I just saw Moonrise Kingdom and it was a beautiful, glorious film that I loved every minute of (except for the few minutes that made me uncomfortable), but I’m not going to talk about that right now. Instead, I would like to discuss a trailer I saw for the film Branded
First, according to its imdb page, it was originally titled The Mad Cow which I like as a title much more than Branded, but that’s just my opinion. Hell, I wanted the movie Zoo to be titled In the forest of the night, there are many birds, so I’m kinda weird like that.
As you can see, the central premise is that corporations are really just covers for aliens or something and they have poisoned our minds to buy their crap. While some may remark that this is brilliant or innovative, anyone who has read a Grant Morrison comic is probably think, “Well . . . yeah.”
Morrison’s “Pop Magic!” article is a perfect example of this similar idea when he discusses the idea of a Supersigil. I won’t go into what all of that means, but if you don’t remember or if you’re interested, here is a link to my article about Batman Inc that discusses Super-sigils.
As I described to Sam, this movie seems like it will discuss all of the parts of Morrison’s the Invisibles that The Matrix left out: interdimensional beings, corporations, being able to see beyond the veil of reality to what is really going on. Okay . . . so maybe The Matrix technically did those things, but they portrayed them in a sci-fi way rather than in a magical way. From what I gather in the trailer for Branded, it seems more like it is focused on the magic, but it has taken out the kung fu, the leather, and the guns.
So, it might suck.
Then again, it has hipster favorite actor Max Von Sydow, so it might be as brilliant as Seventh Seal or as horrible as his race drag from Flash Gordon.
However, it seems at least a little coincidental that this movie is being distributed in 2012, doesn’t it, Invisibles fans?
Sam and I are both waffling on this one and I’m curious what you think. Does it look cool or not?
It definitely borrows from Morrison’s imagination, but I think it still looks like it could be a great flick. Also, isn’t that kind of influence the whole point behind the hypersigil, i.e. reorienting the mass consciousness so that the cultural mind adapts, re-envisions, and evolves the dialogue of the idea?
Recall what Grant Morrison said when he discovered that back issues of The Invisibles were floating around on the set of The Matrix during principle filming. On one hand it was all but a rip-off, but on the other hand he had released the hypersigil into the world to do what it was supposed to do, and that was one of the ways that it manifested itself.