Sep 22
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A musician transforms a tone-deaf artist’s model into the most acclaimed contralto in Europe. There’s just one catch…
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An elderly Countess, mourning the past, is offered the chance to have her youth and beauty restored. There’s just one catch…
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Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
Obviously inspired in part by the 1990 movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the family flick Adventures In Dinosaur City doesn’t have the budget or writing to succeed with adults or kids.
Despite having an all-star cast, the caper comedy The Maiden Heist was released straight to DVD. It definitely deserved a better fate.
Sep 4
I’m running behind on my Roundtable contribution, but in the meantime, here’s what’s been happening lately on Teleport City…
| CHINESE GHOST STORY
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GANGS OF WASSEYPUR When writers tag Gangs of Wasseypur as the next big Bollywood cross-over hit, they seem to be missing the point. First, Gangs of Wasseypurwasn’t a hit in India. It made a profit purely because the budget was tiny (US$3 million; in contrast, the budget for slick, shiny Bollywood action blockbuster Dhoom 3 was US$25 million, at least $10 million of which went to buying derbies for Aamir Khan’s Sahir), but it wasn’t loved by audiences, who — perhaps by design — found it too dark, too depressing, too violent, and too willing to show filth and misery instead of dazzling them with aspirational scenes of cleanliness and wealth. But more than that, Gangs of Wasseypur isn’t a potential Bollywood cross-over hit because it isn’t a Bollywood film. If anything, it is the antithesis of a Bollywood movie. |
ASAMBHAV It’s been said that in an effort to appeal to as massive a population as possible, the average Hindi film tries to cram every film genre into a single movie. Asambhav is the rare entry that maintains a relatively narrow thematic focus — this is an action film, stripped of the romantic comedy and estranged mother that appear in almost every other film, be they action or horror or whatever — but it makes up for its lack of schizophrenic genre-hopping by trying to cram every single editing and camera trick from the last fifteen years into one film, and often into one scene, and occasionally into a single shot. |
OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR Attenborough’s film differed from Littlewood’s play in a number of notable ways — so much so that the playwright considered the film a complete ruin of her work. Firstly, it used historically accurate costumes and military uniforms. Secondly, where the play had been an absurdist comedy played out on top of harrowing statistics and battlefield photographs, the movie realistically depicted things like trench warfare and poison gas. And there is death, lots and lots of death. In the play, no one died. Littlefield wanted people to laugh at the pointlessness of war, wanted to highlight that head-shaking absurdity rather than explicitly depicting it. She was horrified when she saw that the cinematic adaptation of her play was positively caked in the filth and blood of the First World War. |
Few if any have pursued movie stardom as tenaciously but to so little effect as pop singer Madonna. Here she took her (apparently) final stab at it, remaking a grossly misogynistic Italian art classic–it’s OK, it was made by a woman!–while once again all but destroying the film career of whoever her husband was at the time. Guy Ritchie, meet Sean Penn.
Age, a chain of cinematic clunkers that would give Marley’s Ghost pause and this one last giant bomb finally forced Ms. Ciccone to accept that her dreams of moviedom were being Swept Away.
Sep 1
A long time ago… I mean, from now… in a galaxy far, far away happen the events of Starchaser: The Legend Of Orin. Despite the change in time, the movie still comes across as very familiar – among other problems.
