Phlogiston

The Standard has a nice article on Serenity, the forthcoming movie from Joss Whedon: The Browncoats Rise Again. It sounds incredible:

The film more or less wraps up the TV show’s story arc about the psychic sister, River Tam—a crazy girl rescued by her brother Simon from a lab where government spooks poked needles in her brain. The crew is pursued by an eerily calm, sword-carrying assassin (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Vast conspiracies are uncovered. Captain Reynolds takes a number of Harrison Ford-style beatings. There’s a joke about “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Adam Baldwin turns in a hilarious, star-making performance as Jayne, a man so tough and stupid he cracks wise with a spear through his leg. The story is grim and quippy and should make sense, more or less, to non-fans.

But if the preview-screening audiences are any indication, anyone who has seen Firefly or cares about its characters will be knocked on his or her fanny by the final third, during which Whedon basically directs the movie like it’s his last—heaping world-changing, Kobayashi Maru levels of abuse on his characters. It’s a nervy, almost sadistic way to reward the long-suffering Browncoats—who were literally gasping and crying during the screening—but it also immediately removes the sense of fluffy-pillow safety that episodic television provides.

I can’t believe I have to wait until the autumn to see this movie.

Time Magazine’s movie critics, Richard Corliss and Richard Schikel, have compiled their list of all-time 100 Movies. I have to say that there’s little to fault in their choice, although it wouldn’t quite be mine.

The trailer for Serenity is now online. Yay! This is the movie I’m most looking forward to this year. Based on the sadly short-lived but genius TV series Firefly, Serenity is written and directed by Joss Whedon. It’s a must see. For those of you who never saw the TV series it is currently available from Amazon.co.uk for only £26.80. I can’t recommend it enough. It is simply one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen. I’m so looking forward to the film.

I have discovered, to my horror, that a new film version of Brideshead Revisited is in production. Why? What on Earth is the point of this when the most definitive version imaginable has already been done?

Granada TV’s 1981 production, adapted by John Mortimer and with the most perfect cast imaginable is clearly one of the greatest adaptations of a novel to the screen (be it small screen or silver screen) that has ever been accomplished. Deciding that it’s worth having another go at it is like deciding to remake Casablanca, or The Godfather. It’s not just cynical, it’s utterly disrespectful.

Worse still, apparently the producers have decided to squeeze the novel into a two hour time slot by dropping all mention of or references to Roman Catholicism. In other words, by choosing to abandon the entire theme of the novel. As one poster on the IMDb message board said, it would be like deciding to remake Gone with the Wind and then removing everything to do with the civil war!

Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke was on TV tonight and I watched it. Despite not being a fan of either Campion or Kate Winslet, the film won me over. All Campion’s films seem to be the same film made over and over again: emotionally damaged, strong-willed but vulnerable, intellgient, sophisticated woman, brutalised by oafish man who she falls in love with anyway, and then the tables are turned and in falling in love with her he becomes feminised and she becomes assured. Jesus. I started yawning just writing that. (Oh, I nearly forgot: throw in some claptrap about Eastern philosophy and mysticism while you’re at it.) But whilst The Piano and In the Cut were unrelentingly po-faced, Holy Smoke was actually really funny. Not so much laugh-out-loud funny (although the final scenes with Keitel staggering through the Australian desert in a red dress, one black boot, and lipstick, produced quite a few guffaws from me), it was more darkly comical and satirical; everyone gets sent up—Winslet’s awful and hopeless forays into finding herself in India, Winslet’s family’s ludicrous conservatism, and Keitel’s hypocrisy and fraudulence as the “Cult Exiter”. Who knew feminists had a sense of humour? The coda set one year later felt completely out of place, though, and I wonder whether it was tacked on to the end due to studio pressure.

Monday night, whilst nursing an enormous hangover from Sunday’s birthday celebrations, I watched a couple of movies: The Grudge and Wicker Park. Both of them are American remakes of non-American films.

The Grudge is a remake of Ju-on: The Grudge, a Japanese horror film; it’s rather bizarre for a remake, as it is directed by the same director, Takashi Shimizu, is still set in Tokyo, is apparently the same story as the original, but the lead characters are now American ex-pats. Given that quite a bit of dialogue is still Japanese with English subtitles, and I thought that American audiences’ dislike of subtitles (or inability to read them) was one of the reasons films like this got remade, it’s curious to me why they bothered. I guess the fact that they made it for an estimated $10,000,000 and it made well over $39,000,000 just in its opening weekend in the USA alone means that “they” know considerably better than I do.

I don’t really “get” Japanese horror films. On one hand there is much to admire in them: instead of the slash and gore—and the oh-so-clever (and incredibly boring) ironic self-consciousness and reflexivity—of much of recent American horror, the Japanese films tend to work on a more psychological level. Instead of dark interiors and frenetic pacing they are often brightly lit, and move at an incredibly slow deadening pace. Many of the characters seem to sleep-walk to their demises. The pace seems to reflect a suffocating atmosphere, constrained and repressed by a great weight of stifling social convention, from under which terrible things erupt. But the actual stories more often than not leave me scratching my head more than leaping out of my seat. The premise of The Grudge is: “When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born. The curse gathers in the place of death. Those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury”. Now in Japan this is indeed one of their superstitions. Theirs is a culture in which a multitude of spirits watch over every conceivable thing, some kind and some not so kind. The trouble is that it means nothing to me, and I really couldn’t imagine my way into it meaning anything to me. So to me the film just seemed like a haunted house story. The execution of the film was excellent: the lighting, cinematography, direction, the performances. (The opening scene is particularly impressive.) But the story failed to strike any chord in me whatosever, and as a result didn’t scare me or creep me out at all. Those who know me know I loathe the countryside. So a film about getting lost in the woods, wandering around in circles as increasingly creepy things start to happen, scares the crap out of me. Even more so if I’m lost with a bunch of student film makers. Malevolent spirits infesting a house: not so much.

Wicker Park is a remake of a wonderful French film, L’Appartement. Now with nothing to compare it to, Wicker Park would really be a pretty good movie. But compare it to the original and it fares much less well. Firstly, the original is an incredibly complex and subtle examination of the nature of sexual obsession, and the curious nature of memory; the remake is a fairly traditional love story. Secondly, the two main female characters are transformed in the remake into much safer stereotypes (basically, a goodie and a baddie). Lastly, and perhaps most unforgiveably, the remake changes the ending so that everyone lives happily ever after. Arghhh. But that makes it sound worse than it is. If you watch Wicker Park having never seen L’Appartement then you won’t be disappointed. It really is a good film. But L’Appartement is an amazing film—it’s the kind of film people compare to Vertigo. Wicker Park really isn’t.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is starring in Richard Kelly’s new film Southland Tales. Southland Tales, written and directed by Kelly who also wrote and directed Donnie Darko, is described by him as “30% comedy, 30% musical, 30% thriller, and 10% science fiction”. Donnie Darko completely blew me away when I saw it, it’s one of my favourite movies. And of course I’m a huge Buffy fan, and have been a great admirer of SMG’s acting chops. After Buffy ended her movie career has been lacklustre (with the possible exception of The Grudge, which I still haven’t seen but got only so-so reviews despite being a box-office smash). I think starring in this could be the big break SMG has needed. I’m very excited about this. A new Kelly film, and finally a decent role for SMG.

The promotional web site is awesome too. I suspect that it might be a bit painful on dialup, but if you have broadband access or can access it from work or school it is really worth a look. It requires the flash plugin, but 99% of you will have that anyway. (As a web developer I normally don’t like flash-only sites, but this one works very well.) It’s a teaser site for the time being, although Kelly has said that they plan to make the site a proper companion to the film. After a brief intro you have a choice to go “left” or “right”, and both parts are quite different. The left road ends in some cryptic German text (meaning, I think, “roads not necessary”) and the right road leads you to a very cryptic statement about the rotation of the Earth, and a launch button which frustratingly does nothing! It’s really worth trying out as it’s the perfect teaser: it gives nothing much away about the film but really arouses curiosity, intrigue, and a desire to know more.

Reading some comments Kelly made in a Q+A session, it seems the film isn’t a musical (or even 30% a musical) in the conventional sense. Apparently there will be one musical number; I’m imagining something like the scene in Magnolia where all the characters start singing the same song in different locations, a little like the “Mad World” scene towards the end of Donnie Darko. Kelly cites Magnolia as an influence on the film. He does say, intriguingly, that he will be shooting the entire film as if it were a musical! He also describes it as a sprawling epic, well over two hours.

I’m very excited by all this. (But not in a creepy way.)

I decided to have a quiet night last night with a big dinner, a bottle of wine and a couple of DVDs: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, and Michael Mann’s Collateral. I’ve not much to say about either: both were the kind of film that I’d have been disappointed in if I’d seen them in the cinema, but are perfectly good “quiet night in with a DVD” movies. Shyamalan has an incredible ability to just build an atmosphere of creepiness; his films seem to start in a deliberately flat, almost boring way, and then minute by minute he just cranks up the tension. Surprisingly, given his previous films, the big twist to The Village became rather obvious, and I pretty much guessed what was really going on even though I was trying not to. Collateral was an okay thriller, but I think the high point for me was a scene in a jazz bar where the music was Miles Davis’ Spanish Key from Bitches Brew.

Garden State is one of the loveliest films I’ve seen in a long long time. Very funny, very very funny, and as touching and sweet as you can imagine.