Death is the villain you can't beat. Infection is the villain you can beat, slice, mash and shoot repeatedly in the head.
Infection makes for great cinema. OK, infection makes for OK cinema, mostly... with occasional stabs at greatness. But it's spreading.
Today, you have a choice in your Disease Of The Week movie.
There's Extraordinary Measures, which reviewers tell us is essentially 105 minutes of Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser trying to out-scowl each other in the quest to cure Pompe disease (something to do with over-spending until your football club is on the verge of bankruptcy).
Or you can catch The Crazies, in which an accidentally applied government bio-weapon turns a town of hick Yanks into fury-fuelled simpletons who keep trying to kill each other. Yes, apparently, this is different from usual.
The Crazies is a remake of George Romero's '70s shocker. Not only has Romero made - in Night, Dawn & Day Of The Dead - three of the best films ever about death (ea...
It's been interesting watching the reactions to Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, from the trailer alone. People seem to forget that artists have a fractious relationship with their times, that sometimes their work arrives out of synch with public taste, and that sometimes their art takes chances that even their most loyal followers won't accept. The irony, of course, is that nobody knows this better than Scorsese, who has conducted a personal journey through the film cultures of three very cine-literate countries (Italy and the US, with Britain on its way) and directed a milestone documentary (No Direction Home) about the musician, poet and electric folklorist Bob Dylan, himself no stranger to controversy and public questioning. Along the way, the song remains the same; sometimes a contemporary audience isn't always sitting in the right seats to judge.
So what has Scorsese done to blot his copybook, in the wake of his most successful commercial run since the 70s and early 80s? Well...
It’s been a tough few years for Clark Kent and his superhero alter ego (or is it the other way round, as Quentin Tarantino had David Carradine argue?) but with the recent speculation that Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan will be helping to oversee Superman’s return to the screen, things might finally be looking up.
Like any decision regarding the Man of Steel, it’s bound to be a controversial one: the character has been around for so long and so many people (including Richard Donner and, more recently, Bryan Singer) have tried their hand at making a movie based on him, to varying levels of success, that no one can seemingly please everyone.
But Nolan has a solid, proven track record with DC/Warners’ other heavy hitter, Batman and while he has no plans to ditch Gotham City for Metropolis (he has his brother and David Goyer are currently working on the scr...
As a huge Spielberg-phile in general and Jaws-freak in particular, I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of producer David Brown aged 93 this week.
It seems to me that Brown was a dying breed of gentleman producer. As Ron Howard, who worked with Brown on Cocoon, put it Brown was "less the wheeler-dealer than the great judge of content. He knows that story drives everything. He loves writing, and he know what ideas will translate and what won't." Which didn’t mean that Brown wasn’t above the odd gimmick or two. Spielberg had made up some Jaws T-shirts at the start of production. When the director turned up for a meeting with Brown and producing partner Richard Zanuck with every intention to quit, the pair were sporting the Spielberg-sponsored Jaws T-shirts, guilt-tripping the director into returning to work.
Having the nous and foresight to give Spielberg his feature film directing break The Sugarland Express, Brown supported Spielberg...
Helen: Well, here we are – and it feels like it’s a pretty predictable mix. Avatar and The Hurt Locker lead the way, both with nine, with Inglourious Basterds, Precious and Up In The Air snapping at their heels. This year’s awards feel suspiciously like a two horse race between Bigelow and Cameron’s movies (will Oscar reward the money, the scale and technical innovation or the sheer ability?) but perhaps I am unwisely discounting Tarantino and Reitman too early. Precious, I feel, is a lock only for Best Supporting Actress, which will go to Mo’Nique or there is no justice.
But let’s focus on Best Picture to begin with. We can discount any film that didn’t also get a Best Director nod from winning, I think. So goodbye (but well done for joining the party) District 9, The Blind Side (definitely the WTF nomination there), An Education, A Serious Man and (the mig...
The scene: The Empire offices, Friday. Chris Hewitt is leading a news meeting (yes, we have news meetings).
Chris: So, Miramax has been closed down by Disney.
Helen O’Hara: We should do something on that. A celebration or something.
Chris: A celebration? Of Miramax? Are you mad? What have they ever given us?
Pause. Ali Plumb: [meekly] Quentin Tarantino?
Chris: What?
Ali: Quentin Tarantino?
Chris: Oh yeah, Quentin Tarantino. After all, Harvey and Bob Weinstein were the guys who took a chance on him with Reservoir Dogs, and then partnered with him throughout his illustrious career. You could make a case that Miramax is the House That Quentin Built, so yeah, they did give us that.
Phil de Semlyen: And they introduced world cinema to a wider audience.
Taking a break from the Sundance marathon, I found myself watching the SAG awards telecast on Sunday night, which is actually a much bigger event that I'd ever realised. Quite a few things went through my mind as I watched, one of them being that I really think the Oscar race is taking shape now, and, if you haven't already put your money on Jeff Bridges for Best Actor, I think you should do so now, ditto for Mo'Nique (Precious) and Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds), since they too seem to have a lock on their respective supporting-actor categories. But the thing that surprised me most was the award for Best Ensemble cast; like many others, I'd have bet the farm on Nine, for pedigree alone, so I was actually quite shocked – in a good way – to see the guys from Inglourious Basterds win the day. It proved to me that there are still some upsets possible along the way.
So this got me to thinking about the upsets I'd like to see. For Best Acto...
For my money, Shane Black may just be the best commercial screenwriter in Hollywood. From the first two Lethal Weapons through to The Monster Squad to The Long Kiss Goodnight, The Last Boy Scout and his wonderful directorial debut, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, nobody else in Hollywood – not even Tarantino – boasts Black's knack for tweaking genre tropes with an ear for tough-guy dialogue worthy of Chandler, Ellroy, Leonard.
So, naturally, I’m delighted by the news that he’s set to reteam with Mel Gibson on the spy thriller, Cold Warrior. And so should you. In case you need some persuasion, here are ten lines of dialogue that will make you glad that Black is back…
1. “Touch me again, and I’ll kill ya.” Bruce Willis warns Kim Coates’ slap-happy henchman of the consequences of violating his personal bubble in The Last Boy Scout. It’s a laconic threat worthy of Bob Mitc...
So this morning we've learned that the next Spider-Man film will have a budget of about $80 million. That puts it on a lower budget than Sherlock Holmes, lower than X-Men Origins: Wolverine (by nearly half). Heck, it's less than Fast & Furious, which cost about $85m, and only just more (not adjusting for inflation) than the first X-Men movie. So what does this mean for the film, and might Spidey have been better going for balls-out 3D instead?
Let's look at what the budget means first. That sort of money certainly implies that we're going to see less action - or at least less newly-developed, complicated, CG action. Wall-crawling and web-shooting is probably in; multiple trips around the city by web, massive fire effects, large things collapsing and CG character work* is probably out. The first X-Men movie is the one to think about here: the action there was pretty small and scattered until the final show-down (which would barely make the opening reel of...
