blah-og

the new tmnt movie is pretty good. like hellboy and fantastic four, it’s many and copious scripting errors are made up for with a strong visual style and good design, and equally copious nods to the source material. all three movies are populist affairs, reintroducing the characters for a new generation while providing enough fan service to appease the older fans, and set up a franchise that will hopefully provide better sequels than the pilots.

unfortunately, all three had the exact same strengths and weaknesses; specifically, all three had solid casting, generally accurate characterization, good action sequences, good cinematography and excellent set and costume design, excepting my distaste for the rubber suit on ben grimm. they all had everything except a good script. they felt like first drafts, with muddy pacing and poorly written expository dialogue, characters frequently acting contrary to their classical natures or any kind of logic or common sense, and enough of a broad basis in the classic material to make all the small changes somewhat annoying and nonsensical. everything felt right, but many of the details were wrong. barely noticable for the average movie-goer, but quietly maddening for the original fanbase.

BUT as the trailer for rise of the silver surfer proves, once these film crews get into gear, and lose the pilot episode approach, once they don’t have to introduce the world and can simply drop us into it for a thrillride, then things pick up. so hellboy and the golden army should be amazing, and the inevitable tmnt 2 will almost definately be better.

until then, it’s a fun ride. it generally fails to balance the silly bits with the serious ones, and the focus on leo and raph and casey and april leaves don and mike mostly hanging around the lair, literally, until the final sequence. but splinter easily steals the show whenever he’s on screen, and i wish they’d given him more time, since mako won’t be around to voice the sequel.

in other news, the new movie toys are out and the turtles look good and have some good articulation, but it doesn’t really work out. so i went on ebay to pick up a few of the classic figures i’d been meaning to get back from my childhood, primarily leo the sewer samurai, my very favorite as a kid. then i snagged a few of the figures i always wanted when i was a kid, namely all four storage shell turtles.

i wanted to get the rubber limbed movie star turtles from the live action designs, but getting a carded donatello for $25 turned out to be a steal, as another don sold for $66, and the leo and raph i tried for went for $150+ each, and a set of all four, with a buy-it-now price of $200, sold almost instantly.

so instead i picked up the new editions from the 2002 line, off the second cartoon, which eastman and laird were heavily involved in, which explains why it consisted mostly of stories adapted directly from the original comics. those first figures look nearly perfectly like eastman/laird artwork. until they make ’super posable’ turtles with articulation that actually works, these will be the best ever, except for the movie star turtles i can’t afford.

a lot of mail coming my way. but it’s cool. someone has to love this stuff, it may as well be me. i’ve been poring over the toy archive over at the mirage studios website, and making a list of figures i wanted but never got, had but got rid of, and always wanted but couldn’t get for various reasons. not to mention all the silly but awesome vehicles, like the footcruiser.

[addendum]

lyt (in comments) — You don’t think the Hellboy movie had solid casting? Which roles would you have recast, granting that “A-list” stars weren’t possible to get?

i revised my post to make my point clearer, which was that the script was the main weak point for all three of these movies; the rest of the production was solid all around.

although as long as you’re bringing it up, after seeing 300, i’d have gotten gerard butler as rasputin, or basically anybody with some presence. old man grigori was pretty bland and forgettable in the hellboy movie, whereas in the comics he’s an overwhelming presence even as a ghost. i don’t know who’s to blame on that one, the writer, director, or castng agent, but the rest of the cast did a lot with a little, so i’d have changed actors. maybe someone taller.

doom was a bit off from my ideal. maybe clive owen? again, someone with a bit more of a classical and imposing presence. the guy they had would be a good batman villian, but he’s not victor von doom. then again, neither was the character as-written, so again, blame the script first.

jessica alba is hot but i would have gotten someone who looks less like a supermodel and more like a normal person. laura prepon would have been cool, or maybe samantha morton. most of the time, alba was fine, but when she put on the glasses and lab clothes, she just looked ridiculous. like she was about to take off her top and charge $19.95 to see the rest of the show.

honestly, though, the main thing i’d have changed would have been to give chiklis and perlman heavier masks, more comic-acccurate prosthetics, giving hellboy his jutting angular chin, and giving ben grim his modern chiselled face. those guys are both quality actors, they could have pulled it off, and it would have made both characters look better, and given room for more animatronics, giving the masks more emotional range. hellboy looked angry the entire time, and ben just looked lumpy.

although if we actually have to get into it, i didn’t love perlman as hellboy. same problem, and it’s script-based, perlman was too intense. he was angry and brash and overconfident. in the comics, hellboy is 90% of the time a quiet zen-like calm, only going into a rage when he’s being attacked by robot monkeys. in the movie he was kind of a jackass. but that’s because in the comics he’s 60 and in the movie he’s 19, in demon years. 15 years ago i’d have gone with andre the giant.

it’s not that perlman can’t play nice, look at city of lost children. i just hope they write some of that into the sequel. quietly forget about the teenager crap and write hellboy as mignola writes him. quietly confident from decades of experience and nigh-invulnerability. and more importantly, he’s the optimist. liz and abe are the ones who brood and bemoan their existence. hellboy has accepted his lot in life, and makes the best of it. he’s the rock that holds the team together, the constant and stable personality the b.p.r.d. family is built around.

chiklis was great as ben grimm before the transformation, but it all fell apart after that. i didn’t like the suit, and i didn’t like that ben just moped around the whole time. he looked sad, he acted sad, it was just uncompelling. i don’t know how the lumpy suit will play out if he’s supposed to be happier in the sequel. maybe they’ll transform him into the modern version like they should have in the first one.

doom puts ben into the machine, uses it to enhance his own transformation to the final stage. laughs, lightning crashes, he screams out ‘yes! it worked!’

a giant orange hand punches the door off of the pod. ‘no’ says ben grimm, now larger and cgi and more mobile and expressive. ‘no’, he says again, ‘it didn’t.’

then he and victor have a more impressive fight that destroys a big chunk of the neighborhood, before reed is able to brain-fight doom to a standstill. or something. and ben doesn’t have to choose not to become human again at will, with no ill-effects, using reed’s magic box. he simply accepts that he’s never going back and he might as well get used to it.

and alicia masters does not imply that she’s going to have sex with him. because seriously, this isn’t mallrats.