Category: Fanboy

Red Sun, Red States.

“Movies would gradually drift away from the ideals of 1970s Hollywood and more to the simplistic, self-deluding certainties and monochrome morality espoused by the new president. In that sense, Donner’s Superman, and to come extent Dick Lester’s sequel – the one in which General Zod and his minions traverse the universe apparently trapped inside the album-sleeve of Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack – were prescient works of art.” By way of LinkMachineGo, John Patterson of The Guardian argues that, despite his origins under Siegel & Shuster, Superman’s appeal is inherently conservative. Hmm, ok. I’d be more impressed with his thesis if [a] he didn’t immediately write off all comic-book adaptations and [b] he actually got Superman’s name right.

Abandon Ship.

[Argh! Shiver me timbers! I had just finished this post, when an accidental double-click conspired to send it to the depths of Davy Jones’ locker. Ok, let’s try this again…]

Given that it just enjoyed the biggest opening weekend ever and that #3 (World’s End) is already pretty much in the can, I suppose it doesn’t really matter what I thought of the relentlessly overstuffed Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest, which I caught last Friday with the rest of America. Still, for what it’s worth, I found Pirates 2 both remarkably disappointing — sadly, this film is yet another whiff in a summer full of them so far– and literally stunning, in that the movie spends two and a half hours remorselessly beating the audience senseless with spectacle, to the detriment of plot, character development, pauses for breath, or anything else you might think to expect in a 150-minute flick. (AICN’s best reviewer, Alexandra du Pont, hit the nail on the head on this one: “The movie is stimulating without being dramatic. Nothing is properly contextualized..”) What we have here with Dead Man’s Chest is a reasonably well-directed film brimming over with talented actors (Say what you will about Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, but Johnny Depp, Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce, and Stellan Skarsgard? That’s a Murderer’s Row), expertly crafted special effects, striking cinematography, and — yes — rousing action sequences, and for some reason it all adds up to so much less than the sum of its parts. Pirates’ magic, this is.

So, what’s the gist of Dead Man’s Chest, besides all the furious running back and forth, and then back again? Well, that’s most of it. Somewhere in there, a malevolent magnate of the East India Company (Tom Hollander, doing a Peter Sarsgaard impression) has decided to break up the wedding of Will Turner (Bloom, bland and pretty) and Elizabeth Swann (Knightley, pretty and bland), in order to send them out to locate the formidable Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp, even stranger than last time) and — more importantly — his magic compass. Sparrow, meanwhile, has run afoul of the unfortunately not-so-mythical Davy Jones (Nighy, by way of Serkis), the squid-headed commandant of a ship of lost souls — among them Bootstrap Bill Turner (Skarsgard), Will’s dad — that he has retrieved from shipwrecks (and who are now turning into sea creatures as a side-effect of their Faustian bargain.)

With the board thus set, the pieces move…and boy, do they. Jack and Will spend a good forty-five minutes running to and from natives, Elizabeth stows away on a “haunted” ship, Will serves some time with dear old Dad, the Kraken — a ginormous creature of the deep — attacks not once, not twice, but three times (“ah ah ah!), everyone stops in for a few voodoo sessions and/or swordfighting, and all the characters from the first movie drop by every once in a while for a pop-in or three. This all may sound fun, but trust me — the frenetic result goes from intriguing to exhausting to mind-numbing in surprisingly short order. After a smile on my face for the first quarter-hour, I was starting to check out after forty-five minutes, trying to will my watch faster after seventy-five, and was ready to cut a deal with Davy Jones myself by minute one-hundred.

I liked the first Pirates, although I also said that it felt twenty minutes too long, Well, for almost its entire running time, Dead Man’s Chest basically feels like being trapped in that extra twenty minutes. Still, I have to admit, it also feels like something of a watershed. Perhaps the best way to look at Pirates 2 is as [a] an homage to the action-packed, plot-irrelevant, somewhat nonsensical pirate serials of yesteryear and [b] a sequel to a movie based on a Disney theme park ride — really, how good could it have been? And yet, in another way this really does feel like the type of flick film historians of the future might look back to as a signpost in the devolution of American film — as the moment when the summer blockbuster ethos, Krakenlike, effectively swallowed the moviemaking process whole. (There may be something about the increasing caffeinization and decreasing attention span of America in there somewhere too.) I mean, when reasonably talented people get together to spend a whopping $225 million and hundreds of man-hours to make a “movie” like this, which, as DuPont also suggested in her review, is effectively a two and a half hour version of Indy running from the big ball in Raiders — and then are so amply rewarded for it, to boot — one has to fear for the quality of future film offerings. Can we turn this ship around, or are we just going to have to watch it run aground?

Renaissance Men (of Steel.)

In today’s trailer bin, Brazil alums Jonathan Pryce and Ian Holm reunite (as voice talent, with Daniel Craig and Catherine McCormack) in the Sin City-ish new trailer for Christian Volckman’s Renaissance, and Adrien Brody delves into the death of Superman (a.k.a. George Reeves a.k.a. Ben Affleck), with Diane Lane and Bob Hoskins on hand, in the new trailer for Allen Coulter’s Hollywoodland. Update: And one more: Edward Norton conjures up trouble for the powers-that-be (with Paul Giamatti, Jessica Biel, and Rufus Sewell) in the new trailer for The Illusionist (not to be confused with Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, due out later in the year.)

Muggle Memories.

As part of the sixth anniversary festivities for The Leaky Cauldron, the Harry Potter blog-turned-comprehensive-fansite I set up way back when, Melissa Anelli, Sue Upton, and John Noe — current heads of the site team (now numbering 150 strong) — interviewed me this week on their weekly Pottercast. Great job over there, y’all, and thanks for the chance to reminisce. 🙂

Alpha Lyra, Omega Depp.

In fanboy casting news, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass is a go at New Line under director Chris Weitz, with newcomer Dakota Blue Richards cast in the role of Lyra. Also, Johnny Depp joins Will Smith in I am Legend (a.k.a. The Omega Man, for those who haven’t read the Matheson novella), likely as Smith’s neighbor, and head of the vampires. That casting should significantly increase the fun factor.

Bots and Bugs.

Elsewhere, Michael Bay’s big-budget version of The Transformers gets a teaser (hopefully the robots work better than the website), and Spiderman 3 gets spoiled rotten over at Dark Horizons — Seriously, don’t go if you don’t want to know.

My Super Ex-Boyfriend.

“You don’t really love that guy you make it with now do you?” Despite a nice throwback credit sequence to kick things off, and several iconic images of the man in blue throughout, Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns is, unfortunately, something of a disappointment. It’s by no means a travesty, like X3 — the FX are top-notch, and the movie does feel like some care went into it. Still, for most of its run, Superman Returns, while hearkening often to the 1978 original and its excellent 1980 sequel, never really reaches the heights of those first two films. Instead, this “requel” feels, for the most part, drab, leaden, and earthbound, and, at best, plays like a badly-paced bodice ripper (or perhaps a forgotten issue of Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane.)

Like I said, Superman Returns starts off well, with a brief look at Krypton’s fate, kryptonite’s origins, and a whirlwind intergalactic tour of a credits sequence (all of which bodes well for a quality Silver Surfer or Darkseid v. Supes movie someday.) But, soon thereafter, trouble arises. We’re treated to a jokey Anna Nicole Smith-ish re-introduction to Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey, who never gets the tone quite right — he’s either too whimsical or too dark), some Americana flashbacks of Superman’s youth in — and return after five years to — the archetypal Midwest, Luthor’s visit to the Fortress of Solitude and subsequent experimentation with Kryptonian technology, and finally Clark Kent’s reemergence in Metropolis and the newsroom of the Daily Planet, still presided over by Perry White (Frank Langella) and staffed by Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) and Superman’s pal, Jimmy Olsen (Sam Huntington). Frankly, all of this section of the movie takes too long — it seems forever and a day before Superman (Brandon Routh, both better and less Rushmore-esque than I expected) is finally moved to action by a Space Shuttle incident (one involving, of course, Lois.)

I’d like to say the film then finds its momentum, then…but, sadly, it really doesn’t. For one, Luthor’s diabolical master plan — involving growing craggy Kryptonian real-estate that will submerge North America — doesn’t make a lick of sense. But, more problematically, the central questions driving Singer’s Superman, IMHO, just aren’t all that interesting. Will Lois rediscover her deeply-buried love for Superman, the “one that got away,” or will she stay true to her good-hearted current beau, Richard (James Marsden, a.k.a. Cyclops, here blessed with Superempathy)? Can Superman make peace with Lois’s new life (or, at the very least, will he stop superstalking her happy household?) And where does Lois’s doe-eyed child — yep, cute kid alert — fit into all this? (Take a guess.) Not to put too fine a point on it, but, in essence, what Singer has made here is a Superman mythos chick flick, and not a very good one at that.

This is not to say that I only wanted to see Superman crush things for two hours. As sappy and unrealistic as it is, the love triangle that dominates this film might’ve worked in another context (or with another character — This type of thing works better in Sam Raimi’s Spiderman series, but Spidey is generally a more angst-ridden superhero anyway.) But, as it stands, the Harlequin Romance nature of this enterprise, as well as the languid pacing and Luthor’s completely absurd stratagem, are like kryptonite here. Superman Returns looks good, and I’d be up to see Routh don the tights again for another outing. But, as a reboot of DC’s most famous franchise, the movie is passable at best (and it has nothing on Christopher Nolan’s much more enjoyable Batman Begins.)

Spider & I.

Also in the trailer bin, Venom gets his curtain call in the impressive and much-awaited new teaser for Spiderman 3, appearing in front of Superman Returns tomorrow. (A better Quicktime version is due later today) Update: Here it is!

Return of the Shadow.

“Until when chance came, it ensnared a new bearer…” Breaking news from Gondor: The first of what promises to be many re-issues of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy happens August 29, when all three films will be re-released as 2-disc sets ($28.98 each.) “For each film, disc one presents both the theatrical version of the film and its extended edition through seamless branching, while disc two features an intimate, never-before-seen documentary created by Costa Botes. The feature-length documentaries, with more than 300 minutes of never-before-available footage, focus on a number of complexities and circumstances [that] affected the making of the movies.” Since I own both the theatrical cuts and three extended versions, I really have no business buying these, particularly as they don’t seem to include the much-noted blooper reels or any of the still-missing footage (The Watchers of Cirith Ungol, for example.) But the hearts of Men are easily corrupted, and the Ring of Power has a will of its own.