The Green Hornet

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[SiliasRuby]

I have a sneaking cynical suspicion that the trailer is ten times better than the movie. God help me, I'm turning into such a pessimist about the things I love.

[Pubrick]

more like The Green Hornet's Sidekick (..can't act).

[MacGuffin]

How Michel Gondry became cinema's most versatile director
From surrealism to documentary, from pop videos to superhero romps, Michel Gondry's career is impossible to pin down. He talks life, death and film-making
Source: The Guradian

Michel Gondry strides into the restaurant, his darting eyes taking in everything around him. You can sense antennae twitching within his jumble of brown-and-grey curls. He turns out to be an expansive, good-humoured talker. If anything, he's almost too aware: his wavelength seems prone to interference from other people's transmissions. "Ugh, they are too loud," he huffs at one point. "This guy is making me lose my concentration," he complains later as another man loiters nearby.

The 47-year-old Frenchman is best known as the director of some of modern cinema's most deliriously loopy fantasies, from the surrealist tearjerker Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to the sticky-back plastic dreamscapes of The Science of Sleep and the slacker slapstick of Be Kind Rewind. But he spreads his talents far without spreading them thin. He has directed groundbreaking commercials and music promos (most famously for Björk and the White Stripes), as well as a recent episode of Flight of the Conchords; he is also a drummer (he played on Kanye West's Diamonds from Sierra Leone), an artist and the founder of a community film-making project. His official website sells rolls of toilet paper with a joke on each sheet. ("Wipe your ass with my bad humour!" runs the ad copy.) And he has published a comic, We Lost the War But Not the Battle, about four draft dodgers, one of whom is dead, who are called up to fight an army of women.

Gondry's versatility is perhaps best illustrated by the two strikingly dissimilar pictures he has on the cusp of release. One is a big-budget superhero romp, The Green Hornet, starring Seth Rogen as a hedonistic heir turned crimefighter. The other is The Thorn in the Heart, an informal documentary about Gondry's family. He says it was born out of his regret at never having captured on film his grandfather, the inventor and musical pioneer Constant Martin. He admits, too, that thoughts of his own mortality played their part. "Soon after my dad passed away, I was driving on a freeway at night, it was totally black, and my son suddenly said, 'Dad, I just realised that once you are dead, you will be dead for ever.' I was thinking about my age yesterday, and I thought: 'This is a disaster. My life is already way past halfway.'"

But the film's actual subject is his elderly aunt Suzette. "She has this capacity for telling stories," he says. "It was a treasure I wanted to preserve." First shown giggling uncontrollably during a family dinner, Suzette is soon revealed to have a flinty, unyielding side. The documentary was only supposed to cover her professional life, but then she invited her son, Gondry's cousin Jean-Yves, to cook for the small film crew. "Immediately we all saw the tension between them," says Gondry. "My director of photography said, 'OK, you want drama? There it is. Let's film that.'"

Gondry unearths long-buried resentments that he maintains could never even have been broached without the camera running. One uncomfortable scene shows Suzette breaking down while discussing her husband's death, with Gondry heard admonishing himself for upsetting her. "Even when I shoot actors, I have that dilemma," he says. "I want the actor to be good, and sometimes I have to push them to a place that isn't pleasant. I always think: 'Is it worth doing for the sake of the movie?' But I have to remember the bigger picture. If the movie sucks, it is even more of a letdown."

Gondry says his fear of death stretches back to childhood. "I was always very worried, as I still am, about losing my consciousness." He was born and raised in Versailles, along with his two brothers (one of whom, Olivier, is also a film-maker). "At school I was very shy. I wasn't funny really, but there was this one funny guy who made jokes about other people. There was a quality of bullying in his humour, a mocking aspect that I instantly disliked." That aversion to cruelty has stayed with him; the worst you could say about his work is that it's whimsical or excessively kooky at times, but it never wants for compassion. "I don't mock things, which makes me more vulnerable to mockery myself. If you're cynical, you're protected from mockery. But I have to be nice. I don't think I have irony. A sense of humour, yes, but not irony."

Gondry says that, as an adolescent, he was always arguing with his father, who branded him a communist because of his dreams of a society toiling together. That youthful idealism found its voice in Be Kind Rewind, which builds from two video-store clerks shooting DIY remakes of popular films to an entire community collaborating on a short film about Fats Waller. It's there, too, in Dave Chappelle's Block Party, a concert movie in which the revellers in the street are given equivalence with the musicians on stage by Gondry's democratic camera.

In his first music promos in the late 1980s and early 1990s, made when he graduated from art school and joined the band Oui Oui, Gondry's sensibility was already taking shape. "At that time, the fashion was to show people for more than who they were. You still see it in a lot of hip-hop. I was always against that. I wanted to show how they were when they met me. I did a video with IAM, a rap band in France, and they were a very warm bunch of guys. But once we started talking about the video, there was this attitude which came from gangsta rap, and I thought it wasn't representing them. I tried to make sure the audience would see what I saw in them."

By the time he made his first two films, Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both with the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, Gondry was extending that humanising process to established stars. Along with the dexterous editing, sustained melancholy and in-camera special effects (a Gondry speciality) in Eternal Sunshine, it's the transformation of Jim Carrey into a vulnerable actor that was a revelation. "I'm attracted to working with comedians because they don't have that stars' idea of what a hero should be," Gondry says. "The downside is they're always addressing the camera too much. I've worked with several now – Jim, Jack Black, Dave Chappelle, Seth Rogen – and my job has been to break that and to get them to forget the camera."

His eyes light up when he mentions Rogen, but the reaction of the fanboys and bloggers to the prospect of The Green Hornet – which the director describes as a "super-antihero movie" – could hardly have been more hostile. During the film's presentation at San Diego's Comic-Con this summer, the Q&A session was almost drowned out by the stampede of walkouts. Gondry sneers quite magnificently at the memory. "I usually identify with the nerds," he points out, "but these ones just reinforce the social rules. Their values are fascistic. All those people marching around in capes and masks and boots. The superhero imagery is totally fascist!" He's on a roll now. "When you step into this genre, they feel it belongs to them. They want you to conform, or they won't like you. They want the conventional. But it's fine. The movie's been doing very well, I think, whenever we've screened it to normal people."

It is perhaps typical that Gondry should be at the helm of a costly, Sony-produced potential blockbuster while at the same time advancing a community film-making project that spun off from Be Kind Rewind. The "Be Kind Rewind Protocol", as he calls it, involves setting up small studios with modest sets and facilities – props, back-projection footage, video cameras – so that groups of people can make their own amateur movies together according to anti-auteurist rules drawn up by Gondry. (Anyone showing up with a ready-made storyboard is sent packing.) He insists there is no contradiction. "I need both. I want to make popular films, but I also want to find a way for people to entertain themselves."

The project was a hit in New York two years ago, where the shorts produced included Rotting Hill and The Big Nap (a kiddie noir); Gondry is hopeful that it will roll out to other cities, with different centres watching one another's films. "Some of the stories were very violent," he giggles. "You could see kids killing their parents. Teachers were coming along with classes on a school trip." He looks genuinely euphoric. "It's not my vision of film. It's my vision of what society could be – people being entertained without being part of the consumerist system."

[Alexandro]

this review made me crack up. from hollywood-elsewhere...sounds like gondry didn't even injected his own aesthetic style into it that much...

HORNET STRIKES
by Jeffrey Welles

The Green Hornet (Sony, 1.14) is a blend of superhero sludge and a buddy action comedy. Except the action has no juice -- you've seen the same duke-out, shoot-out, car-chase, demolition-derby stuff hundreds of times -- and it's not the least bit funny, largely because it won't stop hitting you with the same old routines. What you get is unimaginative, routinely-staged action. The appalling use of decades-old cliches. Boring and/or tediously-drawn characters. Painful GenX-wanker dialogue that feels half-trite and half-improvised. And not even faint amusement.

It's a co-creation of actor-producer-screenwriter Seth Rogen, co-writer Evan Goldberg, director Michel Gondry, and everyone else who tried to make this into a film, going back to the '90s.

This is one of those big movies that make you feel as if you're being poisoned. You sit in your seat feeling like Alexander Litvinenko succumbing to radioactive polonium-210. This is what corporate entertainment has become in the 21st Century -- a kind of death-trip experience. Most of the time you sit and think about "the end" and what that'll be like, and the rest of the time you sit up and pay attention to the dialogue in order to follow the plot.

What a shock that Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Human Nature, The Science of Sleep), a signature director with a recognizable aesthetic, decided to whore out with this thing.

The irony, of course, is that The Green Hornet is as old as fish fossils. The basic bones -- irresponsible newspaper heir Britt Reid (Rogen) and trusted chauffeur Kato (Jay Chou) becoming an urban crime-fighting team -- were originally created for a 1930s radio serial. So it's the last classic superhero tale to reach the big screen, it took forever to get made, and it's basically a big 3D shit sandwich.

Some of the geek critics are calling it "one of the better superhero flicks of recent years," "sly, silly, thrilling," and "a surprisingly funny and ingeniously clever take," etc. If you want to believe that, go right ahead.

I went into this thing believing that Rogen is a cool actor-writer with good humor instincts, and I came out of it wondering what's happened to the poor guy, and how could he have been part of something like this? I know that poor Christoph Waltz, last year's Best Supporting Actor winner for Inglourious Basterds, has diminished his rep by playing a drug-dealing bad guy in the usual "My God, I'm so evil I can't help but joke about it" deadpan-shrug sort of way. (Why does the winning of Oscars always seem to lead to stupid paycheck roles, and the eventual ruining of careers when the actor/actress accepts too many of them?) I don't know why Cameron Diaz is in this thing, but she is, playing a peripheral sex-tease character.

One of the reasons The Green Hornet cost $130 million is that "the production modified 29 Chrysler Imperials from model years 1964 to 1966 to portray the Green Hornet's luxurious supercar, the Black Beauty," according to a May 2010 N.Y. Times story. They couldn't have made do with ten?

Chou's Kato is an unquestionably cooler dude than Rogen's Reid. Even in his stoner modes Rogen has always played reasonably bright fellows, but he seems borderline retarded in this outing. Reid has trouble thinking or saying anything above the level of "this coffee sucks." On top of which he's a spoiled, immature blowhard. He's genuinely annoying. But Chou is cool and contained and the brains of the partnership. I liked him, and didn't care for big-mouth Rogen dismissing or putting him down. I muttered, "You should take orders from Kato, bitch!"

I mentioned yesterday that I cooked up a metaphor in my theatre seat about Chou representing the more dynamic and forward-moving Asian economies of 2010 and Rogen representing the smug, flatulent and coasting-on-past-glories U.S. economy.

've said time and again that outside of the Chris Nolan realm, the comic-book superhero genre is a plague and a pox upon our cinematic house. And I've explained the reasons until blue in the face. It's gone way beyond the milking-to-death of the empowerment-through-transformation fantasy (lonely, morose compromised guy finds potency through costumed crime-fighting alter-ego). You might as well call the constant re-packaging and re-selling of this sad little dream by corporate-funded movie studios a malevolent Orwellian scheme. You have no power, suckers, and we want it kept that way so here's some more heroin to distract you from the facts.

To me there's nothing sadder than the eagerness of the ComicCon culture to pay to see the same thing (okay, with slight variations in terms of identities, costumes, villains, CG and the usual crash-boom-bang) in film after film, year after year. They have no shame, and there's no talking to them about this. Their comic-book and gamer appetites, instilled during their late '60s, '70s and '80s childhoods, are like serum in their souls. To me the relentlessness of superhero films has become a kind of mass poison.

In his review of this Michel Gondry film, Hitfix's Drew McWeeny writes that it "seems like filmgoers don't mind [the oppressive sameness] because they continually go see [these] films without major complaint." Exactly. This is why I've floated the idea of F14 Tomcats strafing the ComicCon faithful outside the San Diego Convention Center. They have their fantasies; I have mine.

[john]

That's a pretty bothersome review. Not for it's content, I'm not familiar with hollywood-elsewhere or the writings of Jeffery Welles. At best, it's as indistinguishably generic as most movie reviews found on blogs - where the writer thinks he's smarter than he actually is.

What's irritating is it's intent. The writer not only seems like it was predisposed to hate the film, but seems to find enjoyment in of proclaiming his disappointment.

It also seems pretty selfish and close-minded of Welles to call GOndry's aesthetic into question. A if he know what a Gondry film should look/feel like more than the director himself.

Yeah, fuck this guy. I rarely have the knee jerk simplistic response of "if you think it's so bad, shut the fuck up and make a movie yourself" but that's my immediate response to this asshole.

It does make me a lot more inclined to see The Green Hornet, however.

Nevermind, I guess the reviews content bothers me just as much as everything else.

[Alexandro]

Reelist: i posted a review from someone else. is nothing strange around here. is also nothing strange around here to trash movies on end without seeing them and then never post a reaction after seeing the film.

I found the review funny. Not condescending at all, more like pissed off about seeing a bad movie, which we can all relate to, and that's why I find it funny. You guys wouldn't be so defensive if this was a review of spider man 4, but since is Michel Gondry, well...we all want to give him the benefit of the doubt. "Big 3d shit sandwich" is pretty funny, it doesn't matter if it refers to The Green Hornet or not.

I also think most of what he says about comic book movies and culture to be true. is the same thing over and over, it's been going on for a decade now (more, if you count some of the 90's films) and not one director is imprinting any kind of personal creative signature on them anymore (Nolan excepted) like tim Burton did with batman. Sam Raimi did ok with the first 2 spiderman movies but we all know how that ended up.

I have seen the trailer and it looks really bad, in fact it looks just like this guy is describing it. The elements by themselves are attractive but it wouldn't be strange at all if this didn't work, after being in development hell for decades. Also, that shit about the 29 cars pretty much sums up what is wrong with big hollywood studio films these days. But I will see it if the reviews get better than that or the fine people at xixax like it because it's a good movie and not because it's a michel gondry movie. I like gondry, but science of sleep and be kind rewind sucked. his documentary on his aunt was a mild improvement. but let's wait...

[pete]

you know what I liked about the review was that the guy said "signature director" instead of incorrectly dropping in the word "auteur".  other critics, take note.

[modage]

Cheer Up Michel Gondry Fans, 'The Green Hornet' May Be Seth Rogen's Fault
Gondry Didn't Have Final Cut, Or Full Authority, But Says He "Accepted" This Early On
Source: ThePlaylist

"The Green Hornet" may have topped the box office this weekend, bringing in a respectable $34 million but its critical reception was mixed at best.  Personally, this writer thought the film had some good laughs but really stumbled when going through the motions of yet another superhero origin story. More importantly, it was a far cry from director Michel Gondry's best work ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", his music videos) and seemed like more of a compromise than a collaboration with star/co-writer/producer Seth Rogen. Well, according to an article in the LA Times that was exactly the case.

Apparently Gondry did not have final cut and butted heads with Rogen on the direction of the film. He also admitted, perhaps much to the dismay of fanboys claiming it clearly bore his visual imprint, that it was not his movie. While the French filmmaker doesn't go as far to say it was a work for hire gig, he does note that he wasn't on the top of the set hierarchy this time. "Seth was as important, if not more important than the studio," he said. "So I felt, 'well, it's not really my movie.' I accepted that. But I realized there was still tons I could infiltrate or infuse my personality through discussion all the time."  That's pretty disappointing to hear, considering how excited both star and director seemed to be at the beginning of this project. 

Producer Neal Moritz said he and Rogen superseded Gondry's authority too, noting, "Coolio's 'Gangsta's Paradise,' Michel didn't want that – but myself and Seth really wanted it," he said. Gondry went on to add that although he "hated" some of the jokes when he shot them, he came around to them in the film later on.

Rogen does take full responsibility for one of the film's most head-scratching moments: it's that same aforementioned musical setpiece. Rogen recalled, "I remember when we were shooting it, [Gondry] was sitting there with his arms crossed and a grumpy look on his face but there wasn't a second when we thought we might be wrong. We were like, 'You are going to feel so stupid when you see that this is the funniest [freaking] thing in the entire world." Gondry may not have agreed but he was a good sport about it.  He said of the song, "It's not really me at all. But when I saw it, I really liked it." As fans of both Gondry and Rogen, we're glad to see the two ended up working everything out but would be surprised to see any future collaborations and/or Gondry ceding control to anyone else anytime soon.

"The Green Hornet" is in theaters now.

[modage]

from my blog:

The bad buzz and January release should have been indicators but with Michel Gondry behind the camera and a script by Superbad/Pineapple Express team, Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg, I just didn't want to believe it.  It's not as bad as it could have been but it is a far cry from the best work of both director Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and writer Rogen (Superbad).  The film actually does have some good laughs in it as well as a few gonzo Gondry sequences but it definitely feels like you've seen it all before.  The film opens with a good cameo (which I wont spoil) but kinda made me with that the entire film had been filled out with Freaks & Geeks alumni.  Surprisingly the film instead tries to play it more-or-less straight with Rogen seemingly dropped into an otherwise by-the-numbers superhero film.

We've seen the superhero origin story so many times by now I kept wishing they would do something new with it.  Rogen already played the "I can't believe Seth Rogen is in an action movie" card in Pineapple Express, so there isn't much new ground broken there.  The film reminded me of that run of 2nd rate superhero films released after the huge success of Tim Burton's Batman films.  Because Marvel still hadn't figured out how to translate their character to the big screen, studios unearthed various pulp characters like Dick Tracy, The Phantom, The Shadow to try to create another blockbuster.  In the non-Rogen scenes, the film seems to fit right in with those forgotten experiments.

[Reel]

anyone who see's this in theaters deserves their money back, it's a waste of glasses. It was very moderately funny, I feel like Chou stole the show. Seth Rogen is a funny guy, but I feel like he's not even an actor anymore. Just some dork who walked onto a movie set. With that said, it's not half as bad as people have been making it out to be. They're just mad that they walked out of the theater with a headache, after going in all pumped up to see some cool Gondry visuals and getting nilch.

SPOIL!

I just feel like it could've been a lot more creative. In the first seen when Christoph pulls out the double-gun, I was like "whoa, not bad. Double gun" Then it turns out for the entire movie the only weapon he uses is this corny ass double-gun. WTF?