Batch and Logan are here to discuss the biggest movie of 2019 (sorry Rise of Skywalker)….but before they get to that, they talk all about Shazam! They detail the history, the Geoff Johns run, and of course, the new movie. And still before they get to fifing all overthat yuge flick, they talk about some comics. And how much Batch loves Doom Patrol. And then the boys congratulate past guest of the show Chip Zdarksy on his Will Eisner nomination. And then Batch lays into Tom King for damn good reasons. Oh and they do some Google Voice (708-232-3182). And then….ENDGAME.
Take caution, there are plenty of spoilers within. So don’t go saying you weren’t warned, you fucking cocksucker.
I’d be lying to you (poorly) if I said the original Star Wars Trilogy isn’t my absolute all-time favorite trilogy. There have been some amazing contenders, specifically Lord of the Rings, but for my money nothing in the realm of entertainment has ever made such a lasting imprint on me the way Star Wars has. Some of my earliest memories were of watching Return of the Jedi over and over again on VHS, having no concept of the fact that there were “other” movies in the series until my Uncle Bill hooked me up with copies of Episodes IV and V. Before that, all I knew was Jedi, which in a lot of ways was a blessing in disguise. Jedi is very publicly the least well-liked of the trilogy, but for me that has never been the case. When your only exposure to Star Wars is the least liked film, and when you’re so young that you’ll go on monthly binges of watching nothing but that one movie, it does wonders for your taste later in life. Of course, after seeing the other two films, I slowly but surely came to love them all equally, as I do today. Sure, we can nitpick whether or not the twist in Empire even remotely makes any sense, or we can laugh at the clear smears of Vaseline on the lens to mask the Landspeeder’s wheels in A New Hope, but why? The sum total of that trilogy is something truly amazing that has rightfully earned its label as the most sought-after entertainment brand in the world. That was, until, the Prequel Trilogy, where everything went to shit.
If you’re a fan of bad movies then you’d be hard pressed to find three more peculiar and awe-inspiring monuments of failure. When viewed as a trilogy, the films have few redeeming qualities. For instance, Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi was an inspired choice. He truly made the part his own and blended the wisdom of Alec Guinness with his own more youthful sensibilities and is still the standout performance of the trilogy. That’s not to say his performance is sometimes awful in its own right, but more on that later. You see, many have gone out on a limb and blamed George Lucas, solely, for the failure of these movies. When measuring them in dollars and cents, they are a rousing success without question. The biggest issue with these films is the lack of finesse and development as an artist on the part of Lucas, where he somehow manages to take Academy Award winning/nominated actors like Natalie Portman and Samuel L. Jackson and make them sound as if they have all the personality of a wet noodle. The directing and writing is at the center of the mess that is the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, an abomination that most of us wish never happened.
Without going into the gory details, we all know where things are now. Disney owns Star Wars, Kathleen Kennedy is producing and masterminding the universe, Lawrence Kasdan is involved in several of the films now in development and it’s being kickstarted by JJ Abrams. Disney did everything in their power to remove Lucas from the equation, leaving him on with no more than a producing/story credit on the upcoming film. This is a good thing across the board. In fact, their main selling point behind this year’s Comic Con panel was to hammer the idea into our heads that the film is being made with “real, practical effects”, something that is welcome but annoying to hear over and over again. Despite all of this, here’s the thing…this past year is the last one where we won’t have a new Star Wars film on the horizon. Think about that. The only studio to do something near this level of production is Marvel Studios…coincidentally paired with Disney as well. There’s no argument that Marvel’s business model is the new Hollywood trend with everyone from Jurassic Park to Fast & Furious trying to build their own “universes”, but is this a good thing for Star Wars? We’ve all wanted this for a long time. Someone to come in and do another GOOD Star Wars film. I make no qualms about it, I am in the camp of wanting more of this universe on screen. My rationale is simple, and is tied to this past week’s Ant-Man.
Ant-Man shouldn’t have worked as well as it did but it proved a bunch of things to me all once. Slap “Marvel” in front of your movie and you will be #1 at the box office without question (see last year’s smash hit “Tyler Perry in Marvel’s ‘Medea Goes Transgender'”). Seriously though, you had a troubled pre-production, mostly unknown character, kind of bland trailers/promos and a director best known for rom-coms. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did, and I think it had to do with the corporate machine that is Marvel Studios. Marvel is bigger than any one piece of its films at this point, so much so that they can “will” their films to success. Granted, there have been some duds in the MCU, but they’ve done a good job taking the good elements from the shittier entries and using them later to further validate the company’s ideology, i.e. using older Howard Stark in the opening moments of Ant-Man. So let’s apply that logic to Star Wars. Will all the films be great? No, but odds are a few of them will be. Right now we have a 50/50 chance of Episode VII being a great film. People, it could very conceivably be an awful movie. All signs point to it hitting us right in the childhood with references to the original films, but honestly, this film could be a gigantic kick to the nads outside of that.
Where do I stand? I’m ok with this plan. I know Marvel is what Marvel is now but their structure has been imitated to give us Fast Five, the upcoming Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice/Suicide Squad and even the Rocky spinoff Creed. We can rage about the finer points of quantity over quality but in all honesty, so what? If they keep trying, odds are some of what we’ll be getting will be pretty good. Well, at least 50% of it.
So what do you think? Are you happy about the upcoming plan over the next few years or would you rather they left it alone? Let us know below! Enjoy your week and Binge On!
It sure seemed like a marriage made in heaven didn’t it? As far back as 2001, director Edgar Wright -then freshly done with his cult show Spaced– was the one man who seemed like the perfect person to direct Ant-Man. Because let’s face it. How many people can make a movie about a man who dons a costume which allows him to change sizes at will and present it with a sense of cartoonish extremism combined with non bombastic reality? An over the top aesthetic mixed with an aura of plausibility is what a project like this needs. Just how successful is the film they eventually ended up with, which was helmed by Bring It On director Peyton Reed? You can find out for yourself on Friday (or you can read my review HERE). Until then, I thought I would give a little bit of insight as to what happened in the 13 years from the time Edgar Wright and his writing partner Joe Cornish pitched their idea for Ant-Man to Marvel bosses until he eventually left the project in May of last year.
First, a timeline of events leading up to Wright’s exit from the project. As big of a juggernaut Marvel is now, it is hard to remember that there was a time when they were not but a spec of dirt on the windshield of Hollywood. Back in 2001, they were partnered with Artisan Entertainment. Wright and Cornish supposedly brought their initial idea for Ant-Man, which they described as more of a crime thriller than an out and out action film, to Artisan. Even though the script is raved about by those who read it, they were eventually told that the script was not family friendly enough for what the studio was looking for. In 2005, walking around with a bit more clout one year after the release of Shaun of the Dead, Wright met eventual Marvel Films head of production Kevin Feige. Feige and Avi Arad heard Wright and Cornish’s pitch and fell in love with their ideas for the Ant-Man character. He told them to move forward with their plans while he and Arad worked on making them a reality.
Of course, three years later Marvel’s plans for a cinematic universe became a reality when Iron Man was released to monumental success. Knowing this, Feige started envisioning where each character would fit in and suggested that Wright revise his Ant-Man script to help the character do so. While doing this, the original idea for a crime caper/heist aesthetic was more or less fused with a more action oriented storyline. Throughout these script troubles, Wright kept himself even more busy by making his Cornetto Trilogy of films and the 2010 comic book film Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Here is when the clashes started taking their form, as when asked what stage Ant-Man was in during the Scott Pilgrim publicity junket, Wright would respond saying that he is once again revising the script because what they had originally written didn’t fall easily into the universe Marvel had established and that he is having difficulty because he’s not used to the ‘urgency of tentpoles.’
At Comic Con 2010, the cast for The Avengers was unveiled and eyebrows were raised when Ant-Man wasn’t included. This is when it starts getting interesting because the character original creator Stan Lee was championing since the 80s to become a motion picture was now in limbo, and all people behind the scenes were just as stilted as its most hardcore of fans, including Wright himself. It must have been a weird feeling for Wright, because he had pitched his well received idea for Ant-Man three years before Marvel became a powerhouse. Yet here he was five years after that, and there was not a finish line in sight. In 2011 more scripts were turned in and after plans for the character to appear in the after credits scene of Thor were scrapped, Wright would once again go into hibernation trying to get his idea for the character just right before rolling in front of cameras. In yet another subtle jab, Wright told people who kept asking about Ant-Man‘s status that he wants to get it just right because he ‘does not like going into production without a script.’ Hmmm…….
Excitement for the project once again started amping up at Comic Con 2012, as Wright unveiled test footage he had already shot for his still lumbering along version of Ant-Man. If the pattern I have outlined is not obvious yet, then it will become even more obvious now. Even after Wright told the audience at the Con that he is in fact directing Ant-Man, Feige threw yet another iron in the fire by saying that Marvel’s focus has gradually shifted away from making Ant-Man happen, adding that it being ‘shot through Edgar Wright’s lense is the only reason why it is being made.’
At this point, Marvel was well into Phase 2 of their cinematic universe. Here is an idea that was conceived and greenlit years before Phase 1. Why was Marvel still not focusing on the project? I would venture to guess that with the juggling act they had to do with melding Thor -a god- into this band of heroes, Feige didn’t want to add someone who can change into an ant sized physical form to do the same. But my question is why? Was Iron Man’s glowing nuclear chest piece that far off from Ant-Man’s suit? Is it the fact that after getting small enough to hide in drawers and spy on villains, Ant-Man is not that interesting a character to begin with? Or is it the darkness behind his back story?
More on that later. But to conclude the timeline of what happened between the two parties, the year 2013 did not get any better or more productive. Feige started saying in interviews that the Ant-Man script needed yet another rewrite to fit in with the universe Marvel had built. Wright and Cornish ended up writing THREE more drafts of the script, and in October Wright tweeted that he had to fly to LA ‘to finish a little something (he’d) been working on.’ Then yet another road block hit, as plans to shoot on the newly revamped UK based studio Pinewood Studios were scrapped.
A seeming pre production from hell, at this point casting had not even been announced. I again want to put into context that at the time Wright originally conceived his vision of this story in 2001, he would have had a hard time finding any actor worth a dime in Hollywood willing to say yes. After the casting of Robert Downey Jr catapulted the just as second tier character of Iron Man into the stratosphere, talented people were lining around the block to appear in anything Marvel related. By the same token, Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth were not exactly household names. But their presence and charisma in the roles of Captain America and Thor respectively is what helped those characters in their stand alone movies. Paul Rudd, arguably a bigger name in his career than any of the other actors who currently embody stand alone film characters, signed on and brought a new kind of essence to a Marvel entity. To have this entity be embodied by Rudd and directed by Wright was an exciting prospect. Add on the casting of Michael Douglas, and Ant-Man was finally shaping up to be a movie to watch.
And then 2014 rolled around. It seemed like the inevitable divorce was imminent, as Feige demanded even more rewrites, this time without the involvements of Wright and Cornish. No one but the parties involved know what exactly happened next, but it is generally assumed that Wright was not pleased with the final script and instead of moving ahead with a vision he did not believe in, dropped himself from the project altogether. Fanboys fell out of their lounge chairs in disbelief, and everyone now assumed that Ant-Man was even more doomed than before Rudd and Douglas’s involvement gave people confidence that it could work. In an odd but bold act, Avengers films director Joss Whedon tweeted a picture of himself holding up a cornetto, an obvious show of support for Wright. Not surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath Whedon gushed that a draft of Ant-Man he read which Wright and Cornish turned in was ‘the best script Marvel ever had.’
The question is, just how much of this fluster filled divorce was Wright sticking to his guns, and how much was a simple tug of war between Feige and Wright? I’d assume that Wright was not as willing to infuse his film with storylines meant to move the Marvel Universe forward if it meant threatening the integrity of his intended vision. Look what happened to Iron Man 2. After the first forty minutes, the movie, a sequel of which was being made by original Iron Man director Jon Favreau, was flush with plot points only meant to promote The Avengers. The experience left a bad taste in Favreau’s mouth, and something tells me that experience led to him having a little talk with Wright before he continued digging his heels into a film he was losing control of. In the years leading up to its eventual non existent vision, Wright said that he was determined to ‘create an ‘in’ for people so (they) don’t have to know 50 years of Avengers history to enjoy the movie.’ That is not how Marvel works. Marvel is moving more and more toward a pandering way of storytelling. It is a miracle it didn’t lead Whedon to leave The Avengers: Age of Ultron. But Wright was having none of it.
So what does this mean? For one, it is a hopeless task trying to convince Marvel fanatics -even those who have not seen Ant-Man– that Wright wouldn’t have made a better movie. It is a silly ‘what if’ scenario that needs to end. What I am more concerned about is what this means for directors now getting drafted into the overall Marvel cinematic picture. Ant-Man ended up being their cheapest ($130 million), most intimate film yet. The fact that Wright’s name is still in the credits means that the company is not determined to pretend that Wright’s involvement never happened. But I am sure they would like to. While it is commendable to not pander to those who know any and all of the Avengers cinematic and comic book history, it obviously does not serve bigger people who have an even more enormous vision in mind. Good luck with your Avengers films Russo brothers.
Starring: Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Pena, David Dastmalchian, Tip ‘T.I.’ Harris, Wood Harris, Hayley Atwell, John Slattery, Martin Donovan, Garrett Morris and Corey Stoll.
After over a decade of start-stops, and one year following dreams of comic book enthusiasts everywhere getting smashed with the announcement of longtime Ant-Man character fan Edgar Wright leaving the project, Ant-Man, the film about a suit able to render its wearer the size of a peanut M & M, is finally upon us. One thing Marvel Studios and replacement director Peyton Reed need to adapt to is even if their resulting film pleases the masses, the film geeks they are trying so hard to please will inevitably wonder how Wright’s vision could have improved the end result. There was something genuinely intriguing to me about making the last film in Phase 2 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe into an intimate comedic character piece as opposed to yet another catastrophic global danger/destruction porn piece. Though it can be argued that the world’s in danger’ dial was already at its limit after Joss Whedon’s Avengers: The Age of Ultron from earlier this year.
Armed with a likable lead and endearing overall story, Ant-Man works in bunches. The original heist film concept Wright and his writing partner Joe Cornish (who both retain story and screenplay credit) came up with is better realized than you’d expect. Especially considering the vision was taken over by the director of Bring It On. Comic book purists know that Hank Pym (Douglas) is the actual original member of The Avengers and Scott Lange (Rudd) ends up eventually taking the torch that Pym passes to him. Here, the story starts us off in a flashback to 1989, when Pym originally comes up with the Pym Particle. He then makes the by now cliche proclamation that nobody will ever get the formula as long as he lives. Yeah. Right. Of note in this section of Ant-Man is the incredible CGI job done on Douglas, as he looks like he stepped directly from the set of 1988’s Wall Street onto this one. Combined with the similar success of doing the same to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Genisys, I’d say CGI artists are 97% to seamless realism, as opposed to the distraction it was in, say, 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. The film has a modest (in Marvel standards) $130 million budget, and I would venture to say at least a third of that went to getting this de-aging job just right.
Flash forward to modern day. Pym is now a has been losing hold of his company after his former protege Darren Cross (Stoll) metaphorically pushes him out. On the personal end, Pym’s daughter Hope (Lilly) does not have the best relationship with her father and this relationship gets even more strained when Hank decides to turn his attention to down on his luck, former prisoner Lange instead of working on being a father to his real daughter. At the same time, Lange is fired from Baskin Robbins and gets kicked out of a party for his daughter by his ex wife (Greer) and her new beau (Canavale). This line of parallelism between the two father-daughter relationships could have seemed clunky. Though he will never be mistaken for Spielberg, Reed makes it work without getting too sappy.
Though the villain in Ant-Man is better than most Marvel bad guy incarnations, Cross (Stoll) is still one twirl of the mustache away from being cliche. He certainly has some nice moments (the final battle, which consists of changing toys and bugs into different proportions, is a stand-out), but overall I just did not fear nor endear myself to him. Say what you will about Ultron. At least I was in constant fear of what he would do next. Here, Cross makes proclamations to ‘end war as we know it,’ but doesn’t get much more than a blink of an eye and a hand to my yawning mouth each time he did. The fact that Ant-Man is not about the title character as much as Cross’s relationship with his former mentor is a real fault of the movie.
With the villain a non factor of enjoyment, Ant-Man‘s success with me lie in how successful Rudd was at channeling his inner Downey and making the role of Lange his own. No matter what I think of the rest of the film, Rudd (who worked with Reed on Yes, Man) is fantastic, and Marvel could not have picked a better star to fill Ant-Man’s little shoes. The comedy that revolved around Rudd worked for me, though I cannot say the same thing about Pena. While I can certainly see Pena being a standout to most people, I did not laugh at nor like his scenes -specifically his in synch with the action monologues- at all. It almost reminded me of Guardians of the Galaxy in the way that I can see how most people could like him. It just did not fit in with what I feel works from a successful comedic standpoint.
I don’t want to act like I did not enjoy Ant-Man, because in some ways I did. One thing a comic book movie brought down to this intimate a scale does is force writers to work more on characterization than how the villain is going to take out the world. This is where Ant-Man is most successful, as the smallness of the character hides just how big an overall heart the film really has. Nothing about the warmness of feelings these characters had felt manufactured, and the way Rudd plays off all of it is what makes it work. Also, while Pena gets most of the big lines, Dastmalchian is the second hand character who works the best and was a major highlight for me.
Don’t let all the character moments I am describing make you assume Ant-Man is nothing more than a rom-com in disguise. The action in the film comes in strides and hops instead of sprints and leaps, and those who come to Marvel films expecting nothing less than city wide destruction will be disappointed to know the de-porn in Ant-Man is limited to a house. Still, seeing how the suit works is what makes the film’s later action scenes pay off as well as they do, and Reed fills these scenes with items you would not think of as being dangerous. There are great sections involving bath tubs and Thomas The Tank Engine (not kidding) which make any sort of danger Cross brings seem almost microscopic.
I guess that’s my main problem with Ant-Man. As much as I tired of seeing Bad Guy 1 try and out destruct Bad Guy 2 in films past, there was always a sort of scope and danger knowing anything was possible within them. By making Ant-Man a more intimate film, Marvel has painted themselves into a corner, as they have to rely on comedy and drama to move the story forward. As much as I enjoyed the effort, when both of those means of storytelling don’t work, they are going to have problems like this.
I believe I heard John Cleese refer to comedy as being brittle. He spoke about how with comedy, the tone has to be exactly right because if it fails at any point, you can lose your audience and, in turn, lose the joke. A lot of filmmakers struggle with comedy. Even the veterans, like the once god-like Mike Myers stumble and fall when attempting new things, like The Love Guru. Anchorman 2, for all intents and purposes, should have been an easy slam-dunk. You have the entire original cast returning, plenty of juicy celebrity cameos and the blessing of fans everywhere. So why is it, then, that Anchorman 2 so horribly mucks things up?
I am a devoted fan of the original film. I remember seeing it in the theater with my two brothers and my dad, and at at the time, loving it. That love never really went away and I to this day find myself quoting the film, sometimes unknowingly. I always liked the idea of an Anchorman sequel, but never really wanted one too badly, as I felt the original film was very much lightning in a bottle and couldn’t be replicated. With news of the new film and the rumors that the likes of the notoriously picky Harrison Ford signing on in a key role, I got excited. It turned out to be all for naught, unfortunately, as A2 falls prey to the recycled joke disease that has plagued so many films throughout movie history. There were a few bright spots in the film, such as the scene where Will Ferrell has dinner with his boss’ family and tries to “assimilate” with them, and I’ll admit a few scenes made me laugh, but I was overwhelmingly insulted by the trend used in the film where they just took all the jokes from the first movie, put them in this movie and tweaked them all slightly.
Look familiar?
I find it sad that the amount of talent on-screen here did not translate to quality comedy. There is always the argument that the naysayers will give you about “overthinking a stupid movie” or “reading too much into it”, but to that I suggest those people squarely A) Go fuck themselves and B) Take a look at Monty Python. Monty Python was, arguably, the greatest comedy group of all time. They were all Ivy League college students and grads who decided to set their sights on breaking down comedy and discovering what makes people laugh. Their success was a direct result of understanding what about stupidity is funny and using that to their advantage. Ferrell and his collaborator Adam McKay have that ability, as evidenced in their previous work together. Somehow here, however, they didn’t use that knowledge and instead copied and pasted from the first film. Maybe it was studio pressure, maybe it was a lack of genuine creative interest, but if anyone wants to honestly tell me that Anchorman 2 deserves to be spoken of in the same breadth as Anchorman, they need their head examined.
I used Mike Myers as an example earlier of how comedians sometimes mistake what the audience wants with what will actually work in a film, and to see that look no further than Austin Powers vs. Austin Powers 2 and 3. 3 and, to a lesser degree, 2, both have compromised elements that work against the finished product, such as shoehorning in Seth Green’s transformation into Doctor Evil. The problem is, when you take from earlier films in a series, no matter how funny/interesting the idea was the first time, but the second time you see it it feels wrong. Case in point, SPOILERS, the fight scene at the end of A2. I’m sorry, but I didn’t find one piece of that scene funny. Not only did most of those celebrity cameos do nothing for me, but the inclusion of ass-clown Kanye West was like a bitch-slap in the face of comedy. While in real life that guy is a walking punchline, the fact that a group of talented individuals I personally like and appreciate gave him a paycheck to star alongside them is betrayal on par with when William Wallace nearly slits Robert The Bruce’s throat in Braveheart.
Devastating
This is but one example, but it is the freshest in my mind because it so thoroughly fails to deliver the goods, despite the effort. At the end of the day, what did I expect out of Anchorman 2? Not much. I certainly didn’t expected to be blindsided by laziness, sloppy writing and piss-poor casting choices, but sometimes that’s the way it goes. Fuck this movie, go rent the first one instead.
I’m a child of the 90’s so I missed out on the summer camp experience, of course the camps were still around, but they were all the rage back in the late 70’s and 80’s. Actually, I can’t decide if would have rather been a camp goer, or a camp counselor. So, to substitute the first-hand experience, I’ll bask in the glory that is Wet Hot American Summer.
Before Judd Apatow made Freaks and Geeks, there was David Wain who was part The State, which was originally a comedy troop from NYU, and later made to a sketch comedy show on MTV during the early to mid 90’s. Wain was able to bring together most of the MTV version of The State, among both already established actors and newcomers. What he created is arguably the best camp themed comedy since Meatballs, some would even rate this higher than the Bill Murray classic.
Where to begin, the cast of this movie is one to be reckoned with, just about every character has gone on to do awesome things, while the most successful being Bradley Cooper and Amy Poehler. But the shining star of this movie is easily Paul Rudd, his character Andy is the perfect douche bag. The way he plays this character is something of which I’ve never seen. The amount of improv is off the charts, and every decision he made with his character is golden.
Wet Hot American Summer is obviously poking fun at the slew of camp centered movies of the 70’s and 80’s, but it’s also unique in its own right. If you haven’t seen this, the humor is somewhat in the same vein as Apatow films, but only in that it’s extremely dirty. One thing that this has over Apatow comedies is the absurd behavior and situations regarding some of the characters. To give a couple examples on this, Gene (Chris Meloni) is the camp’s cook, who has a back and forth conversation with a can of mixed vegetables. Another would be during what starts out as a feel good montage of the counselors going to town, quickly turns into a full on heroin binge, but arrive back to camp only after an hour as if nothing ever happened.
Besides the stand outs which I’ve already mentioned, other camp counselors include Ken Marino, Joe Lo Truglio, Bradley Cooper, Molly Shannon, Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter. I could easily spend all day watching something involving these people, none of the dialogue is wasted and everything is downright hilarious, my only complaint would be that I wish the movie was longer. Some of my personal highlights would be all of the Paul Rudd scenes, the motorcycle chase between Lo Truglio and Marino and of course the overly explicit sex scene between Michael Ian Black and Bradley Cooper. Cooper’s sex scene is downright hilarious, mainly because I saw this movie after he had the role in Wedding Crashers, which was his first big break in movies. He’s now a sex symbol, but in 2001 he was getting his ass pounded by Michael Ian Black.
With all that being said, this is a grossly underrated comedy, everyone needs to see this, and make it a point to watch often.
1988 – Alvin (Rudd) and Lance (Hirsch) are road workers in Garland, TX, their job – repaint lane lines down a long and lonely road.
The plot here is very simplistic; Alvin is in a relationship with Madison, who is also Lance’s sister, the only reason Lance is here is because Alvin is trying to have him grow up and show maturity and responsibility. Alvin likes to work alone, which is why he has this job, Lance is the complete opposite, leaving the work site during the weekends to try and get laid in town.
When Alvin receives a letter from Madison, he disappears one morning leaving Lance to wonder where he has gone, turns out that Alvin was in town calling Madison…who broke up with him. Alvin takes out his emotions on Lance, who doesn’t seem to understand anything about relationships, and constantly slips up and tells Alvin things about his sister regarding other men.
There was literally no point to this movie, the acting was good, but there was no reason for this. This felt like a cheap rip off of a Noah Baumbach type movie, but without the smarts. Furthermore, this was directed by David Gordon Green. You might recognize that name as he was the director of Pineapple Express, Your Highness, and Eastbound & Down. This was a HUGE departure for him, and it really didn’t pay off.
Besides the two main characters, there is a nameless truck driver who shows up a few times, and each time providing our guys with booze, and some small talk. There is also an older woman who Alvin stumbles upon while rummaging through ashes of a burned down house. These characters didn’t add anything to the story, nor did they influence our main characters in any way.
I can appreciate the obscure, odd, weird, or any other non-conforming adjective I can think of, while this TRIED to be different, it simply fell flat.
First, a timeline of events leading up to Wright’s exit from the project. As big of a juggernaut Marvel is now, it is hard to remember that there was a time when they were not but a spec of dirt on the windshield of Hollywood. Back in 2001, they were partnered with Artisan Entertainment. Wright and Cornish supposedly brought their initial idea for Ant-Man, which they described as more of a crime thriller than an out and out action film, to Artisan. Even though the script is raved about by those who read it, they were eventually told that the script was not family friendly enough for what the studio was looking for. In 2005, walking around with a bit more clout one year after the release of Shaun of the Dead, Wright met eventual Marvel Films head of production Kevin Feige. Feige and Avi Arad heard Wright and Cornish’s pitch and fell in love with their ideas for the Ant-Man character. He told them to move forward with their plans while he and Arad worked on making them a reality.
rewrites, this time without the involvements of Wright and Cornish. No one but the parties involved know what exactly happened next, but it is generally assumed that Wright was not pleased with the final script and instead of moving ahead with a vision he did not believe in, dropped himself from the project altogether. Fanboys fell out of their lounge chairs in disbelief, and everyone now assumed that Ant-Man was even more doomed than before Rudd and Douglas’s involvement gave people confidence that it could work. In an odd but bold act, Avengers films director Joss Whedon tweeted a picture of himself holding up a cornetto, an obvious show of support for Wright. Not surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath Whedon gushed that a draft of Ant-Man he read which Wright and Cornish turned in was ‘the best script Marvel ever had.’
