I cared little for the first Sherlock Holmes movie, finding Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law to be just about the only truly bright spots of the film. My review can be found here.
While director Guy Ritchie, his crew and his stars return for the sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, with pretty much more of what they imagine audiences loved about the first film (a bona fide box-office smash with over half a billion dollars in global earnings) this time they've brought a far more coherent, if slightly cliched script with them, one which doesn't have the stink of Simon Kinberg all over it.
This story, written by Keiran and Michele Mulroney and very, VERY loosely based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1893 novel The Final Problem, pits Holmes (Downey, Jr.) against his archnemesis, Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris), amid brewing tension between France and Germany towards the end of the 19th century. A series of bombings in both countries being blamed on Anarchists is pushing both countries to the brink of war, with the whole world almost surely destined to follow suit.
Dr. John Watson (Jude Law) is about to get married to his longtime fiance Mary (Kelly Reilly) and pays a visit to his best man, Holmes, who is meant to throw him a bachelor party, but who ends up recruiting him for his latest investigation, in which he seeks to tie the current tension between France and Germany, and a series of murders of several people all together with Professor Moriarty as the common denominator. Holmes has intercepted a letter being handed from one agent of Moriarty's to another and endeavors to track down its intended recipient, a gypsy (Noomi Rapace). Their investigations naturally bring the pair afoul of Moriarty and before long they find themselves in a race against time to save Europe from war and themselves from Moriarty's terrible wrath.
As stories go, it's not the most original, even if it only borrowed a few details from The Final Problem. The idea of someone trying to profit from the carnage of world war is not exactly novel, and was in fact explored as recently as the utterly forgettable film adaptation of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Ritchie, however, profits from Mulroney's script, which sets up the characters, the conflicts, and the action more efficiently than the muddled effort of the original film did. Ritchie brings back plenty of the 300-style slow-mo action that he employed in the first film (and of which I am still not much of a fan), but at least I liked the choreography better this time around. Downey Jr. and Law are both extremely capable as action heroes, and Ritchie's fight scenes give RDJ in particular a chance to show off, even more than the first film, the Wing Chun Kung Fu that helped him kick his drug habit.
The good news here is that, as outlandish as a lot of the set pieces here are (such as the gunfight on a train), the action still feels more judiciously staged than that of the first film, and more organic to the overall story somehow. To think, everyone, from cinematographer Philippe Rousselot to film editor James Herbert to composer Hans Zimmer, has come back and that the only thing significantly changed here is the writing team. Well, one thing that significantly livens up the proceedings is the inclusion of Holmes' brother Mycroft, wonderfully portrayed by Stephen Fry, even if I had a really hard time looking at him butt naked.
The best part of the movie is that the banter and squabbling between Holmes and Watson, integral to my enjoyment of the first film, is very much intact here and brought to the next level even. Downey, Jr. and Law really do have a fantastic chemistry and I can't imagine any other two actors in the roles. It's fortunate that Sony didn't push through with the planned Sacha Baron Cohen-Will Ferrell pairing they had in mind for their decidedly more comedic adaptation; it just wouldn't have been as good.
4/5
Monday, January 23, 2012
Monday, January 2, 2012
On Micromanaging and Disowning Movies
At the recently concluded Metro Manila Film Festival, Manila Kingpin: the Asiong Salonga story cleaned up winning 11 awards. While I'm generally not a fan of Filipino movies (as sad as this is to admit), the trailer for this one pretty interesting and may yet see this movie if I have time and money to spare. A potential dealbreaker, though (apart from the lack of time and money, of course) is the fact that the film's director, Tikoy Aguiluz, has publicly disowned the film, going to the extent of securing a court order to have his name removed from the film and all its marketing materials. It's not the most glowing endorsement, to say the least.
Not having seen the movie, much less what was supposedly excised from it, I can only imagine that whatever the studio did, it was to improve the film's chances at the box-office, which can and often does spell disaster for creative integrity and overall quality.
While I realize that creative butchery is hardly new in the film industry, local or otherwise, it nonetheless pains me to think that even during the Metro Manila film festival, when all foreign product is shut out of the movie theaters (with the exception of IMAX theaters) and where, once upon a time, Filipino filmmakers were allowed free rein to make the kind of movies they wanted to make, the desperation of studio suits to get fannies into the seats remains the primordial consideration.
The thing of it is, even assuming that Aguiluz was simply a hired gun rather than a visionary who conceived of the whole film, the studio that made it owed him some common courtesy. As a professional, I expect my clients to place their trust in me, to give me all of the facts I need to help them out, and to respect the work product that I give them. Of course, I owe them the best work I can possibly give, but my initial conference with them should give them an idea of what I'm capable of and what I can give them.
I can side with studios that fire directors before filming even begins; there's a reason why studios and directors sit down and talk, and that is to determine whether or not they have a common vision. To allow somebody to spent several months (or weeks, as is often the case here) of his life shooting and editing a movie only to yank the rug out from under him with unauthorized last minute reshoots and changes, though, is more than simple disrespect; it is a statement of intent from the producers or the suits that the director's vision is not theirs. It's basically the act of flipping the director the middle finger. Of course, probably the most extreme example of such a gesture is the way Warner Brothers threw out an ENTIRE film when they shelved Paul Schrader's Exorcist prequel (thereby denying Filipino-born Billy Crawford, who had a significant role in that film, his moment in the Hollywood spotlight) and had Renny Harlin shoot an all-new one, but Aguiluz's feelings of betrayal are nonetheless entirely legitimate.
I still don't know if I'll go and see Manila Kingpin, but if nothing else, if it turns out to be a total shitfest I'll bear in mind that it wasn't Tikoy Aguiluz's fault. I'll give him that much.
Not having seen the movie, much less what was supposedly excised from it, I can only imagine that whatever the studio did, it was to improve the film's chances at the box-office, which can and often does spell disaster for creative integrity and overall quality.
While I realize that creative butchery is hardly new in the film industry, local or otherwise, it nonetheless pains me to think that even during the Metro Manila film festival, when all foreign product is shut out of the movie theaters (with the exception of IMAX theaters) and where, once upon a time, Filipino filmmakers were allowed free rein to make the kind of movies they wanted to make, the desperation of studio suits to get fannies into the seats remains the primordial consideration.
The thing of it is, even assuming that Aguiluz was simply a hired gun rather than a visionary who conceived of the whole film, the studio that made it owed him some common courtesy. As a professional, I expect my clients to place their trust in me, to give me all of the facts I need to help them out, and to respect the work product that I give them. Of course, I owe them the best work I can possibly give, but my initial conference with them should give them an idea of what I'm capable of and what I can give them.
I can side with studios that fire directors before filming even begins; there's a reason why studios and directors sit down and talk, and that is to determine whether or not they have a common vision. To allow somebody to spent several months (or weeks, as is often the case here) of his life shooting and editing a movie only to yank the rug out from under him with unauthorized last minute reshoots and changes, though, is more than simple disrespect; it is a statement of intent from the producers or the suits that the director's vision is not theirs. It's basically the act of flipping the director the middle finger. Of course, probably the most extreme example of such a gesture is the way Warner Brothers threw out an ENTIRE film when they shelved Paul Schrader's Exorcist prequel (thereby denying Filipino-born Billy Crawford, who had a significant role in that film, his moment in the Hollywood spotlight) and had Renny Harlin shoot an all-new one, but Aguiluz's feelings of betrayal are nonetheless entirely legitimate.
I still don't know if I'll go and see Manila Kingpin, but if nothing else, if it turns out to be a total shitfest I'll bear in mind that it wasn't Tikoy Aguiluz's fault. I'll give him that much.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
If someone had told me ten years ago that Brad Bird, the writer/director of the quirky, entertaining and rather moving hand-drawn animated feature film The Iron Giant, which bowled over critics but underwhelmed most audiences, would go on to direct arguably the best installment of the Mission Impossible film franchise headlined by Tom Cruise, I would probably have dismissed them as crazy.
Twelve years later, I've seen the actual product and still can't believe how good it actually was, especially considering how little I enjoyed the three M:I movies that came before it.
Since much of the narrative of the story is propelled by twists and surprises and can be somewhat convoluted, I'll sum up the plot by saying that a mysterious individual named Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) has gotten hold of a device with which to initiate a Russian nuclear missile strike, and has managed to frame the Americans for doing so. Now, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his Impossible Mission Force team of Carter (Paula Patton), Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Brandt (Jeremy Renner) have to find Hendricks before he is able to actually launch any missiles.
The story isn't particularly novel; it hearkens back to the 1997 film The Peacemaker starring George Clooney in which the protagonists had to hunt down a man who stole a single nuclear warhead from the Russians. The difference is mainly in the execution; Bird's film is superior in nearly every way, whether it's the staging of the action sequences or in building genuine suspense, which is not the easiest thing to do considering that, this being a franchise film, it's practically a given that the good guys are going to win the day.
I probably should not have expected anything less from the director of the animated tour de force that was The Incredibles, but as high as my expectations were this film managed to even exceed them. Although the script is credited to Andre Nemec and Josh Applebaum I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Bird, who wrote The Incredibles and his Pixar studios follow-up Ratatouille as well as directing them, had at least some writing input; it feels, at several points, like something he might have written.
Perhaps what this film has over any of the others is that all throughout, Bird maintains the "team" spirit that made the original TV series such a hit with its audience. In the first film the entire team, save for Cruise's Hunt and Ving Rhames' Luther Stickwell, was wiped out by the end of the first act. In the second film, the only "team" to speak of was Hunt and his long hair, while in the third film, which had a fantastic villain in Philip Seymour Hoffman, was moving along pretty nicely until the climax, when writer-director J.J. Abrams decided that the only way Hunt could take down the extremely clever bad guy was pummel him to death. In Bird's film, however, the climax is divided into two parts as Hunt has to chase down the Nyqvist's Hendrick's while his team has to chase down his right hand and undo what he has done. Without the efforts of one, the other's efforts are useless. Also, even well before the climax, Cruise's co-stars, particularly The Hurt Locker star and man of the moment, Jeremy Renner, had some pretty generous helpings of screen time. I welcomed this development wholeheartedly as Patton is quite easy on the eyes, and because I can never get enough of the hilarious Pegg, who plays his comic talents quite to the hilt in this film and even gets quite a heroic moment at the end of it.
What made the film riveting for me to watch, however, was the fact that for the most part, even though the good guys were always going to get the bad guys, the filmmakers were able to keep me wondering how exactly they were going to do that. One thing that helped, I think was taking a page of The Peacemaker and making the arch villain someone who was not only quite formidable but who had apparently nothing to lose, which made him that much more dangerous.
The Mission: Impossible films have never been wanting in terms of technical proficiency. The production value of each and every one of them, no matter how forgettable the script, has been pretty much top caliber. The areas in which they've been wanting are directors and writers who were ready to accompany all this style with a little substance. Perhaps the closest they got to this prior to this film was the effort of Abrams and his team, but with Bird and his scriptwriters the franchise has finally gotten the creative shot in the arm it has needed all along.
When late in the film, Hunt breathes the words, "Mission accomplished" I could not help but agree.
4.5/5
Twelve years later, I've seen the actual product and still can't believe how good it actually was, especially considering how little I enjoyed the three M:I movies that came before it.
Since much of the narrative of the story is propelled by twists and surprises and can be somewhat convoluted, I'll sum up the plot by saying that a mysterious individual named Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) has gotten hold of a device with which to initiate a Russian nuclear missile strike, and has managed to frame the Americans for doing so. Now, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his Impossible Mission Force team of Carter (Paula Patton), Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Brandt (Jeremy Renner) have to find Hendricks before he is able to actually launch any missiles.
The story isn't particularly novel; it hearkens back to the 1997 film The Peacemaker starring George Clooney in which the protagonists had to hunt down a man who stole a single nuclear warhead from the Russians. The difference is mainly in the execution; Bird's film is superior in nearly every way, whether it's the staging of the action sequences or in building genuine suspense, which is not the easiest thing to do considering that, this being a franchise film, it's practically a given that the good guys are going to win the day.
I probably should not have expected anything less from the director of the animated tour de force that was The Incredibles, but as high as my expectations were this film managed to even exceed them. Although the script is credited to Andre Nemec and Josh Applebaum I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Bird, who wrote The Incredibles and his Pixar studios follow-up Ratatouille as well as directing them, had at least some writing input; it feels, at several points, like something he might have written.
Perhaps what this film has over any of the others is that all throughout, Bird maintains the "team" spirit that made the original TV series such a hit with its audience. In the first film the entire team, save for Cruise's Hunt and Ving Rhames' Luther Stickwell, was wiped out by the end of the first act. In the second film, the only "team" to speak of was Hunt and his long hair, while in the third film, which had a fantastic villain in Philip Seymour Hoffman, was moving along pretty nicely until the climax, when writer-director J.J. Abrams decided that the only way Hunt could take down the extremely clever bad guy was pummel him to death. In Bird's film, however, the climax is divided into two parts as Hunt has to chase down the Nyqvist's Hendrick's while his team has to chase down his right hand and undo what he has done. Without the efforts of one, the other's efforts are useless. Also, even well before the climax, Cruise's co-stars, particularly The Hurt Locker star and man of the moment, Jeremy Renner, had some pretty generous helpings of screen time. I welcomed this development wholeheartedly as Patton is quite easy on the eyes, and because I can never get enough of the hilarious Pegg, who plays his comic talents quite to the hilt in this film and even gets quite a heroic moment at the end of it.
What made the film riveting for me to watch, however, was the fact that for the most part, even though the good guys were always going to get the bad guys, the filmmakers were able to keep me wondering how exactly they were going to do that. One thing that helped, I think was taking a page of The Peacemaker and making the arch villain someone who was not only quite formidable but who had apparently nothing to lose, which made him that much more dangerous.
The Mission: Impossible films have never been wanting in terms of technical proficiency. The production value of each and every one of them, no matter how forgettable the script, has been pretty much top caliber. The areas in which they've been wanting are directors and writers who were ready to accompany all this style with a little substance. Perhaps the closest they got to this prior to this film was the effort of Abrams and his team, but with Bird and his scriptwriters the franchise has finally gotten the creative shot in the arm it has needed all along.
When late in the film, Hunt breathes the words, "Mission accomplished" I could not help but agree.
4.5/5
Thursday, December 1, 2011
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
At the outset, I'd like to state that, even as someone who's grown up with Tintin, I did not object violently to the considerable liberties that were taken with The Secret of the Unicorn, one of the roughly two dozen books that chronicled the adventures of the young Belgian reporter created by cartoonist Georges Remi, a.k.a. Herge, who has over nearly three quarters of a century become wildly popular in almost every part of the world (except, perhaps, for the United States). I'm not like one of those Lord of the Rings zealots who thinks that Eowyn's long-winded speech upon revealing her true identity to the leader of the Nazgul before fighting him made more narrative sense then choosing to make the big revelation just as she was about to deliver the coup de grace upon him. Sometimes it just makes sense to make changes for the big screen.
I had only recently re-read The Secret of the Unicorn and its sequel Red Rackham's Treasure and had come to the conclusion that as impressive as Herge's signature ligne claire storytelling was, as feature length movies there was little these books had to offer that today's audiences had not seen before in one form or another. I get that there was a need to up the visual ante somehow.
I also get that, since this movie was the first time audiences would be meeting both Tintin and one of his stalwart companions, Captain Archibald Haddock, it was necessary to borrow elements from the book in which Haddock was actually introduced into the series, The Crab With the Golden Claws. I even get why director Steven Spielberg, producer Peter Jackson and their writers felt the need to cut and paste a crucial part of Red Rackham's Treasure onto this movie even as they strongly suggested that the second book of that particular story may yet form the basis of a sequel.
Tintin (Jamie Bell) is a journalist who moonlights as an adventurer. One day, in a flea market he spots a scale model of an old ship, a 17th century man-of-war called the Unicorn and, admiring its craftsmanship, buys it straightaway, only to receive two offers from strangers wanting to buy the model ship in rapid succession, the first such offer being made by a nervous-looking man who, upon being rebuffed, tells him the ship will bring him nothing but trouble, and the second, much more generous offer being from an affluent collector named Sakharine (Daniel Craig) who doesn't seem to want to take no for an answer. Tintin refuses him as well and takes the ship home. Unfortunately, an accident involving Tintin's dog, Snowy and a cat that wanders into his apartment results in the ship being broken and a small cylinder slipping under the furniture unnoticed. What Tintin doesn't know but will soon find out is that the contents of that cylinder will lead him on a globe spanning adventure involving mortal peril, the likes of which he will only be able to face with his faithful Snowy and his newfound friend, Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), whose knowledge is key to unlocking the mysterious secret of the Unicorn.
From a narrative perspective, the film works. It's got a solid plot, brisk pacing, good character development and dialogue which retains by and large the spirit of the comic books (or at least the English translations that I grew up with, anyway). Full credit goes to the writers for even trying to situate the adventure properly in the Tintin chronology by making brief reference to Tintin's past exploits through news clippings on the walls. It's not quite the Tintin I grew up with, but to be honest, I don't think a movie geared for today's audiences could have been.
Oddly enough, my problems with the movie stem more from the visualization of Tintin and his world than anything else.
When Steven Spielberg said that motion capture technology represented the best way to bring Tintin's adventures to the big screen, I was skeptical. While I was more than ready to concede that Herge's unique aesthetic was not quite possible with a traditional live-action setup, I wasn't sure why Spielberg believed that mo-cap would be superior to key-frame CG animation; surely the folks at Pixar or Spielberg's own Dreamworks animation, with their technical prowess, were up to the task.
Admittedly, much of the action in Tintin went a considerable way towards convincing me that Spielberg was right, but not quite all the way. The camera movement is simply amazing, with Spielberg's signature flair for following the action with a single shot for several seconds on end where most directors would have cut at least half a dozen times if not more. The actions scenes on the ship at sea and in the streets of what I presume is London, as well as the madcap chase sequence in Morocco stood out for me in particular. Such techniques still remain beyond even Pixar's and Dreamworks' considerable capability.
Where the film falls short, though is in the quieter, character-oriented moments. Several characters in this film, and I am loath to say this because I really hoped that this movie would avoid this, suffer from the dreaded "dead-eye" syndrome that has plagued just about every purely mo-cap film to date. The most conspicuous of all is Tintin himself, and what pains me about this shortcoming is how, in many, many instances, the decision for his eyes or eyebrows not to move or distort or indicate any kind of emotion, even while actor Jamie Bell is trying his darnedest to convey that Tintin is excited or upset or anything else, strongly suggests that Spielberg's interpretation of Tintin is that he is largely expressionless. Anyone who has read even half of Tintin's adventures can attest that even though Tintin's face is little more than very simple lines and a pair of dots for his eyes, Herge was able to draw a fairly wide range of expression from that combination. Tintin's been happy, angry, sad, shocked, intent and a whole lot of other emotions, very few of which are conveyed by his digital avatar.
Not only that, but some characters simply don't translate very well at all, like opera singer Bianca Castafiore, magnate Omar Ben Salaad and a number of her audience members who were clearly rendered in "Herge-esque" fashion but all of whom ended up just looking kind of strange. In particular, Salaad looks like he stepped out of Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express.
The good news on the character front, though, is that veteran performance-capture actor Andy Serkis, who brought J.R.R. Tolkien's Gollum to life in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies and who made two cinematic simians even more lifelike than the Hollywood actors they played against in King Kong and Rise of the Planet of the Apes makes Captain Haddock seem as lively as Tintin seems inert. There is a consistency to this; Haddock was, in the comics, always the more boisterous of the two characters, and it is a delight not only that Serkis was chosen to bring this character to life but that screenwriters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish have reproduced much of his signature colorful language ("Blistering Barnacles! Thundering Typhoons!") for his dialogue. Serkis, along with Spielberg's eye for action, makes a thundering argument for the use of motion capture, one that is not easily dismissed.
Still, I couldn't help but feel that this film could have been a lot more than it was if Spielberg and his crew had done a few things a little bit differently. Still, I suppose budgetary constraints may have prevented them from being too daring. One definite disappointment I have to voice, however, was with legendary composer John Williams' music which, unthinkable as this may sound, actually sounded generic. The 3-D in this film, while it still did not provide as amazing an experience as the 3-D presentation of James Cameron's Avatar did, was put to good use here, and in just the right scenes.
All told, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn hits a lot of the right notes for me, and personally I think Spielberg and Peter Jackson, who's slated to direct the next installment, deserve another crack at this, although I qualify this with the statement that there is still plenty of room for improvement.
Rating: 3.5/5
I had only recently re-read The Secret of the Unicorn and its sequel Red Rackham's Treasure and had come to the conclusion that as impressive as Herge's signature ligne claire storytelling was, as feature length movies there was little these books had to offer that today's audiences had not seen before in one form or another. I get that there was a need to up the visual ante somehow.
I also get that, since this movie was the first time audiences would be meeting both Tintin and one of his stalwart companions, Captain Archibald Haddock, it was necessary to borrow elements from the book in which Haddock was actually introduced into the series, The Crab With the Golden Claws. I even get why director Steven Spielberg, producer Peter Jackson and their writers felt the need to cut and paste a crucial part of Red Rackham's Treasure onto this movie even as they strongly suggested that the second book of that particular story may yet form the basis of a sequel.
Tintin (Jamie Bell) is a journalist who moonlights as an adventurer. One day, in a flea market he spots a scale model of an old ship, a 17th century man-of-war called the Unicorn and, admiring its craftsmanship, buys it straightaway, only to receive two offers from strangers wanting to buy the model ship in rapid succession, the first such offer being made by a nervous-looking man who, upon being rebuffed, tells him the ship will bring him nothing but trouble, and the second, much more generous offer being from an affluent collector named Sakharine (Daniel Craig) who doesn't seem to want to take no for an answer. Tintin refuses him as well and takes the ship home. Unfortunately, an accident involving Tintin's dog, Snowy and a cat that wanders into his apartment results in the ship being broken and a small cylinder slipping under the furniture unnoticed. What Tintin doesn't know but will soon find out is that the contents of that cylinder will lead him on a globe spanning adventure involving mortal peril, the likes of which he will only be able to face with his faithful Snowy and his newfound friend, Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), whose knowledge is key to unlocking the mysterious secret of the Unicorn.
From a narrative perspective, the film works. It's got a solid plot, brisk pacing, good character development and dialogue which retains by and large the spirit of the comic books (or at least the English translations that I grew up with, anyway). Full credit goes to the writers for even trying to situate the adventure properly in the Tintin chronology by making brief reference to Tintin's past exploits through news clippings on the walls. It's not quite the Tintin I grew up with, but to be honest, I don't think a movie geared for today's audiences could have been.
Oddly enough, my problems with the movie stem more from the visualization of Tintin and his world than anything else.
When Steven Spielberg said that motion capture technology represented the best way to bring Tintin's adventures to the big screen, I was skeptical. While I was more than ready to concede that Herge's unique aesthetic was not quite possible with a traditional live-action setup, I wasn't sure why Spielberg believed that mo-cap would be superior to key-frame CG animation; surely the folks at Pixar or Spielberg's own Dreamworks animation, with their technical prowess, were up to the task.
Admittedly, much of the action in Tintin went a considerable way towards convincing me that Spielberg was right, but not quite all the way. The camera movement is simply amazing, with Spielberg's signature flair for following the action with a single shot for several seconds on end where most directors would have cut at least half a dozen times if not more. The actions scenes on the ship at sea and in the streets of what I presume is London, as well as the madcap chase sequence in Morocco stood out for me in particular. Such techniques still remain beyond even Pixar's and Dreamworks' considerable capability.
Where the film falls short, though is in the quieter, character-oriented moments. Several characters in this film, and I am loath to say this because I really hoped that this movie would avoid this, suffer from the dreaded "dead-eye" syndrome that has plagued just about every purely mo-cap film to date. The most conspicuous of all is Tintin himself, and what pains me about this shortcoming is how, in many, many instances, the decision for his eyes or eyebrows not to move or distort or indicate any kind of emotion, even while actor Jamie Bell is trying his darnedest to convey that Tintin is excited or upset or anything else, strongly suggests that Spielberg's interpretation of Tintin is that he is largely expressionless. Anyone who has read even half of Tintin's adventures can attest that even though Tintin's face is little more than very simple lines and a pair of dots for his eyes, Herge was able to draw a fairly wide range of expression from that combination. Tintin's been happy, angry, sad, shocked, intent and a whole lot of other emotions, very few of which are conveyed by his digital avatar.
Not only that, but some characters simply don't translate very well at all, like opera singer Bianca Castafiore, magnate Omar Ben Salaad and a number of her audience members who were clearly rendered in "Herge-esque" fashion but all of whom ended up just looking kind of strange. In particular, Salaad looks like he stepped out of Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express.
The good news on the character front, though, is that veteran performance-capture actor Andy Serkis, who brought J.R.R. Tolkien's Gollum to life in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies and who made two cinematic simians even more lifelike than the Hollywood actors they played against in King Kong and Rise of the Planet of the Apes makes Captain Haddock seem as lively as Tintin seems inert. There is a consistency to this; Haddock was, in the comics, always the more boisterous of the two characters, and it is a delight not only that Serkis was chosen to bring this character to life but that screenwriters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish have reproduced much of his signature colorful language ("Blistering Barnacles! Thundering Typhoons!") for his dialogue. Serkis, along with Spielberg's eye for action, makes a thundering argument for the use of motion capture, one that is not easily dismissed.
Still, I couldn't help but feel that this film could have been a lot more than it was if Spielberg and his crew had done a few things a little bit differently. Still, I suppose budgetary constraints may have prevented them from being too daring. One definite disappointment I have to voice, however, was with legendary composer John Williams' music which, unthinkable as this may sound, actually sounded generic. The 3-D in this film, while it still did not provide as amazing an experience as the 3-D presentation of James Cameron's Avatar did, was put to good use here, and in just the right scenes.
All told, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn hits a lot of the right notes for me, and personally I think Spielberg and Peter Jackson, who's slated to direct the next installment, deserve another crack at this, although I qualify this with the statement that there is still plenty of room for improvement.
Rating: 3.5/5
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Why Pixar Should Acknowledge that Cars 2 was a Failure.
I understand the concept of standing by one's work, for better or worse, which is why I get why Steven Spielberg is not trashing the last Indiana Jones movie despite the negative reaction to it by many of the franchise's fans, and why Avi Arad is in the habit of making excuses for even the most poorly-received Marvel movies. Therefore, when I read an interview in which Pixar's head honcho John Lasseter, on the eve of the movie's home video release, defended Cars 2 from the brickbats slung its way by film critics, citing the film's global box-office as proof enough that they had made a good film, I understood his position, even if I ultimately disagreed with it.
As a fan of Pixar's, I feel their interests, and those of their global audience would be better served if they acknowledged, at least among themselves, that Cars 2 was a train-wreck of a movie, for reasons I shall enumerate:
1. Citing box-office as indicators of a movie's quality is a merchant's argument, not a filmmaker's. For years, Pixar has made original movies which placed story and character development above all else, with the spectacular animation and visuals actually coming in a distant third, even though they're also well-covered in that department. Because Pixar's rivals at Dreamworks Animation and a number of other studios have shown increasing prowess in the technical department, though, Pixar has always had to rely on their virtually patented ability to come up with moving, clever stories and characterizations to stay ahead in the game, sometimes at the expense of ultimate box-office success. Sure, Shrek 2 cleaned up at the box-office in 2004, but I defy anyone to say that years from now, that film will be remembered more fondly than Pixar's The Incredibles, which came out later that same year to smaller box-office returns but considerably greater accolades. Also, the second Transformers movie made over a billion dollars at the global box-office, but that doesn't stop it from being a steaming pile of shit any more than the box-office receipts of Cars 2 do.
Of course, Pixar has to sell movies; it's how to stay in the animation game at all; but they must think like filmmakers FIRST and merchants SECOND. Moreover, notwithstanding the merchant's argument propounded by Lasseter, Cars 2 is the first Pixar movie since A Bug's Life in 1998 to gross below $200 million in the United States and Canada. Factoring in inflation and 3-D surcharges, Cars 2 is actually the lowest grossing Pixar movie ever, despite being easily the most unabashedly commercial one. Prior to this movie, Pixar had achieved the unprecedented: for years, every Pixar movie after A Bug's Life was an undisputed $200 million sure thing, a unique feat which none of their rivals (or anyone else for that matter, including the likes of Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise or Will Smith) could claim, and one which they achieved by thinking as filmmakers FIRST and merchants SECOND, even when making their sequels (e.g. Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3). Whatever Lasseter's protestations to the contrary, Cars 2 felt like the products of merchants and not filmmakers.
2. The Incredibles was a rare animal among Pixar movies in that writer/director Brad Bird managed to tell a story that incorporated both Pixar's signature flair for all-ages stories with a slightly edgier, more mature sensibility in which violent death, of both good guys and bad guys could occur. The Incredibles remains easily the most violent of all Pixar movies, and the only one to sport a 'PG' rating from the MPAA, but Bird made it work because early on, he established that his was the kind of world where things like that could happen. It's all about context.
In Cars 2, however, Lasseter and his crew make easily the most jarring tonal shift in Pixar's history by going from a peaceful Americana atmosphere, in which a barrel-roll at a racetrack is supposed to be a horrifying moment (which the character involved survives) to a knockoff "James Bond" setting where a number of supporting characters get regularly crushed and/or blown up, with one of them even getting tortured before he gets blown up. There is no context here; if anything, the first film was the anti-context. If one can imagine the sequel Finding Nemo having fish getting eaten by angry piranha or Bruce and his friends going on regular feeding frenzies, one can then imagine how...off the second Cars film felt with its rather gratuitous violence.
The lesson is simple; if future Pixar films are going to feature deadly violence, they should follow the model of The Incredibles, and contextualize it from the get-go instead of spending a whole movie establishing one kind of narrative atmosphere only to abruptly replace it with another in the sequel.
3. Finally, and most importantly, I think Pixar is getting a little too comfortable making sequels. Sure, the Toy Story trilogy is probably likely to go down in history as one of cinema's best, along with the original Star Wars trilogy and the LOTR films, but the fact that they decided to make a sequel of the film that was the least well-received by critics, and the one film that broke their streak of Best Animated Film Oscars was already a misstep, one Lasseter, if his interview is any indication, feels rather smug about, and if I understand correctly, another misstep is on the way; they're making a prequel to Monsters, Inc., a highly satisfying film that doesn't really scream for any kind of sequel, let alone a prequel. The truly chilling thing is the only recent buddy-comedy prequel that I can think of is Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd. I'm sure Pixar will make a better movie than that, but it's still rather dubious company for them to keep. I don't think even Pixar will deny that their best movies are their original ones, but even if they have to visit sequel territory, I dearly wish they would craft a sequel for the ONE Pixar movie that was really built for one: THE INCREDIBLES!
As a fan of Pixar's, I feel their interests, and those of their global audience would be better served if they acknowledged, at least among themselves, that Cars 2 was a train-wreck of a movie, for reasons I shall enumerate:
1. Citing box-office as indicators of a movie's quality is a merchant's argument, not a filmmaker's. For years, Pixar has made original movies which placed story and character development above all else, with the spectacular animation and visuals actually coming in a distant third, even though they're also well-covered in that department. Because Pixar's rivals at Dreamworks Animation and a number of other studios have shown increasing prowess in the technical department, though, Pixar has always had to rely on their virtually patented ability to come up with moving, clever stories and characterizations to stay ahead in the game, sometimes at the expense of ultimate box-office success. Sure, Shrek 2 cleaned up at the box-office in 2004, but I defy anyone to say that years from now, that film will be remembered more fondly than Pixar's The Incredibles, which came out later that same year to smaller box-office returns but considerably greater accolades. Also, the second Transformers movie made over a billion dollars at the global box-office, but that doesn't stop it from being a steaming pile of shit any more than the box-office receipts of Cars 2 do.
Of course, Pixar has to sell movies; it's how to stay in the animation game at all; but they must think like filmmakers FIRST and merchants SECOND. Moreover, notwithstanding the merchant's argument propounded by Lasseter, Cars 2 is the first Pixar movie since A Bug's Life in 1998 to gross below $200 million in the United States and Canada. Factoring in inflation and 3-D surcharges, Cars 2 is actually the lowest grossing Pixar movie ever, despite being easily the most unabashedly commercial one. Prior to this movie, Pixar had achieved the unprecedented: for years, every Pixar movie after A Bug's Life was an undisputed $200 million sure thing, a unique feat which none of their rivals (or anyone else for that matter, including the likes of Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise or Will Smith) could claim, and one which they achieved by thinking as filmmakers FIRST and merchants SECOND, even when making their sequels (e.g. Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3). Whatever Lasseter's protestations to the contrary, Cars 2 felt like the products of merchants and not filmmakers.
2. The Incredibles was a rare animal among Pixar movies in that writer/director Brad Bird managed to tell a story that incorporated both Pixar's signature flair for all-ages stories with a slightly edgier, more mature sensibility in which violent death, of both good guys and bad guys could occur. The Incredibles remains easily the most violent of all Pixar movies, and the only one to sport a 'PG' rating from the MPAA, but Bird made it work because early on, he established that his was the kind of world where things like that could happen. It's all about context.
In Cars 2, however, Lasseter and his crew make easily the most jarring tonal shift in Pixar's history by going from a peaceful Americana atmosphere, in which a barrel-roll at a racetrack is supposed to be a horrifying moment (which the character involved survives) to a knockoff "James Bond" setting where a number of supporting characters get regularly crushed and/or blown up, with one of them even getting tortured before he gets blown up. There is no context here; if anything, the first film was the anti-context. If one can imagine the sequel Finding Nemo having fish getting eaten by angry piranha or Bruce and his friends going on regular feeding frenzies, one can then imagine how...off the second Cars film felt with its rather gratuitous violence.
The lesson is simple; if future Pixar films are going to feature deadly violence, they should follow the model of The Incredibles, and contextualize it from the get-go instead of spending a whole movie establishing one kind of narrative atmosphere only to abruptly replace it with another in the sequel.
3. Finally, and most importantly, I think Pixar is getting a little too comfortable making sequels. Sure, the Toy Story trilogy is probably likely to go down in history as one of cinema's best, along with the original Star Wars trilogy and the LOTR films, but the fact that they decided to make a sequel of the film that was the least well-received by critics, and the one film that broke their streak of Best Animated Film Oscars was already a misstep, one Lasseter, if his interview is any indication, feels rather smug about, and if I understand correctly, another misstep is on the way; they're making a prequel to Monsters, Inc., a highly satisfying film that doesn't really scream for any kind of sequel, let alone a prequel. The truly chilling thing is the only recent buddy-comedy prequel that I can think of is Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd. I'm sure Pixar will make a better movie than that, but it's still rather dubious company for them to keep. I don't think even Pixar will deny that their best movies are their original ones, but even if they have to visit sequel territory, I dearly wish they would craft a sequel for the ONE Pixar movie that was really built for one: THE INCREDIBLES!
Monday, November 7, 2011
The Everyman's Caper: Tower Heist
Watching Brett Ratner's Tower Heist, I got the impression that the people who wrote its final script worked from the premise: what would the heist in Ocean's 11 be like if the guys who pulled it off were a bunch of blue-collar schlubs instead of super-slick professional thieves?
The result is an often fun and rather silly comedy caper film which, thanks to some clever casting, manages to stay afloat for the entirety of its running time, but, due to some sloppy writing, only just.
Ben Stiller plays Josh Kovacs, the building manager at a posh New York apartment building, the most affluent resident of which is penthouse owner Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), who, early in the film, is put under house arrest for swindling about $2 billion in Bernie Madoff fashion. Among Shaw's victims, unfortunately, are Josh and just about the rest of the building's staff, whose pensions Shaw misappropriated. Having been a loyal valet to Shaw for a decade Josh is at first incredulous, but when he sees Shaw's indifference to the revelation that the building's doorman tried to step in front of a train he realizes the truth and in his anger smashes a highly expensive classic Ferrari which Shaw has in his penthouse. Having lost his job, Josh is approached by the lead FBI agent handling Shaw's case, Claire Denham (Tea Leoni) who buys him a drink and, in the course of their conversation, reveals that the Bureau is still searching for Shaw's stash of cash, considering that he has cleaned out just about all of his bank accounts.
Josh, having worked for Shaw for a decade, believes he knows exactly where this special stash is hidden, and in order to steal it he recruits his obnoxious, small-time crook neighbor Slide (Murphy) and a motley assortment of conspirators, namely, three of his co-employees at the tower, his brother-in-law Charlie (Casey Affleck), chambermaid Odessa (Gabourey Sidibe), and elevator operator Enrique (Michael Pena), and finally, a former Wall Street wizard who was recently evicted from the tower, Mr. Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick).
As heist movies go, this is certainly not the most clever. For me, the beauty of the Ocean's 11 remake (of which Affleck, incidentally, is a veteran) was how effectively the writers, director and actors sold the idea of the heist before it even happened to the extent that when it did happen, I was so blown away by how the characters pulled it off that I didn't even bother to ask how some of the things they did were even possible. There was a real magician's sleight-of-hand to the planning and staging of the whole thing.
In this film, Ratner is far more preoccupied with two things: 1) getting the audience to hate Alan Alda's Madoff-like charlatan and in the process to sympathize with Stiller and the rest of his blue-collar crew, and 2)milking his cast, from Stiller to Murphy to Broderick to Pena, for as many laughs as he can. This is good for a fair number of laughs, but the heist itself goes from unlikely to absurd in pretty short order as a result. To his credit, Ratner really tries playing to his actor's strengths: Stiller does the everyman he has done so well since the late 1990s, Murphy plays the foul-mouthed con man he played in the 80s, and Broderick seems to be recycling the mousy accountant he popularized on stage in the musical version of The Producers (at least, based on what I've seen from the largely ignored 2005 film version of that play). At least Affleck played against type; from the willing conspirator in the Ocean's 11 remake and its sequels he went to being the reluctant one in the group.
Still, it was good to see Murphy once again play the fast-talking scoundrel he popularized in the 80s, if in a slightly watered-down, PG-13 version, as opposed to the R-18 version that invariably had a more colorful vocabulary. It was surprising to see that the privilege of dropping the film's lone F-bomb went to Broderick, who as the former "one percenter" who suddenly finds himself as one of the less fortunate 99% was a heck of a lot of fun to watch. His meltdown in one of the film's climactic scenes, where Fitzhugh is asked to grab the bumper of a dangling car (don't ask), is comedy gold. Oh, and Tea Leoni still looks smokin' hot at 45.
It's certainly not the most memorable heist movie (or movie, for that matter) to come along in awhile but until Eddie Murphy goes full-on Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond it'll do, and it certainly was nice of Ratner to shift from Chris Tucker's annoying Murphy knock-off act that as seen in the Rush Hour movies in favor of the real deal, even if he does feel a little bit like a parody of himself.
Rating: 3/5
The result is an often fun and rather silly comedy caper film which, thanks to some clever casting, manages to stay afloat for the entirety of its running time, but, due to some sloppy writing, only just.
Ben Stiller plays Josh Kovacs, the building manager at a posh New York apartment building, the most affluent resident of which is penthouse owner Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), who, early in the film, is put under house arrest for swindling about $2 billion in Bernie Madoff fashion. Among Shaw's victims, unfortunately, are Josh and just about the rest of the building's staff, whose pensions Shaw misappropriated. Having been a loyal valet to Shaw for a decade Josh is at first incredulous, but when he sees Shaw's indifference to the revelation that the building's doorman tried to step in front of a train he realizes the truth and in his anger smashes a highly expensive classic Ferrari which Shaw has in his penthouse. Having lost his job, Josh is approached by the lead FBI agent handling Shaw's case, Claire Denham (Tea Leoni) who buys him a drink and, in the course of their conversation, reveals that the Bureau is still searching for Shaw's stash of cash, considering that he has cleaned out just about all of his bank accounts.
Josh, having worked for Shaw for a decade, believes he knows exactly where this special stash is hidden, and in order to steal it he recruits his obnoxious, small-time crook neighbor Slide (Murphy) and a motley assortment of conspirators, namely, three of his co-employees at the tower, his brother-in-law Charlie (Casey Affleck), chambermaid Odessa (Gabourey Sidibe), and elevator operator Enrique (Michael Pena), and finally, a former Wall Street wizard who was recently evicted from the tower, Mr. Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick).
As heist movies go, this is certainly not the most clever. For me, the beauty of the Ocean's 11 remake (of which Affleck, incidentally, is a veteran) was how effectively the writers, director and actors sold the idea of the heist before it even happened to the extent that when it did happen, I was so blown away by how the characters pulled it off that I didn't even bother to ask how some of the things they did were even possible. There was a real magician's sleight-of-hand to the planning and staging of the whole thing.
In this film, Ratner is far more preoccupied with two things: 1) getting the audience to hate Alan Alda's Madoff-like charlatan and in the process to sympathize with Stiller and the rest of his blue-collar crew, and 2)milking his cast, from Stiller to Murphy to Broderick to Pena, for as many laughs as he can. This is good for a fair number of laughs, but the heist itself goes from unlikely to absurd in pretty short order as a result. To his credit, Ratner really tries playing to his actor's strengths: Stiller does the everyman he has done so well since the late 1990s, Murphy plays the foul-mouthed con man he played in the 80s, and Broderick seems to be recycling the mousy accountant he popularized on stage in the musical version of The Producers (at least, based on what I've seen from the largely ignored 2005 film version of that play). At least Affleck played against type; from the willing conspirator in the Ocean's 11 remake and its sequels he went to being the reluctant one in the group.
Still, it was good to see Murphy once again play the fast-talking scoundrel he popularized in the 80s, if in a slightly watered-down, PG-13 version, as opposed to the R-18 version that invariably had a more colorful vocabulary. It was surprising to see that the privilege of dropping the film's lone F-bomb went to Broderick, who as the former "one percenter" who suddenly finds himself as one of the less fortunate 99% was a heck of a lot of fun to watch. His meltdown in one of the film's climactic scenes, where Fitzhugh is asked to grab the bumper of a dangling car (don't ask), is comedy gold. Oh, and Tea Leoni still looks smokin' hot at 45.
It's certainly not the most memorable heist movie (or movie, for that matter) to come along in awhile but until Eddie Murphy goes full-on Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond it'll do, and it certainly was nice of Ratner to shift from Chris Tucker's annoying Murphy knock-off act that as seen in the Rush Hour movies in favor of the real deal, even if he does feel a little bit like a parody of himself.
Rating: 3/5
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Tintin and the Uncanny Valley
I grew up reading the adventures of Belgian reporter Tintin; he was as much a part of my childhood as Spider-Man, Batman or the Hulk. I was therefore excited to hear a few years ago that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson would finally be bringing him to the big screen. That the duo have hired British actors Jamie Bell as Tintin and Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock and the writers of the popular British TV show Dr. Who, goes to show that they're ready to go the extra mile to infuse the story with the distinctly European sensibility for which the character and his world are known.
The thing is, I'm not necessarily thrilled by the format Spielberg has chosen to tell his story. I know that I am but one of a long line of bloggers, armchair experts, moviegoers and Tintin fans not thrilled with the prospect of yet another dead-eyed, chillingly artificial adventure in the vein of Beowulf and The Polar Express, but with the release of The Adventures of Tintin merely weeks away (it opens in the Philippines on November 30, 2011), I find myself willing to get in line for yet another "Motion Capture" movie.
Motion capture is really such a tricky proposition. As someone who's sat through the progenitor of all of these recent movies, The Polar Express, with my children through multiple viewings on DVD (and one in the theater), I know how difficult it can be to endure. I found Robert Zemeckis' follow-up to that film, Beowulf to be just creepy, and even though I respected Zemeckis' vision for A Christmas Carol, which had already been done in just about every other format, I still found it difficult and at times terrifying to watch, even with some virtuoso performances from the actors involved in that process. Ominously, Disney, the parent studio of Zemeckis' Imagemovers outfit has shut down the studio after its latest effort, Mars Needs Moms, tanked at the box-office and has permanently scrapped Zemeckis' plans to produce a mo-cap version of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine movie.
It strikes me that audiences aren't violently opposed to motion capture as an aid to storytelling, as shown by the unparalleled box-office returns of James Cameron's mo-cap-heavy, live-action sci-fi spectacle Avatar, as well as Jackson's own Lord of the Rings trilogy, which featured an entirely digitally-rendered mo-cap character in Gollum, but apparently what really unsettles audiences is to do away with human characters completely and to replace them with the strange approximations of them that mo-cap characters often are.
It's not like pure animation where the stand-ins for humans are, well, conspicuously distinct from humans; after bloggers (and maybe some professional reviewers to boot), have written whole treatises on the subject of the "uncanny valley" and how the phenomenon tends to occur most commonly in mo-cap films, one wonders why Spielberg and Jackson would take the risks that they have, although Jackson's success in the format (as evidenced by Gollum and later, King Kong, both portrayed by Serkis) speaks for itself.
Of course, since Tintin was well-into production when Mars Needs Moms tanked, and millions of dollars had already been spent, the makers were fully committed to seeing the project through, no matter how ominous it is that The Adventures of Tintin is the first mo-cap project to hit screens since rival studio Disney threw in the towel and shut down Imagemovers. Apparently, the perceived risk on Tintin is so high that two studios had to finance it and split global territories more or less equally, which is a departure from the usual practice of one studio distributing the film in the United States and Canada and the other studio distributing it in the rest of the world.
The reviews that are trickling in and the reports of box-office success as the film rolls out slowly around the world (as opposed to one big global premiere as is usually done for Harry Potter or superhero movies), are encouraging, but I'm still on tenterhooks as to whether this film will be the breakout hit I'm hoping it will be, or whether or not I'll enjoy it, which I'm dearly hoping I will.
I suppose one could say that if anyone could make this work, it would be Spielberg and Jackson, but really, with something as big as Tintin the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Here's hoping they're able to vault across that uncanny valley; that in itself would be one of Tintin's greatest adventures ever.
The thing is, I'm not necessarily thrilled by the format Spielberg has chosen to tell his story. I know that I am but one of a long line of bloggers, armchair experts, moviegoers and Tintin fans not thrilled with the prospect of yet another dead-eyed, chillingly artificial adventure in the vein of Beowulf and The Polar Express, but with the release of The Adventures of Tintin merely weeks away (it opens in the Philippines on November 30, 2011), I find myself willing to get in line for yet another "Motion Capture" movie.
Motion capture is really such a tricky proposition. As someone who's sat through the progenitor of all of these recent movies, The Polar Express, with my children through multiple viewings on DVD (and one in the theater), I know how difficult it can be to endure. I found Robert Zemeckis' follow-up to that film, Beowulf to be just creepy, and even though I respected Zemeckis' vision for A Christmas Carol, which had already been done in just about every other format, I still found it difficult and at times terrifying to watch, even with some virtuoso performances from the actors involved in that process. Ominously, Disney, the parent studio of Zemeckis' Imagemovers outfit has shut down the studio after its latest effort, Mars Needs Moms, tanked at the box-office and has permanently scrapped Zemeckis' plans to produce a mo-cap version of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine movie.
It strikes me that audiences aren't violently opposed to motion capture as an aid to storytelling, as shown by the unparalleled box-office returns of James Cameron's mo-cap-heavy, live-action sci-fi spectacle Avatar, as well as Jackson's own Lord of the Rings trilogy, which featured an entirely digitally-rendered mo-cap character in Gollum, but apparently what really unsettles audiences is to do away with human characters completely and to replace them with the strange approximations of them that mo-cap characters often are.
It's not like pure animation where the stand-ins for humans are, well, conspicuously distinct from humans; after bloggers (and maybe some professional reviewers to boot), have written whole treatises on the subject of the "uncanny valley" and how the phenomenon tends to occur most commonly in mo-cap films, one wonders why Spielberg and Jackson would take the risks that they have, although Jackson's success in the format (as evidenced by Gollum and later, King Kong, both portrayed by Serkis) speaks for itself.
Of course, since Tintin was well-into production when Mars Needs Moms tanked, and millions of dollars had already been spent, the makers were fully committed to seeing the project through, no matter how ominous it is that The Adventures of Tintin is the first mo-cap project to hit screens since rival studio Disney threw in the towel and shut down Imagemovers. Apparently, the perceived risk on Tintin is so high that two studios had to finance it and split global territories more or less equally, which is a departure from the usual practice of one studio distributing the film in the United States and Canada and the other studio distributing it in the rest of the world.
The reviews that are trickling in and the reports of box-office success as the film rolls out slowly around the world (as opposed to one big global premiere as is usually done for Harry Potter or superhero movies), are encouraging, but I'm still on tenterhooks as to whether this film will be the breakout hit I'm hoping it will be, or whether or not I'll enjoy it, which I'm dearly hoping I will.
I suppose one could say that if anyone could make this work, it would be Spielberg and Jackson, but really, with something as big as Tintin the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Here's hoping they're able to vault across that uncanny valley; that in itself would be one of Tintin's greatest adventures ever.
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