Category: Fanboy

Of Sand and Symbiotes.

Oops. While promoting Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, Kirsten Dunst seems to have revealed the villains for Spiderman 3: Sandman and Venom. (Let’s hope, for Spidey’s sake, that MJ is less flippant about disclosing Peter Parker’s identity.) Thomas Haden Church as the Sandman was a gimme, but, given Sam Raimi’s purported affinity for the classic villains, I felt pretty sure Topher Grace would be Electro.

Choose your champion.

Five nice new international Goblet of Fire posters materialize online, headlining the various TriWizard contestants. I have to admit, between these and the very impressive trailer, I’m more excited for HP IV than I expected. It looks like Newell has given the series a darker and more epic flourish, which it’ll need as the films hit the backstretch.

Alpha Fight.

“It’s a horrible precedent, allowing the subject of an entry determine what can and cannot be written about them. It would be one thing if the slanderous and innaccurate entries from one particularly psychotic fan were allowed to go through and remain in place, but the entire Wikipedia project has shown that self-policing is it’s greatest strength.” By way of LinkMachineGo, longtime and often-controversial comic writer-artist John Byrne goes to war over his Wikipedia entry. (Comparison of the two entries here.)

More than Half-Full.

The new trailer for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire premiered this morning, and it’s nine kinds of great — I didn’t have much faith in Mike Newell at the outset, but this looks like it may have turned out even better than Cuaron’s Azkhaban. Check out Mad-Eyed Moody, Cho Chang, Rita Skeeter, the lovely ladies of Beauxbatons, and is that You-Know-Who at the very end? Update: There’s also a new international trailer floating around.

Daemonlover.

“I’m thinking that it’s just a movie about a little girl who’s looking for a family, so it’s still just all about emotions. It doesn’t matter how big or small it is, you still have to turn up with a camera and some actors and try to make it convincing for an audience.” Shopgirl director Anand Tucker talks briefly about His Dark Materials, his next project.

Grimm Fandango.

Finally, the Labor Day nightcap was Terry Gilliam’s latest outing, The Brothers Grimm, which has been getting panned in the reviews. Well, it’s not as bad as it’s being made out to be, but I can’t say it’s very good either. Long-time Gilliam fans will probably get a kick out of seeing his eye applied to several classic fairy tales — I sure did. But ultimately the film is a mess, with subpar special effects and a terrible, terrible script that borders on the incoherent. In fact, I can’t figure out for the life of me how Ehren Krueger (and, while I’m hating, Akiva Goldsman) keep getting gigs…they’re out-and-out hacks, the Paul Anderson and Brett Ratner of screenwriting. Brothers Grim indeed.

So, what’s good? Well, as you might expect, the best parts of the film are the Gilliamesque visual flourishes. When the movie involves enchanted forests or sleeping beauties or malevolent mirrors or little red riding…capes, Gilliam is in his element, and his kid-in-a-candy-store enthusiasm is infectious. If you’re a aficionado of the guy, these moments almost make the film worthwhile on their own…almost. Art direction aside, however, the effects often have a real budget FX-house look to them. (Memo to the studios: CGI and werewolves don’t ever seem to mix — cf. this, Underworld, American Werewolf in Paris, etc.) If your tale involves a man-wolf of any kind whatsoever, use an old-school make-up guy like Rick Baker or Rob Bottin.)

And, the story…oof. For what it’s worth, Matt Damon (Will) and Heath Ledger (Jakob) both acquit themselves admirably as the brothers/ghostbusters, and Damon in particular has a gleam in his eye that suggests he’d make an even worse movie if it meant he could continue to hang around the Gilliamverse. But the Brothers Grimm are cursed with a grafted-on fraternal backstory — Will wants to protect Jakob, Jakob wants Will to believe in him — that feels artificial from the start and forces them to spit out increasingly unwieldy chunks of character development as the movie progresses.

Worse, scenes just happen one after another with no feeling of narrative development at all. The brothers are in a dungeon, no…the forest, no…the dungeon again, and so on. The brilliant Jonathan Pryce is wasted in a subplot involving a French general that never makes one iota of sense. (Mackenzie Crook, a.k.a. Gareth from The Office, is also wasted, in more ways than one.) And Pryce’s henchman, the usually amiable Peter Stormare, singlehandledly ruins every scene he’s in with a grotesquely hammy performance of Olympian proportions — seriously, he makes Anthony Hopkins in Bram Stoker’s Dracula seem like Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener. Conversely, the film could have used a good deal more of Monica Bellucci’s evil queen (but, to be fair, most films, and most endeavors in life, could stand to use more Monica Bellucci…the world would be a happier place for it.)

Ultimately, the Brothers Grimm is less grim than it is sadly pedestrian, and it has to be counted as a occasionally diverting swing-and-a-miss for Gilliam. But, I’d say that’s more due to the weakness of the material here than it is Gilliam, who shows flashes of his usual mojo. As such, I still have high hopes for Tideland, which, thankfully, is right around the corner.

Make theirs Marvel.

Marvel Comics signs a deal with Paramount on film rights to ten characters or groups. Ok, Captain America and the Avengers seem like gimmes, but is there anyone out there waiting in line for the Power Pack, Ant-Man, Hawkeye, or Cloak & Dagger movie? Why not throw in Star Brand or Dazzler while you’re at it? This reminds me of the old e-trade ad where the two dot.com guys sign a huge venture cap deal just because they have a website.