You may recall me mentioning a while back that Pixar is adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fabulous pulp novels about John Carter of Mars into a mixed live-action/CGI film trilogy. Well, I’ve just learned they’re not the first animators to take a crack at ERB’s manly Virginia gentleman who becomes the warlord of an alien world. Another attempt was made to translate Carter to film way back in the 1930s by Bob Clampett, an alumnus of Warner Brothers’ famous Termite Terrace and the director of many well-known Looney Tunes shorts (including one of my favorites, Falling Hare, in which Bugs Bunny battles a gremlin).

According to this guy, the attempt never amounted to much, because Clampett and ERB had a different creative vision than the movie studios — unthinkable, I know! — but Clampett got as far as making some test footage, which I now present as a Fascinating Historical Curiosity:

I don’t know about you, but I think that stuff looks really cool, very much in the vein of the extremely nifty Superman shorts produced by Max Fleischer in the ’40s. The running thoat — the eight-legged animal — is especially impressive. Sigh. Yet another item for the “If Only” file…

(Hat tip to Chris Roberson for posting the video first.)

Okay, so it seems that the hot new fad sweeping the InterWebs is “sweded” movies, i.e., ultra-cheap homemade re-creations of well-known films using cardboard, tin foil, and household items as props and costumes. The inspiration behind this phenomenon is apparently a Jack Black comedy called Be Kind, Rewind (which hasn’t even been released yet) in which a couple of dim-bulb video-store owners accidentally erase their entire inventory of VHS cassettes and then start replacing those movies with their own half-assed reproductions. Which of course their customers love more than the originals, causing the two to be elevated into folk heroes or something.

Yeah, I know, it doesn’t sound very funny to me either, but I guess this is the sort of thing the kids are going for these days. And to think our parents didn’t get Yahoo Serious! Oh, wait… neither did I.

Anyhow, the aesthetic at work in these “sweded” flicks — the term comes from one Be Kind, Rewind character’s BS explanation that the replacement movies are the Swedish versions — seems to be “the cheesier, the better.” And oh, god, is this stuff cheesy. Not just cheesy, but cheez-ee. I’ve seen a lot of amateur movies in my time, and even been in a few, but these things strike a new low in sheer painfulness. There is, for example, a sweded version of Star Wars that consists of people wearing cardboard X-wings and TIE-fighter panels chasing each other around a lawn while somebody hums the theme music. I couldn’t even finish that one, it was so embarrassing. Click that link at your own peril.

I’ll be honest, I think the whole sweding thing is just plain dumb. But for every rule, of course, there are exceptions. The following video, sent to me by my buddy Chenopup, is so audacious, so ambitious, so well-done, that I simply couldn’t help but sit in awe as it played for the first time. It’s the lightcycle scene from Tron, completely redone in cardboard, Saran Wrap, and stop-motion animation… and it is frakkin’ awesome:

Just for reference, here’s the original scene:

I’m amazed at how close the sweders got their version to the original… of course, now I want to go watch the real Tron again. Look, it’s The Dude in a funny hat!

One element that has so far been missing from every major film derived from a comic book is the sense that the titular hero shares his world with a whole bunch of other superheroes. For example, Spider-Man-the-film gave no hint that Spider-Man-the-character was only one of a vast pantheon of characters who all live in the same world. Superhero movies to date have all been entirely self-contained and, so far as the novice viewer can tell, each tells of the only super-powered person on the planet.

That’s not how it is in the comics medium, where the world is lousy with super-powered people and creatures, and any character who is owned by a particular publisher is likely to show up in any other character’s book at some point. This is especially true in the case of the so-called Marvel Universe, the shared setting of all the titles published by Marvel Comics, so it is somewhat surprising that all the films based on Marvel titles — and that would be most of the superhero flicks of the last ten years or so, including X-Men, Daredevil, The Hulk, Ghost Rider, and The Fantastic Four — have not so far included any crossovers between them. (Actually, I guess it’s not that surprising, since crossovers would be meaningless — if not actually confusing — for the average viewer who sees only one of these films a year and doesn’t know anything about comics.)

But now, in a summer that’s going to see two major movie releases based on Marvel titles, it looks like the powers that be are going to throw in the sort of thing that comics fans have enjoyed for years: according to this blog, Robert Downey, Jr., who is playing the title role in the much-anticipated Iron Man, will have a cameo appearance in The Incredible Hulk. There is also some rumbling that another big name who is supposed to star in another upcoming Marvel-licensed flick — the rumor mill says that it will be Samuel L. Jackson playing the character Nick Fury — will appear briefly in Iron Man.

I think this brilliant, a nice gesture to comics fans and a good marketing ploy to promote the other movies based on the same universe that will be released around the same time. Now, if they could just somehow get all the movies to meet the same standard of quality…

One more quick item before I shut down for the night:

Stephen Sommers, who scored big with his goofy-fun remake of The Mummy and then flopped even bigger with the dismal Van Helsing, is once again looking to the classic Universal monsters for inspiration. This time, it’s The Wolf Man getting an upgrade. I’ve got to admit, I wasn’t too crazy about this idea when I first heard it. I don’t usually care for remakes, Sommers has a spotty record, and the 1941 Wolf Man with Lon Chaney, Jr., has always been my favorite of the Universal monster movies.

But then I heard Benicio del Toro would be playing Lon Chaney part, and my interest level rose a hair. Then I heard the legendary Rick Baker — who brought An American Werewolf in London to life, among many other projects — would be doing the make-up effects and that he intended to remain true to the look of the original, and my interest level climbed a bit more.
Then I saw a photo of del Toro in Baker’s make-up:

Holy crap! Is that not way-cool? Suddenly, I’m actually looking forward to this project. Let’s hope it’s a lot more like The Mummy than Van Helsing, though…

Via. Another pic of del Toro’s make-up, as well as one of Lon Chaney for comparison, can be found here.

As expected, that one-sheet for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that you’ve been seeing around is just the “teaser.” Here’s the regular release design, which the official Indiana Jones web site is calling the “payoff” poster:

I’ve never heard that term before, but it seems to fit. In more ways than one. I really like this design. It’s in keeping with the standard pattern for Indiana Jones movies: the first poster depicted just Indy alone, and now this design is a collage featuring all the primary characters with a bit of action at the bottom. It is, in fact, very similar to the regular release design for Last Crusade, which is as it should be. It makes this fourth movie feel like it really is part of the series instead of just an afterthought. (Of course, we’ll see what the actual movie is like, but I think at this point my skepticism has degraded to about the same consistency as cheesecloth. I’m ready Uncle George, take me now!)

Still a couple of months to go, of course, before opening day. In the meantime, I think I’ll get out the old credit card and acquire another item for the Archives…

People tend to think that winning an Oscar is evidence that an actor is, in the words of Jon Lovitz, a Master Thespian, i.e., an immense talent who appears only in serious cinema that stretches the minds of all who see it, superior to all those journeyman types who eke out a living doing mere movies. Um, no. The truth is that most Oscar winners get lucky. That’s not to say that they’re not talented — although you can always quibble about some — but rather that they had the good sense or the good fortune to choose the right project at the right time. Acting, like careers in every other industry you can think of, depends as much on factors that the individual cannot control as those he or she can, and most of the time, achieving the pinnacle of an Oscar win is followed by an inevitable decline into “paying the mortgage” roles.

All of which is a rather long and pretentious way of introducing the following amusing video, ganked from AMC-TV‘s SciFi Scanner blog:

For the record, I don’t remember Ray Milland as the star of The Thing with Two Heads. No, in my mind, he will forever be the unscrupulous Sire Uri from the original Battlestar Galactica. He appeared only in the three-hour pilot film and was last seen cravenly running for his life from the attacking Cylon ground forces on Carillon (I like to think he took a laser blast in his smug, puffy face and the Ovions ate what was left over), but he’s always stood out in my mind as an embodiment of the petty evil that so often stems from personal wealth and an overblown sense of entitlement.

I don’t know why I keep watching the Oscars year after year. It’s not like it was back in the old days when I worked at the theater. Back then, I saw pretty much every movie that came out within a week or two of its release, I had very strong opinions about them all, and I enjoyed the validation that the Oscars provided, either by honoring the movies I liked or by giving me the chance to feel superior to those jerks on the Academy when they honored the stuff I didn’t like.

Continue Reading…

From the Department of Holy-Crap-How-Did-I-Get-to-Be-This-Frakkin’-Old? comes the news that today is Molly Ringwald’s 40th birthday. Forty. Wow. Hard to believe that so much time has passed since I first laid eyes on her in the first season of The Facts of Life. (Yes, I’m one of the three people that actually remembers her being on TFoL, before she was jettisoned along with several other girls in the second-season retool.)

Of course, everyone knows her breakout role was in the seminal Eighties teen flick Sixteen Candles, in which she played hapless Samantha Baker (hence the title of this entry), whose entire family utterly forgets her sweet-sixteen because of the chaos surrounding her older sister’s wedding. (As it so happens, I caught a few minutes of Candles on TV the other night; I still think it’s pretty damn funny, although I grant that you maybe had to be there at the time to think so. If I ever get around to having kids, they probably won’t understand enough of the cultural underpinnings of the movie to get the jokes.)

I’m not shy about admitting that I had a pretty hard crush on Molly back in her Sixteen Candles/Breakfast Club days. She was about my age and her characters seemed like girls I might actually know, as opposed to the usual perfect automatons created by Hollywood make-up artists (Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend Cameron, for example, was utterly cool and utterly beautiful and no one like her has ever existed in any high school anywhere on this — or probably any other — planet.) Molly’s career faltered as she matured — she reportedly turned down the lead roles in both Pretty Woman and Ghost (doh!) — but she luckily managed to avoid the drugs, booze, and general nonsense that befell many of her fellow “Brat Pack” contemporaries.

A year or two back, the Girlfriend and I saw Molly Ringwald in the touring revival of the Broadway musical Sweet Charity, and although I know the critics weren’t very kind about her performance, I thoroughly enjoyed the evening. Maybe that was simply because I enjoy seeing someone I used to like return to the spotlight, or maybe it was just another case of the critics being unnecessarily harsh and snobby. Either way, it was good to see her again. I’d love to hear that a comeback is in the offing…

(Hat tip to SamuraiFrog, who brought this my attention and shares some similar sentiments about Ms. Ringwald…)