Yes, Mamma Mia! is cheezy. Yes, it’s uneven and it’s unlikely and, if you look at it dispassionately, it’s all ridiculously silly. But the thing is, you simply cannot watch it dispassionately……

Blame those damn catchy tunes. Blame the fact that absolutely everyone seems to be having an absolute blast (you know it’s daft when career vamp Christine Baranski plays one of the more subdued characters). Blame Meryl Streep for completely stealing the show (how can you not just grin when you watch her sixty-something frame joyously bouncing on her big old bed, singing Dancing Queen at the top of her lungs?) Julie Walters is just dotty. Pierce Brosnan sings! And Greece has itself another glorious destination marketing product that’ll have the tourists clamouring.

A lot of the action was shot on the island of Skopelos - including the remarkable Agios Ioannis Prodromos Monastery that served as the wedding chapel (I thought for a while it had to be a set; I just hoped it really was an actual place). The beach at Kastani, a tiny bay on the west coast bay served as the film’s main external location site. Says the UK Telegraph

The producers built a beach bar and jetty but removed them when they left. Swimming offshore, you look back on a bay so symmetrical it might be an amphitheatre, and so extravagantly green that it might have been painted by a set hand.

The whole production may have been a breathy, high-paced shambles, but who cares? I’m packing as I type.

I’m a crime novel junkie. I’ve read every Michael Connelly, every Harlan Coben, every Jeffrey Deaver and every James Lee Burke novel there is. Lee Burke’s main character is Detective Dave Robicheaux of New Iberia Parish in Louisiana, and you can virtually smell the bayou and the grilled crawfish and the pimples of sweat on the necks of characters and beer bottles. Michael Connelly has Detective Harry Bosch whose turf is LA; every time Bosch steps out, you almost need to squint in the SoCal sunshine, and the smog sticks viscerally to the back of your throat. Great writing.

James Elroy is another crime author who’s made LA his beat - and the vividness of his settings have translated well to movies - think of the remarkable LA Confidential, or Dark Blue, or the creepy and kind of sick Black Dahlia. Elroy also wrote the novel of Street Kings, and he also wrote the script of the film that bears the same title.

Street Kings is again a convoluted and twisting tale of trust and betrayal in and around the LA Police Department. Basically Keanu Reaves - somewhat fleshier, wearier and evidently ageing (occasionally the camera angles aren’t kind) - is a drink-addled, hot-head vigilante-style cop whose boss (Forest Whitaker) is always getting him out of scrapes. When Reaves learns that his ex-partner has gone to Internal Affairs, he thinks he’s been set up. However, things are not quite what they seem. I say ”not quite” because - inspite of a great supporting cast that includes Hugh Laurie and Chris Evans (beauty-and-the-geek) - it takes about three and a half minutes to realise what the twist is going to be. Shame, really.  

Where Street Kings works though is its atmospheric portrayal of LA in all it’s scuzzy, sprawling, chaotic grunge. As the Channel 4 review says:

To acknowledge Street Kings’s one major bonus first, Ayer’s insistence on ensconcing his film in LA’s less salubrious, violent heartlands reaps its rewards, adding an irreplaceable scuffed authenticity to the tale. Unfortunately movies, unlike housing, aren’t all location, location, location. 

Love this: IFC has a list of the top ten “disturbingly powerful” fictional film corporations.

They don’t mention Resident Evil’s Umbrella Corporation though - which is pretty damn scary if you ask me….. 

I saw another apocalyptic destruction of London over the weekend - the TV mini-series, Flood.

The only thing that kept me going was when my friend Victoria appeared carrying flowers from one side of the room to the other but (evidently) going nowhere very fast at all. You see, although the movie focuses on a fictional overwhelming of the London Thames Barrier by a high tide-cum-storm surge, it was partly filmed in South Africa. Which isn’t actually the reason it is so awful; that’d mostly be the fault of the plot/script. Thomas Sutcliffe cannot contain his derision in the UK Independent.

Though the storm surge was powerful enough to flick juggernauts aside like bits of popcorn, it was also sufficiently placid to allow Robert Carlyle to go duck-diving in the Thames to look for a lifeboat. Absolutely nothing made sense: in one shot, the city streets were gripped by mass panic and gridlock, in the next, Joanne Whalley’s daughters appeared to have been able to hail themselves a taxi, something that can be tricky even in light drizzle.

As if day-to-day reality wasn’t quite scary enough, a lot of South African literature focuses on the what-ifs? of a post-apocalyptic Azania. By that, I don’t mean post-nuclear apocalypse as it might normarily apply to you good folks in the rest of the world. I mean post-liberation, post-independence, post-ANC apocalypse. Time and again, books (though rarely movies, which rely on government funding) imagine a future South Africa as a horribly failed state where corpulent, corrupt, vicious officials casually oversee a weakened and disease-ravaged populace, and where unfettered crime and violence have driven white Africans either to flee to Australia or (for those without the European passports) to barren and arid farmsteads out in the waterless bush.

I wonder if my South African alertness to the potential that ordered little life may suddenly take a very different track means that I am particularly receptive to the chilling alternatives offered by Danny Boyle’s movies 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. The first is set in the immediate aftermath of an outbreak of a plague-like cataclysm that turns its victims into soulless flesh-eaters that can chase you really really fast. The second - which I caught on tv the other night - takes place once the virus has been contained (with no one left to kill, the zombies starved - nice) and a mission, lead by the American military, has begun to repopulate Britain.

Both movies have remarkable, mesmerising images of a hastily-deserted London - Cillian Murphy’s solo walk through the deathly quiet streets of Westminster in 28 Days is a complete wondrous thrill to anyone who’s ever been nearly flattened by a big red bus, or (worse) by a gaggle of Italian language students in brightly-coloured backpacks. 28 Weeks Later though trumps even that imagery; beautiful, shiny, devastatingly, hauntingly empty, it films London a lot from the air (which adds to the queasy sense of dislocation.)

Says producer Allon Reich on the FilmLondon website: ”The unique selling point with the 28 idea is London, it really is a character in the film. Without London, the film would be something else entirely.”

Locations include Canary Wharf (massively expanded since I lived in London), Charing Cross tube station, CityPoint, Greenwich foot tunnel, Hyde Park, Wembley Stadium, the Millennium Stadium, Parliament Square, and Shaftesbury Avenue - and it’sno mean feat that the film makers make this overcrowded megapolis seem entirely desolate. Incidentally, the escape from the cottage that opens the film was filmed at Stokers Farm, south of Rickmansworth; the waterway that Robert Carlyle’s character escapes along is actually the main line of the Grand Union Canal.

Like 28 Days, 28 Weeks Later works well - in parts. The zombies are rip-roaringly scary and the action is driven by a nerve-jarring soundtrack and the kind of grim lighting that makes you feel part of the action. Yet in this movie too, there’s that dumb child cliche again; the only two kids allowed back in Britain decide to break out of the secure compound (why?), unleashing the raging havoc all over again. It’s almost criminal that they’re the only two allowed to survive.

In Vantage Point, there’s an assassination attempt on the life of the President of the United States whilst he’s attending a big anti-terrorism summit in Salamanca, Spain. This chaotic exposition of bullet and bomb unfolds piece-by-piece, via six separate points-of-view, culminating in a car chase that features some of the best stunt driving action you’ll see in a movie this year.

Hallalujah for the producers decision to portray the Babel-esque linguistic confusion of a foreign attack (rather than yet another East Coast location). However, having settled for the elegance of Salamanca, there was a significant problem with actually blowing up a historic plaza. Therefore, the decision was made to build the famous plaza from scratch, in the suburbs of Mexico City. It took ten weeks, working seven days each week, with over three hundred workers to construct the set.

Executive Producer Callum Greene explains, “We found an abandoned four-story mall which became a perfect area for us. We built our construction, carpentry, metal work, and plastic shops in the abandoned mall. Next to it was a pit where we built our Plaza Mayor….. We were able to go back to Salamanca and shoot certain scenes there; the two blended together seamlessly. You really can’t tell what was shot in Spain and what was shot on our set.”

And as Emmanuel Levy notes; the key advantage to building your own set is that everyone is excited when it’s time to blow it up. 
From a film-making perspective, Vantage Point is rather classily handled. The six sections sit together well; each witness to the assassination provides important fragments of information so that the pennies drop exactly as they should. It’s well acted too, with the Hollywood grandees of Hurt, Weaver and Quaid doing particularly good stuff. But having said all that, there’s something flawed about the film - perhaps the film makers were so focussed on creating an intelligently constructed film that they forgot to develop the characters in any significant detail.

And ultimately, the carefully-honed plot is sunk by the insipid movie-cliche of the stupid little girl who blunders her way into the path of danger. (As Time Magazine’s reviewer so wryly puts it: It’s as if Dakota Fanning had wandered onto the streets of Ronin.) Given that the terrorists had just both killed AND kidnapped the American president, blown up a historic city killing and maiming hundreds of innocents AND suicide-bombed a hotel lobby, d’ya really think they would have braked to avoid a dumb-ass kid crossing the road?

Whilst I’m on a flow about digital media trends, there’s this from Digital Media Wire.

The global PC game industry totaled $10.7 billion in 2007, led by online PC gaming revenue with $4.8 billion, while retail sales accounted for just 30% of total revenues, according to a report from the industry trade group the PC Gaming Alliance. Sales of digitally distributed games were nearly $2 billion, while advertising revenues — generated by in-game ads, portals and websites — were $800 million.

Of course, with that kind of spend and world-wide use, then Gaming is hardly just a “trend” anymore - it’s a ubiquitous fact of life.

Where I think it starts getting really interesting is the cross-over that’s already happening from movies to games. And I don’t just mean the typical soggy game spin-offs that happen after just about every action flick or even the increasing number of productions that actually grew out of original computer games (can we say Lara Croft?) No, the next trend is indeed that of computer games that are conceived and created as sequels to movies, fleshed-out artistic visions with cinematography, characterisation and story arches, as well as gameplay.

According to a story in the SA Sunday Times, an example of this hybridisation is: 

Developer Sierra is working on Ghostbusters: The Game. The story is being written by the original movie writers, Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd who, along with Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson, all appear. It’s Ghostbusters 3, conceived as a game.

Now I’m not your traditional early adopter - I’m still waiting for my first generation Apple i-phone - but when I get the chance to play Jason Bourne (Sierra launches a Bourne game-sequel in September) I’m first in line.  

Slate Magazine has the following story.

Most Sunday mornings at Buckhead Church in downtown Atlanta, one person is conspicuously absent: the senior pastor, Andy Stanley. A nationally known evangelist, Stanley is usually 20 minutes away at North Point Community Church, the suburban megachurch he has led for 13 years. To the 6,000 or so faithful at Buckhead, he appears only on video, his digital image projected in front of the congregation in life-sized 3-D. The preacher is a hologram.

Questions of “How scary is that?” aside, one of the most interesting trends to watch in film and television production is the democratisation of the production process that comes with the digital age. No longer are consumers bound to the outputs of the Studios or the broadcasters, but are able to source - and indeed create - content that is tailor-made to their own needs and demands.

The Slate story estimates that an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 U.S. congregations now operate multiple campuses, and many of them, like Buckhead Church, are so-called video venues. The Leadership Network, a Christian nonprofit that follows these multisite churches, says there will be 30,000 of them within a few years.

I love Amy Adams. I loved her in Enchanted, I loved her in Talledega Nights, I loved her in Junebug and in Charlie Wilson’s War. The fact that she’s from small-town Colorado has something to do with it. The fact that she’s outrageously talented does too. I so love Amy Adams, I’d watch her in washing powder commercials, or selling funeral insurance.

On the other hand, I hate EPKs. Electronic Press Kits are like predictive text or bullshit bingo; you know exactly what they are going to say, how they are going to say it, and none of it really has much to do with the movie-going experience.

 ”The director is so giving…..”

“She’s so warm and generous as a performer….”

“He’s the best director I’ve ever worked with.”

“We had so much fun.”

Yadda yadda yadda. I await the day when someone says “The director was an idiot who knows zip about directing actors and it was complete hell on set.” But I digress.

I can’t say that the EPK for Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day was particularly awful. But since Dame Frances McDormand is evidently more than a little thesp (she’s interviewed in costume, sitting on the stairs, with the set being shifted behind her - she’s THAT real) and is therefore held in terribly high esteem by other yet-aspiring ack-tors, the EPK was all a bit of a love-in. Which is a shame, because it didn’t give a fair reflection of the movie, which actually is quite sweet and entertaining.

Ms. Pettigrew is a penniless middle-aged woman who (in sheer desperation) scams her way into the life of starlet Delysia LaFosse (Adams) as her new social secretary - thereby setting in motion twenty four hours that change both of them entirely.

Set in London in 1939, as the country slides inexorably towards war, the design and cinematography is excellent, the period deco of the sets and props is sumptuous, and you can almost smell the wet wool and coal smog and lack of personal hygiene products. Apart from the odd establishing shot (hello again The Savoy!) Miss Pettigrew was mostly filmed at Ealing Studios. But since Ealing was the home of British cinema in the forties, there’s even an aptness to that.

I find myself at that stage of life where I’m looking back a lot at the choices I made that brought me to this place. I’m still pissed, for instance, that I didn’t spend my twenties as a tennis pro, repeatedly winning the Australian Open - but that’s the bitter-sweet joy of retrospective dreaming; I gave up tennis when I was eleven. 

Anyway, as I sit here in an increasingly exclusionary and alienating South Africa, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would have taken to have done things differently. More information? Maybe. An upbringing far away from the narrow-minded goose-stepping Army of Christian Youth at my rural boarding school? Possibly. The early demise of apartheid, Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher? Well, yes to all three (a long story.) But actually I’ll tell you what I really think would have made a difference growing up: GOOD ADVICE. If someone, anyone - though particularly one of my peers - had been able to provide me with decent insight and guidance about how my life could be, it would definitely have turned out very, very differently. 

I only take this somewhat maudlin tone because, after re-living my university years with Starter for 10, I was plunged back into the horror of my school days in the bright, sweet, entertaining comedy Charlie Bartlett.

Charlie - a phenomenally accomplished and if-there-is-justice-in-the-world, meteoric-career-launching performance by Anton Yelchin - is a wealthy whipper-snapper with too little parental oversight and an overwhelming need to be liked. Kicked out of his umpteenth private school for forging IDs, he’s sent to the local public school where he struggles to fit in. (Cringe!) Yet in spite of the odds stacked against him, he achieves local fame both by reassigning the drugs (too quickly) prescribed to him by an army of shrinks and really, just by listening and passing on good advice. As Charlie says:

Well duh dude, this place sucks. But I just worry that one day we’re gonna look back at high school and wish we’d done something different.
 

From a location point of view, it’s not a particularly interesting or nice looking film - though some commentators noted that it at least looked “lived in” - which is apparently unusual for teen movie sets. The majority of school scenes were shot on the campuses of Western Technical Commercial School and Ursula Franklin Academy in Toronto. The boys’ lavatory that is used as Charlie’s office is one of Western Technical Commercial School’s. The student lounge from the movie was constructed specifically for the shooting of this movie. Charlie’s mansion home though has a long cinematic pedigree; Parkwood Estate in Oshawa has been featured in Billy Madison, Mrs. Winterbourne, Hollywoodland and the first of the X-Men movies. Parkwood is considered one of Canada’s finest and last remaining grand estates, with architectural, landscape and interior designs of the 1920’s and 1930’s.

A lot of the criticism of Charlie Bartlett comes from the fact that it isn’t Harold and Maude and it isn’t Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Well, yes, but that’s just being pissy. Anton Yelchin’s virtuoso performance - supported admirably by the whacky Hope Davis and Robert Downey Jnr channelling a drunk (who knew?!) - means that this should be ranked up there with the best of them.