ROBERT RODRIGUEZ

Is this irony
Or sincere post-irony?
So identical

THE COEN BROTHERS

Quirky film, dark film
Quirk, dark, quirk, dark, quirk, dark, quirk
Quirkdarkquirkdarkquirk

JAMES CAMERON

Lovely lucid dreams
of immense complexity
shaped by an asshole

GEORGE LUCAS

An old man believes
He can recapture youth’s spark;
Sadly, he is wrong

STEVEN SPIELBERG

Only childlike joy
can now save the universe
(then something explodes)

KEVIN SMITH

Dick joke, toilet joke,
sex joke, an epiphany,
dick joke, dick joke, fin.

RIDLEY SCOTT

The director’s cut
poem of this sense makes more
everything explains

ROBERT ZEMECKIS

Named a volleyball
then thought, “not lifeless enough.”
Thus: Polar Express

TIM BURTON

Johnny Depp appears
within Burton’s haiku. Why?
Obligatory

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN

The surprising twist
is that this very haiku?
No longer Asian

No, you haven’t accidentally mis-clicked on an article for Cracked.com. This is still Mightygodking.com, even if I’m not him and I’m totally stealing a gimmick from Cracked’s lists (that are more like crack than Cracked, honestly. Once you start clicking on them, it’s five hours of timesink before you know it.) Because let’s face it: Lists, especially non-comprehensive lists that you can add onto yourself in the comments section, can be fun.

This time, it’s about film adaptations. We’ve entered a true golden age of film adaptations in some ways, especially when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy films; the improvements in effects technology, combined with the general viewing audience’s increasing familiarity with sci-fi tropes, has resulted in increasingly sophisticated and effective adaptations that bring the book (or comic book) to life. But sometimes, I find myself wondering if “faithful” should really be the defining quality of an adaptation. Sometimes, what works for a book doesn’t work for a movie, and vice versa. By way of counter-example, here are five films that changed a lot, but still made excellent movies.

5. Blade Runner. This one is low on my personal list because, despite it being a beloved cult film that influenced a generation of movie-makers, I really don’t care for it. I’ve watched the theatrical cut, the director’s cut, pretty much every cut they put out, and it always feels like a slow, shapeless mess that wastes Harrison Ford’s talents as an actor (or, arguably, where Harrison Ford wastes his own talents as an actor–Ford can be brilliant, but you can tell when he’s not emotionally invested in a project, and he clearly sleepwalks through this one.) But I’m aware that it is much adored by a great many people, and I can appreciate that even if I don’t share it.

And to the extent that it is good, it’s good specifically because it abandons Dick’s original novel; “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” never really looks at the moral ambiguity present in the Replicants, instead taking the claim that they lack empathy at face value. “Blade Runner” admits the flaw in this entire concept, questioning the morality of gunning down people who look human, act human, and may in fact be more human than human. In fact, I’d say that the less faithful an adaptation of this novel is, the better it could be. (Witness “The Wedding Banquet”, which abandons every single aspect of the novel and is absolutely charming. 🙂 )

4. The Collector. This is an interesting one, because in terms of plot, it’s totally faithful to the original novel…but the original novel was absolutely unadaptable in its existing form. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a story about a kidnapping told first from the perspective of the kidnapper, then from the perspective of the victim, then returning to the kidnapper’s point of view for the finale. The narration manages the almost impossible trick of making you understand the motives of the kidnapper and even sympathize with him at times (the victim’s POV scenes make her out to be every bit as snooty as the kidnapper’s persecution complex imagines her to be)…right before hitting you in the gut with the final sequences.

The film adaptation doesn’t have the ability to do any of that. But with nothing more than a tiny bit of voice-over narration, it still conveys that same sensibility, solely through the acting talents of Terrance Stamp. His body language and facial expressions convey everything that the film can’t show in other ways, and Samantha Eggar strikes just the right note of ambiguity as the victim (it helps that Eggar shot Stamp down for a date when they were at college. Nothing says awkward like actual awkwardness.)

3. Memento. I’m going to try not to gush here, but…the original short story was a very clever idea, expertly presented in an artfully precise short story. Christopher Nolan then took that idea and used it as the seed for a chillingly brilliant film that explores the nature of revenge in a way that almost no Hollywood movie ever does. Seeing that final/first scene, and realizing where Leonard’s quest for revenge has taken him, is a moment far more powerful than any of the various “Death Wish” clones out there ever deliver. Lots of films talk about how revenge is ultimately hollow, but they usually do that as an obligatory wrist-slap after the hero gets heaping helpings of juicy, delicious revenge that we can vicariously enjoy. “Memento” radically departs from that model (which is equally present in the original short story) and is all the better for it.

2. The Princess Bride. I actually read the book before I saw the movie, and I remember watching the whole thing in a state of constant, low-grade dread because I knew how the book ended. I know there will always be purists who feel that the original, unhappy ending is somehow “truer” (I hear the same thing a lot about “The Little Mermaid”, too) but I think that sometimes we need a little bit of fairy-tale in our life. We need happy endings in stories precisely because we don’t get them very often anywhere else, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting them. And “The Princess Bride” is just an unabashedly beautiful film with plenty of heartfelt moments (I defy anyone in the world not to shed a tear the first time they hear Inigo say, “I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” It’s not exactly a “Memento”-level commentary on the hollowness of revenge, but it gets the point across.) Most interestingly, this is a rare case where the writer and the adapter are one and the same person; William Goldman was undoubtedly proud of his novel, but he wasn’t afraid to kill his children if it resulted in a good movie, and “The Princess Bride” is one of the best.

1. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? If you’ve never read “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?”, the novel that formed the basis for the film, let me save you some time: Don’t. It’s downright inept, a muddled murder mystery full of red herrings and an ending that comes so far out of left field that you might legitimately suspect it to be from another ballpark. But somehow, Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman managed to throw away the gallons of bathwater and still keep the baby. Almost nothing remains of the original save the barest bones of the central concept–“Toons”, a private detective, and a murder–but those elements make the story what it is. Every change improves the story, and they’re all done with a keen, aggressive eye towards making it all click with audiences. If you ever want to run a clinic on how to rewrite a book into a movie, this would form a core part of the curriculum.

So that’s my five…or at least, five of my many. As always, feel free to add yours in the comments section!

LazyCustomizer:

I’d like to read your opinion of how the Penguin would fit in the Nolan Batman films, and whether you believe Nolan’s determination not to use the Penguin is wise or closing himself off from a potentially interesting story.

Yes and no.

On the one hand, I share Tim O’ Neil’s opinion that the Penguin is one of Batman’s best villains (although I would personally give pre-eminence to the Riddler, but ultimately “best Batman villain” always comes down to what aspect of Batman you like best, and I like Batman best as a detective) simply because the Penguin isn’t crazy; he’s just a straight-up crook. That might not be as otherworldly and scary as the usual Arkham gang of horrors, but it can make for a great villain because the Penguin is just a bastard, plain and simple. No stupid self-destructive plots, no monologuing, no movie-style villain tropes. The Penguin would make a great villain in a Nolan Batman movie…

…except he probably wouldn’t. Because all of the things that the Penguin isn’t are what’s mostly expected out of a Batman movie now: the Bat-villain in a movie has to be crazy-go-nuts because it has becomes received wisdom that Batman’s Enemies Are Crazy. This goes for the comics too, of course; it’s one of the reasons Penguin has generally dropped down the ranks over the past two decades, demoted to basically being a mob boss. But it’s even moreso in the movies, where Nolan is especially interested in the dark theatricality of Batman and his enemies. Nolan’s Scarecrow is obviously insane long before he ever gets dosed with his own fear chemicals; his Ra’s Al Ghul is a weird blend of totalitarian and guerrilla. Part of what makes the new cycle of Batman films tick is that the films explicitly say that the only sane response to this insanity is a different type of insanity. But the Penguin isn’t insane. He’s just a criminal; nothing more than another version of Carmine Falcone, who gets shoved out of the plot halfway through Batman Begins.

Besides, how do you do a “realistic” Penguin? What makes the Penguin a good comic character are those explicitly comicky bits: the trick umbrellas, the monocle and top hat, the birds as weapons. That’s all stuff that won’t fit in a Nolan film; without it, all you’ve got is a pretty bog-standard deformed criminal. Danny Devito’s Penguin in Batman Returns was great (and Returns is far and away the best of the 90s cycle of Batman movies: the best action, the best acting, and the only one that doesn’t feel tremendously dated now) precisely because in addition to being a nasty piece of work he also went in for all the crazy gimmicks. But all that won’t fit in a Nolanverse film, because if you don’t start out crazy in the Nolanverse, there’s no good reason to play dress-up.

It’s not bad, not by any stretch. Really, it’s quite entertaining. Michael Cera actually pushes a bit beyond his comfortable familiar box (not a lot, but a bit); all of the performances are clever and fun, the gags all work even if a few are groaners (“bi-furious” still makes me wince), the action is decent, and most of the plot chunks that were removed from the comic (Stills’ coming out, for example) aren’t really necessary to drive the movie.

But – I know it’s a cliche to say “the book was better,” but, well, the books were better. The books form a story about the often painful transition to adulthood; although elements of that are still in the script, it almost seems perfunctory, in a “hey [character], I was totally a douche but now we’re cool right” sense. You kind of wonder if the seemingly inevitable director’s cut will focus on that more.

Also, losing the Honest Ed’s chase battle sequence is heresy.

The movie “The Legend of Bagger Vance” popped into my head this morning. (And you think you have problems…) Thinking about it reminded me about how back when it came out, there was a big debate ovSer the movie’s use of the “magical negro” stereotype. I remember agreeing with the people who pointed this out, but not without some reservations…after all, I pointed out, if George Lucas had cast Sidney Poitier as Obi-Wan Kenobi instead of Sir Alec Guinness, would he have automatically become a magical negro even though the script hadn’t changed?

Which, in turn, reminded me of “women in refrigerators”. The list is well-known by now among comics fans, as are some of the excuses different writers have come up with for its existence. But the fact is, the most common one (“Hey, it’s not like men have it easy either!”) is actually sorta kinda true…Steve Trevor bit the big one a couple of times, the Vision was gruesomely dismembered and revived as a pale imitation of himself in order to put a little conflict into the Scarlet Witch’s story arc, the first couple of guys who even thought about dating Ms Marvel bit it, and let’s not even get into the whole Terry Long thing. (Husband and son both bit it there…)

But that’s the thing: Only an idiot would actually try to use these as arguments against the prevalence of racism and sexism in popular culture. Even though you can say, legitimately, that the “magical negro” is simply a mentor archetype that happens to be black, and even though you can say, legitimately, that a “woman in (a) refrigerator” is simply a supporting character that gets bumped off in order to provide a little drama for the main character who happens to be female, we can all recognize that there’s still something skeezy about it all. (Well, most of us can. I know all the enlightened, wise readers here can.) So what is it? Why is it not okay?

The answer is that there are so few other roles for these characters to take that the supporting roles become disproportionate representations of the characters in popular culture. Or, to put that a little less fancy, it’s not that there are lots of black “wise mentor” characters, it’s that there are so few black heroes getting mentored. It’s not that there are so many women in comics who die, it’s that there are so few who get to go off and avenge the deaths. These things are symptoms of a far deeper, more fundamental problem in pop culture, namely a dearth of protagonists who aren’t white guys. Nobody thinks to cast a black guy in the Luke Skywalker role; he’s relegated to the Obi-Wan (or more accurately, Mace Windu) part. We’ve reached a plateau in bringing diversity into our cult fiction, where characters outside the white male “standard” are included, but almost never in a leading role. Until that changes, you’ll continue to see the same stereotypes. Because they’re not stereotypes, they’re archetypes….but they’re the only archetypes women and minorities are allowed to inhabit.

I’ve read a lot of reviews of Inception (including the one here) and a lot of thoughts on Inception (including the one here just a little bit ago, which is quite a nice theory. Me, I tend to go for the straightforward ambiguity of “either the ending is entirely real, or else everything up to the ending is real and it’s only the last few minutes that are a dream”. But I do like the idea that Matthew Johnson put forward…and I like that the movie is more ambiguous than the heist flick it seems to be on the surface.)

But the most common negative I hear about the movie is summed up by one of the comments in Matthew Johnson’s post (thank you, Snap Wilson, for inspiring this post, by the way): “Yes, I suppose it’s thoroughly reasonable that a drab, uninteresting person would dream about other drab, uninteresting people taking place in drab, uninteresting environments (or risible Modern Warfare 2 levels, apparently). That doesn’t make it good storytelling. Dreams certainly are capable of being alternately exciting, wondrous, imaginative or terrifying things. Inception was too serious for that, and thus we’re stuck with sterile concrete, glass and steel cityscapes where everyone wears a suit. The dreams of an accountant.”

This is the big complaint most of the people who disliked Inception had, that the dreams didn’t feel like dreams. (In fairness to Wilson, he said he liked the film despite that.) But I think those people are…not missing the point, because I think that’s kind of mean. Perhaps they’re approaching it from the wrong angle, or approaching it without key knowledge. Nolan isn’t making a film about dreams. Nolan is making a film about lucid dreams.

Lucid dreaming is the phenomenon of experiencing a dream with the knowledge that you are experiencing a dream, and using that knowledge to “steer” the dream and control its contents. The result is something like an astonishingly vivid narrative, like living out a movie. (Yes, the parallels are obvious. Nolan is clearly fascinated with the subject; after all, he apparently worked on the screenplay to Inception for something like a decade. You don’t do that with something you’re not obsessed with.)

Lucid dreams feel very different from normal dreams; there’s less of the disconnected dream-logic, the bizarre and senseless structure that comes from synapses firing randomly. You feel like you’re in a real place, talking to real people. There’s a narrative to it…and it’s one you can control. Does this begin to sound familiar? Lucid dreamers even develop strategies to determine whether or not they’re dreaming, although not the same ones as in the movie. (They do things like look at a digital clock, look away, then quickly look back again. In a dream, the numbers don’t stay the same.)

That was where Nolan’s idea for Inception began. The film takes that initial, real-world idea of lucid dreaming, and asks, “What might happen if lucid dreamers could share their dreams?” And then takes it to the next step, “If a lucid dreamer controlled the dreams of a normal dreamer, how would they know it wasn’t their idea?” And then inserts gangsters, corporate espionage, and guys with machine guns and grenade launchers, which is never a bad direction to take a film. The people who point out that Inception doesn’t replicate a normal dream are right…but then again, it’s not trying to.

(Spoilers follow, I guess)

I finally got a chance to see Inception a couple of days ago and while I enjoyed it, there were a few things that puzzled me. Not that the movie was confusing — honestly, one of its bigger flaws was that it often seemed to feel the need to spell things out for the slower kids — but for a generally well-written movie it had some odd flaws. Or were they flaws? Well, probably, but just for fun let’s use the No-Prize method and see if we can’t find in them hints of a deeper, better story underneath the obvious one.

See, a lot of people think that the ending means the whole movie was a dream, but that’s not likely. To begin with, “it was all a dream” is no less of a cop-out just because your movie is about dreams, and if there’s room for multiple interpretations you might as well pick the one that doesn’t suck. More importantly, though, the “real world” sequences include scenes that Cobb, the Leonardo DiCaprio character, isn’t in. When was the last time you had a dream you weren’t in?

Interestingly, the scenes without him all feature Ellen Page, whose character is oddly underdeveloped and inconsistent considering how prominent she is. She’s set up heavily (Cobb remarks on how she’s a natural at manipulating dreams), has a heavily symbolic name (Ariadne) and gets a number of scenes without payoffs (for example the scene where she makes her totem, the chess piece.) But in the actual action of the movie she’s not very important, being mostly a vehicle for exposition — the “new guy” that other characters can explain things to, as well as the person who ferrets out Cobb’s backstory. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that there’s another character who plays a similar role — Saito, the one played by Ken Watanabe — and at first glance, at least, the movie would be stronger if he had the role to himself: he has an emotional investment in learning the rules of the game and understanding the plan (since he wants it to succeed) and there’s tension added if he learns about Cobb’s issues with his wife (since he has the power to reunite Cobb with his children), while Ariadne is both uninvested and undermotivated. In fact, her motivation changes several times throughout the movie: at first it’s just professional interest, then a desire to protect the other team members, and then finally (for no clear reason) she’s determined to complete the mission even at the risk of her and Cobb’s lives.

So here’s my attempt at a No-Prize: none of these things are mistakes. The whole movie that we see is a dream, but Cobb isn’t the only real person in it: Ariadne is there too (and maybe Joseph Gordon-Levitt, what the hell.) She has inserted herself into Cobb’s dream because he is still stuck in limbo from his experience with his wife — when he experienced her “dying” that was her waking up, but he’s still asleep. The mission is actually to rescue him; like the fake mission explained to Cillian Murphy in the hotel room, it’s a fiction designed to make him rescue himself. That’s why she plays coy at first — the trick of getting the dreamer to do the work for you — then draws out his emotional issues, and in the end is determined to complete the mission at all cost. It also explains her name: Ariadne, after all, was the one who got Theseus out of the labyrinth.

But why was she so determined? Because Cobb has been dreaming longer than he realizes — ten years or more — which explains another motif with no apparent payoff, the hiding of his children’s faces throughout the movie. Ariadne is his daughter.

FLAPJACKS: Hey, you remember how two days ago you were all “oh I want to see new stuff” and then you pretended to be, like, all cool about Thor even though you’re a giant nerd?
ME: I am a nerd, but I’ve never been one of those nerds with a giant boner for Thor. Not least because at this point it is canon that Superman can beat him. Thor’s okay. He’s just not that cool to me and never has been. Jack Kirby, Walt Simonson, I don’t care – it’s all badly mangled medieval English and shouting to me.
FLAPJACKS: So you won’t go see it?
ME: Sure I’ll go see it. I’m just not waiting with aforementioned giant nerd-boner.
FLAPJACKS: Ah, but the trailer is online! I bet you get a giant nerd boner.
ME: We should probably stop talking about giant nerd boners.

ME: Okay, so to guard the hammer in the middle of the wide, flat desert which nobody can lift, they have set up multiple storeys of brightly lit scaffolding. This serves the double purpose of not only being basically useless but also actively working against the whole “secret agents” bit of S.H.I.E.L.D.
FLAPJACKS: But it looks awesome!
ME: And then Thor beats up a bunch of security guards. Why is this impressive? He is Thor. He can, like, mash their faces by shrugging.
FLAPJACKS: But it looks awesome!
ME: And then he gets captured anyway. Way to go, Thor!
FLAPJACKS: He probably held back because he is a noble god and so forth.
ME: A building explodes! That will teach that building to mess with Thor.
FLAPJACKS: He probably hit it so hard all the bricks spontaneously combusted. That is what happened, I bet.
ME: And the big reveal is… he’s Thor! Well, it’s a trailer, I guess.
FLAPJACKS: Chris Hemsworth looks so much like Thor.
ME: If you mean that he is a big guy with long blond hair, then yes.
FLAPJACKS: Why do you gotta be like that?
ME: Okay, I’m pretty impressed with Asgard. It totally looks like Minas Tirith, but metal-plated. That is a compliment. There’s actually a lot of the original Kirby design in this.
FLAPJACKS: Odin speaks! About honor!
ME: Isn’t it one of the things about Thor comics that Odin is, generally speaking, a giant dickhead? Like, Thor comes home and he’s all “father I have slain the dreaded Ogre of Laffafafhafannahaf and saved the villagers” and Odin would be like “yes, that’s very nice, Thor, but what did you learn about yourself in the process?”
FLAPJACKS: So you’re saying Odin is a hippie?
ME: Not exactly.
FLAPJACKS: Volstagg! Fandral! Sif! Hogun!
ME: What’s the over/under on the number of lines they get in this movie, do you think? I’m thinking four for Hogun, nine for Fandral, thirteen for Volstagg and twenty for Sif.
FLAPJACKS: You don’t know! They could be really important!
ME: Based on what we’ve seen so far and the fact that Odin is lecturing Thor right now, I bet the storyline is something like “Odin condemns Thor to go be a human on Earth until he learns to be a proper hero and crap.” Sif and the Warriors Three do not feature heavily in that sort of storyline. I bet they show up right at the beginning, then sit around looking increasingly worried while Loki does Bad Things, and then they get a bit of fight sequence towards the end.
FLAPJACKS: A HA but why are they in the trailer then?
ME: Where did this air? Comicon. This is the movie studio equivalent of foreplay.
FLAPJACKS: That mental image is worse than the one for “giant nerd boner.”
ME: Also, Hogun appears to be holding a colander on the end of a stick.
FLAPJACKS: Maybe he likes pasta.
ME: Ahhhh, there’s the Odin I’m used to. “Thor, you’re an asshole.”
FLAPJACKS: Loki! He’s being sneaky!
ME: There is nothing there that is sneaky.
FLAPJACKS: Black Heimdall!
ME: I can hear the nerds in the far distance saying “I’m not racist, but this godly being should be white, okay?”
FLAPJACKS: …okay, you were right about the Thor being exiled thing.
ME: It’s the most obvious storyline if you want to connect him to Marvel Earth, frankly. I’m not complaining. The story that makes sense is never a bad pick. Unless you’re David Lynch.
FLAPJACKS: What would David Lynch’s Thor be like?
ME: It would feature a meteorologist who dreams surreal dreams of being a Norse god in olden times, drinks beers at O’Denn’s Bar and Grill, and then inexplicably sprays lightning when he masturbates one morning. This would lead him on a vision-quest where he ends up being transformed into a 1967 Chevy El Camino.
FLAPJACKS: I like his delivery of his second line. I personally like it when Norse gods have English accents.
ME: You were expecting them to have Scandanavian accents of some kind? Come on, this is an American movie. English accents are code for “better than you.”
FLAPJACKS: They could sound like Stellan Skarsgard. He always sounds like a badass.
ME: That is true, but shut up I am looking at Natalie Portman because she is pretty.
FLAPJACKS: Magic is like science!
ME: Looks like Marvel is wussing out and going with the “they aren’t really gods, they’re like… aliens or something” deal that gets trotted out whenever they’re worried about pissing off whiny Christians. Right now the comics are in full-on “no, they’re gods” mode. Maybe this is gonna be the next big switcharound, like when the Spider-Man comics had him shooting organic webs from his wrists.
FLAPJACKS: And Thor can’t lift his hammer because he’s not worthy of the power of Thor!
ME: Which is also kind of predictable, but again, nothing wrong with it. Gives Kenneth Branagh an excuse to do a “this is what a hero REALLY is” plot. Thor will help old ladies cross the street and will build wheelchair ramps into buildings for the disabled and give kittens to small children.
FLAPJACKS: What if the children are allergic to cats?
ME: Then Thor will give them goldfish – oh, wait, seriously, are they having Thor do the “drop to your knees and go “NOOOOOOOOO”” bit? Really, Marvel? I mean… really?
FLAPJACKS: Shut up. It is dramatic because he cannot play with his hammer. Oh man I just thought of a dick joke.
ME: And another exploding building means that it’s montage time! Okay, so we’ve got Asgardians walking like they are Reservoir Dogs.
FLAPJACKS: An evil looking… monster thingy!
ME: Odin dies! Loki becomes the King of Asgard. Or whatever.
FLAPJACKS: Thor carries a small child to a pickup truck. I bet he learns to become a hero that way!
ME: Heimdall appears to be a vampire of some kind.
FLAPJACKS: Loki has his curvy horn helmet! He is so mad!
ME: An exploding car. There are a lot of explosions in this movie given that it’s about guys who fight with swords and hammers.
FLAPJACKS: Makeouts! The Warriors Three and Sif again – aw you’re probably right about them.
ME: Another exploding building. All of these explosions seem to be in the same town.
FLAPJACKS: I wouldn’t want to live in that town. Because of all of the explosions. “Hey, Bert, didja see Jerry? He was supposed to gimme a lift to the DMV.” “Yeah, I saw him, but then his car exploded.” “Aw, shucks. Now I’ll hafta -” and then he explodes.
ME: Thor and Loki fighting. I guess they’re actually saving the good stuff for theatres in this case.
FLAPJACKS: And title. That looks good.
ME: But wait, there is more – ahhh, the Destroyer armor. That is what was causing all those explosions.
FLAPJACKS: Well, it would do that.
ME: It would indeed.
FLAPJACKS: So are we going to go see it?
ME: Of course we will.
FLAPJACKS: So are you going to take back what you said and admit that Thor is the awesomest thing ever?
ME: Of course I won’t.
FLAPJACKS: How about we watch the trailer for Yogi Bear next?
ME: I may have to beat you with a cudgel.

A lot of people have emailed me asking about Comicon and what I am most hyped about and usually my answer is “none of it.” (Well, other than TRON Legacy, but we already knew about that.) Most of what gets advertised at Comicon nowadays is adaptation piled on top of adaptation, and although I’ll doubtless go see the Avengers movie and probably enjoy it very much, seeing the actors all in a line doesn’t juice me like it does some people; I at least need a trailer, you know? And this goes for most things at Comicon. I’m looking forward to seeing The Walking Dead on AMC, but I’m not really deeply excited about it. New Rocketeer comics? Well that’s nice I guess. And so on and so forth.

This is an exception, precisely because it is new. God knows I’ve ripped on Zack Snyder before, but I’ve never really had a problem with his visual style of directing per se. (Sure, you can make fun of the stylized slo-mo Matrix-lite bits easily enough, but they’re an easy and predictable target, much like Brian de Palma’s endless tracking shots or Michael Bay’s absolutely everything he does.) My problem with Snyder’s movies has always been that he has a tendency to take an existing work and become worshipful towards it, turning 300 and Watchmen into adulations of the source material rather than good movies in their own right.

But this – this is his own thing. That alone holds a lot of promise for me. That it is his own thing that also has dragons, samurai, giant mecha robots with bunny faces, Nazis, mobsters, spaceships, and apparently everything else in the world that is violent makes it even more something that excites me. And that is all I want: something new.

If Christopher Nolan shot every action scene in this movie like he did the hotel lobby fight sequence – rather than simply relying on quick cuts to cheaply juice the excitement level – it would be just about a completely perfect film; as it is, we must settle for very, very good instead.

Obviously, this post is a few days late; what can I say, I spent the weekend at CONvergence (a Twin Cities-based sci-fi convention) and am just now recovered enough to think about posting something. I still haven’t thought of anything particularly impressive, though, so I’m just going to be lazy and throw out a few books that I think would make great movies. (Or, at least, could. Let’s face it; everyone thought there was a good movie in I, Robot, and nobody thought there was a good one in Who Censored Roger Rabbit?)

1. Phule’s Company. I’ve actually blogged about this one on my own blog, Fraggmented, but it’s been a while and it does belong here. It’s a scenario tailor-made for Hollywood; a band of misfit soldiers and failures gets taken over by an eccentric billionaire officer and becomes one of the elite fighting units of the Galactic Legion. David Tennant would make an absolutely perfect Phule, and there’s sequels ready-made (although the book series goes rapidly downhill once Aspirin stops writing the books himself.)

2. Those Who Hunt the Night. This Barbara Hambly novel would make an awesome movie; it’s got vampires and spies, and the Victorian era is something that it’s really easy to make good by throwing just a little bit of money at. Basically, think “Sherlock Holmes” in terms of design sense, and add in vampires.

3. World War Z. Yes, I know they’re working on it. WORK FASTER. I want to see soldiers battling zombies in an epic battle for the fate of the world, and I want to see it now. Screw “Walking Dead”, this is the zombie story America is waiting for.

4. Magic Kingdom For Sale Sold! Some people might prefer Terry Brooks’ Shannara series, but I always found them to be fairly bland fantasy, and bland “epic” fantasy at that. Nothing like a movie that needs to film in seventy-two different locations because someone had to transcribe every random encounter from their campaign notes. Magic Kingdom has a lot more personality, a smarter hook, and a strong ending to boot.

5. Undead and Unwed. Oh, look! More vampires! But this is as far away from Those Who Hunt the Night as it’s possible to get: It’s a smart, silly action/comedy/romance along the lines of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with a vampire Chosen One named Betsy who doesn’t take the vampire “rules” seriously. And yet, it’s nowhere near as irritating and sucky as Twilight. You could even film it in the Twin Cities (where it’s set, and where author Mary Janice Davidson lives.)

Those are five of mine, but there are plenty more; feel free to add yours in the comments section!

Perfectly adequate summer entertainment with Jackie Chan sliding into the “elder sensei” role like a well-deserved glove, but the real shocker is that while it’s still only visible through a rudimentary level of acting talent right now, Jaden Smith has pretty much all of his father’s screen presence and natural charisma; he’s going to be huge.

On the one hand, I’m not crazy enough to say that the “Star Wars” prequels are good. There’s some rough sailing there, for a variety of reasons: Lucas hadn’t directed a film in a long time, his scripts were less polished due to a lack of a strong editor…and the less said about Jar-Jar, the better. But there’s a very strong theme that tends to get lost or misinterpreted, and it’s actually pretty impressively clever–but it requires letting go of one of the big assumptions the classic trilogy gave us. You have to be willing to understand that while the Sith are the villains of the series, the Jedi are the other villains of the series.

Lots of people complained when the prequels came out that Lucas’ vision of the Jedi philosophy was sterile, emotionless, inconsistent and creepy. But this is not a bug; it’s a feature. Lucas didn’t accidentally make a Jedi code that made his heroes seem unpleasant, he deliberately made the Jedi just as absolutist and unsympathetic as the Sith, only from the other direction. The Jedi’s commitment to detachment and an impersonal “greater good” is as dangerous in its own way as the Sith’s unrestrained and unbridled passion.

Look at “The Phantom Menace”. Everyone jokes about Yoda’s decision that a nine-year-old Anakin is “too old” to begin the Jedi training. First Luke was too old, now Anakin…how young do you have to be to train as a Jedi, anyway? But the throw-away line has a terrifying implication. Anakin’s too old because he’s already had time to live life as a non-Jedi, to form attachments to other human beings. His love of his mother is seen by Yoda as a major strike against him, because if you love someone, you might be afraid to lose them, and fear is a Bad Thing under the Jedi code. One can imagine a maternity ward where the Jedi test newborns for their strength in the Force, taking away the potentially powerful forever to be raised in the Jedi temple (and possibly wiping the minds of the parents with their Jedi powers. After all, they’re “compassionate”, aren’t they?)

In Yoda’s world, love is bad. Hate is bad. Fear is bad. Anger is bad. The only emotions allowed are a sort of vague compassion and commitment to the “greater good”. The Jedi are basically raising an army of ruthless sociopaths, and calling it a positive thing–because supposedly, the only alternative is to be a violent psychopath. Even getting a little bit angry, even if it’s righteous anger against the Sith on behalf of someone you love, is the first step on the road to becoming pure evil. This is the equivalent of claiming that outrage over the Holocaust will make you a Nazi.

Anakin is torn apart–emotionally, ethically, and finally physically–by this false dichotomy. Yoda, his mentor, guru, teacher and spiritual leader, tells him that caring about the people he loves is evil and the only way to stop himself from falling to the Dark Side is to give up on Padme. On the other side, Palpatine tells him that the only way to save his wife is to give in completely to the Dark Side and become a child-slaughtering Sith Lord. There is no in-between, no give from either side, and Anakin is betrayed just as surely by the Jedi as by the Sith. Both sides insist he has to make a choice, when the correct choice is “none of the above.” When Obi-Wan says, “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes,” everyone pointed to the irony, but not many people spotted that it was intentional.

That’s what the prophecy of “bringing balance to the Force” is about, even if Lucas never bothers explicating it properly. (Hey, I did say it was a half-hearted defense. For that matter, he never explains very well who the Sith are and what they’re getting revenge for…) In the end, Luke is being shaped by the Jedi as a weapon against the Sith, not trained as a heroic warrior. Yoda and Ben don’t tell Luke that he’s about to go kill his own father because they think it might make it harder for him to do what has to be done for the greater good, and because he’s “too old” to properly learn that it shouldn’t really matter if he’s gutting his dad like a fish. When he finds out, they view it more as an inconvenience than anything else. If that doesn’t strike you as insanely fucking creepy, why not?

When Luke announces that he thinks Vader can be redeemed, Yoda’s basic reaction is, “Well, we’re fucked.” In twenty-plus years, he never once thought of trying to reach out to Anakin with even the tiniest shred of human kindness, both because it’s antithetical to the Jedi philosophy to care about your friends (and oh, the symbolism of “you have to let your friends die in Vader’s trap” in light of the prequels) and because he just never saw the point, really. There’s no redemption in Yoda’s Manichean philosophy, so why bother trying?

Luke’s final battle against Vader and the Emperor is the culmination of all six movies. When we only saw it in the light of the classic trilogy, it seemed as though Luke was on the verge of falling to the Dark Side and only barely managed to redeem himself by remembering Yoda’s teachings; seen as part of the complete picture, it’s a total repudiation of Yoda’s philosophy. Luke gets angry at his enemy, uses his attachments to his friends as a source of determination, and uses the Force for attack–everything Yoda says will drive him permanently and irrevocably to the Dark Side. (And “once you start down the path of the Dark Side, forever will it dominate your destiny.” There are no in-betweens, remember?)

The Emperor, who’s bought into this black-and-white bullshit just as much as Yoda, says, “Now, strike him down and take his place at my side.” And Luke…doesn’t. He’s a Jedi. More importantly, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” The line is striking, in light of the full picture we see. Luke isn’t just saying that he’s not a Sith, he’s saying his father wasn’t either. Before Anakin Skywalker failed the Jedi, the Jedi failed Anakin Skywalker. It couldn’t be any clearer if he’d said, “Oh, and fuck you, you dried-up green bastard.”

Seen like that, the prequels actually have a lot of meat on them for Star Wars fans. They’re still not perfect, or even necessarily all that good, but they can be seen as “interesting failures”, perhaps even “flawed successes,” instead of the incoherent examples of excess that they seemed to be on first viewing.

Of course, there’s still no excuse for Jar Jar.

John Seavey’s first attempt to try and instill a true nerd/geek/whatever film canon was a good idea, but suffered from obvious operational flaws: namely, the ability of people to add and veto in unlimited amounts. The first is problematic because it means people will add things of which they have fond memories but which aren’t really all-time favorites. The second is problematic because of the jerk factor and because it means people can dismiss films with no cost, which is sort of the opposite of “consensus,” because a consensus usually involves a degree of compromise in the agreement.

Thus, a suggestion. Start the Geek Consensus list over from scratch, but this time, the rules are simple: you can add up to three movies and veto up to two, with no blanket vetoes like “all Pixar films.” (And you can save adds or vetos for a second post if you’re of the “this list will not have Sex and the City 2 on it” variety, with which I can sympathize.) This means that the consensus list will gradually grow, but only films to which people have a serious objection on an individual basis will be removed. I think this removes most of the problems with the first experiment.

Thus, I kick it off with:

Back To The Future
Big Trouble In Little China
Zulu