We have been inspecting you, Mr Bond
The makers of the James Bond series have chosen Daniel Craig to be the next man to don the dinner jacket, the scuba suit, the ski jacket or whatever other attire 007 needs to do the task in hand. I wish him good luck. He is, as the reports say, the first blond-haired man to get the job. He comes from a fairly ordinary background – as did Sean Connery – and has the sort of rugged, mean good looks that Ian Fleming would have liked.
The film is being based on the book, Casino Royale, which was the first and arguably Fleming’s best Bond story. It is a thriller that includes a nasty torture scene, as well as the more familiar settings of baccarat, a lovely but treacherous woman and plenty of vodka and caviare. I fervently hope that the movie does indeed—as reports say—move away from the silly over-reliance on gadgets that we have had in recent years and goes with what is a great, taut story. I also hope the film avoids PCness. Bond smoke, drank, made love and killed bad people who were trying to subvert Britain. Never forget that, Daniel.
Comments are off for this postOne of the crowd?
Not normally my thing I know by my mug is one of them featured in the latest Jib-Jab. See if you can spot me…if at least one person has his way it won’t be the only place you get to see my mug on the small screen.
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They have picked Harold Pinter; left-wing nutter and playwrite. The DT sums it up nicely.
Since the 1980s, however, Pinter has become far more politicised, particularly in his anti-Americanism. There is something shrill about his public condemnation of the superpower, something increasingly mechanical about his depiction of persecution and oppression in his plays. There are worrying moments in his public pronouncements when Pinter seems to find a moral equivalence between George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler.
First the Nobel committee picked a man would was incompetent in his job now they pick this nutter. The Nobel prizes are becoming more and more of a joke. How sad.
Comments are off for this postFriday Film Fest
I thought I’d lead this off with a quote from Sergei Eisenstein, the masterly Soviet innovator (The Battleship Potemkin, Oktober) of film-editing techniques. Surely he would have had something pithy to say about the subject, like, “Jump cuts been berry, berry good to me.”
Alas, what I can find of his writings consists of sludgy Marxist claptrap such as this:
For art is always conflict:
(1) according to its social mission,
(2) according to its nature,
(3) according to its methodologyAccording to its social mission because: It is art’s task to make manifest the contradictions of Being. To form equitable views by stirring up contradictions within the spectator’s mind, and to forge accurate intellectual concepts from the dynamic clash of opposing passions.
I don’t know what that’s all about, but it sounds painful. Here are some clearer examples. We’ve all seen trailers for movies that, um, turn out to be rather less than advertised. Hey, if you had $100M invested in a turkey, you’d want the exciting bits all spliced together in a two-minute reel, too.
But it’s one thing to make a film look more dramatic/humorous/glamorous than it is. It’s another to make it look entirely like something it’s not.
A few weeks back, [Robert Ryang] said, he entered a contest for editors assistants sponsored by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors. The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals, he said.
Obviously this has limitations—you aren’t going to turn Saving Private Ryan into The Bridges of Madison County however you manipulate it, but a couple of the entries used clever tricks to make Titanic and West Side Story into horror films.
Mr. Riang’s winning entry turned The Shining into a sappy feel-good relationship flick. You will laugh out loud at the music clip he uses about halfway through.
Also, via Hanan at grow-a-brain (who isn’t sure if this was part of the above contest), Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho recut as a romantic comedy.
Update: My bad. Link to The Shining now fixed.
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