It's All on Sony

While there's never such thing as a sure thing, of the current crop of movies there are a couple of films that have been almost predestined to succeed. Disney's The Avengers, for example, with its unique marketing campaign that included five other movies of the individual characters as part of its strategy, was always going to be a hit, even though the eventual magnitude of its success came as a bit of surprise. Warner Bros' The Dark Knight Rises is another preordained success, and even if it doesn't end up the year's top-grossing movie it'll be all right because the franchise is scheduled for a reboot immediately afterwards.

20th Century Fox's Prometheus has long been expected to succeed as it is currently doing, and it'll take some ill fortune for the upcoming Brave to break Pixar's long running streak of movies that have grossed at least half a billion dollars at the global box-office.

For me, though, the biggest question mark of this season remains to be Sony Pictures' reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, which marks the studio's attempt to revitalize the franchise following the widely perceived failure of the last installment, Spider-Man 3, to live up to the lofty standard laid down by the first two films of the series. The concern that's been raised by a number of online fans (including myself, actually) is that the reboot is coming too soon after the last movie. This is a two-edged sword; it could be too soon in that it's trying too early to supplant the still-beloved first two films, or too soon in that fans are still smarting from how bad the last film in the series was. Either way, reaction on the internet seems to be largely mixed to negative.

To Sony's credit, though, in deciding to reboot the series they've tried to fix what was missing from the first three movies and have added the two crucial "W"s to Peter Parker's arsenal, namely webshooters (mechanical as opposed to his biological ones) and wisecracks. Fans who have grown up with Spider-Man comics know that the webshooters are a key part of the mythology; they're testament to the fact that far from being just another musclebound lunkhead in spandex, Spider-Man is, in fact, brilliant, and one of the smartest people in the Marvel Universe. The wisecracks are similarly integral to Spider-Man's personality and have been since the very beginning. The whole dichotomy of Spider-Man is that when he's Peter Parker, he's shy and unassuming, but when he dons the mask and tights he assumes a confidence that otherwise isn't there. Raimi's first movie in the series featured Spidey mocking the wrestler played by the late Randy Savage, but they never really picked up on it beyond that, which was disappointing. Still, as the saying goes, haters gotta hate.

Between the Marvel fanatics who want Sony to lose their rights to Spidey to Disney/Marvel, the Raimi zombies who revere his original trilogy and want this new direction to fail, and the rabid fans of Christopher Nolan who want any movie that poses even the slightest threat to their beloved Batman to crash and burn, it's not entirely clear which demographic is going to actually go out and see this movie. Having laid relatively low with their advertising earlier in the year, in the wake of the success of The Avengers, Sony is going all out on its advertising campaigns for the web slinger, employing everything from viral videos to b-roll footage online. A few posts ago I questioned the wisdom of Disney's saturation-style advertising for The Avengers but given the breakout success of that film I have to concede it was a wise move and think that Sony is playing it safe by following this lead. They know they've got a lot to live up to, and that TASM has to make a lot of money in the two weeks before Nolan's next Batman movie hits theaters.

The good news for Sony and everyone wanting the new Spider-Man movie to succeed, however, is that as important as the internet has become, things posted on it are far from indicative of how a movie will eventually fare at the box office. In the months and weeks leading up to the release of The Avengers, rare was the internet pundit, whether a box-office analyst or a casual fanboy, who predicted that the film would do significantly better at the box-office than the first Iron Man film. Even boxofficemojo.com, my most trusted site for box-office numbers and forecasts, predicted only a $420 million U.S. gross for the film after its record breaking $207 million opening weekend. For those not in the know, The Avengers is now poised to become only the third film in history to gross $600 million in the United States alone (the only one not directed by James Cameron), and it's already grossed $1.4 billion around the world.

Of course, the bad news for Sony in the wake of the astonishing success of The Avengers is that the bar has now been set ridiculously high. I, for one, am already taking for granted that TASM will not scale the heights reached by Spidey's fellow Marvel heroes, but I'm holding out hope that, with its earnestness towards correcting the mistakes of the past series, this new movie can at least restore respectability to the franchise, the way Batman Begins did for the Batman series back in 2005, and make some money in the process, regardless of whether or not it ends up on top of the box-office charts by year's end.

R-Rated Tentpoles

I haven't done the statistics, but having been a fan of movies (and of their box-office numbers, which are available on several websites) for two decades now I think I can say with some certainty that as a general rule the most lucrative movies are the ones rated PG-13. The rating, which, as I understand it, was first devised in the United States by its film classification board as a way of rating movies that weren't quite suitable small children but which were suitable for young people. For some reason, films that receive this rating are quite often the perfect "four-quadrant" movies, i.e. movies that please men and women, old and young people alike, and therefore make the most money. There are exceptions to this rule but in general a PG-13 rating, whether by design or not, seems integral to the financial success of a commercially inclined movie. The problem is that not all action movies can be told within the parameters of a PG-13 rating. In fact, a lot of them shouldn't be. Ridley Scott's Gladiator, for example, would probably not have been able to adequately capture the peril of the arena had it been constrained by a PG-13 rating. The first Die Hard would not have been nearly as effective in planting the audience right in the nail-biting peril of the situation had it not shown how violent the criminals against whom Bruce Willis' character was facing off were. The PG-13 rated fourth installment of the Die Hard series was not that bad, but it felt distinctly neutered compared to its predecessors. R-rated comedies like The Hangover and American Pie are not uncommon because of how relatively cheap they are to produce and therefore how easy it is for studios to recover their investment, but in general studios seem leery of spending large amounts of money on R movies. It's refreshing, therefore, to see at least one movie studio, 20th Century Fox, infamous for creating a PG-13 Die Hard and for micro-managing their movies, is releasing not just one but TWO "R" rated big-budget action tentpoles this year,namely Prometheus and, in a couple of weeks, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. That Fox was willing to fork over a reported $120 million for Prometheus is particularly remarkable considering how badly their Alien vs. Predator sequel did back in 2007, but it's made even more remarkable by the fact that even though director Ridley Scott himself prepared a "PG-13 cut" for studio heads, Fox went ahead with the gorier, scarier "R" version, despite knowing that this could curtail potential box-office. Sure, I may have had issues with the actual quality of the film, but I have to commend Fox for their willingness to stick their necks out for a change and to spend some real money on what is effectively a bloody horror movie. Speaking of horror movies, it's similarly impressive that Fox has positioned the unabashedly bloody, R-rated Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter as one of its tentpoles for the summer of 2012. I haven't read the book (though I've been meaning to) but the premise and trailers alone promise a thoroughly blood-soaked affair. The gore isn't what's making me keen to see it (the historical fiction aspect is), but again, I find myself applauding a studio that's quite notorious for trimming out "adult content" to keep its movies box-office friendly for its decision to adapt a famously violent work and getting Timur Bekmambetov, a director famous for his violent movies like Wanted and Night Watch, to adapt it. Now I'm not saying violence, profanity, drug references, nudity, sexuality or whatever else qualifies a movie for an "R" rating make for a better film, but sometimes they're necessary for proper storytelling. Tom Hooper's Academy Award winning film The King's Speech, as I understand it, landed an "R" rating solely for the fact that King George, Colin Firth's character, uttered "fuck" and other colorful words several times over to help him conquer his speech impediment. There was no nudity, violence, or even drug reference; just a string of bad words which were integral not only to the story of the film but an actual part of the history on which it was based. So often the rating system (the American one, I should emphasize, which doesn't necessarily apply to the rest of us outside the United States of America), can be pretty stupid. But at the end of the day it's nice to see film executives, even notoriously profit-oriented ones, putting storytelling integrity over the bottom line.

Not Quite There: A Review of Prometheus

Arguably one of the most anticipated genre films of the year, Prometheus marks the return of British director Ridley Scott to the genre that basically launched his mainstream career. The film, set in the year 2093, tells the story of a scientific expedition into deep space to a planet where, it is believed, the origins of life on earth may be found. Leading this expedition, funded by aging tycoon Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) are archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), who have discovered, by studying ancient carvings and murals from lost civilizations all around the world of people worshiping giant, human-like beings pointing to the stars, a map leading to a solar system with a planet that may well be capable of supporting life much like that on earth. There are skeptics among them, like the geologist (Sean Harris) and botanist(Rafe Spall) who form part of the expedition, those simply doing a job like Captain Janek (Idris Elba) and his pilots Chance (Emun Elliot) and Ravel (Benedict Wong), and finally there are those who seem to know a bit more about the expedition than they are willing to let on, like Weyland Corporation executive Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), and android David (a captivating performance by Michael Fassbender). They arrive on the mysterious planet hoping to find some clues as to the origins of mankind, and, as is usually the case with movies of this sort, find something altogether different and infinitely more terrifying. In marketing this film, Twentieth Century Fox was deliberately vague about its narrative connections to the Alien film franchise created by screenwriters Dan o' Bannon and Ronald Shusett, even though this film was initially announced as a "reboot" of that same franchise, and even though there are obvious connections between this film and those that came before it, presumably in order to allow this film to rise or fall on its own merits. The film starts out with a pretty heady brew of ideas, like the questions of creation, and delivers some pretty striking if not necessarily iconic visuals such as the titular ship itself, Prometheus, and the inside of what appears to be a very old complex of some sort, but as it kicks into horror mode, the filmmakers bring us, well, those of us who have seen at least one of the predecessors of this film, into overly familiar territory with not much new to write home about. One can almost predict the order of people dying in this movie (and that's not a spoiler, I assure you), though if it's any consolation, the film quite mercifully eschews the cliche of having the African-American guy (or the Asian guy) die first. Apart from that, however, the film, and apart from its visuals, which still echo the designs of Alien designer H.R. Giger, brings distressingly little to the table that is new. I've seen B-grade sci-fi horror movies on cable TV that take bigger narrative risks than this film did, which is depressing considering that the original Alien all but reinvented the genre thirty-three years ago. Another disappointment is the performance of Noomi Rapace as Shaw. Scott raised a lot of eyebrows with his unconventional choice of a lead in Sigourney Weaver in the original Alien, but ultimately Weaver's acting chops showed she was well-worth whatever risk Scott took in hiring her, and in fact she was able to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress when she reprised the role in the 1986 sequel. Rapace, while arguably delivering a competent performance, is no Weaver, and Scott's first mistake was casting her as an Englishwoman. Time and again she drops the ball on her English accent, and it's extremely distracting. There are plenty of actual Englishwomen who could have essayed the role more effectively, and if Scott had really wanted Rapace he could have easily made a script tweak or two for her to speak with her Swedish accent. Also, while other writers have lavished praise on what they describe as her unusual beauty, all I saw was a slightly younger, better looking-version of Frances McDormand. Sigourney Weaver, with her strong jaw, is admittedly an unconventionally beautiful woman, but with her short stature and constantly vanishing British accent, Rapace's performance comes across as thoroughly unimpressive. Fortunately, however, the film is saved by a rather riveting performance by Michael Fassbender as Weyland's pet android David. It's a fantastic turn; he manages to come across as childlike, extremely intelligent and menacing all at the same time. This isn't a regurgitation of what's come before, or even of Brent Spiner's Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's a wonderfully textured portrayal, with the added bonus that Fassbender has conquered his Irish accent a lot more handily than he did in X-Men: First Class. His acting speaks volumes even when he isn't saying a word; the scene where he activates a hologram of charted space was, for me, the highlight of the film. Fassbender doesn't spoil it by uttering so much as a word of dialogue, and the thought that he's basically acting against absolutely nothing underlines how brilliantly he played the scene. Fassbender's performance, while certainly the most outstanding, isn't the only noteworthy one here. Charlize Theron is pretty effective as a not-exactly-bad bad guy, Idris Elba makes the most out of a somewhat thankless role, giving Captain Janek some emotional heft, and the rest of the cast do a pretty good job of being scared. Guy Pearce is virtually unrecognizable in what is practically a cameo role, but he most certainly makes his presence felt in his limited time on the screen. As stated, the movie doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel, which is disappointing considering the expectations that have been riding on it. It's eye candy, that's for sure, and the earnestness with which the cast approaches the film certainly at least deserves mention, but even as a standalone sci-fi opus Prometheus falls well short of greatness. As part of a film series that features one of my favorite movies of all time, James Cameron's Aliens which featured taut, virtually airtight storytelling, this film is deeply, fundamentally disappointing. As strange as it may sound, I have now seen every film in the Alien series (not counting the ridiculous Alien vs. Predator movies) EXCEPT for the very first movie, Alien, so I have written this review without any intention of comparing Prometheus to its ground-breaking, Scott-directed progenitor. It simply isn't that good a movie. 3/5

Manila Goes Hollywood!

I'm sure if one looked, one could easily find a list of movies made in Hollywood that,in one fashion or another involved the Philippines as a location, whether these films were set or merely shot in the Philippines. Oliver Stone's Vietnam War epics Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July were shot here, though the Philippines doubled for Vietnam. Lately there have been some notable American movies featuring the Philippines as the Philippines, such as John Dahl's The Great Raid, starring Cesar Montano, James Franco and Benjamin Bratt, and John Sayles' Amigo, starring Joel Torre and Chris Cooper, but both of them were basically ignored by mainstream audiences around the world. So by and large, as far as Hollywood productions goes, the Philippines remains basically a double for other countries, or an obscure reference by one character or another. Universal Pictures' upcoming release The Bourne Legacy, however, looks to remedy that unfortunate lack of awareness. This is a movie which will actually be SET, albeit only partially, in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. In keeping with the Bourne series' globetrotting nature, the Philippines will serve as the latest exotic destination for the highly successful film franchise, which has, in the past, given ample exposure to countries which, to a Westerner, would be far off, like India in the second movie and Morocco in the third. It's a shame this installment this film won't star Matt Damon, but with Academy-Award-nominated director Tony Gilroy, screenwriter of all the previous Bourne movies, at the helm, the film is assured of narrative integrity, and with Jeremy Renner (who's been in a couple of major action tentpoles since his breakout role in The Hurt Locker) appearing in the lead, this film is assured of A-list pedigree, a first for a film featuring the Philippines as an integral part of its setting. It's not easy for me, a fan of the Bourne film series, to root for a film with "Bourne" in its title yet without Jason Bourne in it, but seeing the preview, Tony Gilroy's efforts to tie this movie to everything that came before it, and the wonderfully prominent role of Metro Manila, it's a pill that's just become that much easier to swallow.