Christmas reboot

To continue the Hollywood tradition of reboots, Christmas movies should be rebooted too. Combine How the Grinch stole Christmas, Scrooge, and the traditional American Santa Claus together to create a super dark-toned reboot of the Christmas movie tradition. You do that- then you have one hell of a Christmas movie!

In a small town, men dress up in white clothes with masks on, to hide their identities, before giving their children some gifts. Single fathers must wear red and white for some reason. And they must go down a chimney before giving the presents. But they all must do this: Make kids believe that they are Santa Claus.

Some guy named Nick is the only single father in town.

Meanwhile, a few miles away, Ebenezer Scrooge is bitter and fed up with Christmas.  He developed a severe case of leprosy, severely altering his physical appearance. Scrooge knows that the town will quarantine him if they find out about his disease. Or possibly lynch him.

To avoid this issue, he has gone as far as painting his own skin green to hide his illness, lives in seclusion, and wears a lot of fur to protect his skin.

Scrooge goes through his family album and is saddened by pictures of his deceased children. The thought of people being happy with their families during the Christmas holiday pisses him off. He goes off into the town, hoping to infect many people as possible.

Nick, creative guy that he is, replaces the reindeer with a tank and a cannon (to shoot with) attached to it. He built it himself many years ago when his wife died.

As Scrooge infects people, the mayor learns of the leprosy outbreak. He has the news media inform the citizens to be on alert and to stay indoors at all times. ‘Grinch’ becomes a code word for someone with leprosy.

Nick’s daughter isn’t impressed with him. In order to impress her, he allows her to ride with him in the tank, as they shoot presents out from the cannon. Besides ‘The Grinch’, Nick and his daughter become the only ones in town out in the streets on this Christmas night.

Explosions, gunfire, darkness, easy women, drama, and a heart-racing adrenaline ride ensues in this Christmas reboot. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan.

Catfish review

It’s a fucking strange thing when people lie, know they’re lying, and when they’re caught- they go on with the lie anyway and build a huge tower of contradictions.

Some people have a severe case of mythomania, or “pseudologia fantastica”, for all you super-smart people. Mythomania is compulsive lying but you actually start to believe your lies, and people with this disorder can eventually admit to lying after being confronted with their bullshit stories, discrepancies, and facts.

I was writing a blog for my other blog site, and in the second paragraph, I began by bitching about how people treat the internet like a game. And then I basically wrote a list of people who should be banned from the internet. I had totally forgotten about sock puppets.

ANYWAY…

Catfish, I feel, was unfairly shitted on by the average movie-goer. The film’s trailer made it look like it was going to be some Blair Witch Project type of movie. Obviously, people’s expectations were too high and when they saw this documentary in its entirety, they went apeshit. They flung shit at each other with negative comments on this film. You’ll notice that comments regarding the film usually consist of “it was boring” and “I wasted my time watching this”. In the film’s defense, this documentary accurately portrays people with this mythomania problem when they’re on the net.

The documentary starts out with our star, Yaniv Schulman. He shares an office with his less-attractive brother, Ariel, the director of the documentary. Also sharing the office with him is Henry Joost, the producer, and a friend of the brothers.

Yaniv befriends a child prodigy, Abby, who loves to paint. Or so he believes. He writes emails to the 8-year-old child (nothing creepy about that) and their friendship grows to the point that Yaniv starts talking to Abby’s mom on the phone, and eventually, Megan, Abby’s half-sister. He falls for Megan and pretty much has a long-distance type of relationship with her, although he never admits it to Ariel and Henry.

Megan records a cover song for Yaniv and sends her recording to him. Yaniv, in front of cameras, Googles the shit out of the song and finds strong similarities in Megan’s singing voice with a particular singer in a YouTube video- singing the exact same song, thus creating the first case of things not adding up as the relationship grows and the filmmakers pressure Yaniv into pursuing Megan for the documentary. And so it begins, in 2008, the men go into plane trips, and then a road trip, to see if Megan is indeed the woman from the Facebook profile and the same woman Yaniv has been talking on the phone with for several months.

The trailer includes a quote from a film critic, claiming that “the final forty minutes of the film will take you on an emotional roller-coaster ride that you won’t be able to shake off for days.” It only took me 2 minutes and a cigar, but the critic is right about the last 40 minutes (I counted).

Pretty shocking and disturbing shit. You should avoid reading the comments for the film’s trailer on YouTube because there are way too many disappointed reviews and spoilers. I believe you should see and judge for yourself. Are the filmmakers lying about Yaniv romanticism with Megan from Facebook and the shocking results just to make a movie out of it? I don’t care. This documentary presents a real issue just like any other documentary. And it does it in the form of the people it’s about.

I give it 3 stars out of 4.***

The Man of Steel might suck

Name one movie that makes Zack Snyder a visionary director. That’s a pretty unreasonable demand to ask for, even for the average cinephile. And anybody who says otherwise is a liar. I’m missing something here. When Watchmen came out, it was advertised as the new film from the visionary director of 300.  In 300, you had a juiced-up Gerard Butler in those slow-motion fight scenes and you’d see others get killed in the background. Then the very same fight was done in fast-motion, then slow, and then fast again. I thought it was fucking cool when I first saw all that. I got bored of the fight scenes upon a second viewing. And I was disappointed to learn that this so-called visionary director used the same style of directing for Watchmen. I guess somebody needs to explain to me that visionary doesn’t mean creative, therefore Zack’s Watchmen is legit as a visionary film. Even if I can overlook that, I still have to share with you that I don’t believe Snyder’s style of directing fight scenes can be considered a legit trademark. But that’s another story.

‘The Man of Steel’ is being produced by Christopher Nolan and being written by David S. Goyer. It’s interesting, but mostly confusing, that Nolan picked Snyder to direct the new Superman movie. I must admit that Snyder can make the type of movies that can entertain the average movie-goer and the type people will pay to watch. I’m guessing that’s the real reason why he was picked to direct this. And on top of all that, people tend to go out to watch movies with material that they’re already familiar with. If you make another Twilight movie, you already know that lots of people are going to see that. So that works in Snyder’s favor. One problem: movies based on “familiar material” tend to suck nowadays. You can actually half-ass a movie based on a popular novel, or comic book, and it would still perform well at the box office. Attach a popular director’s name to the movie and it gets better.

But Superman movies haven’t been taken seriously since the original one with Christopher Reeve. In typical Nolan fashion, the movie is being treated for a reboot. Nolan’s reboots include giving the superhero a new outfit. I predict that Superman will be given a mask. Only a fool will fail to recognize Clark Kent without his glasses. Also, the film will be given a dark tone. Nothing wrong with it, but this whole “let’s reboot a superhero movie by giving it a dark tone” thing is being exhausted. The villains are the easy part since Lex Luthor is already realistic enough. Anyway, if anybody can pull this off, it would be Christopher Nolan. Might as well, right? Since everybody is rebooting franchises Nolan-style, it might as well be Chris himself to reboot this one. And it would be another amazing feat of Christopher’s if he rebooted the Superman franchise. It would indeed be another impressive Christopher Nolan accomplishment for the cinema history pages. The man is at the top of his game. I would say that he’s the best director alive right now.

But why Nolan picked Snyder for this movie is beyond me. Maybe he saw something in him that I don’t. Or maybe it’s just another movie being put together to make some money. Yes, the movie will be entertaining and awesome- but to an extent. I mean, if sequels are planned, then expect the franchise to suck. I’ve never underestimated movie-goers, except for this one time when “Meet the Spartans” was number one at the box office. Anyway, if The Man of Steel brings nothing new to the table in terms of rebooting Superman, audiences will not bother keeping up. And Snyder has the same directing-style for all of his movies.

Snyder has like non-existing screenwriting chops, so I’m skeptical that he has the knowledge to tell the difference between a good script and a shitty one. It should be up to Nolan to decide is Goyer’s script is good enough.

Letting Zack Snyder direct The Man of Steel would be like letting Eli Roth (a director nobody but Quentin Tarantino confused with Peter Jackson) direct a live-action The Jungle Book.

Directing is obviously only one facet is creating a great movie. Now, the writing aspect is something else that concerns me with this movie. David Goyer is working on a superhero script alone. Last time he wrote and directed a movie alone, The Unborn was the result. And that film was destroyed by critics and audiences. But I believe that Goyer’s odds at writing a decent Superman movie by himself are better than Snyder directing a decent Superman movie.

This would have been Nolan’s shot at redemption for superhero movies. The Dark Knight was critically acclaimed, but it was not as good as Batman Begins if you’re a fan of reality. In fact, I don’t believe it’s the awesome movie everybody says it is. The only good thing about TDK was Heath Ledger’s role as the Joker, for which he won the Oscar. TDK wasn’t Best Picture material, that’s why it wasn’t nominated. And then Nolan released Inception, it did great at the box office (I sense some Oscar nominations), and I feel like Inception is the masterpiece TDK should have been. So I guess I can let him slide on not writing/directing The Man of Steel. But like most of the cinephiles at IMDB, I’m still trying to figure this out. Why did Nolan pick Snyder? And if Nolan wasn’t the one who chose Snyder, he’s still backing him up. Believe me, this was Nolan’s decision when it comes to choosing directors.

This may be off-topic, but I’m exhausted of these visionary directors. The film industry is changing and directors now favor using big budgets to create these “visually stunning” movies. Last year, we had James Cameron’s Avatar. My problem with that film is that so much money was spent on it to make it the visionary masterpiece it supposedly is. And new technology is being worked on every day in this film business. Now, remove the new technology used (or just ignore it) for Avatar and you have a movie with a mediocre story, predictable outcomes, and corny dialogue. Instead of advancing the technology for movies, filmmakers should instead focus on advancing the art of story-telling. Because without a great story, you just have a projector in the theater running and wasting precious film. And right now, story-telling in filmmaking is at a stumbling block. Movie plots are predictable and are usually revealed in the first 10 or 15 minutes. When you think about it, filmmaking hasn’t really existed for that long. Maybe a little over a century. The  story-telling craft and techniques can still advance. Time to step up to the plate.

In short: I think this movie is only being made to earn a bunch of money at the box office. It makes sense to me that Nolan is only doing work as producer and attaching his name to this project. When everybody sees the name of the same man who revived Batman, they’re going to see this. And if this movie fails, Zack will be to blame because he’s the director and nobody cares about screenwriters, so it makes sense. Nolan and Goyer are safe from any blame if Superman goes wayside at the box office. But it won’t. Actually, I’m expecting it to do great, money-wise. It’s the rebooting of Superman that I’m expecting to be a pile of shit.

Anyway, as I said earlier, maybe Christopher saw something in Zack that most of us are missing out on. I’m going with my gut-feeling and I’m gonna skip this one. And if I ever watch it, it’s only out of curiosity.

Sucker Punch will suck too. So don’t fuck with me about it.