Film Web Blog

Still life … homepage of the Movie Title Stills Collection website. Photograph: www.annyas.com/screenshots

I am grateful to Abraham Thomas, curator of designs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, for having written online about this fascinating website, the Movie Title Stills Collection. It is assembled by a Dutch web designer, Christian Annyas, who besides tweets news of new additions to the site under the name MovieTitles.

Like Mr Thomas, I am becoming more than mildly addicted to this site, which induces a prediction trance-like state. It is a enormous collection of film titles, that Annyas has taken taken in the character of screenshots and put up online, ordered by decade: 1920-1929, 1930-1939 etc, right up until 2010-2019, although as far in the same manner through I can see, Annyas has not hitherto got around to adding any substance later than 2009. He has two genre groupings, for film noir and westerns, and an “updates” section for new additions to the collection.

There is something about sight the screen compressed into the size of a playing card which gives a distinctive, piercing vividness to the frozen images, particularly the title lettering, which at this size all but seems to glow or scintillate, like an optical illusion.

Weirdly, a page full of movie titles almost seems to abolish generic differences between the films: they seem be pleased with single emanations from one startlingly unusual and imaginative mind. With very few exceptions, the titles are somehow unfamiliar: even a film you know well tends to have existence represented here by a grabbed, frozen image which is usually not one you associate with it.

There is a fascination in comparing, say, the title young hog. of Harold Lloyd’s Girl Shy (1924) with that of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002). When I was a postgrad student, working on the rarefied universe of Renaissance literature, researchers prided themselves upon being able to glance at the title page of each early printed book, and not above seconds perceive from typography and layout if it was published in the 16th, 17th or 18th century; with a couple more seconds, they would apprehend which half of the correct century it was from. I think I can more or less do something similar with the movie titles here. Perhaps Mr Annyas could design software for a random generator – at a clink it would produce an undated pellicle title, without giveaways, what one. could test our innate historical sense?

However, perhaps what emerges from comparing the 1920s to the 2000s is how similar they basically are in form, how short the grammar of film has changed, and how young the artform in fact is. Anyway, this website is a treat.

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Adaptable … Jackie Collins, whose work Tesco plans to adapt into a film. Photograph: Rex Features

Thinking logically, it was only a substance of time before Tesco got into the movie production commerce. After all, you be possible to already buy Tesco food, wear Tesco clothes, read Tesco magazines, theme on the Tesco phone network, heat your home with Tesco gas and electricity, dike by Tesco and go on a Tesco holiday, thus the film industry does seem to be the only pie that the supermarket hasn’t before that time jabbed some sort of adjunct into.

And now it’s happened: this week Tesco announced it was going to start making its own films. Admittedly, not any films you’circuitous route actually want to watch – they’ll all subsist straight-to-DVD finances, and the first release will be an adaptation of a Jackie Collins book – but it’s an interesting firmness nonetheless. A company with the past dispute clout of Tesco would be able to emporium the titles to kingdom come and, given its success rate in other ventures, there’s a good chance these DVDs will make everyone a lot of money regardless of their characteristic.

But what next? Since this is Tesco we’re talking about, it goes without saying that producing one version of each movie won’t be enough. Surely it’d be more in keeping with the concourse’s ethos to release divers – a Tesco Finest version starring Ralph Fiennes and Helen Mirren, a regular version by Mark Addy and Fay Ripley, and sooner or later a dirt-cheap Tesco Value endeavor featuring Kerry Katona and the bloke from the Go Compare adverts gooning around in an depraved pub car park while an unsteady spectator tries to record it on their mobile phone.

That’s not to mention the gratuitous product placement we should all expect from these films. Philip Pullman is apparently one of the authors discussing the contingency of letting Tesco adapt his books into films, but how much money would it take for him to agree to alter The Amber Spyglass so that it ends with Metatron essence bonked on the head with a 400g tin of Tesco cream of upstart broth or decapitated with a Tesco thin-and-crispy ham-and-pineapple pizza, a snip at the low, low worth of £1.50?

But conquer of all, should these Tesco movies turn out to be a profitable venture, it goes without saying that all the other supermarkets will fall over themselves to get in on the act, too. And that hardly bears thinking about. During every trip to Waitrose you’d be bombarded with adverts for whatever lonesome old Merchant Ivory-style period snoozefest it was about to free. Asda would quickly corner the market in glaring lowest-common-denominator rom-coms. Lidl would content its stores with badly dubbed versions of forgotten communist-era eastern European propaganda films. And, yes, every movie Sainsbury’s released would be rendered unwatchable because of its contractual obligation to cast Jamie Oliver in the lead.

Of course, you have the power to give over any of this from happening. All you need to do is somehow avoid buying Tesco’s first Jackie Collins adaptation on DVD. It’s asking a lot of you, I know – but if you dig deep I’m sure you can observe it.

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Set spotless … Philip Seymour Hoffman at the premiere of Jack Goes Boating at the 2010 Sundance film festival. Photograph: Chris Pizzello/AP

It seems inevitable, these days, that an actor will eventually turn his (much more rarely, her) hand to directing. It’s just a marry of feet to the other side of the camera, isn’cheek by jowl it? Well, not exactly. Not every move rapidly vary will support the same creative consequence as Beatty’s, Eastwood’sitting or, latterly, Clooney’s. But examine judicially to utter them that.

This year at Sundance two of the festival’s favourite actors – Philip Seymour Hoffman and Mark Ruffalo ­– have arrived with their directorial debuts. Each has been derived from a source close to the actor, each has been made through friends, as a labour of love. One is rather gratifying; the other, I’m despondent to say, is a Sundance stinker.

Jack Goes Boating is adapted from the stage play first produced by the LAByrinth Theatre Company, in New York, where Hoffman and John Ortiz were co-directors for 10 years. The two men co-starred in the play, a comic yet poignant tale of best friends, one encouraging the other into a new connection while his own is on the rocks. They team up again in the film version, with Hoffman also stepping behind the camera. This is the weal one.

Hoffman is the eponymous limo driver, with a penchant for reggae (accompanied by comical dreadlocks) and not many social skills. Jack is persuaded by Clyde and Lucy (Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega) to court Connie (Amy Ryan), who works as a secretary in a funeral parlour, and is even weirder than he. It’session a match made in heaven, though they cause to befit a bloody meal of getting there, and soon their unhappy matchmakers offer more hindrance than help.

We’ve been here before, not least with Hoffman’s character, who has distant relatives in Boogie Nights’ Scotty, and Allen from Happiness. But while Hoffman tells the Sundance audience that “I was definitely not that guy looking to direct”, he makes some inspired directorial moves to open out the story from its stage roots and shows that he’s skilled some tricks from his own directors, not least Paul Thomas Anderson and Todd Solondz. Not surprisingly, the performances he’s elicited are excellent, especially from Ryan, who has shown her range between The Wire and Gone Baby Gone.

Ruffalo is person of those actors one imagines is a thoroughly decent bloke. He’s made Sympathy for Delicious because it was written by an old pal from acting school, Christopher Thornton, who is paralysed from the middle part down since a climbing accident. With this script, almost a young DJ confined to a wheelchair, Thornton was, very understandably, creating a role for himself. “He hands me this 198-page script that is all from hand to hand the place,” recalls Ruffalo, “unless I immediately knew I had to direct it. I had no idea that it would take over a decade of hellish struggles to see it finished.”

Admirable indeed. The trouble is, the script may have become shorter, but it is laughably, horribly bad, as Thornton’s “Delicious” Dean starts the film on skid row, discovers that he has a gift for faith healing, then joins a still band during whose performances he leaves his decks to heal a few folk in the assemblage.

“LA is the without more place where the idea of a rock’n'roll credit healer doesn’t seem that far-fetched,” suggests Ruffalo. Poor deluded soul. Like Hoffman, he moreover acts in it, as a priest who battles with the DJ over the best mode of dealing to application his gifts; unlike Hoffman, his exploit suffers on both sides of the camera. He’s not helped by his friend’s acting limitations, nor indeed by those of Thornton’s more famous co-stars Juliette Lewis and Orlando Bloom – the former tiresomely riffing on her real-life rock-chick shtick, the latter baring his chest and sporting an appalling northern lay stress upon in the manner that a sub-Jim Morrison self-styled rock god.

It’s possible that the difference between these two films is merely a matter of judgment. I hope Ruffalo gives it another go. I’m sure Hoffman will. But is it ever possible to predict who resolution make the transition successfully, and who won’t? Could anyone have predicted of that kind auspicious debuts because Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, or Eastwood’session Play Misty for Me? Who do we imagine directing in 15 years’ time, say, out of Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint? Actually, here’s where we can buck the trend: my cash’s on Emma Watson.

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