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League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Trailer
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League of Extraordinary Gentleman Trailer is on apple.com. It's in quicktime. And since I'm downloading at under 3k a second, I'll let others comment on it. Here's hopin'
Can't help but think they messed up naming this one - everyone (in the UK anyway) is going to confuse it with the League of Gentlemen - a very twisted black comedy.
What is with the sudden onslaught of superhero movies?
Interesting point. In times of trouble (war, for instance) people need heroes. I have seen many news stories to this effect. Its a 'nurture' type need. For those of us in the US, a few more heroes would be a good thing, post 9-11.
In trying times, people don't want to see the bad guys win, and movie makers know that. I would imagine many projects where "good wins over evil" that were sitting on the sidelines pre 9-11 were given a second look, and we are just now beginning to see the fruits of this.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I saw the trailer before Daredevil, and I have to say, this could be incredibly good, or it can be the worst thing ever to grace the silver screen, beyond the badness of Batman and Robin. There will be no halfways on this thing.
I was really psyched by the various characterizations, though; they seemed spot-on. And the voiceover sounds like they kept the, um, moral ambiguity aspect of the Alan Moore stuff. Hopefully he had a large hand in the story/script...
Too bad Sean Connery is such a bigger star than anyone else; this means that the center of the story is likely to be Alan Quatermain, rather than, um, whatsherface. I wonder if he will be the leader, just because of the star power present there...
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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a comic book written by Alan Moore. The movie is extremely loosely based upon the first six issues, which comprise the first volume. The movie, due to its rather frightening changes, has a rather high suck-potential, but the trailer gave me hope.
The comic books are very good, however. Alan Moore has read every book ever written. And he really likes the ones written in and about Victorian England. In the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen reality, just about every book and character ever written is real. The level of detail is astounding. Check it out.
B.
We must respect evil, and we must make evil respect us.
I found this site, which sort of explains the origins.
Physics: Making the universe open source.
Buy the original graphic novel now before it is out of print and zooms up in price.
The league of Extraordinary Gentleman was a Comic written by Alan Moore (at least for some time, I haven't read it myself though I've heard about it).
Basically it consists of pulp heros and villains, like alan quartermain (as in Alan quartermain and the lost city of gold, which i have seen, No imdb but plot synopsis here. )
Basically Moore rewrites the characters of british pulp mythology in ways reminiscent of The Watchmen.
The Invisible man has sex with girls at a boarding school. It's that kind of comic I guess.
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"The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is a very successful comic book written by Alan Moore, who also wrote "Watchmen" with Dave Gibbons (THE comic book of the '80s) and "From Hell" with Eddie Campbell (which was recently made into a movie with Johnny Depp and Heather Graham).
The comic book follows the adventures of several fictional Victorian characters (like Alan Quartermain and the Invisible Man).
For more information on Alan Moore, you should check out The Alan Moore Fansite. LoEG is really worth the read.it looks like a lot of people haven't heard of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and are passing this off as a matrix/x-men/whatnot ripoff.
;) true, it has the slick look of just about any another special-effects movie, but give it a chance.
if you want to know more about the comic book, take a look here.
come on guys, this is a comic book. i thought you were geeks?
It might look like I'm standing motionless, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is kinda like X-Men 1800's sytle with a dash of James Bond both in story and because it includes Sean Connery.
The League is a recuited by MI-5 to protect England and includes Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea," Alan Quartermain from H. Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines," and Jekyll/Hyde of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", H. G. Wells' "The Invisible Man" and Mina Harker from Bram Stoker's "Dracula"
From the Alan Moore graphical novel http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1563898586
That only gave me a 1K... something (I assume it's supposed to switch me to the trailer stream, but I'm using mplayer so it didn't work too well). The full trailer is available here.
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complaining about a low download speed on slashdot is certainly the best way to improve it...
Fleur de Sel
Hollywood seems to follow a pack mentality at times, but this time I think they've actually hit the right cultural spot...
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Good to know /. still has the requisite number of arrogant losers hanging around. Your comment is right up there with "Let them eat cake."
To be honest, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is probably one of my less favorite Alan Moore comics, but I've never been a big fan of the genre of dumping a bunch of unrelated characters into a narrative. Perhaps the worst example is Young Indiana Jones in which kid wonder Jones bumps into every historical figure of the 20th century. People who realy think that an Aliens vs. Predator movie would be "cool" should be profoundly pittied. League does not have the rich exploration of diverse characters bound to a common fate that makes The Watchmen work nor does it have the political poetry of V for Vendetta or the raw mystical imagination of Promethia. V is probably the Alan Moore work I would most like to see translated to the silver screen and the least likely to be made.
I will probably go see this for many of the same reasons that I saw Daredevil a movie about which the best I can say is that it didn't suck, and it enabled me to listen in on a funny conversation about Ben Afflec's chin afterwards. Perhaps this time I'll wait for the $2 theatre.
From the trailer, we have an adaptation that isn't an adaptation. Part of the fun of the comic was the inside jokes on these Victorian characters put into a "Justice League" situation. The trailer delivers little more than "Blade" in 19th century England.
Actually I think it is more economic than anything else. I think we are past the post-Joel Schumacher/Batman and Robin backlash which iced the idea of comic book movies for a while. Then X-Men came along and, although flimsy, it went on to make big cash. From that Marvel was able to sell the rights to three of its biggest movies (Hulk, Daredevil, and Spiderman... along with franchising X-Men).
This occured after 2000 (when X-Men was released and became a hit). Soon after that the rights were sold and all the projects entered the development stages (I remember the whispers appearing online and in publications like Wizard at the time), over a year before 9-11.
Sure they might get more push now but you have to remember how long it takes for the movie industry to go from buying the rights on a movie to lining up the off-screen talent that will pick the on-screen talent to writing the screenplay... even before shooting starts.
Take Daredevil. According to the Coming Attractions page on it, February 24, 2000 was the first time that Mark Johnson's (the director) name was attached to the project and July 13, 2000 when New Regency locked him in along with the Electra and Kingpin properties to make the movie. Over a year before WTC.
What is music when you despise all sound?
And since I'm downloading at under 3k a second, I'll let others comment on it.
Let me get this straight - your're dissatisfied with the speed at which you can download this thing, so what do you do? You LINK TO IT ON SLASHDOT? Do you understand CAUSE AND EFFECT???
Everyone's saying this movie is set in Victorian England. Queen Victoria ruled until 1901. That car, and the WWII-style German helmets, don't look "Victorian" to me.
And besides the Victorian anachronisms, why is it never daytime there?
Heh...some other movies that shouldn't be made besides Aliens vs. Predator (which COULD be a REALLY cool movie)...
Paul Atredies vs. Harry Seldon
Borg vs. Vorlons
Gremlins vs. The Littles
MIB vs. Illuminati
US vs. Iraq
Tech Support vs. the Vast Horde o'Clueless
Count Chocula vs. Lucky
The Thing vs. the Blob
IE vs. Opera (bork bork bork)
Cats and dogs living together...TOTAL CHAOS!
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I don't understand this need for heros, if indeed it truly exists. Does anyone else find the thought that Americans are so frail and weak minded that we need heros to comfort/inspire/nurture/motivate/whatever us, to be somewhat pathetic?
Most find heroes inspiring. We look for the best qualities in our hereos that we hope to find in ourselves. Heroes remind us that the fight is worth fighting, and that in the end, generally, good does win over evil if the goal is worth sacrificing for.
Not everyone believes this. I do. I think the motivations behind every day heroes (doing the right thing) is stronger than the motivations behind the bad guys (self gain), in general.
To most persons, heroes don't represent any new ideals, rather, they affirm the deep convictions of those who admire them. This is not a bad thing in and of itself.
Wanting to watch virtual heroes defeat the bad guys doesn't make me weak as an American. It reinforces the American ideal that ordinary persons can do extraordinary things when they do it for the right reasons.
As a form of entertainment, I find this much more palatable and uplifting than "Faces of Death", "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "Scream".
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The comic's pulp brilliance also relies upon Kevin O'Neil, the hyper-frenetic, stylistic artist who has brought us (along with writer Pat Mills) such sick-humor nightmares as Marshall Law (one of the original and best post-modern deconstructions of superheroes, but one all about the humor and the sado-masochism). Kevin got his start with British imprint AD 2000, responsible for such stalwarts as Judge Dread and Slaine, working with Pat on stuff like Warlock.
I recommend LoEG the comic quite heartily (despite Ain't it Cool's support. . .even a stopped clock is right twice a day). It's written in the tradition of Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton books, where he takes such characters as Tarzan and Doc Savage and writes his own 'more realistic' adventures mixing them with other pulp heroes and villains. Moore can't use these characters due to our criminal copyright laws (he wanted to originally with the Twilight of the Superheroes series, the proposed DC book of which Kingdom Come was a very weak but direct rip-off) so he had to go back to earlier characters.
For those with twisted humor and a high tolerance for violence, I especially recommend looking for the original graphic novel collection of Marshall Law, Marshall Law: Fear and Loathing.
O'Neill's over-the-top art work is as detailed as Moore's references, and without it LoEG wouldn't be half the book that it is.
Additionally, LoEG predates the show League of Gentlemen. As for the trailer, it looks fun, but also a bit sad as they felt the need to turn Mina Harker into a vampire. I suppose that's their idea of grrl power, the dumbest/most-hypocritical ploy in marketing history (baby, you've come a long way. . .not only can you smoke yourself into an early tomb, but now you can be as brain-dead violent as so many Neanderthal men!)
This will be impossible for the generation which follows us. I guess that means no blockbusters with Tom Clancy's characters turned loose to fight Mr. Bean on Jurassic park with Crockett and Tubbs.
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Never been known to fail..."
Your comment is right up there with "Let them eat cake."
Actually, "let them eat cake" is a missquote. When Marie Antoinette was told that the peasents had no bread, she replied 'Why don't they eat brioche', since in the royal family brioche had always been availible when the bread had run out. It was not an arrogant statement, simply one which showed how utterly removed from the real world she was.
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If this film is a success, it could move us all one step closer to "Watchmen."
I think Pharmboy is totally correct in his assessment of "trying times," which closely parallells Adrian Veidt's thoughts near the 11th hour of Watchmen.
. . . and I know a pretty good actor who will work for scale if you'll let him be in the movie.
"Let them eat cake" is a slander against Marie-Antoinette, and an especially heinous one because she took a very active role in trying to relieve the famine in France.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau attributed the words to "a great princess" in his "Confessions" which was written about three years before Marie-Antoinette arrived in France in 1770. So she couldn't have been the original source of the quote.
The situation gets more interesting than that. Under French law, bakers were obliged to sell certain bread products at a fixed price. To prevent the obvious trick of baking only a few cheap rolls then using the bulk of the flour to make expensive products, the law obligated the bakers to sell more expensive products at the cheaper price if the cheap rolls ran out.
"Let them eat cake" was far from a sign of indifference or ignorance, it was a very humanitarian call: the bread shortage could be alleviated if the law was enforced against profiteering bakers.
But alas history is written by the victors, and the French Revolutionaries had a vested interest in making Marie-Antoinette seem foolish and callous.
--
Steven