Iron Sky

I’ve recently been following the ongoing development of Iron Sky a film by the same group that created Star Wreck a Star Trek parody movie with, relatively, high production values.

Iron Sky is an original story idea set in the near future where it’s revealed that many fanatical German Nazi’s escaped to the moon just before the end of the Second World War. They’ve since festered up there, growing in strength  and numbers, ready to renew their struggle for world domination.  The story owes a lot to fantastical early pulp serials from the Thirties and Forties  like Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers, but is very much it’s own thing: a dark science fiction comedy.

Oh and there’s Nazi’s, in space. Space Nazis.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the film is that it’s what might be considered an indie development. There’s no major Hollywood director behind the helm, and no huge studio bankrolling the project. The whole thing is being put together by a talented group of Finns with a lot of help from their supporters on the internet.  It may not be the first movie to attempt to harness the power of the internet, but it’s certainly the first that’s caught my eye.

I’ve signed up with their site to Demand to see Iron Sky, and I suggest that you do the same.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeAfoiN5SDw

Willy Wonka Right Enough

I caught a bit of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory recently on TV, and I really don’t remember it being so damn scary in parts. It’s a wonder they market it as a children’s film. If you need any more evidence just watch this scene where Gene Wilder clearly eats some chocolate laced with acid and goes on a bad trip.

Freaky!

RIP Dom DeLuise

Some sad news today: Dom DeLuise has died at the age of 75. If you don’t instantly recognise the name you might remember him from one of the many classic movies that appeared in over his career.  He’s probably most famous nowadays for appearing alonside Burt Reynolds in The Cannonball Run, but he’s worked hard and consistantly for years as a character actor. I really liked him in many of the films that he appeared in. He was one of those “larger than life” actors in the vein of John Candy, Chris Farley and John Belushi who was blessed with comic timing and could make you smile without even uttering a word.

Rest in peace Captain Chaos. The world is poorer without you.

Hollywood Go Home

I regularly read a blog called /film which deals with movie industry news and gossip as well as humorous short parody films found around the internet by the writers. It’s content has recently begun to annoy me, although it’s not the blog itself that I’ve found fault with: it’s the Hollywood Movie Machine. /film reflects the movie industry, and as the movie industry seems to be currently suffering from a high imbalance in the talent to toe-rag department. Frankly it’s currently churning out piles of shite in desperate search of dollars and worse than that it’s dragging the English language down with it.

As a result I move we excise the following Hollywood-isms from common speech:

Reboot –  Several online dictionaries list the word reboot as a noun, but I consider it more likely to be a verb. You put on boots, but you reboot a computer. I particularly despise reboots – the plural form of this word that’s appeared lately in conjunction with Friday the 13^th and others.

RetCon – Retroactive continuity – This is where things are added, taken away or altered to fit the current storyline. Comic books, especially in the 50′s and 60′s were particularly bad for this as they were never written from the point of view of having an overreaching internal logic. Later on as the kids who read them grew up into self obsessed nerds the writers found that they had to write stories that made internal sense or risk the wrath of the fan boys. Retconning allows the writers to resurrect dead characters, change heroes powers and generally get on with telling the story, but it also tends to degenerate into screen time that has to be wasted to avoid a fan-rammy.

Franchise – Just give it up. If a movie makes money it doesn’t have to become a deluge of action figures, novels and worst of all sequels.

Adaptation – Taking a story from another form of media for example comic books, novels, computer games or even burger restaurants and making a movie out of it. Will someone, for the love of god, explain to Hollywood that many of the things their adapting worked perfectly because they were written for the medium in which they were originally presented? No two hour movie will ever capture every nuance of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and no movie adapted to a video game has ever been good.

Sequel – I’ll admit that some stories deserve a sequel, and they do often set the scene correctly at the end of the movie, but for every one that does a hundred more are made because the original was a money-spinner. Star Wars was fine with the first three movies, the lord of the Rings needed three movies to tell the story, but the Matrix should have quit while it was ahead.  If the story can be told, and told well, in one movie we don’t need to see the characters going through it all again no matter how entertaining it was, and we certainly don’t need:

Prequels – A sequel where the action happens before the original movie. WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT? The movie is supposed to be a heroic journey. The critical event in the hero/world/universes existence, but Hollywood doesn’t trust the audience to sit back and accept the world’s backstory. They’ve got to try and show it with better CGI, bigger name actors and huge special effects.

Hollywood-ism – I  know I only coined this about 400 words ago, but it annoys me already.

Cities In Flight

The Hollywood Movie Machine seems to be determined to remake, re-imagine or adapt every book, computer game, novel, short story, play or song ever made. We’ve got the highly anticipated Watchmen movie due out soon, a heretical remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still and even a Far Cry movie from Uwe Boll with a mainly German principle cast.

I find it strange however that nobody has yet tried to adapt the four novels written by James Blish’s that make up the Cities in Flight series. They seem more than perfect for the big screen treatment, particularly the middle two books: A Life for the Stars and Earthman Come Home. The premise of the novels actually begs for a big screen adaptation, especially in the current climate where spectacle seems to be far more important than substance or even plot.

The four books primarily revolve around the city of New York, or more accurately Manhattan Island, which has left behind a polluted and increasingly authoritarian Earth and is wandering through the galaxy in search of work. This bizarre situation is made possible by the use of a MacGuffin called a spindizzy which through the magic of science creates an anti-gravity field around an object. The limitation of the device is that the efficiency and power of the device is inversely proportional to the mass lifted. Therefore it’s far more efficient to lift a city than to move a conventional spaceship. The cities themselves form a vast spacefaring culture where they trade their skills and advanced technology to various colonies and alien empires in return for supplies, food and raw materials. They refer to themselves as Okies in reference to the historical Okies who left the American Midwest during the 1930′s due to a combined effect of economic depression and the infamous Dust Bowl.

The first book They Shall Have Stars describes the development of the spindizzy and its associated effects on Earth. The western governments become more and more paranoid over the potential of the spindizzy and eventually execute the protagonist as a political threat after he reveals the science and existence of the spindizzy to the world. It’s interesting, but essentially a political thriller with a hint of espionage.

In the second book A life for the stars a young farm boy living near Scranton, Pennsylvania is accidentally caught up in the departure of the former mining city as it leaves for the stars. He survives several desperate and ill managed disasters before being traded along with many other undesirables to the much larger and successful New York.

The third novel follows the adventure of the boy and the city of New York itself as it travels amongst the stars in search of work. Eventually they reencounter the city of Scranton which has devolved into what the Okies call a Bindlestiff: a tramp city that survives by criminal activities rather than honest work. At the climax of the book the residents of New York install spindizzies on a planet in an effort to escape an increasingly hostile Earth based empire. The planet itself is thrown out of the Milky Way towards the Large Magellanic Cloud where it ultimately comes to rest.

The final book A Clash of Cymbals seems to run off at a tangent to the rest of the series. The New Yorkers discover that the universe is coming to an end imminently and they race to be at the epicentre of the collapse before another group in the belief that whoever is present at the exact time and space the universe ends will be able to shape the destiny of the next universe after a big bang. Weird is the only way to describe it.

I think a combination of the two middle books would work best. Have the protagonist wander aboard a city just as it departs for the stars and document his adventures aboard as he struggles against a tyrannical mayor. It’s a simple story with plenty of room for amazing visuals effects: it is a flying city after all. Hopefully a decent screenwriter, director and producer will take up the challenge and create a Sci-Fi masterwork that we can all enjoy, but I’ve got the feeling that if, or when it does come a film version will be a steaming pile of crap.

I can dream though.

Come In Number 9

While reading slashfilm.com I came across a post about a forthcoming animated movie called 9. It’s a post apocalyptic tale based on an Oscar nominated ten minute short film by Shane Acker. Interestingly the protagonists are tiny humanoids that look almost as though they’ve been knitted from wool. They are the last survivors of a world apparently destroyed when humanity’s machines turned against us. The tiny ragdoll beings are charged with the responsibility of ensuring that humanity was not destroyed in vain.

The original short itself is available to watch on Youtube but you can view it below:

Unfortunately 9 won’t be out in the cinemas until the 9^th of September next year. Yes, that’s right, 9 will be out on 9/9/9. How witty are these Hollywood marketing gurus eh? Marketing BS aside though take a look at the trailer and judge for yourselves.

I think you’ll agree it looks awesome, and I can’t wait to see if the entire movie lives up to the promises of the clip.

Someone Needs to Dump on Hollywood's Childhood

Like most of the western world I’m getting fairly apathetic towards the current slew of remakes, reboots and regurgitations coming out of the Hollywood Movie Machine. Worse the few genuinely original ideas seem doomed to mishandling, miscasting or simply being downright crap.

Take Hancock the latest Will Smith blockbuster for an example. The core idea was fairly originally and engaging: What if the world’s only superhero was an alcoholic, self pitying jakey who’s only redeeming quality, his attempts to selflessly help people all is constantly (and humorously) marred by the way he goes about it. It could have been a great comedy movie but instead the Hollywood Movie Machine made it into something else. It swung bizarrely between action movie and comedy while steamrollering over plot holes without even a moments hesitation.

The Editing Room deals with Hancock’s problems in a far more witty form than I’ll manage here, go and check it out. I’ll wait, my rage for my next point knows no bounds of time, space or angular dimension.

Now I’ve been reading on /Film about the forthcoming GI Joe Movie and almost every single piece of available information makes me want to set fire to Hollywood. In fact it makes me want to invent REALLY SLOW FIRE and set fire to Hollywood with that.

When I was a boy I had GI Joe stuff, well it was called Action Force here in the UK but it was essentially the same thing with a few decals changed. For those of you unfamiliar with the toys etc, it was all about a unique team of US Special Forces. They were a hodgepodge of every branch of the US armed forces all hand picked for their skills and abilities. No two of them were alike and they all dressed in less than regulation style. One of them was always cutting about in an American football top for a start. They all had cool code names like Snake Eyes, Gung-Ho, Roadblock and they had everything a boy could want: Ninjas, marines, spies, fighter pilots and even astronauts. They were lead by General Hawk and represented truth, justice and the American way.

They were pitted against Cobra, a terrorist organisation with seemingly limitless resources that constantly concocted bond villain-esque plans to rule the world. Cobra was lead by Cobra Commander who spent much of the time with his face hidden either behind a mirrored face mask or underneath a blue hood.

The battles between GI Joe and Cobra spanned pages of comics, a cartoon series and several animated films all of which continue to this day. The comic tended to be darker and more realistic than the films and notably cobra seemed a far more credible threat on the printed page rather than the cartoon’s bunch of incorrigible ragamuffins.

Unfortunately it seems that Hollywood have thrown all of the rich background out the window in favour of one of these god damn REBOOT things. The director Stephen Sommers and the screenwriter Stuart Beattie have managed to make a boatload of stinkers between them. The mummy returns and Van Helsing to name some of the worst.

Sienna Millar as the Baroness doesn’t convey the look or feel of European Aristocrat. She looks like a naughty schoolgirl in that picture. Christopher Eccleston is a good actor and I’ve seen him in a few things I liked, but he isn’t Destro, they should have got a REAL SCOTSMAN to play a Scotsman for once and wheeled in James Cosmo.

Roadblock isn’t in it, and even if he was I bet they wouldn’t cast Ving Rhames as him. Dennis Quade hasn’t been an action hero since the eighties and even that was as a microbe in Inner Space. As for the rest of the cast, I can honestly say I’ve never heard of ANY of them. I’m assuming they’re the latest batch brewed up during happy hour at the POD PEOPLE factory.

The worst insult of all is probably the casting of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander. I mean seriously? Just look at his pictures on IMDB, the guy looks like cross between a chimp and a Toby Jug. I think that’s as close as you can get to being genetically related to a bell-end without actually being a bell-end. Listen here to me Hollywood and bury this project before it goes any further, these people, these so called actors are not, will not and can never be the one’s to play anyone in GI Joe except maybe some walk on parts in the deleted ROOM FULL OF ASSHOLES scene. Cobra Commander has never been friends with anyone in GI Joe, let alone a former member of it. I mean what was wrong with his original back-story? A man pushed to the brink of insanity by the greed of big business and the indifference of the US government? Too close to the reality for millions of Americans in the process of losing their homes and lives maybe?

The one bit of casting I have to agree with however is Ray Park playing Snake Eyes. He’s got the skills and since he doesn’t have to speak or even be seen it should be an easy ride for him. I will brace myself for the inevitable Snake Eyes spin off movie however.

Hollywood I dare you to prove me wrong, I dare you to make this the movie of the year for 2009 but to be frank I think everyone who see it will be of the same opinion: “This is one to download^TM” I think

Someone Needs to Dump on Hollywood's Childhood

Like most of the western world I’m getting fairly apathetic towards the current slew of remakes, reboots and regurgitations coming out of the Hollywood Movie Machine. Worse the few genuinely original ideas seem doomed to mishandling, miscasting or simply being downright crap.

Take Hancock the latest Will Smith blockbuster for an example. The core idea was fairly originally and engaging: What if the world’s only superhero was an alcoholic, self pitying jakey who’s only redeeming quality, his attempts to selflessly help people all is constantly (and humorously) marred by the way he goes about it. It could have been a great comedy movie but instead the Hollywood Movie Machine made it into something else. It swung bizarrely between action movie and comedy while steamrollering over plot holes without even a moments hesitation.

The Editing Room deals with Hancock’s problems in a far more witty form than I’ll manage here, go and check it out. I’ll wait, my rage for my next point knows no bounds of time, space or angular dimension.

Now I’ve been reading on /Film about the forthcoming GI Joe Movie and almost every single piece of available information makes me want to set fire to Hollywood. In fact it makes me want to invent REALLY SLOW FIRE and set fire to Hollywood with that.

When I was a boy I had GI Joe stuff, well it was called Action Force here in the UK but it was essentially the same thing with a few decals changed. For those of you unfamiliar with the toys etc, it was all about a unique team of US Special Forces. They were a hodgepodge of every branch of the US armed forces all hand picked for their skills and abilities. No two of them were alike and they all dressed in less than regulation style. One of them was always cutting about in an American football top for a start. They all had cool code names like Snake Eyes, Gung-Ho, Roadblock and they had everything a boy could want: Ninjas, marines, spies, fighter pilots and even astronauts. They were lead by General Hawk and represented truth, justice and the American way.

They were pitted against Cobra, a terrorist organisation with seemingly limitless resources that constantly concocted bond villain-esque plans to rule the world. Cobra was lead by Cobra Commander who spent much of the time with his face hidden either behind a mirrored face mask or underneath a blue hood.

The battles between GI Joe and Cobra spanned pages of comics, a cartoon series and several animated films all of which continue to this day. The comic tended to be darker and more realistic than the films and notably cobra seemed a far more credible threat on the printed page rather than the cartoon’s bunch of incorrigible ragamuffins.

Unfortunately it seems that Hollywood have thrown all of the rich background out the window in favour of one of these god damn REBOOT things. The director Stephen Sommers and the screenwriter Stuart Beattie have managed to make a boatload of stinkers between them. The mummy returns and Van Helsing to name some of the worst.

Sienna Millar as the Baroness doesn’t convey the look or feel of European Aristocrat. She looks like a naughty schoolgirl in that picture. Christopher Eccleston is a good actor and I’ve seen him in a few things I liked, but he isn’t Destro, they should have got a REAL SCOTSMAN to play a Scotsman for once and wheeled in James Cosmo.

Roadblock isn’t in it, and even if he was I bet they wouldn’t cast Ving Rhames as him. Dennis Quade hasn’t been an action hero since the eighties and even that was as a microbe in Inner Space. As for the rest of the cast, I can honestly say I’ve never heard of ANY of them. I’m assuming they’re the latest batch brewed up during happy hour at the POD PEOPLE factory.

The worst insult of all is probably the casting of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander. I mean seriously? Just look at his pictures on IMDB, the guy looks like cross between a chimp and a Toby Jug. I think that’s as close as you can get to being genetically related to a bell-end without actually being a bell-end. Listen here to me Hollywood and bury this project before it goes any further, these people, these so called actors are not, will not and can never be the one’s to play anyone in GI Joe except maybe some walk on parts in the deleted ROOM FULL OF ASSHOLES scene. Cobra Commander has never been friends with anyone in GI Joe, let alone a former member of it. I mean what was wrong with his original back-story? A man pushed to the brink of insanity by the greed of big business and the indifference of the US government? Too close to the reality for millions of Americans in the process of losing their homes and lives maybe?

The one bit of casting I have to agree with however is Ray Park playing Snake Eyes. He’s got the skills and since he doesn’t have to speak or even be seen it should be an easy ride for him. I will brace myself for the inevitable Snake Eyes spin off movie however.

Hollywood I dare you to prove me wrong, I dare you to make this the movie of the year for 2009 but to be frank I think everyone who see it will be of the same opinion: “This is one to download^TM” I think

Indiana Jones and The WHIIITT?

I went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night at the pictures and I heartily recommend that you all go and see it as soon as possible. I have to admit that although I usually quite like going to the movies very few have made me smile like a schoolboy all the way through. From the opening scene of a hotrod racing along a highway to the strains of Rock around the Clock to Indy’s greaser sidekick clearly modelled on Marlon Brando in Rebel without a Cause, it was a perfect fit for the McCarthy Era in 1950’s America. I also loved the playful and fun way they dealt with the fact that Indy (and Harrison Ford) are both much older than they were in the first three movies. I think if they had tried to play it of as being a year after the Last Crusade with Harrison Ford’s botox-ed, hair dyed and body doubled to make him look 40 again it would have been a disaster.

Cate Blanchett played a good turn as the cold and calculating KGB villainess which contrasted well with Indy’s world weary but sparklingly cheeky personality.

There were a very few WTF were they thinking bits though and a couple of glaring plot holes that made my teeth hurt but overall it was great movie that I would definitely watch again.

***Spoilers hidden below, if you’ve not seen the movie GO SEE IT FIRST***

Worst Edit Ever!

I’ve been playing Star Wars: Jedi Knight II – Jedi Outcast (henceforth Jedi Knight 2) for the last couple of days as a change of pace. Command and Conquer 3 has got me burned out on RTS games for the next wee while. I would try Crysis but I’m avoiding buying it to wind up McDowall who surprisingly somehow managed to finished it.

Playing Jedi Knight put me in the mood to dig out the original movies and have a watch. It’s amazing how good they are even nearly thirty years after their original release. I decided to watch Return of the Jedi even though it’s not my out and out favourite (it’s the Empire Strikes Back of course). I cracked open the case and stuck the disk into the player. Then I realised to my horror that I had put in the “DVD Tin Special Edition Disk” of Return of the Jedi. Now don’t get me wrong, the special edition does make some remarkable improvements in special effects over the original theatrical release. Then of course with thirty years of development in special effects, computer animation and digital compositing you would expect some improvement. Sure some changes seem a bit superfluous, making the Star Destroyers lighter in some scenes and replacing Sy Snootles and the Reebo Band with a singing monkey. The battle and crowd scenes look a lot more convincing and exciting though and in the main everything is fine till the last five minutes of the film.

In a nutshell I’m talking about one scene, the scene right at the end when Luke wanders away from the rebel’s victory celebrations and sees the ghosts of Anakin Skywalker, Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Here’s the problem:

The three wise men in 1983.

The same scene in the 2004 DVD release.

That’s right, they replaced the original middle aged Anakin Skywalker with the young pretender Hayden Christensen.

OK, according to the official background it’s supposed to be about twenty years between Anakin falling in the lava pit in Revenge of the Sith and the rebel’s final victory at Endor. In the original theatrical released the now unmasked Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker was played by the British character actor Sebastian Shaw. This seemed to fit perfectly as Vader would presumably have been about 40 to 50 years old by the time of the empire’s defeat. Shaw’s face is seen in extreme close-up as Luke helps him take of his mask during his poignant death scene on the collapsing Death Star. Then we get down to Endor only to find that not only has he become a blue force spirit like his old pals Yoda and Obi-Wan, but he’s been guzzling Oil of Ghost-Olay to appear twenty years younger!

Now a question that I’ve always had is why was it only Sebastian Shaw who was replaced in this edit? I didn’t see anyone rushing to replace Sir Alex Guinness with Ewan McGregor or Yoda with his younger, bouncier CGI self. To add insult to injury they didn’t even CGI in the whole of Hayden Christensen, they just cut off Shaw’s head and stuck the weedy half pint Canadian’s head on his body. Anakin has clearly been kept at least on of his dark side powers, the power of body snatching. This has to rank up there as possibly the most unnecessary bit of editing in the history of cinema and I can only hope the reasoning behind it involved George Lucas’s family being held to ransom.

EDIT: I’ve been informed that the fan uproar surrounding this edit eventually caused Lucasfilm to restore the original. The most recent (2006) DVD release returns Sebastian Shaw to his rightful place as the ghost of Anakin Skywalker.