M. Night Shyamalan

Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan, better known by M. Night Shyamalan is a weird fish as far a films go, whenever I hear of a new film from the writer/director I take notice, but the question I have to ask myself is why? As I don’t like alot of the films he’s done, well to be completely honest theres only one I like and that is Unbreakable, his follow up from his breakout success The Sixth Sense.

There are films that come out every year or so, that people rave on about, that our often highly over-rated, 2009 it was The Hurt Locker, in 2008 it was Slumdog Millionaire, then 2006 gave us The Pursuit of Happyness, in 2001 there was Training Day. 2000 there was Gladiator and finally, getting off the rant and on to the point, in 1999 it was The Sixth Sense, a psychological thriller, about a boy who can both see and talk to the dead. Which was nominated for several Oscars including best picture, for reasons I can’t begin to understand, then so were all the others I’ve just mentioned, some even winning.

The Sixth Sense was followed with Unbreakable, starring Bruce Willis, and Samuel L. Jackson as the brilliantly villainous Mr. Glass. The film follows Willis’s character as he learns he may have superpowers, nothing like flight or heat vision, just that he's incredibly strong and ‘unbreakable’, its basically the origins of a superhero, the kind of thing usually crammed into the first half hour of any comic book adaptation, and I think that’s properly why I like it, as a fan of the comic book medium generally.

That was followed with Signs, which is apparently very good, or so I am told, but I haven’t seen it so lets move swiftly on to The Village, and bypassing it because frankly it shit. This leads us to Lady in the Water, part fairytale part mystery , completely weird, which did appeal to me, while I watched it I enjoyed it, and thought, though not brilliant it was entertaining enough, however the two people I watched it with said it was one of the worst films either of them had ever seen. Slight over reaction I reckon, I doubt either of them have seen House by the Cemetery, any way I’ve re-watched it since and still kinda like it, but I am one of the few, critics absolutely panned it, so I think we’ll make that two Shyamalan films I like, or at least one and a half.

Shyamalan continued his flailing career with The Happening a concept that worked for all of ten minutes then got real old, real fast, just becoming more and more ludicrous as it rolled on.

Which leads us right up to Shyamalan’s first foray in to the world of the blockbuster, with The Last Air Bender, based on the Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Legend of Aang (also known as Avatar: The Last Air Bender), and for obvious reasons Avatar was dropped from the title for the film.

Set in a world where the population fall into one of four nations, each nation being centred around an element, namely air, water, earth and fire, and within each of these nations there are a number of people who can control the element of their respective people, ‘bending‘ that element to their will. The Last Air Bender follows the story of Aang the last of the air benders, and the fabled Avatar the one person born into this elemental world each generation, who has the ability to control the four elements and ensure balance in the world.

The Last Air Bender is supposed to be the first of a trilogy, not just to jump on the franchise bandwagon, as every film that can be a franchise is pretty much guaranteed to have films 2 & 3 in the pipeline before the first ones even hit the screens. The original series lasted for 3 seasons, where the story is brought to its conclusion., and the film takes on the story of the first series .

When I first heard James Cameron was making a film called Avatar, I thought he was making this, getting quite excited, as given his back catalogue it would have been amazing, however Shyamalan made it, so true to form its full of potential but ultimately disappointing, the main problem I have with the film is the acting, everybody seems like they attended the soap school of acting, where this semester they learnt martial arts. The story itself I found really interesting, having not really watched the series, it was all fairly new to me, but I couldn’t see the wooden acting for the trees. Makes you wish Cameron had made it, this would never have happened.

Gulliver's Travels

When I was little I used to go to visit my grandparents, they had a small collection of videos mainly things recorded from television, things to keep the grandchildren entertained. One of these videos was a copy of Gulliver’s Travels (1939), an animated version of the Jonathan Swift tale and only the second animated feature film ever made, the first being Disney’s Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs.

Gulliver’s Travels (1939) was created by Max and Dave Fleischer, for their own Fleischer studios, and who also created the animated legends of Betty Boop and Popeye. The Fleischer brothers were also responsible for the creation of rotoscoping, a process of making the drawing of animation easier, by way of tracing over live action film, frame by frame. The live action images were projected on to a piece of glass, and then traced, the projected used is called a rotoscope, hence rotoscoping. Max was granted the patent in 1915, although the brothers had already used the technique in the first animation released the previous year. Rotoscoping was used through out the making of Gulliver’s Travels (1939)

There have been many adaptations of Jonathan Swift’s book in film, on television and on the radio. Notably the 1977 film starring Richard Harris, or the original Dumbledore to anyone born this century. The 1982 BBC series produced by Dr. Who legend Barry Letts and the 1996 mini-series starring Ted Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen.

And now we have Jack Black, in a modern update of the tale, in which Black in an attempt to impress Amanda peet’s travel journalist travels to the Bermuda triangle, and after entering the triangle Black arrives in Lilliput. At first he is considered a beast, but after he safes the king (Billy Connolly)from a fire he is deemed a hero, and made general of the Lilliputian army, to great irritation of the current general and villain of the piece, General Edward (Chris O‘Dowd, TV‘s The I.T Crowd). Who switches sides, defecting to the Blefuscians, with whom the Lilliputians are at war. Eventually building a robot piloted by the General himself, and a Godzilla like smack down ensues, and no Jack Black film would be complete with out a musical number, in this case ‘War’ by Edwin Starr, with black singing the words “War. Huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing” in an attempt to bring the two warring nations together.

This version is my no means an Oscar winner, but a perfectly entertaining family film, much like Black’s previous work School of Rock, perfect for a non-taxing Sunday afternoon, and by no means on the level of the brilliant high fidelity, but not as big a pile of flaming monkey turd as King Kong.

The film is also accompanied by a new short featuring Scrat the pre-historic squirrel-thing from the Ice age films, called Scrat’s continental crack-up, where we’re given an alternative take on the forming of the continents. Lets face it Scrat was the best thing about Ice Age, while the rest of the film was fairly average, you were just waiting for the moments when Scrat would pop up again. But he’s also a character that could never carry a whole film on his own, I think it would start to get a old after ten minutes.

Gulliver's Travels - Trailer

Tron Legacy and the games crash of 1983

Tron was one of, if not the first film to centre around computers, computing and the world of video gaming, and the first to really push the boundaries of CGI. Inspired by the game Pong, Tron was released in 1983 at the height of the first era of gaming and just before the video games crash of 1983.

Now for a brief history lesson: The video games crash or the Atari debacle as it is also sometimes known occurred in 1983 and into 1984, where consumers had lost faith in the gaming market, when the market was flooded with poor quality games, this slump in the fledging industry didn’t pick up again until the release of the Nes, Nintendo’s first console. During the crash many developers were bankrupted, but it is also referred to as the Atari Debacle, due to the monumental mistakes of Atari during this period which have left have them crawling along like a one-legged dog ever since.

It all started to go wrong for Atari with a poor quality cash in on the then popular Pac-Man, which was slated by both critics and gamers alike. This resulted in Atari selling only about half of the cartridges it had produced, and with the high publicity campaign meant a considerable loss for the company.

They then followed this disaster by shooting themselves in the other foot, where the following year Atari released the movie tie-in ET, again widely advertised and mass produced. But much like they had done with Pac-Man, Atari rushed production, in order to get the game out for Christmas, giving it a mere six weeks development, and instead of the anticipated success, they ended up with what is considered to be the worst game ever made, and videogame legend says that Atari buried all the unsold copies in a landfill in New Mexico. Atari originally had plans for a Tron game based on the Space Paranoids, later being cancelled due to the crash, along with tie-in games for movies Superman III and The Last Starfighter.
 

But I digress, we were talking about Tron, which was a visual effects landmark, and family history has it that my uncles first job out of university was as a programmer for the special effects on Tron, again I’m wondering of the topic slightly, but how many people can make such a claim, feels like something that should be boosted about.

So back to the topic at hand. Which goes something like this, given the cult status of Tron, and the integration of gaming into everyday life, it would stand to reason that Disney would eventually bring out a sequel, it may have taken nearly 30 years, but it was well worth the wait.

One of the things that I loved about Tron Legacy was the soundtrack, written by French dance legends Daft Punk (who also cameo in the film as two DJing mp3 files), combining their signature electro sound with the might of a full orchestra, and follows a recent trend of contempory artists producing soundtracks, following Karen O, of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and her soundtrack for the Spike Jonze adaptation of children’s classic Where the Wild Things are, and masters of metal Mastodon, who wrote a large portion of the soundtrack for the DC comic adaptation of Jonah Hex.

The thing that stands out about Tron legacy, is the look, you’ll never see another film that looks like this, almost nothing but black and neon’s, I mean Tron had a completely unique look about it as well, but legacy barely resembles the original, the mythology is the same, so you still have all the elements that people loved about the original, like the light bikes, disc wars and the space paranoids, but were as the look of Tron felt like a cybernetic fantasy in the vein of Conan the barbarian, Legacy feels dark and foreboding, and with its themes of genocide, and world domination its more like Schindler's List than anything else.

 To my mind Tron: Legacy gains access to that fabled and illusive club, with the likes of Aliens and Superman II, where the sequel far out shines the original.

TRON MODERN TRAILER

TRON: LEGACY Official Trailer