Madam Wed Film Review

Sony…

Is this a tax thing?

Or is it like when you made that Fantastic Four movie back in 1994 purely to keep the rights to the characters? I mean at least you had the decency not to release that one.

Or has someone kidnapped one of your executive kids and has threatened to kill them if you don’t keep churning out terrible super-hero films?

I mean, you don’t seem to want to release these things, no-one particularly wants to see them, the actors don’t seem to have enjoyed anything other than the pay check. I mean poor Dakota Johnson – who seems to have wished on a monkeys paw to be a movie star but can only star in unwatchable drokk that comes out around Valentines Day. I mean she allegedly left over this debacle, not 50 shades, Madam Web.

It’s not like you put together a dream team behind the camera either. Director S.J. Clarkson has worked purely in TV – which may explain why this whole thing feels like the first episode of a mid-budget CW show. The writers… The writers the writers the writers…. Somehow four people allegedly wrote this film (shockingly Alan Smithee wasn’t one of them ) and the only two who’s names I could click on Wikipedia were responsible for Dracula Untold, The Last Witch Hunter, Gods of Egypt, Morbius and Madame Web.

Yeah… The signs for this one weren’t good.

But, every film deserves to be seen on its own merits and the fact that this is a standalone film in it’s own universe (I truly hate that I have to specify this but it’s nice to know that you can go in ‘blind’ and not worry about feeling like you’ve missed anything.) Is somewhat refreshing.

Well, I think that covers all the positives, lets get back to business.

Apparently this film has been rewritten and reshot to hell and back which normally results in a film coming in to the 90 -100 minute mark but instead this film comes in at nearly two hours? Why? A film this simple should easily be an hour and a half long. And no longer.

And I do mean simple, essentially, Dakota Web has to save three insufferable brats from a Spider-terminator whilst at the same time dealing with the fact that she’s started to glimpse the future. There’s a few other bits a bobs, a random group of Spider-Cenobites keep turning up to do nothing but repeatedly beat us over the head with the same tedious exposition in a film where the dialogue is seemingly nothing but stilted, repetitive, delivered like I’m in a Shamalan film exposition and references to one character’s un-named nephew.

The guys name is Ben Parker…. Gee, I wonder what his nephew will be called? Oh, he won’t because of… I’m going to guess legal reasons?

Anyway, the saving point of any super-hero film is our villain, our dark Spider…. Ceiling guy. What? Don’t look at me like that, the film calls him Ceiling Guy, why, I couldn’t tell you but I’m just going to assume lawyers again. But he’s got the usual spread of powers, speed, strength, agility and the ability to produce poison from his hands of whatever strength and lethality the script needs at that point in time.    

He’s trying to kill our insufferable leads because at some point in the future, our leads (I think they had names but it doesn’t really matter, Johnson could be protecting 3 pot plants for all they actually do in the film) are going to acquire spider powers and kill him, so he’s going to kill them first. So I’m just going to quote Kung Fu- Panda 2 Panda Harder and move on “One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.” Because I fully support him in his mission.

Also, the three don’t get any powers in this film, they only appear kitted up in dream sequences. Maybe Sony thinks they can make a series out of this and I wish them the best of luck with that. Like I said, this film feels like the beginning of a TV show but it isn’t. It’s a mid budget film with nothing to recommend about it. It’s too dull to become a so-bad-it’s-good film, it doesn’t need to be watched to understand Venom 3: Venom Hard with a Vengeance, it’s just sort of there.

And very shortly it won’t be.

What passes for action scenes are generally very dull, boring car chases, the physical action scenes are terrible, there’s the most obvious product placement for Pepsi I’ve seen since World War Z (2013) and they couldn’t even be bothered to put in any end credits scenes.

I mean, they cut “that” trailer line out of the actual film and we can’t even convince Sony to re-release it again like we did with Morbius.

Am I done?

Yeah, I think I’m done. Whatever Sony thinks it’s playing at, can it please stop because these films are just getting duller and duller. I can’t even call this “The Cats (2019) of super-hero films” like the folks at Rolling Stone did because it’s not even that interesting, and I think that’s because the budget ($80 million) seems too low for what the director wanted to do, or all the reshoots soaked up all the cash and she was forced to do whatever she could with the 83p that was left.  

 Yes, this film is less interesting than Cats (2019) I mean, that WILL generate a cult-following in time. You mark my words. This won’t though. This is just going to be fodder for listicles of “Worst Superhero films ever” forever and ever amen.

I just hope everyone got paid and Dakota Johnson finds a way to break her curse soon.

My Score- Bomb

Whats going to go wrong with Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets?

So far in this series, I have waited for the films to be released into the cold, hard, unforgiving world for their brief moment in the light before dissecting their still warm corpses to see what lessons we can learn but for this one, I’ve got enough evidence to say that there’s no need to wait.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is going to bomb and it is going to bomb bigly. The only question is how much it will bomb by and how many careers will be destroyed by it.

Now, on paper, Valerian seems like a pretty safe bet. Based off of Valérian and Laureline a French science fiction comics series, created by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières. First published in Pilote magazine in 1967, the final installment was published in 2010. So plenty of source material to work from, the fact that the series has been sold all over the world implies that there is some sort of market out there.

Legendary French director Luc Besson has allegedly been given 209 million dollars to play with and had assembled a cast of stars including Cara Delevingne, Dane DeHaan, Ethan Hawke, Rihanna, Clive Owen and John Goodman.

So, a legendary (in France anyway) series of graphic novels comes to Hollywood for its moment on the silver screen. Wheres the issues?

Eveywhere.

Valerian didn’t come to Hollywood to play. It stayed in France. This is France’s highest budget film…. ever. And it’s not close in any way shape or form.  The closest contender is a French movie called Asterix at the Olympic Games, which cost $82 million to make. Now, with the budget for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets reportedly coming in at a staggering $209 million, that puts it at almost triple the budget of the previous record holder. Now, most Marvel films don’t have budgets of 200 million dollars and they’re as safe as films can get. This is an untried, untested franchise that has very little, if any name recognition outside of its native France.

But, thinks you Luc Besson is directing it! He directed The Fifth Element! That he did, 20 years ago. And it’s been dividing audiences ever since. I feel that I should also point out that nothing he has done in intervening two decades has come anywhere close to the scale of this project. Yes, Besson has done Stopmotion, CGI  and action films but none of them have had budgets anywhere near a hundred million dollars, let alone 209 million! And he’s not consistent in the quality of his films either. For every Lucy he’s made, there’s a Taken 2 or 3. I don’t he’s ever made a flop, but he’s no Spielberg.

But leaving all that aside, you then have the issue that we are currently experiencing something of a glut of blockbusters at the moment. At least Jupiter Ascending (the last time anyone tried to do a new space opera franchise) had the good sense to be released in the wasteland of January, a time when there was very little to compete with because to my mind, even if Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets had no direct competition it would be a tough sell, but the week before Fox is releasing War for the Planet of the Apes and Christopher Nolan’s WWII epic Dunkirk will be competing with it directly. Not to mention that Spider-Man: Homecoming will still be hanging around for its third weekend at the box office. With so many tried and true franchises out there, why would you sped your hard earned money on anything else?

And then we move on to star power.

There isn’t any really.

I’m not saying that Cara Delvigne isn’t a star, but she’s a new one and she has never headlined a major film before. Her role in Suicide Squad was little more than a glorified cameo and as for Dane DeHaan, his highest profile role was as Harry Obsbourne in the Incredible SpiderMan 2. I’ve seen him in a few films and whilst he never disgraces himself, he’s never looked like leading man material to me. Especially when according to Wikipedia his character can be described as “as a typical square-jawed hero figure, who is strong and dependable”

Even looking at two comparable films Enders Game and Jupiter Ascending, you find nothing to cheer about. Enders Game had a budget of 110–115 million but made only
125.5 million,  As of January 2014, Lionsgate was waiting to make a decision on a sequel film, and was also considering a television series. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Jupiter Ascending on the other hand had a budget of $176 million and made a mere
184 million with any talk of a sequel being met with hysterical laughter. Hell, even The Wachowskis have claimed that it’s pretty much killed their career as far as high budget blockbusters go.

So there you go, all the reasons why, as far as i’m concerned,  Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets will be one of, if not the biggest bombs of the year.

But what do you think?

 

Quotes on Film Posters- an Opinion Piece

My rating of a film will never appear on the poster for a film. Nor (I imagine)will Jeremy Jahns, Chris Stuckman, Moviebob or any of the other film critics that inhabit YouTube. And yet, if I worked for a newspaper or magazine, I imagine that my musings on the latest Hollywood offerings would (if favorable) wind up on the poster thus hopefully ensuring more attention for me and bigger box-office takings for the film.

I bring this up because I saw a poster for Terminator:Genysis in my paper yesterday, and the sole quote for quite a large blockbuster assuring me that I was going to ‘love this.’ came from a Mr. James Cameron. Aka the Directer of the first two films. A person who if you want a neutral viewpoint about whether or not this film is good or not would, I imagine probably be quite low on the list of people that I would trust to be impartial.

But this got me thinking, why do people trust newspaper critics more than others? To the best of my knowledge we have no guild, no formal training scheme or qualifications required to be a film critic, just write/video/tweet/speak your opinion and there you go, your a film critic!

Or maybe its an experience thing, newspaper film critics have been doing this for decades and have probably watched a wider variety of films then myself or many other internet film critics have had the ability to do. But this experience comes with time.

Also, I don’t trust all newspaper critics the same. I know that some are more, shall we say enthusiastic than others with their high ratings and indeed if I see only some newspapers on the poster than I know already that a certain film is probably going to hurt.

At the end of the day though, my personal opinion is that people have always trusted newspaper critics, they are seen as more respectable, dedicated and somehow more honest than people such as myself.

What do you guys think?

Spider-who?

I imagine that my reaction on hearing that the new Spider-man (according to the BBC it’s with the hyphen) was pretty much the same as everybody else.

Who the hell is this?

And it’s a valid point, Tom Holland who will be playing the webslinger has only done one Hollywood blockbuster before ( The Impossible, budget 45 million, gross 180.2 million 81% on Rotten Tomatoes, I’ve never seen it.) He was also in the highly received Wolf Hall by the BBC and was a voice on a phone in the incredible film Locke (Budget less than 2 million, grossed 5 million, 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, highly recommended). On the stage,he was also in the stage musical of the film Billy Elliot.

But how he got this role, I don’t understand.  With the exception of Billy Elliott I don’t see any leading roles in his CV, it is possible that he blew everybody away with his amazing audition and i’ll reserve judgement until I see at the very least a trailer of him as Spider-Man.

However, i’m still uncomfortable with the idea that the latest adventure of Spider-Man has gone to someone white, when in the comics he’s being portrayed by someone of Hispanic origin or that his stand-alone film has pushed Black Panther, the first superhero film to star a colored actor since Steel (Just don’t.) has been pushed back to accommodate it’s release.

Either way, it’s a bit of an interesting move from Marvel and i’ll keep my eyes open for more updates.