Bleeding Cool is reporting Christoph Waltz may be under consideration to play the Lizard.
Burn.
Dylan Baker played Dr. Connors in two of the Spidey movies, a set-up for the transformation that never happened (bit like Billy Dee Williams in Burton’s Batman).
What makes this worse is this isn’t the first time this has happened to Baker. In Todd Solondz’s Happiness he wowed critics by playing a character who was a paedophile in such a way that you actually feel sorry for him. Solondz recently released Life During Wartime, a sequel to his earlier film that recast all of the roles, including Baker’s.
Christopher Nolan’s Inception promises to be a movie that will divide audiences between those who love its dream logic action sequences and those frustrated by its shortcomings.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a corporate spy whose talents lie in a specialised field of espionage known as extraction. He can break into a subject’s subconscious while they dream and remove information for his employers directly from the minds of their rivals. Cobb’s team is made up of fellow experts in extraction, each of them with their own specialised talents. The architect is responsible for ensuring the level of detail of the dream the subject finds themselves in. Then there is the chemist, who is responsible for the strength of the sedative, as well as a forger who can recreate the appearance of people the subject knows.
Cobb and his crew are hired by Saito, played by returning Nolan performer Ken Watanabe, to go outside their comfort zone and perform an ‘inception’ – the planting of an idea into the mind of a business rival Fischer (Cillian Murphy) in order to ‘inspire’, him to break up his monopoly. In return, Cobb is promised that he will be allowed to return to his family in America. He immediately agrees, despite the reservations of his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). What the rest of the team do not realize is that Cobb’s dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) is breaking into his dreams and working against him. His plan is to drag Fischer through multiple levels of the dreamscape, earning his trust by acting as a protector of sorts and tricking him into believing Saito’s simple idea. The dismantling of his father’s business empire.
Cobb is introduced to Ariadne (Ellen Page) by his father-in-law, a young student with a precocious talent for manipulating the dreamscape. Trained to be the team’s new architect, she becomes determined to discover the secrets of Cobb’s past and the reasons for Mal’s murderous attempts on their lives. In effect Ariadne stands in for the audience. Through her we learn the rules of extraction and inception, as well as the cause of Cobb’s debilitating guilt.
Before getting into what I disliked about Inception I would like to address its strengths. This is a marquee film that is filled with astounding images. Paris is folded like a pretzel and there are hallway fight scenes in zero gravity. The premise of dream thieves is fascinating, a concept that could have sprung from the mind of Philip K. Dick. That a blockbuster film is trading in these ideas is a credit to Nolan’s ambition and talent as a director who can woo modern day audiences. What’s more the film is an excellent showcase for young, up-and-coming talent. While DiCaprio is the ostensible star, this is actually an ensemble picture, the ‘dream heist’, storyline resembling a Freudian Oceans 11. Joseph Gordon-Levitt adds yet another wry performance to his CV, but it is Tom Hardy playing the quick-witted Eames who is the stand out. Adding much needed humour to the proceedings, his shape-shifting forger steals every scene he is in. Something of a relief I’m sure for Hardy, finally escaping the embarrassing memory of Star Trek Nemesis. With this and his performance in Bronson, I reckon we’ll be seeing his name in lights before the end of the year.
Ok now that that’s out of the way….this was a very frustrating film for me. For one a lot of media hype has been generated by the ’secrets’, of Inception and its purported ambiguity. Pajiba and Mightygodking have each addressed complaints of confusing plotlines and that ending. Personally I found the story of the film straight-forward, disappointingly so for a film about lucid dreaming and shapeshifting thieves of the subconscious, with Escher-inspired architecture to boot. Many scenes are given over to exposition and we know from the outset there is something wrong with Cobb. Had Mal’s fate been kept under wraps until later in the film, with the process of extraction running more smoothly, the plot might have been more surprising. This is a film with a smart premise that feels the need to explain itself to audiences, afraid they will be left confused. True this would be box office poison, but the quality of the film itself would have been more successful had it been more ambiguous.
Below is a diagram explaining the several dreamscapes invented by Cobb to entrap Fischer. As a visual aid it does the trick, but I do not recall feeling confused on this point. We are walked through each ‘dream within a dream’, so that we understand what is happening. Excellent work by @DeviantART
The ‘kick’, referred to in the visual aid is the means by which Cobb’s team surfaces from the dream. Gravity generally works and a montage sequence featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt falling off a chair proves yet again, as Zach Gallifinakis has noted, that falling is the essence of physical comedy. Moments of humour are few and far between though. This is grim, dour stuff. The kick releases them from the dream, but can it lead to death? From dropping off a chair we progress to characters flinging themselves off buildings. What is real and what is fantasy? I have heard reviewers say that audiences may return to watch Inception two, maybe three times to work out what scenes occur in the ‘real world’. I suspect the only revelation after multiple viewings will be to discover tinnitus, as Hans Zimmer’s portentous score booms and blasts through the proceedings.
What this film desperately needs is a sense of fun. At times it resembles The Matrix, the Wachowskis lightening the Cartesian dilemma of surfer-dude Messiah Neo by introducing comic book action and Hong Kong fight scenes. The above mentioned Oceans 11 reveled in the banter and camraderie of the casino thieves. Inception fails to convince us that Cobb, Arthur, Eames and Ariadne are individuals. God love him, I could not understand Watanabe’s Saito half the time. It occured to me that as they are all sharing the same dream the actor could have delivered his lines in Japanese, with the others immediately comprehending.
Ultimately the characters seem more like archetypes. Eames represents the mind’s capacity for imagination. Arthur is rational thought, linear and direct in his approach to problem solving. Whether this is intentional or not is immaterial. As I have no investment in the characters I do not care whether they live or die. The rescue of Saito, to my mind, is merely a means of Cobb exculpating his own feelings of guilt. As a result the ending, if you accept that the proceeding is nothing more than a dream, represents his final decision to embrace the dream. At one point he remarks to the team that a positive fantasy is more successful than a negative one. His brain has decided to abandon his paranoid fantasies and accept a happy ending.
Personally I left the cinema disappointed. I have heard Inception described as a smart film for stupid people. That seems like a terrible waste to me.
What do these films have in common? Well 1), they all, to one degree or another, suck. I mean that in the sense of being disappointments and wastes of story potential, not in the generic ‘Wow Soultaker sucks’, sense.
2) All four trailers were scored by Muse. So I feel there’s an important lesson here.
Films trailers that feature the music of Muse, will inevitably suck.
Screw you Matthew Bellamy.
Y’know what, I’m just going to say it. Joe Carnahan’s revamp of The A-Team wasn’t terrible. In fact, I thought it was goofy fun for the most part.
It’s hard to criticise a remake of a show that was already pretty stupid, which the original show certainly was. What impressed me about this version was that for all the bombast and dizzying camera work, there was an occasional sting in the tail too. For instance the CIA agent played by Patrick Wilson who compares live combat to Call of Duty. Now that was an interesting touch. The A-Team was always subversive in its own way, the theme of the show was that the system was broken. These four guys were rebels accused of a ‘crime they didn’t commit’, fighting to clear their name. When you remember that the military police and law enforcement were often the bad guys (not to mention trade unions…yes I looked it up), you suddenly remember that this was Reagan’s America. Y’know that whole schtick about how the business of government is to stay out of business, fat cat bureaucrats living it up in Washington, etcetera etcetera Republicans playing the victim card at all times despite running the country!
If these guys are GOP, does that make BA Michael Steele?
So here we have Hannibal Smith and his team of Army Rangers framed for a crime they didn’t commit – this time with Iraq standing in for Vietnam – and after their escape from military prison, hunt down those responsible for the frame-up.
Half the time I wasn’t really sure what was happening. The camera spins around more than in any of the Bourne movies. The banter between the guys feels forced at times and Liam Neeson makes a dour replacement for George Peppard. It’s especially strange when the younger, more handsome Bradley Cooper (playing Face of course) sidelines Hannibal towards the end of the picture.
However, District 9’s Sharlto Copley is great fun as Howling Mad Murdock. Quinton Jackson offers a respectful turn in Mr T’s signature role of B. A. Barracus, with the character expressing some of the original actor’s own concerns as regards the depiction of violence.Characters even refer to him by his proper name, Bosco, as opposed to the ‘trying too hard’ Bad Attitude moniker of the original show.
What sold me on the film though is its wicked sense of humour where the villains are concerned, corrupt intelligence officers and a mercenary firm named ‘Blackforest’, (ho ho!). Good fun.
Yes it appears Michael Bay will be enlisting the aid of South Park’s Underpants Gnomes once more to wield their magic over his career and produce yet another megahit.
Already the cries of anger can be heard in the Uncanny Valleys of Fandom as the news has arrived that he will be directing Peter Laird’s napkin-creation Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
And I say…..so? It’s not as if the original cartoon and/or comic was Ibsen. Who cares, let the Bearded One fuck the frame one more time and blow up New York’s sewers.
EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon have brought Michael Bay and his Platinum Dunes partners Brad Fuller and Andrew Form on to produce Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the live-action film that reboots the film series launched by New Line in 1990. Bay, Fuller and Form will produce with Galen Walker and Scott Mednick.
The producers will begin meetings with writers in the next few weeks. The deal puts Bay in the center of two Paramount franchises, as he started production May 17 on Transformers 3, and is zeroing in on Rosie Huntington-Whitely to replace Megan Fox as love interest for Shia LaBeouf. TMNT, a co-production between Paramount and Nickelodeon, is an outgrowth of the $60 million acquisition made by Nick last October for global rights to the entire Turtles franchise. Right around the same time, Paramount made a first look deal with the Platinum Dunes partners, who will generate genre projects but also want to expand their scope. While they’ve already set up several projects including a Rob Cohen-remake of Fright Night, the Turtles film puts them into new territory.
Yes I complain about Michael Bay an awful lot on this site. That’s because he’s a terrible film-maker. BUT he makes movies lots of people go see, so he’s doing something right. The argument goes that he’s rooting through the childhood’s of 30-something cinema audiences to find properties that their feelings of nostalgia will compel them to see. If that’s the case – stop placing so much value on nostalgia. Yes I watched the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles cartoon when I was 10. I remembering sand-papering my skateboard and drawing a crude picture of a turtle on it (see Peter Laird and I have a lot in common).
That was twenty years ago! So I guess the Underpants Gnomes won’t be sucking me into this one.
Ok, here’s one of my main objections to the Sarah Palin dominated wing of the Tea Party. Beyond the whole racist/fascist/revisionist agenda they’re spouting while tearing up the GOP and intimidating the fickle Democrat party (US politics is like a car crash in slow motion, eh?) one of their main bugbears is that the Media is run by atheist Jewish sodomites, or somesuch nonsense.
Which is patently ridiculous, as I find American movies and television shows are pathetically reliant on religious themes, particularly Christian ones. Y’know why Richard Dawkins is so angry? Probably because every time he turns on a tv, or watches a movie he finds yet another insipid depiction of ‘faith’ curing all ills. Himself, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens still have their work cut out if they’re to establish any kind of strong secular position.
Above I’ve posted the trailer to the Hughes Brothers’ The Book of Eli. I watched it on a plane, having missed the cinema release. It’s set in yet another post-apocalyptic world that looks surprisingly like Fallout 3. Denzel Washington plays Eli, a lone wanderer who has in his possession a special book. He is traveling west across the remnants of the United States, left devastated after an unspecified event that scorched the Earth’s surface. Arriving at a town that’s ruled by Gary Oldman’s crime boss Carnegie, also searching for a certain book, he is discovered to be in possession of a King James Bible. Which of course is exactly what the villain is looking for, as its words have the power to sway men.
Now I’ll get back to the plot of this movie at the end of this post, but it’s extraordinary to have a dystopian action film that revolves around the importance of the Bible. When Clint Eastwood made Pale Rider there were hints that he was more than he appeared to be, but that interpretation was open to those who wanted to make it. The Hughes Brothers have set up an action film filled with Old Testament wrath and revenge, with Denzel playing a jesuitical knight errant who will kill to protect the book and is protected as a result.
Three long-running television series wrapped up recently that also featured heavy religious overtones. Ashes to Ashes a British cop procedural that flirted with time travel narratives concluded with the main characters discovering they were all in Limbo. Battlestar Galactica which initially pitched itself a show charting the conflict between the monotheistic robot race the Cylons and the polytheist/secular humans – in space – ended with series lead Starbuck being resurrected as a foul-mouthed angel and a final scene that shouts from the roof-tops that God literally had a plan for what had happened. Turns out that we the audience are descended from the characters in the show, having abandoned their technological advantages out of some misconceived Rousseaulian pretence. Lost, like Ashes to Ashes, also employs the “everyone’s dead and in Limbo”, story ending. Like BSG from the very first episode there were supernatural elements to the show, but creators Lindelof and Cuse had previously claimed the fantastical aspects of the Island had a scientific basis that would be explained. Yet in the finale we see a cast reunion in a church, moments before they’re all swept into Heaven.
Oh BSG. You used to be cool. That pussy Bryan Singer wussed out of doing a post 9/11 take on the Dirk Benedict fromage-fest that you once were, but you had balls! Hell, President Roslin had balls – big ones. You had fleshy Cylons that had blew themselves up assured of an eternal reward – getting to come back and blow up more humans! Your main scientist character, Gaius Balter, had an angel living in his head. The only conclusions he could draw were a) he had an angel in his head and b) he was batshit insane. God love him, he opted for b).
Yes from the very start there were religious overtones, but in a science fiction show, set in space, where the villains were genocidal machines that had been programmed by humans….many were surprised when it turned out there was a God. That the Cylons were more or less right all along (if a little too enthusiastic in their faith). And Starbuck was Jesus/Lazarus or somesuch. Actually we don’t know what exactly she was, but she seemed to be a manifestation of God’s will. Also Head-Six (who was in Baltar) and Head-Baltar (who was in Caprica Six) are in the final scene shown walking through Manhattan discussing mitochondrial DNA and how it relates to God’s will. See – science got a look in at the end! Even if it’s a botched mixture of evolutionary theory and intelligent design. In fairness writer Ron Moore doesn’t come out and say any one religion is right, but instead implies that we are caught in a kind of Nietzschean eternal return that will eventually succeed in producing the desired result – which is I presume some kind of Panglossian ‘best of all possible worlds’.
But the entity responsible is for all intents and purposes God. Sigh.
Already the pundits are proclaiming Lost’s finale The End to be ‘not as bad as BSG‘. To wit, it also relies heavily on religious symbolism, but the argument goes it’s not as egregious as the final episode of Ronald D. Moore’s show.
To which I say donkey butter! This was offensive schlock of the highest order, laying the plinky plinky music on thick, with some dead daddy issues to boot (Christian Shepherd! Jesus….) that are sure to elicit a tear from the eye. As the episode ends you’re supposed to be thankful that you had some kind of emotional response, reward enough for the six years spent waiting for answers. No not where the polar bear came from, or why Walt appeared to Shannon, or any of that finicky crap – but WHAT DID IT ALL MEAN!
Was there any meaning to it at all? I don’t think so. Book titles and philosopher’s names are dropped throughout scripts like easter eggs, hinting at some underlying meaning, but in the end this was nothing more than a soap opera for nerds! Philip K. Dick was an expert on interweaving science fiction themes with Biblical apocrypha. This was not up to PKD’s standard. It liked to think it was, but really it’s all come down to hand waving and a musical score.
The final scenes in the Limbo-universe that the dead Losties find themselves in is especially insipid. They all reunite in a church, having been forced to remember their past on the Island by the dimension-hopping Desmond (a plot that copies the equally undercooked House of M from Marvel comics’ Brian Michael Bendis). Attention is drawn to the stained glass windows and religious idols within the building. There’s Christian, Islamic and Jewish iconography everywhere, suggesting that all religions are more or less the same and in the afterlife we can all just hang out, nevermind the misery and division that religion inspires.
In short, Lost sings the praises of Orson Welles’ Sugarcandy Mountain and ends with Jack Sherpherd smiling as the life bleeds out of him. If Kevin Spacey were to have suddenly narrated the end sequence, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Now remember the Book of Eli? I actually love how that film approaches religion. Carnegie sees the Bible solely as a tool to control. Hell I won’t argue with that. He’s basically an evangelist. Eli eventually escapes his clutches and meets Malcolm McDowell, here resembling Mark Twain, who is preserving the few remaining books that have survived the catastrophe. The film ends with him placing a new edition of the King James Bible on a shelf with dozens of other books – all of which are equally important! See, religion as a cultural expression is perfectly valid. It is aspirational at the best of times and can give comfort. There but for the Grace of God go I – give thanks for what you have and look to your advantages so that you can improve yourself as an individual, or help your community. That I have no objection to.
When screen-writers fall back on the Word of God to resolves dangling plot threads though? I find that lazy, cynical and offensive. Religion has been used to justify much evil in this world and should be challenged for that reason to be more meaningful, more relevant to our lives. When science fiction, the speculative imaginings of our present, past or future, uses religion to provide an ending, it’s a step backwards into unthinking dogmatism. “God did it”, is no better than “A Wizard did it”.
Delivered with exactly the right amount of arrogance and bravado, Robert Downey Jnr confirms once again that he is the perfect choice to play Tony Stark. The scene in question features the creator of the Iron Man suit giving testimony under subpoena to US senators explaining why he should be entitled to operate as a superhero independently of the government. They see the Iron Man suit as a weapon. Stark disagrees and argues that it is in fact a full-body prosthesis.
The film itself seems to be having a similar argument with its fellow superhero films. Where they get bogged down in grim origin fables, Tony decides to head off to Monaco for a spot of race car driving. Where vigilantism is shown to be an outlet for personal trauma, Iron Man’s escapades are the perfect means of promoting Stark Ltd’s stock. Iron Man 2 feels like a digression into the life of a press appointed ’superhero’, who just happens to be one of the most powerful technology magnates in the world. Less a superhero, more a CEO.
Which is a great way for Jon Favreau to set his film apart from the also-ran costumed heroes. His two Iron Man pictures have been fun, breezy affairs, with an occasional satirical sting in the tail. The improvised dialogue lends it an Altman-esque air that yields up some lovely gems. Sam Rockwell, playing the Tony Stark wannabe Justin Hammer, gives an amazing speech during a weapons presentation that includes the following wonder:
‘If it were any smarter, it’d write a book that would make Ulysses look like it was written in crayon. And it would read it to you‘
I feel Jon Favreau was smart to avoid taking on the challenge of helming an Avengers movie that ties all of Marvel Entertainment’s properties into one feature. His approach does not suit the more bombastic excess promised by a film that includes a Norse god, a cyrogenically frozen supersoldier and a giant green man in the cast. However, seeing as Iron Man’s success in effect has bankrolled the Avengers project itself, hints and cameos as to the emerging shared universe continues. I’ve heard complaints that Samuel L. Jackson’s sudden appearance in the proceedings as Nick Fury is jarring. Now he does enter the film, solve Tony’s whole ‘I’m dying’ dilemma and then head off again after a cryptic line about Stark Senior, so I can understand why people feel that way. On the other hand the appearance of a certain familiar shield was amusingly introduced and then the mandatory Stan Lee appearance gets a laugh out loud response when Robert Downey Jnr appears to mistake him for Hugh Heffner.
Justin Theroux’s script is surprisingly traditionally Marvel comics in other ways though. Tony’s problems are mostly due to his own personal quirks, a Marvel comics speciality with its stable of heroes to a man neurotic and crippled by indecision. The Avengers Initiative presents itself as a reminder to Tony that he doesn’t have to go it alone, although Favreau has given himself an out should he wish to pursue different stories to the Avengers movie. The failure of Tony to be snapped up by the proposed team also ties into traditional Marvel narratives. It seems he needs to prove himself before being accepted, which knowing Stark’s ability to screw up on a nearly epic scale most days should prove interesting.
As to all the complaints that ‘Demon in a Bottle‘, was only hinted at, or that the second act needed a big fight scene….did y’all miss the bit where Tony and Rhodey beat the crap out of each other to the tune of a Queen remix? I loved it!
Iron Man 2. Knows when to just sit back and deliver the fun. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Dark Knight.
You get to monkey-swinging and things like that and you can blame it on the writer and you can blame it on Steven [Spielberg, who directed]. But the actor’s job is to make it come alive and make it work, and I couldn’t do it. So that’s my fault. Simple.”
and…
“I’ll probably get a call. But he needs to hear this. I love him. I love Steven. I have a relationship with Steven that supersedes our business work. And believe me, I talk to him often enough to know that I’m not out of line. And I would never disrespect the man. I think he’s a genius, and he’s given me my whole life. He’s done so much great work that there’s no need for him to feel vulnerable about one film. But when you drop the ball you drop the ball.”
He also weighed in on the execrable Transformers 2 -
“When I saw the second movie, I wasn’t impressed with what we did[...]There were some really wild stunts in it, but the heart was gone[...]…we got lost. We tried to get bigger. It’s what happens to sequels. It’s like, how do you top the first one? You’ve got to go bigger[...]Mike went so big that it became too big, and I think you lost the anchor of the movie. … You lost a bit of the relationships. Unless you have those relationships, then the movie doesn’t matter. Then it’s just a bunch of robots fighting each other.”
This is being spun as an admirable show of chutzpah on Labouef’s part, criticising Daddys Spielberg and Bay, but I see it differently. To my mind it smacks of a PR gambit to ensure fans return to these franchises.
If he’d sworn off starring in another Bay/Spielberg mess that would have earned respect.
Michael Bay’s Transformers is simply a moronic movie franchise. Labouef’s concerns over their ‘heart’, is all the more confusing as a result – it is all about robots hitting each other. Hell they needed less humans, more robot hitting!
Spielberg/Lucas on the other hand are the old men of Hollywood. They came up through the rank and file with Coppola and have been crowned the kings of the summer blockbuster. Bay is a mere court jester, with J. J. Abrams a young pretender to the throne.
The passion is gone and their presence in Hollywood seems increasingly vampiric, seeking out other people’s talent to stuff into their bloated, morbid franchises. Labouef as Indy fils was insult enough, but shoving Ray Winstone into the picture and giving him nothing to do was a real waste. Redlettermedia’s review of Attack of the Clones addressed the inclusion of Samuel L. Jackson. Here we see Lucas chasing the ‘black demographic’. For that’s how he sees his audience, as the subjects in a marketing exercise. The character of Mace Windu is present only to make the Star Wars prequels more marketable. He has no other role in the film beyond that.
See also Lucas’ recruitment of Robot Chicken to make his deathless franchise more edgy. Seth Green one of the creators of Robot Chicken released this statement after he was given the opportunity by Lucas to produce a comedic Star Wars show:
The Star Wars universe is so dense and rich; it’s crazy to think that there aren’t normal, mundane everyday problems in a world so well-defined. And it’s even crazier to think of what those problems might be, since it’s all set in a galaxy far, far away. What do these characters do when they’re not overthrowing Empires?
Comedy! What Green and Leboeuf don’t seem to realize is they could surpass these grand old dames of Hollywood if they took a moment to stop sucking up to them.
Like say …Neil Blomkamp (although his mentor Peter Jackson has also become a pod-person. Witness his collaboration with Spielberg on Tintin).
Ok then, Duncan Jones and the Spierig Brothers. Young film-makers out to make an impression, with plenty of talent to boot. Dammit, when the French are out Spielberging Spielberg with their own Indy-esque heroine Adele Blanc-Sec, it’s time to revise first principles!
