In 1994, Siskel and Ebert
reviewed the movie version of Double Dragon.
It's in this review that Gene Siskel says, "...I can save everybody
in Hollywood a lot of time and money with this advice: don't try to make a
movie out of a videogame, the material simply won't stretch." This
attitude is, of course, not uncommon. Let's face it, the movie and TV
industry tend to make it easy to be a snarky shit. Often, when I've held
out hope that they finally won't completely fuck up something I'm
apparently dumb enough to want to see done as a movie (a good movie,
mind you, not the stupid shit that keeps getting made), my hopes are far more
often than not dashed right to hell.
"Okay, the ads suck,
but the ads always suck, I'm sure Ghost Rider won't be all that
bad." At the time, I would've been happy had that movie met
Daredevil's standards, fucking Daredevil!
Uh, ahem, okay well back
to my actual point. That point being, when you say X can't be adapted
into a good movie, whether X is a videogame, comic book, novel, TV show, song,
internet meme, whatever, you're knocking movies, not their source
material. It would have been far more on target for Gene Siskel to have
said, "...don't try to make a movie out of a videogame, movies are just
too limited a medium." Technically, I don't really believe that
movies are too limited, though the industry frequently seems to bend over
backwards to prove otherwise. I mean, it's gotten so bad that movies like
Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are now generally considered to be good!
To me, that's a bit like when comic fans placed 1978's Superman on a pedestal
for decades, proclaiming it to be the comic book movie high watermark,
when in reality it wasn't that good. Better than fucking Street
Fighter and Mortal Kombat, though. And Ghost Rider. Fuck those
movies. They, and too many other films, stifle the imagination far more
than they nourish it.
And if you think I'm being
too hard on movies, consider how many times you, your friends, whoever, rolled
their eyes at the notion of a movie based on something, um, not immediately
artistically respected. For example,
how often have you read or heard something in the area of: "They're making
a movie based on Ninja Turtles!
Obviously quality isn't a concern." On the other hand, it's strange and interesting what in our
society becomes iconic. Like Batman,
for example. There have been a fair
number of people who've called 2008's The Dark Knight "awesome." Books like The Dark Knight Returns, Year
One, and The Killing Joke are generally hailed as classics, at least in the
comic community (do they count?). I've
often imagined Frank Miller sitting down with whoever was in charge of DC
Comics back in the mid-'80s, laying out his idea for what would have become The Dark
Knight Returns, only to have been met with: "Hello! Have you actually read this
shit? It's kiddy crap! No one wants some 'dark, mature' version of
this!"
For what it's worth, I
hear that's more-or-less what Stan Lee was told, back when he was a young
writer, and requested doing stories not necessarily aimed at small
children. So it's highly possible
writers like Dennis O'Neil, Frank Miller, and Alan Moore were met with this
kind of hostility when wanting to take the stories they worked on in darker
and, arguably, more humanistic directions.
The thing is, the early
Batman comics aren't what many would consider "good." If one were to make a movie or TV show out
of them, faithfully copying them word for word, I imagine the result would
likely be at least as campy as the '60s TV show, sans the self-aware
humour. What's interesting is that
Batman didn't have to stay that way.
For better or worse, other writers and artists came along and offered up
their, for lack of a better term, more "grown-up" versions of
Batman. Not too long ago, Grant
Morrison was able to write, with Frank Quitely as artist, All-Star Superman,
which many comic critics praised.
Ditto, Darwyn Cooke and DC: The New Frontier. The point is, all of these acclaimed comics were based on
characters and ideas traditionally not considered, well, "good." So, in my opinion, subject matter shouldn't
matter. If it doesn't hold up well by
today's standards, it's up to the artist, writer, filmmaker, whoever, to change
it as they see fit. If those changes
don't work, it's their fault, not the original material. That's kind of like the old saying about the
handyman who blames their tools.
So the consistently poor adaptations of videogames, comic books, old TV shows, what-have-you says a lot more about current filmmaking, and the apparent lack of vision within it, than it does about its source material, good or bad.
So the consistently poor adaptations of videogames, comic books, old TV shows, what-have-you says a lot more about current filmmaking, and the apparent lack of vision within it, than it does about its source material, good or bad.
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