Fall Movies

So things have been pretty crazy the last several weeks. Three weekends ago I was out of town. Two weekends ago my parents were in town, and last weekend I spent part of the weekend at work (and then spent Monday & Tuesday out of town for work). So needless to say I’ve been pretty busy. But fear not, dear readers, because none of that prevented me from getting to the movies during all of those weekends, and so I’ve got four new movies to review. And now I’ve finally found the time to actually get the reviews done! :)

Let’s start with the first of these movies that I saw, which was Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, a remake of the phenomenal Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs. Needless to say, the remake was easily as good as the original. Of course, with Scorsese directing a movie that gets back to his gangster movie roots, and starring such great actors as Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg, Matt Damon, and Leonardo DiCaprio (and as much as I’m not a fan of Leo’s AT ALL, I have to admit that he does a really good job in this movie).

This is so my type of movie. It’s dark, gritty, violent (about the only thing it was missing was nudity, but hey, you can’t have everything). Jack Nicholson is at the top of his game as the crime boss, and I loved Mark Wahlberg’s foul-mouthed cop (although he’s definitely a secondary character in the movie). Everyone does an outstanding job, and this movie easily ranks up there with such Scorsese greats as Goodfellas and Casino. If you like crime dramas at all, this is a must-see movie.

The movie only had one real downside for me, and it was one that didn’t really apply for most of the audience. Although the setting is changed from Hong Kong to Boston, and obviously the feel of the film is different based on the different setting/characters, the movie is pretty faithful to the original script, which means a lot of the twists and turns and surprises in the movie are all things I saw coming because I’d seen them in the original film. Which did take away from the excitement and thrill of the movie just a little bit. But at the same time, it was kind of like watching a movie you really like for the second time. Sure, you know what’s coming before it happens, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy watching the movie. And I did indeed enjoy all of this movie, even if I did know what was going to happen.

So the weekend after The Departed, I headed out to the theatre Sunday afternoon to watch The Grudge 2. While it would have been fun to see it that Friday (it being Friday the 13th and all), my parents came into town that evening, so I didn’t get to the theatre until after they headed home on Sunday (and as far as that goes, I probably wouldn’t have caught it on Friday regardless, since I don’t get off work early enough to catch a matinee, and I generally try to avoid going to evening shows since I’d prefer to pay matinee prices – I'm just cheap like that).

As far as the movie goes, it wasn’t too bad for what it was, being a sequel and all. Sequels in general have a hard time comparing to the originals, and I think horror movie sequels have it especially tough, because you’re trying to keep the same feel and theme as the original, without it being a carbon copy that simply features new people being killed off one by one. But as far as sequels go, I do have to say that I liked The Grudge 2 quite a bit better than I like The Ring Two (of course it goes without saying that I liked the originals of both movies A LOT better than their sequels).

That being said, The Grudge 2 was still a fun, creepy movie. And it did a good job of building on the mythology of the original film and expanding the history of the woman who’s spirit is going around killing everyone. I also love the way it takes three different time periods/locations and jumps back and forth between them. It takes a bit of time to figure out exactly what order the events are in and how everything fits together, but a good part of the fun of the movie is exactly that – learning bit by bit how everything ties together. If you’re a big fan of the Japanese horror movie remake genre (hard to believe there’s enough movies in that category to actually consider it a genre (well, sub-genre, anyways), but boy there sure do seem to be a lot of them these days), this movie’s definitely worth seeing.

Interestingly enough, the discussion of blending of multiple timeframes into a coherent storyline (as was done in The Grudge 2) transitions us very nicely into my next movie review, and that is for Christopher Nolan’s new film, The Prestige. I loved this movie (it was SO much better than the similarly-themed magician movie The Illusionist, which I was so unimpressed with that I don’t think I bothered to do a write-up on it). Christopher Nolan is a top-notch director, and with a stellar cast featuring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, as well as smaller roles by Andy Serkis, and David Bowie as real life scientist Nikola Tesla (who I thought I recognized when I saw him, but I had to wait until the end of the movie to see his name in the credits to be sure it was actually him).

The movie starts with Hugh Jackman drowning in a tank and Christian Bale being convicted of his murder (yes, believe it or not, Jackman’s character dies in the first 10 minutes of the film). Once in prison, Bale is given a diary written by Jackman. As he reads it, we flash back in time to when the diary was being written. During this we find Jackman reading a diary written by Bale, which flashes us back to when the two men first met, and their rise up through the world of magic (and the beginning of the competition between the two men). We shift back and forth between these three time periods, until the first time period catches up to the start of the second time period, and then back and forth between these two periods until the second catches up to the present period (which probably sounds really confusing, but it is done really well in the movie and it’s fairly easy to keep track of what’s going on when).

In the past I’ve never been much for movies that jump back and forth through time like that, but then again I think a lot of that can be blamed on Quentin Tarantino (while I like all of his movies, I’ve never been a big fan of the way he jumps around between characters and time periods and scenes). Both in The Grudge 2 (and the original The Grudge, as far as that goes) and in The Prestige this seems to be handled with a lot more finesse than Mr. Tarantino uses, which made a big difference for me (but that’s strictly my opinion of things, so please no jabs from any Tarantino fans out there who happen to read this).

But back to The Prestige. This movie is just brilliant. If you have any interest in magicians or escape artists at all, you really should see this film. They show a number of amazing tricks (and in many cases, show how they’re actually done, which is quite interesting). The acting is stellar, and the tension and mystery build as the battle between the two magicians builds. There are numerous twists and surprises to it, and I just loved the ending (although the final twist I did see coming).

The second movie that I caught last weekend I was just as excited to see as The Prestige, but I wasn’t nearly as impressed with it once it was over. And that was Clint Eastwood’s WWII drama Flags of our Fathers. Part of this stems from the poor and somewhat inaccurate marketing campaign. Because despite what you see in the trailers, this isn’t really a war movie, which is what I was hoping to see. Sure, there are a number of scenes showing the invasion of Iwo Jima, and a good part of the movie takes place during the invasion, but that’s not really what the movie’s about.

The true focus of Flags of our Fathers is the story of a photograph, the very famous photo that immortalized six Marines as they erected the U. S. flag at Iwo Jima (I’m sure you’ve seen the picture – it has since been made into a statue/monument). The film follows three of the six men (the others were killed during the battle) who are pulled back to the U. S. to go on a whirlwind tour highlighting the moment captured in the photo as a way to convince Americans to buy war bonds (since the government was borderline bankrupt, and couldn’t afford to pay for a war the American people were quickly tiring of). The photograph and the men who placed the flag captured America’s attention, and the government used that to its advantage to motivate people to buy war bonds to help them fund the war.

Throughout the movie we flash back to the battle, then go back to the men as they tour the country, and we see them struggle with being called heroes as they deal with the violence and horror of the battle and the deaths of many of their friends and fellow Marines. We also see the government desperate to use this event to their advantage, and the compromises made in the name of continuing the fight in the Pacific.

The story is pretty compelling, and I learned a lot about that time period and the events surrounding that photo that I hadn’t known before. That being said, the movie would have worked just as well (and possibly better) as a documentary of these events as opposed to a feature film about them. So while it was an interesting movie, it wasn’t as exciting or intense as a good war movie (such as Saving Private Ryan, which it has been compared to), which is what I was looking for when I went to see it. So while I can say it was a worthwhile film, I can’t give it a high recommendation, either. I’d more recommend this to someone who’s a big history buff than I would to someone who’s a war movie fan.

And that catches me up on my movie reviews. I’ve also been working on a couple of other entries that aren’t new movie reviews, to try and add a little variety to the blog, but who knows when I’ll get those done. My goal is at some point to actually start having more varied entries, it’s just a matter of finding the time to write them (I’m sure I’m not the only one out there who can’t seem to find enough time to accomplish everything they’d like to). Of course, I probably have to start with actually getting my movie reviews in on time and go from there. ;-)

You Know You're a Serious Movie Geek When . . .

So there were a handful of other movies that I caught over the last several weeks that I haven’t covered in my blog, but none of them were all that impressive (ranging from just pretty good to fairly disappointing, but none of them interesting enough to discuss, or bad enough for a scathingly negative review), so I’m just going to skip them and move on to last weekend (it was such a nice weekend this weekend that I took a trip to Lewis & Clark Caverns instead of going to the movies so there's nothing to report for this weekend – I might take a mental health day in the middle of the week to check out what’s new at the theater). Last weekend there were four new movies out at the theaters, two of which I really, really wanted to see – Jet Li’s Fearless and Flyboys. And wouldn’t you know it, neither was playing here in town (the joys of living in a medium-sized town in the middle of Montana).

Now, the average person would probably think to himself, “Damn, that sucks. Guess I won’t be catching those at the theater after all.” But not I. No, dear readers, I immediately went to Carmike Cinema’s website (since Carmike operates the vast majority of movie theaters here in Montana) and started checking movie listings in other towns. The nearest place showing both movies was about 85 miles away. So what did I do? That’s right, it was time for a road trip, so I jumped in the car and headed down the highway. I caught both movies as a double feature, had dinner at the Golden Corral, and then headed home. All in all not a bad day out. Of course, it says something about how much of a movie buff you are when you spend as much money or more on gas to get to the movie theater as you do on the actual movies themselves.

So was it worth it, you might ask? Absolutely!! I loved both movies. So let’s get started with the reviews. The first of the two I saw was Flyboys, which is the story of a group of young American men who travel to France to fly in the French air service during the early days of World War I (they’re flying for the French because this is before America has officially entered the war). Just as a quick side note, I have to say it’s hard to believe there was a time in our history when American men actually traveled to another country to JOIN a war, as opposed to the Vietnam War era when people were fleeing to Canada to avoid going to war. But that’s another subject entirely that we’re not going to get into.

Like the football movies reviewed in my last entry, Flyboys is also based on real events, which only really comes into play at the end when you find out what happens to the remaining characters after the movie ends (although it is kind of neat to get a brief look into where the characters’ lives went after the events of the movie). The best parts of this movie, naturally, are the aerial battles between the French biplanes and the German triplanes. They are really, really cool to watch, and because of the differences in technology, are quite a bit different from modern dog fights in movies (or even World War II dog fight scenes, as far as that goes). And there’s a scene involving a zeppelin that’s just stellar. It’s also nice to see a movie focused on World War I pilots, since WWI movies are hard to find in general, and when you do find them they’re mostly focused on the trench warfare of the infantry, and not on the fledgling air corps that had just started to develop during that period.

The overall story isn’t too bad, and the characters are all interesting. There’s even a love story involving the main character and a young French woman that’s tolerable. Of course the critics complained about the story and the dialogue and a number of other petty little things. But in my mind, you go to see a war movie for basically one reason, and that’s the battle scenes. And when it’s a movie about fighter pilots (from whatever era) then it’s all about the dogfights. And the ones in this movie were pretty damned spectacular, as far as I’m concerned. So if you like war movies, definitely check this one out.

Our next film is Jet Li’s Fearless, which – interestingly enough – is ALSO based on true events (that seems to be a theme running through quite a few of the movies I’ve seen recently, surprisingly enough). The film takes place in China early in the 20th century, back when China was a weak nation that was starting to be heavily influenced by foreign nations, especially Western nations. The main character of the story is Chinese Martial Arts Master Huo Yuanjia, a hero of the era who stood up to the Westerners and brought pride back to the Chinese (for a well-written description of the movie, check out the plot outline on the movie’s imdb page. He did a good enough job explaining the story of the film that I see no reason to try and paraphrase it here).

This movie is being billed as Jet Li’s last martial arts epic, and is directed by Ronny Yu (who's done a surprisingly eclectic range of films since coming to the US), with action choreography by Yuen Wo Ping. The combination of these three tells you right up front that the martial arts in this movie are going to be breathtaking, and indeed they were. The fight scenes are absolutely incredible. But just as important, the story is fantastic and the acting is top notch. We see a boy rise to manhood, only to fall from greatness and journey towards redemption. Along the way he energizes the morale of his entire country (and became a national hero). It’s a great story of China’s history brilliantly told. Just as a warning, though, it is also very much a Chinese movie, meaning that you’re watching it with subtitles if you go to see it (for those people who are bothered by such things). Being as big a fan of foreign films as I am, this didn’t bother me in the slightest, and I’m so glad I went and saw this movie at the theater.

I would highly recommend both of these movies as ones to see at the theater if you get the chance (and I will definitely be picking both of them up when they come out on DVD). Well, that’s it for now. Should I get to the theater during the week, I’ll try and get my review out on whatever movie I go see as quickly as possible (which sadly isn’t always as easy to do as I’d like). Until then!

Football Movies

So last time around I covered a couple of comedies that I caught at the theater recently. With this entry, we switch to the inspiration sports film, in particular the football movies Invincible and Gridiron Gang (both of which I caught at the theater several weeks ago). You just gotta love a good, old-fashioned inspirational sports movie, especially if it’s a football movie. I’ve always been partial to football movies as far as sports movies goes (probably because football is about the only sport that I actually don’t mind watching on TV, since I’m not really much of a sports person). I do have to add, though, that I really liked Miracle. But by and large my favorite sports movies are all football movies.

Let’s start with Invincible, the true story (which goes without saying, since pretty much all inspirational sports movies are based on true stories) of Vince Papale, a Philadelphia Eagles fan who gets the opportunity to attend open tryouts for the team, and out of everyone who tries out, is the only one to actually make it onto the team. As is to be expected, this movie pretty much follows the standard formula for this sort of movie by the numbers. We’ve got our hero, the underdog/outsider, who’s not liked by his fellow players, and doesn’t know if he has what it takes to make it as a pro. But he sticks with it, proving to himself, his teammates, and the fans that he can make it in the pros and contribute to the team.

Comments are often made in regards to movies such as this about how formulaic they are, and I wouldn’t argue this point. But I would say, the reason for this is that the formula works. Everybody loves to see the little guy triumph, to see the underdog make good and become a hero. It’s just a great storyline that you can’t really go wrong with. And so there’s no real reason to mess with it. Invincible is no exception to the rule.

Mark Wahlberg does a good job in the lead role, but he’s a very talented actor who does a good job in every role he takes, so that’s no surprise. He makes the character likable and believable – somebody you want to root for (which is exactly what you want in this sort of film). All in all I really liked this movie. Anyone who enjoys sports movies, or just good, wholesome inspirational movies, I think will enjoy this one. I highly recommend it.

Our next movie also follows the same basic formula as Invincible, but has a number of noticeable differences. That movie is Gridiron Gang, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. One of the big differences is that this movie features high school football as opposed to pro ball. Now, as a rule, I generally don’t enjoy high school football movies as much because too often there’s too much focus on parent issues and teen angst and other assorted melodramas that have little to do with football (Friday Night Lights, for example, I wasn’t impressed with at all). Gridiron Gang, however, managed to keep this to a minimum (although it was still present in a few scenes), so I can’t complain about that too much.

The Rock does a really good job in this movie, and I have to say I liked his performance. The fact that he actually played football before becoming a pro wrestler I think helps a lot with his character, and makes him pretty believable. The other actors all do a pretty good job as well. The fact that the kids are all in juvenile detention makes for an interesting twist, and they handle the issue of gang violence pretty well in the movie. I also loved the idea of bringing girls from the girl’s detention center to be cheerleaders at their games was pretty damned funny, too.

So in the end I enjoyed Invincible more of the two movies, but they’re both pretty solid films, and anyone who enjoys this genre of films will not be disappointed with either movie (at least, in my not so humble opinion).

Time for a Little Comedy

So both the weekend before and the weekend after I watched Snakes on a Plane I managed to catch a screwball comedy. The movie that I saw before was the PG-13 teen comedy Accepted. The movie I saw the weekend after was the R-rated Broken Lizard comedy Beerfest. Both movies had some similarities, and some obvious differences. I want to discuss both movies, and then my views on these sorts of comedies in general. Let’s get started with Accepted. I liked this movie. It was just fun. It wasn’t a spectacular movie (it wasn’t nearly as good as Wedding Crashers or Dodgeball, for example), but if you like that sort of goofy comedy, it’s certainly worth taking the time to see. I have to say, though, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie more blatantly filmed as an R-rated movie and then edited down to PG-13 for the theatrical release. One scene in particular really jumped out at me. Everyone at the college is hanging out at the pool having a big pool party. You see three hotties in bikinis painting their bodies, and then one of them starts to remove her top. Just as she’s got it untied in front, the camera cuts to a different scene and we move on. As soon as I saw how the scene was edited, I immediately thought, “What do you want to bet we get to see her tits when the unrated version comes out on DVD.” I mean, you pretty much expect them to do that sort of thing nowadays with this kind of comedy (especially after The Dukes of Hazzard came out on DVD with the big disclaimer on the front of the unrated version stating boldly that it included nudity and drug use), but still, when it’s that blatant you just have to laugh.

Accepted is basically you standard slacker makes good movie. We see a guy who’s pretty much coasted through high school who ends up being turned down by every college he applies to. Since Mommy & Daddy are dead set on him going to college, he does what any scheming slacker would do – he makes up a college. However, when his best friend sets up the website for the college for the guy to show to his parents, he makes it too well, and suddenly all sorts of other slackers and misfits who couldn’t get into any real colleges start showing up at the fake college that the slacker and his friends put together. Hilarity ensues from there, including the standard battle with the snooty elitists from the real college nearby that of course ends up with the evil frat boys exposing the slacker's scheme to everyone. I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say, it will hardly come as a surprise when you see it. But let’s face it, you’re not looking to be surprised when you go to see a movie like this. These sorts of comedies stick to a tried-and-true formula for a reason – because the formula works.

Accepted has a number of great laughs, and is risqué without getting raunchy like most of your R-rated comedies do these days. I’ll be really interested to see what sort of DVD release we see for this one. I’m seriously expecting an unrated version, but the big question will be how unrated it actually is, and how much additional footage gets put back in for the unrated release.

And on the subject of more uncensored comedies, we have the other comedy that I saw at the theater recently, the R-rated comedy Beerfest. As far as humor goes, I think I liked Accepted better, but this was still a pretty funny movie (and it has a fair amount of nudity, which is always a plus). Sadly like most R-rated comedies these days, it has a few gross out scenes that I could have done without (some of which were admittedly mildly amusing, but were still more gross than they were funny). This is one of the reasons I so loved Wedding Crashers, because it was the rare modern sex comedy that was R-rated but did NOT have any truly disgusting scenes in it meant to be funny. For fans of Broken Lizard, this movie is probably right up your alley. I actually liked it more than I liked Super Troopers, their first movie (of course, I didn’t like Super Troopers nearly as much as a lot of people I know did, so maybe that’s just me).

So this brings me to my discussion of comedies, most specifically your juvenile teen comedies. With the success of such R-rated comedies as Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, I’m wondering if we’ll be seeing more movies that are outright R-rated from the start when they hit theaters, or movies that are edited down to be PG-13 and then very quickly returned to their R-rated version (but left “unrated” because that’s such a popular buzz word with DVDs these days) when they’re released on DVD, such as what they did with The Dukes of Hazzard. Being something of a fan of R-rated comedies (for the most part), I certainly wouldn’t complain about this at all. One thing I do have to say, though, is that it’s nice to see that R-rated comedies seem to be getting back to the style of the classics of the 80s, when it was all about a healthy dose of T & A combined with some light-hearted fun, as opposed to the numerous R-rated comedies of the 90s where nudity was suddenly at a minimum, but gross out “humor” as they liked to call it was all the rage (I’m sorry, but while I did enjoy American Pie, I really don’t consider seeing a guy jerk off into a glass of beer only to have some other guy unknowingly drink it afterwards to really be that funny. Call me old fashioned). It will be interesting to see what the comedies of the next few years have to offer us.

Snakes on a Mother F*$@ing Plane, Baby!!

Okay, so this entry is way, way overdue. But in my defense I spent most of last week out of town at my grandmother’s funeral, and this week's just been crazy, so my schedule has seriously been thrown off of late. Since my last entry I think I’ve seen SEVEN movies, so I’ve definitely got a lot of catching up to do. So without further ado, let me jump right into it.

So after all the hype, I just couldn’t resist. Yep, I had to do it – I just had to go see Snakes on a Plane! And you know what, it actually wasn’t half bad. Now admittedly, it is very much a B-movie, and if you’re expecting more than that, you’re going to be disappointed (more to the point, if you’re expecting more than that, you seriously need to get your head examined). Which is not to say that it’s necessarily a dumb, cheesy movie. On the contrary, the director obviously made an effort to make the movie scary and intense, and if you’re afraid of snakes this movie is NOT for you. Hell, I actually like snakes and parts of this movie creeped me out (however, I actually recognized a number of the snakes in the film, and knew just how deadly venomous they really were, so seeing them crawl around people’s feet certainly made my skin crawl just BECAUSE I knew how deadly they were). Of course, there were a few over-the-top scenes that made me shake my head (like the scene where the guy’s taking a leak and the snake comes out of the toilet and bites the end of penis – he then starts thrashing around trying to pull the snake off. Needless to say I wouldn’t exactly call it a scary scene), but sadly you have to expect at least a little of that sort of thing in this kind of movie.

Overall, the movie actually made me think of 70s cinema, as it is a solid combination of killer animal horror movie and airplane disaster movie (both of which are movie sub-genres that haven’t really been popular since the 70s, when you could find all manner of movies in both categories). Many of the common clichés of both types of movies are present (although I don’t want to say more than that, as I don’t want to give away any plot points of the movie). As I’m a fan of both genres of film (especially disaster movies – not necessarily airplane disaster movies specifically, mind you, but I’ve always really enjoyed a good disaster picture), putting them together in a way that worked made for a movie right up my alley. Yes, the idea of releasing deadly snakes on an airplane as a way to kill someone is incredibly hokey and hard-to-believe, I know, but if you look at some of the old 70s animal horror films, it’s far, far from the dumbest idea anyone’s ever come up with. And to be honest, the filmmakers actually did a surprising job of giving you a halfway believable explanation for the whole thing.

There is one thing that I was pretty disappointed with. As I’m sure anyone who’s heard anything about the movie knows, there was a bunch of Internet hype about this movie from the minute the title was announced. The bloggers and Internet movie geeks had enough of an impact on the studio that they even got them to add additional language and nudity in order to make the movie R-rated (although to be honest, I think even without that the movie was violent enough they’d have been pushing the limits of PG-13 regardless). One of the reasons for this change was to get Samuel L. Jackson to show a little more attitude, and to introduce the one-liner that became famous before the movie was ever released – “I’m sick of these mother-f*$^@ing snakes on this mother-f*$^@ing plane!” Now I have to admit this is a great Samuel L. Jackson line, and I can see it becoming a classic because it so has his attitude and his personality in it. But here’s where my disappointment comes in. In the scene in which he utters the line, it feels completely forced and out of place. It was so sadly obvious that this line was inserted after the fact that it almost ruins it. After you watch him say it, you almost wish they’d left it out.

It goes without saying that this movie’s not going to win any awards (okay, I’m sure it’s likely to win something at the MTV Movie Awards, but does anyone REALLY count those?), but if you keep in mind what you’re getting into when you go see it, it’s a pretty enjoyable movie. Sadly it didn’t do the numbers at the box office that the studios were hoping for, but I hate it say it – the only people actually surprised by this are the studios. Let’s face it, all the Internet buzz in the world isn’t going to give you a $30-$40 million opening weekend. It just isn’t. The sad truth of the matter is that people chatting online about movies make up a very small percentage of the movie-going public, and if they’re the only ones that go see a movie, it’s not going to have a very big opening (and sad to day, Snakes on a Plane probably didn’t have all that many people interested in seeing it outside of the movie bloggers who rushed to see it opening weekend. Hell, I certainly didn’t rush out to see it right away).

This brings me to a related topic I’ve been wanting to discuss for awhile (I may have mentioned it in a past entry, I’m not sure. If I did, well, you’ll just have to listen to me rant about it again). And that is selling a movie to a too-narrow audience, then being surprised when it fails to meet expectations. Now sometimes, such as with fan-driven movies like Snakes on a Plane, there’s not much you can do about this but put it out there and hope you can sell it to a broader audience than the core fans. A perfect example of this (and one very close to my heart) is Joss Whedon’s Serenity. Here’s a movie that was completely fan-motivated. After the series was cancelled by those morons over at Fox (a subject I know I’ve covered in the past, so we’ll leave it alone), fans got online and made all kinds of noise about wanting the show back. Well, Fox was impressed enough that when they released the DVD box set, it wasn’t some plain Jane, no frills, here’s your show box set. No, it had all the bells and whistles – behind-the-scenes featurettes, audio commentary, all the un-aired episodes (and the episodes were actually in the correct order, shock of shocks). And the fans responded. The DVD box sets sold like crazy. There was enough success with the DVD sales that Universal bought the movie rights from Fox and greenlit the movie. So now comes our dilemma – if only the people who watched the show and/or bought the DVD set go to see the movie, that’s hardly enough of an audience to make for box office success. But what do you do? Joss made the best movie he could, one that appealed to fans of the show but at the same time was accessible to people who’d never watched an episode. And then he released it and hoped for the best. Sadly, not that many people other than the core fans bothered to go see it (which is why there’s not likely to be a sequel).

Now, as I stated above, with movies like Snakes on a Plane or Serenity, you know that by default you’re going to have a narrow core audience, so you just have to hope for the best. However, there are other movies that have the potential for a much broader audience, and lose it because the filmmakers foolishly are focused only on their small core audience, and it’s these movies that I want to talk about here. The most common category that falls into this trap is the video game movie. I’m sure you’ve all seen them – movie flops such as Double Dragon, Street Fighter, and Super Mario Bros. For every solid, top notch video game movie like Mortal Kombat or Resident Evil, there are a dozen horrible B-movies that give video game movies their bad reputation. And naturally the worse the genre’s reputation gets, the harder it is to get people to take these movies seriously. And by and large I blame this problem on the narrow-minded focus of the creators of the movies.

I see two things that cause this problem. The first is a simple problem with math and economics. A movie studio sees that a video game has just hit $100 million in sales (or however much popular video games tend to make these days – I’ll admit that I don’t really keep track) and they suddenly think, “Hell, that’s a lot of money. If we can get all those game geeks to go see a movie version of that hit game, we’re talking box office gold!” Now I don’t imagine they expect the movie to make $100 million by any means, but they’re still expecting to make huge numbers based on that $100 million. Here’s the problem, though: a brand new, just hit the shelves video game costs $50. So you divide that $100 million by $50 (we’re going to assume for the sake of simplicity that everyone paid full initial price for the game, and not deal with people who bought it down the road once the price had dropped), you’ve got 2 million people who bought the game. Now some of those people probably aren’t going to really like the game, regardless of how popular it is. And quite a few of them are not movie people (why go see a movie of the game when they can just sit at home PLAYING the game), so not all 2 million of them are going to automatically go see the movie. But even if they do, a movie ticket only costs $5-$10 (depending on where you live and whether or not you’re going to a matinee). For the sake of argument, lets use $7 as our median movie ticket price. Even if all 2 million of those game buyers go to see the movie, that’s still only $14 million, which isn’t that bad for a low budget movie (but hardly great), but it's not what you'd call a huge success, and absolutely not what you want to see if you spent any real money making the movie.

So what’s the lesson of all this math? Well, firstly, just because the video game made hundreds of millions of dollars, does NOT mean that a movie version of the game will do the same. Secondly, and more importantly, if you do decide to go ahead and make the movie, you’re GOT to expand your audience beyond that core group of gamers, because they alone will not make your movie successful. And here’s where we run into our second and much bigger problem. And that’s with the directors of these movies. In way too many cases they fall into one of two categories: either they’re way too focused on making the movies specifically for the fans of the game (a mistake, as we’ve already established that there’s not enough of them to make the movie a success), or they’ve decided that since the movie they’re stuck making is ONLY a video game movie, they don’t take it seriously or put any real effort into trying to make a good movie, which is how we get garbage like Street Fighter, which was a complete joke of a movie. It was pretty obvious from beginning to end that the filmmakers didn't take the story they were telling seriously at all. This is why Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (which I recently picked up and watched on DVD – it so rocks!!) is a great, kick ass movie, whereas the live action version is crap. The creators of the animated version obviously took the story and the characters seriously, and wanted to make a serious movie that was true to the story behind the game. The idiots who made the live action version obviously decided there was no reason to make a serious, dramatic movie that was based on a kung fu video game, and well, the results speak for themselves.

Of course, some video games just weren’t meant to be made into movies. I’m sorry, but while the various incarnations of the Mario Bros games have all been a lot of fun to play (and very popular as well), there’s just not enough story there to make a movie out of. I don’t care how popular the games are; whoever thought it was a good concept for a movie was kidding themselves. A children’s Saturday morning cartoon, maybe, but it’s just not major motion picture material. But there are a number of video games out there (yes, even your simple fighting games) that do have the back story to make a great movie, even if the back story isn’t really a big part of the actual game. And luckily as games become more involved and have a more complex story, it becomes much easier to develop a decent movie script based on them, so hopefully we'll start to see better video game movies in the future. But that doesn’t change the fact that as a filmmaker you have to take the material seriously and look at it as more than just a “video game” movie, and you have to be able to look past your core game geek audience and find a way to develop the movie with a broader appeal.

If you look at the movies that were very successful films that were based on video games, the big thing they have in common is that the filmmakers were able to find a genre within the story beyond just “based on a video game” and use that to target a broader audience for the movie. Mortal Kombat was a great fantasy martial arts movie, and Resident Evil is a wonderful example of the zombie horror genre. And because they fit these broader genres, and were marketed accordingly, they were able to draw people who were fans of this type of movie, whether they’d ever played the video games or not (I, for example, have never played any of the Resident Evil games, and am generally not much of a fan of that sort of game, but I generally enjoy zombie movies, and I loved Resident Evil as a zombie movie, and not as a movie version of a video game). This is what the filmmakers need to keep in mind when they make these movies.

There’s one more video game movie that I’d like to rant about a bit before I end this discussion, and that’s the mediocre Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and it’s abysmal sequel. Yes, I realize these movies were actually both pretty successful and I know a number of people who really enjoyed them. But I was highly disappointed in both movies for the very reasons I’ve been discussing above – the writer/director was so obviously aiming strictly for the adolescent male fans of the video game that he completely lost sight of the movie's broader potential as an action/adventure movie. Hence Angelina Jolie’s big, bouncing fake boobs. I’m sorry, while I enjoy women’s breasts just as much as the next heterosexual male, the scene at the end of Tomb Raider where we see Lara Croft running through the ice cave, her big boobs bouncing wildly up and down as she goes was just stupid and inane and sad. The worst of it, from my perspective, is that this is a movie with a lot of potential, and Angelina Jolie was the PERFECT actress for the role. Not only did she have the looks for the part, but she had the accent down pat, and so brought absolutely the right attitude for this character.

This movie character should have been the female equivalent of Indiana Jones, and the movie should have been what National Treasure was. But it wasn’t. Not even close. And all because the director was too focused on sticking to the video game, and those elements of the game that stood out in the minds of the gamers (namely the character’s over-developed bust). I never really played the games, but I’m a serious comic book geek, and there was a comic book series based on the game that I loved that ran for quite a while that was everything that movie should have been, but wasn’t. The comic took the character seriously, it got away from the game’s Junior High schoolboy fantasy elements and presented a kick ass heroine who was smart and daring and beautiful and was involved in numerous exciting adventures. I think if the movies would have taken this route, if the filmmakers would have focused on a broader audience, and had not been so concerned about keeping the teenage game geeks happy, that they could have easily had a 3 or 4 movie (or more) franchise of great movies, as opposed to the two mediocre films that they cranked out. But hey, that’s just my opinion; what do I know?

So there ends my long, meandering rant for the day. In summation, here’s what we learned today. One, video game movies can be wonderful, enjoyable movies to watch, if only the filmmakers take the source material seriously and try to develop a movie that goes beyond the game and the gamers when looking for its audience. And two, Hollywood needs to do a better job of finding an audience outside of core fans when developing a movie adaptation (whether it be an adaptation of a video game, a comic book, a book, a TV show, whatever). And that's my two cents for today.

Wow, that ran longer than I’d expected it to. I was going to add a quick review of the comedy I saw the weekend before I saw Snakes on a Plane (which I actually watched on a Wednesday, when I took a mental health day during the middle of the week). But since this entry has run on, and since the weekend AFTER I watched Snakes on the Plane I saw another comedy, I figure I'll do them both together in my next entry (which will also give me an excuse to do an entry about comedies in general and my feelings on them, so look forward to potentially another long, rambling entry). So, until then, this is Evil Ryan, signing off.