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Non-Review Review: The Terminator

Wow. What a debut. Okay, I know this wasn’t quite a debut for James Cameron, but Pirhana II hardly counts, right? Terminator is perhaps the best example of a talented young director producing a large-scale action movie on a miniscule budget. I’ll provoke the disdain of many a film buff out there when I declare I have a very slight preference for the sequel Terminator II: Judgement Day, but the first two movies are some of the best examples of action movies from the eighties/nineties. Hell, they are both some of the best examples of any action movies.

Don't ask him to show you his guns...

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Suspending Your Belief: Age Before Beauty…

It’s strange, isn’t it, what will break our suspension of disbelief? I mean, we’ll accept (while watching Superman) that a man can fly around in his underwear, but the fact he advertises his weakness to kryptonite in a public interview is distracting. Or we’ll somehow buy into an archeologist who searches for the holy grail and encounters all manner of occult phenomenon, but when it comes to aliens extra-dimensional beings… well, a lot of us call foul. Still, I’ve been thinking a bit of late about the really quite weird fascination that movies seem to have with age and recasting.

Grasping at straws to keep Patrick Stewart on board...

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Non-Review Review: Airplane!

Surely you can’t be serious?

I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.

The lads over at Anomalous Material are running a ‘greatest comedy of all time’ tournament at the moment, which is well worth a gander if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t yet seen all 128 movies. What I have seen, however, is Airplane!, and I can assure you that it deserves serious consideration for the crown.

A take off of all your favourite films...

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Are Spin-Offs the New Sequels?

It seems that year-on-year, the cinemas are flooded with sequels to banal action movies. This year we have Iron Man 2, Shrek 4, Predators and Sex and the City 2, among others. It’s been that way for years. If you summer blockbuster isn’t an adaptation (of television show, novel, comic book, earlier film or even video game), chances are that it is a sequel (or a prequel). It makes shrewd business sense. Given the huge amount of money spent on these tentpoles ($150m for just the production budget, let alone other costs), so it feels somewhat safer to spend it on a known quantity. Franchises have built in fanbases, more merchandise, already had several DVD releases (which means more people are aware of it than casual cinema goers), which means a bigger audience, more awareness and more money. It can be quite exhausting, however, from a cinema goer prospective. However, Hollywood likes to innovate in its own insanely boring way. Much as they redefined cinema by bringing back a gimmick from the fifties, and turned the glut of sequels into prequels, it appears Hollywood has found a new way of generating money from established properties: the spin-off.

Think of the Gross, baby!

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Sequel Query: Hollywood’s Fascination With Sequels…

Can you remember a year when the summer wasn’t dominated by sequels or spin-offs or reboots or prequels? If you can, most of them were probably adaptations. There’s been a lot of back-and-forth recently about the abundance of such films in the summer lineups, so I thought it might be worth a little exploration into the history of the sequel and of Hollywood blockbusters, and also worth considering the suggestion that has been mooted a lot recently: are movie-goers tiring of sequels?  

Even death couldn’t keep Spock out of the next Star Trek movie…

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Taking the Joker Out of the Pack: No Joker in Batman 3

Christopher Nolan confirmed over the weekend that the Joker would not be recast for the sequel to The Dark Knight. Which I suppose means we can rule him off the “list of potential villains” we’ve all been putting together in our heads as Batman 3 approaches. As much as I get the sense (and as much as rumours about the ‘trilogy’ that emerged before The Dark Knight was released would suggest) that the Joker was clearly imagined as playing a fairly lerge role in the conclusion of Nolan’s Batman saga, I can see the reasons for and respect his decision to not to recast the role.

This card is off the table...

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Non-Review Review: For a Few Dollars More

Early in the movie, our anonymous bounty hunter, Blondie or The Man With No Name or whatever you want to call him, wanders into a tavern looking for his target. Identifying the bandit gambling at a table, inches from an impotent sheriff, the hunter wanders over to his mark. He silently grabs the cards and starts counting them out. The hardened criminal stares up silently, and he plays along. The game is poker. The two men settle their hands and trade their cards. The villain lays out his cards on the table. It looks good, and then the stranger reveals his cards. Of course, his hand is better. The gambler at the table looks up to this drifter who has so silently intruded on his game. Apparently behind the audience, he asks what the stakes were. As it always is in stories like this, “Your life.”

You know how it ends.

Sometimes you have to take the Good with the Bad...

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Dennis Hopper

I’ve been kinda sitting on my hands about this. I mean, far more eloquent and informed writers and sources have draft eulogies to the man. And movie stars pass away all the time, yet I’ve never paused to acknowledge them here. I don’t know, I guess I should probably write something, if only for my own reflection in years to come. This isn’t a well-informed article. These are just my memories and associations of Dennise Hopper.

Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010

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Thor and Captain America Costumes Leaked On-Line…

I actually think these are both pretty cool and as reasonably faithful as a big screen live-action adaptation could be, but the costumes for Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger have been leaked on-line. Click below for bigger images.

Source for Thor Concept Art: Cinema Blend

Source for Captain America Concept Art: Fused Film

I am actually quite happy with both, I think they are pragmatic adaptations of costumes which – while iconic – simply wouldn’t work in real life or on the big screen. It does seem though, in banishing the wings from the helmets of each hero (and Thor’s helmet altogether) that Marvel has a vendetta against feathers.

I am a little surprised that Thor hasn’t been “Ultimised” at all. The Marvel movies have shown a trend so far of trying to move iconic heroes more towards reality (or at least in the general direction) and I had kinda expected that Thor’s whole “Viking armour” schtick might be a bit much for mainstream movie-goers. I was kinda expecting something a bit more stripped-down, similar to the look Bryan Hitch gave him in the modernised retelling of the origin of the Avengers, The Ultimates, much in the same way that the movies have presented the Samuel L. Jackson version of Nick Fury, rather than the mainstream spandex-wearing version of the super spy – most memorably brought to life as David Hasselhoff, for those with a fondness for terrible movies.

Its hammer time...

Still, I’m just surprised. I’m certainly not disappointed. If Kenneth Branagh thinks he can pull this off, then, well… I trust Kenneth Branagh. Certainly more than I trust Joe Johnson.

Though the look above has kept the black “power” waistcoat (complete with bubbles), it’s more clearly influenced by the classic conception of the character, complete with chainmail armour and red cape. For those interested in nerdy nuggets of trivia, it’s the waistcoat which was the source of his power in The Ultimates, leading various skeptical characters to suggest that he wasn’t a god of thunder, just a nut job who had stolen some secret technology. This allowed the writer Mark Millar to explore the character’s divinity rather than simply throwing him into the mix with the other more technologically-driven heroes and skirting over the whole “a god walks amongst you” bit.

I’m now kinda curious about how Hugo Weaving’s Red Skull will look in Captain America. A red Skull is probably as least as difficult as that iconic red, white & blue uniform to adapt to screen.

Sight Unseen: Killers and the Future of Film Criticism…

I remember it was only a few years ago that it was just really unapologetically bad movies with built-in audiences that refused (or simply couldn’t be bothered, knowing the inevitable trashing they’d receive) to be screened for critics. You know the films I’m talking about: horror remakes, horror sequels, horror in general. However, it seems that since G.I. Joe demonstrated that blockbusters can still bust blocks even without advanced critical presence. Perhaps it’s a side effect of the viral age we live in, but you don’t need a review in the Friday papers to put bums in seats. Anyway, apparently it looks like there’s more to come: Killers will not be screened for critics either.

Do we have a hit on our hands?

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