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.

Danny Boyle's Sunshine: Now I've Seen It, I Can Knock It With More Authority

Danny Boyle's Sunshine just isn't as good as you've heard. The idea is fair enough, neither special nor ridiculous. The cast too are quite a strong bunch, but nothing to write home about. Alwin Kuchler's cinematography is far more than competent but his collaborations with Boyle don't ever acheive anything as pioneering or awe inspiring as did Derek Vanlint and Ridley Scott on Alien or Geoffrey Unsworth and Stanley Kubrick on 2001.

For the most part, the problems stem from Alex Garland's script. Again, there's a fair smattering of strong moments - Harvey's apology to Capa, for example - but there's far more mediocrity and lots and lots of confusions and contradictions.

When Billy Wilder said "If you have a problem with the end of your script, really the problem is with the beginning" he must have meant "really the problem is with the end AND the beginning". He's not suggesting the ending is correct and the beggining should be moved to meet it, he's suggesting that there's a structural fault and that, as a result, a change must be made. More often than not, both ending and beginning - or that is, set-up and pay-off - will be altered. So, to explore one example of Sunshine's dicky structure, when Mace grabs his tool from the coolant and gets iced over (as it were) in a fraction of a second, this implication is no more at fault, really, than when he later plunges into the coolant for much longer, and mutliple times, without turning into a human icicle. The contradiction is the issue and as a result, there's confusion and the film doesn't seem to play fair, and when the film isn't playing fair, all suspense disappears in the mind of an attentive, observant audience.

So, the popular opinion that Sunshine is very good until the last act isn't harsh enough. The many mistakes in the last part are echoed and rooted in the earlier sequences of the film.

But the end of Sunshine actually is much worse than the already-whiffy first two acts. For one thing, the screen geography and geometry - handled with competence in a fair amount of the earlier material - go to blazes (pun intended). Also, we meet a mad killer character that enacts a convenient action climax that simply left me dumbstruck. He's just dumped into the plot, requiring a certain amount of disbelief-hoisting, and then, with nothing like believable human psychology, he sets about killing people and babbling quasireligious nonsense. This business has been rightly compared to Event Horizon - but it's even worse.

This slasher sequence is where Boyle's camerawork and cinematographic conceits get the most out of hand. There's hardly anything like a reasonable cut to be seen and the images are wildly distorted. At first the idea seems to be that the impressionistic defacement of the image represent the damage that exposure to the now extremely-nearby Sun has caused to the villain's eyes. Of course, though, the effect isn't limited to his pov shots - even though it was heralded by his appearance and there's no doubt that what it is trying to suggest is related to his optical disability.

There's a few (hokey) explanations possible for this, and the most likely of them makes as little sense as the other excuses I could cook up. Let's stick with "The exposure to the sun has damaged his eyes so much, not only his but everybody's vision has been damaged. Even that of the supposedly-objective overhead camera angle we sometimes see". I know that doesn't make any sense, but trust me, it's the most rational explanation for what you'll see. What would you prefer? "He's such an ungodly sight that his entrance alters everybody's senses"?

I could go on about Sunshine for hours, it really is that interesting in it's curious catalogue of errors, pretentions and contradictions. Maybe I will. Any questions?

John Rambo

Speaking to the Kyle and Jackie O show on the Australian 2Day FM radio station, Sylvester Stallone revealed that the new Rambo film is to be called John Rambo, as per Rocky Balboa.

I'm hoping this trend in sequel naming carries on long enough for it to get really silly: it could get very silly. Daniel Craig takes the title role in James Bond, plain and simple; Clint comes back for Dirty Harry Callahan; Ernest Borgnine revisits his Oscar-winning glory in Mary Piletti; it's a romantic rave from the grave in Baz Luhrman's Romeo Montague + Juliet Capulet; and look out earth, here comes John Q. Alien.