movies
Serenity Now
While we all wait for what Joss does next, the A.V. Club has an extremely insightful discussion of Serenity in it’s ‘New Cult Canon’ feature. The line is basically this: it’s a love letter to fans that doesn’t hit the highs of the show and here’s why. And I more or less agree.
I travelled with a friend down the highway to Geelong to watch Serenity in a pre-release screening. I had a good time, liked the film, saw it once again in the cinema on general release with another friend and bought it when it came out on DVD in order to help boost sales and convince them to make more. We now know that that’s never going to happen but what the hell. At least I have it on DVD right?
But here’s the problem: I’ve never watched the DVD. Beyond that, I’ve never revisited the original Firefly series (which I also own on DVD). I’m currently watching (extremely slowly) Buffy with my highly horror adverse wife and I’m enjoying it – we’re only two episodes in and it’s still astonishingly amateurish but it’s fun. When I think of Firefly now I think of it being (a) slightly forced and (b) unfinished. Now I know that (b) is not Whedon’s fault but (a) certainty is. Firefly, I suspect, is not going to go down in history as one of the great shows. If Fox hadn’t canned it in mid-stream, the reasons it is so missed would have been removed. Hopefully it would have provided new reasons to be missed, but I don’t think we’d seen them yet.
And some TV and movie links
Just a couple of interesting news items:
- Apparently Dollhouse has been put on a brief hiatus due to the upcoming sweeps week. Hopefully the fact that its DVR ratings have been huge means that it will finish up the season – at least.
- An Iain M. Banks story has been picked up to be made into a film! Bank’s short story ‘A gift from the Culture’ from the collection The State of The Art is apparently going to be made into a film. More here and here (tip from A Dribble of Ink). No word on timing or anything else. I’ve read the story but can’t remember a thing about it and I think the book is on my parents shelf half a world away. Anyone else remember much?
Holy Crap! Disney buys Marvel
Read all about it here. I’d potentially be very afraid if I was still reading X-Men comics.
Comics and the movie biz
On a plane yesterday I watched the really, really terrible Wolverine movie. I mean the worst comic movie I’ve seen in years – like comic movies used to be. That said it reminded me how there are some pretty cool things about Wolverine as a character.
But what to buy if I wanted to get into Wolverine? This link is all about how the comics business interacts and fails to win from successful movie tie-ins. And a key reason is a lack of obvious starting points for characters – especially characters that have been going since before I was even born. This is similar to the complaints that are made about the lack of a good introductory RPG – attempts Chris Pramas and Green Ronin are trying to solve with their Dragon Age RPG.
I don’t have the time or inclination to get seriously into superhero comics, especially big name ones from the big two publishers, so I’m glad the films like Iron Man, the first 2 X-Men and Spiderman movies and the recent Batman movies are getting made – they allow me to get my big super hero fix without spending wads of cash on comics of variable-quality comics. I just hope that they re better than Wolverine…
Hobbit movie news
You may have heard of the Hobbit movie that is under way currently, directed by Guillermo del Toro and produced by Peter Jackson. You may also have heard that the movie is in some danger, due to a lawsuit brought by Tolkien’s family. Luckily, Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir is casting some light on the matter.
If there’s one thing I’m sure about in this exceedingly murky, high-stakes poker game, it’s that no one at the table is foolish enough to want to shut down a production that promises to yield, at a conservative estimate, an additional $2 billion to $3 billion in worldwide revenue. What the Tolkiens and Time Warner are fighting over is who controls that production and who will reap the enormous benefits.
So don’t worry it won’t get made – everyone wants the cash.
Bah! No time for thinking, only for linking!
So I’m in Singapore for work and had a bit of time to look around but not much. Bu I do have some links to share!
Chris Pramas has done a Dragon Age PnP RPG interview here. It sounds like a simple, introductory system which gels with what Pramas has said before and could be interesting. Also surprising was that Bioware approached them, not the other way around.
Our first release is a boxed set and it presumes no previous experience with tabletop RPGs. It’s designed to teach people how to play, so it has lots of advice and examples.
In less promising news, the Kuzui’s (producers of Buffy) are planning another Buffy movie, without Whedon. Fran Kuzui was the director of the original movie and there’s obviously some terrible, complex rights issues here. Needless to say, I can’t imagine the new movie would be any better than the first without Whedon’s input.
Hobbit movie news
(via A Dribble of Ink)
Empire have posted some tidbits of movie news about The Hobbit. BAsically the book we all know and love will be split into two films:
“We’ve decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur,” says Del Toro.
“We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie,” adds Jackson. “The essential brief was to do The Hobbit, and it allows us to make The Hobbit in a little more style, if you like, of the [LOTR] trilogy.”
So no all new bridging film which will make Tolkien purists happy – I would have been sort of interested to see what they came up with.
Watchmen – I watched them.
So last night I finally got to see Watchmen.
It was good – not great, but not horrible and certainly the best Alan Moore adaptation so far done. While totally overscored, the acting was pretty good, the look/design of the film was astonishingly loyal to the comic, as was the casting and direction. Most importantly, while the plot was shorn of side stories, it was also (with one fairly major exception) ripped almost entirely from the page.
But that’s a big part of the problem. When you film a book you are interpreting prose description visually – one of the reasons that the Lord of the Rings movies were so loved by so many people was because they managed to make our imaginations live on screen. the Watchmen film just took the pointers from a visual source and recreated them on screen. And ultimately that seems a little empty. Why bother to do that? I’ve already seen the comic and the illustration that accompanies the plot – I don’t really need to see it again, especially when there is so little reinterpretation of anything – themes, characters or story.
Where they did change things, there were mixed results. The comic is much less violent than the book. At least one major and brutal fight scene in the film is covered in four cells in the comic and the violence is largely implied. And from the evidence of the comic, Laurie doesn’t stab a gang member in the neck with his own knife and then use his body to shield herself from gun fire.
The violence in the comic is much more sparing and with the exception of Rorschach and the Comedian’s sections of the story, actually fairly tame. It’s two-fisted silver age superhero comic book stuff, not the sort of violence that came after Watchmen. And violence in the movie is graphic – to me, it seemed out of character for Nite Owl and most of the other characters. The violence was well done and fun to watch (in the fight scenes at least – Rorschach and the Comedian’s violence was largely horrifying), but it jarred with me thematically.
That leads me to another point. To me, Watchmen is largely a mediation on what the world would be like if people really had dressed up in costumes and fought crime. What sort of people would do something like that? And what effect could it have on the world, especially if some of them really did have super powers? Perhaps necessarily, the movie doesn’t delve into that, but there’s not a whole lot of mediation on the thematic themes of the story.
One thing I did really like about the movie was how much it made me appreciate the comic. I’m now three ‘chapters’ in to my reread and I’d never previosuly noticed how filmic some of the scene changes and the like in the original work were.
It also did manage to take a sprawling, complex and dense plot and par it back to essentials. The ending, as has been widely reported, has been changed. It needed to be because the original ending is reliant on pages and pages of foreshadowing and sie plotting that needed to be cut form the film, but the new ending is clever, well put together and thematically appropriate which was probably the biggest surprise of the whole evening.
Watchmen was a good action film based on vastly better material – as Ciaran said as we left ‘if it had to be done, I’m glad it was done like that’. I’m glad I saw it.
More Watchmen linkage
For someone who has forsworn the movie, Alan Moore sure is getting a lot of coverage out it! And he’s selling lots of comics too. Here’s some of the more interesting Watchmen links I’ve seen in the last couple of days:
Salon.com have run an interesting, intelligent interview with Moore (you’ll have to get a site pass) – he’s in pretty good form right now! Despite promising to ‘spit venom‘ all over the film last year, he’s been pretty even-handed in his discussions in the interviews he’s been doing.
The webcomic PvPonline has been running a Watchmen parody called The Ombudsmen (that’s part one of 5). It’s pretty funny, if you like PvP’s sense of humour, and uses characters from the newspaper comic pages to riff on the ideas in Watchmen.
Saturday Morning Watchmen is a flash movie about what Watchmen would have been like as an old school Saturday morning cartoon. I haven’t seen all of it yet, but I will!
Finally, on slightly different note, is Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of the movie but also the comic, Alan Moore, his fans and comics in general (with a few black and white exceptions) and it’s safe to say he doesn’t like any of them. It’s an incredible exercise of missing the point and letting your pre-conceptions colour your published work. For example:
The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.
I haven’t seen the film (yet) but lots of reviews are leveling similar criticism at it – that it revels in the violence of the story. But as AVClub’s ‘Book vs. Film‘ feature on Watchmen points out, Moore doesn’t revel in the violence of the story. The violence in Watchmen isn’t supposed to be all ‘kick ass cool’. It’s supposed to show how de-humanised these people have become. Lots of readers have seemed to think that some of the more violent characters in the comic are pretty cool (much as skinheads adopted A Clockwork Orange) but Moore certainly doesn’t and the fact that Lane thinks he does demonstrates how poorly he understood not just Watchmen but Moore’s entire body of work. Best of all he basically says ‘of course the fans will disagree with me on this’ in his opening paragraph saying that
Fans of [comics] are masonically loyal, prickling with a defensiveness and an ardor that not even Wagnerians can match.
Whatever dude – when you’re wrong you’re wrong and on this, you’re really wrong.
“These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored”
In Wired here.
I can remember Willis O’Brien’s King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes, I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because, frankly, I could have gotten someone, a passerby on the street, who could have gotten the same effect if you’d given them half a million dollars to do it.
In his own writing on these subjects, and any other chance he gets, Moore can be a bit ranty. But Adam Rogers keeps him nicely on track, while allowing him to speak his own mind – maybe he just got him on a good day? Anyway, Moore speaks about Watchmen, movies in general, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, cultural criticism through differnet mediums and a few other things besides.