After seeing Les Miserables I started to reassess my feelings about musicals. Why are our opinions on musicals, most of the time at least, so black and white? The discussion around musicals is often different to any other genre of film and I think it’s time that we changed that.
We’ve gotten over Christmas, are under 6 feet of snow in “The Big Freeze” (or Winter as it is known in the common tongue) and we’re in that uncomfortable territory where nobody is really sure when to stop wishing people a Happy New Year. But what does this year actually hold in store for us?
Well, whilst I may not be able to summon upon Mystic Meg powers and discuss most big events that might occur during the year (though my money is on the Mayan’s finally being right sometime during June), I can happily discuss some of the films I am most looking forward to this year.
I’ve decided to exclude the majority of releases from January and February. Most of my most anticipated films from this period are the Oscar/Bafta nominees and whilst they are released this year they feel very much like 2012 films. I will be writing something awards based soon but as most of the films aren’t in cinemas yet I don’t want to comment on them before I’ve seen them (expect something just in time for the BAFTAs on these ones). I also haven’t included any comic book/superhero films here as I’m going to write something up on them seperately. Needless to say, I am looking forward to them a heck of a lot as well.
Instead my focus is on the films we can expect to see later in the year. Some of these are big budget mega vehicles, some are much smaller but all of them have the promise, I feel, to be truly great. Of course, we all said that about Prometheus this time last year and, well, yeah…..
5. Anchorman 2 (December 2013)
He’s a man so important that you can smell the rich mahogany and leather bound books that make up his apartment all over the great city of “A Whale’s Vagina”. That’s right, the man with a voice that can make a Wolverine purr is back in December this year with the long gestating sequel to every student’s favourite quote along, Anchorman.
Whilst part of me is very apprehensive considering the drastic dip in the quality of recent Will Ferrell films, there is an unabashed joy in seeing the moustache and red suit back again. Both teaser trailers released last year were fantastic and if the gag holds up for another 90 minutes then we may be in for a real treat. Plus, at the end of the day, we all know that if the gag rate hits 60% of the time, it hits all the time (ok, so that quote was a little forced but by Great Odin’s Raven the others were good!)
4. Cloud Atlas (February 2013)
I’m going to hold my hands up and say, quite ashamedly, that I haven’t yet gotten around to reading David Mitchell’s mind bending novel. By all accounts it is incredible and I do aim to correct this mistake in the near future.
What I do know however is that this February sees the release of the Wachowski Siblings/Tom Twykers adaptation of the novel starring an incredible cast including Jim Broadbent, Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Agent Smith/Elrond himself, Hugo Weaving. What’s made me most excited about this film is its incredible looking production values. Each actor undergoes a number of intense transformations to portray roles in each of the different time periods changing gender, race and moral outlook constantly throughout.
Having missed out on the major awards there has been some questions over the actual quality of the film and a quick glance around the internet shows that it has truly divided critics. Despite all of this though I am incredibly excited to see the finished product. Whether it disappoints or not is a different matter.
3. Much Ado about Nothing (June 2013)
Another year, another Whedon venture.
Shot on the ultimate shoe string budget in and around Whedon’s house during his 2 weeks off from working on the biggest Superhero movie of all time, this was the surprise that nobody expected.
Famously Joss has held Shakespeare readings for himself and friends at his house for years, though this is the first time that he has ever taken the next step and filmed one. As such, Much Ado about Nothing stars pretty much everyone you’d expect from the Whedon-verse (minus the really big guns of SMG and DB) including the beautiful Benedick/Beatrice romance portrayed by none other than Angel’s Wesley and Fred (Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker).
Expect Shakespeare and Whedon nerds crowding out screenings when it hits cinemas in June.
The teaser poster for Whedon’s “Much Ado About Nothing”
2. The World’s End (August 2013)
9 years after Shaun brought the zombies and 6 after the fuzz brought the noise Wright, Pegg and Frost are back to bring…the World to an end! That’s right, after waiting what feels like forever we are finally going to be gifted with the last part of the 3 Corenettos / Blood and Ice Cream trilogy.
The World’s End sees a group of 5 old friends meeting up to complete a pub crawl they attempted years before. However, the apocalypse has other plans! Aside from this brief overview very little is currently known about the plot which makes the whole thing even more exciting.
As a HUGE fan of all those involved I absolutely cannot wait to see what these guys churn out for the finally to this unofficial trilogy. As far as I’m concerned (and as a massive fan of each of them), Pegg and Wright are never better then when they are working together. I have very high hopes for this one (as do most of the film geek population of the UK) so honestly, August cannot come fast enough.
“The World’s End”, part 3 of Wright/Pegg’s unofficial trilogy
1. Before Midnight (TBC)
(SPOILERS FOR BEFORE SUNRISE/BEFORE SUNSET AHEAD)
Until last year I had never seen either of Richard Linklater’s “Before” films. They were films I’d heard of but wasn’t really aware of and the posters made them look like very ordinary romantic comedies. However, more out of curiosity than anything else I added them to my Lovefilm list and decided to check them out. It happened to be one of the greatest film related decisions I have ever made.
What I discovered were two beautiful indie cinema gems.
The first film, Before Sunrise, sees American boy (Jesse – Ethan Hawke) and French girl (Celine – Julie Delpy) meet on a chance encounter on a train to Vienna. In a moment of sheer awkward boldness, Jesse invites Celine to spend the day with him walking around the city. Over the course of the next few hours the two discuss love, life, their fears and their hopes, all whilst gradually falling in love. It’s a wonderful and self contained snapshot of a day that ends with the promise that, despite being half a world apart, the 2 of them will meet back up in 6 months on the same platform in the same city…
Sadly though, they never do. As such, Before Sunset picks up 9 years later and this time Jesse is in Paris promoting a book seemingly based entirely on the night he spent with Celine. Unexpectedly she shows up and the 2 embark on a real time walk and talk through the back streets of Paris. More World weary, cynical and regretful of their youthful mistakes, Before Sunset is a perfect blend of bittersweet romance and rekindling friendship. Both Hawke and Delpy ARE their characters and the chemistry they portray here is almost unrivalled in any other love story in the history of cinema.
Jesse and Celine over the years
So, why all the backstory? Well, in late 2012 news started to seep through that Linklater, Hawke and Delpy had been strutting around Greece filming the 3rd part of the Before series much to the delight of, well, anyone who had enjoyed the previous films. Nobody knew anything about it, making the surprise all the more…um….surprising.
Before Midnight premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier in the week and reports have been overwhelmingly positive. The film appears to have lost none of what made the first 2 so perfect and the fact that we find the 2 leads in a completely different period of their lives makes the prospect all the more enticing. Ethan Hawke has said that he views the trilogy as 1 long film that just happened to take 18 years to make and I think that’s a wonderful way to look at it. It’s very rare (I certainly can’t think of any examples) for an indie romance like this to track the growth of characters so completely. It’s wonderful to look back at that first movie and see the youthful spirit in the leads compared with the new photos from BeforeMidnight which clearly display a couple aging and dealing with the new issues in their lives.
No UK release date has yet been announced though I’d expect that we will get it later on this year. Whatever happens, you can guarantee that I’ll be first in line when it finally arrives. Maybe I’ll even meet you back here in 6 months….?
Recently I watched the 2009 Judd Apatow film” Funny People again. I remember seeing it in the cinema and, whilst enjoying it, finding it ultimately disappointing. The trailers sold it to me as another knock around romp in the style of Apatow’s previous efforts albeit, with a slightly more serious edge. What I got instead was, what I felt at the time, a reasonably funny comedy with some marginally interesting bits of drama that was overall about 40 mins too long.
However, on revisiting the film again 3 years later, now knowing exactly what to expect, I enjoyed the film a heck of a lot more. I loved the fact that the drama took centre stage. I loved the fact that this wasn’t a film featuring a group of funny people, more it was about a group of funny people. And I loved the fact that it was about how they control their lives when they aren’t attempting to be, well, funny.
This got me thinking about why I hadn’t enjoyed the film as much the first time around. I settled on one major factor; the film’s marketing.
As I said, I expected (due to the trailers and poster quotes) to see a laugh a minute comedy which Funny People really really isn’t. Had it been sold as exactly what it was I get the feeling that it would have received a much more favourable reaction from critics and the public alike. Instead it wound up with a lot of very middling reviews and a sub-par box office for comedy behemoth Judd Apatow ($71m worldwide, lower than almost every other of his films – including Forgetting Sarah Marshall…)
It isn’t as rare as you might think that a film’s marketing kills its box office or critical reception chances before it hits theatres. 2012 featured a perfect example in the honestly-not-as-bad-as-everyone-says John Cater. Hailed as one of the biggest flops of all time, John Carter is a beautiful example of a marketing department getting it staggeringly wrong. Famously the film dropped the Of Mars from the end of its title as Disney were afraid that this sci-fi twist would alienate large sections of the public, forgetting that leaving the title just as John Carter makes the film sound like a Terrance Malick piece about a tax collector.
For the perfect example, compare these 2 posters. Which of these do you most want to see? Then guess which one was posted around the world.
That’s right, the first was the main release poster seen nationwide, the second was the poster handed out exclusively to IMAX midnight screenings and was thus seen by a very limited group… who already had tickets. Moreover, Disney advertised the film during the Superbowl in 2012, in one of the most expensive advertising slots on TV. You want to know what they broadcast?
For comparison, here is what Disney broadcast to advertise The Avengers (which took $1.5bn worldwide and is the third most successful film in history)
One of those trailers builds tension, excitement, action and character. The other is a mess of images and a name I neither know nor, apparently, have any reason to care about.
The marketing of a film is a big deal. To the everyday audience member the only interaction they have with a film is through the marketing campaign; be it trailers, posters on buses or adverts in newspapers. As such a film truly has to make itself stand out as an event worth going to and raise expectations to the correct level. If Funny People had been marketed as the drama it effectively is, I strongly believe it would have appealed to Apatow’s wide fan base as well as a different, new audience and would have been more successful for it. Likewise John Carter‘s marketing campaign was an utter calamity from start to finish. Nobody knew what this film was and so everybody believed that the film itself was equally a mess. Whilst it isn’t great, it certainly didn’t deserve the box office kicking it eventually got, not even slightly.
If a studio truly understands what it has then these mistakes can be avoided. There are so many other examples of where marketing has killed a movie but ultimately, the result is always the same. It’s a shame to see a good film kicked to the curb because somebody messed up the message to the audience as it’s the people that made it that get the blame. The failure of John Carter doesn’t lie with Andrew Stanton, it lies with Disney*. If it had been pushed differently the film could have likely taken a much bigger box office and the sequel would now be greenlite.
And yes, whilst a great film will always find a way through no matter how poor the marketing (think The Shawshank Redemption and its cinematic failure compared to the mega hit it has become in later life) there are some films for which damage is irrevocably caused. John Carter and Funny People may not be Citizen Kane, but I’ll tell you something, they sure aren’t the Plan 9 From Outer Space’s we were led to believe.
*Amendment: It has been pointed out to me that in fact Andrew Stanton did have some marketing control over John Carter making one of the above points slightly moot. Perhaps he wasn’t the best example in that instance. The point I was trying to make there was more that in the majority of cases a director won’t have control over some marketing aspects and even a great film can fail. A better example would likely have been Monsters which was an amazing indie drama, advertised as a mega monster movie. This ultimately meant that a lot of people were disappointed and whilst everyone praised the film and it did very well for an ultra low budget thing, word of mouth could likely have helped the film if the audience would have known what they were paying to see- 500 Days of Monsters, not Godzilla in Mexico. In this case director Garth Edwards did everything right and for the most part so did the studio, but perhaps by not showing that there was something else just as wonderful as the titular monsters in the film audience members weren’t as quick to recommend it to a friend.
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