…they remade The Andromeda Strain. October 28, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , add a commentPicture the scene: a Hollywood mogul sits in his office, wondering what film project to embark upon next. He frowns. Sheets of prospective script ideas are scattered on his desk. Nothing works, the scripts are either poor or too risky, too original. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt in Hollywood, it breeds success. The punters love watching stuff they’ve seen before, they don’t have to work so hard when watching it. But there’s only so many tv shows you can remake into movies, especially as tv itself has gotten into that game, as tv re-imaginings of Battlestar Galactica and Bionic Woman, Kolchak etc have proved.
The mogul wipes his sweaty brow with the back of his hand. Its all gone to hell these days. Back in the day, if you were after an idea for a movie, you just walked out the office to the bestseller racks, and picked up the latest Stephen King blockbuster. These days they are even remaking the movies of his books. Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Carrie…
So the mogul casts his beady stare over to a shelf of DVDs across the office. Somewhere there has to be inspiration there. Citizen Kane? Nah, too highbrow, and anyway, thats an Oliver Stone gig surely, and his biopic of that Alexander fella tanked. Poltergeist? Ach, already beaten to that one. The Thing? No good, heard someone’s making that now. But that John Carpenter fella was kinda hot in his day, maybe one of his… Halloween? Hmm. The Fog? Hmm. Assault On Precinct 13? The mogul snorts in disgust. That well’s pretty much been run dry of late. Ah, wait a minute. Here’s one, that Robert Wise flick, The Andromeda Strain.
This time its a tv movie, or mini-series (or whatever they call it), as its a three-hour piece spread across two nights. On DVD they maintain the two-part format. With a little editing it probably could have been ok as a single, two-hour+ piece; across three hours its somewhat bloated. There is a subplot involving an investigative reporter that is totally redundant, which keeps dragging us away from the real story. And there’s a subplot regards a military cover-up and much political wrangling. I’ve never read the book it was based on, so I have no idea if this version is any more faithful to the book than the 1971 film. The Andromeda Strain in this film is apparently a living creature, sentient, which learns from its mistakes, and actually its been sent back in time from the future, as future humanity don’t have the cure.
Its not a bad effort, just kind of pointless, as most such remakes are. Infact considering the differences it could, with a bit of work, have been an original story about a plague from the future, but I guess thats missing the point. The point with these things is to have familiarity, a brand awareness built-in. You release something called The Andromeda Strain and most punters have an idea what they are in for. You release a novel idea called Plague From The Future and no-one’s interested. Oh well.
I hear they are making another Creepshow movie. Unbelievable. First The Thing, then Poltergeist; there’s the new Conan and Tron in the works- soon it will be 1982 all over again. Please, not Blade Runner… please, by all that’s sacred…
Crom- Ratner’s Conan! October 20, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , add a commentOh well. The idea of a new Conan movie was quite interesting while it lasted. Apparently there is a script that looks good. Unfortunately though the studio, Lionsgate, appears to have signed the directorial genius behind Rush Hour and X-Men 3 to helm it. Brett Ratner. I bet Ratner never heard of Conan, except that it was a 1982 movie that starred Arnie.
Conan, of course, has a rather more interesting history that stretches rather farther back than 1982. Conan is the most famous creation, although not necessarily the best, of Robert E Howard, a Texan pulp-fiction writer of the 1920s and 30s. I’ve been a huge fan of REH’s work since I was a kid in the 1970s- my personal favourite work of his is probably the dark, brooding King Kull (which was a precursor for Conan) and his 17th-Century Puritan Solomon Kane. Solomon Kane is already being made into a movie (I believe it was being shot early this year, so is likely to be released sometime 2009), and from what I’ve heard it won’t be much like the original stories. A Solomon Kane film is probably a little redundant anyway, as the Van Helsing movie of a few years back probably owed more to Kane than any Bram Stoker character. And Van Helsing was awful.
Conan, though, is undoubtedly the most famous/popular creation of REH, mostly from the comics and subsequent movie adaptations of the 1980s. A new Conan movie has been on the cards for some time, and as a fan of the original material, it always fills you with a little dread, you know? I mean, when Hollywood gets things wrong, it gets it very wrong. The 1982 movie, while not really faithfull to the REH tales, at least maintained the spirit of the character, and was a fairly adult piece of work. It has aged well over the years, with some fantastic Ron Cobb production design and a frankly outstanding score by the late Basil Poledouris. But what would modern Hollywood do with Conan? Frankly after Van Helsing and The Mummy films I feared the worst, and getting Ratner on board is hardly an inspiring move. Fantasy has hardly the finest track record in movies, and the trouble with Conan is, you have to get back to the source, the original REH stories, and ignore all the comics and movies that diluted the character over the years. REH’s Conan had a sense of reality. It wasn’t all giant apes/spiders or mad sorcerors and crazy stunts with huge swords.
To be honest, I doubted Hollywood’s ability to ever really bring the real Conan to the big screen anyway. A real Conan would be a big, dark, adult fantasy/horror film. Howard’s Conan is a barbarian, not an audience-friendly, wise-cracking superhero. Conan is a savage whose own code of conduct is mirrored against the depravity and hypocrisy of the ‘civilization’ he wanders through. He’s a thief, a slayer, a womaniser. He eventually becomes a King, full circle to the Kull character he arose from. But he’s hardly your dashing, gorgeous hero that Hollywood would no doubt like to give us. Besides, Hollywood isn’t interested in making a movie, it wants a franchise. It wants a whole series of movies and video-game tie-ins and toys and action figures.
Over the years I’ve seen bits of movies and thought, ‘that would be great in a new Conan’. The Pyramid-Priests/builders in 10,000 BCare the Stygians, the same films mountain village looks like Cimmeria, the dark, shadowy forests of Pathfinder hint at Hyborian horror, and the mud-ridden Vikings of The 13th Warrior hint at the gritty, dirty savagery of Conan’s world. The Jerusalem of Kingdom of Heaven depicts the pomp and ceremony of the civilized Hyborian world that Conan prowled through. But what we are likely to finally get will no doubt be very different. Make Conan a superhero, throw in lots of CGI monsters… plenty of humor and wisecracks. Its all so easy to imagine what we will get.
But Hollywood does sometimes get it right, (although die-hard Tolkien fans dislike the LOTR films with a passion and would argue different). The Watchmen movie looks to have filmed the unfilmable. So it remains to be seen what becomes of Ratner’s Conan, and I hope his research stretches farther back than 1982 or Frazetta’s Conan of the 60s. No-one sets out to make a $100 million turd, do they? But then again, they make films like Spiderman 3, Ghost Rider, POTC: At Worlds End… films like Rush Hour 3. If you are a REH fan like me, it seems you have every reason to be afraid. Be very afraid.
Saw IV October 14, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 1 comment so farCouldn’t understand any of this movie. I’d seen the previous entries in the series on rentals over the years, but didn’t expect this to be quite such a serious continuation of the, ahem, ’story’. It was such hard work connecting the dots/plotholes/characters that it felt like the film itself was a jigsaw; some avant-garde reference to the baddies name? Or just bad scriptwriting- you decide.
Like just about everything else in Hollywood, in which every sequel has to be bigger, Saw IV takes the premise to ridiculous lengths. Is the bad guy a billionaire? How else can he afford to build such elaborate traps? How on earth did he sneak the Hotelroom trap into the building, set it up and activate it with no-one noticing? At every turn each more ridiculous trap shook me further out of the movie.
And someone should tell these new Hollywood directors that gore doesn’t equal scares. Saw IVis particularly gory and no doubt satisfies the gorehounds but the film is never, not once, even remotely scary. Its boring, lazy. Your typical modern horror movie.
10,000 BC October 12, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 2 commentsI was going to write a tirade about how bad scripts are these days in Hollywood, citing this film as yet another example of tired screenwriting, predictable, pretentious plotting… but I can’t be bothered. 10,000 BC. In the film our hero is an Outsider of the tribe who must prove his worth to have his childhood sweetheart. Our hero is handsome, with pearly-white teeth. The sweetheart is a stoneage supermodel. I’m bored already.
Our hero has an issue with his father who supposedly fled in shame and he must redeem his fathers memory. It transpires that there is a Prophecy that One will save the tribe… yawn… the really insulting thing, as the film progresses, is that our White Hero is going to lead tribes of ’savages’/tribesmen to freedom- pardon my language folks, but here we are again with Whitey Saving The Day. It’s just insulting. Why can’t our caveman be a black hero? Why does our hero have to look so handsome and speak such perfect English with a curiously Californian accent? Because its easy, thats why. There’s no challenge to writing or watching films like this.
There are times when interesting possibilities arise that just aren’t taken up. We are told that the big bad guy is considered a God- it is hinted that he may be an Atlantean, or possibly an Alien. If the latter, then perhaps the Pyramids he is building could be a distress signal aimed at the constellation of Orion? Perhaps if he is a survivor of Atlantis he is trying to rebuild it through the Pyramids. But nothing is progressed, the bad guy, inhumanly tall and hidden behind fabrics, is never revealed at all… the hero just throws a spear at him and kills him, story over. It’s as if there was a further half-hour of story that couldn’t be filmed so they just cut it short. And what were woolly Mammoths doing in the desert?
The frustrating thing about 10,000 BC is that it could have been a pretty good movie- certainly visually there are times that it is very impressive, but its all just undermined by a lousy script and formulaic casting. It’s Quest For Fire/Conan/Braveheart/Stargate. With surprisingly iffy CGI. Thats about it.
We meet again, Doctor Jones… October 6, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 1 comment so farOkay, I’ll kick off with the following- watched Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull on blu-ray last night, and I loved it. I thought it was a great, fun adventure movie. Okay. Now all you Kingdom-haters can drop down to the comments section below and rip into my lousy taste in movies. Okay… hmm, thats the majority of readers gone. Just a few of you left. Now, where were we?
Ah yes. I loved this movie. Now, the general consensus seems to be that this movie stank. Infact, word of mouth put me off watching this film when it first hit the cinema. It seemed to be another Phantom Menace. Now, I’m not adverse to criticising Lucas myself; the Star Wars prequels were pretty poor, and Lucas seems to be out of touch with his fanbase if The Clone Wars is anything to go by- it seems to have bombed at the cinema with a very negative rating amongst critics and fans alike. Even the latest Star Wars video-game appears to be a monumental turkey. Unbelievably, it seems that nowadays the Star Wars brand is near dead and buried, and with it any kudos/reputation Lucas may have had. Back in the early 90s people talked about Star Wars like they do about the Godfather films, with reverence and affection, but much of that seems to be gone now.
But Kingdom, for me, is one that Lucas, with his partner-in-crime Steven Spielberg, has actually gotten right. If only the Star Wars prequels had been handled this way. Kingdom may not be a classic, but it at least captures some of the charm and spirit of the earlier films. It feels like an Indiana Jones movie.
And besides, were the Indiana Jones films all that great in the first place? Raiders is a marvelous movie for the most part, a fantastic pulp adventure, but I’ve always had a problem with its ending. Indy races around the map from one perilous fight/situation to another, but ends up in a dumb visual effects spectacle that seems to have stumbled in from the Poltergeist story meetings. He stands there tied to a post with his eyes shut, and thats about it. Everyone else is consumed goggle-eyed by the ILM spectacle. This was a weakness of some of Spielberg’s earlier films- I love CE3K, but some of that visual effects finale is so long and overdone - how many tracking shots do we need towards/away from wide-eyed bystanders to convey the enormity and emotion of the mothership’s arrival/departure? In the case of the Raiders ILM showcase, it feels like its from another movie, and I’ve never been all that enamored by it. Consequently I’m bemused by the fanboy rants against Kingdoms’ conclusion. It just seems very Raiders to me anyway. And it certainly fits in with the 1950s Alien/Chariots of the Gods theme. And its funny how people think that Aliens are far-fetched but the Wrath of God in the opened Ark in the first film totally acceptable.
Temple Of Doomis just awful low-rent Indy for me. The early section in Singapore hints at what it could have been -a thrilling Indiana Jones/Fu Manchu rip-roaring adventure- but instead it falls into a not-very-interesting Voodoo-cult thing, and completely lacks a villain with character or menace. It just doesn’t interest me at all. Past readers of this blog may recall I gave it another go early this year and found it even worse than I remembered. Easily the worst of the four Indy films.
Last Crusade hasn’t dated too well either, pretty much just a comedy buddy-movie for the Jones boys, hardly what I would call an Indy film, with a non-ending (how can you make the Holy Grail so boring and inconsequential?) that baffles me. Which also raises the question why has none of the Indy films ended with a big action sequence such as those that dominate their early sections?
The best thing about all the Indy films is Harrison Ford, who is just simply magnificent in Kingdom. No-one else on the planet can play that kind of matinee-idol adventure hero so effortlessly or perfectly as he can. Watching Kingdom I was just in awe of him. It looks so deceptively easy, and he has such a screen presence, its just a joy to see him at what he does best. Its almost like seeing an old friend. People should appreciate his performance for what it is, for something special. In all the many years since the original Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies, have we ever seen anyone come even close to replicating his Indiana/Han Solo characters? Forget Tom Cruise and all the others, Ford is in a league of his own at this stuff.
Likewise I found it a joy to see Spielberg having fun again. If only Lucas could have let go of Star Wars and let Spielberg shoot one of the prequels, on this evidence it would have been something truly spectacular. In pulp-cinema mode, Spielberg is one of the masters. There’s an ease and charm and sense of fun that permeates Kingdom throughout. Its certainly superior to the National Treasure movies that came out recently.
So yes, I think Kingdom is a good movie, and my second-favourite of the series. It’s far better than what the general consensus seems to have been from the summer. I suspect people were a) expecting too much, raising the fame of the original films too highly anyway, and b) using the opportunity post-Star Wars prequels to have another go at Lucas.
Quite a few times during Kingdom I thought, if only they had approached the Star Wars prequels this way... Okay, they would never, probably could never, surpass the originals, but at least they could have been fun, have felt like the old films we loved. The prequels just don’t feel like Star Wars to me, whereas Kingdom certainly felt like an Indiana Jones movie. I met Doctor Jones again last night, whereas I don’t think I ever saw Darth Vader again in all the prequels. And I should have. We should have seen Darth Vader hunt down the last of the Jedi Knights, but we didn’t, and it seems we never will. The biggest disaster of the Star Wars prequels is that Lucas was intent on telling a story we didn’t want to see. I’d love to see another Indiana Jones movie, but I don’t really care if I see another Star Wars movie, ever.