30.filmfeatures
Monday 30 November 2015
The Courier
Film Editors: Emma Allsopp, Rhian Hunter & Simon Ramshaw
MEGA FAN vs GIANT CYNIC
The Godfather: Part III
The first two Godfather films are considered to be among the best films ever made. However, the belated third instalment polarises many. This week Imogen Scott-Chambers and Ritwik Sarkar battle out over whether The Godfather: Part III continues the success of the first two, or whether it plummets into the depths of despair.
Flopping films, what makes them fall? This year has been full of unexpected cinematic failures, so Salman Ali investigates what makes an audience-disappointing and career-ruining flop
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ilms tend to either skyrocket the profits of a studio or send it down into ruin and bankruptcy. Even if a movie equals its production budget it’s still losing out. Big box office flops are summer blockbusters which are quite expensive and have to face stiff competition. There are reasons for a film to bomb at box office; lack of promotion is a major cause, negative word of mouth or external factors like bad release timing or economic problems in society. One of the biggest flops of 2015, Aloha got poor reviews, stirred up race-related controversy and all of this came together to create an expected loss of approximately $65 million for the folks at Sony and Fox. Warner Bros. had a handful of regrets this past summer with Hot Pursuit, Entourage and others making less than expected but the numbers
suggest that The Man From U.N.C.L.E. will be the biggest disappointment of all. According to The Hollywood Reporter’s figures, the film is looking at a loss of around $80 million which becomes worse when you realize that number is higher than the reported budget of the movie. Marvel’s First Family and Fantastic Four never really stood a chance due to reviews and terrible buzz. The movie hardly made only a little over $50 million in US, and it looks like Fox may lose $100 million on the investment. The studio has not yet announced what they plan to do with the future of the series, but things definitely don’t look good for a sequel. But on the flip side, some flops made it big postcinema-release, achieving cult status. Take Donnie Darko – it might have helped launch the acting career of Jake Gyllenhaal, but it miserably flopped
Giant Cynic You should always go out while you’re on top. Sportsmen alike have done it many times, but the Godfather movie franchise didn’t get the memo. After a string of flops in the 1980’s director Francis Coppola apparently realized that he was in desperate need of money, thus re-launching the franchise. What was supposed to be a second coming turned out into a franchise killer, as the movie’s lop sided plot focus turned out to be the least of its problems. Without a suitable female lead, Coppola cast his own daughter Sofia as Corleone’s daughter. Without any experience, she crumbled in comparison to Andy Garcia and arguably brought the whole movie down. The ending summed up the insulting attempt at re-kindling the franchise. Rather than having Corleone go up in flames, he falls from a bicycle, and brings down one of the greatest franchises with a cringing whimper rather than an erupting bang. Ritwik Sarkar
“Fantastic Four never really stood a chance”
This year marks the 76th anniversary of Wizard of Oz, but audiences weren’t too keen to follow Dorothy when she first took her trip down the yellow brick road. The film made around $3m, but considering cost $2.7m to make, it wasn’t seen as a success, in turn racking up a $1.1m loss for MGM. However, the re-release and endless TV broadcasts helped make The Wizard of Oz the classic it is today. In the end, what makes a movie flop and what can resurrect a flop as a classic masterpiece? The answer is YOU, the audience. In the words of Steven Spielberg ‘They (audience) are the custodians of these visual memories, these stories. And by holding onto a film, or a fragment from a film, that marks a time in your life that will always be a part of your life.”
Mega Fan
“Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in” - the immortal words of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) in the third instalment of the infamous Godfather trilogy. Although a critical flop, when seen in isolation from the other outstanding Godfather films, the final helping actually has some exceptional moments which are overshadowed by the more ridiculous and absurd parts. Firstly, Francis Ford Coppola’s direction is stunning throughout; he provides the audience with breathtaking landscapes and intense character studies. Furthermore, Andy Garcia does not disappoint as the bastard son of the deceased Sonny Corleone (James Caan) he plays the hot-head type well with a unique and sleazy charm. Al Pacino’s religious affiliations are executed with astute subtly so that the audience can adapt to the change in scenery from the previous films, the Corleones have switched from casinos to Catholicism and Al Pacino acts tremendously in every scene. It is well worth ignoring the mass media criticisms of this slightly substandard film, and just take it for what it is - the concluding chapter of a masterpiece of cinema. Imogen Scott-Chambers
when it came out in theaters. After its DVD release back in 2002, it started to play as midnight movie for over 2 years at New York’s Pioneer Theater and became a cult classic. When Fight Club first hit cinemas in 1999, it performed poorly, also receiving mixed review from critics. It was not until the DVD release that sold over 6 million copies that Fight Club reached a wider audience and became a cult classic. The Shawshank Redemption, impossible to change channel from, struggled at first, going up against other classics of ‘94 like Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction. Shawshank eventually found its audience, and today it tops IMDb’s greatest 250 films of all time and is one of Warner Bros’ most cherished assets.
The LGBT+ community in cinema
With the release of Tangerine Sunil Nambiar assesses whether the presentation of the LGBT+ community in cinema is representative or sadly more like a caricature
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erhaps the earliest high-profile representation of homosexuality in cinema was Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, a psychological crime thriller encircling a gay couple, who kill a former classmate in a vainglorious attempt to create the “perfect murder”. It was two decades before Raquel Welch played the eponymous Myra Breckinridge, a transgender woman in the midst of a sexual reassignment surgery, who teaches at a young actor’s academy. The film’s portrayal of transgenderism, arguably the most notable of the 1960s, was less than flattering: predatory and conniving, Breckinridge alienates a heterosexual male student from his girlfriend before luring him to the school infirmary, tying him to an exam table, and raping him.
“Amongst tremendous backwardness, however, there is perhaps a smidgen of progress”
Beyond the basal recognition of the very presence of homosexuality and transgenderism, these films only underscored the perceived menace of sexual deviance. When Dog Day Afternoon, a 1975 film based on a real-life bank robber and his transgender wife, won the Academy Award for best original screenplay, it perhaps set the ball rolling for other films featuring prominent LGBT+ characters. In 1993, Tom Hanks won his Academy Award for his portrayal of a closeted homosexual lawyer dying from AIDS in the film Philadelphia. Seven years later, Hillary Swank won her Academy Award for her portrayal of a transgender man in the film Boys Don’t Cry, before the director Ang Lee won his Academy Award for his representation of a complex homosexual relation-
ship between two Wyoming sheepherders in his 2005 drama Brokeback Mountain. At first glance, this is worth celebrating: it has brought much-needed notice to the intrinsic complexity and wider subjugation of a marginalised community. Looking more closely, however, into these film’s associations of LGBT+ with crime (Dog Day Afternoon), crippling disease (Philadelphia), with violence and rape (Boys Don’t Cry), with hiding and heartbreak (Brokeback Mountain), we note the artistic omission of rational and healthy homosexual relationships, of an untroubled transgender; of LGBT+ characters who navigate their lives without being subsumed by sexuality. Even today, as we rather boastfully identify as a progressive society, where gay marriage is gradually becoming more accepted across the globe, where 1 in every 16.66 Britons are either gay or lesbian, our mainstream film industry is woefully out of touch. This year, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), tracked 114 features released in 2014 across seven major production companies. Of the 20 featuring LGBT+ characters, most still relied on deprec at i n g stere-
otypes. For example, The Other Woman (starring Cameron Diaz) and Horrible Bosses 2 (Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day), appear to draw upon LGBT+ themes only to facilitate humour. Amongst tremendous backwardness, however, there is perhaps a smidgen of progress. Jared Leto’s Oscar-winning performance as the transgender HIV patient Rayon in 2013’s Dallas Buyers Club is perhaps the finest example, along with Pride’s critical and commercial success in 2014. In lauding these small mercies whilst remaining closed to real change, we witness in our film industry a vicious cycle of misrepresentation that, while difficult to break, is gradually being dismantled. LGBT+ is not a niche genre, nor does it exist to cater to the service of jokes; it is part of our social fabric worthy of multifaceted, complex and genuine artistic exposition: it’s time cinema told the truth.