Odds & Ends
Sunday, February 25, 2007
And Now James Cameron Presents the Body of Jesus. No, Really
Strangest movie rumour ever? How about that James Cameron thinks he's found the body of Jesus and is going to present it at a press conference? From the Time magazine Middle East blog: ...film-makers Cameron and Jacobovici claim to have amassed evidence through DNA tests, archeological evidence and Biblical studies, that the 10 coffins belong to Jesus and his family... Cameron is holding a New York press conference on Monday at which he will reveal three coffins, supposedly those of Jesus of Nazareth, his mother Mary and Mary Magdalene. The thing is, James Cameron could have the real Jesus, and he'd still think he was the most important thing in the room. What's the King of Kings to the King of the World?  Labels: rumours Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 25.2.07 - 0 comments  
Friday, February 23, 2007
"We'll Invade Your Countries, Kill Your Leaders, and Convert You to Christianity."
In my post on torture in 24 - which was really just a link to someone else who wrote something interesting on the topic - I touched on The 1/2 Hour News Hour, the conservative response to Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. Well, John Rogers' blog has drawn my attention to a couple of clips from the show. First, Roger's opinion (as a former stand-up and comedy writer): It's as if aliens tried to decipher humor from radiated cable television waves and then constructed a "comedy" show with a poor translation algorithm. It is un-joke. You could put it in a chamber with a knock-knock joke and use the resultant explosion to power a starship. And now, in case you think that this is just because Rogers is some kind of leftie scrooge like myself, here are the clips Rogers highlighted so that you can judge for yourself. Personally, I think the conservatives should stick to the hard-hitting drama they are so good at and leave the funny to Stewart and the other lefties. But perhaps all that Marxism has gone to my head. Labels: commentary Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 23.2.07 - 0 comments
Sunday, February 18, 2007
"Torture is a Dramatic Device."
A while back I wrote a couple of short pieces (such as this one) for the site arguing that Hollywood, for the most part, has showed a surprising reluctance to respond to the events of 9/11 by indulging in paranoid right-wing fantasies. While I stand by most of what I said then, I did forget the obvious counter-example: television's 24. My correction is prompted by an article written by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker that looks in some detail at the show's enthusiastic endorsement of the torture of terror suspects. It's a fascinating article, noting that the show's gung-ho depiction of torture has even led to the US Army sending Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan to visit the show's producers to tell them to cut it out, on the grounds that it is giving young soldiers the wrong idea: Finnegan told the producers that 24, by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country's image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors - cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by 24, which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, "The kids see it, and say, 'If torture is wrong, what about 24?' " He continued, "The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do." As the article outlines, the show is not likely to change course. Basically, the very format of 24, with its unrelenting countdown to impending doom, evokes the oldest rhetorical ploy used to justify torture: hypothetical situations in which the torture of one person can save the lives of countless others. In that situation, the ethical scales are loaded so that the pressure to say endorse torture becomes overwhelming. But it's a completely manufactured scenario, because things are never that clear-cut in real life. In real life, there's doubt over the guilt of suspects; doubt over whether they actually know anything; doubt over the gravity of what's being plotted; and so on. But 24 is a powerful bit of pro-torture propaganda, because it shows the clear-cut imaginary situation (where the party is guilty and their information averts catastrophe) not just as a frequent recurrence, but almost a defining part of the narrative. On another note, it's kind of amusing to see the self-proclaimed right-wingers on the show enthusing about the possibilities of a conservative's version of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. Good luck with that, fellas. Labels: commentary Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 18.2.07 - 0 comments
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Kill the Cartoon Oscar
In the lead-up to the Oscars, there's always a lot of discussion around what will win, the overwhelming majority of which centers on the "big five" awards (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress). And whatever you think about the Oscars, there are usually some interesting features battling it out, even if they aren't quite what you might think are actually the best films. ("Best Picture Made in America, By a Big Studio and Seeming Important Without Being Too Challenging" might be a better name for the night's biggest award). But how's this for a strange little Oscar Contest? Best Animated Feature has three nominees (down from five because less than sixteen films were eligible): Cars, Happy Feet, and Monster House. I have already expressed my dissatisfaction with the okay-to-mediocre Cars and the surprisingly bad Happy Feet. I haven't seen Monster House, and from most reports it's actually pretty good. But it is a heavily motion-captured film (as, to a lesser extent, is Happy Feet), which means that however good it might be, its pretty dubious as an example of the best of the animated form. Which brings up the question: should the Animated Feature award exist at all? It's a recent invention, having only been started in 2001, just as the big nineties revival of theatrical animation was winding down. Despite the downturn in fortunes of the industry (particularly for hand-drawn animation), the award has been saved from outright embarrassment by Pixar, Japan's Studio Ghibli, and Aardman. (The winners, for the record, have been Shrek, Spirited Away, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit). This year, though, both Pixar and Aardman have produced mediocre movies (Cars and the un-nominated Flushed Away), meaning that there's nothing that can win that won't be something of an embarrassing choice. Which leads to my conclusion that the award should be scrapped. The pool is too small, for a start: there were less than sixteen eligible films last year, and many in that sixteen would have been virtual non-starters like Curious George or Barnyard. In reality, it becomes a lucky dip for that year's film from one of about four or five studios: Dreamworks, Aardman, Disney, Pixar, Ghibli, and maybe Blue Sky or a couple of others. This year's spectacle of a non-deserving film getting the award looms as an all-too-likely recurring problem. It's been something of a fluke that there have been good films to award each year: a glance through the nominees reveals just how thin the pickings has been. (Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron? Treasure Planet? Shark Tale?) Only a couple of times - with Howl's Moving Castle in 2005, and The Triplets of Belleville in 2003 - has there been a good film nominated that had to miss out. The original hope was that the award would lead to more recognition for animators and the animation field generally, and the animated short award has certainly served such a purpose admirably. But with the arguable exception of Miyazaki's Spirited Away, the interesting, edgy films are shut out, and big studio films with plenty of recognition are all that get rewarded. So in practice, all the award is doing is reinforcing the ghetto effect, relegating animation to its own category so it doesn't have to compete against the "real" movies. (Animated features are eligible for the regular Best Picture award, but you can bet there won't even be a nomination while the separate category exists). Sure, if they get rid of the category, there won't be a lot of Oscars going to animated features. Prior to the category, only one was nominated for Best Picture: Beauty and the Beast, in 1991. But that example is instructive. When that film was nominated, it was a big deal, one of the real signals that Disney features were back and worth seeing. It was a rare breakthrough, but it was infinitely more worthwhile than all the meaningless nominations now animation has its own category. It's difficult to imagine any of the US features from the last decade having been nominated for Best Picture if the animation category hadn't existed. But it's not so implausible that something like Spirited Away couldn't have given the Best Foreign Language Film category a real shake if its American distributors had given it a marketing push for that award. How much more would that have meant for the medium than the current annual Best Kids Movie spectacle? Labels: animation, commentary Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 17.2.07 - 3 comments
Look at the Size of That Thing!
Those who know me in real life (and does anyone else read this?) will know that really the only movie collectibles I indulge in are Star Wars Lego sets, which I'm afraid press my film nerd buttons too irresistibly to ignore. Until now, though, I've ignored the really obscene items in the line: the magnificent Imperial Star Destroyer and the frankly ridiculous Death Star. Both of those were, at the time, the largest Lego sets ever released. Now, however, they have been knocked off the perch by the impending release of the Ultimate Collector Series Millennium Falcon. And my resolve is being tested. I mean, look at this thing (you can click to enlarge):    Beautiful. Labels: star wars Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 17.2.07 - 0 comments
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Ward Kimball, 1968
Michael Barrier has pointed out an interesting footnote to animation history posted on YouTube: a 1968 protest short by Ward Kimball. Kimball was a lead animator at Disney, one of the so-called "Nine Old Men" who formed the core of the studio's staff in its mature period through to its seventies nadir. The most overtly comic of the Nine Old Men, he was lead animator for such characters as Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio and the crows in Dumbo, and directed Disney's Oscar-winning experiment with stylised animation Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (1953). In 1968, on his own time, he directed Escalation, an anti-war, anti-LBJ short that makes scatalogical reference to Pinocchio. It couldn't be further from stereotypical Disney family values. A mild adult content warning applies. What I find interesting about this is how it flies against the typical perception of the conservativism (both artistically and politically) of the Disney studio. Whole books have been written about the studio's ideological conformity, and there remains a fairly lazy streak of writing that constantly asserts the implicit equation Disney = family values = boring. Of course, Escalation is a private project, not a studio-sanctioned film, but I still think it's interesting that in 1968 (perhaps the definitive year of the sixties counter-culture), one of the studio's senior animators, a family man in his fifties, made a bawdy political film that became an underground hit amongst college students. Kimball often struggled to find ways to express himself at Disney, and as the studio's films became more staid during the 1950s he increasingly struggled for outlets. Yet even if the studio sometimes suppressed its staff's more adventurous instincts, it was full of people of enormously high calibre and creative ability. That's why the best Disney stuff (from the 1930s and 1940s) is so much more interesting than many critics - often, it seems, judging it from half-remembered viewings as children, or not distinguishing the strong periods from the weak - give it credit for. Labels: commentary Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 11.2.07 - 0 comments
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Hot Fuzz
I was a latecomer to the whole Shaun of the Dead phenomenon, but having loved it on DVD I'm looking forward to Simon Pegg's follow up vehicle, Hot Fuzz. There's a new internet only trailer up; you can find the official high quality version here, or in lower quality below. Like the internet trailer for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it's something of a meta-trailer, working as a piss-take of trailer in general. Hopefully that's where the similarity ends, given that the Hitchhiker's trailer was so much better than the film. By comparison, here's the more conventional full trailer: The whole conceit seems somewhat similar to Tony Martin's Bad Eggs, a film I enjoyed a great deal but which was generally poorly received. Pegg and his colleagues should have more luck: Shaun of the Dead worked so well because the zombie elements were done lovingly, rather than just for cheap laughs, and I think this approach should work well for a cop movie. Labels: rumours Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 10.2.07 - 0 comments
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Run for Your Life, Maximus
So apparently Roman Polanski is doing a costume epic / disaster movie, Pompeii. Variety's account is here. Seems an odd fit, but Polanski is nothing if not surprising. What threw me a bit about the story was Variety's potted biography of Polanksi. I mean I know Variety is written for people who know full well who Polanski is, but who summarises his career like this? Polanski, who won an Oscar for "The Pianist," last directed "Oliver Twist." He also played a supporting role in the Brett Ratner-directed "Rush Hour 3" for New Line.I wonder if he gets to fight Jackie Chan. Labels: rumours Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 3.2.07 - 0 comments
I Quit on You When You Cleared Out of Detroit with Willie the Pimp!
By the miracle of YouTube, a clever remix of Darth Vader's scenes in Star Wars with incongruous dialogue from James Earl Jones' other films. Strange, overlong, but intermittently very funny. It doubles as a tribute to Jones and the range of roles to which he's put that remarkable voice. Credit to Akjak.com. Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 3.2.07 - 0 comments
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