Posts by Rich Lock
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And people might want to discuss the utter insanity of this decision as well.
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If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, citizen.
Why did you try to look at that Scorpions album cover, citizen? Perhaps you need to be re-educated.
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Take that, police state fascist overlords.
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And the "hostages on the boats" thing was the whole point - that was the real conflict of the film, and it's where the Joker lost. Getting beaten up by Batman was pratically incidental.
That being the case, it shouldn't have felt like a post-script to the actual film. When I was in the cinema, I was almost reaching for my coat when they suddenly jumped into that sequence, and then I'm sitting there for another 45 mins. Mentally, I was ready to go home. I certainly wasn't 'in the moment' for the last act.
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Hamming it up as a sadistic psycho is the kind of flashy crap that gets people's attention
Couldn't have put it better myself. He was good. But Oscar good? Nah.
The 'shooting style' thing is an odd one. Few directors seem to have the confidence to step beyond the style du jour, and use a mix of techniques and styles to give an overall spectrum, rather than a single style. Pity.
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I seem to be the only person on earth who found The Dark Knight ludicrously over-rated and at least 45 minutes too long
Craig Ranapia is.....__The Omega Man__!
The sole survivor of an overblown marketing disaster that has left humanity as brainwashed zombies who think The Dark Knight was a masterpiece, he continues his desperate struggle to find a cure.
Gasp! as he argues that the film could have done without the 'hostages on boats' end sequence!
Thrill! as he explains why Heath Ledger wasn't all that great, actually, and probably shouldn't be awarded an Oscar!
Coming soon, to a message board near you!
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Would I Am Legend have done US$77m in its first weekend if it starred Joe the Plumber?
It might have been more popular with Republicans.
In my opinion, there's a rather nasty sub-text to 'I Am Legend' anyway.
New York (i.e. the liberal east coast): A violent, dangerous place full of degenerate sub-human beasts.
Small-town America: A homely place full of good, Christian, God-fearing folk who keep to the old ways and worship at the white wooden church before eating a helping of apple pie to give them enough strength to toddle off and pop caps in anyone who looks a bit different. Erm, I mean, zombie vampires. The only way they can defend their true christian lifestyle is to barricade themselves inside a huge concrete fortress and keep the outside world on the outside by use of superior firepower.
Man the walls, men! Those Emo kids and queers from New York are coming back! Show no mercy!
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I wonder the same thing as Mark. Hasn't the success of films like 300, Transformers, LOTR et al shown that you don't need big name stars to deliver at the box office?
'No-one knows anything' is your watchword for any of this stuff. And if you happen to be a studio mogul who is about to make a multi-million dollar decision on a project, not having the faintest idea if it's going to be a sucess or failure (because no-one knows anything, including you) is a scary prospect.
So the decision-makers at the top of the tree cling to what they think they know (in the teeth of all available evidence), which is that stars* open movies. That is, that people will go and see a film with a star in the lead role just because of the star - the actual plot, subject matter and all the rest of it is irrelevant. The star puts bums on seats.
If anyone is interested in knowing a bit more about what goes on behind the scenes, I recommend William Goldmans 'Adventures in the screen trade'. It's quite fascinating.
* star in this context means someone who, by the nature of their being a star, is incapable of playing a villan. Or someone with flaws or depth to their character. They are 100% straight arrow, 100% of the time.
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I'm no great fan of Nicole Kidman, but I find it interesting that when a film she's in tanks she's "box office poison".
I woudn't actually go as far as to say she's box office poison - she's just insanely overpriced for what she can deliver, and most of the time she doesn't deliver.
She is, in my opinion, consistently bad (by which I mean very occasionally ok, but mostly bad). This is why upthread I (somewhat facetiously) asked if anyone could name the last half-decent film she's been in.
Although she is occasionally in something decent (I loved 'The Hours'), her ratio of 'stinkers' to 'decent' is notably heavily weighted towards stinkers. While every actor has stuff on their CV they prefer wasn't, in her case it's mostly dross. Without actually going out and crunching the figures myself, I'd say quite a bit more so than a lot of other 'stars', male and female. But she still commands a stellar price tag.
Someone recently (might have been imdb, can't find the link) worked out the cost/profit ratio of a number of male and female stars - their price tag rated against how well the films they were in did at the box office. In the female category, she was number one in the 'least bang for buck' category by quite some way.
In short, she commands an excessive price tag for what she can supposedly deliver as a star who can 'open' a movie.
And yes, she's not the only one wearing the emperors new clothes. I was quite delighted when her crazed, cult-obsessed short-arse ex was summarily fired by the studio, but that particular bout of hollywood sanity was unfortunately short-lived. There's plenty of other overpaid empty balsawoods* out there. Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, etc.
My comment about 'The Golden Compass' is quite possibly very unfair to her - having read the book, I can actually see her suiting that role quite well. I haven't seen the film. But my point on that was more to compare and contrast the LoTR film adaptions (wildly popular) with the 'Dark Materials' (single) film adaption (about as popular as cancer).
Both a very popular set of fantasy books. Decent subject matter, reasonable characters, almost guarenteed audience. One suceeded spectacularly. One tanked spectacularly. For one, the gamble paid off. For the other, it failed.
Like Philip said, no-one knows anything.
I've got no particular axe to grind with Ms Kidman, I'm just bemused that she can demand the sort of sums she does, and still not be short of work, even in an industry as crazy as Hollywood.
WRT the opening weekend thing, this is taken as a good indication as to whether a film will break even/make a profit, or not. It is extremely rare (but not unknown) for a film to gain popularity through word-of-mouth after the opening weekend, and for box office receipts to go up (rather than down). If a film doesn't 'open' (especially if it's supposed to be a big-budget blockbuster), the studio, having projected the future till receipts from the opening weekend, will go into damage control mode to minimise ongoing costs: pulling it from screens, slashing ongoing advertising, etc. For example, they won't promo a film overseas as heavily if they think the return isn't worth it.
*lightweight and wooden
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Rich, of course film-making is a gamble. Many thought Lord of the Rings was a colossal gamble, which is why so many studios turned it down. Some thought Titanic would be the biggest bomb in history. The question of whether public money should be subsidising the arts is one I guess we have to disagree on.
Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree that public money should be used to fund local films - it is extremely important that local stories are told. They become part of the fabric and fibre of national identity, so I'm quite happy for public money to be spent producing something uniquely kiwi - 'the price of milk', say. Rather than films becoming some sort of homogenised McCulture funded by Hollywood.
But it is possible to make films telling local stories relatively inexpensively and imaginatively.
Yes, LoTR was a huge gamble. Most of my respect for Peter Jackson is based on the fact that not only did he make a decent fist of the films, but that he managed in the first place to persude a studio to fund back-to-back shooting for a big...no, make that huge-budget fantasy epic that would total 9+ hours of finished product. I don't think most people 'get' quite how hard it is to actually get a film (any film) to the shooting stage of proceedings, let alone something of that magnitude. I'm not really surprised so many passed on it.
Compare and contrast with, ooooh, lets say 'The Golden Compass' [coughnicolekidmancough]
What I am surprised at, though, is that someone picked up the script for 'we're here to help' (for example), and didn't almost immediately throw it across the room. I find it utterly baffling that someone would think 'hmm, this could be a goer, let's give them some money'.
While it isn't easy to read a script and pick the gold from the dross, it isn't hard to spot the total dross and ditch it, either.