Happy Hallowe'en

Hopefully, tonight I'll be watching John Carpenter's 1978 classic Halloween on Blu-ray.

The Eleventh Doctor...

So the news has broken that David Tennant is moving on from Doctor Who once he finishes work on the five specials which are to be broadcast over 2009 and early 2010. Tennant's been sensational in the role, and his star and the profile of the show have ballooned in the three years he's been playing the Doctor. His Doctor must rank alongside the first four as a definitive interpretation (such is the magic of the character that there can be more than one definitive Doctor). So incoming executive producer/head writer Steven Moffat has a challenge finding the new Doctor. Who knows if they'll opt for an unkown, an established star, or a hot talent on the rise? If Moffat's previous stories for the show are any indication, his Doctor will be full of daring heroism and prone to romance. With that in mind, here are the people I hope they're talking to for the role...

ROBERT CARLYLE

I would love to see Carlyle in the TARDIS. Nervous energy? Check. Capable of a frightening edge? Check. Cheeky sex appeal? Check. He is perhaps a little over the age range I suspect they're looking for, but would nevertheless do a fantastic job. An increasingly high international profile and attachment to many projects in various stages of production means he may be too busy for the role. On the other hand, the man is the father of three, and may like to combine a rest from the hectic pace (although Doctor Who does have a particular brand of hectic pace all it's own) with the chance to do something his kids can watch. I'll call this one unlikely, much as I'd love to see it. Perhaps he can do a guest role sometime.

DYLAN MORAN

Dylan would be sensational - sadly, this being the enlightened future we live in, the Doctor would not be able to chain smoke or swill red wine - although Pertwee's Doctor didn't mind a nice red, so why not one every now and again? Moran does not do a great deal of film or television acting, and is apparently a very private man who prefers to stay out of the limelight, so if he was approached, he would most likely decline the role. Again, there must be a juicy guest role down the track for him.

JAMES McAVOY

Imagine James McAvoy in the role! I mean, this guy is the fucking shit, quite frankly. He's a bit on the young side, even for the current production team, and is so white hot at the moment that he'd be way too busy and they'd never afford him. Very unlikely to be approached. He'd be great though.

HUGH GRANT

Let me get this out of the way - I'm not a fan of Hugh Grant, and have not really liked much that he's been in. However, I would not be upset if he was approached for the role. I think his dopey charm would work well with a story like 'The Girl in the Fireplace'. His profile has waned in recent years, and he did lament in an interview a few years ago that he didn't get to play the Doctor, so who knows? At 48 years of age, he's perhaps a little old for the role, but I think this one is not outside the realms of possibility. Of course, you must realise that I'm indulging in a lot of speculation about the age range they'll be looking for, based on the history of the show, comments made by previous showrunner Russell T Davies, and the much written about grueling schedule of the show, but humour me, okay?

COLIN FIRTH

He busier than a one legged man in an arse kicking contest. Another one who's possibly a little old. So this one's a total fantasy pick, will never happen. So why's he on the list? Because once, just once, I'd like to see a smokin' hot Doctor. Sure, when I was but a confused 12 year old Peter Davison certainly had my heart racing, but now I can see that I was clutching at straws, and should have spent my time drooling over Matthew Waterhouse's Adric instead. Why? Three reasons: he was much closer to my age; he's gay (I know, as if I'd ever meet him, but at least it makes the chances slightly better); and he's aged into one of those really cute grey haired guys in their mid forties. Before you jump to conclusions about my opinion of Adric, I want to make a few of things clear. Back in the day, I never looked at him twice. His character was poorly served throughout his tenure on the show, and quite possibly just a bad idea. And Matthew Waterhouse cannot act - or could not back then at least. He literally made a showcase of bad acting simply walking across the room in the otherwise superb story 'State of Decay'. Anyway, back to the point: it'd really make me happy to have a Doctor who made me think dirty thoughts.

ALFRED MOLINA

Again, with the never-gonna-happen. IMDb has him listed for at least eight or nine features in production for release over the next two years. He's here because he became my number one choice for the role when I saw the passion, energy, and madness that he brought to the role of Otto Octavius in Spiderman 2.

JOANNA LUMLEY

I don't think she's an example of never-gonna-happen. Ms. Lumley is an example of never say never. The idea of a female Doctor bothers me not in the slightest, and it would at least mean we'd be more likely to get some hot boys in the TARDIS along for the ride as companions. She's already played the role anyway, in the 1999 Comic Relief sketch 'The Curse of Fatal Death' - from a funny and clever script by one Steven Moffat, which featured Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor with Julia Sawalha as his companion Emma facing off against Jonathan Pryce's Master. The climax had the Doctor successively regenerate through Jim Broadbent, Richard E. Grant, and Hugh Grant to finally arrive at Joanna Lumley, who takes off in the TARDIS with Sawalha in tow. Lumley has said she'd love to return to the world of Doctor Who, but only if offered the title role. I say, why not? She was great in 'Fatal Death' and the climax of series 4 showed - with Catherine Tate and her character Donna Noble - that a female Doctor could be sensational. Would love to see this happen. It would be more likely to be in the form of a one episode special rather than handing the show over to her, however.

The totally heterosexual Ricky Martin.

Yeah, I know the photo's old. So what?

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I saw this film for the first time on the opening night of its theatrical run here in Australia. I was with a group of hardcore Indiana Jones fans, all of whom emerged from the screening bitterly disappointed. I didn't actually hear anyone say 'Lucas/Spielberg raped my childhood', but the sentiment hung in the air like a bad smell as the group dispersed. I couldn't fathom the strength of the emotions on display - I mean, I love Raiders of the Lost Ark as much as the next guy, but it seemed to me that the greatest crime Crystal Skull committed was to have the downright affrontery to be a fun time at the cinema. I was certainly much more entertained than by the first viewing of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I've since found that a good way to easily enrage people at dinner parties is to say that I didn't mind this film - I don't even need to use strong language, like I 'liked' or even 'loved' the film. Professing anything but a profound and burning hatred for Ang Lee's Hulk (a film I actually do love) elicits a similar response.

Last night I rented the film on Blu-ray for a second viewing, and I remain an unrepentant fan. Sure, the film has issues - for every scene (and there are many) that looks like it could have come from one of the old films, there's a scene where cinematographer Janusz Kaminski is obviously uncomfortable shoe-horning his own visual style through an anamorphic lens. And there's something a little off about the way Karen Allen is brought into the film only to be promptly sidelined again and again, as though there's a faint air of embarrassment about the fact that she hasn't kept her physique up, Madonna style. And after the film gets away with a terrific jungle chase sequence by the skin of its teeth, there's a sense of 'we pulled that off, now we can do anything' - the only possible explanation for throwing our heroes over three increasingly gigantic waterfalls and having them emerge shaken but unharmed. And then having John Hurt regain his wits at the last minute, seemingly with the single purpose of having him repeatedly remind the audience that the creatures in the climax are not from outer space, but from another dimension. Not that that little nugget of information makes any difference to most audience members' incredulity.

This last one is popular at dinner parties too - the notion that aliens and flying saucers can pop up in the Indiana Jones universe is the cause of blinding rage in people who never had a problem with a man's beating heart being ripped out, leaving him alarmed but still alive (though not for long), in Temple of Doom. Obviously there are rules about where one draws the line that I am not privy to, as having swallowed one, I have no trouble accepting the other. Sure, the film sometimes coasts along on the enormous amount of goodwill generated from the reunion of Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood, but it offers too many treats for me to be surly about the bum notes and crap bits (Shia LeBeouf swinging from the vines along with the monkeys being a prime example of the crap bits).

ILM and John Williams are working at the top of their game, as is editor Michael Kahn. Shia LeBeouf shows again that he is a genuine movie star. Cate Blanchett (another bona fide movie star) has a ball with her Boris and Natasha Russian accent before being given a send off which resembes nothing so much as the dark flip side of the fate which awaited Richard Dreyfuss at the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Sure, the formidable talents of John Hurt and Ray Winstone are pissed against the wall here, but I refuse to say anything bad about a movie in which Cate Blanchett and Shia LeBeouf engage in a sword fight from the back of two moving vehicles. Now that's movie magic!

The Blu-ray disc, by the way, looks and sounds fantastic.

A good look...

The beard works, Matt.

Great Matte Paintings #3 - The Birds

The Birds (1963)

I could fill dozens of these posts with matte paintings from The Birds. Albert Whitlock's extraordinary work is peppered throughout the film, helping to create the township of Bodega Bay, replacing sunny blue California skies with dark thunderheads and most famously in the stunning closing shot, representing an unprecendented (in 1963) complexity of compositing. The shot here is my favourite, however - a trademark Hitchcock oblique extreme high angle, reducing human civilisation to geometric blocks on the screen and people to mere dots. A piece of live action footage nestles right in the centre of frame - a lick of flame across a carpark. As if that wasn't enough, the shot is soon filled with dozens of swooping gulls, each one painstakingly rotoscoped by hand.

Here's the painting, showing the black area where the live action footage will be inserted.

Cute...

I'm gonna try and not get too gay porn or NSFW here, but you gotta admit, this is pretty cute...

Score of the week

Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (John Williams, 2005)

This, the climax of George Lucas' Star Wars prequel trilogy, was one lame film. A classic case of join-the-dots storytelling. Even as fx house ILM reached greater heights with the types of environments and characters they could create, the script plumbed the lower depths of laziness. And just as Ewan McGregor catches the spirit of the young Kenobi and makes him the man we met in the original films, the other cast are resigning themselves to the fact that they are just parts of a machine. We get the Palpatine that Ian McDiarmid usually saves for Christmas parties, Samuel L. Jackson is clearly not engaged by the material as he was in the second film, and poor Natalie Portman can do nothing but watch her character turn into a series of plot devices, before being forced to act the most poorly conceived cinema death ever. George Lucas must have simply lost the will to write. Or bloody well direct, for that matter.

If only the hints dropped in the original trilogy (like Alec Guiness as Ben Kenobi wistfully recalling Luke's father) weren't so evocative, and hadn't had decades to grow in our imaginations. Many fans of the series could have (and probably did) pen superior third instalments. Lucas' insistence on filling in every possible gap (from the evolution of each type of spacecraft to not being able to resist explaining the Emperor's decrepit look in the original films, as if twenty years of abusing the dark side of the force wasn't enough) made it feel like watching a screenwriter run through a checklist of things he had to do. There was more excitement in the Pavlovian response the trailers generated - the right combination of R2 beep, Wookiee growl, laser zap, and bursts of John Williams and the LSO tweaking geek pressure points in anyone of a certain age. It's sad, because Attack of the Clones seemed to be a step in the right direction. Even The Phantom Menace has aged better than I suspect Sith will.

At least John Williams wasn't phoning it in. His score is full of beauty, action, adventure, and despair, even if it doesn't reach the heights of adrenaline as such cues as 'The Asteroid Field' from The Empire Strikes Back. The John Williams of the last, let's say, sixteen years is a different composer to the man who scored Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Dracula. He's a less excitable composer now - his instincts tend more towards subtlety. But he has not lost the capacity to produce thrilling music. Go on, give it a spin and tell me that 'Anakin vs Obi-Wan' is not a terrific action cue, or that the last two minutes of 'Anakin's Dark Deeds' is not beautiful and heartbreaking. Williams has become less prolific of late but when he does choose to work (because it must surely be always there for the asking for the most legendary living film composer) he always delivers something special.

Hollywood set to blandify another hottie...

Crunching his abs and dropping the pounds to play the Green Hornet.

Et tu, Seth Rogen? Well, it was nice while it lasted...

Star Quality

Great Matte Paintings #2 - Dune

Dune (1984)

This one is a pretty extraordinary piece of work. The painting - by Syd Dutton working under the supervision of legendary matte artist Albert Whitlock - was on two separate pieces of glass (one for the foreground cables) and had spaces left in for exposure of live action footage of extras walking around on wet concrete. Further exposures of live action overlays for bursts of steam and flame...

 

...plus a miniature cable car shot against bluescreen...

 

...plus a motion control camera move tilting up to follow the cable car...

...make for one of the great matte paintings of the 80s.

Great Matte Paintings #1 - The Blob

 

The Blob (1988)

This Chuck Russell directed and Frank Darabont scripted remake of the 50's sci-fi favourite was not a box office success and is now largely forgotten. Which is a shame, as it's a clever and exciting B movie which captured the appeal of the genre in a similar fashion to the more fondly remembered Tremors.

The matte painting here is from the opening of the film.

The painting - by matte artist Robert Scifo - was photographed using split screens, dividing the painting into eleven horizontal strips, each shot with a slightly slower camera move than the strip beneath to impart a sense of three dimensional perspective to the painting. A roll axis was added to the camera as well, making the shot look remarkably like a real helicopter shot. It's an interesting comparison to a similar opening shot from The Witches of Eastwick a year earlier. That one was an actual helicopter shot, but shot with a high tech gimbal so steady that it made the shot look like a matte painting!

Foreground clouds were photographed as a live action element and composited into the shot by Dream Quest Images, who had been doing striking work in the couple of years leading up to The Blob in films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and were not far off winning Oscars for work in films like The Abyss. Throughout the 80s, there were two big effects companies in the Hollywood effects industry - Industrial Light and Magic and Boss Film. Dream Quest was the first new fx kid on the block to really give these two companies serious competition in terms of innovation and quality of work. Of course, seven years later the industry became dominated by digital technology and the number of fx houses producing world class work ballooned. Still, in the age of Digital Domain and fx houses in Europe and Australia becoming well known, Dream Quest held their own, being bought by Disney and producing terrific work for Mission to Mars. And then being unceremoniously shut down by a studio that decided it didn't really need a costly in-house fx facility after all. But I digress... here's a screencap from the tail end of the shot, after the composited clouds have cleared the frame...

 

Australian Blu-ray viewers well served again...

The Blu-ray disc of RoboCop contains the director's cut of this wonderful film. I've seen reviews of this and other Blu-ray discs contain phrases like 'screwed the pooch' and 'dropped the ball' over failure to port over special features from previous DVD editions, but as far as I'm concerned, if you get a great film (like this) in High Definition and the transfers are good, I'm a happy customer.