In the spring of 2012, a few months after filming The Avengers and just before reprising his role as Captain America
for a third time, Chris Evans played the rebel who leads a ragtag, rag-wearing
lower-class community in a revolt against their decadent overseers in Bong Joon-Ho’s
English-language debut Snowpiercer (released
in the U.S. in 2014). For the film’s South Korean director, the challenge was finding
the right clothes and camera angles to hide the actor’s Marvel superhero physique in order to
assure his credibility as the malnourished leader of the revolutionaries. This
problem provides an apt metaphor for the
Weinstein Co.’s marketing and distribution of the movie. Analyzing the
Weinsteins’ involvement with and public statements about Bong’s film and its intended audience in trade
publications, I will argue that the distribution company used a discourse of
distinction built on aesthetic value judgments in order to rationalize and justify
decisions based on financial considerations. Their challenge was finding the
right language to disguise the sci-fi action blockbuster as a small indie movie
better fitted for online and on demand distribution rather than a wide
theatrical release.
Intro
I love movies. I have loved movies all my life. I grew up on them. When I was eight years old, I managed to convince myself I would make movies when I grew up. Now I am in the process of getting a degree in Film Studies. I write about film more than ever before, partly because I have to for my classes, mostly because I enjoy it, because I have something to write about. Sometimes it helps me understand the film better; sometimes it helps me understand myself better.I created this blog as a place to showcase my work, and also as an incentive to keep writing reviews, analyses, and essays over breaks, when there’s no one here to grade me.I have tried many times, and failed, to explain in a coherent manner why it is that I love films. Here is my best—and most coherent—guess.
Showing posts with label Blockbuster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blockbuster. Show all posts
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Between the months of May—or, if we follow the ever-increasing trend of
cinematic
climate change, much earlier than that—and August, I go through an
intensive exercise of willful suspension of expectations whenever I set foot in
a theater. Summer Movie Season, or better yet SUMMER MOVIE SEASON in all caps,
is easily dismissed as a period of shameless studio profiteering in which the
industry churns out dime-a-dozen spectacle films that cost a hell of a lot more
than a dime. They’re too big, too loud, too expensive, too reverent to the
altar of the lowest common denominator, too dependent on slick special effects
and not enough so on narrative and character. I bemoan how otherwise gifted
stars spend their estivate months squandering their talents in Hollywood products
addicted to and addled by computer-generated monsters, robots, and explosions.
Then, every once in a while, something like Edge of Tomorrow comes along, and my faith in the mainstream, commercial
American movie industry is renewed. I saw the film the Friday it came out. On
Sunday, I had a 13-hour trans-Atlantic flight to get through. My first priority
was not making sure I had a window seat, low-sodium meals on the plane, enough
time to switch terminals between connecting flights, or, you know, that my
passport was, indeed, in my bag. Between Friday and Sunday I was badgering
everyone I know in Europe not only to go see this movie, but to wait until I
got home on Monday and come see it with me.
Hands-down director Doug Liman’s best
and most purely pleasurable effort in the twelve years since The Bourne Identity (if not longer than
that), Edge of Tomorrow is less of a
time-travel movie than an experience movie. One
review called it “a cheeky little puzzle picture in expensive-looking
blockbuster drag.” It’s a stylish, cleverly crafted, and continually involving mind-
and clock-bending bit of action adventure that neither transcends nor redeems
the genre, but, thanks to a superb creative team and star
Tom Cruise, becomes a surprisingly satisfying exercise of that genre.
Monday, August 26, 2013
Kick-Ass 2 (2013)
Crude, crass, callous and filled with carnage, Kick-Ass 2 commands our attention. Half smart-allecky satire, half
semi-plausible vigilante fantasy, the movie is a worthy, if inferior, successor
to Matthew Vaughn’s original. The series’ first director and co-writer remains
on board as producer, but the creative reins have been handed down to the
little-known Jeff Wadlow.
2010’s Kick-Ass, a brilliant, brazen, charcoal black
action-comedy about a shy, nerdy teen trying to make it as a crime fighter
was a breath of fresh air, the anti-Spiderman
young superhero adventure I’d been waiting for. This screwy, savvy,
self-conscious and self-satisfied sequel fills the screen with even more
arterial spray and lays the irony on even thicker. By the second outing, however,
it’s getting harder to distinguish Kick-Ass from the polished,
name-brand superhero flicks it seemed to offer us respite from.
While still bone-crushingly brutal, Kick-Ass
2 drops its punchy predecessor’s attempt to pass the visceral, vicious
violence off as something shocking or subversive. Gory, gimmicky, and grisly, the
first film was deliciously and insolently provocative; it introduced crime-fighting
children who toted guns, shot to kill, and cursed like Samuel L. Jackson. A
joke is rarely as funny the second time you hear it, but Kick-Ass 2 offers a fresh infusion of comic energy in the loose,
flippant approach to its source material, the ongoing Marvel series by Mark
Millar and John S. Romita Jr.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
The Wolverine (2013)
Trying to resist the cinematic lobotomy Hollywood pulls on viewers
every summer, I have come up with a movie-going strategy that involves lowering
expectations. If, stepping into a theater, I expect nothing, then the films
that offer nothing or close to it (After Earth, The Hangover Part III, Man of Steel, R.I.P.D.) will not disappoint as much. And every once in a while, I
will be surprised by a movie that offers everything: story, character,
excitement, action, intrigue, romance, and the magic of escaping into a
different world. James Mangold’s The
Wolverine was that kind of surprise.
Repairing the damage done by Gavin Hood’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Mangold tells an unexpectedly personal
and intimate tale with style and snap. This time around the most iconic X-Man
of all is somewhat world-weary, wounded, and worn. At the forceful center of
the film is Hugh Jackman, the biggest marvel of Marvel's The Wolverine, who returns for his sixth screen appearance as the
lupine superhero. Letting a
less visible, more vulnerable side show, Logan, a.k.a. the titular hero,
tests his extremes and overcomes his limits, physically as well as emotionally.
The movie
is as packed with feeling as its title character, a mutant with more humanity
than all of the human heroes of this summer’s blockbusters combined. The filmmaker’s foray into the X-Men
franchise is endlessly entertaining, if somewhat existential, dipping into dark
and ponderous psychological territory; Mangold puts his character through all
sorts of physical pain, but the director is also interested in the deeper aches
of the soul.
Monday, July 29, 2013
R.I.P.D. (2013)
Thank heavens for Jeff Bridges! His squinting, six-barrel-slinging,
Stetson-wearing frontier marshal is the only thing in this undead cop thriller with
a pulse. R.I.P.D., Robert Schwentke’s
uninspired mashup of Men in Black, Ghostbusters, and Ghost, had its obituary
written by the press long before release, critics everywhere denouncing it as
the ninth circle of mindless blockbusters. If the film is not exactly the
calamity everyone portended, it’s due solely to Bridges and a sprinkling of
some mildly impressive special effects. But as much as the actor tries, and as
much as he succeeds to elevate his grizzled, gravely 19th century lawman turned
21st century deceased detective way above the potential and pretense of an
inert script, R.I.P.D. showed up in theaters
DOA. Its few isolated positives are as noticeable and affecting as a fine
summer mist amidst a raging, bludgeoning thunderstorm of bad.
Adapted from Peter M. Lenkov’s Dark Horse comic series by the Clash of the Titans team of Phil Hay and
Matt Manfredi, the movie has character types instead of characters, obvious
villains, and sluggish plotting that introduces one tediously predictable
element after another: the young honest cop, his adoring, beautiful French
wife, and the corrupt partner who talks him into some dirty, risky business that
leads to his demise. (As an aside, is it just me or does that stolen “gold”
look like shineless spray-painted gravel?)
Thursday, July 25, 2013
White House Down (2013)
However you feel about the Oval Office, this country, or Emmerich’s compulsive
need to re-enact the annihilation of everything that America holds dear, his
latest is as ripping and riveting as it is ridiculous. A welcome throw-back to
an earlier and more generous tradition of summer blockbusters that didn’t
involve superpowers or science fiction, White
House Down is cheerfully preposterous, marked with a simplicity, wit, and playful
innocence so often missing from current action films.
Even rarer perhaps, it’s a slick, high-concept takeover movie with an
inkling of shrewd political awareness. This time around there are no aliens,
natural disasters, or even non-domestic terrorists—although the media in the
film unanimously describe the White House seizure as an al-Qaida attack. The viciously
violent coup is an inside job; in a way that would make Kubrick proud, the
enemy comes from within. The villains are all disgruntled Americans with
ideological axes to grind, right wing sociopaths, white supremacists, malcontent
war vets and assorted bureaucrats with nasty agendas. Mixing fear, hope, and
paranoia, White House Down is a dire
political fable told with a pearly-white smile as tongue-in-cheek pastiche. It’s
a sturdy, cheerfully preposterous, old-fashioned bit of escapism.
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