John Carter reviews

POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Sunday, April 1, 2012 14:03
VIEWED: 18231
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ZZETTA13

Sunday, March 11, 2012 6:34 PM

Howdy ShinyG!!!

Yepper, it’s time for us Sci/Fi folk to take a stand!

I had a co-worker of mine say last week that he thought it looked stupid!! John Carter jumping off of a meteor to kill big monkeys? Arriving on Mars in a spaceship to create havoc? I could see that he had no idea, the poor soul! I explained to him that this wasn’t some current script-writer trying to make a buck (or a trillion) it was from a writer of our not so distant past. A writer that I enjoy and admire.

Anyway this same co-worker has two young boys that he was just telling me are really into Star Wars. He also loves to be part of their lives as they watch the dvds together. What surprises await him if he were to see this movie with his young offspring?

********
Just a side note. I went to visit a friend of mine that owns a comic book store after the show and he told me that he was at the Comic-Expo in Dallas a few weeks ago and saw Adam Baldwin as he walked the isles just cruising around. The fans were all over him. I would have loved to have been there and pick his brain, but alas, I had to work.

Adam is a true working craftsman, as are Nathan, Jewel, Alan & all the others. I know that they are aware of their fans, but are they aware that we would support them, and Joss through a sequel of the BDM?

At some point it isn’t a matter of money (as long as you can break even) it’s a matter of art! The people creating the art are the ones that matter. The money investment will come for eons after the art has been created. An idea that FOX, in their limited mindset couldn‘t see upon cancellation of FF back in 02……just my opinion! Z

HKCAVALIER

Sunday, March 11, 2012 6:34 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by lwaves:
So, how would it sit with someone that knows absolutely zero about this apart from the trailer and what has been mentioned in the couple of threads on this site.

All I had to go on was the word of Lady Cavalier who'd just read A Princess of Mars and loved it, and my teenage familiarity with the art of Frank Frazetta. The best thing I can say about the story is that the movie actually has one. You do have to follow along. You do have to be interested in alien cultures and the peculiar politics that might develop on an alien world. That's what's so sad about the marketing, but predictable. Here we have an engrossing, slighty complex narrative, a credible love story, a fascinating portrait of an alien world and "oh nose!" says the suits, "We can'ts have pipples wanting that, we must turn movie into whizbang in trailers! Yes, more whizbang!" Very sad. Not to say the whizbang isn't there, but, to my mind, all of it is earned. One sequence, the first time JC really goes to town with his martian sword I found actually profoundly moving, heartbreaking even, the way the film maker cuts between the past and the present. Chris, you know the scene I mean? Did it hit you that way, too?

Quote:
Is it easy enough to get into or do you need to know the source material?

As I said, you do have to follow along and find the world itself interesting. There's a good deal of Martian vocabulary that they don't spoon feed you, so you have to catch on, but it's all pretty clear soon enough.

Quote:
What's the acting like?

I was very pleasantly surprised by the acting, across the board. Think British miniseries solid. A bunch of actors you want to immediately look up on IMDB. I was particularly impressed with Princess Dejah Thoris. Not only was she absolutely able to pull off wearing hardly anything, but she did it without losing her poise and nobility. And she was also quite convincing as an accomplished swordswoman.

John Carter was excellent as well. A good deal of southern gentlemanliness that any fan of Firefly should recognize and appreciate.

And Willem Defoe rocks the four armed green alien. Really, really fine work there. Andy Serkis better watch his back is all I'm sayin'.

Quote:
My biggest problem is what I stated before in the other thread - the trailer makes it seem like a scifi Clash Of The Titans. All macho one-man army stuff with 99% CGI and cliched lines.

Yeah, boo! Effing trailers, man. So estupido selling this property like it's Clash of the Titans dreck. Grrr! Argh! The thing I most and immediately appreciated about the film was the sense of storytelling. You know, like (nearly) every Pixar movie you've ever seen? You're just so thoroughly immersed in this world from the get go. Beautifully done, I say.

Quote:
In your opinion would an uninitiated scifi fan get the same feeling (or the same out of the movie) or is it largely because you are already fans?

Not already a fan, but a convert now.

HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

CHRISISALL

Sunday, March 11, 2012 6:39 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by HKCavalier:
Chris, you know the scene I mean? Did it hit you that way, too?

I was actually having a couple of tears rolling down my cheek...

The Mal-like Chrisisall

LWAVES

Sunday, March 11, 2012 11:11 PM

Thankyou all for your comments.
You have cleared up any doubt in me and I will now be seeing this movie, don't know when yet, but it will happen.

I'd take story over style any day and I certainly don't mind depth or paying attention. It's why movies are there IMO - to tell a story. Too many films these days spoon-feed you with what little plot they have and give you details that you already figured out leaving less time to develop the characters or the world. It's great that there seems to be a scifi film that seems to cater to the more intellectual viewer.
Plus I am familiar with Frazetta's art but just never connected the two. Should be interesting to see how it translates to the screen.

Thanks to you all again.

"The greatest invention ever is not the wheel. It's the second wheel." - Rich Hall

CHRISISALL

Sunday, March 11, 2012 11:28 PM

Hey man, enjoy it. Box office take suggests it'll be a one shot deal. Maybe better that way. No way to be let down by a possibly inferior sequel dictated to by the money men (more explosions in the next one, more funny moments for the kids, more green screen to save costs, etc.).
Back to reading the 2nd & 3rd books for me!

The Mal-like Chrisisall

FREMDFIRMA

Sunday, March 11, 2012 11:36 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by chrisisall:
The marketing campaign for John Carter is every bit as well thought out & executed as the one for Serenity.

Ooo, ouch, that was a looow bloowww.
*laughs*

-Frem

I do not serve the Blind God.

CHRISISALL

Sunday, March 11, 2012 11:40 PM

I knew you'd get it.

The Mal-like Chrisisall

STORYMARK

Monday, March 12, 2012 4:45 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by chrisisall:
Oh, and there was a reason they changed the title from John Carter of Mars to simply John Carter (but you have to see the movie- it's just a little thing).

Methinks you are msitaking "excuse" for a "reason" - as the director has made it clear he wanted the title to include "of Mars" and that Disney insisted on dropping it due to the "Mars Needs Moms" flop and focus groups.

Note to self: Come up with some pity-baiting sig line so everyone sees how persecuted poor wittle me is. Then I can be just like Rappy!

TWO

Monday, March 12, 2012 5:53 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Storymark:
. . . Disney insisted on dropping "of Mars" due to the "Mars Needs Moms" flop and focus groups.

Movie marketing in the good old days -- June 15, 1981 --

The marketing executives are the new high priests of the movie business. It’s natural. They’re handling important sums of money. And they dispense the money dramatically, in big campaigns that flood out over the country. It’s not unusual for more to be spent on marketing a picture than on making it, and this could become commonplace. (Everybody takes it for granted that more is spent selling soap than manufacturing it.) Right now, the easier a project looks to market, the easier it is to finance. And the scope of what these priests think they can sell becomes narrower all the time. Except for the occasional prestige picture that offers middle-class group therapy (“Ordinary People,” “The Four Seasons”), it’s all fantasy. There isn’t a human being on the screen. Having lost the habitual moviegoers, the studio heads have no confidence that if they approve projects they like, an audience will be attracted; they’re trapped by empirical evidence to the contrary. And so they listen to the marketing men, with their priestly jargon—“normatives,” “skewed,” “bi-modal audience.” The mysterious phrases are soothing to the worried studio heads. And when the new geniuses are given what they want—comic-strip pulp or slobby horror—they swing into action heroically. Daggers menace us in TV commercials, magazines, and newspapers, and sometimes the slob movies do become hits. But if you boil out the feathers what it comes down to is: When there’s a flop, the marketing men cluck their tongues and say, “Well, boys, the picture just didn’t have it.” When there’s a hit, the marketing men pound their chests like King Kong and say, “Boy, did we know how to sell it!”

These marketing divisions are a relatively new development. (In earlier years, there were two much smaller departments—advertising and sales.) Their growing power isn’t in any special effectiveness in selling pictures; it’s in their ability to keep pictures that don’t lend themselves to an eye-popping thirty-second commercial from being made or, if they’re made, from being heard of. In the new Hollywood wisdom, anything to do with people’s lives belongs on TV. (As a result, television now makes contact with us in ways that movies no longer do.)
www.newyorker.com/archive/1981/06/15/1981_06_15_132_TNY_CARDS_00011946
2

The Joss Whedon script for "Serenity," where Wash lives, is
Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/two

HKCAVALIER

Monday, March 12, 2012 6:28 PM

Yeah, I'm so pissed about the dumbass marketing for this movie. All they had to do--ALL THEY HAD TO DO--was flash one word across the screen as often as possible in every trailer: PIXAR. Pixar director, Pixar writer, Pixar effects, Pixar, Pixar, Pixar! It's a Pixar movie, in terms of quality, storytelling, originality.

And there were so many things to show in the trailers other than JC jumping around and big white gorillas. Dejah Thoris kicking ass and taking names after John tells her, "Stand behind me, Princess" and then after she dispatches several, mumbles "Maybe I should stand behind you."

Baby tharks bursting out of their shells.

Woola running across the sands.

Charming, fantastical stuff.

Ach! What a waste...

HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

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