O.D. on Films

So, I got to interview Joe Letteri, senior VFX supervisor for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey recently. Since he’s also worked on (deep breath) Man of Steel, Tintin, Avatar, King Kong, The Lord of the Rings and Jurassic Park, it’s fair to say that I was geeking out a bit. Read the interview here!

I had a great time compiling, co-writing and editing this Stuff.tv movie list of the 25 best Western movies ever – an opportunity to make use of all that work I did on the UCD MA in Film Studies course.

Naturally, it’s going up to mark the UK release of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, due out this week – which its director insists is actually a “Southern” rather than a Western, given its unconventional setting of the antebellum South. But we figured, what the hell, it’s got cowboy hats and horses and six-guns in it.

With Django Unchained, Tarantino’s drawn inspiration from further afield than the classic Westerns I’ve highlighted in the Stuff.tv list – for those wanting to dig a little deeper into the Italian spaghetti Westerns that influenced QT, this New York Times article is an excellent place to start.

Hopefully, Django Unchained will spur Hollywood into reviving the genre – at the moment the only other Western on the horizon is Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp’s popcorn actioner The Lone Ranger (which I’m actually rather looking forward to, despite the naysayers). Maybe the long-delayed adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian will finally get off the ground.

One thing’s for sure, though – the Western has been written off time and time again, only to return with a vengeance. This uniquely American genre is definitely not riding off into the sunset any time soon.

Now that it’s December and we’re officially allowed to talk about Christmas, here’s one from the vaults – the 25 best alternative Christmas movies, according to Stuff.tv (and compiled by me).

That means, of course, that it features my personal favourite Christmas movie, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang – which, as per my own Yuletide tradition, I shall be popping into the Blu-ray player this festive season.

Naturally, it also includes Batman Returns, which I’ve previously written extensively about here. Go see if your favourites made the list.

In which sci-fi author Ian Watson discusses his time working with Stanley Kubrick on the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Kubrick died before he got the chance to direct the film; Steven Spielberg brought his own version to the screen some years later.

Among the many gems to be found in Watson’s memoir is this:

I had written a novel entitled Inquisitor set in the wacky far-future world of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000; he wanted a pre-publication printout right away.  “Who knows, Ian?” he mused.  “Maybe this is my next movie?”

Yes, we nearly got Stanley Kubrick’s Warhammer 40,000.

Another recent Stuff.tv feature compiled by myself – the 25 best movie stunts. My contributions to this one were:

• Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
• Steamboat Bill Jr (1928)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
• The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
• The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)

Yes, I know that’s a pic from Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923). I just like it.

This week’s Stuff.tv movie list, which I drew up and contributed to, is all about racing movies – well, it is Le Mans this weekend, after all. Sadly I didn’t get to write about the 1971 Le Mans film for the feature, but that pic of Steve McQueen is too cool to not use.

So, this week’s movie-related verbiage includes…

• Cars (2006)
• Speed Racer (2008)
• Speedway (1929)
• Senna (2010)

Gentlemen, start your engines!

Tying in with the release of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s not-quite-a-prequel to Alien, this week’s Stuff.tv feature trawls through the much-maligned prequel genre in a bid to find the best examples. I wrote the whole thing this week, so you know who to blame.

Prequels are rather tricky to get right – the fact that the audience knows how the story will pan out can kill the dramatic tension, and if you try and add a surprise twist, more often than not it’ll end up retroactively ruining the original film.

And then there’s the Clone Wars Effect. Fans pick up on throwaway lines from films – like Obi-Wan Kenobi’s reference to the Clone Wars in the original Star Wars – and their imaginations run wild.

If the film-maker tries to realise those situations on film, they can never live up to the weight of expectation placed on them by the fans – no movie can be as good as the Clone Wars epic that a Star Wars fan has been playing and replaying in their head over and over again for 20-odd years. And on top of that, the backstory conjured up by those allusive references may not actually play out that well on screen, failing to adhere to the three-act-structure and established character beats as it does.

Still, some prequels manage to come up trumps – telling their own compelling story while meshing with the earlier/later film. Have a look at the feature and let me know what you think.

This week’s big Stuff.tv list is all about cinematic director’s cuts. I’m quite chuffed with this one, having come up with the list, whittled down the entries and written up several of my favourite films.

My contributions to this week’s list were…

• Orson Welles’ classic noir Touch of Evil (yes, not technically a director’s cut as it was completed posthumously – but it was based on an exhaustive memo by Welles).
• Metropolis – this is almost certainly the longest time elapsed between a film’s release and the release of the director’s cut, with Fritz Lang’s original version of the film languishing in a museum for 80-odd years. Had the original cut been in wider circulation all that time, I have no doubt that excised characters like the creepy Thin Man (above) would by now be every bit as iconic as the robot Maria.
• Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut – chopped together from Donner’s footage, his replacement Richard Lester’s footage, and even bits of screen tests, it’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. It works, just about. I still think they should’ve recut the end of the first film to make it fit with the Superman II Donner cut (and to avoid duplicating the “turning back time” ending across both films).
• Léon – Stuff cut all the accents out of my copy, so I’m going to put them in here. Léon: Version Intégrale. Hah.
• The Abyss – the film that started James Cameron’s obsession with adding new footage to his films – culminating in the extended cut of Avatar, which is 178 minutes long, for the love of God.
• The Empire Strikes Back – Far and away the best of the Star Wars Special Editions, because it keeps its changes (mostly) subtle and unobtrusive. That bit where Darth Vader walks back to his shuttle should’ve stayed on the cutting room floor, though.