Father Geek here at Geek World Headquarters deep in the Texas hill country posting a new issue of our regular weekly column from Latauro, our dutiful reporter-editor on the outcroppings of the Great Barrier Reef. Soooo sit your Boogie-board aside for a few minutes and dive into this week's copy of...
The Downunder Report...
Be careful, King of Kings. First you need the victory.
AICN-DOWNUNDER
Be careful, King of Kings. First you need the victory.
AICN-DOWNUNDER
I'm so tired right now I can barely focus on the screen. Luckily, I wrote all of this column this morning between coffee and 'workin'. So here 'tis...
NEWS
* The Australian Federal Government recently announced this year's budget, and it's provoked some interesting reactions from different film groups. SPAA (the Screen Producers Association of Australia) isn't happy that the Government failed to address 'serious funding and tax shortfalls' in the local film and television industry, and is also concerned that the focus is solely on bringing international productions to the country. AusFILM is happy with the Government, but for similar reasons. They congratulated the Federal Government for extending the 12.5% tax offset to high-budget TV series. The result of all this? We may be seeing more foreign productions shooting here, but not a whole lot more local films. Now, if only Australian filmmakers would move to marginal seats, they would have done a lot better.
* I spoke to a crewperson this week who told me about a new film about to start shooting in Queensland. No word on plot yet, but it is written by and starring Nick Cave (musician whose band The Bad Seeds was responsible for the hit "Red Right Hand"). Cave wrote and starred in the 1988 film GHOSTS... OF THE CIVIL DEAD. More news as it comes to hand...
* In an AICN-D exclusive, Dark Horizons has reported that Moviehole has reported that John Jarrat ("McLeod's Daughters" and DEAD HEART) has signed on to WOLF CREEK, an Australian horror film about three backpackers that are terrorized by a man.
* Barry Humphries has been developing a film entitled MY GORGEOUS LIFE, based on the memoirs of Dame Edna Everage. No word on director, but it's likely that Humphries will script, and that the Dame will star.
* Australian filmmaker John Dingwall passed away in Queensland on the 3rd of May, after a brief battle with cancer. Dingwall wrote for the popular TV series "Homicide", and also penned the screenplay for SUNDAY TOO FAR AWAY. His last film was THE CUSTODIAN, which he wrote and directed, and starred Anthony LaPaglia, Hugo Weaving and Naomi Watts.
AWARDS AND FESTIVALS
7TH INTERNATIONAL SPOTLIGHT FESTIVAL
VCA student Juerg Hostettler has won the Silver Trophy at the Spotlight Festival in Germany. He won for a TV commercial he made for Forster+Bischof Switzerland, which showed a freestyle motocross driver jumping over a ramp and landing in a van.
BOX OFFICE
Gabriel Van Helsing (Gabriel? Gabriel?!) took out top spot this week, boosting the worldwide opening weekend gross and helping to ensure that he'll soon be taking on Moby Dick, Heathcliffe and Merlin in the forthcoming sequel.
Soooo the TOP five Downunder are...
RELEASED THIS WEEK
Michael Caine does OCEAN'S 2, Robert Altman finally makes a film containing nudity, we get a franchise-in-sheep's-clothing, odd French animation proves that you don't need a computer to make a cartoon, and Tyler Durden wages war on Legolas and the Hulk.
Annnnd the NEW Flicks are...
REVIEWS
TROY
CHECK IT OUT! I'M AN EPIC! EPIC EPIC EPIC EPIC! LOOK! BIG! WOW!
Yes, TROY, you are an epic. You are epic in scale and scope and general big-ness. But you suffer from the same affliction as GLADIATOR; you try to rush your story through like it's being told in real-time. Leave real-time for "24" or TIMECODE. It took a decade to wage war against Troy, yet thanks to Brad Pitt, the whole thing is over in a couple of days. Just one of the perplexing changes made to a great story.
But I'm not going to focus on that. Because you NEED to change things to make an adaptation. What works on the page will not work on screen, and I'm not going to berate the filmmakers for making different choices to ones that, say, I would make. No, my complaints about TROY focus only on what falls between the opening and closing credits.
I will admit, though, that I have softened on the film a lot since I saw it Wednesday night. I came out of it saying 'That was really dumb', and now as I think back on it I'm remembering things I liked. Things that worked. So, as I write this, I'm fifty-fifty on the film. It was a solid five out of ten.
What did I have a problem with?
- The clichéd dialogue. How stilted it sounds. Historical epics try so hard to write dialogue that could have been spoken thousands of years ago they inevitably lapse into Laurence Olivier doing HAMLET
-'Sometimes you have to serve in order to lead. I hope you can understand that one day.' I hope I understand it some day too, Odysseus. I didn't like watching characters who are so aware of their place in history; it was one notch below Paris turning to Hector and saying, 'Isn't it great living thousands of years in the past?'.
- I didn't like James Horner's score; when Horner is good, he's fucking good, but when he's bad, he's incredibly average... and here he was just re-treading Hans Zimmer's Lisa Gerrard stuff.
- I'm sick of hearing the rousing speech to the troops, for all we ever get is a carbon copy of every other one that has come before.
- Nearly everything that happened in the film has been done better in other films (we could have made TROY simply by editing a highlight package of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, BEN HUR, LORD OF THE RINGS, GLADIATOR, and others).
- The effects shots that looked like effects shots.
- The running time, given so much of the film felt like padding (seriously, you could chop at least forty-five minutes out of the bastard).
- How desperate they were to hide Achilles's homosexuality (look! He likes women! And Patroclus is his... er... cousin! Yeah, that Achilles had to raise! How's that?).
- Briseis is conveniently un-touched by Agamemnon or the troops, despite the fact that she's been in their hands for twenty-four hours; this may sound like a minor nitpick, but she is the typical Hollywood damsel-in-distress who will remain unsullied until our hero can have his way with her.
- How anglo-saxon all the main characters look (especially given that the background extras actually look Greek, or Turkish).
- Wolfgang's direction. I've come to the conclusion that DAS BOOT (cannot wait for the complete four-hour DVD, by the way) was a happy accident. Wolfgang has made some absolute shite lately, and though I wouldn't class TROY as absolute shite, I think the direction isn't completely up to scratch. Sure, there are some moments when he excels (more on that later), but when you consider Ridley Scott's work on GLADIATOR... Both TROY and GLADIATOR suffer, in my opinion, from pretty nothing scripts, but GLADIATOR at least had kick arse direction. Ridley may not be adept at choosing his projects, but his direction is always spot-on. The same cannot be said for Peterson.
What did I like?
- The Great Balls of Fire.
- The fight between Hector and Achilles (the standout scene in the film, as it is thoroughly flawless).
- Eric Bana, who comes off better than anyone in the film.
- Seeing Peter O'Toole on screen again... in fact, in the scene between Priam and Achilles, there was a moment where I honestly thought Pitt was going to look down the lens and proclaim, 'Fuck, he's good'.
- Achilles's fighting style; I honestly believed that he was the greatest warrior in the world. I liked Rose Byrne, despite her not having much to work with (Byrne played the lead role in what I consider the best Australian film ever made, THE GODDESS OF 1967).
- Sean Bean's Odysseus; I could stand watching the sequel (although they'd probably change it so he takes five days to sail home).
- And I liked some of the locations.
TROY's biggest problem is its self-consciousness. How aware it is of the fact that it is an epic. And because of that, we're not given anything new. We're given scenes that have worked in past epics. What is frequently forgotten is the idea that all great films have done something new. Look at (you're going to hate me for this, but you know it's coming) LORD OF THE RINGS. Films that always started with story, and built from that, adding what was needed regardless of whether it fit into the cookie-cutter ideal of what an EPIC should contain. TROY feels like it was written top-down. Starting with a checklist of things that are needed to make an EPIC: a rousing speech to the troops; a fight between two great warriors; big battle scenes; the redemption; etc... I don't think that these elements are necessarily bad, but they weren't organic. It was by-the-numbers, and for all the changes they made, didn't have anything new to say.
It's not a bad film, just not a particularly good one.
NEXT WEEK
- Paramount announce new STAR TREK prequel will go back to the invention of the wheel, and how it eventually influenced warp drives and Human-Vulcan relations (Jimmy Dohan cameos at the end)
- Warner Bros. options the Windows logo for a three-picture deal
- Chris Rock signs on to write and star in a re-jigged movie version of the Bill Cosby TV series, KIDS SAY SOME FUCKED-UP SHIT
