1. Katy Perry: Part Of Me (Opened Yesterday, Paramount, 2,730 Theaters, 95 Minutes, Rated PG):I have to admit, I am a fan of Katy Perry. This is an embarrassing fact to admit because A) I am not a tween and B) I am not a girl. And I am not a fan of hers because of her obviously attractive physical attributes, I am a fan of her music. She is a rarity in today’s music scene–a pop songstress that writes her own music and manages to have her songs be both catchy and unique. “I Kissed a Girl” doesn’t sound like “E.T.” which doesn’t sound like “Part of Me.”

This would be enough to build a documentary/concert film around, but Perry’s rise to fame is an interesting story all in its own. Starting as a gospel musician named Katy Hudson and going through one name change, several genre shifts,and being dropped by no less than three record labels in the nine years before her “overnight success,” the pot holes on her road to fame would have disabled many a less determined person.

So, this might be a cut above the typical film of this type. And it’s in 3D, so those remarkable physical attributes will come popping right out at you.

2. Savages (Universal, 2,627 Theaters, 130 Minutes, Rated R): Do you get the feeling that Taylor Kitsch is cursed. In January, 2012 appeared to be a big year for him, as he was set to star in three major releases. However, John Carter was such a big disappointment that people were tripping over themselves calling it a flop, Battleship, while a success overseas, wasn’t the Transformers level hit that Hasbro expected. And now this film, which had a lot of buzz going for it, will likely be trounced at the box office by Spider-Man, Katy Perry and a talking stuffed bear.

The film centers on a pair of pot dealers (Kitsch and Aaron Johnson) who won’t play ball when a Mexican cartel muscles in on their territory. The war of wills gets nasty when their girlfriend (Blake Lively) gets kidnapped. The film was co-written and directed by Oliver Stone and also stars John Travolta and Benicio Del Toro.

Maybe the film will get lucky. Maybe a bunch of confused pre-teens will see Salma Hayek’s picture on the poster and think its the Katy Perry movie. After all, they have the same wig, only a different color.

1. Battleship (Universal, 3,690 Theaters, 131 Minutes, Rated PG-13): I slammed this film on Tuesday as a form of Hollywood’s twisted new brand of originality. I feel bad because, really, I should have included the film listed below in that article as well. Phooey.

Anyway, I don’t know if I have much more to say about the film now than I did then. It’s a movie “based” on a board game. It doesn’t really draw much from the original source, although it seems to borroow liberally from films such as Independence Day, Titanic, Pearl Harbor, Transformers and just about every other film where the plot is tertiary to the special effects. I mean, the rebel who has to avenge his brother’s death while earning the respect of father of his girlfriend is not the most original or stimulating plots.

Early reports predict that The Avengers will once again rule the weekend. But that’s alright. Battleship has already earned $215 million overseas against a $209 million budget. So whatever this film makes in the U.S. is just gravy. Boggle the mind, doesn’t it?

2. What To Expect When You’re Expecting (Lionsgate, 3,021 Theaters, 110 Minutes, Rated PG-13): As the father of a three-year-old, I am very familiar with “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” and it’s sequels,  ”What to Expect The First Year,” “What to Expect The Second Year,” and “What to Expect the Toddler Years.” It’s a trade paper ATM machine where worried first time parents can have all their questions and fears answered and replaced with new questions and fears (No lie. Here’s an actual exchange between my wife and I: “Does she (our daughter) say 20 words yet? The book says she should say 20 words by now. I don’t think she says 20 words? Do you think we should take her to a doctor?” And that type of thing happens again and again because of that damn book.).

What the book does not have is a narrative, characters or any sembalance of a plot line. So this adaptation of the above book is, like Battleship, passing off a generic ensemble dramedy that could really have been called anything else under a familiar name in efforts to attract an audience. Yes, the book gives advice to expectant mothers experiencing the type of agita and angst the characters in the film, but the connection seems to end there.

But will the film be any good? Well, it’s got a great cast. I love Anna Kendrick and I love Elizabeth Banks. Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Lopez have carried movies all by themselves before. But when the trailer offers “you don’t know true love before you’ve wiped someone’s butt” as an example of one of the best lines of the film, you have a horrible film.

A film called Dark Shadows opened last week. It shares the same name and a number of characters with a cult soap opera from the late 60s, early 70s. Both feature time-tossed vampires who join their descendants 200 years in the future. However, the film plays the story as a wacky fish-out-of-water comedy while the soap opera, which was campy because, well, it was a soap opera with a production budget of $5, portrayed the story as a somber Gothic romance.

This week, Battleship opens. It shares its name with a Milton-Bradley board game that was first introduced in 1943. The game is advertised as a game of naval strategy where players try to sink each others armadas first by guessing location of ships on a grid. The film, which was based on the game, features the U.S. Navy combating a sea-based alien invasion force.

Now, this won’t be the kind of post that criticizes Hollywood for their lack of originality. Hollywood has always adapted  works from other media for the screen. That is not necessarily a bad thing. To prove my point, let’s take a look at the Top 10 films on the 2007 version of AFI’s “100 Years…100 Movies” list.

Now, you can argue semantics about this list all night–this film should be higher, that one lower, this film included, that one not–but we can pretty much all agree that these are great films. What do we see here? We have five films based on novels or plays (The Godfather, Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, Vertigo, and The Wizard of Oz), four films based on or inspired by the lives of real people (Raging Bull, Lawrence of Arabia, Schindler’s List and Citizen Kane, which was a fictionalized account of William Randolph Hearst’s life) and one inspired by Hollywood’s history (Singin’ in the Rain). Not one wholly original, but great films nonetheless.

But those were adaptations done right. Unfortunately, Hollywood has the nasty habit of wanting to put their own stamp on properties they adapt, usually with not-so-good results. And Dark Shadows and Battleship take this habit to a dangerous and puzzling new level.

Now, I’m not naive as to think that every original work should be adapted to the screen with no changes. I realize that it would be impossible for eight seasons of a TV series, 300 pages of a novel, or 200 issues of a comic book to be squeezed into one two-hour movie. But doing a good adaptation means keeping the stuff that works, keeping the same tone and characterization, and if you are going to change anything, change it to the better. The problem lies in the fact that the film studios definition of better doesn’t really end up as being better.

This problem, unfortunately, is nothing new. Studios have been making changes to classic works from other medium for decades. Whether it be modern literature, like The Bonfire of the Vanities (Does the journalist need to be British? Why can’t it be Bruce Willis? And does Sherman McCoy have to be such a erudite jerk? Why can’t he be nice, like Tom Hanks? And why have spot-on, social satire? Wouldn’t broad comedy be better?), classic literature like The Scarlet Letter (You know what would make kids pay more attention to the book in school? If Hester diddled herself in the tub.), comic books like Jonah Hex (What? The character is basically the cowboy antihero archetype that led Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson to stardom? That will never work in films. Give him superpowers, have him stop an anacronistic weapon of mass destruction, and, please, make it campy), or video games, like Super Mario Brothers (You know who the best actors to play a pair of Italian plumbers would be? An British Cockney and a Latino American! And Dennis Hopper playing their turtle nemesis! It’s like printing money!), more than one film adaptation was ruined by studio’s “improvement.” But Dark Shadows and Battleship take these kind of changes to an entirely new, and dangerous level.

Dark Shadows is the latest example of a film trying to present a property that is loved by a large, cult audience while having the studio, or, in this case, the director put their own stamp on the project. But what it really is just an unnecessary form of this type of marketing.

While I don’t deny that Dark Shadows does have a following, the fans of the show are not exactly in the 18-35 demographic that make films a hit. It was before my time and I’m way out of that demographic.

And, really? Do you need help marketing a movie where Tim Burton directs Johnny Depp again? You could have kept the fish out of water/man out of time plot, you could have even kept the main character a vampire,  you could have kept the premise the same and not have it tie into Dark Shadows at all and people would most likely still have come to see it.

The real reason that the film is called Dark Shadows is because Tim Burton was a fan of the series and wanted to do his own take on it, a take even he knew that fans of the TV show wouldn’t like. I’m sure Burton probably sold the idea to studios using the TV shows built in fan base. But this was Burton co-opting an existing property for his own use when he could have, and should have, created something original that would have still allowed him to say what he wanted to say. Dark Shadows fans have a right to be upset.

The case with Battleship is even more absurd. It’s not really a case of an adaptation being screwed up by Hollywood, because, really, if there was any way to adapt that particular board game, it would probably an even worse film than this one.

One of the producers of this film is Hasbro, the toy company that bought out Milton Bradley and owns the rights to G.I. Joe, Transformers and, you guessed it, Battleship (And Candy Land, which also has a film in the works). What happened was that Hasbro saw how much money they could make on films with the first two properties, so they decided to make a film out of every piece of intellectual property they own, whether making it into a film made sense or not. Personally, I cannot wait for Easy-Bake Oven: The Movie.

Battleship, like Dark Shadows, is a film that could have been released under another name and still do probably the same amount of business. Also, like Dark Shadows, the demographic of the source material will probably not follow it to the big screen even it was an exact representation of the game. What we have here is a generic alien invasion flick with the twist that the invasion takes place at sea.

Yes, rumor has it that there will be a scene in the film that mimics the gameplay of the original game, and I’m fairly certain that at some point in the film we will see a character, most likely Liam Neeson’s, pull a pair of binoculars away from their faces, squint off into a point just past where the camera was placed, and utter with grim, steely reserve, “They sank my battleship” (or some variation there of). But other than that, the film could have been called Aliens At Sea and it would not have made a bit of difference, except that it would have been mocked slightly less in the press.

So this is what the state of the film adaptation is today. The source material is reduced to a name only, a name Hollywood can use to practice a new kind of originality. The names become tools for directors to work out the issues they had with the original source or companies to earn a quick buck from their intellectual property in by any means necessary. Hollywood has always been accused of not caring about the books, TV shows and comics they adapt. At least now, they are being honest about it. And they get to have the best of both worlds–a film with a recognizable public image that is an “original” creation by the Hollywood establishment.

Unfortunately, this trend will not stop here. By now we should all be familiar Michael Bay’s Ninja Turtles, which every one from Bay to co-creator Kevin Eastman have promised fans of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would deliver “everything that made [them] become fans in the first place.” Everything except the characters being Teenagers (they will be a bit older) or Mutants (they’re aliens). They couch these changes as “building a richer world,” as if the world that made the Turtles a pop culture phenomenon for thirty years wasn’t rich enough.

And you thought Demi Moore writhing in a bathtub was bad.

Summer is almost upon us and that means that it is time for the studios to flood theaters with their biggest and often brashest films. At the beginning of each month we’ll be taking a look at what films have us excited about the movie season.

The Avengers (May 4) – Here it is, a film four years in the making. The culmination of Marvel’s rise to dominance in the movie theaters. Wow.

I don’t really have to tell you anything about this film. If you are a fan of the series, then you already know the plot, if you aren’t, you probably still know the plot from the endless amount of publicity this film has received.  But I will say this. I am a long time comic book fan–this year marks my 30th year as a collector–and The Avengers was the comic book that got me started. If you told me 10 years ago if there would be a film inspired by my favorite comic book series, I would have said you were crazy. Yet, here we are. I, for one, can’t wait. – William Gatevackes

Death Of A Superhero (May 4, limited) – No this is not another comic book adaption that is foolhardy enough to go up against the 800-pound gorilla that is The Avengers. Instead, Andy Serkis stars as a therapist who is helping a teenager (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) cope with being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. It seems that we don’t get to see Serkis take lead roles outside of ones where he is doing a motion capture performance, and this one looks like it can really highlight his acting prowess for those who doubted how much he actually contributed to his motion-capture work. Also, the lead character’s use of fantasy as a means of coping with his situation makes an interesting companion piece to The Avengers. If it is not opening at a theater near you look for it also on most video-on-demand services. – Rich Drees

God Bless America (May 11, limited) – Bobcat Goldwaith has gone from antic stand-up comic to a rather insightful filmmaker with his darkly comic looks at the American underbelly and God Bless America looks no different. From the trailer alone, it looks like it will poke at a number of people’s raw nerves. But I don’t think that Goldthwaite is really setting out to be an agent provocateur. In a recent interview on Chris Hardwick’s The Nerdist podcast he stated that the film isn’t so much about revenge as it is about forgiveness. It should be interesting to see how that plays out in the film. (Also available via various on-demand services.) – RD

Battleship (May 18) – Just like virtually everyone else, I was skeptical about this film pretty much from the moment it was announced. Did a movie about naval warfare really need to be tied to a plotless board game about naval warfare? The first trailer that was released did nothing to alleviate anyone’s fears about the movie. Aliens? There are no aliens in the game. But subsequent trailers have hinted that this may one action packed popcorn movie despite everything else. And ultimately, so what if they are trying to sell this to us on the back of a classic, beloved game. If the movie is fun shouldn’t that be what really matters? -RD

Hysteria (May 18, limited) – So how many reviewers of this film about the development of the vibrator will either inadvertently on on purpose describe it as a “feel-good romantic comedy”? A cheap joke perhaps and the trailer perhaps sells that angle of the film a bit strongly. But supposedly the film actually concentrates on the story of Dr. Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy), who just so happened to have invented the vibrator, and his romance with the daughter (Maggie Gyllenhall) of his mentor (Jonathan Pryce). – RD

Men In Black III (May 25)- It seems weird seeing the film open in May. Typically, the franchise (and a number of other Will Smith films) opened over the July 4th weekend. It’s throwing me into a state akin to waking up late on a Sunday, yet thinking it’s a weekday and you’re late for work.

As a fan of the first MIB (and one who hasn’t seen the second MIB), I’d be lying if I didn’t say I wasn’t concerned about this film. That’s mainly because it didn’t have a complete script before it started shooting the film. For any movie, this is troubling. But MIB III‘s plot involves time travel (Smith’s character goes back to 1969 to save a younger version of Tommy Lee Jones’ character, played by Josh Brolin), a story that is tricky to work out even when you have a script set in stone once filming begins. But it does look like Brolin is doing a dead on Jones imitation, though- WG

It has rapidly become an old joke that based on impressions from the trailers, any resemblance between the movie Battleship and the Hasbro board game that it supposedly based on is strictly coincidental. And while the film’s director Peter Berg won’t go quite that far, he rather refreshingly does admit that the links between it and the game are rather tenuous.

It certainly doesn’t have any direct correlation to the game. That being said, it was a lot of fun to try to find way to reference the game. If you look at the ordinance that the enemies use, it looks a bit like pegs. Both of our ships’ radar systems have trouble seeing each other, so they gotta try and predict where the enemy is so that they can go after them. And there were some other things that were kind of fun. They were certainly never mandated, but anybody that’s of a certain age that knows the game will look at it and probably kind of smile to themselves. I guess they could say, “This is preposterous!” and storm out of the theater. I don’t think they will, but hopefully they’ll say its kind of a clever reference to the game.

So basically, this could have been titled any old thing, Aliens Vs Navy perhaps, and the movie would have been exactly the same. But by using the pre-sold name Battleship the studio’s marketing department has half their work cut out for them. And that’s pretty damn cynical if you ask me. But it nice to see Berg acknowledge what everyone else has been observing. At least he isn’t treating us like the idiots that the executives who greenlight this film seem to think we are. And for that, I am fa more inclined to see this picture than any amount of advertising or attempts at playing off my feelings of nostalgia for playing the game as a kid ever could.

Via Hollywood Reporter.

1. John Carter (Disney, 3,749 Theaters, 132 Minutes, Rated PG-13): Schadenfreude is the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. I don’t know if a movie can qualify as one of those “others,” but if it can, then this film is a shining example of the term in action. There’s a lot of pre-schadenfreude going on here. A lot of people are actively rooting for this film to fail.

To be fair, the film is calling a lot of the schadenfreude upon itself. It is a $250 million dollar film based on a character celebrating his 100th birthday this year. It has a writer/director with no live-action film experience, an unproven lead, and it’s a sword-and-sorcery concept melded with science-fiction that doesn’t usually set the world on fire.

However, that writer/director is Andrew Stanton, who has two, count’em, two Oscars for his work at Pixar (for Wall*E and Finding Nemo) and four other Oscar nominations.  That unproven lead is Taylor Kitsch, an actor who is playing a lead or co-lead in three huge pictures this year (this one, Battleship in May, and Savages in July), so it’s not that Hollywood doesn’t have faith in him. And that character and concept was created by Edgar Rice Burroughs (of Tarzan fame) who has lasted this long by building generation after generation of fans.

I’m typically negative here, but I’ll tell you what–I’m pulling for this film. I’m rooting for it. I hope it’s great and it pulls the audiences in. Try anti-schadenfreude sometime. It’s fun.

2. Silent House (Open Road Films, 2,124 Theaters, 85 Minutes, Rated R): For a horror film, this one has a lot going for it. It has Elizabeth Olsen, who probably should have gotten an Oscar nomination last year for her work in Martha Marcy May Marlene. And the film was shot as one continuous take–no editing. That is a great technical accomplishment.

However, it is a horror/suspense film. So, not being edited might not be the best thing for the film. You can build a lot of tension with a jump cut here and there. And the plot–a young women is sent to close up her familiy’s lakeside retreat, but while she is there, evil things starts to happen, would be totally conventional if it wasn’t for the continuous shot gimmick.

Who knows? The gimmick might work. But it might not.

3. A Thousand Words (Paramount/Dreamworks, 1,890 Theaters, 91 Minutes, Rated PG-13): Remember a couple months ago, when Tower Heist came out? You couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting some article stating that Eddie Murphy was back to his raunchy comedy film self. Those writers should have held off on publishing those articles until this film came out, because it has more in common with The Nutty Professor than 48 Hours or Trading Places.

Murphy plays a man who screws over a guru and becomes cursed. Whenever he says a word, a leaf falls off a tree in his yard. When the last leaf falls, he dies. The rest of the film involves him trying to make amends as quietly as he can so he can save his own life.

Doesn’t seem as bad as some of Murphy’s worst movies, but that’s not saying much.

While most genre movie fans have at least been faintly aware of Universal’s upcoming Battleship movie and how it seems to have very little to do with the actual Hasbro boardgame, judging by reactions I saw among family and friends last night on Facebook after the one minute commercial for the film aired not many in the general public were in on that fact. “What the hell? and “I don’t remember aliens in Battleship” were the common responses I’ve seen.

Now the common logic in adapting anything to the big screen is that there is already a brand name in the public’s consciousness that will make marketing the film easier. This is what you get when you hire people with MBAs to run your studios instead of people with actual filmmaking experience. But I wonder if that philosophy is going to backfire on the studio as the public sees more that this isn’t so much a movie about naval combat as it is an alien invasion film and decides to not plunkdown their money at the box office when it opens in May. Director Peter Berg could deliver a really thrilling action movie and the best that could be said about it may be “Why the hell didn’t they call this something else?”

If you’ve been wondering what kind of plot the writers of the movie Battleship could wring out of the Milton Bradley game, look no further than the just released teaser trailer for the film. Of course, if you’re like me, you’ll wind up wondering how they got that plot out of the famous game. Anyone else remember alien spaceships from when they played “Battleship” as a kid?

Directed by Peter Berg, Battleship opens May 18th, 2012 and stars Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgard, Liam Neeson, Brooklyn Decker, Rihanna, Josh Pence, Jesse Plemons and Peter MacNicol.

I have to admit that I have not been all that interested in Peter Berg’s upcoming film Battleship. I could never figure out logically why a story about the navy defending the planet from attacking aliens would need to be touted as an adaptation of an old board game that never had attacking aliens.

However, today’s casting of Liam Neeson in the film as an admiral has made me sit up and think about the film a little differently. Could there be something a bit more to the script initially written by Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoeber, and rewritten by Brian Koppelman and David Levien? Certainly the casting of Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgard, Rhianna and and model Brooklyn Decker didn’t really make me think that there was anything to but a quickly produced, mindless summer action pic.

Neeson’s character, Admiral Shane, will be the father of Decker’s character, who is engaged to a naval officer played by Kitsch. Skarsgard plays Kitsch’s older brother, while Rhianna’s a naval weapons analyst is the odd woman out and not seemingly related to the other characters.

Filming began on Battleship began today in Hawaii, but the film won’t be in theaters until May 2012.

Peter Berg is currently in talks with Universal Studios to helm a big screen adaptation of the naval warfare game “Battleship”. Sibling screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber have already been hired to script the project, which Universal is hoping to be some sort of rousing naval adventure.

If you’re scratching your head over why a Hollywood studio would want to develop a movie based on a game like Battleship, you’re not alone. On paper, toy lines and some board games look like good properties to adapt to the big screen. They have a certain name recognition/nostalgia factor with potential ticket buyers. They usually have a built in story line such as the warring robots of the Transformers toys or the murder mystery of the game Clue.

But Battleship does not really have a story that goes along with game play. Basically, its two ships firing cannons at each other. Not much of a plot there. Anything story that gets invented and grafted on this project could probably work just as well without it being a “Battleship movie.” It’s not like Hasbro/Milton Bradley has trademarked the entire concept of naval warfare. Do the producers really think that the name of the game will be a stronger box office draw than just a well done movie?

If so, what won’t they try to bring to the big screen? Coming soon- Jacks: The Movie? Sadly, that may just be the case, as this Hollywood Reporter article mentions that the board games Candyland, Monopoly and Ouija are also being developed as possible films.