Jaron Pitts has made a movie trailer for a non-existent Green Lantern superhero movie. Quite frankly, it’s an odd thing to do and I don’t honestly know why anyone would do it. I certainly like the way it looks for the most part. I’ve always liked the idea of the Green Lantern. But a fan film trailer? I don’t know. There’s a mashup of various films going on in here with some effects on top. The main problem with this kind of work is that you take popular and well-understood tropes from Hollywood super-hero action movies and reproduce them with sometimes astounding faithfulness, but what you end up with is a photocopy of current filmmaking habits. It’s like jumping up and down shouting, “Look! I can do it! I can make the ship, you know… like fly just like in the big Hollywood pictures! Like, you know, it zooms in at you and then it stops, and dips its wings and then darts off in another direction with a big ‘WOOSH’ and a little burst of energy and then the music goes ‘CRASH’ and then we see the guy in the pilot’s seat…” and so on and so on. My Green Lantern trailer would just have a tired nut-job sitting at his dining room table with a flashlight and a roll of Scotchtape, trying to fashion himself a green light logo to stick on his chest while he poses in front of a full-length mirror. But that’s just me. I would generally advise skilled and talented filmmakers to avoid wasting their time.
Category Archives: Film Comment
Fiction, Computer Games and Dante’s Inferno
Here’s an article by Tim Martin in The Telegraph about how computer games are having a growing influence on literature. As the game’s trailer shows, the upcoming computer game, Dante’s Inferno, will be a wild ride into hell. I’m sure the game is full of levels as most games are and as Dante’s original literary Inferno certainly is. It will also most likely contain a good sampling of quotations from the original since you’ve got two poets running around in hell making observations and explaining things for all of us. In the electronic version I’m sure that Dante will get to cut off many limbs and heads and such things. I don’t know – is gaming influencing literature or the other way around? Maybe a little. I think gaming is having more of an effect on film making. Maybe the answer is in the trailer. I also think that if you are going to make a game based on Inferno, you should not make it an action game. You should make it an open-ended exploration of hell. Just that. No more required.
The Limits of Control: Jim Jarmusch Film and Interview
Here’s the trailer for The Limits of Control, a new film by Jim Jarmusch. I’m always very impressed by Jim Jarmusch when he speaks. Extremely intelligent and serious artist working in film. In fact, he might be one of the only serious artists working in American film at present. He’s kind of scary and punkish and seems more like a rock star than a film director. I’d probably run screaming from the room if he came in to talk to me. But maybe not. I always find a person’s weakness and exploit it. Jarmusch’s weakness is Bill Murray. Too much focus on stars in Jarmusch films. He shouldn’t do this. Great directors in the 21st Century should not cast so many stars. Stars ruin movies. Imagine reading a great novel in which every single character is played by a movie star. Sort of like when you buy a novel that’s been adapted to film and right there on the cover you see a big fat picture of Leonardo DiCaprio. Ruins the entire book. Ruins a serious film quite often too. Why movie stars have become so essential to film is a total mystery. A great director spends all his energy trying to direct the movie in circles around his star performers. What a waste. A movie that becomes a parade of the director’s movie star friends is not worth watching. He should make new friends. There’s nothing more time-consuming than watching a movie star pretend to be an artist. It would serve Mr. Jarmusch better to find people on the street and use them instead. He needs to get over this Bill Murray fixation and move on. Murry is a deadly boring actor with a frozen face. These stars are a major headache and a distraction from what the director has to say with film. By the way, here’s a fascinating interview with Jim Jarmusch that is casting off sparks of connective ideas all over the place. They talk about novels, essays, poetry, William Burroughs and the cut-up technique, secret societies, Scientology, Stanley Kubrick, and more. Fascinating talk. I really wish he’d stop hiring movie stars. Jim Jarmusch is not a good director of movie stars. This guy would be a real artistic threat if he’d just run around with a video camera and work that way. Why he would want to be eating catered food with the walkie-talkie brigade is simply beyond me.
German Film Directer Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
He’s a German film director named Werner Herzog and in 1980 he made a bet with another filmmaker that if that other guy actually finished his first feature film Herzog would sit down in front of cameras and eat his own shoe. The friend did finish his movie, and so Mr. Herzog sat down to dine upon his footwear. During the strange event, he talks about how deadly television is and how we must fight its influence. It’s an old refrain, but he puts it in a way that I’ve not heard before. He goes on to talk about how we as a culture have not developed adequate images. I’m not sure he’s right about this, but he certainly thinks he is and that’s always fun to watch. He is deadly serious about what he’s saying, but of course you must not forget that during it all he is cooking and eating a shoe. I always love to see people who are being funny while being totally serious.
The Hunt for Gollum: Excellent LOTR Fan Film
The Hunt for Gollum is a 40-minute fan-made film that is available for free online viewing. The film was made through open collaboration of enthusiastic fans working under the leadership of director Chris Bouchard. I’ve just finished watching it and can report that it is a wonderful success that tells its story with the perfect touch of mystery, action, and romance. It captures the look of the Peter Jackson trilogy expertly and incorporates highly professional costuming, makeup, photography, script writing, and acting. I think the producers of the LOTR trilogy should include this film when they release the eventual DVD of the upcoming film of The Hobbit. Perhaps this is the best fan film ever made. It probably is. I have not seen all the available fan films, but it is difficult to imagine that anyone has made a better one. Watch the film and then think about the fact that it was made for under $5,000.
The Cool School: LA Art Scene Film
This video is from a PBS Independent Lens documentary about the Ferus Gallery that shaped much of the Los Angeles art scene in the early 1960s. It’s short but it conveys some of the sense of LA’s wild, nervy, uncontrolled art attitude that is still in force today. I love the zoom in on Andy Warhol who’s standing in front of one of his works and he just says, ‘Oh.’ LA still has that sense of offering the individual artist the clear opportunity to walk into a gallery, shake hands, say ‘How’s it going?’ and end up with an art showing a few weeks later. It’s a city of entrepreneurs. New York is a city of deeply knowledgeable and experienced people who understand that there is a system in place that’s been there forever. That’s why people walk fast in New York. They’re all trying to stay on schedule so the system keeps running. In LA, everyone is throwing crowbars into the system and breaking it so that they can make their own. The gallery scene in downtown LA is really interesting these days. You can walk for blocks, stopping in at the galleries for a wide variety of offerings. There are a couple of galleries that have copped an arrogant New York attitude and they are the ones I stay away from. In general, you get a real feeling of the art being right there and totally accessible to you. Everything is for sale. The artists are interested in your money. It’s very simple and healthy. When I buy a piece of art in LA I feel like I’ve pulled a fast one on the art world somehow. I feel complicit in something with underground tones.
