Empire BIG SCREEN: Day Two

2.25pm: So much for live blogging
Imagine my amazement when I arrived at the O2 this morning for Day Two of Empire Presents BIG SCREEN to find PIERCE BROSNAN HIMSELF recreating the opening from The World Is Not Enough!

Moving on, my second day of live blogging hasn't been entirely successful. It's past lunchtime and I haven't posted a word, and for that I'm sorry and by way of apology here are several words.

I decided to avoid any pastry disappointment today by securing this beauty from Starbucks for £1.60:

I triumphantly carried it shoulder-high into the press room, where I was greeted by these:

And they were all free.

I wiped the tears from my chin and made my way to a showcase of footage from distributors eOne, which was all a bit rubbs. A video introduction from Paul WS Anderson to 3D footage from his forthcoming The Three Musketeers was greeted with a massive boo (as in "booooooooooo", not "BOO!", that would be weird), and the trailer for Twilight: Breaking Dawn convinced me that I don't need to lose my vampirginity with that particular series.

My first experience on a panel was mildly terrifying, as evinced by the steadiness of my hand while taking this photo of the audience:

So much for my fancy new phone.

The panel was fun though and nobody threw anything at me, although the quite lovely Mark Liversidge from film blog The Movie Evangelist did respond to one of my tweets from the morning by bringing me biscuits, so he's pretty much the bizniss.

I managed to catch some of an interview with David Arnold, and although it wasn't nearly as groundbreaking as the one I did with him last year PLUG he did make the literally amazing revelation that he played chess with Will Smith while watching cage fighting on the set of Independence Day. He also gave me a gang sign, which means we're officially homebizzles:

And that's Saturday so far. Later on I'm hoping to interview a GENUINE LEGEND and watch a secret screening which, for the second night running, may or may not be Drive. Later dudes!


8.00pm: I should have gone home hours ago

Well I think we can all agree that the live blogging experiment has been a heroic failure. It doesn't really help that I didn't really do much this afternoon: I sat in on the Momentum Pictures showcase, which included a forthcoming Swedish (I think) film called Headhunters which looks good from the trailer, and some footage from Steven Soderbergh's Haywire which looks fantastic; I recorded a podcast with the sexy Sam & Simon from the Picturehouse chain, and I failed to get into the no-longer-secret screening of Drive despite standing in the world's most confusing queue for twenty minutes.

In the end I retired to the bar, which was quite a bizarre experience but I've already got someone into trouble for tweeting a picture of it so I'd better not say any more.

Bring on Sunday!

Empire BIG SCREEN: Day One

So I've decided to live blog the ass off this here BIG SCREEN weekend. I've no idea if it'll work, but if you don't try these things you'll never know if it's worth doing. It's a bit like naked kite surfing in that sense.

Anyway check back here for semi-regular updates throughout today, and if it's not a complete and total crushing disaster we'll do it all again tomorrow. In the meantime:


9.44am: I'm at the O2!
Here's proof:

This live blogging is easy. I'm off to find some pastry.


11.06am: The ILM Panel

I just got out of the ILM panel, otherwise known as The Anthony Daniels Show. Daniels, who I'm amazed hasn't changed his name by deed poll to C3PO yet, chaired a discussion with two ILM digimonkeys who were constantly surprised just how little he knew about the films that made his name. They had some interesting stuff to say about how some of the effects were done in the Star Wars series, although if there was anyone in the room who isn't as versed in the franchise as they are I'll be amazed.

There was a splendid moment when Daniels asked the room if anyone wanted to see another three Star Wars films, only to be met with awkward silence, but the ILM guys rescued things with tales of hidden lawnmowers in the Naboo sets and that kind of nonsense.

A nice man asked me on the way out if I'd like to order the Star Wars Blu-ray box set, which I suspect will be a recurring question over the next few days, but I politely declined. Doesn't he know I don't own a Blu-ray player?

Right. I'm late for the Ray Harryhausen chat so off I pop. And I still haven't found the pastry.


12.30pm: The Ray Harryhausen Panel

I just had my first geekgasm of the weekend listening to three blokes talking about a 92-year-old man. One of Ray Harryhausen's friends and colleagues and two current stop-motion animators described some of the techniques the animation genius used in his time, and chatted with passion about his legacy, and I could have listened all day. But more excitingly than that (extreme nerd alert), they brought some of Ray's original models along, including one of the skeletons from Jason And The Argonauts.

To see the detail on these things up close, without them being behind a sheet of glass, was amazing. And just to be sure I made a proper mess in my nethers, Caroline Munro of The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad and, more importantly, The Spy Who Loved Me fame was there to look beautiful and be delightful.

That's Caroline on the right.

Pastry update: I can see that people have pastries but I can't tell where they got them. This is killing me.

1.50pm: The Greatest Movie Poster Of All Time

In the world's most misleadingly-titled panel, three poster artists - Graham Humphreys, Tom Hodge and Olly Moss - talked about some of their, like, well most favouritest film posters. I've never heard of Gareth or Tom but the latter calls himself The Dude and drinks from a hip flask during panel discussions.

Sadly the panel never came to a decision on the greatest movie poster of all time (it's Back To The Future), although we did get to see this amazing polish Crocodile Dundee II poster:

And in pastry news, I found one but it was stale. HOW AM I EXPECTED TO WORK IN THESE CONDITIONS?!


2.55pm: Kim Newman talks Dracula, kind of

Poor old Kim Newman's Dracula panel consisted of himself and three empty chairs. It didn't matter a jot though because that man has more information in his brain than everyone else in the O2 combined, and much of it spilled out in the form of his own unique view of horror. He had a fair amount to say about Transformers too, which was peculiar.

By now I am existing entirely on a stale pastry and a horrible flapjack, so if I pass out from low blood sugar I apolo

4.41pm: Home time

OK, well I think I've seen all that BIG SCREEN has to offer me for today. There's a secret screening in an hour which may or may not be Drive (which I'm dying to see), but I'm prepared to take the chance of missing it because I really need to go and eat something that isn't made of butter. Also The Human Centipede director Tom Six is ten feet away and I don't know if he's washed his hands.

Join me tomorrow for more of this cabbage, and find out how I get on taking part in a panel upon which I am totally unqualified to appear. In the meantime, here's the lovely face of James Warren, PR legend who is largely to blame for my presence here:

Thanks James!

Empire Presents *Caps Lock* BIG SCREEN *Caps Lock*

This weekend sees Empire magazine's wildly ambitious and possibly insane BIG SCREEN event taking place at London's O2, the venue formerly known as the set from the pre-title sequence of The World Is Not Enough.

I've no idea what it's going to be like but from what I can remember of the press launch (there was quite a lot of free champagne) there will be somewhere in the region of 14.2 billion separate events occurring over the next three days. Basically if you've ever seen a film, there will be something there for you.

If you're not going to be there then I hope to God you're interested in what goes on, because I'm about to spend the whole weekend banging on about it here and on Twitter, and possibly even on Facebook if I can remember my password. I've got a new phone just for the occasion so that the quality of photojournalism is slightly higher than it was for my press launch post. The phone was quite expensive but I asked Empire's news editor Chris Hewitt if he'd foot the bill and he said "absolutely no chance and how did you get my number?", so fingers crossed!

If you are going to be there, then whatever you do clear a space in your schedule for these two events:

Because, as improbable as it may sound, I'll be on both panels attempting to dodge a series of difficult questions and, quite possibly, a barrage of rotten vegetables.

So see you there and then, unless I don't, in which case see you some other time and place, or not at all. I'm a busy man you know, I can't just pop round for tea can I?

Behind The Screen: John Barry (Not Literally, That Would Be Weird)

Any London-based film fans out there can't fail to have noticed that Somerset House, in conjunction with Film4, put on a series of outdoor screenings over the last couple of weeks of some really quite good films, the best of which was obviously Die Hard. I was there, but if you weren't, you can recreate the atmosphere by placing your face one centimetre away from this image:

Incidentally, Die Hard was introduced by Alan Rickman. Here's how my phone's camera chose to interpret his presence:

I was quite far away so I can't be sure, but it appears he's had his head replaced with a giant light bulb. These crazy actors, eh?

Anyway what went largely untrumpeted (although I did a small trump myself) were the Behind The Screen talks that were held before each screening in conjunction with BAFTA. I went along to the one about John Barry, which took place before a screening of The Spy Who Loved Me. It looked a bit like this, only with more people:

It was a mixed affair: there were a lot of film clips played in the wrong aspect ratio, the lights kept coming up and going down at random and a man on the front row hadn't grasped the role of the audience on such an occasion, which is to shut the fuck up until you are prompted to ask questions and not to join in the conversation whenever you feel like it, hum loudly while the panel are speaking or hog the mike when other people want to ask questions.

Still, when they were allowed to get on with it, the panel of three composers (none of whom I'd heard of, but I won't hold that against them) spoke knowledgeably about Barry's work. They made some good points about Thunderball's bongo riff being the ideal musical expression of the on-screen cat-and-mouse game between Bond and SPECTRE's henchpersons, the ways in which Barry based his Zulu themes on actual Zulu chants and the layers of hope and hopelessness in Midnight Cowboy's main theme.

One of the composers, Richard Jacques, also talked about the score he wrote for the James Bond video game Blood Stone, which I couldn't help but notice was more influenced by David Arnold than John Barry. It did, however, feature Derek Watkins and Maurice Murphy on trumpets, who both played on Barry's original arrangement of the James Bond theme, and that was the best bit of trivia I'd heard all day so I kept my trap shut about the David Arnold thing.

I didn't get to any other talks but would be interested to hear from anyone who did, if only to reassure myself that the technical annoyances and irritating twats weren't a feature of each event. Did you go to any? Did you have fun? Where did you sit? What were you wearing? What are you doing tonight? Fancy a drink? Let's get interactive!

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes

For anyone whose interest in the Planet Of The Apes franchise stretches no further than having seen the 1968 original on telly or Tim Burton's ill-advised "re-imagining" (a word so awful that it still hasn't been allowed out of its inverted commas), another entry in the dead-horse-flogging series is a less than tempting prospect. A largely unknown director untested on massively-budgeted tentpole flicks? A title that pushes the very boundaries of syntactical tolerance? CG MONKEYS?

Well, fear not. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes isn't just worth 105 minutes of your time, it's the best of the summer blockbusters so far. And yes, I know I said that a week ago about Super 8, but that was a week ago.

Let's not get carried away: this film is a little bit silly. John Lithgow plays a sufferer of Alzheimer's, the severity of which is signified by whether he's brushed his hair forwards or backwards. A group of about twenty angry monkeys very quickly becomes an army of hundreds with little explanation. Freida Pinto is the least convincing scientist since Denise Richards played a hot-pants-wearing nuclear physicist in The World Is Not Enough. But come on: this is a prequel to a film about talking monkeys who've taken over the world. If you want art, GO AND WATCH THE TREE OF LIFE, GRANDAD!

I will make a meme out of this image if it kills me

What's pleasing about ROTPOTA is its surprises. I didn't expect it to be so much of a prison breakout movie, and director Rupert Wyatt (only other feature: prison breakout movie The Escapist) crafts a clever, tense sequence in which the pecking order in chimp chokey is dramatically altered. I didn't expect James Franco's character to take a back seat to a monkey, but he does and it works. And I didn't expect to be so convinced by a bunch of pixellated primates: Caesar the CG baby chimp is alarmingly cartoonish but by the time he grows up to be a man-monkey, Andy Serkis and FX boffins WETA create a character who holds his own against all the human acting talent involved. Even Tom Felton.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes is very clearly designed as the first in a series of prequels, and I'm perfectly happy with that. It's entertaining and smart without taking itself too seriously, and although you know where it's heading (the clue's in the title), the fun is in finding out how it gets there. It even includes a credits sequence that isn't just part of the story, it's probably the film's ballsiest move, and by the time it's all over you've almost forgiven the bit with the monkey subtitles.

Oh yeah, sorry: there are monkey subtitles.

Is This The World's Insanest Cartoon?

Porky In Wackyland (1938)

I know it's Monday morning but I watched this very late on Friday night and it nearly took my head off. When I tell you that a talking pig in a jumpsuit flying an aeroplane is the least mentile bit, you should know to expect an extremely Looney Tune.

Tower Heist Poster Needs Work

Unless, of course, Michael Peña is playing a hobbit.