When Movies Become More Than Movies

Movies are changing in so many ways, one of the most overt being the way they are presented to us. The old days gave us movies straight – just a stand-alone hour and a half to two hour flick, no adornments, no extra stuff attached, just the straight film as it was. Now, though, that’s different. Now, it almost seems like the traditional forms of movies just aren’t enough to please moviegoers anymore. Movies are going interactive.

DISCLAIMER: Most people who watch movies are not this attractive. Picture from movietwatch.blogspot.com.

That sounds like a rather extreme conclusion – obviously plenty of movies today are still very traditionally done, and people enjoy them fine. However, a large portion of the big movies in theaters now don’t seem content with just being movies. They have to try to be something else – like, say, a comic book. The most blatant example of what I’m talking about is Marvel’s Avengers series.

For the whole two of you that aren’t up to date, they’re basically reconstructing the entire way we see movie franchises, sequels and tie-ins. They’ve taken their four big box-office draw superheroes – Thor, Captain America, Hulk and Iron Man – and crammed them into one big movie in The Avengers. They’re also making individual films for each one, and sequels for all of them, in between each Avengers movie. The effect is a constant whirlpool of hype and – somewhat cynically so, perhaps – box office dough.

Hot chick in her underwear destroying everything? That's two cliches in one. Picture from businessinsider.com.

By doing this, Marvel has changed the way we watch movies. We have to keep watching each one as they come out if we want to keep up with the storyline that will eventually be shown in Avengers 2 in 2015 or so. The little clips and easter eggs they sprinkle in after the end credits in each individual hero’s film only makes it more necessary to see each one if one wants to get the whole story.

The style of marketing has made the series of films play out more like a series of comic books. We get multiple films that act as “comic book issues” for each character, then a big multi-spanning tie-in adventure with all of them in one. Which is appropriate, seeing as all of these tights-and-spandex crusaders originally spawned from the ink-pen page anyway. Things are coming full circle with the way these Marvel movies are playing out. Back to the roots – which is a trend all its own.

This was a natural outcome. Naturally films are changing in style and approach. As the world has grown more interactive, movies have changed in approach – this all reflects the 24/7, interconnected mentality going on. Everything has to be at full-speed all the time. There’s no room for downtime anymore in the news and the hype-train has to keep going at full speed, no stops until Bedlam, miles to go before sleep. Hype has to keep going. As cynical as it sounds, that IS a big part of why movies are so inter-connected and span so many various titles now. Money!

You can see more examples of movies trying to be other things in how we do young adult movies now. Three huge Y.A. franchises – Harry Potter, Twilight and the upcoming Hunger Games: Mockingjay – split up their final films into two movies, so as to make more money---cough, cough, I mean, preserve the integrity of the stories. You know. By making sure you see all the details the author of the book intended. That's why they had to stretch out The Hobbit into three movies, you know; because otherwise it just wouldn't have integrity. It wasn't about making money at all.

Picture from thewrap.com.

Personally I like movies better when they’re movies. The way these franchises are making out, it’s like they think they’re making books with visual accompaniment. The Hunger Games and Harry Potter films are structured like books rather than movies. They have chapters and cliffhangers, and people want to keep watching because they’re unsatisfied until they can see the rightful end of the story. That’s not how movies used to work (not all the time, at least, like now) – it’s interesting that they’ve changed to become this way.

"But...I wanted to see the rest!" Picture from vampirediaries.alloyentertainment.com.

It’s also interesting that so many book-to-movie transitions have gone so well these days. Between comic book adaptations like Watchmen to the aforementioned Hunger Games as well as more contemporary novels like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, filmmakers are trying harder to keep true to the source material when they adapt into movie forms. For die hard fans, that’s a great thing – if you really, really wanted to see a visual representation of Lisbeth Salander slicing up some pervert with no changes from how she did it in the original book, the movie will work perfectly for you – either version, Swedish or American.

Picture from stevenspielberg.wordpress.com.

Call me a heretic, but I always enjoy seeing a creative, visionary director make changes to a story for the silver screen. I find it interesting to see different interpretations of a story. Of course, many of them are crap, but you do get gems such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining here and there – that’s worth it.

Jack's happy. Why can't you be? Picture from blogs.indiewire.com.

Most scriptwriters or directors won’t go that route – with the increased Twitter and Facebook communication between creative artists and fans, it’s easier to know what fans want. Thus, there’s no excuse for dissonance between an artistic personality and his or her fanbase anymore – there should be no confusion. Though, I admit I could be partaking in some wishful thinking here.

Overall, the way movies are done now – in a more interactive format for the fans – isn’t good or bad, it’s just different. We will always have traditional, movies-for-movie-fans films, but now we have something else. Now we have movies that interact with the audience and sprawl into larger creations, becoming more than just a self-contained film. The Avengers movies are parts of a whole, and they act like issues of a comic book series. The Harry Potter/Hunger Games movies are visual reflections of their respective books – they have multiple chapters.

Movies aren’t just a fourth wall between the makers and the audience anymore – we’re not just consumers anymore. We play a more active role now. We commit ourselves to these sequels and we’re suckered into seeing all of them, even when we don’t like some of the ones that have come out. Movies are becoming a larger thing now – as they evolve, movies are experimenting with the format of filmmaking and release, and becoming something more epic and immersive in scope, if not necessarily in storytelling.

I hope the storytelling can reach the same quality as the effort put into arranging these films over multiple years, franchises and directors. That would be great. Right now though, things are in the hands of the people making the money. That can’t be denied. Personally I just hope this kind of experimentation with how movies are released doesn’t just degenerate into pure commercialism, as there are plenty of good films still coming out under what I’ve talked about here.

Case in point: Captain America: The Winter Soldier is an amazing movie that everyone should go see. Get on it now! What the hell are you waiting for, the fucking second coming of Christ to tell you to go see it?! Isn't my word good enough anymore?

Picture from fansided.com.

The Best Movies of 2012

Now we come to our final countdown, the best movies of the year - or rather, at least what I thought were the best. Of course opinions will be divided, but to hell with it, I'm here to force mine down your throats!

THE BEST MOVIES OF 2012

11. Lincoln

Steven Spielberg’s biopic on Abraham Lincoln is a monument of stately, comfortable filmmaking from one of the masters of the business. Everything about this is well-made, polished to a professional sheen that does justice to this great man and really brings him to life on screen for the first time ever. This is a long movie, but it’s incredibly lavish and detailed, with that classic Spielbergian charm that shows he is still the master of thoughtful, uplifting cinema. Daniel Day Lewis is fantastic as Lincoln and the story, about the passage of the 13^th amendment, is carried with maturity. The portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln is also very much worth noting.

10. ParaNorman

Children’s’ movies might get a bad rap, but that’s slowly changing with movies like UP, Ratatouille, How to Train Your Dragon and now ParaNorman. The story is pretty basic, just a tale about a kid who can see ghosts who gets called to save the town from a witch, but basic is the way to go sometimes, and ParaNorman is great because it has well written characters who play off each other quite nicely, stunning visuals (though this is the norm for movies today) and subtle, flowing messages that can resonate with children as well as adults. A clever, deft and energized romp that should not be missed.

9. Dredd

Great action movies are almost as hard to come by as great horror movies these days. Dredd is a great action movie, in the style of Die Hard and Terminator if they were done up in a 2010s style. I’ve never read any of the comics about Judge Dredd, but this movie explodes with huge action scenes, delicious gore and a rocket-speed pace that doesn’t let up. It’s got a cool setting, cool villains and doesn’t pull any punches. This movie is like a metal-plated fist to your gut.

8. Killer Joe

This is the most irreverent movie of the year with how outrageous and indecent it is, and Matthew McConaughey delivers as the titular character with one of my favorite performances all year – he is possessed with a manic, quick-witted furor that almost carries the whole movie on its own, if not for standout performances from Emile Hirsch and Thomas Haden Church, too. This is a bloody good time of a movie that speeds through its runtime like a coked up Hell’s Angel with an attitude problem, unraveling a story of betrayal and greed without any sugar coating. Killer Joe revels in its unholiness and I love it for that very lack of restraint.

7. V/H/S

The best horror movie of the year, and an almost revolutionary experience compared to the sad sacks at attempts the last few years have given us. V/H/S’s strength lies in absolutely genius scares and inventive storytelling. It’s a found footage film that actually uses that to its advantage with some creative framing – a family vacation tape and a webcam chat log – and, here’s a shocker – no obvious jump scares! Yes, instead we get brilliant storytelling that unravels itself in short, sweet bursts of sheer gleeful evil and mayhem; stories that set up their atmospheres and settings quick and then deliver a hell of a punchline with great end twists and fascinatingly gruesome concepts. This is seriously awesome, and horror devotees who love the genre for its imagination will find much to love here.

6. Wreck-It Ralph

A sheer joy to behold, Wreck-It Ralph is the best children’s movie I’ve seen in a long time, hearkening back to the kind of grace and power that 2009’s UP possessed in spades. The key to making a great kids’ film is making sure you tell a great story first and then make it kid-friendly second. And Wreck-It Ralph is good at that because it has hugely memorable characters, a great setting – seriously, arcade games! That’s so cool I’d give it a good rating even if the movie was lame. And a tight, fast-paced, electrically charged plot that never stops moving and is constantly inventive and clever. There are laughs to be had, there are emotive moments and there are fist-pumping action and car chase scenes. Wreck-It Ralph is a treasure of a film.

5. The Avengers

Joss Whedon is one of the best storytellers of our generation, weaving Shakespearean drama with modern sci-fi intrigue, explosive action and even some wry comedy here and there. The Avengers is his new big-screen blockbuster, the big movie that every superhero fan was waiting for, and it’s pretty much the summer blockbuster to end all summer blockbusters. Huge, sweeping action scenes are really only icing on the cake of the characters themselves, who are acted brilliantly and written brilliantly, with Whedon’s strong writing tying together a series of films dating back five years. Important for how conceptually brilliant it is, but also incredibly entertaining, and one of the more satisfying movies of the year. A mighty thunderbolt of a film, down from the heavens.

4. The Amazing Spider-Man

I love Spider-Man and have since I was really young, and this was a revolution for me because it proved we could have a really, really good Spider-Man movie. Not that the Raimi stuff was bad, but Marc Webb’s reboot is just so much better in every way. Everything about this is just grade-A stuff and flows like a charm. This is really Andrew Garfield’s movie as he proves he is a dynamite actor, with a ton of range and bursting emotional power, too. Emma Stone as well delivers maybe my favorite performance of hers yet. The action kicks ass and the story has emotional power and can resonate with audiences today just as well as the original comic book could back in the 60s, with the updates made and the clever, snappy directing. This is a smooth, well put together film that I will never tire of watching.

3. The Hunger Games

This was a real surprise for me, because I thought the first book of the series was good, not great – I really didn’t expect much from this movie. I mean, how many times has a YA book series actually produced something meaningful to cinema? Well, this is my mea culpa – The Hunger Games is a big, sweeping and epic hammer of a film that completely washes over you in waves with how much is going on, submerging the audience in the world entirely. You will feel every chaotic action scene rattle in your bones and the world the movie creates will seem as real as your own every day life, and twice as terrifying. First rate acting from Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson only adds to the vitality and strength this movie has in spades. Truly a story more meant to be seen than read, The Hunger Games is one of the best movies of the year.

2. Chronicle

I knew nothing about this movie when I went into the theater, and it floored me. A powerful, individual tale of three young men in the suburbs who come across a mysterious rock in the ground that gives them superpowers – only for one of them, with an unstable family life, to start losing his mind and using the power for criminal means. The three lead actors are all really great and sell their characters superbly – I fully believed they were who they said they were. The story is a very compelling take on troubled teenagers and the sci-fi twist makes this probably the most original film I saw all year. For its depiction of the unfortunate marginalized kids who just can’t get anywhere even despite their efforts, Chronicle is a powerful film that you shouldn’t miss. Essential.

1. Moonrise Kingdom

I never expected to love a Wes Anderson film, but here it is anyway – Moonrise Kingdom. This is just a lovely movie, with charm, grace and power, as well as a wry, fine-tuned dry sense of humor. There’s so much going on here that it’s too much to comprehend on one viewing alone, but at its core this is a love story, and one of the best love stories, in any medium, I have witnessed in a long time. The thing is that Moonrise Kingdom is not just a love story about two kids getting together, but about family in general – about the ties that bind us together and the fissures that break us apart, and about solace found in unexpected places. With a powerful story told by first rate actors all around, this is funny and romantic and everything in between all at once, integrating everything into a melting pot so well that you stop picking apart the different aspects and just accept it as it is: a force to be reckoned with. And for all the estranged and the lonely out there, this is a light in the dark. Magisterial, unforgettable and powerful.

Images copyright of their original owners.

REVIEW: The Hunger Games (2012)

This is the newest young adult novel phenomenon, The Hunger Games, originally written by Suzanne Collins. The book was good and while the premise wasn’t anything too original, it was a solid, well done story for the young adult demographic. Now we have the movie, and it is a huge, searing epic with a ton of great things about it – I mean damn. I don’t remember being this blown away by something based on a book I had already read in a long time. The Hunger Games rules, and I am here to tell you why, so let’s do that, shall we?

Director: Gary Ross

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/

The story is a dystopian tale of a world far in the future, where each year young children are randomly selected from their ‘districts’ to fight to the death in “The Hunger Games,” which is passed off as a grand and fun-filled celebration of sorts by the corrupt, spoilt “Capitol” government city. The lead character is Katniss Everdeen, who subverts the usual and volunteers to be the tribute for her district so her younger sister does not have to. She enters into a strange relationship with fellow tribute Peeta and the two have to fight off 22 others in a game for their lives.

The main reason this works so well as a movie is that The Hunger Games was a very visual story, even in the book – it required you to see a lot of the things happening to get the full effect. I’m not one to decry the power of imagination and the benefits of a good page-turning book, but the massive effect The Hunger Games movie has on the viewer is just undeniable – everything feels big. There is a big epic undercurrent here that turns this rather bleak dystopian story into a swinging, mighty hammer of destruction that will just demolish you.

The action is a full-throttle festival of mayhem that works despite the sometimes overly shaking camera, and the dramatic moments are heartfelt and truly tragic at times. At one point a character, a young child, dies, and the effect is absolutely heartbreaking in how they present the scene. I won’t spoil too much, but I always think tragic moments like these are the cornerstones of a great epic, adding much needed weight to the situation. Everything feels like it matters, and because the people making the movie were so clearly into it, you will be, too.

The acting is just great, with Jennifer Lawrence, previously of Winter’s Bone, giving one of the best lead-heroine performances I’ve seen in a movie in the last few years as Katniss. She is a kick-ass lead, tough as nails, but also capable of being kind, and endowed with certain flaws that make her human. It’s the subtleties in this performance that really make it shine, like her conversation with Gale (Liam Hemsworth) in the beginning – their relationship is very well detailed and shaded, and it feels like two very real people in the midst of something abnormal and hard to deal with.

The fact that this is a dystopian story with a highly un-relatable plot and a futuristic setting is never a deterrent to the excellent characterization, and Lawrence’s Katniss is charismatic, relatable and believable. Much better than crap like the Children of Men movie, which pretty much took the good characters from the book and dialed them way down into the background as cardboard cutouts – ugh. This is a much better dystopian-world story.

Other great performances include Woody Harrelson as Haymitch, their trainer and mentor for the games. In the book you get to see a lot more of him, but the movie makes use of his shorter screen-time very well. He is a character haunted by the past, having survived a Hunger Games some time long ago, and though he hides it a lot by drinking, you can tell he’s hurting inside. He feels desperately sorry for the two tributes and resentful toward the Capitol making them do this in the first place. One of Harrelson’s best performances in years. Josh Hutcherson as Peeta is good, and he conveys the lovelorn-but-tough boy character very well, although he seemed a bit subdued at times – most of the focus was on Lawrence/Katniss a lot of the time.

The directing is pretty raw, and contains a lot of shaky-cam visuals, which I admit is a good tactic to make the whole movie seem more gritty and hard-assed. But sometimes during the really intense action scenes it gets a bit too much, and just feels like the cameraman was having a seizure in the studio. The special effects are top notch – witness the scene where the forest burns down, or the one where Peeta and Katniss ride out on their chariot, endowed in black leather and burning flames. Great stuff.

Now, of course this is a commentary on voyeurism and the blood-thirsty nature of much of today’s reality television – that much is obvious. It’s not a new message, but it’s delivered competently and the conviction with which it is presented is chilling and poignant. A lot of these scenes and characters feel so real that you will begin to feel that you shouldn’t be watching and propagating this kind of violence yourself. But the over-arching purpose is meaningful and necessary – and should not be missed.

This is a great film for its huge presence, and it makes you feel like you are literally in the middle of the battlefield. Most fantasy/sci fi movies can’t do that this well. The Hunger Games boasts brutal action, astounding acting talents from young up-and-comings, some chilling social commentary and as icing on the cake, some really wonderful visuals and special effects that make the whole thing a treat for the eyes. Hell, this was just a superb start to the “Blockbuster season,” and I can’t wait to see the sequel hopefully next year. If you like action movies or dystopian science fiction, The Hunger Games is about to rock your boat. Absolutely awesome.