The Mediatwin Blog

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.

Ah, Christmas. The perfect time to break out those seasonal classics - IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, SCROOGE - as well as some more...unusual choices.

For me, this is the best time of year to settle down and watch THE SHINING. The wintry light and chill outside is the perfect accompaniment to director Stanley Kubrick's magnum opus. I'd go so far as to say that, in my opinion, THE SHINING is one of the horror film greats. Not so much for "jump scares" - although it has a couple - but the vice-like grip it holds you in, from opening to closing credits. Even author Stephen King - who wrote the original book and has famously derided the film as a weak adaptation - admits that his first viewing of the film was "dreadfully unsettling." 

For audiences in 1980, the first glimpse of footage from the film was in the trailer:

Even after thirty plus years of viewings, it's still an incredibly powerful image - made all the more eerie by the atonal music playing underneath. It would have been very easy to turn this trailer into a traditional "jump scare"; the "blood flood" could have gushed forth at standard speed, with acompanying loud sound effects as it washes the furniture around the screen. Kubrick's more restrained approach in doing the complete opposite makes for a far more disturbing sequence.

This was the third (and final) take of the "blood from the lift" sequence - Kubrick was concerned on the first two that the liquid "didn't look enough like blood." Due to the logistics of resetting the scene, it took nine days each time to flush the set of the splashed "blood" and clean it up to Kubrick's satisfaction. 

For fans of the film, I'd recommend seeing this promotional film made to advertise More4's 2008 "Stanley Kubrick Season". The breadth and accuracy of detail is astonishing and repays multiple views:

Finally - and on a lighter note - there's this classic fan trailer:

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.

From the start, The Black Hole was designed to be a game-changer for Disney. The ripples from the splash Star Wars had made at the box-office reached the boardroom in Sleeping Beauty's castle and the Disney executives were determined to get in on the action. With actors Maximilian Schell, Anthony Perkins and Robert Forster onboard, The Black Hole had a far from traditional Disneyesque cast. Disney had such faith in the film's potential that it put it in direct competition with the highly-anticipated Star Trek -The Motion Picture, which was opening at the same time - Christmas 1979.

For the music, they turned to a seasoned professional. John Barry had already gone into space that year with his score for Moonraker; the music he composed for The Black Hole is even better. It begins with the anthemic "Overture", played before the opening credits, like the old roadshow presentations. We then go into the sweeping, circling "Main Title", with Barry's trademark strings in full effect:

This tone is kept through the score - there are no "cute" themes for the robots, none of the chirpy melodies that would have usually been expected in a Disney release. It's powerful, stirring music, often raising the film from the numerous stumbling blocks of its plot and script.

Full disclosure: The Black Hole was the first film soundtrack I ever owned. By the time I was given the album as a Christmas present, I had already seen the film a couple of times. Thanks to continuous performances and the unallocated cinema seating of those days, I was able to duck down and sit through an additional performance, seeing in twice in one afternoon. From these viewings,I soon realised its faults - those stupid Mickey Mouse-eyed robots, the often risible dialogue and a climax that wanted to be Kubrickian in scope and meaning but failing completely. I also knew what was good about it - the production design, the special effects, Maximilian the robot... and the music.

With the sad passing of John Barry earlier this year, releasing one of his most-requested film works is only fitting. It's particularly welcome that his score for The Black Hole has been given such a respectful and thorough presentation. 

The Black Hole soundtrack is a Walt Disney Records/Intrada release and can be ordered from the US here.

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)

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the-titanic-model-aqifrxqioGxlhbDGnHHu.zip (127 KB)

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.