Essays

Here’s a new feature from the folks at RazorFine trying our best to share our wisdom with Hollywood.  As we view the mass amount of media we are bombarded with daily we notice some disturbing trends and fads that seem to be occurring in Hollywood.  These letters are an attempt to let someone with the power and the intelligence in the industry stop such actions before they destroy us all.  In our first letter we examine – The Comic Book Movie.

Dear Hollywood, with Regards to Comic Book Movies
N/A

With the recent disasters of Elektra, Catwoman, Fantastic Four, and X-Men: The Last Stand, the disappointment of V for Vendetta, and the seemingly ominous return of big blue boy scout in a couple of weeks, we sit down to look at what’s wrong with the merging of Hollywood and comics that leads fans to start slashing and burning their collections.  In this letter we hope to provide some guidelines (7 simple rules you might say) to help studio execs avoid experiences like the Dolph Lundgren Punisher (or for that matter the Thomas Jane Punisher – let’s just stop making Punisher films, okay?).

Dear Hollywood,

It has come to our attention despite successes like Spider-Man 2, Sin City, A History of Violence, and Unbreakable you seem to be struggling with adapting comic books into theatrical films.  We at RazorFine love us some comics so in an attempt to help you out (and avoid disasters like Fantastic Four and Batman and Robin) we offer the following suggestions and guidelines to help insure both the studio and the fanbase can have a pleasant experience at the theater watching over-muscled men and women in spandex save the day.

1. Don’t “re-interpret” the character

One of the biggest issues today is the director or writer coming up with a “brilliant” idea to re-interpret the hero into a more modern or more accessible figure.  Yeah, I’m talking to you Ang Lee.  The characters and origins are what help define the character and give them the coolness and charm we enjoy.  If you tamper with the balance even slightly by having Dr. Doom be present and mutated by the cosmic rays, or the Joker responsible for the death Thomas and Martha Wayne, or turn Bruce Banner’s tragedy into a science experiment by his dad, then the character itself is changed as a result (and often horrifically).  Aaron and I disagree about Ang Lee’s Hulk which I strongly dislike for Lee’s re-interpretation of the character by taking away the responsibility and pathos of Bruce Banner by making the accident and the experiment not his fault.  How would you have liked it if Raimi had made Peter Parker into Norman Osborne’s son and ol’ Norman experimented on him as a child making him Spider-Man and then Norman went crazy and fought him as the Green Goblin?  Would that have made a good film?  Probably not, but no matter how it turned out it wouldn’t really be Spider-Man.  Say what you want about Daredevil, and it has plenty of flaws, but at least they got the characters right.

2. Don’t mess with the costumes

Yeah, I’m talking to you Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan, Bryan Singer, et all.  Look at the middle pic – it’s a classic Neil Adams Batman pose and that’s what he should look like.  You notice Hollywood in five tries still hasn’t found a way to capture that look?  He’s not Iron Man, nor is he the incredible rubber guy.  He doesn’t need to take shotgun blasts in the stomach and get up.  He’s Batman.  He’s in the shadows.  He’s stealthy, he’s athletic, and he can actually turn his neck while in costume.  And what’s with the missing eye-lenses and all that black make-up which miraculously disappears when he yanks off that big rubber cowl?  Here I’ll give huge props to Sam Raimi (Spider-Man) and Richard Donner (Superman) for getting the main costumes so right.  However even they took mis-steps with the look of Zod and the black costume in Spidey 3 (which is sad because it is one of the coolest super-hero costumes of all time).

3. Quality over Quantity

Not every comic book character deserves to be made into a film.  I don’t care if you personally love Speedball or Jubilee – they don’t deserve their own films; nor do films on characters such as Ant-Man and Power Pack (both in development) need to be made.  All of the following are in some level of production from script stage to casting to scouting locations – Fantastic Four 2, Black Panther, Captain America, Iron Man, Cloak and Dagger, Magneto, Deathlock, The Flash, Green Lantern, Hellboy 2, Hawkeye, Iron Fist, Sin City 2, Submariner, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Wonder Woman, The Green Hornet, Shazam!, Astro City and The Watchmen.  And there are many more.  Quality over quantity is the mantra you should learn; please choose wisely.

4. In film, looks matter

Jessica Alba as Sue Storm?!  Are you freakin’ kidding me?  Yeah I could buy her as a stripper in Sin City but there’s not enough booze and drugs on the planet to make me accept her as a scientist.  Even Sam Raimi makes mistakes with the casting of Kirsten Dunst as red headed bombshell supermodel Mary Jane Watson.  And Jennifer Garner as the raven haired Greek assassin Elektra?  Um…yeah, sorry but I just don’t see it.  The first order of business, it would seem to me, would see to be examine what the characters look like in the comics and then try and find actors that match up.  Yes it may take more work than just calling a couple agents or actors you like to work with but the effect is much better.  Take a look at the result in Sin City where casting was done to match the character on-screen to that in the novels understanding that preserving the look of the characters and their surroundings is integral in capturing the power of the comic.  So to Brian Singer I have to say kudos for James Marsden, Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart but I laugh at his choice of Anna Paquin as the voluptuous kick-ass sexpot Rogue and we won’t even discuss Ratner’s X3.

5. Respect the Super-Hero world

A world where super-heroes exist is different from the world you look out at from your office cubicle every day.  We as comic fans accept this much as fans of The X-Files or Star Trek accept those realities.  Do your research and capture the feel of a world where men can leap tall stories in a single bound or catch thieves just like flies with a web of any size.

6. Respect the audience

In comic books Hollywood has a built in fanbase for the character and tons of ready market promotions just waiting.  Just because these things exist doesn’t mean the filmmakers can slack off for the film or critics can dismiss it as “just a comic book film.”  Much to the contrary studios should break their backs trying to get the characters right on-screen.  Comic book fans, even die-hard ones, will only go see sub par comic book movies for so long before they stop going to any of them.  We know these characters better than some people know their friends or family.  We’ve grown up with them and for many of us they’ve taught us life lessons and the value of reading, art, and in a few circumstances higher level thinking about ideas such as drugs, racism, poverty, death, crime, love, loss, and so much more.  A few more entries like Fantastic Four and X3 might just do what no amount of bullying or nagging could make these self-pronounced geeks do – grow up and move on.

7. Keep the following people away from such projects

Richard Bowman, Michael France, Mark Frost, Sidney J. Furie, Mark Goldblatt, Akiva Goldsman, Jonathan Hensleigh, Simon Kinberg, Lawrence Konner, Ang Lee, Richard Lester, Raven and Ryan Metzner, David Odell, Zak Penn, Pitof, Theresa Rebeck, John Rogers, Mark Rosenthal, Joel Shumacher, Jeannot Szwarc, Tim Story, Boaz Yakin, and Stu Zicherman.

As part of the publicity for Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (which we’ll have a couple reviews of tomorrow), Dakota Fanning recently came to town for interviews and promotion.  December & I sat in on a round table interview with her, which was a little surreal for me.  In movies, Fanning has this kind of precociousness and adult quality that’s mighty disconcerting coming from an 11 year old.  In real life, however, she acted like any other 11 year old girl (albeit one with one seriously bad-ass hobby.)  While she might not have the storied history or press ready banter of a seasoned actor, she makes up for that by being just genuinely upbeat and enthusiastic. 

Note: Since this was a round table interview, the questions all came from different journalists and critics.  See if you can guess which ones we asked….

…

Feeling Mini-DakotaRead More »

A boozy night produces these rockin’ thoughts for your consideration…

Fleetwood Mac’s Then Play On(1969)

In the wee hung-over hours of the morning I think of rock and roll. I listen to my shiny silver discs and my scratchy black discs and my muffled spools of magnetic tape and I can’t go back to sleep. Sleep would make some of this nausea and disorientation go away, but when I woke up this morning I just happened to hit the play button on the stereo I keep by my bed and Fleetwood Mac’s Then Play On erupted from my speakers, effectively rendering sleep impossible.

Ok, maybe “erupted’ isn’t quite the term, because that album’s music seems to cough and sputter from the speakers, at least in the beginning, when the controlled spaz of the four-chord guitar intro gives way to what I like to call “bongos and shit” and the pulsating, repetitive bass guitar finally ties everything together. There certainly are some eruptions found on that album (so no slight is meant to Peter Green and the rest of the Mac), like the slightly pissed off  "Show-Biz Blues", which asks the pertinent question “Tell me anybody, do you really give a damn for me?” and which also manages to cause an eruption with only electric slide guitar, tambourine, and handclaps. But we all know that to cause such an eruption only a very electric guitar is needed. Just ask Eddie Van Halen. Of course this is followed by the second half of “Layla”-esque instrumental “My Dream”, which I like much better than the second half of “Layla”. And the first half. “My Dream” has a very haunting chord progression, not anything earth-shattering or complex, but one that always makes me think that it’s going somewhere else, somewhere mysterious and minor, but it never seems to go there. “Layla” never goes anywhere mysterious. It just seems to sit there instead of crackle over the airwaves, making me heavy with beer and cigarette smoke even if I’m nowhere near a pool table or a “Golden Tee” game. That song marks the death of Eric Clapton to me and claims his soul in the unholy transformation that he made from English-blues-obsessed psychedelic-rock-lick-meister with a white man fro and a guitar that sounded like an acid-drenched kazoo to an alcoholic perfectly-bearded-washed-out burned-out pusher of boring trite bullshit 70’s soft rock cocaine songs, fucking beer commercials, and a truly lame acoustic ditty about his dead son that just happened to make him a ‘big creative genius superstar’ to just about every nauseating yuppie in the early 90’s. Of course I bought the cassette single of “Tears In Heaven” when it was out, but I was like 13 or something. Give me a break! Ok, if you really want to get a glimpse of the shit-covered skeletons in my musical closet, my other purchase that same day was the cassette single of “Hazard” by Richard Marx. Let’s just say that I never bought another cassette single again. Ever.

Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac

Cassette singles weren’t around when Then Play On came out. That was late 1969. The main single (on a little piece of black vinyl) from this album was “Oh Well”, which was split into two parts for the 45 because the album version is about nine minutes long. Nine minutes, you say? For those of you that don’t know, Fleetwood Mac wasn’t always the cocaine-fuelled public soap opera fronted by a bitchy witch with a missing septum and a fierce finger-picking one-man-band with hair that’s looking more and more like Art Garfunkel’s as time goes on, snorting and fucking its way across the world’s stages and gracing the airwaves and thirty-somethings’ turntables with slick, catchy album rock. No, no, no. In the early days, the Mac were a motherfuckin’ blues band, part of the wave of Brits whose minds were completely blown by Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and the like and who decided to fuse that sound with dirty-ass rock and roll. Eric Clapton and the Yardbirds were part of that, the Stones were part of that, as well as the Pretty Things, the Small Faces, the Kinks, and countless other bands who I’m not familiar enough with (and frankly not all that interested in) were part of that. By the time Fleetwood Mac started recording albums, a good portion of those other bands who began as blues-rock outfits had already moved on to other sounds. The Stones were toying with psychedelia and on their way to re-emerging as the heroin-daze slop-rock kings we all know and love, Clapton had left the Yardbirds and the Bluesbreakers and was creating psychedelic blues with Cream, and the Kinks were singing about the British countryside. So the Mac were still singin’ the blues, which was more popular among young people in Britain than in the country of its birth, and didn’t start moving away from that until Then Play On.

Not Rick Wakeman, but close

I’ve read a review on that album that makes it seem like the band took a plunge head-on into prog rock territory. After reading that, my sick 70’s-tainted cape-wearing mind salivated at the thought of a combination of blues rock and prog, so I immediately went out and bought the CD. Well, ELP it ain’t, and thank Jeebus for that. I don’t know what the fuck some of these reviewers think prog rock is, but I’m sorry, one criterion of being a prog rock band is that one of your members had to have worn a cape at least once on stage. Although Peter Green by most accounts went completely bonkers after exiting Fleetwood Mac, I seriously doubt that he ever wore a cape this side of an asylum door. Now I may be causing some controversy with this cape statement among the 1% of people out there who actually even know what the hell I’m talking about, but fuck it, I know I’m right. I also must remember that most people out there have an extreme disdain for progressive rock and therefore don’t even come close to understanding it. They don’t want to, and that’s fine. It’s just that anything that was produced between 1968 and 1975 (especially by a British band) that contains a song over 6 minutes long with more than four chords in it gets labeled “progressive rock”. We all know that’s not true at all; it’s the flute solo that makes rock “progressive.”

So let me backtrack a little bit for those of you who haven’t yet stopped reading and still have no idea what I was talking about in that last paragraph. Guitarist Peter Green was pretty much the leader of Fleetwood Mac in the early days. They got their name from Mick Fleetwood, the skinny crazy-looking drummer with bug eyes and superhuman abilities in the realm of coke consumption, and John McVie, yet another “quiet man” bass player whom I know absolutely nothing about. Those were the only two guys to stick with the band throuout all the lineup changes that took place during the 70’s, especially after they hired the aforementioned Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, produced one of the biggest selling albums of all time (Rumours, for those of you who have lived your entire life in a coma, or worse yet, in Arkansas), and virtually kept the economy of Columbia afloat for over a decade (I hear that Stevie Nicks’ face is still pictured on Columbian currency). Anyway, Green, Fleetwood, and McVie played together in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (Green, in fact, replaced Eric Clapton when he left to join Cream – it’s all so incestuous, isn’t it?), quit that, hooked up with guitarist Jeremy Spencer, and formed Fleetwood Mac. After releasing their debut album in 1968, they added guitarist Danny Kirwan and put out a few more records, including Then Play On, which would turn out to be Green’s last one with the band. You see, it seems he went the way of Syd Barrett, supposedly frying his brain with LSD and probably free love. He quit the band, recorded a couple of solo albums, and disappeared. Spencer later went crazy from drugs as well, quitting the band to join a cult. Christine Perfect joined, married John McVie, and the soap opera had its premiere episode. They went through various lineup and stylistic changes that I won’t discuss here because a) it’s irrelevant to this discussion and b) I don’t know a damn thing about the albums from that period. Then, in 1975, with the band in disarray and their future uncertain, the remaining members heard a little album put out by a duo called Buckingham-Nicks, auditioned them for the band, and they were soon on their way to having great pop success as well as black holes for nostrils.

Commercial success = Dignity

Some purists who like the early Mac don’t care for the later pop stuff, but you really have to look at them as completely different bands. It’s almost a cliché nowadays to say that Rumours is one of the best pop albums ever, but if you’ve ever really listened to it, you know that it’s true. I must admit, it’s been a bit of a guilty pleasure album for me all these years, but as time goes on I care less and less what people might think of me when I say that Rumours is fucking great. There are so many songs on that album that are a part of our public consciousness: “Dreams”, “Don’t Stop”, “Go Your Own Way”, “The Chain” – that’s like almost half the album. As annoying as Stevie Nicks might be and as grating as her voice can get to some people, I totally fell in love with her the first time I really sat down and listened to her vocal performance on “Dreams”. Sure, she’s slurring the words and was probably dancing around in flowing witch-like robes when she was in the studio recording the song, but man, just the soaring, airy quality of her voice gets me, especially when she goes up high on the line “It’s only right that you should play the way you feel it.” Wow. The other thing that I really love about that song is the extremely loud cymbal crash that comes in on beat two of the chorus, right on the “-der” of   “Thunder only happens when it’s raining” (which isn’t really true, by the way). The crash kind of comes from out of nowhere and it’s really fucking loud! Ok, obscure 60’s garage rock it’s not, but I never claimed to be hip.

Just listen to Lindsey Buckingham’s acoustic guitar picking on the next song, “Never Going Back Again.” I’m going to go listen to it right now. I’ll be right back…. Just listened to it and I must say, that’s some damn fine pickin’. I know there are bluegrass guys out there who could make Buckingham’s playing sound like the Troggs or something, but there’s an intricacy in it that isn’t found in your normal Top 40 album rock stuff. It certainly isn’t found in any music that’s played on the radio today, or at least what I’ve heard since I banished myself from the radio all those years ago. You know, Lindsey Buckingham wrote some strange shit on those Fleetwood Mac albums. “Never Going Back Again” is kind of strange and quirky in its structure, and have you heard “The Ledge” from Tusk? What a paranoid, plastic, frantic, creepy, goofy, cheesy, and scary sounding song. Even a song like “Big Love” from their synth-dominated period has a strange quality to it; maybe it’s just his guitar playing. And speaking of Tusk, there’s some other wacky stuff going on there. “What Makes You Think You’re The One” has that incessant snare drum that sounds like a gun shot, “Not That Funny” has the cheesy Casio sound that comes in and jams itself violently in your ears, and of course “Tusk” has that freakin’ marching band on it… you know, come to think of it, most of the songs on Tusk sound like the band members are attacking their instruments as if those drums, guitars, and keyboards are responsible for leading them into a hellacious lifestyle filled with pervy sex and, you got it, mountains of ‘Grade A’ cocaine. Some of you might be saying, “Ok, man, we get the fact that this band did a lot of coke. Get off it. It’s getting old.” But I’m here to tell you, as long as the part of my brain that remembers Fleetwood Mac remains untouched by chemical abuse or physical damage, I will always have an endless supply of cocaine jokes armed and ready.

Stevie Nicks as Mystic Altar Boy

What in the hell was I talking about? Ah, it doesn’t really matter. What started out as some grand proclamation of what rock and roll really means to me has become me trying to dissect an album I know very little about (Tusk) and a band that is kind of far down on my imaginary list of all-time favorite bands (the Mac, for those of you who nodded off). Well, at least I haven’t gone on and on about the genius of the Monkees. I’ll leave that for another rambling session. The hangover has subsided, and I’ve listened to Then Play On about four times today, so perhaps I should give it a rest. Oh, wait! Did I tell you about the Danny Kirwan songs on that album? Hmmmmm. Forget it.