London is currently being coated in a veneer of snow, which means the usual travel screw-ups and delays, but fingers crossed they won’t affect tonight’s viewing experience. Myself and Daisyhellcakes should — weather, fatigue, and Acts of God notwithstanding — be seeing Avatar tonight. There’s always a chance something will go wrong, but if not, I’m hoping for an unforgettable experience. I’ve engaged in numerous Twitter conversations with people over the past few weeks, many of whom are terribly sceptical of James Cameron. Much of it seems to be aimed at his previous movies, with others just pushed past the limit of tolerance by all of the hype. I can see that, although as I’ve said before, susceptibility to hype is not a problem with the movie and wherever possible they should be viewed with as much resistance to the effect of the publicity onslaught as possible.
That said, it’s become clear that the overwhelming opinion people have of Cameron is that he is a shitty filmmaker and pretty much always has been, so there is no way Avatar can be any good. I can understand the anger people feel towards Cameron, as I will explain below, but I remember a time when Cameron’s movies were lauded and adored, with critical and popular acclaim for his first two movies, followed by a break for The Abyss, and then back again for Terminator 2. How soon we all forget how exciting and advanced those movies felt, how brilliantly Cameron edited and filmed the action scenes. After that he did True Lies — half of a good movie and half of an almost unwatchable one — and then Titanic, which was three halves of a good movie and seven halves of a bad one. I personally don’t think these two films were bad enough to invalidate his earlier, excellent work, but then Cameron made the terrible mistake of becoming very successful and very pleased with himself for becoming successful. As I say, I like the guy, but even I thought, “Shut up, you arrogant moron” when he started strutting around like King Shit.
It went beyond braggadocio. He does come across as an obnoxiously confident man and quite a bully, but then he did make a movie that grossed $1.9bn worldwide after a year of armchair critics laughing at his folly and predicting the fall of two studios. I’d be pretty obnoxious if I’d done that too. He is also willing to spend time and money developing new technologies, including new underwater 3D cameras, just to make the movies he wants to make. He’s a perfectionist who will not stop until he has done everything in his power to entertain audiences, even if that means pissing off his critics or yelling at anyone who gets in his way. It might be galling to hear him refer to himself as “King of the World” in an Oscar speech, or hear reports about appalling behaviour on set, but he delivers. I have to respect that, even though I’d hate to work for him.
As for his movies, Avatar has already been damned for presenting a simplistic moral quandary at the heart of his film (should we destroy native cultures in order to steal the resources on their land? Erm, yes? I mean no! No!), and for Cameron’s terrible dialogue. It’s impossible to argue against these. He cannot write a joke to save his life, but then many writer-directors are incapable of doing that (Guillermo Del Toro has yet to get the tone of his adventure movies 100% right, and no one seems to mind that). The messages in his movies are hammered home with little subtlety, but as Simon Pegg tweeted after he saw (and loved) Avatar, these are action movies. There is no time for vacillating with these messages. If you need to have characters break free of their normal behaviours and risk life and limb, you have to put them in situations where they are pushed as far as they can be. Life or death is a pretty good motivator for action heroes, and reflection ruins the one thing action movies have to do: move like a runaway train.
And hell, Cameron puts his action heroes through the bloody ringer. In the past he has created numerous beautifully edited and designed action scenes, like the truck/bike chase in T2, or the submersible chase in The Abyss, or the Harrier sequence at the end of True Lies, or the last forty minutes of Aliens (possibly the most thrillingly sustained suspense finale to any movie ever). At his best, Cameron can conjure up stunningly well executed action scenes. If the least he does in Avatar is come up with some great setpieces, I’ll be more than happy.
Therein lies the rub. The point of this post is to set some background to my own views on Cameron. I’m a fan, though fully aware that he has flaws. He writes bad dialogue, but then he’s a filmmaker and effects pioneer who is not making radio plays, so a few dodgy lines are tolerable. He’s an action filmmaker who seems to love military hardware but makes movies with clunky messages about environmentalism and nuclear disarmament. Okay, but I think his love of hardware is more to do with being a big kid who likes machines, rather than a gung-ho attitude to the military (many of his movies have had an ambivalent relationship with warmongering types, and T2 is a rare action movie that addresses the problem of dispatching human obstacles while also preserving life). He’s also very talented, very driven, and willing to go the extra thousand miles to get his vision onscreen.
So Avatar is right up my street already. Consider this a baseline, and now you can judge my opinion against that. Nevertheless, one review has rattled me. Keith Phipps doesn’t seem to be as big a fan of Cameron’s as I am, but even so his criticisms are more nuanced than the popular “Cameron writes bad dialogue” kind. My enthusiasm remains, but this one review has really made me question whether Avatar will indeed thrill me. If you’re approaching his movies from a position of respect and still don’t like this, there could well be a problem. If there is, I won’t apologise for him. Even filmmakers I adore will get both barrels if they make bad movies, even when it pains me (Superman Returns has left scars that have yet to heal over). We shall see whether Cameron will satisfy or disappoint in a few hours.
I hate it when a plan doesn’t come together. This poll, which was originally meant to end several months ago, got dragged beyond its natural endpoint by me because it seemed to keep attracting votes from netsurfers randomly sent here by such Google search terms as “sexxy women boobs”, “January Jones bad actor”, “Seth Lakeman”, and, of course, “Moon Bloodgood”. Of all the things that we have done on this blog, be it incurring the wrath of Torchwood fans, incurring the wrath of Bible fans, or incurring the wrath of friends of super-actor Jesse Plemons, the response to that poll, although small compared to bigger, more professional sites, was significant for us. The temptation was there to keep it up until the next wave of superhero movies comes out, which could be a while, thanks to the writers’ strike.
However, Blogger decided to fuck me. Right now the poll states 65 votes have been counted, when last week that number stood at 74. Nine votes lost to the ether! WTF is that about? Perhaps that’s a glitch that can be explained on Blogger forums, but I’m too distraught to check. As far as I can tell Blogger hates democracy. Someone should call Greg Palast.
Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man) – 24 (36%)
Christian Bale (Batman) – 16 (24%)
Ron Perlman (Hellboy) – 7 (10%)
Huge Ackman (Wolverine) – 7 (10%)
Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man) – 3 (4%)
Jennifer Garner (Elektra) – 3 (4%)
Brandon Routh (Superman) – 2 (3%)
Halle Berry (Not-Catwoman) – 1 (1%)
Ben Affleck (Daredevil) – 1 (1%)
Patrick Warburton (The Tick) – 1 (1%)
Chris Evans (Human Torch) – 0 (0%)
Thomas “Homeless Dad” Jane (The Punisher) – 0 (0%)
The Shaq (Steel) – 0 (0%)
Nicolas Cage (Ghost Rider) – 0 (0%)
Wesley Snipes (Blade) – 0 (0%)
Ang Lee In A Motion Capture Suit (Hulk) – 0 (0%)
Anyway, before any more votes can go missing, I might as well shut it down now, and reveal the final tallies. Unsurprisingly (at least to me) the clear winner is Robert Downey Jr., who did what only a couple of other superhero actors have been able to do, i.e. take a character we thought we knew and add another dimension to them. Christopher Reeve showed Superman’s fear and vulnerability, Nicholas Cage revealed that Johnny Blaze loves monkey documentaries, and Robert Downey Jr revealed that Tony Stark is funny. For too long the character has seemed like little more than an intense cypher in a suit, but Downey Jr. found the spark that brought him to life.
Of course Stark is a show-off and narcissist, traits that don’t really go away even when he comes to realise what a negative effect Stark Industries has on the world. That balancing act, between playing Stark as a charming but aloof playboy and as a committed but humorless crusader, is what makes Downey Jr’s performance so perfect. It’s such a complete and satisfying incarnation of everyone’s favourite Registration Act-supporting dickbag that, upon seeing it, I immediately hoped that he would get Oscar attention next year. Just like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, he was so great and entertaining and instantly transformed into A-list superstar material that people came to see the movie to see him as much as they did the superheroics. Add to that his amazing work on the otherwise disappointing Tropic Thunder, and it’s so much his year that I’d bet his chances are higher than you’d expect. Of course, Tropic Thunder is too offensive to get a nomination for anything other than technical Oscars, so the buzz will transfer to Iron Man. The campaign is apparently in full swing, and though I still harbour natural doubts, there’s hope.
Second place goes to Christian Bale, who did something subtly different than Robert Downey Jr. by showing how the character was meant to work. It’s repeatedly stated in Batman comics that the character is meant to be terrifying, but the image of a guy dressed as a bat and unable to turn his head has never seemed scary to anyone. Bale (and Christopher Nolan) finally cracked how to make Batman as fearsome as his reputation demands, and while some find Bale’s Batvoice ridiculous, I totally bought it, so much so that when reading the comics, I now hear Batman’s dialogue in that insane raspy growl. That said, while I give multiple props to Bale’s intense and customarily intelligent performances, I still hear Kevin Conroy’s voice for Bruce Wayne. Fans of the legendary animated series will know what I’m talking about, especially one regular reader who loves him some Mask of the Phantasm.
Coming joint third, (unless, of course, those nine missing votes went to Shaq for his sensitive portrayal of Steel) Ron Perlman also brought his character to life, but maybe only for me. As I’ve said before, the character of Hellboy never worked on the page (subjectively), but once Perlman appeared onscreen, I finally understood what his appeal was. With the talented Perlman usually relegated to gruff bad guy roles, I’m immensely grateful to Guillermo Del Toro for giving him a chance to show how charming he can be, though I think it would go a lot smoother if he wrote Hellboy some funnier dialogue.
Even though joint third place is a good showing, I expected more votes for Hugh Jackman, whose fanboy-appeasing performance as Wolverine was the instant star-making role that gave the superhero genre its big break in film. More than anything else, the massive popular acceptance of this almost unknown song-and-dance guy as a feral killing machine with leaky tear ducts and a heart of gold made everyone who saw it realise there was a way to make superheroes work in serious movies. Without him and his fantastic hott torso (and the guiding hand of Bryan Singer), I doubt any of the subsequent superhero movies would have been possible.
Speaking of Bryan Singer, his random casting of Brandon Routh as Superman ended up paying off brilliantly, which makes the mediocrity of that movie all the more galling. With The Man of Steel seemingly stalled as of this moment, it’s a source of almost infinite annoyance that Routh, who managed to convince many fans that he could embody the nobility and vulnerability of Kal-El, will probably not get another shot at playing the role. When DC and Warner Brothers announced the Justice League movie, they caused me much sorrow by announcing he wouldn’t reprise the role, made up for it a lot by hinting that he would be replaced by Scott Porter (who is often the moral centre on Friday Night Lights), then pissed me off again by casting some other guy instead. Then they cancelled the film altogether. Whatevs. Seemingly forgotten, Routh only gets two votes, one of them from Canyon.
Though it appears to be an unpopular opinion on the net, I think Jennifer Garner is the tops. I’m pleased she got a few votes, expecting the dreadful nature of Rob Bowman’s Elektra to dissuade voters. I’m not as enthused about Tobey Maguire’s votes, as my initial glee at the casting of yet another serious actor as a popular superhero has waned over the course of three Spidey movies as Maguire seems to be doing almost no other work (nothing on this planet will make me watch Seabiscuit, so don’t even go there), so I can’t even tell whether I think he’s a talented actor any more. He’s just the guy who’s too old to play a young loser with powers, dances badly for no reason other than to make the audience put their hands over their faces in embarrassment, and looks like a stack of wet flappy pancakes when he cries. And he’s coming back for three more movies? Oy.
I can only assume that the single vote for Halle Berry as Not Catwoman was an ironic statement, because even someone utterly transfixed by her infamous beauty couldn’t ignore the ineptitude and total misunderstanding of the character on display here. A lot of fanboys complain about several recent Marvel adaptations, but even the real disasters cannot compare with DC’s run of terrible movies. Daredevil has its detractors, though I still maintain Affleck, with his single vote, was better than the haters say, and it at least made an effort to honour the characters. Ghost Rider was appalling but Nic Cage’s total commitment to the weird saves the film from total fail. The Fantastic Four movies might be kiddie versions of the bonkers science fiction adventures we FF fans love, but even when it’s hard to watch Reed Richards dancing, or Doctor Doom played like a bad guy from some 80s cheap-ass 8 frames-per-second animated shite, you’ve still got Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans (who received one votes in this poll, though I’m sure he had more at one point) honouring Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm with their valiant efforts.
What do DC offer us at their worst? The nigh-unwatchable Supergirl, with Peter “Go! High-Ah! Gehhhhlll!” O’Toole’s career worst performance? Steel, which remains the only superhero adaptation I’ve been unable to finish due to overwhelming psychic pain and disappointment? Batman and Fucking Robin? I’d rather rewatch Jonathan Hensleigh’s The Punisher any day, especially as Thomas “Homeless Dad” Jane is my hero, and to be honest the worst crime of the movie is to be a homage to Don Siegel-style economy in the age of Michael Bay-style excess (not that I think emulating Don Siegel is a crime, just a question of misjudging a mood). I predict a wave of reappraisal when the forthcoming sequel is finally released.
Batman and Robin would be the worst DC adaptation so far, except that it at least gave the world the line “You’re not sending me to da coolah!”, which is still in constant rotation in our house. It’s not much, but that vaults it above the complete failure that is Catwoman. Her weakness is insensibility upon exposure to catnip? Her nemesis is an insane cosmetics entrepreneur (played with an offensive lack of skill by Sharon Stone, no less)? That this anti-feminist fiasco was made while Daniel Waters’ brilliantly subversive script sits on a metaphorical shelf would make me doubt the existence of God if I didn’t already doubt the existence of God. A lesser blogger than I would probably write something pun-tastic like, “It was a purr-fectly hair-i-ball cat-astrophe that you should make a fe-line to avoid.” An even lesser blogger might refer to it as Scatwoman. However that kind of dismissal isn’t enough for a failure this total. It’s diarrhoea in the middle of the night. It’s vomit in a pile of freshly washed clothes. It’s nappy rash, poison ivy, tennis elbow, insomnia, and anaphylactic shock all at the same time. Never let it be spoken of again.
Zero votes for Nicolas Cage (which will sadden Johnny Blaze-fan Canyon, I’m sure), Ang Lee in a Motion Capture Suit (even after the blank Hulk Smash performance on the most recent movie failed to generate even a fraction of the character that Ang Lee did), and, most shocking of all, zero votes for Dr. Wesley T. Snipes, who kicked so much vampire bottom in the Blade trilogy? How soon we forget. Or perhaps people thought they would get hassled by the IRS for supporting him. Wimps! Haven’t superheroes shown we should stand up to tyranny? I’m tempted to hand those nine votes to him, giving the Dr. of Asskicking a third place spot. Oh, and kudos for noticing poor Patrick Warburton at the bottom of the poll. I’m glad someone threw him some one vote worth of love for his heroic blue-suited silliness.
*Warning! Cloverfield, Miracle Mile, and Atonement spoilers ahead!*
Last Saturday Daisyhellcakes and I paid an extortionate amount of money so that we could get motion sickness. That’s right, we went to see everyone’s favourite successful whipping boy, Cloverfield, and were in two minds about it. If I were to give it an overall grade, I’d give it a B, or 4 stars out of 5, or a thumb up at about a 65 degree angle. When Daisyhellcakes’ stomach had settled down, she came to a similar conclusion.
Sadly a lot of the things I liked most about it were the things I liked about it before I saw it: the concept, the set-up, the ambition. Watching the movie just confirmed that Drew Goddard and Matt Reeves had come up with and visualised a brilliant idea, and J.J. Abrams was a smart guy for spotting its potential and getting it made. Apart from those things, I also loved the slow open, the bleak tone, the depiction of the mass exodus and shell-shocked reaction to the invasion by the people of New York. The monster was cool, the smaller monsters were even better, and if this doesn’t become a huge franchise I’ll be very surprised. There were enough ideas introduced and left hanging to be fleshed out in future films, and I look forward to them. Especially the whole exploding bite victims thing. That was unnecessarily horrible, and of course, unnecessarily horrible is often a good thing in a horror movie.
However, it wasn’t all good. As the always-reliable Moriarty pointed out in his excellent AICN review:
The single biggest complaint about CLOVERFIELD is that nobody likes the kids that you’re supposed to follow through the movie. I’m a little surprised at just how much everyone hates them… they didn’t strike me as “rich fucking douchebags,” as I’ve seen many talkbacks describe them. But I don’t think any of the characters are defined enough or interesting enough to really pull you through the film.
I certainly didn’t hate any of the characters in the movie, but I wasn’t really that concerned when any of them died. Okay, perhaps I had a moment of sadness for Hud when Marlena exploded, but it was muted as I had only a vague idea of who Hud was, having only seen him for a couple of seconds early on and then hearing T.J. Miller’s voice for the rest of the movie (poor guy). Instead of feeling a strong emotion about that, I was more impressed with the way Goddard and Reeves organically introduced pacing into the movie. Hud’s reaction – having to stop running for a moment to regain his wits – was a perfect moment for the audience to do the same, and these elegant pacing devices cropped up several times throughout the movie.
I think I know why the movie had very little emotional effect on me, and I’ll get to that later. Despite the distance I felt from the characters, the film certainly did some things right. When Hud is blabbing about Rob’s affair with Beth I was furious with him, and yet I also felt awful for him when Rob mistakenly believed he had erased the tape of his special day. It’s odd, though, that I was made more anxious about that than I was by the monsters, or the action scenes (though the crowd scenes were incredibly well done and utterly convincing).
The only time moment Cloverfield really scared me on a visceral level was during the rooftop Poseidon Adventure-style rescue, when the camera catches a shot of the monster advancing down the road towards our “heroes”. More than the possibility of being stomped on (surely a rather slim chance), or being attacked by spider-mite thingies (you might be able to fight it off before it bites you), the sight of the enormous creature heading towards the tilted building gave me the horrible fear. If it had hit the building, there would have been nothing they could do. It would be the end. Those moments were the most effective, and it wasn’t because of the characters, who were mostly cyphers. It was the sense that you have no control over what happens to you, except that when that happens to you it probably won’t have anything to do with an enormous alien.
And that, perhaps, was the point of the film, that sometimes shit really does just happen and you can’t do anything about it except struggle to understand it somehow. With only a tiny amount of pre-amble and exposition (effortlessly introduced, to my extreme pleasure) we’re thrust into the lives of a bunch of pretty twenty-something catalogue models and get to watch them getting picked off without learning very much about them or seeing them grow as characters. They’re monster fodder for most of the movie and as such aren’t really worth our attention. However, I’m not so sure the film is just the empty rollercoaster ride it seems, and might be making a more interesting point about not just narrative, but the narratives we make. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first, another thing that irked me: the scary similarity to Steve De Jarnatt’s lost nuclear-paranoia classic Miracle Mile.
In a garish ’80s Los Angeles, Anthony Edwards accidentally gets a phone call from a soldier in a nuclear missile silo trying to get through to his mother in order to warn her of the impending apocalypse. From that moment on the movie depicts, in real time, Edwards’ efforts to find his true love (Mare Winningham) and get her out of LA before the missiles destroy the city. By the time the film finishes the city has descended into chaotic panic, and as the missiles destroy the city Edwards and Winningham’s efforts to flee fail. Their helicopter crashes into the La Brea Tar Pits, where their bodies will be preserved forever.
In Cloverfield, Rob (played by Michael Stahl-David, who totally looks like a composite of Alias actors Michael Vartan and Bradley Cooper) heads back into the rubble-strewn centre of Manhattan to find his true love and get her out of the city, only to fail when the helicopter they are in crashes into Central Park, where they profess their love prior to being blown up by what might be a nuke, their declarations preserved on camera. I’m really not saying Drew Goddard ripped off Miracle Mile (mostly because I really respect his work and don’t want to countenance the possibility that he consciously rewrote De Jarnatt’s film), but the similarity is striking nevertheless.
Miracle Mile is mostly a conventional film, and as such is emotionally affecting thanks to some skillfully manipulative writing and direction by De Jarnatt. Cloverfield doesn’t follow those conventional filmic rules, and as a result is less emotionally resonant for the most part. At the time I thought that was a strike against it (and certainly made me compare it negatively with Miracle Mile, which is a very moving film), but now I’m not so sure. I still very much like the finale of Cloverfield, and think it shows that Goddard and co. were trying to make a comment about how we now record our lives in an attempt to make some sense of them. Why else begin and end the film with the recording of testimonials, first as a recording of Rob’s friends and family saying their goodbyes as he leaves for Japan, and later as the last memorial of two otherwise anonymous people facing death. We do these things not only to set in stone the events of our lives (much as Miracle Mile shows two characters leaving an impression on the earth in the face of enormous events), but to understand who we are in a confusing world, using digitally-enhanced hindsight to give shape to our lives.
Cloverfield mimics that confusion and amorphousness. To the characters, the narrative they thought they were in (a pretty mundane love story) turns into the worst nightmare imaginable, and for the majority of the film, while they attempt to survive and try get their heads around the catastrophic events around them, we try to make sense of what the story is. For a long time I did think it was just a gimmicky ride, but as their predicament changes, so to does the genre of the movie. At first a love story, it becomes a Gojira-style monster movie, then a traditional monster-horror movie in the subway tunnels, then a war movie as the Army attempts to help our heroes, then a disaster movie as they make their way into Beth’s fallen building, and finally a tragic love story as almost everyone dies and Rob and Beth have one last moment together before being blown up in Central Park.
Just as life has no narrative form until you have a chance to look back on it, so too does Cloverfield. For the majority of the movie we are held at a remove from the events onscreen, emotionally uninvolved as the characters foolishly run around and get into scrapes. Only as the last shot on the Coney Island ride appears does the film generate any frisson, as we understand the journey the filmmakers have taken us on, and understand the heartbreaking consequences of the monster invasion.
In that sense it’s reminiscent of that overrated award-baiting prestige flick Atonement, in that a large stretch of the movie is filled with events that appear flat, inexplicable, and emotionless, until the final scene reveals the secret that unlocks the meaning of the entire film. I’ve not read the novel, in which I’m sure this final surprise is used to explore narrative theory and the purpose and value of storytelling (much as I feel Cloverfield does, perhaps to a lesser extent), but in the movie it feels (if you’re willing to be uncharitable) like little more than a twist ending, despite the efforts of Vanessa Redgrave to bring the conceit to emotional life.
The end of Cloverfield has no twist (unless you count the sight of a meteor crashing into the sea off the coast of Coney Island, which I missed), but it does finally generate an empathic connection with Beth and Rob. The contextless video-glitch “flashbacks” have, before this point, added very little to the movie, but the final glitch, with them commenting on their happy day, made me tear up. Finally they were people, and their deaths struck me as a (movie) tragedy in much the same way that Atonement‘s final reveal made the characters I cared little about seem worthy of my pity.
Okay, so I’ve talked myself into liking the film more than before. It’s certainly more worthy of your time than Atonement, even though that film does explore the storytelling theme in more detail. One last thing about Cloverfield, though. I’ve seen that a lot of people have raged against the film online, angry that the film failed to live up to their expectations. Now, I would never argue the film is perfect. It did drag at times, and belief needed super-extra suspension throughout, and the performances were mostly forgettable (though I hope T.J. Miller gets some more work, this time in front of the camera).
However, I’m not angry at the filmmakers for not making the best film ever, and I’m certainly not angry at them for promising they would make it, because they never said that. What kind of a delusional fool claims that his or her film is totally the best thing ever? It just doesn’t happen. They might express a belief that they’ve made a good film, but they won’t expect everyone to agree. Plus, advertising is often handled by the studio, with the filmmaker having some input into the process but not having full control over it. Why blame the filmmaker for over-the-top promotional blitzes that were set in motion by the studio?
And for that matter, why blame publicists for coming up with clever ways to generate interest in movies? A lot of the time they do their job by getting the word out about new releases, but then the audience takes over from there and blows things up more. Case in point: Cloverfield had possibly the best marketing campaign I’ve seen since The Blair Witch Project, another film that suffered terribly at the hands of viewers who felt they were sold a lemon.
The campaigns for both movies were brilliantly innovative, using the prospective audience’s interest in the subject matter to generate the hype with not really that much help from the publicists. When the Cloverfield trailer aired, it was the fanboy websites like AICN and CHUD that went nuts over the initial trailer, while the Bad Robot team actually kept the plot secret. Hence the ridiculous Cthulhu/Voltron speculation debacles that occured in the first few weeks after the film was announced.
The expectation a person has while waiting for a film is their fault and their fault alone. Hype doesn’t make you expect greatness from a movie; it gives you some possibly misleading information about it that you can ignore or believe depending on how invested you want to become. It’s never an accurate representation of what the movie is like, and if you haven’t figured that out yet, then you can’t have been watching movies that long. Believe me, I know how it is, because I get excited about movies too and go crazy when new trailers or photos appear online, but I still try to hold off on expecting the movie to live up to the speculative images in my head.
Oh sure, I still get disappointed from time to time, but it’s only when talented directors mess up. My disillusionment last year over Spider-Man 3 and Eastern Promises was nothing to do with any external hype. I was just pissed because I personally expected more from Sam Raimi and David Cronenberg. Okay, so I got really upset over Superman Returns, but that was me believing the hype. It does happen, but I really hope that that was the last damn time. Stupid movie.
Anyway, sorry to end the post with some niggling. It’s just a real bugbear of mine. The hype did not brainwash you! You chose to believe the film would cure cancer! If you didn’t like it it has nothing to do with overhype! The hype is separate from the film! The film stands and falls on its own merits! If you didn’t like it, try to figure out why instead of blaming a bunch of trailers and posters and overwrought early reviews! Exclamation points ad infinitum!
That said, ZOMGOMGOMG how incredible is Iron Man going to be!??!?!
That trailer is so awesome! It’s going to be such an amazing movie. I feel it in my old bones!
