MovieZen Blog

Wanted Explodes in a Surprising Summer

Wanted scored a larger-than-expected opening this weekend with a whopping $51 million. While Wall-E took the top spot with $63 million like everyone thought it would, Wanted actually had a higher per-theater average because it's playing in about 800 fewer theaters.

Particularly interesting in Wanted's case is that it was originally scheduled to be a spring release. Universal had planned on giving Forgetting Sarah Marshall a spot on their summer schedule, mimicking the successful release of Knocked Up in 2007, but when they decided that the comedy would work better in the Spring, that left a hole in their schedule. Plugging it with an action thriller, based on an unknown comic book, starring a skinny Scottish guy most people don't know was risky, and now they get to reap the rewards.

It's been a strange summer for business. No sooner had my "5 Predicted Flops This Summer" arrived that Speed Racer -- not on my list -- crashed and burned. Okay, if I was better at this, I might have been able to predict that. But then even Narnia disappointed: while The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe made $290 million, Prince Caspian only stands at $138 million to date. You can pull out the very valid reasons -- the book was less popular than the first, it opened too far before kids were out of school -- but even taking those into account, it was "supposed" to do much better.

Only two movies on my top five list have been released so far, and my track record is 50%, give or take.  Thwarting my prediction, Sex and the City was a success by all accounts, but The Incredible Hulk trails even Ang Lee's scorned 2003 version. That's a particularly strange case, since the reactions on the whole have been significantly better. Despite his legendary status as a comic book character, perhaps the Hulk can just never tap into widespread appeal.

Other surprises: The Love Guru crashes and burns -- and at least part of the blame has to go to the execs who didn't move it away from the release of Get Smart. The Happening kicks off with a much-stronger-than-expected $30 million opening, only to plummet in subsequent weekends thanks to a horrific response from critics and audiences alike.

Even You Don't Mess with the Zohan, which opened exactly in line with Adam Sandler's past movies, hasn't followed the formula: while his films usually hit $125 million each summer like clockwork, Zohan is currently struggling to reach $100 million.

Lessons to be learned? Who knows? Last summer was the Summer of Threequels (or the Summer of Apatow, take your pick); the year before that was the Summer of Pirates 2 (it made double its nearest competitor); the year before that was the depressing Summer of Remakes. This year? We've got a little bit of everything. It might be harder for us bloggers to categorize, but that just makes it all the more exciting, right?

Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com

**Read more articles by Michael Dance**

The Top 5 Stoner Movies

In honor of the upcoming -- and awesome-looking -- Pineapple Express, it's time to look into the past and count down the top five stoner movies. Ever.

This is of course my own opinion, so feel free to argue. But just for clarification purposes, my definition of a stoner film is a movie that (a) contains at least one instance of pot-smoking, and (b) is widely known to be beloved by actual stoners.

It goes without saying that merely labeling these "stoner movies" is a bit shortsighted -- indeed, the reason they're all classic is because they're so much more. Well, at least the top three. #5 and #4 are pretty straightforward.

5. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
I had the privilege of interviewing Kal Penn -- a.k.a. Kumar -- a while back, and he insisted that this movie isn't a stoner movie because the heroes are actually pursuing hamburgers, not weed. Sure, Kal. Except that the reason they're pursuing hamburgers is because they're so high. It doesn't matter -- Harold & Kumar is a relentlessly hilarious one-night-long road trip that single-handedly brought Neil Patrick Harris back into the national consciousness.

4. Up in Smoke
You cannot create a list of stoner movies without paying homage to this film, which is the stoner-movie-ist stoner movie of all stoner movies. Cheech and Chong at their best: playing two guys who smuggle a van, made entirely of marijuana, from Mexico to the U.S.

3. The Big Lebowski
For quotes alone, this is one of the best movies of all time. "You're out of your element, Donnie." "She kidnapped herself!" "The royal 'we.'" "This is what happens when you f--- a stranger in the a--!" "They're nihilists, dude." "The rug really tied the room together." Shall I go on? The Big Lebowski also has the rare honor of paradoxically being a highbrow stoner movie, in that it comes from Joel and Ethan Coen, the writer-directors of No Country for Old Men and tons of other terrific movies. Get involved in the super-complicated story, stay for the pitch-perfect dialogue, and remember the Saddam Hussein/Viking costume/bowling dream sequence forever.

2. Dazed and Confused
Recall your high school days with warm nostalgia in Richard Linklater's ode to teenagers, which follows a group of 13- and 17-year-olds over the course of about fifteen hours following the last day of school in Texas in 1976. The plot is (by design) not cohesive and the pace is leisurely, but the characters will all have a hold of you by the end. Plus there's that immortal line: "That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age."

1. Super Troopers
"That little guy? I wouldn't worry about that little guy." One of the best comedies of all time, watching this movie for the ninth time is like hanging out with your closest friends -- if your closest friends were a hundred times funnier than they actually are. I can't even describe the simple pleasures of Super Troopers, except that they involve plenty of shenanigans.

Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com

**Read more articles by Michael Dance**

The Rise and Pseudo-Success of Viral Marketing

People tend to think viral marketing is a relatively new thing, but it's actually almost a decade old. In the lead-up to 1999's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, word got out that if you did a Google search for "Jeanine Salla," you would find a website about a woman living in the future, doing research on A.I. children. That website linked to other sites with even more information, and collectively they all told a story related to the robotics company seen in the film. (Most of the websites are still up; try it for yourself.)

Back then it was simply an experiment - something cool for the marketing department to tinker around with to see if it would work. And, truth be told, there was no evidence that it did work - A.I. topped out with less than $80 million at the box office. But it seemed to open the floodgates for a bunch of new films.

The appeal behind such unconventional marketing is simple - it makes the fictional world of a film more "real." In 2004's Godsend, Robert De Niro plays a doctor who promises to give a married couple's dead child back to them. If you went online, you could find the website for the Godsend Institute, the company that the doctor founded.

That attempt didn't seem to make much of a difference, either - the movie grossed less than $15 million. One of the main problems with viral marketing is that the amount of people who get into it, seeking out all the websites actually finding it an enriching experience, is negligible. The other problem is that at first glance, by design, the average person would have no idea the website they stumbled across is actually part of a movie's advertising campaign.

Then again, viral marketing campaigns can prove useful. Knowing that there would be an eight-month hiatus between seasons two and three of television's Lost, ABC hired a team to create "The Lost Experience," which went beyond creating a few random websites - it was a full-fledged game. Go to TheHansoFoundation.org, find out more about one of the shadowy organizations from the show, receive a hint about another website you could go to, and so on, and so on. New websites popped up periodically, old ones radically changed, and the Lost fans involved in the Experience were treated to an enriched backstory for the TV show's dense mythology. For ABC, it meant retaining fans who might otherwise forget to tune in to the third season.

One of the original creators of Lost, J.J. Abrams, decided to use viral marketing again when he produced last January's Cloverfield. Disenfranchised with the way fans in this day and age increasingly knew everything about movies before they were released, Abrams wanted to bring back a sense of mystery to filmmaking. So he made sure the first trailer for the film didn't even include the title - just the release date, 1-18-08, and an accompanying website. A few other websites - so cryptic that there was speculation about whether or not they were even related to the film at all - sprang up. Excitement built. And thus a relatively simple monster movie was transformed into a sensation that scored a $40 million opening weekend.

For pure coolness factor, though, the best viral marketing campaign is one for a movie that hasn't even been released yet - The Dark Knight.

Basically, Warner Bros. pulled out all the stops. First there was IBelieveInHarveyDent.com, a website advertising the District Attorney candidate played by Aaron Eckhart. Then IBelieveInHarveyDentToo.com appeared - the same website, only "vandalized" by a criminal called the Joker.  (Go there, then hit Ctrl+A.)  A slew of websites followed - some run by citizens of Gotham City, or the Gotham police department - and some run by the Joker, encouraging his faithful "clowns" to go on missions for him.

What kind of missions? Well, that's where the internet and the real world collided in The Dark Knight's viral campaign, which is part of what made it the best-executed viral campaign yet. There weren't just viral websites for viral marketing's sake - follow them closely enough, and you were rewarded, with scavenger hunts held in major cities that any fan could embark on. At the end of the hunts were various prizes - most notably a chance to go in a theater and watch a new trailer for the film, or even, in one instance, the entire opening scene.

Of course, The Dark Knight is going to be huge anyway. The only viral marketing campaign that you could truly call a success story was Cloverfield's, because of the attention the secrecy brought to it - otherwise, these sorts of campaigns are impossible to quantify and haven't led to any other surprise hits. So why do they keep at it? Perhaps more than anything else, they're compelled to keep things creative - and in an idea-starved Hollywood, that's an encouraging thought.

Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com

**Read more articles by Michael Dance**

Embarking Down 'The Road'

If all goes according to plan, this November, we'll be able to see a movie I'm anticipating more breathlessly than any other: The Road.

It's based on the acclaimed 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy about a father, with his young son, traveling across the United States some time after the world as he knew it ended. McCarthy describes the cataclysmic event as "A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions...A dull rose glow in the windowglass."

But it's no science fiction story - The Road is instead a parable, almost a myth. No character is given a name, which in some stories comes across like a gimmick but here seems almost necessary. The son was born only a few days after the man and his wife "watched distant cities burn." Some time thereafter, the wife took her own life.

Since then, father and son have been traveling the landscape in search of food (the sky is always gray, and nothing will grow), coming across old relics or survivors, and avoiding roaming bands of cannibals. The father's only goal is to keep his son alive.

McCarthy is an abstract writer, and not at all easy to read, but his prose is powerful and more often than not beautiful. But since I'm a movie lover more than a book lover (sorry, English teachers), I read the book fantasizing about what its striking setting would look like as a movie.

The movie filmed this past spring under the direction of John Hillcoat. An Australian director responsible for the violent Outback drama The Proposition, he has the uncompromising vision able to bring McCarthy's tale to life - and The Proposition was also quite visually striking, so it's a good sign that he has brought along the same cinematographer, Benoît Delhomme.

Viggo Mortensen plays the father in what is perhaps the best casting decision of recent memory. Aside from having the right look for the role, Mortensen can portray the sadness, desperation, and also devotion and love that's so important for the role. Relative newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee plays the young son; he had a major role in the little-seen 2007 drama Romulus, My Father, starring Eric Bana.

Even the smaller roles have attracted top-tier talent; Charlize Theron appears briefly as the wife, and Guy Pearce (Memento) plays a man on the road. Likewise, Robert Duvall appears as an old man that the father and son meet one night. 

During a set visit from the New York Times (the article also includes stills from the film), Mortensen had nothing to say but praise for his co-stars, especially Smit-McPhee. "It’s a love story that’s also an endurance contest.  I mean that in a positive way. They’re on this difficult journey, and the father is basically learning from the son. So if the father-son thing doesn't work, then the movie doesn't work. The rest of it wouldn't matter. It would never be more than a pretty good movie. But with Kodi in it, it has a chance to be an extremely good movie, maybe even a great one." It certainly sounds like one.

Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com

**Read more articles by Michael Dance**

Perfect Adventure Scenes

The release and (accompanying never-ending press) of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has caused me to get quite a bit more nostalgic for the original three films than I ought to be. I suppose nostalgia is the whole point of the new one, but it feels a bit like cheating for me, because I wasn't even born yet when Raiders of the Lost Ark was released. In fact, I've always been a bit annoyed that I arrived too late to get in on the ground floor of those three brilliant adventure trilogies from the late '70s and '80s: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Back to the Future.

Then again, catching the films on video as a young kid, with little knowledge of their impact on pop culture, probably made for purer experiences. Heck, I didn't even understand until well into my teenage years that Star Wars and Indiana Jones were elaborate homages to B-grade serial adventures of yore – I just accepted them for what they were: really awesome movies that succeeded in giving me the truest sense of gee-whiz wonder I've ever experienced. 

While the collective experience of these movies is unmatched, my mind always goes back to a couple of specific scenes – scenes so pitch-perfect that I want to capture every individual frame of film and lock them in a vault. (Or maybe in a giant warehouse, right next to the Ark of the Covenant.) Since I'm being all nostalgic, I'd like to share them.

There's so much to choose from in Star Wars, but I love the showdown in Return of the Jedi between Luke, Vader, and the Emperor. (Watch it here.) The dynamic between the three characters is startlingly complex – will the Emperor turn Luke evil? Will Vader come away from the Dark Side to help his son? How can Luke possibly get out of this? And the setting – this is all going down on a giant space station that can destroy planets, in the middle of a fierce space battle fought by Luke's friends that will ultimately decide the fate of the Rebellion against the Evil Empire. 

And then there's The Moment, when all seems lost. The Emperor is using the powers of the Dark Side to repeatedly blast Luke with what looks like very painful bolts of electricity. Luke's on the ground, screaming in pain, dying. And Vader: looking on as his master kills his son.  Cut to the Emperor. Cut back to a close-up of Vader – whose black mask, somehow portrays more emotion and depth than most regular performances. It's do or die: Save your son! You can do it, I scream in my head every time I watch it. And, of course, he does, as we always secretly knew he would: he picks up the Emperor and throws him down the shaft to oblivion, an act which will result in his own death but save his soul.

In Back to the Future, the coolest single moment is easy: it comes in the first film, when Doc Brown swings down the cable from the clock tower as that classic score is blasting and he plugs it in just in time for the lightning to surge through the cable and rescue Marty McFly from being trapped in 1955 forever. (Watch it here.) The image of the Doc swinging down on that cable was ingrained in my head when I was too little to follow the plot of the movie at all -- it simply looked like one of the most exciting things I'd ever seen. 

But then the magic continues: Marty and the DeLorean disappear, and the overjoyed Doc dances down the street, still burning from the time machine. The familiar score comes back on, but it's quieter this time, with one lone brass: some crazy stuff has gone down, but everything's all right now.

Finally, there's the Indiana Jones franchise. I can honestly think of no better stand-alone sequence in any movie ever that tops the very first sequence of the series for thrills and coolness: Indy's perilous journey in and out of a severely booby-trapped temple. (Watch it here.) The bag of sand he puts in place of the legendary idol in hopes that it will stop the alarms from going off. The traitorous companion, played by a young Alfred Molina, who meets a gruesome end as soon as he selfishly leaves Indy for dead. The temple itself coming alive: poison darts springing from the walls, the giant stone door that tries to trap Indy inside forever. And of course the legendary boulder chase. 

The structure is deceptively simply – a series of perilous setups and adrenaline-rush payoffs – but it enthralled my ten-year-old self like nothing else had. Just as important as what was happening inside the temple, of course, was who it was happening to. Indiana Jones was pretty much the coolest guy alive: he got to journey through perilous jungles and legendary hidden temples all day, and during his off-hours he made some money as a mild-mannered college professor.

Perhaps the best compliment I can give the scene is that it partly inspired me to be a writer. In fifth grade, I wrote something like five stories in a row about an adventurer who escaped from booby-trapped temples.

What are some other scenes you wish you could see again for the first time?

Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com

**Read more articles by Michael Dance**

The Delusion of George Lucas

George Lucas, while in France for the Cannes Film Festival premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, mentioned to a Fox News reporter that he'd like to do a fifth Indy movie: "I have an idea to make Shia [LeBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford] come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie," he said. "I can see it working out." This despite continual assurances from Lucas for the past couple months that fans will hate Crystal Skull.

Yep, you read that right – while press junkets for the film have been surprisingly few and far between, whenever Lucas has had the opportunity to talk up the film, he's been doing the exact opposite:

The fans think it's gonna be the Second Coming. And it's not the Second Coming. They've already written the story [in their heads], and lemme tell ya, it's not that story. So they're going to be very disappointed. I went through this with Phantom Menace. Believe me, I've been there, I've done it, I know exactly the way they react. And they're very vocal about these things. We're not gonna have adoring fans sending us e-mails saying how much they loved the movie. We're gonna have a bunch of angry people saying, "You're a bunch of a--holes, you should never have done this. You've ruined my life forever. I loved Indiana Jones so much and now it's ruined."

That's from an Entertainment Weekly joint interview with Steven Spielberg, who followed up Lucas's comments with a shell-shocked "Uh, he needs to speak for himself here."

While Lucas does touch on the real-enough issue of Internet "fanboys" being impossible to please, his comments are frightening proof of his own blindness. Simply put, he refuses to accept that the Star Wars prequels were bad movies. Nope, they weren't bad, it's just the fans' fault – the people who didn't like them were just a bunch of nitpickers with unrealistic expectations.

Imagine that kind of self-deception.

You can go on sites like Ain't It Cool News right now and find plenty of comments trashing Batman Begins or Spider-Man 2, for example. Somehow the attitudes didn't stop those movies from being considered successful on all fronts – with critics, audiences, the box office, DVD sales, however you want to tabulate it. Sure, some fanboys will always thrive on negativity, but their moaning will not stop inherently good films from achieving success.

While all three Star Wars prequels were wildly successful in terms of box office dollars, they left such a bad taste in audiences' mouths because they were a betrayal not just to fans but to the laws of filmmaking – i.e., the need to give us a good story, well told. Plot, and especially characterization and dialogue, were secondary to Lucas's urge to make the movies showcases upon which he could play around with new digital technology, and it showed. Painfully.

I'm not objecting to Lucas's exploration of new technologies, even though his penchant for using digital sound stages for everything instead of real sets and locations only makes the performances worse and the visuals look faker. (That's a topic for another post; to get some idea of what I mean, read the rest of the EW article.) I'm objecting to Lucas the screenwriter writing a horrible script. I don't need to make a laundry list of atrocious lines, or explain how those undeliverable lines begat atrocious performances. I don't need to explain why the concept of midichlorians de-mystifies what was so awesome about the Force and is a perfect microcosm for what Lucas did with the entire prequel trilogy. You've seen the films; you saw it for yourself. Here's the first line of the opening crawl of the original 1977 Star Wars:

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.

And here's the first line of The Phantom Menace's opening crawl:

Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.

Huh? It's not hard to spot where things went wrong. But you heard the man: it's not his fault the movies were received poorly; it was the fans' fault for receiving them poorly.

So where does this leave Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Luckily, it leaves it in the capable hands of Steven Spielberg, the director; David Koepp (Mission: Impossible, War of the Worlds) wrote the final script after no one could agree on previous scripts by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can), and others. Lucas only came up with the concept of Crystal Skulls and served as an executive producer – which doesn't mean much other than that he originally created Indiana Jones with Spielberg and got to visit the set whenever he wanted.

I don't know if the movie is good or not, but if it is, I'd love to see Lucas trying to rationalize it getting a good reception. Will he realize that unlike himself, his friend Spielberg hasn't forgotten the importance of characters, dialogue, and honest-to-goodness stunt and locations work? The unfortunate truth: of course he won't.

Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com

**Read more articles by Michael Dance**

Speed Racer: The First Flop of the Summer

Two weeks ago I wrote a post predicting which movies would flop this summer. Little did I know that the first big one was sitting right under my nose.

Speed Racer, the re-imagining of the old Saturday morning cartoon by The Matrix's Andy and Larry Wachowski, made an estimated $20.2 million, which, just to be clear, is unconditionally awful. Before the marketing had even started, Warner Bros. was dreaming up a $50 million plus opening – sure, it wouldn't match Iron Man, but there was no reason it couldn't hold its own, right?

As the release date grew closer, perilous signs appeared. Initial studio tracking – in-depth studies that survey how aware and how excited potential moviegoers are about the film – pegged it at a $40 million dollar weekend.  Which then turned to a mid-thirty million weekend, with some people whispering the number was actually somewhere in the high $20s. Apparently people just weren't nearly as interested in the film as Warner had hoped. Said Deadline Hollywood Daily on Thursday:

Warner Bros is figuratively on its knees praying for at least a mid-$30 million weekend opening for its kiddie anime Speed Racer -- already down from a hoped-for $40 million just a few days earlier. [...] As a Warner exec told me this afternoon, "I remain optimistic that families will go. I’m hoping we mirror something like Alvin and the Chipmunks. Industry projections based on tracking had it opening at $25M, but it opened to $44M."

Unfortunately, what they got was the opposite – whatever the tracking estimate really was, it had to have been higher than $20.2 million. According to IMDb, the budget for the film was $100 million, although some sources peg it at closer to $125. Add another $40 million (at least) in advertising, and you've got the studio on their hands and knees praying for the movie to do well in international territories.

In the days of yore, movies didn't live or die by their opening weekends. Advertising focused less on when films opened; they would wait patiently in theaters for word-of-mouth to kick in. That won't happen for Speed Racer – the reviews are mixed to bad, and the family audience (and most everyone else) will completely abandon it next weekend when The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian opens.

I really should've seen it coming: on the calendar, it was sandwiched between two surefire hits, Iron Man and Caspian. And it wasn't a sequel or a superhero movie or anything like that – just an adaptation of a TV show I honestly had no idea existed until I saw the Geico commercial spoof.

But the movie looked legitimately creative. The Wachowskis are brilliant visual directors, and their "live-action cartoon" style really seemed to work. The advertising made it look like a lot of fun – and when I went to see it, some talkiness aside, I honestly thought it was a lot of fun. And last year, another movie came out based on a Saturday morning cartoon I never watched that I didn't really understand the hype for: a little flick called Transformers. $300 million later, I saw few reasons Speed Racer couldn't also hit big.

One thing seems certain now: Sex and the City: The Movie will make more money...

Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com

**Read more articles by Michael Dance**

The Top 5 Box Office Failures of Summer '08

While last year was the summer of threequels and a few years earlier was the summer of remakes, this year has a little bit of everything – and I'm liking it. No, the upcoming month of May won't have third editions of Spider-Man, Shrek, and Pirates of the Caribbean – and that has box office forecasters nervous – but it will have Iron Man, Prince Caspian, and Speed Racer, all of which look cool in their own ways, and even unique. Sure, they're all based on pre-existing properties – you can't release a summer movie unless it is – but Iron Man's not that well known, and it looks like it has a great director in Jon Favreau. Meanwhile, Speed Racer looks like a wildly re-imagined, brilliantly visual adaptation of the old cartoon show.

Yet all is not roses. Amidst all the cool stuff there are bound to be a few failures – there's gotta be The Invasion for every Knocked Up. So without further ado, what follows are my predictions for the biggest disappointments of the summer. Read it again in three months to find out how wrong I am.

5. Sex and the City: The Movie

I may be crazy, but since when does a movie adaptation of a show on a boutique cable network become a blockbuster? And not to sound like an old-fashioned studio executive, but they're all women in their forties, which usually doesn't scream "big summer movie." The target audience will surely line up opening day, but after that expect steep drops and, once it's not in theaters anymore, lots of boyfriends high-fiving each other about how they dodged a bullet.

4. The Incredible Hulk

The Hulk as a comic book property = license to print money. The Hulk as a movie franchise = not so much. Ang Lee's 2003 version got mixed reviews, but most of the fanboy crowd rejected it and it limped to around $130 million. They decided to just do a complete do-over, hiring Edward Norton to star and re-write the script. That was a great move, but since then it's been getting bad press over a blown-out-of-proportion dispute between Norton and Marvel, plus the same old "The Hulk doesn't look good enough in the trailer" complaints that are so five years ago. Plus, it's currently opening against The Happening, which has a good chance to become M. Night Shyamalan's comeback movie.

3. Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D

I haven't brought myself to watch the previews yet, but all I've been hearing is bad things. Add in the problem of Brendan Fraser not starring in a blockbuster since 2001's The Mummy Returns and you've got major problems. That was seven years ago. Hm, actually, that doesn't bode well for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor either, but that one might succeed once the publicity train gets rolling. This one won't.

2. Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Hey, I've got a great idea: remember that weirdo superhero movie we took a chance on in Spring 2004 and it was sorta-kinda a success but not really since it made less than $60 million? The director of it just made this awesome foreign-language, R-rated fairy tale that was actually a success by foreign-language, R-rated fairy tale standards! So let's let him do a sequel to the weirdo superhero movie, only inexplicably, this time position it as a big summer movie and hope no one will know the difference!

1. Meet Dave

The most terrible-looking movie since Norbit, directed by the guy who directed Norbit. That's all I really have to say, but I'll go on: did the studio execs forget The Adventures of Pluto Nash? Why on Earth would you put Eddie Murphy in another stupid-sounding, stupid-looking, stupid-feeling sci-fi comedy? Wait, you say – Norbit made a lot of money! You're right – it made $90 million and was a big hit with African-American audiences in particular. But whoops, this one has a predominantly white cast, which muddles the target demographic, and thanks to the special effects, the budget is a reported $100 million versus Norbit's $60. Whoever greenlit this at 20th Century Fox shouldn't just be ashamed of themselves, they should lose their jobs.

Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com

**Read more articles by Michael Dance**

5 Reasons Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Shouldn't Be Split into Two Films

Last month, Warner Bros. triumphantly announced that they would be splitting Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – the seventh and final book of the landmark series – into two films in order to "do the book, and its many fans, justice."  Fervent fans, still ticked off that previous Harry Potter films have cut subplots and characters, rejoiced at the news: more Harry Potter to look forward to!  Yay!

But they're wrong.  This is a terrible idea, and I beg Steve Kloves – who's dutifully writing Part 1 of Deathly Hallows as we speak – to see reason and stand up to the studio.  What follows are just a few reasons why this is a really bad idea.  And in case there are any doubts to my motives, I'm a big Potter fan myself.

5. It's the most painfully obvious money-making scheme ever.

This one is such a no-brainer it almost doesn't need to be on the list: Warner Bros. is not splitting up the films as a commitment to artistic integrity.  They're doing it because Harry Potter is a license to print money.  Worldwide, Harry Potter is already the highest-grossing film franchise in history, beating the sum of the six Star Wars films and the sum of the twenty-one James Bond films; apparently unsatisfied with merely being the best, they now have three more films to add to that total.

4. The actors will get even older.

By itself, this doesn't bother me that much – on pretty much every movie and TV show with high school kids, the actors are all 25 or older, so having a 22-year-old Daniel Radcliffe playing a 17-year-old Harry Potter won't be too troublesome.  What will be annoying are all the idiotic reporters who don't realize this, and now have three more years to pester Radcliffe and company about how old they are.

3. They're destroying the book's arc in favor of cramming everything in.

Actually two related points here.  The first: cramming everything in is good, right?  We love all the minor characters and details!  Right? No.  There are books, and then there are movies.  If you literally translated a 700-page novel to the screen, it would be the most boring thing ever.  The goal is not to fit as much in as possible, but to keep the spine of the story and make it an exciting film. The second: when you do the adaptation, you have to make a movie work on its own terms.  A movie only using the plot of the first half of a book usually won't work.  Case in point: what will the climax of Part 1 be?  There is no built-in climax in the book!  J.K. Rowling saves that for the end, remember?  This is an extreme example, but it's like slicing the Mona Lisa in half, enlarging each half so they're as big as the original painting was, and selling them each as complete works of art.

2. It won't look pretty on my DVD shelf.

I'm a fan of the Saturday Night Live "Best Of" compilations, and I own quite a few of them on DVD.  They're all lined up nicely in a row, but standing out like a sore thumb is the Will Ferrell edition – because unlike the rest of them, he has two different "volumes."  The same aesthetic travesty will now beset the Harry Potter series.  (Okay...so I'm sometimes laughably obsessive-compulsive.)

1. The First Half of Deathly Hallows Drags Anyway.

The dirty little secret about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is that the first half of the book isn't that wonderful to begin with. It's easy to forget this, because the last two hundred pages are some of the most entertaining and memorable prose I've ever read – and I really mean that.  But the first half, after a promising start, soon settles into an eternity of "hiding in the woods" sequences that seem to exist only to make the book take place over one year (in order to fit the format of the other books.)  An eternity, let me again remind you, that has no climax.

And I haven't even gotten to the point that the first half of the book has no Hogwarts scenes.  None.  That's part of what makes the climax of the book so spectacular – we finally return to familiar territory for the mother of all showdowns.  As it stands, the first Deathly Hallows films will be all set up with no payoff, while the second half will be all payoff with no setup.  You have to have the films work individually.  But why care about that when you can make money?

Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com

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