The Mediatwin Blog

It's now only a matter of days until PROMETHEUS arrives in UK cinemas. This is clearly a big deal - director Ridley Scott returning to the SF genre with - what? a prequel? - to his influential 1979 hit ALIEN. The various trailers, viral videos, publicity photos- all have played their part in making PROMETHEUS this summer's arguably most anticipated movie event.

Even though it's now a sobering 33 years ago, I have vivid memories of ALIEN's original release. My first exposure to it was in the THINGS TO COME column of Starburst magazine. In it's May '78 issue, it made brief mention of a recently greenlighted "thriller-horror set in space". It was being financed by Twentieth Century-Fox, newly flush with STAR WARS dollars. The story was the brainchild of Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. Directorial reins were being handed over to Ridley Scott, then hot off the critically acclaimed DUELLISTS. 

Over time, more information began to emerge. The high-calibre cast - Ian Holm, John Hurt, Yaphet Kotto - as well as the then-unknown Sigourney Weaver. The involvement of top conceptual artists such as Moebius, Ron Cobb...and H R Giger, whose nightmarish visions ensured a truly alien ALIEN. Then there was that trailer.

The film was finally released in May 1979 to tremendous critical acclaim and US box-office success. However - as was often the case back then - we had to wait another six months before ALIEN terrified UK cinema audiences..

With an 'X' certificate.

The 'X' certificate was the predecessor to today's '18' classification - nobody under that age to be admitted. As I was 14, this was devastating, heartstopping news. I had read Alan Dean Foster's novelisation repeatedly during the summer, so much so that the spine of the book had broken. I had pored over every illustrated frame of the striking graphic novel. I knew that I had to see this film...by any means necessary. I didn't rate my chances in running the gauntlet of eagle-eyed cinema staff alone, so I roped in an accomplice to get me into a screening...my dad.

Cut to a wet Saturday night, November '79 - father and son patiently queuing in the long, dark alley that ran alongside the Gaumont cinema. This was before the modern luxury of pre-booking your seats online - back then, it was first come, first served. Queuing for cinematic blockbusters was a regrettable, uncomfortable part of the process and you had to factor in an hour's waiting in line to ensure you got a seat. Fortunately, we had arrived in good time, were pretty close to the front of the queue...and I was sick with worry.

Then the doors opened and the orderly crowd surged forward. Dad went to the box-office, whilst I hung back, trying to look four years older. The foyer was packed. With tickets in hand, we went up the short flight of stairs to Gaumont 2 to gain admission. This was the last barrier - the only thing standing between me and Mr Scott's magnum opus...

As it turned out, there was really nothing to worry about. The elderly usher barely gave me a glance, quickly tearing my ticket in half and moving onto the next patron. We stepped inside. The old Gaumont 2 auditorium was huge, easily able to accomodate a thousand-strong audience. The massive screen was hidden behind thick, velvet curtains. These drapes would part to show a short film, adverts and trailers - then sweep back into place for a split-second, before opening once more, as a BBFC certificate heralded the start of the movie. For the first time in my life, I saw the scarlet-coded certificate, announcing that this particular film had been passed as 'X'.

Finally, after months of anticipation, I was going to see ALIEN.

The film didn't disappoint. The audience - largely unaware of what would unfold onscreen- held their collective breath - and screamed - in all the right places. Dad loved the film. And although I was acutely familiar with every character, every scene, every line of dialogue before I had sat down in my seat, I was carried along by the movie like everyone else.

It remains one of my most memorable filmgoing experiences. Sadly, it's not one I can replicate with PROMETHEUS - in 1989, Gaumont 2 was carved up into four smaller screens. However, my expectations are running high and nothing I've seen in the run-up to its release has dampened my enthusiasm.

Not mine - nor that of my inner 14-year-old self...

Over at the Super Deluxe Edition website, there’s a fascinating interview with music producer Stephen Street about the upcoming reissue of VIVA HATE - Morrissey’s classic debut solo album. Street has been remastering the album for the reissue but in the interview, he notes that it’s now not the same version as released back in 1988. For reasons known only to himself, Morrissey has taken the shears to one track (LATE NIGHT, MAUDLIN STREET), considerably editing it down in length by omitting the atmospheric intro and outro. He’s also dropped another song (THE ORDINARY BOYS) from the track list completely, replacing it with a four-track demo of TREAT ME LIKE A HUMAN BEING. “I’m not happy about [this],” says Street, “But then again, what can I do? It’s not my album - it’s his.”

Morrissey isn’t alone in revisiting and re-editing his creative past. In one of his excellent Cinefex magazine retrospectives, Graham Edwards makes passing reference to George Lucas’ obsessive and ongoing tinkering with the STAR WARS series. “I’m going to stick my head above the parapet and say I’m on George’s side.” he writes, “Do I agree with all the changes he’s made? Of course not. Do I defend his right to make them? Absolutely.”

If only George had restricted himself to making changes on films he personally had directed. For subsequent theatrical and home video releases, Lucas has messed around with both THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RETURN OF THE JEDI - neither film, remember, crediting him as director. Fiddling around with movies is nothing new to Lucas - both THX-1138 and AMERICAN GRAFFITI had CGI-assisted facelifts for their debuts on DVD. In fact, it goes back as far as the ’81 theatrical reissue of STAR WARS. Back then, it was just an innocuous subtitle - “Episode IV - A New Hope” - added to the opening crawl. Since then, however, the changes have been far more significant - from Jabba The Hutt’s house band changing both personnel and song, to the more controversial subjects of Greedo shooting first and actors being digitally replaced.

Frustratingly, Lucas’ peers in the film world have shown him how it can - and should - be done. Steven Spielberg made a huge number of changes to the reissues of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and E.T. - but ensured the original cuts were available for purchase alongside them. As well as Ridley Scott’s ’07 “Final Cut”, BLADE RUNNER can be seen in no less than four other different versions on Blu-ray and DVD - including the ’82 theatrical cut. James Cameron routinely re-edits and extends his films for home viewing but the theatrical cuts are still kept in print.

The issue here isn’t actually Morrissey’s or Lucas’ desire to revise their works - they’re perfectly entitled to do that. What rankles is that these new versions will soon become the only ones available. Both the original ’88 CD release and the ’97 expanded versions of VIVA HATE are now out of print, destined to be replaced by the upcoming remaster. If you want to see what STAR WARS looked like before the ’97 “Special Editions”, then you’ll need to be quick. Lucas grudgingly released unremastered, non-anamorphic copies of the original trilogy films on DVD a few years ago and the clock is counting down on their availability.

For better or worse, a line is crossed when the work is made available to the public. Whether it’s STAR WARS in ’77 or VIVA HATE in ’88, there’s an incarnation of the film or CD - or any kind of creative work, in fact - that people get emotionally attached to. I personally dislike imagining a butchered version of LATE NIGHT, MAUDLIN STREET being the de facto standard in the future or Han Solo never again shooting Greedo first. I’m not advocating that an artist should slavishly follow their audience’s wishes but respecting their admiration for a released version should always be taken into account.

At the heart of this is the eternal dilemma of the artist - at what point do you stop? Leonardo Da Vinci said “art is never finished, only abandoned”. The temptation to keep on fiddling, trying to further improve work already ostensibly completed is understandable. The reasons behind Morrissey messing around with VIVA HATE’s track listing aren’t known and probably never will be. Lucas, however, has defended his position by saying “my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.”. Will he ever be completely satisfied? It’s highly unlikely - a retrofitted 3D conversion of Episode IV has already been announced, although the disappointing box-office returns of THE PHANTOM MENACE in 3D may result in the project being scuppered.

Ironically, the final word on the subject goes to George Lucas himself. Back in 1988, he testified to Congress about the then growing threat of colorisation - classic black & white films being transformed by computer into limp colour. “In the future, it will become even easier for old [film] negatives to become lost and be “replaced” by new altered negatives.” he stated, “This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten”.

Quite right, George. Now how about putting your money where your mouth is and restoring the Original Trilogy to its former glories?

So - that's that. The nominations for the 84th Academy Awards have finally been announced.

I'll leave it to the professionals to wade through the rights and wrongs of the various categories - but I have a few thoughts though...

Hugely disappointed that MELANCHOLIA - one of my favourites from last year - didn't get nominated at all. Hell, even REAL STEEL and KUNG FU PANDA 2 snagged one mention apiece. DRIVE, a very impressive flick, managed to grab just a solitary nom...for sound editing. What about Albert Brooks' superb performance in that movie...or Ryan Gosling's? Trent Reznor's excellent score for THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO? Zip.

But that's the way it goes. Some you win, some you lose...most you never even get a nomination for. By the way, it was curious that Spielberg was denied a Best Director nom for WAR HORSE. I'm not a huge fan of the film but the Academy traditionally falls for Steven in this category.

Bright spots: good to see Academy love for Terrance Malick. Rooney Mara getting nominated for her sterling work in DRAGON TATTOO. RANGO's nod in the Best Animated Film category. 

I'll do proper predictions closer to the time but I suspect that, come the night of February 26th, THE ARTIST will clean up. It's a good film and its retro celebration of silent movies will undoubtedly strike a chord with the Academy's voters.

And talking of looking back and the Oscars...

A tender story of boy meets horse, boy loses horse, as his steed is despatched to France for service during the First World War. Steven Spielberg directing a screenplay co-written by Richard Curtis - itself adapted from Michael Morpurgo’s hugely successful children’s book and stage play. A cast showcasing some of the finest British acting talent around today.

So - er - why the long face?

Regrettably, the blame for WAR HORSE not being as effective as it could have been lies squarely with Spielberg and his directorial choices. The first third of the film, set in a pre-war farming village, sinks under a thick Hollywood glaze - Devon, as if recreated on a Hollywood backlot . No pastoral cliche is left unploughed, as Joey the foal gambols under Technicolor GONE WITH THE WIND skies to the cloying sounds of John Williams’ over-lush score.

Fortunately, the film does improve once Joey the horse is transported across the Channel and thrust into the nightmares of battle. There’s a welcome return of Spielberg’s grittier side, as the horrors of the First World War are superbly realised. One sequence - set in a battlefield’s No Man’s Land and bringing together two soldiers from different sides of the conflict - is dramatically stripped to the bone, tautly directed and is arguably the highlight of the film.

Steven Spielberg has proved himself at knowing - most of the time - exactly how to handle his audience. Whether it’s Indiana Jones chasing after Nazis, cute aliens promising “I’ll be right here” or sharks terrorising summer towns, he has masterfully demonstrated that he knows exactly which buttons he needs to push . Here, however, his manipulative tricks are clumsy and obvious. It’s the same kind of wrong-handed approach he brought to THE COLOR PURPLE and ALWAYS - suffocating the film under unnecessarily glossy visuals. At times, it feels more like somebody trying to imitate his style, rather than Spielberg himself.

Tellingly, as a contender for Oscar glory, WAR HORSE has gone from morning line favourite a few months ago to extreme long-shot. I suspect Spielberg’s next film - a biography of Abraham Lincoln - will prove more to the Academy’s taste. Still, let’s not be uncharitable - WAR HORSE isn’t a bad film and hardly destined for the knacker’s yard. It’s just that, with such a high pedigree of talent before and behind the camera, you’d expect more than what’s been trotted out.

With the COMING ATTRACTIONS feature, I like to showcase the very best in movie trailers past and present.

This time around - well - not so much.

The announcement this week of SKYFALL, the new James Bond film, prompted this rather self-indulgent entry. Now, MOONRAKER isn't often to be found at the top of those "best Bond movies" lists. In fact, it's often cited as the worst 007 film (to which I say - have you never seen A VIEW TO A KILL?). Curiously, it wasn't meant to be the 11th Bond movie. At the end of its credits, its predecessor, THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, promised that 007 would return in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. The success of a little film called STAR WARS prompted a rapid change in direction and soon EON Productions was jumping on the cantina band wagon and launching the star of the franchise skyward.

The teaser trailer for MOONRAKER was a neat parody of commercials. For years, it remained frustratingly hard to find but has recently surfaced again on YouTube. The quality isn't great but you'll get the idea:

Immediately prior to the film's release, the official trailer was launched. Clearly, all the imaginative effort was used up on the teaser. This version takes the lazy option: want to see MOONRAKER but only have four minutes to spare? Then just watch this trailer - it's a compression of the film with the talky bits taken out. Hardly a shining example of how to craft a trailer but from the opening shot of a space shuttle scored with Brazilian beats, it's undeniably exciting:

As a 14 year old kid in 1979, this trailer ticked all the boxes for me. OO7? Check. Outer space? Check. Big action setpieces? Check. Good-looking girls in short skirts? Where do I buy my ticket? Thirty-odd years on, I've become more critical and can see the many flaws in MOONRAKER. Then again, I'll argue there's a lot to still enjoy in the movie. There are Ken Adams' brilliantly OTT sets, Derek Meddings' crisp special effects and John Barry's atmospheric score.

And through the refractive haze of nostalgia, I can even forgive MOONRAKER most of its weaknesses. Just not the Shirley Bassey theme song.

A predictably star-studded press conference today finally heralded the return of James Bond to Her Majesty's cinematic service. And it now has a proper name: goodbye "Bond 23", hello SKYFALL.

There's been a prodigious amount of first-rate talent hired both in front and behind the camera for this next instalment. Daniel Craig returns to the fray as Bond, as does Dame Judi Dench as M. New blood includes Naomie Harris as a fellow spy and Bérénice Marlohe as Severin, an "enigmatic yet glamourous" character. The big new additions to the cast are Javier Bardem, Albert Finney and Ralph Fiennes.

It's hotly rumoured that main villain Bardem will be portraying arch-nemesis Blofeld, after a legally-enforced absence from the series of some thirty years. At the press conference, producers Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli made reference to three former Bond characters making a surprise return. It's a good bet that two will be Moneypenny and Q - could Blofeld be the third? Just to add some credibility to the rumour, director Sam Mendes was quick to stress that SKYFALL would not be connected in any way to either CASINO ROYALE or QUANTUM OF SOLACE. So that means criminal organisation Quantum won't be reappearing...leaving a conveniently SPECTRE-shaped gap to fill.

So far, so good, so SKYFALL. Or is that SKYFAIL? Or SKIFFLE? It's not a strong title for the film, sounding more like a bad SF book.The Bond films have been blessed with many great titles - FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, LIVE AND LET DIE...Even the otherwise wretched QUANTUM OF SOLACE had Ian Fleming DNA in its name, the title coming from one of his 007 short stories. SKYFALL rather lets the side down.

Another anouncement that was made but overlooked is that Roger Deakins is the film's director of photography. Deakins is arguably the world's best DoP, with nine Oscar nominations under his belt. He's the Coen Brothers' first choice for photography and has worked twice before with Mendes. If nothing else, SKYFALL is going to look terrific.

A promising start, then, to the next Bond epic. The film gets released late October 2012 in the UK, early November in the US. 

It's unusual for a movie to have a custom-filmed trailer made for it; it's even rarer for it to get the honour of having two. Then again, 1941 is no ordinary film.

Back in the late '70s, director Steven Spielberg was hot property, having just directed two successive blockbusters in Jaws and Close Encounters. The cast boasted several rising comedy stars, such as Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and John Candy. And in another unusual move, two studios - Universal and Columbia - joined forces to make the multi-million dollar action comedy.

The first of 1941's custom trailers came out well in advance of its release - a year before, during the Christmas of 1978. It's so premature, they even had time to change the name of Belushi's character to what he says it is in the trailer (it's Capt Wild Bill Kelso in the finished film):

As well as brief footage from the movie and some of Williams' score, the second teaser also made use of the production's model shop skills, with the film's title tearing up through a miniature Los Angeles cityscape:

This image of a camera dolly towards a nighttime California city is something of a Spielberg trademark, with similar shots appearing in both Close Encounters and, particularly, E.T. 

Whilst it's fair to say the resulting movie isn't exactly a career highlight for Spielberg , it's not a complete dud either. The miniature work is spectacular, there's a beautifully choreographed jitterbug setpiece and John Williams contributes a rousing score. It's also wrong, as many critics have, to call 1941 a financial flop - whilst the film didn't rack up huge box-office numbers as expected, it did end up turning a small profit for the studios. 

I'd recommend searching out the film on DVD, if only for the extensive and surprisingly candid "making of" documentary.

The 1980 film version of Clive Cussler's best-selling novel Raise The Titanic fails for many reasons - the weak script, the lacklustre direction, the lifeless acting. Despite its failings, I've always had a fascination with the huge model liner they built for the climactic sequence where the Titanic breaks through the surface of the ocean like a rocket.

Water (along with fire) has always been the perennial enemy of miniature special effects. It refuses to reduce in scale with the model, so no matter how finely detailed the miniature is, the realism of the sequence is undermined by the water. One way to address the problem is to build as big a miniature as you can afford - this was the route taken by the special effects team on Raise The Atlantic, which had a suitably blockbuster budget. They created a massive 55 foot replica of the original liner, with a slavish attention to detail that pushed the cost of construction to more than $3m over the price of the original (and full-sized) ship. It was then installed in a specially built 350 ft wide by 35 ft deep water tank in Malta, at a cost of an additional $2m.

(download)

Click here to download:

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The shots of it emerging from the north Atlantic in the finished film are very impressive, although the "scale of water" problem still wasn't successfully defeated. The film itself had a disasterous showing at the global box-office, making far less than the budget spent on making it. The model was subsequently used in a couple of other productions but now lies derelict at the studio facility in Malta, rusted and broken beyond repair. The water tank itself has proved far more durable and is frequently used as a location and for special effects work by films, TV shows and commercials.

(download)

Click here to download:

the-titanic-model-pmkInGJIigucAbEhfgBo.zip (99 KB)

If you happen to be a fan of Raise The Titanic, you could do worse than visit this YouTube channel, which has a wealth of videos about nearly every aspect of the making of the film.

It's June '79 in a small Ohio town. School's out and the summer holiday stretches ahead. A group of young filmmakers are working hard on completing their magnum opus - an ambitious zombie movie, shot on the eponymous super 8mm. Whilst doing a late night shoot, they - and crucially, their camera - witness a catastrophic train wreck. Soon the area is swarming with military types, packing the latest in hi-tech hardware and assuring the locals that, hey - everything's fine, it's just a standard clean-up operation. Hardly standard - something very important to the military was on that train and it's gone missing. That something is an alien, discovered in a crashed spaceship, and now free to prowl the nighttime streets of the town, frantically searching for the components it needs to rebuild his ship.

SUPER 8 starts promisingly. The young cast are great (particularly Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning) and their clunky attempts at making a homebrew horror epic are comically, yet affectionately portrayed. SUPER 8 is in 2D (hurrah!), plus it's one of those rare animals this summer - a movie that isn't a sequel or a gross-out comedy or a superhero adventure. 

It's just a shame that after an entertaining first half hour, things start to go off the rails around the time the train does. The dual storylines that follow - "coming of age in smalltown America" and "alien nasty on the loose" - don't sit easily with each other. The teenagers' storyline would have made a great film by itself and really didn't need the crowbarred introduction of an evil ET into the mix. 

Talking of ETs, writer/director J J Abrams works hard at crafting SUPER 8 as a cinematic valentine to Steven Spielberg (who also acts as executive producer on the flick). All those Spielberg trademarks - smalltown milieu to dollying camera to extreme backlighting - are present and correct. The trap that Abrams falls into, however, is the same one descended into by Bryan Singer with SUPERMAN RETURNS. Abrams rapidly moves beyond SUPER 8 being just a homage to Steve, with scenes not lightly referencing but virtually restaging those by The Bearded One. It's cinematic karaoke - superficially enjoyable, yes, but ultimately unsatisfying. With MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3 and STAR TREK, Abrams proved that he could identify the key elements from a previous work and produce something unique from them. Not so here. Abrams appears to be too close to the original material, too enamoured with the Spielberg back catalogue to create anything different from it.

(As a separate point, the placing of the film in the summer of 1979 is an interesting choice. At that time, Spielberg was riding high off his back-to-back blockbusters JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, plus there was the critical acclaim awarded to DUEL and SUGARLAND EXPRESS. His next film - 1941, released later in '79 - was torn apart by the critics and flopped at the box-office. The golden boy was considered not to be as infalliable as previously thought. Of course, he rose to new heights of acclaim and box-office success later.)    

Anyway, let me be clear on one thing - SUPER 8 may be heavily flawed but it's still a cut above recent cinematic blockbusters like PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 4 or TRANSFORMERS 3. Although the characters are not as developed as they should have been, you do find yourself caring about what will happen to them. The climax - which regrettably goes down the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS/ET route, when it should have done a JAWS - does at least have a very effective and emotional kick at one point, which whilst not completely salvaging the ending, does go a little way towards redeeming it.

A final point - be patient and wait a minute into the end credits. There's a bonus sequence that's well worth staying around for.

SUPER 8 has a 12A certificate and opens across the UK this Friday.