Put Down the Pitchforks for "Project X"

Have you heard about "Project X," the found footage movie about a trio of teenagers who throw a house party that goes out of control? With spring break in full swing in many parts of the country, reports have been popping up involving wild house parties where the participants are pointing to "Project X" as the inspiration for their revelry. There have been thousands of dollars in property damage and several arrests. A teenager was shot and killed in the aftermath of this one in Houston. In other words, there have been plenty of consequences for destructive partying that weren't part of the movie.

"Project X" was subject to a lot of vitriol upon its release in theaters a few weeks ago. Several critics predicted that copycat house parties were inevitable after the film glorified so much hedonism and excess. So it's no surprise that various parties in the media are now pointing fingers at the movie and its creators. And after years of watching these kinds of controversies crop up in the wake of other copycat crimes, I'm betting that not only will the creators of "Project X" suffer no adverse consequences for unleashing the film on impressionable young minds, but we're probably going to see a couple of sequels and imitators, their fortunes fueled by all the attention.

Someone will probably try and sue Warner Brothers, claiming that they're responsible for the damage caused by copycat partiers, but this never works. "Natural Born Killers" and other films and television shows have been dragged to court before, and the legal standard is pretty clear. As long as the media in question didn't directly incite its viewers to engage in bad behavior, they're protected by the First Amendment. Simply portraying an out-of-control house party as a fun experience isn't enough to hold Warners responsible for the actions of the kids who may have been inspired by "Project X." After all, just looking at a synopsis of the film shows that it's operating in the realm of fantasy. Cops don't intervene, parents behave irrationally, and the teenage party planners are held up as heroes where they probably would have spent the rest of their youths in juvenile detention if the movie were taking place in a normal universe. It's not, of course, because "Project X" is a movie. It's pure wish-fulfillment.

The only people to blame are the partiers themselves, who are trying to model their lives on dangerous fantasy. It's tempting to want to shift responsibility to a movie, especially one that's been getting called out for being a terrible influence and promoting the wrong values, but that's letting the kids who actually perpetrated the mayhem and destruction off the hook. Most of the people who watched "Project X" didn't go out and start trashing houses. Most of them probably understood that this kind of behavior tends to have extremely negative consequences. Were some viewers, namely adolescents, too young to make those kinds of value judgments? Maybe, but that begs the question what those kids were doing watching an R-rated movie loaded up with graphic nudity and violence. People did notice the R-rating and all the content warnings, right?

I also expect that "Project X" is going to be portrayed as being the cause of more hardcore partying, when it might really just be drawing attention to an already existing phenomenon. The movie was apparently inspired by the real life story of an Australian teenager whose party attracted over 500 strangers after he posted the details on a social media network, and things got out of control. Teenagers and young adults have be throwing raucous parties for ages without so much scrutiny over people's motives. Ask anyone who lives in a college town. I seriously wonder if the "Project X" controversy is just going to make law enforcement more paranoid. A recent write-up over on the Washington Post notes two recent incidents where the cops preemptively arrested party planners or shut down events before the partying ever got underway.

"Project X" fits nicely into the current cultural narrative of feckless young people indulging in alarming amounts of excess and risky behavior, so I'm not surprised that the media jumped on it with such gusto. And I'm sure there really are some young idiots out there who took one look at "Project X" and immediately wanted to recreate what they saw onscreen. However, a couple of sporadic incidents and a brand new buzzable, hash-tag-able label for extreme partying doesn't make a trend. And the media getting all worked up about the few kids who cited "Project X" as prime motivator isn't very convincing.

I may not be interested in watching "Project X" or other movies like it, but then I'm not keen on seeing them scapegoated for a small number of young reprobates' own worst impulses either.
---

Read More

My Favorite Hayao Miyazaki Film

I really should have posted this little tribute last month, to coincide with the American release of the new Studio Ghibli film, "The Borrower Arrietty," also known as "The Secret World of Arrietty" or just "Arrietty" depending on which version you've got. Miyazaki was credited only as producer and co-writer, but his influence is all over the gorgeous visuals, and the lovely, pastoral atmosphere of the picture. I'd know his contributions anywhere. Of all the directors I've spotlighted in this blog so far, it's Miyazaki's work that I know the most thoroughly, from his contributions to early anime features like "Puss in Boots" and "Hols: Prince of the Sun," to his work in television with the first "Lupin III" series, "Anne of Green Gables," and "Future Boy Conan," and finally his own iconic films, starting with "The Castle of Cagliostro" in 1979.

Now, "Cagliostro" was an awfully good film already, a James Bond style caper with some great action setpieces, but Miyazaki kept improving his craft over the next twenty years with a run of incredibly influential, successful features that no one in animation has matched outside of early Disney and perhaps PIXAR. I struggled over which of his films to write about. My childhood favorite was "Kiki's Delivery Service," but his later, most mature features, "Princess Mononoke" and "Porco Rosso," are more challenging and daring. Then there's "Nausicaa" and "Totoro," the films he's best known for in his native Japan. But ultimately, I have to admit that the first movie I think of when it comes to Miyazaki is the one that he's received the most acclaim for, 2001's "Spirited Away."

Ten-year old Chihiro and her parents are moving to a new town, and stop over at what they think is an abandoned amusement park. In actuality, it's a resort town for the spirits, and Chihiro's parents greedily eat up food that wasn't meant for them, a transgression that gets the pair turned into pigs and traps Chihiro in the dangerous spirit world. Luckily, she gets some help from a mysterious boy named Haku, who helps her gain employment at the bathhouse run by Yubaba the witch. However, Chihiro's position is still precarious, and she has a lot to learn before she can save her parents and find her way back to the human world.

One of Miyazaki's great strengths has been his ability to create wondrous, enveloping fantasy environments, and the bathhouse for the spirits in "Spirited Away" is one of his best. It is an endlessly fascinating place, full of strange old gods and monsters from Japanese legend, every shot crammed full of gorgeous, ornate details, and all of them painstakingly hand-drawn and painted. There's an appealing incomprehensibility to the images at first, where it's difficult to say exactly what we're looking at from one minute to the next. However, the bathhouse does work by a certain complicated logic, which keeps the place from feeling like a collection of random elements thrown together. Everyone has a certain job or a role to fill, and once Chihiro figures out how things run and who she can trust, she begins to navigate the place more easily, as do we.

Chihiro is not a typical Miyazaki heroine, at least not at first. She's very much an average ten-year-old girl, not thrilled with the prospect of moving and having a good sulk when we first see her with her parents. She reacts to the strangeness of the spirit world as any girl might. She gets frightened and tries to run away at first. She stamps her feet when she's impatient. After too much excitement, she feels dizzy and faint. But once she starts to get the hang of things, she becomes as brave and resourceful as any young heroine you could wish for. In a movie full of shapeshifters and spirits, she's easily the best character of the lot, and probably one of the best, most well-rounded animated children to ever grace the screen.

Much of the fun of the film is the feeling of being swept away with Chihiro, brought to a totally alien place and culture that seems too big and too complex to ever fully understand. The spirits that inhabit the bathhouse can look like human beings or giant radish roots or overgrown ducklings, and several of them are disguised in other forms. Yubaba has a beloved baby boy the size of a sumo wrestler, and is aided by three creatures who can only be described as bouncing green heads. Despite a twisty plot, there's not much exposition for a viewer to rely on, no rules that are ever explicitly laid out for us. There are a plenty of hints and examples to help Chihiro think her way through various puzzles, but much of the time she's at the mercy of luck and circumstance. It makes her adventures all the more exciting.

Some have found similarities in the story to "Alice in Wonderland," but "Spirited Away" gives its heroine a very clear goal and real challenges to overcome, creating far more tension and suspense. However, the narrative is never straightforward, and Chihiro only manages to accomplish certain tasks in a roundabout way, often with digressions that don't really matter to the plot. And yet, it's some of these moments that are the movie's best. There is a sequence on a train that could have easily been excised from the story, and it takes some serious mental gymnastics to explain the presence of a train in this universe in the first place. Yet the sequence is so perfectly right, just where it is, giving us a few languid, meditative moments to pause and compare Chihiro's behavior near the end of her journey with the beginning, and to take stock of the odd little group of traveling companions she's collected - an accomplishment that proves extremely important.

When you compare Miyazaki's films to Western children's entertainment, they are considerably slower in pace but frequently more absorbing. One of the biggest criticisms I have of the Disney dub of "Spirited Away" is the way it adds extra explanations for things that really don't need explaining. Some of the film's mysteries simply don't have answers, and no one is expected to provide them. That's the strength of Miyazaki's work, his ability to present the strange and the fantastic in such a coherent, indelible fashion, that after a while you stop trying to figure out any kind of rationality behind them, but just accept and enjoy their enduring splendor.
---

Read More

The Death of Internet Authorship

Crediting seems so easy. You quote a few lines from a book, and drop a footnote to provide the name of the author and page numbers. You print a photo with an article, and you add a caption identifying the subject matter and the photographer/agency. In some places on the internet, among the most legitimate sources of media, content creators largely play by these rules. In others, crediting is purely optional. Non-professionals don't follow the old standards for attribution or never learned them. In the amateur realm, content is constantly appropriated, transformed, and presented to different audiences without so much as an acknowledgement of the original. Some don't even bother with the transformation part.

In some corners of the web, the problem has become endemic. One of my guilty pleasures is watching anime music videos, and every time I go looking for them on Youtube, I'll find uploaded copies with hundreds or thousands of hits, and no acknowledgement of who the original creator was. Many of the accompanying video descriptions don't bother to hide this, often stating they found the video somewhere else, thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with their friends. Of course, this has been going on long before Youtube. Back when the major source of anime music videos was file sharing sites, creator names easily got lost if they weren't included somewhere in the video itself. I've still got a couple sitting on my hard drive that I've never been able to link to a specific creator. Should I feel guilty about watching and enjoying them?

Once you start looking, the lack of crediting is everywhere. Publicity materials for movies and television shows get snapped up and manipulated to make icons and banners on social networking sites and forums. Cosplay photos are shared without identifying the person in costume, the photographer, or even the character being depicted. Viral videos and graphic memes are especially prone to taking on a life of their own. The Hitler meme videos, for instance, rarely credit "Downfall," the film from which the clip of Hitler ranting was taken. And I've never seen anyone credit YouTube user DReaperF4, who posted the first known version of the meme on the site back in 2006. Shouldn't he or she get credit for the idea? Then again, would the meme have become such an international hit if every creator of every successive variant was obligated to go back and figure out where the original came from in order to provide the credit?

There's plenty of push back against this kind of behavior. Fanworks communities, where most creators work under pseudonyms, frequently self-police the more obvious instances of plagiarism. Over on Reddit, a link sharing site, users are called out for reposting previously shared content, or making only minor changes to try and pass something off as original. However, there's a growing tendency to treat anything found on the internet as being part of the public commons, a great morass of no-strings-attached free content ready to be remixed, reworked, aggregated, or simply passed along to more and more content consumers. Or to put it more simply, users have bought into the idea that information wants to be free, which comes at the expense of anyone seeking to profit by that information, even when it comes to something as simple as asserting authorship. Even the most permissive licensing schemes I've found, like the ones championed by Creative Commons, at least require credit where credit is due. However, in the current internet culture, it doesn't seem possible to enforce even that much.

Then again, think about what would happen if stricter regulations were put in place. Corporate interests have already severely warped U.S. copyright laws to keep content out of the public domain for far longer than the originators of copyright law ever intended. And they've been behind the draconian recent internet regulation bills that would make it impossible for the internet to function in its current form, where simply linking to someone's copyrighted content, even inadvertently, would be actionable. On the other hand, there's the other extreme. In China it's easier to find knockoffs than the genuine article when it comes to many products. The government recognizes intellectual property rights, but enforcement has always been lax. Ideas are assumed to belong to the public commons at the outset, for anyone to profit by. The public benefits, but it becomes difficult for legitimate creators to operate. Where's the happy medium between the two models here? Is one even possible?

You'll notice that I haven't used word piracy, because the issue here goes a lot deeper than simply copying or using someone else's work without permission. It's the whole approach to intellectual property that seems to be shifting, toward something more collectively owned and controlled, where the original author isn't just stripped of authority upon the publication of a work, but identity as well. In remix culture, he or she becomes the first of a series of authors, each making contributions or helping to disseminate a piece of media. Information becomes free, beyond any single person's influence, self-perpetuating.

Is this a good thing? A bad thing? I don't know, but it's happening.
---

Read More

In a "Perfect Sense"

A few weeks ago, I wrote up a review of "In Time," a science fiction action film that was more parable than speculative fiction, a film of interesting metaphors, put in service of a severely lacking story. With "Perfect Sense," we have a similar kind of science fiction tale. An epidemiologist, Susan (Eva Green), and a chef, Michael (Ewan McGregor), stumble through a tumultuous romance as the world is thrown into chaos by a series of plagues that rob people of their senses, one by one. The various symptoms of the plagues have no grounding in any kind of reality, and have clearly been scripted for the best dramatic effect, to serve various metaphorical and thematic purposes. And yet this time, despite the iffy premise that requires so much suspension of disbelief, the movie works.

We've seen so many, many onscreen apocalypses in recent years, it's always a nice surprise to see an original way to wipe out humanity. "Perfect Sense" does this by having its plagues systematically attacking the human senses. The first plague takes away people's ability to smell, and with it certain memories related to that particular sense. Susan tracks the outbreak while Michael has to adjust the menu at his restaurant to compensate. The two meet by chance and spend the night together. Neither seem quite sure about a future together, but the attraction is there, and Green and McGregor are lovely together onscreen. It's enough to form a foundation for their eventual relationship, and their lives give us a point of reference as things start to go really wrong in the world, until humanity appears to be on the brink of total disaster.

This is not a particularly complex story, but it is an ambitious, high concept one. How do you show a world without taste? Or the moment of extreme grief that signals the onset of the illness? How do people adjust their lives in order to go on? Director David Mackenzie does a fantastic job of introducing us to each new affliction, to each new variant of the symptoms and the way that the world reacts. I don't want to get into details for fear of spoiling anything, but I found myself marveling several times over how inventive the writing was. Most of the story takes place in Glasgow, where the film was shot, but the pandemic feels global in scope. Much of this is accomplished with small details, or by simply achieving a certain tone and mood, especially toward the end of the film. "Perfect Sense" manages to feel more properly apocalyptic than most big budget apocalypse films I could name.

Another vital piece is the love story. Neither of the characters hooked me immediately, I think because I'd seen Eva Green play a similar character a few too many times before. Here again, she's a desperately troubled woman with a very mercurial temperament. And Ewan McGregor is so low-key at first, he hardly even registers as the leading man. However, this is just the film taking its time. Soon enough both characters start peeling back their layers, and letting down their guard. McGregor and Green are both terrific actors, and complement each other nicely. The emotional core that their messy courtship provides the film is an invaluable, and the fact that it's rough and imperfect and frequently unhappy makes it feel all the more genuine. I can't think of the last time I saw a film with a story so well balanced between the romance and the action.

I don't expect that "Perfect Sense" will work so well for everyone. The metaphors have no subtlety whatsoever, and the emotional manipulation is fairly shameless. In spite of all the doom and gloom, the film's message is supposed to be quite a hopeful one, and it’s terribly heavy-handed. And I totally bought it, hook line, and sinker. I liked the difficult love story. I got caught up in the escalating madness of the plagues. And I found the final sequence of the film truly moving and affecting in a way that I haven't felt about any kind of genre film in ages. If you want a movie that deals in realistic pandemic scenarios, go sit down with Soderbergh's "Contagion." But if you're in the mood for a parable about love and loss and the end of the world, seek out "Perfect Sense." It's a very strange and imperfect film, but it also accomplishes something very rare – it evokes a real sense of human empathy.
---

Read More

What's the Holdup on "Hop"?

So, I've been keeping an eye on the DVD release dates of the fourth quarter 2011 films, waiting impatiently to finally get my first look at "My Week With Marilyn" and "Young Adult." While looking over the schedule of upcoming releases, I spotted "Hop," last year's partially animated Easter Bunny movie, slated for a March 23rd release. Not being too keen on watching the film after the negative reviews came in, I'd lost track of it, but I knew it had been in theaters shortly before Easter in 2011. Had Universal really waited a whole year to put the movie out on home media just to be able to capitalize off the holiday again?

Yup. The studio followed the usual release window timeline for Region 2, and "Hop" was released on DVD and Blu-Ray in late August in places like the UK, but Universal opted to wait nearly twelve months to release it on any home media in the US. And they're not the only ones who are using this tactic. "Arthur Christmas," the Aardman animated film that played American theaters starting November 23, 2011, won't reach home media until November 20, 2012. Now I'm a little regretful that I didn't catch it in theaters while I had the chance. It makes sense that both movies, which are so closely linked to a particular holiday, should wait a few extra months to launch their marketing campaigns and maximize sales. After all, who would would want to watch an Easter Bunny movie in August? Or a Christmas movie in March or April?

Out of curiosity, I did a little checking on similar holiday films, including the 2009 version of "A Christmas Carol," "The Polar Express," "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," "Four Christmases," the "Santa Clause" sequels, "Christmas With the Kranks," a couple of Halloween horror movies, the more recent "Valentine's Day" and "New Year's Eve," and "Groundhog's Day." Almost all the Christmas movies that were timed to open in theaters at the start of one holiday season didn't reach home media until the next November or December. By contrast, all the horror movies like the "Saw" and "Paranormal Activity" installments released for Halloween hit store shelves by the following January. "Valentine's Day" and "New Year's Eve," both released close to their respective holidays, were on DVD and Blu-ray a few months later in May. Ironically, the two most recent "Halloween" franchise movies were released in August. "Groundhog's Day" was in theaters slightly after the actual Groundhog's Day in 1993, and was released on home video six months later.

It's understandable why most of the non-Christmas movies don't opt to wait for their holiday to roll around again. Horror movies are effective all year round, as are the romantic comedies that just happen to take place on Valentine's and New Year's. Christmas movies, however, are generally all about Christmas, and the season only comes once a year. Moreover, Christmas movies and cartoons are a holiday tradition, an easy family activity to help fill the dull hours of interminable vacations and family reunions. Americans buy more Christmas themed movies than they do for any other holiday, and Hollywood obligingly produces plenty of them, hoping for more perennials like "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Miracle on 34th Street."

Easter isn't a big movie holiday, despite the yearly broadcasts of "The Ten Commandments." It's a far less commercialized and considerably more religious holiday, one that much of the rest of the world doesn't celebrate. However, there has been a long tradition of secular Easter cartoons and specials aimed at kids. "Hop," one of the few high profile Easter kids' movies, clearly made a play for seasonal relevance, and only time will tell if it manages to stick around in subsequent years or not. By all measures it doesn't seem to be a particularly good film, but there's not much else in the Easter movie category for it to compete with. On the other hand, placing itself in such a narrow niche might end up affecting its playability in the long run.

In the age of steadily shrinking release windows, it's interesting to find a category of movies that still follow a different model, and are immune to the pressures that have so drastically reshaped the rest of the home media landscape. I can't help wondering how these movies are going to be affected by further changes to existing distribution models, especially as consumers' memories get shorter and shorter. I admit I completely forgot about "Hop" until I spotted it on the March release schedule. I'm not really interested in it, but I would like to see "Arthur Christmas," after hearing some positive word-of-mouth over the holidays. But the question is, will I still want to by November? Or will I just watch the next Christmas themed movie that comes along?
---

Read More

Tuned In To the "Dead Set"

It's hard to believe that there have been twelve seasons of the reality show, "Big Brother," with a thirteenth on the way in the US this summer. I watched the first season, way back in 2000, and didn't get much out of it. I understand that the UK version is more popular and has become a bigger part of the culture than it has in the US. And that's probably why one of the most interesting pieces of media to comment on reality show culture that has come out of British television centers around it – Charlie Booker's "Dead Set."

In 2008, shortly after the ninth series of "Big Brother" finished airing in the UK, "Dead Set" premiered on the same channel. It ran as a five episode miniseries, aired over five consecutive nights, chronicling what happens to a group of "Big Brother" contestants and various crew members when a zombie apocalypse breaks out. "Dead Set" extensively incorporates the "Big Brother" format, including the show's host, Davina McCall, playing herself, and former contestants making cameos. All the rest of the crew and the fictional season's "houseguests" are played by actors. We follow several characters, including Kelly (Jaime Winstone), a runner on the show, her boyfriend Riq (Riz Ahmed), an abrasive producer Patrick (Andy Nyman), and a full house of constantly quarreling contestants.

"Dead Set" has one of those concepts that anyone could think up – zombies attack "Big Brother" – but the execution was surely much trickier. Like any good zombie media, it has to have a high degree of camp, but it also needs to develop a few strong, sympathetic characters for the audience to care about, in order to sell the thrills and the horror. The tone has to be light enough for the satire, but also heavy enough to feel like there are actual stakes to the story. "Dead Set" manages to balance all of these things. For the bulk of the time it it's a morbidly funny horror program that just happens to take place in and around the "Big Brother" set. It follows all the rules of a zombie movie, and would be a decent feature without the reality TV trappings. It's only toward the end, when all the storylines converge, that the group dynamics that are at the center of the reality show come into play, and the commentary and metaphor become more pointed. I didn't think it went quite as far as it could have with the satire, but taken as a whole, "Dead Set" is still much smarter than most recent zombie movies I could name.

The central irony is that we only see the reality behind the reality show through the intervention of the fantastic. Facing a real crisis, affected personas are dropped, profanities are plentiful, and the contestants get the chance to show what they're really made of. Or more often, to reveal the weaknesses inherent in their fame-seeking, self-centered personalities and the damage done by the poisonous, artificial game show atmosphere. "Dead Set" is rough on the houseguests, but it saves its worst barbs for Patrick, the obnoxious control-freak producer who reflexively insults everyone within earshot, and spends most of the story trapped in the show's green room with Pippa (Kathleen McDermott), the dimmest of the contestants.

The five episode length of "Dead Set" means the pace has to be brisk, and there is no shortage of blood and guts and gore. Every thirty minute episode features some kind of attack or escape, culminating in a massive action sequence in the last episode that is everything a horror fan could wish for. No slow-moving "The Walking Dead" style storylines here. And no squeamish heroines either. Kelly dispatches her first zombie with a pair of scissors right through the cranium, and subsequent kills get even more graphic. And yet, I think the usual audience for "Big Brother" would enjoy "Dead Set" just fine, assuming they're not too sensitive. There's still plenty of romance and gossip and backstabbing – just with real world, life-or-death consequences this time around.

Like it or not, reality television has become part of the culture, and while I'm not too thrilled with most of the reality shows themselves, I've enjoyed how they've been incorporated into or addressed by other media. "Slumdog Millionaire," and "Mon Meilleur Ami" wouldn't have been quite the same without "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." "Dead Set" wouldn't exist without "Big Brother," and so I'm actually glad I saw what little of the show I did, in order to be able to better enjoy Charlie Brooker's vicious pop culture parable all the more.
---

Read More

All the "John Carter" Drama

It's like watching a car crash in slow motion. Today is the release date of Disney's "John Carter," formerly known as "John Carter of Mars," which cost the studio $250 million by conservative estimates. It's directed by PIXAR alum Andrew Stanton, responsible for "Finding Nemo" and "WALL-E." He shares writing credits with Mark Andrews, director of the upcoming "Brave," and Michael Chabon, who has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and whose last foray into screenwriting resulted in roughly a third of "Spider-man 2." The film is based on the popular "Barsoom" adventure series written by Edgar Rice Burroughs roughly a century ago, before he went on to "Tarzan" and "The Land That Time Forgot." And if the box office analysts and the word on the street is right, we may be looking at one of the biggest box office bombs of all time.

Now, it's on with the finger-pointing. The most obvious culprit here is the marketing, which insisted on a title change that nobody likes, cut trailers and ads that refused to provide any explanation for the confusing visuals, and pretty much did everything that they could to make the movie look as generic and unappealing as possible. The "John Carter" Superbowl ad, for instance, was an unmemorable bust. I shudder to think how "Avatar" would have been received if its ads had been handled by this bunch. Marketing president MT Carney, who was largely responsible for the campaign, was dropped-kicked back in January, but her replacement has hardly done any better in the interim. The best trailer I've seen so far has been a fan-made cut, that was being linked to by several movie sites a few weeks ago.

"John Carter" may not have many obvious selling points, but why have the ads been so timid about pushing its pedigree? Why not trumpet the fact that PIXAR talent was involved? There wasn't even a measly, "From the studio that brought you 'Pirates of the Caribbean,'" or "From the director of 'WALL-E'" anywhere. If a movie is going to fail, I wish the studios would let it fail on its own merits, especially when some of these hamfisted marketing campaigns make the pictures look so much worse than they really are. The campaign for "John Carter" is downright evasive, not satisfied with striking "of Mars" from the title, but giving no indication that the hero is a soldier from the Civil War era fighting Martians in a Jules Verne flavored universe.

Of course the marketing's not the only problem here. Many are blaming a runaway production. What was Disney thinking, industry watchers have asked. Why would they give a director new to live action such a huge budget, let him make a movie based on a practically unknown property, and then not cast a single bankable actor? Sure, the "Friday Night Lights" crowd knows who Taylor Kitsch is, but the show never exactly had the best ratings. On the other hand, I don't think it's hard to see why Disney was willing to give the PIXAR guys some free rein. PIXAR has had a great track record of hits so far, and if they could translate that success into live-action films, think of the possibilities. Some of their best films have had unorthodox stories - who would have greenlit "Ratatouille," "WALL-E," or "Up" based on the plots alone?

And Disney hasn't exactly been rewarded in the past for thinking small. They failed pretty miserably with their would-be action franchise, "Prince of Persia," which was hampered by penny-pinching and came across as a cut-rate production as a result. "TRON: Legacy," a more daring experiment, didn't break any records, but it was much better received, made its money back, and sequel plans have been rumored. And even after considerable wrangling over budget numbers, "The Lone Ranger" with Johnny Depp is still probably going to cost Disney as much as one of the expensive "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies. Speaking of "Pirates," wasn't that a ridiculous idea until it spawned a four movie franchise?

Right now it's hard to tell if the filmmakers succeeded here or not. Reviews are all over the board, with some lauding "John Carter" as a fun popcorn movie and others trashing it as an incoherent mess and a bore. Audiences will be the final arbiters, of course, and it's been proven time and time again that they don't listen to critics. "John Carter" still has a shot, depending on word of mouth, but it's going to be a real uphill battle.
---

Read More