| Commission us: a library of kids' films We asked you to tell us what to write. Today, we present the beginnings of a kids' films library, with the 50 best family films by our critics, plus Michael Hann's own top choicesGALLERY: our choice of the top 50 kids filmsWhy isn't there a recommended library of films for children, was the question @AdvancedDriver posed when we asked you to suggest the articles you wanted to read. "The recommendations should be thought-provoking and/or entertaining," @AdvancedDriver requested, though experience of sitting my pair in front of a movie suggests that if it's not entertaining, then no thoughts will be provoked. Now, this is a subject on which we're going to need your help, so while I'll start the ball rolling with some films that have worked in my home, please let me know the films that have captivated your kids. Surprising and unusual nominations will be especially welcomed, and if we can get a decent longlist of movies, we'll assemble them into a feature for Film & Music in a few weeks' time.A note on methodology: the age suggestions here are my own, not related to the BBFC's recommendations. I've tried to avoid suggesting you sit your toddler down in front of Driller Killer, but bear in mind all parents have different standards about what they'll let their children watch. Mine might be laxer than yours. Or vice versa.Under-sixesThe Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)Catherine Deneuve works in an umbrella shop in Cherbourg. Her boyfriend is sent away on national service, but not before getting her pregnant. She marries someone else. Let's be frank: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was not made for children, but smaller children – girls especially – can be transfixed by the spectacle. It's all sung, to delicious Michel Legrand melodies; the set and costume design is a riot of colour; and Catherine Deneuve is beautiful enough to be a fairytale princess.The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)It's hard to know how popular The Princess Bride really is. Those who love it do so in such vociferous fashion that it can obscure the fact the film was never a hit. And why do they love it? Because it combines comedy, action, romance in almost every frame – and gave a postmodern spin to fairytale mythology years before the tentpole animated releases started doing the same thing.Under-eightsThe Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, 1938)The definitive swashbuckler from the golden age of Hollywood gives us a Robin not afraid of cruelty and ruthlessness, and a world away from the BBC's caring, sharing no-killing hero. Even kids reared on the flying limbs of CGI should be swayed by Errol Flynn dancing up and down spiral staircases, sword in hand.Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978)In which rabbits face genocide, military dictatorship and all manner of evils, in such a manner that even small children will be gripped (though some will be terrified). Richard Adams's source novel doesn't have the iron grip over children's imaginations that it did 30 years ago, but Martin Rosen's animation is an admirably compact introduction to the story.Under 10sWest Side Story (Robert Wise, 1961)Like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, West Side Story is a film whose sheer vibrancy attracts kids – and it's a good way to smuggle a Shakespeare story past them. Leonard Bernstein's score still thrills, and Stephen Sondheim's libretto offers laughs in the likes of Gee, Officer Krupke. The deaths may disturb, but these deaths have meaning – they are not just entertainments.The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003)The most gruesome of the 10 films I will recommend here makes it in because of the reaction of my (then) nine-year-old daughter this summer. She hated The Hobbit when I tried reading it aloud to her, so goodness knows what it was about this that transfixed her, but transfixed she was: the whole trilogy was consumed in one weekend. The reason, I think, is that this is movie-making in excelsis: pure spectacle, and a source of wonder to those small enough never to have seen live action on this scale. It's one you should be watching with your children, that's for sure, but the moral framework is clear enough that there's no danger of them taking mixed messages from the gore.Under 12sSome Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)The immediate pre-teen years are a wonderful time to start watching genuinely adult films, for the balance between cynicism and wonder hasn't yet tipped in favour of the kneekerk "whatevs" to parental suggestions. Some Like It Hot manages to deal with sex, cross-dressing, impotence and the mafia in what my colleague Xan Brooks called "a great, joyous yawp of a movie". That's about right.Galaxy Quest (Dean Parisot, 1999)Junior sci-fi nerds will be giggling at the messing with genre conventions. Adults will enjoy a series of delicious performances from a top-notch cast – Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shalhoub, Sam Rockwell, Alan Rickman and Tim Allen – as the actors in a Star Trekalike series, who find the episodes they recorded years before have come to be sacred scriptures to a threatened alien race.Michael Hannguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Ken Loach: TV is the enemy of creativity Director calls for more BBC executives to lose their jobs in a keynote speech at the London film festivalHighly paid, time-serving television executives are killing creativity and making the medium one big "grotesque reality game", according to one of Britain's most respected directors, Ken Loach.The director, who first joined the BBC 47 years ago and made plays such as Cathy Come Home, launched an excoriating attack on the culture of television today.Making the keynote address of the London film festival, Loach said: "Television has now become the enemy of creativity. Television kills creativity. Work is produced beneath a pyramid of producers, executive producers, commissioning editors, heads of department, assistant heads of department and so on that sit on top of the group of people doing the work and stifle the life out of them."He said TV was in the hands of "time servers, who should be got rid of", and welcomed the news of departures at the BBC. "I'm pleased to see, I guess we all are, that one or two top-ranking BBC people are going to lose their jobs. About time. It takes a million quid and a handshake to get them out the door but nevertheless they're away. Great. Good riddance. Maybe a few more will join them. Let's start cutting further down."Loach spoke of the need for editors and commissioners to give people the confidence to be as good as they could be. "If you've got 10 people sitting on your shoulder you can't be good, you can't be creative. All you can be is a mess."This is no way to cherish originality, this is no way to find those special voices that we need."TV, he said during his speech last night at London's BFI, had been reduced from the national theatre of the airwaves to a "grotesque reality game".Loach said he had been around a long time. In his career he has made many memorable movies including Kes, Riff Raff and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which won the Cannes Palme d'Or. He said that he was speaking out when many were unable to.Loach said filmgoers today, whether watching at the cinema or on TV, had a raw deal and got what they were given by a Hollywood-dominated industry. He said just 3.3% of films shown on television were from European or world cinema."What a disaster we are collectively responsible for, what a disaster. The film council was set up to establish a viable industry but, if you don't confront this basic fact that we don't have access to our screens, how can we be viable? If you're producing anything in your own country and you've only got a tiny proportion of the home market you don't stand a chance. Of course it won't be viable unless we challenge this colonising of our cinema."Loach suggested that cinemas could be like theatres and owned more often by local authorities with programming decided by people who care about films, not "people who care about fast food".He asked his audience to imagine libraries with 80% American fiction and just 3% from the rest of the world, or the same proportion in theatres or art galleries. "It is inconceivable and yet the cinema, which we think is a most beautiful art – we kill it."TelevisionKen LoachLondon film festivalBBCMark Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Bullitt: No 13 Peter Yates, 1968Sure, there's a fantastic car chase in it – one of the first, still one of the best – but Peter Yates's first American movie is so much more than a duel on wheels. First off, it belongs in the esteemed company of Greed, Vertigo, The Lineup, Dirty Harry and Zodiac as one of the finest movies set and shot in San Francisco, that most beguilingly cinematic of American cities. Secondly, it offers the distilled essence of Steve McQueen as an actor and icon at the pinnacle of his career. Exercising his usual restraint, the actor (working as his own producer) pruned every redundant word from his own role, making Bullitt perhaps the most taciturn hero of the 60s – McQueen knew that the less he said, the more intently the audience focused on him.He is the near-silent centre of a very busy, compelling and violent crime drama. Blessed with the fresh eyes of newly landed Englishman Yates (and genius cameraman William Fraker), the movie makes San Francisco fresh and alive, but also completely remakes and modernises the bleak, sleazy gangster demimonde in which Bullitt does his hunting – moviegoers wouldn't see those same pointy, elongated shirt collars on gangsters again until Goodfellas. And the moment when one gangster gets blown away with a pump-action shotgun, lifting him off his feet and halfway across the room, was a key turn in the development of on-screen violence before Sam Peckinpah rewrote the rules a year later in The Wild Bunch.The final pursuit across the runways of San Francisco airport inspired a similar white-knuckle sequence in Michael Mann's Heat, which is to phantasmagoric, nocturnal LA what Bullitt was to San Francisco. Oh, and there's this great car chase …Action and adventureSteve McQueenJohn Pattersonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Psycho: Archive review From the Observer, 7 August 1960A new film by Alfred Hitchcock is usually a keen enjoyment. Psycho turns out to be an exception. The story, adapted from a novel by Robert Bloch, has to do with the fate of one Marion (Janet Leigh), an uninhibited secretary, who steals $40,000 from her employer and drives off into the night to meet her lover (John Gavin). During a storm she arrives at a sinister motel owned by a crazy taxidermist (Anthony Perkins), whose even more demented mother lives in the adjoining mansion.There follows one of the most disgusting murders in all screen history. It takes place in a bathroom and involves a great deal of swabbing of the tiles and flushings of the lavatory. It might be described with fairness as plug ugly. Psycho is not a long film but it feels long. Perhaps because the director dawdles over technical effects; perhaps because it is difficult, if not impossible, to care about any of the characters.The stupid air of mystery and portent surrounding Psycho's presentation strikes me as a tremendous error. "The manager of this theatre has been instructed, at the risk of his life, not to admit any persons after the picture starts." "By the way, after you see Psycho don't give away the ending." Signed, Alfred Hitchcock.I couldn't give away the ending if I wanted to, for the simple reason that I grew so sick and tired of the whole beastly business that I didn't stop to see it. Your edict may keep me out of the theatre, my dear Hitchcock, but I'm hanged if it will keep me in.HorrorAlfred Hitchcockguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Inside the Star Wars machine: part one The latest Star Wars game, Force Unleashed II, is out this week and to find out more we visited LucasArts and Industrial Light and Magic at the Letterman Digital Arts Center. Here's what we discovered about the home of Star Wars...As our minibus pulls up to the LucasArts entrance area, there is a strange but not entirely unexpected welcoming party. Darth Vader and six stormtroopers are lined up along the road, standing to attention in the blinding Californian sunshine. Yesterday San Francisco saw its hottest day since records began, and today the temperature remains in the high nineties. Of course, press trips like this are rare, and the staff at LucasArts like to pull out all the stops. But these poor bastards must think they're back on Tatooine. We're here to tour the Letterman Digital Arts Center, a sprawl of modern office buildings constructed in 1999 to house LucasArts and legendary special effects company, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). LDAC takes up 860,000 square feet of office space (and 17 acres of parkland) on Frisco's historic Presidio site, once a major Spanish stronghold and then a US Army base for 150 years. And like the previous residents, the Lucas organisation has left its own distinctive mark on the landscape; by the main entrance there is an ostentatious fountain with a life-size statue of Yoda at its head.This is where all the in-house Star Wars games are developed; currently that means Force Unleashed II, a Jedi brawler set between the two cinematic trilogies. It's also where ILM produces its cutting edge special effects: the likes of Avatar, Star Trek and Iron Man II have all recently passed through here. The company's far-reaching influence over the last 35 years of cinematic design is abundantly obvious in this vast complex. Everywhere we walk, there are models from the era before digital computer effects took over. We pass ET, the slimer from Ghostbusters, a large spacecraft from Deep Impact; in the reception area there's Han Solo frozen in carbonite (beside a fan-made life-sized model of Jar Jar in carbonite – Lucas liked it so much he wanted it hung here) all intricately detailed and lovingly preserved. On one wall you'll even find the front door to ILM's original office, emblazoned with, 'The Kerner Company, Optical Research Lab', the pseudonym the department once went under in order not to draw attention to its building. "They wanted to keep it because every big director they worked with in those early days touched that door handle," explains LucasArts PR manager Barbara Gamlen as we wander by. Throughout the complex, the walls are lined with painted concept art. We pass a particularly massive canvases depicting an airport scene from Diehard 2, and there are early sketches of Darth Vader, the At-Ats and the Star Wars droids. Every turned corner, every expanse of vertical space, offers an arcane treat for fans of blockbusting cinema, right down to the ancient Howard Anderson optical printer used to composite many of the effects shots in Star Wars. Lucas also owns the world's largest collection of classic movie posters and dozens of his favourites are hung around this building, as well as on the walls at Skywalker Ranch. Apparently, he'll regularly request that they're moved around, slipping post-it notes on the works to be transferred. The close unification of LucasArts and ILM in these buildings is symbolic of the convergence we're now seeing between games and movies. Developers on both sides of the divide now employ the same tools, the same staff, and they're exploring the same technological horizons, using bleeding edge motion capture to record human movement, and experimenting with 3D visuals. At LDAC that sort of cross-pollination is rife. "We can walk the corridors and have conversations with the folks creating the Clone Wars TV series, with writers, artists, directors and animators that are carrying the Star Wars legacy forward," says global VP of publishing, Mary Bihr. "And we can talk to people from Industrial Light and Magic, who not only work on Star Wars and Indiana Jones, they touch other properties – right now they're working on films like Rango and Transformers III. We're all housed here in this one facility."One of our first ports of call is the ILM shooting stage, a darkened warehouse-like space lined with computers and esoteric film-making equipment. "Basically the entire room is a live virtual space," explains digital supervisor Mike Sanders. "We can do blue screen, green screen, HD, you name it. It's equipped for state-of-the-art virtual cinematography, so there's a 40-camera motion capture system in here – if we have actors in mo-cap suits we can record whatever they're doing." This system is used in almost every movie that ILM works on now. The background characters and hero actions in Iron Man, Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean were captured here. "We also provide a lot of digital doubles of actors for the stunt work," says Sanders. "We'll either do full CG replacements or we'll do a head or face replacement. We have a technology called Clone Cam, which allows us to rebuild the actor's head in immensely high resolution. It's a photographic technique like a scan, but laser scans take too long, and there are a lot of inaccuracies if the actor moves their head. We invented this technique about six years ago because we were doing Lemony Snickett and we needed a digital baby. You don't want to put babies in front of a laser…"This same technology, the motion capture cameras and the Clone Cam, have also been used in LucasArts' latest games, including Force Unleashed 2. The pipeline is slightly different, and the data has to be scaled down (it can take all night to render a single frame of a movie CG sequence – a video game needs to render 30 frames a second), but it's the same teams and equipment serving both sectors.And vitally, this isn't just movies leading the way with video games benefiting from a trickle down effect: game technology is ahead in certain areas. "When we've been able to share our real-time shaders and real-time lighting advances with ILM, they've been blown away," says LucasArts art director Matt Omernick. "In fact, they have wanted to adopt it into many of the projects that they're working on. For a lighting artist, there's a huge advantage in being able to get a scene perfectly right, iterate on it 100 times in one day and then send it off as a render. Movies have got to the point where you can do almost anything, and while games still have a lot of problems to solve, what we're good at is doing things very quickly, and iterating very quickly, and that inevitably gets you to a higher quality. That will feed back in to both industries."It's also a gaming event that helped Sanders and his team to develop ILM's latest technique – real-time movie-making using motion capture systems...Continued tomorrow.GamesXboxWiiPS3PCStar WarsKeith Stuartguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |