4 Horsemen of the Film-Making Apocalypse: Part 3 – JAWSBUPS

 

The Four Horsemen of the Film-Making Apocalypse

For a long time I’ve been carefully watching for the end of the world. According to the Bible (the world’s most accurate and consistent book), the world will end in a fiery shit storm, ushered in by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Well, that time is here, albeit not in a form that anyone expected. In fact, all the pestilence, war, famine, and death are not coming literally, but figuratively in the world of cinema.

Horseman numero tres is none other than JAWSBUPS. Wait a second. Who the fuck is JAWSBUPS? Well, it actually isn’t a single director. It is an amalgamation of three small time, but horribly inept directors. Alone each of them is relatively harmless, but put together they combine to become the Voltron of shitty movies. JAWSBUPS breaks down to the original initials J.S., P.W.S.A., and U.B. Those initials stand for Joel Schumacher, Paul W. S. Anderson, and Uwe Boll.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “BUT BRIK THOSE GUYS HAVE MADE SUM GOOD MOVIES YOU DONT KNOW WHAT YOUR TALKIN ABOUT LOL!” You may feel like they have made some good movies, but you’d be wrong. Your memory is playing tricks on you. Let’s take a closer look at their combined efforts:

Screw You, Marvel

This is exactly what Marvel is doing to their properties.

All of Marvel’s upcoming movies are going to be trash.

A decade ago, movie adaptations of comic books were a joke. With the exception of the 1989 Batman and 1978 Superman films, they were laughable at best, and huge steaming piles of shit at worst. The problem was that nobody took it seriously, not even the creators. They made them campy and hokey, and self-referentially stupid. They were the lowest common denominator of movies. They became a self-fulfilling prophecy of crappy movie-making. After all, if the filmmakers themselves treated the properties like shit, then the movies would inevitably turn out to be shit. The industry chugged along, and churned out turd after turd with the occasional, anomalous decent movie like Blade in 1998.

Fast forward to 2002, and the release of Spider-Man. Suddenly, we had a GOOD live action version of a comic book movie. How did it turn out good, you ask? Well, let me answer that for you. The simple reason was that the director, Sam Raimi, had been a longtime fan of the comic book series. He wanted to stay as true to the character as possible while adapting him for the more difficult live action film environment. Naturally, certain things needed to be changed, but they were done with as much care as possible. The characters and situations were taken seriously, and given the right amount of gravity with occasional moments of levity thrown in to keep things fun. The script was solid, the actors were well cast and talented, and everything flowed together seamlessly. It just worked. Worldwide, that movie grossed over $800 million. People were screaming about how awesome the movie was, and all of a sudden it wasn’t nerdy to like comics any more.