Are the Muppets obsolete?

PLYMOUTH - A dozen years have passed since the Muppets last appeared on the big screen. Their founder, Jim Henson, died in 1990. Most Muppet characters, with the exception of the “Sesame Street’’ stable, were sold to Disney in 2004. All of which explains why Chris Cooper, who stars in their new movie, “The Muppets,’’ has concerns. And he’s not alone.

One fear: that the Muppets might not be ready for 2011. Or that we’ve grown up and don’t need them anymore. And then there’s the reality of our evolved techno-savvy: To pass off the shared delusion that is the Muppets - to make a new generation of fans believe in a world where googly-eyed cloth puppets and humans overlap - would require a CGI Kermit interacting with a motion-capture Fozzie.

“I know there are some Muppets purists who have some concerns,’’ said Cooper, who plays the film’s dastardly arch nemesis Tex Richman. “But I think I can say with some accuracy [we’ve] kept it pretty pure and not pushed the envelope.’’

“The Muppets,’’ which opens nationwide on Wednesday, is their comeback story. Fans can rejoice: Their purity - their wholesome, G-rated and pun-filled, slapstick-style comedy - remains intact. As does their low-fi, sock-puppet technology.

“These Muppets are . . .’’ Cooper said, pausing for effect over lunch near his home in Kingston. “. . . Muppets. There was no special effects. This is an old, old process going back to the late ’60s and ’70s.’’ In early rehearsals, Cooper said he first wondered how he was going to act opposite a hand shoved inside brightly colored cloth. “My imagination gets the better of me,’’ he recalled, munching on a panini, and without a trace of the smirk that dominates Tex. “On the first day of work, with all these handlers and Muppet characters, it took about a half hour [to fall for the illusion].’’ As soon as a performer put his hand in a Muppet, “he became that character,’’ Cooper said.

Ever since “Sesame Street’’ debuted in 1969, no one batted an eye when a man-on-the-street journalist wielding a microphone was actually an amphibian, a stand-up comic was a bear, or a pig could beat out “real’’ lovely ladies to be crowned a beauty queen. “The Muppet Show’’ (1976-81) further blurred that fuzzy fringe between fantasy and reality, asking: What if the Muppets had to stage a weekly variety show and we were privy to both the musical-comedy numbers and the chaos backstage? The first “Muppet Movie’’ in 1979 provided additional layers, giving us back stories and exploding beyond the confines of a puppeteer’s maneuvers and the soundstage. It gave these creatures’ dreams.

In the new movie, Muppets still inhabit our world. But the larger question remains: Are they at odds with the current times? Will audiences be unfazed by the old-timey villainy of Cooper’s character, who wants to raze Muppet Studios and drill for oil? “Those Muppets - they think they’re so funny,’’ Richman sneers. “We’ve all moved on. The world is a cynical place.’’ In the words of the jaded TV executive Kermit and Co. try to convince to give them airtime, “In this market, you guys are no longer relevant.’’

Maybe. Or maybe their sweet, dream-catching credo is just what our money-grubbing planet needs.

To share in Muppet aspirations, we’ve always had to extend a rainbow-colored bridge. “The Muppets’’ adds the logical next step in the illusion, making the question of their cultural relevancy part of the plot. Time has passed since the 1970s and ’80s and the hippy-dippy humor of Dom DeLuise, Madeline Kahn, and Mel Brooks. Some assumed the Muppets were dead when Henson, voice of Kermit, died of bacterial pneumonia at age 53, and Frank Oz, the lifeblood of Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear, retired in 2000. The last full-length Muppet feature, the made-for-TV “The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz’’ (2005), was considered a failure. Their influence has lapsed, evidenced by their last theatrical feature, 1999’s “Muppets From Space.’’ Aside from appearances in YouTube parody videos, the Muppets have largely disappeared from America’s cultural radar.

“I guess people sort of forgot about us,’’ Kermit laments, in his empty, Beverly Hills mansion.

Ignoring the intervening Muppet movie capers, Christmas stories, and trips to Treasure Island and outer space, the plot is in keeping with the nostalgic theme, focusing on the characters’ “real’’ lives, just like their movie debut. Muppet super-fans and brothers Gary (Jason Segel) and Walter (a new Muppet character) must persuade Kermit to stage a telethon to save the endangered Muppet Studios. Cue the “let’s reunite the gang for one last show’’ road trip: Miss Piggy works in Paris as the plus-size fashion editor at Vogue, Gonzo is a plumbing magnate, and Fozzie is a member of a cheesy Reno casino tribute band called the Moopets. Dr. Teeth’s Electric Mayhem Band may or may not have smoked controlled substances back in the day, but Muppetland is too wholesome for any rehab narrative. Instead, Animal has to be sprung from the anger management recovery program he’s joined, led by Jack Black. (His trigger word - “drum’’ - must never be spoken.) Wakka wakka wakka.

A Muppet fan since he was five, 39-year-old British director James Bobin, creator of “Da Ali G Show’’ and “Flight of the Conchords,’’ was eager to introduce the joy and irreverence of what he called a “national treasure’’ to his own children. Knowing what fondness older fans have for these felt and foam beings, he didn’t want to disappoint. “My inner child told me make sure this is good, do it justice.’’

Bobin felt that his work on “Flight of the Conchords’’ was the perfect training ground. “Both are musical comedies,’’ Bobin said via telephone from Los Angeles. “ ‘Conchords’ is a very warm-hearted and gentle and positive comedy. Never mean spirited.’’ And both share a tongue-in-cheek, self-referential sensibility. “It can be surreal - the world where puppets and humans coexist. But it has a very positive feel.’’

While neither Bobin nor others involved in the film wanted to change the essential Muppet psyche, they did want pizzazz. One, A-list cameos are again in abundance. Two, Segel, as massive a Muppet fan as the character he plays, co-wrote the script. If you recall, Segel’s “Forgetting Sarah Marshall’’ ended with a Muppet-like musical. Writing and starring in that movie got Segel fired up to update the Muppets for a new generation.

For younger fans to glom onto the new goofy antics, the music and comedy needed to reference current, edgier pop culture. Which explains the hip-hop send-up Cooper raps and hoofs to: “Let’s Talk About Me.’’

“I have an early background in song and dance. The opportunity to do that was terrific,’’ said Cooper. “I have a huge new-found respect for hip-hop.’’

The new movie also makes sure that the Muppet blend of satire and silliness endures. “The great joy of the original series was that Jim [Henson] never wrote down to children,’’ said Bobin. “It’s for everybody. Grandparents can watch it, kids can watch it, parents can watch it. Everyone can get something out of it.’’

Henson may be gone. Oz may have hung up Piggy and Fozzie (Steve Whitmire now performs Kermit; Eric Jacobson takes on Oz’s roles). Fans may be jaded since Henson’s heirs sold the Muppets to the House of Mouse. But the new movie’s riff on the highs and lows of fame is an argument for, and proof of, the very relevancy of these creatures. “The Muppets’’ also doles out sentimental moments, including a reprise of “The Rainbow Connection,’’ that remind us why we loved these characters so much in their heyday, which might be our heyday, too.

Perhaps nothing’s changed. Including the hokey, obsolete, yet necessary need to fall under their spell - lovers, the dreamers and, as Piggy would add, Moi.

Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at www.ethangilsdorf.com.

[this article originally appeared in the Boston Globe]

Movie review: Road to Freedom’ is paved with inanity

* [one star]

THE ROAD TO FREEDOM 

Directed by: Brendan Moriarty

Starring: Joshua Frederic Smith, Scott Maguire, Nhem Sokun, Tom Proctor

Running time: 93 minutes

Rated: R (violence to bodies and normal speech patterns)

During the Vietnam War, film star Errol Flynn’s son, Sean, gave up an acting career to become a photojournalist. He went to Vietnam, where he helped break the story of the My Lai Massacre. In 1970, on assignment for Time magazine, he talked his way across the Cambodian border with fellow journalist Dana Stone. The two men disappeared, probably captured and killed by the Khmer Rouge.

“The Road to Freedom’’ aims to imagine their final days. Sean (Joshua Frederic Smith) is a libidinous loner-wanderer type, playing polar opposite to sincere and pious family man Dana (Scott Maguire). They putt-putt around the Cambodian countryside on little motorcycles, documenting atrocities. Oddly, these photojournalists don’t carry telephoto lenses or extra film. Still, every time a guerrilla guns down a peasant, we get a close-up black-and-white freeze frame that approximates what might have been a prize-winning shot.

Once captured, they are befriended by a fellow prisoner, Po (Nhem Sokun), whom Sean makes promise to “tell their story.’’ The delivery of this information to another journalist back in the capital, Phnom Penh, is meant to bookend the film with import. But the colleague (Tom Proctor) wields a foreign accent so weird that, instead, “The Road to Freedom’’ kicks off under a curious cloud of amateurism.

Unfortunately, beyond orchestrating crane shots sweeping over lush jungles and rice paddies, newcomer Brendan Moriarty is fairly clueless as a director. Most egregious is Smith’s performance. Worse than wooden, it’s flimsy as balsa, and more hollow than bamboo.

The clumsy, cringeworthy script, co-written by Margie Rogers and Thomas Schade, doesn’t help matters. “Maybe I am still searching,’’ Sean is forced to say. “But I know one thing’s for sure: Whatever’s going on here is bigger than you or me both.’’ One Cambodian woman must warp her mouth around lines such as “Cambodia, a once peaceful land, is now full of death and destruction.’’

Even the title remains perplexing - neither a road nor freedom figures in the plot.

A mere 20 years old when he filmed “The Road to Freedom,’’ Moriarty grew up in Cambodia. Clearly, he possesses a big heart and wants to tell a story of consequence. But this micro-budgeted “The Killing Fields’’ disappoints on almost every level, failing to win our hearts or our minds. But it does win some giggles.

Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.

[this review originally appeared in the Boston Globe]

Movie review: "Creature" has usual chumps, chomps in horrid horror flick

MOVIE REVIEW

Usual chumps, chomps in horrid horror flick

* [one star]

CREATURE 

 Directed by: Fred M. Andrews

Starring: Mehcad Brooks, Serinda Swan, Sid Haig, Daniel Bernhardt

Running time: 93 minutes

Rated: R (cliched gore, nudity)

Deep in the swampy hearts and minds of some filmmakers, embarrassing stereotypes still fester, gathering moss and slime.

According to “Creature,’’ rural Louisianans - Cajuns, in particular - are inbred, brown-toothed, and filthy. They live at the bayou’s edge in creaky wooden shacks. They speak about “the Loooord’s will.’’ And, in the cliched horror world of newbie director Fred M. Andrews, they adhere to backwoods, backward rituals that involve blood rites, incest, and a goofy lizard man.

You see, once upon a time, a hick named Grimley lost his loved ones (including his pregnant bride/sister) to a giant white alligator. Overcome with rage, he killed the reptile with his bare hands, ate it, and “became one with the gator.’’ As generations passed, the Bigfoot-like legend of Lockjaw grew.

Naturally, the bumpkins must sacrifice a woman every so often to keep the creature happy, and keep the ancient bloodline pumping, or some such moonshine. So we’ll need the hackneyed trope of outsiders rolling into town: 20-somethings Mehcad Brooks (TV’s “True Blood’’), Serinda Swan (TV’s “Breakout Kings’’) and other hot young things - six in total, three babes and three hunks - road tripping to N’awlins. So our fresh meat has a fighting chance, two of the guys are ex-Marines.

Taking a pit stop, our protagonists meet said yokels who tell them about the alligator man. Curious, they decide to camp on the bayou near the old Grimley shack. Cue the campfire, the pot smoking, even a woman-on-woman sex scene (this is 2011, after all). Off camera, the scaly beast snarls. One by one (except for two survivors) the nobodies go down. Creature: 4, Originality: 0.

All this would be gator-jerky-chomping, tongue-in-cheek fun, if the writers had any clue where their cheeks were located. But the dialogue is written, and played, straight. Our monster is about as convincing as a “Creature From the Black Lagoon’’ man in a rubber suit. Heck, within the first 30 seconds, in a “Jaws’’ rip-off, some woman disrobes, swims, and is promptly gnawed in half.

A more interesting angle might have been to explore the creature’s sorrow, from its point of view. But aside from a brief flashback showing how Grimley’s grief led him to become, like Gollum, more and more mad and reptile-like, it’s hunt and chase and supper time.

Y’all come back, now, y’hear?

Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at www.ethangilsdorf.com.

[this review originally appeared in the Boston Globe]

Movie Review: Puncture portrays lawyer on smack

** [two stars]

PUNCTURE Directed by: Mark and Adam Kassen

Starring: Chris Evans, Mark Kassen, Vinessa Shaw, Marshall Bell

Running time: 99 minutes

Rated: R (drug use, language, nudity)

In “Silkwood,’’ Meryl Streep blows the whistle on the plutonium processing plant that caused her cancer. In “Erin Brockovich,’’ Julia Roberts sues a groundwater-polluting power company. “A Civil Action’’ pits John Travolta against corporations responsible for dumping toxic waste.

“Puncture’’ joins this genre of scrappy-underdogs-taking-on-corporate-malfeasance films. Here, two Houston personal injury lawyers, high school buds Mike Weiss (Chris Evans) and Paul Danziger (codirector Mark Kassen), accept the case of an ER nurse (Vinessa Shaw) who’s been pricked by an HIV-contaminated needle on the job. Her friend, a local entrepreneur (Marshall Bell), has been mysteriously unsuccessful in selling his “Safety Point’’ syringe to hospitals. This is the late 1990s, before retractable needles are in use. This invention could save thousands of lives, but a corrupt arrangement between hospital purchasing cartels and a pharmaceutical giant is blocking the needle’s path to the marketplace.

Audiences love to watch Goliath stumble and fall, especially when that giant is real. Like “A Civil Action’’ and its ilk, “Puncture’’ is based on an actual court case. But is this a story best served by focusing on the legal battle or the arc of Mike’s flawed hero?

Kassen plays the sensible, furrowed-brow Paul. Evans (Sudbury’s own “Captain America’’) brings an intensity to his portrayal of Mike, a self-destructive, narcissistic idealist. Upping the ante: Mike is also a functioning drug addict. After his own needle-sticking or pill-popping binge, he calls Paul at 2 a.m. with brilliant case insights. To practice for court appearances, he persuades his druggie friends to role-play witnesses on the stand.

Whether Mike will show up for the deposition after snorting coke with the paralegal in the parking garage provides tension. Yet we never learn the names of the demons haunting him. No meaty scenes to flesh out the friendship between Mike and Paul, either. In one implausible scene, after Mike hits rock bottom, a doctor tells Paul his friend is “a pretty heavy user.’’ Paul replies, “I had no idea.’’ In place of any sort of explanation, codirectors Kassen and his brother Adam Kassen give us dreamy time-lapse shots of the Houston skyline.

This story of how corporate interests collude against the common good is surely worthy. But you might ask if the facts of the case might have made a better documentary, not a drama.

[This review originally appeared in the Boston Globe]

Seeing the light in cancer story: Seth Rogen helps turn his friend’s screenplay into comedy-drama ‘50/50’

“You can’t pitch a comedy about cancer,’’ Seth Rogen said, recounting how his new film “50/50’’ got made.

“50/50,’’ which stars Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and opens Friday, tries to walk that funny-touching scalpel edge.

To clarify: The illness itself - what Rogen’s character, Kyle, calls “stage four back cancer’’ - isn’t cause for laughter. Rather, as is often the case, comedy stems from dark places. With “50/50,’’ the humor bubbles up from pain and clumsy human interaction. It turns out the premise of a massive, malignant tumor growing along a spinal column can provide plenty of laughs - if the material is handled carefully, and the jokes are among friends.

“To us that was never scary, the idea of blending drama and comedy, because we had all done it before,’’ said Rogen as he slumped into an armchair at the Four Seasons and harkened back to his days on the show “Freaks and Geeks.’’ The actor was in Boston with screenwriter Will Reiser earlier this month to promote their film.

“50/50’’ chronicles a chummy but otherwise distant friendship between Kyle (Rogen) and his cancer-stricken buddy Adam, played by Gordon-Levitt. When their tentative bond is suddenly saddled with medical tragedy, they tackle the situation, despite being awkward 20-something males already ill-equipped to speak of intimacies.

When it came time to convince a studio to green light “50/50,’’ it didn’t hurt to have the involvement of a heavy-hitter like Rogen, star of “The Green Hornet,’’ “The 40-Year-Old-Virgin,’’ “Knocked Up,’’ and “Pineapple Express.’’

“Having Seth attached not only as a producer but as a star certainly helped make the movie much more commercial,’’ said Reiser. In fact, Reiser, Rogen, and their producing partners didn’t even try to sell “50/50’’ based on an elevator pitch. “I just figured I’ll write it and then I’ll sell it,’’ Reiser said.

Not that Rogen even likes to “pitch’’ his movies. “None of my movies are really that pitchable,’’ Rogen said. As a producer, he’s more comfortable working with a completely written script. “Nothing we’ve done really looks good on paper. It was really awesome that Will was willing to just write. It afforded us a lot of creative freedom.’’

They both agreed that genre definitions and boundaries “get in the way.’’ They don’t go for discussions of “tone’’ either.

“We as filmmakers never talk about that,’’ Rogen insisted. “There’s never the ‘genre’ conversation. People like to know how to describe it to each other…’’

“For marketing purposes,’’ Reiser added.

“Right. We were pitching a movie a couple months ago and the studio called us after and said, ‘What’s the tone of the movie?’ and I said like ‘Go [expletive] yourself. That’s what the [expletive] tone of the movie is,’ ’’ Rogen, the more gregarious of the two, said with a throaty laugh. (Reiser, the cousin of comedian/actor Paul Reiser, is more modest and unassuming.) “How do you describe that when it hasn’t happened yet? The tone is whatever we shoot… . Aside from saying ‘it’s realistic’ or ‘it’s broad,’ I don’t know how to describe the tone until we complete it.’’

As expected, no major studio expressed interest. In the end, “boutique studio’’ Mandate Pictures, backer of off-beat comedies such as “Juno’’ and “Stranger Than Fiction,’’ financed the relatively low-budget, $8 million picture. The film also stars Anna Kendrick (“Up in the Air’’) as Adam’s newbie psychiatrist, Bryce Dallas Howard (“The Twilight Saga: Eclipse’’) as his distracted girlfriend, Anjelica Huston as his estranged mom, and character actor Philip Baker Hall as a fellow chemotherapy patient. The director is Jonathan Levine (“The Wackness’’).

Reiser said he was aiming for the feel of his favorite films by Hal Ashby, Paul Mazursky, Robert Altman, Billy Wilder, and Woody Allen. “Typically their characters are always grounded, they’re smart, they find humor more in the slice of life you’re examining in their more everyday scenarios,’’ Reiser said. “That for me was what I wanted this movie to be like. You’re seeing this guy go through this journey. It doesn’t have to be far-reaching, overdramatic. The stakes are real enough.’’ Had a big studio turned Reiser’s quiet script into a $100 million blockbuster, they would have probably gone “broad comedy’’ with wacky situations and goofy high jinks.

The filmmakers had another selling point up their sleeves: The story of “50/50’’ is based on real events.

Reiser and Rogen became real-world friends on the American version of Sacha Baron Cohen’s TV program “Da Ali G Show’’ eight years ago. Rogen and “50/50’’ producer Evan Goldberg were working as writers, and Reiser was the show’s associate producer. In their early 20s at the time, the trio were the show’s most junior staffers, and became fast friends. Then, Reiser was diagnosed with cancer: Doctors discovered a giant tumor growing along his spine. Two years after his successful fight against the illness, the newcomer to feature film writing felt he had gained the proper perspective to write about the experience and began to draft a screenplay.

Not that he simply wrote down everything that happened. Reiser, 31, insisted that the film is “inspired by real events’’ and is not a true memoir. “I’d say that Adam is not as funny as I was back then.’’

“Easy …’’ Rogen joked. “No, I agree with that.’’

“Adam is very much an extension of who I was and how I was feeling,’’ Reiser continued. “I just suppressed everything.’’

“But he doesn’t act like Will,’’ Rogen, 29, added. “The real you complained more than the character. Not about the cancer, but about everything else.’’

As for whether Rogen was as much of a pothead as his character, Kyle, they did not say. But “50/50’’ includes a couple of scenes in which Kyle uses Adam’s condition to talk to girls in bookstores and bars, and even lure them into acts of sympathy sex. Truth or fiction?

“We joked about it,’’ said Reiser. “We never actually did it.’’ But he admitted that once the C-word - cancer - was out in the open, “women would give me a lot of attention.’’

Reiser said that the character of Kyle embodied the idea of how, at 25, men just can’t handle the looming death of a good pal. “Friends said stupid things. Sometimes insensitive. Ultimately, they cared; they just did not know how to… . You find out in the end, [Kyle] really does care.’’ Reiser turned to Rogen. “Seth and I, our dynamic back then was, I was neurotic …’’

“And …’’ Rogen added, finishing his friend’s line like the two had spent a lifetime together, “I would make fun of you for it.’’ His voice then became soft and gentle. “Which has changed somewhat over the years.’’

The two paused for a moment, their heads looking this way and that, almost at each other. A millisecond of intimate quiet settled into the room. Rogen continued. “Now you’re an egomaniac.’’

Then the joking resumed.

Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.

[this story originally appeared in the Boston Globe]

MOVIE REVIEW: "Griff the Invisible" joins the growing ranks of DIY superheroes

[This originally appeared in the Boston Globe]

Between the recent spate of spandex-stretching franchises clogging the screen - lanterns, hornets, Norsemen, captains - and the trend of movies about everyday people with save-the-day complexes, it’s beginning to look like we’re a superhero-obsessed culture.

“Griff the Invisible,’’ posits itself firmly in this latter, DIY tradition, a budding genre already well trampled by “Kick-Ass,’’ “Super,’’ “Defendor,’’ and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.’’ In these movies, average Jacks and Jills, sans superpowers to speak of, craft their own costumes to fight crime. These vigilantes may or may not be crazy.

Here, Australian writer-director Leon Ford, making his feature debut, casts Ryan Kwanten (HBO’s “True Blood’’) as the introverted Griff, a browbeaten office worker who wears a yellow raincoat to “disappear’’ during the day, and dons a black, Batman-like outfit to prowl Sydney at night. He’s tricked out his apartment with surveillance equipment and a hot line to the police commissioner.

As Griff explains to his protective older brother (Patrick Brammall), who begs him to end his dangerous cape crusading, “Sorry, Tim, I made a promise to rid this city of evil. It’s not a choice. It’s a responsibility.’’

His sense of duty may not be a choice for another reason: Griff is mentally ill. Or is he? That’s the question “Griff the Invisible’’ dangles over the viewer like a thought balloon - what measure of fantasy and reality balances the world of this magically-thinking nerd?

The ante is upped when a woman Tim is dating, Melody (Maeve Dermody), herself a dreamer in a different way, falls for Griff. Her geekery involves a belief in her ability to walk through walls. She spouts statistics and bumps her head a lot.

Griff’s “invisibility’’ and alter-ego games serve as metaphors. The bad guys are slaves to social norms, Ford is saying, “for seeing the world one way,’’ while a minority are heroes for refusing to grow up and keeping their freak on. Cute idea, if not terribly original.

Yet “Griff the Invisible’’ is really a rom-com, and thus depends on sparks flying between the two lovers. Yes, as the romance blossoms, our hero is vindicated when Melody accepts his quirks, even enables his fantasy life. But the touches of magical realism begin to feel gimmicky. By the final frame, this romance never feels real enough.

Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at www.ethangilsdorf.com.

New Pixar Movies Announced

[this post originally appeared on wired.com's Geek Dad]

Retro video game fever: A still from "Wreck-It-Ralph"It’s the 25th anniversary of Pixar Animation Studios, the obscenely-successful cartoon company that has pretty much revolutionized the animation business. The company began in 1979 as the humble Graphics Group, once part of Lucasfilm; then it was snagged by Steve Jobs over at Apple in 1986, before finally being bought by The Walt Disney Company in 2006. Value at time of sale? $7.4 billion. According to Business Week, the transaction made Jobs the largest shareholder in the Disney empire.

Anywho, Pixar has continued its forward march into blockbuster heaven with this summer’s Cars 2, which despite mixed reviews has already reached the $500,000 worldwide gross mark. Yee haw.

At D23 expo, Disney’s own Comic-Con-like, fanboy/girl event that wrapped up Sunday in Anaheim, California, production company big-wigs announced the line-up of animated Disney films for the next two years, 2012-2014.

As reported on BuzzSugar, Pixar projects in the pipeline include:

The Untitled Pixar Movie About Dinosaurs: “What the world might have been like if dinosaurs were never wiped out by a giant asteroid, but continued to exist on Earth.” Holiday 2013 release.

The Untitled Pixar Movie That Takes You Inside the Human Mind: “explor[ing] the reasons why we get songs stuck in our head, why we dream, and even why we remember.” Spring 2014 release.

Scottish heroes: A still from the Pixar movie "Brave"Brave: ”Pixar’s first female-driven film stars Boardwalk Empire’s Kelly MacDonald as Merida, a princess set on escaping her fate of an arranged marriage to one of three idiot clan leaders.” With Billy Connolly and Craig Ferguson. June 22, 2012 release.

Monsters University: A prequel to Monsters Incorporated “that will take us back in time to show how Mike and Sully became buddies.” Billy Crystal and John Goodman return. 2013 release.

And here are two releases not technically from Pixar, but from DisneyToon Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios, which like Pixar are overseen by cartoon god John Lasseter, but are separate and independent studios within the Disney animation empire:

Wreck-It Ralph: “Inside the world of retro, 8-bit video games” with a look that apparently “stay[s] true to the look of classic video games.” With the voice talents of John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman. 2012 release, from Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Planes: Cars but with airplanes. “The only non-Pixar animated project debuted at D23, Planes stars John Cryer as Dusty, a cropduster who decides to take off an adventure around the globe.” Spring 2013 release, from DisneyToon Studios.

Clearly, even at the ripe old age of 25, Pixar shows no signs of stopping.

Guillermo Del Toro: The Interview, Part II

[this originally appeared on wired.com's Geek Dad]

Here’s Part II of my conversation with Guillermo del Toro, director of Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, Mimic, Pan’s Labyrinth, Blade II, and the two Hellboy films. [Read Part I of the interview here.]

Del Toro, a former special effects makeup designer, has his own aesthetic: melding of the man-made past — the handcrafted technology of wood, leather, brass, iron — and the organic world of slugs, bugs, and tentacles. He has a fascination with mechanical gadgets, the colors amber and steel blue, and body parts embalmed in jars. You might say he’s invented his own genre: not the clockwork and piston of “steampunk,”’ but more gut-and-gears, something I call “steam-gunk.” (For a peek into del Toro’s sketchbooks, see this previous wired.com link to a fascinating video).

His latest film is one he didn’t direct, but he did co-write and produce: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a throwback to old fashioned haunted house films, starring Guy Pearce, Katie Holmes and Bailee Madison. The family moves into an old mansion and the daughter discovers an ancient evil inhabiting the basement’s ash pit. Scary stuff ensues.

When not prepping for his next stint behind the camera (the giant robot battle film Pacific Rim), Del Toro told me that he’s preparing for the rapidly-approaching age of “transmedia” and “multi-platform world creation,” when audiences will read books, play games, watch movies and webisodes, all set in the same world. To that end, he’s been working in fiction (The Strain is his post-apocalyptic, vampires-in-NYC trilogy) and a Lovecraftian horror video game.

But whatever the media, del Toro’s goal, it seems to me, is never to gratuitously freak us out. Rather, he just wants to touch us. Or as he puts it, “to make beautiful and moving images, and beautiful and moving stories within the genre.”

One of the homunculi from "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark"Ethan Gilsdorf: To me, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark was interesting because typically in a film set in a haunted house, the horror that has happened in the past gets reflected in ghosts, or in things that are more spiritual. In this movie, these little creatures, the homunculi, are really a different kind of manifestation of that curse.

Guillermo Del Toro: The idea in the movie is that these creatures presented predate even the time when the land was colonized. There is a small reference in the movie about how in the colonies they built a mill and it sank into the caves. So the caves in that area have lodged these creatures which are very old. They predate man setting foot in there.

EG: Do you have a sense of why horror movies, especially those with supernatural elements, remain critically underappreciated? I suspect it’s related to the same way that other kinds of genre movies are received, but in some way horror has had less of a critical reevaluation, unlike science fiction or fantasy which seem to be genres people don’t pass judgment on as quickly as they used to. With horror or movies of the supernatural, there is still a stigma in the critical community. Any thoughts on why that is the case?

GDT: The movies that depend on an emotional reaction — being comedy, melodrama, horror — because precisely they are trying to elicit an emotion from the audience, they become almost a challenge to audiences and critics. It’s very hard for the critical audience to admit they got emotional in a movie. It’s sort of admitting defeat. A movie that tries to provoke on a purely intellectual level is always going to be met [more favorably] … Those who claim [they are] stimulated intellectually by that movie almost by proxy are defining themselves as intelligent. They are defining themselves as affected on a higher level. Movies that depend on an emotional reaction are oftentimes almost a dual situation: you go to a comedy as a critic or an audience member, almost saying, “Come on, do your worst. Make me laugh.”

And the same in horror movies. Being scared is often regarded as a childish or immature emotion. It’s very hard to establish that you are affected by [this kind of] movie without admitting that you love stuff that is more challenging.

Historically, science fiction requires more production value than horror. And other genres like comedy or melodrama don’t depend on the budget. There’s never been a categorization like a “B-[movie] melodrama” or whatever. Horror movies [are] a very quick and cheap entryway into the mainstream, in a way. They are very numerous and very visually objectionable, if you will, and very visually low budget and industry-defying. They are qualified as cheap products to cash in. That is true of many of the movies of the genre. But not all of the movies of the genre.

EG: What are some of the movies that you’ve seen that have affected you? I know the original version of this movie, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, you said was one of the scariest pieces of television that you’ve seen. What are some of the films, either recently or ones that go back decades, that you would say have frightened or disturbed you the most?

GDT: The list is the usual. The Shining, Alien, The Innocents, The Haunting, Jaws, The Uninvited with Ray Milland, The Dead of Night (the British movie), The Curse of the Demon … But recently I was very affected by a Korean movie that is very, very extreme called I Saw the Devil. I was very, very affected by it. It’s a very in your face, a broad, brutal, movie, but highly effective.

EG: How do you see your own work having grown or evolved over the years since you first got started as a filmmaker? How do you think you’ve changed?

GDT: Well, I think that technically I’ve become more proficient at certain things, but in terms of artistic intention, I think from he get-go, from Cronos on, I’ve always tried very hard in my own way to make beautiful and moving images, and beautiful and moving stories within the genre. That has been basically unwavering in my intention in creating things. Even in the more commercial movies like the two Hellboys, I tried very hard to fabricate beautiful images, and beautiful moments. Even in a movie as hardcore as Blade II I tried very hard  [to make] a beautiful image here and there.

EG: Do you ever long to do something that’s fairly conventional, in terms of just a straight up drama or straight up comedy or something that doesn’t necessary include these more fantastical, supernatural or pulpy elements?

GDT: Not really. [Laughs.] I don’t think it’s in my DNA. I really think I was born to exist in the genre. I adore it. I embrace it. I enshrine it. I don’t look upon it or frown upon it in a way that a lot of directors do. A lot of directors make a horror movie as a steppingstone. For me, it’s not a steppingstone, it’s a cathedral.

EG: Do you feel like you have a particular lesson that you would like a young filmmaker or a beginning filmmaker, or for that matter a beginning writer, to take away from your work? Is there something that you hope an astute student would be able to appreciate of what you’re doing?

"Don't Be Afraid of the Dark": Dinner at the haunted manor, with Guy Pearce, Katie Holmes and Bailee Madison (Courtesy of FilmDistrict Distribution) GDT: No, I’m not trying to teach anyone anything. I think that’s a waste of time. I do hope that people who like [one of my movies] like it for the right reason. That they like it because they see how many of the moments in the movies run counter to what they are just supposed to do. The Devil’s Backbone’s ghost, I tried to make him more moving than scary. I tried to make him pitiful and beautiful. I tried to make the vampire sympathetic in Cronos. I tried to make the real world far more brutal in a way than the world of horrors that the girl experiences in Pan’s Labyrinth. And so forth. But they are not lessons by any means. They are just strands of my work that I hope that the people who like it notice.

EG: Are you at liberty to talk about The Hobbit and share any thoughts about what is going on? Are you in touch with Peter Jackson and what’s going on down there in New Zealand?

GDT: We stay in touch. I said what I had to say. I really love having had the experience. Now it’s in Peter’s hands and I’m actually waiting for it to come out and I’ll be the first in line. Other than what I had to say, that there’s nothing else to add.

EG: Give me some thoughts on your field and the direction you think filmmaking is going to be headed. Whether this relates to the kinds of stories we’re going to be absorbing, the kinds of narratives, like filmmakers collaborating with game designers, or other changes.

GDT: I’m a firm believer that the narrative form, the storytelling form, for big genre stories, will very rapidly invade into transmedia, in multi-platform world creation, in the next ten years, when we’re going to have the movies, the video games, the storyline, the TV series or webisodes and this and that, all coming at us consecutively if not simultaneously to give the audience a real sense of a world creation. I’m not talking about [every film] — there will be all kinds of films always — just in the genre filmmaking I expect it will be changing. I’m very interested and very actively training myself by designing and directing a video game. I’ve been working on it for the last year and I still have three more years to go to develop the video game. … So by the end of the four years I will have had a bit of a tenure in video game making.

EG: Is that game going to be related to a film you are working on, or is it independent?

GDT: No, this is just my apprenticeship into the gaming world. And my experience has been a very beautiful and productive one. It’s with a company called THQ and it’s game called “inSANE.’’

EG: I see that we are out of time.

GDT: I want to thank you again for this.

EG: Thank you very much. Guillermo, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark opens Friday, August 26.

[Note: Portions of this interview originally appeared in a different form in an article for the Boston Sunday Globe]

Guillermo Del Toro: The Interview, Part I

[This posting originally appeared on wired.com's Geek Dad]

Guillermo del Toro and star Bailee Madison, on the set of "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" (Courtesy of FilmDistrict Distribution)Guillermo Del Toro, the director behind personal, vision-driven films like Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth, plus commercial blockbuster action vehicles like Blade II and two Hellboy films, has been involved in more than his share of film projects over the past few years. But he hasn’t personally helmed a picture since 2008’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army. So fans of del Toro the film director – not the screenwriter, producer, executive producer, video game designer, novelist, and creative consultant – will have to keep waiting.

Perhaps he has simply been the victim of bad luck.

Originally recruited to co-write and direct The Hobbit, del Toro even relocated his family to New Zealand. But after interminable production delays, he backed out, and now Peter Jackson is directing. Del Toro’s next project was to be an effects-laden, 3D adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness. Yet studios balked at the $150-million price tag (even with Tom Cruise attached). It turns out del Toro’s next directorial effort will be a Japanese-style monsters versus robots film called Pacific Rim, with a slated release date of 2013.

In the meantime, fans will have to sate themselves with a new project heavy with the del Toro imprint but not officially part of his directorial oeuvre: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a throwback to old-timey haunted house films. Though he only co-wrote and produced the film — the director is newcomer Troy Nixey — Don’t Be Afraid (opening Friday) contains many familiar del Toro themes: a flashback prologue; mysterious and maleficent creatures, and a hidden world of fantasy revealed by a child protagonist.

The original Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark was a 1973 ABC made-for-TV movie about a young couple in an abusive relationship who inherit an old mansion. Del Toro has claimed that, for his generation (he was 9 at the time), this was “the scariest TV movie we ever saw.” Del Toro began co-writing his version with Matthew Robbins in 1998, but the production had its own delays. Switching the focus to the couple’s daughter, he realized the plot was too similar to Pan’s Labyrinth, so he put the project on hold. He kept pursuing it over the past dozen years, finally beginning production two years ago when he felt the time was right.

Shot in Australia, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is set in present day Rhode Island. An architect (Guy Pearce) and his interior-designer girlfriend (Katie Holmes) renovate and move into a lavish mansion. The architect’s introverted daughter, Sally (Bailee Madison from Bridge to Terabithia), reluctantly joins them. The de rigueur prologue concerns the previous owner of Blackwood Manor, a Victorian-era, Audubon-like illustrator and naturalist who became enslaved to an ancient evil inhabiting the basement’s ash pit.

I had a chance to speak with Guillermo del Toro, via telephone from New York City. We had met in person last year, when del Toro was in Boston promoting The Fall, the second book in his horror novel trilogy The Strain, co-authored with Massachusetts resident Chuck Hogan. (The final volume The Night Eternal comes out October 25.)

Ethan Gilsdorf: Hello, Mr. del Toro. It’s a pleasure to speak with you again. We met about a year ago in Boston when you were promoting The Fall. I was the guy who wrote that book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. We traded books, I seem to recall.

Guillermo del Toro: I remember that, yes. You went to New Zealand for Lord of the Rings.

EG: I’m glad you remembered! Yes, I was that crazy nut who traveled there to see as many of the Lord of the Rings filming locations as I could in three weeks.

GDT: [Laughs]

EG: Yeah, it’s all in my book. So, I should probably get right to the questions since I know you have a limited amount of time. I saw Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark last night and I very much enjoyed it. Can you talk your decision in this case to co-write and producer rather than direct this film yourself?

Blackwood Manor, home to nasty and evil forces. (Courtesy of FilmDistrict Distribution)GDT: I co-wrote the movie with Matthew Robbins in 1998. And in the interim, I did Pan’s Labyrinth. I thought anecdotally and superficially the two movies shared certain traits. A young girl arriving at a foreign place, to an old mansion, discovering creatures underground. I thought about it and I thought, although it was very different, I thought it was superficially, professionally, too much in common. I didn’t want to repeat. I thought, however, I would be very, very involved in the making of the movie.

EG: Troy Nixey, the director you chose, comes from comic books. He illustrated for the Batman franchise and Neil Gaiman’s Only the End of the World Again, among other things. But Nixey had made just one short film, Latchkey’s Lament. Why did you pick him?

GDT: Yes, [Nixey was] a first time feature filmmaker. He had done a wonderful short called Latchkey’s Lament, and I saw that short. It’s really, really quite beautiful. It’s available to see on YouTube. You can just type “Latchkey’s Lament” and you can see why he got the job. [See the film here]

EG: For someone like Nixey, who has gone from a short film to a pretty major production, with some major actors and obviously a lot of special effects work and so on, I wonder if that required any special attention on your part? Were you there on the set quite often to oversee things, or did he get to run with things on his own?

GDT: Yes, this is the movie I have produced where I have been the most involved in every facet of it. It’s the only movie I have produced where I have been, almost 90 percent of the time on the set, every day, because it was a big job to go from a short film as I say to something that intricate and that complicated. Also, we did it for a budget and a very tight schedule. Ultimately, we delivered the movie under budget and under schedule. Which was great, but to do so was a very complicated process.

This is a haunted house movie. Better bring your flashlight. (Courtesy of FilmDistrict Distribution)EG: There have been so many movies made over the years that try to scare people or try to disturb them, or try to effect them emotionally. I was wondering when you are selecting your projects, whether you are directing or want to direct, or just to be attached to, how do you think outside of the box? Particularly with horror movies, it does seem like they are a dime a dozen at this point. How do you be original?

GDT: I think that the case of the genre of horror movies, they are a way to make a quick buck. There are very few filmmakers both on the producing and directing side who actually approach [horror] with the desire to create something either of substance or something beautiful or powerful. Most of the people just try to get a [big opening] weekend and DVD sales.

The first thing is, I don’t get attached, or I rarely get attached, to something I’m not generating from the get go. Don’t Be Afraid is no exception. I started working on this project actively about 16 years ago now. We wrote it in 1998 which was about 13 years ago. And I have not stopped pursuing it actively. So I really just try to get involved in things I feel truly passionate about, and if I happen to be able to control the rights or hold the rights, I don’t let them go. I just hold onto the project until it gets made. If I don’t control the rights, that’s a different matter.

EG: You grew up in one culture, Mexico, and largely work in another, by which I mean the American film system. Obviously your audiences are world-wide, but a good chunk of them are American. Do you find there is a universal thread that connects audience sfrom one culture to another, in terms of what disturbs them or what haunts them? Are there specific kinds of themes that always work?

GDT: I think that no matter what culture you come from [you] are afraid of the   darkness, and what lurks in it is an absolutely common fear. I think that Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is tapping into the most primal, almost universal, childhood fears. That’s what attracted me from the get-go to the idea of making this remake, a complete re-telling of this story. The movie from 1973 was about a very specific, abusive relationship between a husband and wife, and it was very much a product of its time. … I decided to turn it into a sort of a very dark fairy tale. Precisely, as I say, that taps into universal fears — the invasion of the more intimate spaces, the home, the bedroom, the bed — and little by little we show that these creatures can be anywhere at any time, watching from the dark.

And that’s the end of Part I. Tune in tomorrow for Part II, when the conversation with Guillermo del Toro continues. Among other topics, we discuss why the horror genre is underappreciated, how he sees his own evolution as a filmmaker, his relationship with Peter Jackson, his new video game project, and — of course — what scares him.

[Note: Portions of this interview originally appeared in a different form in an article for the Boston Sunday Globe]

Horror story: With “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” Guillermo del Toro keeps infusing horror with “beautiful and moving images”

by Ethan Gilsdorf

[originally appeared in the Boston Globe, Sunday Aug 21, 2011]

scene from del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" 

In director Guillermo del Toro’s estimation, most horror movies are cheap products to cash in, a quick and dirty way for studios to make a buck. Originality and artistry are discouraged.

“Few filmmakers,’’ del Toro said, “approach horror with the desire to create something either of substance or something beautiful or powerful. Most of the people just try to get a [big opening] weekend and DVD sales.’’

Del Toro, the man behind personal, vision-driven projects like “Cronos,’’ “The Devil’s Backbone,’’ and “Pan’s Labyrinth,’’ as well as the commercial successes “Blade II,’’ and two “Hellboy’’ films, has never seen horror as a temporary career move.

“I really think I was born to exist in the genre,’’ the quick-witted, outspoken Mexican filmmaker said in a telephone interview from New York City. “I adore it. I embrace it. I enshrine it. I don’t look upon it or frown upon it in a way that a lot of directors do. For me, it’s not a stepping stone, it’s a cathedral.’’

To make other kinds of film - comedy, drama - well . . . “I don’t think it’s in my DNA.’’

The latest spawn from del Toro’s imaginarium is “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,’’ a throwback to haunted house films of yore. Though he only co-wrote and produced the film - the director is newcomer Troy Nixey - “Don’t Be Afraid’’ (opening Friday) is still glazed with many familiar del Toro tropes: a dark prologue; the weight of ancient, historical forces; subterranean dungeons and mazes; and a hidden world of fantasy.

The original production was a 1973 ABC made-for-TV movie about a young couple in an abusive relationship who inherit an old mansion. Del Toro has claimed that, for his generation (he was 9 at the time), “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’’ was “the scariest TV movie we ever saw.’’

In 1998, del Toro began co-writing his version with Matthew Robbins, switching the focus to the couple’s daughter. Realizing the plot was too similar to “Pan’s Labyrinth,’’ he put the project on hold. “A young girl arriving at a foreign place, to an old mansion, discovering creatures underground,’’ del Toro said. “I didn’t want to repeat.’’

The film remained on the back burner of del Toro’s mind for more than a decade, but he kept pursuing it, finally beginning production two years ago. Shot in Australia, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’’ is set in present day Rhode Island. We assume it’s Newport, given the lavish mansion an architect (Guy Pearce) and his interior-designer girlfriend (Katie Holmes) have renovated and moved into. The architect’s introverted daughter, Sally (Bailee Madison from “Bridge to Terabithia’’), reluctantly joins them.

The film traffics in another frequent del Toro theme: fantasy as escape from conflict. In “Pan’s Labyrinth,’’ against the backdrop of Fascist-era Spain, a girl suffers under a totalitarian father. While “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’’ isn’t set during wartime, Sally feels besieged by her parents’ divorce. Ignored by the adult world, she hears whispers from the basement. Her parents don’t believe the mischievous, rat-like homunculi that pour from the house’s innards truly exist. This is another classic del Toro thread: It’s the lonely, abandoned child who finds the secret doorway to the spirit and fairy world.

“I decided to turn it into a sort of very dark fairy tale,’’ del Toro said, “that taps into universal fears, the invasion of the most intimate spaces, the home, the bedroom, the bed. Little by little we show that these creatures can be anywhere at any time watching from the dark.’’

The de rigueur prologue concerns the previous owner of Blackwood Manor, a Victorian-era, Audubon-like illustrator and naturalist who became enslaved to an ancient evil inhabiting the basement’s ash pit. This opening back story (told in flashback) infuses the present with the horrifying past, but del Toro keeps his modern day protagonists in the dark. The gap between what the audience and the characters know is meant to provide the story’s urgency and tension.

“I think that no matter what culture you come from,’’ del Toro said, “the darkness and what lurks in it is an absolutely common fear. I think that ‘Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’ taps into the most primal, almost universal, childhood fears. That’s what attracted me from the get-go to the idea of making this remake a complete re-telling of this story.’’

The former special effects makeup designer has his own aesthetic: a melding of the man-made past - the handcrafted technology of wood, leather, brass, iron - and the organic world of slugs, bugs, and tentacles. He has a fascination with mechanical gadgets, the colors amber and steel blue, and body parts embalmed in jars. You might say he’s invented his own genre: not the clockwork and piston of “steampunk,’’ but gut-and-gears “steam-gunk.’’

The goal is never to gratuitously freak us out. Rather, he aims to touch us. Of the boy ghost in “The Devil’s Backbone,’’ del Toro said he made him more “pitiful and beautiful’’ than scary. In “Cronos,’’ he depicted a sympathetic vampire. Even the crowd-pleasing action movies “Hellboy’’ and “Hellboy II’’ fit the del Toro ethos of flawed hero-outcasts; the protagonist, an orphaned demon rescued from Nazis, grows into a pathos-filled, cigar-chomping wiseacre, acutely aware of his oddball nature and still compelled to save the day. In “Pan’s Labyrinth,’’ del Toro created a “real world far more brutal . . . than the world of horrors that the girl experiences.’’ He has been unwavering, he insisted, in his intention “to make beautiful and moving images and beautiful and moving stories within the genre.’’

This time around, to realize those images and stories, he handpicked Nixey, a 39-year-old Canadian comic book illustrator for the Batman franchise and Neil Gaiman’s “Only the End of the World Again,’’ among other things. Nixey had made just one short film, “Latchkey’s Lament.’’ It captured del Toro’s attention.

“I saw that short. It’s really, really quite beautiful.’’ Watch it on YouTube, he said, “and you can see why he got the job.’’

Nixey still can’t believe that’s how he came to direct “Don’t Be Afraid,’’ but he was always clear that making his short would help cement his talent for filmmaking. “When I set out to make ‘Latchkey’s’ it was with the intention of proving that yes, OK, I can do this. I can think in terms of a movie,’’ said Nixey, a 17-year-veteran of the comics industry, speaking via telephone from New York. “But my first love had always been movies. This was me seeing if this was in fact what I was supposed to do.’’

Because “Don’t Be Afraid’’ was Nixey’s first feature film, del Toro was “very, very involved’’ in the production. “It’s the only movie I have produced where I have been almost 90 percent of the time on the set, every day,’’ del Toro said. “It was a big job to go from a short film . . . to something that intricate and that complicated.’’

Nixey agreed it was “a big leap’’ to direct a star-studded, multimillion-dollar film, but having what he called “my favorite filmmaker’’ and “a creative genius’’ nearby helped. “He [del Toro] said at the beginning, ‘I’m here when you need me and I’m not when you don’t.’ But I’m no dummy. He’s this amazingly talented, successful filmmaker with an imagination that I’ve never seen before. So, yeah, why wouldn’t I want to pick his brain when I had questions?’’

To see this Nixey-del Toro collaboration, audiences have had to be patient: The film was actually finished in 2010, but the protracted sale of Miramax delayed its release by months. Not only that, but del Toro fans have been wondering when their beloved master will direct again; he’s served as producer on this film and consultant or producer on more than a dozen other recent projects, but he hasn’t helmed a picture since 2008’s “Hellboy II: The Golden Army.’’

Del Toro has been bedeviled by bad luck and bad timing. He relocated to New Zealand to co-write and direct “The Hobbit,’’ but when that production repeatedly stalled, he backed out. Currently, Peter Jackson is filming the two-part adaptation of Tolkien’s fantasy book.

“We stay in touch,’’ del Toro said about his relationship with Jackson. “I said what I had to say. I really love having had the experience. Now it’s in Peter’s hands and I’m actually waiting for it to come out and I’ll be the first in line.’’

After “The Hobbit,’’ a $150-million, 3-D adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s novella “At the Mountains of Madness’’ was announced as del Toro’s next project, but studios balked at the price tag. It turns out del Toro’s next directorial effort will be a Japanese-style monsters versus robots film called “Pacific Rim,’’ which at this year’s Comic-Con he boasted would feature “the finest [expletive] monsters ever committed to screen.’’ Convinced that video games will continue to intersect with film and TV in “multi-platform world creation,’’ del Toro is also midway through “apprenticeship into the gaming world,’’ a multi-year project designing a Lovecraftian horror game called “inSANE.’’ He's also releasing book three in his horror novel trilogy "The Strain" (co-authored with Chuck Hogan); the final volume "The Night Eternal" comes out October 25, 2011.

Whatever the medium, del Toro keeps pushing the boundaries of this horror genre, which he said continues to be stigmatized because it depends on a visceral, not intellectual reaction.

“Being scared is often regarded as a childish or immature emotion,’’ del Toro said. “It’s very hard for the critical audience to admit they got emotional in a movie. It’s sort of admitting defeat.’’

If that’s the case, then may del Toro keep conquering us.

Gygax Biopic in the works

The Examiner.com has reported and confirmed a rumor that’s already been echoing through the dungeons of D&D talk: that a Gary Gygax biopic is in the works. Michael Tresca wrote:

George Strayton confirmed he is … the scriptwriter for a $150 million movie based on Gary Gygax’s life. George describes the film as a ‘combination action movie and bio pic.’ The movie will tell the story of how Gary created Dungeons & Dragons, switching between his real life and the fantasy realm of Dungeons & Dragons.

Strayton is the CEO/Lead Designer of Secret Fire Games, as well as a writer for TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys andXena: Warrior Princess, and the animated feature Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

Another morsel: Tresca said that “George let it slip that a ‘huge star is playing Gary.’”

I’m game.

That said, some skeptical voices have already begun to pepper the blogosphere. As James Maliszewski says over at Grognardia, “I’d frankly be amazed if any studio thought that the life of Gary Gygax had enough mass appeal to be made into a movie, let alone one with a big budget and a huge star.” It’s an excellent question.

This certainly raises the question if the non-nerd world is ready for a biopic on an essential, but for many, still unknown pop culture innovator who helped usher in a new gaming and leisure genre. The Whole Wide World, the 1996 film about Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, and starring Vincent D’Onofrio and Renée Zellweger, proved that more obscure subjects for biopics can be made. But … while that film was largely well-received critically, it tanked at the box office.

The life of Gygax and genesis of D&D certainly sounds like a promising idea for a movie. Who among lovers of RPGs won’t want to see the reenactments of D&D’s early years? Those behind-the-scenes scenes of early play-testing? And to settle once and for all the junk food dilemma — did Gary prefer Doritos or Cheetos?

More updates on this as I hear more.

My Super 8 Summer of Escapism

From the 1978 Sears catalog -- do your chores, save your allowance, and all your movie-making dreams can come true.The film Super 8, which hit theaters a few weeks ago, weaves in pop cultural touchstones that triggered for me a nostalgic tsunami: whispering into walkie-talkies, perfecting techniques for monster makeup, and wearing my hair in a hobbity mop. A project in mind, I’d madly pedal my Schwinn bicycle (with banana seat and sissy bar) from one part of town to another to hatch it, just like Super 8’s Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) and his buddies.

Coincidentally enough, Super 8 also eerily evokes an American boyhood experience similar to my own upbringing in small town New Hampshire. No, I never saw giant spider-like creatures emerging from train crashes and I didn’t film them. But in the late 1970s, enthralled by the same films that Super 8 director J.J. Abrams clearly was — Spielbergian monster and alien encounter movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. — I was determined to be next blockbuster kid. And weirdly, like me, Abrams was born in 1966 and was 12 in 1979, the same year the movie takes place.

Like the boys in Super 8, I armed also myself with a movie camera. I built sets with HO-scale train props, and MacGyvered Revell airplane and boat models to make my own Star Wars-like space ships. Focusing on animation rather than live action films, I’d shoot clay blobs one frame at a time, enacting monster wrestling matches and deep space dogfights. This being an eon before iMovie and YouTube, I edited my footage with crude equipment, assembling each scene with plastic splices, and showed them to an audience of my family and friends.

As I wrote in a recent aticle for Salon.com, my journey through the realm of adolescence to the kingdom of adulthood began to reveal itself as a tricky maze filled with traps, monsters and dead ends, not to mention broken mothers. Like Joe Lamb, whose mother dies in a freak factory accident, my mother was gone, suddenly stricken by brain damage. Like that kid, I was saddled with a heavy cloak of loss I couldn’t come close to articulating. I felt abandoned, and the solution for how to navigate this new life was not published, upside-down, in the back of any book of brain teasers. I longed for answers.

The Super 8 movies I shot provided one avenue of escape. Then, in and around directing my latest Claymation fantasy feature that summer of 1979, another path appeared. I learned how to face my demons in another way. I learned that sometimes, checking out from reality was not merely a fun diversion, but necessary. I was shown a clever trick—how to step away from my own body and mind, my family, and travel to places I’d never even seen. A new, more powerful way out. I discovered Dungeons & Dragons. [More on that story here.]

‘Trollhunter’ director pays homage to Norwegian folklore

The troll hunters approach a massive “Jotnar" troll[This article originally appeared in the Boston Globe]

by Ethan Gilsdorf

Eighteenth- and 19th-century Norwegians believed in trolls. These huge humanoids wandered wild, marginal places and wastelands and caused trouble when they encountered humans.

Nowadays, no one believes in trolls. But they still haunt and inhabit Norway’s folkloric consciousness, a still-pristine landscape of woods, mountains, and fiord lands, largely as comic characters. Think of the dim-witted troll in the Norwegian tale “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,’’ easily tricked by the goats and the butt of jokes.

“Trollhunter,’’ which opens Friday, dusts off those fairy tales and updates them with a fresh, 21st-century coat of adventure and suspense — and ironic reality check.

Trolls exist.

But “fairy tales don’t always match reality,’’ grumbles Hans, the film’s misanthropic antihero.

Written and directed by Norwegian André Ovredal, “Trollhunter’’ shares the first-person-reportage feel of “The Blair Witch Project,’’ as well as the shaky-camera monster-movie vibe of “Cloverfield.’’ Ovredal’s vision also includes doses of Steven Spielberg’s effects-driven shock and awe, as well as that director’s prevailing mistrust of authority.

“I wanted to blend my love of ‘Indiana Jones’ with my love of trolls,’’ said Ovredal, 37, in Boston to promote his debut feature. Which explains why Hans the troll hunter wears a fedora.

As with “Blair Witch,’’ what the audience sees, ostensibly, is footage shot by students. There are three of them, investigating a series of bear killings in the wilds of Norway. They hope to interview the “poacher.’’

Finally agreeing to let the video crew follow him, the poacher is revealed to be Hans, a middle-aged, burned-out government employee working for the fictitious Troll Security Service (or TSS, an echo of the PST, Norway’s version of the CIA). His job: keep the troll population under control. Meanwhile, TSS bureaucrats devise bogus explanations — tornadoes, floods, bears — to explain any isolated troll-wrought damage or deaths.

The troll hunter is played by Norway’s most famous and controversial comedian, Otto Jespersen, known for his crass, dark sense of humor. Here, Jespersen doesn’t aim for laughs. The portrayal is straight. “There’s nothing heroic about what I do,’’ he deadpans to the wide-eyed college kids.

While the troll hunter is supposed to ensure Norwegians never learn that trolls exist, Hans eventually tires of the cover-up and lets the students document his methods. In doing so, “Trollhunter’’ manages to pay homage to Norway’s rich folklore and take jabs at government bureaucracy and politics. He complains he gets no overtime pay. After every killing, Hans must fill out a “Slayed Troll Form.’’ The current controversy over building electrical towers in Norway’s hinterlands is cleverly woven into the plot. Let’s just say those high-tension lines serve a purpose beyond bringing power to the people.

“Because Norway has such rugged landscapes, it’s not surprising that many of the creatures of their cultural lore are connected so deeply with the earth and its perils,’’ noted Sandra Hordis, a professor at Arcadia University, in Glenside, Pa., who specializes in medieval literature and folklore. “They are beings sprung from soil and stone, and have come to permeate much of the folklore of the region.’’

Trolls have given their names to natural features such as the rugged, dolomite formations called Trollholmsund and Trollstigen, a dramatic mountain road that translates as “Troll’s Ladder.’’

Ovredal, who is known in Norway as a director of commercials, and his special-effects team wanted their trolls to have idiosyncratic and distinct personalities. Their creatures aren’t the Hulk-like, Middle-earth trolls Peter Jackson brought to life, nor are they the cute, neon-haired dolls from the 1960s. These trolls were inspired by “The Fairy Tales of Asbjornsen and Moe,’’ a book from the 1850s that Ovredal’s grandparents read to him as a boy.

“I never read ‘Lord of Rings’ and never played the game D&D [Dungeons & Dragons],’’ said Ovredal. “There was a missing, collective mythology I had to create.’’

Ovredal worked out a detailed “natural history of trolls’’ as fastidious as an entry in the D&D “Monster Manual.’’ His lexicon delineates four species: the one-armed “Ringlefinch,’’ the three-headed “Tosserlad,’’ the cave-dwelling “Mountain King,’’ and the massive “Jotnar.’’ All have oversize faces and bulbous noses. Norwegians know that sunlight turns trolls to stone. In Ovredal’s world, flashes of bright light also can make them explode. Here’s the scientific explanation: The UVB rays accelerate vitamin D and calcium production in their bodies, which either calcifies or detonates them.

In a nod to folklore, “Trollhunter’’ also includes a bridge scene reminiscent of “Three Billy Goats Gruff.’’ And just as in the “fee-fi-fo-fum’’ nursery rhyme, these trolls can smell Christian blood.

The director cut his teeth on Spielberg’s alien and fantasy films such as “Jaws,’’ “E.T.’’ and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’’ In those films, he said, “We have to figure out what is psychologically true in the fantastic.’’

But overall, “Trollhunter’’ is more skeptical than Spielbergian. Ovredal likens his film more to “Man Bites Dog,’’ the Belgian mockumentary about a film crew following a serial killer. He didn't want to make the “typical Norwegian socialist-realist film.’’ Like “The Host’’ for South Koreans, perhaps this overlooked Scandinavian nation needs its own monster movie.

“I hope they experience an adventure they have never seen before,’’ Ovredal said of US audiences. “A sense of humor that’s different. A monster they’ve never seen before. [And leave the theater] with a big smile on their face, and talk about it.’’

Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at www.ethangilsdorf.com.

Stake Land hits its mark

Young Martin (Connor Paolo) faces a vampire in "Stake Land"Post-apocalyptic scenarios never used to be inundated with the undead. Take the classics: Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes, The Terminator. Plenty of unsavory characters who’ve fashioned impressive wardrobes out of leather, your pick of unspeakable acts. But no zombies.

Of late, our dystopian worlds tend to be overrun with the plague-ridden. Whatever killed off the humans and caused the US government to collapse was not nuclear, not alien, but viral, spread one sweet bite at a time. Ah, sweet human flesh.

In the case of Stake Land, blame a vampire epidemic. Unlike standard animated corpses, who stumble about while comically shedding limbs, these “vamps’’ are more orc-like: buff, agile, growling, with a bad case of ’roid rage. We don't know where they came from, or what caused the plague, but you don't want to mess with them.

Still, the standard wooden stake to the heart does the trick. Or twisted and hammered into the sternum. Or jammed into the brain stem. Each type of undead --  "vamp," "scamp" and "berserker" --- has its own special way to stop ticking, and "Mister" knows each special way to kill 'em good.

When Stake Land begins, a lone, vampire hunter known only as Mister (Nick Damici, of World Trade Center) saves young Martin (Connor Paolo) just as the baddies kill his parents and munch on his baby sibling. Through spewing black blood, Dad's last burbling words to Mister are "Save him." The misanthropic takes Martin under his wing and trains the boy in anti-vamp hand-to-hand combat. There's a nice scene of the kid waiting in an oversized football helmet and pads, armed with a wooden spear, as Mister unleashes a zombie captured in the trunk of his car expressly for his impromptu boot camp. 

The boy deemed ready to kick his own undead butt, together, surrogate son and father cruise northward in a clunky gas guzzler hoping to reach Canada, a.k.a. “New Eden,’’ a promised land where life is supposedly better and the weather's too cold for the vamps to survive. At night, they chain length of metal fencing to the car's exterior to protect them as they sleep. Sometimes they stay up at night to lure the zombies with bait like a teddy bear, then pounce. Mister collects teeth from his trophies They pick up a nun, played by a shorn, haggard-looking Kelly McGillis (a long way from her Witness and Top Gun days), a pregnant girl country singer (Danielle Harris), and an Army deserter (Sean Nelson). In the weakest plotline, they must fight off a creepy cult leader (Michael Cerveris) and his burlap-wearing minions. It seems that in the future, the end of the world has encouraged nihilistic Christian sects -- what else is new? --- and this cult has a way of air-dropping the undead fodder on the encampments of the living, terrorist-style, much like medieval siege engines hurled plague-ridden carcasses over the ramparts to infect castle residents. There's also marauding bands of cannibals (though it's unclear if, taxonomically, they're undead as well or just hungry).

As in The Road Warrior, a young narrator’s experience is the prism through which we see rape, death, devastation. We watch Martin morph from wide-eyed boy to jaded young man. Damici plays Mister as all brood and no bluster. More of a tight-lipped western drifter than sci-fi action hero, he keeps watch while the others sleep, and utters advice like “One day you’ll learn not to dream at all." The ultimate coming of age training.

Other undead movies needlessly foreground the action. Stake Land has its fight scenes, and they're shot conventionally, with none of that slow-mo, high-flying acrobatic all in vogue. Here, they action is also secondary. While paying debts to John Carpenter's Escape from New York and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films, director Jim Mickle (Mulberry Street), who wrote the script with Damici, has his own aesthetic, which smartly lingers not on violence but on the silent, poignant details of this desolate world— a ruined factory, an abandoned home the travelers scavenge for food and a place to sleep, a Virgin Mary figurine left on a makeshift grave. The beautifully bleak vision is enhanced by Ryan Samul’s exquisite cinematography and composer Jeff Grace’s plaintive piano and violin arrangements. In one touching moment, McGillis recognizes that one of the attacking vamps is a fellow sister of the cloth. She winces as the nun is finally laid to rest, but not before the bitch is skewered by a stake.

This doomed world may feel familiar, full of paranoia and desperation, but Stake Land remains one of the genre’s smartest entries in years. As in The Road, our hope hinges on the survival of this makeshift family. Which suggests the hidden purpose of zombie movies: Given these folks’ post-apocalyptic woes, can the recession be all that bad?

Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, his travel memoir investigation into fantasy and gaming subcultures the Huffington Post called “part personal odyssey, part medieval mid-life crisis, and part wide-ranging survey of all things freaky and geeky," National Public Radio described as "Lord of the Rings meets Jack Kerouac’s On the Road" and Wired.com proclaimed, “For anyone who has ever spent time within imaginary realms, the book will speak volumes.” Follow Ethan's adventures at http://www.fantasyfreaksbook.com.

The Uncle in Carbonite

I was drawing pictures with my nephew Jack.

“What shall we draw?” I asked.

“Let’s draw Star Wars,” Jack said, innocently enough.

We began to draw Star Wars. Jack drew a guy, then a box. Next he drew a face and feet in the box. Then he made a line so the guy next to the box had an arm that touched the guy in the box.

“What the heck is that?” I asked.

“That’s me,” Jack said, adding his name to the figure on the left.

“So what is that?”

“How do you spell ‘carbonite’?” Jack asked, a big smile beaming across his face. He started to giggle.

“C-A-R …” I began. He began to write. The kid was seven. “B-O-N … I-T-E.”  Then he added another word: “E-T-H-A-N-[space]-I-N.”

The giggling commenced.

“Wait. Is that me?”

More giggling from Jack.

I was incredulous. “You little … So, that makes you … Boba Fett?”

Uncontrollable giggling. “Uncle Ethan! You’re trapped in carbonite!”

Read the rest on wired.com's Geek Dad

A Hard Day's Knight

In the short film "A Hard Day's Knight," an average guy (Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks) dons his chain mail and takes to the streets to find glory, camaraderie and donuts. Searching for Gandalf, Frodo and Harry Potter, our hero battles indifference and ridicule as he tries to convince others to join his fellowship and begs for spare change for the quest. 

WATCH ON FULL SCREEN HERE | Watch on YouTube

Taken for a ride

With the new Pirates of the Caribbean out in theaters, it's clear the movie-theme park synergy is conquering our entertainment dollar

In search of movie plots, Hollywood has mined books, plays, TV shows, mythology, epic poems, even religious texts. Today, cinematic narrative is unearthed in other, less traditional places --- comic books, video games, cartoons, toy and theme parks rides.

Take "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides," which opens Friday, the fourth film in the multi-billion-dollar franchise based on the 1967 Disneyland attraction featuring  "Avast, mateys!" pirate talk, skeletons at the ship's wheel, and buccaneers chasing wenches.

Why keep making feature-length adventures inspired by what are essentially elaborate, 10-minute log rides? Is Hollywood that desperate for ideas? Are audiences that unadventurous?To make money? Perhaps. Intellectual property owners do want to make money. The "Pirates" ride at Disney is a beloved institution, with name recognition. Well-executed as a movie series, the Johnny Depp juggernaut have conquered the box office, spawned spin-off novels, picture books, action figures, and video games.

But there are other forces at work here.

Newer generations of genre fans don't want merely to absorb narratives on the big screen. They want to participate in fictional worlds. Multi-platform, movie/book/video game tie-in products are built to sate this desire to experience the narrative outside the movie theater, to interact more directly with the storyline, or to help create a narrative --- whether by playing an video game, writing fan fiction or collecting tchotchkes or other fandom activities.

Movie-inspired amusement park attractions complete the cycle. Take your pick from dozens: Peter Pan to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride (all based on Disney movie adaptations of classic books); Shrek to E.T. to Men in Black; Revenge of the Mummy, Jaws, to Jurassic Park. The Star Tours motion simulator attraction (now closed at US Disney parks for an upgrade and open only at Tokyo Disneyland) takes place in the "Star Wars" film universe. Warner Bros. Movie World (in Australia) has attractions based on "Batman," "Austin Powers," "Scooby Doo" and Marilyn Monroe. At Thorpe Park (in Britain), there's Saw, the world's first roller coaster based on a horror film. We've come a long way since the first roller coasters began appearing in15th century Russia.

So far, only the Walt Disney Company has the pop-cultural relevance and gravitas to get away with basing a movie on an amusement park attraction. That said, few of these adaptations have raked in pirate-like booty. Take "The Country Bears" (2002), based on the Country Bear Jamboree, both critically derided and a $35 million box office dud. Performing better was Brian DePalma's "Mission to Mars" (2000), partially inspired by the old attraction of the same name that was discontinued in the early 1990s; the EPCOT ride Mission: Space was built after the film came out and houses several of the movie props plus the rotating "gravity wheel" set. "The Haunted Mansion" (2003) also did somewhat better. ("Tower of Terror" (1997), based on the Disney-MGM Studios ride, was a made for TV movie.)

What's clear is that amusement parks have always been associated with deviance. Ever since the carnival came to town, so have carnies, serial killers, and torrid summer romances with strangers. In "Rollercoaster" (1977) --- released in Sensurround, an effect that vibrated theater seats with huge bass speakers --- Timothy Bottoms's plot to blow up a roller coaster is thwarted by ride inspector George Segal. Then here's the creepy side to those "It's a Small World" robots. In the dreadful "Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park" (1978),  the '70s rock band, in full makeup, battles an evil engineer turning park-goers into mindless cyborgs. In the adult-themed Wild West amusement park of "Westworld" (1973), androids malfunction and start killing the patrons; its sequel, "Futureworld" (1976) concerns a cloning machine and a sci-fi-theme. The "Jurassic Park" movies (1993, 1997, 2001) further fueled fears of mad scientists and technology run amok, and nicely skewered the wholesome, antiseptic Disney park experience.

Of course, theme parks aren't just for cyborgs and dinosaurs; the undead also love them. Two brothers, Jason Patric and Corey Haim, are the new kids in town in "The Lost Boys" (1987), and must confront Kiefer Sutherland and his gang of teenage vampires plaguing an amusement park set on the California coast. In "Zombieland" (2009), zombie apocalypse survivors Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg hit the road in search of a safe haven, eventually landing in the "Pacific Playland" amusement park, where various rides play a role in the climactic battles.

But not all theme parks are nefarious. "National Lampoon's Vacation" (1983) begins with the lighter theme of summer vacations gone wrong. Chevy Chase drives his family cross-country to the Disney-like Walley World, only to find the park closed for repairs. Which drives Chase crazy, turning him into a BB gun-wielding psychopath. The funny kind. In the 15th James Bond installment, "The Living Daylights" (1987), the Ferris wheel at Vienna's Prater park is where Timothy Dalton scores with one of his Bond girls. In the dramedy "Adventureland" (2009), recent college grad Eisenberg (again) is stuck with a summer job at an amusement park in his hometown (bad), then falls in love (good). At least there are no zombies.

The most lucrative scenario for an entertainment mogul would be to base an entire amusement park on a single franchise. Disney began this by dividing its parks into vague "worlds," like Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, Frontierland, and Adventureland. The "movie studio" parks at Universal and Disney/MGM developed this concept, basing parks around various but mostly unrelated movies ("Jaws," etc). Then Universal's Islands of Adventure created mini-parks devoted to themes like Marvel super heroes, cartoons such as "0Rocky and Bullwinkle," "Jurassic Park"/dinosaurs, ancient myths, and the world of Dr. Seuss. One of these "islands," The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, has blazed a new trail by devoting itself to a single consistent, fictional world. The park opened last year, and features Dragon Challenge, a double roller coaster with intertwining tracks; a more conventional steel roller coaster called Flight of the Hippogriff; and a tour of Hogwarts Castle  called Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey that ends with a broomstick ride past spiders, the Whomping Willow and Dementors. The "set" includes a restaurant, various fake storefronts and real stores where you can purchase merchandise like sugar quills, lemon drops, Bertie Bott's Every-Flavour Beans, and your own broomstick.

It's only a matter of time before entire, giant theme parks are based on the most lucrative franchises in history: Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, Avatar. But if they build them, will fans come?

In the Boston area, there's an entrepreneur who is hoping that answer is yes. Based at Patriot Place in Foxborough, Matt DuPlessie's company 5 Wits taps into our desire to be part of a movie plot. DuPlessie's walk-through spy adventure Espionage (not affiliated with the James Bond franchise, but definitely inspired by it) opened last fall, and another attraction, 20,000 Leagues, based on Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," opened in March. Neither limits users to train car tracks or restricts their motions with seat belts; visitors walk freely through the sets to solve puzzles and, hopefully, save the day.

As the movie-theme park alliance has offered successful synergies, audiences have grown more sophisticated in their taste for special effects. The environments of the original Anaheim and Orlando Disney rides seem primitive by today's standards. Oddly, the quartet of "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies also have very little to do with the ride's original plot, such as it is, which simply evokes generic pirate-themed worlds. To fix this, the old attractions have been retro-fitted and refurbished with better lighting and audio effects. Audio-animatronic figures of Captain Jack Sparrow, his nemesis Barbossa, the squid-faced Davy Jones (all voiced by Depp, Geoffrey Rush, and Bill Nighy respectively) have been added that match the movie world more closely. Of course, the franchise branding had to be updated too; the pirate ship banner and other signage outside the Disney rides now matches the movie poster typeface and other marketing collateral.

While the digital bling of XBox Live, CGI and motion capture may have usurped the power of theme-park attractions, it turns out roller-coaster rides and haunted houses still have their nostalgic tug. They remain an outdated but nonetheless real-world way to participate in cinematic narrative. Taking a ride can still make us feel part of the movie.

As long as the movie is worth the ride.

Recently there's been talk of Jon Favreau ("Iron Man") directing a film based on the entire Disney theme park, Magic Kingdom, but no details yet on what the plot might be. Undead Mickey with assault rifle? 

I'd pay to see that.

Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, his travel memoir investigation into fantasy and gaming subcultures the Huffington Post called “part personal odyssey, part medieval mid-life crisis, and part wide-ranging survey of all things freaky and geeky," National Public Radio described as "Lord of the Rings meets Jack Kerouac’s On the Road" and Wired.com proclaimed, “For anyone who has ever spent time within imaginary realms, the book will speak volumes.” Follow Ethan's adventures at http://www.fantasyfreaksbook.com.

Sucker Punch misses

Sucker Punch

 What happens when you mix Heavy Metal (that episodic, 1981 sex, rock and violence fantasy movie) with teenage boy fantasies of girls in mini-skirts kicking ass with automatic weapons and samurai swords, and a treacle-infused revenge and sacrifice plot about escape from mental institutions?

 You get the chaotic, seething, psycho-nonsense that is Sucker Punch.

 The premise had some promise. In the unnamed 1960s, the doll-faced Babydoll, played by Emily Browning (The Uninvited), accidentally shoots and wounds her evil, molesting step father. No problem; she acts in self-defense. But a stray bullet also offs her little sister. Ooops. Off Babydoll goes to Victorian, thunderstorm-swept Lennox House for the Mentally Insane, hilariously located in Brattleboro, Vermont (where I once lived). Here, dozens of other girls have been incarcerated, and like Babydoll, her compatriots inexplicably have hot-sounding pseudonyms perfectly suited for our Age of Madonna and Days of Lady Gaga. There’s the not-so-sweet Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish of Bright Star), the chummy Rocket (Jena Malone from Into the Wild), and two others with microscopic roles, the non-blonde Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens, who appeared in the High School Musical films) and the near-invisible Amber (Jamie Chung of Sorority Row), They’re all possibly insane or, like Babydoll, just abandoned by wicked step-parents.

 The big, scary Lennox House is full of nut house clichés, from rusty doors, peeling paint and white tile, to the oblivious orderlies, the lecherous cook (who of course is obese), and the doctor (Jon Hamm of “Mad Men”) who administers the lobotomies. A megalomaniac lech heads up the institution (Oscar Isaac from Robin Hood). There’s one understanding psychiatrist, Madam Gorski (Carla Gugino from Watchmen), whose play-therapy shtick equates imagination with freedom. “That world you control,” she says with her Slavic accent. “That play can be as real as any pain.”

 Lovers of games and genre “escapism” already get the point of fantasy: We enter these realms when, sometimes, real life’s crap bears down too hard on us. High expectations also weigh on director Zack Snyder, whose past movies Watchmen and 300 mostly pleased his fanboy and fangirl audiences. (A recent profile in the New York Times Magazine plumbs Snyder’s sudden surplus of geek cred). Clearly, he loves his graphic novels and his Dungeons & Dragons, and for Sucker Punch, he unfurls that well-trodden path of a quest for something—honor, courage, freedom—by an ordinary-person-with-extraordinary-and-hidden-gifts.

 But here, more so than his other outings, Snyder is preaching, even pandering, to the converted, with wild and disappointing results.

 First, you have to swallow this: More than half of the movie takes place in BabyDoll’s mind. Supposedly, to keep her sane in the loony bin, our Snow White begins to have fantasies of being a hooker trapped inside a Moulin Rouge-like whore house run by the creepy pimp (Isaac again; everyone plays at least two roles in the film). Apparently, in the girl’s mind, being a whore is a step-up. But Babydoll inserts another fantasy layer inside the first (I know, but stay with me here): a quest to obtain five items—a map, fire, a knife, a key and a fifth thing TBA. If she succeeds, she can escape the institution and bring her friends with her. This second fantasy she can only access when she revs up her erotic dance routine for the voyeuristic men. (Cleverly, Snyder never lets the audience see her sexy moves.)

When BabyDoll embarks on quest Part One, a solo adventure set in feudal Japan, she meets an unnamed “Wise Man,” the veteran actor Scott Glenn, who’s been wonderful in movies ranging from The Right Stuff, The Hunt for Red October, The Silence of the Lambs and The Bourne Ultimatum. Here, his grizzled, grandfatherly Wise Man character is Master Po/Yoda to Babydoll’s Grasshopper/Luke. “What are you looking for?” he asks, before handing over some serious firepower. “A way out,” replies the stoic Babydoll, who doesn’t break a smile all movie. Emily Browning’s wide, inviting, snow-white face, punctuated by two giant eyes, is an anime artist’s wet dream.

After defeating a trio of troll-like, giant armored samurai, Babydoll invites her ragtag galpals to join her on the next installment of heroic derring-do. Like in the Rupert Holmes song, she wants them to “Come with me and escape.” And they do: first to the zombie-infested trenches of World War I, then into a WW II–medieval castle-siege mash-up scenario, and finally on a bomb-defusing mission on some craggy rock next to what looks like Saturn. Luckily, for the viewer, the babes march off into battle, often in slow-motion, dressed like “slovenly trulls” and “brazen strumpets” from Babydoll’s Prostitutes & Pimps role-playing game. (Check the “Random Harlot Table” from your Dungeon Master’s Guide for details). This set-up permits the young ladies to wear fishnet stocking and high heels as they fight undead German infantrymen and shiny robots from the future. The Wise Man reappears in each fantasy episode as quest-giver, instructing the gals where they’ll find the particular item on their wish list. He also offers advice like “Don’t ever write a check with your mouth that you can’t cash with your ass.”

In shooting his asylum/brothel scenes, Snyder composes his shots with a painstakingly, almost achingly overthought attention. But at least these shots are mostly quiet. Once the fantasy ass-kicking begins, the bloody camera can’t stay still, sweeping, pivoting, dipping, swooping, all the while shooting with jerky, “Hey, aren’t we missing a few frames of film here?” look-and –feel that’s all the vogue these days. Adding to the head-throbs are the blaring remixes of classics like Eurhythmics’s “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” Queen’s  “We Will Rock You” and “I Want It All,” and Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” Each fight episode feels like a video game level sponsored by a record label. Advil, anyone?

Meanwhile, the production design and digital landscapes have been steeped—OK, soaked—in a sea of sepia. Some of it is stunning. We see some cool cross-pollination of genres. Those big samurai dudes wield “naginatas” (a pole arm with curved blade on the end, much like a European glaive) but also primitive machine guns. In that siege scene, the ruined castle is swarming with orcs and foot soldiers in plate mail; into this mess the gals air drop from a bomber plane, then kill a sleeping dragon. Back in WW I, there’s zeppelins but also zombies and an anime-inspired, jet pack-powered bipedal armored fighting machine emblazoned with a pink bunny. That’s piloted by Amber, who handles all the flying duties. At one point, when Wise Guy barks at the ladies, “They’re using steampower and clockwork!” I half expected a subtitle to pop up: “Hey Steampunk Fans: We get it!” followed by, in smaller type, “[Hey Newbies: Steampunk is a genre the uses anachronistic technology or futuristic inventions as Victorians like Jules Venre might have envisioned ...]”

That first action scene, where Babydoll faces the giants with glowing red eyes (they glow, therefore they are evil), has its pleasures. But here’s where the major flaw of Sucker Punch is revealed. There’s nothing at stake. We know each mission is a fight of fantasy. The girls are imbued with awesome superpowers—with their blades they deflect bullets from nasty German undead; they leap, slow-mo, over the crude weapon blows dealt by Japanese trolls; they are thrown across temples and train cars and tossed through stone walls; they are pummeled by shiny robots. Nary a scratch on their milky cheeks. The audience figures out these gals are impervious. So where’s the danger? Babydoll has as many lives as a video game avatar. Only towards the end do we see real death, but the moment is laughable.

Sucker Punch aims to work on the level of universal heroic fantasy epic, but it barely functions as pulp. The Sweet 16 set may get off on the “grrrrrl power” theme, and not a few boys will dig the upskirt action shots mixed with oodles of cartoon violence. But the cocktail of comic book clichés is too sour to swallow. Strong female heroines are welcome, but their impact as role models is diluted when we see their exploits are simply fantasies nested within further fantasies, like level 60 Russian Night Elf dolls.

So what are we left with? Men are horrible, predatory pervs? That they “silence” a young woman and her “voice” via real or imaginary lobotomies? That, as the film’s PR material touts, the only resort is her “dream world” which “provides the ultimate escape from her darker reality.” Or that we should thrilled by the ambiguity of it all, because the filmmakers say, “her incredible adventures blur the lines between what’s real and what is imaginary.” Sucker Punch, meet Jacob’s Ladder, A Beautiful Mind, Fight Club, Psycho and about a hundred other movies with imaginary characters or unreliable (or insane) protagonists and narrators.

Yes, a lobotomy would be the ultimate bummer. But so is that “What chains us? Who holds the key?” voice-over doggerel right before the credits roll. “You get out there and live for all of us,” are Babydoll’s final words before her own grim ending begins.

I think even teenage girls will have more fun playing a couple hours of World of Warcraft, Halo or Portal.

 Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, his travel memoir investigation into fantasy and gaming subcultures that the Huffington Post calls “part personal odyssey, part medieval mid-life crisis, and part wide-ranging survey of all things freaky and geeky." National Public Radio described the book as "Lord of the Rings meets Jack Kerouac’s On the Road" and Wired.com proclaimed, “For anyone who has ever spent time within imaginary realms, the book will speak volumes.” Follow Ethan's adventures at http://www.fantasyfreaksbook.com.

What's up with alien invasion movies?

Battlefield: Earth

When alien visitors do not come in peace

The White House was one of several iconic sites destroyed by aliens in Roland Emmerich’s 1996 film, “Independence Day.’’ (20th Century Fox via AP)

By Ethan Gilsdorf

Boston Globe Correspondent / March 11, 2011

“We’re facing an unknown enemy,’’ barks a Marine officer once the alien spacecraft have begun their assault in “Battle: Los Angeles.’’ In the film, which opens today, the attackers arrive in metallic ships. Other times, they arrive in asteroids, as in “The Day of the Triffids’’ (1962). Or they use asteroids as weapons: in “Starship Troopers’’ (1997) the Arachnids, or “Bugs,’’ from planet Klendathu launch a large space rock that flattens Buenos Aires.

But no matter the mode of transport, nothing gets our flags waving and patriotic juices flowing more than the threat of Earth’s destruction at the hands of ruthless, repugnant, anonymous aliens.

Here’s one reason: Because our angsty, modern-day wars don’t let us demonize the enemy as in decades past, it’s hard to get excited about blowing apart Iraqis and Afghans, whether in the real world or onscreen. Hence the appearance of “Battle: Los Angeles,’’ or last year’s LA-invasion “Skyline.’’ Combating hulking spacecraft and silvery foot soldiers whose weapons are surgically implanted ends up dicier than anything Al Qaeda can throw at us. In one scene, the platoon’s Nigerian medic grumbles, “[Expletive]! I’d rather be in Afghanistan.’’

Not all alien invasion movies are created equal. Earthlings might be mere bystanders in a battle between alien races: Take “Transformers’’ (2007) and its tagline “Their war. Our world.’’ Or “AVPR: Aliens vs Predator — Requiem’’ (also 2007). Watch “Invasion of the Body Snatchers’’ (1956, 1978) and you will notice the aliens don’t rub out metropolises; the Pod People colonize one citizen at a time. Or they walk unnoticed among us, as in “Men in Black’’ (1997). In the Godzilla “giant monsters’’ genre, or even “Cloverfield’’ (2008), they’re not even technically aliens, since the monsters (mostly) hatch from our atomic waste. The cartoon “Monsters vs. Aliens’’ (2009) combines these elements: A human beaned by a meteorite grows gigantic and joins forces with creatures to battle an invading alien robot.

You could argue these invasion films serve a higher cultural purpose. They can be seen as metaphors for some nameless fear — communism, viral infection, illegal immigration. Or think of these films as talismans. Directors imagine the worst, then the ruination won’t happen in real life.

But to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, “War is a war is a war is a war.’’

What follows are battlefield reports from a few memorable movies where the little green men invade armada-style in a coordinated attack, unilaterally and unprovoked. They storm the beaches of, say, Santa Monica, like it’s the Normandy invasion, ray guns a-blazin’. They harvest our resources, take no prisoners, and destroy our beloved strip malls and skyscrapers. When they do, we guiltlessly circle our wagons and fight back. As in “Battle: Los Angeles,’’ there’s only one rightful response. “You kill anything that’s not human.’’

“War of the Worlds’’ (1953, 2005)

You might say H.G. Wells’s 1898 book kick-started the whole alien-invasion genre. At least two major film adaptations (and one freaky radio broadcast) have followed, transposing the battleground from London to US cities. In the 1953 film version, the setting is Southern California. A meteorite falls, and out pop the manta-like Martian ships. A friendly greeting is answered by heat rays and electro-magnetic pulses that vaporize our backyards. Even our A-bombs are useless. When all hope seems lost, it turns out the aliens have no defense against our germs. Should have had their flu shots! Weirdly, 2005 gave us three remakes: two low-budget, straight-to-video affairs, and the Spielberg-Cruise megalith that takes us on a paranoid road trip from destroyed New York through the ravaged New England countryside to Boston, all the while the tripedal aliens hot on the refugees’ tails.

“Mars Attacks!’’ (1996)

Think of “The Day the Earth Stood Still’’ (1951, remade in 2008) or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind’’ (1977). An alien ship arrives. Do we strike first or parley? Do they talk back in musical tones or English? Do they play fair? In Tim Burton’s spoof starring a Hollywood who’s-who (Jack Nicholson, Annette Bening, Glenn Close, Jack Black, Natalie Portman, and more), the conventions are overturned. When Martians surround Earth with their flying saucers, negotiations begin. But the tricksy aliens infiltrate the White House and the destruction commences. The evil invaders even redo Mount Rushmore with Martian faces. Luckily, there’s always a weakness: This time their demise is Slim Whitman, whose yodeling voice in “Indian Love Call’’ causes alien brains to explode. Makes you want to place your K-tel order today.

“Independence Day’’ (1996)

The xenophobia and hawkishness of some of these invasion dramas aside, perverse pleasure can also be found in seeing beloved cities and monuments obliterated: the Eiffel Tower, White House, Golden Gate Bridge. That’s what we get in Roland Emmerich’s alien-inundation flick. Ragtag survivors gather in the Nevada desert in a last-ditch effort — on July 4 — to plan retaliation. But first the audience is treated to the deployment of dozens of 15-mile-wide saucers whose blue energy blasts decimate some of our favorite urban vacation destinations: DC, LA, New York. Eventually, a computer virus (not the common cold) defeats the ship’s force field, and Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith prevail. Yay, Earth!

Ethan Gilsdorf, author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks,’’ can be reached at www.fantasyfreaksbook.com.

"Not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far, far away": Hanging with Nick Frost and Simon Pegg

from the feature story by Ethan Gilsdorf in the Boston Globe

Like Tolkien and Lewis, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are British and longtime friends. Also like Tolkien and Lewis, Frost and Pegg tell stories that please them. “Paul,’’ the latest film they wrote and in which they star, opens Friday. It’s about two British geeks who leave the pop-cultural convention Comic-Con, in San Diego, on an RV excursion through the Southwest, only to take on an unexpected passenger: the title character, a gray-skinned, big-eyed, Area 51 escapee (voiced by Seth Rogen). Greg Mottola (“Adventureland,’’ “Superbad’’) directed.

“We’ve written a film that we want to watch and laugh at with our mates,’’ said Frost, in Boston last week to promote the film. Unlike the socially-awkward, aspiring science fiction writer Clive Gollings he plays in the film, the cheery Frost sported dark-rimmed glasses that self-consciously bespoke “nerd.’’ “That’s always what we have always done. You find that there are pockets of ‘us-es’ everywhere.’’

Those pockets of fanboys and fangirls will have a hard time not whispering to their theater seatmates when they spot the dozens of dorky inside jokes riffing off of “Star Wars,’’ “Star Trek,’’ “The X-Files,’’ “The Blues Brothers,’’ and nearly every fantasy or adventure film in the Steven Spielberg canon, from “Close Encounters’’ to “Raiders.’’

“The movie is very much a tribute to him,’’ said Frost, who was 10 when “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial’’ was released in 1982; Pegg was 12.

Some of the references are more “sci-fi 101,’’ said Pegg, who plays Clive’s best friend, the wannabe comic book artist Graeme Willy. That’s to make sure average moviegoers and not just hardcore genre geeks will buy tickets. “We had to make this film appeal on a broad level because it cost a lot of money. Because of Paul, really. He’s expensive. It’s like hiring Will Smith, literally, to get Paul on the screen.’’

But Pegg promised the film has plenty of obscure references, too. “It’s replete with gifts for those who know their stuff,’’ he said. “For the faithful.’’

One such nod: “Duel,’’ an early Spielberg film, is listed in red letters on the movie marquee seen toward the end of “Paul.’’ “ ‘Easy Rider’ is on double bill with that,’’ said Frost. “The street we were [shooting] on was the street where Jack Nicholson meets Peter Fonda.’’ Be on the lookout for even more abstruse references, and cameos.

In fact, geeks might bring bingo cards that replace numbers with such items as “swooning Ewok,’’ “mention of Reese’s Pieces’’ “Mos Eisley cantina music (played by country band),’’ “dialogue from ‘Aliens,’ ’’ and “bevy of metal bikini-costumed, ‘slave girl’ Princess Leias.’’ Drinking coffee in a hotel suite overlooking the Charles River, the two stressed that the point of “Paul’’ was not to ridicule those who collect samurai swords or speak Klingon (as both characters do in the film), but to celebrate them.

“We never wanted to make fun of it,’’ said Pegg. “Obviously those kind of fans are our bread and butter and helped get us where we are. We didn’t want to then turn around and say ‘Ha, ha. You big bunch of losers.’ ’’ Clive and Graeme are portrayed as mildly, and endearingly, dysfunctional and codependent, but ultimately good guys with big hearts.

Both actor-writers long ago established their geek cred. Pegg costarred with Frost in the cop-action movie spoof “Hot Fuzz’’ (2007) and the “zomedy’’ “Shaun of the Dead’’ (2004). Pegg cowrote both films and more recently voiced the character Reepicheep in “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.’’ “Young Scotty,’’ from “Star Trek’’ (2009), is his highest profile role to date. He will also star in the planned sequel. Both have acted in the forthcoming “Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn,’’ and when the Spielberg-Peter Jackson motion-capture juggernaut hits screens later this year, each of their stars will rise even higher into the dweeby firmament.

On the “Paul’’ set, they also geeked out on special effects required to bring the pot-smoking, wise-cracking space-dude to life. Rogen (“The Green Hornet,’’ “Knocked Up’’) shot a video reference version of the movie and recorded dialogue on a sound stage, but never joined the actors on location. Instead, Pegg, Frost, and the rest of the cast, which includes Jason Bateman and Kristen Wiig, acted with “a child, a small man, a ball, a stick with balls on it, some lights,’’ said Pegg. “All the way through I was thinking, this is never going to work.’’

Lining up sightlines between the eyes of humans and the yet-to-be generated CG Paul (to establish believable connections between the characters) caused the biggest headaches. “How do I know where to look?’’ Pegg said. “But it worked.’’ (“You see Ewan McGregor looking at Jar Jar Binks,’’ he added, taking a swipe at the “Star Wars’’ prequels. “He’s like looking above his head.’’)

If one geek fantasy is finally to defeat the bully, get the girl or boy, and find fame or fortune with your secret passion, then “Paul’’ fulfills the dream. Not to spoil the ending, but Willy and Gollings do become rock stars in their own realm.

Another holy grail is that geeks might get to hang with real wizards, orcs, hobbits, superheroes, or robots. For two hours, “Paul’’ brings this pipe dream closer, too.

“We always see these characters in fantasy environments. We see Gollums in Middle-earth and all the ‘Star Wars’ animations are in the ‘Star Wars’ universe,’’ said Pegg. “The context fits the sprite. But in ‘Paul,’ we wanted that character to be in an environment that was totally, literally, alien to him.

“And that makes him seem even more real, because you don’t expect to see him.’’

Ethan Gilsdorf, author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks,’’ can be reached at www.fantasyfreaksbook.com.