Category: Thoughts

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

Inglourious Basterds

Inglorious Basterds UK posterInglorious Basterds is an insane but deeply satisfying World War II spaghetti western.

Imagine if Sergio Leone and Francois Truffaut co-directed The Dirty Dozen after someone had sprinkled LSD on their lunchtime pasta and you’ll get a good idea of Quentin Tarantino’s latest film.

Set in its own alternative universe, it boldly reinvents the traditional war movie as a stylish revenge western whilst also paying deep reverence to cinema itself.

It will almost certainly divide audiences and critics, but this, for me, was a significant return to form for the writer and director.

Tarantino is one of those rare film-makers who became famous as a modern day auteur in the 1990s and it is worth recapping his career to date, to get a gauge of where this fits in to his career.

With his debut Reservoir Dogs (1992) he exploded on to the scene with a stunning heist movie that marked him out as a major talent with a particular ear for dialogue and an appetite for shocking violence.

Pulp Fiction (1994) not only built on the success of his debut but managed to become one of the defining films of the decade: it won the Palme d’Or; grossed over $200 million world wide; revitalised careers; spawned a raft of imitators and became a cultural phenomenon.

Jackie Brown (1997) perhaps could never live up to the acclaim and success of Pulp Fiction but it contains some of his best and most mature work, especially the performances of Pam Grier and Robert Forster.

Kill Bill Vol 1 (2003) and Kill Bill Vol 2 (2004) was long, drawn out revenge epic with Uma Thurman as an assassin that featured some brilliant sequences but felt like one film spread out too thinly over two.

The Grindhouse (2007) project was a double bill homage to 70’s exploitation cinema with Robert Rodriguez making the zombie horror ‘Planet Terror‘ and Tarantino making the stalker drama ‘Death Proof‘.

It flopped at the box office, which resulted in it being released as two separate films and thus ultimately defeating the point of being a double bill.

His work in that was mixed, with dull sequences with annoyingly verbose female characters contrasted with an underrated turn from Kurt Russell as the villain and a thrilling climax.

All of this brings us to Inglourious Basterds, a project that Tarantino has been developing on and off for years, which finally went in to production last autumn.

It is a World War II story (with significant chunks of history rewritten for effect) which involves a large ensemble cast of characters, who are slowly drawn into a tale of revenge.

There is a young Jewish woman (Melanie Laurent) who escapes the slaughter of her family by a ‘Jew hunting’ Nazi (Christophe Waltz); a group of Nazi-hunting commandos known as ‘The Basterds’ led by a Southern lieutenant (Brad Pitt); a British agent (Michael Fassbender) behind enemy lines; a Nazi war hero (Daniel Bruhl) who has become a film star; an German actress double agent (Diane Kruger) and the Nazi high command of Hitler (Martin Wuttke) and Goebbels (Sylvester Groth).

Now, you may have already heard of the decidedly mixed reaction to the film at the Cannes film festival this year, in which some critics declared their hatred of the film.

But after the hysterical reaction to Antichrist earlier this year and the misguided vitriol hurled at Che the year before I’m beginning to wonder if some critics are getting too affected by the early screenings, parties and stress of the festival.

When I sat down to watch Inglourious Basterds yesterday I did so with a degree of trepidation as I’ve fallen a little out of love with Tarantino’s work. Despite numerous qualities, the films of the past decade simply don’t compare to those in the previous.

But the good news is that this actually delivers the goods and whilst it isn’t in the same league as his first two films it is absorbing, well crafted filmmaking laced with considerable wit and style.

The big rap on it from some critics is that there is too much talk and that it is boring, but from the bravura opening sequence (a homage to an early sequence from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) it had me hooked and if you think about, even Tarantino’s best films have been much more talk than action.

That opening scene is superbly handled – a master class in tension, involving a Nazi having a drink with a French farmer – and it sets up the rest of the story beautifully.

A lot of the film does involve characters talking for extended periods and there is a notable lack of conventional action sequences, but this is actually a strength rather than a weakness.

The main reason for this is that the pool of characters here are some of the best Tarantino has ever written and his uncanny eye for the right actor has paid rich dividends here.

It is being sold as a World War II action movie starring Brad Pitt, but this is a much more European flavoured film with a diverse and expertly cast ensemble.

Brad Pitt does well in a key role but the real stand outs are Christophe Waltz who is marvellous as the multi-lingual SS offficer nicknamed ‘The Jew Hunter and Melanie Laurent as Shosanna Dreyfus, his Jewish nemeis who ends up owning a cinema in Paris.

One sequence between them, set in a restaurant, is superbly played with an underlying menace and tension that is tweaked quite brilliantly. To some it will be just more ‘Tarantino speak’, but the context, the use of music and extreme close ups all give it a different texture from what you might expect.

The rest of the cast all do sterling work but special praise must go to Michael Fassbender and Mike Myers for their only scene together – a wonderfully played military briefing which is hilarious, although I suspect it will be a litmus test for those who love or hate this film.

Going in you might expect this to be mostly about the Basterds killing Nazis, but that is only one slice of the pie, with the real juice of the film being a revenge tale in which even celluloid itself is drafted into the plot.

Whilst much of the discussion about the film will inevitably centre around the director and his reputation, it is worth mentioning the wonderful technical work across the board.

The production values are first rate, with the studio based scenes (shot at Babelsberg Studio outside Berlin) mixed seamlessly with location work and the production design by David Wasco is complemented beautifully by the costumes by Anna Sheppard.

The cinematography by Robert Richardson is beautifully composed and when combined with Tarantino’s style and Sally Menke’s editing makes for some wonderfully snappy and memorable sequences. (One involving a map is almost pitch-perfect in its execution).

Music has always been a strong point in Tarantino’s previous films as he has made a point of never using an original composer and instead inserting previously recorded pieces.

Along with snippets of his beloved Ennio Morricone, he makes great use of David Bowie’s Cat People (Putting Out Fire), the music from The Entity and even a blast of Elmer Bernstein’s theme to Zulu Dawn.

For longtime fans of the director, look out for the now trademark scenes involving feet, a Mexican stand off, close ups of food (think cream rather than Big Kahuna burgers) and numerous references to films throughout.

At 153 minutes maybe some of it could have been cut a little bit more (one sequence in a bar seems to have been trimmed slightly since Cannes) but the fact is that I never looked at my watch during the film – it had me absorbed and each chapter rolling into the next was a pleasure.

Mainstream audiences may get put off by the use of subtitles (attractive yellow ones as it turns out) used in much of the multi-lingual cast and the fact that Brad Pitt is in it less than the marketing is letting on.

This is a film that exists very much in its own world, as you will see when it gets to the climax, but it is such a rich and lovingly created one that avoids the pitfalls of many movies set in World War II. It is as much about our perceptions and fantasies of that war than it is about the actual war itself.

In terms of where this fits into the director’s career, I don’t think Quentin Tarantino will ever top the expectations Pulp Fiction forced on him. Since the enormous critical and commercial success of that film he seemed to be indulged at Miramax (which, to be fair, his success helped shape) and perhaps he hasn’t had the creative tension down the years that he needed.

His last couple of films – despite undoubted qualities – seemed to be showing an artist retreating into his own self-referential head.

Grindhouse marked the point where he seemed to be chasing his own pop culture tail and this was paralleled by the commercial misfires at the newly formed Weinstein Company.

With this film they have partnered with Universal and interestingly this is the first time Tarantino has worked with a major studio as writer-director. Maybe this has given him a new sense of responsibility and helped him creatively.

Certainly Inglourious Basterds is a refreshing change of pace from the crime and exploitation influenced work he had been doing of late.

This movie will not please everyone, it will piss off some critics, it will cause heated debates and it may or may not even help save The Weinstein Company.

But in a summer that has given us soulless, mechanical junk like Wolverine, Terminator: Salvation, Transformers 2 and G.I. Joe, I am grateful that it exists and hopeful that it will be the platform for Tarantino to explore new creative territory.

> Official site
> Read more reviews of Inglourious Basterds at Metacritic

Categories
Thoughts

G.I. Joe: World Police

GI Joe poster

Back in 2004 Paramount released Team America: World Police, a comedy in which a special forces unit goes around the world trying to stop terrorist super villains.

A satire on the overblown stupidity of Bush-era foreign policy and Hollywood action films, it used plastic marionettes instead of actors and deliberately fake sets.

This year with G.I. Joe, Paramount have essentially made the same movie, only the actors are real (despite being based on toys) and the CGI work is only marginally more convincing than the deliberately naff sets used by Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

This is a summer blockbuster that will go down as something of a joke within the film industry as it is both sloppy and ludicrously over the top.

After the massive success of Transformers, producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura and Paramount probably saw this as a logical successor, it being another toy franchise that had been adapted into an animated series.

The creative people involved in bringing it to the screen – principally the studio, director Stephen Sommers and screenwriters Stuart Beattie, David Elliot and Paul Lovett – have somehow created a weird hybrid of action movie and cartoon.

This was never going to be a project that would get highbrow movie lovers excited but there was perhaps a decent action film to be made along the lines of X-Men or Mission: Impossible.

But something has gone badly wrong in bringing this material to the screen: the characters are campy stereotypes, the editing is whizz-bang and the dialogue is crammed with exposition to the point of self-parody.

At times it seems like they are actually trying to duplicate the style of the animated series.

Although hardly meant to be realistic, one sequence demonstrates the nonsensical nature of how it was put together.

Much of Paris is destroyed as Joes pursue evil Cobra agents through Paris, but it is only after several streets and the Eiffel Tower are destroyed that any police show up.

Cut to the next scene in the White House where the US President is told: “The French are very upset”. To which he gives the immortal reply “of course they are upset!”.

Was this stuff added late on for laughs, so in years to come those involved could claim it was all a joke?

More puzzling is the sheer mediocrity of the elements that you might expect a film of this budget to get right.

The CGI used for various desert and underwater locations is well below par by modern Hollywood standards.

Stephen Sommers found success directing The Mummy films in 1999 and 2001 (which were OK but forgettable Indiana Jones rip-offs) but then proceeded to make Van Helsing (2004), which was one of the worst mainstream films of the decade.

He’s back now with this clunker, a film so bad that Paramount decided not to screen it for critics other than web-based ones they felt might give it some love.

They were even afraid to give it a big push at the geek temple of Comic-Con.

However, despite all its flaws it has just opened to a big opening weekend in the US and will earn a fair amount worldwide.

People will no doubt wring their hands at how a film this bad will make serious money and spawn sequels.

But there is a tradition of expensive bad films filled with meaningless set-pieces, the most notable being the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, a series that played more like an LSD-inspired fairground ride rather than an actual movie.

G.I. Joe will be less successful but in years to come might be known as the first post-satire blockbuster, a film which was parodied five years before it actually got made.

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

Antichrist

Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist

By now you may well have heard of Antichrist, the new film from Danish director Lars Von Trier that upset a lot of people at the Cannes film festival and has surfed to UK cinemas on a big, fat wave of controversy.

However, what you have been witnessing is merely the gears of the filmic chattering classes being cleverly manipulated by a cunning provocateur.

The story involves a couple simply called He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who retreat to an isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their relationship after their child has died.

Given that this place is called ‘Eden’ and that the two central characters are not even named, you would be correct in thinking that we are back in the pseudo-parable territory of  Von Tier’s previous work like Dogville.

It then unfolds in a series of chapters titled ‘Grief’, ‘Pain’, ‘Despair’ and ‘The Three Beggars’ in which Defoe’s character (a psychotherapist) tries to cure his traumatised wife with increasingly disastrous results.

As their relationship breaks down, this emotional chaos is reflected in the outside world of the forest, with even animals saying ominous things.

When it first screened at Cannes many in the audience were appalled at the graphic sex, violence and the perceived misogyny of the director.

But if you actually go and see the film (unlike the complete clown at the Daily Mail who denounced it without seeing it), you may wonder what all the fuss and heated commentary has actually been about.

Whilst there are possibly two graphic moments that will upset those of a nervous disposition, they aren’t anything that horrendous compared to the violence in modern horror films like Hostel, Saw or even The Passion of the Christ.

For various boring reasons I couldn’t make the press screening and instead went to see it at a local art-house cinema showing it.

Watching with a paying audience can often be a lot more interesting than catching it with journalists ready to add to the already high-pitched chatter, so part of me was curious as to how it would go down.

When two older women sat in the row behind me I was wondering if there would be a mini-repeat of the now infamous Cannes premiere.

Would there be boos? Perhaps an invasion of militant feminists? Maybe even Daily Mail writers led by Baz Bamigboye would storm the building with pitchforks?

Unsurprisingly none of this happened at the late afternoon screening I was at and furthermore, the supposedly shocking moments were not actually that shocking.

The first sequence has upset some viewers becuase it slowly juxtaposes the two main characters having sex whilst their young child jumps out of a window to his death, all to the strains of Handel.

But tragic though the event is in the context of the film, is it really that offensive?

In Cruising (1980) William Friedkin chose to intercut gay porn with characters getting stabbed in the back by a gay serial killer (not the most subtle moment of his career), whilst the climax of Munich (2005) saw Steven Spielberg intercut a slow-motion sex scene with the massacre of the Israeli hostages.

So, you’ll have to excuse me if I didn’t find it new or shocking. If seeing a dying child on screen is so bad, then where where the howls of outrage at Pan’s Labyrinth or Assault on Precinct 13.

The shot in this sequence that is going to make the sex-averse MPAA unhappy is one which involves porn-like erect penetration.

But even that isn’t really a big deal – one of the women behind me merely let out an excited ‘ooooooh!’ when that happened, so I don’t think we need to get too hung up about it.

The other two moments that ‘scandalised’ the Cannes crowd involved two intimate parts of the male and female anatomy.

When it the story kicks in to the final straight, Defoe’s character is knocked unconscious and has his penis damaged by his (by then) deranged wife.

For good measure she decides to masturbate him, which results in a bloody ejaculation, which (although not pleasant to watch) isn’t exactly as bad as it sounds given that it is shot in a matter of fact style.

The other piece of genital mistreatment is more extreme, as Gainsbourg takes a pair of scissors to her clitoris and performs an act you will never see unless Eli Roth gets to guest-direct an episode of Casualty.

Is it shocking? For that moment it is, but no less than many other films that have featured body parts being cut off.

Mainstream multiplex fodder can often feature such graphic violence: Watchmen has a brutal sequence in which someone’s arms are sawn off, whilst the climax of Hostel 2 features someone’s genitals getting cut off and fed to a dog amongst numerous other graphic body horrors.

But I’m guessing that the combination of the ‘holiest of holies‘ (as Samuel L Jackson’s Jules described it in Pulp Fiction) and the air of controversy surrounding this film has given it extra dimension of notoriety.

As for the misogyny charges, this is something that is regularly hurled at Von Trier, often by people who seem influenced by the more ludicrous elements of post-modern ‘film theory’, have a Freudian’ interest in his background or simply don’t like the look and feel of his films.

He is a filmmaker who has a natural tendency to bait and provoke his audiences, be it the presentation of religion and marriage in Breaking the Waves, disability in The Idiots or the depiction of American culture in Dancer in the Dark and Dogville.

The fact that he seems to derive active pleasure from the critics who get so angry at his work just pisses them off even more, but to me this irreverent attitude is part of what gives his work an extra fizz and bite.

In the case of Antichrist, these two things have collided as the basic story – woman goes mad in the woods – seems to be a cinematic red rag tailor made for those that loathe his films.

I don’t feel his works generally – including this one – are misogynistic, but they do try to rile viewers who have an outdated 1970s view of what feminism is or was.

If a male critic couldn’t entertain the possibility that a female viewer could ever like Antichrist, who is actually being sexist?

The fact that views like this come a critical community that is – in the UK at least – overwhelmingly male, merely adds to the irony.

With his latest, Von Trier clearly seems to be screwing around with the mysogny accusations as well as the certain kind of liberal mindset that espouses them. (For a rough idea of this mindset, think of the liberal commentariat who get very upset at things like Brass Eye and Bruno).

Gainsbourg’s character in the story was working on a thesis about women in history (and comes to some startling ‘revelations’) whilst her husband is a therapist who believes he can cure her with things like ‘roleplay’.

I won’t give away the climax but it feels like a calculated middle finger to a certain kind of chin stroking, academic feminism but also to the idea that pyschological problems can be cured by talking about them.

In short the kind of people who think 1968 was the most important year in human history will likely hate this film.

Surely it is this – allied with the sexual violence – that has got people denouncing and praising Antichrist since May.

But if we strip away all the commentary that has dominated the wider perception of this film then the fact that remains is that this is a dissapointment.

Somehow, in trying to outdo his own brand of wry shock-making, Von Trier has unleashed a boomerang that has come back to hit him on the head.

The narrative of the film is too flat and never allows the characters to live and breathe, meaning that too much of it consist of banal talk in rooms and not enough action (although, ironically much of the hoo-hah has been about the scenes where stuff does go on).

The result is that sections of the film just drag and whilst things heat up considerably, it never recovers as a whole.

That said, there is much to admire here visually: Antony Dodd Mantle’s cinematography is highly impressive, using digital cameras (such as the RED One) in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before on the big screen.

The crisp clarity of the images (especially close ups of the actor’s faces) and the changing colour palette were striking, indeed a lot more interesting than what was coming out of the actor’s mouths.

But that said, Defoe and Gainsbourg do deserve a lot of credit for throwing themselves into their roles with such energy commitment.

Although they are let down by the writing this cannot have been an easy film to make or watch for them.

As for Von Trier, when all the brouhaha subsides, this will not go down as one of his better films.

It never appears to have an identity of its own and, at worst, almost it feels like a pastiche of his earlier work.

A protracted sequence involving a stone feels unintentionally comic (a satirical take on the ball and chain stuff in Dogville?) and as for the very end scene. WTF Lars?

Don’t be fooled by the controversy, just notice the drop in quality.

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

Brüno

Brüno

Brüno is a welcome satirical counterblast to the shallow celebrity culture currently engulfing the western world but also another triumph for Sacha Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles.

The first and most important thing about the latest film featuring a character from Da Ali G Show is that it is really funny.

Much of it contains sequences that are not only hilarious but also peppered with an anarchic intelligence that will prompt many to think ‘am I really watching this?’ whilst they laugh out loud.

Forget the shallow hipsters who complained with the mantra that ‘yeah, Borat was OK, but it wasn’t the funniest film ever‘ (which it wasn’t despite being a groundbreaking studio comedy) because Bruno takes the Borat baton and runs further and faster.

If you are unfamiliar with the central character (played by Sacha Baron Cohen), he is a flamboyant gay Austrian fashion journalist, who first appeared in segments on Da Ali G Show.

He often interviews unsuspecting guests about fashion, entertainment, celebrities often making them uncomfortable with his oblivious references to gay sex or the Holocaust.

The arc of this film sees Bruno blacklisted from his usual haunts after causing a major scene at Milan fashion week and then following him as he tries to make it big in the US.

With the help of his sidekick Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten) he tries to get a pilot together with the help of an agent and interviews all manner of people including Paula Abdul, Harrison Ford and Ron Paul.

There are also some stand out sequences involving Bruno going to the Middle East where he upsets orthodox Jews and Palestinian terrorists; an uncomfortable appearance on a TV chat show where he unveils an adopted African child; an extended attempt to ‘become straight’ with the help of religion, martial arts and the US military and a truly riotous climax involving a cage wrestling match in Arkansas.

It utilizes the techniques used in Borat and Religulous in which various people were contacted and slyly duped into signing release forms before being interviewed.

I suspect that some will think that a lot of the scenes were faked or setup given their outrageous and uncomfortable nature.

Although I wouldn’t doubt that some clever editing has been employed I actually suspect much of it actually happened.

When I spoke with Larry Charles last October he told me how on Borat and Religulous he learned that the irony is that people are dying to speak on camera if you give them a vague outline of what the film is about.

He also stressed the key in a lot of scenes was to keep the cameras running until they were literally shut down.

Bruno seems like the most extreme example yet of this kind of comedy guerrilla film making and there were long stretches where I was in awe of Baron Cohen’s ability to keep his character going in the craziest of situations, where arrest or physical harm seemed likely.

It is the underlying and often uncomfortable sense of comic dread
in the various situations that gives the film its raw power and ability to surprise even if it bears many structural and stylistic similarities to Borat.

What makes it a sharper and more audacious film than its predecessor though is its ability to scratch a little deeper.

It gleefully exposes the prejudices of various cultures towards homosexuality but also manages to turn the tables on the vapid cultures of modern-day celebrity and the fashion world.

Previous satires such as Pret-a-Porter (1994) never worked because – aside from being poorly made – the fashion world is arguably beyond parody anyway.

But somehow Charles, Baron Cohen and his team of writers have managed to have their cake and eat it – Bruno is a repellent narcissist who actually mirrors and lampoons the inanities of fashionistas and the wider celebrity culture.

One sequence in which he asks for help in finding which charity is ‘hot’ at the moment seems like a throwaway scene but is more pointed than it may seem on first viewing.

Somehow the character of Bruno feels like the perfect double agent in the age of Paris Hilton, reality TV and celebrity magazines which take themselves more seriously than even they know.

This has been one of the features of an extraordinary marketing campaign which has seen Baron Cohen promote the film in character (a clever move repeated from Borat).

So far it has seen him get a load of publicity by staging a stunt with Eminem at the MTV awards, dress up at various premieres around the globe and engage with fans via some clever social media marketing (including specially branded pages on MeinSpace, Tvitter and Facebuch).

The irony of all this is that the film is likely to be a big mainstream hit, perhaps proof that Bruno is the ultimate comedic double agent: a fake celebrity highlighting the very fakeness of celebrity itself.

> Official site
> Bruno at the IMDb
> Read other reviews of the film at Metacritic

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

Public Enemies

Public Enemies

Public Enemies left me with that particular kind of disappointment you feel when you see a great director fall short of his own high standards.

Based on Bryan Burrough’s non-fiction book ‘Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34‘, it explores the FBI’s attempts to capture the gangsters who are robbing banks all across the Midwest during the Great Depression.

The focus is on John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), his girlfriend Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) and Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the federal agent entrusted with catching him.

For director Michael Mann, this is familiar territory featuring many of his favourite themes: crime, extreme conflict, good and evil, obsession and the male psyche.

Given that this film saw him re-teaming with cinematographer Dante Spinotti (who he has collaborated with several times on films such as Manhunter, Heat and The Insider) you could also be forgiven for thinking that a visual feast would be in store.

But sadly Public Enemies never really catches fire and curiously it is largely down to the visuals and the acting – things which Mann is famous for getting right.

Like his last two films, Collateral and Miami Vice, Mann has opted to shoot with high end digital cameras (principally the Sony F23 and some smaller cameras).

Although this creates some interesting sequences (especially those set at night), it also leads to others which just look odd, especially when you see occasional bright flaring and sudden movements which the camera doesn’t quite catch.

Some directors like smaller and lighter digital cameras because they can shoot in smaller spaces, often with greater speed.

In Public Enemies this has the effect of putting you ‘in the scene’ in the action sequences and it has clearly been Mann’s intention to create a new visual aesthetic.

But the main problem here, as in his two previous films, is that the images here lack the richness and vibrancy of Mann’s earlier work on 35mm film.

In some ways this film also marks the end of a decade in which Mann has increasingly retreated into his own head. All of his films since 2000 have lacked the weight and stunning craftsmanship of his best work on Manhunter, Heat and The Insider.

Another aspect of the film that is puzzling is the casting of Johnny Depp as Dillinger. Although he can be a brilliant technical actor and a charming screen presence, he gives a Dillinger an aloof coolness here which I find hard to square with the real life criminal.

Christian Bale on paper sounded a fantastic choice to play his lawman nemesis too, but he also seems restrained and lacking in the intensity you might expect given the pressure he was under.

Marion Cottilard brings some emotional substance in the often neglected ‘gangster’s moll’ role, even if her accent sometimes fluctuates here and there.

There are some fine performances, although frustratingly the best stuff comes from the supporting cast with the likes of Billy Crudup, Giovanni Ribisi, Stephen Graham and Stephen Lang offering tantalising glimpses of the film this could have been.

As you might expect for a Mann film the production design is excellent, with great use of a variety of locations in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.

But despite these qualities Public Enemies never hits the high notes you would expect given the potential of the material and the talent involved in bringing it to the screen.

Universal deserve a lot of credit for being the Hollywood studio most likely to take risks on more adult material and filmmakers like Mann, but opening this film in the height of summer is going to be a real test for them.

They have sold it on Johnny Depp’s star power (greatly increased since the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy) but I find it hard to see it making serious money and it may even struggle to recoup its $100 million budget back.

In fact, if this film does badly it may give a lot of studio executives an excuse to no longer green-light similar projects, especially as some of them are probably doubting how much stars are now worth in terms of box office dollars.

I actually hope it does do well because in a time of turgid studio fare such as Transformers 2 and Terminator Salvation, Hollywood needs directors like Michael Mann and mainstream films that cater to more than just the popcorn munchers.

But on the other hand Mann needs to return to the form that made him such an important filmmaker.

Given that the economic model for Hollywood is slowly breaking, maybe a return to lower budgets (along the lines of Stephen Soderbergh) would give him the creative rejuvenation he needs.

> Official site
> Read other reviews at Metacritic
> Find out more about John Dillinger at Wikipedia

Categories
Thoughts

The Legacy of Wall Street

When Oliver Stone directed Wall Street (1987), it was a drama inspired by Regan-era insider dealing scandals.

It became famous for Michael Douglas‘ portrayal of corporate raider Gordon Gecko, who coined the term ‘greed is good’.

But the law of unintended consequences kicked in and – like Milton’s Satan – the villain of the movie somehow became the hero to a generation of stockbrokers on Wall Street.

Even later films such as Boiler Room (2000), a parable about the 90’s stock market boom, saw their trader characters quote Gecko:

Douglas himself admitted that drunken traders would come up to him in restaurants and miss the entire point of the character.

When a sequel was announced in 2007, it was presumably meant to be a milder depiction of the business (maybe even presenting Gecko as a vharming villain).

But now, given that the Western world is reeling from an economic crisis inspired by the kind of greed Gecko loved, what will the new film look like?

> Wall Street at the IMDb
> Gordon Gecko and the sequel at Wikipedia

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

Angels & Dullness

Tom Hanks in Angels & Demons

Although this sequel to The Da Vinci Code isn’t quite as as bad as that 2006 turkey, it is still a plodding big budget disappointment.

Angels & Demons will still make an enormous amount of money, but given the A-list talent involved you could be forgiven for wondering why such a high profile blockbuster is so criminally boring.

For those not familiar with the best selling books by Dan Brown, they involve a Harvard symbologist named Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks).

In The Da Vinci Code (2006) he had to investigate a conspiracy involving the Catholic church and here he is called in to solve a plot by the Illuminati, who are threatening to destroy Vatican City with stolen antimatter during a papal conclave.

On the surface these movies actually sound like hokey fun, but the reality is that they involve a lot of walking and talking in dark places, clunky expository dialogue and a lack of any genuine suspense.

The premise of this film is slightly more appealing in that it is essentially a ticking time bomb scenario.

Almost from the beginning Langdon has to solve the mystery of where four kidnapped priests are before stopping anti-matter from blowing up the Vatican.

But none of this potential excitement really comes off on the big screen.

Given that pulpy novels like Jaws and The Godfather have been made into highly entertaining movies, why has Dan Brown’s bestseller not made a similar transition.

My theory is that it was written from the start to be clunky and obvious – literary anti-matter if you will – and even the skills of David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman (two of Hollywood’s highest paid screenwriters) could not translate it into something even remotely engaging.

Despite having a narrative crammed with riddles and mysteries, they are sacrificed quickly in order to get to the next chase upon where more is revealed and so on and so on.

This leads to a film that is the equivalent of a dog chasing it’s own tail whilst stuck on an out of control carousel – lots of energy and excitement that ultimately leads to a rather pointless spectacle.

Like most big Hollywood productions it does have some impressive technical aspects, most notably the recreation of the Vatican on studio sound stages that is mixed almost seamlessly with nocturnal Rome.

The cast play their one-dimensional roles fairly straight: Hanks is slightly more agreeable here than in the last film; Ayelet Zurer makes a plausible CERN physicist; Ewan McGregor is just OK as the Camerlengo in charge before the new pontiff is elected (although he does have a coup,e of bad lines); whilst veterans like Stellan Skarsgård and Armin Mueller-Stahl add a bit of spice whilst the story plods along.

When you consider the enormous popular appeal of The Da Vinci Code novel and film, it is worth asking what audiences actually see in them.

Part of it could be that a large chunk of religious believers (especially Catholics) get a guilty kick out of seeing a conspiracy about the Catholic church (an organisation ripe for intrigue) and toying with the idea that it all could be true. Even when – or maybe because? – Brown’s material is clearly nonsensical.

Then there are the audiences who just love the film equivalent of an airport novel, where plot rules everything and characters, theme and craft are mere pawns to serve it.

It will no doubt mean that this will be one of the highest grossing films of the year, but in years to come people will be perplexed about why such a dull film could be so popular.

Categories
Thoughts

The Most Pirated Movies of 2008

Movies and Piracy

How much of an effect does piracy have on movies?

Some feared that Wolverine‘s box office would suffer as a result of a test print being leaked last month.

However, it would appear that piracy didn’t have that much of an effect because it earned over $80 million this weekend.

My feeling is that blockbusters are largely immune to piracy because they are so heavily marketed and aimed at such a wide audience.

In Wolverine’s case a rumoured $50 million or more was spent on TV, radio, online and outdoor advertising.

Plus, films like this open on an insane number of screens with multiple screenings throughout the day – in some cases double what other releases are doing.

In short, that they have to be catastrophically bad to flop. 

With Wolverine, the film did get mixed reviews and, I suspect, iffy word-of-mouth but that won’t stop it earning a blockbuster sized gross.

The whole leaking affair probably helped get word out about the film and whilst it will probably be hit hard in the next two weeks by Star Trek and Angels and Demons, I don’t think anyone will be bleating about piracy deflating admissions until, er, the next high profile leak.

Today I came across this image on Flickr of a chart about the most pirated movies of 2008 compared to the highest grossing movies. 

I’m not sure about the exact quality of the research from TorrentFreak but – even if only partly accurate – it still makes for interesting reading. 

N.B. These figures were taken in January 2009

THE TOP 10 MOST PIRATED MOVIES OF 2008

  1. The Dark Knight (7,030,000 downloads)
  2. The Incredible Hulk (5,840,000 downloads)
  3. The Bank Job (5,410,000 downloads)
  4. You Don’t Mess With The Zohan (5,280,000 downloads)
  5. National Treasure: Book of Secrets (5,240,000 downloads)
  6. Juno (5,190,000 downloads)
  7. Tropic Thunder (4,900,000 downloads)
  8. I Am Legend (4,870,000 downloads)
  9. Forgetting Sarah Marshall (4,400,000 downloads)
  10. Horton Hears A Who! (4,360,000 downloads)

Now, let’s compare this with…

THE TOP 10 HIGHEST GROSSING MOVIES OF 2008

  1. The Dark Knight ($996,910,887)  
  2. Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ($786,558,759)  
  3. Kung Fu Panda ($631,869,621)  
  4. Hancock ($624,386,746)  
  5. Iron Man ($581,931,630)  
  6. Mamma Mia! ($572,082,632)  
  7. Quantum of Solace ($537,133,451)  
  8. WALL-E Disney ($502,723,636)  
  9. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa ($460,215,180)  
  10. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian ($419,646,109)

The most surprising aspect is how well The Bank Job and You Don’t Mess With The Zohan did in the piracy chart and it raises some interesting questions. 

Does this mean that people wanted to see those films but were not that keen on actually paying at the cinema or on DVD? (There is of course the added factor that downloading it illegally could lead to a later sale).

Does online buzz spread in a different way to traditional media ads?

What valuable lessons can studios learn from patterns of piracy?

There are also some stats on how pirated films compare to music and software.

  • $4.5 billion of music downloads
  • $5.4 billion in movies downloads 
  • $47 billion in software downloads

Plus, there are some figures on which filesharing sites are used.

Piracy Sites

My take is that piracy isn’t going to go away anytime soon. 

The idea that big media companies should lobby governments to introduce draconian laws that force ISPs to punish users is a dead duck in the short and long term.

The main reason it won’t work is because:

  1. Telecoms companies should not be agents of large media companies.
  2. Users who really want to pirate content will usually be a step ahead of any attempt to stop them.
  3. Suing your customers (as the RIAA found out) is likely to inflame the situation.
  4. It deflects from the pressing need for better legal download services.

One can only hope that the film industry learns from the disastrous errors the music industry made a few years ago.

Like terrorism and drugs, piracy will never be defeated but there can be ways of reducing its impact.

> CNN story on movie piracy
> Torrent Freak

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

X-Men Problems: Wolverine

Wolverine cast

The idea of a prequel to the X-Men films made nine years after the original was always a shaky one and X-Men Origins: Wolverine has a lot of problems.

For those of you not familiar with the universe of these films, they are live action adaptations of the Marvel comics which feature mutants (that is humans with special powers). 

The first two – X-Men (2000) and X-Men 2 (2003) – were directed by Bryan Singer and were really rather good, with an array of interesting characters, exciting action sequences and ideas you don’t normally get in comic book movies. 

The third film in 2006 sadly let the team down as Singer had chosen to direct Superman Returns and Brett Ratner was given the gig.

However, the undoubted star of this hugely successful franchise was Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, the snarly mutant with an ability to heal himself, an unbreakable skeleton and claws that shoot out of his fists.

You may have forgotten that he only got the role at the last minute because Dougray Scott injured himself during Mission Impossible 2 and shooting delays meant he couldn’t do the film.

Hugh took his place and a movie star was born as he was great in the role and connected with a lot of fans and the general public at large.

However, with nearly all successful franchises the decline in quality starts to kick in around the third film and the fact that Fox wanted to make an X-Men spin-off one of their summer tentpoles suggests that things are a little desperate.

I can’t think of a spin-off movie that has been successful and given that Marvel’s recent attempts in this arena includes the awful Elektra, things didn’t bode well.

But the reason Wolverine (let’s just call it that from now on) doesn’t work is two-fold: the central concept doesn’t work and it is executed poorly.

The plot is essentially the back-story of the Wolverine character and his time with Team X, before getting his adamantium skeleton.

If you remember Brian Cox’s character from X-Men 2, this is essentially the story of the flashbacks from that film. 

And here lies the problem, because we have to get to grips with the fact that an older Jackman is playing a younger Wolverine.

Now, this shouldn’t matter because – as fans will no doubt remind you – his character doesn’t age due to his regenerative powers.

Only, it does matter because the whole film is set in the 1970s and (presumably) 1980s and hardly any concession is made to these in terms of period detail.

There is an interesting title sequence (referenced in the trailer) that plays around with the idea of Wolverine and his brother Victor (Liev Schrieber) fighting in battle throughout history but the rest of the film kind of shirks the time issue.

But worse than this is the fact the Gavin Hood is clearly the wrong director for this sort of material.

Although his Oscar-winning Tsotsi won the Best Foreign Film Oscar and got him the attention of studios, he really doesn’t have the chops for this kind of film.

Some people may overlook the challenges of big-budget productions and assume directors for these are interchangeable but it does take a certain set of skills to mix story, character and visuals into an exciting mix.

Hood was reportedly the choice of Jackman, who is a producer on the film, and he seems caught between doing a character piece and a straightforward superhero film.

Unfortunately the story is hamstrung by the inevitability of where it is going, but more importantly it suffers from undercooked ideas, flabby pacing and action sequences that never come alive.

In addition, the visual effects are disappointing for a film of this budget and scale. There are times when the match between live action and CGI is poor and this really matters when it gets to the big sequences like the climax.

Another striking fault is the waste of a really fine supporting cast as Schrieber, Danny Huston and Lynn Collins are all excellent actors given wafer thin roles.

The new mutant characters are also pretty poor – you know you have problems when one of them is a teleporting will.i.am (!) and another is basically a large fat guy.  

All of this is a shame because Jackman is still engaging as Wolverine but the wit and charm have been toned down from the earlier X-Men films and despite a darker story, never really goes to a more interesting place.

Much of the buzz on this film throughout the production has been negative with reports of Fox and Hood at loggerheads during the shoot and it culminated in a leak of a full length workprint on the internet a few weeks ago. 

Beacuse it is the first summer blockbuster with a multi-million dollar marketing campaign, it is almost guarenteed a huge opening, but I’d be surprised if it doesn’t drop off fairly quickly when Star Trek hits theaters the following week.

If this is indeed the case, Fox may claim piracy had an effect on box office but the convenience of that excuse hides the more telling reality that this film is the reheated remanants of former glories.

> Wolverine at the IMDb
> More on the X-Men series at Wikipedia
> Reviews of the film at Metacritic

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

Why the new Star Trek film works

The new cast of Star Trek

The new Star Trek film manages to to strip away the baggage of the long running franchise and become the kind of film the Star Wars prequels should have been.

I am not a huge Star Trek fan (and don’t really care if they are called Trekkies or Trekkers), but this rebooting of the series deserves a lot of credit by focusing on the characters, maintaining a brisk pace and being a lot of fun.

Directed by J. J. Abrams and written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, this is essentially a prequel that explores the early years of the main characters in the Star Trek series.

It explores the back stories of James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) and their first proper mission mission aboard the USS Enterprise which sees them deal with a time travelling villain (Eric Bana) from the future.

There is also an appearance from Leonard Nimoy (the original Spock) but I won’t reveal the details of it as a large chunk of the plot hinges on it.

What is striking though, is the way it has been paced as there is little in the way of flabby exposition, which can bog down origin stories like this.

Not only does Abrams move things along at a refreshing clip, but he has also chosen wisely with his young cast.

Pine and Quinto rise very well to the daunting task of playing such iconic characters and the supporting cast (which includes Zoe Saldana as Uhura, Karl Urban as Bones, Simon Pegg as Scotty and Anton Yelchin as Pavel Chekov) are equally as good. 

The set pieces are well executed and have the visual effects that you would expect for a summer blockbuster, but the real trick here is that time and attention has been spent on the main characters.

Although William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy have been ingrained on pop culture for decades, the leads here manage to breathe new life into these characters and shake off the cobwebs that had plagued the more recent movies.

This is a film that will appeal to long term fans but also a new audience who either weren’t keen on it before or even alive when the TV series and subsequent film franchise began.

Ironically, one of selling points of the film (the return of Nimoy) is perhaps the most unnecessary, as the new cast do a good enough job standing on their own two feet.

Having said that, the writers do find a clever way to work in the ‘old’ Spock and give themselves new possibilities in the future.

Perhaps the best compliment you could pay to JJ Abrams and his team though is that this is what the Star Wars prequels should have been – lean, imaginative and entertaining.

> Official site for the film
> Reviews at Metacritic
> Brush up on Star Trek at Wikipedia and The Guardian

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

Knowing when to screen a film for critics

Nicolas Cage in Knowing

Last night I went a long to my local cinema to catch Knowing , a new film starring Nicolas Cage as a scientist who comes across a set of numbers that appear to predict disasters.

Directed by Alex Proyas, it mixes drama, action and sci-fi whilst sprinkling them with well-worn clichés.

That said there are some highly effective moments that stand out from the routine nature of the overall story.

It also marks another entry into the puzzling career of Cage, still an A-list star who in recent years has mixed quality projects (Adaptation., Lord of War) with some real junk (The Wicker Man, Next) and the blockbuster success of the National Treasure franchise.

However, I have to confess I was intrigued to see Knowing, not because of its star but because it was (in the UK at least) one of those films that was ‘shielded’ from critics before its release.

What happens with most releases is that the distributor arranges for different types of critics to see it at different times.

Print, TV, radio and online outlets all get invited to preview screenings in advance of running their review or feature on the film.

The last screening is is usually for the national press in the week of release, although if a film company is wary of critics not liking a film, they will not even screen it for them.

For example, in recent years the Saw films have not been screened at all before their UK release, partly because the distributors know that critics will hate them and they don’t want bad reviews affecting the opening weekend gross.

As far as I understand, the UK distributor (E1 Films) of Knowing wasn’t keen on screening it before the national press show and I can see why as it is the sort of film that most critics here will dislike (I may be wrong but check the national papers tomorrow and see if I was right or not).

As E1 didn’t respond to my emails about it, I was thinking of just leaving it out of my regular weekly radio review.

However, they actually released it nationwide yesterday on a Wednesday so I decided to go along and check it out with a paying audience.

Some critics, who have the privilege of seeing films for free (lest we forget), resent this but I usually get a kick out of paying to see a film in a cinema that isn’t one of the London screening rooms I spend a lot of time in.

The thing I like most is that you get to see how a film actually plays with a paying audience, who probably see 2 or 3 films a month rather than critics who often squeeze in about 5 or 6 a week.

My excitement though, was tempered a little bit by one of my pet hates with mutiplex cinemas – poor projection.

It was a little blurry and although not bad enough for people to complain, was still not up to scratch.

Generally speaking screenings for critics have a dedicated projectionist who knows what he is doing whilst multiplexes (in trying to cut costs) have the opposite.

I remember seeing Oceans Thirteen in the multiplex cinema at the 02 arena complex in Greenwich and being shocked at how bad the image on screen was.

Sadly, cinemas get away with this because I’m guessing most audiences can’t tell when it is bad enough to complain.

On my way in I took a glance at the poster in the foyer and was struck by how closely it resembled the artwork for Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds remake:

Knowing and WOTW

I’m tempted here to mention more similarites but I’ll hold back for now.

Anyway, the film started and most of it consists of Cage (playing a recently widowed scientist) and his young son trying to figure out what a set of numbers scribbled down on a piece of paper 50 years ago actually mean.

A lot of the time Cage wears the perpetual frown that has become a hallmark of his recent performances and the whole thing mostly plays like a vintage X-Files episode on steroids.

There were some ironic laughs from the audience at some of the lamer moments, especially the pedestrian dialogue, but I think they were mostly in to it.

Despite a plodding narrative, the set pieces – especially ones involving various forms of transport – and the epic climax are very well handled indeed.

Overall, it doesn’t really work but there are some interesting themes and some strong visual ideas that you might not expect in a film like this.

That said, the lead actors (Cage and Rose Byrne) are let down by a script that seems to see dialogue as incidental to the bigger issues of the film.

So, you may ask, why were E1 Films reluctant to screen to most UK critics?

I think that they felt by opening it on a Wednesday they could not only bump up the opening week’s gross by getting in two extra day’s business (and the cinema I was in was surprisingly busy) but also steal a march on the anticipated weak reviews.

It is a strategy that Fox recently adopted for Marley and Me, another film critics reviled but still proved a hit with audiences. Does this mean that critics don’t matter?

My take is that critics do matter to varying degrees, but it also depends on the film.

Major studio blockbusters are almost critic proof as they have enormous marketing budgets but films on a slightly smaller scale like Knowing, with an estimated budget of $50 million, are vulnerable to bad word of mouth.

If critics universally pan a movie at this level then it will, generally speaking, affect the opening and overall box office prospects. For films released during Oscar season, decent reviews and buzz are almost essential to launching them successfully.

Then of course, there are films that got great reviews (The Insider and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and still struggle to make an impact at the box office.

There is a much quoted maxim in Hollywood coined by writer William Goldman that says:

“Nobody knows anything”

But I don’t think that’s quite true.

After all, if you know that nobody knows anything, then you actually do know something (even if it is just the fact that nobody else knows anything).

In the case of films like Knowing, studios get wary of screening them for critics precisely because they do ‘know’ how it will go down.

> Knowing at the IMDb
> Reviews for Knowing at Metacritic

[Image copyright © Summit Entertainment / E1 Films]

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

Watchmen

Watchmen poster

After years of thinking it would never reach the screen, I finally saw the film adaptation of Watchmen last week.

If you are unfamiliar with the source material, it explores what happens to a group of superheroes in an alternative 1985 in which Richard Nixon is a 5-term president and the world stands on the brink of nuclear Armageddon.

The story begins with the vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) investigating the murder of a former hero called the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and he uncovers a wider plot involving his now retired colleagues.

Director Zack Snyder explains more in this featurette:

 

One of the reasons the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons built up such a fanbase is that it deconstructs the ideas of traditional comic book superhero in dark and often fascinating ways.

But it has proved an incredibly difficult film to bring to the screen with its extended flashbacks, violence and bleak tone.

However, after 300 became a huge and unexpected hit, Warner Bros let Zack Snyder do his dream project which was a no holds barred version of Watchmen.

The good news is that Snyder has been incredibly faithful to the source material and has realised the world of the graphic novel with considerable skill and panache.

The production design and visual look of the film are wonderful to look at (the opening credit sequence is particularly fantastic) and the performances, especially Jackie Earle Haley and Billy Crudup, are good across the board. 

There is also a strange thrill that comes from watching so many ‘unfilmable’ ideas appear on screen and Hollywood conventions broken: it runs to 2 hours and 40 minutes, has a sombre tone, keeps nearly all of the flashback material and – even for an 18/R-rated film – contains quite brutal scenes of violence, rape and even full frontal nudity.

None of it is excessively sadistic, like certain modern horror films, but I have a feeling it may put audiences off.

It is going to have a huge opening, but it will be interesting to see how it does in the long run at the box office. 

I’m split on its prospects. Part of me thinks grosses will tail off after the initial fans and younger males eat it up over the next two weeks.

But if a downbeat comic book movie like The Dark Knight can do so well, then maybe Watchmen has a good shot at dominating the March box office.

Watchmen is out on Friday

> Official UK site
> Find out more about the graphic novel at Wikipedia
> Read about the lawsuit that threatened to delay the film’s release

Categories
Awards Season Thoughts

Oscar Predictions

81st Academy Awards posterThe 81st Academy Awards are on tonight at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood.

The main feature of the awards this year is that a lot of the major categories seem to be already decided.

Of the big 6 awards only Best Actor seems a difficult one to call.

Having said that, there can be surprises.

Here are the nominations and my predictions:

BEST PICTURE

  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
  • Frost/Nixon
  • Milk
  • The Reader
  • Slumdog Millionaire

Who will win: Slumdog Millionaire.

After dominating the awards season up to this point, it would be a major upset if Slumdog didn’t get Best Picture. The unlikely feelgood story of the film is mirrored by extraordinary journey of this production.

Just a few months ago it was low budget drama with no stars that looked to be in major trouble after the closure of Warner Independent.

But after early buzz at festivals, it was acquired by Fox Searchlight (one of the savviest studios at marketing lower budget films) and has ridden an amazing wave of critical acclaim and word of mouth success.    

In some ways it is the Barack Obama of this Oscar season – an unlikely outsider who has trumped much better funded and more favoured early candidates like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Frost/Nixon.

BEST DIRECTOR

  • Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
  • David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
  • Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon
  • Stephen Daldry, The Reader
  • Gus Van Sant, Milk

Who Will Win: Danny Boyle.

It is often the case that the director of Best Picture wins Best Director and that trend is almost certain to happen this year.

Given the visual style of Slumdog and the fact that he has also scooped the DGA award, it would be a major shock if Boyle didn’t win.

BEST ACTOR

  • Richard Jenkins, The Visitor
  • Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
  • Sean Penn, Milk
  • Brad Pitt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
  • Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

Who Will Win: Sean Penn.

This is the hardest major category to predict even if it is essentially a two horse race between Mickey Rourke and Sean Penn.

Both have won key awards but I slightly favour Sean Penn because he won the SAG Award (often an indicator for Oscar) and because his performance is showier than Rourke’s.

Another possible reason Rourke won’t win is because The Wrestler is the kind of gritty, contemporary film that puts off older members of the academy.

Whilst my heart is rooting for Rourke, as a win would be an extraordinary comeback, my head says Penn.       

BEST ACTRESS

  • Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
  • Angelina Jolie, Changeling
  • Melissa Leo, Frozen River
  • Meryl Streep, Doubt
  • Kate Winslet, The Reader

Who Will Win: Kate Winslet.

Having been nominated 5 times, it is almost certainly Winslet’s time.

Although The Reader is a film that wasn’t universally embraced, her performance (allied to her turn in Revolutionary Road, for which she could have also been nominated) is up to her usual high standards and exactly the kind that older Academy members love (remember her Extras speech?).

Some feel that Meryl Streep or even Melissa Leo could pull an upset but that looks highly unlikely. 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

  • Josh Brolin, Milk
  • Robert Downey Jr, Tropic Thunder
  • Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Doubt
  • Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
  • Michael Shannon, Revolutionary Road

Who Will Win: Heath Ledger.

This is the easiest category of all to predict. Ever since the film came out last summer the talk has been of Ledger being a lock for this category.

Not only will it be a tribute to the late actor’s career but it will also be an acknowledgement that The Dark Knight was more than just another blockbuster. (Some studio execs were upset that The Dark Knight was snubbed in the bigger categories).

Director Christopher Nolan looks likely to collect on Ledger’s behalf. 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

  • Amy Adams, Doubt
  • Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
  • Viola Davis, Doubt
  • Taraji P. Hensen, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
  • Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler

Who Will Win: Penelope Cruz.

Although there is room here for an upset, it would be  a shock if Penelope Cruz didn’t win for her sparkling turn in Woody Allen’s latest film. 

If there is to be an upset then Viola Davis or Marisa Tomei are an outside possbility.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

  • Courtney Hunt, Frozen River
  • Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky
  • Dustin Lance Black, Milk
  • Martin McDonough, In Bruges
  • Andrew Stanton, Wall-E

Who Will Win: Dustin Lance Black.

Although this is something of a two horse race between Milk and WALL-E, I think Dustin Lance Black is going to win for the former.

Andrew Stanton is just as deserving, but the fact that his innovative screenplay is for an animated film (albeit a masterful one) may count against him.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

  • Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
  • John Patrick Shanley, Doubt
  • Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon
  • David Hare, The Reader
  • Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire

Who Will Win: Simon Beaufoy.

The Slumdog train will keep on rolling with Beaufoy almost certain to collect the award for his bold and clever adaptation of Vikas Sawrup’s novel. 

If there is an upset here then Peter Morgan would be my pick, but I don’t see that happening.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

  • Bolt
  • Kung Fu Panda
  • WALL-E

Who Will Win: WALL-E.

Arguably this masterpiece should have been nominated for Best Picture, but it looks certain to continue Pixar’s amazing run in this category.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

  • The Baader Meinhof Complex
  • The Class
  • Departures
  • Revanche
  • Waltz With Bashir

Who Will Win: Waltz With Bashir.

This looks like a two horse race between Waltz With Bashir and The Class.

I slightly favour Ari Folman’s remarkable film about his experiences as an Israeli soldier, which is a sadly prescient tale about the effects of war.

The Class is a more accessible film with a more feelgood vibe, so it could also win.

BEST DOCUMENTARY

  • The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)
  • Encounters at the End of the World
  • The Garden
  • Man on Wire
  • Trouble the Water

Who Will Win: Man On Wire.

James Marsh’s outstanding documentary about Philippe Petit’s astounding wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974 is the clear front runner.

It the most accessible of the nominees and has the added bonus of playing like a thrilling, existential heist movie.  

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

  • “Down To Earth” (WALL-E)
  • “Jai Ho” (Slumdog Millionaire)
  • “O Saya” (Slumdog Millionaire)

Who Will Win: Jai Ho.

Although Peter Gabriel’s song for WALL-E is a strong contender, I think the final song from Slumdog has the edge, especially given the fact that it accompanies the final song and dance number of the film. 

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Alexandre Desplat
  • Defiance, James Newton Howard
  • Milk, Danny Elfman
  • Slumdog Millionaire, A.R. Rahman
  • WALL-E, Thomas Newman

Who Will Win: A.R. Rahman

Although I think Thomas Newman did some fantastic work on the WALL-E soundtrack, the exotic joy of A.R. Rahman’s score for Slumdog played a large part in why its proved such a hit. So, another win for the Dog.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

  • Australia, Catherine Martin
  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Jacqueline West
  • The Duchess, Michael O’Connor
  • Milk, Danny Glicker
  • Revolutionary Road, Albert Wolsky

Who Will Win: Jacqueline West 

There is a depressing logic that dictates that period dramas with big dresses always scoop this award – if this is the case then The Duchess will win.

However, given that the Academy has got a little smarter in recent years I’m hoping they will recognise the considerable achievement of Jacqueline West’s costumes in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button which impressively span a number of decades.

BEST FILM EDITING

  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Kirk Baxter & Angus Wall
  • The Dark Knight, Lee Smith
  • Frost/Nixon, Mike Hill & Dan Hanley
  • Milk, Elliot Graham
  • Slumdog Millionaire, Chris Dickens

Who Will Win: Chris Dickens.

It is very often the case that the Best Picture will also win Best Editing, so this will be another victory in this year of the Slumdog. 

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

  • Changeling, Tom Stern
  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Claudio Miranda
  • The Dark Knight, Wally Pfister
  • The Reader, Chris Menges & Roger Deakins
  • Slumdog Millionaire, Anthony Dod Mantle

Who Will Win: Anthony Dod Mantle.

The Slumdog bandwagon will roll on with Anthony Dod Mantle, but even if it was the projected big winner of the night, he would still be a strong contender for his imaginative and stylish shooting of Mumbai. 

If there is to be an upset here, then look out for Claudio Miranda, who did some sterling work on Benjamin Button.

BEST ART DIRECTION

  • Changeling, James J. Murakami, Gary Fettis
  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Donald Graham Burt & Victor J. Zolfo
  • The Dark Knight, Nathan Crowley, Peter Lando
  • The Duchess, Michael Carlin, Rebecca Alleway
  • Revolutionary Road, Kristi Zea, Debra Schutt

Who Will Win: Donald Graham Burt & Victor J. Zolfo

Given that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had a ton of marketing money spent on it, expect some of that to stick when it comes to the technical categories. 

In any case, it is probably a deserving winner as the art direction was highly impressive. The main competition here is from The Dark Knight, which could also do well in the technical categories.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton, Craig Barron
  • The Dark Knight, Nick Davis, Chris Corbould, Tim Webber, Paul Franklin
  • Iron Man, John Nelson, Ben Snow, Dan Sudick, Shane Mahan

Who Will Win: Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton, Craig Barron.

It is hard to see Benjamin Button not winning here for the groundbreaking work by Digital Domain in ageing Brad Pitt backwards.

The main contender here would be The Dark Knight, but the deliberate lack of obvious CGI for that film may not have helped its chances (even though that’s what made it look so good). 

BEST SOUND EDITING

  • The Dark Knight, Richard King
  • Iron Man, Frank Eulner, Christopher Boyes
  • Slumdog Millionaire, Tom Sayers
  • WALL-E, Ben Burtt, Matthew Wood
  • Wanted, Wylie Stateman

Who Will Win: Ben Burtt, Matthew Wood

The sound work on WALL-E was simply extraordinary and it will be a scandal if it doesn’t win in both categories.

The Dark Knight is its main rival, so expect it to win if the Pixar film doesn’t.

BEST SOUND MIXING

  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Parker, Michael Semanick, Ren Klyce, Mark Weingarten
  • The Dark Knight, Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo, Ed Novick
  • Slumdog Millionaire, Ian Tapp, Richard Pryke, Resul Pookutty
  • WALL-E, Tom Myers, Michael Semanick, Ben Burtt
  • Wanted, Chris Jenkins, Frank A. Montaño, Petr Forejt

Who Will Win: Tom Myers, Michael Semanick, Ben Burtt.

See above as to why WALL-E should win.

BEST MAKEUP

  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Greg Cannom
  • The Dark Knight, John Caglione, Jr., Conor O’Sullivan
  • Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Mike Elizalde, Thom Floutz

Who Will Win: Greg Cannom

A slam dunk win for Benjamin Button as its makeup effects were quite remarkable.

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT

  • The Conscience of Nhem En, Steven Okazaki
  • The Final Inch, Irene Taylor Brodsky, Tom Grant
  • Smile Pinki, Megan Mylan
  • The Witness – From the Balcony of Room 306, Adam Petofsky, Margaret Hyde

Who Will Win: The Conscience of Nhem En

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM

  • La Maison de Petits Cubes, Kunio Kato
  • Lavatory – Lovestory, Konstantin Bronzit
  • Oktapodi, Emud Mokhberi, Thierry Marchand
  • Presto, Doug Sweetland
  • This Way Up, Alan Smith, Adam Foulkes

Who Will Win: Presto

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM

  • Auf der Strecke (On the Line), Reto Caffi
  • Manon on the Asphalt, Elizabeth Marre, Olivier Pont
  • New Boy, Steph Green, Tamara Anghie
  • The Pig, Tivi Magnusson, Dorte Høgh
  • Spielzeugland (Toyland), Jochen Alexander Freydan

Who Will Win: Spielzeugland (Toyland)

If you have any predictions then leave them in the comments below. 

> Official Oscar site
> Follow more analysis at Awards Daily and In Contention

Categories
Thoughts

Film Lists + IMDb Link = A Huge Jump in Traffic

So, a couple of weeks ago I posted an item on a list of ‘the greatest films of all time’ by French film magazine Cahiers Du Cinema.

It was really just a piece commenting on the films they had chosen and the fact that some observers were upset about the lack of British films on it.

However, soon after The Guardian posted two pieces on the same list – one by Marcel Berlins without any links until a commenter pointed to my post and then one by Ronald Bergan on the ‘scourge’ of the greatest film list.

Then the IMDb linked to it on their front page hit list and my traffic went into overdrive. (The page views for yesterday were 27 times over the average number for a 24 hour period).

At one point the site buckled under the pressure, but we got it back up thanks to Matt and the author of the Super Cache plugin (which helped deal with the surge in traffic).

I never expected it to be so popular but all the interest and comments shows there is still a big appetite for debating the best films ever.

Personally, I zone out a little when I see yet another list of ‘the greatest films of all time’ as it is the usual suspects that seem to dominate (Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Star Wars, The Shawshank Redemption).

Perhaps a more interesting exercise would be something like a list of more overlooked films that deserve wider publicity (Ivansxtc, Crumb, Midnight Run, Gattaca, Taxi to the Darkside and Top Secret!).

That said, there is something healthy about debating and analysing what the great films are and why they are still worth watching.

So, I’ve thought of compiling a ‘superlist’ of films you should see.

It wouldn’t be restricted to 50, 100 but would be whatever is important and worth watching. It could be a 1000, 5123 or whatever number it grows to.

The main idea is that it would grow and be debated online – a bit like the IMDb Top Movies, only it wouldn’t be restricted to 250 titles.

As great films come out every year, maybe it shouldn’t even have a fixed number.

I’ll post some more thoughts soon, but if you have any ideas on what the format should be or what films to include then let me know in the comments below.

> The post on the Cahiers List
> IMDb Top 250
> My favourite films of 2007
> Wikipedia section on Films Considered The Greatest Ever

Categories
News Thoughts

David Cox of The Guardian loses the plot over Hunger

I have to admit that I missed David Cox’s article about Hunger on the Guardian’s film blog, which was published on November 3rd, and only discovered it retrospectively after seeing the reader’s editor piece on it.

For those not familiar with the film, it deals with the 1981 IRA hunger strikes inside the Maze prison.

It premiered to great acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival back in May and it also garnered similar reviews on it’s UK release.

Despite some early articles predicting ‘controversy’, it hasn’t really materialised, mainly because the film doesn’t seek to be a political polemic, but rather an exploration of the reasons and realities of life inside the prison.

One of the actors in the film (Liam Cunningham) recently told me that when it was screened in Belfast last month, the reception from both sides of the political divide was positive because it took a human look at this dark chapter of The Troubles.

So it is extremely disappointing to read Cox’s silly and offensive rant about the film, which possibly qualifies as one of the worst articles I’ve ever read in a paper I generally admire and respect.

I would encourage you to read it for yourself but there are some sentences worth highlighting.

On the conditions in the prison, as depicted in the film, he says: 

Far from being shocked at seeing the inmates roughed up a bit, I found myself wishing they’d been properly tortured, preferably savagely, imaginatively and continuously.  

So, a Guardian journalist advocates torture. I realise we have had an historic week for other reasons but I really never thought I would see the day.  

I assume he is making a feeble attempt at a joke but given the appalling torture scandals in recent years in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, you’ll have to excuse me for finding this both trite and disgusting.

But I don’t need to tell you that as even Cox admits that what he is writing is ‘immoderate’ and ‘reprehensible’:

I appreciate that my responses to this beautifully made film are uncharitable, immoderate and indeed reprehensible.

Yet, the men heroised in Hunger chose to murder my fellow citizens, on their own island and mine, indiscriminately and brutally, in pursuit of a cause I consider unimpressive. What do you expect me to feel?  

Well, you can feel what you like, but before putting your thoughts down for a serious newspaper, I would suggest you think a bit more deeply about not only the long and complex history between England and Ireland, but also about a film which is clearly operating on a level far above your shameful ramblings.

For good measure he even chucks in an offensive term for Catholics when discussing the nationality of the director Steve McQueen:

Admittedly, some of my compatriots seem better able to contain their rancour.

Hunger’s writer/director, Steve McQueen, isn’t some baleful, unreconstructed Fenian, but a Londoner sporting an OBE.

Given that the term ‘Fenian’ has often been used as a derogatory slur against Catholics, I would suggest this was unwise at best and more to the point, what has McQueen’s nationality got to do with anything?

Clearly this is something of a pet peeve, as he goes on to question why British directors like Ken Loach and Paul Greengrass should have the gall to use British money in order to make films about one of the most important historical episodes in our recent history:

His film was funded not by Libya Movies or the Boston Irish Benevolent Society but by Film Four, the Wales Creative IP Fund and the UK Film Council.

Forgiveness is a wonderful thing, but there still seems something a little odd here. Wasn’t the United Kingdom the entity that the IRA was created to destroy? Would Israel subsidise an admiring biopic about Leila Khaled?

Yet, Hunger isn’t alone. The UK Film Council also found cash for The Wind that Shakes the Barley, whose sturdily English director hails from Nuneaton. Granada had a hand in Bloody Sunday, and that film’s director was born in Cheam. 

Cox seems to be implying that there is some kind of irony in British directors making films that ‘glorify’ an enemy bent on ‘destroying’ the UK. 

If you actually watch The Wind That Shakes The Barley or Bloody Sunday (preferably with brain switched on) you might realise that Cox is talking utter bollocks. 

Neither film glorifies terrorism or indeed the Republican cause, so what exactly is his point?

Furthermore, if the UK Film Council were to go insane and select directors for subjects based on their nationality, then surely this is the kind of prejudice and narrow minded thinking that leads to division and conflict?  

But clearly levelheaded tolerance is in short supply on this corner of the Guardian’s film blog:

Doesn’t it ever occur to the British film industry’s luminaries that Britain’s role in The Troubles could also be celebrated, at least occasionally?

It was, after all, shaped by the call of duty, rather than misplaced nationalist fervour.

What kind of film is he talking about here? 

A possible subject comes to mind. Captain Robert Nairac, a maverick undercover agent, was abducted, savagely tortured and killed by the IRA. His assassin subsequently said, “Nairac was the bravest man I ever met. He told us nothing”.

Yet Nairac was a Catholic. His last words were “Bless me Father, for I have sinned”. All of this seems to me to make him a more interesting as well as a more heroic character than Bobby Sands. 

Is Hunger making Sands out to be a hero? I don’t think so, but to go down the road of making films celebrating either the Unionist or Republican position on the Troubles strikes me as a very slippery one indeed.

Do the UK Film Council fund a film about an IRA atrocity like Enniskillen, followed by one involving the alleged shoot-to-kill policy of the SAS?

Surely this is nonsensical – it is best to just let artists and writers bring their vision to the screen and judge them on the final result.

If you read through the comments on the post (currently 848 as I write this) you’ll find that many have taken offence and complained at the lowering of standards at The Guardian.

The reader’s editor  posted her own piece about this, saying:

More than 700 comments were posted to it, but let’s not confuse that with popularity: “grossly antagonistic”, “hysterical”, “uninformed view of Irish history”, “rabble-rousing”, “anti-Irish”, “bigoted” and “a spittle-flecked BNP-style rant” were just some of the objections to it.

How did Cox offend readers? Let me count the ways. Talking about scenes in the film that showed the brutal treatment of republican prisoners at the Maze he said: “Far from being shocked at seeing the inmates roughed up a bit, I found myself wishing they’d been properly tortured, preferably savagely, imaginatively and continuously.”

Many commenters and nearly all of the 21 people who complained to me objected to that statement, which appeared to advocate torture, being published by the Guardian.

It’s obvious that the Guardian doesn’t endorse all of the frequently diverging views in all the comment pieces it publishes, and other articles about Hunger had a different slant. However, fragmentation of web content means that readers of Cox’s blog may not have seen them. 

It’s not that a dissenting view on Hunger is a bad thing, it is more that a bone-headed and offensive pile of rubbish was spewed all over a normally respectable and intelligent part of the web.

But Siobhain goes on to get Cox’s reply and that of the film site’s editor, which is revealing to say the least:

Cox went on: “You see, what kept coming into my mind (although not into the film) was the treatment that these same victims of the shovings and beatings had meted out to the victims of their own bullets and bombs.”

What on earth this has to do in a serious discussion of the film (as distinct from the actual horrors of the Troubles) is beyond me, but anyway let’s continue:

He told me that it was a misrepresentation to suggest that he was actually advocating torture and the film site’s editor said that his blog was a gut response to Hunger.

Well, it isn’t a ‘misrepresentation’ if he actually wrote a sentence advocating torture is it? And if he is making an attempt at satire, then I would humbly suggest that it has failed miserably.

Just because scenes in Hunger made him think of the victims of the IRA doesn’t really mean anything unless he forms that ‘gut reaction’ into a sensible point about the film.

I bring this up because one of the most shocking scenes – which he neglects to mention – is actually a brutal and callous murder by an IRA gunman.

The site’s editor says:

“Film-makers provoke a reaction and the film blog is a forum for discussing reactions to films,” she told me.

Well, that’s all fine except I think this particular comment piece crossed several lines.

Can you imagine what the Guardian’s reaction would be had this piece been published by right-leaning papers like The Daily Mail or The Telegraph?

Furthermore, it annoys me that some editors on newspapers appear to think that tendentious crap can be passed off as colourful comment simply because ‘its on a blog’.

Whether it is in print, online or on a podcast I expect there to be some quality and consistency from a news organisation like The Guardian.

To be fair, the reader’s editor does admit:

It was an extremely provocative blog that deliberately treated a sensitive subject insensitively. 

…As more than one objector said, it was “incendiary”, but in the end Cox appeared to be hoist by his own petard.

There was limited support for his diatribe and, while his approach to the subject matter was a recipe for a polarised and nasty debate, there is evidence that many commenters resisted the urge to match Cox’s intemperate tone.

Generally, they raised the level of debate and the discussion was, in many places, markedly courteous.

Which is more than can be said of Cox, who is fairly unrepentant in his final reply:

Cox has no regrets about causing offence.

“There is a strong tradition in English journalism, dating back to Swift … of robust expression on matters of great sensitivity,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s true that we can debate just as effectively if we all express ourselves in as genteel fashion as Victorian maiden aunts might have done.”

I’m all for robust debate but I want intelligence and facts too, which is ironic because as this one perceptive comment points out:

Swift was Irish, you ignorant pillock

Former Guardian editor C.P Scott once said: ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred‘, but in this case I think he would agree the above comment by user ‘Setanta‘ has a certain divine quality to it.

> Read the original post by David Cox at The Guardian
> The reader’s editor responds 
> Listen to actor Liam Cunningham discuss Hunger

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

First thoughts on Quantum of Solace

The second James Bond film with Daniel Craig as the famous British secret agent continues the refreshingly serious tone of Casino Royale but whether it will cause the same excitement and buzz as the last film remains to be seen.

It would be fair to say anticipation for Quantum of Solace is running incredibly high after the successful rebooting of the franchise in 2006 – not only did Craig silence a lot of sceptics but the raw, stripped down approach really worked, making it the biggest grossing Bond ever.

Beofre the screening I went to in London tonight the head of Sony Pictures UK told the audience that this was the first screening anywhere in the world, so everyone was fairly excited at what was in store.

Unusually for the franchise, the plot here takes off immediately after the events of the last movie, as 007 is searching for the man who fatally betrayed his lover Vesper Lynd.

After an opening sequence in Italy, the trail leads him to Haiti – the back to Italy – and eventually to Bolivia where he encounters the mysterious Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a key player in the Quantum organisation that blackmailed Vesper and is now involved in destabilising regimes in Central America.

Also involved in Greene’s web of intrigue is Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a woman who – like Bond – has personal issues and scores to settle.

The most immediately striking aspect of the film is the breakneck pace of the first 40 minutes or so, as it opens with pre-credits car chase and before things even settle down Bond is pursuing people on the rooftops of Siena before jetting off around the world.

Like Casino Royale the action and stunts are well done, but I do wonder if Marc Forster was quite the director to bring these sequences fully to life.

Whilst engaging, the lensing and editing don’t quite get the adrenaline pumping like the more recent Bourne or Batman movies.

That said, Forster is on much surer ground with the characters and their emotional involvement with one another.

The interplay between Bond and the characters closest to him such as M (Judi Dench), René Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini) and Camille are all handled with a nice amount of humour and genuine feeling – another aspect that marks this Bond era out from the past.

In fact I would have traded some of the action for more character-based material as it is where the director seems more comfortable.

Whilst some of the stunt work is technically impressive, it is the dialogue and interplay between the leads that is more satisfying, especially with actors like Craig and Dench.

Whilst Almaric is a great actor (he was phenomenal in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly last year) his villain here feels a little underwritten – perhaps because he isn’t the true number 1 of the organisation?

Another aspect of the film which will get people talking is the more contemporary, even European, attitude on display here – which I suspect is the influence of screenwriter Paul Haggis.

Whilst it isn’t as despairing as his last film In the Valley of Elah, the underlying politics of the story are clearly suspicious of the CIA – instead of the traditional Cold War allies we have a much more amoral organisation who can’t be fully trusted.

In fact trust is a big theme of the film as the Quantum organisation have, as one character puts it, ‘people everywhere’.

Even MI6 isn’t immune to a world full of deception and mistrust and in some ways this atmosphere is more effective than a lot of the action set pieces.

A lot of people are going to wonder how this shapes up to the last film and in a nutshell I would say that it continues the good work of that film whilst having a more stylised visual approach.

The locations – especially in Italy and Bolivia – are great to look at and some of the sets even seem to be referencing those Ken Adam constructed in an earlier Bond era.

I think some audiences might miss the gadgets and old-school appeal of the earlier Connery and Moore films but I think that the filmmakers have wisely preserved the cool, stripped down approach of Casino Royale.

It will have a massive opening and will no doubt satisfy Bond fans but whether it will surprise me if it does as well as Casino Royale.

This feels very much like the second film of a trilogy with the wider story still to be concluded.

> Quantum of Solace at the IMDb
> More details about the plot and photos from the press conference launch at Pinewood
> Final trailer of the film
> Peter Bradshaw review at The Guardian
> James Christopher review at The Times
> BBC News review
> Telegraph review
> Sky News report on the screening last night

[All images © 2008 Danjaq, LLC, United Artists Corporation, Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved]

Categories
Interesting News Thoughts

Disney ad campaign for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas raises important questions

The Telegraph today are reporting that Disney are using quotes from IMDb message boards on posters for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

Graham Tibbetts writes:

Advertisements in Britain for The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas quoted seven phrases taken from reviews on the film fans’ website IMDb.com (the Internet Movie Database).

The praise included “Simply stunning” from a blogger called Theedge-4, and “Please please see this film”, written by Mjavfc1.

Apparently, the quotes were used in newspaper and online adverts. 

It strikes me as a little odd that Disney’s UK marketing team would go down this route, given that the film got mostly good reviews anyway from ‘established’ critics.

Are they are somehow trying to appeal to a younger viewer who doesn’t read newspapers or magazines and gets their reviews online?

Later in the piece, Disney UK’s executive marketing director explains their aims: 

Having used many of the critics’ quotes on all pre-release ads and also for a further two weeks in-season, we felt that it would provide a welcome change for readers if we were to freshen up the campaign and, crucially, demonstrate that the film now has the support of the public and the critics,” he said.

“The key point to make is that the bloggers’ reviews were always to be used in addition to – and never ‘instead of” – those of the film critics.”

Mr Jury added: “The recognised film critics are, and will continue to be, one of the mainstays of the industry from both a marketing and publicity point of view.”

I’m still not sure this was a great strategy and I think they have confused ‘bloggers‘, as I understand the term, with IMDb users.

However, I remember at a London Film Festival panel last year entitled Is The Internet Killing the Film Critic?, one member enthused that her favourite place to read reviews was indeed the IMDb message boards (was a Disney marketing exec listening that night?). 

But to quote usernames like ‘Mjavfc1’ and ‘Theedge-4’ on a poster for a serious film like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas seems a little bit odd. 

The Telegraph does also bring up some interesting issues though, as it reports on why this kind of marketing might be damaging to ‘traditional’ film criticism:

…the practice, used in newspaper and online marketing of the picture, has been condemned by professional critics.

Jason Solomons, chairman of the film section of The Critics’ Circle, said: “These online postings are unreliable. We don’t know who the writers are.

Anybody can make up an internet name – it could be the producer himself or one of the actors.

“It’s a very dangerous area because the anonymity gives them complete freedom to express themselves without being accountable for what they have written. It’s actually cowardly and I don’t think it’s helpful to use them.”

I actually have a lot of sympathy with what Jason is saying here, as I generally believe that openness and transparency are very important for online readers and writers.  

Apart from exceptional circumstances when anonymity needs to be used for the greater good, such as whistle-blowers or those blogging in repressive regimes, saying who you are is important as it encourages a better and more honest debate. 

Also, anyone familiar with the episode of when an anonymous employee at Vertigo films started posting anonymously on The Guardian’s film blog about Outlaw will know that anonymity online isn’t as anonymous as some might think.

But back to the Telegraph story:

Although many critics applauded the film, none of their reviews were quoted in the newspaper advertisement.

I’m guessing that this was because this particular part of the ad campaign was meant to appeal to a more online-savvy audience, whatever the merits of that.

But it goes on:

The situation contrasts with Mama Mia [sic], which was released to critical derision earlier this year but flourished after reviews by the public.

I think ‘reviews by the public’ means good old traditional word of mouth doesn’t it? Or are they talking about those TV spots that include interviews with audience members enthusing about a film outside a cinema?

Whatever the case, Mamma Mia! was essentially critic proof and didn’t just ‘flourish’ because of ‘reviews by the public’ – it’s record breaking gross was mainly down to the fact that it was based on a hugely successful musical featuring songs from one of the biggest music acts of all time.

But now the wheels really start to come off this article: 

Mr Solomons, who writes for a number of national newspapers and was among those who praised The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, said: “This is a very important film and it’s a shame to see it cheapened in this way, especially when it had decent reviews.”

He said that some of his colleagues believed the use of blogging reviews threatened their future.

“There is a fear that it could spell the end of the critic. I’m hoping that it will highlight the inconsistencies of the internet and reinforce the point of us. People will realise they can’t be guided by ‘Pete63’ because they don’t know who it is.”

Mr Solomons stressed the importance of the relationship between the critic and the public and said: “When a film-goer reads a critic whose views chime with theirs, they know that if the critic likes a film then they go along and enjoy it. That wouldn’t happen with a blogger they don’t know.”

Whilst Jason is expressing a legitimate point of view, the article is framed so that anonymous-bloggers-with whacky-names are positioned against the good old-fashioned print critic.

But you know something is seriously wrong when a national newspaper is using a phrase like ‘blogging reviews’. What exactly are ‘blogging reviews’?

My feeling here is that comments on IMDb message boards are being confused with people who write online in a blog format.

What is a blog format, or indeed a blog? Well, it usually (but not always) means a website, or a section of one, which contains diary style entries, links to other sites and a comments section.

But the mistake some journalists make (like Rachel Cooke of the Observer back in 2006) is that they see all ‘bloggers’ as one huge pack of anonymous amateurs writing ill-informed articles.

Whilst there is a lot of bad writing amongst the millions of blogs out there, only a total buffoon would dismiss them as one amorphous group.

After all, there are many great blogs out there publishing a lot of interesting film material on a regular basis.

What about GreenCine Daily, /Film, Hollywood Elsewhere, Awards Daily, In Contention, Spout Blog, The Hot Blog and The House Next Door? 

And what about established journalists like Roger Ebert, Anne Thomspon, David Carr, Nikki Finke, Jim Emerson and Dave Kehr?

All of these are bloggers I read on a regular basis. They have different qualities and voices that I want as part of my regular film reading. 

I judge them on what they write – not the technical mechanism by which their content reaches me. 

Whilst I agree with Jason’s view that anonymity is (mostly) a bad thing, his view of film criticism (e.g. newspaper critic sees film, which newspaper reader then dutifully goes to see) is a little outdated. 

Now, a film fan with web access – which is a lot of people – can read all sorts of interesting and well written sites about films. The trick is to sort out the good from the bad. 

My contention in these – now surely dated – debates about ‘old’ and ‘new’ media is that the cream will rise to the top.

When some newspaper journalists get into these discussions they often seem like a vicar at a rave – disapproving, confused and out of place.

There is also more than a whiff of ivory-tower disdain that amateurs are storming the Bastille of professional journalism.

But is this idea of angry bloggers waving their pitchforks at mainstream media either helpful or accurate?

Surely with the sheer range of film writing out on the web, there are bound to be some lesser known bloggers who are better than well paid journalists?

What’s interesting to me is that for all of the money and resources pumped into the film sections of The Guardian and The Telegraph, a blog like GreenCine Daily is more useful than either of those.

Now I should say that I enjoy and regularly read the Guardian and Telegraph film sections – a lot of the articles they comission and publish are well written and as national newpapers they can draw upon a pool of excellent contacts and resources.

So why is a blog like Green Cine Daily superior? Because it links daily to some of the most interesting film content on the web and has a great range which takes in blockbusters like Hancock and releases like Silent Light and Vampyr. (And I’m not just saying this because they occasionally link to my stuff).

So, something does stick in the craw when established newspapers distort and misrepresent film writing on the web as anonymous amatuers who are endangering their profession.

For all the power and heavy lifting of ‘old media’ companies, there still seems to be a reluctance to really link out to the best of the web as they appear to be stuck in a world where they have to be the best at everything.

For any doubters about linking out to better content on the web, please watch this video of Jay Rosen explaining why it is important both for blogs and traditional news media:

 

Blogs on traditional newspapers are often not what I would call proper blogs, but rather sections where they throw out questions or allow comments on pieces commissioned for the print newspaper.

To be fair, things are improving and I salute editors like Alan Rusbridger and Will Lewis for embracing the web but that said surely the credits are beginning to roll on the age where we solely read national newspaper critics?

They still have value, especially in the case of Philip French, Peter Bradshaw, Mark Kermode and Wendy Ide – all film critics for UK national newspapers I really respect and admire.

The traditional skeptical response to this inevitable change is to say: ‘ah yes, that’s all very well but there’s a lot of rubbish on the internet’.

But my usual response to that is why aren’t you ignoring the rubbish and hunting down the good stuff? If you need some examples to get going, check out my list of useful movie websites.

For hardcore Internet skeptics I would urge you to read a recent piece by Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine and writes a weekly column for the Guardian.

Entitled Let’s Junk the Myths and Celebrate What We’ve Got, it addresses and refutes many of the paranoid questions established journalists often mutter about online writing. 

Good writers – I think – will always be read. What hasn’t yet been worked out, due to the technological and social changes engulfing the media, is how that will work out in the long run.

Whilst I have sympathy for journalists and news organisations who’s traditional working methods are threatened, it is vital that they and their owners engage in a positive debate about how to use the web to their advantage rather than complain about what a threat it has been.

But the final irony of the Telegraph article is this bit:

Another reviewer, who did not wish to be named, said he suspected Disney quoted the bloggers because it feared the film would receive a critical mauling.

“I don’t wish to be snobbish about them but you can find bloggers who can rave about anything,” he said. 

So it seems wrong for bloggers to remain anonymous, but does the same standard apply to journalists issuing snotty comments?

It seems you can find journalists who will remain anonymous and ignorant about anything.

Your thoughts are welcome below.

> Original story at The Telegraph
> The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas at the IMDb
> Recent interviews I did with the cast, writer and director of The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas
> My LFF report last year on the debate entitled Is the Internet Killing the Film Critic?
> My list back in May of The Most Useful Movie Websites 
> Michael Coniff tried to define what a blog is back in 2005 
> Green Cine Daily with a podcast on a debate about the future of film criticism 
> The Jeff Jarvis piece entitled Let’s Junk the Myths and Celebrate What We’ve Got

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

Why the Saw films own Halloween

I remember walking through Leicester Square in London last Halloween and began wondering why Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween wasn’t being released then.

It had opened on September 28th, a full month beforehand, and in the US had opened even earlier on the Labor Day weekend.

Given the obvious marketing benefits, why had the distributors not gone for the obvious October 31st release date?

The answer is simple: The Saw franchise owns Halloween. 

As the tag line for the Saw IV poster cockily put it:

If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw.

Although I’m still looking for them to use an actual image of a see-saw with the tag line: 

See. Saw.

But anyway, how did this extraordinary success come to pass?

In 2004, Lionsgate Films released a low-budget horror film from the unknown writer/director team of James Wan and Leigh Whannell. 

Although it had some known actors in it such as Cary Elwes and Danny Glover, it was it’s clever mixture of extreme gore and unpredictable twists that powered it to a gross of over $100 million worldwide.

Given that it was made for just $1.2 million dollars, you can see why Lionsgate keep churning these out every year. 

In fact, the last two Saw films alone were made for just $10 million each and both made box office revenues of well over $100 million, showing just how popular and enduring the franchise has become. 

Despite the financial success, there has been an inevitable decline in the quality of the films; Saw II was entertaining, but III and IV were tired riffs on the original premise to the point that I just didn’t really care about who was doing what. 

But the success with mainstream audiences does intrigue me. Do people get a kick out of the sadistic torture sequences? Or is it the intricate and puzzling aspect of the killings that fascinate audiences? (Remember, the villain is called Jigsaw).

Perhaps in an era where the current US president has essentially legalised torture they represent a bizarre fantasy for the viewer – after all, there is often a twisted morality to the people Jigsaw tortures.

But a more practical answer might be that these films are just brilliantly marketed – not only do they offer a younger audience effective scares, but they have an appealing sense of mystery in each one. 

Most horrors involve monsters or a lone boogeyman stalking unsuspecting victims, but the Saw films have an added dimension in that each death is nearly always some kind of diabolical puzzle.

Added to that there is always an element of choice the victim has – even if it means gouging out their own eye, they can still save themselves – which is a neat twist on the helplessness of most horror movie victims.

On top of that, the inherent theatricality of these sequences mean they stick in the mind more than some bimbo getting stabbed with a knife or a creature gobbling someone up.

The latest film sees Forensic Hoffmann (Costas Mandylor) take over Jigsaw’s reign and here is taste of the from the trailer:

The big question for me is where does this all end? The tagline for the poster above states:

In the end all the pieces will fit together.

But I’m already hearing there will be Saw VI next year along with a computer game(!). 

It seems we haven’t seen the last of Saw.

Saw V is released in the UK on October 24th

> Official site for Saw V
> Find out more about the Saw franchise at Wikipedia 
> Listen to our interview with Tobin Bell (who plays Jigsaw) from Saw III

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

I’ve Loved You So Long: A moving drama of sisterly love

I’ve Loved You So Long is an intelligent and beautifully crafted portrayal of family love which revolves around two sisters named Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Lea (Elsa Zylberstein), who reconnect with one another after a prolonged absence. 

To say too much about the plot would be to spoil the cleverly constructed narrative which gradually reveals their past and the reasons as to why they have been separated for so long. 

Writer and director Philippe Claudel is better known as a novelist in his native France and this also shares many of the pleasures of well written fiction: nuanced characters, slow burning emotions and a real sense of the complexities of human relationships. 

This is a film in which a lot of characters spend a lot of time in rooms talking about themselves, but at the same time manages to burrow deeply into the tangled emotions of it’s protagonist. 

Much of the power comes from two marvellous central performances and Scott Thomas proves what a captivating screen presence with what is arguably the role of her career so far. 

Since coming to prominence in the 90s with films like Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and The English Patient (1996), she seemed to get typecast in one dimensional roles as an upper-crust ice queen whether it was middlebrow disappointments (Random Hearts, The Horse Whisperer) or in period pieces (Up at the Villa, The Other Boleyn Girl). 

Her work on stage – notably in Chekhov productions like Three Sisters and The Seagull – demonstrated that she had much more range and ability than some of her screen performances suggested, so it is gratifying to see her grapple with such a juicy part and take it to another level. 

Credit must also go to Claudel for the way in which he has captured the small but subtle details that gradually reveal her character: the silence as she sits alone in a cafe, the wetness of her hair or even the way she smokes a cigarette. 

Zylberstein, in a more straightforward role, also impresses as th younger sister. It isn’t always easy to portray a humane and loving person on screen without resorting to clunky sentimentality but her she does fine work in creating a character who – like the audience – goes on a journey of discovery about her enigmatic sister. 

Since screening at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals a few weeks ago, this film has had a good deal of awards buzz and deservedly so. 

Although it’s status as a foreign film might be a handicap – especially when faced with heavily marketed awards bait from the likes of Miramax and Fox Searchlight – this richly deserves to be recognised for the sheer excellence of it’s writing and acting.

I’ve Loved You So Long opens in selected UK cinemas from this Friday 

> I’ve Loved You So Long at the IMDb
> Trailer for the film
> Kristin Scott Thomas at Wikipedia
> Critical reation to the film from Kim Voynar at Cinematical, Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere, Jonathan Romney in Screen International and Derek Elley in Variety
> Awards buzz for the film at In Contention
> Profile of Scott Thomas in The Times

Categories
Thoughts

Roger Ebert on giving too many stars

Despite his (deserved) status as one of the most revered film critics around Roger Ebert does have something of a reputation of being too generous to films that don’t quite cut the mustard.

Interestingly, he has addressed this in an interesting blog post entitled “You give out too many stars”.

He writes:

That’s what some people tell me. Maybe I do.

I look myself up in Metacritic, which compiles statistics comparing critics, and I find: “On average, this critic grades 8.9 points higher than other critics (0-100 point scale).” Wow. What a pushover.

Part of my problem may be caused by conversion of the detested star rating system. I consider 2.5 stars to be thumbs down; they consider 62.5 to be favorable. But let’s not mince words: On average, I do grade higher than other critics.

Now why do I do that? And why, as some readers have observed, did I seem to grade lower in my first 10 or 15 years on the job?

I know the answer to that one. When I started, I considered 2.5 stars to be a perfectly acceptable rating for a film I rather liked in certain aspects.

Then I started doing the TV show, and ran into another wacky rating system, the binary thumbs. Up or down, which is it?

Gene Siskel boiled it down: “What’s the first thing people ask you? Should I see this movie? They don’t want a speech on the director’s career. Thumbs up–yes. Thumbs down–no.”

My gut feeling is that the star system for rating any artistic endeavour is flawed.

I know that a lot of people (amongst them many readers and editors) like it as it makes their choices easier, but my central problem is that it reduces everything to a simplistic maths equation.

Although in the past I have given marks out of ten and stars out of five to films when asked, I do so reluctantly.

My belief is that if someone can’t convince you of the merits of a particular film, book, play, album (or whatever) through the strength of their words alone, then they really shouldn’t be reviewing it in the first place.

There is also the added complication of whether to use marks out of four, five, ten or hundred. It seems to me that publications are pretty arbitrary on this, even though it has a massive effect on the final grade. 

But perhaps the worst thing about the star system is that it is applying maths to art. I don’t believe anyone (whether they be Andy Warhol, Michael Bay, Werner Herzog or Martin Scorcese) sets out to make a film to fit into a scientific formula – so why do we feel we have to grade them like one?

But back to Roger, he lists the reasons why he grades higher than the Metacritic average:

But forget ratings systems altogether. What inclines me to tilt in a more favorable direction?

I submit the following possibilities:

1. I like movies too much. I walk into the theater not in an adversarial attitude, but with hope and optimism (except for some movies, of course). I know that to get a movie made is a small miracle, that the reputations, careers and finances of the participants are on the line, and that hardly anybody sets out to make a bad movie…

On this I have a lot of sympathy with Roger, as I too always go to a film hoping it will be good. Why would you be doing a job like this if you didn’t?

That said, I’m often surprised at how often this isn’t the case – at times some critics and ‘media’ audiences I’ve been amongst almost seem to relish trashing a bad or average film more than actually celebrating a good or excellent one.   

in my line of work I am often stunned at the amount of people you meet who appear to actually dislike the act of going to the cinema and watching a film (even if this is their job!).

In the UK, where TV and Theatre appears to have a higher social and cultural standing than Film, there is still – in some influential quarters – a certain snobbishness about the medium.

This usually leads to a kind of pointless grumbling about ‘Hollywood trash’, even though Britain, Europe and the rest of the world have also contributed to the collective cesspool of bad films.  

But anyway, Roger’s second reason is:

2. Directors. There are some who make films I simply find myself vibrating with. I will have difficulty in not admiring a work by Bergman, Altman, Fellini, Herzog, Morris, Scorsese, Cox, Leigh, Ozu, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Keaton…and to borrow an observation from my previous entry, I haven’t even reached directors under 60.

This is undeniable. Although I’m not a fully paid up subscriber to the Auteur Theory, there is no doubt that this is a director’s medium.

Even if you don’t fully engage with a particular film, the stamp of the director  -and how it compares to his other work – is certainly a factor is passing judgement on it.    

His third rule:

3. I feel strongly about actors I admire, watching their ups and downs and struggles to work in a system that often sees them only as meat. Example. I opened my review of “The Women” this way: “What a pleasure this movie is, showcasing actresses I’ve admired for a long time, all at the top of their form. Yes, they’re older now, as are we all, but they look great, and know what they’re doing.”

Yes, I really believe that. I interviewed Candice Bergen for the first time in 1971. God, she was wonderful. I mean as a person. She was one of the most beautiful women in the world, and she married Louis Malle, and was happy. Louis Malle was beautiful too, if you know what I mean, and a great filmmaker. She fell in love with both her head and her heart. I felt a particular pleasure in seeing her and that whole cast together.

Hmmm. Whilst I appreciate that audience members (be they experienced critics or young kids going to the cinema for the first time) form attachments to certain actors, one of the basic tenets of decent criticism is that you should be honest about their bad work as much as they best.

I am a huge admirer of Al Pacino, a screen icon who has performed brilliantly in the The Godfather, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and The Insider.

But that doesn’t mean that I should cut any slack to a film like 88 Mins, which is one of his worst performances and, generally speaking, a laughable piece of crap.

To be fair though, that is primarily a problem with the writing and direction, for no actor can create a decent performance with a weak script. 

Rule 4:

4. Once the scent of blood is in the water, the sharks arrive. I like to write as if I’m on an empty sea. I don’t much care what others think. “The Women” scored an astonishingly low 28 score at Metacritic. “Sex and the City” scored 53. How could “The Women” be worse than SATC? See them both and tell me. I am never concerned about finding myself in the minority.

This is a fair enough – people should write their own feeling and not subscribe to critical ‘group-think’. But equally we shouldn’t go all contrarian and swim against the prevailing tide just to stand out.

Rule 5: 

5. I have sympathy for genres, film noir in particular. I am almost capable of liking a movie simply for its b&w noir photography. I like science fiction. Ed Harris has a new Western coming out named “Appaloosa.” I’ll like it more than the Metacritic average. You wait and see.

Although I understand Roger’s passion here – I think we all have genres we prefer – I really do think the quality of a film trumps whatever genre it is in.

For example romantic comedy has increasingly – and sadly – become a genre that signifies a badly written pile of rubbish aggressively marketed to a female audience.

But when judging it, we shouldn’t excuse because of it’s genre, rather we should explain why it is good, bad or average. In short, genres shouldn’t be an excuse. 

Rule 6:

6. In connection with my affinity for genres, in the early days of my career I said I rated a movie according to its “generic expectations,” whatever that meant. It might translate like this: “The star ratings are relative, not absolute. If a director is clearly trying to make a particular kind of movie, and his audiences are looking for a particular kind of movie, part of my job is judging how close he came to achieving his purpose.”

Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean I’d give four stars to the best possible chainsaw movie. In my mind, four stars and, for that matter, one star, are absolute, not relative. They move outside “generic expectations” and triumph or fail on their own.

As for rule 5, I think Roger is on sticky ground here. I understand that certain audience members have certain genre expectations (e.g. horror fans want to be scared or grossed out, comedy fans go to laugh) but I think that the individual voice of a critic is important.

Pauline Kael seemingly loved almost anything Brian De Palma directed whilst deriding Stanley Kubrick and Woody Allen, but I think people read her New Yorker reviews because of that snobbish, whacky passion. 

In a similar vein I think readers love Roger for his generous attitude, wide ranging knowledge and deep passion for movies.

Trying to adjust your own critical personality along genre lines could be selling yourself a bit short.

Rule 7:

7. I have quoted countless times a sentence by the critic Robert Warshow (1917-1955), who wrote: “A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man.”

If my admiration for a movie is inspired by populism, politics, personal experience, generic conventions or even lust, I must say so. I cannot walk out of a movie that engaged me and deny that it did. I must certainly never lower it from three to 2.5 so I can look better on the Metacritic scale.

This is a solid point. Any viewer of a movie with an opinion brings to it their own unique life experiences, so to artificially adjust or deny them is silly.

That said, the Metacritic average system points brings up an interesting issue. It is very rare that I disagree with films that get high (above 70) or low (below 40) scores.

Does this mean that critics tend to think alike? What would happen if we ran the Metacritic scores against the box office numbers? Or for that matter the IMDb 250?

How big a disparity would there be between the so-called experts and the paying audience?

Your thoughts are welcome.

> Roger’s original blog post at RogerEbert.com
> Metacritic and the individual scores for Roger
> Jeffrey Wells with his thoughts at Hollywood Elsewhere

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

Hunger: A riveting look at the IRA hunger strike

Hunger is a riveting look at the 1981 IRA hunger strike and marks an astonishing directorial debut for Steve McQueen.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland represents one of the darkest chapters in recent British history. On screen it has been treated with varying degrees of success, ranging from misguided Hollywood nonsense such as A Prayer for the Dying (1987) and The Devil’s Own (1997), to much more substantial work like Elephant (1989) and Bloody Sunday (2002).

This film is a stark and disturbing look at one of the key episodes of the period when a group of IRA prisoners in the Maze led by Bobby Sands went on a protracted hunger strike. Their aim was to apply pressure against the British government, so that they could be classed as political prisoners.

It opens with some startling facts about the human cost of the Troubles before plunging us into bitter brutality of life inside the prison.

This is a world in which prisoners refuse to wear clothes, smear excrement all over their walls, have cavity searches, are forced to bathe and savagely beaten but also where prison guards live in daily fear of reprisals and where animalistic anger explodes at regular intervals.

Wisely, McQueen has avoided making a some kind of polemic for either side of the conflict and instead has created what is essentially a suffocating war movie that just happens to be inside the walls of a prison.

What makes it so absorbing is the meticulous attention to detail and the indelible images McQueen and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt have created here: a snowflake slowly lands on a bloodied fist of a guard; a fly slowly crawls around the hands of a prisoner; urine gradually seeps out from beneath the cell doors before being gradually swept back in.

All this might sound a little odd, but part of the success of Hunger is the way in which it uses abstract methods in order to present a well-known conflict in a radically different way – instead of bombs and unlikely shootouts, we have a startling examination of hatred and anger fuelling an intractable conflict.

In the role of Sands Michael Fassbender is utterly convincing and his physical transformation into an emaciated hunger striker is remarkable.

One mesmerising sequence with his priest (Liam Cunningham) is shot in a 17 minute unbroken take. It shows Fassbender’s tremendous ability to maintain character whilst also conveying the ideas and thoughts behind the prisoner’s actions.

The supporting cast, costume and period detail is all first rate but there are some clever touches that add to the oppressive sense of reality – most notably the real life audio of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the soundtrack. We never see her, but her intransigent presence is felt throughout.

Although some might feel the balance of the film is too focused towards Sands and the IRA perspective, I think McQueen has gone for a more visual style of storytelling with a script (co-written by Enda Walsh) that wisely eschews the need for clunky expository dialogue or token ‘positions’.

This is not a film that ‘takes sides’, rather it explores the full human horror of The Troubles through the lens of the hunger strike – the physical brutality and sheer squalor point to the entrenched hatreds that ensnared all of those caught up in it.

Perhaps the most shocking scene is one that actually takes place outside the prison – it has the impact of a sledgehammer and the audience is forced to examine a truly disturbing image on the screen. In many ways it encapsulates the audacious approach of the film.

Steve McQueen has been best known until now as an acclaimed visual artist, but this could well mark the beginning of a hugely promising career in feature films.

Hunger opens in the UK on October 31st

> Hunger at the IMDb
> Green Cine Daily with the reactions to Hunger at Cannes earlier this year
> Find out more about the 1981 Hunger Strike at Wikipedia

Categories
Random Technology Thoughts

Ten Things Movies Told Us About Technology This Summer

Hollywood has long had an interesting relationship with technology from classic films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to nonsense like The Net (1995).

Since the rise of the PC over 15 years ago, computers haven’t always always been portrayed accurately in films.

For example in real life when you download something on your computer, the screen looks something like this:

But in a movie it often looks more like this:

But how about this summer’s crop of movies?

Here is a list of what we learned about technology on the big screen this summer:

1. TONY STARK IS BOTH A MAC AND PC GUY (IRON MAN)

If you are a billionaire industrialist trying to make a robotic suit that will turn you into a superhero, you still face the same dilemma as millions of computer users: do you use Mac or PC?

In order to become Iron Man, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jnr) appeared to use both.

In this summer’s first blockbuster, I caught a glimpse of a heavy duty Dell workstation and some Mac Pros – maybe he uses the Dells to crunch some stats and the Macs for the sleek design? Or maybe the two companies paid Marvel a ton of money to feature both.

2. ARCHAEOLOGISTS CAN SURVIVE NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS BY HIDING IN A LEAD LINED FRIDGE (INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL)

One of the most startling scientific revelations from this summer’s movie season was that Indiana Jones could survive a nuclear explosion by hiding …in a lead lined fridge.

It even led to a term being coined: “Nuking the Fridge“, which is supposed to be some kind of follow up to ‘Jump the Shark‘.

This video explains the terms:


Nuke The Fridge

One commentator suggested that:

The problem is that, even if he didn’t get flattened, horribly burned or suffocated (kids, don’t hide in refrigerators), Indy almost certainly would have gotten a lethal dose of radiation from the fallout.

Will the next Indy movie be called Indiana Jones and the Fallout from the Lead Lined Fridge?

3. WALL-E IS A PIRATE (WALL-E)

The cutest futuristic robot since Silent Running charmed audiences worldwide with his impressive devotion to cleaning up planet Earth and love of old musicals.

But where do the MPAA stand on his flagrant disregard of copyright law? Not only does he illegally record ‘Hello Dolly!‘ but there is no compensation for the artists involved.

However, given that the film takes place hundreds of years into the future, I think we can safely assume the 20th Century Fox musical will by then be in the public domain. Unless News Corp and Fox owner Rupert Murdoch lives forever (which shouldn’t be ruled out…)

4. CARRIE BRADSHAW CAN’T HANDLE THE iPHONE (SEX AND THE CITY)

If you were a fan of HBO‘s Sex and the City you will have noticed that Carrie Bradshaw wrote everything on her MacBook Pro.

However, in the movie version of the show she can’t seem to handle the iPhone.

When she needs a phone at her wedding in order to get in touch with her husband-to-be (Mr. Big) she is dismayed at the iPhone’s touch interface, saying ‘I can’t work this’.

Maybe some brushing up is needed for the next film?

5. BATMAN HAS THE NEW NOKIA ‘iPHONE KILLER’ (THE DARK KNIGHT)

In contrast to Carrie, Batman (Christian Bale) in The Dark Knight has a surer grasp on mobile phone technology.

Not only does he have a brilliant CEO named Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) who supplies him with all the gadgets a night time vigilante needs, but he also has an intimate knowledge of Gotham’s phone network.

However, in a move that will give Steve Jobs pause for thought, Bruce is introduced to the new Nokia ‘iPhone killer’ by Lucius on a trip to Hong Kong and it proves invaluable in extraditing a criminal.

Despite official denials from Nokia that the phone doesn’t exist, it looks like it could be the prototype for the Nokia 5200 – which is nicknamed ‘The Tube’.

Reports of a red version in a glass case, that lights up every time someone calls, were sketchy as this article went to press…

6. HELLBOY’S BOSS HATES YOUTUBE (HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY)

When you are the demonic spawn of a Nazi experiment gone wrong – that now secretly works for the US government as secret agent – anonymity is tough. Especially when you are Hellboy, who is bright red with horns and a tail.

In the first Hellboy he just about covered his tracks but in this summer’s sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, he couldn’t escape the attentions of citizen journalists in the Web 2.0 era, prompting his boss Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor) to snarl: “God, I HATE YouTube”.

The same sentiments could apply to Viacom’s lawyers.

7. ALIENS THINK GOOGLE AND YAHOO ARE SILLY NAMES (MEET DAVE)

Like some internet refuseniks (mainly older guys working in the newspaper industry) the aliens in the unfunny Eddie Murphy comedy Meet Dave are tickled pink that humans search and store information in places called Google and Yahoo.

Believe it or not, this was actually one of the funnier jokes in this dull Eddie Murphy vehicle which saw an alien spaceship (Eddie Murphy) land on Earth piloted by lots of little aliens led by a Captain (Eddie Murphy). Confused? Google it.

8. BRUCE BANNER USES AN OLD IRC CHAT PROGRAM (THE INCREDIBLE HULK)

When you are the victim of a radiation experiment that periodically turns you into a large green monster, what do you do when hiding out in Brazil from the clutches of the US government?

If you are Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) in The Incredible Hulk, you use a creaky old laptop and what appears to be an encrypted IRC program (remember those?) to communicate with a fellow scientist about a possible cure.

Would Skype not have been a better option, especially given its appropriately green icons?

9. MARIAH CAREY PREFERS MACS TO PCS (YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN)

Whilst Tony Stark seems happy to multitask on both, it seems Mariah Carey is a Mac devotee. In the Adam Sandler comedy You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, Mariah appears as herself in a cameo and in one scene her assistants are asked what she prefers: Macs or PCs?

Given that the film was funded by Sony, I was fully expecting them to say ‘PC’ and that (like James Bond) she is a huge fan of the Sony Vaio laptop. But no, they look at one another – as if to say ‘what a silly question!’ – and eagerly report she loves Macs.

High fives all round at Cupertino.

10. TIVO DOES MORE THAN JUST TV (TROPIC THUNDER)

Many people find that that DVRs like the TiVo has changed their TV viewing habits, but in the new Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder we find that it has more uses.

But given that the film hasn’t opened yet I don’t want to spoil why…

Can you think of any other memorable tech moments in the movies this summer?

> 2008 in film at Wikipedia
> The Inquirer’s Top 10 Technology Films
> The uses of computers in movies at Annoyances.org

Categories
Cinema News Thoughts

Why The Dark Knight should not be a 15 certificate

Last week in The Daily Mail columnist Alison Pearson helped kick off a silly bout of hysteria with a column about The Dark Knight.

She wrote:

Nothing in this new Batman is in jest. Not even the Joker. This film is doing serious business  –  and, make no mistake, its business is violence.

I saw The Dark Knight on Monday; or at least I saw the bits that I could bear to watch from behind my giant Diet Coke.

Fair enough. If you find the film hard to watch, then that is entirely how you experienced it.

It is dark, oppressive and filmed in a realistic style, especially for a comic book movie. Plus points as far as I’m concerned, and maybe that’s also true for the record-breaking audiences and large selection of critics who also loved it.

However, the picture she painted was not exactly accurate.

Let’s examine the bits she found so repellent:

Within the first five minutes, the body count was in double figures  –  and that was before a detonator was shoved down the throat of a dying bank manager.

Yes, that’s true but she neglects to mention that it doesn’t actually go off,  which is handy if you want to portray the opening sequence as some kind of exploding head filled monstrosity.

But not good if you want to be precise about what actually happens on-screen.

She goes on:

Soon afterwards, the Joker, played with diabolical brilliance by the late Heath Ledger, explained how he got that permanent blood-red clown’s grin.

His father had been attacking his mother’s face with a knife when he caught his young son watching with a serious expression.

Dad slashed the boy’s cheeks to make sure that the kid would never look down-in-the-mouth again.

As far as I could see and hear this wasn’t on-screen violence – it was a character talking.

Plus, if you pay attention you will notice that throughout the film the Joker gives different stories about how he got the scars, suggesting he is lying or screwing with people’s heads.  Creepy? Yes. Violent? No.

Then she brings up the scene in which the Joker kills a gangster with a pencil:

Consider this. If Batman had climbed out of bed and walked across the room to find his rubber boxers, thus showing his Batbum, the film would have been rated a 15  –  nudity being deemed far more shocking than cutting people’s throats, obviously.

Personally, I would be far happier for my children to glimpse Batman’s buttocks than to see a pencil skewered into a man’s eye, but what do I know?

Whilst I agree that sex is seen by censors as more taboo than violence (especially in the US) the problem with her point is that at no point do we see a pencil going in to an eye.

In fact, we don’t see any contact between face and pencil. Not only does it happen so quickly, but the camera cuts away so that even if you slowed it down I don’t think you would even see any actual gore in the frame.

The violence is implied, not shown. It certainly gives the audience a jolt but it is nothing like the grisly scene being painted here.

All of this might sound like standard Fleet Street outrage but the really troubling bit comes when a connection is made to the recent death of a teenager in London:

The day I went to see the film, I happened to drive past the spot where 16-year-old Ben Kinsella was stabbed 11 times. He was the 21st teenager to die of knife wounds in London this year.

His killers may have thought they were some kind of cartoon masters of the universe, meting out a perverse justice, but the scruffy street corner with its altar of rotting bouquets tells a different story.

No stirring music bestowed a thrilling poetic grandeur on Ben’s last seconds. No giant shadow of a cape flitted across the sky. Nobody could save him. Especially not this Batman.

What exactly is the point here? That the Joker’s taste for knives will lead to more deaths? The new Batman (a fictional character let’s remember) can’t save vulnerable children?

What on earth is she actually saying with this ill-advised detour into a much more serious issue?

That seemed to be the end of that, but it now appears that a snowball of indignation from a Daily Mail columnist is threatening to become an avalanche of idiocy.

Now, a cluster of clueless MPs and right wing commentators have all recently turned their sights on the film and the BBFC for awarding it a 12A certificate.

They seem to be rather upset that the film didn’t get than a 15 certificate.

For those unfamiliar with the film ratings system in the UK, each film is given one the following ratings before it can be shown in UK cinemas or sold/rented as a DVD:

  • Uc (Universal Children): Suitable for all, but especially suitable for young children to watch on their own (home media only)
  • U (Universal): Suitable for all, but parents are advised that certain scenes may be unsuitable for children under 4 years old.
  • PG (Parental Guidance): All ages admitted, but parents are advised that certain scenes may be unsuitable for children under 8
  • 12A (12 Accompanied/Advisory): Suitable for those aged 12 and over. Those aged under 12 are only admitted if accompanied by an adult at all times during the performance (replaced the standard 12 certificate for cinema releases only in 2002)
  • 12: Suitable for those aged 12 and over. No-one younger than 12 may rent or buy a 12 rated VHS, DVD or game (home media only since 2002)
  • 15: Suitable for those aged 15 and over. Nobody younger than 15 may see a 15 film in a cinema. No-one younger than 15 may rent or buy a 15 rated VHS, DVD or game.
  • 18: Suitable for those aged 18 and over. Nobody younger than 18 may see an 18 film in a cinema. No-one younger than 18 may rent or buy an 18 rated VHS, DVD or game.
  • R18 (Restricted 18): Suitable for those aged 18 and over. May only be shown at licensed cinemas or sold at sex shops, and only to people aged 18 or over.

The body that awards these certificates is called the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification), which is the organisation responsible for viewing films (and some video games) and given them one of the ratings above.

The Dark Knight was given a 12A which is, let us not forget, a restrictive certificate in that only those under 12 can see it if they are accompanied by an adult.

But clearly this isn’t good enough for the loons who want to see The Dark Knight reclassified as a 15.

Here some samples of what is being said.

The Daily Mail said yesterday in an another article (this time by Olinka Koster and Caroline Grant) that:

The violent new Batman movie has been given a 15 and 16 certificate by many countries – heaping fresh pressure on beleaguered film censors.

Parents say they have been ‘let down’ by the British Board of Film Classification which maintains that a ‘family friendly’ 12A rating is the right classification for The Dark Knight.

Parents? OK, some have complained.

But what sample size are we talking about here? And to what extent did the paper go chasing people who they knew didn’t like the film?

Are they really telling us they couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t outraged by the violence? But why let facts get in the way of opinion?

They then quote Simon Calvert, of the Christian Institute (those noted experts on film classification):

‘The BBFC has let parents down by giving it a 12A rating when it is clearly nothing of the sort.

‘I would like to see parents up and down the country complaining to the BBFC and the whole system of film classification revisited.

‘The BBFC have got this wrong and won’t admit it. I don’t think we can trust the board and perhaps we need a tougher legislative regime to prevent abuses like this.’

Who exactly are The Christian Institute? According to their website they exist for:

… “the furtherance and promotion of the Christian religion in the United Kingdom” and “the advancement of education”.

The Christian Institute is a nondenominational Christian charity committed to upholding the truths of the Bible. We are supported by individuals and churches throughout the UK.

Here’s a quick question. Would they allow children under 12 to read the Bible?

After all it contains scenes of graphic violence and acts of wanton cruelty.

  • In Genesis 6:7, 17 God gets angry and decides to destroy “all flesh wherein there is breath of life.” by drowning them.
  • In Exodus 12:12 God reveals to Moses that he is a baby killer, saying he intends to “smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast.”
  • Leviticus 20:13 puts forth the idea that Homosexuals must be executed.
  • In Numbers 25:1-5 Moses has people killed and then God tells him to hang their dead bodies up in front of the Sun.

These are just the first four books of the Old Testament and already we see a pattern of violence and cruelty much worse than anything in the Gotham of The Dark Knight.

Next up we have John Beyer, director of the rather conservative Mediawatch-uk (the successor to Mary Whitehouse‘s old pressure group The Viewers and Listeners Association):

‘One has to look at the fact we have a knife culture and ask what effect the BBFC’s decisions over the last 40 years or so have had on this.

‘This follows on from a long stream of films that have been excessively violent and badly classified and it gets children accustomed to seeing these sorts of things.

‘There is public concern about violence in entertainment and the board seem to be immune to it.’

We currently have – and have had for many years – one of the most restrictive film classifications in the Western world.

In recent years the BBFC have (rightly in my opinion) taken a more liberal stance on certain films (Such as 9 Songs, in which an erect penis was shown, along with – gasp! – real consensual sex), but it is just idiocy to say that our film ratings system over 40 years has contributed to knife crime.

If Mr Beyer really believes that, then I want detailed research, stats and strong evidence to back up his argument, not just some vague, reactionary sound bite.

I appreciate that when a newspaper rings you up for a quick soundbite it can be difficult, but these are serious issues that need deeper context and details.

They then quote a businessman named Mog Hamid, 43:

…he regretted taking his son Daniel, nine, to see the film in north London yesterday. ‘It was just too violent for someone as young as Daniel, he had his hands over his face a lot of the time because he was scared.’

Fair enough, but what about the thousands of young children who weren’t scared. Do we hear from them? The logic of piece presumably dictates that they are busy dressing up as the Joker and sharpening their knives as we speak.

But then we also get this zinger from Duncan Boyd, of the Church Society (another group renowned for their penetrating insights on film and society):

‘Any film that might encourage a child to engage in gratuitous violence should be awarded at least a 15 certificate…’

Let’s stop right there. These quotes sandwiched together – as they are in the piece – seem rather illogical.

The first suggests the film is so scary kids can’t even bring themselves to watch it. The second then suggests it will turn them into knife wielding maniacs.

If they are so scared by it then why would they be influenced? Surely, following this line of thinking, the film would act as a deterrent.

But again, why is The Church Society – a noble institution I’m sure – being asked for their views on a Batman movie?

Who else do they pull out of the right-wing closet to tip the article further into a pit of moral outrage?

How about Dr Adrian Rogers, former director of the family values pressure group, the Conservative Family Institute? (Could this be the same man who according to a 2001 article in The New Statesman once described homosexuality as “sterile, disease-ridden and God-forsaken”?)

He says:

”The BBFC do have a responsibility to act on their common senses.

I hope none of them are ever subjected to knife crime but they must accept that when they pass things like this, they have done their bit for the establishment of this culture.’

Again, this a lazy and unsubstantiated connection between knife crime and a ‘violent’ film (which The Dark Knight actually isn’t – but more of that later).

Where exactly is the data and evidence to back up these wild claims and suppositions? And has the Dr actually seen the film? Just asking.

But they save the best for last with television presenter, mother-of-three, and Swindon’s most noted cultural commentator, Melinda Messenger. She says:

‘I think children especially younger ones are like sponges and they absorb everything you put in front of them.

I find it really worrying that we are exposing our kids to these kinds of images from a much younger age from such a broad spectrum of media and the messages they are carrying are not positive ones.

‘With the current trend for knife crime in this country this should be the last thing we encourage.’

Whilst I respect someone’s right to an opinion about what films their children should see, this is just another slice of lazy outrage.

And in a piece about a film being reclassified and the connection between media and violence in society, I think getting the opinions of a former Page 3 girl is rather scraping the barrel.

But it also appears that some British MPs have also lost their senses when talking about this film.

The Times quote Keith Vaz (the Labour MP and chairman of the Commons home affairs committee) as saying:

“The BBFC should realise there are scenes of gratuitous violence in The Dark Knight to which I would certainly not take my 11-year-old daughter. It should be a 15 classification.”

But it seems the madness about the films is cross-party and The Guardian report that Ed Vaizey, the Tory culture minister as saying:

“The film contains violent and disturbing scenes, even though it’s a brilliant movie.

We should remember that BBFC classifications are only advisory and local authorities are ultimately responsible for classifications.

It would be interesting to see if any local authorities wish to use their powers for this and future films.”

Would it be interesting? Or would it totally contradict the point of having a central body like the BBFC giving films ratings? And don’t Tory politicians dislike the idea of the nanny state and government intervention?

Even my old boss – and now Sun columnist – Kelvin Mackenzie is chipping in, despite enjoying it:

…the film was tremendous. And violent. Even for adults.

The script was surprisingly intelligent, not at all what you would expect from a superhero film. It was also unashamedly aimed at an adult audience.

So how on earth could the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) have got it so wrong?

This movie deserved a 15. An idiot would know that.

No Kelvin, it appears only idiots do not know that. But anyway…

Not only is there a scene of an eyeball being stabbed with a pencil, a grenade in a bank manager’s mouth and a knife-wielding madman in the shape of The Joker, there is a strange feeling of psychotic danger.

Very clever by the filmmaker, but totally wrong for a little mind.

The BBFC have let it be known that they were lobbied by Warner Bros to allow the 12A.

Warner knew they had a massive worldwide blockbuster on their hands, so why on earth did they feel they needed even more money? It was simply greed.

I would be fascinated to learn how many Warner execs with young children took them to the film. My bet is none.

But the real villains are the BBFC, who now say the film was on the upper limit of what they would allow for a 12A.

Quick question for Kelvin.

If this was a 20th Century Fox film (the studio owned by your former/current boss Rupert Murdoch) would you be complaining about the rating, or would you be raising a glass and congratulating him on the vast sums of cash it is adding to News Corp‘s coffers?

However, at least Kelvin has actually seen the film. I get the feeling that some (perhaps many) of the ‘outraged’ commentators have not even seen it. This makes them look stupid and renders their opinion on the film utterly redundant.

If you discuss this issue with someone and they bleat about how violent the film is just ask them if they’ve seen it. And if they say no, then ask yourself if you can trust someone’s opinion on something they haven’t seen.

It really is that simple, but it is amazing how often people want to bleat ignorantly because an argument has been made for them to swallow hook, line and sinker.

And as for the violence – well, here’s the thing and let me say it in block capitals just for effect:

THE DARK KNIGHT IS NOT PARTICULARLY VIOLENT.

Dark? Certainly. Creepy? Yes, in parts. But violent? I mean as really violent as all these tabloid and Christian film experts are making out?

Well, lets talks about the violent scenes Kelvin highlights (which are the most extreme in the film).

  1. The scene where someone is stabbed in the eyeball with a pencil – We don’t see ANY contact between face and pencil. (See above response to Alison’s comments for more on this scene).
  2. A grenade in a bank manager’s mouth: It is a joke – albeit a dark one – but not violent or gory.
  3. There knife-wielding madman in the shape of The Joker: Firstly let’s just state that although he’s responsible for a lot of deaths and a huge crime wave, The Joker doesn’t actually kill that many people with a knife in the film. When he does we don’t actually see him do the act as the camera cuts away (just like the pencil scene).

Now, I’m willing to accept that some children might find The Joker and these sequences frightening but are they enough to upgrade the film to a 15? No, I don’t think so.

And what’s so wrong with being scared? Surely it is part of growing up, rather than the major trauma some make it out to be.

We are talking about a Batman film here (albeit a dark, realistic one) and not something truly disturbing and violent like Salo or Irreversible.

What is most disturbing is that a series issue like knife crime has been blown out of proportion and inflamed by a collection of tabloids, Christian pressure groups and people who offer little in the way of raw evidence or statistical data to back up their claims.

Even worse than that, some MPs (yes, even on their well paid summer break from Parliament) have found time to effectively railroad the BBFC in to changing their considered opinion on a film.

But we should leave the last word to the BBFC and their spokeswoman Sue Clark, as relayed by The Guardian :

Clark said that the BBFC had received about 100 complaints about the decision to give The Dark Knight a 12A.

A 100 complaints – whilst it may seem a lot in relation to other films that only attract 1 or 2, let’s put it into context.

Many thousands of viewers saw this film (easily one of the biggest of the year) and didn’t complain. Compare the two figures and then do the math.

She also said:

…it had not been made a 15 because the violence was depicted in a comic-book context and because “you do not see any blood or injury in detail”.

Correct. Absolutely 100% correct. This film should not be a 15 certificate – especially after all the lame arguments and slanted reaction put forth by papers who should know better.

Maybe it is time to shine a large bat signal above London and hope a masked vigilante comes into town to rescue us from this chorus of stupidity.

UPDATE 08/08/08: Just so you know exactly why the BBFC passed this film as a 12A, here are the official reasons as quoted from their website:

THE DARK KNIGHT tells the story of Batman’s continuing war on crime and in particular his personal battle with the psychotic Joker. It was passed ‘12A’ for moderate violence and sustained threat.

The BBFC Guidelines at ‘12A’ state that ‘violence must not dwell on detail’ and that ‘there should be no emphasis on injuries or blood’ and whilst THE DARK KNIGHT does contain a good deal of violence, all of it fits within that definition.

For example, in one of the stronger scenes, Batman repeatedly beats the Joker during an interrogation. The blows however are all masked from the camera and despite both their weight and force; the Joker shows no sign of injury.

There are also scenes in which the Joker threatens first a man and then a woman with a knife and whilst these do have a significant degree of menace, without any actual violence shown they were also acceptably placed at ‘12A’.

In the final analysis, THE DARK KNIGHT is a superhero movie and the violence it contains exists within that context, with both Batman and the Joker apparently indestructible no matter what is thrown at them.

THE DARK KNIGHT also contains some special make up effects that whilst clearly not real, have the potential to be moderately frightening.

Check out the parent section of the BBFC website, which helps parents make informed decisions (thanks to IncongruousM for the tip)

UPDATE 09/08/08: Children’s author Anthony Horowitz has posted his thoughts on the whole affair in today’s Guardian.

Although he steers clear of the distorted idiocy engulfing some commentators, some of his points don’t really add up:

Iain Duncan Smith described himself as astonished. Melinda Messenger was really worried. Keith Vaz announced that he certainly wouldn’t be taking his 11-year-old daughter. And a doctor, writing in the Daily Mail, warned of the possibility of brain damage for an entire generation.

The last comment is so utterly ludicrous am astounded Anthony is taking it seriously. Do we have hard data and stats about the generation that is having their brain damaged?

But anyway, he goes on to say:

They had all been to see the new Batman film, The Dark Knight, and it would be easy enough to sneer at their collective dismay as it was expressed in recent days, scattered over the press.

But they were joined by one or two broadsheet journalists including Richard Brooks in the Sunday Times and Jenny McCartney in the Daily Telegraph who wrote that “the greatest surprise of all, even for me, after eight years spent working as a film critic, has been the sustained level of intensely sadistic brutality throughout the film”.

Wow. Two broadsheet journalists didn’t like the film. But Jenny McCartney’s comments are worthy of further examination – whilst there are dark moments in the film, I don’t see anything sadistic or especially brutal in the film let alone a ‘sustained level’ throughout. She’s making it sound like Saw or Hostel – which it isn’t.

Horowitz also makes the daft assertion that:

…it may be one of the bleakest and most cynical films ever made.

What?! I think there are many more films in the entire history of the medium much bleaker and more cynical. But lets just excuse this hyperbole for the moment:

Forget the heroics – Batman barely gets a look-in. The film belongs to Heath Ledger’s psychotic Joker who shoots a colleague point-blank in the face, shoves a hand grenade into an innocent victim’s mouth, drives a sharpened pencil through a gangster’s eye … and all this before you’re barely out of the credits.

Again, why don’t we talk about facts. Two of these acts (the shooting – which by the way isn’t shown as a point-blank shot to the face – and the grenade) happen in the extended opening sequence but the pencil bit happens some way into the film. His use of the word ‘barely’ doesn’t really cover up the misleading picture he – or the Guardian sub-editor – paints.

He does give some background on the 12A certificate but he loses the plot when discussing the BBFC’s decision:

12A doesn’t warn children off. It makes the film more enticing, more of a must-see.

Yet even if the certificate extends what it permissible, it’s hard to see how the BBFC agreed to it in this case. “The Dark Knight is a superhero movie and the violence it contains exists within that context,” it says on its website.

But actually the context of this film is an overwhelming nihilism, which is in many ways as disturbing as the violence itself. The argument doesn’t hold. Would the certificate have stayed the same if the Joker had committed rape?

No. The argument does hold because if the Joker had committed rape in the film then the context would be different.

As for the fact that the violence happens off screen he says:

Nor should we be fooled by the excuse that the actual blood-letting happens off-screen. It’s true that we don’t actually see the pencil enter the eye; we merely infer it for ourselves.

But films speak a strange language. As Lev Kuleshov demonstrated in 1918 with his famous experiment – showing the same, impassive face edited against a series of different images, a cinema audience can easily fill in the gaps, given the right prompts.

More to the point, even if we don’t allow children to see an eye being gouged out, are we really comfortable inviting them to imagine it?

Just think for a moment about what is being said here. An experiment from 1918 (when cinema itself was just over 20 years old) is being used to explain how our current generation observes violence on screen.

Whilst the principles of the Kuleshov Effect may still apply, our current generation consumes media in radically different ways, be it games, TV, DVDs or online videos. So I don’t his argument holds up particularly well, particularly when he discusses his experience of actually seeing it::

There were a great many children in the cinema when I saw it and they didn’t seem particularly traumatised by the experience.

Most of them looked rather bored. At a guess, I’d have said that the fizzy drinks and popcorn they were devouring would have been worse for their overall health.

So what he’s admitting is that despite the panic and hysteria spead by of some of the UK press and the possibility of children being exposed to implied violence, it’s actually OK. Kind of undermines the overall thrust of his argument doesn’t it?

Furthermore, I’m disappointed when he quotes the Mail as a source of scientific data:

In the Mail, Dr Aric Sigman of the British Psychological Society quoted research that showed that “watching screen violence had changed the frontal lobe brain function of normal adolescents to be more like that of the children with disruptive brain disorders.”

Could we please have a link to this research? Or at least some more detail?

His best point comes late in the piece:

…children never really were that innocent. They’ve always been fairly bloodthirsty creatures with a great liking for violence.

From the slapstick of circus clowns to the psychotic mutilation of Tom and Jerry, they have always been entertained by it.

This is true – despite the fact that The Dark Knight has a sense of realism to it, we shouldn’t forget that it is a still a comic book adaptation and not some kind of dangerous explotitation movie.

UPDATE 13/08/08: I’ve just been listening to Andrew Collins on this issue (who has also been standing in recently for Mark Kermode on Five Live), via his podcast with Richard Herring. He claims that a Daily Mail editorial, the day after the Pearson peice, said:

The Dark Knight has been called a ‘symphony of sadism’

Which as Andrew correctly points out is exactly what the Mail’s very own Alison Pearson called it.

So, the logic here appears to be that the Mail quote one of their own writers in order to paint an ever more hysterical picture of the film.

> Alison Pearson on The Dark Knight in The Daily Mail
> The Times on the ‘record complaints’ it has received
> A more reasoned look at the film from Rebecca Davies at The Telegraph
> The Dark Knight at the IMDb
> More background detail on how director Christopher Nolan rebooted the Batman franchise

Categories
Thoughts

The Times on the ‘dark’ world of film PR

There is an interesting article on the world of film publicity by Kevin Maher in The Times today.

Using the recent high profile story of Christian Bale getting questioned by police the day after last week’s UK premiere of The Dark Knight, it explores some of the basics of film PR mixed in with some facts from Mark Borkowski’s latest book The Fame Formula.

It says:

Whether that’s true or not, for years PRs – that mysterious and dark breed of fixers, stuntsters and arch media manipulators – have, for more than a century now, been as fundamental to the Tinseltown fantasy as the Hollywood sign itself.

No doubt film PRs have been important in maintaining the mystique and aura of the film business, but isn’t describing them as a ‘mysterious and dark breed’ making them sound a little like followers of Lord Voldemort?

It goes on:

They are, according to Borkowski, in his new book The Fame Formula, the hidden gatekeepers of the Hollywood dream machine “who guard its formula, often to the death”.

Can you name me one publicist in history who has literally guarded the the formula to the death? Or is this just hyperbole?

But here is the interesting bit:

As recounted in his detailed analysis of publicity through the ages, they are an invisible army of Machiavellian schemers who were ferociously protective of their clients.

Joan Crawford had an abortion when she became pregnant from an affair with Clark Gable.

Publicists also covered up the fact that the sexually rapacious Gable had apparently attended orgies with underage girls, organised by the English actor Lionel Atwill.

They hid Spencer Tracy‘s alcoholism and his alleged affair with Judy Garland when she was only 14.

The Crawford abortion story isn’t such a biggie, although no doubt it would have caused a huge outcry at the time, but Gable attending orgies? It certainly makes you look at Gone With The Wind in a different light.

As for Tracy, although his alcoholism was fairly common knowledge, an affair with a 14 year old Garland is another matter entirely. Is this really true?

I know the fact that he’s been dead since 1967 means that the Times legal department won’t be pulling an all-nighter, but some more details on this allegation would be appreciated.

There is also an interesting stat from Charlotte Tudor – a VP of publicity at Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures UK who says that an internal study found that:

“the estimated value of the Pirates of the Caribbean premiere, in print coverage alone, was £1.4 million – ie, if you bought the equivalent space in pure advertising it would cost that much money”.

As for the Bale incident, why didn’t the police question him after the premiere? Maybe it wasn’t because a sinister cabal of film publicists brainwashed them, but because they may have had reason to believe that ruining the premiere was – to paraphrase The Joker – ‘part of a plan’.

> Times article in full
> Mark Borkowski’s blog
> Ryan Gilbey of The Guardian on an interesting episode when PR’s ‘invaded’ the comments section of his blog

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

The Dark Knight takes blockbusters to a new level

On Friday I finally saw The Dark Knight at a press screening in London, the same day that it broke box office records in the US.

There is no doubt that this film has transcended its comic book origins to become one of the most accomplished and ambitious blockbusters in years.

As I couldn’t make the IMAX screening I had to go to the standard 35mm one earlier in the evening, so when I catch it on IMAX next Friday I’ll write something about seeing on that format.

But even in a conventional cinema it is probably worth beginning with how I felt as it ended – drained. There is a lot of stuff going on and at just over two and a half hours it looks and feels like a serious crime epic, rather than a conventional summer movie.

When Batman Begins came out in 2005, it was an impressive reinvention of the DC Comics character but I wasn’t as blown away as some were. But props to the suits at Burbank for recruiting a director like Christopher Nolan – it certainly atoned for the Joel Schumacher Batman films.

The realistic approach to the Bruce Wayne character and Gotham City worked well and has really reaped dividends with this sequel, which not only builds on the foundations established that film but makes this a richer and more rewarding experience.

In the same way that the first film rebooted our expectations of a comic book movie, this one takes it to another level – imagine a dark, sprawling and realistic crime saga set in a modern city, that just happens to have Batman and The Joker in it.

Emboldened after the success of the first film, director Christopher Nolan and co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan (with story credit by David S Goyer) have crafted a spectacularly ambitious summer blockbuster, one that has many layers and twists alongside some brilliant work from the cast and crew.

The story, set in a Gotham City soaked in crime, violence and corruption, revolves around three central characters: Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), a billionaire vigilante dishing out justice at night time; Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), the District Attorney boldly taking on organised crime; and The Joker (Heath Ledger), a mysterious psychopathic criminal wreaking havoc on the city.

Added to this are several key supporting characters: Lieutenant James Gordon (Gary Oldman), the senior cop in Gotham and Batman’s main ally; Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the Assistant District Attorney who is now Dent’s lover; Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), the newly promoted CEO of Wayne Enterprises who helps supply Bruce Wayne with hi-tech weapons and equipment; Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine), Wayne’s trusted butler and Sal Maroni (Eric Roberts), a local mobster in league with the Joker.

What’s quite startling about the film is the way in the plot doesn’t just revolve around Batman – it gives equal weight to Dent and Joker, forming an impressive triangular narrative.

Added to that, some of the supporting cast (especially Gordon) are given much stronger roles than you might expect for a film of this type.

Most impressively of all, these different strands are developed in ways that are engrossing and genuinely surprising – at times it is so layered, with key sequences often having parallel consequences.

There are points when the narrative (especially in the later stages) stretches to near-breaking point, so exhaustive are the plot lines and events on screen.

But despite the almost suffocating nature of the storytelling, it gives the film a grandeur and seriousness that complements the darker tone of this rebooted Batman franchise.

As for the action, it follows the script in being similarly dense, and some of the big set pieces – especially two key sequences – have an unpredictable and chaotic quality to them.

This at times makes it a little dizzying (I can only imagine what they felt like in IMAX) but also refreshing for this kind of movie, where the beats and outcomes are often too predictable.

What I particularly loved was the old school stunt work in the chase sequences and that actual (although presumably disused) buildings were blown up – it was a raw, effective contrast to the type of CGI-driven sequences that have become the norm for big budget blockbusters.

The performances too are a revelation for this type of genre movie. Bale continues his solid work from the first film but Ledger and Eckhart bring much more to their roles than what might have been expected.

As The Joker, Ledger has managed to completely reinvent him as a wildly unpredictable psychopath who brings Gotham to it’s knees.

Although – due to his tragically early death – there was always going to be added interest in his performance, he really is outstanding.

Completely immersing himself the role, he creates a villain who is scary, funny and unpredictable. Caring only for chaos and death, The Joker uses his considerable ingenuity to alter a city and the two figures (Batman and Dent) who can save it.

Eckhart has perhaps received less press but Harvey Dent is no less important to the story – in some ways his character is where Batman and The Joker meet.

He radiates an old-school charisma and integrity that fits his crusading DA perfectly, making his later problems all the more powerful.

Another interesting aspect of the script is the way in which it taps into modern fears about terrorism and the struggle to fight for good in a world that has become severely infected with violence and evil.

Many aspects of the film raise interesting questions and parallels. Can we see Batman – a sophisticated force for good caught up in a moral dilemma – as a metaphor for the US military? Could The Joker – a psychopathic enigma wreaking terror on society – be a twisted version of Osama Bin Laden?

The fact that a comic book adaptation subtly provokes these questions is daring, but what’s also clever is that they have mined the comic books (especially The Killing Joke) for themes and story lines which have a  contemporary echo.

The anticipation of The Dark Knight has been immense over the last few weeks and in the last few days reached fever pitch: it has already grossed over $155m (breaking the the 3-day opening weekend record held by Spider-Man 3); Batman related articles are all over Digg; critics have mostly given it high praise and IMDb users have even voted it the number 1 film of all time (although I think this should and will change in a few days or weeks).

What is behind on all this mania? I think this is a film that appeals to many different types of audience: fanboys eager to see a cool comic book adaptation; Batman fans; summer moviegoers keen for escapism; cinephiles who loved Nolan’s earlier films (especially Memento) and those caught up in the recent hype.

Time will tell how well it will ultimately do, but for now I can’t wait to see this on an IMAX screen next Friday.

Have you seen The Dark Knight? Why do you think it has become such a success?

Leave your thoughts below.

> Check out more links, videos and background to this movie in our Countdown to The Dark Knight
> A post back in December about the Prologue at the London IMAX
> Official site
> The Dark Knight at the IMDb
> Reviews at Metacritic
> Get local showtimes via Google Movies
> Find an IMAX cinema near you
> Variety report on the box office opening
> Slashfilm report on it topping the IMDb user list

[All images copyright 2008 / Warner Bros / Legendary Pictures / DC Comics]

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

How Chris Nolan rebooted Batman

Today the new Batman film The Dark Knight hits US cinemas and will be opening in the UK a week later.

It is one of the most eagerly awaited films of the year and so I thought I’d write about the history of Batman on film, how the franchise was rebooted under director Christopher Nolan, the latest film, Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker, how some of the film was shot on IMAX and the viral marketing campaign.

Hopefully the videos, images and links will help you get in the mood for what looks like one of the most interesting blockbusters in quite some time.

I’m seeing it tonight, so I’ll put up some reaction over the next 24 hours, but in the meantime let’s begin with the history of the caped crusader on film.

BATMAN ON FILM

The Batman character (created by Bob Kane in the late 1930s) has inspired a TV show, an animated series and a previous series of movies. The first feature film – simply called Batman – was directed by Tim Burton and had Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Jack Nicholson as The Joker.

It was the biggest film of 1989 in the US (though Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade pipped it worldwide) and sold millions of dollars worth of merchandise, becoming a pop culture phenomenon.

A sequel was inevitable and in 1992 Batman Returns saw Keaton reprise his role as the caped crusader with Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman and Danny DeVito as The Penguin.

Similar in tone to the original it was also a big hit, grossing $266 million worldwide, although not as big a hit as the original film.

However, Tim Burton had grown weary of the demands of making summer tent pole movies and when the director and Keaton opted not to come back for a third film, Warner Bros took the character in new – and lighter – direction.

Val Kilmer was cast in the lead role and the directing reins were taken up by  Joel Schumacher.

An all star cast included Jim Carrey as The Riddler, Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face/Harvey Dent, Chris O’Donnell as Robin and Nicole Kidman as the love interest, Doctor Chase Meridian.

Some cast members, such as Michael Gough and Pat Hingle, were kept on but the film was markedly different in tone and style. Despite that, it was still a huge hit and led to another sequel two years later.

Batman and Robin was the fourth film in the franchise and was scheduled to be Warner Bros biggest blockbuster that summer.

However, things started to go wrong when Val Kilmer (like Keaton before him) refused to return and was replaced by George Clooney, who was then breaking into mainstream movies after the success of the hit TV show ER.

Like Batman Forever, it had an all-star cast with Clooney and O’Donnell as the dynamic duo, Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy and Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl.

However, the camp tone, poor script and shoddy direction all contributed to a mess. It would be 8 years before another Batman movie but in retrospect the release Batman and Robin was quite interesting.

The negative advance buzz saw a major studio realise that online buzz could have an influence as much of it was fanned by Harry Knowles of Ain’t Cool News, a site then just over a year old.

Harry posted negative reviews from people who had seen advance screenings and the film – which opened to respectable numbers – never did the business the accountants at Burbank were expecting.

Knowles accurately summed up how a lot of people felt in his review, saying:

Because no matter how bad you have heard this film is, nothing can prepare you for the sheer glorius travesty of the 200-megaton bomb of a film this is.

This film is so bad, so awful, so vanity ridden with horrible over the top performances, that nothing I can say, can prepare you for it.

Even George Clooney seemed to agree, joking that:

“I think we might have killed the franchise.”

But it is interesting to note how his career has progressed since then. He would soon go on to be a major star, often appearing in films that were more left field than many might have expected.

Whilst managing to please the studio with the success of the Ocean’s franchise, he also directed and starred in more personal and challenging fare such as Good Night, and Good Luck and Michael Clayton.

Another interesting aspect of the film was that it marked the virtual end of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s long run of success as a movie star.

Although Terminator 3 in 2003 was a big hit, he was no longer the massive star he was in the 80s and early 90s.

His role was something of a bad joke with endless puns on cold and freezing littered throughout the film.

By 2003, he was Governor of California and effectively put his movie career on hold.

For director Joel Schumacher it took a while to recover – he even recorded a semi-apologetic commentary for the DVD release – and he went back to basics with the low budget Tigerland, a film that effectively launched Colin Farrell‘s movie career.

REBOOTING BATMAN WITH CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

In the following years things started to get a little interesting.

After the success of X-Men in 2000 and Spider-Man in 2002 a rash of comic book adaptations hit the big screen and it was a logical move to start from scratch and give the character a reboot.

A number of projects were considered – perhaps the most tantalising being Batman: Year One with Darren Aronofsky directing – but things finally started to happen when Christopher Nolan was hired to direct a new film in January 2003.

Nolan was an interesting choice, as he had only made two films up to that point – Following (1998) an ultra low budget tale of a writer obsessed with following people around London and Memento (2000), a dazzling neo-noir thriller about a widower (Guy Pearce) struggling with short term memory loss.

It won widespread critical acclaim for its innovative narrative structure – the screenplay was nominated for (but somehow didn’t win) an Oscar – and established him as major directing talent.

His next film Insomnia (2002), was a more conventional thriller about a police officer (Al Pacino) in Alaska on the trail of a killer (Robin Williams), who is haunted by guilt and is unable to sleep. A remake of the 1997  Norwegian film of the same name, it was still a highly accomplished piece of work.

Nolan said at the time of getting the Batman job that he wanted to re-imagine the franchise by:

“Doing the origin story of the character, which is a story that’s never been told before”.

In stark contrast to the Schumacher films, the emphasis here would be on portraying Batman realistically.

Entitled Batman Begins, it would show the origin story of how Bruce Wayne became a crime fighter who dresses up like a bat.

Christian Bale was cast as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Nolan stated that Richard Donner‘s 1978 Superman film was an inspiration, especially the first half which has – for a superhero movie – a long, extended backstory for the main character.

He also wanted big name actors in supporting roles to give the film more credibility and stature which meant experienced leading actors like Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman and Rutger Hauer had key supporting roles.

Some of the key influences on the story were Batman: The Man Who Falls (a story about Bruce Wayne travelling around the world); Batman: The Long Halloween, (which features the gangster Carmine Falcone) and Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One.

The latter comic book influenced the plot details of Bruce Wayne’s extended absence from Gotham City, the idea of a younger Commissioner Gordon (who in this film is a Sergeant) and the general setup of a corrupt city that is crying out for an outsider to bring justice.

Another important influence on the film was Blade Runner, which Nolan screened to his cinematographer Wally Pfister to show the kind of look and tone he was aiming for. The casting of Hauer (who came to fame as replicant Roy Batty) was also a nod to Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic.

When it was released in 2005, the film was warmly received by critics and audiences, going on to earn nearly $372m worldwide and becoming the 8th highest grossing film that year.

THE RETURN OF THE DARK KNIGHT

After completing The Prestige in 2006 – his dark and complex tale of two rival magicians (played by Bale and Hugh Jackman) – Nolan got to work on the Batman sequel The Dark Knight with co-writer David S Goyer.

Batman: The Long Halloween was an important touchstone for the story. The 13-part comic book series takes place during Batman’s early periods of crime fighting and involves a mysterious killer who murders people around the holidays.

Along with District Attorney Harvey Dent and Lieutenant James Gordon, Batman has to solve the murders and uncover the killer. This film also sees the return of The Joker, a development that was strongly hinted in the final scene of Batman Begins.

Nolan was resistant in doing a full on origin story but was influenced by the iconic villain’s first two appearances in DC comics, which were both published in the first issue of Batman in 1940.

They even consulted Jerry Robinson, one of the Joker’s co-creators, about the character’s portrayal. Instead of a straight origin story they focused on his rise to notoriety, saying:

“We never wanted to do an origin story for the Joker in this film. The arc of the story is much more Harvey Dent’s; the Joker is presented as an absolute.

It’s a very thrilling element in the film, and a very important element, but we wanted to deal with the rise of the Joker not the origin of the Joker….”

He also cited Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke and Michael Mann’s 1995 crime drama Heat as inspirations for a story that would show Gotham’s key characters in the context of a crime ridden city.

HEATH LEDGER AS THE JOKER

Heath Ledger was cast as The Joker after Nolan had expressed interest in working with him in the past. After Batman Begins, Ledger went for an interpretation consistent with the more realistic tone of that film.

Reportedly, Ledger prepared by living alone in a hotel room for a month, formulating the character’s physical movements and voice, even keeping a diary of the Joker’s thoughts and feelings.

It would become a much darker character and he said that the Droogs of A Clockwork Orange and Sid Vicious were starting points for the character.

The aim was for a colder kind of sociopath, far removed from the lighter versions popularized by Cesar Romero in the 60s TV show or Nicholson’s in the 1989 film.

Ledger’s portrayal was key to a lot of the early marketing to the film and anticipation was high, especially after his Oscar-nominated performance in Brokeback Mountain.

However, tragedy struck on January 22nd this year when Ledger died in New York during a short break from filming Terry Gilliam’s forthcoming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. His work on The Dark Knight had been completed but it none the less was a deep shock to the film world and his colleagues on the film.

Nolan penned a moving tribute in Newsweek:

Heath was bursting with creativity. It was in his every gesture. He once told me that he liked to wait between jobs until he was creatively hungry. Until he needed it again. He brought that attitude to our set every day.

There aren’t many actors who can make you feel ashamed of how often you complain about doing the best job in the world. Heath was one of them.

When you get into the edit suite after shooting a movie, you feel a responsibility to an actor who has trusted you, and Heath gave us everything.

As we started my cut, I would wonder about each take we chose, each trim we made. I would visualize the screening where we’d have to show him the finished film—sitting three or four rows behind him, watching the movements of his head for clues to what he was thinking about what we’d done with all that he’d given us.

Now that screening will never be real. I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly.

All of Ledger’s scenes were unaffected and Nolan added no “digital effects” were used to alter his performance posthumously.

Recently Christian Bale has been quick to dismiss the idea that Ledger playing such a dark role had any part in his death.

On the Today show with Matt Lauer they discussed the issue:

Lauer: So much was made of Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker. It was such a dark role.

In some way, perhaps, do you think in real life, it caused him to slip across some line of reality and may have had some role in his accidental death?

Bale: Personally, I find it to be a complete lack of understanding of acting. I also find it very rude to try to create some kind of sound bite for such a tragedy. The man was a complex man, a good man, but you know what?

I saw him having the best time playing The Joker. He was someone who completely immersed himself in his role. As do I. But in the end of the day, he was having a wonderful time doing it, He couldn’t have been happier doing it.”

Watch the full interview here:

Nolan has dedicated the film in part to Ledger’s memory, as well as to the memory of technician Conway Wickliffe, who was killed during a car accident while preparing one of the film’s stunts.

SHOOTING ON IMAX

On a technical level, The Dark Knight is the first mainstream movie to have several major sequences shot in the IMAX format.

Nolan was particularly enthusiastic about shooting on the larger cameras, saying:

“There’s simply nothing like seeing a movie that way. It’s more immersive for the audience. I wish I could shoot the entire thing this way.”

Typically, feature films that play in IMAX cinemas are converted to fill the enormous screens.

With The Dark Knight the sequences shot in IMAX will fill out the full screen, whilst on traditional cinema screens they will appear more vivid than usual.

However, there were obstacles in shooting in the format such as the bulkier cameras (IMAX film stock is 10 times the size of standard 35mm), the extra cost and the noise they make, which made filming dialogue scenes difficult.

So far, showing films in IMAX cinemas doesn’t have a huge effect on the overall grosses as there are currently only about 280 IMAX theatres worldwide.

But The Dark Knight could be an important film in making the format more popular, as it will be released on IMAX the same day as it is in regular cinemas (in the UK there was nearly always a delay between the two).

Last December I saw the opening sequence at the BFI London IMAX and producer Charles Roven spoke to the audience afterwards about the film.

I noted down some of the discussions that came up in the post-screening Q&A:

  • Heath Ledger was cast as The Joker because of his range and his initial meetings with Chris Nolan about the character
  • 3-D was never really considered as an option for the IMAX portions of the film
  • Prior to these Batman films he’d been trying to work with Nolan ever since he saw Memento
  • The Alfred/Bruce Wayne relationship continues
  • It is the first time Christian Bale has repeated a role
  • There is a sequence actually set in Hong Kong – they filmed a key sequence there where Batman jumps off a building. The idea of the setting was to get outside the world of Gotham and place it in a more believable context as a world city.
  • They aren’t even thinking about the villain for the next movie.
  • David Goyer, Chris Nolan and Jonathan Nolan wrote the first draft of the script and Jonathan wrote the later drafts whilst Chris was filming The Prestige.
  • The story is not directly based on anything by Frank Miller but has been influenced by him and other classic Batman writers.
  • Chris Nolan reportedly used the London IMAX cinema during the making of the film.

You can read the post I did at the the time here.

Filming took place in Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Hong Kong, the latter being a real location in the story.

VIRAL MARKETING

Perhaps more than any other recent blockbuster The Dark Knight has benefited from a long and detailed viral marketing campaign.

Since May last year, Warner Bros have been running a marketing campaign under the film’s “Why So Serious?” tagline.

The website whysoserious.com features the fictional political campaign of Harvey Dent (played in the film by Aaron Eckhart), with the slogan “I Believe in Harvey Dent.”

Gradually the site revealed itself to be “vandalized” with the slogan “I believe in Harvey Dent too,” and revealed the first image of the Joker. It was then replaced with a hidden message that said “see you in December.”

The site encouraged visitors to find letters composing a message from the Joker which said:

“The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.”

In October last year the film’s official website turned into another game with hidden messages, telling fans to uncover clues in certain US cities.

Those who finished that task were directed to another website called Rory’s Death Kiss (which was how the film was referred to on location). There fans could submit photos of themselves dressed as the Joker.

In December last year, the opening sequence of the film – which involves a bank raid featuring the Joker – was shown in selected IMAX cinemas before selected showings of I Am Legend.

After Heath Ledger’s death in January Warner Bros marketing campaign shifted a little, as up to that point the Joker had been a central part of the campaign.

On the whysoserious website there was even a black ribbon in memory of the actor.

THE RELEASE

Today sees the release at cinemas in the US on regular and IMAX cinemas.

If you are in North America and Canada, Film School Rejects recently posted a list of the different places where you see it in IMAX (click here for the full list).

If you are in the UK, next week you can see it at the following IMAX cinemas:

BIRMINGHAM / Thinktank IMAX
Curzon Street
Birmingham
B4 7XG

GLASGOW / IMAX Theatre at Glasgow Science Centre
50 Pacific Quay
Glasgow
G51 1EA

LONDON / BFI London IMAX Cinema
1 Charlie Chaplin Walk
London
SE1 8XR
020 7902 1234

MANCHESTER / Odeon Manchester
6-8 Dantzic St.
Manchester
M4 2AD

BRADFORD / IMAX Theatre at the National Media Museum
Bradford
West Yorkshire
BD1 1NQ

If you are in the rest of the world go to IMAX.com and there you can find the nearest cinema to you when it opens in your country.

If you have already seen the film then feel free to post your thoughts below.

> Official site for The Dark Knight
> Reviews at Metacritic
> IMDb entry
> Find an IMAX cinema near you

[All images Copyright © Warner Bros. Pictures Inc]

Categories
Thoughts

Die Hard – 20th Anniversary

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Die Hard – one of the greatest and most influential action films of the last 30 years.

Although at the time Bruce Willis was seen as a TV star trying to break into movies (he’d already done the puerile Blind Date), I don’t think anyone really expected this tale of a New York cop battling terrorists in an LA skyscraper to become such an enduring film.

Directed by John McTiernan, produced by Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver and written by Steven E. de Souza, it was an exciting, witty and brilliantly executed thriller.

A major part of why the film works is that it balances so many different elements – the set pieces are often thrilling and funny, the good guys (like the FBI) are often jerks, whilst the villains are clever and witty.

Alan Rickman‘s performance as Hans Gruber – the leader of terrorists who hijack the skyscraper – is sensational. Can you think of a better nemesis in a mainstream movie than this smooth talking connoisseur of expensive suits?

It was made on a budget of $28 million and ended up grossing $83 million in the US, $138.7 million worldwide and was nominated at the Oscars for Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Film Editing, Best Sound and Best Visual Effects.

In the UK it was actually released in February 1989 (how those release windows have shortened!) and because it was an 18 certificate I didn’t get around to seeing it until it’s home video release in September 1989.

Although the sequels (despite their moments) never really lived up to the original, it influenced a generation of films such as:

But all of them paled in comparison to the original – a truly brilliant slice of action movie mayhem.

Relive the trailer here:

N.B. Thanks to John Massey at Martians Attacking Indianapolis for alerting me to this anniversary.

> Die Hard at the IMDb
> Reviews of Die Hard at Metacritic
> Buy the DVD at Amazon UK
> Check out the 1 minute edit of Die Hard

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

WALL-E is another landmark film for Pixar

After seeing WALL-E at the weekend I have to once again salute the geniuses at Pixar for creating another extraordinary animated film.

WALL-E eyes

Set in a dystopian future circa 2815, it is about a waste disposal robot named WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) who meets another robot named EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) and gets involved in an unlikely romance, as well as the future of the human race.

Directed by Andrew Stanton, it is probably the most visually impressive work Pixar have yet committed to film (and that is saying a lot) but at the same time it also resonates emotionally as a suprisingly touching love story.

Robots haven’t been this endearing since Silent Running and the two central characters are joy to watch – the boxy old school charm of WALL-E contrasting beautifully with the cool, sleek beauty of EVE.

Although I would never thought I would ever compare a Pixar movie to There Will Be Blood – both have startling opening sequences with little or no dialogue.

One of the clever aspects of the film is the casting of sound designer Ben Burtt as the central character – for those unfamilar with his work he was the pioneering sound editor on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films.

Along with the animators, Burtt has helped create a character who is extremely expressive without using conventional language.

The same is true for EVE, so it is even more impressive that the filmmakers have managed to craft a compelling relationship between them.

The visual landcaspes are equally impressive, full of rich detail and nods to other sci-fi films.

I’ll review it in full in couple of weeks on the podcast, but for the time being this is another glorious home run for the Pixar team.

WALL-E is out now in the US and in the UK on 11th July

> Official site for WALL-E
> Read reviews for WALL-E at Metacritic (it is currently at 93 which is a very impressive score for a mainstream film)
> Find out more about Pixar at Wikipedia

Categories
Technology Thoughts

Steve Ballmer on the future of advertising

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years and months about the death of the film critic, the wider future of journalism and how advertising will work as print declines and publications go even further down the online route.

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft recently spoke to the Washington Post about the future of media and advertsing online and made some key points.

Microsoft is the 10th biggest advertiser in the United States

For a software company (albeit the biggest in history) this isn’t bad.

On the media he predicts a fundamental shift:

In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down – my opinion.

…there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network.

There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

This I believe is correct – in fact, it could be even sooner than ten years. But the key point here is that there is no going back.

Check out the video:

He also discusses if TV shows will be free with ads or paid for by fees and subscriptions:

I think there will be some things people subscribe to on the Internet, but I think that’s going be more the exception than the rule.

My favorite TV program, ‘Lost’, I watch on the Internet now. I don’t DVR it, I just watch it on the Internet.

Maybe Windows 7 could be renamed The Dharma Initiative?

[Link via Buzzmachine]

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

Iron Man should be a huge hit

Courtesy of Marvel / ParamountI saw Iron Man last night and I’d be very surprised if it doesn’t open really big this weekend.

If you aren’t familiar with the character, it is one of the few remaining Marvel heroes who hasn’t made it to the big screen in the last decade.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jnr) is a billionaire industrialist and genius inventor who is kidnapped in Afghanistan, where he builds a high-tech suit of armor to escape.

When he returns to the US he decides to change his cynical arms-dealing ways and protect the world as Iron Man.

Various elements of the film click into place:

  • The pace is brisk and despite being an origin story, it doesn’t get too bogged down in a sluggish plot.
  • Director Jon Favreau has gone for a nice mix of humour and action – it doesn’t take itself too seriously, despite the terrorist and arms dealing elements.
  • Robert Downey Jnr demonstrates what an engaging presence he can be in the lead role, with bursts of cocky wit and a nice strain of self-deprecating humour.
  • Gwyneth Paltrow plays a more substantial supporting character than is usual for these kind of films.
  • The mix of CGI and live action is expertly done – Stan Winston’s design of the Iron Man suit, the visual effects of him in action and the sound editing are all award worthy.
  • The action sequences are impressive, particularly the first two big set pieces.

There are a couple of elements that don’t quite come off, notably the climax which is a little too standard given what has gone before it, but overall this is slick and smart summer blockbuster.

Given the effective marketing campaign and quality of the finished film I would be suprised if this didn’t open to about $80 million in the US this weekend.

Some are predicting it could be as high as $100 million, but it would have to do extremely well to reach that figure over the 3 day weekend.

That said, tracking and awareness for this film is reportedly huge and I think word of mouth from those who see it on the Thursday preview screenings and Friday night showings will convince others to check it out.

One major fly in the ointment for Paramount and Marvel is the release today of Grand Theft Auto 4 – which is set to be one of the biggest selling computer games of all time.

The big worry for Iron Man’s box office is that the key demographic for the film (young males) will be at home on their consoles all weekend.

It is clearly a concern – and may lead to studios watching computer game release schedules more closely in future – but I actually think that demo is going to want to see Iron Man as well.

There is also a hi-tech cool factor to the film that should play well to both a computer savvy audience and the wider public.

Geeks may note that Stark multi-tasks on Dell and Apple workstations when creating his suit, although the operating system is one of those magical movie creations that does anything it is asked of.

Less tech-savvy audience members are still going to like the action, SFX and his funny robot assistants.

Whatever happens, Marvel and Paramount should have a huge franchise on their hands.

> Official site for Iron Man
> Reviews for Iron Man at Metacritic
> Find out more about the Iron Man character at Wikipedia
> /Film and Deadline Hollywood Daily on whether or not Grand Theft Auto 4 will affect Iron Man’s box office
> Anne Thompson interviews Jon Favreau about the film in Variety

Categories
Thoughts

88 Mins really is that bad

I remember last year seeing a poster in Cannes for 88 Mins – the Al Pacino thriller that has just opened in the US to universally awful reviews.

At the time I assumed it was one of the many promotional posters that adorn the Croisette during the festival, but it was actually one for the local cinema.

I remember thinking ‘why hasn’t it opened in the US or UK’ yet? The answer would appear to be that this was some kind of crazily financed vanity project that went horribly wrong.

Todd McCarthy of Variety points to some of the film’s glaring flaws:

88 Minutes can’t even live up to its title. With 19 — count ’em, 19 — producers, including director Jon Avnet, ensuring that every aspect of the film, from the script to the star’s haircut, is ludicrous in the extreme, the picture easily snatches from “Revolution” the prize as Al Pacino’s career worst.

Available on DVD in some territories as early as February 2007 and rolled out theatrically in France and elsewhere beginning in May of last year, this gape-inducing fiasco is getting a token domestic release that at least saves its star the indignity of a dump straight to homevid.

The presence of 19 producers is just one of the telling signs something was wrong in Pacinoville.

As the dodgy opening credits begin you know things are only going to get worse. And they do – with a vengeance.

The lowlights include:

  • A hammy early sequence involving milk and cookies
  • Pacino’s worst scene ever as an actor when he emotes in a car about a relative
  • Extended scenes that defy any internal logic (e.g. Pacino’s character is informed he has 88 mins to live and swans around like he’s been told it may rain later)
  • A ranty TV debate conducted via phone that is almost a parody of his shouty 90s performances
  • An utterly ludicrous climax that feels like an episode of Scooby Doo at the circus

Check out the other reviews here at Metacritic.

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

The Visitor is a low key gem

Tom McCarthy made one of the best films of 2003 with The Station Agent and his latest The Visitor is just as good.

The story involves a college professor (Richard Jenkins) who finds a young immigrant couple living in his New York apartment.

It then follows the characters as they connect with one another in unexpected ways.

Like his previous work, it is thoughtful, beautifully observed and features rounded characters who feel like people you might actually meet in real life.

Jenkins is a character actor you might recognise – he’s probably best known for his fine work as Nathaniel Fisher in Six Feet Under or as the FBI agent in Flirting with Disaster.

Here he is finally given a lead role that allows him demonstrate his considerable acting skills and there is fine support too from Haaz Sleiman, Danai Jekesai Gurira and Hiam Abbass.

But what really makes this film stand out is the way it manages to tackle some really big themes with such intelligence and grace.

Immigration, loss and love are just a few of the issues dealt with here, but it never feels like a stodgy parable.

Instead, it manages to take us deep into the hearts and minds of people caught up in the chilly climate of a post-9/11 world.

It is one of those rare films that manages to engage your heart and brain, but does so with the subtle skill of a richly gifted director.

Check out the trailer here:

The Visitor is currently on limited release in the US and opens in the UK on July 4th

> Official site for The Visitor
> IMDb page
> Check out reviews of the film at Metacritic

Categories
Thoughts

A.O. Scott on Roger Ebert and film blogs

In an otherwise heartfelt and thoughtful tribute to Roger Ebert, who recently announced he is officially retiring from his TV show, A.O. Scott of the New York Times ponders the state of film criticism:

…if the future looked grim back in 1990 — when Entertainment Weekly’s letter grades and the proliferation of Siskel and Ebert knockoffs seemed to threaten the integrity of the critical enterprise — what must it look like now that the Internet is gobbling up all discourse?

Is the Internet really ‘gobbling up discourse?’ This sounds like a case of someone in a big media Ivory Tower imagining a horde of digital barbarians at his gate.

But – as I’ve argued before – surely the Internet is actaully enabling discourse?

He goes on:

If a star- or thumb-based rating system was the enemy of nuance and complex thought, what are we to make of the splattered fruit at rottentomatoes.com or the numerical averages at metacritic.com?

Are review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic a bad thing? Clearly it is stupid to merely reduce a film’s quality to a percentage or grade, but the benefit of these sites is that they introduce you to new writers and give you a greater awareness of the differences of opinion out there.

But wait, there is more:

If you spend time prowling the blogs, you may discover that the problem is not a shortage of criticism but a glut: an endless, sometimes bracing, sometimes vexing barrage of deep polemic, passionate analysis and fierce contention reflecting nearly every possible permutation of taste and sensibility.

Is this plurality of voices a worrying trend? It can make finding the good stuff harder, but do we really want a quasi-Soviet style system where a few big outlets set the ‘approved’ cultural agenda?

The use of the word ‘prowling’ (look up the definition) seems to imply that Tony was looking for bad blogs to justify his point.

But the real mistake here is not actually saying – or linking to – which ‘blogs’ he is referring to. It is as vague as saying you spend time reading ‘the newspapers’ or watching ‘the TV channels’.

Does he mean blogs like GreenCine Daily? Scanners? Hollywood Elsewhere? Spout Blog? Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule? The Hot Blog? Matt Zoeller Seitz? In Contention? Thompson on Hollywood? All of these are intelligent places for the discussion of films and far from the ‘angry-amateur’ media stereotype of the faceless ‘blogger’.

The irony here of course is that Tony and his colleague Manohla Dargis are usually two of the best film writers you can read on the web. They happen to work for the New York Times, which admittedly gives them a huge platform both in tradional print and online, but I think both could find an audience and make their mark online even if they weren’t employed by the Gray Lady.

Unlike some doom merchants I am actually optimistic about the state of quality film writing – considered and intelligent pieces will spark discussion and stand out amongst the cacophony of snap judgements, ill considered rants and fanboy droolings that can proliferate on certain sites.

A further irony is Roger Ebert has long been one of the most web savvy of film critics, making his reviews available on the web and responding to his readers questions about interesting aspects of movies.

That engagement with his audience is another reason why he is so highly regarded by his peers and readers.

> Full A.O. Scott article at the NY Times
> Roger Ebert’s website

Categories
Thoughts

The Death of the Film Critic?

Death of the film critic?The last couple of weeks has seen a rash of US film critics at established publications get fired, laid off or take early retirement.

The latest high profile casualty is David Ansen of Newsweek, who is stepping down from his full time role at the US weekly magazine and leaving at the end of the year.

He joins an ever expanding list of film writers who’ve recently retired or been let go. Amongst them are: Nathan Lee of the Village Voice, Jack Matthews and Jami Bernard of the NY Daily News, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune, Terry Lawson of the Detroit Free Press, Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour of Newsday, and several more.

Three high profile producers and distributors are quoted in the New York Times by David Carr. Producer Scott Rudin has calls it “A dire situation”, Tom Bernard of Sony Pictures Classics says it is “a terrible loss” and Mark Urman of ThinkFilm says it “puts serious movies at risk”. All three, it must be noted, produce or distribute the kind of films that rely on good critical word of mouth.

But how big a crisis is this? Is the traditional film critic soon to be a thing of the past?

Anne Thompson at Variety recently asked some interesting questions about the role of the critic on her blog and although I initially wrote this up as an email, I thought it made sense to post my answers here:

Do we need film critics? Yes, but not just to say what’s good and bad.

What is their purpose? Like any good writer they should inform, enlighten and entertain. Providing context and perspective will increasingly become more important than dishing out 5 stars – but then for the best critics, this has always been the case.

Is it being served by something else? I guess one of the big changes is how criticism has been eroded by buzz. For example, a lot of people have formed opinions on blockbusters like Indy 4 and The Dark Knight from all the production and pre-release chatter, so they will go and see it. In a sense their opinion of the film is almost confirmed just by seeing it. Check out this ABC News report about the release of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom from May 1984. There was hype then about what was a huge release, but what’s changed is that the web has amplified buzz and chatter (some good, some bad) to the point where considered reviews by print critics are merely a footnote rather than a key aspect in the opening of a film.

With the case of lower grossing awards season movies like No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, it gets a little more complex. There’s no doubt that a lot of online buzz and writing helped those films but key older outlets (e.g NY Times) still play a big role in framing these debates. In fact, the brilliant job Miramax did marketing NCFOM was in how they cleverly surfed this wave of chatter, to the point where possible negatives (e.g the violence, subtle ending) became reasons to actually see the film rather than avoid it.

As aging film critics retire and move on, who will replace them? Younger ones. Or perhaps film sections in papers and magazines will become more like forums, with established critics acting like moderators. The films sections of The Guardian and the New York Times would appear to be models of what may become the norm. But it could be a more gradual process than one might think.

Are there some younger leading lights? This is an interesting question as I can’t think of many ‘established’ critics under the age of 40. Is this because you need to build up many years of movie going in order for your opinions to carry weight? I’m not sure, but it seems to be the case. It also depends what you mean by ‘younger’, as I tend to judge on the quality of opinion rather than the age of a particular writer. What will replace print film criticism? The web. But I wouldn’t declare print dead just yet. Chunks of it will die but in free sheets and magazines it still has a future, albeit one that is tied with an online presence as that’s where the advertising bucks will be coming from.

Should every print critic with a job build a blog following ASAP? Sort of. But as long as its done right. I think the print outlet should help their journalists interact with their audience whether it is via a blog, a podcast or even just an email address (e.g. Roger Ebert’s letter page). It is the interaction that’s important, not necessarily the technology. One thing I think that people underestimate about blogs is that your opinions are spread more efficiently and effectively online and you have a useful archive that anyone can see at anytime. Some traditional outlets have got to seize the opportunity of the web rather than keep moaning about declining sales and standards.

If the younger generation doesn’t read newspapers and doesn’t seek out that one person who reflects their taste online, where will they get their information on what to see? Can one person truly reflect another’s taste? Did they ever? Viewers will still get coverage, as it is just human nature to find out more about something you like. I guess people will just gravitate to sites they like and find helpful. I also think review sites like RT and Metacritic help you get in touch with opinions you disagree with, which is actually healthy and also strangely addictive. Plus, despite what some sceptics might think, debates on blogs aren’t always Bourne vs Bond spats or arguments about the latest Iron Man trailer, they can also be in depth discussions of quality films. The beauty of the web is the breadth and depth. A single critic on a newspaper can’t even expect to compete with this. For myself, I use Netvibes or Google Reader to pull all the feeds of sites I’m interested in – which is a lot – and I just browse and rearrange from there. But I also use essential sites like Google, IMDb, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr – and more recently Twitter – for any film related stuff.

What is the impact on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic on film criticism? Overwhelmingly positive as it gives viewers a wider range of opinion. It really is as simple as that. But I don’t get why Rotten Tomatoes is always quoted more – Metacritic is actually the more useful site. Maybe it is because RT has been around longer.

In case you missed it last October I wrote about a panel at the London Film Festival that covered similar issues. It was chaired by Variety’s Lesie Felperin and featured Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, James Christopher from The (London) Times, Steve Hornby from BBC Movies and James Fabricant from MySpace.

What do you think about these issues? Leave any comments below or email me.

> Anne Thompson’s post at Variety
> David Poland reacts at The Hot Button
> David Carr (aka ‘The Bagger’) with a piece in the NY Times
> Jeff Jarvis with a prescient post from April 2006 about the death of traditional critics
> LFF Panel on ‘Is the Internet Killing the Film Critic?’ from last October

Categories
Cinema Thoughts

Funny Games remake upsets US critics

Funny Games US versionThe US remake of Funny Games has just opened in the States and currently has a Metacritic score of 39.

Such a low score for a film that is clearly well made and acted is a little puzzling.

But if you look at the tidal wave of indignation gushing forth from some of the best critics in the US, one can only assume Mr Haneke has somehow touched a nerve.

A.O. Scott of The New York Times says:

The film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.

Joe Morgenstern of the Wall St Journal says:

In addition to being borderline unendurable, Funny Games is inexplicable, and I don’t mean in any philosophical sense.

J. Hoberman of the Village Voice says:

Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there’s no reason why you should.

Derek Elley in Variety says:

As shocking and deliberately manipulative as the original movie and — some may reckon — even more pointless.

David Edelstein in New York Magazine so disliked the original that he says:

I watched to the end, removed the DVD from the player, and snapped it over my knee.

Then, with a pair of scissors, I cut the halves into quarters, walked the pieces to the kitchen garbage can, and shoved them under the debris of the previous night’s dinner.

Now, most of the time, all of the above critics are sober and intelligent judges of films, whether you agree with them or not.

So why do these all critiques have the tone of a child who has just learnt that Santa Claus doesn’t actually exist?

Let’s rewind.

If you haven’t seen the original Funny Games, the basic premise involves two young men who hold a family hostage and slowly terrorise them in their own home.

Director Michael Haneke (best known for dark dramas like The Piano Teacher and Hidden) has now remade the film in the US with Tim Roth and Naomi Watts as the married couple and Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as the two young sociopaths.

Strangely he has opted for an almost shot-for-shot remake which both looks and feels remarkably like the original in nearly every respect. Despite the change of country, even the locations appear eerily similar.

It is not an easy film to sit through. When I saw it, some of the audience had walked out in disgust before the end and you could feel a palpable sense of unease in the screening room.

After it had ended, I wasn’t sure what to think. After all, why make a film so similar to the original? And why does this version feel even creepier than the original?

One thing I felt quite sure about was that certain US critics would loathe the film. Is it because they secretly loathe what they perceive to be Haneke’s condescending attitude to some of the darker and dumber aspects of US culture?

Are they subconsciously offended that the terrorised middle class couple in the film would almost certainly be avid readers – if not subscribers – of publications like the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal?

Well, perhaps that is part of what’s going on, but I think the main reason is that Funny Games – in both incarnations – is simply a film that gets right under your skin, whether you like or loathe it.

A lot of the discussion about it – both positive and negative – appears to be based around the idea that it toys with how an audience views violence on screen.

In a New York Times magazine piece on Michael Haneke last year John Wary articulated this view:

“Funny Games” is a direct assault on the conventions of cinematic violence in the United States, and the new version of the film, with its English-speaking cast and unmistakably American production design, makes this excruciatingly clear.

More surprising still, Haneke remade this attack on the Hollywood thriller for a major Hollywood studio, Warner Independent Pictures, and refused to alter the original film’s story in the slightest.

Whilst it is mystifying – though also refreshing – that a company like Time Warner are releasing a film as disturbing as this, the view that Funny Games is some kind of lecture on US attitude’s to violence is a reductive one.

Haneke himself has said that:

“Funny Games was always made with American audiences in mind, since its subject is Hollywood’s attitude toward violence…”

But I think he is being a little disingenuous here. Although it certainly does play around with this idea, the film burrows a lot deeper.

In fact, many volatile ingredients are bubbling beneath the surface: class, sex, violence, the absence of God, the nature of evil and perhaps most effective of all, the ‘game’ Haneke is playing with the very type of people who are likely to see this film.

Added to all that, is the interesting difference between the two versions. With all the care that has been taken to make them look and feel visually similar, it is notable that the US villains are somehow even more repellent – and therefore more effective – than those in the European film.

Why is this? I don’t think it is just a case of Haneke taking a cheap shot at Americans in the climate of anti-US feeling in an age of Bush and the Iraq war. Rather, he has found a way of enhancing the inherent darkness of his original for a culture more acquainted with optimism and hope.

The bad guys here feel as monstrous as Anton Chigur in No Country for Old Men but there is no dignified old timer played by Tommy Lee Jones to remind us that some people do care. The suffocating world of Funny Games is disturbingly plausible – a place where hope is violated relentlessly with a cold, almost scientific, precision.

I doubt that this remake will do much business at the US box office, but in an age when horror films like Saw 4 and Hostel 2 are notable for their high level of sadism but lack of anything really disturbing, it is interesting to see Michael Haneke ruffle some feathers with a truly scary movie.

Funny Games opens in the UK on April 4th.

> Official site for Funny Games US
> John Wray’s lengthy profile of Michael Haneke in the NY Times last September
> Michael Haneke at the IMDb
> Reviews of Funny Games at Metacritic
> A.O. Scott with a more reasonable audio assessment of Haneke’s work

Categories
Awards Season Thoughts

Oscar Predictions

Who will win at this year’s Academy Awards on Sunday?

Oscar Predictions Mosaic

Here are the nominations and my predictions as to who is going to win.

BEST PICTURE
Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood

Prediction: No Country for Old Men

DIRECTOR
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jason Reitman, Juno
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood

Prediction: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises

Prediction: Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Julie Christie, Away from Her
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
Laura Linney, The Savages
Ellen Page, Juno

Prediction: Julie Christie, Away from Her

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton

Prediction: Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There
Ruby Dee, American Gangster
Saoirse Ronan, Atonement
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

Prediction: Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Diablo Cody, Juno
Nancy Oliver, Lars and the Real Girl
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Brad Bird, Ratatouille
Tamara Jenkins, The Savages

Prediction: Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Christopher Hampton, Atonement
Sarah Polley, Away from Her
Ronald Harwood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood

Prediction: Ronald Harwood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Beaufort, Israel
The Counterfeiters, Austria
Katyn, Poland
Mongol, Kazakhstan
12, Russia

Prediction: The Counterfeiters

ANIMATED FEATURE
Persepolis
Ratatouille
Surf’s Up

Prediction: Ratatouille

ORIGINAL SCORE
Dario Marianelli, Atonement
Alberto Iglesias, The Kite Runner
James Newton Howard, Michael Clayton
Michael Giacchino, Ratatouille
Marco Beltrami, 3:10 to Yuma

Prediction: Dario Marianelli, Atonement

ORIGINAL SONG
“Falling Slowly”, Once
“Happy Working Song”, Enchanted
“Raise It Up”, August Rush
“So Close”, Enchanted
“That’s How You Know”, Enchanted

Prediction: “Falling Slowly”, Once

ART DIRECTION
Arthur Max, Beth A. Rubino, American Gangster
Sarah Greenwood, Katie Spencer, Atonement
Dennis Gassner, Anna Pinnock, The Golden Compass
Dante Ferretti, Francesca Lo Schiavo, Sweeney Todd
Jack Fisk, Jim Erickson, There Will Be Blood

Prediction: Jack Fisk, Jim Erickson, There Will Be Blood

CINEMATOGRAPHY
Roger Deakins, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Seamus McGarvey, Atonement
Janusz Kaminski, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Roger Deakins, No Country for Old Men
Robert Elswit, There Will Be Blood

Prediction: Robert Elswit, There Will Be Blood

COSTUME DESIGN
Albert Wolsky, Across the Universe
Jacqueline Durran, Atonement
Alexandra Byrne, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Marit Allen, La Vie en Rose
Colleen Atwood, Sweeney Todd

Prediction: Jacqueline Durran, Atonement

MAKEUP
Didier Lavergne and Jan Archibald, La Vie en Rose
Rick Baker and Kazuhiro Tsuji, Norbit
Ve Neill and Martin Samuel, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

Prediction: Didier Lavergne and Jan Archibald, La Vie en Rose

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
No End in Sight
Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
Sicko
Taxi to the Dark Side
War/Dance

Prediction: No End in Sight

SOUND MIXING
Scott Millan, David Parker and Kirk Francis, The Bourne Ultimatum
Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland, No Country for Old Men
Randy Thom, Michael Semanick and Doc Kane, Ratatouille
Paul Massey, David Giammarco and Jim Stuebe, 3:10 to Yuma
Kevin O’Connell, Greg P. Russell and Peter J. Devlin, Transformers

Prediction: Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland, No Country for Old Men

SOUND EDITING
Karen Baker Landers and Per Hallberg, The Bourne Ultimatum
Skip Lievsay, No Country for Old Men
Randy Thom and Michael Silvers, Ratatouille
Christopher Scarabosio and Matthew Wood, There Will Be Blood
Ethan Van der Ryn and Mike Hopkins, Transformers

Prediction: Karen Baker Landers and Per Hallberg, The Bourne Ultimatum

VISUAL EFFECTS
Michael Fink, Bill Westenhofer, Ben Morris and Trevor Wood, The Golden Compass
John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson and John Frazier, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Scott Farrar, Scott Benza, Russell Earl and John Frazier, Transformers

Prediction: Scott Farrar, Scott Benza, Russell Earl and John Frazier, Transformers

FILM EDITING
Christopher Rouse, The Bourne Ultimatum
Juliette Welfling, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jay Cassidy, Into the Wild
Roderick Jaynes, No Country for Old Men
Dylan Tichenor, There Will Be Blood

Prediction: Roderick Jaynes, No Country for Old Men

SHORT FILM – ANIMATED
“I Met the Walrus”
“Madame Tutli-Putli”
“Même Les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven)”
“My Love (Moya Lyubov)”
“Peter & the Wolf”

Prediction: “Peter & the Wolf”

SHORT FILM – LIVE ACTION
“At Night”
“Il Supplente (The Substitute)”
“Le Mozart des Pickpockets (The Mozart of Pickpockets)”
“Tanghi Argentini”
“The Tonto Woman”

Prediction: “The Tonto Woman”

DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT
“Freeheld”
“La Corona (The Crown)”
“Salim Baba”
“Sari’s Mother”

Prediction: “Freeheld”

> Download and print out the official Oscar ballot
> Official site for the Oscars
> Find out more about this year’s Oscars and nominees at Wikipedia

Categories
Awards Season Thoughts

BAFTA Reflections

So, the big story of the night was Atonement winning Best Picture. Or was it Marion Cotillard winning Best Actress? Or was it that fans thought Marion was Kiera Knightley?

The BAFTAs

In truth it was a mixed affair, so here are some thoughts:

Atonement didn’t deserve Best Picture
Part of me cringed when I read that Atonement had won Best Picture. Not because it is a bad film – in fact, it is a very good one – but because it felt as if BAFTA members voted for it because they felt they had to. After all, it is a British film and happens to be very good. But compared to No Country For Old Men or There Will Be Blood? I’m sorry but there is just no comparison – it just feels the win was a result of BAFTA members going for the easy option of a quality British film over two truly great American ones.

The Best British Film category must go
I’m sure this category was set up to reward British films – nothing wrong with that in principle – but it just looks stupid to have Atonement nominated for Best British Film and Best Picture. It is almost as if BAFTA is going out of its way to give British films a major award. That might sound nice on paper but it just seems demeaning to the films that win or get nominated in this parochial category. This is England and Control deserve recognition but let them compete with the big boys in the Best Picture slot.

The Bourne Ultimatum is not a British film
Having The Bourne Ultimatum up for Best British Film was something of a joke. Not for artistic reasons, as it is a terrific film, but for the simple fact that it is not a British film. I’m sure someone will come up with a technical argument that the production was British based (the interiors were shot at Pinewood and a large section was set and filmed in London), but the fact is that it is was funded and produced by Universal – a major American studio. On the day of the nominations, director Paul Greengrass even admitted on 5 Live that he was surprised by being nominated as a ‘British’ film.

Marion Cotillard winning Best Actress wasn’t that much of a shock
Along with a few other people, I thought Julie Christie was going to win Best Actress but Marion Cotillard was also a strong candidate. Reading through some of the newspapers today you would think the bookmakers were confounded, but anyone with a bit of knowledge knows Best Actress at the BAFTAs was a hard category to call. The Oscars may be even tougher to predict.

They shouldn’t be held on the same night as the Grammys
The BAFTAs status has risen in recent years but the schedule clash with The Grammys (the music industry’s biggest awards bash) probably doesn’t help it get the media attention it deserves. Especially when media magnet Amy Winehouse wins a bunch of trophies.

The Lives of Others should have been nominated last year
One of the signs from the bad old days of the BAFTAs, is when you get films up for nomination a year too late. The Lives of Others was deserving of recognition, but is a 2006 film. The reason it got nominated this year is because the UK distributor (Lionsgate) didn’t release it in time before the cut off date in mid-February. Three years ago Million Dollar Baby had a similar problem when it got a raft of Oscar nominations (winning in several key categories) but no BAFTA nominatons at all because it wasn’t released in time. This is where distributors need to get their act together, as the BAFTAs can give a real boost to smaller films and it just looks silly when they get nominated a year late. Is it really that hard to send out screeners or release a film before mid-February?

Stephen Fry should come back as a presenter
Jonathan Ross is a talented presenter and whilst many people in the UK media moan about him for getting paid too much, he does have a genuine love for and deep knowledge of films. But something doesn’t click when he presents the BAFTAs – Stephen Fry just had a better touch when mixing the serious and comic at an event like this.

The British media should be less parochial
In the last few years the status of the BAFTAs has risen to the point where it is now part of the awards season that culminates in the Oscars. The days when it was in April and awards were seemingly dished out to Brits because American stars couldn’t be bothered to turn up seem to be gone (although George Clooney was a notable absentee last night). In short they have become a much more international event that reflect the importance of Britain’s role in the international film industry. Why is it then that British media coverage is full of rubbish that Atonement and Kiera Knightley were ‘snubbed’? And why, when you turn on the TV, are presenters always talking up the ‘British angle’ of Atonement? Despite being an early front runner, it was fortunate in the end to even get a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. Although BAFTA showered it with 14 nominations, I don’t seriously think anyone truly felt it would dominate the major categories last night as the field was simply too strong. Kiera Knightley and James McAvoy weren’t favourites – they aren’t even nominated at the Oscars – so was it really such a great surprise that neither of them won?

Newspapers should use the IMDb
Whilst looking through this morning’s newspaper coverage of the BAFTA’s and wading through the ‘Atonement snubbed’ angles I noticed that the Daily Mail (that’s the 2nd biggest selling newspaper in the UK) seemed to think that No Country For Old Men was about:

“drugs running in southern America”

Daily Mail BAFTA Cock up

It may just be their strange choice of language that’s confusing me here, but the basic plot is actually about a drugs heist gone wrong in West Texas.

Were they so concerned with Kiera’s dress that they couldn’t ring up their film critic Christopher Tookey – or even use the IMDb – to check what the film was about?

Roger Deakins deserved more attention
After all the tutting over Kiera, if the media really want to celebrate a Brit, then what about cinematographer Roger Deakins who won for No Country for Old Men last night? His role may not be as glamorous, but his work this year on the Coen Brothers’ film and The Assassination of Jesse James was simply world class. In fact his contributions over the years to films like The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, Kundun and The Man Who Wasn’t There are worthy of some kind of special lifetime achievement award.

The awards should be shown live on TV
Whenever I say this to people they look surprised as the ceremony has the appearance of being live on TV. But it isn’t. In fact the awards are finished before the TV show begins and the media know who the winners are. The results are then embargoed till 9pm, but if you were watching BBC1 last night and checked the Internet – or turned on a radio – whilst the show paused for the news, you could find out who the winners were. Some websites even had the winners up just after 8pm. So why aren’t they live? Obviously, it makes it easier for TV to edit out the lesser known awards (Ricky Gervais joked last night that the short film categories he was presenting wouldn’t even make the TV cut) and create a slicker show to fit into a neat time slot. You might remember Russell Crowe got upset in 2002 when the BBC cut out a poem from his winning speech for A Beautiful Mind. But if the Oscars are live, then why can’t the BAFTAs follow their lead? Although viewers probably aren’t that excited by the lesser known categories, it makes the bigger categories more exciting to wait for and there is a simply a tension to live TV that is unique.

What did you think of the BAFTAs? Post your thoughts below.

> BBC News with all the BAFTA winners
> Stephen Brook of MediaGuardian on what went wrong with the TV show
> The Daily Mail report on the BAFTAs and tell us that No Country for Old Men is about ‘drugs running in Southern America’
> Danny Leigh of The Guardian with some sensible thoughts on the night

Categories
Awards Season Thoughts

Friction.tv: Oscar Predictions

Friction.TV recently asked me to do a video of Oscar predictions.

I’m already having second thoughts about Best Actress, but here it is:

If you want to respond by video or text just sign up at their site.

Categories
Box Office Cinema Thoughts

The appeal of Saw 4

Saw 4 posterAlthough it wasn’t press screened for UK or US critics Saw IV took a huge slice of the box office over the weekend.

After the relatively disappointing performance of Hostel 2 in the summer, some were predicting that the recent cycle of horror films featuring torture had run its course.

With a highly impressive weekend total of $32.1 million it seems that is not the case, at least with the Saw franchise. I went to a screening in Central London at 5pm and was surprised at how many people were there.

It wasn’t full by any means but it was noticeable at how varied the audience was – it was fairly mixed between males and females of different ages.

For those who haven’t seen the films – or those who avoid them – they all revolve around a serial killer mastermind called Jigsaw. In each film he sets a series of traps (often involving diabolical devices) for his victims which allows them the opportunity to escape if they are prepared to sacrifice something, usually part of their body.

Saw was actually pretty good, two was OK, three poor and four just OK again. But can Saw V  sustain what is a remarkably profitable franchise for Lionsgate? Although they are sadistic and gruesome, people clearly want to check them out. But why?

Is it a craving to see shady characters get tortured in ever more elaborate ways? Do people just enjoy the Se7en-like structure in each film which involves a serial killer leaving a riddle for the cops? My feeling is that it could be a little of both.

But what do you think makes them so successful with audiences?

Leave your comments below or email me.

> Check out local showtimes via Google Movies
> Find out more about the Saw franchise at Wikipedia
> Listen to our interview with Tobin Bell from last year

Categories
Events London Film Festival Technology Thoughts

London Film Festival 2007: Is the Internet Killing the Film Critic?

Internet Debate at the BFI Southbank

Last night at the festival I went to one of the Time Out debates entitled Is the Internet Killing the Film Critic?

I was a little apprehensive about the actual premise. Was this just going to be another old media versus new media debate? Haven’t they already been exhausted?

It was officially billed in this way:

The internet is credited with globalisation and the democratisation of information, enabling anyone and everyone with access to a computer can share their views on an unending number of subjects.

Films seem to attract an especially large amount of public review in the way of forums, blogs and ratings via a variety of online platforms.

With this surfeit of popular opinion does the critic’s voice get lost in the crowd? This panel discusses whether the internet revolution has spurred a crisis in criticism and if so, for better or worse?

So, an old debate if you’ve been reading sites like Buzz Machine by Jeff Jarvis or even newspapers like The Guardian. But perhaps some new ideas and perspectives would be raised in the course of the discussion.

Given that I have a foot in the old and new media camps I went along intrigued as to what would be raised. The panel consisted of three journalists from traditional media and and two from new media.

It was chaired by Leslie Felperin, who currently reviews films for Variety and numerous other outlets including the Radio Times, Heat and Sight and Sound.

The panellists were:

Peter Bradshaw – Film Critic for The Guardian since 1999.

James Christopher – Chief Film Critic for The Times since 2002.

Steve Hornby – Senior Producer for BBC Movies, the film review and listings service on digital TV, web and mobile.

James Fabricant – Director of Entertainment and Head of Video, Europe, for MySpace.

Leslie started off by asking the panel for their views and then the debate went over to the audience. She was mentioned notable “movie bloggers” like David Poland and Jeffrey Wells – and generally seemed to be more clued up than the others about film writing online.

She correctly noted about how Variety’s website used to be terrible but has improved greatly. There was a brief mention of the subscription wall coming down before it shifted to the others on the panel. Overall Leslie was a good chair – clearly knowledgeable, fair and keen for contributions from the floor.

Peter started off by saying he’s been to a lot of these kind of debates and was refreshingly open about the possibilities the internet offered in changing the nature of film criticism.

He mentioned his recent piece about the 100 Movies Mashup on YouTube and how that kind of thing is being produced by the public rather than mainstream media. The Guardian could be doing stuff like that he said, but although it has the manpower it is often the case that great ideas come from unlikely sources.

I think he was being a little hard on his newspaper here. They have been by far the most innovative national newspaper (in the UK at least) in putting their content online, in a variety of different ways. Their role isn’t necessarily one of a producer but a filter of what’s good and bad. For example, I like the way they put their more traditional features and reviews alongside things like The Clip Joint.

He clearly understands and gets the online/blog world but at the same time seemed unsure of how it fitted in with his ‘traditional’ role as the film critic for a national newspaper. My feeling here is that there is a clearly a role for traditional critics if they are good enough and open to writing online.

The audience isn’t just there to be told what’s good and bad but can often be a tool in making you smarter and aware of things that you didn’t know existed. I like the comment sections on Guardian Unlimited as they often contain some very useful links to other sites and often open up another debate. Whilst there will always be trolls and mischief makers, the hassle is worth it if your audience is more engaged and part of the conversation.

One point he raised later on is that now critics are now being criticised, which is a shift from the old days of newspapers. But it seemed part of him enjoyed that aspect of what he does now and that it is only fair that critics be subject to the same scrutiny they themselves apply to films. He also seemed genuinely curious as to what sites the audience used.

Which brings us on to James Christopher, who seemed to be comically dismissive with film writing online. He started of by saying that the web guys at The Times had set up an email address for him so that readers could contact him. Apparently he has around 7,000 unanswered emails (!), which is some sort of record over at Wapping.

I don’t know whether this was a joke but it seemed odd that he wouldn’t want to engage with his readers. Whilst it’s true that you will always get some cranky emails surely it is a good idea to engage with your audience. After all they are the ones who are actually taking time to read your paper or visit your website. He seemed totally lost even when Bradshaw was bringing up basic things like YouTube and how to check out interesting videos online.

When the conversation shifted to social networking sites and the importance of users telling their friends about films they liked he seemed very dubious. I think he missed the point here as it isn’t as though reactions on MySpace or Facebook will necessarily replace traditional reviews – surely it is just another outlet for people to communicate.

Steve Hornby from BBC Movies responded by saying that the user was actually very important for them. The trend now is to try to emphasise their role in reviews. This makes sense for them, as they have a licence fee funded duty to involve their audience but also because it will make it a better site overall. It certainly seemed to chime in with what director general Mark Thompson has said in the past about Web 2.0 and interactivity.

James Fabricant from MySpace also echoed these thoughts about the importance of the user and what people can actually do online now. It is more than just reading text – which I guess was a reference to things like posting video reviews and then having people reply with their own videos.

James Christopher also mentioned his background as a theatre critic and compared it to film criticism. The key difference he noted was that a review of a film is of much less consequence to the industry as everyone has already been paid. In theatre and the live performing arts like opera and ballet, productions and jobs can depend on reviews.

By the end of the debate he seemed more open about film writing online (maybe his earlier comments were meant to be jovially provocative) and he acknowledged that technology is changing his role. He also remarked on how The Guardian has raised the bar for other newspapers and has led the way in putting their content online.

When the talk shifted to the floor it was interesting to see that one person recorded it on their mobile and one guy in front of me was checking out sites that were mentioned on his Mac (thanks to the BFI Southbank wi-fi).

There was actually quite a lot of people there and I sensed that a lot of different people came to it with different expectations. Maybe the nature of the debate was such that it went off into different tangents – at one point some one even brought up the very nature of criticism itself.

One guy seemed a little irate at James Christopher’s dismissal of social network users as reviewers and put forward his take on the wisdom of crowds argument. He said that he would always trust “10 people in a room” over 1 critic. I think this line of thinking has its good and bad points. On the one hand, I would always favour sites like Metacritic over a single reviewer, but at the same time just because you disagree with a critic doesn’t make his take on a film redundant.

Someone like Anthony Lane of The New Yorker isn’t someone I usually agree with – mainly because his reviews often seem like elaborately constructed jokes revealing his distaste for cinema – but reading him gives you another angle on a film that is different from Roger Ebert, Kenneth Turan or Harry Knowles. Surely the beauty of the web is the ability to gauge as many opinions as you like?

One audience member who worked for a film distributor I think – Marie Foulston from Soda Pictures – said that certain sites were useful in how they wrote around movies with comments on posters and trailers, which I thought was a sound point. The site she mentioned was Solace in Cinema (the guy with the Mac then immediately surfed to it) and it is a good example of a blog that provides a lot of commentary about the film going experience – checking out trailers, clips posters and feelings about upcoming releases.

For distributors I guess these sites are valuable because they are more reflective of what a lot of film fans think. The national newspaper critics have a very different experience, often seeing weekly releases back to back every Monday and Tuesday with a review that then goes out on the Thursday or Friday. Just by virtue of the fact that they are paid to see – rather than paying to see – films gives them a different perspective.

Peter Bradshaw conceded this point and said that it doesn’t really matter if people see films before him. One audience member then shot back by asking how could the general public (or even people who wrote online outside the media loop of mainstream critics) see films before the release date? I then chipped in by saying that preview screenings for online outlets were held for 300 and that maybe in future they would do more of this, depending on the film and what demographic they are chasing.

Leslie asked what sites people use to find out about films and reviews. A guy behind me said Green Cine Daily was good and one girl on the front row said that she always checks out the message boards of the IMDb. Another said Rotten Tomatoes and the guy with the Mac mentioned his website (I cant remember the title or URL) and how his community of friends/associates on it are important even if its not a massive amount of users.

James Christopher asked how do people find out about these sites and Leslie said that often the links on the sidebar direct you to other sites. But I guess for some that is a bit of a chicken and egg situation because if you don’t know about the good sites to begin with then it could be a little difficult. I would humbly suggest looking at my old post about useful film websites and checking the links on my sidebar.

One person then asked what qualifications were needed to be a film critic – which provoked an interesting reaction from panel. They mused on how most film writers have possibly done film studies but unlike other reporters there is no ‘practical experience’ of film writers. Is this a good or bad thing? Bradshaw then mentioned that he did all sorts of reporting before writing about film.

He also made the point that it was interesting that the debate about online film writing seemed louder and bigger than say online music writing – which surprised him given that the music industry is experiencing much greater upheavals than the film industry. Leslie seemed to think that film was a more open and popular meduim which more people have an opinion about. I suppose that film has less subsections than music – you basically have popular and arthouse cinema whereas music has all sorts of subgenres (e.g. Pop, Rock, Jazz, Classical etc), but that could probably be another debate itself.

A Greek girl in the audience said that when she used to find out who was the top critic in the top paper but when she came to England she didn’t know who the top English critics were so now she just Googles stuff online.

Overall, it was an interesting session with some solid contributions but I think the premise should have been more about how the web is changing criticism rather than killing it. There will always be critics but I guess the question is who will they be and how will people be reading and engaging with them?

Post your thoughts below or if you were at the debate you can even leave a comment on the LFF event page.

N.B. I would have recorded it but the PA system wasn’t the best and it wouldn’t pick up well enough to put up here as an MP3. I did see a mixing desk there, so if anyone has a link to the recording then do leave it in the comments section or email me.

*UPDATE*: Thanks to Marie from Soda Pictures for getting in touch and identifying herself! (If anyone else who I didn’t mention by name was there, just let me know.)

> Find out more at the official London Film Festival site
> Check out Time Out’s blog of the festvial
> An old post by me last year about bloggers and critics
> Variety’s Peter Bart trying to define the movie blogosphere back in May
> Anne Thompson of Variety on how blogs have reshaped film coverage
> A list of film blogs at About.com