Ghost Rider

Movie poster for Ghost Rider

Ghost Rider

Although it's only about a decade old, Ghost Rider was such a misfire for Marvel, that they pretty much like to pretend it never happened.

It's true critics slammed the film, but audiences liked it enough to justify a sequel, and there's a reason for that - slamming Ghost Rider is a little like picking on the special ed kid - it's an easy target.

Ghost Rider is based on the Marvel comic of the same name. In 1973 Marvel updated one of it's Golden Age properties, "Ghost Rider", a Western hero, hoping for the same success it had in updating other pre-Marvel legacy characters like The Human Torch, Ant-Man, and Sub-Mariner. The series had some cult success, lasting about a decade, but the comic itself was never as memorable as the incredible unique look of the titular anti-hero, Johnny Blaze, a motorcycle rider dressed in black leather with a flaming skull for a head.

Honestly, for most of it's life, the Ghost Rider comics were little more than forgettable diversions, with perhaps the most memorable issue coming near the end of the series when Roger Stern retold Ghost Rider's origin in issue #68 with a clever wraparound story with a twist ending set in a church.

So, right off the bat a movie adaptation was going to be... problematic. There's really no way you can make a two hour film where the protagonist is a talking, flaming skull not look cheesy, no matter how good the effects.

Then there's the casting. Nicolas Cage was chosen for Johnny Blaze, and though he's spent his entire career cultivating a motorcycle bad-boy pose, it's always seemed affected. His love interest is a similarly miscast Eva Mendes, who is way too much of a bombshell to play the middle-American girl next door type. Mendes probably regrets diving into comic films at all, as Ghost Rider and The Spirit were back-to-back flops that seem to have derailed her career.

So it would have been easy for Ghost Rider to be a complete disaster. But it wasn't. The film's saving grace comes from it's willingness to embrace it's own B movie-ness. By concentrating on action sequences, and giving Nic Cage cheesy one-liners and dialogue so cliche that it can't possibly be taken seriously, the film manages to save itself. And while the principal casting left a lot to be desired, the casting of supporting roles was spot on, including real cowboy cred in the form of Sam Elliot as the original Western Ghost Rider, and real biker cred in the form of Peter Fonda as Mephistopheles.

The film had a massive budget which was wisely sunk almost entirely into special effects, given that the acting wasn't going to carry this script. Yes, flaming skull head is cheesy, but it works. And the film is further dressed up with a great soundtrack, including a musical score by horror specialist Christopher Young, and songs by the likes of Ozzy and ZZ Top, and of course an updated version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky".

So while Ghost Rider pales in comparison to the high quality Marvel Studios films we've come to expect every summer since, it is at least as good - if not better - than most of it's fellow mid-2000s, special effects-driven, supernatural action thrillers like Underworld, Van Helsing, Constantine, etc.

*** out of *****

Iron Fist (season one)

Netflix "Iron Fist" may be the weakest Marvel series on Netflix...
but compared to Marvel's shows on networks like ABC and Hulu...
well, that's a different story

Iron Fist (season one)

Marvel's most underrated TV show

I was a bit apprehensive about this show going in, first because I'm a fan of most of the other Marvel superheroes, but I've never been a particular Iron Fist fan, and second because of the overwhelming number of bad reviews it's received.

The chief complaints seemed to be: 1) it's the weakest of the Marvel Netflix series, 2) Iron Fist (AKA Danny Rand) is unlikeable, 3) there is no awesome villain like Kingpin, Cottonmouth, or Killgrave, 4) it strays pretty far from the comic, and 5) the fight sequences aren't that good.

While all those things are technically true, I was pleasantly surprised to find the show was not only not bad, but actually quite good. How can the above criticisms be true and yet the series is still good? Well, let's break each of those criticisms down one by one.

1) It's the weakest of the Marvel Netflix series.
Yes. But talk about a high bar! Daredevil was so good that Netflix chose it as one of it's first original series. It and Jessica Jones are A+ shows - some of the best TV (let alone superhero) shows ever made in the 75 year history of the medium, and Luke Cage isn't far behind. So yeah, Iron Fist isn't that good, but it's at least a B+ if not better, which puts it well above most of the rest of the shows that have ever aired, and it's easily superior to the non-Netflix Marvel shows. In fact, although Luke Cage gets a lot of praise, I'd argue that it's strengths are primarily from the novelty of an all black cast, and the wonderful Harlem setting, nightclub singers, etc. but it's story line is pretty standard vigilante-vs.-crime boss, not terribly different from Daredevil, while Iron Fist has a far more nuanced plot.

2) Danny Rand is un-likeable
This is a matter of opinion, but I'll concede that he isn't the most heroic of superheroes. But this is one of the reasons I find the show so compelling. He's the youngest of all the Marvel TV heroes, and he spent his entire life living in a monastery, is it any wonder he's not relatable? Yes, he is incredibly naive. To portray him otherwise would be a disservice to the character. Yes, he does spend a majority of the series being a tool (literally) of the bad guys, but then so does fan-favorite Colleen Wing (whose inclusion is often cited as one of the points in the show's favor) and she wasn't raised in a monastery, so what's her excuse?

3) There is no awesome villain like Kingpin, Cottonmouth, or Killgrave

Again, this is true. Vincent D'Onofrio, Mahershala Ali, and David Tennant steal every scene they're in as the respective bosses of the other Marvel Netflix shows. But this again is the result of Iron Fist being structured different. Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage all have vendettas against specific people. Danny Rand has a vendetta also, but he doesn't know against whom. There is no one crime boss here, but a number of shadowy figures and organizations exerting influence over him and the world in general. This show is less like The Adventures of Superman, and more like The X-Files when it comes to that. Which means while there are some organization leaders, there are no singular supervillains to dominate the storyline. And more importantly, there are a lot more shades of grey here. Just as nearly every "heroic" character is in some ways unsympathetic (qv #2 above), nearly every villain here is in some ways sympathetic. Instead of one likeable hero and one likeable villain, you get an array of characters that are all to some degree both likeable and un-likeable.

4) It strays pretty far from the comic.
The fans of the comic may have a legitimate beef here. I can't comment too much since, as stated before, I was never a huge fan of this particular comic. But it seems to me that all the Marvel TV shows depart from the comics to some degree. Perhaps someday fans of Power Man and Iron Fist will get the straight adaptation they've always wanted. Until then they may have to be satisfied that like other B-list Marvel anti-heroes like The Punisher and Ghost Rider, they're fortunate enough to make it to the screen at all. And even if it's not as faithful to the creator's original visions it beats seeing them given the Adam West Batman treatment.

5) The fight sequences aren't that good.
Hogwash. Yeah, compared to the amazing fight choreography of Daredevil the fight sequences aren't that good. But what other show is? Again we have a situation of falling short of a really high bar. Martial arts films have gotten so stylized that many were probably expecting that here. But if the fights alone were given The Raid type treatment, there wouldn't be nearly enough time to develop the plot. As it is, the series resolves itself a tad too quickly (one of my chief complaints). The decision to forego a lot of extended fight sequences is one of the more questionable ones made by the showrunners, but one only hopes that they take a cue from the masses and hire a Hong Kong action expert for next season. For most people, though, the fights are more than adequate to tell the tale.

**** out of *****

Can Ready Player One make virtual reality work on film?

Ready Player One

***

Ready Player One is not the penultimate video game movie we've been waiting for.

It seems like every movie about a video game has been a near disaster. Perhaps it's because video games have historically relied less on story and more on game mechanics; perhaps because in order to be faithful to the game experience the genre is too narrow; perhaps its just been bad luck.

When virtual reality was new in the 1990s, there was a spate of movies like, The Net, The Lawnmower Man, and Virtuosity, that attempted to capitalize on the craze, only to find that the idea sounds great on paper, but no one really wants to watch other people play video games on a big screen for two hours.

With both the video game movie trend and the virtual reality trend mostly in the rear view mirror at this point, along comes Ready Player One, the adaptation of the hit novel. And if anyone could be successful at bringing this story to life, surely it would be Steven Spielberg, whose name is virtually (see what I did there?) synonymous with big budget movie spectacle. Could he do for video games what he did for theme parks with Jurassic Park?

Well, sadly the answer is just: sort of. While Ready Player One isn't as bad as Spielberg's poorest movies, it seems to have more in common with Hook and The Adventures of Tintin, than it does with Raiders of the Lost Ark, or The Minority Report. In fact it kind of feels like a cross between Hook and Tintin, with the protagonists being the orphaned kids of the former in the real world, and the cartoony characters of the latter when in the game (where most of the action takes place).

There is so much reliance on emotionally flat motion capture CG characters that the film often feels like an extended cutscene from a video game than an actual adventure film. And to make matters worse, while the film is filled with pop culture references, they mostly come from Warner Bros. properties, and given the studio isn't as steeped in the gaming platform as its rivals at SONY (Playstation) or Vivendi (Activision), or Disney (Electronic Arts), there aren't nearly as many Easter eggs for gamers as there are for movie fans.

But ultimately all the digital pyrotechnics can't make up for the thin human story at the core, which is why a film like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, even with half the budget, succeeds where Ready Player One, just feels like two hours at a video arcade.

A Wrinkle in Time

Oprah as a supreme being... says everything you need to know.

A Wrinkle in Time

It's a bit of a wrinkle in timing

Every once in a while someone decides to make a film about a classic of literature, one that has been so influential on so many subsequent writers that the resulting film is often a) so careful to respect its source material that it takes no chances, and b) seems incredibly derivative, given all the adaptations of subsequent material that were originally influenced by it. Such is the case with Disney's adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

In a day and age when bookstores have huge "young adult" sections dominated by series like Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and Twilight, it's easy to forget that back when A Wrinkle in Time first appeared there was no such thing as the "young adult" market. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, and their knock-offs, were the closest thing to any type of genre fiction aimed at tweens.

But oh, what the intervening decades have brought! So many authors have been influenced by A Wrinkle in Time that watching this latest Disney iteration (yes, Disney studios have even adapted it once before in the early 2000s) reminds you of so many other films that have done it better. The plot involves the daughter of a NASA astronaut who goes through a tesseract and has to be rescued - does that sound like Interstellar? It is, yet Interstellar did it better. The great danger is the all-corrupting "It". Does that sound like the film IT? It is, though IT did it better. But A Wrinkle in Time is a kids movie! Still there are other kids movies, such as The Never Ending Story, that also do it better - the flight on the back of the undulating flying dog/dragon predates a similar scene in this film where the kids fly on the back of an undulating Reese Witherspoon; The Never Ending Story's themes of family and the danger of the growing "Nothing" make it a similar, but far better film. Even other kids movies like Willy Wonka, and Disney's own Tomorrowland tread similar territory, without being quite so sappy, and would make time better spent.

Which is not to say that A Wrinkle in Time is irredeemably bad, it's just flat, and the timing here is about 50 years too late. Had the film been released in the 1960s, it would have been groundbreaking.

**

American Gigolo

American Gigolo

The film that set the style for the 80s

Every so often a film comes along that defines the look of an era. On February 1, 1980 the film American Gigolo was released, making it among the first major studio films of that decade, and the look of the film set the stage for a radical change in style for the 1980s. Gone were bell bottoms, leisure suits, wide ties and brown, orange and green clothes. Even the film's poster, featuring the film's lead, Richard Gere smartly dressed in an austere environment, in the striped shadows of a Venetian blind exudes 80s cool.

The film opens up with to the strains of Blondie's "Call Me", a song that practically epitomizes 80s New Wave, and quite frankly is far more memorable than the film itself. Though the movie defines the look of the of the 1980s, it's hardly notable for much else. The plot is a plodding two hours of conventional melodrama with Gere's character Julian sleeping with wealthy women, and eventually framed for murdering one of them. The film takes forever to get started, and then forever to wrap up.

Much like one of Julian's trysts - or the decade of the 1980s itself for that matter - American Gigolo is ultimately an emotionally shallow, style over substance affair, most notable for coming along, and perhaps contributing to, a sea change in the American cultural landscape.

(*** out of *****)

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (spoiler free review)

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

(Absolutely Spoiler Free Review)

At GC8 we always try to give spoiler free reviews - but we are EXTRA cautious with the Star Wars franchise, given how everybody wants to be a blank slate going in... to try to achieve that first awe and wonder you had seeing Star Wars for the first time when you were seven years old.

What we can say is that so far the Disney films have been better than the Prequels (including the Disney film that was a prequel: Rogue One), but not as good as the original trilogy. Star Wars: The Last Jedi, continues that trend, and is probably the best of the Disney Star Wars films so far.

Having set up the story with The Force Awakens, and Rogue One, The Last Jedi is free to finally go in depth (two and a half hours of depth) to "finish" (yeah, right) what they've started.

And frankly, it's pretty good. We've finally reached a level where practical effects and CGI blend nicely, all the character get plenty of screen time, and most of the original cast is back.

The downside is that none of the new characters (Rei, Kylo, Finn, etc.) are as charismatic or interesting as Luke, Leia, C-3P0, R2-D2, and Chewbacca, and so when the latter are not on screen, you immediately miss them.

Which brings us full circle - to that biggest reason for a spoiler-free review; the desire to go in as a blank slate, and see something you've never seen before with the awe and wonder Star Wars inspired when you were seven. The reality is this series is not going to do that, and it seems almost futile to expect that it ever will again. The more jaded will say it's because you are no longer seven years old, but the reality is that there is an overall familiarity, a been-there-done-that to the series at this point. It's still entertaining and fun, just not all that surprising.








(**** out of 5)

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

The X-Files: I Want to Believe movie poster

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

After pretty much everyone had moved on, The X-Files came up with an encore performance that reminded us why we wanted to believe in the series.

There comes a point in almost every TV series, where the show peaks after which comes a decline and eventual cancellation. Time and time again we've seen that, with rare exception, it's almost always a downhill slide, often with an embarrassing made-for-TV "movie" pilot for a relaunch.

And so it has been for the X-Files. What started as a Kolchak: The Night Stalker type paranormal investigator show - where FBI agent, and true believer Fox Mulder, and skeptical partner Dana Scully investigated a new "X-File" each week - soon devolved into a tedious slog through an overarching alien conspiracy story with endless loose plot threads.

So it's not surprising that even many fans of the show gave up on it after it was canceled and revived to the silver screen in the film The X-Files: Fight the Future, which centered again on the alien conspiracy story yet still failed to resolve anything.

A decade after that film, a second X-Files film made it to the screen, The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Judging by the box office numbers, even most fans chose to pass on this one. It did only about 10% of the ticket sales of Fight the Future.

That's a shame, because The X-Files: I Want to Believe is actually a far superior film. Almost completely ignoring the alien conspiracy angle it focuses on what the show did best - the standalone supernatural thriller.

The plot involves a now retired Mulder and Scully, who are drawn back in to help the FBI when an agent disappears and the only clue to her whereabouts are discovered by a priest with psychic visions. The case soon puts Mulder, Scully and the FBI on the trail of an organ harvesting ring. In doing so, Mulder and Scully must face some of their biggest personal demons, Mulder's obsession with his sister's abduction and Scully's Catholic faith, as well as their inability to commit to each other. But all this character development is handled deftly, without taking away from the driving plot, and one would need no prior knowledge of the series to understand the central premise: both characters want to believe in something.

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson have rarely looked or acted this well on any screen, large or small, and while it's not as good as the best episodes of the series itself, this "forgotten" X-Files film was at least as good, if not better than most Hollywood's other "supernatural thrillers" that were all the rage (thanks at least in part to the success of The X-Files on television) in the first decade of the 2000s.

It would take nearly another decade before the series would return to TV, bumbling along with predictably middling reviews, but The X-Files: I Want to Believe stands as a glimpse at the promise the series once had.

(***1/2 out of *****)