The last man on Earth

Grabbed some time to go and sit and watch I Am Legend before I go back to work. Now I had already surmised from trailers and articles in Empire that yet again Hollywood had not done the book. Third time a film has been made of Richard Matheson's classic 50s novel of Cold War paranoia and humanity's seemingly endless ability for self-destruction and third time they haven't done the bloody book! Come one, please....

That said the film, although different from the book - relocated to New York, which actually works well during the scene of Will Smith hunting wild game in an overgrown Times Square, main character Robert Neville is now an army doctor working on a cure, the scientifically created vampires are now fast, aggressive zombies (although still photophobic) - it actually works very well in creating a sense of isolation and terror as the last man in the world tries to hold it together in a Manhattan populated only by him, his dog and a legion of the infected.

Instead of an unspecified biological agent from a war (as in the book) the cause here is genetic engineering in an attempt to beat cancer, although even if you knew nothing about the story going in you could guess nothing good would come of a medical breakthrough by a character with a name like Doctor Crippen (a cameo by Emma Thompson). Scenes where Neville heads to the DVD store during daylight to withdraw films and return old ones illustrate how he is trying to use routine to keep himself together, rather than simply grabbing whatever he wants from the store. Populating the shop with store window dummies so it looks occupied and he has someone to 'talk' to adds to that feeling, being both slightly amusing and disturbing at the same time, stirring sympathy for Neville.

(SPOILER WARNING: don't read on if you are going to see it, I won't describe the whole finale, but it might spoil it for you if you are planning to see it)

Which makes it all the more annoying when the final section totally destroys what had been so carefully built up earlier, opting for the big fights with masses of CGI infected, big bangs and adding a redemption arc which clashes with the themes established earlier in the same way the original 'happy ending' forced on Blade Runner on its original release, really annoying the hell out of me, Hollywood managing an interesting, bleak, disturbing film then getting cold feet and going for SF CGI action fest at the end. And the CGI is annoying because the infected are hyped up creatures (why? they are diseased, why do they have amazing superhuman abilities now???), leaping up high buildings and their leader's jaws opening preternaturally wide as he yells - yes, they come right out of the Mummy (except some infected dogs which was copied shamelessly from Resident Evil), which was fine for the Mummy which was daft but fun and knew it, this was serious and bleak and psychological then went all cartoony and bollocksed it up.

And if they had stuck to the bloody book in the first place they might have avoided it. The book is far more effective - each night Neville has to be home and barricaded in his home before sunset. Outside his home many of the infected who have become vampire-like creatures due to the virus are people he knows, friends, neighbours (his next door neighbour bellowing 'Neville!' each night seems worse than simple roaring fiends in the movie, more personal) and in a harrowing flashback we see Neville in the book burying his wife then finding her resurrected by the virus and coming back to try and kill him and feed on him. In the book there are live and dead vampires as the virus mutates living victims but also resurrects the dead, who act differently. None of this comes in the film. In the book Neville hunts them by day as they lie in their comas, staking them and wondering why it is that this method of killing from myths works, all the time becoming more paranoid, more bloody and violent himself, staring into the Neitzchen abyss and having it stare back into him, becoming a monster as he fights monsters.

I won't spoil the ending of the book here, but suffice to say Matheson maintains the bleak atmosphere he established effectively with such commendable economy (the book is very short), a skill he used also as a screenwriter (he would work on many of the Vincent Price-Roger Corman Edgar Allan Poe movies), in contrast to the movie which ruins itself at that point. And the title I Am Legend has a very different, darker explanation at the end of Matheson's powerful novel than the film. Film - watchable but be prepared to be suddenly let down at the clunking gear change towards the end (and what a shame, the earlier bits as I said are effective and Smith is allowed to act for once). Book - bloody brilliant, one of my personal top books of the last century, a real insight into the paranoia and fear of the Cold War era which still works perfectly in today's troubled world. You should read it.

"A colossal dick move"

The writer's strike in Hollywood is hitting production in TV and film quite hard, with a number of shows, including Battlestar Galactica and the new Bionic Woman (with the utterly gorgeous Michelle Ryan) now having to shut down because they've filmed episodes and run out of finished scripts, with no more in the pipeline while the strike continues. Family Guy has been hit by it - writer, creator and actor Seth McFarlane is out on sympathy with the writers - three new season episodes are almost finished but not quite and Fox announced they would just finish them without Seth and put them on air. Seth acknowledges they have the legal right to do it but going past him like this is obviously going to damage the relationship between him and the studio and would be, in his own words, "a colossal dick move." I love that and I think that's going to be one of my new phrases for anything spectacularly stupid. On the Family Guy front the special Star Wars episode has to be one of the funniest ones for a while and littered with SF and movie references that makes it Geek Heaven.

Still, it isn't all bad, this strike - the Beeb reports that a prequel to the god-awful Da Vinci Code, based on Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, has been hit by it and postponed. Thank smeg for that, the world really doesn't need any more of that load of recycled conspiracy cobblers - even having the incredibly delectable Audrey Tautou in it wasn't enough to make it bearable.

And before you say, Joe, stop showing your literary snobbery, lots of folks enjoy the book (and movie), leave it alone, yes, fair point, I know they do, but if a lot of people like something it doesn't necessarily mean it is good, just that a lot of people can share the same bloody awful taste; it is the same factor boy bands and reality shows exploit to be popular. What I find even more depressing in the case of tosh like the Luigi Load is the number of brain-dead morons who mutter "I know it's fiction, but I reckon he's onto something here..." NO HE ISN'T!!! Why does the law prevent me from choking people who say that do death by forcing the smegging book down their throat?

Seachd - the Inaccessible Pinnacle

At the weekend I caught an absolutely beautiful Scottish film, the Gaelic-language Seachd: the Inaccessible Pinnacle. A man returns home from Glasgow to his dying grandfather back in the Western Isles, which leads to a series of tales - in many ways it is a story about stories. Rather fittingly, since Gaelic has an immensely rich oral tradition, a seam of folklore and tales told and retold by bards, singers and just ordinary folk generation after generation. In one scene the grandfather - who may have a much more personal link to the stories of centuries past he tells - talks to his wee grandson, angry and bitter after the death of his parents, rejecting his upbringing, calling it stupid and his grandad's stories false and tells him "no-one can tell the truth. We all tell stories."


(Angus Peter Campbell/Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul as the grandfather. A man well suited to play a storyteller since he was taught by Iain Crichton Smith and then later encouraged by Sorley MacLean at University. He is a published novelist and poet and it shows in his performance - like any good poet he has a feel for the fabric and rhythm of storytelling)

As a lifelong reader its hard for me to argue that point - narrative, story, is central to the human condition, it informs who we are in a personal day to day life (how was your day? You don't just say I did this, this and this, you tell it like a short story) and on the grander scale (the older stories which tell us on a deeper level who we are as a people, stories that repeat again and again - Arthur, the Iliad, Beowulf, Ramayana, the songs of the Dreamtime. We are story, we are words and images - we think in words and images, we talk in them, write and draw and sing in them. They're encoded into our DNA. And Seachd is stories within stories, stories defining and illustrating history, culture and the individuals too.


The film is beautiful to behold - much of it is shot on An t-Eilean Sgitheanach, better know to most of us as the Isle of Skye and the mighty Cuillins range. Even in scenes shot on gray, dull, overcast (very Scottish weather) days the imagery is stunning, clouds reaching down to the tops of the mountains, like angel's wings caressing the earth. The music (which is what is playing from the embedded player I got from the official site over on the left of the blog here) is also wonderful.

It makes my blood boil that the numpty heids at BAFTA have decided not to support this Scottish film and put it forward as their non-English language selection for Oscar consideration - not because they had something else they preferred to put forward either, they just didn't put Seachd or anything else forward, which totally undermines their supposed commitment to supporting British film-making (and nice to see London still haughtily mistreats Gaelic culture, some things never change it seems). BAFTA has attracted a raft of criticism, starting with the Scottish arts community, the Parliament and now worldwide condemnation for this shameful and inexcusable lack of support and rightly so. With the fine reception the film is receiving it makes BAFTA's ignorant decision look all the more foolish and ill-informed and I hope they are quite humiliated by their disgusting actions.



But enough negativity - the film itself is truly beautiful and moving; the seemingly simple idea of an elderly storyteller telling story after story doesn't convey the feel of the film. As with any story it isn't just the story, it is how the storytellers tell the story that often makes it and that's the case here. Its hauntingly beautiful, stories that you can feel on those deeper levels that the truly good stories can reach. Go and see it.

Giant steps are what you take, walking on the Moon...

This afternoon at the Edinburgh Film Festival I caught the UK premiere of the documentary by David Sington, In the Shadow of the Moon, detailing the glories (and the tragedies) of one of the biggest undertakings humans ever launched themselves on, the Apollo programme. As soon as I saw this in the EIFF programme this year I knew I was going to see it. I was born at the height of the Space Race; Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong's astonishing, history-making flight to the Moon on Apollo 11 was still a year and a half away. I grew up with an astronaut space suit costume to play in while Gagarin and Armstrong were on posters as my boyhood heroes (they still are, some things you never grow out of); the idea of space exploration has lived inside me my entire life and as I approach the big four-oh birthday on the last day of this year I get a little sad that those promises of holidays in space we were told the future would hold have never materialised and it looks less and less like that boyhood dream will ever come true.

But still it weaves a magical spell on me; as the footage of those enormous Saturn Vs ascending the heavens on a column of fire flickered across the screen I could feel the old excitement rising - the boy in me is never far from the surface and images and ideas like this always bring it out. Much of the footage has never been seen before and is literally out of this world. The story of our first tentative steps out of the cradle of the Earth to our nearest neighbour is told in their own words by many of the NASA astronauts who made those epic journeys, voyages of discovery that stand in a long line of human endeavours such as the explorations of James Cook, Magellan or those unknown Polynesian sailors who crossed vast oceans on small boats made of reeds.

One of those men featured was David Scott, an Apollo commander - a man I actually met a few years back when his publicist came in to my old bookstore to say he was across the road in the Balmoral Hotel doing interviews with the Scottish press and would we like him to come across and sign some copies of the book he had co-authored with his friend the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (the first man to walk in space; his friend Arthur C Clarke would name a spaceship in his honour in the sequel to 2001). An ordinary day at work and then suddenly there I am chatting to a former astronaut and shaking hands with a man who had walked on the Moon; a man who got to live that boyhood dream of mine. Naturally I got one of those signed copies for myself; I've many signed books in my collection but only one signed by an author who has traveled far enough into space to look back and see the entirety of our world hanging in the void. We've all seen the pictures, but it wasn't until the crew of Apollo 8 voyaged around the dark side of the Moon that humans actually saw the entire Earth from space. They took the famous 'Earthrise' photograph, our world rising in the dark above the surface of the Moon, the furthest humans have yet been from our world.

Only a tiny handful of humans have ever seen that sight with their own eyes to this day, all now old men - to look at them in this film you could easily mistake them for someone's favourite uncle of grandfather. But in their prime these men dared death, road on a column of scientific dragon's fire further than anyone in the entire history of the world and in the process changed the way we see our little, beautiful world. It's so sad we've pulled back from those days; I'm not stupid, I'm well aware of my history and understand much of the colossal cost of the space programme was only met because of politics of the Cold War. And yet I can't help but feel we let ourselves become that much smaller as a species when we stopped pushing at the final frontier. Yes, I know we can spend the money on problems right here on Earth, but if we weren't so busy squabbling among ourselves we wouldn't need to waste so much on creating weapons - then we could spend that money on feeding and taking care of people here on Earth and have enough to explore, to go where no-one has gone before.

I still want to go.

Necrophiliacs, please be gentle...

"And I like the idea of graveyards. I don’t want to be cremated, I want to be buried. Though it’s in my will that they’re not allowed to have an open coffin. But, I always say if you’re really famous someone steals your body and then you get two burials and more publicity. I always fear that in America, if you are a necrophiliac, where else are you gonna meet a body? In a funeral home! When you’re dead I think the word goes out: ‘You’ve got 36 hours, Anna Nicole’s here. The bidding starts at $150,000.’ I actually believe that does happen. I am afraid of that. If anyone bids for me, I hope they’re gentle. I hope I go for a high price if they bid on me and if my fear is true."

The great John Waters, the 'Pope of Trash', speaking in the Scotsman today. I love John Waters, if he's one of those counter culture figures in movies that if he hadn't existed he'd have to have been invented. And he also starred in one of the best Simpsons episodes ever (back when the show was still great and not watered down like today), the Homer Phobia episode.

Film Festival moves

The Edinburgh International Film Festival - an annual fixture for me - is moving after decades and next year will move to June instead of during the Festival period in August. According to their site this is to give them a better chance to attract more film biz folks rather than competing against some other major international film festivals and make it more accessible being outside the madhouse of Festival time. Which may be the case, but dammit, I'm really pissed off about the move - I often take time off to do the Film Festival here in Edinburgh and while I'm off in August I can also do some Fringe, Book Festival etc. Now I am going to have to pick which I want to take my time off for and I suspect I won't be the only person who likes to do them all - whichever I pick I'm going to miss on the other. Damn, damn, dammit. I wonder if the attendance will go up as people from outside the city come just for the Film Fest or if it will go down because they were also drawn by the world's largest arts festival?

Simpsons

Since we were going to see the Simpsons movie on Saturday I thought I'd swing by and get the tickets in the afternoon in case it was busy later, although in the event the auditorium was half full. I think I got the ticket clerk who is either the stupidest or, being kind, perhaps just having one of those days. I tell her I want the 8.45 showing and she says, right, 4.15. No, 8.45, please. She looks a bit confused and then goes, oh, okay (not sure where she got 4.15 from at all, but hey); I tell her I need two tickets, putting one on my cinema pass card, paying for the other on my debit card, handing her both as I do. She takes them and looks at them like she has never seen a plastic card before (bear in mind this cinema has its own card which I use regularly).

I have to explain to her again that I want two tickets for that performance and am paying for one, the other is on my own pass, again waving the cards in front of her so it is pretty obvious visually if she can't grasp spoken words. She takes them slowly, looks at them uncertainly then picks at her keyboard. So, that would be one ticket and one other ticket - so you really want two tickets? Er, yes, one and one would be two, which is what I've asked you for several times now... She did finally get there, although she forgot to ask me which seats we wanted. Jeez, we all have off days, but this girl was slower than a tortoise on Prozac.

And was it worth it after that? Well, no. My friend pointed out one of the biggest problems with the Simpsons movie is that it isn't really a movie. As with the X-Files movie it is really just a longer than usual episode with a bigger budget, which doesn't carry a movie. And as with the X-Files movie I have a general dislike of TV shows making a movie version while the series is still running. After the end of the run, as with Firefely or Star Trek, sure, but generally doing a movie when the show is still continuing seems to be to be just a flagrant cash cow. South Park is an exception here as it offered something unusual and different from the series as well as providing a story that worked as a movie. The Simpsons didn't. Don't get me wrong, parts of it are funny, there are some scenes that made me laugh, but it doesn't hold together and overall seemed weak and somewhat futile.

Mind you, I've not thought much of the TV episodes either in recent years. I really loved the Simpsons for many years, but the last two or three seasons have been poor; as with the movie they have some scenes which are brilliant but I can't recall an entire episode which worked for me in the last few seasons, only some scenes, but never an entire episode; magnify that problem by the length of the movie and you have a very poor offering which dilutes the genius of the earlier show. Heresy perhaps to suggest the Simps is past its sell-by date, but it hasn't worked for me for a while now and the announcement that there would be several seasons more after the weak movie depresses me because it tarnishes the reputation it had during its high water mark. As with the X-Files, good shows need to know when and how to bow out, not just keep milking a tired series for money and so ruining the memories of the earlier, better years (of which there were many). Meantime they are talking about another X-Files movie...

Norah

Rewatching the Indy movie Brick, which has the beautiful Norah Zehetner in it (who also crops up in the first season of Heroes). Is it just me or with her gorgeous, elfin face does she have a kind of Audrey Hepburn meets Winona Ryder via Shannyn Sossaman quality about her?

Dead Director's Society

Michelangelo Antonioni has died has died aged 94, right after another famous director, Ingmar Bergman lost his final game of chess on the beach with Death. Since famous folks like this normally go in threes, anyone care to bet on the next respected but aged director to vacate the Editing Room? I almost put Michael Winner on my Director's Dead Pool, but since it is for respected elder directors he clearly isn't eligible...

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe"

Adam Savage of top geek show MythBusters (one of my favourite bits of factual viewing and not just because I look a bit like Adam, especially when I have my hat on) has written a piece in Popular Mechanics in praise of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner as it celebrates its 25th anniversary (link via Boing Boing). I'm totally with Adam on this one - like him I have to re-watch the film every year or so; its one of the most visually ravishing films of all time and easily up there with Lang's Metropolis for stunning images of a future city. The opening scene of LA in 2019, towering buildings with video walls mounted on them, flames shooting into the night from industrial towers and hover cars flying between them all set to Vangelis' music ranks as one of the most stunning visuals in movie history. It still sends shivers down my spine no matter how often I see it, the impact made all the more sudden by being prefaced by a very quiet moment as an explanation of Replicants and Blade Runners is scrolled across the scene before suddenly boom! Future LA.



Adam argues that despite massive advances in effects and digital manipulation which can now create almost anything a director imagines the film's effects remain astonishing: "I worked on Star Wars Episodes I and II, on the Matrix films, on AI and Terminator 3; yet 25 years later there are ways in which Blade Runner surpasses anything that's been done since." He's right, it still looks amazing, which is a tribute to the legendary Doug Trumbull and his effects colleagues but also to Ridley Scott too, a director who has a real flair for visuals. The film, like another now-classic, Citizen Kane, wasn't a commercial success when first released, but (again like Citizen Kane) has gone on to gather a cult audience, critical plaudits and inspire generations of later artists.

For visualising a future cityscape it has to be up there with Lang's Metropolis; both also owe much to photographs and film of New York in the early 20th century (imaginary cities and the real meeting, but then all 'real' cities are also partially imaginary, made up as much of our memories and dreams as they are what our eyes take in). The themes (very Philip K Dick, appropriately) of alienation, individuality, identity and what it is to be human and what is real and what is dream add to the lush imagery. No wonder it is still one of my personal top ten movies of all time.



Some great visualisations or descriptions of imaginary urban spaces: Blade Runner, Metropolis, Carlos Ezquerra's concepts for Mega City one in the original Judge Dredd back in '77, Otomo's Akira, Bill Gibson's Sprawl (see Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive), Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris (see City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: an Afterword), Alex Proyas Dark City, Kafka's work, Borges, Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan... I'm sure you can all suggest other good examples from books, movies and comics or any other artforms. A final bit of movie-comics trivia, Ridley cites the legendary comics artist Moebius' Long Tomorrow graphic novel from the mid 70s as a key reference for Blade Runner's visual look. The graphic novel was written by a young Dan O'Bannon, who would later write Alien, which Ridley would direct (one of his first big successes); Dan would later adapt another Philip K Dick tale, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale for the film Total Recall. I'm sure I could add more here, but it's time for Heroes :-)

Singin' in the rain

TCM is screening Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds in the classic 1952 musical Singin' in the Rain and for a couple of hours I just sit there with a big grin on my face and a strange look from the cats as I give in to the urge to sing and dance along. Generally speaking I don't care for musicals and never have, but I have a soft spot for Gene Kelly because he's just such an incredible dancer (he also buries the stereotype of a male dancer as effeminate, clearly strongly built, well muscled and fit, as many dancers have to be - it isn't for weaklings!) in general (the dance around the fountain in An American In Paris is another amazing scene by Kelly) and for this movie in particular. Much as I generally find musicals annoying and trite I simply can't dislike Singin' in the Rain; it is one of those films which transcends all genre barriers, probably why it has become embedded in popular culture for half a century.



And then there is that scene, the titular song, a smiling Gene Kelly in the pouring rain dancing because he is in love and even raindrops and puddles seem beautiful. Its exuberant and a classic movie marriage of song and dance that never fails to make me happy. It is a scene that is what I normally refer to as a Triple M - Magical Movie Moment. That's the scene which , regardless of the rest of the film, the genre, the period, simply works to transport you for a few moments to an utterly spellbound world. Singin' in the Rain has it, the duel in verse in Cyrano de Bergerac has it, the opening scenes to Blade Runner and the original Star Wars have it, the Big Blue is littered with underwater scenes which do it, A Matter of Life and Death and the Red Shoes are similarly replete with scenes which take me to another world, while a few movies like Casablanca, Amelie and the Wizard of Oz are almost entirely full of such Triple M scenes.

Every time the crowd in Rick's Cafe Americain sings the Marseilles in the face of the Nazi troops I want to stand and sing - I'm there in that moment. Dorothy and her friends dancing down the Yellow Brick Road? I want to tap along to them. Singin' in the Rain? Yes, I have a few times, actually - pouring down, brolly in hand, you can either get infuriated at being drenched or you can think, sod it, smile and start whistling that tune. I know which I prefer to do and I'm pretty sure its better for me from a psychological point of view (even if it gets me odd looks, but to hell with those folks!).



And if it makes you happy and puts a grin on your lips then who cares what anyone else thinks - let the stormy clouds chase them all from the place - I've got a great big smile on my face. Of course, its even better in the cinema; the lights go down, an enclosed dark space full of people in a shadowy, enchanted theatre of fantastic delights, the glowing screen and one of those movies with one of those scenes, pure and magnificent Magical Movie Moment, they just make life so much better...

"Doo-dloo-doo-doo-doo
Doo-dloo-doo-doo-doo-doo
Doo-dloo-doo-doo-doo-doo
Doo-dloo-doo-doo-doo-doo...

I'm singing in the rain
Just singing in the rain
What a glorious feelin'
I'm happy again
I'm laughing at clouds
So dark up above
The sun's in my heart
And I'm ready for love

Let the stormy clouds chase
Everyone from the place
Come on with the rain
I've a smile on my face
I walk down the lane
With a happy refrain
Just singin',
Singin' in the rain
Dancin' in the rain

Dee-ah dee-ah dee-ah
Dee-ah dee-ah dee-ah
I'm happy again!
I'm singin' and dancin' in the rain!

I'm dancin' and singin' in the rain..."

Web-slinging

After all the hype and PR frenzy around the world Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 finally hit the cinemas this weekend, and off we went to a packed theatre to catch it. Two major villains this time (three if you count some bits with Harry Osborn's son of the Green Goblin), more personal and romantic trouble for Peter Parker (including a rather awful Emo look which makes him appear like a reject from My Chemical Romance) and the introduction of Gwen and Captain Stacey - if you aren't familiar with the comics that might not mean much to you, but they are (especially Gwen), very important characters from the comics. Shame then, that they were barely used, making me wonder why all the hype to excited fanboys about her appearance...

The film itself was very disappointing - far too 'busy' as my mate remarked, like they were thinking, must outdo the first two movies, pack more in regardless of the effect on the story. Don't get me wrong, it isn't a bad film; if it were the first Spidey movie you had seen you'd probably enjoy it more, but it lacks some solid direction, has too much squeezed into it for no reason other than trying to make it look 'wow' (which rarely works if it makes the story suffer) while the emotional arc was just a tiny bit tedious this time, unlike the previous movies. It is still worth seeing though - there are some great scenes there, the Sandman is well done, Venom looks just like he should from the comics (but as with Gwen, not used properly) and I liked the humanised version of Flint Marko, a petty hoodlum, but one driven to crime because he is desperate to find money for treatment for his ill daughter.



And the usual brace of cameos from Ted Raimi, Bruce Campbell (as a brilliant French maitre'd from the Clueso school) and, of course, Stan the Man Lee. Enjoyable Saturday night movie, not brilliant but not bad, suffering mostly by comparison with the first two since we know they can do better than this. Here's hoping Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is better (what is it with 'part 3's in movies this year?) - the second one was rather by the numbers and lacking heart, made me think of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark; bigger budget, the right set pieces and cast (apart from the female lead) but it lacked heart and felt like blockbuster by the numbers. Here's hoping Pirates 3 is more Last Crusade then, so I can enjoy some damned fine swashbuckling.