Seen any good films lately? [2]

No argument on the light saber fight- best in the franchise.
Just the complete redemption and instant forgiveness of mass death and destruction rankles with me and has done since I saw it the first time as a kid. It doesnt feel like justice, it feels like a cheat.

Yeah, it is pretty stupid. I used to wonder too what would have happened if Luke showed up on the victory party with Darth Vader - would've been the bar brawl of the decade

Wow, I was just watching Looking for Richard, Al Pacino's meditation on Shakespeare and our relationship with him.  They did part of the filming in a Cathedral not far from me.  At one point they ask a homeless guy his impression of Shakespeare and he goes off on street-eloquent soliliquy on the meaning of shakespeare to the modern age, and I realize "Hey!  I've talked to that guy myself!".

Quite amazing.  I have to go find him and see if he knows he was in a movie.

Inception was on the TV just now. I used to like that film a lot, and still do, but all those "dream within a dream" memes have ruined a large part of it for me And the striking resemblance to Don Rosa's Scrooge McDuck comic "Dream of a Lifetime" makes me think that Nolan was about as inspired by this comic as he was inspired by the Batman comics when he made Batman We'll never know, I guess.

I saw Inception three times when it was in theatres, which was and still is tied for most times I've seen a movie in theatres, but I haven't seen it since then. I was in love with the movie back then but I'm curious if the intervening three years of maturation as a movie-watcher and exposure to the aforementioned memes will have changed my perspective on the film. I should really watch it again soon.

You'll definitely find that the memes will have changed at least something about the movie

Rewatched Asterix in Britain, the live action version.
definitely my favourite Asterix film by a long way, and my favourite actor so far playing Asterix (I think its been different for every film so far!). And Depardieu was born to play Obelix (and has done in every live action version)
Highly recommended.

Ha Ha ! yeah, Ive seen that one ! trouble is, my copy has bloody awful dubbing !   I love foreign films but rather have subs than dubbing !

I cant watch dubbed films  - got to be subtitles for me.

Dubbed films only work if they're cartoons

I rewatched The Good, The Bad and The Ugly yesterday (hence the awesome pic in my signature), and it made the western nerd in me go wild again. Watched Rio Bravo today, a film I've known about quite a while because it's got the most awesome song ever in it, but I've never watched it, and today it was on the TV so I decided to give it a go. Liked it a lot I think I've got to watch some more John Wayne films, I've not seen many of them. Now to play some Red Dead Redemption

just rewatched, Where Eagles Dare, with Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton, I find it an immensely satisfying film, its still thrilling and well acted, classic music score too.

Yeah, that one's great. Maybe that's another one I should put on my "to rewatch" list, I've only watched it once I think.

I still like "The Guns of Navarone"

I havent seen Guns of Navarone in years. Must watch it again.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Rewatched Asterix in Britain, the live action version.
definitely my favourite Asterix film by a long way, and my favourite actor so far playing Asterix (I think its been different for every film so far!). And Depardieu was born to play Obelix (and has done in every live action version)
Highly recommended.

I didn't know they made Asterix movies!   Though I think I would have taken a different twist on filming things, looks a bit too plastic for my tastes.

Its very stylised (well it is French) but the characters are so well played and the script is excellent I think you will quickly get used to the look of it.

There are a few other live action ones (none as good in my opinion) and a couple of cartoon versions- of which Asterix in Britain is one, another good version story wise, and truer to the comic, although the animation is a bit cheap in places.

Christopher Lee talks Wicker Man (in the hope of making Eldo gets his thumb out his arse and watch the bloody thing!  )




The missing footage he talks about has now been more or less restored in the Directors Cut- sadly the original prints were never found (so far) and the reinstated parts are recordings of the original and so the film suffers from sudden and obvious changes in quality between the two- still at least its all there now (more or less) and frankly the studios cut that was the theatrical release should be avoided almost as much as the Nicholas Cage remake- the theatrical cut is like going to see the statue of David only to find out the museum has decided it looks better reduced to a heap of disjointed rubble.  

Why does live-action fantasy fail at the movies?

http://io9.com/why-does-live-action-fantasy-fail-at-the-movies-1203275067

Some interesting views at the bottom of the page.

Saw this and thought WOW that looks like a good film, then realised it was just a game.

chris63 wrote:Why does live-action fantasy fail at the movies?

http://io9.com/why-does-live-action-fantasy-fail-at-the-movies-1203275067

Some interesting views at the bottom of the page.

The article brings up a very interesting question, and one of that I've thought about a fair bit over the years.  Whatever happened to the fantasy boom of the 2000s?  This topic really deserves more attention IMO but the short version is that in just a few years at the beginning of the century there was a boom in all manner of "geek movies".  You had Star Wars Episode I and The Matrix in 1999, X-Men in 2000, the first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies in 2001, and the first Spider-Man in 2002.  All of these movies were big financial successes and spawned sequels that were, for the most part, just as successful.  Also, with the exception of Star Wars, they were all fairly risky propositions and none of them were expected to set the world on fire like they did.

Throughout the early and middle part of the 2000s decade you saw countless imitators.  Science fiction had never entirely gone out of style but the previously moribund superhero and fantasy genres experienced a resurgence and became more popular than they'd ever been.  You had a proliferation of B-tier Marvel characters getting movies: Daredevil, Hulk, Punisher, Fantastic Four, etc.  You also saw a rush to adapt successful fantasy novels in the vein of HP and LOTR: The Chronicles of Narnia, Eragon, The Golden Compass, Bridge to Terabithia, Stardust, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and others.  Whether or not you think any of these films was good is a question of personal taste, but few of them made much of an impression or was particularly well-received.  The only would-be franchise to come close to its inspirations was Narnia, but that ran into probably inevitable diminishing returns since only the first Narnia book is well-known.  Even that franchise is basically dead now and not remembered very much anymore.

However, the fortunes of the superhero revival and the fantasy revival started to diverge in 2008.  After several years of modest successes to outright failures, Marvel and DC both hit it big and found successors to the franchises that started the boom.  Marvel released its first in-house production, Iron Man, which also launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe which grew to include The Avengers.  Only a few months later, DC turned its moderately successful but very popular Batman reboot into one of the biggest films ever with The Dark Knight, which in addition to breaking box office records received unprecedented critical and awards consideration for a superhero film.  DC's attempts to build a Justice League franchise around multiple heroes (driven by a desire to match Marvel's recent success) is based around the idea of the "gritty reboot" that was popularized by Batman Begins.  The genre got an infusion of fresh blood that has kept it going for the past five years, although with more and more superhero movies coming out each year it may be nearing the saturation point again.

Fantasy movies also experienced a turning point in 2008, but in a different way.  After the major summer superhero successes of that year, a little film called Twilight debuted at number one at the box office the weekend before Thanksgiving.  It had a very good run and is what started to make "Twilight" a household name, but the big surprise came the following summer when New Moon earned nearly $300 million in North America, a level that the fantasy genre had only previously reached with HP, LOTR, and the first Narnia.  The Twilight sequels proved to be remarkably consistent and continued to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, which spawned a new wave of imitators.  However, Twilight is primarily a romance story, with just a dash of fantasy thrown in.  "Paranormal romance" is the phrase most often used to describe this subgenre, and in bookstores this section is filled almost entirely with Twilight imitators.  Even old romance novels have been reissued with new Twilight-style cover art.  The search for the "next Twilight" has accelerated now that the series ended, and any SF story with a romantic aspect has a decent chance of getting a movie deal, as evidenced by Warm Bodies, Beautiful Creatures, The Host (from the author of Twilight), and The Mortal Instruments just in 2013.

However, these movies are late to the party (which may explained their lack of success at the box office), because according to many observers the next Twilight has already been found.  Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, it was last spring's The Hunger Games, which despite being a non-entity in the movie world even a few months before its release, successfully leveraged its large book fanbase and savvy marketing campaign to become one of the most successful non-sequels of the past 10 years.  I'm sure some Hunger Games fans will resent the comparison, but both Twilight and THG are based on popular young adult novels, feature speculative fiction elements, and have prominent romantic elements.  And both of them made goo-gobs of money.  For studio executives searching for low-risk, high-reward investments, these two series (along with HP) are solid evidence that young adult novel adaptations are the way to go.  So the fantasy boom has segued into an ongoing young adult novel boom that owes its existence to fantasy, but is less and less dependent on it.  For instance, while Twilight was somewhat a fantasy movies, The Hunger Games is hard to classify as anything but science fiction.  While most people who didn't swoon over Robert Pattinson will consider it a step up from Twilight, it's also a step away from the fantasy genre having mainstream relevance.

One other current trend among fantasy movies that deserves attention is the "dark and gritty" fairy tale reboot phenomenon.  This sub-genre has experienced massive and somewhat baffling growth in the past few years, probably due at least in part to the success of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 2010.  This is explained mainly by it being the first big 3D movie to come out since Avatar three months previously and 3D not yet having worn out its welcome, which is also what made the Clash of the Titans reboot a success.  Now that 3D is no longer a cheat code for easy money, however, the fairy tale reboot phenomenon has run into a wall of sorts.  These movies actually come in two varieties: the dark romantic takes on fairy tales like Beastly and Red Riding Hood which are trying to imitate Twilight, and the "gritty", epic takes on fairy tales like Snow White and the Huntsman and Jack the Giant Slayer, which want to be LOTR.  It's worth noting here that fairy tale movies have always enjoyed greater success than high fantasy or sword and sorcery, though they've usually been animated family fare (think the Disney classics).  The recent gritty fairy tale reboots are almost too easy because they combine what's in at the moment with well-known source material that is conveniently in the public domain.  In fact, they are too easy, because most of these movies have failed to generate any excitement and flopped as a result.

So, what happened to the fantasy boom?  It was on track to burn itself out quickly, but then it got subsumed into its vast offspring: the young adult novel adaptation.  The gritty fairy tale is a gimmick that will probably run its course soon, but young adult novels will likely continue as there have so far been three (including HP) massively successful movie series based on such books.  However, there is no longer any need for the source material to be fantasy, necessarily, though it will probably still fall within the speculative fiction umbrella.  Unlike superhero movies, Hollywood failed to produce a fantasy movie that generated excitement and financial returns without mixing in other genres (mainly romance).  I think the io9 article raises some good points as to why that happened.  Cracked.com also has a very interesting article about the geek movie boom and why it has floundered at times which addresses many of the points I mentioned above.

For my part, I think the biggest reason most of the imitators have failed to find success is that it is so painfully obvious that they are nothing more than imitations.  The Matrix, X-Men, HP, LOTR, and Spider-Man all became successes 13 years ago because they provided something people had never really seen before, largely because they were born of genres that had been marginalized by the pop cultural mainstream in previous years.  It's perfectly understandable that studios wanted to find other, successful properties similar to these, but very few of them offered anything new.  I don't think it's a coincidence that the most successful successor franchises introduced new elements.  On the superhero side, the Batman reboot introduced the "dark and gritty" aesthetic to its genre before that idea became trite.  Iron Man got by largely on the ridiculous charisma of Robert Downey, Jr., but I think The Avengers' success is also because no one had ever seen a superhero team-up movie with so many characters before, so it became a must-see event to a lot of people.  On the fantasy side, much of the source material was already similar to HP and/or LOTR, and the film adaptations highlighted this even more, possibly due to studio interference.  Twilight found success because it offered a romance story with fantastical elements, combining two things that many people (but especially teenage girls who grew up on Harry Potter) were interested in to create a mix of genres that, while by no means original, was relatively obscure at the time.

There's no reason why fantasy filmmakers couldn't have found a similar way to make the genre feel fresh again.  In fact, someone eventually did, they just did so via premium cable rather than the big screen.  Game of Thrones almost certainly wouldn't have been made if LOTR hadn't proven that medievalesque high fantasy could bring in the big bucks.  When the show was just getting started, it was sold largely on the basis that it was a different kind of fantasy, one that reveled in gritty realism and moral ambiguity.  Very little like it, and certainly nothing on that scale, had made it to the screen before, and so the show became hugely popular.  Game of Thrones is a story that would probably never work as a film series since each book is about as long as the entirety of LOTR, but there are other gritty fantasy series that could conceivably work in the length of a feature film.  On the other hand, now that Game of Thrones is as big as it's become, such a film might feel like a shameless attempt to cash in on the show, so maybe onscreen fantasy needs yet another perspective before it can make its triumphant return to cinemas.

Holy shit, I did not mean for that post to turn into an essay, but I've been thinking about this a lot lately (in part because I read that article last week).

Quite the essay! I think it's interesting to compare all this to fantasy books in the 1970's. The Tolkien books had brought the genre into the mainstream in the 60's, and all the publishers were desperately republishing old books under new fantasy covers (T H White, Robert E Howard etc.) and looking for anything new with elves in it. Most weren't worth the trouble.

From your perspective, when would you say that the fantasy novel next hit it's stride?

oh my god.. essay

An interesting article and an interesting response Eldo.

I would add however that I think you underestimate the fact all those films were, by and large, huge steaming piles of cinematic poo.
Also when a big film like LotR's comes along, takes a gamble and makes a mint everyone as you say rushes to find something to cash in- but they have to get it to market quickly enough that the audience hasn't moved onto something else by the time it comes out- so even if they throw money at it the first thing to go under the pressure is nearly always the artistic integrity of the original piece.

David H wrote:From your perspective, when would you say that the fantasy novel next hit it's stride?

I'm not really knowledgeable enough about fantasy literature to say. It's been a while since I read fantasy novels regularly and I know more about movies in general. Clearly Tolkien still casts a long shadow over the genre but there was definitely stuff that went beyond just ripping him off in the '90s (His Dark Materials, A Song of Ice and Fire, Harry Potter). I suspect there was stuff earlier than that too but I really can't say.