Friday, August 17, 2007
The End Of The End
The monster is dead, the woman kissed, the children saved and the bomb blown up real good. The story is done. The characters have been arced. The movie is over. It was pretty good, with some very exciting bits, some boring stretches, a couple of good gags and, all your friends agree, not nearly enough tits. Yes, The end of The Fake Life's final two weeks is here and there isn't going to be any more. So all that's left is to clear up the tissues, finish up that bottle of scotch you snuck into the theatre, remember our fallen comrades and watch the end credits:
Hello, I'm Chris Oliver and I am not being written by Andrew Clarke because I forgot to write a final paragraph myself. I must say that Andrew Clarke was by far the best writer for this site. Fuck y'all, all y'all. Peace out.
Well, it was fun, educational and every so often incredibly frustrating, but there you go. Thank you to everyone that read this stuff, to Charlie for coming up with the idea, to George for being an awesome editor, and to everyone who contributed. Now I can go have a shower and start watching films without the need to think up something clever to say about them afterwards. I don't know where Internet Heaven is (ed - right next to Robot Heaven), but I hope there's free porn there.
And now was acknowledged the presence of the The Fake Life. It had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their memes, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of MODOK expired. And Darkness and Decay and The Fake Life held illimitable dominion over all.
Even though this web site idea Charlie and I hatched back during a random chat session a year and a half ago turned out to be a failure in the end, I'm walking away happy and proud. Why? Because the shit I've learned about just simple dealings with people, both good and bad, has been more enriching than any sort of popular or monetary success we might have had. I say that earnestly. I have zero regrets. And I'm proud of the small community that's arisen over here, even if I don't understand a quarter of what Brad, Matt, Jon, Carl, Tim, Tom, Luca, Neal, The Question, Batman, R.L. Stine, Van, and others are fucking saying.
We made our small little impact, and we got our much appreciated support from a modest number of people. And that's awesome. But I learned, from my earliest stint at CHUD.com to here at TFL, that I'm just not cut out to be a writer. Not a writer writing about films anyway. Creatively, I don't see where I can really go with it. My passion has been and will always be the cinema, and I will continue like I have been for years to work at learning as much as I can about it so that I can hopefully someday make a contribution that isn't a slap to its beautiful silver face. That or I'll just bartend and grow fat off the tips of degenerates, which as I understand it, is quite viable. Especially when you look like Sonny Landham.
So, a million thank yous to Andrew Clarke, Chris Oliver, Doug Slack, Bill Nolen, Carlton Stevens, Shane Yaroch, Bobbie Oliver, Scott Roche, Brad Millette, Matt Hedgecock, Ben "Katanga" Miro, anyone who ever contributed even just a minute of their time to this blog, and of course, my good friend and partner in crime, Charlie Brigden. I hope all of you out there have had a great time. If not, kindly go fuck yourselves. Wu-Tang!!!
Well, it's been a little past one year and four months since a few of us got together and headed for pastures new in the form of The Fake Life. We've had equal amounts of support and protest along the way, together with some pretty good articles, at least when we could be bothered to post them. At times it's been brilliant and rewarding, other times it's been frustrating and demoralizing.
Where it's always been brilliant and rewarding is where some of the contributors are concerned, namely Andrew, Doug, Chris, Katanga, Scott, and last but certainly not least, George, whose eternal support and superior editing skills have always been the backbone of this blog.
But it's over. And I think it's the right time. If we were to go back to the beginning with the knowledge I have now, I'd definitely do a lot of things differently, and probably change our focus greatly. But now is not the time to do that. I can only wish our friends luck in what they do next, and perhaps hold a glimmer of hope that maybe one day, we'll do something together again.
Until that time...
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Labels: The End
Continue reading The End Of The EndTFL's Movies
You know, we've spent so much time talking about other people's movies that we've never really mentioned our own. Like most movie bloggers, a few of us are wannabe directors, actors, and blood technicians, and we thought we'd share with you a couple of our flicks...Andrew:
As a film-maker I have no pretensions to talent or seriousness. Still, for your amusements, here are some short films I done made.
Sunday
This was a first attempt at closely matching visuals with a song. I had ambitions to a whole bunch of things, but they were at best partially succesful. Nonetheless, a very cool song and a very pretty lady.
Hello, Charlie.
This was me and a friend, bored one weekend, passing a camera to each other as we filmed this extremely daft tale of a drug deal gone wrong. It's pretty funny, if hopelessly amateur. Some friends of mine were fairly disturbed by it, the pussies. As cooler than thou film geeks, you can simply enjoy the sight of me making a complete fool of myself. Cool sound though.
Top Of The Monitor
Here's my first attempt at learning how to use my video editing software. I just shot mediums and close-ups of the toys and then improv'd a scene involving them. Very daft, strangely amusing, and probably a good insight into my subconscious.
My Music
www.myspace.com/andrewclarke76.com
Here's what i'm serious about - music. There's only one song on there at the moment, as i'm replacing old recordings with new. As some of my more recent demos and remixes get finished i'll be adding more songs to the list, but come visit and be my friend.
Charlie:
The "award winning" STRAY is a combined effort, written and directed by myself for my final project at "film school," with music composed by Andrew (and very good music it is. By the by, by award winning I mean it won a tiny award at a festival here. I just mentioned it because I rarely get ego boosts.
GIVIN UP is a bit more of a somber short, essentially made a month after my mother died, and a bit of an exploration of my feelings at that time, as well as trying to give up smoking. I may seem a bit emo, but it doesn't mean you can't slate it a bit.
George:
City of Angels
Hindsight is a motherfucker. I cringe watching this music video (Coldplay? Really?). I was asked to shoot this by a very pretty lady friend about 3-4 years ago for an art exhibit held in Los Angeles by some entertainment group that Mel Gibson and a host of c-list celebs were involved with. This was pre-"sugar tits" Gibson, but post-"I hate Jews" Gibson, so it was weird. In any case, this was the final product. Mock me, but mock me gently.
Shane:
This was a film made for my French and Italian New Wave class. Other than the two actors, there were three of us that split up the direction and cinematography. I did the writing in English and the editing, Pierre did the translation (he's French, ya see). The assignment was to make a film in the vein of the French New Wave, which made us essentially make a film aping various visual cues and the like. Luckily we had a French guy on our crew, so that made the French part of "French New Wave" a bit easy to handle.
Overall, the film is okay, I think. We made it in about four days total, and it shows. The script is something that I liked more then than I do now, but it still fits the feel that we were going for. Still, it's 18 minutes of student film (sorry), but I swear it doesn't feel like its run-time. Having a constant underscoring kind of annoys me, but it makes the film easier to take, and it was a lot easier to make it that way, what with the not having to worry about sound mixing and all. I posted the script in the film details, if you'd like it, as the subtitles get kind of fucked up, and as such are hard to see. It's also a bit...well, you'll see. The whole of the project has this air of desired-pretentiousness that falls short of what we were going for, but still, this was our first film.
I could make excuses all day for it, but like I said, it's pretty good, I think, so here you go:
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Labels: The End
Continue reading TFL's MoviesThe End Of Cinema As We Know It?!
Well???
George Merchan: The summer movie season is going to finally come to a close soon. So what were the legitimate phenomenas? I don't know, were there any? Record-breaking numbers aside, I wouldn't say it was May's big three (Spidey, Pirates, Shrek). And as grotesquely brilliant as Transformers was, I wouldn't say it was either. I think Knocked Up may be the only film that's really done what every studio wishes a film would do, which is be made for relatively cheap and sprout gorgeously supple legs. Then again, I don't think that's true either. For the big films (budgeted, at the very least, between 150-200 mil), it's all about the opening weekend. The studios know there's going to be a huge drop-off, so they spend inordinate amounts of cash promoting for that first weekend blitz. And though on the following Mondays you hear all about the broken records and copious amounts of cash pouring out of studio executive ass, we ultimately find out that a lot of films only barely make it to the black. After all is said and done, it's kinda obvious that movies aren't the best kind of investment around. Shit, I think I could've put 150 million into a high-yielding money market account and still have made more bank than Evan Almighty.
I think maybe the better question would be, "The End of the Ludicrous Blockbuster Business Model As We Know It?!" I haven't even started talking about convergence in media and the increased avenues of choice and immediacy that we as consumers now have when getting our entertainment.
Doug Slack: I think we're still in for a lot more OMG HUGE BLOCKBUSTERS. And I think that's partly due to all the recent advances in home viewing widgets. People who get the state of the art home theater systems need the biggest, loudest, bestest DVD's to utilize all their toys. You don't buy surround sound speakers to watch Waitress. You buy them, along with a 20 ft. flat screen, to watch Transformers. THAT'S a flick that'll shake your house, wake your neighbors and fuck their dog.
So the big blockbusters will continue to open big because everybody likes to come out to see the next spectacle. Then they'll sell like crazy on DVD so the ever growing number of home theater owners can impress their friends.
Andrew Clarke: Purely from the numbers, with all the big films aiming for and hitting $300m - a number that was still very rare only a few years ago - suggests that the studios have never been better at this blockbuster malarkey. In fact every film, down to Die Hard 4, has done as well or slightly better than expected. But then none of those big movies were particularly seen as triumphs. Despite the astronomical returns, they all merely 'met expectations', and all will rely on DVD to really bring the profits home. Much was made of Superman Returns' $250m price tag, but Pirates 3's $300m was seen as almost a given.
It would be nice to think that the guys holding the purse strings really know what they are doing. Even if a film costs $500m, if it takes in $1bn for the studio, it is still a sound decision, business wise. The trend is still towards bigger though, and inflationary bubbles will always lead to a moment of 'pop'. One of the producers of Spidey 3 was very reticent about it's budget when figures were leaked, calling it something like 'obscene'.
And however little we know about the real numbers in Hollywood's incredibly opaque accounting, the move to the home market is clear, and that can only lead to a long tail market where lots of things are bought by a few people rather than one thing being bought by everyone.
It all points to this inflationary model of ever bigger, ever more risky tentpoles becoming massively unstable. If one were to care about the health of Hollywood big business, it all seems very scary.
But we don't or, at least, we shouldn't. We aren't making any money from it. The question for me is: would it be great if the model collapsed or not? What if the parent corporations (who could swallow a quarter billion loss if they wanted to) demanded budget caps? Or if a tipping point occurred when everyone just gave up going to the cinema (perhaps when hi def cinema systems become affordable to mortals).
What would we lose? What would we gain? Purely for the spectacle of a pile up, what would happen if a rapidly changing market forced a huge change in the, supposedly, market led Hollywood business? Just for a change (and after sitting through the 3 hour bloats of these recent films), I would really love to see what happens.
Chris Oliver: I'd certainly welcome the end of the Blockbuster Model. Not the end of blockbuster movies, just the end of them being the centerpiece of the industry. But I don't see it happening any time soon. As Andrew points out, they are still making money, even if it is a stupid business plan.
What I do hope for is that, as the cost of filming on digital becomes lower and lower, we'll see a more and more diverse and vital field of independent film. I know this sort of rosey prediction of the future gets tiresome, but I'm an optimistic guy. I can see a very near future where making a movie will be not much more daunting than writing a book or starting a band, and the filmmaker can self-market it through a network of like-minded enthusiasts. Meanwhile, the studios can continue making their exploding robot movies (and releasing vaguely intersting pseudo-indies through their "independent film" subsidiaries).
Andrew Clarke: The explosion of online networks - from MySpace to YouTube to whatever the fuck kids are using these days - proves that there is a genuine desire for this style of content delivery. There's no studio pushing these places - they simply wouldn't exist if the people didn't spend loads of time on them. It's organic, it's real, and it's independent of the old power structures. The question is what sort of things will come from it. As these networks are so self-selecting, would movies made that way not be opaquely specific and insular - not meaning anything to those not in on the culture or 'joke'? Will we finally get our first emo-auteur?
Movies won't go back to the way they were pre-77. If the movie becomes truly democratised, what will happen to the medium?
George Merchan: Like Chris, I'd love to see digital filmmaking become more prevalent. Because of its cheaper/easier to use nature, though, you're gonna get tons of shit (this is similar to the internet and Web 2.0, blogs - not us of course! - etc.) But, it's like if you threw a hundred darts at a board, one or two are bound to hit the bullseye. Digital will unearth new and exciting things at the end of the day. And for film nerds and cineastes, that's fucking exciting.
But I don't think you can talk about digital (or even plain film) without talking about the piracy issue. Practically everything gets digitized now (both professionally and otherwise), and what with the move towards digital exhibition, the amount of "leakage" is probably only going to get worse. Will that ultimately change the method of how we get our cinema? It's morphing the music biz still as we speak. Granted, the experience of listening to music is obviously not the same as watching a film, but I still think the demand is there to have these other avenues of distribution. Look at YouTube and MySpace like Andrew mentions. So far the movie industry is trying its hardest to clamp down on piracy, but I think they're just fighting evolution at this point. Or is it devolution? Nah, probably not. In 50 years time, we'll probably still have the ArcLights and Alamo Drafthouses and... oh... wait...
Doug Slack: Digital filmmaking could lead to more specialized YouTube sights. Sites designed specifically to host movies. This will create a gatekeeper and an online studio system. If an online studio can accumulate enough quality films they could afford to charge a subscription rate. Or a pay-per-view system.
The dawn of a new age of film exhibition will be upon us as soon as someone figures out just how to make money off this shit.
Andrew Clarke: I guess we can look at the music industry, who faced their piracy problems with the same belligerence at first, to see how Hollywood is going to do over the next few years, and at the cable tv market to see how a fractured, more democratised movie market would function. We'd get HBO and a thousand channels of shit.
I guess it would have been fun if the very idea of 'quality' changed. If two hour spectacle movies simply stopped being made because everyone downloaded 10minute clips to play on their 3 inch iPhone screen. A nice, radical idea, but unlikely.
Any collapse, judging by other industries would lead to consolidation of the majors (leading to even safer, homogenised product) and extreme specialisation by everyone else. As always, some good will trickle through the gaps.
Here's a thing though - I certainly make noises in favour of radical change, but do we, as genre loving geek types (I mean, I'm just assuming here), actually have it really good right now? Imagine living 50 years ago when genre films were made for pennies and mostly by morons while Hollywood concentrated on musicals. Now it's Sci-Fi and fantasy. We'll complain about them not getting some character 'right', or being too 'safe' or 'dumb', but studios are still putting the resources into making these expensive properties properly.
Isn't it us geeks that are winning out here, with our Spider-Mans and Lord Of The Rings?
Doug Slack: Geeks love blockbusters more than they'll admit. Hell, I love 'em as much as I love their predecessors, the drive-in and grindhouse movies. I wouldn't be surprised to see all low budget and indie fare driven to the Internet or DVD, while the movie theaters show nothing but blockbuster spectacles. When you think about it, they fit their respective formats well.
Whatever happens with home entertainment, the movie theaters will always be open. People just enjoy going out, plain and simple. They like to do something on a Saturday night and be part of the community. Human nature will keep the theaters in business indefinitely.
Chris Oliver: To continue on the point of digital moviemaking, the actual "making movies" part is going to be much easier, but distribution is still going to be hard. The "specialized YouTube sites" idea sounds about right, or at least like a good start. I guess the question becomes, when you start making actual movies, and not 5-minute or 30-second skits, will people sit on the computer and watch them? Or will it be easier to just sell DVD's through mail-order? (Certainly that would be the easier way to turn a profit on it.) Or by that time, will everyone just have their computers integrated into their home theaters, so that watching something on the web is almost indistinguishable from watching a DVD? That's the part that I can't quite figure out.
Charlie Brigden: I don't think any kind of digital revolution will kick off until the scene radically changes. Right now, YouTube and its ilk are fantastic channels for distribution in theory, but in practice they're distractions that people use in their lunch hour at work to watch funny videos of cats. Currently, at least in the mainstream, I'm not sure they're much more than a glorified version of Candid Camera, neverending in a burning maelstrom of home videoed hell.
And while that isn't everyone, I think it is a large amount of people who would rather watch the current digital comedy zeitgeist as opposed to a creative and thought provoking piece of art. You can throw out a hundred fresh short films, but people will always latch on to Tay Zonday, and send that to all their friends instead. Again, I think it goes back to the mainstream (and the "underground" in some cases) where it's all very casual. Case in point, my shorts that I've thrown online. I've asked a lot of my friends to watch them, and I got very little feedback other than 's'alright,' whereas if I'd posted a picture of a Thundercats clip dubbed with Big Lebowski quotes, I'd be hailed as some sort of comedy wunderkind. Obviously, there's a little bitterness on my part, and I'm not painting my own work as some kind of Kubrickesque brilliance, but the general apathy to anything that requires an actual attention span and a little brain engagement seems to tell me that there's huge promise, but there needs to be huge change before this is accepted as a real viable alternative to something like cinema, or even public access TV.
George Merchan: I agree that theaters will always be around, but they're probably going to become much more elite so as to offer something besides a really big screen, great sound, and annoying people. Cost will reflect this too, unfortunately, but it'll be worth it. Again, the ArcLight model... it's got a fucking bar in the lobby, people! I can't stress how simple and brilliant that is.
But Doug's idea of keeping the big dicks in the theaters and the choads on DVD is a great one, I think. One that we will probably move towards actually. One I'm hoping we move towards as someone who wants to make his own shit and get all the help he can get. Charlie knows my plight. The business simply needs to embrace that because there is a market for it.
Of course, there is the argument that optical media like DVDs are gonna eventually go the way of the Dodo and everything will be delivered to us on giant fucking servers. Imagine every home with a large hard drive that's directly hooked up to the internet and acts as a hub for delivery of digital content. On it you keep your films, your TV shows, your music, your family photos, your porn. Those 3000 DVDs you don't know where to store? Now a bunch of unseen, out of the way files on your shiny new entertainment unit. Sounds like how we're already converging with our computers and Xboxes/Playstations. Also Tivo.
As for the YouTubes, MySpaces, and Revvers (an amalgam of YouTube and Google AdSense... wave of the future?) of the world, they really are like the Nickelodeons of the day, except that instead of getting anything new out of it, we're getting regurgitation. Something will come along eventually that'll completely change the perception of what one can do with this. But right now is not it, like Charlie says. Culturally, it's a child's sandbox. The moment someone builds the "No Homers" treehouse that everyone wants in on is when the paradigm will start shifting.
All that said, "Tourette's Guy" on YouTube is hilarious.
"Fuck salt!"
Doug Slack: Tourette's Guy should get a three picture movie deal.
George, like you said, theaters are looking for other ways to entice audiences. Here is where you need to understand the business model of a theater to guess where it's going. A theater makes very little money from ticket sales. Barely enough to cover overhead, usually. They turn their profit from concessions. Basically, a theater is in business to sell popcorn and soda, not to show movies. The movies are merely the means to get people to the candy stand. This is why theaters LOVE kids' movies and blockbusters and it's another reason why we might see indie fare leave the moviehouses.
The bar is a good idea, but probably won't play with the national chains...yet. It costs a lot to get a liquor license. Not to mention the fact that they're in for a world of headaches if they show anything without an R rating. Soccer moms won't feel safe sending their kids off to a theater with a bar and the theaters will have to use a lot of resources to monitor bar sales and keep the booze out of the minors hands. This strikes me as unrealistic since so many chains can't be bothered now to monitor the houses for noise.
Which leads me to the biggest change exhibitors need to make if they're going to survive. Talkers. Crying babies. Cell phones. Blow jobs. I spent many years as a theater manger for three different companies and I can tell you the reason these problems still persist is money. Exhibitors are notoriously cheap when it comes to payroll. Floor staff make minimum wage, managers are expected to work extra hours every week for no additional salary, staff will be sent home if business is slow. To properly monitor audiences and enforce rules of behavior, you need to add more ushers and so far the chains aren't interested in spending those extra dollars. Then there's the basic policy chains have of never turning away business. They'll sell a ticket to a couple with a baby at 10:00pm just to bring in all the cash they can. If theaters aren't discretionary enough to refuse certain sales, they may very well get hurt in the long run. But they're not ready to take that financial hit just yet.
George Merchan: I knew about the concession stand being the real source of loot for theaters, but that's still really interesting about the attitude exhibitors have in general towards their business. I'm just wondering that what with prices continually getting higher and the pre-roll of ads and what not getting longer, at what point will it be "too much" for audiences? Or am I giving audiences too much credit? Will they not give a fuck and fork over the green anyway?
Chris Oliver: I've always thought that there must be a ceiling--maybe around $10. That if tickets got to be $11, people would just say "fuck it" and watch a DVD. But now that the $11 ticket is almost here, it doesn't look like people are gonna stop. I figure we'll end up with a two-tier system. In rich neighborhoods, it'll be the ArcLight model. In poor neighborhoods, it'll be cheap tickets and lots of ads to see a double feature of worn-out prints of second-run movies, but the air conditioning will always be working. Which leaves the middle squeezed out.
Doug Slack: I'm gonna say it will be split. Most casual moviegoers will continue to suck it up until there's an actual gang rape during the show. And all the rapists' cell phones go off at once. And they're smoking. Crack.
But the indie/art house fags like us will jump ship and watch our Catherine Keener films at home.
George Merchan: Amen, brotha.
Andrew Clarke: So is there any chance this 3-D malarkey Cameron and Zemeckis are touting will be the saviour of the cinema?
Everyone who hasn't seen it in action thinks it is duff. Everyone who has says it's great. People said you can only use that super wide screen format (insert name of super wide screen format) for snakes and funerals, but now it is a valid artistic choice. Then again, it's easier to pull the curtains a bit further back than it is to get everyone to wear goggles.
And what of this mocap stuff Zemeckis is using for Beowulf. He says it gives the director unprecedented freedom and that you can film absolutely anything for $1m a minute, so solving the inflationary budget problem. Everyone who's seen that says it looks like Final Fantasy. Which was crap.
The changes suggested so far are more social, like making cinemas more classy, or getting people to stop watching videos of cats (never, ever going to happen). Are those pushing for a technological solution full of shit?
Doug Slack: Yes. Because cinema doesn't need a savior. It's doing just fine on the technical front. Receipts are up.
Most of the complaints I read about going to the movies revolve around cost and rude audiences. Nobody, outside of a handful of geeks, laments to the overuse of CGI.
George Merchan: About that fancy new tech: if a 3D shot can somehow convey something either narratively or character-wise that 2D cannot (and I mean something beyond immersion), then bully. Bring that shit. In the hands of a James Cameron, I'm not terribly optimistic. Peter Jackson though, we'll see. As for mo cap... there's the terrible possibility of fapping to a CG render of Angelina Jolie. That's only a few steps removed from jerkin' it to Hentai, right?
Charlie Brigden: I think ticket prices and the snack prices are doing a lot to make people not go to the theater. I mean, just looking at a couple of weeks ago when we saw Transformers, the tickets cost $12 each, along with a hot dog, popcorn and a drink, which came to about $16. Fair enough, I didn't care that much before I enjoyed the film a hell of a lot, but when the theaters are pouring out shit and folks are still paying those prices, there has to be a breaking point somewhere.
I mean, one of our favourite nights out is dinner and a movie, and I know that goes for a lot of people. That used to be a good, cheap night out. Now you're looking at $57 a head if you find a cheap restaurant. So you pay $57, and see a movie that cost $300m to make but is absolute pants, you start to get a little bitter about things. Of course, you don't have to buy popcorn, that's just me. But even $12 to see a flick is expensive. Especially since you can pay around double that and buy the DVD and watch it in an environment with less mouthbreathers.
And that's probably the big thing for me, personally (and the wife). While we like to catch up with cinema as much as possible, and we always try and go and see the "big" films (not just blockbusters, but the stuff we just cannot miss) we're perfectly happy enough to just wait for DVD. We have our front room with a good surround kit and a big HDTV, and we don't spend the whole film having the back of our seats being kicked by some retard child who's been thrown in the theater while his mom goes out to buy more wifebeaters, which happened at The Simpsons Movie.
Obviously, this is me being a snagglepuss in general, but I just get so fucking annoyed at theaters now because people just go there to fuck about, and I like to be able to watch a film on a big screen without a child screaming every five minutes. Like when I went to see X-Men 3, and this weekend dad took his five children, one of which was in a pushchair, and who continually threw her toys out of the pram and then cried because of it. Because superdad was too busy watching Brett Ratner's masterpiece, she kept crying and it ended up being my wife who got up and gave the kid the toy back.
Fuck that. I'd rather wait, rent/buy the DVD and watch it at home.
Andrew Clarke: You do have to remember that we are all rapidly leaving the target demographic for these movies. While I sympathise with you Charlie, you are being a big grump. You are after control of your environment, comfort and no stupid people, and so you move away from multiplexes. Remember all those godawful pubs and clubs you went to as a kid? I do, and now I'd rather some friends round for dinner.
We put a sheet up on the side of our house last weekend and watched Jaws after the sun went down. This was the best cinema experience I've had in years.
The thrill of simply 'going to the cinema' is gone from us not, perhaps, because cinemas have gotten worse, but because we've just been so many times. This is normal, and not a sign of the death of cinema, only a changing of the generational guard. One day, we all turn into our dads.
P.S. In London, tickets can be the equivalent of $20 - $25.
George Merchan: Jesus. What's an average Friday night at a pub cost?
What about "Day-and-Date" releases where you get the movie in theaters, on DVD, and OnDemand on the same day? Soderbergh tried it with Bubble. Though that one was obviously doomed to fail anyway, could it work for a big film that audiences actually want to see?
I think it's pretty clear that nothing is actually going to die within our lifetime or that of even our children's, but I do think we're headed towards a new evolution of exhibition defined primarily by choice. So what are the most viable possibilities? And more importantly, will they help promote good filmmaking?
Andrew Clarke: You start saying things like 'our children's lifetime' and I start thinking of peak-oil, environmental collapse and ending my days in a bubble with one faint TV channel being piped in telling me over and over that 'the war is going well, the war is going well'. I got totally taken out of Duel recently because I kept thinking about all that pollution the truck was pumping out.
The novel hasn't really died, though many, possibly grumpy, people said it reached it's peak in the 19th Century, so there's no reason to think feature length movies will die out, either.
While digital could lead to more independent and interesting movies being made, it will make it more difficult to sift through the crap. The only prediction I can give is that I will watch Transformers 3: Cubed.
And thus passed three days with nary a stirring...
George Merchan: Are we finished with this? Any last thoughts?
Doug Slack: I've given my thoughts and don't see any other questions I have an answer for. Unless anyone else has another question to raise, I'm done.
Andrew Clarke: Will you go see Transformers 3 with me?
Doug Slack: Only if you keep your sleek gay robot theories to yourself.
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Labels: The End
Continue reading The End Of Cinema As We Know It?!Crisis On Infinite Hollywoods
Steven Spielberg was supposed to direct Return Of The Jedi. David Cronenberg was attached to Total Recall for a while. Sergio Leone had The Godfather in his chubby hands. Hollywood history is filled with 'almosts' and 'what ifs'. So here's how we think a few films would have turned out if the dice of fate had rolled left in stead of right.
EXT. THE ORCA
Brody (Denzel Washington) is standing aft, shovelling chum. Hooper (Paul Giamatti) is driving the boat, while Quint (Brian Cox) walks around.
QUINT
Slow ahead, Hooper!
BRODY
Slow ahead I can fucking go slow ahead! I see what's happening here, I don't fuckin' believe it, but I see it. Here we have the big ol' white man giving orders, while the educated white guy gets to drive the boat. What, you think a brother can't do that shit? Instead I have to sit here shovelling fish shit just so we can catch a fish that's been killin' white folk. Fuck that. I was born in Brooklyn son, I don't have to take this shit.
Suddenly, JAWS rears his head from the water! As Brody steps back, the shark picks up a barrel from the deck of the Orca, and throws it through the boat's front window.
JAWS
Fight the power!
Babe: Pig In The City
Directed By: Brian De Palma
INT: SHOWER.
NANCY ALLEN
So the serial killer was just a bunch of birds under a trenchcoat?
SOME GUY
Birds.
NANCY ALLEN
Wow. Birds. And the visions I was having about my violent naked death turned out to be video tapes of the violent naked death of my twin sister that I didn’t know I had?
SOME GUY
Yeah. Wacky, huh?
NANCY
Yeah. Wow. Could you rub my tits now?
Harold And Maude
Directed by: Woody Allen
Ext: NEW YORK
MAUDE
So I was talking with my mother, oh my mother, have I told you about my mother? She never stops! I’m losing hair, look at my hair, it’s coming out in clumps! Oh I’m so neurotic. But look at you. Your firm, smooth thighs look great in that short skirt.
HAROLD
I love you so much.
MAUDE
And your pert, young breasts look great in that tight top I had wardrobe give you.
HAROLD
I love you so much.
MAUDE
But my mother, oy. Take my mother, please. My mother’s so fat she has her own zip code. My mother’s so ugly, when she was born, the doctor slapped her mother. I’m here all week, Harold. Harold? You do love me, Harold?
HAROLD
…what… sorry? Oh, right. I love you so much.
MAUDE
Are you wearing a bra?
HAROLD
What? No. I was told it would mess up the profile in two-shots. Why?
MAUDE
(loud)
OK, could we get a rain machine for the next shot?
HAROLD
Right that’s it. This is dumb. I’m out of here you fucking pervert.
Harold leaves.
MAUDE
(quiet)
Could we change that to a fog machine?
The Goonies
Directed by: Larry Clark
INT: CAVE
HOT BITCH
Let's fuck.
BOY BITCH
Yeah, let's fuck.
They fuck.
HOT BITCH
(Fucking)
Fuck!
BOY BITCH
I have asthma.
HOT BITCH
I have AIDS.
BOY BITCH
;_;
Fucking.
World Trade Center
Directed by: Oliver Stone
Oh.
As a fun extra game, guess which pictures George did and which ones were mine.
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Continue reading Crisis On Infinite HollywoodsTFL's Greatest Hits - Part 8: A Bunch Of Other Stuff
For the final bit of re-publishing here's a whole bunch of stuff we kind of liked.
Here's where Charlie did an interview with Takeshi Kitano, the lucky bastard.
Here and here is a short-lived, though fairly funny, column called Timewarp Movies.
Here's Bill Nolen, who did a lot of good DVD work for us, doing some wacky shit.
Here, here and here is me doing something called Turning Your Brain On At The Movies, though I only got to three because I didn't know where else to go after that beyond an article on free Internet porn.
Also we have archives of reviews (Film and DVD), some of which were dead interesting, so feel free to dig through them whenever you can't be bothered to work.
Of course, everything else on the blog, by implication, sucked. LOL! Thanks for reading. Bye!
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 8: A Bunch Of Other StuffThursday, August 16, 2007
The Best Hollywood Endings
As we all know, Hollywood loves to make everything overblown. The major blockbusters all seem to be a hundred and twenty minutes of sound and fury, punctuated by deafening orchestras and epic visuals that like to say "this thing here, this is huge." And of course, this is always accelerated by 88mph at the end, so that you leave the theater with a huge sense of satisfaction that you've just seen something huge, something epic, something, well, giant-sized.Of course, nine times out of ten this turns out to be overbaked crap. Note the F14s swooning across a Bruickheimer-orange sky to the soaring tones of the Righteous Brothers or Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale gloating atop a cliff as her family looks down ala the blue floaty Jedi spirits at the end of RETURN OF THE JEDI, or even Val Kilmer, Chris O'Donnell and Alicia Silverstone wobbling towards the camera in a scene that seems to be missing all the BLAM! and KA-POW! intercutting phrases it surely deserves. These are all crap. Even geniuses like Spielberg are not immune to this, judging from the insipid picturesque storybook ending to MINORITY REPORT, which was, to be fair, absolutely pants.
But sometimes, the blockbusters get it right. Sometimes a film finds a way through the netherworld of excess and actually presents a genuinely emotionally satisfying ending that still conforms to the usual standards of gigantic swelling orchestras and near-pretentious "final shots." Let's take a look.
KING KONG (1933)
KONG has it all. The big epic ending, striking visuals (especially for the year it was unleashed), and a magnificent orchestral climax, as composed by score wunderkind Max Steiner. But KONG also has something most monster movies before and since haven't had: pathos. While the later remakes placed Ann Darrow (or Dwan!) clearly as having strong, if not equal feelings for the big guy, he has no such luck here.
Unfortunately for our titular hero, Ann has just as much disgust and hatred for the guy as the rest of the world. The only person who holds any compassion for Kong is Carl Denham, and by extension, the audience.
In any other movie, we would be cheering on the planes as they fire upon Kong. In the hands of another filmmaker, this would be just another gung-ho action sequence with the audience baying for the bastard creature's blood at the behest of his wave of destruction. But the whole sequence is constructed so well to play on Kong's character development through the film, so that it's not joy and excitement we feel as the airplanes find their target, it's absolute pain, heartbreak and compassion.
As Kong falls to his death, Denham and the audience are left to contemplate Kong's demise, his worthless death as he lies stricken on the pavement, his life spent. It's with a sense of regret and guilt that he delivers that famous line, "It wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast," a confession in so many words that he alone is responsible for bringing Kong to New York, for juxtaposing him against Ann and creating that relationship, and for killing the Eighth Wonder of the World. It's a devastatingly tragic moment that very few movies even attempt, and all the more richer for the emotionally brutal way it's presented. And a piece of Hollywood genius.
KING KONG (2005)
George has already included THE LORD OF THE RINGS in his list, so I'm going to make a quick mention of Peter Jackson's other blockbuster. While it has more in common with the 1976 remake than Jackson would probably like to admit, KONG '05 is a stunning work. Sure, it could stand to lose forty or fifty minutes, and like LOTR, the bits that don't work really don't work, but the parts that do much outweigh the previous, and boy are they spectacular. Never more is this demonstrated than in the film's climax. Obviously, with the differing dynamic of Kong's relationship with Ann in the remake as compared to the original, the context is changed somewhat, but the end result is essentially the same. Where Jackson's picture differs is that instead of being somewhat passive observers in the original film, with ourselves the only ones who are really protesting Kong's death, here we are thrust directly into the heart of the matter, with the action being presented very strictly from the point of Ann.
The lovers' relationship is stressed even more here, with Ann - and the audience - being forced to watch as Kong is slowly murdered. And I mean slowly. The film is notorious for being long, and drawn out, but the ending is a case where both those things are true but in a positive manner. The pacing of Kong's death makes it excruciating to watch - and heartbreaking. Never has a movie made me weep more. A defining moment is that which portrays Kong's last bit of fighting spirit, his nobility. He sits atop the Empire State Building, roaring at the top of his lungs, knowing what is going to happen, with Ann beneath him screaming. It's such a painful moment and so personal between the two, that when it continues to its natural conclusion - Kong's death - you're left utterly helpless.
Indeed, when Ann embraces Jack after Kong's fall, it's an embrace borne not out of the relationship that was built between the two, but instead a catharcism needed by Ann. Whether it be Jack or a security guard, Ann would have hugged him like he was her saviour. Because she, like the audience, just needs that embrace, lest she actually follows Kong herself. The climax is slightly lessened by Jack Black's reading of Denham's final line, which simply doesn't have the right reverence. But James Newton Howard's music - which, like the film, is sometimes middling but often superb - soaks up the emotion of the scene and leaves us with the right mix of regret and grandeur to close the movie.
SPIDER-MAN (2002)
Like many other superhero movies, SPIDER-MAN ends in a similar way to Richard Donner's SUPERMAN - the loose threads sewn up, the hero is celebrated in a final goodbye to the audience, usually flying - or in this case, swinging - through the city. In Sam Raimi's picture, the ending ties together the usual heroism with the definition of who the character is. Peter Parker stands at Norman Osborn's funeral, with one of his best friends telling him he will pay in the future for what he's done, and another telling him she loves him. Yet because of who he is, because of who he's become, Peter cannot reveal his real self to either of these people.
And it's all summed up in some of the best lines ever to end a picture: 'Whatever life holds in store for me, I will never forget these words: "With great power comes great responsibility." This is my gift, my curse. Who am I? I'm Spider-Man. ' With that, that amazing image of Peter walking away from the funeral, alone, transforms into a stunning sequence of Spidey as he soars above the city, scored by Danny Elfman's amazing theme. A quick flick around the stars and stripes, and he's off! - ready for more adventure. And we're with him all the way.
STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)
The climax of what is considered to be the best Star Trek flick by a country mile begins like the climax of just about any other Star Trek movie, or episode, or book, or video game. The starship Enterprise is in trouble as the universe's most powerful weapon (made from a device designed to create new life) is about to explode and consume everything within four hundred lightyears, including the famous starship. Captain Kirk and the crew are begging Scotty for warp speed, but the poor Scotsman is incapacitated - leaving the ship's most beloved comrade to step into the breach and save the day, with the only sacrifice being himself.
Where this ending kicks into overdrive, and greatness, is at the moment Kirk realizes what has happened. The voice of a shocked McCoy comes over the radio, saying "Jim... you'd better get down here." Kirk spies Spock's empty chair, and runs to the engine room, intercut with the creation of the Genesis planet, a pure vision of the flourishing world juxtaposed with the dying flame of Spock's soul. Kirk's final moments with Spock challenge every fibre of Shatner's acting talent, with the man coming up trumps every time. But Nimoy's acting in that scene cannot be underestimated.
Those final words - 'I have been, and always shall be your friend' - leaves Kirk a broken man. As he says at Spock's funeral, "Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human." A possible insult in Spock's irony-free eyes, but nevermore has there been a more honest Kirk. His machismo stripped away, his melodrama shattered, he can do nothing but swallow back the tears. And as Kirk stands on the bridge paraphrasing Charles Dickens, he can but revel in the creation of new life, one which was caused by the selflessness of his friend. And as we see the torpedo on the surface, followed by Spock's reading of the famous introduction, we gain a sense of hope, a transference from mourning to reflection. And that reflection is one we're glad to experience.
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1955)
Jack Arnold's SF classic takes us on the journey of a man as he shrinks, adding the usual sci-f/horror trappings the Universal pictures always loved, but also - as per Richard Matheson's novel the film was adapted from - as a study of misogynism. As Scott Carey gets smaller, his reactions toward the women in his life, particularly his wife, get more and more explosive, borne out of frustration at his disease but also at being cut down to size, namely the same size, as them, and even smaller, relieving him of any comfortable social structure.
This struggle continues in a more visceral and primal form as Scott shrinks down to minute size, first being attacked by the family cat but then being locked in a fight to the death with a monstrous spider, able to fit in the palm of his hand in his original size, but now as big as a car. But no matter how small he is, Scott's ingenuity and adaptability are as strong as ever, and he defeats the spider, only to find out that he's too weak even to really eat the cake he killed the spider for.
It's at this point where tragedy again gives way to life-affirming hope, in what has to be one of the weirdest endings to ever be seen in a mainstream picture. Carey finds himself shrinking ever more, and in an existentialist monologue explains to us that he is now the first of many occupants in a brave new world, and that he will continue to exist. You have to hear this monologue to appreciate it, so here you go!
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)
You've just had your hand cut off, you're hanging from a weather vane above what might as well be a bottomless pit, and to top it all off, you've found out the galaxy's most evil man is your dad. If your name is Luke Skywalker, you're having the bad day to end all bad days.
Fast forward a bit. Luke's been rescued, Darth Vader's very pissed off, and everyone is licking their wounds as the Rebel fleet masses. This is where possibly the most perfect example of how much of Star Wars' power is in John Williams' music. And Artoo-Detoo. As the fleet glides by to the strains of the Force theme, Lando and Chewie prepare to depart to rescue Han. A quick chat with Luke and they're off, the Han/Leia love theme swelling as the Millennium Falcon zooms into the distance, leaving only a glimmer of hope behind.
And that's what makes this ending work so well: the complete lack of any resolution. If you're a cynic, you'll say "well of course they'll rescue Han," but at the end of this movie you don't have any idea what'll happen. What makes this work so well is the body language between Leia and Luke, once possible lovers, now brother and sister in everything but name. As Luke puts his arm around her in a typically brotherly act, and Artoo sighs, any chance of success seems so far away. And there it ends, with Williams' music and Peter Suschitzky combining fiercely to show just how simple these films are, yet so damn hard to replicate.
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Continue reading The Best Hollywood EndingsTop 10 (OK, 4) Endings to Spike Lee Movies
I'll begin by more-or-less paraphrasing the opening paragraphs of Andrew's piece, because he basically stole a lot of what I was going to say. Real life is messy, and doesn't come with neat little endings to stories. So when you're writing a film, you have two options. Either end the story with a big, climactic punchline, and leave the taste of phony, Hollywood formula in the audience's mouth, or go for a more realistic semi-resolution, fade to black and leave the audience with an unsatisfied feeling and their popcorn half-eaten.
But the great thing about movies is that they are a visual medium, so that they don't rely entirely on plot mechanics to convey ideas. A story with a weak--or, let's say, a soft narrative conclusion, can have a strong visual conclusion that gives you a sense of closure without an unnaturally constructed plot device.
The most famous example of what I'm talking about is probably the freeze frame at the end of The 400 Blows. Narratively, there's no spectacular climax to the story. It's just one chapter in a life, ready to bleed into the next. But that final freeze frame serves as a full stop, if not an exclamation point, leaving the audience feeling satisfied that they have seen the end.
The master of this style of ending, in recent decades, is Spike Lee. I've always thought the endings of his movies were among the most poetic in contemporary American cinema. He first tried this strategy out on his second film, School Daze, which ends with Laurence Fishburne walking into the quad of his college campus early in the morning, ringing a bell and yelling "Wake up!" In literal narrative, it doesn't really make much sense for Fishburne to do this. It would, in fact, probably result in a serious asskicking from fellow students who were up partying until six in the morning the night before. But of course, he's not telling them to wake up, he's telling them--and us--to wake up. OK, it's a bit "on the nose," and I'll grant that it's not Spike's best film, but I like the idea.
Lee's next movie, Do the Right Thing, remains his most famous. Now, Do the Right Thing doesn't exactly fit my thesis--it's hard to imagine a non-genre movie having a more definite narrative climax--but I like the way he uses recurring visual motifs to underscore the themes of the film. When Smiley enters the smoldering remains of Sal's Pizzeria to pin the photo of Martin and Malcolm on the wall, the figures whose opposing views on the use of violence for political ends scroll across the screen at the start of the credits, it brings all of the movie's themes together. Of course, this isn't technically the ending--it's followed by the denouement of Sal and Mookie's conversation the next morning in front of the aftermath--but it feels like the end.
In Get on the Bus, Evan (Thomas Jefferson Byrd) has his son, Evan Jr. (De'Aundre Bonds) shackled to his leg as a court-ordered punishment for petty theft as they ride a bus across the country to attend the Million Man March. The shackle serves as a symbol of slavery, both for the audience and for the passengers on the bus. The final shot is of the shackle left abandoned on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. And although the metaphor is not perfect--whatever failings and prejudices of the criminal justice system may have led to this situation, the kid had committed a crime--it ties up the story with an image that has remained embedded in my mind, long after I've forgotten what actually happened when they showed up at the march.
My favorite of Spike's fantastic endings is from He Got Game, and it's an image that has stayed with me through the years, and could possibly be my favorite ending from any film. After two-plus hours of trying and failing to reconnect with his son Jesus (Ray Allen), Jake (Denzel Washington) has returned to Attica. Jesus stands alone in a gym, picks up a basketball and hurls it in the air, as the music of Aaron Copeland swells on the soundtrack. The basketball spins slowly through the air, like the bone in 2001, and finally lands in front of the father's feet inside the prison walls. It's such a beautiful, poetic image, expressing all the frustration of a communication breakdown, and at the same time the hope that communication can happen beyond language and words, perhaps through the sport that is both the bridge and the wall between them.
I didn't even get into 25th Hour, which has one of the greatest endings of all time, partially because it doesn't really fit with what I'm saying, and partially because I can't quite remember the order of what happened. Maybe the reason I admire this stuff so much is because I have such a hard time writing endings. In fact, I'm having a tough time figuring out how to end this right now. Maybe I should just close with an image of, I dunno, a typewriter eating my fingers. See, it's harder than it looks to come up with this stuff.
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Continue reading Top 10 (OK, 4) Endings to Spike Lee MoviesWednesday, August 15, 2007
Transformers: The Rejected Scripts
Hollywood's a funny old game. As soon as the latest big budget extravaganza is greenlit, legions of established screenwriters, dreaming strugglers and internet fanboys announce their intentions to write a draft, all fighting each other like dozens of over or underweight knights in Adult Swim T-shirts in order to reach the damsel in distress, the holy grail, in this case: TRANSFORMERS. Of course, we've already seen the final product as written by literary geniuses Orci and Kurtzman, but what about those scripts that didn't get past the writing stage? Read on for some exclusive extracts...TRANSFORMERS
Screenplay by: George Lucas.
Scene: Int: Autobot base. Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Ironhide, Ratchet, Sideswipe, Blaster, Grimlock, Slag, Snarl, Sludge, Swoop, Inferno, Jazz-Funk, Jetfire, , Blurr, Bluestreak, Broadside, Cloudburst, Downshift, Grandslam, Grapple, Hoist, Hotrod, Hound, Kup, Outback, Perceptor, Ultra Magnus, Sandstorm, Scattershot, Smokescreen, Mirage, Sunstreaker and Beachcomber are standing about.
Optimus Prime: Autobots! I sense a disturbance in the energon. Transform into your stealth attack line configuration.
Autobots transform (See ILM).
Blaster: Sir, i'm picking up signals on my Auto-radar command centre with genuine spinning satellite dish that say the Decepticons are currently attacking the Antarctic secret base play-set!
Optimus Prime: Autobots! Transform into Tundra attack Snow blast colouration!
Autobots transform (See ILM)
Optimus Prime: Most satisfying. Ratchet! How many figures is that so far?
Ratchet: Over 130 distinct forms, Prime!
Silverbolt, Slingshot, Air Raid, Fireflight and Skydive turn up.
Silverbolt: Optimus! We thought we'd show up for a single scene and stand in the background!
Optimus Prime: Excellent! When you're done you can send in the Protectobots, Technobots and Astro Squad.
Blaster: Sir! On my Computer Nerve Centre Command set with genuine flashing lights I see that a far larger threat is approaching!
Optimus Prime: What is it, Blaster?
Blaster: Plot, Optimus.
Optimus Prime: Godammit!
Blaster: Oh...no...it...can't be...s...sir...they're Sideshow Collectibles!
Optimus Prime: We don't stand a chance against their superior build quality!
Blaster: oh...god...they're quarter scale!
Optimus Prime: Autobots! The time for standing around stifly expositing is over! We must go and fight a lot for half an hour! Transform into your attack battle armour forms with working rockets!
Ratchet: 165 distinct figures sir!
Optimus transforms into an Ape.
Optimus Prime: The fuck?
Ratchet: Post Beast Wars continuity, Prime - you'are an Ape now.
Optimus Prime: Fucking EU.
Autobots go and fight a lot for half and hour (See ILM).
TRANSFORMERS
A Dogme 95 project by Lars Von Trier.
A man sits naked on the dirty floor in the middle of a darkened forest. We can barely see his face due to the lack of light.
MAN
I am a transformer.
THE END.
TRANSFORMERS (SECOND DRAFT)
A Dogme 95 project by Lars Von Trier
Scene: Truck stop. There is a truck. Ugly Man and Jessica Biel are looking at the truck.
Jessica Biel: So it was just a truck we've been staring at the past two hours?
Ugly Man: Yes. It is a symbol of America's need for transcendance leading to a refusal to accept grim European reality.
Jessica Biel: Gyp.
Ugly Man: Now I am going to fuck you up the arse for ten minutes to symbolise the co-dependant relationship between grim European reality and really hot young American fantasy. Bend over.
Jessica Biel bends over. Close up of Jessica Biel's arse.
Jessica Biel: This is going to be simulated, right?
Ugly Man: This is art, baby.
TRANSFORMERS: A ROBOTIC ROMANTIC COMEDY
Written By: Nora Ephron
Ext: Busy New York City Street. Intersection lights are broken. Optimus Prime (Volkswagon Camper Van form) and Megatron (BMW form) both try to cross at teh same time and the crash. They try to reverse but find that their fenders are inextricably stuck together. The transform to find themselves joined at the hip.
Optimus Prime: Well isn't this cute.
Megatron: But I have an important business meeting on the other side of town in two hours!
Optimus Prime: And I have to help some photogenically underprivileged kids from being evicted downtown!
Megatron: Gah! My (ask husband to think of some technology stuff) can not seperate us!
Optimus Prime: We're just going to have to get through this day together...
Optimus' best friends, Jazz (in large-booted SUV form) and Bumblebee (in pink VW Beetle form) watch from side street.
Jazz: Mmm-mmm, dat ain't gon' work. Mmm-mmm.
Bumblebee: I think it's adorable!
TRANSFORMERS: FIRST DRAFT
Written, Typed and Xeroxed by MICHAEL BAY. Music by Aerosmith.
EXT. TARMAC
A vibrant orange sky overshadows the huge landing field. Armies of troops jump into their planes, all at 2 frames per second.
We cut to a huge slab of silver, glimmering in the dusk. We pull back and it's the grille of a truck. White foamy liquid spills down the grille. We pull back further. A nubile brunette dressed in a tiny strappy top and jeans that barely cover her g-string is washing the truck, caressing its American steel, its smoke stacks rising in appreciation.
Suddenly, the truck begins to shift. Glittering shards of metal move in uber-slow motion. The shadow of a gigantic robot is revealed. As OPTIMUS PRIME steps into the magic hour light, we see the stars and stripes that decorate his cab. As fighter planes glide majestically in the background, Prime suddenly takes out a gigantic cannon and fires around blindly. Cue a jittering montage of super-fast and mega-slow explosions, all to the music of Aerosmith.
The nubile brunette walks to prime and clasps onto his leg, blowing the smoke away from his now spent cannon barrel. Prime transforms, the nubile brunette leaps onto the bonnet, and they drive into the sunset, flanked by the fighter planes, all to the music of Aerosmith covering Berlin's 1986 classic "Take My Breath Away."
As THE END flashes on the screen, the audience notices that they've been in the theater for four hours.
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Continue reading Transformers: The Rejected ScriptsTuesday, August 14, 2007
Why Mainstream Movies Suck
Now this comes mostly from my refusal to believe that so many Hollywood movies suck simply because the people making them are really sucky at what they do. It seems a too easy, not too mention a too circular, explanation. Suck is the result, not the cause. With no guarantees (Chris) that I’ll stay completely on topic – why do mainstream movies suck?
I mean this is their job, this is their life, this is an extremely competitive business, and it just doesn’t seem reasonable that anyone could get anywhere for very long by just being incompetent. On some level it stands to reason that they are making these films this way deliberately.
There are certainly plenty of reasons why things can go wrong:
Hollywood is very political, so a very collaborative medium can go very wrong if the various parties are pulling in different directions. Hollywood is also a business, so if you are very good at convincing people to part with their money you can carry on making films if, perhaps, only on the low budget outskirts of the industry. Hollywood is also very glamorous, which is presumably why so many would enter it instead of the infinitely less risky businesses of investment banking and the like, so people can be there for the sex, drugs and power rather than the tedious business of actually making a movie. Hollywood is very corporate, so film-makers can be put in straight-jackets by licensing deals, strict release dates, and the mandates of stock-holders. Hollywood, for that matter, is full of humans, who are always capable of just genuinely fucking up.
I am not a Hollywood insider and have no reason to expect to ever be, so I can not claim expertise in these business matters. It is not these things that interest me here, however.
What of Wild Hogs, or Night At The Museum? These were very successful movies. For want of a better term, they ‘worked’. What of Crash, the winner of so many Oscars while at the same time being a lunk-headed, patronising, racist, turgid work of ‘serious’ cinema. What of the Star Wars prequels? George Lucas is a man of great vision, ability, resources and freedom, yet the films really blew.
So here’s my theory and, I guess, what it was I wanted to write about in the first place. This is all about our relationship with ‘Story’.
We are belief machines. Our higher brain functions seek to connect the various things we experience. We make ‘sense’ of the world in this way. This is how we give the world meaning, beyond the ‘hungry, eat, horny, fuck’ instincts of animals. A story is a complicated set of connections between many things. Our reality is the story we tell ourselves about everything. This need for story, common to all peoples, isn’t just an accident in us, and it isn't just a liking for 'cool stuff' - it comes out of the way our brains are structured. Without story, we have no world. Story is fundamental. Deep down, we really believe in them. It’s important.
This is how film editing works. Put two images together and we will try to connect them and create a relationship between them. Take the famous experiment where an image of a man’s face is juxtaposed with an image of a baby, then an image of a corpse, and the audience will read the man’s face as having different emotions. The viewer has created a narrative connection in his mind. The connection is not in the images themselves. The ‘film’ is the story we tell ourselves about the images we’ve just seen. ‘Reality’, I’m arguing, is the same. This is the metaphysical root of all post-modern philosophy from Nietzsche on.
Religious types will say that the defining characteristic of a human is the divine element – the one that allows them to discern the ‘true’ story, and the ‘real’ connections between things. I’m not religious, so you’re getting my take on this. Religion is the ultimate story – the one that connects everything, and gives us complete meaning. It is that which answers that neurological need to connect most fully. It is just another story, but one that proves that us lot have a really, really big need for a really good story.
We don’t even need to bring in different religions here – just the different sects of Christianity show that changing some of these connections can lead to very different ‘stories’. Focus on the ‘turn the other cheek’ stuff and you get a very pacifist, liberal religion. Focus on the ‘eye for an eye’ stuff and you get gay hating, war-mongering fascism.
Religious leaders, politicians and salesmen of all stripes know that if you arrange the connections in the right way, you can get people to do all sorts of things like murder abortion doctors, drink poisoned Kool-Aid or buy snake-oil.
We are hard-wired to believe in Story. Humans need a story to make sense of the world, and these people seek to give you one, with an added dash of agenda thrown in underneath. That it so often works speaks to the power of a good story.
And the other lot of people who know this ‘secret’ is artists and, hey presto, we’re back at movies.
Movies are a far more benevolent form of this, as it is a medium happy to admit it is only ‘a’ story, and only asks you to give yourself up to it for 2 hours or so, but the process is the same.
Now the romantic, artistic ideal is that the film-maker tells the audience a story they genuinely believe themselves, that expresses something they feel is ‘true’ and that they just ‘had’ to tell.
More often, though, these stories are created deliberately and consciously, just as religions were carefully developed and evolved over hundreds of years instead of, I don’t know, coming in a sudden bolt from the sky.
And here we get back to Hollywood.
Producers look at a script and say (grossly simplified, but the process is well documented) ‘It’s too miserable, give it a happy ending. It’s not funny enough, put a ‘comedy’ character in there. Not enough for the ladies, put a love interest there. And a dinosaur, they’re cool right now, right?’
The idea behind this is that if stories are just things you connect together, you can connect together anything and it will be a story. This is the mistake.
“If we just shove these things together,” says my made up producer, with some white on his top lip. “The audience will lap it up. We’ve just got to put them together, and the audience will connect the dots. That what audiences do, the credulous fools! Mwa Ha Ha!”
Then he fucks an actress and kills a writer.
Anyway, z-grade dialogue writing aside, it’s that ‘us and them’ that is the killer. How many times do you read in an interview someone say ‘I don’t really watch too many movies’. I can remember quite a few, though not many recently – maybe PR person has had a word in Hollywood’s ear. Stories are not something that they believe anymore, stories are things only the huddled masses believe. Their job, and their definition of good (if we accept that it isn't just money), is just what collection of things they shove together on screen.
Perhaps this is why Crash won so many Oscars. It connected many important things together that didn’t get connected in most Hollywood films before it and it did it very elegantly (Paul Haggis is, if nothing else is a very technically adept screenwriter). By this definition it was a good story.
Of course, by ours, it was a load of contrived, didactic, speechifying, glaringly obvious, dishonest tripe. It did not tell a believable story.
How about the Star Wars prequels: Lucas certainly filled them full of stuff – mythology, space-ships, much-loved characters, sfx and light-sabers – yet they weren’t very good.
He didn’t care about the story. It was something to do at arm’s length, something those creatures called ‘fans’ would do. It was simply his job to parade all the things he wanted to say across the screen and that, by definition would be a story.
To an extent he was right. Message-boards are filled with fans ‘fan-wanking’ – bending over backwards creating the links and connections between the various bits so they make sense – so that they actually tell a story. But those who don’t put ‘Jedi’ on their census forms couldn’t be bothered doing the work, so revealing the rather cynical half-job the prequels actually were. There were no connections made between the different bits, only lots of different bits shoved next to each other, and it is not the same.
Take this story from The Guardian, all about the furore in England over the shocking reveal that a lot of 'reality' TV is, in fact, made-up. It displays the arrogance of the programme-makers, certainly, but it also shows how important these programmes are to the audience. The programme makers, one can sense in their interviews, are exasperated, desperately wanting to say: 'but of course it's just a load of nonsense! It's TV! None of it's real!', so missing the crucial point that, to the audience, yes it is real.
So that’s why I think mainstream movies suck – this disconnect that occurs when the story-teller believes they are different from the audience. They actually believe what they are doing is ‘good’, which is why they aren’t going to get ‘better’ any time soon – they don’t realise they are making a mistake. This is why religion and politics suck too, but hey, I did at least answer the question posed by the title of the article.
Eventually.
We are all bound by ‘Story’, even the story-tellers. It is our conception of what the world is like, and so runs far deeper than some check-list of talking points or focus-grouped plot points. It is this cynical idea that we are above ‘Story’ and that ‘Story’ is just something to appease, cajole and lead the unwashed masses that leads to such suckiness. Of course, as with the example of the Star Wars fans or, I don’t know, our war in Iraq, it’s our fault if we are so lacking in our own stories that we end up working really hard to fill in all the blanks in their incredibly bad ones.
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Continue reading Why Mainstream Movies SuckTFL's Greatest Hits - Part 7: The Lord Of The Rings 5th Anniversary
In December last year, me, George and Charlie sat down and argued about what is probably the defining movie trilogy for geeks of this generation - Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings - to celebrate the 5th anniversary of The Fellowship Of The Ring's original theatrical release.
It was a whole lot of fun getting into the details of the films at length, not to mention having an online discussion that didn't degenerate into partisan comparisons with Star Wars. It was great to have another excuse to watch the films, and it was also great to use the discussions as a bookend to five years of watching and discussing these films innumerable times. The films sit at the bottom of my DVD pile where I hope they will stay for a few years yet, ready for the time I can watch them again with some sense of freshness and perspective.
I think the articles came out really well, and I hope they are as entertaining to read as they were to write. Here are the links:
1. The Fellowship Of The Ring
2. The Two Towers
3. The Return Of The King
So feel free to make man-love to The Vig and make gay jokes about Frodo as you read them and remember: Extended Editions forever!
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 7: The Lord Of The Rings 5th AnniversaryMonday, August 13, 2007
Consequence, Regret, Heart-Break, and Hope: The Most Human Hollywood Endings
The original intention was for all of us to do a top ten of our favorite film endings, but once the esteemed Doug Slack broke that mold, I had to follow suit. Like he was saying behind closed doors, I didn't want to reach for stuff that might not fit just to fill the list. That and I'm terribly lazy. C'est la vie!
Spoilers to follow...
Jackie Brown (1997)
d. Quentin Tarantino
What moves me the most in what's now unquestionably my favorite of Tarantino's films is the realization of lost opportunity. The "what could've been" mentality that all of us have no doubt felt to varying degrees at one point or another in our lives.
Particularly, seeing Max Cherry (Robert Forster) turn down Jackie Brown's (Pam Grier) offer to go away with her and live it up with bags full of Ordell Robbie's (Samuel L. Jackson) money. And for what? A return to the mundane? A return to the fulfilling life of the bail bondsman? Max himself realizes this as he watches Jackie walk off and drive away. He turns and walks off as the camera stays out of focus, almost grimacing as if trying its hardest not to see the painful sense of regret in Max. All we can make out is Max folding his arms and holding his head, as Bobby Womack's "Across 110th Street" begins to swell up (a fantastic music cue), which of course leads to the long take of Jackie driving in the car.
And what's great about this shot is the whole spectrum of thoughts and emotions being told in Grier's face and subsequent mouthing of Womack's lyrics. For someone who just made off with half a mil, there's a curious sense of ambivalence in Jackie's expression. Is it sadness for not having a companion in Max? Perhaps she's questioning the righteousness of her actions? Or maybe it's regret that she didn't take charge of her life sooner when she was younger? I think it's a little bit of everything. It's an introspective moment, and one that's indicative of Jackie Brown's maturity as a whole. Quentin, I loved Death Proof to pieces, but I'd love it even more for you to return to this kind of filmmaking. It's brilliant, affecting stuff.
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
d. John Cassavetes
I often have to step back and rethink what it means when a movie is being "real". This is usually when whatever film claiming to be real isn't a Cassavetes flick. What kicks your ass in his films are that performances suddenly seize to be performances and cross over that line into honest human action. It's scary stuff because it begins to feel almost voyeuristic, but beautiful all the same. How is it beautiful? It's truthful.
Gena Rowlands (brilliantly whacked out in one of the great performances of the 1970s) plays Nick Longhetti's (Peter Falk - never more naked than he is here) wife, Mabel. Mabel is going nuts. Why? Who knows? That's not really the point. She's simply a woman that's emotionally volatile, living in a relationship with a man that loves her but is also an impatient bastard. They have three kids too, which further complicates the household dynamic. Like all juicy drama, this is a good thing.
Towards the tail end of Cassavetes' film, after a welcome back "party" for Mabel (she's just been released from a mental hospital) turns ugly and everyone is kicked out including friends and immediate family members, all that's left is the basic family unit. And guess what? The unit functions in near-normality.
So what about all this is "human"? The Longhettis, by the end, are at a crossroads. It's either break the chain and move on separately or take a deep breath, regroup, and tackle the bumps on the road ahead they know are coming yet again. They seem to choose the latter, and do it with smiles on their faces. But there's a storm waiting, that much the audience knows. How could they not, what with the absolute nakedness we've seen in both Rowlands and Falk's performances from the get-go? The ending is an affirmation for the human soul's ability to cope with disintegration and its unmitigated ability to find hope when nothing else is left. There are no absolutes, and that much is clear in Influence's ending. Just like real life.
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
d. Woody Allen
When I started thinking of heart-break, a lot of films came to mind besides Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo. But what ultimately made me pick Purple Rose was that it's also a great love letter to the great escapism of cinema and its ability to reaffirm our own hopes and desires (this is a common theme in a lot of Allen's films). Even if those hopes and desires are often delusional or far-fetched, like those of Mia Farrow's Cecilia.
Cecilia is a hopeless romantic and she loves the cinema (a woman after my own heart). She's also holding down a shitty job and is married to a shitty husband (Danny Aiello - born to play the bastard spouse). But no matter how hard it gets, she always gets her fix at the movies... the ultimate drug. There she falls in love with the main character in the film "The Purple Rose of Cairo", Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), who literally walks off the screen and into Cecilia's heart.
By the end, Cecilia falls in love with the real Tom Baxter, Gil Shepherd (Jeff Daniels again, this time as the bastard actor portraying the character Tom Baxter) and plans are made for the two of them to go off to Hollywood and essentially live happily ever after in typical storybook fashion. And you want this for her after all the shit she's put through with Danny Aiello, and more simply, because of her unwavering passion for the romantic. But alas, it's not meant to be, as the movie takes a cruel twist for the worst and Gil Shepherd stands the poor girl up at the very end. And it's fucking crushing as you watch her almost child-like enthusiasm slowly wane. We even get a shot of Jeff Daniels on the airplane going back to Hollywood as he sits in regret with what he's done. Did he love her at all? Does he just feel like a dick for what he did?
And just then we begin to hear Irving Berlin's "Cheek To Cheek", one of THE classic romantic numbers of yesteryear that's used to perfection here, as Cecilia dejectedly walks into the cinema - the only one to never let her down - having nowhere else to go. And while some would say using Top Hat and that particular moment where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers break into song and dance is too on the nose, those people need to get fucked right quick. It's a gorgeous moment of synergy between audience and screen, both in the film and to us the viewers as we suddenly take the role of Cecilia and become captivated by the grandiose vision of Astaire and Rogers performing like gods of the stage. And at that moment, all our problems, our worries, and sadnesses... disappear. And when Cecilia slowly begins to smile again, we can't help but simply smile back.
Magnolia (1999)
d. Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson is a right fucking bastard. A brilliant filmmaker, but a goddamn bastard. And thank goodness for that. Anderson puts his characters through the wringer like few storytellers today do. I mean, he pummels them, treats them to the finest hell has to offer, and then... redemption. Redemption is never as sweet without the bitterness before it. Anderson knows this and he milks it for all it's worth. It also helps when you've got the incomparable Aimee Mann's musical tracks lining the walls of your film. And it's this combination of music and visual again that makes the closing moments of Magnolia one of the most off-kilter hopeful endings ever.
All the characters here are real, and as such, fucked up. Really fucked up. But he uses the John C. Reilly/Melora Walters combo, the most human pairing in the film to close it all off. Their connection, at least to me, is the most touching because you have a girl that's about as fucked up as a girl can be - abusive childhood, terrible father, etc, etc. - and a guy who's sort of the perfect embodiment of the "born to lose" gentleman. And it's obvious he's almost as screwed up as she is too, which is a nice touch. Anderson doesn't look down on these characters, but rather, completely empathizes with their shortcomings and insecurities. And he gives these two the final moment of forgiveness, redemption, and hope. Like with Purple Rose of Cairo, when Melora Walters looks at us and smiles as Aimee Mann's bitchin' guitar chords release all the weight of this character's world, we're smiling (and possibly tearing up) too.
The Lord of the Rings:
The Return of the King (2003)
d. Peter Jackson
The ending to Peter Jackson's epic took some new meaning to me of late. I haven't watched the films in a very long time as I sort of got burned out on the whole thing, despite holding them very dear to my heart. But having rewatched the third act and denouement again the other night for the purposes of this list, I can say that Return of the King, for its occasional hiccups and indulgences, has not lost a thing in the end and still has one of the most poignant and satisfying third acts of any of these large-scale films to have come out in recent memory.
Looking at the very end of the film, as Samwise walks back towards his home and his daughter comes out of the door, running to great her father (a moment that really gets me) you hear Frodo's voice-over basically saying that everyone must live for something in their lives that isn't themselves.
I know I've already mentioned this before elsewhere, but my grandmother passed away a few years ago from cancer. That was a blow, being that she was a very integral part of my small but close-knit family. But the years that have passed have eased the struggle, and life as it does, moves on. However, for my grandfather, the story has been a little different. He does better than any of us thought he would, but there is a void now in his simple life. Who is he living for other than myself and his daughters (my mother and aunt)? It's not the same as living for your spouse. And I know the same thing has been happening to my friends and acquaintances over the last 5-7 years. The observations have been the same.
A very close friend of mine lost his father a few years back. His mother was now alone, faced with having to move to a smaller place with her son and daughter (both older, and as such, not in need of paternal care). It was a confusing and difficult time of change and my good friend worried about how she would cope. And then one day, she decided to adopt a little 2-year old girl from the daycare facility she worked at. A girl that needed a new family as her biological parents were basically clueless kids that didn't know what the hell they were doing and were neglecting the child. So this was a two-way blessing. And suddenly, everything changed. There was purpose. There was renewed love for life and a reason to make the effort of the everyday routine, because someone else needed it.
I watched from afar and was happy to see how things can work out, often in ways we never expect. I hope for the best for my grandfather, a strong man, but a man still made of emotions like all of us. As I watched Sam say goodbye to his dear friend for the last time, I couldn't help but relate in a peripheral sort of way. And what Frodo's voice-over states is indeed so true. Sam finds renewed life and joy in his wife and his children, and once again, the cycle continues.
Return of the King shows its humanity, like all the films already mentioned, in how much we are able to endure. Trials, tribulations, heart-break... none of these things are foreign to us. But films like these basically show a reflection of our lives with a clarity that we'll never have. They often depict a life that's more real than our own. To see characters fall and get back up to soldier on, it inspires. It fills us with confidence. We're learning along with them. And it's a testament to the creative minds behind all these films that we should learn so much about ourselves when watching them.
That, my friends, is a beautiful thing.
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Continue reading Consequence, Regret, Heart-Break, and Hope: The Most Human Hollywood EndingsTFL's Greatest Hits - Part 6: DVD Commentaries
We only had a chance to organize three of these bad boys mainly due to the fact that they were a bitch to set up, edit, and read. But even still, the three that do exist are full of great little moments, both insightful (I think) and funny ("ki-ka-ka-ka-ka-ker-ka").
So shrug off your work duties, grab your favorite beverage, and re-read our filmic ramblings as we confuse Australia for Texas, get hawt for The Vig, and watch in dismay at Carlton's lack of love for murderous William Shatner.
- Wolf Creek
- A History of Violence
- Halloween
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 6: DVD CommentariesFriday, August 10, 2007
Stupid Running In The Movies
I had a really bad back over the weekend. I think it was a combination of a massively sedentary lifestyle and sleeping awkwardly on Friday because a: I was drunk and B: The Cat With Which You Do Not Fuck was sleeping in the middle of the bed. I was walking with a bolt-upright, immobile spine and a sort of backwards-armed waddle in an attempt not to wrench my lower back muscles. 'Hey', I thought, 'That's like Harrison Ford in most of his movies! What an incredibly thin excuse for another list article for The Fake Life! How many more days to go again?'
So here are some fine examples of really stupid perambulation in cinema:
The 'Get Off My Lawn' award goes to Harrison Ford in Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
Even from the first sequence you know something is up. As he's running away from the Hovitos, dust flying off his clothes, you can clearly see the old man emerging. His spine is bolt straight and seemingly without mobility while his arms are doing that high, backwards pumping motion and his little legs are trying to do all the work. This is a clear sign of an action hero who's lower back is giving him gyp.
Compare this to the Harrison from Star Wars.
Here, while running around the Death Star trying to rescue Carrie Fisher from the nearest pile of drugs, you can see him leaning in to the run. His whole body is working as one to create forward momentum. It's dynamic. By god, it's sexy. Look at those hips:
But by the time of Indy, however, his back is having none of it.
No wonder he's so grumpy. I complained for half an hour yesterday just going to buy some teabags and milk from the local shop.
It's interesting to note that in Last Crusade the only noticeable running he does is a short hop onto a boat in Venice. Let's see how much he does in next year's Indy 4.
The bonus 'Get Off My Lawn' award goes to Sigourney Weaver in Aliens.
Maybe 55 years in hypersleep atrophied her muscles but come on. When she's running about the Sulaco hanger fighting the Alien Queen you can clearly see the backward-armed waddle of someone who needs an osteopath and a cup of Ovaltine.
These are supposed to be aspirational forms of human heroism but they look like they could be happy-slapped by my niece. Sigourney and Harrison were only in their mid-thirties when they made these films, and it's not like they had X-boxes to tempt them into entirely sedentary lifestyles. Pussies!
The 'Trying Not To Trip Over The Camera' award goes to Jena Malone in Contact.
This is a perennial problem in movies stemming from the technical limitations of heavy cameras and the DP's need to keep everything in focus. The camera has to move relatively slowly, so the actors who are 'running' in the shot have to move really slowly to stay in shot. The solution involves the actor pumping their arms vigorously up and down, huffing and puffing a lot and hoping like hell that the audience doesn't notice what a fool they are making of themselves. We, of course, don't notice the good examples, but the bad ones look like amateur pantomime and, in one of Robert Zemeckis' typically tricksy shots, young Jena has to run up the stairs and along the upstairs hallway while the camera reverse dollies just in front of her. Moving a heavy steadycam backwards in an enclosed space while actually keeping it 'steady' meant it had to be slow, leaving Jena to seemingly run on the spot for a few moments.
The 'Running Like A Little Girl' award also goes to Jena Malone in Contact.
I'm sorry to pick on her, what with her being a little girl and all, but I just watched Contact again recently and she really does run like a little girl.
The 'Jogging For Your Life' award goes to Gwyneth Paltrow in Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow.
I don't know why people don't like Gwyneth, but one of the main reasons given on messageboards for not liking the movie is her performance as intrepid reporter Polly Perkins. You know, as opposed to the actual film being a bit crap. Maybe, deep down, movie geeks have more love for giant robots than incredibly beautiful women. And the bit of really stupid running she does while New York is being attacked by the giant robots isn't her fault either. 100ft monsters bear down on her and she gently shuffles to the side of the road to get out of the way of all that imminent, painful death. Hurry it up, love!
Part of it is her pencil skirt, which is the fault of the objectivisation of women by a male dominated society (but, hey, still looks great). The other part is that this movie was filmed on tiny green screen stages (with all the scenery added in with CGI later) so if she ran more than 3 yards she would have bumped into a wall.
This problem also afflicts many of the other action scenes in the movie. The sets are huge, but all the characters are stuck in a tiny square in the middle, which both makes the action feel stilted and the CGI backdrops even more fake. To be fair to Sky Captain (which I feel was an honourable failure and a film I still really want to like), this problem also afflicts much bigger and shittier films such as Attack Of The Clones and The Polar Express.
Ironically, the only scenes this '100% green screen' technique works in are the quiet conversation scenes set in small rooms, with the actors in close up and the backgrounds out of focus. Which renders the whole thing a bit daft.
The 'You Try Doing That In The Playground, See How Long You Last' award goes to Robert Patrick in Terminator 2.
Robert Patrick plays the T-1000, a killer robot made of super-mimetic poly wolly got a ding dong pseudo science. Or liquid metal, if you prefer. It had to be tougher than Arnold Schwarzenegger - faster, stronger, scarier. Robert achieved this by clenching his jaw, never blinking ever, and running like a stamp collecting ten year old.
I mean it - most kids will run like big spazzers with the complete lack of co-ordination that comes from gleeful abandon, a few will run with cat-like natural grace, but there are certain little kids, the type that iron their own shirts, that will take this running business really seriously. Remember playing soldiers when you were a kid and you were all running about going 'RRAARRRGHH BANG BANG YOU'RE DEAD BOOM!'? There was always one kid who wanted to hold the gun correctly, practice those parade ground maneuvers when you put the gun on your shoulder and stuff. Him. He wanted everyone to do it properly.
The back is upright, the joints are stiff, all the lines are straight and all the movements sharp. There is no smiling. It's a child's idea of running like an adult. A child who doesn't want to be a child. A child who's room is really tidy. It looks really, really stupid.
But, just like that kid, it's also really scary. Yes it's dumb if you tried to do it in real life, but in the movie you believe he can outrun a car, you believe that it is simply the most coldly efficient way to move quickly, you believe that he is made out of knives.
Some things just work in movies, no matter how silly they are in real life. It is a continuing shame that Edward Furlong isn't one of them.
The 'Supersize Me' award goes to Steven Seagal in Under Siege 2.
The martial artist, Buddhist, legendary bluesman and ecologist Steven Seagal seemed like he could take up the action hero mantle from the Stallones and Van Dammes in the early 90's, but while the former respectively used steroids and coke to stay in shape, Seagal seemed to prefer Big Macs.
It was 1995's Under Siege 2 where the weight started to show, despite his character wearing a lose fitting, black (slimming!) suit. Already a lot of his fights were filmed from the sternum up, or consisted of him shooting lots of baddies in very wide-shot while walking very slowly down a train carriage. One scene, however, demanded he run along the roof of a carriage and his huffing, unconvincing waddle was probably the most exercise he'd had all year.
These days Steven spends most of his time standing in the middle of rooms while strategically doped stuntmen run at his fist. And rocking the fuck out.
The 'This Was Stupid 70 Years Ago' award goes to Ed Burns and Jemima Rooper in A Sound Of Thunder.
In a film so terrible even Franchise Pictures delayed it for years, Ed and Jemima walk down a street in Future City and talk about some shit or other. Not having the budget to create such a lavish set, they imported a Playstation 2 cut scene and superimposed the two actors walking on a treadmill in front of it.
Their steps do not match up with the movement of the pavement, so giving us that 'skating' look computer games managed to solve a half decade ago, the grain and the lighting of the various elements don't even begin to match and it is a nakedly obvious camera trick that went out of favour for being 'really crappy' around about the time of The Jazz Singer.
I'd give the two actors awards for not simply curling up and dying out of shame, but has anyone seen this Jemima Rooper since the film was released?
The 'Most Judicious Use Of Celluloid' award goes to Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 3.
The climactic action setpiece of one of last year's big summer action movies consists of Tom Cruise running a quarter mile down a sidewalk.
Possibly this was a result of starting to shoot before they had a script and simply not having the ideas or money or time to come up with something fancy, but more likely it was the result of Tom thinking that his presence was so magnetic, his physical acting so intense and the American audience's ability to be impressed by regular exercise so strong that he could create all the excitement and tension necessary for the final act just by running really emotionally.
Interestingly, a lot of the PR for the movie concentrated on the fact that he was really running in this scene, not just relying on clever editing (it was all in one shot) or camera tricks like sped up footage (though there were some fancy tricks to make him not look three feet tall). I guess that the PR department realised that this was a pretty crummy finale to a movie to and so tried to 'amp' up, or at least prepare, the audience for it. A shame that the PR department showed more common sense than the film-makers.
I guess one could commend director JJ Abrams for turning this total non-ending into an attention grabbing scene as best he could, but sod that: this is hugely cynical, hubristic and, above all, dumb movie-making. Rumours are the finale of Mission Impossible 4 will consist of Tom doing push-ups for half an hour.
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Continue reading Stupid Running In The MoviesTFL's Greatest Hits - Part 5: Pixellated Rebellion
Next up, Carlton Stevens did a regular column for The Fake Life covering computer games called Pixellated Rebellion. I've chosen this particular column as it contains a great break down of the fanboy console wars still raging retardedly over the Internet as we speak.
Here's the link:
Right here!
I also like the way he was forced to write an entire paragraph for the computer game of Desperate Housewives. Welcome to the suck of writing, Carlton.
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 5: Pixellated RebellionThursday, August 09, 2007
Why Arthouse Movies Suck
Like it or not, there is still a distinction between arthouse and mainstream cinema. The war was perhaps won in the summer of 1977 with the release of Star Wars, and whatever vestiges of resistance were slowly co-opted through the Indiewood 90’s and the creation of the salon mini-studios like Fox Searchlight, but the rhetoric is still there, even if the guns have been put down. Notions of ‘real’ movies still get bandied about, the idea of ‘too good to be popular’ is often behind a lot of critiques, and ‘selling out’ as a phrase still has cultural weight, as do words like ‘serious’ and ‘prestige’. There is still a thing as the concept of an ‘arthouse’ movie, and the term is often conflated with the word ‘good’. Well balls to that.
Before things get to iconoclastically contrarian, of course these are generalisations, of course a lot of mainstream movies are barely lowest common denominator product, and of course a lot of the greatest movies ever made are ‘arthouse’. I’m here to have a go at certain concepts that crop up from this, often purely political, distinction between arthouse and mainstream. The main one I’ll be tackling here is the fetishisation of obscurity.
When you are a kid, picking your nose in school, you are given examples of ‘great literature’ and, I’d wager, it’s all pretty boring and difficult to understand. Most (good) teachers will admit that most teenagers are not going to get the subtleties of Shakespeare, even when they can be bothered to parse the language. Romeo and Juliet maybe, but the old man ruminations of Lear or The Tempest? Come on. Kids are exposed to this adult literature so that they are at least exposed to the possibility of that richness, so when they encounter it as an adult they’ll have a better grounding for appreciating it fully. If they are exposed to that level of depth, even if they don’t understand it, they will at least know it’s possible and, hopefully, have a desire to seek it out in the culture they consume when they have had enough life-experiences to get it. If they grow up eating only McDonalds, how will they know why a perfectly cooked steak is so good?
'Eat your greens!', says your mother. You know that idea that if it tastes bad, it must be healthy? I love Broccoli now.
Anyway, this idea of ‘what is good is difficult’ comes to us early. The idea that quality is defined by a work containing things we don’t understand is an inherently immature one. Yet look at the lyrics of a thousand Dylan wannabes. Look at the drivel that came out of Jim Morrison’s ‘muse’. Teenagers will spend hours looking for the deep meanings in it as they are still under the belief that, if it is obscure, it must be deep. He was on drugs, kids, and a twat.
But these are just a child's mistakes, surely. Maybe the first film/book/album by a posing teenager will be vague and obfuscationary just because that’s what they think ‘good’ is, but adults wouldn’t do that, right?
There was a contemporary dance conference attended by a friend of mine where a piece of work was criticised for not being obscure enough. In the piece, a grid was on the floor and, as the dancer moved over the squares, they would be lit up and the order in which they were lit revealed a poem. It was too obvious, said the luminaries. There should be a couple more levels of abstraction before the piece could be really good, as if a work of art were a logic puzzle or crossword clue.
And here is the break from any sense. It is not that the increased abstraction would reveal nuances of the meaning of the piece – let’s say if someone always gets angry when talking about authority it reveals a psychological block about his dad, which is better than someone saying, on the nose 'I have issues with my dad' – no, it was just an arbitrary rule that equated opaqueness with quality.
So – forced symbolism, empty surrealism, arbitrary non-linearity, dense, random, referentiality. It happens all the time.
Complicated things are difficult to understand, but that doesn’t mean that the difficult to understand is complicated. Sometimes it very simply doesn’t make sense. And if you have an artist functioning under that second, false premise, they will look at something they are working on and think ‘Let's throw some wierd shit in there. I don't know why, but it'll make it seem more 'arty'.'
Every creative person I’ve ever spoken to has admitted to this activity. The good ones admit it a little shame-facedly, thinking it a mistake of youth.
This is all very negative so far. What then, would I use as a definition of ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’? I’ll step up. here goes:
All creative work is there to communicate with its audience. Entertainment is there to tell the audience what it already knows. Art is there to tell them something they don’t. It is the artist’s responsibility, therefore, to have something to say and to say it as clearly as is possible.
Generalisations are great, aren’t they? But then all definitions should be regarded as ‘rules of thumb’ and judged on how useful they are rather than how ‘true’ they are.
‘Mainstream’ movies can be art and ‘arthouse’ movies can just be product, tailored to appeal to the prejudices of arthouse film goers. The accepted distinctions are unhelpful and inaccurate, so reacting against them (i.e. ‘Fuck Hollywood!’) will only lead to defining yourself as the opposite of a phantom – an enemy that doesn’t quite exist.
Ingmar Bergman’s films, for example, are commendably clear headed. They know what they want to express and they do so as straightforwardly and efficiently as possible – it’s just that he wanted to express some fairly abstract, usually metaphysical, ideas.
There’s an argument to be had whether his overly rational films are truly suited to the medium. Reason functions outside of time, being purely abstract, and so best suited to artworks that can be appreciated outside of time, like paintings or, perhaps, books. A medium so wed to the unstoppable passing of moments is more suited to experiential subjects, and the hurtling trajectories of emotions, than the stiff formulations of intellectual ideas. But hell, at least it’s an argument. A genuine discussion. It is not a question of ‘what the fuck was that all about?’
Nicholas Roeg, I feel, despite being awesome in many ways, fannied about with opaque symbolism a little too much. That recent French western, Blueberry: what the fuck was that about? Anime and, yes, The Matrix sequels. Coppola, whose Apocalypse Now (his ‘Hollywood Art Film’) is desperately opaque at times, I feel, doesn’t really fall in to this trap as it’s fairly obvious he was desperately trying to communicate with the audience at all times. It’s just that he was trying to say so many things at once, on such a huge canvas (and the sets Marlon Brando was on, lol), that he got lost.
Akira Kurosawa, famously, was always very specific on set. He spoke with his crew on of practicalities. He never used vague terms like ‘I want it more intense! More, you know, like drinking water with a hangover! Kind of!’ He knew exactly what and how he wanted to communicate.
Yet I had ‘Fuck Hollywood!’ thrown at me just this week at work. Blowhards, ‘artists’ and academic received wisdom still contain these useless distinctions. If debates over the most important things in the world can be de-railed by partisan ‘us or them’ line-drawing, leading us down deadly, stupid cul-de-sacs, it can happen in art too.
It is about communication in the end, I’ll argue, and if you believe part of your job is not to be as clear as possible about what you are trying to express, or that if you just throw some vaguely ‘arty’ stuff together it will kind of say what you want it to, whatever that is, then fuck you – stay in film school. The world does not need you.
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Continue reading Why Arthouse Movies SuckTFL's Greatest Hits - Part 4: Dawn Of The Dead Movies
One thing The Fake Life was good for was coming up with really good ideas for recurring articles, and then never doing them again. Charlie's Dawn Of The Dead Movies was to be all about the great unmade movies of Hollywood's past, and he started it off with Jaws 3 People 0, the movie that wasn't made while Jaws 3-D was. The movie sounded great, and the article was pretty awesome too.
Click here for the whole thing.
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 4: Dawn Of The Dead MoviesRiding A Unicorn Over The Lolipop Rainbow: The Bestest HAPPY Endings!
Everybody loves a happy ending, right? The 80's are known for a glut of feel good films. The geeks of my generation, raised on the nihilistic shit of the 70's, came to reject these artificially manufactured happy endings. The geek audience now has a knee-jerk reaction against any kind of happy ending, it seems. We reject a joyous conclusion as less valid than a tragic one. Our version of a happy ending is smothered in moral ambiguity. Fight Club, for all it's damn-the-man posturing, ends on the most old fashioned of happy endings as the boy kisses the girl... to a backdrop of mass urban destruction. It's hard to find a thoroughly unironic happy ending these days. I would dare say it's always been hard to find a legitimately good happy ending. And that's because a good happy ending - one that is heartfelt and, most importantly, one that is earned - is the hardest thing to pull off.
Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind/Annie Hall - I guess the greatest romantic stories, from Romeo & Juliet to Casablanca, end on a sad note of thwarted love. A romantic comedy, however, is preordained to deliver a happy ending. It's the predictability that sinks most romantic comedies. What makes Sunshine and Annie Hall so unique and beautiful is that they both present doomed relationships and yet send us home feeling elated about the very notion of love itself. There are no outside forces conspiring against Alvy and Annie. No wacky misunderstandings sabotaging Joel and Clementine's relationship. Both couples dive head first into the tempest but fail to maintain due only to their own shortcomings. And yet, at the end, Alvy says it's all worth it. The good times will always outweigh the bad and he will always "need the eggs". When Clementine warns Joel that they will inevitably crash and burn if they attempt to reboot, his simple response - "Okay." - celebrates the beauty of love better than any extravagant Baz Luhrmann set piece ever could. Ironically, these two closing scenes demonstrate that love and happiness aren't defined by how the relationship ends.
Maximum Overdrive - A shining example of the triumphant FUCK YEAH happy ending. I would have said Jaws, but that one's way too obvious. Our heroes have been chased, imprisoned, run over and generally hassled by a slew of asshole trucks. The lead truck wears a giant Green Goblin face that mocks Emilio's every attempt at escape. But eventually the crew finds it's way out and hoofs it to the docks and precious freedom. The Goblin truck races down the road in hot pursuit, intent on slaughtering our ragtag gang of southern white folks. As the climax swells, the Goblin truck, having just run down another faceless extra, barrels towards our heroes. Emilio runs right in front of the 18 wheeled killer, spits out an "Adios, motherfucker!",and fires a missile straight into it's grill. The AC/DC music swells as the truck explodes gloriously and our heroes cheer. Roll credits! FUCK YEAH!
Breaking The Waves - I swear I didn't even see this ending coming. I thought this was a beautifully poignant story about tragedy and friendship. Up until the final scene, it's basically a take on The Monkey's Paw. An eccentric woman, who could only be played by Emma Watson, terrified of being without her husband, prays to God to bring him home from his job at an offshore oil rig. God delivers, but as we all know, God loves irony more than Generation X and the internet combined. The victim of a tragic accident, the husband is sent home a cripple from the neck down. What follows is a thoroughly depressing exploration of grief and guilt. Now we all know Watson really didn't cause this, right? And yet she is convinced this was God answering her prayer. And when she prays that God takes her in exchange for restoring her husbands health we all know that nothing can- HOLY SHIT HE'S WALKING AGAIN! WTF! And still I'm a cynic. Still there's some sort of explanation for this. Until the final scene, that is, when I am given no other choice but to believe that the clear, loud music of church bells emanating from the clouds for her husband to hear is unmistakably her soul singing the power of faith and conviction.
Planes, Trains & Automobiles - It's no surprise such a crowd pleaser from John Hughes would have a happy ending. By the time this came out we fully expected it from the man who had Ferris win the day and Molly win the weird looking guy with furry eyebrows. No, not Judd Nelson, the other one. But what elevates this ending, what makes it more than perfunctory, is the work of Mr. John Candy. This movie is a magic trick. We think we are following Steve Martin as he attempts get home. He's saddled with your average obnoxious American who's good for a few laughs, but you wouldn't want to spend three days with him. Candy, as the traveling shower curtain ring salesman, strikes the perfect balance of gut-bustingly funny and annoying. He pulls it off enough so you can accept the fact that Martin wouldn't have run screaming from the guy within a few hours. But Hughes performs some kind of brilliant misdirection here. While we're busy enjoying the story of Martin's journey, what we're really watching is Candy's story unfold. We're watching him attempt to cobble together a friendship. By the end of the film, we realize it was never about Martin. Of course he would eventually make it home with or without Candy's help. It's all about the traveling salesman looking for some kind of home of his own. It's at the end, when Martin takes Candy home and introduces him to his wife and family ("This is my friend."), that the trick is revealed. Candy's wacky bravado falls away and his look of bittersweet joy closes the film. Makes me cry like a girl every time.
An American Werewolf In London - Yay! The naked American man is dead! London's balloons are safe once more!
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Continue reading Riding A Unicorn Over The Lolipop Rainbow: The Bestest HAPPY Endings!Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Geek Pin-Up #19: Helen Mirren
So who would be the best choice for the last Geek Pin-Up? We could have gone for something 'funny' like Dakota Fanning, or a more tragic choice like Lindsey Lohan, a 'not quite enough movies to justify it yet' Eva Green, or a choice more suited to the sexuality of most of our readers like Christian Bale or MODOK. Instead we've gone for the most terrifyingly sexy lady on the planet - Her Royal Highness Helen Mirren.
Helen Mirren could rip your head off and shit down your neck hole. Then she'd steal your cigarettes and drink a bottle of whiskey before playing Lady Macbeth starkers in front of Wembley stadium. Helen Mirren is an alpha-female and she is hard.
Helen was very much one of those massively ambitious, deeply serious, English actors whom were dead set on marking out the entire legacy of English acting as their own. And with that much determination, ruthlessness and flat out competitiveness, not to mention being hot and being able to act, nothing was going to stop Helen Mirren making it. While others were talking about doing their best, Helen was already fucking the prom queen.
She was in Caligula, that doomed mix of high and low brow tastes, written by Gore Vidal and funded by smut merchants, starring the cream of British acting talent and lots and lots of titty. It's a terrible film to be honest and not even worth the attentions of randy 15 year olds (possibly worth the attentions of randy post-ironic cineastes in their 30's though), but it does have the best IMDB keywords page in the world. I checked out pages for The Devil's Rejects, Salo and Cannibal Holocaust and even they don't compare to this endless list of filth. Dead woman, dead man, voyueristic, penis, peverse, moral corruption, sex orgy, bloody, infamous, incestuous desire, mutilation - the fun never ends! If I was an English teacher, this is the creative writing assignment I would give the little fuckers. Caligula is not really a high point (the plot page, hilariously, is 'empty'), but she does look like Jane Seymour with a brain, which is fairly hot.
Far better was her role as the evil Morgana in John Boorman's Excalibur. I'm not much of a fan of this film, mostly as any Arthurian movie automatically falls prey to Monty Python And The Holy Grail, especially when lots of mid-shots of generic British woodland are used to keep the budget down. Plus the bloke who played Arthur always seemed a bit wimpy to me.
Helen's Morgana however, was blisteringly hot. Obviously evil and still irresistible, you would have let her birth an illegitimate son who would go on to bring down your empire too.
Now, Helen has a slightly long, possibly even equine, face and of course that ferocious intelligence and focus behind the eyes. Though she played a few, she was not entirely suited to the pretty-but-vacant 'characters' of Hollywood leading lady roles. It was when she got old enough to play mothers that she got really interesting. Other pretties have nothing to offer once their smooth skins give way to lines and sag. Helen grew into her age, and just got more awesome.
She was strong yet supportive opposite Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast. She was monstrous in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. She was heartbreaking in The Madness Of King George ('goodnight Mr King'). Dammit, she managed to mix military efficiency and human compassion with a perfect Russian accent in 2010, a film which really isn't as bad as comparisons with 2001 can not help but make it look.
She even played, essentially, God, as the voice of Deep Thought in 2006's Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
And what could be bigger than God? The Queen, of course. She made Lizzy cold, tradition-bound, often utterly contemptuous of the normal folk, but still hugely warm, compassionate and principled. She made a country to whom the royal family was mostly a joke fall in love with their queen all over again. When she was taking the piss out of Tony Blair we were on her side, and considering there are amoebas on Mars dead millions of years who have more in common with the average Brit than we do with the queen, that is quite some feat of acting.
Plus that spark is still in her eyes - the mischievousness, the competitiveness, and the comfort with her own sexuality - so giving the world a queen we would also, if we were honest, quite like to shag.
Now The Queen and its attendant Oscar have given her a higher Hollywood profile than ever before we can look forwards to seeing her in more films, though it remains to be seen whether the usually age-averse industry will know what to do with her mature charms. Look for her to be way too good for the upcoming sequel to National Treasure.
Please dig through our entire archive of Pin-Ups here, my favourite [mine too - George] being Soledad Miranda.
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Continue reading Geek Pin-Up #19: Helen MirrenTFL's Greatest Hits - Part 3: What's Left?
Some of the best writing done for this site was inarguably done by Chris Oliver, especially in his series of articles about those half-forgotten films that have yet to receive a DVD release: 'What's Left?'.
Here are all the links:
Part 1
Part 2
Ace In The Hole
Going Ape
Song Of The South
Get Crazy!
The one on Song Of The South, I think, is probably the single best thing that ever appeared on this site.
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 3: What's Left?Tuesday, August 07, 2007
TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 2: The Halloween A To Z
Last October we did a whole bunch of stuff for Halloween, mostly centered around a (mostly) daily list of the coolest horror stuff. I think it turned out rather well. Click below for a full run down.
Here's the list, some of which are distinctly NSFW:
A
B
C
D-F
G-I
J-L
M
N-P
Q-S
T
U-W
X-Z
And as a bonus, here's my article about real animal deaths, which is most definitely NSFW.
86 more days Halloween, Halloween, Halloween,
86 more days to Halloween, Silver Shamrock!
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 2: The Halloween A To ZMonday, August 06, 2007
Top Ten Movie Endings With A Cruel Twist
Life is complicated, messy and contingent. We are very rarely the central character in our lives (that honour usually going to our bank managers), very little happens during most of the 2nd act, the credits do not roll after our greatest victory (which was probably squeezing that girl's tit without getting slapped when we were 16), and it ends suddenly in the middle of a scene with you dead. This is why the neat, all-loose-ends-tied, happy endings of Hollywood movies are so hated. They are lies and they mock us with their rainbows.
The 1970's (the entire decade, you understand) dealt with this by leaving unresolved, ambiguous endings like that of the did he/didn't he catch him French Connection. And that's great and stuff, but they also remind us of the unfulfilling drudgery our lives ultimately consist of.
Movies are escapism too, after all, and that's kind of the point of those neat, happy endings.
So - surely the best of both worlds are the films that keep the neat, unrealistic endings, but just make them really, really bad for the hero. This list celebrates the the grand tradition of the cruel twist ending.
Huge spoilers throughout.
The Evil Dead Trilogy
Sam Raimi realised very early on with these films that the audience's enjoyment was directly linked to the amount of pain inflicted upon the hero, Ash. As such the films are filled (as pointed out in the endlessly re-listenable commentary tracks) with 'it's all right now' moments where Ash seems to have won, only to have the rug pulled out from under him as everything gets even worse.
The first film ends with Ash as the last survivor, walking out into the new day, only to get gobbled up by the 'Evil' in the final shot. the 'real' ending of the third film ends with him waking up from hibernation to a dead, post-apocalyptic world. But, for me, the best ending is part 2, where he is thrown back in time to be stuck forever in a deadite infested medieval hell. The final image starts as a hero shot of Ash towering over the frame and pulls out until he is a tiny figure lost amongst the smoke and ruins of a battlefield. The shot is actually a perfect encapsulation of the move from the male sublime to the female sublime and captures the gleeful undermining of the idea of the 'Male Hero' that the entire trilogy is thematically pinned on. But I'm usually too busy laughing at that idiot Ash to care.
Evil Dead 4 is actually one of the few geeky sequels I'd actually like to see. Those bits with 'evil' Peter Parker in Spider-Man 3 suggests that Sam still has a gleefully malevolent side and I'd love for him to take it out on Ash one last time.
John Carpenter's Entire Career
Geeky sequels I would not like to see include Escape From Earth and The Thing 2: Things. The first films were perfect as they were and, as evidenced by Escape From LA, John Carpenter does not have any more good movies in him.
The Thing ends with a good victorious explosion that kills the beastie and, in a lesser film, sorts everything out just in time for the pretty sunrise. In this film we are suddenly reminded that the survivors are stuck 100 miles from anywhere in subfreezing temperatures with no transport, power or heat. Add to that the realisation that the paranoia that anyone could be 'the thing' still hasn't been solved. Our two heroes are dead and the world is still probably doomed. My money, by the way, is on McReady being 'the thing'.
Escape From New York reverses Evil Dead's 'shit on your hero' approach by ending with Snake Plisskin shitting on the entire world just because he's in a bad mood. After the final, victorious rescue, the audience realises that the day is not saved and our anti-hero hasn't miraculously turned into a do-gooder in the final reel as per Hollywood business-as-usual. It turns out the bastard we can root for is, in fact, just a bastard. I know that Escape From LA ups the ante with Snake plunging the world into a new dark age, but it's still a shit film.
Prince Of Darkness ends with the heroine getting trapped in hell and returning as the angel of death (or something). In The Mouth Of Madness has the double twist of Sam Neill going completely mad and then having his madness become reality. And Memoirs Of An Invisible Man continues Carpenter's world-fucking theme by having Chevy Chase survive.
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)
Bloody hell but the 1978 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. And I was so excited because it had Spock in it. The unremittingly bleak and paranoid film ends with our few survivors creeping about a defeated, alien-infested world when they spot our lead hero, Donald Sutherland walking about and they say:
'Hey Donald! Nice hair! Good to know you managed to survive! I guess there is hope after all, hey? Phew!'
And he turns to them, raises an accusing finger and calls to his fellow aliens.
'AARRRRAAAGGHHRRAAAAARRGGHHH!'
He says, so proving that we are all, truly, fucked.
Don't Look Now
In the second of Donald Sutherland's appearances on this list, he plays a grieving father of a drowned girl, trying to deal with his grief by moping around Venice and doing Julie Christie.
Now I'm not a big fan of describing things as 'pretentious', mostly out of self defence, but this film is certainly very 'arty' and 'slow' and ramjam full of awfully meaningful 'Symbolism'.
The film is so full of portents of doom that the ending can hardly be described as a twist but, nonetheless, Donald becomes obsessed finding a mysterious figure he keeps seeing sporting the same red coat as his daughter did when she died. He catches up to her, she turns out to be an old woman, and she kills him with a knife. The end.
It's about the mortifying obsession of grief and how not accepting the past will ultimately lead to you not being able to live in the present and, as such, is probably a bit obvious for our subtle tastes. Hell, I bet film-buffs only made a fuss over it back then because it had a totally hot sex scene in it and, godammit, it's really pretentious. That said it kept a 12 year old me interested (if a little confused) for its entire length and I used to think A Nightmare on Elm Street was the very height of horror back then.
The Parallax View
In a rare case of a 70's film actually having an ending (fuck the Nouvelle Vague - it was just the drugs they were all taking), this Warren Beatty conspiracy thriller has him as a reporter investigating a secret organisation that trains assassins to kill politically unpopular people so as to manipulate world events in favour of the military-industrial complex. Warren finds out the secret, runs to tell the world, and gets shot in the back of the head. Warren is set up as a patsy, the bad guys win and go on to invade Iraq as often as is necessary. Tough shit Warren, liberals are losers.
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
After being as suave as an Aussie ski instructor can be for two hours, George Lazenby infiltrates the baddie's hideout, fights some people and saves the day. As a reward, in the final scene he gets to marry Diana Rigg, who promptly gets shot to death by Blofeld. The end. That'll teach you for trying to be James Bond, George - what's it like being not as successful as Roger fucking Moore?
The latest Bond film, Casino Royale, pulls a similar trick while also being a really good film. The bad guy is killed, the poker game is won and the girl is saved, leading to a final romantic scene in Venice where Bond quits the service and accepts true love for the very first time. Which then goes on, and on, and on until the girl turns out to be a traitor, runs off with the money, leads Bond into a trap and then kills herself out of shame. A cruel twist for Bond, but it does mean he spends the rest of his life a bitter, emotionless sadist who gets his kicks drinking, fucking and killing. Result!
Brazil
I think I've decided that I don't like Brazil. It is an extraordinary film; visionary, unique, imaginative and bold. It is also a mess, cluttered in frame and structure, set at a constant tone of shrieking hysteria and has an undertone of spiteful misanthropy. Ultimately it is exhausting rather than satisfying. The ending is still the shit though.
After being beaten down by bureaucracy, corruption and totalitarianism the entire film, our meek hero is finally roused to rage against the system, break his chains and run off into the sunset with his terrorist girlfriend. Then he wakes up in a torture chamber run by his best mate. The last 20 minutes have merely been another of his pointless, fruitless fantasies. He is lost, and ends the film singing a half remembered tune over and over, dead eyed, as the camera pulls back from his torture chair until he is a tiny figure lost in a massive, vaulted room.
No hope; no joy; imagination and individuality provide no transcendence; we must become cogs in the machine or be destroyed by it. How depressing! And pretty rich from a guy who has, in fact, made a career out of his imagination and individuality. Hard though he had to fight, he still got the films made, and I bet he has more money than I do. Artists may be the soul of a society, but they can be whiny little bitches too. Still, great ending.
Friday The 13th
All of these sorts of movies end with the survivor drawing a sigh of relief as the sun finally rises, only for the presumed-dead killer to reappear and drag them down to hell! What a surprise!
Only they are barely twists because everyone expects them. Equally, by the third installment at the very latest, the killer has become the hero, and is basically the only character audiences care about, so his re-appearance is more like a cheer-worthy victory than a shocking downer. Plus they're all just nakedly set ups for sequels, rather than comments on the cruelty of fate.
I'll include Jason leaping out of the water, as well as Carrie's 'hand from the grave' on this list because it needs an example of the form and because they were the only ones that ever actually 'got' me.
The Graduate
You should have copped off with Anne Bancroft, you cretin. She could have made you cum for a week.
The Vanishing
For the final entry here's the coldest, bleakest, nastiest, cruelest ending of them all. Man loses girl. Man meets another man who promises to show man what happened to girl if he will just drink this cup of coffee. Man drinks coffee. Man wakes up in a coffin, six feet underground. The end.
What makes the ending hit home hardest is the uniquely low-key, matter of fact, rainy-Wednesday tone that only Northern Europeans can master. Glitzy Hollywood could never do an ending such as this, as its heroes will break out of a coffin and kill a hundred bad guys before the first reel is over. And, indeed, in the Hollywood remake, the hero not only breaks out of the coffin, he saves the girl and kills the bad guy. The film, thankfully, woke up in a coffin when the box office returns were announced.
So what are these really, really mean endings for? Schadenfreude? That works for The Evil Dead, but not for most of these other films that have really rather nice people getting shat on. Morality tales? Possibly for Don't Look Now's 'perils of ignoring Julie Christie' plot, but doesn't that make them awfully preachy and therefore unbearably dull? Surely the films aren't suggesting that this is how life really is? After all the very existence of Brazil the film makes an hypocrisy of its final lesson that all imaginative action comes to naught. Are they there to punish the audience or, worse, laugh at them for wanting the naively happy ending? And isn't catharsis just a lie perpetrated by greedy psychoanalysts? Is it all just darker-than-thou teenage posturing?
It all seems rather depressing, now that I think about it. What we really need is, I don't know, to have some films that have happy endings that are genuinely earnt. Don't you think?
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Continue reading Top Ten Movie Endings With A Cruel TwistTFL's Greatest Hits - Part 1: Tits In PG Movies
So here's the bit where we blatantly try to pad our content by republishing old articles that we really liked. First up is our most popular set of articles ever - Tits In PG Movies. These were 'digged' and apparently read by literally thousands of people, which is nearly twice the population of the entire Internet.
The following, I would hope you realise, is NSFW.
Part 1: Tits In PG Movies
Part 2: More Tits In PG Movies
Part 3: No More Tits In PG Movies
And for a bonus, here's another bit of tittery I found, from Milos Foreman's 1984 masterpiece of Oscar baiting middlebrowery: Amadeus. In this scene Salieri has forced Mozart's pretty young wife to 'visit his quarters' after dark if she wants him to put in a good word for the wayward 'Wolfie' with the Emperor. She turns up and duly gets them out:
It should be pointed out that this shot gained the film an 'R' in America. Look at the candles, America, this is obviously art! In England it is still available as a PG. Pussies!
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 1: Tits In PG MoviesArgument Of The Dead
Andrew Clarke thinks Land Of The Dead, George A Romero's 4th entry into the zombie genre he all but created with 1969's Night Of The Living Dead, sucks. Doug Slack thinks Andrew Clarke is a fucking idiot. It is on.
Doug: Don't know what your beef is, but here's why it doesn't suck:
It's easy to fault LOTD for it's obvious metaphors and some cliched horror movie set-ups. But the series was never subtle. We're talking about an over-the-top, end of the world, eat your face kind of story. If anything LOTD looks downright subtle compared to 28 Days Later and James Gunn's (superawesome) Dawn Of The Dead remake. And yet, once again, George manages to subvert the cliches he helped establish. He actually has the gall to make the flesh-eating zombies not just sympathetic, but actual heroes. They are no longer clueless consumers or sad little domesticated creatures. They are punk rock rebels smashing the state and claiming their turf. Surely even you can see how this follows Romero's "They're us!" philosophy to it's logical conclusion.
Andrew: You're right, of course, Doug, it is easy to criticise the obvious metaphors and cliched horror movie set ups, and that's because they are awful. But we can get to problems in implementation later. I want to start with problems of conception and you start your foolish, doomed defence with the film's most obvious failing: the zombies. Puny human, you have played right into my hands!
The political subtext is usually the first thing offered up when placing Romero above the genre hacks that surrounded and followed him. But I argue that the more overtly political the films become, the further away from their strengths they move.
What are zombies about? Death. This wave of personality-less, mindless monsters move slowly and inexorably towards you as you try increasingly frantically to avoid it. They are slow and few at the beginning, making them easy to avoid, but you will get tired and they will keep coming until they inevitably overwhelm you. There is no escape. This is the fear of death, and it underpins the idea of the zombie movie as set up by Romero (with survivors in an enclosed space surrounded by the monsters).
Political readings of NOTLD, where the ‘ghouls’ represent the rise of minorities against the ruling, abusive, complacent majority, rest upon this more elemental bedrock of the fear of death.
Thus, as the zombies become overt, deliberately comical, representations of consumer addiction in Dawn and end up as talking, unionised, working class heroes in Land, they lose exactly the base power of fear that those political interpretations rely on.
But perhaps I am just more scared of death than of black people. I don’t live in Mississippi, after all.
Here’s the point: when the zombies are just these blank expressions of nothing, we can read our fears onto them. When the political reading is made crudely and unambiguously specific, in the form of talking bloody zombies, the fear and the power are lost. LOTD is the work of someone who watched NOTLD and got it wrong.
So, all this political nonsense merely renders LOTD a horror movie that isn’t scary.
Doug: Your criticisms would have been dead on if only you hadn't missed the entire point of the film. If anything, you've bolstered my argument.
Yes, up until now Romero's zombies have been a source of fear. No matter what other soicopolitical metaphors one could hang on them, they always represented the universal fear of death. But like I said before, Romero has subverted his own cliche. They are no longer death. They are now the future. They strike terror only in the hearts of evil cigar smoking republicans who do indeed fear black men more than they fear death. More to the point, these entitled white folks fear change. They fear anything that threatens their status quo. That's what makes the assault on Fiddlers Green (an echo of Poe's Masque of Red Death and EC comics) so triumphant. Sure there's carnage and chaos and much gnashing of teeth, but revolution is never pretty. That's what makes LOTD so punk rock.
You see Andrew, what your missing is this- Land is not a horror movie. It's a sci-fi allegory. Emphasis on the gory.
Andrew: Ok, so you're characterising the move as 'undermining the cliches' and I'm characterising the movie as 'forgetting what made it work', and I will admit I am personally disappointed by the move away from primal horror. Criticism of a film should not be based on what you want it to be, but on what it actually is, so I guess we can agree to disagree on that point, even though I am currently flipping you the finger.
So LOTD is not a horror movie anymore - fine. What the hell is it, then? If it is a political allegory, it is not fit to lick Animal Farm's trotters.
Its main thesis is nothing more than 'rich white people are bad' and doesn't seem to develop it at all. What possible bite can it have when the various characters are broad-stoke painted out of any relevance? Dennis Hopper could be a representation of the moral values of the ruling establishment, but he is also indistinguishable from a stock 'slimy, double-dealing asshole' character that appears in countless other genre movies that don't have pretensions to political heft.
In fact, the gross simplicities of the film work against the allegory. If the zombies are 'us', to the point of almost being the heroes, what does it say that they are still portrayed as a shambling, only barely conscious, mob, capable only of inarticulate howls and violence to express itself? It's a very right-wing conception of a working class rebellion. A right-winger might find it scary, but how patronising of us (do-gooder liberals) to cheer on the 'them' - the stupid underclass, finally getting a glimmer of thought in their stupid heads. And which of this 'underclass' would proudly identify themselves with these zombies? I bet they'd rather be a running zombie.
I'm sure it's not deliberate, and merely an unforeseen result of keeping the original conception of zombies (slow, stupid, individually weak) intact out of tradition or brand recognition, but it does not speak well of the political acuity of the movie.
So, no, it is not a horror movie and, if it is to be a political allegory, it is far too basic to have bite.
No, what it really is, deep down, is a remake of Damnation Alley, starring that bloke from Airwolf. LOTD is a crappy DTV action movie.
Doug: I agree Romero is painting in broad strokes here. He's ignoring so many details that contribute to class division in this country and saying "Fuck this, let's just go to Canada where they have socialized medicine and you can get all the Neosporine you want without having to raid the slums of ZombieTown." But again, subtlety was never his forte nor his intent. Perhaps you think the direction he takes in LOTD requires more subtlety than "LOL! Zombies in the mall!". Perhaps you're right. But that's unlikely, as you're nothing more than a lute strumming faux intellectual. But I digress.
The representation of the impoverished disenfranchised as snarling zombies could indeed be insulting. But only if you assume they need to adapt to our or Dennis Hopper's standards of behavior to earn respect. I would say their culture (for lack of a better word) is irrelevant. All we need to respect is their desire to simply co-exist in society. Let's not blow them to pieces with our Mad Max tank, let's let them stake their own claim in this world simply because they deserve it as much as anyone else. Of course, their "culture" includes eating people, so that might get awkward.
Andrew: And this, I think, is the problem. He's ignoring so many details, but it's OK because he's deliberately being crude. We must respect the zombies, but they're still murdering animals.
While watching the film again, I found myself making so many exceptions and 'yeah, buts' I finally decided that I was just involved in apologia. There isn't any subversion of cliche here, only the cliche.
The opening credits have knock-off Se7en stylistic ticks over crappy hard rock, but that's OK because it's just to sucker in the kids and appease the demographic hungry, trend following studio.
The characters are thin, stereotypical and never developed, but that's OK because they are genre archetypes being used to set up political allegory.
The political allegory is basic and confused, but that's OK because it's supposed to be bold and simple.
You've got characters doing stupid stuff and frequent uninspired horror set ups - the kid with the skateboard waiting at the docks being the main one that comes to mind - but that's OK because, hey it's still a genre film and we can forgive this stuff, right?
The cheesy, stunt cameos are OK because...of some reason or other.
Asia Argento never once gets her tits out but that's OK because...?
All this added up until I felt I was excusing everything and enjoying very little.
Plus the fact that he is no longer using an iconic horror template to build his Subversive Political Allegory TM on but a crappy action movie template, complete with dirtbikes, big guns and a toyline-ready A-Team truck.
I got to the point where I wasn't getting anything else out of it but that crappy action movie. It was very much a case of the emperor's new clothes, compounded by the expectation that this is something 'more' than normal genre gruel, made by a master.
So - maybe I don't see the power or the fun in the broad strokes political stuff. Or maybe there's fun somewhere else that I'm missing. I'll stop ranting and ask where the joy is. What have I missed?
Doug: You know, when I showed this to my wife on DVD she had the same criticisms. Of course, hers were delivered much more succinctly.
"This movie" she said, "...sucks."
She actually had to pause the film to deliver her judgment. It was the scene in the armory when our heroes are getting suited up and trash talking and yeah it's the worst scene in the entire movie and whatever. By then it was too much for her to bear. She couldn't make all the allowances you talk about. I guess Land Of The Dead is where you separate the women from the hardcore geeks.
Andrew: Can I have your wife's number, Doug? Maybe I can get some ice-cream and watch a PG-13 horror with her.
It seems you are saying that, yes, it is kind of balls, but it's Romero, I grew up with him and it has zombies and loads of guts so just leave me alone, OK?
I actually can't touch that. It's kind of pure.
Now, if it wasn't Romero, and if it didn't receive such ready love, I wouldn't be so hard on it, so there's definitely some geek politics in my criticism - it would still be a bad film, but one with a lot of grue and that zips along without getting too boring.
Whether it is because he got old, his glasses got too big or he just couldn't be bothered, Romero is only important by reputation now, not by ability. I'm putting my money on his upcoming Diary Of The Dead being right duff.
Doug (looks up "duff"): How dare you!
I'm positive Romero will pull another grueling tale of terror from one of his many, many vest pockets.
Andrew: In the amazing tradition of Blair Witch! Starring teenagers! Canadian ones!
If I'm wrong I promise I'll eat badly refrigerated pig guts.
Doug: May I remind you of another film Romero made in the woods on a shoe string budget? A film that predates Blair Witch by 30 years. A film called Night Of The Living Dead!
Andrew: Oooooo! I see what you did there! But I'm fairly certain reminding people of Night Of The Living Dead won't make Diary look any better. Night is a classic, which means that, even if Diary is pretty good, it will never have that same 'aura' as Night and will only ever look like some crappy digital video compared to, I don't know, a real film. And has there been a clever-clever meta concept horror movie that has worked?
I actually believe that Romero doesn't much care for zombies, but it's the only way he can get funding for movies. After Land flopped (according to Hollywood standards), he had to go much lower budget, and is hiding that behind rhetoric of 'doing it completely his way, with no interference'. Colour me suspicious. Also the meta-concept just feels like someone trying to distance himself from the actual zombies as much as he can, making a film about anything other than the zombies he knows he is tied to forever.
Doug: Scream worked. And so did The Tingler (Wherein Vincent Price implored the audience to SCREAM FOR IT'S LIFE!), in it's own way.
I've actually met and spoken with Romero before. He strikes me as a laid back hippy type. His refusal to play Hollywood politics doesn't seem to be entirely rooted in some kind of artistic ethos. I saw a guy who has no natural talent for networking and no desire to learn. His portfolio also attests to this attitude. So I have a hard time believing the man is just going for a calculated rip-off/cash-in. Especially at this point in his career.
Or maybe I just have a man crush on him. That ponytail can melt your socks.
Andrew: You've met him? That's not fair! And extremely cool! How big are his glasses? How much hair is coming out of his ears?
Doug: They were like two giant panes of reinforced windows, the kind they install in airports.
This was a few years back. He was appearing at a college for a showing of Night Of The Living Dead (a video projection in an AP hall) followed by a Q&A. Sadly, not a big turnout. He talked to the audience a bit and asked if we wouldn't like to see his new film, Bruiser, instead. Of course we would! So he actually pulled a video tape out of his sweater pocket and gave it to the "projectionist". This was actually the best environment in which to see Bruiser - with Romero and his fans- since the film is... not great. Afterward we were asked to move the Q&A to the student lounge area. There was a showing of What Lies Beneath scheduled next for this room and it would take awhile to add extra seats for the crowd outside. Romero, some kind of geek pied piper, led our meager group out of the auditorium and past a giant line of students eager to see the Hollywood horror blockbuster. Sometimes life provides the best metaphors.
So then we just hung out on some comfy chairs and shot the shit about movies, the industry, and Italian food.
And THAT'S why Land Of The Dead doesn't suck.
Andrew: I am defeated.
Big Daddy: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! RAAARRRGH!
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Hello!
Yes, here it is. This is it. The end of The Fake Life movie blog. We're not doing it anymore. It's over. Kaput. Flat-line. Nil Points. Fin. FATALITY!
I know, but move away from the windows, close the knife draw and don't sell your Star Wars figures just yet. And please, whatever you do, don't cry - emotions scare me.
We started here in April 2006, moving on to publish some of the most incisive, world-shaking and revolutionary writing in all of film criticism; becoming trend-setters in our own small way, coming this close to selling our souls to the great corporate devil, and actually starting to build up a reasonable daily readership. Also: gay jokes.
But, over the last few months, the content has dried up, leaving the blog with only the odd article only every few weeks, which is a particularly undignified un-death for a blog and very frustrating for those who would still click on the site every day. Perhaps, in hindsight, we were doomed from the start.
It turns out that it's a lot of work publishing a blog. It takes time, passion, dedication, a small amount of OCD and a borderline autistic personality to keep this shit up, and I'm afraid we just don't have these qualities in anything like the right amounts. We send our respect and sympathies to those who can make a success of this online malarkey and humbly leave you to it.
But, rather than just sweep the blog under the carpet and pretend it wasn't us, we thought it would be good to give The Fake Life a proper send off:
Over the next two weeks we're going to be re-publishing some of our favourite articles, giving some of our regular features one last airing, and giving out a few last thoughts, discussions and arguments on movies and popular culture in general. We hope you enjoy it, we hope you join in with any discussions that pop up on our message board, and we thank you for being a part of the life and death of the greatest movie blog in the whole of the Internet ever: The Fake Life.
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