Will Smith on the other hand also has the same caliber when it comes to making blockbuster films. As the Independence Day guy, his consecutive success in movies every Independence Day has made him one of the most recognized actors today.

But both of them are trying or is looking out to do something really out of their reputation. Steven Spielberg is reportedly considering to remake a relatively popular movie entitled Oldboy. To add the oddity to the report, he is now considering Will Smith to be part of the project wherein Will Smith could most likely get the lead character.

Oldboy is a relatively popular Korean movie that features a character named Dae-Su. This type of movie weaves together emotions and violence as this 2003 movie shows the man out for revenge. The reason? He was not able to get out of a hotel room for 15 years. The original movie of Chan-Wook Park is very violent but it gives the audience the perspective of what goes on inside the mind of the main character.

This movie would prove to be a great challenge for Steven Spielberg in case he takes this project. Will Smith will also have the time of his life trying to be the psychopath out for revenge.

Related posts:

1. Tim Burton: Alice in Wonderland, but where are you?
2. Shane Meadows, Mr. Selfdestruct
3. Stanley Kubrick season on More 4

So when I realised that we wouldn’t be watching the season all together every night this past week, I decided to spend a couple of nights at the office, where we do have Freeview. At least I was at work on time. The season prepared by Channel 4 was an excellent collection of films and documentaries by and about one of the great masters of modern cinema.

Watching Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes I gained new insight into the personality and practices of this magnificent filmmaker. The organisational skills and attention to detail that makes his films not just works of art, but beautifully crafted pieces of work. Viewers forget or perhaps do not know what it takes to organise and execute scenes with massive numbers of extras (Paths of Glory, Spartacus, etc.) or lighting and decorating a set so well that each time the camera cuts to a new shot or follows a character it is like walking through an art gallery (Barry Lyndon, The Shining) or how brilliantly written and intensely researched a script needs to be to tackle serious issues (A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove) and retain the audience’s attention.

Granted, not everyone is a Kubrick fan. I can’t for the life of me see why, but film, like most things in life, is a question of taste. You’re not going to pop Barry Lyndon into the DVD player with your mates after a long day at work so you can relax. Unless you want to fall asleep. To get back to the documentary I was watching, the researcher making the doc went through 900 boxes in which Kubrick had stored research on possible films, thousands of photographs of locations, even fan letters, all categorised by location. And behind every item in the box was a little more insight into how this man’s mind worked. Well, it’s interesting to a Kubrick fan at least.

I’ve been looking into buying the Kubrick collection online, however it is indicative of how respected he is as a director, that a complete collection of his films costs anywhere between $160 and $60. I guess I’ll have to wait a bit longer. There are other special edition collections which include great documentaries and features. The Stanley Kubrick Archives will soon be available again in hard cover, which I think I will invest in.

Worry not if you missed the More 4 season, it’s still going on and you can catch The Killing (one of his earlier films) on Wednesday 23 and The Shining on Friday 25. I haven’t seen The Killing so I will be staying in this Friday. I wonder, am I allowed to eat pizza and drink beer while I watch Kubrick, or is it sacrilege?

Related posts:

1. Tim Burton: Alice in Wonderland, but where are you?
2. Oldboy possibly to get a remake from Spielberg
3. Shane Meadows, Mr. Selfdestruct

Although Mr. Meadows’ films are all different stories, with nothing to connect them directly, there is an underlying theme to all of them, one that he explores over and over again, and has done incredibly well in This is England. It is the them of the self destructive male.

All of his films feature a male protagonist who is trying very hard to control himself. They try to teach and be in charge of their own behaviour and emotions. And yet in each one they lose that control with terrible results. The difference from other violent male leads is that Meadows accepts that these characters are flawed, they are not to be role models, even though in the context of the film they try to be. In the end, they cannot take their own advice and destroy themselves and the things they love around them.

Meadows’ two best points are his excellent directing of actors (and a bloody good casting director) and the emotional depth and development of his characters. He creates a British cinema that is very different to anything else coming out of the UK. It reminds me of 1970s films from the US when suddenly the studios let a pack of kids run wild, which resulted in Taxi Driver and Easy Rider, but his films are also much more European. In the simplicity of his film making there is intellect and care for his characters that ultimately affects and reaches the audience.

Overall this is an excellent box set, although the commentaries weren’t great. It is a well rounded way to get introduced to one of the best film directors working in the UK at the moment. The box set has been out for a while, so prices have dropped at most DVD websites and shops. Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Tim Burton: Alice in Wonderland, but where are you?
2. Stanley Kubrick season on More 4
3. Once – movie review

What on earth has happened to the man that filled my childhood and adolescence with such wonderful films? I had no understanding of directors and actors when I was young, I just enjoyed films that had a certain something. And Burton’s first films all had that certain something; an air of melancholy and hopefulness, a playful desperation in all of his characters. Beetlejuice was the funniest macabre film I had ever seen, which brought Burton’s aesthetics clearly to the fore. Edward Scissorhands explored the outsider, the one who is different in a very literal way, while criticising suburban infatuation with anything that might break the boredom.

His two Batman films were brilliantly camp and still somehow achieved a sexyness (despite the fact that Burton seemed to develop the villains a lot more than the hero, and the whole thing remained very cartoony). Ed Wood and Mars Attacks explored his fixation with science fiction and were wonderful comedies, one completely absurd and violent and the other an incredibly sweet descent into failure. Sleepy Hollow had some genuinely scary moments but you can see the first indications that something is going wrong.

And after that… with the exception of Big Fish, which is a wonderful touching fairytale, the list is horrendous. Planet of the Apes is a distant memory for me, forced into a box, latched, put in a wardrobe and pushed over a cliff into the sea of my subconscious. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory feels like an awkward attempt to find something he lost. All the elements were there but the film was cringe worthy at times and no amount of Johnny Depp’s grimacing was going to help it. Not to mention that it had to compete with the 1970s version which scared the life out of me as a child and had real Umpa Lumpas. Corpse Bride had absolutely no soul whatsoever. Again it looked like he was following the recipe he used for what is one of the best animated films of all times with an incredible soundtrack, Nightmare Before Christmas, and again it all went horribly wrong.

Which brings us back neatly to Sweeney Todd. What the hell was that all about? Were large amounts of blood, gore, posturing and bad singing supposed to conceal the fact that it was terrible? Watching that film in the cinema, it was one of the few times that I did not mind my mates talking between themselves. At some point, most of the audience had sunk into their seats and were sniggering with the person next to them, and it wasn’t because something funny happened.They were bored. I have never been as excited to see Sacha Baron Cohen.

It makes me so sad, that a director whose films I grew up on, could take such a massively wrong turn. A man who has had such a massive impact on popular culture and subculture, seems to have lost it. Perhaps if I was younger I would find his more recent work intriguing or at least entertaining, but then why is it that I still love his older films?

Regardless, lets focus on the future. His next film is an animation/live action Alice in Wonderland and rumours abound about the cast, but there is no point going into it seeing as it is being released in 2010. He is also remaking his own Frankenweenie as a feature length stop motion animation. He is also participating in the production Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and 9. Alice In Wonderland sounds like an ideal project, and he cannot really go wrong with a remake of his own work.

Or can he? I have my own theory that he is too happy to make films since he had kids, but that is far too cynical for me to really believe it. I just want him to put some soul back into his films. I want to go into the cinema and feel like a child for an hour and a bit. Oh please, please, please let me get what I want Tim.

Related posts:

1. Shane Meadows, Mr. Selfdestruct
2. Stanley Kubrick season on More 4
3. Oldboy possibly to get a remake from Spielberg