1 No, he doesn't, yes I did, and no, he didn't look it then either.  Some people have all the luck.

2

Well, luck comes in different flavors. From the early 1990's onward he was confined to a wheel chair as a result of a botched operation on his back. But damn he looked good as an old man, and his mind was clear, and he still had that wonderfully resonant voice. But he was in constant pain.

His scenes with Banderas in the second Spy Kids movie (which is what that picture is from) are really fun. I'm sure they both had a hell of a good time filming those scenes. "Now, Gregorio, don't tell me you don't have a backup plan?"

1 Keep in mind that Hollywood is out of ideas. They have to take from other cultures in order not to produce remakes exclusively. So they will turn to anime again and again no matter what.

Also, it's obvious that many adaptations were simply made poorly (e.g. Wing Commander). Any studio exec can see that a competent director could've done better.

2 Movie profitability isn't strictly a matter of box office sales, either. They made a sequel to the reportedly execrable Fantastic Four movie because the very strong merchandising sales (or so I remember reading).

3

While I think that DBE will probably do moderately well in DVD sales, I can't really see the movie having much potential in the way of merchandising.

Total merchandise sales for the DB franchise is quite good, especially when you include the computer games, but I just don't believe that this movie will cause a substantial bump in merchandise sales.

Or at least not enough to justify a sequel, I hope.

4

It seems to me that the DBZ movie will enjoy a second life on DVD/BR as a So Bad It's Good type movie.  Not that that fact will necessarily bring on the investors, but still.  DBZ should make its money back.

Pete brings up a good point about the talent involved, though it's also worth noting that Speed Racer was awful too.  I think we'll still see Anime properties being made into live-action Hollywood  movies, but the budgets will be lower than Speed Racer or even DBZ.

Hollywood is also getting interested in Manga as a source of new ideas.  For instance, Will Smith and Steven Spielberg announced that they were going to remake Oldboy,  but that they were going to be using the original Manga rather than the Korean movie as source material.  Spielberg also apparently wants to make a Ghost in the Shell movie, which could be awesome.

5 I'm not as sure as I used to be that Hollywood is out of ideas. Really, there's a relatively fixed (if large) set of ideas out there, and I don't think that's the problem.

(If that sounds strange, I would point out that the combination of ideas and motifs is still a fertile ground. I'm not saying every movie has been made, but at the scale most people mean by the word "idea" they've been "out" for a long time.)

The problem is they just don't respect the ideas. They don't respect the story, they don't respect the characters, they don't respect the authors. They'll throw $100 million in special effects at a story that one crappy author wrote in three weeks, as fiddled with by four drive-by executives, and expect the special effects to make up the difference. They especially don't respect the traditions of science fiction, which itself could make up a separate post, and that's particularly ironic since that's one of the well of ideas that has not been completely tapped out.

And... to a significant degree, it works for them. Frankly, commercially I can't fault them. Actually losing money on a movie is pretty rare. It may not make us happy, but we're in the minority.

This is why I watch anime, personally. It is not the case that every anime respects the characters and story either, but it is a much richer vein to mine from, and through a language barrier and a style barrier (at least initially, though you get over it and it can be thrilling too), that fact still shines through. (YMMV, of course.)

6 Speed Racer was awesome (I rewatched it on DVD and it was even better than in puke-smelled theater).

7

Assuming Spielberg does make a GitS movie, Mamoru Oshii has actually mentioned an actress he would like playing Motoko Kusanagi (She is Polish, IIRC.), although I am not keen on Oshii really doing any more work on the property, given his directorial and story-telling style.

Even with Mandalay just announcing the live-action rights to the Full Metal Panic series...We have to see.  We know James Cameron a while ago ended all talks of doing a Battle Angel movie.  Toby McGuire's production company apparently is having trouble with the Robotech franchise (Not strictly anime, for all the purists out there, but close.).  Mandalay's track record has been hit and miss, and I will believe in a live-action Cowboy Bebop when it actually gets released (Though if it ever gets made, a CB movie will at least be faithful to the original series, even if you do have Keanu Reeves as Spike, given the involvement Sunrise has in it.).  And when talking about anime and Spielberg, at least we hope he learn something from back when Dreamworks dabbled in anime licensing.  If not, he really should not bother.

Re: Wing Commander - I think it is less Hollywood lousing up an existing franchise as proof-positive that WC creator Chris Roberts, while wanting very badly to be a movie director, only got it half-right.  He directed the movie, after all.

8 I've got to agree with respect to Hollywood and ideas.

It's not that they're out of ideas; sure, there's only so many themes to be played on, and there's very little under the sun that's radically unique. On the other hand, there's endless variations on each of the themes, and the details are what determine whether the movie's any good or not.

The fact remains that Hollywood studios are not all that good about determining what's good and what's not. They're not unique in that. It's very hard to tell whether a movie's going to be any good from reading a script - plenty of movies with so-so scripts were made good by excellent performances and cinematography, and plenty of good scripts are ruined by actors phoning it in. By the time the outlines of the movie are there, most of the expense is already committed - even if it's bad, release it anyway, make some of that money back. Sure, it might ruin an actor's or a director's reputation (remember when people thought Ang Lee was good?), but you're a producer, and what do you care? You're not expected to have a good batting average.

(Kind of the same thing happens when a company makes a really bad video game. By the time it becomes obvious that it's a real stinker with no hope of getting fixed, you've sunk enough into it that "just throw it out" usually isn't an option. So you roll it out there and hope that someone's dumb enough to buy it...)

9 I remember one Hollywood script writer saying that better writing can be found in Television. Hollywood has always been about the money but they have become inbred and incestuous. They present a vision of the world like that of frogs at the bottom of a very deep well. They've lost touch with their audience as the level of the water in the well drops. They'll produce movies that flop because they insult 60% of their audience but it is never their fault. They've been coasting on their pool of capital and they don't see the competition on the horizon caused by increasing video tech break throughs.

10 Though it doesn't say anything about the reviews, the box-office numbers could be at least partially a marketing mistake. Though I'm hardly glued to the TV, I hadn't seen a commercial for it until about two weeks ago (and only saw two, total, between then and its opening weekend.)

And I mentioned it to a friend of mine who is (a) a movie nut, and (b) the father of a 14-year-old boy, and he hadn't heard of it at all. He has asked me a few times (each) about going to the upcoming new/old Star Trek and new/old X-Men shows, so he's not in a movie-ignoring rut lately or anything.

His comment about it was basically "they're too late". He thought Dragonball was too old-school for the current batch of shonen-anime-watching-age American boys. Maybe they should have done live-action Naruto...

11

Advertising, especially TV advertising, is another way to double-up your bet. It is really expensive, but it can increase your box office. Is it worth it? Often they decide it isn't, and don't advertise films because they think that money spent on advertising is good money thrown after bad.

I'm not surprised that they didn't advertise it; my impression is that it wouldn't have made much difference.

12 Ryk Spoor, who is another major dragon ball fan that I follow, says that the trailers were deliberatly falsified and that he found the movie good. I know there are some intersections between my taste and his, but I can't speak for anyone else. (I think he also recommended Speed Racer, which I haven't seen either.) I kind of doubt that I am going to see it in the theater no matter how good of a review he gives. I haven't been to the theater in probably well over a year, and haven't bought or rented a DVD in at least half a year. I might buy it on DVD when I get the funds to start purchasing again, but I might have forgotten that it exists by then.

http://seawasp.livejournal.com/120569.html

13 Wow, small internet. I used to read Sea Wasp's posts in rec.games.frp.* back when "www" meant "I'm stuttering" and not "I've got a place on the internet."

So if the old-school DB(Z) fan thinks the movie was good but the trailers were a lie (even including changing dialogue)... and the younger set hasn't heard of it at all... I've got no idea what their marketing folks are up to.

14 Re: Spielbeg...  I don't know... AI was (IMHO) an excellent idea which Kubrick might have executed well, and which Spielberg thoroughly botched.  I don't see much evidence that his 'magic' works on other people's ideas.

Re: CBebop... I cannot think of any current actor that could protray Spike accurately, and I'm having a hard time with Ed as well.  Not to mention, Hollywood as a whole usually turns out complete dreck when kid characters are involved (Jurassic, Lawnmower, AI...).  It's not that they cannot do it right, they just try to deliver precocious smarter-than-dad cute kids, regardless of what the actual character really is.  Then again, Ed does fit most of that bill...

I think their best bet for real-life adaptions of Anime lies more in the direction of Ikki Tousen and it's ilk.

1 Now that we've seen the series, why would we *want* to live it? *eg*

1 My tastes are the same in movies and animie, so DO NOT WANT. A friend walked out after about an hour.

2

Two thumbs up.  Don't take the kids - it's hard R.  Theater where I saw it on Saturday was very, very empty, but it wasn't just Watchmen; the whole place seemed empty.

Last twenty minutes is a desperate close-quarters fight with one mind screw after another.  My favorite character was probably the most insane, Rorschach.

There was a little liberal BS in it, especially what I presume was supposed to be the Kent State riot (peacful, flower-in-the-gun-barrel hippies being shot in cold blood, as opposed to bottle/rock/moltov-cocktail-throwing rioters); but it wasn't as bad as it could have been.  Best line I think, has to go the the Comedian.

"What happened to the American dream?"

"It came true!"

At the time, he was violently dispersing an anti-costumed-hero riot during a police strike...

3 Looking at my last comment, I realized something was missing -- why I liked it.  The reason is that neither the writers, nor the filmmakers forgot the key element. The protagonists may wear masks and run around in tights, but they are real people for all that, with all the flaws inherent in human beings.  The movie never forgets that, so we can't . It even makes us empathize with Rorschach -- who, frankly, is a murderous psycho.

4

It was good, but I wouldn't call it perfect.  Ironically, the stuff that worked the least for me was lifted directly from the book... but things that work on the page sometimes come off as overly melodramatic on screen. I greatly enjoyed the movie and I was generally surprised at how well the story was captured.  Rorschach was perfect and the new ending works, though I didn't find it to be a necessary change...

It's basically the same ending, but with a different catalyst...  I don't love the new ending, but it still works.

5 I'm going to give it pass for now. I'm just not in the mood lately for grim. Mr. Den Beste posted too many screen shots from the Kirimeki Project so I've given in and placed an order to Robert. After including USPS priority shipping, it was about $23, now that's my kind of price range.

6 Even though I liked the book, I'm giving it a pass.  The importance of the book, as focal point for the deconstruction of the comic book super hero, is vaguely moot twenty years later, as the lessons learned therein have already been incorporated into pretty much everything in the last decade.

7 What I love about the book -- with the proviso that it's been quite a few years since I read it, and I may see it differently today -- is not the deconstruction of the superhero, but how it explores the temptation to let the ends justify the means.  It's marvelously disturbing and unsettling on that point.  The key is that, from everything we see --

the villain's horrific plan works.  World peace.  And you're left with a little voice in the back of your mind that you can't quite shut up, saying, "Wouldn't it be worth it?  Would you do the same if you had the ability?  Are you sure that you wouldn't?"  Shudder.

8
At the same time, however, while the obvious plot seemingly supports the idea that the ends justify the means, if you examine all the little sub plots and side stories and such. . .

Well, basically, every single one of them implies that Ozymandias was wrong.  And then, right before leaving, Doc Manhattan gives Ozymandias the only come-uppance he gets in the story, by basically telling him outright "nope, you were wrong."

I would be shocked if they actually kept any of this in the movie, though.

9 The importance of the book, as focal point for the deconstruction of the comic book super hero, is vaguely moot twenty years later, as the lessons learned therein have already been incorporated into pretty much everything in the last decade.

...and Shakespeare is moot, because everything he taught us about drama has been done to death over the past few centuries, and everything Citizen Kane taught us about cinema has been played out over the past sixty-odd years, and let's not even get into the Beatles or the Rolling Stones for heaven's sake.  Completely overdone.

10

"...the villain's horrific plan works. World peace."

Yes... but only because the writers of the book say it does, because apparently the novel's entire human race has the scientific skills of a high school dropout high on gold spray paint. World peace, and nobody ever questions why the "aliens" never attack again! Or even if they did find out the truth, by then everyone would have realized that there are no real ideological differences between socialist authoritarians and democratic libertarians, so while they might get mad at the slowly dispersing particles of Ozymandias, they would never ever do anything so gauche as blame one another for the genocide, or have one side decide the repulsive beliefs of the other leaves them no choice but to enslave them "for their own good."

Works great, as long as you are the one writing the story and can make it all perfect "because I said so!" No, in the real world, I would never support any plan that incorporates genocide, by any name (not even one as politically correct as "population control"). Especially for as ridiculous a con game as "world peace." The only way the world will ever have peace is when the entire human race is dead forever, and any leader promising world peace is just looking for people they can cajole into stepping into the mass grave on their own accord, prior to breaking out the guns and driving the rest of humanity into it by force.

11 Ubu, it's true that the Kent State tragedy didn't happen quite as shown in the movie...in our universe. But we didn't have The Comedian there.

12

Think of Ozymandias as a sort of Harry Lime:

You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays.

Only, he's smarter than Harry Lime:

Do it?" Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.

And instead of offering money or fame... he's offering -world peace-. What all the supposedly enlightened people tell themselves they want, along with an end to the nasty cold war and Richard Nixon and all that stuff. All this can be theirs, for the price of playing along with the fait accompli of the destruction of the dot on the map called Manhattan.

As to whether the author thinks it would work, I suspect not. Maybe reading the poem "Ozymandias" would give some sort of clue.

13

Pixy, bug? Take a look at pgfraering's comment. How'd he managed to louse up the display like that? Where did that box come from?

It displays wrong for me in both IE7 and in Firefox 2.

PG, did you format that with some other tool and then paste it in place here? If so, what tool did you use?

14 My apologies. I copied that in firefox from the tvtropes page, where it's already in italics.

When I copied the Harry Lime quote, I had to put it in italics manually, but the Veidt quote (which I copied-and-pasted from tvtropes) showed up as italicized already; it was italics in the original page. I remember thinking at the time that I had stumbled across a neat feature.

15 You don't have to apologize; you just uncovered a bug. We're beta testers, you know; we're supposed to be watching for bugs.

16 We're not, technically, in beta any more.

mee.nu: Not beta, just broken.â„¢

As to the flerbled-up formatting: Yes, you can paste HTML into the editor widget, and it will do its best with it.  But since the stylesheet on this site might be completely different to the stylesheet on the original site, the results are unpredictable.

So the question of whether it's a useful feature or a bug remains open.

17

I'm actually kind of glad that quote got fubared. I'd considered posting it myself and decided against it, because in some ways, it's the climax of the film and the biggest mind screw of all, because it plays on the viewers expectations for a "battle to save the world."  It's also a self-referential, sly wink to the audience.

It won't become a "geek line" like "my name is Neo," or "you don't know the power of the dark side" because it's too long and too complex. At least in it's entirity.  But I think it's going to earn a place in the "Crowning moment of Awesome" for Ozymandius.

And in the end, I think he knows that it is, at best, only a temporary victory; look at the name he chose for himself, not to mention the statue that the entire fight takes place in front of.  Sure, the last stanza is missing.... which makes it all the more evident.

1 It seems these days as if there are a half-dozen or more *really* heavy meme-generation sites (of which Tropes is certainly one, or at least a meme warehouse), all of which make heavy use of geek pop culture.  Whether it's a classic like Spam or something newer like "Nice Boat", some of them just seem to catch on and go viral.

I have to think that surely some linguist out there has written some papers on meme generation and in-jokes and how the Internet has facilitated the creation and spreading of this odd culture... if not, it seems too rich a ground to pass up.

2 It's a relatively recent entry, but I've gotten a lot of good mileage out of Futurama quotes; there's one for every situation (much like the Simpsons), many of them are quite geeky or reference something quite geeky, and best of all, they aren't tapped out from people quoting them for 20 years.

One of my favorite lines is "Now, now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything.". Unfortunately, my brain doesn't work in a way that would allow me to just list off the good quotes, I can only come up with them associatively.

3

Don't forget MPFC's other classic: Life of Brian -- Although some of them work best with two or  more people.

"Sex, sex, sex, that's all you ever talk about. You're 36 years old now!"

"You are all individuals!"  "We are all individuals"  "I'm not!"

"Call me Loretta."

"You lucky bastard!"

"We should all unite to fight the true enemy!" "The Judean People's Front!"  "Nooooo, the ROMANS!"  "Oh yeah, them too."

"He has spiwit.  You thnow, a thense of therring thoo!'

"Shall we throw him to the floor, sir?"

"Biggus Dickus"  (enough said there...)

"He said Jehovah! Stone him!"

"Welsh tart!"

4   If you're going to have Life of Brian, you'd have to include the "Other than that, what have the Romans ever done for us" scene.

5 It's probably also worth mentioning that, by now, EVERYONE expects the Spanish Inquisition.

6

pgfraering said:

If you're going to have Life of Brian, you'd have to include the "Other than that, what have the Romans ever done for us" scene. 

I wanted to, so badly, but I couldn't do it justice, it was so long.

1

You mean it doesn't appeal to the bubblegum crowd, metrosexuals, hippies, single femi-nazis (is that a redundancy?), conspiricy nuts, and/or eco-freaks? 

Watch it become a mega-hit.

2 You can add emigrant computer programmers in their 40s to the list.

Look, I've seen Iron Man and The Dark Knight. Isn't it enough already?

On second thought, maybe on DVD.

3 "Rival distribution executives"....?
Doubtless a valuable and completely unbiased source of information.

4 Well, speaking as a comic fan who likes most of the current wave of super hero movies. . .

I'm *not* looking forward to it, despite thinking the book was a masterpiece.  The way I see it, it'll either be:

1.  A disaster translating book to film

2.  A success. . . and result in the same grim-and-gritty fest that took over comics in the 90s all over again

5 Well I remember buying and reading the book when it came out, I was impressed with it as an artistic project and character study. It was indeed a "graphic" novel. However IMHO it promoted a not so subtle anti-American that was already somewhat dated when the book came out. Gillam just can't help it. He lives in the '60s. Given the viewpoint of the current Hollywood crowd I figure they'll bugger it with political view points.

6

I have to say that I doubt this movie will do really well at the box office.  Even if it's a masterpiece, I just can't see it really catching on... I'd be happy if it did, but the story is dark enough and weird enough that I can't  see it doing that well in theaters.  The hype and lack of competition will probably give it a great launch this weekend, but after that, I'd expect it to drop like a stone.  Perhaps not as precipitous as Friday the 13th (which had an 80% or so drop off in ticket sales in its second week), but bad enough.  It's a hard movie to predict.  I could be disasterously wrong.

7 Pixy, can we borrow the pixy-wand again?

8 Bah, teens and twenty something males are also pretty interested in the movie.

1 Three hours 20 minutes for the director's cut?  That's eight episodes of an anime, more or less.  You can tell an awful lot of story in that amount of time, and Watchmen demands such a length, I think.

As a rule, I don't go to the movies anymore.  I might have to for this one, though.

2 I'm excited about Watchmen the movie...and not a little apprehensive.  The review is intriguing, but I'll probably wait until a friend of mine (James D. Hudnall, who has seen his comics made into movies) reviews it before I venture forth to see it.  Like your reviews, Steven, I rarely find his assessments less than illuminating.
I agree with the reviewer that Gibbons has never been given enough credit for his stunning work on the comic.  I was agog at his brilliance in translating Moore's horrifically dense script to the page, especially when limited to the nine-panel format.

3 Unfortunately for me, I'm on call next week, which means I won't be seeing this movie until next next week...

4 It's scheduled for theater release on March 6.

1 Tim Burton is great on the visuals, and the cast sounds good. I'm not going to invest too much anticipation in it though because sometimes he is not up to snuff on story lines.(He's been called the best second unit director in Hollywood, ouch!) It should be hard to mess up the story line in Alice in Wonderland though.

2 I think he'll do a good job on it. It sounds like the sort of thing he was born to direct. In fact, the weirdness might become so severe it might cause the very fabric of spacetime to collapse, dooming us all. 

3

Here's a movie I'd love to see Tim Burton do a remake of.

It is strange, strange... (If you haven't seen it, it's well worth a viewing if you can find it.)

4

Well, Tim Burton did actually say in at least one interview that he 'wouldn't know a good script if it hit him in the face'.

His visuals have always been impressive but he is the type of person who needs to stay out of the big chair because it is the other parts of the movie production that he lacks.

C.T.

1 Thank goodness for that, though I can't say I'm really surprised.  This seems to be a regular occurrence with properties that take forever to adapt and go through multiple studios.  Often the studio in Fox's position brings up the claim before production begins, which effectively kills the production... hence Fox waiting until the film was in the can before launching their lawsuit...  In any case, I'm just glad it'll be coming out on schedule.  It's a tough enough sell as it is without having to endure delayed release dates.

2 As long as they change the ending, I'm happy.

...

[exit pursued by a bear]

3 Not yet known, but I've seen hints that they did make some changes, which would have affected the ending.

4 That will be entertaining.  There are some aspects of the original comic that don't thrill me - the ending being one of them - but if they've actually changed it in any significant way, O tempora!  O mores!*

* Fried eel in batter.

5

What we do know for sure is that the whole "Tales of the Black Ships" business was cut out entirely. Probably all the characters near or around the newsstand are gone (such as the butch cab driver).

Rumor is that Ozymandias's grand plan was changed for the film; it isn't a giant telepathic monster.

But I expect that the final confrontation will still take place, and the same death(s). But that's just my guesses.

6

I read the original Sam Hamm script a while back and the major difference was the ending.  They scrapped that script though... Spoiler ending below (again, this wasn't the script used for the movie)

In that script, Ozymandias/Veidt figures out time travel and parallel universes, and after examination, he realizes that the only timelines where the human race survives are the ones where Dr. Manhattan never existed.  So he attempts to change the past by assassinating  Osterman before he becomes Dr. Manhattan.

I didn't care much for that ending, so I was glad when I heard they scrapped that script.  I'm a little anxious to see what they do to the ending though.

7 No kidding; that version totally undermines pretty much the entire story, vis a vis Veidt.

8 The Japanese trailer has a lot of scenes in it that weren't from the comic, or were altered.  A lot of political stuff.  I think the reason they haven't been showing that trailer here is that they don't want the fans annoyed, so they've cherry-picked the scenes that are closest to the comic for the domestic trailer.
I had been really pleased with what I had seen so far, but the Japanese trailer gave me a sinking feeling.....

9 The first trailer, I have to say, was visually stunning.  It was the Watchmen come to life.

What that means for the movie?  Well, at least it will be pretty.

10 Oh, yeah, the Japanese trailer definitely looks like a different movie.

-j

11

Now, I've had no exposure to the graphic novel, so this is coming from someone completely outside the loop.

From what I've seen in both trailers (and given Japan's unique history), I'm not surprised they'd put more emphasis on the apparent alt-history and nuclear war aspects.

OTOH, the US has seen a recent run of fairly successful superhero movies, so of course they're going to put that front and center domestically.