Stephen Rowley

377 posts

RIP Norm McCabe

Film

Just a quick post to note the passing of Norm McCabe, who died on 18 January aged 94. McCabe was the last of the directors from the Warner Bros animation studio in its classic era: a handful of animators are left alive (Bill Melendez pops up looking very sprightly in interviews on the Looney Tunes DVD sets, for example) but now all the directors and notable story artists are gone.

I’m not terribly familiar with McCabe’s cartoons: he certainly wasn’t a major director, and like Arthur Davis only got a short spell as director (he left the position for military service). Unlike Davis, who is pretty well regarded by Warners fans, his cartoons aren’t very frequently revived. However, like Joe Grant, the guy had staying power: he was doing work on Tiny Toon Adventures in his eighties.

A little more about McCabe can be found here, here, and here.

Brokeback Mountain and al-Qaeda: The Hidden Connection

Film

It’s really too soon to be editorialising on Brokeback Mountain again – particularly as I haven’t seen it and probably won’t have a chance to review it this weekend. There almost isn’t any point arguing about this – from what I can gather, the film doesn’t seem to say anything terribly controversial: when Fred Nile decries it, he’s really just suggesting that he thinks a film about gay cowboys shouldn’t exist, and if someone’s that far gone there’s not really much arguing that you can do with them. So I should just move on.

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Journey Up the Nile

Film

I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain, but I’m already glad it won the Golden Globe for Best Drama. Why? Because it will upset people such as the conservative politician Fred Nile, who in this story on (Australian) ABC radio spoke out against the film.

But he has our interests at heart: he’s trying to spare us from confusion. To quote from the ABC’s story:

FRED NILE: I think it’s causing a great confusion to have two homosexual cowboys after all the popularity of the cowboy theme in American themes [sic].

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Serkis Performer

Film

The animation directors on Peter Jackson’s King Kong were Christian Rivers and Eric Leighton.

I mention this because from all the media coverage, you might assume that Andy Serkis was the single-handed creator of the character of Kong, just as many sources suggest that he was the single-handed creator of Gollum in Lord of the Rings. It has been suggested, for example, that Serkis’ work on both characters was worthy of Oscars for Best Supporting Actor (and, indeed, Serkis did win several acting awards for Gollum, as listed on his website). Yet, as should be obvious, Serkis is not the sole creator of either performance: both Gollum and Kong represent a blend of the performances by Serkis and the various animators at Weta Digital. Even an article as informative as this one at ComingSoon.Net – which does discuss the split between Serkis’ work and the animators in some detail – is based only on Serkis’ account and runs under the headline “Andy Serkis IS King Kong.” And of course the credits of the movie include a credit reading simply “Andy Serkis as Kong.”

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All Kongquering

Film Film Reviews

King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) and

King Kong (Peter Jackson, 2005)

If you ever wanted to be reassured that it’s okay to like big special effects blockbusters, have a look at the reputation of the 1933 version of King Kong. The film is a solid, rolled-gold classic, and makes a strong showing in any of the dubious-but-fun movie popularity contests: it is in the American Film Institute’s Top 100 List; Christopher Tookey’s The Critics Film Guide cites it has having an average critical rating of 9.53 out of 10; the Internet Movie Database has it in its top 250 user-rated films; and so on. Received wisdom is a wonderful thing: once a film is a famous classic, and several decades old, it is easy to accept its status, and not think about why the film is so revered. Yet with King Kong it pays to ask the question. For the original King Kong is a forerunner to all the light-on-plot, big-on-special-effects blockbusters of recent years: as such, its continuing fame is something of a challenge to conventional critical wisdom, which tends to be dismissive of this kind of filmmaking.

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The Kids, The Claus, and the Shrek Director

Film Film Reviews

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (Andrew Adamson, 2005)

Given the billions of dollars poured by appreciative audiences into the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series, it was inevitable that we would see an adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lewis knew and exchanged ideas with Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien, and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe has much in common with Tolkien’s novel. For Disney, the studio behind the new film, the appeal would have been irresistible: Lord of the Rings for the Harry Potter demographic, with a series of seven novels to be adapted if the first did well.

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Independent Cinema: The New V!@GR@?

Film

Film has traditionally been the most inaccessible art form for budding artists. Writers can write with a pen and piece of paper; painters can paint with a canvas and paints; photographers need only a camera. It is skill, not equipment, that most limits budding artists in these media. Filmmakers, however, have faced daunting costs to access filmmaking equipment of any quality. When even such basics as cameras, film stock, lights, and editing equipment are so costly, low budget filmmakers operate within tightly constrained limits. Breakout low-budget hits (such as Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi, or Kevin Smith’s Clerks) are notable largely for their heroic overcoming of such constraints.

Is Kong is Good

Film

Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong has certain quarters of the internet abuzz with anticipation. Which is only natural: Jackson is coming off an epic project that won both critical and audience acclaim, and moving on to a reworking of a much-loved classic. Sources such as Ain’t It Cool have been at their most openly slavering. (Here’s an Ain’t It Cool quote for the poster: “I am bonerized.“) This is the kind of “this is going to be huge” internet buzz that most other productions can only dream of. The producers of the remade Poseidon Adventure, for example, have engaged in an elaborate process of set visits for the biggest on-line movie sites that has resulted in series of dutifully impressed articles, but little of the genuine excitement that some of the fan community show for Kong.

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Fandom at its Finest

Film Film Reviews

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation (Eric Zala, 1989)

In 1982, three twelve-year-old fans of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Raiders of the Lost Ark (released the previous year) decided to direct their own home made remake. Eric Zala directed and played the chief villain, Belloq; Chris Strompolos played Indiana Jones; and Jayson Lamb took care of the cinematography and special effects. The “Raiders Guys” filmed on and off for seven years, completing their “adaptation” in 1989, after the release of the second official Raiders sequel, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. After a well-received screening for the local community (many of whom had been enlisted in the project), they put the film away and forgot about it until 2003, when friends-of-friends passed the movie to Harry Knowles of the website Ain’t It Cool. Knowles played the film at his “Butt-Numb-a-Thon” film festival in Texas, and wrote a rave review, describing it as “the best damn fan film I’ve ever seen.” In 2004, a detailed article about the production followed in Vanity Fair. Despite very limited screenings – the film is a flagrant copyright violation, so both screenings and the circulation of copies have been tightly controlled – the legend grew. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation has become one of the most famous fan films ever made, and it deserves all the praise heaped upon it. It is more than just a credit to its makers’ ingenuity and love of Spielberg’s original: what might have been expected to be just an amateurish imitation becomes a wonderful mix of loving tribute, comic riff, and childhood memoir.

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