Posts by philipmatthews
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Craig, you're right -- writing a kick-arse three minute pop song isn't that bloody easy. In fact it's so hard that Kylie herself doesn't do it. Her finest hour by a long shot, Can't Get You Out of My Head -- a song so good Paul Morley more or less wrote a book about it -- is credited to Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis, who have also done hits to order for Britney et al. And the early stuff was Stock Aitken and Waterman.
Hope you're not going to bring that righteous and campy wrath.
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I might have missed it but I don't think Russell has promo'ed this week's Media 7 -- was a good one, and an enjoyably unserious way to cap off a great series this year. The Simon Pound bit is especially good -- like EML but for real (I hope).
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Thanks for the Film Archive link. I never knew Ronnie Van Hout had directed a video for The Clean's Getting Older or that a clip even existed of the Suburban Reptiles doing Megaton. Excellent. RVH fans could see how that clip anticipates stuff he was doing on film 10, 15 years later -- Bob Scott as existential nowhere man.
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Incidentally, that argument amongst American critics was kicked off by the great critic David Bordwell in this piece, which is well worth a read if you've ever wondered why action films seem more confusing now than ever before:
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I think you're right about both Forster and Nolan -- they simply aren't action directors. There was a big argument amongst critics in the US last year around The Bourne Ultimatum, shot on handheld and edited to hell. It gives you an adrenalin rush or a jolt but you simply can't get a sense of who's doing what where and to whom. Action should be about choreography -- these films are like shooting a 30s musical in a bunch of handheld close-ups with no wide shots of the whole chorus line.
Compare with a well-staged and coherent action sequence by Steven Spielberg, John Woo or James Cameron -- the latter would be the master in my view, especially in Aliens and the first two Terminators.
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Craig, marketing may or may not have pushed I Am Legend over the line but it did nothing for The Golden Compass. According to Variety, the total brand-backed spend -- ie with all the burger tie-ins and so on -- was around US$120m on top of a US$150m budget. New Line was spending like they had Lord of the Rings IV on their hands. And then they only pulled in US$70m domestically. Those were massive gambles they were taking. And if it was as easy as saying this star does it or that marketing spend does it, every film would be a winner. Which brings us back to that William Goldman line.
You're right about Bond -- it's a confidence trick played on the movie-going public every two years. Those are very ordinary action movies at best.
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Which is why Tom Hanks and Will Smith probably have the most dependable starpower right now. Tom Cruise, not so much. A lot hangs on Valkyrie. Cruise as a good Nazi in an eyepatch?
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If you look at the opening weekends, here:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/weekends/
then it's dominated by fantasy/comic-book adaptations aimed at teens, and not that star-dependent. Heath Ledger's profile might have made a small difference to The Dark Knight's BO (as Variety would put it) and Johnny Depp's to the Pirates movies, and Harrison Ford's obviously to the last Indiana Jones, but otherwise it's about concept rather than star. Then again, would I Am Legend have done US$77m in its first weekend if it starred Joe the Plumber rather than Will Smith?
Generally Steve you're right. But that Kidman film Australia is a different kind of movie and pitched at a different audience -- older, women generally, and less likely to go to the movies every weekend and see whatever's just opened and has a lot of CGI in it. So stars matter for those films.
And Craig, yes, the US is less than 5% of the world's population but it's where these films open first and widest -- and where a good or bad buzz is created -- and it would still be the largest English-speaking market in the world. But there are plenty of people who think that the reporting of weekend grosses as news is inane and possibly destructive to a more marginal film's long-term chances. I'd tend to agree with that. And to bring it all back to Coddington -- it would be nice if she'd tried to assess some of the films named in that NZFC report as art rather than judge them as commerce. At the risk of repeating myself and boring everyone, films like Rain of the Children and Out of the Blue.
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Craig, if John Key had been running for President of the United States you might have a point. But I think Giovanni just put that better in three words.
Here in NZ, anti-semitism has never been much of an issue, which is why no-one bothered talking about John's Jewishness during the campaign.
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Love the bit in that Colepatch column where Clark gets accused of "pseudo-Peronist populism". You think you've heard everything possible insult from the Kiwiblog right, and then a new one comes from out of not-left field. Doubt there's a musical in Peter Davis's life though.