Okay, I’m not trying to be a total jerk by skipping the awesomeness of this post from Anil Dash – you’ve really got to read the whole thing – but I wanted to share this excellent video that I’ve watched a couple of times, but forgot to share it here.
Check out how someone who’s never seen “Star Wars” before relates the story of the film and those that followed it, just by putting together what they’ve “heard” from others.
Here’s today’s batch of links you need to click, including some I’ve sat on for a little bit.
Here’s today’s short list of links that are of interest. I’ve got more links, but a lack of time to share. More later this week.
If you’re of a certain age, then “Nightmare on Elm Street” generates a certain feeling in your stomach (hopefully not a blade-adorned glove coming through it) whenever it comes up. You know, when good old Freddy Krueger and his sweater show up and tear your dreams (and body) to pieces.
Well, Michael Bay’s got a re-up of the flick coming, and here’s the trailer.
As you can see, it’s looking pretty good. I am not sure I’ll be able to avoid this one. Over at NY Mag’s Vulture, Lane Brown says that what we’re getting out of the trailer “seems to be a darker, slicker version of Wes Craven’s 1984 Nightmare.” I’d say that’s a fair assessment. Chris Thilk, what say you?
A mere hour after I posted on Twitter lamenting the time between “I’ve got a great idea” IMs that I’ve sent to Chris Thilk, followed by his response about how it has “got to be hours since I IM’d you something funny related to G.I. Joe,” we’ve got something new and funny, related to G.I.JOE. And oh boy is it funny. If you, umm, get all the jokes and inside baseball, of course. Note the level of talent that FOD continues to score, though.
A week or so ago, I caught Craig Brewer exclaiming “Tron!” on Twitter, referring to the new trailer for the follow up to 1982’s “Tron” movie. Brewer had linked to the Flynn Lives site, which, if you’re a fan of the original movie, you’ll get the “twist” name in a second. Otherwise, about thirty seconds in Google will do it for you. In any case, it was very awesome to see a filmmaker such as Brewer so excited about the new film. I’ve had the pleasure of working with him on “$5 Cover,” a music-focused project that gave a look at the Memphis music scene, and have gotten a glimpse of how he looks at – and appreciates – the work he gets to be a part of on a daily basis. I’ve gotta say, after checking out the trailer, I can’t help but agree about the enthusiasm behind the upcoming flick.
And, for those that either missed the movie the first time around (1982) or have no clue what I’m talking about here, check out the trailer for the first film, courtesy of good ol’ YouTube.
Needless to say, technology has um, improved since the early 80’s.
Oh, all right, this nerduo shirt is pretty damn awesome [via gruber], but Chris Thilk tipped me off to some seriously awesome action figure “action” movies from the Paramount camp, which hit yesterday in advance of today’s premiere of the G.I.JOE flick.
So without further ado, please check out parts 1 & 2 of “The Invasion of Cobra Island” below.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Thilk made sure I paid attention to the t-shirt on the kid in part two, and I’m also going to tell you to just pay attention to the massive amount of fun they must have had with this, as it’s got pretty much every single toy that I had wanted when I was a kid, collecting G.I.JOE toys back in the 80’s. And yes, I have now just time-sucked away your midday on a Friday like he did for me.
Something that I’ve been meaning to get back to, especially as this blog becomes my main jumpoff, is posting links to things that I thought were worthwhile and that you all might dig reading, so let’s get back to it. Here are a few things I flagged and are hanging out in my RSS reader of late.
By now, you’ve probably read, or at least flipped past, dozens of reviews for “Watchmen,” so I’ll do my best not to bore you with another, but I thought given the massive amount of discussion, marketing, and possible box office numbers this film might pull, it seemed worthwhile to say a few things.
Big movies have, for quite a few years or at least as long as I’ve really looked for the chance to do so, offered up the opportunity to head to the theatre at 12:01am the night before the premiere, which is typically on a Friday night. In recent years, I’ve gone to see so-called “preview” screenings for films from the “Harry Potter” series, “I Am Legend,” and a few others. This past week, my local theatre had one screen open on Thursday night for “Watchmen,” and if one gauged the success of a film by the amount of people that were in their seats 40-45 minutes before the movie started, then this movie was a winner. That said, I’m not sure if it really is the winner that it might end up being reported as.
Of course, studios are in business to make money for their owners / shareholders / investors, and this film will surely make a bundle. I don’t know if it’ll reach the staggering areas that some “mainstream” titles have in the last couple of years, but it will do just fine, and probably sell a few DVDs, too. But will the film be an “all-time” favorite for movie fans, or just those who love the graphic novel, or dig superhero flicks? At the end of the day, it’s not “The Dark Knight,” but certainly presents some visually stunning images, and the novelty of an “alternate” timeline of the mid-1980’s is fairly amusing for someone who lived through that era. That said, is “Watchmen” a success if it reaps the hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales, etc., or does it need to have some staying power?
Considering the amount of marketing muscle put behind this film, which Chris Thilk has documented in his “Watchmen” column this past week at Movie Marketing Madness, is this particular film’s campaign “too big to fail,” as Thilk suggests? THR’s Gregg Kilday reported on Saturday that the film brought in $24.9 million on its opening day, Friday – with more than $4 million of that happening at the screenings on Thursday night. That was the pile my $10.75 went into. That same article states that “Watchmen” is tracking lower than “300,” director Zack Snyder’s last film, did on its first full day. I’m sure the creative spin would be “well, the economy continues to tighten, blah blah blah. But no sale, should that happen. Movie ticket sales are tracking way up for a good portion of the box offices in the U.S. year-to-date, so the film shouldn’t be “hindered” by what is a perfectly logical excuse these days, but has proven to be one of the only upward-moving markets this year. Well, except for condom sales.
Speaking of condom sales, let’s get back to the film. Most comic book movies I’ve seen in the last few years have a pretty mixed up crowd as far as men and women. “Watchmen,” not so much. There were so many guys in this theatre that if it were blown up, those condom sales would have dropped significantly in the town I was in. Beyond the high guy-to-girl ratio, I’d say there were far more “fanboy”-esque guys in the room than normal, but that might not be a fair assessment given that it was a midnight show on a Thursday night.
On the way out, I heard FAR more negative comments about the movie, its ending, how it was shot, the soundtrack (should I go on?) than I did positive. Of course, it’s like the online world, it’s a lot easier to say something negative than to be positive publicly – but still. And while I think we all knew that Dr. Manhattan’s junk was going to be on full display here, but hearing the giggles from the “boys” in the theatre was far more distracting than seeing some dude’s stuff on screen.
As far as the actual movie goes, I thought this wrapup at MTV.com pretty much summed up how I felt after leaving the parking lot at 3am – seriously conflicted. Did I “like” the movie? Yeah, I think I did. Was it too long? I do think it went a lot longer than it needed to, and I *LOVE* really long movies, when it actually covers everything integral to the story, but it just felt like it was going and going at certain points. On the LAT’s site, Kenneth Turan sums it up almost perfectly when he says that the film is “something acceptable but pedestrian, an adaptation that is more a prisoner of its story than the master of it.”
The movie certainly makes you think about things a little differently, especially when you recognize that the “superheroes” aren’t necessarily something supernatural, except for Dr. Manhattan’s time-traveling and molecular-transporting self, and even that has some science behind it, or tries to. I would absolutely go to the movie on opening night again, but unlike a lot of other aiming-to-be-blockbuster films, I can’t say I would recommend it to a lot of friends like I would those flicks. As Thilk’s first few paragraphs discuss, the film has had to bear so much weight about being “unfilmable,” as writer Alan Moore had said about the graphic novel. I wouldn’t ever go as far as saying that the result proved Moore right, as the movie stands on its own two legs just fine, but when you bill a movie in such a monstrous fashion, mainstream appeal is typically an end result of those marketing efforts, and I’m not sure that “Watchmen” will bring the ruckus in that way.
I’d give “Watchmen” three out of four stars (barely), as it was done very well visually, the opening credits sequence did a great job of storytelling, and it tried to take a whole lot of characters and concepts and jam them into less than three hours with decent success. But I liked “300″ better.
[ed: you can check out Wil Wheaton's comments on Twitter that I cited in a screen grab above here. Also, the first three or four grafs in Chris Thilk's above-mentioned review of the marketing behind "Watchmen" are some of the best I've seen out of him, and I've edited / reviewed hundreds (thousands?) of his blog posts since 2005 on a wide variety of topics.]
Okay, aside from the SEO game that my headline is trying to play here, I’d like to take a moment and congratulate Chris Thilk, my former team member at MWW Group and fellow writer from the days of AdJab, on accepting a new gig with Spout, where he’ll be the director of marketing. This is a really awesome move for Chris and I’m psyched for him, as he’s going to be working wall to wall on something he loves — movies.
Mid-July was the first time since 2005 or thereabouts that I haven’t been working “with” Chris in some fashion, and I’m sure I’ll go into some sort of mental recession about it in the coming months, but for now, I’ll just wish him good luck and all that stuff.