SQUARE EYES

STANLEY KUBRICK VISIONARY FILMMAKER BLURAY BOXSET

2011-06-10T11:39:00.003-01:00

When he died in 1999, Stanley Kubrick left behind thirteen feature films. Only twelve are available on DVD, his first, the self-funded war film Fear and Desire was pulled from distribution by Kubrick, who was embarrassed by his low-budget fledging effort. Far from being a prolific filmmaker, he deliberately and methodically poured every aspect of his creative vision into each film, building an oeuvre that has changed modern filmmaking and the way we watch films. Stunningly presented on blu-ray, this box set consists of only half of Kubrick’s films, although they are mainly his most well known (the absence of Spartacus and the masterwork Dr. Strangelove are duly noted).

Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut are included plus there’s a bonus disc featuring O Lucky Malcolm! a documentary on Malcolm McDowell’s career as well as the brilliant and exhaustive Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, which is a doco worth purchasing on its own. Sadly Barry Lyndon and Lolita (both new to blu-ray) are devoid of extras, no doubt the impending 50th Anniversary of Lolita will mean yet another blu-ray release, with extras. Despite this small criticism, this is an essential clutch of Kubrick’s greatest hits, an opportunity to view these films in the best possible format. Lolita looks as great as it ever has, as does the exquisitely photographed Barry Lyndon but it’s 2001:A Space Odyssey’s amazing HD transfer that is without doubt one of the best examples of just how great blu-ray can look. Other than Barry Lyndon and Lolita, all other discs come with substantial extras (The Shining features a cracking doco shot by Kubrick’s daughter Vivian during filming), actor and biographer commentaries as well as retrospective documentaries. It’s a pity Jon Ronson’s intriguing doco Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes didn’t make it into the mix but this collection still ranks as one of the best available in terms of value for cash and those all-important geek-tastic extras.

JARROD WALKER

INTERVIEW WITH SENNA DIRECTOR, ASIF KAPADIA

2011-06-08T15:33:00.001-01:00

After making a handful of documentaries, in 2001 British filmmaker Asif Kapadia set out to make his first feature, The Warrior, shooting in Rajasthan and the Himalayas. With a small crew and a cast of mainly non-actors, Kapadia crafted a stunningly epic debut that was part Sergio Leone western, part spiritual quest. He followed it up recently with something of a companion piece, the equally epic Far North, which starred Sean Bean and was arduously filmed against the landscape of the Arctic Circle. His latest film Senna takes him back to his documentary roots, telling the story of Ayrton Senna, widely regarded as the greatest Formula One driver.

In past films, Kapadia has employed a highly cinematic style, using long takes with very little dialogue, most notably for The Warrior and Far North. Given the overt spirituality and existential brooding inherent in his style, it seems an odd fit to make the leap to a Formula One documentary but Kapadia says he was moved to accept the job because of the kind of man Ayrton Senna was: “Some people want to see the pure racing driver and his story works on that level, you’ve got the rivalry, the corruption and then you’ve got what he meant to Brazil – you could make a movie just about what he meant to Brazil. They were just coming out of a dictatorship and were in such a bad way…but Senna would be the one to make them feel proud. All these levels are why you can make a movie about him, he wasn’t just a great sportsman, he transcended the sport in so many ways”.

A enigmatic individual; Senna was headstrong and impulsive yet calculating and methodical, a devout Christian deeply involved in charitable causes, who spoke of the near spiritual ecstasy he’d experience while racing, once risked his life stopping his car mid-race and crossing the track to check on an crashed colleague yet would think nothing of risking his life and that of a fellow driver, in order to win a race. For Kapadia, Senna’s spiritual journey mirrors the themes he’s explored elsewhere in his films: “Senna has got a lot in common with The Warrior…for me there are so many similarities character-wise; in terms of a person who is an outsider, a good guy in a bad world, going on a journey, in The Warrior, it was the western genre, dealing with feudal India. Here, you’ve got a guy in the very contemporary, ultra-technological Formula One world but there are themes that I felt were very similar running through the two films…his spirituality was absolutely something that made me interested (in doing it).” Departing from the usual structure for a feature documentary, there are no ‘talking head’ interviews in the film, Kapadia tells the story only through archival footage using Senna’s own voice, mixed with voiceover narration from family and colleagues: “My feature films tend to have very little dialogue so the idea of making a typical documentary with talking heads is something I can’t do…we had so much footage, Senna lived his life on camera and tragically died on camera. Quite early on, I had an instinct that if you cut away from the real footage, the drama gets broken…what I wanted to show was the footage of the time, when the rivals hated one another because the conflict was real.” After some lengthy negotiations, Kapadia and his producers were allowed access to Formula One’s archives: “We were the first outsiders to ever go into the archive, no one gets in there, we were able to go back to every race and recut it from the dailies. I’m pretty sure we were some of the first people to go in there and actually look at the footage from that weekend (when Senna died). It was really Bernie Ecclestone who owns the archives, without him there’s no movie”. This wealth of archival material was key to the development of the film’s structure and style, there was an astonishing amount of footage to sift through: “we had a seven hour cut at one point… but we were budgeted for a 90 minute film so we had to cut it, we managed to get it to 100 minutes. There was 40 minutes of archives in the budget and the rest of the film was going to be talking heads but I just cut a film made entirely of archive, so for two years we struggled because we were way over budget but the proof was in the pudding, we convinced everyone involved that this was the way to make the film so we had to go back to Bernie Ecclestone and re-negotiate the archival footage…by the time we were cutting Senna’s crash, I could cut to aerial shots, on board cameras, wide shots, whatever I wanted – as a filmmaker, that technology is another layer of the narrative: were it not for Senna’s stardom, we couldn’t have made a film like this.”

JARROD WALKER

TT3D: CLOSER TO THE EDGE

2011-06-08T15:32:00.003-01:00

Directed By Richard De Aragues
Stars: Guy Martin, John McGuinness, Ian Hutchinson

The affable Guy Martin is a champion road racer (and recently a television presenter), ready with a smart-arse remark or blunt opinion, he’s very much his own man, refusing to be boxed or labelled but is tagged as a ‘maverick’ regardless. This film follows Guy (as well as his two rival riders, Ian Hutchinson and John McGuinness) as they train and prepare for the Isle of Man TT (Tourist Trophy), a competition that’s developed over more than a 100 years due the remote Isle’s once informal speed limit enforcement on its roads. Nowadays it’s a fully recognised racing competition for highly experienced riders only and for which the roads are closed but it’s bloomed into a festival that grips the whole of The Isle of Man with racing fever; a yearly test of fortitude and skill as bikes are hammered around the island at speeds in excess of 200 mph. Riders die every year, as the picturesque rural roads with their tight bends, rock walls and tiny roundabouts become deadly obstacle courses for these speed-addicted madmen. There are some catastrophic accidents depicted in the film, one rider’s bereaved wife talks of her acceptance that the risk of being killed was something that made her life with her husband that much more exhilarating. It’s moving stuff and it’s exemplary of the kind of devil-may-care attitude that the nerve-wracked wives contend with throughout the weeklong competition. The risk is high and you’ll be shaking your head in disbelief at the craziness of it all. Despite the apparent insanity of such high risk versus little reward (the prize money isn’t substantial, the race is run largely for the prestige of winning it) there’s something profoundly life-affirming and breathlessly uplifting about watching these obsessives in their chosen sport, risking their lives in pursuit of their passion. Absolutely top-notch stuff.

JARROD WALKER

X

2011-06-08T15:28:00.003-01:00

Directed by Jon Hewitt
Written by Jon Hewitt & Belinda McClory
Stars: Viva Bianca, Hanna Mangan-Lawrence, Stephen Phillips

Holly Rowe (Viva Bianca) is a successful call-girl, she plans to get out of the game for good and start a new life in Paris. The night before she’s due to depart for Europe, she decides to take one more job, a threesome at a Sydney Hotel but needs another girl. She approaches young and inexperienced hooker Shay (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence) and offers her a wad of cash to come along for the trick. Shay agrees and the pair soon wind up hiding in a luxury hotel bathroom as a deal goes south and their client is gunned-down by the psychopathic Bennett (Stephen Phillips) who spends the rest of the night tracking the pair in order to tie up any loose ends. From the opening scene, where Holly has luridly protracted sex with a male prostitute in front of a group of wealthy champagne-sipping menopausal housewives, the film seems to declare itself to be unreserved exploitation. No problem there then but writer/director Jon Hewitt places these characters within a believable and recognisable landscape, Sydney’s Kings Cross. The camera feels Shay’s humiliation as she’s initiated into prostitution but then leers on naked flesh like the camera operator is only using one hand. Viva Bianca’s Holly is believable but the performance is stilted and underwritten, Mangan-Lawrence is convincing but she’s chopped off at the knees by dodgy scripting. The character of Bennett is so full-throttle misogynistic and sadistically cartoony, he belongs in a different film. It’s hard to see Hewitt’s motivations in telling this story in the first place as there are elements of a cautionary tale, erotic thriller and exploitation but it doesn’t really commit on either front. It fails to draw the audience in and simply revels in the grotesque carnality of it all, leaving the characters to flop about pointlessly, ciphers pulling us through a sea of sleaze.

JARROD WALKER

Road to Perdition (BLU RAY)

2010-08-01T07:04:00.002-01:00

Directed by Sam Mendes
Written by David Self
Stars: Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Daniel Craig, Jude Law

Director Sam Mendes followed up his grotesquely overrated Oscar winner American Beauty with this under appreciated adaptation of Max Allan Collins graphic novel, itself a loose reinvention of the classic Japanese manga Lone Wolf & Cub.
Set in the 1930’s, it tells the story of a loyal mob enforcer, Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks), whose young son stows away in his father’s car, leading to him witnessing a mob slaying carried out by Connor Rooney (Daniel Craig), the murderous son of Sullivan’s life-long employer and father figure John Rooney (Paul Newman). Connor attempts to tie-up loose ends and ensure that the young witness can’t talk, so he brutally slays Sullivan’s wife and other young son in a botched home invasion. Michael Snr and Jnr escape with their lives and hit the road, pursued by a haunted hired killer, Harlen Maguire (Jude Law). Largely dismissed upon its release, Road to Perdition boasts a standout cast (including Newman in his final screen performance) firing on all cylinders as well as stunning Cinematography by Conrad L. Hall, who died shortly after production and nabbed a posthumous Oscar for his work on this film. One of Mendes better efforts; it’s a violent and often time’s lyrical and elegiac take on the mobster genre that rewards the repeat viewer. Extras wise there’s a commentary by Mendes, deleted scenes, a featurette on Conrad Hall and the making of the film.

Underbelly: Season One (BLU RAY)

2010-08-01T06:57:00.002-01:00

While its TV run scored massive ratings, Underbelly’s appeal to the Australian television audience proved that the public will happily tune in for a half-arsed crime soap opera because there’s little else in the way of Oz-centric crime drama on offer. Underbelly’s glorification of the Melbourne gangland wars of the 1990’s coupled with an exploitative tits‘n’ass style is salacious and glossy enough to ensure that the casual viewer will find themselves guiltily hooked. It focuses primarily on the ‘Carlton Crew’ crime syndicate consisting of a variety of drug dealers and stand-over men such as Alphonse Gangitano (Vince Colosimo), Mick Gatto (Simon Westaway), loanshark Mario Condello (Martin Sacks), retired bank robber Graham Kinniburgh (Gerard Kennedy), drug-dealing siblings Jason and Mark Moran (Les Hill and Callan Mulvey) and Jason Moran's dim driver, Carl Williams (Gyton Grantley). Narrated in hindsight by police officers Steve Owen (Rodger Corser) and Jacqui James (Caroline Craig), members of Task Force Purana (which investigated the Melbourne gangland killings in the 2000’s), the plot is cobbled together from police records and often times, wholesale fiction. While the show runners had a golden opportunity to create something genuinely compelling and powerful, they ultimately go for the lowest common denominator, fiddling the facts only to churn out badly written and overacted, glossed-up crime-porn. Extras include extended uncut scenes, a behind the scenes featurette and a min-doco ‘Carl Williams: Day of Reckoning’.

KILLERS

2010-06-23T16:45:00.004-01:00

Directed by Robert Luketic
Written by Bob DeRosa & Ted Griffin
Stars: Ashton Kutcher, Katherine Heigl, Tom Selleck, Catherine O’Hara

Strangely echoing the premise and tone of the new Tom Cruise vehicle Knight and Day, the story begins with Jen Kornfeldt (Katherine Heigl) and her annoying parents Mr. Kornfeldt (Tom Selleck) and Mrs. Kornfeldt (Catherine O’Hara) arriving on the French Riviera to begin their dream holiday. After slipping the watchful eye of her controlling Dad (who’s clearly seen Meet The Parents a few times), she meets Spencer Aimes (Ashton Kutcher) in the hotel lift. He’s an uber-assassin on the payroll of the U.S. Government but unexpectedly he finds himself falling in love with Jen and contemplating marriage. Fast forward three years and the pair are living in wedded domestic bliss in suburbia. A call from his old Agency boss sends Spencer into a paranoid spin as he finds out that an unknown enemy has targeted him for assassination. So as the killers start coming out of the woodwork to collect the huge bounty on his head, there’s no one else to trust, except his wife.

After helming the abhorrent Legally Blonde films and the horrendous The Ugly Truth, then gaining some filmic credibility with the stylish gambling drama 21, Australian filmmaker Robert Luketic takes a flamethrower to his street-cred with this mind-bendingly awful effort. The concept does have comedic possibilities (as seen in True Lies) but Luketic explores hardly any of them, he’s totally out of his depth as an action filmmaker and saddled with the task of balancing the comedy and the action, he all but ruins many of the films major set pieces. The script is ludicrously overcooked with too much unnecessary exposition at the expense of laughs and Heigl’s habitual decision to play each role as a nostril-flaring, wild-eyed squealing shrew is growing very tiresome indeed.

POSEIDON (Blu Ray)

2010-06-16T00:10:00.003-01:00

Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
Written by Mark Protosevich
Stars: Kurt Russell, Josh Lucas, Richard Dreyfuss, Jacinda Barrett

Since Wolfgang Petersen directed his World War Two masterpiece Das Boot he has (with the determination of an endurance athlete) inexorably slid towards cinematic mediocrity and abyssal-deep banality. It’s easy to trace his decline after the ‘Hitchcockian’ Shattered and the efficient thriller In The Line of Fire. Without warning came the execrable Air Force One, the leaden The Perfect Storm, culminating with Troy, a camp epic that managed to reduce one of literatures greatest tomes to scenery chewing and Brad Pitt’s glistening ab’s. Soonafter, Hollywood’s fuck-headed typing pool of banana-chewing Simian screenwriters flung a script onto Petersen’s doorstep, its story gouged from the plot of Ronald Neame’s 1972 ensemble epic The Poseidon Adventure, where a rag-tag group of misfits find their way to the surface through the wreckage of an upturned ocean liner when a ‘rogue wave’ flips it during New Years Eve celebrations. In this remake, the survivors struggling to get to the surface are career-gambler Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas), ex-New York Mayor Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell), degenerate gambler Lucky Larry (Entourage’s ‘Johnny Drama’ Kevin Dillon), Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss) and Maggie James (Jacinda Barrett). After numerous fiery set pieces, the group diminishes until a handful remains. Who lives? Who dies? Who cares? The extras are not bad, with a production assistant’s video diary of the film set as well as a featurette on the set construction, there’s also a documentary on those pesky rogue waves.

NINJA ASSASSIN (Blu Ray)

2010-04-30T06:27:00.003-01:00

Directed by James McTeigue
Written By Matthew Sands & J. Michael Straczynski
Stars: Rain, Naomie Harris, Sho Kosugi, Ben Miles

The prime examples of the 80’s Ninja genre are Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja and Pray for Death starring Sho Kosugi. The Matrix creators Larry and Andy Wachowski have brought a similarly blood soaked tale of warring Ninja’s to the screen (by way of anime classic Ninja Scroll). Directed by James McTeigue (V for Vendetta), it tells the story of Raizo (Korean Pop star Rain) a Ninja assassin raised and trained by the deadly Ozunu clan. Raizo has gone renegade and now seeks to destroy his former master. He teams up with Europol Agent Mika Corretti (Naomie Harris) who is investigating the clan and then proceeds to slice, dice and eviscerate the onslaught of ninjas sent to stop the pair from succeeding. The plot is wafer thin but fortunately the splatter-crazed action (the Blu-ray DTS-HD audio really comes into its own here) is more than worth the time of fans of the genre. Supporting performances are efficient but unengaging, Rain does a good line in brooding and makes for an appealing protagonist on which to hang the ensuing 99 minutes of frenzied arse kicking and as clan master Ozunu, Sho Kosugi lends real gravitas as a veteran of the genre. On the whole, the fantastically choreographed fight sequences and insanely stylised violence make this is a phenomenally enjoyable addition to the Ninja action canon. Extras are slim: a short doco on Ninjas and the physical training of Rain.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (BLU-RAY)

2010-04-04T04:27:00.003-01:00

Directed by Oren Peli
Written by Oren Peli
Stars: Micah Sloat, Katie Featherstone, Mark Fredrichs

Like most horror films that pull monumental numbers at the box office, their huge appeal is usually with audiences who wouldn’t normally watch a horror film. Utilising a faux documentary, ‘found footage’ style much like The Blair Witch Project and The Last Broadcast, the story begins as San Diego couple Micah Sloat and Katie Featherstone (the actor’s real names) discuss the nightly activities of a ghostly entity that has apparently been stalking Katie, on-and-off, for most of her life. After a brief home consultation by a psychic (Mark Fredrichs) Micah decides to set up a video camera to record their room each night as they sleep and it’s in the daily reviewing of this footage that they witness the shifting of objects, the house lights flickering and bed sheets fluttering. Soon the attacks become more violent, as the demon in their home becomes angrier. Writer/Director Oren Peli uses his tiny budget (purportedly $11,000) to great effect, utilising atmospheric sound effects and editing to create a spooky mood with the requisite jumps and scares. Whether it’s “the scariest film ever made” is debatable and it’s far from original but thanks to the heavy reliance on audience’s imaginations, it doubtlessly offers the scares many viewers will be after. This Blu Ray release features an alternate ending and a fan photo tribute and the strange lack of a director’s commentary.

THE BLIND SIDE

2010-04-04T04:15:00.001-01:00

Directed by John Lee Hancock
Written By John Lee Hancock
Stars: Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, Quintin Aaron, Kathy Bates

The sports film is a tricky genre to nail. It’s easy to teeter between emotion and sentimentality and more often than not, tumble over into outright treacle. Phil Alden Robinson’s ode to Americana, Field of Dreams and Barry Levinson’s The Natural are examples of the genre as it was, bronzing and mounting a sport (in this case Baseball) as elegiac myth. Recently though, the trend has moved towards reality-based battles against adversity, with themes encompassing the business of sport (Any Given Sunday) or overcoming bigotry (Remember the Titans). In keeping with these themes, Texan filmmaker John Lee Hancock (The Alamo) has adapted Micheal Lewis’s book about Michael Oher (Quintin Aaron), a destitute and psychologically scarred African American teenager taken in by a wealthy white Texan family, who legally adopt him and help him graduate high school. Leigh Anne (Sandra Bullock) and Sean Tuohy (Tim McGraw) then shepherd the bear-like Michael to becoming a prominent college football prospect and ultimately one of the best ‘offensive left tackles’ in the American NFL. So while not relying on the sappy emotions that a lot of underdog sports movies tend to, The Blind Side does spoon feed its audience over-simplified emotions at times and the story, though true, is slightly predictable but its strength undoubtedly lies in Bullock’s solid performance as the head strong and confrontational Leigh Anne. It’s her relationship with Michael that’s at the heart of the film and Bullock plays her with bull-headed gusto. Whether her performance is Oscar worthy is arguable but it anchors the film and John Lee Hancock’s direction is assured, if a little safe, so while hardly being provocative or challenging it works as a well crafted, button-pushing crowd-pleaser.

SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE

2010-04-04T03:59:00.003-01:00

Directed by Jim Field Smith
Written by Sean Anders and John Morris
Stars: Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve, T.J Miller, Mike Vogel, Nate Torrence

This amiable, if slightly saccharine sex comedy (scripted by Sean Anders and John Morris who co-wrote the upcoming Hot Tub Time Machine) tells the story of Kirk (Jay Baruchel) an airport security guard who meets the beautiful Molly (Alice Eve) and through a series of events, summons the courage to ask her out on a date. Kirk’s slacker work colleagues Stainer (T.J Miller), Jack (Cloverfield’s Mike Vogel) and Devon (Nate Torrence) do their best to chip away at his self confidence by telling him that Molly’s a “hard 10” and that he is, at most, a “5”. Kirk’s insecurities begin to come to the fore; firstly as he introduces his new girlfriend to his deranged, dysfunctional family, then as he meets Molly’s fighter pilot ex who presumes Kirk is her new gay friend. It’s the presumptions of others that Kirk has to deal with if he’s to win Molly’s heart and his struggles with his deficiencies are very funny. Baruchel plays essentially the same character he played in the Judd Apatow produced TV series Undeclared and makes for a sweet, amiable lead. Actor-turned-first time director Jim Field Smith has cast the roles solidly and draws the characters well enough to provide some decent moments of comedy. Its final moments settle into formulaic rom-com territory and the dynamic of Kirk’s friends giving him unreliable relationship advice seems to be lifted straight from The 40 Year Old Virgin but it’s still an enjoyable ride with a cheerfully funny and realistic edge.

HARRY BROWN

2010-04-04T02:46:00.002-01:00

Directed by Daniel Barber
Written By Gary Young
Stars: Michael Caine, David Bradley, Emily Mortimer, Charlie Creed-Miles

When vigilante scenarios are realised on film, they either appeal to our own sense of justice by legitimising the vigilantism (Straw Dogs, Mad Max) or emphasize the slow death of the soul that revenge inevitably brings (The Brave One, Dead Man’s Shoes), either way it’s by definition an exploitative genre, designed to pleasure an audience by letting us wallow in our own sense of righteous vengeance. Ad Director Daniel Barber tries his hand at it, setting the scene on a housing estate in South London’s Elephant and Castle, where widower, ex-marine and old age pensioner Harry Brown (Michael Caine) spends his days sitting with his dying, comatose wife and drinking pints at the local pub with his old mate Len (David Bradley). When the frail Len is murdered by local youths dealing crystal meth on the estate, Detective Inspector Alice Frampton (Emily Mortimer) fails to secure convictions. Harry snaps, buying handguns from psychopathic addict Stretch (Sean Harris) then unleashing his old military training as he brutally brings the killers to justice. The gritty cinematography lends an air of Nil by Mouth meets Death Wish but the shockingly predictable script is populated with such cardboard characterizations, it’s all curiously unengaging. Caine delivers a terrific performance and it’s always a pleasure to see him back in Get Carter territory but there’s a deep disconnect between the film his performance belongs in and the one the filmmakers have made.

FRIDAY THE 13th

2009-02-28T12:37:00.002-01:00

FRIDAY THE 13TH
Directed by Marcus Nispel
Written by Damian Shannon, Mark Swift and Mark Wheaton
Stars: Jared Padalecki, Danielle Panabaker, Derek Mears

Today’s young audiences are seemingly incapable of watching anything that isn’t on the new release shelf, perfect chance then for producer Michael Bay to work his way through the horror classics, retooling them into bankable box office fodder. Bay oversaw the similarly re-jigged The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which despite showing ten times more gore as the original, was a fright-less exercise in gross out and an interesting showcase for Jessica Biel’s abs. This latest revamp, of the original Friday the 13th opens with a pre credit sequence in which a group of youth’s decide to pitch tents near the fateful Camp Crystal Lake, scene of innumerable brutal slayings. After fireside ghost stories prove boring, the group pair off for: a) sexy shenanigans b) marijuana consumption and c) reckless exploration of the nearby creepy camp. Mask wearing psychopath Jason Voorhees appears and with supernatural speed, proceeds to machete; bear trap and burn anyone he sees. Of course, that’s just pre-credits. Once we’re into the ludicrously thin plot, yet another group of beautiful people venture lake-side for more partying and more needless exploration of creepy buildings. In keeping with the 80’s horror ethos, graphic nudity precedes a brutal slaying, drug use also means you’re about to cop the business end of a pitchfork and of course, gratuitous sex means you’re about to die horribly but only before you explore the creepiest, darkest room in the house asking loudly if ‘anybody’s there’. It’s almost pantomime in its “he’s behind you!” stupidity but for all its goofiness there’s still an all encompassing enjoyment in watching a bunch of reckless, hedonistic moron’s being axed to death. You’d almost think this stuff was designed to appeal.

THE INTERNATIONAL

2009-02-28T12:33:00.002-01:00

Directed by Tom Tykwer
Written by Eric Singer
Stars: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl

German born filmmaker Tom Tykwer is a relative late-comer to the U.S studio system, his previous feature Perfume: the Story of a Murderer, boldly attempted to make a film about the sense of smell, with predictably unsuccessful results. Tykwer is a gifted filmmaker, as was evidenced in his kinetic hit Run Lola Run, but his style constantly threatens to overwhelm any narrative substance he turns his hand to.
His latest effort sees him trying his hand at a conspiracy thriller, with mixed results.

Interpol Agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) obsessively works to destroy the International Bank of Business and Credit and bring its chief executives to justice. Aided by New York Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) Salinger travels to Berlin, Istanbul and New York in an effort to track the bank’s dodgy transactions and in the hope that he can secure a whistleblower who might be able to provide concrete evidence of the company’s illegal activities, planned from within a shadowy cabal at the centre of the bank’s operations.

Owing a cinematic debt to 70’s conspiracy thrillers such as the films of Sydney Pollack (Three Days of the Condor) and Alan J. Pakula (The Parallax View), the tepid script doesn’t quite live up to Tykwer’s taut direction. Absent character development means there’s few characters to care about and Owen straps his ‘unshaven-half asleep-deeply embittered-pom’ schtick on for one more performance, still managing to hold the audience and provide at least a semblance of intensity amidst the action. A violent shoot-out staged inside the foyer of New York’s Guggenheim museum is a highlight but with little to pull the viewer in, the enjoyment is more in the technical execution rather than emotional investment.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

2007-05-22T20:54:00.000-01:00

A hard boiled, violent modern day western thriller. A major return to form for the Coen Brothers? Did they ever lose their form?
It premiered at Cannes and is reviewed here

300

2007-03-06T10:12:00.000-01:00

Directed By Zack Snyder
Written By Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, Michael Gordon
Starring: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Dominic West, Rodrigo Santoro
Duration: 116 Minutes

Continuing with the veracious comic-to-screen adaptation process pioneered by Robert Rodriguez with Sin City, yet another of Frank Miller’s dynamic and brutal graphic novels serves as the visual inspiration for a cinematic counterpart. It’s the sophomore effort for filmmaker Zack Snyder, who remade George Romero’s zombie epic Dawn of the Dead in 2002, which despite bearing little resemblance to its predecessor, featured solid performances and slick gore laden action which went a long way towards proving Snyder’s cinematic chops.

With his latest film, Snyder has given three dimensions to Frank Miller’s graphic novel, 300. It’s set in the ancient Greek state of Sparta, where newborn males were scrutinised for imperfections and deformities. If any were found, the infants would be tossed from a cliff. Such brutal eugenics were commonplace at the time. If a young boy was lucky enough to survive his birth and reach 7 years of age, he would be then be taken from his mother and given to the state. They would then undergo agoge, a kind of military training. By the age of 20, they would be worthy to serve as Spartan soldiers, fully formed killing machines, bred for battle.

The film begins in 480 B.C as a Persian invasion force of several hundred thousand men threatens Greece. The Persian Empire promises autonomy to the peoples it conquers and dispatches messengers to all states to personally request that Greece yield to Xerxes, its ‘God-King’. The Spartan senate is hesitant to acquiesce and endlessly debates whether to fight, so the single minded Spartan King Leonidas (Butler) decides to take matters into his own hands and travels north with 300 of his best warriors to a narrow mountain pass called Thermopylae in order to hold off the gargantuan Persian onslaught and buy time for Greece to rally for war.

It’s at this point that the film launches into demented overdrive, putting the audience front and centre as the Spartans utterly rout a motley array of battle scarred mutants, crazed psychopathic uber-warriors and wave after wave of intricately costumed soldiers from every corner of the Persian Empire. As the killing progresses, the Spartan’s build their defensive wall higher and higher, using the enemy corpses as mortar between the stones, all the time living in the hope of a ‘good death’ and the possibility that within the multitudes they are slaughtering there may be a warrior worthy enough to provide them with one.

Shot digitally and utilising ‘green screen’, the film is visually stunning, its painterly vistas and ball-tearing battle sequences are realised with a bent towards the hyper-real, surreal touches which are lifted directly from the pages of Miller’s comic: Leper Oracle’s, obese mutants with blades for arms, facially scarred lesbian concubines, rounded out by the multi-pierced, multi-jeweled Xerxes of Persia, whose voice is of such uncommonly rich timbre that even Ghostbuster’s Gozer would be envious. The battle scenes move with muscular dynamism and intensity, punctuated with some stunningly graphic violence. All the while the camera floats through the butchery, speeding up and slowing down at key moments of impact. Blood arcs gracefully through the air as spears puncture and swords rent limb from limb. Such choreographed killing is a sight to behold and in the midst of it, the cast delivers steroidal performances. Wenham is back in Rings territory as the battle worn Dilios, Leonidas’ trusted confidante and it’s through his eyes that the story is told. The cast uniformly oozes the requisite machismo and brute force; their physiques a testament to the extensive fitness regime that they underwent in preparation for the film. Alone in this raging testosterone sea is one island of femininity: Headey in the surprisingly pivotal role of Spartan Queen Gorgo. It’s her story that provides the background to the battle, when she‘s pitted against the Machiavellian Theron (West) as she pressures the senate to go to war and support her husband but it’s Butler as King Leonidas who delivers the standout performance, carrying the film in what will no doubt be his breakout role.

Snyder isn’t aiming to appeal to the masses here, in fact it’s a fairly specific slice of the demographic pie that 300 is squarely leveled at and to that end the film excels. Essentially the anti-Bridget Jones Diary or rather the kryptonite to Dirty Dancing’s Superman; the hard edged, gloriously unsentimental brutality is so damn cool, so slickly designed and executed, it will inexorably call to the 18-35 male like a siren song drenched in arterial spray.

Neill Cumpston's review of '300' - funny as hell

2007-02-09T11:58:00.000-01:00

Check out Neill Cumpston's review of 300 over at www.aintitcool.com. This is hands down one of the best reviews i've read. Simple, succinct in its stupidity and funny as hell....my linking abilities are seriously hampered at the moment...damn computing machines!...anyways, cut and paste this address: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/31520

RADHA MITCHELL

2007-02-08T06:51:00.000-01:00

Here's a Radha Mitchell interview i did several months back. It's a little old but it's still interesting and worth reading ....enjoy...

The tabloid magazine radar seems to fixate solely on Australia’s better known female Hollywood exports such as Watts,
Kidman and Blanchett. However, Radha Mitchell seems to be the quiet achiever having worked solidly in the US & Europe since the late 90’s, in a slew of high profile, critically lauded turns. Recently she’s headlined Woody Allen’s Melinda & Melinda as well as co-starring with Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland, in addition to any number of turns in ensemble drama’s with some of Hollywood’s best and brightest. A relaxed and down-to-earth person, in conversation one gets the impression that the distinct lack of media analysis is exactly how Mitchell likes it. She’s recently finished filming on Rogue, Greg Mclean’s Northern Territory killer-croc horror and follow-up to Wolf Creek. This month also sees the release of yet another lead turn for her, as the protective mother of an ever-so-slightly evil child in Christophe Gans’ (Brotherhood of the Wolf) adaptation of the gaming hit: Silent Hill.
Mitchell speaks highly of her Gallic director: “Christophe is fascinating to talk to and he’s got such a vast film vocabulary. He used to be a film critic and so although we were making something that’s kind of ‘pop’ and ‘cult’, I think his point of view on it was fairly intellectual most of the time.” She also seems enamoured by Gans ballsy yet oh-so-very-French ability to pour scorn on films and filmmakers alike for a career and then dare to set out to make films himself. Clearly the knives would’ve been well and truly out. Mitchell laughs: ”I think you’d really have to be able to pull it off because other people would have been listening to you critique them for so long. Christophe really did that with his first film Brotherhood of the Wolf; I mean if I were a 12-year-old boy that would’ve been my favourite movie ever. It’s such a boy’s own tale.” After seeing him work up close, Mitchell reflects on Gans distinctively Gallic angle on gore. “I think that Christophe’s style is distinctively French horror. It’s horror with style and it’s beautiful to look at. It’s elegant in its gruesomeness.” Gans is also well known for his obsessive eye for the minutia of the mise en scene. What is it like to work with a filmmaker whose eye is always on the details? Mitchell laughs: “He’s kind of like a French Hitchcock…if you can imagine a French Hitchcock? He’s extremely French, in that style is extremely important to Christophe. On Silent Hill we would spend seven takes on an imaginary snowflake falling on my cheek. Those sorts of details were incredibly important to him. The look of the film was something that we really couldn’t see at the time, I mean we saw the (video) splits and we saw the sets and the sketches but exactly how it was going to be treated and what it was going to look like was something I really didn’t discover until I saw the movie. It was something that Christophe would have to intonate and explain to us a lot of the time and sometimes he’d get really bored with having to do that (laughs).

You’ve just finished Rogue for Wolf Creek director Greg Mclean, how does working in horror compare with other film genres? “Silent Hill was an intense experience, highly focussed some days, running from monsters, opening doors and screaming, it kind of turns the rest of your life ‘off’, so I like that about it. Plus in telling the stories, you can vent a lot of your own stuff through them, which is great. The reaction to watching horror films is very physical and visceral y’know? you might even scream…. and when your acting in them it’s very much the same thing, it’s a physical thing to be attacked by a monster (laughs) But it wasn’t so much the horror that attracted me to Silent Hill, more the fantasy aspect of it. The fact that this could not happen in the real world, you know? This could only happen in a dream or in a hallucination but it’s not going to happen if you just walk out of your apartment. I guess so much of acting is emulating reality and making things as real as they can be whereas if you can make it like it can never be and like it never is, it’s somehow more exciting”.

Jodelle Ferland plays your daughter in the film; you have an interesting relationship with her where she is not only your loving daughter but also the embodiment of something quite evil. “Yeah, she’s such a phenomenal actress, that was quite an easy thing to do. She just sort of stepped into that devil character without any coaching from anyone, this weird head motion and strange way of speaking. All of that was her invention, no one told her how to do that. So that was kind of freaky (laughs)
For that reason, it was great working with her because she was compelling and always believable. But even when she wasn’t being that way, I was very protective of her around the set because she’s just this small creature y’know and it felt very natural to be doing that.” Mitchell has recently completed PU-239, in which Paddy Considine stars, as a Russian nuclear power plant employee dying of radiation sickness who makes a last ditch effort to raise money for his family by selling plutonium on the black market. She’s also currently filming an ensemble romantic drama Feast of Love for veteran filmmaker Robert Benton (Kramer vs Kramer). It seems that she’s been working continuously since her ’96 debut in Emma-Kate Croghan’s Love and Other Catastrophes. How does Mitchell feel about the life of an international actor, having repetitive, intense albeit brief working relationships with filmmakers and actors, usually culminating in moving on in order to start the process all over again? “It’s like going to Las Vegas. (laughs) You know? It is what it is. You go with the next episode. I guess it lacks the intimacy of continued relationships that are part of your life everyday, but it can become even more intense because it’s a small amount of time and everybody is focused on each other. Like the film I’m working on right now (Feast Of Love), I just met everyone yesterday and we were just talking about this actually. It is kind of like you ‘invent’ a family for that period of time. You don’t lose contact with people completely, well some people you do but most people remain part of your life and you move on to the next episode”.

RESCUE DAWN

2007-01-30T22:07:00.000-01:00

Directed by Werner Herzog
Written By Werner Herzog
Stars: Christian Bale, Steve Zahn & Jeremy Davies
Duration: 134 Minutes

After his acclaimed 2005 documentary The Grizzly Man, German auteur Werner Herzog turns once more to feature filmmaking, crafting a decidedly tense tale that is a feature adaptation of his own 1997 documentary: Little Dieter needs to fly. It’s the story of Dieter Dengler (Bale), a German–born US Navy pilot who, while on a bombing raid over Laos during the Vietnam War in 1966, is shot down and captured by the Viet Cong. After enduring a variety of punishments, he’s tossed into a Laotian P.O.W camp where he finds a small group of emaciated prisoners who’ve languished there for years. After a time, Dieter befriends the gentle Duane (Zahn) and manages to foster some goodwill with the paranoid Gene (Davies) who feels Dengler’s talk of escape is a threat to the calm they’ve maintained with the shirtless, machine-gun toting guards who seem a hairs breadth away from attacking the prisoners. Remaining dogged to a fault, the survival instinct takes hold in Dengler and he sets about preparing for his escape and his journey through the jungle to freedom.
This well has been drawn from many times by lesser filmmakers but Herzog’s eye for realism and un-formulaic pacing keeps the proceedings taut. The sure handed direction elicits intense performances from the cast; Davies is the embodiment of twitching paranoia and unpredictability as Gene and Zahn, usually cast as the goofy sidekick, is revelatory as the despondent Duane. However it’s the laser-focused intensity of Bale that wholly elevates the film, his skeletal body and palpable desperation serves to create an utterly compelling protagonist for this emotionally wrenching story of the ‘crazy-brave’.

SMOKIN' ACES

2007-01-23T16:47:00.000-01:00

Directed By Joe Carnahan
Written By Joe Carnahan
Starring: Jeremy Piven, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta, Ryan Reynolds, Alicia Keys, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Joel Edgerton, Peter Berg & Martin Henderson

Despite boasting a talented cast, some high octane set pieces and David Fincher-esque stylistics, Joe Carnahan’s follow-up to his excellent cop drama Narc navigates post-Tarantino terrain and loses its direction, emerging a hollow vessel in desperate need of some serious gravitas.

The film opens as Buddy ‘Aces’ Israel, (Piven) a top Vegas magician and entertainer, turns federal witness on some very powerful crime families. Consequently they want him dead. A million dollar bounty is offered and a multitude of idiosyncratic sass-talking killers & bounty hunter’s descend on Buddy’s hotel penthouse. At the same time, their paranoid target back and forth’s with the FBI, (Garcia, Reynolds, Liotta) attempting to negotiate a witness protection deal whilst partying with whores and hoovering his way through mountains of cocaine.
The films first half establishes a stylish crime noir tone verging on screwball farce, which it manages to maintain while introducing a litany of underworld freaks and misfits; however it makes a fatal misstep when it changes gears from a fast and furious lead-fest to sub-Usual Suspects dramatics, causing the needlessly complicated plot to creak under the weight of its own under-developed characters and unjustified drama. The final scenes do rate a mention, if only for the truly spectacular bloodshed and gun play which is about one bear-trap short of a Sam Peckinpah wet-dream. Carnahan’s fan-boy roots in ‘70’s cinema are entirely evident and his virtuoso directing skills are without question but this unfocussed (and at times, pointless) chaos makes Guy Ritchie’s slickly crafted crime fests seem like Kurosawa by comparison.

DEAD MAN'S SHOES

2006-09-01T16:31:00.000-01:00

Largely known for his low key tales of working class life in England’s Midlands, Shane Meadows rose to prominence after the release of his debut feature 24/7 which starred Bob Hoskins as an aging boxing trainer who converts a group of listless teenagers to the pugilistic arts. While collaborating with his A Room for Romeo Brass star Paddy Considine on a low-budget comedy script, the piece eventually evolved into a dark thriller. Despite the shift in genres, Meadows approached the material with the same eye for social realism and character oriented storytelling.

Ex-soldier Richard returns to his home town after a long period of absence. During his time away, Richard’s learning disabled younger brother Anthony has been horribly mistreated by the ‘wide boys’ and small time drug dealers that populate the town.
Richard has returned with one goal: vengeance and to ensure that the cruelty inflicted on his brother won’t ever be forgotten.

Seventies inspired in its execution, Dead Man’s Shoes roots itself firmly in the vigilante revenge films of that era such as Death Wish, Deliverance and Straw Dogs. At times channeling Peckinpah’s unerring depiction of cruelty and violence and Alan Clarke’s (Scum, Made in Britain) bleak portrayal of life in rural working class England, Meadows changes genre gears with admirable ability. The undeniable soul of the film is Considine, in an incendiary central performance that drifts from unpredictable menace and tightly coiled rage to heart broken sorrow without ever missing a beat. Held against similarly plotted revenge thrillers that barely raise a spark, Dead Man’s Shoes is a napalm intense blast to the face.

HALO

2006-08-10T09:05:00.000-01:00

Executive Producer Peter Jackson has chosen 26 year old Neill Blomkamp to helm the feature film adaptation of the highly successful video game: HALO. Blomkamp is most well known for his 'dancing Transformer' Citroen advertisements. You can check out his impressive short film Alive in Joburg here.

THE PRESTIGE

2006-07-12T23:23:00.000-01:00

Christopher Nolan 's (Memento, Batman Begins) new film The Prestige is due for release in October. Set in Victorian London, it's the story of two rival magicians played by Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman. It also stars David Bowie.
You can check out a trailer for it here.

ROAD TO GUANTANAMO

2006-07-05T02:44:00.000-01:00

Here's the new Michael Winterbottom film"Road to Guantanamo".
If you've seen "In This World" then you have a fair idea of how great a filmmaker Winterbottom is when he focuses on topics likes this.
You can check out the trailer at http://www.roadtoguantanamomovie.com/

SUNSHINE

2006-06-22T14:22:00.000-01:00

Check out the website for Danny Trainspotting Boyle's new science fiction film Sunshine. It's scripted by Alex Garland and follows the trials of a crew on a mission to the sun, which is dying.

SILENT HILL

2006-06-09T19:39:00.000-01:00

Retooling video games for the big screen has heretofore been a relatively cynical exercise; given the critical mauling most of them receive. The primary objective is to exploit the gargantuan gaming market and drain it of every dollar it holds.
So it seems nothing will prevent filmmakers from kick-starting the ultimate cash-cow franchise and despite the deeply mediocre results of previous game-to-screen efforts Gallic filmmaker Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) has adapted the gaming hit Silent Hill, with a screenplay by Pulp Fiction co-scribe Roger Avary.

The film opens with Rose (Pitch Black's Radha Mitchell), desperate to determine the cause of her daughter Sharon’s (Jodelle Ferland) inexplicable night terrors. She is convinced that the answers lay in the subject of her daughters nightmares: the eponymous ghost town located in America’s south. Against husband Christopher’s (Sean Bean) better judgment, Rose sets out with her daughter to find some closure. Once there, Sharon strangely disappears and as Rose attempts to find her, local cop Cybil (Laurie Holden) comes to her aid and together the pair explore the mysterious town, finding themselves beset by the plethora of demonic beasts which populate it.

Gans’ striking visuals impress however as a coherent whole the film is a baffling mess. Those unfamiliar with the game will be utterly lost in the early stages as the film lurches from one bizarre scenario to the next with no evident context or narrative thrust. Despite Mitchell’s solid central performance, the supporting players are reduced to paper thin characterisations, their motivations never fully articulated. By the time the film actually deigns to provide some desperately needed plot exposition, we simply no longer care. At this point, the only joy to be siphoned from the confusion are some terrifically realised scenes of horror as well as a climax that showcases some interesting uses for barbed wire but on the whole, it’s a magnificent squandering of the collective talents involved.

United 93

2006-06-07T16:13:00.000-01:00

Written & Directed by Paul Greengrass

Stars: Christian Clemenson, Trish Gates, Polly Adams, Cheyenne Jackson, Opal Alladin, Gary Commock

The September 11th 2001 terror attacks have gained a sacrosanct status making them problematic fodder for the Hollywood gristmill. It’s little wonder that there’s been much ballyhooing and commentating on whether or not we should be seeing this topic tackled so soon, writ large on the silver screen. Despite the protests, films have been (and are being) made on the topic and not just within the Hollywood system. In 2004, filmmaker Antonia Bird (Priest) directed The Hamburg Cell for British television. A fictionalised account of the recruitment and training of the 9/11 hijacker’s, it was a well executed and deftly handled drama. Several months ago, British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom completed The Road to Guantanamo, a searing account of three Pakistani friends from Birmingham, England who were held in detention at Guantanamo Bay for two years, before being released without charge. Given the hypersensitivity that Hollywood has towards this topic, it’s no surprise that the best films to tackle the subject are being made by European filmmakers. Unfortunately it’s these very films that will be all but ignored by a large proportion of the American film-going public. U.S audiences far prefer being spoon-fed their ‘issues’ within the framework of a conventional film narrative. It seems that Oliver Stone’s upcoming 9/11 based film World Trade Centre may better appease the nationalistic sentiments of the average American film goer by presenting a story that audiences can rally around without having their sensibilities threatened, featuring clear cut ‘heroes’ and a bosom swelling sense of national pride to boot. Considering the climate of paranoia we currently live in and the cataclysmic effect that day in 2001 has had on our world, it’s highly appropriate that more daring filmmakers push us to think on exactly what brought us to where we are today.

British writer/director Paul Greengrass has frequently tackled highly charged socio-political subjects in his films. As a young journalist, Greengrass worked on UK current affairs program World in Action. In 1987, he co-authored Peter Wright’s controversial MI5 tell-all: Spycatcher shortly before making the move into feature filmmaking, helming several made-for-TV docu-drama’s that have garnered him high praise including: The Murder of Stephen Lawrence about one of the UK’s most notorious racial killings and writing the screenplay for the intense drama Omagh which told the story of the 1998 IRA car-bombing. In 2002, Greengrass directed Bloody Sunday, which dealt with the 1972 civil rights protest march and subsequent massacre by British Troops in Northern Ireland.

Bloody Sunday brought him to the attention of the Hollywood studios and in 2004, he directed The Bourne Supremacy, the success of which enabled Greengrass to make a bold first move in examining yet another highly charged subject on film, the story of the 9/11 hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed en-route to its intended Washington D.C. target.
From the outset, with remarkable subtlety and grace, we are thrust into a first person experience of the flight and the resulting hijack. Greengrass’s preference for merging the real with the unreal has many of the military and air traffic control personnel depicted in the film playing themselves. This eye for verisimilitude spills over into the depiction of the hijacker’s and the crude methods by which they are able to take control of the plane. The film’s early stages comprises of tail ends of conversations between cabin crew and brief exchanges between passengers. The naturalistic delivery serving to strengthen the faux documentary feel, a testament to the solid performances Greengrass was able to extract from his cast. Families of the victims of Flight 93 supplied the actors with a vast amount of information on the real people they were portraying, right down to the clothes they wore, the sort of music they were listening to on their personal stereos and the kinds of chocolate bars they would’ve eaten. It’s this scrupulous eye for detail that shows the extent of Greengrass’s vision for total veracity.

Clearly informed by his early years as a documentarian, Greengrass’s signature cinéma vérité style impacts the film greatly, helped in no small part by Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, who lends a high degree of authenticity to the proceedings. Although there has been some conjecture about certain events that transpired on the flight, what is known is that a large number of the passengers decided to rush the cockpit and take control of the plane. It’s this aspect of the account that packs the greatest punch and propels the film towards its terrible yet inevitable conclusion. The final moments of the film redefine the words “edge of your seat” as the people on the ground and the passengers in the air, race to avoid what we all know is unavoidable. The fear of the passengers, the brutality of the hijackers and the confusion on the ground; it all combines to deliver a forceful cinematic ‘uppercut’ that leaves the audience reeling. It eschews cliché and avoids the exploitative, presenting a truthful and very human viewpoint of a tragedy. It is a gut-wrenching, bravura work. Go see it.

Stealth

2005-08-05T02:17:00.000-01:00

It’s common knowledge that the U.S Navy utilises computer artificial intelligence in order to operate sophisticated military hardware. It’s also common knowledge that a high percentage of Hollywood studio action films are so intensely excretal, they could give an audience eye cancer. Stepping up to the plate is Stealth, the latest offering from action director Rob Cohen (XXX, Fast and the Furious). So powerfully lacking in any intelligence or purpose, Stealth makes Gigli look like Citizen Kane.

Taking the notion of computer controlled weaponry and applying it to a state-of-the-art fighter jet, Stealth begins with the first of a baffling array of dizzying dogfight sequences. It’s during this CGI onslaught that we are introduced to the three leads; hunky-maverick-pilot-who-does-things-his-own-way Lt. Ben Gannon (Lucas), the impossibly-sexy-yet-intelligent-enough-to-fly-a-jet Kara Wade (Biel) and stereotypical-token-black-guy Henry Purcell (Foxx).

The film begins with an opening crawl which educates the viewer on the scant premise: that the U.S Navy has created an elite division of test pilots who fly highly classified fighter jets known as ‘Talons’. Specifically designed for counter-terrorism, the elite pilots fly their fighters to any destination on the planet and eliminate targets that are considered a threat. Upon returning from training, commanding officer Captain George Cummings (Shepard) introduces the team to their ‘fourth wingman’, an artificial intelligence based unmanned fighter called EDI. Initially wary of the computer controlled aircraft, the team are soon impressed with EDI and its capabilities in the field. Unfortunately, when returning to base after a mission, EDI is struck by lightning and its circuitry is rewired. EDI begins to develop a mind of its own; disobeying orders in the field and making its own judgement calls. It decides to carry out a mission of its own devising, a mission that could result in WWIII.

Essentially 2001: A Space Odyssey meets Top Gun; Stealth is so mind blowing in its unoriginality, it’s difficult to fathom how such an unmitigated turd of a script was green lit in the first place. Director Rob Cohen has fashioned the emptiest, dullest, most tedious and laughable action film yet committed to celluloid. Cohen’s previous excursions into empty spectacle: XXX and The Fast and the Furious are cinematic masterpieces in comparison to the atrocity that is Stealth. Apparently obsessed with ‘detail’ and ‘originality’ Cohen demanded that the computer effects be the most convincing and realistic yet attempted (considering the gargantuan $100 million + budget one would think that this aspect of the film would at least be of merit) but the effects in Stealth are as limp and unrealistic as its premise. The utterly wasted cast struggle with the (for lack of a better word) script; (penned by Buckaroo Banzai Writer/Director: W.D. Richter) which is a bland, nonsensical mishmash of cliché’s and half-assed plagiarism. EDI’s monotone voice mimics HAL 9000’s but instead sounds suspiciously like K.I.T.T from Knight Rider and a mission to Myanmar (formerly Burma) has the team bomb a target in Rangoon which is actually now called Yangon. But Stealth doesn’t care; it revels in such inaccuracies as it blunders along like a live action version of Team America: World Police (perhaps the addition of the Team America theme song: ‘America, F**k Yeah!’ would’ve been beneficial to the proceedings).

Cohen’s unabashed commerciality has EDI in one scene inexplicably downloading songs from the internet (“all of them” as its maintenance boffin says) and playing them at top volume during key action sequences.
Quite why a sophisticated computer wants to listen to rock music is never explained nor is, given the millions of songs that EDI has downloaded, why it only plays those by (Stealth soundtrack contributors) Incubus.
So, if your definition of a great film is ‘Jessica Biel in a tiny bikini & lots of shit blowing up’ then Stealth is the summer blockbuster for you; but if you like to leave a cinema with your dignity and sense of human decency intact then maybe you should just keep moving because there’s absolutely, positively, nothing to see here.

JARROD WALKER

Stanley Kubrick Retrospective

2005-07-27T18:17:00.000-01:00

The word auteur (or author if French is a little too high brow for you) is thrown around quite liberally these days. Most filmmakers who write and/or direct films with a distinct and singular vision are inevitably described as auteurs. Unfortunately for the elitist film geeks, the auteur theory is really just that – a theory. A term coined by French new wave filmmaker Francois Truffaut in his 1954 essay Une certaine tendance du cinéma français, the auteur theory is simply a way of perceiving a film as the product of a single mind, stamped indelibly with the motifs and concepts of an individual: the Director.

This may be the belief of the odd egocentric blowhard as they lambast their film crew through a bullhorn but the reality is, like or not, that one person does not make a film. Period. Of course one person can initiate a film, bring together the elements and focus the talents of the collective on the realisation of a film but, to put it bluntly: if an auteur stood on an empty film set, it’d be highly unlikely that a film would spontaneously erupt from thin air.

Of course, like all opinions of film journalists who like the sound of their own waffling: there is always an exception to the rule; and that exception was Stanley Kubrick. To describe Kubrick as an auteur is an insult to his brilliance; point of fact Kubrick hated the term. No, Kubrick was a control freak, an obsessive creative on the never ending quest for perfection and on the journey to the unattainable; he made some of the greatest films in the history of cinema.

As it happens, July 26th was Stanley’s birthday. He was born the son of Eastern European Jew’s; in the Bronx, New York City, 1928.
His father, a well-respected Doctor, introduced Stanley to two of the three great passions in his life: Chess and Photography. Stanley’s love of Chess directly affected the way he approached his career and the strategic way in which he would conduct his professional relationships. Stanley’s third passion was Jazz. His youthful ambition to be a professional drummer would soon be overtaken by his obsession with photography. He proved his remarkable talent for photography at a young age; he was made the official school photographer and after selling some of his early shots to Look magazine, he eventually was taken on as a staff member, remaining there for four years. One photo essay in particular: Prize-fighter, led to Kubrick’s initial foray into filmmaking: a 35mm documentary about a boxer, entitled Day of the Fight this was followed by two more documentaries: The Flying Padre & The Seafarers.
After exploring the documentary form, which was a natural progression from his photojournalism, Kubrick shifted his gaze to feature films. In 1953 he directed
Fear and Desire, a war film (of a kind) about four soldiers in a fictitious war, trapped behind enemy lines. The film was hampered by production difficulties and the fact that Kubrick shot it silent and post-sync all the audio and sound effects, which added significantly to the production costs. When it was completed, it was poorly received. Fear and Desire is really only noteworthy when viewed retrospectively, as a master filmmaker finding his feet and testing his abilities. Kubrick himself labelled the film ‘amateurish’, which is a pretty apt description. For his next film, Kubrick directed Killer’s Kiss, a noir-ish thriller about a prize fighter who becomes involved with the wrong girl. The film was a marked improvement on Kubrick’s previous effort and showed that he was a fast learner. Its crisp black and white cinematography and atmospheric set pieces showed Kubrick’s developing style and the film was met with positive reviews but failed to make a dent in the box office. It did however bring Kubrick to the attention of James B Harris; a young producer. The pair formed Harris- Kubrick Productions and together they went on to make Kubrick’s next feature, also in the crime thriller genre: The Killing. The story of ex-con Johnny Clay and his intricately planned racetrack heist; The Killing shows Kubrick operating on all cylinders as a fully developed filmmaker in his own right. His experimentation with structure in The Killing was a large influence on Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Kubrick penned the taut script and then wisely asked ‘Dime Store Dostoevsky’ Jim Thompson (who wrote The Getaway) to script the hardboiled dialogue.

After The Killing, Kubrick and Harris made Paths of Glory, which starred Kirk Douglas and was shot on location in Munich, Germany. The film told the story of the bitter trench warfare between the French and the German armies during WWI. Douglas played French soldier Colonel Dax; who’s superior General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) orders Dax and his men to assault a heavily fortified enemy position against impossible odds. The primary reason for this lunacy is the prestige (and possible promotion) that it will earn the General in his military career. Despite their orders to attack the position, the soldiers retreat under heavy bombardment. The spiteful Broulard orders a court- martial and demands that three of the men in the company are made examples of and charged with cowardice, a crime punishable by death. Colonel Dax then defends the men at their court-martial.

With Paths of Glory, Kubrick finally established himself as a force to be reckoned with, not only in Hollywood but in filmmaking as an art form. Paths of Glory is note-perfect, there simply isn’t a misstep or ill-conceived scene in the film and it ranks as one of the greatest war films (or anti-war films) ever made. So often accused of being cold and unfeeling as a filmmaker; the deeply moving final scene of Paths of Glory reveals a compassion and empathy that marks the beginning of a recurring theme in a lot of Kubrick’s work – the loss (or absence) of humanity and it’s toll.

After Paths of Glory, Kubrick was tapped to direct One Eyed Jack’s, a western starring Marlon Brando but when Brando decided to direct the film himself, Kubrick left the project after having spent six months in development. Shortly afterwards, Kirk Douglas invited Kubrick to helm Spartacus, the original director Anthony Mann having been fired by Douglas (who was executive producer) after ‘creative differences’. Kubrick agreed and hit the ground running. He was 31 and was directing some of the biggest screen stars of the time: Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, Tony Curtis & Charles Laughton.

Kubrick was famously undaunted at the prospect of directing such a famous cast and set to work trying to make the film his own, under considerable creative constraints. Unable to alter the script (penned by blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo) Kubrick felt it was full of ‘stupid moralising’ regardless he pressed on, spending six weeks alone shooting a major battle sequence. Adding more pressure, crew members resented Kubrick’s rather ‘hands-on’ method of Direction. Cinematographer Russell Metty walked off the set, complaining that Kubrick wasn’t giving him the freedom to do his job. On returning to the set, Kubrick told him to ‘shut up and butt out’ and as a result, Kubrick assumed a majority of the Cinematography work on Spartacus.
Metty complained about this right up until the film’s release and even tried to have his name removed from the credits. Ironically, Metty went on to receive the Academy Award for Cinematography.

After Spartacus, Kubrick collaborated once more with his producing partner James Harris on an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita, the story of Paedophiliac college professor Humbert Humbert and his obsessive love for a sexually active 12 year old girl. A taboo subject even today (as Adrian Lyne found out when he filmed his version in 1997), in 1962 filming Lolita was tantamount to insanity. Kubrick offered the role of Humbert to a host of A-list actors (including Cary Grant who deemed the offer personally insulting) eventually casting James Mason as the hapless Humbert and new-comer Sue Lyon as the eponymous object of his infatuation. Kubrick cast British actor Peter Sellers in the role of the enigmatic Clare Quilty (a minor character in the book that Nabokov expanded for his screenplay) and spent more time with Sellers preparing the character of Quilty than with any other cast members, causing Mason to opine that he had accepted the wrong part. In some scenes Kubrick would cover Sellers with two or three cameras, in order to capture any improvisation that Sellers might engage in. Invariably, Sellers was gold on take one, patchy on take two and practically spent by take three. It would be the first of two collaborations between Sellers and Kubrick.

Given the uproar that had already developed with the Production Code and the Catholic Legion of Decency; Lolita’s age was changed from 12 (as it is in the book) to a slightly more acceptable 14. Kubrick shot the film in England, mainly to distance himself from the controversy in the United States; eventually Kubrick would make his home there. It would be the first major production over which Kubrick would have creative control. Dancing around the censors forced Kubrick to layer the film with incredible subtlety and employ the use of metaphor and bizarre loaded visual puns (such as Humbert slapping a stuffed beaver with a tennis racket at the aptly named ‘Camp Climax’) as opposed to being literal or obvious. Thanks to the controversy, the film met with box office success but the critics’ opinions were mixed, some complaining that the film lacked the book’s depth and psychological detail; which seems an obvious deduction given the furore created by the Legion of Decency combined with the social taboos of the day. The films greatest critic was probably Kubrick himself who famously remarked that had he known how much he would be forced to cut and alter, he’d have never attempted the film at all. He remarked on the pressures of the films production with some regret: "I would fault myself in one area of the film, because of all the pressure over the Production Code and the Catholic Legion of Decency at the time, I wasn't able to give any weight at all to the erotic aspect of Humbert's relationship with Lolita; and because his sexual obsession was only hinted at, it was assumed too quickly that Humbert was in love, whereas in the novel this comes as a discovery at the end."

After Lolita, Kubrick parted ways with Producer James Harris, assuming producing duties on all his subsequent films. His next project was an adaptation of ‘Red Alert’, a thriller by Peter George about a nuclear ‘accident’. As Kubrick feverishly researched the film he came to the decision to make the film as a black comedy.
Thus Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was born. Again, Kubrick would collaborate with Peter Sellers, who would perform multiple roles in the film, the humour of which was pitch black, endearing it to the younger audiences during the turbulent sixties. It has since become one of Kubrick’s most loved and enduring works. Released in 1964, hot on the heels of the Cuban Missile crisis, the film was derided by many critics for its ‘sick’ humour.
The equivalent reaction today would be to make a comedy about the collapse of the World Trade Centre. When considered in the proper context, the sheer balls of Dr Strangelove is one of its most appealing aspects. Its anarchic assault on the inherent stupidity of nuclear warfare was a breath of fresh air and Sellers utterly surreal performance as the eponymous Doctor is the stuff of legend and has been commented on and poured over by far better writers than myself. You can check out Brian Siano’s great commentary on Dr Strangelove at: http://www.visualmemory.co.uk/amk/doc/0017.html

It’s been a much commented upon fact that Kubrick’s mind was like a sponge and his intellect, vast and probing. He had an extraordinary capacity for assimilating knowledge and that aptitude could be focused like a laser towards almost any topic. He was known to hold conversations with his collaborators (most often via telephone, his preferred method of communication) that would last several hours – or more. British film critic the late Alexander Walker, who knew Kubrick and wrote of his work better than anyone, famously described a dinner conversation between he and Kubrick: "An evening's conversation with him has covered such areas as optical perception in relation to man's survival; the phenomenon of phosphene; German coastal gun emplacements in Normandy; compromised safety margins in commercial flying; Dr Goebbels' role as a pioneer film publicist; the Right's inability to produce dialecticians to match the Left's; the Legion of Decency's pressures during the making of Lolita; S.A.M.-3 missiles in the Arab-Israeli conflict; Irish politics and the possibility of similarities in the voice prints of demagogues; and of course, chess."

Over his career as a filmmaker, Kubrick had absorbed huge amounts of research and information and when choosing a subject for a film, he would often be engaged by a subject or concept and would seek out a novel which could provide a framework around which he could ‘wrap’ his ideas, moulding and shaping the piece till it assumed the form he’d intended for it. This usually meant a large number of disgruntled novelists were left in his wake as he deconstructed the novels he adapted.

Following Strangelove, Kubrick was drawn to a science fiction short story called The Sentinel by British author Arthur C Clarke. He engaged Clarke’s services to adapt his own work and set about developing the story into what would become 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perhaps Kubrick’s greatest cinematic achievement, its lasting power thanks largely in part to the extraordinary impact of its images (the film only contains 40 minutes of dialogue); aided in no small amount by the superior special effects which even today hold their own against the best CGI which, considering the film is 30 years old, is a staggering achievement.

Of working under Kubrick’s intense scriptwriting brain-drain, Clarke remarked: “Every time I get through a session with Stanley, I have to go lie down."
This often unbearable intellectual intensity is repeated throughout the rest of Kubrick’s career; screenwriters and collaborators of Kubrick’s describe a common feeling of being used-up and spent after having worked with the director. Some react with volatility and become disgruntled (Frederic Raphael, who worked with Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut, wrote a scathing ‘tell-all’ book about his experiences called Eyes Wide Open) but others are more philosophical and are even appreciative of the chance to work with such a unique talent as Kubrick. Michael Herr, who worked with Kubrick on the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket - along with Gustav Hasford, the author of that films source material; the short story The Short-Timers - also found Kubrick’s intense working style rigorous but was affected by Kubrick’s humanity, sharp wit and sense of humour. In his book Kubrick published after Kubrick’s death in 1999, Herr reveals Kubrick as a fan of The Simpson’s & Seinfeld ; one wonders what the filmmaker thought of the numerous references to his films that are littered throughout The Simpson’s numerous episodes.

In the years following 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick’s subsequent films have grown in status and have retrospectively achieved a kind of iconic status, this is due largely in part to the director’s decidedly un-prolific output. This meant the ever growing fan base of Stanley Kubrick’s films would wait with baited breath for each successive film, content in the knowledge that they would experience a filmic event that was (and remains) wholly uncommon within the cinema realm. Every film was something to savour, to watch again and again. It was a unique connection between an audience and a filmmaker like Kubrick, we were grateful he existed. As Friedrich Nietzsche said “The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude”

Over 30 years Kubrick produced & directed only five films. They are among his most famous: A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut. The images of which have branded themselves into the collective unconscious: the bowler-hat clad Alex in A Clockwork Orange, flanked by his ‘droogs’, getting ready for ‘a bit of the old ultra-violence’, the axe-wielding Jack Torrance pursuing his terrified son through an ice maze in The Shining, the dream-as-reality Venetian masked orgy in Eyes Wide Shut, the tightly wound, abusive Gunnery Sgt. Hartman lambasting his recruits in Full Metal Jacket – Kubrick’s cinematic eye was entirely unmatchable. His obsession was all pervasive, as if he was more of a conduit for a film, than an author of it.

Every man has his own purpose: the only imperative is to follow it, to embrace it, no matter where it leads – Henry Miller

V For Vendetta

2005-07-24T00:23:00.000-01:00

Here's the trailer for the long awaited adaptation of Alan Moore's masterpiece of comic book storytelling: V for Vendetta.
It's directed by James McTeigue - the 1st A.D on the Matrix Films. The Wachowski Brothers are producing and have written the script. You can check it out here

The Descent

2005-07-06T20:25:00.000-01:00

DIRECTED BY: Neil Marshall
WRITTEN BY: Neil Marshall
STARRING: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, Nora Jane Noone, MyAnna Buring

Let’s face it, modern horror has suffered a slight case of anaemia of late; with the notable exception of Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever & Zack Snyder’s rather excellent Dawn of the Dead, most U.S horror films seem to consist of annoyingly attractive starlets being cleverly slaughtered in relatively bloodless, self-referential exercises in style. The visceral quality that grabbed audiences by the throat in Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre seems to have ebbed away to the confines of cheap horror destined for the straight-to-video wasteland.

In 2002, British Filmmaker Neil Marshall wrote and directed his debut feature: Dog Soldiers. A strange concoction of genre clichés (werewolves, log cabins) its witty script and brutal horror proved a success with critics and audiences alike. Along with recent efforts, such as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Ed Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, it’s helped pull the Brit-horror genre kicking and screaming from its tepid mire. Marshall’s sophomore effort, The Descent is out on July 8th and promises to be an altogether different animal, grounding itself very much in reality in order to mine its scares.

The story follows bereaved widow, Sarah (Macdonald) and her good intentioned friends Juno (Mendoza) and Beth (Reid) taking her on a caving holiday in the remote Appalachian mountains in the U.S. Along for the ride are half-sisters Rebecca (Mulder) and Sam (Buring) and BASE-jumping thrill-seeker Holly (Noone)
After a series of errors (and one character’s bad judgement call) the women soon find themselves lost in the cave system and they struggle to discover a way out. They soon stumble upon evidence of something living deep in the caverns and they realise that they may soon become prey to something far more malevolent and far more disturbing than a wild animal; a creature without mercy or reason, with an unquenchable taste for human flesh. As their grotesque adversaries attack, terror causes the group to fray at the edges, loyalties disintegrate and the group sink into madness.

The female cast admirably hold their own, in roles that require not only believability but also a large degree of physical stamina. The films deliberate pacing, mood-building and eye for character development means that the moments of gore and brutality (and there are many) pay-off admirably. Once the films bizarre antagonists present themselves, it kicks into high gear with some profoundly disturbing moments involving claustrophobia in small spaces, cannibalism, brutal climbing injuries and one sequence featuring a character completely immersing herself in a deep bog of blood, guts and bodily fluids.

The Descent was filmed at Pinewood studios, where the cavern sets were constructed by Production Designer Simon Bowles (who had previously worked with Marshall on Dog Soldiers) with an eye for authenticity and claustrophobia. Larger cave climbing sequences were digitally composited but considering this, the films budgetary constraints have been well concealed. These cramped subterranean environs seem an obvious setting for a film of this kind and Marshall and Cinematographer Sam McCurdy make the most of the surroundings utilising the available light sources of blue-hued phosphorous and sickly green glow-sticks.

Marshall has created something of a companion-piece to his all-male Dog Soldiers.
An all-female horror that defies plot prediction and respects its characters enough to not have them dissolve into scream-queens the minute a threat presents itself. Several of the characters could even give Linda T2 Hamilton a run for her money in the alpha-female-brutal-ass-kicking stakes. While The Descent is hardly blazing a trail in terms of the genre, it does manage to breathe brutal and visceral fresh air into what is unavoidably, well-traversed terrain. It should be applauded for achieving what very few modern horrors can: it scares the living shit out of you.

JARROD WALKER

The Descent - Director Neil Marshall Interview

2005-07-06T20:20:00.000-01:00

British horror has had something of a resurgence in recent years, spearheading the push is Neil Marshall, who helmed 2002’s Dog Soldiers. I managed to have a chat with him recently, about his new horror film: The Descent. A subterranean chiller in which a group of female cave explorers run into some seriously nasty underground dwellers with a taste for human flesh. I met Marshall at a basement club in Soho, which although it’s the middle of the day, feels a little too cave like for my taste….

Each generation of horror filmmaker inevitably inspires the next, who were your horror heroes?
I guess my number one horror hero and the filmmaker who inspired me the most is John Carpenter. Halloween, The Fog and The Thing are films that I grew up with and that I just absolutely love. They’re just superb. In very different ways: Halloween is a very, very simple, economic concept and done very well. The Fog is a very creepy ghost story, well played out - quite low key in a lot of ways; it’s not the one that people often remember. The Thing just for its psychological aspects and because it’s so visceral which took it to a whole new limit and I love that, the creativity of it is just superb – and the ending, I loved the ending of The Thing, the bleakness of it all. I love the idea that that’s what horror allows you to do, to have no happy endings and too many horror films nowadays do have happy endings and I wanted to do something different.

I really liked the fact that many of the women in the film, rather than crumble into ‘scream queens’, react to the circumstances in very real ways, some of them becoming brutal and violent and fighting back and others degenerating into hysteria. What was the horror potential of an all-female cast compared to the all-male cast of Dog Soldiers?
I thought since we had women on board it was a chance to make it more brutal (laughs) I mean anyone who’s ever seen girls’ fight - it’s pretty savage stuff isn’t it? (laughs) I wanted to utilize all that hair pulling, eye poking and fingernail gouging that girls’ get into. It has a raw-ness to it but I didn’t want to make them a bunch of Ripley-Linda Hamilton types – there’s one character that does do that but there’s other characters who behave in very different kinds of ways. There’s only one character who behaves overtly heroic but she’s also an incredibly flawed individual. So I didn’t want to conform to any previous stereotypes. They’re just a bunch of disparate individuals: one’s a schoolteacher, one’s a climber, one’s a doctor – they’re not going to behave in the same way under the same circumstances. In Dog Soldiers they were a bunch of soldiers, they’re trained to behave as a unit under pressure - these girls aren’t. So there’s no way they were going to behave the same way, to do that would’ve been very wrong for the characters.
I thought it was better for scares. If you’ve got a group that sticks together, you’ve got that strength in numbers concept. Well this group doesn’t stick together, they flee, they tear each other apart: physically, psychologically, emotionally – and that makes the whole situation far more scary because you’ve got nothing to cling on to.

I wanted to ask you about working with composer, David Julyan.
(Julyan has previously worked with Christopher Nolan on Memento and Insomnia) Obviously music is one of the most important things in a horror and you’ve mentioned John Carpenter’s films as a major influence on you - (Carpenter composes his own scores) - I find Carpenter’s music creates a mood that’s far more effective than mere jumps or scares. In The Descent, Julyan’s music really helps to successfully create an atmosphere of dread. How did the opportunity to work with him come about? I wanted a very minimalist, very haunting and very atmospheric score. One day I’d love to get John Carpenter to score a film for me - that’d be fantastic, just to get him to write the music because I’ve grown up with John Carpenter’s scores in his films. But with David Julyan it was an interesting turn of events that when I was writing the script – I listen to film soundtracks when I’m writing - I was listening to the Insomnia soundtrack, just playing it again and again and again - and it’s so haunting and so visual as well. So when it came to choosing a composer I said ‘ can we have a look at getting David Julyan?’ and they did - he was available. I didn’t actually realise he was London based, I thought he was American or something, I had no idea. So he came in, I met him and he was well up for it and he agreed to do the score. For me that was just a dream come true and just brings the whole thing full circle. He has this incredible dark edge to him and he really likes exploring his dark side with his music. That was perfect for this. He’s delivered a truly memorable and haunting score that compliments the film perfectly.

Do you think you’d like to stick with the horror genre? As a director, does it interest you enough or would you like to try your hand at a drama?
Horror does absolutely interest me, I love doing it but I don’t want to just do horror - I have too many other stories to tell. The main theme that goes on with everything I write at the moment is probably action led stuff, that’s what I really enjoy doing. Action, character-led stuff and whether it’s horror or not doesn’t really matter - but I want to take it back now and do something else. I’ve explored horror in two different ways and I don’t want to get tired of it, I never want to get bored with it. So I want to go away, do something totally different and return to horror at a later date. I think that’d be a lot of fun to do.

Have you got anything planned at the moment?
I’ve got a couple of ideas, I’ve got a medieval heist movie and a World War II action thriller which is ‘Die Hard meets Remains of the Day’ (laughs) If you can piece those two together! So I’m working on a lot of ideas and who knows what’s going to be next but they’re the kinds of things I’m concentrating on. Something a little bit bigger, a little bit broader, for a broader audience but still remaining true to my roots, which is: action led, ensemble cast, tight locations – just looking at it for thrills.

Will there be a sequel to Dog Soldiers?
I believe a sequel may be happening but I’m not involved with it.

With the publicist looming in my peripheral vision, I figure it’s time to wrap up and say goodbye. I mention to Neil that I’m a fan of the ‘super-glue triage’ sequence in Dog Soldiers in which Sean Pertwee has his guts super-glued back inside his body. I tell him that it was what really put that movie over the top for me. Marshall laughs and I thank him for his time. He politely bids me goodbye and I make my way out of the subterranean club, being careful to avoid any mutated cannibals that may have escaped from Marshall’s brain and secreted themselves in a dark corner, waiting to feed on passing journalist’s.

JARROD WALKER

Batman Begins Premiere

2005-07-01T23:03:00.000-01:00

On June 12th, Batman Begins had its London premier at the Odeon Leicester Square. Most of the Batman Begins cast were in attendance and I managed to have a chat with them. Producer Charles Roven, first on the carpet, compared the merits of Batman Begins to the other mooted Batman projects floating around Tinseltown: “Once Bryan Singer was announced as the director of Superman Returns, Warner Bros. started looking at ways in which they could re-invigorate the Batman franchise. As they had just done Insomnia with Chris, they asked him about the kind of movie that he'd like to do (he had also been courted as a possible director of Troy) and when Chris talked to David Goyer and came in to talk to Warner Bros. about his idea to take the Batman franchise back to its origins, the studio agreed that the best thing to do was an origin story, and one that would be grounded in reality. So that's really how it came about.” I also asked him about how much freedom Nolan had within the studio production behemoth to tell the story he wanted to tell: “Here's the thing, Chris is an amazing filmmaker, he has all the talent in the world and he's also incredibly responsible and collaborative, so there wasn't any need to restrict him or his process. The thing about this film was that everybody was on the same page, the whole way. It doesn't always work that way, (laughs) especially when working within creative endeavours that have to also generate some business bottom line…the biggest problem we had was just trying to maintain the stamin to do it all…it was a big production.”

The general optimism about the quality of the film was echoed by the rest of the cast. 28 Days Later star Cillian Murphy (who plays the villainous Dr. Johnathan Crane, a.k.a. the Scarecrow) seemed happy to just be involved: “I'm just very proud of the film, so you don't mind doing all this if you're proud of what you've done…besides, Batman 's the best comic book hero…. He's definitely the coolest.”

Tom Wilkinson of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, who plays mobster Carmine Falcone in the film, seemed slightly bemused with all the fuss. He told me he doesn't usually come to “these sorts of things” but his family harassed him into attending. When asked how he liked working with Chris Nolan, he replied “He's brilliant… relaxed, a really wonderful guy. We got on great. I always think that you know (laughs) ‘I really get on well with this guy, I'm gonna be in ALL his movies' and they NEVER hire you again!”

Wilkinson headed inside just as Batman Begins' director Christopher Nolan and his wife, producer Emma Thomas, sauntered up the red carpet smiling and waving. Having just come from the L.A premier a few days earlier, Nolan looked a little worn out: “It was a long shoot and it required a lot more physical stamina than I'm used to. But at the same time we had a great team around us so it made it quite a lot of fun.” I asked him about his plans for the future, if we might see a Batman sequel or his planned follow-ups: Victorian thriller The Prestige or the big business-as-war comic adaptation The Exec ? Nolan wearily admitted that he's still getting out from under the Bat: “I really don't know what's happening yet, making this film has been a pretty overwhelming experience and releasing it's been an overwhelming experience, as you can see from tonight (nods at the crowds) so once I get that past me then I'll figure it out.”

Eventually the man of the hour, Batman himself, Christian Bale wandered over. He was clearly uncomfortable in the glare of the cameras but stopped to chat regardless. And he was under no illusions about all the attention: “This is a great reception and everything but they're applauding Batman (nods his head in the direction of the cheering mob), they're not applauding Christian Bale, that's for sure.” As for the pressures of bringing back ‘the Bat,' he explained “I think the principle thing with this is we're not ‘bringing it back,' we're reinventing it, very respectfully ignoring everything that came before. We're taking it back to what Bob Kane [ Batman's creator] intended.” Bale was itching to escape inside, but a journalist next to me managed to blurt out, “Will Robin be back?” Bale thought for a moment, his face registering annoyance and amusement before breaking into a smile: “I hope not!”

Batman Begins

2005-07-01T22:59:00.000-01:00

Dir. Christopher Nolan, US, 2005, 141 mins
Cast: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Katie Holmes, Ken Watanabe,Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson, Rutger Hauer, Tom Wilkinson & Gary Oldman

In 1989, Tim Burton’s gothic and surreal Batman captured the public imagination and went on to become the biggest film of that year. Its success became the benchmark for all future comic adaptations. Each successive Batman sequel grew more and more indulgent, focusing on the misguided philosophy that comic book equals nonsensical camp. Batman and its sequels: Batman Returns, Batman Forever and the ill fated Batman & Robin, bore little to no resemblance to the Dark Knight of the contemporary comics and graphic novels. Laden with camp theatrics, ridiculously over-choreographed fight scenes and some seriously wooden performances, the films descended into self parody, which sealed the series fate by the time Batman & Robin’s end credits rolled.

In the period since then, many different visions of Batman have been mooted as possible franchise re-starters. Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) worked on a first draft screenplay of Year One, co-written with Sin City helmer Frank Miller (based on his graphic novel). Year One completely re-invented Batman, having Bruce Wayne as a homeless man instead of billionaire playboy and re-making Alfred, Wayne’s butler, as a black mechanic named ‘Big Al’.

Another proposed project was Wolfgang (Das Boot) Petersen’s Batman vs. Superman which would’ve revived two Warner Bros. franchises at once, with Jude Law proposed as the Man of Steel and Colin Farrell as the eponymous Dark Knight.

As fate would have it, Memento writer/director, the London-born Christopher Nolan, had just finished his re-working of Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia with Al Pacino. Having proven himself as a storyteller of consummate intelligence and of being more than capable of helming a major studio film, Nolan was a solid choice to helm Warner Bros. favoured screenplay Batman Begins. An entirely new effort by screenwriter David S. Goyer, it is certainly not as extreme a ‘restart’ as Year One promised to be nevertheless it is no doubt hoped it will reintroduce the world to a darker, more visceral winged avenger and reinvigorate the franchise accordingly.

In order to accomplish this, Nolan and Goyer have taken Batman back to his genesis.

Nolan, who admits to knowing very little about comic book lore, worked on Goyer’s first draft screenplay once the screenwriter left to helm his directorial debut Blade: Trinity. Nolan’s lack of comic knowledge appears to have been a major advantage.

With Batman Begins, the pair has stripped back the surrealism, the camp and the cartoon characterisations. This Batman is believable, human and as such, riddled with fear and anger. As a theme, fear runs through this film like a black vein: fear drives Wayne and holds him prisoner, fear is used as a weapon by several different characters (including Batman) and only in facing his fear does Bruce Wayne hope to find an end to his torment.

The story opens with Bruce Wayne (Bale) held prisoner in a Bhutanese prison, fighting with inmates and fighting with himself. He’s a wanderer, cut adrift from the world when he could find no way to deal with the murder of his parents when he was a child. Wayne has travelled to the ends of the earth to search for a way to resolve the conflict within him. A mysterious stranger named Henri Ducard (Neeson) appears at the prison, offering help and guidance to Wayne and the means to fight the injustice that he sees in the world. Ducard arranges Wayne’s release.

Once free, Wayne begins the long ascent to the mountaintop temple of the ‘League of Shadows’, a mysterious ninja sect. There, Wayne is trained by Henri Ducard and the sect’s mysterious leader, Ra’s al Ghul (Watanabe). Over time, Wayne masters the skills that will enable him to become an unstoppable fighter of crime, injustice and evil. On his eventual return to Gotham, Wayne finds the city in the grip of crime and corruption. Using Ducard’s advice, Wayne chooses a symbol in order to become something ‘more than a man’, an emblem of something far greater, in order to create fear in the hearts of evildoers. With the help of his trusted butler Alfred (Caine), Wayne Enterprises and techno-wiz Lucius Fox (Freeman), Bruce Wayne assembles an arsenal of prototype weapons and gadgets. Sophisticated military body-armour, grappling hook guns, a utility belt of defensive weaponry and most notably ‘The Tumbler’, a vehicle designed for bridge building, which looks like a hybrid between a monster truck and a stealth fighter. The vehicle’s destructive power is awesome to behold as it ploughs through police cars and walls in many of the films high-octane action sequences.

After collaring an assortment of corrupt officials and criminal goons, Batman soon gains the trust of honest cop Jim Gordon (Oldman, in a wonderfully understated role) and Assistant D.A (and Bruce Wayne’s childhood sweetheart) Rachel Dawes (Holmes). Batman sets about ridding Gotham of some of its more notorious criminals such as Carmine Falcone (Wilkinson, in a fine turn) and a particularly nasty psychiatrist, Dr Jonathan Crane (Murphy) a.k.a. The Scarecrow, whose most deadly weapon is fear itself.

Every facet that we have come to know of the Batman story has been re-evaluated and approached from an angle of realism and believability. Everything is explained: why Wayne chooses to embody a Bat, why he chooses the suit, how he discovers the Bat cave and even why the Bat suit has ears. Bruce Wayne/ Batman’s motives are treated with authenticity, the action is treated with realism (as well as being refreshingly devoid of CGI) and as a coherent whole, the film is simply the best combination of intelligent storytelling and summer blockbuster fare that has been seen in a multiplex in a long, long time.

As Bruce Wayne/Batman, Bale is simply magnificent. He’s an unusually intense actor and here his talents are put to use well. His Bruce Wayne is essentially three people: Bruce Wayne the intensely private and introspective loner, Bruce Wayne the foppish womanising playboy and Batman, the dark and quite frankly scary creation that’s hell-bent on dishing out justice and traversing the line between vigilante and responsible citizen.

It’s a testament to Bale’s performance that an hour of screen time passes before we see Batman yet the film could just as easily hold an audience enthralled with the story of Wayne and his tortured search for peace. Once the Dark Knight makes his first excursion into Gotham’s underbelly, he is creepy, malevolent and very scary.

The rest of the cast perform their roles without a bum note between them: Neeson, Watanabe (in his small but pivotal role), Freeman, Hauer, Wilkinson, Oldman, Murphy and Caine; all turn in uniformly fine performances. It’s only Holmes, whose youth undermines the authority inherent in her role, that threatens to derail the film but Nolan’s keen eye for performance and story assures that the film holds together regardless.

The editing is spare and ruthless with the film rattling along at a pace that never lets the audience get bored or complacent and long-time Nolan collaborator Nathan Crowley’s production design is superb, mixing hyper-real and existing cityscapes to create Gotham’s stunning skyline. In Batman Begins, a truly gifted filmmaker has realised a comic book adaptation that transcends the comic book-to-film genre to become truly great storytelling and the first REAL Batman film.

Jarrod Walker

Flight of the Phoenix

2005-07-01T22:55:00.000-01:00

Dir: John Moore, 2004, USA, 113 mins
Cast: Dennis Quaid, Giovanni Ribisi, Hugh Laurie

Hollywood seems to be churning out a glut of remakes, re-imaginings and re-workings in recent times. Original thought seems to have taken a back seat in favour of tried and tested concepts and stories which appear to be safe, bankable and audience friendly. From blowing the dust off ancient TV fare (Charlie's Angel's, Mission Impossible, Wild Wild West, Starsky & Hutch, The Avengers, Scooby Doo) to any number of cinematic retreads (Man On Fire, The Bourne Identity, The Grudge, Ring, Assault on Precinct 13, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) there seems to be no let-up in the major studios' (and indeed filmmakers') insatiable desire to one-up, out-do and re-jig the film classics (and the not-so-classic) of yore.

Even ‘respectable' filmmakers see no problem in flogging the proverbial dead cinematic horse. Soon we will witness the no-doubt impressive delivery of Peter Jackson's long gestating King Kong and Michael Mann's cover version of his own TV creation Miami Vice will soon hit screens with Colin Farrell & Jamie Foxx weighing in as Crockett & Tubbs, pulling up their pastel suit jacket sleeves, setting their sights on drug cartel scumbags and wading into the fray.

It's a hit-and-miss process to be sure, and the results vary dramatically. Tim Burton's ill-advised Planet of the Apes was expected to be a visionary epic but arrived as a stillborn atrocity. The aforementioned Michael Mann remade his little known and long forgotten TV pilot LA Takedown into a great example of what can be accomplished with a remake, given some serious script doctoring and decent casting; the result? LA crime saga Heat starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, in what many regard as their best roles in recent years.

So who can tell what makes for a dynamite story idea and what's simply a tired, yawn inducing rehash destined for a high speed sprint to straight-to-video hell?

Despite the fact that most of the top money earners of all time were risky, innovative ventures, there seems to be no shortage in attempts to harvest the collective unconscious and regurgitate rather than innovate.

Into this cinematic climate crashes Flight of the Phoenix, a reworking of Robert Aldrich's excellent 1965 film that starred the incomparable James Stewart (as well as Sir Richard Attenborough and the late-great Peter Finch). It marks the sophomore effort of Irish born commercial director John Moore (his previous outing being the Owen Wilson actioner Behind Enemy Lines).

Then, as now, the story was spare and beautifully uncomplicated: a cargo aircraft laden with a motley group of workers, crash lands in the midst of a sand storm in the Gobi desert. With the assistance of the most irritating and unpopular member of the group, aircraft designer Elliot (Ribisi), the surviving passengers resolve to fashion a new aircraft out of the old one and fly it out of the desert to safety. The pilot of the downed aircraft, Frank Towns (Quaid) is a curmudgeonly, salt-of-the-earth type of guy and realising that he is the only one who can fly the patchwork aircraft, he's hesitant to risk more lives on a plan that potentially could kill them all. Stranded amidst the endless expanse of dunes, in a 2,000 square mile search area and with no hope of rescue or survival, they decide that they have no option but to try to get out under their own steam and (as the film's tagline says) - the only way out - is up.

One of Hollywood 's most underrated and consistently reliable lead actors, Quaid is wonderfully effective as Towns, the grizzled pilot-with-a-heart-of-gold, he wears the role like an old shoe. The supporting ensemble cast, notably Ribisi as their unlikely saviour, as well as Miranda Otto, Hugh Laurie and Tyrese Gibson (who reprises the role played by Attenborough in the original) all capably tow the genre line and prove sure and solid support. With a modern spin placed on the story and some fairly major plot alterations, including an encounter with some seriously badass plainsmen, comparisons with the original are inevitable and it's likely that this version of Flight of the Phoenix will be seen as inferior.

Aldrich's '65 classic was a feat of storytelling and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants location filmmaking (legendary stunt pilot Paul Mantz was killed during principle photography), it was also at least a half hour longer. In spite of such comparisons, director John Moore's visual verve, his passion for avionics, hatred of CGI and sense for ‘good ole fashioned storytelling' imbues Flight of the Phoenix with the necessary believability and sense of adventure to deliver the requisite thrills and spills one would expect from this type of fare.

It rises above the stigma that is usually attached to a ‘studio remake' and condenses the original's scope, action and drama into a palatable rollercoaster adventure, delivering its own stylised, tightly edited take on the original story and as a Sunday afternoon popcorn actioner, it more than delivers. In short: it does what it says on the tin and for this kind of genre film; there can be no higher praise.

John Moore Interview

2005-07-01T22:46:00.000-01:00

In 2001, Irish born commercial director, John Moore, put his long held obsession with aviation to good use and revealed himself to be a talented director of action with the entertaining adventure film Behind Enemy Lines . His latest film Flight of the Phoenix is a remake of Robert Aldrich's 1965 survival epic of the same name.

So how did you come to be involved in the remaking of ‘Flight of the Phoenix '?

Well, the producer, John Davis - I had done ‘Behind Enemy Lines' with him - it was his gig really. He's a fellow airplane nut and while we were making ‘Behind Enemy Lines' he kept slipping this under the door saying “Are you sure you don't want to do this next?” (laughs) and I kind of resisted it for a while thinking ‘oh fuck! Don't tell me you want to do another fucking airplane crash movie' (laughs) but the story's just so damn good and I love all those Robinson Crusoe/Castaway/MacGyver ‘How are we going to wring the last drop of coconut juice out of this' kind of movies and I really do enjoy survival pictures. They're the kind of stories where an audience member has a kind of synaptic reflex response: ‘what would I do in that situation?' There's something primeval about that scenario that makes you wonder how you'd do. So it was John Davis that really pushed it to me and we started work on it in February 2002 – it took a long time to get this film made, it'll be three years this month that I've been working on it full time. It took a long time to develop it - it slipped a little bit for year and went into a ‘development wobbly'. All credit to Twentieth Century Fox - because some people were like ‘is this a drama or an action movie?' Hybrids don't go down very well in the studio system. They make the marketing department very fucking nervous. It's a bit like bringing an ugly girlfriend home (laughs) ‘Come on! She's got a great personality! Give her a chance!' It's a tough situation.

When you came aboard, was the script a done deal? Did you work on it with (screenwriter of ‘Out of Sight') Scott Frank?

I worked with Scott Frank. We brought Ed Burns on very late in the process, to do a dialogue polish because he's got a knack for writing what comes out of peoples mouths (and making it sound like) like it would come out of peoples mouths. I worked on it alone for a while - we had a fundamental flaw in the original script. Dennis Quaid's character was initially part of the original crew, so there was a major lack of conflict - they were all in it together and I flipped that around, so that he's actually picking them up and closing down their oil well. He's kind of the grim reaper. It's like firing a bunch of people then getting stuck in the elevator with them. So we inverted it and made Dennis an outsider…and I think that's what kind of got the script over the edge. That's when the studio said ‘ok that makes more sense'.

Have you seen the original film?

I haven't seen it from frame one to frame last – I've seen it patchily, on TV – I decided not to watch it. Quite simply there was no upside – and we had very honourable intentions going into it, I didn't want to, with malice or forethought, assail a cinematic classic. I mean we didn't want to set it on Jupiter and take the piss out of it. The story is the same story - and look - there'll be some fans out there with fucking telescopic rifles, with my fucking head in the cross hairs – and that's fine, but I think to be fair to us – the original is a great story but it's quite stage-y. At that time only ‘Lawrence of Arabia' had the sort of scope that this film needed and that film cost a zillion dollars – so that's what we could bring to it. Scope. We shot it in Namibia – it's a real desert, a big badass desert – there's no CG work in there at all. So there was no upside to see the original – I mean what would happen? I'd be on the set one morning and go (feigns horror) ‘Oh fuck! We're gonna fuck this up – I've seen this bit and we're gonna fuck this right up!' (laughs) You know what I mean? What would be the point of that?

In the original film, Giovanni Ribisi's character ‘Elliot' (played by Hardy Kruger) was German and everyone hates him because of that?

That's right. They (the filmmaker's) had that device at their disposal. I mean (feigns disgust) ‘don't tell me the fucking Nazi's gonna have the solution!' (laughs) They had that device available to them. That fucking little German motherfucker can't be right, he can't be better than the American!, and Jimmy Stewart, he's all American! Lacking that dynamic - instead of making Giovanni's character German – we just had the conflict between him and Dennis be on an intellectual level – y'know, he's just the arrogant little motherfucker you love to hate. (laughs) So – look - when you do a remake, you know what you sign up for, you open yourself up to a world of fucking comparisons – there's no point arguing with that. If it's a crap film, then it's a crap film - and I don't know what to say to Someone who says ‘it's not as good as the original' - fair enough mate, but did you like it anyway?

In the original they built a real life ‘ Phoenix ' and flew it – but the stuntman Was killed – did you think of attempting something as ambitious as that?

Yeah – Paul Mantz (legendary stunt pilot) was killed flying it, and believe me, there is a ghost of the ‘Phoenix' – there really is. We wanted to go a step further because in the original they did a spectacular cheat - they built a full size version of the ‘Phoenix' as a set piece and then used a Texan T-6 to double for it while in flight. (It's generally believed that the ‘Phoenix' was actually flown for the film) We wanted to go one step further, we wanted to build a real, functioning ‘Phoenix' - out of composite material, a full scale flying version - with stunt aviators on the wings…and we came that close! What stopped us? Fucking insurance! So we built a full scale one that we pushed with a dragster, and a 12-foot radio controlled model…only because CG looks crap - and until it doesn't, it will (laughs)

So how did you accomplish the crash sequence?

Using very unsophisticated methods! We used miniatures, which is pretty much a dying art now. I think ‘Independence Day' was the last big feature to use miniatures - Except for ‘The Lord of the Rings' – Yeah well that's in a class all its own really, isn't it? I mean there's ‘normal' films and then there's ‘ Lord of the Rings'! (laughs) But the C-119, the plane that crashes, is a miniature that we crashed and filmed using a spider-cam (developed for ‘Spiderman' – it's a floating camera, suspended on cables). For the interior shots of the crash, because there are no sets in the movie, everything you see is part of a real aircraft - so we took a fuselage and built a wheel around it; a ‘gimble' - it was 14 meters tall - we wrapped a steel cable around the ‘gimble' and attached it to a truck, the truck would then drive away, literally yanking it - like starting a lawnmower - and the fuselage would rotate, enabling us to get a cheap ‘vomit comet' - that ‘zero g' weightless effect. This was all practically done, out in the desert - we used an abandoned fish warehouse - (laughs) really pleasant place to work! In the heat! Nice touch! But we couldn't rehearse because the danger was that the actors would say ‘fuck that! I'm out of here' - after one take – so we put nine cameras in and we got three takes before two of the actors refused to do it again (laughs)

You worked with Owen Wilson on his own much of the time in ‘Behind Enemy Lines' – but you worked with an ensemble cast of 12 this time around – how was that?

Look – I was absolutely convinced that there would be a mutiny. I was absolutely convinced, I mean we're out there in the desert – I thought they would all get together and say ‘this cunt doesn't know what he's doing! Lets get him replaced!' (laughs) Honestly, I got quite paranoid - Owen Wilson's a really relaxed, funny guy. If there's a problem he takes you into a corner and has a quiet word, y'know? But this was throwing ten or twelve people together, what was likely to happen is that two or three of them wouldn't like each other and then the pin is out of the fucking grenade. But luckily enough, what happened was the opposite, everyone was like ‘let's not fight! Let's all get along!' - maybe it was a result of being so remote, so far from home – but I benefited from that – and Dennis was a big help – he's a real morale booster- sort of guy – but I was shooting seven days a week so they could bond all they fucking liked! They did go out a lot together – they got on very well, a lot of them went on safari on weekends and stuff like that. They stopped short of getting the ‘Lord of the Rings' tattoos! (laughs) - but they drank like bastards! (laughs) They fucking put it away, I mean they're meant to be starving and they had beer guts on them! (laughs)

Any dream projects involving aircraft that you'd like to do?

Yeah – I very nearly made the Chuck Yeager story, who was the first person to break the sound barrier– with the legendary producer Richard Zanuck…and that might yet happen. Dick, Mike Medavoy (former agent- turned Producer) and I went out to Edwards Air Force base (where Yeager first broke the sound barrier in 1947) about 2 years ago now, and we met with Yeager who jumped into his F –15, while we were standing in the desert and he went up and broke the sound barrier - again! He's 72! (continued) But it's a difficult project – as I realised after many drafts of the script, you know, there's nothing as boring as success – the problem with a script about Chuck is that there's no drama –– he broke the sound barrier, broke about 15 other records – but there's no failure and there's drama in failure. I mean they didn't make Titanic because it made it to New York ! Some think he failed in becoming an astronaut but that just wasn't who he was - Yeager was essential to the test program back then, you know, he was a ‘whack-job' - ‘Here's the keys, get in that - you see if it flies, we'll be over there!' (laughs) and if you've ever known an astronaut you'll know that they are not the most exciting people in the world – they're very fucking boring people – and you need them to be. They're like airline pilots, you don't want a jovial, joking sort of guy flying an airliner, you want the boring fucking tea- drinker - that's the guy you want. But it wasn't Yeager. The space program dumped Yeager because they didn't need rock and roller's anymore, they needed very straight, reliable people who could fit into the machine. They started eradicating personality from the space program. So Chuck had the rug pulled out from under him – which is why he still has issues with the space program but he's an amazing guy – and the movie may still happen yet, I hope it does. So, after three years working on ‘ Phoenix ' are you going to take a break? No, I'm definitely not taking a holiday – you know there's a statute of limitations on being a director. I don't know if you know this but after 53 days – if you haven't directed anything, you're just a bloke. (laughs) You know what I mean? So I'd like to get onto something as soon as possibly – I'll direct a fucking hemorrhoid commercial if I have to (laughs) – if you're not directing, you kind of lose yourself and you start to lose that definition thing (of being a ‘Director')

Ever think you might take a step back from action and do a different sort of story?

Yeah I'd like to do a love story – I fucking cry at the movies like a teenage girl - it's hard to make people emotionally invest – but I'd seriously like to do a love story - and just when the couple are about to kiss - then the set would blow up (laughs)

Any actors you'd like to want to direct?

Yeah – Gene Hackman – I had fun with Gene. We had only a short time together. His time on ‘Behind Enemy Lines' was only three weeks.

As a first time director on that film (Behind Enemy Lines), how easy was he to work with?

He's fantastic – you know, I've got this theory about celebrity, I think it's created by the people in inhabit the space between other peoples ideas. They create it as a third ‘force' to create their own industry – so you get warnings and shit like (whispers conspiratorially) ‘oh he can be very difficult' – and everyone falls for it. On the day, I get on the set and walk up to Gene and say ‘Hi Gene' and he says (impersonates Hackman) ‘Hey – how ya doing' and five minutes later he's hitting his mark and I say ‘action' and that's it. All the other crap is just that – crap – and I was almost had by some agent who's trying to pump up his part in the business.

So what are your favourite films?

Pretty much anything Tony Scott's touched – personally I don't think he's made a bad movie – in 30 years time someone's going to say ‘hey this guy was doing this stuff way before anyone else' – editorially he was the first guy to go ‘A to B to C to D – you know what, fuck B and C and go straight to D' – because he knows that audiences have a synaptic response to make that leap, to fill in the parts. Everybody rips him off, I rip him off – every cocksucking commercial director on the planet rips him off. I mean I saw ‘Spy Game' like five times! I fucking paid money, every time – gladly.

War of the Worlds Review

2005-07-01T22:43:00.000-01:00

WAR OF THE WORLDS
DIRECTED BY: Steven Spielberg
WRITTEN BY: David Koepp & Josh Friedman
STARRING: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin, Miranda Otto & Tim Robbins.

Whether we’re talking Independence Day or the TV series V (which Independence Day plagiarized outright), Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Thing or even the Alien films; the concept of mankind falling prey to a dominant alien species is one that seems to massage the film-going public’s paranoia in a highly profitable way. Despite attempts at originality, all alien invasion films unavoidably riff on the one original story that spawned them: H.G Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

A member of the socialist Fabian society in London, H.G Wells’ writing allowed him to espouse his left wing ideals on the state of contemporary society and politics within the confines of a fantasy adventure story. Wells’ was inspired to write The War of the Worlds, ostensibly a damning of British Colonialism, after a conversation with his brother, regarding the 8,000 Aboriginal inhabitants of Tasmania who were decimated after the arrival of English settlers in Australia. Wells’ idea for The War of the Worlds sprang from the thought of what might happen if such an indifferent and technologically superior race was to land in England and exterminate the populous with such unsympathetic determination.

Orson Welles’ 1938 Halloween radio play of The War of the Worlds set the scene for the alien invasion at Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. This stateside tailoring of the quintessentially English story cemented the pre-WWII paranoia that was latent in the hearts of the American public, when the broadcast caused widespread panic and mass evacuations. George Pal’s 1958 version of The War of the Worlds (like Orson Welles’ radio play) also set the invasion at Grover’s Mill, New Jersey and tapped into the cold-war paranoia that was creeping across the globe. Fast-forward 46 years and uber-auteur Steven Spielberg is exploiting post-9/11 tensions in his own interpretation of the story: mixing hard-core science fiction and intimate familial drama.

In 2005’s War of the Worlds, screenwriter David Koepp has (once again) set the U.S invasion epicenter in New Jersey, focusing the story on Ray Ferrier (Cruise) a crane operator at the local dockyards who’s late picking up his young daughter Rachel (Fanning) and teenage son Robbie (Chatwin) from ex-wife Mary-Anne (Otto) for a rare weekend stay with their Dad. This further widens the already huge gap between ‘dead-beat Dad’ Ray and his kids, who think their father is an irresponsible loser who only cares about himself. After a ferocious lightening storm strikes in the town centre, the inhabitants worst nightmares are realized as huge ‘Tripods’ – alien walkers, ascend from deep underground and begin to systematically destroy every living thing in their path. A terrified and dumbstruck Ray loads his kids into the only working truck he can steal
and they hurriedly evacuate as the Tripods advance, destroying everything behind them. Thinking that he’s not up to the task of looking after his kids in a crisis, Ray heads for Boston in order to drop off his kids with someone infinitely more responsible than he is, his ex-wife. But in the ordeal that awaits Ray, he begins to find a semblance of the fatherhood that he’s lost and therefore some kind of redemption; to become the sort of father he should have been all along.

There are some great performances here; most noteworthy is Fanning, who’s extraordinarily naturalistic as Rachel, particularly in her opening scenes with Cruise. Cruise is always willing to take risks in his roles and in the kinds of films he appears in (which is something he doesn’t get nearly enough credit for) and he’s always up for portraying less-than-likeable characters, yet somehow he always allows an audience to connect. This has been most obvious in roles like P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia (the misogynistic Frank TJ Mackey was a role that could well have backfired) and in Michael Mann’s Collateral as the sociopath killer Vincent. Here, as the deeply flawed, not-so-great father Ray Ferrier, Cruise is in top form and make no mistake, he’s no action hero, Cruise plays him as an average guy just trying to keep his family alive.

Typically for Spielberg, family is the primary theme here yet the films undeniable attractions are its set pieces. There is no other filmmaker alive today who can pull off an action set piece as well as Spielberg and once the films spectacle kicks into high gear, it is jaw dropping. In keeping with the disturbing and dark tone, the destruction comes thick and fast and there are many sequences that stick in the mind such as a particularly harrowing sequence featuring a Tripod attacking a car ferry laden with hundreds of survivors and a surreal sequence featuring captured survivors and their ultimate use for the alien invaders. Longtime Spielberg collaborator Janusz Kaminski’s Cinematography in these sequences is surprisingly similar to the style he employed with Saving Private Ryan, shooting handheld, gritty and low, making the audience feel like eyewitnesses rather than mere observers. For the most part, everything is shot from the perspective of Ray and his family, if they don’t see it, we don’t see it. This almost-documentary style works particularly well during the first Tripod attack scene as people are disintegrated and turned to ash as they run in terror; their ashen remains and shredded clothing billow in the wind and settle on the survivors who run behind them. This is a particularly visceral sequence amplified all the more by the familiar 9/11 images of ghost-people covered with ash. Although the story’s similarity to H.G Wells’ original is tenuous, there are major plot parallels and all in all, it’s an admirable update. The tone (and denouement) of the book remains intact, as do the formidable images of the Tripods and the Red Weed. It’s also worth noting that this film took seven months to complete, from cameras first rolling in 2004 to the release in theatres for summer 2005; a stunning achievement for any filmmaker but given that this was the biggest budget Spielberg’s worked with to date, it’s no mean feat. Despite the hype (and the Katie/Tom overkill) War of the Worlds shows that Spielberg can still roll this kind of accomplished entertainment out of his sleeves in a matter of months, at a time when many of his contemporaries (Revenge of the Sith anyone?) can barely manage a passable intelligent summer blockbuster. War of the Worlds is a visually stunning, disturbing and visceral piece of work and it’s a fitting addition to the finer films in Spielberg’s oeuvre.

JARROD WALKER

War of the Worlds Premiere

2005-07-01T22:30:00.000-01:00

The stars were hardly being beaten away with a stick for the premiere of War of the Worlds in Leicester Square on June 19th. The only celebrity of any import to roll up the carpet was Nell McAndrew, who was pounced on by mob of press eager to feed on celebrity flesh. But the fans care not one bit about the lack of celebrity sizzle as they await the arrival of the man of the night: Tom Cruise. Steven Spielberg was absent from the event; ‘The Beard’ was unable to attend because of filming commitments in Malta. He’s shooting possibly the most controversial film he’s yet attempted; his untitled Munich Olympics project. In his absence, Cruise shoulders the event, assisted by his 11 year old War of the Worlds co-star Dakota Fanning. Anticipating the Cruiser’s now famous flesh pressing and autograph-signing marathon, the crowds fill up the square. Eventually, Tom and co-star Dakota Fanning arrive, the Cruiser’s all smiles and with girlfriend du jour, Katie Holmes in tow he wanders out onto the Odeon’s balcony to wave at his fans. A bland TV presenter hurls one leaden question after another at him, finishing by asking Cruise if he can relate to his ‘dead beat dad’ character Ray Ferrier in War of the Worlds. My hopes that Tom will put up his hand and admit to freebasing coke while torturing his children with cigarette burns are dashed as he answers: “No, I love being a dad!” The crowd roars its approval. They love Tom. They love Tom loving being a dad.

Venturing out to commune with the masses, Cruise, Holmes and Fanning do the meet & greet with press. Fanning eventually has time to stop and talk. I ask her about the experience of working with Spielberg, a renowned director of child stars: “It was a blast; it was such a great experience!” - the frighteningly articulate eleven year old drops sound bites like an old pro; “Steven’s such a great guy and it was so much fun working with him and Tom”. I ask her about the mooted Alice in Wonderland project that Spielberg is rumoured to be working on as an intended vehicle for her and she grins: “it’s still being written but the script so far is great! But nothing’s confirmed yet so we’ll have to see what happens, so fingers crossed!”

Ms Fanning continues off along the red carpet smiling her mostly-gum-and-braces smile and scribbling autographs on flyers. I await the arrival of the Cruiser who, as fortune would have it, has just had water sprayed in his face by a Channel Four TV crew. None to happy with the prank, Cruise chews the guy out in front of several camera crews. If it were any other star they’d have thrown themselves into the nearest transport van and legged it, leaving their security to get medieval on the poor hapless fool’s ass but to his credit, Cruise remains cool and moves to another side of the square to sign autographs for fans. Like hunters waiting for an immaculately dressed prey, we wait. Eventually, Tom does sidle by, if only for a fleeting Q & A. I ask him why War of the Worlds: “It’s a timeless piece and it’s a great story” He continues: “You know when Steven and I first discussed working together again, he pitched me three ideas and the last one was War of the Worlds and just seeing Steven Spielberg say ‘War of the Worlds’ made me think ‘I’ve got to see this movie!’ you know? I have to see this on the big screen! When we were making it we always thought of it as a ‘smallest, biggest film’ - it’s epic but it’s really about the journey of this family, it’s a totally subjective point-of-view. It’s the third in his trilogy; you have Close Encounters and E.T, now we have E.T gone gangster in War of the Worlds (laughs) you know, he’s a badass and I cannot wait for an audience to see it”
His publicist sidles up next to him and ushers Cruise away and with that, the most perfect teeth in show-business make their exit. Having undergone something of a public grilling with his very open love affair with Katie Holmes, Cruise seems utterly unaffected. Considering all the fuss, the water pistols, the adoring fans and the $135 million blockbuster that he’s shouldering the responsibility of, Cruise looks like he couldn’t be happier and given that early word on War of the Worlds is that it’s Spielberg’s best film in years, Cruise should rest easy. However, it’s unlikely he’ll sit still for long; he’s collaborating with director J.J. Abrams (creator of TV’s Alias and Lost) on Mission Impossible 3 which will go before the cameras on July 12th in Rome.

JARROD WALKER

Overnight Review

2005-07-01T22:26:00.000-01:00

OVERNIGHT
DIRECTED BY Tony Montana & Mark Brian Smith
STARRING: Troy Duffy, Taylor Duffy, Tony Montana, Mark Brian Smith, Billy Connolly, Willem Dafoe

In 1997, a Boston doorman named Troy Duffy was swept away in a wave of publicity when a script he’d penned entitled The Boondock Saints was bought by Harvey Weinstein (of Miramax Films). Not only did Weinstein purchase the film for $1 Million, he also agreed to purchase the bar for which Duffy worked, co-owning the establishment with him. Harvey also agreed to hire Troy’s band The Brood to record the soundtrack for The Boondock Saints. In short, Troy was offered a golden ticket
He was Harvey’s boy. Once the promise of fame and fortune hit, Troy had his friends Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith document his ‘rise to glory’, the footage of which forms the basis of Overnight, which plays less like a documentary and more like watching someone set fire to a Van Gogh.

With his directorial debut in the offing, Troy forms The Syndicate, a production company consisting primarily of members of The Brood and his fledgling documentary crew, Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith. The Syndicate is intended as the production company by which Troy will ‘dominate’ global cinema and music. Meeting everyday to discuss his rise to ‘world domination’, Troy holds court.
Dressed in his trademark overalls, he chain-smokes cigarettes, guzzles beer and
lambastes his colleagues reminding them of what pathetic hanger’s on they are and how they ‘wouldn’t be anything without him’. Aside from hurling general abuse, Duffy spends a majority of his time getting trashed every night at his bar and languishing in his production offices making abusive phone calls to a variety of production executives and agents, wondering why his project isn’t the highest priority at Miramax and waiting for his impending takeover of Tinsel town.
There are several sequences in which Duffy meets with a variety of celebrities who have latched on to the buzz surrounding ‘Harvey’s boy’ however this honeymoon period soon ends when Duffy discovers that Miramax has put The Boondock Saints into ‘turnaround’ and shelved the film. At this point, Troy doesn’t just burn his bridges with Weinstein; he takes a flamethrower to them. This all culminates in an explosive conference call to Miramax in which Troy blusters and demands that his deep ‘cesspool of creativity’ be duly recognised. His crowning achievement is to end the conference call by calling Meryl Poster, the co-President of Production at Miramax, a c**t. Believing that aggression and castigation somehow equals business acumen, Duffy stumbles embarrassingly through a series of misadventures (including a recording contract for The Brood) and screws up one phenomenal opportunity after another. After destroying his relationship with Weinstein, he destroys his friendships with the documentary makers, claiming they have done nothing to warrant being paid and that they are worthless friends. Duffy is soon given a harsh lesson in the true power of ‘Harvey’, when he figures that he’ll shop his hotly touted script to other studios. Duffy is shocked to discover that no other studio will touch The Boondock Saints after Harvey has passed on it. Eventually a small independent company, Franchise Films, finances the picture but for less than half of what Miramax were prepared to put up for it. Duffy shoots his opus regardless with Billy Connelly and Willem Dafoe starring, an indication that the foul mouthed doorman does have at least a modicum of talent. It’s eventually released onto DVD where it’s found a cult audience.

Watching Troy piss a dream career up against a wall is surely one of finest examples of schardenfreud (pleasure in another’s misery) imaginable however as a three dimensional documentary, Overnight is hardly unbiased. If anything, it’s a total stitch-up orchestrated by disgruntled friends. However in the filmmakers defence, the stitching is ably done by Duffy himself, whose incessant rambling, abusiveness, posturing, pontificating and offensive verbosity - makes for one of the most compelling car-crashes of a documentary you’re ever likely to see.

JARROD WALKER