Worst Actress
Katherine Heigl, Home Sweet Hell
Dakota Johnson, Fifty Shades of Grey
Mila Kunis, Jupiter Ascending
Jennifer Lopez, The Boy Next Door
Gwyneth Paltrow, Mortdecai
Worst Supporting Actor
Chevy Chase, Hot Tub Time Machine 2 and Vacation
Josh Gad, Pixels and The Wedding Ringer
Kevin James, Pixels
Jason Lee, Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Chip
Eddie Redmayne, Jupiter Ascending
Worst Supporting Actress
Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Chip and The Wedding Ringer
Rooney Mara, Pan
Michelle Monaghan, Pixels
Julianne Moore, Seventh Son
Amanda Seyfried, Love the Coopers and Pan
Worst Screenplay
Simon Kinberg, Jeremy Slater and Josh Trank, Fantastic Four
Kelly Marcel, Fifty Shades of Grey
Andy and Lana Wachowski, Jupiter Ascending
Kevin James and Nick Bakay, Paul Blart Mall Cop 2
Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling, Pixels
Worst Screen Combo
Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell, Fantastic Four
Johnny Depp and his glued-on mustache, Mortdecai
Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, Fifty Shades of Grey
Kevin James and either his Segway or glued-on mustache, Paul Blart Mall Cop 2
Adam Sandler and any pair of shoes, The Cobbler
Razzies Redeemer Award
Elizabeth Banks
M. Night Shyamalan
Will Smith
Sylvester Stallone
“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet, what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” — David Mitchell
Let me tell you about Icarus. He took flight with wings of feather and wax. Warned not to fly too low so as not to have the sea’s dampness clog his wings or to climb too high to have the sun melt the wax. Icarus heeded not the latter and tried to fly as close to the sun. Just as his father had warned him the wax in his wings melted as he flew too close to the sun and soon fell back to earth and into the sea.
A tale from Greek mythology that taught has taught us about ambition reaching so high that it’s bound to fail. One such ambitious failure of recent times has been the epic science fiction film Cloud Atlas directed by The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer.
The film was adapted from the novel of the same name by author David Mitchell which looked to take six stories set in 19th-century South Pacific and right up to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Each story’s characters and actions would connect with each other through the six different time and space. The film attempts to do what Mitchell’s novel did through several hundred dense and detailed pages.
Just like Icarus The Wachowski and Tom Tykwer’s attempt to connect the lives and actions of all six stories amounts for what admirers and detractors can only agree on as an admirable and ambitious failure.
The film boasts a large ensemble cast led by Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Hugo Weaving. More than one of the actors in the cast would perform characters in each and every six interconnecting stories in the film which added a sense of rhythmic continuity to the whole affair, but also made for some very awkward and uncomfortable scenes of what could only amount to as “yellowface”. This was most evident in the story set in 22nd-century Neo Seoul, South Korea where actors such as James D’Arcy, Jim Sturgess, Keith David and Hugo Weaving have been heavily made-up to look Asian.
Cloud Atlas was and is a sprawling film that attempts to explore the theme that everything and everyone is connected through time and space. It’s how the action of one could ripple through time to have a profound effect on others which in turn would create more ripples going forward through time. The film both succeeds and fails in portraying this theme.
It’s the film’s narrative style to tell the six stories not in a linear fashion from 19th-century to the post-apocalyptic future, but instead allow all six tales to weave in and out of each other. At times this weaving style and how it would seamlessly go from one time location to another without missing a beat made for some very powerful and emotional moments. But then it would also make these transitions in such a clunky manner that it brings one out of the very magical tale the three directors were attempting to weave and tell.
Yet, even through some of it’s many faults and failings the film does succeed in some way due to the performances of the ensemble cast. Even despite the awkwardness of the “yellowface” of the Neo Seoul sequence the actors in the scenes perform their roles such admirable fashion. One would think that someone like Tom Hanks who has become such a recognizable presence in every film he appears in wouldn’t be able to blend into each tale being shown and told, but he does so in Cloud Atlas and so does everyone else.
It helps that the film was held up from a very hard landing after reaching so high with an exquisite and beautiful symphonic score composed by Tom Tykwer, Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek. It’s a score that manages to accentuate the film’s exploration of emotions and actions rippling through time without ever becoming too maudlin and pandering to the audiences emotions.
Cloud Atlas was hyped as the next epic science fiction film from The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer leading up to it’s release. This hype was further built-up with thundering standing ovation during it’s screening at the 37th Toronto International Film Festival. But once the film finally was released and more critics and the general public were able to see it for themselves the reaction have been divisive. This was a film that brooked no middle-ground. One either loved it flaws and all or hated it despite what it did succeed in accomplishing amongst the failures.
Just like Icarus, Cloud Atlas and it’s three directors had high ambitions for the film. It was a goal that not many filmmakers seem to want to put themselves out on the limb for nowadays because of how monumental the failure can be if their ambitions are just too high. It’s been the reputation of The Wachowskis since they burst into the scene with their Matrix trilogy. Their eclectic and, somewhat esoteric, storytelling style have made all their films an exercise in high-risk, high reward affairs that makes no apologies whether they succeed or fail. Each of their films have a unique vision that they want to share with the world and they make no compromises in how this vision is achieved.
One could call Cloud Atlas an ambitious failure. It could also be pop, New Age psychobabble wrapped up in so-called high-art. Yet, what the two siblings and Tom Tykwer were able to achieve with the film has been nothing less by brave and daring. If more filmmakers were willing to allow their inner Icarus to fly then complaints of Hollywood and the film industry not having anymore fresh new ideas would fade.
The Wachowskis, Andy and Lana, have a new film set for release in early 2015. Jupiter Ascending was suppose to come out in 2014, but things happened and now it’s been pushed back for a February 2015 release.
Such a drastic delay in release usually means something major on the negative side of the ledger has occurred and the studio in charge of it’s release have little to no faith in the film. Has Warner Bros. Studios lost faith in the latest Wachowski offering? Is Jupiter Ascending the hot mess that it has been rumored about? Is the grandiose space opera the film is being made out to be making studio exec’s nervous?
So, many questions that most people who like to dwell on the in’s and out’s of filmmaking and the business of making them are probably asking themselves.
My only concern is that the Wachowskis have taken the extra time to make the film they set out to make. They’re one of the few filmmakers who seem to always get to do the sort of dream projects that more successful directors rarely get a chance to or even attempt to try. Whether it’s The Matrix,Speed Racer or Cloud Atlas, the Wachowskis have danced to their own tune and for some reason Warner Bros. continue to give them big-budgets after big-budgets to get their next dream project made into reality.
Here’s to hoping Guardians of the Galaxy being such a huge success will help this upcoming space opera turn it’s February release (usually a place where films go to die) into a new addition to the resurgence of the space opera.
We’ve been getting quite a bit of hype for the fall and holiday releases of 2012 but for some reason one film that should’ve been on more people’s radar seem to have gone unnoticed until this week when an extended trailer for the film was released to the public. It’s the film adaptation of David Mitchell’s epic sci-fi novel Cloud Atlas.
The film is directed by Lana Wachowski (formerly Larry Wachowski), Andy Wachowski and German-filmmaker Tom Tykwer. It’s a film that has a cast which includes Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess and Susan Sarandon for starters. The story looks to stay faithful to the original novel source which interweaves six different stories spanning time from the 19th-century all the way to a post-apocalyptic far future.
It’s going to be interesting whether the Wachowskis and Tykwer will be able to keep these six stories from becoming too confusing for the general audience to follow. Most important of all will be if these filmmakers will be able to create an entertaining film out of a novel heavy on themes and ideas. One thing the trailer sure points out is that the Wachowskis haven’t lost their touch when it comes to the visual side of filmmaking.
Cloud Atlasis set for an October 26, 2012 release date.
“Remember, remember the fifth of November, the gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.”
Alan Moore’s decision to want his name off the final credits for the film adaptation of V for Vendetta now makes sense. Moore has had a hate/hate relationship with Hollywood and the film industry in general. They’ve taken two of his other works in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. and bollocks’d them up (to borrow a term used quite a bit in V for Vendetta). Outside of Watchmen, Alan Moore sees V for Vendetta as one of his more personal works and after reading the screenplay adaptation of the graphic novel by The Wachowski Brothers his decision afterwards was to demand his name be removed from the film if it was ever made. Part of this was his hatred of the film industry for their past mistakes and another being his wish for a perfect adaptation or none at all. Well, V for Vendettaby James McTeigue and The Wachowski Brothers is not a perfect film adaptation. What it turns out to be is a film that stays true to the spirit of Moore’s graphic novel and given a modern, up-to-the-current news retelling of the world’s state of affairs.
V for Vendetta starts off with abit of a prologue to explain the relevance of the Guy Fawkes mask worn by V throughout the film and the significance of the date of the 5th of November. I think this change in the story from the source material may be for the benefit of audiences who didn’t grow up in the UK and have no idea of who Guy Fawkes was and what his Gunpowder Plot was all about. The sequence is short but informative. From then on we move on to the start of the main story and here the film adheres close enough to the source material with a few changes to the Evey character (played by Natalie Portman) but not enough to ruin the character. Caught after curfew and accosted by the ruling government’s secret police called Fingermen, Evey soon encounters V who saves her not just from imprisonment but rape from these so-called Fingermen.
Right from the start the one thing McTeigue and The Wachowski Brothers got dead-on was casting Hugo Weaving as the title character. Voice silky, velvety and sonorous, Weaving infuses V with an otherworldly, theatrical personality. Whether V was speaking phrases from Shakespeare, philosophers or pop culture icons, the voice gave a character who doesn’t show his face from behind the enternally-smiling Guy Fawkes mask real life. I’d forgiven the makers of this films for some of the changes they made to the story and some of the characters for keeping V as close to how Moore wrote him. Once V and Evey are thrown in together by the happenstance of that nightly encounter their fates became intertwined. Portman plays the reluctant witness to V’s acts of terrorism, murders and destruction in the beginning, but a poignant and emotionally powerful sequence to start the second half of the film soon brings Evey’s character not much towards V’s way of doing things, but to understanding just why he’s doing them. This sequence became the emotional punch of the whole film and is literally lifted word for word from the graphic novel. This is the sequence in the film which should resonate the loudest for most people whether they buy into the rest of the film or not.
The rest of the cast seemed like a who’s who of the British acting community. From Stephen Rea’s stubborn and dogged Chief Inspector Finch whose quest to find V leads him to finding clues about his government’s past actions that he’d rather not have found. Then there’s Stephen Fry’s flamboyant TV show host who becomes Evey’s only other ally whose secret longings have been forbidden by the government, but who’s awakened by V’s actions to go through with his own form of rebellion. Then there’s John Hurt as High Chancellor Adam Sutler who’s seen chewing up the scenery with his Hitler-like performance through Big Brother video conferences (an ironic bit of casting since John Hurt also played Winston Smith in the film adaptation of the Orwell classic 1984). I really couldn’t find any of the supporting players as having done a bad job in their performances. Even Hurt’s Sutler might have seemed over-the-top to some but his performance just showed how much of a hatemonger Sutler and, in the end, his Norsefire party really were in order to stay in power.
The story itself, as I mentioned earlier, had had some changes made to it. Some of these changes angered Moore and probably continues to anger his more die-hard fans. I count myself as one of these die-hards, but I know how film adaptations of classic literary works must and need to trim some of the fat from the main body and theme of the story to fully translate onto the silver screen. The Wachowski Brother’s screenplay did just that. They trimmed some of the side stories and tertiary characters from the story and concentrated on V, Evey and Inspector Finch’s pursuit of both the truth of V and his own journey in finding that truth. This adaptation wa much closer to how Peter Jackson adapted The Lord of the Rings. As a fan of Moore I understood why he was unhappy with the changes, but then Moore was and still is an avowed perfectionist and only a perfect adaptation would do.
Critics on both sides of the aisle have called V for Vendetta revolutionary, subversive, daring to irresponsible and propagandist. All because the film dares to ask serious questions about the nature and role of violence as a form of dissent. But the granddaddy question the film brings up that has people talking is the question: terrorist or freedom fighter? Is V one or the other or is he both? Make no mistake about it, V for all intents and purposes is a terrorist if one was to use the definition of what a terrorist is. The makers of this film goes to great lenghts to describe throughout the film just how Sutler and his Norsefire (with its iconic Nazi-like imagery and extreme fundamentalist Christian idealogy) party rose to power in the UK. Partly due to what seemed like the failed US foreign policy and its subsequent and destructive decline as a superpower and the worldwide panic and fear it caused as a result. V for Vendetta also ask just who was to blame for allowing such individuals to rule over them. V has his reasons for killing these powers-that-be, but he also points out that people really should just look in the mirror if they need to know who really was to blame. For it was the population — whose desire to remain safe and have a semblance of peace — gave up more and more of their basic liberties and rights for a return to order. If one was to look at the past 100 years they would see that it’s happened before. There was the regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia, Milosevic’s Greater Serbia, and the king of the hill of them all being Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Inner Circle.
Another thing about V for Vendetta that will surely talked about alot will be the images used in the film. Not just images and symbols looking so much like Nazi icons, but images from the events of the past decade which have become symbols of oppression and censorship. The film shows people bound and hooded like prisoners from Abu Ghraib. The reason of the war on terror used time and time again by Sutler to justify why England and its people need him and his group to protect them by any means necessary. V for Vendetta seems like a timely film for our current times. Even with the conclusion of the film finally accomplishing what Guy Fawkes failed to do that night of November 5th some 400 plus years ago, V for Vendetta doesn’t give all the answers to all the questions it raises. I’m sure this would be something that’ll frustrate them some audiences. So much of people who go to watch thought-provoking films want their questions answered as clearly as possible and all of them. V for Vendetta doesn’t answer them but gives the audience enough information to try and work it out themselves.
In final analysis, V for Vendetta accomplishes in bringing the main themes of Alan Moore’s graphic novel to life and even does it well despite some of the changes made. It is a film that is sure to polarize the extreme left and right of the political pundits and commentators. But as a piece of thought-provoking and even as a politically subversive film, V for Vendetta does it job well. It is not a perfect film by any respect, but the story and message it tries to convey in addition to its value as a piece of entertainment mor than makes up for its flaws. Alan Moore and his followers might not love and approve of this film, but it doesn’t mean the film in and of itself wasn’t a good one. Sometimes calls for literal adaptations of beloved works or no adaptation at all also becomes a form of creative oppression and censorship.
There comes around a few films every year which I end up enjoying despite how awful it is to most everyone. I’m a major fan and follower of all things grindhouse and for some grindhouse means it was made during the late 60’s and through most of thru the 70’s. I always thought of grindhouse as a state of mind. I mean I like to believe that’s why Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino make the films that they make (all of them grindhouse films at heart if not execution). So, it happens that in 2009 there was one film which was panned universally by critics and mainstream audiences everywhere. It was the second film by Wachowski Brothers protege James McTeigue. He was the same director who made the impressive V for Vendetta film adaptation (I still believe to this day that the Wachowski Brothers had a hand in directing that adaptation).
When word came down that he was going to do a modern ninja film which included Sho Kosugi (he practically was the star of most, if not all, of the best-known ninja grindhouse flicks of the 70’s and 80’s) there was no doubt that this film would rock. The heightened anticipation for this martial arts extravaganza would turn out to be more a whimper than a bang. James McTeigue’s Ninja Assassin became one of 2009’s worst films of the year and part of me don’t agree with how most people viewed it.
The story for this film was quite simple. Former ninja assassin tries hiding from his former ninja clan and it’s badass ninja leader (played by badass ninja-man himself, Sho Kosugi). The part of this former ninja was played by Korean singing pop sensation who went by the name Rain. He got the lead part for this film due to the Wachowski Brothers and uber-action producer Joel Silver having been impressed seeing his work on the Wachowski Brothers’ very-maligned and misunderstood live-action take on the classic Japanese anime series, Speed Racer. The brothers and Silver saw a start on the rise in their midst and decided to make a film around Rain. The fact that the film ended up being Ninja Assassin must’ve been one reason why we haven’t heard of him in the US since.
Still, Rain did a good enough job as the blank-faced, albeit master of the ninja arts, Raizo. He was chosen because he looked the part, moved like the part and probably powers that be thought him being shirtless half the time would bring in the huge J-pop and K-pop demographic. Again, the producers might have been reaching a bit much when they were developing Ninja Assassin.
The rest of the film is Raizo being chased by his former clan, having flashbacks of his time as a child being trained by the Ozuna ninja clan to become their top assassin, then back to the present trying to kill as many ninja as possible, while avoiding getting killed himself. Believe me when I say that the blood and body parts rain down like dismembered bodies were on sale at Wal-Mart and everything was tagged “Entire Stock Must Go!”.
Ninja Assassin will live and die through it’s action sequences and despite the heavy use of CGI-blood the action in this film were pretty good. There’s the usual slo-mo tricks the Wachowski Brothers have become well-known for and it seems like their protege have learned from them well. I actually thought that the ultra-violent and very gory action scenes is why this film reminded me of past martial arts grindhouse flicks. Those were also very bloody and violent. It was as if the filmmakers of those film were telling McTeigue that the more blood and violence the merrier.
I would mention that the film had some good performances from the non-ninja roles played by Naomie Harris and Ben Miles, but I’d be lying. Their work here was passable and just needed to fill the slow and dialogue-heavy gaps in-between ninja butchering. These non-ninja butchering scenes actually slowed the film down. I do believe that if they were replaced with more ninja butchering hapless Interpol security agents and vice versa then Ninja Assassin would’ve turned out a hundred times better. Sometimes mindless gory violence is better than wince-inducing dialogue and exposition.
From the sound of this review one would think that I didn’t like Ninja Assassin. Part of me doesn’t like this film, but the part of my brain which understands the nature of grindhouse flicks loved this film because of the very awful things people say about it. This is a film which was so bad that it passed the point of awfulness and became entertaining in its very own way. I mean this film definitely felt like a Sho Kosugi ninja flick but of the digital age. I always believed that no matter the era and no matter how advanced film techniques get there will always be filmmakers out there who go about in a serious manner to create a good film, but despite their best intentions and plans the overall execution and final product don’t live up to their expectations. In a way, that’s what most grindhouse films tend to be in the end. Films made with the best in mind but got lost in its very own grandiose plans to come out batshit nuts on the other side.
PS: Those wondering how ninja having no guns can take on militayr-trained agents in tactical armor wielding the latest in assault rifles. Well, who needs a Heckler&Koch G36 assault rifle when one can throw shuriken as fast as an assault rifle. In the end, Ninja vs. SWAT makes for a badass, mindless climactic battle scene.
Through the Shattered Lens 