As if you needed more proof that Back to the Future is an amazing film, apparently it’s so good that Michael J. Fox sometimes thought he was still playing Marty McFly while shooting other films. This video is pretty hilarious. I kind of hope Fox used to shout, “DAAAAAAC,” on all the movies he made, especially Doc Hollywood.
(Thanks to Reddit for leading me to this video)
In discussing remakes I usually try to avoid discussing the film in relation to its original. I am generally not interested in what the film does the same or differently, so long as it does those things well. Remakes are hardly ever necessary, but that doesn’t devalue them in my eyes. I’ve loved plenty of remakes, from The Thing to The Fly to Let Me In. Is it nice to see when one of these films ventures on its own path away from its inspiration? Sure, but I don’t see that as a strict necessity, and so I don’t like to even bring up the original. It’s always about the film at hand.
Well, almost always. Though The Amazing Spider-Man is not a remake, and though I prefer to look only at the film I’m reviewing, in this case I can’t help but compare the film to its brother from 2002. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man is not a film beloved in my neck of the woods. I think it handles the origin story of a super-powered hero better than any other film in the modern era of comic book films, but I also find the film visually unappealing, poorly acted, overly silly and paced pretty unevenly. I also think these problems got worse with the sequel. But at its core, Spider-Man did the origin right. In terms of story beats I’d almost be willing to say it did Spidey’s origin perfectly. I’m not opposed to the idea of The Amazing Spider-Man being another origin story, but by being one so half-heartedly, and by sticking too closely to the one in the 2002 film, it forces the audience to recall a much better telling of the same basic story. Click to read more.
In the grand scheme of things it’s good to remember that Brave is just a movie. That’s not to dismiss it, rather it’s a statement of fact. The film’s purpose is, like almost any film, to stimulate its audience. In this case it aims mostly to entertain, as well as illicit and emotional reaction. It’s possible to judge the film on this level alone. Does it achieve these basic goals? How well does it achieve them? This is the level most people will settle on in terms of their appreciation for the film.
There’s another set of criteria that gets attached to certain films, though. The first is a placement within a group, in the case of Brave this would amount to a measurement against other Pixar films. For other films it might be a comparative evaluation within a director’s body of work. Or a writer. Or an actor. Or anything. This sort of judgement is both fair and not. Judging Brave as “not up to par for Pixar” means very little for the film itself despite what it may say about the film within the given grouping and from the critic’s perspective. I have issues with judging a film this way, though I do acknowledge the usefulness of this sort of comparison. More problematic is burdening a film with a weight of necessary importance. The way I see it, Brave has struggled greatly with this kind of unfair weight. Click to read more.
One of the great things about Production Code-era Hollywood is that it forced writers and directors to find roundabout ways of including adult or bawdy subject-matter in films. Just because some censor board decided that all movies had to be chaste didn’t mean filmmakers and audience wanted less adult-oriented films. But, instead of being crude and vulgar, movies of classic Hollywood hid sex in witty dialogue and double entendres. Then the 60s happened and the Production Code died and audiences became more accepting of open sexuality in films and the whole thing went to shit.
I’m fine with more direct sex and language in films. I love me some Judd Apatow. But wouldn’t it be nice to go back to the days where filmmakers couldn’t rely on spelling things out crudely and directly? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some more creativity in the dialogue of romantic comedies or dramas? Those thinly veiled double entendres were witty and funny and bold and sexy as hell, and I want them back! Click to read more.
The modern movie age has become a cycle of hype more than an appreciation for film itself. I chalk it up to the mainstreaming of the nerd class and the ubiquity of the Internet. Film culture online is rarely about the films themselves, but the industry and hype surrounding them. I fall prey to it, as well. It disturbs me, though. For about half the year, all anybody cares about is how the films of the Summer will stack up. Once that’s over it’s just a big race to see which films get the most acclaim and awards. If any of these two seasons is better, it’s the awards one, mostly because the good films tend to stick around in the consciousness more, giving them more time to find an audience. The Summer season is altogether a different story. Almost the opposite, really. Months—sometimes years—of hype lead up to one short weekend, the discussion explodes for roughly a week, petering off through the next week, and nearly disappearing after that.
Take a look at this summer, for example, which arguably began early in the Spring with the release of The Hunger Games. In fact, we can start even earlier, with John Carter. Pretty much since that film’s release, the two or three-week cycle has played out like clockwork. It’s partly a sign of a year with many big releases, but it’s also an illustration of how Internet culture works. There are several stages, but essentially they come down to: The Hype, The Pre-Release Buzz, Release, Taking Sides. Click to read more.
Aaron Sorkin has a problem. He doesn’t know when to stop. I love that he’s something of an idealist. I love that he writes dialogue in a way nobody actually speaks. I love the effortless ways he can build tension into a script with nothing but words, as seen during the broadcast of a news program in the first episode of his new HBO series, The Newsroom. The problem is that he has no filter. He has no sense of proportion. He doesn’t understand that the idealism with which he writes is only appropriate in certain settings.
When Sorkin was dealing with a fictional presidency surrounded by fictional politics in The West Wing, it worked. A dash of realistic policy jargon, stirred in with some heightened dialogue, hilarious characters, and a format that allowed for the fantasy of the perfect modern President to take shape on television week after week. Of course, then Sorkin came back with Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip in which he attempted to bring the same level of social import and awareness to a setting that could never believably call for it. A Saturday Night Live-type show dealing seriously with weighty concerns? It didn’t help that we never actually got to see the fake comedy show being remotely funny enough to justify its own existence. The Newsroom sits somewhere between these two spheres of Sorkin, which makes it all the more frustrating. Click to read more.
I was a bit more productive in my movie-watching this week. And by productive, I mean I watched some more movies. I think the big help here was that my mom likes watching movies, too, so we sat down to watch two together. That said, both films were re-watched for me.
I do plan, this coming week, on finally watching some classics. I now have a region-free Blu-ray player, and with it I’ve ordered Sunrise, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Lifeboat. All films I’ve seen before, but ones I’m very much looking forward to revisiting on Blu-ray. I also plan to finally find the five hours to consume Fanny and Alexander, but I guess you’ll find out in the next ‘Staring at Screens’ post whether I accomplished the task. Anyway, it’s time to tell you about the movies I’ve been watching. Click to read on.
If you’re going to see Brave this weekend (which you should be doing), and you happen to be in one of a few lucky cities, you could be one of the first to experience Dolby’s brand new theatrical surround sound system, Dolby Atmos. I got to check out the new system at a showing of Brave at the SilverCity Yonge and Eglinton in Toronto, and the results are quite impressive. First off, the system is loud. Very loud. But it’s also the first time outside of an IMAX theatre where I’ve heard a sound system be this loud without also losing fidelity. This has everything to do with the way Atmos is designed.
If you’re unfamiliar with how surround sound in theatres generally works, well, let me give you a primer. Theatres have operated with what’s called 5.1 surround for a few decades now, and recently have been upgrading to a 7.1 system. Those numbers are simply an indication of how many separate audio channels a system can support. 5.1 has one subwoofer channel and five regular speaker channels; one in the centre, two on either side and two more on the sides of the cinema. There are often multiple speakers on the sides as well as the back walls, but these all share the same two channels of sound. 7.1 is effectively the same, except that it adds two more channels specifically for the back. A sound mixer on a movie now has control of a more full environment of sound. Dolby Atmos takes that control to a whole new level. Atmos can support up to 128 channels of sound plugged into up to 64 speakers. You don’t need to be good at math to know that’s a huge difference. Click to read more.
I don’t think reviews of live theatre will be commonplace here, particularly since I don’t often go to plays, but then this is only half a play. You see, when Danny Boyle put on a stage production of Frankenstein, newly-adapted by Nick Dear, it only ran for a few weeks, and only at the National Theatre in London. Would that I could have gone to see it live. Luckily, two performances were filmed and broadcast to cinemas around the world. This happened last year, but I was tied up and unable to go. Thankfully, National Theatre Live decided to present the play on the big screen once more. It’s a play, but it’s filmed and seen on the big screen, and while these kinds of events are now commonplace, it’s the first time I’ve been to one. Well, in this case I saw it twice.
You see, Danny Boyle cast two great actors to play Victor Frankenstein and the Creature. Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch took the roles, but they did something really special. Each night they would swap parts, each taking a turn playing the other character. Quite the clever ploy considering I got two tickets and saw the same play twice in the space of a week. I suppose I could have just chosen one or the other, but part of the fun was to see how each actor would approach the roles. It’s a sight worth seeing, though I do think one version comes out better than another. Click to read more.
It’s happening again. It happened back when Toy Story 3 was announced, and then when it came out. It happened when Cars 2 was announced, and when that came out, as well. Now that Disney has released the teaser trailer for Pixar’s Monsters University, it’s happening all over again. I’m speaking, of course, about the annoying requests for a sequel to The Incredibles. It pops up in lots of threads about one of these Pixar sequels. It can’t be escaped. The logic is always the same: we want Pixar making original movies, and we don’t want them to become Dreamworks, so no sequels or prequels or unending franchises, oh but wait, make an Incredibles sequel because it’s a superhero movie so it must have one.
I’d rather see “Incredibles University” – Sanford Bell, /Film commenter
Do you know how many times I’ve heard people claim that the end of The Incredibles was a perfect set-up for a sequel? I swear, these people have no concept of humour. The ending of The Incredibles is not some call to arms for an inevitable sequel, but a thematic capper that completes the arc of the Parr family. It’s left open only because that is thematically functional. Plus, the concept of the Underminer is hilariously silly. It’s an ending almost like the joke ending of Back to the Future, only with more emotional and thematic resonance. And sure, that joke at the end of Back to the Future was used as the the set up for sequels, but by using that scene as a jumping-off point for Back to the Future Part II, the film was significantly hampered all the way through. So why would anyone on earth think The Incredibles was setting up a sequel? And more importantly, why on earth would anyone think an Incredibles sequel is necessary? It’s this mentality, quite frankly, that is destroying Hollywood blockbuster entertainment. Click to read more.
