James Franco’s To Do List

‘Hhmmm, if I sit here long enough stroking my chin and staring at this book cover, then someone might photograph me and people will forget I made ‘Your Highness’ and remember how arty I am.’

The first time I realised that modern day renaissance man James Franco was more than just the guy who played Peter Parker’s bfbnfbhkhf* in Spiderman was a couple of years ago in Paris. I was in one of the Latin Quarter’s tourist trap restaurants with a friend when the camp, middle-aged frenchman dining alone on the table next to us asked what films we’d seen recently. The conversation went something like this:

My friend: Um, I saw Pineapple Express.

Strange Man: Oh, who plays in this Pineapple Express?

My friend: An actor called James Franco is in it.

Strange Man: Oh! James Franco! Yes I know James Franco. What other films have you seen?

Me: Well, I did watch Harry Potter the other day.

Strange Man: Is James Franco in this one?

Me: Uh, no. He isn’t.

Strange Man: Ah, I see. Have you seen any other films with James Franco in?

Me: Um, Spiderman.

Strange Man: And did you like James Franco in this one?

Me: Yeah, I s’pose.

Strange Man: So what other films have you seen with James Franco in?

And so on and so on it went. I detected that the man had a soft spot for James Franco. Since then the Franc’s numerous artistic and academic ventures (books, artshows, albums, creative writing masters to name a few) have seen his value rise dramatically. I feel absolutely certain in my  statistical estimations when I say that in the last year 50% of all cultural magazine and sunday supplement article headlines have been a variation on the sentence ‘James Franco does a lot of different things’. Ever ready to go to extreme lengths to get the latest lowbrow culture lowdown, I concocted an elaborate plan to break into his house undetected and see if I could get a heads up on any of his future projects. The plan is too elaborate to go into here so I won’t bore you with the details, instead I shall just provide  my findings.

*bfbnfbhkhf = best friend but not forever because he kills his father

WE CAN BE HEROES

Short, dialogue-free film by Simon Hutchins (yes, this is blatant nepotism but it really is rather good) that subverts the ‘Apocalypse’ genre. It’s in two parts so you can watch part 1 above or click here to be redirected to vimeo for it, and here for part 2.

The Muppet Christmas Carol

Unless you have a particular aversion to fuzzy, anthropomorphised puppet creatures or anything associated with the festive season makes your skin crawl, then you will surely agree that The Muppet Christmas Carol is the greatest Christmas film ever made. It is impossible to improve on.  (If you are in the position of Christmas cultural poverty in which you’ve never seen the film, then you’ll just have to take my word for it.) However, it is much, much, more than just ‘the greatest Christmas film of all time’, it is also, one of the greatest films of all time of any kind and the greatest musical movie ever. FACT.*

Here are the reasons why The Muppet Christmas Carol is The Greatest:

• Michael Caine as Scrooge is GREAT.
• The Muppets are GREAT.
• The songs are GREAT. (”You know wherever you find love it feels like Christmaaaasss” – aahh)
• The boundary-crossing narrative tool that uses Gonzo (claiming to be Charles Dickens) and Rizzo the Rat as on-screen story tellers who break the fourth wall, directly addressing the viewer whilst at the same time interacting with the characters on screen who are unaware of the viewer, brings an almost Brechtian element to the film. Which is GREAT.

That’s FOUR GREATS! The Muppet Christmas Carol then must be THE GREATEST FILM EVER MADE…

Any Human Heart

First things first, Any Human Heart is my favourite book ever. Through the  journals of fictional writer Logan Mountstuart, the reader is given a review of the whole of the twentieth century and shown that, no matter whether we experience extraordinary events in our lives or not, what matters most is the relationships we develop with others. So on hearing several months ago that it was being made into a television drama my heart dropped. I didn’t want the emotional connection that I have with it to be weakened in the future by memories of a lacklustre film representation. And a on a more snobbish level I didn’t want people to end up watching the TV series before they had read the book. Then I heard that Jim Broadbent and Matthew Mcfadden would be two of the three actors to play the protagonist Logan Mountstuart at different stages of his life and my hopes raised a little. And when I heard that William Boyd, the author, was writing the screenplay himself, my hopes raised a lot.

Obviously, as the novel is my favourite book it will be highly unlikely that I will enjoy the dramatisation as much but it’s not fair to judge the two by the same criteria, as I have written about recently (here). Film exists in a much narrower space than the novel and therefore cannot tell stories in the same way or with the same freedom. So I look forward to watching Any Human Heart as a drama and it will be interesting to see what Boyd has decided to focus on, and what he has decided to leave out.

Any Human Heart starts on Thursday at 9pm on Channel 4

Hegemony or Swedish Vampire Movies: The Arrogance and Imperialism of the Hollywood Remake

The recent Steve Carell and Paul Rudd comedy Dinner For Schmucks was, like many Hollywood films, a remake. This time of popular French play-turned-film Dîner de Cons. Although the European original is funnier and overall better than the American version, the initial idea of the remake could possibly be excused, no matter how bad the final cut actually is, as it has been over ten years since the original was released and the new film introduces new characters. So, in this respect the remake is targeting a different audience to the original and is not trying to just copy the film, rather take the central concept and create new ideas around that.

However, there is absolutely no excuse for a foreign-language film that was first shown in cinemas only two years ago, to worldwide critical acclaim, to be remade into a film that looks to emulate the original in nearly every way except that the language is now English. It therefore follows that there is no excuse for the US remake of Swedish vampire flick Let The Right One In; the story of 12 year-old Oskar who shares a small flat with his mother living in a relatively poor area of Stockholm in the mid-80’s, and the friendship he develops with seemingly 12 year-old vampire girl Eli, who moves in next door with her mysterious elderly male carer. Based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (who also wrote the screenplay) and directed by Tomas Alfredson, it is more a study of the loneliness and longing of children on the verge of adolescence than it is about vampires. Though it does also do that very well. The Anglophone rights were quickly snapped up once it started screening at festivals and those quick-thinking American film execs cunningly re-named it Let Me In, the other translation of the novel’s title. Presumably to support the claim made by the remake’s director, Matt Reeves, that he has made a new version of the book rather than just ripping off one of the most innovative horror films of recent times.

Reeves said at the film’s panel discussion at this year’s Comic-Con that he thinks the original is “a masterpiece”. This begs the question: why the hell are you remaking it then? If a work of art is already exceptional, then where is the need for a new version? Especially when it’s still so fresh in the memory. Evidently, in a case like this there is a clear financial gain to be made. As with all Hollywood films, they’re made first and foremost as a business venture, and in business the safest way to make a profit is to give the customer what you know they want. This is why there are so many sequels, remakes and adaptations. It’s much easier for a studio to keep rehashing old stories that they know are already successful than to risk original and untried ideas.

More than that however, remakes like Let Me In smack of Tinsel Town’s desperation to be seen as the world’s leading cinema industry, artistically as well as commercially. Not artistically in the sense of a film that borders on being an art installation like Zidane: A 21^st Century Portrait for example. More that, if a foreign-language film has an interesting, commercially profitable idea at it’s heart, yet artfully crafted in a very non-Hollywood style, then the major studios will want to plunder that idea, market it as the USP of their version and then flesh it out with classic Hollywood devices. Take for example, the remake of Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire. Here, the studio has picked-up a beautifully made, ethereal tale about an angel watching over Berlin who desires to feel the full range of human emotions, to see life in colour, and transported it to LA, duly called it City Of Angels, cast Meg Ryan and upped the rom-com factor. It’s the type of commercial dilution of art that Hollywood has always been swimming in.

You can see the attractiveness of Let The Right One In then.  As an artistic comment on childhood, it is stunning, emotive and intelligent, and as a vampire story, also has great mass-market potential. Moreover, as Hollywood sees itself as being a leader in vampire movies they would view it as their right to have their piece of this new form of blood-sucking pie and show that they too are capable of making such great cinema. Even if ‘making great cinema’ equates to ‘copying great cinema’, which, in essence, negates the ‘great’ bit. As what is ‘great’ about a like-for-like copy? If a painting by one artist copies an original painting by a different artist then it is labelled a ‘fake’ and discarded as being artistically redundant. If we applied the same rules in the world of cinema then we could call Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho a ‘fake’. (What would we call Michael Haneke’s English language shot-for shot remake of his own, originally German, Funny Games though? ‘Completely unnecessary’ perhaps?)

Reeves seems acutely aware that if the film is to have any sort of critical merit of its own then it cannot merely be a copy. And he forcibly wants to demonstrate that Let Me In isn’t one right from the get-go by reshuffling the narrative structure of events. It’s a desperate appeal to the audience of the original for their approval. ‘Hey, look, I haven’t just ripped it off! I changed it around a bit. I’m not a copy-cat after all! I’ve got my own ideas!’ It is also ultimately an insubstantial appeal because playing with the scene sequences doesn’t differentiate it from Let The Right One In that much when all the costumes, characters and locations in those scenes have been specifically chosen to resemble the original as closely as possible. Plus, it has then been shot in a way that tries to replicate the atmosphere that fills the original.

However, although the filmmakers want to recreate the Swedish film as closely as they can get away with, they don’t appear overly fond of the subtlety that made LTROI so interesting. So, they’ve crudely crowbarred in some Hollywood horror clichés to spell-out what’s going on to the audience. For example, the soundtrack is instantly recognisable as being for a horror film, whereas the original goes without one completely. The murderer wears a bag over his head to give him the look of a classic slasher serial killer. And, typically American, an unnecessary religious subtext is also added via the character of the mother. These are used to tell the audience that they should be scared, that they are watching a horror film. Let The Right One In didn’t do that because it couldn’t easily be classed as a horror film. It was far more than that, and that’s where Let Me In falls short.

In terms of the acting, Kodi Smit Mcphee deserves applause for his portrayal of Owen, the new version of Oskar. It’s not his fault that the film he’s in doesn’t deserve to exist. In contrast, Chloe Moretz who plays Aby, the American Eli, is too annoying to be able to portray the nuances of the character in the way that Lina Leandersson did in the original. Moretz was the worst thing in (500) Days of Summer and Kick-Ass. Her on-screen presence is incredibly grating in all her films. Just because she drops the c-bomb in the comic book movie doesn’t make her anymore edgy, or any less precocious than your normal Hollywood brat.

It must be said though, to be fair to Reeves, taken on it’s own, it is a very well directed film. He has tried a few different tricks, some which work: playing with the narrative structure; never showing the mother’s face, always keeping her on the edge of the frame to depict her as never being fully involved in her son’s life. And some that don’t: the highly unoriginal introduction of a lone cop investigating the case. Yet it is damned, for overall it essentially just aspires to be Alfredson’s film for an English-speaking audience who can’t be bothered with subtitles. There is absolutely no need for this film. Furthermore, Reeves’ shaky assertion that he’s making a different version of the novel, rather than remaking the film is violently tested as soon as the credits declare that it’s ‘based on the novel and the screenplay’ (Italics my own). This was blatantly never true anyway because the studio only bought the rights after watching Let The Right One In and it is highly doubtful they had even heard of the book before that. More importantly though, their denial that they have remade the movie demonstrates that filmmakers know that there is an intrinsic wrongness in remaking a film that they don’t think exists when filming a book. So why is that?

Well, the major, obvious difference between remaking a film, and filming a novel is that in the former case the same medium is being used and therefore falls under the same rules and can be judged in the same way. Whereas, in the latter case the original piece (the novel) is being transferred to a new medium and therefore falls under a different set of rules, so the adaptation (the film) cannot be judged in the same way as the original book. A film of a book must be a viewed as a stand-alone piece and be judged separately from any connections to the book. It must be judged only as piece of cinema. Film works in a vastly different, more narrow space than the novel and so any filmmakers adapting a novel should be free to take what they deem to be the essential elements of the story and then use the language of cinema to reform them. So it is always highly unfair when angry readers decry filmmakers for removing some of their favourite subplots of a book from the film version, or for not recreating locations exactly as they were in the reader’s head.

On the other hand, when remaking a film, a director is using the same language as the original and is therefore already tied more closely to the source material than they would be if they were filming a novel. Therefore they will have to change more essential elements if they want to make a legitimately worthwhile remake. Let Me In doesn’t do this. It’s gone out of it’s way to make locations and costumes that look the same, use the same dialogue, same scenes as Let The Right One In, with a few minor differences to warn off critics saying it’s an outright rip-off. Indeed it may be an official rip-off, but a rip-off it still is. Though Lindqvist may be happy that his pockets are getting deeper, Alfredson must be a bit pissed off that his great work has now been overshadowed in the wider public consciousness by a film that is essentially a ‘wanna-be’.

Remakes such as Let Me In typify not only Hollywood’s unimaginative thinking but also the sheer arrogance of the ‘whatever you can do, I can do better’ variety, even though they’re just copying someone else’s work. They want to envelop global cinema so as to be the reigning film industry empire and take foreign films of their liking for their own. They procure any good idea for themselves, Americanise it and dumb it down. It is their inherent American belief that because they have the money to do this, then they have the right. They don’t. Just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should and Hollywood should learn when to leave a good thing alone. They never will of course if there’s money to be made.

However, sometimes, just sometimes the remake can work if it is sufficiently different enough, and confident enough to have it’s own identity, such as The Magnificent Seven, Hollywood’s take on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samouraï. That film legitimises itself as a remake by ensconcing itself in a very Hollywood genre, the western, exchanging samouraïs for cowboys. Let Me In attempts partly to achieve this contextual transfer, but it feels very half-hearted; a few token clips of Regan speaking on TV are shown in the background of scenes. The overriding sentiment when watching the film is that by setting it at the same time, in a very snowy, not well-off corner of New Mexico, Reeves has gone out of his way to place it in as similar context to the Swedish version as possible. It’s just in America because then everyone can be speaking English.

So, when you hear that David Fincher is shooting his versions of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy in Sweden, alarm bells start ringing. Sure, the books are so globally successful that Hollywood would have made their versions of the films whether the Swedes had beaten them to it or not. Yet by making them so soon after the Swedish versions and especially by shooting them in Sweden, not relocating to America, they are acting as if the Swedish films didn’t exist. Are they going to go to the same locations as the Swedish films? Is everyone in the films meant to be Swedish but just speaking English? Are they implying that Hollywood can do Swedish better than the Swedish? In which case, it’s the worst type of movie arrogance and imperialism: Hollywood’s desire for world film hegemony, the need to envelope all cinema as American in order to control it as much as possible and therefore reap as much profit from it.

Finally however, it is down to the Anglophone cinema going public to not be so lazy and think that it’s hard work to watch a film with subtitles, because that’s a load of bollocks. Watch fantastic foreign language films, rather than the sanitised American versions. There were a lot of people around the world who did go and watch Let The Right One In but if there were more, then Hollywood wouldn’t bother remaking it. They know they can capitalise on it by remaking it as close as possible to the original without coming under fire for just copying it, and doing it in English. This lack of subtitles in English speaking countries will no doubt reap more financial rewards for Let Me In than the original did, and it’s a very sorry state of affairs.

LYNCH INTERVIEW PROJECT

A new 121 part documentary series by David Lynch.
A new episode every three days.

http://interviewproject.davidlynch.com/

L’USINE – TWO DOTS

Britta Johnson (video director for Andrew Bird, among others) brings Lusines gorgeous new single “Two Dots” to life, illustrating the songs relationships-as-trigonometry analogy in an intricately animated video.

In the clip, a pair of marbles—one blue, one yellow—engage in the timeless dance of seduction on a horizontal plain, mapping the ups and downs of a courtship through pencil-drawn geometric principles. Like Two Dots, Johnsons video lives in the middle ground between technology and humanity, emotional immediacy and obsessive detail.

http://lusineweb.com/

This Is England ‘86

Lace up your Doc Martens, button up your Fred Perry, and pull on your Harrington. This Is England returns. The midlands maestro Shane Meadows picks up the story of Shaun, Woody, Milky et al. three years after the end of the film in a new four-part television series for Channel 4. Will surely be at least 100 times better than when they tried to make a TV series of Lock, Stock.

This Is England ‘86 starts Tuesday 10.00pm on Channel 4.

Review: Gainsbourg (vie heroïque)

Any biopic on a singer whose most famous works include a song in which lyrics about going and coming between loins meld with recordings of orgasms, and a track with his 13-year-old daughter entitled ‘Lemon Incest’ is going to have a fair share of sex and music. And Gainsbourg (vie héroïque) is full of it. But to say that was the total scope of this film would be to sell it short. Very short. And to think that this film simply details the most well known events the career of Serge Gainsbourg would be wrong. Very wrong.

First-time filmmaker Joann Sfar has used his background as a graphic novelist and illustrator to create an inventive, fantastical representation of French chanson’s black sheep, partly from fact, partly from his own ideas of who and what the man born Lucien Ginsburg symbolises. For the jewish born director, Gainsbourg is a lover of some of 20^th century French culture’s greatest female icons, a smoker of coronary baiting proportions, and a naturally gifted artist able to turn his hand to anything. Yet he is constantly battling insecurities about his Jewish appearance and feelings of being an outsider.

Sfar’s comic book mind has imagined Serge’s self-persecution complex about his jewishness and the more reckless side of his personality as being manifest in a seven-foot puppet-like caricature that appears during his weaker moments. This character brings to mind Pan from Pan’s Labyrinth not only because the same special effects created both creatures but because they are also both played by actor Doug Jones.

Sfar’s imaginative approach compares favourably to the two biggest films about french icons of recent years. Coco Avant Chanel was criticised in France for being a straightforward telling of the story of a woman who wasn’t the slightest bit straightforward. While La Vie en Rose although not following a linear structure seemed only to be made as such to set up the rather unimaginative final scene. Sfar has given Gainsbourg a linear structure but rather than forming it around the events that shaped the musician’s life, the film focuses on how the personality of the agent provocateur evolves (or not) to present the director’s subjective portrait of what Serge Gainsbourg is. As such, the spectator is thrown straight into the heart of the various phases of the singer’s life when his passions are burning on full flame,  or about to become dying embers, rather than being shown how the these different periods began and finished. This means the film flows at a thrilling pace and never lets up, just like Serge himself. From the very start to the very end he remains the same. The man is shown as being formed from the boy: his love of the female form exists right from the very first scene of the film when, as a youngster, he asks a little girl to kiss him; but as a Jewish boy growing up in Nazi-occupied Paris he also first becomes aware of French anti-Semitism. Sfar has said that this is a film about a French hero, and unlike American heroes, French ones never learn. So Serge never grows up, and on a couple of emotive occasions in his adult life, the young Ginsburg is cut into the place of the elder Gainsbourg. The man forever remains the boy.

Most of all, Vie héroïque makes 60’s Paris look not just chic, but damn cool, mightily sexily, full of beautiful women, and a hell of a lot of fun to be Serge Gainsbourg at his height. The style is most definitely there. The film is oozing with it. But it is intelligently used as the foundations with which to present the substance of a character that is deserving of such a creative depiction.

8.5/10
Gainsbourg is released in UK cinemas 30 July.

King of Nerds: The Geek Genius of Michael Cera

A slight twist on the celebrity adage that would aptly fit the subject of this article would go: ‘All the nerdy indie boys want to be like him, ALL the girls want to sleep with him.’ Who, you may incredulously be asking yourself if for some unlikely reason you have completely bypassed the title of this post, could this technologically literate, social misfit of an Adonis be? The answer, obviously, is Canada’s second greatest ever export (Arcade Fire will forever be number one): Michael Cera. And why do all the hot, cool, intelligent, beautiful and interesting girls want to sleep with him? Because he is the nice guy who also happens to be libido-lubricatingly funny. A winning combination, and one that is put to use yet again in the new Edgar Wright film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

Since moving into the movie industry after the end of Arrested Development, Cera has become Hollywood’s go-to-guy to play the gentle teenage boy who in his unassuming, self-effacing, and mild-mannered way never fails to get the girl of his dreams. So, when in his last film Youth in Revolt, adapted from the ’93 novel by C.D. Payne, his character utters the line “In the movies the good guy gets the girl, in real life it’s usually the prick”, it rings noticeably true.

The list of the films in which he plays this character is long and continuing on a biannual basis to get longer. Superbad, Juno, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Year One, Paper Heart, Youth In Revolt, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Yes, he’s continually playing roles closely resembling his own self, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that is the extent of his range, although there is little evidence at the moment to suggest otherwise. Apart from his role as Nick’s Twisp’s alter ego François Dillinger in Youth In Revolt perhaps, though that still wasn’t really much of a departure from his norm. The fact is that this type of character is in such constant demand in American indie and studio cinema at the moment that Cera doesn’t deserve to be overly criticised for being a ‘one-note’ actor as he’s merely capitalising on his style of acting currently being so very desirable. Moreover, the boy deserves credit for making these types of roles so popular. Yes, he keeps playing himself but he keeps getting parts that require him to play himself because he’s so damn good at it!

He’s also been helped by a resurgence of really good American teenage films in the last few years, the best since the 1980s. The stupid frat boy humour of American Pie and everything that followed in the 90s have been firmly put in place by films like Juno, and even Superbad, which although still silly, is more intelligent than the high-school films of the previous decades. Mainly thanks to it’s interest in platonic male love rather than purely concentrating on boys looking to get their end away. However, even though Michael will always give the filmmakers and the audience what they want, having him as a star of a film is no guarantee that it will be any good, as even his presence couldn’t save the disasters that were, for different reasons, Paper Heart and Year One.

Cera may be the cord wearing geek who gets all the girls but Woody Allen he ain’t, as anyone who has seen the self-penned Clark and Michael web series will testify. He is the characters he plays in films which is why he always plays them well but these characters are also slightly wittier versions of himself as anyone who has seen him on chat shows should concur. He can’t write, he needs to be written for. Although, in the 2005 short film Darling, Darling, where, quelle surprise he plays his usual socially inept self, the most interesting thing about the film is that it credits Cera for ‘additional improvised dialogue’ and you get the feeling that this is what he’s good at. He can’t write a whole screenplay on his own or with a partner (as Clarke and Michael proved) but what he can do is turn up, be himself and subtly adapt his own personality to whatever are the slight difference in nuances between himself and the character he is playing, thus he actually just is the character and can talk in the same style of dialogue that is written for him whilst slightly improving it.

At least in Scott Pilgrim, based on a series of comics by fellow Canadian Bryan Lee O’Malley, there’s a twist which sees his character have to defeat the girl of his desire’s seven ex-boyfriends in cartoon computer-game style martial art combats, but he is still essentially, playing the same character. This is no bad thing as the Michael Cera character is a great character, and no one currently plays it better than Michael Cera. But, you worry about for how long he can keep at it. What’s he going to do when he enters his thirties? His whole shtick is about being an awkward yet charming youth; will being an awkward adult stuttering towards middle age be quite so charming? Probably not.

Nevertheless, for me, and all indie kids, geeks, nerds, dweebs, he is currently Jesus, he is Buddha, he is who we try to be, the epitome of, dare I say it, ‘geek chic’. The whole essence of someone who has most fun making mix-tapes and playing in crappy bands can be summed up in his character’s lines in Juno when he responds to being told that he’s so cool without evening trying, by saying ‘I try really hard actually’.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is in cinemas this summer. The trailer is out now.