Mild Ranting
Escape From George Lucas
If you’re reading this, then help. For the love of God, send help. There’s this man, his name is George, and he’s got me locked away and he’s making unreasonable demands, like some sort of over-excited uncle. I don’t know what to do, there seems to be no way out, and now he’s got me in his hypnotic gaze I don’t know if I’ll ever escape. He’s torturing me, and he seems to think the Geneva convention is some kind of folk band. His evil knows no limits, and I don’t know how much longer I can last.
It’s all right for all of you. Free to wander about the lush green pastures of the world, without a care, able to watch original films and not subjected to the endless torture of the same old films, over and over again. I used to love Star Wars and Indiana Jones; I bought the videos, I bought them again, I bought the DVDs, I watched them over and over, perfect slices of entertainment, which I thought I could never tire of.
But now Uncle George (as he’s making me call him) has me imprisoned; he said he’s never going to let me out, but worse than that he’s converting my beloved entertainments into, whisper it softly, 3D. He intends to keep me here, locked up, and to show me one a year until my eyeballs start to bleed from the sheer horror of it all.
But you, dear reader, you are not subject to my plight. You have free will, you can avoid these travesties, these butcherings of my childhood and pillagings of my fantasies. You don’t have to witness these 3D atrocities, you can avoid them, you are masters of your own destiny. No one will compel you to watch them if you don’t want to. You are the lucky ones.
Sorry, what’s that Uncle George? No, I’m not talking to anyone. No, you can wear the Jabba the Hutt costume tonight, as long as you don’t show me any more 3D footage… (Send help. Please. Before he comes for you too.)
How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways, Gnomeo and Juliet trailer.
I, like every self respecting Hollywood-centric cinephile, like my trailers. Consequently, I rarely arrive in a cinema and see a trailer I’ve not already caught online, and will generally watch pretty much anything that appears on most prominent trailer sites. The first trailer on the list when I went to Apple’s trailer page last night was the trailer for Gnomeo and Juliet.
If you’ve ever read more than a few posts on here, you’ll know I’m not averse to poor puns, so I’m not going to criticise this movie for its choice of title. I do plan, however, to criticise it for just about everything else.
1. It’s clear from the off that this is a story about toys gnomes that come to life when no-one’s watching. Sigh.
2. The rest of us are trying to forget The Matrix’s very poor sequels, and indeed the almost unending list of follow-ups that reference them that have appeared in the intervening decade. If you can’t think of any better references than that, please don’t bother.
3. There is already a classic musical reworking of Romeo and Juliet, of course. So why did anyone think we needed another one, but with CGI gnomes in?
4. And if they thought we needed one, who possibly thought it could be improved with original and new music from Elton John? Original music maybe, new music possibly, but the two are so far removed that both will suffer from comparison to the other. (Actually, the answer to this question is most likely producers Elton John and David Furnish.)
5. The fungi / fun guy joke officially ceased to be funny in around 1971.
6. I did reel slightly when I started watching the trailer, as it sounded like Sir Michael Caine’s voice at the beginning. Surely he’s not lowered himself to this? Apparently he has. But he’s not the only one. But the cast list also includes Emily Blunt and James McAvoy as the titular duo, as well as Jason Statham (sob), Maggie Smith, Patrick Stewart (cont. sob), Julie Walters, Matt Lucas, Stephen Merchant, Ashley Jensen, Ozzy Osbourne and Richard “I don’t believe it” Wilson. It appears that so much was spent on the cast, they forgot to spend money on, you know, jokes?
7. Maybe it’s the writers at fault. However, one of them is Andy Riley, who has written the brilliant Bunny Suicides books. If the sheer mention of those names hasn’t sent you scurrying to Amazon, there’s something wrong with you. So what happened, Andy? Saving all the good stuff for the next book?
8. This does have the feeling of a Tesco value version of Pixar all over. Wait, what’s that? This was being produced by Disney’s animation division and then John Lasseter shut it down when Pixar took over? For the love of God, world, why did you not see that as a hint?
9. If you don’t sit through a poor quality animation trailer, expecting the words “IN 3D” to be thrust in your direction at some point, you need to manage those expectations. (It’s mentioned at around 1:51 in the trailer, in case you were wondering.)
10. On the subject of tired references that the world can do without, no-one in the world ever needed to see another Borat reference / a gnome in a mankini.
11. I could go on, but I’m sure I’ll have much more opportunity when Mrs Movie Evangelist drags me to see this next February. But unless anyone’s willing to spoil this in advance for me, it’s the only way I’ll have to find out if this really has the guts to see the Romeo and Juliet parallels through to the end. Y’see, kiddywinks, Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy. And not in the sense of dragging down the cream of British acting talent (plus Steven Merchant) and smothering it in Elton John songs.
If you watched that trailer and thought it didn’t look that bad, then I feel genuinely sorry for you, and would be willing to offer you a list of two to three hundred other animated movies I’ve seen that were better than this looks that you could spend your time on more productively. (This is also such an affront to Shakespeare I felt the need to paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the title instead, just to give the poor guy a break.) Rest assured, though, if I have to sit through this and they don’t kill someone at the end, I may give it serious consideration.
Three Stars In Their Eyes
As a budding movie reviewer, I always like to understand the opinions of others, both before and after I’ve seen something. So if any publication reviews and rates movies, it is guaranteed to have gotten my interest. Consequently, patterns start to appear over the course of time, and I have become concerned about the reviews of my local paper, which drops onto my doormat six days a week. To protect the anonymity of said publication to save embarrassment, I have made an anagram of the name of said publication, which I will refer to as the Cmabridge New S.
There’s an entertainment section in the Cmabridge New S every Thursday, and it’s always a highlight of my thinking room reading for the week. (The rest of the paper is generally well written, so of course I don’t read those bits very much.) I’ve noticed over the last few weeks, though, that the reviews seem to be settling into a certain groove. To make sure I wasn’t going mad I retrieved the last four from the thinking room recycling pile and reviewed the scores from the last four weeks. The scores were as follows.
Dub Be Good To Me: Why the lack of love for subtitles?
Nearly two weeks ago, I had a wonderful weekend at the Empire / BFI Movie-Con in London. Among the movie previews, trailers and Q & A sessions, there were some unexpected treats, not least for this Belgian animated movie from last year, soon to receive a limited cinematic run in this country.
The most refreshing thing about this trailer for me was not only the wonderfully off-the-wall, absurdist humour, but the fact that the trailer itself was in French with English subtitles. I get the same thrill each time a foreign language film has a trailer which sticks to its principles and its original language, which sadly isn’t always. I’ve now seen 71 movies in a cinema this year, and a fair proportion of those have been not in the English language. The list is currently as follows:
An open letter to the action directors of Hollywood
Dear Sir / Madam,
It has recently come to my attention that you seem to have forgotten how to shoot and frame action cinema. I would like to offer you this simple guide on what not to do.
Equipment required: stopwatch, printer, desk
Step 1 – Look at the image below
The image is the triptych The Garden Of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch. It is a model of structured composition. Please firstly reflect on your own shot composition, and take the time to think if you have given as much consideration to how your shots are composed. Or indeed, any consideration at all.
Step 2 – Use your stopwatch to time how long it takes to review the whole image
Now consider that there is a certain amount of time that they eye requires to take in that detail. The length of your shots and the cuts between them does not need to be directly proportional to what’s in the image, but it should bear some relation to if you actually require us to understand what’s in your action shots.
You can also gauge this effect by printing off the image and placing it on a desk. Now run past the desk as fast as possible – did you see anything? No? Then stop cutting your movie to within an inch of its life.
Step 3 – Pick up the image, hold it at arm’s length and wave it about as violently as possible
Can you make out anything in the image. No? This is what it’s like trying to watch your movie when you wave the camera about in an attempt to put movement into your shots or to appear arty. You could not see what was happening, and neither can we. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, STOP DOING IT.
With these three steps followed, you should be able to return to making action movies that we can all watch, understand and enjoy. Thank you for your attention.
Yours sincerely,
The Movie Evangelist
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I was thinking about seeing The Karate Kid, but…
Then these two facts came to my attention.
On reflection, think I’ll give it a miss.
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Watching movies and the collapse of the universe
I love watching movies on the largest screen possible, which is why I’ve booked tickets for Inception and Toy Story for next weekend at the BFI IMAX in London. As London is a little bit of a trek for me, doubling up to save on the travel seemed like a good idea at the time, but now the reality is beginning to sink in; unless I go and live in a cave for the next eight days, I am unlikely to remain unspoiled for these movies before I go and see them.
I can still remember seeing the first movies on VHS when I was a kid – my very first ever was Superman III. It was a kinder, more innocent time, when the only likelihood of a movie spoiler was the kid with the big mouth on the playground, and running away was a fairly effective option.
But everything took longer to filter down in those days. It could be six months or more before a movie made its way out of cinemas, and three or four years before that movie ended up on TV. But if there was a movie with a big twist, somehow it would make its way at least to the second stage of that process without discussion about it taking place in the wider world.
Where are all the intellectual pirates?
I’m a rubbish timekeeper. If they were to draw up a list of people likely to be late for their own funeral, I’d not be on it because I’d be late for the meeting where they pulled it together. It’s not that I’m disorganised; rather that I’m overly precise and can’t stand being early for things, which means if even the slightest thing goes wrong, then you’ll have to start without me.
Cinema in its current form is ideal for me, because the time stated is never the time the film actually starts. At least in most cases. Normally, anything between 15 and 25 minutes of adverts of increasingly diminishing quality and trailers that you’ve seen several times before if you have iTunes and the internet, before things actually get going. True to form, I normally arrive in my seat 14 to 24 minutes after the scheduled start time, but it’s rare that I actually miss the Orange advert which plays at most of the screenings I attend. (God, how I’d love to miss the Orange advert, not feel that it’s been burned onto my brain through over-repetition.)
Huey Lewis just made me feel really old
Back To The Future was 25 years old this past weekend. One of my top five movies all time, and watching it makes me feel young all over again.
Today is Huey Lewis’ birthday. If I need to explain who he is, you’re reading the wrong blog. Leave now, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Huey Lewis now looks like this:
This made me feel old for some reason. Maybe because Huey Lewis is 60 years old today. Damn.
In other old news, Katherine Helmond off of Soap is 82 today and Gloria Stuart off of Titanic was 100 yesterday – either that or they just stopped counting. Damn damn!
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Catherine Zeta Jones: Is There Something Wrong With Her Face?
Just asking. Wait, better explain. The purpose of this site is to advocate cinema attendance as life choice as regularly as possible, and so consequently I see a lot of things in cinemas, some of which I wonder whether I’ve seen or not.
Went to see Greenberg last night, and had a completely random selection of trailers, one of which was for the upcoming Catherine Zeta Jones yuck-fest The Rebound. Now I’d like to think I’m not descending completely into male chauvinism in my old age, but pardon me for saying that CZJ, once upon a time, was incredibly hot. (For anyone in the UK, I’m talking The Darling Buds of May era here, before she married the scary old man or started appearing in films with them.)
But there was something coming over which seems to only be visible on the big screen. Having sucked it up and re-watched the trailer below, maybe you need to see it on the big screen, or maybe it’s just me, but it looks like Catherine has something wrong with her face. I’m not enough of an expert on these matters to judge, so maybe she’s felt the need for a bit of Botox, or maybe she’s keeping the same fixed expression for fear of catching old man disease (which would explain why she’s playing against men much younger now), or maybe it’s just the effect of the picture she’s got in her attic starting to kick in, but on the big screen something looked scarily wrong with her face, as if the special effects guys who made the young faces in X-Men 3 were now invading random movies.
So maybe that’s a slightly odd recommendation for seeing movies at the cinema, but there you go. Anyway, watch it if you dare. You won’t see it here, but if it comes on before a movie near you, then be afraid. Be very afraid.
EDIT: Having seen this trailer twice more since on the big screen, the bit where it’s most obvious is where she’s on the street and she and her friend are talking about a chiropractor and they see Justin Bartha from a distance. I may end up seeing the whole movie to bottom this out once and for all.
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The Movie Evangelist 