The Kindest Cut Of All – Time To Lose The 12A Rating?

Yet another person who said it was just like Battle Royale was about to face the wrath of Jennifer Lawrence.

PARENTAL ADVISORY: The following blog is rated 18 for strong language, imagery, and a discussion that’s probably not going to interest anyone much under 17. Seriously, if you’re even the slightest bit squeamish and haven’t seen David Cronenberg’s The Fly, read on with care.

Forget your Harry Potters and your Twilights, they’re old news. The latest tweenage sensation, the young adult novel The Hunger Games, will be unleashed on us all in just a week. Well, strictly speaking, 99.92% of The Hunger Games will be released on the UK in just a week, for the distributor has taken the decision to take out seven seconds to receive a 12A rating instead of a 15. This isn’t the first time that this has happened this year, with The Woman In Black similarly cut for its release last month, this time losing six seconds of its run time. Should we care that we’re losing an amount of time that isn’t really practical enough to do anything with?

People Are Idiots

Hand ME the keys, you f****** c**ks***er! Oh, is it not that kind of line up? Sorry.

If ever you wanted proof that democracy is an inherently flawed concept and that we should all move to a glorious dictatorship, then the announcement of today’s Orange Rising Star Award is a case in point, a catalogue of idiocy that reflects poorly on you, me and everyone we know. Most awards ceremonies are content with allowing 40-50% of their decisions to look bad at the time and worse on reflection, but the BAFTA film awards seem to have come in for a particular level of stick, as the recent announcement of the longlist seemed to please precisely no-one.

But the Orange Rising Star award, the one publicly nominated award at the BAFTA ceremony next month, has taken the cake, the biscuit and various other types of confectionery for levels of general stupidity, and no-one is free from judgement here.

1. The Orange Rising Star award is stupid

I don’t disagree as such with the idea of a rising star award, as if you’re going to hand out glittery baubles to people for being in films, you might as well reward newcomers. But in the six years it’s been handed out so far, the Rising Star award has largely been given to people who’ve somewhat, er, risen. Over the last three years, it’s gone firstly to Noel Clarke, who’d been on screens in Doctor Who for four years, and was nominated on the strength writing and directing a sequel to a film that he’d also written, two years earlier. Two years ago, Kristen Stewart was hardly fresh faced when she won on the strength of several Twilight films, and last year was Tom Hardy.

I have a heterosexual man crush on Tom Hardy almost as big as the one I have for Ryan Gosling – i.e. huge – but he was the bad guy in a Star Trek film ten years earlier, had won an Evening Standard Theatre award in 2003, and even his turn in Bronson was the year before his smallish part in Inception finally got nominated for the award. Tom Hardy, Rising Star in 2011, was 33 at the time he picked up the award. Whoever thinks these people are rising stars are idiots.

2. The voting process for the Orange Rising Star award is stupid

The announcement today was of the final shortlist. This is a shortlist of five that’s been selected from a longlist of eight. It’s difficult to consider this to be anything other than a shameless marketing exercise on the part of Orange, as if you’re going to ask a panel of experts to pick a list of eight people, then eliminate only three of them in the first public vote, why not just get the experts to pick five in the first place? Or cut from eight to three? Asking the public to vote twice, for something with little return for their second vote, just feels overly cynical. Whoever put together this process is an idiot.

3. The five choices out of the eight nominees are idiotic

Jessica Chastain. Remember her? My top ginger of 2011, she went from relative obscurity to worldwide stardom in 2011, having been in… (deep breath) The Tree Of Life, The Debt, The Help, Texas Killing Fields, Take Shelter and Coriolanus in the last twelve months. Surely the textbook definition of someone whose star is rising. If the Queen of Gingers isn’t to your liking, though, then consider Jennifer Lawrence. Unbelievably powerful in Winter’s Bone, she followed it up with a scene-stealing turn in the X-Men prequel this year, and has nabbed the starring role in the next big Harry Potter / Twilight type thing, The Hunger Games.

Sadly, both of these up and coming talents (and Felicity Jones) have missed out on the final five, at the expense of the people in the picture at the top. If you know numbers one and four in that line up on sight, then you’re doing very well. Any award ceremony that puts them in (and they are Adam Deacon and Eddie Redmayne) above Chastain and Lawrence has committed a fail of the most epic variety. And whose half-brained decision was that, exactly? Ours, of course. The public failed to vote in big enough numbers to keep the right people in, or indeed to have the sense of taste to work out who the right people were. People are idiots.

4. Anyone who didn’t vote and who allowed this injustice to happen is an idiot

I didn’t vote. I’m an idiot.

Think! Get Angry! Run!

People of Britain, your country needs you! Despicable deeds are being perpetrated up and down the country, and it’s down to the civilised few to recognise this injustice and stamp it out, once and for all! We spoke to a middle-aged ginger man in Cambridgeshire who told us of once such unfortunate incident.

“Yeah, I was at my local Cineworld for The Ides Of March, and I walked in and sat down. Ryan Gosling looked as if he’d lost a load of weight and gone really pasty, but then I realised the film was being projected in the wrong aspect ratio and they’d left the house lights up.”

“Were you the only witness to this unspeakable crime, sir?”

 

“No, that’s the worst thing about it, in a way it was more terrible because everyone else was just sitting there, like they really thought Ryan Gosling really did have a really thin head, or that films were supposed to be shown with the lights on.”

“Dashed awful, frankly. But surely this must be the first time you’ve witnessed such a crime?”

 

“‘Afraid not. I’ve been to over a hundred films this year, and I’ve seen one film projected on the right ratio on the curtains, two with the sound too low and one where they left the door of the projection room open and a bright light in the corridor lit up the entire cinema.”

“Whatever did you do, sir?

 

“The projection room incident happened at The Tree Of Life, and to this day I don’t really know if it’s any good. It had Brad Pitt shouting at some dinosaurs on a beach, I think, I was too distracted to take it in. For all I know it might have been The Flintstones.”

Situations like this are occurring all over the country, as cinemas increasingly find themselves relying more on technology and less on real human beings like you and me. When Mr Robot gets it wrong, it’s down to you, Mr and Mrs Britain, to put things right again. So don’t be afraid to act! Here’s your simple guide to know what to do to avoid being caught in a panic when disaster strikes.

1. Think!

Correct Gosling.

Upsetting Gosling.

Examine your surroundings. Is everything what it seems? Can you tell the difference between these Goslings? Until you can learn to tell the difference between these instantly, you’re of no use to your country. But once you’ve mastered this step, only one test remains. Turn the light on, then turn it off. If you can tell the difference, you’re ready for step 2.

2. Get Angry!

Scores of people suffer in silence because they’re too embarrassed to admit there’s a problem. Admittedly it’s very British to keep a stiff upper lip and suffer in silence, but it’s even more British to fight injustice and to help your fellow man and woman. But one needs motivation to leave a film for which one has paid good money, so you may have to get angry. Rail at the injustice of a cinema so uncaring of your needs that it doesn’t even care if it projects the edges of your film over the curtains! Demand satisfaction when your film is so out of focus that you think you’ve been possessed by Mr Magoo! Be prepared to speak up if you can’t hear any of the voices on the soundtrack! The only way you’re going to put right what has now gone wrong is to have a deep desire to voice that concern, but the blasé, the indifferent and the apathetic need not apply.

3. Run!

Now, you’ve spotted an injustice, and you’re about to burst out of your clothes in a furious rage! But the longer you leave it, the more of the film that you’ll miss, or have to suffer being poorly projected. So put down the popcorn, discard the drink and run to the front as fast as those legs will carry you. If you stay in your seat, nothing will happen, and if everyone waits for someone else to go, everyone will stay in their seat, Gosling will stay skinny and you simply won’t enjoy the film. But if you do complain to the management, then you can enjoy the rest of your evening, safe in the knowledge that you made a difference to the world.

So remember, whenever you see poor projection or end up in a cringe-worthy cinema, you know what to do:

Think! Get Angry! Run!

This has been a public service announcement. Thank you.

Always Read The Fine Print

I’ve always been a fan of action movies, but as I’ve gotten older my tastes have broadened out. I can’t imagine the 14 year old me being interested in Mike Leigh or Michael Haneke, but the 14 year old me didn’t like broccoli or chicken either, and thankfully I’m now able to watch more mature movies and eat Nando’s. But the action movies of my teen years were missing one thing that today’s explosionfests have, and that’s proper actors.

The likes of Schwarzenegger, Van Damme and Stallone might have all become icons to a generation, but (possibly Stallone excepted) they’ve never been renowned for their thespian skills. So the idea that we can live in an enlightened 21st century where people renowned for their talent as well as their ability to look good rolling around on the floor while firing two guns fills me with joy. The idea of a film where Tom Hardy and Chris Pine, the soon-to-be-Bane and the hopefully-will-be-again-Captain-Kirk in an action film, even an action comedy, makes me feel like we’re living in a more enlightened time, where films can be the best of both worlds. Eat your heart out, The Renaissance.

But while it sounded great in concept, the trailer that was released this week seemed to be lacking something. Actually, the poster on iTunes that accompanied the trailer wasn’t great – Pine and Hardy look like they’re auditioning for a Twilight remake and Hardy not only looks like he’s sporting a failed comb-over but has the dead-eyed look normally associated with bad motion capture, possibly because the photo was taken after he signed his contract. Things were looking up in the trailer – for at least the first thirty seconds or so, which looks to have all the requisite explosions, moody looks and men and cars diving off high places. But then…

Two minutes of mirth-free, cringe-enducing mugging follow. Jokes fall so flat you imagine that the CGI budget’s been spent on removing the tumbleweeds and the kind of embarrassing set-ups that make even Jennifer Lopez rom-coms look the height of sophistication. Yes, at one point, the dastardly Tom Hardy shoots Chris Pine with a tranquilliser to cause him to fall asleep mid-date. Oh, the hilarity. If you’ve recently had any kind of surgery in which you had to have your side split in order to reach internal organs, rest assured that nothing in this trailer will leave you in any danger of your wounds re-opening or those stitches coming out.

So what could possibly have gone so wrong? I watched the trailer again, in the forlorn hope that actually I was in a bad mood, and that this was a quality action comedy which I had just misjudged, but no, it unfortunately looks so toe-curlingly desperate that it could set the careers of both its stars back five years. But on re-watching the trailer, I noticed one very small name in the end credits.

Oh. That’ll be it then.

If you still don’t believe me, watch here, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

One Of The Signs Of The Coming Apocalypse

Yeah, I screwed up X-Men and now I'm after the Oscars!

Brett Ratner has today been announced as the co-producer for the 2012 Oscars telecast. The man that brought us Rush Hour, X-Men: The Last Stand and Red Dragon will be bringing comedy (apparently) to the shiny gold man fest in Hollywood next February. In other Oscar news, Oprah Winfrey is getting one, seemingly for being a nice person. Anyone else want to book a holiday for late February?

Why I Don’t Sit Up For The Oscars Anymore

Tom Hooper, that’s the reason.

OK, maybe I should qualify that a bit. This weekend has been a fascinating series of contests, fought by competitors at the top of their respective fields, producing some scintillating viewing and some incredibly close, and unpredictable calls. Then after that, we had the Oscars. Yes, for anyone who loves their sport almost as much as their film, and is as English as The King’s Speech is British (i.e. very), then this has been a great weekend: England earning a hard fought victory over France in the Six Nations rugby, and an even harder fought tie at the World Cup cricket against India. Thrown in Luke Donald’s triumph over Martin Kaymer at the WGC Match Play golf, and the Carling Cup final’s amazing comedy ending between Arsenal and Birmingham, and this weekend of sport has had it all.

The theme throughout all of that is that the best person or team won. In the final case, it came down to an extraordinary piece of bad luck, but live television means that we can see every stage of the competitive process, almost feel the sweat dripping from the pores of the exhausted competitors as they struggle for one last ounce of effort. Of course, justice isn’t always done in sporting contests, but by and large this weekend the right results came out, and watching them was tense, very dramatic and ultimately worthwhile.

It’s been a while since you can say the same about the Oscars, which have now become pretty much the antithesis of a sporting contest. Already the poor reviews for James Franco and Anne Hathaway’s hosting gig are turning up in large numbers; if you’re going to have a three hour awards ceremony, you think you would at least want to make the watching of it in some way enjoyable, but all that’s left is to watch who carries off the awards, and most of them have been entirely predictable. For the second year in a row, Best Actor and Actress have been nailed-on certainties for weeks prior to the awards, and the only acting Oscar where there there was any doubt was Supporting Actress. As it turns out, even a disastrous self-funded ad campaign didn’t dent Melissa Leo’s chances.

Consider that I'll drop an F-bomb accepting the award. Now do you want me?

But every year, hoping against hope, I still cling to the increasingly naive belief that some sense of justice will be meted out at the awards, and not in a Jeff Bridges going round and offing the poorer nominees while wearing an eye-patch kind of way. The majority of people this year seemed to be predicting a split of the top two nominees, for Best Picture and Director, and that’s what BAFTA had done only a few short weeks ago, giving Director to David Fincher for The Social Network but The King’s Speech picking up Best Picture. It wouldn’t have been the first time Oscar did that, though, with Ang Lee (for Brokeback Mountain) and Steven Spielberg (for Saving Private Ryan) as examples where the seeming favourite picked up the Director statue, only for another, less critically acclaimed film to steal in and take Best Picture (Crash and Shakespeare In Love, in case you’d successfully wiped that horror from your memory).

But no, this year a man who cut his teeth on Byker Grove and who just turned down Iron Man 3 has taken the award, at the same time his film got Best Picture. Given its capturing of the time it was made in so perfectly, it is somewhere between disheartening and heartbreaking that The Social Network’s only real love was for Best Adapted Screenplay, a deserving Aaron Sorkin picking up that one. But the injustice goes deeper than that.

If you look at the Best Director category, and then consider the directorial effort and achievement, separated from the film itself, then it’s a hard job to argue that the best five got the nominations. Within his fellow nominees, I can’t help but feel that both Fincher and Aronofsky were more deserving of the award. When looking at the other five Best Picture nominees who missed out, then Danny Boyle, Debra Granik, Lee Unkrich and especially Christopher Nolan all probably deserved slots more than David O. Russell or the Coen brothers, or even Tom Hooper, but their films weren’t serious contenders for the top award, so they missed out. Others who excelled in direction in overlooked films, such as Mike Leigh or David Michod, also didn’t get a look in.

Unfortunately Fincher, who is now 0 from 2 for nominations, is in good company. (Spare a thought for Christopher Nolan, who’s yet to even get a nomination.) While Mike Nichols, Warren Beatty, Ron Howard and Barry Levinson all have a shiny gold man to put on their mantlepiece, the directing efforts of Quentin Tarantino, Alan Parker and Mike Leigh (2 nominations each), Ridley Scott, David Lynch, James Ivory, Ingmar Bergman (3 each), Peter Weir, Sidney Lumet, Federico Fellini and Stanley Kubrick (4 each) and Robert Altman and Alfred Hitchcock (5 nominations each) have never been directly rewarded by their peers for their efforts in a particular year, although Mr Oscar has occasionally put his hand in his pocket and given out a special award for those who’ve been snubbed a little too often.

And this is why I no longer make the effort to stay up for the Oscars. Despite the fact that it’s in the exact middle of the night for us, thus rendering staying up late or getting up very early as impractical options on their own, and that the accompanying awards show has all the charisma of an elderly dentist with halitosis half the time, it might still be worth it if the awards themselves generally found their way into the hands of the most talented individuals in each case. As long as the Tom Hoopers of this world continue to win, then I’ll be sleeping soundly in my bed come Oscar night.

Christopher Robin Has Terminal Cancer!

It's OK, Tigger, it's just an attention-grabbing headline.

My wife is very tolerant of my movie addiction, so I’m always keen to get her opinion on things I think she’ll enjoy. Sometimes that’s a greyer area, as there are certain things in life which have meant a lot to her and if one of them finds its way back into popular culture, that can be a potentially sensitive area. Take, for example, the new Winnie The Pooh trailer which ended up on internets everywhere earlier this week.

I know that Winnie The Pooh has a tender place in her heart, not least due to her father reading her the stories so often when she was young, that he knew every word off by heart, from heffalumps to woozles. Not of course, this Winnie The Pooh:

It's like being in the Disney shop.

Or indeed, this abomination against nature that surfaced a few years ago:

It's legally quite OK to use Darby dolls for voodoo purposes.

But, of course, this Winnie The Pooh:

Old Pooh. (Insert your own joke. Use "piglet in rear" if struggling.)

I will confess that when I became aware that a new Pooh movie was on the way and that John Lasseter had helped guide its direction, from the descriptions I was mistakenly expecting something like the latter image. Silly me. Of course it looks very much like the first of the three, in the style of the classic Sixties movies. So much so, that the only thing that distinguishes it as being contemporary is the Keane song that’s being played over it – a track so maudlin that, when I solicited my wife’s opinion, her reaction was, somewhat unexpectedly, “It’s so sad – it’s like Christopher Robin has terminal cancer or something!” Keane, you have a lot to answer for.

I can only hope that Lasseter knows what he’s doing – hand-drawn animation is struggling, and it’s certainly a brave move to put such a movie with such a distinctive style back in cinemas, and I personally hope that the story is nearer Pixar’s more recent output than Disney’s, while still retaining something of A.A. Milne’s original intent. Whatever happens, it will be fascinating to see how this one pans out. Get well soon, Christopher Robin.

Escape From George Lucas

I have you now! Mwahahahaha.

If you’re reading this, then help. For the love of God, send help. There’s this man, his name is George, and he’s got me locked away and he’s making unreasonable demands, like some sort of over-excited uncle. I don’t know what to do, there seems to be no way out, and now he’s got me in his hypnotic gaze I don’t know if I’ll ever escape. He’s torturing me, and he seems to think the Geneva convention is some kind of folk band. His evil knows no limits, and I don’t know how much longer I can last.

It’s all right for all of you. Free to wander about the lush green pastures of the world, without a care, able to watch original films and not subjected to the endless torture of the same old films, over and over again. I used to love Star Wars and Indiana Jones; I bought the videos, I bought them again, I bought the DVDs, I watched them over and over, perfect slices of entertainment, which I thought I could never tire of.

But now Uncle George (as he’s making me call him) has me imprisoned; he said he’s never going to let me out, but worse than that he’s converting my beloved entertainments into, whisper it softly, 3D. He intends to keep me here, locked up, and to show me one a year until my eyeballs start to bleed from the sheer horror of it all.

Jar Jar, in glorious 2D. Oh, how I envy you.

But you, dear reader, you are not subject to my plight. You have free will, you can avoid these travesties, these butcherings of my childhood and pillagings of my fantasies. You don’t have to witness these 3D atrocities, you can avoid them, you are masters of your own destiny. No one will compel you to watch them if you don’t want to. You are the lucky ones.

Sorry, what’s that Uncle George? No, I’m not talking to anyone. No, you can wear the Jabba the Hutt costume tonight, as long as you don’t show me any more 3D footage… (Send help. Please. Before he comes for you too.)

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways, Gnomeo and Juliet trailer.

I, like every self respecting Hollywood-centric cinephile, like my trailers. Consequently, I rarely arrive in a cinema and see a trailer I’ve not already caught online, and will generally watch pretty much anything that appears on most prominent trailer sites. The first trailer on the list when I went to Apple’s trailer page last night was the trailer for Gnomeo and Juliet.

If you’ve ever read more than a few posts on here, you’ll know I’m not averse to poor puns, so I’m not going to criticise this movie for its choice of title. I do plan, however, to criticise it for just about everything else.

1. It’s clear from the off that this is a story about toys gnomes that come to life when no-one’s watching. Sigh.

2. The rest of us are trying to forget The Matrix’s very poor sequels, and indeed the almost unending list of follow-ups that reference them that have appeared in the intervening decade. If you can’t think of any better references than that, please don’t bother.

3. There is already a classic musical reworking of Romeo and Juliet, of course. So why did anyone think we needed another one, but with CGI gnomes in?

4. And if they thought we needed one, who possibly thought it could be improved with original and new music from Elton John? Original music maybe, new music possibly, but the two are so far removed that both will suffer from comparison to the other. (Actually, the answer to this question is most likely producers Elton John and David Furnish.)

5. The fungi / fun guy joke officially ceased to be funny in around 1971.

6. I did reel slightly when I started watching the trailer, as it sounded like Sir Michael Caine’s voice at the beginning. Surely he’s not lowered himself to this? Apparently he has. But he’s not the only one. But the cast list also includes Emily Blunt and James McAvoy as the titular duo, as well as Jason Statham (sob), Maggie Smith, Patrick Stewart (cont. sob), Julie Walters, Matt Lucas, Stephen Merchant, Ashley Jensen, Ozzy Osbourne and Richard “I don’t believe it” Wilson. It appears that so much was spent on the cast, they forgot to spend money on, you know, jokes?

7. Maybe it’s the writers at fault. However, one of them is Andy Riley, who has written the brilliant Bunny Suicides books. If the sheer mention of those names hasn’t sent you scurrying to Amazon, there’s something wrong with you. So what happened, Andy? Saving all the good stuff for the next book?

8. This does have the feeling of a Tesco value version of Pixar all over. Wait, what’s that? This was being produced by Disney’s animation division and then John Lasseter shut it down when Pixar took over? For the love of God, world, why did you not see that as a hint?

9. If you don’t sit through a poor quality animation trailer, expecting the words “IN 3D” to be thrust in your direction at some point, you need to manage those expectations. (It’s mentioned at around 1:51 in the trailer, in case you were wondering.)

10. On the subject of tired references that the world can do without, no-one in the world ever needed to see another Borat reference / a gnome in a mankini.

11. I could go on, but I’m sure I’ll have much more opportunity when Mrs Movie Evangelist drags me to see this next February. But unless anyone’s willing to spoil this in advance for me, it’s the only way I’ll have to find out if this really has the guts to see the Romeo and Juliet parallels through to the end. Y’see, kiddywinks, Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy. And not in the sense of dragging down the cream of British acting talent (plus Steven Merchant) and smothering it in Elton John songs.

If you watched that trailer and thought it didn’t look that bad, then I feel genuinely sorry for you, and would be willing to offer you a list of two to three hundred other animated movies I’ve seen that were better than this looks that you could spend your time on more productively. (This is also such an affront to Shakespeare I felt the need to paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the title instead, just to give the poor guy a break.) Rest assured, though, if I have to sit through this and they don’t kill someone at the end, I may give it serious consideration.

Three Stars In Their Eyes

As a budding movie reviewer, I always like to understand the opinions of others, both before and after I’ve seen something. So if any publication reviews and rates movies, it is guaranteed to have gotten my interest. Consequently, patterns start to appear over the course of time, and I have become concerned about the reviews of my local paper, which drops onto my doormat six days a week. To protect the anonymity of said publication to save embarrassment, I have made an anagram of the name of said publication, which I will refer to as the Cmabridge New S.

There’s an entertainment section in the Cmabridge New S every Thursday, and it’s always a highlight of my thinking room reading for the week. (The rest of the paper is generally well written, so of course I don’t read those bits very much.) I’ve noticed over the last few weeks, though, that the reviews seem to be settling into a certain groove. To make sure I wasn’t going mad I retrieved the last four from the thinking room recycling pile and reviewed the scores from the last four weeks. The scores were as follows.