Saturday

At last, a proper, contemporary, movie review for you to get your teeth into. Last night I saw Catch a Fire. Not very well publicised, this is a film about apartheid in South Africa, starring Tim Robbins, and directed by Philip Noyce (Dead Calm, Patriot Games, Sliver, Clear and Present Danger, The Saint, The Bone Collector, The Quiet American, and so on). I think this film suffers from being based on a real life - as I've said before about other movies. It is too rambling. It took a long time for me to get motivated and interested in the character. There was no immediate struggle for him to deal with. Sometimes, it seemed, the film-maker was at odds with the facts of the story. He was trying to make the main character a good, honest man, but then had to deal with the fact of him having an affair and a child with another woman. You have to fashion real life to fit the pace of the film, I think. Here it doesn't quite succeed, although there were good moments of deliberate juxtaposition such as the funeral of ANC members cut together with the award ceremony of the soldiers that killed them. Perhaps an even more significant problem was that Noyce seemed sympathetic to the Tim Robbins character who tortured and killed possible terrorists. I found him shown to be fairly human and sensitive, which I thought was brave of Noyce, whereas at the end of the film we were quite obviously supposed to see him as a 'monster'. Overall, a fascinating insight into history, but not a great film.

Friday

I saw the Jon Favreau episode of My Name is Earl the other day, and wondered what this strange actor was up to. I think I first saw him in Swingers, like most people. Since then I remember distinctly his role in Friends, then in Very Bad Things, and more recently The Break-Up. But what else? I couldn't think. Then, I accidentally came upon the knowledge that he has been directing films - five in total. Did you know this? Most notably he did Elf, which I enjoyed without realising his involvement, and then Zathura. He is currently filming Iron Man. As a side-note, he also apparently did one of the voices for the Dilbert cartoons which we all enjoy. So, there you have it: Jon Favreau, man of many talents.

Thursday

It's been puzzling me as to why they have made another Mr Bean film. I had thought the first one was such a failure that it had killed off the character and any hope of a franchise. An hour and a half of a guy who doesn't talk? That's weird. Bean worked in a particular time and place, and for very short fragments. The transference to the big screen and America seemed an awful idea. Anyway, it's been done again, and apparently this time Rowan Atkinson says this is the last one. We can only hope. The review on imdb suggests a connection with 'the silent greats' Keaton and Chaplin. Well, maybe. But they were stretching their medium and its technology as far as it would go. Atkinson is limiting his. Not that that's a bad thing (see Funny Ha Ha), but silent comedy just doesn't feel right anymore. I did like the original Bean TV series, but it seems to have passed its moment. Anyway, it got me thinking about successful and unsuccessful transferences from TV to Film (or short to long). It's very hard to get right.

Wednesday

For those of you who receive this blog through an RSS feed, I'm guessing you won't have noticed this week's quote by Federico Fellini. It runs thus: 'Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me'. When I heard this I was instantly reminded of the previous quote I've had here by Renoir saying a director only makes one film in his life. This then reminded me of my own quote that I say to myself, which is 'everyone can write a novel'. I think people are fascinating and unique, and that all of us are capable of writing at least one good book (perhaps it doesn't have to be fiction). These two ideas may not be directly related, but they connect along an axis of the thought that every person has one interesting story to tell. As I said in relation to the Renoir quote, I think the great directors (and great novelists) are capable of telling many stories, but this principle probably holds true for the rest.

Today I realised one of my favourite words is 'irrevocable'. I like it because I can't pronounce it, and it doesn't make sense. Every time I see it heading towards me in a sentence (and I try to fit it into conversations a lot) I pause and have to think about how to say it. I end up speaking very slowly and conscientiously, and normally repeating it several times to make sure I get it right. It doesn't make sense because it should just be 'irrecoverable', but that has a different meaning. 'Irrevocable' is nice because when it comes to spelling it, I always get it right. I hear the word slowly in my head and just type it out. Irrevocable.

Tuesday

In this week's feature where I discuss what weekly features I should add, I thought I'd bring up the idea of a poll, since there has been so much talk about them recently. A long time ago I did contemplate having one here on Stranded Cinema. What kind of poll? Well, it would be a poll for you to vote as to which film you want me to see and subsequently review. There may be a film you really want to see, but don't have the money or the time to do so. Or, there may be several films that you can't decide between seeing. Or, maybe you'd just like to hear my opinion on a movie you watched but weren't certain about. Any of these and more would be valid ideas. However, knowing my audience, I quickly assumed that you'd probably deliberately pick awful movies and make me go to see them. I found this idea very funny. Every month you could make me see a terrible film, just for fun.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that I don't think a poll would really work here. It would be good to get someone else to narrow down the many films I have to see, since there are so many interesting ones out at the moment, but the practicality of the whole thing probably wouldn't work.

Monday

A new film is about to hit theatres starring Will Ferrell and Jon Heder. It's called Blades of Glory. It will be interesting to see if Jon Heder can play roles other than Napoleon Dynamite, which seemed to define him so clearly. The concept looks funny, but then as we know Hollywood buys and then sells films to us based on the concept alone: Ferrell and Heder ice-skating together, that was the pitch. Whether the film is actually consistently funny is something Hollywood will hide from us until we pay our £6 at the door. Strangely, the film is seemingly directed by two people who haven't done anything much before; and also written by two people who haven't done anything before (two separate groups of two people, not like the Coens).
I pretty much like watching Ferrell do anything, even if the script is terrible (cf. Kicking and Screaming), so I'll probably enjoy this film, but I have a feeling that it's going to be awful. My reasoning is that I hadn't heard about it until one week before it hits the cinemas. I'm guessing this means that it hasn't been able to generate, or wasn't worth generating, any pre-release hype.

Sunday

I saw the original, if it can be called that, film The 300 Spartans the other day. It was made in 1962 by Rudolph Maté (who died only 2 years later, and was better known as a cinematographer). It's a fairly ordinary, classically made film. Nothing, that I noticed, particularly interesting about it. Indeed, I had never heard of it until news of 300 began to circulate. What is remarkable is the old Hollywood style of filming battle scenes: no trick photography needed, they would just hire thousands of actors. Surely this is the best way of doing it? Incredibly difficult to organise and control, but shouldn't good things be hard? I know 300 has been filmed mostly with blue (or green) screen. I don't think that can possibly capture a battle as well as actually having real actors on a real field in Greece (or a parking lot outside Fox studios, wherever it was). Apparently Frank Miller was inspired by this film, but calling it a remake is probably stretching the meaning of the word. We'll see.

For the next three weeks posts to Stranded Cinema may come slow and irregularly due to me trying to work very hard. Again, we'll see.