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The Kite Runner

Whatever you think of the recent directorial efforts of Mel Gibson, we can all hopefully agree on one thing: he is demonstrating that foreign languages and subtitles are no bar to mass cinema audiences. Admittedly with The Passion Of The Christ and Apocalypto he has proved this to be the case just in the arenas of Biblical drama and historical action, but it’s a start. And the success of those films may have encouraged the financiers investing in the current crop of American films using foreign languages: the Universal/Focus-backed Lust Caution by Ang Lee; The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, filmed in French by Julian Schnabel; and The Kite Runner, directed by German-born, US-resident Marc Forster.

Developed by Sam Mendes’ London-based Neal Street production company and financed by Paramount/DreamWorks, The Kite Runner’s backers enjoyed the comfort zone of the popularity of Khaled Hosseini’s bestseller of the same name. The use of Afghan languages is certainly the right creative choice.

I Am Legend

This is what we have been waiting for…I Am Legend is a wonderful spectacle of a Hollywood movie, imagining the end of the world as we know it, and starring the king of sci-fi himself, Will Smith. I wasn’t disappointed. I’ll wager that very few people will be.

Okay, the film starts thus; Smith plays Dr Robert Neville, the last human on earth. His only companion is his faithful dog, who he talks to. And Will Smith proves, like Tom Hanks in Castaway, that he can hold his own in a film with few other players. Though the dog is infinitely easier to warm to than a football.

Smith has to hunt down his own food, which he does by driving around a beautifully deserted and overgrown New York in an old seventies car, trying to shoot the wild deer, before he loses his venison lunch to the lions. Great stuff. It almost makes you wish you could rent an abandoned city for an hour to do just that, but maybe without the lions.

Sweeney Todd preview – the Tim Burton season at the BFI Southbank.

The Cinema of Tim Burton – talk at the BFI given by Mark Salisbury, author of “Burton on Burton.”

What’s not to love about Tim Burton films? Not much, according to Mark Salisbury who started writing “Burton on Burton” in 1994 as a homage to Tim Burton films. Well, all of his films barring Planet of the Apes. He sees Burton as a visionary, with a unique visual style, conveyed through the sets and costumes. Salisbury describes how films such as Sleepy Hollow and Ed Wood have an atypical, exquisite look, with Burton’s signature curves, skeletons, and toys. And the oft-used black and white stripes which you see from the desert monster in Beetlejuice to Johnny Depp’s stripy swimming costume in Sweeney Todd. “If you think he’s brave singing,” Salisbury says, “you will find him doubly so in that costume!” Even Lemony Snicket, the only Burton film not directed by Burton, uses this unique visionary style, evident from the set and costume design.

UK box office December Dec 14-16

Christmas is coming and that can only mean one thing: a near-complete takeover of family flicks at the nation’s cinemas. The Golden Compass held steady at the top of the charts, despite a hefty fall from its debut last week. Below it is Disney’s tongue-in-cheek fairytale Enchanted, with an encouraging start of £2.548 million from 471 screens – a good result, given that it’s not based on a familiar property, and the lead actors are little-known Amy Adams and TV’s Patrick Dempsey (Grey’s Anatomy). Reviews were strong.

Third place is Bee Movie, which debuted with £2.281 million from 435 cinemas – although this includes preview takings of £923,000. Not counting previews, Enchanted scored a significant margin over its rival from DreamWorks Animation. The top five is rounded out with two more family films: Fred Claus, and new entrant Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. The latter got off to a shaky start, with £460,000 from 342 screens. But the Dustin Hoffman magical fable may pick up traction throughout the holiday period: hardly a first choice for many families, they may get round to seeing it at some point before the kids return to school.

Enchanted

Enchanted is a wonderful film, and of all the films out over Christmas, this is the one that I would recommend most. Following hot on the heels of Ratatouille, this is Disney’s next offering, though this is part animated, part live action.

Enchanted tells the story of Giselle (Amy Adams), a bona fide Disney princess-in-waiting, who gets transported to a world where "There is no Happily Ever After" just before her wedding, by her mother-in-law--to-be, Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon), who is reluctant to lose her crown. This is of course, modern day New York.

Disney sends up it’s own classic fairy tales of yesteryear (like Snow White and Cinderella), without ruining the sentiment that makes them so enduring. Despite obvious advancements in the world of animation, the colour of the old Disney animated films make them so much more enduring than their live action black and white counterparts. This explains the longevity of the Disney back catalogue, as animation ages a lot better than 50s live action films. This coupled with Disney’s clever marketing, keeping their films under wraps for years until anniversary re-releases in the technological format du jour, keeps Disney films of all eras on the shelves of most households. Very few homes can or do resist the Disney cannon. And why not? Their films are lovely.

My Kid Could Paint That

Don’t dismiss the documentary

I’ve just had the opportunity to see two contrasting documentaries, both US-based, but each taking a different approach and raising the question of whether you offer the viewer the chance to make up their own mind or impress your own opinion on them.

My Kid Could Paint That
My Kid Could Paint That is about a four-year old girl, Marla Olmstead, who loves to paint and whose paintings have been sold for over $300,000 dollars. The documentary presents this remarkably able child without prejudice, taking you along the roller-coaster ride that her family goes through after discovering that she is a prodigy. At first fêted by the international press, Marla and her family are then denounced as fraudsters, and subsequently learn that even the director is revealing his own doubts during the course of the film. 

Bee Movie

This isn’t Ratatouille, by any stretch of the imagination, and as a Brit, the Seinfeld-like humour of the main character was a little lost on me. However, Bee Movie is still very funny.

Honey is produced by Honex Industries, where all bees go to work after school, each having their own role in its production, including those responsible for colour correction – something that’s not so far from the truth in reality. Barry B. Benson (Jerry Seinfeld) wants to be a Pollen Jock, one of the brave, strapping bees that risks life and wing to collect the pollen in the outside world.

UK box office December Dec 7-9

Since summer ended there’s been a paucity of major blockbusters at the UK box office, with only Ratatouille exceeding the £20 million benchmark. Now, with Christmas coming, the big guns are arriving again, beginning with The Golden Compass. The expensive fantasy adaptation opened with £7.244 million, including Wednesday and Thursday previews of £1.548 million. The UK proved the best territory for the $185 million-budget film, apart from the US, where it opened on $25.8 million. But given the disparity in populations and currency values, the British result is actually much better than the American one. Indeed, the US gross has already been branded a significant disappointment by industry commentators.

Four weeks ago Robert Zemeckis’ motion-capture animation Beowulf opened at 454 cinemas, of which around 50 showed the film in 3D. Thanks to reviews encouraging cinema-goers to catch the film in the 3D version, screen averages at the 3D sites have consistently out-performed the ones projecting it in 2D. As audience word-of-mouth has reinforced the pro-3D message from critics, that disparity has only increased. This weekend the 2D version was playing at 316 cinemas, and took a mediocre £157,000. But the 3D version took a much-healthier £178,000 from just 53 screens – more than the 2D managed, and from one sixth of the sites. As you can imagine, these numbers are giving great encouragement to cinemas converting their screens to 3D- compatibility, and to studios planning more movies in 3D.

The Golden Compass

There has been a good deal of discussion, hype and controversy surrounding The Golden Compass since the announcement was first made, five years ago, that Philip Pullman’s best-selling book Northern Lights was to be adapted for the silver screen. Encouraged by the phenomenal success of their Lord of the Rings franchise, New Line Cinema promised to give yet another fantasy trilogy the big budget treatment.

But getting this project from conception to completion was no plain sailing. Several interested directors were pipped to the post by Chris Weitz, who had approached the studio directly with his own treatment (mini screenplay) of the film. This then resulted in the sacking of the writer Tom Stoppard and his replacement by Weitz, who was asked to rewrite the script too. However, Weitz later resigned over the watering down of religious content in the film, was replaced by Brit Anand Tucker, and was then rehired when Tucker threw in the towel following creative clashes with New Line.

The Killing of John Lennon

The Killing of John Lennon is the story of Mark Chapman, the confused loner who shot John Lennon.

The film’s slow beginning allows you to progressively get into the mind of a man who is miserable with his life, paranoid and struggling to find a purpose to his existence. Chapman’s unfulfilling job and poor relationship with his mother and wife lead him to bury his head in books and daydreams. But when he comes across a copy of “Catcher in the Rye”, he ends up becoming fixated with J Salinger’s character, Holden Caulfield. 

“The phoney must die says the Catcher in the Rye” but Mark Chapman blurs the lines between fiction and reality, taking on the character of Caulfield to give himself a firm identity. He then, by chance, finds a book on John Lennon which triggers his obsession. In his mind, what Lennon preaches through his lyrics he doesn’t practise in his lifestyle. So Chapman becomes angry at this hypocrisy and convinces himself that Lennon is a phoney who must therefore die.