War Weary

War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005)

It’s sort of amazing, really, that Steven Spielberg is still top of the Hollywood tree. Given the constant upping of the ante since his Jaws (along with Star Wars) basically invented the modern Hollywood blockbuster, you would think he might have fallen by the wayside. Yet with War of the Worlds he once again steps up to the plate and shows just why he continues to lead the pack of A-list directors. War of the Worlds is his take on familiar material: not only has H.G. Wells’ novel been filmed before (in a George Pal-produced 1953 version), but it was the source material for Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast that spooked America in 1938. And, of course, it was the unofficial jumping off point for Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day in 1996. It is a perfect choice of project for Spielberg, forming as it does a companion piece with his classic tale of benevolent aliens, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If that film was kind of a sixties hangover, with its stirring finale of intergalactic peace, love, and harmony, then War of the Worlds is the grim, bitter and bleak counterpoint. It’s an extremely well made and effective film, but a feel-good thrill ride it certainly is not.

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Better than Ever

Jim Schembri, the film critic for the EG section in The Age, published an interesting piece in that paper on Friday about Hollywood films. After apparently having an exceptionally unpleasant time with Mr & Mrs Smith – a movie I chose not to inflict on myself – he was moved to write a long piece on how Hollywood films really suck these days. (For the next few days it will be available here, although registration may be required.) The basic argument is that big “event” movies like Mr & Mrs Smith don’t actually need to be good: they open to enormous business based upon saturation marketing, and turn a profit before word gets out that they suck. The marketing media machine is, essentially, making quality irrelevant and thus making both Hollywood movies and their audiences dumber:

The intent is to blitz the eyes, rattle the ears and provide plenty of close-ups of those big, expensive stars. Pummel the audience with the package. Overwhelm them with starpower and firepower.

That’s what audiences are being sold now – not films, but deals.

This dumbing down of movies – it’s still very hard to believe that Miss Congeniality 2 actually does exist – has been accompanied by a dumbing down of audiences.

Top and Bottom

I’ve written before about the trick of producing an “all time top” list to generate publicity for a media outlet or organisation, and keeping track of both the silly and sensible examples of this phenomenon will be an ongoing pursuit of mine on this page. I therefore regret that in my month-long Star Wars hysteria the Richard Shickel / Richard Corliss Time list slipped through without comment. If you doubted my theory about these lists being done to boost circulation, consider the number of hits that the list produced for the Time web site: there were 7.8 million hits to the list in a week, including 3.5 million hits on a single day. Little wonder that Time have tried to keep the interest going: those stats are from a follow-up article by Corliss about how they produced the list that remains on the front page of the Time website as I write, some 20 days after the top 100 debuted. The sites’ coverage is a movie list-geeks paradise, bristling with little offshoot categories: guilty pleasures (including the underrated Joe Versus the Volcano, which I assumed everyone else in the world had forgotten); scores (which snobbishly fails to list a single John Williams score); performances; shorts; and the films that Schickel and Corliss had to cut from their lists.

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Only a Conservative Deals in Absolutes

One of the effects of the generally positive reaction to Revenge of the Sith is that suddenly critics are looking again at the new Star Wars films and noticing things other than the bad acting and CGI effects. Unable to miss Anakin’s paraphrasing of George W. Bush in the newest film, critics have finally noticed that the Star Wars prequels carry a political subtext. “For decades [George Lucas] has been blamed (unjustly) for helping to lead American movies away from their early-70’s engagement with political matters,” wrote A.O.Scott in The New York Times, “and he deserves credit for trying to bring them back.” While fans of the films might appreciate that there is finally some recognition of what Lucas is up to, it’s hard to award any points for journalistic timeliness when these themes have been evident since The Phantom Menace in 1999.

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Now You Know

Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Kore-eda), 2004

Original Japanese Title: Dare mo shiranai

Nobody Knows is the most frustrating kind of filmgoing experience: halfway to being a wonderful film, it is unfortunately let down by a few critical flaws.

Based on real events, it follows the lives of four Japanese children who, as the film starts, are being smuggled into their new apartment by their flighty, irresponsible mother. The landlord thinks only one child is in the house, and the children have been raised to evade detection. The eldest son, twelve-year-old Akira (played by Yuya Yagira), is the most responsible in the household, cooking meals and caring for his siblings during his mother’s increasingly long absences. But one day she simply fails to come home, and the children must fend for themselves.

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Hot Sith

Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005)

You could hate Revenge of the Sith, if you wanted to.

 The night before seeing it, I re-watched much of the original Star Wars, and was captured once again – as always – by its magic. There is a strange alchemy at work in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back (and sporadically in Return of the Jedi) that the prequels haven’t recaptured. For all sorts of reasons, the prequels are not the return to that universe we all hoped for when the prequels were originally announced: they look different and feel different. If you measure the prequels against the originals, and dwell on what’s missing, you can’t help but mourn for what the prequels could have been. Revenge of the Sith is still not the journey back to that feeling of glorious fantasy that Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back achieved. As such, it isn’t everything that either Star Wars fans or casual moviegoers might have hoped, and there will be those who hate it for that.

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Truth in Obituaries

Trust Michael Barrier to step in and complicate the Joe Grant story by bringing up the question of whether what is being written about him in the current round of obituaries is actually true. Barrier was prompted by the following over-the-top passage in the obituary by LaughingPlace:

Joe Grant will forever haunt animation, move audiences to tears, and swirl about our hearts like bright autumn leaves, reminding us that those who have come before us are not to be discarded and forgotten, but to be used as a source of courage and inspiration. True inspiration. Never has anyone so unassuming, so gracious and so gentle walked the halls of Disney Animation. Never has any one person – outside of Walt himself – inspired so much creative magic at Disney.

Websters would do well to slip his portrait neatly beside the definition of ‘gentleman.’ It would have to be a lively caricature that emphasized the snowy wave of hair and apple blush cheeks that framed those jewel-brilliant eyes. Joe Grant’s face shined with a Father Christmas sort of secret knowledge of exactly what you were wishing in your heart, and for decades he granted those wishes.

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RIP Joe Grant (and Disney Animation)

I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to think I could write an obituary of Joe Grant, the veteran Disney artist who died on Friday: try Jim Hill Media or LaughingPlace for that. But I did want to write a little bit about what a symbolic moment this is, particularly coming so soon after the death of legendary animator Frank Thomas (the second-last of Disney’s so-called “Nine Old Men”) last September.

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Bunny De-Buggered

You may have noticed how on current affairs shows, when they cut back to Ray Martin after a story, he often says: “We’ll be following that story and keep you posted on any further developments.” Which means that they’ll immediately forget about the poor victim whose case they were beating up, unless something else sensational happens, or the original story rates its socks off. Well, I’m not like that. So when I broke (okay, repeated) the news of the Bugs Bunny redesign, I followed up the further developments (here).

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The Hissyfitter’s Guide to the Galaxy

I wrote a while back about how much I was looking forward to the new movie of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so I thought it was worth commenting briefly on the ruckus over M.J. Simpson’s review of the film. For those that don’t lurk around the geeky corners of the internet, Simpson – a writer with a pretty impressive CV when it comes to writing about Adams – wrote a long, spoiler-filled review of the film (which you can find here). Previous to this, most of the reviews that had leaked out from preview screenings had been pretty positive: often they said a few things needed to be changed, but even that didn’t seem outrageous given that the whole point of these screenings was to fine-tune the film.

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