The Screengrab : the league of extraordinary gentlemen

Screengrab Presents The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:30:00 GMT

The Best:

GHOST WORLD (2001)

Forget best comic book movies...Terry Zwigoff’s deadpan adaptation of Dan Clowes’ cool blue-black graphic novel (distilled from the bizarre alt-comic Eightball) is one of the best movies of ANY genre to emerge in the past decade. While most of the films on this list are super-powered adolescent wish fulfillment fantasies, Ghost World is a dead-on portrayal of life as it really is for many American teens (as well as the aging misfits some of them...okay, some of us...grow into). Recent high school grads Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson, peaking early in her best role ever) slouch through a dystopic Los Angeles, floating on attitude to keep from drowning in a world of suck...add cranky Steve Buscemi as a hapless, lonely object of affection and you've got a near-perfect black comedy about alienation and the slow death of individualism in America, from the blissful escapism of Enid's private "Jaan Pehechan Ho" Bollywood dance party curtain raiser to her bitter, existential fade-out on a literal road to nowhere.

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

By the time the second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies came around, no one was seriously questioning the idea that a movie based on a comic book could actually be good. But nobody suspected how good until they’d managed to live through The Dark Knight. Nolan and his brother Jonathan tried to cram a huge amount of story into the movie’s heavy running time, but while it didn’t always work out – the Two-Face plot sagged a bit at the end, and there were moments that would have been better placed in a lesser movie – it justified its length and left you wishing there was even more. A great deal of attention is heaped on Heath Ledger’s terrifying, hypnotic (and Oscar-winning) performance as the Joker, and rightly so; but there’s so much more to the movie than that. The Nolans are always willing to sidestep the traditional conflicts of superhero stories and introduce powerful shades of moral ambiguity, which comes across in spades in The Dark Knight; and while Batman himself is left alone and lost at the edge of right and wrong, Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon provides the movie’s true moral center. And, given the numerous ways it manages to transcend simplistic blockbuster-movie tropes, it’s also an amazing-looking movie, with brutal fights, set pieces, and that rarest of things, an exciting and interesting chase scene, all of which helped make it one of the most successful motion pictures in the history of the world.

The Worst:

GHOST RIDER (2007)

I understand why Nic Cage took the lead role in Ghost Rider. It’s because Nic Cage is a hack who will pretty much do anything for money, as evidenced by, oh, let’s say Bangkok Dangerous or any other movie he’s made in the last half-decade. He’s also a major comic book geek (his son’s name is Kal-El, for Christ’s sake), and he probably sized up the script, counted the number of zeroes after the initial digit, realized he’d be performing most of the movie under layers of CGI anyway, and went shopping for a new boat. What’s less easy to understand is why anyone bothered to make Ghost Rider in the first place. The character was always pretty absurd, even by the bong-rattled standards of the 1970s Marvel Bullpen that produced him: a motorcycle stunt rider who gets possessed by the Devil and fights crime for some reason. He was never really that popular, even by the standards of juveniles who find that description totally bad-ass, and was mostly remembered until this movie came out as the only character based on a tattoo to star in his own title. Still, in the right hands, a decent movie could have been made of Ghost Rider, but the right hands are not those of the disgraceful Mark Steven Johnson. The biggest mystery of all is why anyone in Hollywood would give this guy a job doing anything after he made the horrible Daredevil and wrote the even more horrible Elektra, and yet, here he is again, screwing up another comic book character. The sole consolation of Ghost Rider is that nobody appears to have seen it, so maybe my bad memories of it are just a nightmare.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003)

This big-budget belly flop marked a true historic moment in the twinned histories of both movies and comics; never before had a major studio release been widely criticized for having dumbed-down a comic book. The illustrator Kevin O'Neill gave a deliciously perverse period look to Alan Moore's parodic adventure serial about a Victorian era Super Friends team comprised of Alan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, and Dracula's old flame, Mina Harker. The director, Stephen Norrington, began work on the project by casting Sean Connery as Quartermain, apparently a sadistic act designed to get fans' hopes up by giving a false impression that he knew what he was doing. Elsewhere, Norrington and his screenwriter, James Dale Robinson (a comics scribe best known for his work on DC's Starman and the miniseries The Golden Age), coarsened and blunted the comic's sly edge, altering its characters for the worse (such as in the wrong call of making Mina Harker explicitly vampiric, even though the starchy proto-feminist of the comic was much more intimidating than any mere bloodsucker) and added new personnel, including a twentyish Tom Sawyer, presumably intended as a sop to the American market, and Dorian Gray, apparently included so that Norrington could hire, and then not fire, Stuart Townsend, just to show that he was stupider than Peter Jackson. The movie provided news for gossip columnists throughout its production, thanks to the battles between Connery and the director. When it was finally over, Connery announced that the experience had inspired him to retire from acting, and it didn't do anybody else's career any favors either.

THE NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT (1974)

Ralph Bakshi's 1972 Fritz the Cat, an adults-only feature animation based on a Robert Crumb character, helped attract Crumb's work a lot of attention, and the cartoonist has been bitching about it ever since; he can be seen early in the documentary Crumb complaining about how Bakshi browbeat him into giving him the rights and then debased his work. Bakshi's film wasn't very good, but the sequel, which he had nothing to do with, makes Bakshi's work look like the second coming of Winsor McKay. Most of the film, which includes Fritz's encounters with Hitler and various stereotypical mid-'70s "street" characters, settles for being ugly-looking and obnoxious, but it goes for broke in the last section, a mess of racist and anti-Semitic cariactures in which President Henry Kissinger sends Fritz on a mission to New Jersey, which has fallen under black rule and changed its name to "New Africa." If the actual Crumb's work was twice as offensive as his most hard-assed detractors claim that it is, and not funny or aesthetically pleasing at all, it would still be better than this.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: McG Under the Sea

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

McG is in demand! Not by me or you or anyone who actually enjoys watching movies, of course, but by studio execs who can’t get enough of the half-named wonder. The Terminator: Salvation director has settled on his next project and it is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo. That thoroughly unnecessary and downright distracting subtitle is our first hint that this is not something to look forward to. “Scripted by Bill Marsilli, the film is an origin story of Nemo as he creates his warship, the Nautilus. The characters come from the Jules Verne novel,” Variety insists. The last time we saw Captain Nemo on the big screen was in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Poor guy.

The Tron sequel has landed its lead and sadly, it’s not the fellow pictured here. It’s “up-and-comer” Garrett Hedlund, who The Hollywood Reporter helpfully informs us “has been considered one of those actors that is on the cusp within the industry, though without much of a profile in middle America. Starring in a $150 million effects-intensive feature could change that.” Unless it’s a sequel to Tron.

The cast of The Expendables keeps on growing. Earlier this week we told you Forest Whitaker was set to sign on, and now comeback kid Mickey Rourke has added his name to the roster.” Rourke will play an unscrupulous arms dealer who becomes the go-to guy for a group of mercenaries planning to topple a South American dictator,” Variety reports. Comeback over!

Related:
Turning the Anime of the Past into the Bad Movies of Tomorrow
Mickey Rourke Gets Up Off the Canvas

Morning Deal Report: As "The Crow" Flies

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The good news is: Four Christmases is no longer the number one movie in America. (It slipped to the second spot with a $13.3 million weekend take.) The bad news is: it’s been replaced by The Day the Earth Stood Still. Do people know there’s a perfectly good version of this without Keanu Reeves available at their local video store? If they do, they don’t care, as Day scooped up $31 million of our Earth dollars. Twilight has hit the $150 million total mark; word is that Chris Weitz (American Pie) will take over as director of the sequel, New Moon.

Terminator Salvation is months away from hitting theaters, but a fifth installment in the series has already gotten the green light. Halcyon Co. execs “had originally planned to wait until the release of Terminator Salvation next summer before deciding on whether to proceed with the next chapter, but the positive studio, fan and media reaction to footage from the current pic has encouraged them to move forward ahead of schedule,” Variety reports.

Waiting for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen director Stephen Norrington’s big comeback? Looking forward to a reboot of The Crow series? In the unlikely event you’re a member of both groups, Variety has great news for you. “Stephen Norrington has signed on to write and direct a reinvention of The Crow, based on the comic created by James O’Barr.” Ca-caw! Ca-caw!

Related:
New "Terminator" Trilogy on Tap
Forget Christian Bale in Terminator 4, the Israeli Military's Working on T5

Terror Hits the Heart of Bollywood

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The recent terror attacks in Mumbai, India would have provoked some reaction from the nation's booming film industry no matter what; they represented some of the most deadly assaults in the nation's modern history, and their sheer level of audaciousness and aggression make them remarkable even by post-9/11 standards. But the attacks have particularly hit home in the entertainment industry thanks to Mumbai's status as the commercial capital of India -- where a great deal of funding for Bollywood films originates -- as well as the location of the terror attacks (the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, which was the scene of the biggest hostage standoff and which was severely damaged in the attacks, is a frequent filming location for big-budget epics as well as a favorite destination for visiting stars).

With the entertainment industry in India reeling, almost everyone has something to say. As police continue to track down every lead they can, and Indian Muslims brace for a backlash they fear is inevitable, many in Bollywood are taking the step -- astonishing in the hard-working, non-stop, budget-conscious field -- of suspending production. The entertainment site Bollywood Hungama reports a shocked and angry mood, with no one particularly eager to return to work. Very little production was done over the weekend, with only one shooting scene being finished and actors and producers wondering whether to stop filming out of respect or continue their work in hopes it will help the city recover. Actor/producer Suneil Shetty (best known in the west for The Border) reports "The city is in a state of shock. I'm getting to know gradually that I've lost friends in the attack whom I've known for years. My family and I live quite close to the Taj...we saw smoke and fire billowing out of these places where we've spent so many evenings." Several Bollywood stars will spend the next few days attending funerals of friends and relatives of friends.

New York-based producer Mira Nair, whose Salaam Bombay is perhaps the most memorable cinematic portrait of Mumbai, was reached in the U.S., and said "I've no words at the moment. I pray for equanimity to prevail and that we don't give in to hysteria." Naseeruddin Shah, one of the best-known Bollywood actors in the United States thanks to appearances in Monsoon Wedding and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, reflected the prevailing attitude, saying "What's the point in spouting clichés? Let's leave that to the politicians. My reaction of outrage and helplessness is no different from that of any sane person."

SXSW Review: Shot in Bombay