The Matrix Revolutions (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 2003)
I didn’t enjoy The Matrix Reloaded as much as the original, but I think one of the principal pleasures was mulling over the questions it raised but did not answer. The months between the two films have led to in-depth debate about the implications of Reloaded.
E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg), 1982
Accounts of the early development of, and inspiration for, Spielberg’s wonderful E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial talk of two early ideas that merged into one. The first was the idea of a thriller about aliens called Night Skies, involving aliens menacing a farmhouse, which included a subplot about an alien being left behind on Earth. The second was a nebulous idea about a film based on the life of children. The latter idea seems to have gone through many incarnations, being referred to variously as Clearwater, After School, Growing Up, and A Boy’s Life. Some of these may nominally have been considered separate projects (Clearwater seems to have been based on a treatment by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, while Growing Up was a Robert Zemeckis / Bob Gale script), but the common thread was that Spielberg wanted to do a small scale, intimate film about children. The greatness of E.T. can be linked to its origins in this premise: it works so well because it would be an interesting movie even without the alien.
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up to Reservoir Dogs is superficially in the same vein, but it expands the scope of Tarantino’s world enormously. Where Dogs was taut and focussed (telling the story of single bank robbery, with few locations and a small core of characters), Pulp Fiction is a wide-ranging journey through the low-life of Los Angeles. Its several interrelated story lines unmistakeably occur in the same world as those of Reservoir Dogs, but the film is in every way – story, messsage, form – more ambitious than Tarntino’s earlier film. It has an air of definitiveness: not just because it is a key film of its genre, but because it is the most focussed and well executed of Tarantino’s films. It enlarges and illuminates his other work.
The Jaws Log: 25th Anniversary Edition (Carl Gottlieb, 1975 / 2001, Newmarket Press)
As an enormous fan of Jaws, I looked forward to catching up with screenwriter Carl Gottlieb’s account of its making, and certainly it’s very valuable as the first hand account by a key participant of a particularly interesting project. Yet I was strangely disappointed by it.
The Rage in Placid Lake (Tony McNamara, 2003)
Writer-director Tony McNamara’s amiable but shallow coming of age film tells the story of Placid Lake (Ben Lee), who has been bullied throughout his formative years. After a particularly violent confrontation at the end of his final year of high school, he undergoes an epiphany: he needs to try to fit in to normal society. So he abandons (or at least attempts to abandon) his unconventional ways, opting to go corporate and take a menial clerical job at the Icarus insurance company.
Kill Bill, Volume 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)
Volume 1 of Quentin Tarantino’s bisected Kill Bill is at once less than I hoped, and better than I feared. Tarantino’s first three full-length films – Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown – were amongst the best films of the last decade, but the possibility loomed that Kill Bill would favour all his worst instincts. Tarantino’s stated intent was a large-scale tribute to Asian exploitation movies, and the danger with such a project was that it would leach the substance from his work and leave only the sensationalism. After all, there was the clear precedent of his 1996 collaboration with Robert Rodriguez, From Dusk Till Dawn. That film was a tribute to lurid horror movies, and while cleverly done, it’s also a rather unpleasant and barren film. I feared Kill Bill would follow that pattern.
Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992)
The problem with reviewing Reservoir Dogs is that right from its release in 1992, even its detractors generally agreed what its merits were: to review it risks simply listing them. Tarantino, in his first film, had shown he had a good eye for direction, and that he could write slick dialogue that was heavily laden with pop-culture references. He was capable with actors, or at least had a good eye for casting, with the ensemble he assembled here somehow already having the feel of a repertory company (looking back, what is surprising is how few of these actors he actually went on to use in his subsequent movies). And everyone agreed he had a talent for narrative: scrambling chronologies with confidence, he had crafted a taut thriller on a low budget. This is not to say that everyone loved or even liked the film, but rather that its detractors – many of whom remain vocal over a decade later – tended to react not to Tarantino’s technical skills, but rather to the personality that they perceived the film as embodying.
Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton), 2003
Here’s one for those who like conspiracy theories: during 2003, Steve Jobs (head of Pixar animation studios) and Michael Eisner (head of Disney) were renegotiating the deal that allowed Disney to distribute Pixar’s films. With four straight hit films under their belts – Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, and Monsters Inc – Pixar had a strong bargaining position, and Disney expected their cut of the profit from Pixar films drastically reduced. Yet in 2002 and early 2003, rumours circulated that the upcoming Pixar movie, Finding Nemo, was not up to the standard of its predecessors. This put a small, but significant question mark over the future of Pixar – was their strong negotiation based on past glories, rather than a realistic assessment of what might be to come? Were Pixar due for a fall? Ultimately, the negotiations dragged on until Finding Nemo was released – whereupon it received universally positive reviews and eclipsed Disney’s The Lion King as the highest grossing animated film ever. Pixar’s status as the studio that could do no wrong was protected, and the cloud over the negotiations lifted. But here’s the question – could Disney possibly have started the bad buzz on Nemo to force their hand?
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Robert Zemeckis, 1988)
When people talk of the revival of animation in the 1990s, they tend to date the start of the resurgence from Disney’s 1989 feature The Little Mermaid. Certainly there is more continuity in personnel between The Little Mermaid and the 90s hits (such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King) than there is with Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Yet I would argue that the strength of the 90s boom came from the fact that it crossed over into adult audiences: this is clearer when one looks past just the Disney films and considers the full array of animation that sprang out of this period, which includes not only the wave of excellent computer animation (Toy Story, Antz, Monsters Inc, Shrek) but also television work (“The Simpsons,” “Futurama,” “South Park,” and many others). The fact that adults were prepared to go along to these films, or watch these shows, contributed significantly to their success. Adults did so largely because appreciation of the Hollywood tradition of classical animation had bubbled through to the mainstream. People who grew up with the cartoons of the “Golden Age” of the 1930s to 1950s (a staple on TV from the 1960s onwards) were now adults who appreciated the quality of what they had seen. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Robert Zemeckis’ elaborate tribute to Hollywood cartoons, served as a marker for this nostalgia, and hinted at the widening of the audience for animation that occurred in the 90s. Yet it still provokes mixed feelings amongst animation fans.
Treasure Planet (Ron Clements & John Musker), 2010
The failure of Disney’s Treasure Planet to attract a theatrical audience has been much discussed: it brought into focus a lot of criticism of the studio that had been quietly bubbling away for some time. The studio suddenly seems a long way from the halcyon days of its early nineties revival, when films like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King built on the success of 1989’s The Little Mermaid. Back then people were talking of a new golden age in animation, and while that talk hasn’t gone away, they aren’t talking about Disney anymore. They’re talking about computer animation or even television work. Atlantis: The Lost Empire, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Treasure Planet don’t look like a golden age. (Copper at best).