Stephen Rowley

377 posts

Blade Runner Keeps Running

Film Urban Planning and Film

The Digital Bits has a detailed write-up of the new version of Blade Runner, the – allegedly – “Final Cut,” which will be released on DVD in December (and which can be ordered through Amazon here).

Blade Runner (along with Close Encounters) has always been the textbook film demonstrating both the benefits and the pitfalls of preparing revised versions of classic films. The benefits are clear because the Director’s Cut is so clearly a better version. Yet it also illustrated the problems these director’s versions can produce: there are usually compromises involved in making the director’s cut, which may create new problems or shortcomings, and the original cut (which remains historically important and for some might be the preferred version) can fall out of circulation. So for years it was hard to get the original version of Blade Runner; other films, like Close Encounters, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars and Touch of Evil are locked in similar limbo.

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Indiana Jones and the Endless Jokes About Harrison Ford’s Age

Film

The title and logo for the new Indiana Jones movie are out. Wait for it:


It’s pretty hard to get excited about this. It’s a very cumbersome title, for a start (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Skull would be better). And according to a quick Wikipedia search – surely the definitive source for information about bullshit mythology – the Crystal Skull ties into folklore about both Atlantis and the Knights Templar. Atlantis is not a promising concept (all films involving scenes set underwater suck) and the Knights Templar link raises too many other links to both Last Crusade and The Da Vinci Code.

The rumour is we’ll see the first trailer in front of Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf in November.

Rats!

Film Film Reviews

Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007)

Pixar’s newest film, Ratatouille, sees the studio’s gun director, Brad Bird, try his hand at saving a troubled production. The result is a somewhat messy and not completely satisfactory film, but still one that sees the studio expanding the horizons of the form.

Bird is an exciting figure. He worked with Disney in the 1980s, and was mentored by legendary animator Milt Kahl, before becoming one of the key creative personnel in the early years of The Simpsons. He then directed the acclaimed (but underseen) The Iron Giant for Warner Bros before joining Pixar to helm The Incredibles. It’s a career progression that moves from a start under one of animation’s great figures, to a key role in the renaissance of television animation, and then a shift to theatrical features just as that area was growing moribund again after a revival in the nineties. As everyone else’s features have grown more and more alike – with jive-talking animals, fart jokes and pop culture gags galore – Bird’s films have remained distinct. They stand apart from even the generally superior films produced by Pixar: while the other Pixar films show a clear house style that is very much driven by the sensibilities of Toy Story director John Lasseter (and which in Cars had started to slide towards mediocrity), Bird’s films are distinguished by their more adult tone and adventurous subject matter.

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Plonk!

Film Film Reviews

Dr Plonk (Rolf de Heer, 2007)

Rolf de Heer’s new film, Dr Plonk, is built on a brave and irresistible premise. De Heer has made a real, honest-to-God silent movie, evoking about as closely as possible the feel of a silent comedy from the 1920s. The only remotely similar project I can think of is Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, from 1976, but that film did things by halves: shooting in colour and (typically for Brooks) showing only the vaguest sympathy for the genre he was supposedly channelling. De Heer, by contrast, brings to Dr Plonk a serious filmmaker’s urging to get the little things right: the film is shot in black and white using hand-cranked cameras; the camera moves only occasionally, and is shaky when it does; there are intertitles, written with a good ear (eye?) for the style of period titles; and there’s even a slight variability in the brightness of the film that matches that seen in silent prints. The illusion is remarkable, and in the early passages, before the time-travel plot kicks in and the eponymous doctor travels o the present day, there’s really little other than the familiar face of Magda Szubanski to give this away as a contemporary production. At that level, it’s a remarkable achievement, and as a fan of silent films I really, really wanted to enjoy Dr Plonk more than I did. Unfortunately, de Heer’s film also shows up the difficulties of reviving what is basically a dead form.

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The Beowulf Express

Film

A new trailer for Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf has hit the net.

I’ll skip my standard spiel on the uncanny valley (see here for some of my earlier comments). What this Beowulf trailer made me think about is how conflicted I am about the potential of these sort of highly digitised movies. By that I mean movies where most or all of the environments are either computer generated sets, or highly manipulated with computers, whether these use human actors (as in Sin City) or live-action-like motion-capped animation (a la Polar Express or Beowulf). The divide between the animated and non-animated films in this genre seems to be largely trivial now: because these projects use animation that is motion-capped off real performers, and which aspires to photorealism, in an aesthetic sense they are essentially the same thing. (True animated films, like those made by Pixar, are a different beast again.)

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Remember MIFF? (MIFF Report, Part II)

Film

Apologies for the delays in getting further posts on the Melbourne International Film Festival up. There was always going to be limited opportunity to post during the festival, since so many of the films I was seeing were in the last few days, but things were made worse by difficulties at my day job which caused a few planned films on my schedule to bite the dust. Hopefully my previous plugs for Paul Martin’s Melbourne Film Blog led anybody who was hankering for day-by-day coverage there; the boys over at Hoopla also managed to cover a reasonable number of films. One of the films I missed (El Topo) remains very much on my list to cover on the site.

What I did see was generally pretty good, and I had a better time of it than last year. So here are some quick thoughts on what I did end up seeing.

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Big and Yellow

Film Film Reviews

The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman, 2007)

One of the first gags in The Simpsons Movie is a joke about the foolishness of going to see a film of a TV show that we get weekly for free, and it’s true that there is something borderline illegitimate about a film of a TV show that’s currently in production. It isn’t just that it risks being seen as a rip-off: it’s also that it is impossible to separate the film from the series to fairly assess it as a stand-alone work. How can you judge character arcs and narrative of a film like this without placing them in the context of our familiarity with the characters and the grand serial narrative that has been The Simpsons since 1989? It’s probably foolish to even ask what sense this film would make to someone who hasn’t seen the show, since the situation will hardly arise. But that ubiquity means that in some ways The Simpsons Movie can never be anything other than a particularly long episode of the TV show, since we can never come to the experience “clean.”

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Kids

Film Miscellany

Yes, I’m going to give some thoughts on the final Harry Potter book. It’s sort of film related; this is obviously going to be one of the major film releases of 2009 or 2010. But I’ll be the first to admit that’s just an excuse to jump on board the subject of the week.

(Major spoilers for the final Harry Potter book follow).

Most of the way through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows I was thinking the suits at Warner Bros must be cursing: the first three quarters of the book isn’t terribly suited to film, despite the frequent magical / action interludes. The fact that the book eschews the Hogwarts locale for most of its length robs the film of the setting that has united the series thus far, and the long months of travelling that the kids do is going to mean a lot of passage-of-time montages that are going to be tough to keep interesting.

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MIFF Busting

Film

The Melbourne International Film Festival starts next week. I’m hoping I’ll have a better experience than last year, where the films I caught were a fairly mixed bag, and the film I enjoyed the most was a fairly unexceptional kung fu flick. (See here and here for my comments at the time). Things are already looking up this year: the experience of working out what I could see has been made much easier by the festival organisers finally listing session times in the main part of the program, with the description of the films.

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