The smart move Marvel Pictures made was to appoint Kenneth Branagh as director. Not an obvious big action movie choice, but throughout their work to create their cinematic Universe Marvel have repeatedly shown enough faith in the pull of the characters themselves to get people involved who wouldn't have gotten near a Summer Blockbuster tm at the time. It worked with Robert Downey Jr. and John Faveau on Iron Man in spades, and Branagh was a perfect choice here for what is a very Shakespearean set up in the Asgard portions of the film. He knows how to get large performances from the actors without it feeling too OTT or hammy.
Of all the characters Marvel has been carefully plotting to bring to the big screen individually before getting them all together for The Avengers, Thor was always going to be the most difficult sell for the non-comic fan audience. He looks silly, speaks silly, and isn't even as well known as either Iron Man or Captain America were before their films.
The smart move Marvel Pictures made was to appoint Kenneth Branagh as director. Not an obvious big action movie choice, but throughout their work to create their cinematic Universe Marvel have repeatedly shown enough faith in the pull of the characters themselves to get people involved who wouldn't have gotten near a Summer Blockbuster tm at the time. It worked with Robert Downey Jr. and John Faveau on Iron Man in spades, and Branagh was a perfect choice here for what is a very Shakespearean set up in the Asgard portions of the film. He knows how to get large performances from the actors without it feeling too OTT or hammy.
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Death comes to us all. When he came to Mort, he offered him a job. That's the tag-line on the back cover of my copy of the fourth Discworld novel, Mort. And it instantly tells you why this, out of all the books, is the one Hollywood has been chasing for years. There can't be many better one line pitches. Sadly, all sorts of wacky legal issues and stock Hollywood executive incompetence (of the sort you expect they do on purpose so that frustrated writers have something to talk about, the famous comment in relation to Mort was “Can we lose the Death angle?”) means not only has it not happened, it's unlikely ever to see the light of day. At least not whilst Pratchett is alive and able to object, I suspect once he's passed on it will all go Douglas Adams and we'll have a mediocre film backed up with “No, really, Terry would have loved it” comments from those involved. It's now been nearly 30 years since The Colour of Magic was published back in 1983. What started as a fairly simple fantasy spoof has now produced 38 books that have become increasingly complex, thoughtful and serious, with several different sequences covering the adventures of an insanely large number of characters and locations. From cowardly wizzard (sic) Rincewind through to world weary copper Sam Vimes via DEATH himself, Terry Pratchett's world has become one of the richest and well characterized in all fiction. I first encountered the Discworld in the early 90's, sometime around the period between Men At Arms and Soul Music, thanks to the wonders of Kidderminster library. The series was coming up to it's tenth anniversary at this point and the most recent books on the shelves showed an author pretty much at his peak (it's staggering to think that for most of the late 80's and a large chunk of the 90's he was doing two books a year with no decline in quality) and I very quickly became hooked. The comics and audio tapes helped expose me to the early books as well, and by the time I left school in 1998 I was pretty much on top of having my own copies of all the books up till that point. From The Last Continent that same year I even started buying them in hardback as they came out rather than waiting for the paperbacks, which was a fairly steep increase in what I was paying for an unemployed school kid. |
AuthorStuart Webb. Who knows everything about nothing and not a lot about that. Archives
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