Movies for 2010 - Part 9

[dalekboy]

16th March
Stranger Than Fiction

18th March
Transformers

19th March
The Creature from the Black Lagoon - in 3D!

20th March
Hot Fuzz

22nd March
Wanted
The Man Who Would Be King



I rather enjoyed Stranger Than Fiction while Transformers was worse than I remembered. My plan was to watch Transformers then watch the sequel, but it was fucking painful, don't think I'll bother. A film with only one likeable character (female computer geek) is just a wasted effort.

The 3D version of Creature works for all the same reasons Avatar did - the 3D is used to immerse you in a world. I remember seeing this at the Valhalla cinema in Melbourne, and the bits the audience reacted to were relatively simple shots with fish swimming about. In fact, even though I'd seen the film many times before the Valhalla screening, I'd never realised it was 3D feature, there was nothing in the direction that would be out of place in a regular movie. And the most important thing is, I genuinely love the story.

Man Who Would Be King was very good. Sean Connery and Michael Caine playing a pair of utter bastards, but still managing to make them likeable. The end of the film still guts you, even with fore-warning.

Comments

[gutter-monkey.livejournal.com]

The story behind how Transformers 2 got made is pretty interesting, and also quite horrifying if you're a cinema fan.

Remember that big writers strike that Hollywood had a while back? The two writers for TF2 managed to hand a short plot outline to Michael Bay the night before the strike started, and they weren't allowed to discuss the film with him at all while the strike was on. When the strike finally ended they headed in to the studio to get back to work on it and discovered that the movie was already in pre-production. Bay went and wrote a 30 page treatment for the film by himself, created a few characters (can you guess which ones??? C'mon, it's not hard) and a few jokes and came up with some scenes he really wanted to put in the film so he started his special effects guys working on all that. The poor writers walked into this mess and were told to write a script that would tie it all together.

So now you know - the script was literally the last element added to the film.