A Riposte to Lovely Bones Praise
There is plenty of criticism to fling at the article written on The Quietus this week by Josh Saco seemingly in defence of Peter Jackson, currently drowining under a flood of criticism for his The Lovely Bones adaptation. Just for the purpose of keeping this simple, I’ll concentrate on the assertions made about the film itself and its place in Jackson’s body of work.
“In The Lovely Bones he plays out his darkest, most macabre, and most mature film to date, exploring the afterlife and life in ways he never has before.”
I would agree that Jackson definitely explores the afterlife in ways he, indeed no one, has done before. Jackson’s CGI-rendered afterlife, or ‘In-Between’, involves shifting landscapes of mountains, perfect green grass and glistening bodies of water. The CGI (and I realise how much I have marked myself out as a luddite-misanthrope as regards this technology) is unbelievably poor for the man behind the creation of Golem. There are moments in which it resembles a PS1-era edition of Final Fantasy, while the man appears pathologically intent on using effects work even when simply having a camera move through a window. Not a spectacular, otherworldly window, just a basic window which could have been built without even one computer in the room.
Let the Oscar Buzz Begineth!!
As we are prone to do, it feels like to kick-off the Oscar buzz season as awards from major film festivals begin to roll in and the ceremony approaches. I realise that this may feel like the kind of wishing-life-away feeling that it given as you walk into shops in mid-September and see Christmas stock out all over the place, but these will get more frequent as we get closer and can begin to actually predict what could win. This is more to provide an interesting gauge of how buzz works, how it changes and how wrong we could well end up being by the time the awards come around.
So, just for the big few categories, here’s what seems like it’s going to cause a stir this year: Continue reading →
The Lovely Bones Photo
Empire has a photo from Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the acclaimed The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. The picture is purportedly part of the afterlife vision created for the film by Jackson, an exciting prospect in itself for the potential that it may well be a visual feast.
Check out the picture below and in full size on Empire’s site.
The Lovely Bones from Empire
The Hobbit Trilogy?
Reports have emerged through a fan site (courtesy of Cinematical) that Guillermo Del Toro’s already epic two-part adaptation of The Hobbit could be expanding into trilogy form. The reports suggest the only issue behind his becoming a reality are the contracts held by Del Toro and Peter Jackson, as both would need extending and, subsequently, would impact on future scheduling.
I’m absolutely a massive fan of Del Toro, so anything which indicates he will be making more films is entirely welcome to me. But it worries me a little that so much of his precious time will be taken up making yet more Tolkien-related projects.
Personally, I’m a much bigger fan of The Hobbit than the original books, so this film generally gives me a significantly larger amount of excitement that those original three did. But he has so many projects left to do yet. Among them, and most exciting to me, would be 3993, the final part of his Spanish trilogy alongside Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth.
I realise what a brilliant filmmaker he is, but the majority of his truly incredible work has been Spanish language, topped off by his masterwork in Pan’s Labyrinth. The Hobbit is very likely to change that, but I would really like to see him take on his own worlds again.
Producer John: Dune Beats Watchmen As Greatest Failure
As the shy and retiring producer of The Movie Overdose it’s my job to get Sam and Tom together in the same room and record their thoughts and opinions on the world of cinema. More often than not I’m quite content to sit back and bask in the velvet tones of your two magnificent hosts, piping up every so often with a terrible and almost entirely inaudible contribution from the back of the room.
So consider this my slightly more audible response to a section of episode 10 wherein Sam and Tom discussed whether Watchmen was a failure, in particular, the “unfilmable” aspect of the source material. Now I still haven’t seen Watchmen myself, despite paying £25 for a special screening and sitting through the entire film with no visibility and atrociously painful seating arrangements. So utterly awful was my experience with that movie that despite the fact that all the cinema auditorium elements were present: a screen, a chair and myself, I still feel as though I haven’t watched it. Why write an article then? Well my overall impression of the film despite these conditions was positive and as a huge fan of Alan Moore’s work I think I can say it was a success to a degree. For those in the know it’s completely fair to say the book is inherently unfilmable but yet Zack Snyder did it. The structure of the narrative arc, the ensemble cast and heavy message all add up to this sprawling masterpiece which even to try and successfully film just one aspect of the book, the filmmaker runs the risk of massacring the entire book and incurring the wrath of countless die-hard comic fans.
Read on for the rest of this scintillating opinion piece.
Alternatives to the EW Twenty-Five Directors
Entertainment Weekly recently posted a list of the top twenty-five active film directors. These lists will forever cause disagreement and controversy but some of the inclusions, and subsequent exclusions, on this list are pretty unforgivable. Even if you don’t find it too irratating, as a film fan and blogger I feel it only necessary to present some arguments both against the inclusion of some and against the exclusion of others while I would also like to take some time to argue for the inclusion of a few that I think may brook argument elsewhere.
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