Deadpool
Let’s get one thing straight here, folks: DEADPOOL should not be the lead character of anything. He’s gonzo comic-relief, a bit player with a VERY specific bit to play, and that’s where he’s always belonged – or rather, its where he belonged once somebody figured out what to DO with him.
Pride + Prejudice + Zombies
PRIDE & PREJUDICE & ZOMBIES is the latest attempt to answer the question of whether or not you can stretch one joke into an entire movie, though this time the joke being adapted is less of the “setup-misdirection-punchline” and more of a “hey, isn’t it funny that this is a thing that exists” variety.
Agent Carter: Season 2 - Episodes 3 & 4
Well. Needless to say my plans to get back on track for weekly updates didn't go exactly as planned, though I'm sort of glad of that. Episode 3 ("Better Angels") felt a bit lackluster, falling back on elements that have been the least interesting part of the season so far in order to let subplots of later importance (Whitney Frost discovering she can kill with a touch thanks to her Zero Matter infection, Jason Wilkes being a "living ghost" thanks to a blast from the same) handle their setup.
Green Room Trailer
Punk band trapped in a backwoods club with an army of white-supremacists looking to kill them for witnessing a murder. Finally coming out after a big impact on the festival circuit. Looks intense:
TV RECAP: Agent Carter - Season 2: Episodes 1 & 2
With apologies for the week's delay - as you may have heard, I've picked up some work recently. Before anyone asks: Yes, I've also seen Episode 3 - it'll get it's writeup likely sometime later today.
Anyway...
The first season of AGENT CARTER was a revelation: The so called Marvel "assembly line" spinning-off the CAPTAIN AMERICA franchise with a female-fronted period action drama whose narrative functioned as a series-length metaphor for the forced-backslide of women's rights in the post-WWII U.S.? Even if you'd seen THE FIRST AVENGER and thus knew that Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter could more than carry a show, that wasn't what anyone was expecting. And while the first season didn't precisely stay sturdy all the way through (what should've been a gangbusters finale was undercut by TV budgeting, but only just so) it was one of the worthier editions to the canon by far.
So it's with some trepidation that one approaches the series' second season. Sure, the characters more than deserve to be revisited and there are definitely more stories worth telling, but the first run felt like such a meticulously constructed piece - the right actress, the right character, the right story to tell with her - that there was always going to be some worry that any follow-up might stretch the setup too far: The first season felt like it used up every possible angle in the Marvel-ephemera-as-historical-feminist-metaphor toolbox, so where else might there be to go beyond new villains and more world-building for the broader MCU?
The good news is, it turns out that AGENT CARTER still has a lot to say along with being as reliably fun as ever. The less encouraging news, at least thus far, is that there might already be a sense of diminishing returns involved. Notice I said "might."
Make no mistake, Season 2 starts strong: Carter vs Dottie rematch in the opening minutes? Awesome. The SSR Agents (except for Agent Thompson) now holding Peggy in close-to-fetishistic respect? Good development. Shipping her out to the West Coast to help Agent Sousa with a nascent Los Angeles division? Nice change of pace. New mystery involving (thus far) a secret stash of black-hole creating extradimensional black goo already confirmed to be the (chronologically) first appearance of the not-yet-correctly-named Darkforce? Very cool. Lotte Verbeek as Ana Jarvis? Hilarious character, a great addition. All the misdirection business with the frozen lake/bodies? Good stuff. All told, in terms of technical quality and overall charm, it's basically every bit as good as it was before - one of the most seamless progressions between seasons of a non-procedural I can remember.
And yet... yes, it doesn't quite pack the same level of punch the arrival of Season 1 did. To an extent, that's to be expected: We're in the realm of the familiar now, so there's less sense of discovery on the audience's part. But I worry that it also has something to do with the underlying scenario being not as fundamentally compelling.
Realizing that Season 1 really was going to make it's meta-story entirely about Carter as a stand-in for an entire generation of Rosie's who braced at being told to put down their rivet-guns once the war had concluded was an invigorating system shock; not just because a Marvel show was tackling something so specific but because it's a hugely important moment in modern history that we never really get to see in popular entertainment - to the extent that the only major mainstream movie or series I can name offhand that tackled it previously was A League of Their Own.
By contrast, apart from the end-of-Golden-Age-Hollywood setting, Season 2's big thematic bugbears (so far) appear to be pre-Civil Rights racism (Peggy's new would-be paramour is a Black scientist with pointedly Steve Rogers-esque dorky/handsome vibe) and early signs of anti-Communist paranoia and... well, we've seen both of those before. They just don't feel as novel.
Or at least they don't so far.
Like I said, it's early yet. And even if AGENT CARTER can't always be super-novel in addition to being super-entertaining, well... "just" super-entertaining is hardly much of a negative. It's encouraging to remember that this series isn't cheap to produce, and its being handled largely by powers from the Film side of the Marvel business, so its unlikely they'd spend the time or resources to bring it back if they didn't think they had a compelling reason to. Given how good a job so much of the same team did last time, I'd say it's worth enjoying the fun for now and being optimistic about everything else.
QUICK TAKES:
Anyway...
The first season of AGENT CARTER was a revelation: The so called Marvel "assembly line" spinning-off the CAPTAIN AMERICA franchise with a female-fronted period action drama whose narrative functioned as a series-length metaphor for the forced-backslide of women's rights in the post-WWII U.S.? Even if you'd seen THE FIRST AVENGER and thus knew that Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter could more than carry a show, that wasn't what anyone was expecting. And while the first season didn't precisely stay sturdy all the way through (what should've been a gangbusters finale was undercut by TV budgeting, but only just so) it was one of the worthier editions to the canon by far.
So it's with some trepidation that one approaches the series' second season. Sure, the characters more than deserve to be revisited and there are definitely more stories worth telling, but the first run felt like such a meticulously constructed piece - the right actress, the right character, the right story to tell with her - that there was always going to be some worry that any follow-up might stretch the setup too far: The first season felt like it used up every possible angle in the Marvel-ephemera-as-historical-feminist-metaphor toolbox, so where else might there be to go beyond new villains and more world-building for the broader MCU?
The good news is, it turns out that AGENT CARTER still has a lot to say along with being as reliably fun as ever. The less encouraging news, at least thus far, is that there might already be a sense of diminishing returns involved. Notice I said "might."
Make no mistake, Season 2 starts strong: Carter vs Dottie rematch in the opening minutes? Awesome. The SSR Agents (except for Agent Thompson) now holding Peggy in close-to-fetishistic respect? Good development. Shipping her out to the West Coast to help Agent Sousa with a nascent Los Angeles division? Nice change of pace. New mystery involving (thus far) a secret stash of black-hole creating extradimensional black goo already confirmed to be the (chronologically) first appearance of the not-yet-correctly-named Darkforce? Very cool. Lotte Verbeek as Ana Jarvis? Hilarious character, a great addition. All the misdirection business with the frozen lake/bodies? Good stuff. All told, in terms of technical quality and overall charm, it's basically every bit as good as it was before - one of the most seamless progressions between seasons of a non-procedural I can remember.
And yet... yes, it doesn't quite pack the same level of punch the arrival of Season 1 did. To an extent, that's to be expected: We're in the realm of the familiar now, so there's less sense of discovery on the audience's part. But I worry that it also has something to do with the underlying scenario being not as fundamentally compelling.
Realizing that Season 1 really was going to make it's meta-story entirely about Carter as a stand-in for an entire generation of Rosie's who braced at being told to put down their rivet-guns once the war had concluded was an invigorating system shock; not just because a Marvel show was tackling something so specific but because it's a hugely important moment in modern history that we never really get to see in popular entertainment - to the extent that the only major mainstream movie or series I can name offhand that tackled it previously was A League of Their Own.
By contrast, apart from the end-of-Golden-Age-Hollywood setting, Season 2's big thematic bugbears (so far) appear to be pre-Civil Rights racism (Peggy's new would-be paramour is a Black scientist with pointedly Steve Rogers-esque dorky/handsome vibe) and early signs of anti-Communist paranoia and... well, we've seen both of those before. They just don't feel as novel.
Or at least they don't so far.
Like I said, it's early yet. And even if AGENT CARTER can't always be super-novel in addition to being super-entertaining, well... "just" super-entertaining is hardly much of a negative. It's encouraging to remember that this series isn't cheap to produce, and its being handled largely by powers from the Film side of the Marvel business, so its unlikely they'd spend the time or resources to bring it back if they didn't think they had a compelling reason to. Given how good a job so much of the same team did last time, I'd say it's worth enjoying the fun for now and being optimistic about everything else.
QUICK TAKES:
- I honestly wish Marvel hadn't been so preemptively eager to inform us that Whitney Frost is indeed a variation on Madame Masque - that would've been fun (if easy) to put together. I expect she'll end up wearing the signature gold mask at some point.
- I'm going to go out on a limb NOW and say that they're building to a "twist" with Dottie this time around. She's back to early to "just" be a heavy again, why would she be trying to steal an Arena Club pin if she was working for them, she's super-insistent about only talking to Peggy, etc - it doesn't add up. I'm calling it now: She has a good(ish) guy agenda this time, and she and Peggy will be fighting on the same side at some point.
- Speaking of the Arena Club and/or Council of Nine business, they're logo looks too much like a missing-link in that "devil symbol gradually becoming HYDRA symbol" evolutionary change laid out in AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D to be anything but, right? So the question becomes: Are they HYDRA, or do they and HYDRA just share a common ancestor. At this point, they mainly seem to be standing in for The Maggia, hence the Madame Masque connection.
- Masque being an "evil" equivalent to Heady Lamar? Good angle.
- I maintain more than ever that I really want Chad Michael Murray's Agent Thompson to ultimately become an MCU equivalent to William Burnside.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Big New Plans & What They Could Mean To YOU!
Well, hopefully that title was suitably attention getting.
Anyway! Remember that time I wrote a book?
Well, the experience actually worked out pretty good for me overall. I learned a lot about publishing, met a lot of interesting new people, and continue to be making a decent profit off of it. In fact, things went so well that I've been itching to publish a follow-up ever since. And since one of the lessons I've long resisted learning is to recognize my own limitations, I've decided that I don't want to follow-up Brick-By-Brick with just one book - I want to publish a whole bunch of books.
So. Here's what's going on. I've recently finished officially acquiring the rights to republish a rather substantial amount of writing that I previously produced both for the this blog and for other outlets, most notably the bulk of my written work for The Escapist including the Intermission and High-Definition film and television columns. I've heard from many fans, viewers and readers over the years that they would like the opportunity to revisit various pieces that I wrote but don't necessarily want to hunt them down in the backlogs of this or that website, or that they'd like the opportunity to support their favorite older pieces in a way that directly benefits the author (since I, like most writers on a work for hire basis, do not continue to receive royalties or other compensation from future traffic on older writing); and I'm sympathetic to both of those desires - and not just for the obvious reasons.
So I've decided to do something about it.
Over the last few months (and continuing) I've been going through this aforementioned backlog of older work and dividing individual pieces out by subject, and have thus far arrived at a point where it looks like I have enough material (after discarding pieces that have either aged poorly or, like many "speculative" pieces, are no longer especially relevant) to conceivably publish anywhere from 7 to 10 individual volumes of collected writing; organized into subjects like reviews, the film industry, geek-culture, video games, interviews and profiles of celebrities, etc.
That's... quite a bit of product.
And to be perfectly honest, it's a more substantial (potential) project than I was originally preparing to deal with, which means its probably going to take a bit more time and effort than I originally expected to get it underway - and that's if it looks like I've got an audience that's receptive to what I'm offering. Hence the purpose of this post: I'm looking for feedback about how best to make this material available to you, my fans and readers.
Make no mistake: This is happening.
I am determined, barring some unforseen disaster, to get a run of books collecting my previous decade of writing out into the marketplace for sale. The question, however, is what that means in terms of the form they are available and how much can be inititially produced. Ideally, I'd prefer to get the entirety of what I've got out for sale all at once, but production costs are a reality and so is the concept of over-saturating one's own market. In other words, it would likely be prudent to release volumes in "waves;" which means determining both what people most want to read, how they'd most want to read it and what the best system for delivering that is.
My original plan when setting up this project was limited to producing a series of ebooks, and that format remains my primary focus given that I'm an independent freelancer and that these, after all, are republications of previously-existing material (though finished volumes would include new introductions and contextual-intros for each entry.) However, as part of my goal of becoming more active on the convention circuit outside of strictly making panel appearances, I am looking to have more physical product/memorabilia to bring with me when I do.
That means I'll have to find means of producing these volumes in print form, too - easier said than done, since my aim isn't so much to have them on store shelves or printed-on-demand for fans who prefer a physical copy (though I certainly wouldn't be against either) but rather to be able to order copies to sell myself without some kind of obscene markup: FYI, the reason you're able to purchase copies of Brick-By-Brick from me in person at Conventions, occasionally at reduced rates, is because I paid for the printing services myself upfront on the gamble that I would sell enough of them to eventually make that money back (which I did in a shorter than expected amount of time.) That made sense for a smaller single-volume project, but isn't feasible for a bigger enterprise like this particularly in my current (improving, but not fast enough) financial situation.
So what am I looking for right now?
At the moment, I'm mainly looking to get the word out: "Hey a bunch of MovieBob books, get excited!" Could there, potentially, be some a crowdfunding campaign to help facilitate all this at some point? That's definitely a possibility, though there need to be a lot more logistics ironed out before I start asking people for money. Well... money apart from The MovieBob Patreon, of course, as that's still the best way for fans to help ensure that their favorite MovieBob-branded content continues to be produced.
But right now, I'm mainly looking to see if any of the fellow creator/producers in my audience have any advice vis-a-vi getting printing/ebook-formatting done with wide distribution channels without necessarily going broke setting it up - or, hell, maybe there's a publisher out there looking to roll the dice on some eclectic multi-volume entertainment-writing? To that end, here's the basics on what I'm (currently) looking at in terms of eventual product:
- Between 7 and 10 volumes of work, culled mainly from my near-decade of work for The Escapist but also from my blogs and other sources during the same time period plus new work in some instances.
- New introductions for each volume and mini-intros for each individual piece of writing, placing the work in context and offering thoughts in hindsight on the work itself.
- Each volume comprising about 120-170 pages of writing (in standard MS Word doc formatting), not counting introductions, index, etc. Shorter volumes = greater selection at a lower pricepoint, win/win.
- Volumes covering a diverse array of topics, including but not limited to: Geek Culture, Video-Games, The Movie Business, Film Reviews, Television Retrospectives, Classic Films, Superheroes and more.
- Each volume tied specifically to the proven MovieBob brand, with the possibility of additional subseries-branding tied to other projects such as "The Game OverThinker" and "Really That Good."
At this time, one thing I can say that I know will come as a disappointment to some but I feel I need to be honest about: These will not be "book versions" of Escape to The Movies or The Big Picture. Property-rights work differently for projects like that, and even if they didn't reviews written for spoken-word scripts of that nature do not often translate well into plain text. So while a book of straightforward reviews of recent films is on the "to-do" list, if you're expecting your favorite episode from one of those shows it probably won't be part of the series. That still leaves plenty of reviews to be had from the columns and from this blog, but if you're looking for (for example) the early TRANSFORMERS reviews, they won't be in there. Sorry.
On the other hand, if you remember enjoying reviews like WINTER'S TALE, or the retrospectives of older films related to holidays, sequels, remakes or the passing of famous actors and filmmakers, or pieces like "Re-Tales," "South Park as a Gated Community," "Advice From a Fanboy," "Bat-Mitt vs Obamavengers," etc; that's exactly the sort of material being collected. Also, the Video-Games volume will likely included adaptations of scripts from the early Game OverThinker episodes, as well.
So when can you expect to hear more?
That largely depends on what I hear back. Do you have advice, feedback, questions, etc? Let me know in the comments. I'm excited to move forward with this, and I hope folks are as eager for this material in this format as people have been telling me they are.
Thank you for your time,
- Bob.
The Year SOUTH PARK
If Trey Parker, Matt Stone and South Parkhave always better than almost anyone in the business at exactly one thing, it’s preventative self-defense: Few other creators are as consistently reflective enough to anticipate almost any criticism of their work and bake sly inoculative retorts directly into the batter. This is, after all, the same series and creative team that structured their (thus far) sole theatrical outing, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, around the conceit of a busybody helicopter mom unwittingly unleashing an Apocalyptic war with Canada over fury at her son being admitted to an R-rated animated film.
What's Going On?
UPDATE: The first of the "new projects" listed below can now be revealed - I have officially become part of the ScreenRant News Team!
You'll find my news items handily catalogued under my contributor tag, HERE. If you want to keep my content chugging, here's a brand new and simple way to do so: Share the HELL out of these posts to social-media, Twitter, Facebook and wherever else you may want to. Cheers!
(original post appears below)
Hello, friends!
You may have noticed that there wasn't a new episode of IN BOB WE TRUST this weekend. That wasn't an oversight - there wasn't one produced. IBWT and ALL-NEW GAME OVERTHINKER are both taking a bit of a hiatus. There won't be new episodes of either series for a time, and at this point I can't specifically say when they'll be back or in what form.
Don't freak out.
Here's the thing: The reality of Internet-based original programming is in the midst of a major evolutionary shakeup. As original web creators consolidate and grow bigger, in tandem with major media companies becoming increasingly part of the equation; the old model for web video i.e. self-producers making episodes week-to-week on their own self-determined schedule is gradually giving way to a more traditional TV-style "seasonal" model whereby shows come and go in arranged runs. You'll note, for example, that ScrewAttack's DEATH BATTLE is currently taking its break, and popular series like EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY have adopted the seasonal model to increase their production caliber and accommodate their live shows.
So it also goes for independent producers like myself: IN BOB WE TRUST and GAME OVERTHINKER were produced for a set run with ScrewAttack, that first run has concluded and now they're on break; while fans of ScrewAttack's broader content-library have no doubt taken note that BEST/WORST EVER and TOP TEN have started back up again. So goes the cycle. I can't say when my two series will return at this point, or in what form: It's possible that IN BOB WE TRUST (for example) might find a different homebase in the interim. It's also possible (again, for example) that you might see me on ScrewAttack with another brand-new series. All I can say on that front is that you should stay tuned.
Especially since that's far from all I've got going on :)
There are (at least) two major new projects I've currently got in production, at least one of which you should be hearing about very soon and another which is going to substantially expand my footprint in multimedia; so stay tuned for news on both of those fronts.
Finally, tops on my 2016 "to-do" list is to replace this blog (which is, I'm aware, very out of date for the kind of operation I'm increasingly running here) with a more functional, modern website. So keep an eye on that as well (especially if you've got experience in building professional sites and have anything to reccommend.)
As ever, while I'm aiming every day to once again be supporting myself and my work through regular employment in my chosen field(s), the new media landscape remains a tricky place in that regard. If you'd like what I'm putting out and would like to help ensure that I can keep providing it for you, please consider joining (or increasing!) support for The MovieBob Patreon.
Stay tuned!
You'll find my news items handily catalogued under my contributor tag, HERE. If you want to keep my content chugging, here's a brand new and simple way to do so: Share the HELL out of these posts to social-media, Twitter, Facebook and wherever else you may want to. Cheers!
(original post appears below)
Hello, friends!
So. Some changes are afoot, and it's time for a quick update. This technically should have been up sooner, but I was working a convention all weekend. Anyway...
You may have noticed that there wasn't a new episode of IN BOB WE TRUST this weekend. That wasn't an oversight - there wasn't one produced. IBWT and ALL-NEW GAME OVERTHINKER are both taking a bit of a hiatus. There won't be new episodes of either series for a time, and at this point I can't specifically say when they'll be back or in what form.
Don't freak out.
Here's the thing: The reality of Internet-based original programming is in the midst of a major evolutionary shakeup. As original web creators consolidate and grow bigger, in tandem with major media companies becoming increasingly part of the equation; the old model for web video i.e. self-producers making episodes week-to-week on their own self-determined schedule is gradually giving way to a more traditional TV-style "seasonal" model whereby shows come and go in arranged runs. You'll note, for example, that ScrewAttack's DEATH BATTLE is currently taking its break, and popular series like EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY have adopted the seasonal model to increase their production caliber and accommodate their live shows.
So it also goes for independent producers like myself: IN BOB WE TRUST and GAME OVERTHINKER were produced for a set run with ScrewAttack, that first run has concluded and now they're on break; while fans of ScrewAttack's broader content-library have no doubt taken note that BEST/WORST EVER and TOP TEN have started back up again. So goes the cycle. I can't say when my two series will return at this point, or in what form: It's possible that IN BOB WE TRUST (for example) might find a different homebase in the interim. It's also possible (again, for example) that you might see me on ScrewAttack with another brand-new series. All I can say on that front is that you should stay tuned.
Especially since that's far from all I've got going on :)
There are (at least) two major new projects I've currently got in production, at least one of which you should be hearing about very soon and another which is going to substantially expand my footprint in multimedia; so stay tuned for news on both of those fronts.
Finally, tops on my 2016 "to-do" list is to replace this blog (which is, I'm aware, very out of date for the kind of operation I'm increasingly running here) with a more functional, modern website. So keep an eye on that as well (especially if you've got experience in building professional sites and have anything to reccommend.)
As ever, while I'm aiming every day to once again be supporting myself and my work through regular employment in my chosen field(s), the new media landscape remains a tricky place in that regard. If you'd like what I'm putting out and would like to help ensure that I can keep providing it for you, please consider joining (or increasing!) support for The MovieBob Patreon.
Stay tuned!
REVIEW: 13 HOURS - THE SECRET SOLDIERS OF BENGHAZI (2016)
The only thing anyone seems to want to know about 13 HOURS is whether or not it’s “political.” To me, that’s a stupid question – everything is political to one degree or another, and even if you try to not engage in such consciously people are going to read a political dimension into whatever they want to no matter what.
Same goes for the actual events (the 2012 attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya) being dramatized: There shouldn’t really bemuch of a political dimension to an attack on a diplomat beyond “that’s not how you express whatever grievance you happen to have,” but everyone knows there will be anyway. What makes Benghazi especially irritating in terms of politicized tragedy is that it isn’t even politicized in an appropriate or meaningful way: There are real, serious questions to be asked and issues to be raised about these events, in terms of whether “we” (the U.S./West) should intervene in situations like Libya, why or why not, broader foreign policy, etc; but the only thing anyone in U.S. political circles has actually come to care about is whether or not Benghazi can/will/should be used as a cudgel with which to beat back the presidential candidacy of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Which, of course, begs a question of its own: Who’s going to be more obnoxious about 13 HOURS? Your racist, Trump-supporting/Fox-watching uncle on Facebook – or your overzealous bro’gressive cousin who keeps insisting you “FEEL THE BERN!!!!!” on Twitter?
As such, it would’ve been impossible for 13 HOURS to be fundamentally “apolitical” since even saying “it was sad that these people died” implies (fairly or not) a certain level of sympathy (if not explicit “support”) for they’re having been there in the first place which is essentially the key (non-sensationalized) political issue of the entire incident. And yet the film and director Michael Bay will almost-certainly be given positive marks (even in otherwise negative reviews) for “not being political,” on the grounds that they’ve managed to resist including a cutaway of a fiendishly-grinning Hillary explicitly ordering her underlings to feed the Americans to attackers before tossing a symbolic plastic army-man into her cartoonishly-oversized fireplace while lounging on a blood-red velvet couch sipping martinis with Huma Abbedin.
Not that it matters, of course: The mere existence of 13 HOURS as a button-pushing action-melodrama designed to make you sad (Michael Bay has somehow managed to go 11 movies before finally presenting a scene of an American flag being slow-motion shredded by a terrorist machine-gun) will likely be more than enough to guarantee that Fox, talk-radio and the Breitbart thugs to order their low-information hinterland acolytes to symbolically pack theatres over the next few weeks. Which is sort of darkly amusing, since the main thing that will end up distinguishing 13 HOURS from previous recipients of artificial right-wing box-office-inflation like PASSION OF THE CHRIST and AMERICAN SNIPER is that 13 HOURS isn’t a complete a total piece of shit.
It’s certainly not a great film, don’t misunderstand: This isn’t an especially well-made or important film, but it is a engaging and technically-superior action film that serves as a reminder that whatever else you think of Michael Bay when he shows up to work there are just certain things he does better than anyone else in the business; and lavishing near-pornographic love on depictions of high-end military machinery and the men wield it doing what they’re (both) built for in extended action setpieces is one of them. Whether or not it’s ghoulish to use a major recent tragedy like Benghazi as fodder for what’s effectively BLACK HAWK DOWN: THE ALL MONEY-SHOTS VERSION, it’s hard to deny – this guy can shoot the hell out of a firefight.
Dramatically, though, it’s another matter entirely. I don’t know or care to know Bay’s politics, but whatever they are the film stops short of assigning specific blame for the lack of manpower/support that dooms the victims of the attack apart from infrequently hammering that yeah, someone probably should have sent more men and/or guns. Apart from that fact being a likely disappointment to the Fox News crowd and a relief to the Clinton campaign, it’s net-effect for the film is that there’s an lack of dramatic tension visceral enough to compliment the action: Morally reprehensible or not, the “Evil Queen Hillary cravenly sacrified Our Boys to The Enemy!!!” version of this story would’ve at least been more narratively compelling than “Fighting men get the shit end of the stick – what else is new?,” which is where 13 HOURS decides to plant its slow-motion waving flag, save for the (theoretically) notable detail that there’s aren’t your typical fighting men.
Indeed, the one respect in which 13 HOURS opts to feign toward novelty is in offering what’s likely the first unambiguously-heroic portrait of private military contractors (read: mercenaries) in a modern/post-9/11 setting. In lieu of focusing on the diplomatic outpost housing ambassador Chris Stevens (the initial target of the attack), the story centers on a team of soldiers-for-hire stationed nearby as security for a covert CIA operation that’s technically not supposed to exist; a scenario which briefly threatens to present an intriguing dillema: These guys have the firepower, manpower and proximity to potentially rescue the diplomats and hold back the attack; but if they go active they risk causing an international incident by revealing their and The Agency’s technically-illegal presence in Benghazi.
Unfortunately, neither Bay nor the film seem particularly interested in any real exploration of that. The mercs are our heroes because they’re story has the most action-ready material and because they allow what would otherwise be a grueling siege/survival horror show to be fronted by quintessential embodiments of the Michael Bay hero: Hulking slabs of muscle hauling immense high-end weaponry with faces concealed behind indistinguishable beards and varying styles of mirrored sunglasses, with any potential narrative shading regarding their war-for-profit employment status repeatedly undercut in favor of reminders that they were soldiers, SEALs, Marines, Rangers etc beforehand.
Instead, the drama sets up a disappointingly rote dichotomy between the mercs and their CIA/State Department charges on an overstated-feeling class-divide: The Agents are all snobby, Ivy League-educated know-it-alls who are overconfident that they’ve “got this” and don’t need these boorish musclebound cavemen around getting the way; while the warriors are all noble, jovial ‘bros overflowing with common sense and working-class resolve, with David Costabile in the Walter Peck role as a dismissive/arrogant CIA Chief.
Sure, one get’s what they’re going for here and it’s hard to argue that there isn’t a growing respect/experience divide between soldiers and those issuing orders in the 21stCentury military, but 13 HOURS version of it is Saturday morning cartoon-level business, to say nothing of how it (however inadvertently) plays into the stereotype of American soldiers as low-intelligence brutes when in fact U.S. military enlistees are (percentage-wise) better educated than the civilian population overall. It also, unfortunately, means that Chris Stevens is basically a non-entity in the story: They obviously can’t include “the” martyr of Benghazi among the snob meanies, but Bay clearly has zero interest in the heroics of anyone who isn’t hauling the latest and greatest in munitions or who doesn’t look like one of the guys from Altered Beast one power-up away from werewolf-mode; so Stevens is relegated to being a symbolic MacGuffin of only slightly greater import than the aforementioned bullet-riddled flag.
Still, once the actual siege and shooting gets underway and Bay is in his element, it’s hard not to be impressed. There’s enough deliberate chaos on display (that no one seems to know what’s going on or how to discern enemies from local-friendlies is a recurring theme) to mistake some of the bigger moments for examples of the time-filling hyperactive nonsense that clogs up the TRANSFORMERS movies, but overall Bay has seldom had better restraint and control of action geography or composition. The firefights are among the best-looking since ACT OF VALOR (though here going for glossy, high-contrast stylization as opposed to stark realism) and the big blowouts are seriously impressive – though it may have been a miscalculation to blatantly recycle the infamous “bomb’s eye view” shot from PEARL HARBOR in a key moment. It's enough to make you wish, again, that Bay actually had something to say with all this - especially when you run into interesting but out-of-place feeling sequences like the "fun" he seems to have with the idea that the attackers are wielding heavy-arms they don't actually know how to use versus a sudden left-turn wherein the anonymous enemy casualties are mourned by their loved ones.
2015 Oscars - Whatever
So we're doing this again? Okay.
This is a frustrating year for the Oscars, which is to say more frustrating than previous years where you're at least garaunteed the spectacle of being annoyed that no one can seem to decide whether to name each year's show for the (current) year that the ceremony airs or the (previous) year that the nominated films are from, which only becomes more confusing as we proceed on into this continuing business of many of the nominees not coming out beyond NY or LA qualifying runs until February or later. Instead, this year's added frustration is about a lack of obvious "villains" - as ever, there are plenty of snubs to be bitter over, but not a lot of obviously "bad" calls to redirect that bitterness onto.
Well, almost none. Pretty-much every nomination for THE DANISH GIRL could be handily scrubbed, and the Acting noms are overstuffed with "Award Fave" names turning in middling work (Cranston, Fassbender) - which is puzzling, since everyone is so sure DiCaprio is finally going to win (Christian Bale "Dude, here you go - now dial it back, we'd like you to make it to middle-age!"-style) they could've easily packed some more interesting choices in around him just for show. Meanwhile, Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett wound up with the Best/Best-Supporting split for CAROL, which will now accelerate the debate over what to do about nominations for romance movies where two partners have equal-scale roles in an era where we're only going to see more same-sex pairings; which is interesting because I have no idea what the solution is.
The elephant in the room will once again be a look of diversity in the major categories, though I'd (gently) offer that it's less of a surprise this year: Like it or not, The Academy was never going to nominate TANGERINE and Academy Boomers by and large likely looked STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON and wondered why they'd received a screener for something that looks/sounds to them indistinguishable from RIDE ALONG or a FRIDAY sequel - sucks, but there it is. BEASTS OF NO NATION wasn't going to get in because there's a substantial animus on the studio/producer side of the industry toward Netflix's potential negative impact on the theatre business. The "Great Brown Hope" for 2015 would've been CREED, and the studio never understood what they had with that movie until it was too late: They figured they had a "budget" answer to the STAR WARS/JURASSIC WORLD nostalgia-sequel trend at best, never once considering that Coogler and company were going to deliver one of the year's best films.
Anyway...
BEST PICTURE:
The Big Short
Bridge of Spies
Brooklyn
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Room
Spotlight
Sucks that CAROL isn't here, ROOM is overpraised, otherwise hard to be annoyed by any of this. BRIDGE OF SPIES will be retroactively declared the best movie of 2015 once people see it, a'la SHAWSHANK in '94. Glad to see two sci-fi movies make the cut, rooting for THE MARTIAN, won't be as annoyed as some others when it turns out to be SPOTLIGHT, worried that THE REVENANT will win because Innaritu's ego is quite big enough as it is, thank you.
BEST ACTOR:
Bryan Cranston - Trumbo
Matt Damon - The Martian
Leonardo DiCaprio - The Revenant
Michael Fassbender - Steve Jobs
Eddie Redmayne - The Danish Girl
DiCaprio is going to win, though he already should have for WOLF OF WALL STREET. This is probably the worst major category this year: Cranston and Fassbender were both middling to miscast and Redmayne continues his streak as the most overpraised flat-out bad actor working.
SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Christian Bale - The Big Short
Tom Hardy - The Revenant
Mark Ruffalo - Spotlight
Mark Rylance - Bridge of Spies
Sylvester Stallone - Creed
I feel like Stallone has this, "win for the career" style, even though he was legitimately excellent in CREED. But Rylance wowed everyone in BRIDGE and The Academy loves theatre mainstays who make late cinematic bows, plus BIG SHORT is the big out of nowhere Awards Circuit darling of the year and The Academy does love Christian Bale.
BEST ACTRESS:
Cate Blanchett - Carol
Brie Larson - Room
Jennifer Lawrence - Joy
Charlotte Rampling - 45 Years
Saoirse Ronan - Brooklyn
This feels like where Blanchett will win for CAROL being "snubbed" otherwise. Jennifer Lawrence (or at least her "people") are likely praying that she doesn't get it, with JOY being widely dismissed otherwise and the backlash-bomb primed and ready now that "My daughters really love Katniss" isn't going to be there to absorb it anymore.
SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Jennifer Jason Leigh - The Hateful Eight
Rooney Mara - Carol
Rachel McAdams - Spotlight
Alicia Vikander - The Danish Girl
Kate Winslet - Steve Jobs
I feel like this is going to Vikander. The movie is bad, but she's good in it and (more germane to the discussion, sadly) she's the current-model "smokin' hot chick who can actually act" for the Awards Circuit. My preference would be for Leigh to take it, both as HATEFUL EIGHT's only major representative and because if we're going to hand DiCaprio an Oscar for having a rough shoot on REVENANT an actress who also spent most of a Western being cold, blood-drench and beaten-up.
BEST DIRECTOR
Adam McKay- The Big Short
George Miller - Mad Max: Fury Road
Alejandro G. Innaritu - The Revenant
Lenny Abrahamson - Room
Tom McCarthy - Spotlight
It's bullshit that Ridley Scott isn't here (to say nothing of Spielberg!), but that's what happens when A.) everyone already knows you're great and B.) you opt to not actually DO anything great for almost a decade. Miller is the sentimental favorite here, but I'm feeling like this is going to McKay. BIG SHORT has been really well-recieved and he in particular is a popular, well-liked figure in the industry for awhile now. Just please, please not Inarritu again - and I liked the movie, too!
CINEMATOGRAPHY
The Hateful Eight
Sicario
The Revenant
Mad Max: Fury Road
Carol
Should be MAD MAX, will probably be REVENANT, HATEFUL could sneak in because fellow DPs adore the 70mm revival. Honestly they're all worthy choices here, not a bad pick in the bunch.
EDITING
The Big Short
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Revenant
Spotlight
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
MAD MAX should take this one walking away, but I have a suspicion that STAR WARS is going to roll right over all the technical categories.
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
The Big Short
Brooklyn
Carol
The Martian
Room
Tough one. Had been feeling like this is where CAROL would get it's "sorry for no best picture" heat, but The Academy clearly really, really loves THE BIG SHORT.
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Bridge of Spies
Ex Machina
Inside Out
Spotlight
Straight Outta Compton
SPOTLIGHT will take this one. Would prefer BRIDGE OF SPIES.
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Anomalisa
Boy and the World
Inside Out
Shaun the Sheep Movie
When Marnie Was There
Good lineup. I honestly, at this point, think INSIDE OUT is actually marginally better overally than ANOMALISA, but I think ANOMALISA will win based on animation folks loving the idea of the medium getting to bask in Kaufman's "grownup indie" cred - plus the movie is really good.
The Academy Awards will be take place February 28, 2016.
This is a frustrating year for the Oscars, which is to say more frustrating than previous years where you're at least garaunteed the spectacle of being annoyed that no one can seem to decide whether to name each year's show for the (current) year that the ceremony airs or the (previous) year that the nominated films are from, which only becomes more confusing as we proceed on into this continuing business of many of the nominees not coming out beyond NY or LA qualifying runs until February or later. Instead, this year's added frustration is about a lack of obvious "villains" - as ever, there are plenty of snubs to be bitter over, but not a lot of obviously "bad" calls to redirect that bitterness onto.
Well, almost none. Pretty-much every nomination for THE DANISH GIRL could be handily scrubbed, and the Acting noms are overstuffed with "Award Fave" names turning in middling work (Cranston, Fassbender) - which is puzzling, since everyone is so sure DiCaprio is finally going to win (Christian Bale "Dude, here you go - now dial it back, we'd like you to make it to middle-age!"-style) they could've easily packed some more interesting choices in around him just for show. Meanwhile, Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett wound up with the Best/Best-Supporting split for CAROL, which will now accelerate the debate over what to do about nominations for romance movies where two partners have equal-scale roles in an era where we're only going to see more same-sex pairings; which is interesting because I have no idea what the solution is.
The elephant in the room will once again be a look of diversity in the major categories, though I'd (gently) offer that it's less of a surprise this year: Like it or not, The Academy was never going to nominate TANGERINE and Academy Boomers by and large likely looked STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON and wondered why they'd received a screener for something that looks/sounds to them indistinguishable from RIDE ALONG or a FRIDAY sequel - sucks, but there it is. BEASTS OF NO NATION wasn't going to get in because there's a substantial animus on the studio/producer side of the industry toward Netflix's potential negative impact on the theatre business. The "Great Brown Hope" for 2015 would've been CREED, and the studio never understood what they had with that movie until it was too late: They figured they had a "budget" answer to the STAR WARS/JURASSIC WORLD nostalgia-sequel trend at best, never once considering that Coogler and company were going to deliver one of the year's best films.
Anyway...
BEST PICTURE:
The Big Short
Bridge of Spies
Brooklyn
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Room
Spotlight
Sucks that CAROL isn't here, ROOM is overpraised, otherwise hard to be annoyed by any of this. BRIDGE OF SPIES will be retroactively declared the best movie of 2015 once people see it, a'la SHAWSHANK in '94. Glad to see two sci-fi movies make the cut, rooting for THE MARTIAN, won't be as annoyed as some others when it turns out to be SPOTLIGHT, worried that THE REVENANT will win because Innaritu's ego is quite big enough as it is, thank you.
BEST ACTOR:
Bryan Cranston - Trumbo
Matt Damon - The Martian
Leonardo DiCaprio - The Revenant
Michael Fassbender - Steve Jobs
Eddie Redmayne - The Danish Girl
DiCaprio is going to win, though he already should have for WOLF OF WALL STREET. This is probably the worst major category this year: Cranston and Fassbender were both middling to miscast and Redmayne continues his streak as the most overpraised flat-out bad actor working.
SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Christian Bale - The Big Short
Tom Hardy - The Revenant
Mark Ruffalo - Spotlight
Mark Rylance - Bridge of Spies
Sylvester Stallone - Creed
I feel like Stallone has this, "win for the career" style, even though he was legitimately excellent in CREED. But Rylance wowed everyone in BRIDGE and The Academy loves theatre mainstays who make late cinematic bows, plus BIG SHORT is the big out of nowhere Awards Circuit darling of the year and The Academy does love Christian Bale.
BEST ACTRESS:
Cate Blanchett - Carol
Brie Larson - Room
Jennifer Lawrence - Joy
Charlotte Rampling - 45 Years
Saoirse Ronan - Brooklyn
This feels like where Blanchett will win for CAROL being "snubbed" otherwise. Jennifer Lawrence (or at least her "people") are likely praying that she doesn't get it, with JOY being widely dismissed otherwise and the backlash-bomb primed and ready now that "My daughters really love Katniss" isn't going to be there to absorb it anymore.
SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Jennifer Jason Leigh - The Hateful Eight
Rooney Mara - Carol
Rachel McAdams - Spotlight
Alicia Vikander - The Danish Girl
Kate Winslet - Steve Jobs
I feel like this is going to Vikander. The movie is bad, but she's good in it and (more germane to the discussion, sadly) she's the current-model "smokin' hot chick who can actually act" for the Awards Circuit. My preference would be for Leigh to take it, both as HATEFUL EIGHT's only major representative and because if we're going to hand DiCaprio an Oscar for having a rough shoot on REVENANT an actress who also spent most of a Western being cold, blood-drench and beaten-up.
BEST DIRECTOR
Adam McKay- The Big Short
George Miller - Mad Max: Fury Road
Alejandro G. Innaritu - The Revenant
Lenny Abrahamson - Room
Tom McCarthy - Spotlight
It's bullshit that Ridley Scott isn't here (to say nothing of Spielberg!), but that's what happens when A.) everyone already knows you're great and B.) you opt to not actually DO anything great for almost a decade. Miller is the sentimental favorite here, but I'm feeling like this is going to McKay. BIG SHORT has been really well-recieved and he in particular is a popular, well-liked figure in the industry for awhile now. Just please, please not Inarritu again - and I liked the movie, too!
CINEMATOGRAPHY
The Hateful Eight
Sicario
The Revenant
Mad Max: Fury Road
Carol
Should be MAD MAX, will probably be REVENANT, HATEFUL could sneak in because fellow DPs adore the 70mm revival. Honestly they're all worthy choices here, not a bad pick in the bunch.
EDITING
The Big Short
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Revenant
Spotlight
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
MAD MAX should take this one walking away, but I have a suspicion that STAR WARS is going to roll right over all the technical categories.
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
The Big Short
Brooklyn
Carol
The Martian
Room
Tough one. Had been feeling like this is where CAROL would get it's "sorry for no best picture" heat, but The Academy clearly really, really loves THE BIG SHORT.
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Bridge of Spies
Ex Machina
Inside Out
Spotlight
Straight Outta Compton
SPOTLIGHT will take this one. Would prefer BRIDGE OF SPIES.
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Anomalisa
Boy and the World
Inside Out
Shaun the Sheep Movie
When Marnie Was There
Good lineup. I honestly, at this point, think INSIDE OUT is actually marginally better overally than ANOMALISA, but I think ANOMALISA will win based on animation folks loving the idea of the medium getting to bask in Kaufman's "grownup indie" cred - plus the movie is really good.
The Academy Awards will be take place February 28, 2016.
Much Needed
If you're like me, about 2 years ago you considered THE VENTURE BROS one of the Top 10 TV series ever to air. And if you're like me, you imagine you'd probably still feel that way when Season 6 (finally!) starts airing later this month... except it's been so long between seasons this time you've pretty-much forgotten where the narrative left off - which is kind of a big deal, since THE VENTURE BROS went from making fun of dense comic-book style mythology to actually having a super-dense mythology of its own (has there ever been an attempt to mock longform continuity where that didn't happen?)
Well, I'm pretty-much psyched again!
Fortunately, those concerns have been heard: Just like they did for the similarly-stalled Season 4, Adult Swim has released a continuity catch-up reel hosted by Gary/Henchman 21:
Well, I'm pretty-much psyched again!
Review: THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015)
NOTE: This review made possible in part by donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you want to see more like it, please consider becoming a Patron.
Being a fan of Quentin Tarantino (or, really, even just being a critic inclined to award one of his films an asterisk-free positive review) has of late been a frustrating exercise in repeating the phrase: "Yes, but he actually pulls it off!"
In the two decades since PULP FICTION, the onetime insurgent has firmly established himself as the Id of contemporary American cinema, and as such tends to operate within attention-getting parameters that only appear all too easy to imitate to lesser filmmakers. "No, you see, I'm actually commenting on racism!" "You're supposed to be grossed-out!" "She gives and gets as good as any of the men, so we're treating her as an equal!" These are the familiar retorts of Tarantino's legions of lesser imitators, wannabes and in some cases acolytes (looking at you, Eli Roth;) deployed on cue to deflect criticism or (if we're being frank) to whip defenders into a rhetorical frenzy. And in 99.9% of case, it's bullshit - increasingly tiresome bullshit, at that.
But, damn it, above it all (and evermore above nearly everyone else) there still stands Quentin as the living, breathing 0.01% - the guy who just keeps getting away with it. Not because he's popular, or because he's famous, or because the sons and daughters of the cinematic world he exists as the heart of (he's the tone-setter: Whatever obscura he conjures today will be the new bar of "cool" tomorrow and mainstream enough to be mixed into Marvel epics and Disney fairytales a year from now) but because he always backs it up. The wannabes' bullshit-bravado consistently turns out to be his real deal. The fakers' dodges are his stone-cold truth. Where other would-be provocateurs wield smoke and mirrors, Tarantino remains the magician who really can part the sea and call down the lightning.
And, as you'll likely have already surmised, this power is once again on full and righteous display in THE HATEFUL EIGHT; whose basic conceit - eight bad guys, zero good guys, one location, let's watch what happens - sounds an awful lot like the sort of shallow excuse to load the screen with self-indulgent perversity (Matt Zoller Seitz, in his negative review, described it as "just watching a bunch of scorpions in a bucket,") and dismiss any critique with "It's a meditation on violence!" followed with "What'd you expect - we put 'hateful' right in the title!" And in 99.9% of cases, you'd be correct to call that out for the obvious cop-out that it sounds like.
But this is that 0.01%. And, damn it, he actually pulls it off.
(SPOILERS from here on out.)
The setup really is as basic as you've been led to believe: We're in Wyoming, sometime not long after the end of the Civil War. A blizzard has waylaid bounty hunter John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell), his prisoner-in-transport (Jennifer Jason Leigh as a venom-spewing hillbilly murderess called Daisy Domergue), fellow bounty hunter and former ex-slave turned Union mankiller Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and a racist ex-Confederate marauder named Chris Mannix who claims to be the incoming Sheriff of Red Rock (Walton Goggins) at a remote mountain inn; where something seems "off" as soon as they arrive: The door is broken (you have to nail it shut every time someone enters or exits), the owners have apparently left on Holiday with a mysterious Mexican named Bob (Damian Bichir) left to manage things, and the space is already occupied by fellow travelers including a chipper Englishman (Tim Roth) identifying himself as Red Rock's incoming (professional) hangman, Bruce Dern as an aging Confederate General familiar to Mannix (and at least one other...) and Michael Madsen as quietly-withdrawn cowboy Joe Cage. (That makes eight, with Tarantino veteran James Parks as a decidedly non-hateful stagecoach driver none the less marooned with the titular octet of villains.)
There are other clues of something unsettling being afoot (an "unlucky" half-plucked chicken, an unexpectedly bad-tasting pot of coffee, a lone jellybean lying out of place on the floor) and John Ruth - who, this being The Tarantino Universe, is expected to have some experience being stuck in the snow with unfamiliar company - thinks he's got a pretty good idea what's up: One or more of his fellow occupants is an ally of Domergue's, waiting to spring a trap. But, either way, everyone is still stuck together for awhile; and to make matters worse several of the players already have entirely separate reasons to be at eachother's throats. For example: Major Marquis' head was once a prized-bounty for the now-former Confederacy, and Dern's General has come to Wyoming to symbolically bury a beloved son who hasn't been seen for awhile...
I got into a (fulfilling) conversation not long ago on the subject of HATEFUL and it's seeming shallowness, and - after having opined that Tarantino typically has more to say than he let's on - found myself stuck trying to articulate exactly what he may have been saying here. It's a tricky question, mainly because Tarantino doesn't, in fact, always load a message into his work; and when he does it's usually something pretty difficult to argue over ("Nazis were bad." "Slavery was bad." "Misogyny is bad.") Quentin is a creature almost purely of and by the cinema, and he's never seemed particularly interested in matters of morality or philosophy. That's not to say moral or philosophical elements aren't part of the fabric: DJANGO UNCHAINED, KILL BILL or even DEATH PROOF do end up having a lot on their mind (he's too smart and much too detail-oriented for things like that not to make it in), but he's clearly more invested in what films say about themselves, the process of their making or the way they're received by an audience. That's not shallowness - that's Aestheticism.
And in HATEFUL EIGHT, Tarantino The Aesthete (or Aesthetician?) is primarily interested in exploring the nature of narrative itself. It's a film about storytelling and stories, how they can be used as weapons or traps, and how an audience processes the story being told. That makes it less a cousin to fellow racially-charged Western DJANGO and more akin to INGLORIOUS BASTERDS; which not only featured movies as both literal and figurative weapons of war but also begins by letting audiences revel in Jewish-American avengers brutalizing Nazis but ends shortly after showing off a theater full of Nazis themselves in a Goebbels-produced propaganda film that looks very much like the Nazi flip-side of the same breed of pulpy mythmaking (right down to a shared visual-cue of swastika's carved by knives in very different contexts.)
The metaphor is more explicit in BASTERDS, since the setting and story allowed for film to feature literally in the story. EIGHT is set just before the (practical) dawn of Motion Pictures, so instead the storytelling here is all about oral-tradition: The Hateful Eight are mostly strangers or threadbare aquaintances, mainly "knowing" eachother through reputation, self-exposition or by minor bits of documentation that are supposed to identify them (John Ruth's warrant for Daisy, Oswaldo the Executioner's calling-card;) with Joe Gage spending his hours quietly scrawling his life story ("only thing I'm qualified to write") in a journal for those in need of less subtle indicators of where the game is at this time.
The point is that stories like these are only as good as our faith in the telling, and given the people involved that's not very good at all. At one point, John Ruth reacts to the revelation that a particular fact of Marquis' backstory that had endeared The Major to him is a complete fabrication (and what's worse, an obvious one that everyone but Ruth had already seen clear through) with abject betrayal - as though his heart had been ripped out, Which is all the more odd, considering that John Ruth is a vicious sadist who goes out of his way to catch his quarry alive just to watch their executions and takes repulsive pleasure in beating Domergue to a bloody pulp every time she speaks out of turn (but then, Domergue is a murderous racist, and so on down it goes.)
The film goes on like that, with each new revelation (there's a time-reversal flashback that flips our understanding of prior events on its head midway through, a Tarantino signature) designed to manipulate and throw-off the audience's perception of reality and present-narrative. But more so than even that, the writer/director is clearly taking obvious enjoyment in playing with audience expectations about genre, narrative and the story itself: The title is actually an understatement, as we soon come to realize that these aren't just hateful people but genuinely rotten, subhuman monsters: Ruth is a proud sadist, The General earned "The Butcher" as a wartime nickname, Mannix is of a family of vigilantes specializing in ravaging free Black towns, Daisy is something like a screaming witch out of Shakespeare and just wait til you find out what Bob, Oswaldo and Joe Gage have been up to.
For a long while, it feels like The Major will at least be some sort of antihero, given his DJANGO-reminiscent backstory and Jackson's totemic place in the Tarantino canon; and Quentin teases that possibility out as long as possible before cruelly ripping it away in a monologue sequence wherein The General finally learns (in detail) the fate of his missing son that represents a new career highlight for both writer/director and performer and a grim revelation that a presumed plurality of the audience has been caught rooting for a guy who's among the worst of the whole crew. That Daisy Domergue gets repeatedly slugged across the jaw is a recurring bit of ugly scene-punctuation throughout the film, but in aesthetic terms nobody in HATEFUL EIGHT gets smacked around as hard as the audience...
...even if they don't realize it. Tarantino is a student of base-satisfying grindhouse schlock above all else, and he knows better than anyone how to stage a moment to trick an audience into accepting acts of grueling brutality as righteous catharsis. The Major's monologue, climaxing with the relation of an act of violence that's warranted a sentence of death by samurai sword in at least two other Tarantino yarns, has been greeted by cheers and laughter in screenings nationwide, which one can easily imagine soiling a more sober observer on the film itself - particularly if one is (for some reason) inclined to take Joe Popcorn's applause as evidence that he (or she) actually understands what they're actually applauding.
HATEFUL EIGHT may not be the new all-time champion of using the cheers of clueless viewers as a self-indicting punchline (of the audience, not the film); that's still Paul Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS. But unless one is predisposed to imagine Tarantino as an unironic gawker at the Roman Colosseum, it's hard to imagine how anyone can see these sequences and not picture Quentin himself perched in the high-shadows, watching the watchers and rubbing his hands with puckish satisfaction: "You dumb assholes. Think about what I just got you to applaud for." There's an argument to be made where there's a level of cruelty to that, as well - the skilled, clever filmmaker lording his mastery of the form over the pathetic masses - but that doesn't mean he's not good at it or that it doesn't work.
And to be certain, Taratino's technical chops are sharper than ever. The stagebound screenplay rockets by feeling barely half as long as it is (this review concerns the 3 hour "roadshow" version, which features an overture and intermission) and what first feels like the techno-fetishist joke of shooting a single-room piece in expensive 70mm UltraPanavision film reveals itself as a canny way to make every inch of the frame sparkle with life and important detail - rarely has the gag of putting vital actions in the background of a seemingly-unrelated moment worked to greater effect; while the legendary Ennio Morricone's clever, playfully self-referencing score loads every scene with mythic emotional undercurrents that serve to ease the transition when the film abruptly cuts from being a talky, meditative chamber-piece to an absurdly over-the-top locked-room bloodbath at about the midpoint. Midpoint, incidentally, being the point where Leigh's Domergue, who's been simmering like a rattlesnake for the most part, gets to cut loose with a savagely energy that could well make hers the latest career salvaged by Tarantino's unparalleled eye for pairing talent with role; though it's Goggins who walks away as cast MVP, easily.
Speaking of cliche's that are tiresome regarding other films and filmmakers but ever-appropriate for Tarantino, THE HATEFUL EIGHT is an endurance test on multiple levels. It'll be too long for some, too talky for others, too violent for many and too unmoored from tepid moral/philosophical concerns for plenty; and even some who'll no doubt come to love it will have done so by failing the test to comprehend it: If you think there were any "good guys" by the end, that anyone was "redemeed" or that we're supposed to be "happy" about what's transpired, you missed the point - and if you're "happy" about what's transpired, well, thanks at least for becoming part of the entertainment for those who were paying attention.
This is mean, nasty, utterly uncompromised visionary filmmaking straight from the lizard brain of the filmmaker who is himself the lizard brain of his chosen medium; and the only thing more disturbing (yet repugnantly thrilling) about what he's accomplished is just how fabulously he accomplished it. Supposedly, Tarantino plans to fold up his director's chair after two more features - we should all be hoping against all hope that walking away turns out to be the one act as director he isn't capable of.
This review made possible in part by donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you want to see more like it, please consider becoming a Patron.
Being a fan of Quentin Tarantino (or, really, even just being a critic inclined to award one of his films an asterisk-free positive review) has of late been a frustrating exercise in repeating the phrase: "Yes, but he actually pulls it off!"
In the two decades since PULP FICTION, the onetime insurgent has firmly established himself as the Id of contemporary American cinema, and as such tends to operate within attention-getting parameters that only appear all too easy to imitate to lesser filmmakers. "No, you see, I'm actually commenting on racism!" "You're supposed to be grossed-out!" "She gives and gets as good as any of the men, so we're treating her as an equal!" These are the familiar retorts of Tarantino's legions of lesser imitators, wannabes and in some cases acolytes (looking at you, Eli Roth;) deployed on cue to deflect criticism or (if we're being frank) to whip defenders into a rhetorical frenzy. And in 99.9% of case, it's bullshit - increasingly tiresome bullshit, at that.
But, damn it, above it all (and evermore above nearly everyone else) there still stands Quentin as the living, breathing 0.01% - the guy who just keeps getting away with it. Not because he's popular, or because he's famous, or because the sons and daughters of the cinematic world he exists as the heart of (he's the tone-setter: Whatever obscura he conjures today will be the new bar of "cool" tomorrow and mainstream enough to be mixed into Marvel epics and Disney fairytales a year from now) but because he always backs it up. The wannabes' bullshit-bravado consistently turns out to be his real deal. The fakers' dodges are his stone-cold truth. Where other would-be provocateurs wield smoke and mirrors, Tarantino remains the magician who really can part the sea and call down the lightning.
And, as you'll likely have already surmised, this power is once again on full and righteous display in THE HATEFUL EIGHT; whose basic conceit - eight bad guys, zero good guys, one location, let's watch what happens - sounds an awful lot like the sort of shallow excuse to load the screen with self-indulgent perversity (Matt Zoller Seitz, in his negative review, described it as "just watching a bunch of scorpions in a bucket,") and dismiss any critique with "It's a meditation on violence!" followed with "What'd you expect - we put 'hateful' right in the title!" And in 99.9% of cases, you'd be correct to call that out for the obvious cop-out that it sounds like.
But this is that 0.01%. And, damn it, he actually pulls it off.
(SPOILERS from here on out.)
The setup really is as basic as you've been led to believe: We're in Wyoming, sometime not long after the end of the Civil War. A blizzard has waylaid bounty hunter John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell), his prisoner-in-transport (Jennifer Jason Leigh as a venom-spewing hillbilly murderess called Daisy Domergue), fellow bounty hunter and former ex-slave turned Union mankiller Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and a racist ex-Confederate marauder named Chris Mannix who claims to be the incoming Sheriff of Red Rock (Walton Goggins) at a remote mountain inn; where something seems "off" as soon as they arrive: The door is broken (you have to nail it shut every time someone enters or exits), the owners have apparently left on Holiday with a mysterious Mexican named Bob (Damian Bichir) left to manage things, and the space is already occupied by fellow travelers including a chipper Englishman (Tim Roth) identifying himself as Red Rock's incoming (professional) hangman, Bruce Dern as an aging Confederate General familiar to Mannix (and at least one other...) and Michael Madsen as quietly-withdrawn cowboy Joe Cage. (That makes eight, with Tarantino veteran James Parks as a decidedly non-hateful stagecoach driver none the less marooned with the titular octet of villains.)
There are other clues of something unsettling being afoot (an "unlucky" half-plucked chicken, an unexpectedly bad-tasting pot of coffee, a lone jellybean lying out of place on the floor) and John Ruth - who, this being The Tarantino Universe, is expected to have some experience being stuck in the snow with unfamiliar company - thinks he's got a pretty good idea what's up: One or more of his fellow occupants is an ally of Domergue's, waiting to spring a trap. But, either way, everyone is still stuck together for awhile; and to make matters worse several of the players already have entirely separate reasons to be at eachother's throats. For example: Major Marquis' head was once a prized-bounty for the now-former Confederacy, and Dern's General has come to Wyoming to symbolically bury a beloved son who hasn't been seen for awhile...
I got into a (fulfilling) conversation not long ago on the subject of HATEFUL and it's seeming shallowness, and - after having opined that Tarantino typically has more to say than he let's on - found myself stuck trying to articulate exactly what he may have been saying here. It's a tricky question, mainly because Tarantino doesn't, in fact, always load a message into his work; and when he does it's usually something pretty difficult to argue over ("Nazis were bad." "Slavery was bad." "Misogyny is bad.") Quentin is a creature almost purely of and by the cinema, and he's never seemed particularly interested in matters of morality or philosophy. That's not to say moral or philosophical elements aren't part of the fabric: DJANGO UNCHAINED, KILL BILL or even DEATH PROOF do end up having a lot on their mind (he's too smart and much too detail-oriented for things like that not to make it in), but he's clearly more invested in what films say about themselves, the process of their making or the way they're received by an audience. That's not shallowness - that's Aestheticism.
And in HATEFUL EIGHT, Tarantino The Aesthete (or Aesthetician?) is primarily interested in exploring the nature of narrative itself. It's a film about storytelling and stories, how they can be used as weapons or traps, and how an audience processes the story being told. That makes it less a cousin to fellow racially-charged Western DJANGO and more akin to INGLORIOUS BASTERDS; which not only featured movies as both literal and figurative weapons of war but also begins by letting audiences revel in Jewish-American avengers brutalizing Nazis but ends shortly after showing off a theater full of Nazis themselves in a Goebbels-produced propaganda film that looks very much like the Nazi flip-side of the same breed of pulpy mythmaking (right down to a shared visual-cue of swastika's carved by knives in very different contexts.)
The metaphor is more explicit in BASTERDS, since the setting and story allowed for film to feature literally in the story. EIGHT is set just before the (practical) dawn of Motion Pictures, so instead the storytelling here is all about oral-tradition: The Hateful Eight are mostly strangers or threadbare aquaintances, mainly "knowing" eachother through reputation, self-exposition or by minor bits of documentation that are supposed to identify them (John Ruth's warrant for Daisy, Oswaldo the Executioner's calling-card;) with Joe Gage spending his hours quietly scrawling his life story ("only thing I'm qualified to write") in a journal for those in need of less subtle indicators of where the game is at this time.
The point is that stories like these are only as good as our faith in the telling, and given the people involved that's not very good at all. At one point, John Ruth reacts to the revelation that a particular fact of Marquis' backstory that had endeared The Major to him is a complete fabrication (and what's worse, an obvious one that everyone but Ruth had already seen clear through) with abject betrayal - as though his heart had been ripped out, Which is all the more odd, considering that John Ruth is a vicious sadist who goes out of his way to catch his quarry alive just to watch their executions and takes repulsive pleasure in beating Domergue to a bloody pulp every time she speaks out of turn (but then, Domergue is a murderous racist, and so on down it goes.)
The film goes on like that, with each new revelation (there's a time-reversal flashback that flips our understanding of prior events on its head midway through, a Tarantino signature) designed to manipulate and throw-off the audience's perception of reality and present-narrative. But more so than even that, the writer/director is clearly taking obvious enjoyment in playing with audience expectations about genre, narrative and the story itself: The title is actually an understatement, as we soon come to realize that these aren't just hateful people but genuinely rotten, subhuman monsters: Ruth is a proud sadist, The General earned "The Butcher" as a wartime nickname, Mannix is of a family of vigilantes specializing in ravaging free Black towns, Daisy is something like a screaming witch out of Shakespeare and just wait til you find out what Bob, Oswaldo and Joe Gage have been up to.
For a long while, it feels like The Major will at least be some sort of antihero, given his DJANGO-reminiscent backstory and Jackson's totemic place in the Tarantino canon; and Quentin teases that possibility out as long as possible before cruelly ripping it away in a monologue sequence wherein The General finally learns (in detail) the fate of his missing son that represents a new career highlight for both writer/director and performer and a grim revelation that a presumed plurality of the audience has been caught rooting for a guy who's among the worst of the whole crew. That Daisy Domergue gets repeatedly slugged across the jaw is a recurring bit of ugly scene-punctuation throughout the film, but in aesthetic terms nobody in HATEFUL EIGHT gets smacked around as hard as the audience...
...even if they don't realize it. Tarantino is a student of base-satisfying grindhouse schlock above all else, and he knows better than anyone how to stage a moment to trick an audience into accepting acts of grueling brutality as righteous catharsis. The Major's monologue, climaxing with the relation of an act of violence that's warranted a sentence of death by samurai sword in at least two other Tarantino yarns, has been greeted by cheers and laughter in screenings nationwide, which one can easily imagine soiling a more sober observer on the film itself - particularly if one is (for some reason) inclined to take Joe Popcorn's applause as evidence that he (or she) actually understands what they're actually applauding.
HATEFUL EIGHT may not be the new all-time champion of using the cheers of clueless viewers as a self-indicting punchline (of the audience, not the film); that's still Paul Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS. But unless one is predisposed to imagine Tarantino as an unironic gawker at the Roman Colosseum, it's hard to imagine how anyone can see these sequences and not picture Quentin himself perched in the high-shadows, watching the watchers and rubbing his hands with puckish satisfaction: "You dumb assholes. Think about what I just got you to applaud for." There's an argument to be made where there's a level of cruelty to that, as well - the skilled, clever filmmaker lording his mastery of the form over the pathetic masses - but that doesn't mean he's not good at it or that it doesn't work.
And to be certain, Taratino's technical chops are sharper than ever. The stagebound screenplay rockets by feeling barely half as long as it is (this review concerns the 3 hour "roadshow" version, which features an overture and intermission) and what first feels like the techno-fetishist joke of shooting a single-room piece in expensive 70mm UltraPanavision film reveals itself as a canny way to make every inch of the frame sparkle with life and important detail - rarely has the gag of putting vital actions in the background of a seemingly-unrelated moment worked to greater effect; while the legendary Ennio Morricone's clever, playfully self-referencing score loads every scene with mythic emotional undercurrents that serve to ease the transition when the film abruptly cuts from being a talky, meditative chamber-piece to an absurdly over-the-top locked-room bloodbath at about the midpoint. Midpoint, incidentally, being the point where Leigh's Domergue, who's been simmering like a rattlesnake for the most part, gets to cut loose with a savagely energy that could well make hers the latest career salvaged by Tarantino's unparalleled eye for pairing talent with role; though it's Goggins who walks away as cast MVP, easily.
Speaking of cliche's that are tiresome regarding other films and filmmakers but ever-appropriate for Tarantino, THE HATEFUL EIGHT is an endurance test on multiple levels. It'll be too long for some, too talky for others, too violent for many and too unmoored from tepid moral/philosophical concerns for plenty; and even some who'll no doubt come to love it will have done so by failing the test to comprehend it: If you think there were any "good guys" by the end, that anyone was "redemeed" or that we're supposed to be "happy" about what's transpired, you missed the point - and if you're "happy" about what's transpired, well, thanks at least for becoming part of the entertainment for those who were paying attention.
This is mean, nasty, utterly uncompromised visionary filmmaking straight from the lizard brain of the filmmaker who is himself the lizard brain of his chosen medium; and the only thing more disturbing (yet repugnantly thrilling) about what he's accomplished is just how fabulously he accomplished it. Supposedly, Tarantino plans to fold up his director's chair after two more features - we should all be hoping against all hope that walking away turns out to be the one act as director he isn't capable of.
This review made possible in part by donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you want to see more like it, please consider becoming a Patron.
Urban Jungle
So Disney comes in just under the wire to finally tell us what ZOOTOPIA is actually all about, after about a year of low-key (for Disney) marketing mainly focused on anthropomorphic animal visual puns. The result:
So. The basic premise for the main character is already pretty interesting from a thematic standpoint. The animals-as-people trope has pretty much always worked best when it's making points about human behavior/society/etc by associating personality types and social-structures with (broadly-held assumptions about) animal behavior - i.e. putting any kind of identifiable human uniform/costume on an animal automatically makes a statement - and the angle here is pretty nakedly all about professional gender/class/ethnic discrimination; in as much as our lead heroine is Zootopia's "first rabbit police officer" (Ginnifer Goodwin as "Judy Hopps") apparently working to crack her first big case while facing doubts, dismissals and the stigma of "tokenism" about her abilities due to size/species/etc.
Yeah, okay. That's a solid starting-point, certainly the first place I'd imagine one would have to go with an "Aesop in 2015" pretext. But it's the hinted-at main storyline (re: Judy's big case) that looks to have a lot more to unpack, theme wise: The idea looks to be that Zootopia (the city) is a kind of futuristic metropolis that's able to exist via animals of all species having long ago evolved beyond (by agreement? By happenstance?) their predator/prey/circle-of-life "natural" relationship, and that this balance is threatened by a phenomenon of seemingly-random animal citizens (only predators?) inexplicably "going savage" aka reverting back to their primal red-in-tooth-and-claw instincts. Being a "one lone cop with a hunch" story, this presumably involves some sort of far-reaching conspiracy - a G-rated cartoon-animal version of the "everybody freak the hell out" button from KINGSMAN, maybe?
It feels like there's a lot to unpack there, yes? At the most basic, you've got a lady cop versus danger posed by (chosen? encourage? forced?) reversion to violent "natural" tendencies; which has some fairly ugly parallels in the Men's Rights/PUA scene (i.e. "I should be dominant and brutish because that's how nature/evolution intended it!" "Boys are supposed to be out-of-control little monsters! It's normal!") that couldn't have been lost on whoever was working out this premise, given that Disney projects spend ages in story-development.
But more broadly, the idea that a "bright future" civilization in the upscale L.A./San Fran mold (sunny, hyper-diverse, public-transit, prevalent mall/juicebar architectural-aesthetic) held together by the citizenry agreeing to curb behaviors that would infringe on the greater whole - implicitly, even in they come "naturally" or some have more "curbing" to do than others - being a societal ideal is (intentionally or not) a pretty close shot across the bow to trendy lowercase-l "libertarianism." It's also, thematically at least, a close cousin to bugbears of the above-mentioned takes on "human nature," in as much as the idea of boys/men lashing-out because society is evolving in a "feminized" direction where they're (supposedly) unwelcome in their "normal" state being a cornerstone of MRA ideology.
Obviously, you can't expect any of that to be (explicitly) stated in the movie-proper. It's a funny-animal movie for kids, and the premise almost certainly blossomed less out of deliberate metaphor building than something more "organic" like "Okay, city of animals - how does that actually WORK?" But on the other hand, George Miller didn't deliberately set out to make the fourth MAD MAX explicitly about patriarchy, either - sometimes the theme finds the project. Given that picking through Disney features for underlying subtext is something like a national sport at this point, I can't imagine I'll be the only one making note of it if the actual movie plays out on the same lines the trailer suggests. And since we now live in a world where casting a woman and a black man as the new leads of STAR WARS can now trigger (hilariously impotent) calls for boycott, the results should be pretty interesting.
ZOOTOPIA opens March 4th, 2015.
NOTE: This post made possible in part via support of The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you read and would like to read more like it, please consider becoming a Patron.
So. The basic premise for the main character is already pretty interesting from a thematic standpoint. The animals-as-people trope has pretty much always worked best when it's making points about human behavior/society/etc by associating personality types and social-structures with (broadly-held assumptions about) animal behavior - i.e. putting any kind of identifiable human uniform/costume on an animal automatically makes a statement - and the angle here is pretty nakedly all about professional gender/class/ethnic discrimination; in as much as our lead heroine is Zootopia's "first rabbit police officer" (Ginnifer Goodwin as "Judy Hopps") apparently working to crack her first big case while facing doubts, dismissals and the stigma of "tokenism" about her abilities due to size/species/etc.
Yeah, okay. That's a solid starting-point, certainly the first place I'd imagine one would have to go with an "Aesop in 2015" pretext. But it's the hinted-at main storyline (re: Judy's big case) that looks to have a lot more to unpack, theme wise: The idea looks to be that Zootopia (the city) is a kind of futuristic metropolis that's able to exist via animals of all species having long ago evolved beyond (by agreement? By happenstance?) their predator/prey/circle-of-life "natural" relationship, and that this balance is threatened by a phenomenon of seemingly-random animal citizens (only predators?) inexplicably "going savage" aka reverting back to their primal red-in-tooth-and-claw instincts. Being a "one lone cop with a hunch" story, this presumably involves some sort of far-reaching conspiracy - a G-rated cartoon-animal version of the "everybody freak the hell out" button from KINGSMAN, maybe?
It feels like there's a lot to unpack there, yes? At the most basic, you've got a lady cop versus danger posed by (chosen? encourage? forced?) reversion to violent "natural" tendencies; which has some fairly ugly parallels in the Men's Rights/PUA scene (i.e. "I should be dominant and brutish because that's how nature/evolution intended it!" "Boys are supposed to be out-of-control little monsters! It's normal!") that couldn't have been lost on whoever was working out this premise, given that Disney projects spend ages in story-development.
But more broadly, the idea that a "bright future" civilization in the upscale L.A./San Fran mold (sunny, hyper-diverse, public-transit, prevalent mall/juicebar architectural-aesthetic) held together by the citizenry agreeing to curb behaviors that would infringe on the greater whole - implicitly, even in they come "naturally" or some have more "curbing" to do than others - being a societal ideal is (intentionally or not) a pretty close shot across the bow to trendy lowercase-l "libertarianism." It's also, thematically at least, a close cousin to bugbears of the above-mentioned takes on "human nature," in as much as the idea of boys/men lashing-out because society is evolving in a "feminized" direction where they're (supposedly) unwelcome in their "normal" state being a cornerstone of MRA ideology.
Obviously, you can't expect any of that to be (explicitly) stated in the movie-proper. It's a funny-animal movie for kids, and the premise almost certainly blossomed less out of deliberate metaphor building than something more "organic" like "Okay, city of animals - how does that actually WORK?" But on the other hand, George Miller didn't deliberately set out to make the fourth MAD MAX explicitly about patriarchy, either - sometimes the theme finds the project. Given that picking through Disney features for underlying subtext is something like a national sport at this point, I can't imagine I'll be the only one making note of it if the actual movie plays out on the same lines the trailer suggests. And since we now live in a world where casting a woman and a black man as the new leads of STAR WARS can now trigger (hilariously impotent) calls for boycott, the results should be pretty interesting.
ZOOTOPIA opens March 4th, 2015.
NOTE: This post made possible in part via support of The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you read and would like to read more like it, please consider becoming a Patron.
PITCH ME, MR. B: THE SEQUEL (RESULTS!)
You voted, so the next round of "PITCH ME, MR. B" pieces (hypothetical pitches for plausible movie reboots/revivals/etc) will play out in the following four-part order:
1. FANTASTIC FOUR
(Hypothetical Marvel Cinematic Universe re-introduction)
2. STREET FIGHTER
(Based on the game series from Capcom)
3. UNIVERSAL MONSTERS
("Roadmap" pitch for multi-film/year series)
4. GREMLINS 3
(Real-time sequel, set 25 years in continuity after GREMLINS 2)
This means that the potential 5th option, a (new/unconnected) remake of NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) will have to wait for another day - or, y'know, if anyone from WB/NewLine is both reading this and buying. As ever, those who enjoy content like this and wish to support and/or speed-along these projects are invited to check out The MovieBob Patreon.
REALLY THAT GOOD: A CHRISTMAS STOY
Happy Holidays!
If you enjoy this production, please consider becoming a contributor to The MovieBob Patreon.
(NOTE: Watch while you can - the usual bogus copyright-claim is currently in dispute. Wasn't YouTube supposed to start helping users with annoyances like this?)
If you enjoy this production, please consider becoming a contributor to The MovieBob Patreon.
(NOTE: Watch while you can - the usual bogus copyright-claim is currently in dispute. Wasn't YouTube supposed to start helping users with annoyances like this?)
Announcement: PITCH ME, MR. B - THE SEQUEL
Hey! Fans of this blog will likely recall this recently concluded bit of business, whereby we had ourselves some fun at the expense of reboot-happy Hollywood and held a little poll of various psuedo-dormant pop-culture franchises I figured I could (or had already) easily/amusingly brainstorm a "modern" pitch-treatment for. The last poll wound up with pieces for CAPTAIN PLANET, MEGA-MAN, X-MEN (a "joining the official MCU" version) and CARE BEARS.
Long story short, since it's the end of the year and I could always use the distraction and the writing exercise, we're going to do another one - but this time with a two little twists:
Firstly, in addition to counting votes made in the comments for THIS post, I'll be conducting random Twitter-based polls as well and factoring in the totals from that at the end of voting. Secondly, this time, to keep everyone invested and (hopefully) sharing the post and links, there's going to be FIVE possible choices instead of the previous four, and while the top four will still be written/published in order of popularity, choice #5 (aka "the loser") won't be written/published at all (or at least not until if/when I do a third run of these. So, basically, if there's one you're particularly enamored of? Do your part and get the word out :)
In any case, your FIVE potential "nominees" are:
THE FANTASTIC FOUR
Hypothetical new adaptation as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
GREMLINS 3
Real-time sequel set 25 years after the conclusion of GREMLINS 2.
STREET FIGHTER
Adaptation of the game series, primarily based off SFII with broader series tie-ins
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
Re-imagining of the NOES series, not connected to either the original series or the remake.
UNIVERSAL MONSTERS
This would be a pitch for an entire series of interconnected films based on new versions of the classic Universal Monsters. This is something Universal is actually doing, but I bet they wouldn't do it how I would - so it'd be fun to lay that out.
Alright. Get yourselves down into the comments and rank your choices from 1 (being most) to 5 (being least), and keep eyes on my Twitter (@the_moviebob) and let's see who comes out on top. Polls will close at Midnight on Christmas Day.
Long story short, since it's the end of the year and I could always use the distraction and the writing exercise, we're going to do another one - but this time with a two little twists:
Firstly, in addition to counting votes made in the comments for THIS post, I'll be conducting random Twitter-based polls as well and factoring in the totals from that at the end of voting. Secondly, this time, to keep everyone invested and (hopefully) sharing the post and links, there's going to be FIVE possible choices instead of the previous four, and while the top four will still be written/published in order of popularity, choice #5 (aka "the loser") won't be written/published at all (or at least not until if/when I do a third run of these. So, basically, if there's one you're particularly enamored of? Do your part and get the word out :)
In any case, your FIVE potential "nominees" are:
THE FANTASTIC FOUR
Hypothetical new adaptation as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
GREMLINS 3
Real-time sequel set 25 years after the conclusion of GREMLINS 2.
STREET FIGHTER
Adaptation of the game series, primarily based off SFII with broader series tie-ins
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
Re-imagining of the NOES series, not connected to either the original series or the remake.
UNIVERSAL MONSTERS
This would be a pitch for an entire series of interconnected films based on new versions of the classic Universal Monsters. This is something Universal is actually doing, but I bet they wouldn't do it how I would - so it'd be fun to lay that out.
Alright. Get yourselves down into the comments and rank your choices from 1 (being most) to 5 (being least), and keep eyes on my Twitter (@the_moviebob) and let's see who comes out on top. Polls will close at Midnight on Christmas Day.
IN BOB WE TRUST: "MovieBob's Top Ten of 2015 - Part I"
Part II will be up in two weeks, as per normal schedule of release. Meanwhile, did you also take in the most-recent GAME OVERTHINKER?