Michael Hutchison: June 2005 Archives
AMC theater chain offers: Enjoy 'Cinderella Man' or Get Money Back
In a marketing ploy the company hasn't trotted out since 1988's "Mystic Pizza," AMC took out newspaper ads saying it would refund moviegoers' money if they are unhappy with one of its features, "Cinderella Man." The gimmick is seen as a desperate move to resuscitate the $88 million Ron Howard-directed boxing flick which, as of Tuesday, had grossed a paltry $50.6 million after 26 days in release.Of course, this will only work if people are staying away because they think it's going to be a bad movie. If you're a person who was having doubts as to whether the show would be enjoyable, this is good news for you.
I haven't seen it because it'll be on DVD in four months anyway. If Melinda and I go to this movie, we'll do a matinee (we always attend "cheaper before 5PM" showings) for only $5 each...and we'll STILL have spent $2 more than the cost of buying it used from Hollywood Video.
And we don't even have a widescreen TV yet. Once a person has shelled out $1500 and up (way up) for a big screen, it makes even less sense to go to a theater.
Tom Nguyen and Doug Mahnke's new DVD series has debuted. "The Doug Mahnke Style of Comic Book Penciling" and "The Tom Nguyen Style of Comic Book Inking" guide the reader through the rendering of a comic page. I believe you're seeing the same art in progress in both disks, so you'll watch the piece go from blank page to ready-for-coloring.
Tom's DVD features a bit of a storyline as well, as he struggles to meet a deadline and keep his job. It also features beautiful women!
Having pointed you to all of Mark's past Batman movie reivews, I figured we all wanted to know his take on Batman Begins.
Not great, not terrible seems to be the consensus.
Ray Harryhausen’s Birthday is being celebrated on Turner Classic Movies via the showing of some of the stop motion animator's rarities.
Unfortunately, the only Classic Movie channel I get is American Movie Classics. (Someone recently told me that they're changing their name to American Movie Channel because all they ever show are classics like "Turner and Hooch" and "My Boyfriend's Back".) I'll have to comfort myself by watching one of the movies from my Ray Harryhausen box set!
When a studio doesn't allow critics to pre-screen a movie, that's usually a terrific sign that it's a dud. In the case of "War of the Worlds", debuting today, critics were allowed to see it ahead of time but couldn't publish their reviews until June 29th. Was that just a way to pique curiosity, or does it mean that the studio knows it's a stinker?
Looks like the latter. Drudge Report has the following links:
VARIETY RAVE FOR 'WAR OF THE WORLDS'...
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER: ALIENS IMPRESS, BUT LACKS HUMAN IDENTITY...
EBERT: 'BIG, CLUNKY, CONTAINING SOME SENSATIONAL SIGHTS'...
SACRAMENTO BEE: DOESN'T SET ITSELF APART...
LA DAILY NEWS: THRILLING, BUT REMAKE EVENTUALLY RUNS OUT OF AMMO...
NEW YORK TIMES: 'REASONABLY ENTERTAINING RENDERING'...
LA TIMES: 'RIVETING AND RELEVANT'...
SAN JOSE MERC: 'A PICTURE WITHOUT A THOUGHT IN ITS PRETTY HEAD; NOT END OF WORLD, JUST WISH IT WERE BY END OF MOVIE'...
AP: DISJOINTED AND EPISODIC, ALIENS LOOK 'BEGGED, BORROWED AND STOLEN FROM EVERY RECENT MOVIE'...
ORLANDO SENTINEL: 'GRIM, HEAVY AND PONDEROUS'...
Meanwhile, Ebert gives it two stars. He also says that the budget was only $130 million.
If, like me, you forgot to watch the King Kong trailer after Fear Factor, you can now watch it online.
Argh. Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena and other timewasters, all courtesy of a tip from Jonah Goldberg.
Hubble spies lord of the stellar rings
A recent image captured with the Hubble Space Telescope - which makes the system look uncannily like the Great Eye of Sauron from the blockbusting Lord of the Rings trilogy - confirms that Fomalhaut’s ring is curiously offset with respect to the star.
Day By Day by Chris Muir is personalizing the Supreme Court's recent appalling decision by having Damon lose his house.
If you click over to there after today, use the calendar navigation to find the strip for 6/28/05. I love the strip, but Muir has got to get his web guy to change the navigational structure for the site. Currently, there is no way to point people to a URL for a specific day. That's why I often find people swiping the images and posting them, or pointing people to the specific image URL...neither of which helps his advertisers. It's a pity when a major website like NRO's The Corner wants to send people to your site but they can only link to a graphic.
Okay, enough from me. Like I'm one to criticize anyone else's web site.
Ah, the wisdom of offering free handouts on the World Wide Web:
Beau Smith's Guerilla Marketing 101
As part of his grassroots promotion efforts for his upcoming trade paperback from IDW Publishing, The Complete Wynonna Earp, Smith offered to send a postage paid, signed, Wynonna Earp black & white print at no cost to anyone in the world that emailed him with a request. Scoop readers were among those online to whom the offer was extended."I thought I'd get requests for maybe 100 at best," the writer and former IDW marketing chief told Scoop.
The final count came in at 1,754.
Aside from underestimating the count by 1600%, Beau's a marketing genius.
Voices of Piglet and Tigger pass away within a day of each other:
We could solve our transportation problems with a Buttered Cat Array.
The writer of the article I just pointed you to also did a comic on the same subject: CulturePulp 028: 'Serenity' Now!
"Firefly went on the air two years ago ... and was immediately hailed by critics as one of the most canceled shows of the year."
A friend of mine has attended one of these Serenity pre-screenings, even though he'd never seen the show...and he was so entranced with the mini-movie that he ran out and bought the Firefly DVD box set. And this is a guy who doesn't even have a habit of buying TV show box sets!
So... if he could get into the movie even though it isn't complete and even though he'd never seen the show, I'm guessing Serenity is going to be a success.
No real spoilers here if you haven't seen Batman Begins yet. (Why haven't you?)
In a tracking shot in the movie, the camera dolleys past intense, furrow-browed patients glaring through the small windows in their cells, and we see a couple guys lying on their beds.
Here's my question: are any of them supposed to be specific Batman references that I'm not picking up on? One of them is female and thus is probably Pamela Iseley, but aside from that I couldn't detect any particulars.
Please use the comment form to reply. Thanks!
Christopher Priest blogs that he invented the whole "Bruce Wayne goes to Tibet to learn martial arts" thing and he's happy to see it in the movie even though he's sure DC would never acknowledge this.
Little does he know that DC released a new Batman Begins Trade Paperback which contains Scott Beatty's movie adaptation as well as several stories that appear to have shaped the screenplay. And one of them is exactly the story that Christopher Priest cites. Hopefully he'll get this trackback ping and learn that he's not so undervalued by DC. (Of course, he's probably learned that by now when he got his check for the reprinting of his story.)
I'm still working on the redesign of Monitor Duty. The good news is that I just bought the Moveable Typbe Bible and it's an extremely helpful book. It should make it much easier for me to figure out the best way to organize the site redesign. Until I feel I've read up enough about it, I'll just stick to some basics like restoring a navbar so that you can find our Forum and the Fanzing Archives.
Until I get a blogroll going, I'd like to recognize a few sites. The Sock Drawer is a fun read and definitely a site of interest to Monitor Duty readers.
And you've got to love the design of Dial B For Blog, definitely one of the more visual comic feasts on the web. I'd also like to extend my condolences to the site's owner, "Robby Reed," upon the death of whatever crawled up his exit orifice when he was watching Batman Begins. Clearly, its death throes distracted him from the fine movie being shown on the screen.
According to spies for Fox411, War of the Worlds may be the most expensive movie yet.
I've got a solid new figure for the budget on "War of the Worlds." Are you ready?Not counting promotion: $182 million. With promotion, think more like $230 million.
This week I was watching my new Jaws DVD, in which Spielberg in 1974 says that it's unnerving mounting a "multi-million dollar" movie. Jaws only cost about $12 million dollars and made it back in 2 weeks, going on to make almost half a billion dollars. I'm not sure if these figures are in today's dollars or 1975 dollars, or mixed. (Oddly enough, the British documentary on the DVD which was made during the filming says that Jaws' budget is 1.5 million pounds, which would only be 2-3 million dollars; I'm not sure why that figure is so off.)
In any case, the point is that Spielberg and Hollywood in general have gone way past the point where they would put out a movie that could generate returns that are a multiple of the expenditures. This movie could bomb and fall far short of recouping the money. It may make its money back and, if it's really good, make half a billion dollars...which would only be 2x the money spent. If it is a phenomenonal success and generates a BILLION dollars in tickets, DVD sales and all other tie-ins, that would still be only 4.34 times the cost of the film.
Aren't there simpler, less risky ways to earn a couple bucks for every dollar you spend?
A few movies can take those kinds of gambles, sure. Titanic and Terminator 2, for instance, both had seemingly-absurd expenses which only seem wise in retrospect. They had intense spectacles and compelling stars in addition to many other worthwhile qualities (acting, direction, script, art design, etc.). But here they're hinging a $230 million movie on Tom Cruise (who's had a string of mediocre films, is a fading star and his publicity campaign consists of Scientology nuttiness) and Spielberg (hasn't had a colossal runaway hit since Saving Private Ryan in 1998, and since then has had expensive flubs like Minority Report and A.I. and a couple mildly interesting Tom Hanks films). The other big star of the movie is Dakota Fanning, and every time I see her I remember how M. Night Shyamalamalan mounted a War of the Worlds on a much smaller budget!
K-Lo points out that there's a little-known third Brady Bunch movie from 2002 called The Brady Bunch in the White House in which Mike Brady becomes president of the USA and then appoints his wife as Vice President.
Now...how bad must this movie be? Consider:
* The IMDB page doesn't have much of anything on this movie. It doesn't even have a decent shot of the DVD cover!
* Gary Cole and Shelly Long return to their roles and the only other name actor in the entire film is Saul Rubinek who was already in a much better White House movie.
* Reviews of it give it an average of 3 out of 10, and some of those positive reviews are a joke. Indeed, I have to reprint this review for posterity:
Of all the films I have seen, songs I have heard and books I read, this is without doubt the one piece of art that people will continue to appreciate with awed reverence 500 years from now. It totally changed my life. When I saw it, I felt that I had been born on this Earth to be at this particular place and this particular time to experience this incredible feat of human artistic excellence. I am absolutely convinced that it will make stars out of every single actor associated with this film, and will one day win the Nobel Prize for Literature for its scriptwriters. While the Brady Bunch is a milestone of Western Civilisation, and the Whitehouse one of its greatest architectural monuments, no mere mortal would have ever thought to put them together. But the producers of this movie are clearly no mere mortals. The staggering genius on display here simply takes the breath away. The words simply do not exist to describe this film. Watching it, I clearly felt the presence of the Lord. If Leonardo da Vinci were alive today and had a movie camera, I have no doubt he would be making films like this, as well as pornos. Look upon this work, ye mighty, and despair.
No, it's not a Vodka ad.
Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Absolute Edition is an oversized volume reprinting Crisis plus loaded with extras such as the complete Indexes and notes about changes to DC Comics in the last 20 years as a result of the Crisis.
Okay, you don't need me telling you the promotional stuff. Here's a question: what's it mean? More and more, I'm getting the vibe that "Infinite Crisis" will tie in to the previous maxi-series in more than just name.
World's first bionic man! HE'S REAL and he cost SIX MILLION!!!
It's here! It's here!
Bionic Man Moves Artificial Arm With Brain
As if that wasn't weird enough, get this (emphasis mine):
By the time it's perfected, the cost of manufacturing the bionic arm is expected to be about $6 million, according to the report.
Look, I don't care about celebrity romances. Usually, Hollywood marriage stuff just depresses me, and half of it is false anyway. But Tom Cruise is currently in the running to take the "celebrity who creeps me out" trophy away from Michael Jackson.
In case you (sensibly) haven't been following the details, Katie Holmes disappeared for two weeks and re-emerged in love with much older celebrity Tom Cruise (now claiming that she's always carried a torch for him) and cash-sucking, mind-****ing Scientology, the money vacuum disguised as a belief system made up by a science fiction writer.
Yeah, that's right, I said it. We'll see how long this stays up. If this post is edited or deposted, you'll know that a few heavies and a lawyer were at my door. Scientology's tight control of any discussion about their cult is well-known, but the too-public case of Katie Holmes may finally shed too much light their way. In half a month, Katie's ditched her friends, dropped her longtime manager and agent, concerned her family and is now being surrounded by her all-new "friends."
Now it looks like the press' negative coverage of the romance has led to them being blocked from the War of the Worlds premiere. Locking out the critics because they work for papers that don't smile on the couple? Wow.
Free Katie! offers "We're Totally In Love World Tour 2005" t-shirts.
Herbie: Fully Loaded, which features a far more cartoony Herbie car, inspires this question:
The car seems to be self-aware, able to make decisions on its own, and able to communicate with Maggie on an emotional level, and sometimes with pantomime or by example. Why then is everyone, including Lohan, so fixated on how fast the car can go? The car could be up on blocks and be just as astonishing.
There's this joke that is impossible to relate in clean company, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I've heard it once in an unofficial (and perhaps counterfeit, although the voices and animation are spot-on) South Park clip of Cartman telling the world's dirtiest joke.
Turns out that the Aristocrats joke makes the rounds, with comedians trying to top each other as to the disgusting content in the middle of the joke. Now they've made a documentary about it.
Some say it's most surprising to hear Bob Saget tell the joke, because he's thought to be a clean comedian, but I've seen the movie he directed, "Dirty Work".
The Onion 2056 is the funniest Onion read in ages. Also, their design looks spectacular and I hate them.
Be sure to go outside and check out the moon tonight so you can see the Summer Moon Illusion.
Remember that monster moon in "Joe vs. The Volcano"? Of course you don't. How about the moon from Cher's "Moonstruck", where there's this gargantuan screen-filling moon? Well, that's what this looks like.
By the way, both of those movies were by John Patrick Shanley. He was obsessed by giant moons.
I could make a "Marlon Brando dropping his pants" joke here, but I won't.
This Steve Carell movie, The 40 Year Old Virgin, looks to be amusing.
The 'Ex' files: Wilson eyes Regency lead
Luke Wilson is in negotiations to topline "Super Ex" for Regency Enterprises. Ivan Reitman is on board to direct the feature, which is being produced by Gavin Polone from a script by Don Payne, an Emmy winner as "The Simpsons" writer/co-exec producer.The story centers on a man who finds out that the woman he is dating is a superhero; she decides to use her powers against him after he breaks up with her for being too controlling and neurotic.
Tip of the hat to LIBERTAS
One of the joys of getting older as a writer is that my memory is going and I can re-read my old works as though someone else wrote them.
I wanted to find an old comparison I'd read of "Scrooge McDuck vs Richie Rich". And what happens if you google them together? An article I wrote is in the number one spot!
I know it's egotistical to laugh at one's own work, but this one was a lot of fun to do. I really need to e-mail this to Don Rosa.
Oh, and I bet that with this one humor article I still put more political thought into Lex Luthor's presidential bid than the Superman writers did!
Universal Rethinks Boxing Film Plan
Why did "Cinderella Man" fail? Because it's called "CINDERELLA MAN"! That is just the worst title I've ever heard. If you are going to go to a movie about a tough guy doing everything he can to make it during the Depression, don't conjure up mental images of a pretty girl in a ball gown and glass slippers getting towed to the ball by enchanted mice!
Cinderella is just a poor oppressed girl who cries until her fairy godmother appears, waves a wand and gives her everything. Is that really comparable to the man's story?
I have hated that title every time I heard it. I hated it even when the movie itself started looking quite attractive. My wife and I may still see it. But it's still going to be called "Cinderella Man". I'd be embarrassed to tell my co-workers that I saw and enjoyed "Cinderella Man".
Earning His Wings features this terrific appraisal (emphasis mine):
The rugged charm of "Batman Begins," which stars Welsh actor Christian Bale, lies partly its refusal to join the visual-effects arms race that the summer-movie season has lately become. When Nolan does turn to digital wizardry, he uses it to amplify the action, not supply it. "I think there's a vague sense out there that movies are becoming more and more unreal," says Nolan. "I know I've felt it. The demand we put on ourselves was to be as spectacular as possible, but not depend on computer graphics to do it." In "Batman Begins," most of the fireworks come from old-fashioned places: story and character. "Like many people," says Bale, 31, "I've sat through these huge movies and thought, What went wrong? How come, when people have all that time and money, the talent for storytelling so often goes straight out the window?"
Batman Begins has some scenes that are so dramatically intense that I was in tears. Nothing like crying at a movie while you're attending it with a gaggle of comic geeks in superhero shirts, so take a hankie.
I didn't even realize it was time for Batman Begins to debut. Aren't all Batman films preceded by 12 weeks of omnipresent Burger King tie-in ads?
The absence of such gross merchandising is just one of many signs that this Batman film is going to be good. Marketing "Batman Begins" would be like including "Requiem For A Dream" prizes in a Happy Meal or putting "Sling Blade" on a collectible glass. It's just not that kind of film. "Batman Begins" is a wonderful achievement of filmmaking, not a popcorn movie. A work of art, not a thrill ride.
The 1989 Batman movie did many things right in terms of the look and feel, including the Danny Elfman score, but it still had obvious flaws. Batman Begins is thus best defined by all the ways it sheds the flaws of the earlier films.
To wit:
'Nuff said. At least, until I have finished writing my real review of Batman Begins.
Mark Steyn's Batman Forever review resurfaces to mark the debut of Batman Begins.
That last Batman film series got so bad so quickly that I'd like to believe that this new film is an all-new start.
TIME.com -- Andrew Arnold: Heavy
Andrew Arnold is clearly a person with his own personal hobby horse. He's reviewing "Concrete" but he's already got his mind made up about the worth of superhero comics and anything that is owned by a corporation. He feels they would never address something like abortion in comics, because it would get in the way of selling "product." Of course, Wonder Woman's been speaking at the U.N. about "women's reproductive rights" for years, though never so explicitly that a portion of her readers could be driven away.
Simply put, if a stand on an issue is going to sink a character's viability, why have that character take a stand on the issue? If Paul Chadwick creates Concrete as a vehicle for social commentary, then he's pursuing the chunk of the market he wants. Why should DC take Superman and use him to talk about abortion and honk off so many potential customers?
DC would never have Superman talk about abortion anyway. Superman's always struck me as a Democrat, but when it comes to abortion...well, he's Superman. He won't kill the worst of the worst bad guys (and he'll stop you if you try to kill them, too), but you think he'll sanction terminating a fetus because the mother doesn't like what gender it's going to be? I'm not even talking about morals and ethics here; just consider the facts. He's got X-ray microscopic vision and superhearing, plus Mark Waid introduced this thing where Superman sees lifeforce auras around living creatures (which is why Superman won't even eat meat these days). Many women can't go through with an abortion if they see their unborn babies in one of these new-fangled 3-D ultrasounds; how much more tuned-in to the unborn would Superman be? Since Superman would logically have to take a position contrary to the leanings of just about everyone at DC that they'd never have Superman address the issue.
Then again, what do I know? Superheroes never act the way reasonable deductions would dictate or Ralph would have swung that mace at Dr. Light's head a few more times and ended "Identity Crisis" with issue #2.
ADDITIONAL: I should mention that Superman's books have, since 1986, been openly critical of one life issue: cloning. Krypton was ripped apart by clone wars (real clone wars, as in "wars over the issue of cloning") and Superman has always been rather sensitive to the issue of cloning and bio-ethics. And that was years before cloning became an actual issue in the real world!
Despite this link, you don't really want to watch this Flightplan trailer as it gives away far too much of the movie's story. I'll sum it up for you: Jodie Foster (with some sort of youth implant so she looks 25 now) is in an ultimate locked-room-mystery: her daughter disappears in the middle of a transatlantic flight and she goes nuts trying to find her, while the crew begins to think that she's a bit crazy.
Okay, that's all you need to know. The trailer gives away about three major plot twists and renders the movie unnecessary.
Jason Apuzzo blogs...did I say blogs? I meant to say "does a doctoral thesis"...on Star Wars and the end of Hollywood's last great age.
Why We’re Going to Miss ‘Star Wars’
The opening where he recalls what it was like to watch a movie in the 1970s, in the days before piracy, home theaters and leaked movie details, is wonderful. It takes me back to 1982, when "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" played at a single-screen theater in La Crosse, WI, for over 52 weeks. 52 WEEKS! A solid year that movie was on that marquee! That was the last time that happened; within a couple years, everyone would have VCRs and movie rentals, and never again would people think that if they missed a movie in theaters they may never see it again. These days, if you don't see a movie in the first three weeks, it's not worth going because you're at the halfway mark for it to debut on DVD.
As for the rest of his dissertation, Jason's much more affectionate towards Lucas than most of us are, but Jason's a movie-maker who envies Lucas' abilities as an auteur while we all wish that Lucas had turned over the writing and directing chores to people who understand Star Wars better than he does.
Such are the rumors over at Comic Book Resources. According to an alleged e-mail from Devin allegedly reposted over at alleged Geoff Johns alleged board, there is the slight possibility that Devin Grayson will be off Nightwing as of issue #117. This is probably in keeping with the editorial and story directions that will occur at DC as fallout from "Infinite Crisis" and the "One Year Later" storylines.
I do wonder how it's possible to have a story taking place one year after a crisis that is infinite in length.
Mad Scottish squirrels. That's the second funniest squirrel joke I've read this week! (If you don't know what the first joke was, you forgot to buy a copy of "Nick Landime" this week, didn't you?)
It has been so long since I've updated the Fanzing Shopping site. I haven't even bought merchandise from there in two years, since the time I placed a rather massive order for the "All I really need to know I learned from COMIC BOOKS" shirts. I've been selling those at conventions for the last two years.
Tonight, as I'm prepping to go to Iowa I-CON, I figured I'd fix up some of the merchandise before reordering. For one thing, sad as it is, I will need to change the price of the "Best Things In Life" merchandise to reflect the $2.95 price of many comics these days. I'll also fix up a few other pieces.
I also thought I'd make you aware of the current sale:
Batman Begins is getting some good press.
Now that movie previews and reviews are coming out, I'll have to admit, I'm surprised. Over a year ago, I was sent a copy of the script and I was sure it was bogus (like most of the scripts floating around the web) and it turns out to have been genuine! Now I know all the plot twists and spoilers, and I didn't want to know them!
Why did I read that script?
Russell Crowe throws a phone at a hotel employee and gets arrested.
Looks like he and Tugga are still looking for people to beat up. Crowe has a reputation for scrapping for fights. I wonder what Crowe was shouting?
The Sith is in its third week...and third place, below a moderately interesting animated film and a remake of a 1970s football movie. This has got to be disappointing for Lucasfilm. Yeah, yeah, it's making money, but as John Derbyshire (no fan of Star Wars at all) points out:
STAR WARS IN TODAY'S DOLLARS [John Podhoretz] According to this incredibly useful site, which allows you to figure out what a dollar in 1977 would be worth in 2005, the original Star Wars earned $996 million in current dollars -- which puts the new movie's $310 million in current dollars in some perspective.