Welcome to the first Open Thread of 2011, Overthinkers! Power down your jump packs and check this conflarb out.
First, America celebrated the People’s Choice Awards earlier this week. You people chose Katy Perry (Favorite Female Artist), Neil Patrick Harris (Favorite TV Comedy Actor), Johnny Depp (Favorite Movie Actor) and Zac Efron (Favorite Movie Star Under 25). A glimpse into Oscar season, perhaps? No.
No, no, look LESS comfortable.
If the fall is For Your Consideration season, the time studios flood the theaters with Oscar contenders, then early winter is Please Ignore Me season, when studios dump their crap in the hopes that you’ll forget it by the Razzies. First on the docket this year: Nicholas Cage medieval actioner Season of the Witch. If you thought The Seventh Seal needed more flying demons and blood-spraying corpses, then oh baby, this movie will still disappoint you. Also features Ron Perlman.
Finally, reports continue to slip past the Iron Curtain about the nonsense that men call Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark. I point you to one brave correspondent, who witnessed horrors thus:
No such breaking point exists in Turn Off The Dark. Instead, it is a series of breaking points. Every time you think to yourself this couldn’t possible get worse, it does. By the middle of the second act as Our Hero faces his greatest crisis yet and the action stops so that a chorus of spider demons can sing a song about shoes, your jaw will drop with disbelief and conflicting emotions. On the one hand, you’ll be shocked things have gotten this bad. On the other, you’ll be shocked that it got even worse than it was half an hour ago when a Caribbean subway busker showed up to open the second act Rafifi-Style only to then disappear from the narrative, never to be seen again.
Will Nicholas Cage bring Julie Taymor to the Hollywood Bowl for a ritual exorcism and burning? Or is there something we missed? Sound off in the comments, for this is your … Open Thread.
Is there still time for 2011 predictions? Because those things are always useless, and the year always turns out to be totally different from what people predict.
In that vein, I predict a Best Picture nomination for Season of the Witch.
Here’s a prediction that I honestly hope will come true: The novelty of 3D movies will wear off. I literally forgot I was watching something in 3D while watching “Tron:Legacy” and while playing a 3D video game at Comic-Con. I also saw “Avatar” in 2D on TV and felt that the visuals still retained much of their impact. All of this leads me to say that 3D doesn’t add nearly enough to the entertainment experience to warrant the extra cost/trouble to make and watch these games/movies.
Regarding Avatar, I couldn’t disagree more. I saw it on TV and felt it looked FAR more cartoonish – it looked, in fact, like an Xbox game, an impression that I had never gotten in the theater.
I do hope that there is less faddish 3D, but for wholly opposite reasons.
I’d deal with the traffic at Hollywood and Vine to see “…Nicholas Cage bring Julie Taymor to the Hollywood Bowl for a ritual exorcism and burning”.
As for 2011 predictions, I’m going with more sharpening of the long tail and its inverse megablockbusters of vacuous garbage. Along those lines, I predict more false positives on OTI e.g. Bieber and the asian motif where we attempt to OTI something that actually has nothing to discuss.
I predict the new Transformers movie will surpass its predecessors in both revenue and suckage.
CES is this weekend. Apparently there are going to be a ton of variations of iPads from competitors getting launched, for one thing. Microsoft is rumored to have one.
Season of the Witch looks like this year’s contender for “Nicholas Cage squanders his talents in another cash-grab role” and, if I’m not mistaken by watching the trailers, it’s another “some actors affect an accent, others do not” movie (aka Tom Cruise vs. an English cast in “Valkyrie”).
Seeing the review for the Spider-Man musical put me of two minds; first, the Red Sails of Spain with an all-Goulet cast on SNL, secondly the “Springtime for Hitler” portion of “The Producers” (the original movie was on TCM this afternoon). Nuff said…
About the tragedy in Arizona, while I know it’s not the perogative of this website to address political issues, the finger-wagging in the media is already confused and all over the place so let me just say that Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann didn’t pull the trigger in Arizona; they just provided the ammo. Free speech isn’t free; shit can happen if the wrong person listens to you. If this guy that did this turns out to be a Tea Bagger or just a lone nut with a right-wing bent, I wouldn’t be surprised. The sad thing is, in a matter of months we’ll all forget about this and it’ll be business as usual on the political channels.
I’m afraid I have to agree with you about Arizona. I have liked Gabrielle Gibbons (not only because of our shared name!); but even if I totally disagreed with her politics, I would still be feeling as sick to my stomach as I have over this. Just as the assassination of the Afghani governor made me feel earlier this week. It will fade from media attention soon enough, and it may pop up again when the guy gets sentenced or pleas, but I don’t think it will last very long in the media, either.
Although, the fact that a judge and a child were killed (among others, of course), perhaps, maybe, possibly, could mean the treatment of the whole thing will be different.
This isn’t really a political site, but putting at least a media spin on it, the misinformation that was going out all day yesterday was not only nerve-wracking for those paying attention, but somewhat revealing. For all of the power the media has, it was still basically in the same position as anyone else. Media, too, became a helpless and thereby passive observer, only able to report on rumors in a situation where hardcore facts were of a necessity. I suppose I find the role change rather fascinating, and I don’t really have much of a thesis, here, just an observation. :/
They say bad things come in threes. I’m kind of terrified and can’t help but wonder if anyone else is going to get hurt within the next week or so.
And by “Gibbons” I meant “Gifford.” Jeez… Sorry, Gibbons is the name of a former governor of the state I grew up in, that’s the only explanation I have for that.
“Giffords”
I just fail, flat out fail.
Oh yeah, and has anyone else heard about the Batman live-action musical?
Important distinction: it’s not a musical.
http://io9.com/5723395/concept-art-for-the-batman-live-arena-show-promises-joker-balloon/gallery/
Although I would pay good money to watch a Batman musical.
Yeah, that article is more recent than the one I read, so thanks for correcting me. I’d pay good money to see the arena show OR a musical, though.
There was a pretty entertianing snippet of on in a Batman Beyond episode.
“A superstitious cowardly lot…”
And yet, it still does well:
http://blog.moviefone.com/2011/01/11/spider-man-becomes-broadways-highest-grossing-musical/
That just baffles the mind; is Broadway bereft of good ideas?
(Actually, as a non-Broadway kind of person, I’m not sure I’d say they ever had a good idea. That Shakespeare fellow was pretty solid, but since then it’s been hit or miss)
The Spidey reboot for the movies, however necessary after the third film, is even less likely to bring a smile to my face. Of course, I’m sure Batman fans said the same thing when they heard about “Batman Begins” for the first time.
Apparently Glenn Beck has decided that Spider-Man:Turn Off The Dark is the best thing ever, ever:
http://flavorwire.com/142526/glenn-beck-has-something-to-say-about-the-spider-man-musical
This makes an eerie degree of sense to me, for several reasons. First, it is very easy to re-frame critics’ disapproval as an elitist disdain for the comic-book source material and U2 soundtrack. Beck, by making these arguments, strengthens his chosen status as Champion of the Average Guy.
Critical response to the show, however, doesn’t really focus on either of these things. Indeed, the critics seem to take issue with Julie Taymor’s radical departures from the source material. Uncle Ben, for example, is apparently no longer really involved in Spider-Man’s origin; he never tells Peter Parker that “with great power comes great responsibility,” and his death no longer motivates Peter to become Spider-Man.
Instead, Spider-Man’s main motivator is a giant Greek spider-goddess. Why? Apparently, nobody really knows…and that, I think, is the main reason that Glenn Beck has jumped onto this thing with such abandon. The show’s creators have not provided a concise explanation of their work’s meaning, and critics are tending toward agreement that there isn’t one. Enter Glenn Beck and his magical blackboard, ready to straight-up tell us what this show is about. It’s a golden opportunity.
Incidentally, does anyone know how Julie Taymor and/or U2 are reacting to Beck’s support of the show?