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funny(book) business
23 Aug 2013 08:59If you'd said that Ben Affleck was directing the Batman/Superman movie, there would have been an overwhelmingly positive reaction. Instead, we've got news that he's playing Batman and, well, the internet exploded last night.
Affleck's not a terrible actor, he really isn't. He's made spectacularly awful choices as an actor and we tend to remember those, but he's also done some finer work in smaller movies, even during the period when Gigli happened. Like Jude Law, once he stopped trying to be a matinee idol lead actor, things improved. He just tends to work better when playing off stronger actors and, to be kind, Henry Cavill may be capable of that, but he hasn't shown it to us yet.
Also, Affleck is going to be coming in after Christian Bale and, really, if there was ever an actor meant to play a handsome, too-intense man driven to his current vocation from childhood, it's Bale. Who had Christopher Nolan's vision to work with.
For the record, I think Affleck is going to end up like George Clooney's Batman. Whether that includes the franchise-killing part, we'll see.
In other depressing comic book to movie news, there are more details for the... mauling that Snowpiercer is going to get for its US distribution: The Weinstein Company, which owns the English language distribution rights, wants to take out at least 20 minutes of footage. Not because the movie is too long (it's 126 minutes as shown in Korea, where it got rave reviews), but because Weinstein wants all of the character-development scenes stripped out to make it a less-nuanced, more traditional action movie, with voiceovers added to make sure nothing is left for the viewer to discover on their own. Entirely because he doesn't think Americans -- specifically landlocked Americans -- would be able to understand or appreciate things like character development or worldbuilding.
This, people, is why we can't have nice things.
If this goes through, which it probably will, the only chance to see a proper version of the movie will be on DVD if there's a director's cut or a non-Anglophone version that's subtitled and not dubbed. There is apparently a chance that the UK will fight the cuts, so if that happens, Hail Britannia and we buy your DVD.
Affleck's not a terrible actor, he really isn't. He's made spectacularly awful choices as an actor and we tend to remember those, but he's also done some finer work in smaller movies, even during the period when Gigli happened. Like Jude Law, once he stopped trying to be a matinee idol lead actor, things improved. He just tends to work better when playing off stronger actors and, to be kind, Henry Cavill may be capable of that, but he hasn't shown it to us yet.
Also, Affleck is going to be coming in after Christian Bale and, really, if there was ever an actor meant to play a handsome, too-intense man driven to his current vocation from childhood, it's Bale. Who had Christopher Nolan's vision to work with.
For the record, I think Affleck is going to end up like George Clooney's Batman. Whether that includes the franchise-killing part, we'll see.
In other depressing comic book to movie news, there are more details for the... mauling that Snowpiercer is going to get for its US distribution: The Weinstein Company, which owns the English language distribution rights, wants to take out at least 20 minutes of footage. Not because the movie is too long (it's 126 minutes as shown in Korea, where it got rave reviews), but because Weinstein wants all of the character-development scenes stripped out to make it a less-nuanced, more traditional action movie, with voiceovers added to make sure nothing is left for the viewer to discover on their own. Entirely because he doesn't think Americans -- specifically landlocked Americans -- would be able to understand or appreciate things like character development or worldbuilding.
This, people, is why we can't have nice things.
If this goes through, which it probably will, the only chance to see a proper version of the movie will be on DVD if there's a director's cut or a non-Anglophone version that's subtitled and not dubbed. There is apparently a chance that the UK will fight the cuts, so if that happens, Hail Britannia and we buy your DVD.
