Conventional wisdom about writing is conventionally wrong.
Oh, this is well-done.
I liked THE AVENGERS and THOR, along with CAPTAIN AMERICA and IRON MAN, though I do agree that IRON MAN 2 was smothered in useless sidekick nonsense.
Favorite line: “Witness the excitement … of Iron Man fixing a spaceship for 20 minutes.”
So this studio works for years to produce ROSA, a beautiful little short about an apocalyptic android goddess with kung fu powers on loan from Neo, who’s busy not using them in the Matrix — oh, wait?
One lone man did this?
NO WAY.
But it’s true. Take a look.
Hollywood took notice, and now ROSA is becoming a full-on movie, with popcorn and everything. This makes me happy.
Peoples of the Series of Tubes, and the Twitter, what’s your favorite short film that deserves to be made into two hours of movie goodness?
MANIMAL is coming back to TV, rebooted and such.
If you are a child of the ’80s, or even alive and conscious during that decade, you remember some nutty TV shows that — at the time — we thought were cool.
THE A-TEAM is unwatchable today. Go fire it up on Netflix or whatever. The fourth time in a row that (a) Mr. T says “I pity the fool” as (b) bullets spray all over the place and (c) bad guy cars jump in the air and do that half-flip, you’ll do a facepalm, and right in the middle of that facepalm, Col. Hannibal will light up a cigar and say, “I love it when a plan comes together.”
Other things we watched and thought were cool: AIRWOLF and that show where some American guy thinks he’s a ninja because he has an old wise mentor and is constantly fighting some actual ninja who actually should be the hero, seeing how he was the only real ninja within 100 miles.
Anyway, the point is, they’re rebooting one of the nuttiest relics from the Glowing Tube back in the ’80s: MANIMAL.
This is great news for America, and for bored college kids looking for something watch and dissect, as a group, when they’ve had too much Pabst Blue Ribbon to write that term paper about dialectical materialism as it relates to Madonna’s early videos, the ones before she’d married Sean Penn.
Here’s the classic MANIMAL intro.
Watch the hero as he trasforms, and no, they didn’t get this idea when they hired the special effects guy who turned Michael Jackson into a werewolf.
Special bonus: SPACE SHERIFF triple transformation
Note that I have no idea what this show is, aside from a possible father of POWER RANGERS, but it is awesome.
Epic slow-motion. Soaring music. Stunned reaction shots — this commercial from Denmark has it all, and they do it better than Michael Bay without even resorting to 593 explosions.
Think of what they could have done with an explosion or seven.
Ever look at an overstuffed movie poster and wonder, “Is that tiny figure over on the left a man, a woman or a smudge that didn’t get properly PhotoShopped out of existence?”
THE EXPENDABLES 2 is the latest movie to stuff 40 pounds of characters into a 5-pound bag.
Here’s the movie poster.
I counted 11 action heroes on that poster, which is 10 more action heroes than you typically need for an action film, even if eight of these guys just got broken out of the Beverly Hills Nursing Home.
Bet you anything the team of screenwriters — if I put a 9 mm to their head and started counting down — couldn’t tell you all 11 character names, and the average movie-goer wouldn’t notice if you chopped five of them from the film entirely.
This is a common problem, not just for Hollywood but for novels, especially anything involving fantasy and sci-fi, because no self-respecting Jedi or Hobbit goes off on an adventure without at least 23 other people tromping around with them, squabbling with each other when they’re not getting captured by Darth Vader and such.
IT IS A MESS.
Now, this problem also happens in comic book movies, partly because of the Comic Book Movie Laws.
Movie No. 1: The origin story of the hero along with the hero’s nemesis, the best villain. So: one hero, one villain.
Movie No. 2: The hero gets two sidekicks as he battles TWO villains.
Movie No. 3: The hero juggles an entourage that won’t fit in a Greyhound bus while he battles THREE villains.
Movie No. 4: Doesn’t happen, unless your name is Joel Schumacher and you’re making the mistake known as BATMAN FOREVER. Otherwise, the series dies and reboots.
I just watched THOR again, using the powers of Netflix over the Series of Tubes and such, and it is a fun little popcorn movie.
However, the cast of characters will make your head hurt: Thor, Hannibal Lecter, Loki, Princess Leia‘s mom, the Guardian, the Frost Giants, that arrow-shooting guy from THE AVENGERS and BOURNE LEGACY, Agent Coulson, the Frost Giant King, Yoda, the shark from JAWS and other people I’m probably forgetting.
In all seriousness: There’s a scene where Thor’s buddies are walking down the street and one of the SHIELD agents calls it in, saying he just spotted Xena, Robin Hood and Jackie Chan.
This agent is not only sarcastic, but wrong, because he’s completely forgetting Thor’s fourth sidekick, the fat bearded guy who — and this is shocking — likes to eat a lot.
In this movie, Princess Leia’s mom is Thor’s love interest, which is like a sidekick, but different, in that Thor makes goo-goo eyes at her. With his other sidekicks, he simply claps them on the shoulder in a manly way, or maybe hugs them — though he hugs her, too. IT IS CONFUSING.
Anyway, the point is, she has two of her own sidekicks: an old Norwegian scientist guy or whatever and some kind of sarcastic girl scientist who is apparently there for contrast, to make Princess Leia’s mom look even more smart and beautiful.
You heard me right: The sidekick has sidekicks of her own.
This is all too common and all too wrong.
Every movie and book could be improved by killing off every possible character.
In fact, thinking of “Who could we erase from the page?” is the wrong question. Start by saying, “Who is the ONE essential character?” and work up to the number two, the number three, pi (3.14-whatever) and some imaginary numbers.
Then break the Four Barrier and stop to reflect upon WHAT YOU HAVE WROUGHT, which is a far, far better story than what you started with.
THOR can’t exist without Thor (1) and if we need a second character, it’s obviously Loki (2). Odin (3) and the Frost King (4) would round out a top four. That story could work. Everybody else could go take a nice long vacation on a desert planet with two suns.
Going the other direction, just for fun: Say goodbye, Xena / Robin Hood / Jackie Chan / Fat Guy sidekicks (minus 4). Not essential to the story at all. See ya to Princess Leia’s mom and her two sidekicks (minus 3). Goodbye to Agent Coulson and the arrow man (minus 2). No more Guardian and Odin’s wife (minus 2). That’s 11 characters out the door, and those actors need not be unemployed: we will send them to star in THE EXPENDABLES 3: STALLONE NEEDS ANOTHER FACELIFT.
IRON MAN 2 had it much worse than THOR, with the villain played by Mickey Rourke getting buried by layers upon layers of sidekicks. I mean, look at this movie poster. All sidekicks, all the time. Villains are so boooring.
Peoples of Hollywood and writers of books, please kill off sidekicks.
Do it with a sharp pen, a 12-gauge shotgun or a red lightsaber — I don’t care.
Just do it before they make IRON MAN 3.
You’ve been there: sitting in a dark theater for two hours, with sticky unknown substances on the soles of your shoes and your wallet $23 lighter, and you’re thinking, “If the director and the seven different screenwriters given credit for this movie had spent FIVE MINUTES on the major plot holes in this stinker, it would’ve been a fine movie.”
All true.
This is why the folks at How It Should Have Ended have jobs.
Here are my favorites, and these are movies that I actually love (except for SPIDERMAN 3).
Big honking bonus: A recurring thing is cutting to Batman and Superman, sitting in a cafe while sipping coffee and talking smack about these movies and each other. I like it, I love it, I want some more of it.
How It Should Have Ended: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
How It Should Have Ended: THE DARK KNIGHT
How It Should Have Ended: THE AVENGERS
How It Should Have Ended: SPIDERMAN 3
Now that going to the movies more than once a year involves taking out a second mortgage to buy $9 popcorn and $7 Diet Coke and $11 tickets, you must pick your flicks wisely.
I’ve already skewered my favorite genre with Top 10 Thriller Clichés.
Then I went after the Top 10 Action Mystery Clichés — but it goes deeper than that.
Peoples of Hollywood, please stop spending the gross domestic product of Paraguay to make movies with these seven stupid clichés.
7) Romantic comedies starring Matthew McConaughey
We get it: he’s cute, and his Texas drawl is charming.
HOWEVER: He is not required, by federal law, to be in every romantic comedy on the planet.
6) Macho action heroes walking away from explosions really, really slow
Wussy little bad guys are thrown through the air by explosions.
Explosions only make macho action heroes slow down and stroll.
5) Romantic comedies where the man is a bumbling, lovable loser while the woman is a hot neurotic mess
The man is a 40-year-old virgin (Steve Carrell), a chauvinist pig (Russell Crowe) or a nerdy writer type (Woody Allen).
The woman is a beautiful mess (Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson or, God help us, Sarah Jessica Parker) who is far more educated, cultured and successful than the man.
So, she naturally hates this loser at first, then she slowly molds this wreck of a man into a real human being worthy of dating and / or marrying.
Please.
4) False alarms in Every Horror Movie Known to Man
Enough with the cat / boyfriend / little brother nonsense, and the scary music is just cheating.
3) Romantic comedies starring Kate Hudson
Though I have to say this: it’s better than Sarah Jessica Parker.
2) Movie villains who carefully explain their plot instead of KILLING THE HERO ALREADY
Why does every movie villain feel the need to talk to the hero?
Look, the villain always has hordes of minions who are completely motivated to listen to his stupid monologues. He can give speeches that make Fidel Castro look like the king of brevity.
A villain’s minions are the best listeners ever. They must not only nod and smile, but be entranced by his every syllable. The villain is their employer and visionary leader, and there’s a good chance that not listening with your entire body and soul will get you thrown into the tank full of sharks with lasers.
Chatting with the hero makes no sense.
Here’s one villain who gets it right.
1) Romantic comedies starring Matthew McConaughey AND Kate Hudson
And you thought I was making that up.
Now, I’m not saying that Batman would kick Superman’s keister in a fist-fight. No.
Though there is a hilarious series of posts over on The Correctness where they have Batman, Superman, Wolverine and other super heroes fight to the death, tournament style, each time debating who would win and why. It is amazing. Go read it.
I’m saying something different: that Batman is more far more interesting, cool and entertaining than the man who wears blue and red pajamas.
On to the reasons:
5) Batman movies rule, Superman movies drool
Comic books are a separate shebang, and the comic book nerds dive so deep into the Batman and Superman policy weeds that they Confuse me, because when it comes to the comics, I am a Bear of Little Brain.
Movies are something we all know and love, and it doesn’t take a lifetime of reading back issues of Detective Comics to say that THE DARK KNIGHT is 5,982 times better than all of the various Superman movies combined — plus every Transformer, G.I. Joe and My Little Pony movie ever created. (No, there is not a My Little Pony movie yet. At least I hope not.)
Superman movies are lame. Batman movies are fun.
Yes, there is that one exception, the George Clooney version of Batman with that blonde actress who was in a bunch of Aerosmith videos. Alicia Silverstone? Something like that. I hope she’s got a sitcom or reality show now, and that she burned that Batgirl costume, because her wearing it was an abomination. Even so, I’d rather watch the Clooney movie six times in a row than any random Superman flick.
If we throw out the one semi-decent Superman movie — the first one — and the one bad Batman with Clooney, you’ve got zero great Superman flicks versus a whole pack of good Batmans, a few great ones and three brilliant ones.
No contest. Batman wins.
4) Batman is dark and dangerous while Superman is a self-righteous ninny
We know exactly what Superman will do. He’s Mr. Perfect, completely predictable, completely indestructible and completely boring.
Batman keeps on surprising us. He’s got that one rule, but other than that, hey, watch out. Think that Superman would break a thug’s leg to find out where Joker hid a bomb? No. That would be wrong, boys and girls. Superman will use his X-ray vision to find the bomb. Or he’ll fly really fast to go back in time and prevent the bomb from ever being planted in the first place. Ugh.
3) The outfits, they are not comparable
Sure, early Batman looked little different than a five-year-old in pajamas who used a towel for a cape and put on a mask. Adam West’s costume is hilarious.
Superman’s red-and-blue pajamas, though, haven’t really changed over the years. They started out kinda odd. They’re still kinda odd. There’s nothing cool about them.
Batman’s costume has only gotten better and better. Michael Keaton looked amazing, years ago, and the Christopher Nolan movies turned the Batsuit into a work of art.
2) Alter-egos
Superman’s alter-ego is a bumbling reporter who wears glasses. Otherwise, he’s also a goodie-goodie two shoes just like Superman and nothing to write home about.
Batman’s alter-ego is playboy billionaire Bruce Wayne, who is entertaining all by himself.
Who else has a playboy billionaire alter-ego that’s endlessly entertaining? Tony Stark. Does this work as a movie? Oh yes.
Batman wins again.
1) Super powers get old, while gadgets and skills are always good
Invincible powers, like being bullet-proof and invincible and able to fly so fast you go back in time — those stink, because it’s unfair to the bad guys and unfair to the audience. We know who will win, every time.
Powers are also inherently bad because the average person reading a comic book or watching a movie can’t get (a) bitten by a radioactive spider or (b) decide to be born on a different planet and sent to Earth in some kind of spaceship aimed at a cornfield in Iowa.
Batman doesn’t have super powers. He has gadgets that he designs and makes, plus skills that he earned through hard work, study and sweat.
No matter how hard you try, you couldn’t become Superman, Spiderman, the Hulk or the other 927 super-powered heroes floating around out there.
Batman is achievable, given enough money, motivation and training.
Skills beat super powers every time. Also: girls like guys with skills.
ALSO-ALSO: Batman’s gadgets are so interesting and fun, Daniel Craig is jealous. What’s an exploding pen and a Aston Martin with machine guns compared to the Batsuit and the Batmobile? He’s got the grappling gun to zoom around, the cape with memory cloth to fly around Gotham and seventeen other amazing toys that you and I would love to have.
It’s also more interesting to watch somebody solve crimes and defeat villains using skills and brains rather than super powers that you inherited through no effort of your own. How did Superman prevent that comet from destroying the Earth? Oh, he flew out there and pushed it out of the way. No big deal. Didn’t even break a sweat.
If you’re watching a movie or reading a book, even a comic book, you want to identify with the hero. I don’t identify with Superman, not being an alien from another world with invincible powers.
I can identify with Batman, and every man alive would happily trade their two-car garage for a fully equipped Batcave.
Sidenote: By the way, Batman would wipe the floor with Superman.
Now, I am not some kind of movie snob who only watches black-and-white French existentialism plus “films made in the early years of Wes Anderson‘s career, before he went corporate.”
However: Ridley Scott is a crazy great director who made a crazy bad mess out of PROMETHEUS.
Yes, he is a film god for making the original ALIEN and BLADE RUNNER and GLADIATOR.
Being a film god, though, means you shouldn’t spend the gross domestic product of Paraguay on a movie that, with a few tiny little fixes, could have been 5,982-times better than it was.
Because — let’s be honest — PROMETHEUS stank up the joint.
Fix Number 1: Give us some flipping aliens in our ALIEN movie
There was all sorts of noise from Ridley Scott that this wasn’t, technically, an ALIEN movie.
Well, no. Because there was a complete shortage of the alien.
This movie is like selling people bacon cheeseburgers and making them all wonder why they’re looking at a bun with some fried pork bellies on it, but no actual hamburger.
Sure, there are tall bald bodybuilder Engineer guys, who technically are aliens, except their DNA is the same as ours, so technically they’re not. IT IS CONFUSING.
And yeah, we get about six seconds of an alien on screen at the very end when (spoiler!) a baby alien bursts out of the chest of an Engineer after he refuses to pay his dues to the Squid Facehugger Engineering Brotherhood, Local No. 1291.
But otherwise, we all paid $9 for 3D tickets and $8.50 for popcorn that cost 12 cents to make to watch an ALIEN movie with no aliens except for those six seconds.
Instead, we got this stupid black goo that makes no sense whatsoever.
Fix Number 2: Lose the Black Goo nonsense
So, there’s this Black Goo that the Engineers use to: (a) disintegrate some other Engineer they left on earth like some kind of frat-boy prank, you know, filling the bottle of shampoo with Nair, except Engineers are hairless, so hey, we’re gonna turn you into dust; (b) bomb planets far, far away with their donut spaceships; (c) turn worms into snake things; (d) turn humans into zombies; (e) turn lead into gold; and (f) make it so zombie boyfriends who get busy with their sterile human girlfriends create squid facehugger things the size of Volkswagens.
I may be missing five or six other things the Black Goo does. IT IS MAGIC.
Here’s the problem: the Black Goo commits the classic storytelling sin of Double Mumbo Jumbo, which is a technical Tinseltown term that means, “The audience will believe one piece of crazy sci-fi nonsense, but they won’t swallow 17 of them.”
The original ALIEN did this right. Can we believe a cute little facehugger will hatch from an egg, find a human host, implant an egg in his stomach and make an adorable little chest-burster who grows up to become a big, strong Alien?
Yes, we will.
The audience might have bought the notion that this Black Goo could do one magical thing, or maybe two, but not five or six or 30.
Fix Number 3: Cut the crew down from a cast of thousands to like, six people
Pop quiz: Name half the characters on the PROMETHEUS. Now, that’s not fair. Let’s go with 25 percent of them. Ready? Go.
There’s no way. Unless you have a copy of the script and a rewind button, you don’t know who the hell these people are except for (a) the girl with the dragon tattoo, (b) her boyfriend, (c) Magneto and (d) Charlize Theron.
Everybody else gets about 30 seconds of screen time, including Guy Pearce looking like Yoda for some reason.
Kill off all the other guys. We don’t need them.
The original ALIEN had something like six characters. You could keep track of those guys as the alien killed ’em all off until Sigourney Weaver was all alone with the Alien, which was the main event anyway.
Peoples of Hollywood, hear me now and believe me later in the week: Kill off every character you can. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. This will both save you money (good!) and make for a better film (better!), which will make you even MORE money at the box office (amazing!).
Fix Number 4: Engineers should not be super-smart 7-foot tall toddlers throwing a tantrum
OK, I can buy that a bunch of space-faring aliens run around the galaxy, putting the seeds of life on planets. Maybe they got bored of spending their days playing MEDAL OF HONOR: THE BATTLE FOR XENOS, PART 873.
Having the Engineers go wacky, though, makes no sense. Why would they want to bomb earth with Black Goo?
Why would the one Engineer wake up from a long sleep, see the handsome face of Magneto and decide to twist his head off before Magneto says more than two sentences? Because the Engineer, he’s got such a busy schedule that day, just waking up and all. “I have things to do, humans! I have planets to bomb for some random reason!”
There are rumors on the Series of Tubes and papers of news and magazines of film that Ridley Scott himself said little baby Jesus was an Engineer, and they all got mad that humans killed him.
OK, that’s wild and crazy, and would have brought down the wrath of all kinds of church people, so maybe that’s why Ridley the Scott left it on the cutting room floor. HOWEVER: At least that would be a reason for the Engineers acting like two-year-olds all hacked off because Mom won’t let them watch The Wiggles for the 11th time this week.
Here is my take on every Batman movie known to man except for THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, because I don’t want to spoil that for folks who haven’t seen it yet.
Fire up the time machine.
BATMAN
Do you remember the hype for this first Batman movie? It was insane.
Just seeing the intro, where the camera zooms around something that looks cool and immense, and turns out to be the bat symbol — it blew our little minds.
Looking back at it, the thing seems incredibly cheesy and low-budget. But still fun.
The fight scenes were the best thing around aside from movies involving (a) Bruce Lee, (b) lightsabers or (c) Bruce Lee wielding a lightsaber.
Jack Nicholson was also on fire.
HOWEVER: Tim Burton did go a little wacky with the mix of time periods, cars, costumes and musical choices. This movie was a combination of cheesy, trippy, awesome and weird.
Grade: B
BATMAN RETURNS
The Michael Keaton sequel followed the iron-clad law of comic-book movies, which says: “The first movie must have the origin story of the hero plus the best villain, then the second movie must have two villains and the third movie THREE FLIPPING VILLAINS, then you reboot the franchise with a cheaper star and cheaper director.”
Bad news: the sequel had Danny DeVito instead of Jack Nicholson, though Danny did a pretty decent job of being creepy and threatening.
Good news: the sequel had much higher production values. Darker, grittier, less Prince-flavored and cotton-candy colored. Dark looks good on Batman.
Best news: Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, which is glorious.
Grade: B+
Now we’re talking: bring on the craziness.
BATMAN FOREVER goes first. I actually didn’t mind Val Kilmer as Batman, or Tom Cruise’s 5th wife as whoever she was supposed to be.
And shockingly, Jim Carrey does a great job as The Riddler while the more honored actor, Tommy Lee Jones, was boring as Two Face.
HOWEVER: The movie is kind of like Lindsey Lohan: a good-looking mess.
I did like the ending, though. The final confrontation with Jim Carrey in tight pajamas, and the choice Batman has to make in saving his friends — good stuff.
Grade: C+
BATMAN AND ROBIN
BATMAN AND ROBIN is where the franchise jumps the shark.
This may be the most expensive mistake George Clooney ever made as an actor. He’s a tremendous actor, one of the best ever, but he’s completely wasted in this film, which is a bit like IRON MAN 2 in that we have 14 subplots involving sidekicks (Robin, Batwoman, Alfred, whoever) along with another 8 subplots involving Uma Thurman, Arnold Schwarzenegger and whoever else was one of the villains in this mess.
Bane is in here as some kind of wrestler thug. Big waste.
So, this is the movie that gives us Batman on ice skates and batsuits with nipples. This movie should be nuked from orbit.
Grade: F
BATMAN BEGINS
The Christopher Nolan / Christian Bale movies are obviously the best.
This movie is under-rated. Seriously. I just watched it again last night, along with THE DARK KNIGHT, and it’s rock solid.
The beginning is hard core. Bruce in a Chinese prison, his parents getting shot during the mugging, Liam Neeson showing up with a lightsaber and talking about how the Force helps you be a ninja for justice or whatever.
Loved every second, especially when Bruce rejects the League of Shadows and their plan to destroy Gotham for the 14th time, and instead destroys their base. Beautiful.
The middle is great, especially since you get to watch Bruce Wayne tinker and try out new things. He doesn’t just flip a switch and turn into Batman: he evolves into it, painfully, and it doesn’t happen in a Rocky montage set to the music of Prince, Usher, Eminem, Rihanna or Justin Bieber, which is a possibility if you handed the reigns to this franchise back to Tim Burton or Joel Schumacher.
Liam Neeson actually being Ra’s – a great surprise, as was Liam burning down Wayne manor and leaving Bruce for dead, just like what happened to him back at his Jedi ninja lair in the mountains.
The ending is also satisfying. Every payoff has a setup, and things tie together perfectly.
Grade: A+
THE DARK KNIGHT
Now, THE DARK KNIGHT is both more brilliant and more uneven. The beginning scene with the Joker robbing the bank is shocking. Every scene with the Joker is shocking and brilliant, to be honest.
But this film — as genius as it is — is uneven compared to BATMAN BEGINS. The beginning and middle are better than the end, though the closing bit is awesome.
I’m not saying its a bad movie. Love it. I’m saying the beginning and middle are awesome and the end is merely great, and the genius of the whole thing completely overshadows the parts that are a bit talky or slow.
Grade: A+
The Red Pen of Doom 