Don't Mess With The Norton

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:45:00 GMT

You'd think that Hollywood would have learned its lesson by now, but no: another major release starring Edward Norton, another script controversy.

As Anne Thompson reports in Variety, during the pre-production stages of the new Incredible Hulk movie, the fledgling Marvel Studios made the mistake of letting time slip away from them until they were put in the position of offering Norton a screenwriting credit (as well as an unbilled producer's role) in order to get him on board. Unfortunately for everyone within a gamma bomb blast radius of the film, the movie already had a screenwriter (Zak Penn) and a producer/director (Louis Leterrier) with ideas of their own, and by the time the movie finally opened, we were treated to the hauntingly familiar sight of Norton appearing on talk shows to complain about how his vision for the movie was bastardized by studio hacks.

Thompson follows the whole complex affair, with its typical behind-the-scenes wheedling, Norton's pretensions of classing up the superhero movie, Penn's determination to see a script he wrote almost 20 years ago finally see the light of day, and the post-production battles over who owned the right to the final cut of the film. No one emerges smelling like a daisy, with Marvel Studios coming across as naive at best and duplicitous at worst, and Norton once again looking like both a man who's passionate about his work and a total prick.

Why does it all seem like something we've seen before? Perhaps you remember a little movie called American History X...

Related Posts:

Edward Norton Hulks Out

Screengrab Review: The Incredible Hulk

Cinema's Greatest Offscreen Feuds, Part 1

Light It Up: Perfecting the "Stoner Protest Comedy" with Harold and Kumar

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It has been suggested that, after the box-office (and, largely, critical and artistic) failure of the big, dramatic "Iraq war" films of yesteryear, the next step at dealing with the great issue of our times in movies will be through satire. But still, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay? It's good to know going in that they escape, but still, is everybody sure that Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg--who created the characters played by John Cho and Kal Penn in their screenplay for the 2004 Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and who co-wrote and co-directed the new movie-- can be trusted to address the subject of "post-9/11 paranoia" with the right tone? Speaking to Dennis Lim, Schlossberg was quick to insist, “It’s not that Guantánamo Bay itself is funny.” Okay, that's a good start. Apparently the Gitmo thread was written into the sequel partly as a response to Penn's own difficulties when he was trying to get around to promote the first film. “Once we were with a friend of mine — he’s the same age, same height as me, except he’s white,” Penn says. “I was stopped at security, but he went through even though he had a hunting knife that he forgot to take out of his backpack. They were so focused on pulling out the brown guy, they didn’t even notice.” He adds, "“That’s probably one of the only parallels between Kumar and me. We both get pulled out of line at airports.” Did you get that, studio bosses, LAPD, and Fox Network? It's one of the only parallels between them. Kal Penn does not toke up!

As Dennis Lim points out, "Race is at once central and beside the point in the Harold and Kumar movies. Casually integrating nonwhite heroes into a genre that has always been a white male preserve, the films seize on smutty, gross-out humor as the great equalizer. The signal achievement of both Harold and Kumar films is that they make race incidental without taking racism lightly; they presuppose an enlightened audience." (Or, as Schlossberg puts it, “If you don’t know that [racism is bad], you’re a moron.") Beyond that, the filmmakers resist being politically pigeonholed--which is in itself a political statement, since it implies that they reject the notion, still prevalent in some quarters, that rejecting racism is a partisan position. James Adomian turns up in the new movie as George W. Bush, an appearance that Lim describes as "while not exactly respectful, it is arguably the most sympathetic movie portrayal of him to date." “In our minds he isn’t that much different than Kumar in terms of motivation and certain life issues," says Hurwitz. "Both characters have a family trade they’re pushed toward and have a certain attitude of resistance.”

The Screengrab : zak penn

Don't Mess With The Norton

Light It Up: Perfecting the "Stoner Protest Comedy" with Harold and Kumar