Maurice Sendak, Author and Spike Jonze Muse, Dead at 83. I grew up with Where the Wild Things Are and it haunted me to my core. Then, a few years ago Spike Jonze brought it all back with his fantastic film adaptation. For me Maurice was a legend.
Indiewire has a bit more on him here.
With Seema away in Vancouver I decided to take a weeks leave. Now I find myself in the enviable position of being free enough to catch up on some movie watching. This weekend saw me doss down on the couch with the kids, takeaways on our laps, lights dimmed, and Hugo on the screen. I’ve been meaning to see Hugo for a while due mainly to a curiosity I have rather than anything else. I was curious to see how Martin Scorsese would handle a children’s movie. You can read my review here.
Great news! Yann Martel’s excellent Life of Pi is being made into a movie … and it’s being released at the end of this year. This one slipped completely under my radar. Life of Pi is the bestselling novel, released in 2001 and won the Man Booker Prize. If you haven’t read the book then drop everything and read it. It’s a fantastic story and easily one of my favorite books. I’m very curious as to how they will transfer what seems to be an unfilmable story. It certainly is an ambitious venture. However, with Ang Lee (The Ice Storm, Sense and Sensibility, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) at the helm I’m quietly confident that they will pull this one off.
Here is a the first released still … can’t tell a lot from one pic but they seem to be on the right track aesthetically. This is now up there as one of my most anticipated films of the next year, right up there with Prometheus.
Ang Lee's Life if Pi
I won’t go into the politics surrounding Roman Polanski and his dubious past … suffice to say that it always feels a little bit like an elephant in the cinema when his name flashes up in the opening credits. There’s no doubting that he is a talented director and I do, for the most part, enjoy his films … and Carnage is no exception.
You can read my full review here.
With reference to Bridgette Bardot, Feminist Simone de Beauvoir stated that “Males are an object for her, as much as she is an object for them. This is precisely what hurts males’ pride.” Just added this abstract from an essay I did last year about gender in Et Dieu… créa la femme (1956)
Stumbled upon this fascinating doco/interview with H.R. Giger by Dennis Lowe. Giger was the artistic force behind the Xenomorph in Ridley Scott’s original Alien(1979). For me it was his design of the derelict ship (including its interior) that had me in awe. The documentary itself is pretty average and perhaps a little bit cheesy, however, it does give an interesting account of Giger’s professional life. The doco is about 45 minutes long and is in five parts. Apparently it was not officially released because for some reason Giger was unhappy with it. I’m not sure how long these will be on YouTube and at the time of writing part two is missing. So here are the remaining four. (update: you can download the entire doco here. please bear in mind it is a 229mb download)
Aaaargh! It is the very last episode of The Guardian’s Film Weekly. This is it … for good. This completely came out of the blue. So long Jason Solomons and Xan Brooks, I will miss your witty insights. I will be following you on Twitter (@JasonCritic and @XanBrooks). I understand there will be a video podcast later in the year which I am looking forward to.
In the meantime here is their final episode. In this swansong edition of the Film Weekly podcast, Jason Solomons is joined by Guardian film writer Xan Brooks to review Aardman’s The Pirates!, Tiny Furniture, Into the Abyss, This Is Not a Film and Mirror Mirror.
Took the day off on Friday. I went into Howick with Seema, and had brunch at Café Paris. I enjoyed the Eggs Benedict and coffee, while Seema had the “big breakfast”, and then we shuffled off to the Monterey theater to watch The Best Exotic Marigold hotel. A matinee session during a weekday, in a suburb with a high percentage of retired folk, and a movie about retirees dealing with their “golden years”; you would expect a healthy amount blue rinse in the audience to cast a hue over the silver screen … and you’d be right, we were the youngest people in the theater by some way. See the rest of my review here.
Seema and I watched the The Purple Rose of Cairo on the weekend. Having last seen Woody Allen’s classic when it was released some 25 years ago, I thought it was worth a revisit. I was also keen to see how closely this film followed Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author (having brieifly studied it a couple of years back) to which it draws its inspiration from. Seema and I had enjoyed Allen’s latest release Midnight in Paris, so I was fairly confident that she’d enjoy this. If I was to compare The Purple Rose of Cairo to any other film then Midnight in Paris comes up trumps in almost every way. The film has not aged a bit, and had it been released today I’m sure it would sit comfortably among present releases, The Artist, Midnight in Paris, and the like, trending with its meta-film language and fourth wall breaking that is presently popular. If you haven’t seen this film … go and see it.
Just released in IMAX theaters (in the U.S. at least) is the new Prometheus trailer. For those who don’t know Prometheus is considered a loose prequel to the original Alien. To be released this June, Prometheus has a great pedigree, and as with Alien, it is directed by Ridley Scott. I am a huge fan of the original Alien, and I must say that this trailer looks impressive. However, this is not without a few concerns. The original Alien had an authentic realism to it. Bordering on mumble core, Alien, was dirty, industrial, and avoided what I will call the “Hollywood gloss”. Alien used milk crates as set flooring, and modified cricket pads for its space suits, all unrecognizable yet ironically working towards its realist aesthetic. And this is my big concern with Prometheus. Judging from this trailer and previous teasers, my concern is that Prometheus will suffer from the big budget Hollywood gloss that its lower budget counterpart avoided. Its attractive cast, and its computer generated wizardry, among other minor quibbles, suggest to me that Prometheus will not capture the essence of its original. Look no further that Duncan Jones’s cult classic Moon if you want to see a fine example of how a low budget sci-fi can work within its means to create a cerebrally brilliant film. In an interview Jones talked about avoiding this Hollywood gloss and aimed for an Alien aesthetic. I had kind of hoped that Prometheus would do the same. Perhaps my expectations are unrealistic, wrong, … or maybe they will actually be realized. Either way, I still think I will enjoy the film regardless. I’m just hoping it will be good enough to join the pantheon of sci-fi classics.
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