The Screengrab : spider-man

Sam Raimi Gets Back to Basics with "Drag Me to Hell"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Sam Raimi earned the love and devotion of geeks everywhere with the Evil Dead pictures and the original comic book movie Darkman, then rolled up his sleeves and proved to the industry that he could suck it up and direct Kevin Costner (in the sensitive Crash-Davis-at-midlife picture For Love of the Game) if that's what it took to get them to trust him with Spider-Man. Three web-slinger movies later, Raimi has finally gotten in a position where he can make another horror flick, this time with a budget and a highly regarded young actress, Alison Lohman, in the Bruce Campbell part. James Rocchi stopped by the set of Drag Me to Hell to observe. "It's a long-standing piece of trivia," he writes, "that Raimi wears a suit to the set every day, in the mold of Alfred Hitchcock, so I made sure I put on an appropriate suit-and-tie combo for our visit. When Raimi came over to meet us, though, he was wearing a T-shirt and blazer, unshaven, relaxed and happy. Looking me up and down, he laughs: 'I see one member of the press dressed appropriately.'"

The script, which Raimi co-wrote with his brother Ted, who could cure cancer tomorrow and still remain best known to most of the world as Joxer the Mighty from Xena: Warrior Princess, casts Lohman as a loan officer at a bank who chooses to deny an old woman the loan she needs to keep from losing her home because Lohman is angling for a promotion and wants to impress her boss with her ruthlessness. It turns out that the old woman is a witch who retaliates by cursing Lohman with an evil spirit. It's torn from today's headlines, though it's not immediately clear who we're supposed to root for. Raimi says that "my brother and I wanted to write a story about a woman who, like in a lot of morality tales, has a choice to do good or evil, makes a sinful decision, and ends up paying the price for it -- or not, if she can escape."

Raimi also believes that Drag Me to Hell "is a little more complex in some ways than the Evil Dead movies, but the Evil Dead movies were suspense and scares and gross-outs and trying to be fun and funny. This is trying to do the same thing, but we're also trying to base how it kicks off in a way that's ... I don't want to say 'a little more real-world', because, at the time, believe it or not, I was trying to make the beginning of those movies 'real.' All I can say is this is a PG-13 picture, so it's a little less assaultive than the Evil Dead movies, which were unrated films." For those of us with fond memories of Bruce Campbell pulling a demon's dick off and the infamous sexual assault by forest in the first Evil Dead picture, that PG-13 business is ominous; the greatest suspense element connected to the movie may be waiting to see whether Raimi can still do this shit, or whether his acceptance by the industry will inhibit his grisly creativity. There may be signs of hope in the words of special effects chief Greg Nicotero, who recalls that Raimi brought him on board with a pep talk: "Listen, this is back to traditional stuff ... I want to use animatronics and puppets and dummy heads. None of that CG stuff. Get that crazy crap out of here!" Instead, Nicotero says, "We were designing rotted corpses and demon makeup and possession makeup," adding, "In this instance Sam wanted to stick with the traditional prosthetics, like puppets." No crazy stuff there, for sure.

Trailer Review: Drag Me to Hell

Paul Clark — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Can the director of one of Hollywood’s highest-grossing trilogies of all time return to his roots? This is the question that faces longtime fans of Sam Raimi, who began his career with gonzo horror-comedies before becoming one of Hollywood’s big-ticket filmmakers with the Spider-Man franchise. And while Drag Me to Hell looks to be slicker than his classic Evil Dead movies, it’s nonetheless a heartening development in Raimi’s career, a sign that despite the mainstream fare he’s made in the ensuring years, he’s not ashamed of his beginnings. As for the trailer itself, I think it looks pretty promising. The movie appears to have the same moral underpinnings as much of the best horror films- in this case, punishing the heroine (played by Alison Lohman) for trying to further her career at the expense of others. It’s a little hard to get a read on the horror stuff due to the jackhammer editing, but based on what I could make out, Raimi hasn’t lost his ability to go for broke in the interest of scaring the audience. In other words, I’m there. Only one question remains: where’s Bruce Campbell?

He's Burned, You'll Notice: Bruce Campbell Says He's All Evil Deaded Out

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Speaking to Damon Wise of the Guardian, Bruce Campbell has some advice for fans of the Evil Dead trilogy that made him a household name, at least in houses with a heavy geek peopulation: don't hold your breath. "I just finished a 22-city tour of the States and that question would come up all the time. I'd say, 'OK, who wanted Indiana Jones 4?' I did this at 10 different cities and maybe two hands would go up. I'd go, 'There's your answer, right there.'" Campbell, who can currently seen giving disspipation a good name on the cable TV series Burn Notice, warmed to his theme: "Harrison Ford can't even hold the whip any more! Look, if you think it through, those Evil Dead movies were very difficult to make. Every single one was a nightmare. Physically, mentally, financially - just difficult, troubled shoots. So what would make us want to go back into that world again, go through all that pain and agony as middle-aged men? The last time we made one was 18 years ago. Army Of Darkness was made 18 years ago! No one seems to do that math. Am I going to be in a wheelchair by the time we do it? My greatest fear is that we go through all that time and effort, make this part four, and people will go, 'Oh, it's OK. But it's not as good as Army Of Darkness.' Which is what will happen! It's a guarantee!"

Campbell, who seems like the kind of guy who's more likely to shrug than to trash his hotel room when he sees that Wise described him as "strangely handsome", began production on the first Evil Dead movie thirty years ago, when Campbell was twenty years old and director Sam Raimi was nineteen. Shooting would drag on for more than a year, which is a long time to spend hanging out in the woods getting drenched in karo syrup. (It wouldn't be until 1982 before the finished product starting creeping into theaters.) The two had been making little amateur movies together while in high school; from the start, their preferred specialty was slapstick comedy. When they "actually decided to make a movie for real, and we were actually taking people's money out of their pockets to do it, we knew it had to be something they could get their money back on. So we chose horror, which was a completely different genre for us. And I'm still trying to get back to where I was. I'm making horror movies that are not horror movies." The more Raimi and Campbell went back to the well with the Evil Dead sequels, the more they indulged their Three Stooges side, and the head-splitting mixture of gore and whiplash physical comedy left fans happily freaked out. That road eventually took Raimi to the promised land of the Spider-man franchise, but somewhere along the line, Campbell turned into one of those guys who plays supporting roles in big movies and starring roles in small pictures, such as the bizarre horror comedy Bubba Ho-Tep, in which he gave a remarkable performance as a geriatric Elvis Presley turned monster hunter. "I've had my years of getting annoyed with Evil Dead questions," Campbell says, "but now I really do realize, in retrospect, that people only ask about what they're interested in. And if they only see horror movies, they're only gonna see me in the eight or so horror movies I've done. I haven't actually done that many, less than 50%. But Evil Dead was pretty notorious and it was very popular, so it's guilt by association: I'm the horror guy. But there are people who've watched TV shows that I've done who don't even know I've been in the Evil Dead movies. If you stick around long enough you can just move on."

Campbell is in England promoting My Name Is Bruce, the comedy in which he plays a libelous version of himself who is obliged to do real-life battle with a Chinese war god. (The movie was released on DVD and Blu-Ray in the U.S. last week.) A BBC interviewer actually compared the film to JCVD, Jean-Claude Van Damme's recent visit to a metatextual reality, and while the connection may strike Campbell fans as a little off the wall--Campbell has been parodying himself so enthusiastically and for so long that he's practically the pre-AARP version of Leslie Nielson--it is fun just to see these two guys mentioned in the same sentence. Although the project didn't originate wirth Campbell, he embraced it with sufficient enthusiasm that he poured his own money into it and even opened up his own property to serve as a back lot. "Any time you make a movie that's under $200 million, you're going to put some of your own money into it. It got to a point where the composer would say, 'Y'know Bruce, let's get some real strings here because it'll sound great'. And I'd be like, 'Really, do we really need them... well [mimes signing a check]...okay'."

Take Five: The Squared Circle

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:15:00 GMT

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler opens across the country this weekend, and in addition to being hailed as a return to form for the Pi director and a triumphant comeback for shooting star Mickey Rourke, it's also one of an increasingly large number of acclaimed films -- both narrative and documentary -- to deal with professional wrestling. High culture has always had a problematic relationship with rasslin'; it's popularity is undeniable but has always upset the intellectuals of the sporting press, who delight in reminding people that it isn't real, as if its fans don't already know that. It can be lowest-common-denominator entertainment for sub-morons, but it also carries an undeniable emotional heft and a sort of physicalized symbolism that was remarked on at great length by no less august a personage than Roland Barthes, who wrote a famous essay about it for his book Mythologies. And now, years after it was considered an activity significantly less respectable than bowling or roller derby -- the great 'untouchable' sports of the 1950s -- a number of directors have found its combination of artifice and wounded reality irresistible. Here's some of our favorite movies that make reference to life inside the squared circle.

BARTON FINK (1991)

In the Coen Brothers' masterpiece about the art of writing and the way crafting fiction gets in the way of seeing reality, wrestling is used as a metaphor by the highfalutin playwright Barton Fink to symbolize class struggle -- but his inability to complete a simple screenplay in the wrestling genre also serves as a metaphor for his creative blockage. While he seems almost physically incapable of putting words on paper, his flustered producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub) delivers a classically bewildered line: "Wallace Beery! Wrestling picture! Whattya want, a road map?" Watching the moral and physical struggles of wrestling in stark black and white on cheap B-picture dailies, Fink still can't think of anything -- and is typically dismissive and oblivious when his neighbor Charlie tries to show him a few moves. John Goodman's Charlie will eventually teach him a lesson he'll never forget.

HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS (1998)

Bret "Hitman" Hart comes from what can only be described as one of professional wrestling's royal families. His father, a tough-as-nails Canadian legend and a strict disciplinarian who planned his childrens' careers from the crib, runs one of the most respected schools in the sport, and almost everyone around him -- his brothers, his in-laws, his friends -- are involved in pro wrestling. In this A&E documentary, we follow the everyday life of someone immersed in the game: his strained family life, his true feelings about the sport, and his growing discomfort with the storylines being written for him -- which results in one of the most memorable betrayals, both real and staged, in the modern-day history of wrestling. A little-seen film, Wrestling With Shadows is a sharp, perceptive piece of work that deserves a wider audience.

NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950)

Jules Dassin's legendary British film noir would probably have worked just as well if it had featured boxing -- that violent and often rigged sport so beloved by the makers of moody crime dramas -- instead of professional wrestling. But by having Richard Widmark's needy, creepy, desperate little hustler Harry Fabian wrapped up in the sport of wrestling, we get a number of elements that prove highly rewarding: Herbert Lom's compelling performance as Kristo gives some sense of the strange dynastic quality of some of the great wrestling families, and best of all, we get the unforgettable fight scene between Mike Mazurki as the Strangler and Stanislaus Zybyszko as Gregorius. Both men were actual wrestlers -- but Zybyszko, then an astonishing 70 years old, was from the transitional era when it was actually a legitimate sport. His performance in the scene -- almost silent, incredibly brutal, and absolutely mesmerizing -- has both incredible dignity and repulsive, visceral emotion.

BEYOND THE MAT (1999)

Inspired by Wrestling with Shadows and covering a lot of the same thematic territory, Barry Blaustein's Beyond the Mat had a theatrical run and thus attracted a good deal more attention than its predecessor. Both films shared qualities in common, though, from the alternatingly absurd and tragic lives of those who try to make a living as professional wrestlers to the personal dramas of the ring workers that mirror their gamed-out struggles. (They also share the quality of making WWE head honcho Vince McMahon look like an utter fucking creep, but that's not so hard, since he does the same thing himself every time he opens his mouth.) This time out, the most compelling figures are the ruined, crack-addicted wreck Jake "The Snake" Roberts and his opposite number, the witty, gregarious family man Mick Foley.

SPIDER-MAN (2002)

One of the most successful and enjoyable big-screen super-hero adaptations, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man gets a lot of its juice from the way it envisions Peter Parker's origin story without being boring or disrespectful. Since Spider-Man's is one of the most familiar origin stories in comics, Raimi had to do it just right, and one of the just-rightest scenes is the one where Parker, his powers newly acquired but not fully mastered, decides to cash in on them by taking part in a televised wrestling match. Raimi updates the scene by making it a big, flashy, ECW-style 'extreme' competition, but keeps the sense of fun and absurdity, most especially by casting lovable legend Randy Savage as Spidey's squared-circle nemesis, Bonesaw. To this day, the scene is one of my all-time favorites in any superhero movie to date.

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Fox Takes Marvel's Dare

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Adaptations of Marvel Comics have been doing great business at the box office for almost ten years now, from X-Men to Spider-Man to Iron Man. And, just like in the comics, when one creative team doesn't find an audience, the big bosses at Marvel Films have been more than willing to try again with new writers, directors, and stars; Fantastic Four wasn't a critical success, but it made enough money to spawn a sequel; Ang Lee's Hulk was an ambitious letdown, but Marvel handed the property over to Edward Norton for a second chance; and The Punisher is being given another go-round despite two dismal adaptations so far. The one Marvel superhero franchise that hasn't been talked up for a reboot so far has been Daredevil (and its even worse spin-off, Elektra). That's probably because the original -- helmed by a hapless Mark Steven Johnson and starring an out-of-it Ben Affleck -- was such a piece of junk that no one wanted a second try at it.

That may be about to change. 20th Century Fox's co-chair, Tim Rothman, insists that the studio will be pairing with Marvel Films to produce another installment of the adventures of everyone's favorite blind lawyer/costumed vigilante; he's just not saying when. Or who. Or where, how, or perhaps most importantly, why. In a cagey interview with IESB, Rothman says the deed will get done, but fails to name names, and cites a curious precedent: "I think that the thing The Hulk showed...is that it is possible, that if you really do it right the audience will give you a second chance." Exactly what was done right about Norton's Hulk reboot and exactly who gave it a second chance is unclear: the movie was tepidly reviewed, and made almost exactly as much money as Ang Lee's famouse 'failure'. But hey, the spirit is willing even if the facts are weak.

While Rothman goes on to namecheck Christopher Nolan and his approach to the Distinguished Competition's Batman franchise as a possible peek at what the tone of the next Daredevil film might be, it's clearly too early to start talking about personnel. Which, in a way, is too bad: if Daredevil's worth doing, it's worth doing right. As we reported in this space a while back, Frank Miller and Jason Statham have both expressed some interest in a Daredevil movie, and one of the hottest action stars of today combined with the man who wrote some of the best Daredevil stories in comic book history could make for an intriguing film. On the other hand, if all Fox intends to do is find the next Mark Steven Johnson -- well, wake us when X-Men 4 is ready.

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Spider-Man Spectacular, But Hulk Not So Incredible

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:45:00 GMT

As part of my 12-step recovery program to stop gabbing nonstop about Watchmen (I'm currently on Step 8, where I make amends to everyone I forced to watch the "Architects of Fear" episode of The Outer Limits), I'm happy to bring you news of other comic book movies that haven't been made yet. By the time March of 2009 rolls around, I hope to have gotten to at least Step 11, where I can look at a smiley-face button without crying.

Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire has agreed to keep slinging webs for at least two more movies, for an unprecedented $50 million deal that includes profit-sharing and family leave time to hang around with his daughter, the only-slightly-ridiculously named Ruby Sweetheart Maguire. Strangely, it was the family leave time, not the gargantuan paycheck, that was almost the dealbreaker; Sony was ready to walk and restaff the role when CEO Amy Pascal gave in to the demand, saying six months was too long for any parent to spend without family leave. Which should come as a surprise to the majority of working mothers, none of whom make $50 million per anything. To put the figure into perspective, this is the same amount of money Alex Rodriguez makes per year to not win the World Series, or roughly $1.5 million per minute Maguire spends doing a disco strut onscreen like he did in Spider-Man 3.

Meanwhile, Edward Norton, who recently failed to rejuvenate the Hulk franchise, says that if they have any plans to bring him back for a sequel, or for a spot in the proposed Avengers movie, they haven't bothered to let him know. Norton, who has what is known as a 'prickly' reputation on Hollywood with an emphasis on the first syllable, claims that Marvel is being opaque, but he stops short of calling them obtuse, which is just the sort of talk that explains why he hasn't gotten a phone call yet.

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Unwatchable #72: “Meet the Spartans”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Here’s a serendipitous turn of events – not for me, of course, but maybe for somebody out there. On the very day that Disaster Movie, the latest parody from the writing-directing team of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, is released in theaters, our Unwatchable selection of the day just happens to be the humor-challenged team’s previous effort, Meet the Spartans. (And when I say effort, I don’t really mean it in any traditional sense of the word.) This is purely coincidental, but if I can do anything to dissuade even one person from spending money on Disaster Movie this weekend, I’ll consider this post a success.

I doubt that’s going to be possible, though, since it seems highly unlikely that any regular Screengrab readers would be seeing Disaster Movie in the first place. For my part, Meet the Spartans was my first experience with the Seltzer-Friedberg team, but I can’t say I was completely unaware of what to expect – basically, that these bozos are Zucker-Abrams-Zucker for people who were often dropped on their heads as children. Spartans is ostensibly a parody of 300, but really just a string of pop culture references linked by scenes of shiny-chested men in leather loinwear. Notice I say pop culture references, not pop culture jokes; Seltzer and Friedberg proved to me that they watch Entertainment Tonight and TMZ, but not that they have any ability to synthesize their crapulent media saturation into something that would make me laugh.

For example: A group of Persians arrive in Sparta to inform King Leonidas (Sean Maguire) that he must submit to the rule of Xerxes. Leonidas proceeds to kick them into the pit of death. He is about to leave when he notices Britney Spears sitting in front of the pit, shaving her head and flashing her pixilized coochie. He then kicks her in the pit of death. Really, it’s not like I’m looking for some explanation for Britney Spears being in ancient Sparta. I realize it’s all part of the free-wheeling zaniness. But you can’t just have her shaving her head and flashing her girl parts. We’ve already seen that. Likewise, when Ryan Seacrest and the American Idol judges appear in front of the pit, it’s not enough that Simon is mean, Paula is loopy and Randy says “dawg” a lot. Maybe that was enough when MAD TV did their very first American Idol send-up 147 years ago, but if you don’t want people to think you’re stupid, untalented assholes, Messrs. Selzer and Friedberg, you really need to step up your game.

Alas, I do think they’re stupid, untalented assholes and I’m just sorry anyone encouraged them as children or even told them they were the “funny guys” in high school. They weren’t, I am almost certain. Here are some things they think are funny: 1) Balls. Now, here they happen to be correct. Balls are funny, particularly when they’re getting punched and they aren’t mine. It’s somewhat less funny when a Happy Feet penguin teabags Leonidas, but again, it’s because there’s no real context. Ball jokes with context – now that’s humor. 2) Homo jokes. Yes, I imagine there is some humor to be mined from the homoeroticism of 300, but the gags here are about as subtle as prison sex. 3) Celebrities and reality TV. In addition to Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan also make appearances to reference their tabloid troubles and flash their digitally obscured vaginas. (All celebrities are impersonated, of course, except for Carmen Electra who seems to be under the impression that she’s acting in the role of Queen Margo.) We not only get the American Idol panel, but the judges from America’s Next Top Model and Dancing with the Stars. There’s even a Deal or No Deal reference, which really shows Selzer and Friedberg are invested in crafting timeless comedies for the ages.

The worst thing about these non-jokes is that Selzer and Friedberg feel the need to explain them as they’re happening. So when the fat guy from Borat shows up as Xerxes, the narrator tells us he looks like the fat guy from Borat. And when a symbiotic black Spider-Man costume slithers over Carmen Electra, the narrator tells us it’s much like what happened to Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man. An appearance by Rocky Balboa is highlighted by the lingering close-up of the ROCKY stitched on his shorts. It goes on and on. Actually, it just seems like it goes on and on, because, as we learned from this Phil Nugent post and as I can confirm, Meet the Spartans runs for a little over an hour before the end credits begin. After a while, the credits stop and some deleted scenes from the movie are played. I’d really love to know how these particular scenes became the outtakes. The only thing in the whole movie that remotely caused my mouth to twitch in the direction of a smile was Leonidas howling “Tonight! We Dine! AT HOOTERS!” Yet somewhere along the line, a decision was made to remove that scene and show it at the end to pad out the running time. I take back what I said earlier. I think it was Selzer and Friedberg who were repeatedly dropped on their heads as children.

Previously on Unwatchable:
73. Fascination
74. You Got Served
75. The Last Sign
76. Kickboxer 3: The Art of War
77. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance

Warner Brother Tries To Give The Distinguished Competition A Boost

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Despite the fact that The Dark Knight has made roughly eighty-five kerjillion dollars on its way to breaking nearly every box office record since the dawn of motion photography, DC Comics -- and, by extention, their parent company Warner Brothers -- is widely perceived as the big loser in the battle of superhero movies. Much as Marvel Comics did in the early '60s, Marvel Films -- the people responsible for Iron Man, Spider-Man and the X-Men franchise -- has largely trounced what it used to call its "Distinguished Competition". Although both companies have turned their franchise characters into successful movies, Marvel's have generally been seen as more successful, more entertaining, more true to their comic book origins, and most of all, easier to get made. While DC continues to farm its characters out to various studios, Marvel has consolidated its filmmaking power into its studio arm, ensuring a production continuity that provides another curious parallel to the '60s, when the more coherent continuity of Marvel's comics appealed to readers.

This is a situation that Warner Brothers, who's been making movies even longer than DC has been making comics, is eager to change. In an article in the latest Variety, Warner execs and DC bigwigs alike discuss what's being done to avoid the sort of missteps that have led to their being thought of as the second-tier player in superhero films. From greenlighting unprofitable tripe like Catwoman to dragging its feet on potential blockbusters like Wonder Woman and Justice League, DC's film development players have made a number of high-profile mistakes (let's not even speak of the botch-job that was the making and marketing of Superman Returns) that have led them to be seen as failures despite having put out the biggest blockbuster in four decades.

DC development executives Jeff Robinov (production vice-president) and Gregory Noveck (senior VP of creative affairs) describe their recent meetings with Warner Brothers head Alan Horn in terms of a visit to the woodshed with an angry dad. Horn doesn't deny it: "If you do it wrong," he says of developing sucessful films from the billion-dollar DC empire, "you're dead, you're out of there." In a line that will bring power-mad smiles to the faces of geeks everywhere, Robinov talks about no wanting to piss off the Comic-Con contingent, and speaks of the difficulty of making a good film while keeping the fanboys happy. "There's a massive interest and knowledge in the comic book industry, and it takes time to understand the characters and the history, where they've intersected with each other and what their worlds are," says Robinov, who probably spent high school going outdoors and dating girls, in the understatement of the year, "That's part of the education that we're going through." It's an education that Horn no doubt hopes won't prove too costly.

Hey, how about that? A whole post about superhero movies, and no mention of Watchmen! I may get out of this year alive after all...

Morning Deal Report: Coen Brothers Get Serious

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

I have misled you once again. The Coens’ follow-up to Burn After Reading is actually described as a black comedy in this Variety report, but it is titled A Serious Man. Stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg and former Spin City regular Richard Kind will star. (I know, not exactly Pitt and Clooney, right?) “Set in 1967, story centers on Larry Gopnik (Stuhlbarg), a Midwestern professor whose life begins to unravel when his wife sets out to leave him and his socially inept brother (Kind) won't move out of the house. Shooting is set to start at the beginning of next month in Minneapolis.”

Here’s a sentence from the Hollywood Reporter that shouldn’t exactly shock anyone: “As Tom Cruise goes about writing the next chapter in his career, he's developing an interest in comic book movies.” Cruise is teaming up with Spider-Man maven Sam Raimi for an adaptation of Sleeper, and we can all be thankful it’s not a remake of the Woody Allen comedy. “Written by Ed Brubaker with art by Sean Phillips, Sleeper, which ran from 2003-05, centers on an operative whose fusion with an alien artifact makes him impervious to pain and allows him to pass it on to others through skin contact. He is placed undercover in a villainous organization by an intelligence agency and falls for a member of the group, named Miss Misery.” I smell Cruise’s Battlefield Earth.

Yet another graphic novel headed for the big screen is Julius, to be directed by F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job). Sadly, it’s not a biopic about the founder of Orange Julius, but rather an urban crime thriller based on Julius Caesar. Per Variety, Gray “has a vision for this adaptation that will satirize obsessive consumerism while providing a thrilling ride for audiences.” Good luck with that.

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Tom Cruise Still Creepy, Still Not Funny

Jason Statham: I Dare You

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Marvel's recent forays into the world of superhero films have been dynamite. With the Spider-Man franchise more or less held up as the gold standard of super-action, the X-Men movies still holding up strong despite the disastrous third installment, the recent Iron Man film reminding everyone of how much fun comics are supposed to be, and even the Hulk reboot carrying with it the perception of success even though it basically matched the box office numbers of its unfairly vilified Ang Lee predecessor, it's easy to forget they're plenty capable of super-duds. The 2003 adaptation of Daredevil is one of Marvel's few notable duds (the less said about the Elektra spinoff the better); a lukewarm lead performance by Ben Affleck, a morally and technically confused plot, and uncertain direction by Mark Steven Johnson were largely to blame.

Still, for comics fans, the character has a lot of life to give, and most devotees of the comic -- particularly of the so-called "Born Again" plot arc of the 1980s, with its stark religious imagery, sense of moral atonement, and brutal, noirish crime elements, all of which were present in the 2003 movie but ineptly handled -- would be more than willing to give a chance to a potential remake. And while there's nothing official in the works, according to Geoff Boucher, proprietor of the L.A. Times' genre-driven "Hero Complex" blog, if a remake ever gets made, it may benefit from an infusion of a much more dynamic, enthusiastic and charismatic lead actor in the person of Jason Statham.

In the waning hours of the San Diego ComicCon, Boucher found himself in a hotel bar in the presence of stuntman turned actor Statham (there to promote his remake of Death Race 2000) and Frank Miller, who wrote the "Born Again" stories and was primarily responsible for Daredevil's stunning renaissance of the 1980s and early 1990s (and who was there to hype his movie version of Will Eisner's The Spirit). Statham expressed a keen interest in playing the alter ego of blind lawyer Matt Murdock: "Just give me the chance. I would love to play Daredevil." Miller quietly agreed that he thinks Statham's good for the role. But does the rest of the world? It's easy to see the explosive, rough-and-tumble Statham turning Daredevil's action scenes into gripping, bloody street combat, but it's less easy to imagine him losing his bluster to play the sightless attorney, who hides himself behind a mask of timidity to lull his many opponents. Whether or not this really happens is contingent on Marvel's permission (though they maintain strong times to Miller), and how successful the Spirit movie is -- a bomb may take Miller out of the driver's seat, while a success may make him a player with the resources to make whatever movie he wants, including an adaptation of one of his best-loved works in "Born Again".

Can you see Statham in the devil horns and red long johns? Sound off in comments...

Marvel Comics is Ready for Its Close-Up

Movies Into Theater: "Dog Day Afternoon" Sweats It Out; "Spider-Man" Aims to Rock Out

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Anyone with half a slice of ham in his DNA who's watched Al Pacino tearing it up in the 1975 Dog Day Afternoon has to have thought to himself, Man, that looks exciting. I'd love to have done that! That probably accounts for the current reincarnation of Dog Day Afternoon as a stage play performed by New York's Barefoot Theater Company. The production was written and directed by its star, Francisco Solorzano, who takes on the role of Sonny, the desperate but not dishonorable man who, with his dull-witted sidekick Sal (John Cazale in the movie, Jeremy Brena here), walks into a bank in Brooklyn on a sweltering August day in 1972, looking to stage a robbery to raise the money for his male lover's sex change operation and winds up at the center of a hostage drama that involves platoons of cops and cheering, jeering crowds getting off on the chaos and energy. (At times, as when--in a scene not duplicated in the play--Pacino's Sonny marches in front of the bank, pumping his arm and screaming "Attica! Attica!" while the crowd, looking for any reason to knock the police, roars its approval, he was practically the event's emcee.) In a half-hearted attempt to turn this into a real play instead of a chance to live the dream of starring in a beloved classic, Solorzano tinkers with the time frame and assigning the characters monologues to fill in some of the back story. The result is both more heartfelt and a lot less ingenious than the last big restaging of a movie on a New York stage, the four-member-cast high-camp version of Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. Dog Day Afternoon, which runs through August 15, is basically an actor's fantasy and a curiosity, but it may not be a bad way to kill a hot summer evening, especially for people who already have the movie well-memorized. But memories of Pacino, Cazle, Charles Durning, and Christopher Sarandon in the original continue to loom large.

In a glitzier section of the theater news department, auditions began this week for the Spider-Man musical that's planned for a fall 2009 opening. Nell Gluckman reports that the biggest news about the show so far is that it seems to be "attempting to bridge the gap between flashy musical theater and the firmly rooted New York rock scene. With music by Bono and The Edge of U2, the production's interest in a rock edge isn't a secret. But the producers and directors also seem to be cultivating a downtown vibe. Today's casting call is at the Knitting Factory, a venue with a history of performances of alternative music, booking bands such as Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo in their early years." It sounds as if Spider-Man is looking to be the bridge between two emerging trends, the musical-based-on-a-movie (Legally Blonde) and the stage-musical-drawing-on-indie-rock--or at least, music that's closer to "real" rock than what you got with something like Hair--as typified by Spring Awakening and the Obie-Award-winning Passing Strange by the great, weird singer-songwriter Stew. One of the show's casting directors told Gluckman that, by making its presence felt at the Knitting Factory, the show hopes to attract some "people who haven't thought they should go out for a Broadway show." It remains to be seen whether their efforts will result in something that will attract people--as in, ticket buyers--who hadn't thought they'd be caught dead going out to a Broadway musical. But if there has to be a Spider-Man musical, it's sort of nice to know that the people mounting it have actually put some thought into anything besides getting the web-swinging effects to work.

Morning Deal Report: No Venom for Sam Raimi

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Have we learned nothing from the Catwoman movie? Sony is hoping to have better luck spinning off a super-villain from their flagship superhero franchise – in this case, Spider-Man’s “gooey nemesis” Venom. Per the Hollywood Reporter, the studio “is hoping the character could serve as an antidote to the aging Spider-Man franchise in the way that Fox has used Wolverine to add longevity to its X-Men franchise…The studio had commissioned a draft of the script from Jacob Estes, a writer of the specialty film Mean Creek, released several years ago by Paramount Classics.” Topher Grace played Venom in Spider-Man 3, but that’s no guarantee he’ll headline the spinoff.

It’s also a long shot that Spidey director Sam Raimi will be behind the camera, especially now that he’s got a new project set up at Disney. It’s called The Transplants, and – brace yourselves – it’s described as “a four-quadrant ensemble superhero story with a comedic bent,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. The inspiration comes from screenwriters Adam Jay Epstein and Andrew Jacobson, best known for Not Another Teen Movie. Getting excited yet?

If not, here’s some big news for all of you eagerly anticipating Howard Stern’s Porky’s. It’s…Howard Stern’s Rock and Roll High School. The shock jock is producing a remake of the 1979 comedy, to be scripted by Bill and Ted co-star Alex Winter. In case you’ve forgotten, Variety reminds us that the original “was about a group of rebellious students who, with the help of punk rock band the Ramones, thwarted a repressive, rock-music-hating principal.” I guess the only real surprise, given the current superhero mania, is that Stern has not yet resurrected that long-dormant Fartman movie. Surely it’s only a matter of time.

Related:
Raimi Runs Out of Ellen Page, Gets Some Lohman Instead
Vanishing Act: Savage Steve Holland

Half Measures: Leonard Pierce's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Hey, all the cool kids are doing it. With Andrew Osborne posting his favorite films of the first six months of 2008 last week, and Paul Clark doing the same only yesterday, who am I to drop the ball? This list, already heavily revised just since last week thanks to some illuminating July 4th viewing, will no doubt undergo serious revision before anything on it makes it to a Best of 2008 list; living in a city where first-run movies are hard to come by unless they're American and released by a mainstream production company, I've come to reply quite heavly on home video releases, film festivals, and other avenues of distribution that make assessments of this sort quite difficult so early in the year. That said, here's what's flicked my switches so far in a year that follows one of the best in recent memory.

My top five:

1. WALL*E - They say that the studio system is dead, and that the releasing company no longer tells you anything about the quality of the film. That's true to an extent, but Pixar is a glorious exception to the rule. The computer animation studio has hardly released a single film during its entire existence, and their latest, concerning a robot whose job is to clean up the detritus of a dead world, has raised the wrath of conservatives while managing to be perhaps the greatest movie Pixar has yet made. Especially daring because it largely abandons the clever dialogue of previous releases, it instead gives the eyes a feast like they've never seen before throughout its long periods of silence. An astonishingly successful film with heart, spirit and intelligence, proving that great art can be commercial. Or vice versa.

2. Shine A Light - Is it a testament to Martin Scorsese's skill as a filmmaker, or the Rolling Stones' skill as musicians and personalities, that his documentary about them has proven to be one of my favorite movies of the year, despite the fact that I long ago lost interest in them as a band, and wouldn't go see them in concert if you paid me? Perhaps that's not so surprising -- Scorsese, after all, has been following and filming the band for decades, and much of the appeal of Shine a Light comes from the effortless way he edits together his own footage of the Stones and old archival material taken by himself and others. To top it all off, he blends this compelling historical material with a contemporary performance so overwhelming that it almost convinces a skeptic like me that the Rolling Stones are still a band that matters.

3. Iron Man - As a lifetime comic book nerd, I had to sit through decades of neglect, followed by decades of failure, for Hollywood to start getting superhero movies right. While I've always been partial to DC comics, Marvel was the first to get it right, with the two initial X-Men movies; then, with the first two Spider-Man films, I was able to relax and say, finally, somebody gets it. With this year's release of Iron Man, Marvel -- now producing their own product with the Marvel Films studio -- continues to get it right: it's a near-perfect superhero film by a director (Jon Favreau) who clearly adores his source material but knows what to jettison to make it work on screen. Add tons of humor, exhilarating action scenes, and an incredibly charismatic lead performance by Robert Downey Jr., and you have one of the best movies of the year.

4. Assassination of a High School President - Yes, one of my favorite movies of 2008 has Mischa Barton in it. Believe me, I'm as surprised as you are. Not yet in wide release, this clever satire, disguised as a teen comedy, Brett Simon's clever, twisting neo-noir travels some of the same paths as obvious predecessors like Brick, Election and Rushmore, but does so with an intricate and well-carried-out plot and an overall thematic twist that's a lot more cutting than it appears to be on the surface. Not a perfect film by any means, Assassination's reach exceeds its grasp, and it has some clunky tonal problems throughout. But a game cast, some terrific dialogue, and a funny, confident presentation does a lot to compensate for its flaws, making it one of the better festival finds of 2008.

5. Bigger, Stronger, Faster*- I've probably seen more documentaries this year than I have narrative feature films, and one of the standouts, both in terms of subject and execution, is Chris Bell's Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (asterisk in the original). Bell, a former steroid user himself and one of a family of three brothers, all of whom are juicers, has made a movie where the real villain isn't the concrete thing of steroids (which, in fact, are shown, if not as beneficial, at least as not nearly as harmful as TV 'experts' and their drummed-up hysteria would have us believe), but the abstraction of a country that will forgive anything if it ends in victory. Filled with images both inspiring and grotesque, it does what good documentaries do: presents us with the situation and lets us decide what it means and what to make of it.

RUNNER-UP: The surprisingly great first two-thirds of The Strangers.

MADE IN 2007, BUT NOW PLAYING: My Winnipeg; The Band's Visit; and, especially, Paranoid Park.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Hulk (2003, Ang Lee)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In recent years, as “sequel” and “remake” have become dirty words in the minds of moviegoers, Hollywood studios have scrambled to come up with new, less offensive alternatives. How many blockbusters based on previously-adapted properties have been tagged with descriptions like “re-invention”? Yet even by these standards, the efforts made by Universal and Marvel Studios to distance their new, more “crowd-pleasing” version of The Incredible Hulk (“You’re going to like him when he’s angry!”) from Ang Lee’s 2003 film Hulk have been particularly aggressive. And for good reason, as Lee’s take on the classic comic left most viewers disappointed or even pissed off. Does Hulk deserve its reputation? Not really. But just because it’s not that bad doesn’t mean it’s all that good either.

In the early part of his career, Ang Lee was known primarily for his modestly-budgeted films which deftly mixed domestic drama with light comedy. Titles like Eat Drink Man Woman and The Wedding Banquet helped to make the NYU grad’s reputation in the States even before he began making movies here, and Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm only served to further this reputation. But while 1999’s Ride With the Devil was widely considered Lee’s first disappointment, he quickly recovered by returning to the Far East to make Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the critically-acclaimed martial arts epic that brought Lee the best reviews of his career to date and his first Oscar, as well as record-breaking U.S. box-office for an Asian film. It was Crouching Tiger that caught the attention of Universal Studios, who were looking for a fresh voice to bring Hulk to the screen.

But while Lee was an inspired choice for a comic book movie, I really don’t think he was the right one for Hulk. Lee is a gifted filmmaker, but he’s never had a strong, easily recognizable visual style, instead preferring to let his story determine the look of his films. But although other Lee films have benefited from this versatility- the chilly, sterile images of The Ice Storm bear little resemblance to the sweeping vistas of Crouching Tiger, but both are ideal for their respective films- Lee never finds the right look for Hulk. Although it’s not for lack of trying- attempting to accentuate the story’s comic book origins, Lee subjects the audience to a barrage of split-screens and snazzy wipes. Unfortunately, instead of creating any sort of kinetic excitement, the tricked-up style is merely distracting and, in the end, tiresome.

As for the individual shots themselves, Lee’s framing is rarely dynamic enough to make the images pop the way they should. All too often, shots are murky when they should be crisp. This is especially true of the film’s night scenes, which look dank and under-lit. Even worse, Lee insisted on shooting many of the film’s big action sequences at night. But whether this was an artistic decision on Lee’s part or a trick by the effects team to cover for some occasionally dodgy CGI, these sequences are often incomprehensible. This is especially true of the final battle between Hulk and his father- in a scene that serves not only as the action climax of the film but also the resolution of the lifelong conflict between father and son, the last thing you want is for the audience to wonder what the hell is going on.

In addition to the film’s stylistic shortcomings, the storytelling in Hulk leaves something to be desired. Part of the problem is that as far as comic book heroes go, Hulk is a strange case. Rather than being a hero who uses his powers for positive ends, Hulk is unleashed aggression personified- a man who has been cursed by fate and the sins of his father to expand and beat the crap out of anything in his way whenever he gets angry. The premise plays closer to tragedy than traditional comic book action, and to his credit, Lee takes the dramatic stuff seriously, rather than treating it simply as exposition and padding between the action scenes. However, the film’s broad-strokes-only storytelling and one-dimensional characters are less than compelling. Too much time and energy are expended on unlocking the mysteries of Bruce Banner’s past, a torturous bit of “dollar-book Freud” (thank you, Orson Welles) that stops the film dead in its tracks and makes the film less tragic than dour. Not helping matters is Eric Bana’s colorless performance as Banner. Bana came to the attention of Hollywood with his live-wire performance in Chopper, but he displays none of that volatility here. Shouldn’t someone as deeply troubled as Bruce Banner show some evidence of inner life?

Hulk is a strange creature, a film that attempted to be a stylish, kickass summer movie with a solid dramatic foundation but ended up satisfying almost no one. I admire certain aspects of the movie, like the way Lee counterpoints the restrained work by his leads with the unhinged mugshot-era performance by Nick Nolte, or Lee’s occasional use of quietness (a rare quality among most comic-book movies). But at the end of the day, the movie just doesn’t work. Yet I appreciate Lee’s efforts to make an honest-to-goodness art film out of a superhero movie. Hulk isn’t a success, but it’s more thought-provoking than most of the forgettable fare that has characterized the genre for years. It’s no Spider-Man, but I’ll take it over the likes of Fantastic Four- or The Incredible Hulk, for that matter.

Marvel Brings The Multiverse To Movies

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Recently, our own Phil Nugent took a look at the debut of Marvel Studios, the big-screen production arm of the comics company behind Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four. While Marvel's been taking a critical beating lately with its flagship comics, losing retail ground to longtime rival DC, the opposite has been the case in the multiplex: Marvel's aggressive approach and multifaceted marketing has proven to be a success at the box office, and as a rule, Marvel's properties have outperformed DC's and brought in piles of cash for the company.

One of the reasons that Marvel became such a hit amongst comics fans in the 1960s was its 'multiverse' approach; unlike DC, which at the time told all their stories in a disconnected, separate manner, Marvel ran with the pretense that all their stories were taking place in the same world, at the same time, and pushed the idea that any one of their characters could show up in any of their titles. Fans took to the idea that all the stories were connected, that all the pieces mattered, and that what happened in one book made a difference in other books. The idea that the world of the Marvel Universe was unified and that the storytellers were actually creating pieces of a whole was so appealing that DC was forced to adopt it as an editorial policy for their own characters.

Now, as the Hollywood Reporter notes, Marvel is taking the same multiversal approach to their films. The much-discussed post-credits cameo by S.H.I.E.L.D. boss Nick Fury, to be reprised in the new Hulk film, hints at the cohesion that the studio hopes will make the upcoming Avengers movie a box office draw (and, incidentally, beat DC to the punch once again as Warner Brothers scrambles to figure out how to get a Justice League movie in the can). The driving force behind Marvel's unified approach in the comics was editor/writer/mastermind Stan Lee; with Marvel Studios, president Kevin Feige is stepping into that role and keeping the film franchises tied together. Warner Brothers has the money to make something similar happen, but will they give DC's editors a freer hand in film production -- and insist on an easing of the auteur approach that they've used in the recent past?

Watching "The Watchman": An Interview with Kent M. Beeson

Paul Clark — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In case you’ve slept through this past weekend, the summer movie season got off to a roaring start with the big-budget adaptation of Iron Man. With many more comic book movies in store this summer, and even more after that, I figured it was about time to catch up with former Screengrab contributor and all around good dude Kent M. Beeson. As a comic-book fan and movie buff of long standing, Kent recently secured a position with the Web site comiXology, writing a bi-weekly column entitled The Watchman. Kent was gracious enough to take time out of his busy schedule- which also includes numerous freelance jobs as well as a wife and 14-month-old daughter- to conduct this interview via e-Mail.

How did you get your position with Comixology?

Dumb luck, if you ask me! Peter Jaffe, the Online Content Editor for Comixology, asked former ScreenGrab editor Bilge Ebiri to recommend someone to cover film and TV for Comixology, and he named me. I'd done some writing for ScreenGrab, including several on comic books, so I suppose that's why name came up. if I had to guess, I'd say that my ScreenGrab posts on the Watchmen and Shazam! movies had something to do with it, but really, I have no idea.

Why do you suppose Hollywood has made so many comic book movies in the past few years?

I suppose the standard reasons are that the executives greenlighting these movies are the ones that grew up in the 70s and 80s, and grew up reading these comics, coupled with CGI that lets filmmakers show just about anything they can imagine. When those two moments in history coincided, it was bound to be a fertile period. What's really interesting to me, though, isn't that so many comic book movies are being made, but just how important fidelity to the source material has become. It still boggles my mind that Zack Snyder is keeping Watchmen in the 80s -- that never would have happened just a few years ago. We've come a long way from the aborted Tim Burton Superman with Nicolas Cage in a freaky black suit. But even this is a bit of a quirk of history -- I don't think we'd be seeing so many faithful adaptations if it weren't for Bryan Singer's X-Men showing it could be done and Raimi's Spider-Man showing just how friggin' huge it could be.

What are your favorite comic books?

Watchmen is my favorite book of all time, comic or otherwise. Paul Smith's run on X-Men -- I think I might prefer it to Byrne's, actually. Ambush Bug was way ahead of its time. One I loved back in the day, that seems to have been forgotten, was an horror anthology called Wasteland. It was written by John Ostrander and, of all people, improv pioneer Del Close. Some really twisted shit -- I can still remember one story called "R.Ab" that is just... soul-crushingly dark. Like Idiocracy without the safety of the comedy. I always thought this is what reading the E.C. comics back in the day must've been like.

Favorite comic book movies?

The stupidly-titled X2 is, fortunately, stupidly awesome. Spider-Man, I can watch over and over. Akira is great, but it's animated, so maybe that shouldn't count. I have a soft spot for Batman Returns, but the unfortunate practice of overloading a film with villains can be laid squarely at its feet.

Best adaptation?

Spider-Man is the best, I think, but it's adapting a character and his world and not so much a single story (other than the origin), so if you eliminate those, I guess that leaves me with Sin City. Visually, it's breath-taking and kind of addictive -- it's hard to look away from it when it's on. More importantly, though, it turned a series of borderline-unreadable books into something pleasing.

Most underappreciated/overappreciated comic book movies?

Let me go ahead and catch hell from two different camps. The first Superman movie is pretty terrific for about forty minutes when dealing with his origin, but once Luthor enters the picture, it gets too jokey and lame. Reeve and Kidder are impeccable, however. And Ghost World is pretty much ruined by Zwigoff's cheap misanthropy. I mean, Clowes isn't exactly Mr. Positive, but it's clear from the book that he's trying to find some kind of hope. Zwigoff buries it under shots of pregnant women smoking and Blockbuster gags that would never have made it past the Mad TV writing room. There's a reason Bad Santa works -- it's all misanthropy.

I think Hellboy is a bit underappreciated. Considering that the comic isn't very well-written and has one of the most non-sensical origin stories ever -- Mignola came up with the look of the character first and made up everything after, and it shows -- it holds together pretty well. Del Toro's really coming into his own, he's starting to find just what he's capable of, so I'm looking forward to Hellboy II.

When a comic book movie doesn't remain true to its source, how difficult is it for you to turn off your comic book side and simply appreciate it as a movie?

Well, my attack plan for the stuff I'm unfamiliar with -- like Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier, or the upcoming Wanted -- is to watch the movie first. I want to be able to enjoy the movie -- or not -- as a movie first, without any baggage, which is how most viewers are going to see these things anyway. And then I go back to the comic. The comic is usually going to have more information anyway, and I don't need to bring that into the movie. I actually started watching Persepolis after reading the first 20 pages or so of the comic, and it totally fucked it up for me -- I had to go back and see it again to fully appreciate how well the filmmakers were able to streamline the story for the movie. Luckily, most comic movies are adapting characters and not specific stories, so it's pretty easy to turn off the preconceptions.

Obviously, with something like Watchmen, that's not going to be possible. I'm not sure how that's going to work. I might have to conk myself on the head and induce amnesia just before I walk into the theater.

What big-screen comic book adaptations have actually improved on their sources?

I just finished the original A History of Violence, and wow, what a stinker. The movie pretty much repudiates the source, which, admittedly, is an interesting way to go about adapting something. Sin City -- well, my loathing of Frank Miller runs pretty deep, so it was great to see such a tiring and self-important comic turned into high camp by simply giving the thing motion. Whenever I see Clive Owen float down to the street in his red shoes, I crack up.

In your opinion, what are the keys to making a successful comic book adaptation?

Jesus, I really have no idea. The first thing that comes to mind is balance -- knowing when to be faithful to the source, and when to realize, hey, this has to work as a movie first and foremost, and just go off. A History of Violence is pretty faithful for the first 1/3 of the book, then it jettisons the rest, to its credit. I don't think the adaptation of The New Frontier went far enough -- there were small changes here and there that indicated that they knew the story wasn't going to work as is, but they really should have rethought the whole thing from top to bottom. But, saying that, I bet we'll see (if we haven't already) a movie that either is completely faithful or totally throws everything out but the title and works perfectly well.

Now that Watchmen is being made, what are some of your other dream adaptations?

I want to say FLCL, but the comic came later. Does Cowboy Bebop count? It was a serialized manga first. I could totally see an adaptation with, say, Ryan Gosling as Spike, Selma Blair as Faye and The Rock as Jet. I think The Rock is underrated as a performer -- for someone who was supposed to be Schwarzenegger's heir apparent, he displays more genuine warmth and a sense of humor about himself than Arnold ever did. While Jet is a badass, he's still essentially the mother of the group, and it'd be interesting to see him in a movie where his physicality is in strict contrast to his role. Matthew Vaughn is doing Thor, but I'd kill for a Gilliam version -- nobody does giants better, and I'd love to see them get their ass kicked by a blonde dude with a hammer.

The Watchman runs every other Wednesday on comiXology. Kent’s piece on Iron Man will run this week.

When Good Directors Go Bad: For Love of the Game (1999, Sam Raimi)

Paul Clark — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Since the beginning of his career, Sam Raimi has been a hero to genre lovers everywhere. It was his debut feature The Evil Dead that first brought Raimi to the attention of gorehounds, and his subsequent films further endeared him to his fans. With their outrageous camera movements, “splat-stick” comic violence, and the larger-than-life presence of Bruce Campbell, the Evil Dead trilogy gained Raimi a rabid cult following. However, he soon found himself confined in the horror genre. At first, he attempted to transfer his trademark style to other genres- crime story, comic book movie, Western- with varying degrees of success.

Finally, with 1998’s A Simple Plan, Raimi decided to keep his more gonzo impulses in check, and in doing so created his first “mature” work, and his most critically-acclaimed film to date. Having finally tasted mainstream acceptance, Raimi craved more, and decided to make a real stab at Hollywood respectability with his next project, an adaptation of Michael Shaara’s For Love of the Game. After all, what’s more mainstream than a baseball movie starring Kevin Costner? Unfortunately for Raimi, For Love of the Game turned out to be his worst- and not coincidentally, his least Raimi-esque- film to date.

For about half its running time, the film is a decent, fairly entertaining baseball movie. Its hero, Billy Chapel (played by Costner), is a veteran Detroit Tigers pitcher who suddenly finds himself throwing a perfect game in what may be the last start of his career. It’s been said that a perfect game is both the rarest and the most boring achievement in baseball, but Raimi keeps us involved by concentrating on Chapel- not only his actions and dialogue but also the thoughts that occur to him while he’s on the mound. It’s a neat touch whenever Chapel tunes out the hostile Yankee Stadium crowd with the mantra, “clear the mechanism.” By the time the game reaches its last few innings, we can more or less predict what the outcome will be, but Raimi has nonetheless done a pretty good job getting us to root for Chapel to finish the perfect game.

However, For Love of the Game isn’t content simply to be a baseball movie, and almost none of the scenes that take place off the baseball field are any good. Faring worst is the movie’s principal non-baseball storyline, which traces the trajectory of a relationship between Chapel and New York single mother Jane, played by Kelly Preston. Despite taking up nearly half the movie, the relationship between the two is ill-defined. As a result, there’s a highlight-reel to the storyline, amounting to little more than a series of flirtations, breakups, reconciliations, as well as a whole lot of grief from Jane.

A big part of the problem in these scenes is Preston’s performance. Preston, never a particularly good actress, is out of her element as a leading lady. Clearly overmatched and nervous opposite Costner (who’s pretty good here), she gives an overly fussy performance that seesaws constantly between the two notes she knows how to play- beaming and neurotic. Consequently, Jane comes off more as a pill than as the complicated, conflicted adult she’s meant to be.

It would be one thing if the film realized or even acknowledged what a prickly character Jane is, but instead it paints her as the foundation in Billy’s emotional life. Throughout his perfect game, Billy flashes back to his life with Jane- who just left him that morning- and it’s clear that we’re meant to care about whether these two lovers end up together in the end. Instead, all I wanted to do was to keep watching the game. After all, everyone falls in love sooner or later, but only seventeen major league pitchers have ever pitched a perfect game. Talk about burying the lead.

After For Love of the Game met with a critical drubbing and large-scale audience indifference, Raimi decided it was time to re-examine his career path again. First he rebounded with the flawed but interesting Southern Gothic thriller The Gift, after which he made his most popular films to date, the Spider-Man trilogy. With the Spider-Man films, Raimi finally found mainstream success without sacrificing any of his inimitable style, which helped all three of the Spidey films become the highest-grossing superhero movies ever made. And all of them- yes, even the third one- were better than For Love of the Game.

Marvel Comics Is Ready for Its Close-Up

Phil Nugent — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

A long time ago when the world made sense, there were two kinds of comic books: DC comics and Marvel comics. And while Marvel reigned supreme at the comics shop, the company dearly wanted to break into the lucrative and ego-stroking business of licensing it characters for major motion pictures, and it was there that DC pantsed Marvel and took its lunch money. While DC was the home of Superman and Batman, Marvel was the home base of Howard the Duck. For years, Marvel's role in the Hollywood fod chain was epitomized by the 1994 Fantastic Four movie, a cheesy, cheap-looking affair that Marvel put into production without bothering to inform the people who worked on it that they had no intention of releasing it to theaters or even home video but were contractually obliged to make something if they wanted to hang onto the film rights to their own characters. All that started to change in 2000 with Bryan Singer's X-Men, whose success the director was unable to duplicate with his later stab at rebooting Superman. A couple of years later, Sam Raimi's take on the Marvel flagship hero Spider-Man launched a major franchise and proved that Marvel could sire a blockbuster movie without Singer or Hugh Jackman modeling a haircut that could open bottles and cans. Since then, Marvel has had varying degrees of commercial success with a for-real Fantastic Four movie and its sequel, as well as Ghost Rider, Daredevil, and Elektra, a bust in theaters but more of an earner as a DVD release that allowed film connoisseurs to conduct a close study of Jennifer Garner's moist eyes and washboard abs in the tranquil setting of their own fortress of solitude. Even The Punisher managed to make it into theaters with John Travolta on the poster, which helps to set it apart from the 1989 straight-to-video version, with Dolph Lundgren grunting his lines as if his tight skull-face T-shirt were cutting off his circulation.

Stage two in Marvel's renewed campaign to take over the film industry goes into effect on May 2 when Iron Man, the first official production of Marvel Studios, is released to theaters. As reporter Geoff Boucher puts it, this marks "the first step in the company's quest to go from intellectual-property fount to a stand-alone Hollywood player that can greenlight big-time popcorn movies." Studio chairman David Maisel crows that "We're the first since DreamWorks started 14 years ago that can greenlight its own $100 million movies. It doesn't happen very often." In some ways, Marvel might still look pretty small to the big guys: the "studio" is modestly staffed and will rely mostly on Paramount to distribute their finished films. What they do have is the backlist of established characters, many of them created back in the golden days when the legendary Stan Lee and the uber-legendary Jack Kirby were striking sparks together, despite Marvel founder-publisher Martin Goodman's attempts to rein in his brainstorming boys by reminding them that their reading base consisted of "children and a few illiterate adults." (Boy, the more things change, the more things stay the same, huh?) As Maisel puts it, "We're not in the movie business, we're in the Iron Man business right now. Marvel owns the intellectual property. We have an Iron Man video game coming, the toys, the comics, we have an animated television show coming, a direct-to-DVD animated Iron Man movie last year. We're going to have an Iron Man ride at an amusement park in Dubai in a few years." They're also in the Ant-Man business--Edgar Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, is said to be ready to direct a film about the wee fellow--and of course, they're still in the Spider-Man business, with plans by Julie Taymor (Across the Universe) to launch a Spider-Man musical on Broadway. What may be most impressive is that they're in the Hulk business, too. Ang Lee's 2003 The Hulk movie was perhaps the highest-profile misstep of the new Marvel movie era, an ambitious, poker-faced effort that confused critics and disappointed audiences, though it did have the dignity of being a flop of the misguided-art-house variety instead of the underfunded direct-to-video sort. Now, just five years later, Marvel is going to reboot The Hulk with Ed Norton in the lead. The fact that Marvel is taking a second crack at the "property" so soon after the release of a film whose reception might have encouraged lesser mortals to sweep the Hulk under the rug for a generation or three shows an impressive degree of faith in their own product. Can another run at Howard the Duck be far behind? Has anybody run any tests to see how Hugh Jackman would look with an orange beak?

Morning Deal Report: There is Power in a Union

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:00:00 GMT

Looks like this Writers' Guild strike could actually happen. Now, the top-grossing films so far this year are Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, and Transformers. Who needs writers?

While Peter Jackson waits on his next big-budget sci-fi action flick (Halo), he's planning a more personal project: a big-budget sci-fi action flick called District 9.

Speaking of departures, David Fincher will adapt a graphic novel about a detective chasing a killer.

— Peter Smith