Movie critics everywhere are greeting James Cameron’s "Avatar" with praise. The film faces pressure to change modern filmmaking, with some asking whether it will live up to "Titanic's" success. Transcript here.
COMMENTS I never got round to watching Titanic, but I plan to see Avatar during the holidays. I'll post a review if and when I do.
WHAT I THOUGHT Love him or hate him, Michael Moore's films are always very watchable, and Capitalism is no exception. However, if you've been following the news (or reading this blog!) over the past year and a half, you probably won't learn much which is new. (One thing I didn't know was that major US companies such as Wal-Mart routinely take out life insurance policies on their employees, standing to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars if they die. They call this "dead peasants insurance".) And the film concentrates almost exclusively on the US—you wouldn't think the rest of the world had been affected by the crisis. As usual, there's some great archive footage—the section on Ronald Reagan is probably worth the price of admission alone.
James Cameron's eagerly-awaited sci-fi blockbuster "Avatar" is due for release on December 18. The Los Angeles Times describes how an entire alien language was created for the film.
This modern era of moviemaking has plenty of peculiar challenges for actors -- on green-screen sets, for instance, they have to watch a ping-pong ball hanging from a string and convince the camera that they actually staring down some magical beastie -- but for the actors auditioning for "Avatar" the biggest challenge may have been reading a sheet of paper with words invented by a USC professor named Paul R. Frommer.
Frommer, a linguistics specialist, was brought in by "Avatar" writer-director James Cameron to create an entire functioning language for the tribe of 10-foot-tall blue aliens who inhabit Pandora, the setting for the film's conflict. Frommer tackled the project with glee -- "How often do you get an opportunity like this?" -- but the actors who had bend their tongues around the invented vocabulary and syntax were slightly less charmed by the experience.
"Oh, it was so hard and I was really concerned about it," said Zoe Saldaña, who portrays an alien named Neytiri in the sci-fi adventure that opens in theaters Dec. 18. "I didn't think I could get through it. I'm not good with languages. All the actors, we worked together. It was the only way."
Frommer has spent four years laboring on the language of the Na'vi tribe and his work will not end on the day of the film's release. He plans to keep expanding the language until he's, well, blue in the face. Full article >>
COMMENTS It's not the first time that a language has been invented for a film. A Klingon language was developed for the Star Trek TV and movie series. In fact, a father was recently reported to have spoken only Klingon to his son for the first three years of the child's life.
A new Hollywood action disaster flick based on the 2012 apocalypse theories is causing quite a buzz, but some moviegoers seem to be taking the marketing hype too literally. This Newsy report examines the controversy surrounding 2012. See here for transcript.
There wasn't much on at the cinema this weekend, so I was tempted to go and see the apocalyptic disaster movie 2012, even though it's dubbed into French. However, having read the 2012 reviews, I decided to go and see Soul Power instead. Here's part of the synopsis from the official site.
In 1974, the most celebrated American R&B acts of the time came together with the most renowned musical groups in Southern Africa for a 12-hour, three-night long concert held in Kinshasa, Zaire. The dream-child of musician Hugh Masekela and producer Stewart Levine, this music festival became a reality when they convinced boxing promoter Don Kingto combine the event with “The Rumble in the Jungle”, the epic fight between Muhammad Aliand George Foreman, previously chronicled in the Academy Award-winning documentary "When We Were Kings”.
Soul Power is a verité documentary, about this legendary music festival (dubbed “Zaire ’74”) and it depicts the experiences and performances of such musical luminaries as James Brown, BB King,Bill Withers, Celia Cruz, among a host of others.
WHAT I THOUGHT I'm not a particular fan of soul music, but I thought Soul Power was brilliant. It's not often that you come out of a film wishing it had been longer. The mixture of concert performances, background footage and local colour works exceptionally well. And seeing Muhammad Ali in his prime was a bonus. A real feel-good movie which had me smiling throughout.
The movie, adapted from writer-director Rebecca Miller’s novel of the same name, tells the story of Pippa Lee (wonderful Robin Wright Penn), a fiftysomething housewife with a wild past, who has just moved into a plush New England retirement community with her (much older) publisher husband (Alan Arkin). The arrival of a (much younger) good-looking neighbour (Keanu Reeves) makes Pippa realize that there is something missing in her life.
WHAT I THOUGHT Worth going to seejust for the splendid performance by Robin Wright Penn but there is plenty of other interesting stuff to enjoy. 7.5 out of 10.
This afternoon I went to see Humpday. Here's the synopsis from the official movie site.
SYNOPSIS It's been a decade since Ben and Andrew were the bad boys of their college campus. Ben has settled down and found a job, wife, and home. Andrew took the alternate route as a vagabond artist, skipping the globe from Chiapas to Cambodia. When Andrew shows up unannounced on Ben's doorstep, they easily fall back into their old dynamic of macho one-upmanship.
Late into the night at a wild party, the two find themselves locked in a mutual dare: to enter an amateur porn contest together. But what kind of boundary-breaking, envelope pushing porn can two straight dudes make? After the booze and "big talk" run out, only one idea remains—they will have sex together...on camera. It's not gay; it's beyond gay. It's not porn; it's art. But how exactly will it work? And more importantly, who will tell Anna, Ben's wife?
WHAT I THOUGHT Anyone expecting a Judd Apatow-style buddy movie or 'bromance' with lots of juvenile humour and swearing may be disappointed, but Humpday is much better than that. The relationship between the two old friends has real emotional depth, the performances are excellent, and there are plenty of laughs. Do they go through with their crazy plan? You'll have to watch the film to find out. LANGUAGE NOTE The movie's title is a play on words. In American English, Wednesday is sometimes referred to as hump day or humpday. This is because Wednesday is the middle of the work-week, and therefore when this day is ended, you are "over the hump", i.e. past the most difficult part. However, used as a verb, hump means "to have sex with". • Jeff Koons's room – one of several extremely raunchy interludes – consists of a giant, gross, plastic sculpture of Koons humping La Cicciolina, his sometime porn bride. REVIEWS • TIME • Roger Ebert • Rotten Tomatoes (78%) • Metacritic (74) • Interview with director Lynn Shelton (Guardian Film Weekly)
Yesterday evening I went to see Fish Tank by Andrea Arnold, which won prizes at the Edinburgh and Cannes film festivals.
Set on a grubby Essex council estate, it's about a foul-mouthed, violent, uneducated 15-year-old (played by non-actor Katie Jarvis) living in a depressing council flat with her unloving, sluttish, boozy single mum (Kierston Wareing), and a disturbed, hate-filled little sister, Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths). Their torpid lives are disrupted when Mia's mother miraculously gets a new boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender, last seen in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds).
WHAT I THOUGHT I found Fish Tank to be extremely depressing, rather disturbing at times, and far too long (over 2 hours). The characters are uniformly unpleasant, not to say obnoxious. They may be victims of society but that doesn't make them any more sympathetic. The trailer gives a good idea of what to expect.
Last night I went to see Inglourious Basterds, the new movie from Quentin Tarantino. Reviews have been generally positive (89% on Rotten Tomatoes) but some critics panned it, so I wasn't sure what to expect. The film, set in the Second World War, involves a Jewish-American revenge squad (led by Brad Pitt) intent on killing (and scalping) as many Nazis as possible in German occupied France. Historical realism is not a concern!
WHAT I THOUGHT At two and a half hours the film is far too long and very uneven, but I can't say I was bored. Christoph Waltz is brilliant as the evil, polyglot, Jew-hunting SS Colonel Hans Lander (he won the Best Actor award at Cannes for this role), and there's plenty of trademark Tarantino humour and dialogue. There are also some very gruesome scenes—be prepared to close your eyes if you are squeamish. So it's no Pulp Fiction, but it's certainly not a total disaster either. Here's the trailer:
FOOTNOTES 1. One interesting feature of the film is that the actors speak the language they would 'in real life'. So we hear English, French, German and even Italian. The use of these different languages is integral to the plot, especially in the gripping opening chapter (the best part of the film). 2. The title of the film was inspired by Italian director Enzo Castellari's 1978 Dirty Dozen-like war film The Inglorious Bastards. However, Tarantino's film is not a remake. (Source: Wikipedia) 3. To date, there has been little explanation of the title spelling (in English, the correct spelling would be "Inglorious Bastards", without the extra u in Inglourious and with an a instead of an e in Basterds). When asked, Tarantino would not explain the u and said, "But the 'Basterds'? That's just the way you say it: Basterds." He commented on The Late Show with David Letterman that "Inglourious Basterds" is the "Tarantino way of spelling it." (Source: Wikipedia)
We know them as trailers, but they don't trail anything; they play before the movie, not after it. The name dates to their earliest incarnation, when they actually did follow the feature. The documentary "Coming Attractions" dates the very first trailer to a 1912 Edison serial entitled "What Happened to Mary?" After each installment, a black card with white text would appear to inform audiences "The next incident in the series of 'What Happened to Mary' will be shown a week from now." Not exactly "In a world..." but it did the trick back in 1912. Full article >>
You can view the 50 trailers on the IFC site. Here's the trailer for Hitchcock's Psycho (No. 2 on the Top 50)
Abduzeedo, a blog created by Fabio Sasso, a Brazilian designer living in Porto Alegre, has a wonderful collection of vintage posters including film posters, travel posters, advertisements and miscellaneous curiosities.
FOOTNOTES 1. Ft hereis an abbreviation of "foot" (it can also be short for "feet"). One foot is equal to 30.48 centimeters, so 50 feet is 15.24 meters. That's a pretty tall woman.
2. Why, you may wonder, do we not say "50-feet woman"? The reason is that when a compound adjective consisting of a number and a noun comes before another noun, the noun in the compound adjective is always singular. Don't ask me why—that's the rule. Here are some examples:
Farrah Fawcett has died in a Los Angeles hospital after a long battle with cancer. The actress, who rose to fame as the star of the U.S. TV show "Charlie's Angels" was 62 years old. Sky's Mark Stone reports.
The latest film by the controversial comedian Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, Ali G) has come under fire from gay rights campaigners, who say 'Brüno' could reinforce negative stereotypes about gay people. The film, which premiered in London on Wednesday night, pushes the boundaries of social satire. Razia Iqbal reports.
COMMENTS I'm looking forward to seeing Brüno, but I still think Ali G was Sacha Baron Cohen's best character. Some of the interviews from the Channel 4 and HBO TV shows (e.g., feminist Naomi Wolf) were classics (the Ali G movie was rubbish though).
This afternoon I went to see Sunshine Cleaning at the Sirius. Described on the official site as an "offbeat dramatic comedy", the film tells the story of a single mom (excellent Amy Adams) and her slacker sister (equally good Emily Blunt) who set up a crime scene clean-up business and discover important things about themselves and each other.
WHAT I THOUGHT I really liked this movie. It's not quite in the same league as "Little Miss Sunshine" (from the same producers), but it has a similar mix of humour and emotion. The poster sums it up very well: "life's a messy business" (nice pun!)
