The Screengrab : Chronicles of Narnia

Sun Rises In East, Independent Film Industry Doomed

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Every couple of months, someone in the press gets wind of the notion that independent film -- which, to our knowledge, has never been a field people have entered with an eye towards getting rich -- is on its last legs. Lamentations ensue, and then someone pulls out the box office receipts for The Dark Knight, and everybody has a good laugh. This time around, it's National Public Radio's turn to sound the doom bell for our favorite art form.

"Chicken Little was right", screams the headline to Kim Masters' article on the last days of indie film, placing into evidence the testimony of one Mark Johnson, a big-time studio producer (Chronicles of Narnia) who also dabbles in the independents. Unable to find a distributor for his small-budget southern gothic Ballast, he and director Lance Hammer are now taking it from city to city, screening it in front of whatever audiences will pay attention. "I thought that, at the end of the day, quality would win. We would like to think that if something is made well, it ought to be able to pay for itself," says the producer, who apparently has never ever paid any attention to any aspect of our culture. Art-house executive Mark Gill points out that independent films now have a 99% chance of failure (which, we're guessing, is up from the 98% of a few years ago, or the 100% of most of Hollywood history), and warns that "You have to be very good, or great, or you will die," which should come as exciting news to all the people who made great movies and failed anyway as well as reassuring every failure in the industry that they just aren't good enough.

Don't get us wrong -- no one is more sympathetic to the Sisyphean struggle of the independent filmmaker than we are, and no one would love to see a true meritocracy in film, where Charles Burnett gets to make any movie he wants while Michael Bay has to work double shifts at the car wash to afford a new fisheye lens. But all this weeping and gnashing and grinding of teeth every few years about how this time, indie film is really and truly doomed, and if you don't make Citizen Kane the first time you step behind a camera you might as well go back behind the counter at Taco Bell not only ignores the reality that determined artists have always found new and innovative ways to get their movies made, but does a disservice to aspiring filmmakers by making things seem even more dire than they actually are.

Prince Caspian: Now That's Some Goofy-Ass Shit

Andrew Osborne — Sat, 17 May 2008 22:56:00 GMT

So as I write this (on Saturday), Variety is reporting The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian “will easily take the weekend crown, and its B.O. will only gain momentum from Saturday and Sunday family matinees,” although the pic’s “opening day haul came in slightly lower than industry expectations” and behind its predecessor, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Nevertheless, we here at Screengrab feel confident this weekend now puts us three-for-three in our summer box office predictions! Woo-hoo!!!!

As for the actual quality of said movie...well, let me put it this way: I started reading The Chronic- (wha?)-cles of Narnia way back when I was a mere yoot, and I vividly recall The Lion, The Witch and Etc., but I petered out somewhere between Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, remembering no details about them except (spoiler alert!)...

...well, actually, I hate those spoiler alerts where they say “spoiler alert!”, like, two words before the spoiler, after you've already seen it in your peripheral vision, so let's just say I didn’t really remember very much at all about the actual plot going into Disney's film version of Prince Caspian.

The one thing I did know (aside from the afore-un-mentioned spoiler) was that, like The Lion, etc., Prince Caspian was (A) produced by (allegedly) Christian-ish Walden Media because (B) C.S. Lewis included certain overt Christian allegories in the Narnia books, meaning (C) the Narnia films are the summer blockbusters of choice for all the good, upstanding Christian families out there who don’t want to risk eternal damnation by supporting Harry Potter and his evil pagan agenda.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe featured a simple good versus evil story, complete with temptation, redemption and the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ-like super-lion, Aslan...none of which struck me as particularly dogmatic or objectionable. I mean, despite our many, many differences as a species, I'm pretty sure, at the very least, that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, pagans, atheists, Unitarians and pretty much everyone else (except maybe those pesky Satanists) can agree that good people are better than bad people, too much Turkish delight is unhealthy and being enslaved by an evil witch is a relatively bad form of government.

That said, the religious message in Prince Caspian seems noticeably more pronounced while at the same time, far less cohesive. Whether this is due to bad scripting or my own personal issues with certain aspects of Christian doctrine (or both) is unclear. The story, set hundreds of years after the first installment, takes place in a world where the happy, magic creatures of Narnia have been mostly wiped out by nasty humans called Telmarines. Aslan, the protector of goodness and niceness, has gone mysteriously and conspicuously AWOL in the interim, and it’s up to the young heroes of the first tale (siblings Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) to join forces with the exiled Telmarine Prince Caspian and the myriad talking badgers, dwarves, centaurs and whatnot of Narnia to restore freedom and equality to the kingdom.

So far so good...but underlying all the swords-and-sorcery swashbuckling is the question of whether or not Aslan will finally show up and help our heroes defeat the forces of evil. Again, without (ahem) giving anything away, the agnostic in me couldn’t help but think, well, wait a minute...sure, it’s an allegory for having faith and whatnot, but does the message really work if it defies storytelling logic? In the movie’s rigged deck, all the Narnians who’ve suffered terribly for hundreds of years because Aslan inexplicably vamoosed on them are implicated as somehow spiritually inferior to pure, faithful Lucy, who pops into Narnia out of the blue, hasn’t suffered at all and has visions of Aslan nobody else gets to see. In other words, the non-believers have lost their faith because they have no proof of Aslan’s existence, while Lucy says they should have faith, even though her faith is based on the very proof the others don’t have...and let’s just say the internal logic doesn’t exactly resolve itself in the film’s overlong CGI finale.

Another curious aspect of the Narnia films, given the recent national panty-twist about Miley Cyrus’ naked back in Vanity Fair, is the way nobody in the world seems to care about all the people getting shot by arrows, hacked with swords and otherwise, y’know, killed dead dead dead by the teenage Pevensie children (and, yes, I know they're supposed to be hundreds of years old in the story, etc., etc., but work with me here). In The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, the kids pretty much just killed beasties, but this time around, they're wasting flesh-and-blood humans...BAD, freedom-hating, kinda shifty, olive-skinned foreign-looking humans, sure...and I know America loves violence and hates sex and whatnot...but I do find it curious that most of America seems to go completely bug-eyed, batshit crazy at the mere idea of teenagers as sexual beings (despite, y’know, all the heavy petting and whatnot America did in high school) and yet America's totally cool with the concept of teenagers killing people as long as it's in a family film and not one of the Grand Theft Auto cities. ‘Cuz, y’know, that shit leads to Columbine.

All the too-much-thinking aside, though, Prince Caspian was relatively exciting and plenty entertaining enough for a Saturday afternoon, allowing Peter Dinklage to somehow maintain his dignity as a soulful, cranky dwarf warrior called Trumpkin.

Bring the whole family!

Screengrab Predicts: The Top 5 Hits of Summer 2008

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Studio executives, like TV weathermen, can be wrong half the time and still make a pretty fine living. One major difference, of course, is “The Suits” in Hollywood spend zillions on publicity and advertising campaigns to attempt to make their forecasts come true...and even then, they’re only right about half the time when it comes to cinematic hits and misses.

We here at the Screengrab will take that action. With the 2008 Blockbuster Season bearing down on us LIKE A RADIOACTIVE SPACE BUS THAT TRANSFORMS INTO A GIANT ROBOT LOADED WITH EXPLOSIVES, we hereby offer our predictions for the summer’s Top 5 Hits and Misses, in hopes of scoring ourselves sweet development deals based on our uncanny pop culture pulse-fingering prognostication abilities.

For the purposes of this experiment, “HIT” and “MISS” will refer not to the critical reception or cinematic quality of the films in question (because, really, who cares about that stuff?). Instead, we’ll calculate the accuracy of our predictions based on each film’s domestic box office gross in relation to its marketing/production budget and the hype/expectation surrounding it.

Want to play along at home? Let us know your Top 5 picks for upcoming Summer Hits, and compare them to our collective and individual predictions. Whoever scores the most correct answers WINS A BRAND NEW IMAGINARY CAR!

And now, our picks for the Top 5 HITS of Summer 2008:

5. KUNG FU PANDA

This one's pretty easy to explain: (1) Kung fu. (2) Pandas. It's got something for everyone! (LP)

Plurality Opinion: Dreamworks' annual summer animated movie doesn't have the built-in audience of the Shrek franchise, but it should still do good family business for the three weeks before Wall*E hits screens. (PC)

Memorandum Opinion: I haven’t seen that Panda on any big plastic soda cups yet, but maybe I haven’t been hanging out in the right fast food restaurants or convenience stores. This movie just squeaked onto our list as a result of numerous split votes elsewhere...but who knows? Maybe panda is the new penguin! (AO)

4. IRON MAN

Another gamble here, but one worth betting on due to it being the first high-profile summer release. Iron Man isn't an icon like Batman or Spider-Man, but Paramount has done a bang-up job promoting the film, and the re-emergence of Robert Downey Jr. as a high-profile leading man is the kind of story that can do wonders for a movie's public awareness. (PC)

3. INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL

Come on, like it could possibly be anything else. Indiana Jones is one of the iconic characters in cinema. Who's not looking forward to this? Add to that the fact that the film's got next to no competition for the month or so after it's released and this is the one to beat. Here's hoping it's actually good. (PC)

Memorandum Opinion: I'm going to call this as a slight box office disappointment that nevertheless cracks the top five. Indy's heyday was a long time ago, and even Lucas and Spielberg seem to be trying to downplay expectations. (SV)

Dissenting Opinion: First of all, that title is just way too long. Titles more than 20 letters long are for artsy foreign movies. Second, is there really that big an audience for this outside of hardcore geek circles? The key demographic for summer action flicks wasn't even born when the LAST Indiana Jones movie came out. (LP)

2. THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN

Advance word is that the second in the Narnia series outdoes the first in terms of pacing, script, and special effects, but my guess is that it'll succeed because conservatives bitched so much about the previous movie not getting enough attention that America will guiltily drag themselves to see it just to shut them up. (LP)

Dissenting Opinion: The last installment in the Narnia franchise was a blockbuster, but that was released in December. In a more competitive summer season, it should have a solid opening weekend before getting trounced by Indiana Jones. (PC)

1. THE DARK KNIGHT

There's pretty much no way this thing will bomb. Even if it had a bad director, a crummy script, an unpopular main character, and a poorly-designed set, geeks would flock to it in droves. But it doesn't have any of those things, AND one of its stars died mysteriously during filming! That's money in the bank, people. (LP)

Let's see: blockbuster sequel, over a solid year's worth of hype, extensive viral marketing campaign, hugely popular hero and villain, and to top it off, a much-buzzed final complete performance by Heath Ledger. Even non-Batfans are going to want to get a load of his Joker, which should push The Dark Knight to the top of the heap. (SV)

Batman is back in the public's good graces after the awesomeness of Batman Begins, and this one's got the most popular of Bat-villains, The Joker. And sad to say, but the hype around the late Mr. Ledger's performance will only help the movie's chances at the box office. (PC)

HONORABLE MENTION:

HANCOCK:

Will Smith. July 4. Action, comedy, superheroes, you name it. It's got practically everything one could ask for from a midsummer release. (PC)

WALL*E

Here's where things get a little less certain. Sure, WALL-E is a Disney/Pixar release, with all the family cachet that implies. However, it may not be as cuddly as some of the family favorites Pixar has made in the past. Still, this is the highest-profile family-friendly release of the summer, so this is the one to beat. Besides, if Pixar can strike box-office gold with rats in a kitchen... (PC)

TROPIC THUNDER

Historically, August is the time when comedy re-emerges as box-office gold. After months of blockbuster bloat, audiences will want to laugh again, and this movie- starring Ben Stiller and newly-hot Robert Downey Jr.- looks to have the most potential for success. (PC)

AMERICAN TEEN

An instant America’s sweetheart cuddly “rebel” poster girl and a trailer that’s so John Hughes accessible that megaplex audiences may not realize it’s a documentary until it’s too late to get their money back may turn this Sundance fave into an indie hit (at the very least) and maybe even a real live mainstream smash. (AO)

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS

If the rabid anticipation of this flick by the teenage dudes at my last family gathering bears any relation to the feelings of teenage dudes across the nation, this could be a sleeper hit. Plus: Apatow. (AO)

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

With a combination of everyone's favorite annoying jackass, Ashton Kutcher, and a title drawn from an ad campaign predicated on date rape, fatal drug overdoses, and dead hookers, how can it miss? (LP)

***

The above list reflects the combined, weighted picks of four of our resident Screengrab know-it-alls. Below, our original ballots:

Leonard Pierce

1. The Dark Knight

2. Kung Fu Panda

3. Speed Racer

4. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

5. What Happens In Vegas

Scott Von Doviak

1. The Dark Knight

2. Iron Man

3. Hancock

4. Prince Caspian

5. Indiana Jones

Paul Clark

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2. Hancock

3. The Dark Knight

4. Wall*E

5. Iron Man

Andrew Osborne

1. Indiana Jones

2. The Dark Knight

3. Prince Caspian

4. The Pineapple Express

5. American Teen

-- Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce