“I always knew some day you’d come walking back through my door.”
July 27th, 2007
Karen Allen is returning for the fourth Indiana Jones film.
I can’t help but think it’ll just be a cameo appearance, but I’d be delighted to be proved wrong. The prospect of seeing Marion Ravenwood and Indy sparring again might actually get me to watch the fourth instalment.
(My rule of thumb is that if there’s a gap of five years or more between entries in a film series then the later film is guaranteed to be dreadful. Can anyone think of an example that disproves this rule?)
[Via Ghost in the Machine]
July 31st, 2007 at 11:20 am
Define “film series.” For instance, does Batman Begins count?
August 1st, 2007 at 12:29 am
I know one when I see one…
Batman Begins wouldn’t count IMHO, since although they’re using some of the same characters the writer/producer/lead actors had changed completely from the 80s/90s Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher films.
I suppose it’s a matter for debate whether you regard the Guber & Peters-produced films directed by Tim Burton as being a distinct series from the pair directed by Joel Schumacher (Tim Burton had a producer credit on the third film, but from what I remember at the time it was clear he wasn’t actively involved in the later films.) Either way, I don’t see the Christopher Nolan film as being a sequel to the films from a decade earlier. (If anything it was a prequel to those films, at least in terms of the internal timeline.) I’d call Batman Begins a new interpretation of common source material. (The same could be said of Bryan Singer’s recent Superman film.)
Films that are explicitly marketed as sequels, like the numerous horror episodes in the Halloween and Friday the 13th sagas, count as a single series in my book despite a huge turnover in actors and directors. The forthcoming Hellboy 2 is part of a series, because the director and most of the cast are returning. The Star Trek films through to Nemesis were a single series, but the new one J J Abrams is working on isn’t part of that series because apart from a cameo appearance by Leonard Nimoy there’s no continuity of cast or creative team. The Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible films are a series because again the main stars and the producer (i.e. Cruise himself) are still on board.
August 1st, 2007 at 4:36 pm
What about Clerks II? Definitely not dreadful; rather good, in fact, and approximately 10 years after the original. Does that count? (Or do the other ViewAskew-verse films affect the rule?)
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:06 am
I haven’t seen Clerks 2 so I can’t personally vouch for how good it was. I don’t think the other View Askew films figure in the equation because they’re more stories told in a shared universe than direct sequels.
I suppose that I’m going to have to rely on my get-out clause, i.e. that I used the phrase “rule of thumb” rather than “ironclad certainty.” It’s not impossible for a belated sequel to work out well, merely deeply improbable.
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:09 am
I liked Clerks II, for what it’s worth (although I still prefer the original title, The Passion of The Clerks). It was completely faithful to the spirit and characters of first film, without stinting on making use of Smith’s far greater technical skills, and the budget and crew of a larger film that hasn’t become bloated.
But I’ll add another nomination for a violation of your rule, and it might surprise you, because it somewhat surprised me. I saw Rocky Balboa last night, and while I’m neither a particular fan of the earlier films, nor hostile to them, I thought this one was really quite good, and both charming and authentic, while still doing the whole boxing thing surprisingly well, in a way that went quite past any of the earlier films, including the original. 16 years since the previous one. I’m not a boxing fan, either. Good characters, though, and Stallone seemed to have almost reached a kind of Eastwoodian iconicity. As I said, I was surprised to think that well of it.
August 4th, 2007 at 4:11 am
Glancing at a couple of scenes again (of Clerks II), let me stress that the single scene in which Dante watches Rosario Dawson try to teach him to dance, on the rooftop, is worth the price of the whole movie. I can watch that over and over and over.
(The whole donkey sex scene is kinda missable, not that I want to, y’know, judge anyone’s interests.)