Things are progressing steadily on Our Last Summer, my feature film that I'm planning to make in 2012. I have started a pre-production diary which is helping me to make sure that I do things every single day. Ideally, there should not be a day that goes by when I do not do something (however small) towards the pre-production stage of the film. I am now around 80 pages through the first draft of the screenplay, a fairly advanced stage - although it looks like it is going to be considerably longer than I had first anticipated! For those who are unaware, screenplays usually average out at around a minute of screen time per page. So with what I have currently written, I have around 80 mins of screen time, not too far off an hour and a half. As I don't wish the film to go too far past this mark I will be wrapping the script up as soon as possible and sending it to my producer. After this point it's full steam ahead! Casting auditions will be taking place on 8/9 October in both Portsmouth and Southampton, so if you are local and are interested in taking part in a feature film (main characters, secondary characters and extras all required) then please come along. We have booked Groundlings Theatre in Portsmouth for the 9th October - should provide a great base for the auditions. The Southampton location is TBA. I am also currently scouting out local bands and singers to appear on the film's soundtrack, as well as graphic designers to design the film's logo. So if any of this would be of interest to you or someone you know, please keep me informed! Would be great to get as many people from the area involved as possible. We will be looking for runners and extras in due course, as well as more vital roles in the crew.
I found out the other day that my short film, Whirlwind Summer Romance, was screened at the Ventnor Fringe Festival 2011, Isle of Wight at the weekend, and was apparently well received! Although I was disappointed to only find out about this after the event (as I would've quite liked to have attended), it's still great to know that the film notched up its first festival appearance and went down well with its audience. All a good start! The short film will also be shown at Shorts:Cut 2011 in Portsmouth - its screening takes place on the 24th September at the lovely Kings Theatre, Southsea. I will be attending this particular night and look forward to seeing my film on the big screen, as well as the other films made by local talent. These festival evenings may also provide a great chance to begin promoting my feature film. There should also hopefully be another couple of chances for Whirlwind screenings, too, with several expected to get back to me over the coming months with regards to my submission. I am hopeful of being in some way involved with the upcoming Southampton Film Week, which runs from October 7th-16th. It seems I may have a good chance of seeing Whirlwind screened there too.
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I have recently secured myself a volunteering job with the organisation SoFair, based in Southampton. SoFair, which is run by Southampton Solent University, is a social enterprise that distributes fair trade bags made from organic pure cotton, produced by tsunami affected women in Pondicherry, Southern India. This is my first chance to get stuck into some volunteering work and I am looking forward to the challenge. My main responsibilities will be the running of the organisation's social media, predominantly their Facebook and Twitter pages. In the last few days I have set up both a Facebook page and Twitter page for SoFair, so please get liking and following - although it's early stages, it's very important we start to get their name out there and make people aware of the great things they are doing. If you could make use of some fair trade bags, or even if you just fancy supporting the women of Pondicherry, who could so do with your suppport, then please do get in contact with SoFair. Their various links are below -
SUPER 8 - Let's start with the obvious - Yes, this is a quite blatant homage to early Steven Spielberg. Spielberg is on board Super 8 as producer. The film's director JJ Abrams has confessed to growing up watching Spielberg's output and trying to emulate it as a young boy with his own Super 8 camera. In the 'young kids making a film in the 70s' respect, Super 8 seems to draw on Abrams' own experiences of childhood and the effect of cinema, and in particular Spielberg's films, upon his own life and career. It deals with a number of similar themes as early Spielberg, including the obvious (aliens! kids!) to the less obvious (absent parent, family issues). The film is placed within the late 1970's, very much the time at which Spielberg was exploding onto the scene. So it's been done before, and it isn't going to break any boundaries - we know that, we can acknowledge that. What we are left with is a beautifully nostalgic, lovingly crafted dedication to old-school filmmaking and a time in which children gained their entertainment from going outside and making films with their friends, rather than relying on Facebook and their Xbox. Indeed, watching this makes me somewhat regret not taking a camera outside and making films with my friends when I was younger. And if the film does owe greatly to Close Encounters and to E.T, then it surely owes just as greatly to Rob Reiner's classic Stand By Me (1986), the true masterpiece of the coming-of-age story.
Super 8 is set in the fictional town of Lillian, Ohio. A group of friends, led by Joe (Joel Courtney) and Charles (Riley Griffiths), are attempting to make a zero budget zombie film to send off to a local film festival. In the process of filming one evening the group of friends watch as a train is mysteriously derailed, and from then on the film takes a serious turn for the weird. The film in a sense suffers from the same issues of as Spielberg's early films also did - the coming-of-age aspects are infinitely more entertaining and rewarding than the sometimes substandard alien plot. The great pay-off at the film's ending is not the somewhat disappointing conclusion (all very rushed and all very convenient) to the extra-terrestrial goings on, but rather the joy of getting to see the finished zombie film 'The Case' over the end credits - a quirky, funny piece of imaginative storytelling. This is driven largely by the huge likeability of the young leading cast and their characters. During the times in which the friends are kept apart or relegated to the sidelines by the alien and the army trying to shoot it down we as an audience cry out for the next time we can bear witness to the group's sweet dynamics.
Joel Courtney proves a child actor worth keeping an eye out for after his great turn as our hero Joe Lamb, a typically Spielbergian concoction of innocence, wild imagination, an insatiable hunger for adventure and multiple social and emotional awakenings. Newcomer Riley Griffiths' Charles is another nicely sketched character; moving past his initial stereotype of the 'fat kid in the group', Charles becomes wonderfully important, a kid full of caution but also a resourceful nature and a quite mature drive for success. A review that I read online highlighted Abrams' ability to craft a strong female character, an ability somewhat lacking at times from Spielberg's early ouvre, and Elle Fanning's Alice Dainard proves this - a character that is real, believable and yet instilled with a heavy enough air of mystery for her to be a plausible object of pre-pubescent desire for the main boys. Fanning follows up her stellar turn in Sofia Coppola's Somewhere with this equally impressive performance. A number of truly inspiring images within the film show Abrams' true potential as a storyteller after good but not amazing work on Mission: Impossible 3 and Cloverfield, plus his television output. I really can't sum Super 8 up any better than Empire's Kim Newman, who called the film 'something to cherish: a beautifully made homage to better times, and better movies'. I'll give it a 4/5.
I'm off to see The Inbetweeners Movie next week and am also hoping to get to see Captain America at some point soon so I'm sure I will be posting reviews of these and other films in the coming weeks.
Here is a selection of the film trailers currently on my radar. They aren't all brand new, but they have all got me hooked!
DRIVE - First off, let me be honest. I have a massive man crush on Ryan Gosling. I think he's fantastic. I'll watch pretty much anything with him in, let alone something that looks THIS DAMN GOOD. Drive follows 'a Hollywood stunt performer who moonlights as a wheelman discovers that a contract has been put on him after a heist gone wrong' (IMDb). It looks intense as hell - let's just say, this probably won't be for a great number of The Notebook fans. Gosling looks like he kicks serious butt in a role that signifies a noteable change of direction for his career. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn has already made a name for himself after well-received works Bronson and Valhalla Rising, and the film also stars the terrific Carey Mulligan, Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks. TRAILER RATING - 4/5
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN - Now let's get it clear - yes, it most probably is far too soon after Sam Raimi's efforts for Columbia Pictures and Marvel to be 'rebooting' or 'reimagining' or whatever the hell it is they are doing to the Spider-Man series. Spider-Man 3 was also nowhere near as bad as some critics made it out to be; indeed, emo walks and excessive villains aside, it was a fun enough romp and a worthy addition to the series. I always, despite what some may have said, liked Kirsten Dunst as MJ. I also, again despite what some have said, LOVED Tobey Maguire as Spidey himself, believing him to have near on perfected the 'loveable geek turns hero' schtick that made Spider-Man such a popular comic book character in the first place. So yes, fans, I understand your issues. I am now, however, going to forget all that, and do what should be done - assess this trailer, and the upcoming film, on their own merits. After all, it is hardly the faults of Marc Webb, Andrew Garfield or Emma Stone that Marvel decided to reboot so quickly. Were they but untried and untested amateurs they should be given a chance, but the facts that they represent the very bright futures of both filmmaking and acting while already boasting such impressive CVs should instill some level of excitement. I must admit I have always preferred MJ to Gwen Stacy in the role of Spidey's love interest, but Stone could be an inspired choice to take on a more youthful Stacy. Garfield, meanwhile, seems like he will bring a darker and more brooding edge to the titular hero than Maguire's interpretation. His slim build and already well established ability to act wounded and anguished fit Peter Parker well. The film looks like it may stick closer to the comics than Raimi's did, with a welcome backstory involving Parker's parents that was never included in the last three Spider-Man films. Martin Sheen and Rhys Ifans are superb choices for Uncle Ben and Curt Connors respectively. Yes, the POV swinging-through-the-city shots are awful. But what comes before it provides a strong enough suggestion that come next summer, fans may well do away with their scepticism and embrace this fresh take on Spidey. TRAILER RATING - 3/5.
CONTAGION - IMDb calls it 'an action-thriller centered on the threat posed by a deadly disease and an international team of doctors contracted by the CDC to deal with the outbreak'. The film boasts the hugely impressive cast of A-listers Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Laurence Fishburne, as well as the directorial talents of the prolific Mr Steven Soderbergh. Contagion looks set to be a hugely relevant release, tapping into the paranoia so prevalent in today's society. Considering the mass hysteria with regards to the Bird Flu, SARS and Swine Flu outbreaks in recent years, it's a wonder that the worldwide epidemic has not been covered more often in contemporary cinema. And you can be guaranteed it'll be better than The Happening. TRAILER RATING - 3/5
HUGO - If you didn't KNOW this was a Scorsese film, if the trailer didn't announce it in big bold letters, then there would be no clues whatsoever. Scorsese's ventures out of his comfort zone are always if not brilliant then at the very least intriguing. Hugo represents his first foray into the family film - the film even has a release scheduled for the weeks before Christmas, a time usually pencilled in for family adventure films and comedies (and the occasional Harry Potter, LOTR or Twilight). It will undoubtedly prove a wildly different beast to the other films currently on his slate, including his much-anticipated return to the gangster genre with The Irishman, starring Robert de Niro and Al Pacino. Anyway, Hugo has a really quite astonishing cast - Chloe Moretz, Jude Law, Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ray Winstone, Michael Stuhlbarg, Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee, Richard Griffiths, as well as relative unknown Asa Butterfield as the titular character - a (though this may go without saying) fantastic director and what looks like a tale full of the sort of old-school magical adventure so rare in cinema today. TRAILER RATING - 4/5
THE AVENGERS - Captain America. Iron Man. Thor. The Hulk. Hawkeye. Nick Fury. Black Widow. The FREAKIN' AVENGERS. Need I say more? TRAILER RATING - 3/5
THE ART OF GETTING BY - This is a trailer I kind of stumbled across, but The Art of Getting By looks just like the kind of American indie, Sundance-baiting dramedy that really appeals to me. The film follows a young guy called George (played by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's Freddie Highmore - all grown up!) who struggles greatly with school and homework and has fallen off the rails in a certain sense. I think Emma Roberts is a great young actress (particularly after seeing her turns in Scream 4 and It's Kind of a Funny Story) and should bring some quality to her role, while Freddie Highmore looks set to build on a number of great child roles with his first 'grown up' role of note. I'm hoping to catch the UK Premiere of this film at the Chichester Film Festival in a couple of weeks - will update the blog accordingly if I do! The reviews have been mixed but I'm still looking forward to it. TRAILER RATING - 3/5
The trailer I was most excited about? Probably not even in this list. It's probably The Dark Knight Rises. But if I started to discuss my excitement for that particular film I would probably explode.
I have recently secured myself a volunteering job with the organisation SoFair, based in Southampton. SoFair, which is run by Southampton Solent University, is a social enterprise that distributes fair trade bags made from organic pure cotton, produced by tsunami affected women in Pondicherry, Southern India. This is my first chance to get stuck into some volunteering work and I am looking forward to the challenge. My main responsibilities will be the running of the organisation's social media, predominantly their Facebook and Twitter pages. In the last few days I have set up both a Facebook page and Twitter page for SoFair, so please get liking and following - although it's early stages, it's very important we start to get their name out there and make people aware of the great things they are doing. If you could make use of some fair trade bags, or even if you just fancy supporting the women of Pondicherry, who could so do with your suppport, then please do get in contact with SoFair. Their various links are below -
