After the Oscars

• Seth MacFarlane says he won't present again. Total Film have listed his best and worst lines from the night.
• For those who didn't see it: A complete list of all the winners
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• Bizarrely amusing alt-Oscars over at Film School Rejects

Personally I'm with Minnie Driver who, when interviewed outside the Vanity Fair Party by the BBC, said that she had wanted it to be more exciting.

Niche sub-genres that have and haven't taken off

Cross posted from Yellow Bunting

Genre is a useful tool for classifying films and a good way to attract certain audiences to certain films. Sub-genres and Hybrid-genres are a way for directors and writers to come up with new ideas and unique pieces of work. Sometimes then they accidently kick off a (usually short lived) trend:

Cowboy-Ninja Films

What’s cool? Cowboys are cool. What else is cool? Ninja. Therefore cool squared is personified by films like Bunraku (Guy Moshe, 2010) and The Warrior’s Way (Sngmoo Lee, 2010). Both genres share similar themes such as honour, revenge, redemption etc and in both these cases at least, makes for some striking visuals with The Warrior’s Way evoking a steampunk-esque aesthetic while Bunraku favouring a comic book/puppet theatre inspired look.

Terminal Illness Rom Coms

The perfect valentine’s date movie. Or not. 2010 and 2011 saw the release of Love and Other Drugs  (Edward Zwick, 2010) and A Little Bit of Heaven (Nicole Kassel, 2011). One starred Anne Hathaway and the other Kate Hudson and each played a woman who was dying from an awful terminal illness but found love. So that was nice.

For painfully obvious reason neither film was terribly well received though A Little Bit of Heaven got it far worse. Possibly because of the absence of Anne Hathaway.

Victorian Department Store Melodramas

Oh how the big wigs at ITV must have been kicking themselves when BBC broadcast The Paradise last year. Their own series Mr Selfridge looked like a rip off in comparison. Despite the fact that The Paradise is derived from a novel from Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart (albeit with all of Zola’s ideas on Hereditary personality deficiencies within a screwed up French family, the very thing the series was written to demonstrate, removed) novels and Mr Selfridge is based on the establishment of (guess where?) Selfridges department store on Oxford Street  the two share a staggering number of characters and plot devices. Eccentric, brilliant owner whose ideas are scoffed at but eventually proved right? CHECK. Young naïve sales girl with hidden talents for retail? CHECK. Men throwing themselves at her from all directions? CHECK. Rich bitch in fabulous hats skulking around and manipulating everyone? CHECK. Swooshing skirts. CHECK.

NOTE: I am aware that being set in 1906, Mr Selfridge should properly be termed an Edwardian Department Store Melodrama, but that aside, all the other glaring similarities between the two still stand.

Films based on board games

Battleship I’m looking at you. But it may surprise you to learn that another classic family favourite, Cluedo, was turned into a film in the 1980s. Clue (Johnathan Lynn, 1985) stars Tim Curry as butler who brings together a group of eccentric and chromatically themed characters in a case of blackmail and murder. It is wonderfully tacky and gloriously cheesy and comes complete with three different endings, only one of which makes sense but don’t think too hard about that. It was poorly received but has become a cult classic.

Horrifyingly it is being remade by Gore Verbinski.

The Underwater Realm and the New Age of Film

Cross posted from Yellow Bunting

Filmmaking is an industry primarily driven by money. Of course it is artistic but primarily films get money poured into them because they are financially viable and will make a profit.

However, with the rise of the Internet and free content there as been a slight push away from this as content becomes more accessible.  Similarly resources and contacts also become more accessible and the process of making a film is there for the audience to see even before the final product is ready.  For example, Felicia Day’s series The Guild is available first through paid subscription and then in bite size episodes free to view on You Tube. It is low budget but has a huge fan base that extends to the creation of the Geek and Sundry channel on You Tube that has a host of daily low budget and high entertainment shows free to view. The Guild was even inspiration for Joss Whedon’s “show that broke the internet” Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog.

A Rant of Sorts

I love film. That much should be evident. I love writing about film, reading about film, talking about film and obsessing over film but most of all I love watching film for without doing that I couldn't do any of those other things.

So what happens when I can't watch a film.

One of the films I have been dying to see this year is Cloud Atlas, released in the US in October 2012 and opening in the UK this Friday. On it's opening weekend it should be widely available right? Right!?

Picture from here

No. Firstly the shitty excuse for a cinema down the road isn't showing it at all. neither is the nearest large cinema, VUE, in Oxford. The VUE in Reading is only showing it at 3.00pm and 5.00pm during the week a tricky ask for people who are working all day.

Photo from here

This reflects how the film was marketed in the US too, little advertising and overall not pushed as much as the bigger budget Oscar contenders and it isn't unique to Cloud Atlas. Hollywood thrives on money and internal politics, often to the detriment of gorgeous pieces of work and this filters down to the audiences.

So don't expect a review of Cloud Atlas soon, it might take a while to find it.

TV's Biggest Train Wreck?

Happy Valentine's Day. In honour of this day celebrating love, have a read of this article chronicling the disaster that is NBC's Smash.

Airing on Sky Atlantic over here, Smash tells the story of a group of frankly awful excuses for human beings trying to put on a Broadway show about Marilyn Monroe. The second series has started over in the States and I saw series one last year. It is the very height of trashy-ness and I watch it for all the wrong reasons (which are eloquently highlighted in the article) but both the show and the article raises questions about content makers and the behind the scenes issues of some of our biggest shows.

Newsbeat: "Why online companies are moving into TV"

 Natalie Jamieson's article over at Newsbeat was prompted by the recent release of Netflix's first ever original show.

House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey is a remake of the early 90s, British miniseries of the same name, itself an adaptation of a bestselling novel. The action has moved from Whitehall to Washington but the buzz of House of Cards isn't the show itself but it's delivery system.

All 13 episodes are available for immediate watching just like a DVD boxset, so what Netflix have done is essentially sold it's viewers a 13 hour movie in the guise of a Boxset Binge (though Netflix prefers the term "Marathoning" perhaps to move away from the image of viewers vegetating away in front of a screen like a mindless zombie) or if you are more cynical, a 13 hour advert as to why you should opt for them over Love Film.

As the article states other companies are looking to follow suit, potentially changing the way that we view television shows forever.

I haven't seen the show, being a Love Film subscriber instead but if you're interested Mark Lawson has written a review over at The Guardian as does Gennedy Kolker here.

The Underwater Realm

A while back I wrote a.post about a film I was excited about called The UnderwaterRealm. An indie film that looks like it has a Hollywood budget, Realm is free to view on You Tube and is actually made up of five short films with stunning visuals and little to know dialogue. These guys are super passionate about their project and the more views they get the more they will be spurred on to create beautiful works like this so please subscribe and watch!

In roughly two weeks I will have an article over at Yellow Bunting on Realm and the rise of other internet films and shows!

For Your Consideration

Cross posted from Yellow Bunting

Awards season is upon us and as every film geek knows it is a grand celebration of all the achievements made in Western (okay mostly American) film over the past twelve months. Saying that, it’s also a chance for every aforementioned film geek plus critics and casual observers to gripe and whine about the various “snubs” and omissions and for the nausea inducing, sycophantic interviews that forms half all of the multi channel coverage, the other half being those horrific “let’s rip into these otherwise successful and beautiful women by making offensive comments about their appearance” shows.

I have a love/hate relationship with awards shows. On the one hand gets everyone talking about films and I have to own up to enjoying my fair share of glitz and glamour. On the other hand it gets people whinging about films and the complaints over who has been omitted can overshadow the glory of those who win.

The best example of this is how the word “snub” becomes the buzzword on everybody’s lips as soon as the first batch of nominations are out.

There is always outrage that XYZ didn’t make it in or if Film A was nominated why wasn’t the guy who directed it? This year for example, Skyfall didn’t receive any Oscar nominations for its lead actor or director and wasn’t nominated for best picture.  Even at our own BAFTAs Skyfall is trailing behind Lincoln (which hasn’t even been released in the UK yet, much to the consternation of many British film goers) which got 10 nominations. Director Steven Spielberg has been “snubbed” by both BAFTA and the Academy who have both left him out of the lists for Best Director. Add into the mix the same arguments about animation and foreign film that come back year after year and you start to wonder why anyone bothers. Of course money plays a huge part as does ego and the fact that many awards and nominations are politically motivated but there is also the fact that these are good films.

It isn’t helpful to dwell on the negatives and flinging the word “snub” around just diminishes the achievements made by those who did make it in to the nominations. So I for one resolve this year to approach awards season with an open mind and view it as a way to be introduced to new films and discovered new, thoroughly deserving, talent.

Full list of Academy Award nominees here

Full list of BAFTA nominees here