Review: 300

So the IFF Surprise Film was 300. Not that much of a surprise. The queue was a bigger surprise - jesus, I’ve never seen anything like that. Even the premiere of the Lord of the Rings movies had shorter queues.

Anyway, 300 completely floored me. It’s a love song to graphic violence and romantic heroism, told with the most stylish visuals this side of Sin City. The movie suffers from more than a few jerky moments with a lot of the dialogue falling apart as hammy and unconvincing, but I personally found that these were mostly in the parts where the screenwriters actually tried to by historically accurate (“Return with your shield, or on it” being the most obvious). The political sub-plot had real trouble hiding the fact that it existed only as ‘filler’ and illicited an inappropriate titter from the audience, which only highlighted its awkwardness.

But who cares about all this? This movie is about the action sequences and these are what make the movie stand out. Probably not the most epic battles ever filmed, but definitely the most beautiful and balletic. The fact that this was filmed in a warehouse means we never see more than a handful of ‘real’ people on screen at any one time but the director works this to his favour, giving each individual skirmish an intimacy that would be otherwise lost.

Tremendous stuff. Gives me high hopes for what Zack Snyder can bring to Watchmen.

Review: The Fountain

Have you ever had a movie finish and end credits roll, with the entire audience sitting back in stunned silence? Maybe it’s just the type of film I tend to go see, but this has only happened to me a handful of times. The Fountain being one of them.

The Fountain is a love story. Rather, it’s three love stories, told across a thousand years. In the past, a conquistador searches for the tree of life to save his beloved Queen. In the present, a doctor searches for the cure for cancer to save his beloved wife. In the future… well… a guy travels with his tree, in a bubble, to a dying star wrapped in a nebula.

Hey - noone ever said this would be easy.

Arthouse blockbuster or blockbuster arthouse? Either way, this is not a welcoming film. At times, the ambitious storytelling threatens to derail the entire production, and the more cynical among us would almost certainly have trouble giving this film the room it needs to breathe. But for the more persistent, there’s a great reward - something completely and defiantly unique. A sci-fi movie with a very human heart. A film that can leave an entire audience breathless.

I would say this is as close to unmissable as any movie I can think of.

Jameson Dublin International Film Festival - Update

Back at the start of February, I was talking about the films I was looking forward to at the Dublin International Film Festival. Talking about the surprise film, I said

A tenner says that this will be Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain

Well, I was wrong. Sorta. Shortly before the festival began, I got an email to say that the showing of Sunshine was cancelled and they would be showing The Fountain in its place.

So instead, the surprise movie was…

300

Yeah, it wasn’t the cleverest movie shown at the festival, but personally, I couldn’t have been happier. I’m a huge fan of the comic, and of Frank Miller in general, and this was the most beautiful adaptation of his work so far.

Fast Food Nation

For his dramatization of Eric Schlosser’s tell-all expose of the Fast Food industry, Richard Linklater chose to focus on just two points from the book.

1. The meat packing industry is ruthlessly exploitative.
2. There is shit in the meat.

lthough they’re both very important points, they are stretched past breaking point across a two-hour movie. This means, worryingly, that by the fifth time someone on screen has repeated “there’s shit in the meat”, it’s lost all of its emotional impact.

And though there is a token discussion of the morality of the fast-food lifestyle (courtesy of a brief appearance by Ethan Hawke), this thinly-veiled sermon is so naive as to be offensive.

Heavy-handed and overwrought. I wonder if a documentary might have been the better option for this material?

Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Advertising in videogames isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In games set in a ‘realistic’ universe, it can add an extra element of realism. Except when there’s just one product being advertised. For example, Rainbow Six Vegas - are you trying to tell me that only ads on the main strip in Las Vegas are for Axe Deoderant?

Well, that’s what it’s like in Dublin this morning. Overnight, virtually every advertising space seems to have been taken over by ads for the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, which ’launched’ last night.

There’s a complete list of the movies on their website. Here’s the ones I’d be interested in seeing:

This is England

Shane Meadow’s previous film, Dead Man’s Shoes absolutely blew my socks off. Can’t wait to see what he does with this story of a gang of skinheads in the 80s.

Half Nelson

Y’know… I might take some shit for this, but I really enjoyed The Notebook. It was cheesy and soppy but it had James Garner bawling his eyes out, so I figure it’s okay. And Ryan Gosling was pretty good as the lead. And with an oscar nod for his performance in this, I’d say it’s worth checking out.

The Dreamers

Eva Green in the nip.

Once

This Irish movie did really well in Sundance. But will my seething hatred of Glen Hansard keep me away? Probably.

Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch! On the big screen!

Fast Food Nation

Dramatization of the non-fiction account of the crazy goings-on in the fast food industry. Eric Schlosser was interviewed in last week’s Observer and came across as a thoroughly nice bloke.

Sunshine

Any movie that can draw comparisons to Tartakovsky is at least worth a look. The fact that it’s Danny Boyle, Alex Garland and Cillian Murphy together again? Well, that’s just a bonus.

Surprise Film

A tenner says that this will be Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain.

New Project: Cinema Verite

I’m working on a new project: Cinema Verite.

Using processing (a powerful programming language with a lot of media capabilities), I’m ripping apart some of my favourite movies and putting them back together again. By taking screenshots at every second of the movie and laying them out flat - one image per second, sixty images per row - you get a completely different view of the movie.

So yeah, check it out, if you like that kind of thing.

Charlie Kaufman I'm not

I have been itching to do a screenwriting course for ages now. I’ve got a bunch of movie ideas that I don’t really… I don’t know, I don’t necessarily expect to do anything with them, but I want to get them out of my head, just so my brain isn’t cluttered with half-started/half-finished projects. The problem with the way I write, as you probably noticed, is that I find it hard to stay on one track for any length of time. Whenever I would start a screenplay, I would write the ideas I had in a half-assed way and then just hit a wall. I guess this stems from the way I come up with ideas for movies. For example, I want to write something called “JOHN STEELE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO DIE”, but where the fuck do I begin?

So, after putting it off for months, I finally signed up for the filmbase course - “Screenwriting for Beginners”, which finished a couple of weeks ago.

I found the whole thing very useful. I learned all the sorts of useful ‘cheats’ to get you past the various stumbling blocks you’re likely to run into. Like how to flesh out your characters before you ever put pen to paper (or uh… fingers to keyboard) - useful because you know exactly how your characters will react in any situation you put them in. Or the other cheat of buying a book of baby names for when you find yourself struggling to find a decent name for your characters. (Which led to an interesting moment when I went into Waterstones to buy a book of baby names and got served by a friend of mine - so that’s what gobsmacked looks like).

And the tutor, Lindsay Sedgewick was friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. Whenever I gave her ideas for her to look over, she seemed to know exactly which bits I was unhappy with and always gave me useful suggestions for how to improve them. Although she did poo-poo one of my favourite ideas (involving a lost commune of hippies who have to re-join society after their crop of weed fails), but never mind.

So after finishing it, I started reading a few books on the subject: Joseph Campbell, Robert McKee, etc. So far, doing a good job of avoiding Syd Field. One of the books has really stood out for me: Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat”. This one stands out because it doesn’t shy away from the ‘high concept’ side of screenwriting. In fact, for this book, the higher the concept, the better, as long as it sells. Which is just fine by us here on lowbrowculture.com. Unfortunately, his IMDB credits make it a little hard to take the whole thing seriously… would you take advice from the guy who wrote “Blank Check” and uh… “Stop, or my Mom will Shoot!”?

Ugh.

But seriously, any other potential would-be-but-not-really screenwriters out there on the interpod could do a lot worse than to check it out. Especially if you would rather be the next Shane Black than the next Wes Anderson.

Oh, and while you’re at it, you should check out Celtx, a free (as in ‘speech’) screenplay editor that is replacing Final Draft for a lot of people.

Halo 3 Trailer

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The new CGI/live-action trailer for Halo 3 that ran during Monday Night Football in the USA hit the interpod yesterday. You can check out the crappy-quality Youtube version or download the high quality version from Xboxyde.

There’s something important to note about this trailer. This is less a trailer for “Halo 3” than it is for “Halo” as a brand. And there’s a real simple reason for this: it’s a dual purpose trailer. First, it’s meant to remind people of Halo’s (and Microsoft’s) relevance in a post-PlayStation 3 environment. And secondly, it’s meant to “sell” Halo to the movie studios after Universal and Fox got cold feet and pulled the plug on the Halo Movie. Before, they were being asked to put up $135m on a first-time director based on Peter Jackson’s word and they said “no”. Now they’re being asked to put up $135m based on a well-received, highly-polished trailer.

Let’s see if they’ll change their minds.

Update: I thought this trailer was directed by Neill Blomkamp, who was lined up as the director of the Halo movie before the plug got pulled. It was, in fact, directed by Joseph Kosinski, who previously directed the awesome, beautiful “Mad Love” trailer for Gears of War.