I liked Rogue One: A Star Wars Story quite a bit. Despite having a very different tone from either the original trilogy or the prequels, it’s still recognizable as a Star Wars film, and successfully weaves in and out of the events leading up to A New Hope.
There’s a somewhat odd setup for where they actually find the Death Star plans, though. SPOILERS after the cut:
With Jessica Jones and Star Wars: The Force Awakens both out, it’s hard not to compare Kilgrave’s power to Jedis’ ability to influence minds. But while we admire “You don’t need to see our identification” and laugh at “Republic credits will be fine,” Kilgrave is terrifying.
It’s not just that Jedi are compassionate and Kilgrave is a total sociopath with no regard for human life who would casually make someone kill or maim themselves just because he was having a bad day. Darth Vader is just as ruthless, but doesn’t bother with the technique (in the films, at least).
It’s that the “Jedi mind trick” is explicitly shown to be limited. It’s used rarely, and only for specific commands. The first time we see it used in A New Hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi describes it as “influence” rather than control and specifically says it only works on “the weak-minded.” Willpower is sufficient to guard against it. In Return of the Jedi, Jabba the Hutt even laughs it off when Luke tries to use it on him. The only time we see any sort of long-term suggestion it’s to “go home and rethink your life.” Presumably the dealer in Attack of the Clones will be in full command of his own faculties by then, having simply been prompted to start the soul-searching.
Kilgrave, however? His commands are absolute. No matter how hard you prepare mentally, no matter how strong your will, no matter whether your actions would go against your principles, or hurt you, or hurt someone else — even someone you care about — you do it. Immediately. None of the usual trying to stop your hand from moving that you see in a lot of movies where a mind-controlling character shows up. No apparent strain on his part to keep controlling you. Implanted commands can last for hours, and he can renew his control over and over as long as he wants to.
That’s scary enough right there. Putting that level of power in the hands (well, voice) of someone who sees other people as merely tools and playthings, and whose only behavioral boundaries consist in covering his own tracks? That’s nightmare-level stuff.
Think about it this way: Emperor Palpatine spent decades manipulating key people across a galaxy into putting him in a position of absolute control over thousands of worlds. Put him in a room with Kilgrave and he wouldn’t stand a chance.
We took the kiddo to see his first live theater play today, A Year With Frog and Toad. It’s a children’s musical based on the Frog and Toad books, with each song adapted from one of the stories. The costumes in this production tended toward symbolic representation rather than realism. Frog and Toad themselves just wore old-fashioned patchwork suits with green or brown color schemes. Birds had feather boas, aviator goggles, orange tights and yellow shoes. Moles had miner’s helmets and jumpsuits.
That’s something that works well in live theater, but moviegoing audiences want realism. Or studios do. So effects budgets keep climbing, regardless of storytelling quality, as they strive for ever more detail.
The only recent movie I can think of that went for this sort of look was Into the Woods, with the wolf. But everything else in the film went for realism (even Cinderella’s frozen-in-time inner monologue of “On the Steps of the Palace”), so it just looked way out of place. On stage you’d go with it. In another movie you might. But in this case it was just Johnny Depp in a weird outfit. Gee, I’ve never seen that before.
Normally I don’t like these glossy coffee sleeves because they don’t insulate very well (plus the ads tend to be irrelevant to me), but I like the thought put into this one for Inside Out.
I’d like to think that the general popularity of Daredevil amongst comic book/superhero fans should make it clear that fans who aren’t thrilled about the dark tone of Man of Steel (and the implied dark tone of Batman v. Superman) aren’t all just afraid of having grown-up superhero stories, but that grimness and darkness fit some characters better than others. (YMMV as to which characters they fit.)
But then the complementary tones of Flash and Arrow don’t seem to get that across either, and they actually make meta-references about it in the shows.
I’m hoping that once DC’s cinematic universe branches out, they’ll break things up tonally as well (like they’re doing with the DC & Vertigo TV shows), but it’s hard to be confident when they’re presenting the launchpad movie as doubling down on the angst.
Originally posted as a reply to The Mary Sue’s article, Daredevil v Batman v Superman: Getting Angst Right in the Superhero Genre.
We went to see a 75th Anniversary screening of The Wizard of Oz over the weekend. Not that you could tell from this ticket stub. But hey, they made sure you knew it was presented by TCM, right? *sigh*
Despite an overall 7.0 rating, there are a slew of one– and two-star reviews of Into the Woods on IMDB. Did these people see the same movie I did? As I looked through several pages seemingly sorted by rating, a few common threads emerged:
1. Too much singing! It’s a musical. Unfortunately, the trailers seemed to be trying to hide this fact.
2. It wasn’t a fluffy, happy family movie. Well, no. It’s supposed to be a darker, more complex take on the stories. Again, the ad campaign wasn’t entirely clear on this, and several people said they had expected it to be kid-friendly because of the Disney name. That says something about the power of the Disney brand (especially when associated with fairy tales), and makes me wonder if it would have been better to release it through, say, Touchstone.
Interestingly, the things people were most upset by are things that were toned down (or moved off-screen) from the stage version. I guess the studio shouldn’t have bothered with those notes. And one recurring complaint, Cinderella’s stepsisters’ more extreme efforts to get into the shoe, is actually in the Brothers Grimm version (where her name is translated as Ashputtel).
Those two threads are a failure of the ad campaign to prepare people for what they were going to see. (Though the viewers complaining that it’s “not PG” seem a little unclear on the concept of “Parental Guidance suggested: Some material may not be suitable for children.”) But then there’s this…
3. It should have stopped before the final act. That would be missing the point, which is to follow through with the consequences of what everyone did in act one, and the personality traits that brought them through it.
Consider: How does Cinderella fit in with the royal family? How does Red Riding Hood deal with the trauma of her experience with the wolf? How is Rapunzel affected by her life in isolation? The baker and his wife had a lot of trouble working together just to get their child; how are they going to handle raising him? The princes are still going to be charming, and they’re accustomed to the chase. And when you come down to it, Jack broke into someone’s house, stole a bunch of stuff, and then killed him.
Admittedly, the second act isn’t as strong in the movie as it is in the play, because they cut out a lot of it…but I’ve heard the same complaint leveled at the show. That would be like cutting the second act of The Fantasticks. You could perform just the first act, sure, but it would be much less meaningful.
Once you get to the three-star reviews, you find more people who still didn’t like it, but understood what it was supposed to be. They didn’t like the performances, or thought the story structure didn’t hang together, or just don’t like Sondheim, or knew it was going to be a darker take but still didn’t like it. Fair enough. Everyone has different tastes, and what works for one viewer doesn’t always work for someone else. But at least they disliked it for what it was, not for what it wasn’t.
Though it would help if the ads had been a bit more clear.
