Exasperated Calculator

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.