Marvel Studios has been trying to sell audiences the idea of a movie starring comic book heroes the Avengers since 2008, when after the end credits of the first Iron Man film, in which Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury approached Robert Downney Jr.'s Tony Stark to tell him about "the Avenger initiative." This is a movie that has basically been five years in the making, and is the culmination of a painstaking effort, consisting of two Iron Man films, as well as films starring the Hulk, Thor and Captain America, to lay the groundwork for arguably the most ambitious superhero movie ever to be made. Each of those films, some more than others, contained narrative cues leading up to the introduction of Marvel Comics' most popular superhero team.
Now that it's finally here, one inevitably asks the question: does it live up to the hype? As far as I'm concerned, it certainly does and more, which is quite an achievement considering that expectations for this film are no doubt sky-high.
Story-wise, it's a continuation of threads that were started in last year's Marvel Films Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger. Thor, starring Chris Hemsworth as the titular God of Thunder, introduced the villainy and angst of his adoptive brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), and Captain America: The First Avenger, starring Chris Evans as Marvel's iconic super soldier, introduced the power of the Cosmic Cube, known in Marvel's cinematic universe as the Tesseract. The Avengers brings these two story elements together as Loki, having lived in exile since the events of Thor, makes a deal with mysterious alien beings and steals the Tesseract from the custody of S.H.I.E.L.D., the super-spy agency that has been in possession of the artifact since the organization's founder, Howard Stark, fished it out of the ocean at the end of the Captain America movie. Nick Fury (Jackson) concerned, decides to dust off an old plan of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s that has been in mothballs for some time: The Avenger Initiative. For this he needs superheroes, and one by one Captain America (Evans), Bruce Banner/a.k.a the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo in a surprisingly well-textured, nuanced performance), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), and Thor (Hemsworth) come on board at one point or another of the journey. Another member, Hawkeye/Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), comes on later for reasons I will not spoil here. The question then arises: is even the combined might of the Avengers enough to take on the forces that Loki, using the Tesseract, is about to bring to bear on the hapless population of Earth (particularly Manhattan)?
The Avengers is not a film that's heavy on subtext or social commentary. It doesn't try to make profound statements about the human condition, but it does offer viewers a lurid, somewhat entertaining glimpse at a dysfunctional group of people thrown together in the hope that they can accomplish something great together, and as incredible and eye-popping as the action may be, this is actually the film's single biggest asset. Ever since he paired an insecure cowboy doll with a deluded astronaut doll in 1995's Toy Story, of which he was a co-writer, Joss Whedon has most definitely been the man for the job. As many heavyweights as this film sports, Whedon is hands down its biggest star. Handling both directing and co-writing duties (having rewritten the original script turned in by Zak Penn), Whedon infuses a distinct intelligence, humanity and humor into a film that could easily have been, in the hands of lesser filmmakers, one of the biggest clusterf**ks of all time.
As many fans and critics alike have pointed out, the action is sublime. It's frenetic but still judiciously paced, the viewer can actually tell what's going on at any given time, and there's actual suspense to see how things will turn out in the end. Critical to the action, though, is that it features characters whom people can actually care about, and it is in this aspect that Whedon succeeds considerably. In one crucial respect, Whedon's The Avengers stands head, shoulders and every other bodily appendage over any of Bryan Singer's X-Men films in that this is a true ensemble piece. Sure, the X-Men films had the whole metaphor for prejudice going for them, especially the last one, but the thing is, each and every one of those films, with the exception of the Wolverine-centric prequel, was supposed to play out as an ensemble piece but instead ended up revolving around one character, whether it was Wolverine in the first three films or Magneto in the latest one. The Avengers, which could have easily degenerated into Iron Man 3 considering Downey Jr.'s megawatt charisma, or Thor 2 considering that it picks up where the first film left off, actually feels like an ensemble piece in the way it devotes screen time and hefty character development to so many members of its cast. One reviewer says that Downey Jr. steals the show, another one says that Hiddleston steals the show, while Whedon himself feels that the Hulk is the most important character of the movie. This is an extraordinary achievement in that there are so many outstanding performances in this movie, and yet none of them got lost in the shuffle of so many characters.
Whedon, I feel, is Marvel Studios' first true visionary, and that includes the directors of the studio-made Marvel movies. I say this as someone who thoroughly enjoyed the Bryan Singer X-Men movies and the first two Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and Jon Favreau's Iron Man films (yes, even the second one). All of those directors turned in solid, admirable work and even flirted a bit with greatness at times, but I don't think any of them could be mentioned in the same breath as Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson in terms of the ability to construct epics involving massive destruction and conflict. What Whedon has done here, though is something unprecedented, a balance of egos and monstrous logistics and some of the most amazing digital effects I've seen since James Cameron raised the bar for effects with Avatar a few years back. His script brims with pathos, nuanced interpersonal interaction, some tense, some tender, and dollops of impeccably-timed humor. I'm loath to use a cliche that many writers have no doubt used and will no doubt use to describe Whedon's feat but he's really knocked this one clean out of the park.
The ensemble cast of actors, three of whom already veterans of their own individual films, do an amazing job with Whedon's script, and even though they've already each had a film each (two in Iron Man's case) for some healthy character development, they still manage to take their characters to new places this time around and considering they had to share the somewhat crowded film with each other it's really quite a marvel (pun intended) that they were able to make their performances work the way they did. For my part I think special mention should go to Tom Hiddleston in his second go-'round as Loki. To be the arch-villain in a film starring six superheroes is no mean feat and it would not have worked, no matter how spectacular Loki's powers, if they hadn't gotten an actor capable of conveying a genuine sense of menace, something Hiddleston achieves quite admirably with some pretty interesting dialogue. Mark Ruffalo also surprised as Bruce Banner; I was a fan of Norton's performance and was not expecting him to live up to it, but he definitely made the character his own and I hope, for once, Marvel sticks with this particular actor for the inevitable sequels to this film. It helps that in rendering the Hulk, the visual effects crew(s) behind this movie have finally gotten him right. Alan Silvestri's bustling music score deserves a shout out, too, though for some reason it seems infused with a slightly anachronistic 80s flavor at some points.
I'd be lying, though if I said I didn't have any problems with the film at all. Having watched the film in 3-D I have to say the conversion job on this movie was a huge improvement from the half-assed post-production changeover Marvel did with Thor, and a number of effects shots look amazing as a result, but it resulted in a movie that was, overall, conspicuously dark, especially the parts that took place at night, of which there were many. Considering this was Marvel's format of choice I can't help but roll my eyes at their blatant cash-grab. Another quibble I have with the film was that the alien army Loki uses the Tesseract to assemble are, in the comics, a prominent group of bad guys in their own right, (whose identity I will not spoil) and certainly deserved better than the cannon fodder treatment they got here. Still, those are mostly "nerd" concerns, and overall the viewing experience is not significantly diminished by them. This movie is one of those rare examples of the whole being so much greater than the sum of all its parts. As much as I enjoyed most of the individual movies of the characters featured here, some more than others, Joss Whedon has truly set a new standard for the Marvel Studios film.
Score: 5/5
Friday, April 27, 2012
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Overkill
Tomorrow, or sometime within this week, I will buy tickets for myself and my family to Joss Whedon's The Avengers, which opens here in the Philippines next week, on April 25, a full nine days before its release in the United States. It is my movie of the year; I am more anxious to see it than I am to see Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man, Ridley Scott's Prometheus, and just about any other movie, big or small, due out this year. I am fairly certain there are a lot of other people who feel the same way.
That said, I find myself slightly annoyed by the proliferation of footage of the film on the internet, done by Marvel itself.
Now, Disney, Marvel's parent company, has been in the business of making and selling movies for a long time and has done a pretty good job of it, so arguably it's not my place to question the wisdom of their marketing strategy, but for some reason I can't help but wonder why, having given audiences three full-length movie trailers, a tantalizing superbowl spot, and a number of TV spots with incremental increases in footage, Disney still feels it has to go the extra mile and show footage from the film. Even granting the film is 140 minutes or so long (nearly two and a half hours!) and that the sum total of the footage being shown on the internet is less than a tenth of that running time, the saturation of footage seems to suggest that Disney isn't confident enough in their product to just let what they've already shown simmer a bit in the collective consciousness. It strikes me that they aren't content to let the film sell itself at this point. Well, if nothing else, if for some macabre reason this film fails to live up to its massive expectations, no one will be able to accuse Disney of not being aggressive enough in pushing it.
James Cameron's Avatar got a great deal of pre-release mileage out of the mystery surrounding its plot, which in the end turned out to be rather hackneyed and buoyed only by the film's fantastic visuals. Christopher Nolan's Inception benefited from similar ambiguity. Both of these films were released in the internet age, and both are sterling examples of fantastic return on investment.
With their ad blitzkrieg, Disney seem to be saying that if people aren't thinking about The Avengers every waking second, they aren't thinking about it enough. I'm really not sure I agree with that, but I'm not in the business of selling movies.
Well, if nothing else I at least have the choice not to watch all of this footage, even though I couldn't help but check out some of it.
The good news is, from the little I've seen this movie looks at least as good as the trailers promise it to be. Still, if they continue to market it this way, it strikes me that no movie will ever be as good as they are hyping this one up to be.
That said, I find myself slightly annoyed by the proliferation of footage of the film on the internet, done by Marvel itself.
Now, Disney, Marvel's parent company, has been in the business of making and selling movies for a long time and has done a pretty good job of it, so arguably it's not my place to question the wisdom of their marketing strategy, but for some reason I can't help but wonder why, having given audiences three full-length movie trailers, a tantalizing superbowl spot, and a number of TV spots with incremental increases in footage, Disney still feels it has to go the extra mile and show footage from the film. Even granting the film is 140 minutes or so long (nearly two and a half hours!) and that the sum total of the footage being shown on the internet is less than a tenth of that running time, the saturation of footage seems to suggest that Disney isn't confident enough in their product to just let what they've already shown simmer a bit in the collective consciousness. It strikes me that they aren't content to let the film sell itself at this point. Well, if nothing else, if for some macabre reason this film fails to live up to its massive expectations, no one will be able to accuse Disney of not being aggressive enough in pushing it.
James Cameron's Avatar got a great deal of pre-release mileage out of the mystery surrounding its plot, which in the end turned out to be rather hackneyed and buoyed only by the film's fantastic visuals. Christopher Nolan's Inception benefited from similar ambiguity. Both of these films were released in the internet age, and both are sterling examples of fantastic return on investment.
With their ad blitzkrieg, Disney seem to be saying that if people aren't thinking about The Avengers every waking second, they aren't thinking about it enough. I'm really not sure I agree with that, but I'm not in the business of selling movies.
Well, if nothing else I at least have the choice not to watch all of this footage, even though I couldn't help but check out some of it.
The good news is, from the little I've seen this movie looks at least as good as the trailers promise it to be. Still, if they continue to market it this way, it strikes me that no movie will ever be as good as they are hyping this one up to be.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Revisiting Mork: Thoughts on Robin Williams
Yesterday morning, while getting ready to go to work, I caught a replay of Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting on TV. It was the film that launched Matt Damon and Ben Affleck into the Hollywood stratosphere, and which featured a performance by Robin Williams that earned him his first and so far only Academy Award. It was a nuanced, troubled and ultimately inspired portrayal of a world-weary psychiatrist who sees in Matt Damon's prodigy Will Hunting a new challenge and someone who badly needs his help. To be honest, as impressive as Damon's career-making performance was, it was Williams who really stole the show for me.
Inevitably, I asked myself "what's he done lately?" and to my dismay, the almost universally panned 2009 film Old Dogs came to mind, as did a number of other films that were either critically panned, largely ignored at the box-office, or both. His most high-profile role in the last ten years has been as the magically animated wax statue of Theodore Roosevelt in 2006's Night at the Museum, which was pretty much a supporting role. Williams hasn't anchored a major financial success since 1998's Patch Adams.
There are a number of iconic actors who made a huge impact on pop culture in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s who have started to flounder in the new millennium, a topic which could cover an entire post (or something much longer) all on its own, but Williams' fall from grace is particularly disturbing to me because I grew up on his work. I was a fan of the TV show Mork and Mindy in the late 70s and early 80s, and when Williams moved on to motion pictures I was fond of those too, from Moscow on the Hudson to the highly-acclaimed Good Morning Vietnam. Dead Poets Society , which was one of the defining films of my youth and which still moves me when I see it today, is still hailed as one of the most inspiring films of all time by the American Film Institute. In films like this and in the also highly moving Awakenings, in which he co-starred with Robert De Niro, Williams showed he could do serious roles every bit as effectively as he could comedic ones. The man was really incredible; between 1988 and 1992 he scored three Academy Award Nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role, for his performances in Vietnam, Poets and the very stylish Terry Gilliam dramedy The Fisher King, another film starring Williams that I loved. I was even a fan of his work on Steven Spielberg's Hook, for all the lambasting it received from critics.
Williams good form continued throughout the 1990s, with the commercial hit Mrs. Doubtfire, and the Mike Nichols comedy The Birdcage. Williams showed remarkable versatility even in his comedy; he went for zany in Doubtfire, but in Birdcage played the "straight man" in the gay relationship between his character and that of Nathan Lane.
When Williams finally won his Oscar in 1998 for Good Will Hunting, for me it was a bright spot in a year dominated by the thoroughly depressing Titanic and it was easy to root for his success. Apart from giving a brilliant performance for GWH, Williams had, with his performances, his stand-up routines, and his generally pleasant demeanor in interviews, established himself as kind of an everyman, someone one would want to succeed. The guy was obviously a top-tier moviestar by then but he didn't come across as one, at least not to me.
After that, Williams seemed to go through a strange phase where he was attracted to bad guy roles. He played two in succession back in 2002, first in Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, then in Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo. I figured it was a phase, that after it didn't work out we'd be back to more of the high-quality laughs we were accustomed to getting. I was confident that at some point we would once again be seeing Williams in films that were both smart and funny.
It didn't happen. Apart from the odd art house film that didn't even show up in theaters over here, Williams came up with stinkers like RV, License to Wed and the aforementioned Old Dogs, which was apparently so bad that Disney, who released it, nixed plans for a sequel to the successful 2007 film Wild Hogs (which didn't star Williams), for no other reason than that they shared the same director and had similar sounding titles.
So what I'd really like to know is: what happened? Did people just get tired of Williams? Did his ability to tell good scripts from bad ones diminish with old age? Did he fall under some horrible curse after he divorced his Filipina wife? Is this some kind of Oscar winner's curse?
One could ask similar questions about fellow Oscar-winner Al Pacino, who went from Scarface and Michael Corleone to playing a sex-crazed version of himself in Adam Sandler's last stinkfest Jack and Jill, but Robin Williams, first as Mork then later as a bona fide movie star, wasn't just an icon for film buffs, he was at one point a seemingly permanent fixture on the pop-culture landscape with a string of commercial and critical successes throughout the late 80s and early to mid 1990s. He was the voice of the Genie in Aladdin for gosh sakes!
His career didn't exactly implode in the same way that Mel Gibson's did though I have read some reports of alcoholism, but in some ways I'm not sure if what's happened to Williams isn't somehow worse than what's happened to Gibson, who even in his ruination is still the object of much public fascination. Williams' star simply appears to have faded. I hear he's doing well with stand-up routines, but his is a talent that, to my mind, should be shared with audiences everywhere, not just comedy club patrons.
Of course, there's nothing I can do about the state of the man's movie career, but I certainly wish him well. Like I said, I grew up with his work; I've been inspired by him. Judging by the careers of actors like Paul Newman, Burt Lancaster, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon and many others, Williams still has some good years left, and I hope he spends them entertaining a whole new generation of filmgoers, who deserve better from him than garbage like Old Dogs.
Inevitably, I asked myself "what's he done lately?" and to my dismay, the almost universally panned 2009 film Old Dogs came to mind, as did a number of other films that were either critically panned, largely ignored at the box-office, or both. His most high-profile role in the last ten years has been as the magically animated wax statue of Theodore Roosevelt in 2006's Night at the Museum, which was pretty much a supporting role. Williams hasn't anchored a major financial success since 1998's Patch Adams.
There are a number of iconic actors who made a huge impact on pop culture in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s who have started to flounder in the new millennium, a topic which could cover an entire post (or something much longer) all on its own, but Williams' fall from grace is particularly disturbing to me because I grew up on his work. I was a fan of the TV show Mork and Mindy in the late 70s and early 80s, and when Williams moved on to motion pictures I was fond of those too, from Moscow on the Hudson to the highly-acclaimed Good Morning Vietnam. Dead Poets Society , which was one of the defining films of my youth and which still moves me when I see it today, is still hailed as one of the most inspiring films of all time by the American Film Institute. In films like this and in the also highly moving Awakenings, in which he co-starred with Robert De Niro, Williams showed he could do serious roles every bit as effectively as he could comedic ones. The man was really incredible; between 1988 and 1992 he scored three Academy Award Nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role, for his performances in Vietnam, Poets and the very stylish Terry Gilliam dramedy The Fisher King, another film starring Williams that I loved. I was even a fan of his work on Steven Spielberg's Hook, for all the lambasting it received from critics.
Williams good form continued throughout the 1990s, with the commercial hit Mrs. Doubtfire, and the Mike Nichols comedy The Birdcage. Williams showed remarkable versatility even in his comedy; he went for zany in Doubtfire, but in Birdcage played the "straight man" in the gay relationship between his character and that of Nathan Lane.
When Williams finally won his Oscar in 1998 for Good Will Hunting, for me it was a bright spot in a year dominated by the thoroughly depressing Titanic and it was easy to root for his success. Apart from giving a brilliant performance for GWH, Williams had, with his performances, his stand-up routines, and his generally pleasant demeanor in interviews, established himself as kind of an everyman, someone one would want to succeed. The guy was obviously a top-tier moviestar by then but he didn't come across as one, at least not to me.
After that, Williams seemed to go through a strange phase where he was attracted to bad guy roles. He played two in succession back in 2002, first in Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, then in Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo. I figured it was a phase, that after it didn't work out we'd be back to more of the high-quality laughs we were accustomed to getting. I was confident that at some point we would once again be seeing Williams in films that were both smart and funny.
It didn't happen. Apart from the odd art house film that didn't even show up in theaters over here, Williams came up with stinkers like RV, License to Wed and the aforementioned Old Dogs, which was apparently so bad that Disney, who released it, nixed plans for a sequel to the successful 2007 film Wild Hogs (which didn't star Williams), for no other reason than that they shared the same director and had similar sounding titles.
So what I'd really like to know is: what happened? Did people just get tired of Williams? Did his ability to tell good scripts from bad ones diminish with old age? Did he fall under some horrible curse after he divorced his Filipina wife? Is this some kind of Oscar winner's curse?
One could ask similar questions about fellow Oscar-winner Al Pacino, who went from Scarface and Michael Corleone to playing a sex-crazed version of himself in Adam Sandler's last stinkfest Jack and Jill, but Robin Williams, first as Mork then later as a bona fide movie star, wasn't just an icon for film buffs, he was at one point a seemingly permanent fixture on the pop-culture landscape with a string of commercial and critical successes throughout the late 80s and early to mid 1990s. He was the voice of the Genie in Aladdin for gosh sakes!
His career didn't exactly implode in the same way that Mel Gibson's did though I have read some reports of alcoholism, but in some ways I'm not sure if what's happened to Williams isn't somehow worse than what's happened to Gibson, who even in his ruination is still the object of much public fascination. Williams' star simply appears to have faded. I hear he's doing well with stand-up routines, but his is a talent that, to my mind, should be shared with audiences everywhere, not just comedy club patrons.
Of course, there's nothing I can do about the state of the man's movie career, but I certainly wish him well. Like I said, I grew up with his work; I've been inspired by him. Judging by the careers of actors like Paul Newman, Burt Lancaster, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon and many others, Williams still has some good years left, and I hope he spends them entertaining a whole new generation of filmgoers, who deserve better from him than garbage like Old Dogs.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Formula One Racing and Hollywood
While fans of both motor racing and of motion pictures are not altogether uncommon, movies about motor racing are not exactly famous for setting the box-office on fire. Some high-profile movies about motor racing that Hollywood has made in the last fifty or sixty years include John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966), Lee Katzin's Le Mans (1971), Tony Scott's Days of Thunder (1990), Renny Harlin's Driven (2001), Adam McKay's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006), John Lasseter's Cars (2006) and the Wachowski's Speed Racer (2008). There are several other films about car racing, but seeings as how they mostly deal with underground street racing (e.g. The Fast and Furious movies) rather than the sanctioned kind that takes place on racetracks I don't think these are quite the same.
Now, of the movies listed, the last two non-Nascar-themed films, Speed Racer and Driven, were somewhat infamous box-office failures. The recent documentary based on the life and death of the late F1 racer Ayrton Senna, titled, appropriately enough Senna, made a splash among film critics and earned reasonably respectable numbers for a documentary, but again nothing that would send suits rushing to make movies about motor racing in general or F1 racing in particular. The closest grand prix racing has gotten to global box-office success, in fact, is the brief Monaco race scene in Iron Man 2.
My hat goes off, therefore, to veteran filmmaker Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon, The Da Vinci Code, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 and a whole lot more) for daring to make the upcoming film Rush, the first full-on, dramatization of Formula One movie since Grand Prix. (For those who want to quibble this point, Driven was set in the now-defunct Champ Car racing series, which has since been folded into the US-based Indycar series, so it doesn't count).
Rush is the dramatization of the 1976 F1 season which was contested mainly by English playboy James Hunt of the McLaren team, played by Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Niki Lauda of Scuderia Ferrari, played by Daniel Bruhl (Inglourious Basterds). The film is unique in that unlike Senna, it is a dramatization rather than a documentary, and unlike Grand Prix, it is based on an actual story rather than a fictional one.
This film has been in the pipeline for a while, so this is hardly breaking news, but one aspect of the ongoing production that I find discouraging, and which in fact spurred me to write, is how low-key everything seems to be right now. No one has bothered to throw together a Wikipedia page for the film, and announcements regarding production seem few and far between, though a month or two ago, Howard and his crew were pretty generous with shots of the sets, the cars to be used, and a few initial shots of Hemsworth in character. For racing geeks like me these little tantalizing tidbits only added to my agony considering that the film is at least a year away from commercial release, possibly even further away if they decide to release it in time for awards season, which would mean that those anxious to see this film as I am would be looking at a December 2013 release date.
Frustratingly enough, a tentpole movie based on a popular novel or comic book would, at this stage of principal photography, especially if directed by someone with Howard's profile, almost certainly have slavish coverage by media and fandom alike, and while I recognize that F1 fans and pop culture geeks are two entirely different species of enthusiast (although they can be equally opinionated and obnoxious on internet forums) I was at least hoping for some kind of waves among the fan community. Again, a Wikipedia page would be nice.
Howard himself has described Rush as an "independent" movie, and I'm not really sure what that means, but it seems to suggest that even though this movie will bear the popular Imagine films banner shared by Howard and his longtime co-producer Brian Grazer, it will be without much of the fanfare of his more heralded studio work. I certainly hope I'm wrong because right now the silence is deafening.
The worst part of this apparent lack of publicity is that as an action director who showed his chops in Apollo 13 and the firefighter action-thriller Backdraft, Howard is entirely capable of giving audiences the balls-to-the-wall action that any truly respectable movie about Formula One deserves, and therefore this movie should definitely be sold as an action film rather than as some art house drama.
The good news, though, is that with a pretty hot property in Hemsworth who, after the breakout success of Thor is lighting up the screen again in a month's time with Joss Whedon's The Avengers, the makers of Rush now have a solid selling point that they can use to get fannies in the seats. Working Title films is months away from having to market this movie but with any luck they'll make sure to capitalize on this when the time comes.
As a fan of motor racing and movies I would love to see Rush succeed and while I realize this movie has plenty of time to start generating buzz between now and its projected release date, part of me would like to at least see some effort to let the public at large know that this movie is being made and that production is coming along rather briskly. If this movie is as good as I hope it will be, I sincerely hope American audiences can get over their aversion to non-NASCAR racing movies and see it, and that global audiences, the kind that have made Formula One the world's most watched sport, can get in line at the cinemas as well.
Maybe auto racing just needs an extraordinary film in order to find a proper audience, and maybe Howard and his crew are the ones who can deliver.
Now, of the movies listed, the last two non-Nascar-themed films, Speed Racer and Driven, were somewhat infamous box-office failures. The recent documentary based on the life and death of the late F1 racer Ayrton Senna, titled, appropriately enough Senna, made a splash among film critics and earned reasonably respectable numbers for a documentary, but again nothing that would send suits rushing to make movies about motor racing in general or F1 racing in particular. The closest grand prix racing has gotten to global box-office success, in fact, is the brief Monaco race scene in Iron Man 2.
My hat goes off, therefore, to veteran filmmaker Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon, The Da Vinci Code, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 and a whole lot more) for daring to make the upcoming film Rush, the first full-on, dramatization of Formula One movie since Grand Prix. (For those who want to quibble this point, Driven was set in the now-defunct Champ Car racing series, which has since been folded into the US-based Indycar series, so it doesn't count).
Rush is the dramatization of the 1976 F1 season which was contested mainly by English playboy James Hunt of the McLaren team, played by Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Niki Lauda of Scuderia Ferrari, played by Daniel Bruhl (Inglourious Basterds). The film is unique in that unlike Senna, it is a dramatization rather than a documentary, and unlike Grand Prix, it is based on an actual story rather than a fictional one.
This film has been in the pipeline for a while, so this is hardly breaking news, but one aspect of the ongoing production that I find discouraging, and which in fact spurred me to write, is how low-key everything seems to be right now. No one has bothered to throw together a Wikipedia page for the film, and announcements regarding production seem few and far between, though a month or two ago, Howard and his crew were pretty generous with shots of the sets, the cars to be used, and a few initial shots of Hemsworth in character. For racing geeks like me these little tantalizing tidbits only added to my agony considering that the film is at least a year away from commercial release, possibly even further away if they decide to release it in time for awards season, which would mean that those anxious to see this film as I am would be looking at a December 2013 release date.
Frustratingly enough, a tentpole movie based on a popular novel or comic book would, at this stage of principal photography, especially if directed by someone with Howard's profile, almost certainly have slavish coverage by media and fandom alike, and while I recognize that F1 fans and pop culture geeks are two entirely different species of enthusiast (although they can be equally opinionated and obnoxious on internet forums) I was at least hoping for some kind of waves among the fan community. Again, a Wikipedia page would be nice.
Howard himself has described Rush as an "independent" movie, and I'm not really sure what that means, but it seems to suggest that even though this movie will bear the popular Imagine films banner shared by Howard and his longtime co-producer Brian Grazer, it will be without much of the fanfare of his more heralded studio work. I certainly hope I'm wrong because right now the silence is deafening.
The worst part of this apparent lack of publicity is that as an action director who showed his chops in Apollo 13 and the firefighter action-thriller Backdraft, Howard is entirely capable of giving audiences the balls-to-the-wall action that any truly respectable movie about Formula One deserves, and therefore this movie should definitely be sold as an action film rather than as some art house drama.
The good news, though, is that with a pretty hot property in Hemsworth who, after the breakout success of Thor is lighting up the screen again in a month's time with Joss Whedon's The Avengers, the makers of Rush now have a solid selling point that they can use to get fannies in the seats. Working Title films is months away from having to market this movie but with any luck they'll make sure to capitalize on this when the time comes.
As a fan of motor racing and movies I would love to see Rush succeed and while I realize this movie has plenty of time to start generating buzz between now and its projected release date, part of me would like to at least see some effort to let the public at large know that this movie is being made and that production is coming along rather briskly. If this movie is as good as I hope it will be, I sincerely hope American audiences can get over their aversion to non-NASCAR racing movies and see it, and that global audiences, the kind that have made Formula One the world's most watched sport, can get in line at the cinemas as well.
Maybe auto racing just needs an extraordinary film in order to find a proper audience, and maybe Howard and his crew are the ones who can deliver.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
The Return of Alexander Payne: A Review of "The Descendants"
George Clooney seems to have made a career out of making unlikable people likable. Danny Ocean of the Ocean's films, for example, has repeatedly engaged in grand-scale larceny, Ryan Bingham of Up in the Air traveled around America telling people they were fired and giving seminars on why people should go through life without any emotional attachments to anyone, and in his latest movie, Alexander Payne's The Descendants, he plays Matt King, a Hawaii-based real-estate lawyer and sole trustee of an enormous tract property who is apparently so wrapped up in his work that he has pretty much neglected his family altogether. As a result, his wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), gets hooked on motorcycles, speedboats, and dangerous living in general, his seventeen-year-old daughter Alex (Shailene Woodley) turns into a bit of a wild child partying it up while away at her expensive boarding schools, and his ten-year-old daughter Scottie (Amara Miller) has developed a bit of a potty mouth.
As the movie opens Matt has quite a bit to deal with; due to a newly-passed Hawaiian law against owning large tracts of land in perpetuity he and his family now have seven years to sell the 25,000 acres of untouched land that has been in their family since the 1860s. He and his cousins have been looking at buyers, but for some reason that is not explained it is Matt's vote as the sole trustee that truly counts. His wife has been involved in a boating accident and as a result is comatose. It isn't long before Elizabeth's doctor breaks the bad news to Matt; she isn't going to make it. It now falls on Matt to break the news to everyone else, like friends and family, and the first person he decides to tell is Alex, whom he and Scottie fetch from her expensive boarding school on the Hawaiian mainland. His strained relationship is a hard enough pill to swallow, but when he breaks the news to her she, in shock, hits him with a bombshell of her own; Elizabeth was having an affair. After twisting the arms of a couple of Elizabeth's friends, Matt learns that the affair was with a realtor named Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), and upon learning where he'll be staying for the weekend he sets off in search of him, with his two daughters in tow. The journey proves to be a revealing one in ways not even Matt imagined.
As Matt deals with both impending loss, infidelity, and possibly the most important decision he will ever have to make, he discovers a lot about himself, his family and what he really values in life.
I was wondering aloud when Alexander Payne would make a movie again when I stumbled on this movie doing a Google search. This was before the slew of awards nominations came out; I was just happy that the writer/director of one of my all-time favorite movies, Sideways, was working again.
The film represents quite a departure for Payne stylistically; unlike the working-class schlubs played by Matthew Broderick (Election), Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt) and Paul Giamatti (Sideways) in Payne's last three films, Clooney's Matt King is an aristocrat through and through. The guy was basically born into a family fortune and is a highly successful lawyer to boot. There's not a whole lot of everyman anguish going around here, but Payne's and Clooney's strength lies is how they are able to portray King as a sympathetic character, one it is actually possible to pity in spite of everything he has going for him. There's a bit of sentimentality involved, but considering the abrupt nature of the events in the story it's a little natural that the characters, even the somewhat more cynical ones, are caught a bit off their guard.
Still, though the characters are removed from Payne's norm, his signature is all over this film, particularly in the way he is able to inject humor into even the most depressing of situations. And of course, Payne is able to get the very best out of his actors, whether it's the known ones or the somewhat obscure ones. A good example is the young actor who portrays Alex's is-he-or-isn't-he-her-boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) a young man who isn't terribly bright or well-versed in social skills, and who is constant companion to Matt and his family for a good chunk of the film. I have no idea if this character is present in the book on which this film was based, but it seems that it is in him that Payne has found his ordinary schlub in this world of heirs and scions. That he has a kind of, um, homely look to him kind of balances out Clooney's leading-man looks and Alex's somewhat ethereal beauty. Veteran actors Robert Forster and Beau Bridges also make notable and memorable appearances as Elizabeth's father and Matt's cousin, respectively. Lillard's appearance is brief but significant, as is that of Judy Greer, who's always a welcome sight in my book.
The Descendants does not even come close to displacing Sideways as one of my all-time favorite movies, but it is definitely a very affecting film and certainly one of the best I've seen all year.
5/5
As the movie opens Matt has quite a bit to deal with; due to a newly-passed Hawaiian law against owning large tracts of land in perpetuity he and his family now have seven years to sell the 25,000 acres of untouched land that has been in their family since the 1860s. He and his cousins have been looking at buyers, but for some reason that is not explained it is Matt's vote as the sole trustee that truly counts. His wife has been involved in a boating accident and as a result is comatose. It isn't long before Elizabeth's doctor breaks the bad news to Matt; she isn't going to make it. It now falls on Matt to break the news to everyone else, like friends and family, and the first person he decides to tell is Alex, whom he and Scottie fetch from her expensive boarding school on the Hawaiian mainland. His strained relationship is a hard enough pill to swallow, but when he breaks the news to her she, in shock, hits him with a bombshell of her own; Elizabeth was having an affair. After twisting the arms of a couple of Elizabeth's friends, Matt learns that the affair was with a realtor named Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), and upon learning where he'll be staying for the weekend he sets off in search of him, with his two daughters in tow. The journey proves to be a revealing one in ways not even Matt imagined.
As Matt deals with both impending loss, infidelity, and possibly the most important decision he will ever have to make, he discovers a lot about himself, his family and what he really values in life.
I was wondering aloud when Alexander Payne would make a movie again when I stumbled on this movie doing a Google search. This was before the slew of awards nominations came out; I was just happy that the writer/director of one of my all-time favorite movies, Sideways, was working again.
The film represents quite a departure for Payne stylistically; unlike the working-class schlubs played by Matthew Broderick (Election), Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt) and Paul Giamatti (Sideways) in Payne's last three films, Clooney's Matt King is an aristocrat through and through. The guy was basically born into a family fortune and is a highly successful lawyer to boot. There's not a whole lot of everyman anguish going around here, but Payne's and Clooney's strength lies is how they are able to portray King as a sympathetic character, one it is actually possible to pity in spite of everything he has going for him. There's a bit of sentimentality involved, but considering the abrupt nature of the events in the story it's a little natural that the characters, even the somewhat more cynical ones, are caught a bit off their guard.
Still, though the characters are removed from Payne's norm, his signature is all over this film, particularly in the way he is able to inject humor into even the most depressing of situations. And of course, Payne is able to get the very best out of his actors, whether it's the known ones or the somewhat obscure ones. A good example is the young actor who portrays Alex's is-he-or-isn't-he-her-boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) a young man who isn't terribly bright or well-versed in social skills, and who is constant companion to Matt and his family for a good chunk of the film. I have no idea if this character is present in the book on which this film was based, but it seems that it is in him that Payne has found his ordinary schlub in this world of heirs and scions. That he has a kind of, um, homely look to him kind of balances out Clooney's leading-man looks and Alex's somewhat ethereal beauty. Veteran actors Robert Forster and Beau Bridges also make notable and memorable appearances as Elizabeth's father and Matt's cousin, respectively. Lillard's appearance is brief but significant, as is that of Judy Greer, who's always a welcome sight in my book.
The Descendants does not even come close to displacing Sideways as one of my all-time favorite movies, but it is definitely a very affecting film and certainly one of the best I've seen all year.
5/5
Sunday, February 12, 2012
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Though his remake of the Swedish film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starts off with a stylish title sequence that looks like a somewhat darker, slightly more twisted version of the ones that have played in James Bond movies over the decades, the moment it ends director David Fincher tells a story that couldn't be more different from a Bond film if it tried.
After a brief prologue in which an old Swedish aristocrat named Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) receives a gift from a mystery sender, the story begins with Swedish journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) walking out of a courtroom after having been convicted of libel for a series of scathing articles about corrupt businessman Hans-Erik Wennestrom. Disgraced, Blomqvist is at a loss as to what to do next when he is contacted by Vanger's attorney. Blomqvist travels from Stockholm to the remote suburbuan island where Vanger and his entire clan live and Vanger regales him with the story of his niece Harriet, who disappeared from the island forty years earlier and who, Henrik strongly believes, was murdered. His suspects are none other than his own family members who live on the island with him. He hands Blomkvist all of the family records in his possession, including police reports and photographs on the scene, and persuades the down-and-out journalist with a considerable sum of money and, more importantly, dirt on Wennestrom. Blomkvist is skeptical that he will be able to figure out anything that Vanger was not, but enticed by the promise of redemption (and the money to replace that which lost upon paying damages as a result of the conviction) is too much for him to resist, and he sits down to work.
Running alongside this story is that of a young, talented hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), who helped Vanger by performing a background check on Blomkvist, and who apparently does similarly shady work on a regular basis for the right price. By day, however, she is a ward of the state for somewhat gruesome reasons that are disclosed in the course of the film, a condition that has her often visiting her lawyer (Yorick Von Wageningen), somewhat unsavory character himself, for cash dole-outs, an arrangement which leads to a rather harrowing encounter.
As Blomkvist finds himself increasingly involved in the case, which was not quite as cut-and-dried as first it seemed, he meets the Vangers, including Martin (Stellan Skarsgard), Cecilia (Geraldine James), Anita (Joely Richardson) and Harald (Per Myrberg), whose reaction to him ranges from pleasant to downright hostile. All, of course, are suspects, but some more than others.
As Blomkvist gets hotter on the trail of his quarry, his path intersects with Lisbeth's as he learns of the background check Vanger's lawyer had performed on him. While angered by the fact that most of the information Lisbeth learned she did so by hacking into his computer, he decides that someone as resourceful as her could be useful to his investigation and she is onboard in fairly short order. Together, they unearth the truth, and as horrifying as it is, it isn't quite what they expected.
Now, as whodunits go the movie (and, not having read it, I imagine the novel as well) is not all that novel. The many revelations that unfold throughout the narrative are not all that far out of left field (even though there are some pretty startling ones) and the good guys/bad guys dynamic still feels like pretty standard stuff, and certainly not as unsettling as the chilling narrative of Fincher's breakout film Se7en, felt back in the day. What sets this film apart is its somewhat unconventional heroes, with Craig's bookish, useless-in-a-fight Blomkvist and Mara's tough-as-nails action heroine Salander making a somewhat unlikely but oddly compelling pair. Strong performances all around, especially Mara's and Plummer's also help smooth out some of the cliches, and help ground some of the film's more off-the-wall, somewhat disturbing moments (by way of a warning, just let me say for the benefit of the uninitiated that one of these moments involves anal rape). This movie may not have concluded with a gut-punch like Se7en did, but it has plenty of WTF moments of its own.
If there's a weak link here it's actually Craig, who unlike just about everyone in the cast did not even bother to put on an accent for his role, speaking in the Queen's English pretty much throughout the length of the movie. I'm no expert on Swedish accents but there was a sort of uniformity to the way everyone was speaking which Craig quite clearly disrupted. Whether it was Fincher's idea or whether it was because Craig was a diva, it simply disrupted the narrative flow. Not only that, but as goofy as the script dictated that he should be, Craig's body language never really convinced me that Blomkvist wouldn't be handy in a fight. Craig claims he put on a bit of weight for the role but he was nonetheless insanely lean (and I don't mean skinny) for a man who, by his own admission in the film describes himself as "old." I've actually liked Craig's acting in his other movies, Bond or otherwise, so I was somewhat disappointed by his underwhelming performance here, but I'm still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt; perhaps he was simply outshone by Mara, who is the undisputed star of the show.
It's funny how writers have described Mara as having upstaged Craig or having stolen the show considering that she does play the title character, and considering how Salander and Blomkvist are clearly co-equal characters in this film. It would perhaps be more apt to say that she lived up to the expectations of the director who took a chance on an unknown quantity such as her (though Fincher had already worked with her on a brief scene in last year's The Social Network, in which she had a small but pivotal role as Mark Zuckerberg's ex-girlfriend). I haven't read any of Stieg Larsson's Millennium books so I have no idea if Mara has stayed true to the character but I can say that, to my mind at least, she has created a character that is utterly transfixing, and not because of her many body piercings or gaunt face. There's a power to Lisbeth's silence as she contemplates her next move, whether it's to exact revenge on her lawyer or hack into someone's e-mail account for a client; as she stays quiet for much of her screen time it falls on Mara to convey that power purely with her face, something I imagine was challenging considering that Salander doesn't have discernible eyebrows. Also, I love it when actors play smart people really convincingly, whether it's by their line delivery or facial tics. Robert Downey, Jr. is one of my favorite examples and now I can add Mara to that list. Craig's Blomkvist is clever because the script tells us he should be, but Mara really sells Salander's mental acumen.
Of course, Fincher deserves full credit for extracting such performances out of his actors (Craig notwithstanding) and for keeping a two-and-a-half hour movie rather cohesive and rather dynamic, even when including some of the original narrative's more graphic portions which, in the hands of a lesser storyteller, could have somewhat derailed the proceedings.
If Fincher and company came back for the rest of the Millennium series, I can certainly see myself coming back for more, but I would appreciate it if Craig at least put on an accent next time.
4/5
After a brief prologue in which an old Swedish aristocrat named Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) receives a gift from a mystery sender, the story begins with Swedish journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) walking out of a courtroom after having been convicted of libel for a series of scathing articles about corrupt businessman Hans-Erik Wennestrom. Disgraced, Blomqvist is at a loss as to what to do next when he is contacted by Vanger's attorney. Blomqvist travels from Stockholm to the remote suburbuan island where Vanger and his entire clan live and Vanger regales him with the story of his niece Harriet, who disappeared from the island forty years earlier and who, Henrik strongly believes, was murdered. His suspects are none other than his own family members who live on the island with him. He hands Blomkvist all of the family records in his possession, including police reports and photographs on the scene, and persuades the down-and-out journalist with a considerable sum of money and, more importantly, dirt on Wennestrom. Blomkvist is skeptical that he will be able to figure out anything that Vanger was not, but enticed by the promise of redemption (and the money to replace that which lost upon paying damages as a result of the conviction) is too much for him to resist, and he sits down to work.
Running alongside this story is that of a young, talented hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), who helped Vanger by performing a background check on Blomkvist, and who apparently does similarly shady work on a regular basis for the right price. By day, however, she is a ward of the state for somewhat gruesome reasons that are disclosed in the course of the film, a condition that has her often visiting her lawyer (Yorick Von Wageningen), somewhat unsavory character himself, for cash dole-outs, an arrangement which leads to a rather harrowing encounter.
As Blomkvist finds himself increasingly involved in the case, which was not quite as cut-and-dried as first it seemed, he meets the Vangers, including Martin (Stellan Skarsgard), Cecilia (Geraldine James), Anita (Joely Richardson) and Harald (Per Myrberg), whose reaction to him ranges from pleasant to downright hostile. All, of course, are suspects, but some more than others.
As Blomkvist gets hotter on the trail of his quarry, his path intersects with Lisbeth's as he learns of the background check Vanger's lawyer had performed on him. While angered by the fact that most of the information Lisbeth learned she did so by hacking into his computer, he decides that someone as resourceful as her could be useful to his investigation and she is onboard in fairly short order. Together, they unearth the truth, and as horrifying as it is, it isn't quite what they expected.
Now, as whodunits go the movie (and, not having read it, I imagine the novel as well) is not all that novel. The many revelations that unfold throughout the narrative are not all that far out of left field (even though there are some pretty startling ones) and the good guys/bad guys dynamic still feels like pretty standard stuff, and certainly not as unsettling as the chilling narrative of Fincher's breakout film Se7en, felt back in the day. What sets this film apart is its somewhat unconventional heroes, with Craig's bookish, useless-in-a-fight Blomkvist and Mara's tough-as-nails action heroine Salander making a somewhat unlikely but oddly compelling pair. Strong performances all around, especially Mara's and Plummer's also help smooth out some of the cliches, and help ground some of the film's more off-the-wall, somewhat disturbing moments (by way of a warning, just let me say for the benefit of the uninitiated that one of these moments involves anal rape). This movie may not have concluded with a gut-punch like Se7en did, but it has plenty of WTF moments of its own.
If there's a weak link here it's actually Craig, who unlike just about everyone in the cast did not even bother to put on an accent for his role, speaking in the Queen's English pretty much throughout the length of the movie. I'm no expert on Swedish accents but there was a sort of uniformity to the way everyone was speaking which Craig quite clearly disrupted. Whether it was Fincher's idea or whether it was because Craig was a diva, it simply disrupted the narrative flow. Not only that, but as goofy as the script dictated that he should be, Craig's body language never really convinced me that Blomkvist wouldn't be handy in a fight. Craig claims he put on a bit of weight for the role but he was nonetheless insanely lean (and I don't mean skinny) for a man who, by his own admission in the film describes himself as "old." I've actually liked Craig's acting in his other movies, Bond or otherwise, so I was somewhat disappointed by his underwhelming performance here, but I'm still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt; perhaps he was simply outshone by Mara, who is the undisputed star of the show.
It's funny how writers have described Mara as having upstaged Craig or having stolen the show considering that she does play the title character, and considering how Salander and Blomkvist are clearly co-equal characters in this film. It would perhaps be more apt to say that she lived up to the expectations of the director who took a chance on an unknown quantity such as her (though Fincher had already worked with her on a brief scene in last year's The Social Network, in which she had a small but pivotal role as Mark Zuckerberg's ex-girlfriend). I haven't read any of Stieg Larsson's Millennium books so I have no idea if Mara has stayed true to the character but I can say that, to my mind at least, she has created a character that is utterly transfixing, and not because of her many body piercings or gaunt face. There's a power to Lisbeth's silence as she contemplates her next move, whether it's to exact revenge on her lawyer or hack into someone's e-mail account for a client; as she stays quiet for much of her screen time it falls on Mara to convey that power purely with her face, something I imagine was challenging considering that Salander doesn't have discernible eyebrows. Also, I love it when actors play smart people really convincingly, whether it's by their line delivery or facial tics. Robert Downey, Jr. is one of my favorite examples and now I can add Mara to that list. Craig's Blomkvist is clever because the script tells us he should be, but Mara really sells Salander's mental acumen.
Of course, Fincher deserves full credit for extracting such performances out of his actors (Craig notwithstanding) and for keeping a two-and-a-half hour movie rather cohesive and rather dynamic, even when including some of the original narrative's more graphic portions which, in the hands of a lesser storyteller, could have somewhat derailed the proceedings.
If Fincher and company came back for the rest of the Millennium series, I can certainly see myself coming back for more, but I would appreciate it if Craig at least put on an accent next time.
4/5
Friday, February 10, 2012
"Marvel"
As I'm dead certain was the case for many, many other people, I was completely awestruck by the newest trailer for Joss Whedon's The Avengers. I am also dead certain that there are dozens of blogs, written and filmed, that have also taken the time to gush about the contents of the trailer and what they portend for the movie that will officially kick off the 2012 summer movie season in America.
For me, though, there was one thing about the minute-long trailer that grabbed me even more than the stunning visuals and the promise of wall-to-wall butt-kicking action. All movie trailers begin (or more or less begin) with the logo of the studio distributing the movie being advertised. Even when the actual maker of the film is different from the distributor, the distributor's logo still gets top billing, as it were. From 2008 to 2011, for example, Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures distributed, between the two of them, five films that were produced entirely by Marvel studios, and the trailer (and actual movie) of each of those films featured, quite prominently the logo of either Paramount or Universal, followed by the Marvel banner.
During the new Avengers trailer, however, the only banner to be seen, despite the fact that Marvel is owned by the Walt Disney Company, which has its own film studio, was that of Marvel itself. This wasn't being marketed as a Paramount Picture, or a Walt Disney Picture, or a Columbia Picture, or as anything other than as a Marvel Picture.
This year it will have been 26 years since the Howard the Duck movie opened in theaters and proved to be such an abysmal failure with critics and audiences the world over that its stink clung to Marvel Comics for years. When Batman was breaking box-office records a few years later, Marvel characters were appearing in direct-to-video feces such as Albert Pyun's Captain America (1990) and Mark Goldblatt's The Punisher (1989). I was already a fanboy back then, and I was crushed, especially since it was back then that the Spider-Man movie experienced one false start after another.
How things change in a couple of decades; since Stephen Norrington's Blade adaptation knocked Saving Private Ryan off the top of the U.S. box-office in the summer of 1998, films based on Marvel Comic books have been going from strength to strength. Since then, twenty movies based on several different Marvel Comics characters have opened at number one at the U.S. box office, eighteen of them have gone on to gross more than $100 million each at the U.S. box office, seven of them have managed to gross more than $200 million each at the U.S. box office, and five of them have even managed to gross over $300 million each. Sure, rival comics company DC Comics still holds a number of individual records with 2008's The Dark Knight being the highest-grossing comic-book adaptation ever, but considering that over 30 years after Christopher Reeve took audiences' breath away in Richard Donner's Superman, DC and their parent Warner Brothers have been unable to sell films based on characters other than Superman and Batman, what Marvel have done in ten years is quite a feat.
Notably, these films aren't all purely commercial affairs made to pander to the lowest common denominator; several of the films based on Spider-Man, Iron Man and the X-Men are quite highly regarded among critics, for their narrative substance as well as their visual panache. In short, there has been a concerted effort not just to churn out movies based on Marvel Comics, but the best possible movies that could be based on Marvel Comics, with the best directors, cast and crew in place.
Audiences the world over have rewarded these efforts with their tickets, and as a result Marvel Studios has become a brand name unto itself. That parent company Disney would recognize the power of the brand to the extend that it would decline to stamp its own logo on The Avengers is compelling testimony to the faith they have in Marvel as a distinct product.
To someone who grew up grinding his teeth because of how bad movies like The Punisher were, the degree to which one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world respects and supports Marvel is a soothing balm, one that more than makes up for decades of silent suffering.
It's a good time to be a Marvel fan.
For me, though, there was one thing about the minute-long trailer that grabbed me even more than the stunning visuals and the promise of wall-to-wall butt-kicking action. All movie trailers begin (or more or less begin) with the logo of the studio distributing the movie being advertised. Even when the actual maker of the film is different from the distributor, the distributor's logo still gets top billing, as it were. From 2008 to 2011, for example, Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures distributed, between the two of them, five films that were produced entirely by Marvel studios, and the trailer (and actual movie) of each of those films featured, quite prominently the logo of either Paramount or Universal, followed by the Marvel banner.
During the new Avengers trailer, however, the only banner to be seen, despite the fact that Marvel is owned by the Walt Disney Company, which has its own film studio, was that of Marvel itself. This wasn't being marketed as a Paramount Picture, or a Walt Disney Picture, or a Columbia Picture, or as anything other than as a Marvel Picture.
This year it will have been 26 years since the Howard the Duck movie opened in theaters and proved to be such an abysmal failure with critics and audiences the world over that its stink clung to Marvel Comics for years. When Batman was breaking box-office records a few years later, Marvel characters were appearing in direct-to-video feces such as Albert Pyun's Captain America (1990) and Mark Goldblatt's The Punisher (1989). I was already a fanboy back then, and I was crushed, especially since it was back then that the Spider-Man movie experienced one false start after another.
How things change in a couple of decades; since Stephen Norrington's Blade adaptation knocked Saving Private Ryan off the top of the U.S. box-office in the summer of 1998, films based on Marvel Comic books have been going from strength to strength. Since then, twenty movies based on several different Marvel Comics characters have opened at number one at the U.S. box office, eighteen of them have gone on to gross more than $100 million each at the U.S. box office, seven of them have managed to gross more than $200 million each at the U.S. box office, and five of them have even managed to gross over $300 million each. Sure, rival comics company DC Comics still holds a number of individual records with 2008's The Dark Knight being the highest-grossing comic-book adaptation ever, but considering that over 30 years after Christopher Reeve took audiences' breath away in Richard Donner's Superman, DC and their parent Warner Brothers have been unable to sell films based on characters other than Superman and Batman, what Marvel have done in ten years is quite a feat.
Notably, these films aren't all purely commercial affairs made to pander to the lowest common denominator; several of the films based on Spider-Man, Iron Man and the X-Men are quite highly regarded among critics, for their narrative substance as well as their visual panache. In short, there has been a concerted effort not just to churn out movies based on Marvel Comics, but the best possible movies that could be based on Marvel Comics, with the best directors, cast and crew in place.
Audiences the world over have rewarded these efforts with their tickets, and as a result Marvel Studios has become a brand name unto itself. That parent company Disney would recognize the power of the brand to the extend that it would decline to stamp its own logo on The Avengers is compelling testimony to the faith they have in Marvel as a distinct product.
To someone who grew up grinding his teeth because of how bad movies like The Punisher were, the degree to which one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world respects and supports Marvel is a soothing balm, one that more than makes up for decades of silent suffering.
It's a good time to be a Marvel fan.
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