Poseidon Tagged Articles at Cinematical

He may have been the least inspired director involved with the Harry Potter franchise, but Chris Columbus was at least sufficient a talent for the task. He adequately set up the series with the first two movies, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, so that Alfonso Cuarón could come in and comparatively deliver a masterpiece with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. While the idea continues to be tossed around regarding Columbus' possibility of returning to the Potter movies, the director, whose last film was Rent in 2005, has also been offered the chance to start up another franchise by directing Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.

The movie will be adapted from the first book in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. The plot involves a 12-year old boy who discovers that he is a demigod, the offspring of Poseidon and a mortal woman, and follows him in his adventures through Hades and Olympus in order to save the world from an apocalyptic war among the gods. The most interesting, albeit traditionally unfaithful, thing about the books is that they place the entrance to Hades in Los Angeles and they feature Olympus floating above New York City. As an enthusiast of Greek mythology, I am curiously looking forward to the movies (I'd pick up the first book if it wasn't intended for such young readers). Hopefully once Columbus finishes his set-up duties with this series, either after Lightning or the expected sequel, Percy Jackson and the Sea Monsters, Fox 2000 will hire a filmmaker with more talent and more style in order to continue the franchise.

If you want to know about the specific achievements in visual effects made by this year's Oscar nominees, the CG Society website has a great spotlight on the VFX supervisors of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Poseidon and Superman Returns. Obviously we can see on screen the end results of each effect team's work, but there is a lot of interesting information that isn't so apparent, like how ILM had to invent new software for Pirates and how Poseidon actually created some innovative effects in addition to the simulated tidal wave.

Through the interviews with the four men (two are from Pirates), and some great visual aids, you can get a better understanding of how and why these three films were chosen, what sequences were shown to voters during the shortlist "bakeoff" event and what each supervisor thinks of his competition. In case it wasn't already a given, Pirates seems the best bet to win, evident in the detailing of what was achieved and in the compliments given by the other two films' supervisors (plus it won the BAFTA Award and top honors at the VFX Society Awards). One thing that everyone also agrees on is that Charlotte's Web should have at least been shortlisted for the award.

It was a good year for much of Hollywood, but a bad year for A Good Year. The Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe team-up only grossed $7 million domestically, and has been labeled a flop. Variety has listed the major box office disappointments for 2006, and interestingly enough, a few of them have to do with water. The appropriately bad way to describe their fate, then, is to say that they drowned. Flushed Away, The Lady in the Water, Poseidon and The Fountain (okay, I didn't see it, but I don't think there's an actual water-type fountain), just couldn't swim. Here's some more bad puns: Sharon Stone didn't have the Basic Instict 2 stay away from a dumb sequel; Producer Dean Devin said, "Flyboys," to his new movie but it crashed and burned; All the King's Men stayed away from this remake, and so did everyone else; Audiences let their Freedomland in other activities besides seeing a movie starring Julianne Moore and Samuel L. Jackson. There's no pun needed for The Wicker Man; it just sucked.

Unlike the biggest flops of all time, none of these movies from 2006 broke a studio or likely ended a career. Ridley Scott and Wolfgang Petersen (director of Poseidon) have had flops before, but they can be forgiven for "flukes" every once in awhile since they usually turn out successful work. Plus, their films did okay business overseas. International box office saves more flops these days than back in the times of the really big bombs. Most of the other filmmakers represented are also probable to bounce back, or at least fall back on their other talents. Joe Roth (Freedomland) has already returned to producing. Steve Zaillian (All the King's Men) is back to writing. Tony Bill (Flyboys) may continue acting. Michael Caton-Jones (Basic Instinct 2) will eventually make another crappy film. M. Night Shyamalan (Lady in the Water) might need to be forced to work on somebody else's script for once, but he isn't going to disappear anytime soon, unfortunately.

This week four new releases, though they all did ok business, were nevertheless unable to surpass Pixar's Cars, which became the first movie in a long damn time to hold onto the top spot in the weekend box office race. Cars, which experienced a (totally normal, though perhaps not for Pixar films) drop of about 48% from its opening returns, took in an estimated $31.2 million from almost 4000 screens. Roaring into the second spot with his fake accent and stretchy pants was Jack Black, whose Nacho Libre made a respectable $27.5 million; on almost exactly the same number of screens (around 3000), The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift made about $24.1 million, good enough for third place. The weekend's other two debuts, The Lake House and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, finished in the fourth and sixth spots respectively.

Interestingly, The Break-Up continues to do fairly strong business, finishing fifth for the weekend and running its total domestic earnings to just over $91 million. Since the movie cost $52 million to make, I think it's safe to say the folks at Universal are very pleased with their weird relationship movie and its tabloid-magnet stars. On the other side of the coin is WB's sad, sad Poseidon. After a month and a half in release, it's made about $56 million, barely a third of its reported budget. Dear me.

As you know, full numbers are after the jump.

Last week, we asked you to take any or all of five movie titles: Mission: Impossible: 3, X-Men: The Last Stand, Poseidon, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mens' Chest -- and make them into Chinese movie title translations. Quite a few of you rose to the task, and we had some very creative entries. But there can be only one (winner, that is), and the winner is (drumroll, please) ...

Lee! Lee wins a shiny new Cinematical t-shirt for these winning entries:

Mission: Impossible: 3 = Jumping on couch,Jumping off building ("did the translator actually watch this film?")

X-Men: The Last Stand =Mutants in Spandex and the
Weathergirl("enhanced translation")

Poseidon = Po Sigh Done ("sounds kinda like this")

My Super Ex-Girlfriend = Wonderwoman gone blonde and with a vengence !!! ("enhanced translation" since it isnt out on dvd yet)

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mens' Chest= Pirates Chasing Pirates("literal translation")

Congrats, Lee. Please email me at kim (at) cinematical (dot) com with your shirt size (M, L or XL) and color preference (black or pumpkin), and your mailing address. Thanks to all our entrants!

Three major releases today, all screened for critics and, sadly, all pretty bad. Poseidon is forgettable, empty action, Just My Luck is fluff (But ain't that Lindsay Lohan sweet?), and Goal! The Dream Begins is another formulaic sports underdog story.

• Poseidon: Pretty much everyone agrees with James that this remake did away with the cheese and personalities of the original film, and has replaced them with non-stop action. They also, largely, agree that the choice wasn't a very good one (As evidenced by the fact that every single critic mentions Shelley Winters, but can hardly remember anything about the characters in the movie they're reviewing). Well, at least it's not boring. And hey, the effects are good!

• Goal! The Dream Begins: Goal! is a)about soccer, and b)formulaic: on these things, critics agree. Beyond that however, you have to wonder whether these people were watching the same movie. For example, star Kuno Becker is either blindingly talented or a waste of space. By the same token, his character's illegal immigrant status is either a sign of depth and nuance or just another part of the money-hungry studio's effort to broaden the film's appeal. Me, I'm just thrilled to see the phrases "Newcastle United" and "Alan Shearer" in the American media.

• Just My Luck: Yeah, this one's just not very good -- according to most of his critical brethren, James hits the nail on the head when he labels it "fluff" and "not horrible." Those who find good things to say about the movie are entirely focused on Lindsay Lohan who, despite her inability/unwillingness to stay off the gossip pages, remains -- to some, anyway -- a charming, talented actress. (Roger Ebert, in particular, loves her muchly.

1972's The Poseidon Adventure has not only been re-made, but also re-named Poseidon. The story is the same: A passenger cruise ship is turned upside down by a giant wave, and a band of survivors struggle to work their way up through the wreckage and carnage to reach the bottom of the ship (which is, of course, now the top) and hopefully escape certain doom. In this iteration, the film's title is shorter, snappier, simpler. It may be a simple matter of semantics -- and the word 'Adventure' does makes it sound like our characters are on a jovial day-trip instead of a fear-soaked scramble for life -- but you can see the change in the nomenclature as a reflection of the remake itself: brisker, to-the-point, better marketed ... and a lot less fun.  

Poseidon is directed by Wolfgang Pedersen, and there's a strong chance that someone looked at how well Pedersen brought The Perfect Storm from the best-seller list to box office glory and theorized that, if you've got a giant wave in your film, there's only one man to hire. Plus, he's become an adept big-budget technician over the years with only a few black marks on his resume -- I found Troy to be thought-provoking and well-made, although I may have been the only one --  and a pretty steady track record of delivering thrills and chills and spills for multiplex audiences. Pedersen certainly doesn't linger long; the film clocks in at a short 100 minutes, and the boat goes over at around the 17-minute mark.That pace keeps Poseidon tense and terse, certainly -- there's not much letup in the action once the world turns upside down -- but viewed close on the heels of Mission: Impossible III, it also demonstrates a disturbing trend in big-budget moviemaking.

Over at Film Threat, Shane Burridge has a rather entertaining piece up on the perplexing way that American movie titles are renamed in Chinese. Burridge breaks it down thusly: when renaming American films with Chinese names, translators tend to use one of these methods:

• The "come up with a name that reflects the DVD cover" method, by which Finding Nemo became The Big Fish Is Going to Eat the Little Fish;
• The "sounds kinda like this" method, by which Titanic morphed into Tai Tan Ne Ke;
• The "enhanced translation" path, which leads to, say, Mr. Bean becoming Stupid Mr. Bean;
• The "did the translator actually watch this film?" method, in which Deliverance somehow became Four Brave Men Passing Through Rapids and Dangerous Shoals;
• And, of course, the ever-reliable literal translation, such as The Little Mermaid becoming The Romance of Human and Mermaid.

Not only is Burridge's piece a funny read (the bit about the Ass-Kicking Ketchup almost made me snort peppermint tea out my nose -- in a very lady-like way, of course), it's inspired us here at Cinematical to give you yet another reason to win a snazzy, spiffy Cinematical t-shirt. Here's all you gotta do: Come up with the best Chinese translation of any of the following summer movie titles, using any one of the methods listed above to create your translation:

• Mission: Impossible: 3
• X-Men: The Last Stand
• Poseidon
• My Super Ex-Girlfriend
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mens' Chest

Leave your best entries in the comments. If your brain juices are really flowing and you feel super-creative and inspired, you can enter more than one, but we'll only pick one winner. You have until 11:59PM EDT on Thursday, May 11 to submit your entry. Winner will be announced by Monday. Ready ... set ... GO!

I went to a café without wireless to write this column, because I'm finding that the communications options offered by the internet have turned my attention span into a twitching, wretched thing. And I wanted to think. This column is going to be all about what I've learned in two months as Cinematical's Editor-in-Chief, and one of the things I've learned is that my column turned out to be bi-weekly. It's verging on tri-weekly. And I try, weakly, to get it in on a regular basis, but who knows and/or cares if that's going to happen? So I retreat to a lead-lined café in a part of the city I don't get to that often before the press screening of Poseidon, trying to run through what I laughingly call my thought process about this job so far. And here are some things I've learned.

1) "Feed Me, Krelborn! Feed Me Now!"

Anyone who runs a blog of any kind will tell you that frequency of updates translates into traffic, visits and comments. And yet, this has taken a while to sink in with me. But the ravenous hunger of the blog essentially devours all sense -- watching update after update come from our news gatherers and commentators, posted to the site by Kim or Martha or rarely myself. I frankly don't know how a reader keeps up with it. But when you slow it down, you see the effect ... and that's, to quote Michael Franti, "as real as rent." So you step back; you look hard, and you start by kicking you own ass to make more news posts, more reviews, more columns, while recognizing that you are but one part of a much larger, spread-out network of busy, busy people, each of whom you owe about eight e-mails. And meanwhile the hunger of the blog -- what ink-and-print people call 'the news hole" -- demands feeding.

Karina and Martha,

I am very shocked at how big Tribeca feels this year, and I mean that from the point of view of someone who barely registered its existence in the first four years. Mission Impossible III and Poseidon seem like ridiculous attractions for a film festival. I thought that Sundance was bad enough with its share of high-stature "indies," but at least it never brings blockbusters into the mix. As for the quality of the non-Hollywood films, I typically have low expectations of any festival's selections. Even last year at Sundance -- sorry, I can't not compare all American fests with "the big one" -- I saw 36 films and thought 30 of them were surprisingly poor, or at least unremarkable. Still, I have yet to see even one thing at Tribeca that I am as crazy about as the few favorites I've seen at other festivals.