Well, I took my son to see 300 at the local Empire multiplex on Wednesday to see for myself what all the hype was about. I have to admit that it was far better than I had imagined. As long as you watch it  as a fantasy rendition of a true life event, then you see a stunning piece of cinematography and special effects.

At the centre of the film are two strong performances by Gerard Butler (Leonidas) and Lena Headey as his queen. My prayers for some back story and a bit of political intrigue in the plot were answered although it was never going to score highly in these. Why? Because its focus is the battle itself. The scenes in Sparta are merely pauses for you to get your breath back after what are incredible and adrenalin-laced set pieces.

The film revels in war and mayhem. The action scenes are balletic in their choreography and the sense of overwhelming force is always in the background of the shots.  There is even a bit of grim humour as Leonidas, eating an apple, and his captain carry on an everyday conversation whilst wounded Persians are being speared to death around them after the battle. No prisoners. They are Spartans.

The final scenes where Leonidas and his men are slaughtered by arrows is realized in spectacular fashion although surprisingly you don’t feel the emotional pull of, say, “Gladiator”. The sense of a doomed enterprise is overridden by the battle lust. The only hint of vulnerability is when the captain’s son is killed in front of this eyes and he goes mad for a while.

The enemy, Xerxes the god king of Persia, is portrayed as an exotic, exaggerated, charming devil who uses persuasion and seduction to get what he wants. If all else fails he falls back on barbaric cruelty. He looks and feels like a monster, almost other-worldly. I guess this was done to contrast starkly against the heroic and human Leonidas.

All in all, 300 is a roller coaster of an action movie with a look and feel that we have never really seen before in epic movies. Well done Zack Snyder again. A pretty staggering follow up to “Dawn of the Dead”. Even my son loved it.

I’ve just been taken back to my childhood this afternoon. “The 300 Spartans” has been shown on ITV1. A friend and I saw this at one of the cinemas in Scunthorpe (my home town) when I was 11 during a wonderful and formative time in my life.

I guess this latest TV showing is tied into the upcoming release of “300″, a retelling of the classic graphical novel by Frank Miller as a dark comic book fantasy.

I saw “The 300 Spartans” as child as part of my induction into sword and sandal epics. Just another one of a large number of epics made about events in ancient Rome or Greece made as co-productions usually with Italians taking the lead. I remember “The Wooden Horse of Troy” (later retitled “The Trojan Wars”), “Romulus and Remus”, “The Colossus of Rhodes” and a few more.

“The 300 Spartans” was in that genre but had largely Hollywood values and the cream of British acting talent taking the supporting roles at the time. It is not the best film in the world but to an impressionable 11 year old in 1964 it was exciting and captivating. The scale, the action, the excitement, the heroism, the sacrifice.

As a more cynical 54 year old the scenes that invoked my attention this time round were the politics, the oratory, the history and the arguments between the city states of Greece before unification. Ralph Richardson was wonderful as Thermistocles. It’s not quite in the league of the darkly menacing and acidic sparring between Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton in the Roman Senate in “Spartacus” but interesting nevertheless.

The action scenes were quite impressive as spectacle but a few close battlefield shots let them down ultimately. And the final rain of transparent arrows drawn on to the film that kill the remaining Spartans is a bit laughable. But it was 1963. No CGI then. At the end of the day it was a traditional Hollywood film about a worthy subject - self sacrifice to  protect freedom and democracy against tyranny. Some have seen it having Cold War overtones. Looking back there are many parallels with “El Cid” which came out two years earlier in 1961.

Now back to the here and now. I confess to not having seen the film yet but “300″ looks very promising. The trailers are sensational. Clearly this is no remake. And the stamp of “Sin City” on the look of this film is undeniable. I hope the acting and the narrative are as good as the graphics. This time style is paramount. It appears as if bronze statues have come to life. Realism and historical accuracy are put to one side as the tale becomes a fantasy. And maybe a homoerotic one at that.

What it does share in common with its predecessor is the epic qualities in the battle scenes. Nowadays, we cannot expect to see live action epics that just happen to use half of the Greek army to act as the hoardes of Persian invaders. It would be just too costly. So CGI steps in and we can manufacture virtual warriors. Scores of them at much less cost and much more manageable.

Violence as we all now know has to be shown graphically today. Audiences of most ages have come to expect it. Tons of gore and hacked off limbs. Stop motion fight sequences. Blood splashes in slow motion. But there has to be “wow” factor, something that hasn’t been seen before to single it out from the crowd. Even in the trailers you can see that “300″ has it, the “wow” factor.

I just hope there is sufficient back story, character development, and narrative nuance to satisfy us old timers. Otherwise, it may just be a Pyrrhic victory for style over content. I have cheated and looked at the IMDB feedback which at the moment is terrific. I’ll have to see for myself!

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I was watching the television when The Straight Story was showing last night. It reminded me of the first time that I’d seen that film and the emotions that I’d experienced.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting on a bit in years that I found it very moving. And it was all the more moving because it was based on a true story.

The plot is very simple. Two brothers, who haven’t seen each other for ten years, suffer a stroke and a fall respectively at about the same time. One of the brothers, Alvin, decides to visit the other, Lyle, to see how he is and put right the past. Problem - he has no money to pay for the trip. Solution - he ties up a trailer to his lawnmower and sets off on a 350 mile trip down to Wisconsin where his brother now lives.

The film is about the journey but explores lots of themes. The film is gentle and rhythmic (almost lyrical) and is governed by the pace of the lawnmower (which becomes a small John Deere Tractor by the end). There is no whiz bang here, it is a quiet character piece that hints at bigger themes - struggling with old age, the importance of family ties, getting lost on all sorts of different levels , the words left unsaid. It is a beautifully hypnotic film.

One of the most amazing things about the film is that it is directed by David Lynch, he of the surreal Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and the bewildering Twin Peaks (TV). One commentator said of Lynch that “he has the power to disturb and bewitch” at the same time. However, this is a quiet meditation.

This film, set in the mid west small towns, is played straight (no pun intended)  yet Lynch is able to bewitch (if not disturb us) through the surrealness of the ordinary.The odd characters, the unusual nature of the journey, the stunning visuals. The acting, particularly by Richard Farnsworth as Alvin, is excellent as we are drawn into his world and struggle with him. We are aching for him to reach his brother’s place and willing them to reconcile. The final bitter-sweet scene on Lyle’s ramshackle porch (with hardly any dialogue) conveys the obvious rift there has been between them and a brotherly indifference masking the hint of a reconciliation.

I suppose many younger film goers brought up on a fare of action movies and special effects might find the film boring. Older film goers will probably relate to many aspects of the film feeling apprehension at the thought of growing old and joy at the eventual triumph of the will (or equally apt, stubbornness). It’s one of the films that will stick in my memory until the day I die.

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Ever since cinema began Hollywood executives and screenwriters have been looking for the holy grail - a story structure that will work over and over again in different environments, across different genres and with different characters to lay the foundations for a successful screenplay. If you had this formula it would be like pure gold or cash in the bank.

As film-making is a business no one wants to lose money. No studio wants a flop. Every screen writer wants to increase their chance of their script acceptance. Imagine having a story model that would hook the audience every time and draw them into the film and tap into universal human emotions.

Over the years there have been a couple of main contenders which have been used by screenwriters. Surprisingly, the first was of Russian origin.

Vladimir Propp (1928) made an analysis of Russian folk tales and discovered that they shared certain common structural features regardless of the individual differences in terms of plot, setting or characters. He proposed that there were certain roles that were present in the characters - the hero, the villain, the false hero, the donor, the helper etc. - that were always present in the characters despite the different setting and plot. He also defined 31 narrative units that described action in the story. These units were enough to describe all the stories but not all the units are present although the units that are there follow a prescribed order.

The Proppian analysis or structure does have its limitations. It is difficult to apply such an analysis to non linear story structures where there are several storylines intermingling. Examples include Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and several of Robert Altman’s movies eg. Nashville, Short Cuts.

The second major contender is based on the work of Joseph Campbell whose book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” is about storytelling and mythology. This was interpreted by Christopher Vogler, a story evaluator for many motion picture studios, and morphed into “The Writer’s Journey” (1992).

“The Writer’s Journey” shows how a mythic story structure can be used to invest films with a powerful story. There are analyses of many different popular and successful films using the Writer’s Journey structure. And this book has had such an influence on the way Hollywood films are written. George Lucas admitted to using mythic story structures in writing the Star Wars films.

Again, there are more character roles (the hero, the mentor, threshold guardian, trickster etc.) and action narrative units ( ordinary world, call to adventure, refusal of the call, meeting with the mentor etc.) It is probably more sophisticated than the Propp model and can be more flexible in analyzing non linear stories. As the book points out, the model is not a recipe or cook book.

In the epilogue to the book, Vogler says:

the ultimate measure of a story’s success or excellence is not its compliance with any established patterns, but its lasting popularity and effect on the audience.To force a story to conform to a structural model is putting the the cart before the horse.It’s possible to write good stories that don’t exhibit every feature of the Hero’s (Writer’s) journey; in fact, it’s better if they don’t. people love to see familiar conventions and expectations defied creatively. A story can break all the “rules” and still touch universal human emotions.

Whilst there is no perfect story, these models provide genuine insights into what works well and what doesn’t.

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I am not a great fan of film remakes as they rarely live up to the original but when I heard that George Romero’s cult classic “Zombies - Dawn of the Dead” (or better, Zombies at Woolworth’s) was to be remade then my ears pricked up a little.

I first tried to see the original in a cinema in Sunderland in the NE of England many years ago. I only managed to see about twenty minutes of it before my then-girlfriend decided that she could stomach no more and we had to leave. The sight of a zombie having the top of his head sliced off by a helicopter blade and the shooting of two young child zombies just about finished her off. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about (only kidding).

I eventually got to see it one video several years later. For the late 1970s this was graphic, gut churning stuff and extremely scary in a very creepy way.   The special effects make-up was great, pieces of flesh hanging off faces. Zombies blindly following the smell of live humans around. The rigor mortis-type walks. And the all-important eating of limbs with relish.

Any one could out run one of Romero’s zombies but they just kept on coming at you. Just wait till you run out of bullets.It was a case of how long could you postpone the inevitable. It created a siege mentality in the audience particularly in the scenes within the shopping mall. Could they escape? If so, which ones? Would there be a happy ending? (I don’t think we knew at the time that this was the second in a trilogy). It delivered quite a punch at the time and, although time has dulled its effect a tad, it can still shock and disgust in equal measure.

I was never one to invest much time in the notion that it was a hidden swipe at the consumer society (mindless morons going shopping?). It’s just a superb working piece of horror history.

In the intervening period the boundaries of horror have been pushed ever further outwards and our expectations have been raised. Indeed our constitutions have been lined with steel. It takes a lot to shock people any more.

So when I saw the remake I was a little trepidatious. I needn’t have been anxious though. The story was remarkably similar to the original but the realization was very, very different. It works more as a superior Hollywood action thriller with a few twists and turns and is all the better for it. Rather than creeping up on you, it slaps you in the first right from the get go.

The first twenty minutes of the film is absolutely fantastic. The threat and peril to the heroine is cranked up so highly that you are holding your breath to see if she can survive. And all set in a middle class housing area that any one can recognize. But in this case the zombies are like world class sprinters. There is a clear, present and immediate danger from these suckers. Which makes for a much faster pace of film (with much faster editing). The scenes in the shopping mall are a time to catch your breath before the final action sequences.

I think this is a case of a film and a remake being able to happily co-exist with detriment to one another. It is interesting to see the difference in the endings though. Remarkably, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead has the happier ending with the survivors managing to land their helicopter on a deserted island. The remake has no such happy ending as, over the credits, you see that their escape by boat in an effort to try and reach an island haven is short-lived.

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I’ve always had a fascination for this film. I’m not quite sure whether it’s the sort of fascination you get when you stumble upon a car crash (a rubber-necking sort of fascination) or an admiration for what the film was striving for and, maybe, could have been. The facts and figures around Heaven’s Gate are astounding. Michael Cimino’s vision of the Johnson County Wars was not only the costliest film of its time but its burgeoning budget brought down a Hollywood studio - United Artists. Its takings were miniscule in America as the public stayed away in their hordes. You do actually see a lot of the money up there on the screen in the form of authentic-looking costumes and massive sets. This film effectively ended Cimino’s career as a director in Hollywood. Cimino, after his critical and financial success with The Deer Hunter, was the darling of Hollywood. He was given free rein on Heaven’s Gate, a western covering a particularly nasty episode in the development of the USA. The story had some broad similarities to The Deer Hunter - the struggle of immigrants to survive in a terrible situation, the loss of innocence and hope. However, instead of fighting the Vietnamese as in The Deer Hunter, the immigrants in Heaven’s Gate were fighting their own adopted country or the people who ran it.

Masterpiece?

• Fantastic cinematography - you get a real sense of size and proportion of the landscape which gives a real epic feel to the film. Scenes on the prairies with the big open sky are breathtaking.
• Authenticity - millions of dollars were spent trying to make the film look representative of the period. Thousands of handmade costumes and many newly built sets.
• Action - when the action does come, it is brutal, bloody and believable
• Experimentation - Cimino clearly borrows techniques and style from the European Cinema to try and give this western a different edge and feel. The use of a circling camera in action scenes is reminiscent of the work of the obscure Hungarian film director Miklos Jansco. In many ways, it is successful in conveying the clash of cultures

Mess!

• No big stars - For a big budget epic it had no bankable star. Of the main stars only Kris Kristofferson had any sort of kudos for a Western as he had taken one of the leads in Peckinpah’s iconic Pat Garret ad Billy the Kid. Isabelle Hupert, as the love interest, was virtually unknown in America although well respected in Europe.
• Film Length - The film is either too long or too short depending on who you talk to. The original cut of the film was over three and a half hours which was cut by the studio by nearly an hour after a week’s performance. This created problems for the narrative and played havoc with the cadence of the film. It became disjointed and difficult to follow. A Director’s Cut was unveiled in 2004 being nearer the original length and addresses some of the narrative problems.
• Characters - It is difficult to identify with the main characters and warm to them. The film revolves around the Kristofferson character. However, the performance isn’t large enough to fill the hole at the centre of the film.
• Problematic subject - a story about genocide planned by the establishment and a storyline with a whiff of communism about it did not endear itself to the American public at that time. The western had all but died after The Wild Bunch so its timing was poor.
• Poor sound quality - you may think I’m nit-picking here but when important developments in the story are missed because you didn’t hear what the characters were saying…
• Out of Control Director - indulgence on a grand scale proving that more can be less

I would definitely recommend you to go and see whatever version of the film you can get to see although I also recommend you take a comfy cushion to sit on. I’m sure you can get it on DVD. I think it is a magnificent, interesting, infuriating mess with the odd touch of masterpiece about it. You don’t always want to see the best films do you? There is a famous book - Final Cut - written by one of the production executives in charge of the film (haha) detailing the progress of the fated production and the downfall of the studio. An interesting read on its own.