Michael Offutt's Blog, page 73

The Cinderella live action movie that came out in 2015 is a true delight. If you haven't seen it yet you should watch it with your family.

I recently (and accidentally) watched the Cinderella live action remake that was in theaters in 2015. When it debuted, I missed it. Now I wish I had gone to see it in the theater because I really do think that it's magical. If you haven't bothered to look it up, you should do yourself a favor and watch it as soon as possible. It's wicked fun, and just a really good story. But here are some reasons that I fell in love with it.

1) The musical score is from composer Patrick Doyle, and it's incredibly lovely. It just kind of sweeps you along in the same kind of feel good tunes that you heard in the early Harry Potter films, and it lends the whole movie a kind of an old timey Bedknobs and Broomsticks kind of feel to it before embracing some truly epic and emotional crescendos. Just listen to this one tune from the soundtrack, and you'll see what I mean.

2) The costumes and set design are exquisite. When Cinderella shows up in a golden coach wearing the most incredible blue dress there ever was in order to attend the ball where the prince is waiting for her...well, it's magical. I know it's supposed to be, but I was captivated by it. The blue dress is fantastic and Helena Bonham Carter as the Fairy Godmother is the best choice ever for this kind of thing. A little "Bippity Boppity Boop" goes a long way.
If only all of us could feel this good when getting dressed in the morning.3) The chemistry between the two leads is incredibly strong. Of course, I'm probably a little biased because I really like Richard Madden and would watch him in just about anything. But his portrayal of Prince Kit is super worthy of a Prince Charming if ever I saw one. OMG the blue eyes...just sayin'.
4) Cate Blanchett. I'd never seen her play evil until I saw her in Thor: Ragnarok. If I'd seen Cinderella in 2015, I'd have been better prepared to appreciate how evil she can be. She really nails the role of the wicked stepmother.

5) The details are so amazing. There are swan chandeliers. Yes...swan chandeliers. Just stop and go watch it. It's a feel good movie, and if you've been feeling down, it's just the kind of thing to pull you out of that funk and make you believe in magic once again.

Love Simon is a lovely movie that represents the struggle of a gay teen in a very affluent white household and not what it must be like for the other 99% of America.

I saw Love, Simon on Monday night with my friend Brad. Speaking in generalizations, it's a delightful movie in which an angsty teen deals awkwardly and ultimately heroically with coming out in the digital age. Along the way to this heroic end, he makes some very bad choices with regard to his friends (which ends up destroying trust), and he tells quite a few hurtful lies because he doesn't know how to deal with a person who is blackmailing him regarding his sexuality.

The film is directed by Greg Berlanti, who some of you may recognize is the producer behind a ton of the CW hits like The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow. It's also not a surprise (knowing this) that the guy who plays Kid Flash from Legends of Tomorrow is one of the stars. The core of the movie revolves around Simon trying to discover the identity of "Blue," and the reveal is worth the wait as the story is ultimately romantic and about accepting yourself (and asking for acceptance from others).

But the film also has a strange problem that I feel uniquely apt too point out, regarding these kinds of stories as they are presented so casually on screen to unsuspecting viewers. Simon comes from a family where (in his own words) "the quarterback married the head cheerleader, and they did not peak in high school." But their house manages to be one of those "not overtly ostentatious" homes that's easy to accept as an "everyman" home. However, it's not and far from it. How do I know this? Because I have a brother that works in the furniture business, and I can tell you exactly how much all of the things cost that I saw in this "typical white suburban home."

They had a Sub-Zero refrigerator. One of these has to have custom cabinets in order to be installed (like they have to be ordered with the refrigerator) and the base model of a Sub-Zero fridge is somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000.00. They go up to $20,000. I also saw a Wolf-brand range (this is the same thing and it's ridiculous). Their backsplash over the range had a pot-filler appliance. This is only found in upper end homes. They had a massive island with granite countertops (again think very high-end). Simon's bedroom had a chalkboard wall which is on the very cutting edge of the new designs featured on HGTV. Additionally, all of the kids in the movie had every latest gadget and appliance.

Long story short, this movie was chock full of VERY AFFLUENT teens, and this bothers me on a lot of levels. I'm not talking teens with parents who live in a $500,000 home. I'm talking teens that live in homes that are worth well north of a million dollars. Every. Single. One. Why is this movie...this first movie that is a John Hughe's-esque film regarding gay teen agers...so brimming with 1% wealth and being passed off as an "everyman tale of what it's like to grow up gay?" I'm not sure if I can even answer this question. But it's things like this that convince people that they are "middle class" when in fact they are in the "lower class." They see Simon and think, "Oh there are a lot of issues he's dealing with that echo my life so I must be just like him...." And I'm the "buzzkill" because I say, "No...you are not just like him! You have never been just like him. Do your parents have a refrigerator that costs the same as a new car? No you don't! Do you even know what a new car costs these days?! I'll tell you that most people in the nation can no longer afford them. Did you know that the average price of a new car now in the U.S. is in the neighborhood of $45,000? There's not that many people who can afford a new car."

Sure, you can brand me as a leftist whiner about all of this stuff, but income and wealth ignorance create a false reality. In other words, whether or not you choose to believe it, I think a lot of the problems we currently have in this country are because people do not acknowledge or even realize how poor they actually are...that they are IN FACT lower class when they think they are middle class folks. When someone is in the lower class, and they vote in tax breaks that help the wealthy because they feel like this represents them, it's not good for anyone. Love, Simon and other movies like it perpetuate this kind of wealth ignorance, because the wealth is not ostentatious and dripping with gold. "Oh they must have a nice fridge that cost a few extra dollars than my Kitchenaide that I bought at Lowes" is exactly what the one percent in this country wants the everyman to think. "NO NO NO, it is not merely a nice fridge, but one that costs TEN TIMES if not more what you paid for yours and does all kinds of other things. A family that can afford that...that can afford to cook pancakes in a kitchen that easily cost $100,000.00...is as unrepresentative of the majority of America as a tortoise is to a regular human being.

Don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed Love, Simon. But it's a movie that represents the struggle of a gay teen in a very affluent white household, and not what it must be like for the other 99% of America. After Simon comes out, he's seen studying a picture of Anderson Cooper, heir to the Vanderbilt fortune and multi-millionaire anchor of CNN. I think this was an appropriate comparison, because Simon's struggle has way more to do with Anderson Cooper than it does with any other gay teen out there. Just sayin'...wealth is the lubricant of life. The more you have, the less friction you get from all of life's troubles.

I recommend reading books to enable yourself to keep on writing.

It's the first Wednesday of April. Flowers are coming up around my house (I hope they are frost resilient), and only one of my new trees died (however, it was under warranty so only elbow grease is involved extricating it from its grave and replanting a new one). Easter is now behind us, and we are all participating in the Insecure Writer's Support Group if not the A TO Z challenge (good luck everyone!). If by some chance you are not participating, then you can go over to their website by clicking on THIS LINK and sign up.

I almost missed today's post. I got done with the final finishing touches of the composition that I'll now put up on Friday, and then I thought, "I know I'm missing something." And then it hit me, it's that time of the month again. So without further ado, the question for this month's IWSG is as follows:

When your writing life is a bit cloudy or filled with rain, what do you do to dig down and keep on writing?

When I'm down in the dumps, I tend to work on my writing by reading. Some may say that this isn't technically writing, but I beg to differ. I think that reading and consuming books is indeed writing, because it helps you to compose sentences in your head. It also helps by giving you another way to look at a manuscript, and you may become inspired by a story and want to write something similar. For example, my friend Patrick Dilloway told me once that he was reading a John Irving novel, and that he liked it so much he was "inspired" to write a book in the same vein. This is what I'm talking about...the whole idea that another person's writing can inspire you to write.

Anyway, that's my answer. When my writing life is a bit cloudy or filled with rain, I dig down by reading so that I can keep on writing. It just may not happen for a while, but I think that's perfectly okay.

I spotted four Dungeons & Dragons Easter Eggs in the fantastic Ready Player One movie.

Ready Player One was a fantastic movie. I saw it with my best friend, Brad Habegger, and he liked it too. But if you've read the book, there are quite a few differences, and likewise there are quite a few things that are similar with the original story (as told by Ernest Cline). From this point forward, I want to warn you that there may be a few spoilers in this post. But (for the most part), I'm going to talk about how Ready Player One got created rather than concentrate on the individual events that transpire in the movie. So proceed with caution if you're scared of getting even a single spoiler in my weird, roundabout way of giving a review for this thing.

Much of what's enjoyable for me when thinking about a movie is examining the recipe of all the things that go into making the thing in the first place. It's just how I roll. And Ready Player One took a total of eight years for it to get made, which is kind of crazy if you think about it. In a previous blog post, I pointed out how it took Steven Spielberg's creative team some three years JUST to get the licensing for the things they show in the film. This aside, the rest of the time was spent figuring out just how to realize all of the concepts that Ernest Cline wrote about. Making it a tad more difficult was the fact that Ready Player One wasn't even finished yet when it was purchased by the movie studio. I think that's an odd occurrence in and of itself. How lucky can you be when your book isn't even finished, and it's been optioned for a major motion picture by Warner Brothers? I suppose it'd be kind of like winning the lottery, and I honestly can't even imagine that kind of success. However, it does explain why Ready Player One (when you read it) feels like it was written to be a movie more so than it does existing in its other accessible format (as a novel on a shelf).

The original (first) script was written by Ernest Cline. As the story goes, he left out parts in the book that he thought would be too expensive to realize as a movie (the part in the dance club was one of these scenes that got cut). And then in swept Steven Spielberg to the meeting with Ernest Cline, having read the script and the book. The legendary director then asked for the parts to be put back into the script. When Ernest Cline said that he cut them because he thought they would be too difficult, Spielberg replied, "I'm Steven Spielberg. I can do all that stuff. Trust me."

In the end, other script writers were hired to help Cline adapt his book to a workable movie format, but Cline also said that working with Spielberg was a blessing. That being said, the author is really proud of how the movie turned out, and that's good enough for me. With all the differences, and considering the legal nightmare of obtaining all the intellectual property present in the Oasis, the film still tells a resoundingly good story with a moral to it: don't get so caught up in fictional worlds that you let real life slip you by.

To finish, I wanted to point out four things I spotted in my viewing of Ready Player One that are related to my childhood passion of Dungeons and Dragons in the film. Hopefully, if you played D&D at all, you'll appreciate these. So here they are:

1) Look for the Tomb of Horrors illustration from Dungeons and Dragons on the door of the vehicle that "Aech" drives. Here's what it looks like:
2) Look for a picture called "The Great Red Dragon" by the late Keith Parkinson on the Door of Haliday's bedroom near the end of the movie (after Parzival has won the contest and is about to receive the ultimate easter egg). Here's what it looks like:
3) There's a mention of "Gold Mines of Gygax" in the film, which is an homage to Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons.

4) The Orb of Osuvox is obviously a 20-sided dice modeled after the iconic die used to roll in Dungeons & Dragons.

Spielberg is right when he says that Netflix movies should be banned from the Oscars.

I think Spielberg is right on the money when he says that Netflix movies should not be eligible for Oscars. They have the Emmy's for that, and should be nominated for Emmy's.

If you didn't know, Steven Spielberg (whom I have called the G.O.A.T. in a previous blog post) was labeled widely by his critics on the internet as "Old man shakes his fist at cloud" for his comments regarding the popular streaming platform, Netflix, and the following comment:

"Once you commit to a television format, you're a TV movie. You certainly, if it's a good show, deserve an Emmy, but not an Oscar." Of course he has his reasons, but I'm not going to post them here, relying instead upon your ability to google them if you are interested. What I am going to post is my own opinion, which I think is relevant in the realm of public discourse.

Personally, he's making a lot of sense. Netflix original movies are definitely TV films. I personally applaud Spielberg's effort to keep the cinema experience alive. It's something I legitimately enjoy, and his heart is definitely in the right place. Netflix is gaming the system by releasing movies in Los Angeles just long enough to make them eligible for the Oscars before they are available for America to watch in their pajamas. While many people see this as "the wave of the future" I would like to borrow a quote from Jeff Goldblum in a Spielberg movie called Jurassic Park: "Everybody was in such a hurry to see if they could that no one bothered to even ask if they should." If film makers want the prestige of an Oscar, they should have to jump through the hoops to get it. The bonus is that those of us out here who are interested will have the opportunity to view the work as intended in a theater with the latest sound hardware and four-story screens.

/end rant.

I will let you know how I enjoyed Ready Player One on Monday :).

Why did the Walking Dead deviate so much from the Total War storyline in Robert Kirkman's comics when it was so good?

Jumping the Shark is a term that refers to a Happy Days episode. It's a point-of-no-return kind of place from which every subsequent episode is just bad. In my opinion, The Walking Dead has finally lost it and jumped its own shark. This week's episode was ridiculously bad. Please note that I blame writers...as in bad writing. For all the writers out there reading my words, it probably stings, but the truth shall set you free. Spoilers are ahead.

This week's episode was called "Do Not Send Us Astray." It was just bad. Negan's crew under the leadership of Simon decides to attack Hilltop with their zombie-coated weapons, and they get routed by the Hilltop peeps in pretty rare fashion for this show. But despite all the killing by Rick and company, it doesn't ever appear that Simon's crew diminishes in number even though they showed up in what appeared to be like four trucks. How many frickin' people could there possibly be in four trucks?

And then when some people who were wounded turn into zombies at night, people just blunder into them. "Hey are you okay? I'm going to just go out here and-- w-wait! WHAT ARE YOU DOING! Arrrrggghhh..." and death. Like this happens over and over. Death by zombie bite while I'm just sitting on the couch rolling my eyes. If that's not enough, Hilltop has got no one on guard apparently, and the zombies just walk into the house where the people are all sleeping in a huge communal room. One zombie even frickin' falls down the ENTIRE flight of stairs and no one wakes up. So yeah...more screams... "Arrrggghhh! Aahhhh! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" blah blah blah.

Outside, one of the kids (his name is Henry) grabs a gun and goes into the place where Maggie is holding the Saviors they've taken as prisoners and demands that the one who killed his brother step forward or he'll start killing. Well they rush the kid and he gets knocked over and they all run out and escape. Sigh. Really?

And then this random guy that I don't even remember from any episodes dies and they play the music that they always play when someone dies that a main cast member really liked (this time it's Carol) and Carol looks all sad. But seriously, I don't remember this guy from any episode. Why is Carol even attached to him at all? Why is she looking sad?

There's (of course) no mention of Negan who we last saw with Jadis who honestly has no reason to keep him alive but of course she is doing just that.

This storyline did not have to go this way. I read the "Total War" storyline of The Walking Dead as written by Robert Kirkman. It was good and totally different. Why did they change this storyline? Why did they deviate so far from it to make it just stupid? I hate this idea that in order to entertain readers of the comics, they have to make things "different," especially when "different" is essentially synonymous with "bad."

It's a good thing they don't have any real competition on Sunday night for viewers. Otherwise The Walking Dead would be in a lot of trouble.

Tom Holland may be the most talented male entertainer of his generation.

I'm legitimately impressed with Tom Holland. He kinda dropped into my radar when he was cast for Spiderman: Homecoming and yeah, I thought he got the part because he's quite attractive. But then I started watching some of his other movies to see what all else he's been in, and I've been kind of blown away by the guy's sheer amount of talent.

In the movie Pilgrimage he plays a monk and speaks in what I think is Gaelic for the majority of the movie, and it just rolls off the tongue, looking very genuine the whole time. The whole thing is subtitled too. And I also found out that he was in this BBC production called Wolf Hall that was all about the inside court of Henry VIII. It has a lot of great reviews, and he plays George Cromwell, the son of Thomas Cromwell. His acting is superb, although it probably wasn't much of a stretch considering he has a thick English accent. What is a stretch is that he can bury it so convincingly and speak like an American teen.

He can also dance really well. Like...I mean professionally and on a competitive level. His dance routine on LL. Cool J's Lip Sync Battles was over the top good. And I guess that (to get the part of Spiderman), he did as many back flips as he could (without a trampoline) and nailed the part by blowing away the competition.

He's got all kinds of movies. He's been in thrillers in the middle of winter fighting for his life, he's been a kid caught in one of the most devastating tsunami's of all time, and he's been in several medieval dramas. He was also the star of Billy Elliot, which was a very successful play in England. For someone so young, I don't think I've ever seen the kind of spectrum that he's fielding in an entertainment career. Additionally, he seems to be immune to the curse of child actors who fail when they become adults.

Anyway, Tom Holland reminds me of another famous Tom who went on to do great things: Tom Hanks. I feel like we're about to see another one of that caliber that goes on to change the way in which we view movies and entertainment. Just my two cents I suppose. 

Here are eight passing thoughts I had regarding Pacific Rim Uprising immediately following the Thursday night premiere.

Pacific Rim: Uprising is a pretty solid entertaining popcorn flick. From this point forward, there are spoilers. You have been warned.

It delivers on what it's supposed to deliver on: robots fighting kaiju. I like big monsters so mark check on that one. I like big robots so check on that second part. If you've seen the film, maybe you could weigh in on what worked for you and what didn't work for you. This is really one of those kinds of movies where people are going to have opinions on all kinds of things. So here are my assorted musings :):
1) I liked the enemy jaeger because it had two swords. One sword in the first movie was cool. But two was definitely better. I was not expecting the enemy jaeger to have a kaiju brain in it. That was a pleasant reveal and cast a wider net as far as the story goes.
2) I wanted to see the cool ball weapon with the spikes do more than it did. It looks impressive, and it should be more than just a huge morning star, even if that is what it is. Sidenote: Tokyo getting trashed by kaiju seemed somehow suitably appropriate.
3) Whoah! I wasn't expecting the Newt twist! Did anyone see that? What the hell? I'm not sure how I feel about a hero from the first movie becoming a villain in the second. My friend, Brad, really liked it. But it doesn't sit right with me.
4) I loved how the kaiju got to combine into one larger kaiju. However, it would have been fun if the jaeger's also got to combine into one super huge jaeger. I think that should be the next thing that comes out of this franchise (if there's another sequel).
5) I really liked the gravity whip thing that allowed one of the jaeger's to pull down a skyscraper, or rather...multiple skyscrapers.
6) Scrapper (the small jaeger) was super cute. I loved it, and I loved that it had a crucial role to play in the final battle. It had a lot of unique powers for its overall size.
7) Not a fan of the first hour or so of the movie before things really get going. I get that they needed to do some housekeeping related to the former movie, but it did seem to get a bit tedious. It reminds me a lot of how slow the first half of the 2014 Godzilla reboot was.
8) I miss Guillermo del Toro. The legendary director has a way of making the Jaegers and kaiju just look so huge. Maybe it has to do with his film angles, but everything always felt so big in the first Pacific Rim. The final battle in this one didn't seem to capture that same sense of awe. Maybe it had to do with filming most of the battles at night and in water. Or maybe it was just a combination of all kinds of things that only del Toro knows for certain. Either way, it's plain as day that Guillermo had no hand in the making of the movie.
Are you seeing Pacific Rim: Uprising? Do you plan on seeing it? Do you have expectations? What did you notice in your viewing of the film?

I love looking at these old pictures of the white castle that appeared in the 1983 British fantasy movie called Krull.

Because my brain is random, the other day I was discussing the beautiful white castle (at least I thought it was pretty) that appeared briefly in the fantasy movie, Krull, which was a 1983 British-made movie in the same vein as The Dark Crystal. Some of you who read my blog may have seen it. But I googled pictures of "the white castle" and found some production paintings and the actual black and white pictures someone took of the set for it (which made it very real at that point). It never occurred to me that they actually built the thing. I'd always assumed it was just a fancy matte painting or some kind of special effect. But yeah, they created a whole "miniature" for it...only it wasn't all that tiny. There's a truck in the foreground to give it some scale.
Above is the very cool production painting. The final product looks a lot like this as seen below. And you can see that the facade of the castle was about twice the height of an actual truck. That's kind of cool, and I imagine that building on that scale may have enabled more detail to be put into the finished piece. For the balcony section of the white castle in the movie, they actually built a pretty large set piece at Pinewood Studios. Above is what it looked like prior to actors using the set for actual filming. And then the final product as it appeared in the movie is shown above. I imagine it was quite a bit of work to get it all realized for the film. At least, quite a bit more than I originally had imagined. Just a little bit of silver screen magic, right?

People that have seen Deadpool 2 are comparing it to Alien 3 and what it did for that franchise and this is not good.

There are quite a few movies coming out in the next few months that I want to see. Most immediate are: Pacific Rim 2 (March 22nd), Ready Player One (March 29th), Rampage (April 19th), Avengers: Infinity War (April 26th), Deadpool 2 (May 17th), and Solo: A Star Wars Story (May 24th).  Of these blockbusters, Deadpool 2 has done some acrobatics to land perfectly between Infinity War and the next big Star Wars movie. However, that may be the only good thing about it. I read online that Fox (the studio behind Deadpool 2) has had at least one test screening of the movie, and the responses were "not good." Yikes. :/

I know that reviews should be taken with a grain of salt, but these people who are given early access are a great measure of how a movie may perform. And from everything that people are saying, the audience for Deadpool 2 thought the film was a huge mess with characters that weren't used well (Vanessa from the first movie being one of those) with someone even calling it an Alien 3 blunder. For those of you who don't follow science-fiction movies in a franchise, being compared to "Alien 3" is NOT GOOD. THIS IS DEFINITELY NOT GOOD. Alien 3 was a terrible movie, and a departure from everything that came before it to something that had a wildly different feel. In fact, the franchise hasn't been the same since no matter how many times they've tried to reboot it, reshoe it with Predators, or even branch into expensive and beautiful prequels. If I had to point to a movie that ruined the ultimate potential of the Alien franchise, it would be Alien 3.

So how is Fox responding? Studio execs are "reportedly" stunned and they are trying to figure out if there are some last minute things and changes that can be made in order to salvage it. Hmm. Again, this is definitely not good. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, people. But honestly, did any of us actually think that the story of Wade could be carried successfully unto another movie and not lose a ton of its magic? To even begin to answer this question, we might want to ask, "Why was it so good in the first place?"

Well, it pushed the envelope in a field saturated by superhero movies. Deadpool was different because he was crude, gory, and excessive in all the wrong ways. Another thing that made it good was the clever writing in approaching the story with a non-linear structure. This broke from the standard "origin" followed by "hero fights villain" and "villain is defeated." And the final thing (again just trying to be honest) the movie got "lucky." I don't think any of the makers of Deadpool would have thought that it was going to be as big a commercial success as it was (being rated-R). And when something has lightning strike for it, it's usually because of something else that isn't controllable. Otherwise "viral marketing" would be something that people could strategize and repeat over and over. The thing is, what goes viral and what doesn't is completely random. People don't know how to reproduce that kind of success. And Deadpool just "touched a nerve."

Anyway, it sounds like the sequel is going to be terrible, but I will probably end up seeing it anyway. However, it's kind of sad knowing that it will be terrible when I'm still months away from being able to watch it.