Joel Schumacher Pretty Much Sucks Ass

Started by Mesh, June 29, 2003, 01:39:30 PM

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godardian

Quote from: ©brown
Quote from: godardian
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Second that "ha."  I find it so ironic that such a bad director would have such arguably decent (even great) influences in films.  Then again, I haven't seen Tigerland, which is supposed to be decent, but his other films pretty much cancel out any of the decent films he's done.

Yes... he's terrible. Right up there with Adrian Lyne and Paul Verhoeven in my Holy Trinity of Crap.

I always say that the best work he ever did in film was designing the costumes for Interiors.

dude, u didn't like unfaithful?seriously, i'm not being sarcastic.

Lyne was alread way too deep in the crap for me to feel like putting myself through Unfaithful. Why would I watch something by a director who's made almost a dozen terrible movies?

I might rent it someday if I'm feeling especially masochistic, or if anyone can convince me that for some reason, Unfaithful is unlike every other Adrian Lyne movie in every way.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

modage

Quote from: SoNowThenAnyway, RoboCop and Total Recall are great,

true.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

NEON MERCURY

lyne also directed jacob's ladder which is phucking awesome.........

SHAFTR

Quote from: godardianSheesh, I can't believe the people who made 9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Hollow Man, and Starship Troopers have such staunch defenders. But... good for them.


There is something about Starship Troopers that I just love.  Somehow the film works for me and I just find myself very, very entertained.  Plus, the CG used in that film really has held up.
"Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that i'll probably regret soon"

©brad

Quote from: godardianI might rent it someday if I'm feeling especially masochistic, or if anyone can convince me that for some reason, Unfaithful is unlike every other Adrian Lyne movie in every way.

go see it god damnit!

convinced?

MacGuffin

Schumacher Joins the CROWD
The third time's a charm for Joel Schumacher, who after two stalled attempts will finally bring the story of Billy Milligan to the big screen.

Joel Schumacher is coming back into The Crowded Room. After almost bringing the project to the big screen twice in the past, Schumacher is back on the film, which has been picked up and is being developed by producer Alexandra Milchan.

Based on the book The Minds of Billy Milligan, the story centers on the 21-year-old Milligan, who was arrested for rape before police and detectives discovered he had a room full of 24 distinct personalities living in his head. The personalities ranged from a small female child to that of a Serbian-Croatian immigrant. Milligan's condition developed after years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of his stepfather.

Schumacher almost made the film twice while it was in development at New Regency; once with Brad Pitt attached to star and once with Billy Crudup in the lead. Milchan then convinced her father Arnon, head of New Regency, to let her work on the project outside of the company. Alexandra Milchan and Schumacher will begin casting for the lead shortly.

The project had been on the burners at New Regency for nearly a decade. During that time, talent such as James Cameron, David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh had been eyeing the director's chair, while John Cusack, Sean Penn and Leonardo DiCaprio had all been considered for the lead.

Schumacher recently directed a film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, which Warner Bros. will release in late December. Schumacher's other recent directing credits include Veronica Guerin, Phone Booth and Bad Company.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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Myxo

They're showing 8MM Saturday night on the WB. Pretty sure that is national television.

:shock:

It's gunna be like, 45 minutes long.

What's the point?

soixante

I just watched Lost Boys for the 1st time.  It was better than I expected.  It was a nice slice of 80's nostalgia.  I recall walking out of Cousins, however.  I didn't like A Time to Kill or The Client.  Falling Down is my favorite Joel Schumacher film.
Music is your best entertainment value.

Ravi

It's been about 4 years since I've seen The Lost Boys, but I remember thinking that it had an interesting premise but by the end became just another vampire-killing movie.

©brad

i dug it, and a time to kill and the client were good adaptations of mediocre books.

MacGuffin

Schumacher rolls with 'Creek'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Joel Schumacher has signed on to direct "Town Creek," a vampire horror movie for Gold Circle. The story centers on a West Virginia man who comes to terms with his moral qualms and helps his brother wipe out a family that had been protecting a Nazi vampire and who had kept his brother captive for him to feed off of for years. Dave Kajganich wrote the screenplay. Gold Circle topper Paul Brooks is producing along with Tom Lassally and Robyn Meisinger. Norm Waitt and Scott Niemeyer are exec producing.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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MacGuffin

Count on horror movie to make waves
Nazi 'monsters' will be featured in next year's film, Town Creek
Source: The Ottawa Citizen

BEVERLY HILLS, California - Director Joel Schumacher is off to Romania to make a horror movie. And because he's Joel Schumacher, it won't just be any horror movie. The odds are high that Town Creek will touch a lot of nerves when it's released next year.

Everybody's assuming that because he's going to Romania -- fabled venue of Count Dracula, Vlad the Impaler and other blood-sucking monsters from fact and legend -- that he's making a vampire movie. Not so.

"There is blood in it, but it's not really a vampire movie," the shaggy-haired filmmaker says. But it is about monsters -- the monsters of the Third Reich. "It's about Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels' association with the occult.... This is what they based the Master Race on.

"The one thing about the Nazis is that they so loved themselves that they documented everything, and there are these great documentaries on Hitler's obsession with the occult. So it's a 'horror' movie based on that by a very intelligent young writer."

The first part of the film is set in 1936 at the height of the Nazi regime and the second half is set in the present -- with the ghosts of the past rising up to confront today's world.

"I love horror movies and I've never been offered one that was original, and this one I thought really was," Schumacher says.

So Town Creek promises to be controversial, like so many of Schumacher's films -- including The Number 23, which has just opened in theatres and stars Jim Carrey as an ordinary guy in danger of destroying himself through numerological obsession.

At 67, this affable and disarmingly candid filmmaker is resigned to the fact that he's viewed as something of a subversive within the industry and a guy who enjoys making waves.

He doesn't consider himself controversial -- but, he admits, "sometimes my movies have caused a lot of controversy."

That's been going on for more than a quarter of a century. Schumacher began his career as a costume designer for major directors like Woody Allen and Herbert Ross. It was Allen who encouraged him to move into set design and art direction and to try writing.

It was an early screenplay, Car Wash, that established Schumacher as something of a maverick.

"I remember one of the biggest people in Hollywood saying, 'What's this little movie you've written?' When I tried to explain, he said, 'Wait a minute -- you haven't written a movie about some black people washing cars, have you? People don't go to that sort of thing. They go to see Lawrence Of Arabia or Gone With The Wind. They don't go and see black people washing cars.' "

Despite such skepticism, Car Wash managed to get made and was a success. But in the context of Hollywood it was considered radical.

It wasn't long before he started directing and unloaded a ton of controversy with the 1987 St. Elmo's Fire, a movie that was adored by young people and furiously condemned by critics.

"When St. Elmo's Fire came out, it did not get one good review in the United States of America. People were outraged at the behaviour of the young people -- so outraged that Gene Siskel commented twice two weeks in a row over how furious he was. And Janet Maslin of the New York Times -- who had been very kind to me in the past -- was infuriated that the movie was a success."

There was more outrage with the release of Falling Down, which starred Michael Douglas as a middle-class guy who goes into meltdown after his car is trapped on the freeway during a heat wave and ends up on a violent rampage.

"Falling Down was insane -- they were attacking me as a right-wing fascist," remembers Schumacher whose politics happen to be decidedly liberal.

Still, Schumacher is a director with a reputation for getting things done and for making things work. He turned Phone Booth into a nifty suspense thriller despite the fact that the action was almost totally confined to a ... phone booth. It was thanks to him that Phantom Of The Opera, a quintessential theatre spectacle deemed unfilmable by many, made it to the screen.

And it was Schumacher who proved it would be possible to do the risky Number 23 on a modest budget and still use Jim Carrey. New Line was convinced it couldn't afford Carrey; Schumacher knew that Carrey was so obsessed by this project that he would set aside his normal $20-million fee. "We made it for very little. We took our salaries down to almost nothing."

Still, Schumacher admits that he often ventures where angels fear to tread. So this tendency can land him in trouble -- whether it's something like 8MM, which dealt with pornography, or the recent Veronica Guerin, which created an uproar in Ireland because it dealt with the real-life murder of a crusading female journalist.

"You know what? I'd wanted to be a movie director since I was seven years old," he points out. "I got it -- I got it bigger than I ever dreamed of." Schumacher believes taking full advantage of such an opportunity. "The truth is that it's fun to cause trouble."

The uproar that amuses him most occurred when he directed Batman Forever and decided to put nipples on Val Kilmer's Batsuit.

"That's the one where you want to say: 'Just grow up! Stop it!' I know when I make a movie like St. Elmo's Fire that it's going to cause some trouble because kids are doing cocaine. They're not acting like cute little kids on sitcoms -- they're having serious adult problems, and there are some people who don't like that because they want their young people to be wholesome and nice and cute and just act in a proper fashion.

"You know Falling Down and A Time To Kill will be controversial and you know 8MM will raise a lot of eyebrows -- but putting nipples on the Batsuit? I mean -- I was doing a comic book!"

As someone who started out in design, Schumacher has always been a devoted visual stylist who is always concerned with finding the right "look" for a movie.

"I was born in 1939 before television, and I grew up in a very poor neighbourhood behind a movie theatre and I was that kid in Cinema Paradiso. I was always in the movie theatre and had to be dragged out all the time. I was watching some of the greatest American movies."

He was also watching the great international masters. Back in those childhood days in Long Island City, his mother worked in a dress shop, and right next door there was a tiny art cinema.

It was there that young Joel first encountered the directors like Rossellini, Kurosawa and Renoir. He didn't realize it at the time but "I was watching some of the greatest movies ever made -- visual masterpieces as well as great stories."

Now, although a success in his own right, he'll never be complacent.

Having started here in 1971 as a $200-a-week costume designer, I had no idea there was ever going to be a career. How could I? It never dawned on me that at the age of 67 I could even discuss a career. I didn't know if I'd get another job as a costume designer. But Woody Allen really encouraged me to start doing art direction and to write. He was a great mentor.

"But I didn't know that the things I started writing would sell. I didn't know why I should become a directing success. You never know. I still don't know as a freelance person whether I'll ever work again...."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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MacGuffin

'Saints' marching at Paramount
Schumacher set to direct urban drama

Source: Variety

Paramount Pictures has snapped up scribe Kurt Sutter's pitch "Inland Saints" for Joel Schumacher to direct and Lorenzo di Bonaventura to produce.

Eli Holzman is producing with di Bonaventura's Par-based banner, di Bonaventura Pictures.

Project reunites Schumacher and di Bonaventura, who have worked together on pics including two "Batman" films, "The Client" and "Falling Down."

"Inland Saints," described as a supernatural urban drama about love, betrayal and need, is about teens who fall in love. He's the leader of a dangerous street gang; she's the daughter of the detective hired to bring down the gang.

Schumacher ("The Phantom of the Opera," "Veronica Guerin") was recently in theaters with Jim Carrey starrer "Number 23."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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polkablues

Quote from: MacGuffin on April 18, 2007, 12:05:37 AM
"Inland Saints," described as a supernatural urban drama about love, betrayal and need, is about teens who fall in love. He's the leader of a dangerous street gang; she's the daughter of the detective hired to bring down the gang.

And their best friend is (say it with me) A TALKING PIE.
My house, my rules, my coffee

MacGuffin

Paramount Vantage, Schumacher in 'News' biz
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Paramount Vantage is stopping the presses for "Breaking News," a remake of a Hong Kong action movie that Joel Schumacher is in negotiations to direct. Alex de Rakoff is writing the script for the movie, which will be produced by Gold Circle's Paul Brooks.

The story is set in motion when a TV news unit broadcasts live an embarrassing defeat of a police battalion by five bank robbers in a ballistic showdown. While on a separate investigation and stakeout in a run-down building, a detective discovers the hideout of the robbers. But the situation is complicated by an inspector who, in order to beat the media at its own game, decides to turn the stakeout into a breaking-news show.

The original screened Out of Competition at the 2004 Festival de Cannes and was directed and produced by acclaimed filmmaker Johnnie To.

Guy Danella is overseeing for Gold Circle.

"Breaking News" reunites Schumacher with Gold Circle, for which he is in post on the horror movie "Town Creek," which Lionsgate Films is distributing. He most recently directed "The Number 23," starring Jim Carrey.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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