Disney hires Zack Snyder to helm a stand-alone Star Wars film. Three (3) reasons why it's great news.

Update: Hollywood Reporter just debunked the story.  Apparently you can't trust a blog post from the frigging New York Magazine!  And *this* is why I don't generally comment on breaking news!!!  Anyway, all the opinions below still stand.

Well, we now have a big clue as to what Disney has in store for the Star Wars universe and it's the best news I could have hoped for in this capacity.  Vulture is reporting that Zack Snyder has been hired by Disney to make a film that exists in the Star Wars universe aside from the promised "Episode VII" and the related ongoing 'episodes'.  It will apparently be a loose remake of The Seven Samurai which of course makes all-too much sense if you've ever seen The Hidden Fortress.  The secret hope that I had when Disney acquired Star Wars is that we'd see a whole host of interesting filmmakers try their hands in the Star Wars galaxy.  And this announcement seems to indicate that this is indeed the plan, with side-films in the Star Wars mythology helmed by the likes of well, Zack Snyder.  We now have the hope of any number of dynamic filmmakers trying their hand, be it obvious contenders like Joss Whedon or Brad Bird, or the old-guards of the film school generation like Spielberg, Scorsese, DePalma, or Coppola, or somewhat off-the-grid choices like M. Night Shyamalan, Tim Burton, or Kathryn Bigelow.  Depending on how often Disney is pumping these out and/or how reasonably budgeted the off-shoot films are going to be, we may end up seeing a Terrence Malick Star Wars movie after all!  

Why Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar snub is a moral outrage.

For a general discussion of the Oscar nominations, go HERE.

In the broad scheme of things, the only Oscar snub that qualifies as an outrage is the omission of Kathryn Bigelow for Best Director.  Not because it's a bigger slight than snubbing Ben Affleck or Samuel L. Jackson or the like, but because her omission is clearly the result of the kind of smear campaign against the film that has made politics next-to-impossible for the last decade or so.  It's the same kind of baseless campaign that prevented Susan Rice from being nominated for Secretary of State, it's the same mud-slinging that caused Obama to (wrongly) dismiss Van Jones early in his term, thus providing the GOP their first scalp.  And to add insult to injury, Bigelow has been deemed wholly responsible by those who wrongly believe that Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture, leaving screenwriter Mark Boal (who got a nomination) off the hook.  If this kind of stuff happens every time someone tries to make a challenging film for adults, then we can kiss such things goodbye from those who seek award recognition.  If this is a sign of things to come, where Hollywood becomes as frenzied and maddening as politics, then that is a troubling thing indeed.

Bad films have good ideas too. Or why Prometheus shouldn't get a token pass for its 'big ideas'.

Here's a newsflash: Most movies are inherently about 'something'.  Art films are about 'something'.  Studio prestige pictures/Oscar-bat are usually about 'something'.  And yes, even mega-budget studio franchise entries are usually about 'something'.  There is a notion running around the Internet that Ridley Scott's Prometheus should be graded on a curve because it technically has a few 'big ideas' in its screenplay.  And yes it does indeed play around with concepts involving the origin of human existence, the motives for our apparent creation, and what our beginnings say about what we have or have not evolved into.  We can argue about how well they are developed, how they mesh with the pulpier genre elements, or what extra depth the inevitable (and just announced) extended Blu Ray cut will provide this Fall.  But I didn't come here to re-critique Prometheus (review).  That it has ideas, be they big or even good, is not automatic justification for forgiving the film for its pretty glaring slights as an actual story/character narrative.  Moreover, the "But, it's actually about something!" defense is rooted in a long-standing critical falsehood, the concept that most movies are bereft of thought, ideology, and even basic ideas.  This is false.  And this falsehood is hurting how we look at movies in general.

2011 year-end wrap-up part I: The Underrated.

 This is the first of several year-end wrap essays detailing the year in film.  First up, here are ten films that qualify as 'underrated'.  Some of them are good, if not great films, that were unfairly maligned.  Others were mediocrities that nonetheless did not deserve the level of scorn which they received and/or had content that was worth pointing out and praising within the flawed final product.  As always, they are in alphabetical order, with one special mention at the end for the 'most underrated film of 2011'.  I'm sure anyone who has been reading me this year can guess which film that is...

Review: Sleeping Beauty (2011) has strong ideas in service of a lifeless film.

Sleeping Beauty
2011
105 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

It is not fair to writer/director Julia Leigh that I have such strong feelings about Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch.  (here, here, and here). It is not fair that I was so utterly annoyed by the critical community's absolute refusal to even acknowledge the rather unsubtle subtext and ideas that justified the fantastical elements.  It is perhaps ironic that within the same year we get two Emily Browning pictures that are sexually-charged and are knee deep in some rather pointed social commentary about how women are viewed in the culture.  Broadly speaking, Sleeping Beauty and Sucker Punch have many of the same ideas and opinions about the wholesale objectification of women.  Unfortunately, while Sucker Punch has fantastical environments and jaw-dropping action sequences to justify its existence as pop entertainment, Sleeping Beauty frankly has little to offer but its ideas.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Last word on Sucker Punch, as the director's cut comes to Blu Ray. It's what we claim we want, but we couldn't see past the surface.

Zach Snyder made perhaps the ultimate thesis project on the wholesale objectification of women in popular culture, especially in modern geek culture, and how women feel the need to use those tools of objectification in order to achieve some semblance of would-be independence.  Sucker Punch smashed open the absurd notions that girls wearing short-shorts and arbitrarily doing violence is somehow empowering, when in fact those images are almost designed to be titillating to the male gaze.  It was (and is even more so in the longer, more fluid director's cut which restores the original Jon Hamm finale) a sad, mournful, borderline hopeless saga of five young girls who are imprisoned against their will, exploited for their sexuality, and then forced to use the tools of that exploitation in a feeble attempt to escape the clutches of male oppression.  It is about exploitation and it is about titillation.  Yet our nation's critics and audience members couldn't see past the very tools that Snyder was mocking (the mini-skirts, the pigtails, the larger-than-life CGI-infused action) to see what was a borderline art film.

Review: Hanna

Hanna
2011
110 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Joe Wright's Hanna is so detached and so mechanically cold, that the viewer has no real stake in the narrative. It features, at its core, two opposing forces, both of questionable morality, who pursue each other all over Europe with a reckless and relentless abandon. If you have any sympathy at all, it won't be for the young assassin or her ice-cold nemesis, but rather for all the innocent saps who get killed along the way. The picture may be a stylish reworking of "Little Red Riding Hood", but at its core it is detached, resulting in a lack of investment. Despite the arty pretense and polished cast, Joe Wright's action debut is almost as hollow and junky as the kind of low-IQ mainstream thriller that it attempts to surpass.

Weekend Box Office (04/03/11): Hop on top with $37m, Source Code opens to $14m, Insidious open to $13m, Sucker Punch crashes (-68%) in weekend two.

As expected, Universal scored another solid animated win for the weekend, as Hop opened with $37.5 million. This is a solid win for the occasionally beleaguered Universal, as the live-action/animation Easter comedy cost just $63 million. The film came from Illumination, the same company that gave Universal Despicable Me last summer, and the marketing department made sure everybody knew it. The sell was all about the concept, as Universal didn't even bother hyping the celebrity voices (Russell Brand, Hugh Laurie, etc), instead selling the various cuddly characters (the Easter bunny himself, the Pink Berets, evil chickens, etc). No one in their right mind was expecting an Ice Age 2 ($67 million) or Despicable Me ($56 million) level opening, but the moderately-low budget animated film delivered right in its comfort zone.

More thoughts in defense of Sucker Punch.

The following is a re-edited form of a couple mini-essays that I wrote elsewhere over the weekend. I figured my readers might care to read them here as well. The actual review is here.

It is more than a little ironic that Sucker Punch is taking a critical beating for merely being an example of the very things that it's actually most critical of. At heart, it's a critical deconstruction of the casual sexualization of young women in pop culture, the inexplicable acceptance of institutional sexism and lechery, and whether or not images of empowered females on film can be disassociated with the sexual undercurrent of those same images. It’s an angry feminist screed, and a genuinely disconcerting little myth, without the ‘it’s all okay’ feel-good elements that would have made it more palatable to mainstream audiences. I wish it were a better movie overall (the plot is needlessly confusing in the first 25 minutes, and the characters are more game-board pieces than actual characters), but this is genuinely challenging movie-making and should be acknowledged as such.

Weekend Box Office (03/27/11): Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2 knocks out Sucker Punch.

In a somewhat surprising result, the heavily-advertised action-fantasy Sucker Punch (teaser/trailer) did not top the box office this weekend, losing a close race to the lower-profile but popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid franchise. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules was number one for the weekend, with $24.4 million. The second film in the series comes just over a year after 20th Century Fox released the premiere entry (titled simply Diary of a Wimpy Kid) took the number-two slot with $22 million. With no massive Alice in Wonderland standing it is way this time, the further adventures of Zachery Gordon promoted itself to the top slot. The original film cost $15 million and ended up with $65 million in domestic sales. The sequel cost just $21 million and will theoretically end up in the same $60-70 million ballpark. This is certainly not a strong overseas franchise (the original grossed just $11 million in foreign markets), but 20th Century Fox has no reason not to keep pumping out adaptations of the long-running (five books so far) kid-lit series as long as the price is right. So, coming March 2012: Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw.

Review: Sucker Punch (2011)

Sucker Punch
2011
115 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Zach Snyder's Sucker Punch is an experiment and a question: Is is possible to make a female-driven action fantasy without falling prey to certain misogynistic messaging? Just as its difficult to make an anti-war film because war plays out as exciting onscreen, there is a level of titillation that comes from the very idea of watching attractive women taking up arms against various foes. One could argue that the same applies to any number of male action pictures, as I don't think too many heterosexual women or homosexual men minded watching Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, or Matt Damon kicking butt in their respective action franchises. But rather than duck the subject, Snyder dives right into the muck, offering an examination of the voyeuristic nature of our mainstream action fantasies, and how those films view women. It's a severely flawed picture, and thanks to the MPAA (it took seven tries to get a PG-13), somewhat artistically compromised, but there is much more going on underneath the surface that the surface-level razzle-dazzle. Judging by the critics thus far who apparently can't see past the special effects, it would appear that the tagline 'you will be unprepared' is all-too accurate.

MPAA thinks a young women being raped is more appropriate than a young woman initiating and enjoy sex?

There's a choice quote in this Emily Browning interview over at Nylon Magazine, which was reported by Cinemablend that merits a mention. Its implications are kinda shocking,. The crux is the discussion of changes that Zach Snyder had to make in order to ensure Sucker Punch (review) would win a PG-13 from the MPAA, which apparently took seven tries. I'll let Browning lay it out:

"I had a very tame and mild love scene with Jon Hamm. It was like heavy breathing and making out. It was hardly a sex scene... I think that it's great for this young girl to actually take control of her own sexuality. Well, the MPAA doesn't like that. They don't think a girl should ever be in control of her own sexuality because they're from the Stone Age. I don't know what the f**k is going on and I will openly criticize it, happily. So essentially, they got Zack to edit the scene and make it look less like she's into it. And Zack said he edited it down to the point where it looked like he was taking advantage of her. That's the only way he could get a PG-13 (rating) and he said, 'I don't want to send that message.' So they cut the scene!"

I've often defended the MPAA when films are given harsher ratings for breaking clearly-outlined rules (if you have more than one 'f-word', you get an R, period). I've long argued that the real enemy is the major theater chains that won't screen NC-17 or unrated movies, as well as the major networks and newspapers that won't carry advertising for them. But this is a clear cut case of the MPAA showing serious puritanical colors. So, just to clarify, it appears that the MPAA had serious issues with the idea that Emily Browning having consensual sexual relations with Jon Hamm, but they had less of an issue with the idea that Jon Hamm was taking advantage of, perhaps even raping Emily Browning. Let me repeat that one more time: the MPAA was more comfortable with the idea of a young woman raped by an older man than with the idea of a young woman making her own choices in regards to her own sexuality. I don't even need to further editorialize here.

Scott Mendelson

Weekend Box Office (03/20/11): Adult genre fare cannibalize each other as Limitless, Lincoln Lawyer and Paul all open 'okay'.

I often complain about the lack of big-studio adult genre pictures while pointing out that the few such entries generally do well due to the paucity of such things in the marketplace. Alas, this weekend was a comparative embarrassment of riches, with three genre pictures, all starring adults, two rated R, and none costing more than $40 million. Ironically, all three films did moderately well, but at least two of them would likely have done even better without direct demo competition. The number one film of the weekend was Limitless. The Bradley Cooper/Robert De Niro thriller grossed $19 million, and proving a major win for the struggling Relatively. This was a real test of Bradley Cooper's star power and he delivered. The film benefited from an easily-explained high-concept (a pill that makes you the smartest man on Earth). The film played 52% female and 60% over-25. Since the relatively-well reviewed picture cost just $27 million, this is an easy win for everyone involved.

Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch gets a full trailer.

This is obviously a longer, more plot-specific trailer. There's nothing wrong with what's here (more Scott Glenn is a plus), but the original teaser was more enticing, with snazzier music that created an oddly haunting bit of marketing. Still, this is a visually dazzling bit of business. What's nice about the campaigns is the somewhat 'no big deal' nature. In that, I mean that the idea of five young women embarking on an epic and violent adventure is not seen as anything revolutionary, and the women in question are not presented as sexual objects per-se. It's a small thing, but its appreciated. Anyway, this one looks like just the kind of movie that IMAX was made for, so that's the ideal way to see it on March 25th.

Scott Mendelson