dimfuture.net

To follow up briefly on the notes attached to my review of Casino Royale, it appears that Sony has fixed the copy-protection problem with their DVDs, and (apparently) will be issuing replacement disks to customers.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that I’ll be rushing out to purchase Casino Royale, as the DVD copy protection still amounts to introducing deliberate defects in the DVD in order to punish legitimate consumers for the actions of pirates. But it’s a step in the right direction, at least. Well, not really, but close to it, I suppose.

Hey, they’re making a new Hulk movie! With Edward Norton! Before 2003, this news would have made me very excited. However, all my memories of a big-screen Hulk are of Ang Lee’s plodding, overwrought misfire — so I’m more in the realm of “cautious optimism.” So I’ll vent my spleen by taking a few potshots at Sci Fi Wire‘s press release.

Edward Norton (The Illusionist) has been set by Marvel Studios to play Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk, a role formerly played by Eric Bana, Variety reported.

The Louis Leterrier-directed drama will be distributed by Universal Pictures, with an opening set for June 13, 2008. Universal is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.

The Incredible Hulk will shoot this summer in Toronto.

To give it that mystical, elusive Stargate SG-1 feel.

The Incredible Hulk, following on Ang Lee’s disappointing Hulk, aims to be less self-serious and more in line with the comic series and TV show. Leterrier directed the action-filled Transporter 2 and Unleashed.

The most oxymoronic pair of sentences ever… oh, they said less self-serious. Well, thank God.

The new movie begins with Banner on the run, trying to avoid capture long enough to cure the condition that turns him into a misunderstood green menace.

But is he on the run from giant mutated poodles? God, I hope so. That was a Freudian masterpiece of intricate psychological, uh…

The script for The Incredible Hulk was written by Zak Penn, who had a hand in crafting two X-Men films, Fantastic Four and Elektra for Marvel.

Note how it doesn’t say which two X-Men films. Could that be because one of them is The Last Stand? Well, never mind. If he can save The Hulk from the drab, pompous shipwreck of the first film, I’ll oficially forgive him for The Last Stand. I’m sure he’ll be deeply relieved to know that. (I won’t forgive Ratner, though. Don’t ask the impossible.)

After a hiatus of a few months, I’ve decided to start dabbling in posting movie news again. I had something of an identity crisis about this a while back, figuring that anyone who wanted sci-fi news could just get it elsewhere. But then I realized that I rather enjoyed posting sci-fi news — so I’m back at it. So here we go!

Sci Fi Wire reports that Flash Gordon is returning to serial television — Smallville-style, apparently.

Eric Johnson (Smallville) has landed the title role in SCI FI Channel’s upcoming original series Flash Gordon, the network announced. The 22-hour series updates the comic-strip franchise and is slated for an August premiere. Johnson will play space-traveling adventurer Gordon, who is joined by companions Dale Arden and Dr. Hans Zarkov. Ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, they find themselves as Earth’s last line of defense against the forces of the merciless dictator Ming.

Peter Hume wrote the first two episodes, which will be directed by Rick Rosenthal (Smallville). Production is to begin May 1 in Vancouver, Canada.

Flash is being produced by Reunion Pictures under an agreement with King Features Syndicate, which owns the franchise. RHI Entertainment’s Robert Halmi Sr. and Robert Halmi Jr. (SCI FI ‘s Legend of Earthsea) are executive-producing, with Hume also expected to executive-produce. Matthew O’Connor and Tom Rowe produce.

I’m a big fan of Flash Gordon, but have yet to see a manifestation of Flash in television or movies that wasn’t more or less unbearable. I even rented the animated series with the intention of writing about it — and found I couldn’t. Revisiting such a beloved childhood favorite was simply too exquisitely painful. I’ll be interested to see what Sci-Fi does with the material, although mentioning it and Smallville in the same sentence gives me the horrors.

I’m pleased to announce that dimfuture.net has managed to secure the services of kung-fu fan (and master) Craig, who will be heading up our new weekly feature, CHOPSOCKY! Chopsocky will be dedicated to kung fu films both profound and abysmal, and everything in between, with the kind of humor and passion only Craig can provide. And, best of all, it lets my lazy ass off the hook for another day every week.

So enjoy!

Note: Due to Sony’s broken “copy protection” on the Casino Royale DVD, I could not acquire any quality screenshots for purposes of this review, as my (legal) copy would not play at all on my PC. Sony deliberately sells defective DVDs to their consumers with no intention of fixing the problems created for legitimate consumers. I recommend against purchasing the Casino Royale DVD until this problem is addressed.

Like any Bond film, Casino Royale is given context not only by the period in which it was made, but by the films that directly preceded it. The Brosnan films to which Casino Royale is the heir slowly disintegrated from enjoyable camp to not-so-enjoyable schlock, the nadir of which may have been the casting of Denise Richards as hotpants-clad nuclear physicist Christmas Jones. Though, in all fairness, at least Christmas Jones was memorable in some way, if only memorably awful — in writing this review, I was starkly reminded how little I can tell the last three (or was it four?) Bond films apart.

Casino Royale is a much-needed “reboot” of the Bond franchise, and infuses the Bond mythos — which had become weighed down with painful puns, preposterous scripts, and an increasingly obvious lack of self-awareness — into a new, stripped-down, simplified Bond for a new century.

Daniel Craig, who is undoubtedly the least pretty Bond since Roger Moore, inhabits the curiously uneven 007 continuity — it’s present day, but Bond is a fresh agent, just given double-oh status by M (the transcendently cranky Judi Dench). After the lengthy and explosive expository sequence that has become a Bond-movie hallmark, 007 heads to Montenegro to participate in a multimillion-dollar high-stakes poker game at Casino Royale.

What’s remarkable about Casino Royale is how few of the weary Bond tropes it includes. There is no Q in this film. Bond relies mostly on his wits and contemporary items like cell phones and laptops; nothing that will seem unbelievable or quaint in five or ten years. The lack of science-fiction gadgetry in Casino Royale is bemusing — by eschewing the kind of far-fetched gizmos that catapult most Bond films firmly into the realm fantasy, the film roots itself in the present, lending more weight to its relatively low-tech grittiness.

Other elements of the film are equally as refreshing. Throughout the action, David Arnold’s score constantly lurks around the edges of the well-known Bond theme — never quite fully indulging until the final moments of the film — leaving the viewer with the impression that this film is a kind of proto-Bond — the beginning of something new, rather than a retread of something intimately familiar.

Craig’s Bond — played with a sort of rugged, hangdog aplomb that I personally found very satisfying — also spends less time killing people and blowing things up than his counterparts. Rewatching Tomorrow Never Dies recently, I was reminded not only of how awful the Bond franchise had become (Tomorrow is a loud, garish, nonsensical mess, with a cliched villain and far too much Joe Don Baker), but how unbelievably terrible a spy Bond had become. The Brosnan Bond’s idea of intelligence-gathering seemed to amount to walking up to his nemesis and coyly inquiring, “so… heard anything about secret stealth boats?” Capture and explosive escape inevitably ensues. By the end of Brosnan’s tenure as Bond, the character had become less of a spy than another mindless action-hero from the Book of Schwarzenegger — uttering a few groan-worthy puns while spraying machine-gun fire in every direction.

By contrast, Craig’s Bond not only does more genuine espionage, but is, character-wise, simultaneously more masculine and vulnerable than Brosnan — he rarely jokes, bleeds a great deal, drinks too much, and is emotionally cut off. Previous Bond iterations were just as emotionally deranged as Craig’s, of course, but for the first time since a passing attempt at self-awareness in GoldenEye, the film seems to genuinely deal with Bond as a human being, with genuine foibles and shortcomings, instead of a comic-book superman in a tuxedo.

While Casino Royale‘s departures from the deeply-worn ruts of Bond mythology are heartening, the film is not without a few shortcomings of its own. There are a few timeless 007 cliches still in full effect: the disposable first Bond girl, lots of talk about martinis, the fetishistic attention paid to the 1964 Aston Martin. These are not bad things, of course; Casino Royale wisely refrains from throwing out the entire Bond playbook, keeping what works and deftly tossing aside everything else. But there are still a few blemishes. The movie’s second act feels more like the third, the villains are underdeveloped and too quickly disposed with, the final battle is deeply underwhelming, and Eva Green is probably one of the least memorable Bond girls since Tanya Roberts.

Despite a slightly pokey ending and a pace that might be slightly too indulgent in places, Casino Royale is a bold take on the franchise — one with the potential to go in interesting new directions. The last decade or so had more or less stripped me of my enthusiasm for 007 — Casino Royale gave it all back.

Recommended. 8/10