5 posts tagged “comic books”
What's worse: the adaptation of a book to the screen or the adaptation of anything to a Broadway musical? I'd have to go with the latter.
I thought that the Onion A.V. Club was pulling another one of its fun sarcastic jokes when they mentioned a Spiderman musical.....especially when they claimed that it would feature original music by Bono and the Edge. It came at the tail end of an announcement about other Marvel properties that are in various stages of development.
But they weren't kidding. I wasn't the only one who was fooled, judging by the talkback. I got the feeling that the poster found the news ridiculous to a degree to which attempting to make it sound more so would be an exercise in futility. While this would have worked well as a gag, it is instead a rather discouraging reality. A Spiderman musical?! Come on! "With great power comes great responsibility" may be the most hackneyed motto in the vastness of the comic book superhero universe. Do we really need Bono turning that into an anthem, with the Edge's signature (and by that I mean tiresome) delay pedal tagging along? I suppose it'll be interesting to see how they translate webslinging and swinging into choreography, but this just smacks of opportunism. Marvel has milked an awful lot of money out of this franchise, and they're going for every last drop. They have an admirable stable of characters, but the recent glut of superhero has proven once again that every barrel has its bottom (evidenced by the announcement of the upcoming Ant-Man adaptation).
The Marvel nerds barely even seem to be aware of the existence of Broadway theater; only one of the twenty comments on the announcement page made reference to the musical. This appears, however, to indicate a cultural divide rather than an intellectual one; the rest of the posts were devoted to the neglect of black superheroes (there are several notable examples) in film adaptations.
On an unrelated note, how crazy is this casting call for the upcoming Star Trek flick? I'm not at all surprised that they're looking for fit people, but some of the language they use is hilarious! In an obvious bid for people who look like aliens, they encourage actors with facial deformities to audition. Along with anyone who looks very plain, perfect, or ugly. And my personal favorite: "emaciated talent."
The contributors at Ain't It Cool News are the entertainment industry's version of a sewing circle. These guys will jump on just about any rumor and put it out for all to read. And sometimes they're right. At the very least they give movie nerds something to chew while they wait for the main course.
Their latest jive, however, concerns Watchmen. If you don't know about this one yet, you better find out quick. It has the potential to make most comic book superhero movies look like the lineup for amateur hour (even though the genre has gone through a renaissance in recent years). This adaptation has been stuck in development hell for a long time, and I'm really looking forward to the outcome. I frown upon what may amount to wild speculation about who will be playing who, but nevertheless, like every other fanboy I am right here at the sound of the bell.
The obvious wild guess in this case is their dream of Keanu Reeves as Dr. Manhattan. I don't know if I'd go for that. This has got to be the toughest casting decision to make for this movie. In the world of "Watchmen," Dr. Manhattan is pretty much the most powerful being in the known universe. I love Keanu Reeves, and I think his acting catches more flack than it deserves, but I can't agree with them just because they find him to be "alien and otherworldly." That's more of a cheap shot than a reason why he would be a good choice for the role. I really don't know who could fill this spot. In what Zack Snyder has already said will (hopefully) be a CGI-light project (unlike his "300"), Dr. Manhattan will definitely require more digital effects than anything else in the movie. Whoever the choose will probably have to act his way through loads of makeup and green screen.
I can, however, see Jude Law as Adrien Veidt/Ozymandias. He is a very attractive man, very self-confident, and exudes an air of cool intelligence (does one really just need a posh English accent to pull this off?). The broken swimming hero from "Gattaca" comes to mind. Hopefully that will pan out.
As for their call on Night Owl, I know nothing about Patrick Wilson. He was in "The Phantom of the Opera," but I haven't seen that (and as a general principle I don't plan to, either). So we'll see where that goes.
I read elsewhere was that Warner Bros. originally wanted Snyder to change the setting from the late Cold War era to post 9/11. Supposedly Snyder threatened to walk if they wouldn't preserve Alan Moore's original backdrop. I really hope that this is the case. I don't think that the story could work if it were taken out of that context. We shall see.
The Ain't It Cool guys write as though these "offers" have actually been made, and they hint at "a longtime source" as though it were Deep Throat or something. I think they've all gone mad with power, but they do have a large and hungry audience.
But in all fairness, this is a classic pot-and-kettle case. I'd LOVE to get paid to watch movies and/or play video games all of the time. After all, I am the guy who reviewed the third installment of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD's for the St. John's University Humanities Review. And Halo 2 for the Torch. But I got dem shits for free, son!
Which do you prefer? I know that there are plenty of other comic book publishers out there, as well as tons of underground comics, but which of the two titans is your favorite? Write-ins also welcome.
My friend Miguel let me borrow his copy of "Spirited Away," which I've been meaning to watch for some time now. It was pretty good. I really enjoy anime. It's something I'd like to get into more, but it's a pretty vast body of work. There are loads of different styles and types of stories. I wouldn't know where to start. Same thing with comic books, but that makes sense since anime grew out of the manga tradition. I like comics too, but I don't have the time to really immerse myself in them. Trying to catch up with the backstory of even one comic book universe is an intimidating task. Most of the heavy hitters have been around for forty years or more and their continuities involve time travel, multiple dimensions, and other retroactive fixes that the writers have had to cook up in order to reconcile all of the different storylines. Very confusing. I tried to work my way through the X-Men continuity once on Wikipedia. That's probably the most conspicuous example of how labyrinthine comic books can get. Every X-Men character seems to have died at least once, and they're always resurrected or replaced with versions of themselves from alternate timelines or dimensions or something. Crazy.
So I just returned from seeing "300." I was able to gather a nice crew to see it with too, i bought tickets for six people and another ten or so ended up coming along. It was a good outing.
I definitely enjoyed the movie. Great action flick, and of course it looked beautiful. They did a great job of preserving the comic's color palette, which is a gorgeous thing to behold on screen. I wouldn't have missed the Gorgo scenes, though. They weren't in the graphic novel, which isn't necessarily a reason for them not to be in the film, but they seriously dialed up the overall amount of freedom-and-democracy rhetoric (Gorgo actually said "Freedom isn't free!" I couldn't believe that). Its presence in the film isn't as troublesome as the way that it is presented. It sounds like the filmmakers are really serious about it when they back speeches with military cadences and a booming orchestra, but in the comic it's a lot more ambiguous. You could read it as a statement about the strange nature of (Miller's) Sparta as a state that, on the one hand, espouses high-minded principles about freedom and justice, but at the same time throws babies from cliffs because they won't meet their standards as warriors. The Spartans also have insane leaders. There's room for that to strike the reader in the comic, but in the movie they seem very serious about the 300 being a symbol for those ideals. The film portrays Gorgo as a woman who truly believes in these things, so it doesn't seem as ironic as it could. But maybe that isn't a message that Miller was trying to send when he wrote "300;" he was one of the executive producers so I imagine that if this was a criticism he shared he would have been able to get Zach Snyder to change things around. I also appreciate the fact that they needed to add more meat to the story to make the film feature length. The graphic novel is only 88 pages long, and Gorgo only appears in a few panels. I can understand the need to cool down the action every now and then, as well as create a sympathetic female character in a story which is mostly populated with greased up men. But by adding in that subplot I feel that they lost a bit of the edginess that makes Miller's writing so distinctive. The film could easily come off as a neo-con sermon.
Speaking of extending the runtime, virtually all of this movie was in slow motion! Which is fine; it worked well, especially in the fight scenes. But just about every other scene was in slow mo too. For really intense action bits they had to go to super-insane-slow-mo in order to underline how dramatic things were getting. This also sort of makes it the ultimate comic book adaptation. At some points the scenes are slowed down to a point where they almost look like panels from the graphic novel. And then it springs back to life, almost as if the drawings are jumping off of the pages of the comic. It was interesting to see that happen.
Xerxes was a fairly comical character to watch; the computer-deepened voice and making him a giant was way over the top. I liked it, though I did end up laughing pretty much every time he showed up. Same thing with the monsters that Snyder invented for the movie (especially the troll with blade-hands that only seemed to exist in order to decapitate failed generals).
Of course, some of my friends didn't enjoy the movie as much as I did. Several of them downright hated it. I'm biased because I've read the comic, and I enjoy "comic book movies," but I do think that several of their criticisms were a bit unfair. The most dubious of these was the attack on the acting. OF COURSE the acting isn't going to be amazing. You don't walk into this kind of movie and expect to see some of the screen's greatest performances. It's an action movie. I think there's a ceiling for how good you can expect acting in a movie like this to be, or rather there is different set of expectations. Just like with comedies or drama. I'm not looking for the same thing in all of these movies. Also the filmmakers were more concerned with other things, such as the overall aesthetic of the film. It looks great, which is more important to the movie's effectiveness than the people you have reciting the (few) lines of dialogue. Again, this is another area that is worsened by the Gorgo scenes because they considerably increase the word count. They chose these actors because they look good in leather bikinis, were willing to train for months to look good in those bikinis, and because they look menacing. That's it, really.
Another criticism was that it looked like a video game. More bias here, but who cares? I love playing video games, and it takes a lot of technical skill to recreate that sort of feeling in a movie. And I think it's exhilarating. Comic books are certainly the most derided form of literature of all time, but video games probably have them beat as cultural objects. It's hard to convince people that a video game can be considered a work of art. I think that they can. Most of them aren't, of course, but look at Final Fantasy, or Shadow of the Colossus, or even Max Payne. A lot of games out there have incredible stories with deep characters that would make great fiction. And they're visually stunning! Their perceived demographic, however, is what holds them back with critics. Most people think that video games are played primarily by adolescent males who don't have social lives. The truth is that the average age of gamers is in the mid to late twenties, and all sorts of people play them (they may still not have social lives, though). The kids who started playing video games in the 80's never stopped. This might cause critics to consider their artistic value as time goes on and more of them remember growing up as (or with) gamers.
So. "300" didn't blow my mind out. I wasn't really expecting it to, but it definitely made for a great night at the movies. And it was interesting to see how Snyder chose to adapt the comic. Future Shorts tomorrow night, "The Lives of Others" in a few weeks.
