The teaser trailer for Star Trek Into Darkness was
released today. I hope it’s not a spoiler to reveal the film’s villain
is Khan - the same as the second in the original run of films The Wrath
of Khan.
Khan is now played by blonde, blue-eyed Benedict Cumberbatch,
replacing the Mexican Ricardo Montalbán, reinstating the original
concept of the character as a kind of Aryan super-man. First introduced
in the Star Trek episode “Space Seed”, the similarity between Khan and
Kirk was pointed out.
This got me thinking of how I have made a number of references to the
Dark Opposite in a number of recent posts, and I wondered if this was
part of a current fashion to find an interesting opponent in recent
ongoing series seeking to rejuvenate themselves.
As you may have seen from my Five Word Review, a few months ago I saw Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction. One of many things I liked about the film was the casting of Will Ferrell in the lead role. I've never been a particular fan of Ferrell, as I find a lot of his films rather infantile, but he brought a real pathos to this part.
Maybe with this in mind, I was intrigued when I passed Spud in HMV's Bluewater branch, with a big picture of John Cleese on the cover. I took a chance.
Some of you may have seen in the national newspapers the story that someone has seen a giant ape-like man with evil red eyes on Tunbridge Wells' Common. Given that the witness was not named, and no additional information about him or her was available, and the fact that the Daily Mail cited The Sun as its source, I am a little sceptical. The timing a week after a news story that my good ol' hometown was seeking a rebrand is hard to ignore.
It did however call to mind an earlier example of the printed media moronically printing anything they are told when a resident and two friends was able to hoodwink the international press into believing there was a super-hero at work in the town.
Anyway, following a chat on Twitter, I decided it would be a good idea if the two of them duke it out comicbook style.
Following my Page Count Update on Saturday, I thought I'd finish up today with an update:
Having averaged 20 pages a day for the last three days, I added the finishing touches to this script earlier today.
Although I have written and edited several scripts this year, it is my first full-length script since February. While it is numerically the fourth draft of this project, it is also the first draft of the screenplay in this iteration.
This is the project that spawned the Narrative Problems with Anthologies article, so I will be writing a follow-up with my solutions to some of the problems in the next few days. In the mean time, I'm going to take a couple of weeks away from the project to let the mental dust settle, work on other projects and spend some time with real people.
Towards the end of her fascinating book How Not To Make A Short Film, Roberta Marie Munroe includes a chapter called Top Short Filmmaker Clichés.
It is a list comprised of the top cliches included in short films that Munroe spotted during her time programming the Sundance Film Festival. As someone who has programmed four festivals, a lot of these rang true. Meanwhile, as someone who has written, produced and directed a number of shorts I am pleased to say I have not made any of these transgressions… yet.
A lot of the clichés are specific to North American shorts, but here are some of the ones I have seen the most a few of my favourites:
Characters pointing a gun at their own head while breathing heavily
The protagonist drives down a foggy road at night before seeing a child wearing a whit nightgown who mysteriously disappears in the reverse angle.
Someone vomits. The vomit looks like milk and Oreos [or vegetable soup].
Yesterday I saw Skyfall, the third in the rebooted 007 franchise. I think my Five Word Review reflects how I feel about it.
Coincidentally, I also saw The Amazing Spider-Man on half term release at my local indie theatre (my Five Word Review for that one also self-explanatory).
After the disappointment that was Quantum of Solace (I still don't know what that even means!) and doubt about rebooting a franchise barely a decade after it began I was not expecting to enjoy either of these movies.
As it is I enjoyed both of them. Both had something new to bring to their universes, with Skyfall really feeling like Bond's apotheosis after 50 years of films.
So are Hollywood execs really being greedy money-grabbers, or are writers and directors getting to build on their predecessors' work for the first time?
Having just written about how Forward Unto Dawn sets a technical benchmark for web television, I thought I'd take the opportunity to review the series that wrapped up this morning.
Unlike other reviews I've written, it is gratifying to be able to embed the series in question:
The five-part series revolves around Cadet Thomas Lasky and his associates at the Corbulo Academy for the sons and daughters of high-ranking officers in the United Nations Space Command. He and the others are being trained for key roles in the war against the "Insurrectionists" - human colonists who seem to was independence from the main government.
The series starts with the now-adult Lasky receiving a message from AI unit Cortana, who is trapped aboard a stricken ship with the Master Chief in hyper-sleep (where they were stranded at the end of Halo 3), but the bulk of the series action takes place in a time before the Covenant War. In that sense, this series could constitute a kind of origin story, and is the most recent in a long line of visually high-quality live action material from the Halo games franchise.
... but can it only be used as a marketing tool?
by Samuel Marlow
I was visiting my brother a couple of weeks ago and we watched some stuff on his Netflix account. He took the opportunity to show me the live-action trailer for Halo 4.
While we both used to play Halo and Halo 2, I find I don't have the time or disposition for video games these days. Even at the time by brother would get annoyed with me for playing Halo 2 on the easiest setting.
"But I'm playing to relax," was my defence having seen him get so irate shooting Flood-infected Elites that he would be just about ready the throw the controller at the TV.
Regardless, I enjoy the universe and occasionally shoot some Grunts when I want to blow off steam. The amount of time, money and effort that is spent on the Halo series' marketing material has always impressed me. And this is certainly true of the above trailer. I commented at the time that it is sad that an advert for a computer game could look and be acted better than the Star Wars prequels - though seven years, several lifetimes in special effects terms, has elapsed since Revenge of the Sith.
While I know there is bound to be similarity between film posters in a similar genre (posters in the romantic comedy vein seem to be almost interchangeable), I occasionally come across two posters that I confuse with each other.
Two recent ones are The Perks of Being a Wallflower...
...and Seven Psychopaths...
As if you needed the similarities pointed out, both posters have their principle cast lined up at the bottom of the page, with black type of a strong shade of green.
Coincidence, or the start of a new trend in poster design?
The following was written on the Sunday following the Olympic Opening Ceremony. Not wanting to dent that national spirit in the face of what turned out to be a highly successful Games that surpassed my expectations, I decided to sit on it until now...
So I’ve had a chance to sleep on the London 2012 Opening Ceremony and, now that I know it was not all a terrible nightmare, am even more livid than I was last night. Considering I am slow to anger and quick to calm, this is quite a feat.
Just to eschew the rumours before they start, I am not unpatriotic. It is exactly because I am proud of this country and its achievements that I wanted an impressive and memorable Opening Ceremony. While I’ve not doubt it will be remembered, I fear it is for all the wrong reasons.
It's been nearly a fortnight since I saw The Dark Knight Rises, the much anticipated third film in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy.
I certainly enjoyed the film a great deal, and appreciated the effort it went to to break the usual superhero film structure. Also the attempts to make the characters feel "real" was a welcome addition.
However, there were a few things about the film's characterisations that didn't sit right with me and, having had a bit of time to think it through, I have figured out what it is.
I got up to a post in my Facebook timeline about the return of the BBC's popular and acclaimed series Merlin return in September. I have several family members who think the show is brilliant and, while I've been enchanted by the older portions of the Arthurian Legend since I was little - I would be suspicious of an 8 year old boy who didn't Arthur and Merlin were brilliant - my viewing experience of the BBC's Merlin has not been a happy one.
The hook the BBC seemed to hang the series on was having "Prince" Arthur and Merlin both the same age as young men. Merlin is a closet wizard and Arthur is a prissy toff.
While the cynic in my instantly detected the scent of cashing in on the Harry Potter cashstorm - Colin Morgan's Merlin is just a scar and glasses away under-grad Harry - I had bigger problems with the series once I started watching it.
After telling my friend Guy Atkinson I am working on a location-specific anthology movie, he sent me a link to this Guardian article about a Havana-set anthology cut from the same cloth as Paris, je T'aime and New York, I Love You. In this context an anthology refers to a feature film made up of shorter stand-alone segments, a bit like a collection of short stories.
Emmanuel Benbihy, who produced Paris and New York, had a different writer and director work on each segment of those two films each based on the theme of love in their respective cities. While great adverts for the cities, the premise has come into criticism for only showing their lighter sides. Last year I saw a advert for scripts for a British production called London, Fuck You intended to subvert the style. How successful this was I am not sure.
The narrative problems I alluded to in the title refer the effect on the audience of being hit with (in the case of Paris) eighteen short stories one after another. The cumulative result can leave the viewer feeling a bit like this:
The good folks at Raindance sent me their newsletter this morning containing this How To Write What You Know article. Happily, it seems we agree that the mantra drummed into new writers to "Write what you know" is at best confusing and at worst profoundly limiting.
I have never been one to "write what I know". Recent completed scripts or movies include a short about a man who has just died and is about to be sent to hell, a Soho theatre in the London Blitz, Earth's first interstellar colony, and so on...
Varied for sure. All interesting (hopefully). But I have never experienced any of those things.
Needless to say, I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, blogs, etc. on writing and many of them have a script pitch section. I would say at least one in ten of these starts "A brilliant young writer struggles to be recognised, blah, blah, blah..." Occasionally I hope the premise is going to be subverted, but it rarely is.
I was just on IMDb, and the poster for new Robert Pattinson film Cosmopolis was in the side bar. I initially did a double-take as I thought it was the poster for Inception:
Hopefully you will see why:
Both have a very blue bias, apart from a "popping" red(ish) title, both of which are in the Gotham Bold font. Both have a crowd of people standing in the middle of a street with tall buildings flanking either side.
I would even go so far as to say you could simply remove the view out of the back window of Cosmopolis and replace it with the Inception poster to the same effect:
I don't know what this means, I just thought it was worth pointing out.
Okay "hate" is a strong word, but it makes for a better title than "Why I Find Most "Found Footage" Movies Irritating".
I just finished watching Chronicle (so check out the Five Word Review). It's not that it's a bad movie, but I can't shake the feeling I would have enjoyed it more if it hadn't been forced into the increasingly tiresome "found footage" format.
While there were at least several found footage films prior to 1999, it was really The Blair Witch Project released in that year that made the format (in)famous. The found footage style is really a logical extension of a type of story-telling that is at least 300 years old. The "epistolary work" (from the Greek word for "letter") is a work of prose fiction that is presented as a series of documents - often letters, but also diary extracts and excerpts from other documents. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula is presented in this way.
I need to be hacking away at some aluminium and polystyrene, but it's raining and there isn't room in the garage.
You know what that means?
Yep. Time for a Tumblr article!
I was included in a Twitter discussion yesterday evening, and the ending of John Carpenter film Dark Star came up. I won't give away the details, but it is fair to say it is not what one might called a "happy ending".
After my article on Star Wars (which I would still argue is a fantasy film wearing science fiction clothes), it got me wondering if the long-standing animosity between hardcore sci-fi and fantasy fans may be because the views they present of humanity are fundamentally irreconcilable.
I had promised I wasn't going to do any work today, but this has been hanging over me for a while, and it's technically tomorrow now anyway.
Before writing my Id Monster article, I did a bit of research on Forbidden Planet. I found a documentary including Joe Dante. Having enjoyed several of Dante's earlier films, I looked him up, and saw his most recent film was The Hole.
Not the 2001 movie where Keira Knightley gets her nips out:
The 2009 movie where Chris Massoglia gets his nips out:
Soft nipple-porn aside there is more we can learn from comparing the two.
I am breaking with my usual Five Word Review, as Avengers Assemble (which I saw last night) requires slightly more discussion than the quintet of lexemes would have permitted.
I suppose I should start with a Five Word Review: "Much better than I expected".
A couple of people have complained that it has been some time since I have blogged anything (meaningful) on Tumblr. Ironically this is because I have recently finished two large jobs and, though I have slightly more money than I did a few weeks ago, I am no longer sitting watching a render bar crawl across the screen. I am now working full steam ahead on a slate of shorts.
Partly my work is full steam ahead, but I also decided to take a few days off the week before last, in part because of an experience a couple of Monday's ago. In short, I had an encounter with this fellow:
Don't worry. I haven't just lost my mind - that happened ages ago. No, I was the victim of sleep paralysis. This is not the first time this has happened, in fact it is the third. On both of the previous occasions it was the fairly standard "mental hand-break" that your brain applies to stop you thrashing around and injuring yourself while in REM sleep. Simply put, I have woken up and been unable to move or open my eyes. The first time this happened I thought I had had a stroke, but then quickly found myself thinking, "Ah, I've read about this. This is sleep paralysis. If I wait a moment it'll wear off." And sure enough it did.
Those of you who follow the blog of Scott Kingsnorth will know that he has recently rediscovered a fondness for the original Star Wars trilogy after more than a decade of rejecting the series. That he used to be light, turned to the dark side and has since returned to the light side has caused me to liken him to Darth Vader.
I can't pretend I'm not a little pleased. Scott had already fallen out of love with Star Wars when I first met him four or five years ago and, despite passionate agrument on my side about how it actually is one of the greatest stories ever told, he would not be moved. Now that he feels the Force again, I have gone back over what it is that makes this story so important to so many people.
I can't speak for news coverage elsewhere in the world (so please let me know by leaving a comment below), but if you live in England it can hardly have escaped your notice that exactly 100 years ago the White Star Line passenger liner Titanic would be on course for its fateful rendezvous with an iceberg.
Its sinking on the 15th of April 1912 is an awe-inspiring story of scale and hubris which cost the lives of over 1,500 people. It remains one of the largest peacetime maritime disasters, and provoked an overhaul of how safety is approached on large passenger ships. Recently, however, I have come to notice that the disaster has become inescapable.
With maudlin voyeurism, suddenly Titanic is everywhere.
This time it's audio, not video that is exporting, and has driven me to Tumblr.
I say this to tackle the impression of me that must be forming by now that I do nothing but watch strange English films on Film4, because I saw the Film4 premiere of Chatroom last night.
The thought the central premise of a charming sociopath who incites people to commit suicide on internet chatrooms was a fascinating idea and, coupled with the fact you never really know who you are speaking to in a chatroom or message board, had the potential to be as thoroughly disturbing as Hitchcock's better films.
In case I understated it in the title, this post will contain pretty much the biggest spoiler in the Watchmen film and, by extension, the comic on which it was based. Read on at your own risk.
Just to avert any accusations at the starting block, I'm not one of these people who demands absolute fealty to a film's source material. In fact, I generally find the better adaptations tend to conform to film rules first.
My problem is that the rest of film was so faithful to the comic, to change this one little thing seemed arbitrary, but made a big difference to final message of the film.
As you may have spotted from my Five Word Movie Review, I saw Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End on Film4 last night.
It was a remastered re-release of a though-lost film from 1970. The DigiBox blurb called it a "forgotten gem". It certainly didn't look like it was now over 40 years old, in part helped by the hero's again-in-fashion floppy Justin Bieber haircut (incidently, if you come across this post becuase you've searched "Justin Bieber", I wouldn't bother following me).
The set-up of the film was interesting enough as well, with young Mike (John Moulder-Brown) taking a job in a public bath, and falling for engaged co-worker Sue (a very young Jane Asher). Also, both the leads were very good. I am aware that film-making styles have changed over the years, and this was probably a low-budget effort, but parts of the film just struck me as odd. None of the actors seemed to be on the same energy level, they were constantly repeating themselves and going down conversational avenues that went nowhere.
I think I was past the halfway point when I worked out the problem. The scenes were being improvised. After the film finished I looked it up and, sure enough, a number of scenes were largely improvised.
One advantage of spending so much time watching a little blue render bar crawl across my screen is that it gives me the chance to work on Tumblr blogs without feeling guilty.
So here is my opinionated opinion on how a Superman film should be tackled.
I was trawling message boards earlier in the week, and came across a post alleged to be the plot of the new Superman film Man of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder (300 and Watchmen) and slated for release in the summer of 2013. While the veracity of this has been denied, portions of it do correspond to released production stills.
Either way, it seems in keeping with the way the character has been handled, and I'm afraid it does nothing for me.
While I'm waiting for some video to export, I thought I'd take the time to write a little follow-up to my pro-John Carter rant of Sunday, which can be found here: In Praise of "John Carter (of Mars)".
I was listening to the radio the other night, specifically the World Service's World Business Report. I was surprised to hear John Carter is on course to be what the presenter described as the biggest financial flop in film history. This surprised me as Uma Thurman film Motherhood took just £88 on its opening weekend in the UK, and £40,000 in its US run, while Polish film My Nikifor took £7 in its UK release (source: Guardian.co.uk)
John Carter has already taken a vast $180m at the box office, meaning the film has taken more in a few weeks than the entire GDP of the Cook Islands. The problem is films cost more to screen than they do just to make. The budget of John Carter is said to be in the region of $250m (yes, a quarter of a billion dollars!), add to that the print and advertising (or P&A) costs of an additional $100m or so. So John Carter is more than half-way there?
So my brother and I took Mum to see John Carter (of Mars) for Mothers' Day today. In spite of a fairly lukewarm reception from critics we enjoyed the film immensely.
John Carter (of Mars) is a big, silly space adventure film about a former Confederate cavalryman who is mysteriously transported to Mars, called Barsoom by its indigenous population, where he quickly rescues a princess from attack by her would-be husband and ruler and, inevitably, is sucked into a war to liberate the planet.
There are a variety of subplots and some attempts at intrigue, but that is really all the plot amounts to.
For several weeks I have been trying, on and off, to write an analysis of Martin Scorsese's Hugo, specifically what I found to be the highly formal Fairytale struggling to get out. However, by the time I have finished, these posts have been so vast I fear I would crash Tumblr if I were to post them.
What follows then represents my final attempt to get to grips with this topic in a cogent way.
I should start by saying I saw Hugo not exactly under protest, but certainly not with any optimism. What I had seen of it - the first trailer and posters on the sides of buses - clearly seemed to be positioning the movie as this year's (or last year's) replacement for Harry Potter. I think this marketing campaign was a violent misstep on the part of the distributors, but I will tackle that at another time.
So as I have said, I very much felt Hugo was made for me. I wouldn't have bothered with my rantings about Fairytale symbolism, were it not for the fact I felt the movie was so nearly transcendent. Had it been a disposable nothing, I would not have expended so much time and effort trying to unravel it.
So in a way, this is a back-handed compliment...
Ignoring my own feelings about how the story could/should have been different, my biggest complaint is that Hugo as a character never changes. Although starting the movie as a poor orphan, and ending as the adopted son of a famous filmmaker, Hugo's personality never really feels like it changes.
So I was at a networking event this morning, and I met a friend who has been asked to write for a Doctor Who magazine (or this may be the Doctor Who Magazine). Anyway, we got onto a discussion about the relative merits of Fantasy verses Science Fiction (from my point of view, they are both the same, it just depends on which side you like your bread buttered), but I got onto pointing out the overt Fantasy vein running through Matt Smith's tenure.
The first time we meet Matt Smith's Doctor he is wearing the tattered remains of the clothes of his previous incarnation. He is a strange, potentially frightening man who rejects wholesome food like apples in favour of fish fingers and custard. True to form, however, young Amelia is not frightened of him and, like Lucy Pevensey when presented with the otherwise terrifying Mr Tumnus in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, quickly makes a friend of him.
For those of you not in the UK, Doctor Who is a very long-running English television series about a time-travelling human-looking alien. His most famous icon is a blue police box called the TARDIS, which is his time-machine. It is supposed to change shape to blend into its environment, but in the very first episode of the series (all the way back in 1963!) it got locked in this form and has never changed since. So well-known is Doctor Who in Britain, that if you were to show a blue police box (ubiquitous when the series began) to most people, they would not think of the police, but the Doctor.
So said Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade. And who could disagree with him? I would certainly struggle to find ten people to put their hands up and say there were rooting for the Nazis in the Indiana Jones films, Downfall or Inglorious Basterds. The Sound of Music is a different matter, but I think that is more a case of my enemy's enemy...
The good thing about Nazi villains is they are one of the few groups no one will object you killing in a variety of horrible ways. Like the Stormtroopers of Star Wars (who of course took their name from the First World War German Stoßtruppen or Shock Troopers), Nazis represent disposable people. They can be gunned down by the hundred and no one will write in and complain.
As seen in this hilarious sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look, they even have the good grace to look evil.
I recently saw the second trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and it got me thinking about my ambivalence after seeing The Dark Knight way back in 2008.
I was overjoyed that the film had been so exciting, and I felt genuinely drained at the end, not to mention the sense of anticipation as to what was to come. I also felt trepidation as I felt the series had played its Ace card with the Joker (you know what I mean!).
Christopher Nolan’s direction of Heath Ledger’s Joker left an indelible mark on many of the people who saw him. It has been the source of a few heated discussions for me. I know a few people who have said, “I hated Heath Ledger’s Joker. He was far too violent. Completely inappropriate for a superhero film.” When I have asked how they felt about Jack Nicholson’s Joker they would say, “Oh, no. He was fine.”
As I go on to point out that Jack Nicholson’s Joker was far more violent and killed far more people than the Ledger Joker did, the discussion invariably takes a more religious turn. Words like “godless” start getting thrown around.
What I have tried to point out is that the difference between the Ledger and Nicholson Jokers is that the Ledger Joker is credible. He is so frightening because he is not too much of a stretch from reality. Nicholson’s Joker, while being a great pantomime villain, was ultimately just that. He has said in interviews that he believes the “badder” you are, the more the kids love it.
The Batman/Joker relationship may be the best hero/opponent relationships ever invented in the comicbook medium. The reason is that truly are a mirror to each other. Despite the darkness of Batman, he is an agent of the status quo. The Joker meanwhile represents randomness, random violence, random death - the idea that you don’t have to be his enemy or get in his way for him to destroy you. He is Death.
Before I put my 3D rant to bed for good, I thought it was only fair to offer my final conclusions having seen Hugo again in 2D.
Firstly, I enjoyed the visual experience much more. I found I could concentrate more on what I was looking at, and found much more in the frame to look at than I had in 3D. This sounds counter intuitive, I know, but I can only think that I was not having to change the focus and depth of my vision with each cut, my eyes were able to dart over the frame and absorb much more.
In my previous post, I discusses how I found the 3D in Hugo distracting on occasion. I realise I have to tread carefully here, as when both sound and colour came about people called them gimmicks. It could well be that 3D will become part of movie grammar and film students of the future will be taught about the semiotics of depth along with colour, depth of field and sound.
The difference as far as can see, is that neither sound nor colour as they appear on screen are realistic - realism being the main argument in favour of 3D-as-standard. The hyper-saturated colours of Amelie are not how the world looks (which is a great pity). No movie scene set in a public place or restaurant has anything like realistic sound, as the characters would be shouting at each other. Even the way movies are lit is unrealistic. If you actually pay attention to the supposed light sources in a standard short/reverse shot set-up you will see the light sources are jumping around all over the place, getting warmer or cooler, hard and soft, near and to the side to high and far away. Even the convention of editing is unrealistic. To an extent it mimics the way our eye flick between stationary views, but it is entirely invented for cinema.
When reviewing Hugo, critic Mark Kermode who had previously been averse to 3D films, praised the use of the technology. Part of his reasoning was that it was justified by the movie's context as, in part, a history of movie-making and special effects.
While I think context has a lot to do with it, I do still think it is a gimmick. As we see in Hugo, motion picture itself began as a side-show attraction. A curiosity. A gimmick. There were no stories attached to these films, they were shots of people and things doing what people and things do. The novelty came from seeing them projected. No one was yet using them to tell stories.
My first exposure to 3D was in a museum that was playing a very ropey (even to my 8 year old self) stop motion animation of life in the Cretaceous. A triceratops and tyranosaurus were shuffling around their shallow focus world. But the antagonists jutted vividly into the dark little room so that they looked to be within arm's reach. I, along with all the other tiddlers in the screening room, was stretching out my hand trying to touch what seemed to be right in front of me. This is really what 3D works best at - spectacle.
With the approach of what I once heard described as “Hollywood’s annual circle-jerk”, it is probably fitting that I should be seen to discuss some of the contenders for this year’s Best Picture award.
I have already offered my twopence on the highly enjoyable The Artist, and will now attempt to turn my critical faculties to Hugo, completing my double-feature of Oscar-nominated films and movies I saw in a cinema.
Summarising Hugo is not as easy as it would at first seem. “The story of an orphan living in a railway station who tries to repair a clock-work automaton in the hope of retrieving a message from his dead father” really doesn’t cover much of the movie. More it is what the automaton “writes” that reveals the real story of the movie. And this is sort of where the marketing of the movie really didn’t do it any favours, as the first trailer at least caused me to utterly dismiss the movie as this year’s annual Harry Potter placeholder. It was only after seeing a second trailer and interview with Scorsese that I gave it a second look. And I’m glad I did, because it is probably my favourite film or movie of the last twelve months.
While we're on black and white films, and with the Oscars bearing down on us, I want to take a moment to talk about one of the nominees for Best Picture, Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist.
Along with Hugo, this is the only Best Picture nominee I saw in a theatre (sadly an out-of-town multiplex, though I will be seeing it again at my local indie in March). I should start by saying I thought it was a wonderful film, telling a good story, with engaging characters. However, the fact it is many people's favourite for Best Picture leaves me with a slightly queasy feeling.
My concern is that, as enjoyable as the film was, what it manages to do is recreate how all films were made prior to the silent era. Apart from the nightmare scene, which I thought was wonderfully done, it feels like rewarding a film for being at least as good as one that is 80 years old. What it did it did without making comment on the relative values of the silent and sound eras.
