Old School Fridays: Batman (1989)

Friday has rolled around once more, meaning one thing, time for another edition of Old School Fridays! Our weekly retrospectives where we take a look at old movie trailers each and every Friday. This week, it's the original theatrical trailer for Tim Burton's Batman. Check it out:



It really amazes me how much the art of trailer-making has advanced in just a short amount of time (then again, this film came out over two decades ago). This trailer is barely coherent, creates no excitement whatsoever, and is so jumpy and poorly cut that it's like it's the trailer for the straight-to-video slasher flick that you can pick up at your local Blockbuster. Maybe that's too harsh, but for such an enjoyable film, this is a horrid trailer.

Till next Friday, where another edition of Old School Fridays will be waiting!

What's New Studio Ghibli?

Almost any avid fan of animation knows the name Studio Ghibli, the Japanese equivalent of Disney, so to speak. It's kind of funny, seeing as how Studio Ghibli's films are released in North America by Disney thanks to head of Disney Animation, John Lasseter, and his professed love for the studios marvelous out-of-the-box works. Studio Ghibli is the studio that brought audiences the Academy Award-winning film Spirited Away alongside a great many other animated classics, as well they house the two finest directors of animation to ever live, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and the question I have at the moment, is what is up next for Studio Ghibli?

I've been working on this post for quite some time, trying to gather as much information as possible, and it wasn't easy, cause even though Studio Ghibli is a household name in Japan, in America, it's only a niche property. Finally, though, I think I have enough to warrant an entire post devoted to my favorite of all animation studios, Studio Ghibli.

Studio Ghibli is extremely busy at the moment. They're currently putting the finishing touches on their latest film Karigurashi no Arrietty, which is an adaptation of the classic children's book, The Borrowers, set for a Japanese theatrical release this summer. The film is being spearheaded by new director Yonebayashi Hiromasa under the watchful eye of the legend, Hayao Miyazaki. While I've never been a huge fan of The Borrowers, I can only imagine that The Borrowers by Studio Ghibli will be something worth seeing, even if I'm not a fan of the book, and I think it goes to say that whenever Studio Ghibli adapts a book into a film they tend to make many creative liberties to make it fit better into their vision as a studio.

Not only this, but Studio Ghibli lent its animated talents to the realm of video games for the first time, doing artwork and cut scenes for the new videogame Ni no Kuni, which is supposed to hit Japanese shelves this Spring. No news yet as to whether it will come stateside, but I love that Ghibli is really expanding its horizons. Though, what about the big guns at the studio, Takahata-san and Miyazaki-san?

Currently Miyazaki is at work directing a new short film for potential internet distribution, which would be a first for the studio. Not to mention, according to producer Toshio Suzuki, Miyazaki is at work on directing a new feature film that is tentatively scheduled to be released in Japan in 2012, and seeing as how Miyazaki is one of my favorite filmmakers of all-time, I can't control my excitement. As for Takahata, the word is that he is also returning to the director's chair for the first time since 1999 when he directed My Neighbors the Yamadas. Takahata is often known for being the more artistic of the two, so the expectations are extremely high on his return to directing. Of course, what has me most excited at this current moment in time is what Disney is doing with the works of Studio Ghibli.

Disney has been releasing the films of Studio Ghibli for American audiences since the late '90s. While the dubs were always handled with excellent care, the DVDs had very scant special features, but not anymore. Starting March 2nd, coinciding with Disney's release of Hayao Miyazaki's latest masterpiece, Ponyo, on DVD, Disney is going to release two-disc special edition DVDs of three other Miyazaki-Ghibli classics, with more special features included. These re-releases include My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Castle in the Sky.

Now, I'm extremely excited about this, but at the same time I have spent almost two years trying to build up my Studio Ghibli-DVD collection, for Disney just to re-release them. At the moment, the only Miyazaki film I do not own is Castle in the Sky, so if I want to get the special features for the other two, I'll have to re-buy them. Though, there could be worse things, after all, since Disney released most of these films on DVD so long ago, your average retailer like Best Buy doesn't carry them, so with Disney doing a massive re-release of the films, they should be much easier to find and should attract more fans to such masterful works.

So excitement abounds at the moment when it comes to Studio Ghibli. Keep your eyes open for Ponyo as it hits store shelves March 2nd, alongside those other Studio Ghibli classics.

Why I Don't Want to See an Avatar 2

So I got in this little debate the other day with a fellow film enthusiast and we were talking about the recent news that 20th Century Fox was in talks with James Cameron for a sequel to the record breaking film, Avatar. This is no real news, seeing as how Cameron said a long time ago that if Avatar was successful, he'd like to make sequels to it, but after seeing the film, do we really want to see a sequel?

I highly enjoyed Avatar. It was refreshing to see a big budget movie based upon original material, which is such a rarity nowadays. Not only that, I thought it was a pretty good film, by no means as groundbreaking as the original Star Wars, but it was still a solid action/adventure. So why do I not want to see a sequel? I mean Star Wars had sequels and for the most part those turned out wonderfully. So what makes Avatar so different from something like Star Wars, or even The Lord of the Rings for that matter? It's simple, the story.

The story of Avatar, of a man in an organically grown alien body joining the indigenous aliens of a distant moon to fight the encroaching humans, was an intriguing premise from the start, a premise that initially when Cameron said he would like to make a trilogy, I thought would be fascinating to see this conflict unfold over the course of three films. Though now upon seeing the film, I don't see anywhere for Cameron to go with this story. He tied up all of the loose ends in Avatar, killed off the bad guy, and had the Nav'i regain control of the planet and sent the humans packing. A good, classic Hollywood ending, but that's just what keeps this film from being able to have a sequel of the caliber of say Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings.

The Lord of the Rings was a continuing adventure, each film ending on a cliffhanger, leading into the next, and while Star Wars wrapped each film's individual stories up at the end, George Lucas still left many things unanswered to return to in later films. In A New Hope, Luke learns he is a Jedi, but his scant training with Obi-Wan just makes him a potential Jedi, not a full-fledged Jedi, so you knew there would be material for sequels there in Luke's training to become a Jedi. Jake Sully in Avatar has been implanted into his Nav'i body at the end of the film, completely ridding himself of his humanity, as I said, good ending, but nothing to go on in terms of a sequel. In A New Hope, we see Darth Vader live to fight another day, in Avatar, all of the bad guys die, no room to go for interconnecting sequels. In A New Hope, even though the Rebels won the battle, the Empire still ruled the galaxy, but in Avatar... Do I need to say anymore?

My biggest fear is that they're simply going to make sequels to Avatar for the sake of making sequels, much like The Pirates of the Caribbean films. There was nowhere to go after the first film, they tied all loose ends up, so in their trying to make sequels they just derogated what was fantastic about the original. Another example of sequels gone bad, The Planet of the Apes, which actually has a lot in common with Avatar the more you think about it. The only good Planet of the Apes film is the original, after that it's just a bunch of horrid sequels that try to make a continuing story when all that needed to happen happened in the first film. I see Avatar being similar. Many of the reports are that in the sequel the Nav'i will go off planet and embark on a space adventure, but seriously, this just sounds like grasping at straws to me. For all I know it could be good, but I'm not feeling it right now.

Oscar Watch: The Nominees Have Arrived

The nominations for the 82nd Annual Academy Awards have been announced. Here's Best Picture:

Best Picture
Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Bas**rds
Precious
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air

Did anyone else see The Blind Side coming? Many critics and analysts were hoping that this change from 5 to 10 nominees would yield more independent, foreign, and prestige product in the top category, but as I predicted, the widened Best Picture field went more mainstream. So what were the big shockers?

Obviously, The Blind Side in Best Picture came as a shock to all. I still haven't seen it, but I want to (after all, my favorite football team is Ole Miss and it's about an Ole Miss football player). Really, I think The Blind Side's presence in Best Picture as opposed to say Julie & Julia just solidifies the fact that Sandra Bullock is gonna bring home the Oscar for Best Actress as opposed to Meryl Streep.

A few other surprises came in the exclusion of Clint Eastwood's well-received Invictus in the top category, even though Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon both got nods in the acting categories, Damon bumping Alfred Molina out of contention altogether in Supporting Actor for An Education. Thankfully, Nine missed out on the big nomination, but Penelope Cruz still sneaked into Supporting Actress as I predicted, and so did Maggie Gylenhaal for Crazy Heart, which I'm not sure anyone saw coming.

I am extremely saddened that (500) Days of Summer missed both Best Picture, and a deserved Best Original Screenplay nod, but Up got in where (500) Days didn't, and James Cameron also got the shaft when it came to screenplay, very interesting. So does Up have more of a play for Best Picture than we think?

While I was hoping for Star Trek for Best Picture, I knew it was a long shot purely because it's Star Trek. I mean the Academy has never wanted to cater towards fanboys, as is evidenced by the fact that no other Star Wars film was ever nominated aside from the original, no Harry Potter film has ever gotten the nom, nor did strong fanboy fare like Spider-man 2, Batman Begins, or more deservedly The Dark Knight (I still despise The Reader). Though, fanboys can rejoice cause District 9 got in, I was expecting a strong showing for that film, but I was really pulling for director Neil Blomkamp in the directing category, alas the Academy played it safe and went with Lee Daniels for Precious.

Though the big battle between Avatar and The Hurt Locker for the top two prizes, Director and Picture, just got a lot more heated. Both films rounded out the nominations with 9 nominations each, The Hurt Locker surprisingly jumping into Best Original Score as opposed to The Informant!, which still doesn't matter since Michael Giacchino will deservedly win for Up.

While Star Trek missed out on the top nomination, it filled out the tech categories better than District 9, with 4 tech nominations to District 9's 3, and I'm a little victorious in the fact that my favorite cinematography of the year, Bruno Delbonnel's beautiful lensing for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, managed to get a nod for Best Cinematography along with the surprise for Foreign Language favorite, The White Ribbon. As for Best Original Song, Nine and The Princess and the Frog dominated with Crazy Heart at their side, but Paris 36 getting it's song in there as well, bold nominating Academy, I love it, rather than going with Leona Lewis's song from Avatar.

For the most part both the Foreign Language and Animated categories panned out as expected, but I was shocked to see The Secret of the Kells get in for Animated and not Hayao Miyazaki's latest masterpiece, Ponyo. Though I'm extremely glad something like Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs didn't get nominated, and hooray for Fantastic Mr. Fox and Coraline, both proving a ressurgence in stop motion animation.

So at the end of the day, a fair few surprises, The Blind Side probably being the biggest, blindsiding everyone this morning. I'm really bad, aren't I? While all of the talk is on The Hurt Locker and Avatar, it is easy for something like Precious, Inglourious Bas**rds, or Up in the Air, which all three got nominated for Screenplay, Actor or Actress, Director, and Picture to possibly see one of them steal Oscar glory from the two frontrunners at the moment. Anything can happen in a month, so tune in next Tuesday as I look into my predictions for Oscar night in more detail. Till then.

Crossdressers (Women in the Film Industry)

It's funny. We tend to think we're so sophisticated in modern times, way ahead of our ancestors, but are we really so forward in our thinking? The film industry is ruled by old, rich, white guys. While minorities are becoming more-and-more represented in the film industry, the real minority are those of a different gender.

Kathryn Bigelow, the director of The Hurt Locker, recently became the first woman ever to win the Director's Guild Award for Excellence in Film Directing. If she winds up getting nominated tomorrow by the Academy, which there is no doubt she will, she will be only the fourth woman to ever be nominated for the Best Director Oscar. Film has been in existence for over a hundred years now, and we're still stuck in a chauvinistic rut, where we find it staggering if a woman manages to rise to any sort of power and fame and get recognition within the film industry. The first thought is: Wait, she's not an actress?

Is the film industry really that behind the times? Women's lib was four or five decades ago. Bras are no longer burning cause the blazes don't need to burn any higher. There is supposed to be something called equal rights, but that is not so in the film industry.

The only times you ever really see a woman's name attached to a movie is either as an executive producer, costume designer, or in the most common scenarios, an actress, but then where are the rest of the female artists? They're repressed, either finding no work, or being delegated to have to work in independent film and never get the chance to crack a studio film the way that their male counterparts get to do.

I don't think there is a shortage of female filmmakers, I've learned from all of my college film classes, they're actually as common as male filmmakers, it's just harder for them to make a lasting impact in Hollywood cause men can't get past their gender.

If a woman wants to pitch a film to a studio executive, he'll probably think, "Oh, no, here comes Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 3001," when in all actuality the woman wanted to pitch her epic sci-fi/fantasy about 10-foot-tall cat people who fight humans on a distant alien planet. The film she was going to pitch could have made the studio billions, but due to sexism in the film industry, the woman was never seen by the exec and the exec takes a male filmmaker's pitch instead to reboot Leave it to Beaver for the big screen. Uh, oh. So what are woman in the industry to do?

I'll tell you what they need to do. Like many writers in the 1800's and such, adopt a male name, never do public appearances or interviews, and fool everyone into thinking that you're a man in order to make a film. If that doesn't work, go to the extreme and dress up like a man. It worked for Mulan, maybe it will work for you too. Am I the only one that finds something wrong with such drastic measures?

Hopefully if Kathryn Bigelow can become the first woman to ever win the Best Director Oscar come March 7th, then perhaps it might spur a revolution. After all, making something from just one kind of perspective is never healthy for any kind of industry, so why not get the opposite to broaden the landscape.

To get fired up, take a listen to the best song in Disney's Mulan.