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?
I never saw Star Wars in the cinema. I was three when it first came out, and despite seeing The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi frequently and repeatedly on the big screen, I never managed to make it to a showing of Star Wars. Sure, when Episode IV: A New Hope: Special edition made it into cinemas in 1997 I went not once but twice; but it wasn’t my Star Wars, the film I’d grown up on. It had Greedo shooting first and much of the final dogfight had been changed and a whole host of other changes that, every time they came up took me out of my enjoyment of the film. Those parts that were unchanged, it was fantastic to see on the big screen. But for me it wasn’t the experience I’d craved.
I am now reconciled to the fact that I’ll never see Star Wars in its original, unedited format in a cinema; at least, not while George Lucas is alive. While some of the changes in the later films, especially Empire, were undoubtedly for the better, others weren’t, and the most comfort I have from my DVD collection is the poor quality versions of the original film that Lucas saw fit to allow us to have, almost like naughty children being scolded and not allowing us to have anamorphic transfers. Never forget that Star Wars are Lucasfilm productions, and the customer isn’t always right – not when the director knows better.
I was twenty-five when Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out. I queued for an hour to get the best seat in the first showing the evening it came out, and I went back to see it three times. It’s easy, nearly thirteen years on, to be stuck in a particular mindset about the film: this is how many, if not most people, would react to the mere mention of The Phantom Menace these days.
But that’s not how I remember it, Star Wars fanboy that I am (and I bought a toy lightsaber and played with it for the first time after The Phantom Menace; my flatmate and I went at it like Obi-Wan and Darth Maul until they were just misshapen lumps of plastic). Even if I wasn’t a ridiculous optimist, I would still want to believe that a film I saw four times in the cinema had some redeeming features, but there’s a risk that the backlash has gone on for so long that any merit of the first prequel might have been lost a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
There must have been some good features to the film; let’s not forget that the backlash only started when people saw the film itself. When the teaser trailer hit, the majority of people felt more excitement than anything, that their childhood could be revisited and the magic recaptured. Watching the teaser trailer again, it does have a slight “sow’s purse from pig’s ear” feel about it, but many summer blockbusters these days struggle to stitch together even two minutes of entertaining highlights from their two or more hours. Here’s what started the excitement all those years ago:
So now The Phantom Menace is back in cinemas. Except it’s now in 3D, and Yoda’s been replaced with a digital puppet, more in keeping with the look of the final two prequels. So now I’ll never even see the original Phantom Menace on the big screen again. Think that’s a bad thing? Here I present ten reasons why you might want to part with a small amount of your hard earned cash to see this on the silver screen once again.
1. John Williams’ best in series music
The one constant throughout the six Star Wars films has been the music of John Williams. The finest composer of film scores of his generation has been consistently outstanding throughout the twenty-eight years of Star Wars films, but The Phantom Menace actually saw him at the peak of his powers. Duel Of The Fates takes the huge orchestral sound of the original trilogy, adds in a choir (singing a Welsh poem in Sanskrit, fact fans) and embodies everything that’s been so outstanding about his scores: it has the drama of themes such as Luke and Leia, the bombast of the original Star Wars theme and the ominous threat of the Imperial March, all rolled into one. It’s also one of the few tunes that you can do air timpani to. It’s so good I actually put it on my imaginary Desert Island list.
2. The three way, four blade lightsaber fight
It wasn't just the Empire that was a health and safety nightmare. Handrails, people!
It made Mark Hamill jealous, it made an action star out of Liam Neeson for the next ten years and it set a standard that the rest of the prequels could never quite live up to. The Phantom Menace contains the best lightsaber fight of the whole Star Wars sextology, and frankly one of the best swordfights ever committed to celluloid, the only shame being that there was so much going on elsewhere that this was intercut with three other plot lines, slightly diminishing the effect. (The less said about the incredibly daft ending, where Darth Maul stands and watches while he gets chopped in half, the better.)
3. Liam Neeson
I'm so manly I can even pull off this hairstyle. I rock.
Liam Neeson is appearing in a sequel to Taken this year. Liam Neeson will be sixty years old this year. Take in those two facts for a moment – it has to be the latter fact that’s harder to swallow. Neeson dominates the film whenever he’s on screen, even the soft Irish brogue carrying an authority (and a particular disdain reserved for Jar-Jar) that instantly marks him out as top quality Jedi material. You can’t help but feel if Qui-Gonn hadn’t taken one in the gut from the end of Darth Maul’s lightsaber that he wouldn’t have stood for stroppy teenage Anakin’s nonsense, or would have just pushed him off the nearest high rise in Coruscant if he got too out of control.
4. R2-D2
Anyone got 50p for the droid wash? Anyone? Tch.
So often in double acts, one of the pair commands so much more respect than the other. Think of Wallace and Gromit, or Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. So it’s the case with R2-D2, who’s always in the right place at the right time and might actually do more than any other single individual in terms of heroic deeds and derring-do across the trilogy, starting here with saving the ship while all other droids are getting blasted into space dust.. His no-nonsense approach might rub C-3PO up the wrong way sometimes, but if there’s one robot you’d want by your side in a crisis, it’s this one. How on earth Uncle Owen didn’t pick him out of the line up is anyone’s guess. Useless.
5. At home with the Darths
Even after all these years, the Sith still weren't allowed to meet up at Bluewater.
There are always two, apparently, which might explain why it’s taken them 1,000 years to be able to rule the galaxy. But in this case, the two are an excellent team, both with strong qualities. Darth Maul is the muscle of the operation, handy in a fight but also with a head ideal for scaring small children and opening bottles. Undoubtedly the best thing about Return Of The Jedi was Ian McDiarmid’s Emperor, so it’s also gratifying to see that George Lucas knows how to get some things right, giving McDiarmid an increasingly central role in the prequels. He’s satisfyingly smarmy when advising Padmé but also has the air of, well, menace required for his brief appearances as Darth Sidious, and his presence is one of the highlights of the prequels in general.
6. Samuel L. Motherf***** Jackson
Most successful movie star ever you might be, but selling mobile phones you are not.
Oh to be as famous and popular as Samuel L. Jackson. Having expressed an interest in being in a Star Wars film, he was approached by casting director Robin Gurland, and by the second film was even getting to pick his own lightsaber colour. Between him and Liam Neeson, the Jedi were actually believable as a force to be reckoned with.
7. The wonderful wizard that’s Oz
It was also an ideal opportunity to bring back everyone’s favourite short-assed, frog-faced Jedi master. The only slight disappointment was that Phantom Menace Yoda was intended to look younger, but instead he just looked as if he’d spent most of the last eight hundred years getting high. (Now that’s a film I’d pay to see.)
8. I’M BRIAN BLESSED!
Youssa say Gordon's aliva?
Yes, everyone’s favourite shouty man gets to turn up infrequently and spout random bollocks. Somehow it sounds so much more believable when he says it than when Jar-Jar does.
9. The scenery’s lovely
Well yes, obviously it does look better without the spaceships and the robots...
Coruscant looks a bit The Fifth Element-y at times, but Naboo’s cities are beautiful and you can’t fault any aspect of the production design. What me, grasping at straws? Absolutely not. Which leads me to:
10. Look, Jawas!
Fruitini! Or something.
With all that said and done, if you believe these reasons are enough to overlook midichlorians, comedy fighting robots, the incessant casual racism, Natalie Portman being turned into a bad actress in the space of 135 minutes, Jake Lloyd repeatedly shouting comments that would have been anachronistic in an Enid Blyton book and, not forgetting, Jar-Jar Binks and all of the other reasons that The Phantom Menace is so universally loathed these days, then by all means part with your cash, and I would argue that no-one could fault you for doing so. I think, though, four times was enough for me and the promise of an added dimension is still one or two short of the storytelling dimensions that we were all hoping for pre-1999. Until Mr Lucas finds some magic way of sorting out those dimensions, I think I’ll be staying at home.
Coming in 2013: Absolutely No Reasons Whatsoever Why Attack Of The Clones Isn’t Irredeemably Awful
Warning: spoilers abound for Independence Day, which you’ll have watched by now if you were ever going to, and Battle: Los Angeles, which you’ll not watch if you have any sense. Which apparently, I don’t.
I’ve been watching films at an increasingly insane rate for the past sixteen years, and in that time styles and fashions have changed. Cutting edge directors push the boundaries of what’s possible on film, dramas get more intense and big explodey films get bigger and explodier. But over that time, it feels as if the quality of the smaller films has maintained and, if anything, improved, but somehow the biggest films, with the occasional Inception-shaped exception, seem to have been declining in quality. This left me doing something on Sunday that I’d never thought possible: pining for a big invasion movie of the quality of Independence Day.
News reached us yesterday that Bond 23 is on its way in approximately, oh, about 667 days or so. Good news everyone! Daniel Craig is due to return as Bond and, as entirely expected because it was announced before MGM ran out of pennies, Sam Mendes will tell him where to put his gun. I will, of course, be near the front of the queue when it’s released, for what will be the seventh Bond I’ve seen on the big screen. Thanks to my age and the tragic fact that, between The Black Cauldron in 1985 and Speed in 1994 I saw only one film in the cinema, my childhood passed entirely untroubled by seeing Commander Bond on the big screen.
Of course, for the last half of that period there was nothing new to actually miss, given the gigantic rights wrangle that engulfed the series and stopped us getting Bond 17 with giant robots made by Disney. (At least, if Wikipedia is to be believed.) Nonetheless, all of my childhood understanding was based around the Bonds that were on heavy rotation on ITV while I was growing up, so my understanding of what it was to be a good Bond was based on one man – Roger Moore.
The suave sophistication, the safari suits, the arched eyebrows and the innuendos that bordered on filth; this is what it was to be a man in the Seventies, or indeed early Eighties when I was watching. I was also slightly crippled by growing up before the advent of the VCR and having such thing as a bedtime; in particular, my first viewing of The Spy Who Loved Me was cut short by this parental annoyance. I did manage to put it off just long enough for a car to be involved in a really long chase and then the car drove off a pier and went underwater and then it was like a submarine and it had a scanner thing and then it fired out a missile and it blew up a helicopter!! BRILLIANT! I do think it was fairly pointless sending me to bed at this point, as I was so fundamentally over-stimulated that I stayed awake for what felt like hours, then dreamed of Lotus Esprits and men with metal teeth.
And so it was that finally, in 1995, my first ever big screen Bond experience arrived, in the form of Goldeneye. After such a long wait, anticipation could have been fatally high, especially after this fantastic teaser trailer had been getting my excitement inflated for months;
As it turns out, the only blemish of any kind was Eric Serra’s score, which is an abomination against man and nature; thankfully John Altman was brought in to rescore a few key sequences, including the tank chase through St. Petersberg. Of course this was what a Bond should be like: gruff, Irish and with a hard stare and a nasal monotone.As I stumbled out into the night after having watched it for the first time, I had a good look around, then hummed the theme loudly to myself as I skipped up the road, pausing occasionally in a doorway to put my hand and fingers into a gun shape and imagine I was about to get the drop on 006. I also did this the second time I saw it at the cinema. And the third. And also possibly the fourth.
Casino Royale heralded yet another new era, and landed when my cinema addiction had finally begun to exert its vice-like grip. Finally, it felt like a grown up Bond film, with interplay and decent dialogue for Bond and his lady and stunts that were well thought out and well executed. We’ll ignore the product placement so gratuitous that I think the backs of my retinas had sponsorship on them, which has blighted all of my cinematic Bond-age, because it’s time to start getting excited again. By the time the nights are drawing in next year, either the little kid or the grown man in me, or maybe even both, are going to be very happy. Fingers crossed.
I’ve been writing this blog for a little over six months now, and in that time I’ve not been compelled to comment on the passing of any of the great movie stars who we’ve lost, mainly because others have done it so eloquently. But this morning, I awoke to the news that one of the stars of my all-time favourite comedy, in a movie that served to reinvent him for the last thirty years of his career, has died at the grand old age of 84.
Leslie Nielsen became famous for his deadpan comedy style, and it’s easy to underestimate the skill required to pull this off successfully. Indeed, I wondered how much was down to him and how much to the writers, especially after seeing an episode of Columbo from the Seventies in which Nielsen appeared. Watching with a friend one Sunday afternoon, Nielsen’s straight-faced delivery and tendency to glide in at the side of frame had us in hysterics, and it would be a shame of thirty years of comedy had tarnished his more serious roles.
But I’m sure it’s because he was so good at comedy. I only saw four of Nielsen’s movies at the cinema, and sadly that list includes two Scary Movies, Spy Hard and Superhero Movie. But Superhero Movie did, if nothing else, help to convince me of Leslie’s actual talent – about 4000% better than anyone around him, you could see how effortless he made things appear. My regret is that I’ve never get gotten the ability to take in Airplane! or The Naked Gun with a cinema audience, especially one coming to those movies fresh. The gift of shared laughter is one to be treasured, and Leslie Nielsen has handed out his fair share of treasures over the years.
At least we got to enjoy three Naked Gun movies in the end. One of the great tragedies of twentieth century comedy is that Police Squad was cancelled after only six episodes. People talk of the quality of twenty-first century television, but these were six of the densest and most finely crafted half hours of TV put together. If you’ve never sat and experienced them, for once I’m going to recommend a TV series to you; here’s the first act of one episode to get you started, but you’d better not come back until you’ve hunted down the rest.
Even to this day, I head to the shops and call out to my wife, “See you shortly.” She ever unfailingly replies,”OK, and stop calling me Shortly.” Leslie Nielsen, you will be much missed.
I’d like to think that the last two or three years of heavily dedicated movie watching have given me a fairly rounded view on cinema. I do still like my mix of summer blockbusters in among the more art house delights I’ve discovered as I’ve started to venture into middle age. But I think it’s taken a while for me to refine my critical faculties and to truly appreciate what was good. For evidence of this, look no further than my childhood.
Whenever I read about how people my age got into movies, it often relates to a Star Wars epiphany. Now I’m 36, which means that when Star Wars arrived in the UK, I’d have been no more than four. If I did go and see it at the cinema, then that memory is lost to the ravages of time now. So the first experience I can remember of a Star Wars movie when I was a kid was The Empire Strikes Back in the cinema.
It’s finally here. After months of secrecy, speculation and salivation (not to mention alliteration), the saviour of the summer blockbuster is finally upon us. And anticipation in my head is reaching levels not seen since the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phanton Menace, when, despite having a ticket, I queued for an hour outside the screening to get the best possible seat. (Despite the movie being satisfactory rather than spectacular, my flatmate and I still bought lightsabers and fought with them until the early hours. I was 25 at the time.)
The risk here is that I have built this movie (and Toy Story 3 to a lesser extent) up in my mind to such an extent that it can never deliver on that expectation. Christopher Nolan has succeeded in pulling together possibly the best cast for a major Hollywood release known to man (and the best ensemble I can think of since Heat), filmed in seven countries on four continents, spent a huge amount of money on realistic stunts that avoid too much CGI, but has one thing which makes it stand out above pretty much anything else I’m likely to see this year – Christopher Nolan.
There are a few directors whose movies I would go and see if I had been kept in a hermetically sealed bubble until the day of release and knew nothing of the movie itself; they include David Fincher, the Coen brothers, Michael Haneke, Brad Bird and David Cronenberg. But if every other rational human being had dismissed his latest opus, I would still give Nolan a chance.
I could sit and write a lengthy dissertation for this (because, being a blogger, I love nothing more than the sound of my own voice reading my own posts back in my head). It occurred to me, though, that it might be easier just to share with you, my readers (hello, both of you), my top 50 movies of the previous decade. I originally wrote this for my Facebook at the back end of last year, as a summary of my movie-going obsession of that decade; reading it through gives some clear indication of my Nolan-love and why my expectations are vertigo-inducingly high for this one.
“I’m only doing it so I can poke your eyes out,” said my wife. How did it come to this?
From me reading blogs, for a start. I have read as much advice as possible as I could be bothered to before starting blogging, and one I found particularly useful recommended reading other people’s blogs. Seems sensible. Then an article on one of them caught my eye. Someone was attempting to see a movie without any prior information as to what the movie was about. In this case, an interesting movie called Five Killers, which has ended up as a rather anodyne looking movie called Killers, with Katherine Heigl and Mr Demi Moore.
Coincidentally, I’d been feeling a similar frustration, and had tried to think back to the last time I walked into a movie knowing almost nothing about it. The closest I’ve come for a long time was this year’s Exit Through The Gift Shop, mainly because I saw it before most of the major publications had gotten round to reviewing it, but I’d still seen a trailer and read some random bits on the internet before seeing it, so wasn’t totally cold.
Went to see a touring company production of The Marriage of Figaro last night. I must be getting old, because I couldn’t stand opera when I was younger, and I’m seeing two this week, out of choice. (Also, because once in a while 3D is good, as long as it’s proper 3D.) And it was nice not to think about movies for the evening, to prove to myself that I’m not completely obsessed.
Indeed, I wasn’t thinking about any movies during the opening overture, especially not Trading Places or The Last Action Hero.
And I wasn’t thinking about The Shawshank Redemption during this aria.
No siree, I didn’t think about movies all evening. Not me.
Sometimes in life, when things really matter, you can pinpoint in your memory the exact moment when they started. Your first day at a good school or university, the day you got your first pet, or the day you met your wife for the first time. In my case, I hadn’t been to the cinema for years, and I can still remember the first time I went back.
It was October 1994, and I was just starting my third year at Bath University. In the two years I’d lived there, I’d not really given cinema much of a thought. I was a complete sci-fi nerd, and rapidly becoming a Trekkie, but who wasn’t then at my age? Especially when the university student union was showing The Next Generation on a 200 inch projection TV at 5 p.m. every day.
