I just wanted to comment briefly, following the Oscars, on Martin Scorsese and the Best Director Oscar. As many have noted, the poor guy keeps losing out on Best Director to actors-turned-director (Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, and Clint Eastwood), despite pretty much everyone believing Scorsese is amongst the top handful of living directors. I’m amongst those who don’t necessarily feel that he should have won for The Aviator: it’s a good movie, and he did an impeccable job, but it’s certainly not so strong that his loss this year seems some kind of injustice. And Eastwood clearly now deserves recognition as a major director in his own right, so the actor-turned-director thing wasn’t an indignity this time either. (It was when Costner won).
Yearly Archives: 2005
51 posts
I love Star Wars. I love Lego. I love Star Wars Lego. But even I think this – from Lego Shop at Home – is a really strange toy:
As a follow-up to my post about Casino Royale early in February, some of Martin Campbell’s views on the new film have featured in a story over at CommanderBond.net (apparently pretty much lifted verbatim from The New York Daily News).
According to Campbell, the new film will take the storyline from Fleming’s original novel – his first – and tweak it for a 2006 audience. “There are things that will have to be changed from the original novel. The Cold War elements will have to be reconfigured, for example, but Casino Royale will be a grittier, tougher and more realistic Bond movie. We’ll be getting away from the huge visual effects kind of films.”
Perhaps the biggest revelation from Campbell is that Casino Royale will take James Bond back to his early 007 days (a similar idea was floated during pre-production on The Living Daylights). However, CBn can confirm that the movie will not be a period film.
“In the new film, Bond is essentially starting out in his career, and has just recently become part of the double-0 section,” Campbell said. “The idea is to put a bit of the dash back in Bond. By the end of the movie, the character will have been forged into the wiser, harder Bond we know.”
The interview touches on Bond’s romance with Vesper Lynd from Fleming’s novel, one of the most unique of the series. “The door is open for Bond, emotionally. He’s in love with Vesper and he sees there’s another side to all of this, that life might be far more pleasurable, more gratifying, than being a secret agent. And ultimately that door is slammed in his face, which makes him the tempered steel kind of guy that we know. I’m looking forward to humanising Bond a bit.”
As a follow-up to Thursday’s post, here is the full line-up of Loonatics:
I think the line-up is, from left, Wile E. Coyote, The Tasmanian Devil, Bugs, Daffy, Lola Bunny, and The Road Runner. I say “I think” because they have managed to make the characters remarkably indistinguishable. Who thought Wile E. and the Road Runner, in particular, could look so similar?
Both Michael Barrier and Cartoon Brew have covered a bizarre story from the Wall Street Journal that Bugs Bunny is to be, well, “re-imagined” in an upcoming WB TV show. See if you can pick which is the new and which is the old:
DVD Bits 
has alerted me to some good news: more of The Goodies is coming to DVD. The second DVD will contain the following episodes:
- Radio Goodies
- Bunfight at OK Tea Rooms
- Movies
- The End
- Punky Business
- South Africa
- Scoutrageous
- Come Dancing (Wicked Walzing)
It’s official – Martin Campbell is to direct the next Bond film. It is to be Casino Royale. Brosnan is almost certainly out as Bond.
There’s something slighty perverse about getting excited by the fact that a paragraph of introductory text from a movie has been released. (I don’t think it happened with Blade Runner or Gladiator). But when it’s Revenge of the Sith… Well, I’m afraid I can’t control myself. The opening crawl is now up at www.starwars.com, and goes like this:
How good does the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie sound?
This is a book beloved by geeks everywhere: Hitchhikers is one of those franchises like Monty Python, Star Trek, and Star Wars, that attracted the nerdy and friendless like moths to the flame. The first two novels (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Restaurant at the End of the Universe) also happen to be amongst the great comic novels of the last half-century. While Restaurant is a little disheveled, narratively speaking, the first novel has a perfectly rounded story that would be perfect for a film. The only obvious difficulty would seem to be one of selection: what to put in, and what to leave out. Because it originated as a radio play, the whole script is sitting there right before you as you read (in contrast to the way that Adams’ later books became increasingly internalised, and therefore all but unfilmable).
Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)
Alexander Payne’s Sideways is a small, impeccably done character study that may just get crushed under the expectations that are surrounding it. It arrives in Australia swathed in Oscar and Golden Globes buzz, and with strong reviews from some notable critics (such as David Stratton’s 5 star rave on At the Movies). Inflated hopes are the enemy of a movie such as this: while a blockbuster action picture’s sheer mass gives it some resistance to hype, a picture as slight as Sideways can be left seeming diminished if the experience is anything less than transcendent. I was left slightly underwhelmed by Sideways, which is a shame, because the film itself did nothing wrong: it’s pretty much note-perfect, and deserves to be assessed without the burden of Awards hopes. While I’m sure Alexander Payne won’t want to send his Golden Globe for Best Picture back – the award was given while I was writing this review – but it may be that the film itself would have been more comfortable quietly finding its audience.