By Tom Nix

Look, I am going to level with you. I am not out here to argue the fact that a year that made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen its number one release is an astounding year for the art of cinema. What I will be supporting is that this year, unlike a lot of previous years, did something kind of remarkable. And that’s when 2009 got it right, it got it damn near perfect. This year saw some stinkers. Every year sees some stinkers. But what this year saw a little more of was defining moments. This was the year that the Harry Potter franchise shook off its family roots to give us an honest to god movie. This was the year that Sam Raimi shook off his franchise boots and gave us Drag Me To Hell. This is the year that Katrhyn Bigelow delivered on her promise of Near Dark, and this is the year that Quentin Tarantino sealed his name in an envelope with the best filmmakers of all time. Duncan Jones, Michael Daugherty, and Neill Blomkamp made their first movies ever, and all three are touchstones in their respective genres. J.J. Abrams even managed to make the best Star Wars movie in the last 25 years with Star Trek.

Hell yes this is a year that matters.

It’s a mixed blessing that the Oscars have expanded to ten best picture nominees this year. For one, there are certainly ten films worth honoring. For seconds, this is the Academy and there is no way it won’t be an embarrassment. But, in no uncertain terms, UP, Inglourious Basterds, District 9, The Hurt Locker, Watchmen: The Director’s Cut and Where the Wild Things Are are films that deserve consideration as films of the decade, let alone these most recent 365 days.  And those are just the classics.

Let’s throw in movies like Observe and Report, one of the most brutal comedies of the year. In fact, it may be tied only with World’s Greatest Dad as the most mean spirited comedy I have seen in an unbelievably long time. Both feature a loose, crazy, and nearly unlikeable performance by an otherwise aloof actor (Seth Rogen and Robin Williams, respectively). Both also feature penises, and one belongs to Mork. Or lets take a look at The Hangover, the highest-grossing R-Rated comedy ever. More so than any comedy in recent memory, The Hangover managed to capture perfectly the spirit of the waning 2000’s decade. This is a movie that people my age will be watching when we are 80 and saying “Man, we used to dress so stupid back then.” The movie is so good, and so rewatchable, that it singlehandedly erases all of the bad juju that Transylmania will bring in December.

We had a great year for the insane people, as Stephen Sommers brought the onslaught of GI JOE: The Rise of Cobra kung-fu-gripping all our faces apart. Add to that the crack-cocaine-cum-cinema that was Crank: High Voltage, and we’ve already got a potent mixture for a perfect shot of over-the-top. Oh yeah. Let’s not forget to add a dash of Spook-A-Blast. Drag Me To Hell is the best PG-13 horror film made. Ever. In history. It opens up with a nine-year-old getting burned to death, and manages to keep that level of kah-razy for the next 80 minutes. You’ve already forgotten about The Uninvited, haven’t you?

The Basterds tell you to forget about The Uninvited, you nat-zi scum.

2009 brings us films from Francis Ford Coppola, Wes Anderson, Chan-Wook Park, Jim Jarmusch, Werner Herzog, Richard Curtis, Peter Jackson, Pedro Almodovar, Hayayo Myazaki, Michael Mann, The Coen Brothers, Rian Johnson, Sam Mendes, Mike Judge and two films from Guy Ritchie. One of which brings back Jude Law from his self imposed screen exile. YES.

YES.

Watchmen was a good movie on its release. It was a great movie when it came to DVD and Blu-ray. Zack Snyder has thus far proven himself to be a flawless filmmaker (he’s 3 – 0 in my eyes), and it is astounding that one of the most nuanced, non-commercial, violent movies of the year came out of the studio system. I sincerely hope that the Blu-ray sales have convinced WB that it was a risk worth taking. The reinserted Hollis Mason death scene is my vote for the best two minutes of film in all of 2009.

At the risk of overstaying my welcome, I’d simply like to wrap up with the fact that 2009’s highest highs far outweigh its lowest lows. Unfortunately we have a system in place in Hollywood that seeks to churn out the dumbest crap imaginable for a profit. It is the nature of the beast for now, and saying that a year is bad because it contains terrible films is simply not understanding the way commerce works. There’s always going to be more McDonalds in a neighborhood than there will be Ruths Chris’. But the integrity of the art that rises above the garbage is how a year will truly be judged. 2008 had an almost embarrassingly low quantity of truly great films.

Not only does 2009 topple most recent years in this area, it topples many years for producing some of the near pinnacle films in a genre. UP is the best family film in a decade. District 9 is one of the greatest sci-fi films of the modern era. The Hurt Locker finally gives the War on Terror a statement worth saying. Where the Wild Things Are will be remembered as a film that took audience involvement and understanding to a totally new level. It and Watchmen prove that there is still true art to be squeezed out, kicking and screaming, from big budget filmmaking.  Inglourious Basterds is simply one of the best films to be released in America in years. 2010 has quite a lot to live up to.

I will fully stand by 2009 as one of the good years to be a film fan. I can say this despite having seen New Moon in a theater. What else is there to say?

Well, besides this:

HELL. YES.

Share

By Ryan Brlecic

Hollywood and The Year that Wasn’t

2009 will forever be remembered as the year that finally killed Patrick McGoohan (Editor’s Note: this was probably for the best). This year also saw not one, but two Tyler Perry films (black is the new white). Jessica Biel managed to live up to her television roots and make two straight to video flicks, one of which had her showing the proverbial skin. Needless to say, 2009 is one for the record books…The Golden Raspberry Awards record books.

Not since Halle Berry’s Catwoman prowled the big screen has Hollywood been able to consistently produce an output like this. If used in interrogation sessions by the CIA, most of this years output would be labeled cruel and unusual punishment by the rules set forth by the Geneva Convention (two words, Post Grad). Enough, however, of my attempt to feign clever. I am not clever, I am right. The year of 2009 was anything but a banner year for film.

As the decade closes on us, we find ourselves in a time of change for the motion picture industry. Not since the 70’s has the model of “business as usual” changed so much. The problem, however, lies in that change. One of the most common comments from film critics in 2009 went something like this: “You just have to shut your mind off and enjoy it.” We no longer challenge Hollywood to give us a product that matches our various expectations and, like so many other facets of this American life, we settle for mediocrity.

It is easy to write this year off as a mulligan. To feed into the tiresome excuse that most of the false starts and failed attempts this year owe their births to the actor/writer strike. However that is not a reason for output like we’ve had (just Dragonball Evolution). As I scan the top ten highest grossing films of 2009, one can see some of the years worst films are actually some of the highest grossing. Hell, you have to actually work to beat the suck of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

When cinema is at it’s best it allows us an escape. That escape can mean for some Up, for others Taken, and yet still for some individuals Paul Bart: Mall Cop. My argument is not the merit of bad films and the people who love them, of which I take great pride in being counted as one of that lot (look forward to my Albert Pyun retrospective). My disdain with why 2009 was bad year for cinema is Hollywood’s attempt to effectively piss on our legs and tell us it’s CGI rain.

This past summer blockbuster season was packed full of explosions and literal hand fed exposition written by the studio’s college interns. The rest of 2009’s schedule was met with filler and/or no releases. It was like Hollywood put on the auto-pilot and took a vacation and the best part is we bought it. This is not to say that the year did not have merit, there where a handful of films that deserved their acclaim. The Ugly and The Bad however killed The Good in this re-imagining of the classic.

2009 saw the culmination of a director’s body of work into a near perfect film with Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards, but even that was still not enough to save the year from something like Terminator Salvation or X-men Origins: Wolverine. Public Enemies boasting crew credits that would make it a sure bet in Vegas, ended up folding. Star Trek and G.I. Joe gave so many a universal escape, only to have films like Night at the Museum 2 and Imagine That choke their goodwill to death. My insane pleasure in watching Sam Rami’s return to form, was mauled by The Unborn, The Uninvited, Orphan, and Saw XVII.

In preparing for this I looked back over the last few years. Initially I tried to discover if my seething animosity for going to the local cineplex in 2009 was merely caused by the way 2008 left me. Which for those wondering, was hungover in a bathtub full of ice missing a kidney at a motel near the Mexican border. Am I hard to please in my cinematic needs? Or is this a downward slope Hollywood finds itself on? If they are in the business of turning a profit from these film endeavors, what would they gain from losing money?

As actors salaries rise with the cost of doing business, Hollywood is looking for ways to squeeze every penny to their advantage (read about the proposed Netflix 30-day policy). Television has the luxury of reality TV and Music Industry seems fit to find new stars via Disney and American idol. Hollywood still has to contend with actor’s wanting pay for results earned. Is it not that hard to see taking a loss as having benefit in the fact that you could reduce actor’s salary requests? Literally use the market against them for your future gain.

Which brings me to Shutter Island a film that would have easily been an awards contender plucked from this years line-up. Paramount (the studio that pays for Michael Bay’s gold plated C4 detonators) cited having nothing left to properly promote the film or an Oscar (speaking of the telecast, it would have benefited from Kanye West’s letting Hugh Jackman know that no one will live up to Billy Crystal) campaign. Besides why release a legitimately good film after you made slightly more then a years profit on dreck like Transformers 2? I cannot fault them for good business or capitalism, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it either.

In closing, Hollywood realized that 2009 was a good a year as any to have a garage sale. So like most garage sales they worked hard to find the things they no longer wanted and waited patiently for us to come up the driveway. They sold us our old memories, via their unused, remade, re-imagined and dusty properties. They added a few lens flares, maybe a CGI dinosaur, and copied someone else’s SciFi novel to get us the best in modern cinema. Unfortunately for us when you buy at a garage sale, all sales are final. The year of 2009 was anything but a banner year for film.

Share

By Tom Nix

I am going to see The Twilight Saga: New Moon this Friday. That might seem like an odd confession to make, especially on a site like this. So let me explain myself. I am going to see this movie because it is going to be absolutely terrible. And I am going to love every second of it.

Movies do it for me. I am in love with films as I am the act of filmmaking itself. I’ll take all comers, from City of God to City of the Living Dead. In filmmaking, there are some amazing things that happen in spite of the final product. Much like Doctor Manhattan’s speech in Watchmen about the miracle of Laurie Juspesczyk’s birth, there is a series of miracles that have to happen to get a crap movie made.

Not only does someone have to write a movie where a wrongly accused black man seeks revenge on the cops who set him up by strangling them with his massive prehensile penis, someone has to read that script and put up the money to get made. Out of all the other ideas in the universe, that was the one that told them “Yes. This story is the one.” Then someone has to manufacture the manslaughtering member. Can you imagine pre-production meetings focused around how they’re going to get this effect to work? Then someone has to agree to be dropped in a cockpile and pretend to die inside a dick. This movie is called Soul Vengeance and it EXISTS. And for me, that’s enough. These terrible films will show you things you will never see anywhere else. These films have an undying urge for telling you stories that would never make the marquee of any reputable theater. It just so happens that some of the most insane and interesting stories are told by people without the talent to totally pull it off.

Which brings me back to why New Moon is so appealing. This is a movie based on a bland series of books. This is a movie with vapid lead characters and a plot that is so contrived and simplistic as to make a person mad with how derivative the whole affair is. No? Not selling you yet? How about the fact that one of the major plot points of the film is the lead heroine traveling from Washington state to the Vatican (in Italy, natch) to perform a slow motion run in the hopes of stopping her shirtless, pale, brooding boyfriend from walking out into the sunlight and sparkling in front of an audience. Better now? How about the fact that after the same girl gets a paper cut at a party, her vampire boyfriend tells her that he can never see her again because of what might have happened. Are you starting to see where this could be an amazing night at the movies?

Someone wrote this. Millions of people bought it. Millions more will plunk down even more cash to see it. I get to sit in the middle of a massively delusional audience and laugh at a sparkling vampire. The whole scenario is something that should never exist – and yet, here we are. One of the highest grossing films of this year will be one where a paper cut leads to banishment, and an international flight is chartered to prevent unnecessary glittering. THIS IS HAPPENING AND I INTEND TO BE A PART OF IT.

Without bad movies, we’d never have seen Sean Connery dressed like an S&M baby. GIVE THANKS.

That is real movie magic. Anyone can get behind a movie about a law-school dropout who, through incredible circumstances, ends up defending an innocent man in what turns out to be the court case of the decade. It takes a much more unstable and incredible person to get behind a movie that’s about a college kid and his deformed, murderous brother who he carries around in a picnic basket. And we as film fans know this. Sharing a love of The Shawshank Redemption isn’t something to latch onto. Everyone loves it, because it’s a classic. But find someone who has the same specific love for Ricki-Oh, The Story of Ricky, and a friendship happens. The film features a man exploding another man’s head with his fist. That’s something special.

That exact ridiculousness in the face of all sense and good is what makes these movies eminently watchable. Transformers 2 is also a terrible movie, but I hate that film with all of my being. It has no ideas, it has no voice, it has no want to attempt anything new than “make it bigger than the last one.” Most bad film directors are innovators out of necessity. They need their film to get noticed, so they create some insane plot point, or they just ham it up to an absurd degree. I would watch The Room countless times before I would ever watch Transformers 2 again. One is a bad movie made by a man that wants so much for his audience to understand him. The other is made by a man that doesn’t care if the audience dies while watching his film.

Not all bad films are steeped in the silly, however. A lot of them are the playing grounds for truly talented individuals limited by budgets, time, and support. The Lord of the Rings trilogy would simply not exist in the way it does today if Peter Jackson hadn’t cut his directing and FX teeth on Bad Taste and Dead Alive. Spider-Man 2 would not be best comic book movie ever made if Sam Raimi hadn’t discovered his visual style with Evil Dead.

These kinds of second-rate films are important to the art of cinema itself. In fact, four days ago, they gave an honorary Oscar to Roger Corman, the sultan of schlock. For those not in the know, Corman ran New World Pictures in the 60’s and 70’s that churned out dozens of films a year, most by first time directors. I can’t defend the quality of most of the output – they’re pretty much standard sci-fi, horror, and exploitation fare – but the impact these movies had on the industry is incalculable.  At a glance, Corman not only gave Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper, and Robert DeNiro their first acting jobs, he also paid for the first films by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, John Sayles, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, and Monte Hellman.

Frankly, Boxcar Bertha begat Goodfellas. Dementia 13 caused The Godfather. Caged Heat led to The Silence of the Lambs. Bad movies are directly responsible for some of the best films of all time. Movies are much more than the sum of their parts. Bad movies doubly so. They speak just as much of the future of the filmmaker as they do the unfortunate present.

Some people are looking for movies to speak to them. They want to be informed about the human condition. I am not here to tell you that bad movies are better than the ones that really have something to say. But consider this: UP is undoubtedly one of the best films of the year. But it’s still a movie about an 80-year-old who attaches balloons to his house and flies to South America to learn how to love again with the help of a talking dog and an anthropomorphic bird. A ridiculous premise made worthwhile. But simply embrace that insanity: Make the flick about an 80-year-old man with a flying house who learns its not okay to throw his poop on people from 11,000 feet.

I think I’d like that version just as much.

Flip Sides and read Stephy’s stance here.

Share

By Stephy Momper

I have an allergy to bad movies.  Symptoms include nausea, itching, much eye rolling, an increase in swearing and occasional vomiting.  Bad movies are typically composed of stupidity and laziness slapped in the face of a person who has no place to run.  Usually the only treatment to offset the symptoms of a bad movie involves alcohol (provided by those who are subjecting you to the bad).

How did I develop this allergy to bad movies? I think the innate dislike has always been there but I usually had the freedom to change channels or leave when I did not enjoy a film.  While watching movies with friends I don’t want to appear rude, and thus my politeness is greater than my needs and I will force myself to sit through awfulness despite the great rash of mental itching I might feel. After many years of this, it has taken its toll and that itching has progressed to something akin to internal hives.

Movies that lack cleverness, vision or ingenuity bother me. Perhaps these movies exist because certain directors know their audience and continue to profit from their patronage, without feeling the need to push themselves beyond their comfortable boundaries.  Studios can be blamed too for their utter disrespect towards their viewers, in assuming that all people want to see are explosions and romance. Maybe I’m a slave driver, but if I am going to fill someone else’s coffers I want them to work for my money.  I don’t want to feel tricked and cheated.

Bad movies are not well-rounded. They might have memorable characters, but a terrible plot, or the other way around. Wonderful scene design, but horrible timing.  A good solid movie does well in all areas. Its audience will linger on it after its completion, asking themselves specific questions about its plot, characters, and symbols that they experienced within the film.  The only question a bad movie makes me ask is, “WHY??? WHY DID I WASTE MY TIME WATCHING THAT?”

Solid movies need not be complex mind blowing experiences nor great introspectives into the lives of their characters.  They can be simple, which is not the same as stupid.  Compare the wit of the Marx Brothers vs. repetitive slapstick of The Three Stooges.  I can name Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera and Horse Feathers as great examples of American cinema.  Once you’ve seen one Stooge’s sketch you’ve just about seen them all; eye-poke, dodge, a mallet hit. Such dichotomy in film quality persists today in Modern movies, example: Iron Giant was clever and simple; Transformers, overblown and stupid (and no, Megan Fox did not make it better).

Bad movies don’t work with what they have.  They tend to screw themselves over on ridiculous special effects, sacrificing plot; on bad casting where money is misspent on big name actors rather than putting in the time to create a storyline with a convincing set; on hookers and blow, or the other multiple ways things can go wrong in cinema.  It’s like when movie stars attempt to become rock stars and the mess of their music is laughably sad.  But maybe I am more prone to sadness rather than laughter, making these foibles so much more tragic to me.

It doesn’t give me any boost in self-esteem having the knowledge I may be able do better than some of the writers and directors who made a shit film. Rather, it just make me depressed for humanity and further upset by the fact someone is making much, much more money than truly legitimate artists.

One might say that if there were no bad movies, we would never appreciate the good ones.  In the TV series The Middleman, Tyler refers to the movie, The Zombies of Mora Tau, as the perfect zombie movie palate cleanser because it wipes clean the slate of expectation for whatever zombie movie is watched thereafter.  I call bullshit.  You don’t drink a fine wine and then take a sip of piss to make the next thing you drink taste like champagne.  Palate cleansers are neutralizers or refreshers that don’t end up leaving a bad taste in your mouth, and neither should a movie.

A bad movie is mindless entertainment that doesn’t engage your mind or capture your imagination.  It is only memorable in the form of ghastly flashbacks (for me at least) and I can’t fathom why I would want to waste a 1/12^th of my day in a semi-coma state, never mind the other 1/3 of the day already being spent in sleep. If I wanted a soporific I’d turn to old fashioned sleep (because you have to do it anyways unless you want hallucinations… which is potential fun), an unconscious state where my dreams come up with better substance that the shit produced in film for millions of dollars.

“No Love for Gigli”

I will admit to the occasional enjoyment of a bad movie, examples: The Goonies, Red Sonja, Labyrinth, and Legend.  However, these ‘fine pieces of cinema’ are from my childhood.  Nostalgia, what can I say?   Associated with them are times when there were hours aplenty to waste, and the thrill of ridiculous fantasy might have been considered cute even. The large body of education we’ve gained (hopefully) enables us to discern quality from the vast detritus of crap out there.  I don’t recall seeing Sweet Valley High on our teacher’s “must read” list and I don’t think a film like Gigli is on anyone’s “must watch” list either. I’d like to believe that we all grow into mature responsible adults (responsible adults who don’t let other adults watch bad movies).

Flip Sides and read Tom’s take here.

Share

By Rusty Bickel

Everyone remembers that first Christmas or birthday when they got their first gaming system. They remember the first time that they set up that NES, Sega or in my case SNES and popped in their first video game. These are memories that every true gamer remembers. It seemed like as soon as Super Mario Bros. was released people started arguing which was better – the newest games to the market, or the classics from which they came from. The whole new school, old school argument in video games is, in my opinion, a very highly regarded topic with proponents on both sides making valid points and neither side budging. It is my opinion though that ALMOST NO GAMES (some classics are classics and there isn’t any arguing that) from the last ten years or even last year can hold up to the latest and greatest that is offered today.

Everyone remembers their first game just as everyone remembers the first game they played on Playstation, playstation 2, playstation 3. The first time that they dinged 60 or the first time they got that all amazing invisibility cloak. It is just another point on a gamers timeline. People defending the old school front often preach on how much filler has been added to games just to make them “look pretty”, how much of the “true” gaming experence has been lost because of publishers trying to make one topic appeal to everyone. This is actually true in the purest sense but thats nothing to blame current games on.

Publishers make games that will sell (wether or not thats a good thing is an entirely different argument) but they know that a game will sell because YOU, the end user, showed them a trend in video games. As a whole though this entire argument can be summed up into one most important statement: If Nintendo had the technology to make the game look like Halo ODST when designing the original Super Mario Brothers, do you still think they would have made a side scrolling 8-bit platformer…?

Hell no. The problem is not that old school games are more pure, its that they HAD to make the story and game-play mechanics good because they wouldn’t sell otherwise. Nowadays people can buy a game that may not have the best idea but still come away satisfied because of the overall experience that they got from that game. This includes cut scenes and Wii-mote flailing mini-games, and you know what – that’s okay! People play video games for the experience. And it has been proven time and time again that you don’t need to have a graphics rich game in order for it to be amazing. However at the same time the games like this always offer up something new and innovative that make the game great without spending millions on a thirty second FMV.

This is becoming increasingly harder to do as more and more games come out. So of course old school games were viewed as amazing at the time because there was nothing that they could be compared to. Having said all this I want everyone to know that there are games that I don’t think can ever be replaced. Final Fantasy 7, for example. But that’s not 100% because the game was the most amazing thing ever. It’s because to me that game is about going to my aunt’s house and playing it on her Playstation. It’s about for the first time in my life crying at a video game because I had become SO attached to a character. That game is a part of my childhood and will never be replaced. not because of how it affected the video game industry but rather how it affected my life. And it was all because how the new, wicked graphics of that era made me connect with the experience.

And that’s all that matters.

Share

By Tom Nix

Let’s face it. I am old. My first gaming system was the Atari 2600. I was six or seven, and I played Adventure and Asteroids for hours at a time. Hell, I even had a sick thing for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. I won’t defend that. I’m not here to explain why a seven year old likes stupid things. What I am here to support is how the games produced in the 80’s and 90’s blow away the games made in the modern era in terms of story and enjoyment.

I realize this is a hard claim to back up when the story of Super Mario Brothers is “get a girl back from a dinosaur,” and the plot of Asteroids is essentially “Don’t get hit by shit.” All the while, you’ve got games today like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Uncharted that have helped redefine how tales are told in the interactive arena. Let me explain.

These new games have much more elaborate storylines. They have greatly improved graphics and animations. They have superior voice acting, and they are a portal to a world like one you’ve never imagined. And that, friends, is the rub. These games do not require an imagination. They require a set of hands and eyes to navigate an avatar through a lushly rendered environment. You have a generation of games that dictate your own thoughts. They don’t inform you about you. Back in my day (Christ, kill me.), you didn’t need a weighted morality system to go dark side on someone. The game depended on you, not vice versa.

Why do you think the video game industry is in boom? It’s not because the games that are coming out are legendary things of immaculate quality. I’ll give you a hint – it’s the same reason the average age of a gamer is hovering around the low 30’s. They hooked us young with the potential of an interactive environment that you had more or less complete creative control over. Sure, with those early games, the range of motion was a little limited. Sure, there was only so much you could do within a level. But, do you know what you could do? Imagine.

I gave a backstory to Asteroids. I placed myself within Simon Belmont. Not because I was controlling his blocky form, but because I wanted to be him. Because the lack of “This-is-how-you-play-the-game” graphics and storylines. I had to kill the hell out of Dracula. That was the endgame. The rest was up to me. It’s something even the best games of the new school fail to grasp. It’s hard to fill in the gaps in Halo and Gears of War when the world is so distressingly fleshed out. Your decisions are made for you, your allegiances prealigned. Certainly, you have the immersion thing at your advantage, but how does that stimulate the part of you that is, well, you?

On top of that – these games were HARD. I defy anyone to find a more difficult and player-hating game than Super Ghouls and Ghosts. Like The King of Kong has shown, you actually needed a complete mastery of patterns, predictability, and patience to even make it past the third elevator stage in Donkey Kong. There are EIGHTEEN elevator stages in the game. I’m not going to make the mistake of dismissing the new generation of games as being devoid of skill-based interaction. I just don’t believe that they engage your brain on the same sort of level. Halo 3 requires you to react. Donkey Kong requires you to think.

I don’t want to come across as a Player Hater. I’ve enjoyed resident evil 4, Shadow of the Colossus, and Twilight Princess to an absurd degree. But a lot of these I see as exceptions to the rule. Except the first one. I just really like putting bullets in zombies.

Right now, the only modern game I play regularly is Rock Band 2. It’s because I have an unforgiving love and devotion to the act of playing music. It connects me with that on a very real level. I play Castlevania: Symphony of the Night because I love adventure. By expanding my surroundings and motivations with my own experiences and thoughts, it connects me with that on a very real level. I am not fighting the Covenant. I am not trying to make it in the tough streets of San Andreas. These franchises certainly deliver on the experience end through their breathtaking landscapes, and their completed backstories. But my games allow me to tell my own tale. I don’t have the script right in front of me. I’ve got to be at point A at X’ o Clock.

Everything else is on my watch. Let me write my own story.

photo-Illustration by Ryan Brlecic

Share

One man who personified cinematic “cool” was working alongside a graphic storytelling legend.  And yet, somehow, the finished product is a cinematic non-entity. It Frankly (and Robertly) fails as a film. And I am about to tell you why.

Adaptation is a tricky thing. It’s not just the retelling of a story. You have to translate the storytelling experience, as well. Film has a way of telling those stories that is completely different than traditional mediums like books, music, or comics. For one, film has a director. His job is exactly that – he directs the viewing experience. He controls how his audience perceives his characters. He controls what information is withheld, and what information is divulged to the viewer through both performance and composition. A comics author (in close conjunction with a comics artist – very rarely are the two jobs done by one person) also has similar duties, but a lot of his work’s theme is still left to the whims of his readers.

When adapting any non-filmic story to the film media, changes must be made. As noble as “feeding pages through the camera” seems as a concept, it never results in a satisfying movie experience. A simple way to argue this point is to look at the first two Harry Potter films versus the third one. The first rigidly adhere to every literary convention and plot point of the novels. While, perhaps, the most accurate films in the series, they are also the most boring.

We’ve been there before. It’s the difference between being read to and being told a story. Film does not work as a “shot by shot” adaptation. One simply just needs to look at JAWS for this convention in practice. The genius of Steven Spielberg was to take a blockbuster novel and translate it into a blockbuster movie. It seems so simple. But, in the novel, Quint doesn’t get eaten, and the shark dies of exhaustion seconds before devouring Chief Brody, who has all but given up. The movie takes the same endgame – the shark dies – and turns it into an explosive, rousing ending that is not only visually stimulating, but thematically fulfilling. Chief Brody, long terrified of the water, is stuck directly in it with the physical embodiment of his fear. And he destroys the hell out of it. JAWS is heavily inaccurate as a word-for-word translation. It’s also one of the best films ever made.

Film has something that no other medium has. It uses the edit to tell a story. Unlike a comic book that has panels all line up in a row and a visual layout to move the viewer’s eye around the page in a general order, film is uniquely controlled. Imagine flipping through a story with one panel at a time, and a light that blinks to tell you when to turn the page. Comics and books are at the mercy of their readers. Readers are capable of taking as much time as they want to soak in all the detail of a comic panel. They will interpret a character’s demeanor and line delivery based on visual cues. The filmmaker, on the other hand, has complete control over his audience. A shot will end when he wants. A character will say a line of dialogue how he wants.  The edit itself is how the story reveals itself. You get a series of shots, that, if taken one at a time and free of context, would make little sense. But when these images are projected in a row, even without words, a story is told. The best adaptations take the heart of a movie and explore it in a uniquely cinematic way.

The best example I can think of is Chan-Wook Park’s Oldboy. If you were to take the comics of this and Sin City – both black and white, and both dealing with the morality of the scumbag – and compare their filmic counterparts, the difference would be amazing. Park takes Oldboy’s understated sketches about a man imprisoned in a hotel room for fifteen years, and drastically changes the visual look and the character’s motivations. It is, almost perfectly, taking a story and telling it as cinema. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller take a heavily stylized graphic novel about murderers and made it into a highly stylized movie about murderers. You can see the disconnect. Why was this film even made? The film is just the comic book, only moving. It adds nothing to the existing story, and it adds nothing to the experience that only film can provide. It’s the difference of being read to versus being told a story.

And this isn’t simply to point out that the Shot-For-Shot ethos of Sin City (see Bill’s argument for visual aids) yields no positive results. There are some absolutely brilliant performances – Mickey Rourke and a very, very loose Benicio Del Toro certainly come to mind – and it was pretty imaginative visually. The scenes themselves were certainly striking in the strong uses of deep blacks and blown out whites. But cool and good are sometimes in opposite street gangs. Sin City’s insistence at using the comic’s panels for storyboards is pretty, but pointless.

Sin City is, at its heart, a violent noir story. In a perfect world, that film would have been adapted without the glitter and gloss. It could have been pared down to a series of characters that felt real beneath their stylistic appearance. These are people with problems. They are interesting characters whose story is told to the viewer via  sequences of “cool shit.”  Paring down the visuals and integrating a deeper look at the horrible (yet poignant) lives of Dwight,  Marv and the Old Town Girls could have been a real tour de force entry in bringing noir back to the big screens. Instead of the rebirth of Daschiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler-esque stories, we got The Spirit. Can I be any more clear?

I once called Robert Rodriguez a “Movie-God.” I imagine I spoke too soon.

Flip Sides to hear Bill Zilla’s alternate take right here.

Share

Whenever you make a statement like that, you always find yourself looking over your shoulder, trying to make sure you didn’t forget to include some masterpiece that someone’s going to nail you for. When you’re prone to making bold statements like I am, people are always looking to nail you on the things you say. With the recent nice crop of comic book movies, I knew this comment (which was made as a part of a larger discussion on Zach Snyder’s Watchmen), wouldn’t be allowed to stand even for a few seconds.

But damn it, I was right. I wasn’t even basing it on the fact that it brought the amazing Mickey Rourke out of obscurity (yeah, it was Sin City, not The Wrestler ya jerks) It was simply not possible, in my estimation, to make a film that more closely resembled the original author’s intent. Frank Miller – already known the world over by guys of the more overweight and pimply persuasion as a Comic Book God – was not only included, but reportedly given free reign over nearly every aspect of the film. The film’s actual director, Robert Rodriguez seemed to exist only to lend the film credibility in the entertainment circles that had not yet heard of Mr. Miller and to instruct Frank of the finer points of filmmaking. Rodriguez refused to do the film without Miller’s involvement and when the Director’s Guild of America refused to allow Miller (not a DGA member) to be credited alongside a DGA Member, Rodriguez quit the Director’s Guild to allow the credit to stand.

When an already great comic book made by a single artist/writer is given film treatment using that comic book as the film’s storyboards and uses that same artist/writer to direct that film, you can be darn sure that that film pretty closely resembles that comic book. But you don’t have to take my word for it:

Sure enough, the comment wasn’t allowed to stand. My old friend and The Red Circle founder Tom Nix would be quick to point out: Sin City adds nothing to its existing mythos. It is, he says, too close to the original material. If you have read the comic books, you have seen the film and vice-versa. You will gain no new knowledge, there is no added story, and the only insight about the characters you will receive is found in the nuances of the incredible actors Miller and Rodriguez brought along for the ride (Standout in this area Benicio Del Toro as Jackie Boy seems to be having quite a good time on his ride, indeed). It is simply a faithful retelling of three of the graphic novels already in the Sin City canon with elements of a fourth. It did not, as as with the mighty fine Iron Man for instance, retell and update an old story for a new audience or tell a new story with old characters as in the case of the most recent Batman film. From this perspective, it’s easy to compare Sin City to the Star Wars re-releases from the late 90s: “Neat, but haven’t we been here before?”

The answer of course, though, is “No, we haven’t.” I’m a self-professed comic book geek, but even I hadn’t gotten around to reading every volume of Sin City graphic novels before the film’s release. Dark Horse comics aren’t exactly prominently displayed at your local newsstand. Plus, only a select few were aware of the comics existence to begin with. This was gong to be a new story to a lot of people. According to Robert Rodriguez, me, and everyone I know who’s taken the time to read the graphic novels- it’s an awesome story that didn’t need to be changed. It just needed a larger audience. We don’t need to spend a whole lot of screen time on Peter getting bitten by the radioactive spider because everyone knows that story. We just need to hurry up and get to the “twhip, twhip!” But we do need to spend a fair amount of time establishing Hartigan’s feelings for little Nancy Callahan. Fortunately Miller was forward-thinking enough to include a bunch of “bang, bang!” in that origin story so it never, ever drags.

But I do understand Mr. Nix’s point: it is, from a certain point of view, the worst comic book movie possible. A photocopied retelling of a story already told, just with frames filling in the spaces that comic books deem too boring to depict. Whatever Watchmen’s flaws, at least it was a new perspective. No matter how much Lord of the Rings resembled the source material, at least we were far enough removed from the original publication date that it was at introducing the material to a new generation (and the original story didn’t have many pictures). Even the most recent Sin City yarn first hit shelves less than a decade ago.

The difference, of course, is one used many times by my main man Denny Crane: “Name on the door.” This isn’t a retelling of some author’s work- this is the same author using a new medium- a medium he personally didn’t have the skills to use ten years ago, a medium that didn’t even exist in the same form ten years ago (I was in video school ten years ago, guess how much now-useless information about analog tape and celluloid film I paid for). In that way, it has even more in common with the Star Wars re-releases from the late 90s. You can cry all you want about Han shooting first, but if the author says “I’ve changed my mind, Greedo shot first,” well.. he’s the author. Discussion ends.

Fortunately, Miller resisted the temptation to make Greedo shoot first in his retelling. Everyone still shoots everyone quickly enough that it’s far too difficult and just not worth the effort to distinguish the order. The world looks just like the world would look if God had taken an art class taught by Frank Miller. As an artist, that’s the absolute best you can hope for, as a director, that’s what I’d be shooting for, but I suppose that’s a matter of philosophy.

But the main reason I love this movie: Every time – and I mean every time – Jackie Boy says “Nobody ever really quits. A smoker’s a smoker when the chips are down. And your chips are down.”

It just gets me, man.

Of course, that scene was directed as a favor to Robert Rodriguez by Quentin Tarantino, so maybe I need to rethink my entire argument.

Flip Sides to read Tom Nix’s alternate take right here.

Share