Odds & Ends

We have a Revenge of the Sith review.

Filmmaker Kevin Smith has given it a rave review on his website (note that spoiler and language warnings apply: in particular, I feel a little miffed that Smith gave away the final shot of the film). It's the first definitely legitimate review we have.

There have been previous near misses and false alarms. A few months back Josh Griffin, then the editor of The Force.Net, the biggest Star Wars fan site, hinted on the site's forums that he had seen a working version and stated that he would provide a "review of sorts," setting off something of a frenzy. In the end, there was no review - "of sorts" or otherwise - and Griffin instead resigned as editor. (For an interesting but harsh blast at Griffin about this whole debacle by one of Star Wars fandom's more obstreporous figures, click here).

But this is the real Kevin Smith, and he has no doubt seen the film. Smith has good credentials to be posting this review: as he explains in an essay in Glenn Kenney's anthology A Galaxy Not so Far Away, he is a lifelong fan and even got married at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch while doing post-production on his film Dogma. He has also been rumoured as a possible writer / director for the likely Star Wars TV show, a fact that he seems to allude to in the review. Of course, this also counts as a possible conflict of interest.

The other thing that some fans have used to discredit Smith's review is the fact that he gave a positive review of The Phantom Menace back in 1999. In particular, he gave the following damning quote:

I'd rank it right after 'Empire' in a list of fave 'Star Wars' flicks.

Damning because it is of course accepted wisdom by fans that The Empire Strikes Back is the one, shining masterpiece of the series (with the original film close behind). To rank the execrable The Phantom Menace just behind Empire is considered by fans pretty much definitive proof of insanity.

Which would be fair enough if it weren't for the fact that the rest of Smith's 1999 Phantom Menace review is so underwhelmed that it completely fails to back up the quote. He sounds - as so many of us did in 1999 - like someone desperately trying to convince himself that it was okay.

An example? Smith in 1999:

Compare this to Smith in 2005:

"Revenge of the Sith" is, quite simply, fucking awesome. This is the "Star Wars" prequel the haters have been bitching for since "Menace" came out, and if they don't cop to that when they finally see it, they're lying... this flick is so satisfyingly tragic, you'll think you're watching "Othello" or "Hamlet".

Hyperbole raises its own suspicions, but you can't doubt that the enthusiasm level is much higher in the second review.

I obviously have not seen the film: however, I have seen a 7 minute compilation of footage that seems to be very similar to the one described here, with the conspicuous difference that there was definitely no dialogue in the version I saw, only music. The copy I saw was a bootleg, complete with silhouetted heads in the foreground, but you could still get a good feel for it. The footage looked absolutely spectacular. Here's the YouTube version:



I hated The Phantom Menace, and am one of the few who enjoyed Attack of the Clones - but I just have a feeling that this film will really deliver. If Lucas can provide some dialogue and plot that can halfway match what I saw, I'll be happy.

You may have noticed how on current affairs shows, when they cut back to Ray Martin after a story, he often says: "We'll be following that story and keep you posted on any further developments." Which means that they'll immediately forget about the poor victim whose case they were beating up, unless something else sensational happens, or the original story rates its socks off. Well, I'm not like that. So when I broke (okay, repeated) the news of the Bugs Bunny redesign, I followed up the further developments (here and here).

And now comes the news that Warner Bros are backing off on the whole concept. Or are they? This news report sells it as the story of a giant multinational forced to back off by the internet petition of 11 year old cartoon fan Thomas Adams:

Warner Bros. Entertainment spokesman Scott Rowe said his company wants the thousands of fans upset by the made-over characters unveiled in February to know "that's NOT all, folks."

Those "early drawings" have been revised into characters that are softer and less menacing, he said.

"We heard the outcry from fans, including Thomas," Rowe said...

The "Loonatics" - scheduled to air Saturday mornings come fall on Kids' WB! - is aimed at 6-to-11-year-olds. Test-groups loved it, Rowe said.

It's not intended to replaced the original characters, which appear in new episodes on Cartoon Network and classic shows on the network's station Boomerang.

"We just wanted to create something that would be accessible and fun to a new generation of kids," he said.

He said the redrawn characters will be unveiled at a later date but that "Loonatics" will remain an action-adventure show.

As for the eleven year old Thomas Adams himself: while I suspect that even as we speak he is being forcibly removed from his lunch money, I must admit that this is so the kind of geeky thing I would have done when I was eleven. Thomas, I salute you.

I wrote a while back about how much I was looking forward to the new movie of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so I thought it was worth commenting briefly on the ruckus over M.J. Simpson's review of the film. For those that don't lurk around the geeky corners of the internet, Simpson - a writer with a pretty impressive CV when it comes to writing about Adams - wrote a long, spoiler-filled review of the film (which you can find here). Previous to this, most of the reviews that had leaked out from preview screenings had been pretty positive: often they said a few things needed to be changed, but even that didn't seem outrageous given that the whole point of these screenings was to fine-tune the film.

Simpson's review, however, is very negative. Indeed, it couldn't possibly be more negative. Take the concluding paragraph, which is one of the kinder parts:

Hitchhiker's is not so bad that it's good. It's just miserably, depressingly bad. It misses the point by a light year. Is it a good movie? No. Is it a good version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Definitely not. It is ill-conceived, badly written, poorly directed and worst of all staggeringly unfunny. It is a travesty of a film. I mourn for it, I really do.

This review was picked up and run all over the net, including on some of the internet's most widely seen sites (such as Slashdot and Ain't It Cool), and was starting to look like the Internet age equivalent of the Vincent Canby review that famously sunk Heaven's Gate before it was even released. There were various defences of the film mounted from those that had seen the rough cuts (one is on the Ain't It Cool post linked above), but probably the most decisive action to limit the damage to the film's pre-release buzz has been Simpson's own response to the furore he created. Basically he took his bat and ball and went home, closing his website with an angry response to those who had attacked his review (quoted here only in part):

I could put up with the pathetic, jealous ramblings of those sad types who feel the need to criticise something they haven't read, describing something they haven't seen. But what has broken my will is the vitriolic personal abuse and libel which has started spreading across the net from various individuals who don't know me. (A more paranoid person than myself might think that some of these, the ones who have joined discussion boards in the past week and since then posted on no other subject than myself, were studio plants. But not I.) In particular, I am fed up with the no-lifes who constantly post abusive messages on this site's guestbook and then post more abusive messages complaining that the previous ones have been deleted. It is these people in particular who are responsible for the removal from the web of this unique resource. Nobody else in the world has the network of Adams-related contacts that I have, or sufficient knowledge of his life and work to be able to put any piece of news into context, which is why there is no other site providing a service anything like this, and from now on there won't even be this. These people can be found on the IMDB board crowing about their work - please direct any complaints to them.

With one masterstroke, Simpson has turned himself from the Douglas Adams expert who hated the film into a thin-skinned geek who can dish out criticism but can't take it. The film's distributors must be delighted.

What's my take on all this? Well - as Simpson himself sensibly points out - one can't really respond terribly effectively without seeing the movie (and I do expect to review the film in early May at Cinephobia). But you can certainly see why people got upset about the review. Virtually the first thing Simpson chokes on is some product placement, pointing out that Arthur makes conspicuous use of a Nokia phone: but why shouldn't Arthur use a mobile phone, and if he does so, it's going to be some make of phone isn't it? The definite impression this gives is that Simpson had a bad attitude to the film going in: if he's picking up something as minor as this near the start of the film, how could he be giving the film a fair chance?

Simpson's recurring complaint, however, is the loss of Adams' funny dialogue. For example, he cites the loss of the exchange between Arthur and Mr Prosser early in the film about exhibition of some planning documents:

The problem with this example is that this is dialogue that most definitely should be cut in a film adaptation. It is, basically, the same joke hammered three times, and the film can't be sitting around for an extended opening sequence on Earth.

This has been the most consistent response to Simpson's review: that he has unrealistic expectations of how an adaptation should work, and in his closing message on his website angrily denies that this is the case. Yet his review does indeed create that impression. For example, he claims that:

...speaking of running times, let us never forget that this movie is adapted from a novel which was based on only four radio episodes, ie. two hours of material, so there really shouldn’t be any need to cut too much out.

This ignores the fact that cinema works fundamentally differently from radio: the separation of sound from image on radio means you can whip through events really quickly with a sound effect in a way that just doesn't work on film. Furthermore, the radio series was designed to be heard in shorter episodes, not as a two hour block, which means the pacing has to be fundamentally different. Just a few paragraphs later, Simpson mentions of the early sequences that:

...what took an hour on TV and radio is crammed into about 15 minutes here.

Which is exactly why the pacing of the TV or radio versions can't be used as a basis for the film as Simpson has earlier suggested. If the film took an hour to get Arthur off the Vogon ship it would be a disaster, pacing-wise. (For all the pleasures of the TV version, its pacing is terrible).

None of this is to say that I'm not worried about some aspects of the film that Simpson cites. It does sound like they've pretty much jettisoned the plot of the novel, which is a shame. Simpson is right when he notes that despite the tendency of Adams to alter the story somewhat in different incarnations (radio series, album, novel, TV series, computer game), there is a core plot for the early sections of the story that doesn't change much for the variant versions. What's more - and unusually for Adams - it's a pretty solidly constructed one, leading from the demolition of Earth to the discovery of Earth Mark II and the big revelation of how the Earth came to be. Adams' tendency to wander off the plot of the novel in later years seems to have come from boredom more than any well thought out creative vision.

Oh well. We'll see for ourselves when the film comes out I suppose.

There's a new TV spot for Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory up at The Movie Box. While not that exciting in itself, it's an excuse to point you towards the full length trailer that has been around a while now, which is hosted from the same page. This is undoubtedly the weirdest piece of promotional material ever to be released by a major studio: it's strange even by Tim Burton standards.


While the first adaptation of Roald Dahl's novel (Mel Stuart's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, from 1971) has its virtues, I don't think it was such a perfect version that the book doesn't deserve another go-round. Dahl, incidentally, hated the original film despite having been credited with its screenplay (which was actually largely rewritten by David Seltzer, who later scripted The Omen). One of the things he professed to dislike most is the one thing that is usually regarded as unequivocally successful: the casting of Gene Wilder as Wonka. Wilder's performance - alternately funny and creepy - is probably the highpoint of his career, and perfectly captures the deliberately off-putting Wonka from the novel. Dahl's alternate casting choices, however, are intriguing: he wanted Peter Sellers or Spike Milligan.

The Milligan / Sellers version of Wonka is just one example in Dahl's career of fascinating collaborations that either didn't come to fruition or which resulted in disappointing end results. An example of the former is Dahl's working with Walt Disney on a wartime fantasy called The Gremlins: it resulted in his first children's book, illustrated with Disney artwork, but the planned film fell through. A disappointment was Dahl's script for the Bond film You Only Live Twice. Dahl should have been ideal for scripting a Bond movie: he knew Ian Fleming, had a background working on the fringes of the intelligence community, and his writing style - particularly in his adult books - is often very close to Fleming's. Yet in his screenplay he was at his most undisciplined and hyperbolic, and You Only Live Twice turned out to be the most boring of the 60s Bond films.

It probably says something about Dahl himself that the best films of his work have all occurred after his death, when directors with a strong vision could better assert their own approach to the material. It almost seems surprising that Burton has taken this long to get around to directing a Dahl adaptation (although he did previously produce Henry Selick's take on James & the Giant Peach): his talent for a childlike point of view and comic-but-unsettling visuals seemingly make him a perfect fit. The casting of Depp as Wonka - pretty much inevitable once Burton was involved - also looks, from the trailer, to have worked out well. Hopefully this is will be the rare example of Dahl's vision reaching the screen in a fully satisfactory form.

While I try to finish a post of more substance, here's a post for those who like The Simpsons. Or Peanuts. Or animated violence: "Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown." Originally posted at Anime Hell, it quickly went down after Cartoon Brew linked to it, but as I write Anime Hell are linking to a couple of working mirror sites. A violence warning applies, so don't download it and show it to your kiddies. (If you do have trouble downloading it, there's a fairly detailed write-up here.)

(Edit, 16/5/07 - here's a YouTube version, while it works:



It's a student film by Jim Reardon, one of the longest-standing directors for The Simpsons, and despite its surface brutality it's a loving homage to both Schulz's comic strip and the animated TV specials that Bill Melendez made from them starting in the 1960s. It's interesting to note just how good this was - the success of The Simpsons clearly owes a lot to its ability to attract underused animators like Reardon who otherwise wouldn't have had an outlet. The kind of cinematic angles used in the final slaughter anticipate the really strong visuals that The Simpsons would introduce to television animation.

I also like the legal disclaimer at the end, which is a good example of the "begging for forgiveness" style of disclaimer:

The creator of this picture wishes to state that he does not in any way wish to tarnish or demean the beloved characters of Charles M. "Dutch" Schulz's comic strip, "Peanuts." No malice or damage to their goodwill was intended.

So please don't sue me, because it will drag through the courts for years, and I haven't got a lawyer - and besides, you've already got half the money in the world, and I haven't got any. OK?

Well, that should cover it.

Incidentally, if the voice of the narrator sounds familiar, you've been listening to DVD commentaries for either The Simpsons or Futurama: it's Rich Moore, one of the most prolific of the directors on those shows.