CinemaCon 2016

Burbank, CA was the location for Warner Bros. Pictures’ CinemaCon 2016, announcing developments in the studio’s wide-ranging slate. Chairman and CEO Kevin Tsujihara announced the headline confirmation that Ben Affleck—who will reprise his Batman in the upcoming Justice League movie—will direct, as well as star in, a new stand-alone Batman.

The WB’s presentation was illustrated by trailers and film clips—including some never-before-seen footage—and appearances by major stars and film-makers involved in the movies.  Tsujihara’s has talked about basing the WB’s future on the key franchises of DC, animated LEGO^® features, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, but the current slate also encompasses dramas, action adventures, horrors, and comedies. Sue Kroll, new President of Worldwide Marketing and Distribution, and Veronika Kwan Vandenberg, new President of Worldwide Distribution, also spoke. Kroll said, “CinemaCon is always one of the high points of our year: when we get to introduce our upcoming slate to our partners in the exhibition community who are responsible for bringing our films to audiences worldwide,” while Kwan Vandenberg added, “We appreciated the enthusiastic participation of actors and filmmakers from every title, who added tremendous star power to the presentation.”

Ben Affleck and Amy Adams kicked off the presentation with a bang, introducing a reel spotlighting the studio’s ambitious slate of DC films.  The roster includes the new Justice League film, as well as stand-alone Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg features. Embattled Batman v Superman director Zack Snyder closed the reel with a greeting from the Justice League film set, surrounded by his stars. The DC preview also included a glimpse of the summer’s hotly anticipated super-villain team-up Suicide Squad before its writer/director David Ayer took the stage and introduced the main ensemble cast, led by Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, and Joel Kinnaman.  The extended version of the Suicide Squad trailer was met with loud applause and the buzz surrounding the film was palpable.

Host Mario Lopez went through the rest of the summer line-up, with advance footage from the wide range of titles, introduced by stars and filmmakers including Russell Crowe for Shane Black’s action comedy The Nice Guys, Emilia Clarke for the drama Me Before You, director James Wan and stars Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson for the supernatural thriller The Conjuring 2, Teresa Palmer and David F. Sandberg for the horror thriller Lights Out, Kevin Hart and Rawson Marshall Thurber for the action comedy Central Intelligence, Alexander Skarsgård, Margot Robbie, Samuel L. Jackson, and Christoph Waltz for the adventure The Legend of Tarzan, and director Todd Phillips and his Hangover star Bradley Cooper reuniting for the comedic drama War Dogs based on real events.

WB then unveiled films on the drawing board from the Warner Animation Group.  Chris Miller, Phil Lord, and Nicholas Stoller introduced titles in the pipeline, anchored by The LEGO^®Batman Movie, The LEGO^® Movie 2, and Ninjago.  Stoller, who co-directed the next film on the slate, Storks, was joined by fellow director Doug Sweetland and voice talents Andy Samberg and Katie Crown to present new footage from the family adventure.  The animation portion wrapped with never-before-seen footage from The LEGO^® Batman Movie, presented by producers Lord and Miller, and the voice of ‘Batman’ himself, Will Arnett. The presentation closed with a look Warner Bros. closed the presentation with a look at Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, written by Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling.  Four of the film’s stars; Eddie Redmayne, Alison Sudol, Dan Fogler and Colin Farrell; introduced the new teaser trailer and a look behind the scenes of the film.

It is a keen irony that the WB is currently taking flak for launching the Cinematic DC Universe with the humourless dourness of Batman v Superman, while the TV DC Universe is universally beloved for its lightness of touch, almost as if two prime directives are colliding. The need to maintain the WB’s vaunted position as a home for cinematic artists that respects directorial vision – whether that be Kubrick, Nolan, or Affleck – becomes self-defeating when the artist in question is Zack Snyder, and when an entirely less sombre vision, exemplified by writer/producer Greg Berlanti’s roster of Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl, is available free to air weeknights.

One Day (like this a year will see me right)

Regular readers will know that I appeared on Dublin South FM’s The First Saturday Book Club a couple of weeks ago, discussing David Nicholls’ 2009 novel One Day with Sorcha Nic Mhathuna, Eoghan Rice, and host Eve Rowan. Click here to listen to a podcast of that show.

Book Summary
Working-class Emma Morley and rich-kid Dexter Mayhew meet for the first time on the night of their graduation in 1988. They bungle becoming a couple, but an intense bond develops through Emma’s long letters to Dexter as he travels the globe. Dexter becomes a famous TV presenter given to patronising Emma, who is reduced to waitressing, but when she becomes a teacher her relationship with the increasingly arrogant Dexter falters. Dexter’s career implodes due to his alcoholism, while Emma becomes a successful children’s author, but Dexter’s shot-gun marriage foils their coming together. Will Dexter and Emma ever both be in the right place at the right time? And do they deserve a happy ending?

Structures & Pitfalls
BBC scriptwriter David Nicholls previously wrote Starter for Ten, and this starts off as another class conscious romantic comedy before it develops into something a good deal more ambitious; almost a history of social change in Britain between 1988 and 2007. The gimmick blazoned on the book cover, ‘Twenty Years. Two People. One Day’; referring to Nicholls’ audacious decision to only cover in detail the lives of this odd couple for the 15th of July each year; serves two purposes. The first of these is to allow him to gallop over a vast span of time and draw out the pop culture of each year. The second is to allow him to surprise the reader with sudden shifts between chapters. The latter is a trick well-worn by Patrick O’Brian in the Master & Commander novels, where cliff-hangers chapter endings routinely lead into chapters set months later that make no reference to how the cliff-hanger was resolved till half-way thru. Here it allows Nicholls to present conversations where you’re unsure if Dexter is addressing Emma or yet another bimbo girlfriend, and where characters change jobs and locations radically in a page.

The first purpose becomes an increasing problem as the novel progresses as there are too many attempts to cram every possible event in recent British history into the narrative. Dexter presents a show that is basically The Word, and then Channel 4’s failed rival to Later with Jools Holland, before ending up in the impeccably trendy organic food business. Emma bounces around from waitressing to teaching to becoming sort of JK Rowling. Emma’s disastrous meeting with a publisher is the nadir of this technique as it sees her standing on the South Bank afterwards recalling how jubilant she was the last time she was there, celebrating Blair’s 1997 landslide; of course Emma was there celebrating Blair’s victory you groan, Nicholls just had to tick that box… The gimmick works well for the first sections of the novel, as this is a day that the characters would consciously mark, and it becomes that again in the closing section, but during the middle sections of the book (as Dexter becomes ever more obnoxious) it feels very contrived.

Em & Dex: Rom-Com or Hardy-Com?
The character of Dexter is a problem. Emma is loveable and believable from start to finish as she manages to slowly sort her life out, but the privileged Dexter who is initially charming becomes increasingly irritating as he diligently works his way thru every cliché of Britpop excess. By contrast Nicholls’ protean minor characters are brilliantly drawn, from Dexter’s co-presenter Suki Meadows, whose bubbly personality is imagined as liable to start a letter of condolence with the word ‘Wahey!’, to his elegant bohemian mother Alison, who likes Emma precisely for the moment which embarrassed both Emma and Dexter; when Emma called Dexter’s father a bourgeois fascist for his views on Nicaragua, Alison saw a girl with some spine who would stand up to Dexter as he would desperately need his partner to. Alison sees the chemistry between Emma and Dexter that sustains the novel, until its circular ending which reveals more of their magical first day together, despite the truth of Emma’s unfunny stand-up boyfriend Ian’s observation that Dexter takes Emma for granted.

The ending suggests that Nicholls is so in thrall to his beloved Thomas Hardy that he chooses this particular ending merely to cast a backward profundity over what has gone before. The tragedy is that Nicholls does not need do this. Sure, there are moments that are reminiscent of other works. Dexter’s meeting with his agent is straight out of Extras, Emma’s feeble attempts at writing strongly suggest Spaced, and a disastrous sequence involving Dexter is practically lifted from Meet the Parents. But Nicholls has an undeniable skill at summarising cultural shifts in gags; in the 1980s of The Clash and Billy Bragg all the boys wanted to be Che Guevara, thinks Emma, in the Loaded and FHM zeitgeist of Britpop all the boys now want to be Hugh Hefner; and his greatest ability is not this sort of cultural commentary, but what seems to embarrass him.

Dexter’s long letter asking Emma to join him in India features the most memorable romantic comedy gesture I’ve read recently. Dexter tells her to stand in the centre of the Taj Mahal at noon wearing a red rose and holding a copy of Nicholas Nickleby, and he will find her; he will be wearing a white rose and holding the copy she gave him of Howards End. But Dexter forgets to post this letter; which will have you screaming, ‘No! Dexter!!’, at your book. An author capable of conjuring that level of emotional involvement with his characters and such deliriously heightened moments shouldn’t apologise for being a cracking rom-com writer, not Hardy…

Read the book, don’t wait for the movie. Any production which casts Anne Hathaway as Emma rather than Spaced‘s Jessica Stevenson obviously hasn’t a clue.