Tagged: Genre

Bridesmaids

It was inevitable that after numerous guy-centric raunchfests, the women needed their turn to be gross, disgusting, and funny. With Judd Apatow, the current master of the form, aboard, one of the summer’s brightest hits turned out to be the fresh Bridesmaids. Out now on DVD from Universal Home Entertainment, the film comes in two forms: the theatrical release and an unrated version that packs in six more minutes of stuff.

Often, the film felt like it took the guys’ template and followed it so if there was barfing and pooping, then the women had to do it, too. Interestingly, though, despite the numerous sex scenes, there was scarcely any nudity, male or female, which tends to be a must for this genre. Clearly written by women, Wiig and Annie Mumolo, it shows women at their very best and very worst. Unlike the boy-centric offerings, this film lets its scenes play out, giving Wiig and the others a chance to really work each moment.

What this film has over the boys’ fare, is a story with true emotional core even though it is often stretched beyond credulity. Annie (Kristen Wiig) has been having it tough. Her cake business failed and she’s stuck in a dead-end job, with no boyfriend, and is deeply depressed. Despite having a circle of friends, none seem aware of how badly off Annie is. When her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) gets engaged, Annie is asked to be the Maid of Honor and the rest of the film follows her pathetic attempts to plan the festivities while trying to bond with her fellow bridesmaids. All the while, the cattiness that marks female relationships is amplified, notably the rivalry between Annie and the pretty but cold Helen (Rose Byrne).

Annie’s life spirals down and then out of control so she is totally blind to the one good thing to enter her life, a friendly, romantically interested state trooper (Chris O’Dowd). The set pieces such as the failed airplane trip to Las Vegas or the over-the-top bridal shower let the ensemble have free reign and most make the most of it, notably Melissa McCarthy as the rude, crude, overweight and undersexed pal.

Obviously, true love and true friendship will win out in the end and getting there is certainly entertaining but the film is not without its faults. Several of the women are little more than two-dimensional types to round things out without adding much in the way of depth. Everyone’s blindness to Annie’s precarious financial situation is annoying (even if it results in the gross-out moments early on). Still, the bonds between real-life friends Wiig and Rudolph shine through and happily ground the film in a satisfying way.

The leads are well supported by the cast and it’s great to have one more opportunity to see the late, great Jill Clayburgh play Annie’s mother.

The film’s transfer is sharp and having both versions is a nice treat. The rest of the extras consist of the usually hodgepodge of Featurettes. The gag reel is nowhere near as funny as you would expect and the deleted, extended and alternate scenes show the value of having an editor. Noteworthy is a disastrous date between Annie and a guy (Paul Rudd) who gives men a bad name. The commentary from the filmmakers and cast isn’t bad with some interesting insights tossed in. (The Blu-ray, not reviewed, comes with additional features.)

One can hope that this  doesn’t inspire bad knockoffs with women doing even grosser things to one another but does allow filmmakers to take more chances with all-female ensembles and comedies.

Gregory Noveck Leaves DC, Takes Helm at Syfy Films

The press release came out late yesterday:

Gregory Noveck has been named to the newly created position of Senior Vice President, Production, Syfy Films, charged with launching projects for the new film company which the two companies announced in December. Noveck will report jointly to Mark Stern, President of Original Content, Syfy and Co-Head of Content for Universal Cable Productions, and Co-Chairman, Universal Pictures, Donna Langley. Noveck will work closely with the Universal and Syfy creative teams to find projects to develop by leveraging Syfy’s experience in developing genre content.

Noveck most recently served as Senior Vice President, Creative Affairs and Executive Producer for DC Comics where he established a new Film and TV division to help deliver quality content by mining the extensive DC Comics library. Feature projects included Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Watchmen, Red (for Summit Entertainment), and the upcoming Green Lantern, with television projects ranging from Smallville and Human Target to over ten animated DTV features. Prior to that he was Senior Vice President of Silver Pictures Television, developing and producing series and pilots for producer Joel Silver. Noveck previously served as Senior Vice President, Creative Affairs and Producer at Platinum Studios, where he established and grew the Creative Affairs department for Film and Television, overseeing all aspects of production and development. Projects included Cowboys & Aliens (Universal/DreamWorks) and Jeremiah (Showtime).

Syfy Ventures and Universal Pictures joined forces in December 2010 to create Syfy Films, a new film company that will develop and produce Syfy branded theatrical motion pictures to be distributed by Universal. The new entity will leverage Syfy’s genre expertise to produce human and relatable theatrical releases from the worlds of science fiction, fantasy, supernatural and horror. Beginning in 2012, Syfy Films will distribute one to two films a year through Universal Pictures. Mark Stern and Donna Langley jointly oversee the operation.

Very interesting. Diane Nelson is consolidating her position.

As for Gregory, he’s certainly shown the ability to do a lot with limited budgets, which will serve him well at his new job, as Syfy, and Universal’s new owner Comcast, have a reputation for keeping a tight control on purse strings. We wish him the best of luck.

‘The Walking Dead’ on their way to Cable

‘The Walking Dead’ on their way to Cable

  • News
  • January 20, 2010

Robert Kirkman fans ought to pull out a celebratory snack from their beards, and rejoice as AMC has given the go to a pilot for the long running comic series The Walking Dead. Kirkman’s series, a “what happens after the zombie movie is over”, will be brought to the cable network from an adaptation from scribe Frank Darabont, and will be produced by Gale Anne Hurd and David Alpert. Fans should feel safe in Darabont’s pen, as it’s adapted (and directed) some major works in the past, including Stephen King’s The Mist, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, as well as The Blob and The Fly II.

“Working with people like Frank Darabont and Gale Anne Hurd is the right way in for us to deliver a project of distinction in this genre,” AMC’s Charlie Collier said.

No dates have been given yet for filming, so start gathering your zombie hunting gear in the meantime.

Alan Kistler & friends win NYC Audience Award at 48 Hour Film Festival

Alan Kistler & friends win NYC Audience Award at 48 Hour Film Festival

  • News
  • June 17, 2009

From ComicMix contributor and all-around mensch Alan Kistler:

I do the 48 Hour Film Festival where you’re given a genre, character name, character
profession, prop, and a line of dialogue and have 48 hours to script it, film it, edit it and turn it in. It’s an international competition and this year we won the NYC Audience Award, which is pretty great.

Last year I was cast at the last minute after I helped with a read-through and they liked my performance. This year I appeared briefly and got to co-write it (also got to direct one scene, which was fun cuz I miss that).

This year, everyone was told to use a character named Ben Grimes who would be a “professional organizer”. The prop was to be a set of keys and the line of dialogue was “You’re not going to believe what I just heard.” The genre my group picked out of a hat was “Fantasy.”

Here’s the film. It’s a bit cropped here, so if you want to see it full-screen, go here.

Poppy Z. Brite’s ‘Lost Souls’ art by Miran Kim up for benefit auction

Poppy Z. Brite’s ‘Lost Souls’ art by Miran Kim up for benefit auction

From Rachel Bevilacqua, who’s raising money for a child custody court case:

I’m overjoyed to report that a saintly anonymous donor has donated the framed and matted Miran Kim painting of the original cover artwork for the classic Poppy Z. Brite novel “Lost Souls”, and an Advance Reading Copy of the novel.

These items are now up on eBay, and the book will be signed by Poppy Z. Brite specially for the auction winner! This is a unique set of horror genre collectibles that I’m so grateful to be able to auction.

Please also send massive Slack Waves to this donor who wishes to remain anonymous, but who deserves an unstoppable juggernaut of Slack. This person is a really unique individual who deserves every kind of happiness, and it can’t hurt to have a whole bunch of people beaming Slack their way!

Thank you so much for taking an interest in my situation and helping me out, it means more than I can express to know so many people are rooting for me!

The Point – March 27th, 2009

The Point – March 27th, 2009

Meet Phil Morris, a man who’s love for the action hero genre stretches even into his bloodline and wait until you hear what he has planned next, plus Spider Girl is back again and Ingrid Michaelson‘s Twitter Tune that will be stuckin your head all weekend guaranteed.

PRESS THE BUTTON to Get The Point! 


 

And be sure to stay on The Point via iTunes - ComicMix, RSS, MyPodcast.Com or Podbean

 

 

The Un-Ethics of Watchmen Part II: The Under-übermensches

  • News
  • March 10, 2009

For part 1 of this article, go here.

If Alan Moore, in his alternate universe that is not so far from our own, invokes Nietzsche’s übermensch, the hyper-evolved, extra-moral being, each one of our main masks, individually, embodies some stage to that goal as we explore our Nite Owl’s-eye view of things as Moore presents them.

A central tenet of Aristotle’s outlook is that animals and we have souls, but we have rational souls and that’s what makes us human. Humans are beings of action, agents who act upon other things, instead of objects who are acted upon (see First Cause and The 4 Causes in Metaphysics). The result of all that – humanity and agency – yields responsibility through choice. So it’s an argument that starts with source and ends with aim (telos) – happiness, eudaimonia (as no sane being chooses unhappiness, but makes unfortunate choices due to ignorance and error – back to reason). And we gain happiness through the instrumental use of goods toward the ultimate good, which is true happiness (vs. illusory or merely apparent good). Ari posits that when the passions drive the bus, instead of reason, we are moved and that language reflects and helps to create our reality. Look at how we speak about things we experience: “It moved me.” That means we cared, we felt, we gave a damn. And the word “passion” means “to suffer,” and anyone who’s ever been in love knows that it’s both joy and suffering. So how do Moore’s characters move, instead of being moved as pawns in someone else’s game, not being masters of their own game?

Blake’s “understanding of the human condition… he understands perfectly… and he doesn’t care…” is seeing the world through dirt-colored glasses. There is no optimistic rose in Moore’s world – only blood-red, black, white, yellow, crap-brown amidst the chiaroscuro. Blake is never treated as a human, and so never behaves like one and exists by objectifying everyone, creating a never-ending supply of objects that he moves and who move him. He’s operating out of Id (impulse, desire), too far gone to notice and, like Rambo, rise up against his objectification, and so there is no opportunity for redemption. His heart is turned to stone and would fall into Hell on the Egyptian scales of balance vs. the feather. But he’s already been living there all his life, so he has no thought of that, either. Fearless. Contempt and grandiosity are all smoke screens for despair, ego death. Murder is a form of suicide, as part of our psyche can’t help but recognize our own humanity in the humanity of others, even if that part of our empathy (see Hume) and that of those around us is dead or severely damaged goods.

So Blake is totally incapable of making any ethical decisions because he obviously does not know right from wrong (the legal definition of insanity). He only knows how to destroy, feel crazed pain even as he emotionally anesthetizes himself – goes for the thrill to bury the ill. Sleight of hand. Distraction. Noise. The only even remotely good thing he ever created, and that was purely by biology buried under all the sludge of his struggle for power (one of the übermensch impulses), was Laurie. The fact that he never actively harmed her is the one good thing he’d ever done, however passive, before being tossed out that window.

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The Un-Ethics of Watchmen, Part 1: A Bird’s-Eye View

  • News
  • March 2, 2009

Editor’s note: With the imminent release of Watchmen, we thought we’d try and get a different perspective. So we asked Alexandra Honigsberg, a professional ethicist and genre author, to read the book for the first time and delve into the ethos of the world created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

If super-hero comics are the literature of ethics, then Watchmen is the literature of un-ethics. It is the template for what not to do and makes Batman look like a Boy Scout, even at his darkest Dark Knight. They make Dirty Harry look clean. There’s a new saying on the street that Bitch is the New Black, it Gets Things Done. Well, these guys and gals are certainly the biatch. But is there any way to redeem their actions so that the ends justify the means? Or, more importantly, that even the most inhumane or inhuman retains some sense of what it means to be human?

The study of ethics is the exploration of the good life and how to live it. Now by the “good life” I don’t mean the bling life. I mean a life that is honourable, virtuous and, on a profound level not shaken by the winds of change, happy. Happiness (or pleasure or joy or The Good). That’s the end, the ultimate goal, or what Aristotle calls “that at which all rational beings aim.” Ari makes a fine distinction between the acts of a man (animal, non-rational) and the acts of a human (rational) or what some of us might term the mensch (gender neutral). One of the biggest invectives that Laurie hurls at Dr. Manhattan/Jon Osterman is that, after working for so long in the lab and being so all-powerful (the man not only to end all wars, but end all worlds), he ceases to be human. Moore emphasizes this with quotes from Nietzsche, who claims that when we become evolved enough we will not need rules, we will have become extra-moral – the superman (not the Nazis’ bastardization thereof) who has no need of ethics as we now know them. But are we still human? Extreme means change the agent and therefore change the end (e.g., The Comedian’s total amorality). Can we still give a damn if we’re all god-like? Or in the midst of so much horror that no human could reasonably be expected to survive unscarred (think of the Holocaust), are we still human? What’s human? What’s life? What’s good and who decides? Who gives authority to whom and why?

 

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3-D Films in 2009 Face Theater Shortage

3-D Films in 2009 Face Theater Shortage

  • News
  • December 24, 2008

Every director these days is either enamored with shooting films in 3-D or for IMAX or both. DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg has become the 3-D Preacher, going around the country extolling its virtue.

The New York Times, this morning, noted that there’s just one problem: not every theater is equipped to show 3-D movies and its’ awfully expensive to gear up. “Like all studios experimenting with 3-D, Lionsgate is struggling with a shortage of theaters equipped to project the work. By the release date for My Bloody Valentine 3D, Lionsgate will have only 900 3-D screens available, so it will show a 2-D version of the movie on about 1,600 screens,” the Times reported.

The remake of My Bloody Valentine is the first horror film in the current revival of 3-D as a gimmick to make movie going once more a unique experience. “Advances in digital technology and more comfortable glasses — not to mention a young adult audience that doesn’t remember the 3-D horror movies of the past — have studios jumping back on the 3-D bandwagon. Family entertainment is leading the charge, with DreamWorks Animation and the Walt Disney Company set to unleash a blizzard of 3-D pictures over the next year. But the broader market is following fast,” they wrote.

The article noted horror films need something to keep the genre alive given the lackluster box office for the “torture” sub-genre exemplified by Saw and Hostel.

Joe Drake, the co-chief operating officer of Lionsgate and the president of the studio’s motion picture group, said,. “We see 3-D horror as financially lucrative and creatively exciting,” he said. “We want to break some new ground here in R-rated fare.”

“If there was ever a moment when horror needed to be reinvented, this is it,” said Jeanine Basinger, chairwoman of film studies at Wesleyan University. “You can only work one side of the horror street for so long before you have to cross to the other side and explore something new.”

The other option is to remake familiar films with new actors and directors with January 16’s release of Bloody Valentine as the tip of an iceberg. A month later comes the remake of Friday the 13th with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween 2, and a parade of zombie releases to follow.

‘Times’ 100 Book List Stiffs Genre

‘Times’ 100 Book List Stiffs Genre

  • News
  • December 1, 2008

The New York Times named their 100 notable books of the year today and the genre, as one might expect, was likely under-represented. Graphic novels were entirely ignored and just four works of fiction could be considered within out genre and they are:

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. By Victor Pelevin. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. (Viking, $25.95.) A supernatural call girl narrates Pelevin’s satirical allegory of post-Soviet, post-9/11 Russia.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. By Simon Armitage. (Norton, $25.95.) One of the eerie, exuberant joys of Middle English poetry, in an alliterative rendering that captures the original’s drive, dialect and landscape.

2666. By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper, $30.) The five autonomous sections of this posthumously published novel interlock to form an astonishing whole, a supreme capstone to Bolaño’s vaulting ambition.

The Widows of Eastwick. By John Updike. (Knopf, $24.95.) In this ingenious sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, the three title characters, old ladies now, renew their sisterhood, return to their old hometown and contrive to atone for past crimes.

No non-fiction about the genre made the list.

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