Totally with you on “Greyhound”. I actually signed up to Apple TV in order to watch that movie. Tom Hanks, as Everyman who becomes a naval captain besting a German U-boat against all odds? How could that not be a great movie? And somehow it was underwhelming. I’m not enough of a screenwriter to know what went wrong, but maybe it was a la…
Totally with you on “Greyhound”. I actually signed up to Apple TV in order to watch that movie. Tom Hanks, as Everyman who becomes a naval captain besting a German U-boat against all odds? How could that not be a great movie? And somehow it was underwhelming. I’m not enough of a screenwriter to know what went wrong, but maybe it was a lack of development of the secondary characters?
To me, the biggest evidence of corporate culpability in crapifying a movie was Disney’s take on the last three installments of Star Wars. Walking out of the theater gave me the same feeling as walking out of the Paris Metro and wondering if my wallet was missing.
I watched the first of the last three SW movies, and when I walked out I was asking myself how the girl knew all that stuff, why did Han Solo have to be killed and a lot of other questions you shouldn't have to ask a movie if it was fully developed. I ended up walking out of the second one because it was embarrassing me that such a piece of shit could be made and didn't waste my time on the third one.
the only difference in our reactions to the "Star Wars" franchise is that I actually finished watching the second one of the original three, and I was done forever. one "marriage" that was definitely NOT made in heaven was the one that sorta "happened" when George Lucas read "The Hero With a Thousand Faces," which is itself like a movie based on other, better movies. but I'm generally NOT a fan of Joseph Campbell EVER.
I didn't realize "The Right Stuff" didn't do well...it certainly launched a major bunch of acting careers. I didn't see it when it came out and only watched the whole thing a few years ago...and I thought it was really GOOD. but I'm generally a big Phil Kaufmann fan; he takes movies seriously.
more and more I've been thinking that when the Supreme Court decided that studios couldn't own their own theaters, movies began their inevitable slide into mediocrity. I know about the "renaissance" of the '70s, but the number of really terrific movies that came out isn't anything like as huge as people remember.
I really DID like what happened very recently when Anderson, Scorsese and Spielberg staged their (successful??) intervention with Zaslav over TCM. Zaslav is a major presence in that shitty four-hour puff piece on Max that SUPPOSED to be a history of WB but really is just a commercial for the next retelling of the fucking Batman origin myth. he walks around the empty WB lots and says "we" a lot, just as if he really has anything to do with WB and isn't just another one of those rotating CEOs. I read somewhere that Zaslav got his start making cheap Reality Shows (are there any Reality Shows that AREN't cheap?). I confess that I have a very small weakness for the occasional half-episode of "Below Deck," which is sorta fun because every single person is disgusting. but by and large, I've spent many recent nights trying to find something to watch, and there's nothing except TCM and Criterion (and, occasionally, Ovid when I'm in the mood to be shocked and horrified).
a last confession: my new television (inherited from a friend's daughter, whose room was too small for it) is actually 65". I was embarrassed at first and thought it was hard to watch because everything was so huge, but I got over it in about three days. I still feel a little bit like a troglodyte because of it.
and since I'm here and we're talking about what to watch, if anybody hasn't discovered "Happy Valley" yet, now's the time. and I'm getting restless waiting for Season Three of "Slow Horses."
there HAVE been some decent movies released on Netflix, but if it's something like "The Irishman," or the re-edit of "The Godfather, Part 3" we're not exactly talking about original content creation, are we?
The Right Stuff could have been a terrific hit. Do the movie exactly as it is, but when Gordo Cooper blasts off, screen fades to interior-spaceship, on his final orbit. There's an electrical fire in one panel, he's communicating with Earth on a battery-powered radio on his lap, and the computer to set the spaceship for its return is glitched. So he has to take the controls (that the astronauts fought for) and look out the window (that they fought for) and manually align the spaceship with the horizon - too shallow, he bounces off the atmosphere and dies in space; too deep he burns up in the atmosphere. Then he descends. And makes the closest landing any American spaceship did to its' intended touchdown till the Space Shuttle landed at Edwards in 1981. In other words, he has to be the PILOT they always claimed they were. At the conclusion of that movie, it's stand up and cheer and walk out feeling good about America.
Every movie, every story, has to pay off EVERY IMPORTANT POINT or it doesn't work.
Phil Kaufman is a great director, as his other movies proved, but he was the wrong director for the Right Stuff. And I figured that out the first time I read the script two weeks after I started work. It was a great lesson for me as a screenwriter and author. (You'll notice in all my books, everything has a "payoff.")
Totally with you on “Greyhound”. I actually signed up to Apple TV in order to watch that movie. Tom Hanks, as Everyman who becomes a naval captain besting a German U-boat against all odds? How could that not be a great movie? And somehow it was underwhelming. I’m not enough of a screenwriter to know what went wrong, but maybe it was a lack of development of the secondary characters?
To me, the biggest evidence of corporate culpability in crapifying a movie was Disney’s take on the last three installments of Star Wars. Walking out of the theater gave me the same feeling as walking out of the Paris Metro and wondering if my wallet was missing.
I watched the first of the last three SW movies, and when I walked out I was asking myself how the girl knew all that stuff, why did Han Solo have to be killed and a lot of other questions you shouldn't have to ask a movie if it was fully developed. I ended up walking out of the second one because it was embarrassing me that such a piece of shit could be made and didn't waste my time on the third one.
the only difference in our reactions to the "Star Wars" franchise is that I actually finished watching the second one of the original three, and I was done forever. one "marriage" that was definitely NOT made in heaven was the one that sorta "happened" when George Lucas read "The Hero With a Thousand Faces," which is itself like a movie based on other, better movies. but I'm generally NOT a fan of Joseph Campbell EVER.
I didn't realize "The Right Stuff" didn't do well...it certainly launched a major bunch of acting careers. I didn't see it when it came out and only watched the whole thing a few years ago...and I thought it was really GOOD. but I'm generally a big Phil Kaufmann fan; he takes movies seriously.
more and more I've been thinking that when the Supreme Court decided that studios couldn't own their own theaters, movies began their inevitable slide into mediocrity. I know about the "renaissance" of the '70s, but the number of really terrific movies that came out isn't anything like as huge as people remember.
I really DID like what happened very recently when Anderson, Scorsese and Spielberg staged their (successful??) intervention with Zaslav over TCM. Zaslav is a major presence in that shitty four-hour puff piece on Max that SUPPOSED to be a history of WB but really is just a commercial for the next retelling of the fucking Batman origin myth. he walks around the empty WB lots and says "we" a lot, just as if he really has anything to do with WB and isn't just another one of those rotating CEOs. I read somewhere that Zaslav got his start making cheap Reality Shows (are there any Reality Shows that AREN't cheap?). I confess that I have a very small weakness for the occasional half-episode of "Below Deck," which is sorta fun because every single person is disgusting. but by and large, I've spent many recent nights trying to find something to watch, and there's nothing except TCM and Criterion (and, occasionally, Ovid when I'm in the mood to be shocked and horrified).
a last confession: my new television (inherited from a friend's daughter, whose room was too small for it) is actually 65". I was embarrassed at first and thought it was hard to watch because everything was so huge, but I got over it in about three days. I still feel a little bit like a troglodyte because of it.
and since I'm here and we're talking about what to watch, if anybody hasn't discovered "Happy Valley" yet, now's the time. and I'm getting restless waiting for Season Three of "Slow Horses."
there HAVE been some decent movies released on Netflix, but if it's something like "The Irishman," or the re-edit of "The Godfather, Part 3" we're not exactly talking about original content creation, are we?
The Right Stuff could have been a terrific hit. Do the movie exactly as it is, but when Gordo Cooper blasts off, screen fades to interior-spaceship, on his final orbit. There's an electrical fire in one panel, he's communicating with Earth on a battery-powered radio on his lap, and the computer to set the spaceship for its return is glitched. So he has to take the controls (that the astronauts fought for) and look out the window (that they fought for) and manually align the spaceship with the horizon - too shallow, he bounces off the atmosphere and dies in space; too deep he burns up in the atmosphere. Then he descends. And makes the closest landing any American spaceship did to its' intended touchdown till the Space Shuttle landed at Edwards in 1981. In other words, he has to be the PILOT they always claimed they were. At the conclusion of that movie, it's stand up and cheer and walk out feeling good about America.
Every movie, every story, has to pay off EVERY IMPORTANT POINT or it doesn't work.
Phil Kaufman is a great director, as his other movies proved, but he was the wrong director for the Right Stuff. And I figured that out the first time I read the script two weeks after I started work. It was a great lesson for me as a screenwriter and author. (You'll notice in all my books, everything has a "payoff.")