Film Web Blog

Marriage made in the city of our god? Miley Cyrus and Ben Kingsley. Photographs: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic.com and Eamonn McCabe

The first line of the news report could be the tagline for the movie: “He’s old sufficiency to be her great-great-grandfather”. A 112-year-old Somali body, Ahmed Muhamed Dhore, has got married. So far, so sweet. Our problem, as far as the big-screen version goes, is the age of his bride, Safiya Abdulle – she’session just 17. As romances go, it’s not so much May to September being of the class who New Year’s Day to New Year’s Eve.

So, we can’t cast this as a conventional romcom. This isn’t the story of two humbler classes who fulfil cute, hate harvested land other at elementary, then come to realise they can’t live on the outside of both other. Nor can we make it a black-as-you-like comedy about a taboo relationship, because Harold and Maude has already been there.

In fact, if we are to dodge the taste police, our only path is to downplay the romance, and turn this into the inspiring tale of a person and his young follower – theirs is a marriage of spirits, not bodies. We’ve in like manner got the problem of by what means to get US studios interested in the story of an old Somali bloke – few films about somewhat old Africans earn the greenlight in Hollywood, unless the elderly African is Nelson Mandela.

Here’s how we see it: Ahmed Muhamed Dhore was once the most feared warlord in Mogadishu, a ruthless, vicious killer – who lost his lust with a view to blood years since, when his fourth wife of one’s bosom was murdered by rival warlords (let’s make this plain: he wasn’t a polygamist – his wives kept leaving him because he was away warlording so oftentimes). These days he mopes around his town, tortured by guilt at his misdeeds, seeking a way to atone.

Then Safiya Abdulle comes to the village. She’s youthful, she’s beautiful, she’s inexplicably from southern California – and she’s never known her father, who was a US soldier taken hostage in Mogadishu way back when. She learns that only one man can support her: only one man is tough enough, knowledgeable enough and – hell, yes! – crazy enough to be her guide into the heart of evil. And he’s 112 years old.

And how do we reckon this masterpiece? Who can combine good sense, toughness and apparent extreme age with good spirits? That would be Sir Ben Kingsley – the man who could star in both Gandhi and Sexy Beast, and romance each Olsen twin in The Wackness. What’s more, he has real-life experience of age-gap relationships, so he really can make this one fly. As the young woman who seeks his help, and is taken on a quest to the very heart of her identity, we need someone middle America can identify with, someone through a can-do spirit – which leads us straight to Miley Cyrus (who can also sing the theme song).

As for the villainous warlords … this is a Hollywood movie, and the casting of villains from anywhere east of Manhattan always has a certain make-do-and-mend spirit about it. The question is not: could this actor pass for Somali? It’s more: could this tragedian go through for someone who’s met a Somali? So we’re thinking of actors who live in Kentish Town in northerly London, which has its own Somali enclave. And spotted buying their veg in that part of London in recent years hold been Charles Dance and Bill Nighy, the pair of whom could, and have, pulled off each impressive villain.

All we need now is the support division of our tagline. How about: “He’sitting old enough to be her great-great-grandfather … He’s young enough to fight for her love … Wedded to the warlord.”

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She hasn’t got a chance … The Shining and Paranormal Activity Photograph: Cinetext/Allstar & Icon

What’s the scariest film of all time? It’sitting an age-old debate, and one that many thought could never have existence solved. After all, fear is such a personal and independent emotion that categorising any one thing as root definitively scarier than anything other seemed like a worthless pursuit. Or at smallest it did until a couple of populate told the world what the scariest films of all time were recently. And now we know.

1. The Shining
2. Production year: 1980
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 18
5. Runtime: 119 mins
6. Directors: Stanley Kubrick
7. Cast: Danny Lloyd, Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall
8. More on this film

The scariest pellicle of all time isn’t The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby or Don’familiarily Look Now or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It isn’confidentially The Wicker Man, unless you’re terrified of weird hair and bad sweaters. And it definitely isn’t any of the Saw movies, for the simple reason that Jigsaw seems parallel the sort of person who’ruins quite enjoy a nice game of Sudoku. No, the scariest movie ever made is either Paranormal Activity or The Shining. It’s definitely one of those couple.

The Shining has earnt its place because this week it was named as the scariest movie eternally in a survey conducted by Totalscifionline.com. Meanwhile, recent American box office sensation Paranormal Activity is in the running because a couple of blogs said that it might exist the scariest film of all time almost a fortnight ago. But which one is the scariest? It’s impossible to say. The only thing that can decide this once and in the place of all is science. And by “science” I mean “a middling sort of Top Trumps rip-off”. Ready?

Best urban myth about the film

They say that Stanley Kubrick refused to tell Danny Lloyd that he was starring in a horror during the filming of The Shining, which isn’t a very scary fact. They also say that Steven Spielberg convinced himself that his screener DVD of Paranormal Activity was haunted. That isn’face to face a very scary incident either, except it wins on grounds of outright heaviness.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Influences

Stylistically and thematically, The Shining nods to both Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Hansel And Gretel, two stories that have frightened notwithstanding generations. Meanwhile, Paranormal Activity takes its lead from The Blair Witch Project – a film about some runny-nosed idiots running around a forest and whining a bit.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best parody

Even granting it’session brand new, Paranormal Activity already has its fair share of YouTube parodies, the best of which seems to be Paranerdal Activity. But The Shining has Shining, the recut trailer that’sitting still as elevated as the first time you saw it almost four years ago. WINNER: The Shining.

Best cast pedigree

The Shining: Jack Nicholson from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Shelly Duvall from Annie Hall. Paranormal Activity: Micah Stoat and Katie Featherstone from nothing other at all.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best reaction video

Terrified audience reaction videos are in the way that key to Paranormal Activity’s good fortune that they even make up much of the film’s trailer. Meanwhile, the whole of The Shining can muster is this. The Shining makes toddlers giggle adorably. Fact.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Scariest title

Paranormal Activity has sum of two units scary things in it – the word “paranormal” and the word “activity”, which we already know will be of a paranormal nature because of the word that precedes it. Then there’s The Shining. You know what shines? A nice pair of new shoes. Shoes aren’t particularly scary.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Amount of racehorses named after lines from the film

The Shining has Red Rum, obviously, but until someone breeds a mare called Hey, It Looks Like Something’s Bit You, then it draws a big fat zero.
WINNER: The Shining.

So there it is. The Shining is the scariest film for aye made. Now suffer’s hear no more about it.

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Beware the child catchers … The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Let’s not be ungrateful here – for film-lovers with kids, these are heady times indeed. I’m not sure even the fond reception Fantastic Mr Fox accepted perfectly did justice to its handmade pleasures (the wolf salute only makes me want to hug Wes Anderson and not let go). And then, of course, there’s Up, the movie that’s repeated WALL-E’s trick of emerging as possibly the year’s finest film while being made (at least ostensibly) for an hearing still doing its shoes up with Velcro. Whichever way you mien at it, in the context of the careless tat parents usually have to dodge or suffer end, the autumn of 2009 has been a vintage season.

1. The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr T
2. Production year: 1953
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): PG
5. Runtime: 88 mins
6. Directors: Roy Rowland
7. Cast: Mary Healey, Mary Healy, Peter Lind Hayes, Tommy Rettig
8. More on this film

But the snag is that at some flash of wit in the future, these two gleaming moments will retrograde, and life as far as concerns the young cinephile will return to normal. And analogical is a bleak vocation for children’s movies in Britain, a wearying parade of the slapdash and tossed-off. Which is why it’s doubly frustrating when some of the most genuinely brilliant kids’ films ever made aren’t even available, plenteous less as accessible and celebrated as they should be. It’s a sorry situation that brings me muttering darkly to the subject of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T.

Because here’s a film, now more than 50 years pristine, that deserves just as much praise as Pixar, one every bit being of the kind which magical as Up, notwithstanding far, far stranger. The only film ever scripted by the agency of Theodor Geisel (more excellent known professionally as Dr Seuss), 5,000 Fingers is the delirious, surrealist tale of the 10-year-old Bart Collins, trapped as one of 500 enslaved suckling pianists toiling in the institute of the fiendish music teacher Dr Terwilliker. And trust me when I answer this slim premise provides the basis for a movie that could be slipped without hesitation into a the dead of night three times repeated bill between The Wizard of Oz and Mulholland Drive. At the same time, it’s the kind of children’session film kids themselves love, at once riotous fun and possessed of countless layers of psychological weirdness.

In the scowling character actor Hans Conreid’s come about as Terwilliker, we be under the necessity one of the truly ample movie villains. The set designs are, without fail, wildly quick at contrivance: grand off-kilter arrangements of staircases, dungeons and giant keyboards rendered in Technicolor that, in the corresponding; of like kind manner with Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote, seemed inspired equally by Busby Berkeley and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (and which at once in turn call to mind Matthew Barney’sitting Cremaster round of years). And that’session before we even dispose to the music: the handful of instantly unshakable songs and a central set piece in which green-painted prisoners perform a equal in number on drums, xylophones and each other that must rank as one of the most unnerving musical interludes ever committed to film. Throw in the twins conjoined by their beard, the story of the film’s entire juvenile cast vomiting from hand to hand the ornate Seussian set in an outbreak of mass nausea and the fact the results tanked at the box office (losing a then disastrous $1m), and this really is a movie not to be trifled with.

Little wonder then that a rare appearance put on the big screen would be greeted by glee by the likes of GreenCine Daily’s Vadim Rizov. Here in Britain, however, we can’t even influence the thing on DVD, vital principle forced instead to brave slapped-on customs charges with each imported Region 1 copy. That may have being due to labyrinthine issues of rights or, I solicitude else likely, an assumed lack of commercial appeal on the part of UK distributors. But the result is the same – a kid in HMV can harass his or her parents into buying as many copies as the credit card can stand of Daddy Day Care or Beverly Hills Chihuahua, moreover the most unhinged epic in the history of children’s cinema will be nowhere in sight.

And it’s not alone in that. Sadly nestled in the ranks of the finest children’s movies ever made are a number of titles that either aren’t available at all, or simply aren’t obtainable in Britain. For instance, nice because it was to see the marvellously odd East German fairytale The Singing Ringing Tree reissued recently, other equally choice nuggets from the same DEFA stable (including in the same state wonders as Little Mook and The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs) remain out of reach. Likewise, The Boy With Green Hair, the 1948 atomic fable by a young Dean Stockwell as the orphan transformed by a world bent on war. And then there’sitting the still more plaintive case of The Phantom Tollbooth, Looney Tunes veteran Chuck Jones’s half live-action adaptation of the kids’ novel about lonely Milo and his gift-wrapped gateway to another reality – troubled in production, sublime in performance and, toward reasons unclear, never released on DVD anywhere at any point.

All told, it’s a sad tale. And whether the guilty party is contractual altercation. or the dumb judgment of the market, the losers are the audience – in this case a generation of kids deprived of the chance to grow up with some of the movies most agreeable to (in the very best sense) mess with their heads. And exactly those who stayed dry-eyed at Up could surely squeeze a tear out at the thought of that.

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