1. Robin Hood A Couple Hundred Million Dollars Worth of Disaster.
You have to hand it to the entire Robin Hood team. They took a well-known story and just massacred it. Ridley Scott and company were clearly hoping to capitalize on your prior knowledge of Will Scarlet, Little John, Friar Tuck, and Maid Marion … and so they didn’t bother developing any of them as characters. Just oodles of odd choices and logic problems are presented throughout. The film is about nothing, really, and yet they manage to cram in a few dozen themes for good measure anyway. It feels like filmmaking by committee, where no one wants to make a strong choice, and so no choice is made at all. I watched it with about 500 people at The Cannes Film Festival and the general tenor of the crowd afterward was “Well, what happened there?” What happened was a bad movie, only surprising because the talent level and funding were clearly in place for a classic.
2. MTV Movie Awards, Your Table is Ready!
The Academy Awards are for political statements and The People’s Choice Awards are laughably irrelevant. So there is room for an awards show that rewards the films people actually watch on a massive scale. Enter The MTV Movie Awards, hosted by Aziz Ansari, pitting New Moon vs. The Hangover. A similar scenario played out last year when The Dark Knight faced off against Twilight. Now, you know The Dark Knight is a better film than Twilight. Chances are an anonymous poll of the Twilight cast would reveal that they also think The Dark Knight is a better movie than Twilight. But Twilight won, and MTV stepped back from any sort of relevance. Don’t make the same mistake this year! The Hangover deserves something for being wickedly funny, and rewarding New Moon for excellence is completely missing the point. We do need another decent awards show. Let it be you, MTV. Stick with the irreverence, but add a dash of relevance in too. The movie world, gulp, needs you.
3. Marilyn Monroe, Reconsidered.
We need a solid Marilyn Monroe biopic for a number of reasons. In no particular order
1. Ray and Walk the Line proved you can compete for Academy Awards with biopics.
2. Amelie proved studios still don’t know how to make a film about a larger-than-life woman
3. She’s the most famous woman in the past century… that you also know nothing about, other than she married a famous ballplayer, a famous playwright, and was rumored to have dated JFK, while he was married, right in front of everyone. That is what we call moxie.
What I’m getting at is this: Marilyn could be, should be, a gamechanger. A potential fly in the ointment – the synopsis. It actually reads like a JFK-level conspiracy film:
The company has optioned the life rights of Lionel Grandison, a deputy Los Angeles coroner who claims he was forced to falsify Monroe’s death certificate to say it was a suicide rather than murder.
Hmmm, could we just do a film without getting into wild speculation? The woman’s legend and mythos are plenty for a two-hour film. Let’s skip the shenanigans and head right into a serious character examination. Who is with me?
4. Brad Pitt to Undo all the Good Work The Hangover Accomplished?
Remember how great Mike Tyson’s tiger was in The Hangover? You came out of that film wanting a tiger, didn’t you? You can’t be blamed, the tiger seemed like it really had its act together. Sure, it was a little surly, but you’d be mad too if some drunken idiots kidnapped you. Enter Brad Pitt and Darren Aronofsky, set to mess with the current state of tiger-human relations:
The action adventure story takes place on the Siberian plain, where human development is encroaching on the tigers’ habitat — and one tiger turns on the intruders. With townspeople being tracked and hunted with an almost supernatural power, a conservationist game warden must face down the tiger. It is a fight that only one of them can win.
Spoiler alert: how many battles with trackes have tigers historically won? Ah well. Along with Life of Pi, this represents the tiger’s greatest cinematic comeback since “Eye of the Tiger” way back in Rocky III. The film is evidently based on a true story, so I suppose I can’t knock the “man killer” vibe. But I’ll be pulling for the tiger throughout. Brad Pitt has won enough battles (see: Troy).
On that note, I hope you all have a great weekend, full of outlaws and merry men.
Check out last week’s Movie Musings here
Laremy is the lead critic and senior producer for a website named Film.com. He’s also available on Twitter.
