Odds & Ends
Saturday, February 26, 2005
The Ultimate Power in the Galaxy (May Present Choking Hazard)
I love Star Wars. I love Lego. I love Star Wars Lego. But even I think this - from Lego Shop at Home - is a really strange toy:  By the way, if you do happen to think this is pretty cool, and you haven't seen what's happening in the Star Wars Lego scene - far-fetched I know, because it's what all the kids are talking about - then click here and be amazed by what a combination of obsession and amazing building skills can do. (And yes, I do play with this stuff myself, so I'm not pointing fingers at anybody). Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 26.2.05 - 0 comments  
Casino Royale with Cheese
As a follow-up to my post about Casino Royale early in February, some of Martin Campbell's views on the new film have featured in a story over at CommanderBond.net (apparently pretty much lifted verbatim from The New York Daily News).
While it's good to hear Campbell wanting to do the character-based nature of the novel justice, what's with the "Bond at the start of his career" stuff? So it's not a prequel, or a period film, but it is about Bond at the start of his career? This is basically what they tried with Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears, and that basically killed that franchise (admittedly, a weak franchise to begin with). Of course, the Bond series doesn't have any real sense of internal consistency - the Bond of Die Another Day can't feasibly be the same Bond we saw in Dr No. But the slippage of the internal time has always been fairly invisible - one Bond film generally can be seen as taking pretty much right after the other, and certain aspects of the character are consistent. For example, the loss of his wife in 1969's On Her Majesties Secret Service is explicitly acknowledged as still part of the character's past in 1981's For Your Eyes Only (with Roger Moore), and fairly directly in 1989's Licence to Kill (with Timothy Dalton). The Brosnan films deliberately kept this aspect of the character ambiguous - it wasn't acknowledged, but there were occasional references dropped to losses in his past that the fans could read as references to Tracy if they wished. By contrast, an explicit disavowal of all that came before is really unusual and seems a risky move. The previous lapses in continuity have tended to involve quietly ignoring what came before. 1971's Diamonds Are Forever, for example, completely ignores the death of Tracy in the film before. The principal villain (Blofeld) was the driver of the car from which she was shot, but there is not a single mention of the incident, and Moneypenny flirtatiously jokes about marriage in the first few minutes. (As Jim Smith and Stephen Lavington put it in their book Bond Films: "Surprisingly Bond doesn't respond by shouting, 'My wife was murdered at the end of the last film you heartless cow!' at her.") That ruled a line under the very close continuity than through all the 60s Bonds, and the consistency was always much looser after that. Yet even The Living Daylights (from 1987), which introduces a much younger Bond, avoided actually acknowledging any change. What's strange about this is that "resetting" the character is an unnecessary risk from usually risk-averse producers. They would be better off setting Casino Royale totally outside the established continuity of the series - effectively quarantining it as an art Bond film, in the way I described back in the early days of this page. (Click here and then scroll down to the 23/5/04 entry to read that post.) I'll write about something other than Bond or animation next post, I promise. Labels: bond Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 26.2.05 - 2 comments
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Buggered Bunny, Part 2
As a follow-up to Thursday's post, here is the full line-up of Loonatics:  At the risk of devoting too much time and thought to a show that will quickly flop and be forgotten, Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew followed up Jerry Beck's post with an interesting take: A friend last night made this perceptive comment about the new Looney Tunes-inspired TV series LOONATICS: "Warners has already desecrated these characters so many times, why the hell would anybody care at this point?" That pretty succinctly sums up how I feel about the new series. When you've had BABY LOONEY TUNES, DUCK DODGERS, SPACE JAM, LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION, and the new Looney Tunes theatrical shorts that were so atrociously incompetent that Warner Bros. declined to publicly release them, why would audiences suddenly, now of all times, feel an urge to get up in arms over this particular misinterpretation of the Warner stock company. Let's face it, Warner Bros. cartoons were done and over with forty years ago. Isn't it about time we rid ourselves of this unhealthy fetish for geriatric cartoon characters? We can enjoy them and appreciate them anytime we want on the Looney Tunes Golden DVD collection and in any number of revival screenings. Shouldn't that be enough? Chuck, Friz, Tex; they're all dead and don't give a rat's ass about what's going on. Why should we? It's pointless to shed tears because Beloved Bugs is now named "Buzz Bunny" (apparently after a popular women's sex toy) and drawn anime-style by some white boy who's watched one too many episodes of FLCL. My problem with this argument - apart from the fairly gratuitous references to Bugs as "tired," "geriatric," etc - is that I don't buy that a project like this happens instead of some inspired new work by an up-and-coming animator. The last few decades have seen plenty of inspired animation, and it hasn't been threatened by the presence of the low end of the market: crappy superhero cartoons made for TV. The problem is when you pull the classic characters down to that level and deface them. That said, I'm actually not that worried or offended about things like Loonatics. It's more funny than offensive. (I think I would feel differently if it were hard to get hold of the originals, but Disney and Warner Brothers are being pretty good about releasing their classic cartoons uncut on DVD). But I don't accept Amidi's take that the characters should be put out to pasture either. What I'd like to see is some quality new work done with Bugs and the rest. After all, in the classic Warner days, the characters were handed from one director to another, with different approaches to them over a couple of decades. Chuck Jones's Daffy of the fifties was very different from Bob Clampett's in the thirties. It would be nice if Warners could could continue that tradition by doing quality new Looney Tunes cartoons, and seeing if new artists could spark with them in new and interesting ways. Good new work with old characters doesn't stifle opportunity for new artists and new characters: it creates it by fuelling interest in animation across the board. When the legacy of an animation studio is in healthy shape and reaping rewards, it just creates new opportunities for other original work to occur also. What started the 90s animation boom? It was the revival of forties animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the rebirth of the classical Disney tradition with The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and the rest. And despite the fact that boom superficially seems to have ended in disaster, those fairly old-fashioned cartoons did indirectly lead the way to all sorts of interesting stuff: the Pixar films, The Simpsons, South Park, Futurama... A healthy nostalgia market for classic animation is, I think, good for the industry as a whole. And finally, before I sign off on this subject once and for all, you can enjoy the mind-boggling Loonatics promo film here. Labels: buzz bunny Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 19.2.05 - 0 comments
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Buggered Bunny
Both Michael Barrier and Cartoon Brew have covered a bizarre story from the Wall Street Journal that Bugs Bunny is to be, well, "re-imagined" in an upcoming WB TV show. See if you can pick which is the new and which is the old:  If you said the top right one is the new one, you're a brain cell or two ahead of whoever came up with this idea. To quote from the original story: Warner Bros. has created angular, slightly menacing-looking versions of the classic Looney Tunes characters for its new series, dubbed "Loonatics" and set in the year 2772. Names for the new characters haven't been finalized, but they are likely to be derived from the originals: Buzz Bunny, for example. Each new character retains personality quirks of the original. The new Bugs, for example, will be the natural leader of the Loonatics' spaceship; the new Daffy will remain confident that he is the one who should be in charge. Do you think it's possible those running the test groups couldn't get sarcasm? I note neither Barrier nor Jerry Beck at Cartoon Brew felt the need for much comment: this is one of those moves so bone-headed that it sort of renders any attempt at critical analysis redundant. I'm not worried about Bugs - he's been around for 65 years, and no stupid exec is about to kill his following - but somebody at Warners is going to lose their job over this. As Bugs would say: "What a maroon!" Labels: buzz bunny Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 17.2.05 - 0 comments
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
It's Whatever Turns You On: The Goodies on DVD
DVD Bits has alerted me to some good news: more of The Goodies is coming to DVD. The second DVD will contain the following episodes: Radio Goodies Bunfight at OK Tea Rooms Movies The End Punky Business South Africa Scoutrageous Come Dancing (Wicked Walzing) The Goodies is one of those shows that deserves to be better known - it never seems to have made it into the States, and even in its original Britain it apparently is rarely aired. It has always been more popular here in Australia, because the ABC kept repeating it early in the evening, as a filler before the news (although I don't recall seeing it on free-to-air TV in the last five or so years). For those who haven't seen it, it centres on three characters named after the actors who played them: Tim Brooke-Taylor, the snooty upper class twit; Graeme Garden, the scientist; and Bill Oddie, the unkempt ruffian. Continuity between episodes was very weak, with only the personalities and some sets being consistent: each half hour would throw the characters into a different set of often surreal circumstances.While not of the quality of its near contemporary, Monty Python's Flying Circus, at its best it was very funny and adventurous. It is almost unique amongst sitcoms for its very heavy use of slapstick humour, with many speeded-up chase scenes and prafalls. It always appealed to kids, but the best episodes were good enough to deserve an adult audience. I actually think the best-of approach (as opposed to full season sets) is a good one for this show: it ran for more than a decade, and isn't of consistently high enough quality to warrant purchase of the whole lot. The problem is, the selection of episodes on the first disk was haphazard, with only a couple of episodes really showing the show at its best. This second disk sounds more promising: the "Scoutrageous" episode (in which the Goodies, as Scouts, take on the Salvation Army, Navy and Air Force) is very good, as is "The End" (in which the Goodies are buried underground). And if the "Movies" episode is the silnet movies themed one, then my recollection is that's a particualarly good episode also. One final note: the show was notable for its heavy use of original songs written by Oddie, some of which were pretty good. Some - notably the theme song and the infuriatingly catchy "Funky Gibbon" - have made it onto CD. But many of the songs actually used on the show (as opposed to those they recorded as a novelty band) haven't been released - notably Oddie's best song, "Run" (although it was covered by Spiderbait a few years ago). I'd love the original Goodies version of "Run," and find it bizarre that it wasn't included amongst the mostly crap songs on the so-called best-of CD. Labels: goodies Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 15.2.05 - 0 comments
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Whose Casino Royale is it though?
It's official - Martin Campbell is to direct the next Bond film. It is to be Casino Royale. Brosnan is almost certainly out as Bond. While the Bond fans are predictably ecstatic that Fleming's first Bond novel is to get an adaptation, I feel this news raises more questions than it answers. For months now the rumours have been that Eon and the studio were at loggerheads over the direction of Bond: Eon wanted to get back to basics after the Diamonds Are Forever-like Die Another Day, while the studio was pushing for ever bigger action extravaganzas. Many fans are taking the return to Fleming source material as an affirmation that Eon are getting their way. What makes me suspicious of this interpretation is that if the book is filmed anything like a straight adaptation, then it would represent a complete capitulation by the studio. This would need to be a harder-edged, more purist Bond than we saw even in 1962 with Terence Young's superb Dr No. Casino Royale was Fleming's first Bond novel, and it is probably his best. It is built around a setpiece high stakes gambling sequence, where Bond tries to bankrupt the villainous Le Chiffre. When the mission goes wrong, Bond is viciously tortured, and escapes only to find himself questioning his willingness to go on with the job. The concluding sections focus on his relationship with Vesper Lynd, the female agent who had assisted in his mission, and builds to a really effective and shocking conclusion. It's what all the Bond books should be: a really solid thriller, pulp done exceptionally well. The problem is, it is also resolutely small and serious-minded. There is a car chase, and this could be expanded upon, but the first sections centre on a brilliantly written casino sequence, and the latter portion of the book is basically about a relationship going sour. I don't have a problem with Martin Campbell as director - my issues with his Goldeneye are mostly script-related - but his selection suggests an intention to go for a typically big action movie. If they wanted to do Casino Royale straight, they would have been better to take Quentin Tarantino up on his offer of a year or so back. He would have had the critical cachet to get away with a smaller treatment, and his suggestion to set the film after the events of On Her Majesties Secret Service showed a real instinct for the overtone of despair needed. (Peter Hunt's 1969 adaptation of OHMSS was the last attempt to do a really serious Bond film, and it remains the highpoint of the series). If they think they can just adapt the book and add some action, they are doomed to fail. That has worked before, and indeed the best sixties Bond films (Dr No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and On Her Majesties Secret Service) got by by being faithful to Fleming but strengthening action sequences in the book, or adding them skillfully where they didn't exist before. But the nature of Casino Royale, the novel, is such that this approach wouldn't work. I fear that the best we will get is the approach taking by most of the 70s and 80s Bond films: cherry-pick a few elements, names and settings (just enough to thwart anyone ever trying to do a proper adaptation later), and then junk the rest. The Bond films long ago lost the knack of being great films (and the four sixties films I name above are truly that - great films, amongst the best action-adventure films ever made) while remaining true to the books. At the end of the day, the same old tension - between fidelity to the Fleming character, and the expectations of movie audiences - will still exist. The fact that this announcement has a bit each way doesn't do anything to resolve that underlying tension, and without a figure like Tarantino to act as circuit breaker, I'm not sure it can be done. Labels: bond Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 5.2.05 - 0 comments
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