Pokémon Apokélypse

After my posts earlier this year regarding treating “silly” material with a level of dignity that can make it work as a real movie instead of the usual high-budget, low-coherency crap we end up with instead, and praising “Mortal Kombat: Rebirth” as a great example of this principle, I would be remiss not to address “Pokémon Apokélypse.”

MORTAL KOMBAT: REBIRTH

Considering my previous post, the timing of this video is serendipitous.

Video game movies arguably suffer the most from the attitude “Meh, it’s a video game movie, what do you expect?” We have yet to have a video game-based movie that treats the source material with the respect shown to novel adaptations. Comic book movies used to suffer under the same yoke, but in the last decade or so, some filmmakers have realized what I was talking about before: just because they’re comic book movies doesn’t mean they can’t be good movies.

Video games, sadly, are still caught in the catch-22. Filmmakers don’t take the movies seriously and the movies wind up shitty. Since the movies are shitty, they bomb. So filmmakers get it in their heads that a video game movie isn’t going to do well at the box office because it’s a video game movie, so they don’t bother to take it seriously. And round and round. (It looked like we might be able to break out of that cycle when Gore Verbinski was attached to BIOSHOCK, but alas.)

Which is why this video, titled MORTAL KOMBAT: REBIRTH, is pretty exciting.

Dear Fox: Eat All the Dicks

So for those of you not following the Watchmen legal saga, the short version is this:

Fox optioned the rights in the 80s. DC thought that the option had lapsed, and took it elsewhere. Warner Brothers made the film, and once the film was made, Fox stood up and say “Hey, we think we still own that.”

And a few days ago, the judge in the case ruled that Fox was right.

No one is arguing that they weren’t in their rights to do so, but they might have said something before Warner Bros. spent hundreds of millions of dollars making and promoting the film, considering it’s not like the production was shrouded in secrecy.

My thoughts on this are best expressed by Dan O’Brien’s blog over at Cracked.com. So I’ll just be one of many auxiliary blogs linking to that one.

“Watchmen” Fan Cordially Invites Fox to Eat Several Dicks

I never did follow-up…

At Comic-Con, RvD2 won the Star Wars Fan Movie Award for Best Visual Effects, which is a previously non-existent category apparently created solely to award us for it.¹

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth; MC Steve Sansweet had some amazingly kind things to say about both RvD and RvD2. I’m paraphrasing here, but it was to the effect of “When they announced that they were going to do a second one, we all wondered how they could possibly top themselves. But they did. Great work.”

I may be reading into things, but that very brief kudos holds a lot of information between the lines. To wit:

-I assume that the “we” means, generally, “folks at Lucasfilm,” potentially up to and including Lucas himself (to whom Sansweet has a direct line)

-They were aware of — and apparently liked — RvD well before RvD2 hit the scene

-They were paying enough attention to us to notice that we had announced a sequel in the works. This also means:

-They were aware of our call for donations before the film, and are almost certainly fully aware of the fact that we are selling DVDs. Regardless of the fact that the donations were true, voluntary donations, and the content being sold is legally ours to sell, both could have raised some hackles, and the fact that LFL has not only turned a blind eye to our activities but actively praised those activities’ product is worth my gratitude.

I may be cynical about what LFL is offering the fans these days, but there can be no denying that they do know how valuable those fans are.

So thank you, Steve Sansweet, Atom, and Lucasfilm. I probably wouldn’t have given two shakes if you didn’t like the films, but it does mean something to me that you did.

---

1. Oddly, a category that did exist in previous years, and the one for which I actually thought we would be in the running — Best Action — was omitted from this year’s competition. ↩

So what’s this Sandrima Rising thing?

Over the years since RvD, and especially following RvD2, Ryan and I have gotten numerous proposals to be involved with other peoples’ fan films. Generally speaking, we’ve said no. Fan films take a lot of time, even if it’s “just a saber fight,” and if we’re going to spend that kind of time on a project it’ll be our own.

Then I got an e-mail about Sandrima Rising. As I mentioned before, the actual complete title of the project is The Renaissance Chronicles: Sandrima Rising. The idea was that they were going to pitch it, to George Lucas, as an ongoing Star Wars series about the adventures of this freighter, the Renaissance, and her crew. I’m already on record on several occasions saying that I don’t think that’ll happen, and I don’t, but as I said yesterday, that doesn’t mean I think the project is without value.

One thing that intrigued me about the project is that it followed the Han Solo characters. In point of fact, it’s basically Firefly with lightsabers and wookiees — which is fine by me. I loved Firefly, I love lightsabers, and I can live with wookiees (though dealing with the costume is a nightmare), so it seemed like something that would be a lot of fun.

It was (and is) also an extremely ambitious project. I think everyone who gets into the fan film world — myself included — gets it into their head to do a feature-length fan film, but only a few have been able to see it through. Sandrima Rising is shortly going to join their ranks.

My thoughts on Fan Films

So I’ve had some people actually asking me where I’ve been, why I haven’t been updating my blog as much. Which is a little silly, seeing as how I frequently check in and explain, and the story never changes. However, while I’m sure it sounds like I’ve got a lot on my plate — and I do — one project in particular is the focal point of my time, around which the rest of the work I’m doing currently orbits. That project is the fan film, Sandrima Rising.

I know that I’ve been vague and avoided mentioning it too much until now, to the extent that it’s more than likely sounded like a project happening somewhere in the background. The main reason being that I’ve seen too many fan films get destroyed by long-term hype, so I advised the producers that it would be good to wait until we’re fairly far along into post before we start talking about it. But we’re getting pretty deep into the final stages of post, and I’ve been given the go-ahead to talk a little about the project.

So I’m going to do so — in my next post. Before that, though, I’d like to talk a little about fan films in general.