Adaptation Alley

This is how you make a comic movie

While perusing the movie site Aint It Cool News I came across two exciting things for comic book fans. There was the premiere of the new trailer for what I will call the Wolverine movie (aka the absurdly and unnecessarily long titled X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and the first review for Frank Miller's film adaptation of the Will Eisner comic classic the Spirit.

On one hand, you have the Wolverine movie, filled with comic delights such as Gambit and Deadpool finally making it into a movie, a plot delving into Wolverine's very interesting life and origin, and old man Logan getting down and dirty with some good ol' violence. Like he should be. As a movie fan, you have Liev Schreiber flat out dominating the trailer with his portrayal of Sabretooth, you have Danny Huston chewing the scenery as Stryker (I contest that Michael C. Hall would have filled it better, but that's neither here nor there - at least we can save Hall for Arcade further down the line), and you have Jackman looking as in his element as you can get.

In short, get excited folks. I get the feeling that Gavin Hood may actually deliver another good installment of mutant related comic adaptations.


Then on the other hand you have the review of the Spirit, a movie rife with challenges, not the least of which is an amateurish (at best) director in comic god Miller and an absurdly hyperstylized trailer. This review compares Battlefield Earth (one of the worst adaptations and movies ever) favorably to the Spirit.

Words used in that previous sentence did in fact include "compares," "favorably," and "Battlefield Earth."

You there? You five guys (I used to be one of you) who were holding out hope that Miller's adaptation could possibly be serviceable? Give up. Regardless of how poorly written or ridiculous the actual review may be, odds are this just confirms the worst - this movie is going to suck, and badly at that.

That's what always gets me. These movies have great source material. How can you not take decades of material and craft the best stories into something everyone wants to see? I just don't get it. Especially with the Spirit as it adapts one of the best comic stories ever in the "Sand Serif" arc. With all of the confidence the Wolvie preview gets me, movies like the Spirit take it away.

I really want to believe that Mendes and Caruso will do right by Preacher and Y the Last Man. While I can't expect perfect, please, please, please take us towards Wolverine and ignore everything that comes from the Spirit.

Yes!

Apparently Sam Mendes, he of American Beauty and Road to Perdition fame, is going to be directing an adaptation of Preacher, my favorite comic series of all time.

I'm just going to let that sink in for a second. Mendes. Preacher. Awesome.

We've come a long ways since the guy that directed Daredevil producing the TV series.

Congrats to Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, you guys have gotten pretty much the biggest swing in published material adaptation ever.

Lazy Tuesday (now with links!)

I'm pretty sure they're trying to kill me at work. Okay, perhaps that's a tad on the dramatic side, but my responsibility levels are through the roof and I'm fairly certain that they think I'm some sort of marketing equivalent of Atlas. Between that and being physically beat from a lack of sleep and intense basketball after work with Colver, I don't have the energy to really think something out. There were a number of things I wanted to post about, but due to the lack of energy I'll do another smattering of mini-posts with links to satisfy my horrible, horrible addiction to blogging.

Enjoy!

• Think comics are just for nerds? You know who disagrees? Kobe Bryant. Read this awesome article about what his reading materials were for the trip to Beijing for the Olympics (100 Bullets and Preacher! Good call Kobe.) along with pics for proof. Thanks to blogger "To Infinity and Beyond?" for dropping that knowledge on me.
• CERN lit up the world's largest particle collider - the Large Hadron Collider - in an attempt to discover how atoms are created (amongst other things, such as finding God's particle in the mess). Some skeptics suggest this could be catastrophic to the Earth if things go wrong, as a black hole could potentially open. Clearly scientists are too busy making particle colliders to watch sci-fi, as they haven't thought of the possibilities of zombie breakouts, monsters from other dimensions, or even big glowing fields sucking in all metal and people in the room.
• Portugal. the Man's new album Censored Colors is streaming on their myspace page. In typical P.tM fashion, it's massively different than their other albums but is also really, really good. Congrats on being perpetually surprising and good guys. You represent Alaska well.
• Suck it Kindle! A company called Plastic Logic is working on an e-reader similar to Amazon's Kindle that is 8.5 by 11 (like a standard piece of paper), light weight, flexible, loaded with wi-fi, adobe/office compatibility, and has a battery that lasts days. It pretty much rules, and is looking at release some time in the first half of 2009.
• Proving people really can waste time and money on anything, a group at the Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, England did a study of 36,000 people to figure out if musical tastes have any relation to personality types. Their findings? People who listen to indie rock are creative, but are lazy, unkind, not generous, and have low self esteem. I disagree.
• Michael Caine claims that Johnny Depp is playing the Riddler and Philip Seymour Hoffman is playing the Penguin in the next Batman movie. I'd love to know how he knows this when Christopher Nolan has yet to start writing a script. Not a huge fan of Depp in that role - it's a pinch obvious and Depp would be more distracting than anything.
• Preacher was sent packing by HBO, as they claimed it "was just too dark and too violent and too controversial." To this I reply with, did they even read the series before optioning it? It's about a reverend powered by the word of god on a road trip with his hitman ex-girlfriend and a vampire to get God to atone for his sins. Yeah. They had to think that was going to be a family show.
• When did James Marsden become so funny? Check out the red band trailer for this new teen comedy Sex Drive to see Marsden really max out on the ridiculousness meter, plus a surprisingly entertaining looking teen comedy surrounding it.