4 posts tagged “warner bros.”
Picking the gristle of the Fantastic Four debacle from his teeth is Fox studio exec Tom Rothman. And by all reports it’s his repeated interference in the production of ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ that has resulted in this mediocrity.
Look at the title. It’s bad enough they’re going down the now wizened route of origin story, one that disperses the final wisps of mystery and punctures resulting tension, but this title babies an audience of presumed idiots. Those who have already forgotten this movie is the result of a successful franchise.
What’s worse, one of the worst flaws of this film rests on dumb irony. Trying to tie it to current continuity and give it more resonance they’ve muddied the waters further with adamantium bullets that turn Logan’s amnesia into goofy contrivance, a young Cyclops and, inexplicably, new character Emma Frost, a mutant that we have yet to see again.
Fox’s lack of faith in the comic material they have in front of them seems baffling when you consider Warner Bros. and Christopher Nolan’s artistic freedom and faith in Batman’s history or Marvel striking off on their own with ‘Iron Man’ and set to produce a connected movie universe.
Instead of those blockbusters, Fox gets a complete mess. Striking an uneven tone right from the start, all the epic potential from the trailers is dumped into the opening credits: a vigorous war montage that suggests exciting action, bold cinematography and a ferocious pace.
Why then are we instead introduced to Team X, supposedly a black ops unit and yet they walk right up to a mission objective looking like a bunch of narked-off strippers. Why go for subterfuge when a gay wisecrack in a lift would be far more apropos. And it’s like this for the rest of the movie: a cinematic scrap between studio-approved banality and fleeting moments of drama.
There’s no doubting Jackman’s presence, and Wolverine is one of, hopefully, many defining roles for the actor. Unfortunately he’s hamstrung by a script that spreads all of his character’s facets amongst the supporting cast. Whether it’s the motormouth merc Wade Wilson (Ryan Wilson, reprising his Hannibal King routine), later the mutant menagerie Deadpool, the tragic Bolt (Dominic Monaghan, probably the best thing in the movie) or the mysterious Gambit (Taylor Kitsch), each of them evince more humour, emotion and wolfish charm than Jackman’s Logan.
Even Liev Schreiber (a massive improvement on the previous actor), playing villain Sabretooth, has more bite and animalistic energy, leaving Jackman to pull off ferocious poses that look rather absurd surrounded by this puff piece. In fact, rather than elevate the character, it’s a regression, declawing the rebel with dubious morals and turning him into little more than Superman in a bad leather jacket.
The uneven tone aside, the script is a mess of moral platitudes, perfunctory twists, and an all too familiar redemption theme as Logan fights to prove he is not the animal a better film would have willingly indulged and still succeeded in ensuring the audience’s sympathies. Instead of rounded characters, it’s a who’s who of mutant kind that rather than sating the fans and thrilling the audience, instead, annoys and confuses them both equally.
The defining moment, the torturous baptism of liquid adamantium that transforms Logan into Wolverine, is less excoriating and more a disappointing signal of the film’s turn. Rather than let our hero suffer for a moment in the wilds, we’re inflicted with a moment of goofy comedy as an old couple spots him streaking across their ranch.
In between moments of slapstick as Logan examines his new metal claws and destroys a bathroom, sage advice is imparted by the wise old man. Fortunately he is able to gift that familiar leather jacket before the couple is cut to pieces by one of Logan’s pursuers.
While the climax is grounded in the reality of the Three Mile Island meltdown, the location for the mutant equivalent of Guantanomo Bay, it’s undercut by the hysterical comic book destruction wreaked by the characters. It’s this strange back and forth in the script, this schizophrenic setting up and then breaking down of logic that runs through the whole film and truly scuppers the movie.
In fact, when a small moment involving Monaghan’s Bolt early in the film expresses more sad humanity than all the heroic posturing in the climax, you realise this movie was doomed from the start.
Slumdog Millionaire is in a rather interesting position coming as it does off a wave of rave reviews from the US press and ending the year not only at the top of many Best of Year lists, but with a slew of award nominations under its belt. It now moves to the UK, a new year and with such a burden of expectation on this underdog story about love, life and persecution in poverty stricken Mumbai that one might expect a chillier reception from this country’s more cynical critics.
Well with the popular home grown talent of such interesting oddities as dark comedy ‘Shallow Grave’, the cult film ‘Trainspotting’, zombie horror ’28 Days Later’ and recent apocalyptic sci-fi, ‘Sunshine’ it seems safe to say that the cup of praise will continue to overflow.
Danny Boyle is an intriguing director in that unlike many of his peers he’s not quite managed the success his talents so clearly deserve. He’s either continually underestimated or cursed by an almost X-Factorian nonchalance, with critics assuming his success will be ensured by someone else down the line.
Unfortunately this hasn’t quite been the case which is rather baffling when you consider the fact he shows with each film, as he does so brilliantly with this one, an almost prodigious grasp of genre; mixing it up like a new Howard Hawks and punctuating everything with his kinetic visuals and moments of violence that never feel gratuitous, only meaningful.
In fact with one caveat it’s easy to say that Slumdog is Boyle’s most accomplished film to date; taking all of the things that make him such an exciting director and pushing the envelope further. You can see him completely immersing himself in another culture and a city’s energy and it feels like a perfect match. In fact, there’s a sense that this is not the only one the film has to offer.
There are two scenes in the movie that are of such technical and sensory power that you could almost end the film there and herald its success with the rest. Both the police chase through the Mumbai slums and the hijinks on a train moving through the striking Indian landscape crush together adrenalised imagery as the camera careers past the colour popping of green moss on river walls, golden sands and head wraps, multicoloured trash mountains and the contrast of crisp sky blue uniforms against earthy dyed rags.
Along with the composer A.R. Rahman both of these are scored by the fusion artist M.I.A, another huge talent that plays with genre, but this time musically and it’s a version of her track ‘Paper Planes’ that most plays on the ears. It all looks so damn confident and cool that you wish everything that follows and mixes in with these moments could be as good, and it very nearly is.
Interestingly, the problem has already been noted by M.I.A herself. In a recent interview she comments on an initial wish that Boyle had kept greater distance from the more traditional Bollywood elements and while Boyle wanted to appeal to both East and West, it’s the ending where this wish proves possibly to be a mistake.
Up until this point he uses a flashback structure to juxtapose the gritty reality of our hero Jamal’s childhood with the more fairytale aspects of his current position on the Indian version of ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’. How he got there is the thrust of the movie, suffice it to say that it takes memories as breadcrumbs approach with pivotal events like a song he is forced to sing when forced to work as a beggar giving him the answers to the show’s questions.
It’s a brilliant concept and it allows Boyle to parody some of the sentimental and more escapist parts of the Bollywood aesthetic like the movement of a hand that might have been made to do something vile or a dance of great joy and love that very nearly precedes a horrific scarring. Each of these moments are ably supported by the great casting, most especially by the child actors who while not having the recognition of the older Skins actor, Dev Patel, capture both the terror and exuberant spirit of life in Mumbai.
Unfortunately, while this balance between the fantasy and the reality is maintained so brilliantly for 99% of the film’s running time, the moment the fantasy slips into reality is where the film falls apart. While you have to admire the romance of a contest phone call being used to swap faltering words of love rather than to win a quiz, every moment after that is like a jarring hammer blow against the precision filmmaking.
Not only is the death of a key character hijacked with a horribly obvious metaphor about money being the root of evil, the actual reunion of the two main characters, the very bloody thing the audience has been hoping will happen throughout the film, is completely vomited on firstly by some turgid guff about destiny, a concept we’d already got in a far more subtle way earlier in the film, and then a dance sequence that just feels tacked on.
It’s everything terrible about Bollywood and while it doesn’t completely scupper it, and to some will be a clever riff on that genre, it feels like a horribly amateurish cap to a far cleverer and quite frankly, downright fantastic movie.
Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the "Doomsday Clock" – which charts the USA's tension with the Soviet Union – is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the washed up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion – a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers – Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity... but who is watching the Watchmen?
Official word from Warner Bros. It's really happening people
There's a few people who are already crying hoax over at the AICN Talkbacks regarding this Rorschach's Journals site. Apparently some of the embedded code starts you off on a trail that supposedly ends up at some fan film blog. Devin Faraci over at CHUD.com, a fantastic film journalist, has delved a little deeper and revealed that the owner of the blog is:
'one Michael Regina, better known as Xoanon, one of the guys behind The One Ring. What’s interesting is that Regina and Warner Bros have a bit of a history, with Regina getting very uppity about WB going with bluetights.net as the official ‘fan’ site for Superman Returns (read up on the fiasco here)'
He goes on to suggest that this could be the studio teaming up with Regina to produce this bit of viral. As much as I admire a lot of the fan efforts that are circulated on the internet, it does make these kinds of things hard to verify, and sites like AICN who are absolutely giddy about films, and normal schmoes like me, can get suckered on first look. I hope that isn't the case here because it's a really nice idea and the first real signs of marketing taking the film seriously.
