This March, Walt Disney Studios will release Oz, the Great and Powerful, a new film directed by Sam Raimi (Spider-Man), which is based on the Oz books written by L. Frank Baum at around the dawn of the 20th Century. While the Oz series of books is cherished as classic literature for children, a fact that I'm not sure everyone is aware of is that apart from the 1939 adaptation of the first book, The Wizard of Oz, which is equally regarded as a classic and is often, in fact, the means by which many people (including myself) have been introduced to the magical world of Oz, adaptations of the book or series of books have not been particularly well received by movie audiences.
As best I can tell from internet searching, there has only been one attempt at a direct theatrical feature film sequel to The Wizard of Oz: the 1985 film Return to Oz, directed by Walter Murch and released by Disney. That film tanked at the box-office and was basically forgotten. Truth be told, the only reason I remember it is that for years it was the only "Oz" movie I had seen until I finally saw the 1939 original. As blockbuster grosses go, even The Wizard of Oz is not even particularly remarkable; adjusted for inflation, its total grosses come up to something like $400 million all around the world, not too impressive a figure considering that other classics like Gone with the Wind and The Sound of Music have box-office figures that, when adjusted for inflation, would easily put to shame most contemporary megablockbusters.
Of course, this is no indictment of the quality of the first Oz movie, but considering that the average A-list fantasy movie these days costs something like $200 million and has to earn well over twice that amount to be considered a financial success, both hurdles now facing the upcoming Oz sort-of-prequel, it's safe to say that only a betting man or a fool would take a chance on a property that does not quite guarantee the success of a movie based on more "happening" pop culture icons like superheroes or boy wizards. Oz the Great and Powerful does not even have any particularly popular actors in its roster, though the hiring of Spider-Man director Sam Raimi may have been quite a coup, as Disney are able to put the words "Spider-Man" quite prominently in the marketing materials without having to ask for Sony Pictures' permission. All told, though, the risk involved is quite evident.
The courage shown by the Walt Disney execs in taking another crack at Oz nearly three decades after they failed to sell Return to Oz, therefore, is something I cannot help but admire. After all, like just about anyone else, Disney is quite fond of sure things as shown by their acquisition of Pixar and of already-established success-stories like Marvel and, most recently, Lucasfilm. That they would take a cinematic property well past its prime and try to breathe new life into it, and hire one of the quirkiest directors in the business to do this, shows a commitment to so much more than just the bottom line that I'm certain old Walt is smiling down on the studio heads right now.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
How They Supposedly Got Him: A Review of Zero Dark Thirty
This has to be said before anything else: only the most ridiculously zealous, thoroughly indoctrinated American citizen could possibly walk out of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A!" or manifesting some other form of national pride in the manner in which Osama Bin Laden was tracked down and killed. There is no Michael-Bay-style-slow-motion take accompanying the SEAL 6 team onto their stealth helicopters. There is no heroic, muscular Hans Zimmer music accompanying the raid on the Abottabad complex. There is no sweeping dramatic score when Maya, the Central Intelligence Agency played with a fierce sense of commitment by Jessica Chastain, opens the body bag containing bin Laden's body and identifies him.
Zero Dark Thirty is an ugly, unapologetic, and unflinching movie that purports to give an account of the hunt for and eventual extermination of America's most wanted terrorist leader. It begins with a blacked-out screen in 2001, and audio captures of actual people caught in the tumult of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, after which it segues immediately to 2003, to an undisclosed location in Pakistan where CIA Agent Dan (Jason Clarke) is busy torturing Ammar (Reda Kateb) a member of the Al-Qaeda group, for information, in the presence of several other operatives, including new agent Maya (Chastain), who has apparently only just been recruited out of high school. As the narrative unfolds it becomes clear that Maya's sole mission is to gather intelligence in order to cause the capture and/or death of Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden. In the course of the film she goes from being a cautious rookie to a hardened field operative, who in the span of a few years shows no compunction about ordering burly enforcers to pummel suspected terrorists in the face in order to milk them for information. The entire routine of torture does nothing to prevent a deadly terrorist attack in 2004, but later, a little bit of deception and a hot meal with Ammar elicits a name, UBL's supposed number-one courier Abu Ahmed, before the trail ends in a brick wall, one through which no amount of waterboarding or punching in the face can break.
Years later, however, some cross-checking by Maya's colleagues in the CIA discloses vital information that was missed the first time around, and through deduction, technology, and one hell of a bribe, Maya tracks her man quite literally to Osama bin Laden's doorstep. Thus the stage is set for the rubout that captivated basically the entire English-speaking world nearly two years ago, and quite possibly several parts of the world that did not. After months of debating whether or not to descend upon the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the U.S. government finally makes the fateful call and the rest, as they say, is history.
I'm no historian, so I cannot really comment on the criticism of the film that it falsely claims that torture led to the eventual death of bin Laden. People ranging from American Senators to bloggers have weighed in, saying that bin Laden's death was brought about by legitimate sleuthing, and that the torture programs of the Central Intelligence Agency yielded nothing but false leads. The movie, the accusation goes, glorifies torture by asserting that it was a key element leading to bin Laden's eventual death. They say that there is no way that something as positive as bin Laden's death was brought about by something as overwhelmingly negative as torture.
What strikes me as genuinely odd is how anyone could view bin Laden's death, at least in the context of how it was depicted in the film, as a good thing.
For one thing, bin Laden was not killed in a field of battle in broad daylight, while commanding another terrorist strike against the West. He was not killed while wielding a high-powered firearm or wearing a suicide-bomber's vest. He was not surrounded by dozens of armed confederates.
He was, rather, killed in the dead of night by a team that comprised what looked like two dozen heavily-armed Navy SEALs, in the company of women, children, and a grand total of three lightly-armed men who were scattered all throughout the compound where he lived. An unarmed woman was shot in the back and killed in the course of the operation that killed bin Laden. Wounded men were shot multiple times to make sure they were dead. Bin Laden himself was reportedly unarmed; the film does not confirm this, but neither does it go out of its way to refute it. Some of the children present in the compound witnessed the murder of people who were presumably their parents, after which they were rounded up in a room, then hastily abandoned when it was reported that the Pakistani government was scrambling its jets and the SEAL team had to leave as quickly as possible.
Again, how anyone could view the events that took place in this scene as a "good" thing is beyond me. I suppose I'm not that imaginative a person. What struck me, though, was the brutal honesty of this scene, which did not hesitate to show that the SEAL6 team acted a lot more like a gang of hired guns than crack military troops.
There are also little bits scattered throughout the narrative that to my mind debunk the theory that this film is a ringing endorsement of atrocity as a means to combat terrorism. In a crucial briefing scene, a fairly high CIA official named George (Mark Strong) berates everyone below his pay grade, demanding that they deliver targets to kill. There is no talk on winning the war on terror, or saving innocent American lives. There are only enemies that need to die, with basically no regard for such niceties as due process. There is no victory in sight in the "War on Terror," there is only the next kill.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't matter if torture helped "get" bin Laden or not; the very act of perpetrating his cold-blooded murder (at least in the manner in which it was depicted) showed that the men and women of the government of the United States had forsaken their humanity. I did not see anything in this film that justified the use of torture by the U.S. government. But again, that's just me.
At the end of it all, Maya, having seen and identified the corpse of bin Laden, breaks down and cries while onboard a C-130 that will take her home. These are the tears of a woman who has accomplished what has become her sole purpose in life, and for whom life basically no longer holds any meaning. Whatever anyone might say about this film, it is hard to deny the power of Chastain's performance here; her journey from a fledgling agent lurking in the background to a firebrand ready to utter profanities in the presence of her boss, no less than CIA Director Leon Panetta (James Gandolfini) is transfixing, and even as a fan of the TV series Homeland I have to say that Chastain's Maya makes Claire Danes' Carrie Mathison look like a cartoon character. There are a number of solid performances on display in this movie, and with over 100 speaking parts and a running time of over two and a half hours plenty of performers are given ample room to flex their acting chops, but Chastain still stands out, and it is for this reason that this film basically belongs to her. Had those inclined to criticize this film appreciated it as being a story of how one woman's obsession with bin Laden eventually stripped away her humanity and her ability or inclination to do anything else with her life, perhaps they would have been kinder to it, but the painful truth of it is this woman's obsession mirrored that of many other people in America, which is perhaps why it was easy for some audiences in America to swallow the rather disturbing depiction of the Abbottabad raid as the triumph of the "hero" Maya.
Considering that the film purports to be grounded in reality, one inevitably wonders if bin Laden's death will have any lasting and meaningful effect on the so-called "War on Terror." The film makes no suggestion that there has been any real blow dealt to Al Qaeda, and it is just as well because any claim to this effect would not only betray the film as outright propaganda but would ignore the fact that since bin Laden's death in 2011, there have been several more terror attacks, including an attack last September 11, 2012 at the American Embassy in Libya that claimed the life of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American citizens. Apparently, those people didn't need bin Laden to tell them what to do.
To my mind, Zero Dark Thirty is not a propaganda piece. To me, it is a film, one that in many ways closely follows what happened in real life (as shown by the depiction of several actual terror attacks, as well as the painstaking reproduction of the SEAL6 operation, no matter how unflattering it was) but in which liberties have still been taken with its decidedly touchy subject matter. I'll concede that the debate it has stirred on how accurately it has depicted factual events is a point against it considering it has been marketed as a true-to-life film, but if it's one thing the depiction of a savage attack of a civilian compound in the middle of the night resulting in multiple murder makes clear, it's that this film is not apologizing or making excuses for anyone. It is not about glossing over inconvenient truths as much as it is admitting them.
4/5
Zero Dark Thirty is an ugly, unapologetic, and unflinching movie that purports to give an account of the hunt for and eventual extermination of America's most wanted terrorist leader. It begins with a blacked-out screen in 2001, and audio captures of actual people caught in the tumult of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, after which it segues immediately to 2003, to an undisclosed location in Pakistan where CIA Agent Dan (Jason Clarke) is busy torturing Ammar (Reda Kateb) a member of the Al-Qaeda group, for information, in the presence of several other operatives, including new agent Maya (Chastain), who has apparently only just been recruited out of high school. As the narrative unfolds it becomes clear that Maya's sole mission is to gather intelligence in order to cause the capture and/or death of Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden. In the course of the film she goes from being a cautious rookie to a hardened field operative, who in the span of a few years shows no compunction about ordering burly enforcers to pummel suspected terrorists in the face in order to milk them for information. The entire routine of torture does nothing to prevent a deadly terrorist attack in 2004, but later, a little bit of deception and a hot meal with Ammar elicits a name, UBL's supposed number-one courier Abu Ahmed, before the trail ends in a brick wall, one through which no amount of waterboarding or punching in the face can break.
Years later, however, some cross-checking by Maya's colleagues in the CIA discloses vital information that was missed the first time around, and through deduction, technology, and one hell of a bribe, Maya tracks her man quite literally to Osama bin Laden's doorstep. Thus the stage is set for the rubout that captivated basically the entire English-speaking world nearly two years ago, and quite possibly several parts of the world that did not. After months of debating whether or not to descend upon the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the U.S. government finally makes the fateful call and the rest, as they say, is history.
I'm no historian, so I cannot really comment on the criticism of the film that it falsely claims that torture led to the eventual death of bin Laden. People ranging from American Senators to bloggers have weighed in, saying that bin Laden's death was brought about by legitimate sleuthing, and that the torture programs of the Central Intelligence Agency yielded nothing but false leads. The movie, the accusation goes, glorifies torture by asserting that it was a key element leading to bin Laden's eventual death. They say that there is no way that something as positive as bin Laden's death was brought about by something as overwhelmingly negative as torture.
What strikes me as genuinely odd is how anyone could view bin Laden's death, at least in the context of how it was depicted in the film, as a good thing.
For one thing, bin Laden was not killed in a field of battle in broad daylight, while commanding another terrorist strike against the West. He was not killed while wielding a high-powered firearm or wearing a suicide-bomber's vest. He was not surrounded by dozens of armed confederates.
He was, rather, killed in the dead of night by a team that comprised what looked like two dozen heavily-armed Navy SEALs, in the company of women, children, and a grand total of three lightly-armed men who were scattered all throughout the compound where he lived. An unarmed woman was shot in the back and killed in the course of the operation that killed bin Laden. Wounded men were shot multiple times to make sure they were dead. Bin Laden himself was reportedly unarmed; the film does not confirm this, but neither does it go out of its way to refute it. Some of the children present in the compound witnessed the murder of people who were presumably their parents, after which they were rounded up in a room, then hastily abandoned when it was reported that the Pakistani government was scrambling its jets and the SEAL team had to leave as quickly as possible.
Again, how anyone could view the events that took place in this scene as a "good" thing is beyond me. I suppose I'm not that imaginative a person. What struck me, though, was the brutal honesty of this scene, which did not hesitate to show that the SEAL6 team acted a lot more like a gang of hired guns than crack military troops.
There are also little bits scattered throughout the narrative that to my mind debunk the theory that this film is a ringing endorsement of atrocity as a means to combat terrorism. In a crucial briefing scene, a fairly high CIA official named George (Mark Strong) berates everyone below his pay grade, demanding that they deliver targets to kill. There is no talk on winning the war on terror, or saving innocent American lives. There are only enemies that need to die, with basically no regard for such niceties as due process. There is no victory in sight in the "War on Terror," there is only the next kill.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't matter if torture helped "get" bin Laden or not; the very act of perpetrating his cold-blooded murder (at least in the manner in which it was depicted) showed that the men and women of the government of the United States had forsaken their humanity. I did not see anything in this film that justified the use of torture by the U.S. government. But again, that's just me.
At the end of it all, Maya, having seen and identified the corpse of bin Laden, breaks down and cries while onboard a C-130 that will take her home. These are the tears of a woman who has accomplished what has become her sole purpose in life, and for whom life basically no longer holds any meaning. Whatever anyone might say about this film, it is hard to deny the power of Chastain's performance here; her journey from a fledgling agent lurking in the background to a firebrand ready to utter profanities in the presence of her boss, no less than CIA Director Leon Panetta (James Gandolfini) is transfixing, and even as a fan of the TV series Homeland I have to say that Chastain's Maya makes Claire Danes' Carrie Mathison look like a cartoon character. There are a number of solid performances on display in this movie, and with over 100 speaking parts and a running time of over two and a half hours plenty of performers are given ample room to flex their acting chops, but Chastain still stands out, and it is for this reason that this film basically belongs to her. Had those inclined to criticize this film appreciated it as being a story of how one woman's obsession with bin Laden eventually stripped away her humanity and her ability or inclination to do anything else with her life, perhaps they would have been kinder to it, but the painful truth of it is this woman's obsession mirrored that of many other people in America, which is perhaps why it was easy for some audiences in America to swallow the rather disturbing depiction of the Abbottabad raid as the triumph of the "hero" Maya.
Considering that the film purports to be grounded in reality, one inevitably wonders if bin Laden's death will have any lasting and meaningful effect on the so-called "War on Terror." The film makes no suggestion that there has been any real blow dealt to Al Qaeda, and it is just as well because any claim to this effect would not only betray the film as outright propaganda but would ignore the fact that since bin Laden's death in 2011, there have been several more terror attacks, including an attack last September 11, 2012 at the American Embassy in Libya that claimed the life of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American citizens. Apparently, those people didn't need bin Laden to tell them what to do.
To my mind, Zero Dark Thirty is not a propaganda piece. To me, it is a film, one that in many ways closely follows what happened in real life (as shown by the depiction of several actual terror attacks, as well as the painstaking reproduction of the SEAL6 operation, no matter how unflattering it was) but in which liberties have still been taken with its decidedly touchy subject matter. I'll concede that the debate it has stirred on how accurately it has depicted factual events is a point against it considering it has been marketed as a true-to-life film, but if it's one thing the depiction of a savage attack of a civilian compound in the middle of the night resulting in multiple murder makes clear, it's that this film is not apologizing or making excuses for anyone. It is not about glossing over inconvenient truths as much as it is admitting them.
4/5
Thursday, January 17, 2013
My List of Box-Office Champs for 2012: Part III
1. Skyfall (Global box-office to date: $1,032,966,261)
This may be the most obvious entry on this list, but there are things about this movie which, I feel, need to be said in order to emphasize just how amazing an achievement this global gross really is.
The first and most obvious thing that need be said about this movie is that James Bond is, at 50 years, the world oldest's film franchise. People who say the whole concept of the film franchise began with Star Wars, should bear in mind that by the time the first Star Wars came out in May of 1977, there had already been nine James Bond movies starring three different actors as Bond. Sure, Star Wars remains the granddaddy of film-related merchandise and that sort of thing, but James Bond was having sequels before any other property in the film industry. At 23 movies over half a century, audiences around the world have, on the average, been treated to a Bond movie every other year, though of course in real time there have been considerable lulls between some of the later movies. There is not a movie property in existence that can claim this sort of durability. This is a series that has even survived the turbulent political events that spawned the books from which it was adapted.
The second reason this figure is really an outstanding achievement is that this movie was very nearly consigned to oblivion when the studio releasing it, MGM, ran into serious bankruptcy issues a few years back that, had it not been for quick thinking and tenacity of a number of people, could have buried this project for years, if not for good. In short, this is the sort of movie that came close to never even existing, so to go from development limbo to a billion dollars is something definitely worth applauding.
The final thing that makes this film's worldwide take such a landmark achievement is how it has completely shattered what had long seemed to be a glass ceiling for this film franchise.
James Bond was, in his early days, no stranger to towering box-office grosses. Adjusted for inflation, the grosses of two out of the first four Bond movies, Goldfinger and Thunderball, in the United States alone would, according to boxofficemojo.com, amount to half a billion dollars today, without even factoring the undoubtedly high grosses in Bond's native England and the rest of the world. From late sixties and all the way to the end of the 80s, though, Bond seemed to suffer from diminishing returns, as none of his films after those two seemed capable of cracking the magic "century club" or films that would gross $100 million or more, with one notable exception being the 1979 film Moonraker which made quite a bit of money, specifically $210 million around the world in 1979 currency. Still, this was the exception and not the rule.
That changed with the 1995 hit Goldeneye which was notable for being the first movie to feature Irish actor Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. Goldeneye made $106 million at the North American box office (U.S. and Canada) and over $240 million in the rest of the world, announcing quite emphatically that the franchise was far from being a spent force. Brosnan went on to star in three more hit Bond movies, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough, and Die Another Day, each movie grossing more than the last, with DAD setting what was, at the time, the benchmark for Bond's global box-office with over $432 million.
The upward trend continued when the series was rebooted in 2006 with Daniel Craig as 007, with Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace both earning well over half a billion dollars at the global box office.
Still, it was notable that James Bond movies seemed to have a ceiling of sorts, at least at the North American box-office. The highest grossing film in the series as of 2008, Quantum of Solace, could only muster $167 million (unadjusted), which stood in contrast to the heights scaled by other spy movie franchises, like the Mission Impossible series, and the Bourne films, both of which had at least one entry crack the coveted $200 million mark in North America. Even two of the spy spoof Austin Powers movies had managed to gross over $200 million each. James Bond didn't even seem to be in their league, despite the fact that he was basically the granddaddy of all movie spies. Of course, in the rest of the world, it was still a different story, but still, given the fact that spy movies were popular in North America I for one couldn't help but wonder why James Bond was not among the more popular franchises.
Skyfall changed all of that, shattering the proverbial glass ceiling and outgrossing just about every spy movie ever made, with a projected final North American gross well over $300 million (it's currently at $299,627,928, with plenty of juice left) and a rest-of-the-world gross of around $733,500,000, a figure which includes around $164,000,000 from Bond's native Britain. In terms of grosses, it has blown away its rival spy franchises in both North America and just about everywhere else in the world. Its eventual $300+ million North American gross, even in 2012 dollars, is, as it were, "real" money; it's the kind of money usually reserved for giant robots, some superheroes, hobbits, boy wizards and James Cameron. Even among the wildly popular Twilight movies, only one has grossed $300 million, and only just. For a 50-year-old film franchise about an aging spy to pull in that kind of money is nothing short of extraordinary.
The $700+ global gross is another kettle of fish altogether; in the history of Hollywood, only six other movies have earned more than Skyfall at the global box-office, and four of them benefited from 3-D surcharges. This year, only The Avengers has made more money at the global box-office than Skyfall so far, and again, that benefited from a significant 3-D boost. Notably, at the global box-office, Skyfall handily defeated The Dark Knight Rises. This movie is clearly in a league of its own, and it bodes extremely well for health of the franchise for years to come.
Years ago James Bond was too-often described as a Cold-War relic, but currently, to a whole new generation of audiences, he is clearly so much more.
Many thanks to the folks at boxofficemojo.com for the figures cited here.
This may be the most obvious entry on this list, but there are things about this movie which, I feel, need to be said in order to emphasize just how amazing an achievement this global gross really is.
The first and most obvious thing that need be said about this movie is that James Bond is, at 50 years, the world oldest's film franchise. People who say the whole concept of the film franchise began with Star Wars, should bear in mind that by the time the first Star Wars came out in May of 1977, there had already been nine James Bond movies starring three different actors as Bond. Sure, Star Wars remains the granddaddy of film-related merchandise and that sort of thing, but James Bond was having sequels before any other property in the film industry. At 23 movies over half a century, audiences around the world have, on the average, been treated to a Bond movie every other year, though of course in real time there have been considerable lulls between some of the later movies. There is not a movie property in existence that can claim this sort of durability. This is a series that has even survived the turbulent political events that spawned the books from which it was adapted.
The second reason this figure is really an outstanding achievement is that this movie was very nearly consigned to oblivion when the studio releasing it, MGM, ran into serious bankruptcy issues a few years back that, had it not been for quick thinking and tenacity of a number of people, could have buried this project for years, if not for good. In short, this is the sort of movie that came close to never even existing, so to go from development limbo to a billion dollars is something definitely worth applauding.
The final thing that makes this film's worldwide take such a landmark achievement is how it has completely shattered what had long seemed to be a glass ceiling for this film franchise.
James Bond was, in his early days, no stranger to towering box-office grosses. Adjusted for inflation, the grosses of two out of the first four Bond movies, Goldfinger and Thunderball, in the United States alone would, according to boxofficemojo.com, amount to half a billion dollars today, without even factoring the undoubtedly high grosses in Bond's native England and the rest of the world. From late sixties and all the way to the end of the 80s, though, Bond seemed to suffer from diminishing returns, as none of his films after those two seemed capable of cracking the magic "century club" or films that would gross $100 million or more, with one notable exception being the 1979 film Moonraker which made quite a bit of money, specifically $210 million around the world in 1979 currency. Still, this was the exception and not the rule.
That changed with the 1995 hit Goldeneye which was notable for being the first movie to feature Irish actor Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. Goldeneye made $106 million at the North American box office (U.S. and Canada) and over $240 million in the rest of the world, announcing quite emphatically that the franchise was far from being a spent force. Brosnan went on to star in three more hit Bond movies, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough, and Die Another Day, each movie grossing more than the last, with DAD setting what was, at the time, the benchmark for Bond's global box-office with over $432 million.
The upward trend continued when the series was rebooted in 2006 with Daniel Craig as 007, with Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace both earning well over half a billion dollars at the global box office.
Still, it was notable that James Bond movies seemed to have a ceiling of sorts, at least at the North American box-office. The highest grossing film in the series as of 2008, Quantum of Solace, could only muster $167 million (unadjusted), which stood in contrast to the heights scaled by other spy movie franchises, like the Mission Impossible series, and the Bourne films, both of which had at least one entry crack the coveted $200 million mark in North America. Even two of the spy spoof Austin Powers movies had managed to gross over $200 million each. James Bond didn't even seem to be in their league, despite the fact that he was basically the granddaddy of all movie spies. Of course, in the rest of the world, it was still a different story, but still, given the fact that spy movies were popular in North America I for one couldn't help but wonder why James Bond was not among the more popular franchises.
Skyfall changed all of that, shattering the proverbial glass ceiling and outgrossing just about every spy movie ever made, with a projected final North American gross well over $300 million (it's currently at $299,627,928, with plenty of juice left) and a rest-of-the-world gross of around $733,500,000, a figure which includes around $164,000,000 from Bond's native Britain. In terms of grosses, it has blown away its rival spy franchises in both North America and just about everywhere else in the world. Its eventual $300+ million North American gross, even in 2012 dollars, is, as it were, "real" money; it's the kind of money usually reserved for giant robots, some superheroes, hobbits, boy wizards and James Cameron. Even among the wildly popular Twilight movies, only one has grossed $300 million, and only just. For a 50-year-old film franchise about an aging spy to pull in that kind of money is nothing short of extraordinary.
The $700+ global gross is another kettle of fish altogether; in the history of Hollywood, only six other movies have earned more than Skyfall at the global box-office, and four of them benefited from 3-D surcharges. This year, only The Avengers has made more money at the global box-office than Skyfall so far, and again, that benefited from a significant 3-D boost. Notably, at the global box-office, Skyfall handily defeated The Dark Knight Rises. This movie is clearly in a league of its own, and it bodes extremely well for health of the franchise for years to come.
Years ago James Bond was too-often described as a Cold-War relic, but currently, to a whole new generation of audiences, he is clearly so much more.
Many thanks to the folks at boxofficemojo.com for the figures cited here.
My List of Box-Office Champs for 2012 Part II
I decided to split the post into three because my discussion of the next two films is a bit...how shall we say it...epic in terms of length.
2. Argo (Global box-office to date: $181,118,256)
In 1998, 26-year-old actor Ben Affleck's career took off in a serious way when he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay together with his pal Matt Damon for their work on Gus Van Sant's film Good Will Hunting. He was catapulted straight to the Hollywood A-list, and in the half-decade or so that followed he starred in a string of box-office hits like Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Changing Lanes, The Sum of All Fears and Daredevil.
Then, he starred in the universally-panned 2003 film Gigli together with Jennifer Lopez, with whom he had also started an off-screen relationship, and everything went pretty much to hell.
Gigli was not just a box-office flop; it was the kind of certified disaster that killed careers. The film's director, Martin Brest, whose resume also includes the box-office smash Beverly Hills Cop and the acclaimed Scent of a Woman, for which Al Pacino won an Oscar, has not made a movie since then. It certainly didn't do Affleck's career any favors either. For years he drifted from one acting job to another, and for years his name was more of a punchline which conjured up more jokes about his relationship with Jennifer Lopez or the true state of his hairline than it did any discussion of his work. In fact up until late 2010, his most high-profile role was a tiny part in the abysmal comedy He's Just Not That Into You.
In 2007, however, Affleck started the process of his own reinvention, directing his brother Casey in a small, unheralded but nonetheless well-reviewed thriller titled Gone Baby Gone. Affleck garnered praise for the film (and even an interview with either Time or Newsweek, I forget which), but still remained on the road back to respectability.
Then, in 2010, Affleck directed and starred in the crime thriller The Town alongside The Hurt Locker star and newly-minted "it-boy" Jeremy Renner, Mad Men's Jon Hamm, and Gossip Girl's Blake Lively. The movie was adored by critics, embraced by audiences, and recognized by awards bodies; Renner garnered his second straight Academy Award nomination (after having been nominated for his work in The Hurt Locker). It was official then; after nearly having had his career buried in 2003, Ben Affleck was back.
The thought that Affleck's next movie was going to be set during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, therefore, must have made a lot of people scratch their heads.
Inclusion of topics like terrorism or political turbulence in the Middle East in movies has, at least in the last few years, generally been a potent recipe for box-office disaster. Not even high profile directors ranging from Steven Spielberg (Munich) to Ridley Scott (Body of Lies) to Paul Greengrass (The Green Zone) have been able to beat this particular box-office curse, so the thought that a relatively fledgling director, one looking to rebuild his career years after a couple of bad decisions very nearly destroyed it, was somewhat perplexing at least, and mind-boggling at the very most. Not only that, but relations between the United States and the Middle East were (and still are) extremely strained, a factor which could easily have made people way too uncomfortable to watch a movie where that tension was an integral part of the story.
The fact, therefore, that Affleck basically put his newly-rejuvenated career on the line for this movie, which was definitely going to be a hard sell, and came out on top testifies to what a box-office miracle this movie was, even if the grosses don't necessarily say so. This was made using a paltry $44.5 million budget, so the studio has definitely recovered its investment by now.
Much more than the receipts, however, considering the risk involved for everyone, especially the director, this movie's achievement at the box-office is no less than phenomenal. This was a movie that could so easily have gone wrong for Ben Affleck, but which arguably ended up being the best thing to ever happen to his career so far. What better way to celebrate one's definitive return to the big leagues with a $100 million North American gross and a passel of Academy Award Nominations?
It may not be a billion-dollar juggernaut, but Argo is, for me, a monumental gamble that paid off handsomely.
Next: My Ultimate 2012 Box-Office Champ
2. Argo (Global box-office to date: $181,118,256)
In 1998, 26-year-old actor Ben Affleck's career took off in a serious way when he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay together with his pal Matt Damon for their work on Gus Van Sant's film Good Will Hunting. He was catapulted straight to the Hollywood A-list, and in the half-decade or so that followed he starred in a string of box-office hits like Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Changing Lanes, The Sum of All Fears and Daredevil.
Then, he starred in the universally-panned 2003 film Gigli together with Jennifer Lopez, with whom he had also started an off-screen relationship, and everything went pretty much to hell.
Gigli was not just a box-office flop; it was the kind of certified disaster that killed careers. The film's director, Martin Brest, whose resume also includes the box-office smash Beverly Hills Cop and the acclaimed Scent of a Woman, for which Al Pacino won an Oscar, has not made a movie since then. It certainly didn't do Affleck's career any favors either. For years he drifted from one acting job to another, and for years his name was more of a punchline which conjured up more jokes about his relationship with Jennifer Lopez or the true state of his hairline than it did any discussion of his work. In fact up until late 2010, his most high-profile role was a tiny part in the abysmal comedy He's Just Not That Into You.
In 2007, however, Affleck started the process of his own reinvention, directing his brother Casey in a small, unheralded but nonetheless well-reviewed thriller titled Gone Baby Gone. Affleck garnered praise for the film (and even an interview with either Time or Newsweek, I forget which), but still remained on the road back to respectability.
Then, in 2010, Affleck directed and starred in the crime thriller The Town alongside The Hurt Locker star and newly-minted "it-boy" Jeremy Renner, Mad Men's Jon Hamm, and Gossip Girl's Blake Lively. The movie was adored by critics, embraced by audiences, and recognized by awards bodies; Renner garnered his second straight Academy Award nomination (after having been nominated for his work in The Hurt Locker). It was official then; after nearly having had his career buried in 2003, Ben Affleck was back.
The thought that Affleck's next movie was going to be set during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, therefore, must have made a lot of people scratch their heads.
Inclusion of topics like terrorism or political turbulence in the Middle East in movies has, at least in the last few years, generally been a potent recipe for box-office disaster. Not even high profile directors ranging from Steven Spielberg (Munich) to Ridley Scott (Body of Lies) to Paul Greengrass (The Green Zone) have been able to beat this particular box-office curse, so the thought that a relatively fledgling director, one looking to rebuild his career years after a couple of bad decisions very nearly destroyed it, was somewhat perplexing at least, and mind-boggling at the very most. Not only that, but relations between the United States and the Middle East were (and still are) extremely strained, a factor which could easily have made people way too uncomfortable to watch a movie where that tension was an integral part of the story.
The fact, therefore, that Affleck basically put his newly-rejuvenated career on the line for this movie, which was definitely going to be a hard sell, and came out on top testifies to what a box-office miracle this movie was, even if the grosses don't necessarily say so. This was made using a paltry $44.5 million budget, so the studio has definitely recovered its investment by now.
Much more than the receipts, however, considering the risk involved for everyone, especially the director, this movie's achievement at the box-office is no less than phenomenal. This was a movie that could so easily have gone wrong for Ben Affleck, but which arguably ended up being the best thing to ever happen to his career so far. What better way to celebrate one's definitive return to the big leagues with a $100 million North American gross and a passel of Academy Award Nominations?
It may not be a billion-dollar juggernaut, but Argo is, for me, a monumental gamble that paid off handsomely.
Next: My Ultimate 2012 Box-Office Champ
My List of Box-Office Champs for 2012 Part I
Another year in film has ended, and throughout the month of January many publications and organizations have started coming up with their "best of" lists. Box-office related websites have published their list of winners and losers for the 2012, most prominent of which is arguably boxofficemojo.com. Familiar faces, like the Avengers and Batman, have shown up on that particular list.
As someone who has been obsessed, for reasons I can no longer remember, with box-office earnings of Hollywood movies since his early adolescence, I have thought of compiling my own list of box-office champions for the past year. It's easy to name the top-earners, or the movies that made a mint relative to their tiny budgets, but I want to look at things from a slightly different perspective. My calculations are not based on sheer grosses, or even necessarily return on investment, but on slightly different criteria which I will explain with each and every entry. I should qualify that I have not seen all of the films on my list, and therefore my personal assessment of their quality has nothing to do with their inclusion. So as not to go on forever, I've limited my list to five films.
From last to first, my big winners of 2012 are:
5. Les Miserables (Global box-office to date: $234,701,295)
I have yet to see this film, but it is on my list, first and foremost, for the sheer ambition of its makers. Its global receipts, in an era when there are over a dozen films that have grossed over a billion dollars, and in which most global blockbusters need to make at least twice as much money as Les Mis did to even just break even, do not tell the whole story here. While the movie's reported budget itself was a relatively frugal $61 million, its realization was a monumental task that took years and unbelievable amounts of chutzpah. Adapting a world-renowned stage musical into a feature film is no mean feat (just ask Joel Schumacher and Gerard Butler, whose cinematic take on The Phantom of the Opera in 2004 went out with a whimper, not a bang). From throwing together the production to assembling cast members who could actually sing (again, unlike Gerard Butler) and act the parts to marketing the film in order to ensure that the fans of the stage musical would show up on opening day, director Tom Hooper and his crew faced a monumental challenge, and for hurdling it I think they deserve a huge pat on the back.
4. Ted (Global box-office to date: $503,015,487)
Like Les Mis, this is a movie I haven't seen but it was another ballsy move from Universal Pictures (which also produced Les Mis) considering the strange subject matter (a foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed teddy bear). To anyone who would argue that Seth MacFarlane is a marketable brand name, I can only say this; not even Twentieth Century Fox, for whose TV studio his shows like Family Guy, American Dad and The Cleveland Show have made mucho dinero, wanted to get behind the project. Comedy is usually a good bet, and star Mark Wahlberg has proven bankable in the past, but considering the somewhat unique plot this was still a risk for the studio, and they deserve the success they've gotten for taking it.
3. Life of Pi (Global box-office to date: $451,349,806)
Like I said in my review of this film, Ang Lee, as a rule, does not make the same movie twice. What makes this career decision particularly striking is the fact that this movie, shot in 3-D for the considerable budget of $120 million, did not have the participation of a single known Hollywood actor. The lead actor, Suraj Sharma, was in fact a complete newcomer to movies, Hollywood or otherwise. Ang Lee's name attached to this movie was essentially its only selling point, and his highest grossing films prior to this were martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the disappointing Hulk, neither of which managed to make more than $300 million at the global box office, but that did not stop Fox, a studio often alleged to be risk-averse, from gambling on an almost completely unknown cast of actors, and a story that mostly involved a young man interacting with a digital tiger. This film is Lee's biggest global box-office hit to date, and he and Twentieth Century Fox deserve the success they've reaped for daring to make this movie.
(To be continued)
As someone who has been obsessed, for reasons I can no longer remember, with box-office earnings of Hollywood movies since his early adolescence, I have thought of compiling my own list of box-office champions for the past year. It's easy to name the top-earners, or the movies that made a mint relative to their tiny budgets, but I want to look at things from a slightly different perspective. My calculations are not based on sheer grosses, or even necessarily return on investment, but on slightly different criteria which I will explain with each and every entry. I should qualify that I have not seen all of the films on my list, and therefore my personal assessment of their quality has nothing to do with their inclusion. So as not to go on forever, I've limited my list to five films.
From last to first, my big winners of 2012 are:
5. Les Miserables (Global box-office to date: $234,701,295)
I have yet to see this film, but it is on my list, first and foremost, for the sheer ambition of its makers. Its global receipts, in an era when there are over a dozen films that have grossed over a billion dollars, and in which most global blockbusters need to make at least twice as much money as Les Mis did to even just break even, do not tell the whole story here. While the movie's reported budget itself was a relatively frugal $61 million, its realization was a monumental task that took years and unbelievable amounts of chutzpah. Adapting a world-renowned stage musical into a feature film is no mean feat (just ask Joel Schumacher and Gerard Butler, whose cinematic take on The Phantom of the Opera in 2004 went out with a whimper, not a bang). From throwing together the production to assembling cast members who could actually sing (again, unlike Gerard Butler) and act the parts to marketing the film in order to ensure that the fans of the stage musical would show up on opening day, director Tom Hooper and his crew faced a monumental challenge, and for hurdling it I think they deserve a huge pat on the back.
4. Ted (Global box-office to date: $503,015,487)
Like Les Mis, this is a movie I haven't seen but it was another ballsy move from Universal Pictures (which also produced Les Mis) considering the strange subject matter (a foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed teddy bear). To anyone who would argue that Seth MacFarlane is a marketable brand name, I can only say this; not even Twentieth Century Fox, for whose TV studio his shows like Family Guy, American Dad and The Cleveland Show have made mucho dinero, wanted to get behind the project. Comedy is usually a good bet, and star Mark Wahlberg has proven bankable in the past, but considering the somewhat unique plot this was still a risk for the studio, and they deserve the success they've gotten for taking it.
3. Life of Pi (Global box-office to date: $451,349,806)
Like I said in my review of this film, Ang Lee, as a rule, does not make the same movie twice. What makes this career decision particularly striking is the fact that this movie, shot in 3-D for the considerable budget of $120 million, did not have the participation of a single known Hollywood actor. The lead actor, Suraj Sharma, was in fact a complete newcomer to movies, Hollywood or otherwise. Ang Lee's name attached to this movie was essentially its only selling point, and his highest grossing films prior to this were martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the disappointing Hulk, neither of which managed to make more than $300 million at the global box office, but that did not stop Fox, a studio often alleged to be risk-averse, from gambling on an almost completely unknown cast of actors, and a story that mostly involved a young man interacting with a digital tiger. This film is Lee's biggest global box-office hit to date, and he and Twentieth Century Fox deserve the success they've reaped for daring to make this movie.
(To be continued)
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
On Screwing Ben
There's a fairly old joke for situations in which a motion picture is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture while the director of said motion picture is not nominated for the Best Director award: "(insert title of film)" is apparently a film that directed itself. I don't know how old the joke is, but the first person I ever heard crack it was longtime Oscar host Billy Crystal way back in 1990.
It's a joke that still holds true today, with the Academy Award nominations for Best Director for films released in 2012 conspicuous for the absence of several high-profile names. Kathryn Bigelow, Oscar winner for 2009's The Hurt Locker and the first woman ever to win an Academy Award for Best Director, was shut out of the derby despite the fact that her highly-controversial film on the killing of Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, received a nod for Best Picture among others, as was Tom Hooper, who won the 2010 prize for The King's Speech, despite the fact that his adaptation of the musical phenomenon Les Miserables became the first musical since Dreamgirls to receive a nomination for Best Picture.
The exclusion that has arguably generated the most violent reaction, however, is that of Ben Affleck, who directed the spy-thriller Argo, a film which, prior to Affleck's exclusion from the Best Director category, was widely viewed as a strong contender for the top award. Affleck, like Bigelow and Hooper, has an Oscar under his belt, albeit one he won over fifteen years ago for co-writing Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon.
There is an inevitability to the exclusion of directors from the Best Director category considering that the field of nominees for Best Picture has expanded from five to ten while the number of slots available for Best Director nominees has stayed pegged at five. Affleck and company should take some consolation from knowing that, at least, they weren't overlooked in favor of someone who did not direct any of the nominees for Best Picture.
Still, this should be cold comfort to a guy who has pulled off one of the most remarkable career reinventions in recent years, and who deserves due recognition for what I and many others feel is a truly extraordinary film. Unlike Bigelow and Hooper, Affleck doesn't have a little golden man for Best Director sitting at home. The Golden Globe he just won may not quite cut it.
To my mind the main reason Ben Affleck's work on Argo deserves an Oscar (and not even just an Oscar nod) was the difficulty of the subject matter. Recent and even not-so-recent history shows that movies set in, or which touch upon events in the Middle East tend to be a really hard sell. Affleck's buddy Damon, who happens to be an extremely bankable movie star on a good day, learned this the hard way when he teamed with Bourne series director Paul Greengrass for the critically-reviled and commercially-ignored film The Green Zone, which was basically a heavy-handed critique of the Bush administration's incursion into Iraq in 2003. Damon's flop was the latest of a long line of films talking about war or political turbulence in the Middle East, including films including Ridley Scott's Body of Lies and Peter Berg's The Kingdom, Sam Mendez's Jarhead, among many others. Even Bigelow's Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker grossed chump change during its entire theatrical run. Not only that, but tensions between the United States and the Middle East, and in particular in Iran, remain high today. This makes the success of Argo, both with audiences and critics, a particularly outstanding achievement, and the fact that Affleck, the principal architect of this success, succeeded where many others before him had failed, easily merits a Best Director nod all by itself.
Affleck's exemplary treatment of the subject matter, I think, was really what made the difference between the film flopping like so many before it and becoming a breakout hit. The film was, as hard as this may be to believe, apolitical in a way, because it was not about the righteousness of either side of the political tension, but quite simply the peril faced by the men and women from the U.S. Embassy who hid in the Canadian Ambassador's house and by the man who took it on himself to bring them home. There was a touch of heavy-handedness in the way Affleck portrayed a couple of pivotal Iranian characters, but overall he made a film that transcended all politics, a film about unbelievable courage and heroism, pure and simple. The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences clearly recognized the virtues of this film, so why not attribute them to the guy who directed it? This particular mystery is really one for the books.
We mere mortals will probably never know why Ben Affleck was screwed out of an Oscar for Best Director for his work on Argo by the members of the AMPAS, but those of us who admire his work as a director can take considerable solace from knowing that this guy appears to have plenty left in the tank, and that as far as Ben's Oscar prospects are concerned, tomorrow is another day.
It's a joke that still holds true today, with the Academy Award nominations for Best Director for films released in 2012 conspicuous for the absence of several high-profile names. Kathryn Bigelow, Oscar winner for 2009's The Hurt Locker and the first woman ever to win an Academy Award for Best Director, was shut out of the derby despite the fact that her highly-controversial film on the killing of Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, received a nod for Best Picture among others, as was Tom Hooper, who won the 2010 prize for The King's Speech, despite the fact that his adaptation of the musical phenomenon Les Miserables became the first musical since Dreamgirls to receive a nomination for Best Picture.
The exclusion that has arguably generated the most violent reaction, however, is that of Ben Affleck, who directed the spy-thriller Argo, a film which, prior to Affleck's exclusion from the Best Director category, was widely viewed as a strong contender for the top award. Affleck, like Bigelow and Hooper, has an Oscar under his belt, albeit one he won over fifteen years ago for co-writing Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon.
There is an inevitability to the exclusion of directors from the Best Director category considering that the field of nominees for Best Picture has expanded from five to ten while the number of slots available for Best Director nominees has stayed pegged at five. Affleck and company should take some consolation from knowing that, at least, they weren't overlooked in favor of someone who did not direct any of the nominees for Best Picture.
Still, this should be cold comfort to a guy who has pulled off one of the most remarkable career reinventions in recent years, and who deserves due recognition for what I and many others feel is a truly extraordinary film. Unlike Bigelow and Hooper, Affleck doesn't have a little golden man for Best Director sitting at home. The Golden Globe he just won may not quite cut it.
To my mind the main reason Ben Affleck's work on Argo deserves an Oscar (and not even just an Oscar nod) was the difficulty of the subject matter. Recent and even not-so-recent history shows that movies set in, or which touch upon events in the Middle East tend to be a really hard sell. Affleck's buddy Damon, who happens to be an extremely bankable movie star on a good day, learned this the hard way when he teamed with Bourne series director Paul Greengrass for the critically-reviled and commercially-ignored film The Green Zone, which was basically a heavy-handed critique of the Bush administration's incursion into Iraq in 2003. Damon's flop was the latest of a long line of films talking about war or political turbulence in the Middle East, including films including Ridley Scott's Body of Lies and Peter Berg's The Kingdom, Sam Mendez's Jarhead, among many others. Even Bigelow's Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker grossed chump change during its entire theatrical run. Not only that, but tensions between the United States and the Middle East, and in particular in Iran, remain high today. This makes the success of Argo, both with audiences and critics, a particularly outstanding achievement, and the fact that Affleck, the principal architect of this success, succeeded where many others before him had failed, easily merits a Best Director nod all by itself.
Affleck's exemplary treatment of the subject matter, I think, was really what made the difference between the film flopping like so many before it and becoming a breakout hit. The film was, as hard as this may be to believe, apolitical in a way, because it was not about the righteousness of either side of the political tension, but quite simply the peril faced by the men and women from the U.S. Embassy who hid in the Canadian Ambassador's house and by the man who took it on himself to bring them home. There was a touch of heavy-handedness in the way Affleck portrayed a couple of pivotal Iranian characters, but overall he made a film that transcended all politics, a film about unbelievable courage and heroism, pure and simple. The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences clearly recognized the virtues of this film, so why not attribute them to the guy who directed it? This particular mystery is really one for the books.
We mere mortals will probably never know why Ben Affleck was screwed out of an Oscar for Best Director for his work on Argo by the members of the AMPAS, but those of us who admire his work as a director can take considerable solace from knowing that this guy appears to have plenty left in the tank, and that as far as Ben's Oscar prospects are concerned, tomorrow is another day.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Oscars 2013: Flipping the Bird at Fanboys? Part II
The ultimate effect of the shooting on public reception to The Dark Knight Rises will never be known, but even after the movie opened to less enthusiasm than The Avengers or even its predecessor, and even after people expressed the view that it was simply not as good a movie as The Dark Knight had been, there was still much love for Nolan's Batman swansong.
Earlier this week, the AMPAS finally released the complete list of nominees, and while it was not particularly surprising that neither The Dark Knight Rises nor The Avengers, featured in either of the major categories, what came to this particular fan as a genuine shock was that between these two intelligent, very well-made comic-book based movies produced by filmmakers with considerable pedigree and, between them, several Oscar wins or nominations, they could only muster one nomination: a single nod for the visual effects of The Avengers. The Dark Knight Rises was ignored completely.
Perhaps it would help to explain the reason behind my surprise. Since Richard Donner's Superman picked up three Oscar nominations and an award for its visual effects in 1978, movies based on comic books could almost always be counted on to garner some kind of recognition, if only for their technical achievements. Tim Burton's 1989 take on Batman took home an Oscar for Anton Furst's art direction. Two out of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy of films picked up a total of five nominations in visual effects and sound categories, with Spider-Man 2 winning the award for visual effects. The first Iron Man film picked up three Oscar nominations, albeit all in technical categories.
Christopher Nolan's Batman films, at least as far as awards and awards nominations are concerned, are pretty much in a class of their own. The first film in his trilogy, Batman Begins, scored a nomination for Best Cinematography, a relatively prestigious category, and The Dark Knight, even though it was snubbed for the major awards, snagged a whopping eight, nominations, eventually taking home two, one of which was for the late Heath Ledger's almost universally-acclaimed take on longtime Bat-villain the Joker.
That the last film in Nolan's Bat trilogy garnered zero nominations as opposed to the last film's eight, as well as the eight picked up by Nolan's last work, Inception, cannot possibly be an indictment of the film's overall craftsmanship, the standard of which Nolan quite arguably maintained, at least on many if not most levels. Heck, Richard Corliss, a highly respected film critic for TIME magazine, has put it on the magazine's yearly top ten list.
The same, to my mind, can be said of the lack of any other Oscar nominations for The Avengers apart from its visual effects, considering that the film, at least as a technical achievement, quite easily towers over the first Iron Man. I cannot even help but
It is my opinion that the shocking dearth of nominations for comic-book related films, even in the technical categories, is, more than anything else, a categorical statement of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that whatever anyone else may believe, they do not give a rat's ass what internet fanboys around the world think, a statement that they were willing to make even if it meant overlooking the hard work of dozens of highly deserving craftsmen and women. To put it another way, I think Oscar voters did this to spite fanboys. Sure, I could quite easily be wrong, but I dare the AMPAS as a body to openly disclose how they arrived at their decision making. They never will, for the same reason they'll never explain any of several dozen messed up choices for Best Picture or various other categories over 85 years.
This is what makes me angry enough to write such a long-winded post; assuming my theory is correct, it is thanks to the antics and ultimate self-importance of obnoxious fanboys so obsessed with a film they had not even seen yet that they were willing to post death threats to critics voicing their opinions, that the most prestigious awards-giving body for motion pictures in the entire world has decided to snub not just one but two highly successful comic book-based movies.
In the great scheme of things, the Oscars don't really matter. Some people in the film industry have won Oscars and yet gone on to see their careers crumble, and some people have gone their whole lives without winning Oscars and yet have had the respect of both audiences and their peers until their death. Not only that, but time and again the Oscars have been accused of being a corrupt political exercise, accusations which may not be entirely untrue. So really, if The Avengers only got one Oscar nod or The Dark Knight Rises got none it really is not any indication of either film's quality or lack of it.
The thing of it is...there are fans like me who don't threaten film critics or shout like maniacs on the internet, who would very much like to see the films we love rewarded with recognition, even if it is just in the technical categories. It would make us happy to see the people who worked hard to entertain us acknowledged and honored by their peers in the industry. This snub is genuinely frustrating to people like me.
Not only that, but in choosing their candidates for this year's Oscars, the members of the AMPAS did not completely shun popular movies; the billion-dollar James Bond mega-blockbuster, Skyfall, has scooped up five nominations including nods for Cinematography and Best Original Song. And there's still the lone Avengers nomination. Oscar doesn't hate popcorn movies by any stretch of the imagination, but in view of this monumental snub I'm starting to think he hates fanboys.
So, really, to the troglodytes who got rottentomatoes.com shut down and who may have given a lot of people the impression that devotees of comic-book based films are basically the scum of the earth, thanks a lot. It is quite possible that you have taken the gains made by the likes of Christopher Nolan, Jon Favreau and Joss Whedon, who have taken great pains to move comic book movies away from the camp with which they are too often associated and towards the respectability they deserve, and flushed them down the toilet. Looks like it's back to square one.
Earlier this week, the AMPAS finally released the complete list of nominees, and while it was not particularly surprising that neither The Dark Knight Rises nor The Avengers, featured in either of the major categories, what came to this particular fan as a genuine shock was that between these two intelligent, very well-made comic-book based movies produced by filmmakers with considerable pedigree and, between them, several Oscar wins or nominations, they could only muster one nomination: a single nod for the visual effects of The Avengers. The Dark Knight Rises was ignored completely.
Perhaps it would help to explain the reason behind my surprise. Since Richard Donner's Superman picked up three Oscar nominations and an award for its visual effects in 1978, movies based on comic books could almost always be counted on to garner some kind of recognition, if only for their technical achievements. Tim Burton's 1989 take on Batman took home an Oscar for Anton Furst's art direction. Two out of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy of films picked up a total of five nominations in visual effects and sound categories, with Spider-Man 2 winning the award for visual effects. The first Iron Man film picked up three Oscar nominations, albeit all in technical categories.
Christopher Nolan's Batman films, at least as far as awards and awards nominations are concerned, are pretty much in a class of their own. The first film in his trilogy, Batman Begins, scored a nomination for Best Cinematography, a relatively prestigious category, and The Dark Knight, even though it was snubbed for the major awards, snagged a whopping eight, nominations, eventually taking home two, one of which was for the late Heath Ledger's almost universally-acclaimed take on longtime Bat-villain the Joker.
That the last film in Nolan's Bat trilogy garnered zero nominations as opposed to the last film's eight, as well as the eight picked up by Nolan's last work, Inception, cannot possibly be an indictment of the film's overall craftsmanship, the standard of which Nolan quite arguably maintained, at least on many if not most levels. Heck, Richard Corliss, a highly respected film critic for TIME magazine, has put it on the magazine's yearly top ten list.
The same, to my mind, can be said of the lack of any other Oscar nominations for The Avengers apart from its visual effects, considering that the film, at least as a technical achievement, quite easily towers over the first Iron Man. I cannot even help but
It is my opinion that the shocking dearth of nominations for comic-book related films, even in the technical categories, is, more than anything else, a categorical statement of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that whatever anyone else may believe, they do not give a rat's ass what internet fanboys around the world think, a statement that they were willing to make even if it meant overlooking the hard work of dozens of highly deserving craftsmen and women. To put it another way, I think Oscar voters did this to spite fanboys. Sure, I could quite easily be wrong, but I dare the AMPAS as a body to openly disclose how they arrived at their decision making. They never will, for the same reason they'll never explain any of several dozen messed up choices for Best Picture or various other categories over 85 years.
This is what makes me angry enough to write such a long-winded post; assuming my theory is correct, it is thanks to the antics and ultimate self-importance of obnoxious fanboys so obsessed with a film they had not even seen yet that they were willing to post death threats to critics voicing their opinions, that the most prestigious awards-giving body for motion pictures in the entire world has decided to snub not just one but two highly successful comic book-based movies.
In the great scheme of things, the Oscars don't really matter. Some people in the film industry have won Oscars and yet gone on to see their careers crumble, and some people have gone their whole lives without winning Oscars and yet have had the respect of both audiences and their peers until their death. Not only that, but time and again the Oscars have been accused of being a corrupt political exercise, accusations which may not be entirely untrue. So really, if The Avengers only got one Oscar nod or The Dark Knight Rises got none it really is not any indication of either film's quality or lack of it.
The thing of it is...there are fans like me who don't threaten film critics or shout like maniacs on the internet, who would very much like to see the films we love rewarded with recognition, even if it is just in the technical categories. It would make us happy to see the people who worked hard to entertain us acknowledged and honored by their peers in the industry. This snub is genuinely frustrating to people like me.
Not only that, but in choosing their candidates for this year's Oscars, the members of the AMPAS did not completely shun popular movies; the billion-dollar James Bond mega-blockbuster, Skyfall, has scooped up five nominations including nods for Cinematography and Best Original Song. And there's still the lone Avengers nomination. Oscar doesn't hate popcorn movies by any stretch of the imagination, but in view of this monumental snub I'm starting to think he hates fanboys.
So, really, to the troglodytes who got rottentomatoes.com shut down and who may have given a lot of people the impression that devotees of comic-book based films are basically the scum of the earth, thanks a lot. It is quite possible that you have taken the gains made by the likes of Christopher Nolan, Jon Favreau and Joss Whedon, who have taken great pains to move comic book movies away from the camp with which they are too often associated and towards the respectability they deserve, and flushed them down the toilet. Looks like it's back to square one.
Oscars 2013: Flipping the Bird at Fanboys? Part I
In 2009, when the Academy Award nominations for films released in 2008 were announced, several netizens raised a hue and a cry over the exclusion of one film in particular from the Best Picture and Best Director category: Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, the second of his Batman trilogy of films. The film was the highest-grossing film of that year and was a critical favorite, and it was therefore argued by many that the reason for its exclusion was a deep-seated bias against films based on comic books.
It would appear that the Dark Knight backlash did not go unnoticed, as the next year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reinstated a practice that it had not used for decades; it expanded the field of Best Picture nominees to from five (5) to ten (10) nominees. As a result, the year after that, 2010, featured several commercial hits like Avatar, The Blind Side and District 9 vying for the top honor along with the usual "arthouse" fare. In 2011 the Academy nominated the work of the man whose omission from the 2009 awards was what caused so much uproar in the first place; Christopher Nolan's acclaimed science-fiction film Inception featured prominently that year with eight Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture, though Nolan was once again snubbed in the Best Director category.
Last year, the Academy showed that although the field for Best Picture had expanded, the awards were not about fulfilling populist expectations, as none of the nominees from that year's field of nine could really be described as a blockbuster hit. In fact, of all nine films, only one, had even grossed over $100 million in North America, usually viewed as the minimum benchmark for whether a film is a commercial success or not.
This year, 2013 could have been a benchmark year for films based on comic books in terms of recognition. In May of 2012, Marvel's The Avengers not only shattered box-office records but impressed critics the world over.
And then, the Dark Knight/Nolan fanboys struck.
While The Avengers knocked down record after record and was celebrated as a global phenomenon (with an eventual $1.5 billion gross), Dark Knight/Nolan fanboys infested movie and pop-culture related websites like aintitcool.com and comingsoon.net as well as Facebook pages of sites like boxofficemojo.com shouting at the top of their proverbial lungs that none of these records would matter once The Dark Knight Rises came out in July because it would destroy them all. It was annoying, but to anyone who had sat through their first wave of obnoxiousness in 2008, it was entirely expected.
When The Dark Knight Rises started screening for critics around the world, reviews started trickling in, many of which were posted on the online review aggregator rottentomatoes.com, and were quite overwhelmingly positive. However, they were not unanimously so.
And this was when the fanboys went from annoying to absolutely ridiculous.
When two reviewers whose names I forget dared to post negative reviews of The Dark Knights Rises, each of their reviews on RT was inundated with hundreds of hate messages, almost entirely from fans who, unlike the reviewers, had not actually seen the film, most of which were infantile, and more than a few of which were apparently rather alarming. These comments included death threats and more than a few obscenities which were apparently so menacing that the site administrators saw fit to disable the commenting section for several days. The unpleasant incident was reported by several online media outlets.
Then, of course, the Aurora, Colorado shooting happened during a regular screening of The Dark Knight Rises, and the empty threats of fans hiding behind their keyboards became trivial in comparison to this very real act of senseless violence.
...to be continued...
It would appear that the Dark Knight backlash did not go unnoticed, as the next year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reinstated a practice that it had not used for decades; it expanded the field of Best Picture nominees to from five (5) to ten (10) nominees. As a result, the year after that, 2010, featured several commercial hits like Avatar, The Blind Side and District 9 vying for the top honor along with the usual "arthouse" fare. In 2011 the Academy nominated the work of the man whose omission from the 2009 awards was what caused so much uproar in the first place; Christopher Nolan's acclaimed science-fiction film Inception featured prominently that year with eight Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture, though Nolan was once again snubbed in the Best Director category.
Last year, the Academy showed that although the field for Best Picture had expanded, the awards were not about fulfilling populist expectations, as none of the nominees from that year's field of nine could really be described as a blockbuster hit. In fact, of all nine films, only one, had even grossed over $100 million in North America, usually viewed as the minimum benchmark for whether a film is a commercial success or not.
This year, 2013 could have been a benchmark year for films based on comic books in terms of recognition. In May of 2012, Marvel's The Avengers not only shattered box-office records but impressed critics the world over.
And then, the Dark Knight/Nolan fanboys struck.
While The Avengers knocked down record after record and was celebrated as a global phenomenon (with an eventual $1.5 billion gross), Dark Knight/Nolan fanboys infested movie and pop-culture related websites like aintitcool.com and comingsoon.net as well as Facebook pages of sites like boxofficemojo.com shouting at the top of their proverbial lungs that none of these records would matter once The Dark Knight Rises came out in July because it would destroy them all. It was annoying, but to anyone who had sat through their first wave of obnoxiousness in 2008, it was entirely expected.
When The Dark Knight Rises started screening for critics around the world, reviews started trickling in, many of which were posted on the online review aggregator rottentomatoes.com, and were quite overwhelmingly positive. However, they were not unanimously so.
And this was when the fanboys went from annoying to absolutely ridiculous.
When two reviewers whose names I forget dared to post negative reviews of The Dark Knights Rises, each of their reviews on RT was inundated with hundreds of hate messages, almost entirely from fans who, unlike the reviewers, had not actually seen the film, most of which were infantile, and more than a few of which were apparently rather alarming. These comments included death threats and more than a few obscenities which were apparently so menacing that the site administrators saw fit to disable the commenting section for several days. The unpleasant incident was reported by several online media outlets.
Then, of course, the Aurora, Colorado shooting happened during a regular screening of The Dark Knight Rises, and the empty threats of fans hiding behind their keyboards became trivial in comparison to this very real act of senseless violence.
...to be continued...
Monday, January 14, 2013
Shipwrecked in a Dream: A Review of the Life of Pi
As far as I know, filmmaker Ang Lee has never made the same type of movie twice. This is, according to an interview he gave a few years back, by design. Looking at his resume, I can totally believe this assertion; his body of work includes an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel (Sense and Sensibility, 1995), a Chinese martial arts epic (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), a superhero movie (Hulk, 2003), a love story between gay cowboys (Brokeback Mountain, 2005), an erotic thriller set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai (Lust, Caution, 2007) among others.
The Life of Pi goes a long way towards reinforcing Lee's reputation for keeping his resume varied, and towards enhancing his reputation as a master filmmaker capable of just about anything on which he sets his artistic sights. Based on the novel by Yann Martel, the film is about a young Indian boy, Piscine Molitor Patel, nicknamed "Pi" and how he survives a shipwreck that kills his entire family.
The story begins with a Canadian writer (Rafe Spall) interviewing the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) about his life experiences, having been introduced to Pi by the latter's uncle. Pi then recounts his story, from the origin of his given name and nickname, to the time he decided to practice three religions, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam, all at the same time in a quest to be closer to God, to the time he found himself lost at sea.
His family, based in Pondicherry, India, owns a zoo, but as time goes by his father opts to sell the zoo to Canadian buyers and to relocate his wife and two sons, of whom Pi is the younger, to Winnipeg. During the lengthy boat ride from India to Canada, however, the family is waylaid by a storm that ends up sinking the entire ship. Pi and a handful of animals from the zoo survive on the ship's lifeboat, including an adult Bengal tiger named, oddly enough, Richard Parker. The story that follows is a truly strange one, interspersing Pi's actual experiences and visions or hallucinations so often that at times it becomes difficult to tell the difference between what happened to him and what he only thinks happened to him, though one thing is clear; he feels that these experiences have defined his relationship with God.
In this day and age in which "religion" is treated like a four-letter word it was actually refreshing to see a film that managed to talk about religion openly, and yet which managed at the same time to avoid being preachy or overbearing, as many "faith-based" films can often be. Perhaps one reason all mention of religion is so easy to swallow is the positively buoyant quality of Lee's work here; he deftly mixes topnotch acting, cinematography, music, and wonderfully whimsical digital effects to tell his tale, and if time and budget allow me I dearly hope to watch this in 3-D, the way I think it was meant to be seen.
This film has often been compared to Robert Zemeckis' 2000 film Cast Away, in which Tom Hanks played a Fed Ex employee stranded on an island in the middle of nowhere with only a volleyball for company, and to be fair the comparison is, to an extent, valid, given that both films are largely about the power of the human spirit, but Lee's story is not merely one of survival against the odds, but of finding the divine in unimaginably hostile conditions. After all, Tom Hanks' character did not have to live at sea with a Bengal tiger constantly trying to eat him.
In this respect, furthermore, newcomer Suraj Sharma does an outstanding job as the 16-year-old Pi Patel (with Khan playing his adult version and other actors portraying the character as young children). This is an actor whose very first feature film called upon him to spend most of the film in a water tank acting opposite nothing, or at the very best, markers where the eventual digital creatures would appear, and yet he is utterly convincing. He took me on Pi's journey of loss and pain, anxiety and survival, and eventual epiphany and redemption. It's an exhilarating trip, one enhanced by some topnotch visual effects through which Lee is able to depict the encounters with the various zoo animals, especially the fierce Richard Parker, a whale and various other species of sea life, and even Pi's trippy hallucinations.
All things considered, apart from Sharma (and to a lesser extent Khan, whose narrator is actually a bit of a narrative cop-out for reasons I will explain later) the only other real star of this movie is the tiger Richard Parker, who is portrayed in the film through a combination of computer-generated imagery, animatronics and use of a live animal. Rhythm and Hues, the visual effects studio that won an Academy Award for the talking animals in 1995's Babe: The Gallant Pig, and that won over the hearts of C.S. Lewis devotees with their spectacular rendition of Aslan the Lion in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, are responsible for the digital version of Richard Parker, and I dare say this is some of their finest work.
I think it is to the ultimate credit of Lee and his visual effects crew that in probably all but the most extreme scenes it is next to impossible to tell which particular device is being used to portray the tiger at any given time; I tend to think most viewers, like myself, would assume the tiger was only CGI when he was too close to Sharma to be anything else without putting the actor in the peril of his life, or when he was called on to do stunts which may be deemed cruelty to animals. At any rate, Richard Parker is a special effect for which recognition is definitely in order, and as big a fan as I may be of Marvel's The Avengers, the sole Academy Award nomination of which is for Best Visual Effects, I seriously hope that that The Life of Pi takes home that particular prize.
For all its virtues, though, I confess that I was not all that fond of the "narrator" device, especially when I found out that this was not part of the book but introduced solely for the film. It robs the audience of some suspense by disclosing, right out of the gate, that whatever happens to Pi, he will survive his ordeal, apart from the fact that it's a rather overused technique which was prominently employed in films like Titanic and Saving Private Ryan.
Still, I suppose the filmmakers, who plunked down $120 million on what had to have been a somewhat risky venture considering the subject matter and the complete absence of any bankable movie star, had to hedge their bets one way or another.
All things considered, though, this is a minor quibble as the film was just one of the most wondrous viewing experiences I have had watching a film released in 2012, and whatever accolades and awards this movie receives, I am firmly convinced that it will thoroughly deserve them.
5/5
The Life of Pi goes a long way towards reinforcing Lee's reputation for keeping his resume varied, and towards enhancing his reputation as a master filmmaker capable of just about anything on which he sets his artistic sights. Based on the novel by Yann Martel, the film is about a young Indian boy, Piscine Molitor Patel, nicknamed "Pi" and how he survives a shipwreck that kills his entire family.
The story begins with a Canadian writer (Rafe Spall) interviewing the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) about his life experiences, having been introduced to Pi by the latter's uncle. Pi then recounts his story, from the origin of his given name and nickname, to the time he decided to practice three religions, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam, all at the same time in a quest to be closer to God, to the time he found himself lost at sea.
His family, based in Pondicherry, India, owns a zoo, but as time goes by his father opts to sell the zoo to Canadian buyers and to relocate his wife and two sons, of whom Pi is the younger, to Winnipeg. During the lengthy boat ride from India to Canada, however, the family is waylaid by a storm that ends up sinking the entire ship. Pi and a handful of animals from the zoo survive on the ship's lifeboat, including an adult Bengal tiger named, oddly enough, Richard Parker. The story that follows is a truly strange one, interspersing Pi's actual experiences and visions or hallucinations so often that at times it becomes difficult to tell the difference between what happened to him and what he only thinks happened to him, though one thing is clear; he feels that these experiences have defined his relationship with God.
In this day and age in which "religion" is treated like a four-letter word it was actually refreshing to see a film that managed to talk about religion openly, and yet which managed at the same time to avoid being preachy or overbearing, as many "faith-based" films can often be. Perhaps one reason all mention of religion is so easy to swallow is the positively buoyant quality of Lee's work here; he deftly mixes topnotch acting, cinematography, music, and wonderfully whimsical digital effects to tell his tale, and if time and budget allow me I dearly hope to watch this in 3-D, the way I think it was meant to be seen.
This film has often been compared to Robert Zemeckis' 2000 film Cast Away, in which Tom Hanks played a Fed Ex employee stranded on an island in the middle of nowhere with only a volleyball for company, and to be fair the comparison is, to an extent, valid, given that both films are largely about the power of the human spirit, but Lee's story is not merely one of survival against the odds, but of finding the divine in unimaginably hostile conditions. After all, Tom Hanks' character did not have to live at sea with a Bengal tiger constantly trying to eat him.
In this respect, furthermore, newcomer Suraj Sharma does an outstanding job as the 16-year-old Pi Patel (with Khan playing his adult version and other actors portraying the character as young children). This is an actor whose very first feature film called upon him to spend most of the film in a water tank acting opposite nothing, or at the very best, markers where the eventual digital creatures would appear, and yet he is utterly convincing. He took me on Pi's journey of loss and pain, anxiety and survival, and eventual epiphany and redemption. It's an exhilarating trip, one enhanced by some topnotch visual effects through which Lee is able to depict the encounters with the various zoo animals, especially the fierce Richard Parker, a whale and various other species of sea life, and even Pi's trippy hallucinations.
All things considered, apart from Sharma (and to a lesser extent Khan, whose narrator is actually a bit of a narrative cop-out for reasons I will explain later) the only other real star of this movie is the tiger Richard Parker, who is portrayed in the film through a combination of computer-generated imagery, animatronics and use of a live animal. Rhythm and Hues, the visual effects studio that won an Academy Award for the talking animals in 1995's Babe: The Gallant Pig, and that won over the hearts of C.S. Lewis devotees with their spectacular rendition of Aslan the Lion in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, are responsible for the digital version of Richard Parker, and I dare say this is some of their finest work.
I think it is to the ultimate credit of Lee and his visual effects crew that in probably all but the most extreme scenes it is next to impossible to tell which particular device is being used to portray the tiger at any given time; I tend to think most viewers, like myself, would assume the tiger was only CGI when he was too close to Sharma to be anything else without putting the actor in the peril of his life, or when he was called on to do stunts which may be deemed cruelty to animals. At any rate, Richard Parker is a special effect for which recognition is definitely in order, and as big a fan as I may be of Marvel's The Avengers, the sole Academy Award nomination of which is for Best Visual Effects, I seriously hope that that The Life of Pi takes home that particular prize.
For all its virtues, though, I confess that I was not all that fond of the "narrator" device, especially when I found out that this was not part of the book but introduced solely for the film. It robs the audience of some suspense by disclosing, right out of the gate, that whatever happens to Pi, he will survive his ordeal, apart from the fact that it's a rather overused technique which was prominently employed in films like Titanic and Saving Private Ryan.
Still, I suppose the filmmakers, who plunked down $120 million on what had to have been a somewhat risky venture considering the subject matter and the complete absence of any bankable movie star, had to hedge their bets one way or another.
All things considered, though, this is a minor quibble as the film was just one of the most wondrous viewing experiences I have had watching a film released in 2012, and whatever accolades and awards this movie receives, I am firmly convinced that it will thoroughly deserve them.
5/5
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