2011 has been a weird year for cinema. Lars Von Trier admitted to being a Nazi, A werewolf fell in love with a baby in a 12A and one of the best films of the year was a documentary (Senna), WTF right? All this has meant that choosing one film to crown as my annual favourite has been even harder than usual. Then there’s the films I haven’t even seen yet; Take Shelter, Money ball and The Artist could all as yet take the crown but for now they’ll have to wait.
To make the task arbitrarily easier I have also discounted those movies decorated by the Academy earlier on in the year. Using my dog eared collection of ticket stubs I whittled the list down to fifteen movies then to ten, then to three, then finally to one. The ticket that remained read simply ‘Submarine’.
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With the San Diego Comic Con whetting the appetite for geeks and freaks all over the world, Lewis Swift runs down the top 5 moments from this years convention.
5) The first picture from Cowboys and Aliens!
Whilst Scott Mitchell Rosenberg’s graphic novel series retains a relatively cult status for now, chances are, when the film adaptation is released this time next year copies of the genre bending romp will be flying off the shelves. The man in charge of further lining Rosenberg’s pockets is none other than John Favreau, the man who made Iron Man into a phenomenon. Whilst initially rumoured to be another project for The Fav and his go to guy Robert Downey Jr, scheduling issues forced Fav to look further from home, finally settling on none other than Daniel Craig for the lead.
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For a large portion of the twentieth century the Western Genre was king, making icons out of stars like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Then, in 1977 a little movie came along called Star Wars and all of a sudden Cowboys were no longer cool enough. Science fiction was the new box office bread winner and the Old West was once again condemned to the pages of history. Fitting then that it was in that the very same year, bit part, comic book anti hero, cowboy Jonah Hex was given his own self titled series.
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Continuing our Kick-Ass week over here on www.thisfilmison.com, we got resident comic book lover/geek/obsessive (delete where applicable) Rob Lawton to start thinking about ‘superheroes’ without anysuper powers. Wandering into the light after a lab full of highly dangerous chemicals exploded all around him, here’s his results.
Thinking of non-super superheroes makes you wonder what classifies a ‘superhero’ exactly. I would say a definition of a superhero is a character possessing “extraordinary or superhuman powers” and dedicated to protecting the public. However, Google’s web definition page gets it a bit wrong saying “A superhero is a character in a cartoon or film who has special powers and fights against evil… Superheroes like Batman and Superman.” Find out why that’s wrong after the jump.
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When I think of dragon tattoos, I think of overweight, middle-aged men sat outside British pubs called The George that casually place BNP flyers on the bar. And in the toilets. And stuffed inside every Kick-‘Em-Out ice cream sundae, like little papery flakes of racial intolerance. You know the kind of tattoos: those really horrid bluey-greeny faded ones, yellowed over the years by an abundance of nicotine and cirrhosis of the liver.
Thankfully though, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is set in rural Sweden, not Burnley, and while it may be the world’s most blue-eyed-blonde-haired country, the movie isn’t a tribute to white supremacy. In fact, Millennium Trilogy author Stieg Larsson was an ardent Trotskyist, so on the political spectrum sat a good few places to the left of Nick Griffin and his loveable ilk.
Larsson’s communist outlook in mind, it’s hardly surprising that corporationy corporations and Nazis in the story aren‘t portrayed too favourably. The coporationy Nazis are even more rubbish, evidently painted in light conditions similar to those of Christmas at the North Pole circa 10,000BC. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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I haven’t read Alice Sebold’s ‘The Lovely Bones’. I was going to read it before I saw Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the best-selling novel, but then I thought that for the purposes of my blog it would be easier to analyze the film if I wasn’t affected by the books alleged power. I was hoping that as a stand alone piece, the core material would transfer faithfully enough to move me all the same. The last time that Peter Jackson adapted from literature, he created the Lord of the Rings trilogy (and we all know how that turned out).
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“They say in heaven love comes first/ We’ll make heaven a place on Earth.”
First adaptations of books. Then adaptations of computer games, theme park rides, adverts, trailers. Now, Peter ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Jackson has taken on the work of the late, great Belinda Carlsle.
Of course he hasn’t you silly sausages, instead it’s the latest literary adaptation to hit the screens based on the wonderful best-seller, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Prepare for your tears to be well and truly jerked.
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Reading Jane Austen is like watching The Wire. Bear with me, I have evidence to back this up.
Both The Wire and Jane Austen inhabit a completely different world to myself and the average watcher/reader. From location to dress to language to the complex social hierarchy, it’s a bewildering place to be. Stick with both, though, and you’ll find that in no time at all (four our five episodes and approximately a hundred pages in ) you find that not only do you understand what’s going on, you want to find out what’d going to happen next.
Both are ultimately rewarding, and for first time watchers/readers there will no doubt be a period where you recommend either/both to everyone you meet.
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I promise to try to keep the film versus book review to a minimum in this review.
However, there will be a bit of it – I’ll try to keep it to this section. Gone, Baby, Gone, is a book written by Dennis Lehane. Lehane also wrote Mystic River, directed by Clint Eastwood and with a galaxy of stars. Gone, Baby, Gone was the directorial debut of Ben Affleck. If you’re in the UK, you’ve probably never seen it as it got a pretty limited release. That’s because the missing child in it looks a little bit like Madeleine McCann. Nevermind that the book was written in 1998 – I reckon that if The Two Towers came out now, it would also have a delayed release.
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Everyone knows the story of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. If you haven’t seen the film or read the book, you’ve seen one of the parodies floating around – Spaced’s being the best one, in this reviewer’s humble opinion. The main character, Randle P McMurphy, draws everyone around him like a moth to a flame, dominating the narrative. Right? Wrong. The book’s narrator is Chief Bromden, the apparently deaf and dumb Indian revealed to be the eyes and ears of the mental hospital.
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