The Great Gatsby – The Catcher in the Rye – On the Road

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”

As I walked out of a screening of The Great Gatsby I tweeted a 140 characters review of the movie concluding that some stories are just better on the page than the screen. The problem with Gatsby is that many of its 172 pages (in my Penguin Modern Classics edition) are taken up with thoughts and descriptions, the very things that it is hard to depict in film. The most notable thing about them is that Gatsby (and all the other characters) only have a voice through our narrator Nick Carraway. Is he a reliable narrator? He is clearly enamoured with Gatsby and disillusioned with the world he lived in. Is Carraway as much the embodiment of author F. Scott Fitzgerald as Gatsby is? The disillusionment certainly lends the new film version a certain relevance and prospective today. The format does however present problems forcing filmmakers to rely on voiceovers and in the case of Baz Luhrmann’s new version words floating of the screen with the aid of 3D.

The only conclusion I can reach about this movie is that it is as good as it can be. The Robert Redford/Mia Farrow version from 1974 (directed by Jack Clayton with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola) is very faithful to the book but fails to capture the essence of the novel. And that was the problem, the book isn’t great because of what is going on in the story, it is great because of what is going on under the surface. I wouldn’t even go as far as to call it a subtext, it is more a feeling, an essence. Maybe the abandoned Truman Capote script would have “got it?” we will never know. Made post Watergate, the movie lacks the cynicism you would expect of the era but also misses the heroic but naïve romantic Gatsby of the novel. It lacks both the hope and the despair.

Long considered the “holy grail” of un-filmed novels, JD Salinger described his masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye as “unactable” and refused to let Hollywood adapt it. After his death in 2010 there was a lot of speculation that a film would be made. I have very mixed feelings about the prospect of a film being developed. I think it would be best if it were not made, but if it were I would want it to be the best movie it could be. That is why I would rather have seen the proposed Billy Wilder movie in the 60’s and not a big budget star vehicle made by whoever is fashionable in Hollywood at the time. But can it really be successfully filmed? If the rumours are true we will find out in about two years. If The Great Gatsby is the seminal novel of the Lost Generation, the equivalent for the Beat Generation has to be Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Filmed last year by Walter Salles. Well made, well cast, like Luhrmann’s and every other version of Gatsby it got the look and story about right but lacked the essence of the book, again it was about as good as it could have been for what is essentially an un-filmable novel.

To give my thoughts prospective; I am a movie lover first and don’t hold with the notion that films are inferior to there source material, but I do believe that some stories are better on the page than the screen. And that is the problem with many of these great novels. In the wake of the release of The Great Gatsby I have read and heard many people (including the new movies star Leonardo DiCaprio) say how they read the book at school and didn’t think much of it. Literature is no different to music, film or any other art, it is so much better when we come to it ourselves in our own time. Anyone who reads a novel because they were forced to is going to appreciate it far less than someone who chooses to read it. The conclusion; if you have got as far as to read this last paragraph, you must have some interest in the books mentioned, so read them, if you were forced to read them at school, read them again, but only when you want to!

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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Moviedrome

Any British film fan of a certain age will have fond memories of Moviedrome. For those who don’t, it was a film series shown on BBC2 between 1988 and 2000 dedicated to cult movies. More than just series of films, Moviedrome featured an introduction originally by director Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Walker) and later by Mark Cousins.

In the first two years, as an impressionable 12/13 year old I had my first experience of: The Wicker Man, Big Wednesday, The Last Picture Show, Barbarella, Johnny Guitar, The Parallax View, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Fly (1958), The Man Who Fell To Earth, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, The Man With The X-Ray Eyes, D.O.A. (1950), The Thing From Another World, The Incredible Shrinking Man, THX 1138, Night of the Comet, The Big Carnival aka Ace in the Hole, Alphaville, Two-Lane Blacktop, Trancers, Five Easy Pieces, Sweet Smell of Success, Sunset Boulevard.

Then in the third year something interesting happened. Alongside movies I had never seen – Yojimbo (my first Kurosawa movie), Something Wild, Carnival of Souls, Manhunter (the first and still the best Hannibal Lecktor movie), Badlands (my first Terrence Malick movie) and Performance – they started showing movies I had already seen and loved such as: Assault on Precinct 13, Brazil, Get Carter, The Terminator, An American Werewolf in London, The Beguiled, Rumble Fish and Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? Many of the films shown are well known if not that well seen. But then others really blindsided me: despite being 27 years old at the time, Sergio Corbucci’s spaghetti western Django had never been shown in UK cinema’s or on UK network television until its premier on Moviedrome in 1993.

 This continued into the fourth season with one of my all time favourite genre/B movies Mad Max II shared a double bill with Orson Welles’ bizarre documentary about fraud and fakery, F for Fake. It was around this time that they started showing more themed double bills including The Day of the Locust / The Big Knife, Alligator / Q – The Winged Serpent, Wise Blood / The Witchfinder General, but the one that stood out for me was the David Cronenberg double feature Dead Ringers and Rabid. To the best of my memory, this was the first time I had seen a Cronenberg movie, I quickly looked out all the other s and have been a fan ever since. The real appeal of the series isn’t just the movies I got to see, it was the introductions by Cox. A man passionate and knowledgeable about movies, particularly genre movies. This you must remember was at a time before the internet as we know it. A time when information about older movies wasn’t as freely available and copy of Halliwell’s Film Guide was as close to IMDB as existed at the time. Listening to Cox talk about Cronenberg’s body of work and in comparison to other horror directors and revelling in its wideness and the “vicious horror lurking behind the most mundane things” certainly gave me a greater understanding of what made certain horror movies disturbing.

Alex Cox’s final season of Moviedrome came in 1994 after a seventeen week run, many of them including double features, Cox ended with Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich’s seminal noir thriller adapted from Mickey Spillane’s novel of the same name. the movie features an interesting maguffin that Cox borrowed for his 1984 movie Repo Man. The interesting thing about the timing of this movie on Moviedrome, was that it was still fresh in my memory a few months later when I saw another movie that also borrowed the idea, Pulp Fiction. It was around this time that I started studying film at university as part of my degree course, many of the films on the watch list had been movidrome films.  The series seemed to have come to an end in 1994 but was resurrected in 1997 with Mark Cousins introducing and choosing the movies. His choices often seemed more recognisable or mainstream, or was it that I was so immersed in film by this time a had already come across them? None the less the choices were always interesting and as Cousins promised they were “movies you won’t forget”.

Since its cancellation in 2000 there has not been anything like Moviedrome on British television. Nothing, including film courses at university has ever introduced me to such a breadth and depth of weird and wonderful movies. Mark Kermode has dabbled with the formula providing movie introductions on his blog and to Film4’s Extreme Cinema season, but this is far from the scope and impact of Moviedrome. All I can do is that Alex Cox, Mark Cousins and BBC2, and appeal to BBC or any other channel to do something similar.

You can see a list of all films shown on Moviedrome HERE

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Thanks for Two Million Hits

With my blog reaching a landmark two-millionth hit this week it seems like an ideal opportunity look back at what I have done so far and forward to where I am going. When I started the site back in 2009 I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. I had no agenda and no plan, I just wanted an outlet for my ramblings on film beyond bending the ears of my friends and family. My second post was actually a collection of paragraph reviews I had previously published on Flixster via facebook. By my second month I had started writing full reviews; in 2010 I wrote little other than reviews, reviewing every film I watched in the cinema (more than a hundred) that year. My most clicked on posts came from appearing on IMDB’s now defunct “hit list” and Word Press’ Freshly Pressed. The articles that have had the most visits via search engines have been about Robin Hood, The Cars from Death Proof and Anne Hathaway as Catwoman prior to the release of The Dark Knight Rises.

The other thing I didn’t realise when I started blogging is that it isn’t a solo pursuit. It is very much a community. As well as collectives like The LAMB many blogers read, comment on and even provide content for other blogs. I certainly read many other movie blogs (see the side bar of this site for the “Blogroll” of sites I read) at the expense of printed media. Many bloggers have joined forces to create bigger better sites. While I have resisted this and stuck with a solo project, I have provided content for other sites and organised a few blogathons; winning LAMMY for best blogathon three times. I have also appeared on The Matineecast and MILFCAST pod-casts.

Where am I going? The simple answer, just like the day I started, I don’t know. I still have no agenda or plan. Forgoing any format or deadline I am still happy to post when I have time and about what I feel like talking about. The important thing for me has always been that I write about what I want to write about and hope that people want to read it. As there has never been a commercial element to the site I have never felt the need or desire to chased extra traffic. I been asked about the possibility of buying my domain name and start accepting advertising, but I like the idea that as long as Word Press exists my innate ramblings.

All that leaves me to do is thank those who have helped, supported or simply read Fandango Groovers Movie Blog in that past four and bit years.

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Possible Inspirations For The Cars from Death Proof

1970 Dodge Challenger: The most directly referenced car in the movie. Not only is it the same make and model in the same colour, but Kim (Tracie Thoms) and Zoe (Zoë Bell) describe it as a “Vanishing Point car”

1969 Dodge Charger: Stuntman Mike’s (Kurt Russell ) Charger appears to reference two movies. It has the same license number as the ’69 Charger in Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (938 DAN) and looks just like the Charger involved in a classic car chase with Bullitt’s Mustang.

1972 Mustang: the Mustang is full of references including to his own movies. The has a colour scheme reminiscent of the outfit worn by The Bride (Uma Thurman) in Kill Bill (itself a reference to Bruce Lee) and the Kawasaki motorcycle she rides. The livery is also similar to the 1972 Ford Granada Coupé (sometimes incorrectly referred to as a Mustang) in Alexandre Aja’s French horror/thriller Haute Tension (Switchblade Romance in the UK). It is very similar to the 1971 Mustang to Eleanor from the original Gone in 60 Seconds (and not the remake Gone in Sixty Seconds as Kim reminds us “NOT that Angelina Jolie Bullshit”). If you look closely at the rear of the car it says “Lil’ Pussy Wagon” referencing the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill.

1971 Chevrolet Nova: Unlike the other cars in the movie, Stuntman Mike’s Chevy Nova doesn’t appear to be a direct reference to any movie, but look a little deeper and there are lots of references. It shares a licence plate with Bullitt’s Mustang (JJZ 109). The Duck hood ornament (also used later in the movie on the Charger) is copy of the one seen on the Rubber Duck’s Mack truck in Convoy (1978). A more tenuses link is the primer grey paintjob, a possible reference to the 1955 Chevrolet One-Fifty from Two-Lane Blacktop (1971).

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Iron Man 3, The First Steppingstone From The Avengers to The Avengers 2

I am not going to review Iron Man 3, why bother there are probably already three hundred reviews online, most of them by better reviewers than me and some of them who actually got paid for the privilege! However I couldn’t let the movie come and go without passing comment, after all, it is a significant movie in the history of Marvel and given the significance of Marvel in recent movie history that makes it a significant movie full stop!

When it was announced that Jon Favreau would not direct the third Iron Man movie no one would expect the chosen a director to be one whose only other movie was flop nearly a decade ago. However anyone who has seen the fantastic Kiss Kiss Bang Bang will know that Shane Black was the perfect choice. Possibly the first step in the resurrection and reinvention of Robert Downey Jr.s career. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was smart, funny and dark, the perfect movie of Downey Jr. just like Iron Man. Better known as a writer, Black is responsible for the Lethal Weapon movies, The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight as well as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It therefore comes as no surprise that he brings a lot of dark comedy to the charter, possibly even more than in the first two movies. This really works taking the movie to a different level, making it equally as good as, if not better than the first movie and certainly righting the wrongs of the second movie. It is also filled with other Black trade marks: kidnapping as a plot device, black comedy, set at Christmastime. But these are little more than window dressing and comfort blankets for the director. The real flair is the self awareness he brings to a character trying to rebuild himself.

I started writing something a few years ago (I don’t think I ever finished it) about how the characters in films (if they were real people in the real world) would go back to their daily lives after a significant event. For example, John McClane may be good at taking down a group of terrorists, but what’s he like as a detective doing a day to day job? This was touched upon in the third Die Hard movie but never explored. I didn’t expect to see it explored in a superhero movie through the eyes of the hero character, a brave and risky plot with a character that is seminal to the future of The Avengers franchise as well as the hugely profitable Iron Man movies. This is achieved through Stark’s inability to deal with the aftermath of the events of The Avengers. This along with a plot device that I won’t spoil, results in Stark spending a lot of time out of the Iron Man suit, this is a good thing and a brave choice. The film is at its best at these times. Without straying into reviews or risking plot spoilers, the villains are perfectly conceived and portrayed, there are also seamlessly intertwined with the stark/Iron Man plot. This is a movie written as a movie, a complete and integrated story and not one where a committee has listed all the elements and plot points that have to be shoehorned in.

Back to the significance of the movie. The first Iron Man existed as a sci-fi movie set on the edge of reality, this places the character closer to The Dark Knight than Thor (leading to the question how will Batman fit into DC’s hero collective, The Justice League?), whose introduction, along with the rest of the Avengers marked a movement more towards total fantasy. Where the Avengers dropped the characters, if not the audience into this new world without warning, Iron Man 3, drags us back, takes a look at what happened then lets us move on. This is an important step for the franchise to take to give it a future, it creates a neat bridge between the world of the first Iron Man and the future of the franchise. And that is the important thing. A film has to exist in a believable world that obeys its own rules or it risks alienating or distracting its audience by taking them out of the story.

So what next? The Avengers 2 is set for release in two years time and little is know about it yet. Before that Thor: The Dark World is in the can and will be in cinema’s towards the end of this year, early synopsis’ suggest a plot surrounding protecting Jane Foster from “the denizens of the dark world of Svartalfheim”. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is out next spring and is set to feature a prominent role for Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow. There is no sign of a further Hulk movie. This makes me wonder, where will the Avengers villain come from? Loki from the first Avengers movie had been introduced in the first Thor movie. Will the primary villain of the next movie be introduced in a similar way, in either Captain America: The Winter Soldier or Thor: The Dark World? I would suggest Captain America the more likely of the two simply for balance, and the balance of power in the collective. But then you have the curveball, Guardians of the Galaxy is set to go into production shortly and scheduled for release next year. It is being made by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (owners of Marvel) and not a co production, will it exist in the same universe or cross over with The Avengers? In comic books the Guardians of the Galaxy originally existed in an alternate universe within the Marvel Comics continuity but now exists in the mainstream Marvel Universe with Tony Stark/Iron Man as a member. Only time will tell, but based on what I have seen so far I am looking forward to finding out.

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Olympus Has Fallen or Die Hard in The White House

Please note this is not a review of Olympus Has Fallen but is does contain plot spoilers.

When I saw the lazy and lamentable A Good Day To Die Hard back in February I suggested the filmmakers take a look at the original classic Die Hard from 1988 to remind themselves what made it so great. Now two months later I have seen a film made by people who have clearly spent a lot of time watching Die Hard, so much so that at times it felt like a remake. It also had the benefit of a decent director in the shape of Antoine Fuqua. Although he has never recaptured the heights of Training Day (2001) he has made some good dumb fun like The Replacement Killers (1998) and Shooter (2007).

So with all this going for it Olympus Has Fallen must be a great film? Sadly it isn’t. at risk of damming with faint praise, it isn’t terrible. The problem, going far beyond the confined setting of Nakatomi Plaza/The Whitehouse, the movie totally lacks originality and actually takes key plot points from Die Hard. Including the failed helicopter assault, the hero bumping into one of the terrorist (who is pretending not to be a terrorist), and not forgetting the twist, where the terrorists motives are revealed to be different to what they first appeared to be.

Then we move onto Die Hard’s greatest asset, the villain, not only is Hans Gruber one of the best (and best written) villains in movie history, but he is played with relish by Alan Rickman, a great actor who was born to play the role. Rick Yune, isn’t terrible, but he lacks the menace of Rickman’s Gruber as well as an underwritten part.

Bruce Willis has become an action hero and is often mentioned in the same breath as fellow 80’s action stars Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, what is often forgotten is Willis only earned this reputation because of Die Hard, prior to that he was best know as the star of TV romantic comedy drama. This everyman quality was one of the things that made John McClane agreat character and more importantly, Die Hard a great film. Casting the man best known for playing King Leonidas prevents any possibility of any everyman quality to Olympus Has Fallen, but it would have been so easy to solve this problem. Simply swap the casting around and making Aaron Eckhart the action hero and Gerard Butler (who also produced) the President.

So while I can’t condemn a filmmaker for following my advice of making a film more like Die Hard, I equally can’t praise them for remaking Die Hard. My plea, please come up with some original ideas. And this leads me to a final thought; last week I was left wondering how Oblivion would compare to the similarly themed After Earth due out later this year, Olympus Has Fallen isn’t the only White House under attack movie this year. White House Down is due for release in the summer, given that it is directed by Roland Emmerich, I suspect the American landmark will get even more trashed.

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Ars Gratia Artis – Art for art’s sake

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s motto is “Ars Gratia Artis”, it appears on the company logo inscribed into a ring of film that surrounds “Leo” the roaring lion that is at the heart of the companies brand image. The Latin phrase translates to “Art for art’s sake”, but how many studios truly believe in this concept. Is the motion picture industry the one art form where cash is king and art is an afterthought? More so than any other art based industry including music, the bottom line comes first and if they make some art along the way that’s a bonus.

Where would the movie industry me if the money men took a step back and let the artists run the industry? Would it be a case of the lunatics running the asylum and all the studios would go bust, or would the products be so great that they would make money along the way? To go back to the comparison with the music industry, manufactured bands who want to be rich and famous often make it big for a short time, make lots of money then disappear without a trace. Whatever amount of success they have often pales in comparison to genuinely talented artists who are in it for the love of the music.

The late 20’s through to the end of the 40’s is often referred to as the Golden Age of Cinema. Many people dispute this as it was controlled by the big studios and their moguls, it was also the time of a huge amount of censorship. It was the time of the “Studio system” where stars were bound up in studio contracts and the vertical integration of production, distribution and exhibition was designed to dominate the industry. But constraint often inspires creativity and this era produced many classic movies, Citizen Kane and Casablanca to name just two. The system came to an end in the late 40’s following a Supreme Court ruling and things would never be the same again. But did they really change that much from an artistic point of view?

The lunatics did run the asylum for a while, or at least the actors ran a studio when in 1919 D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks founded United Artists. By the end on the 1940’s the studio existed in little more than name, producing and distributing very few movies. Of the original stars who set up the studio only Pickford and Chaplin remained. Following the US government revoking Chaplin’s re-entry visa the pair agreed to sell the studio to Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, a pair of lawyers turned movie producers. Throughout the 50’s 60’s and 70’s the studio produced many classic movies and launched the James Bond series, but it was a long way from the ideals of Griffith, Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks.

Then came Heaven’s Gate. The director Michael Cimino, had won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director for The Deer Hunter (a film I don’t think has aged that well and its crown as a classic may be slipping) and was given unusual creative freedom. There are lots of articles about this by people who know the story far better than me, look them up. The important thing here is the result and the fallout. The film had a budget estimated at $44 million (around $140million when adjusted for inflation), it took around $3million at the US box-office. Around this time the company was sold by Transamerica (a holding company that had acquired it a few years before) to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It is estimated that they paid around $350 million. Was this for the artistry of the companies back catalogue or its value in the emerging home video market? I will let you decide. So there we are back at the beginning. The company that proudly bares the slogan Art for art’s sake purchased the company that was set up by artists for arts sake.

Heaven’s Gate may have seen the end of what is often referred to as New Hollywood, but the echoes of the era are still been felt and many exponents of the time are still making movies, they include: Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, John Carpenter, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Clint Eastwood, William Friedkin, Terrence Malick, Roman Polanski and Ridley Scott. There are also great directors who work outside or on the edge of the system like Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater. Their films may sometimes suffer from being bloated and or self indulgent but this is a small price to pay. Most interestingly are the directors like Christopher Nolan and Danny Boyle who work within the system but make it work for them in a similar way to the auteurs of the golden age.

So what’s the conclusion? Sadly I have no insight or profound words. As a cynic, I truly believe that the studios are in it for the money but as a film lover I believe there are artists (actors, writers, directors and other creative people) in the industry who are in it for the love and for the art, and once in a while they create art. True art, Art for art’s sake.

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Future Classic Movies?

I spent a large proportion of the past Bank Holiday Monday listening to a BBC Radio2 poll ranking their Top 100 Favourite Albums. Basically what they did was take their Top 100 Most Played Albums (limited to one per artist) and asked listeners to rank them. The results were often surprising with a top five consisting of:

1. Coldplay – A Rush Of Blood To The Head
2. Keane – Hopes & Fears
3. Duran Duran – Rio
4. Pink Floyd – The Dark Side Of The Moon (the only one a lot of people expected)
5. Dido – No Angel

Ahead of what a lot of people expected including in the top five:

The Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers
The Beatles – Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Queen – A Night At The Opera
Fleetwood Mac – Rumours
Led Zeppelin – Untitled fourth album

One of my thoughts were that different records live longer in the mind and memory, and possibly the heart than others. For example, I bought No Angel when it first came out (before the Eminem sample made it a hit), I listened to it a lot but haven’t listened to it in about five years. I first heard Rumours and Zeppelin’s fourth album when I was a kid and still listen to them all the time and see no reason why I won’t continue to for the foreseeable future. The conclusion, if they re-do this list in fifteen or twenty years time No Angel and A Rush Of Blood To The Head may not make the top 10 or even the top 100, but Rumours, The Dark Side Of The Moon, Sgt Pepper, Born to Run, Bridge Over Troubled Water and countless other classic albums will still be there.

This got me thinking about the current and recent movies that will be heralded as classics in the future and which will be forgotten. Skyfall will be watched a lot and may prove to be the best Bond ever but will be dismissed as just another Bond movie. The Dark Knight Rises will survive as part of, one of the best movie trilogies ever, but possibly the weakest link of the trilogy. The Artist may be considered a gimmick. Stoker, Cloud Atlas, We Need to Talk About Kevin and some great foreign language movies like Amour, Rust and Bone, The Skin I live In and In the House may be too obscure for the masses. Moonrise Kingdom is going to age well as is Argo so could be up there in popular opinion. I can’t make my mind up about Drive and Black Swan but hope I love them as much in years to come as I do now after two or three viewings and hope others feel the same about them. Margin Call and Zero Dark Thirty will possibly stand as testaments to the time but possibly not a time we will want to look back on too often or very fondly.

The conclusion, there hasn’t been a 12 Angry Men, The Godfather, Goodfellas or even Star Wars in recent years, the two closest are probably The Dark Knight and Inception. I’m not saying it is a bad time for film, in fact the opposite, while, the occasional all time classics seem a little few and far between the number of really good movies being made is greater than ever. I just long for a Citizen Kane, The Searchers or Casablanca, we are about due one. Or am I being cynical and some of the movies I have mentioned will find their way to the upper reaches of the IMDB top 250?

Update:

Want to read more on the subject? Check out THIS ARTICLE that picks up the baton from where I left off.

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Kinkstarting Veronica Mars

The big movie news earlier this month was the Kickstarter fundraiser campaign to get a Veronica Mars movie made. The aim was to raise $2million, if successful Warner Bros agreed to distribute the movie. Reaching its goal in just ten hours it became the most successful Kickstarter film project to date.

As neither a fanboy or detractor Veronica Mars, I can look at it subjectively. I have seen a handful (I’m guessing around 10) of the 64 episodes of the TV show so kind of know what its about. I liked what I saw but not so much so as to make me want to hunt out the other episodes. For those who know even less than me, the show revolves around high school, then college student Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) who moonlights as a private investigator.

Getting the green light is only the start, now they need to make the movie. That starts with a script, that in turn starts with an idea. That idea needs to be a great one for the show to make the transition form the small screen. The two mediums are very different and to succeed a balance has to be found the way Joss Whedon did with Serenity based on the TV show Firefly. The TV show was made up of individual episodes with an overriding story arc/back story. The film version created one larger story centred on the larger story. It also worked equally as well for fans of the show and people with n prior knowledge. Can this work for Veronica Mars? The TV took the “case of the week” format but was elevated by an overarching story. So the same could work. The only problem, it has been six years since the show was cancelled and its star Kristen Bell is now 32. It is possible to engineer a storyline where the character is still in collage, if not she will have to be in a profession that does not ruin the dynamic of the show. It would easy to make her a Cop or private investigator, but would that work? The story will also need a suitable mystery.

Then we have the issue of the audience. With an audience of around 2.5million on its original American release and around 50,000 in the UK, it is far from having a readymade audience. Although a fans favourite Kristen Bell is far from “A list” and isn’t going to open a movie. This is why a great story that will gain positive reviews and word of mouth is possibly the only way the film can be successful. It would be a shame to go to all this effort for the movie to of straight to DVD and never see the inside of a cinema.

What Next?

What next for the Kickstarter concept? The internet is awash with suggestions of show fans would like to see revived. Pushing Daisies and Firefly seem to be the two that keep coming up. Personally I favour a different Nathan Fillion show, Drive. Made by FOX and lasting for just six episodes and also featuring a young and relatively unknown Emma Stone. Based around a cross country road race, the show offered nothing new or original but was good fun and could work well as a 100 minute movie.

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Parker’s Full Contact Point Blank Payback

Have you seen the trailer for the new Jason Statham movie Parker? Does it look familiar, do you think you have seen it somewhere before? If the answer to the second question is yes, there is a good reason, you probably have seen it before! This isn’t the first time the story has been filmed. Based on the pulp noir crime novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake (using the pseudonym Richard Stark), the plot revolves around a criminal named Parker who is betrayed and left for dead by his partner and wife, who are having an affair. Parker survives and goes on (to quote The Bride from Kill Bill) “roaring rampage of revenge”. The character went on to appear in 24 and novels and has been adapted into several movies. The new movie is the first time he has gone by his original name, Parker having previously been called: Porter, Walker, Gou Fei, Earl Macklin, McClain and Stone.

The most famous and best of the movies is Point Blank (1967) directed by John Boorman and starring Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. With a dreamlike unrealism the movie is very much of its era from the late 60’s. essentially a noir thriller it is a product of New Hollywood with elements of neo-noir and French New Wave influences. Often a harsh and brutal film it completely revolves around its star Lee Marvin in a towering performance.

Based on the novel of the same name, The Outfit (1973) is a different story staring the Parker character (there were 24 books in total) directed by John Flynn and starring Robert Duvall, Karen Black, Joe Don Baker and Robert Ryan. A more routine and straightforward movie than Point Blank but also well worth a look.

Loosely based on the same source novel as Point Blank, Full Contact (1992) (original title: Xia dao Gao Fei) is a Hong Kong action movie directed by Ringo Lam and starring Chow Yun-fat. A by the numbers action movie but with the grit and flair you would expect from Ringo Lam. I haven’t seen the movie for a very long time but seem to remember enjoying it.

Released in 1999 before Mel Gibson’s well published problems Payback is a stripped down and violent but more light hearted version of the story. Directed by first time director Brian Helgeland who is better known as a screenwriter. Gibson is having a great time in the lead and is well supported by Maria Bello, William Devane, Lucy Liu and Kris Kristofferson. Not a patch on Point Blank but great fun.

A little research tells me the character also appeared in four other films I haven’t seen: Made in U.S.A (1966) a French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard and unofficially based on the novel The Jugger. Mise à sac (1967) (also known as Pillaged and Midnight Raid) also a French film, directed by Alain Cavalier and based on the novel The Score. The Split (1968) directed by Gordon Flemyng starred Jim Brown and based on the novel The Seventh. British film Slayground (1983) is based on the novel of the same name, directed by Terry Bedford and starring Peter Coyote.

Parker was released in America at the end of January and is due out her in the UK later this month. Unsurprisingly, reviews are reserved but relatively positive, Jason Statham is after all, a reliable if predicable action star. Obviously I will reserve judgment until I have seen the movie, but fear they have made one vital mistake. At just two minutes shy of two hours, it is clearly going to be too long. Point Blank is 92minutes, Full Contact 96 min and most notably, the cinema release of Payback was 100 minutes but the director’s cut (take note Peter Jackson) is 90 minutes.

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