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The last Harry Potter movie (the Half-Blood Prince) was the first one to leave me genuinely cold when it was over. The first part of the film seemed to fritter about with various pieces of business until finally getting down to brass tacks in the last 30 minutes or so. I had to wonder if the connective tissue between these scenes was more apparent in the printed word and just didn’t translate readily to the screen.
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Before the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the practice of shooting two sequels in quick succession had a short and unspectacular history. In the eighties, they tried with the Back to the Future movies and, while those sequels had some charms, they were pale imitations of the original. These efforts, however, were masterpieces compared to the Wachowski brothers’ follow-ups to The Matrix, which managed to completely suck all of our good will for the original into that blank space behind Keanu Reeves’ eyes.
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In Hollywood, success comes with its own peculiar brand of curses, most notably the expectation that one will follow that success with a sequel that will match, if not vastly exceed, the creative and commercial accomplishments of the original. Since any successful film is a matter of artistic and technical alchemy outside the control and understanding of us mere mortals, it’s little surprise that most sequels end up being pale, stunted, mutated offspring of the first movie. Continue reading
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In your typical American spoof of an over-amped, testosterone-pegged action film, the standing cliché seems to be to cast the hero as an incompetent bore, an anti-intellectual simpleton who bumbles his way through a handful of elaborately staged but unimaginative stunt scenes. Also, someone usually gets kicked in the crotch; often more than one someone.
Hot Fuzz, from the British creative team that brought us Shaun of the Dead
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Douglas Adams’ “The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy” has seen so many iterations that I’m only waiting for the cave painting and haiku versions to cover the last remaining possibilities. I’m aware of a radio show, books and then a BBC TV mini-series, a computer game and even more books. The movie version, however, has been a long time in coming. I first became aware of the books and TV series as a college student in the mid-1980s and even back then, they were already talking about a film version. It wasn’t until this year that it finally came to fruition. The tortured path to the big screen is evident in that, four years after Adams’ death, he still gets a screenplay credit. Now that is being stuck in development hell.