My main concern, though, isn't with the project itself, it's with the fact that Aronofsky is slated to direct it. As you know, I absolutely love The Fountain. Watching it for the first time may have been the most moving experience I've ever had in a theater. His prior films, Pi and Requiem for a Dream, are similarly visionary, and he's just coming off of his most critically acclaimed film yet, The Wrestler. So what in God's name is he doing making a remake of RoboCop? Is this how he's going to spend the filmmaking capital The Wrestler gained him, making a movie nobody needs and nobody with a shred of intelligence wants? Baffling.
This goes beyond this particular project and this particular filmmaker to a trend evident for the past few years of talented, visionary filmmakers making big-budget, mainstream popcorn flicks: Ang Lee with Hulk, Chris Nolan with the new Batman franchise, Sam Raimi with the Spider-Man franchise. I'm not saying that those films are bad—The Dark Knight and the first two Spider-Man films were quite good—but it seems that they could be doing more with their time and energy. Raimi's case might be a little different, since he hadn't really established himself as a well known director outside of the Evil Dead trilogy. But Ang Lee had made The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by the time he made Hulk, and Nolan had made Memento and Insomnia when he signed on for Batman Begins; coming off critically acclaimed, relatively successful (in Crouching Tiger's case, extremely successful) films, I have a hard time believing that they felt they needed to make some super hero movies to finance their "passion projects" or to keep the cinematic world's attention.
When I saw the CHUD article, the first think I thought of was Barton Fink, whose social-realist playwright leaves New York to write scripts for wrestling movies in Hollywood. That in turn reminded me of the real-life example of Faulkner, whose Hollywood screenwriting in the 1940s inspired Barton Fink in general and, obviously, John Mahoney's character in particular. During that time Faulkner wrote for some good films, including Howard Hawks's Bogart-Bacall classics To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, but it's nevertheless considered a low point in his career brought on by financial need rather than creative vision. In the same way, as good as some of their mainstream films have been, I can't imagine that these are really the kinds of stories that filmmakers like Aronofsky, Nolan, or Raimi are longing to tell. What I don't get, though, is their motivation; are these guys really so hard up for cash, as Faulkner was, that they need to make huge-budget, $200- to $300-million-grossing summer spectacles to finance, say, another Wrestler or Memento?
Another recent topic here, Stanley Kubrick, in some respects seems to have faced similar moments in his forty-plus-year career. In 1960 he directed Spartacus, one of the better examples of the late-'50s, early-'60s historical epics but nonetheless merely that; but his films prior to Spartacus had been relatively small (none had a budget of more than $1 million), and he hadn't yet made his name in the cinematic world (he only got the Spartacus job at Kirk Douglas's insistance). Twenty years later he directed The Shining; though a film about a haunted hotel based on a Stephen King novel sounds like pure paycheck work for someone like Kubrick, he ended up making one of the greatest, most definitive horror films of all time, with the end product being much more a Kubrick film than a King adaptation (hence King's dislike of it). Moreover, despite King's reputation even then as an author of pulpy airplane and beach fare, film adaptations of his work may not have gotten their own dubious reputation yet; the only prior adaptation had been Brian De Palma's critically praised Carrie. So I don't think Kubrick fits into what we're seeing nowadays, despite superficial similarities: When he made Spartacus he hadn't yet had his Crouching Tiger, Memento, or Wrestler to put him on the map, and when he made The Shining he was so established and confident that he wasn't at all limited by the fact that he was adapting a mainstream horror novel.
So what do you think of this phenomenon? Does it trouble or disappoint you the way it does me? Do you think it will continue, and that other respected filmmakers will get in on the act? Can we expect to see the Coen Brothers doing Aquaman soon? Paul Thomas Anderson doing Dino-Riders? Fincher doing Captain Planet? Tarantino doing Luke Cage and Iron Fist? (Actually, I think he'd jump at that; what better way to combine his two great loves, blaxploitation and martial arts?) Or do you not mind their taking a break from more visionary or serious fare to make mainstream, big-budget spectacles?
P.S. — I gotta say, I love the new blurb. At this point, I think that the Republicans support the Second Amendment solely so that they can shoot themselves in the foot.
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