- Friday night's screening of Back to the Future at the Cinemark was packed with a rowdy, appreciative audience. The movie is the perfect crowd-pleaser; even though most of the audience had seen the film before, there was spontaneous applause in several spots. July brings Terminator 2 and hopefully another fun collective experience of the kind that we film geeks live for.
- Rob Zombie is directing the next installment in the Halloween series. I'm not much of a Bond fan, but I think I understand the 007 crowd's anxiety over Casino Royale, because I'd love to see the film meet the highs of the original. Or part II. Or at least part 4. Anyway, I wonder if Sid Haig will play Donald Pleasance.
- The screenwriting process carries on at a snail's pace. It's like Whack-a-Mole: when one problem has been successfully clobbered, another rears its ugly, toothy little head. The story is more or less in place; now all I have to do is figure out what the characters, you know, say. There also remains the persistent question of tone; the choice of whether to push the story in a funnier, or scarier, or more reflective direction opens up opportunities at the same time as it closes others. And what I believe to be every filmmaker's nightmare has already happened; a sequence I'd imagined as a cornerstone of the film has turned out to be strikingly similar to another work (in this case, Charles Burns' brilliant Black Hole). My choices are to defend the similarities as unintentional (as Terry Gilliam did with Brazil and 1984), push them further in the direction of homage, or start from scratch. I really just want to get behind a camera.
- Re-watching Sid and Nancy today, I found myself reflecting on the fact that Alex Cox desperately needs to make another movie that lives up to the one-two punch of Repo Man and this. I mean, it's been twenty years. Which auteur are you rooting for to make a comeback?
1 comment:
Nicholas Roeg needs to make another film.
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