Stuff…

Updated on April 1, 2011 By Ken Begg 23 Comments

Thank goodness! Despite hiring the execrable Shane Black to direct Iron Man 3 (presumably Joe Esterhaus wasn’t available), they will NOT be allowing him to script it. Whew! On the other hand, this means the film will probably lack the following dialogue exchange:

Iron Man is tussling with the Bi_Beast (an obscure villain Black would use to allow for endless profane jokes regarding his name):
Black Widow, from the sidelines: “Iron Man! Kick him in the motherf~@#*&$ nads!”
Iron Man kicks Bi-Beast in the groin, and the villain collapses in agony to the floor.
Iron Man, in astonishment: “Holy ~@#*&$! Bi-Beast has  f~@#*&$ nads!”
Black Widow: “F~@#*&$ that f~@#*&$!! I guess he won’t be f~@#*&$ both men and women any time soon!”

*****

You never want to say anything bad about Pixar, but man, could they lay off the sequels for a while? Toy Story 3 will be followed by Cars 2 and a second Monsters Inc. film. I’m sure the movies will all be good, but that seems a bad sign over all. And if they’re going to do sequels, how about The Incredibles? Or how about just doing a straight Marvel superhero movie, since Disney now owns Marvel?

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  • HammerHorror

    Honestly, I thought The Incredibles was perfect as it was, and would only be diminished by a sequel. Monsters Inc. kind of set itself up for one – what they’re going to do with a bunch of laughter-inducing monsters is anyone’s guess.

    I do have to agree, new ideas are better than rehashed old ones.

  • Toby Clark

    “And if they’re going to do sequels, how about The Incredibles? Or how about just doing a straight Marvel superhero movie, since Disney now owns Marvel?”

    I’d love to see their take on Ant Man, for obvious reasons.

    As for Shane Black, personally I’m more concerned about him directing the American Death Note movie.

  • jzimbert

    Good news: If I heard correctly, Monsters Inc. won’t have a sequel. It’ll have a PREQUEL, which is totally different.

    “Titled Monsters University, it will take Billy Crystal’s Mike and John Goodman’s Sulley back to college, where the two burgeoning friends first learned their trade, as well as the crushing reality of the limited monster job market.”

  • Terrahawk

    I figure it’s just Disney slowly sucking the life out of Pixar. First, it looks like that have a much faster release schedule than their old one movie per year plan. They seem to be doing a 1 and 1 type of release plan. They do something new and then they either do a sequel or a much more traditional kiddie film (like Cars was).

    Sadly, by the end of the decade, Pixar will be a shadow of itself turning out Disney trash.

  • Man, Ken. I LIKE Monster Squad. Along with Lethal Weapon, it’s one of the two good movies Shane Black penned. I guess they were his first so after that he was used up.

    And things don’t always get worse, Terrahawk. Bungie bought its soul back from the devil, after all. It’s possible that even Disney could experience a moment of redeeming grace. Unlikely, but possible.

  • fish eye no miko

    @Toby Clark: He’s directing the DN films? Aw, fuck.

  • Rock Baker

    It seems the only truely decent movies being made these days are coming from Disney and Pixar. As long as their output is good, who cares if they’re mostly sequels?

    And I shudder to think of The Incredibles 2. The first film set such a high bar, there’s almost no way they could match it. They’ll toss in more characters, make things bigger and bigger (where the first film actually had quite a bit of restraint), and it’ll be too messy and too crowded. They delivered a nearly perfect movie with The Incredibles, I wouldn’t even want the execs to get a hint of making a sequel. There’s almost no way it would work!

  • Today, as in the past, many good movies come from Independents, rather than the studios. For obvious reasons, it’s hard for an independent to construct an animated or effects-heavy film.

    So if all you like are superhero movies or outer-space epics then yes, only Disney and Pixar are making good movies.

    But if you are able to enjoy things like Suspension (2008), Monsters (2010), or Brigham City (2001) then in fact there are still movie-makers out there. Sorry if I seem peeved, but just because Hollywood’s head is full of flies doesn’t mean there aren’t some neat movies out there. And it’s not all teen angst stuff, either.

    Of course I have a hidden agenda – I recently invested in an independent film myself, though I must admit it sports no superheroes. One guy does wear a costume at one point, though.

  • Rock Baker

    The thing about independent movies is that (in today’s climate as opposed to the ‘old’ days before costs became too great) they avoid “pandering to the masses” and go for niche interests. If it’s a good movie, I really don’t care if its independent or a studio product. But I am one of ‘the masses’ they speak of.

    If I were to actually get the resources together and make independent movies myself, they’d be ‘real’ movies (just non-union) and not what most people think of when independent films are brought up, which is pretentious character studies. (That’s not aimed at you, Sandy, its just the impression that keeps people like me away from 98% of ‘independent’ movies.)

    Another way to describe it, most of us would rather see dubbed movies that entertain, than suffer through subtitled “art” pictures.

  • Rock Baker

    By which I mean, if there were more ‘independent’ films made to entertain, as opposed to spit on everything the audience holds dear (like logic), the audience would eat it up just as much as they do the studio stuff.

  • Sure plenty of indies are pretentious crap. After all, most of the film-makers are informed by Hollywood’s ethos which is, of course, pretentious crap.

    But have you seen “House of the Wolfman”, “Call of Cthulhu”, “Being John Malkovich”, “The Nativity Story”, or “God’s Army”? Or the movies I mentioned in my last post? They’re all independents, and none of them are pretentious angsty crap (Being John Malkovich probably comes closest) Hell even Napoleon Dynamite is an independent, and even if you didn’t like it, you can’t deny that it bends Hollywood comedies over its knee and spanks them.

    There are plenty of still-good independent movies. We’re not all infected by the teen angst virus.

  • Also let’s not forget “The Room”. THAT’S an indie, and it stands proud as reprsentative of all the idiot character studies we are forced to endure at art houses.

  • Rock Baker

    I’m not saying ALL of them are crap! I can’t, as one who has enjoyed Larry Blamire’s films, Black Dynamite, and dozens of regional horror films shot in the 60s. I can’t say that I haven’t enjoyed quite a few flicks made away from the studios. I watched The Astronaut Farmer again last weekend, which is still more independent film than studio fare, I’d love to see more films like that get made. I’m eagerly awaiting House of the Wolfman, I just hope it measures up to its trailer. These are all entertainment films, however, and the majority of independent fare falls squarely into the pretenious ‘art’ grouping. That more and more studio films are falling into that same basket brings me back to where I started, which is to say that most of the really good movies being made these days are coming from Disney and Pixar.

  • zombiewhacker

    Ken, just curious, why do you put all the blame for Monster Squad on Black? Fred Dekker co-wrote and directed it, so he deserves as much blame for that debacle as Black does.

  • Petoht

    As much as I’d love an Incredibles sequel, the story was told. It was, essentially, a movie about a mid-life crises, and that crises was dealt with and resolved. Honestly, there’s no need for one.

    However, if Brad Bird was to write and direct a sequel and given as much freedom as he had with the first one, I’d watch it in a heartbeat.

  • Toby Clark

    fish eye: http://www.deadline.com/2011/01/warner-bros-taps-shane-black-for-japanese-manga-death-note/

    Of course, he’s not writing the script for this one either, and he’s evidently a fan. I think it’ll come down to the casting.

  • JJ

    Well, I like Shane Black. Comparing him with Joe Eztserhas is just mean.

    Not that all his movies are classics or anything. But Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the original Lethal Weapon are both films with engaging stories, exciting action scenes, and compelling characters.

    Eszterhas, on the other hand, got lucky with directors a few times – Lyne, Marquand, and Verhoeven – who put together his sleazy junk with far more style than they deserved.

    To be fair, though, I find a lot of Black’s dialogue amusing, and they’re very dialogue-driven films, so that probably influences my judgement.

  • Rogue1stClass

    Shane Black died yesterday, so I guess they are gonna have to find someone else…

  • Rogue1stclass

    At least, his wiki says he died. Can’t find anything else about it, though, so it might be an April Fools prank…

    Sometimes, I hate this time of year.

  • I compare Shane Black to Esterhaus because they’re both skuzzy writers. Last Boy Scout and Long Kiss Goodnight gave me the same sense of being dipped in sleaze that Esterhaus’ films do. For the record, I was never a fan of Lethal Weapon, although it’s not awful. Monster Squad, however, leaves me pretty cold, and most of the stuff I dislike about it has Black’s ring to it; the horribly offensive concentration camp number scene; the pitifully juvenile “Wolf Man has nads!” bit; the wildly uncomfortable ‘virgin’ element, which ends with a six year old or whatever identified that way (yuck); the really, really stupid bit where Dracula is striding around tossing dynamite at stuff; and so on. Maybe Dekker was responsible for some of these points, but I’d be surprised to hear it.

    This quote from Steve Martin always stayed with me: “I saw The Last Boy Scout on laser disc. It’s very ugly. It’s about a family falling apart. The wife is having an affair and the husband is a detective who’s always at work. The daughter is just plain repellent. Her language is horrible. Toward the end of the movie she supplies the gun to her dad to blow away the people. Early on, the wife is trying to get a rise out of her husband and she says something like, “You don’t care about me. Why don’t you just say, ‘Sarah, fuck you. I’ll spit in your face if I ever catch you with another man again.'” By the end of the movie, this has become the love theme. When he says to her, “Fuck you, I’ll spit in your face if I ever see you with another man,” she melts.

    I’m thinking, Is there a world out there I don’t know about? Is that the way a lot of people are in this ugly, ugly world? Well, I don’t know about those problems. I know about the problems in Parenthood.”

  • zombiewhacker

    @Ken

    Fair enough. I guess you loved it when Black bought it in Predator, huh?

    For the record, though, Shane’s brother Terry is far worse.

  • Petoht

    Toby: just remember, M Night claimed to be a fan of the Last Airbender, too…

  • Toby Clark

    Point taken.