The news is that the site for the movie “Simple Jack”, which stars Ben Stiller’s character Tugg Speedman in a parody of Hollywood stars taking roles as mentally handicapped people (Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, Juliette Lewis in The Other Sister etc.) in hopes of getting an Oscar. A bit more info here. I keep forgetting the word “retard” is offensive in the world outside of teens, 20-somethings and the internet. But yeah, the whole issue appears to have been that the background context (that it’s a parody of something that should perhaps be considered more offensive, yet accepted as commonplace) was overlooked and/or not known.

Here’s the poster in question. Judge for yourself.

The controversy hasn’t pulled the plug on any of the other sites though – more have gone up. http://www.jeffportnoy.com/, the site for Jack Black’s character and http://www.fatties2.com/, the site for his grossout comedy that stars him as 4 different characters. As well as that, the site for http://www.alpa-chino.com/, Alpa Chino, one of the other characters and that of his product “Booty Sweat” are also up, as well as his Myspace. Also Make Pretty Skin Clinic, Cody Effects – Pyrotechnic for hire, Tropic Thunder: The Book. I think that’s most of them.

But they still haven’t responded to my panda email :(

• Ghost in the Shell remake rights picked up by Dreamworks – pushed ahead by Steven Spielberg and with no one but producer Steven Paul (of SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Bratz and Ghost Rider fame) attached to the project so far. And before you laugh at the hapless Shirow fans – he’s also attached to the Tekken and Castlevania remakes.
• Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse – Cowboy Bebop remake announced, with Keanu Reeves attached to play Spike Spiegel. It does say it’s just a rumour, but the previously announced info, with Keanu’s agent/manager Erwin Stoff as producer attached points in that direction. Really now. It’ll be horrible.
• Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation has teaser footage released. I don’t care, to be honest. I saw the trailer ahead of The Dark Knight and it was a confusing mess. Calling Zack Snyder visionary is a joke. Dawn of the Dead came on the heels of 28 Days Later, 300 was after Sin City and Watchmen is coming after basically every single other goddamn comicbook movie. He’s a hack who makes technically sound but incredibly shallow and unsatisfying films – calling him Michael Bay for fanboys does Michael Bay a disservice. His films have the potential to be so much more, but I have this feeling that he’s sitting there in the background going “Oh shit, the audience is about to start thinking! Quick! Stop them! Spoonfeed them some more information!”.
• Just when you thought Singstar couldn’t get any gayer after Singstar Anthems (probably the best of the Singstar games out there along with Singstar 90s), Singstar: Hits from the Musicals is allegedly in development. I do like that they’re going an anti-Rock Band/Guitar Hero route with these games, and I admit, “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” is damn tempting.
• Mythological Veterinarian sounds like an incredibly cute concept, though the whole point of comedies is that they’re cheap to make and this sounds like it’ll need a lot of creature effects. Still, gonna keep my eye on it.
• Spiderman Musical wtf. Directed by Julie Taymor, so obviously they want to recapture the magic of The Lion King Musical (interesting trivia – Timon and Pumbaa’s dialogue is localised for the various regions, even within countries. In the Japanese run, the Nagoya, Tokyo and Fukuoka productions each had different regional accents for the characters). But yeah.
  

  Arache, a beautiful, boastful young woman turned into a spider for her hubris and lack of respect for the gods. She subsequently appears to Peter Parker and the audience as in turn a powerful spider-woman who comes from another time to inspire Peter; an otherworldly lover; a bride; a terrifying (and sexy) dark goddess of vengeance; a dance partner in a charged and violent spiders dance of death; and, finally, a lonely, fragile young woman.”

  This just doesn’t make sense.

As well as all that, the success of The Dark Knight – currently number 1 on IMDB, breaking records left and right. And of course, the viral marketing campaign was a huge success. Indeed, even just Gotham Cable News is a good watch to prepare for the film or to watch later as a supplement.

So naturally, everyone and their dog wants to start viral marketing or an ARG of some kind.

• What looks like it’s trying to be this year’s Halo 2 Ilovebees – Resistance 2 has a game going on at http://www.getawarjob.com/, where you can sign up to join their army (but I wouldn’t recommend it – they’ll test drugs on you).
• Need for Speed has a viral site up at http://www.whichroadtotake.com/, which is… kinda lame really. You click around and find video clips. The weird numbers spell out “Undercover” when inputted into a cellphone with predictive text.
• The game Too Human has a weird one up, apparently about the Goblin Man of Norway. Yeah I don’t know what the fuck.
• Apparently there’ll be some sort of Watchmen related viral material – naturally, they’re all about the bandwagon. The source for this is apparently somewhere within G4’s coverage of SDCC, but… ugh, don’t want to touch that shit.
• Lost is starting up again, apparently. They had a fairly successful campaign a few years back, and at this year’s Comic Con was recruiting for the Dharma initiative.
• Tropic Thunder, the comedy about a group of actors filming a war film (Kung Fu Panda and Iron Man go to the Jungle), has a few viral marketing sites up which are rather giggle-worthy. http://www.tuggspeedman.com/ and http://www.kirklazarus.com/ are both up, as are the various websites for the movies they’ve been in. I tried emailing the Panda Relocation Foundation regarding a panda, but they haven’t gotten back to me…
• Can probably expect something from the upcoming Star Trek film as well – the creator JJ Abrams is big on the viral thing, what with Lost and Cloverfield both having big online campaigns.

Whew, I think that’s it for now.

Ben X is about a boy called Ben with Asperger’s syndrome (a type of autism). Online, he’s a powerful warrior called Ben X, but in real life he’s a shy, misunderstood bullied teenager, and the film details his struggles.

Personally, while it was ambitious, I thought it failed on a number of levels. There were a few neat factors – most notably the incorporation of the MMORPG ArchLord and it was reasonably competent, but it just wasn’t mindblowing on any level. And I expect mindblowing from my festival films dammit!

So our poor Ben is played by an actor at least 10 years too old. He’s perhaps a bit too effective in his acting his part as a scary loser, because I thoroughly lost sympathy for him partway through and starting hoping the bullies would beat the crap out of him at one point. I guess it doesn’t help that I’m used to watching Asian films, which can be pretty extreme with the bullying scenes (even in comedies like Shaolin Soccer), and comparatively while Ben’s situation sucks, I find it hard to feel sorry for him (though part of that is because I’m just a bitch). Though it was well acted – I was especially taken by the fact that the same nervous tic is repeated by both the actor playing the young Ben and the older ben – and there are other instances of similar attention to detail.

Ben uses way too much internal monologue, because the director also wrote the novel upon which it was based. I had a writing teacher who said that we shouldn’t be afraid to slaughter our sacred cows (those being special, beautiful lines we love and don’t want to get rid of), and this guy really needed that advice. Internal monologues should be saved for bad TV.

The relationship between the guy and the girl kinda pissed me off. Anti-social internet guy winds up with a girlfriend who looks like this:

I really do hate watching movies where the guy gets a girl way too attractive for him. Their relationship overall was poorly depicted. Why would she know his cellphone number but not have his photo after a year? More importantly, why would a guy like that who doesn’t understand normal social interaction find anything attractive in a normal girl? Hell, is she a normal girl? Her personality is far too poorly defined. I feel the movie didn’t establish their relationship at all beyond a cursory conventional romantic thing, so there was a major lack of believability there.

For that matter, his online life wasn’t really defined beyond being “Level 80″ which was a shame, because it’s always quite interesting to see people’s online double lives, especially when contrasted against their real lives. Basically I think the writer was bluffing his way through the entire online aspect of the film (fucking noobs), which means that the main hook of the plot was… toothless (yay mixed metaphors!). The director also doesn’t know when to show and don’t tell, and I saw the ending coming a mile away.

The structure of the film is really disjointed as it’s intercut with “documentary” type interview footage with various characters – all of this is meant to convey some sense of dread, but instead cluttered up the film with largely empty dialogue (”It was only a matter of when.” “It’s sad when kids like this do things like this.” type stuff) and the desired effect could have been achieved more subtly (though it’s possible some parts to make it make more sense were cut during editing, or were from the original novel). But instead all it did was slow the film down at strange points, and could have been cut entirely, I think.

What I did like was the visual linking of the game world to the real world – the HUD would appear, the game mechanics would be mentioned as a metaphor for Ben’s life and so on, but these are applied pretty haphazardly. There’s also a weird Christian element that meshes poorly overall.

Don’t get me wrong though. It wasn’t a terrible film by any means – it was competently done. Just it fell short of the expectations I had of it given its presence in the Film Festival, plus my standards are absurdly high. The old man sitting a few seats down from me walked out, though I think there was an element of generation gap in that. I think to its target audience, it’ll hit its mark no matter what, but personally for me I feel it was lacking.

To be honest, this year I’m pretty underwhelmed by the range of films. I’m usually pretty big on seeing anime at the cinema, but there isn’t even very much of that. But this is a long entry nonetheless…

Anime is represented by Evangelion 1.0 and Vexille. I’d never heard of Vexille so I looked it up – it’s by the director of the live action Ping Pong. It’s also already been out in the States on DVD for the past month, ugh. So shit, basically – I’m pretty pissed that Madman NZ have screwed us out of any chance of seeing anything good. I’ll still wind up seeing Evangelion, but… eh. It’s at the Skycity cinemas, for one, which is highly unatmospheric (for any non-locals reading this, the main screenings are done in the theatre from the modern King Kong movie – you know, where they’re exhibiting Kong and he breaks free and escapes into New York).

There’s Sukiyaki Western Django, for the Takashi Miike fans here (the guy who did Audition). It sounds… kind of odd, but that’s Miike for you. I still have no idea what it’s about, so read the synopsis for yourself.

The new movie by Nobuhiro Yamashita (directed Linda Linda Linda, and The Matsugane Potshot Affair from last year’s film fest), which is apparently based on a shoujo manga series. It’s been given the horribly bland English title of A Gentle Breeze in the Village. A good watch if you like boring tedium/slice of life stories, I imagine – Linda Linda Linda was worth seeing for the opening tracking shot through the high school festival preparations alone. Also I Just Didn’t Do It, which won a boatload of things at the Japanese Academy Awards. Still looks… eh.

Lots of Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese film for those of you who are into that sort of thing, including a retrospective on Edward Yang. Top of my list there is probably Stephen Chow’s CJ7 – it’ll be interesting to see him do something a bit different to his older work (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer). Also Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux, relegated to the ghetto of the Skycity theatre. I didn’t even know he did wuxia. Only two Korean films this year, and both look rapeful, so I think I’ll skip that.

Lots of American and French film, especially docos like King of Kong, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Doctor Hunter S. Thompson and Standard Operating Procedure. Personally I want to see Michel Gondry’s Be Kind, Rewind, partially because of this video (Probably best to watch the official trailer first though).

Zombies (though I haven’t been able to get into Romero), Nazis (Best Foreign Film at the Oscars last year), Das Experiment Lite, Turkmenistan, Ben X and Boy A both showing on the same day in Auckland (bound to cause confusion), the world’s most descriptive title, The Next Karate Kid, among others. Also lots of European torture porn in the Incredibly Strange Film Festival section, if you’re into that sort of thing.

There doesn’t seem to be anything too horribly pretentiously indie, which is a relief, but still seems like slim pickings this year. Especially The Incredible Film Festival section – I expected more than splatter movies, and it did not deliver.

So anyway, so a list of what I’m interested in.

A Gentle Breeze in the Village

Yeah, what the hell, might as well. If it isn’t boring as hell, it might not be so bad.

Be Kind, Rewind

Michel Gondry is an imperfect director, but I forgive him. Plus I like Jack Black and I think Mos Def is a highly underrated.

CJ7

Stephen Chow hasn’t steered me wrong so far.

Earth

Apparently the BBC’s Planet Earth is one of the best things on bluray right now, and this is derived from it. Sometimes you’re in the mood for a grandiose nature doco, though it remains to be seen whether I’ll feel this way in a few weeks’ time.

Evangelion 1.0

Because it’s a moneygrubbing attempt to leech money out of a classic series, and I’m stupid enough to fall for that shit.

Flight of the Red Balloon

The director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s earlier film Cafe Lumiere holds a firm place in my heart – the main character in the film lives a few steps away from my grandparents’ house in Tokyo, and while the film’s slow pace is definitely not for everyone, for me it managed to perfectly capture a certain time and place that’s very special to me. If he can manage the same for the city of Paris, it’s definitely something I want to see.

In Bruges

Must see Irish humour, apparently.

In Search of a Midnight Kiss

This film apparently manages to make downtown Los Angeles look romantic. Kind of curious as to how that goes…

Obscene

One of my favourite poems is Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (along with Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol”, if you must know) and this film covers, among other things, the legal battle to publish it in Britain. Plus censorship is something I’ve been fairly uneducated about and feel I should care more about.

The Orphanage

Apparently a great spooky Spanish horror film, strong on atmosphere. It’s a Spanish blockbuster too, which I like – I generally go to the festival to see popular foreign films, rather than stuff that’s niche even in its own country. Produced by Guillermo del Toro, and apparently it’s got that creepy Pan’s Labyrinth vibe. Plus, you know, orphanages are scary as shit.

Persepolis

It lost out on the Best Animated Feature Oscar to Ratatouille last year. Plus you know, Iranian Revolution black and white animated coming of age film in French… deep. It looks interesting, even though the last animation I saw in French was The Triplets of Belleville. I won’t hold that against it.

Standard Operating Procedure

I read this blog entry by the director Errol Morris regarding the Abu Ghraib photographs and immediately realised that I’d been doing the same kneejerk reaction. I don’t agree with everything he says, but from reading some of the other stuff he’s blogged, I admire his depth of analysis. Go read that article!

The Visitor

The director Tom McCarthy made The Station Agent, which was all sorts of things I should hate – Sundance acclaimed full of self-absorbed Americans wandering around doing nothing, yet McCarthy managed to make me thoroughly enjoy his film. While the synopsis worries me, I hope he can do the same this time around.

So like I said, slim pickings this year, heh.

1. Gore Verbinski to direct Bioshock. I’m pretty average on the American Ring remake – it’s not bad, by any means, just not as good as the original. I am however impressed that he managed to make three ridiculously high grossing movies based on a Disneyland ride (The Haunted Mansion, anyone?), something that I don’t think anyone could have predicted would happen (to be fair, a lot of that credit is due to Johnny Depp). But really, if anyone can make a really good videogame movie, I imagine it would be him. He’s already proved he can work with CG and big budgets, not to mention shooting around water, after all. His films turn out pretty but shallow though, so I hope he finds a good writer.
2. Timur Bekmambetov set to produce The Knights Templar. How can you make a movie about the Crusades more interesting? Add the Russian director of Night Watch and Day Watch (which I still haven’t gotten around to seeing), though his upcoming comic adaptation Wanted looks like it may be a big fistful of fail (I’ll still probably see it in some form or another, given it stars Angelina Jolie as an assassin). Also, add a vampire army and the holy grail. If done well, it’ll be beautiful. But most likely, it will be really bizarre, and probably terrible, in a hilarious way. Can’t wait.
3. Guillermo del Toro to direct The Hobbit and sequel (a bit late, but I needed a third item for my list…). I’m not as hugely enamoured by Hellboy as everyone and their mother seems to be (quite literally – my mother of all people is a huge fangirl of it). Plus I never got around to seeing Pan’s Labyrinth. But I’m hugely relieved by the news that he’s taking the whole thing very seriously, with Ian McKellan and Andy Serkis returning, the Hobbiton location being reused and all that. Plus committing four years of his time to live in Wellington, that’s one hell of a sacrifice too. Everything seems to be there for it to go well, let’s hope it does.

Oh yeah, and talky bitch from Juno/pedobait from Hard Candy is going to be Jane Eyre. Bah, I don’t care.

And I want to see Speed Racer, for some reason. Somebody stop me!

Via Comingsoon.net and TheOneRing.net