I haven’t watched any of the trailers for Michel Gondry’s The Green Hornet and I haven’t read the opinions of anyone that’s already seen it. However, I have read Gondry’s response to early critics of the film, saying, “I usually identify with the nerds but these ones just reinforce the social rules. Their values are fascistic… All those people marching around in capes and masks and boots. The superhero imagery is totally fascist!” Yikes, I won’t go around calling people names, but he’s definitely onto something with this following quote, although the “normal people” part is a bit of a second stab at detractors:
“When you step into this genre, they feel it belongs to them. They want you to conform, or they won’t like you. They want the conventional. But it’s fine. The movies has been doing very well, I think, whenever we’ve screened it to normal people.”
This reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s quote from 2003 when he said, “The reason I’ll never do a comic book movie with like, ‘The Flash’ or something like that is (f**k) those comic book geeks, man. You can’t please them. I might do a comic book movie, but I’d come up with my own characters where I’m god and I’m the expert and not you guys. The thing is, film geeks can be your best friend, but man, they can be your worst enemy.”
Since that time, Tarantino was offered Green Lantern and obviously turned it down and in talking with MTV he reiterated there’s only one way he’d ever direct a superhero movie. “It wouldn’t be an existing comic book character,” he said. “I’m a writer. I’d want to use my imagination and not have to fight with geeks’ memories of how this character should be and, ‘Oh, I cast an actor as opposed to a bodybuilder’ or it’s not as good as the way Neal Adams drew him.’ If I were to do something like that, I would want the fun of coming up with the superhero myself.”
I wonder if Gondry will regret his decision to helm The Green Hornet should fans turn on him and his film over his adaptation, which was penned by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg based on George W. Trendle’s original radio series. The film stars Rogen, Jay Chou, Cameron Diaz and Christoph Waltz, hits theaters on January 14 and has already suffered its share of rumors and, as you can tell from Gondry’s comments above, he’s already reacting to early negativity, but with a sequel reportedly in the works and test screenings going well you’d think there would be little to worry about.
Yet, I found the following independently made Green Hornet short film on Twitter from someone saying, “THE GREEN HORNET movie we should be getting. Why o why o why?!” I don’t know about you, but this short looks like a Zack Snyder/Kick-Ass/The Dark Knight wannabe. It’s decent for an independent short, but to me it looks like the same thing every Batman/Watchmen copycat would produce. I’m not sure Gondry’s Green Hornet is the version I want, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t the preferable alternative.
P.S. The poster at the lede of this post is a new one and you can get a larger look at it as well as three new images and some international posters from the film right here.
