The film Super 8 may not necessarily be everyone's cup of tea--I know I had my issues with it (as articulated a few posts back with my review)--but its apparent success at the box-office means it has a thing or two to teach people about how to make a hit movie. It may not have pulled in Avatar numbers, and at least one box-office analyst has described it as a failure given the aggressive marketing campaign, but J.J. Abram's love letter to Spielberg and his coming-of-age movies in the 1980s, when all is said and done, will be remembered as one of the true financial successes of the 2011 U.S. summer movie season. It has a few lessons to teach about selling a non-franchise film to today's summer audiences, in particular the coveted 18 to 35 demographic:
1. Familiarity is Essential - people embraced Avatar because, like it or not, James Cameron was the biggest upfront attraction, and people wanted to see what he could do twelve years after Titanic. Peter Jackson's name on District 9 made sure that Neil Blomkamp's film got noticed; it could have just as easily have been an obscure art-house affair or, even worse, been consigned to direct-to-DVD oblivion. People went to see Super 8 because of Steven Spielberg, whose name featured prominently on the marketing materials and because the film was pushed as an homage to his earlier work. These days, and in this economy, people want to see names they know.
2. Starpower NOT Essential - This one's a no-brainer and is a lesson already borne in mind by most people launching franchises; don't waste money on "name" actors. Megawatt movie stars like Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise all have one thing in common: none of them have headlined 300+ million blockbusters, and those angling to launch franchises are all aware of this. It's a fact made even more dramatic in movies like Super 8 where, apart from having no big name actors, there is no merchandising angle to be found anywhere.
3. Style Must Be Accompanied by Substance - Now, this maxim may be easily debunked by referring to the runaway popularity of things like the Transformers movies, but at the end of the day it's still important to make a good movie, especially when the filmmaker doesn't have the strength of a popular toy line or comic-book character to lean on. I may have had my issues with Super 8 but I certainly respect J.J. Abrams' craftsmanship in creating this film.
The rules sound simple, but it's amazing how many filmmakers still manage to stumble on the last part, what with all of the scripts written by committee and the marketing execs dictating what goes into a movie.
Anyway, it's still gratifying to know that in a time when franchises generally rule the box-office there are still movies that can buck the trend like Avatar, District 9 and Super 8.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
Fears of Comic-Book Movie Fatigue
With the underwhelming grosses of the mega-budgeted tentpole film Green Lantern, one of the box-office analysts and prognosticators over at boxofficemojo.com, one of my favorite sites, has raised the question of whether the failure of GL, as well as the most recent X-Men film to set the box-office on fire are evidence of comic-adaptation burnout among moviegoers, particularly American audiences. Now, I may not be an American and I may not live in America, but I happen to enjoy good Hollywood movies in general and good comic-book movies in particular, so I found this topic particularly interesting.
The theory is that because neither Thor nor X-Men: First Class ended up doing Iron Man numbers, and because Green Lantern has apparently failed to launch a bankable DC Comics character film franchise outside of Superman and Batman, studios will no longer be willing to invest large amounts of money in what are considered B-List comic-book characters. The writer then went on to speculate that the respectable if not quite stellar grosses of Thor could be indicative of the kind of business that Marvel's upcoming Captain America film will do.
Now, box-office prognostication is never a 100% exact science, and if people had the perfect formula for launching a new film with new ideas, there probably wouldn't be any need for sequels, so obviously there's no point in taking the article at face value. That said, I do feel a touch of trepidation as far as the box-office fate of Captain America is concerned, even while I feel that the writer is still off-base about comic-book movies in general.
Even though, if the trailers are any indication, Captain America looks like a genuinely well-made film and one which its distributor Paramount Pictures appears to be marketing with reasonable aggressiveness, the tepid reception of the actually very good X-Men prequel along does not bode well for its box-office chances, nor does the fact that it's opening in the wake of arguably the most highly-anticipated movie of the year, the last installment of the Harry Potter series.
To my mind the problem facing Marvel with Cap's movie seems to be one of timing; part of me can't help but wonder why, instead of cramming Cap into a precarious July spot, after audiences have had to digest two Marvel movies and one DC one, they didn't just use Cap to launch next summer's slate and push The Avengers back to Memorial Day? Well, they have their own number-crunchers to figure that out, I guess, but if their current gambit fails I'll bet they'll be wishing they'd thought of moving Cap to next year, or done something more audacious like move him to winter, where he'd be the lone comic-book-based property as opposed to just another face in an already-crowded summer slate.
That said, I hardly think these numbers spell the doom of comic-book movies, even those based on "b-listers."
Sure, Thor didn't post Iron Man numbers, but what the writer didn't mention in his article (and which I'm sure he was aware of) was that in 2008, Iron Man was an overachiever, powered mainly by a career-resurrecting performance by Robert Downey, Jr., who, it is worth mentioning here, had, prior to that film NEVER anchored a film that grossed over $100 million in the United States, let alone a bona-fide, half-a-billion-dollar-worldwide-grossing blockbuster. Even the most optimistic estimates for that film seemed to peg its U.S. gross at $250 million. Considering that the first Iron Man beat out every other movie but The Dark Knight at the US box-office that year, it seemed to make a rock-solid case for adapting not-so-well-known comic-book characters for the big screen.
What makes Thor such a poor barometer for the blockbuster potential of films like Captain America and other non-Batman/Spider-Man/Superman/Iron Man movies is the fact that Thor was always going to be extremely hard to pull off and even harder to sell, and the fact that Marvel, Kenneth Branagh and their cast and crew managed to do both is something for which they deserve medals all around. But it should always be remembered that the odds of Thor becoming a hit were always kind of remote. It could have just as easily suffered the same fate as Ang Lee's Hulk. It's easy for people to say "I knew it would be a hit all along" now, but deep down I'm sure people know better. In industry where there's still no such thing as a 100% sure thing, this movie was about the farthest thing from a sure thing that a Marvel movie could get, ergo its inability to crack the magical $200 million mark in the U.S. simply cannot be viewed as a weakness of the genre in general. It's kind of a funny way to say that Thor should be viewed as an unqualified success, but there it is.
I will not debate, on the other hand, that X-men: First Class is a definite underachiever, one which looks set to finish even below the least well-received of all the X-men movies, the risible Wolverine prequel at the box-office, but as a lot of people have acknowledged, that film was definitely going to be hurt by the absence of Wolverine from the team's roster, especially considering that all four of the previous films were basically centered around him. Still, considering it was a fantastic film, arguably as good as if not better than the best in the series, which got a lot of love from critics, I am genuinely disappointed that it hasn't been doing better at the box-office, although I think it has, if nothing else, established that the franchise can stand on its own two feet without Wolverine, even though its first couple of steps free of the Canucklehead's support have been wobbly ones. I honestly think, if they maintain this standard of quality, that the sequel to this prequel or reboot or whatever it is, will almost certainly outgross X-men: First Class.
If there's anything that can truly hurt Captain America: The First Avenger and other non-Batman/Spider-Man/Superman/Iron Man comic book flicks it will definitely be Green Lantern's poor reception by critics and audiences alike. Again, like I said before (in my review), the real tragedy of that film was that it should have worked as it had most of the crucial ingredients in place (except, unfortunately, a decent script). I don't know why Warner Brothers wasn't able to make it work, so there's not much more I can say on the subject.
What I can say, though is that the lesson to learn from this is a pretty simple one, one I would think movie execs should be capable of remembering: too much of anything is bad. In 2006 there were something like a dozen or so animated films that came out, with a lot of them falling by the wayside, and in subsequent years the glut was corrected and fewer such movies came out; the same will be true for movies released in 3-D, which is the current craze: a lot of 3-D movies will bomb and so fewer of them will be made. Box-office duds like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Losers and Priest can pretty much guarantee that studio heads will be more discriminating about which comic-book property they adapt, especially if Cowboys and Aliens tanks too. People will learn that just because it's a comic-book property doesn't mean it'll make money. The movie has to be a good one, too, and it has to be sold well.
Good adaptations of good comic books can do plenty of box-office business when given room to breathe, something that's not happening this year, and which, with The Avengers, and new Spider-Man, Batman, Superman and even Ghost Rider films on the way, is not going to happen next year, either.
Pixar does only one film a year, maybe Marvel, now Pixar's stablemate at Disney, can think of doing the same once they've finally put The Avengers into theaters. Or maybe Disney/Marvel, Warner Brothers/DC and everyone else with future ambitions of adapting comic books into movies can actually sit down or conference call each other and figure out a way to give each other room so that their movies don't end up cannibalizing each other at the box-office or collectively wearing down audience interest. There's a thought; release comic-book movies few and far between to keep people lean and anxious to see new movies every time, like Pixar does.
Too bad it'll probably take Captain America flopping at the box-office to get studio execs to think like that.
The theory is that because neither Thor nor X-Men: First Class ended up doing Iron Man numbers, and because Green Lantern has apparently failed to launch a bankable DC Comics character film franchise outside of Superman and Batman, studios will no longer be willing to invest large amounts of money in what are considered B-List comic-book characters. The writer then went on to speculate that the respectable if not quite stellar grosses of Thor could be indicative of the kind of business that Marvel's upcoming Captain America film will do.
Now, box-office prognostication is never a 100% exact science, and if people had the perfect formula for launching a new film with new ideas, there probably wouldn't be any need for sequels, so obviously there's no point in taking the article at face value. That said, I do feel a touch of trepidation as far as the box-office fate of Captain America is concerned, even while I feel that the writer is still off-base about comic-book movies in general.
Even though, if the trailers are any indication, Captain America looks like a genuinely well-made film and one which its distributor Paramount Pictures appears to be marketing with reasonable aggressiveness, the tepid reception of the actually very good X-Men prequel along does not bode well for its box-office chances, nor does the fact that it's opening in the wake of arguably the most highly-anticipated movie of the year, the last installment of the Harry Potter series.
To my mind the problem facing Marvel with Cap's movie seems to be one of timing; part of me can't help but wonder why, instead of cramming Cap into a precarious July spot, after audiences have had to digest two Marvel movies and one DC one, they didn't just use Cap to launch next summer's slate and push The Avengers back to Memorial Day? Well, they have their own number-crunchers to figure that out, I guess, but if their current gambit fails I'll bet they'll be wishing they'd thought of moving Cap to next year, or done something more audacious like move him to winter, where he'd be the lone comic-book-based property as opposed to just another face in an already-crowded summer slate.
That said, I hardly think these numbers spell the doom of comic-book movies, even those based on "b-listers."
Sure, Thor didn't post Iron Man numbers, but what the writer didn't mention in his article (and which I'm sure he was aware of) was that in 2008, Iron Man was an overachiever, powered mainly by a career-resurrecting performance by Robert Downey, Jr., who, it is worth mentioning here, had, prior to that film NEVER anchored a film that grossed over $100 million in the United States, let alone a bona-fide, half-a-billion-dollar-worldwide-grossing blockbuster. Even the most optimistic estimates for that film seemed to peg its U.S. gross at $250 million. Considering that the first Iron Man beat out every other movie but The Dark Knight at the US box-office that year, it seemed to make a rock-solid case for adapting not-so-well-known comic-book characters for the big screen.
What makes Thor such a poor barometer for the blockbuster potential of films like Captain America and other non-Batman/Spider-Man/Superman/Iron Man movies is the fact that Thor was always going to be extremely hard to pull off and even harder to sell, and the fact that Marvel, Kenneth Branagh and their cast and crew managed to do both is something for which they deserve medals all around. But it should always be remembered that the odds of Thor becoming a hit were always kind of remote. It could have just as easily suffered the same fate as Ang Lee's Hulk. It's easy for people to say "I knew it would be a hit all along" now, but deep down I'm sure people know better. In industry where there's still no such thing as a 100% sure thing, this movie was about the farthest thing from a sure thing that a Marvel movie could get, ergo its inability to crack the magical $200 million mark in the U.S. simply cannot be viewed as a weakness of the genre in general. It's kind of a funny way to say that Thor should be viewed as an unqualified success, but there it is.
I will not debate, on the other hand, that X-men: First Class is a definite underachiever, one which looks set to finish even below the least well-received of all the X-men movies, the risible Wolverine prequel at the box-office, but as a lot of people have acknowledged, that film was definitely going to be hurt by the absence of Wolverine from the team's roster, especially considering that all four of the previous films were basically centered around him. Still, considering it was a fantastic film, arguably as good as if not better than the best in the series, which got a lot of love from critics, I am genuinely disappointed that it hasn't been doing better at the box-office, although I think it has, if nothing else, established that the franchise can stand on its own two feet without Wolverine, even though its first couple of steps free of the Canucklehead's support have been wobbly ones. I honestly think, if they maintain this standard of quality, that the sequel to this prequel or reboot or whatever it is, will almost certainly outgross X-men: First Class.
If there's anything that can truly hurt Captain America: The First Avenger and other non-Batman/Spider-Man/Superman/Iron Man comic book flicks it will definitely be Green Lantern's poor reception by critics and audiences alike. Again, like I said before (in my review), the real tragedy of that film was that it should have worked as it had most of the crucial ingredients in place (except, unfortunately, a decent script). I don't know why Warner Brothers wasn't able to make it work, so there's not much more I can say on the subject.
What I can say, though is that the lesson to learn from this is a pretty simple one, one I would think movie execs should be capable of remembering: too much of anything is bad. In 2006 there were something like a dozen or so animated films that came out, with a lot of them falling by the wayside, and in subsequent years the glut was corrected and fewer such movies came out; the same will be true for movies released in 3-D, which is the current craze: a lot of 3-D movies will bomb and so fewer of them will be made. Box-office duds like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Losers and Priest can pretty much guarantee that studio heads will be more discriminating about which comic-book property they adapt, especially if Cowboys and Aliens tanks too. People will learn that just because it's a comic-book property doesn't mean it'll make money. The movie has to be a good one, too, and it has to be sold well.
Good adaptations of good comic books can do plenty of box-office business when given room to breathe, something that's not happening this year, and which, with The Avengers, and new Spider-Man, Batman, Superman and even Ghost Rider films on the way, is not going to happen next year, either.
Pixar does only one film a year, maybe Marvel, now Pixar's stablemate at Disney, can think of doing the same once they've finally put The Avengers into theaters. Or maybe Disney/Marvel, Warner Brothers/DC and everyone else with future ambitions of adapting comic books into movies can actually sit down or conference call each other and figure out a way to give each other room so that their movies don't end up cannibalizing each other at the box-office or collectively wearing down audience interest. There's a thought; release comic-book movies few and far between to keep people lean and anxious to see new movies every time, like Pixar does.
Too bad it'll probably take Captain America flopping at the box-office to get studio execs to think like that.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Not So Bright: A Review of Green Lantern
Anyone reading some of the reviews over at rottentomatoes.com might come to believe that Green Lantern is one of the worst movies of the year if not all time. I say that's slightly unfair.
Green Lantern is the story of Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a test pilot with some daddy issues; as a child he watched his father, a test pilot just like him, die in a fiery explosion while testing an aircraft. While he is grappling with his issues, he finds himself drafted by an intergalactic corps of space cops known as the Green Lantern Corps, whose most distinguished member has been mortally wounded fighting the Corps' greatest threat, a gigantic yellow cloud with an evil-looking head known as Parallax that feeds off fear, represented by the color yellow. This dying Corpsman, Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison), tells his power ring to choose his successor, and it chooses Jordan. The Green Lanterns derive their power from their rings, which in turn are powered by lanterns, which in turn are powered by will, represented by the color green.
Now, critics have bashed this film for everything from the script to the acting to the visual effects to the music, and while I do not entirely disagree with the criticism, I will say that this film is not as bad as everyone says it is. The dialogue isn't as bloodcurdling as the lines that Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox spouted in the Transformers movies. The acting isn't as bad as Jessica Alba trying to convince people she's a scientist in Fantastic Four. The effects aren't as bad as the melange of shit thrown at the screen in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The music isn't as bad as the Frankenstein's monster of a score that was devised for last year's Kick-Ass by no less than four composers.
That said, while it isn't all that bad, it is godawful nonetheless.
Now, I don't know exactly if Hal Jordan was a reluctant hero when he started out in the comics, but if he was, then the writers did a horrible job of translating that origin, and if he wasn't they made a huge mistake in trying to ape the formula of Spider-Man 2 and Iron Man. Reynolds simply doesn't do pathos well at all, and whatever little acting talent he might have is severely compromised by the leaden script which, while not quite Transformers bad, has some real clunkers scattered all throughout the proceedings. Blake Lively is lovely, like a younger Mia Sara, but with next to none of the personality she showed in Ben Affleck's The Town. Peter Sarsgaard turns in a pretty quirky turn as mad-scientist Hector Hammond, complete with the swollen, misshapen head, but at some point the prosthetic head he puts on starts doing the acting for him. Mark Strong turns in a solid performance as one of the top lanterns Sinestro, but again, the script lets him down with some really silly dialogue, as well as some rather abrupt character shifts later in the movie. Tim Robbins, who stars as a Senator and Hammond's dad, Angela Bassett as DC Universe mainstay Amanda Waller and the rest of the cast kind of just hang around for the paycheck.
The scenes set on Oa are, to me anyway, the best of the film and, despite some dodgy CGI, gave us a glimpse of what the film could have been like if its makers had been less preoccupied with keeping things down on earth.
(Spoiler alert)
I found a lot of the supposed "money" shots in the movie rather jarring and silly. In one scene, Hal Jordan comes up with a giant Hot Wheels car and track to stop a helicopter from crashing. The first thing that popped into my head was to wonder how much Mattel paid for that sequence, especially considering how much the car looked like an actual Hot Wheels vehicle, right down to the wheels. In another scene, while trying to catch Parallax, a squadron of, in Sinestro's words, the very best Lanterns, can only think of...a giant net, and shooting it with their apparently ineffectual energy blasts? And this...after they condemn Jordan for his lack of imagination and after ONE of them kicks Jordan's butt by conjuring up a miniature sun?
Not only that but (spoiler alert still on) an after-the-credits scene involving Sinestro feels downright gratuitous (i.e. no real basis has been laid for it in the script, even though GL comic fans know what Sinestro eventually ends up becoming). Mark Strong's performance deserved far better than for his character to make so abrupt a change, like another movie, for example.
(End spoiler alert).
Also, it kind of bothered me that the head of Parallax looked strikingly like the bad guy in Dreamworks' animated comedy Monsters vs. Aliens; it kind of blunted the dramatic tension right there.
In the end, the painful irony of this film is that, while the Green Lanterns' Power Rings are supposedly only limited by their wearers' imaginations, apparently the filmmakers' imaginations were quite limited, especially considering the reported $200 million that was spent on this movie.
What happened to this movie was a crying shame and is strongly reminiscent of the way Twentieth Century Fox messed up the Fantastic Four movies. I went into this movie wanting to like it because I could honestly sympathize with the GL fans who wanted their hero to make it onto the screen at all costs. I made myself like both FF movies (and even still actually enjoy watching the second one a bit from time to time), but with all of the rampant stupidity in this film I simply couldn't con myself this time.
Now, I maintain that this isn't the apocalyptic pile of crap that a lot of professional critics and armchair critics have made it out to be. I have seen a lot of worse movies, even comic-book based ones, but the real tragedy of this movie was that it had everything it needed to work: a great superhero and premise, a ton of money and a proven action director in Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro, all movies I loved) who to be honest was the main reason I had such high hopes for this movie, even after all the bad reviews started to surface. The willingness to go the extra mile for this movie to work, as evidenced by the massive budget, was there, but for some reason the skill simply was not.
Well, if nothing else, at least my wife and kids liked it.
Score: 2/5
Green Lantern is the story of Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a test pilot with some daddy issues; as a child he watched his father, a test pilot just like him, die in a fiery explosion while testing an aircraft. While he is grappling with his issues, he finds himself drafted by an intergalactic corps of space cops known as the Green Lantern Corps, whose most distinguished member has been mortally wounded fighting the Corps' greatest threat, a gigantic yellow cloud with an evil-looking head known as Parallax that feeds off fear, represented by the color yellow. This dying Corpsman, Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison), tells his power ring to choose his successor, and it chooses Jordan. The Green Lanterns derive their power from their rings, which in turn are powered by lanterns, which in turn are powered by will, represented by the color green.
Now, critics have bashed this film for everything from the script to the acting to the visual effects to the music, and while I do not entirely disagree with the criticism, I will say that this film is not as bad as everyone says it is. The dialogue isn't as bloodcurdling as the lines that Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox spouted in the Transformers movies. The acting isn't as bad as Jessica Alba trying to convince people she's a scientist in Fantastic Four. The effects aren't as bad as the melange of shit thrown at the screen in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The music isn't as bad as the Frankenstein's monster of a score that was devised for last year's Kick-Ass by no less than four composers.
That said, while it isn't all that bad, it is godawful nonetheless.
Now, I don't know exactly if Hal Jordan was a reluctant hero when he started out in the comics, but if he was, then the writers did a horrible job of translating that origin, and if he wasn't they made a huge mistake in trying to ape the formula of Spider-Man 2 and Iron Man. Reynolds simply doesn't do pathos well at all, and whatever little acting talent he might have is severely compromised by the leaden script which, while not quite Transformers bad, has some real clunkers scattered all throughout the proceedings. Blake Lively is lovely, like a younger Mia Sara, but with next to none of the personality she showed in Ben Affleck's The Town. Peter Sarsgaard turns in a pretty quirky turn as mad-scientist Hector Hammond, complete with the swollen, misshapen head, but at some point the prosthetic head he puts on starts doing the acting for him. Mark Strong turns in a solid performance as one of the top lanterns Sinestro, but again, the script lets him down with some really silly dialogue, as well as some rather abrupt character shifts later in the movie. Tim Robbins, who stars as a Senator and Hammond's dad, Angela Bassett as DC Universe mainstay Amanda Waller and the rest of the cast kind of just hang around for the paycheck.
The scenes set on Oa are, to me anyway, the best of the film and, despite some dodgy CGI, gave us a glimpse of what the film could have been like if its makers had been less preoccupied with keeping things down on earth.
(Spoiler alert)
I found a lot of the supposed "money" shots in the movie rather jarring and silly. In one scene, Hal Jordan comes up with a giant Hot Wheels car and track to stop a helicopter from crashing. The first thing that popped into my head was to wonder how much Mattel paid for that sequence, especially considering how much the car looked like an actual Hot Wheels vehicle, right down to the wheels. In another scene, while trying to catch Parallax, a squadron of, in Sinestro's words, the very best Lanterns, can only think of...a giant net, and shooting it with their apparently ineffectual energy blasts? And this...after they condemn Jordan for his lack of imagination and after ONE of them kicks Jordan's butt by conjuring up a miniature sun?
Not only that but (spoiler alert still on) an after-the-credits scene involving Sinestro feels downright gratuitous (i.e. no real basis has been laid for it in the script, even though GL comic fans know what Sinestro eventually ends up becoming). Mark Strong's performance deserved far better than for his character to make so abrupt a change, like another movie, for example.
(End spoiler alert).
Also, it kind of bothered me that the head of Parallax looked strikingly like the bad guy in Dreamworks' animated comedy Monsters vs. Aliens; it kind of blunted the dramatic tension right there.
In the end, the painful irony of this film is that, while the Green Lanterns' Power Rings are supposedly only limited by their wearers' imaginations, apparently the filmmakers' imaginations were quite limited, especially considering the reported $200 million that was spent on this movie.
What happened to this movie was a crying shame and is strongly reminiscent of the way Twentieth Century Fox messed up the Fantastic Four movies. I went into this movie wanting to like it because I could honestly sympathize with the GL fans who wanted their hero to make it onto the screen at all costs. I made myself like both FF movies (and even still actually enjoy watching the second one a bit from time to time), but with all of the rampant stupidity in this film I simply couldn't con myself this time.
Now, I maintain that this isn't the apocalyptic pile of crap that a lot of professional critics and armchair critics have made it out to be. I have seen a lot of worse movies, even comic-book based ones, but the real tragedy of this movie was that it had everything it needed to work: a great superhero and premise, a ton of money and a proven action director in Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro, all movies I loved) who to be honest was the main reason I had such high hopes for this movie, even after all the bad reviews started to surface. The willingness to go the extra mile for this movie to work, as evidenced by the massive budget, was there, but for some reason the skill simply was not.
Well, if nothing else, at least my wife and kids liked it.
Score: 2/5
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Missed Opportunities
Reviews are coming in for Warner Bros' Green Lantern, in theaters now, and many of them are quite unkind, to put it mildly. I'm trying to put them out of my mind as I intend to see it sometime during its release(though I'll definitely save money and avoid the 3-D screenings).
All of this vitriol, however, reminds me of all of the wasted opportunities in launching comic-book properties that were rushed to the screen after the first Spider-Man smashed box-office records at the time, being the first ever movie to make more than $100 million in its opening weekend.
People talk about the Hulk movies as wasted opportunities, and maybe they were, but if nothing else they can't be blamed for not trying. They got a white-hot director (Ang Lee, who at the time had just been nominated for an Oscar), a topnotch effects outfit (ILM, with no less than the legendary Dennis Muren overseeing the effects work), and a competent cast with the inspired casting choice of Sam Elliot as General Thunderbolt Ross. It took Ang Lee and his team of screenwriters to screw everything up, rather than any of the Marvel execs, but even in the midst of the wreckage one can see the production value of this movie. There was an effort, albeit misguided, to make a compelling movie. The second movie tried, perhaps too hard, to distance itself from the first one in tone, running time, and overall production, but it was simply not enough. Still, the effort in both cases to make and sell good movies were there, and there are people who acknowledge that, so these are not completely wasted opportunities.
No, for me the true wasted opportunities to bring comic books/graphic novels to life are those in which either the production or promotion of the film was done so badly that one could reasonably argue that the studio did not really care whether the film was any good or, in at least one case, if the film actually succeeded. They are:
1. The Fantastic Four - the funny thing is, I can actually relate to the DC/Green Lantern fans trying to stem the tide of negative reviews over at rottentomatoes.com. At the time this movie came out I wanted to like it and succeeded in spite of all the negative reviews, in making myself like it, even though all it took was for me to see it again on cable to finally have the reality of what a trashy movie it was sink in. The Fantastic Four, whose members were dubbed "imaginauts" by one of the series' writers if not co-creator Stan Lee himself, had the potential to be bigger and more dazzling onscreen than any superhero movie to date, what with their star-spanning, dimension-jumping adventures, but Twentieth Century Fox, who outside of the first two and the most recent X-men movie has yet to make a decent comic-book-based film, saw none of that and instead made one of the most pedestrian movies ever to hit the screen. A pedestrian director, a limp script, mostly pedestrian actors, and a visual-effects house I (and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people) never even heard of pretty much ensured this film's painful mediocrity, and even though the sequel had slicker effects courtesy of WETA Digital and a slightly brisker pace, it was still saddled by many of the same issues. Fox itself has declared the series up for rebooting, what with the threat of Disney/Marvel recovering the property looming and all, and to be fair X-Men: First Class showed that they can make a decent comic-book based movie, but it was a shame that they weren't able or even willing to get this right the first time. At least Green Lantern fans can have the consolation of knowing that WB spent reportedly $300 million on bringing Hal Jordan to the big screen; Fox didn't even bother to pony up half of that, and the parsimony definitely shows.
2. Daredevil - this is a character whose personal pain and pathos could give easily give Batman a run for his money, and a Daredevil film done right could easily make Nolan's Bat movies look like kitsch. There are some people who even regard Frank Miller's work on Daredevil (particularly his Born Again storyline) more highly than his work on such landmark comics as The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. Unfortunately, in 2003 Mark Steven Johnson made a film that was so bad it's mentioned in the same breath as Joel Schumacher's Batman movies rather than Christopher Nolan's. Again, this was a movie I wanted to like, but even a second viewing in the theaters was enough to burst my bubble and bring me back to the real world. I've heard talk about how much better the director's cut of this movie is, but I honestly won't bother to find out; that's how badly burned I felt by this movie.
3. Stardust - it was downright criminal what Paramount pictures did with this movie. The truth is that it was a truly solid, if not necessarily great movie. It was entertaining, it had a likable lead actor (Charlie Cox) and some memorable supporting turns from some pretty well-known Hollywood actors (Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer), decent effects and a freaking Neil Gaiman story and had the potential to work, even as a modest box-office hit. Heaven only knows how many worse movies have gone on to greater success. Rather than even try to sell this film Paramount, more enamored with crap like Transformers and Shrek 3 dumped it in the late summer of 2007 and gave it a couple of trailers that can best be described as perfunctory, and which, quite frankly, didn't really capture the spirit of the film. The fact that Vaughn was able to get his next film, the self-financed Kick-Ass, to open at number one at the U.S. box-office despite having derived the film from a lesser-known comic book property and despite having no known actors in the lead roles (with Nicolas Cage's Big Daddy character being a supporting role) shows the power of marketing, very little of which was invested in this film. Now THIS is a wasted opportunity; another good movie that just fell under everyone's radar.
Now, granted, the FF and DD are getting reboots, but if there's anything the failure of both Hulk movies and of all three Punisher movies shows, if you get it wrong the first time, there's no guarantee that people will come back for seconds, even if it is better the next time around. The reason the Batman and James Bond reboots worked so well for their respective franchises was that these films were a return to form; they reminded audiences of the movies in the series that they liked in the first place. Therefore if the Fantastic Four or Daredevil reboots fail to take off in the eyes of audiences, then those first half-assed efforts really will have been nothing more than wasted opportunities to introduce audiences to what could have been some truly compelling stories. If Green Lantern fails, it will be too.
All of this vitriol, however, reminds me of all of the wasted opportunities in launching comic-book properties that were rushed to the screen after the first Spider-Man smashed box-office records at the time, being the first ever movie to make more than $100 million in its opening weekend.
People talk about the Hulk movies as wasted opportunities, and maybe they were, but if nothing else they can't be blamed for not trying. They got a white-hot director (Ang Lee, who at the time had just been nominated for an Oscar), a topnotch effects outfit (ILM, with no less than the legendary Dennis Muren overseeing the effects work), and a competent cast with the inspired casting choice of Sam Elliot as General Thunderbolt Ross. It took Ang Lee and his team of screenwriters to screw everything up, rather than any of the Marvel execs, but even in the midst of the wreckage one can see the production value of this movie. There was an effort, albeit misguided, to make a compelling movie. The second movie tried, perhaps too hard, to distance itself from the first one in tone, running time, and overall production, but it was simply not enough. Still, the effort in both cases to make and sell good movies were there, and there are people who acknowledge that, so these are not completely wasted opportunities.
No, for me the true wasted opportunities to bring comic books/graphic novels to life are those in which either the production or promotion of the film was done so badly that one could reasonably argue that the studio did not really care whether the film was any good or, in at least one case, if the film actually succeeded. They are:
1. The Fantastic Four - the funny thing is, I can actually relate to the DC/Green Lantern fans trying to stem the tide of negative reviews over at rottentomatoes.com. At the time this movie came out I wanted to like it and succeeded in spite of all the negative reviews, in making myself like it, even though all it took was for me to see it again on cable to finally have the reality of what a trashy movie it was sink in. The Fantastic Four, whose members were dubbed "imaginauts" by one of the series' writers if not co-creator Stan Lee himself, had the potential to be bigger and more dazzling onscreen than any superhero movie to date, what with their star-spanning, dimension-jumping adventures, but Twentieth Century Fox, who outside of the first two and the most recent X-men movie has yet to make a decent comic-book-based film, saw none of that and instead made one of the most pedestrian movies ever to hit the screen. A pedestrian director, a limp script, mostly pedestrian actors, and a visual-effects house I (and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people) never even heard of pretty much ensured this film's painful mediocrity, and even though the sequel had slicker effects courtesy of WETA Digital and a slightly brisker pace, it was still saddled by many of the same issues. Fox itself has declared the series up for rebooting, what with the threat of Disney/Marvel recovering the property looming and all, and to be fair X-Men: First Class showed that they can make a decent comic-book based movie, but it was a shame that they weren't able or even willing to get this right the first time. At least Green Lantern fans can have the consolation of knowing that WB spent reportedly $300 million on bringing Hal Jordan to the big screen; Fox didn't even bother to pony up half of that, and the parsimony definitely shows.
2. Daredevil - this is a character whose personal pain and pathos could give easily give Batman a run for his money, and a Daredevil film done right could easily make Nolan's Bat movies look like kitsch. There are some people who even regard Frank Miller's work on Daredevil (particularly his Born Again storyline) more highly than his work on such landmark comics as The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. Unfortunately, in 2003 Mark Steven Johnson made a film that was so bad it's mentioned in the same breath as Joel Schumacher's Batman movies rather than Christopher Nolan's. Again, this was a movie I wanted to like, but even a second viewing in the theaters was enough to burst my bubble and bring me back to the real world. I've heard talk about how much better the director's cut of this movie is, but I honestly won't bother to find out; that's how badly burned I felt by this movie.
3. Stardust - it was downright criminal what Paramount pictures did with this movie. The truth is that it was a truly solid, if not necessarily great movie. It was entertaining, it had a likable lead actor (Charlie Cox) and some memorable supporting turns from some pretty well-known Hollywood actors (Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer), decent effects and a freaking Neil Gaiman story and had the potential to work, even as a modest box-office hit. Heaven only knows how many worse movies have gone on to greater success. Rather than even try to sell this film Paramount, more enamored with crap like Transformers and Shrek 3 dumped it in the late summer of 2007 and gave it a couple of trailers that can best be described as perfunctory, and which, quite frankly, didn't really capture the spirit of the film. The fact that Vaughn was able to get his next film, the self-financed Kick-Ass, to open at number one at the U.S. box-office despite having derived the film from a lesser-known comic book property and despite having no known actors in the lead roles (with Nicolas Cage's Big Daddy character being a supporting role) shows the power of marketing, very little of which was invested in this film. Now THIS is a wasted opportunity; another good movie that just fell under everyone's radar.
Now, granted, the FF and DD are getting reboots, but if there's anything the failure of both Hulk movies and of all three Punisher movies shows, if you get it wrong the first time, there's no guarantee that people will come back for seconds, even if it is better the next time around. The reason the Batman and James Bond reboots worked so well for their respective franchises was that these films were a return to form; they reminded audiences of the movies in the series that they liked in the first place. Therefore if the Fantastic Four or Daredevil reboots fail to take off in the eyes of audiences, then those first half-assed efforts really will have been nothing more than wasted opportunities to introduce audiences to what could have been some truly compelling stories. If Green Lantern fails, it will be too.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Go Home E.T., but Show Yourself First: A Review of Super 8
The marketing for J.J. Abram's Super 8 packaged it as a throwback to Steven Spielberg's adventure films of the 1980s, most notably E.T. and Goonies. The idea, presumably, was to evoke an era of less cynical filmmaking, a time when moviegoers and movie execs were less preoccupied with explosions and special effects and more interested in stories with some genuine heart, and to be fair, to an extent the actual film succeeds.
Set in 1979, the film tells the story of Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) a twelve-year old middle-schooler whose mom died in an industrial accident and whose dad (Kyle Chandler) the deputy of the small town of Lillian, is having trouble processing his grief. In the summer of that year, Joe joins his friends Charles (Riley Griffiths), Carey (Ryan Lee), Preston (Zach Mills) and Martin (Gabriel Basso) in making a short film which Charles, the director, intends to enter into a contest. They also recruit Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) a slightly older student from their school who is something of a heartthrob, and whose father Louis (Ron Eldard) is, for reasons that will be explained, indirectly responsible for the death of Joe's mother.
While the kids are shooting a scene for their film (a zombie movie), at a local train station, a train roars by, whereupon a pickup driven by the science teacher from their school, Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), drives onto the tracks and into the train, derailing it and causing a spectacular wreck in the process. From the wreck, something strange emerges, but the kids flee the scene when several men show up.
The men, it turns out, are from the U.S. Air Force, and are led by one Colonel Nemec (Noah Emmerich), and upon securing the wreck they keep all local authorities in the dark, including Deputy Lamb, who immediately becomes suspicious.
The next few days are highly eventful as appliances, car, engines, pets and even people start to disappear. The Air Force takes a keen interest in the town of Lillian, and spend a lot of time poking around. Throughout all of this, Joe and his friends keep quiet even as they suspect it all has something to do with what they witnessed. Amidst all of this, a friendship blossoms between Joe and Alice, even as his relationship with his father deteriorates amid the increasing tension.
As things come to a head, however, Joe, his friends and his dad come to realize what's truly important to them and the extent they're willing to go to protect it.
Now, I've never watched The Goonies and I was seven when I saw E.T. so I really can't make the comparisons so many people are talking about, but based on what I remember of E.T., it was primarily a "boy and his alien" story, wrapped up in a family drama and leavened with sci-fi. There was lots of heart, with the sci-fi being secondary. I think that's an apt way to describe Super 8, which focuses mainly on the relationships between Joe and the other characters in the film, such as his dad, his friends, and Alice, and what makes it work is how honest it all feels. There's no schmaltz or syrupy sentimentality, even though there's ample opportunity to pour it on. Rather, J.J. and the actors, every one of them, capture the appropriate amount of emotion that the story dictates and just nail the tone perfectly. Special mention should go to leads Courtney and Fanning, who quite handily steps out of the shadow of her sister Dakota and delivers an absolutely luminous performance.
Sure, this movie may be an unabashed homage to Spielberg's 80s movies, but its warmth and genuine emotional resonance is something Abrams et al can honestly claim to have created on their own.
It's not, however, a perfect film and for me one of is weakest points is that which was touted as one of its biggest selling points: the creature.
This film was shrouded in mystery for almost the entirety of the period leading up to its release, with scant plot details being disclosed to the public. The shot of the creature punching the iron door of the rail-road car in which it is trapped is a highlight of the film's full-length trailer.
Now, the thing about mysteries like that is that at some point they have to be revealed. There is a digitally-generated creature; it does come onscreen late in the film, but its screen time, even after it is revealed, is so fleeting, and the precious few closeup shots of its face are so infuriatingly dark that at times I felt Abrams would have been just as well-served by having two eyes staring at the screen. It is with great disappointment that I note that there isn't a single full shot of it standing on screen. This could be down to many things: it could a ploy to get people to plunk down money for the DVD so they can freeze all the frames the creature appears in, or it could be evidence some kind of budgetary constraint, considering this movie was, by summer movie standards anyway, made on the cheap (though 2009's District 9 was reportedly made for even less, but still featured plenty of lengthy creature shots). To my mind, however, it just smelled like a cop-out, and seemed like Abrams wasn't ready for the thought that today's audiences, after all the hype, might just yawn at the creature's appearance. So the creature is basically all foreplay and a payoff that felt virtually like no payoff at all. If most of the digital-effects budget was spent on the train crashing, I'd say it's money wasted as such CGI mayhem is a dime-a-dozen nowadays. Sure, E.T. may have been a midget in a rubber suit or an animatronic puppet, but at least audiences SAW him. This creature is neither gentle and cuddly like E.T. nor murderous and marauding like the aliens in countless invasion films. Its story arc, in fact, is fairly interesting, but to my mind Abrams really screws the pooch by never letting the viewer get a truly good look at it. Considering the build-up of not only the film's marketing but also the narrative itself leading to the monster's eventual appearance, this isn't some minor quibble.
Still, as a love-letter to the 80s films, or at the very least to E.T., Super 8 works well enough. I took my kids to see it and was a little surprised to walk into what is definitely a PG-13 movie considering that our local ratings board, the MTRCB, gave it a "G" rating (probably because the protagonists are children), but it isn't Abrams' fault that the MTRCB is too stupid to realize that potty-mouthed pre-teens and the presence of a stoner isn't exactly "all ages" material. It's a more-than-decent afternoon at the movies, if one can tone down one's expectations of the creature.
I would recommend seeing this in a regular format rather than IMAX, though; save yourselves the money.
Score: 3.5/5
Set in 1979, the film tells the story of Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) a twelve-year old middle-schooler whose mom died in an industrial accident and whose dad (Kyle Chandler) the deputy of the small town of Lillian, is having trouble processing his grief. In the summer of that year, Joe joins his friends Charles (Riley Griffiths), Carey (Ryan Lee), Preston (Zach Mills) and Martin (Gabriel Basso) in making a short film which Charles, the director, intends to enter into a contest. They also recruit Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) a slightly older student from their school who is something of a heartthrob, and whose father Louis (Ron Eldard) is, for reasons that will be explained, indirectly responsible for the death of Joe's mother.
While the kids are shooting a scene for their film (a zombie movie), at a local train station, a train roars by, whereupon a pickup driven by the science teacher from their school, Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), drives onto the tracks and into the train, derailing it and causing a spectacular wreck in the process. From the wreck, something strange emerges, but the kids flee the scene when several men show up.
The men, it turns out, are from the U.S. Air Force, and are led by one Colonel Nemec (Noah Emmerich), and upon securing the wreck they keep all local authorities in the dark, including Deputy Lamb, who immediately becomes suspicious.
The next few days are highly eventful as appliances, car, engines, pets and even people start to disappear. The Air Force takes a keen interest in the town of Lillian, and spend a lot of time poking around. Throughout all of this, Joe and his friends keep quiet even as they suspect it all has something to do with what they witnessed. Amidst all of this, a friendship blossoms between Joe and Alice, even as his relationship with his father deteriorates amid the increasing tension.
As things come to a head, however, Joe, his friends and his dad come to realize what's truly important to them and the extent they're willing to go to protect it.
Now, I've never watched The Goonies and I was seven when I saw E.T. so I really can't make the comparisons so many people are talking about, but based on what I remember of E.T., it was primarily a "boy and his alien" story, wrapped up in a family drama and leavened with sci-fi. There was lots of heart, with the sci-fi being secondary. I think that's an apt way to describe Super 8, which focuses mainly on the relationships between Joe and the other characters in the film, such as his dad, his friends, and Alice, and what makes it work is how honest it all feels. There's no schmaltz or syrupy sentimentality, even though there's ample opportunity to pour it on. Rather, J.J. and the actors, every one of them, capture the appropriate amount of emotion that the story dictates and just nail the tone perfectly. Special mention should go to leads Courtney and Fanning, who quite handily steps out of the shadow of her sister Dakota and delivers an absolutely luminous performance.
Sure, this movie may be an unabashed homage to Spielberg's 80s movies, but its warmth and genuine emotional resonance is something Abrams et al can honestly claim to have created on their own.
It's not, however, a perfect film and for me one of is weakest points is that which was touted as one of its biggest selling points: the creature.
This film was shrouded in mystery for almost the entirety of the period leading up to its release, with scant plot details being disclosed to the public. The shot of the creature punching the iron door of the rail-road car in which it is trapped is a highlight of the film's full-length trailer.
Now, the thing about mysteries like that is that at some point they have to be revealed. There is a digitally-generated creature; it does come onscreen late in the film, but its screen time, even after it is revealed, is so fleeting, and the precious few closeup shots of its face are so infuriatingly dark that at times I felt Abrams would have been just as well-served by having two eyes staring at the screen. It is with great disappointment that I note that there isn't a single full shot of it standing on screen. This could be down to many things: it could a ploy to get people to plunk down money for the DVD so they can freeze all the frames the creature appears in, or it could be evidence some kind of budgetary constraint, considering this movie was, by summer movie standards anyway, made on the cheap (though 2009's District 9 was reportedly made for even less, but still featured plenty of lengthy creature shots). To my mind, however, it just smelled like a cop-out, and seemed like Abrams wasn't ready for the thought that today's audiences, after all the hype, might just yawn at the creature's appearance. So the creature is basically all foreplay and a payoff that felt virtually like no payoff at all. If most of the digital-effects budget was spent on the train crashing, I'd say it's money wasted as such CGI mayhem is a dime-a-dozen nowadays. Sure, E.T. may have been a midget in a rubber suit or an animatronic puppet, but at least audiences SAW him. This creature is neither gentle and cuddly like E.T. nor murderous and marauding like the aliens in countless invasion films. Its story arc, in fact, is fairly interesting, but to my mind Abrams really screws the pooch by never letting the viewer get a truly good look at it. Considering the build-up of not only the film's marketing but also the narrative itself leading to the monster's eventual appearance, this isn't some minor quibble.
Still, as a love-letter to the 80s films, or at the very least to E.T., Super 8 works well enough. I took my kids to see it and was a little surprised to walk into what is definitely a PG-13 movie considering that our local ratings board, the MTRCB, gave it a "G" rating (probably because the protagonists are children), but it isn't Abrams' fault that the MTRCB is too stupid to realize that potty-mouthed pre-teens and the presence of a stoner isn't exactly "all ages" material. It's a more-than-decent afternoon at the movies, if one can tone down one's expectations of the creature.
I would recommend seeing this in a regular format rather than IMAX, though; save yourselves the money.
Score: 3.5/5
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Disney's Marvel Movies
Since purchasing Marvel Entertainment a little a few months ago, the Walt Disney company seems to have done one thing right: they have left the boys and girls at Marvel Studios to their own devices. Joss Whedon's Avengers is currently filming without any reports of micromanagement from the Mouse House, and Disney is also apparently letting Marvel continue its tradition of hiring edgy-but-not-necessarily-bankable filmmakers for its films, as evidenced by the fact that Shane Black, perhaps best known for for scripting the first two Lethal Weapon movies but who has not helmed any blockbusters, is currently slated to direct Iron Man 3.
From all indications, so far it seems that Disney is perfectly happy to simply sign the checks.
The thing is, though, that the wheels were set in motion for both The Avengers and Iron Man 3 looooong before the Disney purchase was finalized, so one could argue that, considering how late they came on board as far as those two films are concerned, Disney figured that the best thing they could do was get out of the way and let Marvel do their work. Whether this is an indication of things to come or unique to this situation only time will tell.
What I am curious about, though, is which Marvel character Disney will shepherd to the big screen, meaning; what is the first Marvel movie which will be conceived, shot, marketed and released entirely under Disney's watch, and how will it do?
There has been talk of Doctor Strange being the first such movie, but Marvel has a number of other properties stuck in "development hell" many of them with other studios like The Black Panther, Luke Cage, and The Sub-mariner to name a few. A film adaptation of the relatively-new Marvel comic Runaways was greenlit not too long ago, barely months before the Disney takeover, and one wonders what Disney plans to do with it.
Now, Disney, in the new millennium at least, has not really had a lot of quality films to their name, apart from a few with Jerry Bruckheimer's name on them, and most of the Pixar films. Tron: Legacy, the rare example of a non-Bruckheimer, live-action Disney film that was actually released under the Disney banner (as opposed to those released under their "imprints" Touchstone, Hollywood or Miramax) was reasonably fun but not breathtakingly good. In fact, since the Weinstein brothers put up their own studio, Disney has lost significant amounts of art-house cred as well. In fact, one of Disney's most high-profile, non-Bruckheimer live-action hits was the execrable Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
So at the end of the day, their true benefit to Marvel is not so much creative input, considering that their strongest product has always ever had someone else's name attached to it (Pixar, Bruckheimer), but their deep pockets and undeniable marketing muscle. However, those crucial factors could spell the difference between a Marvel movie rotting in limbo and one that's out in theaters, putting fannies in the seats.
Disney's pockets could be the solution to buying back the rights to all of those unmade movies that studios like Fox, Universal and Sony are desperately hoarding with empty promises of reboots and upcoming productions, and to pulling these projects out of development hell by waving big fat paychecks under noses of the talent that Marvel wants to land. The Sub-Mariner, for example, has been languishing at Universal for years, and the last update on production was something like five years ago. Black Panther and Luke Cage are properties that have been talked about for decades with Sony Pictures not apparently not being any closer to making the movies as they were when they were announced years upon years ago. These are the kinds of problems that Disney money and legal muscle could solve.
To my mind, Disney has been playing it right by letting the Marvel boys and girls just do their thing while just giving them money, but in other ways they could be a lot more proactive; they can try to go out there and rescue Marvel's "orphans."
From all indications, so far it seems that Disney is perfectly happy to simply sign the checks.
The thing is, though, that the wheels were set in motion for both The Avengers and Iron Man 3 looooong before the Disney purchase was finalized, so one could argue that, considering how late they came on board as far as those two films are concerned, Disney figured that the best thing they could do was get out of the way and let Marvel do their work. Whether this is an indication of things to come or unique to this situation only time will tell.
What I am curious about, though, is which Marvel character Disney will shepherd to the big screen, meaning; what is the first Marvel movie which will be conceived, shot, marketed and released entirely under Disney's watch, and how will it do?
There has been talk of Doctor Strange being the first such movie, but Marvel has a number of other properties stuck in "development hell" many of them with other studios like The Black Panther, Luke Cage, and The Sub-mariner to name a few. A film adaptation of the relatively-new Marvel comic Runaways was greenlit not too long ago, barely months before the Disney takeover, and one wonders what Disney plans to do with it.
Now, Disney, in the new millennium at least, has not really had a lot of quality films to their name, apart from a few with Jerry Bruckheimer's name on them, and most of the Pixar films. Tron: Legacy, the rare example of a non-Bruckheimer, live-action Disney film that was actually released under the Disney banner (as opposed to those released under their "imprints" Touchstone, Hollywood or Miramax) was reasonably fun but not breathtakingly good. In fact, since the Weinstein brothers put up their own studio, Disney has lost significant amounts of art-house cred as well. In fact, one of Disney's most high-profile, non-Bruckheimer live-action hits was the execrable Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
So at the end of the day, their true benefit to Marvel is not so much creative input, considering that their strongest product has always ever had someone else's name attached to it (Pixar, Bruckheimer), but their deep pockets and undeniable marketing muscle. However, those crucial factors could spell the difference between a Marvel movie rotting in limbo and one that's out in theaters, putting fannies in the seats.
Disney's pockets could be the solution to buying back the rights to all of those unmade movies that studios like Fox, Universal and Sony are desperately hoarding with empty promises of reboots and upcoming productions, and to pulling these projects out of development hell by waving big fat paychecks under noses of the talent that Marvel wants to land. The Sub-Mariner, for example, has been languishing at Universal for years, and the last update on production was something like five years ago. Black Panther and Luke Cage are properties that have been talked about for decades with Sony Pictures not apparently not being any closer to making the movies as they were when they were announced years upon years ago. These are the kinds of problems that Disney money and legal muscle could solve.
To my mind, Disney has been playing it right by letting the Marvel boys and girls just do their thing while just giving them money, but in other ways they could be a lot more proactive; they can try to go out there and rescue Marvel's "orphans."
Friday, June 3, 2011
When Erik Met Charles: A Review of "X-Men: First Class"
After the clusterfucks that X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine turned out to be, it was pretty hard to imagine the film franchise of Marvel Comics' famous mutants regaining any kind of respectability. When Bryan Singer, the director responsible for the first two films, returned to shepherd the franchise, things seemed to be looking up. However, Singer relinquished directorial duties to British director Matthew Vaughn who had made the fun Stardust and the controversial Kick-Ass, but who had no blockbusters to his name.
Also, given the fact that the studio managing all of this, Twentieth Century Fox, was the one that drove Singer away from the franchise to begin with and was responsible for the execrable third and fourth installments of the X-Men film franchise, I simply could not feel optimistic about this film's chances of being any good. I was vaguely encouraged when they cast James McAvoy as a young Professor Charles Xavier and Michael Fassbender as a young Magneto, but not enough to get over my fear of Fox making a hash of the film. I found my attention on Marvel's 2011 film slate focused more on Thor and Captain America, and pretty much wrote this film off as an also-ran a long time ago.
That all changed--all of it--when I saw the first trailer a few months ago. I was quite honestly shocked at how good the film looked. I still had my doubts, though; I worried that this might be a simple case of "best foot forward."
When I finally saw the movie last night, however, I was relieved and delighted to discover that the trailer was no con job; this movie was the real deal. Whether this movie is a prequel or reboot I will leave up to the fans to discuss, although I will say, without spoiling any story details, that this movie seems to completely disregard the events of The Last Stand and Wolverine.
The movie, beat for beat, reprises the beginning of Singer's first X-Men film, complete with the proper excerpt from the late Michael Kamen's music score, in which a 12-year old Polish Jewish boy (Bill Milner) is separated from his parents who are hauled off to a German concentration camp, and in his anguish and despite being restrained by several Nazi guards, he is able to twist the enormous iron gates to the camp until he is knocked out by the guards.
The movie picks up from where that one left off, with young Erik Lensherr lying insensate among the Nazis; here a German scientist named Schmidt (Kevin Bacon) is seen observing it all.
The film then shifts to a sprawling mansion in Westchester, upstate New York, where a young telepath Charles Xavier (Laurence Belcher) sees his mother raiding the refrigerator in the middle of the night, and, knowing this isn't his mother thanks to his knowledge of her habits, convinces her, through a bit of telepathic conversation, to reveal her true form, that of a shapeshifting mutant child named Raven (Morgan Lily). Rather than being upset by Raven's duplicity, Charles expresses joy that there is another mutant like him in the world, and he invites her to stay with him.
The film then returns to Erik, who is sitting in a room with the Nazi scientist Schmidt (with Bacon managing a whole scene of pure German dialogue, though I can only guess how good it was), who then tries to get Erik to replicate his feats of magnetism on a simple coin. When Erik is unable to do so, Schmidt resorts to an extreme method which does the trick of unleashing Erik's powers, while effectively scarring the young man for life.
Years later, in 1962 to be exact, Erik has grown up and is now played by an absolutely feral Fassbender, and is on a globe-spanning quest to find and kill Schmidt, a mission which takes him from Europe to Argentina and eventually to America, leaving a trail of Nazi corpses in his wake.
Elsewhere, grown-up Charles (McAvoy) is finishing up his graduate thesis at Oxford, where he is constantly using his powers and his intellect to pick up girls, much to the disapproval of the equally grown-up Raven (the beguiling Jennifer Lawrence), who harbors her own desire for him even though they are for all intents and purposes brother and sister. His thesis is on genetic mutation, and it is for this reason that he is sought out by CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) who is, herself, on the trail of Schmidt. Schmidt now goes by the same Sebastian Shaw and appears to be working with both the Russians and with a high-ranking officer in the United States Military. MacTaggert has seen that he is flanked by apparently super-powered individuals whose talents are the result of what Shaw himself referred to as mutation.
The Cold War is at its height, so this is a matter of paramount concern to the American government. The CIA sees Charles as a possible ally in their fight against Shaw and the Russians, and Charles is intrigued at the possibility of encountering yet more mutants like himself and Raven, so they agree to work together.
Inevitably, thanks to their common quarry, Charles' and Erik's paths cross, and because Shaw and his men (and woman) prove to be some pretty tough cusses they realize they will need help. Help comes in the form of other mutants they recruit to aid their cause, starting with ape-footed genius Henry McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) who actually already works for the CIA, and whose cleverness is responsible for the creation of Cerebro, a device that enables them to find other mutants like Havok (Lucas Till), Darwin (Edi Gathegi), Angel (Zoe Kravitz) and Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones).
Shaw's grand plan is play Russia and America against each other and wipe humans off the face of the earth in a nuclear holocaust to ensure that mutants will take over as the dominant species on the planet. The fight to stop him will be anything but easy, and before the end Erik and Charles, with their widely differing views on mutant/human relations, will clash, but anyone familiar with this movie series already knew that.
Whether this film is a straight-up prequel or a reboot, I found it absolutely riveting. Casting McAvoy and Fassbender was a true stroke of genius, because their relationship is the glue that holds everything together. Fortunately, they have a pretty good script to work with as well, with writers Vaughn, Jane Goldman, Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz having fleshed out their relationship very nicely, even though such attention to detail may have been at the expense of other aspects of the story. Also, to my mind the decision to set the film in the 1960s was equally brilliant as it enabled the filmmakers to play with a lot of things from the era like the oft-referenced James Bond vibe, as well as the global tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with just some hints of the upcoming Civil Rights movement.
Bacon's Shaw, complete with his lingerie-clad henchwoman who can turn into diamond but who, in Jones' hands is more wooden than anything else, looks like he was ripped right out of one of Connery's old Bond movies, which could be a good or a bad thing depending on a viewer's preference. To me, though, it was clear that Bacon was having a ball with this role. The young actors playing the mutants are not given a whole lot to do besides showcase their powers, some of which look cooler than others, but this was always Charles' and Erik's story and it plays out perfectly.
Of the two young actors, McAvoy has gotten less attention for his performance, but I don't think that's entirely fair. Magneto's role was always going to the meatier of the two with the whole Holocaust backstory, and given the fact that this film was, at some point, actually conceived as a Magneto origin story, but McAvoy doesn't give anything away to Fassbender in fleshing out Charles Xavier's origins as a privileged, high-society boy with naively wrong-headed ideas about mutants' place in society at large. It is to McAvoy's and perhaps Vaughn's credit that this incarnation of Charles Xavier is not a simple copy of Patrick Stewart's take on the character but truly a young Charles Xavier, meaning that this one is very much a young man in terms of how he thinks and what motivates him. I love the bit about how uses not only his telepathy but his big talk in trying to pick up chicks. He is bereft of the wisdom he will gain in later years, though the hints of Professor X's personality are still there for viewers to see. I was actually vaguely skeptical of McAvoy's ability to channel Stewart, but as it turns out the story was served much better by him doing almost exactly the opposite. I hope that as time goes on Xavier gets the narrative heft that the founder of the X-Men deserves.
A lot of the reviews I've read have declared quite categorically that with this film, a star is born and his name is Michael Fassbender. Fassbender, a veteran of two other comic-book adaptations, namely Zack Synder's 300 and last year's largely-ignored Jonah Hex, also made quite an impression despite some rather brief screen time in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds as the British spy who can speak German. Apparently a native-German speaker (his father is German), this skill served him well as the young Erik spent several of the film's first few minutes hunting down, conversing with, and killing Nazis. Like McAvoy, Fassbender opts out of channeling Ian McKellen, the actor who first popularized this role, and instead brings a ferocity to Magneto that I have never seen onscreen before. The way he conveys Erik Lensherr's pain and cold-blooded purpose is, pardon the pun, simply magnetic. McKellen, fantastic actor though he is, talked about playing Magneto as more of a champion for those discriminated against with a Machiavellian streak than a straight-up villain, but he still came across as a bad guy. Fassbender's Erik is something different; he's the walking wounded, though it'll be interesting to see how he can go from being a man ready to kill soldiers out to kill him to a man with no compunctions about taking the lives of innocents. I sincerely hope Fassbender gets to revisit this role several times more, especially with all this talk of him being the perfect replacement for Daniel Craig as James Bond. One quibble I have with Fassbender's performance, and I'm surprised it hasn't come up in the reviews, is how Erik Lensherr went from being a Polish Jew with a reasonably nondescript European accent through most of the film to being an Irishman with an unmistakable brogue in the last ten minutes of the film or so. Vaughn and company should have caught that in post-production, and I guess it's one of the film's reported production woes that they didn't.
Against a backdrop of some truly spectacular special effects that easily trump anything from the previous mutant flicks and a rousing music score by Henry Jackman (no apparent relation to Hugh, and the X-Men series' fifth composer in as many movies), this movie is, flaws notwithstanding, easily my favorite in the series and something I would HIGHLY recommend to people looking to restore their faith in the X-Men movies. It's not just a good X-Men movie; it's a great movie, period.
Score: 5/5
Oh yeah, it's worth mentioning that there are no Easter Eggs after the credits, so anyone not inclined to sit through them doesn't have to stick around for any.
Also, given the fact that the studio managing all of this, Twentieth Century Fox, was the one that drove Singer away from the franchise to begin with and was responsible for the execrable third and fourth installments of the X-Men film franchise, I simply could not feel optimistic about this film's chances of being any good. I was vaguely encouraged when they cast James McAvoy as a young Professor Charles Xavier and Michael Fassbender as a young Magneto, but not enough to get over my fear of Fox making a hash of the film. I found my attention on Marvel's 2011 film slate focused more on Thor and Captain America, and pretty much wrote this film off as an also-ran a long time ago.
That all changed--all of it--when I saw the first trailer a few months ago. I was quite honestly shocked at how good the film looked. I still had my doubts, though; I worried that this might be a simple case of "best foot forward."
When I finally saw the movie last night, however, I was relieved and delighted to discover that the trailer was no con job; this movie was the real deal. Whether this movie is a prequel or reboot I will leave up to the fans to discuss, although I will say, without spoiling any story details, that this movie seems to completely disregard the events of The Last Stand and Wolverine.
The movie, beat for beat, reprises the beginning of Singer's first X-Men film, complete with the proper excerpt from the late Michael Kamen's music score, in which a 12-year old Polish Jewish boy (Bill Milner) is separated from his parents who are hauled off to a German concentration camp, and in his anguish and despite being restrained by several Nazi guards, he is able to twist the enormous iron gates to the camp until he is knocked out by the guards.
The movie picks up from where that one left off, with young Erik Lensherr lying insensate among the Nazis; here a German scientist named Schmidt (Kevin Bacon) is seen observing it all.
The film then shifts to a sprawling mansion in Westchester, upstate New York, where a young telepath Charles Xavier (Laurence Belcher) sees his mother raiding the refrigerator in the middle of the night, and, knowing this isn't his mother thanks to his knowledge of her habits, convinces her, through a bit of telepathic conversation, to reveal her true form, that of a shapeshifting mutant child named Raven (Morgan Lily). Rather than being upset by Raven's duplicity, Charles expresses joy that there is another mutant like him in the world, and he invites her to stay with him.
The film then returns to Erik, who is sitting in a room with the Nazi scientist Schmidt (with Bacon managing a whole scene of pure German dialogue, though I can only guess how good it was), who then tries to get Erik to replicate his feats of magnetism on a simple coin. When Erik is unable to do so, Schmidt resorts to an extreme method which does the trick of unleashing Erik's powers, while effectively scarring the young man for life.
Years later, in 1962 to be exact, Erik has grown up and is now played by an absolutely feral Fassbender, and is on a globe-spanning quest to find and kill Schmidt, a mission which takes him from Europe to Argentina and eventually to America, leaving a trail of Nazi corpses in his wake.
Elsewhere, grown-up Charles (McAvoy) is finishing up his graduate thesis at Oxford, where he is constantly using his powers and his intellect to pick up girls, much to the disapproval of the equally grown-up Raven (the beguiling Jennifer Lawrence), who harbors her own desire for him even though they are for all intents and purposes brother and sister. His thesis is on genetic mutation, and it is for this reason that he is sought out by CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) who is, herself, on the trail of Schmidt. Schmidt now goes by the same Sebastian Shaw and appears to be working with both the Russians and with a high-ranking officer in the United States Military. MacTaggert has seen that he is flanked by apparently super-powered individuals whose talents are the result of what Shaw himself referred to as mutation.
The Cold War is at its height, so this is a matter of paramount concern to the American government. The CIA sees Charles as a possible ally in their fight against Shaw and the Russians, and Charles is intrigued at the possibility of encountering yet more mutants like himself and Raven, so they agree to work together.
Inevitably, thanks to their common quarry, Charles' and Erik's paths cross, and because Shaw and his men (and woman) prove to be some pretty tough cusses they realize they will need help. Help comes in the form of other mutants they recruit to aid their cause, starting with ape-footed genius Henry McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) who actually already works for the CIA, and whose cleverness is responsible for the creation of Cerebro, a device that enables them to find other mutants like Havok (Lucas Till), Darwin (Edi Gathegi), Angel (Zoe Kravitz) and Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones).
Shaw's grand plan is play Russia and America against each other and wipe humans off the face of the earth in a nuclear holocaust to ensure that mutants will take over as the dominant species on the planet. The fight to stop him will be anything but easy, and before the end Erik and Charles, with their widely differing views on mutant/human relations, will clash, but anyone familiar with this movie series already knew that.
Whether this film is a straight-up prequel or a reboot, I found it absolutely riveting. Casting McAvoy and Fassbender was a true stroke of genius, because their relationship is the glue that holds everything together. Fortunately, they have a pretty good script to work with as well, with writers Vaughn, Jane Goldman, Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz having fleshed out their relationship very nicely, even though such attention to detail may have been at the expense of other aspects of the story. Also, to my mind the decision to set the film in the 1960s was equally brilliant as it enabled the filmmakers to play with a lot of things from the era like the oft-referenced James Bond vibe, as well as the global tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with just some hints of the upcoming Civil Rights movement.
Bacon's Shaw, complete with his lingerie-clad henchwoman who can turn into diamond but who, in Jones' hands is more wooden than anything else, looks like he was ripped right out of one of Connery's old Bond movies, which could be a good or a bad thing depending on a viewer's preference. To me, though, it was clear that Bacon was having a ball with this role. The young actors playing the mutants are not given a whole lot to do besides showcase their powers, some of which look cooler than others, but this was always Charles' and Erik's story and it plays out perfectly.
Of the two young actors, McAvoy has gotten less attention for his performance, but I don't think that's entirely fair. Magneto's role was always going to the meatier of the two with the whole Holocaust backstory, and given the fact that this film was, at some point, actually conceived as a Magneto origin story, but McAvoy doesn't give anything away to Fassbender in fleshing out Charles Xavier's origins as a privileged, high-society boy with naively wrong-headed ideas about mutants' place in society at large. It is to McAvoy's and perhaps Vaughn's credit that this incarnation of Charles Xavier is not a simple copy of Patrick Stewart's take on the character but truly a young Charles Xavier, meaning that this one is very much a young man in terms of how he thinks and what motivates him. I love the bit about how uses not only his telepathy but his big talk in trying to pick up chicks. He is bereft of the wisdom he will gain in later years, though the hints of Professor X's personality are still there for viewers to see. I was actually vaguely skeptical of McAvoy's ability to channel Stewart, but as it turns out the story was served much better by him doing almost exactly the opposite. I hope that as time goes on Xavier gets the narrative heft that the founder of the X-Men deserves.
A lot of the reviews I've read have declared quite categorically that with this film, a star is born and his name is Michael Fassbender. Fassbender, a veteran of two other comic-book adaptations, namely Zack Synder's 300 and last year's largely-ignored Jonah Hex, also made quite an impression despite some rather brief screen time in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds as the British spy who can speak German. Apparently a native-German speaker (his father is German), this skill served him well as the young Erik spent several of the film's first few minutes hunting down, conversing with, and killing Nazis. Like McAvoy, Fassbender opts out of channeling Ian McKellen, the actor who first popularized this role, and instead brings a ferocity to Magneto that I have never seen onscreen before. The way he conveys Erik Lensherr's pain and cold-blooded purpose is, pardon the pun, simply magnetic. McKellen, fantastic actor though he is, talked about playing Magneto as more of a champion for those discriminated against with a Machiavellian streak than a straight-up villain, but he still came across as a bad guy. Fassbender's Erik is something different; he's the walking wounded, though it'll be interesting to see how he can go from being a man ready to kill soldiers out to kill him to a man with no compunctions about taking the lives of innocents. I sincerely hope Fassbender gets to revisit this role several times more, especially with all this talk of him being the perfect replacement for Daniel Craig as James Bond. One quibble I have with Fassbender's performance, and I'm surprised it hasn't come up in the reviews, is how Erik Lensherr went from being a Polish Jew with a reasonably nondescript European accent through most of the film to being an Irishman with an unmistakable brogue in the last ten minutes of the film or so. Vaughn and company should have caught that in post-production, and I guess it's one of the film's reported production woes that they didn't.
Against a backdrop of some truly spectacular special effects that easily trump anything from the previous mutant flicks and a rousing music score by Henry Jackman (no apparent relation to Hugh, and the X-Men series' fifth composer in as many movies), this movie is, flaws notwithstanding, easily my favorite in the series and something I would HIGHLY recommend to people looking to restore their faith in the X-Men movies. It's not just a good X-Men movie; it's a great movie, period.
Score: 5/5
Oh yeah, it's worth mentioning that there are no Easter Eggs after the credits, so anyone not inclined to sit through them doesn't have to stick around for any.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Kung Fu Panda 2
The sequel to Dreamworks Animation's 2008 hit Kung Fu Panda, while inevitable in view of that movie's box-office success, was never going to quite duplicate the charm of the first; after all, how many times can a goofy, overweight panda become the ultimate Kung Fu warrior? Fortunately, there's still plenty of the humor, action and even the heart, that made the first one such a pleasure to watch.
The story begins with the tale of Shen (Gary Oldman) an aristocratic peacock whose with ambitions of ruling all of China using the gunpowder which his parents, rulers of Gongmen City invented as a means to entertain their citizens with fireworks for a more deadly purpose. An old soothsayer (Michelle Yeoh) warns Shen that he will one day be defeated by a warrior of black and white, as a result of which Shen goes out on a genocidal quest to rid China of all Pandas. Of course, as the viewer knows, he was not successful because Po has grown up (albeit raised by a goose) to become a Kung Fu warrior. For his misdeeds, Shen's parents banish him from their city, as a result of which he spends a lifetime planning his revenge, and his takeover of all of China.
Po (Jack Black) is happy being the Dragon Warrior, and all is well in the Valley of Peace in which he lives, until Shen's goons (who are a pack of wolves) invade it in search the metal needed in Shen's foundries to manufacture his cannons. As Po and his friends, the Furious Five, fight off the wolves, Po finds himself confronting the leader (Danny McBride) and faltering when he sees his tattoo, which triggers a flashback of a time that Po can barely remember; the day his biological mother left him. The wolves escape, and Po is left searching for answers, which he can only find after he confronts Shen himself. Of course, this task doesn't prove easy as Shen takes over Gongmen city using his newly-forged firepower, taking down the Kung Fu Masters Thundering Rhino (Victor Garber), Storming Ox (Dennis Haysbert) and Croc (Jean-Claude Van Damme) charged with the stewardship of the city following the death of Shen's parents.
As Po and the Furious Five embark on a quest to stop Shen from taking over China, Po is troubled by his visions and tries to use techniques mentioned by Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) to gain inner peace. However, the road to inner peace will be a rough one for Po as he and his friends find themselves head-to-head with Shen's army of wolves and fearsome arsenal of cannons, which could mean the end of kung fu.
While not on the same level as its predecessor, this film is buoyed by two things: its fantastic animation and its humor, which had me in stitches most of the way through. Sure, it suffers from the "bigger is better" syndrome with which most sequels are saddled, some of the jokes, like Po's seemingly eternal clumsiness and inability to climb stairs, are recycled, and the scriptwriters even find a way to shoehorn in explosions that were absent from the first film, but for the most part the filmmakers have managed to make a movie that is entirely consistent in tone and, for the most part, quality, with its predecessor. It's definitely more than just another direct-to-video candidate. The flashback sequences, rendered in the same faux-handrawn style in which the opening dream sequence of the first Panda film was done, is juxtaposed nicely with the full-on CGI action and provides a very effective transitional device between past and present. The opening of this film, detailing the origin of Shen, has its own stylized rendering which, while not necessarily slick, adds a nice bit of cultural texture to the narrative, especially since it seems based on Chinese puppetry.
The heart of the film, which focuses primarily on Po's relationship with his adoptive father, the noodle-vending Goose Ping (James Hong), and while it's pretty standard-issue stuff in terms of how it eventually pays off, the actors and animators do a good job of investing the father-son relationship with some genuine emotional weight.
I guess one genuine weakness of the film is that apart from Black, Oldman and Yeoh (and to a lesser extent Angelina Jolie as the Furious Five's Tigress), the cast of mainly comic actors doesn't have a whole lot to do, which is a shame especially with some fresh comedic blood on board in the form of Danny McBride. Fortunately, though Black does a great job of supplying the laughs, aided amply by the animators.
It was also nice seeing (or hearing) Jean-Claude Van Damme in something other than a direct-to-video clunker again, especially when his character Master Croc did one of his trademark splits.
I skipped the 3-D version of this; one might say I'm suffering from 3-D fatigue at this point, especially considering that the 3-D tickets were exactly twice as much as the 2-D ones. I don't think it would have been twice the viewing enjoyment, to be honest, and recommend this to martial arts fans, animation fans, and anyone just looking for a good laugh at the movies.
4/5
The story begins with the tale of Shen (Gary Oldman) an aristocratic peacock whose with ambitions of ruling all of China using the gunpowder which his parents, rulers of Gongmen City invented as a means to entertain their citizens with fireworks for a more deadly purpose. An old soothsayer (Michelle Yeoh) warns Shen that he will one day be defeated by a warrior of black and white, as a result of which Shen goes out on a genocidal quest to rid China of all Pandas. Of course, as the viewer knows, he was not successful because Po has grown up (albeit raised by a goose) to become a Kung Fu warrior. For his misdeeds, Shen's parents banish him from their city, as a result of which he spends a lifetime planning his revenge, and his takeover of all of China.
Po (Jack Black) is happy being the Dragon Warrior, and all is well in the Valley of Peace in which he lives, until Shen's goons (who are a pack of wolves) invade it in search the metal needed in Shen's foundries to manufacture his cannons. As Po and his friends, the Furious Five, fight off the wolves, Po finds himself confronting the leader (Danny McBride) and faltering when he sees his tattoo, which triggers a flashback of a time that Po can barely remember; the day his biological mother left him. The wolves escape, and Po is left searching for answers, which he can only find after he confronts Shen himself. Of course, this task doesn't prove easy as Shen takes over Gongmen city using his newly-forged firepower, taking down the Kung Fu Masters Thundering Rhino (Victor Garber), Storming Ox (Dennis Haysbert) and Croc (Jean-Claude Van Damme) charged with the stewardship of the city following the death of Shen's parents.
As Po and the Furious Five embark on a quest to stop Shen from taking over China, Po is troubled by his visions and tries to use techniques mentioned by Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) to gain inner peace. However, the road to inner peace will be a rough one for Po as he and his friends find themselves head-to-head with Shen's army of wolves and fearsome arsenal of cannons, which could mean the end of kung fu.
While not on the same level as its predecessor, this film is buoyed by two things: its fantastic animation and its humor, which had me in stitches most of the way through. Sure, it suffers from the "bigger is better" syndrome with which most sequels are saddled, some of the jokes, like Po's seemingly eternal clumsiness and inability to climb stairs, are recycled, and the scriptwriters even find a way to shoehorn in explosions that were absent from the first film, but for the most part the filmmakers have managed to make a movie that is entirely consistent in tone and, for the most part, quality, with its predecessor. It's definitely more than just another direct-to-video candidate. The flashback sequences, rendered in the same faux-handrawn style in which the opening dream sequence of the first Panda film was done, is juxtaposed nicely with the full-on CGI action and provides a very effective transitional device between past and present. The opening of this film, detailing the origin of Shen, has its own stylized rendering which, while not necessarily slick, adds a nice bit of cultural texture to the narrative, especially since it seems based on Chinese puppetry.
The heart of the film, which focuses primarily on Po's relationship with his adoptive father, the noodle-vending Goose Ping (James Hong), and while it's pretty standard-issue stuff in terms of how it eventually pays off, the actors and animators do a good job of investing the father-son relationship with some genuine emotional weight.
I guess one genuine weakness of the film is that apart from Black, Oldman and Yeoh (and to a lesser extent Angelina Jolie as the Furious Five's Tigress), the cast of mainly comic actors doesn't have a whole lot to do, which is a shame especially with some fresh comedic blood on board in the form of Danny McBride. Fortunately, though Black does a great job of supplying the laughs, aided amply by the animators.
It was also nice seeing (or hearing) Jean-Claude Van Damme in something other than a direct-to-video clunker again, especially when his character Master Croc did one of his trademark splits.
I skipped the 3-D version of this; one might say I'm suffering from 3-D fatigue at this point, especially considering that the 3-D tickets were exactly twice as much as the 2-D ones. I don't think it would have been twice the viewing enjoyment, to be honest, and recommend this to martial arts fans, animation fans, and anyone just looking for a good laugh at the movies.
4/5
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)