Back before the Lord of the Rings movies came out, I used to enjoy arguing with Tolkien fans.
They are (or were), I discovered, among the most argumentative people on the Internet, back in the day. Far more so than the real nerds who exchanged lists of reasons why one Star Trek captain was better than another. Until you've seen a bunch of Tolkien geeks arguing, and I swear to all that's holy I'm not exaggerating this even slightly, for weeks on end about whether Balrogs had wings or whether the Rohirrim used stirrups... you don't know what vitriol is.
At one stage I tried to play peacemaker. "It's not as if anyone was going to dig up a fossilised Balrog and prove the answer either way", I said. "Why can't we each have our own image?" Which, of course, made me no friends at all, and pretty soon I learned to stay out of those threads. It was, it seemed, the most important thing in the world to be able to correctly divine the precise image that was in Tolkien's mind when he wrote the scene. To compromise in pursuit of that ultimate truth - that would be sheer apostacy.
These were the people who had gobbled up each of the interminable volumes of Trash Reconstructed From Tolkien's Litterbox & Blotter, known in the trade as the History of Middle-earth, as well as collections of the great man's letters, reminiscences by other people who knew him, and Vague Hints His Son's Housekeeper's Daughter's Boyfriend Told This Guy Who Wrote To My Local Paper.
Occasionally in these robust discussions, someone would mention Tolkien's dream of creating "a mythology for England". I think, now, that phrase is key to understanding his work.
Tolkien was a scholar of mythology. He didn't use the word lightly or randomly. He knew that it is in the nature of mythology that there is no such thing as a definitive version. The whole point of myths is to be retold.
That's why the Tolkien and his estate, for years, made no attempt to "control" his intellectual property. Everyone and his dog copied Tolkien's basic prototypes for "dwarves", "orcs", "elves" and "hobbits" from his work, and Tolkien lifted not a finger to stop them: not, as Hollywood imagines, because he was a senile old quack who didn't recognise a gold mine when he was sitting on one, but because that was what he wanted to happen.
By the time his estate fell into the hands of "competent" (read: "evil") managers, those stereotypes had made their way into thousands of imitative books, paintings, films and cartoons, games, posters, and, of course, Dungeons & Dragons.
Where there are contradictions and inconsistencies, or incompleteness, in his books - that's not just a mistake. I'm not saying it's intentional, but it is an intrinsic part of the whole. The books themselves aren't "authoritative": they are meant to be a vehicle for debate, not its subject.
This mindset is, of course, the antithesis of modern Hollywood. To Hollywood, all stories - and to the (steadily increasing) maximum extent permitted by law, all separable literary or visual elements of those stories - are by nature private property, to be exploited and monetised ruthlessly. To Hollywood, someone "giving away" his intellectual property is not a hero or a philosopher, but merely a mug to be exploited.
And that is why no film of these books made by the present-day studio system is ever going to do them justice. Movies are produced by a process based on ideals and morality that by its very nature cannot begin to understand Tolkien. In carrying Tolkien's legacy, D&D was more faithful and more effective than any movies will ever be - because D&D is based on creating new stories, not merely the messy regurgitation of old ones. To be faithful to Tolkien, you would have to donate all your scenery, sets, designs, props, models, scripts, scores and publicity to the public domain, the moment the movies were finished. And, of course, allow anyone else to sample, recut, redub, rebuild, reimage etc. as much as they liked.
Even if Peter Jackson had no problem with that (and to do the man justice, I think he might not), the studios would never allow it. It's anathema to their business model.
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Friday, December 17, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Failures of imagination
I just noticed a poster for the new Robin Hood movie.
No, we're not quite that far behind the times. The poster has been there for, ooh, must be over a month already. But sometimes I'm a slow reader.
From all I've heard, I have no interest in seeing the current movie. I've often complained about the prolonged rape of British culture by America - the process by which our stories are taken without so much as an acknowledgment to a thousand years of tradition (or, in some cases, to real live heroes) - then recast in dysfunctional Hollywood molds to suit some featherbrained modern philosophy and sold back to us - and it's going to take a more appealing offering than this to sell me on such a product again. I think one per year is a reasonable limit.
But what struck me today was the tagline: "The untold story behind the legend".
Of course, every generation retells myths in its own image. That's what myths are for. What I'm wondering now is, what does it say about our generation that this version is being marketed as some kind of "true story"? (The same thing happened to King Arthur in 2004.)
Throughout the history of cinema, Robin Hood has been a fruitful vehicle for stories. You can watch virtually any version and deduce what decade it was made in by the political values it espouses. Our hero has been cast as a Saxon liberation fighter (in the 1930s), a selfless patriot (in the 1950s), an economic pragmatist (1990s), and today, from what I read, he's become a rationalist republican, chafing against taxation in general. Maid Marian's role has been steadily upgraded over the decades, from passive damsel in varying degrees of distress, to (in some cases) full-fledged bandit leader and the real brains behind the whole operation. In the 1990s it became de rigueur to include a token "Saracen" in the Merry Men. I gather the latest version was initially supposed to cast the Sheriff of Nottingham as the hero, and Robin as a sort of proto-terrorist; but then Obama's election showed a public falling out-of-love with the police state, and the Rebel-figure suddenly became glamourous again. (A shame - I might well have gone to see Nottingham.)
At the same time, films have striven for "authenticity" in sets and costumes - from Errol Flynn's tights, via Sean Connery's chainmail, to Patrick Bergin's mud. This is a fashion thing - Hollywood has long taught us to despise "stagey" settings, costumes and acting. But there's a big difference between "authenticity" and "truth". Showing something that approximates, in at least some dimensions, to the reality of medieval life, is not the same as pretending that the story you're telling is a bona-fide recreation of actual events.
Maybe it's the CSI syndrome applied to folklore: we've grown accustomed to see people using magical computers to recreate past events based on the thinnest of evidence, so why shouldn't we demand the same of historians? - that they should "know" things that no-one will ever know, short of the invention of time travel. Maybe it's the way Hollywood has infantilised its audience, to the point where we can no longer accept historical tales for what they are - an imaginative retelling of an old story.
Or maybe it's just a marketing department with a total failure of imagination, trying to make a completely redundant film seem, for a few weeks at least, like a significant contribution to our culture.
No, we're not quite that far behind the times. The poster has been there for, ooh, must be over a month already. But sometimes I'm a slow reader.
From all I've heard, I have no interest in seeing the current movie. I've often complained about the prolonged rape of British culture by America - the process by which our stories are taken without so much as an acknowledgment to a thousand years of tradition (or, in some cases, to real live heroes) - then recast in dysfunctional Hollywood molds to suit some featherbrained modern philosophy and sold back to us - and it's going to take a more appealing offering than this to sell me on such a product again. I think one per year is a reasonable limit.
But what struck me today was the tagline: "The untold story behind the legend".
Of course, every generation retells myths in its own image. That's what myths are for. What I'm wondering now is, what does it say about our generation that this version is being marketed as some kind of "true story"? (The same thing happened to King Arthur in 2004.)
Throughout the history of cinema, Robin Hood has been a fruitful vehicle for stories. You can watch virtually any version and deduce what decade it was made in by the political values it espouses. Our hero has been cast as a Saxon liberation fighter (in the 1930s), a selfless patriot (in the 1950s), an economic pragmatist (1990s), and today, from what I read, he's become a rationalist republican, chafing against taxation in general. Maid Marian's role has been steadily upgraded over the decades, from passive damsel in varying degrees of distress, to (in some cases) full-fledged bandit leader and the real brains behind the whole operation. In the 1990s it became de rigueur to include a token "Saracen" in the Merry Men. I gather the latest version was initially supposed to cast the Sheriff of Nottingham as the hero, and Robin as a sort of proto-terrorist; but then Obama's election showed a public falling out-of-love with the police state, and the Rebel-figure suddenly became glamourous again. (A shame - I might well have gone to see Nottingham.)
At the same time, films have striven for "authenticity" in sets and costumes - from Errol Flynn's tights, via Sean Connery's chainmail, to Patrick Bergin's mud. This is a fashion thing - Hollywood has long taught us to despise "stagey" settings, costumes and acting. But there's a big difference between "authenticity" and "truth". Showing something that approximates, in at least some dimensions, to the reality of medieval life, is not the same as pretending that the story you're telling is a bona-fide recreation of actual events.
Maybe it's the CSI syndrome applied to folklore: we've grown accustomed to see people using magical computers to recreate past events based on the thinnest of evidence, so why shouldn't we demand the same of historians? - that they should "know" things that no-one will ever know, short of the invention of time travel. Maybe it's the way Hollywood has infantilised its audience, to the point where we can no longer accept historical tales for what they are - an imaginative retelling of an old story.
Or maybe it's just a marketing department with a total failure of imagination, trying to make a completely redundant film seem, for a few weeks at least, like a significant contribution to our culture.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Crime against art
I was curious to see "Alice in Wonderland". Tim Burton's works generally have a degree of quality, and Johnny Depp is always watchable. I'd heard that it was a quite different story from the original, featuring a 19-year-old Alice revisiting a land populated by critters from both books; but, I reasoned, how can you go far wrong filming the Mad Hatter's Tea Party?
In a surprising number of different ways, it turns out.
First, you can set the whole thing in a kind of fantasy version of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where everything is broken and dusty and looks vaguely poisonous. You can explain this by introducing a conventional good-versus-evil story in which the Red Queen (modelled superficially on the Queen of Hearts, but really owing more to the Wicked Stepmother) and the White Queen (modelled mostly on Generic Disney Queen Number 3, the Exiled Wise Benefactor, and resembling nothing in either of the books even physically) are duking it out for control of "Underland".
Add in an unexplained and pointless prophecy about Alice slaying the Jabberwocky (the noun is "Jabberwock", by the way, as anyone who's read the freakin' poem could have told you). Scene set for a final battle, because what's a fantasy movie without a climactic battle? Add in romantic tension between Alice and the Mad Hatter. Convert Tweedledum and Tweedledee into an underplayed comic sidekick with almost no audible lines - then they can fight in the final battle with their own unique martial art which involves one riding the other piggyback (whaddya mean, "stupid"? - it worked in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey). Oh, and make sure there's a talking dog, because without a talking dog how would we know it's Disney?
Next, take out all the bits that don't fit into this infantile new narrative. All those Victorian nursery rhymes, they've got to go. All that clever mathematical and satirical stuff, we don't want anything in the script that you need to be over 12 to understand. Take out the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle, the White Knight, the Dodo and the caucus-race, Humpty Dumpty, the Sheep. Take out the Pool of Tears, Giant Alice in the house - in fact, everything relating to Alice's difficulty in controlling her own size is reduced to some feebly predictable dilemmas about her clothing (and despite having reworked the rules of size changing, the writers haven't bothered to make them coherent). Take out the jokes, and don't replace them with anything; after all, there's no point trying to be funny without Jim Carrey, is there?
Finally, turn the caterpillar into some kind of oracle (and, of course, the obligatory "transformation" metaphor), turn the Cheshire Cat into a deus ex machina, forget about the trial and the chess game. Oh, and tell Johnny Depp he's still playing Willy Wonka.
Put it all together, and we have what might well stand as the worst crime against literature ever perpetrated. It's hard to be sure, but it's definitely a contender.
What's even more pointless is the framing narrative, in which Alice runs off and falls down the world's biggest rabbit-hole...
The child Alice is seen talking to her father, Charles. Their surname, bafflingly, is neither Dodgson nor Liddell, but Kingsley (or, IMDB insists, "Kingsleigh"). They live in London, not Oxford, because obviously that's the only place in England that a young American audience might have heard of (and ratings forefend that we should be thought to be trying to Educate...).
Thirteen years later Charles is dead, and Alice is being proposed to by a young aristocrat - which is odd, since it's clear neither one of them can stand the other. She feels the pressure of expectation upon her, everyone from Jemma Powell to Frances de la Tour is confidently willing her to say yes, so what could be more natural than that she runs off after a rabbit in a waistcoat?
Later in the film, she's feeling exactly the same communal pressure of expectation to take up the vorpal sword and slay the monster. That time, to nobody's surprise, she caves in. This is a blessing, because I have to admit the warrior Alice looks very fetching in her silver armour. Sad to say she doesn't wear it long, before being transported "home" to reject her pompous, patient swain in the gratingly anachronistic language of post-feminist empowerment.
Lewis Carroll's Alice, lest we forget, is no diffident, oppressed Victorian flower:
With due thought and consideration, I give this film an F. F for Failure. As a visiting friend put it: "Never in the field of human cinema has so much talent been so squandered by so many for so little."
In a surprising number of different ways, it turns out.
First, you can set the whole thing in a kind of fantasy version of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where everything is broken and dusty and looks vaguely poisonous. You can explain this by introducing a conventional good-versus-evil story in which the Red Queen (modelled superficially on the Queen of Hearts, but really owing more to the Wicked Stepmother) and the White Queen (modelled mostly on Generic Disney Queen Number 3, the Exiled Wise Benefactor, and resembling nothing in either of the books even physically) are duking it out for control of "Underland".
Add in an unexplained and pointless prophecy about Alice slaying the Jabberwocky (the noun is "Jabberwock", by the way, as anyone who's read the freakin' poem could have told you). Scene set for a final battle, because what's a fantasy movie without a climactic battle? Add in romantic tension between Alice and the Mad Hatter. Convert Tweedledum and Tweedledee into an underplayed comic sidekick with almost no audible lines - then they can fight in the final battle with their own unique martial art which involves one riding the other piggyback (whaddya mean, "stupid"? - it worked in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey). Oh, and make sure there's a talking dog, because without a talking dog how would we know it's Disney?
Next, take out all the bits that don't fit into this infantile new narrative. All those Victorian nursery rhymes, they've got to go. All that clever mathematical and satirical stuff, we don't want anything in the script that you need to be over 12 to understand. Take out the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle, the White Knight, the Dodo and the caucus-race, Humpty Dumpty, the Sheep. Take out the Pool of Tears, Giant Alice in the house - in fact, everything relating to Alice's difficulty in controlling her own size is reduced to some feebly predictable dilemmas about her clothing (and despite having reworked the rules of size changing, the writers haven't bothered to make them coherent). Take out the jokes, and don't replace them with anything; after all, there's no point trying to be funny without Jim Carrey, is there?
Finally, turn the caterpillar into some kind of oracle (and, of course, the obligatory "transformation" metaphor), turn the Cheshire Cat into a deus ex machina, forget about the trial and the chess game. Oh, and tell Johnny Depp he's still playing Willy Wonka.
Put it all together, and we have what might well stand as the worst crime against literature ever perpetrated. It's hard to be sure, but it's definitely a contender.
What's even more pointless is the framing narrative, in which Alice runs off and falls down the world's biggest rabbit-hole...
The child Alice is seen talking to her father, Charles. Their surname, bafflingly, is neither Dodgson nor Liddell, but Kingsley (or, IMDB insists, "Kingsleigh"). They live in London, not Oxford, because obviously that's the only place in England that a young American audience might have heard of (and ratings forefend that we should be thought to be trying to Educate...).
Thirteen years later Charles is dead, and Alice is being proposed to by a young aristocrat - which is odd, since it's clear neither one of them can stand the other. She feels the pressure of expectation upon her, everyone from Jemma Powell to Frances de la Tour is confidently willing her to say yes, so what could be more natural than that she runs off after a rabbit in a waistcoat?
Later in the film, she's feeling exactly the same communal pressure of expectation to take up the vorpal sword and slay the monster. That time, to nobody's surprise, she caves in. This is a blessing, because I have to admit the warrior Alice looks very fetching in her silver armour. Sad to say she doesn't wear it long, before being transported "home" to reject her pompous, patient swain in the gratingly anachronistic language of post-feminist empowerment.
Lewis Carroll's Alice, lest we forget, is no diffident, oppressed Victorian flower:
'Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. 'The idea of having the sentence first!'Tim Burton's Alice says none of this. She's an entirely conventional Disney heroine, all trace of individuality or independence wrung out of her not by Victorian social convention, but by the far more deadening hand of a Hollywood focus group.
'Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.
'I won't!' said Alice.
'Off with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
'Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) 'You're nothing but a pack of cards!'
With due thought and consideration, I give this film an F. F for Failure. As a visiting friend put it: "Never in the field of human cinema has so much talent been so squandered by so many for so little."
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Short film review
We went to the movies last night. For myself, I wanted to satisfy my requirements to remain a cultural consumer in good standing; I think Susan was mostly looking forward to the popcorn. And we were pleasantly surprised by the Berkley in Mission Bay: clean, reasonable seats, not too big.
And the popcorn was good. This in itself is unusual, possibly unprecedented in my cinema-going experience in this country.
And we enjoyed Sherlock Holmes. It was interesting to see the world's first superhero getting the Dark Knight treatment. Could have done with fewer explosions and without the prizefighting scene, but you've got to allow these creative types some leeway. My biggest complaint was that the ending made the whole thing look like the pilot to a TV series, or (gods help us) a series of movies.
Note to producers: if you make a TV series, I'll give it a try. But if you make it a movie series, don't count on me to keep buying tickets. That's a lot of money.
And the popcorn was good. This in itself is unusual, possibly unprecedented in my cinema-going experience in this country.
And we enjoyed Sherlock Holmes. It was interesting to see the world's first superhero getting the Dark Knight treatment. Could have done with fewer explosions and without the prizefighting scene, but you've got to allow these creative types some leeway. My biggest complaint was that the ending made the whole thing look like the pilot to a TV series, or (gods help us) a series of movies.
Note to producers: if you make a TV series, I'll give it a try. But if you make it a movie series, don't count on me to keep buying tickets. That's a lot of money.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Identity theft
I hear with sorrow that Peter Jackson is remaking The Dam Busters.
Well, actually, I'm quite glad that the project has escaped the venomous grip of Mel "England is Satan" Gibson. In fact, if Jackson wants to win me over, he only needs to make one major change: the title.
The Dam Busters (1955) follows in a long line of classic movies whose memory Hollywood has defacated on by making a modern version with the same title as the original. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951/2008), The Pink Panther (1963/2006), War of the Worlds (1953/2005), The Italian Job (1969/2003), Psycho (1960/1998), The Ladykillers (1955/2004), School for Scoundrels (1960/2006), Bedazzled (1967/2000)... Jackson himself perpetrated the similar desecration of King Kong. All of these are movies that really, seriously didn't need to be remade. In every single case, the popular vote recorded at IMDB supports my own prejudiced judgment - that the older version was better.
(I'm not counting TV movies. All of the above remakes were budgeted for, and received, major theatre releases.)
It's always gone on, of course. I'm not forgetting Ben Hur (1907/1959) and King Kong (1933/1976, before the recent silliness). But it's accelerated sharply, in recent years. There's been a whole bunch of remakes of movies from the 50s and 60s that were not blockbusters, but were generally accepted as classics of their genres.
It's easy to put this down to the risk-averse, creativity-starved nature of modern Hollywood, and I'm sure that does play its part. Similarly, there's a lot of British movies in the list, and obviously Americans are too chauvinist to appreciate them, so they have to be remade with American casts and settings. If that were all that was going on here, I'd just sneer quietly and keep my opinions to those who ask for them.
But it's not. There's something bigger, something far more sinister at work. A kind of naked greed that does not hesitate to rob our culture to enrich itself.
See: when someone takes the title of a movie, and then pours a lot of money into promoting it, they attract name recognition to their new version. Result: the old version gets hidden. Walk into any video store today and ask for The Italian Job, and what you'll be offered first is that pointless drivel with Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron. You'll have to ask again, and quite possibly root around the remainder bins, to find the Michael Caine/Noel Coward classic. (It's well worth it, if you haven't seen it.)
And I think the reason for this identity theft lies in one of my most harped-on words: copyright.
Movies aren't like books, or songs, or poems, or even pictures. Copyright on movies doesn't date from the death of the author: it dates from when the movie was first shown to the public.
Hollywood's first attempt to extend this duration was "remastering". By touching up old films, it claimed, the clock gets restarted for the "new version". But that interpretation wasn't universally smiled upon by the courts. So instead they set about rewriting the law, so that now copyright on movies in the USA lasts an eye-watering 95 years from first publication. However, in backwards countries such as New Zealand, the studio has a paltry 50 years from the date of first showing to recover its investment on a movie, before it becomes free for anyone.
(Barbaric. How can anyone be expected to make a return in just 50 years?)
That means those older movies belong to all of us, and no-one can stop anyone else from doing as they please with them. That's a lot of fine movies. What Hollywood is working on, now, is a systematic effort to erase those older movies from our collective consciousness.
You can help. Whenever you hear of a movie that's been remade, nip down to your video store and ask for the old version. Borrow it from your library. Buy it, if you like it, and lend it to your friends and force it on your family. Make sure the stores keep those movies on their shelves.
Well, actually, I'm quite glad that the project has escaped the venomous grip of Mel "England is Satan" Gibson. In fact, if Jackson wants to win me over, he only needs to make one major change: the title.
The Dam Busters (1955) follows in a long line of classic movies whose memory Hollywood has defacated on by making a modern version with the same title as the original. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951/2008), The Pink Panther (1963/2006), War of the Worlds (1953/2005), The Italian Job (1969/2003), Psycho (1960/1998), The Ladykillers (1955/2004), School for Scoundrels (1960/2006), Bedazzled (1967/2000)... Jackson himself perpetrated the similar desecration of King Kong. All of these are movies that really, seriously didn't need to be remade. In every single case, the popular vote recorded at IMDB supports my own prejudiced judgment - that the older version was better.
(I'm not counting TV movies. All of the above remakes were budgeted for, and received, major theatre releases.)
It's always gone on, of course. I'm not forgetting Ben Hur (1907/1959) and King Kong (1933/1976, before the recent silliness). But it's accelerated sharply, in recent years. There's been a whole bunch of remakes of movies from the 50s and 60s that were not blockbusters, but were generally accepted as classics of their genres.
It's easy to put this down to the risk-averse, creativity-starved nature of modern Hollywood, and I'm sure that does play its part. Similarly, there's a lot of British movies in the list, and obviously Americans are too chauvinist to appreciate them, so they have to be remade with American casts and settings. If that were all that was going on here, I'd just sneer quietly and keep my opinions to those who ask for them.
But it's not. There's something bigger, something far more sinister at work. A kind of naked greed that does not hesitate to rob our culture to enrich itself.
See: when someone takes the title of a movie, and then pours a lot of money into promoting it, they attract name recognition to their new version. Result: the old version gets hidden. Walk into any video store today and ask for The Italian Job, and what you'll be offered first is that pointless drivel with Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron. You'll have to ask again, and quite possibly root around the remainder bins, to find the Michael Caine/Noel Coward classic. (It's well worth it, if you haven't seen it.)
And I think the reason for this identity theft lies in one of my most harped-on words: copyright.
Movies aren't like books, or songs, or poems, or even pictures. Copyright on movies doesn't date from the death of the author: it dates from when the movie was first shown to the public.
Hollywood's first attempt to extend this duration was "remastering". By touching up old films, it claimed, the clock gets restarted for the "new version". But that interpretation wasn't universally smiled upon by the courts. So instead they set about rewriting the law, so that now copyright on movies in the USA lasts an eye-watering 95 years from first publication. However, in backwards countries such as New Zealand, the studio has a paltry 50 years from the date of first showing to recover its investment on a movie, before it becomes free for anyone.
(Barbaric. How can anyone be expected to make a return in just 50 years?)
That means those older movies belong to all of us, and no-one can stop anyone else from doing as they please with them. That's a lot of fine movies. What Hollywood is working on, now, is a systematic effort to erase those older movies from our collective consciousness.
You can help. Whenever you hear of a movie that's been remade, nip down to your video store and ask for the old version. Borrow it from your library. Buy it, if you like it, and lend it to your friends and force it on your family. Make sure the stores keep those movies on their shelves.
Monday, May 11, 2009
When pirates were cool
I'm a shade too young to remember Radio Caroline. But I remember the memory of it. When I was at school, Caroline was a legend - gone but far from forgotten, its personalities, practices and morals co-opted by the Establishment, in the person of the BBC.
But there was a time, in Britain, when rock-'n'-roll really was considered dangerous and subversive. That time was, approximately, 1964 to 1967 - a period often seen as a golden age of rock, with the UK firmly in the lead. But no-one would legally broadcast the music in its home country. Back then, if you wanted to listen to rock music on the radio, your only option was to tune in to a ship anchored in international waters off the coast of Norfolk.
(Which is an interesting thought, when people try to argue that revenues and/or exposure from broadcasting are important to stimulate creativity. But I digress.)
The legend of pirate radio is probably unknown to most Britons under the age of, ooh, about 35, or to most foreigners of any age. And so I was delighted to see it being given new life, perpetuated for another generation, by Richard Curtis's The Boat That Rocked.
Curtis has attracted a lot of flak in the British press for reducing his subject - which, some seem to feel, deserves an epic historical rewrite worthy of Oliver Stone - to a merely average British sex-comedy, closer in its feel to Carry On Caroline than Good Morning, UK.
But for me, it works. Pirate radio was indeed a glorious, romantic rebellion against the mores of its time - but it was always and essentially trivial, and it does no service to the spirit and memory of Caroline to take it too seriously. What we are left with is a celebration of rebellion, anarchy, the sexual revolution and the healing power of tea and biscuits. Plus an astonishing soundtrack that reminds one just what was so special about the 60s.
Despite its historical roots, the film and its characters are firmly fictional. Which is a wise decision. Relieved of the need to do justice to real people or events, the cast is freed to unleash its own creativity. There are fine performances from Kenneth Branagh, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Chris O'Dowd and (particularly) Bill Nighy, who seems to be channeling the unnatural lovechild of Peter Sellers and Peter Stringfellow.
Sadly, the film's ending lets it down badly. First, Curtis tries to invoke the Dunkirk story, to show The People standing firmly behind the pirates. It's a cheap twist, co-opting mainstream history - or at least mythology - into his rebels' story; and it seems to legitimise the wholesale identity theft that happened next. (Because if Caroline's heroes were the legitimate heirs of Dunkirk, it follows that they were also legitimate, if rebellious, children of the BBC.) Then he gives us a triumphal postscript, which notes that since 1967, pop music broadcasting and private broadcasting have both flourished across the UK.
And with that postscript, he endangers the entire story - utterly missing the point that those things are only thriving now because they're not only permitted, but actively nurtured by the same establishment that once tried to repress them.
Indeed, their grip on power today is far firmer than it was in 1967. With the growth of digital broadcasting, it's now physically impossible for a successor to Caroline to attract more than the barest handful of listeners. Most people simply wouldn't know how to receive their signals any more. Unlicensed broadcasting is dead.
Long live the unlicensed Internet.
But there was a time, in Britain, when rock-'n'-roll really was considered dangerous and subversive. That time was, approximately, 1964 to 1967 - a period often seen as a golden age of rock, with the UK firmly in the lead. But no-one would legally broadcast the music in its home country. Back then, if you wanted to listen to rock music on the radio, your only option was to tune in to a ship anchored in international waters off the coast of Norfolk.
(Which is an interesting thought, when people try to argue that revenues and/or exposure from broadcasting are important to stimulate creativity. But I digress.)
The legend of pirate radio is probably unknown to most Britons under the age of, ooh, about 35, or to most foreigners of any age. And so I was delighted to see it being given new life, perpetuated for another generation, by Richard Curtis's The Boat That Rocked.
Curtis has attracted a lot of flak in the British press for reducing his subject - which, some seem to feel, deserves an epic historical rewrite worthy of Oliver Stone - to a merely average British sex-comedy, closer in its feel to Carry On Caroline than Good Morning, UK.
But for me, it works. Pirate radio was indeed a glorious, romantic rebellion against the mores of its time - but it was always and essentially trivial, and it does no service to the spirit and memory of Caroline to take it too seriously. What we are left with is a celebration of rebellion, anarchy, the sexual revolution and the healing power of tea and biscuits. Plus an astonishing soundtrack that reminds one just what was so special about the 60s.
Despite its historical roots, the film and its characters are firmly fictional. Which is a wise decision. Relieved of the need to do justice to real people or events, the cast is freed to unleash its own creativity. There are fine performances from Kenneth Branagh, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Chris O'Dowd and (particularly) Bill Nighy, who seems to be channeling the unnatural lovechild of Peter Sellers and Peter Stringfellow.
Sadly, the film's ending lets it down badly. First, Curtis tries to invoke the Dunkirk story, to show The People standing firmly behind the pirates. It's a cheap twist, co-opting mainstream history - or at least mythology - into his rebels' story; and it seems to legitimise the wholesale identity theft that happened next. (Because if Caroline's heroes were the legitimate heirs of Dunkirk, it follows that they were also legitimate, if rebellious, children of the BBC.) Then he gives us a triumphal postscript, which notes that since 1967, pop music broadcasting and private broadcasting have both flourished across the UK.
And with that postscript, he endangers the entire story - utterly missing the point that those things are only thriving now because they're not only permitted, but actively nurtured by the same establishment that once tried to repress them.
Indeed, their grip on power today is far firmer than it was in 1967. With the growth of digital broadcasting, it's now physically impossible for a successor to Caroline to attract more than the barest handful of listeners. Most people simply wouldn't know how to receive their signals any more. Unlicensed broadcasting is dead.
Long live the unlicensed Internet.
Monday, March 9, 2009
The blind Watchmen-maker
(Spoiler-free review.)
Alan Moore famously considers his creations - all of them - unfilmable. Having watched the latest, much-touted effort, I think I see what he means.
It's easy to see why Hollywood loves to adapt comic books. After all, the original artist has already done not only the scriptwriting but also the visualisation, much of the hard work of costume and lighting design, and quite a lot of the photographic direction. You might think this would make the two media a good match.
But somehow it never quite comes together. Comic-book movie adaptations have run the gamut from acknowledged disasters (The Hulk, Catwoman, Daredevil, Batman & Robin) to merely lacklustre movies. I really wanted to like such massively hyped efforts as The Dark Knight, Spiderman, V for Vendetta - but I really didn't. And after watching Watchmen, I think I know why.
The story of Watchmen - the book - unfolds like a magnificent origami decoration. It's told in an intricate non-linear structure to which the medium is beautifully adapted - cutting and chopping between storylines is not merely smooth, it's practically inevitable. At the end of each chapter there are several pages of dense text to read, creating background and atmosphere for the main story. There's a whole story within a story - one (very) minor character spends his time reading comic books at a newsstand, and we also get to enjoy the adventure story he's reading as a bonus. And Moore skilfully weaves all these strands - even the comic-book story, which is a rattling good yarn with pirates and sharks, death and undeath and insanity - into the baroque tapestry that is the Watchmen Experience.
The movie takes some of these same threads, and tries to string them together into an epic of naïve idealism versus entrenched, institutional corruption. Somehow, the multi-dimensional tale of the book has been reduced to a cliché. The budget may be bigger than Mr Smith Goes to Washington, but the story really isn't, not any more.
In the reducing process, it's succeeded in making the story dull. There's simply not enough left to fill 163 minutes. Jimmy Stewart took just over two hours, and frankly even he drags sometimes.
Here, the action scenes and the sex scenes take on far inflated importance. Take, for instance, the episode where two of our heroes (in plain clothes) get ambushed by muggers. In the book, the fight scene fills a total of five frames, interspersed with wordy frames of Dr Manhattan's fateful TV appearance. In the movie, we're treated to what feels like a full minute of choreographed, gratuitously brutal violence. Evidently the producers felt the story was dragging at this point.
And they were right. Their error was in thinking that the fight would improve matters.
In a vain attempt to soften Alan Moore's righteous wrath, the producers have tried to follow the source material slavishly (with a few notable exceptions). The thing is: what works on the page, doesn't work on film.
Back to the abovementioned fight scene, for instance. On paper, the fraction of a second it takes to glance at the fight before getting back to the interview contrasts with the time it takes to read the speech frames. The effect is that you're reading the speech while looking at the fight. But rather than running the speech over the silent film of the fight, here the director - with a devastating failure of imagination - literally cuts between scenes.
Laborious. Tedious. Dull.
Many of the more memorable lines are lifted directly from the book. That's fine, except that half the time the actors don't seem to understand their own lines. In a comic book, the words and the artwork are used to create the character. Onscreen it's the actor who creates the character, and sometimes the words no longer fit.
I call this "Christina Ricci syndrome", after her memorably detached performance in Sleepy Hollow. The characters of Dan Dreiberg and Adrian Veidt, in particular, suffer from it: two major figures who simply don't seem to be in the same movie as everyone else.
(And what is it with Dreiberg's glasses? An eight-digit f/x budget, and they still can't make it look like the lenses actually refract light?)
Where the script does depart from the book, it makes matters worse. Now that the Cold War is a fading memory, the film feels it has to go to great lengths to Recreate the Era of Nuclear Paranoia. In doing so, it is both gratuitous - every channel and every paper is filled with end-is-nigh doom-mongering - and intellectually dishonest (fielding Richard Nixon, as a president who has somehow weathered not merely Watergate but also the 22nd amendment - as all-round scapegoat and shorthand for unchecked corruption). Thus this part of the story is reduced from an imaginative fable to a political cheap shot - and a very dated one at that.
Another failure: in the book, Laurie (Silk Spectre II) smokes. (That's why she accidentally fires off Arcimedes' flamethrower - she mistakes it for a cigarette lighter.) In the movie, she doesn't smoke, and just presses the button for the hell of it. It wouldn't be a big deal, except that the movie makes it so by sticking so closely to the appearance, costume and words of the characters in every other respect. Now, of course, it's practically illegal for a sympathetic character in a movie to smoke; but this was the 80s, and that's the era the film is supposed to be capturing.
I wish Zack Snyder, who pleased a lot of people with 300, had shown just a little more courage and cut out some of the back story. Who cares about the involved history of the Minutemen, the Comedian, Silk Spectre, and all the heroes who died long before the story begins? Let it go. If you can cut out the undead pirates, you can cut that too. In the book it adds depth and weight. Onscreen it's just confusing and distracting.
Lots of people, mostly I'm guessing those who don't even remember the 1980s, seem to like this movie. That probably means Snyder will get to make more. God help us.
Alan Moore famously considers his creations - all of them - unfilmable. Having watched the latest, much-touted effort, I think I see what he means.
It's easy to see why Hollywood loves to adapt comic books. After all, the original artist has already done not only the scriptwriting but also the visualisation, much of the hard work of costume and lighting design, and quite a lot of the photographic direction. You might think this would make the two media a good match.
But somehow it never quite comes together. Comic-book movie adaptations have run the gamut from acknowledged disasters (The Hulk, Catwoman, Daredevil, Batman & Robin) to merely lacklustre movies. I really wanted to like such massively hyped efforts as The Dark Knight, Spiderman, V for Vendetta - but I really didn't. And after watching Watchmen, I think I know why.
The story of Watchmen - the book - unfolds like a magnificent origami decoration. It's told in an intricate non-linear structure to which the medium is beautifully adapted - cutting and chopping between storylines is not merely smooth, it's practically inevitable. At the end of each chapter there are several pages of dense text to read, creating background and atmosphere for the main story. There's a whole story within a story - one (very) minor character spends his time reading comic books at a newsstand, and we also get to enjoy the adventure story he's reading as a bonus. And Moore skilfully weaves all these strands - even the comic-book story, which is a rattling good yarn with pirates and sharks, death and undeath and insanity - into the baroque tapestry that is the Watchmen Experience.
The movie takes some of these same threads, and tries to string them together into an epic of naïve idealism versus entrenched, institutional corruption. Somehow, the multi-dimensional tale of the book has been reduced to a cliché. The budget may be bigger than Mr Smith Goes to Washington, but the story really isn't, not any more.
In the reducing process, it's succeeded in making the story dull. There's simply not enough left to fill 163 minutes. Jimmy Stewart took just over two hours, and frankly even he drags sometimes.
Here, the action scenes and the sex scenes take on far inflated importance. Take, for instance, the episode where two of our heroes (in plain clothes) get ambushed by muggers. In the book, the fight scene fills a total of five frames, interspersed with wordy frames of Dr Manhattan's fateful TV appearance. In the movie, we're treated to what feels like a full minute of choreographed, gratuitously brutal violence. Evidently the producers felt the story was dragging at this point.
And they were right. Their error was in thinking that the fight would improve matters.
In a vain attempt to soften Alan Moore's righteous wrath, the producers have tried to follow the source material slavishly (with a few notable exceptions). The thing is: what works on the page, doesn't work on film.
Back to the abovementioned fight scene, for instance. On paper, the fraction of a second it takes to glance at the fight before getting back to the interview contrasts with the time it takes to read the speech frames. The effect is that you're reading the speech while looking at the fight. But rather than running the speech over the silent film of the fight, here the director - with a devastating failure of imagination - literally cuts between scenes.
Laborious. Tedious. Dull.
Many of the more memorable lines are lifted directly from the book. That's fine, except that half the time the actors don't seem to understand their own lines. In a comic book, the words and the artwork are used to create the character. Onscreen it's the actor who creates the character, and sometimes the words no longer fit.
I call this "Christina Ricci syndrome", after her memorably detached performance in Sleepy Hollow. The characters of Dan Dreiberg and Adrian Veidt, in particular, suffer from it: two major figures who simply don't seem to be in the same movie as everyone else.
(And what is it with Dreiberg's glasses? An eight-digit f/x budget, and they still can't make it look like the lenses actually refract light?)
Where the script does depart from the book, it makes matters worse. Now that the Cold War is a fading memory, the film feels it has to go to great lengths to Recreate the Era of Nuclear Paranoia. In doing so, it is both gratuitous - every channel and every paper is filled with end-is-nigh doom-mongering - and intellectually dishonest (fielding Richard Nixon, as a president who has somehow weathered not merely Watergate but also the 22nd amendment - as all-round scapegoat and shorthand for unchecked corruption). Thus this part of the story is reduced from an imaginative fable to a political cheap shot - and a very dated one at that.
Another failure: in the book, Laurie (Silk Spectre II) smokes. (That's why she accidentally fires off Arcimedes' flamethrower - she mistakes it for a cigarette lighter.) In the movie, she doesn't smoke, and just presses the button for the hell of it. It wouldn't be a big deal, except that the movie makes it so by sticking so closely to the appearance, costume and words of the characters in every other respect. Now, of course, it's practically illegal for a sympathetic character in a movie to smoke; but this was the 80s, and that's the era the film is supposed to be capturing.
I wish Zack Snyder, who pleased a lot of people with 300, had shown just a little more courage and cut out some of the back story. Who cares about the involved history of the Minutemen, the Comedian, Silk Spectre, and all the heroes who died long before the story begins? Let it go. If you can cut out the undead pirates, you can cut that too. In the book it adds depth and weight. Onscreen it's just confusing and distracting.
Lots of people, mostly I'm guessing those who don't even remember the 1980s, seem to like this movie. That probably means Snyder will get to make more. God help us.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Tips to Kiwi cinema-owners
- Popcorn tastes better when it's less than a day old.
- Selling tickets is not the same as popcorn and ice-creams. When I'm trying to buy a ticket to a movie that starts in four minutes, I don't want to be in a queue behind six teenagers arguing about which Meal Deal they want.
- It is possible to focus the projector. Try doing it at least once a day. Oh, and much as I applaud your equal-opportunities policy, I suggest this particular job be given to someone who isn't blind.
- Don't make stupid rules about what I can take into the theatre. If you make me go home to leave my stuff there, I'm not coming back.
- A hot dog is a sausage in a bun. It doesn't have to taste good - that's what mustard is for - but it's appropriate to the movie-going experience, and that's what counts. What that porcine abomination on a stick might be I don't know, but keep it away from me.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Rags to rags
So all the buzz now is about Slumdog Millionaire. I haven't seen it yet, and I'm not entirely sure I want to.
It's always nice to see a non-Hollywood movie getting this kind of hype. It'd be even nicer if the movie itself were a bit less Hollywood in plot. Unregarded lowly schmoe comes into incredible good fortune? Pur-leeze. It's a story that was old when Charles Dickens was cranking it out.
Another way of putting it would be to say that it's an updated version of a timeless classic story. As, let's face it, what isn't? We've all heard the argument that there are only N basic plotlines, where N is anything from three to sixty-something. But the lowly-guy-makes-good story is ancient by anyone's standards. It's embedded very deeply in our culture.
And, I've decided I don't like it there.
Rags-to-riches stories make us feel good. They're inspiring. But they're also oppressive: they preach the value that it's okay for billions of people to live in abject misery, because a vanishingly tiny fraction of them will escape it... and if they can do it, anyone can do it.
And to a point, that's true. Anyone can do it, with sufficient luck. But not everyone can get that lucky. There just aren't enough winning lottery tickets to go round. And for every slumdog millionaire who gets to have a movie made of their life, there are tens of thousands who live and die in the same misery they were born in.
I think that's why I like Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure is a tale of wasted potential; our hero constantly tries and fails to better himself, living out a life of high drama and deep tragedy without ever making a ripple in the world. That's a hero I can relate to.
But this "rags to riches" myth is endorsing poverty. And it's so unnecessary.
It's always nice to see a non-Hollywood movie getting this kind of hype. It'd be even nicer if the movie itself were a bit less Hollywood in plot. Unregarded lowly schmoe comes into incredible good fortune? Pur-leeze. It's a story that was old when Charles Dickens was cranking it out.
Another way of putting it would be to say that it's an updated version of a timeless classic story. As, let's face it, what isn't? We've all heard the argument that there are only N basic plotlines, where N is anything from three to sixty-something. But the lowly-guy-makes-good story is ancient by anyone's standards. It's embedded very deeply in our culture.
And, I've decided I don't like it there.
Rags-to-riches stories make us feel good. They're inspiring. But they're also oppressive: they preach the value that it's okay for billions of people to live in abject misery, because a vanishingly tiny fraction of them will escape it... and if they can do it, anyone can do it.
And to a point, that's true. Anyone can do it, with sufficient luck. But not everyone can get that lucky. There just aren't enough winning lottery tickets to go round. And for every slumdog millionaire who gets to have a movie made of their life, there are tens of thousands who live and die in the same misery they were born in.
"Stories are not, on the whole, interested in swineherds who remain swineherds, and poor and humble shoemakers whose destiny is to die slightly poorer and much humbler." -- Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad.
I think that's why I like Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure is a tale of wasted potential; our hero constantly tries and fails to better himself, living out a life of high drama and deep tragedy without ever making a ripple in the world. That's a hero I can relate to.
But this "rags to riches" myth is endorsing poverty. And it's so unnecessary.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)