At any rate, I blogged about it a couple of times, mostly based on the trailer and a quick reread of the book, which, along with most other classic literature that's since passed out of copyright protection, you can read online for free.

February 19, 2004

Around the World in 80 Days. This upcoming film, which I've heard almost nothing about, takes active searching to find information on.  I mostly use the Apple/Quicktime page for movie trailers, but this movie is not listed, despite being an apparently major release, and being distributed by Disney. Perhaps Pixar was right in devaluing their promotional abilities?

I first saw mention of it on a movie news site, Rotten Tomatoes has their usual encyclopedic coverage, and more comprehensive movie trailer sources like The Movie Box have it listed, along with dozens of other movies that are never mentioned on the Apple Quicktime site.  The official site is here, and click this to see the trailer in full quality, though it will probably take a while to open, depending on your Internet connection speed.  Try a lower quality version if you're in a hurry.

As for the movie, it's yet another film version of the old Around the World in 80 Days story by Jules Verne.  And as is the case with most old, famous novels, you can read it for free online, if you so desire. The film stars Jackie Chan as the comic relief sidekick, and Steve Coogan as Phileas Fogg, an inventor who is trying to make it around the world in 80 days. He's not an inventor in the book, just a very precise and quirky gentleman, and his sidekick is French, not Asian, and there are certainly no set piece karate battles, but hey, what do you expect from a movie?

Also, who the hell is Steve Coogan?  Good question.  I'm looking at his IMDB stats, and there's not a film or TV show on there before this year that I've ever heard of.  I guess he's a big star in the UK, since lots of those titles look British. And yes, his fame and popularity in the UK have been confirmed by one of my UK sources.

Anyway, I'm here to review the trailer, not give you movie background information.  I don't personally have any real interest in the movie.  I like Jackie Chan, but he makes a ton of movies, and lots of them are pretty dreadful.  Fun, playful, but low budget and silly. This one looks to be a bit higher budget, and it's not an American production, which in of itself is sort of unusual and interesting when it comes to English language productions of any size and quality. Jackie is really a worldwide star, only breaking through in the US in recent years, now that he's past his athletic peak, but still very good as a comedic actor.

This movie looks to be a very mixed bag; Jackie is mostly comic relief and pratfalls, but there also looks to be one big fight scene with Jackie battling evil Asians who have imprisoned our white hero.  It's also full of intentionally anachronistic errors, like roller blades and carrier launched aircraft and such. It looks to be silly and sort of kid-themed, but with all adult actors, and enough action that adults might enjoy it.

The biggest problem I have with the trailer is the utterly predictable and dreadful voice over on it.  It's one of those Mr. Voice guys, and the script he reads from is just painfully bad.  Just like it is on 90% of the movie trailers out there.  I physically wince at the narration on most trailers, and this one is no exception.  It's like the dialogue writers who handled the laughable "your skin is soft, not rough like this rock" lines from Episode Two are on permanent call for trailer narration, and no cliche or corny canned remark or bland generality is too cheesy for them.

Inventor Phileas Fogg was a dreamer...
but nobody believed in him!

Bleh.

The best trailers have no voice over, unless it's words spoken by one of the actors in the movie. See all of the LotR trailers for examples of that done expertly.  Others can be okay with a Mr. Voice guy, providing they give him some decent, "words like a real person would ever speak" dialogue, though ideally they get someone who talk like a computerized version of a smarmy game show host. Richard Dawson bot?

Really, there's nothing in the entire trailer voice over that's not at least somewhat loathesome.

A man who has always lived life by the book...
has 80 days to prove just how far his imagination can take him!

Now, he'll have to face his fears...
and he'll have to find the courage....
to discover his destiny!

A story about how far you can go...
when you chase your dream!

God, do these people have no shame?  Tin ears? Imagine reading a book, or seeing a movie where a character actually talked like that?  You'd gag. Yet it's somehow become the accepted and almost mandated style of narration in movie trailers.

As for the trailer itself, you don't get much more than an introduction to the plot, and a bit of the set up.  The set up is interesting, for the changes from the book that it reveals.  In the book, the first 3 or 4 chapters of which you can read in about 10-15 minutes, Fogg is proper and precise to the point of borderline OCD. Requires his shaving water at exactly 86º and fires a servant for bringing it at 84º, has an extensive list on the wall in the servant's room of his daily duties with exact times to perform them at, does everything, every day exactly according to pattern, counts his exact number of steps to the social club, etc.  Nothing is left to risk or chance, and you just know that even considering the implications of the chaos theory would make his head explode.

The wager that he can indeed go around the world in 80 days comes about almost by accident, while he and three other men are discussing it over a game of whist, and he is the one who makes the claim and offers to make the bet. The others try to let him out of it and feel that it's ridiculous to allow no room for error, and are amazed when he says he can leave that very night, and will return by a certain time on a certain day, 80 day later. They are very gentlemanly and proper and mature and polite, and wish him the best of luck.

In the movie, the other club members are of course dicks who push him into the wager, say he must never invent again if he loses, and then scream about how they must do everything they can to stop him on the way.

The first scene in the trailer is very cute, as they enter his lighted room with "the whistler" joke skewering "the clapper" effectively.  The second is lame, with Jackie Chan riding around an obvious miniature train track thing which breaks and sends him flying into a metal light pole (that's obviously not metal if you look closely at how it bends) which he dents in silly fashion.  Of course a real human would have his neck broken by this, but let's overlook that little detail.

I'm sure a serious historian could spend 10 minutes with this trailer and fill a book with anachronisms.  They probably all wear clothing from every different era, use technologies that didn't exist yet, have buildings that are clearly modern, etc. But what would be the point in that?  It's not like anyone is going to this modern adaptation of the book for the historical accuracy.  It'll just give the geeks and nit pickers at MovieMistakes.com something to do.

After the opening and the club scene where Fogg takes the wager and the bad guys snarl and sneer a lot, they cut to various scenes of archaic forms of transportation, and numerous Asian assassins who are being sent to stop him.  Good thing his manservant changed from French to Chinese, and will prove to be an expert in hand to hand combat, eh? That's actually not entirely off, since while he's French, he had a background in acrobatics, and is strong and nimble.

The movie trailer even shows a girl, apparently a romantic interest.  There's a woman in the book, but she's Indian, rescued from being forced into suttee. The chick in the movie is very white, but I suppose as they've swapped the white servant for an Asian one, they can switch a minority out elsewhere and still break even.

Probably the eeriest thing in the trailer is Arnie showing up as some sort of polygamist Sultan, stretching out his aging, slightly flabby arms, and wearing a wig from Carrot Top's closet before shouting "Get them!" in classic cheesy movie bad guy fashion. There is no character remotely like that in the book.

Fogg is also working on a "flying machine" and somehow runs into the Wright Bros once in the US.  It's tricky to slip in actual historical events into a modern movie for American audiences, since history is no longer taught in any intensity in schools, there's virtually nothing of any informative nature on TV, and audiences are damn likely to just shrug and ask, "Who's that?" when they see a reference to anyone less famous than Napoleon, Julius Caesar, or Abraham Lincoln.  The Wright Bros. reference is probably safe, what with the 100th anniversary of their flight getting media attention recently, but I wouldn't count on it.  Plus it moves the entire movie forward quite a few years, from 1872 to the early 1900's, which of course changes the entire plot, since the whole point in setting it in 1872 was that that was the first time ever that it was possible to do anything even remotely like what Fogg did in the novel.  Railroads were just open across India and China and the US, ship travel was faster than ever before, etc.  I'm no historian, but I'm sure that by the early 1900's it could be done in 80 days very easily. But hey, that's not the point, and anyway, American audiences will never realize any of this anyway.

The trailer ends with some ridiculously futuristic flying machine being launched off of a ramp on a boat and soaring into the sky, before zooming back down around the title logo while trailing magical sparkles.

I groaned at that part.  Let's be serious; no construction materials existed then to allow that sort of speed and light weight; wood would break, canvas would rip, and there weren't any metal alloys light enough.  And materials like aluminum or titanium or carbon fiber alloys were decades and decades in the future.  You hooked the Wright Bros plane up to that super slingshot thing, it would simply rip in half, and if the plane were somehow to reach that speed, it would instantly disintegrate.  So would any wooden contraption like the one in the movie.  And even if it didn't, it wouldn't fly at all since it needs about 5005 more wing space to even glide, given how bulky the rest of it is, especially when overloaded with three passengers.

But hey, if I can accept the rest of the foolishness, why balk at something so simple as the laws of physics?

Overall, I find it an interesting trailer, in terms of how they're selling the movie. It's obviously a popcorn movie, with some fun/funny fight scenes, and a few hints of actual emotional issues, mostly in terms of Fogg trying to succeed against the odds and beat the bad guys. But it's got no hints of weight or importance; there's no way anything bad will happen to any of the principles, no one will die or even be badly injured in the fight scenes despite the fact that they're trying to kill the good guys, and you know it'll end happily since they show cheering crowds carrying the heroes around several times in the trailer. So it's basically a kid's action movie, based on content.

But they're not really marketing it as that (if they're marketing it at all, given how hard I had to look to find the movie site, and that I've yet to see any preview discussion of this, no buzz at all, and not even so much as a poster for this in a movie theater).

They're not marketing it as Jackie Chan movie either, since while he gets top billing, there are hardly any fight scenes in the trailer, and it's obviously not your typical "Jackie is a cop trying to save the world." Chan film.

There aren't any other marketable stars in it, the director isn't a big star, and it's not a hot current story, or one that's so well known people will automatically want to see it in the theater.

So is it a family film? An action film?  A romance?  An adventure?  A literary adaptation?  I don't see that they have any idea what they're doing with this one, and that when it opens to about $9m and vanishes after a month and $35m, and people wonder why, they're going to have to look back at how it was sold and promoted in advance.

Or perhaps there will be a marketing blitz come the summer, this will get good reviews (the only thing that would get me into a seat), and it'll make $150m and be Jackie's biggest movie ever.

June 16, 2004

Around the World in 80 Days is being released this week, and it continues Jackie Chan's inexorable slide from amazing action hero to has been comic relief sidekick. Early reviews aren't good, and from reading them it appears that the movie is pretty much the big, dumb, ridiculous, harmless, family friendly action comedy the trailers make it look like. That can be a good thing, if the movie is at least fun, and that might be the case with this one. There are only six reviews posted on RT, (as of Monday night, when I'm writing this) and while 4 of them are negative, 2 are positive, so it's too soon to assess any sort of critical mass.

His is the school of anti-casual cool, the drama club suiting up for the Friday night football game, and his supporters are cut from the same cloth, believing that there's a point to be made in Beckett for the brute while ignoring that Beckett is best staged with Spartan minimalism and left in the theatre besides.

He's not wrong for saying it, but his pride has no place outside of exactly the kind of populist, condescending flimflammery of this kind of self-congratulatory Disneyfied horseshit, as clear a headwater and bellows as any for the kind of condescending, marginalized invisibility of Asians in American cinema.

I was one of three Asians in a large high school in the middle of one of the whitest, most conservative states in the Union, where Chan bootlegs provided by one of South Federal's Vietnamese groceries were among my few lifelines to a positive Chinese media role model amidst all the Long Duck Dongs, Short Rounds, and Ancient Chinese Secret launderers. For me now to feel more apathy than outrage at Chan selling out--dancing, singing, and acting the fool for the charity of the dominant culture--represents a death of a lot of things essential about me. It happens this way: the tide of ignorance wins out not with a bang but with a whimper.

(Also, checking back to RT Tuesday night, Around the World is up to 41%, with 7 positive and 10 negative.)

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