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4-horsemen-of-the-riordanverse · 3 years

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Why The Percy Jackson Adaptation Should Be Animated

We can have Heroes of Olympus/Trials of Apollo/Magnus Chase series

Percy shows up in four of Rick’s five (at this time) mythology series, those four series have eighteen books spanning six years

Even if Disney could crank out say three in two years, that’s still twelve years, the actors playing Percy, and Annabeth, and Grover, and Thalia, and Clarisse, and many more will be in their twenties when all the books are covered and that’s on a sped up timeline that is unlikely to work in reality

The reality is, we probably won’t get a Heroes of Olympus television series and we definitely won’t get a Trials of Apollo or Magnus Chase series, which is sad as many favorite characters won’t be seen

Grover, Thalia Chiron, and the Gods won’t age

Yes, technically Grover does age, so that title is a bit of a misnomer, but he ages slower than the others, either the whole he’s actually twenty-eight, but satyrs age slower will need to be axed, or he will have to be played by an adult so that he doesn’t age, which will look strange since he’s suppose to look fourteen/fifteen for the entire series

Grover is only a small problem though, how are they going to deal with Artemis or Hestia, both of whom are portrayed as very young ages, the twelve year old playing Artemis will be fourteen, minimum (though, if we want good cgi, she’ll be more likely around sixteen) by the time the show reaches The Last Olympian

Plus, Thalia is suppose to stop aging at fifteen, again, I suppose an adult could play her, it isn’t unheard of for adults to play fifteen/sixteen year olds, but unless they get an actor with a serious baby face, she’ll stand out amongst the children and teens playing the other characters

It’ll be bearable to watch in ten years

Cgi is improving everyday, which is great....until you watch something that’s more that a few years old, when we have newer and better cgi, the monsters and action of Percy Jackson is going to look....well we’ll remember that it looked good once

That is, if they pay attention to details, skimming over detail, especially when making living things with cgi, you risk falling into the uncanny valley (I’m most of us have seen at least a clip of Lion King 2019), if something is off, we will notice, even if we can’t place why

We can have it sooner

Animation for animated series are easier to make than animation for live action series, they don’t have to worry about matching the lighting and shadows because they get to choose the lighting and shadows, no need to worry how the actors are interacting with the animated monster (ex. the Percy actor bumps into Mrs. O’Leary, then goes to pet her, but moves his hand too far forward and now that has to be accounted for)

The battles will probably cause the most delays, anyone watch Game of Thrones? remember how long the final season took to get out? that was because of the major battles spanning multiple episodes, which is exactly what The Last Olympian will be

They wouldn’t have to use child actors

This isn’t a bash on child actors, there are some good ones out there, what I’m concerned about is the children’s well being

Ever read or watch an interview from an ex child actor, especially Disney child actors, it’s brutal and takes a toll on their mental health, there’s even instances where the child doesn’t want to act, their parents are forcing them to

If on the extremely rare chance someone from the Percy Jackson crew is reading this please: let the kids play when they aren’t filming, don’t make them feel guilty for eating, shield them from the inevitable criticism that always comes with an adaption, take care of them, very few people do these things and kids get messed up from that

It’ll be easier to relate to the characters

Acting just doesn’t doesn’t have the same feel as animation, especially when the actors are new to acting

Acting is obvious, we ignore that it is because that’s how you watch live action, but rarely will it ever not feel like people repeating back lines they memorized, that the expressions are calculated and filmed 20 times over to get it right

Animation doesn’t have that, characters feel real, not like they’re acting because they aren’t, making it a lot easier to relate to them

None of the fight scenes will have to be cut

These are children playing these characters, obviously fights scenes are going to be cut and the ones kept are going to be simplified, these kids will probably have limited fighting experience and even if they don’t, they can’t hire children to play stunt doubles for safety reasons, so they won’t do anything too risky

Just imagine the fight scene between Ares and Percy in The Lightning Thief, they’ll probably hire a bigger guy to play Ares, comparing that to tiny Percy, the battle is probably going to look more like a dance number with every movement scripted as to keep Percy’s actor safe

It supports social distancing

Social distancing is still important and animation is easier to do social distanced

We could see every part of camp, not just the parts they built sets of

Camp is big and fantastical and probably will be barely shown, that’s a lot of set to build, so they probably won’t see it all

The big house, interior of the Poseidon, Athena, and Hermes cabins, and the mess hall will most likely be made, but the lava wall? the forge? doubtful

It’s easier to replace actors

Like I mentioned before, there are 18 books if they were willing to make them all, even if /magnus Chase and Kane Chronicles were made along side instead of in between, a lot of actors, especially child actors, don’t want to be stuck playing a character for that long

while no one shows up in ever book, some characters get dropped and brought back, which when being adapted causes actors to be replaced, the actor playing Will in The Last Olympian will probably not be the actor playing Will in Blood of Olympus (that is, if they even make Heroes of Olympus)

They won’t have to sacrifice the small details

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a Nico and Bianca cameo in the Lotus scene? won’t happen, what about characters slowly getting more scars after each battle to symbolize the trauma half-bloods carry with them? Luke will probably be the only character with a scar, see a background character that resembles minor characters like Drew or Kayla or Castor and Pollux? that’s not going to happen

Small details that make the story will be tossed to the side, mostly because it isn’t feasible in live action, I think the Lotus scene is the best example, seeing Nico and Bianca there in the background would be so cool, but they don’t age in the Lotus hotel, and it’ll take probably 14 to 18 months to make a season, let’s say 14 months for now, that’s over two years between their cameo and they’re actual appearance, a very obvious difference when discussing 10 and 12 year olds

All in all, this is just in my opinion and preference

Will I still watch if it’s live action, of course, it’s Percy Jackson

It won’t be as good as something animated and I’m sad I’ll never see some of my favorite characters on the big screen, but at least we’ll be getting a decent adaptation

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alexanderwrites · 7 years

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Top of the Flops - Cursed (2005)

A brief introduction: I watch a lot of movies, and specifically, I watch a lot of terrible movies. On purpose. Perhaps it was growing up on Adam Sandler movies that did it, but I am naturally drawn to the mistakes of cinema. Making friends that are equally as obsessed with the annals of acrid cinema helped encourage my plight, as did the great podcast, How did this Get Made? I’ve learned to embrace my love of the hot garbage, yet all my terrible film watching tended to just fall into a well deep inside my brain where it’d remain, only to occasionally crawl back out and force me to admit: “Oh shit, I think i’ve seen that”. And so, with this feature, I will attempt to look these movies dead in the eye and say “.....alright then”. These films won’t necessarily be the traditional flop, but they will exist in one of three categories (or hopefully, all three): Financial Flop, Critical Flop, or Flop inside my own Heart. And we start with a movie that swipes at those three categories with a badly animated paw and succeeds at being all of them.

Budget: $38m

Gross: $29.6m

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 16%

When you think about something being cursed, sure, you might think of someone bitten by a Hollywood Werewolf. Or, you might think of a film that is produced by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the unsurpassed ineffectual tinkerers of Hollywood Movies. Cursed has a lot of curses, but it is hard to find one more damning than that of the Weinstein curse, which put this movie through years of production hell while they desperately attempted to lower the rating and stuff it full of stars so that people would actually go and see it. They failed wildly. Pandering is the bread and butter of Horror Cinema of the mid-2000s (let us not forget that Paris Hilton starred in the House of Wax remake that year) and boy does this film come off as a parent trying to access your love by accessing your CD collection (shit, ‘CD collection’? Sorry, this film has put me into 2005 mode, when I actually owned CDs by some of the bands in this soundtrack).

How pander-ific does it get? The film opens with a Bowling for Soup concert. Y’know, the guys who sang Girl all the Bad Guys Want? Yeah, them. Whether or not they were a voice of a generation, this film skews pretty young, and in case you were worried that they’re just aiming for the kids who ride skateboards, worry no more: the singer Mya is at the concert. Yes, the singer Mya. And the strangest thing is, the singer Mya doesn’t sing at all. Which is what, if anything, she was known for. It is entirely possible she showed up to the production, Wes Craven didn’t recognise her and instead cast her as “girl who flirts and therefore gets violently killed”. And later, the trifecta of “WHY ARE THEY THERE” musicians is complete when Lance Bass has a wordless cameo. Oh Bass, you truly were the Alfred Hitchcock of cameos! (Alfred Hitchcock was also the Alfred Hitchcock of cameos, as well as the Alfred Hitchcock of Alfred Hitchcocks).

Aside from Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg leading the cast, (who no teen on earth cared about in 2005), the film’s attempt to celebrit-ise the cast list is, erm...weird? There’s Shannon Elizabeth (who was 5 years past being popular), Joshua Jackson (who was 10 years past being popular) and Scott Baio (who was literally never popular). As Bart once pointed out: “What’s a Chachi?”. And, if it had been released ten years later, the film could’ve had something on their hands with this cameo...

It’s odd that the film should be such a cynical Hollywood cheap-fest because writer Kevin Williamson (scribe of classics like Scream and...not classics like I Know What You Did Last Summer) is quite the meta lover, and is excitedly peppers the script with lots of digs at Hollywood. They’re not good digs: Jesse Eisenberg suggests that as the werewolf is from Hollywood, it might have breast implants, an image that’s so stupid, yet so viscerally disgusting, that I wish Eisenberg had never opened his bastard mouth to say it. Williamson is not much of a satirist outside of Scream, but you get the feeling he thinks he is. “I’m gonna make fun of dumb old Hollywood whilst making a film that is the most clear cut example of dumb old Hollywood. Haha! Take that, me!”.

The film has promise in its names: Wes Craven behind the camera and Rick Baker on makeup, but in reducing the film’s certificate, The Weinstein’s rid the movie of almost any of that great Baker body horror makeup, and any of that Craven intelligence. I can’t blame it all on them: the scariest thing about it is how horrifically directed it is: it looks like a TV Movie, and I genuinely would not surprised if Craven was napping through 80% of filming. And it’s an odd decision to rely so heavily on cheap looking CGI when Baker is around - it’s like they said “Great, we’ve got Rick Baker on board! Now, lets lock him in that cupboard over there for two years”. Because this film literally took over two years to make. A film taking a long time, a film having reshoots, and a film having rewrites, are three signs your film is in trouble. Cursed has all three of those. I mean, did it really sound promising when Men in Black 3′s rewrites were going so badly that they got Will Smith on board to help out? It damn well didn’t, and we ended up with a film with lines like “I will pimp-slap the shiznit out of you”. In 2012.

You can tell Cursed was filmed over gigantic periods of time, which would explain why nobody in the film appears to give a shit about anything that’s happening. Ricci, Eisenberg and Jackson seem so entirely bored and quite honestly, sleepy, that it’s baffling that Wes didn’t say ‘Hey can we try that once more but this time not shitty?’. Not that he cared too much - how do you direct a film from someone’s else’s script for nearly THREE years and still care? How do you maintain a solid and consistent directing style over three years? The answer is: you don’t.

I can not blame the bad performances. The script is so dire and laughable that caring about it requires energy which could be better spent on things such as making some lunch or clearing out your junk mail folders. I mean, what could Ricci possibly see in her character Ellie? She’s a talk show producer which never plays into her story, and after she and her brother are attacked by an LA Werewolf, what exciting changes in her occur? What emotional developments does she have to grapple with? Well for a starter, she wears a new shirt to work. It’s the most nondescript shirt imaginable, and yet it causes her co-worker to tell her she looks “Saucy”. Did I mention that this movie has no idea how people talk or act? She does so little else, except sniff the odd bit of blood, and worry that her brooding boyfriend, Joshua Jackson, isn’t happy with her. His story isn’t much better, the crux of his arc in the first half is “He loves to fuck so much, but can he learn to cut back on all the fucking?”. Oh, and he has a club to open, which is a bizarre Madame Tussauds of horror movie mannequins, but also Cher and Xena, and also a house of mirrors, and also a DJ. And Lance Bass attends the opening. It feels like the weirdest and laziest shoehorn of “Hey here’s some horror movie imagery so we can tie our movie to much better horror movies!”, and the twist is so predictable that I wrote in my notes “If Joshua Jackson doesn’t turn out to be a werewolf I will eat my own hands.”.

IF ONLY there was some framing to give me a hint! Darn it!

Meanwhile, Jesse Eisenberg plays Jimmy, who knows he is turning into a werewolf because he went on “internet search” and typed in the words “Werewolf L.A”. He doesn’t seem very bothered, though. As soon as they get home from their initial attack (during which Shannon Elizabeth is in a fiery car wreck and then dragged off to her death), he says, with casual indifference “Well. G’night”. After he saw a woman killed. And after they were attacked by a gigantic wolf. Nobody seems to care about anything that is happening, but why should they? Jimmy’s werewolf transformation is only marginally more exciting than Ellie’s, because he gets the Spiderman 3 style hair makeover (although this is spiky rather than floppy) and he can now suplex his bully.

Ellie’s transformation means she can catch a fly in her bare hand, y’know, just as werewolves are always doing. The film seems to forget that they’re actually supposed to be werewolves because they never actually turn into werewolves, and it never seems to affect their lives too badly. The traditional impetus for werewolves’ story arc is that they want to stop becoming a werewolves because they don’t want to kill people. That isn’t even hinted at with either Ellie or Jimmy - they never even try to kill anyone, they never fully transform, and the most dangerous Ellie gets is when she yells “Don’t start with me!” at a producer who doesn’t want Scott Baio to be bumped for Carrot Top. Seriously. A moment that is supposed to showcase Ellie’s newfound animal fury involves a conversation about Carrot Top and Scott Baio. For most of the film she doesn’t really believe she’s a werewolf, which gives us a contender for worst line of 2005: “Everybody’s cursed. It’s called life”. Her story is thoroughly underwritten, meanwhile you wish Jimmy’s story was not written at all.

Because he’s Jesse Eisenberg, he gets bullied by someone who throws homophobic slurs at him even though, as Jimmy repeatedly reminds us, he’s not gay. Poor straight kid! That must be tough, being straight! Some of these insults include “Your dog is gay too!”, and “You ass wimp wad”. But it’s okay, because it turns out the bully is gay! And not only that, but he turns up on Jimmy’s front porch and tries to kiss him, which leads to another of the worst/best lines of the film: “i’m not gay....i’m a werewolf”. The nonchalant way he just reveals that information is ridiculous, and is another demonstration of the way that nobody seems to care very much about anything in this movie. The film doesn’t seem to care very much about its set pieces either, one of which happens moments after the porch scene. The family dog for no apparent reason is a werewolf now, too! A vague, fuzzily CGI’d ball of brown that throws itself through windows!

“Ahh!! It’s an....onion bhaji?”

Meanwhile, Joshua Jackson’s secret kind of just falls out, as if Kevin Williamson was like “Oh RIGHT, there has to be an antagonist”. Joshua Jackson is a werewolf after all, and this draws the action towards the opening of his club, where Jimmy’s bully joins them for some reason, and proceeds to get knocked out instantly, a state in which he remains for the entire duration of the scene.

“My dying wish is that I one day star in a superhero show that is beloved for one season and then the most hated thing on TV for the second season”

The great TV writer John Swartzwelder was known for using “for some reason” in his scripts, which worked beautifully for a solid, absurd joke. But Cursed is a supposed horror film that takes “for some reason” and bases its entire third act on it. Why are they all here at this club? Why is Judy Greer turning into a werewolf now? And why, by any stretch of the imagination, did the writers think that, after having her looks insulted, it’d be a good idea to have the Greerwolf do this:

Yes, Judy Greer is the last-minute big bad wolf, but to what end? Where was all the build up to that? What is her motivation? And how much longer if there left of this film? She gives an expository dump about how much she hates women and thus wants to eat her, and it carries about as much weight as the fly that Ellie caught earlier (callbacks!). The big fight between Greerwolf and Jimmy & Ellie feels totally unearned, and they don’t even use any of their Werewolf abilities. I mean, sure, it’s a fun sight seeing Jesse Eisenberg charging at Greerwolf with a sword and shouting “yyAAAH YAAAAAAAH”, but the scene ends without Ellie and Jimmy doing anything impressive at all, and instead a bunch of cops just shooting her to death. It’s not very clever or satisfying. At least she got to crack a few lines before her time was up, including “Showtime. Isn’t that what they say?”. Uhh...yeah I guess? Good one? The film cannot seem to make up its mind on what any of the characters think or want, and so Joshua Jackson goes from good, to bad, to good and back to bad again, and not for one second does the disinterest on his face let up.

“I’m a fuckin wolf and uh, i’m gonna eat you now I guess. Or not. Wes!?”

The final set piece, which limps along after what feels like a 20 minute film (which is actually 100 minutes) occurs after 3 acts which involve zero emotional development, and zero cool werewolf moments. Surely now is the time for our protagonist, Ellie, to have both? Nah! Instead she slowly sort-of turns into a werewolf, by getting lumpy skin and big teeth. She never fully transforms (“It happens slowly at first” says Jackson, meaning “we don’t have the budget for a full transformation”) and doesn’t even get to overpower Joshua Jackson, which would’ve at least given her some agency and closure. That task is left to Jimmy who crawls around on the ceiling for a bit, (another classic werewolf attribute??) before eventually stopping Jackson with a shovel and a....cake serving knife. A cake serving knife that you see a lot of in the film, because apparently cake serving knives are really cool props to have as a sort of Chekhov’s Cake Server?

“Teenagers LOVE cake servers, right” - Kevin Williamson

Jimmy saves Ellie with the help of the cake server, and once Jackson is down, Ellie at the very least she gets to smash Jackson’s head off, and his body burns. Kitchen RUINED. She doesn’t even seem upset that she’s had to smash her supposed love’s head clean off his body. And mere moments after this, Jimmy’s crush comes to the door having found their were-dog, and conveniently knowing that a) it’s his dog and b) where he lives. They have a kiss and walk off, with his bully in attendance because apparently he doesn’t have a family of his own. They all got over that evening pretty fast. After tearing a werewolf’s head off and having your sister nearly killed, would you not want to hang out for a bit longer? Just have a bit of a night in? Instead, it’s a casual “Well that’s done then, bye!”. And there’s his arc. He’s made a friend, got a girlfriend, and saved his sister. And what was Ellie’s arc? She wears a new shirt, has her life nearly ended several times, has her house ruined, and then, as Jimmy fucks off with his mates, she closes the film with the line “I’m just gonna stay here and clean”. Seriously. That’s her resolution. That’s how she ends the film. Bloodied, miserable, alone, and cleaning up the gore in her kitchen. I can’t wait for Cursed 2 to see if she managed to successfully hoover up all that werewolf fur!!

It’s a real failure of a film in every regard. It does lean towards trying to be fun rather than trying to be scary, but couldn’t it have tried to be even a bit spooky? Could the jump scares have not been so endless and predictable. I mean, ten points for anyone who can guess where the jump scare is coming from in this scene:

Yes, a cuckoo clock is about as scary as it gets. I could tolerate the lack of care put into the story and the characters if the action and horror were there, but they really aren’t. There is nothing tense, well crafted or smart in the film. It’s baffling to think this is the guy who made Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street, because this doesn’t just feel like it was directed by someone having an off day, it feels like it was directed by someone whose only experience is directing episodes of MTV’s Cribs. It doesn’t attempt to subvert, improve or even just successfully repeat the werewolf formula, instead it just throws random iconography from those movies at you with Dashboard Confessional songs playing loudly enough to distract you from this terrible film with an even more terrible soundtrack. Terrible, and yet I did have fun with it. It actually benefits from being flimsy and light as air, and as dreadful as it gets, I did appreciate it not taking itself too seriously. There are enough unintentionally funny and simply bizarre moments to make it an enjoyable watch, and it’s not the most hatable of films. It could almost have had a charm, if it wasn’t really, really, extremely bad.

Worth a hate watch?: Yes

Worst/best line: “I’m not gay....i’m a werewolf”

Worst film of 2005?: Son of the Mask, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Doom, XXX 2, The Pacifier and Bewitched all came out in 2005, so no. Cursed might be a bad film from a bad year, but it is not the worst. Rob Schneider knows very well which film is the worst of 2005.

#top of the flops #horror #wes craven #christina ricci #jesse eisenberg #2005 #film #review #bad movies

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