Darren Aronofsky’s sure-to-be-controversial new film Noah, based on the Old Testament story, is already getting less than stellar reviews from religious test audiences. Paramount is pushing for a different cut, in order to broaden the films appeal, even if it means going against Aronofsky’s artistic vision. Paramount has a huge investment in the 125 million dollar picture (Aronofsky’s most expensive yet), so they have reason for concern.

However, it should come as no surprise to them that anything less than “Kirk Cameron presents Noah” would rub religious fundamentalists the wrong way. The irony is that the atheist, Darren Aronofsky, is probably more familiar with the story of Noah than the zealots who decry his interpretation. Paramount’s best course of action is to trust in their award-winning filmmaker and embrace the controversy. As Life of Brian and Dogma have shown, religious protests will actually generate more revenue for the film.

Aronofsky has reportedly been dismissive of Paramount’s suggestions. Hopefully, he stays true to his vision, as the March 2014 release isn’t far off and this has the potential to be a truly original artistic endeavor. To make a half-assed biblical analogy, Aronofsky should continue to treat Paramount the same way Noah treated skeptics, with inattention.

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You may have heard of a similar service before, one that offers unlimited movies at a theater for a monthly fee, but MoviePass is taking the idea national-wide. The idea is that with constantly rising ticket prices, people are attending the movies less than ever just as media subscription services like Netflix are at an all-time high of popularity. What MoviePass aims to do is take advantage of the subscription phenomenon while also making movie attendance in masse more affordable.

Right now, movie tickets weigh in around $12, with matinees slashing a few bucks and 3D or IMAX screenings jacking up the rate, sometimes significantly. Instead of paying for each and every theater venture, MoviePass lets you pay for a service that would allow unlimited monthly screenings. While the service is definitely a great investment for those of you who are already attending a handful of movies a month, it may not be worth it for people who only make a few trips to the theater.

But just do the math. If you’re seeing four movies a month at $12 a pop, you’re averaging just shy of $50 a month. A monthly subscription to MoviePass is just $35. If you’re like me and see upwards of 25 movies a month, the savings provided by this type of service can be monumental. Although I get the critics special privilege of not paying for my movies, you better believe me: if I weren’t, I would sign up for this in a heart beat.

Like Netflix gives people the impetus to seek out things that they otherwise would probably never be exposed to, MoviePass gives you a reason to go to the theater because the more you go, the cheaper it is! The only hitch is that you need to sign up for a whole year.

MoviePass is available at 95% of theaters nation-wide, with 14 theaters participating in the Seattle area, seven in San Francisco, and a whopping 52 in New York City.

Take into account that MoviePass only provides for movies that are shown in 2D though so anyone whose got a major need to strap on those goofy glasses need look elsewhere. The icing on the cake is that there aren’t any strings attached like blackout date or movie exceptions.

I sound like a salesman but I really just pumped about the product. Let me know if you end up giving it a try!

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Culture is a thing worthy of celebration, not a placeholder. It’s a proud artifact of a civilization that distinguishes its unique place in the world while offering a respectful homage to the past. In large part, world cinema is dictated by Hollywood but the cross-pollination taking place here crosses a line in the sand, using cultural differences as a means to gut and sanitize a film that was once called great. This Americanized cut clearly is not.

Foreign films like Amelie aim to invite us into a distinctly different world that works not in spite of their cultural inconsistencies with our more familiar Hollywood fare but because of them. Amelie wasn’t hacked down, re-spliced and formatted to fit an American audience ideal of three-act basics. It was perfect just the way it was.

Likewise, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Y Tu Mamá También didn’t bandage its decadent carnal acts. It wore its overtly sexualized heart on its sleeve, regardless of the puritan American mainstream who just so happened to gulp it up. We didn’t need a redux where everything just so happens to work out in the end because we didn’t need it. Similarly, Guillermo del Toro‘s bleak Pan’s Labyrinth wasn’t sterilized with a storybook ending. No, we couldn’t wash the gritty, greasy afterbirth nightmares we get from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days out of our brains and yet it’s a film that would have been laughed right out of the studio system. It works because it showed us something different, something distinctly non-American.

This brings us to The Grandmaster, a film referred to by the droves who saw it open at the Berlin International Film Festival as a “masterpiece.” I can tell you frankly, what I saw was no masterpiece. The narrative shifts felt wooden, character movement is frantic and often ungrounded and an attempt to simplify two life stories into one 108-minute film reaches too far. There are moments of grandeur, some stunning camera work and often interesting focal points for the masterful kung-fu battles splayed throughout the film but these are overshadowed by a disjointed narrative and increasing sense of something missing. The only rational conclusion is that in hopping from one continent to another, something has been lost in translation.

Produced over the course of three years (filming itself dictating almost two years), director Wong Kar-wai admits that he himself took a scissor to the original 130 minute cut to make it more “Americanized.” Although he stands behind the select-copy-deleting of entire portions of his film, we have to wonder what qualifies a Hong Kong native as an arbiter for what works best for an American audience. Over at The Huffington Post, Wai had a chance to speak out and express his stamp of approval on this US cut of the film:

“As a filmmaker, let me say that the luxury of creating a new cut for U.S. audiences was the opportunity to reshape it into something different than what I began with — a chance one doesn’t always get as a director and an undertaking much more meaningful than simply making something shorter or longer.”

Here, Kar-wai admits how his reshaping impacts the final result in far more ways than run-time. What he fails to realize is just how much he has castrated his film by attempting to perfect it for an audience that he doesn’t understand.

For a parallel from the past on how edits can entirely change the meaning of a film, take for example Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner. Now often called a “sci-fi masterpiece,” Scott’s original vision was buried under a studio-ordered voice-over ending that made the conclusion seem more suitable and close-booked than the vaguely ambiguous and much more thought-provoking original cut. Thankfully, that edit was largely redacted and Scott’s far superior vision was able to shine through to his audiences via his much-celebrated Director’s Cut. What Blade Runner proves is that even a fragment as short as a minute can change the entire course of a film. Accordingly, it is without question that a re-cut removing a whole 22 minutes can morph a masterpiece into just another lukewarm kung-fu film.

Another flagrant case of authorial manipulation is Anthony Burgess‘s fiery novel A Clockwork Orange. In the American version of the novel, the last chapter was excised entirely – cut clean from the book and swept away. For those unfamiliar with the novel, it involves a young, rapey ruffian, Alex, who is institutionalized in experimental hopes of ridding him of his ultra-violent ways (involving methods too extreme even for the US government). Much lo and behold, after all of this course-correction, Alex eventually returns to a life of debauchery and evil doing. This is where the American-version of the book and the still fantastic Stanley Kubrick film end.

With this conclusion, we’re meant to take away that you can’t change a bird’s feathers permanently just by painting them a different color. We get it. But the original novel jumps forward a ways into the future where Alex just suddenly grows out of being such a mean-spirited douche, entirely changing the message so precisely lain into the framework of the story. It says, “Change comes only from within, never from an outside source forcing it upon you.” But those conniving publishers thought this was too much flip-flopping for an American audience to comprehend and instead reshaped the message and shifted the entire cultural zeitgeist revolving around this great work of art.

Returning to The Grandmaster, even though having the approval of director Kar-wai frames the whole re-editing process in a less authoritarian light than what took place in Scott and Burgess’s work, it is still a manipulation of vision for the percieved sake of an audience. An audience he obviously fails to understand. Like George Lucas returning to our beloved Star Wars trilogy (you know which one I’m referring to) and making Greedo shoot first, little changes make a big difference.

I wish that I had indeed seen the original cut of the film as I feel like I could fairly access it on different terms if that was the case, but as is, The Grandmaster feels doggedly incomplete. It’s packed with some truly stunning cinematography and a bulk of inspired directorial choices but is cut down by the hand that feeds it, resulting in a strange cross-cultural-hybrid nearly as confused as it is confusing.

First things first, this editorial features in-depth discussion on Iron Man 3 so if you haven’t yet seen it turn back now. Don’t say I didn’t tell you so because SPOILERS FOLLOW…

Ok now that you’ve made it through, let’s talk Kevin Feige and Iron Man 3. So anyone who had seen one trailer, poster, T.V. spot or any semblance of marketing out of the third Iron Man campaign who be sure to tell you that Sir Ben Kingsley plays the villain, The Mandarin. Anyone who has seen the film however knows full-well that the Mandarin is actually a scapegoat, a performance, a fake. He’s the personification of our American fears of others, specifically when it comes to his eccentric Middle Eastern style of dress but when the camera’s stop rolling he’s actually just Trevor, a fickle English actor getting the role of a lifetime.

When this fact was revealed, I did a double-take. Was this some fake-out or a body-double? No, it was just plain old Trevor. I felt cheated. I had been waiting for my Ben Kingsley villainy and he’s nothing more than a hack thespian?! It took me a good twenty minutes to come to terms with the fact that Kingsley was not in fact the villain, even though I was under the impression from the first production announcement out of the Marvel camp that he would be.

Not only did Marvel head exec Kevin Feige, he rep Kingsley as the villain, he even talked up his performance as one of the fear-inducing dread:

“On his last take of his first full day as the Mandarin, when they yelled ‘Cut!’ the entire crew burst into applause, spearheaded by Mr. Downey himself…It was pretty amazing to see that. That’s what you get when you hire Sir Ben Kingsley. He’s so excited about his part and so into this character, and frankly just scaring the heck out of everybody…They’re like, ‘You’ve broken us out of our skeptical malaise!’

The more I began to dissect that gotcha! moment, the more I respected the long con on Feige’s part. In this information age, nothing is secret and nothing is sacred. There’s set photos snapped from iPhones, spoiler alerts that saturate online forums before the movie even gets close to theaters and trailers themselves have become more SparkNotes than intrigue builders. What Fiege has done is dupped us all into expecting something and pulling the carpet from under us. Did it work though? Yes and no.

On the one hand, he got me. He got my brother. He got probably most of the theater I was in. As far as subverting expectations, well done sir. He has managed to proof that Marvel and Co. are not strictly subject to the overflowing rumor mill and are willing to play their own crafty hand to mislead and deceive expectant audiences and impart a degree of surprise.

On the other hand, I feel like this bit of maneuvering is just a little confusing. Now that we know that Kingsley is just a goof in a silly robe isn’t it ridiculous that he’ll be plastered all over the posters and Blu-Ray covers? Guy Pearce put on a great performance as the true villain, Killian, and yet he won’t really be getting any cred nor will we see posters of Iron Man punching Killian in his fiery face (which I would personally love to see). It was a big risk and potentially could have alienated audiences but, IMO, it was a risk that paid off for the most part.

The question going forward is where will we see Feige-led deception next? Is the misleading something we can expect more of in the future or was this a one-and-done gambit? Honestly, I say keep the surprises coming. I like when you make me go – ‘Huh?’

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You may have seen the headlines strewn across internet banners that Iron Man 3 has bested the opening weekend of The Avengers internationally, putting it on track not only to be the biggest box office monster of the summer but also entering it in a position to duke it out for one of the top spots of all time. While The Avengers pulled in $185.1 million internationally on its opening weekend last May, Iron Man 3 has surpassed that opening take with $195.3 million to its name. And that’s before it opens in US theaters.

Thus far, reviews have been positively glowing and it’s got to nab a CinemaScore in the A/A+ range so it really seems like the sky is the limit for the Marvel behemoth.

The question is, will it best The Avengers hefty opening weekend that soared past highest expectations with $207.4 million? Probably not, as it is tracking somewhere around the $167M mark. Personally, I expect it to get closer to that prized $200M slot, but probably not to top it.If I had to put money down, I’d say it winds up somewhere in the $188M range but would not be surprised to see it blow past that number.

As for the residuals, so long as it snags the great CinemaScore that it seems to already have in the bank, hold-overs are sure to be good on this one and with nearly $200M in the bank already, this is sure to be a wild success irregardless. Will it reach that massive billy international mark though? I believe it will. It just needs time.

Iron Man 3, directed by Shane Black and starring Robert Downey Jr, Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Kingsley, Guy Pearce and Jon Favreau, hits theaters this Thursday, May 2.

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