After spending a week hanging out with our two-year-old niece, I’ve memorized the words to “Let It Go” and “Do You Wanna Build a Snowman?”
Those two songs–especially “Let It Go”–are what made this movie insanely popular among pookies.
The movie itself isn’t up to snuff. Compare it to anything from Pixar, also owned by Disney now, or to any Marvel movie (owned by Disney, which owns STAR WARS, too, and possibly America–somebody needs to check), and the story in FROZEN is meh.
That’s easy to say. What’s hard? Fixing the movie.
So let’s try that, in the tradition of THE PHANTOM EDIT, which radically improved the hot mess known as STAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACE.
How did filmmaker Mike Nichols fix this travesty?
Nichols shortened or deleted a bunch of scenes with Jar-Jar Binks.
He killed the lamest possible explanation of the Force, which George Lucas suddenly decided, four films into this series, comes from microscopic bugs in your blood called “midi-chlorians.” Yeah, no joke. I believe this was one of the terms I had to memorize when studying plant cell biology.
He trimmed a lot of political nonsense and added deleted scenes that should never have been deleted.
Basically, he recut the entire film. And it was Good.
How can we recut FROZEN?
Here goes:
First edit: We kill off Olaf the Snowman, who is the equivalent of Jar-Jar Binks in this movie. The silly snowman is supposed to be comic relief, but he’s just goofy and not funny at all. There’s already comic relief in the form of Kristoff and his reindeer.
Second edit: Let’s give Kristoff more to do. If he’s going to be a bigger hero, he needs to try to prevent the villain from doing bad things in Act 1 and get banished to the snowy wastelands in Act 2, when Anna travels by herself out there and meets him while searching for her sister.
Third and biggest edit: Who’s the villain? In the original cut, the villain isn’t clear. Elsa is sort of a villain for leaving the castle and causing winter. Hans the prince is the villain in the end, but he’s sort of a surprise to the audience. He’s not in the beginning of the film and doesn’t drive events. He shows up late and there’s nothing really suspicious about his courtship with Anna, then bam, oh, he’s actually evil and after the throne. There’s no setup to this payoff. It’s a cheat.
The Duke of Weselton is sort of a villain, but he’s not driving the Ship of Evil, either.
Elsa and Anna’s parents (the king and queen), but that’s because of a storm, not nefarious deeds, done dirt cheap.
So: let’s make a real villain who’s there in the beginning, middle and end. Combine the roles of Hans and the Duke and get him there from the start.
Our combined villain, Duke Hans:
(a) sabotages the royal ship to cause the deaths of the king and queen, an act of sabotage that a common worker (Kristoff) notices and tries to stop, leading to his banishment to Snowy Reindeerville.
(b) Meanwhile, Duke Hans has spent years grooming and courting the much-younger Anna so he can marry into the throne.
(c) The final piece of the puzzle is planting the idea in Elsa’s head that she can only prevent harming her sister again by living the rest of her life in the icy wilderness, which would also mean giving up her right to the throne, but hey, those are pesky details.
(d) Kristoff is now critical to the climax, since he knows the big secret that Duke Hans is who murdered the king and queen, a secret Duke Hans would kill to protect.
Better, right? I’d be happy just whacking Olaf the Snowman, though giving the story a true villain who drives events and making Kristoff more than a Random Nice Guy does a ton to help the story.
How would you fix FROZEN? And how do you get a two-year-old girl to stop playing “Let It Go” seven times an hour? Hit me in the comments.
Updated: Fixed the cases of mistaken identity, like calling the reindeer and his master by the wrong names and saying Anna when I meant Elsa. Thanks to folks for seeing that. My niece would never forgive me. 🙂
As a huge fan of action movies, hear me now and believe me later in the week: the Era of Epic Explosions is over.
Stick a fork it in.
It’s kaput. Done. Dead and buried.
X-MEN: OSCAR ISAAC WEARING 30 POUNDS OF MAKEUP is only the latest nail in the cinematic coffin, though it’s a nail that cost more than the domestic product of Paraguay.
Now, I liked the movie more than I expected after all those bad reviews. HOWEVER: the big action set pieces where the villain started destroying the world?
Big shrug. Didn’t care.
Here’s why explosions were once movie magic and now make people sneakily check Twitter on their magical phones.
1) In the old days, big explosions meant big budgets and big stars
Way back, only the biggest productions could afford to blow things up.
Those same movies also had the best directors, best actors and biggest budgets.
Meanwhile, B movies had incredibly cheesy explosions and effects that looked like Ed, president of the AV club, cooked them up on his Macintosh during a long weekend fueled by two-liter bottles of Orange Crush and two over-sized bags of Cheeto’s, which should be spelled Cheetoh’s but isn’t. Not sure why.
This is why the following compilation of great movie explosions skews toward old action movies. Because they actually blew things up, using real explosives, instead of spending millions of dollars on fake pixels.
2) Explosions were rare and therefore precious
In the Golden Age of Things Going Boom in the Movies, directors and producers had much smaller budgets, which meant you couldn’t have things explode on screen every two minutes.
You had to (a) find an abandoned building that fit your script, (b) file permits with the city for permission to blow it up and (c) hire professional people to blow them up on time and on schedule, while cameras rolled.
If the things went wrong, you were out millions of dollars and needed to find a new abandoned building.
Therefore, action movies of yore couldn’t go overboard with fire, smoke and debris. They had to use explosions when it mattered most.
This was a good thing, for movie budgets and for people sitting in dark rooms while they munched on overpriced kernels of exploded corn.
3) Today, everybody can afford special effects and explosions
It was epic when Bruce Willis sent the office chair down the elevator shaft in DIE HARD.
And I be you can remember the first time you saw the Death Star explode in STAR WARS. (The second and third times, not so much.)
Directors making movies today grew up watching those cool, big-budget movies with amazing explosions. Even if they’re working on a cheesy TV show, now they can afford to blow up anything they want, as big as they want.
So yeah, they do it.
All. The. Time.
It goes deeper: people making fan movies or YouTube parodies have the technology to blow up New York City, the West Coast or the entire solar system, if they’re truly ambitious. Check out the insanely detailed fan-made movies about Star Wars with excellent lightsaber effects. Amazing.
With giant budgets and armies of CGI people, it’s insanely easy these days to spice up a bad scene with explosions. Except it’s used so often, it’s a cliché.
Michael Bay has created an entire career out of blowing things up in slow motion. Here’s a montage:
4) Easy CGI means explosions aren’t believable
Audiences today grew up watching real explosions in action movies. We know what they look like.
Even big movies with big budgets struggle to get CGI right.
When you know it’s fake, you don’t care.
5) We’re numb to ka-booms by now, and we know the villain will lose
It’s a staple of every action movie, comic-book movie or thriller that (a) the Bad Guy Wants to Destroy the World and (b) the Bad Guy Gets to Start Blowing Up the World because (c) it wouldn’t be any fun if the audience didn’t get to see six blocks of Manhattan get demolished for the 2,874th time.
The old rule of storytelling was to always, always raise the stakes. If saving your wife and daughter from terrorists was good, then saving an entire city from a stolen nuclear warhead was better and stopping a villain from destroying Earth had to be the ultimate.
Except we expect this now. We’re numb to it.
And audiences know how it ends. The villain never, ever gets to truly destroy Gotham, New York City or the Earth.
The dice are loaded. The villain is going to lose.
Which means there’s zero suspense.
Oh, we’ll get a little look at the Big Bad Guy stomping on a few blocks, or a glimpse of how his doomsday device will flatten New Zealand, but no, the villain never gets to actually win.
So as I sat there watching the X-Men head off to stop Apocalypse from destroying civilization, what should have been the most exciting part of the movie had zero thrills whatsoever.
Because you knew the villain would lose. No question.
This is part of the reason why CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR worked so well. The story is smaller and the stakes are lower. The villain isn’t trying to destroy the third rock from the sun. He’s simply trying to get revenge by turning the Avengers against each other. Yet you care far more about CIVIL WAR than BATMAN VS SUPES or X-MEN: COME SEE WOLVERINE FOR TWO MINUTES. And the reason why is simple: audience will always, always care more about living, breathing characters than bits of concrete and rebar.
TL;DR: Blowing up things isn’t shocking or thrilling anymore, not when it’s CGI pixel nonsense. Also: Villains with evil plans to destroy Gotham, D.C. or Earth never get to actually do it, so stop making that the plot of every action thriller and comic book movie.
Bonus video: Expectation vs reality – action movies
We live in the Golden Age of comic book movies, with Marvel and DC pumping them out as faster than you can swipe your VISA for $14 tickets to IMAX 3D and $9 bags of popcorn.
Here’s the secret recipe for mediocre superhero movies and its two sequels, each of which will costs at least $250 bazillion to make and $150 gazillion to market, and no, those insanely high numbers are not why you have to pay so much for tickets and kernels of dried corn that have been exploded. That’s a coincidence.
Note: I strongly deny the theory that this post is suggesting movie studios spend more than 1 percent of the budget on the actual story, because diverting that amount of money would eliminate the CGI budget for the skyscraper that explodes and falls down in the middle of the seventh fight scene, the one in that city that sort of looks like Vancouver, B.C. after the villain kidnaps the love interest and has a creepy dinner with her in his lair, but not the explode-y fight scene where the villain crashes the mayor’s birthday party to announce his plans for doomsday.
Secret Ingredient #1: A hero is born, which means Mom and Dad better have life insurance
Sorry, moms and dads of the world: if your son or daughter is destined to put on a mask and cape to fight evil, there’s a price to pay. Which means you’ve got to go.
Superheroes with dead parents are incredibly common, for these good reasons.
Here are those reasons: (a) any villain with a brain in their noggin could simply kidnap mom and dad whenever they wanted something, forcing (b) every movie or comic book starring a superhero with actual parents to spend precious time explaining exactly how mom and dad are hiding and surviving, (c) dead parents are an easy way for writers to give their superhero their motivation to fight crime and evil and (d) how else would you get Superman to fight Batman except by leveraging his human step-mom?
The list of superheroes with dead parents is so long I don’t even have to start, but I will: Batman, Superman (his real parents, not Martha), Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther—you get the picture.
Secret Ingredient #2: Our hero is a total loser
This is a necessary step to the first movie, which tells the hero’s origin story.
You have to show how lame the hero is before he gets his powers. The bigger the contrast, the better the story.
Peter Parker is a nerdy little high school kid who gets bullied.
Steve Rogers is so small and scrawny, they won’t even accept him as a volunteer to fight in World War II.
Tony Stark is a billionaire playboy who invents and sells weapons when he’s not busy trying to poison his liver and catch every STD known to man.
Finally, here’s an example that shows how going halfway doesn’t work AT ALL.
Oliver Queen (Green Arrow) is a billionaire playboy who’s totally not a copy of Batman, and though Arrow’s rich father is dead, his mom is still alive, and living with him (?) and his kid sister (??) in the same mansion, even though he’s a grown man. Yeah, that’s the setup. It is as soap-opera-ish and stinky as you could imagine.
Secret Ingredient #3: Power up
A superhero needs talents and powers, whether they come from (a) a science experiment gone wrong (Spiderman, Hulk), (b) a science experiment gone right (Captain America, Ant Man), (c) years of training and (Black Widow, Falcon, Arrow) or (d) being a playboy billionaire genius who invents his own suit and arsenal of gadgets (Batman, Iron Man and a dozen other copycats not named Arrow).
Then there are weird powers that we do not, cannot and will not accept, like gills to breathe underwater combined with the ability to get whales to act like underwater taxis whenever Batman and his buddies in the Justice League don’t feel like using in the Batsub or Wonder Woman’s invisible plane.
Secret Ingredient #4: An old mentor who eventually MUST DIE
Sorry. It’s a thing.
The same clause in Sean Bean’s contract that requires him to die in every role is included for any actor playing the mentor to our superhero.
This is also necessary, because eventually (a) the screenwriters will write themselves into a corner and need the ultimate motivation for the hero to go beserk or the aging actor playing the mentor will (b) get sick of being a glorified sidekick and do other roles or (c) demand insane amounts of money to be in the sequels.
Before he dies, the mentor needs to be wise, charming, helpful and funny.
This is almost always a male role, whether we’re talking about a hero or heroine. Sorry. That’s how the Bad Superhero Blockbuster rolls.
Our old and grizzled mentor also needs to own many hats, because he’ll be wearing them all: sidekick, martial arts trainer, tech support and father figure.
But his death serves another purpose, because it opens up the way for five different sidekicks to pick up those hats, dust them off and put them on in the sequels.
Secret Ingredient #5: A dash of young love
Didn’t expect this in a movie with capes and explosions, did you? But it always happens.
Captain America had Agent Carter and now her niece.
Iron Man has Pepper Potts when they can afford Gwyneth Paltrow.
Thor has Princess Leia’s mom.
Batman has Rachel, or he did for a while, though I’ve always said it’s a lot like Harry Potter winding up with his best friend’s sister instead of Hermione: wrong, wrong, wrong. Batman should be forever linked to Catwoman, who rocks.
The new Wonder Woman will have Captain Kirk, which is pretty cool. Great actor. Good choice.
Arrow has–actually, I don’t really care about Arrow’s paramour, and don’t even make me think about what Aquaman does on Friday nights.
Back to our recipe: Preferably, this relationship should (a) start as early as possible, maybe even childhood, and (b) it should be a love triangle, with the third person also a friend from childhood.
That third person, ideally, should be our next ingredient.
Secret Ingredient #6: A delicious nemesis
Not a villain.
No, a villain is common and boring.
A nemesis last. He or she endures.
But this takes time. Like fine wine and good whiskey, a nemesis must ferment. Because they start out good before turning sour.
The hero and nemesis were once friends, if not best friends. Maybe they both wanted the same girl, the same achievements, the same powers and status.
A true nemesis is the flip side of the hero, showing what happens if you take the path less travelled.
Or you could take the easy way out and cast an aging Hollywood has-been as the villain, somebody who used to be box office gold. Give them a terrible foreign accent, a little backstory and let them chew up the scenery until the hero punches them into oblivion and locks them inside a chamber that gets flooded with radiation from the superweapon our big baddie intended to use to nuke LA.
Also: a quick, Cheaty McCheatypants way of creating your nemesis is to give him or her the same powers or power source as the hero.
This so lazy and bad, it rarely happens except for Iron Man 1, Iron Man 2, Thor, Man of Steel, Batman Begins, Arrow and fifteen other movies and TV shows I won’t look up right now.
It’s not enough for your villain or nemesis to steal every bar of gold from Fort Knox or crown himself Lord of Canada after unleashing his army of mind-controlled badgers with steel-tipped claws and industrial lasers strapped to their heads.
To be a truly clichéd superhero movie, the villain must threaten to destroy planet Earth, or at least nuke Gotham or Metropolis, which is the same thing for DC movies.
You can blow things up however you like, though nuclear warheads were only used as a plot device in every other Bond movie, spy film and TV show since 1953.
What gives you enough pop to make the third rock from the sun go bye-bye? Here are your choices: (a) an bio-engineered super virus, (b) alien invaders, (c) an army of killer robots / sharks / zombies or (d) manipulating or mind-controlling a hero so the other heroes have to fight them, especially if the hero is somebody unstoppable like Superman.
Secret ingredient #7: Clean up the kitchen and start prepping for sequels
To be a truly Bad Superhero Movie, you must follow the recipe exactly. To the letter.
That means Movie #2 has two villains, two sidekicks and two love interests.
It also costs twice as much. Batman Returns, Spiderman 2 and The Dark Knight all follow this formula.
Movie # 3 has three villains and three sidekicks. The number of love interests is your choice. Spiderman 3 and The Dark Knight Rises are good examples. We’re not even going to talk about the Batman movies starring Val Kilmer and George Clooney. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.
The budget for Movie # 3 is also triple the original.
Despite all the big name stars and big budget for explosions, the story is a mess and entire thing collapses under its own weight, with the only hope of bringing it back being a reboot with a new actor and director.
Why is this cheap, terrible trailer from a movie that was never released 8,594 times more entertaining than a modern film, released in 2015 with a huge marketing campaign and enough CGI to turn your Toyota Camry into a silver Aston Martin with an ejection seat?
1) This trailer is so bad, it circles back to good
You’d watch this. I’d watch this.
It’s insanely bad enough to turn into a cult classic, the kind of thing where people dress up in horrible costumes and sing along to the bad dialogue.
This trailer alone could give birth to 29 different drinking games. Think of 120 full minutes of this on a big screen. We’re talking comedy gold.
2) The special effects are extra-special
Put a gun to my head and I would’ve said this movie was made in 1964.
Put another gun to the other side of my head and I’d say they borrowed the 2nd unit special effect apprentice for the Star Trek series. You know, Assistant Prop Master for Styrofoam Boulders and Green Lizard Alien Masks.
But no, this was made in 1994, when the art and science of special effects had already given us STAR WARS (in the ’70s!), ALIEN, TERMINATOR 2 (liquid metal! Come with me if you want to live!) and JURASSIC PARK (lifelike dinosaurs!). So yeah, you have to try hard to be this bad.
3) It jumps the shark, then dives into the ocean and rides that shark all the way to Loony Land
Everything you see violates seventeen different laws of screenwriting, dialogue, storytelling, cinematography and acting. This thing is amazing.
My favorites: (a) the CU of Dr. Doom’s gloved fingers doing the “I’m a diabolical villain” dance, (b) the Invisible Woman turning invisible right before minions smash into her, except she’s invisible, not a ghost, so they should’ve still smashed her and (c) the random man with a hat and eyepiece who thinks this movie is Shakespeare and recites the deep, deep dialogue in the grandest possible way.
I want that Shakespeare man in more movies, because every good villain needs a minion that, instead of shooting people, tries to make grand statements about profound things. Reminds me of the announcer character in MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME who kept saying things like “Two men enter, one man leaves” and “Break a deal, face the wheel.” Beautiful. Somebody find the man in a hat.
4) This trailer leaves you wanting moar, moar MOAR
And that’s the whole point of a trailer, isn’t it? Teasing you. Making you want more.
Raise your hand if you’ve been in the local megaplex lately, or flipping through YouTube, only to see a trailer that seems to last for fifteen minutes and gives every twist of the plot away.
Yeah. Happens all the time. They gave away the big surprise in the trailer for the latest TERMINATOR movie, and when that didn’t satisfy their inner spoiler, they splashed that plot twist all over the poster for the movie. I believe the director of that film is in jail now for punching five different studio execs.
This trailer, now, is confusing. Can’t really predict the plot from it. In fact, I bet you’d couldn’t you’ll fully understand the plot of this classic without watching it three times with a yellow legal pad to take notes, then tracking down the screenwriter to find out the exact drugs he was taking in 1994.
It’s a brilliant piece of trash, wallowing in its pure trashiness, and to whatever studio has this unreleased movie, please release it. I guarantee more people will pay to watch it than the current FANTASTIC FOUR flop.
Note: No, I haven’t watched the new movie. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent. After every living critic spat upon it, kicked it to death and set it on fire, I took that as a sign. You couldn’t pay me enough to watch it. Okay, that’s a lie. I think $985 might do the trick, and I’d go as low as $817 if there was dinner and drinks beforehand. But no lower than $817. Life is too short.
Let’s talk about why this works, as a story, and how it could be even better. Because I’m not adding value by simply sticking funny or heartwarming videos in your feed. We have to dissect them and learn a little. SCHOOL IS IN SESSION.
Why this works and how to make it better:
1) The mangled start doesn’t matter–yet fixing it would’ve made it even more viral
This video works even if you read the story on Huffingtonpost or wherever, and know all the story beats, before you watch the thing. That’s how good the story is.
HOWEVER: Starting out a video with text screens like this is almost always a mistake. Cramming all the text in the beginning slows it down and I bet a good percentage of people bail in those first few seconds instead of sticking with it, which is a mistake.
How to fix it: Start with video of the dog chained up. We don’t need any text to understand the problem, to get that setup. Then if you really have to, add a little voice narration. I’d kill the text screen entirely.
2) Our narrator takes risks and is a hero
The narrator keeps the focus entirely on Rusty the Dog, but he shows real heroism, taking time–and risks.
He spends time to get to know this dog, repeatedly risks getting bit and confronts the owner, saying he’s not leaving without the dog. That took guts.
And all the while, he knows his family can’t adopt the dog, that he’d have to find another home for it.
Everything the narrator does is unselfish, and while he doesn’t focus on it, or take credit, this makes the story better.
3) The biggest possible gaps
Conflict and surprise comes from the biggest possible gaps between expectation and result.
You expect the chained up, aggressive dog to bite his hand.
You expect the owner to laugh at him when he says he’s not leaving without the dog.
You expect the narrator to adopt the dog himself, not search for a home.
And you expect the dog to be timid and afraid when finally free, not friendly and joyous.
This is a little story, a tiny snippet of life. But it made me feel more than most of the action movies that I’d happily paid money to watch and wouldn’t see again.
I’d see this again. I’d smile to see a follow-up, to find out how Rusty is doing.
And I’d want to shake the narrator’s hand for taking some risks, and doing the right thing, for an old dog most people would avoid and forget.
Name something popular, anything at all, and chances are it’s a series instead of a One Hit Wonder.
This is about why that is, despite a serious quality handicap, and how your favorite series either does it wrong, does it halfway or flat-out nails it.
There are two basic types of series: evergreen and meta-stories.
Evergreen
This includes sitcoms, mysteries, and other shows where things don’t really change … except for the villain or problem, which constantly changes, until the movie series runs out of steam, the novelist gets sick of it or studio execs at NBC look at the dying ratings and pull the plug.
The advantage of an evergreen story is the audience can fire up Netflix and watch any random episode without being lost. You can , buy any of Lee Child’s series at Barnes & Noble and enjoy Reacher beating people up for 325 pages without needing to know anything about the other books.
Star Trek, in all its forms (original, TNG, Voyager) was an evergreen series.
HOWEVER: the best string of movies was a meta-story about Spock, with Spock sacrificing his life to save the Enterprise and crew (Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Corinthian Leather), then Kirk and crew sacrificing to bring Spock’s newborn body back from Planet Crazytown (Star Trek 3: We Stole This Sweet Klingon Warbird) and finally Spock is back with us and directing the movie, which was smart {Star Trek 4: Save the Whales), except it lead to a future movie where Shatner directed, which turned out to be an Achy Breaky Big Mistakey.
The disadvantage of an evergreen series is huge: it inevitably grows stale. Also, the lead actor will always be tempted to cash out and bail for the movies. And often, the ratings or sales simply tank, making studio exec or publishers pull the plug, ending the series with a whimper. Continue reading “8 reasons why blockbusters are meta-stories instead of Villain of the Week”→
This is about why lectures never work, poetry is powerful, even instrumental music can make you cry and the humble, silly music video can be one of the most devastating weapons of persuasion and change on this little rock orbiting a ginormous burning ball of nuclear fusion and fire.
1) Lectures never work
If you have a toddler, or a teenager, or are married, you are well aware of this fact.
Lectures are basically journalism, writing or speaking to inform. If your purpose is to persuade, journalism and lectures won’t do the job.
It’s common to hear, “If I just had more TIME to explain the facts, they’d understand and agree with me.”
This is about why Flappy Bird was such a surprise hit, Taylor Swift’s newest mega-video is meh and why your favorite movies, novels and video games work when others fail.
Here’s why: audiences want something interesting, and entertaining, which means different and surprising. Yet there’s a fuzzy line between Hard and Impossible and a deadly chasm between Complex and Bizarre.
It’s like thinking, “chocolate chip cookies are yummy, so why not chocolate chip cookies with almonds, M & M’s, pecans, Oreo sprinkles, peanut butter and a Snicker’s Bar on top?”
Watch the big Taylor Swift video, BAD BLOOD, then we’ll chat.
Now, this has high production values and great costumes, and I’m sure Michael Bay watched it on an endless loop all weekend. Yet it’s not elegantly complex and entertaining. It’s a hot mess, the music video equivalent of THE EXPENDABLES, with so many random stars thrown in for cameos that I have no idea who’s who. Does it look cool? Sure. Do we care one bit? No. Not even half a bit, or a quarter bit.
Compare that to the simplicity and beauty of Iggy Azalea’s BLACK WIDOW, which is a masterpiece, paying homage to KILL BILL and flat nailing it.
The Red Pen of Doom 