| Film Weekly meets Andy Serkis and reviews The Road Film Weekly gets 2010 off to a blistering start with actor Andy Serkis, who has gone from playing Gollum and King Kong to inhabiting the skin and withered limb of the late Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Serkis tells Jason Solomons about channelling the spit and fury of the uncompromising late 70s jazz-punk warrior, and how bringing Dury to life on the big screen forced him to dig deep into his skills as an artist, actor and musician. Serkis also discusses his return to playing Gollum in The Hobbit and why motion-capture technology will never put actors out of work. The hard-hitting documentary Mugabe and The White African – about a white Zimbabwean farmer's attempt to take his country's president to the international court over his brutal land-reform programme – took the top prize at the recent British Independent Film awards and is released in the UK this week. Co-director Andrew Thompson reveals why he was compelled to tell the story of Mike Campbell's struggle to hold on to his farm and how he managed to get the film made during the country's fractious elections, despite being handicapped by the regime's total press ban and the need to film covertly with smuggled-in large-format cameras and sound-recording equipment. Next, Xan Brooks joins in to review the week's key releases: the successful transition of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road to the big screen, Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin in Nancy Meyers's romcom It's Complicated and, of course, the strictly un-airbrushed portrait of Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll.And finally, the winner of the competition in Film Weekly's final 2009 podcast, who wins a Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee prize pack, is revealed.Jason SolomonsXan BrooksJason PhippsObserver guardian.co.uk |
Lindsay Lohan involved in hit and run LINDSAY Lohan's car struck a member of the paparazzi and then sped away, TMZ reported. news.com.au |
Video: Exclusive clip from Blur documentary No Distance Left to Run Watch Blur tear through Parklife at the Rough Trade East record shop, shortly before their reunion shows at Glastonbury and Hyde Park last year guardian.co.uk |
Did Ricky Gervais shine at the Golden Globes? After a weak start, the British comedian got stuck in to the Hollywood crowd, but by his own standards he was pretty tameBefore Sunday night's Golden Globes Âceremony, host Ricky Gervais was promising a gloves-off performance. "There were about five things [the producers] didn't like in rehearsal," he boasted. "I said I wouldn't do them – but I'm going to. It's live. They can't stop me." By his words so must we judge him. Was this the no-holds-barred comic performance he told us to expect?On his last live tour, Gervais's post-PC shtick seemed tired, the trademark self-Âregard wearing very thin. And so too here, where egotistical material about The Office – and, worse, his penis – made a duff start. When will he learn that his spoof self-absorption is as obnoxious as the real thing?But when Gervais got stuck in, one or two gags generated the type of response that must be music to this shock-peddler's ears. In his recent show, Science, Gervais directed his nastiest jokes at the absent and the vulnerable – but not so here. A witheringly sarcastic routine about the importance of acting tartly undercut the Tinseltown love-in to come, while a quip about Irish stereotypes sent up the sanctimonious "oblivious to colour and creed" guff that preceded it.His performance, though, wasn't hard-hitting enough for some: the Hollywood Reporter called him "toothless", and sure enough, he did pull some punches. Joking about Mel Gibson's drinking is one thing – but off the leash, ÂGervais would surely make hay with Gibson's anti-Semitism too.That, alas, is never going to happen at an event as stage-managed as the Globes – nor from a man as palpably delighted to be a Hollywood insider as Gervais. Yet there were at least glimpses of Gervais at his gadfly best.Ricky GervaisComedyComedyGolden GlobesBrian Loganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Avatar vs realism | Andrew Brown Science fiction can be the most realistic genre we have. That's why Avatar is a shameful travestyI went to see Avatar because of a subtle and enthusiastic review by Roz Kaveney – a pity that she must have watched it in another universe. The film I saw had no plot, no characters, no conflict, and no depth of field. The last complaint is literal as well as metaphorical. The 3D effect is in some ways even more two-dimensional than normal films, since there is only one plane where anything is in focus. Everything that protrudes into the theatre or recedes from it is blurry and insubstantial if you look at it directly. The explosions are very pretty. The robots and the dinosaurs are great. The noble savages swish their tails with admirable elegance. There is one CGI effect, half jellyfish and half bacteriophage, that's absolutely lovely. The other good bits: there is one human character, the corporate villain. He is a lovely cameo of a man who has made his peace with the devil. There are two recognisable and enjoyable caricatures: the evil security chief and the good scientist. There is a momentary glimpse of a mother-in-law from hell. No one else acts even half as naturally as the CGI robots. The storyline is just gruyère, made up of nothing but cheese and holes. Since there are many explosions, and lots of people baring their teeth and going "raaargh", it may seem absurd to say that this is a film without conflict. But there is no difficulty that cannot be overcome by magic and desire. There is nothing the hero need – or can – do but exercise his willpower ever more heroically while mounted on ever more flamboyantly coloured and elaborately winged representations of his id. In most SF and fantasy, dragons are really just winged ponies: a cuddly and romantic way for adolescent girls to come to terms with the unbiddable power of sexuality. In Avatar they are motorbikes with wings and scales. This is the world as it appears to a confident, eight year old boy. And because there is no real conflict, there's no plot either; no suspense. You know that no one young and sympathetic will ever die; no one old and wise will ever be foolish; that a pterodactyl will always beat a helicopter in a fair fight. No white man in Avatar ever needs to overcome fear, or doubt, or confusion. (Savages may be briefly confused till they come to their senses and follow the white man or their shaman). Even treachery is an act of impulse, never regretted. Soldiers change sides as if they were moving from McDonalds to Burger King. But what about the blue men, you will say. What about these noble, long-tailed savages who live in harmony with their mother the planet and teach us compassion for all living things? They even say "Thank you" when they kill their dinner, though not, I notice, when they kill the alien whites. Perhaps that's because they are not going to eat them, although they are in every other respect boiled down to the dregs of noble savagery. Their arguments move immediately from disagreement into spitting knife fight, yet can be quelled at a word from the divinely inspired priestess. They never grow old, or ugly, ill, or hungry. They can work magic, but are not bitter if it fails. They are, in fact, Sam and Samantha Saddleback, imagined as tall, thin, blue-skinned, and with the most elegant tails. Physically they are obviously (and beautifully) based on black faces before recolouring. But their dreams are those of white suburban America.Of course the film has a necessary element of realism. The villains all work for a ruthless corporation, and the hero is corrupted by the promise of health care. But these are quite as shallow as the rest of it: the greed of earth is taken for granted as deeply wicked: we want more than we should have. When the humans are expelled at the end of the film to their overcrowded and poisoned planet, it's taken for granted than Pandora should belong in its entirety to its 20 or 30,000 natives. I know it is a huge part of the attraction of fantasy as a genre, as Brian Aldiss points out, that money plays no part in it. But there is something grotesque in a film purportedly about ecology in which money, need, and economics play no part except to motivate the bad guys.I don't know that Avatar is worse than most blockbuster films. Quite possibly they are all this thin. But Avatar comes freighted with claims of seriousness and that's the one thing these films can't be. They replace wonder with spectacle. They replace conflict with violence. They replace dialogue with grunts, exclamations, and occasional bellyflops into management cliché: "I realised I would have to take this to another level". Some films show dreams convincingly. If you want a moving and in the best sense childish fantasy about deep ecology and the destructive powers on industrialisation, there is already one in Princess Mononoke. But that is an animated cartoon, whose characters are more real and sometimes more frightening, than anything in CGI; it's only two dimensional, but has much greater depth than anything in 3D; and it is quite explicitly aimed at eight-year-olds and thus has interesting complexity.But Avatar replaces dreams with wish-fulfilment. It has shocks, but programmatically excludes surprises. From time to time, when the explosions were particularly soothing, I would take off my 3D glasses and look around the audience. The place was crammed. Their black plastic glasses all faced the front. Their hand moved mechanically to the ice-creams, the popcorn, and the nachos on their laps (£6.80 with a big tub of sugary drink for free). They thought they were seeing a lesson about ecology and the perils of greed.James CameronAndrew Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |