Of course, that’s the ground-breaking 1985 BBC TV serial I’m talking about. It gazed into the abyss of 1980s political corruption and asked doom-laden questions about mortality … all haunted by Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen’s sparse, jarring score and the fathomless depths of Bob Peck’s pain. Edge of Darkness also brought director Martin Campbell to the attention of Hollywood. Already 45 years old, he had worked his way up through directing TV shows like The Professionals (1977 – 83) and Shoestring (1979 – 80) to the pinnacle of Edge of Darkness, which showed a restraint and a maturity that has, sadly, been all-but entirely absent from his subsequent movies.
One such movie is … Edge of Darkness. Yes, the man who helped make the original an event which is still discussed admiringly 25 years on, has directed the big-budget feature-film re-make. I fear this will not live quite so vividly in the memory.
The film begins with dead bodies rising to the surface of a lake … something forgotten, long-buried, rising up to cause misery and confusion.
Of course, the main reason this film is considered of significance is because Mel Gibson has himself risen back to the surface after, what, seven years either behind the camera or in the headlines.
Here, he is well-liked copper and proud father, Tommy Craven, just getting on with his life when his daughter suddenly starts vomiting blood – something else unwanted coming up – and she is very soon cold in his arms. At this point Mel becomes the character we have seen before … a steely-eyed hollow man on the edge of sanity with nothing to lose and no fear of losing it. His confusion and grief gives way to flashes of fury and an icy determination … ole Mad Mel has resurfaced.
He begins his own investigation into his daughter’s death and that eventually brings him to the attention of (Darius?) Jedburgh a mysterious Security Specialist without portfolio. Joe Don Baker brought a real charisma to the original role, a flamboyant American amongst a cast of dour, grey Englishmen … Ray Winston here reverses the cultural divide … but plays Jedburgh as a very calm, still man.
I like watching Winston in a film, he is at his best when his obvious physical size is held in check, threatening to break out into acts of extreme violence at any moment. He was fascinating in The Proposition (2005) and, of course, utterly mesmerising in Nil By Mouth (1997); but Hollywood has never really found a role that fits him. This film is no exception. His role in the narrative is never entirely clear and I fear that is because the point of him was lost somewhere in the adaptation. His line “I don’t know what it means to have lost a child but I know what it is to not have one” should be redolent with sadness and significance but, instead, just sounds like fortune cookie rhetoric.
Much about this film is less than clear. To some extent that is deliberate because, after all, it’s a political thriller – filled with long scenes of people sitting in dark rooms delivering pages of exposition … a sure sign of a political conspiracy. But then the weighty nature of the conspiracy is interrupted regularly by the obligatory fist-fight, car-chase and shoot-out which interrupt the gradual accretion of suspense that sustained the original TV version through almost five hours.
Again, the original had a faceless, systemic corruption with no single villain at its core, but here we have Danny Huston who, like Winston, has pretty consistently failed to capitalise on the screen-burning potential he demonstrated with his breakthrough performance in The Proposition. As the evil industrialist, Bennett, he is asked to do nothing more than arch that eyebrow and exudes slimy charm. He may as well have ‘Bad Guy’ printed on his business cards.
Edge of Darkness doesn’t have the genuine political credentials of 1974’s The Parallax View or 1976’s All The President’s Men (the films that all conspiracy thrillers want to be) but then it doesn’t have the pace or energy of The Net (1995) nor Enemy of The State (1998) either … leaving it just floating between these two shores.
To be fair to Mel’s performance, you are actually more interested in his journey than in the details of the actual conspiracy. That’s irrelevant. What you are actually getting is the story of a man unravelling because his reason for being has been taken away.
As a character, Craven is infinitely more interesting and more convincing in the moments where he is hallucinating conversations with his dead daughter … these scenes are genuinely affecting.
Out of curiosity, I dug out my old DVD of the proper version just for comparison purposes and was very quickly reminded that Peck’s performance in those scenes, when he goes from joy to despair in a moment, joy at hearing his daughter’s voice, despair at realising it is just a memory and he is still utterly alone in the world, are genuinely heart-breaking. His performance is a master-class in how an actor can allow the calm surface of his face betray the turmoil roiling in the depths below.
Gibson gives of his all and is to be congratulated but, ultimately, this new version of Edge of Darkness merely has a few hidden shallows, it lacks the gloomy depths and solemn clarity of the original. Ultimately Jedburgh’s coda, in the original, has a grandeur which helped lift the whole serial far above the tame and tepid police procedural it could so easily have been. Here it just reads like a flaccid pastiche of the end of the Marky Mark movie Shooter (2007) a film that is, frankly, best left to sink without trace.
You see, some things are just best left where they lie, Martin.
Dir: Martin Campbell
Stars: Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Bojana Novakovic
Since this blog is mine and I decide the editorial policy, I write the reviews to whatever length feels right. In the case of Daybreakers this initially ran to a little over 800 words. Ultimately, I decided that the optimum length for the piece was to trim it slightly to 700 words for publication on the blog here.
But, of course, I understand the need for brevity and word limits, so I’ve presented this review here in its uncut 800+ word version, then a version trimmed to a healthy 500 words and, finally, a truncated and slightly re-written 200 words. Just to show I can hit any word count required without losing the essence of the review.
Uncut 835 word version:
Okay, it’s a rubbish title. Let’s get that out of the way to start with. A bad, horrible, clumsy, committee-approved title. Daybreak? Nice. Break of Day? Classy. Daybreakers? Pah. Gack. Spit. That’s the name of a duff straight-to-video action pot-boiler from the early nineties. Starring Jeff Fahey or Wings Hauser. So offensive is the clumsiness of this title it almost stopped me watching the film. Only the presence of Willem Dafoe tempted me. He’s usually very reliable. Even if this were one of those rare films he did just for the money … it must have some value, surely it can’t be another Mr Bean’s Holiday (2007) or XXX2 (2005) … can it?No, it can’t.
What it can be is another Gattaca (1997) mixed with more than a dash of the first Blade (1998) and just a hint of the ubiquitous Matrix (1999). Not a bad gene pool from which to draw inspiration.
A rather confusing introductory montage gives us to understand that we are ten years in the future and the world is entirely vampire. It takes the vision we see in, say, Alan Ball’s True Blood TV series (and the Charlaine Harris books on which it is based) and extends that into a logical future where humans are a minority, grown in factory farms and bled for food. The vampire world is trundling along very successfully, having completely replaced our society with a dark mirror-image of it. Almost everyone seems happy with their immortality. Almost everyone.
Cue Ethan Hawke – who doesn’t make nearly enough films – as Edward, Chief Haematologist of the Bromley Marks corporation which provides the vampire world with all the blood it needs – now refined as a supplement to add into coffee in place of milk. Hawke is very good at looking worried and Edward is very worried. Worried about the shortage of living humans and their blood, worried about the failure of his experiments to refine an artificial blood substitute but, above all, worried about the morality of reducing humans to food animals. His boss, played with practiced ease by the always malevolent Sam Neill, has no such qualms. He, like any good captain of industry, sees every problem as an opportunity to sell more product.
The Grendel at their gates is the effects of starvation. If a vampire goes without blood for long enough, he becomes ‘a sub-sider’, a bestial creature with little remaining intelligence and a powerful, overwhelming thirst. I would make a joke about the film being made in Australia here, but I can’t think of one.
Inevitably, then, there will be a human resistance movement which Edward stumbles across, as you do, and finds himself adopted by them. They are led by Willem Dafoe who has a secret, the key to unlocking the problem that both the vampires and the last remaining humans face.
Visually, the film has a very classy, noirish feel to it, with some particularly striking images – such as the queue of vampire commuters standing on the tube station, all in silhouette, their eyes reflecting like cats. Even though this film cloaks itself in the guise of science fiction, it is undeniably horror – with enough moments of explosive blood-splattered violence to keep most gore-hounds happy.
The work that writers/directors The Spierig Brothers have done in conceiving and then executing a modern world designed for vampiric convenience is very clever indeed. If you can’t go out in daylight, then the preferred mode of public transport will be the subway. Obvious. If you can’t see through the smoked-glass windows of your car, festoon the exterior with cameras so you can still safely drive around the streets. The only problem I had with all of this is that ten years just doesn’t seem long enough for almost everyone in the world to adjust to such a massive change, to come up with all these wonderful coping mechanisms then put them into production so everyone has access to them. Civilisation seems to have fallen then risen again with astonishing speed. I bet they didn’t put any of these innovations through for planning permission. That’ll add a decade or two!
Don’t worry too much about the logic of the way vampires breed and evolve, nor about the plan that Dafoe and Hawke hatch which is, frankly, barmy. At least the Spierigs stay consistently within their own rules and successfully explore the problems that arise from them. The dénouement manages to be satisfyingly cunning while addressing a fundamental flaw in Dafoe and Hawke’s plan (that I can’t discuss without giving too much away) and gives vent to some spectacularly explosive blood-letting, all-the-while leaving the way open for a sequel.
All-in-all Daybreakers is a refreshing and enjoyable take on a clapped-out old sub-genre which reminds us that, however prettily and romantically vampires may have been re-packaged for selling to a naïve teen audience, they are, essentially, parasites that see humans as food. Relationships with them will, given time, always devolve to the relationship a butcher has with his cow.
Edit #1: 500 word version:
Okay, it’s a rubbish title. A horrible, clumsy, committee-approved title. Daybreakers? That’s the name of a duff straight-to-video action pot-boiler from the early nineties. Starring Jeff Fahey or Wings Hauser. But, despite this, what we get is a film worthy of standing alongside its influences: Gattaca (1997), the first Blade (1998) and the ubiquitous Matrix (1999). Not a bad gene pool from which to draw inspiration.
The film is set ten years in the future and the world is entirely vampire. Humans are a minority, grown in factory farms and bled for food. The vampire world is trundling along very successfully, having completely replaced our society with a dark mirror-image of it. Almost everyone seems happy with their immortality. Almost everyone.
Cue Ethan Hawke – who doesn’t make nearly enough films – as Edward, Chief Haematologist of the Bromley Marks corporation which provides the vampire world with all the blood it. Hawke is very good at looking worried and Edward is very worried, worried about the shortage of living humans and their blood, worried about the failure of his experiments to refine an artificial blood substitute but, above all, worried about the morality of reducing humans to food animals. Sam Neill has no such qualms as his blood-sucking boss, the slippery evil-doer of the piece, a role he has slid skilfully into many, many times before.
Inevitably, then, there will be a human resistance movement, led by Willem Dafoe, which Edward stumbles across, as you do, and finds himself adopted by.
The Grendel at their society’s gates is the effects of starvation. If a vampire goes without blood for long enough, he becomes ‘a sub-sider’, a bestial creature with little remaining intelligence and a powerful, overwhelming thirst. I would make a joke about the film being made in Australia here, but I can’t think of one.
Visually, the film has a very classy, noirish feel to it, with some particularly striking images – such as the queue of vampire commuters standing on the tube station, all in silhouette, their eyes reflecting like cats. Even though this film cloaks itself in the guise of science fiction, it is undeniably horror – with enough moments of explosive blood-splattered violence to keep most gore-hounds happy.
The work that writers/directors The Spierig Brothers have done in conceiving and then executing a modern world designed for vampiric convenience is very clever indeed. If you can’t go out in daylight, then the preferred mode of public transport will be the subway. Obvious. The only problem I had with all of this is that ten years just doesn’t seem long enough for almost everyone in the world to adjust to such a massive change. Civilisation seems to have fallen then risen again with astonishing speed.
All-in-all Daybreakers is a refreshing and enjoyable take on a clapped-out old sub-genre which reminds us that, however prettily and romantically vampires may have been re-packaged for selling to a naïve teen audience, they are, essentially, parasites that see humans as food. Now there’s a thought to get your teeth into.
Edit #2: 200 word version:
Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe star in this superior mix of Gattaca (1997), Blade (1998) and the ubiquitous Matrix (1999).
The film is set in the future, where the world is entirely vampire. Humans are a minority, grown in factory farms and bled for food. But the humans are dying out, blood is scarce and, if a vampire goes without blood for long enough, he becomes ‘a sub-sider’, a bestial creature with an overwhelming thirst.
Hawke is very good at looking worried, Dafoe is all about being earthy and wise while Sam Neill turns-in his trademark slippery evil-doer role.
Visually, the film has a very classy, noirish feel to it yet, even though it cloaks itself in the guise of several different genre, it is undeniably horror – with buckets explosive blood-splattered violence.
The work that writers/directors The Spierig Brothers have done in conceiving and then executing a modern world designed for vampiric convenience is very clever indeed.
All-in-all Daybreakers is a refreshing and enjoyable take on a clapped-out old sub-genre which reminds us that, however prettily and romantically vampires may have been re-packaged for selling to a naïve teen audience, they are, essentially, parasites that see humans as food.
BROADSWORD CALLING DANNY-BOY … the making of WHERE EAGLES DARE
This retrospective was commissioned and published by 'Film Review' magazine in 1998, to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the film. As specified by the brief, it is 3,000 words long.
1: “He came out with the shittiest fucking title you could imagine.”
Film Producer Elliot Kastner doesn’t do interviews, but will occasionally make exceptions to discuss ‘Where Eagles Dare’, a film which he was involved in from before the word ‘go’:
“I rang Alistair MacLean at his home in Surrey, and told him that I would really like to meet with him. He refused; he didn’t wanna meet without my telling him more details. So I told him: I wanted him to consider writing an original story, directly for the screen. There was a moment of silence, followed by ‘Hmm, nobody ever asked me that before.’”
Kastner, a native of Harlem and exponent of a typically dry New York sense of humour, was amused to be invited to MacLean’s house after lunch. “This was so he didn’t hafta spend any money feeding me. Well, he was Scottish.
Kastner is refreshingly candid about money: “I agreed to give him ten thousand pounds up front and an additional hundred thousand dollars when I had arranged the finance. The first ten grand being from my own money.”
“ 'So’ he said ‘What is it you want?’ ‘I want a team of five or six guys on a mission in the Second World War, facing enormous obstacles. I want a mystery. I want a sweaty, exciting adventure movie.’ That’s all I told him, just that.”
Inevitably, Kastner’s mind returns to the subject of money and what he considers his big mistake: “So, we made the business arrangement and ... shit, I even gave him ten percentage points of the profit. I tellya, to this day he and his estate collect money from ‘Where Eagles Dare’. Every February, they still get a cheque.”
Kastner found himself invited back to MacLean’s house some weeks later, for a progress report. “This time he invited me to lunch, well, I had given him ten grand. Anyway, after lunch, he took me into his study and showed me a globe. He gave me a magnifying glass and pointed to a spot in the Alps and said: ‘This is the Alder Schloss. This where it’s all going to happen.’ And that’s all he told me; he wasn’t a very demonstrative guy, but I could tell he was excited about it too!”
By this point, Kastner had brought his childhood friend Brian G. Hutton on-board as director; so, when the script was delivered, at a whopping 170 pages, the three of them worked on it and whittled it down to130 pages. “I never called another writer in, I stayed with Alistair and, with a lot of work, we got a screenplay that was absolutely delicious.”
Unfortunately, MacLean’s title didn’t leave such a sweet taste in the mouth; or, as a New Yorker might put it: “He came out with the shittiest fucking title you could imagine. I don’t even remember it, it was so bad, but I thought about this ‘Alder Schloss’ meaning ‘Eagles Castle’. That reminded me of a quote from ‘Richard III’, “Where eagles dare to perch”, so I snapped off the end and ‘Where Eagles Dare’ had a nice rhythm to it.”
Although Kastner had rapidly established a track-record of working with premier league talent (Paul Newman in 1966’s ‘Harper’ [‘Moving Target’ in the UK], Warren Beatty in 1967’s ‘Kaleidoscope’) he wanted Richard Burton for this one, and Burton was in a league of his own.
“I had enormous difficulties with his agent, a man called Hugh French, who was contemptuous of anything that didn’t come directly from the studio head offices. So I went round him. I chased Burton down to a Bistro near the Victory Studios in Nice.
“I did my tap dance with him, and he kinda agreed. Then I had another obstacle: I had to get him to go with a director who was totally unknown. We came through that okay, then I went through it all again with Clint Eastwood. They didn’t wanna pay $350,000 plus a percentage to a Spaghetti Western star.”
As it happened, Hutton would follow ‘Eagles’ a year later with ‘Kelly’s Heroes’, which also starred Eastwood, then quit the film business altogether. As for Kastner and Burton, they would work together again on ‘Villain’, ‘Equus’ and ‘Absolution’.
2: “The day I met Richard Burton, he set his dogs on me!”
Once he had the green light, it was time for Kastner to stop chasing, and for others to chase him. Ingrid Pitt crossed two continents to make certain of her place in the credits roll. “I was living in the States at the time, working on the TV show ‘Ironside’. Ralph Meeker rang up and asked if I wanted to join him in a poker game. Well, you don’t pass up any invite in Hollywood; so I played poker with him, John Wayne, Yakima Canutt and a few others.
“Yakima told me he was preparing for ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and urged me to speak to the director. So, the next day I got Brian Hutton on the blower, we met, I blew in his ear and all was well.
“Months later, I was having my hair washed when I got the call. I was needed ... immediately. I ran around the house, packing, with my hair dripping all over my clothes as I packed them.
“I arrived in Salzburg in the evening, was due on set next morning and didn’t have a costume to wear. However, Ever-Ready-Ingrid had foreseen that something like this might happen, so I had brought some things with me ... The waistcoat they found for me was loose and horrible, so I had to sit up all night on my bed, sewing the bloody thing.”
The next morning would be her first chance to meet Richard Burton, one of her screen idols: “I arrived and Brian wasn’t ready for me, so I had to go and sit in this lean-to and wait. “I went in, and suddenly these dogs rushed out of the dark at me, barking and biting at my ankles. I yelled ‘Call your dogs off!!’ Then, there he was, Richard Burton, my idol, with this huge fur wrapped around him, sitting by a fire. The day I met Richard Burton, he set his dogs on me!
“I got my revenge, though! In my first scene, I got to slap Richard. ‘You’re not really going to hit me are you?’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t be daft, I’m gonna hit you, take it like a man!’ I kept him on tenterhooks all morning, then when we did the take, I just missed him.”
Then there was another hold-up for Pitt, her costume was fine, now her hair needed altering: “Mary Ure insisted on being the only blonde in the film, so my hair had to be dyed, which eventually sent it all green and brittle. I should have just told her what she could do with her blonde hair, but it was my first big film, so I rather did as I was told.”
Peter Barkworth went along to audition for the role of a German spy: “Brian Hutton and I got on so well, he changed the nature of the character to an Englishman and the name to Barkley, to accommodate me. Unfortunately, after all that trouble, I only had five lines.”
One can be forgiven for asking why Kastner had cast actors like Burton, Barkworth and Michael Hordern in roles hardly befitting their abilities. “Well,” He explains: “Any actor worth his salt can bring something great to any material. The English have always been known for their pool of character actors, and we deliberately picked the best.”
Peter Barkworth remembers the day he, Burton, Eastwood and the others had to cross a bridge and saunter through a German check-point: “Now, gentlemen”, Brian Hutton had told them, “I want you all to look at those German guards and think ‘oh shit, what do we do now’. In fact, this is the Oh Shit Bridge!’’
“We laughed a lot on ‘The Oh Shit Bridge’ that day.” Barkworth confesses. “Brian and Richard were ribbing each other off camera, while Richard and Clint were ad-libbing the bits no one has bothered to write, on the bridge. By the time we finished work, we were all weak with laughing.”
Extracts from Barkworth’s film diary beautifully sum up the atmosphere on set: ‘January sixth, 1968: It’s extraordinary, we actors are given wooden boards to stand on, so our feet don’t get cold in the snow, chairs to sit on, capes to protect us from the bitter wind, and caravans to rest in. It is lovely, I enjoy being pampered very much.’
Summing this up, Barkworth adds: “During those first five or six weeks, I felt at the heart of something, like I was really working on a big film. That feeling soon departed when we got back to England to shoot the rest at MGM. That was just months of hanging around. In fact, all-told, it took me six months to say my five lines!”
3: “All the cattle for miles around spent the next week suffering from diarrhea!”
Veteran stunt-man, Alf Joint worked closely with Burton throughout, not only taking the falls, but, because of their striking physical similarity, literally doubling-up as the star’s on-screen stand-in. Spending so much time at the centre of the action afforded Joint plenty of opportunity to see Burton at his best, and his worst:
“You hear stories that Burton was inept; people talk of his suffering from vertigo and needing a hoist to help him climb walls, but this was just him being lazy. When his family visited, he was jumping of the cable-car and running around and showing off to his kids.”
But, on the other hand, Burton did like his drink: “I remember one time he went to Paris on a drinking spree with O’Toole, Harris and Trevor Howard, his usual drinking set. They set off on the Friday, promising that they’d be back on the Monday. They were carried off the plane on the Thursday.
“Because of that, Brian decided to use me as Richard’s double more extensively. I worked on three or four sets that Burton himself never even saw. It saved them a lot of money.”
One set Joint shouldn’t have seen, was the baronial hall, scene of Burton’s big monologue. “Of course,” Alf explains, “Burton had had a few, and, as he’s striding around, walks straight into the mantlepiece over the great fireplace, knocking himself out cold.
“After that it was, ‘Alf, get into uniform’, and we shot the rest of the scene from behind. I must have the most photographed shoulders in the business.”
One temperamental star can’t hold up a production the size of ‘Eagles’ by himself. If he really was doing it deliberately, Burton must have enlisted the help of Mother Nature. Alf Joint again: “Burton kept getting the blame for the shoot going on and on, but, at least during the location shoot, it was actually the drastic changes in the weather. For example: there was the jump out of the cable-car into the river. The first time we did it it didn’t work because the snow was gone, we’d been filming for so long it had turned Spring.
“They were up three nights covering the ground in commercial epsom salts and then, of course, there was a torrential downpour which washed all the salt into the river and all the cattle for miles around spent the next week suffering from diarrhea!”
Still, while the cast and crew were away from home far longer than planned, they managed to maintain a holiday atmosphere. Peter Barkworth’s diary recalls: ‘Long talks with Richard and the gang, led to an invitation to the Burtons’ for drinks and dinner. Elizabeth Taylor was visiting. She was wonderful, exquisitely dressed, a perfect, oh-so-relaxed hostess’.
‘Elizabeth told me that she had been lost as to what to feed us all, then thought of cold roast pork and chips! The best cold roast pork comes from The Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane, London; so she had sent her jet over to London that morning to collect a leg of pork.
‘We had that wonderful leg of pork, with french fries and a salad. Elizabeth advised me to spread some Heinz salad cream on a roll and make a sandwich of the whole lot, which I duly did and it was delicious.’
4: “I ended up hanging upside-down from the platform.”
Back in England, delays continued to dog the production, and presented Burton with yet more distractions; as Pitt remembers: “He used to invite us all to luncheons in a thatched barn in Borehamwood.
“Sometimes Robert Shaw would visit, or Peter O’Toole, and, inevitably, these luncheons would turn into marathon drinking sessions. I’d sit there, sipping a wine and feeling so guilty, I’d apologise to Elliott Kastner, but he’d say, ‘Don’t worry, we don’t need you, we need him’.” That’s New York diplomacy for you!
Continuing to fly in the face of received wisdom , Kastner had insisted on employing retired living legend Yakima Canutt as his stunt co-ordinator. He gets positively misty-eyed when recalling his collaboration with the man they called ‘Yak’: “My partners couldn’t unnerstand why I wanted to pull this old guy out of retirement, but it was because I knew he was the best. He forgot more than most young stunt-guys know.”
Yak’s major responsibility - the big showpiece stunt on ‘Where Eagles Dare’ - was organising the jump Alf Joint was to make from one moving cable-car to another. This was supposed to have been one of Canutt’s first jobs on the film, to be shot using a real cable-car. It ended-up being one of the last things shot, back in London, using a full-size model; as Joint explains:
“In Salzburg, Yakima asked me to go out and look at the cable-car with him. He explained that I had to jump from one to the other, while they were moving. I said ‘Do what?’ So, we climbed out on the roof of the cable car and I was explaining to him that there was no way this would work, when the other car passed by - whoomph - and was gone. Yak said ‘God. What was that?’ ‘Oh, that was just the cable-car you want me to leap onto.’
“Next Sunday, Plan B: He’s built this platform onto the side of the mountain, from which he wanted me to leap onto the passing cable-car. Fair enough; ‘Supposing I miss?’ I asked. It was a long way down. So they tied a rope to me.
“I leaped it and just made the cable-car. Problem was, they forgot to tell the guy in the control station to put the brakes on, so the car kept going and I was still tied to the platform. I ended up hanging upside-down from the platform. Yak whipped his lasso out, lassoed my leg and pulled me up; but I wasn’t too pleased.”
Consequently, all talk of doing the stunt on location stopped and plans were laid to build a full-size set, back at MGM. “When I actually did the job, it was against a front projected screen. I more or less dove off a small trampoline at the car as it came up, grabbed hold, and everything worked out alright.”
“Except ... when I did the dive, I hit the car with all my body weight and smacked my mouth into the safety bar. It saved me from sliding off and falling sixty-odd feet, but I lost three teeth.” Of course, it is only fitting that Joint’s most famous job should have made a permanent mark on him.
This same set provided Peter Barkworth with the climax of his part: the vicious fist-fight with Burton on the roof of the cable car, during which the two combatants never actually met: “They could only manage one shot per day, because it required such precise setting up. Then, if the camera was pointing at me, Richard wasn’t needed, so Alf Joint would stand in, with his back to the camera. We would swing one punch, and that would be that for another day. We had that ferocious fight, which took weeks to film, and never actually laid our eyes on each other, let alone our fists.”
While this second unit work was going on, Ingrid Pitt was still waiting around to finish off her first unit chores. “I wasn’t working very often, but I had to always be on call in case they changed the schedule (because Richard hadn’t shown up), so I sat in the Hilton Hotel for days and weeks on end. I must have read every book in the library. God it was boring. I tell you, sitting in that hotel, fending off the Arabs who kept sending me bloody roses, was horrendous.”
But there were moments when the camaraderie of the Salzburg shoot would return, usually thanks to Burton and Eastwood’s mischievousness: “Never more-so,” Pitt concludes, “Than after the last day of shooting. We were driving back from Borehamwood in Richard’s Rolls when Clint said to Richard ‘Shall we tell her now?’ I said ‘Tell her what?’ ‘Well, we had a bet over who would get you in the sack first, him or me!’ I thought that was very ... cute. Bloody actors.”
For Kastner, the problems of the shoot are now a dim and distant memory, a lot of water has flowed under The Oh Shit Bridge these past thirty years: “That film was a joy for me, from beginning to end,” He enthuses, “I was making the perfect meat and potatoes movie movie. The kinda movie I love, the kind that grabs an audience for two hours and sucks ‘em in! It was like a Michael Curtiz or John Huston film: ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘The Maltese Falcon’, rolled into one. Those were movie movies, and so was this.
“Everything about that movie was so tremendously satisfying, to relive those moments is delicious for me; that’s why I’ll talk about that film and no other. I just enjoy remembering it; you know what I mean!?”
This 3,000 word interview (cut down from one almost twice that length) comes from a different world. A world before the internet. A world before viral marketing allowed a movie like The Blair Witch Project to prove you could have a big hit with a cheap film and long before Paranormal Activity came along and did the same again. Nowadays, literally anyone can make a film and get it seen. This was not the case before cheap HD video and internet distribution. Back then, making and releasing El Mariachi was a unique and almost miraculous achievement.
It was 1995. On the train coming down to London for a press-screening, I finished reading a book called Rebel Without a Crew. It is a film diary telling of the year in the life of a 23-year-old Texan who made a home movie called El Mariachi for $7,000, then sold it to Columbia Tri-Star for a quarter of a million.
Rebel Without a Crew is a startlingly honest and inspirational book which leaves the reader with the unshakeable belief that any shmo with a little money, a lot of gullible friends and a determined streak a mile wide can make a movie. It’s certainly a philosophy that has made Rodriguez one of the most interesting and creative film-makers working in (or around) Hollywood.
I arrived at Columbia Tri-Star’s preview theatre in London’s West End, sporting my favourite baseball cap (well, it’s always a good idea to dress up for these formal occasions). It bore the legend Hard Boiled in bolshy gold letters. The choice of this hat was a strategic move on my part as I was about to interview Robert Rodriguez, the fore-mentioned Texan one-man film crew, post-Tarantino phenomenon and, not coincidentally, lover of John Woo films.
This’ll get his attention! I thought ...
First they screened Desperado, the sort-of-sequel-sort-of-remake to El Mariachi then, as the lights rose, in wandered the director, dressed in jeans and a lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Oh good, I thought, at least I’m not the only scruffy bugger here! After our brief introduction I switched on my microphone and set about checking levels on my tape machine, the first words it recorded were: “Cool hat! Wow, where do I get one of those? Damn.”
“Ehm ... who distributed the film? Metro Tartan, I think. I got it off them!”
“That’s great!”
[Trying hard to act surprised] “Thank you. Ehm ... So, has your reputation for making films cheaply helped or hindered you in Hollywood?”
“Oh, completely helped! I’ll work forever off Desperado alone, because Hollywood just doesn’t know how to make movies that look big, that can be sold like a big movie, but that cost under ten million. It’s really funny, ’cos they just can’t see how to do it, and I dunno why.
“Desperado cost seven million which is, y’know, a lot for me but it’s nothing for a big action film. Action movies start at thirty and, if it’s a summer movie, which this one was in the States, they start at fifty. In fact, there was an article in one of the industry magazines and it showed all the hits and all the disasters - the big bombs that cost a lot and made nothing - and there were only seven films on the list that made it. Desperado was one of ’em, simply by the ratio of what it cost to what it made.”
“No one in Hollywood really knows what they’re doing, they’re all dependent on somebody else. The studio guys don’t know how to make movies, they’re all accountants who’re totally dependent on guys like me, who can tell ’em anything. They don’t know. They haven’t learned what you need. They should, then they wouldn’t get shafted so much! On the other side, creative guys aren’t usually very technical so they’re dependent on technicians and on the crew, who tell ’em it’ll take so long and cost so much to do, so there’s another waste.
“Something I learned from my first job in high school was that the last thing a creative person does is learn to be technical, they’re just too lazy to do that. But, if you’re creative and you become technical, then you’re unstoppable. That’s what I did, I learned how to make a movie from the ground up, I learned all the camera stuff, I learned how to cut it, all so I wouldn’t be dependent on anybody.”
“And you’ll continue doing it this way?”
“Yeah, ’cos once I’d set the precedent with El Mariachi (and then they made the mistake of letting me do it again with Desperado) that really locked it in. I was able to persuade them to let me direct and shoot and edit Desperado like that because I was doing it for so little money. They had nothing to lose, so they let me do it. Now it’s standard operating procedure. From now on, when a producer hires me, he knows already that I’m gonna shoot it and edit it and arrange the music myself, he won’t even question it.
“It used to be that you either made big movies which everybody had to go see so were really watered down, and had no one person in control or you had to make really small independent movies where you had a lot of freedom, but no one would go see ‘em. But movies like Pulp Fiction, Desperado. and From Dusk Till Dawn don’t have to appeal to everybody because we make ‘em cheap enough that the investors’ll get back their money back plus a little profit.”
They want me to make movies that make money and don’t cost anything. True, when they see how cheap I can work, they sweat a little it makes it harder for them to justify such great expense. But that’s good! The whole industry has gotten too big, it’s time it was shaken up a little bit. That’s what young people are supposed to do, shake things up. Then I’ll be there in a coupla years and some new guys’ll breeze into town and tell me what an idiot I am. I guess what goes around comes around! I’m just making the most of it while I can.”
“But a lot of film-makers get on the ladder by calling in favours, getting someone high up to give them a break, and they do on condition that later on you do them favours back ...”
“That’s one way to get in, but I tried not to do that. There are people who borrow money from their parents to make their first movie, but I tell people “Go sell your body to science for a few months, then you can do it with your own dime. Put yourself on the line, don’t drag someone else into it.” That’s what I did, and if it’s your own risk you’re actually more careful with the money.
“Does working so cheaply make the job easier?”
“Well it’s never easy with any budget, but with a bigger budget you’ve just got other kinds of problems. You’re always gonna have problems, it’s just that you solve ‘em differently when you don’t have a lot of money. It wasn’t like “Hey, now I’ve got seven million dollars, I can relax”, ’cos I was making something that, by Hollywood standards, would cost much more. So it was still a struggle, but when you don’t have very much money you end up solving your problems creatively. What a movie is, is a whole series of creative problems that you have to solve, that’s why big movies get into trouble, ’cos when they get a problem they don’t stop and think about how to fix it creatively and make the movie better, they just wash the problem away with the money hose. That’s easy and it doesn’t really solve your problem.”
“So how does seven million dollars get spent?”
“I shot the whole movie, put everything in the can, for $3.1 million. The rest went on wages for the actors, producers, post-production, the SDDS eight-track sound mix, the release prints, all the post stuff which we didn’t think we needed to spend so much on, but the studio thought we did. I’ll be controlling more of that from now on! But to actually make the movie, all the sets, all the explosions and all the stunts came in at 3.1. That’s nothing.”
“Does more money mean bigger names?”
“On Desperado, Antonio Banderas cost a little bit, not much. He was on the way up. The same is true of George Clooney in Dusk. You can either pay twenty million dollars for these big actors, or you can find new guys and make them into twenty million dollar actors. We got George Clooney for a song ’cos no one was offering him movie roles when I hired him, now he’s been offered Batman, which is great. I’d rather make someone a star and then not be able to afford ’em, so have to go find someone else and make them a star instead! That keeps the budgets down and sparks your creativity.”
“Do you resent the way that you and Tarantino are grouped together in people’s minds?”
“I think film makers have always worked together, Spielberg and Lucas worked together for years, and that happens all the time, because Hollywood is a small community where you find that people you relate to are few and far between. Quentin and I worked together three times in a row [Desperado, Four Rooms and From Dusk Till Dawn]... but on Desperado, he was only there for one day.
He always wanted to be an actor, he studied acting, and he took it very seriously on Dusk. After I saw him in Desperado, he seemed like a real natural. It’s true that he needs a strong director while he’s still learning, especially when he comes up against a guy like George Clooney who’s been in awful stuff for years, but got away with it because no one even paid enough attention to dismiss him. The critics wouldn’t say “George Clooney was terrible in this movie” because they didn’t even care who George Clooney was. He had years to get the seasoning that Quentin has to get very quickly and, as you see in Dusk, he got there very fast.
“How do you respond when your films are compared to John Woo’s?”
“That’s great, ’cos that was our major inspiration. American action movies were getting really stale because, I found out, action is usually shot by second unit, a stunt guy who takes the camera and a whole other crew and shoots the action stuff. They usually move so slow on a big movie that the director will spend all his time directing the main sequences with the main actors while the difficult stuff is passed on to second and third crews. We did everything first unit on Desperado, I wanted to shoot everything. I was horrified when I found out that I was supposed to hand all the fun stuff to somebody else, that’s what I was waiting for the most, I didn’t wanna do the dialogue scenes, I wanted to blow things up.
“It was the John Woo movies that made me realise that the difference between our films and films from other countries is the way they would commit to the action. I hadn’t been excited about an action movie like The Killer or Hard Boiled since I was a kid watching James Bond movies, and I thought it was just ’cos I was getting older, but I realise now that it’s just that our movies are getting stale. Those Hong Kong movies made that catharsis come back again, they made you wanna be Chinese and do all that neat stuff.”
“Where do you find your actors?”
“All over the place. People sometimes have very little acting experience because they don’t get the chances, so I start them sometimes from nowhere. I saw Salma Hayek on Spanish television saying how she couldn’t get work in the States ’cos of her accent, even though she is a big soap star in Mexico. In Desperado, for instance, since we were shooting in this little town, we couldn’t afford to fly a lot of actors out of Los Angeles, so a lot of the actors, even in bigger parts, are my crew people. I deliberately hired a Mexican crew, so my first assistant director’s in the movie, my director of photography, my grip, my gaffer, my make-up artist, they’re all in there.
“You know that bit where Antonio slides across the bar and the other guy slides up to him and they run out of bullets and they’re shooting empty guns at each other [a sequence ripped whole and bleeding from John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, it must be noted!], well that’s my second assistant director. As soon as we killed him he went back to work. I just looked at my crew and said “Man, you guys look like movie stars”, so I put ’em all in. That was fun, every day a different crew guy got to be in the movie, which kept the morale up!”
“Did you get much co-operation from the small town you filmed in?”
“Tons. We’d shot Mariachi there, but they didn’t notice us when we were there first time because there was no crew, just me with a camera running around shooting one take and then off to the next location, really fast. That’s how we made it look expensive by filming on the real streets, with real cars rolling by. Normally you have to pay the city to clear the streets, hire people to rent cars, bring in guys to drive ‘em - it’s all that backwards kind of thinking, the old way is just to let real cars go by and film your actors running between ‘em. This time we wanted to go back because we wanted to pay back the town. Everyone got to work on the movie in some capacity, ’cos it’s only a small place.”
“Will there be a third Mariachi movie?”
“We’ll see. Maybe I’ll call it Once Upon A Time In Mexico. I heard about this small town in Mexico where all they do is make guitars, so I thought, maybe that’s where he’ll be holed up, building guitars.”
“Obviously you’ve got a reputation for action movies, but in Rebel Without A Crew you talk about starting out with animations -”
“ - And family comedies, yeah, that’s mainly what I do. I’m the blood and guts guy now, but what I’ve always been is Mr Family Comedy. I wrote a comic strip for a few years called Los Hooligans, which was based on my family, and that’s what’s coming next. I mean, From Dusk Till Dawn is by far the capper on all this, I can’t go any further than that, it’s like completely an exploitation, drive-in, horror, action, splatter thriller with Tarantino and me together at our most extreme. You can’t go beyond that. So it’s time to go the other way, I’ll probably do a family comedy and after that maybe a biopic on Stevie Ray Vaughan.”
“Does your drawing lead you to storyboard everything?”
“Not so much these days, ’cos there’s so many shots if I had to draw ‘em all ... If I didn’t operate the camera myself I’d probably do that, but since I’m framing the shot anyway and I’m choosing the lens, I just tell people to move fast and follow me. You just use a storyboard to tell your crew what you want. That’s what directing is in Hollywood, it’s more of a power position where you tell people what to do I don’t like to do that. I don’t wanna be the boss, I wanna be making the film, so rather than telling the crew what to do, I’ll work with them and lead by example, that’s how we can move so quickly and make the movie so cheaply, not because I’m cracking the whip but because I’m leading the way, and I’m moving very, very fast.
“You’re not good at deputising then?”
“No, I don’t deputise. I can’t imagine who even thought of that. Editing is the best part of making a movie. Who thought to give that to someone else? In fact, they don’t just give someone else the chance to have all the fun, they pay them to have all the fun, that’s ridiculous. To call yourself a cook when all you do is buy the groceries doesn’t make any sense, y’know. Too much of this and not enough of that can screw up the whole thing, so editing’s very, very important, the most important part of the job.”
“Rebel Without a Crew almost reads like a manifesto of how you think people should make films ...”
“I’ve had several people tell me that, does it really sound like that? When people quote me they say “You said ‘You should do this’.” But I never said “You should do -” anything, ’cos I hate it when people tell me that. All I said was what I did, and I wrote it to show you that it is all completely against everything you’ve ever heard, but it worked for me. It should make you realise that all that stuff you thought you needed to know, all those people you thought you needed to be in with, you don’t need that at all.
“I just wanted to demystify it, make it seem less frightening, because that’s what held me back for so long - just not knowing the nature of the beast I was confronting. It turns out to be a little rabbit. So, I thought I’d better tell some people, ’cos no one else wants to let people know or there’ll be too much competition, but I don’t care. I know what I can do, it’s the other filmmakers who are scared they didn’t want anyone to know how easy it all is, which makes me mad, so I decided I’m not gonna keep the secret, I’m gonna blurt it out.”
And with that, his next appointment arrived. However, so won over was I by the man’s disarming honesty, by his refusal to be precious about his ‘art’, I felt foolish getting him to autograph my copy of Rebel. Instead of just acting like a fan-boy, I offered him a trade. Consequently he went to his next interview happy in a new hat, and I walked to the tube clutching my treasured book and my signed photograph, while the wind whipped around my now hatless head.
Here we are, thirty years after The Flash, the war that led to the end of the world and down that road, through the scorched desert wilderness, walks a man called Eli. A man on a mission. Denzel Washington is using that confident, rolling stride of his to walk across America, heading always West. Has been ever since the war.
Hang on? Thirty years walking in a straight line? A quick bit of maths: If he wanders along at two miles an hour for, say, eight hours a day, has weekends off, gives himself four weeks holiday a year for good behaviour and keeps that up for thirty years … that’s a hair over 115,000 miles. In a straight line. Just how big do Americans think their country is?
Anyway. Interestingly, it seems that the war was fought over religion and, immediately after it, religious books like The Bible were gathered together and burned. He carries something very precious, therefore: the last surviving Bible. He knows it’s the last one because, presumably, God told him.
He certainly claims that God told him where to find it and that he has to take it West where, one day, he will find somewhere were he and it will be safe. Until he gets there, he must read it every day. Until he gets there, he must kill everyone who tries to take it from him. Until he gets there, he will be protected by it.
Well, that part seems to be born-out by experience because, whenever he encounters violent resistance (invariably in the form of half-a-dozen or more people arranged in a circle around him) he successfully manages to take them all out with his very impressive high-speed kung-fu.
Washington’s kung-fu is so good he can escape from a locked room without anyone noticing and he can produce a bow and arrow from nowhere at will. His kung-fu is so good bullets just pass harmlessly through him (Hm. Maybe he’s The One … oh, sorry, wrong Joel Silver film). Indeed, during one ludicrous sequence, machine-guns, a mini-gun and a rocket-launcher all fail to touch him.
This is a useful skill to have because, when he wanders into a ramshackle border town to get his ipod re-charged (yes, really), he finds it is run by Carnegie who is played by Gary Oldman in full-on furniture-chewing mode and you know there aren’t many ways that can be a good thing.
Indeed it can’t. Carnegie is one of the few literate men left in the world and he has a passion for books – but he desires one book in particular. Can you guess which one? Can you? That’s right. Dumb luck, a contrived script or God’s inscrutable plan have brought the only man with a Bible into the precincts of the only other man who wants it bad enough to kill for it.
As he quickly runs short of henchmen, Carnegie demonstrates that he will quite literally sacrifice anything to possess the book. But Washington doesn’t want to play. He continues heading in one direction, Oldman following close behind in a convoy of cars he mysteriously has the fuel for. His few remaining henchmen bristling with all varieties of machine-guns which he, equally mysteriously, has ammo for.
Unfortunately, by this time, my disbelief would need wings to stay suspended. Why? Well, partly because Denzel briefly holes-up with a couple of dotty old homesteaders, played by Frances De La Tour and Michael Gambon – who both have a riotous time taking the piss mercilessly out of these poor, dumb Americans. They both have ‘the shakes’ which, Washington sagely informs us, is brought on by eating too much human meat. Yes, you did read that correctly: Dumbledore is a cannibal! How could I take the film seriously after that?
There are some excellent cinematic flourishes here … not least in the staging of the thrilling fight-scenes, one of which is acted out entirely in silhouette under a bridge. Also, the assault on the old folks’ home is filmed with a sweeping camera which moves in and out and around with no apparent edits. Both sequences remind one of the visual virtuosity of The Hughes Brothers’ Dead Presidents (1995).
But, overall, the film demands too much forgiveness. And here’s where I’m going to spoil the film for those who haven’t seen it.
Read no further if you have any interest in seeing this film.
Seriously.
Okay, have they gone?
Good.
So … exactly how far are we prepared to forgive the Hugheses their trespasses?
Are we prepared to forgive them for ram-raiding Mad Max 2 (1981)? Yes, I suppose so. How about Fahrenheit 451 (book 1953, film 1966). Hmm … at a push. Will we forgive them for being the latest in a long line of movies to semi-demolished The Golden Gate Bridge? Well, of course. It wouldn’t be an end-of-the-world movie without old reliable.
But what about the more serious sins of incredible plotting, the blame for which would seem to lie firmly at the door of first-time script-writer Gary Whitta? Well, Whitta’s background includes designing video games wherein one can pick up and put down weapons at will without carrying them and where re-spawning when dead is common-place. Okay, so that can explain some of Washington’s kung-fu powers. But … and here’s the big one … can we forgive him the conceit of having a blind man successfully demonstrating none of the behaviour of a man with no sight?
There is a heritage of blind fighters in Eastern cinema (Zatoichi, for example) so we can, I suppose, let that slide. If absolutely pushed, I might begrudgingly acknowledge that he can have a sense of direction and therefore know when he’s heading West. But to walk so confidently with no fear of encountering an obstruction in the road, not even a pot-hole? To be woken up every morning by the sun? To know there is a house in the middle of an otherwise deserted plain? To jump when opening a door and finding a hanging body?
I’m sorry but, unless he has Daredevil’s radar I really can’t buy that he never gives even the slightest hint of his blindness to anyone, even another blind person.
Fair enough, as surprise endings go, you’ll no more have seen this one coming than Eli would himself … but that’s because you’ll be expecting a twist that is both clever and possible. However elegant the last few moments of the movie may seem, they just don’t bear thinking about too much.
The one saving grace of this denouement, is the fate reserved for the book once delivered. It is put on a shelf, next to the last existing copy of The Koran and there, presumably, it will remain; like Indy’s Ark of the Covenant: filed out of harm’s way … until God tells someone else where to find it.
Dirs: Albert and Allan Hughes
Stars: Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson.
As I write this, I’m listening to Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ soundtrack on The Spotify. Its atonal scrapings and wheezings are helping me evoke my feelings and order my thoughts about the film. I’ve been chewing over this review for some days. It’s about time to spit it out.
If you’ve read the book, you’ll know. You’ll know the bleak, icicle-sharp precision of Cormac McCarthy’s vision. You’ll know that the world he envisions for the future is more metaphysical poetry than a serious attempt at science-fiction prediction. You’ll know that it is the story of a man’s love for his child and how, even if the rest of the world went away, that would endure. You’ll know how tense you were reading the book, teetering permanently on the brink of an explosion of emotions you couldn’t bear to feel. You’ll know.
If, however, you come to the film innocent, you’ll have to learn.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize. I have yet to find a review of it that is anything other than awe-struck and reverential in its praise. The last time a Pulitzer winner was so universally adored and then adapted into a film was, I think, To Kill A Mockingbird (book 1960, film 1962). That’s a lot to live up to … which is why, after just one viewing, my thoughts on John Hillcoat’s film adaptation of McCarthy’s novel tend to focus on the differences, which irritated me at first like grit on the tongue, but I am now coming to terms with them.
As I watch the film again and again, as I surely shall, the memory of these irritations will fade and I will be able to see the film as a work unto itself. Yes, it is different, because that is what a process of adaptation necessitates, but is it better? No, of course not. Such notions are irrelevant when you are dealing with a work as subtle and layered as this. Is it, then, worthy? Is it a suitable counterpoint to the book, a fitting interpretation and representation of the themes? Will it break your heart? Yes, yes and avowedly, yes.
McCarthy’s vision is more nightmarish than Hillcoat’s, sketched in charcoal tones, imperfect and indistinct and all the more chilling for it. Two unnamed pilgrims, a father and son, slowly trudge through the ash and snow and dead leaves of a dead land, also nameless, heading vaguely South … trying to stay ahead of the ever-worsening perpetual winter in which the world is suspended, timeless, unmoving. Evolution has come to an end, all that is left is the inevitable devolution and decay.
Those who have read the book may be relieved to know that the most grotesque, most inhuman moments in the book (or the most human, depending on your perspective), the starkest realisations of the depths to which civilisation has so completely sunk, the ones that burrow into your imagination and revisit you long after you’ve put the book back on the shelf, are mostly missing. They would seem too prurient on the big screen, I imagine.
But, of course, what works on the page and in the mind’s eye cannot always be relied upon on the screen. The book has the chaotic atmosphere of a Bosch painting … take, for example, the description of a passing caravan:
“They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys … Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harnesses … and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each …”
If the film had included this image, it would have pushed our memories in the direction of Mad Max 2 (1981), a very differently-purposed vision of civilisation’s afterlife. As it is, during the film’s few urban scenes, we see vistas of grey tumbledown buildings stretching into the distance, which tweaked my memories of old-fashioned matte paintings of ruined cities from the likes of The Time Machine (1960), Logan’s Run (1976), Damnation Alley (1977) and the Twilight Zone episode Time Enough, At Last (1959) to name but a few. You see, this sort of thing is common coin in movies and Hillcoat had to take care not to let his road lead him into too many clichés.
Hillcoat’s vision doesn’t have the timeless, placeless quality of the novel and, therefore, the tragic waste is more specifically American and less universal. I wondered about this, I couldn’t pick out quite what made this so, then I realised … It’s the baseball caps. The few people they encounter on the road, are usually wearing baseball caps. In the book the fashion is for rags. You get descriptions like “Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators” and “He looked like a pile of rags fallen off a cart”. In one scene in the film, a colourfully-dressed mother and child are chased across a field by a band of cannibals and it is, for all the world, a moment lifted from any one of a dozen zombie movies. This film needs the unearthliness Hillcoat brought to The Proposition (2005) but, instead, it gets an occasional unwelcome whiff of Romero pastiche. The recognisably modern, recognisably American clothes in the film have limited the vision of the book to a specific where and when.
Ironically, the world in the book is blessed with limited vision. Because of the constant haze of falling ash and grey clouds of pollution the travellers get only rare glimpses of the full scope of the hellish landscape, more familiar are lines like “ … he could see the shape of a house and barn … Shrouded in the carbon fog.” Often the boy’s young eyes see things older, tired eyes will miss. But this myopia serves a narrative, tonal and metaphorical purpose: “He looked at the sky. As if there were anything there to be seen”.
This perpetual haze, too, is missing from the film, but that may have been a visual decision forced upon Hillcoat by the producers, keen to avoid making the film look like Darabont’s The Mist (2007) which was excellent, but died on its arse at the box office. Never-the-less, we still get an impressionistic world of greys and browns, of bare, broken, dead trees. We see the tree-line burning in a subtly Biblical way, and the flash-backs to the unstated apocalypse are lit from without by the burning of the world.
The film has a little more narrative drive than the novel and a barely perceptible vein of irony has been added to the film’s last moments (which I won’t discuss, in case you haven’t read or seen them). Previous to this, one or two things are stated that, in the book, were implied. The reason why it is important to have two bullets in their gun, for example.
Further, the film displays more overt emotion. The role of the mother (here played by Charlize Theron) has been greatly expanded, partly, I imagine, for marketing reasons, but also to ground the man in his memories. The culmination of these flashbacks is the realisation of just how immensely strong the man has been to weather this endless storm, of how Sisyphean a labour his protection of his son is and, therefore, how complete the failure of the mother.
In the book, the man is stoical under the weight of this responsibility, he is numb, he has suffered so much he can suffer no more. This is why he has no place left in his heart for memories. In the film, he is haunted constantly by his memories. In the book, he leaves all his memories in the middle of the road and walks way from them. That had a stark, awful, simple poetry. In the film, he drops them from a nose-bleedingly tall road-bridge, and this gives the gesture a grandiosity it doesn’t need.
By pointing out these differences, I am not denigrating the film. I’m sure I will come to love it for its differences as much as its similarities to the book. It is a different take on a tale which deserves to be told to as many people as possible. A grown-up, heartfelt, pure tale which tells us more about the power of love than a thousand simpering rom-coms or a year’s supply of silly love songs.
The only sustained dialogue scene in the book to involve anyone other than the man and his son is here brought to life by Robert Duvall, whose rough-hewn, time-worn tones can deliver McCarthy’s lines with the doomy, elusive, terrifying honesty they require. A perfect piece of casting, there.
And Viggo Mortensen, a man who typically looks as though he bears the weight of the world on his shoulders, is undoubtedly the person I would trust to carry The Fire – the love that binds man and boy together. McCarthy made him nameless because he is Everyman. Viggo Mortensen is not every man, but looking at the steadfast dread etched in his drawn face, every man must marvel at his fortitude and quietly fear that, one day, we might be so tested and be found wanting.
The boy, Everyboy, doesn’t carry the baggage of a fallen world. He was born during the fires and therefore has no memory of the before. He cannot know that life was once plentiful and cheap, to him all life is precious. His father thinks that his son is The Word of God, but his son thinks that of all souls.
The boy is the heart and the hope of both the film and the book. McCarthy, of course, wrote the book because he became a father surprisingly late in life and wanted to celebrate the fact. Yes, he chose an odd way to show his love, by depicting it tested beyond endurance. But then, what other love is there between a parent and child? As played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, the boy’s mix of deep wisdom and beautiful innocence is far more moving, I felt, on screen than on the page.
For me, the book belonged to the man. The film belongs equally to them both and, through the film, I realised, that the man belongs to the boy.
If you know the book, you know the end of the road. If you don’t, you need to know that it will break your heart, but leave you with a newer, fuller heart than before. For that is McCarthy’s point … if you have a heart to break then you, too, are that rare and precious thing in which his boy believes with fierce, unshakeable faith: You are someone who carries The Fire. You are a heart filled with love and a soul worth saving!
Dir: John Hillcoat
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall
I can’t believe I’m doing this. I’m about to review an Adam Sandler film.
Adam Sandler: The man who did for comedy what Benito Mussolini did for … flower arranging.
Adam Sandler: A man who (along with The Farrelly Brothers) drove the American feature-film comedy vehicle down an intellectual dead end, parked it there, let the tyres down and threw away the keys.
Adam Sandler: Without whom, there would have been no rise of adult morons acting like children, no American Pie atrocities, no Freddie Got Fingered abomination. No Harold and fucking Kumar.
Adam Sandler: he of the whiney, nasal voice and blank, vacuous face that I would never tire of punching.
Adam Sandler: in a film that is about comedy, rather than a failed attempt at being a comedy.
Thing is, I didn’t bother with this before because, well, it’s a God-damn Adam Sandler film. But I love films about comedians. Lenny (1974), Man On The Moon (1999), Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedian (2002), The Aristocrats (2005); can’t resist them. So, eventually, I gave in.
What appealed to me was Funny People’s parentage. Writer/Director Judd Apatow and Sandler were room-mates twenty years ago when they both arrived in LA. So they have a lot of history. Seth Rogen’s Ira Wright is essentially Apatow then, just starting out as a stand-up. Sandler essentially plays himself now, household name movie star George Simmons who, on the rare occasion he does sand-up, needs someone else to write his jokes. The only difference is, George has been diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia.
He hires Ira ostensibly to write those gags, but really just to keep him company. You see, Simmons is that tragic American hero, the impossibly wealthy, ludicrously famous man living alone in his palatial mansion. The Charles Foster Kane of comedy.
We’ve all seen the pity-the-lonely-millionaire Hollywood biopic before. Does this film add anything to the form? No. Does Sandler shine any great insightful light into the psychology of the modern comedian. No. Do we really care whether George dies and whether Ira learns any life lessons? No. See, the problem is that Sandler can only act broad emotions, he can’t do subtle, he’s never had to. Unlike a Jim Carrey or a Will Smith, Sandler does not come across as a likeable, sympathetic straight character and he is incapable of imbuing Simmons with any real depth because, let’s face it, he’s built his career creating characters who have no depth. Unfortunately, because Apatow is his friend, he apparently can’t see this.
As for Rogen, I struggle to see what his function is in the film. I understand that his stumbling, unfocussed style is meant to reflect the way we all are in real life, but real life tends to be a rambling mess. Unfortunately, so is this film.
The film has the feel of Boogie Nights (1997) helped, in no small part, by Janusz Kaminski’s exquisite seventies throwback photography, but Apatow doesn’t have the ability of Paul Thomas Anderson. Having established his cast of wise-cracking characters, Apatow then forgets all about them for the second half of the film, which seems divorced from the first half, concerning, as it does, Simmons’ attempts to rekindle the relationship he ruined with the love of his life, Laura, played very effectively by Apatow’s real-life wife Leslie Mann. During this extended aside, Ira becomes a passenger, standing in the background a lot, or playing with the children while the adults go off and have sex.
The film which is already over-indulgent at two hours twenty-odd, is also available on this Blu-Ray as an extended version with an extra seven minutes. Woo.
The saddest thing about this film is that, however satirical it tries to be about Sandler’s alleged comedies, you just know that, with his producer’s hat on, Apatow is prepping to earn big money by actually making Re-Do, featuring Sandler’s head and the lame remnants of his New York accent on a chubby babies body. Oh, the horror, the horror.
So, Funny People is a mixed bag of half-formed moments and half-drawn characters. The main reason for watching it is to prepare you for watching the far superior Funny People Diaries documentary that accompanies it on this disc.
The Disc:
Funny People Diaries – 75 mins
This documentary is as much about Apatow as the main feature is but, unfiltered by fiction, it succeeds in being both more revealing and more entertaining. Apatow’s opening comment to camera is quite telling, he knows this is the only chance he’ll ever have to make a film this self-indulgent, so he’s going to go for it shamelessly.
The process of making the film began with assembling his cast and forcing them to write then perform stand-up routines to, let’s be honest, sympathetic LA audiences. This comedy boot camp clearly helped put everyone in the proverbial zone, though I must admit it was revealing to see the brain-storming sessions where they only seemed capable of creating dick jokes.
This process set the tone for the whole production, which included improvisational rehearsals which reveal that one of the film’s best moments, Eric Bana’s skin-crawlingly embarrassing routine about Cameron Diaz, sprang from his improv.
It transpires that Bana, who has never played comedy on film, was originally a stand-up in his native Australia. It’s also interesting, in other scenes, to see that Sandler is quite useful with a guitar and has a lovely singing voice. So, in some alternate universe, he’s a pop-star and the alternate me doesn’t hate him so much.
One of the delights of this documentary is the inclusion of much more footage of the cavalcade of comedians appearing and playing themselves. Unlike the characters in the film, these are established, confident comedians who are comfortable enough to actually laugh at each other’s jokes.
This documentary tells you far more about the brutality of a life in stand-up comedy and the anxieties suffered by its practitioners, than the main movie does. It is worth the price of admission in its own right!
We are also told that the first cut of the film ran to three and a quarter hours yet, oddly, with so much material having been hacked out, the disc doesn’t contain any deleted scenes.
What it does have is:
Line-o-Rama – 8 mins
A series of alternative one-liners, as Apatow continued the improv process even during shooting, often shouting suggestions to his actors from behind the camera. The diamond in here is Eminem railing at Ray Romano. A riot!
Gag Reels – 10 mins
The inevitable montage of mistakes and corpses that you would expect to have on a set where lines are being added and improvised in an ongoing basis.
Writer/Director: Judd Apatow
Stars: Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Eric Bana
Okay, it’s a rubbish title. Let’s get that out of the way to start with. A bad, horrible, clumsy, committee-approved title. Daybreak? Nice. Break of Day? Classy. Daybreakers? Pah. Gack. Spit. That’s the name of a duff straight-to-video action pot-boiler from the early nineties. Starring Jeff Fahey or Wings Hauser. So offensive is the clumsiness of this title it almost stopped me watching the film. Only the presence of Willem Dafoe tempted me. He’s usually very reliable. Even if this were one of those rare films he did just for the money … it must have some value, surely it can’t be another Mr Bean’s Holiday (2007) or XXX2 (2005) … can it?
No, it can’t. What it can be is another Gattaca (1997) mixed with more than a dash of the first Blade (1998) and just a hint of the ubiquitous Matrix (1999). Not a bad gene pool from which to draw inspiration.
The film is set ten years in the future and the world is entirely vampire. It takes the vision we see in, say, Alan Ball’s True Blood TV series (and the Charlaine Harris books on which it is based) and extends that into a logical future where humans are a minority, grown in factory farms and bled for food. The vampire world is trundling along very successfully, having completely replaced our society with a dark mirror-image of it. Almost everyone seems happy with their immortality. Almost everyone.
Cue Ethan Hawke – who doesn’t make nearly enough films – as Edward, Chief Haematologist of the Bromley Marks corporation which provides the vampire world with all the blood it needs – now refined as a supplement to add into coffee in place of milk. Hawke is very good at looking worried and Edward is very worried. Worried about the shortage of living humans and their blood, worried about the failure of his experiments to refine an artificial blood substitute but, above all, worried about the morality of reducing humans to food animals. His boss, played with practiced ease by the always malevolent Sam Neill, has no such qualms.
The Grendel at their gates is the effects of starvation. If a vampire goes without blood for long enough, he becomes ‘a sub-sider’, a bestial creature with little remaining intelligence and a powerful, overwhelming thirst. I would make a joke about the film being made in Australia here, but I can’t think of one.
Inevitably, then, there will be a human resistance movement which Edward stumbles across, as you do, and finds himself adopted by them. They are led by Willem Dafoe who has a secret, the key to unlocking the problem that both the vampires and the last remaining humans face.
Visually, the film has a very classy, noirish feel to it, with some particularly striking images – such as the queue of vampire commuters standing on the tube station, all in silhouette, their eyes reflecting like cats. Even though this film cloaks itself in the guise of science fiction, it is undeniably horror – with enough moments of explosive blood-splattered violence to keep most gore-hounds happy.
The work that writers/directors The Spierig Brothers have done in conceiving and then executing a modern world designed for vampiric convenience is very clever indeed. If you can’t go out in daylight, then the preferred mode of public transport will be the subway. Obvious. The only problem I had with all of this is that ten years just doesn’t seem long enough for almost everyone in the world to adjust to such a massive change. Civilisation seems to have fallen then risen again with astonishing speed.
The dénouement manages to be satisfyingly cunning while addressing a fundamental flaw in Dafoe and Hawke’s plan (that I can’t discuss without giving too much away) and gives vent to some spectacularly explosive blood-letting, all-the-while leaving the way open for a sequel.
All-in-all Daybreakers is a refreshing and enjoyable take on a clapped-out old sub-genre which reminds us that, however prettily and romantically vampires may have been re-packaged for selling to a naïve teen audience, they are, essentially, parasites that see humans as food. Relationships with them will, given time, always devolve to the relationship a butcher has with his cow.
Writer/Dir: Michael and Peter Spierig
Stars: Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill, Isabel Lucas
Dur: 98 mins
Cert: 15 (six seconds were cut from the film in order to secure this certificate, you can find information about that at the BBFC website here.
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Alien is relative. When the big silver spaceships land in the Arizona desert, they’re the aliens. But, when our spindly little space-craft precariously touch down in the deserts of other planets, we’re the aliens.
It’s a simple idea, which Ray Bradbury explored very fruitfully in The Silver Locusts (aka The Martian Chronicles) and which Planet 51 now dallies with.
Capt. Chuck Baker’s spindly little space-craft lands on Planet 51 in a pleasant suburb during the little green version of the 1950s. As with our 1950s, the period is one of extremes: the naïve innocence of the populace contrasting with the hair-trigger paranoia of the authorities.
Chuck has to go into hiding, in the bedroom of the easy-going Lem. What develops, then, is a sort-of E.T. in reverse as Lem tries to keep Chuck secret from his siblings, his parents and the authorities. Obviously, there wouldn’t be much of a film if he succeeded with any of this, so it’s only a matter of time before the streets are teeming with troops and tanks.
Of course, their fear of alien invasion has been inspired by years of our probes landing on their planet. Their movies and comics are full of stories of ‘humaniac’ invasion.
There are a couple of well-devised stabs at merchandising, with the cute Geiger Alien ‘puppy’ and the Mars Rover who thinks he’s a dog. Yes he looks, sounds and behaves very much like Wall-E, but we can forgive the film this as he serves a good solid narratological function … and he’s sooooooo cute!!
The film is peppered with fairly obvious movie references (mostly from Alien – 1979 - and E.T. – 1982 - but with a few additional nods to such stalwarts as 2001: A Space Odyssey – 1968 - and The Day The Earth Stood Still – 1951 - among others) which it doesn’t need, but such inter-textual references are so common-place in films like this, it would almost feel incomplete without them.
Okay, so this film doesn’t really do much that Monsters vs Aliens didn’t do last year, and it certainly isn’t as laugh-outloud funny, but what it does do – is hang together better as a story, all wrapped up in a design aesthetic which has been beautifully thought through.
All of their design is based around circles, and this feeds through everything we see in the film in a consistent and consistently beautiful way. Houses are round, cars are round, even their comic-books have rounded corners.
All of which makes for a well-rounded (ahem), good-looking, good-fun movie with no pretensions to grandeur.
When the credits began to roll, I was surprised to see a stream of Hispanic names so did a little digging and found that the film is produced by Ilion Animation, based in Madrid. The film has unambiguously been made with an eye on the American rather than Spanish market, but invading America makes perfect business sense. When animation is this captivating, it doesn’t really matter where it comes from. After all, alien is relative.
Dirs: Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad Stars: Dwayne (Don’t Call Him ‘The Rock’) Johnson, Justin Long, Gary Oldman, John Cleese Dur: 91 mins Cert: U
Let's start the new decade with a look back at an issue which has, in one form or another, rumbled on as a controversy since the invention of the domestic VCR: Piracy.
I recall my first pirate video was in 1982. It was E.T. It was a fuzzy nth generation copy of a tele-cine transfer, so degraded the colour had been leeched out of it and so badly recorded the dialogue was barely audible. That was back in the day when people really did take video cameras into cinemas and record the movie. One also heard stories of cinema managers being held hostage by gangsters intent on getting hold of some precious print of a movie. Hmm … now there’s a premise for a Bruce Willis movie!
A whole generation and several thousand bootlegs later, video piracy has changed beyond recognition. Gone are the dodgy dealers in smoky pub corners, even the car-boot cowboys seem to be a thing of the past. It’s all web-based now and the majority of the films seem to be leaked by the companies making them, or are mastered from a preview DVD issued somewhere in the world.
The ease and speed of distribution has increased exponentially as has, generally speaking, the quality of the sound and picture. Surely, then, this should be sounding the death-knell for legitimate mainstream movies, shouldn’t it? The empty cinemas should be echey and dark. Blockbusters should be pulling down the shutters and laying off their staff. Unemployed movie-stars should be sitting on street corners offering autographs and catch-phrases for food. But it doesn’t seem to happening that way. Instead we seem to be getting more ‘event’ movies than ever before. There appear to be queues in the cinemas and clusters of new DVDs and Blu-Rays hitting the shelves each and every week.
How can this be?
Well, is it possible that allegations about the profits of video piracy funding terrorists are a bit over-blown? After all, a transaction where films are uploaded for free and downloaded for free, copied for free and shared for free doesn’t strike me as the kind of transaction from which there will be an awful lot of profit to fund the afore-mentioned terrorists.
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Is it also possible that the timely release of certain bootlegs help create the awareness and buzz that a film needs to get that all important bonanza opening weekend? Last year’s Wolverine controversy would seem to be a workable test-case, given all of the adverse publicity that threw up. The delightfully insightful yet deceptively entitled Den of Geek looked at that in detail here.
And now, additional grist to this particular mill has arrived in a report about J.J. Abram’s Star Trek, which has the dubious honour of being 2009’s most pirated film. Not quite sure how they would measure that. Did you tell anyone you’d downloaded it? I certainly didn’t … or wouldn’t have, if I had downloaded it, which I haven’t … obviously. Anyway, this report looks at the effect this piracy has had on the film’s profits and then goes further to discuss the general state the movie industry is in.
I think it makes interesting reading, hence why I’m sharing it.
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