Tales from the Black List: Pan (2015)

* *
Director: Joe Wright
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Levi Miller, Garrett Hedlund, Rooney Mara

When original ideas are in short supply, just turn a well-worn property into an origin story and call it "new." Pan is what I suppose you would call the "winner" of the great Peter Pan adaptation race that started about six years ago. Following in the footsteps of Snow White, who found herself in two different "re-imaginings" released in 2012, by 2011 there were no less than 5 Peter Pan projects in development, two called "Neverland" (one of which actually did get made as a miniseries prequel to Peter Pan, the other of which was a take with Peter Pan as the villain and Captain Hook as the hero), one called "Peter Pan" (a "family adventure"), one called "The.Never.Land" (described as a "Twilight-ish spin" on the relationship between Wendy and Peter), and one called "Pan" which would have seen Peter and Hook as brothers and which would have had Channing Tatum involved in some capacity. I'm not sure whether that "Pan" and this one are the same film a few re-writes apart but, at any rate, this version of the Peter Pan story, written by Jason Fuchs, made it onto 2013's Black List and presumably read much better on paper.

Tales From the Black List: Hancock (2008)

* * 1/2
Director: Peter Berg
Starring: Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman

But first, a story: I was perusing the Black List looking for a title that I could watch and write about for the feature and learned that Hancock, the 2008 Will Smith film that tries to deconstruct the superhero story, was part of the first ever list in 2005. Since I specifically use this feature to write about movies I've never written about before, I thought this was a non-starter because I was sure that I'd written about Hancock already. A quick search revealed that I was wrong about that, so I happily sat down to re-watch the film and promptly discovered that the reason I've never written about it is because I had not, in fact, ever seen it before. I'm not sure whether that says more about me (in my defense, I see a lot of movies) or about the film, which had such a long and winding trip from page to screen that it became part of Hollywood lore for a while, and which has such an easily digestible premise that apparently it can seem like you've seen the movie without ever having actually watched it. At any rate, here's Hancock, a movie that I've now definitely seen and which never really manages to pull itself together enough to bring its idea successfully to life.

Tales from the Black List: Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

* * 1/2
Director: Sam Raimi
Starring: James Franco, Michelle Williams, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz

In hindsight, the fact that Oz the Great and Powerful would be met with both enthusiasm and disdain was inevitable. The screenplay hit the Black List in 2010, about 8 months after the release and massive success of Alice in Wonderland, so the people who shell out money to make movies had every reason to be excited about the prospect of using people's connection to a beloved old property, pumping it full of CGI, and then watching the money roll in. But 3 years can be a long time in pop culture, particularly when your project is anchored by an actor who has become a lightning rod for animosity, and by the time Oz the Great and Powerful hit theaters, the knives were out. The film did okay box office-wise but was critically savaged and went on to become one of those movies that makes hundreds of millions at the box office but leaves absolutely no lasting mark on pop culture. As a result my expectations were pretty low, but to my surprise Oz the Great and Powerful is actually not terrible - it's not great, mind you, but it's a perfectly fine (if totally forgettable) movie.

Tales from the Black List: Z for Zachariah (2015)

* * *
Director: Craig Zobel
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Margot Robbie, Chris Pine

I've never read the novel Z for Zachariah but I imagine that if I had, I would have been dumbfounded by the film adaptation, which diverges so sharply from the plot of the novel that it almost seems like an "in name only" adaptation. The film appears to have borrowed the premise of the book in order to tell a completely different story, one which is at times quietly captivating but ultimately a little disappointing, and now that I know what the novel's plot was, I would really like to have seen that movie instead. None of this is the fault of the cast, who all do very good work here, but the original story sounds a lot more psychologically fascinating than the post-apocalyptic love triangle that the movie, whose screenplay appeared in the 2009 edition of the Black List alongside such big-ticket screenplays as The Social Network and The King's Speech (but also, somehow, That's My Boy), relies on.

Tales from the Black List: The Voices (2014)

* *
Director: Marjane Satrapi
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Anna Kendrick, Gemma Arterton

It's a bad sign that the only time I truly felt engaged by The Voices was when the screen faded to black and the credits began, revealing Marjane Satrapi as its director. It was such a jolt that I actually said, "Really?" and second-guessed what I just saw. I remain confused at how Satrapi, whose autobiographical Persepolis so actively engages with the meaning and effect of patriarchy and misogyny, could be at the helm of a film about a guy who kills a bunch of women because he just can't seem to help himself, but seems to have nothing to actually say about the fact that this guy keeps killing women because he just can't seem to help himself. Maybe the script, which was written by Michael R. Perry and featured in the 2009 edition of the Black List, read better on the page. On screen it's weirdly flat and never musters up enough energy to succeed at the comedy half of the horror-comedy hybrid.

Tales From the Black List: 50/50 (2011)

* * *
Director: Jonathan Levine
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogan

"That doesn't make any sense though. I mean, I don't smoke, I don't drink, I recycle..." Cancer is the great equalizer. You can do everything right and live an entirely unimpeachable life, you can be young or old, male or female, be anyone anywhere, and still get the news. Loosely based on screenwriter Will Reiser's experience with cancer 50/50, which was part of the 2008 Black List (a list which also included such films as Inglorious Basterds, Up in the Air, The Descendants, Easy A, Foxcatcher and Sherlock Holmes), doesn't linger on the shock of the diagnosis. It comes fast, is given a moment, and then the film carries on, cycling through the stages of grief as it follows its protagonist, whose story is as much about him learning to deal with his diagnosis as it is him learning how to deal with the people around him as they deal with his diagnosis. It's a film that finds the comedy in tragedy, alternately funny and moving, and ultimately very humane.

Tales From the Black List: The Judge (2014)

* *
Director: David Dobkin
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall

Back in the days before movies lived and died by their opening weekends, films like The Judge were Hollywood's bread and butter. A mid-budget drama where the stakes are emotional more than anything, as opposed to the now commonplace massive budget behemoths where the stakes are no less than the survival of the world itself, and where a big star gets to flex his muscle as an actor, The Judge is the kind of movie that used to be a no-brainer. Times change, of course, and now projects that used to seem risk free on paper struggle to recoup even their modest budgets (though The Judge might have helped itself by cutting 30 minutes from its running time and making the first casualty its weird and wholly unnecessary incest plot). The market is no longer particularly favorable to movies like this, but I can understand why they tried and why this would have seemed like a good idea when the script hit Hollywood. Old habits die hard, after all.

Tales From the Black List: Pawn Sacrifice (2015)

* * *
Director: Edward Zwick
Starring: Tobey Maguire, Liev Schreiber

The story of Bobby Fischer is so strange and fascinating that the surprising thing about Pawn Sacrifice is not that it would end up on the Black List, but that a feature film based on Fischer's story hadn't already been made before the first list was published in 2005. Pawn Sacrifice, written by Steven Knight (screenwriter of Eastern Promises and the upcoming Allied), made the 2009 list and when it made it to the screen last year became the first non-documentary film about Fischer, which is kind of surprising when you think about it. You would think that a true story of an American triumphing over a Russian on the world stage would have made it to the screen sometime between the actual triumph of the Miracle on Ice and the fiction triumph of Rocky vs. Drago, but then again perhaps Fischer himself (who died in 2008) was what kept his story from getting to the screen. At any rate, Pawn Sacrifice benefits from being such an interesting story that it would be difficult to go wrong with it, though it never does manage to quite become everything that it could be even with a great performance at its center.

Tales From the Black List: Dirty Grandpa (2016)

*
Director: Dan Mazer
Starring: Robert De Niro, Zac Efron

Released every year since 2005, the "Black List" is a list of the most widely liked unproduced screenplays floating around Hollywood. It's not a "best" list, per say, but rather a list of the screenplays that have garnered favorable reactions from the most people in the film industry. Among the films to make the list are Best Picture winners Spotlight, Argo, The King's Speech, and Slumdog Millionaire, as well as Best Picture nominees Django Unchained, The Social Network, There Will Be Blood, Juno, and The Queen, among others, and at least one Black List screenplay has been Oscar nominated every year since 2006. So, it's a fairly prestigious list that has included some of the films considered, and awarded as, the best of the best by the industry. It is also, however, a list that has included such ill-received films as Wild Hogs (14% on Rotten Tomatoes), Our Brand Is Crisis (35%), That's My Boy (20%), The Last Witch Hunter (16%), and Sex Tape (17%). So they certainly aren't all winners, which goes a long way to explaining how a film like Dirty Grandpa could have made the list despite being completely awful.