The Screengrab : warner brothers

FOX Lawyers: The Smartest Men on the Cinder

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:45:00 GMT

Movie nerds like myself, who have invested what little remains of their self-identity in the remote possibility of Watchmen not being terrible, were thrown into a major tizzy a few months ago when FOX Studios, which claims to own the rights to any and all future movie adaptations of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons superhero classic, moved to legally block Warner Brothers from releasing the Zack Snyder film.

Many felt this would be an epic moral battle where FOX exerted their rights in the labyrinth of complex entertainment laws to protect their rightful property regardless of future plans, while fending off the ire of pissed-off fans; others thought that it would be a titanic legal showdown where Warner allayed incomprehensible facts and figures in a desperate attempt to prove themselves on the correct side of the law and get their movie out on time. Others, like your humble correspondent, figured that it was basically just FOX making a bunch of noise, based on a slender bit of legalese, in order to wring a fat payday out of what's widely predicted to be one of 2009's top-grossing films. As Mania.com is reporting, well...one of us was right.

FOX and Warner Brothers are both reporting "productive talks" in the attempt to settle this thorny legal issue, which means that both company's lawyers kept writing dollar amounts on a piece of paper until they arrived at a figure that was mutually more than you will ever make in your life. In case you're really curious, ugly details of the whole money-grubbing mess -- in which producer Larry Gordon accuses FOX of pushing the entire thing to make a buck -- can be read at the Hollywood Reporter's legal blog. What was it someone once said about everyone having their hands in the next guy's pockets?

We Watch the Watchmen...and Watch, and Watch, and Watch...

Are We Ready for We3?

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:15:00 GMT

We do our best to keep you updated about comics-to-film adaptations here at the Screengrab, but it's rare that we get to bring you news of a good comic being adapted for motion pictures. (And when we do, we're usually pretty nervous about it; see the last half-million posts we've made about Watchmen.) We were a bit surprised when it was announced recently that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's critically acclaimed DC/Vertigo miniseries We3 was set for a big-screen pickup -- but not as suprised as we were when further details started coming in.

We3 is a strange property from the start. On the surface, it's a funny-animal tale, but it very quickly takes exceedingly dark turns that belie its Incredible Journey trappings. It's a brilliant, highly moving story, and its ethical stance is one of unabashed animal rights advocacy. And it's a visually dynamic book, with remarkably intricate art from Scottish artist Quitely that complements and enhances the writing by Morrison, probably the most highly praised author in comics since Alan Moore. Its visual style -- described by its creators as "Western manga" -- would seem to make it a perfect fit for animation, so it was shocking when Warner Brothers announced it would be a live-action production. To add bafflement to perplexity, the website Mania is now reporting, based on an interview with producer Don Murphy, that it will be directed by John Stevenson, best known for Kung Fu Panda.

There's a lot to make fans nervous about a big-screen version of We3; will gunshy producers dilute the animal rights message? Will the money-hungry studio dumb it down to appeal to family-film audiences? Will the story's violence get toned down? But with this latest announcement, subtle questions like that get swept away in the speculation that Murphy and Warner don't even understand the basic format: why make a live-action movie of a story so perfectly suited to animation -- and, if you're determined to make a live-action film, why hire a director best known for his work in animation? We'll keep you posted.

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I Don't Mind a Parasite, I Object to a Cut-Rate One

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:15:00 GMT

Early shoppers who lined up quick at their local video vendors this morning got a one-time special treat with their DVD copies of The Dark Knight. No, not the free digital download code that allows you to get a second copy of the billion-dollar actioner (unless, of course, you own a Mac, or want to be able to play it on your iPod, or something crazy like that).

No, I'm talking about the hilariously misguided -- though is there any other kind -- anti-piracy 'public service' advertisement that precedes the movie. Anyone who ponied up for a copy of the latest Christoper Nolan Batman flick -- and are thus by definition not engaging in piracy -- got to watch a bunch of footage from Casablanca in which Rick Blaine estimates those who would violate studio policy as being morally somewhere south of Major Strasser.

There are a lot of genuine arguments to be made in favor of the anti-piracy stance. But exhuming the corpses of people involved in the creation of a classic Hollywood film and pressing them (without consent, naturally) into the sevice of the corporate digital rights management issue -- which is unquestionably a political one more than it is a moral one -- is a lot sleazier than buying a DVD and making a copy for a friend. You stay classy, Warner Brothers.

Apple Falls Far From Tree

Comic Book Movies Go Parisian

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Let it never be said that the European film industry is so arty that it doesn't know a cash cow when one comes rambling by. In fact, Europe's reputation as a bastion of filmic integrity rests largely on the fact that, as a rule, only the best of their films are exported to the U.S.; we rarely see their big dumb moneymakers, which, in the Old World as the New, tend to be noisy action pictures, dopey romances and lowest-common-denominator comedies. Regardless of the assumptions some people make about Euro-film, producers over there aren't banking on a new Pasolini to pay for their winter vacation.

Witness the birth of Europa-Glenat. A brand-new amalgam of Luc Besson's powerhouse film production company EuropaCorp and the French comic book giant Editions Glenat, the new company -- headquartered in Paris and headed by Besson's right-hand woman, Eleanore de Prunele -- was formed after both companies saw the gargantuan box office business done by superhero movies in America over the last half-decade. Their initial deal calls for a straight 50/50 split on television and film developments based on Editions Glenat properties and and exclusive first-rights deal similar to that of DC Comics and Warner Brothers. Live-action films of properties like Voyageur and Vinci are planned, but much of the production money may be sunk into animation, which traditionally has a larger adult audience in Europe than it does in the U.S.

We're looking forward to seeing some of the Europa-Glenat products (Vinci in particular has loads of potential), but we urge both parties to stay very far away from American comics companies' conception of European superheroes. Believe us, Mr. Bresson, no one is waiting eagerly for an El Aguila or Olympian movie.

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Screengrab Review: "Watchmen"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

No, unfortunately, your humble correspondent, despite his long history of being obsessed with the upcoming Zack Snyder adaptation of Alan Moore's brilliant Watchmen comic, was not one of those recently invited to view 26 minutes of the footage at a special preview screening. Nor was I numbered among those who got to see the entire film at a preview in Portland, to decidedly mixed reviews. Why I wasn't included despite my spooky fixation on the movie is unclear; it might have something to do with the fact that I've predicted the movie will suck raw pork knuckles since it was first announced. Whatever the case, I haven't seen the damn movie yet, and so that's not what I'm going to be reviewing today.

What I'm going to be reviewing today isn't even, technically, a movie. I'm not sure what it is. Its producers call it a "motion comic". It's not an animated film, exactly, nor is it a motion picture, nor is it a webcomic or anything else that we have the critical language to talk about. It's also not playing at a theater near you: it's available (the first three chapters, at least) exclusively as a download from the iTunes music store. Even though it isn't music, either. So what is it? It's basically the entire comic, written by Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, panel by panel, with a very basic, stripped-down sort of cutout animation. It's also narrated, but not dramatized -- that is, the dialogue is read aloud, in a sort of dramatic fashion, by character actor Tom Stechschulte. But he's the only member of the cast, which means it's not really a dramatic adaptation of the story -- or any kind of adaptation at all, really. It's almost like a book on tape of a comic book, only it movies. Kinda.

While it may be difficult to describe what Watchmen: The Motion Comic (no, really, that's what it's called) is, it's a lot easier to say whether it's any good: no. Since I have nothing to compare it against, lacking any other "motion comics" and not even sure what is supposed to be accomplished by them other than to serve as a promotional tool for the comic and the movie, I can't honestly say if it succeeds or fails on its own terms, because I don't know what those terms are. But I do know it's really boring. The only original element is a soundtrack that virtually defines the word "perfunctory", and while many people have pointed out how ridiculous it is to hear Stechschulte performing the female voices, equally ridiculous is hearing him perform any of the voices when there's no particular reason to do so. The animation, such as it is, can be clever, but it doesn't really add anything to the illustration -- it's too limited to do so. If you've always wanted to pay someone fifty dollars to get the same effect as reading a book to yourself out loud in the living room, this is the...uh...book? Movie? Comic? whatever...for you. Otherwise, the whole thing is pointless on a rather grand scale; take half the fifty and go buy a copy of the original Watchmen comic. You'll still have enough money to see the book, and enough to spare on a bottle of gin to forget this ludicrous endeavor was ever launched.

Still Watching the Watchmen...and the DVD Market, Too

Michael Caine, Batspoiler

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

So you're in a high-stress profession. You work all day and all night to try to make the world a better place, but to protect some very important people, you have to keep certain things about your job secret. But the strain of such a massive secret, a thing that some people would kill to know, can't be borne forever by just one man. So you turn to the one person you think you can trust, the one man you believe will keep your secret: your faithful butler. And then he goes and blabs it to the whole world.

Ever since Christopher Nolan's latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight, made its first trillion dollars, speculation has been rampant about who's going to play the villain role in the next installment. Heath Ledger's untimely death makes it an unlikely, albeit intriguing, possibility that he'll return as the Joker; the two hottest rumors are that Angelina Jolie will be the draw, slipping into a Catwoman costume, and that Johnny Depp and Phillip Seymour Hoffman will tag team as the Riddler and the Penguin. Both have generally dismissed as fan-driven wishful thinking until yesterday, when Michael Caine -- currenty paying his club fees as Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred -- took a moment at the Toronto International Film Festival to cite an unnamed Warner Brothers exec and insist that the latter rumor is true.

Of course, just to keep us baying, Hoffman had to come out and insist he's never heard any such thing. But who are you gonna trust, the Penguin, or Batman's loyal batman? The rat!

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OST: "Batman Begins"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The Dark Knight is currently smashing box office records with the same alacrity that the Joker makes a pencil disappear, and as with the first Christopher Nolan Batman movie, its soundtrack is provided by two veteran industry hands in the person of James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer. While it seems like this time around, their work was heavily influenced by the seething, screeching, atonal score that Jonny Greenwood wrote for There Will Be Blood, it's still highly reminiscent of the work they did for Batman Begins.

The two had their work cut out for them when they accepted the assignment from Warner Brothers to score the rebooting of the Batman franchise. DC Comics' famed vigilante already had a number of memorable pieces of music associated with him: from the jaunty, swinging theme song to the campy '60s TV show composed by jazz veteran Neal Hefti to the brooding, chaotic main theme written by Danny Elfman for the first Tim Burton Batman (which later became the theme music for the celebrated Batman animated series), and even Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus have been associated with the hero in the past. Their goal when putting together a new score for Nolan's reboot of the franchise was to create something that conjured the proper tone of darkness and struggle without too obviously drawing on what had come before. Howard, whose previous work has included The Prince of Tides and The Sixth Sense, took charge of the main theme and the loftier passages, while Zimmer, the German-born composer who created the eerie score for The Ring as well as the memorable soundtrack to Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, worked on the incidental music and quieter, more sinister passages. It was imperative that they create something that enhanced the brooding, bleak tone of Batman Begins while never threatening to overwhelm the action on screen or make the psychological development of the characters too obvious.

Happily -- if you can use that word to apply to something so grim-sounding -- they were successful. The soundtrack, while it lacks any songs as immediately catchy as Hefti's famous Batman theme or as universally recognizable as Elfman's, perfectly captures the tone and feel of the Christopher Nolan vision of Batman. The tracks (all of which are cleverly named for various species of bats) exactly invoke the right move, from the slow, magisterial main theme to the ponderous, somber music that accompanies the destruction of Wayne Manor to the mesmerizing, atonal shrieks that go along with the first attacks by the hideous Scarecrow. It's not quite strong enough to stand entirely on its own, except perhaps as mood music for a Halloween party, but it's still a terrific piece of scoring that illustrates the right way to make music and image mesh.

BEST TRACKS: "Verspertilio", the song that opens the film and the movie, shows how the main theme to a Batman film doesn't necessarily need to be bombastic or hummable to work well. "Molossus", which is the music by which the villainous Scarecrow terrifies his subjects, is both fitting and instantly recognizable thanks to its out-of-control slithering strings. And the climactic battle scene is accompanied by "Corynorhinus", which adeptly combines Howard's trademarked heavy, echo-laden piano chords and Zimmer's crushing percussion and taste for non-western tonal dynamics.

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Andrew Stanton's Retro-Futurism

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Tasha Robinson at the AV Club brings us a brief but very engaging interview with Andrew Stanton, longtime studio pro at Pixar and the director of WALL-E. In a wide-ranging discussion, he talks about the lunch meeting that produced a decade of the best animated films in history, the development of Pixar from a handful of like-minded creatives to a massive Hollywood studio employing hundreds of people, and his unconventional approach to writing a script in which the main character has no voice. "I remember reading the script for Alien," he recalls; "It was written by Dan O'Bannon, and he had this amazing format where he didn't use a regular paragraph of description. He would do little four-by-eight word descriptions and then sort of left-justify it and make it about four lines each, little blocks, so it almost looked like haikus. It would create this rhythm in the readers where you would appreciate these silent visual moments as much as you would the dialogue on the page. It really set you into the rhythm and mindset of what it would be like to watch the finished film. I was really inspired by that, so I used that format for WALL-E."

One of the fascinating things about the interview is the discussion of how the most high-tech movie studio in history uses some positively primitive methods to actually make their movies. Starting with the standard lament that computers will always take up all the time you allocate them to solve a problem ("Once you've got more memory, you just want to do more with it. And you end up feeling it takes just as long to do now the 16 things in five minutes instead of the one thing you used to do in five minutes"), Stanton notes that Pixar always views its films as storytelling challenges, not technical ones (how do you make a cool movie about monsters, as opposed to how do you solve the fur problem in CGI). He also notes that, with WALL-E, they were attempting to tell a story almost entirely visually, and so looked back -- way back -- for cues: forsaking Chuck Jones' Warner Brothers cartoons as overly familiar to geeks like themselves, they instead prepared for each day's work by watching a Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd silent short every day at lunch for a year and a half.

By the way, I can't be the only one who thinks of Wally Gator when this film is discussed, can I? I can? Okay, never mind.

No, But I've Read the Movie: THE FOUNTAINHEAD

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Up until now, the "No, But I've Read the Movie" has focused on great works of western literature, and assessed the movie versions to see if they can possibly stand up to the titanic reputations of the novels upon which they are based. That ends today! For today, we will focus on one of the most successful, and yet overrated and overblown, works of the western canon: Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. It's a novel that helped launch her career as one of the preeminent authors and philosophers of our time, but as a novel, it's hokey, overlong, bloated, and filled with characters one dimension short of being one-dimensional; and as philosophy, it's incomplete, inconsistent, and unable to look past its own epistemological shortcomings. Rand's ideology of Objectivism became hugely popular, just as her novels became huge best-sellers, but whereas most literary adaptations were doomed to failure because what makes a great novel rarely makes a great movie, anyone daring to tackle her endlessly preachy books would be faced with the prospect of improving on the original, rather than dumbing it down for the format. Given the runaway success of The Fountainhead -- Rand's story of an incorruptible architect who refuses to compromise his craft to satisfy the demands of the masses -- it was inevitable that there would be a film adaptation. The question is, how would it handle such a patently unworkable premise and fundamentally unbelievable storyline?

Mistakes, as they say, were made. Casting the young, fiery Patricia Neal -- 26 years younger than her co-star and with virtually no big-screen experience -- was one major gamble. Casting earnest, plain-speaking Gary Cooper, who excelled in playing jus'-folks characters who knew what was right as the pompous, speechifying Howard Roark was another. And it didn't exactly do anyone any favors to select the hapless King Vidor (who, for every Stella Dallas or The Crowd he had in him, also had a Duel in the Sun or Beyond the Forest) to direct. But what should have sent a jolt of fear down the spines of everyone involved in the production is who Warner Brothers hired to turn Ayn Rand's mess of a novel into a coherent screenplay: none other than Ayn Rand. She made it a condition of the sale of the rights to the novel that only she could write the script, and her fierce demeanor during pre-production (she apparently nearly drove the formidable King Vidor to a nervous breakdown) meant that, as with her hero Howard Roark, it would be her way or no way at all. This was made explicit when Warner wanted to trim Roark's famous speech before the jury at his trial down to a manageable length because it was rambling and dull; Rand pitched a fit, demanding it be included in the movie in its entirety or there would be no movie. The result is right there on the screen for all to see, in all its rambling, dull glory. She got the movie she wanted -- the question is, did anyone else?

WHAT IT HAD: You certainly can't fault The Fountainhead for inauthenticity. With the force of nature that was Ayn Rand writing the script and throwing her weight around as much as possible behind the scenes, it's as faithful an adaptation of the novel as we're ever going to get. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is subject to debate, but its truth cannot be denied. The score is one of Max Steiner's livelier ones, and King Vidor occasionally gets to hit those whoozy melodramatic notes at which he excelled. A few of the supporting cast, including Raymond Massey as the newspaper tycoon Gail Wynand and Robert Douglas as the cartoonish villain Ellsworth Toohey, figured out what they were up against pretty quickly and decided to throw in the towel, resulting in some enjoyable performances. And, again, the basic story and the ham-handed philosophy from the novel are there, more or less perfectly intact, for better or for worse.

WHAT IT LACKED: Aside from a point, a direction, or any sense of style, decency or restraint? Pretty much everything. Vidor was clearly phoning it in as much as possible, even for a hack like him. Ayn Rand's script, much like the novel, hasn't got much going for it; the characters are cardboard-thin, the motivations are as transparent as the glass in Howard Roark's skyscrapers, and the situations strain the credulity of anyone who, unlike Ms. Rand, has actually interacted with other human beings and seen the way they behave. The two leads are amongst the least charismatic in screen history: Patricia Neal's heaving, fire-breathing, nearly psychotic Dominique Francon would be ridiculous just on her own, but is especially so when contrasted with Gary Cooper's abysmally miscast Howard Roark. Cooper reportedly didn't understand the screenplay at all, and tried to downplay Roark's character, leading to total disaster: one of the great tragedies of Charlton Heston's recent death is that the overwrought ham never had the chance to take a shot at Howard Roark, the character he was born to play.

DID IT SUCCEED?: Critics hated it then, and they hate it now, but Rand's books have always been rather critic-proof, both in literary and philosophical terms. More pertinently, it wasn't much of a success at the box office, either; at the time of its release, it barely broke even (it didn't cost much to make due to Rand and Vidor ramming it through to completion in less than two months, and it shows). However, it's picked up a certain degree of cachet in subsequent years: devotees of Objectivism have flocked to it because of their cultlike fervor for Rand's works, and it's also acheived a bit of a cult status in so-bad-it's-good circles. Rand herself blamed studio interference for the movie's failure (because it certainly couldn't have been her fault) and vowed never to write for the movies again. She never did, but her books still exert a mystical hold over some people in Hollywood; a big-budget adaptation of the interminable Atlas Shrugged is in preproduction and slated for a 2009 release, and longstanding rumor had it that a remake of The Fountainhead was brewing, to be directed by Michael Cimino. It never happened, thus robbing us of the delightfully egomaniacal romp that would have been, but rumors of a remake persist, this time -- even more wonderfully/terribly -- with Oliver Stone's name attached.