Todd’s Movie Blog

With all of the talk about movies being converted to 3-D to cash in on the Avatar craze, a trend in movies is being overlooked by many.  Filmmakers have started taking movies they hope will become a series and leaving the first installment open ended to lead right into an immediate sequel.  This has been done with GI Joe, Sherlock Holmes, and The Losers.

That doesn’t sound like a good business plan to me.  What if the film tanks at the box office?  People who did go to see it get cheated because there is no follow up and the story is never finished. Golden Compass anyone?  There was a reason most film series’ followed the original Star Wars blueprint of stand alone first film followed by two interrelated sequels, it work.  Lord of the Rings doesn’t count as that was really one long story cut into three parts and everybody knew that going in.

I know that these are bad economic times and the studios are trying to maximize profits with ready made material to appeal to a large demographic, but what they fail to grasp is that people aren’t going to  go to movies if they know they aren’t going to get the full story for their $10.  Studios should really be following the Batman franchise set up, the first one had Ras Al Ghul defeated but there is a new criminal in town leaving playing cards at his crime scenes, implying The Joker will be the villain in the followup, and then in the next film Batman defeats The Joker but has to go on the run as a outlaw.  You get a complete story each time and a teaser to make you want to come back to see what happens next.

And here’s the thing.  This actually works to build up anticipation for a sequel.  Just look at Iron Man.

An eye catching post title, huh?  It comes from Roger Ebert’s review of Kick Ass.  He finds the movie morally reprehensible (which interestingly enough he also said about every Friday the 13th movies) due to having an 11-year-old girl beating up and killing bad guys, and then getting beaten up herself (I wonder if he will feel the same way about a 77-year-old Michael Caine gunning down drug pushers in Harry Brown?).

Now he states that he understands that the film is a satire, but doesn’t get what the film is satirizing, probably because he can’t get past the undoubtably horrible images of a child being beaten.  To be fair I haven’t seen the movie myself yet (tax day having been this week), so I can’t give a fair assessment on what Ebert saw.

However I have read the synopsis and what I get from it is that the morally reprehensible image of a child giving and receiving pain, is showing just how messed up the image of Batman and Robin would be in real life, remember that originally in the comics Robin was about ten to twelve years old.  And the movie really plays up the Batman connection, Nicholas Cage’s costume, he speaks in an Adam West style of voice, and one ad actually has the villain say they need to take out the guy who dresses like Batman.

So maybe there is an actual valid point behind the character of Hit Girl, and the film makers are really critiquing superheroes.  Or maybe it’s just a way to stir up controversy to boost ticket sales, I know one person at work was horrified when she learned about all of the swearing Hit Girl does throughout the film.  Hard to say which is the truth, might even be both.  Satire is such a difficult thing to really interpret and understand sometimes.  Perhaps I will have a better grasp of what the film makers were trying to do after I have seen the film.

I was watching an interesting documentary the other day that got me thinking that I really don’t get it anymore.  It was His Name Was Jason, a look at the long lived Friday the 13th franchise.  Being a teenager in the eighties, I of course watched them all on cable when in high school, and then in the theaters in college.  Was it for tense suspense scenes or interesting characters?  Not really.  Back then I watched the films for two reasons, to see what outrageously gory death scenes they would think of this time, and more importantly, somebody going topless.  As the nineties progressed my interest in gory effects has faded (have never seen a Saw movie and don’t plan on seeing one in the future), and as for gratuitous topless scenes, though still enjoyable, I can’t bring myself to sit though a film I have no interest in just to see a quick flash of nudity.  Must be something about being forty….and the internet (Wonder if Al Gore ever saw that coming when he “invented” the Web?).

Anyway, I have seen all of the films up through Freddy v. Jason, it’s the completist in me.  So I was curious about the back stage origins of the series.  It was interesting seeing interviews with producers, directors, make up effects artists, actors, and celebrity fans talking about the different films, what they enjoyed and didn’t.  And like a Friday the 13th movie there was a death scene from one of the films every ten minutes and gratuitous nude scenes sprinkled throughout.

But then everyone started really getting into this topic that pulled me out of the film and left me scratching my head for the rest of the interviews, feeling like a true outsider.  Everyone started going on and on about the subtle emotional nuances of the different actors who have portrayed Jason, one Jason portrayor comparing him to Frankenstein (though not specified, I assumed he meant Karloff’s interpretation).

Now no offense to Kane Hodder and the other actors who have slipped on the hockey mask, but I don’t think I ever saw Jason as a real character in the films, he was just the mechanism used to kill the characters in the film, an object as animated as the machete he usually carried.  All the talk about his psychological motivations ranging from abuse, abandonment and being ostiscized by society as a child had me wondering if I was missing something obvious right in front of me.

I never thought of the films as having depth of meaning or characterization.  They were just summer popcorn fare.  A quick ninety minutes of mindless action, you sat down, turned your mind off and just enjoyed the make up effects and brief nudity.  I guess that is the difference between beng a casual viewer intead of a die hard fan.