harry potter – Page 2 – World’s Best Media

Solo: Learning the Wrong Lessons!

Published on June 23, 2018November 20, 2020 by Michael Christopher Cole2 Comments

There’s a quote from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, “Once again you’ve put your keen and penetrating mind to the task and as usual come to the wrong conclusion!” said by Sirius Black to Severus Snape. The quote is one of my favorites, and I cannot think of a place where it seems to apply more than Hollywood.

If you somehow break through and make a movie about a woman who makes falls in love with a water balloon, the lesson that Hollywood would take from that is “water balloons are sexy” and you’d see some crazy slate of movies in which water balloons have sex with hot women, and drive fast cars, and airplanes, and stuff. (Sorry about all the water balloons but I’m sitting next to a bag full of balloons, so it was the weirdest thing in eye shot.)We’ve seen Hollywood learn the wrong lesson from successes too many times to count, (i.e. all of the Jaws sequels, and Piranha movies and so many others). But we also see them learn the lesson from failures. This can be really upsetting to me personally, because it often means something is abandoned early due to the wrong reasons, and who likes their movie franchises ended early?

The latest victim of this problem, seems to be Star Wars. I wrote about Solo a few weeks ago, but let me catch you up. The film seemed like a bad idea, but it was a good movie. So now, almost a month after it’s release Disney and Lucasfilm have announced that they’re reconsidering Star Wars spin-offs due to its failure.

So let’s talk about its failure, and yes it seems it is undeniably a financial failure (although the budget hasn’t been released so it’s difficult to tell exactly). First of all, you released 3 Star Wars 3 Decembers in a row, and they were all very successful. Is that because the films were excellent? I’ve liked them all, but there is a fair amount of debate on the quality of each. A huge reason for their success was the fact that December doesn’t have much for general audiences, it’s prestige film season, which leaves the “blockbuster” crowd open. That cannot be underestimated as a factor in their success. Solo however, came out just 6 months after TLJ in May. May was the traditional time for Star Wars in the previous 2 trilogies, but May’s were not as packed with action films in those years, and movies had multiple weeks (in some cases months) to rule the box office. This year we had Avengers: Infinity War (also a Disney film, which should be a double no-no for packing them in the same 30-day period) which was the biggest film of the year (and has the potential to be the top of the decade) was released a month before, then Deadpool was released a week before, and just three weeks after Solo, came the Incredibles (again Disney, wtf were you thinking? Spread it out more).

So that’s the first problem, Disney put Solo out with the biggest films of the year, and even by Star Wars standards it shouldn’t have. It’s far from the largest story, or the biggest impact in that universe. The second problem is confidence.

Solo suffered from a few pieces of confidence undercutting. After the fact that many of us didn’t think the idea was a good idea, there were the production ‘issues,’ with Lord and Miller getting fired mid-production, Ron Howard having to take over and needing to reshoot (which involved recasting at least one role), and then lastly there was the rumors of Alden Ehrenreich needing and acting coach. None of these would add up to confidence boosting, then we didn’t see a trailer until February which seemed very late in the game for a film of this size. And lastly, TLJ, it’s a pretty split popularity, but when 50% of the audience thinks the film was a crap-fest, and think Disney has ‘ruined Star Wars,’ six months may not be enough time to cleanse their palettes.

Let me offer an example of a time when the correct lesson was learned, and how it may benefit you to follow in those footsteps. On November 23rd 1963, the BBC aired the pilot of Doctor Who, and it did really poorly in the ratings that night. The executive in charge was on the side of canceling the show after the first episode, because obviously the whole thing was going to be a flop, but the creator was opposed to that. She argued that the show had suffered from the whole world being consumed by JFK’s assassination the day before, and that if they reaired the pilot a week later, that would be a more realistic example of how the show would do. She was right, and the show continued for 26 years before being canceled (and then rebooted, and now having 50 years, 3 movies, and 36 seasons altogether). They realized that timing had been off. Releasing Solo in the midst of the superhero frenzy was bad timing, don’t blame Solo for that.

So I ask you this question, given all of those things could Solo have succeeded? Even modestly? I don’t think it really could have. But Disney is looking the box office and acting as if that means the movie is a piece of shit, which it wasn’t. Please Disney, learn the right lesson. I get that you don’t want this to happen again, but if you learn the wrong lesson it likely will. Please, I love Star Wars too much for it to become the DCEU (with all the second guessing and undercutting and ultimately not learning the right thing)… I’m begging you.

Written by Michael Cole

FIRST LOOK: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Published on December 30, 2017November 17, 2020 by theworldsbestblogwithpaulwright1 Comment

3394D278-42D2-43FF-A7D6-B42216018730 — The cast of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald

I haven’t spoken much about it on any of our podcasts or written about it in any of my articles, but I’m a huge, huge fan of the Harry Potter books. I really believe they’ll go down in history, remembered as some of the best fantasy literature of our time. For the most part, I’m also a big fan of the films as well. There were some things that were fundamentally flawed to them, but to get such a beloved series done that well, over eight films is a huge accomplishment. Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Parts One and Two were probably the best of the films.
But my favorite moments in the books were always quiet, character driven moments. Like an emotional and distraught Harry venting to Dumbledore in his office after the death of Sirius Black. Or seeing the real reason Snape hated Harry so much, when Harry gets a glimpse in a pensive that shows him Snape’s worst memory. Which included being humiliated by Harry’s father when they were both students at Hogwarts. Harry had to come to terms with the idea that his Dad wasn’t the perfect, ideal image in his head, but a real, flawed person. For the most part I felt some of the most powerful moments in the Books were passed too quickly, if they were even touched on it all.

Now we have this new series of films that take place in the Harry Potter Universe set in the late 1920’s: “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”or as Mr. Sunday Movies calls them “Fantastic Creatures, Have You Seen Them, Where Are They, Are They In The Case? I Bet They’re In The Case. They were In The Case”. EW.com had a bunch of great character photos from the upcoming movie, which I have posted throughout the article. I enjoyed the first film well enough, but what that really hurt the film for me was the reveal that Collin Farrell‘s character was actually Gellert Grindelwald, infamous dark wizard in disguise, played in ridiculous make up by Johnny Depp. Shortly after the first Fantastic Beasts film came out it was announced that the over arcing plot of the series would be the growing threat of Grindelwald and the magical war that takes place in this universe roughly around the time of our WW2 in the muggle world.

370A09CA-C040-48FC-920F-C4EBAEA30BC0 — Johnny Depp (UGH) as Gellert Grindelwald

I really like this concept from a storytelling standpoint because in the Harry Potter books and films Dumbledore is such a world renowned, respected wizard because he cut his teeth being the man who took down Grindelwald, who was at that time the darkest and most dangerous wizard the world had ever seen (at least until He Who Must Not Be Named came along). Dumbledore has always been one of the more fascinating characters in the Harry Potter universe, so getting to see more of this character in a very different part of his life is really intriguing to me. Another interesting wrinkle in this backstory is the fact that Dumbledore and Grindelwald were romantically involved. They were kind of like Charles Xavier and Magneto, they were two men who were gifted magicians and had a lot of the same ideas, but Grindelwald felt that Muggles should bow down and be subservient to the wizards of the world. Grindenwald felt that magic users were inherently superior to non-magical humans. That’s where he and Dumbledore parted ways and their friendship became increasingly antagonistic until Grindelwald gathered followers and was basically in open war with the rest of the world. You’ll see in the photos that they cast Jude Law as young(ish) Dumbledore, which I think is excellent casting.

B8D12960-2690-4F77-A92A-FC237750893A — Jude Law as Prof. Albus Dumbledore

Still, I can’t help think it was such a missed opportunity that they swapped out Colin Farrell for Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp hasn’t put in a compelling performance in years. He relies on absurd visual gimmicks, just like you see in these photos. Colin Farrell was genuinely menacing in Fantastic Beasts. He’s a great actor and would’ve made an excellent Grindelwald. I still hope they keep him around and use him in the series in someway (I forget his character’s name). Because the only way a wizard can turn into another person is by creating a potion called pollyjuice but that requires the person they are impersonating to still be alive. So the real Colin Farrell has to be out there somewhere. Anyway I thought these were some interesting photos that I thought you’d find interesting. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald opens in theaters 11/16/2018.

Thanks for reading!
-Paul

FANTASTIC BEASTS 2 — It would be nice if a bus just fucking took him out seconds after this picture. I mean, he’s in the middle of the fucking street!

How To Treat Source Material by Guest Writer Michael Cole

Published on September 15, 2017November 16, 2020 by Michael Christopher Cole3 Comments

I’m fortunate enough to know many talented and creative people. Some of them have already contributed great stuff to World’s Best Media. Like Tim Cuff, my cohost on The World’s Best Podcast with Paul & Tim, or Ryan McDonald who created the amazing promotional video for that podcast. Both Ryan and Tim have contributed much more than that to this creative project I started, but one person who’s had a big influence on this entire thing who hasn’t gotten his due, is an old friend of mine named Michael Cole. Mike’s an extremely talented writer who has his own blog and has published a book of his own short stories called “Everything I’ve Got: A Collection Of Short Stories, Poems, and Essays”. He was the person I went to when I knew I wanted to start a blog and there would be no World’s Best Media without Mike Cole. One of my goals, when I created World’s Best Media was to give a forum to all of these talented people I knew to offer what they’ve created to the world. So I’ve been wanting to do something with Mike specifically for some time and we are going to have him be a special correspondence for World’s Best Media. Mike will be contributing guest articles every now and again on topics similar to the type of thing we cover all the time on all our podcasts and blogs. Pop-culture, movies, books, TV, everything. So without further ado here is Mike’s first piece for our site. I already have one more of his articles ready to post and we’re very happy to have him writing for us. I think you guys will love his point of view. Below his article I just posted a link to his website. Enjoy!

-Paul

How to Treat Source Material by Michael Cole

When something is adapted into a movie, there is inevitably some complaint about source material. Whether it’s a video game, a book, a comic book, or a TV show, someone is going to be unhappy. It’s inevitable.
Currently, the problem tends to be that something doesn’t follow the source material close enough. It’s a natural complaint, after all if you were a fan of the original thing, then you want to see it adapted well, but is it a fair to expect a literal translation of page to screen?
I think it depends, and I don’t mean it depends on the specific work it’s based on, as much as I mean what the original format was. Look at a finite book series, like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson; there are 7 Harry Potter books, telling one overarching story, there are 5 Percy Jackson books (plus 5 where he’s a semi-main character, plus 5 where he’s a background character). Both of the series have pretty defined beats that lead to their ending in the final book, so they should be pretty close to the original source material, at least in those beats. Harry Potter does a pretty good job of this, cutting some of the fat that isn’t needed, but overall sticking to the same structure. Percy Jackson got two movies (of 5 books) and by the end of the second book, there was a battle which was essentially the final battle from book 5. By doing this, they had predetermined that even if it had been successful enough to warrant further movies, that they wouldn’t be able to continue following the story that had been laid out for them.
I think a finite series, should adapt the basic bones of the original, but an ongoing serial, something which has the mythology being rewritten constantly, has much less responsibility to strictly following the source material. We’re seeing this with comic books, they’ve been restarting, and reinventing, and reimagining the stories and the worlds, and so when it comes time to adapt them into films and TV shows there is a wealth of source material, but sometimes its contradictory, so in this way sticking with the spirit of the characters and their arches tends to be paramount, and making sure that any element that has remained untouched through all the various adaptations and updates isn’t changed (at least without VERY good reason). It’s well established that Joe Chill killed Bruce Wayne’s parents, in every variation except for Tim Burton’s Batman, in which Jack Napier killed them before becoming the Joker. While there was some disagreement about changing it, ultimately it made no impact on the ongoing storytelling in the overall Batman catalog, but allowed that films story to have the proper impact without shifting too far from source material.
What is interesting about film adaptations is, that if you look at them before a certain point (I tend to think of Harry Potter as being the turning point) a significant amount of book to movie adaptations had significant changes to the source material. Look at a movie like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest based on the novel by Ken Kesey, (among many other hugely successful films adapted from books around that time) it took a starkly different approach from the book. In the novel, the whole story is told from Chief’s perspective, and as readers we have a hard time differentiating between what is real and what is hallucination. There are moments in the book to make it clear that the Chief does hallucinate, like when the beds each lower down as the floor opens up and all the sleeping people are experimented on by putting mechanical and electronic parts in them. In the movie, because the story is closer associated with McMurphy’s point of view, we see the ward as being filled with people who are mentally ill, but the view point of it is clear itself.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is an example of a book that would have been unfilm-able as a literal adaptation, and that is where a lot of stand-alone literature falls. We naturally want to see a film adaptation, but not every book translates, whether that be due to technical constraints, or more hard limit medium differences (if Chief had narrated the film as heavily as he had the novel, he would have been talking nearly the entire movie.)
One of my favorite books, The Knife of Never Letting Go which is the first book in The Chaos Walking Trilogy, is being adapted into a film for release in 2019. The book takes place on a world where everyone can hear everyone else’s thoughts, including the animals. (I’m going to give no spoilers so don’t worry). The people refer to that concept as ‘Noise,’ as in your thoughts are your ‘Noise,’ and most people can hear everyone’s ‘Noise’. On the page, Patrick Ness, fills the page not only with what you need to know, but noise, words all over the pages a typography nightmare, and it makes for an incredible novel. We can ignore a lot of it visually, so we get the idea, but we’re not actually as overwhelmed as the characters. How is this going to work in the film? My hope is that they’re not going to be completely faithful to the novel. My hope is that they’ll find some other manner of conveying that, because— at least for me— ignoring audio noise will be too difficult and distract from the storytelling.
Ultimately, I think there must be a consistency whether it’s to the characters, or the concept, or in some cases it should tell the same story, but I think depending on what kind of source material you have, and what kind of film you’re going to make, you have to change things. You’re going to get some people mad, and those people will get frustrated with those who enjoy the new item, but a movie isn’t a comic book, or a book, or TV show, and the focus just has to be on the quality of the storytelling, and not an overwhelming reverence to an original in a medium that doesn’t tell stories the same way.

What do you think about adaptations and source materials? Do you prefer them to be perfect visual representations or are you ok with changing things as needed? Tell us in the comments below.

https://michaelchristophercole.com

Why We Need Heroes: How A Story Can Change The World

Published on August 13, 2017November 16, 2020 by theworldsbestblogwithpaulwright3 Comments

No event in modern history has had a greater impact on pop-culture than the September 11 attacks. It was a tragedy that fundamentally changed us as a country and as a society. The day the modern world changed forever. But the difference between the September 11 attacks and, for example, World War II was that the Nazis were clearly and unquestionably the enemy. It was armies facing armies, you knew who the bad guys were. Nazis are pretty much the ultimate bad guys after all. As we all quickly learned after the attacks, fighting a terrorist cell is much different than confronting a hostile foreign country. After 9/11 people wanted justice and who could blame him? I think this is an important distinction to make because our cultural mindset after the attacks is key to the point I’m trying to make.

This attack haunts us to this very day and it will for decades and maybe even centuries to come. Now before I get into my main topic I want to make it very clear I am in no way disrespecting the gravity and seriousness of the September 11 attacks. The last thing I would ever want to do is disrespect the families of those who died in the attacks, the rescue workers who saved countless lives, and of course the many victims who lost their lives that day.

I have a few rules I live by in my life, philosophies if you will. I wouldn’t pretend to have a whole hell of a lot of my life figured out, so there’s only a few profound, fundamental life lessons that I’ve learned. One of my most important beliefs is in the power of storytelling. And how it shaped us as a species and a society. We use stories to make sense of things we don’t understand. Stories tell us about our past and our heritage and make sense of our present. So sometimes when we watch the news or look out our window and see things that scare us, that we don’t understand, we turn to our stories.

Films, music, books… the stories inside them can help us get through some of the darkest periods of our lives. Around the time of the 9/11 attacks, we began to see an interesting shift in the types of films and characters that resonated in our popular culture.

When we look back to the 80’s and the 90s, there was a specific hero archetype that dominated cinemas:”The Muscle Bound Super Man”. Men like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damm, Dolph Lundredgren, I could go on and on. The main thing these “heroes” had in common is that they were all unstoppable killing machines who obliterated anyone or anything that stood in their way. They were badasses, they played by their own rules, they were RIPPED, and they always, ALWAYS, got the girl. Perhaps the most important thing these heroes had in common, was that they were absolute nothing like the people watching them in movie theaters and on TV. As we got closer to the turn of the 21st-century, these types of heroes begin to become less and less popular. Former power houses like Arnold Schwarzenegger suffered bomb after bomb at the box office. And when 9/11 hit, the world had forever changed.

I remember reading somewhere that within the first few weeks after the September 11 attacks, rentals of movies like Armageddon, The Siege, Die Hard with a Vengeance skyrocketed. All of these films feature destruction and violent attacks on New York City. My personal theory, is that people were trying to make sense of the very real horrors they were witnessing on TV by turning to something they knew, in this case: movies. Movies are stories and as I said earlier one of the reasons stories are so important is they help us process our grief and help us get through tragedies we can barely wrap our heads around.

One of the big things that came out in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was an appreciation of the heroism of every day people. Not only cops, firefighters, and paramedics, but civilians as well. That kind of heroism is what keeps people going in the worst of times. Seeing people come together to help each other, in the face of horror, can make you think there might be some hope for this world after all.

And that’s when I really started to notice something different in the types of movies that were being released. I’ll give three examples that perfectly reflect that change: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Spider-Man, and the Harry Potter films. I think the reason people gravitated towards these movies and why they were such big hits was because they came out right around September 11. All of these movies were about very clear fights of good versus evil (One of my favorite reviews of the first Lord of the Rings film described the movie as having “impossibly noble heroes” specifically referring to Aragorn, the reviewer meant this as a positive. It perfectly sums up that character). At the heart of each of these films was an “everyman” hero: Frodo Baggins, Peter Parker, and Harry Potter. You can’t get much further away from the musclebound action heroes of the 80s and 90s then those characters. They weren’t built like Greek gods, they didn’t always get the girl, and they didn’t always know the right thing to do.

That’s why those movies resonated with audiences so much. People needed it. It was cathartic. Characters like Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter, and Peter Parker, they are us. These films show us that you don’t need to be a superman to behave heroically. In Return of the King, the fate of the earth isn’t in the hands of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, but two small Hobbits who spent most of their days tending to their gardens and going to their local pub only months before the events in that film. Our art and our pop culture reflects the time we live in. In the end, I don’t know if any of these stories made a real difference, if they changed anything in the real world. I’d like to think they did, but I really don’t know.

Today we face new threats, new fears (and some old ones rearing their ugly head again). I think, to a lot of people, the problems that we face, from ISIS to global warming, to issues with our government, can feel overwhelming. Every day, we wake up, check the news feed on our phone or read the local paper and we find out about the new disaster of the day. We want to chose leaders and put them into power who are supposed to protect us and do what’s right and represent the country with the respect and dignity it deserves. But that’s not what we’re seeing, they seem to have forgotten what their role as our political leaders are, if they ever cared at all. It would be great if we could turn to our political leaders to be role models, to inspire us to change the world. But they seem content to leave the world a worse place than they found it.

Im certainly going to sound like an old man raging against those damn kids, but a big problem is people under the age of 25 don’t consume entertainment like older generations have. Social media has shortened their attention span so much that I don’t know many high school or college age kids who make it a priority to go to the movies or follow a television series. I’m concerned about the long term affect this will have on our pop culture, but maybe that’s an article for another day.

So here we are with our leaders content to watch the world burn and the next generation too distracted to care. We’re more dived than ever. Can a great, powerful story help inspire us to change that? Do our stories have the same power they once did? I don’t know. I wish I did.

But people are looking for a hero, they NEED a hero. Which is one of the reasons we see so many superhero films being made. Of course, they make a shitload of money and that’s the real driving force behind it. But sometimes, even unconsciously, our pop culture reflects the real world problems and situations we deal with. I know from experience and that a superhero story can give people hope, make them fight one more day. That’s why superhero stories are more important than ever, because there are so few people we can look to in the public eye to help us make the world a better place.

It would be great if Captain America could show up, raise his shield and rally hope and dignity around him, but sadly that’s not gonna happen. We need to be our own Captain Americas, our own Iron Mans. To some people out there, these comic books movies and superheroes films are silly kid stuff, but like I said, stories are powerful things. So, even if just a few people walk out of the latest Avengers movie or Captain America movie with the desire and the inspiration to go out and make the world a better place, even in some small way, then a story can still help change the world…

As always, thanks for reading…
-Paul