Ghost Rider film
Oct. 9th, 2010 12:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI couldn't get to sleep so I watched some more TV.
Malcolm Reed is pretty but his role is mostly to get wound up and melodramatic about CGI trying to kill redshirts. Or sometimes to suicidally heroic when actually bringing someone qualified to do the work quicker would have worked pretty well. It's like Enterprise in any incarnation is only really crewed by the bridge officers, unless someone needs to die. Freaky loss of realism there.
... I still likes him. Suicidally heroic is kind of my type. *facepalm*
Then I watched Ghost Rider. The film with Nicholas Cage.
After the first five minutes I watched it while trying to figure out how to fix it, because this was clearly not a good film.
First fix would be to cast someone who was not Nicholas Cage. There's actors who melt into a role, who become a new person in a new way every time, and then there's actors who bring their star image to it and hope it meshes well. Cage is not the melty sort. And whatever his star image is, I didn't feel it brought anything helpful to this one.
Second problem was the film had three protagonists, even if they were all the same dude. Johnny Blaze (comics naming at its best there). First there was the actor playing the young him, who I thought had a certain charm. I watched the film because it was on TV, so I had no expectations, but the first ten minutes with this devil stuff and this guy on a bike, I figured I could watch this film. Then that guy disappears and it's suddenly his older version. Except since older him is played by Nicholas Cage it's more like we start watching this film with young Johnny Blaze and his father with cancer and his girlfriend who is getting sent away by her father and there's a whole story going on and
huh
Nicholas Cage is on a motorcycle. Crashing. And then some idiot pulls his helmet off. Do they want him to get dead? And what has this got to do with the first twenty minutes? Wait, he's the same guy? Noooo, he's Nicholas Cage on a motorcyle.
Only then we don't have to worry about that mismatch for very long, because suddenly he's this third guy, who acts according to different priorities and motivations. And also is a skeleton. On fire. On a bike.
Really the bike is the most consistent part of the first... probably hour of the movie.
So they've introduced three main characters, and by the time you get comfy putting them all together to be the same story, the movie is over.
So that's kind of a big problem.
Last problem is the way the words all fit into word balloons. It was a comic script, really. Short utterances, flashy visuals. Fight scenes that are mostly CGI and can only mostly pass. And the skeleton, who isn't going to look any kind of realistic, obviously.
The iconography also made me LOL a lot. I mean, bikers catching fire and being all skeletal hell things and being the devil's bounty hunter... it does not work for me. But I don't reckon that's a problem per se, because clearly it worked for a bunch of people for a bunch of time, cause Ghost Rider been around a while. It didn't seem to mesh though, the stunt rider symbol set and the Ghost Rider biker symbol set. Different styles of leathers, different styles of legends. Has fire in common, yes, but the big spiky shoulder leathers aren't much related to the white stuff he were wearing before. Nor is the big bike much related to the jumping things bike. Felt like there was a gear change between, with crunching. Kind of like the difference between mesh-metal-uv-reflective cybergoth and frills-lace-velvet-veils old school goth, like you can't switch someone from one to the other and still be in the same symbol language, even though they're closely related styles you might buy in the same shop.
So, anyway, the film wasn't so obviously terrible as quite a few I've seen. The thing where there's only one female character in the whole film and she's the love interest is clearly a whole crappy badness. It didn't bother giving her goals of her own or even let her figure things out by herself, and her cleavage did most of the acting, and we know the shape of this story so very well by now there was not one instant of surprise. But the part where there's this guy who sold his soul to save his dad and then decides to keep the powers to fight other demons, that's got all kinds of mileage. It just went all kinds of clunky turning into a film.
I should actually write stuff. Pulling stuff apart and then not writing my own is a bit cheap, really.
Malcolm Reed is pretty but his role is mostly to get wound up and melodramatic about CGI trying to kill redshirts. Or sometimes to suicidally heroic when actually bringing someone qualified to do the work quicker would have worked pretty well. It's like Enterprise in any incarnation is only really crewed by the bridge officers, unless someone needs to die. Freaky loss of realism there.
... I still likes him. Suicidally heroic is kind of my type. *facepalm*
Then I watched Ghost Rider. The film with Nicholas Cage.
After the first five minutes I watched it while trying to figure out how to fix it, because this was clearly not a good film.
First fix would be to cast someone who was not Nicholas Cage. There's actors who melt into a role, who become a new person in a new way every time, and then there's actors who bring their star image to it and hope it meshes well. Cage is not the melty sort. And whatever his star image is, I didn't feel it brought anything helpful to this one.
Second problem was the film had three protagonists, even if they were all the same dude. Johnny Blaze (comics naming at its best there). First there was the actor playing the young him, who I thought had a certain charm. I watched the film because it was on TV, so I had no expectations, but the first ten minutes with this devil stuff and this guy on a bike, I figured I could watch this film. Then that guy disappears and it's suddenly his older version. Except since older him is played by Nicholas Cage it's more like we start watching this film with young Johnny Blaze and his father with cancer and his girlfriend who is getting sent away by her father and there's a whole story going on and
huh
Nicholas Cage is on a motorcycle. Crashing. And then some idiot pulls his helmet off. Do they want him to get dead? And what has this got to do with the first twenty minutes? Wait, he's the same guy? Noooo, he's Nicholas Cage on a motorcyle.
Only then we don't have to worry about that mismatch for very long, because suddenly he's this third guy, who acts according to different priorities and motivations. And also is a skeleton. On fire. On a bike.
Really the bike is the most consistent part of the first... probably hour of the movie.
So they've introduced three main characters, and by the time you get comfy putting them all together to be the same story, the movie is over.
So that's kind of a big problem.
Last problem is the way the words all fit into word balloons. It was a comic script, really. Short utterances, flashy visuals. Fight scenes that are mostly CGI and can only mostly pass. And the skeleton, who isn't going to look any kind of realistic, obviously.
The iconography also made me LOL a lot. I mean, bikers catching fire and being all skeletal hell things and being the devil's bounty hunter... it does not work for me. But I don't reckon that's a problem per se, because clearly it worked for a bunch of people for a bunch of time, cause Ghost Rider been around a while. It didn't seem to mesh though, the stunt rider symbol set and the Ghost Rider biker symbol set. Different styles of leathers, different styles of legends. Has fire in common, yes, but the big spiky shoulder leathers aren't much related to the white stuff he were wearing before. Nor is the big bike much related to the jumping things bike. Felt like there was a gear change between, with crunching. Kind of like the difference between mesh-metal-uv-reflective cybergoth and frills-lace-velvet-veils old school goth, like you can't switch someone from one to the other and still be in the same symbol language, even though they're closely related styles you might buy in the same shop.
So, anyway, the film wasn't so obviously terrible as quite a few I've seen. The thing where there's only one female character in the whole film and she's the love interest is clearly a whole crappy badness. It didn't bother giving her goals of her own or even let her figure things out by herself, and her cleavage did most of the acting, and we know the shape of this story so very well by now there was not one instant of surprise. But the part where there's this guy who sold his soul to save his dad and then decides to keep the powers to fight other demons, that's got all kinds of mileage. It just went all kinds of clunky turning into a film.
I should actually write stuff. Pulling stuff apart and then not writing my own is a bit cheap, really.