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Learning the wrong lessons from The Lone Ranger
Allow me to preface this by saying I have not yet, as of this writing, seen Disney’s The Lone Ranger. I probably will eventually, but it’s looking increasingly like the sort of movie I can wait to get from NetFlix, one I’m not particularly looking forward to anymore. I love the character, though, and in my capacity as a fully-accredited Geek Pundit, I sort of feel obligated to see the movie in order to completely analyze what’s wrong with it.
That said, this article is going to tell you what’s wrong with it. Well… not with the movie itself, I’ve got no intention of discussing the plot or performances beyond the snippets revealed in the trailers, but I’m going to discuss what I think went wrong in the production of this $215 million film that, in a five day opening weekend that included the Fourth of July holiday, only managed to scrape up $49 million. (It came in second to Universal’s Despicable Me 2, a $76 million film that pulled in $142 million in the same frame.) Most importantly, I’m going to talk about how the Disney studio is going to look at the weak performance of this movie, analyze the problem, and as they have done so often in the past, completely misunderstand what they did wrong.
I’m going to pick on Disney here because they made this movie and they make these mistakes a lot, but to be fair I should point out most of these problems apply to any major movie studio, where decisions are made by people with business degrees and not anybody with the first idea what makes for an entertaining motion picture. I’m talking about the Disney that could only bring in $104 million for a wonderful movie like The Princess and the Frog — a charming fairy tale with classic Disney charm and, four years later, persistent popularity among fans. They took a look at the film’s underperformance, decided that the problem is that “boys won’t see a movie with Princess and the title,” and forced their upcoming sci-fi epic to change its title from A Princess of Mars to John Carter of Mars, then cutting it to the unbearably bland John Carter under the logic that girls wouldn’t want to see a movie with Mars in the title (because Mars Needs Moms tanked in-between the two films). John Carter, of course, has been marked as a cinematic blunder of Hindenburg-level proportions, but it was a strong, deserving film that got sunk because the Disney suits played musical chairs with their marketing department and didn’t know what the hell to do with it. The Princess and the Frog and John Carter were both good movies that could have had success at the box office if they’d found their audience, but Disney insists on trying to make the box office audience for their movies “everybody on the planet.”
And that gets us to the root of Disney’s problem. In the last two decades, they have become increasingly identified as a studio that produces content that is more appealing to girls than boys (the various princess films, for instance, or the avalanche of girl-led sitcoms on the Disney Channel). There’s nothing wrong with making content that appeals to girls, of course, but all Disney sees is a gaping black hole where the money they want to get from boys and their parents should be. They’ve tried to combat this in multiple ways — changing their Toon Disney network to “Disney XD” and loading it with sitcoms starring boys, turning their 80s sci-fi film Tron into a modern franchise and, of course, purchasing Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm to exploit their superhero lines and Star Wars, respectively. The thing is, Tron: Legacy wasn’t a blockbuster either, and although the Marvel films have done extremely well, the general public didn’t walk out of The Avengers satisfied that they had seen a great Disney movie. Marvel has its own brand, and while Disney is perfectly happy to rake in the money from that success, they want a property they can put their own stamp on.
Arguably, the biggest success of Disney proper in the past decade has been its Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. To the Disney suits, this is a movie that has everything: swords and fighting and monsters for the boys, dreamy hunks like Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp for the girls. (Note for the benefit of readers who happen to be my fiance: I’m not saying I personally believe in this incredibly sexist attitude. I’m saying that this is what a Hollywood suit sees when he tries to determine why a movie has made money.) What this exec fails to see is that the Pirates movies… well, the first Pirates movie, and to some degree the fourth one… are actually good movies. They’re fun, full of energy, exciting, and for the most part deliver what you expected when you saw the trailers. Monsters were abundant, adventure was had, swashes were buckled. Great.
Compare this, if you will, to the major complaints I’m hearing about The Lone Ranger. Most people who have been dissatisfied (and even many of those who liked it) have reported a long, dull stretch in the middle and a surprisingly violent climax, neither of which is something you would expect from the trailers, which show trains blowing up, Helena Bonham Carter shooting a gun out of her garter belt, and Johnny Depp unforgivably mugging for the camera. People don’t expect excessive violence out of the Disney brand. (Even the fights in the Pirates franchise are largely cartoonish, without showing the real consequences of such action.)
However, such violence is in keeping with The Lone Ranger. On the other hand, Depp seems to have imported his Captain Jack Sparrow shtick into Tonto, a character that traditionally is rather solemn and wise, and turned him into just another facet of the same clown Depp has been playing in assorted movies since the first Pirates film. So Disney took a franchise with an 80-year history, tweaked it enough that longtime fans won’t like it, but failed to change it enough so that the four quadrant “family” audience they keep chasing will buy into it. The result of Disney trying to make a movie that appeals to everyone is a movie that appeals to no one.
Pixar notwithstanding, it’s virtually impossible to make a movie that will appeal to every possible demographic. In truth, it’s not even smart to try. Invariably, something that appeals to one group will turn off another group, so by trying to make something that everybody likes, you have to cut out pretty much everything that makes something interesting, original, or worth watching. This is why so many cookie-cutter action movies, romantic comedies, or brainless horror movies keep getting turned out over and over again. It’s the reason you can watch a brand-new movie and feel like you’ve seen it a thousand times before.
The Lone Ranger could be an excellent movie if made properly: that is to say, made in a way that appeals to the existing fanbase and a potential new audience that would be into a western adventure. In the same way that some people try to argue that Superman is a character who no longer matters, some say the same about the Lone Ranger. These people miss the point — properties don’t last for three quarters of a century or longer if there isn’t something about them that matters in a timeless way. The Lone Ranger is, in fact, rather timeless — a man whose family is murdered and left for dead, then uses the anonymity of his “death” to seek justice. In many ways, characters like he and Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel are all prototypes for the modern superhero, and superheroes are huge at the box office these days. Why can’t they make that work?
What’s more, the story is primarily one about a man’s search for justice, which is a major theme in many of the greatest westerns ever made. But westerns are an entire genre that, like the Lone Ranger himself, constantly struggle to prove they still matter. Every time we get a great western like True Grit, Hollywood has to balance it with a movie that feels like it has to “justify” the western by combining it with something else. Take Jonah Hex, a comic book western about a Confederate soldier that turned against the south, was hideously scarred, and now makes his way as a bounty hunter. It’s grim and gritty and, when played properly, enormously engaging and dramatic. But when Warner Bros decided to make a movie out of the character, they decided a solid western wasn’t good enough and instead threw in a bunch of stupid supernatural elements ripped off from The Sixth Sense and The Crow, tossed out some steampunk weapons that didn’t belong there at all, and wound up with a film that ranks somewhere between X-Men: The Last Stand and Halle Berry’s Catwoman on the scale of comic book movies that are an utter disgrace to the source material.
The Lone Ranger couldn’t “just” be a great western. It had to be a western that looked like a family comedy. And also had that dreamy Johnny Depp in it to get the girls to come.
Let’s talk about Depp, by the way. It could be easy to get the impression, from this piece, that I hate Johnny Depp, and that’s simply not true. He’s a talented actor and he’s made some great movies. I’m just getting a little sick and tired of seeing him. He doesn’t have to be in every movie, and he sure as hell doesn’t need to play Tonto. Reportedly, when this film began having budget problems and was almost derailed, he took a big pay cut to ensure it got made. Good for him. He still shouldn’t have been cast as Tonto in the first place. Honestly, I’m of the opinion that most cases where an actor is cast against the usual race of an established character it’s something of a stunt, but there are times when it can be made to work. Laurence Fishburne as Perry White in Man of Steel, for example, was no big deal because Perry’s ethnicity isn’t really of any importance to his role in the story. Tonto, however, is a Native American Indian. This is vital to the character. And casting Johnny Depp in the part makes you unable to see Tonto at all — all you see is Depp in that goofy makeup he insisted on wearing, contrary to pretty much every interpretation of Tonto ever.
Even if Depp had played the character completely straight, even if he’d done a remarkably faithful interpretation of Tonto, do you honestly mean to tell me that Disney couldn’t find one Native American actor in the country who could do the part just as well, if not better?
Of course, then Disney couldn’t have promoted the film on Depp’s “star power.” Which of course, makes all the difference. Just look at the raging success of last year’s Dark Shadows, in which he turned a supernatural soap opera into a goofy 70s comedy. Smash hit, right?
(Side note: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Tim Burton all need to take a break from each other. They’ve made great movies in the past, but their routine has gotten really old. The three of them need to pledge to stop working together for at least 10 years, and which point we’ll have forgotten why we got sick of them and they can come back with a triumphant “reunion” movie. Probably a slapstick reinterpretation of Creature From the Black Lagoon.)
What should Disney take away from this? They should learn to make a good movie first, one that appeals to existing fans but also has the potential to grow the fanbase, and that they should make a movie that will be successful with a smaller group of people instead of a movie that fails across the board. They need to properly identify the audience that will enjoy this film and target it instead of trying to cut trailers that make the movie look like something it isn’t. They may not do Avengers numbers that way, but they could make movie that’s entertaining, profitable, and will have longevity.
What lessons will they likely learn? “People don’t like westerns or the Lone Ranger. What’s the next classic franchise we can try to homogenize into a mass market hit?”
What I Watched In… June 2013
In the interest of full disclosure (and to generate a little content here) I thought I’d present a regular tally of what movies I managed to see in the previous month. Some of them I’ve written about, most of them I haven’t. This list includes movies I saw for the first time, movies I’ve seen a thousand times, movies I saw in the theater, movies I watched at home, direct-to-DVD, made-for-TV and anything else that qualifies as a movie. Feel free to discuss or ask about any of them!
(June being the first month of Summer vacation and me being a teacher, I had a bit more time than in previous months to watch a lot of movies. I usually do. Expect July’s tally to also be extensive.)
- Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), B
- Warriors of the Wasteland (1983), F; RiffTrax Riff, B
- Creepshow (1982), B+
- Cat’s Eye (1985), B-
- Sherlock Holmes (2010 Asylum “Mockbuster”), D
- Brainiac (1962), F; RiffTrax Riff, B+
- Dark and Stormy Night (2009), A-
- Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow (2008), B-
- Superman: The Last Son of Krypton (1996), B+
- Batman/Superman Movie: World’s Finest (1997), A-
- Superman: Brainiac Attacks (2006), C-
- Superman/Doomsday (2007), B
- Superman (1948 Serial), B+
- Superman and the Mole-Men (1951), B+
- Superman Unbound (2013), B
- Superman (1978), A+
- Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (2006), A
- Superman III (1983), C-
- Supergirl (1984), C
- Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987), D-
- Superman Returns (2006), B-
- Man of Steel (2013), A
- Bill Cosby, Himself (1983), A
- Carnival of Souls (1962), D; RiffTrax Riff, B
- The ABCs of Death (2012), B
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), C
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991), C-
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time (1993), C-
- TMNT (2007), B+
- The Shawshank Redemption (1994), A+
- The Green Mile (1999), A
- Upstream Color (2013), B+
- The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz (2005), C+
- The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), B-
- Adventures in Babysitting (1987), B
- Clue (1985), B+
- The Aristocrats (2005), B
- The Princess and the Frog (2009), A
- Starship Troopers (1997), B
- The Mummy (1999), B+
- The Mummy Returns (2001), B
- The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), C+
- The Purge (2013), C
- Unforgiven (1992), A
- Futurama: Bender’s Big Score (2007), B
- Run Lola Run (1998), A-
- Futurama: The Beast With a Billion Backs (2008), B-
- Unbreakable (2000), A-
- Futurama: Bender’s Game (2008), B-
- Wonder Boys (2000), B+
- Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder (2009), A-
- Shrek 2 (2004), B-
What I Watched In… May 2013
In the interest of full disclosure (and to generate a little content here) I thought I’d present a regular tally of what movies I managed to see in the previous month. Some of them I’ve written about, most of them I haven’t. This list includes movies I saw for the first time, movies I’ve seen a thousand times, movies I saw in the theater, movies I watched at home, direct-to-DVD, made-for-TV and anything else that qualifies as a movie. Feel free to discuss or ask about any of them!
1. Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006), B
2. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984), B+
3. Iron Man 3 (2013), B-
4. The Producers (1968), A
5. City Slickers (1991), A
6. Space Jam (1996), C+
7. Mars Attacks! (1996), B
8. Psycho II (1983), D+; Rifftrax Riff, A-
9. Tangled (2010), B+
10. The Grey (2011), B+
11. The Great Gatsby (1974), A-
12. Sound of My Voice (2011), C
13. The Wizard (1989), C-
14. Future Force (1989), F; RiffTrax Riff, B+
15. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), A-
16. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), A-
17. Up (2009), A+
18. LEGO Batman: The Movie-DC Superheroes Unite (2013), B
19. Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962), D
20. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), A-
21. Defending Your Life (1991), B+
22. Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965), D; RiffTrax Riff, A
23. The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire (2002), C
24. Sherlock Holmes (2009), A-
25. A Matter of Life and Death (1946), A+
26. The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), B-
27. The Great Mouse Detective (1986), B+
28. S&Man (2006), C
29. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), C+
Merida’s Makeover
Over the last few days, I’ve heard a little outrage on the part of a few Disney fans over the slight makeover that’s taking place for Princess Merida, the heroine of Pixar’s film Brave. You see, Disney’s princesses are a huge franchise for them, and when they put out a film featuring a new princess, they tend to follow up on it with a big ceremony at one of the theme parks for her “coronation,” officially making her part of the family. Merida joined Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Belle, Ariel, Pocahontas, Mulan, Jasmine, Tiana, and Rapunzel earlier today.
The furor is not over her joining the “Official” Disney Princesses, making her the first Pixar character to do so. The problem is with the redesign the character is sporting for her appearance on Princess-branded merchandise, which (let’s be honest) is the point of this whole endeavor anyway. And while I agree that there’s a problem here, I think this is one of those cases where people are letting their anger lead them to statements of such hyperbole that they’re hurting their cause overall.
I hear people complaining that they’re trying to sexualize Merida. The phrase “slutting her up” has been tossed about rather liberally. And frankly, guys, I don’t really see it. The character in the “after” picture may be more traditionally cartoon-beautiful than the “before,” but that’s a far cry from turning her into a sex object. I read American superhero comic books all the time, I know what I’m talking about here. And she’s not even as tarted up as some of her sister princesses, if you want to get technical. Hell, Ariel just goes around in a clamshell bikini all the time. Only the top half of the bikini, in fact. Shouting things like this, starting a Change.org petition over it… it kinda makes a person seem a little like a zealot, and nobody listens to zealots, not even when they have a legitimate point in there somewhere past the noise.
No, the problem I see isn’t so much one of sex as of softening the character. Merida, for those of you who didn’t see Brave, was a girl whose mother tried to force her into an arranged marriage. Merida proceeded to thwart her mother’s plan by proving herself more than a match for the three princes who tried to win her hand, slinging around a bow and arrow in a method that would make Hawkeye of the Avengers take notes. This is all in the first few minutes of the film, by the way, and the bulk of the story is a sweet tale about a mother and daughter growing to understand and respect one another, plus magic bears. But the point of Merida is that she is a character who is not defined by anyone else — not her parents, not her prince. She didn’t need to be rescued like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, she’s her own woman and prefers it that way. Hell, she’s the only one of the princesses who’s still single at the end of her movie, and she’s perfectly happy that way.
The “new” Merida wears a slightly fancier version of her iconic dress (a dress she hated in the movie, incidentally, but I’m willing to let that slide for the sake of branding and marketing, because that’s what drives all of this), with a slimmer waist and hair that isn’t quite as wild as it was originally. Most bothersome to me, though, are the small changes to the face — it looks like she’s been covered in eyeshadow and lipstick, something the movie Merida most certainly would reject.
A minor reworking of the character is inevitable, if for no other reason than that she has to be on-model with the other princesses. The same thing happened to the previous CGI princess, Rapunzel, but her changes were less dramatic. Seeing a Merida like this, made up and missing her trademark bow and arrow, takes away her uniqueness. The character on the right fits in fine with the other Disney princesses, but that’s sort of the problem. She fits in. She no longer stands out, and that’s what made her such a fun character in the first place.
This isn’t a life-changing, cataclysmic change. The princesses have very little to do story-wise anyway — after their films they seem to exist mostly to serve as models for dolls and to put their pictures on everything from pajamas to notebooks. (My niece, Maggie, has a child-size fold-out sofa stamped with the earlier princesses. She sits on it when she watches Brave.) But want to see Merida with her bow, taking aim, and standing on her own. That’s what made her different, that’s what made her worth remembering. It’s what sets her apart not only from the iconic princesses, but also from forgotten Disney princesses like The Black Cauldron‘s Eilonwy or Atlantis: The Lost Empire’s Kida. I like to think that Merida earned her spot on that platform by being who she is. Why take that away from her?
Let’s just hope we don’t have this conversation all over again when Disney decides to drop Princess Leia in the group.
Movies you (maybe) didn’t know came from comic books
In case you didn’t know, this coming Saturday is Free Comic Book Day, the annual celebration of comics where stores across North America give out special edition comics made just for the occasion. Many of the best stores have gone so far as to make this event a sort of mini-convention, with tables for writers, artists and media folk to sit, chat, sketch, and interact with the fans. In fact, I’ll be at BSI Comics in Metairie, Louisiana Saturday with my podcast and promoting my novels.
But this year, we’re stretching the celebration out. This year, the days before FCBD have been declared Comics Kick Ass Week, a time for everyone to spread the word and talk about how great comics are. Now, I do that all the time on my main blog and in my position as a columnist and podcaster for CXPulp.com, but I know the Reel to Reel blog reaches a slightly different audience. So I decided that here, to help get folks in the mood, I’d run down some movies or franchises you (probably) didn’t know were based on comic books. Then, check out the Comics Kick Ass Week Tumblr page to see how other bloggers and podcasters are celebrating.
Road to Perdition (2002)
Based on the graphic novel Road to Perdition by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner
This graphic novel, originally published by DC Comics’ now-defunct Paradox Press imprint, tells the story of Michael Sullivan Jr., a young man horrified when he discovers his father is a hitman for the mob. When his father’s boss, John Looney, finds out that Mike Jr. knows what his father does, he tries to have the family killed. Mike Sr. and Jr. both survive, and begin a road to revenge for the murder of the rest of their family.
Collins is a great novelist and comic book writer who does some of the best old-school crime drama being published today in either medium. He also takes great lengths to make his books as true to life as possible, including real historical figures and events whenever possible. The film, directed by American Beauty’s Sam Mendes, starred Tom Hanks as Mike Sr., Tyler Hoechlin as Mike Jr., Paul Newman as John Rooney (they changed his character’s name for the film) and Jude Law as another hitman sent out to take care of the Sullivan problem. I’ve always enjoyed this movie, even though it can be kind of difficult to accept a hardcore Tom Hanks, and the graphic novel has several sequels, both in comic book form (which tell additional stories about the Sullivans’ time on the road) and in prose form (which focus more on what happened to Mike Jr. when he grew up).
Ghost World (2001)
Based on the graphic novel Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
Ghost World focuses on a pair of teenage girls, Enid and Rebecca, the summer after their high school graduation. A practical joke on a lonely man named Seymour sends Enid into an unexpected friendship, a relationship neither of them seem to particularly understand.
Terry Zwigoff, who had previously directed a film about indie comic legend Robert Crumb, helmed this film, casting Thora Birch as Enid, Steve Buscemi as Seymour, and a pre-superstar status Scarlett Johansson as Rebecca. The graphic novel is far more episodic in nature than the film, showing assorted short stories featuring the girls without as much connectivity as Zwigoff gave them on screen. It’s an acceptable compromise, though, making the film feel unified in a way that wouldn’t have happened if he had made a strict adaptation. That sort of anthology feel works much better in book form than it does in a movie.
The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
Based on the series The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé.
Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson achieved a long-held dream in 2011 when they directed and produced the motion-capture Adventures of Tintin. Most American audiences were unfamiliar with the character, though, or if they knew him at all knew him only through the cult favorite 90s animated series. Most audiences didn’t know that Tintin is over 70 years old and, in fact, one of the most popular comic book series of all time… it’s just that most of its success has been overseas.
Created by Hergé in 1929, The Adventures of Tintin featured a young boy reporter going on incredible adventures all over the world. Hergé filled the comics with intensely-researched artifacts and cultures that Tintin and his large cast of friends would get involved with on a regular basis. The comic is criticized sometimes for some culturally insensitive portrayals of different races, depicting them as primitive in comparison to the White-As-The-Driven-Snow Tintin (who, like Hergé himself, is Belgian). Considering the time period Hergé was working in, though, it’s something I’m willing to give a partial pass. Tintin is one of those properties with a huge cultural imprint, inspiring later adventure characters like Indiana Jones, another Spielberg co-creation. It’s worth giving the original a look.
Tales From the Crypt
Based on classic comics from Tales From the Crypt, The Crypt of Terror, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear by William Gaines, Al Feldstein and countless others.
Remember that awesome HBO horror series Tales From the Crypt? Every week it was like a new horror movie, presented by one of the greatest creepy movie hosts ever. This too, though, was based on a comic book series (in case you missed it somehow). In the early 50s, horror and crime comics were among the most popular titles being published in America, with the EC Comics line dominating sales. Then came a nationwide panic about the effect comic books were having on children, a congressional hearing, a psychology book of extremely questionable pedigree, and the comic publishers got together and wrote a content code that was so restrictive EC went almost completely out of business, eventually ceasing publication of all of their titles except a humor magazine you may have heard of, Mad.
Many of the episodes of the TV show were based on stories pulled straight from the comic books, and like the comics, they maintained their warped sense of justice. Criminals usually received a suitably karmic punishment, victims were rarely completely innocent in the first place, and through it all the Cryptkeeper would hit us with deliciously deadpan puns. The TV series was enormously popular, spawning three movies (not counting two earlier movies made before the HBO formula got it right) and an animated spin-off for kids, Tales From the Cryptkeeper. And that’s not even mentioning the huge stamp the property had on horror fiction in general over the last 50 years, influencing the likes of Stephen King and Sam Raimi and producing plenty of imitators, such as the Creepshow series.
Ducktales
Based largely on Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics by Carl Barks.
I know what you’re thinking. “Blake, you can’t tell me DuckTales was based on a comic book. The Disney Ducks were cartoon characters first!” Well, Mr. Smarty Pants, that’s true of Donald Duck and his three nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie. But what about the rest of the cast of DuckTales? Scrooge McDuck? Crazy inventor Gyro Gearloose? Nefarious villains like Magica DeSpell, Flintheart Glomgold and the Beagle Boys? Just a few of the characters conjured up by one of the greatest cartoonists ever to pick up a pencil, Mr. Carl Barks. Barks worked in animation before finding his niche in the licensed Disney comic books published by Dell. Although he was one of many creators working on those comics, he quickly outshone many of the others… in fact, although at the time the comics were published without creator credits, his style was so distinctive and so much better than his contemporaries that fans sought out his work, and without knowing his name, simply started referring to him as “the Good Artist.”
Barks expanded Donald’s universe immeasurably, not just introducing new characters and concepts, but turning the ducks into globetrotting treasure hunters. Many — hell, most of the most memorable episodes of the DuckTales TV show (which did have a movie spin-off) were lifted straight from Carl Barks comics. He even did a little work on the show for a while. But his best work was in the comics, and those comics were some of the greatest ever made. Fantagraphics Comics is currently publishing an archival series of hardcover books reprinting Barks’s work — if you’re a die-hard Duck fan, you owe it to yourself to read the comics that breathed a new life into the Disney characters and helped spark the renaissance of 80s animation.
The Smurfs (2011)
Based on The Smurfs by Peyo.
Look, I’m not even going to pretend I think the Smurfs movies were any good. But I was a fan of the cartoon when I was a kid, and at the time, I had no idea that the Smurfs, like Tintin, made their original appearance in comic books from Belgium. Originally, they were supporting characters in a Spirou magazine story called “The Flute With Six Holes,” but they soon became popular enough to explode into their own series, many of which are currently being published in English for the very first time by Papercutz Comics. And that’s the reason I’m closing off this list with the Smurfs — because this year, they’re going to be featured in a Free Comic Book Day offering that’s never appeared in the US before. If you’ve got kids who enjoy the movies, here’s a great chance to get them reading.
Check out the Free Comic Book Day website to find the nearest participating store. And while you’re there, look at some of the other books available. Your kids will find recognizable characters from Sesame Street, Spongebob Squarepants, Teen Titans Go!, Adventure Time, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. For you grown-ups, there are comics based on the NBC series Grimm, the British cult favorite Judge Dredd, and the Image Comics publication that inspired the AMC smash hit The Walking Dead. Plus, you’ll find Superman, the Avengers, Star Wars, Tinkerbell, Garfield, the Peanuts gang, the Tick, Sonic the Hedgehog, Archie Andrews and other old friends, and there’ll be plenty of titles and characters you’ve never heard of before, but may turn into a new favorite.
And while you’re there, if you’re a fan of any of the movies I mentioned, browse the shelves of the store and pick up a few volumes, or look for something totally new.
Gut Reactions: Condorman (1981)
Director: Charles Jarrott
Writer: Marc Stirdivant, based on the novel by The Game of X Robert Sheckley
Cast: Michael Crawford, Oliver Reed, Barbara Carrera, James Hampton, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Dana Elcar, Vernon Dobtcheff, Robert Arden
Plot: Comic book creator Woody Wilkins (Michael Crawford) is about to debut his new superhero: Condorman. Woody insists on authenticity in his character, though, and travels to Paris to test the gadgets he designed for the comic. His friend Harry (Oliver Reed), a CIA file clerk, asks him to carry out a special delivery for which a civilian has been requested. The over-enthusiastic Harry goes too far trying to impress his beautiful contact Natalia (Barbara Carrera), who is actually a KGB operative. Natalia returns to Moscow where her superior and lover Krokov (Oliver Reed) treats her cruelly. She decides to defect, and requests the agent known as “Condorman” be sent to retrieve her. Woody agrees to the mission, provided the CIA fabricate the rest of his comic book designs so he can test them in the field. Woody, Natalia and Harry are soon pursued by Krokov in a race across Europe to bring the beautiful spy to safety.
Thoughts: There is always a danger, when you go back and watch a movie or TV show you loved as a kid, that it simply won’t hold up. We’ve all been disappointed as adults, looking back and realizing things like the old Masters of the Universe TV show really wasn’t very good, or wondering how in the hell we were ever able to sit through Mac and Me more than once. Still, my fiancé Erin managed to secure a copy of this movie after she heard me mention how much I loved it back in the 80s, and I recently managed to find the time to watch it again for the first time in at least 20 years.
Condorman comes from the Disney company during that long stretch in the 70s and 80s when the company simply didn’t know what it was supposed to be anymore. After Walt Disney’s death in 1966, the company coasted on projects he’d already put in the works for a few years, then started to flounder, trying to figure out a direction now that its founder was gone. This film is the perfect example of that. The studio tried to simultaneously capitalize on the popularity of superheroes (thanks to the Christopher Reeve Superman franchise) and James Bond-style spy thrillers, while at the same time creating the sort of family friendly comedy that Disney’s live action properties were expected to be. The result is a film that fails to live up to the standards of any of the three.
That’s not to say the film is terrible. I mean… it kind of is, but at the same time, there’s something about it that still entertains me. Michael Crawford is chewing the scenery so much you expect him to blow a bubble, and James Hampton plays the same sort of big-smiling best buddy he is in most of his work. In fact, if you told me his character in this film retired from the CIA and returned to the states so he could raise his son properly before the family’s werewolf curse made itself known, I wouldn’t think you were that crazy. Just in terms of performance, Barbara Carrera and Oliver Reed are the ones that actually do the most acting. Carrera in particular is fun to watch, putting out a sort of Disney-friendly sensuality that you didn’t get to see often. In essence, she’s a G-rated Bond Girl, which is exactly what the script required her to be. (She would get another chance to be an sort-of Bond girl two years later in the infamous non-canon Sean Connery Bond film Never Say Never Again.)
The concept here is actually perfectly sound – a goofy, good-hearted man leaps at the chance for a little adventure and to test out the toys he’s only, until now, created on paper. It’s the execution that falls flat. The flying scenes are pretty uniformly terrible, with weak bluescreen effects and sometimes even visible cables. The rest of the tech is a bit more acceptable; the “Condormobile” in particular has a cool design and neat gadgets, and I can forgive the 80s-era computer display on the inside. Truth be told, to this day I occasionally fantasize about having a switch in my car that would allow me to blow off the outer shell and reveal a super-sleek high-speed sports car underneath. (These fantasies are usually prompted by sitting in traffic.)
I don’t want you to misunderstand me, guys. This is not a good movie. In fact, if the guys from RiffTrax could somehow get Disney to allow them to do a Video on Demand riff of this, I think it could be one of their greatest productions ever. But despite its cheese, this is one of those rare films from my past that I can look back on and still kind of love, warts and all. I can’t explain it, and I don’t feel the need to defend it. It’s silly, it’s crazy, it’s goofy…. And that’s why I like it.
The first Reel to Reel study, Mutants, Monsters and Madmen, is now available as a $2.99 eBook in the Amazon Kindle store and Smashwords.com bookstore. And you can find links to all of my novels, collections, and short stories, in their assorted print, eBook and audio forms, at the Now Available page!
Dorothy Gale Week Day 5: Fairuza Balk in Return to Oz (1985)
Director: Walter Murch
Writer: Walter Murch, Gill Dennis, based on the novels The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Cast: Fairuza Balk, Nicol Williamson, Jean Marsh, Piper Laurie, Matt Clark, Sean Barrett, Michael Sundin, Tim Rose, Mak Wilson, Denise Bryer, Brian Henson, Lyle Conway, Justin Case, John Alexander, Deep Roy, Emma Ridley, Sophie Ward, Fiona Victory, Pons Maar
Plot: It has been six months since Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk) came home following her adventure in Oz. Her Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) is working to rebuild the farm, destroyed by the tornado, and Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) is worried that the little girl is sleepless, stuck imagining the fairy land she “dreamed” about before. Dorothy scolds a chicken named Billina who has been unable to produce eggs, and finds an old key in the chicken coop. The design on the end of it seems to bear an “O-Z” – the symbol of the land of Oz. She shows it to Em as proof of her stories, but it only furthers her resolve to bring Dorothy to the a doctor. She tells Dr. Worley (Nicol Williamson) her stories of Oz, of her friends, of the Ruby Slippers that were lost as she flew home. Worley unveils an electrical device with a “face” that may cure her, and Dorothy sees a reflection of a girl (Emma Ridley) looking at her. The doctor and his nurse (Jean Marsh) prepare Dorothy to stay overnight for treatment. Dorothy is strapped onto a gurney for treatment, but she’s frightened by the device placed on her head. Before the Doctor can turn it on, the power to the hospital is knocked out by a storm. The Nurse goes to check on a screaming patient while the Doctor tries to repair the power, leaving Dorothy alone so the mysterious girl can unstrap her and let her free. Rushing outside, the girls are separated by a flash flood, and Dorothy clings to a floating chicken coop to ride out the storm.
In the morning, Dorothy finds that her hen Billina is in the coop with her, she begins speaking (voice of Denise Bryer). The coop has washed up on the edge of a desert, with lush, green land nearby. Dorothy realizes they must be in Oz, which means the sands beneath them are those of the Deadly Desert, which transforms any living creature that touches it to sand. Dorothy carries Billina to safety, leaping from one stone to another until she reaches the grass, unaware that some of those stones are watching her. The creature watching from the rocks rushes off to inform his king that she has returned to Oz, and has a chicken with her.
Dorothy and Billina find the old farmhouse where it crashed in Munchkinland, but realize the Munchkin City is gone, and the Munchkins with it. The Yellow Brick Road has been reduced to rubble, and she races along it until she comes to the destroyed remains of the Emerald City. The people have been turned to stone, including the Tin Woodsman and Cowardly Lion. They are attacked by creatures with wheels for hands and feet, who chase them into a hidden chamber. The lead Wheeler (Pans Maar) tells them they’ll destroy them, for the Nome King doesn’t allow chickens in Oz. Turning around, Dorothy finds a clockwork man with a plate that proclaims him “The Royal Army of Oz.” Winding him up with the key she found in Kansas, he activates and introduces himself at Tik-Tok (Sean Barrett). Upon the orders of the Scarecrow, he was locked in the chamber to wait for Dorothy’s return after the people began to turn to stone. Tik-Tok defeats the Wheelers and interrogates the leader, who tells them the Nome King is responsible for Oz’s devastation, and that only Princess Mombi can tell them where the Scarecrow is. In Mombi’s palace, they find a beautiful woman with a room full of interchangeable heads. She imprisons Dorothy in the attic, planning to come back for her when her own head is a bit older.
In the attic, Dorothy finds a pumpkin-headed man named Jack (Brian Henson), who tells her he was built by Mombi’s former servant to scare the witch. Instead of destroying him, Mombi tested a “Powder of Life” on him, then locked up the remaining powder with her original head. Jack believes his “mother” was enchanted by Mombi and hidden away. Dorothy and Jack sneaks out to steal the powder, but Mombi is alerted when her original head (Jean Marsh again) wakes up and shouts for help. The others have constructed a flying contraption from couches, leaves, and the mounted head of a Gump (Lyle Conway), which they bring to life with the powder and escape. They fly until the Gump comes apart and crashes on the mountain of the Nome King (Williamson), where the Scarecrow (Justin Case) is imprisoned.
The Nome King (happy that Billina has seemingly disappeared, although she is merely resting inside Jack’s hollow head) has transformed the Scarecrow into an amusing ornament for his vast collection, and claims his conquest of Oz was simply taking back what belonged to him – the gems from the Emerald City were all mined from his underground kingdom, after all. As she weeps for her missing friend, the Nome King seems genuinely touched by her tears, and offers her an opportunity to win him back – if she or her friends can guess which ornament he is, he will be set free. The Gump goes first, but fails in his effort and is transformed into an ornament himself – a condition of the contest the Nome King failed to mention before. Jack goes next, then Tik-Tok, and each are transformed. The Nome King offers to send Dorothy back home using the Ruby Slippers, which he found after she lost them, but she insists on trying to save her friends. She manages to rescue the Scarecrow, who was turned into an emerald, and realizes the people from Oz are all green ornaments. They quickly rescue the Gump, and the Nome King grows angry, sending an earthquake through the mountain. They find and transform Jack as the Nome King attacks them, enraged, tired of the games. He grabs Jack, lifting him to his mouth, but he’s stopped by a sudden clucking sound. Inside Jack’s head, Billina lays an egg, which rolls into the Nome King’s mouth. As he shrieks, he begins to crumble away, revealing that eggs are poison to Nomes. The mountain collapses, and Dorothy takes the Ruby Slippers from the Nome King’s body, using the magic to bring them back to the Emerald City, bring the people back to life, and return Oz to its former glory. With them is a green medal that was somehow stuck to the Gump. Dorothy guesses the truth, and transforms the medal back into the missing Tik-Tok.
The people of Oz ask Dorothy to stay and be their queen, but she wishes to return to Kansas. As she debates what to do, the women whose heads Mombi took tell the truth about her serving-girl: she is Ozma, queen and rightful ruler of Oz. (Also Jack’s “mother” and the girl who helped Dorothy escape the hospital), lost after the Wizard came. Freed from Mombi’s magic, Ozma is restored to the throne and promises to send Dorothy home, on the condition that she signal her should she ever wish to return to Oz again.
Thoughts: This film is an old favorite of mine, probably my first experience with Oz beyond the MGM Musical. It may, in fact, be what first stirred me on to read the further Oz books, when I heard it was essentially a combination of the second and third novels in the series, The Marvelous Land of Oz and Return to Oz. (Honestly, I don’t remember if I read the books before I saw the movie or vice-versa. I would have been 8 years old when this movie was released, and certainly old enough to have discovered the Oz shelf at the St. Charles Parish Public Library where I would be utterly lost for the next few years – a sojourn for which I am eternally grateful.) The writers took the characters and plots of both books and blended them together in a very satisfying way, creating a story that evokes parts of each of them, but manages to feel complete in and of itself. I won’t go into what parts came from which book (read them yourself – they’re in the public domain and free on the internet), but I can say that if I hadn’t read them myself, I wouldn’t have guessed the movie is a mash-up.
Fairuza Balk is the most age-appropriate Dorothy we’ve had yet (she was 11 at the time the film was released), and puts out a decent performance. She’s a young actor, obviously still learning, and you frequently hear the stilted delivery of a child actor trying to remember her lines. But there’s a nice bit of emotion and determination in her voice, even during those abrupt and unnecessary pauses. She feels like a Dorothy who’s already been through a lot and has to reconcile the world she experienced with the ordinary one in which she was raised. It’s a nuanced idea, one that Baum never dealt with much in the books (except perhaps in The Emerald City of Oz), and rather daring for Disney to attempt in the 80s.
Except for Dorothy and Mombi, most of the cast is realized through the use of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, doing a job that these days would probably be mostly CGI. I find the practical puppetry of Tik-Tok and Jack Pumpkinhead far more impressive than most computer animated creations, however, and they add a sense of realism to this fantastic setting. The character designs also skew very close to the illustrations in the original Oz books — even the three characters from the original Wizard of Oz are made up to look like their book versions rather than Jack Haley, Ray Bolger or Bert Lahr. Of all the versions of Oz I’ve looked at this week, this is the one that feels most like the fantasy epic it is at its heart, and I attribute a lot of that to the designs of the characters and sets used here. There’s also some well-done stop motion animation for the Nomes, which are more like living rocks here than the dumpy creatures of the novel. The animation, done by Claymation creator Will Vinton, looks very impressive, and I can try to reconcile the changes to the characters with an attempt to make them more menacing – although the Nome King in Baum’s novels is one of the few truly credible threats to the power of Ozma and Glinda, his appearance is by no means something that will inspire fright.
Return to Oz was thought of by many people as an attempt to do a sequel to the Judy Garland movie, but this film has only a few nods to the MGM musical – the use of Ruby Slippers being the most obvious. The sequence in Kansas at the beginning, like in the MGM movie, introduces actors that would reoccur in Oz and elements that would reflect back on Dorothy’s second adventure (the pumpkin, the lunchpail, and the mechanical man most obviously). Fortunately, the end of the movie makes it pretty clear this time, it’s not just a dream, which Baum never intended in the first place.
As far as deviating from Baum’s intentions, the villains are farther off than anything else. Mombi has little in common with her counterpart from the books, borrowing her most distinctive aspects from Langwidere, the head-swappin’ princess from Ozma of Oz. The Nome King himself, though, is the biggest departure, showing a sense of compassion that doesn’t bespeak the character from the book at all, although the temper he displays at the end feels appropriate. His appearance is also very different from the pudgy, deceptively silly character he is in the books. In this version, he begins as a creature made of solid rock, and slowly becomes more human with each person added to his collection of ornaments. Once Dorothy starts setting her friends free he grows more and more inhuman again, finally crumbling to skeletal rock after Billina’s egg poisons him. It’s an interesting idea that would probably work with some villains, but doesn’t really fit the Nome King of L. Frank Baum’s novels all that well.
Despite that, this movie feels more like Baum’s Oz than any Oz movie I’ve ever seen – not perfect, mind you (the Emerald City’s sudden proximity to the very edge of Oz still strikes me as being somewhat ridiculous in the context of any version of the first story), but closer than anything else. We’ve still yet to have a truly faithful big-screen adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, let alone the rest of the books in the series, but if we ever get them, the look and flavor of this movie wouldn’t be a bad template to use at all.
Now I know I promised you five films for each week of this project, but I feel a little bad, as the most recent significant version of Dorothy Gale I can find in cinema is nearly 30 years old. Hollywood really needs to pick up the pace. But in order to have something a little more recent, just for perspective, come back tomorrow for a Dorothy Gale Week bonus! This time we’re going to the small screen to see how Zooey Deschanel depicted Dorothy Gale (or “D.G.”) in the 2007 Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Tin Man.
The first Reel to Reel study, Mutants, Monsters and Madmen, is now available as a $2.99 eBook in the Amazon Kindle store and Smashwords.com bookstore. And you can find links to all of my novels, collections, and short stories, in their assorted print, eBook and audio forms, at the Now Available page!
2 in 1 Showcase Episode 287: Summer Movie Preview 2013
Twice a year, on the Showcase podcast, I sit back with whichever of my co-hosts are available and talk about the new movies coming out in the next several months. It’s time for this year’s Showcase Summer Movie Preview!
Gut Reactions: Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)
Director: Sam Raimi
Writers: Mitchell Kapner & David Lindsay-Abaire, based on the works of L. Frank Baum
Cast: James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams, Zach Braff, Bill Cobbs, Joey King, Tony Cox, Bruce Campbell
Plot: Carnival huckster Oscar Zoroaster Diggs (James Franco) is swept up by a cyclone and hurled away to the mysterious, magical land of Oz. There, he finds himself caught in a power struggle between three witches (Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams) over the realm’s vacant throne. A prophesy claims that a wizard from another land will save Oz from wickedness, but can this humbug of a man find in himself the hero that Oz needs?
Thoughts: Before I really dig into this movie, I think it’s only fair that I (briefly) tell you about my personal history with Oz, so you can understand where my opinion is coming from. Like most people these days, my first exposure to Oz was the 1939 MGM film, which I saw as a child and enjoyed. When I was a bit older, though, at my local public library (visit ‘em kids, they’re awesome) I found an entire shelf of Oz books by the creator, L. Frank Baum. I devoured the books they had (which, as it turned out, weren’t all of them), and since then I’ve been a devoted consumer of any book, movie, or comic book I can find that offers a different vision of the land of Oz. Although I think there is plenty of room in media for many, many different Ozzes (a phenomenon I discussed in more depth on my other blog yesterday), in my heart, my favorite visions of Oz are those that pay due deference to Baum.
And it’s with that perspective that I can say I enjoyed Oz the Great and Powerful immensely. (Don’t worry, I’ll put up a warning before I get into any spoilers for those of you who haven’t seen it.)
The biggest problem with prequels, as George Lucas proved, is that it’s difficult to maintain suspense when the audience already knows where the characters will be when the story ends. This isn’t really a big problem with this film, though. Baum gave precious little backstory on many of his main characters, and almost none on the witches of Oz (although subsequent writers would often turn to this as their inspiration), and that leaves the screenwriters an enormous amount of room to play in. They also create a version of Oz that is mostly consistent with the books, while still giving a few nods to the 1939 film that they know is what most people will use as their measuring stick.
The casting is very good. Zach Braff as Finley the Flying Monkey brings a totally unexpected element of comedy to the film, one that serves to give us a glimpse of light in very dark moments. Each of the witches feels very natural in their respective roles – Mila Kunis’s naïve Theodora and Rachel Weisz’s sly Evanora work very well as the sister witches, and from the beginning present an interesting question to the audience… which of the two will someday become the insidious Wicked Witch of the West, and which one has a date with a house that’s going to fall out of the next tornado?
Michelle Williams is almost perfect as Glinda. While Billie Burke’s portrayal from 1939 is that of a hands-off fairy godmother, the sort who prefers to pulls the strings and not get directly involved, Williams is a much fiercer, braver woman. The display of power she puts forth in this movie is impressive, and certainly more in keeping with the character Baum created. He didn’t go in for the pyrotechnics quite as much as this movie does, mind you, but it’s easy to see Williams’s Glinda capable of maturing into the strong, confidant witch she becomes in the original books.
Then there’s Oz himself, James Franco. Oddly enough, he’s the only one of the main cast that doesn’t always work for me, and it’s for an strange reason. Franco plays Oz as a snake oil salesman, a con man who has a good heart buried somewhere deep inside, and that’s all well and good, that’s how he should come across. But there are moments in the film where it feels like he’s actually overselling the overselling, moments where you’d want Sam Raimi to ask him to dial it back down to 11 from 12 or 13.
As for Raimi’s directing… it’s fantastic. His visual effects team has built a brilliant, remarkable Oz that satisfies me on absolutely every level. Even the 3-D in this film is superior to most others. It’s funny – I’ve long said that I’ve never seen a movie that convinces me that 3-D is a tool that improves storytelling, that there is no movie that does for 3-D what the 1939 The Wizard of Oz did for color… and this film almost does it. Raimi’s transition from Kansas to Oz is a truly remarkable moment, and one that uses 3-D in a very clever way, similar to the way the ’39 film did with color. It’s visually stunning and, for a few scarce moments, I was glad I saw it in 3-D. Then later on he starts throwing monsters and spears straight at the camera and I was over it. Raimi also throws in a few moments of self-reference, which I think are fun as well… there’s one scene that’s almost straight out of his own Army of Darkness, which had my friends and me in hysterics, probably because we’re the only people in the theater that got the joke.
I’ve got other things to say about this movie, including a few problems, but nothing I can discuss without putting up a spoiler wall. So if you’ve read this far and you haven’t seen the movie yet, let me assure you that it has my wholehearted recommendation. It’s a great fantasy film, probably too scary for the little kids, but well worth watching in the movie theater. And I won’t even judge you for choosing the 3-D this time.
SPOILERS AFTER THIS LINE. ———————————————————————————————-
Aside from Franco being a bit over the top, my biggest problem with the story itself is one of timing… not pacing, timing. Once Franco arrives in Oz, it feels like things happen entirely too fast. For one thing, I think it’s clear too early in the film that it is Theodora, not Evanora, who is fated to become the Wicked Witch of the West. In fact, I think it’s clear too early that Evanora is the real villain, and not the “Wicked Witch” the sisters are warning us about. Granted, as soon as we learn the “Wicked Witch” is named Glinda, the audience should know Franco is being conned, but that moment should be played as a reveal and never really gets that chance.
Theodora’s emotional turns are also hurt by the sheer speed of the piece. I’m not entirely sure (after just one viewing) but it seems like no more than three days pass between her meeting Oz and her transformation. In that time she falls madly in love with him, decides she’s going to marry him and become his queen, and then grows to utterly hate him when she sees a glimpse of him talking to Glinda and learns that he “romanced” her sister the same way he did her. (Incidentally, I think the film does a nice turn leaving it a little ambiguous as to whether or not this actually happened. We see Oz work his charms on various women in the movie, but never Evanora, which leads me to suspect he never did. Instead, I got the impression Evanora pulls off the con on her sister because she was spying on the two of them in her globe the whole time.) The sheer speed with which Theodora’s affections turn weakens the character, making her the fantasy equivalent of the internet Overly Attached Girlfriend meme. Even more problematic, she truly becomes wicked not because her heart is broken, but because after her heart is broken she allows her sister to make her evil. It’s still the character making a choice, but I think it’s a weak choice, she doesn’t “earn” her evil, so to speak… not so much a monster as a victim, which will give her death at Dorothy’ s hands a level of forced tragedy I don’t think works.
It seems very clear to me that this movie was made to be the beginning of a franchise, despite its prequel status – and in fact, Disney was already talking about sequel plans the day before the movie was released. I’ve got no problem with this turning into a franchise, but it’s a little too obvious that was the intent… instead of taking us from point A to point Z (“Z” being where The Wizard of Oz begins), this gets us to about… let’s say “J.” The film ends with Oz in power and the witches banished, but there are a lot of things that don’t mesh up. Evanora doesn’t have the Silver Shoes (or, if you insist on going with the MGM version, Ruby Slippers). Theodora isn’t in command of the Flying Monkeys. Both sisters have been driven out and humiliated, where Evanora pretty much has dominion over Munchkinland when the original begins. Probably lots of other little bits I’m forgetting now, but will remember when I (inevitably) see the movie again.
The biggest sequel hooks come in for the Wizard himself, though… specifically, he’s not the recluse we know he’s doomed to become. He and Glinda have a romantic relationship, which simply doesn’t fit the first movie (or any other incarnation, for that matter). This gives the screenwriters a delicate task – they have to do something to alter the relationship in such a way that they are no longer together, that he has retreated into his palace, but where she still has enough faith in him to send Dorothy down the Yellow Brick Road when she drops from the sky. Then there are Finley and the China Girl, Oz’s surrogate family. Their inclusion in this story is actually wonderful, but it has us poised for tragedy. The moment Finley swears his life debt to Oz, pledging to remain with him until he (Finley) dies, I had a chill at every moment he was in danger. We know that the Wizard has no Finley when Dorothy arrives, and there’s simply no way the character Zach Braff played would ever turn on his friend… which leaves only one possible reason for his absence in the later stories.
I appreciated a lot of the little touches that were brought in from the original book, for example, the inclusion of all four of the peoples of Oz, and not only the Munchkins as the original film did. The prominence of the China Town was good too, although it does raise the question of how it will be rebuilt to the point it will be when Dorothy arrives. (Then again, as this is a point left out of the original film, perhaps the filmmakers don’t plan to address it again.) And although there were a few creatures we encountered that didn’t come straight from the books, there was nothing that would feel out of place in a Baum story, and so I’m perfectly happy with that.
As a lifelong Oz fan, though, there’s one glaring red flag waving in my face, one thing that simply flat-out contradicts any version of Oz I’ve ever seen, one thing I’m having a little trouble getting over, and that’s the notion that Glinda is the daughter of the murdered King of Oz. This doesn’t fit in anywhere, and I have a hard time wrapping my brain around it… not only idea that Glinda is the king’s daughter, but also the question of what this means for the true ruler of Oz in the original novels, Princess Ozma. Considering how much work was done to mine the book, making a change of this magnitude is really troublesome to me. At the end of the movie, I kept waiting for an exchange like this:
OZ: Hey, if your father was the king, doesn’t that mean you should be queen?
GLINDA: No, I had to renounce my claim to the throne when I chose to become a witch. My sister was supposed to take over, but she’s been missing ever since our father died.
Not a perfect solution, I admit, but at least it would be something. The point is, it’s not a minor quibble, but a major chance to the Oz canon that I think the sequels simply have to address.
That said, as big an issue as I have with that element, I still really enjoyed this movie. It’s a modern Oz with a timeless feeling, which is as much as anybody could possibly have hoped for, and I hope to see Disney march forward with this franchise for a long time… even, if they have the guts, rolling into an actual adaptation of the original novel. Despite all the different versions of Oz that have hit the screen, very few filmmakers have dared try a full-on adaptation of the original, fearing comparisons to the MGM film. If the Disney juggernaut doesn’t have the courage to finally make a version of The Wizard of Oz that’s closer to the book, nobody ever will. And that, my friends, is where I really want to see this franchise go.
The first Reel to Reel study, Mutants, Monsters and Madmen, is now available as a $2.99 eBook in the Amazon Kindle store and Smashwords.com bookstore. And you can find links to all of my novels, collections, and short stories, in their assorted print, eBook and audio forms, at the Now Available page!
If I was making the Justice League movie…
Fans of DC Comics’s Justice League franchise saw what seems to be another setback this week, when word leaked the script that has been in development is being scrapped entirely. For those who just want to see the damn movie made already, this is obviously distressing news. But my approach is slightly different. I absolutely want to see a Justice League movie, but I want to see a great movie. So if Warner Bros recognized that the script they’re working with is crap, by all means, start over and do it right.
Earlier this week over at CXPulp, I wrote about how Disney seems to be planning to apply the lessons of Marvel Studios to their recently-acquired Star Wars franchise. (For those of you who may not follow this stuff the way I do, let me briefly explain that Disney bought Marvel in 2009 and that Marvel and DC have been the two biggest publishers – and therefore the two biggest rivals – in American comic books for decades). Marvel created films for several of their characters, brought them together in their mega-hit The Avengers, and are now breaking them off into smaller films again before the next combined go-around. Comic book fans, delighted with what Marvel is doing, are asking why the hell the movies based on DC Comics – the Justice League, Superman, Batman, and many more — can’t do the same thing. Although DC Comics, for a long time, had properties with more mainstream recognition than Marvel, in the past decade Marvel has dominated superhero movies. The only hit from the DC Universe in recent years has been Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, while Marvel’s X-Men, Spider-Man, and Avengers-related films have become legitimate powerhouses.
The reason for this, I believe, goes back to the late 90s. Marvel, at the time, was still an independent company, although one reorganizing after a bankruptcy. DC, however, has been wholly owned by Warner Bros for a very long time. That means Warner Bros is the only game in town to make a DC movie. If Warner Bros isn’t interested, it won’t happen, and if Warner Bros doesn’t understand what makes the property work, we get crap like Steel and Catwoman. Marvel, on the other hand, had the freedom to shop their properties around. Universal doesn’t have the right feel for Spider-Man? Take it to Sony. Paramount can’t give us a decent X-Men film? Bring them to Fox. Granted, this system turned out its share of clunkers too (let’s not forget that some genocidal maniac gave approval to not one, but TWO Ghost Rider movies starring Nicolas Cage), but their batting average over this period, beginning with Blade in 1998, is pretty damn good.
Things are different now, of course, since Marvel is owned by Disney. But by the time of that purchase in 2009, Marvel had already launched their own film unit to make movies with the characters other studios didn’t have – Iron Man and Incredible Hulk had both already come out and production was underway on Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger. By the time Marvel was a Disney property, they’d proven that they could make great films on their own, and Disney has wisely stayed the hell back and let them do it, the way they did when they bought Pixar in 2006. (Disney seems to have a three-year cycle for buying other companies, they got Lucasfilm in 2012. That means I have until 2015 to create a franchise with lucrative enough IPs that I can sell them to Disney and retire in luxury.)
This, more than anything else, is what Warner Bros needs to learn in regards to any DC Cinematic Universe. It’s not about copying Marvel’s storytelling or casting tricks or format. It’s about letting the people who know the characters do what they do best and getting out of their way while they do it.
Marvel needed to raise the profiles of their lesser-known characters or Avengers never would have been the hit that it was. DC has a different problem. Ten years ago, nobody who wasn’t a comic book fan knew who Iron Man or Thor were. DC’s problem is that everybody knows many of their characters – Wonder Woman, Aquaman – but they fundamentally misunderstand them. Aquaman is a punchline, he’s “the guy that talks to fish.” But as writers like Geoff Johns and Peter David have shown us, he can be so much more than that – a tragic monarch, a man who struggles with the responsibility of protecting two-thirds of the surface of the Earth… not to mention the fact that the physical changes necessary to allow a person to survive on the ocean’s floor would make them pretty strong and otherwise badass on land. Putting Aquaman in a movie doesn’t necessitate that you explain who he is, it necessitates you explain what makes him awesome.
So if I was in charge of the Justice League movie, this is what I would do.
First, start with this summer’s Man of Steel. The film is generating some positive buzz and I’m excited about it. I’d work in a small reference to a larger DC Universe – have some news report about Green Lantern in the background, or a page of the Daily Planet referencing the chaos in Gotham City that happened during The Dark Knight Rises. Nothing that would really influence Superman’s story, but enough to nod at the fact that he’s not – as Nick Fury said in the first Iron Man – the only superhero in the world.
Then, I’d work on putting together a phenomenal Justice League story. I wouldn’t start with the big bad that was in the previous script, Darkseid, for two reasons. First, Marvel is already using Thanos in their movies, and although Thanos was largely a Darkseid rip-off when he was created in the comics, movie fans won’t get that and will think it’s the Justice League that’s being derivative. Second, he’s too big for the first movie. Where do you build from there? You need a threat big enough to justify bringing all of these characters together, of course, but they shouldn’t go up against the biggest threat in the universe their first time out.
Next, get the recognizable aspects from the current DC films and put them together: Henry Cavill as Superman, build off the end of The Dark Knight Rises (as a spoiler consideration I won’t be more specific than that), and yes, I’d get Ryan Reynolds back as Green Lantern. That movie had problems, but his casting really wasn’t one of them. Then I’d add the characters that the public has heard of but doesn’t understand – Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash. Use this movie to showcase them the way Avengers suddenly turned everyone in America into fans of the Hulk for the first time in decades.
Don’t bother with everybody’s origin. It’s a convention of the superhero genre, true, but it’s often the least exciting part of it. You don’t need to know why John McClane became a cop to enjoy Die Hard, so why do I need to see Barry Allen get struck by lightning when I’ve already accepted a world with a man from Krypton and another guy with a magic ring? After Justice League, we’ll start spinning the other characters off into their individual movies – if necessary, work in the origins there. There’s no rule that says they have to take place after the Justice League movie just because they’re made in that order, although even then, I think a quick flashback would probably be more than sufficient in most cases.
Finally, make it clear that the Justice League isn’t the be-all and end-all of the DCU. Marvel can’t reference Spider-Man, the X-Men, or the Fantastic Four, because the rights to those characters are still tied up with other studios thanks to deals they made before they were purchased by Disney. DC doesn’t have that problem. Guillermo Del Toro is working on a movie featuring some of DC’s supernatural characters like Swamp Thing and Deadman – a Justice League movie could drop in a reference to them. Give us veiled hints or rumors about other Leaguers from the comics like Zatanna, Plastic Man, Firestorm… characters that have potential for their own films in the future, assuming of course that they’re done right. Even better – if you have some sort of huge battle for the end piece, the sort of thing that the public can’t help but notice (like the battle of New York in The Avengers, and it just shows how great that movie was structured that it keeps being the best analogy), give us glimpses of some of these other heroes fighting their own battles while the League takes on the Big Bad, whoever it happens to be.
And most importantly, make sure that the story is one that satisfies the fans but is broad enough to grab people who don’t know all of the characters. This is what Marvel has done brilliantly and what Warner Bros has prevented DC from doing for years. If you can pull off that trick, we’d have a movie that could launch not just one franchise, but an entire universe.
Of course, that’s what I would do. But what do I know? I’m just a guy who reads comics and watches movies. It’s not like I’ve got the pedigree of the man who gave the green light to Jonah Hex.
(If that line isn’t enough to convince people I should be running the show, nothing will be.)
Reel to Reel 