Fan Fiction

"I just got off the phone with Bale's agent. For the last time, he says, he won't do it."

"Not even for $50 million?"

"Nope."

"What about back-end?"

"Sir, even without Bale this movie will cost us at least half a billion to make and market. I've been crunching the numbers and I can assure you were are not in a position to offer him back-end."

"Well, why the hell won't he do it for $50 mill up front? That's a shitload of money."

"I dunno, something about wanting to move on to new artistic heights or some B.S. like that." 

"New artistic heights? Does he think he would have gotten to make his awards bait if it hadn't been for the exposure the Dark Knight movies gave him?"

"Well, that's what he said."

"Screw him, then. There are a whole truckload of buff twenty and thirty-something actors banging on our door who can put on fiberglass muscles and a cookie monster voice. We don't need that pretentious British shit. So let's look at that list of unknowns then."

"I don't think you understand the magnitude of the problem we have here."

"Problem? What problem?"

"Nobody on our list wanted to be the Batman that came after Christian Bale. The guy's basically a god to Batman fanboys. It's like...replacing Connery as Bond!"

"What? Isn't there anyone on our list who wants the job?"

"Umm...basically...nnno."

"Not even the D-listers?"

"The D-listers least of all, sir. No one wants to be the Batman equivalent of Brandon Routh. It wasn't like when we cast Bale, sir. After Batman and Robin killed the franchise nobody gave a shit who we put in the costume; we had carte blanche!"

"Shut up! I'm thinking here..."

"Sir?"

"Okay, here's what we do; we look up the actors who are fanboys, the guys that would basically beg us for the job. You know, people like Reynolds, Snipes, Cage...Cage! What's he doing lately? Doesn't he need money to bail him out of his tax problems?"

"We started getting on the phone with Cage the first time Bale said no, sir. We wanted to hedge our bets."

"And?"

"He's busy sir. Same with Reynolds and Snipes. Cage was actually willing to drop his project to work on this but the people he was working with threatened to sue."

"Shit! Wait...what about that kid who did Argo for us last year?"

"Ben...Affleck, sir?"

"That's the one! The kid from Good Will Hunting! What?"

"I'm sorry, sir. I just...threw up in my mouth a little."

"What are you talking about? He won an Oscar, didn't he?"

"Sir, he won an Oscar for PRODUCING Argo (though people say he should have won one for directing it too), and before that he won an Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon, but he...isn't widely regarded as a particularly good actor..."

"Doesn't matter, we can still put 'two-time Academy Award winner' on all the marketing materials. And besides, didn't he play a superhero already?"

"Yes, sir, he was the title character in Daredevil."

"See? So what's the problem?"

"THAT'S the problem, sir. Daredevil was a quantifiably terrible movie. The only reason it even made any money was that it played like a low-rent Spider-Man and people basically just needed their superhero fix. In fact, if I may venture to say so, the fact that Affleck played the character like a poor man's Batman is probably one of the biggest reasons why he'd be a horrible choice for the role."

"Stop talking like a nerd. It'll be fine. Anyway, fanboys are morons; we can tell them Affleck's an award-winning actor and they won't know the difference. Anyway, even if they don't like it, they'll line up to see the movie no matter how much they bitch online, especially if we can sneak in some writing or producing credit for Christopher Nolan. Get him to fart on this treatment I had some of the boys write so we can give him some 'story by' billing. But that can come later. Get Affleck's agent on the phone first."

"Right away, sir."

"Oh, and after that, get on the phone with whoever has the video rights to Daredevil; let's see if we can get them to pull it off Netflix for a couple of years. And start buying up all the Daredevil DVDs you can find, online or in the stores. And do the same thing for Gigli. No sense in taking unnecessary risks here."

"S-sir?"

"Don't worry about the costs; we can write it off to marketing expenses."

"All, right, sir. Right away."

"Excellent. Now let's make a movie!"

2014: The Battle of the Non-Marvel Produced Movies Based on Marvel Characters

Since Marvel Studios decided to start making their own movies some years back without the help of studio backers, things have gone pretty well for them. Every single movie they have made has managed to earn over $250 million at the global box-office, and it was arguably their early success that spurred the Walt Disney Company to buy out Marvel three years back. The gambit paid off in spectacular fashion last year when The Avengers became a box-office phenomenon, grossing $1.5 billion at the global box-office.

This year, they're following though on that success in pretty convincing fashion, with Iron Man 3 being the year's top-grossing film so far (and the top grossing in the Iron Man series) with a $1.2 billion global gross, and Thor: The Dark World arguably poised to exceed the performance of its predecessor.

Next year, though, seems to be a relatively low-key year for the Disney-owned Marvel studios in the run-up the 2015 sequel to The Avengers; in April 2014 they'll be releasing the sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier, before the U.S. summer movie season where they probably hope to make Fast and Furious money, and in August 2014 or basically the "winding down" month of the summer season they'll be releasing The Guardians of the Galaxy, or their first non-sequel in several years.

In short, for the first time since 2009, when they didn't release any films, Marvel will be stepping off the scorching summer battlefield and leave two different protagonists to slug it out with movies made from their characters: Sony Pictures, who will release The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Twentieth Century Fox, who will be releasing X-Men: Days of Future Past, which marks original X-Men director Bryan Singer's return to the mutants that made him a household name. Both films will be released in May of next year, within three weeks of each other, and this will mark the first time since both franchises were launched, X-Men in 2000 and Spider-Man in 2002, that they will have movies in the same year.

I'm genuinely interested to see how this showdown will play out. Personally I'm more partial to Spidey and am quite fond of the first two films in the series. I also welcomed last year's series reboot, which brought mechanical webshooters and a better lead actor to the screen. I am also a fan, however, of Michael Fassender's and James McAvoy's take on the younger Magneto and Professor X, and of the whole period feel of X-Men: First Class. I am also quite fond of Ellen Page, who starred in the often-reviled X-Men: Last Stand before her breakout role in Juno, and am anxious to see her play X-Men mainstay Kitty Pryde in a decent X-Men film for a change.

What's more interesting, though, is the fact that Fox and Sony are the only two studios left holding rights to Marvel characters outside of Disney. Their contracts allow them to continue to hold the rights to these characters for as long as they keep making movies based on them. To be able to continue making these movies, the movies they make have to make money. By effectively going head-to-head by releasing their movies within weeks of each other, they are jeopardizing that proposition because each of the films may well cannibalize off the other's grosses given the proximity, though to be fair Sony had staked its first weekend of May slot long before Fox decided to bump their X-Men flick up to the Memorial Day weekend.

Spider-Man will probably come out on top, considering that the first weekend of May is prime box-office real estate these days, and considering that last year's reboot, which "everyone" supposedly hated, still grossed $750 million at the global box-office, which is something like $250 million more than any X-Men movie since the beginning has made at the global box-office, but for my part, I want both movies to do well, and I sincerely hope they do.

Now That's More Like It: A Review of The Wolverine

My review of the 2009 film X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was obliterated when multiply.com shut down its blogging section, and perhaps it's only fitting that it's gone forever considering how awful I found that movie to be. 

Four years later, Twentieth Century Fox, one of the only two studios left aside from Disney that has the rights to make movies based on characters taken from Marvel Comic books, appears to have learned its lesson and has come out with a movie that is substantially better than what came before it, this time simply titled: The Wolverine.

The film opens with a flashback in which the mutant Logan, also known as the Wolverine (played again by Hugh Jackman) is trapped in a prisoner-of-war camp in Nagasaki, moments before the atom bomb is dropped. With the bomb about to drop, Yashida (Ken Yamamura) a young Japanese officer decides to set the prisoners free. Because there is nowhere to run, the Japanese officers commit ritual suicide, but the young officer, Yashida, cannot bring himself to do it as he watches the bomb's catastrophic explosion. In that moment, Logan saves Yashida by throwing him into the hole in which he was imprisoned, which turns out to be the safest place to be, and covers him with a metal plate and his own body. While the blast basically flays Logan, his mutant healing gift restores his skin right before an astonished Yashida's eyes.

Decades later, and after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, Logan lives as a hermit in the Yukon, his only friend apparently a large bear. When some local hunter kills the bear using an illegal poisoned arrow, Logan follows him to the bar and is about to lay waste to him and his companions when a mysterious Japanese girl named Yukio (Rila Fukushima) brandishing a katana and some serious skill intervenes, telling him that an old acquaintance of Logan wants to say goodbye to him in person. That old acquaintance turns out to be a dying Yashida (now played by Haruhiko Yamanouchi), who has, since Logan saved him back in the war, built an empire based on technology, and who basically asks Logan to give him his healing factor. Logan declines, but having set foot on Yashida's premises, with a shady doctor (Svetlana Khodchenkova) and Yashida's power-hungry son (Hiroyuki Sanada) basically just waiting for the old man to expire, Wolverine soon finds out that he is already in over his head. Before he knows it, he is on the run with Yashida's fetching granddaughter Mariko (the statuesque Tao Okamoto) from mysterious forces whose true motivation will shock him (though not necessarily the audience).

While the quality of this film is not exactly on par with other Marvel notables like the first couple of X-Men or Spider-Man movies, the first Iron Man movie or last year's global box-office phenomenon The Avengers, it is a substantial improvement over the first Wolverine movie, which was so unabashedly idiotic that it had the lead villain thinking he could erase Wolverine's memory by shooting him in the head with an adamantium bullet, and even worse, actually being right.  

Loosely based on a 1982 mini-series by noted comic-book creators Chris Claremont (X-Men) and Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns), this film explores Wolverine's character more than any of the other films in the X-Men series, even though the majority of them were already arguably Wolvie-centric, but more importantly, actually gives him dimension this time around. Here, he grapples with regret, desire, and later, fear. Sure, he's still Marvel's resident loner, but at least here, there's more to him that growling, howling, and his adamantium claws. Full credit for this turnaround goes to director James Mangold and his screenwriters Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, and, of course, to Hugh Jackman, whose earnestness almost elevated X-Men Origins: Wolverine past the utter schlock that it was. Here, his utter commitment to this role shows again, from his straight-faced line delivery, even when the film jumps off the rails in the third act, to his ridiculously ripped physique.

Fortunately, Jackman isn't on his own here; his supporting cast, made up mostly of Japanese actors, are, as strange as this may sound, more effective in their roles than a lot of the X-Men actors were in their supposed ensemble piece. Supermodel Okamoto, obviously cast so that the 6'2 Jackman wouldn't look too much bigger than his leading lady, surprises in her role as Wolverine's love interest Mariko, especially considering this is her first-ever feature film role. Veteran Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada does well with limited screen time as Mariko's dad Shingen, as do Yamanouchi and Korean-American actor Will Yun Lee with their roles.

For me, though, the real standout was Fukushima as Yukio. Like Okamoto, Fukushima is a model starring in her first feature film, but as a rather plucky action heroine, she's quite a find. I hope she doesn't end up in direct-to-video limbo after this; she deserves a heck of a lot better in my opinion.

A lot of reviewers have complained about how the film collapses in the third act, and truth be told, it does, but to be honest, the overall plot really isn't the movie's strong point, as it was basically designed to end up there in the first place. I will agree with them that Khodchenkova's Viper brings the film dangerously close to some of the low points of the last solo Wolvie pic, but the good news is that the movie has too much else going for it to let some moments of stupidity drag it down. The action set pieces are pretty impressive at times, and Wolverine's battle with Yakuza thugs atop a speeding train is quite easily a highlight. It is worth pointing that not all the fight scenes are all that good, though.

Whatever the film's flaws, though, there was nothing even approaching the stupidity of the memory-erasing bullet from the first Wolverine solo picture, and in any event, I was able to forgive the movie its various flaws after watching the nigh-obligatory, but this time positively tantalizing post-credits scene.

3.5/5

Snails For the Win: A Review of Turbo

There was nothing quite as effective in shattering my resolve to wind down my movie-watching for the next couple of months as the entreaties of my ultra-cute three-year-old daughter that she wanted to watch "snail" which was what she believed to be the title of Dreamworks' Animation's new movie Turbo, starring the voices of Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Samuel L. Jackson and a whole slew of other Hollywood stars. This movie actually piqued my curiosity with its distinctly ironic premise of a snail becoming fast enough to race in the Indianapolis 500, but after sitting through a glut of action movies and two consecutive animated films in the last three months or so I didn't really know if I had it in me to sit through yet another cartoon.

As it turns out, pardon the pun, I had just enough in the tank to appreciate this one, which was pretty good, all things considered.

Theo, or as he likes to call himself, Turbo (Reynolds) is a garden snail living somewhere in California with his brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) and several other garden snails, but who has a very peculiar personality quirk; he is a speed fanatic. He spends his days in a greenhouse with several other snails, knocking rotten tomatoes off their vines, and his nights watching the Indy Racing League on an old television in the garage, at least until the T.V. gets broken. He wanders around town and, amidst the speeding cars, he falls from a bridge right onto a car about to start a drag race. He is sucked into the hot rod's blower, and, when the driver of the car turns on the nitrous oxide feed that is supposed to give his car a boost in speed, Turbo is flooded with it, and when he is spit out of the car's exhaust, he is a changed snail. He has been endowed with super speed.

After a disastrous incident in the garden involving his new-found speed and a sadistic little boy with a tricycle, Turbo and Chet leave the garden and end up being captured by Tito (Michael Pena), the truck driver and co-owner of a taco restaurant in a strip malls somewhere in Van Nuys. Tito enters Turbo in a snail race he regularly has with the other business operators of the strip mall, not quite realizing what he has on his hands, and when Turbo demonstrates his incredible speed, Tito realizes he has a chance to promote not only the taco stand he runs with his brother Angelo (Luis Guzman) but the whole strip mall as well. Meanwhile, Turbo befriends the "crew" of snails headed by Whiplash (Samuel L. Jackson) who admire his speed but show him that they still have a thing or two to teach him.

With his blazing speed and the encouragement of his new friends, Turbo decides to pursue his greatest dream: to win the legendary Indianapolis 500. It won't be easy, even after he convinces Tito, through a series of overt gestures, to enter him in the contest, he still has to face five-time Indy 500 winner Guy Gagne (Bill Hader), who also happens to be Turbo's idol.

The premise of this film, by itself, is a lot of fun, but not exactly the kind of conceit that, by itself, can sustain a feature-length film. To address this, the filmmakers threw in a few other plot devices, like Turbo's own feelings of inadequacy, as exemplified by a scene involving a perfect tomato, as well as parallel "brothers" stories between the two snails on one hand, and Tito and Angelo on the other, with Chet's support and approval being the one thing that Turbo apparently needs to succeed.  The paper thin villain of the film is the kind who will easily be forgotten, and Turbo's "crew" of snails look designed to sell toys and to give him characters to interact with in the reported spin-off series. In short, for all of the padding the writers have thrown in to extend a half-hour cartoon into a ninety-minute film, and despite some earnest performances by the voice actors, I really felt the thinness and familiarity of the well-worn plot of pursuing one's dreams. Henry Jackman's endlessly derivative score, which seemed to have been yanked right out of Cars in a few scenes, did not help things either.

What really carried the film, however, were some stunning visuals, especially of the magnificent racing sequences. Until I see Ron Howard's Rush, due out later this year, I will have to content myself with the depiction of open-wheel racing in this film, and it was genuinely interesting to see the racing from a snail's point of view, with the "marbles" or bits of rubber flaking off the tires looking absolutely enormous. The marbles would play an important role in the race later on, as well. I was also amused by the sequence in which the racing cars metamorphosed into giant rolling tomatoes in Turbo's mind's eye as he remembered his big moment of failure from earlier in the film; to my mind it was pretty imaginative.

I am officially all cartooned-out; I have seen five animated feature films this year and I am pretty sure that, no matter how sweetly my three-year-old asks me, I do not want to see another for quite some time.

Still, if nothing else,, this film was at least more lively than the somewhat tepid, presumptuously-named Epic, and is reasonable fun for grown-ups who have an hour and a half to spare, especially the ones with kids who know how to ask very nicely if they can watch a movie.

3.5/5