I don’t know why I do it to myself. I only watched the Hollywood remake of Bangkok Dangerous because we’re planning a trip to Thailand later this year and I was curious. It meant of course trying to set aside my qualms about Nicholas Cage, and sitting back to enjoy a panoply of exotic locations, from the Floating Markets to Buddhist Temples to the Red Light District. What’s not to like?

Um, everything, just about. Cage plays a gloomy assassin working in Bangkok for some shady thugs. He dies at the end. (There, I said it.) To be honest, I simply could never get beyond the truly appalling presence of the lumpen Mr. Cage himself. His face lift has made his skin as mobile as wax, his hairline is now somewhere back around the top of his shoulders, he’s got NO laugh lines, and that straggly fake hair sits on his scalp like a pair of crow’s wings that flap with a life of their own. It’s really bizarre, and it makes any scene he’s in completely unwatchable. The only salvation is his voice – which is grimly ironic given that the original Thai film featured a deaf hitman with no dialogue.

Bangkok looks fantastic though. According to ScreenDaily, Bangkok Dangerous brought in $5.8m (220m baht) to the Thai economy. Here’s a discussion page on some of the key locations.

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There’s a fascinating article at the New York Times about the Sandra Bullock surprise hit “The Blind Side” – a true tale about a wealthy white woman who adopts a black teenager and helps him to become a football star. Made with $35 million (including $5.5 mill of Georgia state incentives), the movie is currently topping $235 million at the box office and has garnered Oscar attention with Best Film and Best Actress nominations. I haven’t seen the film yet (American Football movies don’t translate well to South Africa, where we like to play physical games without padding and helmets) so I’m not blogging the location today.

Rather, I’m interested in my other pet topic – how the savvy filmmakers took control of their own destinies and created a movie with multiple levels of appeal, which they then rode like hell.

In this case Grace Hill (Media) took the unusual step of offering online sermon outlines based on “The Blind Side,” with clips that could be used in churches equipped with video screens. According to Mr. Johnson and Mr. Kosove, about 23,000 churches downloaded the sermons, laying an exceptionally strong base for the film.

It’s clever stuff. Read more here.

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And while we’re still on the oldies, we’ve also been working our way through an Agatha Christie box set, which has been rather marvellous. Although I’ve never quite seen the glamour factor of the tween-War years (wet wool, no deodorant, the rise of fascism, hanging) the movies are all great little period pieces, all cocktails and devils-on-horseback and changing for dinner and the kinds of slappable, plummy public school accents that give me nightmares of childhood.

Evil Under the Sun, I think, is one of the better ones. Filmed in 1982, it’s got all the best Agatha elements; the secluded setting, the all-star cast of conniving, bitter upper class twits, the Object of Disaffection (in this case an oddly masculine Diana Rigg) and the various reasons each of the toffs hate her overheard by the oily Belgian Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov, surely the gold standard in Poirotism?) Some snappy dialogue, some seething resentments, the beach: lovely.

The book was (rather hopefully for a storyline that involved sunbathing) set in Devon, but the film relocated to the fictional Mediterranean country of Tyrania. In reality, the Spanish island of Majorca and its uninhabited satellite Sa Dragonera, were used for the external stuff. The most detailed info is actually on Wikipedia. In case you may want to visit, Daphne’s Cove and Hotel, at the time a private estate owned by a German, has since been bought by the Majorca Council and demolished to its foundations.

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The Redhead will be pleased; we finally watched Grace Kelly’s last film, High Society on pvr last night, and he insisted I blogged on its locations today. And look what glorious gossip I found: one of the main locations, Clarendon Court in Rhode Island, was later the place where the heinous Claus von Bulow allegedly topped his lovely lady wife Sunny. (she was found in an insulin coma on her bathroom floor and never recovered; his conviction was overturned and he was later found not guilty. blah.) And all in the house where Frank and Bing and Grace and Louis strutted their stuff. Imagine?

High Society itself was shot in 1956, and it’s always amazing to me just how much things have changed – in manners, in aesthetics, in class and race consciousness. But there’s as much in the film that’s still fresh, amusing and original; the marvellous Celeste Holm singing a line into a silver tureen still makes me smile. Grace Kelly too is beautiful and her performance here shows the kind of range, nuance and flair that we’ve all missed out on since she traded down her life with a very inconsequential European princeling. There’s no one really to match her today – Amy Adams perhaps, for talent, January Jones for looks?

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The Mist, I’m pleased to report, is a fairly cracking little horror pic. Set in small town Maine (of course – it’s a Stephen King story) in the aftermath of a ferocious storm, the good townsfolk have hurried to the local store for supplies and repair materials. But across the lake, from the general direction of the top secret military base (of course – see above), comes a rolling mist that envelops the crowd of hapless shoppers. And then things turn bloody.

As a movie, The Mist works on so many different levels. There’s a great ensemble cast. The action, when it happens, is quick and brutal, the monsters are ferocious, implacable, otherworldly, the CGI is spare and beautiful, but there’s enough restraint to punctuate both action and dialogue with some terrific, pregnant silences. There’s never any real doubt that the humans inside are facing a dire and overwhelming threat. And yet The Mist is as much a lesson in group dynamics as anything, and Marcia Gay Harden’s Religious Crazy is as scary and pathological as any of the monsters that come out of the fog. And the end of the film – it’s SO not Hollywood. If you haven’t been short-changed by the trailer, I challenge you to guess which of the neat cross section of survivors are left standing.

[Read more →]

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Fox has officially confirmed that Avatar passed Titanic in global box office takings this week. Avatar’s new world-wide total gross is $1,858,866,889. Yes, that’s billion….

But did you know that the production budget of the film was partly raised courtesy of a UK scheme whereby investors can defer their (not inconsiderable) income tax and capital gains tax in return for backing British and US films? It’s run by a fabulously opportunistic bunch called Ingenious Media and a really odd assortment of folks – Kate Adie, Sir Bob Geldoff, lipless Frank Lampard, Guy Ritchie – all stand to clear a quick fifty grand (and counting) from their investment in Avatar alone. That’s money for unobtanium, if you ask me.

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Five survivors of a deadly plane crash are assigned to therapist Anne Hathaway (I know). Most are traumatised, one (Patrick Wilson) is giddy and euphoric and positively flirty. But something strange is happening; a creepy airline employee lurks in the shadows, the airline itself is denying the account of the eyewitnesses, and those eyewitnesses start disappearing.

So Passengers is part therapy drama, part paranoia thriller, with spooky elements of M. Night Shylaman. But Girl in the Water M. Night, not Sixth Sense. And that, dear readers, is why it all starts to go wrong. We’ve seen all of this before somewhere, and the mixing of genres therefore comes across as clumsy rather than inspired. And although the saving grace is an excellent cast, I just couldn’t really get beyond Anne Hathaway as a therapist. She’s about as confidence-instilling a trauma councillor as Cher Horowitz.

On the location side, it was interesting to see Vancouver as Vancouver for once. In fact I’m so inured to the fact that Vancouver (Hollywood North) always plays stand in that I first thought that signage in the background saying British Columbia Mills was actually a blooper, left behind by some third rate art department.

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I have to say I’m bemused at the negative critical reception for Sunshine Cleaning. I thought it was great; thoughtful, tender and quietly entertaining. Admittedly it’s got Amy Adams in it, so I’m biased (really biased) but the story of sisters Rose and Norah finding personal redemption in the sanitisation of dead people’s homes is really very good.

Here’s the story in brief: Rose Lorkowski is the sole (but frankly only semi-) functioning member of a damaged family that includes her wastrel sister, her too-bright son, her wheeler-dealer Dad, and the haunting memory of her suicidal mother. Her son’s dad is her old high-school boyfriend who married someone else but is still schtupping her on the side. There’s not a lot of self-confidence on display anywhere, to be honest, and the economics of small town America and the outcomes of bad choices are all too painful to behold. But when Rose gets the opportunity to make good money clearing up crime scenes (yes, she’s got no experience, or insurance, or qualifications, or even the right pair of hazmat gloves), she realises that she can make a difference.

Originally set in Baltimore, Sunshine Cleaning filmed in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, no doubt taking full advantage of the State’s far-reaching film incentives; under Governor Richardson and the leadership of Film Commissioner Lisa Strout, over 60 feature films and television series have shot in the state, adding over $925 million dollars to New Mexico’s economy.

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It’s quite a convoluted way to get from Johannesburg to Cape Town; take a bus to Durbs, and drive via the Transkei and the Eastern Cape. But nevertheless, that’s what hapless Elvis and best man Tumi do in the South African road movie White Wedding. (I guess it wouldn’t be a road movie if they’d done the sensible thing and taken the plane….) Unfolding in English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa – there’s even a Francophone character in there somewhere – it is of course inevitable that all these most complex of plans come undone. Will Elvis get to the church on time?

Let me say first up, that I loved 85% of this movie. Most of the time it’s spot on in its portrayal of the colourful clashes and cacophonous confusions of the new South Africa – racial, cultural, sexual, generational. But there are a couple of stereotypes that are so jarring, so offensive, it’s like any attempt to actually portray real people has been set aside in order to create a cartoon. Given the refreshing depth and honesty of the main black characters (and the foreign white hitchhiker), the gay wedding planner is simply an odious portrayal, and the depiction of Afrikaners as dumb, retrogressive hicks moves the film temporarily and unworthily into the realm of farce. Shame, really.

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It doesn’t happen quite so much these days, but there was a time when you mentioned living in Africa and people thought there were giraffes in the street. I did live in Zimbabwe for a while and I remember startling a zebra once, when out on a morning run (the run being more unusual than the equine, quite frankly). I also can vividly recall the moment, out canoeing on the Zambezi, when I realised that log-shapes in the the water all around me were crocodiles. Good times.

Anyway, I recount this because I caught Rogue on DSTV – a great little Australian movie about a monster croc that’s chewing its way through the good folks of the Northern Territory. It stars Radha Mitchell and Michael Vartan, but there’s also Sam Worthington – pre, but very much on his way to, meteoric fame. In short; there’s a tour boat, it sinks, the ill-assorted survivors struggle to an island, but the island’s going to be below water by nightfall….. And guess who comes out to eat at night?

So what can I tell you? Well to be honest, there’s very little to fault. The characters, though familiar, are well acted and their psychologies feel real enough given the limited amount of time we spend getting to know them. The animatronic croc is great, the scenes are tense and the Kakadu National Park in Northern Territory stands out as a completely gorgeous but utterly ruthless backdrop. (Me, I’d be freaking about the snakes.) Interestingly though, the nocturnal scenes were not shot in the Northern Territory; the director used a specially built island in the midst of a lake in the Yarra Valley in Victoria.

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