Tag: 20th Century Fox

The Magic’s Gone with the Fantastic Four, A Review

By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)

F4_TEASER_ONESHEET

It’s a foregone conclusion to know that the Fantastic Four 2015 movie is going to fail. Reboot, remake or reimaging … the reality here is that there was interference while this movie was being crafted. The responsibility of a movie’s success or failure can include how strongly the studio’s executive producers want something in the film instead of the director. When they do not understand the world of comic book fandom, they should not get involved. When a few people have been involved in other works, there’s hope.

Writer/Director Josh Trank‘s one hit wonder, Chronicle, does not mean he should handle a keystone Marvel property like Fantastic Four. After a lamentable X-Men: The Last Stand, writer Simon Kinberg took a long time to prove himself to fans with his work in the very enjoyable animated television series Star Wars Rebels and well made X-Men: Days of Future Past. Jeremy Slater, the third member of the writing team, does not have enough cred to say if he’s even at fault here. To wonder if these three shared the chores of crafting this film equally or they worked independently in certain segments only reveals a muddled product that is not helping these new four heroes any. As far as some producers are concerned, it’s all about the financial gains a franchise can offer over a film by fans for fans. Where’s Joss Whedon when we need him?

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Going to Rio for Carnival is better than seeing Rio 2

By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)

Rio 2 Poster (2)

The city of Rio is best known for its carnival and the revelers of this six-day party can certainly live it up. It’s such a shame the movie Rio 2, a tale about a domesticated blue macaw learning how to live life freely, cannot live up to the same name and previous hype. It tries — especially with all its high-spirited musical numbers — but it fails when the concepts it tries to extol on are far too formulaic.

Blu (Jesse Eisenberg) has a happy life with Jewel (Anne Hathaway) in the city. But when their owners Linda (Leslie Mann) and Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro) discover a flock of their kind deep in the jungles of the Amazon, they decide to track the humans down and find that life is not as golden. Jewel’s father, Eduardo (Andy Garcia) does not take an immediate liking to Blu, and with even more enemies to come, just which antagonist becomes important is muddled in a quagmire of who wants to climb up the ladder of being an alpha male. The story may be too complex for a young mind to handle and even for an adult, they may ask why is the message of saving Earth’s rain forests not engrained better in this film.

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Is Movie “Magic” Possible with a Trading Card Game?

Magic the Gathering is a trading card game that studio 20th Century Fox is daring to gamble their fortunes on, just for a movie.

Magic the Gathering

Magic the Gathering is a trading card game that studio 20th Century Fox is daring to gamble their fortunes on, just for a movie.

The news broke on The Hollywood Reporter and some reactions from the fandom may well be mixed. I played the game when it first came out, and I enjoyed it for what it was before it became expensive to maintain. I imagined a world that was filled with mages who can control the elements, summon monsters and go Fantasia against another opponent.

There were some good concepts that were created to make this imaginative version of poker more than profitable for Wizards of the Coast and pocketable for the masses who can enjoy a game anywhere. The same crowd is what the studio is hoping to draw into the theater. If the film becomes a mega-success, the additional products that can be sold under this license can even make Warner Bros. green with envy or red with rage.

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Where is the “Epic” Appeal? A Movie Review

Epic inserts is a movie made on steroids. It tries to be too much of everything we love from Disney and it’s not needed.

Epic Film PosterThe main problem with Blue Sky Studio’s Epic is that it tries too hard to be just that. This film forgets where its inspirations should be coming from. It could have borrowed from Peer Gynt—which would have been fine—but it didn’t. While the CGI is very impressive with its photo-realism, that isn’t enough to carry this film.

This movie deserves a Oscar nomination for artistic direction. As for any other category, it may need a Razzie for its story development.

Its fairy tale aspirations gets forgotten in favor for an action story in the same vein as Avatar. Instead of an invasion of an evasive human species, the antagonist here is with the forces lurking under the earth. All the nastiness of mosquitoes, mole-men and rodents (including bats) gets personified as agents of pestilence.

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