Australia's Replica Tumbler

Australia's "A Current Affair" aired a story last night about 2 Aussie blokes (Grant Hodgson and Gordon Hayes) who have custom built their own Batman Tumbler. And yes, you can actually drive it!

So FREAKIN COOL!

Watch the segment below:

http://video.au.msn.com/watch/video/australia-s-own-batmobile/xas9cg3

Law Abiding Citizen- That's no how you make revenge

The “revenge” genre is such a classic one. It is fair to say that films throughout the decades, from the quasi-exploitation Death Wishes of the 70’s and 80’s, to more recent big-star thrillers like The Brave One, have explored the genre to death.

What I loved about Law Abiding Citizen was, for the first half of the film at least, it looked like the revenge genre was going to go bigger and further than any of it's peers.

Where Death Wish pitted Charles Bronson against thugs and criminals in his local community and The Brave One's Jodie Foster opening up cans of the proverbial "whoop-ass" on the criminals of New York City, Law Abiding Citizen pits Gerard Butler's character (Clyde Shelton) up against the whole justice system. And let’s be honest, who hasn’t watched the news and seen weak sentences handed down to criminals and thought the justice system could do with a biblical break down and rebuild at some point?

And that’s what I found really appealing and captivating about Butler’s character. Like Bronson and Foster, Butler is introduced as your typical American family man, only to be tormented by a brutal home invasion that results in the death of his wife and daughter. The film wastes no time cutting right to the chase. Disatissified with the district attorney’s plea deal to reduce one killer’s sentence for testifying against the other, Shelton takes it upon himself 10 years later, to enact revenge on his family's murderer and all those involved in the morally questionable legal events following that crime, from the lawyer's to the judges and everybody in between.

It’s when Law Abiding Citizen raises the stakes in this matter that I really got into the film.

I love a good revenge film and Butler’s transformation from simple family man, to avenger is believable and relatabale. It's not difficult to see the justice system fails him and you really do want to see him get revenge as a result. We understand his violent torture methods are a reflection of his hatred towards the sleezy and downright evil man who murdered his family. I for one couldn’t stop smiling and giggling with satisfaction as Butler went about his delightful and gory torture.

High class cinema Law Abiding Citizen is not. Bloody, graphic and violent revenge cinema this definitely is. But like any genre film, there is a roadmap that really should be followed. For the revenge film, it goes something like this:

(a) introduce average Joe-Citizen;

(b) kill off Joe’s loved one;

(c) show “the system” failing to deliver adequate justice;

(d) minus a mask and cape, Joe goes all vigilante and decides to clean up the town;

(e) Joe gets his own justice in bloody, satisifactory style;

(f) audience cheers, curtains.

Law Abiding Citizen follows this map perfectly for 2/3 of its duration. However there is a certain point in the film that the story takes a detour, undermining everything its built up so far and ultimately deviates too far from this roadmap.

To put it simply, you don’t turn the good guy, into the bad guy. You don’t spend an hour or so of what is obviously a revenge film, building up a character who you can relate to (and are obviously meant to relate to being a “typical law abiding citizen”), who you empathise with, who you’re cheering for the whole time, only to kill him off and ultimately fail in his revenge. You want to see him win, you don’t want the bad guys (in this case the “system”) to win!

It’s almost like this film is travelling along nicely for a while and then it suddenly discovers some kind of moral compass, that questions itself and perhaps the audiences belief that we don’t want to see some blood thirsty psychopath killing a whole bunch of people in his family’s name.

But that’s just it, in a revenge film, we DO want to see him achieve his goals! How goddamn cool and un-Hollywood would it have been if this film had ended with Butler’s character, succeeding in his plot to kill the heads of the justice system?! What if the closing shot was one of him walking free from jail, hinting a possible sequel where Shelton is on the run from the authorities, living outside the law and delivering his own kind of justice. A whole new franchise could have been spawned! The new millennium's version of the Death Wish series! No-one would have expected it!

But no, instead we get some, “see the system works”, morally righteous, bullshit ending. That's not how you end a revenge film.

And you know, I get it, the film makers were trying to show that while Butler’s character’s intentions for vengeance where warranted, he ultimately crosses a line. But it’s the crossing of these morally questionable lines that make a revenge film so cool. These characters of the genre exist to enact the kind of justice that some people would only fantasize about.

And isn’t fantasy what we want from a film?

Mad Max & The Australian Film Festival 2010

I was lucky enough to attend a 35mm screening of George Miller's original, kick-arse, ozploitation classic Mad Max on Wednesday night, followed by a Q&A with some of the actors and none other than legendary stunt man Grant Page!

As promised, I wanted to share this incredible experience so let's start with the film itself.

There's something about watching a film in 35mm, especially one as old as Mad Max. I'm talking about the artifacts or for want of a better word, 'scratchy' nature of the film. To me, I almost enjoy watching a movie more when it's in such a state as this- well love and un-remastered. It's less a novelty for me, that is, a throwaway to a nostalgic era in cinema, before digital film making meant everything was so cleaned and over-produced. It's something more earnest and tangible. And I loved every single, jumpy, scratchy second.

Mad Max as a film definitely still stands the test of time....well in terms of the car chases anyway. These are some of the best you'll ever see. With legendary Grant Page involved why would you expect anything else?! Some of the dialogue and campy acting has definitely dated but that's half of the charm of this seminal 1979 film. It's probably the only Australian comic book film you'll ever see and one of only a couple of films where Hollywood 'pillar of the community' Mr Mel Gibson speaks in an Australian accent.

Mad Max did a lot to put Australian film on the world stage (especially the New Wave films of the 70's and 80's), shooting both Mel Gibson and George Miller into their respective super stardom. It showed the Americans we could it just as good, if not better and to quote Mr Page himself, "kick 'em in the guts".

In some ways, Mad Max is to Australian audiences, what Star Wars and Star Trek was to the American audiences. By this I mean, the hardcore fans. No other Aussie movie, has managed to capture the imaginations of bikers, motorheads, film geeks, comic book geeks and action movie fans more than Mad Max. What other Aussie film has compelled fans to convert their own Ford Falcons into customised police Intereceptors from the film?!

What I love about the film is a lot of the real impact violence occurs off screen (which is why I'm somewhat perplexed as to the films still current R18+ classification here in Australia). For example, when Max's wife and son are mowed down on the highway, we don't actually see the hit. We see the biker gang inches away, we cut away to the speedometer, then the babies shoe and ball as it falls to the ground and the gang screams away up the highway. It's an incredibly violent moment right? But so masterfully done and works so much better, not seeing the gruesome collision itself. The same goes for the incredible closing set piece when Max cuffs Johnny the Boy to the leaking wreck, leaving him with only a hack saw to decide his fate. We see the ensuing explosion and are left to wonder...did he die?

Tim Burns who played Johnny the Boy seems to think so, which leads me to the awesome Q&A that followed the screening of the film with none other than Steve Bisley (The Goose), Joanne Samuel (Jessie), Hugh Keays-Byrne (The Toecutter), Roger Ward (Fifi), Paul Johnstone (Cundalini) and of course the greatest stuntman alive, Grant Page.

The Q&A revelaed a lot of quirky behind the scenes anecdotes about the making of the film. Steve Bisley told us about the scene where he is pursuing the Nightrider at the start of the film on his motorbike, crashes and delivers that hilarious line "I don't know mate I just got here myself!" Bisley informed us that he wanted to deliver that line with laughter so asked Mel Gibson to sit on the bonnet of the car off-screen and pull funny faces at him. Gibson apparently did one better and pulled his dick out of his pants. Needless to say, Bisley delivered the line in laughter.

Another interesting point also came from Bisley involving the "get out of jail free" card which he hands to a couple on a tandem motorbike midway through the film. Apparently while filming in and around Melbourne, the cast and crew of the film, while fanging around on motorbikes were given actual "get out of jail" cards if ever questioned by Police. The card itself had words to the effect of "this vehicle is being used in a major American motion picture, any assistance would be appreciated". So in that scene when he's chatting up the couple on the tandem bike and pulls out the card, it was actually in his pocket at the time. It wasn't a prop, as most of the cast and crew had one for the whole of the shoot.

There were other gems that had to be heard to be believed such as Grant Page accidentally crashing his bike on the way to set, injuring both himself and a prospective actress, real bikers messing around with the cast on set and the fact that much of the finished film was cut to reduce the original 2.5 hour running time to appease Hollywood producers.

A brilliant night that I will not forget any time soon. A big thank you to Popcorn Taxi for making it happen!

Comics and Reel Life

Remember the day when "comic book movies" were few and far between?

The story of comic book movies begins in the 1970's with Hollywood's first respectable effort to bring a costumed hero to life on the big screen. Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie (1978), is a classic of the genre and audiences were dazzled with the revolutionary (at the time) visual effects, ultimately buying into the movie's tag line "that a man can fly".

The 1980's is pretty much DC's decade with sequels to Donner's film (including the spin off Supergirl in 1984) coming along every couple of years, while Marvel is essentially nowhere to be seen. It tries to get in on the action with Howard the Duck which vomits into cinemas in 1986 (and the less said about that the better).

The next serious landmark comic book film has to be Tim Burton's Batman (1989), which showed you could take a classic character (one that people had previously only seen as campy, colourful, children's character) and make it a serious, angst-ridden (and here comes that buzz word kids) dark story, about a masked vigilante, cleaning up the city one thug at a time (and this time, it was personal....)

Cut to the 90's, and comic book movies still only come along once in a blue moon. Marvel characters Captain America goes direct to video in 1990 and a Fantastic Four movie gets made but is never released.

On the back of Burton's Batman, the independent gem Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) rakes in the bucks as does Dick Tracy (1990), while flops such as New World's The Punisher (1989), go relatively unnoticed.

In the mid-90's, the occasional comic book movie crops up, the animated Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), essentially flops at the box office but kills it on video and Judge Dredd (1995) and Blade (1998), both rear their ugly head, however audiences aren't really being saturated with comic book characters just yet. It isn't until we get to the new millennium that things really begin to change in a big way.

Come the year 2000 and cometh the flood. Brian Singer's brilliant X-Men (2000), did a lot to convince pretty much the entire movie industry and audiences alike, that the time had come to kick the comic book genre into overdrive.

The makers of X-Men showed that certain creative licenses could be taken with the traditional conventions of the comic book genre (such as ignoring bright colourful costumes, cheesy dialogue and outrageous situations) and a more grounded/realistic approach was possible. Coupled with huge advances in CG technology, it suddenly wasn't difficult to convince anybody, that comic book characters could be brought to life, more realistically, authentically and entertaining than ever before. And people would begin to flock in droves.

Marvel finally finds it feet in the naughties, releasing Spider-Man in 2002, X-Men 2 and Hulk in 2003 and continues to release three films a year in 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2008. That's right! Three films a year! Between 1986 and 1998 (a period of 12 years if you're counting), Marvel released a total of 2 films. The numbers alone (ie the sheer number of films being pumped out) show that at this point, the game had changed and it was indeed....game on.

With an abundance of colourful comic book movies now gracing movie theaters, some studios and directors begin to target more 'adult' material. Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's Sin City (2005), Zack Synder's 300 (2007) and Watchmen (2009) satisfy the hordes.

Around this time DC's core characters receive their obligatory face lift with Batman Begins (2005) and Superman Returns (2006). In 2008, everybody loses their minds with The Dark Knight and the internet is suddenly flooding with stories that Hollywood producers want their next comic book film to be "dark" and "edgy" and suddenly reboot is everybody's favourite word.

It's now the year 2010 and audiences obsession with comic book movies is still running unabated and the Hollywood machine isn't slowing down to feed that hunger. Already in the works is the reboot of Spider-Man, rumours about a live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a Superman reboot and expect Warner Bros. to absolutely dominate the box office when Batman 3 is eventually released.

I'm willing to guess that the idea of "realism" will be a common one in the comic book movies of the next decade.

Will movie going audiences soon tire of the comic book movie genre or is it here to stay? Already films such as Kick Ass and Defendor (two of my must see films of 2010) are beginning to 'parody' the genre.

I can't help but think back to the staple action-movie genre of the 80's and 90's, that are now virtually a rarity and wonder if the same will happen to the comic book genre eventually. Like all trends, they are are circular by nature and like all resources, comic books are a finite commodity and surely at some point filmmakers will have said all they have to say about costumed superheroes? Will there be a trough period like we had between the 80's and the 2000's? I think a lull needs to happen to preserve the genre long term. Let us forget about men and women in crazy costumes for a while and then BAM! hit us again with a new approach in a decade or so.

I for one am not necessarily 'bored' with the comic book genre, I'm just not necessarily excited about every new film that comes from the pages of DC, Marvel etc. I think if the genre is to survive deep into the decade, more obscure material needs to be considered to keep audiences on their toes, or (and this will upset the comic book fan boys) filmmakers need to take more creative licence with classic characters (like Singer and Nolan have shown is possible) to surpass movie goer's expectations.

Geek Meet- Peter Berg

Met director Peter Berg for the briefest of moments today.

Told him I was a fan of The Kingdom and he seemed genuinely stoked, shaking my hand!

A super cool geek moment in an otherwise crappy day!