FANBOYS #1: Best Restart Button?
By Aaron 6/14/2007

Casino Royale v Batman Begins

Two great movies came out recently that reinvigorated two of my favorite franchises - Casino Royale for James Bond and Batman Begins for Batman. Aided by creative directors and brilliant young actors with new attitudes and ideas, both movies were a financial and popular success.

Those movies were so good they got me thinking which one is the better franchise reinvention? Which franchise needed their respective “restart” the most? Some background on each franchise helps contextualize this question.


James Bond was aging and ailing as Pierce Brosnan’s Bond was captured and traded in a spy-swap in Die Another Day. That movie was a mess as the producers and directors rehashed at least one scene from every Bond movie in a misguided attempt to commemorate Bond’s anniversary. The result was a cheesy movie, corny at best, with poorly patched together scenes. A movie with an old Bond who had gone off the reservation, driven an invisible car, cooperated with one of Michael Madsen’s agents…the franchise seemed like it had nowhere to go. They needed someone to really shake things up.

Batman was aging in a different way – he seemed ancient compared to the young guns, Robin and Batgirl who joined him in the final, cheesy installment. Corrupted by Joel Schumacher and ruined by an overweight Alicia Silverstone who’s Clueless routine failed in a comic-book-actioner. To make things worse, flat villains and a futuristic Gotham replaced Burton’s true-to-form depression era city. With a once dark Burton franchise made into a merchandise-making machine, Batman seemed to have little room to flex his wings beyond the toy shelves.

Casino Royale was a much needed shot in the arm that helped Bond fend off the attack of the realistic, fast paced Jason Bourne and hip heist movies like Ocean’s Eleven and The Italian Job that ate into Bond’s market share. Bond had become little more than a car totaling, smug, playboy, closer to Brosnan’s Thomas Crown than the cunning spy Fleming imagined. Martin Cambell, the director of Goldeneye, came back to help Barbara Broccoli out of the modern action quagmire with “Casino Royale”. Harnessing the explosive energy of Daniel Craig and using the popularity and marketability of Texas Hold Em, “Casino Royale” relaunched a franchise. Cambell took a big gamble by spinning a tale around Felming’s first book and keeping Bond’s character as a recently crowned double-0. “Casino Royale” had it all – brilliant acting and great characters, a fast moving action flick and realistic fighting unlike any other bond movie and feeling and emotion Fleming’s character never enjoyed before. Bond was back and firing on all cylinders.

Batman Begins was another movie that re-imagined the origin story of one our favorite heroes. The early over the top movies couldn’t hold a candle to the high-class Spiderman and X-Men movies (I mean X2) and DC needed something new to catch up to Marvel’s movie juggernaut’s success. Luckily, Christopher Nolan took the helm and took the franchise to new heights, rivaling those of the comic movies mentioned above. Inspired by Frank Miller’s Year One and Dark Knight series and returning to Burton’s dark Gotham, Nolan used Christian Bale as an inventive, determined Bruce Wayne to defeat original and emotional villains. Avoiding the camp of Arnold and Uma, Nolan focused on maniacal villains like Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow and the mystical Ra’s Al Ghul which made sense given the themes Nolan was developing. Plus Nolan pulled out all the stops and got Oscar caliber actors Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine to join the supporting cast. I strong story with strong actors helped Batman fly to the top again.


I battled with this for awhile, and changed my mind several times. In the end, I decided that I thought Batman Begins was a better origin movie. BUT, Casino Royale was a much better franchise restarter. Broccoli and Cambell took a gamble by making Bond a new double-0 and throwing formulaic successes to the wind (the cars, the gadgets, the Bond girls, the timeline). What they got was a hard-hitting movie I saw in theatres three times in two weeks. Bond was back and he was fresh as new. We got to see the origin of the title sequence, Bond’s early vulnerability and why he hardened his heart toward woman and how he became a cold-blooded super agent.

More importantly, Bond needed “Casino Royale” more than Batman needed “Begins.” Without this new look, Bond could have “retired” as Brosnan’s Bond, who was signed on for four more movies, would have continued to age amidst the old formula. Batman was doing okay, immortalized by Burton and capturing newer, younger viewers with its animated series. So Bond wins this round, but not without being thoroughly shaken, because this one was pretty close.

Could “Avatar” Win Best Picture?

By Brett Hogan

 

Last week, the trailer for James Cameron’s sci-fi experiment “Avatar” debuted. While initially unimpressed with the teaser, I began to wonder: Could this film win best picture? 

 

Buzz has been generating for this movie for years. Years. The technology to make this movie didn’t exist when Cameron conceived it, so he invented it. When is the last time you heard of a director spearheading the invention of anything? The casting started in 2005. Most movies these days, even epics, are done in half that time. I could go on. 

 

The most important thing to take away from all of this is that people are saying this will be the future of movies. Now, I don’t agree with the idea that CGI will become more prevalent than it already is. But I do believe that this will set the bar miles higher for sci-fi. I mean, that is what Titanic did. And that won some awards if memory serves.

 

I’ll bet you’re asking yourself, how can you even suggest that a film like this will win Best Picture when the initial trailer was nothing better than visual stimulation? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, the Academy has expanded Best Picture to ten films. This doesn’t guarantee anything other than improved chances for most films on the cusp.

 

Second, after last year’s Oscars debacle, which saw the best film of the year, “The Dark Knight,” not only get shafted in awards but nominations as well, the Academy is pulling out all the stops to appease those with the loudest voices in the film industry, the fanboys. Now, the Academy probably didn’t lose anything because of that other than some viewers of the award show. Perhaps if people are again outraged with the winners or nominees, the heads of the Academy would lose their jobs. So this is all about the Academy protecting itself, which is not so outrageous.  

 

 

Third, there is an economic motive here. I’ve heard this film will cost $190 million, not counting the R&D costs associated with Cameron’s inventions or the cost of getting 3-D cameras into every theater in the country. The Academy will do everything in its power to get people into the seats and make this the next “Titanic” or “The Dark Knight.” But the Academy doesn’t have much power, besides nominating and awarding, so they will slap the “Nominated for Best Picture” moniker onto every commercial and print ad to get the people who didn’t believe the critics to relent and see this movie.

 

Of course, all of this is pure conjecture, and no revolutionary film (Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, etc.) has ever won the Best Picture category because it changed the game. Except maybe Titanic. But still, could this movie actually win? My answer is no but a nomination is certain and who knows what could happen from there. We’ll know more come February 2010.