Pirate Cinema

Chapter 4

A shot across the bow/Friends from afar/Whatever floats your boat/Let's put on a show!

What's worse than making a great comic into a crap film? Making a great comic into eigh- teen crap films. Which is exactly what they did to Milady de Winter, which sold zillions of books in Japan before it was translated into English and forty-five other languages, sweep- ing the globe with its modern retelling of The Three Musketeers. So naturally, it became one of the most anticipated films of the century by kids all over the planet. They signed the best-grossing adult actors in Hollywood to play the villains, and imported two Bolly- wood actors, Prita Kapoor and Rajiv Kumar to play the beautiful visiting princess and the evil king of the thieves. The producer, who mostly made films where computer-generated space-ships fought deadly duels over poorly explained political differences, explained that these actors would “Open up the billion-strong Desi film-going market,” in an interview that made it clear that his $400,000,000 film was an investment vehicle, not a piece of art.

They got the cutest child actors. The finest special effects wizards. The best toy and video-game tie-ins, and advertisements that were slathered over every stationary surface and public vehicle in places as distant and unlikely as Bradford, and Milady de Winter was a success. Opening weekend box-office smashed all records with a $225,000,000 tally, and all told, the first one alone was reckoned as a billion dollar profit to Paramount studios and its investors.

Only one problem: it was an utter piece of shit. Seriously. I saw it when I was only twelve and even though I was barely a fan of the comics, even I was offended on behalf of every half-way intelligent kid in the world. Every actor in the film was brilliant, but the words they were asked to speak were not: it was like the film had been written with boxing gloves on. Whenever the dialog got too horrible to bear, the director threw in another high-speed and pointless action sequence, each wankier and stupider than the last, until by the end of the film, it was climaxing with a scene where swordfighters leapt hundreds of feet into the air, tossing their swords into enemy soldiers as they fell, skewering several at once like a kebab, then doing an acrobatic midair somersault, snatching the blades clean of the dead bad guys, and whirling them overhead like a helicopter rotor for a gentle landing. The critics hated it. The reviews were so uniformly negative that the quotes on the film posters were reduced to a single word, like:

• “Action” - The New York Times

• “Fast” - The Guardian

• “Adventure” - The Globe and Mail

Of course, the actual reviews said things like, “Too much action, not enough thought,” or “Scenes that move fast without managing to excite,” or “Turning one of history's best-loved adventure stories into yet another trite Hollywood blockbuster.”

So, what happened with this miserable, festering gush of cinematic puke? It was only the most profitable film in history. So profitable that they were already shooting the sequel before the opening weekend. Everybody I know saw them. Even me. And no one I knew liked them, but we all went anyway. And there was so much marketing tie-in, it was impossible to avoid: school gave out orange squash in Milady de Winter paper cups on fun- run days, sad men on the streets holding signs handed out Milady de Winter coupons for free chips at Yankee Fried Chicken and Fish (which didn't even let school kids eat there), the animated hoardings during the World Cup replayed the stupidest scenes in endless loops.

The standard joke was that Milady de Winter films were just barely tolerable if you down- loaded the Italian dubbed version and pretended you were looking at an opera. I tried it. It didn't make the experience any better. And still, we kept going to see the sequels, and still, they kept making more, two or sometimes three per year.