Dorian Gray - Poster - He sure has a pretty picture

Ben Barnes (The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian) stars in the new major feature film adaptation of Dorian Gray.

Dark Horizons got hold of this poster for the film that is due out in UK cinemas on 11th September.

'Gray' tells the story of a strikingly beautiful young man named Dorian (Ben Barnes). He arrives in Victorian London and is swept into a social whirlwind by the charismatic Henry Wotton (Colin Firth), who introduces Dorian to the hedonistic pleasures of the city.

When a portrait of Dorian is unveiled, such is its beauty that he makes a pledge: he would give anything to stay as he is in the picture - even his soul. "Dorian Gray" examines the destructive power of beauty, the blind pursuit of pleasure and the darkness that can result.

I always liked the tale of The Picture of Dorian Gray and I say a great stage show of it a few years ago. I just hope this new film does it justice. It's got to be better than the version we saw in The League of Extraordinary Gentleman film.

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You know Alan Moore doesn't like comic book movies don't you?

Total Film have a great interview with the genius that is Alan Moore. Here are a few snippets from it. Be sure to check the rest of it out.

Comics don’t work as films.

“The main reason why comics can’t work as films is largely because everybody who is ultimately in control of the film industry is an accountant.
These people may be able to add up and balance the books, but in every other area they are stupid and incompetent and don’t have any talent.
And this is why a film is going to be a work that’s done by dozens and dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of people.
They’re going to show it to the backers and then they’re going to say, we want this in it, and this in it... and where’s the monster?”

Comics are better than blockbusters.

“There is more integrity in comics. It sounds simplistic, but I believe there is a formula that you can apply to almost any work of modern culture.
The more money that’s involved in a project the less imagination there will be in the project, and vice versa. If you’ve got zero budget, you’re John Waters, you’re Jean Cocteau, you’re going to make a brilliant film.”

Films are a waste of money.

“If you’ve got a 100 million – that’s what they spent on the Watchmen film which nearly didn’t come out because of the lawsuit, that’s what they spent on The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen which shouldn’t have come out but did anyway. And that is what it would take to sort out Haiti.

Put like that, do we need any more shitty films in this world? We have quite enough already. Whereas Haiti could do with sorting out the civil unrest. And the books are always superior anyway.”

Movie contracts are ridiculous.

“The League film cost 100 million because Sean Connery wanted 17 million of that. And a bigger explosion that the one he’d had in his last film. It’s in his contract, that he has to have a bigger explosion with every film he’s in.

In The Rock he’d blown up an island, and he was demanding in The League that he blow up, was it Venice or something like that? It would have been the moon in his next movie.”

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McG to set sail in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea remake

Looks as if McG has got his next film sorted once Terminator Salvation wraps. Variety as the news that he has signed on to direct 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea a sort of remake of the 1954 live-action Disney film that starred James Mason and Kirk Douglas.

The original Jules Verne tale was first published in 1870, but most people remember the Disney version famous for its giant squid scene and excellent design of the Nautilus or the cool Nautilus and Captain Nemo in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (not the poor film, but the cool Alan Moore comic book).

Bill Marsilii, (Deja Vu) has written the screenplay for this new version and it will be an origin story focusing on Nemo as he creates his powerful submarin, the Nautilus. This sounds like a great way to go as Nemo is a truly mysterious character.

Here is what wikipedia have to say on Nemo:

Nothing concerning his past is revealed in the Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, excepting his having reason to hate the countries of the world and the apparent loss of his family. It is in its sequel, The Mysterious Island, that Nemo declares himself Prince Dakkar, the Hindu son of the Raja of Bundelkund. He was deeply antagonistic to the British Raj of India. After the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, in which he lost his family and his kingdom, he devoted himself to scientific research and develops an advanced submarine, the Nautilus. He and a crew of his followers cruise the seas, battling injustice, especially imperialism. The gold of Spanish ships sunk in Vigo Bay, as a result of the Battle of Vigo Bay, provided them with bullion.

This could be excellent film if done right and should have a dark edge to it all. What with this and a Bioshock film in the works it looks as if Hollywood will be underwater for a while. Are you excited about the remake?

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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, 2003. DVD Review

Director: Stephen Norrington
Starring: Sean Connery, Naseeruddin Shah, Peta Wilson, Tony Curran, Stuart Townsend, Shane West, Jason Flemyng, Richard Roxburgh, Max Ryan.
Running Time: 110 minutes

Score: 3/10

People who know me will be aware that am a big fan of comic books and comic book movies. In particular I enjoy those comics written by the genius that is Alan Moore (Watchmen, The Killing Joke, Swamp Thing etc) who wrote the mini-series upon which this movie is based. I could review this film by comparing it to the comic book, but I won't as the differences are too many and painful to list.

When I first watched this when it first came out I really enjoyed it. There was a pulp novel sensibility to the proceedings and the many characters meant there was always something else to look out for. However, having it watched it again on DVD (for the purposes of later comments I'll mention the fact it was a normal DVD played on an Upscaler DVD player and viewed on an LCD TV) I realised that it is an absolute travesty of a movie.

Basically, a few fictitious characters (Allan Quartermain, Capt. Nemo, Mina Harker, an Invisible Man, Mr Hyde, Dorian Gray, Tom Sawyer) are recruited by the British Empire to combat the villianous plans of the mysterious Fantom (Richard Roxburgh).

The characters are all introduced bit by bit and say something humorous and then an bit of action happens. All the characters appear to speak with the same voice with a constant quipping at every encounter. Their lines could be pretty much interchangeable. There is also no consistency with their characterisation. For example, Mina Harker (Peta Wilson) is at first all distant and mysterious about what happened then at the first sign of trouble she Vamps up and rips out the neck of a generic guard. She then whackily licks the blood off her hand while tidying herself up in a compact mirror. There is a tiny bit of exposition about this and then on with the story as if nothing much happened. It just doesn't make for a convincing character portrayal. The characterisation of all the characters is similarly poor.

Then there is the all pervading presence of Allan Quartermain (Sean Connery) who basically sorts everything out while the rest of the team don't do much apart from take out the generic guards and be the source of copious amounts of exposition.

The effects, particularly the CGI, are pretty much rubbish and stick out like a sore thumb which good effects should not do. The compositing of the building blowing up near the start of the film is atrocious. As for the Mr Hyde costume/effect, at first you think it is pretty well done, then the more you watch it the more you realise how embarrassingly stupid it really is. It looks like a load of balloons covered in skin. The Invisible Man (Tony Curran) effects aren't too bad until you notice that the white face paint he applies to make himself visible keeps changing from a few bits slapped on his face to his whole head being covered and then back again (plus if he is naked when invisible why does he leave bootprints in the snow?)

The sets themselves are okay and quite detailed, particularly the portraits in M's meeting room that show previous incarnations of The League. However, Dorian Gray's (Stuart Townsend) library appears to have been designed purely for the arrival of gun toting generic guards to stand in the gaps between the bookshelves. This is lazy plotting and design to make the environment fir the fight scene. Just one of those faults that niggles at you.

All of this could maybe have been lifted if the bad guy had been a great one. They don't really come much better than the criminal genius of Professor Moriarty, but this film would make you think the total opposite. At first Richard Roxburgh plays him as The Fantom a basic 1 dimensional scarred bad guy and then shows no menace whatsoever when he shows his true face. I assume this was the start of Mr Roxburgh's career suicide which was completed during his camp portrayal in the dreadful Van Helsing movie.

I could go on about how Tom Sawyer (Shane West) was shoe horned in to give Allan Quartermain a surrogate son and also appease the American audience by giving them an American hero, or how they wasted the character of Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah) by having him do a bit of kung fu but whose basic function is to get the team from point A to point B. I could go on but I won't. I think you get the picture.

Needless to say the reported conflict between Sean Connery and the director during the making of the movie will have contributed to some of the disaster that appears on screen, but the scriptwriter, effects people and other actors must take some of the blame.

Phil