Please, please, let this be good

- Any chance I get, flatten Paul flipping Madeley.

- Good lad.

Even though I disliked Frost/Nixon, that doesn’t change the fact that The Queen was my favourite film of 2006, or that I simply cannot wait for The Special Relationship. Peter Morgan is an excellent writer, with a paradoxically great ear for real-yet-affected dialogue, and a deft touch for seamlessly bringing together the mundane with the extraordinary to create wholly fulfilling works of art. Morgan’s next film, directed by Tom Hooper, is The Damned United, an adaptation of David Peace’s best-selling novel of the same name. Here is what Wikipedia says about the book:

Told from Clough's point of view, the novel is written as his stream of consciousness as he tries and fails to impose his will on a team he inherited from his bitter rival, Don Revie, and whose players are still loyal to their old manager. Interspersed are flashbacks to his more successful days as manager of Derby County. Described by its author as "a fiction based on a fact," the novel mixes fiction, rumour and speculation with documented facts to depict Clough as a deeply flawed hero; foul mouthed, vengeful and beset with inner demons and alcoholism.

The film stars the almost always reliable (cheap Frost/Nixon dig, I know) Michael Sheen as Clough, as well as Jim Broadbent, Colm Meaney, and Timothy Spall. You can’t judge a film by its trailer, but a trailer can get you excited for a film. I am very excited for The Damned United.

Watchpeanuts

Cartoonist Evan Shaner at Exploding Moose recently answered that most perplexing question, which has plagued fanboys the world over for decades. What if Charles Schultz created the Watchmen? Well, here it is, and it's brilliant:

No Time for Subtlety, Dr Jones

The final one-sheet for this summer's eagerly anticipated Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has been released. Anything new and official from the Indy camp is good by definition. However, as with the teaser trailer (brilliantly dissected by Ted Pigeon here), the poster lacks that old-timey quaintness, which was promised by Spielberg et al in the recent Vanity Fair spread (and was captured perfectly in the teaser one-sheet). There is way too much happening in the poster - it's very crowded.

It is understandable, if not downright essential, that the poster be dominated by Indiana Jones's giant noggin, and his equally huge fedora. The hat is a crucial part of the character's iconography, more so than the wip, and in the image, its size occupies the same amount of space as Indy's face. That might seem like stating the obvious, but it goes to show that whenever we see the character in action, our mind is taking in the same amount of information with regards to the hat as to the head. In The Last Crusade, the curious boy-scout only becomes the character we know when he puts on the hat. In all the films, the motif of the character's losing his hat, and his subsequent attempts to retrieve it, are repeated, thus solidifying the inseparability of the head and the hat.

Drew Struzan has framed the poster with the silhouette of jungle flora and Aztec(?) relics, appropriate since the film takes place in the jungles of South America. This is also a better use of Struzan’s usual penchant for constricting his posters with thick borders – his work for the Star Wars prequels featured increasingly expanding black frames. It’s a valuable, if slightly simplistic, technique – one which calls the viewer’s attention to the centre of the frame. It also has the misfortune of constricting the image, making it look too cluttered, even before the addition of other elements. Since Struzan likes to cramp in a lot of detail, one of the greatest devices of his trade also becomes one of its worst enemies (the large snake on the top right hand of the frame points directly at Shia LaBeouf’s character. If it weren’t so obvious that he plays Indiana Jones’s son, I would be inclined to suspect some sort of treachery).

The not-quite centrality of the eponymous skull is also necessary in the theatrical poster. Struzan likes to scatter the various elements of his designs somewhat haphazardly, which must be born out of his rush-hour-in-Cairo-like nature of his compositions. There have been some rumblings that the revelation of the skull’s obviously alien origin is given away too early. Well, this is an Indiana Jones film. The title says the skull is crystal. I think people would have made the connection to some sort of other worldliness, and not Damien Hirst (yes, I know his piece was made out of diamonds, but still). Besides, the skull is a MacGuffin, just like Ark of the Covenant, the Sankara Stone or The Holy Grail – its nature is incidental to its purpose. One of the things that drives me wild about genre fans (and there’s a lot that drives me wild) is their obsession with explanations – they are suckers for literalism, which the better examples of genre fiction very deftly avoid.

The remaining figures in the poster are dispersed slapdash beneath Indiana Jones’s face, with Shia LaBoeuf and Cate Blanchett's characters’ taking prominence. They are both featured with the one accessory that seems to define them in the film (this based on production photos) – LaBoeuf’s character’s motorcycle, and Blanchett’s sabre (she seems to have adopted a pose similar to the one Obi Wan did in the Attack of the Clones' theatrical poster, also by Struzan). Underneath Blanchett, we see the floating heads of Karen Allen and Ray Winstone, the latter looking like a cross between Rembrandt and Dom DeLouise. My favourite part of the poster is Indy legging it from the angry tribesmen behind him – a nice visual homage to the beginning of the first film. I just hope there aren’t too many of those, visual or otherwise, in the film.*

Compared to the other three posters, this one feels way too crowded, even though it features around the same amount of characters, or elements, as its predecessors. It’s just that the composition has made it look clunky, and amateurish; kind of like those fan posters where everything but the kitchen sink is thrown in for no other reason than the überfan’s central philosophy of “more is more.”I still can't wait for the flick, mind you.

And just a reminder: I will be hosting an Indiana Jones blog-a-thon to coincide with the release of the film in May. Come one, come all...

*OK, OK, maybe just the one:

(Photo credits: USA Today, and Indyfan.com)

Watch out!

I used to be a huge comic book nerd. Then I grew up. To this day, one of my favourite pastimes is ripping into people who consider comics a serious art-form. Sequential art, they say. Bollocks, I reply. I will write a longer diatribe on how laughable it is to lionize comic books, especially mainstream ones, at a later date.

Having said that, sometimes it’s impossible not to get lured in by a work of seminal genius (a phrase I use sparingly, unlike comic book aficionados). Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen is one of the few comics (or graphic novels, if you are being pedantic) that is a complete work in itself. In fact, it is the Citizen Kane of comic books if you will, not just for the story, but for its use, nay mastery, of the comic book form – including, but not exclusive to, all its natural limitations.

Anyway, a film version, long, long in gestation, will be out exactly a year from now. 300’s Zach Snyder is at the helm, and even though that film was an abysmal piece of trash, Snyder has the visual mastery, as well as the nerdish excitability, that a project like Watcmen demands. He’s finally posted the movie versions of most of the characters from the story. Most of them look great, though I am not sure why Ozymandias is wearing George Clooney’s costume from Batman and Robin.

Kali Ma Shakti Debut: Indy Trailer to Arrive Today

The teaser trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (one truly graceless title) debuts in a few hours at Yahoo Movies, and the film's official site. There’s a bootleg version floating about, which I have no intention of watching. The official site says the trailer will have an international launch at the cinemas, so hopefully I will also catch it on the big screen sometime this weekend.

Don’t forget – Cerebral Mastication is hosting an Indiana Jones Blog-a-thon to coincide with the release of the new movie. Click here for details.

Pineapple Express Red Band Trailer

Judd Apatow is a very funny man. The 40-Year-Old Virgin is the funniest film of this decade, with Superbad's running a close second. Even when he fails to meet my expectations, as in Knocked Up, Apatow still manages to bring enough of the funny that I overlook his films' other problems (like his penchant for keeping his movies, on average, at a sprightly seven hours).

Judd Apatow is also a very busy man. His schedule, and seemingly overnight success following Virgin, has been compared to John Hughes' in the director’s 80's heyday, and, like Hughes, Apatow likes to have myriad projects at various stages of development simultaneously. Of his current slate of movies, Drillbit Taylor and Forgetting Sarah Marshall do not interest me in the slightest, even though I'll end up seeing them the weekend they open - though I am not sure I will be able to extend my patronage to You Don't Mess with the Zohan, an ostensibly by-the-numbers Borat knock-off, which sounds like a take-the-money-and-run kinda deal for Apatow.

However, I can't wait for The Year One, and Pineapple Express, an action/comedy written by Apatow, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and directed by David Gordon Green, which is a combination just kerazee enough to work! Its red band trailer has been leaked to the interwebs, and, in only a minute and half, I counted quite a few references to Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, Hong Kong cinema, 80's action movies... So basically it’s like Hot Fuzz, but actually funny. Check it out:

Thanks to Timothy Sergeant for sending me the link.

Coming Attractions: Paprika

There are few words to describe the majesty of Satoshi Kon's genius, but awesome, heartwarming, and overwhelming are some of them. His unswerving loyalty to the anime form, and his insistence on telling fully-formed feature length stories within its boundaries are examplary.

The main "problem" with anime is that it relies on fairly static character animation complemented by stationary backgrounds over the course of a given shot, if not an entire scene. One has to master both anime as a form and the art of storytelling in order to create a distinctive world within an overall constrictive framework. It is a testament to Kon's talents that he can tell better stories in such an anachronistic, almost antediluvian, style than many of his "contemporaries" in Hollywood.

Like the incredible Tokyo Godfathers before it, Kon's next feature, Paprika, promises to be a feast for the senses and the soul. You can view the trailer here: http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony/paprika/trailer/.