The Screengrab : 300

Trailer Review: Watchmen (Trailer #2)

Paul Clark — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I somehow missed this trailer a few weeks ago, so apologies if posting it now feels like too little, too late. But I think the important thing is getting it out there for the other three people who didn’t know about it and are interested in the movie, so here you are. As trailers go, this one is actually more enticing than the first one (Philip Glass > Billy Corgan), although I’m still a little uneasy about the Zack Snyder factor. On the one hand, it’s nice to see him shooting on some physical sets this time around, instead of shooting 99% of the damn thing against CGI backdrops like he did with 300. Yet his overreliance on slow-motion is troubling, both in his last movie and in the Watchmen trailers we’ve seen thusfar. After all, the graphic novel is incredibly dense, both in terms of plot and character, and if he’s working with a studio-mandated running time, too much slo-mo will necessitate paring it down the story until a lot of what makes the source material great has been lost. Oh, who am I kidding? I’m there on opening day, not least because the casting looks almost uniformly great. I’m still not sure about Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, but Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach and especially Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Comedian look perfect.

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:30:00 GMT

HONORABLE MENTION

300 (2007)

Even relatively anti-war films like Platoon acknowledge the fierce camaraderie and euphoric adrenalin rush of warriors in combat, but this surrealistic adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel about a legendary phalanx of Spartans taking on a zillion enemy warriors is all bloodlust, all the time. Yet, while historically suspect (since modern researchers are pretty sure the power-mad Persian king Xerxes didn’t really command a legion of trolls, orcs and giants from the darkest reaches of Middle Earth), and hardly on par with more serious evocations of combat (like, say, Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket), 300 is notable, like many of the best war films, as a reflection of its time. Some critics detected jingoistic echoes of George W. Bush’s “bring ‘em on” foreign policy in the refusal of Spartan badass King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) to negotiate with foreign powers, going it alone with his own Coalition of the Willing when other nations (and a cowardly Congress...er, Spartan Council) refuse to authorize war against an imminent Persian threat to democracy and freedom. Just as Nixon reportedly watched Patton over and over again before sending troops into Cambodia, it’s easy to imagine Bush viewing 300 to make himself feel better about sending American troops into combat without sufficient body armor: after all, Leonidas and his 299 BFFs take down half Xerxes’ army bare-chested! Framed as a tale of indeterminate tallness relayed by a warrior to inspire his fellow troops on the verge of combat, the fetishized fairy tale unreality of 300’s violence, tone and (xenophobic) politics, its conflicted homophobic/homoerotic ideal of manliness, its complete surrender to (and celebration of) CGI fakery and its wild popularity and seductive guilty pleasure craftsmanship all combine into a fascinating time capsule of an age when troops compare combat to video games and the line between fact and fiction, has never seemed quite so blurry.

JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (1971)

Some antiwar films spin their message with subtlety, some with humor, some with grace and some with a quiet sense of loss. Not Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun: it cuffs you to your chair and spends the next two hours beating you over the head with its message that war is nothing more than a huge grinding machine designed to destroy bodies and minds. Based on his own novel – which had the misfortune to appear on the eve of the Second World War, thus assuring its brutal message would be completely drowned out – Johnny Got His Gun was directed and written by Trumbo himself, following a thirty-year quest to bring the story to the screen. It’s not a particularly accomplished movie; Trumbo was a first-time director, and it shows. But the sheer horror it conveys through the portrayal of young Joe Bonham, a WWI veteran who has been rendered more or less a human paperweight by an enemy shell, and the sheer contempt it shows for a social order in which hundreds of thousands of lives are destroyed as if that were an acceptable way to solve problems, makes for a devastating viewing experience, and one which found a much more receptive audience at the height of the Vietnam War. (Many viewers later became familiar with Johnny Got His Gun due to its being heavily excerpted in Metallica’s video for “One”; the band had encountered so many difficulties in licensing individual scenes that they eventually just bought the entire move outright.)

THE GENERAL (1927)

Buster Keaton's Civil War comedy starring a train is probably the greatest war comedy of the silent era, unless you want to count The Birth of a Nation as history's little joke on D. W. Griffith's reputation. In the big battle scene, the Union army was played by five hundred members of the Oregon National Guard, and the Confederates were played by the same five hundred members of the Oregon National Guard, after a quick costume change. Apparently Keaton had some doubts about the acting ability of the guy playing the Northern general who sees the train tumbling into a river as the bridge it's crossing is dynamited, since legend has it that he didn't tell the fellow that the bridge he was facing was about to be blown up while the train was crossing it; certainly the man's expression of surprise is Oscar-worthy. After the location shooting was done, Keaton and his crew went back to Hollywood without bothering to clean up after themselves, and the wreckage of the train remained where it had fallen. The locals turned it into a tourist attraction until the scrap metal was needed during World War II.

MEN IN WAR (1957)

This diamond-hard Korean War drama was directed by Anthony Mann, a once-neglected action master who's now best remembered for his Westerns with James Stewart. Though little known, this movie is up there with the best of those. The superb cast is headed by Robert Ryan as a lieutenant in charge of a platoon lost behind enemy lines. As they inch their way along in search of safe ground, they're joined by a couple of strays: blunt, bullying Aldo Ray and Robert Keith -- gaunt and aged-looking, with huge hands and haunted eyes -- as a mute, shell-shocked Colonel who Ray treats as protectively as an especially mean seeing eye watching out for its master. The flat simplicity of the movie's title summons up echoes of early Hemingway, and its best scenes would do Papa proud.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Unwatchable #72: “Meet the Spartans”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Here’s a serendipitous turn of events – not for me, of course, but maybe for somebody out there. On the very day that Disaster Movie, the latest parody from the writing-directing team of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, is released in theaters, our Unwatchable selection of the day just happens to be the humor-challenged team’s previous effort, Meet the Spartans. (And when I say effort, I don’t really mean it in any traditional sense of the word.) This is purely coincidental, but if I can do anything to dissuade even one person from spending money on Disaster Movie this weekend, I’ll consider this post a success.

I doubt that’s going to be possible, though, since it seems highly unlikely that any regular Screengrab readers would be seeing Disaster Movie in the first place. For my part, Meet the Spartans was my first experience with the Seltzer-Friedberg team, but I can’t say I was completely unaware of what to expect – basically, that these bozos are Zucker-Abrams-Zucker for people who were often dropped on their heads as children. Spartans is ostensibly a parody of 300, but really just a string of pop culture references linked by scenes of shiny-chested men in leather loinwear. Notice I say pop culture references, not pop culture jokes; Seltzer and Friedberg proved to me that they watch Entertainment Tonight and TMZ, but not that they have any ability to synthesize their crapulent media saturation into something that would make me laugh.

For example: A group of Persians arrive in Sparta to inform King Leonidas (Sean Maguire) that he must submit to the rule of Xerxes. Leonidas proceeds to kick them into the pit of death. He is about to leave when he notices Britney Spears sitting in front of the pit, shaving her head and flashing her pixilized coochie. He then kicks her in the pit of death. Really, it’s not like I’m looking for some explanation for Britney Spears being in ancient Sparta. I realize it’s all part of the free-wheeling zaniness. But you can’t just have her shaving her head and flashing her girl parts. We’ve already seen that. Likewise, when Ryan Seacrest and the American Idol judges appear in front of the pit, it’s not enough that Simon is mean, Paula is loopy and Randy says “dawg” a lot. Maybe that was enough when MAD TV did their very first American Idol send-up 147 years ago, but if you don’t want people to think you’re stupid, untalented assholes, Messrs. Selzer and Friedberg, you really need to step up your game.

Alas, I do think they’re stupid, untalented assholes and I’m just sorry anyone encouraged them as children or even told them they were the “funny guys” in high school. They weren’t, I am almost certain. Here are some things they think are funny: 1) Balls. Now, here they happen to be correct. Balls are funny, particularly when they’re getting punched and they aren’t mine. It’s somewhat less funny when a Happy Feet penguin teabags Leonidas, but again, it’s because there’s no real context. Ball jokes with context – now that’s humor. 2) Homo jokes. Yes, I imagine there is some humor to be mined from the homoeroticism of 300, but the gags here are about as subtle as prison sex. 3) Celebrities and reality TV. In addition to Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan also make appearances to reference their tabloid troubles and flash their digitally obscured vaginas. (All celebrities are impersonated, of course, except for Carmen Electra who seems to be under the impression that she’s acting in the role of Queen Margo.) We not only get the American Idol panel, but the judges from America’s Next Top Model and Dancing with the Stars. There’s even a Deal or No Deal reference, which really shows Selzer and Friedberg are invested in crafting timeless comedies for the ages.

The worst thing about these non-jokes is that Selzer and Friedberg feel the need to explain them as they’re happening. So when the fat guy from Borat shows up as Xerxes, the narrator tells us he looks like the fat guy from Borat. And when a symbiotic black Spider-Man costume slithers over Carmen Electra, the narrator tells us it’s much like what happened to Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man. An appearance by Rocky Balboa is highlighted by the lingering close-up of the ROCKY stitched on his shorts. It goes on and on. Actually, it just seems like it goes on and on, because, as we learned from this Phil Nugent post and as I can confirm, Meet the Spartans runs for a little over an hour before the end credits begin. After a while, the credits stop and some deleted scenes from the movie are played. I’d really love to know how these particular scenes became the outtakes. The only thing in the whole movie that remotely caused my mouth to twitch in the direction of a smile was Leonidas howling “Tonight! We Dine! AT HOOTERS!” Yet somewhere along the line, a decision was made to remove that scene and show it at the end to pad out the running time. I take back what I said earlier. I think it was Selzer and Friedberg who were repeatedly dropped on their heads as children.

Previously on Unwatchable:
73. Fascination
74. You Got Served
75. The Last Sign
76. Kickboxer 3: The Art of War
77. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance

Trailer Review: RocknRolla

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Last week I declared Guy Ritchie’s latest film to be one of my most-dreaded titles for this upcoming fall, and this trailer is a big reason why. Normally, with such an insistently-cut trailer, I’d wonder if it might just be trying to punch up a somewhat less aggressive movie. However, seeing as how every movie Ritchie has made that wasn’t Swept Away looks exactly like this- convoluted gangland proceedings, gonzo violence, a laddish sense of humor, in-your-face onscreen text, show-offy camera tricks out the wazoo- I don’t think that’s the case here. One would think that the disastrous reception to Ritchie’s Revolver would relegate this to a direct-to-DVD release. But since it stars 300’s newly-anointed star Gerard Butler, this is practically guaranteed to receive a nationwide booking. And I suppose that’s fine- far be it from me to begrudge a filmmaker the chance to get his work seen. But that doesn’t mean I have to buy a ticket.

Watchmania

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

This Watchmen obsession of ours! When will it ever end? Well, March 6th of next years, at which we'll hitch our irrationally high hopes to some other wagon. But in the meantime, that still leaves us six more months to slavishly pore over every detail that comes down the pike! (By the way, we won't say this is a Screengrab exclusive or anything, but has anyone noticed the Full Cast and Crew notes for the movie? Apparently, John McLaughlin, Eleanor Clift, Andy Warhol and Annie Liebowitz are in the movie as characters (thankfully not playing themselves). Will Rorschach party at the Factory? Will the Comedian be grilled on his foreign policy expertise on The McLaughlin Group? We certainly hope so...

Meanwhile, in the wake of the San Diego ComicCon, almost everyone involved in the movie has been doing publicity interviews. Collider managed to speak to actors Billy Crudup (who's playing Dr. Manhattan) and Matthew Goode (who's appearing as Ozymandias), and Good is -- surprisingly and pleasingly -- very circumspect about the whole thing. "We haven't seen the scenes yet," he cautions fans who are going buggy about the trailer; "We haven't seen how people interact, we haven't seen the full flesh of their characters. And obviously we saw them on set, because of the interations that we had, but I want to see that world; I want to see if it all totally makes sense. Because sometimes things can get left a little flat. So let's not start sucking each other off just yet." Wise words, and the interview also drops hints that the film will remain very true to the book's original ending -- but in the bad news department, Goode also claims his character's outfit has nipples on the suit as part of Zack Snyder's 'homage' to Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin movie. This, combined with the use in the trailer for Watchmen of a song from the same film, makes us very nervous; if you want to make the best superhero movie ever made, you want to do as little as possible to remind viewers of the worst.

Collider likewise gets a chance to sit down with Carla Gugino (Silk Spectre), Malin Akerman (Silk Spectre II) and Patrick Wilson (Night Owl), all of whom mention how closely the script adheres to the comic (a situation which is certainly a double-edged sword; stray too far from the original, and fans will eat you alive, but stick to it too closely and many will wonder why you bothered to make a movie). Akerman notes that when the movie comes out, it will take fans a long time to come to terms with its complexity and density, just as is the case with the book. "Someone else who's read the novel for 10 years straight now has so many different views and insights. It'll take me another 10 years to figure out because you have to read it about 20 times to get every single piece, and every single moment because it's so dense. But I think we can all come out of it and just give you our opinion about how it feels for us and how we can relate to it."

Finally, Joe Crosby at Mania wonders: is all the advance hype for Watchmen killing the magic? Is the pre-release hype simply putting us in a position where we can't see past the commerce and judge the actual art itself? Ouch! Et tu, Joe?

Frank Miller Gets Into the Spirit at Comic-Con

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:04:00 GMT

Frank Miller, writes Kevin Scanlon in The New York Times, "exudes comics cred." This week, Miller will be at the opening of the San Diego Comic-Con International, where comics professionals will be honored with the presentation of the annual Eisner Awards, named for the legendary writer-artist Will Eisner. According to Scanlan, "few outside fandom have any idea" who Eisner-- who died three years ago at the age of 87, though he seemed to have been around for much longer than that and to have been active in his field for most of that time--was, and I will take his word for it, since I've spent most of my life in the company of people, myself not excepted, who were more likely to be able to recite Eisner's bibliography chapter and verse than to know how to add fractions. As the creator of the urban detective strip The Spirit (and, later, one of the first producers of a "graphic novel"), Eisner was always hailed for his "cinematic" style, his way of bringing the mood and feel of an action-packed film noir to the four-color page. So was Miller, when he first made a splash with his own take on the crime comic disguised as a superhero comic, Daredevil. (It was to humor those publishers who thought that a comics hero had to be a costumed crimefighter that Eisner drew two horizontal lines across the Spirit's face and called that a mask.) However, Eisner, who spent the last thirty years of his life trying to make a case, through his own work, for the artistic validity of comics, never made the leap to actual filmmaking. Miller did, when he collaborated with Robert Rodriguez on the 2005 big-screen version of Miller' Sin City. At that time, Rodriguez would up resigning from the Directors' Guild after they refused to let him share full credit with this uncredentialed, pen-wielding upstart. Several million dollars at the box office later--both from Sin City and the movie version of Miller's 300, a movie that is its look, and whose look was transferred complete and intact from the paper version-- Miller had little difficulty getting the go-ahead for his first solo directing project, and that project is The Spirit.

Another connection between Eisner and Miller is that, having made their names telling stories in a medium over which they had more or less complete control, neither readily took to Hollywood's free-and-easy approach to intellectual property, or its dismissive attitude towards whoever does the writing. Miller, whose Daredevil comics and origin reboot Batman: Year One are drenched in the spare imagery and dark, tilted shadows of basement-budget noir, and whose Dark Knight miniseries gave the world an older, crustier Batman recast in the mold of a Clint Eastwood hero, first dallied with Hollywood in the late 1980s, when he worked as a screenwriter on some RoboCop sequels. That experience sent him screaming back to his drawing board unti Robert Rodriguez showed up at his door, on bended knee. Now Miller is in the driver's seat, and out there selling his baby. (Also at Comic-Con this year are the movie's star, Gabriel Macht, and co-star Samuel L. Jackson. (Those who know the comic will be either relieved or sorely disappointed to learn that Mr. Jackson does not play the classic strip's most prominent African-American character, Ebony White, the Spirit's biggest male fan, and a constant source of embarrassment to contemporary readers: in keeping with the standards of the time, Ebony looked like a blob of ink with big rubber lips. He is not featured in the movie, having been cast into P.C. oblivion to keep the cast of Bob Clampett's Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs company.) As for Eisner, he fought to maintain control of his characters rather than score a payday by selling them off to the movies, and reportedly had to be talked in off the ledge after seeing a 1980s TV movie allegedly based on The Spirit. Producer Michael Uslan pitched the idea of a Spirit movie to Miller, and recalls that at the suggestion, "Frank looked at me like I was out of my mind. He said: ‘Touch the work of the master? How could I do that?’ About 10 minutes later he tapped me on my shoulder and said, ‘I can’t let anyone else touch it.’ ” Early trailers for the movie have done their best to make it look like Sin Cty 2--which is coming, and which Miller hopes will ultimately be the second film in a trilogy--but Eisner's world was very different than the bleak, monochrome vision reflected in the recent Miller comics that have made it to the movies, and Miller knows that. “The only ways [Sin City and The Spirit] resemble each other," Miller says, "are the ways that I learned from Will Eisner: the use of black and white, certainly the rapturous approach to women.” Visually, Sin City, with its hyperbolic black and white design, certainly represented some kind of apotheosis of such performers as Rosario Dawson, Carla Gugino, Jessica Alba, and Jaime King, and the cast of The Spirit includes King, Eva Mendes, Paz Vega, upcoming Bond girl Stana Vatic, Sarah Paulsen (as the daughter of Police Commissioner Dolan, which means that in this company, she's the closest thing to the girl next door), and the future Mrs. Ryan Reynolds. So, you know, let the rapture begin.

Trailer Review, Comic-Con Special: Watchmen Teaser

Paul Clark — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I guess you could call me old-fashioned, since despite the teaser footage, stills, and hype that has popped up about the upcoming Watchmen movie over the past year, it hasn’t felt real to me until now. And I’ve gotta say, this teaser certainly whets my appetite for the movie. I’d been skeptical about the non-movie-star casting of the movie before, since while I respect director Zack Snyder’s idea that big names would overwhelm the roles themselves, I wasn’t sure if his choices were the right ones, aside from Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach, a choice I’ve loved from the beginning. But seeing them in this context, I buy them a lot more. I guess my only hesitation now is how flashy and eye-candy-filled this teaser is. Yes, I realize that’s what a teaser is for, but I got the same vibe here that I got from 300, a movie for which I had little use. Of course, the source material for Watchmen beats the hell out of 300’s inspiration any day of the week, and if nothing else, the Snyder imprimatur could mean a lot more business for what might otherwise be a niche title. Oh, what the hell am I saying- this will almost certainly be awesome. Right? RIGHT???

Hellboy: The Letting Go

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As more and more movies are made from comic books, the issues of creator's rights will increasingly pick at the film industry. With Marvel and DC products, it's generally not an issue -- not only are most of the creators long dead, but the characters themselves are corporate properties, held by two huge companies and not beholden to any single artist or writer. With independent comics, however, the issue grows much more complex. Some creators will be happy simply to sell the rights to their characters and stories for the kind of huge paycheck that only Hollywood can write; others will insist on being involved, to one degree or another, in the production of any film based on the characters they created. Frank Miller represents one extreme; displeased at the prospect of what liberties the movies would take with his characters, he decided to learn the film business himself so as to be able to exert maximum control over his properties in 300 and Sin City. (Although he didn't create the Spirit, he's taking a similarly proprietary approach in the creation of that movie.) Mike Mignola represents perhaps the oppisite end of the spectrum: always fiercely protective of the Hellboy character from the time it first appeared in Dark Horse Comics, he has learned when it's proper to let go of his creation in order to see it succeed on the big screen.

In an interview with Comics2Film regarding the new Hellboy 2: The Golden Army movie, which opens in wide release this weekend, Mignola discusses the differences between the comics and the film, the trust he came to develop with director Guillermo Del Toro when it came to creating the look of the movie, and how he had to learn when to let go of his own beliefs about what the movie should be and how it shouldn't be necessary for there to be major divergence between the two. "The first film was a loose adaptation, but it was coming off my work, and it was basically taking the Hellboy universe that I had created and translating it into del Toro's world. The second film, we chucked that idea after about eight hours because even in the first film, that character is already veering away from the world I created in the comic," says Mignola. "I know in the first film, he was making conscious decisions to try to suggest certain things that I do in the artwork...I'd love to think that he got some of that from studying my comic, but I think he's just a very careful craftsman."

(Of course, on the other other extreme, there's Alan Moore, who still refuses to take a dime from any movies based on his stories, on the theory that, since he had nothing to do with them, they're not his...)

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: June 28-July 4, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Hey gang, we're taking the day off to roast some weenies and blow a few bottle rockets off the roof of Screengrab headquarters. But that's no reason you can't celebrate your independence by catching up on the week in Screengrab!

Do your patriotic duty and check out America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right with U.S. (Parts One, Two and Three)

Celebrate your Independence Day with, er, Independence Day. Either that or cheer on our national pastime with The Bad News Bears Go to Japan.

Here's an All-American Gal for ya! OK, a South African All-American Gal, but still: Charlize Theron Is a Sexual Creature.

If you have the day off, why not catch up with Wall-E? We investigated director Andrew Stanton's Retro-Futurism and pondered whether Wall-E and Silent Running were Separated at Birth.

When I'm grilling my burgers, I like to crank up the Superfly soundtrack, especially if it's a Long Hot Summer.

No celebration of what makes America great would be complete without The Joker, The Smokers and The Midnight Tokers. (At least, we assume they were toking something to conceive a sequel to 300.)

You know who wasn't American? Derek Jarman. However, Don S. Davis was.

And finally, we hope you all are taking a much-deserved Requiem for a Day Off.

Morning Deal Report: Another “300”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Wall-E walloped the competition at the box office over the weekend, taking in an estimated $62.5 million. That’s good for the second best June opening ever, right behind Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. In second place, Angelina Jolie racked up $51.1 million for Wanted, which no one at this desk was expecting. Get Smart hung in there at third place with $20 million, but The Love Guru plummeted 61%, taking in only $5.4 million. Looks like Mike Myers needs a new mantra.

Proving Hollywood will never let a little thing like all of the characters dying get in the way of cashing in on a popular movie, Legendary Pictures has announced that a sequel to 300 is in the works. According to Variety, Frank Miller is penning both the graphic novel and the screenplay, “although at this point it's not clear whether it will be a prequel or spinoff. Most of the characters, including Gerard Butler's King Leonidas, died in the original, making a follow-up tricky…Spinoffs of bloody actioners can prove challenging, especially when the main characters kick the bucket the first time out.” The sequel story seems obvious to us: Leonidas and his troops dining in Hell, as promised.

Per the Hollywood Reporter, the roller derby comedy Whip It! is ready to…er…roll. Drew Barrymore will make her directorial debut and also star alongside Ellen Page. Also appearing will be Marcia Gay Harden as “an overbearing ex-beauty queen who would rather see her daughter, Bliss (Page), in pageants than skates,” Kristen Wiig as “Bliss' rowdy mentor, Malice in Wonderland,” and Juliette Lewis as “Dinah Might, the star of Austin's top team.” Don’t they know the ultimate Austin roller derby story has already been told in the documentary Hell on Wheels? Send them to Spank Alley!

Related:
Frank Miller: CGI Lacks Spirit, So "Spirit" Will Lack CGI

Frank Miller: CGI Lacks Spirit, So "Spirit" Will Lack CGI

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:45:00 GMT

In a recent blog entry at the website for his upcoming adaptation of the beloved Will Eisner superhero comic The Spirit, director Frank Miller -- himself a much-respected comic book artist whose reputation has been decidedly mixed with the fanboy contingent since he entered the arena of filmmaking -- tries to come to terms with the debate over computer-generated imagery, and, somewhat surprisingly, decides he's having none of it in his upcoming movie.

Well, not none, exactly. Even Merchant-Ivory movies have CGI in them nowadays, and Miller says that The Spirit will only eschew the use of computers on the characters -- the rest of the film will be "abetted by abundant CGI that you will find elegant -- or invisible." Curiously, Miller claims that he came to this viewpoint after discussing it with CGI expert Stu Maschwitz (of the Orphanage, who's worked on everything from the Star Wars prequels to Iron Man). Maschwitz convinced him, Miller says, to make sure that the movie didn't "look digital", and that the entire urban landscape of New York -- where the movie is set, rather than the fictional Central City in which most Spirit stories take place -- would seem as if it were filmed in the comics' 1940s milieu.

While we're not exactly sure if this will make the movie any better, or why Frank Miller didn't develop this attitude earlier in his film career (CGI was hardly lacking in his Sin City, and 300 was so digitally processed it might as well have been made for the Xbox), we suppose it's nice that he's taking some liberties with The Spirit and not others. After all, you're not gonna hear us complain that he's leaving Ebony White out of the picture.

Related Posts:

Trailer Review: The Spirit

CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why

Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Hollywood Accountants

Phil Nugent — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Moviemaking is "still a very challenging business," says media analyst Richard Greenfield. "The average movie still loses money." The question is, will Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull turn out to be an average movie? In a piece calculated to make you break out the crying towels, Claudia Eller of the Los Angeles Times reports on "the new economic realities of the movie business" and how they're reflected in the deal that Paramount Pictures cut with director Steven Spielberg, star Harrison Ford, and fount of contemporary mythology George Lucas in order the get the fourth Indiana Jones picture up and running. The franchise is different from most of the more recently forged brand-name pictures (such as your Spider-Mans and your Pirates of the Caribbeans) in that the producer, Lucas, rather than the studio, owns the property, which puts Paramount more in the position of a distributor than a proud parent who can expect the movie's long-term revenue potential to take care of it in its old age. After it became clear that the picture was going to cost much more than originally projected--not an unheard-of occurrence in Hollywood--the major participants agreed to sweeten things for them by forgoing their upfront salaries. Eller reports that the studio "spent about $185 million to make the movie and will pay at least $150 million to market it worldwide. The studio will earn a distribution fee of 12.5% of the revenue it receives from the film's release in all media, including theaters, DVD and television." Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford will stand to make 87.5 cents off every dollar the movie makes after the studio has been fully reimbursed for the cost of the movie and been paid their distribution fee, but that means that they won't start to clear anything until after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has made $400 million.

The thing is, if the movie makes less than $400 million, Spielberg, Lucas, and Ford will have spent a year of their lives killing themselves--well, Ford, anyway--just for the exercise. Is there a chance in hell they'll go home empty-handed? Eller: "Although the "Indiana Jones" franchise is considered one of Hollywood's surest bets -- the first three pictures amassed $1.2 billion in worldwide ticket sales -- there is no guarantee that younger moviegoers will turn out in droves to see a now 65-year-old action hero in a fedora dust off his trademark leather jacket and crack his bullwhip. Today's under-25 action junkies are wowed by computer-generated effects spectacles, such as Spider-Man, Harry Potter, 300 and Fantastic Four." Stress the age of the leading man (and the franchise) and the fact that the movie is built around old-school physical stunts instead of CGI, and it starts to sound more and more like Live Free or Die Hard, a movie that did better than respectably at the box office (and not half bad with the critics) but that has yet to clear the $400 million hurdle. Hollywood: where success has a thousand fathers, and failure sometimes clears $3,999,999 in profits.

2008: First Quarter Wrap-Up

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s not that I didn’t see this coming.

By my reckoning, 2007 was a pretty solid year for movies, so I suspected 2008 would bring a cyclical downturn in cinematic quality (accompanied by a distinctly fishy, low-tide smell wafting from our nation’s multiplexes). And, yes, I know we’re in the Horse Latitudes of the movie-going year, before the summer blockbusters and the fall Oscar contenders...but, seriously, has anyone seen anything really good yet?

By this time last year, I’d already seen four of the movies that wound up on my 2007 Top Ten list: the fine, Oscar-neglected Zodiac, a sneak preview of Knocked Up at the South-By-Southwest Film Festival, along with two outstanding documentaries, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and the lesser-known but equally awesome roller derby-umentary Hell On Wheels.

Even the first quarter cheese I saw last year was pretty entertaining: the silly sexploitation of Black Snake Moan, the gay-panic-at-the-disco iconography of 300, and the A.D.D. chaos of Smoking Aces, a fake Guy Richie movie I enjoyed at least as much Snatch.

So far, at the quarter-mile mark of 2008, the only truly Top 10-caliber flick I've seen is Full Battle Rattle, a SXSW Special Jury award-winning documentary (reviewed here by Mr. Von Doviak on March 17) about a simulated Iraqi province in California’s Mojave desert, populated by Iraqi-American citizens and U.S. Army “insurgents” in a full-immersion training scenario where soldiers practice both their combat and diplomacy skills before heading off to the real war in Iraq.

As for the rest of the year-to-date...feh. Cloverfield had moments, but no characters. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, Penelope and 21 were all pleasantly unobjectionable but instantly forgettable, and I Am Legend’s deserted Manhattan streets were compelling until the director filled them with boring video game ghoulies.

But, hey, maybe things are looking up for 2008...only three more shopping days ‘til Zombie Strippers!

In Other Blogs: List-o-Mania

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Our “In Other Blogs” survey team has been working around the clock to determine exactly how best to serve you, the “In Other Blogs” reader. The results are in, and it turns out: you like lists! This works out well for us, since our research also indicates that other blogs love to run lists. Here’s a roundup from the week in ranking pop culture ephemera.

Spout offers up both the 5 Best and the 5 Worst Directorial Sellouts of All Time. Any such “worst” list seems incomplete without Francis Ford Coppola’s Jack, and it’s hard to view Michael Moore’s Canadian Bacon as a sellout since nobody was buying. We can't argue with Finding Forrester, though. “After the huge success of Good Will Hunting, Hollywood would let Gus Van Sant make anything he wanted. Unfortunately it was a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, which was deemed the biggest-budgeted experimental film of all time. When that deservedly tanked, Van Sant went for this, his real sellout.”

The sci-fi blog io9 presents 15 Great Movies You Didn’t Know Were Science Fiction. After reading the list, we still don’t know about most of them. For example, the 1992 undercover cop thriller Deep Cover apparently qualifies simply because it contains “a fictional designer drug created by a combinatorial chemist.” And consider us decidedly unpersuaded by this argument for Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: “He's a black samurai who works for the Mafia, and he communicates via carrier pigeon. He clings to the Bushido, the way of the Samurai, in the midst of a world of randomly murderous thugs, and seems to have almost superhuman fighting abilities. Plus he can communicate somehow with his friend who only speaks French. (Telepathy?)”

While we’re in the science fiction realm, how about Mahalo’s list of the Best Evil Robots? Of course, the T-1000 and Mechagodzilla are given their due, but we’re more impressed by the inclusion of the grotesque Bicentennial Man. “I defy anyone to watch the trailer for Bicentennial Man without feeling your soul in peril. Not only is Bicentennial Man singlehandedly responsible for destroying Robin Williams' career, but it's just plain evil through and through. Director Chris Columbus must be a sick, depraved individual to have thought: ‘Hey, I think I'll follow up on Mrs. Doubtfire with a sequel of sorts. Except instead of a cross-dressing man invading the privacy of his ex-wife's life, I'll have a robot, played by the same actor, infiltrate a family! Over the course of 200 years, he can trick everyone into acknowledging him as a sentient being, all the while waiting and biding his time, trying to marry the youngest daughter of the family! Then when that doesn't work out, I'll have him fall in love with her daughter!’”

Finally, someone calling himself the Sports Blawger weighs in with the Top 10 Guy’s Guy Movies. Most of his choices are what you’d expect: The Great Escape, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and The Dirty Dozen are perennial favorites at the Screengrab’s Manly Man Movie Night gatherings. But Mr. Blawger’s top choice has us questioning his usage of the phrase “guy’s guy”: “300 has freaking awesomeness all around it. The Spartans were history's original guy's guys. Spartans would look at today's metrosexual ‘guys’ with contempt, and then stab them through the stomach with their spears so they would die the slow and painful death they deserve. Spartans don't get manis and pedis. Spartans exist for one reason: to be AWESOME. Is there anything that says ‘guy's guy’ than 300 guys armed with only swords and spears, protected by only helmets and shields, destroying a million man army?” He forgot to mention all the glistening hairless chests.

Critic Celebrates Unapologetic Manliness

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Stephen T. Asma applauds Beowulf and "other recent films that champion pre-Christian masculine virtues," such as 300 and the HBO series Rome, for their "unapologetic celebrations of macho competence" and the "distinct sympathy for honor culture. . . brute strength, tribal loyalty, and stoic courage actually get things done." But Asma also detects a compromise with our softer modern sensibilities in the movie's characterization of the hero Beowulf and the monster Grendel and his mother. "In the original Beowulf, the monsters are outcasts because they're bad (just as Cain, their progenitor, was outcast because he killed his brother), but in the new liberal Beowulf the monsters are bad because they're outcasts. And while the monsters are being humanized, the hero is being dehumanized. . . By transforming Grendel's mother into a femme-fatale seductress, they've found a way simultaneously to further demonstrate Beowulf's flaws, give the female lead more dimensionality (albeit uncharitably), and connect the denouement to the earlier story. But more interesting than these plot changes is the character adjustment. In the original, Beowulf is a hero. In the new film, he's basically a jerk, whose most sympathetic moment is when he finally realizes that he's a jerk. It's hard to imagine a more complete reversal of values from the original Beowulf story. . . Many academics will probably appreciate the new emasculated Beowulf (thinking it more psychologically sophisticated and more appropriately critical of machismo), but I'm not convinced this new version transcends and nullifies the heroic original." Also, he says that you should definitely see it in 3D. Whooo!! — Phil Nugent

Trailer Roundup: Valkyrie, Atonement, Meet the Spartans

Peter Smith — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Valkyrie

Despite the movie's late June release date, a high-toned thriller set in Nazi Germany would not appear to be summer movie fodder. But based on the trailer, Valkyrie looks typical of Hollywood’s approach to the Third Reich, boiling it down to the Ultimate Evil in charge and the morally-just "traitors" who have history on their side. Why else would they mount a big-budget telling of the story of the man who tried to kill Adolf Hitler, starring Tom Cruise, who, with a handful of exceptions, has made his reputation playing morally uncomplicated heroes? Perhaps director Bryan Singer and his collaborators could have taken a cue from Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, whose breakout star Carice Van Houten is cast here as Cruise’s arm candy — in the shadow of the Nazi regime, things were rarely so simple as black and white.

Atonement

Normally, when I write my blurbs for Trailer Roundup, all I have to go on are the trailers themselves and the advance buzz for the movies. So it’s a little different to take on Atonement, which I had the chance to see at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. As far as trailers for prestige pictures go, this one’s pretty good, especially for the way it uses Dario Marianelli's score, a kind of concerto for typewriter and orchestra. But while the trailer for Atonement does a good job summarizing the plot and showing some of the film’s more visually impressive moments, I’m not sure I would have found this trailer particularly inspiring had I not already seen the movie itself. I also think it was a mistake to show Vanessa Redgrave, who doesn’t turn up until the very end of the film, for reasons that will become clear if and when you see the movie. All the same, Atonement should be catnip for awards-season voters, as its trailer makes abundantly clear.

Meet the Spartans

You know, I like many different kinds of movies, and even when I don’t like something I can usually see why others might. But occasionally a phenomenon will arise that makes me feel like Pauline Kael did when she claimed she didn’t know anybody who voted for Nixon. So it is with the recent wave of chintzy spoofs: who actually LIKES these things? Someone must enjoy these if they keep making them, right? Well, not necessarily. All it takes is for enough people to visit Blockbuster on a slow night and say, "Epic Movie might be okay," and boom, the studio greenlights Meet the Spartans. Now, I know I’m one to talk here, but don’t you think there are better ways to pass two hours than to watch a movie that will be, at best, "okay?" Read a book. Talk a leisurely walk. Try out a new sexual position or two. Or if you absolutely must rent a movie, try venturing inland from the outside walls of the local video emporium. Once you get over the old-timey movie stars and the black and white images and maybe even subtitles, you just might see something better, or at least more interesting, than the time-waster you passed over on the new release wall. Of course, it would be hard to be WORSE than Date Movie. . .

— Paul Clark

And Now For Something Relatively Lowbrow

Peter Smith — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Sick of reading about '80s toy franchises being adapted into two hour long Mountain Dew commercials here on the 'Grab? Too bad! Unlike the flood of '80s remakes announced made in the wake of Transformers, this just-leaked animated pitch for a new He-Man and the Masters of the Universe movie from 2004 is definitely not getting made. This flick might have been good, trashy fun, considering John Woo was attached to direct. From the looks of it, it would’ve been 300 but with more science-fiction and people riding giant cats while fighting skeleton men. (Read: Totally awesome.) — John Constantine

The Sound of Science

Peter Smith — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

PZ Myers, the invaluable science blogger, reports that physicist Jim Kakalios, author of The Science of Superheroes, has been brought in as a consultant for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie. It seems like a curious decision; the comic features only one character with superhuman powers, after all, and he is essentially godlike and not bound by any sort of physics. And it’s not as if they needed to bring in a historian to keep 300 on an even keel, if the box office numbers rather than the critical reactions are anything to go by. May we suggest saving the money they’d spend on a physics consultant and putting it towards a script doctor instead?

— Leonard Pierce