The word ‘no’. It has a lot of power in cinema. As you can imagine, it’s said a lot. Think of the thousands and thousands of scripts that don’t make it to the screen each year – it’s an impressive pile, even without those scripts that get sold and float in limbo forever. The film industry needs to say ‘no, to these. If all of these scripts got made, Cinemas would drown in a tide of slurry. Film critics would work 48-hour shifts. Multiplexes would be the size of Swindon. It would take audiences so long to sift through the never-ending film listings (presented in dictionary-sized hardback form) that they’d never bother going. For those that do risk it, the chances of seeing a good film would be on a par with winning the lottery.
If only film had more… More what, you ask?
How about more invincible heroes? Laughable villains? Battling robots? Talking chipmunks? Talking dogs? Talking anything-that’s-not-human?
No. No self-respecting individual who claims even the slightest interest in film could possibly want more of these. But the studio execs seem to think we do. Just a month ago 20th Century Fox saw fit to burn our souls with a third Alvin and the Chipmunks film. A franchise with characters so grating that just the trailer made me want to insert barbed wire down my throat, pull it out the other end and floss myself to death.
Late last year Like Crazy whipped up a whirlwind of hype after bagging the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic Film and Special Jury Prize: Dramatic Acting for young Brit star Felicity Jones at Sundance. Well, the hype is certainly warranted, because Like Crazy is one of the cinematic highlights of the past year.
The nominations have been announced and so it is time once again for the annual game of being upset that a large group of people didn't collectively validate your own opinions on something.
According to Sony this month, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire, is still moving forward, despite many believing that the franchise would not continue after the first film in a series of adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy didn’t do as well as expected.
The news follows Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal confirmation in November 201 that The Girl Who Played With Fire was definitely a go, and that it was planned to start filming late this year with a late-2013 release date targeted.
Michael Fassbender has revealed that another X-Men prequel is likely to be made to follow on from last year’s box office hit, X-Men: First Class.
Tom Hiddleston revealed to Empire earlier this month when and where Marvel Studios will start filming Thor 2, as Marvel Studios confirmed that Saving Private Ryan scribe Robert Rodat is rewriting the script for director Alan Taylor.
Madonna makes her long-awaited (by someone, surely… her agent, perhaps) directorial follow up to Filth and Wisdom (which had a limited run in US and was never released in the UK in 2008) with W./E., a fictionalised account of the romance between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII. Anyone willing to give the legendary pop star the benefit of the doubt here will be treated to an astonishingly horrid affair, which is pieced together less like a film and more like a cinematic ransom note.
Ralph Fiennes makes his directorial debut with a modernised retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus. Fiennes directs himself, in the lead as the titular army general and a cast including Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain in this interesting, wildly uneven experiment. Despite flashes of brilliance, Coriolanus struggles to engage the viewer for much of its two hours.
HBO and Scott Rudin have acquired the rights to remake the documentary Indie Game: The Movie which premiered at Sundance this week.
