Quick Take: Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee

If you're getting a little tired of the complicated, bombastic and over stuffed blockbuster movies of the summer, then we have something for you. A break, if you will, from the loud noise of the summer movie season.

Jerry Seinfeld is back with a new series. One strickly for the web. It is called, simply, Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee. The title explains exactly what the show is. Seinfeld picks up a familiar comedian, in one of his classic cars from his vast collection. The two then proceed to talk, go get coffee and talk some more. It's such a simple premise, bare bones to its core, and thats the point. It has no plot, just two funny people talking about whatever is on their minds.

Here is the first episode which features Larry David. Hope you enjoy.

Quick Take: Critic Gets Death Threats For Not Liking "The Dark Knight Rises."

The Dark Knight Rises has just gained its first accomplishment. It is the first movie to have its comment section suspended on Rotten Tomatoes due to death threats towards a critic. And the movie hasn't even opened yet.

Marshall Fine of the movie blog "Hollywood and Fine" gave the first negative review of the much anticipated superhero movie. He then, in the next 10 minutes, received 200 replies from angry fans of the movie. Some were of course meant to be taken as slight jabs merely hinting at the backlash he might get. Other commenters however, were not so nice. The site at first started deleting these hateful comments, however it eventually got so jammed (it closed in on 1000 replies by Wednesday afternoon) that the site just decided to suspend the comment section completely.

I understand the circumstances that this movie has for some people and it's interesting to see that a lot of the internet crowd has a good grip on reality. But for the ones that don't I'd like to quote Alfred Hitchcock in saying "it's only a movie."

The rating a movie gets on a site does not and should not effect how you personally feel about the movie. We sadly live in an age that if your film does not receive the rating you think it should get by even a single critic, you either feel betrayed or, worse, your opinion may be wrong about the movie. What makes this even worse is that most of the commenters haven't even seen the movie yet.

Some critics are not going to like this movie. Quite a few people are most likely not going to enjoy this movie. For whatever reason. It doesn't matter. Everyone has an opinion and they should be shared, not attacked for not being exactly like yours. Or else, what's the point of creating art at all if just to make everyone happy?

Kevin Smith Explains His Motivation For Life

Taken from Kevin Smith: Burn In Hell

For the full Q&A click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCkI01_Kvf4

The Alternate Five: Comic Book Movies That Dared To Go Somewhere Different

Acting in the spirit of The Dark Knight Rises coming out in a week, we thought we would take a look at some groundbreaking comic book movies. These are the ones that wanted to separate themselves from the crowd, reach for something different, to try and do something that had never been done before. 


And the list can include any comic book adaptation, not just those in the recent onslaught.

This is in no way a ranking of the movies' quality, but instead a list showing how these fantastic five paved the ground for some different ways to think about comics-on-film. They are at the frontier, pushing the limits to get at something a little better.

In an age where every superhero seems to be getting his or her shot at 24 frames-per-second, (deserved or not) it's good to know that they aren't all trying to give us the same thing.

5. BATMAN (1989)

Close to the dawn of all comic-book movies, Tim Burton’s Batman is probably the most singular addition to this list. With Burton’s adaptation, we see a world created in and of itself for film. In all honesty, the Gotham of the comic books doesn’t really match up with Burton’s, but for god knows what reasons, we really don’t care. It’s thrilling to be thrown into such a wacky world for two hours.

 What’s strange about the timing of this release is that when Burton was developing his version of Batman, writers like Frank Miller and Alan Moore and Grant Morrison were developing their versions of superheroes – two totally different views of the genre. It seems like Burton took no influence whatsoever from the then recent additions to the superhero library. (his infamous quote "I've never read a comic book in my life" speaks to this) In reality, it took 15 – 20 years before filmmakers were really starting to be influenced by the designs of these graphic novels.

So, of course, this is not in any shape or form a faithful adaptation of the original Batman comics. Far from it. What Burton really creates is an opera. A grandiose exaggeration of all things gothic. And while this specific style did not continue in many comic-book movies, what it did give way to was the idea that a whole new world could be created for superheroes to play around in. It doesn’t have to be grounded so close to reality, especially since the comics aren’t. Without this, I don’t know if we would have movies like 300, Hellboy, Spawn, or…

4. SIN CITY (2005)

While Burton created his own unique world for Batman, Robert Rodriguez tried to not change a single thing when creating his unbelievably faithful adaptation of the Sin City graphic novels. To even call it a adaptation sounds a bit weird since the film is so close to its source material. A better word would be "translation." With it's multi-story approach, ensemble list of characters, insane stark visuals and gruesome violence, this was no easy feat. 


Sin City, in the book or film form, is unlike anything either medium has given us. The author (and co-director) Frank Miller worked with Rodriguez in creating this black and white (and some colour) noir feast for the screen by taking a brand new approach: change the way the film is made to suit the novels.  It opened the doors on what was possible for comic book adaptations. Only this time, showing what can be done not in adjusting, but in terms of being faithful. Almost to a fault. All of a sudden, any piece of material seemed possible for the screen. Even if that material is deemed "un-filmable."


However, it's biggest advancement was its use of digital photography and technology. This broke new ground in what can be done. The very frames of the movie, for the first time, seemed as if you were watching the characters from the books move. The shots matched the frames not just in composition but also in its artistic design. This paved way for the free screen look. (See: 300) Where most studios push for things to work on an all ages level, Sin City seemed to say "Screw it. Let's do it shot for shot, line for line and make the camera work for us."

3. X-MEN (2000)

X-Men pretty much paved the way not only for comic-book movies, but also a large part of the 2000’s filmmaking sensibility. X-Men took a highly stylized source material and tried to shed off all the pomp and circumstance to render it in gritty realism. For the first half of the movie, director Bryan Singer succeeds, but then falls into a more traditional depiction of good-guy versus bad-guy. The movie is still amazing (perhaps the best of the series) but it’s the first half that really left an impression on filmmakers.

The big question before X-Men came out was how could they possibly show Wolverine in yellow tights, growling like an animal, and still make him watchable? Well Singer found the perfect way. Instead of trying to copy the source material directly, like in Sin City, he developed a new made-for-film version.

The introduction of Singer’s Wolverine is probably one of my favorite introductions of any superhero to-date. Seeing him in a bar surrounded by drunks and smoke and steel, even if you already know who the character is, marks the moment in film when we all realized there was another way, a much harsher way, to adapt comics. They don’t have to be all wearing flamboyant costumes and say catch-phrases in order to have a faithful, and good, adaptation.

2. THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

Without X-Men to start us off, we probably would never have gotten a movie like The Dark Knight. For the first time, critics and audience were floored by how un-comic book a comic book movie could be. At times it moves beyond any semblance of what we think a comic book movie should be, and while it stays close to the good-versus-evil dilemma, Christopher Nolan goes so far beyond any adaptation that came before it, he has come close to creating a whole new way of seeing these stories on film. 

Even Batman Begins feels like a comic book movie: the introduction and growth of a superhero, the love interest, the hidden identity, the sepia colour tones, etc. And while most of these aspects are still present in The Dark Knight, (blue replaces sepia) its scope expands far beyond its predecessor. It became a crime saga, with a hero and a villain that dress up. 

What’s even more impressive is how these are original stories. Nolan does not literally translate a source material like with Sin City, but instead takes the influence from years of Batman’s mythology, shifts and shapes them to create his own. The opening bank robbery, or the boat dilemma, or the magic trick are scenes Batman fans get to see for the first time. And this ability to create all things original allowed for Heath Ledger’s Joker: perhaps the quintessential performance of any realistic comic book villain.

It goes without saying that Nolan’s Batman is probably the best film-depiction of the caped crusader, and we would be hard pressed to imagine a better one arriving in the years to come. We wait with eager anticipation if Nolan can in fact top himself with The Dark Knight Rises, but the real accomplishment will always be injecting the comic book realism and raising the bar to levels that will be hard to match. 

1. WATCHMEN (2009)

This is the one that really did it all: it creates a new world, plays out like an opera at points and a gritty drama at others, dives deep into the psyches of superheroes,  and still remains quite faithful to its source material. Watchmen is at number one on this list because there is really no other movie like it.

No, it might not be better than The Dark Knight, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Other than maybe Batman, Watchmen exists as one of the most unique superhero movies of all time.

The sheer length of the film separates it right off the bat. With a director’s cut of 186 min and an ultimate cut of 215 min, the movie, like the graphic novel, is a whopper and dense. But in all that extra time, a world is presented to us like no other: a world of multiple superheroes, powerless superheroes, a god-like creature, retired heroes and villains, death and sex and brutality and altogether, a world of unfettered madness.

Watchmen is a comic universe lacking in good guys and bad guys. There are no heroes and there are no villains in this movie – there are only people, all lost in a moral haze. The dramatic questions that arise for the audience are not things like “will he catch the wrong-doer” or “will they find out who he really is”, but rather are questions the audience asks themselves about what the psychological ramifications are of being a hero in a dying world. Watchmen is a dark story without any sort of moral compass to guide you – even in the end you don’t know whether to clap or cry.

The saddest part of this movie is that, much like the graphic novel that birthed it, it will probably only be fully appreciated many many years from now. It certainly has mixed reviews by critics and audiences alike, but for us, despite its problems, Watchmen went where no other comic book movie had gone before, or has gone since, and deserves the place at the top of this list.

An Off Take: All You Have To Do Is Make Me Care: Or How Chael Sonnen Forced Us To

Indulge me for a bit here...

If you are objective enough to realize when a life lesson is being presented to you, literal or metaphoric, you will grab it and remember it forever. There are also moments in life when you realize just how powerful one person can be, just by their sheer ability to be so.

On Saturday night (July 07) Chael Sonnen, a UFC Fighter, participated in the biggest MMA fight not just of the year, but perhaps of all time. It was against Anderson Silva, the best MMA fighter on the planet. As I sat in the bar my friend and I were at, awaiting this most epic of all epic encounters, I found myself getting far more nervous for this than even when I went sky diving. I looked around the bar, just as the fight was mere seconds away, and nobody was talking. I mean nobody. Everyone had their eyes glued to the TV’s.

I have been watching UFC/MMA for over three years, which is not very long compared to others. I did, however, watch WWE for most of my childhood and teenage years. Even then, there was nothing in that “Sports Entertainment” brand that ever came close to the anticipation of this fight. At this moment the PPV buyrates have not come out, and we don’t know how many people in fact watched this fight, but no matter the size of the audience, everyone in the MMA world was intensely focused for a moment in time on just these two men.

Fights with a lot of build only come around every couple of years, and nothing has ever come close to this. The only way you get this kind of intensity is getting an audience, one way or another, to care about the outcome. As Andrew Stanton says in the famous TED talk “Make me care.” It’s a simple as that, and is probably the hardest thing to do in storytelling, especially film making. However, it’s not just a rarity in MMA, it borderlines on myth.

For those of you who don’t know, Chael Sonnen is an MMA fighter with a heavy amatuer wrestling back ground. The first time he fought Anderson Silva he was a 4-to-1 underdog. Silva, at this time, was on the brink of being called the greatest MMA fighter of all time. Going into the fight, nobody gave Sonnen a chance, yet Chael began talking so much trash, it gave a new meaning to the word “hype". On August 17, 2010 he backed up everything he said. He beat up Silva for four and a half rounds. It was a spectacle you had to see to believe, and all fans were in shock. Near the end of the fifth and final round, Silva submitted Sonnen in a come-from-behind victory that will go down in history.

After this fight, Silva went on to defeat two more challengers and Sonnen fell on hard times. He was suspended for elevated testosterone (not steroids) and had some run-ins with the law that forced him out for 14 months. He won his first fight back (October 2011) and called out Silva in a now infamous post-fight interview. Silva, who had an injury at the time, did not accept the fight. Sonnen then fought another fighter (Michael Bisping) for the chance to fight Silva in the summer. Needless to say, Sonnen won and got his rematch.

Those are the facts. But the bigger story is how Chael Sonnen, not just trash talked, but promoted himself and the rematch in ways that MMA fans can’t even begin to understand.

You see, Sonnen created an alter ego, which he and the fans now call ‘Chael P. Sonnen.’ With this character, he was able to say things that were disrespectful, (bashing Silva’s home country of Brazil) outrageous (claiming he didn’t understand the rules of the first fight) to almost crossing the line (commented on Silva’s wife cooking him a steak). There are interviews of him on sports shows, MMA websites and he was even on TMZ. For the latter, his humor and classic sayings had the entire place laughing like it was a comedy show.

But how did MMA fans react? Well half of the audience loved it and the other half hated Sonnen with such distaste it seemed as though someone would attack him physically before the fight. He created such a polarizing view of himself, that the audience either loved him or hated him. Nobody, not one UFC fan was on the fence about Chael Sonnen. You either wanted 'The Bad Guy' to win gloriously or be defeated embarrassingly. It was more intense than any movie. Because it was real.

And that’s the point.

So often in story telling we are presented with such indifferent stories and characters that the audience just doesn't care on a basic and fundamental level. Too often do we sit in a movie theatre and are indifferent to how our main characters will end up at the end of the film. It doesn't matter what situation they are in, how good your action sequences are, how intense your romantic or break-up scenes are, or even how funny your scene is - if you do not care on a basic level about a character, it's death for the story.

I use the example of Chael Sonnen not only because it’s rare to have such an intense story unfold in front of your eyes in MMA, but for all sports in general. This rivalry he created with Anderson Silva is one of the greatest that the world of sports has ever seen. Sure, the UFC has guys who fight each other that don't like each other. Guys with some history between the two. But the level that we experienced leading up to UFC 148, was above and beyond.

So why am I praising a UFC fighter on a film blog?

MMA has fights almost every week. Two men enter a cage, or ring, and fight. It's as basic of a sport as you can get. It's just one on one. Professional Wrestling has been doing a 'fake' version of this for years. While they benefit from a script and a much more spectacle-type show, MMA is completely unpredictable. You just never know what's going to happen. All these ingredients should on their own add up to every fight being intense. But it's just not. In fact sometimes I find myself cheering for fighters I don't know, simply because they are wearing a cool set of shorts. Even in a simple, brutal and intense sport like this, people usually find themselves completely indifferent to the outcome. Even if a fighter does an amazing knockout, it wont be as impressive since you had no stakes in the fight anyway.

Sonnen made you choose to hate him or love him. He showed us the power of not just hype and promotion, but of basic story telling. At its very core, when I say "made you care" I really mean "made you have an opinion." That's what it's all about. Half the people that watched that fight wanted to see him get beaten and they did. The other half wanted to see him win and they didn't. But for those 7 minutes of fighting, no movie on earth has ever made me that emotional or nervous. Everyone wanted to know the outcome. And whether or not you got your desired outcome is next to irrelevant. The joy in this has been the months of hype and build. The debate's and the articles. The name calling and the shoving between these two. The stare-downs. Then the fight. That's what we want to be apart of.

I know it will be hard for people who don't watch UFC to understand the specifics of what went down, but I believe the overall point is glaring. Story telling after all its bells and whistles, no matter what medium your in, all comes down to emotion. Whether it's watching two people falling in love, a Superhero saving the world, or two guys in a cage fighting, the very first thing you have to get right, is making me care one way or the other.

Quick Take: Movies Are Meant for the Theatres, Nowhere Else

Movies are meant to be watched on the big screen and beg to be watched in groups, so when we have a generation of movie-watchers delving into cinema through the 4 inch screens of handheld devices, I weep inside. People like watching movies of all kinds, and instead of trying to bring people to the theatre by developing worthless gimmicks like 3D, they should be creating an atmosphere that allows for the love of CINEMA, not just what’s new.

I just went to theatres to see the most classic of all theatre-films, Jaws. I was one of two people who dared to go alone, but surprisingly, even on a Monday evening there were roughly 30 people who came out for the thirty-seven year old movie. It was an amazing experience and I thank theatres like TIFF Lightbox for doing what most theatres don’t. Which brings me to my question, why don’t more theatres show older films?

I would gladly pay 10+ dollars to watch Terminator 2: Judgement Day on the big screen, or Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, etc., but I hesitate every time I have to pay 15 dollars to watch a movie in 3D. We don’t need new technology to draw us into the theatres, because 3D doesn’t make a movie any better, it just changes the texture of what we’re seeing.

What we need is the theatre to be the central hub of film-lovers. Bring us back to the theatre with great movies, movies we’d actually pay again and again to see the way it was meant to – that’s how you’ll win our hearts. I can't wait to go back and watch more, and if you're in Toronto, I implore you to go to the TIFF Lightbox and check out the older screenings. If you're not, find a theatre near you that does and bask in what so few of us are able to nowadays. 

“Show me the way to go home.”

Why Some Adaptations Just Don't Work

Some of the best movies in history have been adapted from other sources. The Godfather was originally a novel by Mario Puzo, The Shawshank Redemption a novella by Stephen King, The Batman series a comic by Bob Kane, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest a novel by Ken Kesey – you get my point. Interestingly, these novels are not necessarily considered the best of their medium, yet their film counterpoints often are. How does this happen? Some stories work really well in film, yes, but it’s also due to the writers knowing how what may work for one medium, works much differently in film.

I really enjoy adaptations when they’re done right, and I wanted to know what some people thought were bad adaptations compared to the ones I just mentioned. So I looked up a number of “Worst Film Adaptations” lists and was surprised to find, despite all the regular inclusions, that Dragonball: Evolution was not even on one of them. I’m sure there is a list out there that has DB:E located at number one (I know mine would place it there) but I suppose the fact that people aren’t really discussing this movie as one of the worst adaptations ever made isn’t that big of a deal. And for the purposes of this post, I have no intention of completely bashing the movie for what it is, because I believe that the movie is actually so bad, it is such a piss-poor adaptation of one of the greatest modern mythological stories, that it can actually teach us why some adaptations just don’t work. Yes, I want to learn from DB:E, not just laugh at it.

First things first, I don’t believe that it’s impossible to adapt Dragonball’s convoluted and overreaching story. There is a way to do it. But DB:E isn’t the shining example.  

The first sin of the piss-poor adaptation, not just DB:E, is focus. When a fan thinks of what he/she likes about a show or movie or book, the first thing that comes to mind is what makes it cool. Dragonball allows for fans to fall in love with and personally imagine the possibility of flying, fighting, teleporting, creating energy blasts, having super-strength, telekinesis, etc.

The problem becomes the desire to focus too much on the spectacle and not enough on characters. At most, a writer can balance the two equally, but if the spectacle becomes more important than the characters, the film is lost. Very, very rarely does a film work where this is the case, and even when it does work it doesn’t make for a great film, just an enjoyable one.

An excellent example of creating an effective balance between spectacle and character is the movie 13 Assassins. No, it’s not an adaptation, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it. Anyone who knows anything about this movie knows they are going to watch it so they can see samurais do what they do best: kill. But for the first hour of the movie, the audience might be left unsatisfied with this desire. There are hardly any moments of samurais swinging their swords around and all we get is an old samurai recruiting many others. There are a few scenes which tease us, giving us a splatter or two of blood, but the majority of the first half develops the assassin’s motives, and the truly malicious nature of the younger brother of the Shogun.

The writers of movies like DB:E think completely opposite to those of 13 Assassins. “They’re coming for the action,” they say, “so let’s just give it to them right at the beginning, not waste any time with characters”.

The problem with writing an adaptation is the mistaken belief that your audience already knows the characters you’re trying to present, and therefore won’t have the time or the attention or the need to relearn the facts they gained from the source material. This then leads to the thought that you don’t need to develop the desires of your characters as much as in other movies because it’s already been done, and the audience would much rather see the action of the source material rendered as semi-realistic CGI.

If anyone reading this is thinking of adapting anything, ever, never skip out of character development. I don’t care if every person in the world already knows the stories of the characters, retell it for film. If the audience doesn’t care about the people in a fight, the fight is shitty, no matter how well choreographed (refer to The Protector). We need ample time to know and experience the people involved before getting to the visually appealing stuff. Think of it like sex. Well, like good sex.

Any great lover will tell you that foreplay is probably the most important part of the whole process, making the finale multiple times better than it would be without it. And character development, my dear friends, is that foreplay. DB:E is a terrible movie because Piccolo is never shown to be a deplorable villain like the one in 13 Assassins is. The Street Fighter and Dead or Alive writers think all we want is stupid people fighting each other. Joel Schumacher believes the appeal of Batman is over-the-top bad guys in colourful clothing, who often yell when speaking their lines. Of course, there are many other reasons why these adaptations are poor films in general, but I think you get my point.

 And if you don’t get it, this is my point: you can’t tell the same story in the exact same way for two different media.

The adapted material MUST exist as a different entity. The storytelling rules of film are not congruent with the rules of television or novels or video games. The same story that is told by a critically acclaimed video game (such as Max Payne) does not translate to film as easily as taking what worked in the game and making actors act it out in real-time. Even within those categories, there are subdivisions that have their own set of rules as well. Television can be divided into sitcoms, one-hour dramas, cartoons, anime, etc. – and each of these formats tells their story in very specific and unique ways. Dragonball Z, for example, is not a cartoon, and does not follow the same storytelling principles of a show like Powerpuff Girls, despite both being stories about superhero-esque adventures. They are vastly differently is their approach. DBZ is an anime and must be adapted from that perspective. (I have heard that there’s a Death Note movie in the works. I am, of course, highly skeptical of the acclaimed anime being converted to film because so much is necessary in the story that I wouldn’t know where to begin to cut scenes, I wouldn’t know how to make what seems natural in the anime (the shinigami, for one) and convert it to seem natural in a live-action film. They’ve already tried to do it in Japan and the movie was terrible. Plus, the show is already so tight at 37 episodes, cutting it down to 2 hours seems like a grave error. But hey, stranger things have happened.)

 

 

So without this mentality, what we often receive are adaptations that don’t live up to the source material, causing a whole audience who loved the original to bash the adaptation because it didn’t feel the same. But there are two errors here. First, the director/writer must think about adapting material in a way that works for film. As I’ve said, DB:E takes on too many properties of an anime, which don’t work in a 90 min movie. The original must be changed so that it can function as a good piece of art.

If this first error is corrected, the second error is on our part, the audience. We have to stop griping and moaning when a film is not exactly like the source material. We need to accept that the story will change from one medium to the next and that it is a necessary change. Nothing irked me more than Harry Potter fans bashing the movies because they left out some good scenes from the 700 page novels. It’s going to happen.

Or even worse are the complaints that the actors in adaptations don't really match what readers imagined the characters would be like. Again, continuing with Harry Potter, some people were angry that Daniel Radcliffe was chosen as Harry (bad acting, maybe?), or Emma Watson as Hermione (don't understand this one). It is the closest thing to impossible to have real life actors match what you've come up with in your head by reading the source material. And furthermore, resemblance shouldn't be the criteria for determining whether an adaptation is well done or not.

Yes, these are not perfect movies, but neither are where they come from. Harry Potter has its problems. So does Dragonball Z, The Road, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Lord of the Rings, and yes, even The Godfather.

There is a responsibility of the viewer to know that not every aspect fiction will translate properly onto film. Directors need to shift focus, choose actors based on different criteria, even reshape the original story to create something that is worth being put on film. They also need to do it properly, and with DB:E as an example, we know how easily it can fail. But if you want the feeling of the source material, return to the source material. The film is going to, and should, give you something different. If it doesn’t, what the hell is the point?