Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. What is a Film Commission to do? First you get word that Hollywood is coming to your area. There’s even an A-ish list star attached to the project - Mr. Fergilicious, Josh Duhamel. And the story is actually set in your region. It’s even called Turistas - Tourists! Wahey. Lots of opportunities to show off your fantastic locations, promote tourism, encourage visitors.

And then the movie turns round and shows that your bus drivers are reckless, your prettiest girls are whores, your locals are unfriendly, untrustworthy, psychopathic or downright evil and that even the Turistas title has a sub-heading - GO HOME. Whether you go home with all your body parts is fundamental to the script. Ah, right then……

Turistas is not a great movie, so it probably won’t be widely seen. Imagine that when Leo di Caprio made it to The Beach, every single person he met was a homicidal maniac, then you’ve got the jist of the plot. So, no, it doesn’t show Brazil in a good light. I think maybe the film makers felt a bit guilty about this afterwards - there’s a fulsome thankyou to the people of Brazil for their kindness and co-operation with the making of the movie in the credits, and apparently Mr. Duhamel even apologised for its approach in the Today Show. Ouch.

Comedy, tragedy or cultural delusion? In January’s Vanity Fair, AA Gill ponders the meaning of a Sex and the City bus tour that takes in some of the New York locations of the movie and the tv series. Sounds truly too ghastly for words.

On Christmas night, once the hoardes of revellers had left and we’d got about a third of the way through the cleaning, we all collapsed on the couch for Hairspray. Not the icky 1988 John Waters opus, but the magnificent, ebullient, entertaining 2007 one, most famous, perhaps for John Travolta in drag.

Featuring a truly tremendous cast that simply doesn’t put a well choreographed foot out of place, the movie charts fat girl Tracey Turnblad’s unfolding desire to appear on a Baltimore tv dance show AND to win the guy - Zac Efron - neither of which seem that realistic, to be honest, at the start of the movie. But that doesn’t factor in Tracey’s overwhelming cheerful sweetness - a star turn from newcomer Nikki Blonsky - whose joie de vivre is infectious. Throw in a Civil Rights sub-plot that slowly becomes the plot, remarkable routines (some of it real 60’s dances - how funny!) and some truly brilliant throw-away comedy, and you’ve got yourself a really entertaining movie. The fact that it also shows up the alleged innocence of the fifties as a vicious, ignorant, bigoted and actually unlamented era is also a bonus.

Hairspray is explicitly set in Baltimore, Maryland, but the 2007 film was shot primarily in Toronto because the city was better equipped with the sound stages necessary to film a musical. One thing that caught my attention when originally watching the EPK was the requirement for spongy floors to assist the dancers - something that couldn’t be acheived on Baltimore tarmac, I’m guessing.

And here’s something I found interesting - Director Adam Shankman’s production diaries. A fascinating insight into large scale production.

……And I wanted to see a really good movie. So we’re both disappointed, then.

The latest X-Files movie feels like a really long tv episode. Duchovny and Anderson are great as usual, but the plot is leaden and, aside from a couple of genuinely creepy moments, it is rather lacking in suspense. I guess icky Russian scientists with hard-ons for internal organs can’t generate the same level of conspiracy hysteria for which the TV series was so famed. Ah well.

The movie is set in wintry West Virginia but was filmed in British Columbia in Canada (including the old mining town of Pemberton, population 2912 - which the writer had in mind as a location when developping the script) It’s therefore an apt return to the Canadian roots of the original tv series. Frackin’ cold out there though.

There were titters and guffaws in the Capetonian audience watching The Day the Earth Stood Still when it realised that an interstellar body with enough speed and size to anihilate the entire planet was heading for a direct impact with Manhattan Island. All 23 square miles of it. So here’s another little tip for Hollywood’s cognoscienti; out here in the Rest of the World plc - where, incidentally, we make up more than a fraction of the revenues your product will score over the course its lifetime - we’re actually a little bored of seeing New York or Los Angeles getting blasted. It’s been done. To death.

Anyway. Fortunately - and without giving away too much of the plot - this particular incident is not at all happenstance. Aliens are coming, and they have a specific purpose; they want to save the dying Earth. [Read more →]

When I say As it is in Heaven is a Scandinavian Sister Act, I mean no disrespect to either movie. Both films feature a wild-haired, fish-out-of-water protagonist who unwillingly becomes involved in teaching harmony to a characterful, cacophanous choir, thereby allowing both choristers and choirmaster to discover joy and music, independence and community, redemption and love. There’s even a frosty religious zealot in both movies, proving once again that there’s no hypocrite like a religious hypocrite.

The difference of course is in the telling; As it is in Heaven is a gentle, moving human drama shot in the Swedish Norrland (in and around the rural towns of Kalix, Boden, Gallivare and Lulea, apparently) as the grim and gloomy winter slowly gives way to the promise of spring. Over 185 days, the characters fill in the gaps between their given lines and define themselves both as individuals and as part of a broader, connected family. It’s a lovely film, utterly winning in its humanity, and uniformly brilliantly acted. Look out in particular for the painful rebellion of the Preacher’s wife, and for the subtle kindnesses of the damaged Lena.

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Strangely enough, I wasn’t really looking forward to Quantum of Solace, the 22nd Bond offering. In South Africa, movie critics roundly labelled the movie as dull, muttering that the artsy German director couldn’t “do” action, and they hinted darkly that the demise in standards marked the end of the Bond franchise globally. 

So to be honest, I was really pleasantly surprised. I mean, it’s not an outstanding film, and some of the more talkative moments feel awkward and they’re poorly lit. But it’s still got a enough of the old Bond legacy (cars, girls, glamorous locations) to make it striking, whilst moving ahead with the newer, grittier, brawlier Bond of the Daniel Craig era.

Taking up the story immediately after the death of Vesper in the previous film, Bond starts hunting down the people responsible for her death. The journey takes him from Siena to Haiti (with Panama playing grubby stand-in), then to Austria and finally to the deserts of Bolivia, where the criminal mastermind - weedy, nasty Dominic Greene - is undertaking a cunning plan to monopolise scarce water supplies.

So it’s got Bond islands, and Bond car chases along mountain roads and it’s got Bond hotel rooms and Bond girls at champagne-swigging parties. The most striking location is perhaps Greene’s eco-hotel in the desert - which is actually the space-age workers’ quarters at the Paranal Observatory, high in the Atacama Desert, Chile. There’s more at The Times on how to travel like Bond, and Nubricks goes a step further with ideas on how to buy property in the various locations. No gadgets in this movie though.

A downtrodden teenage boy discovers to his surprise that he has special, magical powers. He’s instructed in the use of them by an assortment of adult mentors, while a sinister dark lord of many disguises threatens an epic battle for the future of the planet……

These days, you would of course be forgiven for thinking the above was a precis of something by JK Rowling. In fact it’s the synopsis of a book - Seeker; the Dark is Rising - by Susan Cooper that she wrote in 1973 that was made into a movie in 2007. We watched it with Rowan last night. And what can I tell you? Well, Harry Potter obviously sets a very high bar for comparison that this fails to live up to. The film’s entertaining enough, but in a messy, afternoon-television kind of way. 

However it was the locations that really stood out - and not in a good way. Here’s a wee word of advice to film makers; if you’re doing a movie that’s unambiguously set in rural England, it really, really helps if you choose locations that look, well, English. 

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It hurts me to put more cash in the pocket of Mel Gibson - that mad, bilious, drink-addled anti Semite - but Apocalypto is really worth seeing. Not for the violence (which is crushing) nor for the storyline (which is anachronistically middle class) but for the sumptuous, rich, remarkable and utterly alien world of the declining Mayan civilisation. It’s like watching the patrons of the Mos Eisley Cantina invite their mates to a street party; breathtaking.

The plot is simple; bad guys attack nice guys in idyllic rural setting. Hero hides wife and child but is enslaved and taken to decaying capital. Human Sacrifices! Hero escapes and is chased home through the jungle. However, the fact that this pared-down tale is spun with such riotously vivid and thought-provoking imagery - and in Yucatec Mayan language no less - is what makes this production so remarkable. Yes, there were the usual complaints of gross historical innaccuracies and accusations of racism. Even the offer of salvation through Catholicism slips in at the end - though of course in my personal interpretation, the arrival of the Spanish priests is an immense “oh shit” moment when you know that how ever bad things have been for Jaguar Paw and his family, they are about to get much much much worse.

Gibson filmed Apocalypto mainly in Catemaco, San Andrés Tuxtla and Paso de Ovejas in the Mexican state of Veracruz with a cast of mostly non-professional local and native American actors and extras. The waterfall scene was filmed at Salto de Eyipantla near San Andrés Tuxtla. Apparently the DVD (we saw it on pvr) includes a 25 minute documentary entitled “Becoming Mayan: Creating Apocalypto” which interviews the Mad Nazi and his co-writer Farhad Safinia about these Mexican locations and on the challenges of building the Mayan city. Other members of the creative team talk about recreating the Mayans through costumes and make-up and weapons consultant Simon Atherton discusses Mayan weaponry.

I have a recurring dream. Or more accurately, I have an extremely vivid experience that occurs occasionally when I sleep, where I find myself in the midst of a raging gun battle. The dream’s location isn’t ever the same place twice (the Falkland Islands, the Balkans - never Africa, funnily enough.) But the activity is always the same; an onslaught of machine gun fire clattering around my ears. Think Black Hawk Down. Think the ambush in Clear and Present Danger. Think Heat (again.) What’s more curious is that I am always surprised by just how icy calm I am as the bullets slam into the walls around me; I really don’t expect to actually be tough in the line of fire.

I mention this because I saw Peter Berg’s movie, The Kingdom, on tv again the other night - the second time I’ve caught it in a couple of weeks. A crime drama that’s punctuated by breathtaking episodes of sustained violence, the plot follows a small team of FBI experts (including a rocking Jennifer Garner) following a massive terrorist attack on an American compound in Saudi. Given grudging permission to travel to Riyadh, they are “managed” by local investigators, police, the Saudi Royal family and unctious American diplomats, as they attempt to work through the restrictions and solve the crime. [Read more →]