Thursday, 22 May 2014

How to tell if your movie title is shit

This is how movie titles are created today: a puppy is covered in glue and fed a bottle of bourbon, then let loose in a room full of pieces of paper with random words on. After ten minutes, the puppy is released and whichever words are stuck to it are then arranged into order by a blindfolded chicken and divided midway by a colon to form the title.

As if evidence were needed of this improbable claim, along comes the unwelcome announcement that Zack Snyder's Man Of Steel follow-up (thus far referred to simply yet excitingly as Batman vs Superman) is to be officially and, frankly, stupidly, known as Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice. Hot on the heels of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Dawn Of The Planet Of The ApesTransformers: Age Of Extinction and The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies, Snyder's title is proof that it's time someone put a stop to all this nonsense without further ado.

And so, in order to alleviate this blight on cinema marquees, bus stops and life in general, I have helpfully come up with ten basic questions for filmmakers to ask themselves in order to determine whether or not their film's title is shit. I trust that this will become a standard text in every filmmaking handbook, and hope to God that I never have to give a film a title and announce it on the internet.

How to tell if your movie title is shit

1. Does your title actually make sense?
a) It makes perfect sense
b) Yes, if you're familiar with the comic book run on which the film is loosely based
c) No idea, I assumed it was a clever metaphor or something
2. How exciting is your title?
a) The Empire Strikes Back exciting
b) Noah exciting
c) Salmon Fishing In The Yemen exciting

3. How long is your title?
a) 1-3 words
b) 4-6 words
c) More than six words

4. How many times does the word "OF" appear in your title?
a) None
b) Once
c) More than once
5. Does your title contain a colon?
a) No
b) Yes, because it's part of a series
c) Yes, even though it's not part of a series

6. How do you feel saying your title out loud?
a) Cool
b) A bit silly
c) I would never in a million years refer to the film by that title out loud, least of all when requesting a ticket for it at a cinema

7. When you say your title to another person, how do they react?
a) They don't react at all
b) They ask me to repeat it, only more slowly
c) They look confused and ask for dictionary definitions of the words I just said
8. If your film is part two of a series, how have you denoted that in the title?
a) Not at all
b) With a "2" or a "II"
c) With the word "too"

9. Is your title a pun?
a) No
b) Yes, but it's a good one
c) Yes, it's an Alvin & The Chipmunks movie, it has to be a pun by law

10. Does your film title contain the words "Die Hard"?
a) Yes, but those are the only words in the title
b) Yes, twice in fact. Plus the number 2 and the letters E and R
c) Yes, cunningly integrated into a phrase which may or may not make sense

How did you do?
Mostly 'A's: Your title is fine.
Mostly 'B's: This is the first title you thought of, isn't it? Ponder some alternatives.
Mostly 'C's: Your title is shit, fuck off.

Tuesday, 20 May 2014

Three simple ways Gareth Edwards
could have improved Godzilla (a bit)

Not including this one.

*** WARNING ***
Contains massive spoilers for Godzilla.
Don't read unless you've seen it, aren't planning
to see it, or don't give a hoot about spoilers.

Gareth Edwards' Godzilla, currently stomping around in a cinema near you shouting about something or other, may have some of the best set-pieces we've seen in monster movies for yonks, but in terms of its human characters it's prehistoric. Everyone's a cliché, relationships are irrelevant and emotional attachment to any of them is non-existent.

But more troublingly, despite this being The Year Of Our Lord 2014, the film is a total sausagefest. Juliette Binoche is dispatched in the first reel, Sally Hawkins is a dutiful, irrelevant assistant and Elizabeth Olsen spends the whole film being a worried wife on the end of a phone while the men get on with all the heavy lifting. The only important female character in the entire movie is a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Object, and if there's one thing I know about women it's that they don't like to be referred to as Objects. Or, for that matter, Massive.

While much of the blame for this woeful state of affairs can be apportioned to screenwriter Max Borenstein, Gareth Edwards has gone on record to say that he was largely left to his own devices by Warner Bros, so as director the buck must stop with him. He's an intelligent guy, and his first film Monsters did a much better job with the gender balancing, so what gives? The most frustrating thing about the testosterone overload is that there were three very simple solutions available to Edwards and Borenstein, and any one of them would have made a positive difference. The plot may still have been throwaway, but at least we'd be making some kind of progress in an industry powerful enough to cause ripples as big as Godzilla's footsteps.

1. Swap Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche
Cranston and Binoche are both terrific actors, and their billing in Godzilla is a sly wrong-footing of the audience given the amount of screen time they get. But imagine for a moment that Binoche is the nuclear expert who has to make the terrible decision to seal her husband's fate, and then spends fifteen years trying to uncover a conspiracy. Not hard, is it? The story would barely change, but the mother-son dynamic between her and Aaron Taylor-Johnson would have been a refreshing spin on the Steven Spielberg Absent Father routine Edwards employs.

2. Swap Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins
Presumably Ken Watanabe has to be the Godzilla expert rather than Sally Hawkins because he's a) older and b) more Japanese. Fair enough. But couldn't Hawkins' Dr Graham have been on a more equal footing to Dr Serizawa, if not his superior? Hawkins can do anything, and I for one would love to have seen her get all misty-eyed over the discovery of Gojira and excitedly spewing exposition. Gareth Edwards' love of Jurassic Park is obvious, but it doesn't appear to have extended to a close examination of the skillfully written relationship between Graham and Serizawa's predecessors, Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler.

3. Swap Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen
I'll admit this one's a stretch, but only because the ridiculously-named Ford Brody is a soldier and we don't see many lady soldiers. But why not? He doesn't need to be physically intimidating, he's a bomb disposal expert. I'm pretty sure women do that job too. Shove him in the hospital with an iPhone stuck to his face and get Elizabeth Olsen, one of the most exciting young actresses of the moment, out in the field. The dynamic between her and her fellow soldiers would immediately suggest the kind of gender politics-based interest we saw in Aliens, and young female audiences would get their very own Ripley to boot.

I realise this might sound a bit hypocritical coming from someone who's a huge fan of such classic feminist films as the James Bond series, but I genuinely believe that young, exciting directors like Gareth Edwards have the ideal opportunity - a responsibility, even - to do something about a problem which very much exists. The fact that it might have improved his slightly disappointing film somewhat just happens to be a bonus.

Thursday, 15 May 2014

X-Men: Days Of Future Past




Collars were big in the '70s, apparently



Wednesday, 14 May 2014



The Godz must be crazy! etc.








Friday, 9 May 2014

That's Rogertainment! Rogisode 4: Gold

The mid-1970s were glory years for our toffee-tanned hero. In the middle of the decade in which he made his best films, he was an adonis; a bronzed idol, always immaculately dressed and in fine physical fettle. Michael Caine and Malcolm McDowell might have been making better films, but neither of them had the catalogue model looks of Roger Moore. Now you could argue that that makes Michael Caine and Malcolm McDowell more deserving of your time, but this is That's Rogertainment so bugger off.

Just three months before his second Bond film (The Man With The Golden Gun, in which he looks his Bondy best) was released, Rodge popped up in Gold, a tale of greed and heroism set against a backdrop of South African gold mining, and it's hard to deny how goddamn handsome he is in it. It's as if he's in competition with actual gold to see who can look the best. He knows it too: in most of the Johannesburg-set scenes, Rodge is incapable of doing up more than a couple of shirt buttons, a look which he somehow gets away with far more successfully than I do when I emulate it in the pub at the end of our road.
It helps that Gold is directed by Peter Hunt, a man used to working with models-turned-James-Bonds after ushering the equally teaky George Lazenby through On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Hunt had also directed Moore in an episode of The Persuaders!, and knew how to make his star look good. In fact Bond alumni fill out the crew of Gold: John Glen directs the second unit and edits (as he did on OHMSS), Maurice Binder knocks up the titles, Syd Cain is production designer and Alec Mills is a cameraman. Perhaps most excitingly, Don Black writes the lyrics to the brilliant, bonkers and Bondesque theme song, which is a touching paean to the plight of the humble gold miner expressed via the medium of some absolutely bollocks-out brass:

After that vaguely crackers opening, Gold disappoints slightly by turning out to be a perfectly adequate drama about the heroically-named Rod Slater (our Rodge), a gold mine manager who unwittingly gets caught up in a wicked plot, devised by a suspiciously SPECTREish cabal of businessmen bafflingly led by John Gielgud, to flood the mine and tinker with global gold prices. It's zippily edited, as you'd expect from Hunt and Glen, and despite its earnestness it never gets too boring for its own good. Its questionable high point is the total annihilation of a six-year-old Patsy Kensit in an explosion aimed at her SPECTRE-disappointing father.

Unsurprisingly, Roger Moore is the best thing about it, although this is one of his roles for which he leaves his self-parody hat at home. Hunt demands that Moore plays Slater straight, and as a result he comes off as a believable patsy and a genuine hero come the climax. He gets to bark lines like "Shut up Kowalski!" and "Drop it Kowalski!" (Kowalski is a bit of a prick), while the double entendres we so love to see him wrap his tongue around are scant and given to others: "I noticed you slipped out," purrs a female conquest as Rodge climbs back into bed in the middle of the night. You can practically see the eyebrows desperately itching to climb north but being beaten back by Peter Hunt's steely glare.
It is a little-known fact that Roger Moore ejaculates champagne.
For this scene he filled a bathtub in one sitting.

A solid slice of Rogertainment then: proof that he can actually act when given good direction, but not as Rogertaining as when he's got his tongue jammed in his cheek and his eyebrows ready to ask "how high?" when he says jump. But my goodness he's a dishy devil, and if I look anything like that when I'm in my late forties (I won't, I can't afford the hair) then I'll consider myself to be a very lucky bastard.

FUN FACT! In his autobiography, Rodge fondly remembers how the arsenic in the water at the bottom of the gold mine turned his nipples a funny colour.

Why am I banging on about Roger Moore? Hard to say. Here's an attempt to explain.

Friday, 2 May 2014

redefines the word "met"



Insanely, no matter how long you stare at this photo,
it does not constitute a meeting.


That photograph may or may not hang on my bedroom wall.








Further reading