers already have egg on their face as Thor is a bona fide box-office hit.
Now, most of those films represent aspiring franchises and aren't exactly high art, but the off-the-cuff certainty of these people, some of whom claimed to be "industry insiders" that the public would reject new product is a sad reflection of how the movie viewing experience has, by-and-large, metamorphosed into the intellectual equivalent of eating at McDonald's or KFC. The belief is apparently that people will pay money for the same old dreck every single time.
Well, that belief is misplaced; people are forgetting that two years ago, Iron Man not only saved Robert Downey Jr.'s career, it conquered a known brand name like Indiana Jones, despite being put together without any name recall whatsoever by a fledgling studio, and by a director whose biggest hit had been a Will Ferrell comedy. Last year, the highly original Inception, though it may have ridden on Christopher Nolan's goodwill from his Batman exploits, was a global box-office hit, a critical darling and eventually a multiple Oscar winner, and its success is particularly gratifying because the nature of its story does not lend itself to a sequel, and therefore it was not designed to be a part of a franchise.
The first Matrix movie became a pop-culture phenomenon until its sequels wore out its welcome. Pixar, with the exception of the Toy Story and soon Cars films, has churned out a new, original movie almost every year since 2001. Heck, landmark movies like E.T., Star Wars and Forrest Gump weren't exactly pre-packaged hits, were they? Sure, marketing a new movie has a lot to do with its success, which explains the rather massive marketing costs involved in trying to launch a new franchise, some of which pay off (e.g. Thor) and some of which do not (e.g. Speed Racer), but at the end of the day, people will go to see a new movie if they think it's any good.
Thor, franchise-in-the-making though it may be, struck the first heroic blow for new movies this year with its meaty grosses in the U.S. and around the world, and perhaps out of consideration for their subsidiary Marvel, Disney has scheduled POTC 4 two weeks after Thor, allowing the God of Thunder to breathe a little and stretch his legs before the inevitable onslaught of sequels begins. I'm honestly hoping this is a harbinger of good things to come, not necessarily for my favored movies like Captain America and Green Lantern, but for the new stuff coming out in general, like J.J. Abrams' Super 8, Terrence Mallick's The Tree of Life, and other films that may find themselves a part of moviegoing public's collective consciousness if people only give them a chance. The inaugural Tintin movie, which is due out later this year, is another example of a fresh new product that needs people to approach it with the same open minds they had when they walked into Star Wars, Iron Man, or Inception.
There is still plenty of room out there for new ideas, if one can only look past the re-boots and remakes and sequels. Here's food for thought; as derivative as it may be, Avatar was not directly adapted from any book or previous work, and yet it is the top-grossing film of all time. People will still pay to see something they've never seen before.
There is a built-in cynicism, as a result, among many casual moviegoers, that the market can only truly accommodate sequels. About a month or so ago I read an article in the newspaper in which several people who attended a film expo were asked (on condition of anonymity) what films they thought were going to pop and which they thought were going to flop. The answers were almost uniform; Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two (essentially Harry Potter Part 8 or Harry Potter Part 7.5, depending on how you look at it), Transformers 3. Their predictions for flops were a little disheartening. A number predicted Thor would tank, a number more predicted Captain America: the First Avenger, Cowboys & Aliens, Super 8, and Green Lantern would bomb. Two weeks into the U.S. summer season, those would-be soothsayers already have egg on their face as Thor is a bona fide box-office hit.
Now, most of those films represent aspiring franchises and aren't exactly high art, but the off-the-cuff certainty of these people, some of whom claimed to be "industry insiders" that the public would reject new product is a sad reflection of how the movie viewing experience has, by-and-large, metamorphosed into the intellectual equivalent of eating at McDonald's or KFC. The belief is apparently that people will pay money for the same old dreck every single time.
Well, that belief is misplaced; people are forgetting that two years ago, Iron Man not only saved Robert Downey Jr.'s career, it conquered a known brand name like Indiana Jones, despite being put together without any name recall whatsoever by a fledgling studio, and by a director whose biggest hit had been a Will Ferrell comedy. Last year, the highly original Inception, though it may have ridden on Christopher Nolan's goodwill from his Batman exploits, was a global box-office hit, a critical darling and eventually a multiple Oscar winner, and its success is particularly gratifying because the nature of its story does not lend itself to a sequel, and therefore it was not designed to be a part of a franchise.
The first Matrix movie became a pop-culture phenomenon until its sequels wore out its welcome. Pixar, with the exception of the Toy Story and soon Cars films, has churned out a new, original movie almost every year since 2001. Heck, landmark movies like E.T., Star Wars and Forrest Gump weren't exactly pre-packaged hits, were they? Sure, marketing a new movie has a lot to do with its success, which explains the rather massive marketing costs involved in trying to launch a new franchise, some of which pay off (e.g. Thor) and some of which do not (e.g. Speed Racer), but at the end of the day, people will go to see a new movie if they think it's any good.
Thor, franchise-in-the-making though it may be, struck the first heroic blow for new movies this year with its meaty grosses in the U.S. and around the world, and perhaps out of consideration for their subsidiary Marvel, Disney has scheduled POTC 4 two weeks after Thor, allowing the God of Thunder to breathe a little and stretch his legs before the inevitable onslaught of sequels begins. I'm honestly hoping this is a harbinger of good things to come, not necessarily for my favored movies like Captain America and Green Lantern, but for the new stuff coming out in general, like J.J. Abrams' Super 8, Terrence Mallick's The Tree of Life, and other films that may find themselves a part of moviegoing public's collective consciousness if people only give them a chance. The inaugural Tintin movie, which is due out later this year, is another example of a fresh new product that needs people to approach it with the same open minds they had when they walked into Star Wars, Iron Man, or Inception.
There is still plenty of room out there for new ideas, if one can only look past the re-boots and remakes and sequels. Here's food for thought; as derivative as it may be, Avatar was not directly adapted from any book or previous work, and yet it is the top-grossing film of all time. People will still pay to see something they've never seen before.
Inaugural Post
Since 2005 I've maintained several blogs, the first of which I named "The Tantrum" with the URL "tantrumjim.blogspot.com." It's been visited by my friends and a very small number of internet nomads, and over a six-year period it hasn't even gotten 2000 views.
Now I'm not famous (though I'd be a liar if I said that didn't appeal to me), so I didn't exactly expect gangbusters in terms of hits (and I don't even know if profile views is the same as hits) but 2000 over half a decade is really a miserable number.
So I asked myself; what can I write about? As a professional, I could probably open a blog about legal advice, or human rights case studies, or political commentary or that sort of thing, but looking over my blog, I remembered why I started it in the first place: as a means of escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday life, including my often-stressful professional life. I love what I do, but I still need a break from it. I write largely for myself, but as a frustrated writer, I'd also like to reach a wider audience, too, one that isn't turned off by the thought of reading someone's tantrums.
And more often than not, while I like to talk about just anything under the sun, I've noticed there are certain topics towards which I have tended to gravitate more than others, and there's one more than most: movies. Old and new, theatrical releases and DVD releases, I simply just love movies, even though there are a LOT of great movies out there I have yet to see.
So that, in a nutshell, is it; this is my DEDICATED movie blog, where I will talk about everything I know and learn about old, current and upcoming movies.
Let the movie love commence!
Now I'm not famous (though I'd be a liar if I said that didn't appeal to me), so I didn't exactly expect gangbusters in terms of hits (and I don't even know if profile views is the same as hits) but 2000 over half a decade is really a miserable number.
So I asked myself; what can I write about? As a professional, I could probably open a blog about legal advice, or human rights case studies, or political commentary or that sort of thing, but looking over my blog, I remembered why I started it in the first place: as a means of escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday life, including my often-stressful professional life. I love what I do, but I still need a break from it. I write largely for myself, but as a frustrated writer, I'd also like to reach a wider audience, too, one that isn't turned off by the thought of reading someone's tantrums.
And more often than not, while I like to talk about just anything under the sun, I've noticed there are certain topics towards which I have tended to gravitate more than others, and there's one more than most: movies. Old and new, theatrical releases and DVD releases, I simply just love movies, even though there are a LOT of great movies out there I have yet to see.
So that, in a nutshell, is it; this is my DEDICATED movie blog, where I will talk about everything I know and learn about old, current and upcoming movies.
Let the movie love commence!
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