You know, maybe the newspaper industry would be in better shape if they still had headlines with this kind of zazz: Dateline: Silver Age collects headlines from papers like The Gotham News and The Ivytown Record. This Daily Planet headline is my favorite so far, as it devotes the entire front page to a single headline about…a marble championship? Say, now I wonder how what the Daily Planet looked like when Pearl Harbor was attacked or a man landed on the moon …
Yeah, suck it video games: This dude’s totally right—movies that are based on comics are sometimes good, while movies that are based on comics’ traditional archenemy The Video Game are all so bad they generally fall somewhere between “crimes against aesthetics” and “crimes against humanity.” I’m thinking as hard as I can right now, and I’m unable to think of a based-on-a-videogame movie that didn’t make me want to slap almost everyone involved as soon as the credits rolled.
Am I missing one? Can any of you think of an actually good video game movie?
Weird Mark Trail storyline just getting weirder: Bill White on the bizarre seeming resolution to the current dude-who-hit-his-wife-due-in-part-to-her-letting-a-deer-in-the-house story. Surely bringing a child into their marriage will solve everything. (?!) Joshua Fruhlinger has of course been following every weird step of the weird story.
Reader participation Part 1: If you were a producer on Dancing With The Stars and were empowered to invite any comics professional to be one of the participating stars, who would you ask? I was thinking about this the other night, and came up with a short list of comics folks I think would be entertaining in that context at my home blog. Just curious.
Reader Particiption Part 2: Would Watchmen have been a better film if it chose a single character and followed him throughout the narrative instead of trying to religiously follow the plot of the graphic novel (except when it did the opposite) and thus end up kinda sorta missing the point and failing to make any new one? I don’t mean would it have been a better adaptation, or would it have done more right by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons of course, but would it have been an all around better film if it were extremely different? Like, say it was a movie about Rorshach, instead of a movie about Dan, Laurie, Rorschack and John, gues-starring Eddie and Adrian. Again, just wondering. Tim O’Neil, one of my favorite comics bloggers, has a pretty intersting post up about vigilantes, serial killers and Rorshach, which reminded me that Rorshach seems to be the character who survived the transition to film the best (no wonder, really), and was one of the better performances involved. And while I’m linking to a Watchmen piece (again), I might as well link to Joe McCulloch, another of my favorite comics bloggers, who reviewed Watchmen for his Watchman column. I like how his piece sums up conventional wisdom and immediately moves on to tackle the differences inherent in the media more directly, thoroughly and amusingly than a lot of others have.
March 11th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children was quite the cool movie; not the deepest story ever, but enjoyable from start to finish, and a movie I can watch over and over.
I actually mostly dug the Resident Evil movies (I know, in the minority there), including the recent direct-to-dvd CGI one. Dead Space’s movie prequel is vicious, gory fun. Silent Hill strayed too far from the games for most fans, but it was a cool flick.
So, I guess horror translates the best from game to screen, as three out of my four examples are survival horror. For the most part, though, you’re not wrong in your blanket statement.
March 11th, 2009 at 11:00 am
yeah, the first resident evil movie is a fine movie. i could name a million worse movies than it that weren’t based on a video game.
March 11th, 2009 at 11:06 am
I thought the first Tomb Raider was a decent popcorn flick.
March 11th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
re: video games as movies
The demo films for the now-scuttled Halo movie looked promising, and the miniseries Escape from City 17 based on Half-Life 2 is quite cool thus far. Neither of them went through the whole movie studio production process, though. Comics had an easier time (relatively) gaining respect for some reason. Maybe it’s some sense of history, or that the superhero motif just happened to strike a chord in this decade.
March 11th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Dan Didio’s gotten awfully good at tap dancing the past few years, so I’d think he’d be a natural for Dancing With the Stars.
March 11th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Wasn’t Il Postino based on Paperboy?
March 11th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
McCulloch’s review of Watchmen is one of the best, and most thoughtful, that I’ve read. He nails a number of the qualms I had with the movie. I was really looking forward to the movie, but I ended up really not liking it, and McCulloch articulates many of my reasons very well.
I disagree with him, however, about Silk Spectre’s “butt-thrusting” sex… I could’ve used more Silk Spectre “butt-thrusting” myself.
March 12th, 2009 at 12:29 am
You know, for all the shit it gets, House of the Dead is basically perfect when it comes to capturing the videogame franchise it was adapting. I mean, they’re both incoherently plotted, horribly acted, incredibly cheesy, and serve no storytelling purpose other than to string together various scenes of graphic violence.
And Roger Avary’s dumbed-down Hellraiser meets The Crucible screenplay aside, Silent Hill actually did a pretty good job of capturing the tone and feel of the game for the first hour, and the art direction was excellent.