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We’re Home

As you’ve probably noticed, Alternate Takes has been on something of a hiatus of late.  But fear not, normal service will resume in the new year. We have some exciting new plans for the site in 2016, kicking off with “For Your Consideration”, our new series of articles for awards season.  We also have some top secret plans for the site that cannot yet be revealed.  Suffice it to say that these plans open up a new avenue for alternate takes, and we’re very excited.  On top of that, we have all the usual usual reviews, alternate takes, and articles. To tide you over until then, we have a great article on Star Wars weighing up the relative merits of The Force Awakens and Episodes I-III.  At the risk of descending to the level of click-bait: what happens next might surprise you. The article is available to read here. Keep an eye on twitter for further updates!

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Alternate Takes Round Up: September

A brief round up this month, with a festival report from James Taylor recounting his experiences at FrightFest 2015, and a review of 45 Years from Claire Jesson.  Claire’s alternate take will follow shortly.

This month, our friends at the Overlook Screening Room are treating audiences to a screening of Paperhouse (Bernard Rose, 1988) on Thursday 1st October.  You can read about last month’s selection, Citizen Ruth, here.

Remember to follow us on twitter for more updates, and don’t forget to check out www.alternatetakes.co.uk for even more reviews, articles, and alternate takes.

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Alternate Takes Round Up: August

Welcome once again to the Alternate Takes Round Up.  One or two gremlins seem to be interfering with the smooth running of the alternate takes round up machinery at the moment - as one or two articles we published in August managed to sneak there way into the July round up! Finding it easier to join them rather than beat them, this “August” round up will be a bumper sized edition collecting articles previously collected in the July edition, and even a few published in September! Think of it more as a Summer round up, or even a back to school edition.

First up, we have articles reflecting both extremes of the summer movie spectrum, from the enormous Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation to the intimate Song of the Sea.  In addition to the reviews, Nick Jones gives us an alternate take looking at authorship across the Mission: Impossible franchise and Zoë Shacklock considers the animate landscape in Song of the Sea.

We also have a review of Phoenix from James Slaymaker and an article from Matt Denny on Chappie, Ex Machina, and filmic representations of robots.

Continuing our partnership with Overlook Screens, Patrick Pilkington provides us a short write on their latest screening Citizen Ruth.  The film is playing tonight (Thursday 3rd September) as part of Scalarma, with more details available at the The Overlook Screening Room facebook page.  You can read about the previous Screening - Hammer’s Taste of Fear - at the alternate takes website.

To keep up to date with all the latest news from Alternate Takes, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter

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Alternate Takes Round Up: July

Welcome back to the Alternate Takes monthly round up.  This month features reviews of three very different films and an article from Matt Denny on representations of robots in film doing double service as alternate takes for Chappie and Ex Machina.  As for the reviews, we have James Slaymaker on Phoenix,  Zoë Shacklock on The Song of the Sea, and Nick Jones on Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.

We’ve recently entered in to collaboration with the excellent Overlook Screening Room, a monthly London based film club  dedicated to discovering and showcasing cinema's best kept secrets.  July’s film was the excellent and much underrated Hammer film Taste of Fear (AKA Scream of Fear), which you can read about here.  We’ll release information regarding this month’s film shortly or you can follow the Overlook team on Twitter.

To keep up to date with all the latest news from Alternate Takes, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter

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Alternate Takes Round Up: June

This month James Slaymaker reviews Results and provides us with an alternate take on Inherent Vice.  We also have an article from Cat Lester comparing the treatment of dystopia and optimism in Tomorrowland an Fury Road.

You can find these articles, and many more besides, over on our main site - and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for regular updates.

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“I recently had the rather odd experience of viewing a double bill of Mad Max: Fury Road and Tomorrowland: A World Beyond. The pairing of these two films was completely coincidental - I wanted to see Max Max again before it left the cinemas, and in the interest of efficiency and making the most out of my train ticket I decided to double bill it with another film I had not yet seen. Of the options, Tomorrowland was screening in the right place at the right time. Mad Max was scheduled first in my double bill. I left as soon as the end credits began, arriving in the screen for Tomorrowland just as the BBFC black card appeared, signalling that the film was about to begin. The extreme proximity with which I viewed these films therefore made their parallels all the more apparent, but also all the more jarring. In this article I attempt to work through the connections between these films, discussing why it is that one of them works so spectacularly well for me, succeeding at doing the very thing that the other tries to do but which, in my view, fails.”

Read the rest of Cat Lester’s article exploring the differing treatment of dystopia and optimism in Mad Max: Fury Road and Tomorrowland here 

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“Nearly every review of Inherent Vice has made much of its status as the first direct cinematic adaptation of a Pynchon novel (Alex Ross Perry’s excellent Impolex is highly indebted to Gravity’s Rainbow, but it’s more of a playful riff than a faithful translation, using a number of the book’s key images, plot strands, and thematic threads as a foundation upon which a distinct and singular narrative is built), and many argue that it provides a shining example of why this is the case. To some, Anderson has done little other than map the novel to the screen, and, in the process, stripped away the many intertextual associations, complex descriptions, and head-spinning run-on sentences that make Pynchon’s writing unique: in reducing the novel to narrative and dialogue, Anderson has softened its subversive edge, transforming it into an example of the very variety of noir Pynchon was aiming to pastiche.  The same people tend to argue that Anderson’s camera doesn’t add to the writing, merely literalize it.  An article in the New Yorker by Richard Brody (for the record, a critic I admire a lot), exemplifies this attitude, writing that “Anderson’s reverence for the book confines the movie between its covers” and his adaptation “maps the book onto the screen by way of a cinematic approximation that seems to bypass the camera”.  While I can see the validity of this opinion, I think that it stems from a misjudgment of Anderson’s approach, which, unusually, doesn’t aim to find a filmic analogue to Pynchon’s prose but to filter the author’s established style through his own: an act of intertextual layering and refraction that’s distinctly Pynchonesque.” James Slaymaker’s Inherent Vice alternate take Read the short review here 

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Alternate Takes Round Up: April

In the words of Lord Summerisle, “Summer is a coming in” (or Sumer is Icummen in, for the purists), and rather appropriately we have a bounty of articles to present this month.  We have reviews of While We’re Young and Age of Ultron from Rebecca Rae and James Taylor respectively.  We also have Cat Lester’s alternate take on LAIKA’s latest, The Boxtrolls, as well as Patrick Pilkington’s alternate take on St. Vincent.

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“There's a shot towards the end of The Avengers(2012) that glides from one Avenger to another, capturing each of them in a long take that isn't just stylistic bravado, but outlines their specific skillsets and demonstrates that the team has finally gelled.  This is mirrored in The Avengers: Age of Ultron's (2015) opening moments in an even more spectacular long take that showcases each character individually and draws them together as a united force.  While establishing that the team's synchronisation hasn't lapsed between films, this shot is also emblematic of one of the film's key achievements: managing its ensemble so that each character has a unique role, while relations between them develop.”

James Taylor reviews The Avengers: Age of Ultron

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The Boxtrolls is based on Alan Snow’s 2005 children’s novel Here Be Monsters!, which would have been an extremely apt title to retain for the film.  Not that there is anything wrong with the film’s title, but there indeed be many a monster in The Boxtrolls.  What I wish to discuss in this Alternate Take are the varying types of monstrosity that the film presents, and the potential problems that arise from these presentations, particularly in terms of class and gender.

Cat Lester’s The Boxtrolls alternate take

Read the short review here 

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“The film provides a great comment on how an older generation interacts with its younger counterpart. There is a cyclical nature presented in the film through generational hierarchy and its placement within the bracket of documentary filmmaking provides further insight into how adults interact with other adults (who are at the same time also children) at different periods in their personal and professional lives.The dual-review film criticism site: for both before and after you watch the movie”

Rebecca Rae reviews While We’re Young 

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When I first saw St. Vincent, the film it reminded me of most was the classic It’s A Wonderful Life (1946, Dir: Frank Capra).  Several things prompted this - for a start, although not strictly a Christmas film, it was released in the UK in December of 2014, and played with the festive season’s association with heart-warming entertainment in its marketing (“This Xmas Meet St. Vincent” ran one tagline, the title festooned, deliberately haphazardly, in tinsel). The film also shares with Capra’s classic a religious inflection that is far from common in the contemporary Hollywood cinema, as it relates the tenets of sainthood to the everyday struggle of the 21st Century Westerner.  But more than anything else, St. Vincent reminded me of the earlier film in its attempts to reconcile an awareness of life’s less ‘wonderful’ elements with the utopian sensibility Richard Dyer sees as characteristic of screen entertainment.  The film’s utopian strategies of containment and recuperation result in a happy ending somewhat at odds with the prior depiction of unremitting pressures within its social world.  I would like to explore the film’s initial depiction of an unsatisfactory world, its utopian strategies for dealing with this world, and the nuances embedded in both of these aspects that few of the film’s reviews seem to have engaged with.

Patrick Pilkington's St. Vincent alternate take

read the short review here

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Alternate Takes Round Up: March

A quieter month after the awards madness of February, March brings us a review of Blackhat and an alternate take on Gone Girl from James Slaymaker, and a review of Chappie by Matt Denny

Don't forget to follow us on facebook and twitter for the latest reviews, articles, and alternate takes.

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“Chappie is a really odd film.  On paper, it could be a heart-warming Spielberg inspired, eighties nostalgia piece, a homage to the likes of Short Circuit, exploring themes of family and growing up.  Alternatively, Chappie could be a Verhoeven-esque postmodern sci-fi romp, gleefully skewering such comfortable notions.  Chappie is neither of these things.  Chappie is both of these things.  It's patchy, abrasive, and a bit of a mess.  It's also joyful, enthusiastic, and full of warmth.  There are moments in Chappie that are utterly fantastic in themselves, but the film never really coheres.”

Matt Denny reviews Chappie

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“In the many months I've spent putting off writing about Gone Girl, I've learned that Gone Girl is a hard movie to write about.  It didn't help that most of the critical writing on the film has taken one of the two positions: either Amy Dunne is the non-ironic embodiment of every ridiculous patriarchal fear about "unruly women", and hence the movie is itself irredeemably misogynist; or Amy is a heroic feminist figure, breaking free from the patriarchal structures that have circumscribed her freedom and determined her social identity and finally taking control of her own narrative.  Since the first time I watched it, neither of these interpretations has sat right with me, and I think that there being roughly the same number of smart pieces arguing each side is an indication that the power dynamics explored here are more complex.”

James Slaymaker’s Gone Girl alternate take

Read the short review here

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How to write critically about How to Train Your Dragon 2?  I’m not asking this question because the film is an animated fantasy blockbuster aimed at kids; a film so resolutely positioned at the entertainment end of the art/entertainment axis that it has no need of further examination.  Not only do I reject this claim on principal, I also believe that How to Train Your Dragon 2 has even more to say than other films of its type - setting the bar particularly high for those films following it.  Neither do I ask the question out of a feeling that the film is beyond criticism.  Yes, I described the film as "near perfect" and a possible contender for my favourite film of the year, but that doesn't mean I'm blind to the film's less than perfect elements.  Where then does this difficulty stem from?  On further consideration, the obstacle to critical thought seems to lie more with the writer than text.  In brief, the problem is fear.  I'm afraid that the sometimes brutal nature of analysis will damage the film.  After being prodded and poked, deconstructed and dissected, what will remain of that exhilarating kinaesthetic joy that I tried to describe in my review?  Even using the word kinaesthetic to describe that particular sensations seems to leave it somehow diminished, somehow dryer.

Haven't read the short review? read it here

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The time travel plot mechanic in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) is facilitated through Kitty Pryde’s (Ellen Page) ability to project the consciousness of another person back through time.  This is an evolution of her power in comic books to move through solid matter by manipulating the particles from which she is composed.  Kitty’s ability to shift through spatial obstacles therefore extends to one that usurps temporal linearity, although she can only send back a consciousness other than her own.  As such, this embodies the film’s key obsessions; the malleability of space and time, and the power of people unifying to affect this.

Haven't read the short review? Read it here