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Comments
Freddy vs. Jason for bad crossovers, or so i heard.
I think Freddy Vs. Jason is more good than bad, though it's not on the level of Avengers. Alien Vs. Predator is a bad crossover film.
I'm watching Utena now and as much as I dig it, the fact that every episode pretty much ends with a swordfight on a flat plane makes it feel a little formulaic.
If anyone's interested in the making of the official (albeit not particularly interesting) music video for the Bokurano theme song "Uninstall", check this out: SnvEZyojdkA
I found out by accident (thanks to Youtube, in fact) that the singer of this song, Chiaki Ishikawa, is also the singer of First Pain (the Element Hunters OP that I mentioned earlier).
^^ Well, Utena is a magical girl show, and being formulaic kind of comes with the genre. But I do agree, and I did sometimes wish it'd change things up a bit more. Still, everything else more than made up for the end of episodes being repetitive, so...
Can anyone make sense of this?
It's the text written on the gravestone of Ren's grandfather, in Element Hunters.
The question marks are unreadable characters due to their being offscreen.
Thanks go to someone on 2ch for transcribing this.
I don't even mind each episode ending with a swordfight, honestly. It's more that it's the exact same swordfight every time. Even Highlander switched up how the fights worked.
So far it's why Nanami's fight has been the most interesting so far, because her hatred and spite led her to completely disregard the rules of the battle so she could hurt Utena.
It doesn't get worse than the second Alien vs. Predator film. The first is no great shakes and is flawed up the wazoo but it's possible to have fun with it if you don't take it too seriously. And the final battle with the Queen is actually kind of awesome. I could spend a whole post detailing its pros and cons, but while it's a pretty bad film overall, "pretty bad" sells the tripe that is crossover films very short.
If you want to see a very, uh, interesting crossover, I recommend Godzilla vs. King Kong. The Godzilla series of movies isn't known for its outstanding quality (barring the original and a small handful of other films) and this example is no exception. All the same, it's a pretty interesting study in crossovers, especially from the perspective of another location, time and demographic. Whereas Alien vs. Predator and Freddy vs. Jason were dead in the water before they began, Godzilla vs. King Kong seems like a perfectly reasonable concept within a monster movie's definition of "reasonable" -- basically, you have the most famous large monsters of early American cinema and early Japanese cinema battle it out. This is interesting because of the cultural status both monsters already held (and continue to hold) -- Freddy and Jason are more well-known for their bad movies these days, and while the Alien and Predator monsters are more fondly remembered for their heydays, both pale in comparison when it comes to cultural significance.
While Godzilla vs. King Kong doesn't match, say, Destroy All Monsters for its level of sheer bizarreness, it's still pretty much nonsensical bullshit from start to finish. While I doubt that this is the first mainstream crossover to ever make it to the big screen, I think it's pretty telling that we can at least measure such crossovers to the 1960s whereas 2012 represents the mastering of the crossover concept with The Avengers. But then again, The Avengers has a very different take on the concept. Most crossovers are about pitting two mighty forces against one-another and pissing off one or both fanbases, but The Avengers is about a group of protagonists coming together against a common threat.
The Avengers essentially has two sides -- the good guys and the bad guys. Alien vs. Predator, Freddy vs. Jason and Godzilla vs. King Kong all have three factions -- the good guys, the bad guys and the bad guys. It's a narrative nightmare to pit two sets of antagonists against one-another convincingly while keeping a story relevant to the human characters. Given that The Avengers themselves are human and all follow similar enough moral codes that they can agree on an alien invasion being pretty bad, that problem was taken care of by definition. The fact that Whedon still managed to deliver appropriate, engaging action scenes with conflict between the Avengers says a lot about the quality of the movie, too. If you wanted to do that with Alien vs. Predator, I think you'd need to have the human characters impregnated early one with an adult Alien or two running about at the same time -- now, the Aliens are protecting the humans from the Predators who want to contain an Alien threat before it spreads, but the humans also have to solve their terminal pregnancy problem while putting as much distance between themselves and the Aliens as possible. I've been thinking about how this might be done for years and this is the only conceivable way I can think where the whole idea might make a good film.
The point here is that the effectiveness of crossovers is about how efficiently and gracefully the filmmakers meld everything into a singular, natural line of reasoning, both in terms of intellectual consideration and audience investment. The Avengers might be a crossover, but it's also a crossover where all the good guys are fighting the same bad guys while, even when they're at odds, being on the same side. Freddy and Jason might have worked together if they were a team at odds against interesting human protagonists for much the same reason. It's about paring it down into a story that can be effectively told through the medium, not creating an excuse purely for cool stuff.
And those are my thoughts.
^^^ Is there a screenshot availible? The only things I can make out are:
jlinedoga w???
ici dort
ce scientifique (?)
sacrifiqué pour le
de l'etre humain
?insl que pour le (monde?)
jlinedoga w???
rests here
this scientific (?)
sacrificed for the
of the human being
?insl (than?/that) for the (world?).
@DYRE: I'm not interested in Dance in the Vampire Bund because the way they market the loli creeps me out. I also ended up stopping Haganai because they just insisted on sexualizing the main character's little sister. Not okay.
I was thinking of trying a few episodes of Black Butler, to see what all the rage is about. If that doesn't work out, I'll either find something else, or play more BlazBlue.
>Freddy and Jason might have worked together if they were a team at odds against interesting human protagonists
The... the movie starts with them working together.
I get what you're saying, but in the case of FvJ it doesn't really apply. The two bad guys thing doesn't make it more complicated because it all just happens to be a turf war of who gets to murder kids.
The thing about FvJ is it is really simple, since slasher movies tend to be and it actually streamlines the two universes together pretty well since they tend to operate 'if it's creepier it happens' logic.
I knew we were friends for a reason.
Okay, I got a screenshot:
^^^ I haven't seen that particular movie, although I've heard that it's really awful. And I don't really see how it could work, anyway, since if the horror monsters are fighting against one-another, where's the tension for the human characters? The monsters are fighting, awesome -- we can use this time to figure out how to clean out the winner. Jurassic Park provides two great examples of what I'm on about.
In the first film, the climax of the movie pretty much finishes up with the T.rex ambushing (???) the raptors just about to finish off the protagonists. This relieves the tension rather than deepening it. Two major antagonistic factors completely at odds, and it works in favour of the audience's sense of security and safety.
The third film gives us a showdown between T.rex and Spinosaurus. It intends to make the latter look like a badass, but it doesn't really work because it removes an antagonist early in the film and reminds us of natural interspecies struggle, whereas it was an end-movie reminder in the example above. Remember, the bulk of the first film is about the humans against an engineered ecosystem ruled by escaped dinosaurs -- ergo, tension. We get a clear line that's blurred by additional factionalisation.
Not that films with three or more factions cannot or have not worked, but they're a much more difficult endeavour. Even Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, for all its genius in adapting the books into accessible movies, cut out the potential conflict between Isengard and Mordor. That was a great concept in the books, but left out of the film entirely understandably.
^^ Huh, I thought it had those mistakes because it was transcribed from a barely-legible screenshot, but it's just mangled French.
Anyhow, yeah, I think it's supposed to say what I wrote above.
Edit: Wait, make that second line "that scientist that is"
>I haven't seen that particular movie, although I've heard that it's really awful.
Really? I've heard quite the opposite. Check out AVGN's review of the film for example.
> where's the tension for the human characters?
The fact that what they're fighting over is the right to murder with abandon and people are getting caught up in their killing? So they're trying to figure out how to get rid of both of them.
I'm not calling the film a Hitchcock work by any means, but it does accomplish what it sets out to do.
That word at the bottom corner is probably "ainsi", so in full it says: "Here rests that scientist that is sacrificed for the future of the human being as well as the world." (That weird present tense thing sounds clunky in French, too, I think.)
Oh, so it really is...Flench? Japrench? Frempanese?
And thanks for the translation, @Stormtroper.
Honestly? You're the only person I've heard of who actually likes the movie. And I always chalked it up to you being a damn hipster slasher loving person
I do know that moviebob, for instance, gave it a mildly positive review, but I recall reading other reviews when the film first came out that pretty much just slammed it.
Granted, I'm less talking things like Ebert and more places like CHUD and Bloody Disgusting, since I tend to trust their opinions on slasher films.
EDIT: Evidently it has a 41% freshness on RT, which truth be told is more than I expected.
Of course, it might be because of the people I talk movies with and the fact that its very premise ensures a cult status.
So I've heard overwhelmingly positive stuff about it in the same way I've heard overwhelmingly positive stuff about Army of Darkness and Speed Racer.
I grant you Speed Racer, but Army of Darkness is an indie darling, man. Like Reservoir Dogs, but, you know, with a gigantic chin for a protagonist.
Speed Racer and Re-Animator then.
It also has plenty of Freddy Vs. Jason-ing where most other crossovers dilly-dally on that so that's something I appreciate.
More like French mangled in a pure way, the misspellings are kinda random as if they were typos (but with letters on opposite sides of the keyboar), not the kind of mistakes you'd make because you're thinking in Japanese (like the l/r thing). Kinda reads like chatspeak (which is what I thought it was at first).
You're welcome.
(And I just noticed I made a mistake there... *goes back to studying*)
The thing that bothered me about Re-Animator is that it was massive suckage compared to the actual book. I know it was going for a "humour horror" take, but then again I don't have to reiterate how loathsome I find horror comedies to be.
I also really disliked Army of Darkness, even though its a medieval horror film about a time-travelling shotgun jockey and a garrison of knights against an incoming army of nearly-traditional revenant monsters. By all accounts I should have enjoyed the hell out of it.
I didn't dislike it, but I definetly think it's overrated and has issues. Namely, of the misogynistic kind.
For me, the misogyny overpowered the whole film. On an objective scale, I guess it's a pretty solid supernatural comedy, but eh...
Isn't Evil Dead 2 considered a superior film?
But it lacks knights and revenant undead.
does not compute