comment #1

Ethan says ...

Oh, Jeffrey.

comment #2

bluefugue says ...

What did you think of Heavenly Creatures? That came after his zombie flicks and incorporated an intense visual style, but applied toward something "respectable" and relatively non-genre.

comment #3

Eloi Manning says ...

This year's Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

comment #4

kingofnails says ...

My desire to see this is only slightly higher than my desire to see Burton's ALICE IN WONDERLAND. That is to say, not very high at all.

comment #5

George Prager says ...

Great story. Still might be good.

comment #6

Phreaker says ...

Right because artists should never evolve. They should be one thing for their whole careers and never step out of their box or else. Peter Jackson is a great director.

comment #7

Movie Watcher says ...

I read the book, it was good. Directors have a difficult time adaptng a movie from a book, like how Kubrick adapted King's The Shining. I'm not comparing Jackson to Kubrick; when I see the movie I will of course think of the book, and maybe have a different opinion of how it should look.

comment #8

YND says ...

Haven't read the article, but I think HEAVENLY CREATURES more or less submarines your theory, Jeff. That movie (still Jackson's best by quite a wide margin, imho) employed all the Jackson stylistic traits in the service of a character-driven drama... and was made LONG before there were any expectations for Jackson to live up to.

comment #9

THE MovieBob says ...

the rank condescension in this piece can tell you everything you need to know about why the 30-something generation of Film Geeks - myself certainly included - were so supportive of LOTR and continue to be so toward Jackson especially: The notion, assumed and unreconsidered, that "genre film" is somehow "disreputable." Horror, science-fiction and fantasy have given the cinema some of it's most important and transcendant moments; to say nothing of the fact that - while less important from an asthetic standpoint - "genre" film is essentially paying about 98% of the film community's bills at this point.

You'd think that nearly 30 years after Exorcist, Star Wars, 2001, Jaws etc... and not even a decade after LOTR, we'd be over this bullshit, but no. By any fair calculation, Jackson is one of the most successful AND artistically-accomplished filmmakers of this age. Dead Alive/Braindead is one of the greatest films ever produced in it's genre, ditto Heavenly Creatures, and Meet the Feebles might be the best in it's genre PERIOD. LOTR speaks for itself.

But NO, none of that matters. The earlier films have zombies and/or monsters in them, so they have to stay in the genre-ghetto. He won PILES of Oscars for three film in a row, but they had elves and magic swords in them so THEY stay in the ghetto, too. Want to be "reputable?" Well, you'll have to adapt a fucking Oprah selection... and even then, the "worry" won't be that a gifted filmmaker might be wasting his time on a minor work but rather that he might HARM "Suburan Torment Novel #4,612" if any shred of his "disreputable" earlier career is visible.

Fuck this entire thing.

comment #10

M. Hulot says ...

VERY well put, MovieBob.

Jackson has more talent in his pinky then most of the So-called A list working today. And that most certainly includes the likes of that way overrated television-talent, Michael Mann.

Heavenly Creatures alone is worth a thousand Public Enemies, which looks like it was shot by a kid with a video camera in my backyard. And don't get me started on that 100 plus million crapfest, Miami Vice, or Collateral.

Why don't you actually wait to see the fucking movie BEFORE you rake Jackson over the coals? Oh wait, thatcwould be the intelligent thing to do. But you're just a mere blogger who, like your fellow brethren, make such comments for the simple purpose of driving up page views.

comment #11

Luke Y. Thompson says ...

If movie bloggers waited to see the actual movie before opining in every case, there'd be a lot less to blog about. And likely less readers too.

comment #12

sumo-pop says ...

So are you suggesting he should be someone else? For better or worse, Scorses, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, etc. are generally true to themselves, which in the end makes their mis-steps far more interesting than other people's successes. If you don't like what he does, fine. Don't ask him to be somone else though.

comment #13

Gordon27 says ...

Hulot - Exactly. This is what I've been saying all along. Michael Mann has gotten to a point in his career in which subject matter or theme or tone, even, matters a bit less than it used to There is really only one law, one rule -- he must be "Michael Mann."

comment #14

drbob says ...

I don't mean this post to be a put-down on Peter Jackson. But, I have to say, the trailer gives off too much of a "What Dreams May Come" vibe for my tastes.

comment #15

M. Hulot says ...

LYT,

I get your point. But there's a huge difference between opining and maligning. And since Jackson has been on Wells' hit/shit list for quite some time, his prejudice regarding his opinion of Jackson is tainting his view of a movie has yet to see.

comment #16

Anthony Thorne says ...

I just give Jackson kudos for trying something different. Aside from that, maybe his 'hyperbolic style' is appropriate for sections of the movie. I doubt he cares a bit about directorially posing as 'Peter Jackson', however that would work, rather he viewed the film as a creative challenge, and the directorial choices he made - whether they're to Rafferty's taste or not - were part of the solution he brought to the project. Fuck knows why it's even possible to have such an emphatic debate over a 'few minutes of footage', but here I am commenting so i can't point fingers.

comment #17

Markj74 says ...

I love it when people pick certain directors worst films and compare them to other directors best films.

Michael Mann made Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, Heat and The Insider - Peter Jackson can only dream of making anything on those levels (and I say that as a big fan of Heavenly Creatures).

comment #18

Eloi Manning says ...

Michael Mann shits on Peter Jackson.

Peter Jackson is to subtlety as rape is to sex.

comment #19

Gordon27 says ...

Why not just go all the way and say "Peter Jackson is to directing what Adolph Hitler is to international diplomacy"?

comment #20

lipranzer says ...

How the fuck did this become Peter Jackson vs. Michael Mann? Jesus.

comment #21

Yuval says ...

I really hated The Lord of The Rings trilogy, but I welcome any kind of debate concerning those movies, because the fact they are so loved fascinates me. But this type of discussion (on blogs) usually deteriorates to Oscars counting, rotten tomatoes ratings and empty rhetoric like “By any fair calculation, Jackson is one of the most successful AND artistically-accomplished filmmakers of this age.” or “Jackson has more talent in his pinky then most of the So-called A list working today” or “LOTR speaks for itself.”
And where did that Michael Mann comparison come from?

comment #22

Gordon27 says ...

Re - the Michael Mann thing

Whenever Jeff goes off on one of his pet-hates, like how Spielberg doesn't make good movies anymore, or Peter Jackson needs to stop directing in the Peter Jackson style, he'll usually provide fodder to satirically counter-point Michael Mann, whom Jeff always loves unconditionally no matter how bad his latest movie is.

It's pretty common 'round these parts.

comment #23

THE MovieBob says ...

Mann and Jackson make a bad comparison, appropriate or not, because they work in a different spectrum for the most part. There's not much to usefully compare between the two of them, save MAYBE stacking Two Towers up against, say, Mohicans because both of them are predominantly wilderness-set action epics with big seige battle setpieces. It's still a pretty bad "match" since one is a historical piece and the other is epic-fantasy, but there you go. My contention would be that Two Towers IS narrowly a superior film overall, but there you have it.

Now, if you were to take the two men's output on a "whole career" basis... i.e. the scope of their best AND "worst" work, I don't know how Mann could really "win" that one even while once-again pointing out that the comparison isn't very sound to begin with. But the fact is that while Mann has made GREAT films like Manhunter or Insider; he's also made utter miserable dogshit like Miami Vice.

Jackson, on the other hand, has in my estimation really never made a truly god-awful film. "Frighteners" is probably the "worst" by default, but even that's just a 2 1/2 star movie that's maybe a little too ambitious for it's own good. "Dead Alive" is a PERFECT zombie comedy. "Heavenly Creatures" is a PERFECT 'inside the mind of dual-psychosis' drama. "Kong" has problems but is a blast once it gets going (3 stars, at least.) "Bad Taste" and "Feebles" are PERFECT distillations of exactly what they want to be. "LOTR" I regard as the greatest live-action fantasy film(s) ever produced, period. That's a STUNNING body of work and a hit-to-miss ratio that any filmmaker or artist of any kind would KILL for.

comment #24

Terry McCarty says ...

THE Movie-Bob wrote:
Jackson, on the other hand, has in my estimation really never made a truly god-awful film. "Frighteners" is probably the "worst" by default, but even that's just a 2 1/2 star movie that's maybe a little too ambitious for it's own good.

I thought that THE FRIGHTENERS was sort of a cage match fight between the creative sensibilities of Jackson and Robert Zemeckis.

comment #25

Gordon27 says ...

For me, 'The Frighteners' takes all the good things that Zemeckis can do, but then has a real director follow through on them.

I wish Hollywood made more movies like that, where it's a total mess, but a mess because its packed with too many things going on, too many characters who are fully developed (albeit, cartoony characters; that's the movie), too many interesting cinematic ideas...

I'd go as high as three stars, 'cause I'm a Jeffrey Combs fan.

comment #26

Gordon27 says ...

Oh, but I do think 'Meet The Feebles' is pretty awful. I wanted to like it, I was really looking forward to it, but there were only two things I liked:
- The Vietnam sequence
- The "Sodomy" song

On a technical level, though, it is amazing.

comment #27

Noiresque says ...

The Lovely Bones is middle-brow garbage. It is at the level of a Jodi Picoult novel, only more sentimental and more emotionally dishonest.

comment #28

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comment #29

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