| Mexico's drug wars captured in film comedy named Hell Story of El Infierno follows cartel foot soldier capable of 'insane levels of brutality' and is tipped to be a box office hitA black comedy taking Mexican cinema audiences on a rollercoaster ride through the horrors of the country's drug wars is set to become one of the year's big box office hits, even in areas worst affected by the violence.El Infierno, or Hell, tells the story of a well-meaning middle-aged deported migrant called El Benny as he transforms into a drug cartel foot soldier capable of insane levels of brutality.The film has been doing well in cities across the country for a month now, and was released in Ciudad Juárez this weekend. So far this year more than 2,400 people have been killed in drug war linked violence in and around the border city."The cinema was unusually busy and the audiences came out laughing and repeating scenes from the film," Juárez usher Armando MartĂnez said in a phone interview. His own opinion? "It's funny, but it's hard too."The film's director and co-writer, Luis Estrada, says his initial inspiration came from opening a newspaper one morning four years ago to read about a group of gunmen rolling five severed heads on to a nightclub dance floor along with a note about divine justice."It was something that screamed out that a line had been crossed," he says, stressing that things have got much worse since then. "Dante Alighieri wrote about nine circles of hell. The question we are all asking now is which circle we have reached, and how much further have we got to go?"Estrada describes his film as less about drug traffickers than the corruption, impunity, inequality, lack of opportunity and official hypocrisy he believes underlies the spiralling violence. It is deeply critical of the military offensive President Felipe CalderĂłn launched against the cartels in December 2006."The important thing for me was to show some of the complexity of the phenomenon," he says, including humanising the killers. "This is not a problem about good guys versus bad guys like the government says."In a recent radio interview CalderĂłn insisted he had not seen the film, but made his displeasure at it obvious nonetheless. "What I ask is that we take more care of Mexico and the country's name and image," he said, "And that we avoid this kind of demolition of the national spirit."El Infierno's success, seen by more than 1.5 million people so far despite an adult-only certificate and its 145-minute running time, surprised distributors Alfhaville. Along with the fact that it appears to hold as much appeal in the provinces as in the capital. "That's something that normally only happens with blockbusters," said company spokesman Alfonso LĂłpez.Last week the film performed best of all in a cinema in Culiacán, capital of the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa. The state is home to the country's most famous trafficker, JoaquĂn "El Chapo" Guzmán, and is another major front in the violence that has killed more than 28,000 people since the government offensive began.Culiacán resident JesĂşs González, whose cousin was kidnapped and killed by gunmen, said he loved the film. "We identified with it," he said. "You see, this is what we are living in Mexico today."But Estrada describes El Infierno as an allegorical satire, comedy, farce and tragedy all rolled into one. But it was never, he insists, intended to be taken as realism."A lot of people seem to think they are watching a documentary," he says. "That's why I'm particularly keen to find out how it's viewed in the rest of the world where there isn't so much noise from the reality."Estrada says US distribution is looking likely for 2011, along with a slot at the Sundance festival next January and a guaranteed place as the Mexican representative at the next Goya film awards in Spain. Aside from that, he says, hell will travel to where it's invited.MexicoDrugs tradeGun crimeJo Tuckmanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Why Hollywood can't get the hang of science fiction Wherever and whenever it's set, this genre's most special effect is its ideas – things that Tinseltown generally leaves on the cutting-room floorIf science fiction is a genre of ideas, is there any wonder Hollywood doesn't get it?Look. There are are only two truly great science fiction movies. The first is Stanley Kubrick's 2001, written in collaboration with Arthur C Clarke. The second is Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott and adapted from Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. You may disagree with this statement. You would be wrong. Let's move on. News that Ridley Scott is returning to the rich source material of Philip K Dick will raise hope among fans of good SF that the new BBC mini-series of The Man in the High Castle will equal the heights of Blade Runner. Faint hope, perhaps, as Scott is slated only to executive produce, and the BBC's track record with SF adaptations is less than stellar, but hope nonetheless.Many of the Philip K Dick adaptions to hit our screens following Blade Runner have dragged those hopes lower still. A slew of star vehicles and forgettable summer blockbusters including Total Recall, Impostor, Minority Report, Paycheck and Next replaced PKD's dark and complex vision of the future with formulaic Hollywood action movie plots. The same has proven true for other classic SF authors from Issac Asimov (I, Robot) to Richard Mathieson (I Am Legend) - films heavy with CGI but stripped of the single most important element that made the original books great: their ideas.It is often said that science fiction is a genre of ideas. The best of it brings together threads not just from the physics or chemistry, but from the arts, politics, philosophy and beyond. The best SF authors are natural autodidacts, synthesising often disparate areas of knowledge to produce their own distinct visions of reality. And the best of those visions offer invaluable insights into the modern world as we experience it.When science fiction succeeds on screen, it is because it preserves the ideas and visions that are the heart and soul of the genre. 2001 traces the evolution of humanity, from bone-wielding ape-man to intergalactic star-child, stopping off midway to suggest that our current state of evolution is perhaps not as advanced as we might like to think. Blade Runner is a story about empathy, and humans' ability to dehumanise one another when it suits our needs. Neither are comfortable ideas for audiences seeking the brain-numbing experience that is Hollywood's stock in trade. The Man in the High Castle speculates that, whichever side wins the war, the same oppressive forces end up in power. In an era of increasing cynicism about our democratic process this is a timely notion, but whether it's one the BBC will choose to broadcast into every home in the nation remains to be seen.But film and television are becoming braver in the ideas they choose to propagate to the masses. Smaller scale, lower-budget productions such as District 9 and Moon have succeeded in capturing some of the unique energy of SF and have proved with their success that audiences are not satisfied with the trappings of SF alone – they want the ideas at its heart.So perhaps when Hollywood catches up with the current crop of talented SF writers, we'll get to see their true visions shining from the silver screen. If so, I'll happily queue up to see Charlie Stross' Accelerando, or The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang. Which SF authors will you be willing to pay the price of admission for?Science fiction, fantasy and horrorScience fiction and fantasyDamien G Walterguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Die Hard: No 14 John McTiernan, 1988Arnold Schwarzenegger may be beefier and Sylvester Stallone may direct his own films but, admit it, you love Bruce Willis the most. Actually, that's not strictly true. You don't love Bruce Willis at all. Bruce Willis made Hudson Hawk and Perfect Stranger. Bruce Willis named one of his own children Rumer. Bruce Willis fancies himself as a pop star. No, it's John McClane who you love. And even that's not strictly true. You don't love the homicidal lunatic from Die Hard 2, or the ancient bald-headed superman from Die Hard 4. You love John McClane from the first Die Hard. The barefoot, vest-wearing John McClane, trapped in a skyscraper full of terrorists at Christmas and surviving purely on instinct alone. Of course you love him. Why wouldn't you?But there's more to Die Hard than just one character. It's a brilliant, suspenseful, witty, drumskin-tight action film littered with truly iconic moments, and it arguably hasn't been bettered in almost a quarter of a century. Alan Rickman soars as the urbane terrorist Hans Gruber, Bonnie Bedelia is convincingly ballsy as Willis's wife and Hart Bochner damn near steals the show as the loudmouth cokehead who almost gets everyone killed. You've probably never met anybody who doesn't like Die Hard, and there's a very good reason for that. It's dangerously close to perfect.Action and adventureBruce WillisStuart Heritageguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Psycho: Anatomy of a scene There is often fear, danger, suspense and action in cinema, but horror is something extra. It's the challenge that asks: "Do you think you can actually look at this, without running out of the dark screaming?" At first in film history, horror was fantasy and fanciful: it was Dracula, or Nosferatu, the spectre of endless night from which you could never escape. Or it might be the Frankenstein monster, the Wolf Man, or Mr Hyde. All of those characters had their roots in folklore and literature, to say nothing of the psychology of nightmares. But in the 50s, horror began to be domesticated. Henri-Georges Clouzot's unbearably frightening film Les Diaboliques (1955) suggested the monster was just the man you were married to (previously a topic for comedy). That film had a huge influence on Alfred Hitchcock, who had a new trick for horror up his magician's sleeve.Psycho starts out as a kind of road picture, or the study of a pretty, decent woman under stress. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) drives for two days and finds herself lost in the rain when she finally sees the motel sign: "Vacancies". What a relief. And there's this very sympathetic young man, Norman, in charge of the place, the most tender, thoughtful person she's met so far.The setup was cruel, but this was Hitchcock. Something is going to happen. Here's Marion, taking off her clothes again. She's made up her mind. She's going to go back to Phoenix to return the $40,000 she stole. So it's going to be OK – except that the movie is only 45 minutes old. What else can happen?"What else?" occupied a full week before Christmas 1959 as Hitchcock shot the shower scene – the most radical, horrific assault on us that the movies had ever dared. Could we watch? It was part of Hitchcock's provocative primness that, after this meticulous outrage, he declared with wide eyes and wider vowels that you couldn't actually see a knife-point piercing flesh. Connoisseurs who can watch it frame by frame say that's a white lie, but who cares? The point of the scene is the onslaught on sensibility and the weird mixture of feelings left in us – for we are being attacked, but we are the attacker too. What ensures that ambivalence is the very deliberate way in which for 40 minutes the movie has stripped, grilled and stared at Marion until we want her and her flesh.Of course, in the end, that is the most horrific thing of all – the tacit complicity is more disturbing than the hideous murder. And after Psycho, the knives were out, with chainsaws and the vast armoury of modern cold steel. Murder has become a sport which every amateur is prepared to practise in his or her head. The scene runs less than a minute, with every angle calculated and predesigned. The orgy had begun.Watch it here: bit.ly/psychoshowerHorrorAlfred HitchcockDavid Thomsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
New Zealand refuses to get into bidding war over The Hobbit Prime minister rules out increasing subsidies to keep Lord of the Rings prequel in New Zealand amid film union protestsNew Zealand's government warned today it would not be drawn into a bidding war to prevent Warner Brothers from moving production of the film The Hobbit to another country.In the wake of a short-lived union boycott,studio executives said last week they would consider shooting Peter Jackson's $500m (ÂŁ318m) adaptation of the JRR Tolkien fantasy elsewhere.Studio executives will decide on the location for The Hobbit after meeting with government officials, led by Prime Minister John Key. But the centre-right politician ruled out increasing the country's subsidy program to sway studio executives."In the conversations I've had with Warner Brothers so far I've made it quite clear if it comes to a bidding war, then New Zealand's out, because I don't think that's the right way to run this," Key said"We don't want to be re-negotiating with every single production company that comes to New Zealand."Economists said the move could cost the country up to $1.5bn. Thousands of protesters – some dressed as hobbits – took to the streets on Monday to convince the studio that New Zealand was the only valid location for the two-part series.New Zealand-born Jackson's adaptation of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings proved beneficial to everyone: his home country received priceless international publicity, Warner Brothers sold nearly $3bn worth of tickets at the box office, and the film-maker and his team won armfuls of Oscars.Subsidies are expected to run to about $50m. Some union members had argued that Warner Brothers was using the industrial dispute – over working conditions – to wrangle a better deal from the government.The rising value of the New Zealand dollar has also been cited as a factor, with the currency trading at about $0.75, around a third higher than when New Zealand was first investigated as a potential site for filming.Though Key has pledged not to throw money at Warner Brothers, he has also said he will not rule out further tax breaks or changes in industrial laws.Reports have suggested that Warner Brothers is considering locations in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia and eastern Europe.The project has already suffered a series of delays including the resignation of director Guillermo de Toro, who quit in May as the uncertain financial future of movie studio partner MGM put the project in doubt.The Hobbit is based on the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit who lives in the land of Middle-earth that is filled with wizards, elves and other fantasy creatures. Bilbo goes on a quest to find treasure guarded by a dragon.The book, first published in 1937, is the precursor to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which also takes place in Middle-earthLord of the RingsNew ZealandPeter JacksonJRR Tolkienguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |