Pirates vs. zombies

The early 21st century was a big time for both pirates and zombies.

You could argue that Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later revived our interest in zombie movies in 2002, and then the following year, Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl made pirates hip again. (If they were ever hip in the first place.)

Why, then, have zombie movies been allowed to proliferate without seeming to owe a debt to either Boyle or zombie godfather George A. Romero, but every time we see a new pirate-related property, we feel like it's an attempt to ride on Pirates of the Caribbean's coattails?

These may seem like rather outdated thoughts, since there is neither a new zombie movie nor a new pirate movie acting as a news peg, but I've been thinking them because my son has been watching The Pirates! Band of Misfits every couple days since Christmas, when he got it as a present.

I quite enjoy The Pirates, which is a big step up from non-Wallace & Gromit Aardman movies like Chicken Run and Flushed Away, but I do recall thinking at the time it came out that it was a rather too-obvious attempt to capitalize on Disney's Caribbean-led pirate rejuvenation. Perhaps being a rival studio of Disney -- albeit a significantly less powerful rival -- made the inevitable comparison seem all the more inevitable.

But it was the zombie thing that caused me to judge that comparison unfair. Did Disney take out the patent on the pirate movie? Certainly not. People can and should make whatever pirate movies they want to make without having to bear the burden of owing something to Caribbean, a series that only really has one good entry. (I actually didn't see On Stranger Tides, but the critical consensus on it was not great.)

Certainly, zombie movies exist in whatever forms they want to exist. One of my more delightful surprises of 2013, for example, was Warm Bodies, which sees a teen zombie as its lovelorn protagonist/ narrator. On the opposite end of the spectrum there was World War Z, a surprise only because it wasn't terrible, in which the zombies are like mindless swarming insects. The zombie movie genre allows you to go off in all different directions.

And here's where we see the reason why zombie movies have exploded and pirate movies have basically disappeared from the landscape, not to mention the reason why comparing zombies and pirates in the first place was only useful to the extent that they had a revival around the same time. People continue to want to see zombies in both traditional and non-traditional forms, while pirates all assume more or less the same form. And that pirate form will always be unduly influenced by puffy shirts and affected speech patterns and other silly elements that leave the genre perennially associated with comedy and children's fare.

I do sometimes wonder, though, why we couldn't have seen other types of pirate movies. Why couldn't you have a pirate noir, where characters are double-crossing each other aboard a pirate ship, resulting in a suspenseful game of wits? Why not a gritty pirate movie done in a realistic indie style? Why not a pirate movie in the Quentin Tarantino mold, violent and funny and full of pop culture references?

I may be answering my own questions here.

While I'm waiting for these movies to materialize, I look forward to the seven or eight new zombie movies we are sure to see in 2014.

Blink and you'll miss Matthew Fox

Matthew Fox is not, like, a huge movie star or anything.

However, he is someone who seems like he should be in a movie like World War Z for longer than about two-and-a-half minutes, during which he has no lines of dialogue, and you can really only tell it's him because you can see his eyes peering out through his heavy military garb. (He's a soldier who gets off a chopper and shoots some undead in helping Brad Pitt and his family take off from the roof of an overrun building.)

Sometimes you can't tell the way a movie's been reshot; other times, you really can.

I just finished watching World War Z -- it's rainy as hell on this Tuesday afternoon, so I don't feel guilty being holed up at home -- and only because I have the keen eyes of a guy who's constantly trying to pick out actors he recognizes that I even determined it was Fox.

There's been a fair amount written about how Fox's character was originally more developed, as part of a possible trilogy of movies. However, I hadn't heard about any of that before watching the movie. Only now, trying to get an explanation of what happened, did I even google it.

While watching, when Fox didn't show up again, I just assumed "Nah, that wasn't him -- it was just someone with similar eyes."

Lo and behold, there he was in the credits -- he was actually listed sixth overall, even though there are at least 20 actors who have more to do in the movie than he does. I guess that's the consolation prize when you're the star of the box office juggernaut Alex Cross and you get cut out of World War Z.

Overall, I guess the changes Fox's Lost collaborators Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard made were pretty successful, as I enjoyed the movie. Because I stopped reading the book -- I just couldn't get into it -- I don't know how it differs. I will say that they certainly weren't kidding around about getting the "world" part into it. Who ever heard of a zombie movie in which one character trots his way around the entire globe?

That's World War Z for you, the James Bond movie of zombie movies. If you can't find Brad Pitt in South Korea, check for him in Israel or Wales. If he's not there he might be in Philadelphia or Nova Scotia.

If you're looking for Matthew Fox, well ... he's on the cutting room floor.

Overseeing a disaster

Is it a bad sign that the thing that makes me most excited about seeing a certain movie -- in fact, the only thing that makes me excited about seeing it -- is the billboard used to advertise it?

The billboard for World War Z that I'm talking about is essentially an elongated version of this poster. There's something so arresting about this image of Brad Pitt looking down over a sea of carnage. The sea of carnage is nothing new for a poster like this, but his perspective on it is. It's damned enthralling.

The rest of the movie? Eh.

What I think is sort of unintentionally funny about this poster (and the double-entendre title I've used for this post) is that it works pretty well as a metaphor for Pitt's involvement in the project.

What most people know about World War Z is that it was a production that was plagued with problems, delays, reworkings and reimaginings. In fact, there were times when it seemed like the whole thing might go belly up. All that resulted in footage that looks pretty lackluster.

It would be one thing if Pitt were just a hired gun, but he's probably the single-most invested creative talent involved in this project. It's his baby, his dream project, his nightmare. If it's a flop, it could indeed by the biggest disaster he ever oversees, and it could have a lasting impact on his career.

Then again, all these things were said about Titanic, and look how that turned out. That too was a movie whose subject matter worked well as a metaphor for the production, but that ship certainly didn't sink. In fact, that ship flew.

Will these zombies be DOA, or rise from the ashes like a phoenix?

This weekend's box office will tell us a lot about that.

The year that filled up

Now that we're past Thanksgiving, it's time to get in that reflective mood as the year starts to close down.

Too early for year-end lists, mind you, but not too early to start assessing what kind of year 2012 has been.

I don't think this has been a great year for movies, but it certainly has been a full one.

When was the last time you can remember hearing about four major releases that had to be shifted to the following calendar year?

Most release years include one or two movies that must move their release dates forward for one reason or another. But in 2012, The Great Gatsby, Gravity, Gangster Squad and G.I. Joe: Retaliation all jumped to 2013.

Must have something to do with the letter G, though The Grey, Goon, Gone, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Good Deeds and God Bless America were all spared.

So the market is becoming more competitive but less good. What else is new?

Then again, the best part of the release schedule is still largely ahead of us. And it was from now until the end of the year that the first three of the four delayed titles were scheduled to come out.

With The Great Gatsby, the reason for the delay (to May 10, 2013) is listed on wikipedia as "delays in the production schedule." But conventional wisdom suggests that perhaps Warner Brothers didn't want to send Leonardo DiCaprio up against Leonardo DiCaprio. The Great Gatsby was supposed to come out at Christmas ... which is when Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, starring one Leo DiCaprio, is also going to quench our Quentin thirst.

Gravity -- Alfonso Cuaron's long, long-awaited follow-up to 2006's Children of Men -- is cruelly having an entire year tacked on to that wait. Originally slated for the day before Thanksgiving this year, the movie now won't bow until next October 18th. It sounds like the reason for the delay is all the CG required in post. I'm reading that Cuaron is experimenting with all kinds of innovative technology, including an "uninterrupted" 17-minute take (though the article suggests that the take is done with digital assistance, unlike the long takes in Children of Men, which were au naturel).

Gangster Squad fell victim to that old problem of having a trailer containing subject matter that was rendered controversial by real-world events. The Gangster Squad trailer they were showing this summer had a bunch of baddies with tommy guns blowing away patrons in a movie theater from behind the screen. The shooting in Aurora, Colorado during The Dark Knight Rises pretty much killed that particular trailer. And not only is that scene now gone from the movie, but the whole movie was moved by four months from September to January 11th (a release date that would be a sign of very low confidence by the studio in most cases). Maybe it was reshoots, maybe it was just trying to keep a wide berth from those tragic events.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation has the most number of apparent reasons for its delay from this past June to next May. The "official" reasons are that 3G is being added in post-production and that Paramount is trying to boost interest in international markets. (Since when aren't international markets interested in Hollywood action movies?) However, the unofficial reasons include all of the following: reshoots to avoid the early death of Channing Tatum's character, after Tatum had officially become a star in 2012 (hey, it's not a spoiler if it isn't going to end up happening in the movie); a desire not to compete with Tatum's Magic Mike, which was set to open the same day (in a situation that echoes the potential Christmas Day DiCaprio double feature); and, um, that's it, but the rule of three dictates I list three things.

And come to think of it, it isn't only movies that start with G that have jumped ship from 2012. I just thought of a fifth movie that was supposed to come out this year, but didn't: World War Z. The adaptation of Max Brooks' popular zombie novel would have been part of that crowded late December release schedule had it not been for production delays and the seven weeks of reshoots that were required earlier this year. With or without those reshoots, the trailer tells me this movie might be a bigger disaster than an actual zombie apocalypse.

Of course, now that I've analyzed the reasons for the delays of five major would-be 2012 films, it seems pretty clear that none of them were delayed only because "too many movies are already coming out in 2012." In each case there seem to be other factors, even if they are as simple as too many movies by one of the movie's stars coming out during the expected release window -- not too many movies in general.

What I think this really illustrates is how over time, making movies is becoming an increasingly complicated proposition, with studios finding profit margins to be ever thinner, and the need seeming ever more paramount to fine-tune the movie until it's a perfect product released at a perfect time.

Or, maybe it's just a statistical blip.