The blog for Peter T. Chattaway, film critic, journalist, religion junkie, etc. Not all posts will be film-related, but film will always be just around the corner.
For months, there has been speculation that John Hurt may be playing Abner Ravenwood, the father of Indy's erstwhile girlfriend Marion Ravenwood, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which comes to theatres next week Thursday. The filmmakers, on the other hand, have been keeping his character's identity secret. But the cat may have been let out of the bag now -- and with the filmmakers' approval. So, dear reader, if you do not want to know the answer to this question just yet, do not -- I repeat, do not -- check out the bonus features on the new "special edition" of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) that came out today. Or at least not the 'Indiana Jones: An Appreciation' featurette.
Two years ago, I interviewed Cory Edwards, the writer-director of Hoodwinked! (2005; my review), and in that interview, he talked about how he tried to overcome the budget limitations on his animated film by employing the same "fakey" but "charming" aesthetic that Jim Henson had used for Kermit the Frog. So I wasn't that surprised to read in Variety tonight that Edwards is bringing another of Henson's old creations to the big screen:
The Weinstein Co. will turn the Jim Henson series "Fraggle Rock" into a live-action musical feature.
Cory Edwards, who directed the animated "Hoodwinked!" for TWC, will helm the picture and write the screenplay. The Jim Henson Co. will produce and TWC will distribute. . . .
The deal furthers the relationship between TWC and the "Hoodwinked!" creative team. Edwards is reteaming with "Hoodwinked!" co-writer Tony Leech on the animated alien adventure "Escape From Planet Earth," on which Leech is making his directing debut.
Edwards is separately developing a live-action feature adaptation of Cedar Fair's Halloween Haunt franchise, designed to be shot in 3-D by Kerner Optical and produced by Davis Entertainment, Dave Phillips and Tracey Edmonds. That pic is looking for a backer. . . .
This news comes only two months after it was announced that Jason Segel, the writer-star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, will be developing a big-screen revival of the Muppets themselves. Edwards and Segel couldn't be more different in terms of their approach to comedy -- at least where family-friendliness is concerned -- but their work does suggest a strong, shared affinity for the works of Henson etc. It could be interesting to see them share a panel discussing the subject, or something like that.
UPDATE: Cory Edwards comments at his personal blog.
The first time I saw someone put brand-new subtitles on this clip from Downfall (2004; my review), it was when Warner decided to ditch their HD-DVD product and go exclusively with Blu-Ray as their next-generation, high-definition format of choice:
Click here if the video file above doesn't play properly.
More recently, there was this version produced after the Democratic primaries in North Carolina and Indiana last week:
Click here if the video file above doesn't play properly.
These were the only two variations of this gimmick that had come my way until today, when I came across this post by Karina Longworth, who is surprised to discover that there have been several other variations as well. She comments:
Almost all of these clips have view counts on YouTube in the six or seven figures. Downfall was the second-highest grossing foreign language film of 2005, but it still only made about $5.5 million. Almost certainly, more people in this country have now seen a clip from the film wrangled into a new context than would have ever seen the film in its original state. Downfall thus becomes part of the cultural conversation, but at the same time, it seems unlikely that any of these clips could effectively function as commercials for the film. Maybe it’s sad or maybe it’s totally appropriate, but it seems clear that the general YouTube user would be able to summon way more excitement for the concept of Hitler on the phone with Microsoft tech support, than they would for the concept of Hitler…doing Hitler stuff.
So, ironically, the movie that was supposed to "humanize" Hitler -- not by excusing him, but by treating him as a human being with enormous flaws rather than a cartoon or a supernatural demonic type -- has ended up contributing to his trivialization.
Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay -- CDN $5,740,000 -- N.AM $30,716,000 -- 18.7% 21 -- CDN $8,990,000 -- N.AM $80,418,000 -- 11.2% The Forbidden Kingdom -- CDN $4,960,000 -- N.AM $48,261,000 -- 10.3% Made of Honor -- CDN $2,500,000 -- N.AM $26,275,000 -- 9.5% Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- CDN $4,810,000 -- N.AM $50,772,000 -- 9.5% Iron Man -- CDN $14,310,000 -- N.AM $177,134,000 -- 8.1% What Happens in Vegas -- CDN $1,610,000 -- N.AM $20,000,000 -- 8.1% Nim's Island -- CDN $3,310,000 -- N.AM $44,257,000 -- 7.5% Baby Mama -- CDN $2,310,000 -- N.AM $40,377,000 -- 5.7% Speed Racer -- CDN $746,852 -- N.AM $20,210,000 -- 3.7%
A couple of discrepancies: 21 was #9 on the Canadian chart (it was #12 in North America as a whole), while Redbelt was #10 on the North American chart (it was #12 in Canada).
No time to argue! You throw me the newsbites, I throw you the whip!
1.Variety reports that Religulous, Bill Maher and Larry Charles's satirical documentary about religion, has been postponed from its early summer release date to October 3, which is more or less the same time of year that Charles's last film, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), opened. The new release date also happens to be smack dab in the middle of the Jewish High Holy Days; this year, Rosh Hashanah takes place September 30 while Yom Kippur takes place October 9. It's also a few days after the end of Ramadan, the month-long Muslim fast.
2.Variety reports that Steven Spielberg is finally going to get around to directing that Abraham Lincoln biopic that he and Liam Neeson have been talking about doing for a while now. He could start shooting it as soon as early next year -- but first, he has to shoot the opening installment of the Tintin trilogy.
3.Variety reports that Walden Media is "partnering with HarperCollins Children's Books to launch Walden Pond Press" -- and along the way, it mentions that Steven Knight, the writer of Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Eastern Promises (2007), is now working on the script for The Chronicles of Narnia:The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Knight and Dawn Treader director Michael Apted previously collaborated on the William Wilberforce biopic Amazing Grace (2006).
Variety and the Associated Press do their best to assure him and all who share his fear that, if anything, Marion is even tougher this time out. As Karen Allen, the actress who plays Marion, tells Variety: "She's now become somebody who takes charge of things and is not so easily thrown into a bed of snakes. She's somebody who sees what needs to be done and can do it. And that's lovely."
Allen also tells the Associated Press: "As the film begins, they haven't seen each other for a long time, and suddenly, they're thrust back together . . . They kind of pick up from where they left off. A few bumpy roads have passed between them since then that they have to work out with each other."
That's an intriguing quote, partly because we don't really know where Indy and Marion left off, exactly. They were together at the end of Raiders, in 1936, but they had obviously split up again by the time Indy fell for that Nazi double agent in Last Crusade, in 1938. So how, exactly, did they break up the second time? (The first time they broke up was in 1926, when Marion was a child, and she was in love, and it was wrong and Indy knew it.)
This is an issue the James Bond stories have never had to deal with, since Bond never dates the same girl twice -- though at least some of the Bond novels have begun by explaining how things fell apart for Bond and the girl from the previous book. But as far as the Bond movies are concerned, if I'm not mistaken, the only time they have ever referred to his past lovers is when they died in the film that introduced them. Several films have referred to the death of Bond's wife in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), and it looks like the next Bond film, Quantum of Solace, will partly concern Bond's quest for revenge following the death of Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale (2006). But if a Bond girl makes it to the end of a Bond movie alive, it's usually a sure sign that she'll be completely forgotten by the time the next movie comes along.
And if memory serves, it has only happened once so far that a Bond girl was introduced as a figure from Bond's own past -- and that was with the Teri Hatcher character in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), who died almost as soon as she was introduced, and was never mentioned again in any of the films that followed.
The first trailer gave us "Roswell, New Mexico, 1947". The second trailer gave us a glimpse of the crystal skull, which doesn't exactly look all that humanoid. And now, the third trailer gives us this aerial shot, which seems to depict the Nazca Lines in Peru. These images are believed to have been created between 200 BC and AD 700, and are said to be visible only from the sky -- which has led Chariots of the Gods author Erich von Däniken, among others, to speculate that these images may be evidence of early contact between humans and aliens. And sure enough, there have been rumours for quite some time now that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull may be taking its cues from Chariots of the Gods. Hmmm. We'll see when the film comes out May 22.
Two years ago, before anyone had heard of crystal skulls, George Lucas hinted at the reluctance with which Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford had come to accept the concept behind what would turn out to be the newest Indiana Jones movie:
“I discovered a McGuffin,” continues Lucas, still reluctant to name said McGuffin. “I told the guys about it and they were a little dubious about it, but it’s the best one we’ve ever found… Unfortunately, it was a little too ‘connected’ for the others. They were afraid of what the critics would think. They said, “Can’t we do it with a different McGuffin? Can’t we do this?” and I said “No”. So we pottered around with that for a couple of years. And then Harrison really wanted to do it and Steve said, “Okay”. I said, “We’ll have to go back to that original MacGuffin and take out the offending parts of it and we’ll still use that area of the supernatural do deal with it”.
What, exactly, was so "connected" about this MacGuffin, and what, exactly, the "offending parts" of it were, we may never know. But Lucas recently made much the same point in an interview with the Associated Press:
"The MacGuffin of it slowed down a little bit from what my original enthusiastic version was. Again, that's the way it works with Steven and Harrison and I," Lucas said. "We're not going to do anything anyone's uncomfortable with. We want to do something everybody likes, we in the group, the three of us.
"They wanted to go off on some other tangent. I said, `I'm not going to do that. I'm going to stick with this no matter what, so we either do this or we don't. That's it.' Finally, we got something that we could all compromise on and all be happy with. It wasn't quite as wacky as I wanted it to be, but it still is subtle and nice and works really well and has the same idea behind it."
To this, Harrison Ford adds:
Resurrecting Indy took more than a decade of debate, disagreement and compromise among the film's three principals, Spielberg and Ford disliking a way-out-there initial idea Lucas had.
"It was the three of us, Steven, George and I, coming to agreement on the central notion of it all," Ford said. "I think the original idea is still a large piece of it in the movie, but it's been developed and worked on in ways that made it a lot more palatable to Steven and I."
Arrrgh. Steven and me. Steven and me. Being a millionaire superstar does not excuse bad grammar. (And come to think of it, Lucas made a similar error above. They're reinforcing each other's bad habits.) But I digress.
What, in a nutshell, does all this compromising of Lucas's original, enthusiastic, wacky idea mean? New York magazine's 'Vulture' column sums it up in a headline: "Relax: The New Indiana Jones Movie Won't Have That Many Aliens".
In related news, the New York Times has an interview with Spielberg that includes this interesting quote on the movie's style:
In fact, Mr. Spielberg said, he tries to cut as little as possible in these movies’ action sequences, because “every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel there’s something wrong, that there’s some cheating going on.” So his goal is “to do the shots the way Chaplin or Keaton would, everything happening before the eyes of the audience, without a cut.”
Warming to the subject, he went on: “The idea is, there’s no illusion; what you see is what you get. My movies have never been frenetically cut, the way a lot of action is done today. That’s not a put-down; some of that quick cutting, like in ‘The Bourne Ultimatum,’ is fantastic, just takes my breath away. But to get the comedy I want in the Indy films, you have to be old-fashioned. I’ve studied a lot of the old movies that made me laugh, and you’ve got to stage things in full shots and let the audience be the editor. It’s like every shot is a circus act.”
The "comedy" of it. I like that, truly.
Finally, the movie's official website has a bunch of brand-new TV spots, some of which have footage that has never been seen before, and given this franchise's interest in religious matters, I cannot help but note the presence of a nun in one of the spots -- even if it looks like she's simply running an asylum or something. Here are screen captures taken from the relevant shots:
A couple new items about Oliver Stone's George W. Bush biopic W surfaced today. The main one, of course, is the Entertainment Weekly cover story, which notes that the film starts shooting next week, no one has been cast as Dick Cheney yet, and the script has been rewritten at least twice since an earlier version was leaked to the press around April Fool's Day; for more on that, see the reactions to that version of the script that were posted last month by ABC News, Slate, the Hollywood Reporter and Jeffrey Wells. Meanwhile, Variety reports that Lionsgate has acquired distribution rights and plans to release the film October 17 -- three weeks before election day. Anyone want to guess what effect this movie will have at the polls, if any?
Matt Page links to this page at Ain't It Cool News, which has some "spy shots" from the set of The Year One, the "biblical comedy" being produced by Judd Apatow and directed by Harold Ramis. A sampling:
There's been a lot of talk lately about The Dark Knight and Harvey Dent's transformation into Two-Face. On Sunday, Jeffrey Wells posted an image from the new trailer, copied above, that hints -- just barely barely hints -- at the nature of the transformation. Then, on Monday, Comic Book Resources posted a seriously grotesque image taken from the other side of Harvey Dent's face; the website eventually took the image down at the request of the studio, but you can still see it at Ain't It Cool News.
Finally, the Los Angeles Times ran an interview over the weekend with Aaron Eckhart, who plays Dent, and Eckhart seems to give away a major spoiler -- though the spoiler in question is also hinted at strongly in the new trailer for the film. Maybe it occurs early enough in the film that all the people involved figured they could let it leak, and save other surprises for later?
At any rate, with regard to Two-Face's appearance, Eckhart does say: "I can tell you that, basically, when you look at Two-Face, you should get sick to your stomach. . . . It's like you would feel if you met someone whose face had pretty much been ripped off or burned off with acid. . . . There are fans on the Internet who have done artist's versions of what they think it will look like, and I can tell you this: They're thinking small; Chris is going way farther than people think."
The Times reporter also says that Two-Face's wounds "are structurally deeper than in the comics" -- and that certainly fits the description of the photo that was leaked, and which I am declining to post here because I kind of wish I hadn't seen that image myself before seeing the movie.
1.Variety and the Hollywood Reporter say Universal has picked up a spec script for a horror film called The Knights Templar:
Plot puts a horror spin on the famed organization of fighters from the Middle Ages, with the Knights Templar, fresh from the Crusades, forced to fend off an invading vampire army set on destroying the Holy Grail.
One of the producers attached to the project is Timur Bekmambetov, who directed the Russian genre pics Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006), as well as the upcoming Wanted starring Angelina Jolie.
3.CT Movies has a brand new interview with Andrew Adamson, the director of the first two Narnia films, which gets probably as much information about Adamson's family and religious background as any interview with him is ever likely to get -- but Adamson finds an interesting way to tie that subject to the themes of Prince Caspian, which comes out next week:
Before Lion/Witch, a USA Today story referred to you as the son of "associate missionaries" in Papua New Guinea. Can you tell me more about that?
It's a difficult thing to get into. I'm sort of in the public eye, and I don't think it's fair to drag my family into it. So I don't talk about it a lot. But yes, we did move to Papua New Guinea when I was 11. My father worked at the university there, and my parents were involved in the church there as well.
Living in Papua New Guinea is an important part of my story in another way. When I tried to understand the Narnia stories from a kid's point of view, I realized that the Pevensie kids were going through something I'd gone through. I went to this country when I was 11, and Papua New Guinea has changed significantly since then. When I was there, I'd ride my cycle all around, a huge amount of freedom. Now there's a lot of violence and corruption. Basically, the place that I grew up in doesn't exist anymore, and for me, there's a sense of loss. I realized that's something the kids go through in returning to Narnia [in Prince Caspian]. They try to go back to a place they spent 15 years in, and now the place they knew is gone. And ultimately at the end of the story, for the older Pevensies, they have to let go.
It's something we all go through in our passage from childhood to adulthood, when we realize we can't go back to the innocence of our childhood. We can't get back to the house being as big as we thought it was when we grew up. And at some point you have to say I accept that—and move on and become an adult. To me, that was the heart of this story from Peter and Susan's point of view. And my own experience provided this sort of bittersweet, nostalgic framework for that.
4.Variety, Reuters and the Associated Press all report that Viacom chief Sumner Redstone has indicated that it would be okay with him if Tom Cruise came back to Paramount for another movie in the Mission: Impossible franchise (1996-2006), despite the fact that they parted on such bad terms just a couple years ago.
But wait a minute. Tom Cruise might indeed need a hit right now, but wasn't his character on the verge of retiring and settling down with a brand-new wife in the last movie? Not that this franchise has ever cared much for things like continuity, but still, you can't just dump story elements like that without a little more explanation than usual. Or, perhaps the fourth movie would tie into the third movie more than the first three movies ever tied into each other -- but that, too, would be a little weird for this franchise.
Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.
Dans une galaxie près de chez vous 2 -- CDN $902,450 -- N.AM $902,450 -- 100% Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay -- CDN $4,660,000 -- N.AM $25,270,000 -- 18.4% 21 -- CDN $8,780,000 -- N.AM $79,057,000 -- 11.1% 88 Minutes -- CDN $1,630,000 -- N.AM $15,424,000 -- 10.6% The Forbidden Kingdom -- CDN $4,560,000 -- N.AM $45,124,000 -- 10.1% Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- CDN $4,170,000 -- N.AM $44,804,000 -- 9.3% Made of Honor -- CDN $1,290,000 -- N.AM $15,500,000 -- 8.3% Nim's Island -- CDN $3,160,000 -- N.AM $42,544,000 -- 7.4% Iron Man -- CDN $7,490,000 -- N.AM $104,250,000 -- 7.2% Baby Mama -- CDN $1,820,000 -- N.AM $32,330,000 -- 5.6%
A couple of discrepancies: Dans une galaxie près de chez vous 2 was #10 on the Canadian chart (it might not appear on the North American chart at all), while Prom Night was #8 on the North American chart (it was #13 in Canada).
1.Variety reports that Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins -- which starts shooting today -- is going to be rated PG-13. The previous three films in the Terminator franchise were all rated R. One of the producers says the more family-friendly -- and merchandising-friendly -- rating won't compromise the grittiness of the franchise because "the ratings have changed . . . The PG-13 has increased in intensity." Well, maybe. But the track record of franchises that went from R to PG or PG-13 is not a very promising one.
2.Flicks.co.nz reports that production on Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lovely Bones was shut down for a while because Jackson and his art director couldn't agree on what Heaven -- a key location in the film -- should look like. Meanwhile, The Bad & Ugly claims that the film's release date has been pushed from March 2009 to sometime in the Fall -- which isn't necessarily a sign of trouble with the production, since that's when a lot of movies begin their Oscar campaigns.
4.Roger Ebert has a fun post at his blog -- yeah, he's got one too -- about the relationship between blogs and fanzines, and the possibility that he was an "eyewitness to one of the formative moments in the connection between computers and science fiction" nearly half a century ago, when he attended a lecture by Arthur C. Clarke at Urbana, i.e. the very place where HAL would claim to have been created in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
5.Andrew Wallenstein, a writer for the Hollywood Reporter, looks at the ad campaign for The Dark Knight and a few other films -- but especially The Dark Knight -- and concludes: "Viral marketing has gone positively bubonic. While this unconventional approach to building buzz online is nothing new, it has achieved full-blown plague status in the walk-up to the summer movie season." Scott Van Doviak says Wallenstein is just being "cranky", and he notes that elaborate viral campaigns have been around at least since before the release of Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001); he also expresses skepticism that such campaigns "work": "They seem to appeal only to the hardcore faithful who will be shelling out to see the product multiple times anyway."
The Times story is accompanied by the video below:
Click here if the video file above doesn't play properly.
Some of the more interesting details to emerge in this story include:
There is another irony. The actor who plays Jesus, Ahmad Soleimani-Nia, once was a soldier in the Iranian army and later a welder for Iran's Atomic Energy Agency, which the Bush administration accuses of pursuing nuclear weapons. Such footnotes don't seem odd when talking with Talebzadeh, who has kept Nia in Jesus character -- flowing hair, beard, mystic pose -- for seven years because he never knows when he might shoot new sequences for the film.
The actor has kept a pose for seven years!?
The rough, choppily edited $5-million film, condensed from a 1,000-minute-long series that will soon air on Iranian TV, reveres Jesus as a blessed prophet speaking parables and moving through soft light and angelic chants amid a ruckus of zealots and conspiring Pharisees.
A thousand minutes!! That's, like, almost 17 hours. I guess that's not too impossible, though, considering it's about the length of 22 hour-long TV episodes without the commercials -- in other words, the length of a typical North American TV season.
MAY 5 UPDATE: Matt Page notes that director Nader Talebzadeh "seems more evangelistic in this piece than previous articles have suggested." He also notes that Times reporter Jeffrey Fleishman posted a brief item about the film at the newspaper's blog.
The debate over Bill C-10, the proposed law that would permit the government to deny tax credits to Canadian films that are deemed to be offensive in some way, has now been kicked up to another level or two.
First, the Globe and Mail reports that the federal finance minister has said he considers this bill a matter of confidence, meaning the opposition parties could trigger an election if they vote the legislation down -- and it looks like the opposition parties are still vowing to amend the bill against the finance minister's wishes anyway. However, the opposition Liberals have frequently threatened to bring down the Tory government over the past several months and have consistently backed off from doing so in the end. What's more, the proposal that has everyone so upset right now was originally drafted by the Liberals when they were in power -- so it might be difficult for them to take all that hard a line against the proposed law, or to campaign on their opposition to it.
At any rate, the fact that the Tories have exploited a Liberal proposal to censure unacceptable works of art just demonstrates why such laws shouldn't be created in the first place: You may think that the law you create will only be used to censure works of art that you find offensive, but once another political party comes to power, you can be sure that they will use the mechanisms you created to pursue agendas of their own -- agendas that might conflict with yours.
Meanwhile, the debate has attracted attention south of the border; the New York Times ran a story on Bill C-10 yesterday -- the source of the Sarah Polley photo above -- that didn't add anything new to the coverage except for the fact that the story has now been covered in The Paper Of Record.
And of course, people continue to speak out against the bill. John Moore of the National Post asks, among other things, why the government can't spare money for the arts if it can afford to "pay pork farmers $50-million for their unprofitable pigs", as it did a couple weeks ago. He adds: "The problem with Puritanical societies is they are renowned for their chastity and temperance, but never for their art or creative leisure."
MAY 9 UPDATE: The Globe and Mail reports that some Liberal senators disagree with Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's claim that Bill C-10 is a matter of confidence. Yoine Goldstein says Flaherty can make it one if he chooses to, but since the bill concerns mere details of tax law and is not a full-fledged budget, it is not automatically a matter of confidence, per se.
A friend of mine wrote to ask if I felt any "outrage" over the kiss that takes place in the newest TV spot for The Chronicles of Narnia:Prince Caspian. In a nutshell, no I don't, at least not yet; I am willing to wait and see how it fits into the broader film, though I must say the kiss should be deeply awkward for Caspian, at least, since to him Susan is no ordinary girl but, rather, one of the legendary, even mythical, Kings and Queens of Narnia come to life. (Imagine if your favorite hero from centuries past were to suddenly pop into your life -- and then kiss you on the lips.) If this film is giving me any seriously bad vibes right now, it is due to the film's alleged treatment of Peter, rather than Susan, etc.
Click here if the video file above doesn't play properly.
In other news, the Los Angeles Times explains why director Andrew Adamson came back to make a second Narnia film:
ADAMSON, WHO also directed the first two "Shrek" films, wasn't sure he wanted to return to Narnia, even though the first film was acclaimed by critics, embraced by families and has grossed more than $748 million worldwide. But he looked into the eyes of the then-10-year-old Georgie Henley and changed his mind.
Henley plays Lucy, the youngest of the four Pevensie children who enter Narnia's timeless world. When Adamson was directing Henley in the first film, she couldn't cry when he needed her to, after the lion Aslan's death. Henley had always wept watching "The Lion King," so Adamson cued its DVD up, but that didn't work, either. Running out of ideas, the director shared with Henley his doubt that he would direct the next film. The tears finally came.
Months later, with the first film completed, Henley sidled up to the New Zealand-born director. "When you said you weren't going to do the sequel, were you saying that just to make me cry or because you really didn't want to do the sequel?" she asked Adamson. "That made me want to do it," the director says. "When you look into those eyes, you can't say no."
Well, I can certainly sympathize with that; Henley is indeed irresistibly endearing, and the franchise's best asset. But alas, it looks like those of us who concluded that Adamson wasn't right for this franchise must now hold Henley responsible for the fact that he came back and did not let a better director take the reins.
MAY 11 UPDATE: NarniaWeb reports that, according to Anna Popplewell, who plays Susan, the film was going to feature a fair bit of "flirting" between Susan and Caspian, but the "flirting" has since been "removed from the final cut of the film, so that the kiss was more of an impetuous thing rather than a running theme."
A few days ago I posted a trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that had apparently been filmed surreptitiously and leaked onto the internet. By the end of the day, however, the trailer had been taken down. Well, now it's back online again -- and in high-definition -- on the movie's official website. As before, it gives us new glimpses of the crystal skull and of the John Hurt character, so I have added screen-captures from this trailer to my blog posts on those particular subjects.
Last week saw the release of Baby Mama and Then She Found Me, two movies that, as Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times pointed out, both concern "a woman in her late 30s who is desperate to have a baby." But one of those films opened in over 2,500 theatres across the continent, while the other one opened in only 9, so it wasn't really a fair fight -- and I'm sure you could always find some obscure flick and match it with a mainstream release if you were looking for coincidences of that sort.
More interesting, I think, is the face-off this week between Iron Man and Made of Honor. The former film, which I have seen, is a superhero movie heavy on the masculine machinery, while the latter film, which I have not yet seen, is a romantic comedy that has, as they say, been released this week as "counter-programming" designed to appeal to all the women out there whose boyfriends have abandoned them for the metal guy. But I wonder if the two films are all that different, really.
I mean, think about it. Based on the trailer for Made of Honor and my viewing of Iron Man last night -- at a stupid suburban theatre that cropped the top, bottom and sides of the picture, but that's another post for another day -- I think it is safe to say this much: Each film is about a promiscuous man who enjoys a platonic relationship, and indeed is best friends of a sort, with a particular woman who is wise to his ways but isn't bothered by them because, well, they're not lovers or anything. And both films suggest that the relationship changes, and the man feels an itch to become more responsible, after the man and the woman spend several weeks or months apart on separate continents.
Is that a stretch? Well, yeah. But there is an element in Iron Man that is as old as the romantic comedy genre itself, and I wonder if that might help the film appeal to the so-called female quadrant, i.e. to the intended audience of films like Made of Honor. Certainly my wife liked Iron Man, and she got a kick out of the Tony Stark-Pepper Potts relationship -- but then, she has always preferred superhero movies to romantic comedies anyway.
I haven't had a chance to listen to the director's commentary yet, but I checked out the bonus disc that comes with The Golden Compass today, and one comment in particular stood out from the nearly three hours of behind-the-scenes documentaries. In the featurette on the film's production design, executive producer Mark Ordesky states:
Dennis Gassner started with the idea of Lyra and her world as this pure place, so to use -- to sort of take that into a visual metaphor, he came up with the idea of the circle, you know, a perfect circle. A circle's a pure form, and this'll be cool when you're watching the movie. If you look closely in the production design of Oxford, you'll see the circle represented in a number of ways. The spirit projector that Asriel shows, the lenses are these perfect discs. The alethiometer is a perfect form, it's a circle. And you move from Oxford and you get to London, you start to see a different form, which is the oval. And the oval is an impure form, it's an impurity of the circle. And as you track his production design -- when you look at Bolvangar, you look closely at Bolvangar, you'll see that oval. Even if you look at the Magisterial emblem, you'll see it. So it's a changing of the form, and in a weird kind of way, the villainy of the movie and the books is trying to change Lyra, in the same way that the perfect circle that is Lyra, that is the golden compass, that is Oxford, gets bent and changed. And I've really, really oversimplified it, but if you're looking for one sort of visual metaphor for Dennis's approach to production design, that would be it.
I find this striking because the film and the books, broadly speaking, are about the loss of innocence and the acquisition of knowledge, and historically, I have long associated the contrast between circles and ovals with Johannes Kepler's discovery in the 17th century that planets move in imperfect ellipses rather than the perfect circles that astronomers had believed in for centuries. In other words, I always thought circles were associated with the pre-modern immature innocence that Philip Pullman associates with Adam and Eve, while ovals were associated with the modern grown-up knowledge that Pullman associates with the serpent and the Fall. In other words, I would have thought that Pullman preferred ovals to circles, just as he prefers knowledge and the messy imperfections of this life to innocence and the promises of perfection made by religion. But the film seems to go the other way, making the circles good and the ovals bad. Fascinating.
Here are some screen captures of the Oxford circles:
And here are some screen captures of the non-Oxford ovals:
Click on any of the images above for a larger version.
Time to unload another stockpile of links 'n' things.
1.Bridge to Terabithia (2007) was a modest hit, so now, reports Variety, it is time to convert one of Katherine Paterson's other children's novels to the big screen, namely The Great Gilly Hopkins. Like the film version of Terabithia, this one will be based on a screenplay by Paterson's son David. I read the book once, a couple decades ago, and I remember very little of it beyond the fact that there was a fair bit of swearing -- so it will be interesting to see how the film turns out, if, as Variety says, the filmmakers do intend to make this a "movie for children". For what it's worth, Paterson has also called the novel "the most openly Christian book I have written".
2.The Hobbit director Guillermo Del Toro has given another interview, this time to MTV News, in which, among other very interesting things, he nicely dismisses recent efforts to cast doubt on his affinity for the works of Tolkien:
MTV: Just two years ago, you were quoted as saying, "I was never into heroic fantasy." Did your views change?
Del Toro: I wasn't. I completely gravitated towards horror. For whatever reason, I never hooked into sword and sorcery. I really rediscovered fantasy through my love of filmmakers as a filmmaker. Something kind of popped and jelled. I now can empathize with one side of the fantasy genre without ever wandering into lubricated musclemen with giant swords. "The Hobbit" occupies a particular seat in fantasy that is irreplaceable. They can dredge up old cadavers in my closet. I'm not running for president. I'm a f---ing filmmaker! I'm just trying to make the movie I want to.
3.Variety reports that Mel Gibson is going to step in front of a camera again for the first time in years, as the star of Edge of Darkness, a remake of a British mini-series from the 1980s. Coincidentally, Gibson's last speaking part was a supporting role in The Singing Detective (2003), which was also a big-screen remake of a British mini-series from the 1980s. Even more interesting: The new version of Edge of Darkness is written by William Monahan, and Gibson once claimed that he had been offered a part in The Departed (2006) -- which was also a remake written by William Monahan.
4.Lou Lumenick reports that a new DVD edition of How the West Was Won (1962) will digitally erase the "join lines" that were an inevitable byproduct of the original three-panel Cinerama process. Apparently only one other fiction film, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), was shot using this technique, but that film was also shot in CinemaScope, so existing video versions have been transferred from a one-panel master. How the West Was Won, on the other hand, only existed in the three-panel format -- until now. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this; I have never seen this film, and a part of me thinks it would be nice to watch the film without the ugly "join lines", but a part of me also thinks I should experience the film the same way everyone else has experienced it until now.
5.High-Def Digest confirms that a "director's cut" of Alex Proyas's Dark City (1998; my article) is due to come out on DVD and Blu-Ray in July. RopeOfSilicon.com says the "director's cut" will be about 15 minutes longer than the version that came out one whole decade ago.
6.The New York Times has an article looking at how some of the more racist cartoons produced by Warner Brothers way back when are now available on YouTube, despite efforts by the studio to suppress them. One complicating factor is that some of the cartoons are so old, it's not exactly clear who owns them, if anybody. Jerry Beck says the article "has had an (unintended?) effect in further spreading the awareness of said cartoons", though it has apparently also prompted YouTube to yank one of the videos that Beck links to.
For the past 17 years, Walt Ruloff has done an admirable job of keeping out of the public eye. For years, the business press seemed to miss the tale of how he, along with a roommate, built a world-beating software company out of their Toronto bedroom. After just seven years, when they sold Inter-Trans Logistics Solutions to a U.S. buyer for $160-million, "I took my family and my little kids and we hid off on a little island called Bowen Island, just outside of Vancouver," he says. There they stayed, unnoticed, unbothered. Until now. . . .
"I'm definitely not a creationist. I'm the furthest thing from a creationist," says Mr. Ruloff, who produced the film through his company, Premise Media. Just a mild-mannered West Coast Anglican venture capitalist, he maintains, who was trying to do a bit of biotech investing one day when he stumbled upon what he believes are the taboos of biology.
"The first thing I discovered in talking to these biotech engineers was they weren't allowed to ask a whole bunch of questions; they weren't allowed to collaborate under these new paradigms that were being discovered," he says.
"They were all kind of talking in code. I realized that the issue was that what they were discovering has massive metaphysical implications and so they were trying to retrofit their findings back into a Darwinist position."
Coming from the software business, Mr. Ruloff explains, he was used to tossing commonly accepted thinking out the window every few months. "People in the biology field and biotech and microbiology are kind of on the threshold of some massive breakthroughs, and they need to be able to collaborate. And if what they find has metaphysical implications who cares? If Darwinism is going to collapse, well, who cares? Let's move on." . . .
Still, the film is having an impact. Private screenings for lawmakers in Florida and Missouri have helped fuel state bills that could put intelligent design into public classrooms. But while he waits to see if his project brings change to the halls of academia, Mr. Ruloff is warming to his new career. "What I loved about software [is] it's very creative, very dynamic, very fluid. And the movie business is all that on steroids. If we are profitable and we can figure this Holly-wood machine out, we hope to make a lot more films."
When it comes to matters of faith, there's a built-in market for such films as Expelled among America's 70 million or so Evangelical Christians. "Being a capitalist that I am, there's an opportunity here."
Former Rep. Charles Wilson played no official role in the making of last year's film "Charlie Wilson's War," which chronicled how he helped the Mujahedeen repel the invading Soviet army in the 1980s.
If the Texas Democrat had participated, it's clear he would have cast an actor to portray a figure all but ignored in Mike Nichols' production — President Reagan.
"He was absolutely essential to the victory," over the Soviets in Afghanistan, Mr. Wilson says during a phone interview to promote "War," out on DVD this week. . . .
"There just wasn't time," he says, adding former Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill deserved a film mention as well for his support of Mr. Wilson's efforts. . . .
"Charlie Wilson's War" ends with a cautionary note about the lack of follow-through that left a power vacuum in Afghanistan.
"The American people are a generous people, a creative people, a can-do people, but we have the world's shortest attention span," he says, a lesson he hopes will be applied to the current Iraq war.
"Learn from it. Finish the job," he notes, adding that the United States owes it to Iraq to reconstruct the battered nation. "We must at least try." . . .
9.ComingSoon.net has an interview with Superman Returns (2006) star Brandon Routh that might shed a little light on what producer Thomas Tull meant by that "angry god" comment:
CS: What sides of Superman and Clark Kent are you excited about exploring in the sequel? Routh: Well, I think that something that audiences are looking for – and I certainly am, too – is for Superman to actually be able to lay a punch on someone or something. I was filming and I thought, "I haven't really hit anything. I feel like I'm going to need to let some of this anger out." So I'm happy that I think that's going to be a central part of the sequel, getting a good villain that we can actually have physical altercations with.
10.The National Post has an update on the war of words between Paul Rusesabagina, the hotelier played by Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda (2004; my review), and Paul Kagame, the current president of that country. Kagame says Rusesabagina is a lying opportunist; Rusesabagina says Kagame is a war criminal.
It’s about a rash of thefts of baby Jesuses (Jesi?) from manger scenes all over Denver during the holidays. As Denver DJ Warren John Narrates from atop a billboard in an encroaching blizzard, the city is whipped into a frenzy over the rash of disappearances. Throughout the ensuing hullaballoo, the interpersonal relationships between characters are explored against the backdrop of faith tested; parent to child, husband to wife, friend to friend. It’s “Love Actually” meets “Miracle on 34th Street;” a holiday piece that connects seemingly unrelated dots to a conclusion both touching and funny.
12.The Hollywood Reporter says Cloud Ten Pictures, the Ontario-based outfit that has produced the LeftBehindtrilogy (2000-2005) and a slew of other end-times movies, has promoted writer-director Andre van Heerden to the position of CEO, while Variety says the studio has signed a new distribution deal with Koch International, after being dumped rather suddenly by Sony.
It doesn't happen often, but there are times when I wish I had that boxed set of the original Batman films, just so I could fact-check stuff like this. Is the trailer below for Tim Burton's Batman (1989) the real deal, in which case Chris Nolan and the marketing team on The Dark Knight are mimicking the earlier film's ad campaign and are thus twisted geniuses far beyond anything I ever realized? Or did someone edit the trailer for Burton's film together to mimic the trailer for Nolan's film? Christopher Campbell, who starts out by writing as though the old movie's trailer is genuine, leans towards the latter option in the end, and so do I. (For one thing, I doubt that a trailer back then would have followed the Warner logo with a wordy title card giving credit to DC Comics; my hunch is, that bit was pinched from the earlier film's opening credits, to create a parallel to the extra logos that appear at the beginning of the new trailer.) But I kind of wish Nolan and his team were the sort of twisted geniuses who might have done something like this.
Click here if the video file above doesn't play properly.
APR 29 UPDATE: Speaking of Dark Knight trailers, check out this leaked video of the new trailer due sometime this week:
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APR 30 UPDATE: Here is another version of the new trailer, which has apparently been "defaced" by the Joker.
Click here if the video file above doesn't play properly.
