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.

Sorry about not posting during my usual time last week, but this thing happened and I got caught up in it.  Basically my NetFlix streaming disc for the Wii came last week and I have been doing nothing with my free time except streaming movies.  It is awesome!  The picture quality is unbelievably sharp.  There has yet to be a lag time that I have noticed due to bandwith issues.  The whole thing is just too cool.

Want to watch a movie?  Scroll through your choices and then hit play and wham, it starts playing.  Want to skip ahead, pause for a bathroom break, or stop it and come back later right where you left off?  No problem.

And I have been going nuts, watching everything from The Dark Corner to Billy Jack, from Dirty Harry to SNL: the Best of Christopher Walken (I got a fever and the only cure is more cowbell!).  Heck I even watched stuff I already have on DVD, like The Big Sleep and episodes of Firefly. How crazy is that?