Is "Gods of Egypt" a Bad Movie People Will Eventually Love?

The cast sees the reviews! The Horror. The Horror.The ill begotten would be blockbuster Gods of Egypt, directed by Alex Proyas (I Robot, The Crow), is currently enjoying a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes; you could call that score bad luck but for the fact that the movie fully earns it.

Still... There's something enjoyable about tallying up the ways it goes wrong. It continually charges toward its own spectacular idiocy with gusto. Despite heaps of exposition it never makes a lick of sense, explaining rules only to break them. It mounts each action sequence with zero artistry in disguising its shameful lust to earn extra $ as a video game (you half expect congratulatory text and bonus points on screen a la Scott Pilgrim vs The World). It builds its own crazy as high as its in-movie Tower of Babel. It wants to play with surreal Egyptian imagery but is so 2016 that it mistakes human gods with animal heads for organic derivatives of Michael Bay's Transformers. 

Each actor, freed from mundane concerns of "direction" or even other actors (green screens abound so half the time it's clear they're not together), does his/her own thing. The result is a hilarious hodgepodge of styles, accents, and wildly varying degrees of success at self-amusement: Egyptians with Australian accents? why not, Gerard Butler!; You once saw Pirates of the Caribbean and want to do something affected but can't quite commit to your mincing gay idea? Then do it half ass, Chadwick Boseman; You only want to entertain yourself? Thank you thank you Geoffrey Rush & Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. You are both having so much fun which is the only way to do a bad movie.

Maybe it's the time of year, the garbage dump month between serious adult films vying for metaphoric gold (it's just gold plating) and studio four-quadrant product vying for audience gold (the green stuff) but I found its monotonous/cheap aesthetic weirdly endearing; the sets and costumes are gold, the lighting is golden, some of the superpowers are fiery gold, and these Gods even bleed gold! This is not a recommendation so much as a "if you're in the mood for it" which I, surprisingly, was. It's a blockbuster dumb as Brenton Thwaites is twink pretty, but it just can't help itself.

Grade: C-/D+
Oscar Chances: Teehee. not even if 2016 ended today with only 40ish movies to choose from. 

Westeros Comes to Hollywood: Casting News for Game of Thrones Actors

Margaret here to talk about Hollywood casting directors' collective infatuation with the actors on Game of Thrones. HBO's fantasy epic is a ratings juggernaut and has been Emmy-nominated a hundred times over. Its enormous cast (more series regulars than any other show on television) is getting a lot of attention, and many of them are landing high-profile movie roles. The prestige cable effect, so often noted for its ability to bring movie stars to TV, seems to be working in the other direction for Game of Thrones. 

Let's check in on the upcoming projects from our Westerosi friends: 

Carice van Houten

GoT Role: Melisandre, spooky red-headed priestess

Recently Booked: the Jesse Owens biopic Race. The Dutch actress will play legendary German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

Aidan Gillen

GoT Role: Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish, slippery schemer.

Recently Booked: Recently greenlit sequel The Maze Runner Chapter II: The Scorch Trials. It's reported that he'll be playing the villain, Janson. 

Gwendoline Christie

GoT Role: Brienne of Tarth, lady warrior

Recently Booked: Star Wars: Episode VII. Her role is top-secret, but the movie is about as high-profile as they come. Her combat experience and 6'3" frame are likely to feature. She's also booked a small part in the final Hunger Games film, as a military commander.

More Westerosi movie news after the jump..

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Divalinkious

Clothes on Film on every costume worn by Doris Day in Pillow Talk. Love it.
Felix in Hollywood Louise Brooks is looking at you.
Film Doctor on Dark Shadows. (Eek. I pforgot the promised pfeiffer pfriday posting). He says my pfavorite thing anybody has said about Michelle Pfeiffer recently:

America does not appreciate her enough... she deserves to be treated at least as well as France treats Catherine Deneuve

I've always felt the Deneuve/Pfeiffer comparison was apt. But the auteurs aren't biting or Pfeiffer isn't baiting. Deneuve, on the other hand who is 15 years her senior, is still making vital films for important directors. 

A New York Night *CONTEST* Sarah Jessica Parker is inviting you to her place if you win the contest to attend her Obama fundraiser. Yes, I entered. We need a sensible President and, more importantly, I need to be inside SJP's home!
Towleroad the Magic Mike pr blitz has begun. 
Time countsdown the 10 greatest movies made since the year 2000. Kind of an odd list -- very Oscar bestpicturey -- but lists are like pizza. Usually worth devouring even when far from satisfying. I'm in love with number•1

ways in which the upcoming Tonys are just like the Oscars
Gold Derby on the "precursors" the Drama Leagues. It may lock up the expected Tony wins.
Everything I Know... hates Ghost the Musical -- based on the hit movie Ghost (1990)-- and would like to remind Tony voters about about one of our Oscary pet peeves:

 I would like to remind the Tony voters that "best" design doesn't necessarily mean "most expensive" or "most complicated." Ideally, it would mean "design that works with the dramatic intent of the piece, enhancing the inherent effectiveness of the work, rather than hiding the fact that there essentially is no effectiveness." 

Amen. I haven't seen this musical but this is a standard awards group problem.

Oh what the hell. 2 more links to go.
My New Plaid Pants [nsfw] is always reminding me of hot things I've forgotten, like Game of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster Waldau doing Clive Owen in Bent (1997)
Rope of Silicon Ewww. what the hell with Matthew Fox's new body for Alex Cross. He plays a serial killer. (If you believe the movies, serial killer is practically as common a profession as waitressing!)

Game of Thrones, Three Hours In

I've resisted commenting on the new HBO series Game of Thrones, made possible by way of The Lord of the Rings. (That's a gift that will hopefully keep on giving to the fantasy genre. No one wants to go back to the 80s when B movie status was forced upon an entire genre.) I wanted to see how the series did or did not evolve from the kick-off show a couple of weeks back. So after three hours in the Seven Kingdoms, it feels like time to discuss.

After glancing at a few reviews and comment pieces, most of which seem elated at the ratings or the instant second season renewal, it seems the general consensus is FuckYeahGameofThrones. I am personally not elated though I did want to be. I imagined that the right cast or storytelling decisions in the series would smooth over or even hurdle some of the problems with the book series. I loved the first book but grew less enamored with each until I finally gave up on the series halfway through the third. By that time we had been introduced to dozens of major characters (plus several dozen minor ones) and the story threads, splintered at the thrilling final chapters of the first book, had only been rebraided in the abstract. The characterizations were, generally speaking, quite interesting. What killed it was the lack of interaction between the characters. The map is so big and the plots so resistant to truly intertwining that it felt like you were reading 100 different novels at once and even the ones about blood relatives would almost never overlap. Great characters are great characters but even they need chemistry with other great characters to truly leap off the page or screen.

George R R Martin can turn a phrase with the best of them, build a thrilling moment, and make complex decisions about characterizations (the best longform aspects of the book may be that, aside from maybe three or four characters, most of them minor, nobody seems entirely like heroes or villains). But I found the author's voice too cruel -- the ratio of gruesome plot turns to endearing or lighter or funny or romantic bits is roughly 99 to 1 -- and the stories far too repetitve once it was clear that entire books would go by and we'd still be harping on the same points (in that way it was already a television soap opera!) and still yearning for some face-to-face time between ANY of the characters we'd seen interact in the first novel.

But here's how the pros and cons and character detail breaks down thus far.

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