I pity the fool who remakes 80s classics

People of the 80s rejoice, Fox Pictures remake of The A-Team has been pushed back from a 2009 release to 2010. The director John Singleton has left the project and so has the only actor to be linked to playing any of the four characters. I personally am hoping that this project goes the way of the dodo and becomes extinct.
The actor linked to play B.A. Baracus (Mr T), was none other that Tyrese Gibson! No I'm not saying that hes a bad actor, its just that I don't think that there is anyone capable of filling those big gold chains, let alone the guy who so far has had secondary roles in 2 Fast, 2 Furious and Transformers.

There has been an influx of news relating to retro remakes of 1980s film and television of late, especially those concering artificial intelligence. The man who directing Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is now shooting Terminator Salvation, a re-boot of the cyborg franchise. Knight Rider has made a comeback to American TV screens this month, without David Hasslehoff. And rumours are strong that a script for a new Robocop movie are doing the rounds in Hollywood. There is also a planned franchise restart for Beverley Hills Cop, which some say is the only memory left that Eddie Murphy once had a career!

For the love of my childhood memories, this has to stop! I awaken every day fearing that the Variety or Empire wesbites will be carrying a story about Back to the Future 4 or Bill and Teds Lastest Adventure.

Ghostbusters has now been mooted for a comeback by many people in the film industry. Some say that it will be the reuniting of the old cast for one last, which could be good, others sources are stating a new cast (possibly Seth Rogan and the usual Judd Apatow movie suspects), which sounds all kinds of bad.

I think the final message to movie executives would be to find some new ideas, hire inspired people and not to get desperate enough to look backwards to cash in on previous successes. When you re-invent, re-start or re-imagine past movies, you are not just kick starting a commercial venture, you are playing with the happy memories of so many peoples childhood!

Geeks Invade Hollywood!

No you have not missed an assault on LA by spotty, spectacled individuals, what I am referring to is the increasing number of self confessed film geeks who have successful careers among the Hollywood elite.

The list includes people such as Quentin Tarrantino, Simon Pegg (pictured right with fellow film fanatic Nick Frost), Edgar Wright, J.J Abrams and Judd Apatow.

Looking at the projects this type of person takes part in, the pure passion and enthusiasm (often bordering on obsession) comes to the fore. Tarrantino has a habit of recreating classic feelings in his movies, such as the Eastern matial arts tone of Kill Bill vol.1 and the old Western atmosphere of Kill Bill vol.2. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have created films that pack a huge amount of cultural referencing into the running time. And finally J.J Abrams who has reinvented the monster genre with Cloverfield and has now turned his attention to the re-building of the Star Trek franchise with a prequel to the original series.

People who live and breath for celluloid seem to be drawn towards each other by some cinematic version of gravity. J.J Abrams has cast Simon Pegg to play a young Scotty in his new Star Trek, Tarrantino has lent his voice to the commentary on the US DVD release of British TV sitcom Spaced (starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and directed by Edgar Wright) and Edgar Wright has moved into a flat in LA above Tarrantino's cinema.

This revolution has been welcomed by people the world over, as it gives people who are crazy about film the hope that with enough passion, a career in the world they love is attainable. I know this, because I am one of them!

Did I miss the Pineapple Express?

Above I have addede the trailer for the film Pineapple Express. I like many people will have seen the trailer, or read a preview, and thought that since this is written by the same guys who penned Superbad, that is was sure to be another fantastically funny string in the Judd Apatow comedy bow. And then Empire Magazine, of whom I am a regular reader, gave it four solid stars in this months review.

So on the strength of the above evidence, I went to the cinema and parted with my hard earned cash. But sadly, I didn't get it.

Firstly, I must point out that the film isn't a complete waste. The whole cast are fantastic, particularly James Franco, who for once has been trusted with a role that does not fall into the category of 'brooding'.

It just seemed to me that the writing was a little off. Comedy moments were patchy and some jokes completely missed the spot. The drusg message within the film started by hinting that they will ruin your life and then did a U-turn. The outcome of the relationship between Seth Rogan's character Dale Denton and Amber Heard's love interest is left hanging. The final showdown is too predictable and lasts too long.

People who have seen this film and loved it can feel free to tell me I'm wrong, as I think I have figured out why I didn't like it. I suppose it is because I know that this isn't a bad movie, its just not as good as I have come to expect from the combination of Apatow and Rogan.

Rocknrolla.....return to form for Guy Ritchie??

There have been very mixed reviews of the latest offering from Guy Ritchie, Rocknrolla. Some have called it a return to form for the London gangster specialist, while others argue that its too much like his previous offerings Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.

I can see both sides of this arguement, but I have to admit that I enjoyed the movie. Yes, it is very similar to the previous criminal offerings of Mr Ritchie. Yes, its dated badly already because the credit crunch means that property in London isn't what it used to be, and yes, anyone looking for something original will be disappointed. But why is this familiar territory painted as a bad thing? Did anyone see what happened when he tried a new genre.......Swept Away, a film so bad I honestly thought deafness and blindless was a better option than the naff story, apalling acting (coutesy of Mrs Ritchie) and downright terrible writing.

Prior to Rocknrolla he reaffirmed his talent for uniquely beautiful shooting, with an amazing Nike advert. And looking at his two original gangster films, there are elements of this talent that occasionally shoot forward and deliver a wake up call to anyone doubting the director. Who can forget the dizzying shot of Ed in Lock, Stock.... or the knock out scene from Snatch that featured Brad Pitt's Mickey and a swimming pool.

Alot of the reviews, particularly the ones found in broadsheet newspapers, seemed to be judging the film on a dislike the journalist held for Guy Ritchie rather than actually watching the film. Which is a shame, as its a movie worth giving up the times to visit the cinema.

Tom Wilkinson excels, Gerard Butler proves himself an actor of worth, Toby Kebbell is more Pete Doherty than I thought possible and Mark Strong has another storming performance. There are weak points in the use of cast though. Jeremy Piven, who has proved himself as a sensational character actor in the series Entourage is wasted here, as so is Gemma Arterton, the girl who has only about four lines of dialogue yet is good enough to be part of the new James Bond film and also Jerry Bruckheimers next franchise Prince of Persia.

After personally finding joy in the film on the whole, all I can say is that people should not listen to anything I say and go tp see it for themselves, after all, I'm a blogger, not a critic.

The British Comedy Invasion of American Television

It seems that America is looking to British television for its concepts and ideas. It started when Ricky Gervais' The Office was signed up and re-imagined as The Office: An American Workplace, starring Steve Carrell.

Life On Mars and Peep Show are the latest British shows to be given the face lift ready to be presented to American audeinces. But will they work? I would say that one of the reasons these shows are so successful is their Britishness.
Life On Mars drags policeman Sam Tyler back to the 1970s after an accident. But the reason it is so watchable is because in this country, the 197os was a completely different society to the one we have now. We had strikes, a distinct fashion, cutting edge music and racist and sexist social attiitudes. Sam Tyler's boss, Gene Hunt was always designed as a broad shouldered, proud Yorkshire man who drives a Ford Cortina, I cannot see how how the character will carry the same mix of emotions when he is an American possibly stepping out of a Camaro or a Ford Gran Turino.
Peep Show again, works because of the polar distance between the two main characters, with one of them being Mark, the openly patriotic Brit.

So what will be left of these two shows after they have been through the Hollywood filtering process. At best, they may turn into something completely fresh and watchable like The Office: An America Workplace, but at worst they could just become soulless shells of the shows they used to be.

Culture, when it comes to comedy especially, is a difficult thing to grasp. Over here in Britain, broad sitcoms such as Friends, Frasier and Will and Grace have been well received, but it is the more complicated niche comedies that struggle. Although Curb Your Enthusiasm has a big fan base here, it has never matched the success of the three previously mentioned shows. And the fear is that this could work in reverse when our comedies cross the Atlantic.

RIP Stan Winston

Now, some people reading this are going to be wondering who the heck Stan Winston is. To put it simply, he has shaped cinema in the last 30 years maybe more than any director, producer or actor could have dreamed of. He is the creative genius behind the looks of the Terminator (Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day), the Predator (Predator), the Alien Queen (Alien and Aliens), Edward Scissorhands (Edward Scissorhands), Gotham City, Penguin and Cat Woman (Batman Returns), various dinosaurs including a full scale T-Rex (Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park 2) and various cybertronics (AI).

He was nominated for nine Oscars and won four, as well as other numerous acolades.

People from James Cameron to Steven Spielberg talk about what a genuinely passionate person Stan was. His company boardroom was a perfect a example of his personality, with full scale models of the Termintor, Predator and velocoraptors all seemingly pouncing on those who sat down and a full scale Tyrannosaurus Rex head over the seat of the chairman.

His last fully complete project was the suit for Ironman, with work being carried out at the moment for Terminator: Salvation. He died in his sleep on 15th June at his home in Malibu, California, after suffering with multiple myeloma for seven years.

So next time you watch one of the films above, spare a second to think of the failed actor who was trained in make-up at Disney and then went on to change the movie world. But then push this to the back of your mind and enjoy the film, I'm guessing thats what Stan would have wanted.

His fame is their fortune

Big budge American series are everywhere at the moment, spreading movie style effects, acting and filming over multiple episodes to grip audiences everywhere.
Now personally I'm very hit and miss with these programmes. I never got into 24, I lost Lost after the first season and the same happened with Heroes. So when a friend came over and said he was bringing a DVD, I thought a movie was inbound. But no, he made me sit through the first two episodes of one of these American shows.

And to my surprise, I enjoyed it. The show in question is Entourage. Many people in the U.K. will probably be wondering what the hell I am on about.
This is because, ITV bought the rights to this show, and screened it on ITV2, which is all sounding good so far. But, some bright spark in the publicity department decided to try to advertise it as Sex and the City for men.

The premise of the show is that we follow Vince, a young man who has just broken into to Hollywood A-list and looks like being a big star. Joining him on this adventure are his two childhood friends and his brother. Eric is the kind of friend that a new star would need, level headed, loyal and always with Vince's best interest at heart. Turtle is another friend along for the ride that flicks between selfish and selfless. Finally Drama, the idiot brother of Vince and one time network TV star. There is also a fifth character, celebrity agent Arie.

With the exception of Eric, all of the characters are self obsessed, with not a likeable human being amongst them. But I still ended up caring about them. This is because of some fantastic writing, the chemistry between the five guys is brilliant and the cameos from real celebrities are well judged. I emplore anyone who has not seen this show to watch an episode and judge for themselves.

And as a final note, Jemery Piven who plays Arie, won an Emmy for his role, its not hard to see why.

What is scarier, a psychopathic killer or a shark?

Recently I was reading an article about the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, when director Christopher Nolan said something that really got me thinking. He said that in the new film there will be no explanation of why the Joker is a psychopath, because things are scarier when they are unjustified.

He also used a great example to back this claim up. The shark in Jaws. As an audience we all felt the uneasy feeling when the music kicks in and that infamous fin appeared near a beach, but apart from using nature as a reason, we cannot justify why this is. We don't know whether the shark was abandoned at birth, treated badly by its parents, not given something it asked for or any other psychological reason. The shark just appears, causes mayhem, kills an innocent swimmer/ surfer and then dissappears.

Linking like for like, when Tim Burton made his Batman movie, certain elements of the Joker's back story were adjusted to give him an emotional link to Bruce Wayne/Batman. He made Jack Napier (the Joker) the killer of the Wayne family. Even though we know some of this background, Burton never explained why the Joker is the way he is.
I read a wall post online the other day that stated that Jack Nicholson's Joker acts in this way because of the accident that bleached his skin, an accident which he blames Batman for. Technically this is true, but Tim Burton also shows Napier to be a murderous madman before the accident, so again, we are left without an explanation for this behaviour.
This could be intentional, using the same principles of Nolan in that things are scarier when we don't understand what created them.

I'm not sure where to stand in this arguement. I can see the point of view that the unexplained is scary, which is why supernatural horrors and thrillers are good at dishing up that sickening nervous feeling. But I also fear the twisted logic that could turn an everyday human into someone capable of an atrocity. At the same time, does this logic qualify as an unknown?

But there is a last minute piece of evidence for the arguement that the unknown is scarier! Cloverfield!
Cloverfield is a brilliant concept and the idea of the handycam style footage does wonders for cranking up the sense of fear and panic. This film drew me in and I really began to feel that I was part of the survival mission that the characters were undertaking. But, this changed the minute the monster is seen. From that point on I felt deflated and I no longer felt the same heightened sense of fear. If the movie had run its course and never shown the offending creature, I cannot help feeling that the audiences would have been left thinking "what have we been running from and what kind of creature could cause this kind of destruction", rather than "wow, another CGI monster".

I think the arguements on the debate could run for a long time. But all I know is that in a society where movies are becoming more and more predictable, a bit of the unknown would not go a miss. If there is fear due to lack of understanding, its hard to know what to expect and predict what is coming.

Apatow: The King Of Spin?

A slightly misleading title to this post. By spin, I do not mean adjusting the truth for his own means, what I mean is, is he the king of taking an old concept and re-inventing it for new audiences.

Superbad for example, on paper looks like another all American coming of age teen comedy, much like American Pie and other clones that were spawned around that era. But what happened was a hysterically funny movie that in places was a painfully accurate portrayal of being a teenage boy who is:

a) inept with the opposite sex
b) too young to buy alocohol to make up for this ineptness
and
c) leaving for university soon and has no idea how to deal with the changes this will bring.


I feel that the answer is that while American Pie was a funny film, the charaters were walking cliches, we had the over enthusiastic sexual deviant (Stifler), the geek (Finch), the naive fool (Jim), the sensitive jock (Oz) and the sensible one (Kevin). And in the case of this film, it worked.

With Superbad, there were elements of the characters being real people, with real problems, real paranoias and real feelings. At that age, I knew people who were like the three main guys in the film and I could also spot elements of myself in them. This seems to be the success of the films that Judd Apatow chooses to get involved with. On paper all of them look like gross-out comedies, and in a way they are, but they are so much more than this.

40 Year Old Virgin had its fair share of sick moments, but it was also beautifully touching and dealt with genuine feelings. As a teenage virgin I felt that I had problems, god knows how much more those feelings would deepen as time goes by.

Knocked Up again presents the comedy side of a situation that could be deemed tragic.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall again brings back those feelings of bumping into an ex that dumped you. Its bad enough dealing with the strange silence that happens when bumping into them in your local supermarket, but having to spend a vacation, on a small island with them must be close to hell. Thats even before you throw in the fact that they are there with their new partner!

So, Judd Apatow, could very well be the king of putting an original spin on standard projects, and all he needs to do is to continue making sure that characters are flawed human beings, because after all, thats what every single one of us is.

Introduction to the blog

Hi everyone,

I am Mike Beddoes, a 23 year old movie and TV fan. I have set up this blog as a way to vent my thoughts and musings about the world of television and film.

Ask anyone who knows me, and I am guessing that within a couple of minutes talking they will have mentioned my ability (some say annoying, I like to think endearing) to quote endless lines from films and to apply them to the current situation.

Hopefully, one day, all of this enthusiasm will manifest itself as some sort of job in movies and television, so I can put this passion to good use.