Miramax: A journey through Netflix
One of the things I most thoroughly regret is not having the concentration and energy to finish the PhD I started on authorship in contemporary Hollywood. But if those years spent researching gave me anything besides quite a big DVD collection, it’s a painfully narrow and useless-in-almost-every-context-imaginable knowledge of Miramax Films.
So imagine my joy when Netflix UK launched with a healthy library of Miramax movies, providing just such a context. Here, for no other reason that it’s possible and the information exists in my brain, is a brief history of Miramax using films available on Netflix as illustration. The films mentioned in bold and in lists of italics are available to stream now. Sign up for a 30 day trial and watch them all if you want. Or don’t, because it’s not like they’re paying me.
The Beginning
Miramax was launched by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the only studio bosses in history to have been played by puppet villains, in 1979. It was a lunatic time for the film business, with the arrival of home video combined with the rise of the blockbuster changing the industry at a crazy pace.
“Perhaps the biggest boom that has ever occurred in the independent sector was the explosion of home video in the early 80s” says Ira Deutchman, who really should know as he was president of New Line spin-off Fine Line Features. “It was a voracious market for anything with sprocket holes, and even the major studios couldn’t provide enough product to satisfy the demand.”
In the bubble that video created several small studios thrived. It was relatively easy to catch a break and make a few deals, but harder as the bubble contracted to maintain success. This is where Miramax excelled – at choosing films that played to traditional non-mainstream audiences (people have broken their minds defining these audiences, but they’re basically referring to arthouse/prestige movies, and exploitation/genre flicks) and then marketing these films aggressively by playing up sex, violence and controversy.
Jon Pierson, an industry middle-man who helped sell the Weinsteins sex drama Working Girls in 1987 (available on US Netflix) said they had “an instinctual grasp of how to walk the tightrope between sensationalistic come-on and classy intellectual tease,” which sums up campaigns run for Scandal, sex, lies and videotape, Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down! and many others during this time.
Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover is a great example of a film sexed to success. It is full of gore and knobbing, but it’s also dark and difficult to watch, with Greenaway’s deliberately stiff theatrical style intellectualising the nudity and making it all but impossible to have a wank to. It was one of several Miramax movies handed an ‘X’ rating on release – the studio mustered a tabloid-like campaign in the courts challenged the very basis of the ‘X’, calling it “the property” of pornographers, thus sending out a clear message that their film was classy while also advertising the fact it contains lots of tits. (Eventually this pressure helped force the introduction of the MPAA’s NC-17 rating).
The Thin Blue Line is a superb piece of documentary filmmaking by Errol Morris which analyses the roadside murder of a Texan police officer through interview testimony. It’s so finely constructed that it needs no voice-over, yet was powerful enough to overturn a wrongful conviction. Naturally, the Weinsteins made it look like a deadline-driven Hollywood thriller.
Harvey Weinstein famously described Miramax as “the house that Quentin built,” and in that sense Reservoir Dogs is the studio’s most important early film. It finished the job sex, lies started, putting Sundance on the map and giving shape and character to US indie filmmaking for a decade (even if that shape was invariably ‘like Tarantino, but slightly worse.’)
See also: Sirens (1993)
Welcome to the Mouse House
In April 1993 Miramax was bought by Disney, which sounds fucking mental. But it made sense. The industry-wide trend for making mega-budget blockbusters with global appeal and merchandise-friendly elements meant the one market huge media conglomerates like Disney couldn’t reach with their giant evil money-claws was the ‘specialist’ sector. It was like putting a spear at the end of a missile – Miramax knew how to seduce those lucrative but small audiences who hated the crassness and obviousness of mainstream Hollywood and, besides, they really needed the money.
Pulp Fiction was the result of the new financial power the buy-out gave them. Now able to produce their own films, not just purchase them for distribution, the Weinsteins agreed to finance Tarantino’s movie for $8 million just two months after joining Disney. They were now a true mini-major studio, and a crazy successful one – Pulp Fiction is the best film Miramax made, and it earned over $200 million at the box office.
At the same time the Weinsteins realised that with a corporate hand up their arse it was a good idea to look as indie as possible, which is often given as the reason for Miramax buying Clerks at Cannes in 1994. It was even described as “shrewd” by director Kevin Smith: “Buying this scrappy black and white American independent film shot on the ultra-cheap was a great PR move for them,” he said, laudably not saying “dick” even once.
See also: The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill And Came Down A Mountain (1995), Sling Blade (1996), Swingers (1996), Emma (1996)
Another Dimension
As I’ve said, non-mainstream movies split very generally into two groups: arthouse and exploitation (the common factor being they both promise the occasional flash of skin). This is reflected in the fact that Miramax’s biggest rival was New Line Cinema, who would become the powerhouse behind The Lord Of The Rings but whose foundations were laid with a Nightmare On Elm Street, Evil Dead and Critters.
To compete with New Line Miramax set up a horror label called Dimension films, primarily run by Bob, which rose to prominence when it released Wes Craven’s Scream in 1996. Scream was a reinvention of the slasher movie that proved just as influential in its sphere as Miramax and Tarantino were in theirs (films as recent and terrible as Final Destination 5 can be blamed on Scream). And just as many of Miramax’s films pondered the institutions and industrial shifts behind Miramax’s success (sex, lies and videotape and home entertainment, Cinema Paradiso and arthouse theatres) so Scream was a self-aware horror for the encyclopaedic video-age viewer.
Scream’s smart mouth is generally credited to screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who also wrote The Faculty which was directed for Dimension in 1998 by Robert Rodriguez. It’s like a fun, good-looking version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers without Donald Sutherland’s existentially terrifying maw, and must be considered Important as it’s probably the best Famke Janssen has looked on screen.
Because the exploitation business has no shame, when the Scream franchise ran dry it was Dimension itself that made a further giant pile of money from ripping it to pieces with the Scary Movie series, “Scary Movie” being the working title for Craven’s original film.
And mixed in with all the wry demographic-humping slashers was the occasional bit of class, like Alejandro Amenábar’s period ghost story The Others, which is excellent even before Eric Sykes turns up.
See also: The Prophecy (1995), Scary Movie, 2,3,4 (2000), Dracula 2001 (2000), The Others (2001), Equilibrium (2002), The Amityville Horror (2005), Sin City (2005), Death Proof (2007), Planet Terror (2007)
Chasing Oscar
Miramax’s success altered the landscape around them. Other big studios launched or acquired ‘boutique’ side operations to compete (New Line at Warner, Sony Classics, Fox Searchlight) and indie films became big business. Budgets bloated, and Miramax’s output changed.
The company still made small, sharp movies. Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy is a good example – it’s his best film, and a look at the funny but disciplined filmmaker he might have been. Also on Netflix are heavy drama In The Bedroom, which did us all the favour of making Tom Wilkinson a name in Hollywood, and searing Brazilian import City Of God, which proved the Miramax name was still on thrillingly good films as late as 2002.
But after the success of The English Patient at the Academy Awards in 1997, Miramax and Harvey Weinstein’s focus shifted to prestige films. Films with classy themes, with the names of Booker Prize-winning authors written on the poster in fucking big letters, set in the desert or by the sea or some other bastard poignant place. Films which win Oscars.
It was a sensible switch of strategy. In the arthouse arms race winning the Oscar is the final stamp of quality. And, like dragging the MPAA to court because you’re ‘shocked’ your Spanish movie about a BDSM-fetish rapist got an ‘X’, it’s also great free publicity. The problem was that as time went on Miramax’s award-chasing films got costlier and drearier, from The Cider House Rules at $24 million in 1999 to Chicago’s $45 million in 2002 and Cinderella Man’s $85 million in 2005. Miramax was no longer independent, specialist, or very interesting.
See also: The Castle (1997), Wings Of The Dove (1997), Rounders (1998), Chocolat (2000), Serendipity (2001), Kate & Leopold (2001), The Son’s Room (2001), Infernal Affairs (2002), Frida (2002), Hero (2002), The Station Agent (2003), Kill Bill 1 & 2 (2003/4), Finding Neverland (2004), Jersey Girl (2004), Kinky Boots (2005), The Brothers Grimm (2005)
The Mouse That Roared
With Miramax clearly not fulfilling the function for which is was originally intended, the Weinsteins’ contracts were wound down and they were effectively ousted by Disney execs in October 2005.
The company continued for a few years following their departure and made some excellent films. Maudlin noir drama Hollywoodland did the seemingly impossible and made Ben Affleck look good again after the tabloid ruin of Bennifer and Gigli, and then his directorial debut Gone Baby Gone made him look positively fucking golden. The Lookout was a tough thriller from Out Of Sight scripter Scott Frank which caught Joseph Gordon-Levitt on his rise to being the coolest guy in Hollywood, and There Will Be Blood is a raging geyser of thick, blinding, black fury. (It’s really good).
See also: The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas (2008) but watch out because it’s really sad.
The Weinstein Company
The Weinsteins took Dimension with them (I’ve not separated the pre- and post-divorce films in the list above) and set out to make more Academy-friendly films of tedious quality with slightly less money. Evidence on Netflix includes Miss Potter from 2006, and Hannibal Rising from 2007 (the Weinsteins having not learned Dino De Laurentiis’ lesson that, if you didn’t make Silence Of The Lambs, it’s over.)
What makes tracing the path of Miramax and the Weinsteins on Netflix particularly interesting, and the reason I decided to write this post, is that tucked away in the documentary category is Barry Avrich’s Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Story. It takes in the same basic story as I’ve just laid out, without as much swearing and with visual reference to Peter Biskind’s extra-terrestrial moustache. It puffs up and re-uses a lot of old Weinstein stories – He shouts! He edits! He went to see 400 Blows by accident! – but they are good stories.
See also: Derailed (2006), The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), Outlander (2008) but actually, don’t.
Afterword
The documentary’s one failing is reflected on Netflix: it leaves the story too soon. Smarming on the failure of Miss Potter, it all but condemns Harvey as an Oscar has-been just months before he owned the 2011 awards with The King’s Speech.
Tellingly, he looks set to do the same again this year with The Artist, a film made for just $15 million which features more charm, style and brains than anything he’d made at Miramax this century. And if not The Artist then maybe his other frontrunners My Week With Marilyn or The Iron Lady – Harvey Weinstein, without Disney’s money and apparently with a sharper sense of hunger, is on a legitimate roll. I’m glad to see him back.
David Lynch’s Best Forgotten Characters
When I saw that Time Out had done a list of the best 50 Lynch characters my reaction was something like, “Jesus, 50? That’s click-bait madness”. Then I took a look at the list and realised that not only were the 50 choices all excellent, but that there were plenty of other brilliant characters missing.
What it really brought home is how exceptionally good Lynch is at making even the smallest part memorable. He is a master of the odd behavioural tic, the unexpected casting, the bizarre frozen moment of heightened significance. And as a small tribute here are my favourite seven Lynch characters that embody that skill, and weren’t included in Time Out’s 50.
1. Guild Navigator – Dune, 1984
Dune is a brilliant mess of ideas Lynch clearly fell in love with and a commercial mode of filmmaking he couldn’t get a grip on. It’s a dichotomy that gave us the unspeakable. But it also gave us this – a giant spice-breathing space slug in a big jar capable of folding space with its mind.
2. Major Briggs – Twin Peaks, 1989
The big recurring cast of Twin Peaks presented Lynch with opportunities for all kinds of oddballism. My favourite – Major Garland Briggs, the father of petulant juvenile Bobby whose stiff bearing becomes rigid military poetry when he’s exposed to the euphoria of the White Lodge.
3. Piter De Vries – Dune, 1984
Lynch takes Frank Herbert’s notion of Mentats as human computers and makes them awesomely compelling mind-junkies by inventing a weird chant and giving them huge fucking eyebrows. “It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed. The lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.”
4. Agent Phillip Jeffries – Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, 1993
This is the best moment in Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me. I have no explanation for it, except that David Bowie’s Phillip Jeffries seems to have been taken by the forces of the Black Lodge. But I love the stunt with the security camera – removing our faith in the recorded image at a stroke – and the spiralling urgency which Bowie’s appearance provokes.
5. Rebekah Del Rio – Mulholland Dr, 2001
Del Rio’s short appearance in the Club Silencio section of Mulholland Dr is one of the rare things I’m allowed to call ‘stunning’ without sounding like a hyberbolic dick. It’s crammed with ideas: she’s introduced as “La Llorona de Los Angeles,” a modern take on a Mexican folk tale of a ghostly weeping woman and the latest in a long line of women singing on stage in Lynch’s work (Lady In The Radiator, Isabella Rossellini, Julee Cruise). Her performance is an echo of Dean Stockwell’s sleazy torchlit strut in Blue Velvet – where he mimed to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, she pours herself into a Spanish translation of Orbison’s Crying. And of course, she’s found to be miming too, the resounding emotional power of her voice mocking the audience’s investment as she collapses to the floor and underpinning the film’s fractured take on what is and isn’t real.
6. The Yellow Man – Blue Velvet, 1986
The weirdness of Blue Velvet’s small town suburbia reaches its apotheosis when Jeffrey discovers the still-warm murder scene inside Dorothy’s apartment, featuring Dorothy’s dead husband and, standing impossibly next to him, The Yellow Man. He’s neither alive nor obviously dead, lobotomised on the spot and – along with the whining, broken television – giving us the sense that Jeffrey is interrupting something active and ongoing.
7. Audrey Horne’s fucking shoes – Twin Peaks, 1989
Which speak entirely for themselves.
Let’s (re)do this Thing
I watched the prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing today, which is also called The Thing because it’s not really a prequel but a remake with incidental changes.
It adds very little to what Carpenter’s film had already laid down. In fact it gets some of it wrong. What Carpenter understood – or at least didn’t have the budget to explore – is that his film didn’t need anything more than a shapeshifting alien and loads of fucking ice. The film is very tightly wound around key concepts – intense paranoia heightened by Arctic isolation, our heroes surrounded by ice and only able to kill the enemy with fire. The alien’s ship is unexplored, its consciousness a blank. Even the exact process by which it transforms into and disposes of bodies is left to our imagination.
The remake leads us into areas best left unexplored. It gives us a clumsy brace of horror cliches – a long autopsy-table look at the alien’s body, then a microscope-lens view of its spiky, evil cells replicating the shit out of a human host. There’s some power to the half-formed man uncovered in its stomach (is he half-ingested, or half-formed?) but effective as it might be, I don’t want to see details. In Carpenter’s movie, the discovery of a two-headed corpse was heavy with monstrous meaning. It’s a beautiful symbol of shattered identity, fallen man, agony – was this a human host resisting the parasite? A creature tortured by its own mutated existence? Oh, no – the new film tells us it was two people whose heads were pressed together by a fucking alien. And for fuck’s sake, don’t set the climax down some fucking air vent on the alien ship as its engines are powering up. Jesus.
All of which is stupid, because remaking The Thing is easy. Don’t believe me? Here are three ways of doing it that are way better than last year’s average attempt.
This is a music video made for a track called ‘Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free’ by some men from France called Zombie Zombie, which sort-of remakes The Thing with GI Joes.
Here’s a more direct remake set in the world of Pingu, which for reasons unexplained is not called Thingu.
And here’s an incredible piece of work which recuts the film as a musical, set from the perspective of the alien and sung in the style of Frank Sinatra.
That wasn’t so fucking hard, was it?
30 Days Of Netflix
Netflix has launched in the UK with a catalogue of streaming movies and TV shows. On the surface that catalogue isn’t massively exciting, what with it not being particularly big or filled with a great amount of very new things.
But then most new things are shit, and quality doesn’t need company. For whatever reason, the current Netflix collection has plenty of ‘90s US independent movies (well, Miramax) and a few choice picks from United Artists and ‘70s New Hollywood.
The service is currently offering a 30 day free trial, so here are 30 things that I would describe as “amazing” without too much thought. That’s one a day! If you’re useless enough not to have seen any of them so far.
Day 1: The 39 Steps (1935) 
Alfred Hitchcock’s best British film, about a man who goes on the run even though he’s innocent because of a girl and a train and a man who remembers things and oh, it’s amazing and you should just watch it.
Day 2: The Ipcress File (1965)
Doggedly British and bureaucratic spy drama with Michael Caine as the obstinate Harry Palmer. It’s designed as a sort of anti-Bond (producer Saltzman and composer Barry worked on both), with a rain mac and getting beaten up instead of Aston Martins and sex with booby ladies from the sea.
Day 3: Network (1976)
A raging media satire which, sadly for everyone who isn’t a fucking moron, is more pertinent and powerful than ever. Peter Finch is the unstable newroom anchor whose dignity is stripped away as his network (a pre-Fox fourth major) abandons integrity for sensation.
Day 4: Midnight Cowboy (1969)
In the ‘60s and ‘70s United Artists had a near-miraculous run of fresh, compelling and important films that showed the kind of artistry possible after the fall of the studio system. Schlesinger’s sleazy-but-innocent tale of loneliness in New York is among the very best. And makes you want to hug Dustin Hoffman, even though he’s probably covered in piss.
Day 5: The Conversation (1974)
This is the best movie on the list, and maybe just the best movie. Between knocking out Godfathers, Francis Ford Coppola made this beautifully cold Watergate-era thriller about surveillance and paranoia. Gene Hackman is extraordinary, and Walter Murch’s combination of sound design and editing is masterful. Plus, like every film contending for the title of ‘best ever’, it features John Cazale.
Day 6: Rumble In The Bronx (1997)
Jackie Chan’s best movie, in which he beats up 58,003 guys, jumps off a bridge that’s three miles high, and saves all the orphans in America.
Day 7: Firefly (2002)
If you’ve been on the internet longer than 15 minutes there’s a very good chance you’ll know that it’s very angry about Firefly not being alive any more. And with good reason – Joss Whedon’s Western-in-space was warm and full of adventure, and had a cast of characters that you wanted desperately to be your friend, even when they were cancelled.
Day 8: Clerks (1994)
One of the first movies acquired by Miramax after they’d been bought by Disney, apparently because its dialogue-heavy style and black and white photography bolstered their indie credentials. Ironically the rest of Kevin Smith’s career showed he was just trying to make a shit ‘80s comedy but didn’t have the budget. Nevertheless, this remains excellent.
Day 9: Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
Magic black comedy with John Cusack as the coolest man on earth who happens to be a hit man going home for the first time in ten years to a small town of angst, regret, and all those other things you feel when you hit 30.
Day 10: Swingers (1996)
An impossibly young and thin Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn play NHL 93 (the greatest hockey game of all time) and are painfully useless with women. Funny and full of a repressed yearning, which is the best kind.
Day 11: City Of God (2002)
Intense drama set in the favelas of Rio De Janeiro that feeds off the energy of its young cast to be by turns soaringly exuberant and gut-punch brutal.
Day 12: The Lives Of Others (2006)
Stasi drama set in East Germany in the 1980s which explores power and corruption under totalitarian rule. Also the lead character owns an incredible anorak. Take that, capitalism!
Day 13: Das Boot (1981)
Don’t be put off by the fact this German TV series is 16 hours long and subtitled and set entirely on a dirty metal box full of filthy Nazis. It’s amazing!
Day 14: Videodrome (1983)
An extraordinary hybrid of video-nasty splatter horror with a sharp intellectual (if metaphysical) analysis of the impact this kind of new media experience has on audiences. So – expect to see really fucking disgusting things happening, and then an explanation of why, that you won’t understand. Fucking brilliant.
Day 15: Blue Velvet (1986)
The counterpart to David Lynch’s disastrous, dead interesting Dune, which is also on Netflix if you’ve forgotten what Kyle McClachlan looks like wearing special water trousers and pretending to ride a giant worm. Both films were made for Dino De Laurentiis, Blue Velvet coming after the failure of Dune and giving Lynch the space to find a recognisable voice – one that deals with obsession, dream sensuality and the darkness of ordinariness.
Day 16: Dazed And Confused (1993)
Suburban high-school nostalgia done excellently – avoiding sentimentality, not falling back on trite life lessons, and featuring Ben Affleck as an idiot bully with a giant paddle.
Day 17: Annie Hall (1977)
Woody Allen’s best film is a playful love letter to three things: New York, Diane Keaton, and European intellectualism. If nothing else it’s worth watching for a dazzling opening ten minutes during which Allen seems not to have simply broken through the fourth wall, but taken it down and made it into a jaunty hat.
Day 18: The Lookout (2007)
Tidy crime drama with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a high school athlete-turned-amnesiac pulled into a bad crowd. Director Scott Frank is a man familiar with the angled set-ups of Elmore Leonard having adapted Get Shorty and Out Of Sight, and Isla Fisher’s character is inexplicably called Luvlee Lemons.
Day 19: Twin Peaks (1989)
The first seven episodes of David Lynch’s murder-in-a-small-town serial represent the best of television. Kyle McClachlan is FBI Agent Dale Cooper, a Trump Card of a man slowly peeling away layers of suburban normality to reveal startling, malicious evil. It is a world of its own.
Day 20: Brief Encounter (1945)
A beautifully restrained romance of two married people who fall in love in glimpses and snatched moments on a train station. It’s careful and touching, and made all the more painful for the fact that Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard are so repressed it seems at one point like their heads might actually pop off.
Day 21: Some Like It Hot (1959)
Routinely listed as the best American comedy of all time (writer-producer-director Billy Wilder apparently not content with making some of the best war films and crime thrillers). Essentially comes down to Marilyn Monroe looking incredible, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis dressing up as women, and it all being brilliant.
Day 22: In The Heat Of The Night (1967)
A backdrop of Hollywood on the verge of revolution and the civil right movement combine to give this a murder investigation drama a charged atmosphere, thick with Southern state racism, the ugliness of discrimination and, somewhere in Sidney Poitier’s impossible dignity, a kind of hope.
Day 23: The Thin Blue Line (1988)
Back when Miramax was a real independent they had a capacity for marketing controversial issue movies like this meticulous Errol Morris documentary into cosmopolitan causes. The insistent case for justice made in the film had a direct impact on the questionable murder conviction it investigates.
Day 24: Fargo (1996)
Typically perfect Coens – a screwball thriller with an outlook of general absurdism punctuated with moments of great and sudden emotional heft and tragedy. Mostly, though, it’s really funny, with Frances McDormand a refreshingly female, refreshingly pregnant hero.
Day 25: The Bicycle Thief (1948)
Post-war Italian masterpiece of social injustice and making you feel really fucking sad. Antonio is the would-be-worker who has his bike stolen and trawls Rome with his young son looking for it. At one point it rains really heavily.
Day 26: Primer (2004)
There’s a diagram “explaining” the plot of Primer online which looks like if I tried to illustrate the theory of relativity using my teeth. So don’t worry too much about the story details of this micro-budget time-shifting drama, but enjoy the imagination, the low-key style and the character conflicts the sci-fi premise is designed to draw out.
Day 27: There Will Be Blood (2007)
An unconventional monster of manners and brutality that demands to be viewed on its own terms. Which is fine, because its terms mostly consist of looking beautiful and having Daniel Day Lewis storm around like a furious force of nature who forgot to have his nap.
Day 28: Capricorn One (1977)
Another ‘70s conspiracy thriller, this time involving a botched mission to Mars, a faked landing, and a murderous cover-up. Damn you, Nixon! And you, space guys!
Day 29: Internal Affairs (1990)
Bad Richard Gere is an order of magnitude better than good Richard Gere, and in this bent cop thriller he’s an utter bastard, reacting to Andy Garcia’s internal affairs investigation by putting his cock in all the women and shooting all the men he can.
Day 30: Gone Baby Gone (2007)
It was a toss-up between this, Requiem For A Dream and Demetri Martin’s stand-up special for the last slot, but this wins because any movie that salvages the career of Ben Affleck following the awful E! Bastard roundabout it had become is pretty special, and unlike Requiem it won’t leave you wanting to die in a puddle.
The Fantastic Four: A Defence Of Sorts
Last year I was asked to write a contrarian defence of the widely derided 2005 Fantastic Four movie. I re-watched the film to make sure I could do so without exploding into a smokey cloud of lies and devil’s advocacy, then I wrote this, a not-entirely-disingenuous list of reasons the film is better than most people suggest (with a title that oversells just a little).
Is it just me… or is The Fantastic Four the lost superhero gem of our generation?
Poor old Fantastic Four. Of all the sub-Spidey comic book adaptations we’ve been bombarded with since X-Men made spandex shorts cool again in 2000 – The Punisher, Ghost Rider, even Ben Affleck’s bastard-chinned Daredevil – the Fantastic Four movie of 2005 has been the most roundly jeered and derided. But six years on, I contend that not only is it a better film than you think it is, it’s also a better film than it thinks it is. Hell, it might even be a better film than I think it is, and I’ve been thinking about it for ages.
The complaints go something like this: Fantastic Four is witlessly optimistic and lacks the depth and darkness of the best comic adaptations, while Ioan Gruffudd is a manicured bag of warm air as Mister Fantastic and Michael Chiklis is a vocoder away from Mr Blobby as a sad-faced Thing. Jessica Alba is best when she’s invisible, Chris Evans’ nuclear smirk is unbearable, and the science underpinning the story sounds like the ravings of a physics teacher in the grip of a full-on, wizard’s-hat-in-the-classroom nervous breakdown.
It’s hard to deny any of this. And certainly, the stats seem to back it up. Fantastic Four has a 5.7 rating on IMBD, a 27% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 40 on Metacritic. All sad numbers. And while the film scored a worldwide box-office gross of $330 million, exactly $330 million more than the previous Fantastic Four film from 1994, that’s only because the 1994 film was made as a copyright-extending throwaway (unknown to the cast and crew) which never received a release of any kind.
But let’s remember this: everyone on the internet is wrong about everything. And, more importantly, while all those criticisms of the film hold true, they’re not necessarily mistakes. Yes the film is upbeat and limits the techno-jabber to some balls about cosmic rays. But the Fantastic Four has always skewed towards a younger audience, and the film simply ditches cheap mood photography and paper-thin character complexes synonymous with the Wolverines and Batmans of the world for a broader appeal that’s faithful to the source material. And anyone who claims this isn’t a kids’ movie, based on a kid’s comic book, should consider the fact that the hero is called Mr Fantastic (a man so insipid Gruffudd did a fine job just making him slightly boring) and his metal-skinned nemesis carries the equally subtle name of Victor Von Doom. And he turned out bad?
Not that the film is just a big, bright nothing. It’s also far funnier than it’s given credit for. With his brutal turn in The Shield now a fading memory it’s easier to appreciate the comedy of Chiklis’ Thing – fat rock fingers thudding concrete while grasping for his wife’s discarded wedding ring (a scene so devoid of real emotion it can only be aiming for laughs) or turning to a crowd of terrified kids and roaring a rushed and feeble “Don’t do drugs!”
An even bigger factor is that at the time Evans was hard to take as the cocksure Human Torch – too young, too handsome, too on fire. But six years on he has the track record to back up the swagger, and we know there’s more to him than sparkly eyes and one-liners (now the funniest part of his reply to a nurse shocked at his temperature isn’t the initial zinger – “You’re hot” “Thanks, so are you” – but the follow-up “…and I’m not afraid to cry”). Like a fine wine confusingly made from a small muscled actor from Massachusetts, the film is better with age.
It’s not dark or clever or menacing. But then it’s really not trying to be. It’s funny, it’s unpretentious, and it’s over in a just-right 90 minutes. It’s also better than you remember. And by God, it’s better than Daredevil.
This piece originally appeared in Total Film issue 181.
Films With Friends: Five Favourites Of 2011
Being a champion of pluralism and also tired of my own wittering, I asked five people whose writing I enjoy and whose opinions I don’t automatically disregard to contribute a few words on the best film they’d seen in 2011. Crucially these are all people who know me well enough to feel emotionally obliged to say yes. Here they are presented in the order they arrived in my inbox.
Kill List – Tim Clark
“A tricky recommendation, partly because it features a scene so startlingly violent that I actually whispered ‘bloody hell’ at a frequency only dogs can hear, but also because the less you know going in, the more you’re likely to get out. Kill List’s triumph, I think, is that it splices quintessentially British, well worn genres – suburban kitchen sink drama, gangster geezers, and something else I’d rather not mention – and still manages to come out feeling startlingly fresh. Credit for that is split equally between the superbly natural performances, and sophomore director Ben Wheatley’s ability to find evil – the real, banal kind – lurking around every corner of satellite town England. In fact he manages off kilter mood so well I want to call it Kubrickian, but fear coming across as quite the cunt on Nathan’s blog.”
Tim is editor-in-chief of the Games Division at Future Publishing, and runs the carefully spelt Arsenal blog arse2mouse
Never Let Me Go – Sarah Ditum
“Love, duffel coats and British boarding school life as dystopia – Never Let Me Go was always liable to take (and break) my heart. Even Keira Knightley was good, her chilly clipped performance for once making perfect sense rather than feeling like a dressed-up stick bobbing about on screen. Mulligan and Garfield were perfect, as the film unfussily layered up the anguish of its protagonists’ fates (bumper crop sadface) to an ending of terrible, tragic complicity. It left me longing for a hug, and a new dress.”
Sarah is a freelance writer who’s written for the likes of The Guardian, Psychologies and The New Statesman, and blogs on politics and feminism at Paperhouse.
Black Swan – Rachel Weber
“It’s a cliche to say something is stunning, but this mix of beauty, madness and waterfowl really is, in the physical, can’t-move-my-legs sense. And of course it’s visually amazing too, with Portman’s ballet dancer choreography and physical transformation mashing together the gorgeous and horrfying, and doing it so deftly you forget to stop and question the weirder, bone-snapping feathery moments. It also gets a special mention for featuring the most ostentatious girl wank scene you’ll see without using the internet and your credit card details.”
Rachel works for news website GamesIndustry.biz and blogs about awesome baking at Bite Me.
The Guard – Matt Elliott
“The Guard is the finest Brendan Gleeson showcase there’s ever been, and that includes In Bruges. It’s the only reason you need to catch John Michael McDonagh’s soggy, refreshingly unconventional Celtic crim-com, but I’ll give you another for free: it contains the best milkshake slurping scene in cinematic history (beating even There Will Be Blood’s theoretical drainage). Describing the plot does it no justice – Ryvita-stiff FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) visits the west of Ireland, plays straight man to Gleeson’s crumpled garda Gerry Boyle – but Gleeson’s portrayal of the glassy-eyed shuffle of anarchy helps make The Guard constantly surprising and completely irresistible.”
Matt is a script editor at Future Publishing. You can read more of his mind on Twitter.
Bridesmaids – Joel Snape
“There’s a saying in films that once you’ve seen a bomb, it has to go off, and because of that I felt vaguely cheated when Bridesmaids promised to end up in Vegas but never made it there. Still, the run-up to that mild disappointment made me laugh hard enough to make other passengers on my plane turn around – neatly bracketed by a decent story and a deus ex boyfriend who was genuinely nice and funny. In a year when I switched The Hangover 2 off in favour of looking at the back of a plastic seat for an hour, it was nice to have at least one decent bromance, especially when one of the bros was Rose Byrne.”
Joel is features editor for Men’s Fitness and blogs about MMA fighting at Tiny Little Gloves.
Thanks to all, and especially to Joel for writing his entry with a New Year hangover and not making the pun ‘Bros Ryrne’.
The Eighties: The Musical
Growing up in the 1980s meant growing up with a style of Hollywood filmmaking more expensive, violent and culturally hollow than had ever been seen. It was, in many ways, completely amazing. And also, as most of us began to recognise as we hit adulthood, completely stupid.
This amazing stupidity has been celebrated in a series of condensed musical versions of ’80s action movies, featuring Sondheim-esque vocal arrangements, brilliant plot-condensing lyrics and excellently terrible impersonations, created by composers Jon and Al Kaplan.
The quality of the music and the editing in these videos is exceptional. These guys are really good. And there’s also something perfect about the mesh of emotionally overwrought melodrama with the macho excesses of a Hollywood which had gone into a peculiar ideological overdrive. Their version of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Commando lays bare the anabolic madness of a superman special forces killer with a caring daddy side, while their version of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky IV rinses the original’s overblown propaganda for laughs.
While the ’80s ubermensch action hero is ripe for parody, they also do some great work with the decade’s less conventional films. Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop smuggles a dark satire of corporate America into a big-budget action movie, but that doesn’t stop this operatic ballad of regret being hilarious. And John Carpenter’s The Thing is both chillingly atmospheric and a landmark for horror effects work, but this musical version is sung from the perspective of the Thing itself in the style of Frank Sinatra, and is so amazing I’ve embedded it below.
A Savagely Partial Look At The Films Of 2011
Here’s a review of the year in film about which I make only two promises: it’s monstrously skewed towards whatever I managed to see, and it contains swearing. I already did a similar-ish thing (with less swearing) about games for The Observer which you can read here if you want.
So January, which began with podgy Russell Crowe prison break thriller The Next Three Days, the highlights of which included Liam Neeson deploying his now customary ‘scowling man of action’ routine in a cameo of throat-punch intensity, and all the fucking about at the end which I fast-forwarded through. Better things were to come, but not until I Spit On Your Grave depressed with empty misogyny and anal savaging, and The Mechanic proved that Jason Statham vehicles should stick to being heavy on the roundhouse kicks and as light as possible on any kind of material that stops Jason Statham doing roundhouse kicks. Things looked up a little with the arrival of The Green Hornet (although if you think too hard about the limitless imaginative potential of Michel Gondry being reduced to servicing Seth Rogen slapstick you will start crying) and then looked up a lot with Black Swan and Tangled, which make for a diverse and thought-provoking double bill about representations of femininity in Hollywood. And that horse was pretty fucking funny.
The Fighter arrived in the UK in February following Oscar success and heaped in shiny praise from Stateside critics, who’d all apparently fucking forgotten that Raging Bull existed. Sanctum 3D was demonstrably worse despite the above-the-title bleat of James Cameron’s name, mostly because it was like a remake of The Descent with all the monsters and tension replaced by water. Mark Romanek’s beautifully photographed Never Let Me Go was a poetic sci-fi drama about love, death and acceptance that conjured an England of thick sweaters, buckled shoes and fuzzy childhood colours, while True Grit saw the Coen brothers in fine, unflamboyant form and only strengthened the claims of Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon to the respective titles of Man I’d Most Like To Be My Uncle and Most Interesting Actor At Least You Know At The Moment. The month was rounded off by Paul, a messy tribute to Spielberg, science fiction and the San Diego comic con that lost the chemistry of Nick Frost and Simon Pegg in a swirl of CG effects and smug gags, while throwaway alien adventure thing I Am Number Four would have benefited from having a less shit name, like I Am A Fucking Badass Alien, and Drive Angry had Nic Cage coming back from hell to drive quite fast, and all the charm of a car full of lads making a wanker sign at you in the highstreet.
March was a finely balanced scale of shit and unshit. Bad were Hall Pass, in which Owen Wilson irritates his wife into agreeing he can sleep with other women if he’ll fuck off for five minutes, and Battle: Los Angeles, a motion sickness ET invasion hewn from solid cliché. Wavering somewhere in the middle were medieval siege ‘em up Iron Clad (alright, it’s shit really but also set in Rochester Castle, which I used to climb as a child so I could look over the side imagining how unlikely it was that I’d survive the fall), Faster, an effective revenge headbutt starring The Rock, and Unknown, which is exactly what would happen if you combined Harrison Ford Euro-thriller Frantic with Total Recall and Liam Neeson’s fists. Johnny Depp was good in the admirably unusual, Three Amigos-ish animation Rango, and I’ve just remembered that Roman buddy movie The Eagle should really have been in the shit pile because the only bit I can really recall is everyone being painted blue for some reason. The Adjustment Bureau was better, a magical realist romance in which Matt Damon battled the agents of fate and their dashing hats to give Emily Blunt a kiss on the face, and none of them were as good as Submarine, Richard Ayoade’s stingingly accurate portrayal of teenage love which contains an excellent amount of duffel coats, Godard fringes and ostentatious posing. It is my favourite film of the year, and here is a bit of it which ends with Miles running on a beach like he’s channelling Jean-Pierre Léaud.
My least favourite film of the year was released in April. Sucker Punch somehow loses the moral thread in a story of domestic abuse and institutionalised rape because it’s busy staring at moronically over-stylised sequences of fantasy violence. Also lacking any urgent reason to exist was slasher reboot Scream 4, or Sre4m, or W4nk, the latest in a series once founded on self-aware cool which now has all the edge of liking your mum’s holiday photos on Facebook. Insidious was a domestic horror in the line of Paranormal Activity which creeped the shit out of me for 45 minutes before simply giving up and becoming a tribute to Living TV’s Most Haunted, Fast Five was utterly stupid but undeniably good at making cars go in the air and on fire, and Thor was an uneasy mix of magical bits in a frankly shit-looking Asgard and quite funny moments of a de-powered Thor smashing coffee mugs and searching for a steed. Finally, Source Code, Duncan Jones’ follow-up to the exceptional Moon, had big ideas but a more wobbly premise and ended up feeling a little too much like a feature-length episode of Quantum Leap.
May was a month of the unexpected. Kiddie assassin thriller Hanna looked threadbare during the hyped killing bits but did do a nice line in teen friendship drama, and despite the evidence piled up over two overlong, overwank sequels, the fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, On Stranger Tides, was sort of alright, mostly thanks to having finally dumped the bland-faced ballast of Bloom and Knightley. Dystopic vampire nonsense Priest had the kind of hook (ninja priests fighting the undead!) that might’ve earned it Prophecy-style cult favour had it not been quite so bad, while The Hangover Part II didn’t feature enough original thought to be considered a true sequel, and was more like a two-hour headache with bumming and a smoking monkey. Hilarious! The best movies of the month were Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules, which is far smarter and funnier than parents everywhere dreaded it might be (and I’m not just saying that because my son met the stars and they were super-nice), and Joe Cornish’s south London sci-fi Attack The Block, which pre-riots made some timely points about community and belonging in the UK, and which had the same tight urban intensity that made John Carpenter’s films brilliant until he began to make them rubbish.
In June origins story X-Men: First Class was watchable thanks to better-than-it-deserved leads James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, and Kung Fu Panda 2 made a sequel about a fat bear who does stomach-based martial arts surprisingly enjoyable thanks to dazzling fight sequences. Green Lantern really was a film about Ryan Reynolds’ emerald onesie versus Peter Sarsgaard’s massive head, in case any of you thought you’d imagined that, and just scraped by on Reynolds shouting “I KNOW, RIGHT?” every time things got extra stupid. Transformers: Dark Of The Moon was an over-produced disgrace grasping for meaning like a sinner on his deathbed and finding nothing but sun-flared, plastic oblivion, while Bridesmaids was dead funny and featured a charming romance between Kristen Wiig and Chris O’Dowd.
Once in year five at school I got a new orange A4 Design and Technology book and I wrote on the front “DESIGN AND TECH” and then because I’d taken up too much space had to write “nology” really small. That was a lot like how Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 2 felt in July – after all the staring and dancing and tents of Part One, suddenly three things are happening every minute in a rush to squeeze in all the various deaths, duels and shouting. Plus the white corridor bit made it look like Dumbledore had opened a dentist’s surgery in heaven. Cars 2 felt like the first truly soulless Pixar film for reasons I’ve discussed in an earlier blog, seeing Jennifer Aniston say rude words turned out not to be enough of a reason to watch Horrible Bosses, and thanks to Chris Evans being so handsome and likeable Captain America was the year’s best superhero movie, even if the fact expensive digital effects were deployed to make him look runty and normal while the ubermensch physique was all his own is, you know, sickening.
In August I loved the fact that the goofy bmx-gang kids in Super 8 looked like authentic ’80s children (the hair? the shirts?) even if in the end it felt like a soft remake of Spielberg rather than an electric tribute. There were many problems with The Smurfs, but none of them was Hank Azaria’s Gargamel, or the fact that his cat was played by the original voice of Megatron, while the big issue with Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes was that it was secretly not very exciting nor was a planet of apes featured at any point. Spy Kids 4 continued Robert Rodriguez’s descent into wilfully awful b-movie dreck, while the big talking points surrounding Cowboys And Aliens were Harrison Ford’s grumpy nearly-villain being the most fun he’s been to watch for ages, and the fact that JESUS CHRIST HOW DO YOU MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT ALIENS AND COWBOYS THIS BORING. The Inbetweeners Movie was the best of the month, losing none of its gleefully adolescent humour or eye for a painful teenage truth (clearly it’s going to take me a lot longer than I hoped to recover from my own awkward home counties teens).
September saw the release of The Killer Elite, in which Jason Statham (not a single roundhouse kick) and Robert De Niro look totally bemused to be in the same movie as each other, let alone Clive Owen’s moustache, period Ford Anglias, and a script so clunky it might as well have been a giant tower with a big fucking flashing sign saying “EXPOSITION” written on it. Body-swap comedy The Change-Up saw Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds switch places via the magic of having a piss, pretty much the only thing the film added to a genre that’s now surely ready to walk into the snow and fucking die. Also very much concerned with people dying were tense and grimy British nasty Kill List, which is best approached in total ignorance, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, which mixed bits of Lynch, Friedkin and Carey Mulligan’s lovely smile to excellent effect, even if it did result in everyone going on about Ryan Gosling far longer and louder than is generally acceptable.
I only saw two things released in October. The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn was dashing and full of zip and adventure, and also strangely flat. I put this down to seeing the front of Tintin’s face, which is distracting like realising there’s an extra dimension and staring at the fourth side of your hand for ages, and also the fact that Uncharted 3 had many of the same set-piece beats and was, you know, better. Then there was Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, which was like Traffic with germs, with the same sense of cross-section, right and wrong, and everything going on regardless.
In November Aardman released Arthur Christmas, which had an excellent hook (the army of elves and military precision behind Santa’s global present delivery, and how they eclipse the joy of giving) but didn’t make me cry because I’m dead inside. Then in December I missed The Thing prequel (which if it really wanted to let everyone know it was a prequel should’ve been called “The… You Know…”) and instead caught Puss In Boots, which was better than every Shrek ever even if Zach Galifianakis’ weird egg bastard made me feel sick.
And that’s the end of the year. The best thing I saw which wasn’t a film was Danish crime series The Killing seasons one and two (Troels!) and the best non-2011 films I caught up with were Le Samorai and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Things I feel stupidest about missing are The Ides Of March, The Artist and Hugo, though I’m hoping to set the last two right at the cinema before New Year.
Happy end of this enormous post!
Why trailers are more than just advertisements
I woke up today and got pretty cross at a few things I saw flying around twitter regarding the first trailer for The Hobbit. To name names in the nicest possible way, Stuart O’Connor of Screenjabber got me wound up enough to write down why I disagree a million with the idea that trailers, as he insisted this morning, are “nothing more than an advertisement.” This is crazy, and here’s why.
It paints the film itself as some kind of sacred artistic artefact, and ignores not only the craft that goes into creating trailers, but their importance to the project as a whole.
There is an art to making good trailers. Yes, some of them are full of spoilers and brick-subtle voiceovers. But others aren’t. The trailer for Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is such a wonderfully condensed slug of everything the film aspires to be that it’s better than watching Scott Pilgrim itself. Wes Anderson’s trailers have developed a signature style as expressive of his authorship as anything in the films, and so recognisable that it’s parodied regularly. And as the Walt Disney Classics home video trailers have shown for over two decades, trailers can also be a fascinating insight into the industry’s self-expression (the way these trailers reinforce and protect the value of the Disney canon is masterful).
Then there’s the flip side of the argument. Anyone who looks down on trailers as the clumsy commercial end of an otherwise laudable creative enterprise is forgetting that films are very often just adverts themselves, for a lifestyle or a world view, or a DVD or a persistent entertainment IP. I’m not normally militant about this, but in the face of trailer snobbery it’s worth pointing out that there’s commonly no kind of cultural or emotional substance inside a film past the urge to sell other things. And I would rather watch the Scott Pilgrim trailer 60 times than anything with Ashton Kutcher in, ever.
Then, more practically, there’s the consideration of what pulling assets and resources together to create a trailer midway through a production does for the production itself. I recently visited the offices of Naughty Dog, the games developer behind Uncharted. They’d just revealed that they were working on a new IP, a post-apocalyptic drama called The Last Of Us, and had released an announcement trailer to that effect.
Speaking to the creative team behind the game, they didn’t view the trailer as a gaudy off-shoot of the project, or a piece of marketing. It was the game’s first major milestone. It was a project landmark that forced them to make creative decisions about character, story and setting that would effect the final game. It forced them to analyse which elements of the game they wanted to draw attention to, which in turn shaped the game itself. And it gave them the opportunity to shape the public’s first reaction to their new world.
The same is almost certainly true of any trailer, especially a first-look trailer, of a film in production. Music, effects and sound mixing would have been finalised on chosen sections of The Hobbit footage. Shots selected, bits of story and character interaction teased. A year ahead of release, certain sections of the film would be fast-forwarded through post-production to ready them for a public airing, in a way which would inevitable impact their final form.
Trailers don’t just shape expectation, they shape the creative product itself, and should be recognised as a full and proper part of the filmmaking whole. There are bad trailers, but then there’s no shortage of bad movies either, and I wouldn’t get very far claiming that all cinema is a juvenile crock of cock-waving bullshit just because the last thing I’d seen was The Change-Up with Ryan Fucking Reynolds.
But then again, who does? (Maybe Barton Fink)
Last week I saw a short film called ‘Address Is Approximate’. I made everyone in the office watch it, partly because I’m a monster, and partly because it’s carefully shot and wonderfully imaginative.
Having used Street View for a series of features on film locations I consider google’s virtual map to be inherently cinematic. But I also like the short film’s tragic reach for experience, I guess the classic Pinocchio desire to be real. I was struck by the sadness of the film’s end – for all the ingenious visual trickery the robot hasn’t left the office, the same house-lights-rising jolt experienced with all cinema-going.
It put me in mind of two particular things – another image of the ocean, this one hanging on the wall of Barton Fink’s study as he grapples towards his own reconciliation of reality and cinema (“Are you in pictures?” he asks the girl from his picture when they finally meet), and James Edward Olmos’ haunting line from Blade Runner (“It’s too bad she won’t live… But then again, who does?”) which collapses the distinction between robot and human experience altogether.
Nathan Ditum
