MOVIE August Rush
PLOT SUMMARY Fairytale scenario about kid whose parents never even knew he was born and who sets out to find them via twin powers of music and hope
WAIT, YOU ACTUALLY SAW THIS? Blow me
MOVIE EQUALS Amadeus times The Journey Of Natty Gann
DIRECTED BY Kirsten Sheridan
WHO LAST DIRECTED A bunch of Irish films you have probably never seen, but more importantly, she co-wrote In America with her dad Jim
WAS THAT ANY GOOD? Fucking right it was
STARRING Freddy Highmore as idealistic musical prodigy, Keri Russell as mourning cellist mother, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as depressed and lost rocker father, Terrance Howard as sad-eyed social worker, and Robin Williams –
WAIT, ROBIN WILLIAMS? YOU ARE SERIOUSLY TELLING ME YOU PAID TO SEE A MOVIE WITH ROBIN WILLIAMS IN IT? – ahem, let me finish – Robin Williams as a pretty creepy guy who thinks he’s charming and funny, which is some of the best casting of all time in my opinion
…OKAY, I CAN SEE THAT Naturally
ARE THEY ANY GOOD? Yes, from Robin Williams being actually quite tolerable all the way to Terrance Howard just being fucking masterful
SO I TAKE IT YOU LIKED THIS MOVIE Oh hell yes; it manages the very, very, very rare feat of being actually magical – a word so many movies want to be called, but which generally gets applied to crap like, I dunno, The Santa Clause 2 or something like that, where “magical” somehow gets redefined as “showy, over-the-top hi-glam effects” instead of “mysterious in small but precise and exact amounts”
THE TRAILER MADE IT SEEM LIKE YOUR STANDARD FEEL-GOOD FLICK Well, it’s certainly a feel-good flick – I mean, come on, it’s about a kid trying to find his parents while they try to find him and (BIG SPOILERS) they of course do so by the end, but it manages to be sentimental and warm and hopeful without ever becoming tedious or preachy or mawkish; I haven’t seen a movie achieve that since Millions, which I loved unreservedly
BEST PERFORMANCE Everybody in this movie is very good (yes, even Robin fucking Williams), and Freddy Highmore deserves note as one of the best child actors to come along in a very long time, and he’s only progressing ever-faster since his debut in James and the Giant Peach, but Terrance Howard executes his role just perfectly – subtle tics you’re vaguely wondering at the origin of early on finally become apparent as the film progresses and it’s never overdone
AWARDS? I can see this getting passed over quite easily, but I hold out hope for a few acting nods and maybe a shot at original screenplay, since the writing is so wonderfully restrained given the subject matter
IF THIS MOVIE WERE AN ICE CREAM FLAVOR IT WOULD BE Mint chocolate fudge
WORTH Full price

Via United Hollywood, your viral video/writer’s strike mention of the day.

I really kind of suspect that the studios had no idea what they were getting into when they forced a strike.

Found in a Pyjamas Media column’s comments:

I’m not sure you do. Hollywood has made utter garbage at least 90% of the time for at least 10 years, if not more. I will provide just one factoid. In the last two decades, more actresses have won the academy award for portraying a prostitute than for portraying any other profession. Why do current Hollywood writers have such a obsession with prostitution?

First off, I went and checked, because I was pretty sure that “factoid” was not actually, like, true. And of course it isn’t. Only one woman has won an Academy Award in the last twenty years for portraying a prostitute, and it’s kind of a stretch to say that because the woman in question was Charlize Theron for her work as Aileen Wuornos in Monster, and the most distinguishing aspect of the character was not that she was a prostitute but that she was a serial killer.

In comparison: two cops (Helen McDormand in Fargo and Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs) and three rich British ladies (Helen Mirren in The Queen, Emma Thompson in Howard’s End, and Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love). WHY does Hollywood continue to glamourize cops and rich British ladies? WHY?

Secondly, though, I wanted to just make my general disgust with this line of argument known. You can argue against the strike in good faith (and Brad Fox has done so, both here in the comments and at his own joint), even though I won’t agree with you. But the line of argument advanced above – and it’s easily the majority opinion among those (mostly conservative) commenters is “I don’t like it so they don’t deserve anything.”

And that’s just abhorrent. It doesn’t matter if you think Hollywood makes a lot of crap; they also make about a trillion dollars a year in revenue, so the question of whether you personally are invested in the product is moot. It’s both stupid and insulting to think that you have to like a business to determine whether or not its practices are sound.

The question is simple: do writers, having helped to produce a product that is financially successful, deserve a share of that financial success? Answer that question. Jesus, how is this hard?

Let me be plain as possible before I start giving you links:

The WGA writers’ strike is practically the definition of a just strike. This is a battle over corporations earning billions of dollars and unfairly refusing to give those most responsible for the creation of the content which mandates their profits their proper due.

Most screenwriters aren’t rich. Yes, the average salary of a Hollywood screenwriter is $200,000. However, that figure is overinflated by the high end of rich screenwriters, the tiny minority who make millions per picture, the Tina Feys and the Steve Carells. (Both of whom, I might add, are striking.) The median salary for a screenwriter is about twenty thousand dollars. So this isn’t a battle between “billionaires and millionaires,” much like the last actors’ strike, where everybody focused on Leonardo DiCaprio’s salary and ignored the fact that most actors, stunningly enough, are not Leonardo DiCaprio.

So, links:

– John August explains the basics.
– John Rogers lays out some excellent metaphor (“that tiger went tiger“) and some mild prediction.
– Ken Levine provides some perspective.
– Rick Schimpf quotes Micah Wright’s now-infamous “Screwed Over For Spongebob” post and adds some commentary. Also, he provides a link to this informative Youtube.
– An account of what happened at the eleventh-hour negotiations.
– Chris Kelly explains residuals.
– Related to the previous item: Mark Evanier explains why residuals aren’t just fair but also encourage writers to perform better.
– Brian K. Vaughn weighs in.
– And finally, Craig Newmark asks the pressing question on everybody’s minds.

The Frighteners. Six years or so ago, it was slightly more obscure, but those movies with the hobbits in them mean that Peter Jackson’s earlier movies have received more attention. Of course, most of that attention went to Heavenly Creatures, which is excellent and deserves it and that’s all right, but The Frighteners is a pretty goddamned solid movie in its own right, and just right for Halloween viewing (hence this post, you see).

In its way, The Frighteners is delightful. Yes, it’s a bit uneven, starting out as an off-kilter supernatural comedy then shifting to a horror flick and finally culminating in balls-out sci-fantasy action. But it’s good comedy followed by good horror followed by good action, so if it’s uneven in tone it never really varies in quality, and the special effects are just choice to boot, the entire way through.

This is one of Michael J. Fox’s last onscreen film roles before he permanently migrated to television and the occasional voice-acting job, and it’s worth noting just how fucking good an actor Fox is, not just as a comedian (and during the funny parts of this movie, his timing remains as choice as ever), but as a dramatic actor too and even as a believable action star in the “normal guy forced to crank it up” ouevre of action. Fox just has chops a mile deep. It’s uncanny how talented he was in his prime, and a further reminder of how much Parkinson’s Disease really goddamn sucks ass.

Fox of course completely commits to the role of Frank Bannister, a man with deep emotional scars who can see the dead (and uses it for personal gain in the least satisfying of ways). But he’s matched by a cast that commits to their roles in turn. Trini Alvarado, whose career never really took off – and that’s a shame, because she pairs up Andie McDowell-esque looks with the actual acting talent Andie McDowell never had – works the love-interest/co-hero mode excellently, and her contributions to the final fight scene are wholly exciting. Chi McBride shows up (really, once I type the words “Chi McBride” you know at least part of whatever I’m talking about will be good) along with John Astin as an elderly ghost, and I am not quite sure how that works particularly. (Along with a lot of the other elements in this movie – The Frighteners is a movie that requires wholesale commitment from the viewer and a willingness to think things like “well, ghosts, that’s why” a lot.) Jake Busey’s crazy-ass baddie is just fantastic – utterly psychotic and well worthy of his eventual ghostly asskicking – and yes, he really is the spitting image of his dad, and all the moreso in this flick. And Jeffrey Combs’ crazy-ass FBI agent (there is a lot of crazy in this movie, but it mostly works because a movie that is about people who deal with ghosts should be weird as all get out) is hilarious.

And, again, it’s Peter Jackson, and that means one thing: inventive visual genius married to an action sense that equals top-notch entertainment for all concerned. Well, not all, maybe, because this is a movie where a guy’s head explodes and rotting things fall apart at times. But if you like that, or at least can get past it, then by all means, catch this.

P.S. Go with the director’s cut, which adds both fifteen extra minutes and 150 percent better flow in the action sequences. Trust me on this one: Peter Jackson films are always more coherent in the director’s edits.

I have taken, in my time, a lot of grief for unapologetically loving Posse. I am not sure as to why.

It certainly can’t be because the movie isn’t entertaining. With a wealth of excellent performances from Mario Van Peebles, Big Daddy Kane, Tiny Lister, Billy Zane (as the crazy evil white dude) and Stephen Baldwin (as the crazy good white dude) and many others – including the usual Peebles brigade of former blaxploitation stars, this time around casting Pam Grier, Isaac Hayes and Peebles’ father Melvin – the acting in this Western is definitely up to snuff. (Amusing: current Black Panther writer Reginald Hudlin shows up as an extra.) The action sequences are excellent (as can be expected from Peebles’s direction), and the plot is perfectly decent. Okay, maybe the bits with the golden bullets are a touch melodramatic, but they also add a pleasant larger-than-life, mythic aspect to the movie.

Plus – and this cannot be underrated – the movie addresses a major complaint I have with Westerns, which is to say their whiteness. There were a lot of black people headed west during the post-Civil-War period, but in just about every Western movie you find a dearth of black people – short of Morgan Freeman’s turn in Unforgiven I’m hard-pressed to think of any offhand. This sort of thing is forgivable in earlier westerns like High Noon, but it’s something that continued way longer than it should have; even when movies like Silverado and Tombstone had token Mexicans (mostly because sloppy-looking banditos in sombreros with guns are a staple of the Western, for good or ill), there was always a conspicuous lack of black people. And that is lame.

Some have criticized Posse for being an overreaction to this, in the “oh so you’re not going to have black people in your Westerns well I’ll make a Western with all black people, how do you like them apples” variety. They have a tiny bit of a point, but given the cinematic situation with westerns and blacks, it’s not a very big point, and moreover it’s just plain harping considering that Posse isn’t just cinematic affirmative action but a damned entertaining movie in its own right. When Stephen Baldwin’s crazy white boy points out, quite reasonably, that “I ain’t ever personally enslaved nobody,” Peebles gives him ups that the argument doesn’t necessarily even deserve. That’s because Peebles, in addition to writing a damn fine oater, also wants to be fairminded.

But so what if he is? This is a movie with black cowboys quoting poetry and Scripture while they shoot the bad guys, with Stephen Baldwin throwing knives at people (this long predates Stephen Baldwin’s born-again phase, for those wondering), and Billy Zane wearing an eyepatch because he is EEEEEEVIL. It is good goddamned fun. I can understand not liking Westerns as a genre, because not everybody likes cowboys. But if you do like Westerns, why you would not like Posse is beyond me.

MOVIE: Elizabeth: The Golden Age
PLOT SUMMARY Finally, the story of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, put on film! Except much moreso
I UNDERSTAND THIS IS A SEQUEL Well, duh
MOVIE EQUALS Elizabeth times Braveheart
DIRECTED BY Shehkar Kapur
WHO LAST DIRECTED The Four Feathers
WAS THAT ANY GOOD? It was pretty decent, actually
STARRING Cate Blanchett as Queen Elizabeth, Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh, Geoffrey Rush as Lord Walsingham, Abbie Cornish as lady-in-waiting ALSO named Elizabeth, Rhys Ifans as scheming Jesuit, and Samantha Morton as Mary, Queen of Scots
ARE THEY ANY GOOD? Generally speaking? Nope
HOW SO They mostly all shout their lines a lot (so we know the scenes are INTENSE), there are many Meaningful Stares that we know are Meaningful… really, it’s hammy costume-drama acting of the worst sort, and the scripting is so bad that major characters are frequently never even named (Rhys Ifans’ character is the worst example here, but there are others – check the post title for another one)
BEST PERFORMANCE Geoffrey Rush, because he has an Academy Award already and doesn’t need to shout lines now if he doesn’t feel like it, so he delivers a strong, nuanced performance as Walsingham
I’M GETTING THE FEELING YOU DIDN’T LIKE THIS It’s terrible; everything that was good about the end of the original Elizabeth amped up to eleven
…AND THAT’S BAD HOW? The deeply dramatic end of Elizabeth works because it’s counterbalanced by the nuance exhibited elsewhere throughout the film; in comparison, this movie is entirely loud dramatic shouted speeches and Shekhar Kapur “lookit this” shots and poetic visual allusions that go on and on and ON and ON and ON; this movie is all climax and no foreplay, if you appreciate a good sexual metaphor
…BUT THE DEFEAT OF THE SPANISH ARMADA…? Manages to actually be boring. Yes, one of the greatest naval battles in history, never before committed to film worth a damn, with the money and technology to back it up, and Shekhar Kapur totally botches it and makes it about as interesting as doing your taxes
COME ON, IT CAN’T – Hey, did you know that the defeat of the Armada serves as a good display of hubris and works as a storytelling tool for Man being humbled by God? Well, you will after you see this movie, because Shekhar Kapur beats you over the head with it for twenty goddamn minutes straight
AWARDS? Unfortunately, very likely, because Academy voters are idiots who think shouting is good acting
IF THIS MOVIE WERE AN ICE CREAM FLAVOR IT WOULD BE Pistachio fudge cluster
WORTH Pass

Brain Donors is one of those movies that I routinely inflict upon my friends. Unlike other overlooked movies I have previously mentioned, Brain Donors is not necessarily a movie everybody will love. Because Brain Donors can be explained in one simple sentence: it is a remake of a Marx Brothers movie with a young John Turturro in the Groucho Marx role.

“No?” Flakfizer doesn’t know the MEANING of the word “No!” We’re also a little fuzzy on “panaglutin” and “viscosity.” Actually, come to think, everybody should love Brain Donors precisely because it is a remake of a Marx Brothers movie (specifically A Night At The Opera, their finest, except with ballet instead of opera) with John Turturro in the Groucho role. And let me assure you that Turturro is full-on manic in what I consider to be his finest pure comedic performance ever. Yes, better than any Coen brothers film he’s ever been in. Yes, better than his freak turn in Transformers, where he was the best thing about a pretty marginal movie. As Roland T. Flakfizer (Brain Donors enthusiastically embraces the silly-name traditions of the Marxes), Turturro chews up the scenery then regurgitates it as cud to digest later. “Charity work. I gather these for those less fortunate than myself who can’t afford pornography.” Still, the Groucho role is only one of three in a Marx flick, and luckily Turturro has compatriots as game as he is: Bob Nelson, a more-or-less unknown standup comedian, takes on the Harpo role with exceptional gameness (and turns out to be a splendid physical comedian), and Mel Smith turns the Chico role from Italian-American to illegal-British-immigrant, matching Turturro word-for-word in often-dizzying dialogue. “I could make love to you right here.”
“Roland, let’s keep this professional!”
“Fine, I’ll charge you fifty bucks a pop.” Brain Donors is old-school, a finely-tuned romp with an enthusiastic love of silliness for silliness’ sake. Every single element of this movie is dialed up to eleven (except for Turturro’s performance, which I would estimate to be dialed up to around thirty-six). And the best thing is that it builds, and builds, and builds, starting with Turturro chasing an ambulance (literally) and slapping an inflatable rotator cuff on an opportunistic little kid while encouraging said kid to sue his parents (“I sued mine!”), and ending with one of the funniest extended sequences in film comedy ever, a twenty-minute sequence with the three numbskull-heroes deliberately sabotaging a performance of Swan Lake so that the evil ballet dancer (yes, there’s an evil ballet dancer) and the evil rich guy get their horrible comeuppances. “And that spells cash with a capital…”
“K!”
“You should go back to school.”
“I hated teaching.” I won’t pretend that Brain Donors is going to be everybody’s cup of tea; even a modernized take on the Marx Brothers isn’t going to appeal to everybody no matter how much I think it should. But it has John Turturro shooting at a large man in a duck costume onstage in the middle of a ballet, and if loving that is wrong then I don’t want to be right.

From the comments, a while back:

Now the question is whether we start a petition asking you publish Vampire Hitler

Well, it’s not finished as such. Hence why I’m still working on it.

However, I will confess that it contains the following things:

– a race war between the incoming Aryan vampires and the city’s native vampires, which are largely black,
– a jive-talking number one soul brother vampire who got turned in the 1970s,
– an order of vampire-hunting rabbis, including one shot with all of them walking towards the camera in slow motion, their long black coats fluttering behind them,
– an archvillain who has a cane tipped with a sharpened diamond, which he uses as a weapon,
– a RENEGADE COP, LIVING ON THE EDGE,
– and a chainsaw shaped like a Star of David.

And yes, it was originally meant as a serious project for a direct-to-video distribution model. The conversation that spawned the concept essentially went as follows:

ME: Okay, so if we wanted to do a straight-to-DVD project, what would be a good concept?
OTHER GUY: Has to be horror, of course.
ME: Right, but it has to be good horror. High concept horror. What’s a good bad guy?
OTHER GUY: …Hitler?
ME: Good, but it needs something more. What’s worse than Hitler?
OTHER GUY: …Hitler and he’s a ninja?
ME: That’s not a horror movie, though.
OTHER GUY: Hitler and he’s a vampire?
ME: YES.

continue reading "It’s entirely possible someone beat me to this, but if they did, big deal."

I saw Persepolis a few weeks ago at a press screening for the Toronto International Film Festival, and last night I watched Superman/Doomsday. And really, there are no two works as spiritually akin as these two are: Marjane’s struggle against patriarchal fundamentalism is, dare I say it, exactly like Superman’s struggle against a giant killer alien hitting him repeatedly with a tanker truck.

Okay, not so much.

Persepolis is much, much better than the book was. This may seem like hyperbole, but I assure you, it isn’t – the dreadful events depicted in the comic take on much greater immediacy when they’re animated and happening in “real time” as opposed to when they’re static images on a page. The comic was interesting, and even involving, but for me it was never really very gripping. (Your mileage, of course, may vary.) The movie, on the other hand, is gripping – deeply so, both when it’s lightly entertaining (Marjane air-guitaring to Megadeth) and darkly oppressive (the secondhand, surrealistic accounts of the frontlines of the Iran/Iraq war). The same cartoony motif that is omnipresent throughout the film both makes the comedic bits funnier and the dramatic bits more poignant (and yes, I realize that you can say the same about the comic, but in the case of the film it’s even more apparent). And technically, it’s a marvel – simple black-and-white animation rarely manages to pull off the degree of liveliness that this flick does. Hell, most colour-animation films aren’t as lively as Persepolis is.

Early buzz has it that France has selected it as their entry for the Foreign Language Film category in this year’s Academy Awards, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it also get a nod for Best Animated Film in a year where thus far its only serious competition is Ratatouille. In short, it’s very, very good, quite possibly great. See it on the big screen if you can: it really is a beautifully made movie.

Superman/Doomsday is a retelling of the Death of Superman saga, pared down with a lot of the extraneous bits removed. Other than Doomsday and a few brief appearances by Kelex, this is a very pure Superman story: it’s about Superman, Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, and the complicated relationships they have, plus a lot of awesome earthshaking violence. Doomsday’s brutality is barely toned down at all – he brutally murders a lot of innocent human beings (although without much blood, to be sure), and later on in the movie Superman’s heat vision becomes genuinely terrifying as he wields it with the precision of a laser. (Well, it’s actually a crazy clone of Superman. I would have avoided spoiling that, but the moment he shows up it is SO GODDAMNED OBVIOUS HE IS A CLONE that I feel fine about it.)

What’s really wonderful about the movie is that, more than anything, this is Lois’ movie – she’s more the protagonist than Superman is, because Superman has a big-ass fight, dies, then is mostly offscreen for the majority of the rest of the movie until the SECOND big-ass fight. It’s Lois who has to deal with her lover being gone, and Lois who goes around trying to find out what the hell is up with Obviously Fake Replacement Clone Superman, and Lois who invades Lexcorp on a mission to discover the truth. (And, in case I haven’t made it clear yet, this is very much a movie about how Lois and Clark are a team, and I’m glad DC is one hundred percent behind that. Unlike certain other companies I could name, Marvel Comics.)

The voicework is pretty good: Anne Heche does a good Lois, Adam Baldwin is perfectly acceptable as Big Blue and James Marsters comes very, very close to matching the level of perfection Clancy Brown achieved as Lex Luthor in the Superman and Justice League cartoons. Not quite as good, but then again Clancy Brown just owned Lex, lock stock and barrel. The animation is generally good, despite the fact that the attempt to give Superman prominent cheekbones makes him look alternately like he’s severely aged or has weird facial scars.

Obviously, Superman/Doomsday isn’t going to be as general-interest as Persepolis is, but it’s a very well-made ‘toon feature and a decent Superman story, so if you like cartoons and you like Superman, you won’t be disappointed.

Originally written March 21st, 2006.

Recently, around the internets, in reading people’s opinions on V For Vendetta, a commonly mentioned argument (in both positive and negative reviews of V) is that Alan Moore has a right to be gun-shy about Hollywood because League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was, quote, “the worst comic-book film ever.”

From now on, the punishment for anybody saying this is as follows: be strapped to a chair in a theatre with your eyes pried open like in A Clockwork Orange (with drops, I am not unhumane) and forced to watch the following, nonstop:

Superman III
Superman IV
Steel
Elektra
Catwoman
Batman and Robin (not just the worst comic-book movie ever, but easily one of the worst movies ever made period)
Popeye
The Punisher (Dolph Lundgren version)
The Punisher (Tom Jane version)
Ultraviolet
Garfield
Man-Thing
Swamp Thing
Howard The Duck
Judge Dredd
Captain America (the one where the Red Skull is Italian)
Barb Wire
Fantastic Four (the Corman version)
Spawn
The Shadow
Flash Gordon
Faust
All of the sequels to The Crow
Monkeybone
Red Sonja

And that is the short list. LXG wasn’t a good movie, but geez, people, it was just a mediocre timewaster action flick. The bottom of the barrel is so much further down.

MOVIE: Shoot ‘Em Up
PLOT SUMMARY Wait, you want a plot?
OH COME ON NOW Fine: Clive Owen is the good guy protecting a baby from the approximately seven million gunmen who want to shoot the baby
MOVIE EQUALS The Transporter minus Cars plus Three Men And A Baby
DIRECTED BY Michael Davis
WHO LAST DIRECTED a shitload of very bad straight-to-video movies you have never seen, including the truly pathetic 100 Girls
WAS THAT ANY GOOD? Try to infer from the previous comment what I just made
STARRING Clive Owen as crazy-ass good guy, Paul Giamatti as crazy-ass bad guy, Monica Belluci as crazy-ass lactacting hooker
ARE THEY ANY GOOD? They don’t suck, although god knows they all chew the scenery something fierce
SO I DON’T HAVE ANY HOPE FOR THIS TO BE A GOOD MOVIE; IS IT AT LEAST A GOOD ACTION MOVIE? It’s a live-action cartoon in the most complimentary sense; when I compare this movie to The Transporter, what I mean is take the craziest moments in that movie, like say when Jason Statham beats up eight guys with a firehose, and then make that the entire movie – and no I am serious I mean it’s the entire goddamned movie
BEST PERFORMANCE I am uncomfortable calling anything in this movie a “performance” in the traditional sense per se, because the line readings are clearly over-the-top on purpose for a laugh the entire way through and it doesn’t seem quite right to say “Clive Owen because he stabs people in the face with a carrot multiple times”
MOST LIKELY STUNT SEQUENCE TO BE “HOMAGED” BY A BIG-BUDGET MOVIE TEN YEARS FROM NOW the skydiving gunfight
BEST ACTION SEQUENCE IN MOVIE Tough call; I mean, understand that this is a movie that begins with a gunfight – and a good one – taking place during the delivery of a baby (an event which is the goddamned climax of Time and Tide, so you have an idea of how amped up this movie is), and that none of the action pieces lag even slightly
AWARDS? Nope
IF THIS MOVIE WERE AN ICE CREAM FLAVOR IT WOULD BE English trifle gelato
WORTH Cheap Tuesday or full price for action fans

SCENE: A crummy-looking producer’s office. The walls are covered with posters detailing past glories – such as they are, we’re talking mostly budget SF/horror flicks and one Hallmark made-for-TV movie that won some technical awards. A SMALLWIG is sitting behind the desk, which is covered in mounds of paper. His LACKEY brings him coffee.

SMALLWIG: Okay, I got fifty grand from ABC and more coming from Sci-Fi. We need a project, stat.
LACKEY: What type of project?
SMALLWIG: Something nerds will like. I don’t have a distribution deal yet.
LACKEY: They gave you funding without giving you a distribution deal?
SMALLWIG: I think it’s a tax write-off for them. More money for us.
LACKEY: So why does it have to be something nerds will like? We could go upscale, make an indie drama –
SMALLWIG: Kid, I know I promised my sister I’d show you the ropes, but you got to stop saying stupid crap like that. What’s the first rule I told you when you came in here, day one?
LACKEY: “Buy the donut store coffee, not the Folger’s. Schmucks drink Folger’s.”
SMALLWIG: Not that.
LACKEY: “If you put mayo on my pastrami sandwich next time it’s your ass.”
SMALLWIG: Get past lunchtime.
LACKEY: Oh. “If you want to go broke in a hurry, make an indie drama.”
SMALLWIG: Right.
LACKEY: But we got that great script, Uncle Bernie. It’s funny, it’s clever –
SMALLWIG: And the best we could do for stars was George Wendt. Kid, people say they want indie drama, but what they really want is standard Hollywood, just not as crappy, and we don’t got the connections for that. Capice? Good. Now, where was I?
LACKEY: “Something nerds will like.”
SMALLWIG: Right. So here’s my thinking. We don’t got a distribution deal. No TV, no movie release, nothing. So we got to build buzz the old-fashioned way.
LACKEY: Bribe reporters to say we’re criminally ignored and build up cachet?
SMALLWIG: Good thinking, maybe later, but no. I think we got to use the Internet like you always say.
LACKEY: Really? So my memo on Youtube and –
SMALLWIG: Shut up, kid. Here’s what we do. We got to get one of those fan-film directors. They’ll work cheap and they got an existing fanbase of loser dorks who will do nothing but talk up the movie.
LACKEY: Good idea, Uncle Bernie.
SMALLWIG: Course it is. Might even save money on overhead if we can get his nerd friends to work cheap for us.
LACKEY: And then what? Do we get him to execute his brilliant original vision?
SMALLWIG: Right, because I want original vision from someone whose big idea was to do what George Lucas already did except with crappier actors.
LACKEY: …the slush pile?
LACKEY gestures at a towering, precariously balanced pile of scripts.
SMALLWIG: Not yet. We go in there later, find what we need, “adapt” it. But what’ll this potential audience of ours like, right? What do nerds on the internet like?
LACKEY: Battlestar Galactica?
SMALLWIG: Too fresh. We need something that’s been out of the public eye for a little while so nobody outright accuses us of plagarism. Especially lawyers.
LACKEY: How about Firefly? It’s got those rabid fans –
SMALLWIG: And it’s been out of production for a while. Good thinking. Plus, those particular fans are so hungry for anything that even looks like their show that they’ll ignore how crap our show is. Look through the headshot file later and see if we can get anybody who looks vaguely like the captain guy.
LACKEY: Nathan Fillion?
SMALLWIG: That’s the one. But now we got to come up with a twist so it’s all original and ours. Right. So it’s Firefly. What does it meet?
LACKEY: Huh?
SMALLWIG: What does it meet? You know, “Predator meets Waitress.” That sorta thing. Firefly meets…
LACKEY: Das Boot!
SMALLWIG: Interesting, a sorta outer-space submarine war flick. Oh, and we could do it for cheap because the entire set could be the sub. That one’s got potential, but I got favors that are coming due with some CGI guys and I wanna big space battle and stuff. Write me two pages on it for later use, though.
LACKEY: Okay. Uh… Firefly meets… Total Recall?
SMALLWIG: What, so they’re on Mars? Boring. Next.
LACKEY: Underworld?
SMALLWIG: Vampires and werewolves in space. Uh huh. Next.
LACKEY: The Matrix?
SMALLWIG: Kid, you’re killing me here.
LACKEY (getting desperate): …Aliens?
The SMALLWIG chews his cigar thoughtfully.
SMALLWIG: Yeah. I can see that. So say the captain guy is back in the army during the war days, and they’re fighting on a planet, and then they, I dunno, blow up a hole somewhere they shouldn’t, and the aliens come out of the hole.
LACKEY: Can we do that?
SMALLWIG: Course we can. Oh, and we can also do the “two sides have to team up” bit. You know, to survive against the aliens, both sides of humans have to fight back-to-back. People eat that shit up.
LACKEY (leafing through headshots): I got an “Aaron Matthias” here, looks kind of like Nathan Fillion.
SMALLWIG: Good. Get him. Also make sure to get at least one Asian chick and one black guy. You know, for diversity. I’ll go through the slush pile later today and take what we need, hand it to Dougie for “repolishing,” script’ll be done by Friday.
LACKEY: …so how do we make money on this?
SMALLWIG: Make money? Ha! Nah, we take a nice juicy producer’s credit, and with it a producer’s paycheque from the budget of the movie. Then we put the thing up on the Internet, like, in ten or twelve episodes or whatever, and we use those tricks you were talking about to inflate hit count, and we use it to try and get a proper production deal somewhere else.
LACKEY: Man, Uncle Bernie, you got this down cold.
SMALLWIG: Damn straight.

This is what happens when somebody tells me that something unproven is a certainty and I disagree.

In this case the email in question said “the reason there are so few DC movies is because nobody wants to see anything but batman and maybe superman. wonder woman never gets made because she sucks. green lantern and flash are too complicated, so is justice league. and nothing else would make their money back after they made it. you can’t make a movie about elongated man or guys like that.”

I disagree, and my argument is thus:

But I am sure that the varied talents of the comics blogospheric fandom (which needs a shorter name – I nominate “the Crunklehood”) can make the point even better. So my challenge to all of you is thus: better my visual argument. Do up a mock poster for the movie you wish DC would just make already. Or Marvel, why not (although given Marvel’s releasing schedule I’m pretty sure Rocket Racer is on tap for 2012). Photoshop it, draw it, do a Claymation trailer, whatever. Email me your link and I’ll put it up here.(Also, a valuable lesson learned: making Question’s no-face is goddamned hard to do.)