In Contention

Tag: Roland Emmerich

  • ‘Anonymous’ draws mixed reaction in Toronto

    I’ve had a sharp eye on thoughts on and reviews of Roland Emmerich’s “Anonymous” out of the Toronto film fest. I had expected to be alone in my appreciation for the film (having heard of quite a few detractors), but I must say I was relieved to see that some are reacting in the positive.

    The Guardian’s Damon Wise, for instance, gave it mostly high marks (which is noteworthy given that it comes from across the pond where I imagine scrutiny would be harsher). “Roland Emmerich’s meticulously crafted and often well-acted exposé of the ‘real’ William Shakespeare is shocking only in that it is rather good,” he writes. “[B]eneath the CG and bombast there is a very enjoyable film. Emmerich vividly portrays Elizabethan audiences and their visceral appreciation of the plays put before them.”

    In the theatre section, though, Wise’s colleague Paul Edmonson took extreme aim at the authorship question in advance of the film’s festival bow.

    (more…)

  • Emmerich surprises with ‘Anonymous’

    I have to say, quite unexpectedly, I really liked Roland Emmerich’s “Anonymous.” I think it’s his best work yet. Having busied himself with matters of the apocalypse for the better part of two decades in films like “Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow” and “2012,” it’s fair to say few would expect him to have something toned-down in him. So perhaps on one hand, lowered expectations play a hand here (despite the fact that, quite frankly, I very much enjoy Emmerich’s singular brand of entertainment).

    Regardless, the film is an elaborate piece of work (from an engaging screenplay by John Orloff), dense but rewarding, smart but entertaining, and Emmerich pulls it off without a hitch. In fact, while the effort is surely stylized, Emmerich gets out of his own way here, leaving no real trace of his typical leanings — anonymous, you might call the work. That’s impressive for a guy who has made his living basically just destroying the world on celluloid.

    (more…)

  • Who should be on Christopher Nolan’s ‘Superman’ shortlist?

    My RSS feed was absolutely stuffed to the brim with the clamoring re-reporting of the geek press’s favorite story of the week yesterday: OMG! Christopher Nolan is meeting with a shortlist of potential “Superman” directors!

    Except the list is all wrong. The names: Tony Scott, Matt Reeves, Jonathan Liebsman, Duncan Jones and Zack Snyder.  Now, I love Reeves and Jones (the two getting most people excited) as much as the next guy. But they don’t feel thematically right for this material. And Superman boasts a scope that these directors, however talented on a smaller scale, have yet to prove capable of navigating.

    Liebsman, meanwhile, is the intriguing up-and-comer pick, and though I haven’t seen “Battle: Los Angeles,” I feel like this is just a way to insert some in-house cross-promoting potential (“from the director of ‘Clash of the Titans 2,’” you know?). And Snyder, well, I wouldn’t be entirely against it, but I’d know from the start that it would be a stylistic divergence unsuitable to the character.

    Scott is really the most interesting pick of the bunch, and if this were pre-frenetic filmmaking Scott (i.e. pre-“Enemy of the State”), I’d be all about it. I’d say the guy who copped Scott’s early style would be a better pick…

    (more…)

  • Werner Herzog named president of 2010 Berlin jury

    Werner HerzogAfter premiering two films at September’s Venice fest, perhaps the most surprising thing about Werner Herzog heading the jury at February’s Berlin Film Festival is that he won’t be inflicting another film upon the competition.

    I kid, I kid. Herzog, the first German jury president since Roland Emmerich in 2005, is inarguably deserving of the position, and should bring a welcome streak of eccentricity to the jury’s deliberations. The press release declares him “one of the most significant personalities of New German Cinema,” which is risking understatement.

    Interestingly, the 67 year-old auteur has only twice competed at the Berlinale himself, with his 1968 debut “Signs of Life” (for which he won a special award) and 1979’s “Nosferatu.”

    (more…)

  • SUNDAY CENTS: Apocalypse wow

    2012*All historical figures are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    Roland Emmerich’s still got it. And by “it,” I mean the ability to make blockbuster hits out of the same movie again and again.

    “2012” opened at the top of the box office with $65 million and the seventh-biggest opening of 2009. It’s also the 10th-biggest November opening of all time, sliding in between last year’s “Quantum of Solace” and 2002’s surprise juggernaut “8 Mile.”

    Mid-November releases have the benefit of the highly lucrative Thanksgiving holiday coming somewhere around their second or third week, so “2012” has the chance to earn three times its opening, which certainly wouldn’t be the case in the summer. I actually don’t think it will be the case here either and I think we’ll see it top out around $150 million. While that figure is less than the production budget, the film has already made $225 million worldwide after just three days, so Emmerich has free reign to make whatever disaster movie he wants next.

    Destroying the Earth four times is probably the limit for any director but luckily for Emmerich, we just discovered water on the moon, so he can go ahead and make a movie where we’ve colonized it and are living there, but for whatever reason it gets destroyed.

    (more…)

  • Lenny Bruce is not afraid

    2012I’m in San Francisco through the weekend and, having missed the week’s “2012” press screenings, I headed on over to the Van Ness AMC to settle in for Roland Emmerich’s two and a half hours of global destruction, and as overwrought, cheesy, painstakingly contrived (“Where’s the map!?”) and downright BAD as the film is — and it is all of those things — I ate it up.

    Mainly, I salute Emmerich’s gargantuan, platinum cojones for giving us the exact…same…escape sequence not once, not twice, but THREE times.  And make it four if we want to go ahead and trace the roots of the by now standardized moment back to “Independence Day.” I kept waiting on someone to open a laptop with a countdown clock.  Oh wait, they’ve got one on the ark — we’re good.

    Staggering.  Every unconscionable drop of it.  And you know what?  Good.  I want this movie in the marketplace right now.  Sure, it’s a bastardized piece of “drama,” but squeezing damn near every 2012 theory into the mix, cranking the production up to 11 from frame one and STILL Tom McCarthy is able to keep a straight face?  This is high art on some level.  Has to be.

    (more…)

  • FRIDAY FORECAST: ‘2012’ on the way

    John Cusack in 2012*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    (This is the first of a new series of columns splitting the weekly Sunday Cents column in half. We’ll cover the weekend box office on Sundays and save the forecasts for Thursdays from here on out.)

    Roland Emmerich returns this weekend to popular landmark destruction for the fourth time in his career. He has experienced gargantuan openings in each previous attempts, so there’s little reason to think that “2012” won’t win the box office weekend by a mile.

    Sony has spent a fortune on the making and advertising of this film, although the studio seems to have saved some money by not hiring an editor as the finished product clocks in at a totally gratuitous 158 minutes. Squeezing in less showtimes may factor microscopically in the grosses, but theaters will be playing this sucker around the clock beginning tonight at midnight.

    “Independence Day” opened with $81.6 million during the fourth of July weekend in 1996 for a venue average of $28,311. “Godzilla” earned $67.4 million during Memorial Day of 1998 for an average of $20,373. “The Day After Tomorrow” also bowed on Memorial Day, in 2004. with $79.5 million and an average of $23,206. Clearly, audiences have a taste for the Emmerich touch when it comes to disaster flicks. His various attempts to make films outside this micro-genre have been met with relative shrugs at the box office (“The Patriot” and “10,000 B.C.”).

    (more…)

  • New ‘2012’ trailer melts my face off

    Alright, I’ll say at the top here that I’m full on in the tank for Roland Emmerich’s brand of blow-stuff-up-good apocalyptic cinema.  Even when the science is dubious (coughthedayaftertomorrowcough), I’m glad there’s someone out there who at least knows how to make this stuff engaging.  Sue me.  And this new trailer for “2012” (a subject I’ve written at length about before and which fascinates me completely), is indicative of what has to be the most balls-to-the-wall, destroy everything, leave nothing standing movie ever.  Of all time.  Biblical.  BRING IT.

    A sound mixer friend who saw large chunks of the film also told me the technical aspects of this thing are unbelievable.  The carnage is outrageous, he says, which has me wondering: could “2012” be the first Emmerich film since “Independence Day” to rack up some tech nods?  His films as of late have seemed somewhat stuck in the 1990s when it comes to the below-the-line stuff, but the effects in this trailer (exclusively released on Yahoo! Movies) are quality.  Mind you, I laughed out loud at the brazen nature of this destruction.  I cracked up at the performances, too.  It’s so sincere it’s just too much.  But I don’t care.  I can’t wait.

  • Put this in your pipe and smoke it

    Rod Taylor in The Time MachineI love watching the end of the world unfold on screen.  It’s just something I enjoy.  And sue me if I was a little bummed at a certain caution on the part of Hollywood to offer up the apocalyptic imagery it had serviced to the masses in the action-packed summers of the 1990s following 9/11.

    Go back and take a look at “Armageddon,” for instance.  Hardly great cinema but I got a kick out of it just as I did “Independence Day” or anything comparable.  The shot of the Chrysler Building being sheered in half by meteorites as people plummet to their death — the imagery is obviously prickly in the post-9/11 environment.  And everything from “War of the Worlds” to “The Dark Knight” has gone out of its way to comment toward the disasters of that year, to put forth the sense that a thought process is being injected into blockbuster entertainment, that the mayhem actually means something on an artistic level.  And I’m all for that.  But I prefer not to be held hostage by it, either.

    I remember talking with a colleague in New York last month who was bemoaning the failure of Alex Proyas’s “Knowing.”  I had not seen the film yet at the time (though I have sense, and it’s certainly a…lesser accomplishment, shall we say, but it also deals with interesting ideas that really should be in mainstream Hollywood cinema).  I rebutted with the notion that maybe a good, spectacle, end-of-the-world trip to the movies is just what Hollywood needs to shake out all the cobwebs.

    When my list of the year’s most anticipated films hit on New Year’s Day, more than a few people raised an eyebrow at the inclusion of Roland Emmerich’s “2012.”  I should come clean with the admission that Emmerich’s films, more often than not, work for me on some primitive, Neanderthal level.  But I have to also admit to being fascinated with all of the speculation over the year 2012, which I wrote about nearly a year ago.

    (more…)

  • 12.21.2012

    The Milky WayI have my own fascinations with the year 2012, by now making leaps and bounds in the pop culture stratosphere some 20 years since Jose Arguelles first began scaring the shit out of everyone back in 1987.

    I’ve read the books.  I’ve always got one toe in the cosmos, so I’m certainly interested in the harmonic convergence that is supposed to occur on December 21, 2012.  At 11:11 a.m. GMT, to be exact.

    Frankly, most of the stuff that fascinates me about the fated day has less to do with the Mayan long count calendar than it does with the expected geological turmoil forecast.  I recommend Lawrence Joseph’s “Apocalypse 2012” despite its hyperbolic (or perhaps not-so-hyperbolic) title.  If a former New York Times journalist can dig into things with such precision, it’s no longer safely reserved for the loonies.

    So despite the fact that Rolland Emmerich was obviously going to be the guy to exploit the supposed apocalypse around the corner, I still had a strange sort of anticipation built up.  Then, this afternoon, I saw that the folks at Collider had gotten their paws on a copy of the script…and boy did my heart sink.

    This thing (I know — duh, right?) looks to be a total rehash of everything we’ve seen out of the “disaster movie” genre before, and that’s too bad.  Despite the hysteria, it really is a concept worth exploring in a film.

    Also this month, LA City Beat is carrying a cover story about 2012.  It’s a good primer for those somewhat interested, but I’d suggest digging into Joseph’s book for a good immersion.  And if you really want to go out there a bit, I recommend Daniel Pinchbeck’s “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.”