Jumper September 21, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , add a commentWell here we go again…. throw logic and your brain out the window and settle down to another new Hollywood movie. Hayden Christensen, that remarkable thespian who somehow made Darth Vader boring, is somehow allowed to again deliver his angst-ridden/misunderstood hero routine in another sci-fi extravaganza. Who cast this movie? Did they even SEE the Star Wars prequels?
Still, Christensen’s acting credentials are the least of this films problems. I find it unnerving when there is a twist of logic that throws me out of a film to such a degree that I just can’t get back ‘into’ it. It happens in Jumper quite early on, when Christensen is tracked down by Samuel Jackson’s baddass baddie who promptly beats/electrocutes the crap out of our hero, said hero escaping within an inch of his life. Now, if I had been set upon by Jackson like that I’d have gone into hiding, laid low. Instead our hero decides to go back to his childhood sweetheart, back home where it all began eight years before. Okay, maybe if it followed my lead there would be no movie, but really… when Samuel Jackson in baddass mode is hunting you down and nearly kills you… what would the smart move be?
Fortunately for the movie our hero is dumb enough to strike up his admittedly one-way romance of eight years before and finds his sweetheart has grown up (and fortunately gorgeous) and working as a barmaid nearby, fortunately still harboring a secret torch for him despite his apparent death back in high-school. Cue romantic trip to Rome, her childhood life ambition. Cue passionate love scene in a hotel room. Agh. I can’t go on. The film was painful. I forgot to mention that back when he was five his mom split leaving him alone with a deadbeat dad- well his mom turns out to be Diane Lane, who also just happens to be head of the group of Paladins who have hunted Jumpers for centuries. Thats what Samuel Jackson is, by the way, a Paladin who kills said Jumpers for having powers only God should have- presumably similar Godlike powers such as life-saving medicine, flight, genetics, etc are okay, its just Jumping around the world that is immoral and against nature/God.
Strangely enough not ONCE does the film ever try to explain just HOW these guys can Jump around the world just by thinking about/looking at a photo of a location. The film is so lazy. Okay, it would probably just be pseudo-science techno babble but still, some effort would have been nice. It doesn’t postulate that they are mutants or freaks or evolved. It doesn’t seem to tire them/wear them out as they Jump all over the world. No premature ageing/weight-loss/burnout. They just have a cool time Jumping around the world robbing banks/chasing surf/boozing in London. And no-one explains why the Paladins don’t think to convert/coerce Jumpers to their cause to chase down their prey rather than have to fly around the world chasing them down the old-fashioned way. Or why Diane Lane’s Paladin thinks it wrong to kill her son when he turns out to be a Jumper yet finds no moral conflict killing other Jumpers. Or how she just happens to be in Rome when he needs freeing from the police.
Mercifully the film is just 84 minutes long. I ‘ve read somewhere that there are a series of novels that this film is based on. Hopefully the novels are better than the film suggests. Hopefully we won’t be seeing any of the other books transferred into sequels.
Remembering Sara Campbell… September 6, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 2 commentsThe other evening I was browsing through some old film magazines and picked up the Fall, 1979 issue of CINEFANTASIQUE, which featured ALIEN on the cover. Old magazines are fantastic time capsules, particularly those from before the Internet and before industry marketing teams turned the mags into publicity rags. But what particularly interested me was the letters section. It’s here you get the real meat of both the mag and the times in which it was published. Something like the forums that litter the Internet today, the letters columns of those old mags really give an insight into what people thought back in the day.
So I noticed a short letter berating the editor of CINEFANTASTIQUE for his negative editorials regards the popular science fiction films of the time- namely STAR WARS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and ALIEN. “I keep running across articles devoted to films which you feel are beneath your standards,” the letter stated. The writer of the letter contended that rather than being the film magazine with a ‘Sense of Wonder’ as proclaimed on the editorial, it was instead one with “a sense of hypocrisy”. Indeed, the writer of the letter noted that CINEFANTASTIQUE evidently believed that “STAR WARS was too much fun, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is nice, but its aliens too cute, and ALIEN is too yucchy and besides, it reminds you of a still you saw from PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES.”
The response from the editor, the late Frederick S Clarke, argued that he did indeed have a sense of wonder, still feeling the buzz from watching 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY back in 1968. He just didn’t seem to think much of the then-modern offerings.
I noted with some irony that I have a similar feeling nowadays, loving STAR WARS and ALIEN as old classics and disliking all the modern cgi-dominated mindless dreck we have now. Times change and yet they don’t. But what really struck me was the name of the writer of the letter- Sara Campbell. I knew that name.
Sara Campbell will forever be linked, in an albeit minor way, with BLADE RUNNER lore. Few people appreciate the fact that when BR was released, it really bombed in spectacular fashion. I think it grossed only $17 million on a $24 million production budget that needed $50 million to break even. No-one saw it and generally critical opinion was very negative. Back in late 1982 the film was over, dead, finished, and the industry was very different back then. Films didn’t turn up on £20 DVDs and Blu-Rays after four months, they disappeared for years. Films were only kept alive by their fans, who read magazines about them, collected memorabilia and the like. There was no Internet to gather together the thoughts and love of fans of movies in forums.
Here in England I watched BR dumbstruck, fell head over heels in love what has always been since then my favourite film, and watched in dismay as the film faded away out of public consciousness. It was a Cult movie back when the word Cult meant something. When in College a few years later, a lecturer looking through my art folder saw an image I had drawn from BR and waxed lyrical about the film… I remember feeling how odd it was to actually meet someone other than my mate Andy who shared my high opinion of the film. Of course years later thanks to video, BR became popular, the Directors Cut got released, critics rewrote their opinion of the film… but for those of us who saw it back in 1982, I honestly think BR feels different, special in way later fans could never understand.
Sara Campbell was one of those fans from 1982. Just as I was blown away, over in America, in Oshkoshi, Wisconsin, so was Sara, someone I would never know or meet but who shared with me a love of a special film. Sara got together with a few friends and they made a fanzine about BR, titled CITYSPEAK. You can find the first issue online if you run its title through a search engine. It’s a fascinating window into a time when BR was something new, before it became imitated, before it became popular. Back when it was something special, almost secret. Sara’s love of the film shines through. Reading CITYSPEAK I’m dragged back to those old days, how it felt back then. Later when the film became popular and the book RETROFITTING BLADE RUNNER came out, Sara’s name was mentioned as one of the first voices to popularise and analyse the film. It was the first time I had read about her and her fanzine devoted to BR.
I never got the opportunity to know or meet Sara on Internet forums, share memories of those golden days of 1982. Sara never got to see her favourite film in either its flawed Directors Cut version or completed Final Cut. Having produced three issues of CITYSPEAK, Sara died in 1985.
But its funny how someone can live on, in the thoughts recorded in letters to magazines or self-produced fanzines, so that someone half-way across the world who loved the same movie can share those thoughts and opinions, and wonder what they might have thought of the films later renaissance. I guess Sara would have been excited about the Final Cut as I was last year- I guess she would have loved it. Its a damned shame she never saw it.
So how odd the strange coincidence after all these years, reading through an old film mag and stumbling upon that letter by Sara Campbell some three years before BR came around? How weird is that? Anyway, I urge any fans of BLADE RUNNER to run CITYSPEAK through a search engine and read that fanzine and re-live that buzz from 1982, or if they saw the film years afterwards on video, learn what it was like back then for the original fans.
THE MIST September 3, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 3 commentsIts a funny thing- a few weeks ago I declared on this blog that I had given up on horror films. All the torture-porn and needless remakes (they have just announced a remake of POLTERGEIST for crying out loud) have resulted in a genre that’s getting as tired and pointless as the Western. But like with Westerns, there are, thankfully, exceptions, individual movies that shine and signal hope for its genre. Such us the case with THE MIST. It bombed in the States and got a very limited release over here, but that is no indication of quality- in fact, quite the opposite.
First, The Ending. I won’t reveal it here for obvious reasons… you really have to see it yourself. You may, like me, love it, you may, instead, absolutely hate it and the movie with it. But you will never forget it. I have not seen such a bold, brave ending in a mainstream movie for years.
Based on a Stephen King novella, and directed by Frank Darabont, THE MIST probably suffered by expectations derived from THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and THE GREEN MILE. Such expectations are unfair- THE MIST is a small-scale horror film, shot with a very low budget in just 37 days. Expecting something as radical as Kubricks THE SHINING is not realistic. This is more old-school, ‘B’-movie film-making, something more like a Twilight Zone episode than the gorefest of mutilated bodies and homicidal maniacs that modern horror films seem to have become. In some ways, its not even about the horrors that lurk in the titular Mist… it’s more about human frailties and what civilisation means. How far need we be pushed before we turn on friends and neighbours… how far can we trust the person next to us? Are we truly, basically good? When push comes to shove, how far have we progressed from the superstitious savages of our ancestors? Are some people naturally leaders, others followers?
The cast is universally excellent, demonstrating again Darabonts ability to get actors performing at their very best. You really feel for their plight, and believe in how they react in very different ways to the horror that unfolds around them. Centering around several dozen people that get isolated in a store as their town becomes enveloped by a bizarre Mist, it treats them as a society in microcosm. Some refuse to believe the horror before them, some turn to religion and superstition, some turn to logic and try to reason their way out. Some lead, some follow. They pull themselves into groups, becoming fragmented and turning on each other. And throughout they are preyed upon by the terrors that lurk within the grey mist that surrounds them.
THE MIST is superior horror, an example of old-school film-making. Probably the best horror film I have seen in years. The ending will no doubt polarize viewers… it will no doubt ruin the film for some. But for me it makes a good film great, by staying true to itself and the core arc of the movie, it’s inevitability. THE MIST is no doubt a film loved and hated, but at least it makes you feel something. I’ll be watching this film for years… haven’t said that about a horror film in a long while.