THE TOURIST poster is plain, simple, boring
Oct 01
Can the publicity for a film completely hinge on the popularity and faces of its stars?
Granted, if The Tourist didn’t star A-listers Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, I likely wouldn’t have given it a second look. That’s a large chunk of publicity completed in casting. Still, I don’t think that permits the promotion of the film to lack any excitement or, I dunno, risk.
The poster for The Tourist is playing incredibly safe. So safe, in fact, there isn’t much to discuss beyond the picture of the stars. The rest is all white space and text. The picture of Jolie and Depp isn’t riveting at all. They could be stock shots from a red carpet, for all we know.
Clearly, this poster simply states: It stars them! Go see it!
At least the recently released trailer showed promise.
The Tourist opens Boxing Day 2010 in Australia, 10 December in the States.
First trailer for THE TOURIST, starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp
Sep 16
Columbia Pictures have released the first trailer from their highly anticipated suspense film The Tourist, starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. The film is directed by Oscar winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others) is about an American tourist (Depp) whose playful dalliance with a stranger (Jolie) leads to a web of intrigue, romance and danger during an impromptu trip to Europe.
I had figured this film to be a little more cut-and-dry than the trailer suggests it might be. Instead of being just a straight-laced suspense thriller, I was treated to some surprising dry comedy that improves the premise a great deal. Depp has kept the beard on for this one (Jack Sparrow commitments while filming??) and Jolie looks elegantly stunning, as always.
The Tourist opens 10 December in the States.
No Australian dates have been announced yet.
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 4 teaser, featuring Johnny Depp sitting on a chair
Jul 27
Built deep into the core of this teaser is the main problem confronting the fourth Pirates flick, On Stranger Tides: on his own, as the sole focus of the picture, Jack Sparrow doesn’t work as well as he does as a side-character.
It’d be like making Star Wars all about Han Solo — it may sound cool, but ultimately, focusing on the “shapeshifter” archetype doesn’t deliver the kind of satisfying narrative we’re used to; shapeshifters are designed to test, undermine, but ultimately help build our protagonists. They don’t function well as protagonists in their own right.
I found it hard not to cringe during this teaser, in which Johnny Depp tries valiantly to carry a weak and overlong skit, to varied results. Maybe it works a lot better in 3D, but somehow I doubt it.
Watch as he reels off all the popular memes — booze, maps, rum — without providing anything to hook our interest in the future (zombies? Again? Really?). And whose idea was it to break the fourth wall? If this is any indication of the level of respect they’re treating Jack Sparrow with nowadays, On Stranger Tides will be a grim affair indeed.
Something Of The Something: The Ensomethening is due on 20 May 2011, in 3D. It’s got zombies, mermaids, and Penelope Cruz.
Top 7 twist endings that sucked
Jul 24
A good twist will immediately set your mind spinning. You sit there in the darkened theatre with your jaw agape, breathlessly going over the last two hours of your life and combing through those memories for some kind of clue. The best twists will encourage repeat viewings; the very best twists will serve to enrich the thematic conent of the film.
The other side of the coin is the bad twist: the kind of twist that makes you go “Huh?” The worst case scenario is that the final twist is a cheap shot, a retread of a dozen other twists, or an obviously easy way out of a tricky situation. The very worst twists invalidate the entire film’s existence — such as the rightly-hated “It was all just a dream!” twist.
Here is a list (by no means exhaustive) of the film twists that annoyed me the most:
7 – Remember Me (2010)
Robert Pattinson spends a most of the movie trying to un-estrange himself from his distant father, Pierce Brosnan. He finally manages to pin him down for a meeting, to reconcile their differences. They agree on a time and a place. Pattinson arrives early, but Brosnan, as always, is late. Pattinson looks out the window, and the camera tracks out to reveal he’s halfway up the World Trade Centre. We find out the date — 11 September 2001 — and the film fades to black. I guess that’s one way to solve familial relationship problems, but it’s no way to end your movie.
6 – Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008)
The infamous “space between spaces” line came after the all the fridge-nuking and monkey-swinging, and as such isn’t the target of as much vitriol as those earlier indications of inanity. But it is still mind-bogglingly stupid. The Indiana Jones movies have always had a creeping sense of the supernatural about them – Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull took it a step too far.
5 – Planet Of The Apes (2001)
People often forget that Tim Burton made The Planet Of The Apes. They’re too busy swooning over Edward Scissorhands and … well that’s it, actually. People often forget how awful the twist ending of The Planet Of The Apes is, too, because it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Mark Wahlberg travels into the future, hangs out with some cranky apes, comes back to his own time, and finds … the planet overrun by cranky apes. This sucks twice as hard because the twist of the original Apes was so much better.
4 – Saw (2004)
The first time I watched Saw, I guessed that the genial old fellow in the hospital was the killer, purely because the camera lingered a beat too long on him in the first act. What I didn’t know was that he could paralyse himself for extended periods of time, and stop his breathing, in order to convince two people in the room with him that he was a corpse. That’s an impressive skill. So impressive a skill, in fact, that it’s quite clearly bullshit.
3 – Inception (2010)
Inception was such a cortical strain that it really needed a powerful finish in order to validate all the hard work your poor cerebellum did over the past two and a half hours. What we got instead was a cheap trick, a sleight of hand that denied the film a real sense of purpose or higher meaning. Nolan delivered such a satisfying twist in Memento that we all thought he couldn’t possibly fail. Then, he did.
2 – Most M Night Shyamalan movies (2002, 2004, 2008)
It started with Signs: aliens for whom water is like acid is to us. It’s like humans landing naked on Venus and complaining about all the sulfuric acid everywhere — that is, outrageously stupid. Plus, biologists have shown that water is one of the few reliable mediums for live to get started in. So chances are, any alien life-form (especially if it looks suspiciously human-shaped) we come across will be water-dependant, not -intolerant.
Then there was The Village: all those monstrous beasts you spent the entire film evading were just people in fake-looking suits! And also you’re living in the modern world, but you’re trapped in the woods so that you’ll never escape and find out that science can cure all your illnesses! The twist ending ruins the movie, drains any sense of horror, and causes your empathy for the characters to dissolve in seconds.
Finally, there was The Happening: turns out all plants everywhere in the world have evolved a very specific airborn neurotoxin that breaks down the brain’s inhibitions! And it only applies to one species out of ten million — us! There are so many things wrong with this — including the implication that plants are sentient — that The Happening officially destroyed what little faith I had in M Night Shyamalan to deliver anything resembling a half-decent movie any more. I didn’t even watch The Lady In The Water — did that have a stupid twist as well?
1 – All those mid-noughties thrillers that tried to copy Fight Club
People watched Fight Club. A lot of people. Some of them were filmmakers. Forgetting that so many other people had also watched Fight Club, these filmmakers decided to pull the same final-reel twist over and over again in the following decade that it became something of a running joke.
Hide And Seek: the menacing killer is the protagonist’s (Robert DeNiro) split personality. Secret Window: the menacing killer is the protagonist’s (Johnny Depp) split personality. The Number 23: the menacing killer is the protagonist (Jim Carrey), before he got amnesia. Perfect Strangers: the mancing killer is the protagonist (Halle Berry) — the kicker is that she knows what she’s doing — and keeps doing it anyway.
The rash of mid-00s twist-based films has finally abated, and hopefully we can look forward to films that offer decent, rather that deficient, twists.
What final-reel twists bugged the hell out of you? Did you think Inception‘s twist was that bad, or am I crazy? Any thoughts are welcome and appreciated.
Johnny Depp does something, everyone pays attention: PIRATES 4 set pics
Jul 03
That’s right, Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is filming right now. Well maybe not right now; today’s a Saturday. Depends on their schedule — do they do 6-day weeks at Disney or do they shoot Monday – Friday? Who knows.
Anyway, check out these photos of Johnny Depp chillin’ with some dudes on a log, and asking whether he’s allowed to go pee in the ocean, respectively:
Yep, looks like they’re hard at work bringing you the next installment in one of the biggest film franchises of all time. Also, where can I get one of those boom-stands? It looks outrageously convenient.
Pirates 4 (or, if you accidentally hold shift, Pirates $) is due in May 2011, and will be in 3D, etc.
OPINIONS COUNT