By now, I’m sure everyone has read about the petition to stop Uwe Boll from making more movies. I don’t know how long the thing has been around, but it got a huge boost over the weekend thanks to a FEARnet interview with Dr. Boll, in which he said it would take a million signatures to convince him to quit filmmaking. Various blogs picked up the story and thanks to support almost webwide, the number has gone up from 18,000 to more than 60,000 (it was apparently only 40,000 this morning). As New York’s Vulture blog points out, that is a whole lot more people than went to see Boll’s film In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, which makes me sort of dubious and disappointed. If you’re not going to his movies anyway, why do you care if he keeps on making them? Personally, I would expect most blogs would favor him continuing his career. He gives us all something to write about, and on slow days like this that’s something to be thankful for.
Vulture also notes that while the petition could easily reach 1,000,000 signatures by the middle of this week, Boll is not going anywhere soon. Of course, even if he didn’t have a number of projects in the pipeline the guy is not really going to disappear just because people (either one or a million) ask him to. Why should he? He has as good a reason to keep making films as you have to try convincing him not to: he can. I wouldn’t stop blogging just because a million people who don’t even usually read me don’t want me to continue (in fact, I’d probably appreciate the traffic from everyone checking to see if I’m still here). Would you stop working at Starbucks because a million Dunkin Donuts customers petitioned for you to quit? We don’t have to like Uwe Boll’s films, but we also don’t have to worry about them. And presumably, Boll isn’t worried about your signatures, either.
So, I’m boycotting the Boll boycott. I might even go see Postal when it opens May 23, just to rub it in. Isn’t he supposed to be as good as Stanley Kubrick, anyway?
There are a number of accomplished actors who have worked with infamously bad filmmaker Uwe Boll: Sir Ben Kingsley; Geraldine Chaplin; Clint Howard. And many of those actors have worked with some great filmmakers. Yet who would think to ask Kingsley how Boll compares to Spielberg or Polanski, or Chaplin how Boll compares to David Lean or Robert Altman, or Howard how Boll compares to his brother Ron. Well, Shawn Adler of MTV Movies Blog decided that it would be really amusing if he asked Leelee Sobieski to comment on any similarities between Boll and Stanley Kubrick. Surprisingly, she managed to squeeze out a decent answer — at least considering she’s on camera to wholeheartedly promote her and Boll’s film In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale and has to say something nice about the director.
Sobieski may not be the best person to ask, though. She was only 15 when she appeared in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and that film isn’t even considered to be on par with the filmmaker’s regular work. Still, she obviously understands the clear distinctions between “the greatest filmmaker of all time” and “the worst director of all time,” as Kubrick and Boll are respectively labeled, and she gives a good response in saying that both ask a lot of questions and both deserve respect for getting things done and not being lazy. As for the rest, its a cop-out, though a good save publicity-wise, but still makes perfect sense as an apples vs. oranges kind of comparison. Even Kingsley, who has been in his share of terrible films (only one of which is Boll’s Bloodrayne) and likely has to defend his choices all the time, would probably say something along the same lines as Sobieski’s claim that people want to be stimulated in a “plethohra” of directions and that there’s room for intellectual films and “great” action movies.
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