movies

Raising the undead

The big talk in the blogverse today — well, besides this, or this — is of a planned Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot. This is obviously a very bad idea, especially since it will reportedly be without the involvement of creator Joss Whedon. Whedon, however, doesn’t own the rights to the character — Fran Rubel Kuzui, the director of the original Buffy film, does — so such a project could conceivably go forward:

The new “Buffy” film, however, would have no connection to the TV series, nor would it use popular supporting characters like Angel, Willow, Xander or Spike. Vertigo and [Fran Rubel] Kuzui are looking to restart the story line without trampling on the beloved existing universe created by Whedon, putting the parties in a similar situation faced by Paramount, J.J. Abrams and his crew when relaunching “Star Trek.”One of the underlying ideas of “Buffy” allows Vertigo and Kuzui to do just that: that each generation has its own vampire slayer to protect it. The goal would be to make a darker, event-sized movie that would, of course, have franchise potential.

I suppose nobody told Kuzui that her Buffy movie wasn’t very good? (Seriously, I don’t think many people are waiting around for the return of Kristy Swanson or Luke Perry’s Pike.)


The worst thing about the success of the new Star Trek reboot is that it’s encouraging this sort of behavior, suggesting remakes where none needs to be made. Just because you can kickstart a series doesn’t mean you should. What’s especially annoying about this one, however, is that, unlike the Trek franchise, the Buffy brand is still going strong. It doesn’t need a kickstart.

Occasionally a reboot can work — I’ve gone into some detail on why I think the new Star Trek doesn’t — but there needs to be a reason for it, beyond corporate synergy or the desire to make lots of money. Battlestar Galactica, for instance, worked — when it worked, which wasn’t always, and with increasingly less frequency as the series went on — because it took a relatively bad series, or at least one that was not well loved or well remembered, and made it its own, with its own story to tell.

You could argue that it ultimately failed in the telling, but I don’t think you could argue that the attempt was without merit.

Kuzui’s attempt, however, seems like exceptionally poor judgment. I’m hoping there’s no truth to this story, or the idea will die a merciful death in committee.

Unless, of course, Whedon does get involved. Then I might be willing to consider it.

We’ve got movie sign!

Over the long Memorial Day weekend, I watched a few movies — three, actually. (I won’t include the The Skydivers, the MST3K episode I re-watched on Monday morning. But I like coffee!) These were, in order, Baby Mama, Terminator Salvation, and Audition. I don’t think you could have picked three more different movies. All of them had their moments, but all of them were, in their own unique ways, rather disappointing.

Baby Mama has a stellar and talented cast, beginning with its stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, yet it never manages to be all that remarkable. Pleasant and likable, and often quite funny, but more forgettable than anything else. Stephanie Zacharek at Salon calls it “sometimes conventional to the point of being formulaic.” While talented comedians can sometimes rise above a mediocre script, I don’t think the cast here quite pulls it off. (Although I will agree with Zacharek that Undercover Brother, writer Michael McCullers’ earlier comedy, is “marvelous and unjustly overlooked.”)

Terminator Salvation is at least as good as its predecessor, Terminator 3 — which is, of course, to say not so good really, or at least significantly worse than the first two films in the series. It isn’t completely terrible, often a halfway decent summer action movie, but it’s awfully generic, incredibly cheerless, and never seems to have any real reason for existing. Director McG almost fetishizes the machines in this film, as if that’s what made James Cameron’s original Terminator movies work, but he skimps on the human characters. Few of them here make any real solid impression. Christian Bale, for instance, is basically just playing a parody of himself, and those raspy bellows — which I actually defended in The Dark Knight — did start to get on my nerves after a while. It’s tough to argue that Bale is even the star of this movie, however. Just like in The Dark Knight, he’s more a supporting player. Sam Worthington seems to get considerably more screen time, and his is the only character with anything like a real arc. I don’t know what it says about the movie that its ostensible hero could maybe be cut from the film altogether, but it isn’t good.

And then there’s Audition, which was not at all what I was expecting — but I guess I should have come to expect that from a Japanese horror movie. Easily the best of the three films I watched over the weekend, it still left me somewhat disappointed, maybe because my expectations were so high — maybe because I had expectations at all. As Scott Tobias writes:

Japanese director Takashi Miike’s astonishing, one-of-a-kind Audition presents a sticky catch-22 situation: The best way to see it would be to stumble absentmindedly into the theater knowing nothing about it. On the other hand, only the most adventurous moviegoers would be grateful for not having been warned.

It is truly shocking — Elvis Mitchell calls it “a test of nerves,” requiring “a strong constitution” — but maybe less so because you know the shocks are coming. Ultimately, while I’m very glad I knew it was a horror movie going in, I wish I hadn’t known the direction that horror was coming from. I wish, basically, that I just hadn’t read the plot description.

What’s past is prolonged

The new Star Trek film is shiny and fun and all kinds of entertaining.

I wish they hadn’t made it.

At the risk of sounding like the butt of the Onion’s recent funny joke, I do think there’s something special about Star Trek that J.J. Abrams’ very watchable movie wholly fails to replicate. You could certainly argue that the series has done nothing but replicate that same something for many, many years now — Gerry Canavan calls it a franchise “built almost entirely on the bedrock of nostalgic repetition” — but, when all is said and done, I really don’t think Abrams brings anything new to the table. He shuffles some things around, remakes characters and events, and heaven knows he modernizes the aesthetic and beefs up the special effects. But to what end? Beyond being mildly diverting for a couple of hours, I don’t see that the film has a whole lot to offer. While it’s neat to see characters we know so well meet up for the first time, I don’t know that these characters, these particular re-interpretations, are ones that I’d need to spend any more time with. This is and isn’t the Star Trek universe; the film is both a prequel and a re-imagining — through some clever, yet very hokey, time travel* — but ultimately I think it fails at both. Abrams and company have chipped away at that bedrock of nostalgia, but they haven’t provided a new, solid foundation of their own. The movie isn’t quite Star Trek, but it also isn’t quite anything else.

Abigail Nussbaum writes:

It seems to me that far from regaining the franchise’s relevance, a film like Abrams’s Star Trek relinquishes it. Casino Royale is a hell of a good film, but it reinvents James Bond on others’ terms, and in so doing acknowledges that the Bond franchise, which once defined the concept, look and feel of espionage films, is now merely a follower, emulating newer and more innovative series. There’s something sad about a once-vibrant cultural artifact becoming first venerable and then a forgotten relic, but not nearly as sad as not allowing that artifact to die a dignified death, and more importantly, not allowing its successors room to grow. Every generation comes up with its own stories, but ours seems content to slap new coats of paint on the old ones so that it can keep telling them again and again. I’d much rather boldly go where no one has gone before.

All that said, however, it is fun for a couple of hours, and most of the actors acquit themselves reasonably well. Zachary Quinto is the obvious — although also only — standout as Spock, although the underused Simon Pegg is always fun to watch, and I did enjoy Karl Urban’s grumpy DeForest Kelley impersonation. Chris Pine’s James Kirk fares not quite as well, in no small part because — as John Rogers points out — he has no real character arc or development whatsoever. This isn’t Pines’ fault — I think he plays the character well for how it’s written — but just another symptom of what doesn’t quite work about the movie.

As I remarked to a friend this afternoon, in many ways it felt like fan fiction, written by people who weren’t really fans.

Yesterday evening I also watched Doomsday. Talk about not bringing anything new to the table. I joked via Twitter that it’s basically “Snake Plissken Beyond Thunderdome,” a little bit of Escape from New York crossed with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, but there’s also a quick stopover in medieval times, Gladiator-style, and a small pinch or two of 28 Days Later. Then it cycles back into The Road Warrior just for good measure. It’s entertaining enough, and never feels completely like a waste of time, but it also never feels like anything more than a disconnected string of homages to better, more exciting films.

* Star Trek, as a series, is notorious for playing fast and loose with the science in sceince fiction, but it seemed particularly egregious here. A MacGuffin is one thing, but the ridiculousness of the “red matter” — with its many shades of Abrams’ earlier “Mueller device” — and the way the film refuses to be even internally consistent with its complete misunderstanding of how a black hole operates…well, it does get a little annoying.