The American Akira is somehow getting worse

So Acting Auditions, a website that lists casting calls for major Hollywood features, has announced one such call for extras to star in the upcoming remake of Akira, which is already doomed to die unmourned and unloved except by Warner Bros who are that desperate to get something out of development hell. Why is this significant? Well, they've announced the plot in a nutshell.

It honestly feels like they're trying to make it purposely bad to prove a point to Warner Bros, because otherwise I have to accept the possibility they're serious. And that's far too terrifying a possibility to consider. Here it is:

Kaneda (Garret Hedlund) is a bar owner in Neo-Manhattan who is stunned when his brother, Tetsuo, is abducted by government agents led by The Colonel (Ken Watanabe). Desperate to get his brother back, Kaneda agrees to join with Ky Reed (Kristen Stewart) and her underground movement who are intent on revealing to the world what truly happened to New York City thirty years ago when it was destroyed. Kaneda believes their theories to be ludicrous but after finding his brother again, is shocked when he displays telekinetic powers. Ky believes Tetsuo is headed to release a young boy, Akira, who has taken control of Tetsuo's mind. Kaneda clashes with The Colonel's troops on his way to stop Tetsuo from releasing Akira but arrives too late. Akira soon emerges from his prison courtesy of Tetsuo as Kaneda races in to save his brother bfore Akira once again destroys Manhattan island, as he did thirty years ago.

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Triumph of the Will: A Green Lantern Review (may contain spoilers)

Another poster better than the film deserves, by James White.

Well, by my reckoning I'm about six or seven months late to the party with this one. This film has had the stench of death about it for quite some time. Not just the reviews, which could charitably be described as unkind, but the lead-up to it - there was the muted reaction to the first reveal of Ryan Reynolds' CGI sausage-man costume, then a lack of anything noteworthy at the Comic-Con preview, and the report that Warner Bros had spent $9m fixing up the special effects in post-production, on top of the film already having something like 1300 visual effects shots (according to director Martin Campbell). Several effects studios were working overtime on it until the film's release, and this has, on balance, not turned out well (see the big fat bomb Last Action Hero).

2011 would see the end of the Harry Potter franchise, meaning Warner Bros needed to find a new franchise they could print money with. DC Comics, a new subsidiary of Time Warner, also needed more exposure for their label, as so far they've been understated in the comic book movie business as of late. Oh sure, they had The Dark Knight grossing $1bn, but for every one major success, they had box office disappointments like Superman Returns and Watchmen. And with Marvel quickly dominating the superhero film field with their big tied-in universe, DC chose to throw Green Lantern in as their best bet. There was a lot riding on this film, so it came as a real shame that the resulting film was not very good.

Who Wants to Live Forever? An Immortals Review (may contain spoilers)

Boys keep swingin'.

A while back, film critic Mark Kermode wrote an article for The Guardian - well, I say article, it was really an extended extract from the chapter of his latest book The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex (which I recommend by the way - end shameless plug) - about how blockbusters, due to their formulaic nature, could in fact have the most potential to be experimental in all of film. After all, if a summer blockbuster is advertised well enough or heavily enough, then people will turn up in their millions to watch it, regardless of whether they like it or not, or the subject matter. They think "Oh, that looks good/interesting/like a good way to stave off suicide for a few hours" and turn up. Last year we had Inception, a film set largely within the minds and dreams of its protagonists, and this year gave us Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which focused the action on a non-human main character and was told mostly without dialogue. Both of these films sound like the sort of thing you'd see in arthouse cinemas, and yet both grossed over $300,000,000 each.

So if there's a possible new fertile ground for experimentation, the blockbuster could well be that. Granted, we live in a world where films like Zookeeper and Jack & Jill exist, so we'll still have to wade through the crap to get to the gold, but with today's film Immortals, released on the same day as Jack & Jill and will hopefully crush it like a bug at the box office, we see a film that tries a different stylistic approach to blockbusters. And while that works, the film itself is...oh, how do I put it? Um...

Now, when I say stupid, I don't mean that in a bad way necessarily. Commando is stupid. Crank is stupid. Warrior King/Tom-Yum-Goong is stupid. And I enjoy all of those films because they take their stupidity in stride and pull out some amazing set pieces. Warrior King's famous one-shot fight scene, for instance, or Arnold Schwarzenegger acting as a one-man army corps in the climactic action scene of Commando. Immortals, however, isn't that glorious. Oh it's glorious to look at, but its pacing is so slow, the characters so blank, and the plot so nonsensical and, well, stupid, all it really offers in the world of macho action films is a pretty face. Just a shame that it plays things completely straight-faced and serious.

Veni Vidi Vici: A V for Vendetta Review (contains spoilers)

Found at PosterGeek.

So Winchester Film Society decided to show V for Vendetta tonight as part of their Comic Book Month - showing film adaptations of comics and superhero stories. Next week I have the pleasure of Green Lantern and watching Ryan Reynolds do nothing heroic or likeable for 90 minutes, but for now let's focus on a film that's good. I have watched this film a few times already, have it on Blu-Ray, and it still holds up, even when compared to the superior source material; however, there are some problems with it that need to be addressed.

Motherfuckery

For this entry I'm going to get up on my soapbox for a bit. I apologise, but frankly this behaviour needs to be accounted for.

This is an article published in the Church of England Newspaper. I don't know whether this actually represents the Church's views, or is independent from it, but as you'll notice, the author - Alan Craig - compares several leading gay rights activists to Nazis. Yes, you are reading this correctly; indeed, he makes a lot of comparisons between LGBT people trying to get equal rights in their country with Hitler's lebensraum campaign. We get references to the Sudetenland and everything!

As Nazi analogies go, it's at least dedicated. That still doesn't stop it from being hilariously and horribly wrong, but you can't deny Craig loves a metaphor.

Now, the Church of England is the official Christian church of the UK, and is part of the world's largest religion. If you are in that secure a position of power, you are in no way entitled to complain that a minority is getting on your nerves and "threatening your religious freedom". You have to take your lumps with a grin. I say this with the authority of a Caucasian, heterosexual middle-class male, the core demographic for taking lumps with a grin. This whole article smacks of hysterical self-pity, and it's important to note it's published at a time where the government is considering legalising gay marriage.

It's around the time of this, a major social change, that the fearful and the paranoid, afraid that they'll be rendered second-class citizens and forced to groom unicorns for their new gay overlords, launch out an assault of muck-spreading in a sort of desperate last-minute grunt and spew. Many have claimed that this will - in the words of Andrea Williams, head of the Christian concern organisation - "see churchmen...being dragged through the courts for refusing to marry homosexuals and sanction their behaviour". Even though the government has made it clear that they will not force church ministers to marry gay couples. 

And you know what? They have the right to do so. You don't have to do anything against your faith, so long as you don't hurt anybody. One vicar who declines to marry a gay couple won't be the be-all end-all for two men or two women wanting to be married; they'll just go find another one. But this irrational fear of LGBT individuals means that the truth gets distorted. It's blurred in an attempt to court public behaviour. And hiding the truth, distorting the truth, outright lying - that can't pass.

This article was brought to my attention over Twitter by Patrick Strudwick, a gay rights activist who particularly protests gay conversion therapy, or "praying the gay away" as it's sometimes known. Leaving aside the ethical dilemma of involving religion in a clinical process, conversion has been proven to not work, being little more than repression, and indeed, many people undergoing this feel worse than when they started, particularly since homosexuality hasn't been considered a psychiatric disorder since 1973. You might as well get therapy to sort out your eye colour. Strudwick notably infiltrated a therapy group that was "curing" men of homosexual desires, and although it was for journalistic purposes, he still found himself questioning why he found men attractive: "The therapists planted doubt and worry where there was none".

So I want you all to do a favour for your good ol' pal Jack. I want you to go to that article (skip past any comments not made my Adrian or the admin, it will just make you cry) and leave comments refuting his claims. Be civil - don't act rude or hateful in the comments, that's what we have the Daily Mail for. Feel free to mention your sexuality or your beliefs if you so wish. Just let Alan Craig know this kind of behaviour is simply not on.

Going off to Winchester and waiting for everything to blow over

Feels like home already.

Oh blimey I have been neglecting this, haven't I? I guess that review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes never fell through (short version: it's great, go see it on DVD) and since my rant on the big steaming turd that was Transformers: Dark of the Moon, things have been pretty quiet. So to the attention of all one of you who still read this, time for a quick catch-up, or as quick as I can make it since this is a lot of ground to cover.

I have been a student of the University of Winchester for nearly seven weeks now, and I've been studying Creative Writing and Film Studies for slightly less than that. It's been going well so far - my flatmates have all been kind, funny, brilliant people, and the people on my course (well, both of them) are dedicated, like-minded and charming. You don't know how weird it is to find someone on your course who's as big a soundtrack geek as I am, or to be able to go down the stairs to chat about A Clockwork Orange or David Mamet - just knowing people who pick up my geeky references is amazing in and of itself.

This is my friend Phil. As you can tell, he makes a very good Doctor, and he says more morally bankrupt things than I do. It's good to have him around.

The courses themselves have been going swimmingly, although I find myself preferring Creative Writing just a tad more. Maybe it's because we're creating something new every week - in both Fictional Writing and Scriptwriting I have written about, in no particular order: 

• A man becoming increasingly cyberized by his mobile phone
• The galaxy's largest library
• A miniature dog that considers itself some sort of canine god
• Living in a world that just missed the apocalypse
• A prequel to Jaws following Quint's days aboard the USS Indianapolis
• Death being predetermined and mandated by the government

And I've read a lot of excellent short stories, so that's all been fun. I do have problems with Scriptwriting tutors constantly talking about the three-act structure, though. Film Critic Hulk has talked about this in great detail already, so I won't repeat too much, but when writing a script, all the three-act structure is, is a summary of a story. It doesn't help you write a story, and it's certainly not useful when writing characters, since so many screenwriters consider an act break the point where one act ends and another begins, regardless of what the little people you control in your story actually do...but I digress. I can work around this.

This isn't to say I'm not enjoying Film Studies, because I am; all of the films I've seen I've liked, with the exception of La Haine (seriously, I've seen this fucking film so many times I now have a valid reason to shoot the director. Aside from him directing Gothika), and I enjoy being challenged, being stuck for words, having to think in new ways. The problem is my tutor Imruh's lectures.

Now Imruh is clearly an intelligent man. He has a mind like a steel trap, he forces you to think about film in a new way, and he knows a lot about the subject. But dear God in heaven, his seminars are painfully boring. He reads aloud from a pre-written script, and I think it might be from a thesis because it contains some complex technical vocabulary, not just in cinema but in philosophy, language and sociology. Combine that with dull PowerPoint presentations with thick detailed quotes and not a lot of time to get them down in, and you get me playing Bejewelled Blitz on my iPod to make it pass. The weird thing is that he's much more engaging in a seminar, when he doesn't have a script, and I don't get why he doesn't just go with that.

Seriously, this fucking game plays itself.

Speaking of iPods, if you have ever said at some point in your lives that Apple is simpler and more user-friendly than Windows, I WILL FIGHT YOU ON THE SIDE OF THE STREET. It's like ever since Steve Jobs' untimely demise the bigwigs of Apple have suddenly realised that without him, then what they thought their beloved Midas had turned to gold was rapidly turning into rusty tin. iTunes 10.5 was dropped on us a month ago and it is crippled. I have never had this much of a problem with any piece of software before on my computer. Don't get me wrong, iTunes has always been skull-splittingly horrible, but it worked. It started up. It barely managed to do so, but it was there. 10.5 has honestly made me want to tear my hair out and form it into a noose with which I can strangle every single Apple employee.

It all started when I decided to put some music on my iPod. The device wasn't being recognised in iTunes, so I figured it needed a software update. It wasn't working out, so I decided to uninstall the program, then reinstall the new one. Uninstalling was an uphill battle already, since there was one component that refused to budge (oh yeah, and Apple asks, nay demands, you uninstall everything in a specific order or else "who knows what might happen? Not us, shithead, that's your problem"), and I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get rid of that.

That done, I re-downloaded but, wonder of wonders, iTunes just didn't feel like doing it. Due to some unspecified flaw, either in my laptop or in the program (more likely the latter, considering the amount of Windows 7 users also complaining about it), it would always roll back several times and when it did finish, iTunes wouldn't open. I have spent hours and hours trying to find a solution and there has to be something wrong with my laptop, because otherwise it should be working fine. Said laptop has ventilation problems anyway, so I've asked for a fresh one for Christmas. I could get it fixed, but to solve the overheating, I would have to pay £45 and wait ten days while they disassemble everything.

Click for animation. Prince does not approve.

Yeah, fuck that noise.

It's not as bad as it could be. I still have my iPod, which I just need to keep charged; I can buy music and comics off of there, and there's always Spotify. Even if I do have to convert all my iTunes stuff into standard MP3's, which is still joyless work. I just need to wait until Christmas before I can use in on a computer proper. I'll probably get a new iPod at some point in the next month anyway; this one has become more sluggish and the screen has cracked (not much, thankfully), and all new ones come with iOS5 already on there. I'll just have to save up my birthday money.

Oh yeah, it's my birthday in two days. I've been promised/threatened with a week long birthday by my flatmate Becci. Gosh, time has gone quickly.