Friday

In yesterday's theguardian there was a short article on Wes Anderson. It confirmed many of the things I thought about the director, but never really voiced. He is great, but has yet to make a great film. So far they have been 'whimsical', as the journalist put it, and out of touch with reality. The movies were entertaining, undoubtedly, but still somehow felt like a waste of a great talent. Apparently his new film, The Darjeeling Limited, fails to make any improvement on this situation. The journalist, however, doesn't mention The Life Aquatic, which I enjoyed. This film makes an attempt toward seriousness, but I believe again still fails. Putting serious events, such as death, into your movie doesn't make your movie serious. It is all about how you treat such events and into what context you put them. Earlier this year, though, Anderson made a short film with Natalie Portman and Jason Schwarzman called Hotel Chevalier. I haven't seen it, but apparently this was very good, and crossed over into seriousness succesfully. I'll try to track it down. But for now I'll go see The Darjeeling Limited, and continue to have faith in him.

Thursday

Michael Clayton has been out for a while. You may struggle to find it in cinemas. Its release was not overblown. There were a few trailers on TV, and some posters on bus stops. The reviews from critics, however, have been overwhelmingly positive. This is because the film is brilliant. I had doubted seeing it. For some reason the trailer contains the worst line in the whole film: 'you think you've got them all fooled, don't you?'. Everywhere else the dialogue is excellent. The acting is superb and the direction subtle and intense. The beginning was perhaps unnecessarily complicated, but it does make the ending much more exciting. And the conclusion is one of the most satisfying I've seen. This is a movie made for people who love movies. It allows the audience space and time to figure out what is going on, never dictating to them. I'm not sure about the title. This film isn't a biography, or particularly about Michael Clayton. It's about a situation, or a type of people. I don't want to say too much about it. I loved it, and I think you will too.

Wednesday

Last night I saw a very odd film. Starring Samuel L. Jackson and Milla Jovovich, you might think you'd (or I'd) have heard of it before. It's called No Good Deed and came out in 2002. Apparently its alternative title is The House on Turk Street, which is the name of the short story the film is based on. Looking its author up, you find that he also wrote The Maltese Falcon and other film noir type novels. This helps explain a bit of this film's bizarreness, since it is a film noir movie set in the present day. I believe its main faults are that it's terribly miscast and directed, but there is also a problem with the story. Perhaps this could be rescued by new cast and direction, but I suspect there's a reason a good writer's short story was never made into a film before - because it's not that good. There is very little tension or chemistry here. I didn't engage with anything that was going on. They tried to update some aspects of the story, but left others lingering in the 1940s, which just made it odd. It felt empty and hollow - the house they chose to shoot in, the locations and the camera-work. It looked like a TV movie, and I wouldn't be surprised if this didn't go straight to video (if it even made it to cinemas). The change of title was obviously for the worse, but the ending of the movie shows that there was some glimmer of a good idea in here somewhere.

Tuesday

When I was a young teenager, the movie everyone wanted to see was Navy Seals. For some reason I was never able to see it, and thus felt a large part of my life was missing. I saw the movie for the first time on Monday night. As you can imagine, I was deeply disappointed. I had other thoughts on my mind, and several times drifted away from watching to doing other things. But, still, a good movie should hold your attention. It seems entirely pointless. I can guess why people liked it, but I had hoped there was something more substantial to this movie than it being a cheap Top Gun copy. Charlie Sheen is amusing, perhaps because I now always imagine him as the character he is in Two And A Half Men. In general this film is going to be forgotten very quickly, if it hasn't been already. In other news, I think I discovered why I've been struggling to keep up with my posts here. Alex's gamboling blog has almost entirely ceased to function recently. When he was posting frequently, it in a way kept me going too. But now that he's stopped it feels like something's missing.

Monday

I've decided it would greatly benefit both me and you if I didn't try to catch up a week's posts in one day. Instead, we'll just forget about the missing entries in Stranded Cinema, and start afresh this week. Last night I watched the majority of Mickey Blue Eyes. I've seen scraps of it before - I don't know if I've ever seen the end (although I can guess what happens). It stars Hugh Grant as an auctioneer in love with a girl, Jeanne Tripplehorn, whose father, James Caan, is deeply involved with the Mafia. This, in its purest terms, is a situation comedy. And I think it's reasonably funny. The stereotype of the Mafia is perhaps over-used (and more originally inverted in Analyse This, which came out in the same year), but strangely not much fun is made of Grant's Englishness. Perhaps my liking for this film is influenced by the attractive Ms Tripplehorn, but I think it does achieve everything it sets out to achieve. It's funny, heart-warming, and all those other adjectives you associate with this kind of movie. Probably a very good Christmas movie, although, as I said, I'm still not sure I've seen the end. If they all die in a drive-by shooting, my verdict of this film may be different.

Tuesday

I remember being quite bored the first time I watched Mission: Impossible 2. Since then, however, people have told me they quite liked it, so I decided to give it another chance. It starts with a plane crash and hundreds of innocent people dying. As I've mentioned several times before, this isn't a good way to get the sympathy of your audience. Deaths are ok, as long as they are compensated for adequately, and as long as you don't really care about the people dying. Anyway, aside from this, I have to say the plot was awful and the dialogue not much better. The slow motion sequences were unnecessary - like his star Chow Yun-Fat, John Woo doesn't translate very well. His stylistics seem tacky and overly-sentimental. There were some good set-pieces (jumping out the building and the face switch) but overall I think this film fails. An evil enemy compound surrounded by men in black with automatic weapons is laughable now. We've moved on from this type of action film. As the director of the last James Bond said: as soon as you hear the theme music you feel comfortable. Modern action movies don't let us feel comfortable. The tone of this film just doesn't work, especially considering the woman was essentially prostituting herself for the benefit of Tom Cruise's character. Bizarre.

Monday

Watching Sean William Scott in Bulletproof Monk reminded me that he is one of quite a few young, promising actors who has not done many, or any, good films yet. I liked him in Evolution, but then I like almost everything about that movie. Mentioning Alfie earlier, also made me think that, really, Jude Law has yet to do something really spectacular. He can be quite annoying, but he does have potential. Josh Hartnett and Ryan Reynolds too (although The Nines may exclude him from this list) need to start getting in some good roles. And then I think of Ewan McGregor who seems to have just wasted his opportunities after Trainspotting. Perhaps I'm too harsh. Perhaps no good films are being made anymore? Or if they are, they're out of the Hollywood system where these actors are scared to go. Choosing what films to make must be incredibly hard for actors. They're not writers or directors - they don't really know what's going to be good, and how it will be produced. I suppose we have to admit the best actors do know, and do choose intelligently, but they are very rare indeed. A more succesful approach is to become attached to a great director, like Leonadro DiCaprio with Martin Scorcese, or Owen Wilson with Wes Anderson. The problem then, of course, is knowing which directors are actually good, and then getting them to like you.

Sunday

For some reason I wanted to see Bulletproof Monk when it came out. Perhaps it was merely the combination of Chow Yun-Fat and Sean William Scott, produced by John Woo, that seduced me. Whatever the reason, I only actually got round to seeing it last night. It's pretty bad. There were a lot of special effects - someone spent money on this movie - and sometimes they look good, but sometimes they also look very cheap. All the blue screen action looks terrible. The fight scenes just weren't quite good enough and felt awkward, especially when compared to The Matrix (which this obviously emulates). Chow Yun-Fat is a great comedy actor, but it's unfortunate he can't quite deliver the lines in English. The plot itself is absurd, more like a TV movie, or an episode of MacGyver. There is a scroll that can give whoever reads it all the power in the world. One chosen monk has to guard it, he will not age while it's near him, and he has currently been pursued by a Nazi for sixty years who has set-up an evil empire in its pursuit fronted by the Human Rights Organisation. See what I mean? The acting of everyone but the main characters is awful, and I'm sure some of the voices are dubbed. I suppose this could have been an interesting buddy-cop type film, but it fails dramatically.

Saturday

It may seem like I'm slowly falling behind again this week, and that is entirely true, but hopefully I'll catch up soon. Meanwhile, I thought I'd entertain you with another of my completely useless reviews. This time it's the Jude Law version of Alfie, made in 2004. I only saw parts of it, my concentration kept drifting, and I've never seen the original starring Michael Caine. All I can say is that it seemed to be pretending to be cooler than it actually was. It was more like a 90 minute fashion shoot than a movie. Jude Law just wasn't quite engaging enough. The problem was always going to be updating this film to modern times, and I don't think they succeeded. It still felt out of date. Alfie's philandering doesn't entirely seem plausible, and getting our sympathy is difficult. But there is something engaging about the film - what it was will have to wait until I actually watch it properly. I did like, however, the bravery of the director and the actor to leave the camera on Jude Law for a long time at the end. It's not often in a Hollywood movie that someone is just left to act, with no dialogue and no action, to express conflicting emotions, internal conflict and decisions being made.

Friday

I've been hearing about Stardust for a while now. The first I knew was that it was written by Jane Goldman, the wife of Jonathon Ross. For a long time this coloured my opinion of it. A few months ago they started showing trailers in the cinema. It looked fairly bad. Recently, however, I discovered that the story is actually written by Neil Gaiman (and Charles Vess), and merely adapted to the screen by Goldman (and someone else). Entirely influenced as I am by names and reputations, I then began to think more of this film. The premise sounds vaguely entertaining, but of course also very predictable. The problem was, and is, that this seems like a film out of time. Perhaps it would've worked in the 1980s, but we're just not interested in fairy-tales at the moment. Maybe the studio is hoping this movie will revive our interest in fantasy films, but I very much doubt it's going to do so. The title is awful, and the mere fact that it has so many stars in it makes an audience suspicious. Stars should be hard to obtain for a film, and to see so many cheapens them, in a way. So, it is not top of my list of movies to see, but I will attempt to do so, albeit sceptically.

Thursday

In his interesting comment yesterday, Adrian said how he'd seen Clerks 2 on a plane, and he wondered if that made any difference. The answer is a wholehearted 'yes', but how and to what extent is difficult to answer. I've been told that studios edit movies for planes, and they also have to adjust the format, I believe. Some directors resist this kind of thing, but even if the movie was shown exactly as it appeared in cinemas there are of course still differences. The size of the screen, the sound through the headphones, and the commotion around you. In many ways, I suppose, a plane is like a cinema - especially during a long flight when the lights will be dimmed. I first watched Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World on a plane, and I quite enjoyed it. The problem is, I found, that you keep drifting in and out of consciousness, and the film is normally on a loop, so that you'll watch it three or four times but not all together. I'm not sure how much thought studios put into showing their films on planes. Do they expect to make money at all? One thing I know is that, although it will never happen, it would've been great to see Snakes on a Plane in a plane.

Wednesday

After watching Clerks yesterday I decided to visit the IMDb trivia page on the film. I wonder if there is such a thing as knowing too much about a movie? If there is a picture you particularly love, I'd advise against viewing its trivia page. What I found out about Clerks was that it seemed to be entirely an accident. Almost every piece of trivia points out a different direction that should, or could, have happened, but due to chance didn't. For example, Kevin Smith and his friend Scott Mosier made a pact that whoever of them began a film first, the other would produce. It was just luck that Smith started first, and Mosier has produced all his movies since then. All the main characters were initially cast differently. The only reason the shop's shutters are down is because they could only shoot at night. The film was going to end with Dante being shot in an armed robbery of the store. And even the title was going to be different - Inconvenience. It often astonishes me how films are made at all, and how they get to the finished form which we believe they were initially conceived as. It frequently seems these people have no idea what they're doing, but somehow, sometimes, their collective creative efforts and accidents occasionally produce a good movie (although I am being unfair, the basic script for this film is ok). Anyway, only the very greatest directors appear to be able to force through their ideas whole from conception to completion.

Tuesday

Would you be as surprised as I was to learn that Clerks came out in 1994? And was thus made in 1993? Perhaps I was astonished by my own ignorance, because I only became aware of and watched this film probably in 1999-2000, and it felt contemporary then. Anyway, I watched it again last night for perhaps the first time in about five years. Undoubtedly the dialogue and the characterisation is great. The black and white felt claustrophobic and oppressive, though - even if this was the intended effect. The main appeal of the movie, really, is the character Randal - like Han Solo in Star Wars, you're not really interested in Luke, or Dante Hicks here. Randal is a character who doesn't change, although our perceptions of him may change by the end. Since I last saw this movie I've worked as a clerk, and met people who have worked their whole adult lives as clerks, so there was an extra level of enjoyment, and meaning, for me here. Otherwise, the direction is quite amateur, and seemed deliberately to draw attention to this fact, as if for novelty. The sentiments at the end are rather naive and simplistic, but I'd still say this is a good movie, alive with the force of the generation it was produced by and parodies.

Monday

You may have seen a trailer for the movie Black Sheep. You'll know if you have. It's about killer sheep in New Zealand - the kind of thing that sticks in your mind. I'd really like this film to be great. It could be as brilliant as Shaun of the Dead, or some other similar horror-comedy film. The premise is there, and the humour seems extremely black. I also have a feeling, though, that it might be terrible. We'll see. Also coming out soon is the interesting The Invasion, another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's directed by the director of Downfall, and so promises to be a bit better than your average Hollywood remake, but he could easily just have been 'shipped in' and told what to do, literally (as often happens to successful foreign directors). Again, we'll have to wait and see. The story is always a compelling one, and I hope they've treated it well. In this age of 'terrorists amongst us', the plot has a lot to offer and reveal.

Sunday

I have now finally finished the first season of Heroes (I haven't seen many movies at all recently, sorry). I don't know if it's a modern phenomenon or not that shows are aired before they have finished shooting the series, but it seems to be happening more and more frequently. This is especially the case with the long twenty-two or so episodes of American dramas. The advantage for the production company is that they can get an idea of what the audience does or doesn't like about the show. For example, in the series Vanished, the main character is killed off about half-way through the series and replaced with someone else. The show became popular and the company wanted a better actor in the lead role. Pretty astonishing, you have to admit, but little things like this are always happening. I'm sure changes were made to Heroes for the second half of the series after they realised they had a hit on their hands. The overall plot, surely, must change when the writers are told they are going to get another series. This definitely happened with Vanished, Heroes, and Prison Break, and is quite frustrating for the viewer. Things seem to be coming to a nice conclusion, but then something will come out of nowhere in the last episode to keep things propelling onwards.

Saturday

Finally Day Watch, the sequel to Night Watch, is out in cinemas. But the reviews so far have been mediocre, sometimes bad and sometimes ok. This is disappointing. Perhaps I was lulled by the Russian production and the sense of something different, when really these films are quite ordinary. I don't know. They're trying something unashamedly epic and original (although these movies are developed from novels), which is what Hollywood is increasingly not brave enough to do anymore. The style is glamorous, but the content is ugly - again something America is afraid of. Aside from this, there are still far too many other films out that I need to see. The Kingdom, whose premiere I accidentally walked into on Thursday, seems overrated, as does The Brave One. I'm interested in the westerns, but they've almost disappeared already. Several people have told me Run, Fat Boy, Run is good, but I remain unconvinced. I did see a good review for what looks appalling (and you can tell from the title): Hatchet. Maybe...

Friday

Perhaps the question you want to ask me is, is Death Proof a return to the early form of Reservoir Dogs for Tarantino or is it a mainly stylistic exercise like Kill Bill? I have to say the stylistics weren't actually that intrusive - only at the beginning, then the black and white reel halfway through, and the occasional strange cut (made to look like mistakes). Overall, it was much less than I thought it'd be. Perhaps in the shorter Grindhouse version the effect was more intense, and perhaps that would be better? Anyway, as you'd expect, this movie is relentlessly cool. The dialogue is not quite top notch, not polished enough and some conversations go on too long - like it was someone trying to imitate Tarantino, rather than the man himself. Not much really happens in the movie. The image of 70s cars driving in and out of contemporary traffic, listening to 70s music with people having strained artificial conversations, made me think that was perhaps Tarantino himself - out of place and time. But I don't know. Some of the stunts seemed to have been worked backwards: they come up with the idea for it, then created a preposterous plot and characters in order for them to achieve it. Nonetheless, it really picks up towards the end, and the conclusion is great fun. You really leave the cinema thinking: this is a film by one of greatest directors alive, and everyone should see it.

Thursday

You may have heard recently that this summer has been the best summer for movies in 40 years. Sadly, this was not because the films were particularly good, but because the weather has been miserable here (although, as you'd expect, I enjoy seeing films in sunny weather too). We were apparently up by 27% on last year, which is fairly incredible. Some of this also has to do with the amount of franchises we've seen - Bourne, Bond, Shrek, Spider-Man, Pirates. As Alex pointed out, these are 'pre-sold'. You get people in the door for your first week easily, and even if people subsequently hear bad reviews, they'll probably still go to see the movie because they liked the previous ones and they want to know how it all ends. Conversely, however, this summer can only have been bad for the burgeoning business of showing films outside, in parks, on large screens. This sort of viewing was becoming increasingly popular, but now may have taken a battering. What's coming next year? Indiana Jones, Narnia, and The Happening (M. Night Shyamalan's latest) so far...

Wednesday

Yesterday a film crew were set up outside, opposite the entrance to Birkbeck college. It was possibly the largest crew, with the most amount of equipment, I've ever seen. They had a swinging crane, a big white screen, and a large lamp, as well as a lot of other stuff in-between. There were lots of people in orange jackets, but I didn't see any actors - not that I examined anything carefully. Every time I walked past (I use that walkway perhaps six times a day) they tried to usher us in a certain direction. It seemed a futile effort - directing thousands of unpredictable students. I think they wanted some as extras, but not everyone. Anyway, once whilst walking past with a friend, we did hear the director shout 'roll video', and so we may have got ourselves into a movie. You never know.

Tuesday

I don't know about you, but I feel fully refreshed after Alex's postings. Now I'm only two days behind, which is easily recoverable. Sometime in the near future, I may be able to tell you the reason why I let things slip, but not yet... Anyway, as he said, it was a bit strange commenting on my own blog, but it was all good fun. I haven't been to the cinema in the last week, but I have been watching the entire series of Heroes. I think I'm near the finish now. It got a little bit weak somewhere in the middle, but quickly picked up again to become fascinating. Nonetheless, tonight I should be going to see Tarantino's Death Proof. I've had people tell me that it's the last movie they'd want to see at the moment, which is interesting. Like Alex, however, I'm going to see it purely because it says Tarantino on the poster. He himself is a franchise - all the merchandising calls it 'Tarantino's 5th film' (although of course we know it isn't, and it shouldn't count as his film because it's been split from Grindhouse). I hope someday they'll realise their mistake and give us Grindhouse in the cinema. Anyway, you'll have my review tomorrow.

Monday

[The final part of Alex's examination of film adaptations.]

So if you're still reading four days in you'll know that we are in a situation where we as writers know that the medium is inexorably linked to the story and so we shouldn't adapt the work, but on the other hand we know that it's commercially lucrative to do so. How do we reconcile the two?

Well I'll tell you how most people do it, they fudge it. Most adaptations simply go through the book looking for bits where they talk about where people are and put that in square brackets. And then look for the bits where people are speaking and turn that into dialogue. Everything else gets thrown away and that’s how you get your movie running time. These are generally the worst kind of movies that there are. This, for example, is exactly what they did with the The Da Vinci Code.

The best method seems to be to throw away the actual words and just listen to the story. We've recently learned that this is exactly what happened in the first Bourne film. The director wrote a 25 page short story treatment of the book and demanded that the author not look at the whole book, he had to work simply from those pages. It worked very well and it's difficult to imagine Bourne as a novel while you're watching the film - surely the best compliment we can give.

Finally this is the crux of excellent adaptation, there must be a "re-imagining" of the original. It's difficult because fans of the original, the very fans who are pre-sold on this franchise don't like it when you change their source material. This was a key problem for The Lord of the Rings. In the end I felt they were too respectful of the original, but the fans were widespread and militant so they certainly made the correct commercial decision. Usually it's the other way around. It's always safer to abuse the fans, they'll turn up anyway. On the other hand, if you forget to write a good film everyone else will stay away.