Many smart cinephiles and comic book geeks will avoid watching Watchmen this weekend. Not to avoid the crowds of opening weekend, and not to patiently await word of mouth from friends and reactions from critics. No, these bright few will ignore the out-of-season blockbuster event because there is absolutely no reason to see this movie. They recognize that any Watchmen adaptation (particularly this one that’s been made) is completely unnecessary. Well, for anyone not out to profit from it, anyway. Of course, even Warner Bros. might have been better off not producing the thing, since the studio won’t be making as much money as it had initially envisioned thanks to that profit-participation settlement with Fox.
The point of this post is not to call Watchmen watchers stupid. Rather, our list of five reasons the film is unnecessary is to help moviegoers get smart. After reading this, though, if any of you are still determined to waste your time sitting through almost 3 hours of redundant, rehashed, irrelevant, ridiculous and inescapably disappointing superhero cinema, we’ll be left with no choice but to consider you mindless sheep, the kind that deserve to be duped. And if Dr. Manhattan chooses to vaporize us (or fans choose to curse us out in the comments section) for exposing the truth about this enterprise of excess, then so be it. We believe we’ve served justice here. …Read more
Frank Miller’s film adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit is an elaborately stylized train wreck. It would be easy to see only the glaring dissonances, such as childish one-liners sharing the screen with a scene in which a man is bludgeoned with a severed head, and write off the film entirely. But this wouldn’t do it the justice it deserves. The Spirit is a kind of “what if?” that populates the daydreams of only the most committed comic book nerds, which by some miracle has actually been made into a film. It’s a film that exists to answer an outlandish hypothetical question: what if two of the greatest comic artists of all time, Will Eisner and Frank Miller, teamed up to make a movie?!? Fortunately for Mr. Eisner, he didn’t live to see the result
The plot of the film is really unremarkable, and serves only to deliver the more considered stylistic elements. One of the big questions the film needs to answer, but doesn’t, is whether or not it’s a comedy. And what does “comic” mean here?
On October 28 the world will plunge into an irradiated nightmare, littered with the wreckage of civilization, overrun by savage super mutants. Or, my world will be, anyway. Next month is when the hotly anticipated new video game Fallout 3 will be released. It’s been over a decade since the first Fallout, a now classic post-apocalyptic role-playing game. How has the franchise maintained such a devoted fan base? Simple: great story, great characters, great setting, and killer cinematics.
The games have always been deeply indebted to post-apocalyptic cinema. The opening sequence of the first game is almost identical to the one in The Road Warrior, and the similarities don’t end there. As the Max Payne movie is (hopefully) about to prove, there is an elegant solution to the problem of video game movies sucking: make movies about games that are already steeped in cinematic influence. In other words, a Fallout movie would kick serious ass. It would have a similar feel to classics like The Road Warrior, but Fallout has its own brand of dark humor and retro-futurism.
After the jump, I take a crack at assembling a dream cast for such a film. I’m going to stick to characters from the first game, where it all began. Chime in with your own picks in the comments.
Kevin Smith has a sort of Clerks-does-Letterman interview style. He uses it mercilessly on some Hollywood women who love to make pain: Gale Ann Hurd (producer Terminator, Terminator 2), Lucy Lawless (Xena, Battlestar Galactica), Jaime King (The Spirit, Sin City), and Pia Guerra (Y: The Last Man).
Highlights:
- Lucy Lawless has more sex than Kevin Smith (obviously)
- A 16 year-old palm reader warned Lucy of Jay Leno
After seeing the sleek teaser trailer for The Spirit, Frank Miller’s adaptation of the classic Will Eisner comics, it’s hard to believe that this new leaked trailer (originally posted on Film School Rejects, where it may still be available) is for the same movie. It begins with an arty, perfume-ad sort of misdirected marketing angle and then evolves into a goofy mix between the campy Batmanseries/movies, Sin City, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Brenda Starr(remember that piece of crap?).
And I’m not alone in thinking it now looks pretty terrible. Bloggers and commenters around the web are mostly critical of Samuel L. Jackson’s look. Personally, I think Gabriel Macht, as the lead, looks about as lame as Billy Zane in The Phantom(is it possible domino masks are never cool on an actor?). For a roundup of what others are saying, since you probably can no longer see the clip out yourself, check out some links after the jump.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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