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Being a fan of westerns, I'm curious to see how this turns out.

 

[YOUTUBE]Sw1XFu-mFVk[/YOUTUBE]

 

Looks to be cast well, with Ed Harris playing a role he should be able to pull off well. I'm won't be worried about anyone else.

 

Written and directed by Harris as well. There's not enough westerns to go around if you ask me.

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There was an article in the Guardian this week about Somer's Town. It was funded by the people who run Eurostar and Meadows was originally to do a ten minute film but it kind of snowballed. The article was all about product placement on a grand scheme, and talked about Nike's involvement in Run Fat Boy Run amongst other films.

 

Here's the article.

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I always thought V For Vendetta was a pretty good stab at the graphic novel.

 

The trailer for Watchmen looks superb. I watched a couple of the diaries on the official site and it's interesting to see that they've tried to shoot a lot of scenes in a similar manner to the frames in the novel. I just can't see them bringing it in at under 3.5 hours as a minimum.

 

The Bill Maher documentary looks like it'll be very amusing.

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I really enjoyed V for Vendetta when I first saw it, but I hadn't read the book for ages. I went back to the film after refreshing my memory of the book and was decidedly unimpressed. It's not a bad film. It's just not particularly good either.

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V for Vendetta the graphic novel is superb... the film is entertaining and everything but it isn't the graphic novel.

 

Now, the Watchmen is fucking ace but I have this feeling that it will be poorly done on film as well.

 

Here's an article on the fact that Fox are suing Warners over the cost of the film - something to do with the rights.

 

What? Im wrong? I don't want to watch the new X-Files film? What the fuck? Are you smoking crack?

 

Hell, yes - it is Sunday, after all.

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Disney does the holocaust - for kids!

 

How can they understand?

A new film about the Holocaust, aimed at children, represents the Disneyfication of the Final Solution.

Can the horrors of the Nazis ever make great cinema?

By Linda Grant

 

'Both cinema and literature have struggled making art from the Holocaust' ... The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

 

After the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz won the Nobel prize for literature in 2002, his little-known 1975 novel Fatelessness, about his own childhood deportation to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was filmed, with a script by Kertesz himself. Although it lacked the book's eerie meditations on the nature of fate and personal responsibility it made a disturbing and unsettling film. The narrator speaks of his "favourite time" of day in the concentration camp, and when he finally returns home to Budapest and a fractured family, he seems almost nostalgic for the recent past. A man on a tram asks him whether he saw the gas chambers with his own eyes, prefiguring the denial that was to come.

 

I saw the film at the Jewish film festival in London a couple of years ago. I don't believe it ever received a general release in Britain and the very faint mark it made will soon be obliterated by a new film about the death camps, a Miramax/Disney production of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, a bestselling children's book published in 2006.

 

Both cinema and literature have struggled making art from the Holocaust. It is only in the past 15 years that mainstream cinema has regarded the events as sufficiently distant in time to constitute entertainment. In the immediate aftermath of the liberation of the camps, artists understood that they had nothing to offer that could better straightforward documentary realism. The photographer George Rodger, who covered the liberation of Belsen, noticed that in pointing his camera at the piles of emaciated corpses he was artistically framing his shot. He put the camera down and resolved never to cover war again. From the 1950s onwards, the gold standard account of the camps was Primo Levi's memoir, If This Is a Man.

 

In Europe, Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) both wrestled with the Holocaust, but fell back on newsreel footage. Only Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) attempted inexpertly to explore the themes of guilt and complicity. It was Hollywood - with the exception of Steven Spielberg - that for decades ignored the Holocaust, the very town that antisemites were always complaining was controlled by Jews.

 

Child-centred depictions of the Final Solution, such as Roberto Benigni's comedy Life Is Beautiful (1999), coat a veneer of sweetness over a horror that you can't get too close to without being personally scorched. A million Jewish children were murdered by the Nazis, but it is the very innocence of children that sentimentalises the subject, and draws the mind away from the moral complexity of the many questions the Final Solution raises. Pimps, prostitutes, adulterers, thieves, embezzlers and the more mildly and mundanely unpleasant went into the gas chambers, as well as the concert pianists and the talented teenage writers. We don't get any films about them.

 

I saw a press screening of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas earlier this month. The critics sat in stunned silence at the end and some were still there when the credits had finished rolling. It is impossible to write about the film's impact without the final spoiler. It relates the story of Bruno, the eight-year-old son of the commander of an Auschwitz-like death camp, who is removed from his comfortable Berlin home, where he and his friends run around the streets, arms spread, playing Luftwaffe pilots. Relocated to a house in the countryside on the edge of what he first believes to be a large farm, he is deprived of friends to play with and defies his parents' express orders, haring off through the woods where he comes up short against a barbed wire fence and Shmuel, a boy his own age on the other side, thin, miserable and wearing striped pyjamas.

 

Over several months the boys become friends, in a static sort of way, talking through the wire. At home, there is Nazi ideology for breakfast, dinner and tea, and a sister with pin-ups of Hitler on the wall, mooning over a blond Aryan lieutenant. A Jewish servant in the house, who lives in the camp, gets bludgeoned to death when he accidentally knocks a glass of red wine on a snowy tablecloth. Shmuel is sent in to clean wine glasses for a party. Bruno gives him a piece of cake. The cruel lieutenant accuses Shmuel of stealing it. Bruno is too frightened of him to disagree. But then he peers over the staircase at a screening of a propaganda film about the camp - life is lovely in there, so Shmuel can't be that hungry.

 

Eventually Bruno accepts Shmuel's invitation to go on an adventure beyond the fence. Changing into striped pyjamas, he burrows under the wire and they run about a bit, until Bruno asks to go the cafeteria he's seen in his father's propaganda film. But before he can scamper back home, there is a selection. An entire hut is herded into the gas chamber. The two boys die, holding hands as Bruno's father, arriving too late, screams in the rain outside.

 

Is any of this plausible? The book describes itself, under the title, as a parable, and John Boyne - who wrote the source novel and worked on the screenplay - appends the obligatory device of enlarging its meaning so we are to view it as a warning about what is happening today. Is the fence of the book analogous to Israel's "separation barrier"? It's easy for parents and teachers to draw attention to the connection if they so wish. Critics were complimentary about Boyne's novel but one children's writer expressed concerns: "I simply didn't believe in the innocence of the hero," she told me. "There is no way the son of a high-ranking Nazi officer wouldn't know at least something of what was going on in Berlin and later on in the camp. I didn't buy Shmuel's ignorance about the fate of the camp's inmates."

 

When I watched the film, my attention was drawn away from the unintentional death of the innocent Nazi child in the gas chamber to the extras without speaking parts, the grown-up men and women standing around him. The enforced identification with Bruno as an innocent victim of a taste for exciting adventures left a sour taste in my mouth. He isn't in the camp long enough for him to be lost, swallowed up inside the system. At the point of death, he still thinks they're sheltering from the rain. Nothing at all disturbs his innocence. The true horror would have been the child's gradual starvation, the narrow moral choices open to the camp inmates, reduced to stealing a smaller child's spoon to eat and live. He has a mercifully quick death.

 

The film begins as a glossy, teatime BBC drama serial, with vintage motors and smart 1940s hats, but it ends in a very unexpected place for Holocaust films, with no happy ending. I can think of no other Holocaust film that takes you inside the gas chamber without the narrow escape for its about-to-be murdered inhabitants. But during the rest of the film, the camp is largely peripheral to the main action. Equally implausibly, Bruno's grandmother is a dissident. His mother, when she understands what is taking place on the other side of the fence, becomes distraught and wants to take the children back to Berlin. We can read her moral position on her face: she stops wearing lipstick.

 

This is a Hollywood version of the Holocaust, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is literally a Disneyfication (you wonder whether The Gas Chamber ride is being installed outside Paris). When you make films about the Final Solution for children there's not much you can say other than to introduce the historical events in a palatable way, and to make a general lesson about being nice to other people. When The Diary of Anne Frank was adapted for the stage in the 1950s, it was with the intention of suppressing the specifically Jewish element of the story to make it "universal".

 

Imre Kertész shocked interviewers by saying he felt lucky to have been in Auschwitz: "I experienced my most radical moments of happiness in the concentration camp. You cannot imagine what it's like to be allowed to lie in the camp's hospital, or to have a 10-minute break from indescribable labour. To be very close to death is also a kind of happiness. Just surviving becomes the greatest freedom of all." The true lessons of the Holocaust remain with us today, largely unexplored, buried beneath hypocrisy and our own perpetual naivety about the nature and consequences of suffering. When Kertész went on his first visit to Israel, watching tanks roll into the West Bank, he remarked, "I'd rather the star was on the tank than on my chest." We are ourselves too childlike to understand much of the great opaque experience of the Final Solution, with only occasional windows breaking through the stone walls of history. How can we expect children to understand what we do not?

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As for a new Ghostbusters Akroyd has been trying to get one done for years but Universal said no due to the costs involved but this was before all the remakes we've seen in recent years.

 

They fobbed him off with the animated one they are doing but I wish they'd sanction a full film.

 

Get Murray and the whole crew back in and it would be a guarenteed hit.

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As for a new Ghostbusters Akroyd has been trying to get one done for years but Universal said no due to the costs involved but this was before all the remakes we've seen in recent years.

 

They fobbed him off with the animated one they are doing but I wish they'd sanction a full film.

 

Get Murray and the whole crew back in and it would be a guarenteed hit.

 

I love Ghostbusters, but would it really work? I presume the storyline would focus around them having to get Busting again after falling out some 15 odd years ago to fight a new threat?

 

Hmm, I'd probably watch that

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I love Ghostbusters, but would it really work? I presume the storyline would focus around them having to get Busting again after falling out some 15 odd years ago to fight a new threat?

 

Hmm, I'd probably watch that

 

You could have it something along the lines of them not speaking and something so big happening they have to get back together one last time for the sake of humanity.

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The Spirit

 

[YOUTUBE]<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWm8U17QguA&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWm8U17QguA&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>[/YOUTUBE]

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  • 3 weeks later...
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[YOUTUBE]<object width="480" height="295"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNfbNHQh_iI&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNfbNHQh_iI&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed></object>[/YOUTUBE]

 

Død Snø

 

Zombies!

Nazis!

Yess!

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