Nobody Knows Anything

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *.

Lilo & Stitch (2002)

In the wake of all of the extras I saw last week, I had to watch the film again, and it continues to hold up. It stars Tia Carrere as the voice of Nani, and she turns up in…

Rising Sun (1993)

The launch of a new format provides some subtle clues to what the film companies regard as their major potential sellers. 20th Century Fox launched widescreen VHS with Die Hard, Alien and the original Star Wars trilogy, and this film, which turned up on DVD three years after the format launch, is one of Fox’s first back catalogue releases on Blu-ray. Clearly, there must be some kind of audience out there waiting to snap it up in high definition. This isn’t a cult audience eagerly awaiting the arrival of Donnie Darko (2001); this isn’t an audience that’s set up websites to discuss the fascinating topic of precisely how many minutes of screen time take place in cars driving between buildings during both night and day so Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes can fill us in on the plot and provide what passes for character development in the Michael Crichton universe (this isn’t a diss; I like Michael Crichton’s work a lot). Rising Sun must have been a solid, consistent seller on DVD over the last 8 years for it to reach the head of the high definition queue. Yet as a movie, it’s only solid rather than spectacular, a chance for Philip Kaufman to assure executives made nervous by the NC-17-rated Henry & June (1990) that he’s still a commercial filmmaker. It’s one he made for them, rather than for himself.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) *

So where does that leave Guillermo Del Toro’s highly touted and eagerly awaited (especially by me) sequel to 2004’s original? Del Toro has received extensive critical approval for the films he’s made in Spanish - Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) - whereas his films in English have for the most part been more financially successful but subject to a fair number of sniffy reviews. Even though, for someone like myself who’s seen all of them, they have mostly been constructed from terribly similar personal obsessions - clockwork, insects, surrealism, and so on - and in a weird kind of way have fed off each other and enabled each individual project to come to fruition. Hellboy II only started to seem like a bankable idea again (Hollywood watchers will note that this sequel has been produced - maybe uniquely - by an entirely different corporation) after the critical praise dealt out to Pan’s Labyrinth, and the original Hellboy only fell into place after Blade II (2002) was a major hit. Del Toro has made the sequel more him and less Mignola, when what made the original work so well were all the quirky Mignola-style character notes that were especially emphasised in the Extended Cut of the original. So the sequel looks fabulous, every dollar of the budget is on the screen, and yet it’s nowhere near as interesting. It has a straightforward narrative, more old school Dr Who-style running around in tunnels, and an action beat (read: fight scene) every 10 minutes. The emotional heft of the story has been lost, which in the wake of the strong impact of Pan’s Labyrinth, is especially disappointing. All we can hope is that Del Toro will rediscover his mojo with The Hobbit films, and there won’t be quite so much running around in tunnels, except perhaps under the Misty Mountains. And in Smaug’s cave (I think Smaug lives in a cave, right?). Oh.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Maybe Del Toro should take a leaf out of the Coens’ book, and never make a film for them, meaning the studios, although there was Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and The Ladykillers (2004), and they’re better than you think, cause, y’know, it’s the Coen brothers. I’m still learning to like the Lebowski, but I’m getting there. It is really unusual for a major studio release, though, and you can see why this film has become a cult and Rising Sun hasn’t.

I haven’t found time in my busy schedule to watch anything like a proper movie this week, even though Hellboy 2 has now made it into cinemas. Hurrah! Instead, this post’s title should be sufficient to warm the heart of any longtime DVD purchaser, and was prompted by my recent acquisition of the Walt Disney film, Lilo & Stitch: 2-Disc Special Edition, the edition that almost never was. This week’s title in bold is the title of the documentary on Disc 2.

The Story Room: The Making of Lilo & Stitch (2005)

While it might seem in many ways a minor entry in the Walt Disney canon, recent developments in the world of animation have assigned it another place of importance: it was the Disney studio’s last major 2D animated hit when in 2002 it outperformed the much more expensive (and by no means terrible) Treasure Planet (2002) at the American box office. And this 2nd disc of the DVD release includes an indepth 2 hour exploration (which can be expanded to about 3 1/2 hours with a bunch of supplemental featurettes) of how two first-time writer/directors (though both Disney veterans in other areas), Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, pulled it off.

This release followed in the tradition of the exemplary 2-Disc Special Edition release of Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), where, regardless of the qualities or not of the finished product, a comprehensive 2 hour documentary (amongst many other features) told in impressive detail how and why it had been brought to the screen.

It was at this stage that the Disney villain of the piece, then-CEO Michael Eisner, enters the picture. Propped up by a bunch of unreliable marketing reports (”parents didn’t like changing the discs” - so don’t buy the SE, buy the standard edition, you dopes - duh!), irritating corporate bottom-line-ism and his own personal prejudices, Eisner decided that 2-Disc Special Editions which paid respect to a large number of the artists who created these films were to be shitcanned and replaced with bog-standard, feature-light DVDs packed not very full with crappy DVD games for kids and Gareth Gates music videos for no one.

This wouldn’t have been much of a problem except that at this time Disney had embarked on a series of dedicated 2-Disc Platinum Edition releases packed to the gills with the kind of indepth documentary materials, commentary tracks, DTS soundtracks and the like, the majority of which was clearly aimed at adult DVD collectors like me, and not the kids that Eisner thought should be the Special Edition’s intended market; this is precisely the kind of arrogant, blundering wrongheadedness that was ultimately to cost Eisner his job.

The immediate effect of this was that The Lion King (1994) still came out as a 2-Disc Special Edition, but was curiously denuded of a lot of the kind of exemplary background material that had characterised previous releases in the series. Instead there were any number of plugs for The Lion King Broadway musical and featurettes about how great Walt Disney World was, and wasn’t it about time you paid a visit? And The Lion King had been Disney’s biggest recent hit! It deserved much better treatment than this.

One of the other casualties was the 2-Disc Special Edition of Lilo & Stitch, which at the time of writing has still not been released in the US. Eisner has now gone, Pixar has taken over Disney, and it is yet to be seen whether or not the much ballyhooed commitment the Pixar team have publicly made that they would support a 2D animated feature if they felt it was the right way to tell the story will come true. Let’s hope so.

Lilo & Stitch was the little film that could, it was the last film of the much derided Thomas Schumacher era (appointed Animation CEO in the wake of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s controversial departure, though disappointing returns from Treasure Planet led to Schumacher’s departure as well) to connect with a popular audience, proof that a good story, well-developed characters and great jokes could still win through in 2D at a time when the domination of 3D animation had started to become one obvious future. But, for just one example, as the films of Hayao Miyazaki showed, especially Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), not the only one.

No cinema visits this week. Hellboy 2 still not released. Boo.

The Da Vinci Code (2006)

Time in film can be interestingly elastic. The events of The Da Vinci Code take place in the course of a single 24 hour period, possibly due to Dan Brown’s lack of experience as a novelist or perhaps his desire to adhere to the Aristotelian unities. Or something like that. On the face of it, 24 hours seems like a ludicrously short period of time for the might of the Catholic Church to be brought metaphorically to its knees by the shocking, unspoilered here revelations of the film’s narrative, or for Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) to uncover them.

This time compression happens out of necessity. For example, how long does it take Jake Gittes to go from photographing Burt Young’s adulterous wife to being told to “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” Two weeks? A month? In fact, and I’m not going to check as I know the film enough, it’s a lot less than a week. It seems like a longer period of time as a result of the film’s languid pacing.

On the commentary track for Les Rivières Pourpres (2000), Vincent Cassel points out just how superhuman the two cop characters played by himself and Jean Reno are to have uncovered the complicated, long-running conspiracy that faces them in just a few days. Cassel quite rightly points out that in reality uncovering this kind of conspiracy would take months of boring and monotonous research, if it could even be uncovered at all.

Yet we accept this as a convention of thriller-going and would feel rather cheated if, like the cops in Hot Fuzz (2007), crimes were solved by paperwork rather than by the kicking in of doors, or the punching of faces, or the shooting of guns.

Brick (2005)

In a related vein, Joseph Gordon-Levitt ties up another hideously complicated noir plot in under a week, although he has skipped most of his classes in order to do so, since Brick is set not in the metaphorical state of mind of Chinatown, but in the San Clemente High School which writer-director Rian Johnson attended. Loaded with MacGuffins, femme fatales and stylised dialogue, this is the kind of indie gem made for spare change that the Sundance Festival and seasoned moviegoers live for. A reminder that what you really need in the movie business is a unique point of view distinct from everything else in the marketplace rather than the same old same old recycled yet again. Even though this film noir is old as the hills in plot terms and narrative devices, its location in high school sets it apart and makes it shine.

Just one cinema release, marked with a *. Roll on, Hellboy 2, I’ll be able to see it on DVD from America sooner than it appears in UK cinemas.

Out of Time (2003)

There’s a second (or maybe it’s the third) tier of American film directors who can be relied upon to helm solid character pieces or decent genre work, the kind of films that are too good not to release in theatres, but a long way from being straight to DVD fodder. Discovering these directors is a little more tricky than being, say, a Tim Burton film, since the nature and scale of their productions means the promotional budget gets scaled down appropriately (worst case scenario: there is no marketing budget). Carl Franklin is one of those directors, and Out of Time is eminently solid genre fare with one absolute standout fight sequence that starts in a hotel room that really caught my attention (as it will catch yours, should you catch this film). Carl Franklin is not going to let you down if you want to see a real movie like they used to make them. And he’s not alone.

The Prestige (2006)

I want to see this again. Immediately. Even after it told me I was going to be sideswiped going in (the film is about magic and magicians after all), it still caught me out with the kind of twist that only seems obvious in retrospect. Almost casually thrown away between the two batbusters, this is Christopher Nolan reminding everyone that he’s the same director who made Memento (2000), and his mastery of non-linear storytelling that retains its clarity remains intact.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008) *

Hmm, yes, it was a bit of a let-down after the build-up, and it was more like a good TV episode than something that demanded to be told as a movie. Duchovny and especially Gillian Anderson remain very watchable, but Chris Carter et al really don’t seem to have quite worked out the climax of the A-plot and seemed at times rather more interested in the subplots of the narrative than the main event. The one thing the original X-Files movie had which this one doesn’t was size and ambition. And the final Easter egg for the fans in the credits may tell you that the filmmakers know this as well.

Planet Terror (2007)

Well, it took a year but I’ve finally had my Grindhouse (2007) experience (sort of). Although we know why Rodriguez and Tarantino did this (actually to deliver on the promise of grindhouse trailers instead of shortchanging the audience in true exploitation style), I remain ambivalent about the end results. There’s something very misguided about spending an awful lot of money to reproduce (sort of) the effects that were achieved back in the 1970s with chump change and a lot of audience goodwill (and sometimes not even that - some grindhouse films are so ineffably awful that even Tarantino can’t bring himself to champion them - maybe). The most celebrated moment in Planet Terror is the missing reel jump in which all sorts of mayhem happens. Oh, and Machete: there were times I was thinking I’d much rather have watched that movie.

Death Proof (2007)

There’s an awful lot of talk, then a really good stunt, then there’s an awful lot of talk, and a really good chase. And someone somewhere should start an online petition to remind Tarantino that he really isn’t a very good actor, and his cameos should be smaller rather than larger. Anyone for the 6th film from Quentin Tarantino? Me, I’m waiting for his 8 and a half.

Three cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

WALL•E (2008) *

In which Pixar continues to pull away from DreamWorks Animation, proving that its focus on story, character and originality is a far more successful strategy than DreamWorks’ focus on celebrity voices and pop culture references. Pixar may not be at the Studio Ghibli level yet, but it’s definitely getting closer, and it has still to produce a single film that can be fairly described with the words average or mediocre or poor. It’s also good to see a film with an environmental message that doesn’t try to beat you over the head with it. It may be okay to make a film about a man standing in front of a Powerpoint presentation saying it’s all going to hell, but it’s much better to achieve the same result with cute (and frankly, not so cute) robots, a cockroach and the last surviving humans. Oh, and really, really good visual jokes, delivered at a furious pace.

Mamma Mia! (2008) *

The jukebox musical is a much derided beast, and rightly so. Appealing to the kind of popular music fan who only buys one record a year, and that record is a Christmas-released greatest hits compilation of some pop act they remember listening to twenty years earlier, the jukebox musical assembles an endless stream of songs, either from one act or from one genre of music, strings them together with a musical book so utterly stupid (We Will Rock You) or so utterly light (Mamma Mia!) that the end result has no substance whatsoever. The jukebox musical has proved that there are some song catalogues that cannot be mined for frothiness (Bob Dylan’s, for one), and it has proved to be enormously popular with the aforementioned popular music fans, the great unwashed masses of people who don’t really listen to music anymore, but don’t mind a lot of songs by Queen or Abba or Madness being packaged up and presented to them to singalong to in a theatrical context. Dismissed by critics, but embraced by the public, the jukebox musical is only too willing to show once more that the public has no taste. And having said all that, Mamma Mia! the movie was utterly irresistible and I enjoyed it enormously. So I have no taste either, and am just like the public. Rats! Centred as it is on the ups and downs of romantic relationships, Abba’s song catalogue makes a better fit redefined in a musical form than, say, the songs of Bob Dylan, which draw upon a greater range of subject matter that resists compilation into a flowing show. Mamma Mia! doesn’t really have a plot, though it does seem eerily like a Shakespearean comedy, and it doesn’t really have characters, just corny stereotypes. What it does have is Abba’s songs performed by Meryl Streep (who maybe puts too much into The Winner Takes It All) and Pierce Brosnan (who can’t really sing but isn’t going to let that stop him) et al, and perma-sunny locations in Greece, partly recreated at Pinewood. It’s candy floss cinema, and in this case, that’s not so bad.

Hairspray (1988)

In which John Waters, possibly feeling the effects of the Reagan era more than most filmmakers, rather than continue to subvert mainstream cinema from the outside, attempts to subvert it from the inside. Packed to the seams with great dialogue (”My diet pill’s wearing off”, “Our skin is white but are souls are black”, etc) and possibly even greater music (handpicked dance classics from the days before the Beatles), all Hairspray does in the subversion stakes is put a fat girl who can dance in the lead. These days, this wouldn’t feel at all out of place (or would it?), but this was twenty years ago, and no film director in America was casting large women as leads, they could be the lead’s best friend, but that was about it. And somehow this led Waters to Ricki Lake in her first movie, and Divine in his last.

the devil wears prada (2006)

I watched the first episode of Sex and the City (1998-2004), and swiftly decided that it wasn’t for me. The piece was packed with the kind of poor writing, sloppy generalisations and lazy stereotypes that characterise so-called think pieces in women’s magazines, and I couldn’t believe someone thought this would be a good idea for a TV series. Sex and the City may have got more interesting, but it did so without my support. And so to this movie, inhaling heavily from the Sex and the City vibe, based on Lauren Weisberger’s chick lit novel about her experiences as the new Emily for Vogue’s notorious editor in chief, Anna Wintour (and I’m not using the word allegedly here). The commentary track spends an inordinate amount of time detailing the designer outfits everyone is wearing with, appropriately enough for Americans, no sense of the irony involved in doing so. Having dipped in and out of publishing myself, it was nice to see that a lot of the details are spot on: everyone uses Macs, there’s “the book”, a kind of portable flatplan that’s the Bible for every issue, and Meryl Streep’s disdainful attitude and throwaway putdowns (this might seem over the top but these people are really out there, and publishing seems to attract them like moths to a flame).

The Dark Knight (2008) *

For the record, this was a sold out screening at the IMAX Birmingham, and it was every bit as great as everybody said it would be. It’s one thing to see this film in a conventional cinema, but it’s quite another to see it on a screen forty feet high with the majority of the action sequences actually filmed in IMAX filling the screen. Considering that this is only a comic book movie, the plotting is dense and complicated, and I have the feeling this won’t be the only time I see it. And if you can’t get to see a screening of this film in the IMAX format and you already like the film, you really owe it to yourself to make an effort to try. It’ll be worth it. As for the film itself, having devoted a whole chunk of running time in Batman Begins (2005) to the hero’s origin story, Christopher Nolan feels able to hit the ground running on this one as did Sam Raimi with Spider-Man 2 (2004). Continuing the Mob motif in Gotham from the first one (which I’m reasonably sure is a lift from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween), Nolan relies on Heath Ledger to up the intensity even further with his turn as the Joker, and I tell you, it’s like someone gave Ledger a copy of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Batman: Arkham Asylum and Ledger did his utmost to bring the Joker in that book to the screen. The majority of the cast return from Batman Begins as well, with Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes as The Girl. And I’m not saying anything more.

No cinema visits this week, something which is very much set to change next week.

Batman Begins (2005)

In which Christopher Nolan appears to have been an inspired choice as director after many others had tried and failed, including Darren Aronofsky. The key to a comic book movie is taking it seriously on its own terms; this doesn’t mean your approach has to be humourless, but you have to believe in the world of your protagonist and their situation. As soon as you approach a comic book movie as a camp lark - as Joel Schumacher did when he took over from Tim Burton in 1995 – you’ve already lost. Seeing the film again after some time, it becomes even more impressive. What’s particularly good is Nolan’s instinctive mistrust of CGI and desire to film as much of the movie “for real” as he possibly could. In collaboration with David S Goyer on the script, Nolan also infuses the film with a pretty tricky structure, and his casting choices are spot on. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are great value, it becomes more difficult with every role to remember that Christian Bale got his break as Jim in Empire of the Sun (1987), but even Katie Holmes almost has a decent part to work with when the deadly role of “the girl” in a Batman movie has been so greatly overshadowed by Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman. Apparently, Halle Berry has also played Catwoman (2004), but I wouldn’t know, because I will never see that film. Here’s to The Dark Knight (2008) at the IMAX next week.

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

My Region 1 DVD has a discrete 6.1 DTS Japanese soundtrack which is awfully spare (I guess the reason would be expense), but this only adds to the film’s intense melancholy and isolation. It’s taken me some years to warm to this film but now I really like it. I think the principle reason is that for an 80 minute film, it’s incredibly dense with information and plot exposition (if not necessarily with plot), and you have to get past both that and the subtitles to start approaching the core of the film’s ideas about artificial intelligence, cyborgs and the philosophical differences and similarities between human life and machine life. The subtitles are essential, because, when the choice is available to me, I will never watch a film produced in a foreign language dubbed into English, regardless of how many name actors have been bussed in to perform the English dub. In the cinema, you sometimes don’t have any choice. When I saw Persepolis (2007) recently, it was the English language version of the original French soundtrack. But I guarantee that when I see Persepolis again on DVD later this year and the French soundtrack is on the disc, that’s what I’ll select to accompany the video. You lose so much of the nuances of the acting and the inflections of the actor’s voices in an English dub. There are a very few exceptions to this: Jodie Foster’s French is good enough for her to insist on dubbing her own voice in French, but for the most part, you’re stuck with what you get, and it’s jobbing actors being paid by the word to overdub, as at the beginning of Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). If this is another Almodóvar film, pedants can correct me. It’s been a long time since Women on the Verge underwhelmed me.

Hellboy (2004)

It seems an even longer time since Sony Pictures was mishandling the UK release of this film so badly I was able to see it on Region 1 DVD two months before it turned up in UK cinemas (see also The Mist (2007) this year). Very poor. Thankfully, the Hellboy franchise has been moved over to Universal Pictures, and they are at least savvy enough to be giving the sequel a worldwide release on the back of Del Toro’s acclaim for Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Back in the original, Ron Perlman is indelible as the big red guy, and wrings every last bit of humour and pathos out of a script that wittily plays Hellboy as a working class stiff rather than a denizen of the pit. For the record, this was the Director’s Cut of Hellboy that only runs about 15-20 minutes longer than the theatrical release. As is typical of Director’s Cuts initiated by the director rather than a studio offering a needless double dip, those 15-20 minutes are pretty much all solid gold character moments that should have been left in the film in the first place, and not artificially trimmed out to squeeze in another showing in US cinemas. The theatrical release was good without those moments, but the director’s cut is much better with them.

No cinema visits this week. It’s almost like I’ve stopped watching movies for two months, but what’s really happened is that June was Euro 2008 and the first half of July has turned into database work involving all nine series of The X-Files, which HMV had very generously made available in its sale for £75. Result.

The X-Files (1998)

For the record, this was the movie, not any episodes from the TV series. One of the mysteries around the film is why it isn’t called The X-Files: Fight the Future, because this is a) a way better title than just The X-Files, and b) the title is spoken on screen by not just one but two characters at entirely separate moments. Baffling.

I’ve steadfastly resisted getting involved in X-Files boxsets over the years. I remained untempted by VHS sets (and am now jolly glad I did), and stayed away during the initial release on DVD. I was more of a casual X-Files watcher than a true fan who had to watch every episode. So there are a whole bunch of episodes towards the beginning and the end that I haven’t seen at all. Back in the days before DVD, when TV programmes were at the mercy of the schedulers, Sky kept The X-Files pretty much as exclusive as they could, and when it finally turned up on the BBC, they would move it round the schedules and cut things from it and all sorts of craziness.

It would appear that the DVD box set has now become the best way to watch serial television with reasonably finite beginnings and ends. I remember trying to watch the first series of Russell Davies’ revamp of Doctor Who with Christopher Eccleston and it was tremendously difficult trying to organise my life around a television programme after 98% of my viewing had become movies on DVD. I found it irritating. I wanted to watch Doctor Who when I wanted to watch it, and not necessarily when the schedulers wanted to. And so the BBC’s iPlayer. And so the slow, painful death of network television around the world. The spooky thing is that I don’t think enough people who actually work in TV realise that they are presiding over its demise, or at the very least the demise of TV as we now know it.

I don’t know how incomprehensible the movie might have been if you hadn’t been a slightly more than casual viewer of the TV show, since I was that slightly more than casual viewer. The one thing I remember being impressed by was how naturally great Gillian Anderson and to a lesser extent David Duchovny looked on the big screen, and how much more effectively a larger canvas coped with the onscreen darkness and gloom that is so much part of the show, and why I’m so glad I never bothered with X-Files TV sets on VHS, where the gloom can’t have worked at such low resolution.

Two movies this week, both cinema visits marked with a *.

Wanted (2008) *

Tossed away amid the morass of summer blockbusters, this return to the old school of 18 rated action movies will probably find an even wider audience with its release in the aftermarket, though it has done pretty well for itself as it stands, but not well enough, let us hope, for there to be sequels. Adapted from Mark Millar and JG Jones’ comic book (of which as a longtime, disillusioned comic book fan I have somehow managed to remain entirely ignorant), this film easily matches the enjoyable absurdity of Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) or any other favourite, balls to the wall action film of your choosing. Assembled with what I can only imagine to be bucketfulls of the original comic’s dry Scottish wit (which starts with the witty casting of James McAvoy as an action hero), it freely pilfers from The Matrix (1999) amongst others, but reassembles the elements with such crowd-pleasing surety that it manages to be at the same time wholly derivative but totally enjoyable. It’s critic proof, they say.

When I was finding my feet in filmgoing back in the day, I would look to critics I read and watched and try out films they recommended, and if their recommendation chimed with my enjoyment of the film, I would continue to value their opinions. I started rather obviously with Barry Norman, and always found him to be a pretty reasonable guide to good films worth seeing, especially if they were offbeat. But Norman had one problem, at least as far as I was concerned: he didn’t like horror films at all, and was unable to discriminate good horror from bad horror. So sitting in our local library reading the Monthly Film Bulletin and lurking in the Andromeda Bookshop in Brum somehow led me to Kim Newman, a man who lives to choose between good horror and bad horror, and who filled Norman’s horror gap nicely.

Advancing to University, I became aware of this woman called Pauline Kael, who was celebrated as the great New Yorker film reviewer of the 1970s and earlier and later, and who published a large number of her collected film reviews as books. So you could sit, when you were supposed to be researching your next essay, in our University library and read great chunks of Kael, and what I learned from her was to be exasperated, because she would write about a film I loved and praise it to the skies and tell you exactly why she thought it was great, and then you turned the page and she would write about another film I loved and decry it as the biggest heap of dogshit to hurl itself against a projection screen. She was utterly inconsistent in her opinions (for my taste at least), and thus irritatingly useless as a source of decent film criticism.

I then went through a phase of ten years of buying Empire magazine and Premiere magazine and the short lived and lamented Neon magazine, and reading a lot of reviews and suffering through all of Empire’s endless fucking ULTIMATE PREVIEWS and ULTIMATE GUIDES and generally being highly informed before I saw a film. Then I dumped all of that, stuck to subscribing to Sight and Sound, and I now prefer to know nothing at all about a film before I go to see it. I prefer to have not even seen the trailer. I don’t even read film reviews in Sight and Sound until after I’ve seen a film for myself and made up my own mind about it. Ignorance is bliss. Which is a line from The Matrix (1999).

However, something has been happening to film criticism in popular newspapers and magazines in the ten years I’ve been able to survive as a human being without consuming a single issue of Empire. What I feared was coming to pass with Empire has indeed come to pass everywhere else, and film reviewing has now become just another part of the publicity machine for the film, where what seems more important is how many stars a film wins in the five star rating system and how many “astounding”, “classic,” “hilarious,” “masterpiece” quotes the hack in question can cram into their 200 words.

There’s a wonderful website I’ve come across at www.hollywoodbitchslap.com where the folks are really, really, deeply pissed at these quote whores, as they tag them, who have displaced proper film reviewers (essentially in America, which is where the bitchslappers are based) and are only too willing to declare the worst piece of Hollywood dreck a masterpiece if someone invites them on the press junket and they get to spend some face time with the assembled talent.

I’ve met almost nobody in the film business. I was once in a room with Stephen Frears, and seen Ken Russell interviewed, and watched Alex Cox and Guy Maddin introduce screenings, and witnessed a rather embarrassing Q&A with John Hillcoat where the big elephant in the room was that the mediocre film we’d just sat through - To Have and to Hold (1996) - wasn’t much cop and both we the audience and he the filmmaker realised this, but we were all too polite and British to tell the guy he’d just wasted four years of his life, or however long it took him to raise the finance to direct something quite so underwhelming.

I’m about as far away from a quote whore as it’s possible to get.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) *

Everybody loves the 1970s and the classic films it produced except contemporary audiences who refuse to have anything much to do with films where you have to keep your brain with you for the screening and not check it in at the box office. Zodiac (2007) is another recent example of a great film that was pretty well ignored.

(As yet another aside, I know that the 70s was also full of disaster movies and yee-haw films with Burt Reynolds in a car which were as popular as hell - these films have dated as badly as Hai Karate and the great smell of Brut; you know the classic films I’m talking about, that great canon of well-respected greatness that runs from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to Raging Bull (1980), or, to my mind, Heaven’s Gate (1980), which may well be greater than Raging Bull because a) almost no one has seen the full four hour version in 70mm like I have and b) Heaven’s Gate is a film that’s a lot harder to love than Raging Bull because Raging Bull is self-evidently great, but Heaven’s Gate you have to work at.)

Like the rest of us, Ben Affleck loves those 70s films too, and his directorial debut, its release very sensibly delayed by a year after the abduction of Madeleine McCann, unfurls at exactly the same kind of languid pace as did Mystic River (2003), no real surprise as the source novelist of both stories is Dennis Lehane, and on the evidence of these two films, a writer whose work I should have been following already.

The film is subtle, exceptionally well-acted, and wholly ambiguous in the best possible way, in that it leaves you with a welcome sense of resolution that is at the same time very disquieting and really rather a long way from any kind of resolution at all. And I’m not saying anything else about that. In the 70s, you didn’t have to.

No cinema visits in the past fortnight, and evenings have been dominated by Euro 2008. With any luck, normal service will now be resumed after this midsummer break.

The Name of the Rose (1986)

Or a palimpsest of Umberto Eco’s novel. So what is a palimpsest anyway? Put simply, it’s a text written on top of another text, and, appropriately enough for a story principally concerned with the power of the written word, it dates back into the history of writing itself. It’s also the mot juste for that most vexed of cinema topics: is the book better than the film, or is the film better than the book? Or are they, as  more illuminated commentators have come to realise, entirely different entities, and questions of “better or not” are obfuscatory blurs particularly ill-suited to two opposing and contradictory media.

The classic quote on this from the writer’s point of view goes something like this: “There’s a tale about the writer who was asked how he felt about Hollywood ruining his books. His answer was to point to the bookshelf and note that the books were sitting right there and hadn’t actually been ruined at all.” I’ve seen this attributed to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M Cain, and lately even Stephen King. I’ve also seen it appropriated by other writers who’ve quoted it and applied it to their own work without acknowledging that it might be a quote with a history. It may even be an urban myth. Regardless, the point of view it expresses is a valid one, and rather than Raymond Chandler (whom I haven’t read enough), I’m going to use Stephen King for a few examples (of whom I’m a constant reader). But I could just as easily use John Grisham or James Ellroy, popular authors whose work has been filmed with varying degrees of success. (As a side note, it’s interesting to me that as John Grisham has become less formulaic and more interesting as a writer, the film adaptations of his work have more or less dried up.)

Stephen King has been particularly ill-served by Hollywood. Obviously, we know the Stephen King film adaptations that are any good: Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), The Dead Zone (1983), Stand by Me (1987), Misery (1990), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Dolores Claiborne (1995) and The Mist (2007). There are a number of other adaptations that have their moments – Christine (1983) would fit into this camp – and then there are way too many absolute dogs like The Lawnmower Man (1992) and The Running Man (1987). Why is the writing of Stephen King so difficult to adapt successfully to cinema?

The principal problem is that although one of King’s strengths is narrative, and in film, for the most part, narrative is all, it isn’t his only strength. King is particularly strong in character, dialogue and tone, and tone is perhaps the most difficult to adapt to cinema. I’ve recently acquired Warner Bros’ R1 DVD release of The Maltese Falcon (1941), which handily includes the two earlier adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, a pre-Code version with the same title filmed in 1931 and a light comedy adaptation starring Bette Davis in 1936 called Satan Met a Lady (good title). And yet the only one to click with both the public and the critics and that has entered the pantheon of classic films is the 1941 version that a) got the tone absolutely spot on and b) has been successfully retrofitted by the French as a key entry in the film noir genre. I think this is the main reason that Frank Darabont has hit three for three with his Stephen King adaptations: he gets Stephen King’s tone, and has been able to reproduce it successfully on film.

Stephen King was so ticked off by what Stanley Kubrick did to The Shining (ie. made a modern masterpiece that, particularly in its longer American cut, continues to improve every time you see it, but which departs from King’s novel in many ways) that he was able to persuade an American TV network to readapt it under the aegis of Mick Garris in 1997 and so see a more faithful version of the story produced. Naturally enough, since no one seems to have much of a good word for it, I’ve avoided it like the plague. When you’ve got what Kubrick did, why would you want some second rate, allegedly more faithful, compromise produced for US TV? Writers can be particularly poor judges of the end result of film adaptations. King’s always struck me as a highly perceptive and insightful writer, but it does amuse me that he can’t appreciate how good Kubrick’s film is. So it goes.

Which more or less brings us back to The Name of the Rose. UK purchasers of the DVD have been irritatingly shortchanged by Warner Home Video, who elsewhere in Europe have issued the film as a 2 disc set with an excellent 2 hour interview in French (subtitled in English) with the articulate director of the film, Jean-Jacques Annaud, on disc 2. Among the gems of information Annaud lets slip is that both he and Eco didn’t want to cast Sean Connery (in what is one of his best roles), Christian Slater would only audition his love scene with Valentina Vargas and not the two other women also up for the part, and that Feodor Chaliapin Jr was struck by falling masonry during the filming of the climatic scenes in the library but was more concerned whether or not they got the shot than with being hurt.

I am now re-reading Eco’s original novel, and it’s interesting to see how bits and pieces of Eco’s prose made it into the film, sometimes from dialogue, but sometimes from descriptive passages. As just one example of the magic of adaptation, in the novel the library is on the top floor of the large tower in the monastery, and both the kitchen and the refectory are also located inside the tower; in the film, the implication is quite clear that the tower only contains the library – the kitchen and the refectory magically disappear. Eco also loads the novel with a ton of historical exposition, which Annaud and his four screenwriters have successfully filleted down to the bare minimum for the atmosphere of the time to be established.

There is one particularly odd outcrop of the film publicity machine that remains more than a little baffling: the novelisation. And surely, you say, Hollywood has never made a film from a book and then ended up with another book adapted from the film (or, as is more common, the film’s screenplay)? And you would be wrong. Before I was old enough to see it, I was quite proud to own the novelisation of David Cronenberg’s Scanners. But now? There is, quite literally, only one novelisation that is worth anyone’s time and that is Orson Scott Card’s adaptation of The Abyss, which was produced to such a tight deadline and in such close collaboration with James Cameron himself, that it more closely resembled what eventually became The Director’s Cut of The Abyss than the initial theatrical release it was meant to be promoting. There is one more: horror writer Dennis Etchison wrote a pretty neat version of Videodrome under the pseudonym of Jack Martin. Everything else novelisation wise is pretty much an ecological blight and a waste of trees.

A palimpsest on top of a palimpsest is a palimpsest too far.

I’ve been watching Euro 2008 all week and no movies. As the knockout phase starts, there will actually be days without football, and I can start squeezing films in again. In the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to offer a few words on the subject of football in the movies, and why there aren’t any good movies about football, because football is really popular, right, and movies are really popular, so why can’t a combination of the two put the boffo in box office?

Of course, I haven’t seen many of these movies about football (because I’m really interested in movies and not football, with the exceptions of major tournaments or big games), although I might have seen Escape to Victory (1981) in a moment of weakness when I was younger, but who can say? Sylvester Stallone is the goalkeeper, apparently, and it must have been all downhill from there. I haven’t seen either the most recent attempt at box office gold, Goal! (2005), though according to the imdb, for a $10 million budget, it pretty much made that sum back, which doesn’t make that movie a big hit. And I haven’t seen Zidane (2006), a total football documentary that follows Zinedine Zadine over the course of one game with multiple cameras, but in the cinema this was basically relegated to an arthouse release.

The audience for cinema and the audience for football are two different audiences, and it is hopeless to try and accommodate one audience because in doing so you will only alienate the other. One recent football film I have seen is Bend It Like Beckham (2002), though the football sequences were shot as quickfire editing montages, sometimes using an open shutter a la the opening beach combat scenes in Saving Private Ryan (1998). This successfully obscured an accurate assessment of the footballing talents of the actresses involved.

But as an attempt to show the game of football, I think quickfire editing is deadly, especially when so much of what is great about football is long passes through space allowing a player to break and pass to allow another player to score, or a defender to stop them. Football is oddly uncinematic and awfully difficult to film well, and breaking it down into short bursts does it no favours (because you can assume that what’s being obscured is the twenty takes when the actor didn’t pass the ball properly), but neither does allowing it to flow uninterrupted (as I’m assuming moments in Zidane were allowed to flow) because then it stops being cinema and starts becoming television (and who wants to go to the movies and watch television?).

What must be terribly annoying about football for film directors is that, as every football fan knows, there are moments (if not endless 20 minute periods) in which nothing much happens except the ball being knocked around the park. This can be a compelling midfield battle, or it can be timewasting dullness of the first order; either way, how can you film that and make it interesting? Much better to concentrate on the goals like all those endless montages that fill up football coverage before the game starts. We know what football looks like because we see so much of it on television, and as soon as you start to interfere with that by running slow motion replays and swishing things around on screen to make it more visually interesting, you end up missing the corner, because one of the teams has taken it quickly (something which Euro 2008 TV directors have been doing at least once every match). To break with that and turn football into over-edited cinema ends up denying what makes football great. Football happens in real time, and for the most part real time is something that cinema doesn’t do very well at all.

I don’t know how good a footballer Sean Bean is, but in When Saturday Comes (1996), I’d like to bet that a good deal of his part on the football field was created through editing. What Bend It Like Beckham (2002) got right though was that a sports movie really has to be about something else if it’s going to succeed at the box office and achieve the more long term goal of becoming a film that is valued after its time in theatres has gone and the passing of time has allowed a film to continue to be valued or not.

Although there are apparently fewer words designed to cause a movie executive to choke on their coffee more than “it’s set in the world of minor league baseball,” Bull Durham (1988) has become that kind of revered classic (I love it to bits, and it’s one of those movies I can turn to when I’m feeling a bit down and in need of cheering up). Although Bull Durham is set in the world of baseball, it’s really about any number of way more interesting, character-based themes such as aging, maturity, adulthood, childishness and so on, along with generous helpings of warm sexuality and goofball humour.

The good sports movie is a field in which writer/director Ron Shelton has succeeded because he understands the sports he makes movies about because he’s played the sports in the real world and knows that the machismo that fires a sportsman up is even more compelling (and/or ridiculous) when contrasted with the no-nonsense femininity of his romantic partner. I could be wrong, but I don’t think a professional footballer has ever directed a movie (and thank heavens for small mercies). The Americans have got the sports movie down much more successfully than we have in the UK because they understand that a sports movie has to be about more than just sports. Here we make Footballer’s Wives (2002) and it’s all a bit of a disaster area because it turns out that you can’t out-tabloid the bizarre reality of tabloid football coverage.

Is there a football movie that has achieved that classic status? I don’t think there is.