| Transformers: The Dark of the Moon and other film-album mash-ups Michael Bay has played a blinder by tapping into the lucrative market for movie-Pink Floyd crossovers. Which other classic albums could he hitch a ride on?Transformers fans, if they're able to get through a block of text this size without drifting off because nothing explodes and there aren't any abstract scenes of robot-on-robot violence, have every reason to rejoice. Next year's Transformers 3 finally has a title. It looks like it'll be called - wait for it - Transformers: The Dark Of The Moon.Without hyperbole, this is a brilliant title. Not only is it even more overblown and self-important than last year's Revenge Of The Fallen, but it perfectly describes everything that will happen in the film: it'll be set on the moon and it'll be both literally and emotionally dark, as evidenced in the scene where Optimus Prime gets addicted to OxyContin and starts self-harming on his sofa to old Elliott Smith records. That scene may not make the final edit, you understand, on account of me just making it up.But the best part of Transformers: The Dark Of The Moon is its obvious homage to Pink Floyd. There had been rumours that this was going to be made more explicit, with the film being called The Dark Side Of The Moon, but it looks like the connection has been scaled down a little. Not that it matters, of course – even by skipping a word, Michael Bay has unwittingly managed to tap into a highly lucrative market.By which I obviously mean stereotypical stoners. It's genius. Stereotypical stoners love Pink Floyd, almost as much as they love playing Hacky Sack and getting freaked out because they think that their blood has suddenly turned into lots of ants. Just look what a loose association to Dark Side Of The Moon did for The Wizard Of Oz. In the mid-1990s it was dragged back into relevance by several potheaded reports that it synchronised perfectly with the album – from Breathe's "all you touch" line coinciding with Dorothy touching a farmhand to a guitar making a noise that sounds like a warning sign as the tornado approaches – even though, as online videos have since proved the links are tenuous at best.If Bay has any sense at all, he'll do his best to exploit this. Perhaps thirteen and a half minutes into the film, during the song Time, he could show Shia LaBeouf holding onto Bumblebee's back in quiet desperation for long enough to convince a new generation of listless slackers that there's some kind of all-powerful cosmic connection between the film and the music, or maybe he could flash up a quick shot of some money whenever it is that Money starts. It probably wouldn't take a lot to get the ball rolling.Sadly, Transformers: The Dark of Moon looks set to be the final film of the Transformers franchise, which is a great shame because Bay is really on to something by naming the films after classic albums. I don't know about you but I'm desperate to see Transformers: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, where all the Transformers go around counting up all the different holes in Blackburn while vocally wondering what they'll be doing on their 64th birthdays. Or Transformers: Pet Sounds, where all the Transformers sit around making animal noises for a couple of hours. While surfing. In space. I'd watch it. And so would you, you layabout.Action and adventureScience fiction and fantasyStuart Heritageguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Why Imax is still the way forward The big news in cinemas over the last couple of years has been the return of 3D, but it's Imax that's now coming into its own and really transforming the movie-going experienceThe future of cinema is here. It's been around for years but, as studios now struggle to find a way to offer audiences a spectacle that can't be replicated by downloads or illegal streams, it's currently enjoying a quiet renaissance. It has revolutionised the way we consume movies, and an increasing number of well-respected film-makers are seeking it out as a creative outlet. 3D? Don't be daft – 3D is the medium of cut-price dance films; the medium of Piranha and Yogi Bear and that terrible Clash of the Titans remake. No, I'm talking about Imax.More than anything – more than 3D, more than digital projection, more than crazy schemes where you have to pay 30 quid to see a secret film you've already seen – Imax has spent the last few years quietly asserting itself as the superior way to experience movies. The vastness of the screen. The infinite clarity of the picture. The way that securing a last-minute seat is almost impossible. It's event viewing. Imax can make bad films bearable and good films incredible.That's handy because, for the majority of its 40-year life, Imax has specialised in bad films. The first Imax movie, a 17-minute piece entitled Tiger Child, debuted at the 1970 Osaka World Fair and was more of a perfunctory demonstration reel than a piece of art. And things didn't really improve for years after that. Knowing that its screens would appeal to spectacle-obsessed audiences regardless of the content shown, its output was largely divided between dreary educational documentaries such as 1976's To Fly! and 1984's Grand Canyon: The Hidden Secrets, and badly acted novelties such as the 40-minute Haunted Castle.It wasn't until 2002, when Imax wheeled out its new digital remastering procedure (DRM) on a rerelease of 1995's Apollo 13, that the medium reached something approximating its full potential. By digitally converting each frame in high definition, then using a software programme to remove any remaining hints of grain from the film stock, and finally exporting the finished product to a 70mm film format, Imax had finally found a way to merge its superior technology with content that people would actually enjoy.Since then, DRM has been used for an increasing number of releases, from Superman Returns to Inception. And it's certainly a lucrative revenue stream: the recent Avatar rerelease largely came about because Alice in Wonderland snatched up all the Imax cinemas before demand for Avatar had been met. As James Cameron himself said in March: "The word we're getting back from exhibitors is we probably left a couple of hundred million dollars on the table." To give a measure of the demand for the combination of Hollywood spectacle and huge screen, the BFI Imax in London reported 99% average occupancy for its screenings of Avatar in the original run, and that figure included middle-of-the-night screenings. The Dark Knight scored 84%, Star Trek 82%, and even the likes of the second Transformers movie could sell 75% of seats for the Imax format.That said, when films such as Resident Evil: Afterlife and Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience are being upgraded for Imax presentation on a severely limited number of screens, there's a real risk of oversaturation. So what's next for the medium? For that we might have to look to The Dark Knight. In 2008, director Christopher Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister became the first mainstream film-makers to avoid the DRM process by shooting portions of the film directly on to 70mm Imax stock. That's no mean feat: Imax cameras are giant, weighty, deafening monstrosities that can only shoot 150 seconds of film at a time. But the result certainly paid off: the Imax sequences of The Dark Knight, especially when blasted across Imax screens, are staggering in their vibrancy, clarity and scale.Perhaps that's the future. Large-scale Hollywood blockbusters shot entirely on Imax stock. It's certainly something that Pfister seems keen on – rumours abound that he wants Batman 3 to be an exclusively Imax affair. If the practical limitations of Imax equipment can be overcome, the result might be films on a visual scale that we can only dream of. And who'd want to watch a cut-price 3D dance film if that was the alternative?Christopher NolanStuart Heritageguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The Wages of Fear: No 8 Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953When Henri-Georges Clouzot took on a genre, it generally led to a classic: so Les Diaboliques is one of the most frightening pictures ever put on screen; The Mystery of Picasso is among the most outstanding films exploring the work of an artist; and The Wages of Fear has no superior in the field of action-suspense. Set in an unnamed south American country, the action starts in a small town with an airfield where we are introduced to four shady characters anxious to get out, but minus the money for a plane ticket. A very venal oil company offers them $2,000 each to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerine over rough mountain roads to an oilfield that is on fire. The roads are awful. The hazards are unlimited. And the nitro, sweating in the heat, itches to explode long before it gets to the oilfield. The way Clouzot films this process (in a movie of over two and a half hours) is a model of grinding, unrelieved suspense. The film was shot in black and white, not in south America but in the south of France. And it is now well over 50 years old. Yet the inspired calculation of action and agonised human reaction is irresistible and inescapable. It is a film that leaves the audience shattered and exhausted. All of which is enhanced by the feeling, common to most of Clouzot's pictures, that he rather despised people and knew that sooner or later their worst traits would come through. Of course, the trick to that is that these tough guys become all the more heroic because they are not sentimentalised. So the picture hangs on four grim faces – Yves Montand, Folco Lulli, Charles Vanel and Peter van Eyck. We depend on them. Yet we know the remorseless destiny of nitro. We are there with them, and, as in any intense experience of combat or action, they become brothers and comrades.Action and adventureWorld cinemaDavid Thomsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The best horror films: 'We'd freeze-frame the bit where the head falls off' Xan Brooks tentatively enters through cinema's blood-spattered back door as he explores the history of what is traditionally the tawdriest genreXan BrooksAndy Gallagher guardian.co.uk |
Paranormal Activity 2 keeps Paramount top of the pile | Jeremy Kay It's a US box office one-two for the in-form studio as the spooky sequel forces another of its films, Jackass 3D, into second spotHollywood is first and foremost about commerce, not art, so while it's heartening to see Paranormal Activity 2 soar to the top of the US charts after Jackass 3D set a new October launch record a week earlier, it's also pretty grim. The producers of the horror sequel will be turning cartwheels after their baby grossed an estimated $41.5m through Paramount. That is a superb result considering the movie cost around $3m to make and Paramount waged a cost-effective marketing campaign. This will play well for several more weeks in cinemas, make a killing on DVD and end up as another vastly profitable enterprise for producers Oren Peli and Jason Blum. Paramount's one-two box office punch had Jackass 3D in second place. It has almost crossed $100m after two weekends.Good news for the studio, but not such good news for those of us who champion good movies. After a typically mindless mainstream summer – punctuated by entertaining commercial work like Iron Man 2, Toy Story 3, Inception, The Other Guys, The Karate Kid and The Kids Are All Right – audiences can be forgiven for expecting better and, apart from The Social Network and The Town, so far this autumn the studio product has been dull. That includes Paranormal Activity 2, which fails to command the genre.I'm not talking about the summer's small independent releases; there were some crackers there. The Kids Are All Right is a bit of a hybrid but I included it here because while it was independently packaged it is distributed by Universal's corporate stablemate Focus Features and thus has the backing of a studio.Audiences can only work with what they're given and they vote with their wallets. Distributors who are smaller and must operate a different game plan on a different level need to be judicious with their marketing campaigns. One new independent release, Carlos, deserves mention. Around five-and-a-half hours long, Olivier Assayas's mesmerising biopic about Carlos the Jackal isn't the most appealing prospect on paper and is playing in two US cinemas. The distributor IFC is also rolling it out on its video-on-demand service. I hope Carlos attracts more advocates because maybe then it would get a wider release in theatres, which could spark bigger business with TV viewers. It's worth every minute and Edgar Ramirez is memorable in the role.This is the kind of movie you wish everyone could see, but without a studio marketing budget, IFC will have chosen its broadcast, internet and print spots carefully and quite rightly targeted its core constituents, who like to be challenged. The five hours actually fly by, but there's no getting away from the fact that the running time is a major impediment and it's hard to imagine Paramount's Demand It campaign for the Paranormal Activity franchise working here.Which brings us back to Paranormal Activity 2. Paramount deployed the Demand It campaign to brilliant effect last year in support of the first movie. This allowed the studio to release the unknown entity in a few cinemas and, as the word of mouth spread and fans voted online to have the movie come to their local theatres, Paramount expanded it into a nationwide release pattern. Roughly a million people responded and this played a significant role in the eventual $100m-plus North American box office. This time around, the idea was to use the Demand It platform to give Paranormal Activity 2 a boost before it opened. The campaign enabled people to see previews before the official opening weekend. The movie's profile is a lot higher now, hence the initial release in 3,216 cinemas.The role of Demand It is waning for this particular property and its seems to apply only to theatrical releases,as video-on-demand services already serve individual tastes. But video on demand has problems, one of which is that menus tend to be too crowded and complicated: there's too much choice and viewers are turned off. Until it settles on a presentation format that is simple and intuitive – think of the in-room entertainment service in a hotel room – it may struggle to take off in the way everyone thought it would. For many titles such as Carlos that migrate towards video on demand as their primary distribution channel, a notable theatrical release backed by marketing muscle would be a great way to build a potential audience.North American top 10, 22-24 October 20101. Paranormal Activity 2, $41.5m2. Jackass 3D, $21.6m. Total: $87.1m3. Red, $15m. Total: $43.5m4. Hereafter, $12m. Total: $12.3m5. The Social Network, $7.3m. Total: $72.9m6. Secretariat, $6.9m. Total: $37.4m7. Life As We Know It, $6.2m. Total: $37.6m8. Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls Of Ga'Hoole, $3.2m. Total: $50.2m9. The Town, $2.7m. Total: $84.7m10. Easy A, $1.8m. Total: $54.8mJeremy Kayguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |