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algy
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Re: FILMS WE CAN'T BLOODY WAIT TO SEE...
a sex comedy (modern romantic comedies aren't 'romantic comedies'; they're mostly sex comedies)
I'm a big fan of the rom-com and the recent decimation of the genre has left me unhappy. It's been used as a dumping ground for movie-star wannabes from TV and pop; I call it the Jennifer effect. Step forward Ms Aniston and Ms Lopez.
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6/17/2008, 8:55 am
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Edge44
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Re: FILMS WE CAN'T BLOODY WAIT TO SEE...
quote:
Fitzgerald Fortune wrote:
Yeah, and it's telling that Bekmambetov moved onto directing a cartoonish Hollywood action movie that looks indistinguishable from your reams of MATRIX/FAST AND FURIOUS/MR AND MRS SMITH/TOMB RAIDER clones. It's a vision of the action film as complete spectacle, a true 'bread and circuses' approach to cinema, an empowerment fantasy for the clerical classes who are tired of desk-jockeying. It's interesting that THE MATRIX and its clones have appeared concomitantly with an increasing political passivity, both here and in the US.
The original GHOSTBUSTERS I still care for, because in the early 1980s the New Hollywood blockbuster ethos hadn't by that point been recycled to the nth degree and had not yet filtered down into all aspects of independent cinema and other national cinemas. By the time GHOSTBUSTERS 2 appeared in the late 1980s, the New Hollywood 'event picture' was wearing thin; but it never disappeared, and if you talk to a bunch of under-20s they tend not to have any patience for anything other than Hollywood 'event pictures'.
It'll be interesting to see how people respond to Bekmambetov's new film now that his work has been removed from the exotic production context of the Slavic states.
***SPOILER WARNING***
Fitz, have you read the 5 issue comic book run that Bekmambetov's new movie is adapted from? It works very well in this format, although there is lots in the series that the production would find impossible to adapt into mainstream Hollywood.
Most of what I've seen in the trailer is in the comic, except that when Fox meets wesley in the fast food place, she doesn't protect him from hitmen: she simply kills everybody in the place to prove to Wesley how serious she is. They later become lovers and the comic manages to get it's audience rooting for them, even though she's a sadistic killer of innocents. Imagine adapting that into mainstream Hollywood?
I don't think the original story would work in the Hollywood format. For one, beneath the surface, the story is an excellent deconstruction of comic book history, and the audience for that is very narrow. And the adapted film that's about to hit the cinemas will be full of too many creative compromises for me.
In the comics the members of the fraternity that protects Wesley are all supercriminals, hence their super powers. This helps with the suspension of disbelief when Wesley demonstrates his ability to shoot the wings off flies and bend bullets around corners etc; it will be interesting to see what device they've employed in the film in order to prop up the believability of all the overly fantastic acrobatics and special effects...
Last edited by Edge44, 6/18/2008, 9:40 pm
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6/17/2008, 5:09 pm
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Fitzgerald Fortune
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Re: FILMS WE CAN'T BLOODY WAIT TO SEE...
quote:
algy wrote:
Given the success of No Country and Jesse James then perhaps there is hope for the future. I'm yet to see There Will Be Blood but maybe that'll help as well.
Mind you, since its Oscar win NO COUNTRY has gathered quite a few snotty reviews. The same thing happened to PULP FICTION after its profile was raised by its win at Cannes and its Academy Award nomination: I remember seeing it in a small one-screen cinema before its win at Cannes, and the audience was very small but very vocal about their enjoyment of the film. I went back to see the film a few weeks later at a multiplex, with a couple of friends who had been persuaded to see the film only because it had gathered such good reviews, and I remember that the screening was packed; and as I was leaving the auditorium, a good number of people were complaining very loudly about the film, saying that they found it confusing or slow. (The friends I saw it with loved it, however.) Sometimes critical success can be a bad thing for a film that really strives for a niche audience: because the success puts more bums on seats, there seems to be an inevitable backlash.
I'd love to think that JESSE JAMES (or perhaps ZODIAC or RESCUE DAWN) was the most well-received film of last year, but it was completely mishandled by Warners. Warners wanted to cut the film, but if I remember correctly Pitt's contract specified that the film could only be released if Dominik had final cut (Pitt was a co-producer on the film), and thus Warners delayed the release by almost a year and then dumped the movie with little publicity. (I think the film made no more than $3.8 million in the US, which is small change by modern standards.)
I'd like to see Hollywood make more films, with smaller budgets. That may be the only way they can turn back the tide and reduce their dependency on pictures that are 'big earners'. That way, when a film like JESSE JAMES only makes $3.8 million, it won't be seen as a 'failure'.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD is very good, by the way. Not as good as JESSE JAMES, but almost on par with it. Aside from HARD EIGHT, it's the only P. T. Anderson film that I've connected with.
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6/17/2008, 5:27 pm
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Fitzgerald Fortune
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Re: FILMS WE CAN'T BLOODY WAIT TO SEE...
quote:
Edge44 wrote:
Fitz, have you read the 5 issue comic book run that Bekmambetov's new movie is adapted from? It works very well in this format, although there is lots in the series that the production would find impossible to adapt into mainstream Hollywood.
Most of what I've seen in the trailer is in the comic, except that when Fox meets wesley in the fast food place, she doesn't protect him from hitmen: she simply kills everybody in the place to prove to Wesley how serious she is. They later become lovers and the comic manages to get it's audience rooting for them, even though she's a sadistic killer of innocents. Imagine adapting that into mainstream Hollywood?
I don't think the original story would work in the Hollywood format. For one, beneath the surface, the story is an excellent deconstruction of comic book history, and the audience for that is very narrow. And the adapted film that's about to hit the cinemas will be full of too many creative compromises for me.
Yes, what works in one medium doesn't always translate to another, although Hollywood seems to think that because comics are a largely (but not wholly) visual medium they're always 'fair game' for a film adaptation. Something like Millar's WANTED sends up both the conventions of comics and, to a lesser extent, the Hollywood action movie; like you say, that aspect will inevitably be downplayed in the Hollywood movie. I expect the producers simply see in the comic book potential for lots of explosions and some fancy gunplay, not to mention Ms Jolie in various stages of undress and distress.
(I actually thought SHOOT 'EM UP was a good parody of the Hollywood action film though; although it may also have simply been a very shoddy straight-laced action flick that wasn't aware of how much it had descended into self-parody. I like to think that Clive Owen knew what he was doing, however.)
--- 'Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy'.
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6/17/2008, 5:33 pm
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algy
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Re: FILMS WE CAN'T BLOODY WAIT TO SEE...
Just as an antidote to Fitz's pessimism and opinion that things were better then, here's a passage from 'Franny and Zooie' by JD Salinger:
'Or will you dream of something a little more cosmic - zum Beispiel, playing Pierre or Audrey in a Technicolor production of War and Peace, with stunning battlefield scenes, and all the nuances of charactersation left out (on the grounds that they're novelistic and unphotogenic), and Anna Magnani daringly cast as Natasha (just to keep the production classy and Honest), and gorgeous incidental music by Dmitri Popkin, and all the male leads intermittently rippling their jaw muscles to show that they're under great emotional stress, and a World Premiere at the Winter Gardens, under floodlights, with Molotov and Milton Berle and Governer Dewey introducing the celebrities as they come into the theatre.'
Published 1955; Hollywood's been disappointing for every generation I reckon.
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6/20/2008, 4:47 pm
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Fitzgerald Fortune
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Re: FILMS WE CAN'T BLOODY WAIT TO SEE...
quote:
algy wrote:
Just as an antidote to Fitz's pessimism and opinion that things were better then, here's a passage from 'Franny and Zooie' by JD Salinger:
'Or will you dream of something a little more cosmic - zum Beispiel, playing Pierre or Audrey in a Technicolor production of War and Peace, with stunning battlefield scenes, and all the nuances of charactersation left out (on the grounds that they're novelistic and unphotogenic), and Anna Magnani daringly cast as Natasha (just to keep the production classy and Honest), and gorgeous incidental music by Dmitri Popkin, and all the male leads intermittently rippling their jaw muscles to show that they're under great emotional stress, and a World Premiere at the Winter Gardens, under floodlights, with Molotov and Milton Berle and Governer Dewey introducing the celebrities as they come into the theatre.'
Published 1955; Hollywood's been disappointing for every generation I reckon.
Of course, but the major difference is in the monopoly that Hollywood now possesses over film distribution and exhibition, which squeezes any truly independent cinema (or any un-Hollywood cinema of the kind that the majors won't distribute) out of the distribution chain. Following the Paramount decrees (anti-monopoly legislation) of 1947 and the divorcement of production from distribution and exhibition throughout the 1950s and into the 1980s there was a growth of independent cinema. Gradually, over the last twenty years that has been stripped back by the multiplex culture and Hollywood's corporate acquisition of its competition: there are less and less independently-owned cinemas, and therefore there are less and less outlets for any non-Hollywood films. If you think of the 1950s, there were five major studios (Fox, MGM, Warners, Paramount, RKO) and several 'minor' studios (United Artists, Columbia, Universal), not to mention numerous independents (such as AIP) and distributors who specialised in foreign films.
Now, film distribution is mostly run by Sony (who now own MGM, Columbia/TriStar, Fox and United Artists, as well as most of the back catalogue of the now bankrupt independent producers such as Orion and AIP/Filmways) and Warners (which is now owned by AOL). Paramounts films are now usually distributed through deals with either Sony or Disney. Independent distributors have been pushed out of the cinema trade (for example, Artificial Eye and Metro-Tartan both used to distribute a lot of European films to British cinemas in the 1990s, but over the last five years they've dropped off the scene), as have most independent cinemas. Now, it's harder to see a non-Hollywood film on the big screen that it was during the late-1940s, when the antitrust legislation was brought into play to stop Hollywood's monopoly over film distribution and exhibition. (Unless, of course, the film is made--like Bekmambetov's movies--using Hollywood's methods, and therefore may be picked up for cinema distribution by Sony or Warners and subsumed into their own catalogue.)
Also, you have to remember that most of the best and most well-remembered films to come out of the 1950s and 1960s (such as the classic films noir or films by now well-regarded auteurs like Orson Welles) were independent pictures, often 'Poverty Row' films, that were sold as 'B' features. That channel of distribution has vanished now, too.
Then of course there's the fact that Hollywood's cinema is now so concerned with chasing the pocket money of the teenyboppers that, unlike during the 1950s, it hardly bothers attempting to make morally bankrupt pictures for adults anymore.
Breaking Hollywood's stranglehold over the business of film distribution and exhibition would only be a very good thing for the development of diverse, independent cinema.
Last edited by Fitzgerald Fortune, 6/20/2008, 9:27 pm
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6/20/2008, 9:22 pm
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algy
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Re: FILMS WE CAN'T BLOODY WAIT TO SEE...
Still nice to read though; misery loves company
I heard an interviel with James McAvoy the other day. He claims that his new flick WANTED is "attempting to make morally bankrupt pictures for adults". Believe it when we see it but fingers crossed!
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6/21/2008, 5:43 pm
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