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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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How Final Destination Went From Real-Life Premonition to Horror Phenomenon

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The year 2000 was a scary one for horror films and not always in a good way.

While American Psycho and The Cell offered up visually striking nihilistic thrills to genre fans, the majority of horror movies released at the dawn of the new millennium were at best forgettable and, at worst, lamentable – yes, we’re looking at you, Leprechaun in the Hood.

This was the year of duff sequels like Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Urban Legends: Final Cut and, though it is painful to admit, Scream 3. Horror fans were screaming out for something different, something exciting. They found it with Final Destination.

Discarding the stalk-and-slash thrills that had enjoyed a revival in the years following the release of Scream, Final Destination centered on a group of high schoolers who end up avoiding a fatal plane crash thanks to a premonition, only to discover there is no escaping death’s plan as one by one they are offed in a variety of brilliantly inventive “accidents”.

Released in March of that year, Final Destination was a sleeper hit with word-of-mouth helping the film to clean up at the box office, earning $112 million off a $23 million budget with more than half of that coming internationally.

To date, it has spawned four sequels as well as a variety of novelisations and comic book spin-offs while a franchise reboot is also on the horizon.

Movies

The Final Destination Movies, Ranked

By Sarah Dobbs

Jeffrey Reddick has worked on several films during his career to date but he’s probably best known as the creator of Final Destination. It’s something he has come to terms with.

“It’s probably going to end up on my gravestone, it’s such an ironic title,” he tells Den of Geek.

“Sometimes I’ll be out and I will hear someone say ‘you just had a Final Destination moment’ and it will make me smile. The whole thing just took on a life of its own.”

Nightmarish Origins

A screenwriter and director, Reddick recalls how his neighbors in rural Jackson, Kentucky, would laugh when his six-year-old self would tell them about his plans to work in the movie business.

An avid writer and reader of Greek and Roman mythology, he recalls spending his formative years watching horror movies with his friends. His mother was only too happy to indulge his burgeoning interest too, knowing it kept him out of trouble elsewhere.

Reddick’s life began to change after he saw A Nightmare on Elm Street.

“That film cemented my love of horror. I was this 14-year-old hillbilly from Kentucky but I decided I was going to write a prequel. I went home, banged it out on my typewriter and sent it to Bob Shaye.”

The legendary head of New Line Cinema initially dismissed Reddick’s draft out of hand, returning it with a note explaining the studio did not “accept unsolicited material.”

Undaunted, Reddick sent the script back with a note telling him “Look mister, I spent three dollars on your movie and I think you could take five minutes on my story.”

Shaye was impressed and struck up a bond with the youngster that saw him sending everything from scripts to posters to Reddick during his teenage years.

When Reddick moved to New York to study acting, age 19, he was offered an internship with New Line, which would become a full-time role despite acting being his “main passion.”

“Diversity in casting was not a thing at that time,” he recalls.

“My agent was like ‘I don’t know what to do with you as an actor. We can’t put you up for gangsters or pimps and you don’t rap and you don’t play basketball.”

“So I figured, screw it, I will just write stuff and put myself in it.”

Reddick was present at New Line during their company’s early 90s creative heyday and credits the experience with helping him get Final Destination off the ground.

“I learned a lot about how to get a movie made. I knew that to make a movie that connected with an audience you had to tap into something that was universal. Death is the ultimate fear.”

As luck would have it, the idea actually came to Reddick while on a flight back to Kentucky.

“I read about a woman who was on vacation and her mother told her not to take the flight she was planning to take home as she had a bad feeling about it. The woman changed it and the plane she was supposed to be on crashed.”

At that point however the idea wasn’t Final Destination. It wasn’t a film either. It was an episode of The X Files.

The Truth Is Out There

“I was trying to get a TV agent at the time and they recommended I write a spec script for something already on the air. I was a huge fan of The X Files and thought about a scene where somebody has a premonition and gets off the plane and then it crashes and used that as the plot.”

“It was going to be Scully’s brother Charles who had the premonition. He gets off the plane with a few other people but they start dying and Charles blacks out every time there is a murder so people suspect he is doing it.

I Still Want to Believe: Revisiting The X-Files Pilot

By Chris Longo

“The twist at the end was that the sheriff who had been investigating alongside Mulder and Scully the whole time had actually been shot and flatlined at the same time as the plane crash. Death brought him back to kill off all the survivors, including Charles.”

It would have made for a great episode except it was never submitted to The X Files. Reddick showed his spec script to some friends at New Line who were so impressed, they told him to develop it into a treatment for a feature, which was eventually purchased by the studio.

Producers Craig Perry and Warren Zide were brought onboard to develop the story and set about tweaking his idea.

“Originally the cast of survivors were adults because I wanted to explore more adult themes but Scream had come out and teenagers were hot again so New Line got me to change it”

In a twist of fate, two established writers from The X Files, James Wong and Glen Morgan, were brought onboard to rejig Reddick’s script.

“My version was definitely darker and more like A Nightmare on Elm Street,” he says.

“In my script, death would torment the kids about some kind of past sin they felt guilty about. They would then die in these accidents that ended up looking like suicides.”

For example, Todd’s death saw him chased into the family garage by an unseen specter where he accidentally ended up rigged in a noose triggered when his dad opens the automatic garage door.

Death is all around us

Ultimately that death scene and several others were ultimately scrapped in favour of what would prove to be the franchise’s calling card.

Reddick credits Wong and Morgan with coming up with the idea of having the film’s key death scenes kicked off by a Rube Goldberg machine-like chain-reaction that would see everyday things colliding to create a lethal scenario. It was nothing short of a masterstroke.

“It created this notion that death is all around us,” Reddick says.

“Death would use everyday things around us. It made it more universal and allowed us to set the deaths in places where people go all the time. The payoff would be fun but it was the build-up that had you on the edge of your seat.”

There was one major sticking point for the studio though: the presence of death, or rather the lack of.

“I fought really hard to make sure we never showed death because for me, if you didn’t show it, it could be something someone, no matter their belief system, could project onto our villain. That was a tough sell for the studio. They would be like ‘this doesn’t make any sense, you can’t see it and you can’t fight it’ but that’s the point, it’s death.”

“Luckily both James Wong and Glen Morgan were very insistent we never show it and tie it in to a specific belief system.”

Reddick credits the move with helping Final Destination become “an international phenomenon”.

“It struck a chord with people around the world. It broke out beyond the horror audience.”

Casting dreams

When it came to casting, Reddick had a clear idea of who he wanted in the lead roles, even if the studio’s opinion differed drastically.

“I had a wish list with Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst as my two leads but New Line was like ‘well…’”

He might not have got his first pick but Final Destination boasted an impressive cast of up-and-comers who had already made waves among teen audiences.

Devon Sawa had starred in Idle Hands, while Ali Larter was known for Varsity Blues and Kerr Smith was a regular on Dawson’s Creek. There was even room for Seann William Scott, fresh from his breakout turn in American Pie who was drafted in on the recommendation of producer Craig Perry, who told Reddick “you’ve got to get this kid, he’s going to be huge.”

Even so, Reddick was left a little unhappy.

“One of the conversations we had early on was like ‘Just remember this is set in New York, which is one of the most diverse cities in the world so let’s make sure we have some diversity in the cast’ and they were like ‘oh we will’ and then there wasn’t anyone who wasn’t white in it.”

New Line chief Bob Shaye did find a way to make amends on some level at least, casting Candyman horror icon Tony Todd in a cameo role as a mysteriously foreboding mortician.

“He called me up and said they had got Tony Todd and I flipped out. He is an icon. Such a talented, serious actor.”

As well as co-write the film, Wong took on directorial duties while each of the film’s death sequences would require careful planning, his first aim was to have the film start with a bang by creating as terrifyingly realistic a plane crash as possible.

“We want to do for planes and air travel what Jaws did for sharks and swimming,” he declared in one interview.

Yet the film would later garner criticism for its eerie similarities to the explosion and crash of TWA Flight 800 off East Moriches, Long Island, New York in 1996 where 16 students and five adults died.

“There was some criticism that the movie was written to exploit this real-life crash,” Reddick recalls.

“I even realised later they used footage from one real-life crash which I wasn’t particularly happy about.”

Indeed, much of the news footage shown in the film actually came from the 1996 crash.

That didn’t stop the film becoming a major hit and spawning a sequel within three years.

Final Destination meets Game of Thrones

Reddick returned to write the treatment for Final Destination 2, determined to move the franchise away from its teen Scream origins.

“We had tapped into that zeitgeist and didn’t have to do that again. I wanted to expand the universe and subvert it, so I had it open by following a bunch of teens who are then killed off.”

Once again, divine intervention led to divine inspiration for the opening set piece.

“Originally, I was going to have it open with some kids going to spring break and they stop off at this hotel and there is a fire but the producers were not sure. Writers always say you should go out and live life – life informs you and a lot of inspiration comes out when I go out for a walk.

“I was driving back to Kentucky to see my family and I got stuck behind a log truck and the idea just came to me. I pulled off the highway and called Craig and was flipping out with this idea for a log truck on a freeway.”

The resulting freeway pile-up that leads to multiple deaths is one Reddick ranks as his “favourite scene in the entire franchise.”

“The second film is my favourite. I wanted to create a sequel that didn’t feel like a remake of the first. It went in a more fun direction – but it’s still scary.”

That first sequel also represented the last of which Reddick was formally involved in, though he remained very much in the loop as the Godfather of the franchise, revealing that producers had been “looking at scripts before Covid hit.”

He also revealed that, at one point, things looked to be heading in an altogether different and thoroughly fascinating direction.

“There was talk about setting a Final Destination back in Medieval times. Like Game of Thrones in Final Destination. Craig Perry worked with a writer and they talked about the idea and put a teaser trailer together [which has leaked online].

“I would go and see that movie in a heartbeat but the studio said that the reason Final Destination was so popular was that element of deaths in normal, everyday situations.”

Future Destinations

Reddick hasn’t given up on a return to the franchise though, hinting at a “unique” idea he has for a new film that is simply too good to reveal yet.

In the meantime, he has been busy writing and directing Don’t Look Back, a film that shares some surface similarities with Final Destination and is painfully relevant to society today.

“It’s a mystery thriller about a group of people who witness someone getting fatally assaulted in a park and don’t help the person and somebody films them and puts it online. The public turns on the witnesses and someone or something is coming after them.”

Eager to make more horror films and celebrate diversity in his work, Reddick remains immensely proud of Final Destination and the impact it has had on audiences.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

“It’s cool. To have one movie that is going to be talked about after you die is a life goal. If that’s what I leave behind as a legacy that’s enough – but I still want more.”

Don’t Look Back is available on DVD & Digital from 14th June

The post How Final Destination Went From Real-Life Premonition to Horror Phenomenon appeared first on Den of Geek.

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maniclemons · 4 years ago

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Yolanda, Camp Sensibility and the "Oscar Wilde Of The Camera"

Okay, so I was minding my business reading stuff for my work on dream narratives in popular culture and suddenly I was attacked at the footnotes section of one of the academic papers (which happens all the time tbh). The author mentioned in passing that, well, there is a musical called YOLANDA AND THE THIEF (1945) which just happens to be one of three Vincente Minnelli musicals that have been characterized as a self-conscious camp style of visual excess. The author argued that the camp style in musicals, especially those made by the Arthur Freed unit at MGM, was particularly appropriate to the even greater visual excess of the dream sequences.

So yeah, of course I did a double-take and immediately thought of Donde estás Yolanda (Sherlock and John reunion theme) - thanks for the opportunity to refresh the hell out of it @thepineapplering !

FEATURES OF INTEREST of “Yolanda and the Thief” in no particular order:

• The "dream ballet" dream sequence (inspired by Dali); • Repressed homosexuality manifesting itself through nightmares and fear of entrapment in a heterosexual marriage; • Integration of straight romance (plot) and gay-inflected visual codes; • Critique of a capitalist culture industry from the point of view of a queer professional embedded in it (writer/director/set designer/crew member etc.) • Something else?

Also of interest: Holmesosexuality: On Mark Gatiss’s Camp

As I am not, academically speaking, a specialist in queer theory, all the references can be found below.

I haven’t seen anyone writing about this particular musical in connection with Sherlock yet, but I might be wrong, because my tumblr search skills still suck a bit. Anyways, it was fun and added more contextual layers to my own understanding of the show!

“YOLANDA AND THE THIEF” is a 1945 American Technicolor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer “Arthur Freed Unit” musical-comedy film set in a fictional Latin American country called Patria. It stars Fred Astaire, Lucille Bremer, Frank Morgan, and Mildred Natwick, with music by Harry Warren and lyrics by Arthur Freed. The film was directed by Vincente Minnelli and produced by Arthur Freed. The “Freed Unit” refers to the “unit” (studio team within the larger studio production house that was MGM) headed by lyricist and producer Arthur Freed.

"Yolanda and the Thief" is one of three Vincente Minnelli musicals that have been characterized as a self-conscious camp style of visual excess, the other two being " Ziegfeld Follies " (1946) and…….. "The Pirate" (1947). As Jane Feuer suggests, "a gay subcultural reading would elevate these Minnelli masterpieces of the 1940s above the currently more esteemed Freed Unit musicals of the 1950s – "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Band Wagon", whose sophistication stems more from their smart Comden and Green scripts than from elements of excess in their mise-en-scene."

CAST:

Fred Astaire as Johnny Parkson Riggs Lucille Bremer as Yolanda Aquaviva (aqua-viva? as in Latin vivere/vita? as in "aqua vita(e)" which is "an archaic name for a concentrated aqueous solution of ethanol" and at the same time a type of magical water which brings people (mostly heroes) back to life in Slavic mythology?) Frank Morgan as Victor Budlow Trout (a friend of Johnny's and literally his partner in crime)

FEATURES OF INTEREST (in no particular order):

The narrative of Yolanda offers a romance between a naive and wealthy young woman, Yolanda Aquaviva (Lucille Bremer), who is tricked by a con man, Johnny Riggs (Fred Astaire), into believing that he is her guardian angel. Johnny plays upon Yolanda's gullibility in order to convince her to confer her power of attorney on him, but just as he is ready to depart with the goods, he finds himself romantically and erotically drawn to her. His attraction to her surprises Johnny, because he ostensibly does not expect to find Yolanda a figure of erotic contemplation, and his jaded sensibilities lose out to his romantic impulses. But moments of camp playfulness in the film offer another reading of Johnny's surprise at discovering himself in a seduction beyond his overarching greed and cynicism, for there are strong possibilities for seeing him as gay.

DREAM SEQUENCE BALLET

The "dream ballet" sequence is an extended (approximately 15 minute) routine for Astaire, Bremer, and various others, which Minnelli has described as, "the first surrealistic ballet in film". Its Dali-esque scenery sort of mirrors "real-life" Patria which Yolanda’s Aunt Amarilla called “an out of the world place” elsewhere. That’s really what Minnelli was going for here. He seeks to evoke a feeling that Johnny have left behind what he knows and entered a world of mysticism and dreams.

This dream sequence ballet opens with Astaire dressed in a remarkable dandy outfit with a pair of off-white satin pajamas. Becoming restless in his bed, Johnny dresses and walks through the streets of Patria's unnamed capital, where he moves into increasingly surreal landscapes in which various women trap him in symmetrical dance steps: washerwomen unfold furls of different-colored fabric in stark geometric patterns that form a prison out of which he cannot escape. Yolanda’s entrance into the dream is grandly spooky. Against the backdrop of a Dali-esque desert landscape, Yolanda rises from a pool of water wrapped head-to-toe in pale scarves that float all around her. Her face is obscured, a look reminiscent of René Magritte’s 1928 painting The Lovers, and more suggestive of alienation than romance. Once Johnny unwraps Yolanda from her scarves, the spookiness of the sequence dissipates a little, but the mood has been set, and when the unwrapped Yolanda puts her arms around Johnny and sings, “Will You Marry Me?,” the effect is mildly sinister. The sequence concludes as Yolanda dons a set of outrageously long bridal veils and Johnny gets one of them wrapped around his neck like a noose when he attempts to flee.

In the "Will You Marry Me?" number Johnny wrestles with the trauma of potentially being trapped in a marriage to Yolanda for her money. Yolanda appears throwing off a series of veils trimmed in coins, and sirens in short dresses and high heels entice him with a cask into which Yolanda has dispensed her gold. The number effectively links Johnny's fear of marriage with his greed, or, more properly according to the dream-logic of the "Will You Marry Me?" sequence, his greed is the film's alibi for not stating more directly his desire not to bond with a woman, no matter what her beauty or wealth. The film temporarily addresses the question of whether Johnny will accede to the demands of marriage through the camp art direction's treatment of him as gay.

So this is more specifically a nightmare ballet, one that takes marriage—the typical happy ending of many an MGM musical (including—spoiler alert—this one)—and transforms it into a thing of anxiety and horror.

While the dramatic function of the dream ballet is questionable, its adventurous spirit and execution should not be ignored. Bear in mind that Agnes de Mille’s dream ballet for the original stage production of Oklahoma! first appeared on Broadway in 1943, just two years before Yolanda and the Thief hit movie screens. Yolanda and the Thief also predates The Red Shoes by three years and An American in Paris by six. Minnelli was staking out new territory here, trying out a storytelling technique that he and other filmmakers would employ with greater success in the future.

STYLE

What is labeled as the integration of straight romance and gay-inflected visual codes is more generally within the camp sensibility what we might call "style," or more particularly, a style of excess. James Naremore describes this differentiated style as Minnelli bringing “a rarefied sense of camp to musical numbers, making…[him] ‘an Oscar Wilde of the camera.’” To be an “Oscar Wilde of the camera” would of course conjure images not only of queer sexuality, but a simultaneous devotion to the aesthetics: one who would converse, write, lecture on subjects ranging from poetry to interior design. This parallels Sunsan Sontag’s assertion that “Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual décor, for instance, make up a large part of camp. For camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style [sometimes] at the expense of content.” Indeed, Sontag begins her “notes on camp” by quoting Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism, “one should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” However, camp is not simply an adoration of colour and texture, but a certain critical – comical, even – perspective on heterosexist and gender normative culture, both male and female.

And beyond discussion of pure aesthetics of delight, camp within the Freed Unit is also indicative of a process of labour as method of negotiation between queer identity and heteropatriarchal capitalist hegemony (critique of a culture industry from the point of view of a queer professional embedded in it).

AUDIENCE REACTION

Campy style within Freed films circulated to noncamp audiences under the more general idea of their being “stylized” or “witty". The comments of film-goers who attended previews of, for example, Minnelli's "The Pirate" confirm that the studio knew that the film tended to emphasize its own spectacular art direction while sometimes disregarding streamlined storyline and clear characterization. In the cards, where anonymous viewers offered praise and disparagement, a repeated emphasis on the art direction arises: "the sets detracted from the people and the music was too loud," "not realistic enough," "entirely too surrealistic," "the beautiful background settings were exceptional," "plot rather thin," "truly one of the most exciting pictures from every standpoint, direction, artwork, color, dancing, scoring," "beautiful coloring," "slightly fantastic plot not developed in as natural and realistic a way as it could have been," and perhaps the most telling, "Minnelli back to the small minority who really appreciate him." The above comments would suggest that these viewers had screened a film by Dali or Bunuel, not the product of MGM after twenty years of corporate film-production experience.

Which takes us to the next (and very familiar) aspect…

MISE-EN-SCENE VS. STORYLINE

Musicals have largely been understood as primarily narrative films at the expense of other features. The plotline that structures many musicals is that of straight romance and marriage. The world in which a man and a woman meet and find initial attraction, in which their union is frustrated, and where ultimately the prohibitions to heterosexual bonding are overcome through the mediation of the song and dance number is typically the world of the musical. But there is more to the making of musicals beyond the plotline and its ancillary subplots, all of which are said to be brought to happy closure at the film's completion.

What seem to have been the memorable features of Freed unit musicals for contemporaneous viewers were their dazzling sets, costumes, use of color (in terms of film stock, set painting, and lighting) and choreography. These specific elements of film production are perhaps most likely what the various viewers are locating as the Freed unit's distinguishing style, or, to remember the viewer who commented on the "small minority" who might be interested in Minnelli films, that this style was idiosyncratic enough to have both fans and detractors. This style distinguished the unit's films from those of its rivals.

Minnelli's work habit of plotting a film's numbers by creating a series of paper dolls and scaled-down sound stages in which to place these figures suggests that his first impulses were to conceive of a film through its mise-en-scene rather than its storyline. Within the limits of the system, Minnelli was able to say a good deal about sets and costumes, and he usually influenced the overall visual conception of his films.

Dance (and singing) performance disrupts the narrative by momentarily disregarding the force of the story for the power of the spectacular dance routine. Likewise, the backdrops and costumes perform a similar function but that we tend not to notice their potential to antagonize narrative because, of course, most often the disjunctive features of the mise-en-scene are maintained in the film's movement back to the storyline.

Just as Johnny emerges from his dream shaken but unsure of what it means, the historian of camp production can perhaps trace the presence of a masked homosexual narrative only by remembering the strange details which seem to have been so easily forgotten.

REFERENCE:

Tinkcom, Matthew. Working like a Homosexual: Camp Visual Codes and the Labor of Gay Subjects in the MGM Freed Unit. Cinema Journal, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Winter, 1996), pp. 24-42.

Turner, Lexi C M K. A Queer Translation: “Camp” Sensibilities of the Classical Hollywood Musical Era, vs. the 1970s Desertion of Narrative Utopia.

Cohan, Steven. Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).

Dunne, Michael. American Film Musical Themes and Forms (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2004).

Cohan, Steven. “Introduction: Musicals of the Studio Era.” In Hollywood Musicals, the Film Reader. Edited by Steven Cohan. 1-15 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

Feuer, Jane. The Hollywood Musical, 2d ed. (London: BFI Books, 1993).

Sontag, Susan. “Notes On ‘Camp.’” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays. 275-292 (London: Penguin, 2009).

https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2018/10/24/yolanda-and-the-thief-1945/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yolanda_and_the_Thief

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autolenaphilia · 4 years ago

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Sherlock Holmes in New York

The 1976 TV movie Sherlock Holmes in New York is a bad movie. It is mostly remembered for casting Roger Moore as Holmes and the otherwise starry cast, with many famous actors of the era in the main roles like Patrick Mcnee as Watson, Charlotte Rampling as Irene Adler and John Huston as Moriarty. And it wastes all of this talent due to a bad script.

David Stuart Davies’s book “Starring Sherlock Holmes” explains that the reason for the existence of the film was so that Twentieth Century Fox could re-use the period New York sets built for the musical film “Hello Dolly” (1969).. And it shows in the perfunctory mood of this movie. I also suspect it was made to take advantage of the surge of interest in Holmes caused by the extraordinary success of “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution”. It was released the same month (October 1976) as the film adaptation of that book.

Yet it is bad in an interesting way, because one of its greatest missteps is replicated in a lot of modern Holmes adaptations: the treatment of Irene Adler.

She is a love interest for Holmes here, and in fact had a son with him who is about ten when the film takes place. This is interesting, because it is the first major adaptation I have been able to find where Irene is treated in this way. The prior adaptations I could find in which she has featured were direct adaptations for radio of “A Scandal in Bohemia” which followed the story more or less accurately.

Of course this movie is preceded by William S. Baring-Gould’s fan fictional “biography” of Holmes, where Irene is Holmes’s great love. And that the author of the movie’s screenplay has read Baring-Gould is obvious. There is not just the Holmes/Adler shipping and their son but also the dialogue reveals Holmes’s full name to be that of the book (William Sherlock Scott Holmes) and which Baring-Gould entirely made up.

Another reference to Baring-Gould’s book is quite bewildering in the context of the film: the son being born in Montenegro. This was because Baring-Gould wanted to imply their son was Rex Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe, who was born in Montenegro. But there is nothing suggesting that in the film, the son is named Scott, making the Montenegro reference a non-sequitor.

Anyway, the Irene/Sherlock ship is popular and was certainly the most popular ship in the pre-internet fandom (even if they didn’t call it shipping) due to Baring-Gould’s wide-ranging influence within it. But I never liked it. It is such a flagrant violation of Holmes’s character in the canon where he is definitely uninterested in women. And it diminishes the message Holmes learns from Irene in “A Scandal...”. Her defeating him taught him that women can be intelligent. Making him fall in love with her dilutes it: his lesson becomes that women can be attractive.

And the ship does even an even worse violation to Irene’s character. She has little interest in Holmes, even if she is somewhat impressed by his scheme. She has no reason to like Holmes on a personal level, because he quite literally tries to steal from her. Irene also has a canonical love interest of her own, Godfrey Norton and her happy ending is that she gets to live with him, something that Irene/Sherlock shippers have to ignore or overwrite.

To get back to the subject of “Sherlock Holmes in New York”, the movie never explains how Irene and Sherlock got together, so all these problems hang over the film’s implied backstory. And the film does injustice to Irene’s character beyond that. The strong woman of the canon feels like she has nothing to do with the damsel in distress in the film that bears her name. She is not even an intelligent damsel in distress, walking right into one of Moriarty’s very obvious traps. Charlotte Rampling is not an inherently bad fit for the role and is well-respected as an actress, but the script gives her nothing interesting to do with the role.

She also feels too young, being around thirty when she made the film. Her character having a child who is almost ten and playing against Roger Moore who is almost 20 years older makes this obvious. Irene was also canonically born in 1858 and the film is set in 1901. Having an older actress would have worked much better in every way, including for the story the film was trying to tell.

Roger Moore, here sporting an unusually hideous pair of L-shaped 70s-style sideburns, fares little better as Holmes. Moore was in my opinion not a great actor, but nevertheless a very charismatic and likeable screen presence who generally fit the roles he played, like the Saint and James Bond. However Moore couldn’t vary his general screen persona much. And it is doubtful that persona could ever work for the role of Sherlock Holmes, even the version of Holmes presented in this film. Holmes is supposed to be heavily emotionally affected by the events of this film, with Moriary threatening his son, and it doesn’t really come through in Moore’s performance.

Moore as Holmes does do the things you expect from the character in this type of movie, like wear a deerstalker, play the violin and smoke a big meerschaum pipe to think things through (I did at least appreciate the detail of Holmes putting his tobacco in one big pile which is canonical). But it feels forced, as if we are supposed to accept this character is Holmes because of the trappings he affects, instead of the script and performance. And any effect those trappings might have had is all ruined by Holmes behaving very uncanonically in romancing Irene.

And then there is Patrick Macnee as Watson. It is one of the worst depictions of Watson I’ve seen. Well, it is probably not Macnee’s fault, but rather the script and direction. Macnee performs all his lines in this hoarse voice which is probably meant to imitate Nigel Bruce. But it is a very bad imitation and feels very unnatural and annoying. Bruce naturally spoke that way, Macnee didn’t. The film’s Watson is possibly even dumber than Bruce’s Watson ever was, yet with none of the charm. To illustrate: a running gag in the film is that Watson doesn’t understand time zones and keeps his watch at greenwich mean time, despite being in New York. He just thinks “the colonials” are very rude in making up their own time like that. This probably says it all.

The most genuinely fun performance in the film is the legendary director John Huston as Moriarty. Huston is charismatic and fun, as the film portrays Moriarty as a complete pulp supervillain. It is hard not to enjoy his campy, ludicrous and inefficient traps in his lairs, and the fact that he reuses them exactly when building a second lair in New York.

His gold robbery scheme to take over the world is ridiculous in an a relatively imaginative and fun way. And there are some fun campy bits sometimes in the movie which points to how a more enjoyable film could have come to be. It could have been a silly fun movie about Holmes foiling a take over the world via a gold robbery scheme by pulp supervillain Moriarty. But it gets bogged down in annoying Holmes-Adler romance and family melodrama which tries and fails to give the movie an emotional core.

The end result is a disappointment. Sometimes the campy ridiculousness is entertaining, but there are too many annoying things to make it truly “so-bad-its-good”. And while the film is little remembered today for good reason, its introduction of Irene to the world of non-canonical Holmes films oddly enough set a precedent for the problems in how she was to be adapted.

#sherlock holmes in new york #film review

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xavantina · 6 years ago

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I got my hands on a copy of the new Euroman for @idontfindyouthatinteresting, and I took the opportunity to translate some of the interview as well. I tried scanning the article, but my scanner is broken, so you’ll have to make due with iPhone pics of the photos until someone with a working scanner gets in the game.

Rest of the photos and the interview under the cut.

The interview itself was a monster of a thing with lots and lots of flowery descriptions of random scenery, so I cut it down to just the questions, though a few highlights of the rest include:

When he was knighted the Queen of Denmark told him she liked Flame and Citron and he was like ‘fuck yeah’.

He rolls up with his classic bedroom eyes, mismatched tracksuit, and worn sneakers, and just needs a smoke before they go in.

The reporter thinks it’s pointless for a hairdresser to style Mads’ hair because it’s amazing already.

Mads goes around introducing himself to everyone in the room with “Hi. My name is Mads.”

He speaks very fast in Danish.

Onward with the questions:

Q. You were an unknown dancer for ten years before you became an actor. In terms of staying grounded, has it been an advantage for you that you had your breakthrough at such a mature age?

A. Yes, I think so. I probably wouldn’t have had problems staying grounded even if I had been 20 years old. But I think it’s harder for a 17-year-old today, where you can have your breakthrough on a whole different platform and gain three million followers, or whatever the hell they have. It’s obvious that if everyone thinks you’re cool, and you’re told so a bit too often, then you start thinking ‘yeah, I am. I’m cool’. It’s easier to handle being recognized in the street when you’re 32, than when you’re 17. I think.

Q. Your James Bond co-star Jesper Christensen has said that he can no longer enter a public space and just sit there observing, because everyone is always staring at him. He can no longer gain inspiration for his work from real life– from ‘ordinary people’ – like he used to. Do you feel the same way?

A. It’s a terrible loss. It’s not that I’ve always been preparing to be an actor, but I’ve always been curious. Even as a child, I would sit in different places and watch what was happening over there, human behavior, the way they looked and the way they walked. Always. And too often I started copying people when I saw them. I would sit just like them for a while, just to try how it felt. That’s over now. Whenever I’m out somewhere, 50 people are sitting around staring at me. Then I have to worry about scratching my nose, and there’s 40 camera phones in my face. Then I have to go to a different country.

Q. Don’t you get recognised abroad?

A. They know me around the world to various degrees. There are definitely many places where they don’t care at all, but James Bond, Star Wars, and Marvel movies, all of which I’ve starred in, have a great reach. The happy result of this is that people become curious about me as an actor, so I’m often stopped abroad because people know me from The Green Butchers or The Hunt. That’s super cool.

Q. Is it important for you to get recognition in the business? And do you?

A. A foreign colleague whom I have great respect for told me that he and three friends would sit down and watch the Pusher trilogy every weekend. That made me happy. Recognition from colleagues is important. Recognition from yourself is just much more important. You can get into a cycle where you go around constantly patting each other on the back because you need it so badly in my line of work. We’re judged all the time. It’s really hard, and so we probably have a tendency to praise each other more than we should. You should be happy when other people think what you’re doing is great, but you need to remember to consider what you think about it personally. ‘Was this what I wanted? Yes, okay, fine. Next time I might go in this direction instead.’ That’s important. And it’s the same if what people are saying about you sucks. There are many opinions out there. And if you start reading on social media you’ll never get to bed. You should stay away from that.

Q. Where do you find material and inspiration when you can’t go people-watching anymore? Do you have a memory bank you draw from?

A. Probably. I can also sit and watch people on screen, television and so on. But inspiration should primarily come from the script and the director. But I really miss sitting around and watching other people, and I certainly miss them not staring at me. I don’t try to hide though, I never wear a cap or anything. Sunglasses annoy the hell out of me, so I don’t use those at all. Luckily I‘m forgetful: I walk outside in the morning and don’t spend a second wondering how it’s going to be when I arrive somewhere – whether I’ll be recognized, I mean. That’s not just something I’m saying. I get in my car and drive somewhere and enter wherever I’m going, and don’t think about it at all. It’s not until people do this (Mads widens his eyes and turns his head) and do a double check that I’m reminded what it’s like. And that’s good, because otherwise I’d never leave the house.

Q. But you haven’t always been famous – in Hollywood you were a total unknown in the beginning. As the unknown from a small country did you have to work to earn the respect from people around you when you did your first foreign films?

A. I never consciously considered that I had to do something to make them listen to me. If I thought something could be done differently, I haven’t been afraid of going up to people and telling them. Obviously it’s not like it is in Denmark where I can just call Thomas Vinterberg up and say ‘hey, I just had an idea, won’t you come over?’ A Hollywood director on a big movie has maybe 30 actors on his list and everybody wants something from him, so the scale is different. But I still speak up, if there’s something wrong, and only if I’m serious about it. If I’m not serious about it, we just start working on whatever we’re doing.

Q. Are you treated differently on set now that you’re a bigger star?

A. Yes. I was very surprised with first time I was part of a large foreign production. We were on set, and I approached someone from the light-crew to ask about something. Then he looked down at the ground and didn’t answer. Turns out there had been this big name actor, whose name I can’t be bothered to mention, who had just done a movie with this crew, and the crew was under strict orders to never look this actor in the eyes. So there I was, a product of all this. Those were the kind of things I had to get used to. Luckily I found out that if I just focused on my work in the same way I usually did my surroundings would relax pretty quickly. They care more about things abroad than they do in Denmark. I’ve had some pretty weird experiences on foreign jobs. For example, I’m often assigned a so-called handler. Someone who meets me at the airport and helps with checking in and stuff like that. Which is fine, if you’re in Beijing and your have no idea where you’re going. But on foreign gigs I’ve also tried being a assigned a handler at Copenhagen Airport, who is supposed to follow me and help me. That’s pretty absurd, since I’ve checked in 2000 times before in Copenhagen and know how to do it. A handler is always dressed really nicely too, so everybody at the airport ends up staring at me even more. That’s a weird service.

Q. How about the treatment you receive from the other stars, or the business as a whole? How do you experience the hierarchy in Hollywood?

A. When I worked with Benedict Cumberbatch in Doctor Strange and with Daniel Craig in Casino Royale it was their first big films as well, so the hierarchy wasn’t crazy. I’ve been spared from meeting someone abroad who was a real hot shot or just tired of doing what they were doing. There are plenty of people with attitude, plenty of large personalities, but I’ve met very few proper divas who are impossible to work with. The few I have met have been here at home. It’s actually a myth, that this is a diva business. If you did an inquiry and compared us to bus drivers or doctors for example, I think actors would rate much lower than them on the diva-scale. We’re very conscious about not behaving like divas, so everyone tries to act natural. Nobody wants to be branded like that. And when one finally comes along, which obviously happens, then it’s so exciting, and it sounds like the whole business is infected with them. But holy shit, man, how many little kings in their little kingdoms have you met driving the 8 Line?

Q. Your generation, which had its breakthrough 20-25 years ago, has taken up a lot of space back here at home and internationally. You’ve become…

A. You can say ‘old’. We’ve gotten bloody old.

Q. Has it only now become clear how much space you take up?

A. No. I think it was obvious from the beginning. We were a generation that grew up with a big fascination for certain foreign films. Many of us had Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola in common. There weren’t’ many Danish films we could relate to. [here follows a whole bit about Danish movie history that no one outside Denmark will care about, so I’m skipping it] We felt like we were living in the 50’s. We were watching foreign movies like ‘Taxi Driver’ and saying to each other ‘is this from 1975?’ What have we done in Denmark this year? It was crazy. Completely crazy. Obviously something had to be done. And it was. We grew in different directions but suddenly the gap wasn’t so wide… I mean, we were no longer being told what it was like to be a teenager by an 88 year old director. We were the same age and we communicated directly. Just like Scorsese and De Niro in the 70’s. Same age, let’s go, rock’n’roll. Obviously it’s hard for the next generation, who comes after us, to just change things as well. Because we did the right thing. So now they either have to copy that approach, or improve it, or come up with something completely new. It was easier for us, if I’m being honest. We said ‘Hey, have you seen this before?’ and people went ‘No, we haven’t. Cool!’ But we had to do it. And we were allowed to do it, first and foremost. Some things went wrong, some things went right. But it was really important.

Q. You and your brother both seem like you’re very down to earth. Is that a result of growing up on Nørrebro?

A. Yes, I guess. No… Where the fuck did Pilou (Asbæk) grow up? He has some higher ‘a’s than I do, when he taaaaalks. But he’s damn well down to earth too. So I think it’s a Danish thing. If you try to rise a bit above other people, it won’t be very long until you’re pulled back down.

Q. Have you tried it?

A. No. As a Danish person it’s very hard to demand only to be served the yellow M&Ms without people laughing at you.

Q. Can’t it be limiting, that we’re like that? That everything has to be so down to earth.

Pause.

A. It’s funny, because we’re different than the Swedish. They have a whole different way of engaging with their stars. The Swedish are down to earth too. But when Swedish actors sit down to talk like this, like I’m doing now, and a journalist enters the room, that they start (Mads straightens and adopt a somber tone) speaking like this. And the things they say become great philosophy. They also start to move (he waves his arm theatrically) like they were on stage at the Royal Theatre. When I see that I think ‘what the fuck just happened?’. The Swedish write with great reverence about their stars as well. They have a huge amount of respect for what they give us. Swedish stars have a whole different status in society than we do in Denmark. They like putting things up on a pedestal, and they’re allowed to do that in a totally different way then we are. You can’t do that here. And thank God for that. But you can also say, that in Denmark you don’t always respect people for what they can do. Sometimes people will go ‘Fuck man, I can do what Caroline Wozniacki does. She’s the worst I’ve ever seen.’ Okay? I mean, it’s nice that we’re down to earth in Denmark. But it’s grotesque to say that ‘What Wozniacki does, I can do just as well.’

So that’s how I spent the last five hours of my life...

#Mads Mikkelsen #translation

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mrleopard25 · 7 years ago

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James Bond Series Revisited: SPECTRE (2015)

Directed by Sam Mendes

Starring Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Ralph Fiennes, and Léa Seydoux

Yes, this has taken years to complete, and for that I apologize. In part it was due to me seeing the film during its opening run and then not again until very recently. I like to be fairly familiar with the film before giving it my full thoughts. Also I like hearing what other people had to say, and well...some of it wasn’t so kind. But I’ve also gone through each of the other Bond films in deep analysis so, like Quantum of Solace, maybe I could give the film a better appraisal. Was it terrible? Was it great? Well...

The film opens on Bond engaging in some good old fashioned espionage in Mexico City, during the Day of the Dead celebrations. Some nefarious types are meeting in a hotel room talking about bombing a stadium, and Bond decides he’s going to assassinate all these guys. They get wise to the attempt at the last second and several explosions later, the block is leveled. But Bond’s target, a man named Sciarra, survives and decides he’s going to escape Bond by the most inconspicuous way he can think of: a helicopter in a crowded town square. Bond’s having none of that, takes his octopus ring, and shoves him out of the helicopter.

But uh oh – why was Bond even there? That’s what M wants to know because, from his point of view, a vacationing agent demolished a couple city blocks and did some aerial tricks in a helicopter above several thousand people. So M wants an explanation, but Bond gives him nothing. This is especially frustrating, as there is a new centralized intelligence agency, the Joint Intelligence Service headed by a man named C, that wants to merge with MI6 and has made no secret about wanting to shut down the 00 program. Why? Because it’s the future!

Meanwhile, Bond reveals to Moneypenny that M, the last M, sent him one of those tapes that says “If you’re seeing this, that means I’m dead, so do this because I’m dead.” Unfortunately M has grounded Bond, but Bond also enlists Q to help him out, and soon Bond has gone to Rome to go to Sciarra’s funeral. He makes an acquaintance of Sciarra’s wife, and later that night saves her from assassination. In response, she informs him of where he can take that octopus ring.

Bond finds himself at a meeting of a clandestine organization engaged in operating terrorist activities around the globe. The leader of the organization notices Bond is there, and soon Bond has to go on the run through the streets of Rome. Based on some word clues, Moneypenny informs Bond that this organization has ties to Mr. White. Bond tracks him down to a remote cabin where he finds the man dying. Bond gets some information about this organization, SPECTRE, and their involvement in global affairs. White makes Bond swear to protect his daughter, then commits suicide.

Bond finds his daughter, Madeline Swann, as a doctor in a special treatment clinic in the mountains. He reveals her father’s fate and her role in this, and she spurns him. On his way out, he bumps into Q, who is feeling chagrinned at working with Bond illegally. Bond gets Q to identify some DNA samples on the ring (not sure why they’re there), and we get links to all the previous Craig movie. More on that later.

SPECTRE tries to abduct Swan and a long chase sequence ensues. After recovering Swann, she takes Bond to a hotel that White used to take his family to, as Bond believes White left information there. Bond tears the room apart, and eventually finds a hidden room that contains information detailing Quantum / SPECTRE activities, including coordinates to a secret base in the Sahara.

Travelling there by rail, Bond and Swann get to know each other a little better, but this is interrupted by Hinx, a SPECTRE assassin, who nearly succeeds in killing them both. After finishing him off, the pair arrive at the SPECTRE base where they are confronted by the leader, Franz Oberhauser – the son of the man who took Bond in after the death of Bond’s parents. Oberhauser killed his father and staged his own death, and has lay hidden as SPECTRE’s leader, calling himself Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Blofeld lays out his objective in overseeing the new global intelligence community, and how C is one of his agents. He then decides to torture Bond by drilling into his brain. Luckily, Bond has an exploding watch that allows him to escape and destroy the compound.

Returning to the UK, Bond meets up with the remains of the 00 program: M, Tanner, Q, and Moneypenny. Their goal is to dismantle the intelligence network before it is activated, and time is running out. Unfortunately, Blofeld kidnaps Swann and keeps her tied up in the old MI6 headquarters, which are rigged to blow. The former MI6 teams now has a limited amount of time to stop Blofeld, C, and SPECTRE.

So SPECTRE isn’t a bad movie. If anything, it’s biggest flaw is that it follows Skyfall. But it’s also not a great film, and I’m pretty sure it boils down to the script. Sam Mendes returns to directing, but we’re missing the fantastic cinematography of Roger Deakins, and he is sorely missed. Not to say that Hoyte van Hoytema is a bad DOP; certainly his work on Interstellar and Dunkirkwas fantastic, but there was something visually stylistic that was missing, and this film just feels like it was filmed as a normal action film.

But on to the script. There are some things taken as granted in the script that rub people the wrong way, myself included. First is that we had a build up in the first two Craig films about an organization called Quantum, that was clearly supposed to be the reboot’s version of SPECTRE at the time. And I was fine with that. It seemed to have the same goals and methods, but be updated for the 21st century. Now we learn that Quantum was really taking orders from SPECTRE this whole time. That could have been an interesting development, if it made sense. But it doesn’t. It only really seems to be done because Blofeld has an anger-boner for Bond. For the fourth movie in a rebooted franchise, having Blofeld be the evil mastermind behind all of it just because he has daddy issues is not good enough for me.

Second are the leaps in logic that serve only to move the story. I really didn’t know how Bond located White’s cabin so quickly. There’s a reference that the Pale King is actually Mr.White, and he was last spotted in some certain place, and then we cut to Bond finding this remote outpost. The average audience member might forgive this, but I found it nonsensical in how fast it happened.

Very glaring is C, played by Andrew Scott (perhaps best known as Moriarty in the BBC Sherlock series). Nobody was fooled by his betrayal, and I think the story would have been better served by this being a genuine surprise that he was working for SPECTRE. I don’t want to denigrate Scott as an actor, but I really feel that he was cast because he has such a sinister presence, not because it would service the story.

And finally is a scene at Blofeld’s Sahara compound where we get a twist on the cliché. Blofeld goes to explain his whole evil plan to Bond, but Bond just explains it to him instead. Blofeld kind of nods and smiles, and basically says “Yeah you got it.” Now, I am completely for us bypassing this cliché, but the way it was written, it seemed more like the movie was getting impatient with itself.

I don’t want to harp on the film too much, because it’s certainly far from the worst in the franchise. And although it’s easy to only focus on the things you don’t like in the movie, we shouldn’t forget the good stuff.

Right at the beginning of the film, we get a great long shot of travelling through Mexico City, which must have included some fantastic trickery, including getting on and off cranes and going through false walls. That whole opening sequence is pretty stellar. This is then paired with an unfortunate credit sequence which borders on uncomfortable the entire time. Apparently Radiohead was involved at some point to do the opening theme but this fell through. The song, “SPECTRE”, is a dark and moody piece with some moments of levity, but has a very grand and sweeping cinematic feel to it (and fits in amazingly with the “A Moon Shaped Pool” tracks they were working on at the time). The replacement, “The Writing’s On The Wall” by Sam Smith is too much for me. The verses work all right, but then he keeps hitting this painful falsetto in the chorus. Meanwhile some of the imagery is great, but then we get some nutty allusions to tentacle porn. It’s a shame, because the title sequence is always a golden opportunity to set the stage for the film.

We are given some interesting questions at this point, and that is: what is the role of the 00 program in the 21stcentury? Skyfall gave us a pretty good answer about using raw tools against advanced technology, but this film picks up that thread by asking what if the good guys have that advanced technology? Do we still need the blunt instruments? C brings up a good point – why use assassins when it’s more effective to destroy their reputation and limit their resources? Don’t make them a martyr, and instead let them fade into obscurity. Remove their power. We do see this with White. He wasn’t killed at the end of Casino Royale, while he was a powerful and influential man, and was allowed to degrade into a recluse with very little standing. Sadly, we really don’t get much discussion about this topic, as the movie goes through the same motions as the last few, wherein the blunt instrument Bond just blows everything up and wins.

Continuing on the theme of technology, watch this film against an older Bond film, and the filmmakers made a logical and interesting use of cell phones. Sometimes you’ll watch a film and if it’s an older film, you are chagrinned that so many of the issues that could be solved with a quick call on a cell phone, or if it’s a newer film you might be shouting at the screen to make a quick phone call and fix the issue. This film does not have this issue, as it uses the technology of the day appropriately.

There are a few chase sequences in this film, and those are Bond staples, but the real task was to make them interesting and compelling. And it’s successful! These were great chases with some inventive ideas, and even a way to incorporate some useful information via a phone call with Moneypenny thrown in.

My final point I want to touch on is casting, and this is the most complicated issue. Daniel Craig continues to really seize the role of Bond and own it. The screenwriters and Craig continue to develop the psychological destruction of Bond was a sure treat. After Bond has demolished the suite at the hotel, we see him devolve into a drunk just barely hanging on to sanity. He is used to being an unstoppable force, and when that doesn’t seem to be the answer, he begins to lose cohesion with his psyche. Seeing the mouse scuttle on the floor, a weak animal that lives under cover of darkness, amuses him and challenges him – especially when it gives away the location of the room. Going on with that thought, whenever we see Bond lose composure, it can make the scene gripping.

The supporting cast are mostly very good. Fiennes is an excellent M in this film, and Harris as Moneypenny has the type of relationship with Bond that we expect, in that it borders on romantic, but never gets going. But it’s more realistic than the condescending / paternal relationship that the Bond / Moneypenny relationship danced in the original run. Bautista as Mr. Hinx is brutal. As with his other roles, he conveys a real presence while on screen and his punches look like they hurt. There is a raw masculinity and physicality in his motions, and it really creates an impression. Naturally the fight scene on the train is reminiscent of the fight with Red Grant in From Russia With Love. That has to be one of the best homages.

Christoph Waltz delivers despite some pretty bad dialogue given to him. His allusion to Bond as a cuckoo chick, with him making cuckoo noises to taunt him are a little grating and not at all sinister. Where Waltz delivers is in his mannerisms and the cold in his eyes, and he has such amazing potential to really develop further as Blofeld. Again though, his character is undermined by the lackluster motivation of daddy issues.

Also, during the big SPECTRE meeting, we get a call back to previous SPECTRE members in the last run with two characters who seem to be visual callbacks to Klebb and Mr. Big. I actually had to double check IMDb to see if the characters had actually been named that.

But now for the elephant in the room: Léa Seydoux as Swann. I haven’t seen Seydoux in anything else, so I really am not qualified to give a review of her as an actor in general (although apparently she was good in Blue Is The Warmest Colour). And it is not without precedent to have a French girl in a Bond film. But there’s two ways in which her character portrayal lets the film down, and I’m not sure if its her fault or Mendes’. The first is that she has no chemistry with Craig. I don’t at any point buy their relationship, either romantically or sexually. There is no fizzle between them. There was something really serious and real with Eva Green in Casino Royale. And secondly is her stoicism with her father. I never really came away with the sense of her emotional state towards her father, and that should have been a major component of her character. She should have extremely complex feelings towards him. She should love him dearly but have an anger at him for bringing so much death and destruction into her life. It should drive her character.

Okay, so let’s break this film down.

Mission Completed?

Bond was grounded after failing to have a vacation. He received an unofficial mission near the end to stop the launch of Nine Eyes, the global intelligence network. The MI6 team really kind of did it all together to be honest.

Dastardly Scheme

So by using a subsidiary organization, Quantum, SPECTRE has been achieving two goals: one to slowly convince world governments to reconcile their intelligence services into one network, and the second to slowly convince the British government that the MI6 agency (in particular the 00 program) is obsolete and to disband it.

SPECTRE mostly succeeded, but was undermined by Blofeld’s endless pursuit of Bond.

Best Buds

The entire MI6 team stands behind Bond and helps him out whenever they can. Naomie Harris continues in her support of Bond as Moneypenny, being a reliable source of information to keep him moving. Ben Whishaw steps up as Q, going into the field to lend forensic aid to Bond, and even getting involved in a chase sequence himself. He really should be more careful out there. Bill Tanner and M also show up at the end to take a hands on approach to stop the Nine Eyes.

The Bad Guy and His Goon

I already spoke about Christoph Waltz’s cold portrayal of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, a man who uses humour to mask his insane revenge plot and obsession with having eyes everywhere. Waltz is supremely charismatic, even if some of his writing is subpar.

Dave Bautista plays Mr. Hinx, an assassin who fills a vacancy in SPECTRE for being the go-to for dispatching enemies. Again, I’m a big fan of Bautista, as each role I’ve seen him in is completely unique. He’s strong but funny in Guardians Of The Galaxy, and strong but tragic in Blade Runner 2049. I almost wish we saw more character from him here because his portrayal is just... strong and brutal?

An interesting take on a villain role is Andrew Scott as C, head of the Joint Intelligence Service, but not because of his portrayal. It’s because he is an antagonist for M, not Bond. His arc revolves around M, and the conflict is with M. It is resolved through M’s actions and confrontations. That’s a welcome addition.

Booty Snatched

Two again. The first was Sciarra’s wife, Lucia, played by Monica Bellucci. She had been a name floating around the franchise for years but only now has finally landed as a Bond girl. She’s the oldest woman cast in such a role, but you know what? It really doesn’t matter – she absolutely fits the profile. Bond gives her a contact to help her get out of the country and into safety and... hey what happened with that? Did she make it?

The second was with Swann, after they dispatch Hinx. Apparently there is no bigger turn on than barely surviving a big sweaty fight. Well...and her dress.

Baddies Dispatched

An astounding 31 killed by Bond, a strong percentage of which during his escape from the SPECTRE compound.

Gadgets Trashed

Bond dumps his car into a canal in Rome, after exhausting all the bonus options. He then hijacks a plane to chase down Swann’s kidnappers, and thoroughly demolishes it. And finally his watch explodes spectacularly. I would actually be really hesitant to wear something with that much yield on my wrist.

It Goes BOOM

Eight explosions, including an absolutely spectacular fireball in the middle of the Sahara.

You Misogynistic Pig

I realize as someone who must use every tool at his disposal to save the world, this falls in line with Bond’s objective, but it still feels really slimy that he immediately sets his sights on, follows home, and seduces Lucia on the day of her husband’s funeral.

White Man’s Burden

This is a weird one. While this film was being made, there were no such Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico as depicted in the film. It’s really reminiscent of Carnival in Brazil with Day of the Dead imagery thrown in but apparently Mexico City was so enamored with the idea of it, it’s actually become a real celebration in this manner in recent years.

Best Line

“Your word?! The word of an assassin?!” White is incredulous that Bond is promising anything, much less protecting someone.

Worst Line

“He’s everywhere – everywhere! He’s sitting at your desk, he’s kissing your lover, he’s eating supper with your family!” White, during the same scene, trying to beef up how scary a villain Blofeld is. It’s too hammy and making Blofeld sound like a metaphysical demon stalker isn’t intimidating, it’s a cartoon.

Bond Moment

During a fight scene at the clinic, one of the security guys gets up and approaches Bond. Bond gives him a look, raises his hand and says “No! Stay!” The man immediately obeys, probably seeing it’s not worth the trouble.

Special Awards:

Another Number:

Bond’s car (Aston Martin DB10) was to be reassigned to 009, who apparently has questionable tastes.

Scrooge McDuck’s Heir:

Blofeld is so rich, he has a massive compound in the middle of the Sahara desert with a fully landscaped and maintained yard, that is fully staffed with enough supplies to easily sustain at least a hundred people, with the most cutting edge technology at their disposal.

Worst Spy Ever:

When M is grilling Bond at the beginning of the movie about why Bond just blew up Mexico City, it is painfully obvious Bond is lying which forces M to ground him, hindering his objective. Bond really should have brought M in on it – the last film already established Bond could trust him.

Lately there’s been a question as to whether or not we still need to have the Bond franchise, and what it should look like. “Why can’t Bond be a black man?” some say. Others press on and say “Why can’t Bond be a woman?” And it’s really hard to argue against that when you have mediocre movies as evidence.

And that’s what this film is: an average Bond film at best. The film fails in its script and execution, but succeeds in some of its themes, acting, and quiet moments. So what do I think about radically changing the Bond franchise? I’m really against it, but hear me out.

Bond is a depiction of toxic masculinity. He’s an embodiment of it. Those who glorify him as someone to aspire to miss the point entirely. When Bond films are done well, we get the image of a man who can not hold himself together when he has time to himself. So he perpetually endangers his life. The irony is he hates his job. He drinks himself to numb his pain at having love only once, and having that love taken away from him by his work. He uses people for his ends, and his ends are the tool of a government he’s not even that attached to.

The best Bond films explore this. Even this film shows some of it, in that scene at the hotel with the mouse. Bond is a man who needs to be in control at all times, but drinks himself stupid. He is a white male because he is the worst of the white males. He’s a killer, a tool by a higher power playing by old rules, a man who does not value life, he hates every minute of it, but he will never leave it. The end of this film shows him and Swann leaving together, but that’s part of what makes this movie so unsatisfying – it’s not a logical end point and seems tacked on.

The Bond films aren’t glorifying the lifestyle; they’re a warning. At least... they should be.

2.5 / 5

#James bond #007 #spectre #blofeld #Daniel craig #mi6 #m #sam mendes #Ralph fiennes #Christoph waltz #rome #Andrew scott

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claudia1829things · 4 years ago

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"FORT APACHE" (1948) Review

"FORT APACHE" (1948) Review Between 1948 and 1950, director John Ford made three Westerns that many regard as his "cavalry trilogy". All three films centered on the U.S. Army Cavalry in the post-Civil War West. More importantly, all three movies were based upon short stories written by American Western author, James Warner Bellah.

The first film in Ford's "cavalry trilogy" was "FORT APACHE" released in 1948. Starring John Wayne and Henry Fonda, the movie was inspired by Bellah's 1947 Saturday Evening Post short story called "Massacre". Bellah used the Little Bighorn and Fetterman Fight battles as historical backdrop. The movie began with the arrival of three characters to the U.S. Army post, Fort Apache, in the post-Civil War Arizona Territory - a rigid and egocentric Army officer named Lieutenant Owen Thursday; his daughter Philadelphia Thursday; and a recent West Point graduate named Second Lieutenant Michael O'Rourke, who also happened to be the son of the regiment's first sergeant. The regiment's first officer, Captain Kirby York, and everyone else struggle to adjust to the martinet style of Thursday. Worse, young Lieutenant O'Rourke and Philadelphia become romantically interested each other. But since O'Rourke is the son of a sergeant, the snobbish Thursday does not regard him as a "gentleman" and is against a romance between the pair. But Thursday's command style, the budding romance and other minor events at Fort Apache take a back seat when the regiment is faced with a potential unrest from the local Apaches, due to their conflict with a corrupt Indian agent named Silas Meacham. Thursday's command and his willingness to adapt to military command on the frontier is tested when he finds himself caught between the Meacham's penchant for corruption and the Apaches' anger and desire for justice. "FORT APACHE" proved to be one of the first Hollywood films to portray a sympathetic view of Native Americans. This is surprising, considering that Bellah's view of the Native Americans in his story is not sympathetic and rather racist. For reasons I do not know, Ford decided to change the story's negative portrayal of the Apaches, via screenwriter Frank S. Nugent's script. Although Ford and Nugent did not focus upon how most of the other characters regarded the Apaches, they did spotlight on at least three of them - Captain Kirby York, Lieutenant-Colonel Owen Thursday, and Captain Sam Collingwood. Both Thursday and Collingwood seemed to share the same negative views of the Apaches, although the latter does not underestimate their combat skills. York seemed a lot more open-minded and sympathetic toward the Apaches' desire to maintain their lives in peace without the U.S. government breathing down their backs. In the case of "FORT APACHE", York's views seemed to have won out . . . for the moment. As much as I enjoyed "FORT APACHE", I must admit that I was frustrated that it took so long for it to begin exploring its main narrative regarding the Apaches and Meachum. The movie's first half spent most of its time on three subplots. One of them featured the clash between Thursday and the men under his command. The second featured the budding romance between Philadelphia Thursday and Second Lieutenant O'Rourke. Do not get me wrong. And the third featured scenes of the day-to-day activities of the fort's enlisted men and non-commission officers. I must admit that I found the last subplot somewhat uninteresting and felt they dragged the movie's narrative. I had no problems with the Philadelphia-Michael romance, since it added a bit of romance to the movie's plot and played a major role in Lieutenant-Colonel Thursday's characterization. And naturally the York-Thursday conflict played an important role in the film's plot. The ironic thing about "FORT APACHE" is that the plot line regarding the Apaches does not come to the fore until halfway into the film. Due to this plot structure, I found myself wondering about the film's main narrative. What exactly is "FORT APACHE" about? Worse, the fact that the Apache story arc does not really come to fore until the second half, almost making the film seem schizophrenic. There were plenty of moments in the first half that led me to wonder if director John Ford had become too caught up in exploring mid-to-late 19th century military life on the frontier. Many have claimed that "FORT APACHE" is not specifically about life at a 19th century Army post in the Old West or the U.S. government's relations with the Apaches. It is about the conflict between the two main characters - Captain Kirby York and Lieutenant-Colonel Owen Thursday. In other words, one of the movie's subplots might actually be its main plot. Both York and Thursday were Civil War veterans who seemed to have conflicting ideas on how to command a U.S. Army post in the 19th century West and deal with the conflict between the American white settlers and the Apaches, trying to defend their homeland. Captain York had expected to become Fort Apache's new commander, following the departure of the previous one. Instead, the post's command was given to Colonel Thursday, an arrogant and priggish officer with no experience with the West or Native Americans. What makes the situation even more ironic is that while York had wanted command of Fort Apache, Thursday is both disappointed and embittered that the Army had posted him to this new assignment. The problem I have with this theory is that movie did not spend enough time on the York-Thursday conflict for me to accept it. Thursday seemed to come into conflict with a good number of other characters - especially the O'Rourke men and his old friend Captain Sam Collingwood. York and Thursday eventually clashed over the Apaches' conflict with Silas Meacham. And considering that a great deal of the movie's first half focused on the day-to-day life on a frontier Army post and the Philadelphia-Michael romance, I can only conclude that I found "FORT APACHE" a slightly schizophrenic film. Despite this, I rather enjoyed "FORT APACHE". Well . . . I enjoyed parts of the first half and definitely the second half. While I found some of Ford's exploration of life at a 19th century Army post rather charming, I found the movie's portrayal of the entire Apaches-Meachum conflict intriguing, surprising and very well made. Instead of the usual Hollywood "white men v. Indians"schtick, Ford explored the damaging effects of U.S. policies against Native Americans. This was especially apparent in the situation regarding Silas Meacham. Ford and screenwriter Frank S. Nugent made it clear that both Captain York and Lieutenant-Colonel Thursday regarded Meachum as a dishonorable and corrupt man, whose greed had led to great unrest among the Apaches. And yet . . . whereas York was willing to treat the Apaches with honor and consider getting rid of Meachum, Thursday's rigid interpretation of Army regulations and arrogant prejudice led him to dismiss the Apaches's protests and support Meachum's activities because the latter was a U.S. government agent . . . and white. Worse, Thursday decided to ignore York's warnings and use this situation as an excuse for military glory and order his regiment into battle on Cochise's terms - a direct (and suicidal) charge into the hills. U.S. policy in the Old West at its worst. God only knows how many times a similar action had occurred throughout history. I might be wrong, but I suspect that "FORT APACHE" was the Hollywood film that opened the gates to film criticism of American imperialism in the West, especially the treatment of Native Americans. Another aspect of "FORT APACHE" that I truly enjoyed was Archie Stout's cinematography. What can I say? His black-and-white photography of Monument Valley, Utah and Simi Hills, California were outstanding, as shown below:

Thanks to Ford's direction and Jack Murray's editing, "FORT APACHE" maintained a lively pace that did not threatened to drag the movie. More importantly, the combination of their work produced a superb sequence that featured the regiment's doomed assault on Cochise's warriors. Richard Hageman's score served the movie rather well. Yet, I must admit that I do not have any real memories of it. As for film's costumes . . . I do not believe a particular designer was responsible for them. In fact, they looked as if they had come straight from a studio costume warehouse. I found this disappointing, especially for the movie's female characters. "FORT APACHE" featured some performances that I found solid and competent. Veteran actors like Dick Foran, Victor McLaglen and Jack Pennick gave amusing performances as the regiment's aging NCOs (non-commissioned officers). Guy Kibbee was equally amusing as the post's surgeon Captain Wilkens. Pedro Armendáriz was equally competent as the more professional Sergeant Beaufort, who was a former Confederate. Grant Withers was appropriately slimy as the corrupt Silas Meachum. Miguel Inclán gave a dignified performance as the outraged Apache chieftain Cochise. The movie also featured solid performances from Anna Lee and Irene Rich. John Agar's portrayal of the young Michael O'Rourke did not exactly rock my boat. But I thought he was pretty competent. I read somewhere that Ford was not that impressed by Shirley Temple as an actress. Perhaps he had never seen her in the 1947 comedy, "THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBYSOXER". Her character in that film was more worthy of her acting skills than the charming, yet bland Philadelphia Thursday. John Wayne also gave a solid performance as Captain Kirby York. But I did not find his character particularly interesting, until the movie's last half hour. I only found three performances interesting. One came from George O'Brien, who portrayed Thursday's old friend, Captain Sam Collingwood. I thought O'Brien did a great job in portraying a man who found himself taken aback by an old friend's chilly demeanor and arrogance. Ward Bond was equally impressive as Sergeant Major Michael O'Rourke, the senior NCO on the post who has to struggle to contain his resentment of Thursday's class prejudices against his son. But for me, the real star of this movie was Henry Fonda as the narrow-minded and arrogant Lieutenant-Colonel Owen Thursday. I thought he gave a very brilliant and fascinating portrayal of a very complicated man. Thursday was not the one-note arrogant prig that he seemed on paper. He had his virtues. However, Fonda did an excellent job in conveying how Thursday's flaws tend to overwhelm his flaws at the worst possible moment. I am amazed that Fonda never received an Oscar nomination for this superb performance. How can I say this? I do believe that "FORT APACHE" had some problems. I found the movie slightly slightly schizophrenic due to its heavy emphasis on daily life on a frontier Army post in the first half. In fact, the movie's first half is a little problematic to me. But once the movie shifted toward the conflict regarding the Apaches and a corrupt Indian agent, Ford's direction and Frank S. Nugent's screenplay breathed life into it. The movie also benefited from a first-rate cast led by John Wayne and Henry Fonda. I must admit that I feel "FORT APACHE" might be a little overrated. But I cannot deny that it is a damn good movie.

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years ago

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Book Review: The Star Wars Archives 1977-1983

For anyone younger than twenty in 1977, the first "Star Wars" movie came like a bolt from outer space, revolutionary in its blend of drama, mythology, and special effects. “I love kids, and I think movies are really for young people because films can help them or shape their lives,” says George Lucas, the “onlie begetter” of this extraordinary sci-fi series. Peter Jackson, whose "Lord of the Rings trilogy" also touched that chord, has called Lucas “the Thomas Edison of the modern film industry.”

Dozens of books have been devoted to Star Wars and its various offspring and sequels, but trust Taschen to create the most comprehensive guide imaginable for the first three films. Diehard fans will swoon over the 1,232 illustrations and minuscule detail concerning the technical challenges that faced Lucas and his crew during that seven-year period. Younger filmgoers who have been reared on "Star Wars" Episodes I, II, and III may feel that characters like Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan, Liam Neeson's Qui-Gon Jinn, and Natalie Portman's Padmé should have been featured. As the ever-reliable editor, Paul Duncan, explained to me in an email, however: “From a practical point of view it was easier to do three films, and it made sense to cover it as a trilogy over a short period of time. When I was writing it, I also realized that it made poetic sense too - the first film was made against the odds and became a phenomenal success despite Lucas's disappointment with it. The second film was another trial by fire as cost overruns and delays almost forced Lucas to sell 'Star Wars' back to Fox – but 'The Empire Strikes Back''s success helped to kickstart Lucasfilm as an independent entity.”

Duncan offers an excellent survey of Lucas' career up to 1976, when he was the first Vice-President of Francis Coppola's American Zoetrope, revealed a distinct talent for drawing, and followed Coppola's advice to write his own screenplays. His friends and contemporaries in San Francisco included Walter Murch (his first editor), Michael Ritchie, and John Korty. All were non-conformists as far as Hollywood and the studio system were concerned. Although the book includes a valuable interview with sound guru Ben Burtt, there is scant mention of the Dolby Stereo, which enhanced the 70mm experience to such a degree that Alan Ladd Jr., then President of 20th Century Fox, issued a directive to theatres saying that if they wanted "Star Wars" in 70mm, they must be equipped for Dolby Stereo.

Lucas initially described "Star Wars" as a blend of "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Lawrence of Arabia," and James Bond. The film began life as a 14-page typed treatment in May of 1973. Lucas had spent four years trying to get John Milius' "Apocalypse Now" script off the ground, and when that failed (to be taken up, with historic consequences. by Coppola), he worked night and day to develop Star Wars, to retain control of the property despite financial setbacks, and to assemble a team of brilliant designers and technicians including Joe Johnston, Ralph McQuarrie, John Barry, and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor.

A film buff to his fingertips, Lucas paid homage to directors like Fellini, Kurosawa and Fritz Lang (C-3PO resembles Brigitte Helm's female robot in "Metropolis"). He wanted music in the tradition of Erich Wolfgang Korngold or Gustav Holst, and followed Steven Spielberg's advice to commission John Williams to write the score.

"Star Wars" and its sequels proved labor-intensive because every device and every character had to be designed with meticulous care as well as inventiveness. “The 'Star Wars' films are basically visual movements with music,” notes Lucas, and he applied himself indefatigably to the task. He established Industrial Light and Magic, which would become the preeminent facility for CGI and special effects on so many blockbusters beyond "Star Wars," notably "Jurassic Park." And he took merchandising to an altogether new level. Every kid worth their salt at the turn of the 1980s had a bedroom packed with "Star Wars" figurines.

Although the stills and designs remain the glory of this massive, 13-pound tome, Paul Duncan's three-day conversation with Lucas yields so much more about the creative process than the shy mogul has ever spoken of before. “Most of this filmmaking effort,” he confides, “is so I can create a dream, a dream I've had for a long time, which is to build a research retreat for film.” Thus was born Skywalker Ranch, nestled in the countryside of Marin County.

While movie critics have never considered George Lucas as an auteur, he retains an iconic status as a fount of entertainment, creator of a fantasy world as resonant as those of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis or J.K. Rowling. Paul Duncan's sterling endeavor pays him the tribute he richly deserves.

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inhandnetworks-blog · 7 years ago

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The Best James Bond Movie Ever?

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Newsweek published this story under the headline of “Bond—Stirred, Not Shaken” on November 2, 1999. Daniel Craig recently confirmed he would play Agent 007 for the 5th time in a 2019 film. To acknowledge 50 years of the film franchise, Newsweek is republishing the story.

Bond is in the details. the script for the latest 007 adventure, The World Is Not Enough, called for the legendary superagent (Pierce Brosnan) to be helicoptered to a wintry mountaintop with a gorgeous oil heiress (Sophie Marceau), who wants to check out the pipeline. The script then called for Bond to be ambushed by flying snowmobiles. Easy enough. But how should Bond elude the attackers—how, exactly, should he get down the mountain? Before the scene was shot in Chamonix, France, the production team and some MGM executives had a tense meeting. Skis were the obvious answer. But the studio's marketing department pressed for a cooler, younger mode of transportation. There was a huge discussion whether Bond would be on a snowboard to make him more hip, says Michael Wilson, whose family's production company co-owns the Bond character. Wilson still likes Bond best in his tuxedo, and his family had already allowed 007 to act more casually in the movie, to dress down on occasion, even to sport a stubbly beard in one scene—all in the interest of attracting a younger audience. He drew the line at snowboarding: It just wasn't right. The World Is Not Enough may be Bond's 19th outing, but MGM is fighting to keep him forever young. The 007 juggernaut is already the most successful franchise in history—the movies have made about $3 billion worldwide since 1963, not to mention decades' worth of TV and video revenues. But while Bond rules the world, teens and 20-somethings now rule the box office. So MGM has been waging an astonishingly successful campaign to pander to Generation Y, an audience perfectly primed by the Austin Powers spoofs. (I love what Michael Myers does, says Brosnan, 46.) The World—in which a terrorist played by Robert Carlyle attempts to stop the flow of oil from Russia—is typically preposterous, escapist fun, and it should beat the living daylights out of Arnold Schwarzenegger's End of Days at the box office. When we made GoldenEye [in 1995], we wondered how, in the Arnold era, we could keep someone like Bond alive, says screenwriter Bruce Feirstein. Now those guys look like Macy's Thanksgiving Parade balloons. They're freaks. And Bond lives.

As recently as 1989, Bond had a near-death experience. License to Kill, with Timothy Dalton, made just $32 million. Then a new crop of executives took over the foundering MGM and realized that, sickly or not, 007 was still the studio's most valuable asset. MGM doubled the production budget on the films. They dumped Dalton in favor of Brosnan, and ditched the antiquated Aston Martin in favor of a souped-up BMW. The studio also launched a Bond videogame to introduce kids to the Cold War icon and gave 007 a female boss named M (Judi Dench) to put the sexist pig in his place. GoldenEye made $106 million in the States, and twice as much worldwide. The rebirth of Bond was so remarkable that Sony Pictures tried to make a rival 007 series, setting off a legal battle that continues to this day. Bond resonates with the culture, says Sharon Lee of Look-Look, a market-research company specializing in the 15-to-30 crowd. Today, brawn has to be sleek. Heroes aren't pumped up. While Arnold hasn't updated his image, Bond has. These kids list Muhammad Ali, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon and Andy Kaufman as their heroes. For them, Bond works.

Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now

For The World, MGM has gone after the youth audience more randily than ever—and been rewarded with an unprecedented 100 hours of original MTV programming to run worldwide. How did the studio pull it off? It made sure all its villains were under 40. It ran trailers before Austin Powers 2. According to MTV's marketing executive John Shea, however, MGM's smartest moves were hiring Garbage to play on the soundtrack and casting pinup girl Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones. Richards is best known for the elan she displayed—along with much else—in a menage a trois in the seamy cult hit Wild Things. Denise is a hot prop, says Lee, from Look-Look. She scores very high right now in our surveys of kids. But would a nuclear physicist really wear hotpants? There is no reason why a smart girl cannot be attractive, says The World's director, Michael Apted, a little wearily. I would have been s**t on from a great height if I had not delivered jiggle-vision. Much has changed for Bond in 36 years, but some things are still sacred.

Actor Daniel Craig on the red carpet at the German premiere of the James Bond 007 film "Spectre" in Berlin on October 28, 2015. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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From Dog Soldiers to The Reckoning: Neil Marshall Revisits His Filmogrpahy

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Ever since launching his career in 2002 with the independent action-horror thriller, Dog Soldiers—a bracing, fresh werewolves-vs.-soldiers exercise—the writer and director Neil Marshall has been devoted to genre filmmaking. His second film, The Descent, is a generally acknowledged modern horror classic, and since then he’s branched out to post-apocalyptic action, historical thrillers and high fantasy before returning again to horror.

His sixth and latest film, The Reckoning, stars Charlotte Kirk (who co-wrote the script) as a young woman who is accused of witchcraft in northern England in 1665 after losing her husband to the Great Plague. With its period setting and story of unjust persecution and hysteria directed against women in particular, The Reckoning (which just premiered on Shudder) channels some of the old Hammer Studios vibe, as well as that of iconic British films on the same topic like Witchfinder General.

For Marshall, The Reckoning represents a return to the genre that gave him his start and to his early independent days, following 2019’s poorly received reboot of the horror-themed Hellboy franchise. The latter film was his first feature in nine years, during which time he directed episodes of high-profile TV shows like Westworld, Hannibal and most notably Game of Thrones while trying to get various theatrical projects off the ground.

With The Reckoning now making its premiere on Shudder, Marshall is already at work on his next film, a horror outing called The Lair. He says it’s “a bit different from The Reckoning… it’s going to be full-on action, monsters, guns, explosions, the works, blood and guts.” With Marshall now seemingly back on track with feature films, we thought this would be a good moment to take a look back at his career to date.

The Beginning

Marshall was born in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England, and he says that he was inspired to become a filmmaker when he saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time in his youth:

“I’m definitely a product of the nerd generation of the ’80s, and proud of it,” he confirms. “Raiders is the movie that got me into making movies. I was already a big movie fan, just like anybody. But when I saw Raiders, it just changed everything, as did watching The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark on TV. I just thought, ‘That’s what I want to do with my life,’ and never looked back.”

Interestingly, Marshall says that his one unrealized dream project to date harkens back to the impact that Raiders had on him:

“There’s one in particular, a project called Eagle’s Nest…I always wanted to do my Indiana Jones project, my Raiders kind of project, and Eagle’s Nest is very much in that vein. It’s set during World War II, but it’s not a war movie as such. It’s an adventure/action movie. It’s kind of like Die Hard meets Where Eagles Dare, or Indiana Jones meets James Bond. Spies and soldiers and things. It’s full-on action adventure. That’s my dream project, and I still dream of one day getting it made.”

Pathe

Dog Soldiers (2002)

After attending university, Marshall spent a number of years as a freelance film editor before finally getting the chance to direct his first feature film, Dog Soldiers, from an original screenplay he had written. The taut, low-budget thriller revolved around a squad of British soldiers who are attacked in a remote house by a pack of werewolves. For Marshall, it was his chance at last to pursue his dream of making films.

“It was a six-year process of getting it written and getting it financed and getting it made, and it was just stubborn determination,” the director says. “But finally getting there and finally getting on set was just amazing, so satisfying. It was finally achieving a dream that I set about 20 years earlier, really.”

On whether anything surprised him about his first time as a feature director, he adds, “Well, I had directed stuff before. I’d done some short films and some TV things. This was my first feature, but it wasn’t completely new to me. But I was so well-read at the time. I’d spent my teenage years reading nothing but Starlog and Fantastic Films, and all that kind of stuff and learning how these things work. So it wasn’t a complete surprise. I think the main thing was, is just how exciting it all was.”

Werewolves, which were the film’s monsters, hadn’t been seen on the screen in a while at that time. Marshall suspected this would make the film a refreshing change of pace.

“I didn’t want to do the classic Curse of the Werewolf story, which is essentially what all werewolf films had been up until that point,” says Marshall. “I wanted to do essentially Aliens with werewolves, in which they’re just a ferocious enemy and really difficult to kill, and who they are as people is irrelevant.”

Pathe

The Descent (2005)

Next was Marshall’s 2005 film The Descent, in which six women go exploring in a cave system and discover that the tunnels are inhabited by cannibalistic humanoid creatures. A staple of “best horror of the 2000s” lists ever since its release, The Descent was not only genuinely terrifying but groundbreaking in its use of an all-female cast, which was originally not the case.

“I think when I wrote the first draft of it, it was mixed,” Marshall recalls. “When I pitched the treatment, I think then it was a mixed group. I’d done such a testosterone group of men or whatever with Dog Soldiers, part of me was like, ‘Well, let’s just do the complete opposite of that.’

“Then the more research I did into the world of caving and climbing and outdoor sports, it turns out, it’s a really heavily populated by women, and they do everything that the men do. So I just kind of figured, well, why not? Why not have an all-female group? It makes it very different. It made it different from anything that I’d seen for a while, and it came about that way.”

On the inspiration for the horrifying creatures in the caves, called “crawlers?”

“The creatures just came from trying to pare things down to a very, very basic form. I had great difficulty with the werewolves on Dog Soldiers. The guys in the suits, they couldn’t see very well. They were on stilts, so they were really limited in how they could move. Even for a practical effect, they couldn’t move around that well. I wanted to dispense with all that and have the crawlers be as freeform as possible.

“The whole point of the crawlers was that they were meant to be humans who evolved to live in caves,” he continues. “They’re the caveman that stayed in the cave. Whereas the rest of us left and evolved, they stayed in the caves and devolved to live in darkness. They were always essentially going to be human, so that really just required some basic prosthetics. But beyond that, they would just be people. That gave me so much more freedom of movement and allowed them to be fast and agile.”

Universal

Doomsday (2008)

The Descent was a critical and financial success, earning some $57 million on a budget of less than $5 million. It opened the doors for Marshall to begin entertaining offers to direct bigger films, and soon Rogue Pictures (a division of Universal) gave the director a budget of more than $24 million to make Doomsday, his homage to post-apocalyptic action movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s in which Scotland is sealed off due to a deadly virus.

“Doomsday touches upon two things that have cropped up in later work,” Marshall says. “One was the building of a wall to separate two countries, particularly England and Scotland. And then the other one is a viral outbreak, which comes into play in The Reckoning, as well. And the wall reappears in Centurion. It also, I guess, figured in my Game of Thrones episode.”

On the eerie relevancy of doing a movie about a country sealed off because of a viral outbreak, he says, “It was very strange that end of last year, I think it was, when the second wave [of COVID-19] hit, that they closed off the border between England and Scotland. I just thought, ‘This is Doomsday. It’s happening right now. Only a matter of time before they build a wall.’ But yeah, it has been quite scary, especially with The Reckoning, as well. Who could have seen it coming, you know?”

Doomsday was also the first time Marshall had major Hollywood studio resources to work with, which made it a strikingly different experience.

“It was great having much better resources to do a lot more crashes and explosions and things like that. It was a big action movie, it required all those bells and whistles, and we got them all, so that was fantastic… We had more time to shoot it, which was great. I loved that. Because we were filming it down in Cape Town, in South Africa, we didn’t really have the studio on our backs at all. We were let loose to do it. It was one of the most fun experiences I’ve had making a movie.”

Magnet Releasing

Centurion (2010)

For his next film, Marshall turned to the early history of Britain and its resistance to the Roman Empire for inspiration. The result was Centurion, which starred Michael Fassbender, Dominic West and Olga Kurylenko in a violent tale based on the legendary disappearance of the Roman Empire’s Ninth Spanish Legion in what is now northern England and Scotland in the second century. A.D.

“It’s very loosely based,” Marshall explains. “It’s based more on a legend than the history. The history unfortunately disproved the legend. It’s a classic example of the quote, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ The facts aren’t very interesting, but that’s historians doing their thing. Until then, it was a legend that I really liked, the legend of the 9th Legion that marched into Scotland and disappeared without a trace.”

Even though historians have since argued that the Legion wasn’t wiped out in battle with northern England or Pictish tribes as long believed, Marshall was still fascinated with the story:

“My whole kind of thing was, ‘Well, why and how? If it disappeared, how did they disappear? Did none of them survive? If no one survived, how do we even know about it?’ So that’s when I came up with the story of the lone survivor and trying to explain it in logical terms. Nothing supernatural or anything of that, but logical terms of how they were massacred and why.”

As with several others of his films, Marshall also saw contemporary reflections in the story.

“When we were making it, it seemed very relevant to what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the insurgents fighting the oppressors. Telling the story from the Romans’ point of view made it a bit more interesting, because they were the invading army and the other side were freedom fighters. Because we were telling the Romans point of view, it was kind of like, ‘Well, they’re our heroes—but are they?’ I just thought that was really, really interesting.”

Lionsgate

Hellboy (2019)

Hellboy, which was not a sequel to the two films made by Guillermo del Toro and which starred Ron Perlman, featured David Harbour as the title demon from Mike Mignola’s long-running comics. Marshall’s first feature in nine years landed with a loud thud both at the box office and with critics.

“It was one of those things,” the director says now. “The reason I was away from features for nine years was not out of choice. I was trying to get my features made during that time. But because of the revolution in television, there was a certain kind of budget level that I had been working in that disappeared from features and was now going into television, during a transition period of the last 10, 15 years. And I couldn’t find anybody to finance films at that kind of level.”

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Marshall says that when he was initially approached about Hellboy, the idea was to create more of a straight forward horror movie version of the character:

“That appealed to me, and obviously getting a chance to do a feature was a big thing. Despite my reservations or whatever, I jumped at it, because it was a chance to do a feature after nine years. I wanted to get back in the game. But I made an unwise decision, because I should have based my choice purely on whether the script was any good. Unfortunately, the script was never any good, and there’s only so much a director can do.”

Marshall notes that the problems with the Hellboy script arose from confusion over what kind of film it was supposed to be.

“I’ve said it a few times before, you can’t polish a turd. Even the best director in the world can’t make a masterpiece out of a script that was substandard. This was a confused script from the start, combining different stories and sticking rigidly to the comics, which worked fine as graphic novels. But when you translate them to the screen, there are gaping plot holes.

“Unfortunately, the producers just didn’t care. They brought me in so they could tell me what to do. They didn’t really want to make a horror version of it at all, because I was the most experienced horror person involved in the entire production, and I wasn’t allowed to touch the script. I wasn’t allowed to bring any kind of horror essence to it. So it just ended up as a disaster, really. It was just a mess, and a deeply unpleasant experience. That’s the price that I paid for making the wrong choice, or making it for the wrong reasons specifically.”

Shudder

The Reckoning (2021)

Going back to his roots with The Reckoning was a “breath of fresh air” after Hellboy, Marshall says in 2021.

“It was the complete opposite,” he explains. “On Hellboy, I had lots of money and no creative input. On this one, I had full creative control over the piece and no money. But that was a good sacrifice to make because the experience of making The Reckoning—even though we had less money, less time, whatever—was just creatively way more satisfying. It was good to just get back to my roots and get stuck in there and make this little movie that I’m really proud of.”

The director says that he wanted to capture the tone of some of the iconic Hammer horrors from the ‘60s and ‘70s with The Reckoning while the subject matter touched on themes expressed in horror classics like Witchfinder General or Mark of the Devil.

“I felt that there hadn’t really been anything made in that particular period or about that kind of subject matter, the witch hunter in particular,” says Marshall. “There have been witch movies obviously, but not the witch hunter. That kind of vibe, and that Hammer kind of vibe as well, hadn’t been done for a while. But the reason to do it at all was because I felt that it was relevant today for a modern audience… witch hunts are still going on today. They just take on a different form. And certainly, misogyny and female persecution has not gone anywhere in the intervening hundreds of years since our story took place.”

Marshall also notes that he missed being part of the horror film festival circuit, a thriving subculture in its own right.

“I actually wanted to get back on the horror circuit, as far as the festival circuit is concerned, because I loved that experience with my first movie,” he explains. “Going around the world, going to these incredible festivals, meeting the fans, engaging with the fans and also meeting other filmmakers. It’s so inspiring doing that. That was my hope with The Reckoning, but of course, all that went out the window with COVID. But fingers crossed, we’ll be back full strength and next year will be great.”

The Reckoning is currently streaming on Shudder.

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Star Trek: Bringing the Enterprise Home, 55 Years Later

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All odysseys must end.

The final year of the starship Enterprise’s five-year mission has long been speculated about, but never before been given such descriptive and reverential treatment as in IDW’s Star Trek: Year Five, a comic written by Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly. Yet, it too must come to an end as the intrepid crew of The USS Enterprise complete their final year of exploration in this true-to-The-Original-Series story that wraps up this summer. Den of Geek was able to sit down with Lanzing and Kelly to talk about the journey, its challenges, and how they managed to bring the Enterprise home in this epic comic series that gives the final year of James T. Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise’s mission the proper examination it deserved.

“I’m happy to have finally landed the ship,” Lanzing tells us, before continuing in a bittersweet tone: “I’m sad. Star Trek means so much to me and Collin. We’re enormous fans and we have been shaped by it in a lot of ways and fought really hard to get to work on it. Hitting that point, and getting to work on it with such an iconic crew of the original series – it felt like we couldn’t drop the ball on this. When we got it – we felt the enormous weight of responsibility that it had to stand apart from other Star Trek books.”

Which, of course, was the purpose for this odyssey. This series had to be different from other Star Trek comics and there could be no other way to show its distinction by exploring the ending of The Original Series. As any loyal Trek fan knows, TOS ran for only three seasons. It survived, sporadically appearing in novels and other literature. There was room to create stories about the seasons that never were. For many writers and fans, additional stories were just accepted to be in that missing time span. Some even accept The Animated Series to be the missing years, but there was never any formal acknowledgment that, when that series ended, so did the Enterprise’s five-year mission.

Star Trek: Year Five boldly announced its finite nature from the start. With 24 issues in two years, Lanzing and Kelly created a set of stories that filled a void by incorporating elements and recognized work from other comic creators that any TOS fan would have instantly recognized and accepted into the canon of the franchise. While this may have been the Enterprise’s last leg of her journey, it was certainly a full one.

“I really felt it was important to know what had come before,” Jackson says of the series. “I’d read everything Mike Johnson had done, the work the Tiptons put out, but I had to also look at the DC and Marvel works as well. I had to know what we were living up to.”

Both creators cut their Trek teeth on The Next Generation, DS9 and Voyager; in Lanzing’s case, it wasn’t until his early twenties when TOS would be available for greater study: “TOS was the distillation of everything I had learned about Star Trek. It was the first, there were Utopian visions, character studies, dramatic military stories, morality plays! It was everything that I had learned from TNG, DS9, Voyager and it all came from this core … thing that I originally dismissed as cheesy or old, but it evolved into the stories it tried to tell, the lessons it tried to teach and the characters it grappled with. I found myself blown away and Kirk, Spock and Bones became the focus.”

Kelly had this to say about his formative Star Trek experiences: “For me, it was about spending time with my dad in middle school. We moved a lot and we were different people. I was a pale, bookish kid in Hawaii and my dad was an outdoorsy type. But the one thing that we could come together about was Star Trek: Voyager. Every Wednesday night, we would create a big old meal, and sit down for some solid father-son bonding time. Even though we were different, my dad was a big nerd, especially when it came to Star Trek and we would bond over the higher-concept science fiction ideas that we wouldn’t be otherwise be talking about.”

The most exciting adventures begin with the simplest of vessels. Both Kelly and Lanzing were avid table-top role-players and really wanted to create their own Star Trek adventures. Within months, they had small, persistent Star Trek universe, it swelled to over thirty player characters, over a hundred and fifty games and was essentially four seasons of television in its own right. They incorporated characters from the Federation, Romulan, Klingon and Cardassian Empires and by the end of the experience, they had learned how much they loved telling Star Trek stories. This became the core of and the first step of their Trek writing journey.

“Who gets to write Star Trek stories?’ Kelly laughs.

“We loved it,” adds Lanzing. “But what we realized from this experience was that how many people could become Star Trek fans if you gave them the right in. That game taught me that. We had friends who wanted to be part of the game but didn’t know Star Trek. We were like: that’s fine! No problem! Here’s a watch-list. Watch some Star Trek, pitch me an idea and we’ll figure something out! We had so many people become Star Trek fans through the game and saw that people could become fans if they were interested in astrophysics, or religion or they are pulp-adventurers and love that style of storytelling.”

Kelly adds: “My wife really loved sneaking around and betraying people, utterly savagely, with a knife in the back! So, she loved playing a Romulan! She was a part of the Tal’Shiar and then eventually usurped the throne for herself!

“Yeah – she was great at it!” Lanzing confirms.

Meeting new people along the way is a characteristic of an epic journey. In this case, Lanzing and Kelly were able to not only meet new people but they were able to turn them into Trek fans. That’s a pretty impressive accomplishment. “We found all sorts of entrance points for people to get into Star Trek,” says Lanzing. “So, we thought, well, shoot, If we could write something like this that gets people into Star Trek, then … “

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After all this preparation, how did Year Five start?

“Jack and I have been writing together for about a decade until this point in our journey,” recounts Kelly. “Our first comic we wrote was Joyride – we pitched it as ‘teenaged punk rock in Star Trek’. We used the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triumvirate as the apex of storytelling, which if you get that, it’s the most powerful engine for storytelling in any genre. We wrote 12 issues and it remains one of our all-time favorite books. That was around when we started to get into comic book sphere, make relationships and get us to the door of IDW.”

“We literally thought: who’s going to pay us to write Star Trek? So, we wrote our own!” Lanzing says, with a laugh. After a series of different editors at IDW, eventually Lanzing and Kelly managed to find a launching point for their grand adventure. “We put together a two-year multi-book plan, to take all of the characters from TNG and Voyager and do what we had done with our role-playing game and create a multi-threaded, Game of Thrones–style of story. It was a tapestry. We had a book that was going to be a ship book, another that was going to be a station book and then a Section 31 book. They were all going to work together to tell this story and it was going to be over two years. We pitched it to IDW.”

With that pitch came the first challenge to the odyssey.

“We pitched it with all the Trek maps, the official maps of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants,” says Kelly. “We spread them all over the table – told everyone to clear their notebooks off the table – four square feet of space! We had a conspiracy board. The Federation was going to cross over into the Beta Quadrant, they’re going to face Romulan forces … we had this whole thing mapped out! The pitch lasted a while and it was gripping! They were eating out of the palms of our hands! I am happy to say it was one of our proudest pitches!”

“It was a great pitch,” Lanzing continues. “We went out for lunch with David Hedgecock afterwards and he thought it was going to happen. Awesome … let’s do it, he said. We got really, really close and then they greenlit Picard.”

This meant that Lanzing and Kelly couldn’t use the characters from TNG, so it was over and it looked like this odyssey was over before it even began.

“We went from ‘this is going to happen!’ to ‘No Star Trek for you’!” says Lanzing, with a laugh.

However, Star Trek IDW editor Chase Marotz was in the room when it happened.

“We got a call from Chase. He was like ‘Hey guys – I was in on that pitch. You clearly love Star Trek. We’re doing an issue of Star Trek: Waypoint. Are you interested? We pitched one about Data and Spot, and Spot manages to save the ship. We turned it in and suggested Sonny Liew. We never thought it would happen – but Sonny made time out of his schedule to do twelve pages of Star Trek. Lo and behold, it came out and that was our first Star Trek story.”

Chase came back to Lanzing and Kelly on the success of that story and offered them Star Trek: Year Five.

“Chase said they were going to run it like a television writers’ room,” explains Lanzing. “They were going to have writers pitch stories but if we had an idea for an over-arcing plot that would run from Issue #1 to Issue #24, then please pitch it. If that worked, we would be hired to be the showrunners. We would write the first 12 issues, run the writers’ room and then our plot would be the over-arching narrative for the rest of the story.”

With that, the odyssey was afoot.

What is striking about this series is the overwhelming attention to detail in the presentation of the characters. The dialogue reads like script lines from a TOS episode; speech patterns, turns of phrase and even body language is emulated. In Issue # 1, Page 9 in the second panel (drawn by Stephen Thompson), we see a Kirk in an all-too familiar, arms-outstretched pose as he describes the importance of the decision to become Admiral Kirk and leave Captain Kirk behind.

In Kirk’s own odyssey, this is a pivotal moment in the lore and no other series has taken the time to examine this process of the final year of the Enterprise’s return and Kirk’s career. It’s the detail that not only pays homage to that essential piece of Trek lore but gives it the reverential consideration it is due. Every TOS fan would pick up on the importance of this transitional moment.

“We didn’t want to tell Star Trek comics; we wanted to tell Star Trek stories. We had to drop our egos and tell the story that Gene Coon would have approved of. We couldn’t write Kirk as we imagined him. We had to write Kirk as Bill Shatner would have performed him.” Lanzing adds about the artistry in the series: “Stephen Thompson doesn’t just get Shatner or Kirk – he gets the essence of Kirk.”

Every odyssey needs a hero, and Kirk is at the center of this series—a decision that was made intentionally.

“We wrote a ‘bible’ heading into the writers’ room,” says Lanzing. “We noticed that comic writers love Spock. They love Bones. So, Spock and Bones get all these great stories. Kirk gets forgotten a lot in Star Trek comics because they feel like he already had the stories to begin with … He also gets lampooned a lot. When an audience thinks about Kirk, they think about a portly sex-fiend! And that’s hard – especially for people who don’t know the character. They don’t see him as the brooding, stoic warrior genius that he is, so, we saw that and Kirk needs to be at the core of this.”

Lanzing reads from the “bible” he presented to writers Jody Hauser, Brandon Easton and others in the writer’s room: “When in doubt: Kirk. James Kirk is the unabashed protagonist of this series. While Spock and Bones will both have arcs, Kirk must remain a focus. He is not the reckless youth that the Abrams movies have ingrained into the public consciousness but instead a thoughtful, mercurial warrior poet, who couldn’t bear to waste Khan’s potential in a Federation penal colony. He’s 37 years old; he’s a father who does not know his own son and he is completely without close friends other than his first officer and the ship’s doctor. In his own way, he is a tragic figure and we are catching up with him on the cusp of a life-change that we will know he will come to deeply regret. This story is about legacy and responsibility and giving up command after five years. So, think about whatever story you tell as a chance to tell the last tale of Kirk in whatever field your story attacks.”

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This is the Kirk loyal fans who grew up with him as their idol would recognize. Not only is this true of the Original Series, but it is also at core, the essence of Star Trek, as Kirk is the figure who epitomized all of humanity’s passions, failings, ambitions and capacity to learn. This is James T. Kirk as he was meant to be and has now been realized in this missing gap of his career.

Along with Lanzing and Kelly, the writers’ room boasted the talents of Jody Houser, Brandon Easton, Jim McCann, and a one-shot Valentine’s Day special by Paul Cornell. The artists on this series included Stephen Thompson, Martin Coccolo, Silvia Califano, Christopher Jones, Angel Hernandez and one of my personal favorites: J.K. Woodward. The cover of the inaugural issue was by the legendary Greg Hildebrandt. The crew of the odyssey was a rich and accomplished one.

Sadly, it has to end. Why? “We ask ourselves the same ding-dang question!” Kelly answers. “It’s been the highlight of our careers to write these characters. The nature of the title suggests that it has to, but it’s something we regret every day.”

“The power of the book comes from the fact that it does end,” Jackson adds. “We know that the story is ending. We know that it is a tragic story about Kirk giving up the captain’s chair. So, we knew that we were going to land somewhere poignant. Kirk giving up that chair is inherently poignant. So, the challenge is how poignant we can make it. The real power behind this story is turning around and going home and sadly, the odyssey has to end. It’s no good if he doesn’t get back to Ithaca.”

At the time of this article, Issue #20 is the current one. We have four more issues to go, with the finale coming in July. Jackson reports that he had received the art for Issue #24 and, with that, the ship is safely at port for him. For loyal readers who are loathe to see this series end, at least there are more issues to read and enjoy until then.

On social media, fans exclaim that it should be considered canon, high praise for writers who saw the appeal of this franchise to the point that they felt they had to explore its origins, eventually writing what some consider to be the defining story of this missing period. Not only have they given fans something that is acceptable but they have done it with the kind of careful observance the television series deserved.

However, both Lanzing and Kelly take effort to report that this would not be the last time they are to be involved in writing Star Trek. Perhaps we might see them create stories within TNG, Voyager or the other iterations that this franchise has created. In that, perhaps we will see, and enjoy, other odysseys of their creation? If so, then here’s to the next journey.

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Star Trek: Year Five is available to buy here.

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