Yesterday I already twittered (is that how you spell it, or is to “I twoot”?) the winners of the first – perhaps annual – Jasper’s Take Awards. These are completely immaterial, ceremonyless, non-carpet, celeb-free, low-cal awards given out for achievements in cinema that are usually overlooked by the Oscars, the Globes, the Baftas and the likes. These are the winners, and this is why they’ve won.
The Tess Benedict Award for Most Mediocre Film of the Year goes to The Eagle. A film that is so completely redundant that it should not have been made. Actually, it was so redundant that, despite the fact that it was already made, they shelved it for a year before releasing it. Because there was already another, better film about the same subject: Centurion. It is actually a pity, considering that if The Eagle had beaten Centurion in terms of release dates, it would have been a completely acceptable, entertaining little adventure film.
The ‘Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’ award for worst use of 3D in a Motion Picture was a close call. Technically I might argue that the worst 3D I have seen this year was in the Dutch film Nova Zembla. But if we consider budgets, and experiences in making this types of film, the biggest let down – and the winner of this award – must bePirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides. Whatever you think of the third Pirates film, at least it offered state-of-the-art visual effects and set-pieces like you had never seen before. Its successor managed to add to that prize-winning formula the hottest new film technology of the last 3 years and come up with… absolutely nothing. No sea battles, no stunning set-pieces, just dark boredom.
The Muhammar Khadaffi Award for morally most reprehensible film that is nonetheless succesfull was an easy choice this year. Yes, both Transformers: Dark of the Moon and The Change Up offered very bleak, pessimistic visions of what our civilization has come to. But truly the most morally depraving thing film studios have done this year was releasing Green Lantern. A film that was so bad and ugly, so boring, such an assault on the senses and such a joust at our cognitive and rational capabilities that it does not deserve to exist. Not a crime against our standards and values, but against Film. And on this website we shall have none of it.
Disclaimer: A film that was not nominated and that you may find missing in relation to this award is The Hangover 2. But I can’t honestly nominate it, because I had better things to do.
We close the Jasper’s Take Awards on a positive note though. The Mind Heist Award for most enthusiasticating trailer! Goes to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Sure the other nominees (The Dark Knight Rises, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Muppets and The Guard) were at least as exciting, but the difference is this: those are films I would have seen (and will see) anyway. While Tinker Tailor… might well have past my attention had it nto been for that fantastic first trailer.
So that’s it for the Jasper’s Take Awards 2011 then. Stay tuned, because before the year is over there will still be reviews of Puss in Boots, Tresspass and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, I will finish my early Oscar predictions and on 30 and 31 December I will share with you my top tens of best and worst films of 2011.
Of course, this being the end of the year, I will publish my lists of best and worst films of the year. These lists will be uploaded on 30 and 31 December. Next to that there will be a novelty on this website: the Jasper’s Take Awards. These awards celebrate all those qualities films can possess that are generally overlooked by the Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press Agency and the British Academy. Below you can find the categories, if you want to nominate people or films for a category, then just post a response to this blogpost. Also, if you have strong arguments in favor of or against a particular nomination, let me know…
The Tess Benedict Award for Most Mediocre Film of the Year
“Does he make you laugh?’ asks Danny Ocean (George Clooney) to Tess Benedict (Julia Roberts) of her new husband Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) in Ocean’s Eleven. “He does not make me cry” she answers. The Tess Benedict Award celebrates those movies that leave us entirely untouched. Neither arousing nor angering us they simply exist. It is time to acknowledge such mediocrity. The nominees for this award are:
The ‘Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’ award for worst use of 3D in a Motion Picture
Of course we do need to be afraid of the dark. Very afraid. In fact, being too dark and still using darkening 3D is the serious fault in most of the following nominees.
The Mind Heist Award for most enthusiasticating trailer!
Mind Heist is the song by Zach Hemsey that was used for the trailer of Inception, to great effect. This award celebrates those trailers that make us want to abso-fucking-litely see the film. The quality of the trailer, it should be said, is absolutely independent of the quality of the film. Nominees:
The Jasper’s Take Awards wiinners will be announced on twitter in real time on the evening of 20 December, and will subsequently be listed on this website.
The new version of The Three Musketeers is by far the Dumbest Film of 2011. And I don’t mean dumb as in ‘incoherent’ (Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides) ‘ridiculous’ (Sucker Punch) or ‘non-sensical’ (The Green Lantern). I mean dumb as in: not smart enough for special education. It is the mentally handicapped nephew of such fare as The Man in the Iron Mask or The Musketeer. Or better still: it treats its audiences as a bunch of Simple Jack’s.
This is Dumas-for-Dummy’s, or for very young kids. Director Paul W.S. Anderson (from Resident Evil and Alien vs. Predator, and absolutely not to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of Magnolia) offers 110 minutes of show-and-tell: everything is shown, explained and repeated, so as to make sure that four-year old children will understand the plot. Fine. If this were a kids film. But it is not. It’s got a PG13 rating in America, and a 12 in The Netherlands. There is an amount of nasty violence and low necklines that is most certainly not appropriate for toddlers.
So if Anderson tried to do a ‘Robert Rodriguez’ (successfully switching from ultra-violent to kids films) he clearly failed. If he wants to make an ultra-light, breezy and entertaining blockbuster, then he partially succeeded. For when you’re not bugged out by the film’s simple-mindedness, there are still some things to enjoy. Machine gun equipped airships, for instance. And stunt casting.
Anderson has hired a whole bunch of talented actors to do relatively little, relatively good. Christoph Waltz for instance, as cardinal Richelieu. Milla Jovovich – the director’s wife – as a ninja version of Milady de Winter. Mads Mikkelsen as the one-eyed baddy Rochefort. But the best joke is a cheeky reference to the film that The Three Musketeers wants to be: Pirates of the Carribean. Whereas Gore Verbinski’s Pirates films were hindered by the bland wetness of their protagonist Orlando Bloom, Anderson’s movie benefits from that same Bloom’s wondrously bizarre turn-out as the Duke of Buckingham. The actor certainly has a field-day playing a bad guy, and if he’d been given more screen time he could have been to this flick what Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow was to Pirates.
There is also too little screen time for the actual musketeers, Athos, Aramis and Porthos, who are decently cast (Matthew MacFadyen, Luke Evans and Ray Stevenson). The kid playing D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) is a disaster. Unsympathetic is a euphemism. Creep gives him too much credit. Compared to the thespically-challenged Lerman, Bloom’s performance in Pirates was Oscar-worthy. But he has Justin Bieber hair, so he’s probably there to draw in that part of the target audience that consists of thirteen year old girls.
There is one thing Anderson did do very good. He has understood that 3D is not (yet) a story-telling device. It is for pointing and throwing things at the audience, and nothing more.
Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers. You know what? Despite being incredibly dumb, and an insult to Dumas, and in 3D, I moderately enjoyed myself for the length of its running time.
It is September. We’ve had the Oscars, Cannes and the blockbuster season, and this weekend saw the end of the Venice film festival. So, most of what was to happen in film this year has already happened. Time for a little overview then.
Last year I kept lists of the best ten and the worst ten films of the year. I’ve done the same thing for this year so far. And to start off on a good note: this year’s worst films aren’t that much worse than last year’s worst films. 2011’s Clash of the Titans was Conan the Barbarian, in terms of noisy nonsense, but Conan still offered some fun. Last year we had a Sex and the City sequel, this year we had the third Transformers movie. Those two cancel each other out. The same goes for Sucker Punch and Prince of Persia, and for Get Low and Fair Game. The ‘worst films of 2011’ list, for all the dreadful terrors that are on it, is not my main concern.
I have two main concerns. The first one is the list of films that should have been on the ‘worst film’ list, but aren’t there, because the list is already filled. I’m thinking of Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, of the superfluous The Eagle, of the failed Horrible Bosses and the incoherent The Rite (review forthcoming). That these films are now in the large bulk of ‘mediocre’ films is a problem.
My second concern is the ‘best films of 2011’ list. There are films on there that really don’t deserve to be there. Mainly because I am still to stumble upon anything resembling A Serious Man, or The Hurt Locker. True Grit, though good, was nowhere near the Coen’s best work, and Oscar grabber The King’s Speech felt strangely tame and artificial, despite outstanding performances.
So on this year’s ‘best of’ list, so far, we find such films as Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Rango. For a film to be simply exciting (Rise…) or simply funny (Rango), and for it to showcase impressive technological advances (both) is now good enough. Just compare: In 2010 the one animated movie on the list was Toy Story 3. Now it is Rango.
Of course The Fighter was excellent, and so was Black Swan. And Bridesmaids was fantastically funny, despite the excessive vomiting and diarrhea. Source Code is the closest we’ll get to an Inception this year. But it is the closest to it, not a match. Furthermore Bridesmaids doesn’t hold up to Four Lions or Kick Ass. And I am yet to find anything as emotionally charged as Winter’s Bone or El Secreto de Sus Ojos. Harry Potter 7.2 was satisfying, but not much more than that…
Nothing to feel really good about then? Well, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger were not as bad as I expected them to be. They were surprisingly entertaining actually, apart from the action scenes. X-Men: First Class lived up to its expectations, and Fast Five was an outrageous guilty pleasure. These films kinda make up for the big let down of Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides.
But in conclusion, all in all? Quite too many films did not live up to potential or expectations or the sheer common decency of meeting the lowest level of quality you can still get away with. 2011 is just not good enough. Yet.
What’s left to look forward then? Well, the award films will start pouring in, with strong contenders in We Need To Talk About Kevin, Martha Marcy May Marlene, War Horse, The Help, The Iron Lady, We Bought a Zoo and The Ides of March. And perhaps the The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo remake. But I’m looking forward most to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which really should see Gary Oldman pick up a long overdue little gold statue.
Best of 2011 so far: Black Swan, The Fighter, The King’s Speech, True Grit, Rango, Source Code, Bridesmaids, Harry Potter 7.2, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Tree of Life.
Worst of 2011, so far: The Green Hornet, The Green Lantern, Paul, Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Unknown, Sucker Punch, Get Low, Conan the Barbarian and The Tree of Life.
Yes. Malick’s is in both categories. Everyone who has seen it will understand.
Hey, look: I’m not the only one. Professional film reviewers and projectionists notice it too: not only did 3D add nothing to such recent features as Thor and Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides (apart from euros to the ticket price), it also ruins the experience of everyday (2D) movie going! Even your common, no-pretensions 2D flick is ruined - projected darker than intended because of bloody 3D!
The problem apparently is the largest with Sony’s so-called ’4K’ digital 3D film projectors. Multiplex personnel do not remove the special 3D lenses from the projectors if they are used for showing a 2D film, because this is too difficult, too time-consuming (time is money) or made difficult and time-consuming by Sony itself. Sod that! I pay 8 to 9 euros for a cinema ticket and I want a film projected the best way possible. So you think the film you see is projected too dark? Follow the following checklist, here reprinted from Matthew Humphries piece at Geek.com.
• The title of the movie listed by the theater will have a “D” after it if it is being shown on a digital projector
• If you are in a D movie, look at the projector window when seated. If you see two stacked beams of light it is a Sony projector with the 3D lens still on.
• A single beam of light means no 3D lens, or a different make of projector that doesn’t have the issue
• If you see the two beams, then get up and go complain. You paid good money to see the movie, so make a fuss until they either give you back that money or remove the lens. Seeing as that’s an involved and time-consuming process, expect a refund.
Whether it will help at all? I see a darkness spreading and look for a Neo(n).
The first reviews are in for Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides. Is the franchise on course for box office booty? Or can reviewers sharpen the swords of witty wordplay?
The latest Pirates of the Carribean film, On Stranger Tides, premiered in Cannes this weekend. And the first reviews are, to say the least, not very positive. Reviewers seem to have been sent on a quest of their own, in competitive search for the Holy Grail of Anticipated Disappointment.
Here is Empire’s Helen O’Hara:
“An overly complicated plot and poorly thought-out characters detract from the flashes of charm that Cap’n Jack still emits. Despite quality set-pieces and the best efforts of the cast, this is dull and crossbones.”
Dull and crossbones, and merely two stars, and that from a magazine that gave Fair Game (by far the most boring film I reviewed on this website) three stars.
More ‘witty wordplay’ from Chris Laverty (Clothes on Film):
“This saturated saga is dead in the water.”
And from Robbie Colin (News of the World)
“Yo ho ho and a bottle of sleeping tablets”
It should be noted that there are some reviewers who consider the film less terrible than the third installment (At World’s End), and there is one stand-out reporter claiming that this is “the perfect summer movie and perhaps the best Pirates of them all” (Pete Hammond for Boxoffice Magazine). But this is from someone who thought Paulwas any good. Well.
Will the Pirates of the Carribean franchise be dragged up by On Stranger Tides? Or is it a sinking ship (see what I did there?). We’ll see. I’ll sit it through and report back.
We kick the year of in the middle of the awards season. The big ones are of course the BAFTAs, the Oscars and the Golden Globes (although this year’s comedy nominations suggest that they’ve lost their minds there). Main contenders (apart from last year’s Inception, Toy Story 3 and A Winter’s Bone): 1) Darren Aronofsky’s ballet film Black Swan. 2) Horror based on a true story in Danny Boyle’s 127 hours. 3) British Royalty, handicaps and Colin Firth in The King’s Speech. 4) Coen Brothers Western remake True Grit. 5) Family drama with awards darling Nicole Kidman Rabbit Hole and 6) The Fighter, a boxing drama starring Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale.
There will be a trainload of mostly uninteresting comic book movies coming out. Captain America: First Avenger, The Green Lantern, The Green Hornet, Thor, X-Men: First Class are all completely uninteresting and instantaneously forgettable. Well, that’s the guess. The only one I am really looking forward to is Cowboys & Aliens, because it has cowboys. And aliens. And Daniel Craig. Finally I hold my heart for Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tin Tin: The Secret of the Unicorn, because the first pictures were, well, awful.
The Adventures of Tin Tin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Looking forward at this year’s comedy offerings one must not set one’s hopes too high. We get The Hangover 2 (bwerk)… Johnny English 2 (nooo!) And we get Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and a sweary alien in Paul (mwah) and if anything is to save the year it must be Your Highness, a medieval set comedy piece the trailer of which suggests that it is at least in the same league as Robin Hood: Men in Tights. In romantic comedy we see two films (No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits) about people having sex without having a relationship. Which is about as unfunny as, well, pornography.
Your Highness
BLAMs then. The original Big Loud Action Movies of this year are JJ Abrams super secretive Super 8 and Paul Bettany versus vampires in Priest. Sequel fare there is in Sherlock Holmes 2 (with the amazing Noomi Rapace joing Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law), Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (which is promised to be at least less dorky then its predecessors) and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, in which Jeremy Renner steps up as the pupil of Tom Cruise. Furthermore there are a gazillion films about aliens attacking earth (see also: Paul and Cowboys & Aliens)
Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon
Pixar has as yet its most unpromising offering in years, with Cars 2. Disney continues its classic track of the last two years with Winnie the Pooh and other animation hits might be Rango (which looks greatly odd) and Gnomeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare then: The Tempest, directed by Julie Taymor (Titus) will be a real treat, but I am taking the airplane-in-an-emergency-landing-head-between-your-knees position for Anonymous, a Roland EMMERICH! Take on the Bard’s lifetime.
Stuff I need not mention: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II, Pirates of the Carribean: At Stranger Tides.
The filming has wrapped, the release is scheduled, a disappointing teaser was shown at this year’s Comic-Con, but now there finally is: the TRAILER for the new Pirates of the Carribean film, starring of course Jack Sparrow. Eehm, Johnny Depp. Ah, whatever, there is no real difference between the two anynmore anyway.
And it may very well be the first trailer to have an official premiere (in 3D, at one of the American Disney theme parks). True, the trailer for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace drew in huge audiences for the film it was attached to (The Siege) with many audience members leaving the cinema after the trailer and before the actual film was shown, but at least that trailer preceded an actual film. 3 minutes of promotional material and outtakes for the 4th installment of Disney’s succesfull Pirates franchise got a premiere of their own.
So what have we now learnt that we had not learnt previously? Well not that much, actually. Casting news was already out: Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom are dropped, Geoffrey Rush and off course Johnny Depp stayed on (Depp’s captain Jack Sparrow being the only reason there were any sequels in the first place, and Rush’s Barbosa being alternately Sparrow’s nemesis and best buddy). Keith Richards cameos as Sparrow’s dad again. Ian MacShane is a new baddy as Blackbeard and Penelope Cruz gets to play a love interest to Jack Sparrow. That last bit is bold, considering how much of Sparrow’s appeal is based on his wildly attractive asexuality. One simply cannot picture him as a romantic lead the likes of Bloom or Robert Pattinson.
Plotwise the film seems to be slightly less messy than the sequels, but still on the bad side of the ultimate in nonsense already reached with the first film. It involves the search for a The Fountain of Youth, both by Sparrow, Barbosa (both of whom may or may not be at times more or less allied with the Royal Navy) and Blackbeard. There will be zombies and mermaids in the way, as well as the occasional(ly) untrustworthy fellow pirate.
Visually nothing spectacularly new seems present. A real story or character arch is not discernible from the trailer. The music is the same old same old. But the greatest threat is that Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides will be a one-man show for Jack Sparrow. The way he introduces and narrates the trailer feeds this suspicion. And I truly believe that Sparrow’s greatest asset – his shapeshifting, backstabbing inventiveness – lacks the moral centre and gravity that any light-hearted action adventure needs.
Either the makers (Chicago‘s Rob Marshall takes over directing chops from Gore Verbinski) will screw up the Sparrow character, or we will get a film without a heart, mission and point. I never claimed that the first three Pirates films were cinematic or artistic masterpieces, but I enjoyed every single one of them – several times. With this trailer in mind, I have the creepy feeling that On Stranger Tides (the title seems to be without any plot-related relevance at all) may actually not be that entertaining.
Oh, and something new that we’ve learned is that Jack Sparrow will be visiting London. with stunts and all. Okay.
A long time ago, in a kingdom far, far way, the blockbuster was simply a movie that stood out in terms of its box office result. Gone With the Wind is the classic example. Later, when cinema attendance fell dramatically due to suburbanization and the introduction of television as the form entertainment pur sang for the masses, the blockbuster became an event movie, planned extensively by studio executives. They were historical or biblical epics, or when these started to fail in the 1960s, musicals or disaster movies. They were populated with a large number of a-list Hollywood stars. But they did not save Hollywood from the television. Neither did the artsy films of the ‘New Hollywood’ generation, the Scorseses, Coppolas, the Ciminos and the Altmans. The Godfather notoriously was the huge success that Francis Ford Coppola did not want to make in the first place, because he though that Mario Puzo’s book was trash.
Then, in 1975, there was Jaws. Its production history almost guaranteed a flop. The director was a relative unknown, and his three lead actors (Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss) were not exactly typical Hollywood stars. The book it was based on, by Peter Benchley is an exercise in misanthropy, and therefore not exactly a crowd pleaser. Once shooting the film, the shark did not work in the water and an increasingly annoyed and agitated crew were stuck on location for weeks.
But Jaws became a blockbuster. It ‘ate up’ all its competition, consuming the screens of the summer 1975. It was the first of its kind, soon to be followed by Star Wars (and its follow ups), Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (and its follow ups), Alien (and its follow ups), the Terminator films, the Die Hard franchise, Jurassic Park (and its sequels), Speed and ultimately the One That Could Not Have A Sequel: Titanic. Films that were more than just films: they were advertisements for fast food, toys, lunch boxes, computer games, pyjamas and theme park rides. They, eventually, made more money abroad than in the US. And, also eventually, more on video and tv than in the cinemas.
The films listed above are of course but a fraction of what has been served to us as blockbusters over the past decades. They are I think the most significant ones though. I think it was Speed that reached the ultimate in what a blockbuster could be, in terms of breathtaking action thrills and almost no character development (because there is simply no time for building a true romance when you’re on a bus that’ll explode if it slows down). I also think that from that moment on, with Titanic as the ‘ahead-of-the-wave’ prototype, blockbusters became ‘epic’. The possibilities offered by Computer Generated Images of course helped, but ‘epic’ means more than just ‘grand scale’. It is a deliberate reference to those old time (1950s/1960s) historical and biblical films, that, apart from a grand scale, offered a historical, moral or even religious lesson, character development, politicking and social relevance. The non-stop action movie as a powerhouse blockbuster had outrun its possibilities, perhaps because its target audience was at home behind their Sony Playstation. A fin-de-siecle sentiment at the end of the millennium may have played a role as well.
So we got Gladiator and its numerous unsuccesful rip-offs, the Star Wars prequels, the Matrix films and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And we got numerous comic book adaptations that took their subject matter seriously, and introduced ‘darkness’. The Spider Man and X-men films for example, but also Batman Begins, by Christopher Nolan. No wonder that people, in the summer of 2003, were happy to see a film without a number attached to it. That offered almost no character development and noon-stop action. One that was epic only the sense that it was set in a historical period. And one that, perhaps most significant, was not followed up by a theme park ride, but was inspired by one. Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl was the delightful guilty pleasure for film fans all over the world who were tired of morals and heroes with troubled histories, and who craved for a hilarious cardboard character like Jack Sparrow.
Of course the success of the film inevitably led to a sequel and a ‘three-quel’, filmed at the same time and basically two parts of one long movie. And as all serious, and less serious, film critics agree, they are overlong, over-written and most of all, overplot. Really. The plot is all over the place. Or should I say ‘plots’. For not only every major character, but also most supporting characters, have their own agenda, which are all played out in the third film ‘At World’s End’. The general idea is that it probably makes some sense, but it is hard to figure out what sense. It needs constructed set pieces like the one described in my previous post ‘The Guitar Chord Effecting the Mix Up of Right and Wrong‘ in order to work out. Basically, there is so much plot that it does not matter. It might be argued that there is no plot at all. As British film critic Mark Kermode argues, in an incredible condemnation of the film (check it out on youtube), it is three hours of ‘stuff happening’, and its success signified the inevitable downfall of Western civilization.
I disagree with Mark Kermode. I think that Pirates at the Carribean: At World’s End is, intended or not (probably not), as a modern reincarnation of Once Upon a Time in the West. Not in that it is as good, which it of course is not, but in that it is about a) the end of the age of piracy (Jack Sparrow actually contemplating eternal damnation just to be ‘the last pirate’) and b) the end of this series, the ultimate end of this type of movies as a major blockbuster potential. The no-content-all-action blockbuster was already displaced with the epic one when Gladiator and The Matrix came along, but Pirates 3 is its definitive salute, its ‘in memoriam’. From now on, this type of film can only exist in the b-league, honourably alongside From Paris With Love or last year’s Taking of Pelham 123 remake (what does it say that John Travolta is in both?). It is a full round circle back to Jaws, because the machinery of the Black Pearl, in its final battle, in a maelstrom, did not have to work in the water. The water was computer generated afterwards.
To seal the closed gate between major blockbuster and b-rate action film, one year after Pirates 3 there was The Dark Knight. Taking in over a billion dollars worldwide (which are just its cinematic earnings) it finally set the mark for the new type of blockbuster movie: action packed and with sequel potential, certainly, also but dark, ambiguous and socially or philosophically relevant. This is why there may very well be a Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides, and it may even be very succesfull, but it will inevitably be a b-movie, or a genre-flick. And of the major blockbuster films to look forward to this spring and summer, the ones that will stand out are probably not Clash of the Titans or Prince of Persia and the Sands of Time, but a politically charged Robin Hood, and the darkly tinted Iron Man 2.
Hell, there is even already a stream of commemorative films, dedicated to and reinvoking the ‘all-action-no-brains-required’ summer film: The Expendables, The Losers and of course, The A-Team.
Yesterday I already twittered (is that how you spell it, or is to “I twoot”?) the winners of the first – perhaps annual – Jasper’s Take Awards. These are completely immaterial, ceremonyless, non-carpet, celeb-free, low-cal awards given out for achievements in cinema that are usually overlooked by the Oscars, the Globes, the Baftas and the likes. These are the winners, and this is why they’ve won.
The latest Pirates of the Carribean film, On Stranger Tides, premiered in Cannes this weekend. And the first reviews are, to say the least, not very positive. Reviewers seem to have been sent on a quest of their own, in competitive search for the Holy Grail of Anticipated Disappointment.
