From deep in the heart of London’s Soho, thoughts from the manager. Plex has worked in the industry for a decade and if you can stand the occasional rant, you might find an occasional interesting angle. And get involved, he’ll answer back.
I am a huge fan of comic book movies. This is no secret. I love them all, good, bad and otherwise. However, not everyone shares my love for pretty people in ludicrous costumes beating other people in ludicrous costumes up while things explode in the background. There will soon come a time when the juggernaut of superhero and comic book movies will grind to a halt. The genre is very close to a pastiche of itself right now, with properties being rebooted seemingly as the credits finish rolling on the previous film.
What do you do when the story's finished but there's more to say? Wait an appropriate amount of time then make a sequel! And if the thing you have to say happens to actually be incredibly similar to what you said in the first place, but with louder bangs, then all the better, right?
There are of course many good sequels that aren't just cynical ploys to make more money with no regard for Art (capital A Art, not just drawing and stuff). Where would we be without The Godfather 2? The Back to the Futures? The Toy Stories? This blog post? Maybe there is Art in the following list. Or quality at least. Maybe. Fast and Furious 5 ended up being one of Time Magazine's top films of 2011, after all, and who would have expected that this time last year?
Here's twelve sequels set to come out in 2012.
Hello 2012! What a year you promise to be:
February 6: the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.
June 5: The extra bank holiday for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.
July/August: The Olympics.
December 21: the end-date of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.
Last week I paid a visit to the local multiplex and caught a busy screening of Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut Coriolanus. When I emerged from the screen a couple of hours later rather saddened and shaking my head in disbelief. It wasn't to do with the quality of the film (3/5 if you are interested) but from what occurred in the auditorium during the screening.
Within the first fifteen minutes I witnessed twenty people leave and not return. Why? It couldn't have been the quality of the film because they had not had enough time to really give it a chance. No, they left because *spoiler alert* this adaptation of the Shakespeare play Coriolanus was performed in the original Shakespearean iambic pentameter.
The word ‘no’. It has a lot of power in cinema. As you can imagine, it’s said a lot. Think of the thousands and thousands of scripts that don’t make it to the screen each year – it’s an impressive pile, even without those scripts that get sold and float in limbo forever. The film industry needs to say ‘no, to these. If all of these scripts got made, Cinemas would drown in a tide of slurry. Film critics would work 48-hour shifts. Multiplexes would be the size of Swindon. It would take audiences so long to sift through the never-ending film listings (presented in dictionary-sized hardback form) that they’d never bother going. For those that do risk it, the chances of seeing a good film would be on a par with winning the lottery.
If only film had more… More what, you ask?
How about more invincible heroes? Laughable villains? Battling robots? Talking chipmunks? Talking dogs? Talking anything-that’s-not-human?
No. No self-respecting individual who claims even the slightest interest in film could possibly want more of these. But the studio execs seem to think we do. Just a month ago 20th Century Fox saw fit to burn our souls with a third Alvin and the Chipmunks film. A franchise with characters so grating that just the trailer made me want to insert barbed wire down my throat, pull it out the other end and floss myself to death.
As David Cameron declares war on non-mainstream cinema a mostly silent, entirely black and white and technically French film is filling our brave nation’s cinemas with delighted audiences. I am of course talking about Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist. It isn’t a radical position to be enthusiastic about this film; it was the toast of Cannes and has topped numerous best of 2011 lists. Much as the iconoclast hipster within me wants to hate something everyone else loves I can’t help adoring this film. Naturally, now that there is Oscar buzz naysayers are coming out the woodwork declaring that the film is a shallow pleasure and Kim Novak, star of Vertigo, has even said that she felt raped* by the film.
You may recall, dear reader, that approximately two and a bit moons ago I accused the venerable directors Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsey of a selling out of sorts. My issue was that they were both directors of a unique vision and I fretted that their upcoming works, both being adaptations of popular books, might represent a shift into the mainstream from which they may never return. In that article I confessed that I hadn’t seen either of the films I was talking about (Wuthering Heights and We Need to Talk About Kevin). Well now I have AND LO, I SHALL BESTOW JUDGEMENT.