There's a very clever movie out on DVD titled Mrs. Henderson Presents which was directed by Stephen Frears and starred Dame Judi Dench as the titular Mrs. Henderson and Bob Hoskins as Vivian Van Damm, the man who helped her run, of all things, a burlesque show in Britain at the height of World War II. The twist was that under English law, girly shows weren't allowed and the only way around the loophole was for the women in Mrs. Henderson's shows to stand perfectly still. So she presented dozens of naked girls on "frozen tableaus" while performers sang before them. In one scene, a naughty college student lets loose a mouse on stage, causing the naked women to recoil in fright. Van Damm rushes the college student and his friends out of the theater, yelling about what a scandal they have caused, only to turn to his assistant shortly afterwards and quietly order him to pay other young men to let loose another mouse on the stage during another performance. All just part of the show.
A couple of days ago, Marvel Studios held a special screening of Captain America: The First Avenger, for the U.S. Military. I had no idea such a screening even took place until someone posted a video on Facebook that had apparently been taken at that screening of what was described as a teaser for Marvel's upcoming movie The Avengers. The video having been taken (supposedly) on the sly and in a darkened room, it was of course of absolutely wretched quality. That particular video has since been removed from the site, but eagle-eyed fanboys looking for the bootleg footage will probably be able to find it scattered here and there for the next 48 hours or so.
Now, this close to its release, there were already reviews all over the place for Marvel Studios' Thor, and even for 20th Century Fox's X-Men: First Class. Three days before its release in the U.S., there has yet to be a single review of Captain America: the First Avenger, on either rottentomatoes.com, metacritic.com, or even "fanboy" havens like aintitcoolnews.com. Instead, Paramount Pictures and Marvel Studios have opted to push the film hard with trailers and TV spots, several dozen of which have been bombarding TV and the internet in the last couple of weeks.
Not being a marketing guy I have no idea what the thinking is behind the review embargo, though past experience has revealed that it often is not a good sign. What I really don't get is why Marvel not only screened the movie from someone other than the media but gave them something to leak to the public. How about some glowing reviews instead?
To me, this tactic, coupled with the bombardment of TV ads, feels like Marvel's belated way of responding to the Harry Potter juggernaut; while dozens of average joes like myself who want to see this movie succeed are still scratching our heads as to why Marvel chose to position it just one week after a film touted to be the biggest of the summer instead of pitting it against a similarly untested product as Jon Favreau's Cowboys and Aliens, apparently Marvel's marketing whizzes already have it all figured out. Or maybe they don't, considering the deluge of TV teasers and now this "leaked footage" stunt.
Now, while I'm not quite rooting for this movie the way I was for the first Spider-Man film or even Iron Man, I still want this movie to be good, and to succeed. I can only assume Marvel does too, considering how much is riding on it.
I just wish they wouldn't insult the collective intelligence of their viewers with this "leaked" nonsense, considering that they're making a major play for our hard-earned cash.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Saturday, July 16, 2011
All Things Must End: A Review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Prior to watching this film I had neither read the book nor seen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I, so watching this movie definitely felt like walking into the middle of a much longer one, or opening a book in the middle. Fortunately, it didn't take me all that long to get up to speed given the urgency with which the story was told. As I want this review to be spoiler-free, I will discuss precious little of the actual story, given the considerable number of twists and turns the narrative takes before the very end.
All that the viewer needs to know is that this is the end; this is the last Harry Potter movie that will ever be made unless and until some troupe of filmmakers decide to reboot the series some twenty-odd years from now. This is the ultimate throw-down between Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and the wizard once known as Tom Riddle and now known as Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). This one's for all the marbles. People die. Tears are shed. Hard decisions are made, and in the end, only one is left standing.
The nice thing about the Potter movies is that they have tended to improve the closer they get to the conclusion. The first two were by-the-numbers in their fealty to the book and simply did not feel terribly compelling to me. It did not help that they were stacked against rival fantasy franchise The Lord of the Rings, which provided an instant point of comparison, with the films of then-series director Chris Columbus' Potter films ultimately losing the fight.
Of course, as everyone who follows these things knows, three years later and roughly 3 billion dollars later the Tolkien adaptations wrapped up, while the Potter series still had several books yet to be adapted, and after Columbus left the series to squander the goodwill he'd earned by unsuccessfully adapting things like the wildly popular musical Rent and the well-received young adult books Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the Potter films got both better and darker as the series progressed.
The series really settled into a nice rhythm when David Yates came on board with the fifth film. There was, from that point onward, a consistency of tone that really served the storytelling well.
Still, as good as the movies got, I never really quite got over the "Tolkien lite" feel that the earlier films conveyed. Maybe it was the urgency of the characters' mission, or something like that, but for some reason I never really quite got the sense of peril that I felt when watching the LOTR characters face off against their enemies, which is ironic considering that all told, the last three Potter films have a higher body count of supporting characters than the LOTR films.
That changed with this film; Yates seriously upped his game. From the music to the effects to the deliciously dark cinematography, Yates dials the sense of menace up to eleven. Certain things like tend to keep levity throughout the film, Helena Bonham-Carter's scenery chewing as Bellatrix LeStrange and Rupert Grint's general goofiness as Ron Weasley are, for the most part, discarded (though Ron and Neville Longbottom still sneak in a chuckle or two), so as not to distract from the fact that this film, as all the marketing material suggests, is all about Harry and Voldemort.
It'll be interesting to see Radcliffe's first mainstream post-Potter role; he may have acted on stage but really, until he gets out there, in a series of mainstream movies, and probably even then, he will always be Harry Potter to the public in the same way Sean Connery, for all of his accolades and even his Oscar, will always be James Bond. Still, the interesting thing to see will be how well he can render a character whose journey does not quite parallel his own the way Harry's did. Sure, he was never a wizard who had to save the world, but just as his character did Radcliffe went from boy to man in the years that the eight movies spanned, starting out tentatively and acquiring experience and confidence as the years and movies passed.
While I'm looking forward to Fiennes' next portrayal of a tortured soul (though not, I must admit to another turn as Hades), I confess I'll look back on his work in this series, and in this film in particular, with some fondness. The Voldemort of this film is decidedly more nuanced than the one who tore up the scenery in the last few he was in; this Voldemort talks about "burying your dead with dignity" and actually comes across as the walking wounded, in stark contrast to Dumbledore who, it is revealed, is far more coldly calculating than we had previously been led to believe. My wife even mentioned to me that one of the biggest revelations of the Deathly Hallows book is just how corrupt Dumbledore really was, something which, while touched upon in the films (though like I said, I haven't seen Part I), is not quite that developed. I wonder how far a bolder filmmaker would have gone with that notion. Still, I have to give Yates and Co. full kudos for that one scene in the third act...
(spoiler alert)
featuring that bloody little Voldemort fetus. That was some seriously creepy stuff that, had it not been handled well, could have earned the movie an 'R' rating, to the obvious detriment of the grosses. Very ballsy stuff.
(end spoiler alert)
It's still not a perfect film, and I cannot discuss my main objections to it because they may involve spoilers, but it was, overall, a well-made film. I'm pretty sure Peter Jackson could have done better with it, but Yates does himself proud.
Definitely a worthy sendoff for one of the most lucrative film franchises of all time.
4.5/5
All that the viewer needs to know is that this is the end; this is the last Harry Potter movie that will ever be made unless and until some troupe of filmmakers decide to reboot the series some twenty-odd years from now. This is the ultimate throw-down between Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and the wizard once known as Tom Riddle and now known as Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). This one's for all the marbles. People die. Tears are shed. Hard decisions are made, and in the end, only one is left standing.
The nice thing about the Potter movies is that they have tended to improve the closer they get to the conclusion. The first two were by-the-numbers in their fealty to the book and simply did not feel terribly compelling to me. It did not help that they were stacked against rival fantasy franchise The Lord of the Rings, which provided an instant point of comparison, with the films of then-series director Chris Columbus' Potter films ultimately losing the fight.
Of course, as everyone who follows these things knows, three years later and roughly 3 billion dollars later the Tolkien adaptations wrapped up, while the Potter series still had several books yet to be adapted, and after Columbus left the series to squander the goodwill he'd earned by unsuccessfully adapting things like the wildly popular musical Rent and the well-received young adult books Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the Potter films got both better and darker as the series progressed.
The series really settled into a nice rhythm when David Yates came on board with the fifth film. There was, from that point onward, a consistency of tone that really served the storytelling well.
Still, as good as the movies got, I never really quite got over the "Tolkien lite" feel that the earlier films conveyed. Maybe it was the urgency of the characters' mission, or something like that, but for some reason I never really quite got the sense of peril that I felt when watching the LOTR characters face off against their enemies, which is ironic considering that all told, the last three Potter films have a higher body count of supporting characters than the LOTR films.
That changed with this film; Yates seriously upped his game. From the music to the effects to the deliciously dark cinematography, Yates dials the sense of menace up to eleven. Certain things like tend to keep levity throughout the film, Helena Bonham-Carter's scenery chewing as Bellatrix LeStrange and Rupert Grint's general goofiness as Ron Weasley are, for the most part, discarded (though Ron and Neville Longbottom still sneak in a chuckle or two), so as not to distract from the fact that this film, as all the marketing material suggests, is all about Harry and Voldemort.
It'll be interesting to see Radcliffe's first mainstream post-Potter role; he may have acted on stage but really, until he gets out there, in a series of mainstream movies, and probably even then, he will always be Harry Potter to the public in the same way Sean Connery, for all of his accolades and even his Oscar, will always be James Bond. Still, the interesting thing to see will be how well he can render a character whose journey does not quite parallel his own the way Harry's did. Sure, he was never a wizard who had to save the world, but just as his character did Radcliffe went from boy to man in the years that the eight movies spanned, starting out tentatively and acquiring experience and confidence as the years and movies passed.
While I'm looking forward to Fiennes' next portrayal of a tortured soul (though not, I must admit to another turn as Hades), I confess I'll look back on his work in this series, and in this film in particular, with some fondness. The Voldemort of this film is decidedly more nuanced than the one who tore up the scenery in the last few he was in; this Voldemort talks about "burying your dead with dignity" and actually comes across as the walking wounded, in stark contrast to Dumbledore who, it is revealed, is far more coldly calculating than we had previously been led to believe. My wife even mentioned to me that one of the biggest revelations of the Deathly Hallows book is just how corrupt Dumbledore really was, something which, while touched upon in the films (though like I said, I haven't seen Part I), is not quite that developed. I wonder how far a bolder filmmaker would have gone with that notion. Still, I have to give Yates and Co. full kudos for that one scene in the third act...
(spoiler alert)
featuring that bloody little Voldemort fetus. That was some seriously creepy stuff that, had it not been handled well, could have earned the movie an 'R' rating, to the obvious detriment of the grosses. Very ballsy stuff.
(end spoiler alert)
It's still not a perfect film, and I cannot discuss my main objections to it because they may involve spoilers, but it was, overall, a well-made film. I'm pretty sure Peter Jackson could have done better with it, but Yates does himself proud.
Definitely a worthy sendoff for one of the most lucrative film franchises of all time.
4.5/5
Friday, July 1, 2011
The Movie Almost Nobody Will See This Weekend: A Review of Monte Carlo
I enjoyed films like Norman Jewison's Only You, with Robert Downey Jr. and Marissa Tomei, the late Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley with Matt Damon, and Michael Winterbottom's Genova, with Colin Firth, largely because of good scripts and compelling performances by the lead actors, but a huge part of the experience, and I'm sure the filmmakers know this, was the location, which was integral to the story of all three of those movies. All three of these movies were set in idyllic Italian cities, and the vistas really did just take my breath away. Those movies put me there, in the moment, in those glorious European locations. It's the same thing with the better James Bond movies, and would have been the same thing with Iron Man 2 but for the fact that the scenes of the film that took place in Monaco were fleeting.
The promise of a movie that takes place mostly in Monaco, therefore, was reason enough for me to want to see it, and reason enough for me to ignore the fact that the film, a starring vehicle for Disney pop princess Selena Gomez, was basically tween girl fodder.
The story is generic enough; Grace (Gomez), a fresh high school graduate from Texas, goes off to France with the money she's been earning waiting tables and saving for four years. She's accompanied by her best friend Emma (Katie Cassidy), also a waitress, and is forced to go with her stepsister Meg (Leighton Meester) who went to high school with Emma, who apparently didn't bother going to college, and who doesn't think much of her, or of Grace.
The trip turns out to be an unmitigated disaster; the accommodations are terrible, and the trio are saddled with a tour guide intent to sprint them through all of the attractions in Paris. When the girls linger at the Eiffel Tower, they end up getting left behind by the bus and have to make it back to their hotel on foot, something that becomes even harder when they get caught in the rain. They take refuge at what appears to be a very posh hotel, and while they are drying off in the ladies room, with Grace crying in a toilet stall and Meg and Emma standing around the powder area in awkward silence, a young woman who looks exactly like Grace walks in chatting on her cellphone. It seems this young woman, Cordelia Scott (also Gomez) is a filthy rich British heiress who is billeted at the hotel but who has no intentions of hanging around as she has another agenda altogether. When she leaves, Emma, seeing a way out of their hellish holiday, suggests that Grace impersonate Cordelia, which, after a moment of waffling and despite Meg's stern warning, she does, specifically when the hotel staff intercept her in the lobby and present her with a twenty-pound lobster.
As it turns out, Cordelia has a paid trip to Monte Carlo waiting for her, which the girls take while Cordelia is off playing hooky. High jinks, naturally, ensue, involving boys, dancing, fabulous jewelry and clothes, blah, blah, blah teen girls' wet dreams. After an altogether predictable turn of events the girls learn important lessons about self-esteem and social status and all of that and everyone ends up happily ever after.
Now, to be fair, from a storytelling perspective, the movie wasn't a complete waste of time. Gomez shows some earnestness in her portrayal of a young woman who has worked hard and who feels she deserves more than life has given her, before she realizes just how lucky she is. There was a part of me that could relate to someone who felt she deserved more out of life considering what she put into it, and who would embrace, however reluctantly, the chance to live the high life, if only for a moment.
At the end of the day, though, I didn't find her performance compelling enough for me to forget how utterly trite the script was. Worse still, she utterly failed to convince me that she could be a spoiled British heiress.
What really killed the narrative were unintentionally funny things like Katie Cassidy's Southern drawl coming and going, and the really goofy way Leighton Meester, uptight for most of the film, portrayed Meg letting her hair down, so to speak, while enjoying nightlife with an Australian backpacker. I even found myself snickering at little things like a sunbathing scene where Gomez appeared to be wearing a pushup bra. If the direction, script or performances had been any better I'm pretty sure I could have overlooked the little kinks but as I watched one well-worn storytelling trope after another unfold I really couldn't help myself. Ultimately, the biggest laugh I got out of the whole thing was seeing twenty-something straight males singing Gomez's "Who Says" in falsetto when I went to the men's room after the whole thing was done.
The good news, though, is that at the end of the day I got what I came for: some really glorious shots of Monte Carlo, though still not as many as I would have wanted to see from a film titled "Monte Carlo." Ah well. I'm still glad I watched this instead of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
Score: 2/5
The promise of a movie that takes place mostly in Monaco, therefore, was reason enough for me to want to see it, and reason enough for me to ignore the fact that the film, a starring vehicle for Disney pop princess Selena Gomez, was basically tween girl fodder.
The story is generic enough; Grace (Gomez), a fresh high school graduate from Texas, goes off to France with the money she's been earning waiting tables and saving for four years. She's accompanied by her best friend Emma (Katie Cassidy), also a waitress, and is forced to go with her stepsister Meg (Leighton Meester) who went to high school with Emma, who apparently didn't bother going to college, and who doesn't think much of her, or of Grace.
The trip turns out to be an unmitigated disaster; the accommodations are terrible, and the trio are saddled with a tour guide intent to sprint them through all of the attractions in Paris. When the girls linger at the Eiffel Tower, they end up getting left behind by the bus and have to make it back to their hotel on foot, something that becomes even harder when they get caught in the rain. They take refuge at what appears to be a very posh hotel, and while they are drying off in the ladies room, with Grace crying in a toilet stall and Meg and Emma standing around the powder area in awkward silence, a young woman who looks exactly like Grace walks in chatting on her cellphone. It seems this young woman, Cordelia Scott (also Gomez) is a filthy rich British heiress who is billeted at the hotel but who has no intentions of hanging around as she has another agenda altogether. When she leaves, Emma, seeing a way out of their hellish holiday, suggests that Grace impersonate Cordelia, which, after a moment of waffling and despite Meg's stern warning, she does, specifically when the hotel staff intercept her in the lobby and present her with a twenty-pound lobster.
As it turns out, Cordelia has a paid trip to Monte Carlo waiting for her, which the girls take while Cordelia is off playing hooky. High jinks, naturally, ensue, involving boys, dancing, fabulous jewelry and clothes, blah, blah, blah teen girls' wet dreams. After an altogether predictable turn of events the girls learn important lessons about self-esteem and social status and all of that and everyone ends up happily ever after.
Now, to be fair, from a storytelling perspective, the movie wasn't a complete waste of time. Gomez shows some earnestness in her portrayal of a young woman who has worked hard and who feels she deserves more than life has given her, before she realizes just how lucky she is. There was a part of me that could relate to someone who felt she deserved more out of life considering what she put into it, and who would embrace, however reluctantly, the chance to live the high life, if only for a moment.
At the end of the day, though, I didn't find her performance compelling enough for me to forget how utterly trite the script was. Worse still, she utterly failed to convince me that she could be a spoiled British heiress.
What really killed the narrative were unintentionally funny things like Katie Cassidy's Southern drawl coming and going, and the really goofy way Leighton Meester, uptight for most of the film, portrayed Meg letting her hair down, so to speak, while enjoying nightlife with an Australian backpacker. I even found myself snickering at little things like a sunbathing scene where Gomez appeared to be wearing a pushup bra. If the direction, script or performances had been any better I'm pretty sure I could have overlooked the little kinks but as I watched one well-worn storytelling trope after another unfold I really couldn't help myself. Ultimately, the biggest laugh I got out of the whole thing was seeing twenty-something straight males singing Gomez's "Who Says" in falsetto when I went to the men's room after the whole thing was done.
The good news, though, is that at the end of the day I got what I came for: some really glorious shots of Monte Carlo, though still not as many as I would have wanted to see from a film titled "Monte Carlo." Ah well. I'm still glad I watched this instead of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
Score: 2/5
Saturday, June 25, 2011
The Lessons of Super 8
The film Super 8 may not necessarily be everyone's cup of tea--I know I had my issues with it (as articulated a few posts back with my review)--but its apparent success at the box-office means it has a thing or two to teach people about how to make a hit movie. It may not have pulled in Avatar numbers, and at least one box-office analyst has described it as a failure given the aggressive marketing campaign, but J.J. Abram's love letter to Spielberg and his coming-of-age movies in the 1980s, when all is said and done, will be remembered as one of the true financial successes of the 2011 U.S. summer movie season. It has a few lessons to teach about selling a non-franchise film to today's summer audiences, in particular the coveted 18 to 35 demographic:
1. Familiarity is Essential - people embraced Avatar because, like it or not, James Cameron was the biggest upfront attraction, and people wanted to see what he could do twelve years after Titanic. Peter Jackson's name on District 9 made sure that Neil Blomkamp's film got noticed; it could have just as easily have been an obscure art-house affair or, even worse, been consigned to direct-to-DVD oblivion. People went to see Super 8 because of Steven Spielberg, whose name featured prominently on the marketing materials and because the film was pushed as an homage to his earlier work. These days, and in this economy, people want to see names they know.
2. Starpower NOT Essential - This one's a no-brainer and is a lesson already borne in mind by most people launching franchises; don't waste money on "name" actors. Megawatt movie stars like Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise all have one thing in common: none of them have headlined 300+ million blockbusters, and those angling to launch franchises are all aware of this. It's a fact made even more dramatic in movies like Super 8 where, apart from having no big name actors, there is no merchandising angle to be found anywhere.
3. Style Must Be Accompanied by Substance - Now, this maxim may be easily debunked by referring to the runaway popularity of things like the Transformers movies, but at the end of the day it's still important to make a good movie, especially when the filmmaker doesn't have the strength of a popular toy line or comic-book character to lean on. I may have had my issues with Super 8 but I certainly respect J.J. Abrams' craftsmanship in creating this film.
The rules sound simple, but it's amazing how many filmmakers still manage to stumble on the last part, what with all of the scripts written by committee and the marketing execs dictating what goes into a movie.
Anyway, it's still gratifying to know that in a time when franchises generally rule the box-office there are still movies that can buck the trend like Avatar, District 9 and Super 8.
1. Familiarity is Essential - people embraced Avatar because, like it or not, James Cameron was the biggest upfront attraction, and people wanted to see what he could do twelve years after Titanic. Peter Jackson's name on District 9 made sure that Neil Blomkamp's film got noticed; it could have just as easily have been an obscure art-house affair or, even worse, been consigned to direct-to-DVD oblivion. People went to see Super 8 because of Steven Spielberg, whose name featured prominently on the marketing materials and because the film was pushed as an homage to his earlier work. These days, and in this economy, people want to see names they know.
2. Starpower NOT Essential - This one's a no-brainer and is a lesson already borne in mind by most people launching franchises; don't waste money on "name" actors. Megawatt movie stars like Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise all have one thing in common: none of them have headlined 300+ million blockbusters, and those angling to launch franchises are all aware of this. It's a fact made even more dramatic in movies like Super 8 where, apart from having no big name actors, there is no merchandising angle to be found anywhere.
3. Style Must Be Accompanied by Substance - Now, this maxim may be easily debunked by referring to the runaway popularity of things like the Transformers movies, but at the end of the day it's still important to make a good movie, especially when the filmmaker doesn't have the strength of a popular toy line or comic-book character to lean on. I may have had my issues with Super 8 but I certainly respect J.J. Abrams' craftsmanship in creating this film.
The rules sound simple, but it's amazing how many filmmakers still manage to stumble on the last part, what with all of the scripts written by committee and the marketing execs dictating what goes into a movie.
Anyway, it's still gratifying to know that in a time when franchises generally rule the box-office there are still movies that can buck the trend like Avatar, District 9 and Super 8.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Fears of Comic-Book Movie Fatigue
With the underwhelming grosses of the mega-budgeted tentpole film Green Lantern, one of the box-office analysts and prognosticators over at boxofficemojo.com, one of my favorite sites, has raised the question of whether the failure of GL, as well as the most recent X-Men film to set the box-office on fire are evidence of comic-adaptation burnout among moviegoers, particularly American audiences. Now, I may not be an American and I may not live in America, but I happen to enjoy good Hollywood movies in general and good comic-book movies in particular, so I found this topic particularly interesting.
The theory is that because neither Thor nor X-Men: First Class ended up doing Iron Man numbers, and because Green Lantern has apparently failed to launch a bankable DC Comics character film franchise outside of Superman and Batman, studios will no longer be willing to invest large amounts of money in what are considered B-List comic-book characters. The writer then went on to speculate that the respectable if not quite stellar grosses of Thor could be indicative of the kind of business that Marvel's upcoming Captain America film will do.
Now, box-office prognostication is never a 100% exact science, and if people had the perfect formula for launching a new film with new ideas, there probably wouldn't be any need for sequels, so obviously there's no point in taking the article at face value. That said, I do feel a touch of trepidation as far as the box-office fate of Captain America is concerned, even while I feel that the writer is still off-base about comic-book movies in general.
Even though, if the trailers are any indication, Captain America looks like a genuinely well-made film and one which its distributor Paramount Pictures appears to be marketing with reasonable aggressiveness, the tepid reception of the actually very good X-Men prequel along does not bode well for its box-office chances, nor does the fact that it's opening in the wake of arguably the most highly-anticipated movie of the year, the last installment of the Harry Potter series.
To my mind the problem facing Marvel with Cap's movie seems to be one of timing; part of me can't help but wonder why, instead of cramming Cap into a precarious July spot, after audiences have had to digest two Marvel movies and one DC one, they didn't just use Cap to launch next summer's slate and push The Avengers back to Memorial Day? Well, they have their own number-crunchers to figure that out, I guess, but if their current gambit fails I'll bet they'll be wishing they'd thought of moving Cap to next year, or done something more audacious like move him to winter, where he'd be the lone comic-book-based property as opposed to just another face in an already-crowded summer slate.
That said, I hardly think these numbers spell the doom of comic-book movies, even those based on "b-listers."
Sure, Thor didn't post Iron Man numbers, but what the writer didn't mention in his article (and which I'm sure he was aware of) was that in 2008, Iron Man was an overachiever, powered mainly by a career-resurrecting performance by Robert Downey, Jr., who, it is worth mentioning here, had, prior to that film NEVER anchored a film that grossed over $100 million in the United States, let alone a bona-fide, half-a-billion-dollar-worldwide-grossing blockbuster. Even the most optimistic estimates for that film seemed to peg its U.S. gross at $250 million. Considering that the first Iron Man beat out every other movie but The Dark Knight at the US box-office that year, it seemed to make a rock-solid case for adapting not-so-well-known comic-book characters for the big screen.
What makes Thor such a poor barometer for the blockbuster potential of films like Captain America and other non-Batman/Spider-Man/Superman/Iron Man movies is the fact that Thor was always going to be extremely hard to pull off and even harder to sell, and the fact that Marvel, Kenneth Branagh and their cast and crew managed to do both is something for which they deserve medals all around. But it should always be remembered that the odds of Thor becoming a hit were always kind of remote. It could have just as easily suffered the same fate as Ang Lee's Hulk. It's easy for people to say "I knew it would be a hit all along" now, but deep down I'm sure people know better. In industry where there's still no such thing as a 100% sure thing, this movie was about the farthest thing from a sure thing that a Marvel movie could get, ergo its inability to crack the magical $200 million mark in the U.S. simply cannot be viewed as a weakness of the genre in general. It's kind of a funny way to say that Thor should be viewed as an unqualified success, but there it is.
I will not debate, on the other hand, that X-men: First Class is a definite underachiever, one which looks set to finish even below the least well-received of all the X-men movies, the risible Wolverine prequel at the box-office, but as a lot of people have acknowledged, that film was definitely going to be hurt by the absence of Wolverine from the team's roster, especially considering that all four of the previous films were basically centered around him. Still, considering it was a fantastic film, arguably as good as if not better than the best in the series, which got a lot of love from critics, I am genuinely disappointed that it hasn't been doing better at the box-office, although I think it has, if nothing else, established that the franchise can stand on its own two feet without Wolverine, even though its first couple of steps free of the Canucklehead's support have been wobbly ones. I honestly think, if they maintain this standard of quality, that the sequel to this prequel or reboot or whatever it is, will almost certainly outgross X-men: First Class.
If there's anything that can truly hurt Captain America: The First Avenger and other non-Batman/Spider-Man/Superman/Iron Man comic book flicks it will definitely be Green Lantern's poor reception by critics and audiences alike. Again, like I said before (in my review), the real tragedy of that film was that it should have worked as it had most of the crucial ingredients in place (except, unfortunately, a decent script). I don't know why Warner Brothers wasn't able to make it work, so there's not much more I can say on the subject.
What I can say, though is that the lesson to learn from this is a pretty simple one, one I would think movie execs should be capable of remembering: too much of anything is bad. In 2006 there were something like a dozen or so animated films that came out, with a lot of them falling by the wayside, and in subsequent years the glut was corrected and fewer such movies came out; the same will be true for movies released in 3-D, which is the current craze: a lot of 3-D movies will bomb and so fewer of them will be made. Box-office duds like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Losers and Priest can pretty much guarantee that studio heads will be more discriminating about which comic-book property they adapt, especially if Cowboys and Aliens tanks too. People will learn that just because it's a comic-book property doesn't mean it'll make money. The movie has to be a good one, too, and it has to be sold well.
Good adaptations of good comic books can do plenty of box-office business when given room to breathe, something that's not happening this year, and which, with The Avengers, and new Spider-Man, Batman, Superman and even Ghost Rider films on the way, is not going to happen next year, either.
Pixar does only one film a year, maybe Marvel, now Pixar's stablemate at Disney, can think of doing the same once they've finally put The Avengers into theaters. Or maybe Disney/Marvel, Warner Brothers/DC and everyone else with future ambitions of adapting comic books into movies can actually sit down or conference call each other and figure out a way to give each other room so that their movies don't end up cannibalizing each other at the box-office or collectively wearing down audience interest. There's a thought; release comic-book movies few and far between to keep people lean and anxious to see new movies every time, like Pixar does.
Too bad it'll probably take Captain America flopping at the box-office to get studio execs to think like that.
The theory is that because neither Thor nor X-Men: First Class ended up doing Iron Man numbers, and because Green Lantern has apparently failed to launch a bankable DC Comics character film franchise outside of Superman and Batman, studios will no longer be willing to invest large amounts of money in what are considered B-List comic-book characters. The writer then went on to speculate that the respectable if not quite stellar grosses of Thor could be indicative of the kind of business that Marvel's upcoming Captain America film will do.
Now, box-office prognostication is never a 100% exact science, and if people had the perfect formula for launching a new film with new ideas, there probably wouldn't be any need for sequels, so obviously there's no point in taking the article at face value. That said, I do feel a touch of trepidation as far as the box-office fate of Captain America is concerned, even while I feel that the writer is still off-base about comic-book movies in general.
Even though, if the trailers are any indication, Captain America looks like a genuinely well-made film and one which its distributor Paramount Pictures appears to be marketing with reasonable aggressiveness, the tepid reception of the actually very good X-Men prequel along does not bode well for its box-office chances, nor does the fact that it's opening in the wake of arguably the most highly-anticipated movie of the year, the last installment of the Harry Potter series.
To my mind the problem facing Marvel with Cap's movie seems to be one of timing; part of me can't help but wonder why, instead of cramming Cap into a precarious July spot, after audiences have had to digest two Marvel movies and one DC one, they didn't just use Cap to launch next summer's slate and push The Avengers back to Memorial Day? Well, they have their own number-crunchers to figure that out, I guess, but if their current gambit fails I'll bet they'll be wishing they'd thought of moving Cap to next year, or done something more audacious like move him to winter, where he'd be the lone comic-book-based property as opposed to just another face in an already-crowded summer slate.
That said, I hardly think these numbers spell the doom of comic-book movies, even those based on "b-listers."
Sure, Thor didn't post Iron Man numbers, but what the writer didn't mention in his article (and which I'm sure he was aware of) was that in 2008, Iron Man was an overachiever, powered mainly by a career-resurrecting performance by Robert Downey, Jr., who, it is worth mentioning here, had, prior to that film NEVER anchored a film that grossed over $100 million in the United States, let alone a bona-fide, half-a-billion-dollar-worldwide-grossing blockbuster. Even the most optimistic estimates for that film seemed to peg its U.S. gross at $250 million. Considering that the first Iron Man beat out every other movie but The Dark Knight at the US box-office that year, it seemed to make a rock-solid case for adapting not-so-well-known comic-book characters for the big screen.
What makes Thor such a poor barometer for the blockbuster potential of films like Captain America and other non-Batman/Spider-Man/Superman/Iron Man movies is the fact that Thor was always going to be extremely hard to pull off and even harder to sell, and the fact that Marvel, Kenneth Branagh and their cast and crew managed to do both is something for which they deserve medals all around. But it should always be remembered that the odds of Thor becoming a hit were always kind of remote. It could have just as easily suffered the same fate as Ang Lee's Hulk. It's easy for people to say "I knew it would be a hit all along" now, but deep down I'm sure people know better. In industry where there's still no such thing as a 100% sure thing, this movie was about the farthest thing from a sure thing that a Marvel movie could get, ergo its inability to crack the magical $200 million mark in the U.S. simply cannot be viewed as a weakness of the genre in general. It's kind of a funny way to say that Thor should be viewed as an unqualified success, but there it is.
I will not debate, on the other hand, that X-men: First Class is a definite underachiever, one which looks set to finish even below the least well-received of all the X-men movies, the risible Wolverine prequel at the box-office, but as a lot of people have acknowledged, that film was definitely going to be hurt by the absence of Wolverine from the team's roster, especially considering that all four of the previous films were basically centered around him. Still, considering it was a fantastic film, arguably as good as if not better than the best in the series, which got a lot of love from critics, I am genuinely disappointed that it hasn't been doing better at the box-office, although I think it has, if nothing else, established that the franchise can stand on its own two feet without Wolverine, even though its first couple of steps free of the Canucklehead's support have been wobbly ones. I honestly think, if they maintain this standard of quality, that the sequel to this prequel or reboot or whatever it is, will almost certainly outgross X-men: First Class.
If there's anything that can truly hurt Captain America: The First Avenger and other non-Batman/Spider-Man/Superman/Iron Man comic book flicks it will definitely be Green Lantern's poor reception by critics and audiences alike. Again, like I said before (in my review), the real tragedy of that film was that it should have worked as it had most of the crucial ingredients in place (except, unfortunately, a decent script). I don't know why Warner Brothers wasn't able to make it work, so there's not much more I can say on the subject.
What I can say, though is that the lesson to learn from this is a pretty simple one, one I would think movie execs should be capable of remembering: too much of anything is bad. In 2006 there were something like a dozen or so animated films that came out, with a lot of them falling by the wayside, and in subsequent years the glut was corrected and fewer such movies came out; the same will be true for movies released in 3-D, which is the current craze: a lot of 3-D movies will bomb and so fewer of them will be made. Box-office duds like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Losers and Priest can pretty much guarantee that studio heads will be more discriminating about which comic-book property they adapt, especially if Cowboys and Aliens tanks too. People will learn that just because it's a comic-book property doesn't mean it'll make money. The movie has to be a good one, too, and it has to be sold well.
Good adaptations of good comic books can do plenty of box-office business when given room to breathe, something that's not happening this year, and which, with The Avengers, and new Spider-Man, Batman, Superman and even Ghost Rider films on the way, is not going to happen next year, either.
Pixar does only one film a year, maybe Marvel, now Pixar's stablemate at Disney, can think of doing the same once they've finally put The Avengers into theaters. Or maybe Disney/Marvel, Warner Brothers/DC and everyone else with future ambitions of adapting comic books into movies can actually sit down or conference call each other and figure out a way to give each other room so that their movies don't end up cannibalizing each other at the box-office or collectively wearing down audience interest. There's a thought; release comic-book movies few and far between to keep people lean and anxious to see new movies every time, like Pixar does.
Too bad it'll probably take Captain America flopping at the box-office to get studio execs to think like that.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Not So Bright: A Review of Green Lantern
Anyone reading some of the reviews over at rottentomatoes.com might come to believe that Green Lantern is one of the worst movies of the year if not all time. I say that's slightly unfair.
Green Lantern is the story of Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a test pilot with some daddy issues; as a child he watched his father, a test pilot just like him, die in a fiery explosion while testing an aircraft. While he is grappling with his issues, he finds himself drafted by an intergalactic corps of space cops known as the Green Lantern Corps, whose most distinguished member has been mortally wounded fighting the Corps' greatest threat, a gigantic yellow cloud with an evil-looking head known as Parallax that feeds off fear, represented by the color yellow. This dying Corpsman, Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison), tells his power ring to choose his successor, and it chooses Jordan. The Green Lanterns derive their power from their rings, which in turn are powered by lanterns, which in turn are powered by will, represented by the color green.
Now, critics have bashed this film for everything from the script to the acting to the visual effects to the music, and while I do not entirely disagree with the criticism, I will say that this film is not as bad as everyone says it is. The dialogue isn't as bloodcurdling as the lines that Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox spouted in the Transformers movies. The acting isn't as bad as Jessica Alba trying to convince people she's a scientist in Fantastic Four. The effects aren't as bad as the melange of shit thrown at the screen in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The music isn't as bad as the Frankenstein's monster of a score that was devised for last year's Kick-Ass by no less than four composers.
That said, while it isn't all that bad, it is godawful nonetheless.
Now, I don't know exactly if Hal Jordan was a reluctant hero when he started out in the comics, but if he was, then the writers did a horrible job of translating that origin, and if he wasn't they made a huge mistake in trying to ape the formula of Spider-Man 2 and Iron Man. Reynolds simply doesn't do pathos well at all, and whatever little acting talent he might have is severely compromised by the leaden script which, while not quite Transformers bad, has some real clunkers scattered all throughout the proceedings. Blake Lively is lovely, like a younger Mia Sara, but with next to none of the personality she showed in Ben Affleck's The Town. Peter Sarsgaard turns in a pretty quirky turn as mad-scientist Hector Hammond, complete with the swollen, misshapen head, but at some point the prosthetic head he puts on starts doing the acting for him. Mark Strong turns in a solid performance as one of the top lanterns Sinestro, but again, the script lets him down with some really silly dialogue, as well as some rather abrupt character shifts later in the movie. Tim Robbins, who stars as a Senator and Hammond's dad, Angela Bassett as DC Universe mainstay Amanda Waller and the rest of the cast kind of just hang around for the paycheck.
The scenes set on Oa are, to me anyway, the best of the film and, despite some dodgy CGI, gave us a glimpse of what the film could have been like if its makers had been less preoccupied with keeping things down on earth.
(Spoiler alert)
I found a lot of the supposed "money" shots in the movie rather jarring and silly. In one scene, Hal Jordan comes up with a giant Hot Wheels car and track to stop a helicopter from crashing. The first thing that popped into my head was to wonder how much Mattel paid for that sequence, especially considering how much the car looked like an actual Hot Wheels vehicle, right down to the wheels. In another scene, while trying to catch Parallax, a squadron of, in Sinestro's words, the very best Lanterns, can only think of...a giant net, and shooting it with their apparently ineffectual energy blasts? And this...after they condemn Jordan for his lack of imagination and after ONE of them kicks Jordan's butt by conjuring up a miniature sun?
Not only that but (spoiler alert still on) an after-the-credits scene involving Sinestro feels downright gratuitous (i.e. no real basis has been laid for it in the script, even though GL comic fans know what Sinestro eventually ends up becoming). Mark Strong's performance deserved far better than for his character to make so abrupt a change, like another movie, for example.
(End spoiler alert).
Also, it kind of bothered me that the head of Parallax looked strikingly like the bad guy in Dreamworks' animated comedy Monsters vs. Aliens; it kind of blunted the dramatic tension right there.
In the end, the painful irony of this film is that, while the Green Lanterns' Power Rings are supposedly only limited by their wearers' imaginations, apparently the filmmakers' imaginations were quite limited, especially considering the reported $200 million that was spent on this movie.
What happened to this movie was a crying shame and is strongly reminiscent of the way Twentieth Century Fox messed up the Fantastic Four movies. I went into this movie wanting to like it because I could honestly sympathize with the GL fans who wanted their hero to make it onto the screen at all costs. I made myself like both FF movies (and even still actually enjoy watching the second one a bit from time to time), but with all of the rampant stupidity in this film I simply couldn't con myself this time.
Now, I maintain that this isn't the apocalyptic pile of crap that a lot of professional critics and armchair critics have made it out to be. I have seen a lot of worse movies, even comic-book based ones, but the real tragedy of this movie was that it had everything it needed to work: a great superhero and premise, a ton of money and a proven action director in Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro, all movies I loved) who to be honest was the main reason I had such high hopes for this movie, even after all the bad reviews started to surface. The willingness to go the extra mile for this movie to work, as evidenced by the massive budget, was there, but for some reason the skill simply was not.
Well, if nothing else, at least my wife and kids liked it.
Score: 2/5
Green Lantern is the story of Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a test pilot with some daddy issues; as a child he watched his father, a test pilot just like him, die in a fiery explosion while testing an aircraft. While he is grappling with his issues, he finds himself drafted by an intergalactic corps of space cops known as the Green Lantern Corps, whose most distinguished member has been mortally wounded fighting the Corps' greatest threat, a gigantic yellow cloud with an evil-looking head known as Parallax that feeds off fear, represented by the color yellow. This dying Corpsman, Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison), tells his power ring to choose his successor, and it chooses Jordan. The Green Lanterns derive their power from their rings, which in turn are powered by lanterns, which in turn are powered by will, represented by the color green.
Now, critics have bashed this film for everything from the script to the acting to the visual effects to the music, and while I do not entirely disagree with the criticism, I will say that this film is not as bad as everyone says it is. The dialogue isn't as bloodcurdling as the lines that Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox spouted in the Transformers movies. The acting isn't as bad as Jessica Alba trying to convince people she's a scientist in Fantastic Four. The effects aren't as bad as the melange of shit thrown at the screen in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The music isn't as bad as the Frankenstein's monster of a score that was devised for last year's Kick-Ass by no less than four composers.
That said, while it isn't all that bad, it is godawful nonetheless.
Now, I don't know exactly if Hal Jordan was a reluctant hero when he started out in the comics, but if he was, then the writers did a horrible job of translating that origin, and if he wasn't they made a huge mistake in trying to ape the formula of Spider-Man 2 and Iron Man. Reynolds simply doesn't do pathos well at all, and whatever little acting talent he might have is severely compromised by the leaden script which, while not quite Transformers bad, has some real clunkers scattered all throughout the proceedings. Blake Lively is lovely, like a younger Mia Sara, but with next to none of the personality she showed in Ben Affleck's The Town. Peter Sarsgaard turns in a pretty quirky turn as mad-scientist Hector Hammond, complete with the swollen, misshapen head, but at some point the prosthetic head he puts on starts doing the acting for him. Mark Strong turns in a solid performance as one of the top lanterns Sinestro, but again, the script lets him down with some really silly dialogue, as well as some rather abrupt character shifts later in the movie. Tim Robbins, who stars as a Senator and Hammond's dad, Angela Bassett as DC Universe mainstay Amanda Waller and the rest of the cast kind of just hang around for the paycheck.
The scenes set on Oa are, to me anyway, the best of the film and, despite some dodgy CGI, gave us a glimpse of what the film could have been like if its makers had been less preoccupied with keeping things down on earth.
(Spoiler alert)
I found a lot of the supposed "money" shots in the movie rather jarring and silly. In one scene, Hal Jordan comes up with a giant Hot Wheels car and track to stop a helicopter from crashing. The first thing that popped into my head was to wonder how much Mattel paid for that sequence, especially considering how much the car looked like an actual Hot Wheels vehicle, right down to the wheels. In another scene, while trying to catch Parallax, a squadron of, in Sinestro's words, the very best Lanterns, can only think of...a giant net, and shooting it with their apparently ineffectual energy blasts? And this...after they condemn Jordan for his lack of imagination and after ONE of them kicks Jordan's butt by conjuring up a miniature sun?
Not only that but (spoiler alert still on) an after-the-credits scene involving Sinestro feels downright gratuitous (i.e. no real basis has been laid for it in the script, even though GL comic fans know what Sinestro eventually ends up becoming). Mark Strong's performance deserved far better than for his character to make so abrupt a change, like another movie, for example.
(End spoiler alert).
Also, it kind of bothered me that the head of Parallax looked strikingly like the bad guy in Dreamworks' animated comedy Monsters vs. Aliens; it kind of blunted the dramatic tension right there.
In the end, the painful irony of this film is that, while the Green Lanterns' Power Rings are supposedly only limited by their wearers' imaginations, apparently the filmmakers' imaginations were quite limited, especially considering the reported $200 million that was spent on this movie.
What happened to this movie was a crying shame and is strongly reminiscent of the way Twentieth Century Fox messed up the Fantastic Four movies. I went into this movie wanting to like it because I could honestly sympathize with the GL fans who wanted their hero to make it onto the screen at all costs. I made myself like both FF movies (and even still actually enjoy watching the second one a bit from time to time), but with all of the rampant stupidity in this film I simply couldn't con myself this time.
Now, I maintain that this isn't the apocalyptic pile of crap that a lot of professional critics and armchair critics have made it out to be. I have seen a lot of worse movies, even comic-book based ones, but the real tragedy of this movie was that it had everything it needed to work: a great superhero and premise, a ton of money and a proven action director in Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro, all movies I loved) who to be honest was the main reason I had such high hopes for this movie, even after all the bad reviews started to surface. The willingness to go the extra mile for this movie to work, as evidenced by the massive budget, was there, but for some reason the skill simply was not.
Well, if nothing else, at least my wife and kids liked it.
Score: 2/5
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Missed Opportunities
Reviews are coming in for Warner Bros' Green Lantern, in theaters now, and many of them are quite unkind, to put it mildly. I'm trying to put them out of my mind as I intend to see it sometime during its release(though I'll definitely save money and avoid the 3-D screenings).
All of this vitriol, however, reminds me of all of the wasted opportunities in launching comic-book properties that were rushed to the screen after the first Spider-Man smashed box-office records at the time, being the first ever movie to make more than $100 million in its opening weekend.
People talk about the Hulk movies as wasted opportunities, and maybe they were, but if nothing else they can't be blamed for not trying. They got a white-hot director (Ang Lee, who at the time had just been nominated for an Oscar), a topnotch effects outfit (ILM, with no less than the legendary Dennis Muren overseeing the effects work), and a competent cast with the inspired casting choice of Sam Elliot as General Thunderbolt Ross. It took Ang Lee and his team of screenwriters to screw everything up, rather than any of the Marvel execs, but even in the midst of the wreckage one can see the production value of this movie. There was an effort, albeit misguided, to make a compelling movie. The second movie tried, perhaps too hard, to distance itself from the first one in tone, running time, and overall production, but it was simply not enough. Still, the effort in both cases to make and sell good movies were there, and there are people who acknowledge that, so these are not completely wasted opportunities.
No, for me the true wasted opportunities to bring comic books/graphic novels to life are those in which either the production or promotion of the film was done so badly that one could reasonably argue that the studio did not really care whether the film was any good or, in at least one case, if the film actually succeeded. They are:
1. The Fantastic Four - the funny thing is, I can actually relate to the DC/Green Lantern fans trying to stem the tide of negative reviews over at rottentomatoes.com. At the time this movie came out I wanted to like it and succeeded in spite of all the negative reviews, in making myself like it, even though all it took was for me to see it again on cable to finally have the reality of what a trashy movie it was sink in. The Fantastic Four, whose members were dubbed "imaginauts" by one of the series' writers if not co-creator Stan Lee himself, had the potential to be bigger and more dazzling onscreen than any superhero movie to date, what with their star-spanning, dimension-jumping adventures, but Twentieth Century Fox, who outside of the first two and the most recent X-men movie has yet to make a decent comic-book-based film, saw none of that and instead made one of the most pedestrian movies ever to hit the screen. A pedestrian director, a limp script, mostly pedestrian actors, and a visual-effects house I (and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people) never even heard of pretty much ensured this film's painful mediocrity, and even though the sequel had slicker effects courtesy of WETA Digital and a slightly brisker pace, it was still saddled by many of the same issues. Fox itself has declared the series up for rebooting, what with the threat of Disney/Marvel recovering the property looming and all, and to be fair X-Men: First Class showed that they can make a decent comic-book based movie, but it was a shame that they weren't able or even willing to get this right the first time. At least Green Lantern fans can have the consolation of knowing that WB spent reportedly $300 million on bringing Hal Jordan to the big screen; Fox didn't even bother to pony up half of that, and the parsimony definitely shows.
2. Daredevil - this is a character whose personal pain and pathos could give easily give Batman a run for his money, and a Daredevil film done right could easily make Nolan's Bat movies look like kitsch. There are some people who even regard Frank Miller's work on Daredevil (particularly his Born Again storyline) more highly than his work on such landmark comics as The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. Unfortunately, in 2003 Mark Steven Johnson made a film that was so bad it's mentioned in the same breath as Joel Schumacher's Batman movies rather than Christopher Nolan's. Again, this was a movie I wanted to like, but even a second viewing in the theaters was enough to burst my bubble and bring me back to the real world. I've heard talk about how much better the director's cut of this movie is, but I honestly won't bother to find out; that's how badly burned I felt by this movie.
3. Stardust - it was downright criminal what Paramount pictures did with this movie. The truth is that it was a truly solid, if not necessarily great movie. It was entertaining, it had a likable lead actor (Charlie Cox) and some memorable supporting turns from some pretty well-known Hollywood actors (Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer), decent effects and a freaking Neil Gaiman story and had the potential to work, even as a modest box-office hit. Heaven only knows how many worse movies have gone on to greater success. Rather than even try to sell this film Paramount, more enamored with crap like Transformers and Shrek 3 dumped it in the late summer of 2007 and gave it a couple of trailers that can best be described as perfunctory, and which, quite frankly, didn't really capture the spirit of the film. The fact that Vaughn was able to get his next film, the self-financed Kick-Ass, to open at number one at the U.S. box-office despite having derived the film from a lesser-known comic book property and despite having no known actors in the lead roles (with Nicolas Cage's Big Daddy character being a supporting role) shows the power of marketing, very little of which was invested in this film. Now THIS is a wasted opportunity; another good movie that just fell under everyone's radar.
Now, granted, the FF and DD are getting reboots, but if there's anything the failure of both Hulk movies and of all three Punisher movies shows, if you get it wrong the first time, there's no guarantee that people will come back for seconds, even if it is better the next time around. The reason the Batman and James Bond reboots worked so well for their respective franchises was that these films were a return to form; they reminded audiences of the movies in the series that they liked in the first place. Therefore if the Fantastic Four or Daredevil reboots fail to take off in the eyes of audiences, then those first half-assed efforts really will have been nothing more than wasted opportunities to introduce audiences to what could have been some truly compelling stories. If Green Lantern fails, it will be too.
All of this vitriol, however, reminds me of all of the wasted opportunities in launching comic-book properties that were rushed to the screen after the first Spider-Man smashed box-office records at the time, being the first ever movie to make more than $100 million in its opening weekend.
People talk about the Hulk movies as wasted opportunities, and maybe they were, but if nothing else they can't be blamed for not trying. They got a white-hot director (Ang Lee, who at the time had just been nominated for an Oscar), a topnotch effects outfit (ILM, with no less than the legendary Dennis Muren overseeing the effects work), and a competent cast with the inspired casting choice of Sam Elliot as General Thunderbolt Ross. It took Ang Lee and his team of screenwriters to screw everything up, rather than any of the Marvel execs, but even in the midst of the wreckage one can see the production value of this movie. There was an effort, albeit misguided, to make a compelling movie. The second movie tried, perhaps too hard, to distance itself from the first one in tone, running time, and overall production, but it was simply not enough. Still, the effort in both cases to make and sell good movies were there, and there are people who acknowledge that, so these are not completely wasted opportunities.
No, for me the true wasted opportunities to bring comic books/graphic novels to life are those in which either the production or promotion of the film was done so badly that one could reasonably argue that the studio did not really care whether the film was any good or, in at least one case, if the film actually succeeded. They are:
1. The Fantastic Four - the funny thing is, I can actually relate to the DC/Green Lantern fans trying to stem the tide of negative reviews over at rottentomatoes.com. At the time this movie came out I wanted to like it and succeeded in spite of all the negative reviews, in making myself like it, even though all it took was for me to see it again on cable to finally have the reality of what a trashy movie it was sink in. The Fantastic Four, whose members were dubbed "imaginauts" by one of the series' writers if not co-creator Stan Lee himself, had the potential to be bigger and more dazzling onscreen than any superhero movie to date, what with their star-spanning, dimension-jumping adventures, but Twentieth Century Fox, who outside of the first two and the most recent X-men movie has yet to make a decent comic-book-based film, saw none of that and instead made one of the most pedestrian movies ever to hit the screen. A pedestrian director, a limp script, mostly pedestrian actors, and a visual-effects house I (and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people) never even heard of pretty much ensured this film's painful mediocrity, and even though the sequel had slicker effects courtesy of WETA Digital and a slightly brisker pace, it was still saddled by many of the same issues. Fox itself has declared the series up for rebooting, what with the threat of Disney/Marvel recovering the property looming and all, and to be fair X-Men: First Class showed that they can make a decent comic-book based movie, but it was a shame that they weren't able or even willing to get this right the first time. At least Green Lantern fans can have the consolation of knowing that WB spent reportedly $300 million on bringing Hal Jordan to the big screen; Fox didn't even bother to pony up half of that, and the parsimony definitely shows.
2. Daredevil - this is a character whose personal pain and pathos could give easily give Batman a run for his money, and a Daredevil film done right could easily make Nolan's Bat movies look like kitsch. There are some people who even regard Frank Miller's work on Daredevil (particularly his Born Again storyline) more highly than his work on such landmark comics as The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. Unfortunately, in 2003 Mark Steven Johnson made a film that was so bad it's mentioned in the same breath as Joel Schumacher's Batman movies rather than Christopher Nolan's. Again, this was a movie I wanted to like, but even a second viewing in the theaters was enough to burst my bubble and bring me back to the real world. I've heard talk about how much better the director's cut of this movie is, but I honestly won't bother to find out; that's how badly burned I felt by this movie.
3. Stardust - it was downright criminal what Paramount pictures did with this movie. The truth is that it was a truly solid, if not necessarily great movie. It was entertaining, it had a likable lead actor (Charlie Cox) and some memorable supporting turns from some pretty well-known Hollywood actors (Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer), decent effects and a freaking Neil Gaiman story and had the potential to work, even as a modest box-office hit. Heaven only knows how many worse movies have gone on to greater success. Rather than even try to sell this film Paramount, more enamored with crap like Transformers and Shrek 3 dumped it in the late summer of 2007 and gave it a couple of trailers that can best be described as perfunctory, and which, quite frankly, didn't really capture the spirit of the film. The fact that Vaughn was able to get his next film, the self-financed Kick-Ass, to open at number one at the U.S. box-office despite having derived the film from a lesser-known comic book property and despite having no known actors in the lead roles (with Nicolas Cage's Big Daddy character being a supporting role) shows the power of marketing, very little of which was invested in this film. Now THIS is a wasted opportunity; another good movie that just fell under everyone's radar.
Now, granted, the FF and DD are getting reboots, but if there's anything the failure of both Hulk movies and of all three Punisher movies shows, if you get it wrong the first time, there's no guarantee that people will come back for seconds, even if it is better the next time around. The reason the Batman and James Bond reboots worked so well for their respective franchises was that these films were a return to form; they reminded audiences of the movies in the series that they liked in the first place. Therefore if the Fantastic Four or Daredevil reboots fail to take off in the eyes of audiences, then those first half-assed efforts really will have been nothing more than wasted opportunities to introduce audiences to what could have been some truly compelling stories. If Green Lantern fails, it will be too.
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