THE HOBBIT movie poster is seven separate kinds of awful.
This isn’t bad in the usual way. The production values are high. The photograph looks nice. There’s nothing low-budget about this.
HOWEVER: From looking at this poster, and reading the tagline “An unexpected journey,” what do you think this movie is about?
Here are my theories:
Theory Number 1: Gandalf makes an unexpected journey back to the store after he forgets to buy sour cream AGAIN.
Theory Number 2: “Oh, it’s only partly cloudy today, when my weather prediction potion said it would definitely rain. How unexpected! I’ll go for a stroll.”
Theory Number 3: Gandalf, being older than the oldest hobbit’s great-grandfather’s grandfather, is getting rather senile. Every journey he takes is unexpected.
See, here’s the thing: a movie poster needs to express one thing, and one thing alone: conflict.
No conflict, no story.
No story, no movie.
No movie, no audience.
This is why the JAWS movie poster is so powerful and iconic.
The JAWS movie poster is classic, and will always be classic, because it’s simple and visceral and seven separate types of awesome.
Do you have any doubts, whatsoever, about what this movie is about? (Hint: It’s about a killer shark.)
THE HOBBIT poster gives us nothing to work with, no reason to plop down $12 for tickets with funky 3D glasses and $9 for popcorn that costs 26 cents to make and $6 for Diet Coke.
Memo to Hollywood executives: Put the conflict — the villain — on the poster. If you make the poster calm, beautiful and boring, there’s no reason to see a film that cost $230 million to make.
Pixar isn’t like other movie studios, which are busy throwing $200 million a piece on remakes of ’80s TV shows, board games and movies based on cartoons meant to sell toys.
No. Pixar is better than that. They know story, and embrace the whole “storytelling is far, far more important than fancy CGI” idea.
So I love them.
However, not everything they do is equally awesomesauce.
RATATOUILLE was shockingly good. FINDING NEMO had suprising depth. Even CARS was different and entertaining.
Animated movies from other studios tend to throw in a bunch of pop-culture jokes that get stale after two months and stunt-cast famous actors. The story seems to be an after-thought, and it shows.
But we are here to pit Pixar’s newest film, BRAVE, against another Pixar great, WALL-E.
Story nerds, get your geek on.
BRAVE
I hear they spend gobs of money making Merida’s flowing red hair just right, and that this is the first Pixar movie with a female lead.
Much hay has also been made of the bow-and-arrow scene, and the amazing slow-motion detail they did with her shot. Yes, it’s spiffy.
But we came here wallow in the mud of story.
BRAVE is a tough story to tell because it’s a love story between Merida, the princess, and her mother, the queen.
Their relationship gets broken because Merida doesn’t want to get married off to some random prince, despite the fact that it’s her destiny, her job in life, and that not getting married off might lead to war.
Private stakes: Merida gets selfish and gives her mother a potion to change her … but the potion changes her into a bear. Unless they repair the bond that has been broken by the third day or whatever, her mom, the queen, will stay a bear forever.
Public stakes: Not marrying a prince from another clan will lead to war. Marrying a prince she doesn’t love will lead to a lifetime of unhappiness. It’s a Catch-22 wearing a kilt.
Bottom line: Though this was entertaining, we need to dive deeper into story geekdom.
Merida does take risks and do a lot to save her mother from staying a Care Bear forever. And she does manage to fix all that she broke and convince everyone that princess and princesses should marry who they love. Merida doesn’t really suffer and sacrifice in any permanent way. In the end, she gets what she wants.
Without a lot of words, it’d be hard to explain this story. And that’s my acid test, especially for a cartoon: If you turn the sound off, does it (a) make sense and (b) make you feel anything?
WALL-E
Even if you are the manliest of men, watching WALL-E will make you laugh and cry and want to see it again.
There’s no dialogue in the first 30 minutes of the film, and you don’t care, because watching WALL-E the robot do his thing for 30 minutes is glorious.
The love story is between WALL-E and EVE is one of the best love stories I’ve ever seen. He’s a lovable doofus, a low-tech hunk of junk who’s charming and resourceful and inspiring. She’s everything he’s not: sleek and expensive, zooming around around while he chugs on treads.
Private stakes: WALL-E dedicates himself to taking care of EVE when she shuts down. He risks life and limb to cling to the spaceship that picks her up and takes her to where all the humans live after they fled into space when Earth became too polluted. And he basically commits suicide to save the last plant around, the one EVE found and the only hope of making Earth livable again.
Eve returns the favor by doing all she can to help him — and to save his life.
If you don’t get verklempt during the ending of WALL-E, then you don’t have a soul.
Public stakes: Just the survival of Earth and humankind.
Bottom line: WALL-E is simply a better story, with more at stake and a much more involving love story. WALL-E truly suffers and sacrifices for the benefit of EVE and others. He’s selfless and endearing. Unlike most heroes, he’s not tall, dark and handsome. He’s the robotic version of Urkel, and you don’t care — WALL-E rocks.
Verdict: WALL-E wins in a storytelling knock-out. It’s not even close.
Despite the advance in CGI in the years since WALL-E was made, WALL-E still looks more impressive. There are so many epic scenes that stick with you: the moment he first sees EVE, the dust storm, the escape pod, the evil computer that runs the ship, humans who’ve grown so fat and lazy they can’t even walk anymore.
The film sticks with you, and you’re better for having seen it. That’s rare. I’ve seen this sucker a dozen times and wouldn’t hesitate to fire it up again, which is even MORE rare.
But that’s the power of great storytelling, which gives the audience more than the biggest of Michael Bay explosions ever could.
Oh, this is too good. Some talented man sat through 5.93 bazillion hours of Aaron Sorkin footage to find all this glorious stuff.
I’m a big fan of Aaron the Sorkin, especially The West Wing (when it didn’t stink up the joint) and Sports Night and even A FEW GOOD MEN (mostly because of Jack Nicholson and in spite of Tom “Short! Annoying!” Cruise).
HOWEVER: Both Sorkin and another favorite of mine, Quentin Tarantino, are easy to parody. And this supercut of Sorkin is so funny because — like a fine Swiss bell, made by Swiss monks IN SWITZERLAND or whatever, despite the fact that I’m not sure Switzerland has a lot of monks, or any monks who make bells — well, it’s funny because it rings so true.
Every time that Hollywood reboots the SUPERMAN franchise, they hire some hot-shot screenwriter, who pens something the hot-shot director hates, leading to some OTHER screenwriter taking a stab at the page 1 polish (rewrite) until studio execs get involved and bring in five of their favorite screenwriters to add their spices to the awkward stew.
This is a certain way to spend $300 million on an epic failure.
HOWEVER: some random man, posting on the Book of Face, just told a better story than anything I’ve seen from any Superman movie in the history of mankind.
Anybody who’s a fan of Clint Eastwood‘s spaghetti westerns knows that THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY is one of his best films ever. Clint hardly says a word the entire thing. It’s like the first 30 minutes of WALL-E, if you changed him from a robot that cleaned up humanity’s trash in an apocalyptic wasteland to a gunslinger who cleaned up human trash in an apocalyptic wasteland.
So: flying over to Germany and back, I saw many, many airplane movies. As a public service, I’m reviewing the ones that I remember to (a) save you from watching stinkers, (b) give you a head’s up on hidden gems and (c) say sarcastic things about Sarah Jessica Parker.
First up is the Good, then the Bad and finally the Ugly.
More good stuff from George the Clooney and Ryan the Gosling, who does a good job portraying the crazy life of a political campaign.
As a reporter who covered all kinds of campaigns, and as somebody working in politics now, this movie gets a lot of things right. The long hours. The mix of cynical veterans and 20-something interns full of energy. Lofty ideas crashing into the shores of reality. Reporters working angles. War by leaks.
I appreciated this movie, and how it saw all the shades of gray in the characters.
Ryan goes from a wunderkind who can do no wrong to having no job — and then, having learned things the hard way, rolls around in the mud to pull a coup on the boss who fired him to get the job of running Clooney’s campaign. You see this character suffer and change.
Clooney could have played his presidential candidate as a straight-up hero, a cartoonish good guy. Once again, Clooney has the guts to play somebody interesting and flawed.
Verdict: Rent it on Netflix at least TWICE, because I say so.
PAUL NEWMAN AND ELIZABETH TAYLOR IN SOME FILM WHERE PEOPLE TALK A LOT
From watching this with the sound off: Paul Newman is a good-looking jerk. He broke his leg, so he lays around the house all day, drinking up the booze and glowering at people. For some reason I never understood, Elizabeth Taylor is completely nice to him the entire time, even after he tries to break her ribs with his crutches.
This movie raised many, many questions in my mind:
First: Why doesn’t Elizabeth Taylor — or whoever owns this house — kick angry Paul Newman to the curb?
Second: Who’s paying for all this booze that Paul drinks?
Third: Does he have a job?
Fourth: Yes, he’s good looking, but does he have blackmail photos of Elizabeth or something? Because being good looking doesn’t usually let you sit around a house for weeks and weeks, drinking all their alcohols while you throw things at your host and act like a total dipstick.
This is a talky movie. There are old people and kids and a birthday cake.
I’m guessing it was a play (CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF?) before it was a movie, because nobody every drives anywhere and there’s just a few sets. The camera keeps bringing us back to Paul Newman’s bedroom, where he demolishes Elizabeth Taylor’s liquor while giving her the cold shoulder.
She is far too kind in this flick. I would’ve kicked him out of the bedroom, crutches or not, after his first hissy fit.
Also, why is Paul the Newman such an angry drunk? My guess is he was some kind of high school sports jock, sad about the passage of his glory days, because the first scene I saw was Paul at some high school stadium at night, killing a bottle of whiskey or whatever while he throws stuff around before running hurdles. On the last hurdle, he trips up and that’s when he breaks his leg.
I found Paul Newman to be completely unsympathetic. Plugging in the airline headphones wouldn’t change my opinion because he never seemed to say anything anyway.
Note: After firing up the googles, yes, this was CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, and the internets say Tennessee Williams, a playwright famous enough to have his OWN STATE, hated this movie adaptation of his play so much that he told people the film would set back cinema for 50 years or whatever.
Verdict: This might be a good movie with the sound on. Who knows? Visually, it was boring. You’d have to pay me in purple euros to watch it again.
I DON’T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT
I also watched this with the sound off, peeking every 10 minutes, and that was plenty to understand the plot: Sarah Jessica Parker is a working mom with a husband, kids, a gigantic loft and many, many pairs of shoes. Her boss is Remington Steele / 007, which makes her life even more miserable, right?
It’s a rough life.
There are more than 7 billion people on the planet. Half are women. I bet if you showed this film to moms in Africa who walk miles every morning to fetch drinking water, or moms in China working on assembly lines 14 hours a day, they’d break down and cry at all the hardships that Sarah Jessica Parker has to endure in this movie. Should she spend more time at the office with the suave Pierce Brosnan, more time at home being a wife and a mother or maybe hire another nanny and just not feel guilty about it?
The climax of this movie, I believe, comes when Sarah Jessica Parker faces the ultimate test: should she pack five pairs of shoes on her business trip or six?
The Hollywood executives who greenlit this turkey should be belted into a 15-hour airplane ride, halfway across the world, while they’re forced to watch this thing five times straight.
Verdict: Kill it with fire. Nuke it from orbit. No mercy.
On the airplane to Germany and back, I saw many, many movies.
Some were good. Some were terrible. Though my record of seeing something like 5,982 films on a flight to Dubai wasn’t broken, I saw plenty.
Two movies made a real impression for entirely different reasons: ONE DAY starring Anne the Hathaway and THE DESCENDANTS starring George the Clooney.
First up: ONE DAY.
Anne Hatheway — Catwoman this summer in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES — is a good actress in this bad movie, which smelled strongly of Nicholas Sparks.
Here’s the plot: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, girl gets hit by a truck and dies.
I kid you not.
When the truck smashed into Anne the Hatheway, I wanted to throw cutlery at the screen.
Then there was 10 minutes of the boy, Dexter, being sad about the love of his life dying like that. The End.
But maybe my sleep-deprived brain was being grumpy. So when I got home, I fired up the Series of Tubes and hit Rotten Tomatoes to see what professional critics thought of this movie, and they thought it stank up the joint. This reviewer hits it on the head.
HOWEVER: Let’s dive into why the movie rubbed audiences and critics wrong. The acting was fine. The dialogue was good. The episodic thing of showing one day per year of their relationship didn’t hurt the movie that much.
It was the structure and storytelling. The bones were all wrong.
ONE DAY is like sucking all of the comedy from WHEN HARRY MET SALLY and replacing the laughs with misery, then making sure the ending left the audience mad.
Love stories should make you believe in the power of love, not make you think, “The love of my life might get hit by a truck tomorrow, so why bother?”
Up until the truck hits Anne the Hathaway, she’s the focus of the movie, the protag, the heroine. It’s really her POV and she’s quite sympathetic while the boy, Dexter, is a charming jerk. After she’s randomly smashed by a truck, the POV and focus shifts entirely to Dexter for the last minutes of the movie. He wallows in misery. He gets drunk, starts fights in nightclubs, blah blah blah. Then he takes his daughter up to the same hill that he and Anne walked up when they first met and credits roll. Oooookay.
There are rules for (a) love stories, (b) tragedies and (c) horror movies. Rules that make sense for audiences and writers alike.
It’s not really a love story when your heroine gets hit by a truck for no reason. Not a tragedy, either, because tragedies require heroes who fall from grace. They cause their own downfall.
Anne the Hathaway didn’t do anything to deserve her death. Neither did she sacrifice herself for a cause, which would’ve made her death meaningful. Tom Hanks dying in PRIVATE RYAN sucked, but you understood why he did it: to save Matt Damon.
Now in horror movies, it’s perfectly fine for the boogeyman to kill any character in any way, but horror movies are really about punishing sin, with the monster going after lusty teenagers or silly scientists who think they can play god. Everybody dies in the end.
ONE DAY was bad because all sorts of things just happen for no reason.
Dexter randomly gets fired from his TV host job.
His first wife randomly cheats on him, so they get divorced.
Anne the Hathaway randomly gets pancaked by a truck.
If you’re doing a French existentialist movie in black-and-white with subtitles, that sort of thing is fine. Life is meaningless! Personal choice is an illusion! Things just happen!
Good love stories, good tragedies and good horror movies work because things don’t just happen. Characters make choices. Bad choices tend to get punished. Good choices eventually get rewarded. That’s a story.
Verdict: Rent it on Netflix if you want to get truly mad and need to pre-funk before the main event.
THE DESCENDANTS is an entirely different movie, and not just because it has George the Clooney in a Hawaiian shirt instead of Anne the Hathaway pretending to have a British accent.
There is a parallel: George’s wife dies in this movie. She’s in a powerboat accident right off and spends most of the movie in a coma before dying.
Now, that sounds sad, and superficially close to ONE DAY. Except it’s not. The wife isn’t the center of the movie.
The A story is George’s relationship with his two daughters, which isn’t great at the start of the movie. His young daughter keeps getting in trouble at school and his older daughter is in a boarding school to shape up.
The B story is whether or not George, as trustee of 25,000 acres of ancestral land — virginal, undeveloped land in Hawaii — will sell the land and turn it into golf courses and condos.
George’s wife is also a thrill-seeker who (a) does dangerous things like ride really fast in power boats and (b) was cheating on him. Also (c) she isn’t the protag for 3/4ths of the movie, as Anne Hathaway is before getting thwacked by that random truck.
So it makes story sense for George’s wife to get injured while riding too fast in a power boat with a man who’s not her husband, though this is a different man than the one she’s sleeping with.
And it makes story sense for the man she is cheating with — who is also married with kids — to get punished. This happens after George and his daughter visit and the man’s wife figures things out.
To get me to watch ONE DAY again, you’d have to hand me a stack of purple euros and an endless pitcher of margaritas, and even then, I’m 50-50.
I’d happily watch THE DESCENDANTS again. There are plenty of neat little moments throughout, like the obnoxious surfer-stoner friend of the daughter who turns out to be kinder and wiser than he looks. George is also happy to look goofy, like whenever his character runs, which is hilarious. He doesn’t insist on being a movie star.
This is what I like about George and his OCEAN 11 buddies Brad Pitt and Matt Damon — despite being voted Sexiest Man Alive, none of them care about looking stupid. They take risks. They roll the dice with movies big and small.
THE DESCENDANTS is a small movie that says big things. There are no CGI effects. It looks like a no-budget indie movie. And you don’t care, because the story is good.
George suffers, sacrifices and grows. He learns how to be a dad for his daughters, and makes the right choice by not selling all that land, consequences be damned. Things happen for a reason, and nobody gets randomly hit by a truck.
You leave the movie feeling hopeful, and a little wiser.
Verdict: Buy it, if movies can still be bought and stored on the cloud or whatever.
Our first documentary — which I rented on the NetFlix and watched TWICE — answers the questions all of us have asked, at one time or another: What happened to the 13-year-old dudes who were really, really into Dungeons and Dragons? I’m not talking a little into it. I mean really, really serious about it, as in they’d go pro if there was such a thing.
The documentary DARKON answers those questions. And no, they don’t hang out in mom’s basement dressed up like warriors and wizards and elves while rolling dice on a table for ten hours a day. That’s silly. They dress up like warriors and wizards and elves for entire weekends and bash each other with foam swords.
And this is serious business. The swords may be foam, but the armor is real, and the politics are all kinds of crazy.
So: watch this trailer, then watch the whole thing.
This documentary is less deeply epic than DARKON and far more comic. You will snort coffee from your nose, or bourbon, or a Capri Sun juice box, if that’s what mom packed.
A former actress from STAR TREK: I FORGET WHICH SERIES (she’s blonde, and left the show, then came back as an evil Romulun twin or whatever) goes forth and interviews all sorts of Star Trek fans. She’s also got interviews with Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner, but those won’t stick to your mind as much as the dentist whose entire office is decked out like the bridge of the Enterprise or the gang of Klingons ordering food from Taco Bell while speaking Klingon.
True film fans enjoy stuff like this, because it doesn’t pretend to be anything but B-movie trash. There’s all sorts of trash aiming for Deep and Meaningful that hit entirely different targets named Pretentious, Obscure and Boring (shorthand: POB).
RAWHEAD REX looks like a silly little nugget of stupid fun. And to be honest, watching films with subtitles is fine, but if all you ever watch is black-and-white movies with subtitles about depressing and intellectual things, it will simply put you in therapy and give you migraines. Your brain, it needs a break sometimes. It need simple fun like RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC or TRANSPORTER or, if you really want to wallow in the B-movie mud, stuff like RAWHEAD REX.
See? What’d I tell you:
The special effects are terrible.
The monster is a foam rubber joke that would feel at home on the set of Doctor Who.
The shreds of a storyline are simply an excuse for crazy scenes of mayhem.
Do these flaws matter? No. Because when you already know you’re watching nonsense, so the lack of polish is refreshing and a conversation starter.
Before the invention of YouTube, you’d only find gems like this at estate sales in Hollywood. And the only way to play such treasures would be if you owned a 8mm projector, eight-track tape or some other obsolete technology brought to you be the number 8.
HOWEVER: We have the technologies today, and just like Christmas in July, they give is insane film clips and trailers of things that Should Not Exist, But Somehow Do.
The trailer to WILD WILD PLANET is awesomely, ambitiously bad. Take a peek.
My favorite bits:
the four-armed thugs who look like offspring of a Terminator-Matrix union
the women who know kung fu and how to disappear
the twisted plan by some man to transmorgify into a half-man, half-woman using transporter tech stolen from the U.S.S. Enterprise or whatever
The ’90s and ’00s (oughts? oh-oh’s?) brought us movie after movie where the heroines are tough women in black leather catsuits with guns. Maybe this all started with Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, but it’s taken off ever since.
As this movie proves, tough women (good or bad) in ‘the ’60s and ’70s movies didn’t wear black leather catsuits. No. They wore red flowing polyester. If red flowing polyester wasn’t available, they wore bright orange or green.
If anybody actually WATCHED this movie, as in paid actual monies and rented it or whatever, please shout.
Also: if you are brave or crazy enough to fire it up on Netflix or whatever, please report back on what happened to the crazy man with the mustache.
True movie fans actually HATE getting to the theater late, despite the fact that there are 20 minutes of trailers, because true movie fans loooove trailers.
Sidenote 1: Nobody who hearts the movies calls them “previews.”
Sidenote 2: Yes, there used to be these places with giant screens and popcorn that costs $8. This was before people watched movies on Netflix, their iPhone or some secret pirate channel on the Series of Tubes.
I just saw SAFE on opening day with Jason Statham, who ate $7.50 worth of my $8 popcorn, but did I complain? No. Jason the Statham is a lot like Reacher (while Tom Cruise is NOTHING like Reacher) in that he’s not that handsome of a man, and not a one-note tough guy, but men want to be him and women want to be with him. Jason the Statham just has charm in a non-smarmy way. Anyway, every flipping trailer for SAFE was for flicks from Lionsgate, and they all featured Bruce Willis, Jason Statham or Bruce Willis AND Jason Statham (EXPENDABLES 2).
HOWEVER: We are gathered together to talk about a bunch of other trailers.
The Good
Here’s the original trailer for THE AVENGERS, which opens this Friday, May 4. Marvel, you know where to mail the check.
What say you?
I’ll go see it. IRON MAN was great, though IRON MAN 2 buried the bad guy, Mickey the Rourke, under seven separate layers of sidekicks and nonsense, including Sam Jackson wearing an eyepatch for some reason. Also: How can anybody take you seriously as a bad guy or a leading man when your first name is Mickey, as in Mouse?
CAPTAIN AMERICA was a shocking amount fun. I expected it to suck. Even THOR was entertaining, though every time I saw the rainbow bridge thing, I expected to see My Little Ponies to show up.
The Bad
AVENGERS ON A BUDGET is so purposefully bad that it’s well-done.
I salute you, random people who created this little film.
The Ugly
TOTAL RECALL (2012)
Now, the original TOTAL RECALL was good, campy fun that didn’t take itself too seriously.
TOTAL RECALL (1990)
This remake is (a) far too serious, (b) looks like a bad cross between MINORITY REPORT and THE FIFTH ELEMENT and (c) doesn’t even go to Mars.
Let’s think about that. They don’t go to Mars at all. Arnold would be hacked off.
The Red Pen of Doom 