Pegg in a hole
Simon Pegg will play one of the graverobbers in John Landis's new version of Burke and Hare. The veteran comedy director begins shooting in London and Edinburgh this autumn and told me he's thrilled to be working with Pegg. "He's a fabulous comic actor and he immediately 'got' the script and what we're trying to do - a black British comedy in the Ealing tradition of Kind Hearts and Coronets, laughs with poison in them." Although unconfirmed, I understand it's possible that Pegg will reteam with his Shaun of the Dead co-star and former flatmate Nick Frost. Their self-styled zom-rom-com was a success in America as well as being an instant classic here, one that made it into the Observer's list of the best 25 British films of the last 25 years, as revealed in our Film Quarterly magazine today. Landis meanwhile is preparing a surprise for the audience at tonight's FrightFest - the director will world premiere a Leicester Square screening of a new HD print of Michael Jackson's Thriller video, and a "making of" doc.
Brighton rockers
As a new film version gets under way, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock will be updated to 1964 and set among the famous seaside battles between mods and rockers. Originally filmed, by John Boulting, in 1947 with Richard Attenborough as teenager Pinkie Brown and no mods or rockers, Greene's 1938 novel is receiving the modern make-over "to refresh the story". According to director Rowan Joffe: "We're making it as contemporary as possible because it feels so modern. It's too vibrant, too alive, to be contained in the late 1930s." As I revealed in my Cannes column earlier this year, Joffe has signed up actor Sam Riley to recreate Pinkie, one of Lord Attenborough's signature roles. Riley was a charismatic Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division in the biopic Control. Sam will be joined by rising star Andrea Riseborough - see her in Sam Taylor-Wood's short Love You More - as well as Helen Mirren and Pete Postlethwaite, who will play Brighton gangster Phil Corkery.
Turgoose on the telly
News of another British classic (also appearing on the Observer's Top 25 list): Shane Meadows is making the sequel to This Is England - as a four-part television series. The show will move the action on four years from the end of the film and bring back many of the main characters, including Thomas Turgoose as wannabe skinhead Shaun. Entitled We Were Faces, the series will be set in 1986 and finds Shaun preparing to leave school and enter the grown-up world.
It will be co-written by Meadows with Jack Thorne, who penned The Scouting Book For Boys, which has just been filmed with Turgoose in a major role. Meadows revealed his plans for the project while promoting his latest low-budget film, Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, a mockumentary starring Paddy Considine. This Is England of course, suffered from an 18 certification, due to some racist swearing and violence. The certification angered Meadows as he believed it prevented many young people, for whom the film might have contained useful lessons, from seeing it. The TV sequel will thus open the characters and themes up to an even wider audience.
Showing posts with label films of books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label films of books. Show all posts
Friday, 4 September 2009
Can't imagine Pete Postlethwaite as a gangster, but still excited... #brighton rock
via guardian.co.uk
Saturday, 21 March 2009
Alan Moore article in the Guardian
I missed this earlier in the week, but just in case anyone else hasn't seen it there's a good interview with Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, From Hell & the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen on the the Guardian website.
The sense that I got of Moore from the interview was that he's got a lot more integrity than most.
The interviewer, Steve Rose, notes that on the day he met him, Moore had turned down interviews with Time and CNN, because he was too busy getting ready for a charity gig at his local pub.
It might sound like arrogance, given that everyone's talking about Watchmen at the moment, but it makes sense when you consider that Moore has done his best to avoid being associated with film, right down to assigning his share of the profits to Dave Gibbons, the artist with whom he originally wrote the graphic novel.
He told Rose, "I am aware of the immense power of absence. I'm not being completely disingenuous here. Of course I'm aware it doesn't hurt my reputation, but I'm not playing hard to get as some publicity ploy. I'm genuinely busy with stuff that is really important to me."
I can understand his distancing himself from Watchmen, and all the other adaptations of his graphic novels - they haven't been great have they? From Hell, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen weren't actively bad films, but they aren't that good either and they pale into insignificance when you compare them to the graphic novels they are based on.
Moore makes the point to Rose, "There is something about the quality of comics that makes things possible that you couldn't do in any other medium. Things that we did in Watchmen on paper could be frankly horrible or sensationalist or unpleasant if you were to interpret them literally through the medium of cinema. When it's just lines on paper, the reader is in control of the experience – it's a tableau vivant. And that gives it the necessary distance. It's not the same when you're being dragged through it at 24 frames per second."
He's got a good point - the medium is an incredible one and provides an experience to its readers that it's hard to improve on, so why try? Is trying to turn a graphic novel or a comic into a film a futile exercise? You've got the words and the pictures, what else do you need? However, I do love the film Sin City, as an exception to the rule, because it looks so incredible - it feels like Frank Miller's drawings have started to move on the pages (a bit like that A-Ha video - which is an inappropriate comparison, I know).
Bearing in mind what Moore thinks about the power and possibilities of his medium, I'm intrigued to see his new offering Lost Girls, which is porn in graphic novel form, illustrated by his wife Melinda Gebbie.
"We felt we could reclaim and redefine what pornography was, and we deliberately chose to use that word. We didn't want to hide behind 'erotica' – because it's not etymologically accurate for one thing, and I'm very fussy about that kind of stuff, and there's a class element to it. Pornos graphos – drawings or writings of wantons – that will do," Moore tells his interviewer.
Moore did his research too, reading feminist theory and analysis of pornography - and it's refreshing to hear someone call porn porn, but a big task to try and reclaim it, but if there's a medium in which it can be done, then why not the graphic novel, and if there's a author to do it, why not Alan Moore?
The sense that I got of Moore from the interview was that he's got a lot more integrity than most.
The interviewer, Steve Rose, notes that on the day he met him, Moore had turned down interviews with Time and CNN, because he was too busy getting ready for a charity gig at his local pub.
It might sound like arrogance, given that everyone's talking about Watchmen at the moment, but it makes sense when you consider that Moore has done his best to avoid being associated with film, right down to assigning his share of the profits to Dave Gibbons, the artist with whom he originally wrote the graphic novel.
He told Rose, "I am aware of the immense power of absence. I'm not being completely disingenuous here. Of course I'm aware it doesn't hurt my reputation, but I'm not playing hard to get as some publicity ploy. I'm genuinely busy with stuff that is really important to me."
I can understand his distancing himself from Watchmen, and all the other adaptations of his graphic novels - they haven't been great have they? From Hell, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen weren't actively bad films, but they aren't that good either and they pale into insignificance when you compare them to the graphic novels they are based on.
Moore makes the point to Rose, "There is something about the quality of comics that makes things possible that you couldn't do in any other medium. Things that we did in Watchmen on paper could be frankly horrible or sensationalist or unpleasant if you were to interpret them literally through the medium of cinema. When it's just lines on paper, the reader is in control of the experience – it's a tableau vivant. And that gives it the necessary distance. It's not the same when you're being dragged through it at 24 frames per second."
He's got a good point - the medium is an incredible one and provides an experience to its readers that it's hard to improve on, so why try? Is trying to turn a graphic novel or a comic into a film a futile exercise? You've got the words and the pictures, what else do you need? However, I do love the film Sin City, as an exception to the rule, because it looks so incredible - it feels like Frank Miller's drawings have started to move on the pages (a bit like that A-Ha video - which is an inappropriate comparison, I know).
Bearing in mind what Moore thinks about the power and possibilities of his medium, I'm intrigued to see his new offering Lost Girls, which is porn in graphic novel form, illustrated by his wife Melinda Gebbie.
"We felt we could reclaim and redefine what pornography was, and we deliberately chose to use that word. We didn't want to hide behind 'erotica' – because it's not etymologically accurate for one thing, and I'm very fussy about that kind of stuff, and there's a class element to it. Pornos graphos – drawings or writings of wantons – that will do," Moore tells his interviewer.
Moore did his research too, reading feminist theory and analysis of pornography - and it's refreshing to hear someone call porn porn, but a big task to try and reclaim it, but if there's a medium in which it can be done, then why not the graphic novel, and if there's a author to do it, why not Alan Moore?
Thursday, 26 February 2009
Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's
I've always loved the film Breakfast at Tiffany's - in that film, Audrey Hepburn is pretty much the most beautiful woman ever to walk the earth, so when I saw a free copy of Capote's novel with The Times a few weeks ago, I snapped it up.
What really struck me reading the book, was how well the film captures Holly, her speech, her mannerisms, and the overall tone of the novel, despite the difference in the ending. I go through different phases -one where I can believe that Holly would stay, and another where I know she'd go, so rather than being angry that the film betrays the plot of the novel, I can accept it and be pleased by it in a way. And it ends well for the cat in both versions, which is just as important.
In the version I have, Breakfast at Tiffany's is anthologised with a few short stories, which I enjoyed too, particularly House of Flowers a funny little romantic story that really caught me off guard, because it was so unconventional and offbeat.
What really struck me reading the book, was how well the film captures Holly, her speech, her mannerisms, and the overall tone of the novel, despite the difference in the ending. I go through different phases -one where I can believe that Holly would stay, and another where I know she'd go, so rather than being angry that the film betrays the plot of the novel, I can accept it and be pleased by it in a way. And it ends well for the cat in both versions, which is just as important.
In the version I have, Breakfast at Tiffany's is anthologised with a few short stories, which I enjoyed too, particularly House of Flowers a funny little romantic story that really caught me off guard, because it was so unconventional and offbeat.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)