Reading Kevin Sampson’s account of Awaydays’ decade in development hell goes to show what an achievement it was to get the film made at all.
On a personal level, I didn’t know the book was published the day before my 18th birthday. I do remember seeing it when it came out because I worked in a bookshop. I was drawn in by the great cover — Trainspotting-style design combined with cool trainers. When I read the back I went cold — it was about a young Tranmere fan on the Wirral! I was a young Tranmere fan on the Wirral! It was about a young Tranmere fan on the Wirral going to loads of cool gigs! I was a young Tranmere fan on the Wirral going to loads of cool gigs!
Now I learn the film will premiere on my actual birthday, March 5th 2009. I have to be there.
Now I love Clint, but Gran Torino just looks ridiculous.
Clint Eastwood stamping on a gang-banger’s face, that I’m on board with. But the whole family in danger thing just looks a bit boring, and the trailer makes it seem as if the whole thing happens in his front garden.
Some Star Trek movie stills from MTV. Looking pretty cool.
The bridge is the wrong colour! It’s supposed to be black and red!
Vulcan nerve pinch! Stitch that! Or is that Kirk and he’s doing some mystical alien CPR or something?
Eric Bana as the evil Romulan Nero. Boo! Hiss!
The uniforms look spot on. Kirk’s black shirt is explained in the story, apparently. I really like Chris Pine in Smokin’ Aces, but here he looks like a Furby.
Look at Simon Pegg though! I’m actually genuinely excited about this.
Source: MTV Movies Blog
I wrote this a while back and it never really took off traffic-wise, but it still makes me laugh. Does not compute: The 10 most annoying kid + robot team-ups grew out of a lunchtime conversation with Nick about how lame Scott Trakker and T-Bob were. It was primarily fuelled by my longstanding hatred of Telemachus, and features a bunch of irritating little terrors and their sidekick metallic morons.
Also I should point out, having now become a massive fan of Wil Wheaton, that Wesley Crusher and Data were annoying because of the sappy crap they had to spout, when they were both awesome in so many ways. That is all.
It’s Being Jean-Claude Van Damme…
Chris Morris‘ next project, Four Lions, sounds every bit as potentially controversial as past highlights like Brass Eye. It appears, from the sketchy details emerging on the intowebs, that the film will tell the story of a British jihadi terrorist cell.
Morris has apparently been researching Four Lions for three years, during which “even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce.” The story will show that “terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks”, with terrorist cells having “the same group dynamics as stag parties and five a side football teams.” The choice of title must be deliberate, echoing the none-more-English, cry-God-for-Harry-England-and-Saint-George Three Lions, to get past “seeing these young men as unfathomably alien”.
I can’t wait to see it. Reminds me of this, from the blackly brilliant Monkey Dust…
…but knowing Morris, turned up to 11.
Source: Warren Ellis
There’s a film being made of Fantastic Mr Fox. Cool. But wait, it gets better.
It’s being directed by Wes Anderson! And Bill Murray’s in it! And George Clooney, Anjelica Huston, Cate Blanchett and Jason Schwartzman. WANT.
Somewhere between Doomsday and Sweeney Todd, Once More With Feeling and Moulin Rouge, skulks and spits…
Bit short of anything to write about, and I’ve just found my abortive attempt to think of something when my friend tried to convince me to pitch to Front (“BRITAIN’S FUNNIEST MAGAZINE”), so, for your amusement:
Dumbledore’s Beard - Other famous fictional characters who were blatantly gayers
I’m inordinately proud of that headline — the Dumbledore pun, not the use of the word ‘gayer’, please bear in mind I was trying to fit in with the style of the magazine
Mr Benn may have spent the daily nine-to-five as a straight-laced businessmen, but after-hours he dolled himself up and went on all sorts of exotic adventures.
…er, that’s it. Suggestions in the comments…
Mancrush: We know it’s wrong…
…but we still would. From Steve McQueen to Johnny Depp and Dave Grohl, we can’t help but see the ladies’ point.
On reflection the list would also include Simon Pegg, Pete Cashmore, Jason Perry and, I don’t know, Jack Bauer or someone.
I loved Awaydays by Kevin Sampson when I was in my late teens. It was about several of my favourite things: Tranmere Rovers, punk rock, the Wirral, and football hooliganism. Not so much the hooliganism actually.
I once started a screen adaptation of Awaydays. It was a bit of a Trainspotting rip-off with an opening monologue. But now someone else has done it properly…
And yes, Stephen Graham is in it.
Update: But thankfully not, as Andy points out, Danny Dyer.
OMFG, etc:
As good as it is to see rugby on the big screen, what the heck is this about?
Update: Astonishingly, this is based partly on a true story.
Won’t be around much next week, as I am invading the Far East. Tomorrow I’m flying to Hong Kong to look at Epson projectors. On Wednesday we get bussed over to mainland China for a day trip, during which we have to try not to look like journalists, and then we hit Tokyo Godzilla-style. We’ll be in the hotel from Lost In Translation. Back Sunday for three days, then off to Germany for IFA.
It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.
Update: Couldn’t get hold of Lost In Translation before I went — no time to torrent even if I did understand torrenting, and iTunes don’t have it. Then I get back and bosh: three quid in Asda which I’d only wandered into on a whim. Obviously life really does have a funny way of helping you out (which reminds me).
“A little fight in you. I like that…”
***SPOILERS!***
At the risk of harping on about The Dark Knight, I was reading the excellent Girl-Wonder.org, and it got me thinking about the gender politics of Christopher Nolan’s Bat-opus. I’m a sucker for masculine bonding and professional, or men-on-a-mission, stories. But why did Rachel Dawes have to die?
Skipping the snarky jokes about killing the Katie Holmes version being OK, it’s obvious in narrative terms why Dawes dies. She’s the one thing that all the characters care about. Harvey Dent loves her; Bruce Wayne sees her as symbolic of his someday/maybe release from the mantle of the Bat; and Jim Gordon trusts her, a pretty exclusive honour in this troubled town. And someone we care about has to die, otherwise the Joker’s sense of menace isn’t validated — killing faceless extras doesn’t carry the same weight.
Everybody loves Dawes, so her death has far-reaching implications. And she’s the only character not entrenched in the Batman mythos. Dent, Gordon, or Alfred can’t die because they can’t be replaced. Lucius Fox maybe, but as the most benign presence in the film that would just be cruel. So we kill the girl.
Because that’s what she is. She’s the girl. She’s the moral centre for the men taking care of business, but she has no role in moving the story forward except to provide motivation for the men. Holmes’ limp incarnation didn’t convince for a second that she was a crusading lawyer, so credit to Gyllenhall’s more authoritative take. Yet the one point when the script calls for her to do some lawyering, when she interviews Lau in the MCU holding cell, could have been given to Dent and the story wouldn’t have skipped a beat. As such, she’s replaceable.
Just as Vicki Vale, Chase Meridien, Julie Madison, Vesper Fairchild, Silver St. Cloud and the rest are disposable and replacable, Dawes is the only who can go. Then there’s Judge Freel, who gets blown up, and Ramirez, who is a corrupt cop. But not even a cool, badass corrupt cop, just one who loves her dear old mum, gawd bless’er.
It’s galling that a female character — the female lead, no less, can’t be more than the voice of reason who provides motivation for the men, by looking pretty and then dying. It’s called Girlfriend in a Refridgerator Syndrome.
What makes it worse in this context, is Gordon’s death. When Gordon dies, I felt that the gloves were off. Holy shit, they’ve killed one of the main characters from the comic! Anything can happen! Except, of course, he isn’t dead. The guys don’t die.
Incidentally, see if you can guess if Dawes shows up in IMDb’s memorable quotes from The Dark Knight, which is stuffed full of great lines. When a character called Tattooed Prisoner gets better dialogue than the female lead, there’s something wrong.
How to right this? Talia al Ghul kicking the shit out of everybody.
I love Frank Miller. But come on:
Christopher Nolan 2008
Pretty much faultless, apart from the slightly silly mobile phone sonar. There’s about three climaxes, each better than the last — although the ultimate denouement is a bit talky. And can you really trip over an articulated lorry? Anyway, fripperies aside, this is the most intensely character-driven action movie I think I’ve ever seen. The central relationship between Batman, Harvey Dent and Jim Gordon is a brilliantly-realised men-on-a-mission bonding triangle. But the film belongs to Heath Ledger’s lipsmackingly psychopathic Joker, a true “agent of chaos”. I came home and bought the soundtrack and listened to it all night. By the way they’ve extended the run at the IMAX. See you there.
Just come back from an extremely interesting panel discussion involving comics legend Pat Mills, Nikolai Dante creator Robbie Morrison and 7-year 2000AD editor Matt Smith at the BFI. The focus was split between the history of 2000AD and the possibility of the galaxy’s greatest comic on film. Cyber-Matt was a bit cagey about details of upcoming projects, but apparently a new Judge Dredd film may be in the offing…
Smith made a great point about Judge Dredd being a straight man to the insanity of the world around him. That made me realise that suspension of disbelief works with Dredd in almost the opposite way to the usual: instead of placing a changeable character in a believable world, with its own internal logic, Dredd is a fixed point in a world where pretty much anything goes.
Morrison’s recollection of a Dredd story in which Brian Bolland conjures up Hammer horror with a story of waxwork robots escaping into a peasoup fog evokes Dredd’s ability to span genres and styles without sounding a wrong note. Something that has always mystified me about why Dredd endures as a character even though he has almost no character arc now becomes clear to me: he is near-incapable of change, and as such he will always be our fixed point of reference in a world of everyday criminals and aliens, psychos, psychics and super-fiends.
My friend and chief red biro-wielder Nick made an excellent point over a pint or two later, that Dredd is also about the British relationship — or perhaps more accurately, fascination — with American fiction. It occurred to me that Dredd is less about the gap in time between his world and ours, than the gap in space between us and the incipient violence of the States. Dredd was partly inspired by Dirty Harry — or his comic book counterpart, One-Eyed Jack — which suggests that Dredd’s creators weren’t commenting on the crypto-fascist ultraviolent urban hell that could happen way off in the future, but on the crypto-fascist ultraviolent urban hell that was already threatening way off across the Atlantic. And, most importantly, what that means to us.
The Art of the Title Sequence - is a blog with Quicktime movies of interesting title sequences. Particularly interested is the Alien movies intros compared.
Warren Beatty 1990
Dick Tracy is perfect — on paper. The concept is brilliant, the design is immaculate, the casting and acting are spot-on, the script sparkles with zingers. So why doesn’t it work?
It’s the structure of the film. The story is kicked off by mobster Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino)’s murder of rival mobster and club owner Lips Manlis (Paul Sorvino). At the same time, his goons kill a cop, but that’s quickly forgotten: Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty) only asks Caprice about Manlis.
The problem is, we just don’t care about Lips Manlis. He’s a grotesque character and a gangster. Caprice’s henchmen blitz rival gangsters and we don’t care — that’s what (celluloid) gangsters do. And frankly, we don’t get that emotionally invested if they kill (celluloid) policemen either, because that’s also just what they do. In terms of storytelling, cops and robbers pays their money and takes their chances.
In order for a murder to act as a catalyst to a police procedural like this, it needs to be more than a murder. It needs to be a crime more heinous than a gangster killing another gangster. It needs to be a gangster crossing the line.
Big Boy Caprice is a great character, but there’s no sense of danger about him because his goons do all his dirty work, including offing Manlis. Contrast this with DeNiro’s fleshy, pampered Al Capone in The Untouchables — who suddenly, explosively kills several men with a baseball bat. Caprice should have got his hands dirty, by killing someone who wasn’t meant to die in such a squalid fashion: someone who didn’t choose to be there.
If Lips Manlis was the last straight club owner in town, that would have worked, as his murder would have been a tragedy. If the cop was days from retirement — he was pretty old — then that would have been (a cliché, but also) a tragedy. In order for us to really buy Tracy’s crusading zeal we need to feel Caprice isn’t just doing what gangsters do: he’s also preying on Joe and Josey Everyday.
Which we never see, apart from the opening radio news bulletins about shoeshine vendors getting leaned on. Even then, the good citizens are attacked for resisting the gangsters, so it’s almost like the citizens don’t need Tracy’s protection. And we should be shown, not told. When we do later see glimpses of the protection rackets in action, it’s during this colourful musical montage, devoid of any actual sense of threat:
Speaking of which, there are three musical montages, which is at least one too many. The first act of the film is Tracy’s repeated failure to nail Caprice, with the first plot point being the bugging of the club (not Manlis’ murder). This allows Tracy to smash Caprice’s operation , but where a kick-ass action sequence should be we get a musical montage. The campy punching-six-guys-at-a-time stuff is great, but we could have done with more fights like the brutal-yet-hilarious lean-to set-to with Steve the Tramp.
On the musical note, Madonna isn’t as bad as you might remember. As vampy nightclub chanteuse Breathless Mahoney, she is a bit blank-faced (no pun intended) but with those dresses, that lipstick and those killer lines she’s great value (Tracy: “No grief for Lips?” Breathless: “I’m wearing black underwear”). Beatty’s steadfast yet frequently-flummoxed Tracy is just the right side of self-righteousness, while the Kid (Charlie Korsmo) and Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly) are spiky and sparky enough to sidestep winsome child and whiny damsel cliché.
It’s interesting that Beatty originally wanted Bob Fosse to direct, while Martin Scorcese was also a possibility. Either may have given the film a little extra zip. Ultimately Dick Tracy suffers from comparison to Batman (the success of which probably helped Tracy get made). Despite appearing a year later, Tracy feels like an ’80s film, where Batman feels like a 90s film (even if it has dated badly and is inferior, IMO, to Batman Returns).
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