I’ve decided to go for an entirely new theme for the blog. It’s cleaner and simpler and easier to read. It also offers up cool post format opportunities (like this very post!) which should make for some interesting variation in content and style.
Hope you all enjoy it.
Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the classic satire of religion and Christianity, was a very controversial film upon release. There was a question of whether it was okay to lampoon religion, and I think any reasonable person would say that the Python boys came out on the right side of that particular debate.
The BBC talk show series, Friday Night, Saturday Morning, did a show at the time of release featuring Michael Palin and John Cleese defending the film from attacks by Malcolm Muggeridge and Bishop Mervyn Stockwood. It’s truly one of the great episodes of television. Click to read more and watch the episode.
One of my favourite scenes ever in a film is one that wasn’t in the book it was based on. In most cases I wouldn’t know what an adaptation left out or added, but in this case the book also happens to be one of my favourites. The scene appears near the middle of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. Ron has abandoned his friends, who now sit depressed in the English wilderness. Harry, while contemplating his situation, hears a song coming from their tent. He walks in to find Hermione sitting there listening to Nick Cave’s “O Children” on the radio. He goes to her, takes her by the hand and begins to dance. The scene is only about two minutes long, but it’s a perfect encapsulation of that first half of the book. And it’s completely invented for the film.
The themes of friendship and feeling lost are right there in one beautiful scene. It’s beautifully filmed, beautifully acted and the song choice is wonderful. What I love most about it is that the screenwriter and director found a way to do something new and truly cinematic. It’s a scene that wouldn’t work as well in a novel anyway. It’s all visual and aural. It appeals directly to visceral emotion. They took the very heart of the book and translated it into filmic terms and came away with the best scene in the entire franchise. Click to read more.
Dear Lazy Directors,
It’s time to stop ripping off Saving Private Ryan‘s simulation of tinnitus. If you don’t know what tinnitus is, it’s that ringing sound in the ear often encountered in the aftermath of a loud bang or explosion. There were a few films that simulated this before Saving Private Ryan. The sound drowned out and was replaced by a very high-pitched ringing. The idea is to immerse the audience in the subjective experience of a person caught in an explosion. It’s a cool idea, and Saving Private Ryan used it extremely effectively.
Unfortunately, since Private Ryan, the technique has been used over an over and over and over and over and over again. It shows up so often that these days I expect it every single time something explodes really close to the main character. It has gone from unique and effective sound effect in the premiere of Lost and the opening of Children of Men, to completely predictable and annoying.
I watch a lot of movies, and you probably do, as well. When it comes to the actual watching part I do have preferences. In an ideal world I would see every movie in a huge, glamorous theatre, with a well-dressed, well-behaved audience and not a single food item or cell phone. The audience would stay totally quiet, expect for laughing/gasping/screaming/whooping at the appropriate times. If the theatre features classic style inclined seating then I wouldn’t allow any tall people in unless they agreed to sit behind me. The image would be perfectly projected on 35mm or digital (for digitally shot films only) and would be constant-height so that scope films are truly the widest viewable on the screen. The sound would be THX certified and scalable to 7.1 surround. There wouldn’t be any ambient lighting whatsoever. Nobody would be allowed to enter or exit the auditorium during showtime.
THAT would be my preferred way to see a film in an ideal world. Of course, this isn’t an ideal world, and that has to be taken into account. Click to read more.
Remember the emergence of CGI? There had been a few of films to employ the technique in the 80s. Tron, Young Sherlock Holmes, The Abyss. But really, CGI came to the fore with two landmark films in the early 90s. The first was James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and the second was Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. Both films used CGI in very specific ways, and both sparingly. They look like CGI, but their very deliberate usage means they don’t feel too dated, even compared to a lot of modern CGI. But after those films came all the bad CGI. The Mummy is probably the most notable. That thing was a total CGI fest. Of course, at the time CGI was still something of a novelty, bringing images to the screen that were previously impossible. Sure, it looked like CGI, but it was also cool. Now it just looks like dated crap.
These days CGI has become the norm. Some CGI is better than others, but for the most part it all looks pretty good, and we’re starting to see directors like Christopher Nolan and Brad Bird scale back on the CGI in favour of melding the computer animation where necessary with practical effects taking the spotlight. But otherwise, I feel like we can say CGI has essentially matured into something that will generally look great and become more photorealistic and refined over time. So what’s the next “new” technology? I’m starting to feel like 3D is the answer. Click to read more.
Dear Smug Jerks,
The Hunger Games is not Battle Royale.
Sure, both properties have an authoritarian government forcing teenagers to do battle-to-the-death. And sure, both have serious political undertones and social satire. Nobody can deny this, and I think it’s reasonable to assume Battle Royale, either in film or manga form, was a considerable influence on The Hunger Games.
Other influences on The Hunger Games? The Most Dangerous Game, The Running Man, Soylent Green, Death Race 2000, The Giver, and many other sci-fi films and books.
But The Hunger Games is not merely the sum of a bunch of influences. While I am not the biggest proponent of the novels—I find them entertaining, but also quite poorly written—I do think they cover really interesting thematic and allegorical ground in a unique and accessible way.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller are two of my favourite people. They were the co-creators and show runners of the short-lived cartoon series, Clone High, which is one of the funniest shows of all time. They followed that up with a great stint producing and writing some of the best early episodes of How I Met Your Mother. In 2009 they made their feature directorial debut with one of my favourite animated films of all time, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. So it stands to reason that I was highly anticipating their live-action feature debut, 21 Jump Street. I’m happy to report that Lord and Miller do not disappoint. Click to read more.
After loving Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, I wanted to read more from the author. He only had one other published novel, so I bought a copy of Ablutions and set to reading. I won’t deny how happy I was to see that the book was very short. Not even 200 pages! This was going to be an easy read. And while the prose was certainly easy and enjoyable, the content was dark and difficult. It took getting through the whole book to come to terms with wether deWitt had gone too far in his dark depictions of debauchery and apathy. Click to read more.
It happens sometimes. You go see a mediocre movie, or even a bad movie, and you come away feeling pretty indifferent to it all, except for one scene or sequence. John Carter, for example, has loads of problems, though it’s generally a fun time at the movies. But there’s one very emotional action scene in the film that takes things to a whole other level. It’s so good you almost wonder how it ended up surrounded by such a flawed film. You’d think the people who could come up with that one scene could have made the entire movie that perfect. John Carter isn’t the only example of this. It does raise the question, though, is it worth seeing an entire film just for one scene? Click to read more.
