Daily life is full of decisions. What shall I have on my sandwiches? Where should I park? Should I download child pornography for the purposes of spurious ‘research’ into the area of childhood as a whole for a one line appearance in a BBC Three late night comedy drama, or is that a bad idea fraught with pitfalls?
Decisions, decisions, decisions. But in what form of reality could you reasonably be expected to decide whether you prefer a serial killer, a dwarf, or an animated crab? I’ll tell you where, in a land called Listopia, where even the most idiotic of people can claim to be film buffs because they can enthusiastically rate fictional characters depending on their resonance in their pathetic daily lives.
We all know that lists are big money these days. Lists on TV can last for six hours and straddle a whole bank holiday weekend, and will guarantee news coverage and promotion when the Daily Mail gets upset that ‘Gaz twatting Mozz’ is the nation’s best loved street crime on YouTube. Lists in magazines always guarantee big sales, because everybody wants to match their personal outrages with those of their film/music/tv heroes. “Jimmy Page better than Jimi Hendrix by one place! I’ll firebomb the offices of Mojo before I will allow this travesty to stand!”
Total Film magazine have already delivered their Top 100, as voted for by people who find Empire too mentally challenging. Readers placed The Empire Strikes Back at number one, rather predictably, in a list so masculine that it virtually sprouted chest hairs. The gangster, horror and sci-fi genres were so overwhelmingly represented that you get to number 18 in the list before you find a film with no violent deaths. Total Film have now unveiled the voting forms for their newest list, the Top 100 Movie Characters, and the result is a trip to Listopia so surreal and unfathomable that David Lynch must have been the guest editor.
Only in the fields of entertainment are enthusiasts expected, nay encouraged, to rate completely disparate paradigms against one another. In Annie Hall Woody Allen jokes about the pointless awards industry and wonder whether they will crown ‘Best Fascist Dictator – Adolf Hitler’. But that would at least draw some lines of comparison – Maggie probably wouldn’t make the cut if there was a panel involved - unlike the idea that a sci-fi film about killer robots can be judged equally against a Swedish language dadaist introspective about fruit trees.
To help those film buffs who don’t actually know or like any films, Total Film has compiled a list of characters to choose a Top 100 from. As well as fictional characters from literature (Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird, Gandalf) there are real people (Johnny Cash, Bonnie Parker) and all manner of weird inclusions. Nowhere does the magazine attempt to justify or explain its reasons for compiling this list. Is it to measure the skill of actors in taking a script and developing a character, including voice and movement? If so then Johnny Depp’s rendering of Captain Jack Sparrow is certainly a relevant entry. Caspar on the other hand owes very little of his ‘character’ to the voice actor playing him in the children’s movies. There’s a even a clue for the kid in the description ‘the friendly ghost’. Not rocket science really, just don’t make him a bastard platypus who speaks fluent German.
Elsewhere amongst the prescribed choices is ‘The Monster’ from Frankenstein. Unfortunately the IMDB lists four films called Frankenstein, including a frankly strange method attempt by Robert De Niro and the 1931 version with Boris Karloff. Other multiples occur with Alice In Wonderland (8 versions), Aladdin (3), and Cinderella (24). This would suggest that it is the character in general that is being celebrated and not the film character at all. If that’s the case, why is there Hightower from Police Academy, but not Dr.Jekyll? Are we voting for Jude Law or Michael Caine as Alfie?
There are so many errors and omissions in the list that it becomes painfully clear that the magazine is putting this out as a money making exercise. Who is Willy Wonker? What the fuck is Toy’s Story? Who is Romeo ‘Montigue’? Don’t they know that Danny Zucco is in Grease and not ‘Greece’? Or is this a straight to video version that I haven’t seen? Also, if the Total Film journalists are choosing the list from which to vote, should they not be fired immediately for suggesting that of the millions of characters ever committed to celluloid, the dad from Jumanji and the whale from Free Willy are among them?
In the October issue of Total Film, this feature will probably take up around ten pages. That’s ten pages that could have been used to discuss relevant and important issues in film, such as funding for independent films which haven’t been produced by George Clooney and don’t have Oscar nominees in them, or the state of British film industry, or the fact that cinemas like FACT in Liverpool are forced to screen summer blockbusters instead of foreign language films to keep on the sweet side of the distributors. Instead we have the eternal question – is Sebastian the crab better than Idi Amin? If only we didn’t have to wait til October to find out….
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Tuesday, 31 July 2007
Sunday, 12 March 2006
Film Review - Red Eye dir. Wes Craven
Being a fan of Wes Craven's Nonsense Horror as I like to rename the sub genre, and also a fan of Cillian Murphy's face, I thought a film which could combine the two would be a great evenings entertainment. I saw it LA, where radio DJs are apparently more candid than they are in Blighty. As we were driving back from the cinema, a local radio presenter remarked that Red Eye 'sucked turtle butt' and that director Wes Craven was 'King of the 'Tards'. I was inclined to agree. Red Eye seems to be Craven's attempt at a suspenseful thriller, maybe he'd seen Collateral and thought he'd chance his arm. What you get is barely more suspenseful than your regular wait at the concessions counter to see if any hot dogs are ready.
Cillian Murphy plays Jackson Rippner (yes, an attempt on Jack The Ripper, and it only gets worse) alongside Rachel McAdams as Veronica Victim (just kidding, it's Lisa Reisert). The two meet at an airport and after some bedroom eyes and barely disguised foreplay they part onto their respective flights. But wait! They end up on the same flight! And sat next to each other! Which is great because I was worried that the first twenty minutes of the film would actually come to nothing, and that Cillian Murphy wasn't the star at all, merely a bit part, 'stranger at airport'.
So on the plane they get, and Jackson starts to go a bit mental. He admits that he's an international assassin, and that his hitman buddy has Lisa's father firmly within his gun sight. If Lisa (who works at some hotel or such) doesn't move the deputy secretary of homeland security into a room where another assassin can get a clear shot on him, her father will die. The next five hours are a battle of wills between Lisa and Jackson, until, in the daftest moment of the entire film, she stabs him in the thorax with a pen. Poor Cillian then has to spend the rest of the movie talking like...well, like he's got a pen in his thorax. Throw in a crazy chase across an airport, some useless bit characters who give nothing to the plot whatsoever, a fragment of back story about Lisa being raped, a ditsy hotel receptionist and a frantic battle in Lisa's bedroom, which still, luckily, holds an arsenal of sports related weaponry.
And in the end, who do you think emerges the victor? Do you think that the murderous assasin manages to have the politician killed? Do you think that Jack the Ripper kills Lisa and her Dad and walks off into the sunset to write novels with his own throat? No. There is barely any suspense once they're off the plane, and even whilst on it the action resembles more of a comedy of errors than a masterpiece in terror. Cillian Murphy really deserves more than this, and just ends up looking and sounding ridiculous by the end. Avoid this nonsense, and pay homage to the LA DJ who summed it up better. Red Eye sucks turtle butt and Wes Craven is King of the 'Tards.
Cillian Murphy plays Jackson Rippner (yes, an attempt on Jack The Ripper, and it only gets worse) alongside Rachel McAdams as Veronica Victim (just kidding, it's Lisa Reisert). The two meet at an airport and after some bedroom eyes and barely disguised foreplay they part onto their respective flights. But wait! They end up on the same flight! And sat next to each other! Which is great because I was worried that the first twenty minutes of the film would actually come to nothing, and that Cillian Murphy wasn't the star at all, merely a bit part, 'stranger at airport'.
So on the plane they get, and Jackson starts to go a bit mental. He admits that he's an international assassin, and that his hitman buddy has Lisa's father firmly within his gun sight. If Lisa (who works at some hotel or such) doesn't move the deputy secretary of homeland security into a room where another assassin can get a clear shot on him, her father will die. The next five hours are a battle of wills between Lisa and Jackson, until, in the daftest moment of the entire film, she stabs him in the thorax with a pen. Poor Cillian then has to spend the rest of the movie talking like...well, like he's got a pen in his thorax. Throw in a crazy chase across an airport, some useless bit characters who give nothing to the plot whatsoever, a fragment of back story about Lisa being raped, a ditsy hotel receptionist and a frantic battle in Lisa's bedroom, which still, luckily, holds an arsenal of sports related weaponry.
And in the end, who do you think emerges the victor? Do you think that the murderous assasin manages to have the politician killed? Do you think that Jack the Ripper kills Lisa and her Dad and walks off into the sunset to write novels with his own throat? No. There is barely any suspense once they're off the plane, and even whilst on it the action resembles more of a comedy of errors than a masterpiece in terror. Cillian Murphy really deserves more than this, and just ends up looking and sounding ridiculous by the end. Avoid this nonsense, and pay homage to the LA DJ who summed it up better. Red Eye sucks turtle butt and Wes Craven is King of the 'Tards.
Wednesday, 15 June 2005
Film Review - Tarnation dir. Jonathan Caouette
Since seeing Jonathan Caouette’s mega-low budget documentary Tarnation, I have been asked for this review several times. I tried to kid my self that my failure to deliver it was down to laziness on my part, when at the back of my mind I knew it down to lack of ability. When I review films, I try to be funny, I try to be witty, and I try to think up a really dynamite line – something nice and quotable. After seeing Tarnation, it just wouldn’t come. I couldn’t describe it, I couldn’t think of a summation which could grace the DVD cover. This is the only review I can truthfully give.
Tarnation is not a documentary, it’s not even a film. Made on Apple’s iMovies programme, it cost under $300 to make. The director compiled it using old video footage, the tragic attempt of a young boy to make sense of his life by committing it to video and watching it back, trying to convince himself, often successfully, that it was a work of fiction that stopped affecting him after the TV was turned off. At one point, a 14 year old Jonathan, who was serially abused by his grandparents and a parade of junkies that his mother brought to their home, performs an improvised monologue as a southern belle being beaten by her husband. He’s actually very good, which is even more disturbing than the pantomime unfolding before us. Caouette is depicting himself as a bit player in his sick mother’s life. She was a photographic model at the height of flower power, until she was paralysed in a fall. Her parents took the advice of a doctor who said that her ‘paralysis’ was psychosomatic and that she may benefit from a course of shock therapy. After ten years of this treatment, Renee LaBlanc was brain damaged and suffering from schizophrenia. This is the story of her and Jonathan’s life, as if it were understood and complied by a stranger.
Caouette has been portrayed as the unreliable narrator, but the film actually comes to us with a feeling of unwanted honesty. The onslaught of captions, still pictures, music and the rudimentary image manipulation which iMovies offers is like a waking nightmare at times, but it makes statements rather than begging for an emotional response. There is no Dawson’s Creek style musical manipulation, and the director has depicted himself as sympathetic, suffering, annoying, self-obsessed, selfless and selfish all at the same time. Other reviews of Tarnation have been concerned with whether this is a good film. I question these peoples understanding of what this ‘documentary’ was supposed to achieve. At the screening I saw, Jonathan Caouette was present, and answering questions about the film, and still I have no idea why this film was made, or who it was made for. The closest metaphor I can apply is that of a stomach bug. It seems that everything that happened in Jonathan’s life has been regurgitated onto film, and that the director can no more control the results than he can form a perfect turkey dinner from a pool of vomit.
I have concluded that 25 years of Hollywood film making has convinced me that film needs to be entertaining, or diverting, or that it at least has to have a point. Tarnation satisfies none of these conditions, yet I urge you to see it. Forget what you have previously expected from celluloid, it doesn’t apply here.
Tarnation is not a documentary, it’s not even a film. Made on Apple’s iMovies programme, it cost under $300 to make. The director compiled it using old video footage, the tragic attempt of a young boy to make sense of his life by committing it to video and watching it back, trying to convince himself, often successfully, that it was a work of fiction that stopped affecting him after the TV was turned off. At one point, a 14 year old Jonathan, who was serially abused by his grandparents and a parade of junkies that his mother brought to their home, performs an improvised monologue as a southern belle being beaten by her husband. He’s actually very good, which is even more disturbing than the pantomime unfolding before us. Caouette is depicting himself as a bit player in his sick mother’s life. She was a photographic model at the height of flower power, until she was paralysed in a fall. Her parents took the advice of a doctor who said that her ‘paralysis’ was psychosomatic and that she may benefit from a course of shock therapy. After ten years of this treatment, Renee LaBlanc was brain damaged and suffering from schizophrenia. This is the story of her and Jonathan’s life, as if it were understood and complied by a stranger.
Caouette has been portrayed as the unreliable narrator, but the film actually comes to us with a feeling of unwanted honesty. The onslaught of captions, still pictures, music and the rudimentary image manipulation which iMovies offers is like a waking nightmare at times, but it makes statements rather than begging for an emotional response. There is no Dawson’s Creek style musical manipulation, and the director has depicted himself as sympathetic, suffering, annoying, self-obsessed, selfless and selfish all at the same time. Other reviews of Tarnation have been concerned with whether this is a good film. I question these peoples understanding of what this ‘documentary’ was supposed to achieve. At the screening I saw, Jonathan Caouette was present, and answering questions about the film, and still I have no idea why this film was made, or who it was made for. The closest metaphor I can apply is that of a stomach bug. It seems that everything that happened in Jonathan’s life has been regurgitated onto film, and that the director can no more control the results than he can form a perfect turkey dinner from a pool of vomit.
I have concluded that 25 years of Hollywood film making has convinced me that film needs to be entertaining, or diverting, or that it at least has to have a point. Tarnation satisfies none of these conditions, yet I urge you to see it. Forget what you have previously expected from celluloid, it doesn’t apply here.
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