Exasperated Calculator

So, there’s a movie of Watchmen coming out. Probably the greatest graphic novel of all time.

Now, it’s a film based on Alan Moore comics, so it’s going to suck.

But…

Every time I see something from the director’s blog I start to get a little hope that it might be OK. Like these story boards showing a careful adaptation of the imagery of the comic book.

I need to deal with this excessive hope, or I’m just going to be disappointed. But I guess I’ll find out in about 14 months time.

This weekend I went to see the new movie from JJ Abrams, Cloverfield.

I went in with fairly low expectations - I enjoy monster movies, but don’t really enjoy Abrams’ work very much.

I’m happy to say that I was completely blown away. This is a superb film, which anyone who can stomach it should see.

(When I say ’stomach it’ I mean two things - firstly, it’s a tough film, and reportedly very tough for people who were in New York on September 11. Secondly, there have been a lot of reports of motion sickness from the handheld camera work).

I’ll put the rest of this review on the post page, so I can include some spoilers from this point on. Read the rest of this entry »

No Country For Old Men.

Directed by Ethan & Joel Coen. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin.

In West Texas, June 1980, a drug deal has just gone very badly wrong. A case containing two million dollars ends up in the hands of Llewlyn Moss (Brolin) when he comes across the aftermath. He soon finds himself being chased not only by the mexican drug dealers, but by shadowy psychopath Anton Chigurh (Bardem), who is not afraid to leave a trail of bodies behind while chasing the money. Following all this is Sheriff Bell (Jones), trying to save Moss from his one bad decision.

The Coen brothers have produced some marvelous films over the years: Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Miller’s Crossing, The Hudsucker Proxy. But No Country is without question their finest work to date, and already one of the classics of cinema. The film is intensely visual, relying on the sweeping panoramas of desolate West Texas to tell part of the story. The dialogue is generally sparse, and much of the plot is told through the screen rather than the soundtrack. The acting is superb, with Javier Bardem’s chilling psychopath and Tommy Lee Jones’ desperate laconicism the standout performances. But Woody Harrelson turns in a great cameo, and Kelly Macdonald (as Moss’s wife) has a great scene towards the very end of the film. Inevitably this film will attract comparison with Fargo, with its own case full of money, but this is a far deeper, more downbeat piece than Fargo. And ultimately a (slightly) better film than the Coen’s previous masterwork.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

Directed by Jon Turteltaub. Starring Nicolas Cage, Justin Bartha, Diane Kruger, Jon Voight, Helen Mirren and Ed Harris.

Treasure hunter Ben Gates (Cage) sets off on a new hunt, this time looking for proof that his ancestor was not involved in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. With only a page of the diary of assassin John Wilkes Booth to go on he must follow a trail of clues planted in the 19th century. Together with his assistant (Bartha), his estranged girlfriend (Kruger), his father (Voight) and mother (Mirren) he must try and race the shadowy Mitch Wilkinson (Harris), who has an agenda beyond simply showing that the Gates’ are descended from traitors.

This film rolls neatly down the rails set down by the first National Treasure movie. While viewed from a distance the premise and plot is completely ridiculous, the film maintains such a momentum and seriousness about itself that you end up being caught up in the ride. As before, there are spectacular sequences in ancient catacombs. But there are also some good character moments, with Helen Mirren’s appearance adding something to the overall picture other than her own paycheck. If you liked the first, you’ll enjoy this too. And if you missed the first film, come and enjoy this one anyway.

Hitman

Directed by Xavier Gans. Starring Timothy Olyphant, Dougray Scott, Olga Kurylenko, Robert Knepper and Ulrich Thomsen.

A mysterious, powerful organisation (known only as “The Organisation”) has created a series of genetically engineered super-assasins. Trained from birth, they are killing machines who complete the contracts the organisation takes from outside. The best agent, known only as 47 (Olyphant), is working on a contract to publicly kill the Russian president (Thomsen). But following the assassination attempt the president is still alive, a witness (Kurylenko) must be dealt with, Interpol (Scott) is trying to hunt him down, and his own organisation is now trying to silence him.

Hitman is based on a moderately successful series of computer games, which does not, from the history of such adaptations, bode particularly well for the movie. Fortunately the film is largely able to climb up above the somewhat ridiculous plots of the original game, but in trying for Bourne-style political intrigue the reach of first-time director Gans somewhat exceeds his grasp. The plot is pretty silly, with plot holes galore and plenty of suspension of disbelief required. But the actions scenes are frenetic and exciting, and the director shows a good (if somewhat unsteady) eye for a pretty scene. It just goes to show that the first rule of film adaptations still holds: good source, bad film; bad source, good film. And in this case: middling computer game translates into a middling film.

Movies coming up in the next couple of months, and my thoughts (as according to IMDB).

• A Mighty Heart: Interesting, has a few good reviews it seems. Does also look pretty depressing… Probably.

• October 18: Saw IV. I have a fond hope to never, ever see any of the movies in the Saw series. Not if wild horses dragged me.

• October 25: Waitress: I like the sound of this one, sounds like a nice little romantic comedy. Bit of a tragic back story for the director, though. Likely.

• November 1: Death Proof: Quentin Tarantino’s very misunderstood ode to 50s B-movies. I’d prefer to see Grindhouse, but this’ll do… Very likely.

• November 1: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: Interesting sounding western, Brad Pitt as Jesse James. Didn’t get great reviews, but I’m interested by the ideas. Likely.

• November 15: Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Cate Blanchett returns to one of her greatest roles. The reviews have not been kind, but most of the complaints would apply equally to the first film as well, so I’m optimistic. Definitely.

• November 15: Fred Claus. Cookie cutter seasonal rubbish with Vince Vaughn. Nope.

• November 29: Beowulf. Script by Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman, check. Greatest medieval epic poem, check. Naked digital Angelina Jolie, check. How could this go wrong? Definitely.

The top 20 movies according to the IMDB, with the ones I’ve never seen in bold:

• The Godfather

• The Shawshank Redemption

• The Godfather Part II

• The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

• Pulp Fiction

• Schindler’s List

• The Empire Strikes Back

• Casablanca

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

• The Return of the King

• The Seven Samuari

• Star Wars

• Rear Window

• 12 Angry Men

• Raiders of the Lost Ark

• The Fellowship of the Ring

• Goodfellas

• City of God

• The Usual Suspects

• Once Upon a Time in the West

Still six to go. I have seen the end of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly , but just not the whole thing.

As you may (possibly) have heard by now, there’s now a movie version of the The Simpsons TV series.

The plot is pretty simple: Homer does something stupid, it was horrible consequences for the town, and as a result Marge and the family get very annoyed by him.

But The Simpsons has never really been about the brilliance of the plot. It’s about the writing and the jokes. And the strength of the writing is unlike anything seen on TV for some years - I suspect there’s been a lot of writers saving the good jokes for the movie. There isn’t a lot of the movie taking advantage of the things that can’t be done on television, but a few jokes do make good use of the big screen in one way or another.

The animation is fantastic, with some amazing visuals at various points. It’s not up to the quality of Pixar, but it’s still pretty good. The best thing is that it takes the larger-than-life quality of the designs in the TV series and scales them up, rather than trying to make them more realistic.

This movie is exactly what you should expect: a really good episode of The Simpsons. Nothing more, nothing less. If you’ve ever enjoyed The Simpsons, go and see it.

Amazing Grace is the tale of William Wilberforce, the crusading British MP who was instrumental in the banning of the slave trade. The story picks up in the very late 1790s, with Wilberforce defeated by the pro-slavery forces in parliament. Sickly and defeated, he tells the tale of the early days of his involvement in the movement against slavery, and perhaps rediscover his passion for the cause.

Wilberforce is played by Ioan Gruffod, and inhabits the role well. He plays Wilberforce as a passionate, religious man with a strong sense of right. I suspect that the portrayal differs a bit from historical reality, as my reading is that Wilberforce was actually a bit of a wowser. He deserves an Academy Award nomination.

There are plenty of strong performances. Rufus Sewell in particular is excellent as Thomas Clarkson, and Benedict Cumberbatch is interesting as William Pitt the Younger. Some of the others suffer from a slight tendency to chew on the scenery from time to time, especially Albert Finney as John Newton and Romola Garai as Barbara Spooner.

The script is mostly strong, despite a couple of over-the-top scenes. The historical accuracy is also pretty good for the most part. Although I could list quibbles all day long¹, of course.

Overall, a very enjoyable biopic well worth the time.

Adapting a book to film is not easy. There are not many succesful examples around, and what few there are (Blade Runner, for instance) drift a very long way from their source material.

The five books of the Harry Potter film series so far have been a distinctly mixed bag. Why? In my opinion, because they’re trying to stuff increasingly more book into less and less film. Consider:

• Book 1: 223 pages, 152 min: 1.5 pages/minute

• Book 2: 251 pages, 161 min: 1.6 pages/minute

• Book 3: 317 pages, 142 min: 2.2 pages/minute

• Book 4: 636 pages, 157 min: 4 pages/minute

• Book 5: 766 pages, 138 min: 5.5 pages/minute

There’s a rule of thumb that one page of a book corresponds to around one minute of screen time on average. So even the first book required tremendous cuts. By the time of the adaptation of Book 5, realistically only about 20 per cent of the book can make it to screen.

The recent book to film adaptation with the most critical acclaim, the Lord of the Rings series, which runs to around 1000 pages excluding appendices, was given 557 minutes in total (683 in the extended edition), or slightly better than 2 pages of book per filmed minute.

Which is not to say that more is better. The first film was criticised at the time for sticking overly to the book, and not allowing the plot to really come through. The film plods along making sure to check off every scene in the original book.

The most recent film, Order of the Phoenix, by contrast feels like nothing more than a ‘greatest hits’ of the book - a few disconnected scenes that mainly make sense if you’ve read the book. I’d love the opinion of someone who hasn’t actually read the book of the film, if such a person exists…¹

By far the strongest film so far was Prisoner of Azkaban, which felt far less compunction than any of the others to stick closely to the design of the book. It probably helped that it was directed by a truly singular artist, Alfonso Cuaron.

But as the books grow ever longer, I’m not sure there’s a good solution to adapting them to film. They would probably be a lot more interesting as a mini-series or even full on TV series. But as it is, there is so much plot in the last few books that it’s difficult to fit anything but that into a couple of hours of screen time. Which means that the real strength of the series, the characters, gets lost.

Last week we went to see The Last King of Scotland, the new film based on the regime of Idi Amin.

The film (based on the book of the same name) is a fictionalised account of a doctor (Nicholas Garrigan, played by James McAvoy) who falls in with the regime of Amin. But the centre of the film is Amin, played in what is probably the performance of the decade by Forest Whitaker. It’s a very difficult role to play - Amin must appear charismatic in order for us to understand how Garrigan (and, indeed, Uganda) can be attracted to him in the first place. But he also has to have the underlying evil of the man too. Anything other than a brilliant performance would have undermined the whole film.

It’s not an easy movie to watch, and gets a little graphic at times. There are also a couple of small stylistic missteps (in my opinion, at least) in the final third as Garrigan begins to realise what situation he’s in. But overall this is a fantastic movie well worth seeing.

That someone made a film about the Helvetica font?

Or the fact that I really want to see it now…

(Via Daring Fireball).

That of those 16 movies I fully expect that Helen will want to see about 6…

A few of the films that I want to see coming out this year (in release date order):

• For Your Consideration. From the makers of Looking for Guffman and Best in Show (and A Mighty Wind, which I haven’t seen yet). Should be fun, but uneven like the rest.
• The Fountain. Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, promises to be spectacular, difficult to understand and fun. Been looking forward to this for a while.
• Stranger Than Fiction. An IRS agent begins to suspect that he’s the character in a novel. Whee! I love modern surrealism.
• Last King of Scotland. A lot of Oscar buzz around Forrest Whittaker’s performance as Idi Amin. Definitely worth a look see.
• The Illusionist. Well, I liked the last movie about a magician… (Actually, this one came out first in the US, it’s taking forever to get here).
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It looks intriguing, a return to the style of original underground comic book.
• Spider-Man 3. Loved the first two.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End. Loved the first two.
• Transformers. Oh please oh please let this not be a complete piece of rubbish.
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Although I’m looking forward to book 7 more.
• The Simpsons Movie. Maybe this is where all the jokes they took out of the main series went?
• License to Wed. Movie about marriage prep courses.
• Ratatouille. It has a rat in it, how can I resist. And it’s from Pixar.
• Stardust. Magical Fantasy based on a story by Neil Gaiman.
• Beowulf. Adult fantasy made using the same technology used in The Polar Express. Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary are writing the script.
• Bee Movie. Don’t know much about it, but the early ads are smart and funny.

Only 16 that I have to see, I must be slowing down…

Quick review of Casino Royale, which I went to see last night. Overall, liked it a lot. The first half has some great action sequences, but the second half is the overall better movie. Good acting, and Daniel Craig is one of the most impressive Bond’s ever: after 20-some movies it’s nice to see a bit of a new take on the whole thing. Go see it!

(No spoilers review)

A couple of weeks ago now I went to see The Prestige, the new movie from Christopher Nolan (director of Batman Begins, Insomnia and Memento, all great movies). Overall, it’s a very strange, complex movie that I greatly enjoyed, although Helen not so much…

Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale, who also played Batman in Nolan’s recent film) play a pair of magicians with a fierce, dangerous rivalry. They compete in particular with continuous elaborations of a trick named “The Transported Man”. The film jumps around in time with great complexity, and if you don’t watch closely you could easily get lost. But then the movie does start with Cutter (Michael Caine, in another great performance as Michael Caine) saying “Are you watching closely?”.

The performances are great, and the plot is intricate (if a little shakey at times). As the complexities grow the great, strange Nikolas Tesla makes an appearance (played by an unrecognisable David Bowie), and things get odder and odder from there.

This isn’t a film for everyone, but it is very enjoyable for the right person. Highly recommended if you are the right person.

(As for the title, well Cutter explains it best: “Every great magic trick consists of three acts. The first act is called “The Pledge”; The magician shows you something ordinary, but of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”; The magician makes his ordinary some thing do something extraordinary. Now if you’re looking for the secret… you won’t find it, that’s why there’s a third act called, “The Prestige”; this is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking you’ve never seen before.”)

While checking the Apple Movie Trailers site I came across a trailer for America: Freedom to Fascism. From watching the trailer, it seems to be the most prominent example yet of the tax protestor lunacies about the legality of the US income tax system. Except rather than being promoted through dodgy seminars and mimegraphed leaflets, it’s going to be on cinema screens across a country.

Needless to say, it is all completely unbalanced. Here’s a handy list of the ‘experts’ the trailer shows are in the movie:

• Dr. Edwin Vieira, a ‘constitutional expert’ (who once threatened the life of a US supreme court justice), promoting his idea that the 16th amendment was never ratified. Which is not true.
• G. Edward Griffin, from ‘Freedom Force International’, who promotes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as being true. Which is despicable, anti-semitic rubbish.
• Congressman Ron Paul, a Libertarian representative from Texas. Probably wishes he hadn’t agreed to be in this film.
• Katherine Albrecht, an RFID-chip scare-monger.
• Peter Gibbons, a tax attorney who I’ve been unable to find anything substantial on the Internet. Which is probably not a good sign for his authority.
• Joe Banister, described as a ‘former IRS agent’. A former IRS agent who sells a range of tax protestor books and videos.
• Sherry Jackson, another ex-IRS agent. Nothing new here, just another tax protestor.
• James Bovard, another one with a book to sell.

This gaggle of tax protestors seems to have nothing new to say. Just the same old rubbish about flags with tassels, the 16th amendment, and so on. Surely there were better ways to waste money than to make a documentary about them.

For the first time in months we actually got out to see a movie last night. Given the pretty average range at the moment (Poseidon, MI: 3 and X3 were the other choices) we ended up going to The Da Vinci Code.

Overall, a pretty competent thriller with some nice moments and a few flaws.

(I should note first that I’m not addressing the problems with the source material. Can we all just accept, for the sake of this review, that I think almost all of the historical information in the movie is complete bunk?)

First, the good.

• The actual ‘thriller’ elements of the plot kept things moving along nicely, with good use of intercutting to keep some tension in the more expository scenes. The action scenes were well done, although fairly sparse compared to the other summer blockbusters.
• The locations in Paris and London are gorgeous and are used to full effect. The Louvre was probably somewhat underutilised, focussing too much on the awful pyramid.
• Ian McKellan turns in a fantastic, scenery munching performance. Unlike Hanks and Tatou, who take the material far too seriously.

The average:

• Ron Howard is always going to be Ron Howard, so you can be pretty sure about what you’re going to get. The childhood flashbacks were nice, but overused. And the direction was generally workmanlike without being inspired.
• Paul Bettany was good in a flawed role. I’m with NOAH on this one.

The bad:

• The music was absolutely awful. In addition to the volume being way too high (the cinemas fault, I’m sure), it was badly timed, over dramatic, repetitive and boring. Rarely have I come out of a movie where my first comment is ‘gee, the music was bad.’ I guess the composer was just having a bad week when he wrote it, as he’s done other good stuff.
• I know I said I wouldn’t mention the source material, but it really hurt my suspension of disbelief. Especially when talking about the Council of Nicea and the Arian heresy.

Overall, worth seeing once. I certainly won’t bother buying the DVD, though.

Rating: 3/5

Ever seen a movie and thought afterwards that the trailer you saw looked nothing like that? Well guess how far you can take it…

• The Sound of Music (as a drama, without music).
• The 10 Commandments (as a teen high school comedy).
• Jaws (as a romance).
• Top Gun (as a Brokeback Mountain like movie. There are about 1000 different Brokeback Mountain style trailers, including Shawshank redemption and others. But once you’ve seen this one, you’ll get the idea and won’t need to see the rest).
• The Shining (as a screwball comedy).

And then, of course, there are the trailer mash-ups:

• Sesame Street meets V for Vendetta.
• Toy Story meets Requiem for a Dream.

(Isn’t You Tube fantastic?)

Wow! I haven’t been this excited by a movie trailer in a very long time. This looks like a lot of fun.