Trouble Is Their Business

"If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I should not have come" - Raymond Chandler.

Clive Owen is to play Philip Marlowe in Frank Miller's film of Trouble Is My Business and the plan is, this will be the start of a series of Chandler adaptations. So, should this be a hit, Owen will be set for a nice string of gigs, though it's by no means guaranteed Miller would be sticking around.

Reporting on the deal, Variety lists various other Miller projects, past and future. Besides 300, Ronin and The Spirit, they remind us that Miller is working on a Sin City sequel. Don't take that as confirmation of anything.

What isn't clear is if the film adapts only the short story Trouble Is My Business or the entire collection of four stories now published under that umbrella title. I'd expect it will only be the one - it's quite involved and could easily fill out a feature film if adapted correctly. There's plenty of Hollywood stuff in this one, and if he fancies getting stuck into such in-jokes, Miller could probably make hay.

You can read an extended excerpt from the beginning of the story at Random House's site.

Film Of Ronin Stalled For Castlevania Adaptation

After Stomp the Yard made more money than was expected, Sylvain White became something of a hot property (note: money was the convincer, not some sudden awareness that he'd made a surprisingly good film - because he hadn't). He's been attached to numerous projects, most famously a film of Frank Miller's Ronin comic books. That film has now been shelved, at least temporarily, while White makes a film for the Castlevania videogames.

Now, the Castelvania games are fine - if massively overrated - but there's no suggestion at all that they're going to make for a good film so the project might as well be unrelated, should be considered as though it was cooked up from scratch. A script by Paul W. S. Anderson, directed by Sylvain White? That's looking a lot like the recipe for another Van Helsing.

Gothic horror sits uncomfortably with modern popcorn pictures, for me at least. After James Whale and Tod Browning and other, undoubtedly populist, filmmakers actually managed to make entertainments out of great gothic stories while retaining appropriate atmospheres, tones and Freud-baiting undercurrents, it seemed like we were on a slippery slope. Half way down, we whooshed through the house of Hammer, past the garish, lusty, liberated take on the same old stories, settings, characters but by then, a lot had shifted. Complete the shift, get up to date, and we end up with a gothic horror that's predicated entirely on style, on semi-buried subtexts, on pantomime pieces.

The last great gothic horror film classic - and I mean great - was Ridley Scott's Alien. It was surprisingly similar to the early Universal horrors, but used modern cinema technology in exciting, unparalelled ways, mixed in tropes from other genres, scrambled the signals, wove the gothicism into a tapestry. But this gothic weave was powerful, and almost every scene was clad in it like ivy creepers. It was a timeless, classic dread and a primal, animal sexuality that crept through the corridors of Alien.

We've had great horror films since with a splash of the gothic - and plenty of horror films that went all out with the gothic, but weren't great. Aesthetically, only Tim Burton seems regularly convincing in standing steady a few paces back up the slope but - so far - he hasn't tried to horrify us. I'm sure he could, though. And then some - if he went all out.

Could Castlevania be a grand gothic adventure? Sure. Will it be? Well, only if Anderson's script and White and his crew are interested in the idea. And why would they be? The commodity-gothic that they're needing to trade on, I expect, is the same thing tromping in and out of Hot Topic all day long. Gothicism as a can of spray-on cobwebs, not as a deep, scarlet romance of horror.

Expect Pirates of the Caribbean with Vampires instead of Pirates. At best.

Ronin Rerun

Word got out in February that Sylvain White was to direct a movie of Frank Miller's Ronin. Today, the traes have it, so the news has finally gone wide. Sigh.

In the interim, I suspected the project might falter because Miller had suggested no future films would be made of his material unless he was directing them himself. Obviously there was nothing he could do to stop this one. So there's definitely nothing you or I could do either.

Frank Miller's Ronin

According to the IESB, Sylvain White is to direct an adaptation of Frank Miller's Ronin. Where will it all end, this Miller-Mania?

I'll volunteer now for directing duties on Frank Miller's Shopping List. Maybe the cast of Foodfight can be reunited?